The Accidental Diva

by Tia Williams

  One night, she slept with Damon’s cousin Cap (short for Capricorn). He was an up-and-coming pimp from Bed Stuy, and managed to lure her away from Damon with the promise of cash and a rent-free apartment. She was thrilled to find out he wasn’t lying. All things considered, Cap was a good guy. He never hit her, or any of the girls she lived with, and wouldn’t let the johns mistreat her, either. Unfortunately, his crack habit proved to be contagious, and she was now a full-blown addict.

  Tammy began to cry. Her life sounded horrible out loud. Then for the first time that nightmare day, Jay cried. For hours they cried for each other. The windowless, boiling, pitch-black room became a kind of confessional. They gave up their secrets, copped to their fears, and made promises. At dawn, they had sorrowful, necessary sex. She did everything. It wasn’t love sex; it was blood-brother sex. Without saying it, the two knew they were now inextricably joined for life.

  The next afternoon, Tammy presented Jay to Cap as her long-lost, distant cousin, and asked if he could stay. The chubby man jumped at the sight of the obviously ill boy.

  Cap looked long and hard at Jay and said, “You Jerome Lane’s son?” Jay looked miserable enough to prove that this was true. “I knew your pops. S’shame. He was a funny motherfucker.” Jay was kind of intrigued. He didn’t know a thing about his father, and an utter stranger—a pimp—was telling him he was funny. His mood lightened a bit. A bit.

  Cap decided that Jay could stay in Tammy’s room, under three conditions: He had to disappear when she was working; he couldn’t fuck her unless he paid; and he had to be Cap’s crack gopher. This meant nothing more than taking his money, buying drugs for him, and bringing them back. Jay happily accepted the rules. Cap then escorted him to the emergency room, and Jay began a new life. The first thing he did after leaving the hospital was buy a notebook. He began writing a new history.

  Jay’s position as a crack gopher turned out to be a profitable career opportunity. Turning on his infectious personality, he convinced the local crack baron to let him start selling some, here and there. In a matter of weeks, Jay had regulars. Hundreds of dollars turned into thousands. Jay didn’t care, he just wanted to make enough money to take care of himself and Tammy, his new sister. He wanted a better life for her, but she had to want it, first. Jay figured out how to trick her into quitting crack. At the Nathan’s on Thirty-fourth Street, Jay announced to Tammy that he wasn’t going back to school.

  “What?” Jay was the smartest person she’d ever met, and this was almost sinful to her. “You got too much brains not to go to school.”

  “Baby, I got too much paper to go to school. I ain’t gotta do shit.”

  “If you don’t go to school, I’m kicking you out.”

  “You ain’t kickin’ nobody out.”

  “Watch.”

  Jay considered this.

  “Okay. If I go to school, you gotta quit smoking.”

  “How you gonna ask me to do that, when you out sellin’ the shit?”

  “Sellin’ and smokin’ is two vastly different things. Smokers are puppets, and sellers pull the strings. If you ain’t playin’ the game, the game’s playin’ you. How long you wanna be played?”

  “It ain’t that easy and you know it.”

  “Okay, look. We’ll buy some hot dogs and some Skittles. I’ll get you some tapes”—in three weeks’ time, Jay had made enough money to buy Tammy a TV, VCR, and stereo—“and we’ll lock ourselves in that room till you over it.”

  Tammy looked terrified. “I don’t know, I can’t…” But she trusted Jay more than anyone else in the world. If he said she could do it, then she could.

  “What do you wanna do when you grow up, Tammy?”

  “What kinda question is that?”

  “What you wanna be?”

  Tammy looked dreamy. “I always wanted to do hair and have my own salon. Back home, not here. I’m good at it.”

  “Ain’t nobody gonna pay no jittery crackhead to do they hair.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Think I’m playing? Look, you gotta get outta Cap’s. That ain’t no kinda life, what you doing. I know you ain’t had a choice, but you do now. I got enough money for us to get our own place. You gotta quit. Both. And I’ll promise to go to fucking ridiculous ninth grade.” He took the last bite of his second hot dog and looked at her expectantly.

  “Fine but I hate Skittles,” she said, her enormous doorknocker earrings bobbing.

  That night, Tammy told Cap she was sick and couldn’t work. Then she and Jay locked themselves in her room. The first night was agony. The second night she prayed to die. On the third night, she finally slept. The next morning, August 30, 1987, she woke up and smiled at Jay. It was his fourteenth birthday.

  He got Tammy and himself a huge apartment in his old neighborhood, and started his freshman year. In a high school full of hustlers, he became almost a cult figure. He rose through the ranks from street dealer to street manager. A kind of middleman between the dealers and the suppliers, he handled distribution. This was an underage orphan who, somehow, had managed to become a crack executive and rent his own crib (shady landlords were abundant in the drug-controlled neighborhood). He made everything look effortless, and mysterious. Who was that quiet, older girl he lived with? Where’d he disappeared to after K got shot? Even more curiously, he wasn’t flashy about the fact that he was so incredibly paid. He pushed a very used Beamer. He barely had any furniture in his apartment. He didn’t spend all his cash on jewelry. It was like he was too cool to profile. People treated him like he was Superfly. It was a favorite pastime for classmates to sneak into BAM to see if they could spot Khalil’s father, who had a gnarly “K” emblazoned on his forehead. Rumor had it that he had something to do with K’s death, and his guilty brand had to be Jay’s doing. Who else was crazy enough to do some gangster-revenge shit like that? He was a legend. Boys wanted to be him, girls wanted to be next to him. Everybody was in awe.

  Jay was oblivious to his reputation, and if you told him that he was the mayor of Fort Greene at fourteen, he’d deny it. He moved through life in a kind of fog. Everything was mechanical. Still, he had that quality that made people want to know him. He had so many selves occupying his body—drug dealer, intellectual, thug, orphan, caregiver—that everyone could relate to one. But Jay couldn’t relate to anyone—not even to Tammy, on some levels. She was older than him, but he took care of her. He wasn’t her peer.

  Of course, being a teenager, he obviously wasn’t immune to girls. He took them out sometimes, fucked them, whatever, he wasn’t really there. Jay lived inside his head. He always had to keep his mind occupied. Whenever he could, he threw himself into books and movies (he had no discretion, he’d go to anything that was playing—he saw Mannequin three times). He filled up his mind with made-up stories. It was the only way he could drown out the memory of Khalil’s horrible, middle-of-the-night voice.

  He was failing everything at school. He knew he really didn’t even have to be there—but he had to keep busy, he had to outrun his thoughts. He was like a machine. Totally preoccupied, he wrote through all his classes. One day, his furious English teacher, Miss McCargo, asked him what was more important than her lesson on Catcher in the Rye.

  “Many things, seeing as how I read it when I was nine,” Jay replied.

  She snatched the notebook off his desk and was astonished to find a beautifully written short story. Miss McCargo submitted his story to a writing contest at the tony Eardale Academy on the Upper East Side. He won a full scholarship.

  He spent the next three years profiting from some of Manhattan’s richest, youngest crackheads. They thought he was “rad!” Fancy Education Boy was added to his list of personalities.

  Meanwhile, Jay put Tammy through cosmetology school. Jay and Cap (who gracefully accepted her career change) were there at her graduation, beaming like proud pa
rents. Jay’s present to Tammy was not only her own salon, but also the apartment above it—in her hometown, Newark.

  Their separation was teary and sad, but Tammy was finally living her dream. His work done, he retired. He passed the torch to Black Andre, who had been shadowing him for years. He had cash for the rest of his life.

  Jay graduated from Eardale in 1991 with a creative writing scholarship to the University of Virginia. He lasted there for two weeks. He loathed the South. It took people too long to talk.

  He came home and embarked on what he would later call his “Blue Period.” Jay was aimless. None of his old crew was around. Yellow Andre, Darryl, and Bone were in jail. Black Andre, who wasn’t blessed with Jay’s wiles, was shot and killed in ’92.

  Jay rented a huge, impersonal, industrial loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, miles away from Fort Greene. The neighborhood was virtually empty save for some abandoned warehouses. Jay spent the next couple of years drunk, high, and wide awake. Sometimes, nerves completely shot with insomnia, he’d catch the NJ Transit and seek refuge at Tammy’s. They’d have their therapeutic, nonsexual sex. Despite the vaguely incestuous undertones—or because of them—he’d temporarily feel reconnected.

  Eventually, he ran out of cash and started hustling again. Low-level. After some research, he found out that the real money was in heroin. Grunge was in full swing, and the East Village was full of white slackers scouring the streets for a hit. Jay claimed the corner of Second Street and Ave. D. This was two blocks from the famous Nuyorican Poets Café, where the early nineties’ spoken word/slam poetry revolution originated. On slow nights, he’d stop by the café and listen to poets like Saul Williams, Paul Beatty, and Jessica Care Moore. They were becoming Names, publishing books, and reading in places like London and Amsterdam. Inspired, he began to rise out of his funk. He started writing short stories again. One of his café clients, a scatterbrained, purple-haired Columbia student named Adam Wunderman, owed Jay money. Adam never went to his creative writing class (at 10 A.M., it was too early for him) and knew Jay was a writer, so he offered to let Jay attend it, free of charge. All he had to do was use his name. Jay became Jewish for art.

  The class (“Yeah, my name’s Adam but my friends call me Jay”) was a workshop format, where you read your work out loud and the students critiqued you. When he read what would become the “old man on the stoop” monologue, a cute girl named LaLa began hyperventilating. She wore a dyed-orange Afro and a dashiki, and hosted an open-mike night at Brooklyn Moon Café. Immediately, she asked him to be a guest. He agreed, and was an immediate scene-stealer.

  And then it happened the way things happen. His name was on everyone’s lips. A woman in the audience invited him to a showcase downtown at School of Collective Thought. Jay became a regular there, and the owner of the East Village’s Performance Space 122 asked him to write a one-man show. He started making money and dropped hustling for good. One thing led to another, and he ended up at Public Theater, causing all kinds of stirs.

  This is how a boy from the projects becomes a sensation in NY. Speaking of success, Tammy’s salon hit the ground running. So she wouldn’t confuse herself with the messy girl she once was, she went by her middle name, Pandora.

  * * *

  • • •

  Billie, Vida, and Renee were having Sunday brunch at Chez Oskar. This ritual began two years before, when the trio moved out of their shared apartment and into ones of their own. Their careers had begun to hit their stride, and they were in danger of never seeing each other. So, every Sunday they took their place at the trendy bistro among the writers, musicians, engineers, artists, designers, and publishing folk who made up the turn-of-the-century Fort Greene scene.

  Billie was deliriously, blissfully happy. Her entire body felt bruised and wonderful, and she was in love, love, love. Jay Lane was delicious, in every way imaginable. She was all atingle and couldn’t calm down. Yet she was waiting for the right time to divulge her secret to Vida and Renee. This would blow their minds. Billie was used to hearing the details of Vida’s torrid affairs and Renee’s Go Down Moses, but she’d never had anything to tell.

  The girls were discussing their week over omelettes and French toast.

  “…and so, basically, I told Diana that she wanted to launch Sam C.’s perfume at a location that really says ‘Thrust.’ Somewhere that screams sex. And what venue is sexier than Heaven? On a slow night you have supermodels giving brain in the VIP lounge.”

  “So what did she say?” asked Renee.

  “She said yes!”

  They whisper-screamed, as it was a public place.

  “Oh, Vida, that’s so huge!” exclaimed Billie.

  “I know, I know! I’m sure I can get at least two party photos into New York magazine.”

  “Of course,” said Renee. “Without trying, even.”

  “You know I had a feeling about Heaven, from the very beginning.” Vida sipped her mimosa. “I’ve never thrown a beauty event, though. Who should I put on the list? Besides my standard photogenica.”

  “Make sure you invite all the beauty editors from all the magazines. Even the teen ones. Sam C. is high-end, but you never know what they’ll cover. Also, when a beauty event is so closely tied with fashion, the crowd is more intense. Especially since it’s a night event and at Heaven and it’s Sam C. The whole city’ll be there.”

  Vida opened her mouth in a silent scream. “Okay, I can’t talk about this anymore—I’m so excited I’m gonna earl.” She changed the subject. “So, what are you gonna write about Fashion Week, Billie?”

  Fashion Week was the furthest thing from Billie’s mind, but she scanned her memory and recalled what she’d thought of the shows. “The whole week was an orgy of ethnic borrowing,” she pronounced.

  “Okay?” agreed Vida.

  “How? Explain, explain,” ordered Renee.

  “Don’t get me wrong, the shows were beautiful, they really were. But, look. Dale Bane’s show was basically a parade of Chinese pajamas. The models were made up like China dolls. And I’m not even gonna talk about the Azucena event on Friday. It was Chinese everything—they even put a mah-jongg set in the gift bag.”

  “Is that racist?” Vida wondered aloud.

  Billie continued. “The Kotillian show was a suede-and-fringe homage to Native Americans. Pocahontas braids, bronzer, the whole nine. Gaston Arnold was trying out, like, some kind of agresso-chic, Black Panther aesthetic.”

  “What?” Renee didn’t do fashion speak.

  “There were Black Power fists, Afros, and camouflage Nehru jackets. I don’t know what he was thinking. And the Sam C. show was all ghetto, all the time. I mean, fully. Little minidresses that looked like they were made from FUBU jerseys. The models wore Timberlands and straight-outta-the-Bronx dark lip liner around frosted lipstick.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I kid you not. But the models had these really beautiful cornrows, and I found out backstage that a black girl—with her own salon, mind you—did the hair. At least Sam C. was authentic about it. I was ready to be so mad at some Fifth Ave. stylist trying to tell me how to cornrow hair.”

  “Oh, don’t get me started,” said Vida. “That’s so Bo Derek.”

  “Thank you. So I want to do an article on the inspiration for the ethnic beauty at the shows. Give a little credit where credit is due. Anyway, that’s what I’m throwing around.”

  “That sounds hot, baby,” Vida said, as she picked at Billie’s un-eaten omelette. “It’s so crazy. Black culture is the culture now. Everybody wants to be on some black shit. Look at Sarah Jessica Parker on Sex and the City. This girl is rocking Kangols, gold bamboo earrings, name plates. What is that? Rocking it like it’s new. And now it’s all the rage and high fashion cuz a white woman’s wearing it.”

  “Girl, that ain’t nothing new,” said Renee. “That’s America,
always wanting to jock what we’re doing. And claiming it, too. Debbie Harry invented rap, Gwyneth Paltrow invented weaves, Elvis invented rock and roll…”

  “As if Little Richard didn’t even exist,” added Vida.

  “And the first rock star to wear eyeliner was Alice Cooper,” said Billie.

  “Yeah, when it all started with Little Richard!”

  “Damn, Vida, are you related to Little Richard?”

  “I just saw his Behind the Music,” she replied sheepishly.

  “Are the tables turning?” asked Billie. “We’ve spent the last four hundred years trying to define ourselves by white standards of beauty, trying to keep up with them. Ten years ago you had Spike Lee hating on Whoopi for her fake eyes. Now you have a former Footloose costar spending millions to look like Lil’ Kim.”

  “Okay, ya’ll are hating on Sarah Jessica Parker,” Renee said, laughing. “Please admit the bitch is fly.”

  “Oh, without a doubt,” said Vida. “Doorknocker earrings are mad cute. But I knew that when Salt-N-Pepa wore them in nineteen eighty-six.”

  “Everything comes back, and there’s an inspiration for everything,” said Billie. “But at least flip it on some new shit. Be creative.”

  “Like Madonna,” said Vida. “She’s a shameless cultural rapist, but she makes it interesting.”

  “What?” Renee was shocked. “How does Madonna flip it?”

  “Don’t mess with my girl,” warned Vida.

  “No, I love Madonna. But really. She had her black moment with ‘Lucky Star.’ Then she was Spanish for ‘La Isla Bonita.’ Recently, she was Hindu. Then she read Memoirs of a Geisha and became Japanese. We all read that book and loved it, but we didn’t become Japanese. Now she’s British.”

  “The Scone Age,” said Billie.