by Shaw Sander
I rolled my eyes but I was listening. He had a point. I was a little defensive. I remembered the AA definition of fear and realized it fit far too often: being afraid I will not get something I want or something I have will be taken away. Time to put that aside, feel the fear and walk right toward it, chin up.
But believing everything would be alright was not my strong suit. Drake and I called it “Our Bridge Syndrome,” since we both had huge chasms of fear, open maws calling our name around every corner, the bottom surely about to drop out, leaving us destitute, homeless and living under a bridge.
“I had a bad weekend with OBS,” he’d tell me on a Monday morning and I’d know he’d wrestled the devil fears, feeling fat, worthless, broke, floundering rootless and going nowhere but down.
“Change the thought direction,” Malcolm continued, reading my mind. “Drop the serious, the fearful, and project nothing but zip-i-dee-doo-dah sunshine. Lemme tell you something, Al, when you walk into a room and smile, you light the whole place up, I swear. When you first came in here you were sunny as hell and smiled at me and I was hooked instantly. You do know how to work a room so concentrate on that part of AnnaLee. You are beautiful when you feel beautiful. Like Gil Scott-Heron said, baby girl: ‘You can be so very beautiful when you are who you are.’”
“Okay. I’ll try that.”
“Put an ad on the internet. Then you can weed them out, pre-screen, pick and choose.”
“No fucking way.”
“Honey, I’ll show you how to do it so it’s completely safe. Lots of…what do you gals call them?...boundaries, like it’s the wild fucking west. Safeguards. No one’s going to hurt you. I’ll be on speed dial, that’s part of the safety plan, the ‘Big Brother Watching.’ No one’s going to fuck with you if you’re careful. It’s not all Green River Killer out there. I met my wife online years ago and my cousin met her husband online, too. It’s really an efficient way to date. I’ll help you, girl.”
I’d had a hippie childhood with the Sunshine People, full of androgynous role-switching. In the 70’s we’d dismantled the hierarchy so my training had stressed Our Bodies, Our Selves, carpentry, auto shop and overthrowing oppressive patriarchal gender roles rather than deportment and feminine charms. Sex was a given in our world, without any of the bothersome courtship ritual. I’d never dated, been given flowers, played hard to get. I understood none of the unspoken rules others seemed to innately use to join the romantic slipstream.
Sometimes that had gotten me into dangerous situations. As a teen I had packed a pearl-handle knife to level the playing field.
In my next life I wanted to come back as a tall black man like Malcolm, I thought, watching him talk. Women’s fears were embedded, ingrained. We remained ever vigilant, our eyes furtively scanning the scene for predators, walking at night in protective groups, nervous antelope at the twilit watering hole. We kept keys between fingers, ready at any moment for imminent danger. Malcolm never had to feel like gender-based prey.
He was telling me something, his face earnest. I hadn’t really heard him.
“Did you hear me? I said grow your hair.”
“Okay,” I answered. “I’ll grow my hair.”
“You want…what is it you tell me they say in therapy? You want your outsides to match your insides.”
“In other words, grow my mullet out so I don’t look so much like a dyke anymore?”
“That, too,” he smiled, and moved the toothpick with his tongue to the other side of his luscious mouth. “Men like long hair. They want to touch it, smell it, hang onto it when…” he leaned in closer “…when they’re riding y’all from behind.”
I blushed deep pink and set my fork down.
“Okay, I’ll grow it out.”
“And get some dresses. I’m gonna guess how many dresses you own: none.”
“Wrong. I have one.”
“One. And you bought it in 19…?”
“Okay, okay, I’ll get a dress. Some dresses.”
“Get one and see if it feels comfortable to you. You might like it. Might not. You shave your legs now? Armpits? Christ, I feel like a sleazy gym teacher or something. But seriously, I don’t want to assume shit. Men like smooth these days, is all I’m sayin’. Smooth everywhere. Get me?”
“I’m picking up what you’re putting down, brother,” I smiled, not so shocked this time. Maybe men and women could be friends and speak directly.
“And you’re gonna have to learn to play a little hard to get. Men like the challenge. Fucked up, I know, but it’s true. Give them everything and they don’t want it. They want to fight uphill like fucking salmon to spawn. Put them off for a while.”
“But I want sex, too. They want it, I want it, what’s the big deal?” I didn’t see the benefit in not getting right to the point.
“But if you want sex with dinner and conversation and the promise of more dates in the future, you have to wait. No sex until the third or fourth date.”
“Jesus. This sucks.”
“The good news is they buy every time. Pay for everything.”
“What? Why?”
It didn’t sound fair to me.
“Because,” he said, very seriously, “…they are paying for the pleasure of your company. That’s jessa way it is. Always been, always will. The man pays, period.”
I stayed quiet, not sure men would pay for my company without an immediate payback. The bar phone began to ring but he ignored it. Malcolm went on.
“You have to choose really carefully to even get to the first dinner date. Then you have to choose all over again, whether you really want to have a long-term interest in the guy. It’s a given that he wants you. Let that be your baseline. Don’t even sweat that. Everybody loves a big-titty woman, like Chris Rock says. And you’re good-looking, interesting and very sexy. So from jump street they like you, you hear me?”
This warmed my insides. Having a handsome straight black man tell me I was attractive was wonderfully uplifting.
After downing the rest of his liquid lunch, he went on, lowering his voice even further.
“You, know AnnaLee, if I wasn’t married, you and me, we’d be….we’d have taken care of business a long time ago, know what I’m sayin’? You have that It, that Something, so just use it. You’ll do fine.”
“You’ll help me write the ad, too?”
“You the writer. You do that part. But I’ll help with all the rest. And,” he smiled and winked as he got up to answer the phone. “…the man always pays so I’ma be the first man to buy your lunch. I’m comping that salad.”
The writer. Right.
If you counted long letters, unfinished stories, unspeakably personal narratives and unpublished manuscripts, I was a writer, sure. No one ever saw my work, they simply believed me, while I squirreled myself away for long periods, a full ashtray beside my right hand, caffeine glaze over my eyes, phone unanswered, the hour unimportant. I never let anyone I knew read my stuff. I had ended relationships over unauthorized reading of my work.
My road to hell was paved with rejection letters from magazines, agents, and free weeklies, all of whom sent the most ingratiating notes while turning me down. It felt after a while that they must think their recipients were on edge and potentially suicidal as their tone was magnificently, even tenderly apologetic, careful not to crush the writer’s spirit. I could think of no other professional circumstance where such care was taken with rejection.
So a few-line personal ad? I could do that.
Strong 40-ish single woman desires playmate
No, too…butch.
Elegant woman of mystery needs daredevil companion
Way too over the top.
Seeking charm, wit and quality banter in a black 40-ish male
Too direct.
Billie Dee, where are you?
Idiotic on paper but I did wonder where his clone might be.
Silver fox looking for salt-n-pepper match
That sounded like Steve Martin.
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I finally settled on describing myself a bit, asking for what I wanted, and threw in a political reference to snag a smart one. Adding three recent pictures of me smiling in my gladiola garden with a purple silk scarf around my neck, I carefully reviewed the snapshots. The new black silk dress clung close to show my assets and my hair had looked great that day, the silver Bonnie Raitt streak off to the left shining through my growing dyed-auburn hair. The wording was short, to the point, and had some brain-teaser value.
Marilyn’s stats, Poundstone’s humor and a hunger for man appreciative of both. Fin.sec. SWF seeks fin.sec. SBM for endless exploration. Old enough to know the revolution will not be televised.
I pushed Send, paid my monthly dating site fee and called Malcolm at the restaurant.
“I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” I said when he answered.
“What?”
Drake would have gotten the reference.
“The personal ad. I submitted it. What the hell do I do now?”
“Sit back and watch the responses stack up, baby. Come in to the restaurant tomorrow and we’ll talk safety and strategy.”
“Deal.”
“Proud of you, Al.”
After the Capital Hill meeting, I asked Shell out for coffee, alone, so I could tell her I was going to start dating men again. She whooped with glee.
“Girl, that’s great!”
“Why does this make you so happy, might I ask?”
“So I can live vicariously through you! I’ve been bogged down with Blake now for a while and I’m restless. I’ve been noticing men again and they’re noticing me but I’m too comfortable to change anything.”
“Still having sex?” Lesbian bed-death was a common occurrence, the domestic scene as sexless as the twin beds in “Eating Raoul.”
“We…kinda do. Once in a while. But she turns me off.”
Shelly looked away.
“Honey? What does that mean? Kinda?”
“It means I do her and then I fake it right away because I get so turned off…”
“What turns you off?”
Shelly’s voice got low, and she looked down, swirling her wet cappuccino.
“She…Blake yells like a banshee when she comes. Like yippie-ki-yay! Whooping. The neighbors look at us funny.”
“What?”
“I know. It’s weird.”
“No, no, I mean….”
“C’mon. I’ve slept with lots of girls and I’ve never heard it like this. Like kd lang. It turns me completely off,” she frowned, steering me into a Tully’s that had been a Seattle’s Best Coffee. In Chicago SBC had been Stewart Brothers Coffee, confusing me when I moved to the coast. All Seattle coffee was great but I was partial to Tully’s since the founder was starting a new business on my Twin Toasters West building route. He was always friendly and warm, not something many folks were to blue-collar folk, had the whitest teeth of anyone I’d ever seen and signed for his packages personally with a huge smile, telling me to just walk right into his office. So I liked Tully’s.
I wasn’t sure how I’d deal with it, either.
“Well, it doesn’t matter all that much since it’s rare we even have sex. I’ll just listen to your stories and fantasize,” she said.
“Are you sure this internet dating is a good idea, darling?” Drake worried, mentally running through every axe-murderer scenario possible.
“I’m tired of being alone. I’m tired of lesbians after Angel fucked me over. I want companionship and a date with dinner. Black men appeal to me, and I’d like to get serious with a fine upstanding black man if it’s in the cards. I’ll never know til I try. I’m not gonna date anyone from work and I’m not gonna go stand at 23rd and Cherry. Plus Malcolm’s coaching me on safety.”
“Why would you need coaching?”
“So I don’t have to be scared. Because I never dated before, real dating, like everyone else did in high school but I skipped completely. He set up a whole array of safeguards so I can feel comfortable meeting these complete strangers. The man is a wealth of information.”
“Like…?”
“Always leave time between contacts---no being rushed into anything. If I’m on the phone and we make a plan to meet, it is always a few days later. If he’s in a hurry, red flag. Drop him.”
“Okay. Makes sense.”
“Always meet for the first time in the daytime. Always in a crowded public place. Coffee only. That way, I can skate in and out in ten minutes if he’s awful or dangerous or grabby. No whole-meal dates until later.”
“Makes complete sense.”
“You’d be surprised how many men don’t want to go along with these things. They want instant nighttime sex. A lot of them are married and this weeds them out, too. Red flag. No home phone number means they’re married. Red flag, too. And no last name until I know them, no employment information, no telling them exactly where I live. No house calls. No riding in their car. Always meet with my own transportation.”
“This guy’s smart.”
“He knows men. And lastly, no going on any date without first letting someone know where I am going, with whom, and when I expect to be back, calling at that time as well.”
“Also good.”
“You’re it.”
“What?”
“You’re it,” I told him. “You have been elected as the one I am going to call before and after. Malcolm’s married so I can’t go calling him at home. Shelly’s lover Blake would flip out if I called there and described dates with men, especially black men since she’s a fucking Mason County knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. And Birgitte is far from ready to hear about happy serial dating, since she’s hating men in general and Kyle in particular.”
“Well, I’m glad you thought of me first, Al,” Drake sniffed, his feelings hurt at my practical analysis.
“You big queen, you know I’m crazy about you and there will never be a replacement. Besides, they are all too pedestrian to understand the ins and outs of such things anyway. I’d trust no one else.”
“Well, if you put it that way…. maybe I’ll watch and learn, maybe take out an ad of my own. I could use a Prince Charming myself. A white one for me but same concept. As long as it doesn’t interfere with my trip to Mexico. Only a few more months. Mary Baker Eddy, I need to get away. This office job is like wrestling alligators in a K-Y pit.”
“Men like the long hair,” agreed my hairdresser, eager to get rid of my dated mullet. She’d thrown a plastic apron over me and snapped it behind my neck, twisting the paper into the collar. “We’ll give it some layers as it grows out. Men don’t understand layers. Anything that’s shoulder-length or longer is long to them so we’ll keep it manageable as it grows out. How long have you had it…feathered like this?”
“Since God was a baby. Make it different. I’m tired of looking like a dyke.”
She’d grinned at me in the mirror, holding my hair tips out to measure by feel.
“My own private research has shown that people wear the hairstyle that reflects their prime. If they were a cheerleader or a football star, they still wear their hair the way they did then, no matter how old they are now. People get stuck.”
“You might be on to something there.”
When the children were small, I’d read everything I could get my hands on about being a non-custodial mother.
Imprint them with smell and voice repetition, the books said and tell them you love them over and over. Don’t make promises, just stay genuine. Use terms like “a different day” rather than being time-specific. Don’t criticize the other parent.
I wore White Shoulders perfume, stuck with it for almost 20 years and asked for it every Mother’s Day to further bond the fragrance to their mother-memory. Each time we spoke on the phone, I told them: “I have two things to tell you. One, I love you very much and two, you are very important to me.”
Soon I could say “One, two” and they’d repeat it back to me in a sing-song voice, “I love
you very much and you’re very important to me.” When we were together I’d show them two fingers, first the index popping up then the middle finger to make two and they’d nod.
I’d started a non-custodial mothering group but the other stories were so horrific, so sad I couldn’t bear to hear them. Most of the other women never got to see their kids at all, or were involved in hopeless, exorbitant legal battles that had stretched for years. The meetings became a forum to air pain that had no reconciliation and hearing them made me feel wretched for my low-level good fortune. I stopped answering calls for a while, removed my name from the phone tree and hugged Dew and Peanut even tighter. I was “lucky” their daddy agreed on visitation that seemed to work. Summers and holidays with me, school years with him. I flew in for parent-teacher conference and the kids and I did homework over the phone almost every night.
Joe would measure Peanut before Halloween as she’d agonize over what to be, the measurements sent to me with her request for the year’s costume: a cocker spaniel, a harlequin-ed court jester with a three-corner belled hat, or a princess bride. Dew would read me his essays, patiently explain elementary school football plays for the hundredth time and regularly fall asleep with the phone to his ear while I read him Ferdinand the Bull, The Visitors Who Came To Stay, or Uncle What-Is-It-Is-Coming-To-Visit.
We’d cope through the school year in short visits and live for the end of June when SeaTac Airport would deliver them back to my arms. My jubilant Unaccompanied Minors would be towing a stern flight attendant demanding my identification, despite both children already wrapped prehensile around my legs.
We’d weathered their adolescence, Peanut with huge circles of kohl eye makeup, a cigarette dangling from pierced lip between her hennaed ringed fingers, Dew reading Vonnegut, playing football and going to the prom in a Cole Haan suit with a florescent lime green tie. Now they were at college, making adult decisions, finding their balance, thinking about careers.
I finally switched fragrances to one that smelled like Bakir and no longer had to find a partner who could parent. I had the house all to myself now. They had lived to 18 and beyond so I could breathe a little, enjoy myself.
