Dapper Carter's 8 Rules of Dating

by mitchell, alan

  I could feel Charisma's eyes on me. They twinkled and they would close when she smiled.

  "Dominique, you didn't tell me that Dapper was fine."

  "Yeah, this is my buddy. My boy."

  That was my wake-up call. Her boy? It was obvious that she had put me in the Friend Zone, too. Once again I was being perceived as a sucker. Dominique got up and excused herself to go to the ladies’ room and invited Charisma to go with her. She refused, which made me read between the lines. But I didn't have to read for long since she swung over to my side of the booth, making sure to infringe upon my personal space. Albeit cute, Charisma had a simple unassuming look. Not that she wasn’t attractive, but she looked like hundreds of girls that I had met growing up in Jersey.

  "So, what's up with you and my girl?"

  "Nothing. Didn't you hear her? I'm her boy."

  "Goody. Then that means maybe we can kick it?" Goody? Hadn't heard anyone say that in a long time, but it was cute coming from her. Caesar’s antagonizing voice echoed in my head about how women only want men that other women want. It's unfortunate, but that’s the way women are built unless you're fortunate enough to be the one they want.

  "You're serious?"

  "As a heart attack."

  "Just like that? While your girl is in the bathroom?"

  "All's fair in love and war. She's done it to me before." It was the oldest story in the book. Dominique was the attractive friend that got all of the attention and Charisma was the friend with the great personality, which usually meant she wasn’t very attractive on the going-on-blind-dates circuit. Lucky for her, as we get older looks become less and less important and personality goes a long way.

  I was becoming the king of mediocrity. I was scarfing up all those 5, 6, and 7’s on a scale from 1 to 10. I knew I was underachieving, but so what? I was about to turn thirty-six so you have to take it wherever you can get it, because there are no guarantees as to when the next train is going to pull into the station.

  Charisma was a little bit heavier than I like, but beggars can't be choosers. In my mind, as long as your breasts are bigger than your stomach, I can work with you. She asked me for my cell so that she could enter her phone number into my contact list herself. This had become the cute little fad, indicating that a person was interested and could be assertive.

  I was old school, though, instructing her to tell me her digits verbally and I would remember. I had developed this practice while I was married and still used because consequently it left no physical evidence. Most women were like CSI and I wasn’t going to take any chances. Remembering the digits was also quite impressive with the ladies because it showed how interested I was, if I called. Besides, I didn’t want Dominique to return to the table and see me taking down her girlfriend’s info.

  Varvatos

  I spent many quiet nights in my tiny apartment relaxing and trying my hand at poetry. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be and I arrogantly thought that just because I had an imaginative mind and took a creative writing class while at Rutgers that I could put my thoughts down on paper and it would make sense in iambic pentameter. The only thing I could come up with was a title: “Letter to Mrs. Carter.”

  I would listen to old, sad-ass blues singers thinking about my mother. Phyllis Hyman, Etta James, and Muddy Waters were my favorites. I love my mother and she is an angel on earth. She had me when she was seventeen, and for the most part, gave up all her career dreams in order to raise me. She said her calling in life was to be my mother and she was accepting of that. My father was in the Navy and was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. He would drive six hours every weekend to come see us and drive six hours back to the base for work on Monday morning.

  My father was a proud, quiet man. In his mind, actions spoke louder than words and he demonstrated his love for us by what he did, not what he said. I never really articulated how much I appreciated him paying the rent, tuition, and keeping the lights on. Small things that were easily overlooked and underappreciated that dad’s didn’t get enough credit for. He didn’t say very much, but when he would drop a pearl of wisdom on me, I held it close to me to be never forgotten.

  I remember being on a rant when I was fifteen years old about “how the white man wasn’t shit” and was trying to keep the Black man down. He reminded me that he knew a lot of Black people who weren’t shit either. That became my mantra, putting things into perspective for me and contributing to my ability not to trust anyone. Some people will give folks the benefit of the doubt, but I didn’t. You had to earn my trust because it was not given freely.

  My mother’s heart broke when I revealed to her that the babysitter was molesting me when I was ten years old. I told her how each time she left the house, the fear would be so paralyzing that it would cause me to pee in my pants. Both of my parents felt horrible because they felt like they didn’t protect me, but it wasn’t their fault. Shit happens. At least now I could begin to understand why I do some of the things that I do and begin to work on it.

  Frustrated, I launched my notebook off the red brick wall. Poetry sucks, I thought, until I was distracted by the annoying hum of my cell phone vibrating on the nightstand. I reached over and grabbed it.

  Yesss! It was Green Eyes texting me and she wanted to come over. She claimed that she felt bad about getting sick and going to sleep on me the last time we hooked up. It was already 11:05, so according to the Honeycomb Hideout Rule she would have to hit me off, or at least give me a blowjob. I’d even settle for a hand job at this point.

  She maintained that she was nearby and would be over to my apartment in as little as fifteen minutes. I even offered to go pick her up, which was a ploy to make sure I could see her, but she relented and promised that she was on her way. She had gone to a wine tasting and was good and tipsy but hopefully not as toasted as the other night. I suggested that she bring a steak with her because I was going to give that monkey a black eye!

  I was smiling like a Cheshire cat as I jumped into the shower to freshen up, then sprayed myself generously with my go-to cologne, John Varvatos, when I was done. I normally wore Issey Miyake during the day because of the light, citrus smell. But at night it was Varvatos.

  I was careful to light each of the twenty or so red candles that I had placed in my fake fireplace to give the room nice warmth and glow. I also had to choose between which incense I would go with. I settled on Nag Champa. Three years without sex and I was finally going to pop my cherry again...or so I thought.

  After completing all of my pre-sex functions, I glanced nervously at the clock, which now read 12:30 AM. Fifteen minutes had turned to ninety and I paced frantically with the phone stapled to my ear in one hand and the bottle of half-finished Merlot in the other. I left message after message and sounded like a straight sucker.

  "Hey, it’s me again. What's going on? You were supposed to be here an hour ago. Give me a call."

  "I'm calling you again. Where are you?"

  Finally at 3:00 I knocked off and rolled up into the fetal position under my white down comforter, pissed off and broken hearted yet again. I should have known better and I didn’t even get a chance to enforce the rule. Something had to give.

  Caesar Likes You

  Caesar pulled this Alfred (freak) at an after hours club over on Myrtle Avenue and got her drunk on Moet and high on ecstasy. That was how Caesar rolled. He took her to her crib and beat it up, then crashed at her apartment that was conveniently located around the corner from me.

  The following morning he picked me up and gave me a lift to work in his brand spanking new raven black Cadillac Escalade hovering on 24-inch Giovanni rims. Just because you’re in your thirties doesn’t mean you’re too old to rock hot rims on your car. When you’ve got an $80,000 vehicle you just don’t need all of that other shit. Nothing says drug dealer like tinting the windows, putting a rocker panel on the sides, and having a sound system you can hear in outer space. We’re too old for that shit.

  However, we weren�
��t too old to nod to Jay Z’s first album, “Reasonable Doubt,” arguably his best. Matter of fact, Cez had most of Jay Z’s whole catalog in his rotation. “Hard Knock Life,” “Life and Times of Shawn Carter,” and “The Blueprint I and II.” We were both still heavy into hip hop, and why shouldn’t we be? It was the voice of our generation.

  I was a freshman in high school when KRS-One dropped “Criminal Minded” during the summer of 1987. It changed my life the first time I heard “The Bridge is Over” and so began my love affair with hip hop music. I didn’t mind the fun, party anthems that were banging in the clubs, but when it was all said and done, I wanted to listen to MCs that could tell you why “I’m the baddest motherfucker on the block and this is why you should be listening to me.” Braggadocios rap was a lost art form, but it remains an integral part of the culture.

  We cruised down Flushing Ave. past the Marcy Homes, where Jay Z grew up, before boarding the Brooklyn Bridge and heading into the City.

  I thought it was cool how Brooklyn had so many diverse groupings of people, but it was still very separated. Bensonhurst was Asian. Italians took up most of Bay Ridge. The Russians were in Brighton Beach. The Orthodox Jews had the most opportunities to live anywhere since they dominated Williamsburg and Crown Heights. Flatbush was Trinny and Jamaicans, Africans, and plain old Black folk lived wherever we could afford to, which was usually Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Brownsville and anything headed east.

  The money areas— Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Garden— were more about class and less about ethnicity. A new species of yuppie lived there now.

  Caesar pulled slowly on his Cuban cigar. The sweet stench made me want to vomit. I preferred the smell of a plain old Dutch Masters filled with the green sticky substance over the $50 stogie he was smoking. But it was his car so how much could I complain? "You can't make a ho a housewife. You never heard that before?"

  I had. I just didn’t understand it, though. A city full of millions of people and this was the loneliest place on earth. That was the running theme for me. I just couldn't get it out of my head how a city with so many people and resources could be so lonely. I noticed that everyone in the City talked to themselves. Most people lived alone and had gotten very used to their own company and frequently talked out loud as if there was another person in the room. The only way to defeat that circumstance was to get a pet.

  "I keep going out with these chicks and just can't connect. These women got so many guys sweating them that by time your name comes up again in her “rolla-fuck” it might be a week later. I need someone I can talk to every day."

  Caesar exited the bridge then gunned the Caddy’s Northstar engine onto the FDR, the fastest way to the east side. We flew by several of New York City’s finest without any repercussion. The NYPD had more important things to worry about than the occasional speeder.

  "Do what I do. Only fuck with people who fuck with you," he offered.

  "What’s that mean?"

  "Only deal with people who are giving you their energy. If she's feeling you, going out with you, fucking you, that's the person you need to deal with. Why swim upstream? I may not deal with the finest chicks all the time, but I only deal with women who like me. If you like Caesar, Caesar likes you."

  I pondered the sage advice that Caesar dropped. That conversation changed my life, causing me to approach this thing differently. Since it was a game, I had to play it like a game.

  Caesar dropped me off at work and I began to incorporate my new attitude immediately. I started to shine at the Fitness Depot since I was confident, self-assured, and relentless. My technique in the bars became my technique on the sales floor. Or was it vice versa? Steel sharpened steel and closing sales was helping me close dates.

  Monday or Tuesday?

  Mr. and Mrs. Smith from Greenwich, CT were gracious and elegant, and right off the bat I could detect a hint of a Southern accent. I took a stab and inquired if they were originally from Georgia. They were from Atlanta. I told them (lied) that I too was from Georgia originally and how I missed the peaches.

  One of the rules in sales is to find a common interest with the customer, even if it's a lie. It wasn’t too much of a stretch, though, because my grandmother on my mother’s side was from Savannah, so I could claim Georgia if I had to. I constantly probed, looking for a common link between the customer and me; be it geographical, sports teams, culture, politics or religion. In sales all was fair game to establish that feeling of comfort and trust between the customer and me.

  They were shopping for a treadmill and right away they were bitching about the price being too high. It amazed me how people who live in multi-million dollar homes are looking for $400 treadmills. They buy their Jaguars and Rolexes among other things that won't help them live a day longer, but I had to convince them to invest in saving their own lives?

  So I went to work on this couple. Salesmanship fell under the sales umbrella and this was where I made my money. All those years struggling as an actor in Hollywood didn’t go to waste, fortunately, as I was able to call upon the showmanship from this experience necessary to make the deal happen.

  "Let's throw price out of the window for a moment and assume you like what you see and want to buy. Let’s not forget that you came in my store, not me coming into your home, so you’re obviously interested, right?" They nod in unison. Another rule was to keep them nodding.

  I continued my presentation with the precision of a surgeon being sure to focus on all the key elements involved in selling and buying a treadmill. I was relaxed. I squeezed my scapulas together, forcing me to draw my shoulders back and pop my chest forward to let everyone know that I truly was an expert and knew what I was talking about. Confidence will take you places you never thought you could go.

  After a flawless twenty-minute presentation, I knew that it was time to start cutting to the chase. "So, Mr. Smith, this treadmill has all the qualities you’re looking for, right? Durability, motor size, shock absorption, warranty? So what's keeping you from doing it right now?” I asked. It was the hard sell. What’s keeping you from doing it right now? Not for amateurs. This question a novice should never ask unless you’re supremely confident or really just don't give a fuck. I stood in front of the Smith's in total control. They glanced at one another with that honey-maybe-we-should-talk-this-over look, so I went for the trial close. "So when can we deliver it, Monday or Tuesday?”

  This was a technique designed to help the customer feel like they have some control over the situation. Whichever answer they chose was the sign that the sale has been unofficially closed by their committing to a delivery date.

  He or she was a sitting duck because if the first rule of sales is ABC- Always Be Closing, then the final rule of sales is the first one who talks loses. Put it out there, say what you have to say, and then shut the fuck up. I've used that tactic and the standoff has gone as long as thirty to forty seconds because the jerk on the other end knows that rule too. He usually worked in sales too.

  "Monday?” Mr. Smith offered. And it only took three seconds.

  Friday or Saturday?

  Today was one of my best days in sales since starting for the Fitness Depot back in September. I took in an easy nine grand while only selling a “measly” three items, a $4,000 treadmill, a $2,000 elliptical trainer, and a $3,000 gym for a big shot hedge fund manager’s home studio on Central Park West.

  New York is a running city, but sometimes it’s hard to carve out your own space in a city of eight million people that are always on the move. So most New Yorkers have found a way to stick a six foot by two foot treadmill in a space that usually has less than one thousand square feet for the low, low price of a half a million dollars. New York City leads the nation in heart attacks statistically, so exercise is imperative to combat the stress of living in the tri state area. So that’s how I buttered my bread.

  Finally spring had arrived, although the strangest phenomenon I have ever witnessed occurred earlie
r that day.

  The apple blossoms had already bloomed weeks ago but we got a blast of cold air from Canada that caused snow flurries in April. It was surreal as the snowflakes became indistinguishable from the white blossoms blowing off the trees from the gusts. The Upper East Side looked like an urban snow globe.

  When I got off of work I decided to walk the long way to the downtown C train, cutting through Central Park. It was 8:00 and the sun hadn’t even started to set. I loved this time of year and I had the perfect job to fit my social schedule.

  There was nothing like getting off work and there’s still enough daylight to get a beer, get something to eat, get another beer, hit a club in the Meat Packing District, which is in lower Manhattan and puts me closer to Brooklyn anyway, party for a while and be in bed by 2:00 a.m. I didn’t have to be up for work until eight, so I was assured of getting at least six hours of rest. Gotta love those retail hours with store openings at ten.

  The tourists and nannies that commonly frequent the park were gone and people getting off work, such as myself, take over the landscape of the park in search of a glass of wine at The Boat House or brown paper bagging a beer and sitting on a park bench like me. It’s illegal to have open beverages in the park, but as long as you weren't rowdy and out of control, you wouldn't draw the attention of the horse-mounted police officers.

  I mulled over my breakthrough day while I sipped my suds. I drank a Miller Lite, keeping it simple today. My body was getting tighter by the day and I didn't need alcohol undermining all my hard work.

  Posting up on the park bench directly across from me was the ebony goddess, Lynne Whitfield. She was eye catching in a tangerine sundress, probably Donna Karan, a pair of oversized Prada sunglasses, and that pouty I-don’t-want-to-be-bothered look she is known for. I could tell that her body was ridiculous from the hourglass silhouette beneath her dress and I wanted to satisfy her badly.