You Got Anything Stronger?

by Gabrielle Union

WHEREAS, I, your friend, know that love is not a guarantee, but heartbreak is not a certainty, either; and

  WHEREAS, you, my friend, perhaps think I am giving this person my heart to break, you can disclose this concern of risk but not hold it as an absolute guarantee of outcome.

  In consideration of the mutual promises contained herein and with the desire to be legally bound by the provisions of this Agreement, the Parties jointly agree as follows:

  You, the undersigned, pledge to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection, and recognize that parties forming relationships in different age brackets have been subject to unjustified criticism and inequality in the eyes of friends and family.

  You hereby acknowledge that it is hard enough for me to find someone to love who won’t ruin my credit, and you, my friend, desire to encourage me to be hopeful for an “amazing” outcome.

  I am aware that “amazing” is not a legal term, and is subject to different definitions. For the purposes of this Arrangement, the Parties agree that it means simply that you allow me to dream.

  Because your opinion matters to me and I feel better knowing you have my back, if and when my Arrangement dissolves—either in amicable clarity or in an instance of slashed tires—you agree to continue to have said back.

  WE, THE UNDERSIGNED PARTIES, have read this Agreement thoroughly. This Agreement expresses our intent and by signing below, we acknowledge our individual desires to be bound by its terms.

  Witness Signature ____________________________ Date __________

  All I expect, and I would like to think deserve, is for my relationship to be treated with the same hope as any other. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find my IcyHot.

  9

  Into the Matrix

  You couldn’t just walk in to Extensions Plus expecting vault hair. You had to earn it.

  Not just as in the fortune that a good weave cost, but the owner, Helene, had to like you. If she didn’t think you worthy of the hair, you weren’t getting it.

  “I have an audition,” I said. She nodded. Every girl in Hollywood had an audition.

  “It’s for the Matrix sequels,” I said. “I’m meeting with Joel Silver and the Wachowskis.” The movie had made half a billion dollars internationally, but it was the casual drop of the names that got the desired effect. Helene raised her chin just slightly, at the mention of one of the most successful film producers of all time and the famous writer-director siblings. It was early 2002, and those people could name their price in Hollywood.

  I was up for the part of Zee, who would be in both sequels. Every Black woman in Hollywood aged twenty to forty-five wanted it. Aaliyah had been cast in the part, but her tragic death in a helicopter crash the previous August meant they needed to recast. I had a vision for Zee, one that went against the expected look of all-black, streamlined trench coats. The character was maternal, but able to operate a bazooka, so I wanted something that was of this earth. Soft, yet powerful.

  “I was thinking . . .” I said to Helene, acting like I just happened to have this photo in my purse. I pulled it out and handed it to her. She smiled.

  The photo was of Janet Jackson.

  Now, if you are as much of a fan as I am, I will pinpoint the Janet moment in the photo. It’s from a summer of 1993 shoot, a long-sleeved white gauzy V-neck crop-top sweater and tiny red-tag Levi’s with the perfect slouch under her chiseled navel.

  And the hair. A cascade of curls swept back from the left to fall down the right side of her face. Yes, the “If” video hair.

  I wanted to channel that soft power for Zee. I’d already gotten the working-actress version of the outfit scouring the racks at Contempo Casuals and trying on hundreds of Levi’s to find the perfect ones. But to really get the look, I needed Helene to open the special vault of hair. To give me the most pristine whatever-virgin-died-at-some-temple hair.

  Helene nodded. I exhaled. I’d passed the test. I held it like a talisman on the way to my car.

  For the day of the audition, I lined up Kim Kimble, a hairstylist who would work magic with the weave, and planned to go straight from her salon to the studio. In her chair, with a makeup artist at the ready, I was transformed into my vision.

  “Do you want the mole?” the makeup artist asked.

  Janet Jackson has a perfect beauty mark on the left side of her face, just above her top lip. I was so caught up in being Janet that I had to go full force. “Yes,” I answered.

  I walked out of that salon ten times more powerful than when I walked in. I drove differently, a coquettish smile to every red light. I’ll allow it, I thought. I was, after all, on my way to meet destiny. They would be filming in Australia—it would be a full lockdown on my time, but completely worth it. I turned up my stereo, blaring “The Pleasure Principle.” “You might think I’m crazy, but I’m serious,” I sang.

  I got to the Warners lot, where I had been given drive-on privileges. No street parking for this Matrix star. The space I was allotted was right by Joel Silver’s production office, which I took as not just an omen, but a nod to our working relationship. I walked right to the door of his office. The door to my blockbuster destiny.

  I walked in fifteen minutes before my appointment, giving full Janet realness. The receptionist gave me a funny look, stared at me a second, and seemed flustered. It’s working, I thought. She’s thinking, This one isn’t like the others. What a look!

  I was amped up on my Janet music, completely off-book on my life, and sitting there as confident as hell. Minutes ticked by. I’m early, I thought, it’s cool. And really, I was in the zone. I was going to walk in there and Joel Silver and the Wachowski siblings were going to say, “There’s our Zee. She is not like anyone we’ve seen.”

  When the door into the office opened, I turned to see what sad sucker was going to have to follow me.

  And in walked Janet Jackson.

  She was there for her audition for Zee. The real Janet Jackson, dressed in the Matrix garb of black and leather. Janet started to say something to the receptionist, and then her eyes fell on me. She leaned back, speechless, but the look on her face unmistakably said, What in the creepy fuck?

  I was speechless, too, breaking into an immediate sweat because I had never met her and was such a fan. Now, here I was dressed as a bootleg bargain basement version of her, down to the mole. Except for my weave, which cost a fortune.

  “Uhhh,” she finally said, but because it was Janet Jackson, they were waiting for her whenever she arrived. Joel Silver and the Wachowskis burst out of the office in excitement. “Hello, Janet,” they said in a chorus. “Come this way.” They didn’t even look at me, but Janet could not take her eyes off me, her gaze turning into a pitying side-eye as she entered the audition room.

  All I was missing was a red clown nose. My makeup was sweating off my face, and I would later realize the mole had run into a streak.

  When they walked Janet out after her audition, I pretended to be very interested in the hole in the knee of my jeans so I didn’t have to look at any of them.

  “Wow,” one of the Wachowskis said once she was gone. Then they turned to me. There was an odd pause as they took in this sight. “Yeah, come in,” said Joel.

  It didn’t get better from there. I barely remember the actual audition, and what was the point? Why take the dollar-store Janet when you could have the real thing? But neither Janet nor I ended up getting the part. Nona Gaye did. For a while I wondered if we had somehow canceled each other out. Or if Janet now hated me. I pictured her psyching herself up for the audition, listening to whoever her idol was. Marching in there to show them Janet the actress. The star. In a look she had chosen that said, “I am ready to be Zee.”

  And there I was, a cosmic joke with a streaky mole, dressed up in my Janet-the-singer cosplay.

  * * *

  Two years later, I was partying at Club Bed in Miami after Bad Boys II was released. Club Bed was exactly that, a nightclub with beds lining the perimeter, a
ll separated by gauzy curtains in a giant room full of pink and lavender lights. There was the ultra-VIP bed in the center near the dance floor, where you could see everything, and toward the way back, there I was with Wilmer Valderrama and one of his best friends, Tadao Salima, who did security. We were doing our version of popping bottles, but not the best ones. Just the ones the non-leads of That ’70s Show and City of Angels could afford. Balling on a budget.

  Wilmer and Tadao returned from a walk around the club. “Yo, Gab,” said Wilmer. “Jermaine Dupri just said he wants to introduce you to Janet.” Jermaine was dating Janet at the time, and I had known him for a while.

  “Now?” I actually said. Here’s what I said in my head: “I am sweaty from being in a club all night and this is not the outfit I want her to meet me in because the last time she saw me I was dressed as her and I thought it was weird so I know she thought it was really fucking weird.”

  So, I just refused.

  Wilmer and Tadao then proceeded to drag me through the crowded club to her VIP bed in the middle. They brought me to her security, just like parents bringing a kid to the front of the line to meet Santa at a department store.

  “Oh, right this way,” said one of the guards.

  “Really?”

  He moved his body so I could see Janet in her large group. Well, the back of her head. The girl she was talking to looked at me, and then leaned forward and whispered something in Janet’s ear. In my mind, what I was hearing is “That creepy bitch from the Matrix audition is here. She’s still fucking sweating and still fucking weird.”

  Janet popped up and turned, and gave me the most amazing soul hug. And she said, still holding my arms, “I’m so proud of you.”

  I immediately started bawling like I was that kid meeting Santa. She heard it all: “I have loved you since Diff’rent Strokes. Charlene. Your hair, Willis Drummond chose you . . . Fame . . . Oh, God, Cleo on Fame . . .” This verbal diarrhea continued, and I will spare you in a way that I did not Janet.

  She was grace personified, saying in her light voice, again and again, “I love it. I love it.” Like a gentle bird gliding over the mess. “Stay,” she finally said. “Hang out.” I looked back at Wilmer and Tadao, my proud parents standing there with a thumbs-up. Their little sweaty creeper had made it.

  All these years later, she’s the friend who reminds me to set my clocks back. We are the older moms in our group, and we just get each other. She’s good for a funny meme, or the text that says, “Hey, I just thought of you . . . How are you doing?”

  I confess that every time she pops up unexpectedly on my phone, I think of that sweaty creeper. Last year, I finally had to ask her. “Hey, uh, do you remember the Matrix audition?”

  Her face briefly fell into a look of intense pity, and she touched my knee in consolation. “Oh,” she said. “I was not gonna bring that up.”

  And then she laughed. That perfect Janet laugh.

  10

  Fuck Balance

  I’m going to tell you a secret about life. You might know part of it, but chances are you don’t know the whole story.

  Wait, hold on. You’re multitasking right now, aren’t you? You can’t even read or listen to a book without having something else productive going on. This is exactly the thing I am talking about: whether or not you have kids, there’s that creeping sense that you are borrowing your time from others. If it’s not your family, it’s your job, your friendships, your abs, and the most guilt-inducing, your potential. Anything for you is at the expense of something or someone else, and you’re always in the red.

  Your life is not just a hamster wheel. It’s an elaborate but creaky system of about five wheels you are expected to keep moving with precision timing. You know the whole thing is being held together with some gum here, acrylic-nail glue there, and maybe a dried-out but still passably sticky Band-Aid you found in your bag. You tell yourself that if you make one wrong step, the whole thing will fall apart, but the truth is if you make any step, the whole contraption is liable to fall down on your hamster ass.

  But you keep going, and the second things start to go off track, the helpful message you get is, “Find balance!” It’s always phrased as something you need to “find,” right? As if it’s waiting to be discovered and you just haven’t tried hard enough.

  You won’t find it. Because balance doesn’t exist.

  “Balance” is actually a multilevel marketing program—what we used to call a pyramid scheme. You know those things. They target your high school friend or cousin, usually a woman who has kids, and tell them to invest their money in a product and then sell it to their friends and family. Worse, these women are told to recruit their friends to become “consultants” so they can access their network. I guarantee you, check your old Facebook inbox—there’s a message lurking in there that begins “Hey girl!” as a preamble to tell you about an exciting opportunity involving nonessential oils or tie-dye leggings.

  No matter how much time or energy they put in, those women never turn a profit. The same goes for balance: you will be continually urged to invest in the idea of balance but never find it as you work yourself to death. Women in the public eye, myself included, are encouraged to promote balance as a concept to everyone in our reach. Whether you’re a senator or CEO, an actress or athlete, you need to have a practiced answer for the question every single interviewer will ask you: “How do you find balance?” It doesn’t matter how absurd the answer is—“I get up at four A.M. to work out so I can be present as I make breakfast for the kids before work.” You just need to have one. Nobody really cares about the answer, mind you, because it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s just about promoting the idea that some equilibrium exists as a possibility. A reach. And that if you work hard enough, sacrifice even more of your time or self, you will achieve this feeling. So, go ahead! Overextend yourself. Hustle more, complain less. If you and your friends are not greeting each other with “I’m so tired” then you are doing it wrong.

  Deep down, you have known that this is a lie. That nagging suspicion you’re being conned is what’s leading to that feeling of rage inside you. The current of anger runs under all the emotions that demand your attention: isolation, resentment, self-doubt. But it’s the rage that surprises you. There’s some tipping point you never see coming that makes your whole day unravel.

  You race for an elevator with a bag and a baby, and you just need someone to hold the door. And they don’t.

  You are managing your family’s schedule and ask your husband the most basic question. He sighs, having to think for a moment about what you have to think about all the time.

  You have engineered your workday to the minute in order to be off at 5:00, so you can pick up the kids from practice, but your boss tells you at 4:50 that they need you to stay longer to salvage the work some mediocre coworker did a half-ass job on.

  Those tipping points put you on the verge of tears and rage. When your anger pops out like that, it feels foreign, it feels powerful, and yet so essentially you that it makes everything else about you seem false. It’s your primal fight-or-flight response to being trapped. Adrenaline floods your bloodstream, your heart rate increases with your blood pressure, and your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain that does the smart stuff—shuts down so the faster-acting, primitive parts of the brain can do the work.

  But what happens to us when we’re always trapped? What do we do with all that adrenaline? All that ragey rage?

  I rebelled from the party line in interviews years ago, but not enough. Before Kaavia James was born, reporters asked me how I balance work and “home”—meaning my marriage and life as a stepmother. Dwyane was never asked about this, mind you. I was the only custodian asked to give progress reports. Once Kaav was born, the stakes seemed higher and the questions more pointed. “How do you make it all work?” was the question.

  “We just try to make it work,” I would say, and I would make a point of acknowledging that it was hard, but we also
had advantages like paid caregivers. “You do your best.”

  What I should have said, and what I ask you to say now, is “Fuck balance.”

  I know for a fact that balance is a lie, because this year I came so close to the mirage, I could almost taste that cool water. It looked so refreshing that I fell to my knees and made cups of my hands to scoop up all the balance. The thing that all these superwomen say keeps them going. Give it all to me.

  But when I brought it to my lips, it was sand. Believe me, I had every single advantage available to me, and it was still a mirage. The system, you see, is rigged against women.

  * * *

  The first five years of marriage with Dwyane were in some ways unconventional. We had very active but separate schedules. I was also a stepmother, so my role in the family had a different set of expectations. But in many ways, it was like most marriages. The male was the breadwinner, and the female generally managed the home. For many years, the life of that home was dictated by my husband Dwyane’s schedule and needs. I don’t think people have an understanding of what goes into getting an athlete of his age and caliber ready every day. If he had practice at 10 A.M., he was up at 7:30. Quick breakfast and a full workout, before a three-hour practice. Then another workout, shooting drills with another coach. Then maybe he’d come home and have a nap. When he napped, the world stopped. The kids put on headphones, and we had a houseful of people moving around like mice. Then there would be specialists—the cupping person, the masseuses, and the physical therapists arriving to make sure his body was working properly. This was a practice day, not even a game day when he had to travel. And there were no “days off,” because a day off from the team just meant he was doing charity work like visiting sick kids for Make-a-Wish, and seeing to business ventures outside his life as an athlete. This didn’t leave time for, well, most things. No parent-teacher conferences, or really anything having to do with school. Like many men, he was not much involved in the nuts-and-bolts parenting that happens during business hours.