Bitch Is the New Black Read online

  This year, we had a certain refrain committed to memory:

  “Dude, where are the men at?” Gina would start.

  “Sheeeeeeiiiiiit,” I’d say. They might as well have been on the moon.

  Our astronaut, Lisa Nowak, was like us. She was well educated: U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1985. She was successful: umm, NASA. And she would do practically anything to hold on to what she thought was a good man—checking his e-mail, Google-mapping her competition’s whereabouts, then showing up unannounced. We worshipped her. The police found her in an airport parking lot in possession of a steel mallet, a four-inch buck knife, a BB gun, and a map to the home of her rival, Colleen Shipman. All Lisa wanted to do was “talk.”

  “Dude, if by ‘talk’ you mean do intense bodily harm!”

  We laughed and cried over dirty astronaut diapers for months, dissecting every new morsel of the three-way between Nowak, Bill Oefelein, and Colleen, the other woman. This part was especially hilarious: while planning a vacation to his parents’ home, Bill e-mailed Colleen to say that they needed a hotel room “due to noise requirements.” He wrote, “We need some ‘privacy’!!!!”

  “Dude, why are there so many exclamation points in this correspondence?” I wrote.

  “You KNOW he holding something,” wrote back Gina.

  “Grodie!”

  We were diaper-dope sick, every day wondering if there was no end to what a hard-up housewife would do for a little romance—trash your current marriage, murder your coworker, crap your pants. But this was more than just another Midwest meltdown or celebrity slipup. Something besides the random ridiculousness of Nowak’s situation made us hungry for her canonization. See, I don’t watch Flavor of Love, I Love New York, For the Love of Ray J, or Real Chance of Love because I like to keep my white people crazy limited to the Fox News Channel. So what kept us glued to Ms. Nowak wasn’t just the fact of her lunacy—tune in to any of the aforementioned shows, and your eyes will bleed reality-TV red—but the cause of it. It was the same thing that was causing ours. When being interrogated by the police, Lisa described her fling with Bill as “more than a working relationship, but less than a romantic relationship.” We immediately started a blog in her honor. Our mission statement:

  We here at Dirty Astronaut Diapers worship secretly at the altar Nowak. We send her the burnt offerings of all the failed relationships, blind dates, missed connections, and random hookups we’ve endured over our decade of dating—the epic saga we hope will one day lead, Odysseus-style, to marriage. Anyone who’ll drive countless hours with a carload of latex gloves, black wig, trench coat, drilling hammer, rubber tubing, and about $600 to “talk” to the bitch who stole her man is a goddess among lesser women. So this is for you, Ms. Nowak—nay, this is for all you women out there who’ve been in “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.”

  I was obsessed with the blog for about a month—paying $29.99 for the domain name dirtyastronautdiapers.com, getting some college geek I found on Craigslist to design our Web site, and coming up with a pseudonym for my snarky but sentimental posts. Then we posted like three things on there and got bored of it. Hello, real life was calling. Plus, writing about how much our reality was biting seemed less like some type of postfeminist protest journal and more like a defeatist’s dying declaration. Remember that one scene in SATC when Carrie wants to go live in Paris with Petrovsky’s old light-installing ass and Miranda’s all, “What about your column?!” and Carrie’s all, “I’m old as shit and I need to live my life instead of just writing about it for some bootleg tabloid nobody’s heard of!” Sorta like that.

  Still, sweet heavenly Jesus if we didn’t know what it was like to be in the more than / less than emotional equation—who doesn’t know what that’s like? Stuck in that in-between place where nobody’s happy, nobody’s leaving, and everyone thinks you’re settling. But as black women, we felt an even bigger gravitational pull toward the jerks who were at once unworthy and seemingly worthwhile (and I speak for all black women because I can). How many times had we convinced ourselves of someone else’s potential while ignoring our own, giving each other great advice that we never follow (girl, he just might not be right for you)?

  Crazy astronaut ladies and fabulous twenty-something black chicks are in the same spaceship: they’re aliens among men blasting off to who knows where.

  Right before we met Lisa, I’d just finished licking the wounds of a wasted year being way more than a friend but much less than a girlfriend to a Wellbutrin-popping Muslim podiatrist named Abdul. I slipped up once and said something about “this relationship” in casual conversation. “What relationship?” he asked. Abdul was preceded by West Point Willy, who drunk-dialed a proposal that he, of course, couldn’t recall the next morning. I pretended not to care. Then came possibly gay Winston, two-timing Darin, crazy Darin, short Eddie, possibly gay Jean Claude, etc., etc., etc.

  Also, I had been surviving the workday by Facebook-stalking James, a summer associate in my job’s legal department, whom I fell in love with during a seminar on libel. He was staring at me so hard, my white work wife passed me a note: “That guy is totally checking you out!” No shit, Sherlock. He sneezed a few times during said meeting, so afterward I slipped him a packet of raspberry lemonade Emergen-C. He asked me out to Starbucks the next day.

  “Soooo, basically this cat is an intern,” said Gina, doing her best to sound supportive.

  James and I played relationship limbo for a while, meeting for coffee and philosophy twice a week and hooking up once in his bedroom, which was missing a door because it was two-timing him with the better half of a living room. A week later, he told me we couldn’t get “romantically involved” because it might affect him professionally. Dude, you’re a fucking intern! You’ve got Ikea curtains for walls! Six months later, I was still convinced we could make it work. I mean, he grew up in Namibia and France and Arkansas. Barack and Michelle 2.0!

  At my twenty-seventh birthday party, about a year after the Emergen-C move, I slunk over to where James was standing and wrapped my fingers around his bicep. “Soooo, what are weeeee doing later?”

  “You mean after this?” He used his martini glass to draw a circle around the crowd.

  “Yes, retard.”

  “Wait, you wanna have sex!”

  “Omigod. I can’t.” We left shortly after and did.

  That was also the first time I met Dex10 (also known as Dexter). I don’t remember it (James, champagne, hormones), but supposedly I was extremely friendly.

  “Dude, get your fucking life together,” was the message that came down from the Oracle. But then again, she was the one who’d spent the past three years “dating” a guy we called the Fireman because he was a fireman. He wanted to marry her and move her to St. Louis, where he fought fires and stuff. “I’m too bourgie for that shit,” was her answer. So now she’s playing red light / green light with Bilal, who thinks marriage is for suckers and children are unethical.

  The point is, we’re becoming those women. The ones guys refer to as “wifey material,” since apparently spouses come in specific fabric grades. After about a week of flirting online, Dex10 described me this way: “Hi, my name’s Helena and I’m awesome. The end.” Gee, thanks. I’ll make sure to keep that in mind when we break up for the fifty thousandth time. Suddenly, Lisa Nowak didn’t look so crazy. Actually, she might have been on to something.

  What does “wifey material” even mean when someone at the Washington Post thinks the headline “Marriage Is for White People?” is okay? The article, of course, became another one of Gina’s and my obsessions. The Washington fucking Post was against us now.

  “Dude, is there anyone out there who wants us to find a man?” I asked, more begging than wondering. SOSing, really.

  “Nope.”

  The reporter who wrote the story worked part-time with kids, who I’m going to assume were from the “inner city,” because those are the kids people write about in newspapers.
Once, in one of her classes, during a discussion on how to be a good father, one frustrated little boy said, “Marriage is for white people,” and clearly a movement was born (remember the AAHMI? Me neither). This kid wasn’t into the whole “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage” thing. Perhaps Nursery Rhymes that Subliminally Teach Minority Children about Healthy Social Institutions 101 should be a kindergarten requirement.

  If so, Dexter would still be eating Play Doh, instead of just playing dumb. Fast-forward to a scene between my sheets on one of the many horrendously long Saturday nights that led to my ignoring him on IM.

  So, we’re naked and he goes, “I don’t know. It’s like…I don’t know…Maybe it’s that I don’t think I can live up to the low expectations you have of me.” He’s looking past my forehead.

  “What?” I’m trying to sound as nonmurderous as possible. No such luck. “Are you fucking serious right now? Like are you actually saying this to me right now?”

  “Helena, you’re the most amazing person.” Now he’s looking me in the eyes. “Like, I’ll never meet anyone better than you. I just know I’ll mess this up.” He was slipping through my fingers, and I couldn’t clench my fists fast enough. It was one of those terrifying, long-winded, up-late, naked conversations that never begin or end. The first of many we’d have.

  This particular cram session all started with a bad fashion choice.

  I’d “caught” Dexter—at this point my maybe-boyfriend for at least a month—kissing some girl in a club. Yep, he was tonguing down some light-skinned, curly-haired, Forever XXI fashion-top-wearing girl. The shirt she had on was asymmetrical. Repeat. He kinda betrayed me with a girl wearing a shirt that was long-sleeved on one side and tube top on the other. After a marathon curse-out, he managed to make the situation not about his “cheating”—we weren’t exclusive yet—but about my inherent awesomeness physically compelling him to treat me like “some stupid chick off the fucking street,” in my humble opinion.

  Was I too perfect? What kind of crazy monkey-junk logic was that? Was he just not that into me? Did I actually just ask myself that? What kind of maniac subscribes to a self-loathing brand of reasoning created by a comic with frosted tips? So what was it then? And we’re back to the beginning. What would Lisa do? Where does one purchase a mallet?

  We’d started out promisingly enough. Dex was terrifyingly good-looking and had a quirky I-write-poetry-about-the-women-I-date-to-make-each-one-feel-special thing going. He was in law school. He’d be my Cliff. And I’d be a less pathetic Pygmalion. James who?

  Then, on that never-ending Saturday night, I stupidly decided to do a drive-by. Sure, I was going to check up on him at the club, but I was going to be super-covert about it—two-stepping in the background and pretending not to care about what he was doing over there with that woman dressed for Homecoming 1996. So the girls and I posted ourselves on the fringes of the dance floor, and he was so good for the first two hours.

  Then I came back from the bathroom.

  “Stop staring at him!” I screamed over the music. They were busy drilling neat holes in the back of Dex’s head, arms crossed over their chests like pissed-off principals.

  “That girl just kissed him,” said Adrienne, my best friend since freshman year, too matter-of-factly to be joking.

  “Ummm, what?”

  “She kissed him on the lips,” she repeated in the same “just the facts, ma’am” voice they use with victims on SVU. “We both saw it. There wasn’t tongue or anything. But definitely on the lips. Whaddyawannado?”

  What do I want to do? What do I want to do? I want to fucking scream is what I want to do! I want to punch that bitch in the damn throat and slap that shirt back to the bargain-basement bin to which it belongs. I want to slap you for seeing them tongue each other down and then telling me about it. I want to hop in my time machine and take back the blow job I gave him last night. Fock! This dude was supposed to be it. I took him to an office party, for Jesus’ sakes. An office party! I couldn’t stop saying, “Oh fuck.” He was gorgeous and smart and funny and muscle-ly and beautifully weird and ugly when he came. I’d farted in front of him and didn’t bother to pretend it wasn’t me. And now I was going to have to start over. But fuck it, right? Keep it moving.

  Yeah, maybe tomorrow morning.

  I clicked over to where Dexter was sitting with Forever XXI girl and pounded my fingers into his left shoulder. “We need to fucking talk.”

  He was surprised to see me but followed my back through the club without asking questions. I pushed past people like an astronaut with space dementia. When I finally whirled around to face him, I could tell he was drunk. “Are you here with that fucking girl?” I screamed with my feet shoulder width apart and my nails digging into my hips. Power stance. “And don’t even try to fucking lie, ass face, because Adrienne saw you licking her goddamn titties.” Dex’s eyes got big, but he didn’t deny it, not even the parts I’d made up. Not a sound came out of this man’s mouth, even though it was so wide open I could’ve put my fist through it. I thought seriously about doing that.

  “Omigod, your breath! It’s doing karate moves. Close your fucking mouth, retard!”

  He closed it, and I left.

  I ran past Adrienne, who’d witnessed my meltdown along with a bouncer and a few other people, to the ATM across the street to try and get $20 for a cab. Why do I never have cash?! Adrienne ran too. “Get in my car, Helena. I know you’re embarrassed, but it’s me, dude.” Fock.

  As soon as I got into my apartment, my always empty but now totally emptier apartment, I flipped open my laptop and deleted Dexter from Facebook, MySpace, AIM, and my Outlook address book. I needed to do something real. But really, he was just another ephemeral disappeared-into-the-Internet ether. Nothing. It was 4:00 a.m., and I wore down my living room floor pacing back and forth, making guttural sounds—grunting like a damn maniac because I couldn’t cry. I wouldn’t cry—not after only five weeks. So instead I lay on my bed, hissed at the ceiling through clenched teeth like a woman in labor, and waited for sleep to come.

  Then he caaaaalled, and we taaaalked, and he beeeegged, and I liiiiiistened.

  Yes, I am totally familiar with how ridiculously pathetic I am. How fucked I am in this entire situation. How like Lisa I am right now. She’d been in outer space. Outer freaking space! I assume she knew she was better than dirty Depends (I mean, there are rest stops). And yet this woman, this woman who was like us in so many ways, was willing to abandon life on the moon for a man with whom she shared “more than a working relationship but less than a romantic relationship.” Does success drive you totally insane? Or do men?

  Six months and one Lisa later, I still didn’t know for sure. This is why I can’t answer Dex’s whining IMs. This is why I have to get over him. This is why I’ve been super-strong and full of resolve for the past two weeks. This is why when I saw him walking up the stairs of yet another club just last night, my stomach flipped, my eyes went all watery, and I almost choked on a shard of ice. This is why when he came over to our pack with a shit-eating grin on his face and embraced one of my friends and then tried to give me the one-armed homie hug, I gave him the thumbs-up. This is why, when I saw him later the same night, this time standing by himself at the bar looking all lonely and irresistible like DVF at Filene’s, I had to say hello. This is why we ended up talking all night. This is also why I woke up to him the next morning and have to start all over again with the whole ignoring thing.

  This is why I never win.

  Two

  GETTING MY HAIR UNDID

  Know how I found out my family thought my mother was a crack-addicted sex fiend who dabbled in the international child slave ring and planned to sell her only daughter to the highest bidder? Over the phone and under a hair dryer.

  “Whaaaa?”

  “I never told you this?” Umm, no.

  See, Frances does this. We’ll be talking about something FCC-approved for mothers
and daughters, like, say, vaginal itch, and she’ll bust in like the emergency broadcasting system with a “What kind of birth control do you use?” or an “I’ve been celibate for almost a decade” or an “Oh, so you two are just fuck buddies then.” Beeeeeeep goes the filial flat line. Dead. She’s got mommy Tourette’s.

  Even better than talking, she’ll actually do things that are totally unkeeping for a woman her age or sexual orientation. In a perfect world, I’d be blissfully oblivious to these random acts of kinkiness, but for the persistent photo evidence. It’s as if she’s leaving me Kodak crumbs, snapshot SOSes. Like the time I found a picture of her with Treach. Yes, that Treach, one half of the Grammy-winning rap duo Naughty by Nature, who famously asked, “Ya down with O.P.P.?”

  “What. The hell. Is this?” I say, ripping the four-by-six from her fridge and eyeing it up close. Oh, it’s Treach, all right. I pinch a triangle of the edge and dangle it in her direction.

  “Oh yeah, he’s a performer,” she says, actually using the word performer, which proves just how wrong it is for her to be in this picture.

  “Jesus, woman!” I feign a proper degree of daughterly disgust, when really I’m proud of how utterly ridiculous she is. How totally unacceptable her whole life is. She’s in this picture cheesing like someone told her to, holding a glass of champagne, and wearing Treach’s arm for a shawl. This lady is old enough to be wearing shawls. According to her version of the night in question, the two of them—my mommy and the hip-hop star—just happened to be in the same club celebrating the release of a porno Treach was in—she claims ignorance here—and Frances, being Frances, finagled her way into VIP bottle service, because that’s what she does. Now she’s got proof of how inappropriate she is magnetically fixed to her fridge.

  It was also through This Week in Pictures: The Frances Andrews Edition that I learned she’d gotten married. I was in grad school at the time, and the “wedding” to which I did not receive an invitation had taken place a few months before. The groom was this African guy named Isa, who was gay and illegal. Frances wore garb for the “ceremony,” which in five-by-seven looked like it took place in the kind of church basement slash community center slash banquet hall in which fake marriages are held. Less than two years later, they were found out by the Feds when neither one could remember (a) the last time they had sex or (b) which way the toilet paper rolled off the handle. Frances said two weeks ago and under. Isa said two months ago and over. The INS agent decided to be merciful and file their interview in a trash can. Better it never existed.