Bitch Is the New Black (18 page)

The scene was Manchester Avenue, a stretch of depressed gravel that kisses the Pacific Ocean to the west and tongues down Inglewood on the east. It's familiar and old. Like most Los Angeles streets south of anything good, it belongs to the '60s on a clear day and the late '80s on a smoggy one. Earlier Bilal had mentioned something about there being drunk-driving dragnets on Manchester right across from the cemetery and next to the Forum—where huge crowds of screaming fanatics used to worship the Lakers and now do the same for the Lord. But since the general consensus inside The Explorer was that Bilal was a damn maniac who opened the doors of moving vehicles, we shut him down before he even got started.

We should have listened.

“What's with the traffic? It's like three in the freaking morning,” I asked the Stupid Questions fairy outside my window.

“Is that a cop?”

“Perfect.”

We couldn't see the whole thing until Gina pulled up to her place in the line to get fucked. The stoplight, blinking red like a silent alarm, flashed everything into obviousness—cops in cop cars, clipboards, mobile booking units that made me think of
temporary classrooms, tow trucks, poor unfortunate souls trying to pat their heads while rubbing their tummies, and the absence of hope. One uniformed gentleman walked up to Gina's window, did the international hand sign for “Roll your window down, your best friend just ruined your record,” and asked her if she'd had anything to drink. She said, “No.” I imagined we'd get the same cell, but one never knows.

“You sure, ma'am?” he asked, giving her an eye exam with the flashlight buried in his palm.

“Well, just a glass of wine or two.” This was so ballsy it made my mouth water. I swallowed with a guilty gulp, remaining silent without having to be told.

“Ma'am, can you pull your car around the corner here.” Politeness while being policed is offensive. And since peeling off in a cloud of smoke down Manchester and to my grandma's for a new pair of panties and then maybe on to Mexico was out of the question, so was defending ourselves. I couldn't protect Gina, and it seemed as if Bilal just didn't want to. He planted an elbow against the passenger door, resting his chin on his balled fist and rolling his eyes. Teaching her some kind of lesson, I suppose.

Another uniformed gentleman took Gina away to do all the choreographed calisthenics you see on
Cops
. Thank God she'd decided against heels. While she aped drunken
Darrin's Dance Grooves
outside, I was going ape-shit inside. They were about to take her down to Chinatown! And it was all my fault—sort of. I promised baby Jesus I'd buy the ten-lesson package from Drive Right as soon as I got back to Washington—
just please don't force her to fashion a shank out of her Shu Uemura eye pencil.
As I begged our Lord and Savior to spare Gina from a life of checking “yes” to the crime conviction question on any application, Bilal reached into his back pocket and pulled out his PalmPilot.
Bilal has JC on speed dial?
Nope, but he does have a saved game of Solitaire.

“What the hell are you doing?!” I said, wedging my head into the space between him and his home screen. Visual confirmation complete. This dude was in fact playing a game designed specifically for octogenarians and eighth-graders while the woman he told me he loved (again, we'd known each other for one-third of a day) was pivoting with her left foot on the imaginary line, dividing the us of right now from whatever we were before an acronym made everything all blurry. DUI. Don't underestimate incompetence. What was bizarre about this entire situation, aside from the fact that an innocent Riesling-induced rage had spun way out of control, was how damn nonchalant Bilal was acting about the whole thing. As if Gina and I both had brought this on ourselves. As if the two of us together were the problem. Maybe one without the other would have a chance.

Every good friend just wants to be needed by the other, until she's not because a penis has come between them. Then when the thing goes limp, she's needed again, and whatever condescension she feels is fleeting, wiped clean by the righting of the order of things. This was how it was supposed to be, right? Just me and Gina. I hated him for making me feel so damn useless.

“Well, there's nothing we can do right now,” Bilal said without looking up from the stacks of cards smaller than Chiclets in his hand. He was serious. This was happening. I was being voted
Most Likely to Have to Get Her Shit Together When Boyfriend Loses His
without having to hand out cupcakes or oversize buttons.

“Are you insane? We need to figure out what we're going to do if they arrest her ass,” I said, squinting my eyes in the rear-view, trying to make out if the objects therein appeared bigger than they actually were. I mean, were we really in the shit? Was Gina going to do time, or at the very least suffer major bureaucratic inconvenience, because I was too busy for a driving lesson ten years before?

“Oh, they're
going
to arrest her,” Bilal announced, without pity. Great, a card game enthusiast and a pessimist.

As far as rescue teams go, Bilal and I sucked. Lacking the positive energy necessary to secret her out of those handcuffs and back in the driver's seat, we spent the next half hour debating whether or not Gina (a) brought this on herself, (b) would get out of this unscathed, or (c) would be not only scathed but scared shitless. He kept the time by tapping black and red cards across the screen with his stylus. I drummed the backbeat against my window, watching to make sure she wasn't getting brutalized—or worse, videotaped.

A rap on the windshield threw us off. Yet another Mr. Officer, Sir—this one kind of sexy in that lame Bachelorette Party stripping-to-get-through-med-school sort of way, did I mention it'd been a long time?—came over to smash my pipe dreams: Gina was in a mobile home being booked under the suspicion of drunk driving. Her continued refusal to take a breathalyzer test (more balls!) would most definitely end in a one-way ticket down to Chinatown. Population: alarming. Praise Jesus, there was a conjunction in there somewhere. If one out of the two of us had a California driver's license, they could release her to our custody, and this whole thing would play out in the fluorescent light of day court. Otherwise, The Explorer was on its way to wherever irresponsible cars go for a time-out. Since Bilal was from Ohio, and I was from Idiot Island, our last card got played before the game even started. No, we couldn't talk to her. No, we didn't have much time.

Was there someone, a real adult maybe, into whose custody they could release her? Yes, yes! I called Frances, who showed up in PJs and Asics. Bilal called his roommates, Jewish guys doing the scriptwriting thing. Oh, wait, did we mention that only The Explorer's registered owners can save it from the tow truck?
Crap. I was trying to avoid calling Jane and Carl, Gina's parents, at all costs. There was a time in eleventh grade when Gi told her mom she was with me when in fact she was with a college guy until well after midnight curfew. By the time sixteen-year-old Gina finally got home, the always-appropriate Jane, who'd been waiting on their manicured lawn in a terry-cloth robe, said, “Ass.” I didn't want to be the jackass at the beginning of that sentence. So using the 3:00 a.m. voice, my opening line for talking to Jane had been passed down over the centuries from fuckup to fuckup: “We're okay….”

But were we? I knew I was, and Bilal, who all during the wait to be rescued by people obviously more qualified managed to stack all his cards up in a row, had to be too. It was the “we” part that had me all messed up. Without me, Gina would be on the opposite side of the universe right now, in a place called her boyfriend's arms, oblivious to the fact that she had a selfish bitch for a BFF and a possibly autistic asshole for a boyfriend. Solitaire for a straight hour? Really, guy?

Even if I had the DeLorean, the flux capacitor, and all the gigawatts to get us out of here, Doc only knows when I'd program it for—1996 and Melrose Driving School? To Pilgrim High School in 1994, when the sporty girls needed a fifth and Gi picked me? Two hours ago on the corner of Wilshire, or a day ago when Gina said she wanted me to meet Bilal: “All right, you gotta see this dude and tell me what the deal is.” Helena from today would have tried to convince the Helena from yesterday to say something sincere or white girl–ish like, “If you like him then I like him. I'm sure he's perfect!” And when the old Helena rolled her neck around to give me the side eye and ask, “Why the hell…?” the time-traveling Helena would cut her off with the YouTube of right now and say, “This is why, bitch!” Then the happy couple in the picture would fade back into existence, minus the annoy
ing friend holding up bunny ears behind them. Then the present day would be even better than before. Or…

Maybe all of this was a good thing. Well, not the whole DUI situation—everyone can agree how much that was going to hurt come tomorrow morning—but perhaps by some convoluted cosmic kismet, my lack of a driver's license had inadvertently outed Bilal's lack of common sense. I mean, why didn't he just drive? Why didn't the three of us just head to his house, which was like ten minutes from the bar, and sleep off our troubles? But see, someone in possession of a nondriver's ID cannot ask these types of questions from the backseat. It isn't done. Also, what kind of sociopath plays solitaire when his girlfriend might be in solitary? It didn't take long for me to diagnose Bilal with Asperger syndrome. I was rescuing Gina from having “special” children. Screw my promises to Mr. J. H. Christ: not driving was saving more souls than the Forum on Sundays.

In the time it took for me to absolve myself, the cavalry had arrived. Frances came first, walked straight up to Gina at the mobile home moonlighting as the intake center, gave her a wink, and said, “It's all good.” Then she gave Gina her shoulder, and the two of them stood still for a minute. Then came Bilal's white boys from Hollywood. And then Carl and Jane, who, just wanting their daughter back, decided to hold the furious for later. I was all set to roll down my window and yell, “It wasn't me!” but thought better of it. Whichever way the steering wheel turned, it
was
me. I'd helped rack up negative points on her driving record and added yet another name to the losing column of her love life because, obviously, I'd have to inform her of what a jerk Bilal had been this whole time. She should probably dump me, though—trade me to some East Coast team where nobody passed me the ball. Trying for one last Hail Mary, before everybody got to The Explorer, I gave Bilal the score.

“Don't say shit to her. All that other bullshit that happened before—forget about it, for now at least. She's had handcuffs put on her. She is now a person that has been handcuffed. Her whole life is a shambles.” I was talking fast, hoping he was catching some of it, any of it.

“All right,” he said, sounding annoyed.

I wish I could say he'd put down his phone.

File this under G.H.E.I.:

Cardigans in Mister Rogers red, size
smedium
, hyper nipple awareness, the flexibility to lift one's five-foot-long legs over one's head, squealing, combat boots, jeans with stretch, eurocentricity, K-Swiss sneakers, fat laces, pashmina, limes in Corona, Corona, the phrase “I love modern dance,” exclamation points, squealing, white linen, flip-flops, guy gauchos, cashiering at Barneys CO-OP, sexy face, DSLs, overactive hands, overarched eyebrows, BeDazzling, working on one's personal relationship with Jesus Christ, light eyes, briefs, boat shoes, the facedown jockey position, a plastic pink butt replica hidden underneath a West Elm bed, Amsterdam, acting classes, sarging, Express Men, eye-rolling, and squealing. One hundred words on why we never win, by Gina Albertson.

“Dude, I can't with you and these gay dudes,” she said, frustrated by the exponential growth of the questionably queer database I call the G.H.E.I. file so we can speak about it in public without offending the actual gays. “Seriously.”

“James is so not gay. He's just…eurocentric. In France he'd be totally normal, masculine even. Uber. Masculine!” We were a day past Inauguration 2009, and to commemorate, I'd decided that James and I should get married. His dad was from Africa and he grew up in Arkansas, and I was from the south side of California. We were a campaign ad waiting to happen, but for his apparently conspicuous attraction to men as evidenced, according to Gina, Inspector Gayness, by his smedium skintights.

“Those pants aren't even that bad. He's got some way sexier.”

“Sexy or suspect, dude? But it's whatever, 'cause I'm uberly familiar with your protocol. Uberly.”

“I hate you.”

If she had a point, I couldn't see it past the pulsating mob of American flags in our future. Not to mention the fact that James didn't have a gay bone in his entire body. Gay jeans, gay cardigans, and maybe even a slight case of gay face, fine. His bones, however, were anything but—trust. But at my twenty-seventh birthday party, he spent no less than an hour chatting up the two fiercest guys there, my gay husbands Antonio and Ricky. Most recently, Ricky had spent a small fortune at the Co-op in Georgetown just to get a closer look at James, who worked the register in between law school classes. I considered him safe until Antonio tapped me on my shoulder.

“Who
is
that?” he asked, doing a bad job of hiding a finger pointed in James's direction behind his upturned palm.

“Who? James?” I was buzzed.

“Yeaaaaaah…is he gay?” he asked, whispering in my ear as if the answer was already understood.

“Um, no, honey. He's mine.” We slept together for the first time that night because (1) I needed birthday buns, and (2) I needed proof.

Somehow, Gina still got a “told you so” out of this. “And there
you go,” she said the next morning. Antonio's suspicion proved everything, and my sluttiness, nothing. What mattered was that James fit the profile, a constantly updated but well-edited list of identifying characteristics that made up the G.H.E.I. file, which started years before with a guy we'll call Winston.

Tall and good-looking with an island lilt only detectable when he answered the phone after six—“Good night?” That always threw me off. Another thing sticking with me was the time we went to see
Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical
. Not the musical part; that was my idea. Taye Diggs was sitting in the row directly in front of us.
Fine, no big deal, loved you in
Malibu's Most Wanted. But then afterward, as the porno-theater-goers crowded the sidewalk outside, Winston made a big show of patting his pants pockets. He claimed to have left something inside. Taye Diggs was still inside. I don't know if it was the way he'd whispered, “Hey, isn't that Taye Diggs?” or the overcompensating “Who gives a shit” way he acted when I answered, “Yes,” but something in my spirit gave me the sneaking suspicion that Winston wanted to go in to take a closer look at Taye Taye. Maybe even sniff some of the air where he had stood or touch the seat where he had sat. I don't know; it was just a hunch. One that Gina was too thrilled to jump on. “I mean, dude, he did have on those Mexican Nikes.” That's what she calls Nike Cortez Basics, which, in her jumbled opinion, are a very gay sneaker.

Aside from the Taye Diggs incident, there was also the issue of Winston's favorite position, which involved me lying facedown with my legs squeezed together and his on the outside.

“Like is he simulating a butt? Rear entry, I mean.”

“Dude, I know what you mean, and, umm, yes.”

So when a few months later, Winston told me that he was “uncomfortable being intimate” with me, instead of cursing him out, I considered myself lucky. Seeing as how I'd just been saved
from a life of boredom being some hot guy's beard, I thought, Good riddance.

But not to the end of my gay phase. Next there was Jean Claude, whose real name was Frank. I noticed him courtside at a Nets game while I was shaking my pom-poms during TV timeouts. Yes, I used to be a professional cheerleader, a personal fact that has awarded me more ass than a lost puppy or a bigger bra size. Anyway, Jean Claude/Frank's lips were like something out of a racist comic book, and what he did with them was superheroic. But I couldn't get past how they looked attached to his face—always slightly parted, glistening with a “natural” gloss. So after a few weeks of struggling to explain his lips (“Dude, what's he supposed to do, cut 'em off?”), I took my own advice. Jean Claude/Frank asked me to “go with” him, and I laughed it off. He left offended.

Taylor's challenges were also physiological. Bored of going to the movies alone, I was on the lookout when I spotted a giant with a pointy bald head across a rooftop on a damp night out. Ignoring the likelihood of snow blindness, I stared directly into it as if it were a crystal ball, and like magic he turned around, his light browns bulging right back at me. Adrienne was concerned—“Does he have a hyperthyroid issue?”—and I was encouraged. I skied across the crowded rooftop and said, “You think I'm cute.” Taylor called the next day, and casual dating ensued. High off that new-boy smell, I overlooked the fact that he said “put up” instead of “put away” and wore dress shoes with pressed denim. The squealing, though, was too high-pitched to ignore. “Play with my nipples,” he'd moaned, out of breath on our first conjugal visit.
Um, okay, I guess, why not?

My fingers had barely grazed them when it happened. There is no onomatopoeia in existence capable of sufficiently describing the wild banshee mountain lion siren sounds that followed. I
immediately snatched my hands back for fear of killing this man with kinkiness. His head shot up from the throes of passion, “Why'd you stop?”
Um, okay, I guess, why not?
More ungodly sounds. I was busy deejaying his pecs when he decided to high-kick things up a notch—literally lifting his lanky man gams up to his head, waiting for me to…do something. I was so impressed I forgot to throw up.

“I don't believe you.” This was beyond even Gina's realm of comprehension.

“Swear to Zeus and CC Allah.”

“So, what'd you do, dude?”

“Umm, pretended not to notice and went to sleep scarred but satisfied.”

“You know you have AIDS now, right?”

“I hate you.”

Was I ignoring the obvious or just obviously desperate? Or was it that I was looking for an excuse? A sheet of paper I could give my mother that read, “Listen, it's not her fault you don't have grandkids, blame it on
the gays
, signed Dr. What's-His-Guts.” If dude was gay, well then obviously it wasn't going to work out. It wasn't my fault or anything. I mean it's not like the G.H.E.I. file was scaffolding meant to shore up all my issues with men or something. What I'm saying is that I was never the problem. Even I could admit to that, whether or not famous people could.

 

“Star Jones finally filed for divorce,” Gina said over IM one day.

“I saw that, tombout she made a mistake or whatnot by bringing the media into her life. Girl, stop. You made a mistake by marrying a gay man.”

“Right. That'll do it. But, dude, that's what happens when you're forty and need a wedding…bad.”

“What?” Gina gets paranoid sometimes, and the best thing to do is wait.

“That's why after I turn thirty-five, I'm all for having a wedding with no groom.”

“For what purpose?”

“To get the fantasy out.”

“That's just a ‘happy to be single' party. We can do that right now. Or not.”

“No, it has to have all the trimmings of a wedding, because seriously, how many of these weddings are about anything else but the woman anyway?” This from the same woman who once quoted Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale in a Gchat status message—“If you can't get a man to propose to you, you might as well be dead.”

“But you need the man next to you,” was my point. “He's an invaluable accessory.” This was my attempt at injecting romance into our scenario.

“So hire one,” Gina said. “That's probably just as likely to work out as your actual boyfriend, especially if your boyfriend is the gays.”

We were enjoying this. Making our lives sound like an especially scary episode of
Law and Order SVU
or
New York Undercover,
if you want to get old-school. The musical montage at the beginning tells you everything you need to know, and the rest of the show is just filler for product placement. See, there's the master's in sociology strategically placed near her mid–twenties, and oh, look, there's the new condo in Leimert Park right in front of her thirties, and over there is the annual girls' weekend in Negril, Montego Bay, or somewhere in Mexico. Things had been set into motion since the first note of the theme song (elevator music?).
All we had to do was figure out how the pretty brunette ended up dead and alone in her apartment for four days with “Bohemian Rhapsody” blasting on repeat, her dog humping her broken heart and no one noticing.

There was one snag in the plot, though—none of these guys were, in fact, gay. Gay-ish? Maybe. But ready for a ride on the party bus down to Tangy Town—not so much. Once I traumatized Dexter, who Gina had warned me about after seeing him appear online in a fierce face (c)
Zoolander
. I told him one day I wished he was gay, because then we could be the black Will and Grace. “Then we could be together forever, no problem!” He said there was just one hitch—the doing the nasty with other dudes part. See? Not gay. Still, we carried on our detective work with associates from Carmen San Diego Community College, memorizing their down-low dossiers for midterms that would never come.
Marry you? Please. I know the truth, rootytooty69
! James–Taylor–Jean-Claude/Frank–Winston could have been any unsuspecting gentleman willing to bet on my personality while I picked apart his sexuality. My real job was to beat him to the punch before
I
got outed as an asshole.

Admitting my own perversion—namely egocentrality—was out of the question. Blaming it on the downpour of down-low hysteria was much easier. Especially since I've got this other friend—let's call her Stella—whose “boyfriend” really is gay. For real.

“She's so not familiar with his gayness,” I told Gina on my way back from meeting Stella and her new manfy for brunch. Exhibit A, if you will.

“Why, what happened? What he do?” Whatever she was doing, she stopped to get the juice on the latest fruit.

“First off, he had on flip-flops. Then he ordered a cup of tea and drank it with a superflexed pinkie.”

“Was it flexed, dude?”

“No, dude—superflexed.”

I wanted to tell Stella that Eric, the black Canadian she claimed to be in love with, was super gay. Like totally, unquestionably gay. Like “I pair sandals I bought from Armani Exchange with smedium polo shirts” gay. More than a vibe, I got a vision from something bigger than us—a burning bush, let's say—and it was compelling me to tell Stella to stop, drop, and roll before Eric's flames got too intense. Despite the fact that she was an Easter Sunday Catholic, I knew she wouldn't believe me. Who would, besides Gi? Better to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open.

“Really? I didn't think Eric was all that gay when I met him.” Adrienne was next on the phone tree.

“I don't even know why I'm telling you this.” I sighed, annoyed by how totally in the dark she was. “Everybody knows your gaydar is all out of whack.”

“Shut your face!”

“Right.” It'd been a touchy subject—Adrienne's lack of a homosexual sense—since the Calvin situation. Picture freshman year, a handsome sophomore with hazel contacts, and a fresh-faced co-ed that went by the nickname “little big booty girl.” They dated for just a few months, but in Columbia time, that was long enough to forever brand her as “Oh, who used to date Calvin?” And when he switched from mechanical engineering to modern dance, it became “Ha, who used to date Calvin!” Long after we were formally introduced to his “friend” from the Dance Theatre of Harlem, he'd still leave Adrienne messages on Facebook about how she'd gotten better with age, “like a fine wine.” All that coupled with a protracted “pretty boy” phase had chipped Adrienne's credibility down to negative gazillion when it came to deciding who was down-low or just too slow.

Anyway. Stella.

She called me in the middle of the day and in tears because of some books she'd found of Eric's. He likes settling down with a good murder mystery? Not sooo gay. No, she said. These books were on something called “sarging.” They'd just moved in together, and Stella was going through discarded boxes, not looking for evidence of his sexuality, mind you, just for the kitchen stuff. We immediately consulted Google. Sarge (verb): to go out for the explicit purpose of either: (1) working on skills to attract the opposite sex; or (2) putting those skills to effect. “Well, that could mean a lot of things,” I said, hoping to sound confident while mentally placing this bit of hard evidence in Eric's G.H.E.I. file (
the lad doth overcompensate too much, methinks
). Stella thought he might be cheating. “With who?” I asked in a gentle child predator's voice, not wanting to sound too menacing as I primed her for my next line: “A man?”