The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (3 page)

Sometimes I joined them at the table, but I read the
New York Times
on my laptop. Like most East Coast transplants, I considered the
NYT
a vastly superior newspaper. Also, I didn’t get the appeal of having to sort through unwieldy pages and varied sections just to read the same stuff that I could peruse way more efficiently in hyperlink form and with a few simple clicks on my laptop’s trackpad.

I grabbed an unopened box of Kashi cereal out of the cupboard, and when I went to the refrigerator for some milk, Benny garbled something in Scottish behind me. Something that sounded like, “A baby yandin dah arrow plain row aitch. Carro coh wittoo picker oop?”

“You know I can’t understand a thing you say,” I answered. I tapped the magnetic notepad hanging on the freezer door. “If it’s important, write it down.”

If I sounded surly, it was because we’d already had this conversation, like, three hundred times that summer, and he kept trying to act like what was coming out of his mouth was actual English, when we both knew it wasn’t. Benny grumbled some more in Scottish but got up to write something down on the notepad before throwing his dishes in the sink and heading off to work at some movie filming on the Warner Brothers lot in nearby Burbank.

I finished making my cereal before checking the note, which read, “Would you like to come with me in two weeks to the airport to pick up Abby? She’s got a mate traveling with her who she thinks you’ll like.”

My first instinct was to say no. I’d learned the hard way never to let my white friends set me up, because they were usually trying to pair you with the only other black person they knew.

So there was that.

But this was a social invitation—even if it was a really lame “come with me to the airport” one. So technically, I had to take it.
The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men
had, like, a whole chapter on how women looking to get married should never turn down any kind of social
invite. And since I’d apparently made some kind of dream-fueled jump onto the “trying to get married” wagon …

I grabbed my phone and texted Benny. “Down to go to the airport. Please thank Abigail for the invite.”

RISA

I
f I were asked to write a book on how to be a future rock star, I would say, “Can’t be learned. The shit only comes naturally. And the world knows when you’re just pretending.”

But if they threw a bunch of money at me and were like, “Pretty please,” I’d probably do it. Mostly because I could use the dough.

The first chapter would be all about the rock star schedule, which basically goes like this:

Noon:
Wake up. Give yourself about ten to fifteen minutes to adjust to your hangover, then roll over and tell last night’s girl she needs to bounce. Like most future rock stars, you have a “night job.” That is, a job with an odd schedule that provides you with funds while you pursue your future rock stardom. You practice and compose in the late afternoon, then join the ranks of struggling musicians who tend bar in Silver Lake at night. (Every Silver Lake bartender is a struggling musician. It’s, like, the law.) In any case, you’ve picked up many a tattooed girl after drinking on an empty stomach.

12:30:
Have breakfast: Shot of whisky for the hangover, sugar-free Red Bull for the energy, handful of Cheerios eaten dry and straight out the box for the nausea, protein shake for the nutrients. You’re done. Don’t bitch if you’re still hungry, that’s how rock stars stay crazy-thin.

12:50:
Listen to NPR in the shower. If you stay in till one p.m., when they do the news rundown, you’ll learn just enough to sound smart and current the next time you’re trying to pull some
heavily tattooed girl. It’s not hard to sound smart and current in L.A. People usually don’t ask follow-up questions.

1:05:
Do your hair. If it takes you under a half hour to do your hair, you ain’t a rock star. You’ve got to commit to a hairstyle that will get you noticed, and hairstyles that get you noticed never take less than thirty minutes. Right now you’re rocking a Mohawk with the sides of your head shaved down and the middle relaxed and dyed purple—yeah, purple. The shit is badass. So you need to get out the product and spend at least thirty minutes to an hour styling it in a way that makes it look both spiky and haphazard at the same time.

2:00:
Put on your makeup. If you don’t have a gig that night, then you can probably get away with lip gloss, blue mascara, and blue eyeliner, smudged to look like you slept in the shit.

2:30:
Throw on some clothes. And by “throw on,” of course, I mean scour your closet for just the right outfit combination that looks both hot-to-def and like you’re not really trying. It might take you up to an hour to “throw on” vintage orange-checkered Bermuda shorts, a faded black Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and a green rhinestone skull ring.

3:30:
Call one of the local promoters you know to check in. Until you manage to actually score a record deal to match your rock star status, it’s a good idea to keep in regular touch with the people that get you gigs around town. Mumble that you just got up, but wanted to say thank you for getting you on the bill for Space Camp (a club in Silver Lake) in October. It’s crap pay, but, hey, at least it’s in the neighborhood. While you have this
suck-up conversation, go out on your balcony and smoke a cigarette, not because you’re addicted to nicotine, but because smoking kills your taste buds and makes everything taste like fucking dirt and keeps you skinny. If anyone ever tells you that smoking causes cancer, answer, “It also keeps me skinny, you fat bitch”—but only say that if the person you’re talking to is a friend and/or really skinny. If neither of those apply, just say, “I love cancer. I can’t wait for it to kill me.” Then stare back at them like, “Yeah, I said it.” People will both love you and hate you for saying shit like this.

So that was my usual routine. But this day was different. This was the day that a promoter finally gave me the good news I’d been hoping to get for years.

He said, “Yeah, I was just about to call you myself. One of the A&R guys from Gravestone e-mailed me and asked about you specifically. He’s coming out to the show.”

I nearly dropped my cigarette. Gravestone Records was one of the biggest indie labels in L.A., and unlike every other indie label, they didn’t already have a black female artist in their stable—it was like some kind of quota with these labels and they all claimed they could only have one, like they were all
Highlander
and shit.

“That’s fucking fantastic,” I said. “If you were here in person, I’d suck your dick so hard.”

He chuckled because he knew I was kidding. The rumor around town was that I burned down the closet door with a flamethrower when I was, like, seven and had been a hardcore lesbian ever since. Not exactly true. I didn’t officially come out to my parents until I was twenty-one, right after I announced that I was dropping out of college—not a pretty conversation. I liked the rumored version of my backstory much better.

“Just work on that set list and make sure it’s perfect,” the promoter said.

I assured him that I would and hung up. Then I opened my wallet and looked at the picture of The One that got away. Also, The One that turned me off marriage in general after she turned down my proposal when it was legal for like a second back in 2008. A small pang of guilt pinched me in the heart. The two of us weren’t together anymore—not officially anyway, but I still felt guilty whenever I slept with other girls, since she was The One.

I began to imagine the kind of crowds I would start getting if I were signed to an actual label. I imagined her standing in that crowd, looking up at me and swaying with it. I imagined coming off the stage and finding her outside my dressing room looking fucking amazing and making all the other groupies standing outside my door read like skanks.

And I imagined kissing her in front of all of them and her kissing me back, not caring who saw.

And then I took another drag off my cigarette and wondered if November’s show was the first step to making that scenario happen. The scenario I’d been playing over and over in my head since the first time we broke up back in 2002. I sure as Hell hoped so.

SHARITA

H
ere’s what I needed after a weekend filled with a food drive sponsored by my accounting firm, a brunch with my three closest girlfriends, a half dozen complicated tax returns filed for a client who had “forgotten” to pay his taxes for six years straight, and a lock-in for fifty church-going-but-horny-as-heck middle schoolers: sleep, sleep, and more sleep.

But here’s what I got—a phone ringing at six on Monday morning. I picked it up without looking at the caller ID, thinking something had to be burning to the ground if anyone was calling me this early. “Hello, this is Sharita,” I said, sitting up on one arm.

“Sharita, it’s Nicole.” My sister’s voice came trembling down the line, shaky and sad.

Now I really sat up in bed. “Nicole? What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t get the Verizon commercial,” Nicole said.

I would’ve put some effort into comforting my sister, but the thing was Nicole was an actress. Which meant that at least two or three times a month, somebody turned her down for something. And the other thing was, “It’s six in the morning. I thought it was an emergency.”

“It’s an existential emergency,” Nicole said. “I can’t even land the non-speaking role of Girl #2 in the salon? Why am I even doing this? I don’t know. I don’t know …”

Then she started crying. Not sobbing, of course—she was a graduate of the Yale School of Drama and that would have been too melodramatic for her training to bear—but she hiccupped loud enough for me to hear the tears in her voice.

“Maybe you should come out to Los Angeles,” I said. “Like we talked about. You could stay with me for a while and audition out here.”

“I couldn’t leave the theater behind,” Nicole said.

I resisted the urge to point out that Nicole had been in New York for five years and had yet to land a part in anything but the most off-off-Broadway of plays. Instead I said, “Well, the theater isn’t exactly paying the bills right now.”

“That’s because all of your city’s untrained actresses come here and steal our roles.”

Every time any Hollywood actress landed a role in a Broadway play, Nicole acted like the part had been straight snatched right out of her hands.

I tried again. “Maybe if you came out here, then you could become a Hollywood actress and go back to New York theater after you got famous.”

“Why are you always trying to stage-manage my life?” Nicole asked. The tears disappeared and her tone cooled.

“I’m not trying to stage-manage your life.”

“No, you are. You think I’m a problem that needs to be solved like your shady clients’ taxes.”

“They’re not shady. We serve a very sophisticated clientele at Foxman & Carroll. They just need help with their taxes.”

“Then help me instead of trying to control me.”

“I’m not trying to control you …” I trailed off. “Have I mentioned that it’s six in the morning?”

“I’m sorry,” Nicole said, her voice suddenly softened and went pliant again. “It’s nine out here and I didn’t think before calling you. I’m sorry I woke you; I’m just so upset. My rent’s due in two days and I really needed to get this Verizon spot. The director even called my agent to get my number; we thought I had it for sure. I guess I’m going to have to pay my landlord late and hope that I can find some kind of job before he evicts me.”

I reached over and took my laptop off the nearby side table. “That’s not a good idea, Nic. How much do you need to make rent?”

“No, I don’t want any more money from you. You’re my little sister, and I’m a grown woman. I shouldn’t have to keep asking you for money. I wish Mom …”

Our mom didn’t make a lot of money at her job as a concessions worker at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, so asking her for help was never an option.

“I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t mean it,” I said. “How much?”

“Eleven hundred,” Nicole said. “And I’ll pay you back as soon as I find a waitressing job or something.”