I Can't Date Jesus Page 10

  And yet I asked him out anyway. Because he was incredibly attractive, and I wanted some ass. So I went despite having it on good ground that this probably wouldn’t work the way I thought it would. Where we chose to eat was a bit of a one-sided negotiation. He was adamant about picking the restaurant, and every single one of his options was ultraexpensive. I didn’t mind paying for an expensive meal, nor did I object to paying for the company of someone I had invited out. Did I have it like that? Hell no, but you weren’t going to have me looking like I was a cheap-ass. Still, the way he broached the issue was a turnoff. He discussed it with this sense of entitlement coupled with a bitchiness that I found frustrating. Like, I don’t mind taking you where you want to go, but you’re acting like an escort, and if that’s the case, how much are you? We can get to the point, because, after all, food would get in your way, no? Having said that, despite getting the sense that he wasn’t the sharpest person in the Southern California region from his texts, most of those texts were flirtatious on both ends, so once again, I brushed the signs away.

  An’toine ended up picking none of the options he had previously mentioned. Maybe he merely wanted to see if I would be willing to go wherever he wanted. Whatever the case, we ended up at Yard House, some saddity sports bar. I went with an open mind and hoped for the best. That feeling didn’t last long. Once we sat in front of each other, the sense I had that he had the capability to be cold was promptly confirmed. He greeted me like I was the uncle who falsely claimed one of his mama’s children to cheat on his taxes.

  During the get-to-know-each-other portion of the evening, he said, “Wait, you said you’re a writer, right? What do you write about?” After giving him the topics and some of the outlets I was writing for, he looked me up and down and snarled, “I don’t like to read.” My response should have been, You don’t like to read, but you write lengthy-ass Facebook posts as if you’re Iyanla Vanzant with a learning disability or a keyboard that barely functions because you spilled a liter of Dr. Pepper on it.

  Who doesn’t like to read? This beautiful, empty-headed jackass who liked to dispense passionate, grossly uninformed “life tips” on the Mark Zuckerberg–made platform, apparently.

  Yes, it was a pretty shitty thing to respond to a writer by saying “I don’t like to read,” but at the same time, I didn’t give that great of a fuck. If you wanted to be stupid, such was your right.

  What insulted me was what happened a few minutes later. My back was turned to the person when he said it, but An’toine declared, “You look just like that dude at the bar.” I turned around and looked.

  It’s impolite to call someone ugly, but it’s equally rude to tell a person that they resemble someone you would call a bugawolf in your head.

  “I don’t look like him.”

  “Yeah you do.”

  “I do not look like him, An’toine.”

  “C’mon, you’ve got to see it.”

  “I don’t see shit over there but someone’s child who doesn’t at all look like the one in front of you.”

  But he kept pressing it.

  It’s one thing to say you think my profession is a waste of time because the consumption of words is too taxing an ordeal for you and your unimaginative mind, but I’ll be damned if you say I mirror a man who appears to be well over a decade older, at least twenty pounds smaller, and looks like the light inside of him got stomped out by three cases of bourbon consumed five years prior. You got me fucked up.

  In just under an hour, I had learned An’toine was blind and dumb. Thankfully, he spared me from discovering that he might also be slightly deaf, because he said he had somewhere to be in the morning. He meant his job, but I personally wished that he would drive into the fourth circle of hell. We didn’t hug good-bye, and that was perfectly fine. While in the parking lot, I started to entertain the thought of finding a hypnotist to fulfill my mom’s desires for me to like vagina, marry one, and make grandchildren with it in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, because that motherfucker annoyed the everlasting shit out of me. By the time I got inside of my car, I called my friend Kim in Houston. I asked her if it would be okay to run him over. She told me no.

  “I know violence is wrong, and I already look like Chris Brown’s second cousin to some people, but doesn’t he deserve to be hit?”

  “Yes, but you can’t do that. I don’t got no bail money.”

  Considering how often God behaved like a troll, it was no surprise that I ran into An’toine repeatedly for a few months, and then finally he fizzled away. Two years later, I got a message from him on Facebook Messenger. It was 6:00 a.m. in New York, where I now lived, which meant it was the middle of the night for him back in LA.

  “HUB?”

  The fuck is that?

  Oh, you want to know how I’ve been? This is why you need to join a book club, damn fool.

  After that, he randomly inserted that he was horny. It was the fringes of the day, so I was too. We took the conversation back to text after he sent a picture revealing just how horny he was. I responded by saying I wish I had gotten a chance to get at that when I was in LA.

  Me 2 but u was trippin.

  By my love of literacy? Supposedly, I was too eager and rushing him to get serious. Serious how? I had no idea what he was talking about and could bet he was confusing me with some other sucker whose time he had also wasted. After masturbating to his videos and pictures, I was finished and told him that if he was ever in New York, he could hit me up and we could finally make something happen. He said “cool” while casually mentioning that I could also fly him to New York.

  Hardy har, bitch.

  My mistake was that I should have never bothered trying to get to know him on any deeper level. That wasn’t how you were supposed to ho. You made your intentions clear and acted accordingly. I knew this fool was a fool only good for fornication, and I gave far too much energy to someone I only could deal with in scenarios centered on ejaculation.

  He was a terrible person. Having said that, I know terrible people can be tempting, and despite his being an insulting, rude simpleton who needs to have his eyes examined, I would still fuck. Obviously, it would be a hate fuck. And for my own comfort, I would bring a book and pull a condom out of it.

  IV. 2016.

  Even after he told me that once upon a time, he’d faced nearly a twenty-five-year sentence for beating the hell out of his ex to the point that he had multiple severe head wounds, I was thinking, “I’d still fuck, though.”

  We met at a restaurant called Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash in Harlem. Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash sounds like the name of a rapper’s mixtape. I know this because the name of my unreleased mixtape is Cognac and Celexa. Before the restaurant was called Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash, it was called La Bodega. And before it was called La Bodega, it was called Native. These name changes all happened within the first four years of my living in Harlem. In spite of this, the owner has remained the same. Presumably, he bores easily, and change is a constant in his sphere.

  Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash is a rum bar that sells tacos inspired by San Francisco food trucks. This is their description, not mine. I am from Texas, and after living in Los Angeles for a few years, I now know that Tex-Mex is nothing like the Mexican food found in any other region of the country. Like most Texans, I think our way is the best way.

  Bryce, the man who almost went to prison for manslaughter, was also from Texas, so we shared this sentiment about Mexican food, and most things generally. He wasn’t from the best part—Houston—like me and Beyoncé, but I didn’t hold that against him either. People always talk about forgiveness, but we do not always allow people who aren’t necessarily monsters but committed monstrous acts the space to sincerely start over. Bryce talked a lot about therapy, anger management, moving to New York, and, pointedly, the ability to now know when to leave a violent relationship. He came across as sincere in changing the course of his life after his self-described “life-changing experience.” Bryce also had a Louis
iana connection. He was, as one country-ass man who read my name at a midwestern airport once blurted out, “One of them Creoles, ain’t you?”

  Bryce worked as a hair stylist—primarily taming heads over at the de facto state TV network known as Fox News. When he shared this, I had to make a conscious decision: to ask more questions and potentially sour the mood of this drinks situation or just sit and smile and try to get to know the hottie in front of me.

  It had taken a good while for this meeting to happen. I had been talking to Bryce online for well over a month and had decidedly given up on us linking because he didn’t seem that interested in me. Then out of the blue on Facebook, he circled back to an invitation beginning to mold in the dark corner of his Messenger inbox to ask, “Are we ever going to get those drinks?” I assumed he was bored, but considering I was being trifling and evading an assignment with a deadline crawling up my leg, I agreed. Another motivating factor was that through my virtual snooping, I had learned a lot about his body by way of his many, many thirst traps posted on Instagram.

  It was Bryce who decided that we would meet at Sexy Taco/Weird, Long Name. He asked for options in Harlem, but with a caveat: “I need a frozen margarita. They’re all I drink!” He liked dick and diabetes, I guess.

  We met around ten that evening. He had just gotten off work at Murdoch’s House of Madness (Clearly), Sexual Harassment (Allegedly), and Propaganda (Obviously). The conversation was going pretty okay until that mention of Fox News came up. Sensing my hesitance to dive deeper into his work, he went, “I know, I know. But I don’t have anything to do with that.” He surely did not. After all, he did the anchors’ hair, he said, not fill their minds with that drivel they spew. For about fifteen minutes, I let him tell stories about various anchors. To the shock of no one, Bill O’Reilly was apparently a racist asshole (and, as we would later learn, an accused sexual predator at the workplace, which led to his ultimate ejection). Somewhat surprising to me, Sean Hannity was “nice.” Wasn’t that special? “Fuck Sean Hannity” was my response to that new nugget of intel.

  Then the now former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly came up.

  While Bryce had learned I was a writer, and a very opinionated one at that, he didn’t know how I felt about Kelly, whom he fancied very much. I hated Megyn Kelly. I was raised not to say that I hated anyone, but I was also raised to procreate by way of vaginal sex and holy matrimony. If I could break the rules on that, I could break the rules on declarations of hatred. I fucking hate Megyn Kelly. As Bryce went on and on about what a nice woman she was and how well she treated everyone on set, the forced smile on my face could no longer handle the weight of pretending I harbored nothing but disdain for her.

  I agreed with Bryce that Megyn Kelly’s role in helping oust Roger Ailes was a courageous act forever worthy of celebration. However, Megyn Kelly, like Bill O’Reilly, like Sean Hannity, like Tucker Carlson, like those morning simpletons on Fox & Friends, and like just about everyone on that network besides Shepard Smith, followed the Fox News model of stoking racial animus to pander to the old, white racists who watched the news network in droves. She magnified the New Black Panther Party in ways no sensible newsperson ever would—because their clout was virtually nonexistent within the Black community—to the point where journalists decried her work as a “minstrel show.” She was a woman who, in 2015, claimed that the Obama administration intended to force “too white [and] too privileged” communities to embrace diversity “whether the communities want it or not.” That same year, Kelly dismissed a DOJ report that found racial bias and stereotyping within the Ferguson, Missouri, police department based on the notion that “there are very few companies in America, whether they are public or private,” where “you won’t find any racist emails [or] any inappropriate comments.” The same person who once declared that a speech by First Lady Michelle Obama played into a “culture of victimization.” A woman who invoked racial stereotypes to portray Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as temperamental. And the woman who, despicably, described a Black girl needlessly tackled by police at a pool party as “no saint.”

  Evidence of Kelly’s on-air racism was far and wide. I honestly, truly might have gotten over the fact that Bryce had almost cracked the skull of an ex. I could fight, and there was a troupe of folks who would swoop me in if he had a relapse. I could get with him learning to “relax, relate, release” and exhale, shoop, shoop, after a brush with the law. But Megyn Kelly? How could he question all the evidence presented before him? He had her hair looking pretty as she said the ugliest shit about us. What about that was not racist and reprehensible?

  “I don’t think it’s fair to call her racist, because you don’t know what’s in her heart.”

  Oh, dear God, you are one of those. Whenever there were accusations of racism leveled against someone likely guilty of being a racist, the peanut gallery would come with the retort that it was hard to gauge another person’s racism because we didn’t know what was in their heart.

  I didn’t give a fuck what was in her heart. That had nothing to do with whether or not she was racist. There are levels to racism. In the case of Kelly, stoking racial prejudices for professional gain was a racist act. This drinks thing also happened after the 2016 presidential election, so to that end, I thought of Megyn Kelly as the epitome of the 53 percent of white women who voted for that man, Sweet Potato Saddam: a white woman willing to sacrifice the humanity of nonwhites to preserve her privilege and status. She may not have presented herself in the same way as the loud, cantankerous, vile white men with whom she shared prime-time space, but she was guilty of perpetuating the same sins because she delivered the same ugly sentiments about Black people on her breath.

  After explaining all of this, all I got back was the sight of this man slurping from his third frozen sugary-ass margarita and the quip, “I disagree.” Then he went to the restroom, and as I watched him walk to and from the bathroom, I wondered if my visible annoyance and monologue had killed the mood. Fine, I didn’t have to wonder: I had killed the mood. We changed the subject and talked more about each other, but whatever this was, it had pretty much died. Many advise not talking about politics on dates, but he was half Black and it was Megyn Kelly. I have never met a Black person in New York City who greeted the topic of Megyn Kelly with a smile and a gush about her not being so bad. I just assumed he did her hair, offered her a few, “Hey, girl!”s here and there, and then texted his friends like, I HATE HER. But when you make assumptions, you sometimes don’t get any ass.

  I never saw him again. I wonder what he thought of me. Like, even though he was the one with the violent past, did he think I was going to break a glass and scream “Black lives matter!” at him?

  I regret nothing.

  This Place Is No Sanctuary

  As a kid, I had jet-black hair full of curls. I used to routinely twist my hair in the front into a knot. My sister used to always tease in response to this comforting habit: “Quit doing that! You’re going to go bald.” I would always tell her to stop saying that, as it sparked too intense a fear in me. There were some men and women who were stunning bald, but not once had I ever thought my peanut head would allow a similar beauty for me. The end result was me never, ever wanting to go bald or to give the appearance that I was going bald. I tended to obsess over my hair and was particular about the way I believed it ought to look. These were character traits I definitely shared with my father.

  My earliest memory of barbers was my dad’s friend JB, who used to cut in a garage: ours or his. I liked JB a lot. Most of my dad’s friends were as loud and rowdy as he was, but there were others like JB who were a lot more chill and measured in their behavior—a necessary counterpoint to the magnetic personality of my pops, a man who didn’t know how to be still unless he was sleeping. I also liked JB because he would feign being impressed by me repeating phrases like “three-hundred-and-sixty-degree angle.” We both knew I had lifted that from professional-wrestling commentators, but encouragement was e
ncouragement. I had met so many of my dad’s friends over the years. Some stuck around; many others didn’t. JB did not, but I don’t recall anyone ever questioning one of his cuts.

  After JB, my dad took me up the street to a barbershop located in a plaza that included a hole-in-the-wall club for the old heads, a pawn shop, and a big barbecue pit in the parking lot that used to service patrons of all of the above. That place was named Roger’s Barber Shop. The owner, unsurprisingly named Roger, looked like he used to be in a soul group that opened for the Chi-Lites. He never cut me. I went to Ron, another one of my dad’s friends. After a few years, Ron moved to another barbershop less than five minutes away from the old location. I can’t recall the name of that shop, but I do remember that Ron used to wear eyeglasses that suggested he really missed the Run-DMC era. Once, Ron cut three parts in my hair, and I temporarily hated him for it. I used to keep a part in the front, but I didn’t care for that degree of excessiveness. I felt that the money he was owed for that cut should have been spent instead in the McDonald’s right across the railroad tracks (RIP to that long-demolished location) on a twenty-piece nugget and extra-large order of French fries as a reward for the emotional abuse I had just endured over superfluous cuts on the side of my head that I did not ask for. That barbershop closed abruptly, and I never knew where the hell Ron went after that. Maybe it was divine intervention, because who was to say he wouldn’t have kept putting unrequested parts on the side of my head?

  As I sought a replacement barber, my friend Kim introduced me to her brother Gary, who cut my hair at her mom’s house. Gary was both an amazing barber and someone amazing to look at. However, despite not knowing what the word “patriarchal” meant at the time, I certainly knew how to frown whenever I heard a man drown me in machismo and casual sexism. Even so, though I didn’t want to hear a lot of the things he had to say about women, I shrugged it off, because as much as he liked to talk, I liked to look at him while he expertly cut my hair. But, like Ron, he upped and disappeared, leaving my hairline once again in a state of total abandonment.