“Um, okay. Have you ever waitressed before?” she said, glancing my way only long enough to pass me an application before she resumed smiling and winking at customers. She even flirted with the gay couples.
“No...um...not really.”
She turned and looked at me, really looked at me, for the first time.
“Is that permanent?” she said, gesturing toward my face, with a dismissive flip of the wrist. I wanted to grab her by the hair and slam her face into the cash register. Instead, I willed myself to hold that fake smile on my face like it was chained to me.
“No. It only lasts two or three weeks.”
She looked me up and down then turned to blow a kiss at an old man I assumed was a regular. He returned the gesture, beaming from ear to ear.
“We might still be hiring in three weeks,” she said, without ever turning back to look at me. I stood there for nearly a full minute, during which she never looked at me again. Finally, I walked out of the little diner, refusing to cry, determined not to give up. I caught a bus to Haight Street and walked down to the Lower Haight district where there were quirky little shops and bars that were used to people with odd tattoos and piercings.
There was a bar called The Mad Wolf that had advertised for a cocktail waitress. It was right in the middle of the block. The kind of bar with saloon doors, pool tables, dart boards, and a sparse smattering of lonely drunks, having their first drink of the day when most people were still digesting their Froot Loops.
I walked up to the bar. The guy behind it was a big, six-foot, urban redneck/punk in a black cowboy hat, a black Sex Pistols t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, black jeans, and black combat boots with spurs on them. He had gray hair and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and lips. He was old enough to have seen Sid Vicious live.
“What’s up?”
“I’m here about the cocktail waitress job?”
“What’s the tattoo for?”
“It’s a long story.”
He leaned over the bar and locked eyes with me.
“If you want to work here, I think I need to hear it.”
“Basically, my boyfriend wanted me to see if I could get a job looking like this.”
His eyes remained fixed on me, and his expression was deadpan. I felt so uncomfortable under his gaze that I almost turned and left.
“Ever worked in a bar before?” he said finally.
“No. I was a schoolteacher. I taught seventh grade English.”
“But you couldn’t teach kids with ‘Slut’ and ‘Liar’ tattooed on your face, so you’re slumming at a bar, hoping my standards are low enough to hire you?”
I smiled and nodded.
“I guess so.”
“Well. You’re in luck. My standards are just that low. Welcome to the Mad Wolf!”
He spread his arms wide and gestured around the nearly empty bar.
“Thanks!” I said, a little too energetically.
“It pays nine dollars plus tips. Most girls make a hundred a night in tips. Two hundred on the busy nights. That okay?”
“That sounds perfect.”
I reached across the bar and shook his hand then turned to leave, but he didn’t let go.
“You in a hurry? Let me show you around the bar.”
He stroked my arm with his other hand and I quickly snatched my hand away.
“I...um...I—”
He smiled a wide predatory smile.
“Let me show you where we keep all the kegs and the cases of beer.” He leaned close enough for me to smell the marijuana and beer on his breath. “We’ve got a bed back there.”
“No. I don’t think so,” I said.
“Come on. Why not? I told you I’d hire you.”
“So I’m supposed to fuck you for a job?”
He sneered at me.
“You’re the whore with ‘Slut’ tattooed on your forehead,” he said.
“Fuck you!” I yelled. My voice echoed in the near empty bar. A few of the drunks laughed. The others barely looked up from their drinks.
“Fucking asshole!” I flipped him the bird over my shoulder as I stormed out.
“You’re fired!” he yelled back and then I heard him laugh. His laughter was worse than any insult he could have hurled at me. I wanted to crawl in a hole and die.
I stormed out of the bar. That was it. The last straw. Fuck this. I walked back to the bus stop. I was done. I had a decision to make. I could either go back to the plantation, as Kenyatta suggested, or I could say fuck the whole thing, as Angela suggested.
An hour later, when I walked up the steps of Kenyatta’s home and opened the front door, I was still undecided. It was the sound of the headboard smacking the wall, the moans and screams coming from Kenyatta’s bedroom, that made up my mind.
XX
He was fucking her. I walked in and caught him, fucking his ex-wife. Fucking her hard and angry. Crushing her into the mattress with each stroke. His ass was poised in the air, preparing for the down stroke, that beautiful, muscular ass I loved so much, poised there. Her legs tossed over his shoulders, her moans of pain and pleasure echoing from everywhere.
He had been fucking her all along. I don’t know why I was surprised. I would have had to be a fool to think he wasn’t. But, I had been that fool. Even as I was lying on a bed of straw in the backyard, as I was being whipped and almost raped at Mistress Delia’s farm, pulling a plow and picking grapes. As I was being humiliated day after day, walking the streets with this damned tattoo on my face, I had believed every second that there would be a happily-ever-after for Kenyatta and I. I had believed that he would love me and protect me and be all those things a man was supposed to be according to the romance novels and romantic comedies.
Angela spotted me first and the look of guilt on her face confirmed everything.
“Oh, shit!”
She pushed Kenyatta off her and pulled the sheets up to her chin in some ridiculous show of false modesty. I had fucked this woman. I licked her pussy and she licked mine. What did she think she was hiding that I had not already seen? But she wasn’t hiding her body, she was holding up a shield, protecting herself with the only thing she had, a thin sheet. Kenyatta, however, was unfazed. He stood, naked, cock still hard and bobbing in the air like a divining rod. He held out his arms for me.
“Come join us.”
That’s when I found my voice.
“NIGGERRRRRRRR!” I screamed it loud and long. Then I screamed it again.
I picked up whatever I could find off the dresser and threw it at him as I repeated it over and over again. “NIGGER! NIGGER! NIGGEEEEEEERRRRRR!”
Kenyatta rushed across the room, raised his hand, and slapped me to the floor. He didn’t slap me as a master slapping his willing slave. There was nothing safe or sane about it. Perhaps there never had been. I had been slapped like this by men before. There was anger in his eyes and in his heart. It hurt me more than anything else I’d endured during those long arduous months of servitude. I turned and walked out, Kenyatta chased behind me, apologizing, begging me to stay. I guess the safe word didn’t matter anymore.
“Okay! Okay! Wait! Forget about the experiment. It’s over. I don’t care about the safe word. I’ll marry you, okay? I’ll marry you!”
He was standing there in the doorway as I walked out onto the porch, down the front steps and down the walkway toward my car. He was naked, beautiful, but somehow pathetic, diminished, and not merely because his cock had shriveled. I could see him now clearly for what he was, a sad, lonely, angry man who was full of self-loathing.
His ancestors had been through horrors and atrocities that most people could scarcely imagine, let alone survive. From the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and Jim Crow, through the civil rights movement, right up to the insidious institutionalized racism that holds so many of his people in economic dungeons to this day. Black people in America have suffered what no race of people should have ever had to endure, but he hadn’t. Kenyatta had never been a slave. He had never been through segregation. He was handsome, successful, and should have been happy. But he would never be, because he clearly hated himself. I pitied him now, and I could never marry him.