He turned to look back up at us as he continued down the stairs and we turned and looked down at him. His eyes went from my friend Tina back to me and then to Tina again. I knew the look. He was deciding which one of us to pursue. I would have laid bets that he wouldn’t have picked me, not with Tina standing there.
My girlfriend Tina was thin and pretty and easy and drunk. She had fake breasts that still barely increased her bra-size to a C-cup. She was dressed in a tight baby-t to show off the surgeon’s work and her thin waist. The mini-skirt she wore just barely covered her tight little ass and her legs were long and slender. She dressed like a slut because that’s exactly what she was and she wanted to make sure that every man in the club knew it. I was sure she would wind up sucking his dick in the parking lot if he wanted her to. When he started walking back up the stairs toward us, I was certain the evening would end with her head bobbing up and down in his lap while I waited for her at the bar. When he walked right past her and took my hand I almost fainted. I was fat then, not obese, not the kind of fat that made people pity me. I was just a little chubby, thighs thicker than I would have liked, hips wider, ass bigger. My waist was actually rather small for a large woman though I still had that unsightly bulge where my lower abs should have been. Tina had once called it my FUPA—Fat Upper Pussy Area. I hated her for that even though I laughed when she said it. Laughing is what fat girls are taught to do when insulted. It is the most common defense mechanism in the world. That’s why I was so surprised by Kenyatta’s actions. I knew I was fat and men didn’t often pass up women who looked like my friend Tina for women who looked like me.
“Hello, ladies. My name is Kenyatta.”
His voice was deep and warm, and he continued to hold my hand and look into my eyes when he spoke to me, still ignoring my Barbie-like friend, still looking at me like I was something on a dessert tray.
“M-my name is Natasha and this is my friend Tina.”
He never looked at her. Not even once. He kept his eyes on me the entire time.
“Are you ladies having a good time this evening?”
“We’re doing great,” Tina interjected.
Kenyatta turned toward her, looked her up and down, then turned back to me. I didn’t even have to look at Tina to know she was insulted. I looked at him quizzically, wondering what his game was. Then I turned to Tina and shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what I could have possibly done to single myself out for his attention, what might have made me stand out above Tina. Tina looked pissed. She crossed her arms beneath her hard surgically enhanced breasts, pushing them up even further so that there would be no mistaking what she had to offer, and started tapping her foot impatiently waiting for him to notice her. Kenyatta seemed to enjoy ignoring her. I began to wonder if he was just using me to get a rise out of her.
He began asking me about myself, where I was from, what I did for a living, what I did for fun, why I was at the club tonight. He never let go of my hand and never broke eye contact.
“I’m a teacher. I teach seventh and eighth grade English.”
“Cool. You like kids?”
“Most of the time. Sometimes it can be rough. I used to work at a group home for girls when I was in college. The whole reason I went to school was so that I could get a job helping children. I thought I wanted to be a social worker or a child psychiatrist for a while.”
“That’s really cool that you were that into helping kids.”
“Yeah, but after a year of working at the group home I quit and switched my major to English. I was having nightmares every night. I just couldn’t detach myself from those kids. I’m too sensitive for that kind of work. I was depressed all the time. You’d be amazed what some of these girls had gone through, violence, abuse, rape, I just couldn’t take it. Half the black girls that walked in there were crack babies and half the white ones had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or mothers that were on meth. They didn’t have a chance in hell. Sometimes I felt like someone should just drop a bomb on the entire ghetto.”
“Fuck did you say?”
Kenyatta’s face twisted up into a snarl as he spat his words out at me in anger. I pulled back, fearing for a second that he was about to physically attack me. He sensed my anxiety and did his best to relax his features and his posture. When he spoke again it was in calm measured tones.
“I’m from one of those ghettos and not everyone in there is smoking crack.”
“Yeah, but you’re an exception. The majority of them are.”
Again, I could see that it was taking everything he had not to lose his temper.
“No. The majority of them are not. The majority of the people in the ghetto are hardworking honest folks who were just given less opportunity than most. When you live in an environment where violence, drugs, and gangs are everywhere, coupled with the worst educational system imaginable, it takes an exceptional individual to crawl up out of that mess. I wasn’t an exceptional individual. I just had an exceptional mom who made sure that I never went to any of the neighborhood schools. She faked our address and gave me bus fare so that I could go to schools in predominantly white areas where the quality of education was better. If she hadn’t done that I’d probably be stuck right there in the ghetto with the rest of the kids I grew up with.”
“You can’t blame all the ills of the ghetto on education.”
“You’re a teacher and you don’t believe that education has that great an impact? Do you know that every single kid I know who went to my neighborhood high school instead of a magnet school or a Catholic high school or something is still right back there in the ghetto and most of them have drug habits or criminal records or both? They can trace seventy-five percent of the prison population in Oakland back to three high schools. Eighty percent of the prison population in America never graduated from high school. Rather than blowing the ghetto up or putting it under martial law they need to spend all that money they’re currently spending on more police and bigger prisons and put it into building better schools with better teachers. I mean, no offense, but when I was growing up teachers weren’t kids fresh out of college. The teachers I had were the same ones who taught my parents. Back then teaching was a career not a job. Not something you did for a while until something better came along. I mean, if you don’t believe that education makes a difference why are you even doing it?”
“Because I love kids. But you wouldn’t know what it’s like trying to teach children nowadays. I don’t exactly work in some rough inner-city school, but I do get a fair mixture of kids and you can almost tell the income level of each child by how well they perform in school. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I had to walk through a metal detector every morning and have security walk me to my car every afternoon after work. How the hell do you teach kids like that?”
Kenyatta’s nostrils flared.
“I can understand it might be easier for a kid to concentrate who has a full stomach when he comes to school, who didn’t wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunfire and have to hide in the bathtub because stray bullets were coming through the walls, who wasn’t listening to police helicopters thundering overhead all night long, who wasn’t dodging gang members, drug pushers, crack heads and crack whores everyday walking to and from school. Poor kids have a lot going against them, but that doesn’t make them any less intelligent or any more inherently violent. It just means that teachers have to work a little harder to keep them on track.”