“Foy, you okay?”
“Don’t touch me! This is war, and I know whose side you’re on!”
I backed away as Foy dusted himself off, muttering about conspiracies and defiantly marching toward his car like he was leaving the Philippines under siege. The gull-wing door to his classic sports car opened up, and before getting in, Foy paused to put on his aviator sunglasses and, in his best General BlackArthur, announced, “I shall return, motherfucker. Believe that shit!”
Behind us, the student on the second floor closed her window and returned to her microscope, blinking rapidly as she readjusted the focus, moved the slide around, and scribbled her findings in her notebook. Unlike Foy and me, she was resigned to her situation, because she knows that in Dickens it be like that sometimes, even when it doesn’t have to be.
APPLES AND ORANGES
Seventeen
I’m frigid. Not in the sense that I don’t have any sexual desire, but in the obnoxious way men in the free-love seventies projected their own sexual inadequacies onto women by referring to them as “frigid” and “dead fish.” I’m the deadest of fish. I fuck like an overturned guppy. A plate of day-old sashimi has more “motion of the ocean” than I do. So on the day of the shooting and drive-by orange-ing, when Marpessa stuck a tongue suspiciously tangy with satsuma tartness into my mouth and ground her pudenda into my pelvic bone, I lay there on my bed — motionless. My hands covering my face in shame, because fucking me is like fucking Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus. If my sexual ineptitude was a problem, she never let on. She simply boxed my ears and worked my beached-whale carcass over like a Saturday-night wrestler looking for revenge in a grudge match I didn’t want to end.
“Does this mean we’re back together?”
“It means I’m thinking about it.”
“Can you think about it a little faster, and maybe a little more to the right? Yeah, that’s it.”
Marpessa’s the only person to ever diagnose me. Not even my father could figure me out. I’d make a mistake, like, say, misidentify Mary McLeod Bethune for Gwendolyn Brooks, it’d be “Nigger, I have no fucking idea what the fuck is wrong is with you!” Followed by all 943 pages of the BDSM IV (Black Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition) flying at my head.
Marpessa sorted me out, though. I was eighteen. Two weeks from finishing up my first semester of college. We were in the guesthouse. She — thumbing through the bloodstained BDSM IV. Me — in my usual postcoital position, rolled up into a ball like a frightened teenage armadillo, and crying my eyes out for no earthly reason.
“Here, I finally figured out what’s wrong with you,” she said, snuggling up to me. “This is what you have, Attachment Disorder.” Why do people have to tap the page when they know they’re right? A quick read-aloud will suffice. You don’t have to rub it in with all the smug finger tapping.
“Attachment Disorder — Markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate social relatedness in most contexts, scenes, and happenings. Beginning before age five and continuing into adulthood as evidenced by either 1. and/or 2.:
1. persistent failure to initiate or respond in a developmentally appropriate fashion to most social interactions (e.g., the child or adult responds to caregivers and black lovers with a mixture of approach, avoidance, and resistance to comforting. May exhibit frozen watchfulness). Hoi Polloi Translation — The nigger flinches or jumps whenever you touch him. Runs hot and cold, and has no friends to speak of. And when he isn’t staring at you like you just got off the banana boat, he’s crying like a little bitch.
2. diffuse attachments as manifested by indiscriminate sociability with marked inability to exhibit appropriate selective attachments to black people and things (e.g., excessive familiarity with relative strangers or lack of selectivity in choice of attachment figures). Hoi Polloi Translation — The nigger fucking white hos out there at UC Riverside.
It was a miracle we lasted as long as we did.
I stared at her blurry silhouette for a long time before she poked her head from behind the chessboard-patterned shower curtain. I’d forgotten how brown she was. How good she looked, her stringy hair clumped to the side of her face. Sometimes the sweetest kisses are the shortest. We could discuss the clean-shaven pubes later.
“Bonbon, what’s the time frame?”
“For us, from now until. For the segregation thing, I’m thinking I want to be done by Hood Day. That gives me another six months.”
Marpessa pulled me in and handed me a tube of apricot scrub that hadn’t been opened since the last time she showered off here. I rubbed the exfoliant into her back and scratched a message into the grainy, supposedly skin-softening swirls. She always could read my writing.
“Because between that nigger Foy and the rest of world, this shit’s going to catch up with you sooner or later. Forget the racial segregation, you know motherfuckers wasn’t too keen on Dickens even when it did exist.”
“You were in that car today, weren’t you?”
“Shit, when Cuz and my brother picked me up from work and we drove back here, soon as we crossed that white line you painted, it was like, you know, when you enter a banging-ass house party and shit’s bumping, and you get that thump in your chest and you be like, if I were to die right now, I wouldn’t give a fuck. It was like that. Crossing the threshold.”
“You threw that fucking orange. I knew it.”
“Hit that stupid motherfucker square in the face.”
Marpessa pressed the crack of her shapely rear end into my groin. She had to get back to the kids, we wouldn’t have much time, and knowing me, we wouldn’t need much time.
Despite that initial scratch of her seventeen-year itch, Marpessa insisted we start slow. Since she worked weekends and put in crazy overtime, we had to date on Mondays and Tuesdays. Our nights on the town were trips to the mall, coffee shop poetry readings, and, most bothersome for me, open-mike nights at the Plethora Comedy Club. Marpessa hated my Wheaton-Chaff segregation joke and insisted that I improve my sense of humor by learning to tell a joke. When I protested, she’d say, “Look, now you ain’t the only black man in the world that can’t fuck, but I refuse to go out with the only one with absolutely no sense of humor.”
From the music clubs to the jailhouses to the fact that you can find Korean taco trucks only in white neighborhoods, L.A. is a mind-numbingly racially segregated city. But the epicenter of social apartheid is the stand-up comedy scene. The city of Dickens’s paltry contribution to the long-running tradition of black funnymen is an open-mike night, sponsored by the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals, that on the second Tuesday of the month transforms the shop into a twenty-table club called the Comedy Act and Forum for the Freedom of Afro-American Witticism and Mannerisms That Showcase the Plethora of Afro-American Humorists for Whom … there’s more, but I’ve never managed to finish reading the temporary marquee they hang over the giant donut sign that hovers over the parking lot. I just call the place the Plethora for short, because despite Marpessa’s insistence that I had no sense of humor, there were a plethora of unfunny black guys who, like every black sports analyst trying to sound intelligent, use and misuse the word “plethora” at every opportunity.