Fifteen
THE NEW B WORD
Sometimes it’s hard to tell.
I’ve got this good friend who happens also to be black. He was in an important meeting for work when someone said, “nuclear’s the new N word.” Ahh, okay. That’s fine. Just hold on a second while the rest of us dust off our universal translators. [Insert futuristic computing sounds here.] Got it. So, what you meant to say was that nuclear is the twenty-first century’s version of something so vile it cannot be named—sort of like the Lord Voldemort of physics. What you did not mean to say was that nuclear energy is some nigger-shit.
Even with the aid of advanced Federation technology, the safe-for-work reaction to such highly paid stupidity is purely a game-time decision. Leap over the conference table to choke someone out or nod your head knowingly, all the while ignoring the piercing holes being drilled into your face by all the other cowards at the table.
Celebrations should be in order for all those nonpostal heroes who choose the latter. This same friend of mine sent out an e-mail asking whether or not he should feel some kind of way about the whole thing. I responded something like, “Well, I don’t think he meant any harm by it.” What I meant was, pretending your coworkers are philosophers as opposed to racists is most certainly the more spineless option. It’s also a recession. So there you go.
The same principle applied to another e-mail I got.
“Maureen wants you to go out with Barack’s body guy, Reggie Love. When can you do drinks?” It should be noted here that Maureen Dowd does not speak about herself in the third person, nor does she send her own e-mails. This was from Ashley, her assistant. When I first started at the Times two years before, Maureen was between assistants. The girl I replaced at the news desk applied for the job but didn’t get it. Word around the fax machines was that she lacked a certain cool, which left Maureen with no one to show her how to do stuff. The calls would start coming in at around 11:00 p.m.
“Remember that character from Li’l Abner? Who always had the cloud over his head? What was his name?”
“Maureen?”
“I need to send the column up to New York. How do I do that?”
“You mean via e-mail?”
“Sure, yeah.”
“Okay, first open up your Outlook by double clicking your mouse on the desktop icon, then go to ‘compose mail,’ which should be—”
“How ’bout you just come back here.”
When Ashley, having met the cool specifications, arrived a week later, I looked upon her with pity and a bit of jealousy. She’d be an all-things-normal oracle on columnists’ row. I told her to start looking for her next job by year two, lest she get sucked into that black hole never to come out.
Then when I got my job at Politico, Maureen (Ashley) sent me flowers and a Mylar balloon that read “Congratulations” in crazy crayon letters. Once it was deflated, I stuck it above my computer with a pushpin. Passersby would nod in its direction, “From who?” and I’d answer “Maureen” without swiveling my chair around, leaving whomever to guess. “Maureen Dooowd, she means,” chimed in my work wife Emily. “Oooh,” they’d say.
After I’d spent a year covering Congressman What’s-His-Guts’ hair plugs and profiling his chief-of-staff’s allergic reaction to jeans, the higher-ups asked if I wanted another shot at Barack Obama, since my South Carolina story was pretty decent. I was on my way back to Washington from Los Angeles, where I’d spent the weekend celebrating Gina’s great-grandmother’s one-hundredth birthday at the Chester Washington Golf Course of Gardena and trying to get over the fact that my sorority sister died at twenty-seven just the week before. For the sit-down-dinner portion of the afternoon, we got to choose between chicken, beef, or fish. When I answered “beef,” a teenager in black pants gave me a piece of red construction paper. I figured it’d be a while and headed for the door before someone cued up the tape for a cousin’s gospel rendition of “I Believe I Can Fly.”
While I was outside admiring the neat carpet lines of the golf green, an old “boyfriend,” probably bored on a Sunday, called to check in. I routinely reply to all just-being-polite personal inquiries the same way: “Good good.” But I was worn down from a morning spent arranging “gold not yellow” roses with baby’s breath while trying to keep the knot in my throat at bay. “Actually, life f*cking sucks right now,” I told him.
“Really? What’s wrong? What happened?”
I entertained no thoughts of this man being able to comprehend, much less solve, any of my problems but wanted him to know about them anyway. “Well, you remember my friend Adaoha? You met her at that club that one time.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, she died Thursday and I can’t be alone in that f*cking rat-infested basement, so I’m in Cali for less than forty-eight hours for this family thing with Gi. My life is a shambles.”
“Jesus.”
Calling on the Lord was the one thing I hadn’t tried, and unfortunately there was no time. “Wait, hold on. Actually, this is work calling. I’ll talk to you when I get back.” He was probably more relieved than I was; spilling your guts sounds pointless, because it is. On the other line was the office, collectively wondering if I’d like to cover Obama’s “race speech” in Philadelphia on Tuesday. It was Sunday. Well, yeah, sure. Sounds great, but did they know what was going on with me? By the way, sorry about your friend. So can you do it?
Inside, my well-done brisket was waiting.
I spent the next three days perpetually exhausted. My flight was delayed for no less than ten hours because of a computer glitch, and the new citizen manning the SuperShuttle heard my address in a different language, stealing even more hours from me. The one night I spent in the bat cave was especially sleepless. A rat had set up shop under my bed, getting to work by devouring the crotches of two pairs of Calvin Kleins and, if I was ever able to dream, my eyeballs. Leaving every light on helped. Plus, after too many weekends of rain my one closet was full of mold. The shoes I planned for Philadelphia had been ruined in a lovely shade of green—the kind of color that looks sophisticated and old-worldly on once-bronzed generals riding horseback. I took a wet towel to their soles and hoped no one would notice.
I rode in on the Amtrak “quiet car,” figuring the likelihood of business commuter chitchat would be greatly reduced. So when my phone rang, I had to take it in the bathroom. Over the choochooing of the train and swish-swishing of the toilet bowl water, I could hear my boss asking what I thought the day would be like. I managed to say “historic” without choking.
Once inside the scrum of reporters, I found myself longing for the wide-open spaces of an Amtrak restroom. It was too late to pretend like I’d never made it, like I’d accidentally crapped my pants and fallen onto the third rail. Since that hadn’t happened yet, I put on my “I so know what the f*ck I’m doing” face and handed over my ID card when pressed. People seemed equal parts impressed and surprised when matching the name to my face, which made little to no sense because there was a caricature of me on our home page. A snarky blog once wrote, “Why is one of Politico’s only black writers Helena Andrews portrayed as a drinker? All of the other caricatures on their pages are pretty vanilla, if you catch our drift.” I thought I looked cute comicized.
I was getting quotes from a Baptist preacher-minister-reverend-doctor when I spotted Maureen looking bored over by a group of reporters who’d converted their mics into light sabers, fighting to get to a man in rabbinical garb. I thanked Rev. Whatever-the-Hell and walked over to say hello, careful to avoid the clusterf*ck to my left.
“Maureen? Hey!” It took her a few minutes to register my existence, but once that was out of the way, an immediate flash of purpose lit up her face.
“I’ve got a guy for you. He’s so hot, it’s perfect.” When I balked, she brought in reinforcements.
“Zeleny, Zeleny! Don’t you think Reggie would be great for Helena?” She was surveying other page-one journalists from the campaign trail.
“Yeaaaaah.” This reporter eyed me up and down with a finger at his temple—the international hand sign for “Give me a minute to think about it.” “Yeaaaah, I could see that, I guess. Reggie Love, right?” I wasn’t sure if his lack of enthusiasm was meant for me or Reggie. Either way, I was worried. And Reggie Love? Did this guy moonlight as a political porn star?
“I don’t know, Maureen,” I said, half protesting.
“Please. Don’t be stupid. Ashley’ll set it up.” And then she disappeared inside the auditorium where Obama had just spoken about his awesome blackness, leaving me to wait to grab a few quotes from the rabbi.
Weeks went by, and I forgot all about loving Reggie, hoping Maureen had too, since white-people hot is never the same. I tried explaining this to Emily. “What about that guy on The West Wing?” she asked. I’m shaking my head no before she can finish. “You’re crazy,” she said. “He’s hot.” Impaired judgment aside, the idea of going out with a presidential candidate’s bodyguard did sound sexy as hell. “Oh, what does your boyfriend do?” strangers would ask over highballs at Arianna Huffington’s house. “Sacrifices his body for democracy on a daily basis. Yours?”
But I had my doubts after getting the e-mail: “Maureen wants you to go out with Barack’s body guy…”
Ooooh, body guy, not guard. The f*ck? Fantasy crushed. Expectations flattened as per the usual. What does that job title even entail? Maureen Dowd. Barack Obama! Reggie Love? This was my internal discourse.
Then Ashley BCC’d me on the one she sent to Reggie: “So, Maureen wants me to introduce you to our friend Helena Andrews. Are you free for a drink tomorrow night in D.C.?”
Our friend? Tee-hee-hee. Okay, fine, I’ll go. But only as a personal favor to my Pulitzer Prize–winning pal.
The three of us decided to meet at a bar/lounge/restaurant called Marvin over by my house. The place is cool because everyone says so, and since the lights are never turned on all the way, nobody could tell one way or the other. The manager is this black guy with high-water pants, Malcolm X glasses, and a fro-hawk. Ashley and I (I needed both moral support and a possible cover) ate dinner while we waited…and waited, and waited.
After two hours and as many e-mails, Reggie finally showed up wearing his workout clothes—gym shorts, an “Obama for Change” T-shirt, and tube socks. I was in tight jeans and three-inch heels, wishing I’d stayed home. I got an “I do it to white girls” vibe from him. In person he explained that he’d just had his first day off in months, which in and of itself speaks volumes for his work ethic and maybe his ability to commit. Check. Then he kept talking. Turns out he’d gotten so drunk with his buds back home that’d he’d passed out and missed his flight to Washington. If he got any points for being honest, they were immediately negated by his adolescence. I was missing Sex and the City reruns for this.
Reggie was cute in a way-too-tall way. The chair he sat in didn’t have a chance. Reminded me of one of those scenes where parents are forced to sit in their second-grader’s desk for Back to School night. This thing might turn out just as clumsy. His head was too pointy, purposefully shaved in a way that inadvertently highlighted the isosceles shape. I thought about the crazy Gigantor babies we’d have and decided to do the planet a favor by not liking this guy. He had a boyish smile that would have suckered me in if not for the basketball shorts. Like, thanks for stopping by on your way to Bally’s, guy.
The three of us made klutzy conversationalists for an excruciating hour. “So you work for Politico?” “Yeah.” “Well, this is all off the record!” “Right.” I was playing it too classy and casual to ask about his famous boss and instead imagined the two of them sitting in a sauna after a hard game, towels wrapped around their waists ever so loosely. He said he was rarely in Washington, which I took as a preemptive strike right in line with the Bush Doctrine.
But then I was confused, because just a few moments later, he slapped my left butt cheek kind of hard with an open palm. Google said he was a college basketball player, so I wanted to get his thoughts on the pervasive homoeroticism displayed in men’s sports because that’s what I do—I’m a ballbuster. Better than explaining it to me using his words, Reggie decided to demonstrate the innocence of the ass pat by going all medieval on mine. His hands were quite large, though…so make that strike two and a half.
With a searing backside, I excused myself to the bathroom—which was quickly becoming one of my favorite places to unwind—to call Gina to discuss my options. I mentioned the word square multiple times.
“Dude, how the hell you gonna call somebody else a square? And what options do you have right now?” If she was right, I was well on my way to doing exactly what Dex told me not to—dropping Perfect Guy for a not-so-perfect one.
When I got back to our table, Ashley had already left (smooth), and Reggie offered to escort me home.
He walked on the outside of me like a true gentleman—an adjective I’d never used to describe a “date” before—and said he’d be “honored” if I’d go out with him again the next time he was in town. Standing outside my door, I said yes for the same reasons he’d asked—out of duty and nostalgia. When I stood on my tippy toes, we were able to hug, both knowing this hours-long detour was finally over with. Back to the campaign for him and complaining for me.
“I think she thought that you were two people at the top of your game and that you guys would click,” explained Ashley the next day, adding that according to some people “Reggie was like the coolest person on the trail.”
“And you’re sure it wasn’t more like, ‘Hey, here’s two young black people I know, so why not let’s get them together,’ Ash?”
“No, no, no, no, no.”
A profile on Reggie came out in the Times a week later. In it, Barack said, “There’s no doubt that Reggie is cooler than I am. I am living vicariously through Reggie.” I developed major reservations concerning the future president’s hipness acumen but looked up my voter registration info anyway. Then People magazine voted Reggie one of the top twenty-five hottest bachelors of the year, and I had a mini-breakdown.
“Dude, did you see the Times story and this thing in People? This f*cking guy is everywhere.”
“I’m looking now,” said Gina. “Yeah. Gay.”
“Dex called it an ode to bromance,” I told her, and yes, I’d told Dexter all about my date and he was kind enough to act jealous, going on and on about how Reggie holds Barack Obama’s nuts in a briefcase for a living. Actually, they were MET-Rx chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars, but what did that matter?
Really, I was the one going crazy, finding fault in a nationally ranked bachelor in favor of a retard who made nonsensical gonad jokes and couldn’t tell the difference between friend feelings and more-than-friend feelings. I wished I could get Lisa Nowak on the horn. Honk if you have impossibly high expectations that never get met so you’ll settle for an idiot with a law degree and commitment issues. Sure, Reggie was no Cliff, but perhaps he was something even better. But then again, white people hot is never the same.
“You’re so crazy pants. He’s super friggin’ hot. Look at him in this magazine,” said Emily, doing the ta-dah hands in front of her computer, which was displaying a full-screen photo of one Reggie Love in the kind of oversize business suit pro athletes wear.
“Why do white people always think black men who take baths are the hottest things since Morgan Freeman?” I asked. “That guy is in his seventies, you know.”
“You’re the whitest black girl I know!”
Now how to take this? Sometimes I wanted to go through my entire life story as a way of explanation: “Well, my mom has a high-falutin’ accent—basically she speaks the King’s English, I spent a lot of my childhood on an island with no black people, I went to an Ivy League college. So don’t let the white girl accent fool you—I was raised in da ’hood. Compton, Cali-forn-yah to be exact, pimpin’. Left Co-ast!” By now I’ve thrown some C’s on it, having just finished up the complicated heel-toe known to a certain demographic as “the Crip walk.”
“You’re not from the ghetto. You went to Columbia. Please.” Emily always felt it acceptable—nay, necessary—to knock my street creds. Almost as often as I felt the need to offer them up. One time I invited her and her now-husband, then-fiancé, to the fish fry I have at my house every year.
“You eat fried fish?!”
“Emily, I’m black.” That’s as far as I got. Because, really, she was a good friend of mine. A friend I allowed to ask me mildly racist questions because, really, who the hell else is going to answer them for her? A friend for whom I’d Googled, printed, and pushpinned the lyrics to “Ebony and Ivory.” A friend who once asked me if it was “ghetto” around where I lived, and to whom I’d given an unflinching “yes.” We were walking down U Street—like 125th in Harlem, but with many more “hot spots” and many fewer black Jesus posters—when she said she had something for me to see. Get ready, Emily said, for “the most ridiculous thing” ever in “five, four, three, two…” It was the McDonald’s walk-up window.
“Isn’t that the most hilarious thing ever?”
“Umm, they have that so crackheads don’t shank some poor guy on the midnight shift for a McFlurry.”
“I know, but still!” She had the innocent wide eyes of someone who’d never bit into a delicious McRib sandwich. I bet they never even sold them in Indiana. Sad. If I took her under my wing, then maybe she wouldn’t get henpecked (shanked) by a real black person sometime in the immediate future.
The most egregious indictment of my racial invisibility happened, coincidentally enough, on my way to Emily’s wedding the next summer. I’d planned the trip with another girl named Emily because we were both taking the cheap flight into Kentucky and then “driving” the hour and a half to Evansville, Indiana. I put “driving” in quotes because, as previously stated, I do not now nor do I ever plan on obtaining an actual license to operate a motorized vehicle of any kind, but no one says “I’m gonna ride from point A to point B,” because it sounds too passive-aggressive. Basically, I needed a chauffeur, and for half the rental car costs, this chick was up for the task.
Chauffeur Emily and I had suffered through work wife Emily’s day-long bachelorette party and the string of mass e-mails leading up to it. The only one I added to the thread was about cup and panty size: a subject no one else would touch. Chauffeur Emily sent me an e-mail saying, “Thank God,” and we immediately got to synchronizing our flight schedules.
The Raleigh-Durham International Airport is ghetto—period. There are no good places to eat, and the seats smell like missed connections mixed with dreams deferred. We had an hour lay-over and were forced into Maui Tacos. Between bites of burrito, the two of us waxed poetic about overblown Washington men and my coincidental singledom.
The guys in town, we agreed, had inflated stomachs and egos to match. I was supposed to have a date for the wedding—James, the one who announced at a pizza place that being an intern twenty floors up from my cubicle precluded the possibility of us getting “romantically involved.” This from the guy who convinced me to swallow his man juice because anything else was “emasculating.” So the District, we decided, just wasn’t the place to meet anybody normal—although she and her lawyer were currently redoing their kitchen. Plus, everybody’s gay! And then there’s the shitty club situation! With like two places to go, you end up seeing the same people over and over and over again.
“I mean, everybody goes out to all the same crappy places,” said Chauffeur Emily, picking through her beans and rice. Mouth full of pico de gallo, I nodded my agreement. “Plus, if you want to go to like a big club, especially on a Saturday, it’s always all these minorities.”
Wait, what? I looked around to make sure we were still in this zone and not the Twilight one. She was already folding a napkin around her leftover burrito, headed for the trash cans. Alone at the table, I wondered whether or not I’d heard her correctly. Minorities? That’s me, right? But I don’t think she meant to include me in that category. Had we gotten so chummy in the security line that Emily had mistaken my bronze skin for a tan, a costume, a cover?
Adrienne was always wary of me “getting too cool” with “the whites,” as Gina called them. “You can’t trust them,” is what she’d say when I’d tell her about a bitch session work wife Emily and I had over burgers at Ruby Tuesdays. “I know you think she’s your friend and ish, but be careful. She’s not your friend friend.” Ah, the difference a double makes.
What was this, West Side Story? Or, even more apropos, the “Bad” video? I didn’t straighten Chauffeur Emily out, because I didn’t want our travel plans unraveled. Once again my lack of a driver’s license was making the ride uncomfortable. Especially since I was in charge of Google Maps for the next two hours. How would the navigating have gone if instead of “Turn right here,” I shouted, “Excuse me, I am black, and you, my good lady, are out of or-dah”? Or pointed out the street sign that read, AIN’T I A WOMAN? Nope, I was a Shark with no teeth.
So we got to Evansville no problem, and as long as I kept my mouth shut, the weekend would go off without a hitch. Because we were here to see my good friend get hitched, and bringing up racism at the rehearsal dinner is just plain rude. Later that night when I met Chauffeur Emily downstairs for a glass of “the red one” at the Evansville Airport Marriott’s bar, she looked shocked. “How’d you get your hair like that? It’s gorgeous.” I wrapped my new ponytail around my wrist and whispered, “un-be-weaveable, isn’t it?” She didn’t get it, and I promised to show her later.
“Dude, did you see that article about the blacks and best friends forever?” When Gina gets super hyped about an “article,” I stop what I’m doing and click on the link.
“Please hold.” It only took minutes to get enlightened. “Are you serious right now? This is awesomeness.”
“Am I your BBF?” she asked.
“If not you, then who?”
It’d been a week since Emily’s nuptials, and my spinelessness in the face of wedding favors. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times had obviously been stalking me. In the article “Buddy System,” the paper coined the acronym BBF, or the “black best friend.” I was immediately reminded of the “LMBAO”—“laughing my black ass off”—phase we went through online in college, which in turn gave birth to my favorite Chicana’s cyber acronym of choice, LMMAO.
Anyway, according to the Times, BBFs were a pop culture phenomenon in which black actresses were repeatedly cast as characters whose “principal function is to support the heroine, often with sass, attitude and a keen insight into relationships and life.” They were most often “gorgeous, independent, loyal and successful…. And even though they are single or lack consistent solid relationships, BBFs are experts in the ways of the world, using that knowledge to comfort, warn or scold their BFF.” (The latter being their “best friend forever,” otherwise known as the white heroine.) I was pissed I didn’t come up with this shit first. They were typing my pain with their fingers, writing my life with their words.
My BBF blues song was sung mostly at work. The New York Times, Politico, even Oprah magazine, were all “pretty vanilla.” I remember complaining to a young black reporter whom I admired that the folks at the Times always seemed so afraid to ask me about my life after five. “It’s not like I was beating African drums all weekend.” Laughing, she said that sometimes it pays to be the only black girl in the room. “Everybody here knows who I am.”
When I got tired of being asked about Michelle Obama, I started freelancing stories for TheRoot.com, and one of my bosses referred to the Washington Post–owned Web site as “some blog.” I got the most hits on a piece about Jennifer Hudson’s character in Sex and the City: The Movie, basically comparing her to a twenty-first-century Mammy: big-breasted with plenty of down-home love to offer her hapless white charge. The story got dozens of comments from women who were tired of being the “magical Negro.” One chick said that I had low self-esteem, and another claimed I just wanted to be part of the in crowd. Duh. But the feedback from someone calling herself “Uppity Negress” got to me:
“I think because we are older, Generation X, we are set in our sub-demographics and with me not being married and with the same exact interests, I don’t fit in or get invited. That has a lot to do with my being single and Black with a tongue that tends to pronounce that there are elephants in the room. That is not SATC’s responsibility to work this out for me and my White Peers. It’s upon us.”
I guess my tongue, having been tied for so long, was suffering from atrophy. And if there were elephants in the room, stepping over their massive poop was always preferable to stepping in it. The thing is, Uppity Negress, as BBFs we’re all too busy being defined by that negative space, by what we are not, to actually focus on what we are. We aren’t weak. We aren’t white. We aren’t idiots. That leaves: strong, black, women. I wish I could say we were goddesses. But the BBF is anything but divine; in truth, she is destroying us.
Helena to Gina: “Dude, I am in these streets right now fighting for survival!”
“What are you doing, dude?”
“Fighting. For. My. Damn. Life. Do I need therapy?” I knew what her answer would be. Gina was a sociologist. “I was watching Sex and the City last night,” I said. “That episode where Carrie sees a shrink.”
“Everybody needs therapy, dude. Especially you. I’m totally familiar with how you get down.”
I had been very down. Adaoha was gone. Adrienne and Stella were studying for the bar, and I hadn’t spoken to them in weeks. Kia was busy with three kids now. Evelyn was getting married. And Dex, the dum-dum, was in Indianapolis for the summer, learning about how not to be with me. But who cares about Dex? We broke up right before he left during a torturous car ride to work.
“So you don’t want me to visit this summer?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think you should. I mean, how would that help things?”
Things? Where are these things everyone keeps talking about? And how do I get rid of them?
I started ignoring my mother’s calls and spent entire weekends in the farthest reaches of the bat cave, not caring that the rats had probably given me the bubonic plague. Rashes broke out on my arms that hadn’t been visible since 2004, when West Point Willy told me he got some other chick pregnant. I was drinking a $4.99 bottle of Whole Foods wine on a good day, two on a bad one. The fainting spell behind me, I was still too scared to walk over the Key Bridge from Virginia to Georgetown because jumping seemed all too doable. I cried at the office twice and refused to look up from my computer screen when someone asked me a question. Emily gave me a sign that read, “Out to lunch: If not back by 5, out to dinner.” I hated everyone, especially this jackass named Jonathan who insisted on saying, “Hello Hah-laaaynuh,” every time he walked past my desk. We’d shared an excruciating slow dance at Emily’s wedding. She forwarded the picture evidence to all the cool kids, and I got mad because my face looked greasy.
In short, I was in a weird place. Every morning, Emily would tell people who stopped by our cubicle that I was “grumpy-pants today.” So they kept walking past without saying “hello.” Most days I appreciated the intervention, but on others I just wanted someone to f*cking say “hello” to me! Someone other than Jonathan (and sometimes even him).
“He just wants to flirt with you but doesn’t know how,” she explained. “He’s scared.”
“Why the hell is everybody so scared of me around here? Is it because I’m black?”
“No,” she said. “It’s because you’re a bitch.”