Bitch Is the New Black (16 page)

“Well, then, you have fun with your dry v-wedgie!” I shot back.

There was a vacuum of silence and shocked looks right before the table burst into epiphany-strength laughter. DRY V-WEDGIES! This would be Adaoha's new epithet and our new rallying cry. Whenever heartbreak conned one of us into hating men, all anyone had to do was mention the word
dry
together with
v-wedgie
. Most closely translating to the phrase “Open sesame,” “dry v-wedgie” unlocked visions of a nightmarish future where we spent each day racing through life with our heads down and our legs strong but all that chafing in between.

Maybe that's what Adaoha was thinking about the night she left us. We had our last conversation the day before.

 

JamAmPrincess (12:30:33 p.m.): Uh, what's with the piss face

nyCALIgrl4 (12:32:45 p.m.): no more Dex

JamAmPrincess (12:33:45 p.m.): what y?

JamAmPrincess (12:34:08 p.m.): y r u makin it sound so final

JamAmPrincess (12:36:26 p.m.): ppl get back together

nyCALIgrl4 (12:36:32 p.m.): nope

nyCALIgrl4 (12:36:36 p.m.): we break up too much

JamAmPrincess (12:37:02 p.m.): ur still not telln me what happened

nyCALIgrl4 (12:37:06 p.m.): he doesnt want a relationship

nyCALIgrl4 (12:37:17 p.m.): nothing “happened” per se

JamAmPrincess (12:38:02 p.m.): so no more friends either?

nyCALIgrl4 (12:38:23 p.m.): i'm so not into s&m

JamAmPrincess (12:38:34 p.m.): lmao!

JamAmPrincess (12:38:59 p.m.): i'm just sayn mayb he's on a diff schedule

JamAmPrincess (12:44:42 p.m.): but u guys seemed so comfy together

nyCALIgrl4 (12:44:46 p.m.): we are

nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:28 p.m.): but he's so schizo about it

nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:36 p.m.): one second he wants to introduce me to his parents

nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:46 p.m.): and the next he's still hollering at this other chick

JamAmPrincess (1:02:49 p.m.): the one he was canoodling with in the club?

nyCALIgrl4 (1:07:05 p.m.): GIRL YES

 

She wasn't online the next day. Had already logged off. In real life I couldn't forgive her. Wouldn't. Or myself for letting her sign out without a warning. Something. I couldn't help thinking she had a secret. It made me jealous. Maybe what it really was: a surprise. Buried at the bottom of her bag. A lot of good that would do me: I was still too scared to look.

There comes a time in every twenty-seven-year-old's life when
one realizes that the space between dormitory and factory has folded unflattering crow's feet into one's social life. Gone are the days when friends are an elevator ride away, dinner plans are made on the way to somebody's hall, and Thursday is Friday or Friday is Thursday (who cares, you'll figure it out in Philosophy C203). Dry-erase boards, once the standard-bearers of celebrity, are the vintage signboards of a bygone era: “Helena, me again. Just thought I'd remind you and that random guy you picked up about taking off your shoes. You spent the entire last Sunday cleaning footprints off your ceiling. Also please don't throw your condoms out of the window you're creating a small mountain. P.S. meet us in the dining hall at 7.” Life is now a really misleading rerun of
Friends
, with no all-star cast and only one storyline—yours.

Soon enough, the little old lady living in a shoe is you—and the rent is effin' unbelievable, and nobody comes to visit because
you're too far from the metro. Adulthood comes in little jigsaw pieces. Once the painstaking work of fitting them all together is done, the picture doesn't look nearly as cool as it did on the box. False advertising. But whom to sue? Jesus H. Christ?

Really, you should thank God for the gang of nerds who got together on their Segways and rode the information highway all the way to the bank, cashing in on our collective quarter-life crises, crisises, crisi. Making it impossible to stay mad forever, Facebook, MySpace, Gchat, LinkedIn, Skype, Twitter, and whatever people are doing now have each made this American life bearable for those of us on the too-in-touch-to-ever-be-nostalgic side of thirty. Actually, we all might be the unwitting participants of a controlled field study of the latest drug to battle Alzheimer's—
nevurfugetatal.

What's the point of pontificating on the theoretical catechism, “Whatever happened to Randi Davidson?”—high school track star, wearer of purple lipstick to Prom, and face on a milk carton since senior night 1998—when suddenly her every move (“Randi Johnson is ready for date night with hubby!!!!!!”) is shoved into your news feed quicker than you can say, “I bet you a million bucks she's gay now.”

Where's the fun in playing fact or fiction when everybody knows the boring, nonpervy truth? And the ho-hum headlines break so fast you don't know which to pay attention to: “Aaron Ouyang just scored 8 out of 10 on his Sliders fanatics TV quiz,” “Nicole Watson is thanking everybody for all the bday love,” “Harry Chin is :(,” “Adaoha Hamilton is hiding under her desk again,” and “David Soriano is…” That last one is so fucking annoying—it's like, did you forget to type in that tedious tidbit that seemed so important three seconds ago or is correct conjugation that important to you? Fascist.

None of this is to say that I myself don't participate in the constant reel of unreasonable updates, adding my small change to the stock ticker along with all the other grown-ups bored out of their gourds. But at least I have the decency to set most of my crap to private, unleashing my ego fertilizer to “only friends.”

The one time I showed up to my grandmother's $1 soul food restaurant in a “cropped sweater,” she went nuts. “Lena, you're too young to have your stomach all out like that.” At seventeen, I was wise enough not to laugh in her face, but stupid enough to say something like, “This is how people dress. It's the nineties, not olden times.”

Nowadays, I would never wear anything baring my midriff and wish most people (especially plump ones) had Effie's conservative Compton values. Why not save something for later? And leave something for the imagination? Or better yet, make use of a highly advanced cow-cloaking device designed to keep 'em thirsty?

We don't have the time or the technology—that's why. So instead, the Jenga tower that is postjuvenile delinquency continues online, so that our offscreen affairs don't seem so lacking. An old friend once told me she wanted this other chick's “Facebook life,” an oxymoron if there ever was one.

“She's got all these cool-sounding events on her page. Like every friggin' night there's something. I wanna go too. Would it be weird if I sent her a FB message like, ‘Take me with you!'”

“First off, yes, Crazy Pants McGee,” I said. “Second, get the heck outta here! It's not like she's actually going to any of these places. And, I'm sorry, does ‘Grown and Sexy Saturdays at Saturna Italian Bar and Grille' really sound that awesome? No, ma'am.” I was trying to be supportive.

“Whatever. Why aren't you on Twitter?”

“Because I'm not a fucking maniac.” Again with the support.

“Since when?”

Later this same girl sent me and a whole bunch of other people she was either trying to impress or help get through the workday an e-mail with the subject line: “I'm famous.” What followed was not an enthusiastic paragraph about her doctoral dissertation being accepted, but a link to a snarky Web site that posts particularly literary “tweets.” Hers was first on the list: “The Ikea shuttle switches lanes like woah and drives over the double yellow line. Not so Captain Safety.” I was proud in a Special Olympics type of way.

There is something to be said for the self-gratification felt in the presence of a group (or mass e-mail). The competing senses of purpose, accomplishment, and remorse.

Case in point: RBBDA. Street name: RuhBuhDuh. To its pushers: Rasheed's Black Bourgie Dating Advice. Yes,
that
Rasheed. “Raj,” Britanya's ex. After I got rid of her in life, I picked him up in cyberspace. Not in a sexy way, but in a “Hey, the more guys I friend the higher probability I'll inadvertently meet a non-friend guy” kind of way. I considered falling in love with him one night after a friendly dinner at Clyde's, but then I figured it'd be easier to introduce him to my other friend Hillary, who wears pearls in the middle of the week by point of reference. Two jumbo lump crab cakes and six months later, they're in love. Even still, he remains dedicated to the cause of documenting the “exciting developments in the world of black bourgie dating” with his “just for fun” Facebook group, RBBDA.

Gina, at her dick's end, had an interesting theory on the educated-while-black dating scene: “I am just so tired of this shit. Like argh! Why don't they just keep a handful of men in a barrel, so that when one situation ends you just grab in there for another.” Rasheed had his own suggestions. A fan of public dis
plays of irritation, he got fed up and decided to tell the world according to Mark Zuckerberg about it.

A rhetorical note entitled, “Is bourgie black dating really that tough?” started everything. In it Rasheed answered his own question yes, and then told everyone he could tag why:

1. The numbers are against us
   —with only a fraction of the black population certifiable bourgie, it's hard to date healthy.
   
2. The rest of the Blacks are against us
   —Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois are more than the names across a booty-shaking high school band's parade banner.
   
3. We're too career-oriented
   —nobody works hard
   and
   plays hard. That's a dangerous myth made up by white people who like golf with their tequila.
   
4. We take ourselves out of the game
   —Grown and Sexy Saturdays at Saturna Italian Bar and Grille? Fail.
   
5. The clusterfuck
   —the only difference between bourgie dating and Appalachian inbreeding is the sea level.
   
6. Robin Thicke
   

At first it was just for shits and giggles. A silly list you might forward to your friends on a Friday before a working lunch at Fuddruckers. But eventually the comments section underneath unfurled like a red carpet. The road to social network stardom now clear, another note followed—“Bourgie Macking Week”—which included a maxim I adopted as my own, “Leave the hating ass friend at home.” Sorry, Gi. Although I made sure to send her
each of Rasheed's lists, because of course, another followed. The third and final note bore its header more like a headstone: “Bourgie Macking Week Failing!?! Dating Dead!?!” That's when shit got heavy, or at least a little chubby. Chances were getting slim that any of us girls would find
the one
for ourselves, since according to one comment, “I'm saying, meeting people clearly does not translate into dating. Because, in my experience, it is not hard to meet people in this city. But, I'm not convinced that dating exists in this city.” This city being the nation's capital, and we, the people, being totally screwed.

Then, like rats on a sinking ship, we decided there was power in numbers and formed RBBDA, a Facebook “group for uppity black people to discuss dating, relationships, sex, and whatever else is on the mind.” Of the 302 members, about 24 were doable in a classic sense. Most were from bourgie-approved locales like Washington, Atlanta, and Chicago. Rasheed dubbed himself “The Originator” and demanded that we go forth and mull over heady topics like: “The Champagne Brunch,” “Your Standards Are Too High,” “I Caught Him Peeing in the Shower,” “Fuck Yeah, Dow Jones,” and “Addicted to RBBDA.”

I authored a few new topics myself, most notably one entitled “The Kinsey Scale,” which I wrote after watching Liam Neeson, as real-life nerd-turned-sexpert Alfred Charles Kinsey, have movie intercourse with his straw-haired wife and manly researcher. Since he literally wrote the books on sex, I assumed we could have a robust debate about “the down low” and whether men having sex with men were gay. Thoughts? None.

They (I use the third person plural here in order to protect the innocent from any lame-doing) even planned a “conference” in D.C. that I reluctantly chose Netflix over only after a robust debate on which would be more productive. “Dude, you met these people on the Facebooks? What are you now, a forty-year-
old white lady?” Gina did not approve. But then again, she was no less single than I was. RBBDA was planning a second conference, and I decided to take Raj's advice and “leave the hating ass friend at home.”

RBBDA 2.0 was taking place in New York that summer. I gave a Chinese woman wearing a fanny pack thirty bucks for a ticket to Thirty-fourth Street on a charter bus that looked like it'd had a hard life. “You going New Yawk?” she asked, already herding me into the line of graduate students and staff assistants to Sen. Somebody. My bag was sentenced to the hull before I could answer, “Yes! I going New Yawk to find me a man.” I grabbed a seat near a window, sat back, and watched
Mission Impossible II
.

Dexter and I were broken up, and this time I was serious about it. He said he had “weird in-between feelings” for me, so I was determined to get someone else between the sheets. Well, not really. The only one-night stand I ever had ended eleven months after with tears and a “what relationship?” So maybe I've never had one. Really, I just wanted to do enough heavy petting to warrant mentioning on Monday when Dex called to ask how my weekend with those “probably psycho-killer online sex chat friends” went. Because in-between feelings were still feelings, after all.

So. RBBDA. There were three distinct factions on “the boards”:
newbies
,
regulars,
and
lurkers
. I was a semiregular with lurker tendencies. It seemed as if every thirty minutes spent working damaged my brain in such a way that I couldn't remember whether or not I'd checked the groups discussion board, wall, or news section that day. Trusting my gut, I'd get as far as “www.fa…” before my computer did the rest. Once inside, I spent the next hour reading posts, showing the pervier ones to my white work wife Emily, and then deciding not to make any
potentially-harmful-when-my-husband-is-trying-to-win-Iowa comments of my own. That was the
lurker
in me—getting off on the sex diaries of others but remaining stingy with mine. To a certain extent. Once I did share a few lines about the time an old friend gave a valiant if brusque effort in a Los Angeles hotel room. But that was it. And the other time with a seven-foot college basketball star who could lift his leg behind his head and squeal like a gymnast half his size. Okay, fine, I was a perv too.

As such, I felt like I “knew” these “people,” who up until now had been only thumbnails to me. But I wasn't a regular either. Despite evidence to the contrary, I did have a full-time job and a part-time life.

Of the regular chicks, there were five in New York: Justine, Tonya, Courtney, Reiko, and Dee. These were girls I'd never seen after five or in the flesh. On the guys' side there were Douglas, Van, Raj, Chris, and Stu—all super cute in miniature, like doll-house furniture. Looking back, the black-and-white glamour shots should have tipped me off. Who takes a picture of just their eye?

After making it off the Chinatown bus with only the slightest case of SARS, I met up with the group at a dive bar in the West Village. The only people I'd met in the nonvirtual world were Hillary and Raj, who according to their text messages were somewhere in the back. A bunch of black people were holding court at the table nearest the front entrance. I tried to avoid eye contact, because being the new girl is a lost art, like climbing monkey bars and raising my hand. Checking my phone for the third time in as many seconds seemed like the better option.
I'm really in high demand and not a loser
, this pantomime was meant to say.
I
have
friends. They're just not here—yet. Because they, of course, are tardy and rude. I, on the other hand, am responsible and confident
. My phone rang in the middle of me fake-listening to a
ghost voice mail. As “Does that make me craaa-zaaay…” torpedoed down my ear, I pretended not to notice.

“Something's wrong with this damn phone,” I told my face to say. It was Rasheed. He'd spotted someone who looked like me looking like an asshole and wanted to make sure. They were two tables away. I couldn't see them past all the mixing, mingling, and morbid obesity. Yeah, a lot of these girls were…healthier than their thumbnail versions suggested. There was someone that resembled Justine, who according to her profile pic was often surprised mid–high kick. This real girl had missed a few dance classes and added as many pounds. The before shots went on from there like a Dexatrim commercial that'd been horribly botched.
Geez, Larry, some idiot cut out the girls from Barbizon!
I thought I saw someone who looked like Doug, but about a foot shorter. Van's teeth were way bigger than useful; no wonder he never smiled in his pics. Raj and Hillary, always a puke-inducing example of bliss, were sucking a supersize something from the same straw. I wished my brain was frozen too. Maybe I could still catch the 11:00 p.m. back to the bat cave.