What We Give Up

Shoutouts to all who came through for the Cake Release Party last night. Those who did got a sneak peek of the new novel I'm working, Nightshift, the first in a three-volume epic about how two strangers end up as a happily married husband and wife. It went over really well with an audience that 98% female (A good sign). Murph and Gonzales were there to laugh at all the porn and assorted other guy references. I'm really excited to have 60 pages of something new that I'll be putting my name on (wherever it ends up). I'll end this post with a little bit of an excerpt. But let me get to what I was getting to.

My boy Ant Demby and I have known each since my freshman year at Morehouse. We went to Million Man March together and spent countless hours chopping up the state of the game through the first half of school and have been in the same cities for most of the time since we've graduated. He manages some real powerhouse talent and spins a nice little event at Tillman's in Manhattan on Tuesdays. This whole short bio comes down to his comment on a mutual friend of ours page. As we both took in our homie's baby girl and her husband and that picture of them in front of the house (with the literal white picket fence) he remarked that while he had been spending the years since school grinding it out in one of the world's most dangerous games, there she is with this beautiful baby.

Then last night at Frank White, long after most had taken off, myself, man Brooke, Tahir, Molaundo and my mentee Gerald sat in the muggy air and talked about the old days at Morehouse and how the years we spent there were the last that they'd ever let such a large group of rebels into any graduating class. We hadn't shown up trying to fight the system. But it was in our blood, and hence it ran through everything we did in our tenure there. From rocking locks (way before the days when you could get them done in a salon) to alternative diets to critiquing every part of our school experience, we were a collective of black sheep that became a thorn in the side of the administration. We didn't plan it. It just happened.

As we were leaving I told Brooke that I might start my old Spades night back up again is I manage to survive the summer.

"What do you mean get through the summer?" he asked me, as if I was kidding.

I explained to him that in the last few years I seemed to have run our of the pixie dusk that we as a group always seems have carry by the cartload. We could make anything happen, breach any secure event, get to any person that we need. We were like magic. I told him that though I'm done questioning what I'm supposed to be, it seems like my dust is all gone. He just kind of blew me off with a laugh and said.
"We're finaglers. That's what we do."

I guess if there are all types of people in the world for a Divine reason then I had to end up in some sort of a category, even though I would sometimes rather believe in free will. I'd rather like to think that all of my screw-ups over the years were merely acts of human error, and that my successes were all about hard work and determination. But that's not my truth. I'm seen too much that says otherwise. And while I might be Wolverine with no adamantium or healing abilities, scrapping until I'm bloody, my claws chipped and broken from having gone against enemies that would not be moved, I wonder if this is all my big trial by fire, a test of my faith in what I started chasing as a boy like Coltrane did that song in the dream. It goes without saying that I'll take on a whole army by myself if it's for a reason. But it ain't about war these days. It's about peace.

Still, my house and wife and kid seem so far off that they might as well not even be there. The crumbling economy has everyone, particularly artists, on the ropes. So I'm a little shaky, wondering if this is the Houdini episode where I don't get out of the burried coffin before I run out of air. I think of Jason Bourne's last line in The Bourne Ultimatum, a gun trained on him as he's facing certain death. "Look at us. Look at what they make you give." Then he jumps. And he lives.

Big shout to Richard Louissaint (www.richardlouissaint.com) for taking dope shots of the event. If you need a man with a camera you should definitely hit him up. Without further ado, here's an excerpt from Nightshift:



1.

“So wassup, Ma?”

He puts a lighter to my cigarette like a boy who knows how to be a gentleman, a rarity up in these parts, especially since there’s barely anywhere you can smoke anymore. Before I started smoking it seemed like I couldn’t get away from the smell of cigarettes. Ten years later it’s the other way around.
He’s wearing chef’s whites. The double-breasted jacket is unbuttoned to give him some air. His hair is cut real short, almost bald and he’s about my complexion. 5’9 maybe? A good 170. He looks like he lifts, or at least keeps up with the pushups. But he’s young. I’d be shocked if he’s over 24.
“Just enjoying my cigarette,” I say. This is my light and fluffy version of ‘Keep any cornball ass game to yourself’. Humoring him for too long will kill my buzz.
Yeah, I’m making all kinds of assumptions. But what in the hell am I gonna do with a boy this young? Fucking him is asking for a lot of phone traffic I don’t need and dates to places like BBQs and the Applebee’s on Flatbush. It’s best that be both suck our sticks down to the filter and go about our way. But he just can’t see the logic.
“I’m the sous chef here,” he says, after letting out a cloud.
“Is that right?” I say with a mouthful of sarcasm.
“Yeah, that means-“
“That you do all the work,” I interrupt. “And the chef gets all the credit.”
He laughs. “Yeah, somethin’ like that. But we all gotta start somewhere.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” I say just as my square gets to the halfway point. His lips are just like Teddy’s, round and full, kissable. I was 23 the first time I kissed him. The last time nearly killed me.
Teddy was a chef too. Then he vanished. But not like the Jamaican. Teddy did it in a million pieces over seven years. The funny thing is that most of him was gone before I ever even noticed.
“Let me make you dinner,” he had said in the library stacks while I was flipping through this book on turtles. At the time, I was thinking about getting a tat of one on my lover back, because it was always hard for me to come out of my shell.
I almost burst out laughing when he said that to me. Where I came from a man in the kitchen was like a woman in Sunday church with pants on. A no-go no matter which way you looked at it. Still it was something about the way he smiled. And he kept calling me “Chere,” a habit from having creole parents and the fact that he’d spent a whole year in Paris.
He’d conned his Dean of Students into letting him take cooking classes as a part of his degree in French. But instead of coming home for the summer he jammed through enough courses at that cooking school to get a degree there before he got one here. He met me his last semester before dropping out. That dinner he made was a good as my Grandma’s gravy.
He made me shrimp etouffe with a sliver of chicken breaded in nuts as a appetizer. He presented it on a paper plate like we were at a restaurant. He even bought wine, and got a little salty when I told him I didn’t drink. But it was something about him that made me say yes to my first first glass of merlot. I said the same thing when he put his fingers inside of me and pulled them out dripping. He asked me to lick them and I sucked them dry, tasting myself for the first time in somebody else’s presence. He got me to do a lot of things I’d never done before.
But Teddy was a Scorpio, a dick that just happened to have a brain attached. When he figured out that my pussy only came with commitment he turned our love affair into a ménage that I wasn’t aware of with some country ass bitch from Birmingham who worked as a hostess at the Italian place where he was working. I knew long before the grapevine ever told me. And I was more than ready to do something about it.
Like I said before, I was a girl who grew up in a house full of boys. Men are territorial. Men don’t believe in subtle. So I knew the kind of message I needed to send. And I was young enough not to think about it before I did it.
I waited for that little bitch in the parking lot. When she came out in that ugly ass chiffon dress with the wedges that barely matched, I grabbed her by the arm and slapped her silly until both sides of her face were bruised. She was wearing heavy foundation for a week.
Her love affair with Teddy ended when I left her there lying on the asphalt, crying like the tears were going to heal those bruises. I dumb enough to think that he wasn’t going to do it again. Like a boy I just didn’t get the fact that he’d already made a decision about who he was going to be. He knew what I’d done to that girl and he that I’d do it again if I had to.
He never said it but I think that was too much like a man for him. From then on, no matter what I did, he started moving away from me. But the make-ups made the breakups worth it. I got him as sprung off me as I was off him. So we fucked our way through five years and three states, through grad school and his very first restaurant opening and closing in less than six months. By then we were in Philly.
Then I came home from work one day to find half of our place emptied out. No note. No forwarding address. His friends said that they didn’t have a clue. I didn’t believe them. It took a visit to his mother a week later to find out that he’d taken a job on a cruise ship.
It was less than a month before we were supposed to move to New York. I’d gotten a job that paid more than enough money to hold us both. With his restaurant closing he saw it as him being on the way down while I was coming up. I’d made him feel like less of a man when all I was trying to be was be his woman.
“So what you doin out here, Ma?” the boy asks me. I don’t even look at him as I start back inside. I don’t even answer.