Sure, I'll Be Your Black Friend

by Ben Philippe

  If I mostly remember college as a series of questions on fast-forward, the city of New York itself, on the other hand, provides some much-needed answers. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know who you are when you get here: the pressure cooker of New York City will tell you. I’ll leave the mystique to HBO’s programming and simply summarize New York as a magical place where three days without a belligerent person screaming at you on the subway is a good streak. You’re very proud of living in a city surrounded by so many art venues you only visit when people are in from out of town. You will spot someone you know and like coming your way down the street and pray to God they don’t see you. You regularly mismanage your small amount of money and end up buying a $14.99 notebook at Strand Bookstore even though you have a stack of cheap $2.99 ones at home because, presumably, this is the one that will finally make you a real writer. New York City is about three years of reading on the subway and never once making that stupid “Hot Dudes Reading On the Subway” Tumblr. Like, not even by accident. Bah! I’m telling you, it’s a conspiracy.

  Finally, New York—at least the New York of that time—was just so many plastic bags. A plethora of plastic bags. Grocery stores, pharmacies, food delivery: it’s constant. You bring your reusable bag to the store and before it’s even out of your hand, the cashier has already double-wrapped your stick of gum in two bags. You become vaguely environmentally conscious. Or, at least environmentally aware. On the other hand, you also harden yourself to walking by a string of twelve beggars without taking your headphones off. That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s needed here. You become lean, frugal, subway hard and Central Park–sunset soft, all at once. Here, you’re allowed to live as a Black guy instead of experiencing being the Black guy. Trust me, the difference between the two is a canyon.

  Years later, at my graduation, my uncle will admit that he was terrified for me upon dropping me off. “You were just a fat, sweaty little boy! I was sure this city was going to eat you alive. But look at you now. You survived!” he’ll say with a proud hand on the shoulder of my graduation robe.

  My extended family isn’t always great at compliments. Anyway, graduation is getting ahead of ourselves.

  THANKS, OBAMA

  My first year of college, the air of New York City was thick with Obama. This was 2009 Obama. “First time around” Obama. The HOPE™ of what could be if a Black man somehow became president of the United States. That blue-and-red “Hope” poster was already peppered across dorm rooms alongside the likes of Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, and MLK.

  Despite being an international student who cannot vote, I easily get caught up in the Black & Proud Obama frenzy, which unites everyone from the Black Student Organizations to the nineteen-year-old socialist poets in hoping for a Democratic victory. Barack Hussein Obama was a Black friend to all and, within this Ivy League bubble, we are all rooting for him. Obama had himself attended Columbia years prior—an experience he apparently abhorred because he has, to this day, never given a speech there—but we still take any credit for him. We, Columbia University. We, Democrats. We, Black people everywhere.

  Columbia is hands down the most liberal environment a minority student can ask for after the Sherbrooke years. It’s the land of calls to action, often against the very institution we all so proudly moved into not too long ago. There are Reserve Officer Training Corps protests and hunger strikes held by children whose ID cards grant them access to state-of-the-art food halls where we throw away the patty of the burger to lessen the total calorie count, all half a mile away from a then-rapidly gentrifying Harlem. That dissonance is rarely malicious but will often be lost on a lot of the peers I interact with.

  “I almost wish he hadn’t won,” sighs my floormate Benjamin—white, tall, with theater aspirations and the talent to boot—watching CNN in the common room, the day after Obama’s election.

  “You literally put his poster on our door, dude.” His roommate Chris, another transfer, laughs.

  “Yeah, I know,” Benjamin muses aloud, still watching the TV. He seems conflicted by his own opinion. “I just don’t want him to sell out.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask, genuinely curious.

  “You don’t become POTUS without serving a lot of masters.”

  There’s a silence I don’t understand until all eyes are on me. I start to notice that I’m still, somehow, often the only Black person in the multicultural hubs I find myself in.

  “Don’t say that!” Min, a second-generation Korean American girl from one floor below, instantly chastises. It’s as if the N-word has just been dropped. She likes talking to me when we cross paths in the kitchen and we mutually bemoan our dual unpaid internships and the fact that simply being students without working on résumés would somehow feel luxurious.

  “Oh, n-no,” Benjamin catches himself, suddenly dark pink because he’s one of those white people who come preinstalled with a very clear color chart. “I didn’t mean, like, master-master!”

  I know Benjamin didn’t mean anything by it, but I’ve been a college student long enough now to be performatively offended on behalf of a cute girl. Benjamin goes to bed early.

  When the small group shrinks down to Min and I, I again receive her well-intentioned sympathies and later, on that same couch, her woke fellatio as reparation for a slight she hadn’t committed and that I hadn’t felt. Later that night, I receive a text from Benjamin, hoping there are no hard feelings. The next time we cross paths, I salute the Obama poster on Benjamin and Chris’s door. I’m starting to get this country.

  Columbia’s larger Black ecosystem is also thriving and disparate. No two Black people here are alike. Well. That’s not entirely true. Some of them are figurative clones of one another, hailing from the same corners of the map, having the same interests and championing the same causes. Fortunately, however, these profiles are varied and I meet my fair share of jocks, artists, activists, Black Republicans, fellow awkward half-bakeds looking around with big eyes and scurrying back to their dorm rooms. “Black” is no longer the first word that defines these people to me. And amid all the interpersonal growth and kindred spirits, I also meet some powerful douchebags at my Ivy League college; the type who leave you lemony fresh for days. And some of them happen to be Black! There’s a new thrill to being able to freely dislike other Black people without any hand-wringing. We might share a common Blackness, but some of our lives and interests look nothing alike. And here I have the freedom of knowing they won’t be the only Black person I meet that day, that week, or that semester. It’s a brave new world for me. The guy clipping his toenails in that morning lecture on the Social Imagination? My God, can that proud Black brother suck it.

  Sixteen

  Sherman Klump v. Buddy Love

  I’M TWENTY-ONE and just like that it’s already time for junior year of college. I’m also the skinniest I will be for the next decade. It’s my reward for having previously gone through every last human emotion while standing in unfamiliar pants in front of the full-length mirrors of the American Apparel fitting rooms. Weight loss is something that happens in the space of a few sentences in books: Why buck the trend? I’m skinny!

  See also:

  Fit. Compact. Lean. Lissome. Archeresque: pertaining to the body of an archer. Svelte. That’s right, I said svelte, motherfuckers. A tight little bod for my five-foot-nine-inch frame. If this were a movie, the part would need a recast or an ungodly amount of CGI. I’ve transformed from, well, not Sherman Klump (though entirely too close for my taste) to something closer to a soft, less chiseled, and less confident Buddy Love.

  If you are frowning in confusion right now, Sherman Klump was the chunky, prosthetic-made “Before” to the slim and sleek “After” of Eddie Murphy with a mustache in the 1996 hit The Nutty Professor. The transition from morbidly obese to fuckboy before there was a term for it is triggered by an untested serum he becomes addicted to. How dare you not know this off the top of your head, friend? As a child, I didn’t so much watch
this movie as exhaust the VHS tape to within an inch of its goddamn life.

  Now, to be clear: there are Sherman Klumps out there who love their bodies as such and are as sexually confident and viable as Buddy Love in the one scene where Eddie Murphy had to have abs. It is nothing short of awesome to love your body that way, and I admire it. I simply didn’t love mine; it was surplus and felt that way.

  I leave all my tightening size-36 pants bundled up in a drawer of my childhood dresser as I instead pack for life as a slim upperclassman. Fresh packs of medium-size black T-shirts and black size-32 jeans that fit loosely. Mom watches from the doorway of my burgundy-painted bedroom that, unlike my waist size, will not change an inch for the next decade. She is less sad that I’m leaving and more concerned that I am thirty pounds lighter than when I first arrived home.

  She thinks of me as anorexic and weird now: a shallow New York City deviant. It’s feminine to diet, after all. What is a man who doesn’t eat? What man portion controls? Philippe men are stout. It’s the state we default to. Endomorph body types, brah. “Often pear-shaped, with a high tendency to store body fat.” The junk amasses at the trunk, which, if left unchecked, will absolutely get in the way of funk. (Hehe, I just laughed typing that out.)

  “A real Haitian man needs heft,” she admonishes, unfolding and then refolding a nearby towel and watching me, while we wait for my cab to the train station.

  Is that what she was trying to raise all along? I wonder but don’t say as we hug goodbye for too long. She still cries whenever I leave but there’s no devastation in it anymore. I know that within two days, her voice will already have that tinge of annoyance when I call while she’s in the middle of a story with someone on the other line. (“Yes, yes, I love you, too, call back in forty minutes!”)

  Let’s be clear: I didn’t diet that summer. I strategically underfed myself. Something about being surrounded by prep school varsity students and rail-thin English department writing majors for four semesters had created some self-consciousness on my part. Imagine that.

  I initially flirted with reinventing myself as bulky before opting to shrink myself instead, tired of having the voice of a man, the face of a twelve-year-old, and the body of a weird adult with thick thighs and hints of shadows under my tits when I’m shirtless.

  I’m defiantly lazy and resort to guerrilla mind tactics. I go to bed hungry and take two Sleep Well melatonin gummies to fall asleep faster, not thinking of the hungry maids left in Haiti. I also hold on to the memory of James, tall and skinny James, sitting next to me in a slow sociology seminar and how in a lull he was suddenly transfixed by the bulkiness of my thighs. How wide they are next to his skinny and hairy white ones, in cargo shorts. The guilty embarrassment in his eyes when we made eye contact is enough to slam the fridge shut and go back to bed. There’s not enough dedication there to call it an eating disorder, but years later, a girlfriend will hear this story and diagnose me as having had a summer of “disordered eating.” (Yes, she will be white. And from Massachusetts. With horses. Don’t look at me.)

  That’s so problematic, Ben!

  Did you just transfer here? Did you just open the book to this page? Of course it is. Look, from the vantage point of the year 2020, I acknowledge there is something deeply problematic about writing all of the above. I fully realize this and apologize . . . It was a different time. Our iPhone 4s only came in black and white with screens that did not even stretch out to the edge; we were body-negative savages, all right.

  Why even include it, though? Why make some of your readers feel like there is something wrong with body types that do not adhere to—

  —Oh my god. Fine. Stop yelling at me.

  Let me start over, then: it was my beautiful summer of self-care, and broccoli suddenly became delicious. I laughed rinsing carrots and ran in slow motion on a beach, flanked by golden retrievers in matching bandannas. I learned to savor the subtle nuances of a crisp stalk of celery. And what do you know? The weight just disappeared! I did this for me and only me. It was never about the number on the scale or any Western standard of fitness or attractiveness. I was not at all chaotically horny and looking to be looked at by people who looked through me before. Better?

  (I truly have no wisdom or objectivity to add here. To this day, I will approximate the calorie count of a single cupcake at 10 calories or 3,400 calories depending on my mood and personal fulfillment. I’m the kind of person who furiously does fifty pushups and then spends forty minutes digging fingertips into the doughy fleshiness of my arms in front of the bathroom mirror, feeling for the new muscles I’ve been granted for my hard work and dedication.)

  Regardless of the state of mind then, I return to campus with abs. Four of them, never quite six. It’s nowhere near the shirtless Black teenagers doing pull-ups on city scaffoldings, glistening with backs that look like litters of puppies wrestling to burst out of brown latex, but I’m happy with the results that I will never be able to replicate again once the weight comes back. But for now, it’s 2010, and I return to campus eager to make new first impressions.

  The luck of the skinny and pretty people is already on my side. My new dorm room is a gigantic single in 600 West 113th Street, commonly known as “Nussbaum” for the bakery deli on the ground floor and home to an Egg & Cheese on Everything Bagel you would flick a baby hard on the nose for. Not that that’s my breakfast anymore. No. I’m skinny now: for a semester I will belong to the tribe of Columbia that studies in navy hoodies after ordering egg-white omelets with roasted vegetables, a green juice, and rye toast, no butter.

  My casual friend Sabrina is mixed—half Black, half white—and has lived an international life, too. She alternates her summers in either Berlin, where she is familiar with all the cool spots, or in Japan, where she is discovering them and will be spending the next winter semester.

  Sabrina is the first of seven people not to recognize me on Move-in Day.

  I wiggle my eyebrows at her in friendly recognition at the corner of Broadway and 113th Street, which she notes but stares through, carrying a box and a full backpack.

  I’m still groggy from the lengthy Greyhound bus ride back into America, pushing a heavy blue bin of my minimal possessions up a sidewalk ramp in a sea of moving students and resident advisers, but I hear it.

  “There’s your friend Ben,” says her friend Angela, who will also double as her roommate for the next five months.

  “No, it’s not,” Sabrina says. “You think all Black guys look the same.”

  “No,” Angela says, annoyed at both having been corrected and accused of something so ugly all at once. “That’s Ben.”

  “Um, yes, it is,” I interrupt with a nervous giggle, eager to defuse while Sabrina’s squint gives way to shocked eyes. “I escaped the Canadian Gulag. Did you two have a nice summer?”

  “Holy crap!”

  Sabrina gasps and hugs me, before taking a step back and jumping forward to hug me again. On the second hug, she pats down my back, as if to make sure it isn’t prestidigitation. Just like that, a summer of dry toast and bouts of medium-to-so-very-severe constipation is totally worth it.

  “No BS,” she asks right away, “what did you do?”

  I give her the Kanye shrug. I guess my pants are a little baggier, now. I hadn’t noticed. S’all good, shawty, know what I mean? No effort or body image issues were involved in the making of this thoroughly average bod.

  “They have gyms in Canada, too, Sabrina.” Angela smiles, eyeing me up and down, looking vaguely approving of what she’s appraising.

  “I mean, I might have done a few late-night reps.” I shrug, caught in my lie.

  That’s how guys of all races and creeds lose weight, after all. In underground fighting rings like Ryan from The O.C. did when mourning his high school sweetheart, the tragic Marissa Cooper played by the even more tragic Mischa Barton. They “hit the gym” and do incline hammer curls to become Tough Mudders, whatever that means, I’m still not sure. Cool T-shirts, though.
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br />   I don’t tell Sabrina or Angela that I’m, in fact, the other kind of guy. The one standing in basketball shorts in front of floor-length mirrors, pinching and folding, sucking and flexing, trying to fight off hunger with disappointment. Our kind—also found across all races and creeds—avoids the limelight of gym selfies.

  “You’re gonna have so much sex this semester,” my friend Elliott, a thriving sociology major, says later that week. “I’m already annoyed.”

  Another detached shrug.

  I don’t mind the assumption living on in those who know me, but that’s not my goal. If what closed the fridge at 2 a.m. was the grimace on James’s face eyeing my thighs, what closed it again at 2:25 a.m. was a much loftier goal.

  See, on my list of to-dos before the end of college was something else entirely: I wanted to fall in love. That kind of big TV-season-finale love. A thug and his woman, or two thugs, or two women after having murdered their boos and run off together. It didn’t matter. I want that spark, that realization that happens deep inside your chest and leaves your skin prickly and filled with goosebumps as if a tongue has dragged all over your arms and back.

  Another characteristic of Columbia was that the entire campus was always filled with couples. Heck, the entirety of New York City was, and to this day remains, afflicted with the happily monogamous. Couples holding hands in the middle of a sidewalk and swinging their arms to maximize the offense, couples leaning forward to kiss at restaurants, or couples slobbering over each other at the top of a subway entrance begging to be set on fire at rush hour.

  They were everywhere. (My favorite were those carrying Trader Joe’s brown paper bags together, basking in the simple domesticity of a salad-mixing Jane and their simple-minded sourdough-bread-baking John.)