“Which black experience?” I asked, as in, Do you want to read about Clarence Thomas or Tupac?
“Just, you know, the regular one,” she replied.
I forced myself to take a deep breath. How does a grown woman educated for sixteen years in private schools not know one book on the black experience (regular or irregular version) and have the same job I do? I studied European history for years. I told her I’d look into it for her and excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I exploded.
My white coworkers’ mortified reactions to the House of Bargains story surprised me. Did they truly think the nation had a funeral for racism when the COLORED signs came down off the water fountains? How could people still be saying nigger when Martin Luther King has a holiday, for crying out loud? Which congress-man can we write to, Angela? In the stall alone, I thought maybe I was being too hard on them. Maybe no one said nigger in their hoods in the eighties.
I was eager to get home. In the spirit of keeping it real, I had my first postcollege apartment in the hood. I wasn’t going to be one of those black people who took their degrees and moved out to all-white neighborhoods in the suburbs.
After one month living there, I was definitely keeping it real— real terrified. My next-door neighbors had started a nightly ritual of shooting out streetlights from their roof. Afraid of getting a bullet in the brain, I started sleeping on the floor.
Instead of rushing home to get away from the white people, I was begging to hang out with them after work.
“You know, I’ve always wanted to go to a grunge concert,” I lied to Danielle.
After weeks of hanging out listening to music I hated, only to come home to sleep near the litter box, I decided to make a major change. I was leaving Philly.
For a single black (somewhat) professional, Philly started to feel like a small town. There were only one or two black professional–friendly hangouts and, like every other major city, half as many professional black men as black women. After a year of happy hours, I went into the bar and realized I’d dated every man there.
I guess Philly also seemed like a small town because I’d been part of all of it, from the acute level of the psych ward to the most expensive private school. It all had been adding up to way too many intimate encounters for me. There’s only so many times you can walk out of your new temp tax-return job with your business suit and your white colleagues and be greeted by name by the homeless guy. “Bitch, don’t act new,” he said. “You know you were up in the hospital with me.”
“I worked in the hospital with you,” I’d lie, hoping my colleagues couldn’t see my lip quivering.
My girlfriends were moving safe distances away like Jersey and Washington, DC, I wanted to go to California. My psychiatrist said I seemed to have seasonal affective disorder. I wanted some sun.
“It’s dangerous out in LA,” a black secretary at my job warned me.
“The cops whip black people’s behinds for jaywalking,” my grandmother said.
Without fail, every black person would warn me not to wear red or blue once my plane touched down at LAX. “There’s no light-skinned or dark-skinned out there, just red and blue,” my girlfriend said.
Sounded good to me.
“Are you sure you want to give up that job with benefits?” my mother asked me. “People would kill to have a temp job that covers two dentist visits a year.”
My entire family lives in the Philly area, and moving across country with only a bunch of savings and a need for change seemed irrational to my mother.
“And you’re not moving for love?” my mother asked, remembering when I was in high school and would have moved to Mars if a boy told me he loved me. I assured her that I was definitely not moving for love. If I had half the sex life now that I had in high school, I would definitely be staying in Philly, I thought. The best romance I’d had recently was with a self-tortured artist who lived 120 miles away in Maryland. I’d drive four hours just to sit on his twin bed, rub his back, and convince him that stress wasn’t enough to rupture his colon, but even if it did, I’d push him and his colostomy bag wherever he needed to go. His mom would come in and tell him his underwear was washed and ask did he want his favorite food for dinner. He was twenty-six. Thank God he broke my heart.
My mother gave up questioning my motives until the day she drove me to Goodwill to donate almost every piece of clothing I owned. I still had six months before my planned move, but I was slowly getting rid of everything. I wanted to move to California with no baggage, mental or physical.
“Angela, I have to say, if it’s the crazy homeless man outside your office who’s making you do this, there are other ways of dealing with him,” she said, and went on to tell me how I could get him involuntarily committed, just like the police had done to me. “I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t tell you that I think moving to Los Angeles alone is foolish.”
“Mom, Jesus did a lot of things people believed to be foolish,” I said, and immediately wished I could suck the words back into my mouth. My mother knew I still didn’t love Jesus as much as she did, even though, out of respect, I’d ceased calling him “the Christian God the white man uses to control you.”
I didn’t want to tell my mother the real reason and start dredging up the past. Talking about all the mistakes I’d made in this city, including the latest one, moving to the hood, trying to make a difference. The only difference I’d made so far was asking my landlord to install a deadbolt.
I didn’t feel like explaining to her that I was trying to make up for all the time I’d wasted hating white people in college. I remember that during my first semester a Black History professor told me that many black nationalists go through a “hating white people phase.” In response, I laughed out loud. A phase? Please. At the time, I thought that hate, much like teal, was a great color on me. I could never see giving it up.
Nevertheless, there comes a time in every hater’s life when the antidepressants kick in and she sees that hate hasn’t done a damn thing for her, nor has it prodded her to do anything for anyone else. I wasn’t even that good at hating. At least the KKK has marches; all I did was go to the tanning salon and watch a bunch of taped lectures.
I was ashamed. I had learned a lot more in Nation of Islam Lite than why white people were worthy of my hate. I had also become aware of how much better I had it than the majority of black people. Sometime during my senior year I promised myself that when I graduated and got a job, I’d move into the hood and start planning that Black History school I used to talk about with Mah.
So, I’d done it. I’d moved smack dab into the middle of the hood. And just like my plan to move to Los Angeles, some black people thought I was crazy. My ex-boyfriend’s mother, a black Washington, DC, socialite, told me over dinner that I didn’t owe black people a damn thing. The harshness of her response jarred me. Flustered, I squeaked back, “Well, people helped me out, and I just want to do the same thing.” She huffed, refilled her champagne flute, and sat in silence for the rest of the dinner, like she wasn’t wasting her words on an Ivy League dunce who wanted to squander her life by living in the ghetto.
If I told my mother the truth about what finally pushed me to buy the plane tickets to LA, that my teenage next-door neighbor had recently threatened to kill me, she’d swear we could solve this by having a sit-down with his mother. Unfortunately, Gene carried guns. His mother probably did, too.
The only time I heard Gene’s mother talk to him was when she yelled about how bad he was at selling weed. At least twice a week, she’d scream that if he couldn’t do better at selling weed, maybe he should think about getting his dumb ass back into school. I could hear their conversations because only a small alley separated our ground-floor apartments, and neither of us had air-conditioning so our windows were always open, trying to catch a hot South Philly breeze. You could hear everything. Sometimes, I even heard his shower running.
Two months earlier, Gene had bought his sister Janet a pit bull
puppy for her thirteenth birthday. I watched their backyard party from my window. When Gene held up the energetic puppy, he was the hit of the party. After blowing out her candles, Janet kissed her puppy and announced, “By the time I’m fourteen, I’m gonna have made so much money fighting this li’l motherfucker!”
Oh, my goodness, I thought. She’s the same lost teenager that I was. Next time I see her outside, I’m going to tell her that young women don’t need to fight puppies to be beautiful.
Two weeks passed and I hadn’t talked to her. It was nearing April 15 and I was stapling tax returns from 8 A.M. until midnight every weekday. On weekends, I made excuses about why I couldn’t talk to her: I need me time, or I haven’t seen my mother in a while. Truth is, I was scared of Janet. I was scared she could whup my ass like she was Christina and Tascha’s protégée and that her brother would back her up with one of his new pistols.
At that point, the puppy pretty much lived alone in the backyard. My apartment building was longer than Gene’s, so my bedroom was right next to the yard.
One morning when I woke up for work, I heard Gene stomping around and screaming. “That was my blunt, motherfucker!” he yelled, and stormed into the backyard. He snatched the puppy up and took him inside. Two minutes of yelling about an eaten marijuana wrapper were followed by what sounded like a belt snapping and the little puppy’s yelp.
I couldn’t just lie in bed while a puppy cried for help. One of my grand hood plans was to start a public school program that brought animals back into the classroom. Of course all these kids treated animals poorly. They’d never had the experience of the unconditional love a pet gives, I thought as I started writing requests for funding plans I never got around to finishing. When I heard that puppy yelp, I wanted to throw a boot through Gene’s window and hit him in the head. God, I hope my hunch that abusers are reincarnated as victims is accurate. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the patience to wait for Gene’s afterlife karma to kick in. I had to do something to save the puppy.
The puppy yelped again. I hopped out of bed buck naked and ducked under the windowsill. As soon as I made sure all of my easily identifiable curls were tucked under the ledge, I screamed into the alley, “Stop beating the dog, you little punk bitch!”
There was a brief moment of silence from Gene’s side; then he yelled, “Who the fuck is that?”
For some reason, I kept going. “Stop hitting the dog and hit a man your size! Or are you a fucking punk who hits dogs?”
Yes, that’s me. Ivy League grad bringing peace to the hood.
The thought of Gene scared and confused gave me confidence, so I yelled again in the deepest voice I could muster. “I see you don’t have shit to say now. Stop hitting the dog. Be a man and hit some shit that can hit back!” I crouched a little lower after I yelled that. I was afraid something might come crashing through the window.
Gene responded to my demand with “Shut the fuck up! If I find out who you are, I’m-a fuck you up!” I heard the sound of a gun cocking.
My nose was pressed into the carpet. I was certain Gene was going to run to his building’s roof and aim at my window until he saw blood splatter against it. My thoughts were spinning. How will I ever leave my house? Does Gene know my voice? I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him; I only nod when I walk by. Of course, he knows I live in the building next door to his, but I don’t think he knows that I live on the ground floor. Doesn’t God protect those who look after small creatures? Isn’t that like a beatitude or something? Yes, God won’t let me die. He wants me to save the puppy. Having convinced myself, I crawled to my bathroom to get in the shower.
But then I thought, What if Gene gets even madder that someone yelled at him and takes it out on the dog? What if he kills the dog? I couldn’t live with that. More action had to be taken. I crawled against the linoleum floor and, still too scared to stand upright, I threw shoes at the wall phone until it dropped into my hands. I dialed the SPCA.
The woman who answered the SPCA hotline sounded like she weighed about ninety pounds and put a fresh flower in her hair on weekends before attending peace rallies. She made sentences that weren’t questions sound like questions. “Thanks for calling the SPCA?” She took my complaint and asked for my name and number. I asked her twice if the SPCA was going to tell Gene that I complained. She replied, “No, we wouldn’t do that?” I wished she were a little more sure of herself. I knew she’d never lived next to a drug dealer. I warily gave her my correct contact information in hopes that it would just be used to ensure that I, the complainer, was a real person and that they would take the call more seriously knowing that. She told me they would send someone to Gene’s house (“So, we’ll be sending someone to that house?”). I didn’t believe her.
Shame on me. The SPCA proved to be street-smart. Three days later I got a call from a guy who sounded like Barry White. Barry told me he’d visited Gene. God bless the SPCA for having diversity training, I thought. I was hoping the flower-wearing hotline woman didn’t go out on calls. Sending a meek-sounding librarian to Gene’s house would have been about as effective as sending two kissing Latino men in to follow up on a complaint that seventyfive guys were burning a cross in my backyard.
I imagined this mysterious SPCA man to be tall, with skin as rich in color as his voice. I wondered if he was single or if I’d already met him at the bar. I hoped that as soon as Gene opened the door to him, Gene realized that SPCA Brother was the father he’d never had but the one he needed, a tough and stern dad but one who used his big hands only to rescue little animals. I loved SPCA Brother. I pledged to be rich so I could send checks to the SPCA.
SPCA Brother told me he’d schooled Gene on the proper care of a puppy but couldn’t remove the puppy from the house as it had no outward signs of abuse. SPCA Brother told me that he’d left Gene with mandatory pamphlets and informed Gene that his neighbors had turned him in.
“Oh, my God! You told him I turned him in?”
“No, of course not. I told him we were responding to the complaints of a neighbor.”
I wanted to believe SPCA Brother, what with a voice that sounded more suited to removing panties than rescuing puppies, but I felt in my gut that somehow drug-dealin’ Gene knew I was the snitch. My sixth sense was confirmed the next afternoon when I saw Gene outside. He barked at me.
I couldn’t believe he’d barked at me. I tried to play cool and nodded my head at him like I always did but I’m sure my first look was surprise. I would have been prepared for Gene to shoot me but not to bark. Was that a new greeting I wasn’t up on? I knew I shouldn’t have stopped watching 106th and Park.
The next day, Gene was on the porch with a friend. He barked at me again. “Man, you need to stop messing with her,” his friend said, laughing.
I went into my apartment and kept the blinds down. I had to figure out a way to let Gene know I wasn’t the SPCA snitch.
The next evening, I came up with a plan before I rounded the corner. Right before I hit my block, I started having a pretend conversation on my cell phone. I talked loudly, with a Jamaican accent. I’d learned the accent when a woman who ran the Campus Curry food truck swore up and down that I looked like I was from the islands. I had taken that identity on for a while, dropping the h sound from all my words. Ain’t not’ing but a ’ting. . . .
I was certain being Jamaican would solve the Gene problem. The woman yelling out of the window at him when he was hitting the puppy was American; I’m his neighbor Angie from Kingston. I thanked God for my chameleon-like abilities.
“Mi rada you no talk to mi!” I yelled into my mouthpiece, trying to replicate what the Campus Curry chef said when her boyfriend tried to win her back after she found out he was cheating with a white girl. “Blond ’airs were all over mi ’ouse,” she told me while she cooked my codfish.
My accent threw Gene off a bit. I felt him stare, but he didn’t bark. After I was safely in my apartment, I congratulated myself by listening to “No Woman, No Cry.” I found an o
nline guide to speaking patois and studied it as intently as if I had only a day to learn basic French before going to Paris.
The next evening I had a date with this guy Rob. It was my first date in two months, so I was determined to keep this budding relationship alive. The week up to our date, I read The Rules every night and chanted “do not sleep with him, do not sleep with him” every morning. If he asks to come in after the date, do not let him.
As we were turning the corner to my block, Rob asked if he could come upstairs and use my bathroom. I saw Gene coming out of his apartment. I had no choice but to answer Rob in patois.
Shit. How do you say My toilet is broken in patois? “Me kyann pee indoor,” I replied instead.
Rob looked at me like Who is this woman? I must have looked like I had multiple personality disorder. I hadn’t told him about Gene during dinner. I mean, what kind of conversation would that be? By the way, if you decide to walk me home, Gene the drug-dealing puppy-beater might be outside, so I’ll have to start talking like I’m from Jamaica, okay? Can you order an apple-tini for me? I’m going to run to the rest-room.
The look on Rob’s face said it all anyway. He didn’t want to come in after hearing me talk in a Jamaican accent about peeing indoors. He didn’t say What? or ask for clarification or anything. He just walked me through the main entrance to my apartment door, said, “Good night,” and walked away. I was glad Gene had seen him escort me in, though. Before that, he’d never seen a man at my door.
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