Capital City

by Omar Tyree

  I call up Carlette as soon as Butterman drops me off back in the District at Popeye’s on Florida and Georgia.

  “Hello,” she answers.

  “Where you been at?”

  “Where you been?”

  “Aw, girl, I was callin’ you.”

  “Did you leave any messages, Darnell?”

  I can tell she’s smiling by the sound of her sweet-ass voice. “Fuck no. I’m tired of leavin’ messages.”

  “See, then it’s not my fault. Plus I went home for the Christmas vacation. Remember I told you about that?”

  “Yeah, I forgot about the shit. But yo, I’m right next to Popeye’s. You want some chicken?”

  “No, I had some chicken last night.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, what’chu want then? I’m buying.”

  “Oh, you are?”

  I suck my teeth and smile. “I jus’ said that shit, didn’t I?”

  She laughs. “Okay, well, I want some Chinese food then.”

  “Oh, so you gon’ eat da Chinese food, but you don’t want no nigga food, huh?”

  “No, Darnell, I just told you I had chicken last night.” I can imagine her dimpled-ass smile through the phone. And I’m gonna spend the night and tear that ass up!

  “Yo, is it that time of the month?” I ask her, just to make sure.

  She laughs. “Unh-uh, it’s over. Why?”

  I can tell she’s smiling again. She probably has pink cheeks from all that laughing.

  “’Cause we haven’t been t’gether for a while. And what was all that damn laughin’ for?”

  “’Cause you funny.”

  “’Cause I’m funny? What do you mean by dat?” I talk like an Italian: “Am I amusing to you? What am I, a fucking joke to you? What am I, a clown? Is that what you mean by ‘funny’?”

  She’s laughing her ass off at my Goodfellas impersonation. My dick is hard as hell just thinking about her.

  “Oh, cut it out and come on,” she says to me.

  I grin. “You smilin’, ain’t’chu?”

  “You know I am.”

  “Why?”

  She giggles. Then she sighs. “That quarter didn’t run out yet?”

  “It was twenty cent, and naw. What? You don’t wanna talk to me?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “What?”

  She’s laughing some more. I’m out here lunchin’ up like shit.

  “I wanna see you,” she says.

  “Naw, fuck dat! I’m gon’ make you wait like you made me wait.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause you should’na went home.”

  “But my parents would’ve killed me if I didn’t.”

  That recorded message comes on telling me to put more money in.

  “Ah, ha, it’s time to hang up.”

  I smile. “Aw’ight, girl, here comes the Night Stalker.” She smiling again with her pretty-ass dimples. I mean, I just know this girl like that. You know what I’m saying? You always know your main bitch.

  “Okay. Bye,” she tells me.

  I hang up and straighten out my shit in my pants.

  I’m about to say, “Fuck da food” and just head on over there.

  I get to the Howard Towers Plaza-East with the bags of Chinese food and look inside to see if my man is at the front desk. Yeah, he is. This motherfucker lets me in without all that identification shit these Howard students go through.

  Fuck that shit! I don’t even have a driver’s license yet!

  I walk in after a student and look you’n in his eyes. He drops his head and goes back to reading some textbook he’s reading.

  I remember when I first caught his punk-ass slipping.

  It was right across from the McDonald’s parking lot. I caught up to his ass when I had my .25 and told him if he ever talked shit to me again I was gonna kill him. I told him that snitching on me would only get him killed when I see him again. Man, this motherfucker ain’t said nothing about me coming up here yet after that. But the first time, I had to sneak up to Carlette’s room because of him. Joe was steady talking that identification shit.

  I get up to her room on the ninth floor and see some studious-looking guy talking to her out in the hallway. She smiles at me as walk toward them. Nerd dude shuts the fuck up.

  “Well, I’ll see you in class tomorrow,” he says to her.

  Yeah, jus’ get da fuck outta here, punk. I smile.

  “Hi,” Carlette says to me, grinning.

  “Don’t ‘Hi’ me. Take dese damn bags.”

  “Oh.” She takes the bags and bumps her ass into me. She’s wearing a black skirt and a white blouse with black panty-hose.

  Shit! I love taking off panty-hoses and skirts for some ass. You know what I’m saying? That shit seems sexier than just pulling off jeans.

  Her colorful, decorated room smells good and flowery, like it always does. I walk right in and take off my hat, jacket, and black Tims to stretch out across her bed. She walks into the room with shrimp fried rice on a plate and a big, green plastic cup filled with Hawaiian Punch. She always buys that shit.

  She puts it on the floor and smiles at me. “Those are new socks?” she asks, talking about my feet.

  “Why?”

  “Because they look so white.”

  I grin at her. “Why da hell you worried about my socks? I mean, you know I like to stay clean. It’s a habit.”

  She shakes her head, smiling. “Yeah, you prob’ly buy new socks every other week.”

  “So what? And why you put my food on’na floor?”

  “’Cause I keep tellin’ you I don’t like crumbs and food and stuff on my bed.”

  “Well, ain’t we neat.”

  “That’s right.”

  I smile and climb off the bed and hit the floor. Carlette brings in her plate and cup.

  “How come you didn’t ask me if I wanted some of that egg-foo-yung shit?”

  She laughs and chokes on her food. “See what you made me do?”

  “Naw, you da one laughin’. I ain’t do nothin’.”

  “You made me laugh.” She leans down beside me with her plate. I lean over and nibble on her ear. She pulls away.

  I look at her surprised-like. “What’sup wit’ dat?”

  “I don’t want no shrimp fried rice in my ear.”

  I grin at her. “You silly.”

  “No, I’m not. You are.”

  “Fuck is this, Pee Wee Herman an’ shit?”

  She fucks around and chokes on her food again. “Would you shut up so I can eat.”

  “Yeah, but don’t get too full, ’cause I don’t want you throwin’ up an’ shit on me.”

  She looks at me strangely. “Why would I throw up?”

  I smile and nod back to her bed. She twists her lips and says nothing.

  “What, ain’t got nothin’ t’ say?”

  “About what?”

  “You know what I’m talkin’ ’bout . . . Fuckin’.”

  She sighs and stops eating. “Must you keep calling it that?”

  “Aw’ight, aw’ight, makin’ love.”

  “Well, it ain’t that either.”

  “What is it then?”

  She smiles. “Having sex.”

  I giggle like a clown. “Havin’ sex, huh?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she mumbles through a mouthful of food.

  “You know what?” I ask her.

  “What?”

  “Why we sittin’ here starin’ at a blank tube? Turn’na fuckin’ TV on.”

  She smiles and gets up to turn it on. “Oh, that’s right, today is Thursday. Damn! We missed Martin!”

  I’m curious. “Would you make love to Martin Lawrence?” I ask her.

  She frowns at me. “No. Why would you ask me that?”

  ’Cause, I’m fuckin’ curious! I’m thinking. “I’on know,” I tell her.

  “I don’t even know him. And how you know I don’t make love to you?”

  “Because you said that we be havin’ sex.”r />
  “That’s because I don’t know if I could tell you the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  She smiles and looks away. “That I really do like you.”

  I try to keep my cool now. This the stage where girls start to play you. That nice shit starts to sound good to you and you lose track of your game. “Yeah, okay,” I tell her, like I don’t give a fuck.

  We sit quiet on the floor and watch TV until twelve o’clock.

  “I’on think I can make it home.” I tell her. I’m teasing to see what she says. I know I’m spending the night already. I don’t go for that girls kicking you out of their crib shit.

  She says, “You can stay over. I don’t have classes until one o’clock tomorrow.”

  “How many days is your schedule like that?”

  “Just on Fridays.”

  “Oh.”

  I take off my black Champion sweatshirt and climb into her bed.

  She watches me and grins. “Aren’t you gonna take more than that off to sleep?”

  I grin back at her. “Naw, I’m gon’ take it all off to ‘have sex.’”

  She laughs and turns off her lamp. Through the silence in the dark room I can hear her stripping off her clothes.

  I start to unbuckle my belt for some all-night drama. And like Eddie Murphy said in Raw, “My dick don’t get much harder than this.”

  Wes

  “Ray, you haven’t been showing the same sales capabilities you usually have. Is everything all right?”

  I pack up my things to head home after another Friday night of throwing robotic sales pitches over the phone from my downtown telemarketing job. My brown-haired white manager—who isn’t much older than I am and considerably younger than a lot of the other employees—is now asking me why I haven’t been performing like usual.

  Typical. Whenever you’re held accountable for producing quality work, people tend to believe that you’re incapable of faltering on occasion like the rest of humanity.

  “Yeah, I’ve had a lot on my mind lately,” I tell him.

  Jon Fletcher pats me on my back as if I’m one of his “dudes.”

  “Well, maybe you need to chill a bit with all that overtime, pal.”

  Now he’s trying to flatter me with a little ‘blackness’ in his word choice.

  “I’ve already thought about that with school back underway and all,” I tell him.

  “Oh, yeah? Where do you go?” he asks with genuine interest.

  “UDC.”

  He looks confused. “UDC?”

  I look at him questioningly. “You’re not from this area, are you?”

  “No way, man. I’m from upstate New York.”

  “Rochester?”

  Jon’s face lights up. “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “I guessed.” And I wonder if he would have been so surprised had I been white, I’m thinking. It seems that even though a lot of American Blacks are educated in the 1990s, many Whites still feel that we don’t know anything outside of the ghetto. And at the same time, white Americans are seldom criticized for knowing almost nothing about Blacks.

  Now I’m curious. “Have you ever heard of Howard University?” I ask him.

  He grimaces, probably straining to pull some knowledge of black culture from his Eurocentric mind. “Yeah, isn’t that that black school?”

  “Do you know where it is?” I challenge.

  “It’s down here somewhere, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, in Northwest, off of Georgia Avenue. And by the way, UDC is the University of the District of Columbia. It’s located up on Connecticut.”

  “Oh, yeah, I heard’a that. I just haven’t heard it called UDC. So it didn’t strike me right away. Anyway,guy,” he says, slapping me on my back again. “I have t’ get outta here and go party.”

  “In Georgetown?”

  His face lights up again. “Yeah, why, you hang out in G-Town, do ya?”

  I head to the door that leads into to the hallway as I respond, “No, I just figured you did.” Because you’re a white boy in “Chocolate City,” Washington, D.C.

  It never fails to amaze me how little white people know about us and how little they think we know about them. Actually, many blacks in America know much more about white Americans than they know about themselves—myself included. It wasn’t until getting involved with the African cultural lectures held by UDC’s Pan Afrikan Student Alliance and the further agitation by “The Spear”—Jesse Mc Dade—and his WPFW radio show that I began to blossom in African awareness.

  I head down the escalator at Metro Center to ride the Red Line train to Fort Totten and I’m stopped by a panhandler who steps out in front of me.

  “You got any change on you, brother?”

  I dig into my pocket and pull out fifty-six cents and toss it in his change-jingling cup.

  He smiles with a hair-covered brown face. “Thanks, brotherman. You have a good day, now.”

  “You hear about those three white men that set that black man on fire down in Florida?” one middle-aged sister asks another as we wait for the train.

  “Yeah, girl! And two white men raped a black woman in Maryland. And you know how much time they gettin’?”

  “No. How much?”

  “Eighteen months! You believe that? Eighteen months!”

  “Uh-huh, now that’s a damn shame, ’cause you and I both know that if it had been two black men rapin’ a white girl, they would have gotten twenty years to life! You hear me?”

  “Ain’t it the truth! Don’t make no damn sense the way they do us.”

  The train arrives. I jump on it and take a seat next to an older black man. I pull out my Urban Profile magazine and start to read.

  “Who you got this Sunday?” the older brother sitting next to me asks. He smiles through a thick mustache.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Super Bowl. Who you thinks gonna pull it out?”

  “Oh, I mean, I don’t care.”

  He nods. “Uh-huh, you ain’t in ta sports much, huh?”

  “Not particularly, no.”

  We sit quietly as the train pulls into the Rhode Island station where we both watch a curvaceous, chocolate-brown sister boarding our car. She takes a seat across from us.

  The older brother whispers to me, “A beauty, ain’t she?”

  I agree. “Definitely.”

  He laughs with deep rumbling spurts. “You got a girlfriend?” he asks quietly.

  Now I’m starting to wonder if he’s just friendly, nosy or doesn’t have anything better to do.

  “No, we broke off before Christmas,” I tell him painfully.

  “Well, shit, that’s the best time to break up wit’ ’em.

  “’Cause I tell ya, young brother, some of these women will rob you blind.”

  I get off at my stop and catch the bus to my six-story apartment building to find Marshall, Walt, and Derrick all dressed and waiting for me at the entrance.

  “Come on, slow-poke, it’s already ten after ten and we wanna get there early,” Walt says, peering down at me from his six-foot-five frame.

  “The Mirage is not gon’ up and fly away if we get there at eleven thirty,” I respond. “Besides, the crowds don’t really come until twelve.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t know how long it’s gon’ take for you to get dressed. You know you act like a girl sometimes when it comes to gettin’ ready.”

  We take the stairs to the fourth floor. I open my door and let them all inside my apartment.

  “Well, tonight I have all my clothes ready. And I bought some Karl Kani jeans, too.”

  “What? Some Karl Kanis? Yo, Wes tryin’a get fly on us!” Marshall screams.

  “Yeah, that nigga ti’ed of dressin’ like a bamma,” Walt says.

  I look to Derrick, who’s usually quiet, to say something in my defense. And he does.

  “I mean, why can’t he go out and buy some Karl Kani? It’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, at least Karl Kani is a brother.”
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  “Yeah, but this is coming from the same guy that says we spend too much on clothes,” Marshall retorts. “So unless he got some Karl Kanis on a twenty-five percent off sale—and I doubt if he did—he’s contradicting himself.”

  “So what? He has a right to do that. Everybody contradicts themselves if they live long enough.”

  “Yeah, Joe, ’cause I den done many things I said I wasn’t gon’ do no more,” Walt says.

  I pull on my loose-fitting, forty-dollar, navy blue jeans and a navy blue cotton vest over my off-white knit shirt and striped blue tie. I brush my freshly cut hair, put in my contact lenses and spray on the finishing touch of some Drakkar cologne.

  “Yo, you’n, Wes got some Drakkar!” Marshall shouts, nosing in on me inside the bathroom. “Now tell me he ain’t gettin’ fly on us now.”

  “You got some Drakkar, for real?” Derrick asks me as I walk out into my small living-room area.

  I smile embarrassingly. “Yeah, I went out and splurged a bit, so sue me.”

  “He might just book a girl t’night,” Walt says, smiling and standing up from my tan, striped, second-hand couch to leave.

  I grin as I walk to my closet. I know that I’ll probably receive more of the same jiving when I pull out this new yellow down coat I bought.

  “Oh, shit! Wes lost it! We gotta get him checked out at the hospital!” Marshall shouts after eyeing my yellow Polo coat.

  Derrick looks at it, smiles and says, “You know Ralph Lauren said he don’t like Blacks wearing his clothes?”

  “So? Fuck him!” Walt retorts from the front door. “That white nigga can’t designate who his clothes are for.”

  At this point in my life I’m growing tired of feeling guilty for desiring a bit of the limelight, so I agree with Walt for a change. “There are a lot of things that white people enjoy from us that weren’t necessarily produced for them: jazz, hip hop, blues, animation, slam dunks, and even their use of slang.”

  “I know. That’s why them white politicians are talkin’ that shit about rap music now, because it’s starting to reach their kids,” Marshall agrees.

  We hop into Marshall’s blue ’87 Pontiac and head to Southeast to the Mirage nightclub.

  “So this the weekend that you give me twenty dollars, Marshall?” Derrick asks.