My mom loved Natalie Wood, so I grew up watching this film and her others, like West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause. Junior year of high school, I needed Splendor in the Grass to help get me through my first, and perhaps worst, breakup. Only then was I able to fully understand Deanie and feel understood myself. She and I knew the truth: heartbreak feels like a death sentence.
I thought Jason Kidd and I were a power couple. He was a sophomore at a nearby Catholic high school, quickly becoming a national phenom. But part of the allure for me was that he seemed like such a good guy. He came from a two-parent household and he was Catholic like me. We had this very eighth-grade relationship, despite being in high school. We didn’t have sex. I had already lost my virginity, so I was down for it, but it didn’t seem like something he had to have in order to be with me.
Two weeks before my junior prom, I went to one of his games. My friends couldn’t go and I didn’t want to do the thirty-minute drive from Pleasanton by myself, so I asked my dad if he would come along. He loved that I was dating Jason, so that was a no-brainer for him. We sat in the stands, and I saw his parents were in the bleachers across the gym. Next to them was a tall girl with an asymmetrical haircut like Salt’s from Salt-N-Pepa, only even shorter on one side and longer on the other. I took her to be a cousin or family friend. She was wearing Jason’s #32 wristband, and I thought, How sweet. He gave his cousin his wristband.
Then I noticed that he was wearing a #22 wristband. When you as a player wear someone else’s jersey number it means one of two things: You are paying tribute to a significant other who plays, or you are honoring a player who died. Now, my number was 21, so I made up this scenario in my head about who #22 could be. My teenage levels of narcissism and drama wrapped in a crazy double helix of denial. I decided Jason had a friend who died. Jason was so sensitive, paying homage to this person via a sweatband. RIP #22, I hardly knew you.
During the game, a few of his friends came over to me, led by a female friend of his with a severe case of a Valley Girl accent. “Soooo, are you and Jason going to prom?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I answered, innocently.
“Uhhhhmmmmm, I might, like, hold off on those plans.”
I flew right past the obvious dig. Why would Jason be busy? We had talked about prom. He’s didn’t have a game. Clueless Valley Girl.
Then, a guy friend of his came up to me.
“Hey, you know, whatever happens with you and Jason,” he said, pausing for a second, “you know, we’re always gonna be friends. I think you’re really cool.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
See this is what grown-up love was about. You created connections with his friends. And even though you know you will never, ever break up—because that would be preposterous, right?—you keep those friendships you made. I filed that knowledge away for a time I would never, ever need it.
Jason’s team won, and right after the game ended the high school gymnasium ritual of pushing in all the bleachers began. Jason was already doing postgame interviews in high school, so they had left one of the bleachers open for the entire team to sit and wait for him. He was literally surrounded by a ring of reporters. And at six foot four as a sophomore in high school, he was head and shoulders above the crop of people jotting down what he said. I could clearly see his face as I stood standing off to the side with my dad. Across from us, pointedly not saying hello, were Jason’s parents and this girl “cousin.”
Then his teammates started a chant:
“Just do it, you pussy. Just do it.” Over and over, and Jason kept looking at me and then back at the team and then back at me.
My dad smelled what was coming. “We should go, Nickie,” he said, as if the idea had just occurred to him. “We should just get out of here.”
“Just do it, you pussy,” the chant continued. “Just do it.”
“We need to talk,” Jason yelled to me over the reporters. They all turned to look at me.
The chant stopped, and the gym was silent except for the squeaks of sneakers as his teammates leaned forward in anticipation.
“Let’s go, Nickie,” Dad said.
“No, Dad,” I said, in my most dramatic voice. “I want to know the truth.”
But I couldn’t let go of hope.
“Um, is it positive?” I said, giving the thumbs-up sign. “Or is it negative?”
Jason gave a thumbs-down sign. The team went “OHHHHHHH!” in unison.
Condemned to death by heartbreak, I ran from the arena.
He called me that night to officially break up with me, which is exactly what he had done to the girl he dated before me. Karma is a bitch that surfaces quickly. I went into this very quick whirlpool of a downward spiral. I began writing a lot of sad, terrible poetry. I even incorporated my vocabulary words into the verse with lines like “You are the crystal sextant leading me to my fate.” Then there was a poem I called “Little Boys.”
Little boys like to play
Childish games from night to day.
They think they’re grown, but to their dismay
They’re years from where manhood and maturity lay.
The fact that I remember this, thirty years later, speaks volumes about where I was at that time. It’s just one from a full three-ring binder of musings on my despair. I asked myself if #22 gave Jason more than I did as #21? Just as Deanie tortured herself over Juanita, I wonder if I had been naïve to think he didn’t want sex. Was that the deal breaker? ’Cause, jeez, tell a girl.
I also had the terrible realization that I now had two weeks to find a date for fucking prom. I’d just been dumped by Jason Kidd, so it had to be a good date.
There was another black kid that had moved to Pleasanton, a guy named Walter. He was a senior when I was a junior, and he was the running back on the football team. He was really cute, and I decided his looks alone made him my best candidate. Even though my heart was still broken, the pictures would tell a different story. As one of my girlfriends said, “The pictures are going to last a lot longer than your memory.”
My vanity about the optics was so consuming, I even convinced myself I had a crush on him. It was him all along. To hell with Jason. I just had to actually talk to Walter first. I decided that the best way to not take another hit to my dignity was to ask him in the most casual, devil-may-care way. If I just ran into him and tossed it off . . .
Walter lived in the Val Vista development, right at the entrance to a cul-de-sac. Saturday afternoon I decided to do a drive-by in my mom’s Cutlass Ciera. I went by the house and didn’t see anybody around. I was relieved and realized that this was a fool’s mission. Worse, I realized that the problem with doing a drive-by in a cul-de-sac is that it’s actually two drive-bys. I went around the circle, and as I was a few houses down from passing again, his garage door started to open. Shit.
I gunned the engine and saw his dog flying down the driveway. This crazy dog ran right in front of my car! And I panicked: the teen driver in her mom’s Cutlass hit the gas instead of the brake. The last thing I saw was his dog jumping for my mom’s hood ornament.
I braked again and looked behind me. The dog was running in circles, fine. He had crouched under my car as I ran over him. Stunt dog. I pulled over and had the shakes. I just did a drive-by of my faux crush’s house and almost crushed his dog.
Lesson learned, I just called him. I didn’t tell him I was only choosing him for the optics. And karma got me. A week before prom, Walter got the goddamned chicken pox. He was no longer contagious on the big night, but he was covered head to toe in chicken pox scabs.
Through Splendor in the Grass, I also saw the way out. In the film—spoiler alert!—Deanie tries to kill herself and her parents have her institutionalized. This is the part you need to see, my brokenhearted one: While she’s locked up, Bud goes to Yale and completely blows it. His family loses everything when the stock market crashes and he has to come home and work the ranch. Deanie, sprung from the nuthouse, gets a new dude and
goes to see Bud. She’s got her rich girl gloves on and she’s at their filthy farm with chickens everywhere. There’s Bud, working with his dirty hands and hanging out with his new girl, who looks like a mess. You see it in Deanie’s face: Whew, I dodged a bullet.
So I say to my patients, the friends going through a bad split, “You are Deanie.” We waste our nutty on people who don’t deserve it. Wait it out. He’s gonna end up dirty with chickens and #22, and you’re going to come out on top. Trust me on this one.
PRO TIP: WATCH WAITING TO EXHALE AND LIVE IN THE SOUNDTRACK
This is for when things get really messy, as they did for me in my early twenties when I couldn’t wait for my Greek-Mexican beauty school dropout to break up with me, and then would do anything to get him back.
Alex and I had moved to L.A. together, against the wishes of his parents, who called him a nigger lover. So there was that little hurdle. I was still at UCLA, and I used my own student loan and my Payless settlement money to finance his beauty school tuition. I hated the Payless money and saw it as blood money, payment for being put in an unsafe situation that allowed me to be raped. Alex had no problem with taking that money, and in many ways saw it as something he had a right to because of what, he said, we had been through.
That was bad enough, but then he dropped out. This was a habit. He’d gone to junior college to play basketball and then enrolled at California State University, Northridge, but didn’t stay. Now he didn’t even want to finish his hours to get his license from beauty school. All he had left was basketball. Every day, he would just play pickup basketball games at a court in Burbank, right around the Disney studios. Not for money, mind you. There was no hustling in the least. It was just one endless loop of pickup games. His ambition didn’t match mine, and as I completely supported him, I began to resent the other costs I was paying for being in an interracial relationship. We got snickers and stares everywhere we went, and his parents had wanted nothing to do with me until they saw the depth of his emotion when I was raped. It just wasn’t worth it if I couldn’t respect him.
I bought the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack just before I drove home to Pleasanton for Christmas break. I listened to it all the way there and all the way back. There are five stages of grieving love, and they are all there in that soundtrack: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I resolved to end things with Alex through listening to those songs, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to leave someone who was so absolutely dependent on me.
In Pleasanton I ran into Keith, who had been a senior at a nearby high school back when I was a freshman. Home for Christmas, we met up at a bar in Old Town Pleasanton. He was a star soccer player who got a scholarship to UCSB, and now he was in law school in San Diego. We hit it off and exchanged information. And we kept talking. He was very much like me if I hadn’t had those Omaha summers to undo parts of my assimilation. He was so terminally corny.
I fell in Deep Like with Keith and began lying to Alex about reasons to go to San Diego. On the drives, I listened to my angst soundtrack of Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan, and Toni Braxton. As Toni sang “Let It Flow,” I liked the idea of Keith even more. There was never an “Oh my God I want to fuck you” moment. But when you are young you start thinking that if you want to be a grown-up, you need a résumé guy. Someone who looks good on paper. Keith could be that guy for me.
My plan was to become brazen enough about Keith that Alex would break up with me. It’s a trick I learned from my dad: you create a bad enough situation that the other half of the partnership just wants out. After all, Alex had always said, “If I ever find out that you’re cheating, I’m just gonna leave.”
One day I was driving down Wilshire in Westwood, just leaving the UCLA campus in my little Miata. My pager went off—call me Grandma and I’ll kill you, but this is how we texted in the olden days. It was Alex.
“911,” it read, which is how we kids expressed “Call me back now!” Then the numbers “04,” which, upside down, spell out “ho.”
“Oh,” I said when I read “ho.” I pulled into a 76 gas station on Wilshire and went to a pay phone.
“Get. Home. Now” was all Alex said.
I am not joking: My heart was dancing. He knew something and had called me a ho. The nuclear option was in play and I didn’t have to do a thing. I listened to Whitney’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” on repeat the whole drive on the 405, joy filling me as I practiced my sad face. “Oh my God,” I rehearsed in a flat, dull voice. “I can’t believe this.”
Alex was waiting with an envelope in his hand, addressed to me from Keith. I had two realizations. First, Alex had opened my mail, which just seemed rude. Second, corny Keith had sent a fucking love letter to my house. Just call me, dude.
“Here,” Alex said, handing me the letter.
I took my time, reader. I took my sweet damn time wading through that boring-ass letter, and on page 2, I finally got to the portion of the program that sparked this scene.
“I’ve just got to say,” Keith wrote, “the fellatio this weekend was very good.”
I nodded a double confirmation—one for Alex now knowing I was cheating and one for Keith being corny enough to say “fellatio.” I will say, however, that wanting to be caught cheating is different from having the specifics in print. So I just put on my game face.
“What is that?” Alex said, in a dramatic tearing-me-apart voice.
I paused. “It is what it is.”
Nailed it! You know when you say shit and you think, Oooh, that was good. I was really impressed with myself.
Alex was just incredulous and looked like he was about to cry.
“Did you suck his dick, Nick?”
Look, I don’t know if it was the Seussian title of Did You Suck His Dick, Nick? or the stress of the situation, but I just fell out into a lean-on-a-chair fit of laugh-crying.
“I did!” More laughter. “I did! What more proof do you need? Yes, ‘fellatio.’ I did.”
This had to be it, right? It was over now.
Nope.
“I can’t live without you,” he said. “We can work this out.”
Record scratch.
“You said you would leave if I cheated,” I said, holding back what I wanted to say: “A deal is a fucking deal. Get OUT.”
He started singing “Nobody Knows” by the Tony Rich Project. “Why didn’t I say the things I needed to say? How could I let my angel get away . . . ?”
“You need your space to heal,” I yelled, cutting him off before the chorus. “I don’t deserve you. Go!”
Alex left, and then everything went radio silent. I’d gotten what I wanted, shoop shoop. But then I was stuck with Keith. He came to Black Graduation at UCLA, officially called the Afrikan Graduation Ceremony since its start in 1979. In front of all my cool friends, he gave me a crystal vase as a present. He was suddenly Grandpa to them. They were all taking pictures with it, putting the vase on their heads, pretending to drink booze from it. Then he corrected my grammar. Like the time I said “I think it would be funner to just do that.”
“Funner? Is that a word?” he said. “Did you just make that up?”
So that ended that, just about the time I found out that Alex had fucked one of my best friends and was also dating a model and a Janet Jackson dancer. I was stuck with Crystal Vase Grammar Cop, and he had upgraded to a backup dancer? Hell, no. What if Alex was the one and I screwed it up because I was chasing a cornball? What if nobody ever loves me again?
So I became obsessed with what he was doing. Everything he was doing. I went back to the grief side of Exhale, with only Whitney’s halting breathy voice to help. “Yes, why does it hurt . . . so bad, Whitney?”
If you’re in the crazy-hurt passage of heartbreak, let’s go on this ride together, shall we? One night I decided it made perfect sense to put on all-black clothing and a black knit cap and borrow my friend’s car. I drove to Alex’s apartment, where he now lived with his old college teammate. I closed the car door
softly and skulked my skully-hatted ass into his bushes so I could look in his window. I just wanted to see his face. I wanted to know who he was with. This seemed perfectly rational.
There were no lights on, so when I got to the window, I could see myself reflected in the glass. I looked at my eyes, shining brightly at me.
“You are officially the psycho bitch,” I said.
I’m not supposed to be in the bushes looking in someone’s window. So I slowly, ever so slowly, crept back to the car like a hapless cat burglar coming up empty-handed.
I could have avoided all this if I just watched Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale. Angela plays Bernadine, who sets her husband’s car ablaze, lamenting all the times she put him first, making herself the background to his foreground. She didn’t pay for his beauty school, but she did become his secretary. It’s the scene that created the term “Angela Bassett moment,” an epic declaration of self-worth that I wanted for my mother and for everyone who realizes they got played. As I watch, I start screaming, and I can do every word. “But the worst, oh the fucking worst,” she says, ripping his clothes out of his closet, only to later light the cigarette that will set them and his car ablaze. “The worst thing is that he made me move out here where my children are in school with only one other black kid so they won’t be improperly influenced. Well, guess what, John? You’re the motherfucking improper influence! Get your shit, get your shit, and get out!”
It’s the moment where you reclaim your sanity by going insane, the burst of clarity that comes with blind rage. So, let Angela have it for you, breathe in the smoke from the car, and move on with her out of the bushes. In retrospect, I can say to myself, “Are you kidding me? Why would you lose it over that freaking loser?” But I know it doesn’t ever feel like that in the moment. It feels reasonable to be in all black wearing a skully as you crouch in someone’s bushes. Absolutely fucking reasonable.
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