Bitch Is the New Black

by Helena Andrews

  Her mom had pizza and chicken wings waiting. I grabbed a slice and went about the business of gathering up her Delta things in the black tote bag that was exactly like the one I had, but with Adaoha’s name on it. I could joke with all her high school friends, but whenever Adrienne walked in with an old photo or a funny story from college, I’d leave the room or start inspecting my pepperoni. It was easy to act like we were throwing a surprise party and that Adaoha’d walk through the door shouting, “Loooosers,” any minute. But I was stingy with my real grief. After we finished, I couldn’t look inside the bag or in Adrienne’s eyes.

  “Because life gets you fucked up, and you need some clarity from an uninvolved party.” Gina was preaching therapy again. I was kind of sorry I brought it up.

  When Adrienne called a few days later—we were all on this “check-in” thing now—I answered with a gruff, “Whaddayawan?”

  “Hello,” she said, ignoring my bitchy welcome. “I’m alive, in case you were wondering! Some best friend you are. You’re supposed to be checking on my sanity.” It was already summertime, and she was studying for the bar.

  “Ummmm…”

  “Which I’m COMPLETELY losing, by the way!”

  “I have my own damn sanity to worry about. Thanks.” I thought this might get her to hang up.

  “What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with your sanity?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me.” How could I tell her what I didn’t know?

  “Oh, so you’re just being stanky.”

  Silence.

  “Well—” She sighed. “I see you woke up on the wrong side of the bed…just saying hello.”

  “Dude, I’m working on a story that’s due. I’m trying to keep my job, so I have a fucking career. And I hate everyone! Jesus. Can I live?” Maybe she’d leave me alone now.

  “Like I said, just saying hello. You can go back to your dry v-wedgie now.”

  Everybody’s got a thing. Kia talks to strangers. Adrienne’s from Hah-lum! I’m a nomad. Adaoha? She had a dry v-wedgie.

  If it sounds uncomfortable, that’s because it’s supposed to. We had no clue what a dry one actually felt like but imagined it involved vaginal friction equal to corduroy-on-corduroy action. If this sounds pornographic, it’s not supposed to. The dry v-wedgie is more like an aphorism. A v-wedgie stings for but a moment, a dry v-wedgie for a lifetime. Basically, it’s about spinsterhood. The first warning sign of that apocalypse. It was a joke, and Adaoha, our good friend and sister, had the misfortune of being its butt.

  It started like this. We were two years out of college and at another one of Kia’s baby showers. One little girl in attendance was wearing a pink corduroy jumpsuit that was too constrictive. In an effort to escape, she kept yanking it toward her chest as if it were a tearaway, the force of which created what can only be described as baby camel toe. No one saw but me. I tried to get her to stop violently exposing the outline of her little vah jay jay, but she was insistent, outlining the tiny V shape with each pull. “Okay, that’s enough,” I said gently, bending down to lift her little hands out of the pockets of her one-piece.

  “She has a v-wedgie!” shouted some six-year-old in eyeshot.

  “Excuse you?”

  “A V-WED-GIE”—exasperated now, she was shouting like how you do with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you—“it’s when—”

  “Umm…I know what a v-wedgie is, little girl.” I had no idea what a v-wedgie was, and neither should a first-grader. I shooed both of them—the v-wedgee and the v-wedger—into the next room for more fruit punch and innocence.

  A few weeks later, we were having an alcohol-fueled debate on men—why we wanted ’em, where to find ’em, how to keep ’em. Adaoha, twenty-three, was a virgin then, or something close. It was my opinion that as soon as some dude got past her bra, all moral authority would go the way of the underwire. She ignored this and instead ticked off her list of requirements for happily-ever-after in old-school MASH style. Remember? Mansion, House, Apartment, Shack. Adaoha wanted a man with a degree, a six-figure salary, perfect teeth, a good family, a healthy 401K, and who would be ready to get married after a year of dating (and perhaps not doing it).

  “What if you meet some gorgeous garbage collector or a street sweeper whose penis is like ten inches long?” I asked.

  “Nope!”

  “Boooooo. Just wait until some dude licks your titties. It’s gonna be Reynolds for you, honey—a wrap, done, finito.” At least that’s how it was for me. All my onward-Christian-soldier brainwashing in Awanas came out in the wash once Gary Johnson convinced me to just let him “put the head in.”

  “I’m friggin’ serious,” Adaoha said. “I’m not going to settle for some ole bullshit.” She beat back our barrage of explanations (the ones we’d been telling ourselves): there weren’t that many college-educated black men on the market in the first place, and those who were on the auction block wanted white women or ghetto girls or men, not bourgie broads. A good black man wasn’t just clandestine, he was near Jurassic. We were twenty-three and jaded.

  But Adaoha wasn’t—then. She’d skipped born-again trips to health services (“Please, God, if I’m okay this time then…”) and reality checks before dawn (“Soooo, you’re not staying over?”). I couldn’t let her get away with being the me before I got grown and a prescription for Ortho. I wanted her down in the dumps with the rest of us. Back in the black girls’ club.

  “Well, then, you have fun with your dry v-wedgie!” I shot back.

  There was a vacuum of silence and shocked looks right before the table burst into epiphany-strength laughter. DRY V-WEDGIES! This would be Adaoha’s new epithet and our new rallying cry. Whenever heartbreak conned one of us into hating men, all anyone had to do was mention the word dry together with v-wedgie. Most closely translating to the phrase “Open sesame,” “dry v-wedgie” unlocked visions of a nightmarish future where we spent each day racing through life with our heads down and our legs strong but all that chafing in between.

  Maybe that’s what Adaoha was thinking about the night she left us. We had our last conversation the day before.

  JamAmPrincess (12:30:33 p.m.): Uh, what’s with the piss face

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:32:45 p.m.): no more Dex

  JamAmPrincess (12:33:45 p.m.): what y?

  JamAmPrincess (12:34:08 p.m.): y r u makin it sound so final

  JamAmPrincess (12:36:26 p.m.): ppl get back together

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:36:32 p.m.): nope

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:36:36 p.m.): we break up too much

  JamAmPrincess (12:37:02 p.m.): ur still not telln me what happened

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:37:06 p.m.): he doesnt want a relationship

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:37:17 p.m.): nothing “happened” per se

  JamAmPrincess (12:38:02 p.m.): so no more friends either?

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:38:23 p.m.): i’m so not into s&m

  JamAmPrincess (12:38:34 p.m.): lmao!

  JamAmPrincess (12:38:59 p.m.): i’m just sayn mayb he’s on a diff schedule

  JamAmPrincess (12:44:42 p.m.): but u guys seemed so comfy together

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:44:46 p.m.): we are

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:28 p.m.): but he’s so schizo about it

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:36 p.m.): one second he wants to introduce me to his parents

  nyCALIgrl4 (12:47:46 p.m.): and the next he’s still hollering at this other chick

  JamAmPrincess (1:02:49 p.m.): the one he was canoodling with in the club?

  nyCALIgrl4 (1:07:05 p.m.): GIRL YES

  She wasn’t online the next day. Had already logged off. In real life I couldn’t forgive her. Wouldn’t. Or myself for letting her sign out without a warning. Something. I couldn’t help thinking she had a secret. It made me jealous. Maybe what it really was: a surprise. Buried at the bottom of her bag. A lot of good that would do me: I was still too scared to look.

  Twelve

  RUHBUHDUH

  There comes a time in every twenty-seven-year-
old’s life when one realizes that the space between dormitory and factory has folded unflattering crow’s feet into one’s social life. Gone are the days when friends are an elevator ride away, dinner plans are made on the way to somebody’s hall, and Thursday is Friday or Friday is Thursday (who cares, you’ll figure it out in Philosophy C203). Dry-erase boards, once the standard-bearers of celebrity, are the vintage signboards of a bygone era: “Helena, me again. Just thought I’d remind you and that random guy you picked up about taking off your shoes. You spent the entire last Sunday cleaning footprints off your ceiling. Also please don’t throw your condoms out of the window you’re creating a small mountain. P.S. meet us in the dining hall at 7.” Life is now a really misleading rerun of Friends, with no all-star cast and only one storyline—yours.

  Soon enough, the little old lady living in a shoe is you—and the rent is effin’ unbelievable, and nobody comes to visit because you’re too far from the metro. Adulthood comes in little jigsaw pieces. Once the painstaking work of fitting them all together is done, the picture doesn’t look nearly as cool as it did on the box. False advertising. But whom to sue? Jesus H. Christ?

  Really, you should thank God for the gang of nerds who got together on their Segways and rode the information highway all the way to the bank, cashing in on our collective quarter-life crises, crisises, crisi. Making it impossible to stay mad forever, Facebook, MySpace, Gchat, LinkedIn, Skype, Twitter, and whatever people are doing now have each made this American life bearable for those of us on the too-in-touch-to-ever-be-nostalgic side of thirty. Actually, we all might be the unwitting participants of a controlled field study of the latest drug to battle Alzheimer’s—nevurfugetatal.

  What’s the point of pontificating on the theoretical catechism, “Whatever happened to Randi Davidson?”—high school track star, wearer of purple lipstick to Prom, and face on a milk carton since senior night 1998—when suddenly her every move (“Randi Johnson is ready for date night with hubby!!!!!!”) is shoved into your news feed quicker than you can say, “I bet you a million bucks she’s gay now.”

  Where’s the fun in playing fact or fiction when everybody knows the boring, nonpervy truth? And the ho-hum headlines break so fast you don’t know which to pay attention to: “Aaron Ouyang just scored 8 out of 10 on his Sliders fanatics TV quiz,” “Nicole Watson is thanking everybody for all the bday love,” “Harry Chin is :(,” “Adaoha Hamilton is hiding under her desk again,” and “David Soriano is…” That last one is so fucking annoying—it’s like, did you forget to type in that tedious tidbit that seemed so important three seconds ago or is correct conjugation that important to you? Fascist.

  None of this is to say that I myself don’t participate in the constant reel of unreasonable updates, adding my small change to the stock ticker along with all the other grown-ups bored out of their gourds. But at least I have the decency to set most of my crap to private, unleashing my ego fertilizer to “only friends.”

  The one time I showed up to my grandmother’s $1 soul food restaurant in a “cropped sweater,” she went nuts. “Lena, you’re too young to have your stomach all out like that.” At seventeen, I was wise enough not to laugh in her face, but stupid enough to say something like, “This is how people dress. It’s the nineties, not olden times.”

  Nowadays, I would never wear anything baring my midriff and wish most people (especially plump ones) had Effie’s conservative Compton values. Why not save something for later? And leave something for the imagination? Or better yet, make use of a highly advanced cow-cloaking device designed to keep ’em thirsty?

  We don’t have the time or the technology—that’s why. So instead, the Jenga tower that is postjuvenile delinquency continues online, so that our offscreen affairs don’t seem so lacking. An old friend once told me she wanted this other chick’s “Facebook life,” an oxymoron if there ever was one.

  “She’s got all these cool-sounding events on her page. Like every friggin’ night there’s something. I wanna go too. Would it be weird if I sent her a FB message like, ‘Take me with you!’”

  “First off, yes, Crazy Pants McGee,” I said. “Second, get the heck outta here! It’s not like she’s actually going to any of these places. And, I’m sorry, does ‘Grown and Sexy Saturdays at Saturna Italian Bar and Grille’ really sound that awesome? No, ma’am.” I was trying to be supportive.

  “Whatever. Why aren’t you on Twitter?”

  “Because I’m not a fucking maniac.” Again with the support.

  “Since when?”

  Later this same girl sent me and a whole bunch of other people she was either trying to impress or help get through the workday an e-mail with the subject line: “I’m famous.” What followed was not an enthusiastic paragraph about her doctoral dissertation being accepted, but a link to a snarky Web site that posts particularly literary “tweets.” Hers was first on the list: “The Ikea shuttle switches lanes like woah and drives over the double yellow line. Not so Captain Safety.” I was proud in a Special Olympics type of way.

  There is something to be said for the self-gratification felt in the presence of a group (or mass e-mail). The competing senses of purpose, accomplishment, and remorse.

  Case in point: RBBDA. Street name: RuhBuhDuh. To its pushers: Rasheed’s Black Bourgie Dating Advice. Yes, that Rasheed. “Raj,” Britanya’s ex. After I got rid of her in life, I picked him up in cyberspace. Not in a sexy way, but in a “Hey, the more guys I friend the higher probability I’ll inadvertently meet a non-friend guy” kind of way. I considered falling in love with him one night after a friendly dinner at Clyde’s, but then I figured it’d be easier to introduce him to my other friend Hillary, who wears pearls in the middle of the week by point of reference. Two jumbo lump crab cakes and six months later, they’re in love. Even still, he remains dedicated to the cause of documenting the “exciting developments in the world of black bourgie dating” with his “just for fun” Facebook group, RBBDA.

  Gina, at her dick’s end, had an interesting theory on the educated-while-black dating scene: “I am just so tired of this shit. Like argh! Why don’t they just keep a handful of men in a barrel, so that when one situation ends you just grab in there for another.” Rasheed had his own suggestions. A fan of public displays of irritation, he got fed up and decided to tell the world according to Mark Zuckerberg about it.

  A rhetorical note entitled, “Is bourgie black dating really that tough?” started everything. In it Rasheed answered his own question yes, and then told everyone he could tag why:

  The numbers are against us—with only a fraction of the black population certifiable bourgie, it’s hard to date healthy.

  The rest of the Blacks are against us—Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois are more than the names across a booty-shaking high school band’s parade banner.

  We’re too career-oriented—nobody works hard and plays hard. That’s a dangerous myth made up by white people who like golf with their tequila.

  We take ourselves out of the game—Grown and Sexy Saturdays at Saturna Italian Bar and Grille? Fail.

  The clusterfuck—the only difference between bourgie dating and Appalachian inbreeding is the sea level.

  Robin Thicke

  At first it was just for shits and giggles. A silly list you might forward to your friends on a Friday before a working lunch at Fuddruckers. But eventually the comments section underneath unfurled like a red carpet. The road to social network stardom now clear, another note followed—“Bourgie Macking Week”—which included a maxim I adopted as my own, “Leave the hating ass friend at home.” Sorry, Gi. Although I made sure to send her each of Rasheed’s lists, because of course, another followed. The third and final note bore its header more like a headstone: “Bourgie Macking Week Failing!?! Dating Dead!?!” That’s when shit got heavy, or at least a little chubby. Chances were getting slim that any of us girls would find the one for ourselves, since according to one comment, “I’m saying, meeting people clearly does not translate into
dating. Because, in my experience, it is not hard to meet people in this city. But, I’m not convinced that dating exists in this city.” This city being the nation’s capital, and we, the people, being totally screwed.

  Then, like rats on a sinking ship, we decided there was power in numbers and formed RBBDA, a Facebook “group for uppity black people to discuss dating, relationships, sex, and whatever else is on the mind.” Of the 302 members, about 24 were doable in a classic sense. Most were from bourgie-approved locales like Washington, Atlanta, and Chicago. Rasheed dubbed himself “The Originator” and demanded that we go forth and mull over heady topics like: “The Champagne Brunch,” “Your Standards Are Too High,” “I Caught Him Peeing in the Shower,” “Fuck Yeah, Dow Jones,” and “Addicted to RBBDA.”

  I authored a few new topics myself, most notably one entitled “The Kinsey Scale,” which I wrote after watching Liam Neeson, as real-life nerd-turned-sexpert Alfred Charles Kinsey, have movie intercourse with his straw-haired wife and manly researcher. Since he literally wrote the books on sex, I assumed we could have a robust debate about “the down low” and whether men having sex with men were gay. Thoughts? None.

  They (I use the third person plural here in order to protect the innocent from any lame-doing) even planned a “conference” in D.C. that I reluctantly chose Netflix over only after a robust debate on which would be more productive. “Dude, you met these people on the Facebooks? What are you now, a forty-year-old white lady?” Gina did not approve. But then again, she was no less single than I was. RBBDA was planning a second conference, and I decided to take Raj’s advice and “leave the hating ass friend at home.”