Dapper Carter's 8 Rules of Dating

by mitchell, alan

  “Columbia High School in Maplewood!”

  Rain cracked a knowing smile like she just did me a favor. I was really beginning to dig this girl and it seemed like she had my back. Rain strolled off as I turned on the girls.

  “It was nice meeting you guys, but this is where I say goodnight.”

  “Goodnight? We're just getting started,” offered Daphne.

  “Not me, kids. It's a little past your bedtime,” I expounded.

  “Maybe it's bedtime for all of us?”

  “Shit, they'll put me under the jail messing around with you two. I'll pass. Goodnight, Daphne and Velma. Go find Shaggy and Scooby. I'm sure they're down to party still.”

  I could not believe I was doing this. I still hadn’t gotten any action since my divorce and there I was turning it away, a threesome at that. But I guess I did the right thing. Those girls didn’t even know who Shaggy and Scooby were.

  So after I put the kids to bed, so to speak, I wandered Lafayette Street wondering how you could feel all alone in a city with six million people. New Yorkers walked around with their guard up and wouldn’t let anyone get close to them when deep down no one really wanted to be alone.

  Born in Nairobi

  The Brooklyn streets weren’t jumping like they normally were in the summer. The change in seasons tended to do that. But there were small bands of people scampering to the different watering holes with the intent of getting out of the way of the 15 mph wind that was blowing. I wandered around for another 20 minutes or so before I settled on John Henry’s, which oozed of energy. People were chillin’ outside watching “Superfly,” which was being projected onto an adjacent building’s rear wall. There was a DJ playing ’70s funk and ’90s hip hop. The crowd was a cornucopia of the diverse people living in Brooklyn.

  I was nursing a Corona hanging out near the bathroom when an avocado-colored lassie with dreadlocks and a pierced nose, Ladonna Charles, stumbled from the restroom. She had an eclectic, punk rock look; complete with a tongue and lip piercings that I had gotten used to since living in Brooklyn.

  She was a bit frumpy in her flip flops (48 degrees outside) and baggy jeans. But that was par for the course in New York. There is not as much pressure to be in shape like places where they show skin all year round like LA or Miami. That’s the reason New Yorkers are all about fashion in order to compensate for that layer of winter fat they put on to stay warm. We don’t give Eskimo women a hard time about being fat to stay warm, so we shouldn’t hassle women from NY, Philly, or Chicago.

  Ladonna shot me a quick, inebriated smile, so I decided to speak. She was puppy cute and couldn’t be more than twenty-three years old. I chuckled as the poor girl tried to seduce me with her drunk, globular eyes. She didn’t look like a deer caught in headlights, but more like its larger cousin, the Moose.

  “You’ve been in there for a while. I thought you might have fallen in.”

  “Not this time.”

  “If you had, I would have saved you.”

  “My hero. Who are you here with?”

  “Me, myself, and I.”

  “Do you want to come sit with me and my frieeends?” It’s kind of cool to be alone at a bar and show off how independent you can be. But at the same time, women start to wonder “Why is he alone? What’s wrong with him?” So I accepted and to be honest I was beginning to feel a little bit like the old me again. Confidence will take you places you never thought you could go.

  At the table I met Ladonna’s roommate, Mackenzie, an engineering student at Pratt. We passed the time by playing the Kevin Bacon game, which I was much better at than I thought I would be. I was a bit of a movie buff and amazed them by connecting renowned Black actors such as Sidney Poitier to the well-known thespian. We laughed and had a good time. I even treated them to a round of drinks. After drinking my second Corona, curiosity got the best of me.

  “So, Ladonna, where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Why would I mind you asking me if I was from Luziana (Louisiana)?” This might be the only word that New Yorkers will annunciate every single syllable correctly: Lou-i-si-a-na. She knew what I meant. Fucking smart ass!

  “No, I meant your ethnicity.”

  “Oh. French, Jamaican, Irish, and Creole.”

  “Shit, you ain’t nothing but a plain old nigga.” I snickered under my breath.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. I said I wish they made these glasses bigger!”

  “Ohhh. Tell him what you’re mixed with, Mackenzie.” She involved her seemingly white roommate who sported fire engine red hair, electric blue eyes, and a door knocker hoop bulled through her nostrils.

  “Dutch, Irish, and Kenyan. I was born in Nairobi,” she bellowed.

  “Get the fuck outta here! Ladonna, you look Black, but you’re actually more white. And Mackenzie, you look white and are actually African. Go figure.”

  “I’ve got a little Indian in me too,” Mackenzie chimed in for good measure.

  She was definitely Black. Sistas have been using that line for years! Ladonna took a healthy gulp of the Riesling she was finishing.

  “So, changing the subject, are you going to put a dress on for us?”

  I looked around like they must have been talking to someone else that entered the conversation and I didn’t know it. There was no way she could be talking to me.

  “Excuse me? What did you say?”

  “Are you going to wear a dress for us? You would look so cute. All of our male friends have done it. Haven’t they, Kezie?”

  “Yup.”

  “Get the fuck outta here!”

  Mackenzie tapped two guys standing nearby. It was no coincidence that neither of them were Black nor were either of them over the age of twenty-four.

  “Guys, haven’t you put on a dress for us before?”

  Dumb and Dumber nodded yes. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but you could tell they were having regrets about it now. Mackenzie then whipped out her cell phone, adding insult to injury, to show condemning pictures to prove it. They didn’t look too happy. Red sequins dress for Dumb and a turquoise one for Dumber. I laughed my ass off.

  “Well, that shit ain’t gonna happen here. You motherfuckers are crazy…and confused.”

  Ladonna hungrily ran her hands up the inside of my thigh and looked at me with her sexy, drunk eyes.

  “You wouldn’t put on a dress for me, baby?”

  I thought about it for a second. Not to consider an answer to her ridiculous request but deciding whether or not I was going to call her every bitch in the book.

  “HELL NO! That shit ain’t even negotiable.” I stood up, finished my beer, thanked them for the company, and began to step. I could see the wheels turning in Ladonna’s head. A naughty look came over her face as she grabbed me by my hand and led me through a score of drunken Brooklynites into the co-ed bathroom.

  Once inside, she pinned me against the door and began to attack my face with her mouth, planting sloppy kisses aimlessly.

  I slid my hands down her hips and around her plump behind. She had some cushioning to her and I even liked the muffin tops that hung off her hips. It was soft and gooey like pizza dough, but I wasn’t complaining since it was the first female body contact I had in over two years.

  I showed off my newly acquired strength, picked up the five feet four inch 150 pound cutie and hoisted her onto the sink. My hands were ravishing her soft, plump behind that oozed between my fingers. I promptly hitched up her skirt, spread those Virginia hams wide and dropped to my knees.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Giving you a gift..”

  “You know I’ve never done this before?” I smiled at her and thought to myself, yeah right.

  “Let me do this, not because you want me to, but because I want to for you!” Part of her was shocked at the swiftness and grace I moved with scooping her literally off of her feet, and another part of her was shocked that I had the presumptiveness that I c
ould go down on her after having just met. Luckily, the part of her that was drunk and horny overruled the reasonable part of her brain.

  I began to lap up her panty less crotch. Suweeee! She squealed with delight like an Arkansas razorback. But mostly because I stuck my tongue in her ass. I was nasty like that.

  Next I stuck my index finger in her gopher hole as a place holder while I inserted the thumb from my same hand into her flooded ravine. I stood up to gain leverage while keeping both fingers in her orifices and rubbed them together vigorously, simulating playing the world’s smallest violin. While the symphony was playing I tongue kissed her right in her mouth with my booty breath, wanting her to know exactly what she tasted like. She didn’t mind. Luckily, she was nastier than me.

  Bigger Than a Rattlesnake

  After biting Ladonna’s muffin, I came out of the bathroom with a cat-that-ate-the-canary grin. Or should I say canary-that-ate-the-cat? I walked back through the crowded bar and things seemed to have all of a sudden gone from dullsville black and white to full blown Bugs Bunny Technicolor for the second time in my life.

  I guess you could call it pheromones because all of a sudden every chick in the whole bar was checking for me like they could smell the sex on me. All eyes were on me almost to the point where I was feeling self-conscious. I slowed my gait, lagging behind Ladonna on purpose to relish the attention. A smoking hot honey who was melanin-challenged (white) staggered by and instantly caught my attention. We held eye contact for what seemed like an eternity before we both stopped in our tracks, smitten with one another. Our connection was obvious especially since she had emerald green eyes, shoulder-length dark hair, and tantalizing hot pink glossed lips. It also didn’t hurt that she sported 40-DD jugs beneath her teasingly half zipped or half unzipped (glass half empty or half full) chinchilla bomber jacket with the matching yak fur Uggs. This got an arousal from my already over-stimulated loins.

  “I like your eyes.”

  “I like you,” she replied with her baby doll lisp, which was sexy as hell to me.

  We shook the spot and bolted up to Fulton Street. The hawk was out and he wasn’t taking any prisoners after the temperature dropped to a nippy 28 degrees.

  We jumped in the first gypsy cab we saw. Since I was riding with Snow White, I was able to hail a cab faster than I ever had been able to. It made my day when two white boys walked by drooling all over themselves and gawking at Green Eyes knowing that I was about to take her home and smash it, trying to make up for four hundred years of oppression. They knew deep down that the old adage was true about going Black and never coming back. Although I’m quite sure she had been there before.

  White boys thought they had the market cornered, snatching up our top sistas whenever they decided to come down off the plantation and bed one of our finest. But I had that swagger in me too. And I always said that if I was ever going to bring a white girl home, you could bet dollars to donuts that she was going to look like Kim Khardashian and no one was going to be able to complain, including sistas.

  Panting in the cab from our brisk two block walk, I finally got a good look at Green Eyes, as I liked to call her. Baby girl had the biggest cantaloupes I had ever seen and all I could do was wish I was three months old again so she could nurse me.

  We made out ferociously in the backseat of the old Lincoln Town Car like two horny teenagers. We were unconcerned about the roughshod Jamaican cabbie spying on us through the rearview mirror since we were experiencing a flood of dopamine throughout our red hot bodies.

  I managed to slip my hand into her painted on panty-less jeans. White girls were notorious for wearing jeans without panties. Once again I was not disappointed. I would think it would be uncomfortable and chafe but evidently not. Fashion hurts sometimes and not having a panty line seemed to be more important. All that aside, I made her purr like a well-tuned Ferrari.

  “I’ve got a riddle for you.”

  “Playful. I like that.”

  “A woman goes to her mother’s funeral and meets what she thinks to be the man of her dreams and falls in love instantly. However, she leaves the funeral and fails to get his phone number and fears she will never see him again. So she goes home and kills her sister. Why did she kill her sister?”

  “Huh?”

  Exactly! Young and dumb.

  When Green Eyes and I got back to my place she was all over me. We hadn’t even made it through the door yet when she was grabbing at my belt, trying to free Willy. One of my neighbors, an older Jamaican raisin, was enjoying a Newport in the hall and witnessed her mugging of me. He playfully arched his eyebrows, signaling his approval. I shot an appreciative smile back at him. The girl consumed my tongue as if it were her last meal right in the hallway at my door. She pulled back.

  “I sure hope you're more African than American!”

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? Then I figured out that she was trying to inquire about the size of my Johnson.

  Green Eyes was a Long Island chick who grew up not too far from Hempstead. She always had a thing for Black men, although she spent most of her time hanging out in Southampton. Long Island no longer cured her fancy for brothas, so she moved to Prospect Heights, down the street from Prospect Park. Brooklyn had this thing going on whereas lily white girls were nuts about Rastas. What Australia was for Black men, Jamaica had become for white women and they could get a taste of Negril right on Fulton Street.

  “I guess I'm all right, as long as you're not expecting an Anaconda. Think Water Moccasin.”

  I downgraded to a more realistic serpent. She thought about it for a second, and then looked puzzled. “I don't know what a Water Moccasin is? How big is it?”

  “Well, it’s bigger than a rattlesnake but smaller than one of them big ass African Pythons.”

  She accepted that as enough of an explanation, then resumed doing what she does best— kissing. Green Eyes was the heavyweight champion of tonsil hockey. She was tight, precise, and almost mechanical in how she would let things escalate slowly to a crescendo of titillating and tantalizing tongue and tonsil teasing until time to detach. After a few more seconds of passion, she pulled away once again.

  “Whoa. I think I may have had a little too much to drink.” I guess she shouldn’t have had that last Long Island Iced Tea or as we like to call it, “the date rape drink.” (not funny)

  I got her stumbling, slurred speech having, drunken ass inside my apartment so she could lie down on my new queen-sized mattress on the floor. That didn’t last long as she hopped up and bee-lined for the bathroom to pay homage to the porcelain god.

  This is always the undertaking when it comes to taking a female home. They just don't know when to stop drinking. Trying to balance just enough liquor to get them loose but not so much as to get them drunk, or sick, or pass out. Unfortunately, I was a C student in chemistry and could never quite find the correct balance. Nothing is worse than trying to hide the salami, but you spend half the night at the toilet pulling her hair away from her face so she doesn't throw up in it.

  About an hour later, after she finished heaving up the chicken wings, peanuts, and five shots of Don Julio that she had taken before the iced teas, Green Eyes stretched out across my mattress. I sat on the edge disappointedly staring at the numbers on the digital clock. 2:00. I had enough. I decided to kiss her, but to no avail as she put her elbow into my throat, fending me off.

  “I don't feel good,” she said. “Can we just cuddle?”

  Was she serious?

  Dapper Carter’s rule number four: If you're at my house after 11:00 p.m., we're having sex.

  This ain’t the fucking Honeycomb hideout.

  Like a Sofa

  I was looking like who-did-it-and-ran and needed a fresh twenty-dollar cut before I went back to work on Monday, so on Saturday I did the reverse commute and went to meet the fellas at our old barbershop, Cool V’s, in Newark.

  I hated how cliché it was that barbershops are institutions in the Black community, but
it was true. Barbershops were where information was exchanged and knowledge was passed down from father to son. The barbershop experience was invaluable to young, Black men and was a rite of passage.

  As I rode the PATH train to Newark, I chuckled to myself about how stick-up kids would ride the PATH into Manhattan, rob a few people, and then jump back on the train to go home like they were commuting to and from work like everyone else. Newark thugs took being hard to a whole new level, like it was an Olympic sport or something, and they were competing against the other notorious hoods throughout the country for the grimiest reputation. Seeing the PATH stops in reverse reminded me of 1989 when Caesar, Khalil, and I would trek into the city hitting up 8th St. in the Village to get the hottest new club shoes that were out.

  The Twin Towers had just been brought down less than a decade ago and security was still tight. Californian’s complained about the looming threat of earthquakes. Gulf Coasters were worried about hurricanes. Midwesterners had their tornadoes. But how would you like to ride the train to work every day with the Homeland Security carrying machine guns to keep you safe? The threat of a terrorist attack is always present in New York City. It’s not seasonal like the aforementioned places.

  It was especially soothing since the attacks to hear the conductor call out the stops. World Trade…Exchange Place…Grove Street…Journal Square…Harrison. My favorite part of the trip was between Harrison and Penn Station. I liked to look out of the window and see the Passaic River looking just as majestic as the Mighty Mississippi. Downtown Newark real estate was on the upswing and just as prime as Inner Harbor Baltimore proved to be.

  Caesar and Khalil were already in the chair when I arrived, so I jumped in the next available one. The barbershop was full and I knew everybody there. There were four barbers: Shaheed (Preston), Duquan (Kelvin), Bilal (Tommy), and Talib (Morris). Waiting to get cuts were Munir (Wee Wee), Musadique (Corey), Rahim (his name really is Rahim), and Big Rahim (Mohammed).