by Tyra Banks
One night, we had gone to the movies and were making out afterward. After about thirty minutes of kisses that felt like heaven bathed in whipped cream (my fave dessert topping), he said those eight little words. But I didn’t jump up. I didn’t scream. I didn’t yell, “She said you’d say that!” He didn’t catch me off guard. I was prepared.
But really, I wasn’t—sex was nothing like the movies. It was painful and awkward, and after, I cried!
I waited about three days, and then, yep, I knocked on you-know-who’s door and said we needed to talk.
Carolyn: She said, “Mommy, I have to tell you something,” and immediately started crying. I knew what was up. Immediately.
“Baby,” I said, “what’s wrong?” Even though I knew.
Through her blubbering, all the details came out. She stopped crying long enough to tell me that everything I’d told her would happen had happened. “Even though I did it,” she said, “I didn’t do it in a cloud. I did it because I wanted to.”
I listened and comforted her the best I could. She said she had been mentally prepared so she didn’t know why she was crying. I hugged her, dried her tears. Then I told her to get in the car now because the next stop was the drugstore to get some condoms.
Here’s the thing: There are plenty of parents out there who think that abstinence education works for everyone, and that if you tell them not to have sex, they will listen and they won’t do it. I wish that was always the case, and that everyone listened to the warnings and decided not to have sex until they were married! But if kids want to have sex, it’s pretty difficult and at times impossible to stop them. You hear me? I wish we all could, though, believe me. Rarely can you stop them—but you can arm them! And I armed mine with a pack of Trojans, complete with nonoxynol-9.
HOW TO HANDLE BAD BOYFRIENDS
Carolyn: When it comes to the guy your daughter dates, you’re not going to like all of them. In fact, you’re probably not going to like most of them. The reason I didn’t like the guy who took Tyra’s virginity was because he’d come to my house with nothing to say. He’d never make eye contact, much less conversation. Sometimes he wouldn’t even come in the house when he came to pick her up. Instead, he’d honk-honk and have my daughter running outside to jump in his car. That’s a flag for me. You can’t look me in the face, and can’t have the most basic of conversations, then what the heck are you hiding?
Tyra: My brother goes on a first date on Halloween and then brings ’em home for Thanksgiving. He loves him some love. Me? I’ll wait months, sometimes even more than a year, before I introduce someone I’m dating to the family. Cuz I know if I bring him around too soon, Ma won’t be able to hide how she feels and I’ll either immediately drop the dude or rebel against her and commit for way too long. Ma can sniff a hot mess, loser, or douche like a pig sniffs out truffles. And ugh—she’s always right.
I dated one guy who was a Shakespearean actor, and I would try to coach him before he’d come over to the house. “Come on,” I’d say. “You’re an actor; you can do this. Just look my mom in the face. If you can’t look her in the face, she’s going to think you’re shady.”
Still, “Romeo” couldn’t do it. Ma would walk in and he’d suddenly start staring at the floor or get really interested in the remote control.
There were also other things wrong with him. Other “warning signs,” should we say? He’d just had a big, successful movie come out, but he hadn’t booked anything after that, and he wore one pair of beat-up shoes that looked about 101 years old. They were so broken down, the soles were coming loose and flapped as if they were having a conversation with the sidewalk. He also couldn’t afford his own place and was late on the rent he owed the person he was crashing with.
Finally, Ma had had enough. “The man doesn’t have a job, a car, a phone, shoes without holes, or eye contact, Tyra,” she said. “What else do you need to see to know that you do not need to be with this fool?”
My hair-and-makeup team agreed. “Girl, it’s the shoes,” they said. “Even if you didn’t know about the no ride and no phone, you should have taken one look at them broke-down shoes and gone runnin’, boo.”
When I finally did kick him to the curb, he filled up my answering machine with Shakespearean sonnets with stuff like, “Maiden Banks, thoust shall burn at thy stake for thy heart you hast brokest.” I don’t know about you but that don’t sound like no Shakespeare I ever read.
Carolyn: I finally had to call and quote some Shakespearean N.W.A to “Romeo” and his crazy sonnet-ass attempts at threatening my baby. Dr. Dre, thanks for the words and “Beats” (see what I did there?) that sent that sorry fool running.
But that one time aside, I’m not really trying to jump into my kid’s relationships. I probably knew that if I told Tyra, “You shouldn’t be with him! You should leave him!” she would hold on tighter.
No matter who Tyra brought home, I think I was always polite and kept a pleasant smile on my face, even if I knew he was sweatin’ because his butt knew I could see right through him, even if Tyra couldn’t.
She had one boyfriend who was just talkin’ about himself, talkin’ about himself, talkin’ about himself. All. The. Time. It was like there was no other conversation to be had in the room if it didn’t pertain to him. I’m thinking, can my daughter not see what is going on here? It’s all about him! He’s not interested in what you are doing, where you’re going, what you ate for breakfast. He made eggs and is stuck talking about how it was the best omelet ever created by humanity. It was just, argh! All through meals, he just would not stop. I’d leave the room, come back twenty minutes later, and he’d still be talking about himself.
One day, Tyra said to me, “You don’t like him, do you, Mama?” I didn’t lie, so I told her nope, I didn’t, and gave her my reasons. “These are the traits I see,” I said, “and this is my personal opinion. If you like him, then you go on and like him. And look on the bright side. He will never run out of things to say. About himself.” I never tried to change her mind, but I could give her something to think about.
Tyra: Yep, I remember that dude. He loved him some him. Two weeks into our dating, we were at dinner one night and I said, “I could be anybody sitting here right now. You just need an audience.” Ha ha ha. We laughed it off. I didn’t pay too much attention to it. Cut to five years later and Mama finally yelled, “That mofo is so stuck on himself! And I’m sick of him! You’re dating him, so you spend time with him. I’m done.”
Soon after, when I was going through some very stressful times and would shake and cry in his arms and he still couldn’t have a conversation that didn’t focus on him, I was done, too.
Yep, she always knows.
BOYFRIEND RED FLAGS AND HOW TO RECOGNIZE THEM
THE MAN: THE HEARTBREAKER
This was a musician who broke my baby’s heart (and about ten other models’ hearts). I damn near tied her ass down and said, “If you call him, I will disown you. Sit your butt right down here and let’s start forgetting about him and his crazy-ass antics! I don’t care how many Grammys he has!” (More on him if there’s a book number 2.)
The flag: When you find out he’s a serial heart crusher, don’t give him the power to continue to break you. He dumps you? Don’t chase him like all those other chicks did. Disappear, chile. David Copperfield his butt.
THE MAN: THE MAMA’S BOY
This pretty boy’s mama wanted our children to be married after dating for only three weeks! She was obsessed with what their future children would look like. I really just tried to stay away from Tyra’s time with Mr. Gorgeous as much as possible. Yeah, they looked cute together and he had a natural Smize, but that’s about it.
The flag: A beautiful relationship is between two people, not three. Also, a pretty boy ain’t worth his eyelashes if he doesn’t also have a pretty personality to back up his angel baby face.
THE MAN: THE
UNSTABLE SCRUB
Like Tyra said, this actor had no phone, no car, and no job, but plenty of time to leave threatening messages on her answering machine. He must have called from a pay phone.
The flag: The man who’s always trying to bum a ride probably isn’t going anywhere.
THE MAN: THE GASLIGHTER
This strong, strapping man cried to me like he was the victim, like all his wrongs (compulsive cheating and other unsavory shenanigans) were just because Tyra didn’t see how much he loved her. I killed him with kindness until Ty was able to see that she wasn’t crazy and put that nonstop soap opera in the past. He was young, restless, and not worth it. I knew I had to treat him nice. Had I told her he was dead wrong and she should run, she woulda held on.
The flag: No, you’re not crazy. When you smell gasoline, there’s a gaslighter in the midst.
THE MAN: THE NARCISSIST
This highly successful guy thought the world was a one-man act with an endless monologue about himself.
The flag: If you can’t get a word in edgewise, he needs a mirror, not a girlfriend.
6
WE’RE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU!
Tyra: What do you do when a girl comes up to you and asks you how to cover a black eye? Specifically, a black eye her boyfriend gave her?
Oh, and you’ve only got fifteen seconds to answer.
When I did my tour for Tyra’s Beauty Inside & Out—a book that talked about all kinds of things, like dating, nutrition, and makeup (I even showed my face with and without makeup, way before #wokeuplikethis was the huge thing it is today)—I signed my books in Walmart as part of a Cover Girl promotion. (You could find me shopping up in Walmart, too; I bought a denim purse there that I carried until it was stained and falling apart. My model buddy Rebecca Romijn would always tease me about it: “Girl, I love you, but you’re crazy and that purse is disgusting. It’s got an ink blot on it!”)
Girls (and the occasional guy) would stand in line for hours to get their books signed and ask me basic questions. Most were cheerful and bubbly—we’d rap for a few seconds about lip gloss and maybe snap a photo—but I’ll never forget the girl who made everything come to a screeching halt (in my mind, at least). She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old, with curly light brown hair and a smattering of cocoa sprinkles across her nose and cheeks. Her eyes were big and hazel, and one was puffy, bloodshot, swollen, and purpled with bruising.
I swear I hadn’t heard her right.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said. “Could you repeat that?”
“Well, so, like, my boyfriend, he hit me,” she said softly, shifting from foot to foot and twirling one of those curls through her fingers. “So now I have this black eye, and I need to find a good concealer so that I can cover it up when I go to school.”
I had heard her right the first time, but I had no idea what to say. I’m sitting there, silent and dumbfounded, and my heart is breaking for this precious girl, and she’s just smiling at me expectantly.
Security comes up. “Time’s up, next!”
I should have jumped up and yelled to the whole crowd to wait while this girl and I went and found a private aisle and hashed out what was really going on right there, surrounded by laundry detergent and litter boxes and packs of tube socks. But instead, while I was in shock and couldn’t think of what to say, she took her signed book back from me and disappeared into the crowd.
For the rest of the day, I kept signing like an autograph Roomba, but my mind didn’t leave this girl. I was so down on myself. As someone in the public eye, I didn’t want to just have fans. I wanted to connect with people and really make a difference in their lives. This girl had obviously come to me because she didn’t know where else to go, and then she’d just slipped through my fingers.
I didn’t want that to happen again, and I knew I had to do something where I could communicate with these girls in need for longer than the time it took to write L-o-v-e, T-y-r-a.
Carolyn: Sometimes Tyra would talk to a girl for five seconds, then worry about her for the next two days.
Girls would tell her all sorts of things—how their mother’s boyfriend hit them in front of their mother, and Mama didn’t do anything about it; how a boyfriend had forced her to give him oral sex while his friends were watching; or how they were afraid to eat lunch at school because the popular girls would walk by their table and call them fat if they saw them so much as take a bite out of an apple.
It was crazy. “Mama,” Tyra would say, “these girls want to talk to me about extremely personal, deep stuff! It’s like they don’t have anyone else to talk to.”
It would break her heart, and on many occasions her security team had to stop her from handing out her phone number and address.
But far and away, the number one thing she heard over and over again, from girls of all races, all socioeconomic levels, all body types, in different places all over the country was: I’m ugly. I’m ugly. I’m ugly.
They’d say things like “You’re a model and I’ll never be anything like you”; “I hate how I look and no one’s ever gonna want me”; “My life is horrible and I know that if I was pretty, then everything would be better.”
It tore her up. “Mama, these girls think I’m all that because they only see one side!” Tyra said to me one night after a signing. “They only see me after I’ve been in the glam chair for three hours being transformed. They don’t see me popping pimples or getting my weave sewn in. They just see me smiling in interviews, unaware that just ten minutes before, you had to pull me outta the bathroom ’cause I was crying over some loser chump. They don’t know that there’s still a scared skinny-ass eleven-year-old inside me who was once called a monster.”
So Tyra decided to swap photo ops for a mountaintop.
Tyra: I went to Girl Scout camp when I was a kid and loved it (to be fair, I didn’t love it all, like how I’d hold my bowels for almost a week because I didn’t want to go in those disgusting, fly-infested, rotten-smelling latrines). I was craving to connect with and inspire young girls wearing grubby clothes with rank armpits and twigs in their braids, where the only makeup is a layer of bug spray so thick you can scrape it off with your nails. And so I decided to found a camp of my own for girls.
Yep. Camp. Rough camp.
I decided to call it TZONE. I’ve never told this to anybody, but I thought of the name as a play on the T in my name (obvious) but also as the oily parts of your face (forehead, nose, chin) that are prone to breakouts. I wanted my TZONE girls to break out of their shells.
I believe self-esteem issues span all demos and all neighborhoods, and because I was funding the camp myself, I could choose the campers myself. I found girls from all over the place, from South Central to Beverly Hills, girls of all races and backgrounds, and girls who were straight-A students to ones who were barely staying out of trouble.
Later, when we started to get advisers, they put a stop to that. “Tyra, I’m sorry, but we’re not paying for Becky with the good hair from Bel-Air to go to camp for free.”
“But she has problems, too,” I’d protest.
“Yeah, and her dad can afford a therapist.”
That first year, my mama and I tried to do most of the prep ourselves. We rented this grubby white van and filled it up at the Price Club with everything we thought a camp full of girls might need (sanitary napkins, Band-Aids, extra flashlights). As soon as we got to camp, we didn’t have anyplace to store all our supplies, so we smushed it all into our bunk and spent the rest of the week crawling over paper towels and toilet tissue rolls every time we went to get in bed.
Carolyn: The bunks we stayed in were full of critters running through the walls, but after the first few nights, we were so tired we became numb to them. “All right, rat-opossum-skunk, whatever you are,” I’d think as I’d crawl onto my two-inch-thick mattress, “just shut up and go to
sleep so we can sleep!”
TZONE was one of the most difficult projects I took on the whole time I worked with Tyra. Starting a nonprofit from scratch with no previous experience? Thank God I’m crazy, ’cause a saner mama woulda shook her head and walked right back out the room the minute she realized what she was in for. But I believed in TZONE just as much as Tyra did. From day one, I knew her career wasn’t just about her, and we were putting that into practice. TZONE was as rewarding as it was hard, and the backstage drama of a fashion show ain’t got nothing on a summer camp.
Tyra: Everybody was under strict order not to throw away any food in their bunks. All the girls listened. Some of the staff did not, and when a few of them snuck out of camp to go into town to McDonald’s once, they tried to hide the evidence—a.k.a. the Big Mac wrappers—in their bunks.
Those fragrant wrappers might as well have been a neon sign for an all-night buffet. The staffers woke up to Yogi Bear trying to break down the door, and his roars echoed throughout camp, waking up everybody. The next morning, that staff’s cabin was covered with claw marks.
Carolyn: That’s true, camp food was nothing to write home about! Unless it was to say it was just plain ole nasty.
Tyra: During the day, typical camp activities made us hot, sweaty, and hungry, but nighttime was when the camp really came alive and became TZONE, where the breakouts would really happen. These were our night talks. We’d sit around the campfire or inside with candles and create a safe, no-judgments-not-even-an-eye-roll space to talk about the bigger, serious issues that girls face.
I’m obsessed with nicknames, and TyTy is mine. But at camp, my baby backs and Kansas City sauce–obsessed self was Barbeque or BBQ. And it was mandatory that every girl changed her name once she set foot on TZONE soil. Fun, new names made everyone feel safe. If I’m calling on a girl and asking her to talk about something really personal, like abuse, and I call her Kimena or Jasmine or Shelby, she might feel self-conscious and not share for fear of being judged.