She didn’t understand how I could be with him and claim to love him, but not want to take him from her. He’d taught me that I could love again after breaking up with DJ and he’d made me realize I could be loved, but I was no fool. I firmly believe in the adage “How you got him is how you get got.”
And I’m not going to lie. Part of the allure was that I could send him back home. I loved him and I loved being loved again, but I wasn’t ready to hop back into a committed relationship. My ho phase was losing its appeal, yes, but I also knew he wasn’t the one. I didn’t want to take him on just because I felt obligated by our affair.
* * *
After the emergency splenectomy when I was twenty-five, I was sure no one would ever want to have sex with me again. I thought I’d have to recycle old lovers who knew I had that gushy and didn’t care about a scar.
I poured out my vanities in emails to Bayard. He’d call me and tell me everything he remembered about my body in quiet detail. When it got to the point where I was fully healed and ready to try dating again, he couldn’t stomach the thought, and so he came to visit me. He wanted to be my first lover after my medical trauma. He wanted me to find pleasure with him before anyone else. He kissed my belly and touched me carefully until I demanded firmer attention. Then he was gone again.
A little while later, I came home one night and stopped short of putting my key in the door. Something was off. Had I been robbed? The door was still locked and there was no sign of forced entry, but the space in front of my door didn’t feel like me. Inside, everything was as it should be, but when I logged in to instant messaging later that night, Bayard’s wife pinged me. We had become awkward friends and chatted a few times a week.
If you’re talking to me, you know that he’s not.
Maybe.
Mm-hmm.
I had to travel for a conference recently.
Oh? Where?
DC.
Hello?
Yeah.
I stopped by your apartment.
I see.
How’d you get my address?
From the emails you sent to Bayard.
I wanted to see you for myself.
In person.
Why you?
I tried to explain there was nothing in particular about me, but I did know what it was. I was a country bumpkin, someone who had bailed on grad school, while he was a Yankee East Coaster working on his doctorate. He could teach me all the things that were old to her. His jokes were new to me, my laugh even fresher to him. They shared a similar ethnic background, each a child of an immigrant parent, and had visited that homeland together; but I am a plain ole American Black woman, born and raised in the South. He had lived in Brooklyn before and taught me New York slang. He described bodegas and sent me mix CDs he made to put me on to new music. I was a different kind of student for him.
When I think back to him and our love, I wonder if he really loved me or loved the newness of me, the “difference” of me. He was a kind and generous man, so maybe he did. I loved him, too, for a while. I think I stopped loving him first. I was tired.
The next year, I’d had a second surgery, and he and his wife came down to visit me. She gave me a papier-mâché butterfly. I still have it in storage somewhere.
After I had recovered, Bayard came back to DC, with his wife’s permission. He said she wanted him to seal the closure, but I knew it was a test. He failed. No candles lit the way that night. He was shadowed in blue and less gentle than he normally was. He would usually start off a little too caring, and I’d have to coax the aggressive side out of him. He once said he didn’t want to smack my ass because he didn’t want me to feel like a porn star. I appreciated his attempt at being a feminist in the bedroom, but I also wanted my ass slapped.
On the night of this visit, he wanted me to remember him. He wanted to take out all the frustration and conflicting emotions he had about his wife becoming friends with his mistress. He wanted me to feel his anger at betraying his wife yet again. He wanted to punish me for being irresistible. And I took it all from him. He had saved my life. He had helped me realize I was not unlovable. He’d made me remember what it was like to take off the armor of casual dating and relax into a relationship, to be comfortable enough to share secrets. So I would take on a little of his pain. It was nothing.
I eventually cut off both Bayard and his wife. She began inviting me places and wanting to meet up. I didn’t trust her. Is that ironic? I didn’t think she would murder me, but I did worry that we were entering Single [Black] Female territory. She wanted to know more about me, and Bayard mentioned she’d become more sexually aggressive, in a way that was more my style than hers. There was no real point in growing closer to each other. I didn’t want a sister-wife situation, and it was obvious she felt I had some kind of spell over Bayard, a magic she wanted me to share.
As for Bayard…I began to wonder when we would ever end. I wasn’t sure what he needed, but it wasn’t me. By the time I separated myself from him, he had almost slept with someone else during a work trip. When he told me, I think he wanted me to soothe him and tell him what was wrong with him: Why couldn’t he be faithful? I had no answers. I couldn’t make him feel better. As I’d known all along, his infidelity was never about me.
At the time, we didn’t use the word “ghosted,” but that’s what I did to him. It felt like our affair was never going to end unless I took drastic measures. I stopped answering his emails and calls. He wrote me a letter, and I burned it, unopened. I was tired of the drama. It made for a riveting story with my friends. They would ask for updates and become visibly disappointed when I said everything was over. It made me wonder if we’d been letting the drama push us along, the thrill of two people who couldn’t let go.
* * *
“Everything I Miss at Home” by Cherrelle shows yet another perspective in the prism of infidelity. In this song, Cherrelle tells us the story of a woman who cheats, without regrets, and is grateful to have found someone who gives her everything she’s not getting at home. It’s a groovy slow jam, perfect for a two-step and eye contact—perfect for a woman who refuses to feel remorseful about receiving love from unexpected places.
Keyboard Courage
I didn’t get my first email account until I went to college in the fall of 1995. Of course, it was a Hotmail account. I told everyone my nonsensical username was a portmanteau of my first and middle names, like “nichoand.” But really, I chose it because DJ and I had already started seeing each other and I wanted to eventually make it a couples’ account.
Whew. I’ve been holding that secret in for twenty-five years.
Until that point, the internet had been something I’d used to research colleges or to do social experiments, like type in “white women,” then “Black women,” to compare the search results. For white women, images of celebrities and little blond girls would show up. For Black women, there were tons of sexually explicit content and mug shots. The internet was supposed to be some kind of information superhighway, but it was still built by man (read: a bunch of non-Black people).
During college, I did not have a personal computer. I used one of the university computer labs to do any typing or research. Well, to be honest, research was still using the card catalog in the library, which was actually really fucking satisfying. The little drawers would either be so heavy and full with cards that you couldn’t thumb through them properly without sticking your knee under it to keep it from falling onto your foot and breaking a toe, or there would hardly be any cards inside, so you’d overestimate how much strength you needed to pull out the drawer and end up taking the whole thing out before fighting to shove it back in. Looking for the books you needed was like a Choose Your Own Adventure task. Go here. Now, go there. Back to the beginning. Head to the stacks, leaving trails of white slips of paper scribbled in Dewey Decimals.
Then you’d have to thumb through thick books that smelled like someone else’s happiness and find a single paragraph of
useful information that you’d photocopy for ten cents a page and write down on the sheet all of the MLA citation info before sticking said sheet into your folder.
And don’t get me started on the delicious sound of speeding through a microfiche roll.
Have I mentioned I am decidedly, proudly Generation X?
So, yeah, I didn’t really use the internet for much beyond coursework in college. I may have been a nerd who loved the card catalog and the microfiche machine, but I also had a boyfriend and we had sex frequently. For porn, we’d turn to the scrambled cable television channels or the dirty magazines our parents had hid poorly. When I wanted to share my writing, I’d go to open mic poetry nights or print out too many copies in the computer lab to avoid the photocopy fees.
It wasn’t until 2002 that I decided to connect to the internet in any real, long-lasting way, and, like perhaps too much of my life, it was all because of a guy.
When Bayard and I started emailing each other, then IM’ing, that’s when I realized there was so much more out there on the internet. As a way to be more discreet, Bayard suggested I join an online community he was a member of. He said we could communicate via messaging there. Plus, he thought I might enjoy it.
“There are these forums, like chat rooms, for different topics, like movies, music, even poetry,” he told me. “Maybe you can post some of your work there and get feedback. And maybe you’ll see me there…”
The website was Okayplayer, home of the Philadelphia hip-hop band the Roots. It had been online since 1999. There were message boards dedicated to different topics, like all things specifically about the Roots, then a general music board, film and television, sports, tech, and more. General Discussion was where any and everything else went. Need new parenting advice? Want to talk about the latest celebrity gossip? Want to make a post about Prince so your married lover could write you a message in reply? General Discussion was where to go. I created a username that was an inside joke between me and Bayard, but when other people asked, I said it was an homage to Prince. Let’s pretend it was PurpleMistress.
Because people had already been on “the boards,” as we affectionately called the site, for about three years when I signed in, which is an eternity in internet time, most people already had cliques, which were largely regionally based. The main groups were New York, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and Atlanta, plus big pockets of users from Los Angeles and the Bay Area. There were people from all over the world represented, but these were the groups that seemed to have the most impact. I quickly learned the technical aspects—how to reply to and edit messages, how to post a new topic, and how to send private messages, which was called inboxing. These days, I might say “Check your DMs” or “He slid in my DMs”; on the boards, the equivalent was simply “Inbox” or “He inboxed me.”
Bayard would sometimes inbox me little messages, nothing too risqué, just something to let me know he was online. We’d have harmless exchanges in public. I always tried to talk to people in polite, fun ways, since I was still learning the dynamics of the place. He told me he was not popular and was mostly a lurker—someone who spent more time reading than posting messages. What he did not tell me was that his wife’s younger sister was also a lurker, so when she saw us occasionally have public exchanges, it set off some alarms, which she, of course, brought to her big sister’s attention. What made our exchanges so suspicious was that by the time she took notice, I had become someone other people took note of. I wasn’t one of the cool kids, like the guy named Desus from the Bronx or the funny young woman named Trace from Louisville, Kentucky, but I was fresh meat. And since I was living in the DC area when I joined the boards, I had met a few people who could vouch for me. I was real, didn’t look like a bag of shit, and I talked about sex openly and boldly.
One of the first people I met in person was disappointed when she saw me. “Girl,” she said, “I thought you’d be five ten and stacked, light-skinned with long hair, the way you always talk that freaky shit. I thought you’d look like a stripper.”
That was a lot to unpack, so I just gave a nervous laugh, because what do you say to that?
(She ended up having a lot of shit with her, and I had to block her across social media apps over the years because of a volatile relationship she had with someone who became one of my good friends. There were real people on the boards, and real people sometimes come with drama.)
Anyway. While Bayard’s sister-in-law was clocking our public messages, Bayard himself was feeling some kind of way about my presence on the boards. I wasn’t popular per se, but I received more engagement than he did. He had to watch guys flirt with me online. I was taking up space in what used to be his little corner of the internet, and he wasn’t sure how to process it all. I was twenty-five, about to be twenty-six and was finally unlearning all the lessons that had said to make myself small so a man could feel good. I briefly thought about toning myself down, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized he had some nerve—a married man upset that his mistress was pulling attention away from him. I won’t lie: A small part of me was thrilled at his jealousy. I still loved him, and I understood jealousy as a sign of fear. He didn’t want to lose me, but I also recognized he had no right to try to dictate how I shared myself.
And I loved writing on the boards. General Discussion was usually less strict when it came to being monitored for infractions, and people were looser in what they talked about. I felt most comfortable there. People talked about the pros and cons of washing meat before cooking it. Shortly after I joined, a beloved member died by suicide, and it was touching to see so many strangers, both to me and to the person who passed away, come together to express condolences and speak openly about their own struggles with mental health. There was a Black woman who talked openly about her bisexuality. A white woman was an aggressive advocate for anal sex. Parents posted honest messages about raising children with learning disorders. There were ugly fights between people—sometimes because of a romantic or sexual relationship that soured and sometimes just because one person simply didn’t like the other.
There was no such thing as “going viral” back then, but if your post didn’t go “View all,” meaning it had so many replies you’d have to click “View all” to see what everyone was talking about, it was a flop. The rules for the site were that you could reply to as many posts as you wanted but you could make only two of your own posts during a twenty-four-hour period, so it taught me to be judicious about what I had to say and why. Every week, a user with multiple aliases would create a post called Confession Wednesday. People would reply with a list of wild things they did over the weekend, like stealing a purse from the mall or having a threesome, or they’d unload unpopular thoughts, like dissing an album everyone else loved, or they’d take digs at other posters—subtweets before tweets existed. There was an unspoken rule that you shouldn’t reply to confessions, no matter how juicy. So if I wanted to share a story about an interesting date I’d had, I’d weigh how much engagement I wanted. If I wanted to just drop the info to get it off my chest, I’d put it in Confession Wednesday. If I wanted to have people ask me questions or I wanted to give a fuller account of said date, I’d make a post.
People created aliases to dance around the two-a-day rule. Sometimes it was obvious who was behind an alias, and other times it became a guessing game. Folks took it upon themselves to investigate and add up clues. Sometimes people used their aliases to be cruel, and sometimes they used them to express a different side of themselves. Some users talked a lot of shit from behind their keyboards, but in person, they were mad quiet and acted innocent as pie.
Long after Bayard’s wife confronted him about me, long after Bayard stopped posting and lurking, I remained. I had found new friends and discovered I like being able to communicate without people looking at me. I could take my time to write responses and find the right words. I could double-check spellings or confirm facts without someone growing impatient with me because I
let silence into the conversation. Because of the relationships that grew from the boards, I visited Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York—all for the first time. My friend DL in Chicago would have major house parties and invite anyone from the boards who could make it. People drove from Ohio, Michigan, Indiana. If you were in the Midwest and cool, you were there. I would take my camera and try to get as many pictures as I could. Because I had missed out on at least three years of the board members’ bonding, I didn’t know all the secrets and scandals, so when I’d post the pictures later, I’d inadvertently start little brush fires of gossip as people zoomed in on a couple standing too close in the background of a shot featuring a guy holding up Mardi Gras beads shaped like marijuana leaves.
I had serious intimate relationships with men I met on the boards, and I learned so much about myself—what I could tolerate, what I wanted more of, what I no longer wanted, how to stand up for myself—online and in person. I learned how to deal with trolls, the people who can feel important only if they make you angry or disgusted. Ignore a troll and they will burn themselves out trying to get a rise out of you.
The boards gave me an invaluable education in the entitlement of cis-het men, even in online spaces. Men posted images of naked women or sex acts as their avatars but reported women who did the same to men. (I was reported a couple of times.) The men constantly belittled women in music discussions, especially if it was about rap. One guy started a thread about how turned off he was when the woman he was having sex with began to touch herself. He said he felt insulted. That sparked a huge discussion about women’s pleasure versus men’s egos, and the ways men tend to watch porn that led to unrealistic expectations of actual sex.
Topics constantly repeated. It seemed like every other month, someone would post “Do you say soda or pop?” “Sneakers or tennis shoes?” “Sugar or salt on your grits?” “Should men pay on the first date?” “Sex on the first date?” Almost eighteen years later, these same topics repeat on Twitter with almost the exact same frequency, with people still bemoaning the frequency even as they answer each time the topic comes up.
Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be Page 11