When All Hell Breaks Loose, page 6
“No.” I frown at my answer. Shreese knows how I feel about the subject of our mother.
“Don’t you think you should?”
I exhale. “Not really. And I don’t want to talk about her right now.”
“Okay, okay. Dang. Gregory, I don’t know why you act like you hate her so much.”
“Hey, look, Shreese, I have to go,” I lie to rush my sister off the phone. “Tim is at the door.”
“I didn’t hear him knock.”
“You weren’t listening.”
“A lying tongue is the way of Satan. God is going to get you, Gregory.”
“He already has. ’Bye, Shreese.”
She hangs up without saying anything. It’s cool, though. Shreese is funny that way sometimes. I’m upset that she brought up our mother. Who does she think she is? Now Tim really is knocking at the door.
“Hey Greg! Open up, man!”
I go to the door and let him in. He struts in with some expensive-looking sunshades on to complement his starched and ironed red shorts with matching red-and-white-striped shirt.
“What’s happening, cool breeze?”
“You the man, you tell me.” We slap each other five.
“You ready to hit the mall?” I ask.
“Yeah, but let me tell you, it’s hot out there. I ain’t never seen a hot day like this in September.”
“This heat ain’t no joke.”
“So, did you and Adrian find a caterer?” he asks.
“Finally.” I grab my car keys and wallet and we head out the door.
“Who did she decide on?”
“LaSalle.”
Tim shrugs. He’s not familiar with the name.
“Have you and Simone been out anymore?” I ask.
“No. She’s supposed to call me, though. That threesome we pulled was all that!” he says excitedly. “Her homegirl’s name was Charnelle. She was fine, too! I’m talking about thick legs, long hair, and the softest ass I’ve ever touched.” Tim is smiling and shaking his head. I’m laughing on my side of the car. “Man, I was like a bitch after they were through with me. I was hounding Simone day and night for a little while. I phoned her to give it another go and she wouldn’t return my calls. I went by her crib, but no one answered. Shit, eventually I had to start looking elsewhere. I can take a hint. Tonight, I got a date with this chick named Neecy. She’s a bus driver.”
“School bus driver?”
“City bus. She drives for DART.”
I laugh. “Yo, man, how in the hell did you hook up with a woman who drives for DART?” Dallas Area Rapid Transit is our city transportation. We always joke by calling it “Driving Africans ’Round Town.”
“You know me, I gets around,” he brags.
We climb in Tim’s silver Acura Legend and pull out of the parking lot.
“Seriously.”
“We met at the barbershop.”
“She had her son with her?” I ask, assuming that would be the first reason she was at a barbershop.
“She doesn’t have any kids. She was getting her hair cut.”
“She wears a natural?”
“Yeah. She has naturally curly hair.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I respond as I put on my own designer sunshades. “So I guess you’re about to tell me how non-American she looks.”
Tim looks at me. “This woman has it going on!”
“What does she look like?”
“She’s originally from El Paso and she has a nice accent. She’s mixed with black, Choctaw Indian, and Mexican.”
“Tim, when are you going to date a black woman?”
“She is black. We all know that in America the twenty percent of Mexican and thirty percent Indian in her don’t count,” he states with a laugh.
“No, I mean a woman who has dark skin,” I argue.
“What does it matter?”
“Bro, I’ve just never seen you with a dark-skinned woman, that’s all. I’m beginning to think you have a hangup on skin color, and that’s hard to believe since you’re dark-skinned yourself.”
“I’ve dated across the board, Greg.…”
“I know, man, and none of them, since I’ve known you, would have failed the brown bag test.”
Tim shifts into fourth as we get on the freeway. “Man, I just haven’t come across one I really like. Skin color has never been an issue with me. If a woman is down to be with Tim, and Tim is diggin’ her, then it’s on.”
“What about Vanessa Ross? She was dark as a purple grape, beautiful, and was diggin’ you.”
“Vanessa was married. You know I don’t get down like that.”
“She was separated when you met her.”
“And she went back to him after I was through with her. You know I don’t get down like that.”
“What about that fine sister you met at that Chinese restaurant? What was her name?”
“You’re talking about Arlandra.”
“Yeah, that’s her. She was dark-skinned and unattached.”
“Yeah, she was, but her attitude was stank and she didn’t have a job.”
“Simone has a stank attitude.”
“Yeah, but she was exotic in bed.”
“And she’s also a redbone.” I laugh. “Okay, would you go out with Tichina Arnold?” She played the role of Pam on the show Martin.
Tim shook his head. “She looks too rough, man. I didn’t like the way she acted on the show, either.” He frowns up like a bad odor is resting on his top lip. “I like a sister who is feminine at all times regardless if she’s famous or not. A woman like Chatina or whatever her name is wouldn’t last with me.”
“That is the finest black woman I’ve ever seen! Tim, you can’t tell me you are letting her acting take over her looks.”
Tim ignores my comment. “Try another one,” he says, smiling.
“Okay, what about Lauryn Hill?”
“Was she the one who played in that old movie with Whoopi Goldberg?”
“Yeah.”
“M-m-m. She’s too skinny. I like a meaty woman.”
“And Kellie Williams from that show Family Matters?”
“Too young.”
“Last one. What about Toni Braxton?”
“Toni Braxton ain’t dark-skinned,” he protested.
“Nigga, you a damn lie. Toni would not pass the brown bag test,” I argue.
“Well, for your information, yeah I would fuck Toni.”
“I didn’t say nothin’ about fucking!” I break out in laughter.
“Shit, I did. I’d give it to her good, too. Tim Johnson style. Have her singing all kinds of love songs. I’d give her a Grammy she could be proud of.”
I’m cracking up, even though Tim still hasn’t convinced me that he would date a woman with dark brown skin. We get to the mall in no time. Gingiss Formal Wear is kind of crowded. There are several groups of men in there looking at tuxes and suits. Jamal is waiting for us when we walk in. His dreadlocks are down, framing his strong facial features. Sometimes, I can’t believe that’s his hair. My shit would never do that.
Growing dreadlocks was something I never even considered when I was growing up. My mother … I mean, my father always kept my hair low to my head. Jamal has been growing his for about five years now, and I think it’s tight as shit. I ain’t sweating my boy or nothing, but his hair is cool and only Jamal can do that and get away with it.
He’s a freelance graphics artist. He has accounts with some of the top advertising firms in Dallas and several others in other cities. You may have seen some of his work in magazines like Essence, Ebony, Vibe, Esquire, and GQ. He’s paid in full all the time, and he works from his house, so he can grow his hair down to his ankles if he wants to.
We walk up to the counter to be helped. A portly man with red hair and freckles looks over at us. When he returns to the counter, small beads of perspiration are formed on his nose and he doesn’t look pleased that new customers have walked into the already crowded store.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m here to view some vests and ties for Alston,” I say.
The man goes to the back and returns with a list. Once he spots my name he goes into the back again. This time he takes a few minutes before he comes out. He’s carrying about ten different vest sets. He takes them over to a nearby table and lays them out.
“When you find what you like, bring it up to the front and fill out the order form.” Portly walks away.
“Who ate his breakfast this morning?” Jamal says smartly. “That cracker needs to relax a little. Take some weight off.”
“Literally.” Tim takes off his shades and helps me sort through the packages. He pulls out a black-and-red-checked silk vest with matching tie.
“This is cool.”
I look at it. “I dig the vest, but a checkered cummerbund and tie are whack.”
We all begin sifting through the vests. We see everything from polka dots, to stripes, to snowflakes. After getting the selection down to three vests, we finally decide on a red silk vest with black diamonds. I really don’t like it, either, but I don’t want to make this an all-day event.
I take my selection back up to the desk and the same store attendant is standing there looking more bitter than ever. I give him the vest, fill out the order form and get the hell out of Gingiss Formal Wear.
We decide to get a bite to eat, so Jamal follows Tim and me across town. We end up at Jo Mama’s Soul Food Kitchen. We get a booth near the front. A small jazz band is playing and I immediately notice the tune. It’s “Lover Man.” I know because Diana Ross sang it in Lady Sings the Blues. I also have a Sarah Vaughan CD where she blows the hell out of the same song. I love me some Sarah. In my opinion, she is the hottest jazz singer ever. Forget what you’ve ever heard about Billie, Ella, Abbey, Nancy, Nina, and all the others. I mean, they’re great in their own right, but they can’t touch Sassy.
When I first heard Sarah Vaughan sing, I was about four or five. We were living in New Jersey and my parents took me and my sister cross state to New York to a jazz festival where Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, and other legends were performing. I still remember how statuesque she was. Tall, thick, and dark. Lovely! I can still see her holding that cigarette while blasting, “It Never Entered My Mind.”
I wouldn’t be telling you this story if it weren’t true, but I have proof that I was there. In my father’s house, hanging on the wall, is a picture of me, my sister Shreese, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, and my mother. I have on these high-water purple denim pants with a Disney World T-shirt, and Shreese has on a yellow Winnie the Pooh jumper with matching ribbons on her two long ponytails. It was the last time I saw a live performance before we moved to Dallas. My sister and I grew up on straight old-school jazz all our lives.
Anyway, Sarah’s voice was what I heard most of my life after that. I would sit in our study and play her records all the time on my Superfriends record player. The richness in her voice was so warm that it could make you sweat. I was in college when she died in 1990. I got sloppy drunk that night after I found out. Ended up missing classes for two days and my father had to travel down to Commerce, Texas, and beg the school not to throw me out of Hubbell Hall, the all-men’s dorm on campus. Needless to say, there has yet to be another like Sarah.
This band playing at the restaurant isn’t doing too bad a job. The bass player could use some more skills. He’s actually walking a tired dog. No swing in his play at all. Not pulling the strings enough. He’s young-looking, so I let it rest.
We all order and have drinks as we wait on our lunch. Tim is sipping on a rum-and-Coke, Jamal has a ginger beer, and I’m gripping a Heineken. As the waitress walks away, Tim stares hard at her ass. When he turns back around, he sees me shaking my head. He shrugs his shoulders in guilt. “What? She has a nice ass,” he says innocently.
“But did you have to stare at her like that?”
“Man, her ass had me hypnotized.” He laughs slyly.
“What if you walked by a table and a group of women stared at you like that?” Jamal asks.
“I’d fuck ’em all.”
We all laugh. Tim’s good with comebacks.
“No, seriously,” Tim responds. “I think women enjoy being stared at. That’s what God put them here for.”
“To be looked at?” I ask.
“Yeah. They don’t do nothing else but take your money. I haven’t met a woman yet who didn’t want something materialistic from me. Either my money, my sex, or my car.”
I disagree. “Tim, you’ve been going out with too many gold-diggers and women who are a direct reflection of yourself. Sisters who are caught up in looks, status, and fashion. That’s why you think they’re just to be looked at. I can’t believe you said that.”
“Greg, you know it’s true, man. We could do without the secretaries, waitresses, manicurists, and teachers, right? These women ain’t trying to hear about the bills you got to pay if it’s not their bills. All they do is take from you until you can’t give no more, then ride your dick until it goes limp.”
“Women are simply trying to take back what was originally theirs. They just don’t know it,” Jamal interrupts. “Women are the mothers of civilization. Surely you don’t believe that story about the snake in the garden, do you?”
“Jamal, what are you talking about?” I challenge him.
“Adam and Eve.” He takes a drink from his bottle. “That wasn’t a snake in the Garden of Eden. That was another man.”
“Aw, shit, there you go talking that Malcolm shit again.” Tim adjusts the cap on his head. “What’s the truth this time, Brother Bilal?” he asks sarcastically. “Enlighten me, my brother.”
“The truth is that when the Good Book was rewritten, man was called a snake because he whispered in Eve’s ear and it was unlike anything she had heard before. Women had no reason to whisper when they were the only ones walking the face of the earth. Have you ever noticed, when people whisper, it sounds like a snake?”
“So you’re saying that there were two men in the Garden of Eden?” Tim laughs.
“There was more than just two people walking the earth at that time, but before then women were here first and they created man. All existence comes from a womb, not a nutsack,” Jamal proclaims. “Adam and Eve were a civilization of people, not just a man and a woman. What do you think God meant by ‘in Our image’?”
I’m listening to Jamal, trying to understand where he gets all this crazy-sounding radical information from. It makes sense to an extent, as all theories do, but to totally accept it goes against everything I was raised to accept as a Christian. I shake my head at his question. “I don’t get it, Jamal.”
“Have you two ever paid any attention to how women react to a smooth-talking brother when his game is tight?” he asked. “The way the man slides all up on her and leans in, letting the heat of his breath tickle her earlobes? The sister gets like butter and will do damn near anything for that man, that’s the truth. Imagine him asking her to close her third eye and use the two on her face to see his logic and ignore her own innate wisdom. That was the knowledge right there. Wasn’t a tree with apples on it, but rather it was the actual act of the spiritual being overtaken by the physical.”
I sit back against the booth, trying to absorb what Jamal just said. All I can think about is my sister and how she reacts to Reverend Dixon. Like butter. Just like butter.
“Jamal, you can’t be serious, man!” Tim’s voice breaks my thought. “You can’t possibly be insinuating that women were running around here first, when it’s a known fact that men were.”
Tim looks at me.
I have a blank look and offer no support for him.
He continues to try to convince us. “We were!” he argues. “Man was doing fine until the wind blew and his dick got hard.”
“Dang, Tim, do you have to be so graphic?” I ask.
“Greg, you grew up in a Christian home and you know that Adam was the first man on this planet and God took his rib and made woman.”
I shrug my shoulders. “All I know is we here and we gon’ be here and we got to figure this out before the system and AIDS kills us all,” I say emphatically.
Jamal folds his arms on the table and leans, in staring at both of us. “The oldest living human bones in the upright position that have been found to date are those of a woman. A black woman.”
“He has a point, Tim,” I tease.
“But that means that reproduction could never have happened.”
“Tim, women have in their bodies only X and X chromosomes. That means, if you break it down to a simple science, they possess all natural abilities within themselves to create a female nation, brother,” Jamal says. “There was probably a time they could reproduce without the aid of a penis. They had the egg and one sex determiner.”
“But not the fertilizer,” I interject, making my point.
“That’s bullshit. Crazy! Any man knows that women can’t run nothing but their mouths and niggas to their graves. And those two brothers in the Garden of Eden with Eve should have run a train on her and set her straight for listening to that snake and being disobedient.” Tim is practically hollering.
“You and Phil are hopeless,” Jamal says as he takes a sip from his ginger beer. “The only two men in the world who think they know all there is to know about women in less than five sentences.”
“Hey, don’t compare me to Phil,” Tim responds. “I got a degree from a decent school, I’m a businessman, and I personally think that I’m a good man. I don’t do drugs, I’m not gay, and I work every day at a legal job where I make good money. There is no way in the world I’m going to let some woman come in and melt me down to some sniggling boyfriend chump who will do anything for her. My woman will have to carry her fifty percent, while she watches me carry mine.”
“What about being there for her?” I ask. “A woman needs a man’s support. Doesn’t all that go hand in hand?”
“All these strong sisters want nowadays is a virile brother with stamina and bedroom skills, and I got that covered, you know what I’m talking about?” Tim flashes his white smile. “I’ll support her, that’s for sure.”
