Bitch Is the New Black (9 page)

Take the morning routine, for instance. There are some people who live and die by the chipper morning salutation. Despite being raised every morning on Frances's “You've got to ri-ise and shi-ine and give God the glory, glory,” I am not one of these people. And needless to say neither was She. But damn, can a sista get a “Hi”? Sometimes we got a half-eaten “Hello,” given grudgingly as She fumbled through whatever paper was in her hand at the time, and considered ourselves lucky. That's why I decided that finishing my list early and trolling the Internets for crazy animal-loving freak shows was not only totally indicative of my commitment to hard work but also remuneration for her social retardness. She didn't think so.

“Yesterday you mentioned that you often have nothing to do (other than what I have given you on your list that day). I will assume that this means that you have completed everything for my upcoming NBC segment on bedding and pillows—research in terms of identifying new resources, trends, who will loan us
things for the segment, etc. Please put all of this completed information in my box for me to review at the end of the day. Thanks.”

How awesome would it've been if I replied, “You're welcome,” and then high-kicked my way out the front door? Too bad I opened that Platinum Student MasterCard senior year.

Funny, it was a credit card that eventually swiped Jeanne's job.

The boss lady decided that working from home wasn't working for her anymore and wasted no time renting a one-bedroom apartment on Madison Avenue near the Met. The assistants set up shop in what was formerly known as the living room, and She worked out of the bedroom. The day we moved on up, She instructed via “the list” how to orchestrate the placement of furniture, tea bags, dishes, files, Jo Malone candles, topiaries, and books. Turning on the heat somehow got left off. It was past January. We stuffed our office chairs with puffy coats and ham-handed at our keyboards with gloves on for hours before realizing how ridiculous we looked. Adrienne sent me an e-mail about unacceptable working conditions, and we decided to grab breakfast across the street at E.A.T.

E.A.T. is a fancy acronym for stupidly expensive deli. A plate of scrambled eggs and bacon was like $15. She ate there once in a while but made it a point to complain about the high price of breakfast. When we went, Whoopi Goldberg was waiting two people in front of us on line. Made me think of that line in
The Color Purple
—“This side last a lil' while, Ms. Sophia. Heaven last always.” Jeanne said we should use our corporate credit cards for breakfast since (a) we were obviously suffering in unacceptable working conditions, and (b) that basically made this a business expense. Made sense to me. Pass the jelly.

She lost her shit when she got our bills. We'd been typing all morning with mittens on, which is to say really, really carefully. Wouldn't anybody with a beating heart have let it slide? It's not
like we bought something that would accrue in value. It was breakfast, for grape jelly's sakes.

The next week Jeanne got called into the bedroom office via the phone intercom: “I need you back here. Thanks.” We exchanged a brief glance as she got up to walk through the kitchen and into whatever shit storm She had in store. At two years, she was the veteran of the bunch. None of us were positive this was about eating at E.A.T., but we'd learned never to hope. Jeanne came back into the living room office with a smile so big I thought maybe she'd gotten promoted to like “head assistant” or something.

“She fired me.”

“Whaaaa?”

“Yep.”

“Are you okay?”

“Finally.”

If I had been a better twenty-two-year-old, I would have left with her in some valiant display of loyalty. Instead, I watched her go and prayed I wouldn't be next. Because for all our collective bitching, I still wanted this maniac to think me worthy of another “Great Job!” Really, I just wanted her to look me in the fucking eye. So even after She made me write her a check for $15, I managed to smile through reading this:

“Received your check for your AmEx charge. Please leave $15.00 cash in my box instead (I will rip up the check). As I explained to you before, if you make any additional personal purchases on the corporate card, you will no longer be able to continue working here. If you are still unclear about this for some reason, you should read page 34 of the office policy that was given to you on Friday.”

There was something missing at the bottom. I was in a no-thanks land.

Without Jeanne there to complain to, to commiserate with, it was all I could do to last through lunch. Whatever happened after was anyone's guess. I stopped trying—because despite all my fuckups, I
had
been trying. Now if my update was longer than four bullet points, I was having a good day. Messages weren't purposely forgotten, but they weren't purposefully written down either. Up until then, I'd made it one of my duties to shout “Hello” as loudly as possible when She walked through the door in order to (1) point out how crappy She was at saying it and (2) maintain my own human decency like how Tom Hanks paints a bloody face on a volleyball in
Cast Away
. Now whenever She came in, I commenced a staring match between me and my computer screen. It made my eyes hurt, and it was worth it.

In the end, in the Clue game of my life, it was the HP Inkjet, in the office, with a forgotten résumé, that did me in.

I'd been working double duty as a production assistant on her television show (I made the mistake of looking for my name in the credits once) and as her unofficial in-house scribe. Whenever someone e-mailed her, asking her expert advice, I was the one who wrote back. It was the only worthy experience of my day, and I stretched a hundred-word reply on the correct pronunciation of “chaise” to take at least two hours. That's around the time I realized what I wanted to do and started trolling Monster.com for gigs that had “write” in the title. What got me wasn't the faxing out of my résumé during work hours. Who doesn't do that? What got me was the copy of my résumé left in the machine overnight.

Again with the phone intercom. “Helena, can you come back here?” Maybe she wanted to congratulate me for looking for another job. I'd made it perfectly clear that I had an English degree that I planned on using. She even said that this would be a great opportunity for that, since, you know, She was so “well-connected.”
In fact, her best friend was the editor of a magazine. I overheard them once talking on the phone, talking about doing their own laundry at a coin-operated 'mat, and figured I was golden. Until I wasn't. I guess She didn't think I would ever actually try to make it. That filling my heart with hate every day would be fulfilling.

She was barefoot once again. I took a seat on the chair facing her without being offered and crossed my legs dramatically, all Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
, trying my hardest to act like I was interrogating her (it works for interviews).

“I was looking in the fax machine last night and found this,” She said with such dinner-theater emphasis on the word
this
that I almost let out a gasp when she flipped over the wayward copy of my résumé lying facedown on the coffee table. Is She for real? My résumé? I thought She'd printed out all the orange-alert e-mails I'd sent to Adrienne and Gina about how “fucking psycho” She was.

“Okaaaaay.” To keep my face looking serious, I stared at the space between her eyebrows. “You
do
know that I want to write, right?” Ending a declarative sentence with the mocking inflection of a question. Perfect. I was handling this like a
Law and Order
extra.

“This is unacceptable, Helena. You won't be able to continue working for us. We're going to have to ask you to leave.” It was the first time She acknowledged her many personalities. And for the first time in six months, I felt like she might have actually gotten a glimpse of me.

“That's fine,” I replied, faster than I thought professional, but I couldn't help it. I'se free nah! “Do I have to stay all day, or can I leave now?” She looked away. Her wild curls wilted.

Still pinching my deserted résumé, She mumbled something about finishing up anything outstanding on my list. My eyes were still rolling when I sat back down at my desk, ready to write my final update. It only took ten minutes and two spell checks to come up with this:

Bad. Ass. The guts to read it aloud to her face would have been nice, but I settled for the grammar skills. In reality I didn't have another job lined up, but there was no reason for her to know that. The letter was my first grown-up resignation. Once the send button was fired, including a few names in the BCC field, I made a beeline for the front door and never looked back—that is, until Jeanne decided to call me two years later with news.

The trip down trauma lane didn't take long at all. I'd snapped out of it by the time I got to the magazine section, scanning the titles for
Elle Décor
. I could've just skipped through the pages right then and there and gotten it over with, all dirty like. But I didn't want randos around when I saw whatever it was Jeanne wanted me to see. This was a private moment. I bought my copy and ran to a storefront across the street.

Page 149, please tell me something good, or at the very least something so depraved it makes me smile. And there She was. Her hand was on her hip, and the other was resting “naturally” against the fireplace in her living room. Gone was the desk with my water-glass stain. She had on a heavily bejeweled tank dress, probably from Bendel's. Her biceps were as muscular as I remembered. I could even tell without my glasses that her fingernails had been manicured—French—and She was wearing that nude lip gloss. She looked like your mom's cool younger sister visiting from the big city for the weekend. Why couldn't things have worked out between us? I like the big city. I like weekends.

But one of these things was not like the other. Something was…missing. Oh, fuck! Where her hair should've been, there was…nothing. Not a hat or hijab. She was bald as the day she was born, if, in fact, she had been.

I stared at that image for the devil knows how long, wishing it wasn't true and glad that it was. I closed the magazine and carefully slipped it back into my purse. There was a brief moment
of silence before I called everyone who knew what She'd put me through, feeling a twinge of shame each time I phoned another friend but forcing it down. “One word. Four syllables. Alopecia.” The more times I said it, the more sadistic I started to sound, sort of like She did when the couch pillows weren't karate-chopped just so. Her hair was gone, sure, but maybe it was my moral fiber that was receding. Maybe that's what Jeanne wanted me to see.

So in the end end, the for-real end, the no-more-sequels end—it was the hair that got me.

There's something terribly frightening about being the only
black person at a political newspaper when there's a black guy running for president. Or should I say freeing? Whatever F word you choose, I was most likely fucked.

It was like the Christmas story on steroids: a random act of birth had suddenly bestowed upon me a type of divine wisdom. Running low on Frankincense and myrrh, melanin would have to do. “You should totally be out on the trail right now,” a colleague would say.

“Why, because I'm black?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I'll take it.”

I finally felt special—or maybe I didn't, finally. Either way, I knew covering Hillary's pantsuits wouldn't get me on someone's masthead. So when my bosses at
Politico
needed someone to go down south to get the “black perspective” on then-Sen. Barack
Obama's possible primary win, I ditched the “who gives a fuck” act and started packing.

This was big shit. At last I'd see some return on my grad-school investment. Once I got to the
Times
, the previous year I'd spent mastering journalism at Northwestern felt like a setup to this highly sophisticated field study of the overeducated black female in the bull pen. I lived and died by the phone. Some days I got over myself by timing how fast I could pass out newspapers, shuffle through faxes, and sort bins of mail. The scene that follows is real. The characters therein are not actors, but actual people:

What I needed to control was my work rage—a swirling typhoon that sucked whatever front-page hopes I had down to my gut, threatening to explode out the business end. The “in case of idiocy” affirmation went like this: (deep inhale) (slow exhale) ramen noodles, plastic forks, Ivy League, master's degree, NYT, ramen noodles, plastic forks…Mentally fast-forwarding through all the boring stuff in order to one day get to the good parts helped some. The speech I'd give at a prestigious podium would undoubtedly mention Frances. Once that got old, I'd already gotten a few stories in the paper—even wrote five hundred words on Muslim women being cool with the whole hijab thing for the A section. Eventually, five stories in fourteen months would forever spoil me for the title of assistant and earn me a job at the
Politico
covering political news (yuck) in Virginia (yuck yuck).

Fine, the joke was on me—“Wait, I thought you wanted to do arts and culture stuff? Do you even know where the Capitol is, dude?”—but I planned to make the most of it. During one of his cigarette breaks, Mr. Leary, a reporter from the
Times
who actually knew my name, gave me some advice: “Kid, you always gotta look two jobs ahead.” I loved it when he called me kid. It was so…authentic. He'd given me a pocket-sized can of pepper spray after I'd been mugged for the second time walking home from the bureau late at night. He made me promise only to whip it out if I seriously planned on using it; otherwise the suspect in question could always use it against me. He also said it didn't work on “Latinos,” but I forgave him that. Two jobs from now, I'd parlay covering history into covering Hollywood, where I wouldn't need no stinking pepper spray.

In short, screwing this Barack thing up would mean a lifetime (e.g., another year) of watching grainy reruns of the un-funny version of
Saved by the Bell
that is the legislative branch of the U.S. government, with Harry Reid as the cantankerous but lovable Mr. Belding. If you can picture Mr. Belding better than you can majority leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), then like me, you should never be in possession of a congressional press pass.

But there was one snag on my red carpet to the Pulitzers. It was becoming increasingly impossible to disguise my violent allergic reaction to the phrases “on the Hill,” “in session,” “staffer profile,” “pushing the envelope,” and “pulling back the curtain.” “I hate everyone” became my new “Good morning.” How could I convince the bosses I avoided at Chipotle that I could be a chip off the old block?

There was a new features editor. Over coffee, I convinced him that someone needed to go to South Carolina, and that that someone could only be me. I never actually pulled the race card per se, but I'd never cut it in two with a pair of scissors in front of unsuspecting diners either. We got into logistics after I got the official go-ahead—like where I was going to stay, how I was going to get around Columbia, and who the hell I was going to talk to. They wanted “reax” from regular folks, who couldn't be hard to find.

During the Friday plane ride, my idle thoughts got some exercise jumping ahead to Monday morning in the office, when the story would be front page, be on Drudge, and then get bandied between boxes of blowhard foursquare on cable. I do this a lot—sneak into advanced screenings of my life. But the trailers for
Helena Does South Carolina
were totally misleading. Instead of an intellectual thriller, this thing would turn out to be a romantic tragedy.

It started with an old man loitering in a “garage.”

The plan was simple—grab a handful of the pulsating masses of black people brimming on southern streets and get them to say something profound. Also, I can't drive—as in don't know how. Frommer's was moderately helpful in finding me a “car service” to get me to my hotel. At the airport, a balding white guy in a leather bomber jacket was flashing a sign that read “Andrews.” We were surprised to see each other. He sounded black on the phone, and I could tell he assumed I wasn't.

“Whatchu heah foh,” he asked, lifting my carry-on into the back of his “cab”—a black Lincoln-like town car with a laptop where the meter should have been. Littered with yellowing newspapers and what I assumed were conspiracy theorist manifestos, the entire front seat looked as if it belonged to either someone just too busy to make it to the recycling center or a deranged psycho killer.

I got in anyway.

“I'm a journalist, and I'm doing a story on Senator Barack Obama.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Actually, you might be able to help me. Is there a particular neighborhood or any place down here where African Americans hang out?”

“Oh. Well, you don't wanna be going to any of those places. It ain't rally safe—drugs and…” The rest of that sentence would only be important to know at my murder trial. I'm not going to say “Mr. Cabdriver, sir” was a racist, but he was racist-ish. After a mind-boggling minutes-long tirade about all the places I shouldn't go because “the blacks”—who he personally had nothing against—in Columbia were not only dangerous but also totally in the dark about politics, he dropped me off at the one place he knew there'd be “someone smert enough tuh talk tuh ya,” Dr. Ray's Used Cars and Ground Transportation. He promised I'd be safe.

“They'll take care of you,” he said, now unloading the trunk, perhaps unaware of the alarming similarity his guarantee had to a gangster's. Perhaps. “It's back in there.” He pointed to a darkened wormhole–slash–front door near where his “Lincoln” was parked. You've got to be shitting me.

But before I had the chance to plead, “Wait, what? In there?!” the handle to my suitcase was in my hand, and I was left alone, listening to the popping sounds tires make when they run over busted-up gravel mixed with dirt. Across the driveway, overalled men worked under the huge shadows of beached Beemers. It started to rain, and I walked inside.

See, this is what Gina calls “some ole white people stuff.” The type of commonsense-defying idiocy—sticking your head in a “trained” lion's mouth, walking alone from the train at 2:00 a.m.—that we of the overcritical-black-female variety routinely categorize as “white girl shit.” Which is to say any action that is in no way demonstrative of how we ourselves personally would behave in a situation of similar life-threatening level. Much is made of the high mortality rate of horror-movie black people. But think of it as a question of plot, not prejudice. Boomsheekah gets the ax in the first five minutes of
Slasher Movie Magic IV
, not because she lacks the mental acumen to stay alive, but because the whole thing would have been over in the five minutes it takes to run out the front door (not up the damn stairs) and call the police (not your idiot friend who lives twenty minutes away).

Back at the garage, nobody came out to offer me a mint julep, so after standing perfectly still with my eyeballs looping roller-coaster-like in their sockets, I decided to stop looking like an asshole and go inside. The solid smell of boiling meat greeted me at the door like a gruff old man.
Whuddayawan, I don't have all fucking day.

“Heeehhh-looowww,” I yodeled, one hand gripping the door-frame.

“Yeahp,” came the answer from the next room.

I approached the main office the way a Discovery Channel intern approaches a den of wild hyenas in the bush—very carefully and with low-pay-grade precautions. Sticking my head into the room before the rest of me followed, I wouldn't take my notepad out just yet—don't want to frighten them into a stampede.
Them
was a seventy-one-year-old black man, J. C. Martin, and the boss of the place, “Dr. Ray” Charles Jones, who, judging from the juice of his Jheri curl, looked to be in his early fifties and definitely not a doctor.

Steak and onions. That, plus motor oil. Perfect. I was interrupting lunch. Everybody knows wild things act more so when they're hungry. Dr. Ray walked over to a Crock-Pot on a desk littered with garage tools, stirring what was inside before introducing himself and his friend. “He'll answer all your questions,” he said, nodding to where J.C. was sitting without taking his eyes off what was in the pot. I took out my reporter's notebook.

“I know more about Jesse Jackson than Obama. He just popped up. I never heard anybody say anything about no Obama,” answered J.C. when I asked him the most profound question I could muster: Did you ever think you'd live to see this day? We went on like that for a while—me asking stupid questions and him trying his best to answer them without making me feel stupid. He sat with his legs so far apart I was in constant uncomfortable eye contact with his old-man junk. I played it off by pretending to be blind. He wouldn't tell me what J.C. stood for, aside from “the closest you'll ever get to Jesus Christ.” When it was finally over, he decided to do some interviewing of his own. Probably trying to show off.

J.C. and his wife had been married for fifty years before she died. Dr. Ray, who finally started acknowledging my presence, said he “got started early” and had eleven children before he was middle-aged. I scanned a shelf crowded with frames of cap-and-gowned girls and tuxedoed boys, while Ray checked on his steaks and onions for the third time. He mentioned his wife in the past tense, and I nodded, not sure how we got so off topic. But there does come a point after one has reached the socially preferred age of procreation when talking about one's reproductive prospects with total strangers is not only common practice, but anticipated.

“Are
you
married?” asked J.C. as I was furiously scribbling down details. Something like—“Ray Charles Jones, who runs a ground transportation business in Columbia…”

“Ahhhh? No,” I answered hastily, looking up with a cocked eyebrow. I knew this would be coming, but not so soon. My coat was still on.

“But you're looking for a husband? Right?” This was more of a biblical command than anything else. Make babies, not bachelor's degrees.

Had I been looking? Had any of us? I wasn't so sure. At that point, Dex and I were still in the “this could so work” phase. Everything he did was magic—making inedible eggs, writing impossible poetry. Imagining the look he'd give me just as the doors were opening for my big reveal on the day of our wedding was a treasured pastime. As was examining every inch of his Facebook wall. Happy to claim somebody, I was hardly concerned if he was
that
somebody, and ignored the faraway looks he sometimes got. Besides, a stared-at BlackBerry never vibrates or whatever. If I was out there looking all the damn time, I'd probably never stop long enough to find someone. In my head that sounded all feministy and liberated and logical.

Hiding behind a brief smile, I considered what to say to the little old man sitting in front me with the potbelly and splayed knees. He was waiting patiently for whatever answer I was searching for. How exactly does one look for a husband? Is there an educational game I should've gotten for Christmas instead of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Who's got time to find Machu Picchu when there's a man on the loose?

If I had screamed, “YES, yes. A thousand times yes!” would I be better for it or worse? Of course I wanted someone of the male variety, a husband even, to help get rid of the lonelies, but hadn't I just gotten to the looking point? Or was it the tipping point? Even after reading Dex's copy of Malcolm Gladwell in four metro rides, I still didn't know the answer to that. So J.C. got the response I usually saved for family things. “I'm just way too busy. I'm trying to be a super star right now. Career stuff, you know?” It's hard to imagine three more ridiculous sentences in the history of speech. I'd either just sledgehammered more nails in the coffin of educated-while-black relationships or slugged a grand slam for the home team.