Dapper Carter's 8 Rules of Dating (12 page)

“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 8
^th
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).

Everyone in Newark had a Muslim attribute that they
went by, except for me, Khalil Khalil (so nice you had to name him twice)
Wilson, and Caesar Lord Baltimore Jenkins. We played the dozens like we were twelve
years old still. That was our thing and we cracked on one another every chance
we would get.

Khalil was always the warm-up, being a much easier
target and not possessing the skills to be a championship level cracker (not a
white person).

“Khalil, your momma is so stupid that when she
finished filling out her job application and it said SIGN HERE, she wrote
Pisces,” Caesar started.

“I didn’t know hos had to fill out job
applications.”  I said.

“Caesar, your mama is so stupid that at the end of
the job application where it says DO NOT WRITE BELOW THE LINE, she wrote
Okay
!”

“Your girl is so ugly that she looks like she fell
out the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down!”

“Caesar’s girl is so fat that when she wears heels,
she strikes oil!” Khalil said.

“That isn’t a diss. Caesar likes them fat now.” 
I chimed in.

“Since when?”

“Not fat, just healthy. Those salad-eating bitches
are out. It’s about some weight nowadays.”

“You? Shallow Hal? Elaborate.”

“Gladly. I was with this bigger girl the other
night…”

“How big?” Khalil asked.

“Size ten or twelve.”

“That’s big?” I questioned.

“Compared to your ex-wife, yeah. Anyway, this chick
was big enough that I could just lie out across her. Like a sofa. That’s where
I came up with my new rating system.”

 We all were intrigued so everyone stopped what
they were doing in order to give this fool our full attention.

"Furniture," he said.

Khalil and I both had a lot of trouble wrapping our
heads around that one, but we knew he would expound. I've always maintained
that Caesar had a unique point of view and as usual he didn't disappoint. He
had an incredible sensibility about him that was so simplistic. It worked for
him and the way he lived his life.

"You see, if she's a sofa, she's the perfect size,
eight to ten. A loveseat is a six to eight. I'll even do a futon once in a
while, although they’re starting to get a little small. But recliners and
ottomans are a little too tiny and they get thrown back."

"Well, what's too big?"

"Anything over a twelve is a sectional, and
that's too big!"

We laughed it off as we had become accustomed to;
however, Caesar was about to bless us with some more of his barbershop wisdom until
Khalil brazenly shifted the attention over to my dating predicament and me.

"So, I heard you've gone over to the white
side!"

"Don't start!"

"Black women deserve a Black man," Khalil
said. You could just see Caesar's bushy eyebrows furrow and his lips twist. I
knew what he was going to say, and so did Khalil I'm sure.

"Fuck them stuck-up, angry bitches. They don't
deserve a strong Black man. At least the white girls acknowledge that
we
are the true strength, power, and beauty of what a man represents."

"I admit, some of us are. But some of us ain't
shit either."

"Of all the Black men that are gay..." Caesar
paused and cut his eyes at Khalil. He always did that whenever the subject of
homosexuality came up, for some reason. That in turn elicits the response from
Khalil asking Caesar why he looks at him whenever he says that.

“I’m not gay.”

"We know," Caesar said.

He always said "we know" tongue in cheek. I
could tell he really wanted to say, "Yeah, right."  

“Like I started to say, with all of the Black men
that are gay, in jail, on drugs, or dead, you’d think they'd give us some
respect. As children the Black male was raised primarily by a single female, so
he was brought up to be submissive in a white society. She thinks she is
protecting her son from his white counterpart, but she is actually emasculating
him.”  You could hear a pin drop as Caesar dropped pearls of wisdom on the
shop.  The barbers even stopped cutting in order to give him their full
attention. 

“Preach.”  Big Mohammed belched with his
baritone voice.  He was a man of few words and even fewer syllables. 

“She raised her daughter to be strong, independent
and not take any shit.  Subconsciously the Black female feels the need to
challenge or continually change the Black male to fit her standards, thus
protecting us from ourselves.