Stranger Danger

Once upon a time fourteen year old me was up at Eastern Market buying incense and oils for my uncle. I was at one of the vendor's stands looking for the specific one my uncle wanted when this dude standing next to me suggested one I should buy. I told him it wasn't for me, that I didn't wear that stuff and that I was just getting something for my uncle..."but thanks anyway." So then the guy asked me what I was buying. I told him. He asked what he should get. I told him I didn't know because I don't wear that stuff.

Normally, I don't talk to people I don't know. Hell, I don't really talk to people that I do know. It's a survival mechanism for living in the city. But this dude looked like a mix of Suge Knight and Terry Crews (Damon from Friday After Next). He was about 6'6, bald and looked like he picked up cars for a living. His voice sounded like thunder and I swear to God he looked like a minotaur. You tend to be nice to people who physically can beat the hell out of you and mentally look like they're one line of coke away from going on a stabbing spree.

So I'm thinking to myself, "Is this nigga on drugs? Does he want money or something? Why the hell does he keep talking to me?" I paid for the stuff and went on about my business. I get like two blocks away and I hear someone yell out, "Yo main man!" Oh hell, just keep walking. But you can't ignore that Darth Vader voice. "Yo main man!" The ground shook. The birds in the trees all flew away. He runs up to me and tells me that he bought the same thing I got. "Okay. That's good." I start walking. Then he tells me the guy let him sample something new and asked me if I wanted to smell it. "Uh...no." So then he gets in front of me and is like, "Hold up man, let me talk to you for a second." I think to myself.

This nigga bout to rob me. Damn!

Instead, his voice goes from Zeus to Antoine Merriweather (David Alan Grier) from Men on Film, "You wanna go home with me?"

...

The people in my head held a meeting:

Time out! Everybody bring it in. Okay look, this nigga is a foot taller than us and his arms are eight times more biceptier than ours. Anyone think we can take him? No? Okay. We need to be nice to him then. What's the chances of us outrunning him? No chance in hell? Okay. Using our peripheral vision, does anybody see anything we can hit this nigga with? No loose bricks, branches, or large rocks? Shit. Okay we're running out of time. What if we just say no really politely? Okay, we'll do that but if that doesn't work the backup plan is to break one of these little oil bottles and stab him in the eyes and then the throat. Good luck everybody.

"You wanna go home with me?" Clutching the little oil bottle in my hand, I said, "Oh naw, I'm good man. But thanks." I continued walking. As predicted, he thought I was playing hard to get and started telling me that he drove a Mercedez and had a bunch of movies back at his place that I might like. It was like a ghetto version of "The Way You Make Me Feel" video except instead of someone whose ass you could easily kick like Michael Jackson, it was Deebo. Then he asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was in high school and in a surprising turn of events he said, "How old are you?" When I told him I was fourteen he said, "Oh, you too young for me." And he walked away.

The moral of today's story is two-fold. First, not all gay men are pedophiles. That's an unfair bigoted train of thought. Second, always carry some kind of make-shift weapon with you because you never know.

 

Shooting Two

It finally happened.

We were in the store when my daughter decided to have a nervous breakdown and act a damn fool...and in the worst possible place, Nordstrom. All of the pseudo-bourgeois people just stopped in their tracks. It was like the scene in every Western where someone walks into the saloon. The guy playing piano near the escalators stopped playing and all eyes were on me.

The White people were fixated on me probably thinking, "He better not strike that child. I will call the police right now." The Black people were looking at me like, "You better represent! Beat that girl's ass, you know we don't let kids fall out in the store." My daughter fouled me with no time left on the clock and now I was shooting two to win the game, but which team was I on?

Pre-parenthood I watched kids go crazy in the store and usually the response from the parents went along party lines. Most Black people beat the hell outta their kids to the point that it started looking less like discipline and more like a lynching. Most White people either ignored the kid or tried to reason with them which just made me wonder how long it'd be before the kid would be beating their ass in the future. I'll admit it was a pretty ignorant way to dichotomize parenting, but I was young and didn't know any better.

So fast forward to the present and my darling child has put me under the ire of the Nordstromites. I was tempted to beat the hell outta her, but all I kept thinking about was breakfast. She had a sippy cup in one hand and an apple in the other. She chewed up some of the apple and then took her sticky disgusting hand to put the pre-chewed apple in my mouth. All the while she's saying "Yum!" Then she semi-waterboarded me by shoving the sippy cup of water in my mouth to wash down the apple.

That's how we get down in our house. Back before she had teeth, we chewed up food for her and gave it to her. She saw that I wasn't eating anything and she wanted to share, and just how I would say "Yum" to her and put food in her mouth, she did the same to me. She was looking out for me because that's her subconscious way of loving me. That kind of innocent love doesn't go away in the three hours that transpired between breakfast and walking through Nordstrom. She's upset about something and hitting her as a knee-jerk reaction to my embarrassment just didn't feel right.

I did what I never thought I'd do, I knelt down to her level and gave her a kiss on the forehead and said, "I love you. I don't know why you're upset but you can't yell and kick and scream. Everything is gonna be okay." I gave her a hug and another kiss and we continued our walk through the store. I'd like to say that she quieted down and that the Full House moment was enough, but I'd be lying. She hollered even more and this Black woman gave me a look like she sincerely felt betrayed. My daughter yelled all the way to the car and before we made it out of the garage she was asleep. Apparently that's what was wrong all along. When she woke up at home, I gave her some potato chips. She chewed one up and fed it to me.

I love you too.

It's A Celebration!

I was a strange little boy. My favorite thing to do when I was six years old was count money and make lists of things I'd buy when I grew up. I imagined that I'd be rich and make about a thousand dollars a month. I used to break out my notebook paper and Mickey Mouse calculator and total up all of my future expenses. I was gonna live in a nice place so rent would be about $100 a month and my car note would be $50. I dedicated a whole $100 to my wife. Yep, back then I knew that I was gonna get married. In fact, I spent my whole childhood trying to perfect the craft of being a good husband.

I wanted to hit the ground running. I had a surplus of bad examples, and I said I'd be different. The funny thing is, it's hard trying to find a wife when you're under 18. Girls used to always tell me that I would make a good husband but a horrible boyfriend. That's code for, "you're too nice." I didn't see the point of treating girls like shit just to get them to like me. That reverse psychology thing was for kids and I was 17 going on 30. I decided to just pick an HBCU and meet a girl like the ones like I saw on A Different World. In fact that was my only motivation for going to college...find a wife.

I picked a school in the South because I heard southern women could cook and considering the AIDS rate in DC, I needed to go to a more wholesome place. Damn was I wrong. There were so many skeezers running around my school. I remember reading an article in the school newspaper my freshman year. We had the highest turnout for a blood drive in the school's history and yet they had to trash 60% of it because of STDs. Finding the woman I'd been El Debarging for all these years was gonna be difficult. (El Debarge= All This Love is Waiting for You...Love in a Special Way)

Anyway...I'd just gotten out of a relationship and had pretty much just decided to King Jaffe Joffer it up (sewing my royal oats) when I had a Prince Akeem moment. It's the corniest thing in the world, but I literally found myself lost in her eyes. They were like these big pools of mahogany and I couldn't stop staring at her. It was as if time itself had stopped and we were the only two people in the room. One long three hour phone conversation and I knew that I was gonna marry that girl. Three months later,

I had seriously been planning my entire marriage from the time I was six years old. I thought about gifts, I thought about spontaneity, I looked at all the failed marriages in the adults that I knew and I tried to imagine not the perfect woman, but the perfect woman for me. I have a shit load of flaws and I used to write em down and figure out what traits my wife would need to have in order to complement them. After fourteen years of that kind of thinking, you know the minute that you meet it. It doesn't take a whole day to recognize sunshine, so when I met my wife, I put a ring on that quick.

Nine years later, we're still together. I still feel complete and I still feel like I found the perfect complement to all of my flaws. And thirty years ago, today, she was born. So while she's probably somewhere dreading turning thirty like most women do, I'm ecstatic that the fates conspired to have her born at exactly the right place and right time so that all of the random coincidental events of our lives could push us in a seemingly random directions that would cause our paths to collide and bring to fruition every dream that I could have or will ever have.

In short (which I probably should have began with)...
Happy Birthday. Your presence is the greatest present I could ever receive.

Michigan J Frog

My daughter is a year and eight months old today. She can navigate an iPod and iPad with no issue. She knows which songs she wants to hear by looking at the album cover art. She can spell two or three words, count to twenty and has been doing amazingly advanced things for the past three or four months...

And I have no proof of it.

Like that frog on Looney Toons, she won't do any of it outside of the house. Every time I try to get it on camera she shuts down. Today she was in the house spelling.

S-T-O-P, stop! S-T-O-P, stop!
P-O-T-T-Y, potty, potty!

I pull out my phone to record it and what does she do?

Apple?
Milk?
P-P-L-K-Z, Car!

So now I look like a dumb ass. A couple of months ago, she was running around the house singing James Brown and Michael Jackson songs.
"Baby Baby baby, baby baby baby. Ow. Good god!"

It's adorable. It's the kind of stuff that gets you on TV...and in other words, it's the kind of stuff that gets us some money. It's exploitable. LOL

I put up a camera on the bookshelf and tried to get her to do it. She started crying. I turn off the camera and she starts singing again. She's screwing with me!

My friends came over and did the "You gave a baby a iPod for Christmas!" look. I handed it to her and said, "Watch this." She sat there playing with the settings app. They left, and she started singing the sesame street theme before cutting it on and finding that song.

I guess she's saying, "You won't get rich off me."

Brother to Brother

I wrote about "the talk" (sex) the other day but there's another important talk that little Black boys get that's equally important. There isn't really a name for it, it's just the "what it means to be a Black man" talk. You hear little snippets of it all the time when you're young: "A Black man gotta work twice as hard to get half as far." In my mind, that was just the pledge of allegiance for the old men at the barbershop. A lot of the people in my grandmother's neighborhood were White and everyone at my mother's job was White and all of them were nice and friendly towards me. Then I hit puberty.

Now I won't lie and say that those people treated me differently, because they didn't. What did change was the way I was approached by strangers. Pre-puberty everyone greets you like your some kind of chocolate cherubim. Post puberty, you're a threat. I started growing a mustache when I was ten. I couldn't understand why people crossed the street when they saw me coming or quickly looked the other way whenever I made eye contact. Most importantly, I couldn't understand why the police always slowed down when they passed me and would shine the light on me.

Luckily my elementary school sent the guys to the "Brother to Brother" conference at Howard University. It was a one day "Intro to being a Black man." They explained the crime rate, the hard facts that most crime in DC is committed by us and that with puberty comes the unfortunate fact that you now fit the description of every suspect in the city. They talked to us about how to talk to police. Be respectful and answer their questions and whatever you do, don't run away or make sudden movements towards your pockets. Be conscious of your surroundings and don't walk too close or too fast near women, especially White women after dark.There were other things discussed that day like going to college and setting goals, avoiding crime and gangs, but the thing about the cops and walking behind women stuck with me the most.

It would all prove useful in the months ahead. That's it for today class. Tomorrow we'll examine the hilarious tale of Ordale's first few experiences nearly being arrested by the police.

 

 

Kokomo?

My birthday is in four months and I'm still trying to find something to do to ring in the big 3-0. I want to rent a beach house for me and fam but having a birthday so close to the Fourth of July makes that venture extremely expensive. Plus I don't want just any beach, it has to be someplace with clear water. I grew up staring at the Potomac River so brown water doesn't interest me. I've only been to two beaches in my life. One was in The Grand Caymans and the other was Sandy Point beach.

Sandy Point beach is the equivalent of going swimming in a wastewater treatment facility. They say I was stung by six jellyfish, but personally I think I caught scabies in the water. I never actually got to get in the water in The Grand Caymans because cleaning crew on the cruise ship, Amistad, that took us there misplaced my trunks, sandals and anything else I would've used to go swimming.

For my 30th I want to make amends. I just want to sit on a private beach somewhere and watch the tide roll in as the sun rises on the greatest day of the year. My daughter and I have the same birthday so it'll be nice to say that she was able to do at two, what I couldn't do until I was thirty.

Here's hoping.

Birds, Bees and Dreams Deferred

As my daughter gets older I find myself eyeing every man that walks by and stares too long. She's a year and eight months but my mind is years in the future thinking about all the guns I'll need to set up around the house. I keep wondering when exactly we need to have "the talk" with her. I tried to think back over my own childhood and after reflecting on the talks that I got, NONE of those will work.

My first talk came when I was about five. I saw something on TV where the kid asked the parents about sex and the whole audience laughed. I had no clue what the joke was, but trying to be funny I raised the same question in the living room one day. "How many of yall are having sex?" That prompted my mother to take me to the Martin Luther King Library where she checked out a book called "Where Babies Come From." She gave me the book, told me to read it and to let her know if I had any questions.

The book used chickens as examples and it talked about the rooster impregnating the hen and a chick hatching from the egg. For about two months I thought my mother got pregnant by a rooster and I hatched from one of the eggs in the fridge. Then I was in Sunday School one day and they talked about the immaculate conception. I stated that babies came from chickens and the teacher corrected me saying that the Holy Spirit got Mary pregnant. I thought that applied to me, so for a couple of months I was going around telling people that God was my father. Because of the wording of that statement, no one corrected me. "Yes, God is everyone's father."

It wasn't until I was in school one day and proudly telling everyone that my mother was a virgin that a teacher pulled me to the side and told me to stop telling people that. It just so happened that one day I was looking through a book called "The Science Book" for science fair project ideas when I came across a section in the book about babies. I was about seven or eight. It was extremely graphic in explaining the actual act of copulation. So I read it and then I asked my grandmother if what I read was true.

She had me read the book to her at the kitchen table and then she asked me if I had any questions. I had a bunch. My first was, "It says that it swells with blood and becomes hard. Does that hurt?" She told me that it did. My next question, "It says that the hymen tears. Does that hurt a lot?" Her reply: "Everything about sex hurts. If it doesn't hurt you physically it destroys you mentally. It's the worst thing you can do to a woman. Half of these old no-good niggas lay up next to these women and mess up both of their lives. Then the women too stupid to realize that the man aint no good and go running after him all the time. Just a bunch of tramps. It's just bad! If you care anything about a woman or yourself, you avoid having sex at all costs. You look at half the adults around you and I bet you that if they aint done nothing with their lives it's because of sex and having children that they weren't ready for."

So at eight years old I decided upon a life of celibacy. You know what? Now that I think about it, I might go with that version of the talk with my daughter after all.