B-Sides and Remixes, page 11
“I’m a grown man, and she’s a grown woman, and frankly that’s all I’m going to say about that.”
Denise nods. “Personally, I couldn’t care either way, but it’s my job to get to the bottom of all of this. So from what you’re telling me, you’re not going to deny the fact that Roxanne was telling the truth. Well, that just means you’ll have to write a retraction on your last entry, and we’ll have to see if we can go ahead wrap all of this up.”
“A retraction?” I respond. “You want me validate her story to the world? I’m not going to do that.”
“Validate her story?” Denise says. “Apparently her story is the truth and yours is just some fluff you threw together to fool our readers.”
My breathing quickens. “I’m not the bad guy here. Isn’t there anything to say about privacy? I mean, I may as well take the readers into the bathroom with me while I’m at it.”
Denise begins to shake her head. “Cool, you’re missing the point here. Soul Sista is not concerned with your sex life or anything that intrudes on your personal space. Our bottom line is that you lied. Now our credibility is on the line. If we have one columnist spinning fictions, then where does that leave us with how readers perceive the rest of our content?”
“Come on,” I say exasperated. “Even people on the forums agree with me.”
“Yeah, I heard about the Michael Baisden Show. And while that is all fine and good, Rachel, the editor-in-chief, is taking the position that we need to cover our asses in behind all of this.”
“And leave my ass out in the wind in the process,” I say.
The server reappears with our orders, but now my appetite is beginning to wane.
“You know,” I continue, “I can’t write a retraction. I’m not going to give everyone the pleasure of knowing my confidential business. I understand where you guys are coming from—and I respect your positions—but I have to be true to myself on this one.”
Denise places her fork down on the table. “My boss is not going to like that. She’s likely to scrap the column and issue a statement on your behalf anyway.”
I push my plate away from me. I’m no longer hungry, and I’m clueless as to why we are doing all of this over lunch, Jerry Maguire-style. I look her dead in her eyes and say, “Do you really hate me that much?”
She stares back at me incredulously. “Don’t be so self-righteous, Cool. This is all business.”
I signal the server for my ticket.
“Business?” I respond, as the server hands me the ticket for the table. I pay for both of our meals and stand up.
“Sir, would you like a doggy bag?” the server asks me.
My pride won’t let me say yes.
As the server walks away thanking me for the tip, I look down at Denise.
“You’re right. This is all business. So you’ll have to excuse me while I get back to taking care of mine.”
She doesn’t say anything as I leave her at the table with two giant burritos and an empty chair.
20
If it weren’t for the step team, J and I would probably have never become friends. He was a lanky brother from Chicago, and I was a very average guy from a small place in Mississippi that few people had ever heard of, that is unless they were Civil War buffs. The step team was probably the only way you would find the mix-match pair of us interacting in any meaningful way.
We were both stepping for our freshman step team and were glad to be in the last nine guys standing after tryouts for the team ended. We both stayed in Hubert Hall, but on different floors. Back then, each floor had its own swagger, so my floor was considered the Book Worm floor, while J’s floor was considered Playa Central. Ironically, his floor produced the valedictorian for our graduating class, and a guy from my floor went on to become a porn star in Van Nuys, California.
J was one of the few people on our team who’d actually been a part of a step team before coming to college, so he was an obvious choice for the team when the upperclassmen held tryouts. I, on the other hand, was not the most obvious pick for reasons I would only discover after I joined the team.
Yes, I had a sense of rhythm, largely the by-product of my younger days as the resident Michael Jackson impersonator for my family, but it takes much more than a sense of rhythm to be a stepper. It takes conditioning, balance, precision, energy, enthusiasm, a level commitment rarely used outside of organized team sports, and a beast-like rawness that must be summoned upon command at the drop of a dime—even if your lungs are burning so hard from exhaustion that you think they will explode into a million tiny pieces of pink pulp.
But the main reason I wasn’t as obvious a choice is because I was too regular. At 5’10 and 150 pounds, there wasn’t a lot about me that would stand out on a stage with eight other guys. As I would later learn, the most dynamic-looking steppers tended to be the really hefty brothers or the really small brothers—or, on occasion, that one tall, skinny dude (like J) who was always sticking out his tongue and giving the girls the “I will lick you cross-eyed” look. The thing about the heftier brothers is that no one expects them to be able to keep up with the rest of the group—not on an intense show—so often times the big guy will just stand onstage looking out of place. But this is a ruse, because as soon as the step show comes to his part, he will set it out like nobody’s business and bring down the house. In the years since I stepped, both Greek and non-Greek, I’ve seen this technique used repeatedly, always successfully. The same thing goes for the smaller brother, who can often be overlooked on the stage and sometimes thought of as too slight to make much of an impact. But time and time again I have seen smaller brothers step harder and with more energy than everyone else. When this happens, people tend to go ape shit. One time I even saw a smaller brother step so hard that be actually broke one of the boards on the stage.
But I was neither big nor small—nor even lanky. I was just one of the standard looking steppers who helped those other guys to stand out even more. But to my credit, there were more of us than of them—as it should be. Clearly, everyone can’t be Michael Jordan.
Our team didn’t win the big show that year, but J and I became best friends. It turns out that we were both business majors, too, although neither of us had taken a course in our major yet. We also did a lot of our female scoping together, moving back and forth between Clark Atlanta and Spelman with comfort and ease. We were wingmen for the other and when we finished freshman year, we got an apartment together in Smyrna. We both kept a rotating door for women we dated, but when I met Rhonda all of that changed.
J didn’t trust her off the bat, and that bothered me. I was so into her that when he told me that I shouldn’t take myself off the market for her (in essence, that I could do much better), I stopped speaking to him for two weeks. I even considered moving out of the apartment altogether. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that I didn’t have enough money to cover all of the rent for a new apartment by myself.
I stayed, but I told him that Rhonda was my girl, and he would just have to respect it. After that, he never made a bad comment about her again. Even when Rhonda and I broke up and he had every single opportunity to gloat and rub it my face, he didn’t say a word. He just asked me if I was going to be okay and offered to take me to Little Nikki’s Strip Club to help me get over my pain and anguish.
That’s when I knew we would be friends for life.
I’ll never forget the advice he gave me that night. “Relationships are like B-sides and remixes,” he had said.
I laughed. “Is that some kind of Forrest Gump-type wisdom?”
“Not even,” he responded. “If women were like records, you’d only see the A-side—the side they wanted you to see. But if you stuck around long enough, you might see the B-Side and the changes that go along with having both sides out there.”
I nodded my head, but I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about at the time, nor did I care. I was still feeling the pain in my chest from Rhonda’s stilettos marching up and down my body. As I started dating on the rebound, what J said started to make more sense. After a few weeks of going out with a woman, the B-Side would come out and put an end to the fun and the newness of it all. But rather than hope I’d find a woman with a nice B-Side, I just felt content to stay on the A-Side. If shit got too heavy, I’d just change records. Plus, I needed to focus on getting other aspects of my life together, things like my cash flow.
At that time I didn’t know that J and I would both end up with jobs on Wall Street or that we would ever open a business together in Harlem. Growing up in Mississippi, my plans for the future had been far more conservative than that, and I don’t think I would have ventured to dream that big if J hadn’t had my back the whole time.
Now as I consider how fucked up the situation will become with Soul Sista, I wonder if it’s really possible that I may have single-handedly sunk our fledgling business.
It makes me think about Bill Clinton’s impeachment. They can say it was all about his lying under oath, but we all know that the reason Congress came down on him like a trapeze artist who missed the bar was because he got his dick sucked AND got caught. And while I wasn’t under oath, the editors at the magazine have clearly decided that they have absolutely no interest in standing by me. I guess I can’t totally blame them, but I would think that all of these people discussing me could be something that they could play up in a positive and productive way and not just an “it stinks so run from it as fast as we can” kind of way.
I know that J is going to stand behind me on this, but I hate that I even have to put him through any of this. He definitely didn’t sign on for it. Neither did I, for that matter.
Still, I just can’t roll over and play dead on my dream.
I don’t know exactly how I can make things right, but I know that I don’t plan on sitting on my ass and allowing my fate to be determined by other people. That was never part of the plan, and I refuse to start incorporating any of that nonsense right now.
21
There’s a message on the table in the back of the store telling me that Rhonda called, and while I’m curious to find out what she wants, I know I need to talk to J and Ray-Ray first.
I call an emergency meeting and put a “Will Return in an Hour” sign on the front door before locking it.
As the three of us head to the back of the shop and gather around the small folding table that functions as our de facto conference room, I tell them about what happened at my lunch meeting with Denise and how I think there’ll be some fallout in behind my Roxanne journal entry.
“Why don’t you just do the retraction? You could just say that you were trying to be respectful of Roxanne and everything. You two were clearly consenting adults, and with that comes a code of discretion. I doubt if anyone would hang you out to dry on something that basic,” J offers.
I nod, wanting to believe him. “What do you think, Ray-Ray?”
Normally, Ray-Ray wouldn’t be a part of these meetings, but because of his knowledge of what the word on the streets is, I can’t avoid leaving him out of the loop now. I can tell that he’s happier than a kid in a candy store, too. This is probably the moment he’s been waiting for since we hired him nearly eight months ago.
He leans in as if he’s one of the delegated captains of a crime family. “I don’t know, Cool. Most everyone thinks you blew your chance with that dancing chick. And I think that you would be crazy retarded to think of riding anything out with that ol’ girl Roxanne. You know how many dudes done run up through there. At least you can say that you done hit something that’s been beat out the frame by some famous niggas.”
“Damn,” J says.
I quickly interject. “Ray-Ray, I’m talking about the magazine. What are your thoughts about the magazine?”
I’m still a little thrown off by his comment, but I’m desperate to refocus all of our collective attention to the problem at hand, which in my mind is Soul Sista, not Rochelle. But maybe I’m fooling myself. I look at Ray-Ray, hoping the next thing he says is more relevant than the last.
“It’s just one mag. It’s not like you’re being blacklisted across the industry. If you don’t feel like you owe a motherfucking cripple crab a crutch, then I would shoot them the deuces. I’d be like ‘Peace!’ I’m just saying. You could blog your own shit by this point. Folks that care will find you. Those that don’t care, well you know.”
Up until this moment I’ve never even considered the prospect of taking control of my own story outside of the Soul Sista website.
“What do you think about me doing my own site, J?” I ask.
He lifts one eyebrow as he mulls this over.
“What are you thinking, dude?” I ask.
“I’m thinking that Ray-Ray might be on to something, but there’re a number of other factors you might want to consider.”
“Like what?”
“This thing could easily blow over in a week or two, and people would forget that any of this even happened or that it was you who was involved in any of this,” J says. “Then the flipside is if you actually keep the blog going, putting all of your business out in the streets like that, at what point would you actually stop? Would you just keep going until you met a woman and decided to get married?”
Hearing J say that aloud makes me realize just how absurd some of the implications are. I keep reminding myself of what Angie said: They are pimping you. Would I not be pimping myself at this point though?
I shrug. At this point I just don’t know anything anymore, but one thing becomes clear: I will have to let some of this marinate on my brain before I commit to a course of action. Maybe if I sit still long enough, the best course of action will come into view.
I thank both J and Ray-Ray for their suggestions, and we wrap up the meeting. As we change the sign on the front door and reopen the store, I’m surprised to see a familiar face standing next to the door.
As soon as our eyes meet, I know that things are not about to get better any time soon.
It’s been nearly two weeks since I saw her, and she’s easily just as dazzling as she was the moment I first laid eyes on her. This time, however, she’s not wearing a black mini-dress. She’s dressed in form-fitting jeans and a baby tee that says Harlem Diva.
“Sarah,” I say.
“Cool,” she responds. “Got a minute?”
There’s a little boy inside of me that wants to just break ship and run, but the rest of me needs a sense of closure, if that’s what it’s going to be. After all, this beautiful woman has been waiting a long time to hear from me, and she’s done everything that anyone has ever asked her to do with regard to this situation.
We step out of the store and start down the sidewalk.
“How have you been?” I start.
“It’s been going,” she offers.
I nod, unsure if she wants me to take the lid off of things first or if she wants to unleash her thoughts, minus my interference.
We walk for another half a block not really speaking, so I start. “What are your thoughts?”
She looks at me out the corners of her eyes. “You mean about us or about you and that other girl?”
“Both,” I say.
“Well, what you did with someone else doesn’t really concern me. But if you were looking to add me as another notch to your belt, then you’re sorely mistaken.”
“I wasn’t even thinking that,” I say.
She stops cold and turns to face me. “Cool, you really made a fool out of me, didn’t you? Here I am thinking that you were this really nice guy, the kind of guy that a sista could grow with, maybe build something with, but you turned out to be just like every other guy. And while that really shouldn’t mean a lot to me, my friends and family were following your blog, waiting to see how things would go with us, and then you dog me like this.”
“I didn’t dog you like anything. We had a great evening together before all of this mess happened. I didn’t plan any of this stuff. I was just going with the flow.”
“You were just being a ho,” she says.
I laugh. “So I’m a ho because I had a one night stand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes? Miss ‘I would rock your world if you didn’t have to write about it’?”
“That’s not fair,” she says. “I was flirting.”
“Yeah, maybe. But I didn’t judge you because of it.” I rub my fingers across my temples. “You know, Sarah, I really think you’re a beautiful woman with a wonderful personality. You’re definitely the kind of woman I would’ve asked out—even if this Soul Sista thing never happened—and I can understand why you’re upset. I can’t even blame you, if I am being real here. I wish there was something that I could say to change everything that’s happened, to roll back the clock, to give us a chance to see what could really happen with this situation if we didn’t have all of these outside factors at work.”
She looks at me, her face solemn and unchanged.
“Does that sound like something that you would like to try?” I ask, looking into her eyes, hoping to capture any connection that we might have had at any point prior to the Rochelle situation.
She shakes her head weakly. “You know I can’t do that.”
“You can’t or you won’t?”
She shakes her head. “No matter what would happen between us, this would always be the beginning of our relationship, this funky situation, and I can’t have that. I don’t think it would be good for either of us.”
I sigh. “So this is it, then?”
“It has to be,” she says.
“Well,” I offer, “I’m sorry to have even put you through this.”
“Yeah,” she responds. “But I’m a strong woman. Trust. I’ll be quite all right.”
I lean in to hug her goodbye, but she steps back from me. I nod.
