One of my favorite movies when I was growing up was Strictly Business, that flick with Tommy Davidson and that dude from the Cosby Show. More importantly, it was the movie that presented Halle Berry to the world as “Natalie,” the 90’s version of the video vixen.
I guess one of the things that appealed to me the most about the movie was that the nerdy guy became cool and got the girl. How contrived the plot was and how rushed the sequence of events was didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was that a square, like me, could wind up with the pretty girl.
Growing up, I had arms like pipe cleaners and weighed barely a buck soaked and wet. It took years and a lot of milk and exercising to get to my current physique. I was never the fastest kid on the playground or the strongest person at the gym, but for some reason I took to school like a fish to water. The only thing about high school was that the better I did in the classroom, the lamer I was to everyone else. It wasn’t until I got to Morehouse that being the bookish type of brother proved to be to my advantage. And by that time, there were hundreds of Natalies throughout the Atlanta University Center vying for attention. The only thing that was missing was the multimillion-dollar Savoy Towers deal to save the day.
All of this rushes to the front of my mind as soon as I set eyes on Roxanne, my third and final date. We’re standing in front of a swanky little restaurant that caters to the local Harlem buppie population, and she’s wearing a hot red dress, her long hair falling in curls onto her shoulders. Her body is bodacious in a way that seems almost exaggerated. I feel strange standing next to her. It feels as if she’s a three-dimensional super heroine and I am just a mere mortal. For some strange reason, I sense she would be the woman drawn to a professional athlete and not a fledgling entrepreneur like myself.
As we shake hands, I find my eyes unable to avoid spying her legs and hips, her small waist and flat stomach, and of course those voluptuous breasts. Her caramel skin and cat-like eyes add to the exotic allure of her aura. To put it bluntly, she looks like a video vixen. She’s the quintessential Natalie, more than Halle ever was.
As we take our seats in the back of the restaurant, I try to push all of this out of my mind. Roxanne deserves a fair shake, just like Sarah and Taylor.
There’s still some sunlight outside, and the clock on the wall reads seven-fifteen. It could be that the extra lighting makes her make-up even more pronounced.
“I been waiting forever to get with you,” she starts.
“Oh really?” I answer. “Why’s that?”
“I’m not trying to diss these other chicks, but I knew when I seen you that we was supposed to be together. And I got up this morning and read my horoscope, and you know what it had said?”
“No,” I answer, still unable to shake the “I seen you” part of her comment.
“It had said that my life was about to change for the better.”
“For real?” I say, glancing around the room. There must be a camera in here somewhere, although I figure I’m way too common to be “punk’d.”
“Whatchu looking for?” she asks.
“Oh, I thought I heard someone call my name. That’s all.”
“Oh, okay,” she says, glancing at her fingernails. “Sometimes I be thinking that someone is calling my name and it ain’t nobody. But one day, I won’t be able to go nowhere without folks being like, ‘That’s Roxanne! Heyyyyy!’”
I nod. I am momentarily at a loss for words. Finally, I say, “So you want to be famous?”
“Well, I’m already a actress, small roles right now though. I also did a few videos. So I guess I’m kinda famous already, but I really want to be more famous. Know what I mean?”
“Okay,” is all I can muster. “So what made you want to go on this date?”
“It’s like you was a cutie already, but I know this is also like reality television, too, except there ain’t no television. I figure it could be like knocking out two birds with one stone.”
One of my eyebrows arches involuntarily. “So you’re more concerned about me writing about you than you are about trying to make a connection with me?”
Sensing that things are going south, I see her shift uncomfortably in her chair. “Naw,” she says. “I’m really feelin’ you. I’m just the kind of chick that’s straight up. I’m direct. I speak my mind.”
“So what do you want to see happen tonight?”
“I figure we could get something to eat—and talk, you know? And if you feel like it, we could go back to my place and see how things go from there.”
While I had considered the possibility of one of my dates wanting to get intimate on our first date, I never could have predicted the bluntness that Roxanne was putting on the table right now.
“Why don’t we just take everything a step at a time?”
She smiles weakly. “Yeah, that’s what I meant, you know? Let’s just see how it goes. But know that I’m already feeling you, so it’s more on you than it is on me.”
We order. This time I order a seafood cioppino, a tomato-based stew of shellfish, shrimp, and calamari poured over a bed of linguine. Roxanne orders a filet mignon and a lobster tail. Yes, tonight we will actually exhaust the per diem given to me by Soul Sista.
“So tell me about your store?” she says, sipping on a glass of chilled white zinfandel.
“We’ve been opened for almost a year—up here in Harlem. Our store is called C&J’s Rare Grooves, and we specialize in carrying soul artists, particularly smaller acts and indies.”
“Like who?” she asks.
“Carmen Rogers, Conya Doss, Eric Roberson, The Foreign Exchange, Donnie, The Fuzz Band, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Jimmie Reign. The list goes on and on. You ever heard of any of them?”
She shakes her head and then stops. “Hold up. Did you say Foreign Exchange? Ain’t that the group that did that song with that girl?” She starts humming the song, and her voice is in pitch-perfect.
“You’re talking about ‘Sincere’ with YahZarah? Yeah, that’s them.”
She starts smiling. “That song is hot! I heard it at one of my girl’s cribs and asked her to make me CD. I just don’t be knowing who these people are, but I know the songs when I hear them.”
I look at her, nodding. “I could put together a list of people for you to check out. Hey, you can even come by the store, and I’d be happy to play some of their music for you.”
She takes another swallow of her zinfandel. “That’s what’s up.”
“So who do you like to listen to?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” she says. “A little bit of everybody.”
I lean forward, urging her to give me a few names.
“I don’t know,” she says again. “Raphael Saadiq, D’Angelo, Lalah Hathaway, India.Arie, Raheem DeVaughn. You know, those kind of people.”
I can feel the awkwardness from earlier lifting. “You ever been to the Capital City Jazz Fest in Columbia, Maryland? They have one every June.”
“Are you serious? I been to the last three. Me and my girls go every year.”
I am now visibly smiling. “So I guess we could have met before. I’ve been going for the past five years.”
She starts chuckling. “Well,” she says, “when I go, I don’t be dressed like this.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“I be going to kick back when I go there, so I ain’t dressing like I’m going on a date. We just be rocking jeans and baby tees—and baseball caps,” she adds. “You can’t get loose when you all did up.”
Now as I look at her, I realize that there’s much more to Roxanne than the exterior she’s presenting to me right now. From the sounds of it, she might actually be my musical soul mate. Still seeing her looking like a cover model for King magazine is straining my ability to make the connection to who she really is.
“You know, you didn’t have to get dressed up for this date. We could have kept this really laid back.”
She smiles, and this time I look beneath her make-up and hair, and I see a sista who is naturally beautiful, but somewhere along the way she realized that she could doll herself out to get much more attention.
“I wanted to make sure that if anyone saw us together, they knew how we did it,” she says.
“I see. Well, let me tell you something,” I say, my tone softening. “What we do is not about what other people think. This is our time. Our chance to get to know each other. Don’t worry about people checking for us. I don’t live my life that way. I just want us to have a good time.”
She looks confused for a moment. “So you woulda rather gone out with the Capital Jazz Fest me?”
“No,” I answer. “I would’ve rather gone out with the real you.”
She holds up her empty glass, and a server appears to refill it. She looks down into the glass, seemingly distraught.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I’m blowing it, right?” she asks, and I am taken aback. This is the most vulnerable she’s appeared all night.
“No, you’re not blowing it,” I say. “In fact, I think you’re a pretty chill woman.”
She lifts her head slowly, attempting to hide her smile.
When our dishes finally arrive, I spend the rest of dinner talking to Rochelle Nichols, not the facade of Roxanne.
We don’t leave the restaurant until just after nine. Rochelle stops walking and places a hand on my shoulder. “Give me a moment,” she says. “These shoes! Ooh. I don’t know if I can keep walking in these things.”
We haven’t walked more than a block. I look at the sidewalk and realize that we’ll have to flag a cab, because I wouldn’t wish walking barefoot on this dirty ass New York sidewalk on my worst enemy.
“Okay,” I say, placing my hand around her waist and moving us back out of the way of pedestrian traffic. Her body is soft, in an alluring way. The irony is that she might’ve looked unreal before, but she feels one hundred percent real now. “Where would you like to go? I’ll get us a cab.”
She exhales as she considers this. “We can go back to my place so I can change.”
I don’t know if this is an extension of her bedroom invitation from earlier, but the strain in her face seems real—and we obviously won’t be getting very far down any street in this city if her feet are hurting.
“Okay,” I respond.
I escort her to the corner and hail down the next cab. As we take our seats in the back, the cab driver asks, “So where to?”
I look at Rochelle. She looks at me without saying a word. Then she turns to face the driver. “Flatbush Avenue,” she says.
Damn, I think to myself.
We’re headed all the way to Brooklyn.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Brooklyn.
I love the people, the neighborhoods, the flavor. But I live in Harlem, USA, which is almost like another planet. To get to Brooklyn, you have to drive down the BQE or head towards City Hall and take the Brooklyn Bridge across. To put it plainly, we are taking a trek, and when you factor that we are in a cab, that constitutes a trip.
As we speed along in the cab, cutting back and forth between other traffic, I realize that the chances of my getting out of Brooklyn and back to Harlem tonight are slim to none. There just aren’t enough cabs running the distance back and forth between the two places at night. Factor in that we’re dealing with two gentrified neighborhoods known primarily for their high black populations (although the white populations are steadily increasing), and my options for getting home tonight rest solely on my ability to hail a gypsy cab or wait indefinitely for the subway to come through. Or, and I am trying not to focus on this option, I can just wait and catch a cab the next day when the sun rises.
We pull up to an old brownstone apartment building, and I pay the driver. A few of the guys on the block start speaking to Rochelle immediately.
“Damn, shorty! You look so good I’d drank yo bathwater with a crazy straw!” one guy says.
Another one says, “I’d suck yo toes!”
I look at Rochelle, and she only smiles, so I brush off the comments. No need in defending her honor if it’s not being insulted.
I place my hand on the small of her back and escort her through the gate in front of the building, and for a moment I feel like I’m replaying Kid’s date with the “around the way” girl from the movie Class Act.
A guy calls out from behind me. “Man, I’d rob a bank to be you tonight!”
I don’t bother looking back.
She unlocks the door, and I walk in behind her. We take the stairs to the second floor, and as she sways her sexy ass just inches from my face, I realize that I’m more drawn to her than I would’ve admitted earlier. Before she opens the door, she turns to me and says, “You’ll have to excuse my mess. I didn’t expect to be coming back here with a man, so don’t trip if you see things laying around.”
“Well, okay,” I respond, not sure what to make of her comment, given her earlier invitation for me to come back here and apparently see her place like this.
As soon as she opens the door, I immediately understand her warning. There are things everywhere. No food or anything else, for that matter, decomposing on the coffee table or the floor, but there are dresses and shirts on plastic hangers dangling from half-opened doors. Clearly, she must buy clothes that can’t be placed in a dryer. In addition, every other doorknob has a purse hanging from it. The main area of her apartment simply looks like the inside of anyone else’s closet.
On a table across the room is a small pile of hair, which she notices immediately and runs to grab and tuck under her arm before going into her room. “I’ll be right back,” she says, trotting across the floor, her shoes coupled with her purse beneath her other arm.
There is a couch facing a thirty-two inch flat screen television. I take a seat in the center so that I don’t lean on any of the garments she has stretched out over the arms. Picking up the remote control, I flip on the power and scan channels aimlessly until I hear her reappear behind me.
“See anything you like?” she asks.
I start to say, “no,” but I look away from the television and at her in her jeans and snug wife-beater, a simple relaxed-fit baseball cap atop her head. “Well, you’re looking casually fly.”
“Thank you,” she responds. “Let me move some of this stuff. You know, I just wasn’t expecting no company.”
She walks around the couch grabbing stray clothes, and when her arms begin to fill up, I ask if she needs any help. “No, I got it,” she says, toting her load into her bedroom where I assume she is dumping the pile into another pile.
She returns, cascading barefoot across the floor, and I have to admit that she is very cute in her mannerisms. She takes a seat on the couch next to me.
“Kick ‘em up,” I tell her, pointing to her feet.
“Oh, I can’t let you do that.”
“You’ve been complaining about your feet for a while now. Prop them up here. I won’t take no for an answer.”
She smiles and backs into the other arm of the couch, placing her feet onto my lap. I am not a foot man like J, but I feel this is the least I can do for her since clearly she’s been trying all night, in her own way, to make a positive impression on me.
Her feet are warm, and I begin to carefully knead the balls of her feet and massage the arches.
“Lord have mercy,” she whispers under her breath. “That feels incredible.”
I nod. “So tell me about what you do for a living, or are you one hundred percent an actress—like you said earlier.”
She closes her eyes, enjoying her foot massage. “Acting is one of the craziest jobs out there, because everything is just a gig. You milk it while you can, and when it’s over, you gotta go and get a whole new job. So when I ain’t working, I work at this cafe over in Forte Green. It’s pretty cool. I get to meet famous people there sometimes, too. Spike Lee be up in there a lot.”
“Did you always want to be an actress?” I ask.
“Ever since I can remember. I was always trying to get up in front of somebody and do my thing.” She exhales deeply, her eyes closed. “So what about you? You always want to have your own store?”
I continue to rub up her ankles and onto her lower leg, through her jeans. “If you would have told me when I was little that I would own a record store in New York City, I would have told you that you were crazier than a pig tap dancing in the pulpit of First Baptist Church. I mean, I wanted to own a business, but a record store? Hell no.”
“Damn, Cool. That’s some pretty country shit to say. Where you from?”
“Oh,” I say, chuckling. “I grew up in Mississippi.”
“I got folks down there. You know the LeBoufs?”
I look at her incredulously, but her eyes are still closed. “You’ll have to tell me what town, because Mississippi is a state.” Normally, I give people hell when they do this, but I don’t want to interrupt the evening with unnecessary stuff.
“Right. I think they from around Jackson.”
I am convinced that most people think that Mississippi only has one city: Jackson. So to them everything is around Jackson. That’s just a shortcut for saying that they really think that Mississippi is just some giant city. I don’t know if Rochelle is talking about the real “around Jackson” (Pearl, Clinton, Brandon, Ridgeland, Flowood, Madison, Canton, etc.) or if she’s just making a generic reference. Being from Corinth, which is as far north as you can get in Mississippi—and at least four hours from the Jackson metro area—I have heard it all.
To politely move forward, I tell her that I don’t know any LeBoufs and pray like hell that she doesn’t ask me to deliver a message to these people when I go home for the holidays.
“That feels good on my legs,” she says.
As my hands rest below her right knee, I realize that it might’ve been better had she put on shorts. Her jeans are very tight, and I am having more difficultly gripping her body than I thought I would.
“You got anything that’s a little looser to wear? I can’t really get at your muscles,” I say.
She opens her eyes and looks at me, as if checking to see if I am fucking with her or if I’m serious about what I am doing.
“I can just take them off,” she says.
I’m at a loss for words. I probably should’ve considered that as an option to begin with, but knowing that I have to write about this date, I didn’t want to do anything that wouldn’t play well with the people over at Soul Sista. So I say the dumbest thing that I’ve said in quite some time: “Are you sure?”
“I’m not the kind of person to be embarrassed about my body. Not anymore.”
“Not anymore?” I ask.
“I always been a thick sister, and even when all the boys wanted them skinny ass girls, I knew I was fine. My mama is thick, and she is beautiful. I took after my mama, so that mean I don’t need nobody to tell me I ain’t beautiful, too.”
I nod. “I feel you.”
Rochelle quickly unbuttons her jeans and begins to literally peel them from her legs. As soon as she gets them off of her feet, she tosses them on the floor beside the couch. Now she’s lying there in only her wife-beater and panties—and the baseball cap, which, while cool before, isn’t quite the image it was when she walked into the room earlier.
“You don’t have to keep on the baseball cap,” I say. “You can kick back and relax.”
She takes it off and tosses it on the floor, too.
I place my hands on her calves and gently massage the backs of her legs, returning slowly to her feet. Her legs are warm, smooth, full, soft. They are the kinds of legs that a man wants to have wrapped around his waist pulling him into the magic that glows between them. I can feel my other head waking up, wanting to force itself into as erect a position as it can in my slacks. I just pray like hell that I can hold it together.
I work my way up to her thigh, patiently moving my thumbs in small circles. She is no longer lying back with her eyes closed. She is looking directly at me, watching every movement of my hands and arms and every expression on my face. I can tell that she knows my breaking point is close, so I try to steer things back across the line into the land of the platonic.
“So where did you grow up?” I ask.
She looks at me, her eyes unmoving. A slight smile escapes her lips. “Newark.”
“Newark?” I repeat. “Nice city.”
“Yeah,” she says, her cat-like eyes looking at me more seductively by the second. “It’s a regular Disney World.”
Slowly she lifts her other leg toward my hand, and her leg brushes the hardness I have been trying to conceal. She doesn’t say anything and pretends to ignore the fact that I could stand up and bang my shit against a wall and leave a hole in the plaster.
“Don’t forget this leg,” she says, lowering it and resting it back near my crotch.
I feel my erection twitch against her leg, and I suddenly feel like a little boy sitting in a classroom with an uncontrolled hard-on and being asked to walk all the way to the front of the classroom to write an answer on the chalk board for the teacher. She twirls her foot around over the edge of my lap, moving it back and forth slowly. The red toenail polish on each of her toes looks as though she had them done very recently. I trace my gaze from her toes all the way to her black spaghetti string panties. I place my hands on her leg and begin to slowly massage from the foot up.
Suddenly she leans forward, getting my attention. I look to see her unfastening her bra and pulling it out of the shirt opening under her arm. She places it on the floor with the other things.
“Just getting comfortable,” she says. “My girls have to breathe.”
The only light in the apartment comes from the lamps she turned on when we arrived, but they are more than enough for me to clearly see her nipples piercing the ribbed shirt.
“What are we doing here?” I ask, surprising myself that I can even ask a question this stupid aloud.
“You’re giving me a massage,” she says. “And a damn good one.”
“I see,” I say. “You know I’m supposed to write about our date. Are you sure you want to take it any further than this?”
“Cool. I’m just chilling. We ain’t done nothing you can’t write about.”
I grip her leg and pull it toward my erection. She slowly moves her leg back and forth against it.
“This date is supposed to be about compatibility. About seeing if there could be a real connection here,” I say, breathlessly.
“You don’t feel a connection with me?” she asks, feigning hurt, her leg still stroking me.
My hands move to her thighs, and her legs fall open. I can feel the heat of her sweet spot only inches away from my fingertips.
“We can’t do this,” I say. “There’s too much at stake for us to go at it like this.”
She shrugs. “It’s a column for a website. There ain’t no one else up in here.”
She rocks her hips forward and her crotch brushes against my fingers. I can feel the dampness beneath the thin fabric.
“Still,” I whisper.
Before I can say anything else, she is unbuckling my pants.