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.