She wants to lead. Snap! … Snap!
The glamorous life!
She don’t need. Snap! … Snap!
A man to touch!
That Sheila E. song was glued to my head. I couldn’t stop humming and singing it with my fingers popping and my feet stomping. Pearl was out there with the wannabe rich and famous, and I had no bait to reel her back in.
She quit her job at Macy’s and began hanging out with Kiki Monet regularly. They were traveling from coast to coast and overseas before I knew what was happening. Pearl was definitely on her way up, but she still had not signed with a modeling agency. She was a scraping and clawing outsider, spending good money to keep up with the crowd, leaving me to pay most of our bills.
Pearl no longer wore street clothes. I remembered when she couldn’t wait to get home from work to toss on her jeans and a T-shirt, but after hanging out with Kiki, she wore nothing but expensive fashion statements. She was a walking, talking fashion magazine. Her transformation was unreal. Somewhere along the way she picked up the habit of smoking Newport Stripes.
I would get home late from work and flip through the growing portfolio that Pearl began compiling of her new modeling work. I was actually living with a model in New York. What would my mother say?
Even though Pearl and I weren’t married, every once in a while I thought about her being unfaithful to me while on her photo shoots and extensive travel. Every time she came home, though, she made love to me like a tigress. I continued to wonder about her. Maybe she just had a strong sexual appetite. I still hadn’t bothered to discuss with her the intents of our relationship.
We never did make it down to North Carolina to see my folks that summer. I got a chance to go home for a few days over Christmas, but that was it. My mother became more concerned about how Brad was doing in grad school anyway. I guess she had written me off. I couldn’t blame her. I barely called home twice a month. I was just too busy and exhausted half the time to go through the drama with my mother. I usually called home when something special was going on, like a birthday, a wedding, an anniversary, or the holidays. And I don’t know where the time went, but before I knew it, I had been in New York for more than a year.
It was late July 1987, and I was still producing at WHCS-AM in Harlem. Things were getting really hectic there. Mr. Payton had me producing for nearly half of the shows, and operating the audio console. It became harder and harder to keep up with what everyone was doing, and a lot of the radio personalities were some real pains in the ass. Mr. Payton was no saint himself. There were a lot of sexual affairs going on, egos flaring up, and inexperience was everywhere. It seemed that many New Yorkers had the “I am a star” syndrome and didn’t want to work with anyone. No wonder Mr. Payton sought out newcomers.
I was tired of being cursed out for things that went wrong on different shows. There were just too many issues in New York’s black community to find concrete solutions to on an hourlong radio show. I don’t think a lot of the listeners got the point of radio. Some of them assumed that the dialogue on our programs was actually the be-all and end-all of solving problems. People were constantly arguing during valuable air time about what was being said or what needed to be said. No matter how many guests or organizational leaders we had on the different shows that aired, I felt that their dialogue was meant to inform the community and not be taken as God’s word to man.
A lot of our guests, on the other hand, were disappointed with the minute level of support that the station got from serious sponsors. There was nothing we could do about that. We were one small black-owned radio station in a huge broadcasting market.
I thought we had too many on-air arguments myself. I didn’t like controversy nor the Ping-Pong matches of opinions, but Mr. Paton thrived on it. “I know it may not be healthy for the community, Bobby, but we get three times as many callers when there’s an argument on the show. A little disagreement gets the blood pumping.”
My favorite radio personality at the station was this smart young guy named Reggie Hinton. Mr. Payton canned his show because of low ratings. I thought his “Youth Talk” program was one of the best that we had. It covered a large range of issues regarding black youth. However, since the older listeners and advertisers failed to back it, the ratings were dismal. No one seemed to care about what the youth of New York had to say.
Anyway, we started moving “Youth Talk” around, trying to find a time slot that would be best for it. The original show was on Mondays through Fridays from three to four in the afternoon. “Caught in Traffic,” a work-related show, followed from four to six. Reggie thought that “Youth Talk” would have been best on the weekends. There was too much competition on the weekends, though. That’s when most of the more successful New York stations played long hours of rap music. Reggie would have been slaughtered. Then he came up with a great idea to bring rappers on the show to converse live with young people. I loved the idea, but Mr. Payton said no go.
Mr. Payton never responded well to the youth who came into the station. Then one afternoon, he simply told Reggie we couldn’t do the show anymore. Period. End of story. That broke my heart. You learn to live with the canceled shows, though, and that scared me. I stopped caring as much as I used to about things because there was simply too much to care about. One mind could not possibly absorb it all. I really admired politicians in that regard, because they had to cater to a hundred different issues and millions of different people every day.
The best shows I was a part of at WHCS were when we had Reverend Al Sharpton. That guy had people calling in for days. He really got the people out and talking in New York. Whenever Reverend Al was involved in something, he brought out the strongest emotions in people. He got people to move, and I grew to respect his can-do attitude.
So there I was, a good-natured college boy from down south, thrown right in the middle of everything going on in New York. After a while, I fell into a rhythm of flipping through various newspapers to stay abreast of the local news. I read The Amsterdam News, the Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Times, The Big Red, and The Village Voice. The thing I regretted was that I spent so much of my time trying to produce shows that I missed out on a lot that was going on in New York. It’s one thing to produce a show about art, politics, people, and the community, but it’s another thing to actually participate in what’s going on. I spent far too much time at the station and at home organizing shows. Without Pearl there to literally drag me out of the house, I had turned into a workaholic hermit.
I remember asking Mr. Payton for a raise during that second summer at the station. I wasn’t asking for much, so I figured I had a good chance of getting that little something extra. I mean, I had been loyal to WHCS-AM to a fault. It was extra hot outside that day, and even with the air-conditioner on full blast, Mr. Payton looked exhausted behind his desk.
“What’s bothering you, Bobby?” he asked me, reading my body language. He could always tell when someone had a gripe. I guess that came from being in the business for years.
I closed the door and sat down.
“Uh-oh,” my boss responded. He held out his open palms to me and said, “Okay, what is it? You need a week off, or are you leaving us for good?”
I smiled, nervously “No, it’s not that. I thought I’d talk to you about something else.”
“And what’s that? Somebody’s giving you problems again? Who is it? I’ll have a talk with them for you.”
I began to wonder if a raise had ever even crossed his mind. Mr. Payton was the cheapest boss that I had ever worked for in my life, but it didn’t stop him from driving a Cadillac and owning an elaborate wardrobe. Of course, he made it a habit of telling everyone that those were things acquired before his ownership of the station.
“Actually, I was thinking more of monetary concerns,” I told him.
The boss leaned back in his chair. “I see. So what are you telling me? You want a raise?”
“That would be awfully nice of you,” I said with a smile.
He nodded and asked, “How long have you been working here, Bobby?”
“About fourteen months.”
“Fourteen months,” he said with another nod. “Do you realize that some of the people working here have been here for three and four years?”
“I’m aware of that,” I told him. “But none of them have worked half as hard as I’ve been working since I’ve been here. A lot of people are here for two or three hours a day. I’m here for ten and twelve hours sometimes, making sure that everything goes right. I’m even here on the weekends.” Hell, I’ve been practically running this station for the past year, I thought to myself. If anyone deserved a raise at WHCS, it was definitely me.
Mr. Payton grinned. I didn’t know if that was good or bad, I just felt that a raise was overdue. “How much of a raise are you asking for?” he asked me.
“A dollar-and-a-half.” I had calculated that with the nearly sixty hours I put in each week, a dollar-and-a-half raise would increase my paycheck by close to two hundred dollars.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll think about it for you. And if I can’t do it…” He folded his hands, and I got the message; either I agreed to work without the raise, or he’d break in another hungry newcomer.
I left Mr. Payton’s office with a loss of energy. I felt like taking the rest of the day off and going to the movies. I didn’t, but that’s what I felt like doing. I wanted to see Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle. Everyone was talking about how hilarious it was. I had already missed the premiere and the after party at B. Smith’s Bistro. It was big news to have an elegant, black-owned restaurant in Manhattan, and a lot of stars showed up there in support of Robert Townsend’s film. All I did was read about it.
•
Pearl was back in New York the last weekend before August. She brought Kiki Monet by the apartment with her. We all sat in the living room eating popcorn and watching She’s Gotta Have It on video. Pearl and I had seen the Spike Lee Joint the summer before at the Cinema Studio in Manhattan, but Kiki had never seen it.
“I am so proud of that brother,” Pearl was saying of Spike Lee. “I mean, that’s how you make it in America, you see what you want, and you just go after that shit.”
I had already heard the speech a year before. Pearl was repeating herself for Kiki’s benefit.
Kiki didn’t respond, she was too busy laughing at the come-on lines in the introduction. “Oh my God! This reminds me of when we were in Vegas,” she said to Pearl with a laugh.
“Vegas?” I asked, confused. “Like in Las Vegas?”
They both ignored me, continuing to watch the video. Pearl never told me about going to Las Vegas. What kind of photo shoot do you do in Vegas? I thought to myself. For the rest of that evening, all I could think about was asking Pearl about Vegas.
After watching the video, Pearl and Kiki watched tapes of fashion shows until late. I retired to the bedroom after awhile. I was still upset about the Vegas thing.
Pearl walked into the bedroom around three in the morning. I had dozed off to sleep with the light on while reading Piri Thomas’s memoir, Down These Mean Streets. Doreen had told me about it at work. It was one of her favorite books. I must admit, it was pretty good.
“Kiki’s spending the night on our couch,” Pearl told me.
“Okay. Thanks for asking me,” I responded. I already had a bone to pick with Pearl.
“What’s wrong with you? I do still live here, you know.”
“Yeah, you just don’t pay bills anymore.”
Pearl frowned and began to undress. “I’ll take care of it,” she said.
“What kind of photo shoot did you have in Las Vegas?” I asked her.
Pearl sighed, meaning she didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m a little tired, okay? We went to Vegas, Bobby. So what? I mean, what’s the big deal?”
After she put it to me like that, I couldn’t see what the big deal was either. I think I was jealous. I wanted to go to Las Vegas, too. “You never told me you were going, that’s all.”
Pearl clicked the light off and climbed into bed wearing more Victoria’s Secret. Thinking about her increasingly expensive wardrobe, I didn’t see how she had money left to pay any bills.
Pearl leaned into me and squeezed my ribs. “I’m always thinking about coming back home to you, baby. You should know that by now.”
I was wondering if she was telling me the truth. It’s easy to say you miss someone after being away. I was wondering if she had ever once had another guy since we were living together. She surely had enough opportunities. I did too, for that matter. I had remained faithful, though.
“Does Kiki have a boyfriend or something?” I thought I’d ask. The thought had never entered my mind before.
I felt Pearl smile against my chest. “Nope. She just has male associates.”
I wanted to ask, “And what about you?” but I didn’t. I wondered if she still called me her “friend” while on her photo shoots. From what she had told me, she and Kiki had been to Florida, Dallas, Virginia Beach, Chicago, L.A., Paris, and Italy. Kiki had even footed the bill a few times.
I had another sleepless night, filled with insecurities. Most guys would have never put up with the things I was beginning to take from Pearl. I rarely questioned anything she did.
Early that morning, Pearl slid her hand inside my drawers. “We have company,” I whispered, attempting to pull her hand away. I didn’t feel up to it.
Pearl was enthused by the idea. “So what? My roommates were home when you used to come over to my apartment down at Howard, and that never stopped us.”
“Yeah, but this is different,” I said, still resisting.
Pearl wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Come on, Bobby. I want it,” she said, getting louder.
To make a long story short, Pearl got what she wanted that morning, and she was louder with her moans than usual. I suspected that she was showing off.
“Stop that,” I told her, tight-lipped.
“O-o-oh, Bobby!” she moaned to me.
I tried to shut myself down. The freak-show thing was turning me off. Pearl did her usual wildness in bed, and I couldn’t help but finish the job with our box springs squeaking.
“Yeeah, yeeah, yeeah!” Pearl let out. She jumped out of bed when we finished and rushed back out into the living room with her robe on.
“Girrrl, I want some of what you just got!” I heard Kiki howling as they laughed together. I felt like some kind of circus act, a damned sideshow!
Pearl ran the shower water and took a shower. I sat up in bed, angry at her. Things were really getting foul between us. I looked over at the clock, and it was after 10 A.M. I had to be down at the station by noon. When Pearl finally finished with her shower, it was 10:30. I rushed into the bathroom with my things and Kiki clapped her hands for me. I took my shower in disgust and got dressed for work. Pearl and her girlfriend were still tickled by that morning’s events as I headed out the door. I remember thinking that I had somehow turned into a plaything. Or had I always been a plaything to Pearl?
It felt like my manhood had been stripped away from me that morning. I tried to rationalize that any other man would have been flattered by the idea of two beautiful models hooting and howling for his sexual favors, but all I could think about was how violated I felt.
I was a zombie at work that day, and I was out of the station by five. When I arrived back in Queens, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go in the house, thinking that Pearl and her friend were still there. I nodded to my neighbor and slowly headed down the cement steps toward the basement gate with my key. Pearl and Kiki had left. I took a seat on the couch and noticed that Pearl had left her Newport Stripes on the coffee table. I took one out and went to light it at the stove. When I was a teenager, my brother Brad and I had experimented with cigarettes, but neither of us had continued smoking. After our mother caught us one day, she made us smoke an entire pack out in our backyard. Brad cried and plotted to call the police on her.
I took my first drag of one of Pearl’s Newport Stripes and laughed to myself, remembering the letter that Brad had written informing the county police department of child abuse. He was all of fourteen years old. I was fifteen. It had been his idea to experiment with cigarettes in the first place. Even then, Brad was convinced he could do anything.
I felt like calling Brad and reminiscing with him as I blew out smoke. I thought about telling him what happened that morning with Pearl and her friend Kiki. “You should have done both of ’em,” I could imagine my adventurous brother telling me. Brad started having sex before I did. I remember when he told me that he had “bunned” this pretty girl who lived down the street from us. I called him a liar. He barely spoke to the girl. As proof, that next day, Brad brought home a pair of the girl’s underwear. I thought that it was disgusting. From that day on, though, he continued to collect the underwear of girls that he slept with. I asked him how he was able to come away with them, and he told me that he asked.
“But what if they say no?” I asked him.
“Then I beg them for ’em.”
“And what if they still say no?”
“Then I just take them. And I tell them if they don’t let me have them, I’ll tell everybody what we did.”
A girl’s reputation meant everything down south. I felt sorry for those girls. Brad was sick in the head. I don’t know where he got it from. He was just born that way, I guess. He was a predator. He and Pearl were chips off the same ugly block.
I finished the cigarette and decided not to call. I misplaced the number my mother had given me for him anyway. I would have had to call her first to get it, and I wasn’t that desperate.
The Newport Stripes weren’t all that bad. They weren’t as strong as the Marlboros my brother and I used to smoke. We chose Marlboro because we liked the masculine advertisements. The Marlboro brand was a macho man’s cigarette.
The phone rang and surprised me. I answered it, expecting Pearl to be calling me from Kiki’s apartment in Manhattan, but it was Pearl’s mother. We talked on the phone frequently whenever Pearl was away. Pearl’s mother was named Marianne Tyler. Ms. Tyler was very likable, but you could tell that she was a busy woman. Whenever her line beeped, she was gone, and her phone rang a lot.
“Hi, Bobby. I guess Pearl’s out on the town again,” she said.
“Yeah, you guessed it.”
“Well, I bumped into one of her girlfriends from Howard University. Do you know Shawn?”
“Yeah, I know her.”
“Well, I just gave her the phone number over there. It seems Pearl hasn’t kept in contact with her old friends.”
Tell me about it, I thought to myself. “Okay. No problem.”
“How have things been going for you over at the radio station?”
“I asked for a raise,” I told her. Ms. Tyler was a lawyer. Maybe she’d understand.
“Oh, you did? And what happened?”
“I’m still waiting.”
“Hmm,” she grunted. “Well, you’ve made the first step. Now after that, you start writing down everything that entitles you to that raise.” Pearl’s mom was straight business, a pure professional.
“Thanks for the support,” I told her.
“Like you said, ‘No problem.’ And you tell that on-the-move daughter of mine to slow her ass down for a minute and call her mother. Okay?”
“Consider it done.”
“Okay, Bobby Dallas. I’ll talk to ya.”
A minute or two later, the phone rang again.
“Hello, can I speak to Pearl Davis, please?”
“She’s not in. Is this Shawn?” I asked.
“Yeah, is this Bobby Dallas?” She sounded surprised.
“Yeah.”
“Oh my God! You two live together?”
“For a year now,” I told her.
“Get out of here!”
“Why, is that so hard to believe?” A year ago, I felt the same way. Me living with Pearl was truly amazing.
“Hell yeah!” Shawn admitted. “Pearl used to say she wasn’t gonna have time for a man after college. ‘I got moves to make,’ she used to say.”
“Well, she’s still making those moves. She didn’t let me get in her way.”
“I see. Girlfriend making it in all the magazines now,” Shawn said. “I guess she too busy to get in contact with somebody, hunh?”
“I guess so. She’s too busy for me now, too. And I live with her.”
“Well, give her my number and tell her ass that I called.”
I took down Shawn’s number and stuck it on the refrigerator door. She told me she had just recently finished school at Howard. I sat back down on the couch and started thinking about Faye. Faye Butler had one more year to go. I wondered if she had the same phone number or lived in the same dorm. I made a note to get in contact with her as soon as September rolled around.
I fell asleep on the couch that night while watching MTV videos. I expected Pearl to walk in the door late that night, but she never did. I was up bright and early and headed for work that next morning. Pearl had not been home all night, and I hadn’t received one phone call from her.
When I got back in that Monday night, Kiki was over at the apartment again.
“Hi, Bobby,” she said to me.
“Hi,” I grumbled. “Where’s Pearl?”
“She’s in the bathroom.”
Pearl walked out of the bathroom straightening her clothes. I wanted to keep my concern private, so I walked over to her and whispered, “Where were you last night?”
Pearl frowned at me and said, “You know where I was. I was over at Kiki’s.” She was loud enough for her friend to hear. It occurred to me at that moment that I didn’t have Kiki’s phone number.
“You could have called and left a number or something,” I said. “What if there was some kind of emergency? Your mother called here last night, and your friend, Shawn, from Howard, called.”
“Shawn called here?” Pearl stopped and asked. “How did she get our number?”
“Your mother gave it to her. I left a message on the refrigerator.”
Pearl walked over to the refrigerator and pulled the message from underneath a magnet. “Thank you,” she mumbled.
I ignored it and headed for the bedroom. I was tempted to lock the bedroom door and leave Pearl to sleep out on the couch herself. I was just waiting for her to try and pull another freak show. I grabbed Piri Thomas’s Spanish Harlem memoir off the long dresser and picked up where I left off. Once I got back into the book, I heard our basement gate closing.
Good! Kiki’s not staying over tonight, I told myself. I went on about my business until I realized it was after midnight. It was a little too quiet out in the living room. I walked out to find that Pearl had left with her friend again. I found a note on the door with Kiki’s Manhattan phone number. I was beginning to not like Ms. Monet so much. She was becoming a bad influence.
Things were pretty much the same for a couple of weeks. Pearl was coming and going as she pleased. I felt better about being alone when Pearl was traveling. At least then I didn’t anticipate her walking in the door so much.
Something told me that things would only get worse between us, and my hunch was right. I walked into work at WHCS one day, and Doreen was reading The Amsterdam News. I hadn’t had a chance to get a copy yet.
“Hey, Bobby, isn’t this your friend, or whatever?” Doreen asked me.
I walked over to her desk where she pointed out Pearl, hugged up with a New York Knick at a charity basketball tournament. I stopped breathing.
Doreen looked up into my face and nodded. “Yeah, man, she’s been to a lot of functions lately. She’s been getting around.” Doreen went to nearly everything. I think that was her main reason for working at WHCS, she loved the perks.
I stormed off to my tiny office area, which I shared with two senior producers. I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was September. I hadn’t gotten the raise that Mr. Payton had promised to think about, I was tired of spending all of my hours at the station, and Pearl was “buggin’ out” on me, a term New Yorkers liked to use when people acted out of the ordinary. I was ready for a nervous breakdown at the tender age of twenty-three.
“What’s wrong with you?” Timothy Gaines asked me. He was in his early forties. He produced most of the early morning shows.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to work today,” I told him. I felt nauseous.
“Have you talked to Payton?”
“Not yet. I just walked in.”
“Well, go let him know”
I walked down to Mr. Payton’s office. As usual, he was on the phone. I took a seat and waited for him to finish his call.
“Yeah, hold on for a second,” he told whoever was on the other line. “Bobby, I’m really busy this morning. Is it urgent?” he asked me.
“Well, I’m feeling kind of sick. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to make it through the day,” I told him.
He nodded his head and showed me out the door. “Okay, Bobby, I’ll be right with you. Let me finish up with this call.”
I had heard that one before. He’d be in his office for hours sometimes while you were waiting for him to get back to you. I don’t think he realized how urgent my situation was that morning. I couldn’t think at all. I would have been no good to anyone.
I walked back into the tiny producer’s office with Tim.
“Did you talk to Payton?” he asked me. He was packing up his things.
“Not really. He’s busy. You know how he gets,” I told him.
“Well, you know, hang in there until he gets a chance to talk to you.”
I shook my head and got out that day’s schedule. “Not today,” I told him.
Tim looked over at the schedule and frowned. “You can’t just walk out of the station.”
I ignored him and headed on my miserable way. Tim followed me out into the hallway but didn’t try to stop me. Debbi Willis, our news announcer, was finishing up a morning news brief. I was supposed to produce “Harlem Is Talking” at ten, with host Shannon Conway. Shannon was having a discussion with Doreen when I approached the front door on my way out.
“Hey, Bobby,” she said to me.
“Hi,” I responded, walking right out the door. Shannon didn’t come out after me. She didn’t know that I wasn’t coming right back. In fact, I was thinking about not returning at all, or at least not that day.
To hell with work! I told myself. I wanna see New York. I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be staying there much longer.
I remember listening to a group of white kids who were on their way to school. They spoke as if New York was the greatest place to live in the world. It was the same way though with the kids who lived in Washington, D.C. They loved living in the Capital City. Me? I didn’t know where I wanted to live, really. The only reason I was in New York was because I was hooked on Pearl with nothing better to do with myself. I could have gotten radio experience anywhere.
I arrived in downtown Manhattan and just walked around, taking in the multitudes of people and the busy morning traffic. I was a walking zombie. There was a science fiction movie around that time called The Brother from Another Planet, starring Joe Morton. That’s exactly how I felt in downtown New York that day.
By the time I began to snap out of my daze, it was nearly two o’clock. I must have walked over thirty blocks that morning all in a random fashion, up one block, down another, up two blocks, and so on. I doubt if I could have done that in any other city and still been downtown.
Anyway, I stopped in front of this radio and television place. They were playing Sheila E.’s hit song, “Glamorous Life.” I had heard the song before, but as I stood there and listened to it, the song made perfect sense to me. Sheila E. was singing about Pearl Davis. I was so moved by it that I walked right in and bought the tape. That was the beginning of my addiction to the song. I had lunch downtown and headed back on my way to Queens to listen to it on Pearl’s stereo system.
When I got back in, after three o’clock, Pearl was sitting on the couch eating ice cream and watching TV in her white robe. She turned around and looked at me and then looked away. “What are you doing back here? Don’t you have to work today?” she asked me, facing the television set.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but seeing Pearl in her bathrobe made me walk back to the bedroom and check the sheets. They were just as I had left them. Instead of walking back into the living room to face Pearl, I grabbed Piri Thomas’s book and began reading again. I was nearly finished with it. Pearl walked into the bedroom a few minutes later.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You tell me,” I answered.
She grimaced and said, “I don’t have time for this,” and walked back out.
“I saw your little picture in The Amsterdam News this morning,” I said.
Pearl walked back into the bedroom and stared at me. “Is that why you’re acting all crazy?”
I stared back into my book.
“Bobby, all I was doing was taking pictures. That’s part of the business. Now if you’re gonna be with me, then you need to get used to it.”
I wanted to ask her, “Is that all you’ve been doing?” But I didn’t. I didn’t say another word. Pearl did the rest of the talking.
“I don’t believe you’re acting like this, Bobby. You need to grow up!” she shouted at me from the living room.
The fact that I failed to respond was pissing Pearl off. I felt good about it. I planned on ignoring her all day if I had to.
“Bobby? Bobby!” she continued to yell from the living room. “Oh, you’re not gonna talk to me now, right? Okay, fuck you then!”
I looked up and closed my book after she said that. I used my thumb as a page marker. I felt all this anger bottled up inside of me, but I didn’t know how to get it out. I had been an agreeable man all of my life. My brother, Brad, would have told Pearl where she could go weeks in advance. Brad would have humiliated her in some way and thrown her the hell out, but I wasn’t Brad, and I didn’t know what to do. I was simply frozen. Sometimes it’s more normal to react to things than to sit and think about it. I was sure there were plenty of brothers who would have been at least verbally violent with Pearl. How was I supposed to deal with that kind of woman, being the kind of man that I was? I felt like a wimp.
I decided to take a deep breath, ignore Pearl, and go on back to my reading. Then the telephone rang. I ignored that, too. Pearl answered it. She sounded as if she was having a conversation with an old friend. The next thing I know, she was at the bedroom door with a new cordless phone in her hand.
“Pick up the phone. It’s for you,” she told me.
“Who is it?” I asked. Who could I know that Pearl would have a detailed conversation with? I started thinking that it was a call from home, either my mom or dad or even my brother.
“It’s Mr. Payton,” Pearl said.
Damn! I didn’t want to talk to him that day. I was definitely not coming back in to work. I picked up the bedroom phone. “Hello.”
Pearl hung up her cordless and walked back into the living room.
Mr. Payton said, “Bobby, that’s a hell of a way to get a raise, son. If I didn’t like you so much, I might have been forced to fire you for that.” I wasn’t even thinking about the raise anymore. Mr. Payton went on, “I didn’t know you were living with Pearl.”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t been no ice cream and cake.”
He laughed and said, “I know it hasn’t. You can’t hold on to her kind too long.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked him. I wanted to know what he knew. I was tempted to ask if they had been involved before.
“I just know what kind of woman she is. Her kind ain’t changed in a million years,” Mr. Payton told me. “Now don’t get your feelings hurt over there, Bobby, because we need you at the station. We can start you off with that raise we talked about the first thing next week. I’ll let you have the rest of the day off, but you come back in tomorrow. And son, please don’t try anything like this again. You hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you,” I told him.
“All right then, Bobby. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I felt pretty good after that. I closed my book and went to the refrigerator to pour a glass of juice with a smile on my face. I walked out into the living room to rub it in with Pearl. She was filing her toenails over the coffee table.
“What, you got a little raise, and you feel better now?” she said to me with a grin.
“That’s right.”
“Bobby, so what? It’s only an extra hundred dollars. It’s not like you got a company car.”
“You know what, how come everything you do is so important?” I asked her.
Pearl strained to answer me. “Because, Bobby, you’re doing little shit. I could see if you were moving your way up at a major station.”
I walked away from her, disgusted. She still had not been signed to a major modeling agency, and I wanted to know when she would start paying her part of the bills again. I had dipped into my bank account more than a few times. I stormed right back out into the living room. “Have you seen the bills for this month?”
“No,” she snapped at me.
I looked at her sternly and went to the bedroom. We usually kept our bill notices in the top dresser drawer. I looked in there, and every last bill was gone.
“Did you find anything?” Pearl asked me when I walked back out to her.
“No,” I said, confused.
“That’s because I took care of the shit. Okay? So get off my damn back.”
•
Things were fine for the next couple of days. I went back to work, and Pearl was spending more time at home. I no longer had feelings of anxiety about her leaving me. I even had my raise.
I got home that Friday night, and Kiki was back over at the apartment. Pearl greeted me with her good news as soon as I walked in.
“I got signed, Bobby! I finally got signed!” she told me. I forget the name of the modeling agency she was signed to, but she was real happy about it.
She and Kiki wanted to go out and celebrate. Pearl asked me if I wanted to tag along, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. That celebrity stuff was not for me. I didn’t want to be around Kiki too long anyway. Pearl was on her worst behavior around her.
I decided to stay home and relax that night. I was pleased to know that my little world was still holding together. Before Pearl left, though, she told me that she would be going to Milan, Italy, that next week.
“For how long?” I asked her.
As it turned out, her one week in Italy turned into three weeks of missing in action. My peace of mind was shattered again. I could no longer take Pearl’s traveling. I finally broke down and called Ms. Tyler.
“Has Pearl been in contact with you from Italy?” I asked her.
“Italy? She got back from Italy a week and a half ago.”
“She did?” I was baffled, still waiting around for her.
“She hasn’t been back to Queens yet?” her mother asked me.
“She hasn’t even called here,” I emphasized to her.
“Mmm,” Ms. Tyler grunted. Then her other line beeped. “Hold on for a minute,” she told me. I knew what that meant. She came back on the line and told me she’d have to call me back. I didn’t expect it to be just minutes later.
“Bobby,” she said to me, “this is gonna be a hard thing for you to take, but I would advise you not to bother yourself with my daughter. Take my advice, and get on with your life. I don’t think she has your best interests in mind. She’s only thinking about herself. And, you know, I really have myself to blame for that, being that I was so busy when she was younger. It hasn’t been an easy life for her. She can be very selfish sometimes. I’m just telling you this because I like you. You are a very honest and straightforward young man, and I don’t want to see you get hurt by her.”
I was already hurt. It was only a matter of time before my relationship with Pearl ended. All of the signs were there. I had been counting the days. Pearl hung around that last week just long enough to receive her important phone call from the modeling agency.
I hung up the phone with Ms. Tyler and just stared at the television. It was my television hooked up to Pearl’s stereo. Her stereo didn’t cost much. She could do without it. Her mother had bought the bed for us, and all of the other household items were things you could easily go out and buy again. Even the few pieces of clothing Pearl had left in the apartment were disposable. I suspected the next time she came back to Queens, it would be to collect her pictures, magazines, and mementos, if she even wanted them.
It was October by then, and New York was cold. I put on a jacket and walked a few blocks to a corner store to buy a pack of Newport Stripes. I smoked one on the way back and lit up another as soon as I got back in. I sat in my usual spot on the couch in front of the TV and thought about how I had hurt Faye during my senior year at Howard. It served me right that Pearl was acting the way she was. I knew I had some bad karma to deal with.
I still hadn’t tried to reach Faye in D.C. I felt like picking up the phone, tracking her down, and apologizing to her, but then I decided not to. Faye had probably moved on with her life and found a more appreciative friend. It had been well over a year since I had spoken to her. The last thing she needed was for me to call and resurrect bad memories.
I got up and turned on Pearl’s stereo to play Sheila E.’s “Glamorous Life.” I just kept rewinding the tape while smoking cigarette after cigarette like a nicotine junkie.
I was feeling pretty down and out when I walked into work the next day. Doreen was sitting at her desk looking nice and innocent like she always looked on the job.
I leaned over her desk and asked, “If I stop working here, will you stop by and visit me for a few hours?” I figured I had nothing to lose, so what the hell.
Doreen looked up at me and smiled. “What about your friend?”
“What about your friend?” I asked her back.
Doreen grinned at me and said, “We’ll see.”
I smiled back and walked away from her. I remember having this big feeling of relief that morning, as if I had been freed from jail. I had never been in jail, but I had been locked in my emotions with Pearl for two years.
I let our radio personalities, guests, and callers argue all they wanted that day. Usually I tried to cut them off and get everyone back on the subject. The big issue that morning was whether or not uniforms would change some of the negative behavior in public high schools and junior high. There had been an increase in student robberies that school year of 1987. I tended to agree with those callers who believed that it was a sign of the times. If students didn’t get robbed in school, they’d be robbed after school. There was a growing desire in young people to take other people’s property, and guns were becoming more available to youths. That had nothing to do with uniforms. I planned to produce a couple shows on handguns.
“Those were some hot shows we had today, Bobby. I noticed you let them go for it for a while,” Mr. Pay ton said to me with a big smile that night. “I’ve been trying to get you to do that for a while. Keep up the good work.”
I felt pretty good about the shows myself that day. I rode the subway back to Queens feeling uplifted. I got in and discovered that Pearl had been by the apartment to collect the rest of her things. At first I thought she had left without locking the basement gate. Then I found an envelope on the bed with Pearl’s house keys inside, along with a one-page letter. It basically said that she was sorry and that she couldn’t face me, but she didn’t want to be tied down. She wanted to explore all of her dreams without any inhibitions. She ended the letter by saying I was a very sweet person who deserved much better treatment than what she could give me.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I told myself. I guess Pearl wasn’t as bold as I thought she was. Our breakup was official, though. We had finally ended it. Pearl did decide to leave the stereo with me. I guess she realized how attached I had become to it. I sat down on the couch and popped in that Sheila E. tape. Boy, was I miserable. The whole affair with Pearl Davis had been a big fantasy for me. It was time for me to wake up and smell the coffee.
“I’ll survive this,” I told myself. “I’m not dead yet.”
I took the train back home to North Carolina that Thanksgiving and had a lonely dinner with my parents. Ironically, Brad had gone to Boston to visit the family of a girl that he had fallen in love with. She attended graduate school with him at North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I asked my father privately that night about lost loves. He said, “Every man has a few women who got away from him. Unless, of course, you got a chance to marry your second or third grade schoolteacher.” That was my father for you. He was always the comedian. He did make me feel better, though.
Back in Queens, the lease on the basement apartment was up at the end of the year, so I told myself after Thanksgiving that I had one month left in New York. That first week in December I gave Mr. Payton my two-week notice at WHCS-AM.
“There’s absolutely nothing I can do to convince you to stay?” he asked.
I shook my head and said, “I don’t think so. New York’s just not my kind of place.”
He nodded and said, “I understand. Well, good luck in whatever you decide to do.”
I asked Doreen about coming over to visit me again. There had been a few other women I could have propositioned before leaving New York, but I felt closer to Doreen. I felt like we were meant to have a roll in the hay together. Maybe it was my exotic memory of her at The Garage. Doreen was the first woman in New York to come on to me.
“Are you serious?” she asked me. “You’re gonna stop working here?”
I told her I was. My time in New York was up.
“I don’t know. New York just isn’t where I wanna be.”
“Well, where do you wanna be?”
I hunched my shoulders. “I don’t know that either.” I still wasn’t planning on going back home.
Doreen and I set a date for my place on my last Friday on the job. I thought she was pulling my leg. She was supposedly loyal to her jealous boyfriend. When she showed up at my basement gate after ten at night, I knew that she was serious about sleeping with me.
“You actually came,” I said to her.
“Yeah. I wouldn’t have said that I was coming if I wasn’t. I’m not like that. I do what I say I’m gonna do.”
“What about your boyfriend? You don’t feel guilty at all?” I was kind of nervous about it once Doreen showed up. I didn’t want her boyfriend tracking me down and stabbing me or something. I don’t know why I thought of being stabbed instead of shot or just plain beaten. I guess I had fed into the stereotype that Latino men carried switchblades.
“He has other girlfriends,” Doreen told me.
“He does?”
“Sure he does.”
“But he’s still your guy?”
“I mean, we’re not married or anything, but yeah, he’s still my man.”
It was too awkward a situation for me. I just let it go. Doreen took off her coat and I hung it in the half-empty closet. Pearl had twice as many things as I had. When she left, you could easily tell the difference.
Doreen was wearing a black lace outfit, something I would expect her to wear at The Garage. She had a long brown bag in her right hand with her black pocketbook over her shoulder.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked her.
She grinned and said, “A little something to get us in the mood.”
I didn’t mind. I was all for experimentation. I made sure I let Doreen drink first, though. We took a seat on the couch and clicked on the television.
After her taste test, I took a pop of the drink myself. “Hey, this is pretty sweet.”
“I know, right? But watch out. It’ll sneak up and get you,” she told me as she took a longer swallow.
I took a long swallow after her. Before I knew it, my stomach felt warm and my head was a little woozy.
“This is a nice place,” Doreen was saying. By that time we were as close as two people can get with their clothes on. The drink inside of the brown bag was almost done.
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?” I told her. I was feeling over her well-curved body on the couch, reaching for her breasts.
“Umm, if you don’t have any protection, I have some in my bag,” she said to me.
When I tried to answer her, she slid her expert tongue into my mouth. It felt like an explosion went off. I couldn’t wait to get inside of her. I never asked her what was in that drink of hers, but the next thing I knew, I had lifted Doreen off the couch and was clumsily heading for my bedroom. I was in such a rush that I accidentally bumped into the doorway.
“Damn, man, don’t break me in half,” Doreen said with a giggle.
I was too sexually aroused to feel embarrassed by it. We fell into the bed and had some really good sex, for hours. Despite being a little woman, Doreen could hold her own. I was too loaded to remember all of the particulars, though. I guess I could say we made hungry love, because of all the biting and necking that I remember. I don’t think it was a Latin thing. Maybe we were both hungry from the alcohol.
“That was great,” Doreen told me.
“Yeah, it was,” I said, all out of breath. “I wish we would have done this in the beginning.”
“So, what happened to your, ah, friend?” Doreen asked me.
I thought about Pearl. “She’s gone Hollywood,” I said. I tried to laugh it off, but Doreen felt my pain anyway.
“Do you miss her?” she asked me.
Good question, I thought. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know yet,” I answered. “I mean, if you got a chance to be a star, would you leave everything behind and just go for it?”
“I don’t know. It depends on how important those things were to me,” she said. “I mean, I would never leave my family.”
“What about your man?”
She laughed and said, “Yeah, I probably would leave his ass.”
I shook my head with a grin. “Damn! I thought Latinos fell in love and stayed in love. You ever see West Side Story?”
Doreen pounded on my chest in her excitement. “Yeah, that’s one of my favorite shows of all time,” she said.
“Yeah, I liked it, too,” I told her. “It was a damn good musical.”
Doreen got quiet on me. “I’ve been in love once,” she said. “But he died.”
“Mmm,” I grunted. Her comment was pretty dramatic. I wasn’t expecting it. After that we just lay there naked for a long time without a word, healing each other’s pain with our silence.
“Well, life goes on, Bobby Dallas. That’s all I can say, you know. You win some and you lose some.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“You know I’m right,” she said to me. Then she leaned over and kissed my lips.
“What was that for?”
“Because I like you. And I hope that you’ll always remember me as your Spanish friend in New York.”
I laughed and said, “All right.”
“You promise?” she asked, leaning over me and staring into my eyes. “Don’t lie, man. I can always tell when people lie.”
She had the darkest and shiniest eyes in the world. “Yeah, I promise,” I said to her.
Doreen turned out to be quite a lighthearted soul, and I will always remember that lust-filled night and the conversation we had shared afterward.
•
After that night with Doreen, I was ready to move on from New York and close that entire chapter of my life’s book. I couldn’t stay there because I would have been thinking about Pearl too much. I kept wondering that maybe I should have spoken up a lot earlier about how I felt and asked her how she felt about me. I should have stopped her in her tracks instead of letting her take me for granted for so long. Isn’t it natural for a guy, or for anyone for that matter, to establish some type of understanding with their partners? It felt like the breakup was all my fault. Maybe I should have been more of a man and stood my ground. I should have shown Pearl how I felt. Brad would have done it, with all of his macho.
I thought back to all of my previous relationships with women. It was never that many. And I never had anyone as driven as Pearl. I guess that’s what I needed to begin responding more to women. Maybe my hands-off approach to relationships had painted me as an unfeeling man, or someone who was not concerned. Then again, I don’t think I was too concerned about relationships. I was just going through the motions with women. Maybe I didn’t know how to care, or at least how to make women feel that I was there with them. My life never revolved around women like Brad’s did. My brother had to have a woman at all times, and there was no denying his emotions. Brad wore his emotions on his chest for all to see.
I remember reading The Bluest Eye, a book by Toni Morrison, while attending Howard University. In that book she explained what she called a “plain brown girl,” a woman who didn’t allow real passion to touch her. Toni Morrison referred to the physical and emotional passion of love as “funk.” However, these sedate “plain brown girls” controlled their “funk” by seeming to be above it all, above the physical and emotional vulnerability of love. In some respects, I could have been thought of as a “plain brown man.”
My ways of abstaining from emotional drama, I guess, had been an early response to my mother’s overenthusiasm. It was how I saw my father deal with her, using his offbeat humor to lessen her bite, and it had finally come back to haunt me with Pearl, a woman who needed all of the “funk” in the world. And I gave her nothing.