EMJAY
Dash had been mugging me for weeks about getting together. I’d been so busy with school and all this craziness going on with me and Mama, I hadn’t exactly been best friend of the year to Dash. So when I called to ask if he wanted to go for beers and wings, he was all too happy to jump at the opportunity. I owed him one for being such an asshole. I needed to bounce my troubles off somebody, and Dash, who has been my best friend since fifth grade, I knew would give me some advice on what to do without telling me what I wanted to hear. Dash was the only one I can confide in and not worry about him blowing my shit up.
It was after two in the afternoon, according to the clock on my car stereo, when I pulled in front of Wing Stop. When I do have time for that thing they call lunch, I prefer to eat after two when the lunch crowd has died down. I didn’t see Dash’s Saturn, so I figured he hadn’t arrived yet.
“His ass is going to be late to his own funeral,” I said, as I addressed a text message to him. I’m here; hurry your narrow ass up. The spicy scent of buffalo sauce that met me when I walked in sent my stomach rumbling. The dining area was vacant, while the bar occupied a few patrons who sipped slowly on cheap beer. I sat at the bar where this girl with slick, brunette swimmer’s hair pulled back tight into a ponytail, stood behind the bar. She wore black short-shorts and a black T-shirt with the Wing Stop logo emblazoned on the front. She had these tiny apple tits that came nowhere near filling out the T-shirt.
“Hello, welcome to Wing Stop.”
“Hey,” was all I said, as I sat in the middle of the bar. I could tell by her tone that she was the bubbly, cheerleader type. Give her a set of pom-poms and she’d break out with a cheer for a tip. One of them corny-ass white girls. Cute to look at, but cornball fuck.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” I made out her name scribbled in black marker on a plastic white name tag. Kayla, it read. Kayla had big, brown eyes and a cute smile.
“Do you all serve Shock Top here?”
“Yes we do.”
“Can I get that?”
“Do you have ID?” I tugged my wallet out of the left-front pocket of my shorts and showed her my license. “Cool,” she said, smiling. “Would you like bottle or draft?”
“Draft.” I never seem to finish beer for some reason when I drink it out of the bottle. I was like that as a kid, too. Mama would give me soda, and I could never drink it out of the can. It had to be in a glass. Kayla took a mug from the back counter and filled it with Shock Top. I didn’t know how thirsty I was until I watched her fill the mug up with the thick, cold beer. Since Mama had cut me off, I paid for the beer with cash I got from selling a few books back at the Paperback Rack. I didn’t get nearly as much as I hoped, so I sold off some CDs at Vinyl Fever, making a total sum of thirty dollars. I hope I get a job soon because I’m getting down to the bare essentials. “That will be two dollars,” Kayla said.
I handed her a ten and left her a two-dollar tip. I was trying to scratch up every penny, especially with Christmas around the corner.
Shariece said she would take care of whatever I need, but I don’t want my girlfriend treating me like a kid. It only makes me feel like less of a man if I can’t provide for us.
This is Ma trying to teach me a lesson because she can’t stand the idea of Shariece and I being together. Damn, I can’t help who I fall in love with. I’m not even going to play into her hate game. I love her, but she can think again if she thinks I’m going to pick the phone up and call her to apologize. I don’t have anything to be sorry for. All I can do is live my life and hope that she comes around to my side of things, because Shariece isn’t going anywhere. Everything will be everything once I get a job.
“Kayla, hey,” I said, waving her over.
“Are ya’ll um . . . hiring at all?”
“You know, I’m not sure. We might be. Brice, our general manager, just left. He would be the guy to talk to.”
“When is he here?”
“Usually in the mornings, if you want to come by tomorrow and talk to him. He usually comes in around nine.”
“That’s what’s up. I’ll do that.”
I was about to text Dash again when I felt someone slap me hard on the back of my neck. The sting was immediate and caused me to jerk up from the barstool. I turned around and it was Dash’s ashy black ass playing too much.
“What up, Black?”
“Boyyyy, you was about to get punched in the throat.” Dash was always doing sneaky shit like that. “Damn, dog, what have you been eating? You big as hell,” I asked as he looked at me through a set of black-framed glasses. “Gimme some love.” Dash gave me this big bear hug to the point I thought my lungs were going to collapse. “Dang, you trying to break a brother in half, shit.” I laughed. At six-foot-three, two-hundred and ninety-five pounds, Dash didn’t know his own strength.
Kayla stood with a smile on her pretty sorority girl face to take Dash’s order. “Can I get you something to drink?”
Dash looked at my glass of beer and asked, “What is that swill you drinking?”
“Shock Top, baby boy, you know what’s up.”
Dash scrunched up his face like he had tasted something nasty.
“Let me get a Blue Moon. That’s a real goddamn beer.”
“Can I see some ID, please?” Kayla was smart and didn’t let anything get past her. Dash pulled out his wallet and showed his ID. “Bottle or draft?”
“Draft is cool,” Dash said.
“So I was surprised your ass called saying you wanted to have lunch. You know I’ve been trying to get you to hang out for a month now.”
“Stop lying. It hasn’t been that long.”
“I thought you had forgotten about a brother.”
“Yeah, my bad about that. Shit has been crazy with school and my mama pressuring me about keeping my grades up.”
“Your mama’s still on your ass, I see.”
“Man, you have no idea. She makes a federal case out of everything. My grades, where I am, who I’m with, if I’m eating.” Kayla set Dash’s cold glass of Blue Moon in front of him. “She has to keep tabs on her only child, her baby boy.”
“Would you guys like to see some menus?”
“Do ya’ll still have the forty-cent all-you-can-eat wings?” I asked.
“We do. What flavor would you like?”
“You want to get a basket of twenty spicy Cajun and share it?” Dash asked.
“That’s cool.”
“Are they like mildly hot or real, real hot?” Dash asked.
“Oh, they’re pretty hot,” Kayla said in an almost cautious tone like she was warning us to eat the wings at our own risk.
Dash looked at me and I back at him. “Cool, let’s do it. We’ll get the spicy Cajun wings.” Dash and I had stomachs like steel, so we didn’t sweat it.
“You want plain or sweet potato fries with that?”
“Let me get a basket of sweet potato fries,” Emjay said.
“Coming right up.”
“You know she cut me off.”
Dash took a long sip from his beer that oddly resembled stale piss. “Who?”
“My mama. She canceled my credit card, closed my checking account, all that.”
“Damn, why?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Well, I got all day, so what did you do this time?” Dash joked.
“I fell in love.”
“Who is it this time and do I know her?”
“Okay, before I say anything, you have to promise you won’t say nothing to the guys.”
“Jay, you know I love a good secret. What is it?”
“You gotta promise me. I’m serious.”
“Jay, remember that time you told me in the fourth grade that you stole Mrs. Greene’s glue out of her desk?”
“Yeah.”
“Did I run and tell her that you took it? No. You know you can trust me, so what’s up?”
“Pinky swear?” I said.
Dash playfully slapped my hand down. “Nigga, quit playing and tell me what’s up.”
I took a long drink from my beer before I let Dash in on what had been going on with me.
“The woman that I’m in love with is a little older.”
“Like how old?” He smiled.
“Oh shit.”
“Man, keep your voice down, damn.”
“Is she a student? How long has this been going on?”
I gawked at Dash as he took a swig of beer. “It’s a teacher.” Suddenly, he sprayed Blue Moon across the bar almost hitting Kayla. He howled out with laughter.
“WHAT!?!”
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you. Kayla, did he spray you, did he get you?”
“Oh my bad, baby girl. I didn’t spit on you, did I?”
“I’m fine. I think you missed me by a few inches.” She laughed.
“You sure? I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, guys, I’m fine.”
One of the cooks came out with our order of sweet potato fries and hot wings. Kayla set our food in front of us and said, “Can I get you guys anything else? You want another beer?” she asked me.
“Please.”
“Are you shittin’ me, Jay?”
“Why don’t you tell the whole bar?”
“Who is she? Do I know her?” Dash asked.
“It’s Shariece.”
“Shit, the chick that used to babysit you? Holy fuck! You did tell me that you’ve always had a crush on her. I didn’t know she taught at TCC. Hell, I didn’t know she was even a teacher.” I plucked one of the wings from the basket and started to rip meat from the bone with my teeth. I quickly started to feel the spicy effects. “My boy’s fucking a cougar.”
“Man, shut up, damn.”
Dash sucked chicken from one of the wings. “Hold up. Isn’t she your mom’s friend? Oh shit, does she know? Your moms, I mean?”
“Shariece and I tried to keep our relationship on the low, but she found out.”
“And that’s why she cut you off? How did your mama find out; did you tell her?”
I was only on my second wing and already my mouth was on fire. “Shariece and I were at my crib when she caught us.”
Dash started laughing as he sucked wing sauce off his fingers. “She caught ya’ll fuckin’.”
I took a drink to cool off the four-alarm fire that was going on in my mouth.
“So your moms was pissed after walking in on her son fucking her best friend.”
“We tried to talk to her, but you know how my mama gets when she’s mad. You can’t tell her anything when she gets like she does.”
“I’m glad you called to catch up. That’s some crazy shit for real. Have you tried to talk to your moms since then?”
“There’s no point. She won’t talk to me and I really don’t have anything to say to her.”
“So what are you doing for money?”
“Selling off shit. Books, CDs and whatnot until I can find a job.”
“Shit, I’m sorry, bro.”
“It is what it is. I need to do for myself anyway. I’ll feel better when I start making my own money without her threatening to cut me off if I didn’t live how she wanted. I’m relieved. It sucks the way everything went down ’cause I didn’t want her to find out like she did, but I can’t rewind back to that night and change it, so it’s whatever.”
Dash was wolfing down the wings faster than me, as if he wasn’t affected by the fire from the meat. I took swigs from my Shock Top, but seemed like the beer only made the burn worse.
“Are you and Shariece careful?”
“What? Yeah. She’s on the pill and I use rubbers just in case.”
Dash laughed between devouring wings. “That’s good to know, but I mean, no one at the school knows what ya’ll are doing, right?”
“We messed around in her office a couple of times.”
“Are you serious? Man, you gon’ get caught; watch and see.”
“We locked the door. Nobody saw us.”
“Jay, someone always sees.”
“We both agreed that if we were going to make this work that we weren’t going to risk her career, so we make sure to keep it professional on campus. We’ve decided to maintain a professional teacher/student relationship at least until the end of the semester.”
“Ya’ll better hope the department doesn’t find out about you two.”
“We’re careful.”
“I’m just saying, you can never be too careful.”
“Dude, I love her.”
Dash shrugged. “I hope she’s worth it.”
He had put away ten wings while I had seven. “I can hear your moms now: ‘She’s a damn cradle robber.’” I laughed to his spot on interpretation. “Trust. I know how your moms can be. She wouldn’t let you do anything when you were a kid. Remember that time you fell off the monkey bars? Your moms acted like you broke every bone in your body. All these cops and ambulances were at the playground. It was crazy.”
“I know. I was so embarrassed that day. Everybody started calling me ‘Mama’s Boy’ after that. You included.”
“I’m surprised she let you hang with me knowing how she feels about gay people.”
Kayla came and refilled our glasses with beer.
“But I almost forgot to tell you this. This goes to show how much of a hypocrite Mama is.”
“Why? What’s up?”
“This was before she found out about Shariece and me. She invited me to have dinner at the house, right. When I get there, she’s got this dude who looks like he could be my big brother sitting in the living room sipping on wine and shit.”
“Whaaaat?”
“She gave me all this shit about me and Shariece, but here she is playing shack-up with a man half her damn age.”
“So what is so different from your relationship with the cou—I mean, Shariece, and . . .”
“Exactly. I guess the difference is that Shariece was her best friend.”
“I can see how that would come as a shock, but she has no right to preach to you about who you see and how old somebody is when she’s out here doing the same thing.”
“I was mad pissed when I saw this dude in my mama’s house sitting there like they’re husband and wife.”
“Well, you and your moms will work things out. She’ll come around. I know Shariece is her bestie and everything, but she has to accept your choice like you have to accept hers.”
“True, but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. She’s never been this mad. I mean damn, I’m still her son.”
“Just give her some space. The two of ya’ll need to process what’s going on.”
“I guess.”
I managed to steal the last wing while Dash stuffed his face with sweet potato fries.
“So when do we get to meet her?” he asked as he sucked chicken from the bone.
“I don’t know if she’s ready to meet my friends yet.”
“She’s not ready or you’re not?”
“Do you really think that she can handle our group of friends? Nosey Chadae who you know likes to give everybody the third degree.”
“Forget Chadae. You can handle her. Shariece sounds like a cool chick. I’m sure she can hold her own with our clique.”
“Here I am running my mouth about my life and haven’t asked you what’s been up with you. You still holding it down at Black Dog Cafe, hosting Thursday night poetry readings?”
“You know it. We’re trying to get a Tallahassee slam team together, if you’re game.”
“I don’t know, man. I’ve been so busy with classes and looking for a job, that I’ve barely had time to put pen to paper.”
“True, but we miss you. Cameron and Jalinda are always asking me about you, and you know Chadae is. Asad is back from New York.”
“I haven’t seen him in a year.”
“Asad is back doing readings, and guess who works there now as a waitress?”
“Who?”
“Arielle.”
“Arielle Mobley?”
“Yep. She’s thick, but she still looks the same. She asks about you all the time.”
“I don’t know. I’ll talk to Shariece about it.”
“Jay, you know you my boy. All I want is for you to be happy, and if this sister is truly the one—”
“She is. I know she is.”
“Then that’s all that matters.”
“Thanks, bro, that means a lot. Glad to know that someone’s on my side.”
“And don’t stress about your moms. She’ll come around.”
“I hope so. Well, enough about me, what’s up with you? You still dating that same guy you met on Grindr?”
“I didn’t tell you? I kicked Montez’s cheating, lying ass to the curve when I caught him with his dick in the ass of a pizza delivery boy.”
I laughed through tearing meat off a hot wing to Dash’s ballsy confession. “I thought Montez was the one?”
“Oh, me too, but apparently he had other ideas. I should have known when he started talking about having an open relationship, something was up. You know I’ve never believed in no shit like that, Jay. These dudes out here want to have their cake and eat that shit too. Even the ones that are supposed to be in relationships are out here creeping on Grindr, and who knows where else. I kicked him and his pizza boy bottom out of my crib, booty-naked and all.”
“Aww, shit, son, no you didn’t, not ass-naked.”
“Ass . . . naked, both of them, and I tossed Montez’s clothes out the window. You know I don’t cosign on some shit like that. If this double-bubble chocolate ass ain’t enough for you, then we don’t need to be together.”
“Well, I never liked Montez anyway.”
“Maybe I need to take a page out of your book, get me a sugar daddy. A big ol’ Santa Claus-looking motherfucker with some coin. I’m sick of these baby gays wanting to stick their dicks in every ass they see. Get me a prime-timer, a man with sophistication, class, and a fuck load of Obamacare.”
I laughed so hard to Dash’s rant, I damn near choked. “I’ve never pegged you as the gold-digging type.”
“I’m just over being taken for a ride by these . . . garbage pail kids. So, yeah, I’m back on the meet market. I hope Montez and his pizza boy are real happy together because I’m in a whole new area code of over it.”
* * *
I was knocked on my ass when Dash had told me he was into guys. As early as middle school, he had girls on his jock 24/7, so when he came out to me in the tenth grade, I honestly didn’t believe him. He played sports, had cheerleaders giving him head behind the gym, so he said. It wasn’t like I actually saw him fuck females. When he had told me that he fucked Craig Lawson at his house after school one day in his parents’ basement, I almost shit a car. “Hold up. You and Craig Lawson? The same Rickards Raiders quarterback who got a full ride at Florida State who went on to play ball for the Baltimore Ravens?”
“The very one, and baby, he can take dick like a porn star.”
I grimaced to the thought of this big, muscle-bound dude taking it up the ass by my best friend. “Please. I don’t need that image running around in my innocent fifteen-year-old mind.”
I wasn’t sure I could deal with having a gay guy as a friend and started to end the friendship, but Dash and I had been boys since grade school. He made me popular. If it wasn’t for him, I would have spent the next four years as some comic book geek, hermit crabbing it in the school library with the rest of the Dungeons & Dragons geeks. I got enough of that in grade school. I was not about to be one of those statistic kids left to be bullied and punked.
“So what’s up? You and Shariece coming out to the poetry reading on Thursday or what?”
“I can’t give you a definite answer on that yet.”
“In other words that means no.”
“That means I will call you and let you know. I gotta talk to Shariece about it. I told you we’re trying to keep a low profile until the semester is over.”
“Well, I’ll tell the gang that you might make a special appearance. They’ll be glad to see you. Maybe we can get your high-yellow-ass up on the stage and spit something.”
Kayla came over and cleared away our basket of bones. “You guys want another beer?”
“You want another one?” Dash asked.
“No, I’m good. I’m not trying to get a DUI in the middle of the day.”
“We’ll get the check, Kayla,” he said.
“Is it on one check or separate checks?”
“One check,,” Emjay said.
“Man, I got this,” I told him.
“No, let me take care of it. You can get the next one when we go out again.”
Kayla returned with the check., “Have a good afternoon, guys.”
Dash pulled out his wallet and handed Kayla forty bucks. “Keep the change, baby girl.”
Dash asked, “So have you been writing?”
“I’m working on some new stuff I’m still polishing.”
“I’m sure Shariece would like to see you in your element.”
Dash was bad about taking no or even maybe for an answer. If you didn’t give him a solid yes, he would nag and nag until he got one. We walked out into the parking lot to our cars where we continued talking. “I will say this right here. If Shariece can’t make Black Dog, then I’ll come out. I might even read something new.”
“Can I get that in blood?” Dash joked. “I’ll let the group know.”
“Remember what we talked about. Not a word.”
“I won’t say nothing, Jay. Scout’s honor.” Dash held up two fingers.
“Scout’s honor is three fingers, dumb ass.”
“You know what I mean. I’m excited already. Show me some love.” Dash held his arms out for another one of his rib-cracking bear hugs. I was still feeling the love he gave when he walked into Wing Stop. I braced myself. “Come on, take it like a man, bro, come on.” His hug was like a thousand and one kung fu grips around me.
“See you Thursday.”
I was on my way to the library to catch up on some homework for my Western Civilization class when my cell rang. I recognized the first three digits. It was from Capital City Movie Theatre, where I had applied three weeks ago.