If it wasn’t for my desire to curse out Kyle’s ass for telling my parents about our date—no, meeting—I would’ve gone straight home after church. I was dead tired from all the hustling to get the car from the Bronx and then down to Harlem to pick up Nana Rue for church, but I had a bone to pick and it was with Kyle. Where did he get off telling my mother about our meeting? I was in the middle of trying to get Julian back and I wasn’t interested in Kyle—no matter whom he had on his side. Period.
When I arrived at Paola’s for dinner, thirty minutes late, I peeked inside to see if Kyle was still there. I found him sitting at a table in the back of the restaurant. There was a vase filled with magnolias sitting on the table in front of him.
Determined to get my point across about him calling my mother, I stormed toward him, ready to use even my lip liner as a weapon.
“Kyle,” I said angrily. Just as I was about to speak again, he looked toward me and smiled wide enough to make me stop dead in my tracks. He stood up with a bouquet of flowers in his hands.
“These are for you, Troy.” Kyle handed me the bouquet and pulled out my chair. I sat down, holding the flowers in my arms, and I do believe I literally felt myself melt. My anger got lost somewhere between his smile and the calming scent of the magnolias. In the spring, Nana Rue decorated her entire brownstone with fresh-cut magnolias. The scent was so strong you could smell them in the street when you walked by. They were my favorite. But how did he know?
“These are lovely,” I said, looking at the flowers. “My favorite.”
“Well, I wanted to surprise you, so I called your mother this morning to ask her what your favorite flowers were. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Kyle, this is really wonderful.” I paused. “It’s amazing.” Sitting there with one bouquet of my favorite flowers in my arms and another on the table in front of me, my little complaint about Kyle calling my mother felt tiny and insignificant.
“I just wanted to cheer you up after last night. I know you were stressed about the whole thing with your car and then your friend. How is she?” Kyle smiled, and for the first time I noticed a tiny dimple in the middle of his chin. It was just small enough for me to stick my pinky finger in. It was adorable. I had to admit, Kyle was truly a good-looking man. He had a kind of classic, young Sidney Poitier fineness to him.
“Tasha’s better,” I said, forcing myself to look at the menu and not at the dimple.
“Well, that’s good to hear. She seemed pretty shaken up.”
The waitress came over and Kyle ordered for both of us.
“I must say, it was nice to see you last night,” he said as she walked away. “It was nice to get to know the real Troy.”
“The real Troy? What does that mean?”
“Well, in the car, I realized that you’re really down-to-earth. You’re funny, Troy.” He grinned. “You’re not just a…what do they call them…Black American Princess.”
“Oh, so now you think I’m a BAP?” I laughed. I was used to the “BAP” classification. It always amazed me how quickly people wanted to put me into some category as soon as they found out my family had a little money and I had decent taste. Hell, for the most part it was true. I was a BAP poster child.
“Well, let’s be honest, at the country club you seemed a little snobby,” Kyle said. “I wasn’t exactly fond of you.” He held up his napkin like a shield.
“Snobby?” I said, grabbing the napkin. While I could handle being called a BAP, I was not snobby. Shoot, I could drink and cuss with the best of them! “Please, you know you were trying to get with this,” I joked.
“Troy, you were acting like a spoiled little rich girl that day. Not my type.” We both laughed. I couldn’t help it. He was right. Kyle wasn’t even on my friend list.
“But that’s the past. And what I know now, after talking to you in the car and seeing how carefully you took care of your friend, is that there’s more to you. There’s a lot more,” Kyle said. “And I’m happy you came out today, too,” he went on. “I was afraid you’d stand me up.”
“Stand you up?”
“Yeah. I know how you ladies can be about going out with, you know, religious men who have dedicated their lives to God. And you didn’t seem too thrilled about me being a virgin.” Kyle started laughing again and I realized that I’d almost forgotten about his occupation.
“It was nothing, Kyle. Really,” I said. “I mean, it’s a choice.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, because I didn’t want to spend all of my money on these flowers trying to impress you and then get dissed.”
I sighed and looked down at the flowers. They were great. Kyle was great. But I had to tell him the truth.
“No, the flowers are lovely, Kyle. But I have to be honest with you.” I paused, giving the waitress time to put the food on the table. “I’m not really looking for anything right now. I’m kind of in between places.”
Kyle said a short prayer over our food and looked at me.
“‘In between’? Oh, that’s a new one.” He dug into his steak forcefully. I could tell he was annoyed with me. It was obvious that he had gone through a lot of trouble trying to impress me. Hell, the man had called my mama! It was the right gesture—just the wrong man. Why couldn’t Julian have done something like that for me? Suddenly, the spring salad I’d ordered tasted incredibly dull in my mouth. I wanted to eat my words.
“It’s not a line, Kyle,” I said, sliding my fork onto the plate. “You just caught me at the wrong time, that’s all.”
“So my obligations don’t bother you?”
“Well, I’ll admit, I’m not exactly thrilled with it, but it doesn’t make me not want to be your friend.” I reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “And I do want to be your friend.”
“Hmm…” He gasped. “Friend?” He looked me over. “I guess that’ll work. Besides, then I’ll get to see you again. And that would be a blessing.”
“Great!” I said. He smiled, and judging from the appearance of the chin dimple, it was a truce.
“Troy,” Kyle said, looking at me, “whoever he is, he’s a lucky man.”
“Thanks, Kyle.”
“I really mean that or I wouldn’t even be here. I don’t exactly have a shortage of women trying to get to me at the church.”
I had to laugh. Those church sisters were a trip. They loved trying to get with a single man of God—or even a married man of God. I saw the way they flocked to the pastor at my own church. They carried cakes to church, asked for special “prayer” meetings—some of them even tried to have their mamas hook them up. It was some stiff competition going on in the Lord’s house.
“So are you throwing the church ladies up in my face?” I frowned playfully.
“No, I’m just saying, I don’t want you to allow people to take you for granted.” He stared deeply into my eyes. “No one should ever take a woman like you for granted. You’re smart, loving, witty, and more beautiful than any one man could ever deserve.”
“That might be one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me, Kyle,” I said, after turning to look behind me to see if he was talking to someone else or reading from a script. The man was unreal. His words were so sweet, I didn’t know if I wanted to cry or jump over the table to hug him.
“It’s true.”
“Enough about little old me,” I said, blushing. “What about you? Tell me about you.”
“What about me?” Kyle asked. “I’m an open book. No secrets.”
“I mean, you mentioned the whole ‘obligations’ thing. What made you become a pastor? How did you finally decide to just do it?”
“Hmm…” He looked up at the ceiling like he was searching for the right thing to say.
“I’m sure plenty of people ask you that. I’m sorry if it’s a stupid question.”
“No, it’s not stupid,” he said. “In fact, I like to answer the question. It reminds me of why I’m doing this. Keeps me focused.” He paused. “You know, my family history was one thing. I was born and raised in the church. It was all I knew for a long time. But then when I turned twelve and I thought I could go against my father and my grandfather, I decided that I didn’t want to be a preacher. I was like, ‘To heck with them and this whole church thing. It’s corny. I want to be a rapper.’”
“What happened?” I laughed. I couldn’t imagine Kyle the Rapper! Christian Kyle was funnier. “I know they didn’t like that.”
“No, my father always had this way of letting people see the truth for themselves. So he didn’t fight me.” Kyle smiled. “He went and got me a notebook and told me to write my rhymes in it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. So I changed my name to MC K-Lover and I was writing rhymes, and my cousins started writing too, and we made up dances and stuff. It was crazy. We thought we were some kind of Tennessee rap group, about to take the world by storm,” Kyle said, laughing. “But then my father started asking me about the things I was saying in the songs. He asked me what I wanted to do with my music, how I wanted to change the world and touch people. I guess it had never dawned on me, because I couldn’t answer. I could think about the girls and the cars, but I didn’t know what in the heck I wanted to say in my rhymes.”
“You wanted to be like the rappers in the music videos. Like Slick Rick,” I joked.
“Exactly. So when I ran out of things to write about—there wasn’t exactly a lot of murdering and drug dealing going on in our small town in Tennessee—I just started putting little things about God in the songs. It was really all I knew. So then we turned into Christian rappers.”
“No, no, no.” I was laughing so hard I almost spit out my food.
“I swear. We performed in the church pageant and everything. Now, this was a big deal in Tennessee in the late ’80s. Then one day my father said he wanted me to do one of my rhymes for the church. In the church.”
“Really?” Even I knew folks wouldn’t like that. Rapping in the church?
“I thought, this man has lost his mind. I couldn’t rhyme from the pulpit—people would hate it. We’d lose the whole church after that for sure. So anyway, I told my father it was a bad idea and he pretended he didn’t know folks would have that bad take on it. I say he pretended because I now know the old man was just setting me up. So he said, ‘Well, boy, I think you have some powerful things to say and I really want the church to hear them.’”
“So what did he suggest?”
“He was acting like he was thinking about how we could pull it off and then he was like, ‘I got it. You can read one of the rhymes. Just read one of them to the church so they don’t know it’s a rhyme.’”
“That’s a sermon,” I said.
“Exactly, but I didn’t see that back then. All I knew was that MC K-Lover had a gig.”
“Sneaky man.” I laughed.
“Yeah, so that was my first sermon. Well, it was a rap, but it was a sermon. I read it up there and I was just overwhelmed when the crowd responded. I felt the energy moving through the room. I could see the Holy Ghost touching people as I spoke. It was an amazing feeling. I wasn’t even reading the words anymore after a while; it was just coming from inside me. Like fire. Soon, I stepped away from the pulpit; I was in the aisles, walking around, touching people. I couldn’t stop. I just wanted to preach the word.” He paused reflectively. “I was just twelve.”
“Wow. So what happened to the rap thing?”
“Please, I was young but not dumb. The women and the cars and fly stuff didn’t have nothing on what I felt in the church. It was a young love between me and the church, but it was a beginning. I never turned away again. Not once.”
“Wow” was the only thing I could say. I’d never heard anyone speak of what they did with such conviction.
While we ate, we discovered that we both loved the free summer jazz concerts at Bryant Park, and though he stayed away from R&B for obvious reasons, he loved listening to jazz. As the waitress cleared our table, Kyle and I decided to check out the opening concert coming up in two weeks. I didn’t exactly have a packed schedule, and he was good company.
I felt such a sense of relief, listening to Kyle talk. I grew to like him even more, and I was looking forward to being his friend. Plus, he was a good distraction from all the stuff with Julian. And every girl knows that a good dude distraction is the best thing a girl could have when she’s trying to heal a broken heart.
“I have another confession to make,” I said, standing beside my car in front of the restaurant.
“Oh no, don’t drop another bomb on me like last time.” Kyle playfully threw his hands up in the air. “I can’t take it anymore.”
“It’s nothing like that, silly.” I laughed. “I was just going to say I was mad at you before I came here.”
“And why was that?” He placed the magnolias on my passenger seat.
“I found out that you told my mother about our dinner and it made me really upset.”
“I’m sorry, but I had no other way to find out your favorite flowers, and I wanted to do something—”
I placed my index finger over his lips. “But it’s okay now. I understand.” I got into the car and turned it on. Kyle turned to walk to his own car, which was parked behind mine, but he kept looking over his shoulder.
“Bye, Kyle,” I said, waving at him.
“Bye, Troy,” he replied. “Get home safely and don’t go getting towed.”
“Kyle,” I called. He turned back around. “Thank you.”
How to Get a Dude Distractor: I Do…Just Not You
When you know the main course will take more than a little while to come steaming out of the kitchen, the best thing you can do is feast on a tasty side salad. Why should your love life be any different? Stop sitting at home watching Living Single reruns, waiting for the man of your dreams to come knocking at the door. There are many men out there willing to be your tasty Caesar salad…you just have to place your order. A Dude Distractor (DD) is someone you hang out with (not date) temporarily to distract yourself from whatever’s ailing you. Say you’re dating a guy you really like, but you’re afraid you may be crowding him—get a DD to occupy your time. The same applies if you’re waiting for the love of your life to show up, your lover is acting up, or you’re just hungry and broke as hell.
DD Do’s:
DD Don’ts: