We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Read online

  All this might be easier if I could punch something, but I’m not a punch-something person. I’m a “sit in the dark in the bathroom with a package of sharp cheddar cheese slices” person. Except I don’t even really eat cheese anymore. Plus I can’t fight. I’m soft, man. And I don’t have any answers. The world is scary and terrible and people out here don’t want Obamacare to fix a paper cut let alone offer some discounted mental health care, so what is left for us to do? Talk about it? Stop being afraid of it? Shut down those who want to dismiss us as fragile or crazy?! I went on Lexapro, but after three weeks I had stopped sleeping and fuck that. Maybe it doesn’t work that way for everyone, but I’d rather be angry and well rested than tired and happy. Or “happy,” I guess. I have pills that make me sleepy instead of panicky, and I learned how to do this four-seven-eight breathing technique that’s supposed to switch your body from fight-or-flight to a passive response, but come on. Seriously, the only time it even occurs to me to do it is when I’m already sweating and trying to dry swallow some of these benzos. Do black girls even get to be depressed? If I ever have more than $37 in my pocket I’m going to open a school for girls with bad attitudes where we basically talk to therapists all day while wearing soft pants and occasionally taking a field trip to the nearest elote cart. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just tell some more stupid jokes. Good thing I’m hilarious.

  A Civil Union

  I witnessed a Civil War reenactment once. And that is a straight-up miracle, considering I had absolutely no idea that people in the North even participated in that kind of thing. Having grown up in this liberal North Shore enclave where no one blinks an eye at your Liberal Gay Blackness, I sometimes forget that the minute you jump on 355 heading west, Illinois becomes an entirely different place. A place where mullets are still fashionable and fanny packs are considered an acceptable accessory.

  My homie was getting married on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon in Naperville, because that is where he is from and that is where his parents still live and would it kill one of my idiot friends to marry some asshole who could afford to throw a wedding downtown? But I love him, so I had to go. After waking up at noon and dragging myself out of bed, the first thing I thought was “Shit, I totally forgot to buy nude panty hose. I am going to look so out of place around these sensibly shoed people.”

  Deciding who to drag with you to a wedding when you’re unattached is a tenth-circle-of-hell situation for real. Especially if it’s a church wedding and you have the type of friends who might burst into flames upon entry. I made my friend Amy go with me, promising that I would sit through her traveling folk metal band’s next show in Chicago but secretly hoping I would die before the time came to make good on that promise. When I went downstairs to meet her, carrying my reusable grocery bag with nice shoes, makeup, and one of those inner-thigh chafe sticks in it, I stopped cold. Amy, my beloved tomboy, typically clad in trucker hats and fitted tank tops and baggy ripped jeans from the boys’ section at Target, was wearing a dress. My sweet, sweet Amy, five feet tall and built like a Lego, was wearing daytime sequins. It looked like someone had stretched an ice-skating costume over a refrigerator box. I gasped. She put the cigarette she was smoking out between her fingers and tried to twirl her sparse mustache, the octopus tattooed on her partially shaved scalp shining in the sunshine. “My tux is at the dry cleaner’s so I’m wearing my old prom dress,” she said by way of explanation, and I put my head down to keep from laughing as I went to toss my stuff in the backseat. “This was the only nice thing I had!” she wailed, and I basically almost choked.

  As Amy’s grumbling, oversize truck belched a steady stream of greasy blue-gray smoke from its exhaust, she took my hand to help hoist me up, then climbed over me like a toddler to get into the driver’s seat. We peeled out with a screech, Ice Cube bumping from the brand-new speakers she’d proudly installed herself. Naperville is a relatively wealthy and predominantly Republican suburb a little over an hour outside of Chicago, and I knew I was in trouble the minute I saw how many churches we were driving past as we exited the tollway. Seriously, it was like church, church, Burger King that whole families actually sit down and eat dinner in, church, church, Walmart, church. We saw at least 137 churches in a two-mile stretch, and that was only after I’d actually started counting them.

  Despite having stayed at least ten miles over the speed limit the entire trip, we arrived late to the ceremony. Blame CVS for not having any good wedding cards and for putting the generic Aleve too far from the Doritos and snacks we needed for the road. Blame all of the semis that kept trapping us between them, condensing the prolonged horror show that is my life into an incomprehensible flash before my eyes. Please also blame my closet for being disorganized and not having any fancy clothes in it. They were already at the altar reciting their vows as we snuck into the back of the church, Amy in the gym shoes she hadn’t thought to bring (or didn’t own) an alternate for, and me in bare feet so my heels wouldn’t click on the hardwood floors, and while that definitely made me feel like a jerk, I was also kind of relieved and hoping that we’d missed some of the boring “what is the meaning of love?” parts.

  Anyway, I tried to inconspicuously scan the room to see if any black people other than myself were in attendance—defense mechanism! we all do it!—and my eyes locked instantly with those of a black woman a few pews over from ours. And she was glaring at me like I’d stolen her fucking bike. I was all ready to breathe a sigh of relief, and homegirl over here was scowling like I’d taken the last piece of chicken off the buffet. Can you even believe that bullshit? Doesn’t she know the unspoken rule that all black people have to stick together within large white gatherings? You never know when a lynch mob might be forming next to the cupcake table!

  Maybe it was because I was wearing sunglasses indoors, or maybe she’s a real stickler for punctuality, but rather than give her the benefit of the doubt, I instead hissed and bared my fangs, which is International Black Code for “I would never light your path to the underground railroad.”

  I let her stare a hole into the side of my face as I shifted my attention to the bridesmaids, who looked absolutely perfect. Combed and sprayed and cinched and plucked, and no unlucky fat friend ruining the uniformity of the bridesmaid roster. Man, I have been that bitch before and I hate it and it sucks. Can’t I just sit in the last pew and undo the top button on my expensive outside pants and make eyes at all the bride’s single uncles? Why you gotta shove me into this tight and shiny shit? You knew I wasn’t going to lose fifty pounds, you asshole, especially because your incessant calling and e-mailing me all hours of the day about the florist and the caterer and the dressmaker caused me to stress eat like you would not fucking believe. Would it have killed you to pick a nice jersey or cotton-poly blend? My eyelashes are sweating in this cheap-ass dress, and my tits are exploding out of the top like biscuit dough from a can. I was in a wedding once in which every other bridesmaid was five-foot-two and approximately thirty-two pounds, and they all looked gorgeous and toned and please keep in mind that I do not shave my armpits. I only went because the bride had a cousin I was interested in, but I ended up looking like some sort of mythical creature, all giant and hunched over and tucking my T. rex arms into my sides so I wouldn’t mess up the pictures with my mossy pits. It was a fail, believe me. After the humiliating amateur photo shoot (“On the count of three, everybody jump!”), I threw my Spanx in a trash can at the hotel, put on a hoodie, and took off my pinching shoes before they had even served the salad course.

  The service was lovely and brief, praises be to the most high God, and the only blemish on the whole thing was that the minister spaced on the words to the Lord’s Prayer as she was reciting it. Holy crap! I’m the biggest sodomite this side of Gomorrah, and even I know all the words to the Apostles’ Creed, the Twenty-third Psalm, and the Lord’s Prayer. Don’t they teach you that on the first day of Ministry 101?! Lesson one: skimming the collection plate. Lesson two: Our father, who art in heaven, hall
owed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Blah blah daily bread, blah blah trespasses, AMEN. I was saying it along in my head with her, feeling pure and clean and washed in the blood of the lamb, and when she flubbed the line my first thought was, “Well, Sam, it’s obvious you’re the devil and that Jesus really was watching when you let that kid finger you in the laundry room of his apartment building freshman year. Give it up, dummy.” But then I realized that she was the wrong one, and now I’ve found the loophole through which I’m going to slip into heaven come Judgment Day. Like God is Judge Mathis.

  The wedding was at four and the reception at six thirty, and the minute we walked outside to stand broiling under the summer sun and wave ribbons at the happy couple as they descended the steps of the church, I turned to Amy and was like, “Dude, we have two hours to kill in the [redacted] suburbs.” Now, if Janessa hadn’t been turning her nose up at me in the church I would’ve asked her and Marquise if they wanted to team up and find someplace to day drink, but by the time I took my ass off my shoulders and thought about inviting them along on whatever adventure we were about to get into, they were already getting into his grandmother’s Buick Regal. So I did the next best thing: I unbuttoned my pants and decided to take a driving tour of the western suburbs. And that, my little pumpkins, is how a dude in a dress and a runaway slave happened upon Civil War Days.

  When we initially drove past the field full of tents and campfires in the middle of downtown, my first thought was “White people will go camping anywhere.” Then, spying the hoop skirts and Confederate flags peppering the crowd, I told Amy to turn the truck around. Right. Now. As we drove past the second time, two young soldiers in homemade Union uniforms were walking down the sidewalk, rifles slung low across their backs. We obviously needed to park the truck. I started humming “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as I got a couple of bottles of water out of her trunk and Amy readied her camera for our long journey back to 1862.

  Being away from the city is terrifying to me. I am not comfortable being around people who homeschool their children and sew their own clothing, and I am never doing that ever again. I was for real afraid for my life. I also really don’t understand this fascination some people have with going back in time. Why in the world would I want to sit around in nine layers of dark wool on an eighty-degree day, sweating into my beard as I pretend to be Robert E. Lee at Antietam, when in the present there are iPhones and air-conditioning? (Well, I guess sometimes you just want to call a woman a nigger in the middle of Main Street, but that’s just you.) You’ll never catch me spending a week in the wilderness trying to “get back to nature” or whatever, especially not when I have an apartment and a bed and a refrigerator. (AND MY FREEDOM.) There’s nothing glamorous to me about sleeping outside or drinking from a different water fountain, particularly when circumstances don’t require it. Seriously, do you Starbucks-drinking people know a single person who cures his own meats?! No, you don’t. Because in this day and age that shit is not necessary. What is this thing people have with pretending they want to go back to when doctors did surgery with two sticks and a roll of jute? I like technology! I love medical advancements! I would rather be dead than dress up like Little Bo Peep on a Saturday afternoon to chase diaper-clad babies named Malachai and cook food over a trash barrel that has been fashioned into some sort of old-timey grill by putting a Bunsen burner inside.

  We walked up and down this stretch of sidewalk for half an hour, gawking through the chain-link fence at your grandfather and the rest of the infantry getting their musketoons and artillery swords ready for the next battle, all while trying to inconspicuously take their photographs. They caught me looking every single time, and I had to pin my freedom papers to my shirt just to keep them from tackling me at the waist and forcing me to braid their children’s hair. Amy and I were making fun of a life-size rendering of Abraham Lincoln made out of mayonnaise (pretty sure) when someone straight out of an episode of Little House on the Prairie appeared from out of nowhere and stood there scrutinizing us. She was wearing a long-sleeved plaid dress with a pinafore, a petticoat, a bonnet, leather, and held a woven basket with both arms. I waited for her to appraise the width of my hips and ask if she could get a look at my teeth, but she didn’t. Instead, she said, “Your necklace is pretty intense.” I was wearing this necklace I got on Etsy, a coyote mandible hanging from a chain that I only wear when I need to feel edgy and cool. And while she might have had a point, this broad was dressed like fucking Florence Nightingale. I was like, “Honey, you are wearing a hoop skirt in 2013.” She stormed off, probably to soak a pig carcass in saltpeter or make coffee out of okra seeds.

  Amy and I drove through the rest of downtown, which pretty much looks like downtown everywhere else: a Gap and a Talbots and lots of little adorable places for your mother to put antique sugar bowls on her house charge and eat overpriced crab salads. From there we drove out through a bunch of subdivisions and new developments, and it was so insanely Children of the Corn–y that I was almost afraid to ride with the windows down for fear someone would reach in with a scythe and slice me to death. So many churches. So many blank blue eyes drinking in our close-cropped city hair and head-to-toe black outfits in disbelief. I was exhausted by the time we got to the reception, which was at this beautiful restaurant that had been dressed up like the ballroom in Cinderella. And even though we’d fought the Battle of Vicksburg and survived, we somehow were still too early and had to stand in the parking lot waiting for the only people of color other than me and Stinkeye to open the doors. (We didn’t really have to stand outside, I guess, but I hate to be the first big bitch in a room full of food, so hovering awkwardly near Amy’s truck was what it was gonna be. I am not going to be the asshole who has a bib tucked into her shirt and is pulling a chair up to the hors d’oeuvres while people are wandering in looking for the gift table with their starter glasses of champagne.)

  Whenever I walk into a room like that I think, “I’m going to ruin this tablecloth or break this chair” before I even get a chance to set my purse down. It took us approximately an hour and a half to find the little placard with my name stenciled on it, and I said a silent prayer to Horus that this dude hadn’t messed up and sat me with his parents’ ancient golf buddies or something. (I already almost got called a nigger once that day, no need to tempt fate). Since we were among the first people in, we were the absolute first people in line at the bar, and the cocktail-hour sangria was flowing. The bartender handed me a plastic cup full of green apple chunks and I paused, paralyzed by the memory of my sister’s wedding with its “either buy drink tickets or suck down tap water all night” theme, then Amy elbowed me in the ribs to get me moving. “It’s free!” she whispered, balancing three cups in one hand and pulling my shirt with the other. Everywhere we turned, someone was shoving a tray loaded with crostini and olive tapenade or bacon-wrapped dates in our faces. I hate olives but I love fancy wedding food, so between the two of us we probably consumed an entire pig and wiped out every olive in the Mediterranean. Seriously, I had toothpicks sticking out of all my pockets. I had to hide them under my chair before anyone noticed the amount of food we’d eaten was greater than what I’d spent on the gift I’d purchased from the low end of their registry.

  —

  I had bet Amy at the church (is “thou shalt not make pointless wagers” one of the Commandments?) that we’d be at the same table as the other black people at the party, but they were seated at the table across from ours, just close enough that I could barely make out the bulging vein in Brenda’s forehead as she glared at me in the romantic candlelight. I wanted to shout, “Look, I just survived typhoid pneumonia and the Battle of Gettysburg to be here and eat these tapas, lay the fuck off,” but my mouth was way too full of manchego cheese. Amy and I got put at the “fun table,” the one full of hip single people who did not speak to us save for this trio of drunk bachelors who were hilarious and asking questions, all except “Are you guys a couple?”
because, duh, they are polite and have manners, but you know that’s the only question they really wanted to ask.

  Dinner was equally delicious: a bunch of really good hot and cold dishes that they served family style, which caused me a great deal of agita, but what can you do? People waiting for me to serve myself from a communal food dish stresses me out. I took a quarter of what I’d normally eat, then watched wistfully as the platters circled the table. You could tell how much the bride’s parents loved her by the quality of the food. Seriously, as we passed all of the gleaming fresh seafood trays and steaming bowls of chicken with artichokes I couldn’t help but think, “I bet she got really good grades in high school.” Plus, we were sitting so close to the top-shelf open bar that I could pretty much serve myself.