Hanging with Deb

Well it was a date night of sorts. Dinner and a movie with one of my closest and longest, most dear friends, Debbie. She had an Entrepreneur group meeting at church that I opted out of and after that we were off to dinner but I just didn’t have much of an appetite since I had a tiny bite with my kids before Deb arrived at 7:30. Luckily, she wasn’t much for eating either so we just hit the mall until then 9:10 showing of Tyler Perry’s “Daddy’s Little Girls”.
We walked around Brookdale and made our way through various shoe stores and finally ended at Lady FootLocker where I picked up a red and white sweatsuit ( jacket, shit, pants) and new Nike kicks to go along with it. Debbie couldn’t find anything that worked for her in her size. Being 37 and 3 feet tall kinda limit’s the options, but she has never let O.I. limit her style. She’s still rocking her animal print.

The two of us haven’t had much opportunity to hang over the last year since I’ve been recovering from this crazy Benign Intercranial thing. Benign my ass. A headache everyday for over a year is anything but benign. I gave into it for a year and that’s all the time I was willing to give it. I have had enough cat scans and MRIs to allow scientists to fully document my thoughts if they dedicated enough time to interpreting the scans. I had enough of the bed. I had enough of being sick and I was tired as hell of being tired as hell so I just quit being sick and decided that with or without it, I have to keep on living and keep on keeping on…and that’s just what tonight was about.

I knew hanging with Debbie would be falling right in step as if I never veered from the path of our friendship and allowed myself that time of seclusion and being the dutiful friend, she played her role to the hilt. We laughed from the minute I got into the van until she dropped me back off at home when she warned me to be careful on the ice and reminded me of days long gone by when I fell out of the van at Paisley Park. Thankfully, I hadn’t consumed the amount of cocktails that was required back then to pull a Chevy Chase out the passenger door, but the laughter from the memory was enough to make me hold on to her car until I got to the sidewalk, fearful of falling down just the same. It was all as if time had never passed. We started reminiscing about old friends and talking about one in particular and in the simpatico we found that first night in 1991 outside of Glam Slam, we found we still spoke the same language when we both said at the same time with the same intonations in response to that old friend, “Bitch, shut the fuck up”. Words neither of us use on a regular basis anymore, but if ever there was a girlfriend that deserved to hear that phrase over and over again, this one was surely her.

Angela ( name changed to protect the guilty as sin) is from South America. She has seen the horrors of war and witnessed and been victim to the abuses of foster care in this country. We met in 1990 when she was doing nails at Regis next door to the record store I worked at. The two of us had a deal; I let her use my discount and she did my nails when she didn’t have a customer, no charge. Thinking back, she should have paid me to wear those things….acrylic nails out to there in Vivid Red. What WAS I thinking? Well, probably that it matched my Revlon Cherries in the snow lipstick pretty well. It would take me two days to be able to use the cash register again each time I had a fill.

Eventually, Angela and I had a falling out. She wanted a bigger discount that really was akin to theft and I wasn’t willing to lose my $4.55 an hour job over some nails, especially since she rented space in her store to do nails and paid for her own supplies so her freebie to me was really a freebie to me. It wasn’t corporate theft. Well, I think her short stature and the fact that she had fought so many people for so little in life made her think she needed to come at me like a bulldozer and she approached me in the club with all the fervor of a red hot on virgin taste buds. Oh, no, boo. I’m not the one. I can be hot tempered but I’m known for my mouth, not my fists, but some people just know the right button to push. If not for Debbie and that wheelchair, I would have thrown Angela’s ass over the balcony at Glam Slam. Thing is, it’s been 15 years. It wasn’t a big deal back then so one would think she could let it go but my life moved on and hers didn’t and we both remained Debbie’s closest friends. That is just ripe for conflict. The resolution has always been keep that woman out of my sights and it has worked for both of us until now.

See, I don’t have anything against her. If anything, I would like to see her better her station in life because I have never met a more bitter soul and it’s heartbreaking to hear about her because she holds the ghosts of her pasts closer than the fruits of her future and that’s a breeding ground for toxicity. For people lost in that, I used to bring myself down to another level thinking I could help to lift them up, but they have to want to come. For her, I may extend my hand…but I won’t leave it outstretched for too long. My train is moving and it’s slow enough for others to climb on board. I’m good with that. I want it like that. I thrive on that…but I’m not stopping and I’m not getting off. There it is. So for those moments where she wants the train to stop or wants to go one further and start pulling me and mine off, “Bitch, shut the fuck up”. It’s that simple. Aw Ready!

Onward and upward, kids.

So here’s the kicker, when Debbie and I get together, it’s like some weird backwards cultural exchange program. Debbie is White. She runs a million dollar business today that she founded and runs on her own. She is supposed to be disabled and has been in a wheelchair for most of her life because she has brittle bone disease, known as Osteo Genus Imperfecta or O.I. She breaks bones in her sleep. She grew up in the hood and it grew in her. Well, I grew up on the other side of the tracks. My parents were Grambling grads with honors. They were Who’s Who. They were recruited and they bore me with high expectations and paid for many a school to ensure their R.O.I. ( return on investment). Debbie grew up listening to hip hop and clapping on the 2 and 4. I grew up straight Duran Duran and clapping on the 1 and 3, KNOWING I was supposed to clap on the 2 and 4. A conundrum.

We met outside a club when I was 19, sporting on helluva fake I.D. It was my brilliant idea to take my “cousins” birth certificate down to the driver’s license center and apply for an ID with my picture and her info and it worked beautifully, so for awhile, I was Kim at the club entrance. LOL! After leaving the club, I came across two girls that looked kinda familiar in wheelchairs looking like they were having a duel, spinning in circles. It looked like an interesting enough scene so I stopped for a second and Debbie looked up and said, “Hey, don’t we go to college together” and I had to think about it because I was enrolled and I did show up at a few classes I enjoyed from time to time, but I wasn’t sure that qualified as going to college. I was squatting in psychology and sociology classes basically and even then, I didn’t have a goal. I was just biding time until something new came along. Ah, the ignorance of youth.
Debbie and her friend/roommate Rhonda had just come from a night out as well and we all started chatting and laughing and the laughter just didn’t stop. We exchanged numbers and though I’m sure it was after 2am, Debbie and I ended up on the phone all night when she had to ask “WHAT kind of Black girl ARE you” and I responded by asking what kind of white girl she was. As far as stereotypes go, she and I were ass backwards and a perfect pair.

It’s interesting because tonight, after the movie, she confided in me that she recently wondered if she were less of herself, if things would have been different for her and if more White men would have found her appealing. Of course I laughed it off with her and told her that she is who she is and who she is supposed to be and who gives a good damn who finds her appealing and what their ethnicity is. But, I have to confess to wondering the same thing about Black men. So many of the things that were second nature to me just didn’t sit well with most men that I dated. Whether it was my education, my diction, my ambitions, reading for enjoyment, listening to all kinds of music, whatever , all kinds of surface bs…stereotypical bs that I expected of all people, MY people to be above…it just made men question my Blackness, much in the same way that Debbie was wondering about the question of her Whiteness.

WHEN will we move beyond this garbage? My music tastes will not change my physical appearance. Many a Black woman can’t dance worth a damn. I’m not the only one that can’t cook and can’t dance…but the things that I can do, those are good enough to marvel at and appreciate. Since when did all the things that make me ME become flaws within the Black community anyway? I can turn a decent sentence so I’m trying to be something I’m not??? I don’t wear other people names on my ass because they aren’t paying me to promote them, so I’m not down? I never got down on a first date ( and if I did, I'm sure as hell not putting it out there) and I was fine paying my way for dinner and cab, thank you very much. So that makes me unappealing? I’m a friggen PEACH! Giggles.

I’m a Queen and don’t think I don’t know it. Of any ethnicity, I would be one helluva woman but I’m a Black woman and baby, for me that‘s the tops. I was born one helluva woman. I’m timeless and my beauty and my nature unparallel in this universe and that’s not bragging, that’s fact. If I had one leg and an ashy one at that and 3 teeth, I would still be all that. Ok wait…I would have sense enough to buy lotion so I wouldn’t have ashy legs no how. Pass the cocoa butter. But for real, at any size, I’m still all that and lord knows I have been many a size.
We put too much emphasis on things that don’t matter. They just don’t matter. People that have health problems get this because that will level you with a quickness. Dying doesn’t discriminate. Cancer doesn’t discriminate. Chronic pain does not discriminate. When I got Fibromyalgia, I had to realize that I was more than musculoskeletal. When I got Pseudo Cerebri Tumor ( Benign Intracranial Hypertension) , I had to realize that I was more than pain in my brain. There is more to me than just matter. All that you see is NOT all me. The good news is that my body has realized that I’m more than just those conditions too and slowly but surely, they are fading into the woodwork. Background noise. Fade to black. I don’t allow them to stop me. I don’t allow them to define me and there isn’t a thing that I cannot do because of them.