Chapter One #2
If my mom or any of her sisters had been alive to see the state of my current life, they’d have cussed me out for it.
The writer in me could hear them in my head as I relived listening to their sista speak and Black mama wisdom from the top of the stairs or through the cracked-open door of my bedroom while they drank jug wine, listened to Denise LaSalle or Johnnie Taylor records, and smoked menthol cigarettes at the dining room table of our home in the University of Detroit district.
The kind of conversations that made me want to advance from a boy to a man quickly and be able to talk like grown folks did.
All the phrases I remembered hearing as a youngster flooded into my head, and I wished I’d taken them to heart.
“Don’t ever take care of no grown-ass man. Every able-bodied adult in a household needs to work. Period.” Mom. A high school principal married to my steel factory dad.
“Don’t have no wet ass and a dry purse.” Aunt Jackie. A teacher, never married, but always with a new man friend.
“Make sure the penis you go after can also be a provider.” Aunt Rose. A homemaker married to the steel factory foreman my dad reported to.
“Be a good ho. Don’t never be a broke ho.” Aunt Loretta, who lived comfortably off the pensions of her three dead husbands.
“If he can’t show you some kinda money, you need to put his ass out on the street where he belongs.” Mom, again. And she’d had a beautiful marriage with my dad before he passed my senior year of high school.
I’d been good at crafting fictional gay love stories. Not so much in my own life.
Antoine was yet another lesson learned. No more dating or sleeping with people in bookish life, no more hiring readers as assistants without vetting them outside of the bedroom, no more moving said reader/employee into my home, and definitely no more flings with service workers masking as readers or bookish people in book convention spaces. Lessons learned.
I sighed as I thought about Antoine and our situation, while staring at the greenery of the trees and lush lawns whizzing by. Southeast Michigan gave true summertime beauty realness.
There was no indication it had stormed earlier as the rideshare pulled over in front of Soho in Ferndale.
At just before seven, the sun was now out in full force.
I was grateful for these Michigan summer evenings, and I looked forward to having a couple glasses of wine alone on the outside patio of the bar.
Just as I tapped to pay the driver, my phone chimed.
A text from Antoine. I sighed as I opened it to see what he wanted.
Yo, I just signed off on two envelopes for you. Certified. Want me to open them?
I sighed again. Who asks to open someone else’s mail? No. Leave them outside my bedroom door. Thanks.
Bet .
The Pride flags outside and inside the bar cheered me up a bit and distracted me from thinking about Antoine.
I ordered a glass of wine. The bartender gave me a wooden chip, which during happy hour meant I’d get another drink for free if I wanted it before the bar transitioned into a nightclub at nine.
I sat down at a dry and empty seat at a high table outside.
There, I opened Blowers, Grindr, and Sniffies on my phone to see if anyone was in the vicinity and hosting.
Frustrated by Antoine, losing my job, and being dropped by my publisher, I felt like seeking validation by giving a benevolent blow job to an anonymous guy.
Didn’t like having strangers in my place, both for safety and in case they recognized me for my author life.
Books with my name on them and storyboards on walls tended to give that part of my identity away.
And though Antoine and I were no longer together romantically or sexually, I didn’t want to disrespect him with a merry-go-round of men in and out of my place.
As I scrolled and tapped on anonymous torsos and dick pics, I noticed Antoine was online, too, so I quickly logged off.
Didn’t want him seeing me shopping for dick or knowing I was nearby.
A stranger in the bar would have to do. The Tina Turner song “Private Dancer” ran through my head as I perused the happy hour crowd and assessed who might be the recipient of my skills and services.
I was too old for this.
I needed to figure out a way to get my career back and have my place alone just for myself.
On the surface, everyone thought I had it all.
A university teaching job. A side hustle writing gay romance novels.
A little bit of notoriety in academia and romancelandia.
People knew me on the outside. But they did not know anything else beyond what I performed or gave to them in the classroom, meetings, book events, podcast interviews, or happy hours.
My phone buzzed.
It was my friend Dustin McMillan, one of my buddies whose dick I used to suck from time to time during my short stint living in Chicago a few years ago, before he and I transitioned from instant attraction, to friends with benefits, to friends without the benefits.
He’d left Chicago for the San Francisco Bay Area, his hometown, right after our mothers died around the same time.
He’d lucked out with a real-life workplace romance with a university president named Taylor James while on a consulting assignment for Taylor’s campus.
Every now and then, being members of the same sad club—grown men who’d lost their moms recently—we’d text or call each other to check in and see how we were doing.
The dick sucking thing, we kept silent and in the past.
I scooted my seat around to get the benefits of golden-hour illumination for the video call.
“What up doe?” I said.
“Hey, ho. What’s good with you?”
“Surviving and trying to get to thriving.”
“Well, you’re looking good and chocolatey and glowing in that sunshine out there, Renny,” Dustin said. “Love them asymmetrical twists and slutty little glasses. The new look works for you.”
“Thanks,” I said, smiling. “You still looking good yourself. If you wasn’t in a committed, I might shoot my shot again.”
“I’m flattered and grateful for your friendship.
” He blushed and flashed his mega-white smile, something I always admired.
It’s what initially drew me to him at one of those Saturday afternoon day-drinking events in Chicago for gay men over thirty-five.
“I miss summers in the Midwest. That lighting agrees with you.”
“Don’t let the golden-hour lighting fool you, Dustin. I’m a mess. A hot mess.”
“You are far from a mess, Renny. At least you ain’t walking around in fog and fifty-five degree weather, like I am here in San Francisco. Talk about June gloom. Where you at, by the way?”
“Outside a bar having a glass of wine after work.”
“Man, I’m sorry to interrupt friend time.”
“You see any friends here?” I rotated the phone around my table and seating area and back to my face. “Anyway, I got let go from the university today. Budget cuts.”
“Sorry to hear. Taylor’s dealing with the same thing at his campuses—budget cuts. Anyway, you shouldn’t be alone.”
“Don’t wanna go home. Better to be alone with familiar strangers. And a drink.”
“Avoiding Antoine? I thought that shituationship ended. You sure are a sucker for a man with a big dick. No pun intended.”
“It’s complicated,” I said, sipping. “We ended the romance part almost a year ago. Fired him from being my book assistant at that time, too. But I can’t throw a YN out on the street in this economy.
Times are hard. I’m an author. He knows too much about me.
The optics and publicity would hurt, especially if he said anything about me on social media, you know? ”
“You ain’t have to take him from Chicago back to Detroit with you, either,” Dustin said. “But that’s another story.”
“Oh, like that YN Silas who was crashing in your place in San Francisco. I remember that pandemic relationship rent drama you told me about.”
“You on one today, Renny,” Dustin said, laughing. “Touché.”
“Anyway. Subject change. What’s up? What’s the call about?”
“Man, I just called to check in on you. Mother’s Day is too hard to do a check-in, though it makes the most sense given our situations. So just before Father’s Day, I thought, is the next best thing.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. I felt myself making a strong attempt to hold back a tear.
The emotions of losing her still welled up at the most random times, even after forty.
Effing grief. I swallowed the remaining wine and signaled my chip and empty glass to a barback walking nearby.
“I’m taking it day by day, like most of us.
I love having the condo she bought just before…
Anyway, can’t believe it’s been two years. For both of us.”
“I got a good support system out here. Taylor is my rock…love that man,” Dustin said, smiling.
“A living romance novel,” I said. I truly was happy he’d found love in his forties, something I didn’t really think was in the cards for me. “Can’t wait to meet him IRL, not just in the background of our chats.”
“Please come visit,” Dustin said. “We got a nice little crew of Black gays out here in San Francisco and Oakland, believe it or not. Maybe we’ll find one who’s a better fit for you than that YN chilling at your place. What about you? Any friends or prospects?”
“Like I said, I haven’t made a lot of new friends since moving back to Detroit. The high school and college friends I grew up with here are all over the country now. Damn Renaissance Phoenix overachievers.”
“Well, you have a lot to be proud of, Renny,” he said. “And stop calling yourself a mess. You are not a mess.”
“If you knew me back in college,” I said, singing the chorus of Mary J. Blige’s “My Life.” “But that was twenty years and just as many boyfriends ago. Ha.”
“I ain’t trying to go back to the quote unquote glory days of my twenties,” Dustin said. “Forties are where it’s at…to me, anyway.”