Who Teaches Black Boys How to Love? by Aaron Foley #2
“That’s for damn sure,” Desmond said. “May I offer just one suggestion?” He sat next to her at the vanity. “Just a little more blush under the cheeks. And is there any eye shadow? You need eye shadow. And this lipstick doesn’t really go with this dress, but it’ll have to do for now, I guess.”
“Who’s this sissy who thinks he can do my makeup better than me?” Valencia laughed.
“Maybe we can call him artist and repertoire,” Wilbur said, putting on a faux French accent on the last syllable.
Desmond stayed for the show, where Valencia dazzled under mirrored glints.
Her reward was a share in the club’s earnings that night, and she went with Wilbur and Desmond out for sliders at one of those late-night, decked-in-white hamburger stands on Livernois Avenue, only about the size of someone’s living room but just enough to accommodate the three hungry clubgoers.
Desmond wanted a commission for his makeup artistry, so Wilbur picked up the check while Valencia went out for a More menthol cigarette.
“She shouldn’t smoke. It could damage her vocal cords in the long run,” Desmond said.
“You shouldn’t worry so much,” Wilbur responded, finishing a plate of crinkle fries.
“You shouldn’t talk with your mouth full.”
“Why you so uppity?”
“I am not uppity. You call this uppity? Sitting here in this greasy spoon?”
“So you like being here is what you’re saying.”
Desmond was still finding it hard to look directly at Wilbur, so he rolled his eyes instead.
Then he looked around and realized the restaurant was empty.
Both the cook and the cashier had joined Valencia outside for smokes, cracking jokes and bemoaning the rising cost of gas.
He looked over at Wilbur for the first time, and this time didn’t look away when he repeated his stance.
“I’m not uppity. I’m not saditty. I’m not none of that. I had a really good time, so thank you.”
Wilbur quickly sucked his teeth, lest there be any bits of beef stuck in them, and cracked the slightest grin. “Squo?”
“What?”
“ Squo. Squo? You know, it’s like saying…‘Are you serious? For sure?’?”
“Is that what they’re saying on the west side of Detroit?”
“It’s what they’re saying on the west side, the east side, on the first shift, on the second shift…we got to get you out more often. I don’t mind catching you up.”
Desmond took a moment to absorb another one of Wilbur’s vocabulary words. Out suddenly seemed like a foreign concept as well. But until the right definition came, it didn’t stop him from looking Wilbur in the eye—again—and responding “Okay.”
In their Introduction to Business Management course, the professor asked everyone to count off one by one and break into groups of four to practice negotiation tactics.
Those who counted one and two would be mock business owners looking to rent a hall on a small budget, and the threes and fours would be the hall owners who’d have to barter what services they could or couldn’t offer depending on the price.
They sat on opposite sides of the classroom that day, but somehow Wil landed on one and Des landed on two anyway and ended up in close company once again. They paired up against two other students, turning their hard plastic chairs and pressed-wood desks into foursquares.
“I’m Florentino, but they call me Tino,” one on the opposite side said.
“Are you from Mexico?” Desmond asked.
“Do I look like it?” Tino was brown but had a close-cropped cut with two parts on the side and a herringbone chain on. “Nah, I’m from the east side. My mom just saw a name in a magazine and went with it.”
“I like that name,” Wilbur said with a smile, and Desmond gave him a quizzical look.
“And I’m Charlotte,” said the lone woman in the foursome.
“Well, I’m Wilbur, and this is Desmond.”
“Hey, I can introduce myself, you know. Just ’cause it’s not as exotic as Florentino.”
“You know Black moms in Detroit love a foreign-sounding name, it ain’t nothing exotic,” Tino said. “So if y’all are the business owners, what kind of business do you have for us?”
“Right, right, so check it out—me and my business partner here want to have a party for our, ummm, new business—” Wilbur said.
“A restaurant. A Mexican restaurant,” Desmond interrupted.
“Two brothers opening a Mexican restaurant?” Charlotte asked.
“Yeah, and the brother sitting next to you can make the chimichangas since he’s got the nice name for it,” Desmond shot back.
“Daaaaamn, okay. I see how this is going,” Tino said. “So what do you have to offer?”
“Well, uh, you have to excuse my business partner here, sir, he can be a little huffy and uppity sometimes.”
Desmond nearly gasped out loud but remembered he had to tone it down—in more ways than one. So he folded his arms and kept his mouth shut.
“So we know that the rental rate for your hall is $250 a night, but we were wondering if we could offer $125 if we just used it for a few hours—and in exchange, we offer you some free promotion when we formally open up our restaurant.”
“And what if the restaurant fails?” Tino asked.
“Nothing I do ever fails,” Desmond said.
“Maybe nothing you do, but it’s the two of you,” Charlotte said.
“Right, right,” Wilbur said. “And we do make a good team, don’t we?”
Wilbur put a playful hand on Desmond’s shoulder and shook it a little.
Desmond relaxed his shoulders, unfolded his arms and, in a split second, tried to figure out what to do with his eyes.
Rolling them would give off too much feminine energy, but using his to look directly into Wilbur’s at this moment would knowingly set off something he knew he wasn’t prepared for.
Instead, he looked squarely at Tino and said, “We do.”
There’s no time to waste when two Black men make love under a cloak of discretion.
You wait for aligned breaks at work, wait for big mamas to fall fast asleep, wait for a home to become a sanctuary when its inhabitants find temporary salvation elsewhere for an extended sojourn.
(For Detroiters, that’s down home in Alabama.) Desmond and Wilbur make love with caution and efficiency.
It is more of a game of strategy than sexual expression.
The more you score, the more you want to move to higher levels.
The more you win, the more you want. Lovemaking was covert, elusive, dangerous, addictive, all at once.
Wil—just Wil, moving away from Wilbur—learned how to ease his love in slow, and learned how to build to crescendos like his music.
Des—just Des, moving away from Desmond—learned to grow love, to take love, to wrap around love, to move around love, to pull from love, and to repeat that chorus if time allowed.
Love could fill one of those temples on Woodward Avenue, but so far it was confined to public housing bedrooms and bathroom stalls.
Love even dared to try at least once in one of Lewis’s basement storage rooms, six weeks in, but then love realized that love can be questioned, envied, judged if found out.
Lewis College of Business is one of the smallest Historically Black Colleges on the land.
On the west side of Detroit, a woman by the name of Violet Lewis, from Indianapolis, had a dream to open an outpost of an already existing school in Hoosierland, and she turned her ambitions north to the Mitten State.
So many folks were getting educated down south, back home.
What to make of the Negro, then the Colored, then the Afro-American, then the Black, above the Mason-Dixon?
Mother Lewis took over a vacant Bible college of four scant buildings on Detroit’s west side—once all Jewish but quickly turning Black.
For a time, there were two Lewis colleges.
Small and humble, just like the homes on West Grand Boulevard pumping out the world’s Black pop music at the same pace as the assembly lines around them.
But there’s never enough money to spread around folks just a generation and a half out of slavery, so the two campuses merged into one in Detroit.
Three classroom buildings and one auditorium, the campus’s pride and joy.
Love could be found out, and love could be weaponized against its practitioners.
Religion passed down from slaves to the Negroes to the coloreds to the Blacks, and the biblical beginnings of Lewis’s newer digs would forever haunt.
They all say man shalt not lie with man.
Wil and Des were students upstairs, lovers downstairs, falling prey every time to their own physical desires that were yearning to manifest outward.
But they couldn’t be found out. They loved in discretion every time and always.
But sometimes, as they walked along campus class to class, some wondered if they were more than just fellow classmates.
Wil saw the stares, cared about them more.
That wasn’t the only thing on students’ lips and minds.
There was a new rumor going around. To keep the doors open, the finance department said, drastic measures had to be taken.
Tuition would have to go up. And there were new IBM computers that needed to be bought to train the future secretaries, new adding machines for the accounting students, new typewriters, new books.
Students asked if they could help. One top academic suggested prayer.
Ain’t we been praying since we were slaves?
A more practical solution was fundraising.
“And let’s do a fashion show, too,” Des said.
“Now you’re talking,” Wil said. They were near whispering anyway, discussing a fundraising plot in Wil’s bedroom while his roommate was away. “I’ll get Tino in on it.”
“You sure he’d be right?”
“You know he’s talented.”
“Under certain direction, of course.”
“I know what you mean. But you know what I mean, and you know what it is. Remove any doubt now.”
“It’s not my concern you should be worried about.”
“Maybe we’re worrying too much.”