Dapper Carter's 8 Rules of Dating (14 page)

"Have I told you that you look amazing today?"
Amazing is one of those adjectives that a female can’t get enough of hearing
about herself. Just saying the word caused you to smile, corroborating the sincerity
of the statement further. Girls don’t want to be told that they look “pretty.” They
want to hear that they look “hot.” And they don’t want to hear that they look “nice.”
They want to hear “amazing.”

"Not as much as you should. But I do, don’t
I?" she said, modeling her True Religions, riding boots, and a black,
leather Baby Phat top.

Stupid ass me. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything,
but it did perk her up immediately. We continued our date with very little
conversation and lots of uncomfortable silences until unexpectedly one of Dominique's
girlfriends slipped into the booth we were sitting at. Charisma Halifax was extremely cute, thirty pounds overweight, but nonetheless attractive.

I noticed Dominique gave her a weak pat-pat on the
back type of hug. You know, like she really didn’t like her all the time, but
she tolerated her.  Must be a girl thing. When guys don't like each other,
they won't hang out together.

"Dap, I hope you don't mind if Charisma joins
us? I told her we'd be here."

"Sure. Why not?" I answered
condescendingly.

I could feel Charisma's eyes on me. They twinkled
and they would close when she smiled.

"Dominique, you didn't tell me that Dapper was fine."

"Yeah, this is my buddy. My boy."

That was my wake-up call. Her boy? It was obvious
that she had put me in the Friend Zone, too. Once again I was being perceived
as a sucker. Dominique got up and excused herself to go to the ladies’ room and
invited Charisma to go with her. She refused, which made me read between the
lines.  But I didn't have to read for long since she swung over to my side
of the booth, making sure to infringe upon my personal space. Albeit cute, Charisma
had a simple unassuming look. Not that she wasn’t attractive, but she looked
like hundreds of girls that I had met growing up in Jersey.

"So, what's up with you and my girl?"

"Nothing. Didn't you hear her? I'm her
boy
."

"Goody. Then that means maybe we can kick
it?" Goody? Hadn't heard anyone say that in a long time, but it was cute
coming from her. Caesar’s antagonizing voice echoed in my head about how women
only want men that other women want. It's unfortunate, but that’s the way women
are built unless you're fortunate enough to be the one they want.

"You're serious?"

"As a heart attack."

"Just like that? While your girl is in the
bathroom?"

"All's fair in love and war. She's done it to
me before." It was the oldest story in the book. Dominique was the
attractive friend that got all of the attention and Charisma was the friend with
the great personality, which usually meant she wasn’t very attractive on the
going-on-blind-dates circuit. Lucky for her, as we get older looks become less
and less important and personality goes a long way.

I was becoming the king of mediocrity. I was
scarfing up all those 5, 6, and 7’s on a scale from 1 to 10. I knew I was
underachieving, but so what? I was about to turn thirty-six so you have to take
it wherever you can get it, because there are no guarantees as to when the next
train is going to pull into the station.

Charisma was a little bit heavier than I like, but beggars
can't be choosers. In my mind, as long as your breasts are bigger than your
stomach, I can work with you. She asked me for my cell so that she could enter
her phone number into my contact list herself. This had become the cute little
fad, indicating that a person was interested and could be assertive.

I was old school, though, instructing her to tell me
her digits verbally and I would remember. I had developed this practice while I
was married and still used because consequently it left no physical evidence. Most
women were like CSI and I wasn’t going to take any chances.  Remembering
the digits was also quite impressive with the ladies because it showed how
interested I was,
if
I called.  Besides, I didn’t want Dominique to
return to the table and see me taking down her girlfriend’s info.

Varvatos

I spent many quiet nights in my tiny apartment
relaxing and trying my hand at poetry. It was a lot harder than I thought it
would be and I arrogantly thought that just because I had an imaginative mind
and took a creative writing class while at Rutgers that I could put my thoughts
down on paper and it would make sense in iambic pentameter. The only thing I
could come up with was a title: “Letter to Mrs. Carter.”

I would listen to old, sad-ass blues singers
thinking about my mother.  Phyllis Hyman, Etta James, and Muddy Waters
were my favorites.  I love my mother and she is an angel on earth. She had
me when she was seventeen, and for the most part, gave up all her career dreams
in order to raise me. She said her calling in life was to be my mother and she
was accepting of that. My father was in the Navy and was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. He would drive six hours every weekend to come see us and drive six
hours back to the base for work on Monday morning.

My father was a proud, quiet man. In his mind,
actions spoke louder than words and he demonstrated his love for us by what he
did, not what he said. I never really articulated how much I appreciated him paying
the rent, tuition, and keeping the lights on. Small things that were easily
overlooked and underappreciated that dad’s didn’t get enough credit for. He
didn’t say very much, but when he would drop a pearl of wisdom on me, I held it
close to me to be never forgotten.

I remember being on a rant when I was fifteen years
old about “how the white man wasn’t shit” and was trying to keep the Black man
down. He reminded me that he knew a lot of Black people who weren’t shit either.
That became my mantra, putting things into perspective for me and contributing
to my ability not to trust anyone. Some people will give folks the benefit of
the doubt, but I didn’t. You had to earn my trust because it was not given
freely.

My mother’s heart broke when I revealed to her that the
babysitter was molesting me when I was ten years old. I told her how each time
she left the house, the fear would be so paralyzing that it would cause me to pee
in my pants.  Both of my parents felt horrible because they felt like they
didn’t protect me, but it wasn’t their fault.  Shit happens.  At
least now I could begin to understand why I do some of the things that I do and
begin to work on it. 

Frustrated, I launched my notebook off the red brick
wall.
Poetry sucks
, I thought, until I was distracted by the annoying
hum of my cell phone vibrating on the nightstand. I reached over and grabbed
it.

Yesss! It was Green Eyes texting me and she wanted
to come over. She claimed that she felt bad about getting sick and going to
sleep on me the last time we hooked up. It was already 11:05, so according to
the Honeycomb Hideout Rule she would have to hit me off, or at least give me a
blowjob.  I’d even settle for a hand job at this point.

She maintained that she was nearby and would be over
to my apartment in as little as fifteen minutes. I even offered to go pick her
up, which was a ploy to make sure I could see her, but she relented and
promised that she was on her way. She had gone to a wine tasting and was good
and tipsy but hopefully not as toasted as the other night. I suggested that she
bring a steak with her because I was going to give that monkey a black eye!

I was smiling like a Cheshire cat as I jumped into
the shower to freshen up, then sprayed myself generously with my go-to cologne,
John Varvatos, when I was done. I normally wore Issey Miyake during the day
because of the light, citrus smell. But at night it was Varvatos.

I was careful to light each of the twenty or so red candles
that I had placed in my fake fireplace to give the room nice warmth and glow. I
also had to choose between which incense I would go with. I settled on Nag
Champa.  Three years without sex and I was finally going to pop my cherry
again...or so I thought.

After completing all of my pre-sex functions, I
glanced nervously at the clock, which now read 12:30 AM. Fifteen minutes had
turned to ninety and I paced frantically with the phone stapled to my ear in
one hand and the bottle of half-finished Merlot in the other. I left message
after message and sounded like a straight sucker.

 
"Hey, it’s me again. What's going on? You were supposed
to be here an hour ago. Give me a call."

"I'm calling you again.  Where are you?"

 Finally at 3:00 I knocked off and rolled up
into the fetal position under my white down comforter, pissed off and broken
hearted yet again. I should have known better and I didn’t even get a chance to
enforce the rule.  Something had to give.

Caesar Likes You

Caesar pulled this Alfred (freak) at an after hours
club over on Myrtle Avenue and got her drunk on Moet and high on ecstasy. 
That was how Caesar rolled.  He took her to her crib and beat it up, then
crashed at her apartment that was conveniently located around the corner from
me.

The following morning he picked me up and gave me a
lift to work in his brand spanking new raven black Cadillac Escalade hovering
on 24-inch Giovanni rims. Just because you’re in your thirties doesn’t mean
you’re too old to rock hot rims on your car.  When you’ve got an $80,000
vehicle you just don’t need all of that other shit.  Nothing says drug
dealer like tinting the windows, putting a rocker panel on the sides, and
having a sound system you can hear in outer space. We’re too old for that shit.

However, we weren’t too old to nod to Jay Z’s first
album, “Reasonable
Doubt,”
arguably his best. Matter of fact, Cez
had most of Jay Z’s whole catalog in his rotation. “Hard Knock Life,” “Life and
Times of Shawn Carter,” and “The Blueprint I and II.” We were both still heavy
into hip hop, and why shouldn’t we be? It was the voice of our generation.

I was a freshman in high school when KRS-One dropped
“Criminal Minded
”
during the summer of 1987. It changed my life the
first time I heard “
The Bridge is Over”
and so began my love affair with
hip hop music. I didn’t mind the fun, party anthems that were banging in the
clubs, but when it was all said and done, I wanted to listen to MCs that could
tell you why “I’m the baddest motherfucker on the block and this is why you
should be listening to me.” Braggadocios rap was a lost art form, but it remains
an integral part of the culture.

We cruised down Flushing Ave.  past the Marcy
Homes, where Jay Z grew up, before boarding the Brooklyn Bridge and heading
into the City.

I thought it was cool how Brooklyn had so many
diverse groupings of people, but it was still very separated. Bensonhurst was
Asian. Italians took up most of Bay Ridge. The Russians were in Brighton Beach. The Orthodox Jews had the most opportunities to live anywhere since they
dominated Williamsburg and Crown Heights. Flatbush was Trinny and Jamaicans,
Africans, and plain old Black folk lived wherever we could afford to, which was
usually Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Brownsville and anything headed east.

The money areas— Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope,
Boerum Hill, Cobble Hill, and Carroll Garden— were more about class and less
about ethnicity. A new species of yuppie lived there now.

Caesar pulled slowly on his Cuban cigar. The sweet
stench made me want to vomit. I preferred the smell of a plain old Dutch
Masters filled with the green sticky substance over the $50 stogie he was
smoking. But it was his car so how much could I complain? "You can't make
a ho a housewife. You never heard that before?"

I had. I just didn’t understand it, though. A city
full of millions of people and this was the loneliest place on earth. That was
the running theme for me. I just couldn't get it out of my head how a city with
so many people and resources could be so lonely. I noticed that everyone in the
City talked to themselves. Most people lived alone and had gotten very used to
their own company and frequently talked out loud as if there was another person
in the room. The only way to defeat that circumstance was to get a pet.

"I keep going out with these chicks and just
can't connect. These women got so many guys sweating them that by time your
name comes up again in her “rolla-fuck” it might be a week later. I need
someone I can talk to every day."

Caesar exited the bridge then gunned the Caddy’s
Northstar engine onto the FDR, the fastest way to the east side.  We flew
by several of New York City’s finest without any repercussion. The NYPD had
more important things to worry about than the occasional speeder.

"Do what I do. Only fuck with people who fuck
with you," he offered.

"What’s that mean?"

"Only deal with people who are giving you their
energy. If she's feeling you, going out with you,
fucking you
, that's
the person you need to deal with. Why swim upstream? I may not deal with the
finest chicks all the time, but I only deal with women who like me. If you like
Caesar, Caesar likes you."