Episode 3: The Bong and the Restless

I’m sitting alone at my neighborhood dive bar when I meet my next boyfriend. He plants his Pabst on the bar in front of me, looking away.

            “Is that for me?” I ask.

            He looks down and smiles. “No, but I can get you one.”

I glance at my girlfriend chatting up some fool at the bar, then I look back at Mr. Pabst. While we wait in line at the bar, I ask him his name. He yelps, “Alex!” I smile. He has the same name as my last Portland boyfriend. I’ve been back for four months, and this is my first night of going out since I've returned that I don’t live with my parents. I feel alive; ready for the crab to come out of the shell. I don’t know what the crab or the shell is, but I hope I don’t get crabs. Just some dick. This one will be Alex 2: the sequel.

Alex has a sweet face, which justifies his stained, ‘70’s porn star jacket. After he buys me my own Pabst, we sit outside while he smokes.

            “So what do you do for work?” I ask.

            “Um, well, I used to work at a coffee shop, but then I got laid off, see, and now I’m actually on unemployment. But I’m looking for work and stuff.”

            I nod. Every guy that has hit on me in the past month either didn’t finish college or is on unemployment. Welcome home, Rose.

            “...But I’m in a band,” he adds.

            Okay, I can work with that. “Cool, what do you play?”

            “I play bass. It’s sort of dancey, electronic pop stuff.”

            Fuck. As if I don’t hear enough of that on 94.7 and at lesbian dance parties at Rotture. “That’s cool. How long have you guys been playing?”

            “A while. We haven’t been playing that many shows as much recently. Our lead singer is kind of...well, addicted to drugs.”

            For having had more Pabsts than fingers, he’s surprisingly coherent and conscientious.  This makes me okay with asking him to walk me home when I realize it’s 2 am and I have to be up for work in four hours.

            In front of my house, he asks if it’s okay for him to call me sometime. Though he seems a little, well, Portland (no job, in a band), my criteria for dating someone ‘settled’ (financially independent, emotionally stable) appears to only be leading me to excess masturbation. I give him my number and a kiss. 

            Seven months later, I’ve lent him $100 three times, and more often than not, made or spotted him meals. At times I wonder if we’re still together because I need to escape my roommates and he needs sustenance. Our relationship is feeling like “Survivor,” except I already know who’s getting kicked off the island.

I eat breakfast with my cousin one morning, whose girlfriend has recently left him for grad school. I ask if he misses her. “I don’t know, I’d like her around, but it’s weird; I don’t necessarily miss her, or the company, or even the sex- I miss having someone remind me to do something with myself. Lately I won’t get up before 11, unless I’m working.”

            I nod, thinking about how I snapped at Alex yesterday for not actively seeking employment, or signing up for PCC classes like he said he would way back during date number five. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m the only slap of reality to my boyfriend’s face.

            A month later, my roommate and his girlfriend strike a similar iceberg. My coworker complains she's outgrowing her 5-year boyfriend. My friend goes for coffee with me and says she's supporting her boyfriend, and doesn't know how much longer she can put up with it. Is this a domino effect? Why have hopes and dreams massacred every romantic relationship in my line of vision? And why does the more restless/ambitious party tend to be the woman?

Women have more options now than we’ve ever had. This new sense of freedom isn’t limited to just careers or tampons. We don’t have to put up with misogynistic douchewads anymore, but simultaneously, guys have less incentive to be career-driven, especially when living in a young stoner mecca such as Portland. Women dominate college campuses, and have for the past 25 years. Though women still earn only 75% of what their male counterparts earn, and we no longer have the societal pressure to marry young and live off of our partners.

After nine months with now-semi-employed dude, I start to feel Alex wear on me. He still hasn’t signed up for any PCC classes, and his band has disintegrated. “Are you going to find other people to play with?” I ask him one day.

“Yeah, well I was supposed to start playing with Sean soon, but I can’t get a hold of him.”

“Why’s that?”

He fiddles with his phone. “Probably ‘cause he’s on mushrooms all the time.”

I stare at him.  

At dinner one evening, 9 months after our Pabsts, I analyze his scraggly beard, all the way down to his only pair of jeans and decaying loafers. He is nice sex, sweet words, and has been my anxiety hot-line for most of 2011. But I can’t explain one more time how to make an omelet or set up online banking. “I don’t think we should be together anymore.”

            A month later, I find myself back at the same bar, sitting with a 31-year-old barista. He raves about “Do-It-Yourself culture” in Portland and the spiritual benefits of Brazilian dance. He asks if I want to come back to his place and listen to old hip-hop records.

            “You’ll really like my place,” he says. “I live with some friends and their kid. Did I mention I play in a band?”

At least this guy’s name isn’t Alex.

Episode 2: Black is the new Black

I’m in love. Well, that’s if “love” is watching a painfully handsome black man in high-tops bang out a killer guitar lick with his ten-piece funk band. He towers over the audience, looking invincible, and all I can think is, “Dang.” 

I don’t know how, but I need to talk to this man.

As they round their last number, I’m brainstorming conversation starters: 
Are those glasses real? How’d you get so tall? Are you just black, or am I happy to see you?

I notice their set has ended. A DJ appears onstage, looking like a children’s party clown after the presence of ten instruments. “Dang” is standing a mere few feet away from me- I know this is my only chance. Scanning through all my unusable lines, I spot the hat he was wearing onstage now on the floor, beside him.

I swoop for the hat off the ground and tap him on the shoulder. He swivels his head back. “Don’t you need this?” I ask over the booming bass.

He smiles and I know it’s over for me. “Where did you come from?”

I glance back at where I was standing. “Um, over there?”

His smile is pebbled with disagreeing teeth, but is still endearing. “No, I mean, did you fall from the sky?”

Barf. “Mm, not the last time I checked…”

He stares at me. “Where u from?” He asks.

“Here.”

“What? No!”

I nod.

He smiles and stares at me again. “You are beautiful.”

“Thanks. You, too.”

We chat about what we do, his arm now draped over my shoulder. I know he has probably slept with half of the city's vaginal population, but I don’t care- I’m enjoying the ride. When the next band comes on, he dances with me, feeling me up a little bit, telling me he sees potential for us- it’s starting to feel like what would be a third date with the average Portland male.

A few weeks later, we’re on a second hang out (I’m beginning to hate the word ‘date’), sitting at a bar that thinks it’s in Brooklyn, NY. Our drinks waning, our knees sparking, we discover new ways we can faintly touch each other without disrupting the conversation. This pre-sex dance, I think, must be obvious to the entire bar, until the bartender plants herself in front of us, more breast than tank top.

“You want another one, sweetie?” She asks Dang, batting her Bambi eyes.

He strokes his chin. “I’m thinking about it.”

She grabs a cold glass. “Here, how about I make you something really good? I know what you like.”

I look down; we’re halfway to hug, I’m in a liquid skirt, and his hand is on my thigh. What the hell does this bartender think she’s doing? I’ve never had my date poached before. 
Have I only ever dated fugly men?

For the next few weeks, any time Dang and I go to a bar, I witness the most flagrant eye-batting and giggling from women I’ve ever seen, and it’s all directed towards my date. It appears as though wherever this guy goes, vaginas fly at him left and right. He’s hip, attractive, and clearly a player, but I think it’s something else.

“Duh, it’s because he’s black,” my guy friend says with a mouth wadded with burger. 
“Black men are like a commodity in this city- there aren’t very many of them, and girls are down.”

Urban dictionary defines “white guilt” as: 
“A belief, often subconscious, among white liberals that being white is, in and of itself, a great transgression against the rest of the world for which one must spend their life making atonement.” 
What’s the best way for guilty Caucasian women to band-aid the centuries of mistreatment endured by blacks via whites? By having sex with a black man. It’s not a conscious thought for us college-educated liberal white chicks, undeniably apparent. And Portland is 80% white. Finding black men to date/screw in this city is like trying to find sexy, dark Waldo.

It’s an early Sunday morning on Facebook when I face some of the downsides of this particular man. Curious to see just how many women this guy is boning, I spy on his page; the first pictures that appear are of him and the hot black girl I saw him dancing with at his last gig, where I’d run into him. She commented on all of her photos of the two of them, cracking jokes about being his baby mama and how cute they were together.

I spot one photo of her scowling in the foreground, with him talking to another girl in the background. Next to the photo reads the words, “Caught in action!” The comments underneath the caption say, “All bad,” and “Lol right??” and “Dammmmnnn.”

I look closer- the girl he was talking to was me.

I hang out with him as friends a couple weeks later. I don’t care whether or not he’s seeing this chick, but I’m curious if I had been an unknowing accomplice to his bad habit. I tell him I saw that photo, and what it said.

“Nah, I’m not with her or anything. She’s into me, but we’re just friends,” he claims. “Her and her friend said that shit because they’re not down with me talking to a white girl.”

Um. “So…they’re racist?”

“No, they’re just not down with black dudes talking to white chicks. A lotta black girls are like that.”

I thought racial segregation was reserved for the mouth-breathing states and history books. But apparently, Portland is still part of America. 

Am I Black Enough For You 

Episode one: 24

     My head throbs. I'm tasting whiskey and ash; my head feels full of lead. My alarm is screaming “It’s 6:00 AM, bitch!” and I can’t remember where I’ve left my work clothes. Glancing at the “admitted” stamp on my right wrist, I remember punching my cell number into a Cirque du Soleil acrobat’s phone. Rolling over, my stomach feels like it's at sea and I know I'm not going to get tipped well today. I'm 24, and so far, it sucks.

Today, the diner is empty. Manuel the dishwasher mumbles in my ear while I'm wiping down the counter: "wassup, my nigga?" I shake my head and say, "No digas. Do you want to get beat up?" 
“No me gusta menos que venticinco,” one of the head chefs mumbles to the other in Spanish, while looking at me. I stare at them, and they laugh.

I look down at my stained blouse, covered in our crappy Costco condiments- the blood, sweat and tears of what used to be food. I did not picture that two years after getting my degree, I’d still be shepherding greasy cheeseburgers to unsettled families.I suddenly feel like a bad punch line to a Republican joke (redundant?).

At three, I walk through my front door and smell mold. The living room still looks like shit, and clearly our landlord hasn’t dealt with the flooding in the basement. I go into my room and close the door behind me. I put on "Kind of Blue" again and start to roll a joint on the floor. 

I hate 24 because I’m just that much closer to 25; the year that I really should be paying off my school loan and my own phone bill. The next ten years zip through my head and up my spine; job applications, troubling dates, and never having enough money. All I can do for now is dance, drink, and wait for the acrobat to call.