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