White Girls Read Free

identified with white girls like Mariel Hemingway as she appeared in the 1979 motion picture Manhattan . I’d never felt like part of a couple before. We did things together. The only time I felt as though we’d separated was when we went to gay bars together. But when it comes to gay bars, it’s every man for himself. K was one pretty white girl. As such, he had a certain currency in those bars that made me feel jealous: couldn’t the world see he was mine? Couldn’t the world see I was his universe, and he mine? While we each had boyfriends (K more than me; I couldn’t physically take how much I wanted to be loved and how much I felt when I was; K was made of the world and, so, of much stronger stuff) they were animal-smart enough to know that the real connection was between K and myself. Inevitably, one of his boyfriends but more likely one of mine because that was the only real power they had in the relationship, threatening not to love me, they were men after all and getting there was always on their mind—anyway, more than one of these guys hit on K after they broke up with me. But I wouldn’t have known about it had K not told me. Once, after he relayed that So and So had come on to him, K said: “I don’t know why I told you that! I don’t know why!” I didn’t know why, either, but I knew who K was, and I knew he could and did fall in love with that whichI could not love: the blowhard boy, the taking-up-too-much-space boy, the hysterical boy, the consumerist boy, because they were as glamour-struck as K was struck by their surface glamour. I wanted to love K as a lover but I wanted him to get this kind of person out of his system first. But couldn’t he see I loved him more than any of those horned-up lunkheads, and that he could sometimes be like them in that he wanted to get at some essential part of me that was my own and couldn’t be touched, in the Flannery O’Connor sense? Were all white girls like that?
    Of course, SL was more than aware, emotionally and otherwise, of what was happening as K began to leave. SL drove me to K’s funeral in Connecticut. He even helped me walk K down the stairs in the tenement building K lived in before he died so he could get home to Connecticut to be with his family one last time. SL even had dinner with my beloved and me and another friend on K’s last New Year’s Eve on earth, December 1991, and then SL drove him home, trying hard not to look at K’s body leaving his life—while sporting a cravat, even. For a time, after they first met, K would sometimes twitch in SL’s presence. And while K could let his periodic impulse to hurt but not his jealousy show—“I don’t know why I told you that!”—I wonder, now, if my twinship with SL flooded him with feelings he couldn’t sort out. When K was growing up in Connecticut, the Black Panthers were on trial in New Haven. This was in 1970; he was eight. One day, his mother drove her children into New Haven to do a little shopping. Upon arriving, his mother told her kids to lock the car doors because “those Panthers were loose.” And K remembered thinking: Oh, let them in, let them in. SL and I let him in. Sometimes things got evenmore confusing. Once, K’s boyfriend threw me a birthday party. I was twenty-three and K was twenty. After the party, K found me in bed with a woman. Later, over breakfast, K was tight-lipped for a long time. I don’t think I remember asking him what was wrong because I knew what was wrong. Finally, he exploded. “You were in bed with B!” Did K want to be my only white girl? It was a marriage.
    SL listened to me sob on the telephone once, after my beloved was diagnosed: But he’s only thirty. He doesn’t even know who he is. SL stood by my side as the lid was placed on K’s coffin and the dirt was being shoveled. There was a figurine on top of the coffin lid—a dark Jesus. Looking at that Christ, SL said, I bet K would like that black Jesus on top of him. And without