The Last Black Unicorn - Tiffany Haddish Page 0,43
Hitting up old people for their money, that kind of stuff.
The Nice Guy
I dated a lawyer once. He was much older than me, like sixty, and he was so nice. He was always kind, always polite, and bought me nice things. He took me nice places, taught me a lot, was easy to talk to, a good communicator, and we had a lot of fun. Wherever we’d go, we would have a good time. We could go to a baby shower and still have fun, and we went to that kind of stuff all the time. He was dope.
But that’s not why I dated him. To be honest, I dated him for racist reasons.
I dated him because he was white. At least, I thought he was. I didn’t ask him, I just assumed.
I found out the truth when he went in for surgery on a torn rotator cuff. I went with him to the hospital to help him afterwards, because I’m a good girlfriend. When he was asleep, I wanted to see if we was healthy—you know, because we’d been hooking up without a condom for a while.
So I went through his charts, and right there, plain as day on his blood test, it said he’s African-American. I went up to the nurse, all confused.
Tiffany: “He’s not African-American. Why y’all got this on here? He came in here with me, I know him.”
Nurse: “No, that’s his chart. That’s what it says.”
I got sad, because I really thought I was dating a white man. When he woke up, I gently broached the subject:
Tiffany: “You black?!?!”
Old Boyfriend: “I don’t normally talk about it.”
He didn’t know his mom. He was raised by his white, English father in London. When he asked his dad about his mom, his dad was like, “Your mom was mixed, but she was a harlot.” Some English people call a ho a harlot, I guess. So his dad was calling his mom a ho.
You know the sad thing? If he’d been white, I might have kept dating him.
Well, maybe. There were other problems. He was also old.
He kept asking me to have babies with him. That didn’t make sense. Here he was, sitting around with a messed up shoulder, already sixty, and he wants me to have a baby.
First off, he can’t hold a baby with that shoulder!
Second, I’m not about to have to change your diaper and the baby’s diaper. That’s too much work.
Third, he already had two grown kids. What if they have babies? Now I’m getting grandpa dick. I don’t want grandpa dick. I’m cool with baby daddy dick, but grandpa dick is no good.
That’s how I felt, anyway. But he was the best boyfriend I ever had. If he was like twenty years younger, it would have been cool.
Toxic Shock
This isn’t really a boyfriend story, but it kinda fits in this chapter, ’cause I wanted this doctor to be my boyfriend. Here’s how it went down.
When I was thirteen—right before my mom hit that baby with a two-by-four and I got put in foster care—I got toxic shock syndrome.
I got toxic shock because I was using a super-absorbent tampon and I probably should have just been using a junior-sized tampon. I didn’t even know how to really use it right. I had the applicator in there and everything.
I went through the school day, I got home from school, and then I took the tampon out. I was itching and scratching all over. I just felt so sick. I was telling my mom, and my mom was like:
Mama: “She’s just faking. She not sick. She’s just faking.”
Grandma: “She got a fever though, she got a fever.”
Mama: “She all right. She going to be fine. Just take this Herbalife. That’s what you need to do, just take this Herbalife.”
To this day, I hate Herbalife because of this incident. She was making me swallow these pills, but soon as I swallowed them, I threw them up. Anything I drank—water, juice, whatever—I threw up.
Mama: “Oh, she acting. She acting. Stop acting like you sick. Stop acting like you got a problem. You just acting.”
Then she whipped me. That whipping hurt, but it also felt so good, because my body was so itchy. Every time the belt hit me, it was like a good scratch.
Then, when my grandma came over, I was completely dehydrated. I had scratched holes in my legs and my feet. You know when you run outside after the ice cream truck in the summertime and the