We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,4

would smell by morning. But my hair was also a problem. I didn’t want to go through the normal ritual that I did at home, wrapping my hair with a scarf, because it would draw attention to my blackness and therefore my difference. When in Rome, do as the white girls do. So I would put my hair in a ponytail or a bun and try to keep as still as possible all night—as we call it, “sleeping pretty.” But eventually slumber takes over and you become a human being. By the time I woke up in the morning, my hair would be unruly.

“Oh my God, you look like Buckwheat!” someone invariably said, pointing to the mass of hair on my head. Eddie Murphy’s SNL version of Buckwheat was still fresh and popular, all hair and teeth and “Ohtay!”

“Do Buckwheat!”

And I would do it. I would go into the “Buckwheat Got Shot” routine, with my hands in the air like Eddie’s. Every time I said, “Ohtay,” the girls would die.

Now that I was willingly their clown, the directives began.

“Act like you put your finger in a socket.”

“Pretend you’re a Kewpie doll.”

I pulled my hair up to make it stand on end. Making them laugh gave me the illusion of agency and control. Minstrelsy makes the audience comfortable. Now that I am on the other side of it, and proud of my blackness, they wouldn’t know what to do with me. People don’t know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate.

Nevertheless, I did manage to create real, lasting friendships with other girls during this period. And we liked to have fun. We had our first kegger in seventh grade, right before school let out for summer. We were farting around in a park and we saw these older kids hide their pony keg in the bushes. We waited for them to leave, snuck over, got their pony keg, and rolled it right on over to my friend Missy Baldwin’s house. None of us knew how to open it, so we hammered a screwdriver into the side until we made a hole and were able to drain the beer into a bucket.

And then we had all this beer! So we called people—meaning boys—and they biked over to Missy’s house. There was just this trove of Huffys and BMXs dropped in her front yard as kids raced to the back practically shouting, “Beer!” The house got trashed and kids put her lawn furniture into her pool. This wasn’t even at night and it was in a planned community. But her parents were hippies and were like, “Missy. Man, that’s not cool.”

That wouldn’t have worked with my parents, but they had no idea where I was anyway. They put in long days at their telecommunications jobs—my dad in San Jose, my mom in Oakland, both a one-hour commute away. My older sister, Kelly, who acted as if she had birthed herself, was given a very long leash, but she had a lot of responsibility, too. If anything happened, my sister had to take care of it. If I had a dentist appointment, she would have to take time off from school activities to play chauffeur. Class projects, homework—she was my Google before there was Google. In high school, she loved sports but didn’t have my natural athleticism. She quickly recognized the gifts she had and segued into being a team manager and coaching youth basketball. Everything she wore was from Lerner, and she became a manager there at sixteen. There she was in her blazers with the huge shoulder pads. I idolized her, but also took her guidance and intelligence for granted.

She and Tracy, my little sister, had the caregiver-child relationship because of the eleven years between them. I was in the middle, completely under my family’s radar. So I created a family of my friends. They were everything to me, and as a result, I was hardly ever home.

I only drank with friends, enjoying the game of getting the alcohol as much as drinking it. We’d steal from our parents or con older relatives into buying it for us. We used to play a drinking game called vegetable. Each person would choose a vegetable and try to say it without showing our teeth, and then we’d give someone another vegetable to say. You’d always pick something tough, like “rhubarb” or “asparagus” or “russet potatoes.” If you showed your teeth—by laughing, for instance—you had to pound a Keystone Light