my Greek-Mexican beauty school dropout to break up with me, and then would do anything to get him back.
Alex and I had moved to L.A. together, against the wishes of his parents, who called him a nigger lover. So there was that little hurdle. I was still at UCLA, and I used my own student loan and my Payless settlement money to finance his beauty school tuition. I hated the Payless money and saw it as blood money, payment for being put in an unsafe situation that allowed me to be raped. Alex had no problem with taking that money, and in many ways saw it as something he had a right to because of what, he said, we had been through.
That was bad enough, but then he dropped out. This was a habit. He’d gone to junior college to play basketball and then enrolled at California State University, Northridge, but didn’t stay. Now he didn’t even want to finish his hours to get his license from beauty school. All he had left was basketball. Every day, he would just play pickup basketball games at a court in Burbank, right around the Disney studios. Not for money, mind you. There was no hustling in the least. It was just one endless loop of pickup games. His ambition didn’t match mine, and as I completely supported him, I began to resent the other costs I was paying for being in an interracial relationship. We got snickers and stares everywhere we went, and his parents had wanted nothing to do with me until they saw the depth of his emotion when I was raped. It just wasn’t worth it if I couldn’t respect him.
I bought the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack just before I drove home to Pleasanton for Christmas break. I listened to it all the way there and all the way back. There are five stages of grieving love, and they are all there in that soundtrack: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I resolved to end things with Alex through listening to those songs, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to leave someone who was so absolutely dependent on me.
In Pleasanton I ran into Keith, who had been a senior at a nearby high school back when I was a freshman. Home for Christmas, we met up at a bar in Old Town Pleasanton. He was a star soccer player who got a scholarship to UCSB, and now he was in law school in San Diego. We hit it off and exchanged information. And we kept talking. He was very much like me if I hadn’t had those Omaha summers to undo parts of my assimilation. He was so terminally corny.
I fell in Deep Like with Keith and began lying to Alex about reasons to go to San Diego. On the drives, I listened to my angst soundtrack of Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan, and Toni Braxton. As Toni sang “Let It Flow,” I liked the idea of Keith even more. There was never an “Oh my God I want to fuck you” moment. But when you are young you start thinking that if you want to be a grown-up, you need a résumé guy. Someone who looks good on paper. Keith could be that guy for me.
My plan was to become brazen enough about Keith that Alex would break up with me. It’s a trick I learned from my dad: you create a bad enough situation that the other half of the partnership just wants out. After all, Alex had always said, “If I ever find out that you’re cheating, I’m just gonna leave.”
One day I was driving down Wilshire in Westwood, just leaving the UCLA campus in my little Miata. My pager went off—call me Grandma and I’ll kill you, but this is how we texted in the olden days. It was Alex.
“911,” it read, which is how we kids expressed “Call me back now!” Then the numbers “04,” which, upside down, spell out “ho.”
“Oh,” I said when I read “ho.” I pulled into a 76 gas station on Wilshire and went to a pay phone.
“Get. Home. Now” was all Alex said.
I am not joking: My heart was dancing. He knew something and had called me a ho. The nuclear option was in play and I didn’t have to do a thing. I listened to Whitney’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” on repeat the whole drive on the 405, joy filling me as I practiced my sad face. “Oh