Racial Love Stories: It Doesn't Matter if You're Black or White (or Hispanic)

Today as I was walking back from lunch wearing my bottle green skirt (as Roxy likes to call it) with my legs out in all their white glory, I passed an older black gentleman who stopped, looked me up and down, and then said, "Green. MMMMMM." Surprisingly, I wasn't as uncomfortable as you might think, but instead, laughed out loud at his choice of words...or should I say sounds. But, it reminded me of a time when I did feel uncomfortable as a 20-year-old at work in the RB. I was on the phone, probably taking a tennis reservation, when I was passed a note by a creepy professor (Kacy & Carly, I think you know who I'm talking about) that simply said, "Nice Skirt, M." Yuck.

My experience today also reminded me that I am generally loved by black men. I am pretty certain that this has to do with my, shall I say, non-stick-thin appearance. In high school, I had a friend named Chris. We had a "top secret notebook" where we used to write notes and then leave it in each other's lockers. I don't really know what the point of it was except that we were kids, and it was secret and fun. He did have a girlfriend named Teresa and word got around to me that she was going to wait for me after my Art class to beat me up. Does this really sound like me? It even feels foreign to write it. Not that she ever did wait for me or beat me up....but it's just funny to be involved in a conversation like that. I don't know what I had done that made her so mad, both she and Chris seem to have their fair share of "really good friends" of the opposite sex and all I was doing was writing dumb notes in a notebook under the alias "Aeon." Anyway, I bring it up because he (as well as another black man who was a customer of mine when I was a carhop at Sonic in high school) told me that "I had a nice A$$ for a white girl."

I could go on with a lot of stories about Chris, but will move on to tell you about a different man named Chrys who works at the carry-out window in the restaurant on the first floor of the building I work in. Chrys recognizes my voice when I call, has "my usual" memorized and always winks and tells me he gave me some extra corn muffins when I pick up my order. Now you may think that this has more to do with the frequency of my ordering food from there than anything else, and you may be right...but all of that pales in comparison to the fact that what I really want to tell you about Chrys is: once I saw on a printout at the restaurant that his real name is Chrysanthemum.

The final story I would like to share is not about me, but I was a first hand witness to it, and it is much more interesting than any of the above stories about myself. Let me first give you a little bit of background about where I live. The street I live on is a dead end, but attracts a lot of traffic of foreign laborers because they can walk to the end of the street, through a grassy area and under the underpass of the freeway. On the other side of the freeway, there is a corner where these laborers gather and wait for people who have work that needs to be done to drive up honk, say how many workers they need, and then they hop in the van and go with them. It is pretty fascinating, in a scary Elizabeth-Smart-type way.

Anyway, one Saturday Roxy and I were going out for a little run (and by run we meant walk), and I was upstairs getting ready. Roxy decided to sit down on the front porch and wait for me, when a man, who I'm sure was headed for the underpass and had quite a bit of an alcoholic stench, stopped to talk to her. Roxy, being the extremely nice girl that she is, was carrying on a small conversation with him and getting a little antsy for me to hurry it up. In the meantime, I came down the stairs, looked through the glass door and saw Roxy sitting on the front porch with a man named Omar (he even spelled it out for her). I saw them, walked into the kitchen and said to Shotzy, "Who is Roxy talking to out there?" I could only see the back of him and didn't want to interrupt anything, even though Roxy was praying I would. Shotzy didn't know what I was talking about, so we headed through the doorway just in time to see Omar go in for a kiss. Roxy jumped to her feet, threw her hand out and yelled "NO!" in the way you are taught in a self-defense class, and then said "I have to be going in now." She came in to our shocked faces, and was a little annoyed, I'm sure, that we hadn't intervened before it got to that point. I'm glad that a few years later, the horror of it all has worn off enough that she can laugh about it with us, as hard as we laughed at that moment.