“This poem,” she begins, “is for this sista that I met and well, you know when you meet a new girl and she’s cool but something tells you that you don’t want to like her? And then you find out that she likes the dude you like? Right. Well…” she trails off to snaps and some girl church like chatter responding to her from back near the espresso machine. Motherfucker. That’s what I say to myself.

“Fuck. No lie. I try to
Not like you but
You are a lost soul like I
And must I put myself
Aside to get larger than I
Am so that I can be better
For me
But you are cool as shit
And he is just dick so
Growth means friend is larger
Than sex that’s harder
To understand
Flash forward forty years
See me on the porch with you
He married to someone else new
We laugh at jokes started just today
Grandkids at our feet to play
Yes this scene makes my heart swell with love
Rather than remembering a come that may or may not fit like a glove.”

It was one of her better poems and I’m not just saying that because it’s about me. Okay, maybe I am. But it is one of her better poems (all of us would agree later on this). Soon after this, she would start reciting her poems with her eyes closed and touching herself in a way that made most of us who knew her uncomfortable. Then came the sexual politics metaphors. Oil wells exploding. Eyelashes blinking back tears of hunger….blah blah blah. Most importantly, Gayl pulled a good poem out of her ass to be my friend. I mean, she did that for me. It was the first time anybody had ever written anything aside from a dopey obligatory love letter, just for me. That means she thought about me since we saw each other. More than though, she contemplated. And at that age, I didn’t know that people gave two shits about you once they walked away after shaking your hand. I told you I had issues. Chic Aunt Lucy with issues. I wrote one back but I don’t read out loud, on stage, all vulnerable and shit. So I sent it to her in the mail. This was before the largesse of email. I wrote it on a napkin that night on the C train uptown, with the lights going off and on and me trying not to be freaked out since that’s beginning of most horror movies. I write (sometimes I close my eyes and let them roll back a bit…so weird…like I need some wacky Ouija board visualization to tap into whatever talent I have…I know I’m crazy)…Well, I can’t really show you what I write because I’m not a performer like these guys. It will take me longer than this moment to be a writer. At this point in my life, I’m attempting to be a writer. I don’t have the shit in me to own who I am yet. And the poem I wrote her was about that.
Me and Gayl? As best friends as we could be. After all, we are artists and we’re about the same age and there is a suspicious unsure wall among us sometimes. Not because we don’t love each other. But because we aren’t sure of ourselves yet. I know, I’m starting to sound like a women’s cable channel but you’ll figure out what I mean by that when I introduce Vangey though you already probably have fantastical idea about it already. Basically, none of us have super sympathy for one another because we don’t have enough sympathy for ourselves yet.
Where Hiero and I go from here is a bit more tricky because there are more people involved and, well, so is sex so you know that shit is COMPLICATED (though I hate that word because we use it interchangeably for the word “dramatic” since that’s what we really mean but that word makes us look like we’re immature since we can all get rid of drama. But we can’t get rid complication easily, right?). But Hiero is no where near as complicated, I mean, dramatic as El and I were. El deserves a larger introduction but I think it’s cool to mention, at this point, that El is not his real name. El is what I use because it’s that general masculine Spanish connotation. He’s not Spanish. But he sure is masculine and general. More of El later. Not ready. Inside. Broke my heart. Bad. One word sentences must tell you something.
We’re back at the concert now because Gayl has come back and she is going to start wondering why I’m not talking and I can’t very well tell her that I’m telling the story of all of us in my head so that I can finally write a worthwhile book, now can I? Okay I could but that wouldn’t go over well. Too revealing of my own artistic insecurities. I might as well say “I’m wack” out loud.
“What did you say?” Gayl asks me. “Why are you wack?”
Inside voice, Larri, I say. Inside voice.
“I said, ‘This is wack.’” We are still watching MC Poet thrash around the stage like some bootleg version of Wu Tang, thinking that just because they say they’re “spoken word artists” that they don’t have to be held up to the same standard.
“Yeah. Vangey’s fucking that one right there.” Gayl points to the tall Bob Marley like one with locs piled on top of his head. Very roots, except for the fact that he’s wearing what looks like a fur tracksuit.
“He looks hot…literally. Why isn’t his ass on fire yet?” Gayl laughs with me. “Where’s Hiero?”
“Ran into an old girlfriend.”
“Are you serious? Fucking everywhere we go! Did I tell you we ran into a Hieroian—“ my word for his exes (I’m kind of one of them but that’s coming)—“in Florence?? All of us walking out to do that day tour of Sienna. We sit on the bus and there’s Rose.”
Gayl looks at me with a wrinkle-nose. She doesn’t remember Rose??? What kind of friends do I have?
“Rose! The beautifulreddreadloclegsunderherchinblemishfreefatfree Rose who started the nonprofit when she was thirteen.”
“Oh right! Saint Rose. I remember. Hated her. Except for when she got me that speaking gig when my rent was due. But I went back to hating her after that. Wow, things were kinda easy back then. All I had to do was say I needed a gig and somebody would come through at the last minute. I asked Hiero to see if there was work where he is.”
“You what?” Is this Gayl talking? Gayl who doesn’t unpack her suitcase because life might call? Gayl who, at one point, could go almost anywhere in the world because of all the damn frequent flier miles she racked up on gigs alone? Gayl who was on Off Broadway (I say that with envy. I’m strong enough to admit envy…to myself).
“Well, Lar, I need money. The magazine might go straight down and hit the bricks like ‘Savoy’ and all those other ones. This ain’t dot com anymore. What do you want me to do? Fuck. I don’t want to talk about it now. In fact, let me just be quiet for a second.” She starts looking around. I’ve learned to let her do her own psycho-dramas and wait for her to come back to earth when she’s done. That took awhile to learn so I hope I’m getting some applause or something.
I have to steal a moment to tell this story and hopefully I’ll use inside voice so Gayl doesn’t think I’m ready for the padded room. Gayl not remembering Rose, or, should I say “not remembering Rose” is for a reason. Let’s see, how to phrase this ….Rose was after me but before Gayl even though Gayl and Hiero didn’t do anything with penetration however it doesn’t matter because Gayl is possessive and still doesn’t even get along with Hiero’s wife, though she’s quite amazing. Make sense? Fuck. Fine. Here’s the story.
I moved to Harlem because it was cheaper even though everybody lived in Brooklyn. Plus I got fat in Brooklyn. I like Jamaican food WAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much. And it likes me so much that it won’t go away. Anyways, poetry gigs starting coming uptown and sometimes Hiero didn’t want to go all the way home to Brooklyn on the train. So he started crashing at my place. Which was fine. I had an extra room, or opening—more like opening since it was a railroad apartment that was kind of crooked. And this happened on and off for about six months before I accidentally saw Hiero’s pee pee. He was sleeping and his boxer shorts were open and I was going to the bathroom. Pee pees aren’t pretty and I didn’t get this whole desire to do it to him then (I had to say that in case some dude got the wrong idea about how women see a penis and then just start salivating. Check yourself.). No, it started on a specific day. When he made me breakfast (he’d broken from his vegan diet around this time—but only for a second). Right. And it was good. It went something like this:
Hiero: You need to go shopping. You don’t have any food.
Me: I always eat in Brooklyn. There’s coffee though.
Hiero: Well, I went and got some stuff so I made you something to eat.
Me: What? What could you have possibly made?
Hiero: Cheese eggs and French toast. Don’t fall in love.
Me: I will…with the food.
Hiero: You’re like a dude, sometimes. You know that? But then other times, you flirt all passive aggressive.
Me: Do not.
Hiero: Do too.
Me: Prove it.

And that’s when he kissed me. Not like he stole my ball on the playground. Like a man kisses a woman, which didn’t happen very often to me back then because I was a baggy jean, thrift store girl who had no idea what “high heels” meant (I think I thought it was some sort of foot condition or maybe even what dancers had). We spent that afternoon kissing. Really. Just kissing. If men only knew that sometimes if you devote an afternoon to tongue foreplay that you would get the goods most assuredly…apparently Hiero knew that. Granted there was other stuff that got rubbed on but seriously, his lips…fine. Anyways, that day was the beginning of a lot of afternoons with Hiero and me and us separated from nosey folks because I lived where none of the crew lived…yet. He would call me from the train station on 125th St. and say “It’s me. We’re going on a date. I’m paying. You’re eating. No dutch. We ain’t going as friends.” And I would say, “Hiero, you don’t have to—“ and then he would say, “So five o’clock at the African spot? Perfect.” Click. Macho. Sexy. Not satanic and evil and demanding. Just macho. And sexy.
Whenever I went to Brooklyn, I kind of had to not show that we were um, “kicking it” because there were always eyes watching and, let’s face it, we were young and there was no way you could’ve told me that I was The Only. I wanted to be. But later I would discover that was only because of my ego and not because Hiero and I would make great babies together. So our “thing” was an invisible big pink elephant, shoved in the corner of the Tulip or the street or somebody’s apartment, with everyone else’s elephants. How fun! How tense!
After about six months, there’s really no way to avoid the “what are we doing” bit. I mean, maybe there is but I’m not sure I’m good at it. My heart is too heavy not to fall for people I’m sleeping with. And maybe that kind of shows in my behavior (what I wouldn’t give to just date me for a few months just to see how I am. Right now, I’m biased) because, as you know, things don’t always stay joyous and full of free Senegalese dinners.
It was a Wednesday. I was eating mafe (peanut stew with fish) and trying not to go stupid over the couscous. Hiero had stew vegetables and mac and cheese. I think I was wearing a shirt he left over my house. And I think that’s when the ton of bricks fell on him. Ton of bricks=you’re sleeping with a girl you like who is acting like she’s falling for you.
Hiero: “Um, is that my shirt?”
Me: “Oh, yeah. I think so. You left it and I didn’t do laundry.”

Hiero makes sour face. Larri shifts uncomfortably. You see where this is going. Do you? Because I didn’t. Pretty shade of red! Who knew they were flags? We go back to my apartment. We have sex in my bed-in-a-bag sheets on top of my then-expensive futon (it would take me a while to go back to a real bed because futons seemed so much cooler though I’m not sure why because they were heavy as shit, not easy to move and never long enough for my, ahem, tall lovers). He gets up in the morning. And then never calls me from the train station again. No more free Senegalese dinners. No more marathon sex. No more macho. All on the platonic now. Without even a conversation (I’d get that later—but I was over it by then).
Do I act a fool and start boiling rabbits? No. After a few attempts at paging Hiero (I SO just dated this thing) with no calls back, I knew the score. After all, my whole life has been about being a “Cool Girl.” I’m the girl that men can talk shit with, laugh with, not worry about language, catty bullshit. I’m just mad cool. So Hiero gets off free. With me, anyways. More than a couple of girls would put his dick on stage, including Gayl. And that’s where were we are now. Aren’t we? No! Rose! Rose and Gayl! Fuck. Okay.
So, Rose came breezing through Tulip, the café spot, one day from some place like Ethiopia or London or something. She had one of those hard to place sexy accents, legs under her chin, curly hair that could almost be kinky if she had grown up in Alabama or something and not Botswana or Katmandu (I can’t remember where the hell she grew up). Everything was “charming” and “radical” to Rose. She liked to tell people that she wasn’t Rose the flower, she was Rose the verb. I mean seriously…so anyways, Rose walks into Tulip (hey! I never saw how ridiculous that looked on the page until I just thought about it) and every man with a pulse turned around with his tongue hanging out. She even pissed off the Masala Girls. She was dark like root beer but her eyes and smile were bright like stars on top of a Christmas tree. She was one of those sexy girls where you could see her clavicle. You know what I mean. She touched all the time so you could see how swan-like she was. I remember once I tried to recreate the whole African wrap over my jeans like I saw her do and I literally looked like Oprah’s Sophia from “The Color Purple” when she’s barreling through the fields towards Whoopie.
Rose and Hiero hit it off grand right when Gayl was making her move on him. No, she didn’t know really that he and I had a “thing” and even if she did know Gayl wouldn’t stop over a “thing.” She stopped over obvious relationships. You see the difference? My heart didn’t at the time but that’s okay. She’d been making her move. She’d been calling Hiero and buying him these obscure graphic novels, taking him to dinner, getting him booked on shows with her. I mean, anything she could do to get him at least somewhat engaged in her face, she would do. And not all pathetic like because that’s not Gayl’s style. In fact, she was very self assured the whole way through her plot to get Hiero in her bed. Then Rose comes. And Rose is so nice and so girlfriend-like, despite being almost unreal and completely the archetype of the “Hot Conscious Hip Hop Video Girl”. You could talk to Rose. Hell, I talked to Rose. With ease! The girl has not a mean bone in her hot body. Maybe a few flakey bones but that comes with age. What I’m saying is that she’s irresistible and I’m not sure why Gayl didn’t put two and two together. I know Hiero, as usual, was oblivious because he only understand like obvious plays for him and not passive aggressive shit.
Gayl is so passive aggressive sometimes. Like you have to think twice to make sure she’s saying what she’s saying which is annoying. I mean even right now here at the concert. She is acting out her psycho-drama but she REALLY wants me fall over her decision to get a job. She keeps doing the sideways glance at me while looking back checking for Hiero. I know the score, Gayl. Keep your eyes moving. It’s a good thing we’re listening to a DJ right now and he’s mixing Blackalicious and Diana Ross. Props to him!
Back to Gayl and how she totally fucked herself with Hiero, kind of. Anyways, I’m sure Hiero kissed her a few times because everyone during this time kissed everyone. That’s not a big deal. It’s totally an answer to a period of time when I think we all forgot about kissing…during our first fucking years. Fine. Great. But Rose and Hiero starting performing together. Riiiight. You feel me now, right? Rose is an accomplished violinist, along with all that other stuff she can do so perfectly (bitch). So Hiero got up on stage and did his performing skills which were somewhere along the line of Butterfly from Digable Planets and George Carlin—I know, hard to picture. That’s why he was good. So then add Rose up there with her red—yes RED–violin and you see. Right. So Gayl didn’t think twice, which I don’t understand because I could see it totally from the back of Tulip, sucking on a chai (which I hate but I drank because it was the new thing—so shallow). And then Gayl tells me that she and Rose hang out. So I think, cool, maybe they’re doing a threesome or whatever. Too public for me but that’s cool. And I imagined for some reason all of them hanging from that African fabric Gayl has hanging from her ceiling over her light bulb and pouring candle wax all over each other while listening to old records of The Last Poets (Gayl has a record player—cause she’s one of those kind of cool-like-thats) and sticking mangos in each other’s orifices. I’m so nasty. Not that nasty though because the image grossed me out. I think I just love Gayl’s afro-chic apartment. I was imagining lots of loving but you know that’s not what was going on for real. It went down in one night (don’t most things though?).
Picture this: Hiero and Rose get announced by Mic (pronounced like “Mike”—clever, so clever), the MC for that particular poetry night (because there are several—okay, three event nights at Tulip). And it’s Choco-ratica Night. So Hiero and Rose go up to the stage, dressed in chocolate brown together. Rose’s red violin attached at her side and…they come up HOLDING HANDS! Hiero is NOT a hand holder. I gasp. Out loud. Like. LOUD. And then I cough. Because I was so not trying to be that obvious. I look for Gayl. And she’s off to the side talking to Vangey (still haven’t introduced her properly aside from us being at her concert and her being a rimmed out SUV-lover but she’s coming) when I see her eyes get about as big as the spotlight on the stage. In fact, you could’ve used the whites of her eyes as a spotlight. Complete “What The Fuck” in her eyes. Sucker punched in the heart! Or the vaginal area. Not sure if she loved him or if she just wanted him because most girls did. Rose and Hiero proceed to do some kind of Jay Z/Beyonce type duet that makes me quite green and I continually talk to myself while I’m watching. It goes something like:
“Larri, you’re pretty. You’re smart. You were not the one for him. And that’s okay. Someone will love you too. You will love you. You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and by golly…” You get it. Talking down from your internal ledge. Here’s what I know: I only wish I was Rose being loved. I know I don’t wish I was Hiero’s girl. Too many problems…like this one:
They finish their Richie/Ross-like duet and Choco-rotica breaks for a few moments (intermission, if you will) and then Gayl totally avoids them. Slithers off like a shamed snake and goes outside to smoke a bidi (bidi: small rolled tobacco like cigarette in brown paper that comes in flavors and probably lights your insides on fire) with some random people. However, said random people are really funny and catty as hell and so therefore have something mean and hysterically jaw-dropping to say about EVERYONE. And this time they are dissing Rose.
Catty Person #1: Somebody needs to tell Mahogany Diva that we don’t do violins, honey. We speak drum.
Catty Person #2: I’m saying! What is up with Nefer-nono and her one note fiddle twitching?? I ain’t heard that girl play more than two songs on that fiddle.
Catty Person #1: Member when she came out with the incense stick in her mouth while she played that Erykah Badu song?
Catty Person #2: Remember? I think I got a tattoo of that night on my back since Gayl made me laugh so hard. Gayl, do what you did that night! Come on, girl, that shit was funny!

And then Gayl caves in. I mean the Catty Club Kids are so funny that it’s hard not to cave in. Their wit and banter make you feel like the lion in “The Wiz “when he gets to the opium fields. All bad news. Gayl actually does more than cave in because cave in really could just be laughing with them. No, Gayl goes one step further and actually redoes that little pantomime she did. With great detail. To the point where she kind of looks like she’s playing charades or something while not being able to breathe. It’s pretty funny actually. Except not when Hiero is coming out of Tulip behind you. Does Catty Club give you a head’s up? No way. Gayl turns around and there he is, staring at her, like she’s the old used up tea bag on the bottom of his shoe. And he keeps going. Because what I like about Hiero is that he is not an immediate fighter. He will not cuss you out in the street. He will go home, he will shit, eat, sleep, do push ups, watch Twilight Zone reruns, listen to Abbey Lincoln or Frank Sinatra at two in the morning, clean, write and read without speaking to you until he has calmed down but he will not give you the satisfaction of acting a fool in the street. Gayl runs after him down Fulton Ave. but he has already turned down a dark side street with trees that look like bridges with Rose, who is shoving a spring roll in her mouth and wondering why Hiero’s jaw is clenching.
I am not sure how Hiero and Rose’s relationship went because there wasn’t that door for us to come in and out of their business. I mean, I know she tried moving in with him but that didn’t work because they both require too much personal space and found that they did better visiting. I know that she got him and a couple of us to do college poetry tours through her nonprofit which was really into promoting literacy (the one she started when she was like 15 when she found out her grandmother didn’t know how to read since she was from that island that I can’t remember). I know neither one of them was afraid of being with or without each other in public. I know he wasn’t a fan of her sister who liked fucking NBA players. I know she didn’t love his Masala family since they weren’t very warm to her but that’s because they weren’t warm initially anyway. And then I know the pregnancy scare put them both over the edge and they realized (there are rumors that one of them “realized” it more than the other but nobody can get it together to say which) that they weren’t right for each other.
“Two alphas leave no room for the rest of the alphabet to spring from our equation and bring forth new,” he wrote in a poem that he did one really sad night at Tulip. He pulled a Miles Davis. You know that story? Maybe you don’t since it’s a Detroit tale and not many folks are hip. Raining night in the 1960s in Detroit. Miles Davis walks into Baker’s Keyboard Lounge with his trumpet under his blazer. He walks on stage and plays a heartbreaking rendition of “My Funny Valentine” and is gone as fast as he came in. I love that story. That’s what Hiero did the night he and Rose broke up. He wouldn’t have a serious girlfriend until he met his current wife. Crazy. Lots of Hiero-ians in between though.
He eventually forgave Gayl but you know something else happened to change their relationship from potential to “hell to the naw” that neither one of them ever talk about. I heard it was after he and Rose were on the outs. I heard they met up at the Cadillac Bar (it’s exactly what it sounds like—long, leather, flashy, pimpy, red and time warped) for drinks one night, both to pour their broken hearts out, which was tricky since Gayl’s broken heart was because of her changed friendship with Hiero. And Hiero’s broken heart was over the girl he’d always imagined he’d end up with. One of the Catty Kids saw them kissing in the Clinton Washington subway. Gayl didn’t answer her phone the next morning (I remember calling that day for something so uninteresting that I’m not sure what it was now). Here are the words that they both let slip over the next few years about it:

Hiero:
Lonely
Shit
Jack Daniels
Coke
Sick
Shit on neck
Favorite socks gone?
Torn muscle?
Crazy

Gayl:
Lost jacket
Strep throat
Soup?
Bruise from stool
Special
Painted circle on her floor
Crazy

That’s all. Nothing else.