Bed Stuy: A Love Story by Jerry McGill

Author:Jerry McGill [McGill, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2021-11-30T22:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

“Wait. She broke up with you?” Marlon was beside himself. They were at the local pizzeria, eating a pie with sausage and splitting a plate of garlic knots. “That shit don’t make no sense.”

“She was right. She deserves someone who is gonna be more present. Someone who is gonna worship her for the queen she is.”

“Didn’t you say the sex was great?”

“It’s not just about that, Marlon.”

“Don’t get all Dr. Ruth on me, okay? I know a thing or two in this area. How come you couldn’t worship her? She got some kind of defect?”

“No, she don’t got some kind of defect. If anything, it’s me with the defect.”

“Elaborate.”

He bit his lip and shoved a piece of sausage in his mouth. He didn’t want to say it, but he had to tell someone, and Marlon was his most reliable friend.

“Rachel reached back out to me.”

“Rachel? Aw, shit. You can’t be serious.”

“She stopped by Comforti’s to see me.”

“Stopped by Comforti’s? Oh shit, nigga, you fucking her again, ain’t you? Oh shit, yeah you are. I could tell by your demeanor. Tell me you ain’t.”

He looked down and out the pizzeria window at a light snow that was beginning to fall.

“Niggas are something, boy. Three hundred years ago they brought us all over here on these huge-ass ships and they told us—‘Pick this fucking cotton! Pick it ’til you bleed! Pick it all day and all night! Oh, by the way, you can fuck your own women—hell, have twenty kids if you want. But whatever you do—do not put your hands on these white women over here! Don’t even think it!’ We listened to half of what they said. It’s like it was too much for us, the whole forbidden-fruit shit. We was Eve and they was the apple. Don’t ever demand a person don’t do something. They gonna wanna do it. Psychology 101.”

“What makes you so sure I’ve started fucking her again?”

“What? Nigga, this don’t take Columbo to figure out. Your ass is weak, and she had you eating out of her hand the first time. Got you listening to Beethoven and shit. You gonna deny it now?”

He bit harder into his slice of pizza, resentful he ever brought it up.

“That’s what I thought. Shit is more obvious than a horoscope. What you gonna tell me next, Soylent Green is people?”

He was reading from his James Baldwin book on the subway. A distinguished older Black man in a business suit sat across from him. He hadn’t noticed the man watching him. The man spoke up with a baritone, commanding voice.

“He was one of our greatest minds.”

“Sir?”

“Baldwin. He was one of our greatest minds. Was closely aligned with some of our greatest thinkers: Malcolm X, Martin, Lorraine Hansberry. But he hated Richard Wright. Hated him with a fury. What does that tell you? That two of our greatest literary heavyweights couldn’t see eye to eye on the subject of Blackness?”

“Honestly, sir, I don’t know what it tells me.”

“Well I’ll tell you then—it tells you that we are fucked.

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