I was so goddamn insecure, so lonely in this Tucson shithole, that I bought two tickets to a show without having anyone to go with. Two tickets to see The White Buffalo at some new venue I wanted to check out. An act of pure, pathetic, and completely beautiful optimism.
And then, of course, I had to find a date.
The dating apps out here, Christ. They’re not just a used car lot; they’re a goddamn graveyard. A rogues’ gallery of broken toys and single mothers with dead eyes and a long list of grievances. The women are fucking ugly. And I don’t mean on the inside.
But then I saw her. A good-looking black chick. Now, I’d sworn off the dark meat. After a few too many bad hands at that particular poker table, I’d decided to cash in my chips. But she was pretty, and she bit on one of my lines, and before I knew it, I had a phone number.
So I made the call. “Look,” I said, “I got tickets to see The White Buffalo. New venue. Should be cool. You interested?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice a little too bright. “I need to get out of the house. I’ve been in for a month.”
A red flag, of course. A beautiful, flapping, and completely obvious red flag. But I was desperate. “Alright,” I said. “Dress casual.” Which is like trying to explain the concept of quiet to a fucking hurricane when you’re talking to a black woman, but what the hell.
I was surprised when I picked her up. She was on the far east side, a goddamn safari away, but she was worth the drive. Nice big tits, flat belly, good legs. A blonde wig, of course, a beautiful, synthetic crown for a temporary queen. Alright, I thought, I can work with this. I just need a warm body to stand next to me while I listen to the music.
She got in the truck. And she started talking.
And she was slurring.
And just like that, I wasn’t on a date anymore. I was a goddamn detective, a homicide cop who’d just walked onto a fresh crime scene. And the victim was my own quiet, hopeful evening. She was talking, but the words were just… noise. A beautiful, ugly, and completely insane symphony of gibberish.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re gonna go get some zip-zips and some zoom-ins,” she was saying, “and then we’re gonna go and, yeah, just spill the zing-zings, ’cause they don’t make any sings anymore.”
I had no goddamn idea what she was talking about. I just nodded, and smiled, and made a few jokes, and tried to keep the whole beautiful, sinking ship afloat until we got to the goddamn venue.
We got there, I parked, and I reached for her hand. We held hands walking in. A perfect, beautiful, and completely fraudulent picture of a happy, interracial couple. And for a second, it felt okay.
And then she opened her mouth again. And she was just… so black. A walking, talking, and completely unapologetic collection of every stereotype I’d ever seen in a bad movie.
“Where are you from?” I asked her. “Are you Michigan black? Alabama black? New Jersey black?”
“I’m from Tucson,” she said.
And I just thought, Fuck. You have no excuse. You have no goddamn excuse to be this ignorant.
The venue was gorgeous. A real class act. The music started, slow and meditative. And the crowd, it was a sea of quiet, respectable white people. And us. A pale, aging king and his beautiful, blonde-wigged, and completely unpredictable queen.
I bought her a whiskey and ginger ale. Then I bought her a double vodka and Red Bull. And then I noticed the vape pen.
It was her little magic wand. Her soul-sucker. She’d take a long, deep hit off that thing, and you could just watch the lights go out in her eyes. She’d go down about twenty-three levels of consciousness in a single, quiet puff. Is that a crack pipe? I thought. What the hell is in that thing?
And then The White Buffalo came on. A great show. A real, honest-to-God artist. And for a little while, she was into it. She was moving to the music, she gave me a kiss. A quiet, hopeful little moment in the middle of the storm.
And then the band would quiet down. The singer would start to tell a story. And she would scream.
The first time, it was funny. A little burst of drunken enthusiasm. The second time, it was annoying. By the third time, I was holding her close, my arm around her back, and every time the music would slow down, I’d whisper in her ear, “Please, for the love of God, do not say anything. Keep it down.”
It was a game. A beautiful, ugly, and completely pathetic little tug-of-war for the soul of my own goddamn evening. I’m rubbing her back, she’s got a great rack, but I’m just counting the songs, praying for the end. She’s doing some kind of ghetto dance thing on my dick, and the quiet, polite white people around us are all pretending not to notice. It was a beautiful, ugly, and completely awkward piece of performance art.
And then, the singer, he quiets the band down to say something, something real and honest and beautiful, probably.
And she just lets out a goddamn war cry.
And that was it. I couldn’t control her anymore. I pulled her away, out of the crowd. She could barely walk. It wasn’t the booze. It was that goddamn vape pen.
“You’re an asshole!” she was screaming at me as I dragged her through the beautiful, new venue. “Why are you doing this? I love being an asshole! I love to fight!” A beautiful, ugly, and completely predictable aria of victimhood and aggression. You can’t make this shit up. I’ve never had this experience with a blonde, or a brunette, or a redhead. Only with this particular brand of beautiful, chaotic, and completely self-destructive animal.
I got her to the truck. She was a dead weight, a beautiful, broken doll. The fifteen-minute drive to her apartment was an eternity of some shitty ghetto music blasting on my stereo and the quiet, constant, and completely infuriating hiss of her soul-sucker. She could barely get out of the truck. A thirty-five-year-old black woman, looking for the man of her dreams to take care of her. And all you have to do is be a fucking human being for a couple of hours. But no.
I sat in my truck for a minute after she was gone, in the quiet, and I wasn’t even angry. I was just… empty.
Yeah, I got a kiss. But I also got a two-hundred-dollar bill for a show I didn’t get to see and a story that’s funny now, but was a quiet, ugly, and beautiful little slice of hell at the time.
And you sit there, and you think, “I’m done. I’m really, truly, and completely done.”
What a goddamn waste of a beautiful night. And what a goddamn waste of dark meat.
