Kissing Michelle

MICHELLE DAVIS WAS Shirley Temple recast in black. She was goodness with a high-yellow glow and a virgin's smile for a virgin she was, and a teenage beauty queen to boot. In that part of my 14-year old imagination, which if you're feeling generous I'll call erotic, she was second only to the darker, shorter and altogether less refined, Adrienne Jones. Both Michelle and Adrienne were well beyond my grasp. Each was the radiant queen at the center of their respective circle. Each was surrounded by rings of progressively lesser girls. Scrutinizing girls. They were the gatekeepers, acid-tongued demons armed with an insulating contempt. Demons waiting to hurl insecurity-seeking barbs at all but the most confident boys. They were, in short, the queens' defenders, and here they are in action.

"Ain't that Craig Johnson, with his big ol', ugly ass? I know he ain't even thinkin' about comin' over-"

"He better not be. With that crater face and them high waters? Girl, please."

"Can you say 'Salvation Army?'"

"Salvation Army don't take no food stamps."

Many stormed, but few survived the gauntlet. I admired the bullheaded young bloods who tried. I admired them the way one admires an ant that continues to drag itself forward after you've pulled off all but two of its legs. I marveled at how they plowed on day after day--the Sisyphus Brigade in marshmallow-soled stax and raggedy afros--driven by vivid instincts and a dim sense of mission, defending themselves with little more than stammering oh yeahs? and a well-used yo' mama or two. God bless 'em. And if by fluke one of them was able to penetrate those defenses and succeeded in getting a message to the queen, well God help them anyway.

Three years earlier I was the shy and chubby new kid at P.S. 161. One day I told a classmate who knew one of the gatekeepers that I wished to apply my precocious drawing talents to the precociously voluptuous Adrienne Jones. Word traveled away and came back with a message attached: "Tell that boy, that fat boy, that I don't like him." I wanted to object, to lie and tell her that I didn't like her either thank you very much, that I wished only to draw her. Moreover, that I wasn't fat, just heavy set. But the damage was done--I didn't even think about approaching any girl for another three years, and only then by invitation.

•
THE SWEETER, BUT NO less remote Michelle Davis had an outer ring gatekeeper named Bear. Bear stood eight feet tall, her shoulders rounded and slightly hunched. In spite of her brown skin, she seemed more polar--her head was not so boxy as a grizzly's and her hips were broad. Her mouth was always slightly open, her tongue always visible and forever threatening to drool, but never quite. On this particular day between classes, she lumbered into my path, rose to her full height and stopped.

"Michelle Davis likes you." The din of a hundred scampering, whispering, yelling, conspiring teenagers fell away.

"Uh...."

"Ask her out." Then, still upright, she walked away. Just like that. As I bobbed in Bear's wake with two friends, I clung to just one thought, knowing that it alone would keep me buoyant and hold the sharks at bay. It was simple: don't smile. Do not smile.

"Go 'head muthafucka. Smile!" David laughed and slammed a fist into my chest. My face had been frozen, but now I could feel it begin to tear. I could feel the pull of a grin that refused to submit to my better judgment, a grin pulling at the corners of my mouth against clenched jaws and an iron will. "Shit! I'd smile if Michelle Davis wanted to wrap her little virgin lips around my one-eyed trouser puppy." I was losing. The smile was coming. Not because I could imagine Michelle's little virgin lips anywhere on my body, but simply because Michelle Davis, for reasons entirely beyond my imagination, liked me. Not L.T. Bryant and his was huge and perfectly round afro--a Michael Jackson replica set in plastic from a mold and dipped in pitch. Not Jason Prysock, who at five foot four could dunk a tennis ball, and who paraded himself openly in the boy's locker room just because he had so much more to parade. (The rumors that found their nucleus just below his belt made the gatekeepers blush and giggle.) In fact she didn't like any of the boys she was supposed to like. She liked me. That weird, artsy fartsy boy who was always hunched over a desk drawing naked pictures from Michael Angelo books. That proper-speaking Black boy who sounded like a white boy, and when the song cooed Do the Hustle, couldn't to save his life. Michelle Davis liked me. And as I entered Mrs. Donahue's art class, slipping away from my friends and the promise of more teasing, a smile jumped to my face and stayed there for the rest of the day.

•
KEITH HENRY, BEST FRIEND and fellow artist since the seventh grade, sat on a box in his parents' attic. A well-scratched album on a portable record player skipped over Langston Hughes' Weary Blues. Brother Langston, by his own admission, was a bad, bad man, taking his meanness and his liquor everywhere he'd go. And Keith and I were bad, bad boys. Two very patient bad boys waiting for Alberta "Ol' Faithful" Haynes on the dark side of a small pane of glass. At exactly the same time thrice a week, Alberta and her magical growing titties would run to her room fresh from jazz and tap and practice her routines in only panties and a severely over-burdened bra. She never bothered pulling the shades because her window faced nothing more than the Henry's tiny, ivy-trimmed, dark attic window. Being religious boys, Keith and I gave thanks to a smirking God for a treat far beyond our wildest hopes--a treat that more than amply fueled this young boy's splendid new locked-door hobby. Yet, in spite of our good fortune, we continued to pray a desperately staccato please oh please oh please oh please oh please. And God, whom we were convinced was a boy once himself, always came through like a champ--Alberta's sessions invariably closed with a modern dance striptease which we liked to call, Woman with Big Titties Gets Naked.

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