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The Date
Previously Written in 2015
Marcus was speaking to a hood chick trying to balance his perception of her perception of him. He unveiled his baser primal manhood through story; thus simultaneously proving and disproving his point. The words painted pictures of him as an aggressor, but there was no proof that anything in his life had ever occurred. He could be saying he puffed out his chest when he just stood up straight.
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He told her how he choked the manager at Play Here Drink Here the gaming-themed bar because the guy made his ex-girlfriend cry. He left out the fact that the same manager had him pinned to the ground so fast that it felt like life had skipped a scene. He let her know that he almost killed a man because he called that same ex-girlfriend a bitch. He left out the fact that the man was more boy than man; late teens/early twenties. Something like that.
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And this again, is where brush strokes of his stories paint him as manly and inauthentic at the same time. Both of these things happened but both were premeditated. He planned to fight the boy in the afternoon so in the morning, he switched his glasses out for contacts. He went looking for the manager at Play Here while his ex-girlfriend was weeping. He even had time to finish his beer while deciding on what to do before setting the glass down and attacking him. Both of these situations resulted because, like now, Marcus was trying to prove his manliness and his blackness to a black woman.
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Candy was the cashier at his job. Whenever he got his lunch he would linger and they would converse. He was pretty sure it wasn’t the typical flirtatious professionalism he had seen with strippers and bartenders, because she would always tell him to “hold on a second” when she had to take care of a customer and return to him immediately afterward. However still, this could be misinterpreted. That’s why the following is always a shot in the dark, but a shot one must take for life to go on.
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“We should kick it after work,” he mumbled to her, almost dismissing this, running his mouth in a volley of words before she had a chance to reject him. But she verbally chased him down, and the falsetto in her answer was music to his ears.
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And just like that, a few hours later he was driving on Washington Ave., which, mind you, is something he promised himself he would never do on a night he promised himself he would never do it on if he did break his first promise. But… The power of pussy.
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The street was gridlocked with yellow and red sports cars hovering on pounding bass and glowing lights like pretentious spaceships jerking forward at random moments. The sidewalk and the street held fleshy inebriated souls darting between people and cars. Everything was moving unpredictably. It had Marcus' anxiety going crazy. Or maybe it was the music. He turned off Kendrick Lamar’s album and threw on a Disney playlist singing along to one of the greatest songs ever made. Even though it was sung by a Jewish chick voicing a Native American, the message was still timeless.
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He looked to the address he was given on the other side of the street and noticed Candy’s ass bulging beneath a tight pencil dress before he even parked. At first, he didn’t think it was her. He still has to get used to the fact that he is in a position where he can get good things. And if it was her, where did she get that ass from? Did she stop somewhere to pick it up? Were they on sale at KMart? Or was this something she had always had with her, hidden beneath the unflattering pants of her work uniform? He felt pride and took a small amount of ownership of something so enticing connected to someone who was waiting for him and only him.
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She stood under a glowing neon logo as she looked through the window with a phone to her ear. She still looked confident, but not as confident as she looked at work. Her neck snaked this way and that as she stood on her tippy toes looking around the people inside the small diner. For this moment, she was incomplete without him.
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He ignored the buzzing phone as he got out of his car planning instead to grab her by the attention. Dodging traffic and people, he stared at her intensely like the sight was something tangible until she actually felt his gaze and turned to him with a smile, hanging up the phone.
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One step onto the sidewalk, and he was connected to Washington Avenue and all it entailed; the disturbing smell of piss in paradise; the residual odor left behind by the bums who used the entranceways of restaurants as their bedrooms. Million and billionaires descend through hell holding plastic wives on their way to nightclubs with astronomical entry fees. This place, where the devil vacations and celebrities play, was only two streets away from the sands of Miami Beach. It was nothing like the movies and TV shows he grew up watching in Pittsburgh.
“Hey,” she said, happy, so happy to see him. She hugged him and her head barely made it above his chest. The hug was the most physical contact they had ever had. Marcus tried to remember. Had they ever touched at all before tonight? No, not even a handshake. And this was a hug; a symbol of an agreement that this was a social meeting with undefined terms and loose interpretations.
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As he peeked into the burger joint crowded with questionable human beings, he felt his heart pump vigorously a few times as he mentally prepared himself like when he had to walk into prison on that misdemeanor. He stopped smiling. He straightened his back. He opened the door for her to be polite, but also to linger at the entrance and analyze the scene.
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She was the one who had picked out this spot and he had agreed because he had never been there, so she wanted to show him something new, and this place was famous for its burgers. And that’s why the hood showed up. Everybody wishes to be in the presence of anything that has been touched by celebrity and this was the same environment that J and B had graced which was captured by a photo of the power couple on the wall. The night of the week and time that everyone met here was due to a funnel system that started with a traditional work week, continued through a few nightclubs that were only open at certain times, and ended here, and a few other late-night spots where people could wind the party down as well as get a jump on replenishing nutrients that were lost through the night.
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They both stepped in and were immediately in line. To the left, near a mirror that spread the length of the wall, urban women replayed confrontations from earlier in the night. The bar stools held the lost souls, slumped over their beers, dreaming, sleeping, or awake, but drifting in a space they would barely remember tomorrow. Above, in between, and around them niggas that already ordered squeezed in like fan girls at a concert, shouting directions and stipulations to a black cook who nodded his head as he kept in constant motion, sweating his glasses to the edge of his nose, trying to pair the different stipulations to each of the myriad of meats sizzling on the grill.
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“Did you hear about that little boy in Disney World?” she asked him.
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“No. What happened?”
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“I guess they were at a beach outside of the hotel they were staying at. The mom and the dad were, like, laying on the beach, and the little two-year-old...”
While she was telling her story trouble makers entered the small eatery like they were the definition of “the shit.” They were the loudest and the most obnoxious above the already noisy and irritating crowd that surrounded them. Everybody looked their way except for Marcus and Candy. They stood out like a hitchhiker without a thumb as he stared deep into her eyes trying to tune out the commotion making him the most noticeable purposely ignoring the focal point with such fervor that the act itself was all but aggressive. …“and an alligator grabbed him.” Once she was done speaking, she looked back as well, turning into a pillar of salt.
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“Shit, really?” Marcus said, still focusing all of his attention on her, “That's fuckin' crazy.”
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The ring leader of the pre-judged troublemakers bumped into Marcus like a slow-moving glacier as he passed the line to greet a calmer friend. Marcus was 5’8” which was slightly shorter than average, but monsters like these made him think the scales used to measure didn’t matter.
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After the ring leader and the calmer friend exchanged pleasantries, he slipped to the front of the line.
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“Uh. Excuse me?!” Candy said, snaking her neck, tilting her head while cocking it back like an offended cobra. Marcus had seen her do this once before at work when she was telling him the story about how she “let off two shots” at a girl who was talking to her boyfriend “a little too long.”
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Nobody else in the restaurant said anything, but she projected as if without a filter.
The ring leader knew he was wrong. Everybody in front of her turned back except for him. He purposely ignored her as I had done him upon his entering. And being ignored was a bigger insult than him skipping the line. She stormed toward him.
“Hey!”
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He turned to her, amused. “Wassup shorty,” he said through a gold grill inside of a lackadaisical jaw.
“You can’t just jip everybody in line. What? You think you more important?”
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“I ain’t jippin nobody. Look,” he said grabbing the calmer fellow, “this my homeboy. He was saving my place.”
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“Nigga. This ain’t a seat at a bar.”
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Watching her lean into him, flapping her wings, and watching him lean back slightly as if a bee were hovering in the air, Marcus felt envious of the emotion the ringleader had caused. The aggression was more passionate than a hug. This was the actual reason he had gotten into that fight with the Play Here manager some time ago. He made his ex cry and at the time Marcus hadn’t even made her cry yet. Come to think of it, that’s probably why he got into the fight with that boy. He got his ex so riled up and he had never caused a reaction like that with her. She gave other men control over her emotions, while their relationship stayed smooth and uneventful. That’s why Marcus went off those other two times. But not tonight. He had learned his lesson.
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Candy was furious, as she returned to her spot in line, as the two exchanged “Fuck you”s, that turned into “Fuck you, bitch”s while Marcus and everybody else in line did nothing except watch. Even his goons were nestling in the back without the balls to do what the ring leader did.
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And now her smile was gone. This had turned from a simple goal to undress a cashier to a dense, emotional silence that heated her spirit and collapsed his throat.
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He thought about the story she told about the alligator or something. Maybe he could revisit that to change the subject. But she did not seem like she was in that mood anymore. Maybe he could bring up the colleague that they always teased. No. That would just amplify the fact that he was trying to avoid this reality. All he could do was secretly watch her as she shot eye darts at her new enemy as he ordered the Baby's Fave, with blue cheese and Pepper jack, tomato and sauteed onion, egg sunny side up, in a wrap, well done, “I mean, burnt, nigga. Leave that shit on the grill until the Clippers win the finals.”
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She stared until the ring leader noticed, stepping past Marcus and Candy and locking eyes with her on his way back to his cronies. Marcus stared too, but he stared straight forward, fortunate that they could still return from this point.
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“Aye dawg,” The Ring Leader said, nudging Marcus with the back of his wrist, “You better control your bitch.”
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Fuck.
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Candy’s mouth dropped at the audacity almost simultaneously with her movements as she reached into her purse. Marcus grabbed her hand and refused to let her pull out America’s greatest love. They couldn’t come back from this point, but going forward didn’t have to end lives through death or jail.
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“Whoah. Whoah. Woah. Woah,” Marcus pleaded with her. “Just… Hold on.”
He narrowed his eyes and began turning on his pivot. He sped up and balled his fingers and thumb into a fist as he projected it toward the ring leader's face.
But if you don’t mind I’d like to pause this scene. If we could stop everything leaving Marcus' fist a millimeter away from the ring leader's clenched jaw as Candy holds tight to her metal life ender still concealed by her purse. People in the line looking on, not yet reacting to what’s happening because their minds haven’t registered it yet. A burger patty stops in the air as the cook raises his arm with the spatula.
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If we could just focus on the ring leader for a quick sec that’d be great because he is an integral part of this story as well.
The Ring Leader, Allen, is a hustler; has been all his life. When he was 8 he sold homemade icees in styrofoam cups in front of his house in the hood. At 12 he would buy whole boxes of candy and sell the individual bars at school for a profit. And as a teen he participated in some light b and e and robberies.
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In his twenties a friend of his procured a nice settlement when she baited a Walmart employee and got her to throw the first punch, which was caught on camera. That brings us to the burger joint. This was the same burger joint he worked in on the weekdays. The same rowdy burger joint he knew where every security camera was and what section of the Ddiner they pointed to.
He had weekends off so in between selling some light narcotics on Ocean Avenue he would enter the diner to get his free discount and while he was there he would choose a target and taunt them, trying to get them to make the first move. Before tonight, nobody had taken the bait.
And that’s why the ringleader Allen was purposely bracing for the impact of Marcus’ fist.
Now we can continue, letting the flipping burger patty land on the spatula, letting Candy keep her grip on the hidden weapon, and letting Marcus land the punch on the Clenching ringleader, knocking his head back to the direction of the camera. He smiled through his golden fangs at his payday and the fact that he could now legally retaliate.
Marcus’ victory would be fleeting. Although he did prove his blackness (if there is such a thing) and his toughness, he wouldn’t get to take a bite outta Candy’s unclothed ass because, after getting mollywopped by Allen he would spend the rest of the night in handcuffs. And after all of the charges, it turns out that this one date with her would cost him for years to come