I Don't Care I'm Black And Ugly As Ever

They named me ugly three times. I balked, unsure. A tougher pill than predicted. Bulbous, drooping lips and smile half-curled apostrophe. Not all the way. My nose bend too much. Symmetry escapes. One time for my ugly niggas. Face snap, freckle and pop. That nostril. I can’t be fine.

Sweating on Avenue L, passing 93rd Street, I thought her titties must be big ‘cause the picture. My homey had ‘a/s/l’d her into sending her Strawberry tank top pic through the load bar on Instant Messenger. The place I nursed my boners. Her titties looked big, and because they might be real-life titties I could feel, I was truly hype. Won’t get stuck on a detail but my polo-knit top over Docker khaki and Nike Air Max 97s had me legit poppin’. Borderline feeling myself. 

I wore glasses. Pimple misbehavior was low but my sun rash sufficiently gross. Anyway, I was fly and ready for my first and only blind date. This girl’s friend was having sex with my friend, so it’s like I was having sex with her pretty much. The associative puberty. A lock-in fuck, I strolled five feet and ten inches of S’medium shirt and Mark Ecko style to the corner of Rockaway and L. And waited.

Decided after 20 minutes to walk into the Burger King that’s not there anymore. They must be -- my friend, the really cute girl he was fucking, that girl’s friend (with the big titties) -- in the spot ordering fries or some--? 

I asked for a Sprite in the empty Burger King because I probably just missed them. On the way in and out. I was dressed so flossy though, I was near unrecognizable. Had to have a sense of humor about life. ‘People funny, yuh know?’ is what my mother taught me.

Shannon and his brother Dame pulled up, pretty as ever, in their Lexus sedan. 

“Get in the back.”

There were no girls with big titties anywhere in the vehicle. 

“What are you wearing?” I could tell by his sneer: the worst thing I could have on. A measles belt with a chickenpox collar. Doo doo socks and snot suspenders. 

In my mind I was the Stefan Urquelle of the rap game but the mirror had lied. A rare ally indeed, my reflection made me gag in the rear view. 

“She said she didn’t wanna…”

“She didn’t wanna? Ok cool. Bet.”

I understood code but he explained. They had secretly, and with remarkably on-point teenage cruelty, circled the block I’d just walked. The big titty girl and Shameka, the cute one Shannon lost his virginity to, assessed that I was nasty and they didn’t want to be around me, much less double date. Shannon snickered his way through telling me I was ugly. Dame, his junior year older brother, just shook his head. He had light eyes, a fresh line-up and calm demeanor for one so frustratingly handsome. But he wasn’t humble. His grin signaled amusement at Shannon’s verdict. I wanted them to take me home before the chest heat exploded into tears. Fucking pretty boy dickheads.

I asked my mother that night if I, too, could be handsome. My thinking: I know I’m grotesque now and that my ears, nose and lips don’t match the shape of my head, but time heals all ugly. 

Only a mother could love me. 

So she told me, in detail, why my lips were beautiful, like Denzel’s, and how, soon, women would be jumping over each other to kiss them. But since I was all hurt, I thought “Shannon has pretty lips. He already had sex because of this reason.” Then I went to bed, unable to complete my nightly jerk because I was disgusted with myself. 

There was validity to Shannon’s prettiness. His thin nose bridge, perfectly unbraced teeth, six-pack abs and angular jaw stood opposed to my paunchy torso, fat cheeks, wired buck teeth and endless lips. Nature had blessed him with the one-up so he could reproduce muscular offspring and laugh me into oblivion as I died heirless, the last hideous Ricketts. My father’s other children were shades of tan and yellow and red. I was the black sheep with fucking hair of wool. What smoothed this roughness?

A year later, in the narrow bleachers at prep school, I suffered again. Cab Freeman was, at that point, Harlem’s closest thing to Casanova. We were at an all-boys’ school but I swear you wouldn’t know it on Friday afternoon. Cab got to work, inviting paramours and “potentials” to our lobby. He had a simple first-come-first-serve system: The first girl to show up got to leave with him. A lion’s mane of finely twisted locs and a slight stack of subtle, strong features embellished his quick humor. Not to mention his parents’ wealth got him all the Jordan Sixes and Girbaud jeans a 17-year-old could want. To young women, closely guarding imagined virtue, he was unfair. He was on the Bad Boy street team. He knew people who knew people who cut the line at The Tunnel. And it seemed like the only thing he had time for, aside from casual sport, was fucking your girl. Didn’t matter who you were, friend or foe, Cab was snatching her away from you. And you wouldn’t know until the story got around and she started avoiding your two-way texts and shit.

The Friday bleachers hosted a meet-up for all the bad jawns from the other prep schools and the Black and Brown and Yellow boys from Collegiate. And whatever school our varsity basketball team faced that game. At 6, when tipoff happened, the sideline roasts started too. I saw Cab’s girl, or maybe friend of a girl he was scouting, look up at me annoyed. Maybe because I was rudely dressing down their players like “point guard got a bowl cut it’s a wrap!” or, to our players, “Chu’s farts like Agent Orange out this bitch. Defend that shit!” 
Talking that talk.

Except Jennifer or Tiffany or Stacy couldn’t get over my steady heckling. So she eye-rolled me from four rows down, tilting her ponytail in a flip before spinning her neck and hissing her teeth. 

Noticing this: 

“Somebody tell ole Weaving Tower Of Pisa over there stop snapping her neck like she know me.” 

To which: 

“Cab, can you tell ya UGLY friend we doing everything in our power to NOT see his ugl-ass.” 

I went blind. 

From the howls of laughter. How her joke must be riveting because it rung true. The chest heat threatened to melt me. 

Her eyes were far apart. Her forehead was big. Her bubble coat crumpled.

But nothing from my catalog could beat the dryness of my throat. That humiliation attacked my entire soul. Feet to lungs.

Rather than retort, I swallowed that lump because defeat stung. She could have this one. I was ugly. Fair enough.

But the last time life shamed me, I couldn’t take it. Puberty passing did a ton for my ugliness and dressed it way better, for one. Plus, in adulthood, you refine expectations of beauty depending on other traits you like. One swipe and the people you don’t like don’t exist. Dating apps are an ugly man safe haven. Lonely beautiful women took my loneliness in, often a while.

Gloria riffed constantly.. She couldn’t say three words without giggling. Twice disarming me when she talked this way about the baby she’d lost. 

I’d say she tastes sweet.

“That’s cause I pickled my womb with Henny.”

She knew how to make moments special. Given cigarettes, joints and drinks, she could regale the room. I indulged because I felt ugly too. We got twisted and let loose in her ground floor apartment, a room inside a studio.

Doll-faced Gloria was a homecoming drama queen gone wrong. A Southern peach rotting in city winter. When her first man got locked up, she vowed birth control or bust. But the hormones besieged her skin with lesions and raised bumps. 

“I only fuck in the dark so you better read Braille, nigga.” 

It pained her to be robbed of beauty, but gave us marshy ground to stake our affair. Our real, ugly bodies needed touch. There’s nothing sexier. 

But as I struggled to fuck her often and right, I knew it was time to end things. I tapped refusal into my screen while I rode the LIRR home from her place. I didn’t want to see her anymore, I told her, and felt unhealthy pretending. Her texts fired back threats of self-harm, and my paranoia set in. She’d mused suicide before, but had the decency to conceal her real self from me in our stupor. We remained stoned and blameless. 

Two days before her 30th, I debated reaching out but didn’t. Those midnight hotel room decisions ruin lives. So I laid on a starchy top sheet, ignoring a message from her, only seeing the words “Daddy” and “taste.” Enough to know she felt alone, and wouldn’t spare me her hot desperation. For the first time, I wasn’t so sure I was the ugly one. 

She didn’t let go because I wanted her to. And because that wouldn’t be tragic. 

Instead, the afternoon of her birthday, she aimed at my throat for not sending a greeting. 

Her instant messages read something like: 

“You??? Nigga YOU? Gonna ignore me on my bday?”

“It’s always the ugly niggas who try it lol”

“I shoulda never gassed your wack ass giving you the pussy. Fucking crusty face nigga.”

Worse than the stuck up girls who flamed my appearance, a hurt grown woman had dismissed me. After the fact. Her words unwound the spell of the pitch black grope matches. Suddenly I dreaded what she’d suffered just to let me fuck. And how fucking me must be like fighting a baby werewolf. None of the times I’d made her laugh mattered either, since it was all ugly pity. What I thought I was giving her. 

So now, real talk, I’m proud I’m ugly. Yes, my Maroon nose is big and sits on one side. My teeth ain’t shit, never been straight or white. They say my people look like monkeys, like apes, but I’ll take these primate cheekbones over a lack of flavor. Factually, I’m too black but also not black enough. Not a lusty yellowbone, but no blue black ebony god either. But images are made by their imperfections, and I’m vivid like that. My face peels out from negative space. To the ugly people, like me, who dared to feel good today, this is for all us. Big bellies and crooked teeth deserve joy. Bumpy skin and dark spots attract their opposite, and even if they don’t, the best people have ugly parts. Bodies become flabby and difficult and scarred no matter what so we should praise the universal ugliness. And for the people who mocked me, and said I’d never amount to nothing, thank you for showing me your ugly side. Love how it looks on you.