Ego much?
The next time I had her class, I strutted in as if I owned the place. I couldn’t wait to rub my success in her face. But in typical fashion, Professor Katz quietly broke me down. “Miss Henson, you were loud and over the top. It was too big.” Even with all the accolades and applause, even when everybody else was laughing and falling for my jokes, Professor Katz was making it clear my tricks didn’t work for her. I was missing what was on the page. I was a fraud.
The rest of my time there, I worked to get her approval. The last monologue I did for her was a quiet one. There was no yelling, no grand physical gestures; only pure emotion and restrained intensity, which was so much more difficult to do than any of the other tricks I’d employed up until that moment. I’d finally internalized everything she’d been saying to me over our year together. When I said my last word and the class’s applause died down, Professor Katz stood and gave me an easy smile. “All that time, I thought you were fighting and not listening,” she said quietly.
“I was,” I said. “I just had an odd way of showing it.”
We reconciled, and years later, at an awards ceremony where she was being honored and I was a host, I apologized to her. “I know I gave you hell,” I said. “But you are a huge reason why I’m so successful in the business. You challenged me to be a thinker, to always stay alive and be in the moment. To respect the craft.”
• • •
I meant that, too. I’d like to think that the choices I’ve made were informed by the way Professor Katz and my other acting coaches, Jemal McNeil and Tony Greco, who taught legendary methods like the Meisner Technique, trained me to engage the work; through them, I learned that hustling as an actress isn’t just about flicking your hair, batting your eyelashes, wearing the cutest outfit, and plowing through the words; it’s about understanding and working the spaces and angles between what is obvious to everyone else, and using those quiet moments to stand out. To win.
That is the hallmark of a true hustler.
5
My One and Only Love Story
We had that Jody and Yvette Baby Boy kind of love—passionate, raw, and “young, dumb, and out of countrol,” like the tragically immature, stunted main character in John Singleton’s critically acclaimed, urban cult classic. That’s what you get, though, when you mix youth with inexperience, shake in some hood, and boil it with a heap of hot tempers: an intoxicating brew of tragic ghetto love.
The truth is we didn’t stand a chance.
But I didn’t know any of that when I first laid eyes on Mark in the summer of 1987. I saw him in the lobby of the Riverside Theater in Riverside, Maryland, standing there with a bunch of his friends, eating popcorn and staring at me with these great big ol’ eyes as if he were in a trance. Without saying a single word, he made me feel as if I were the most beautiful girl in the world. I was seventeen and had only had one boyfriend up until then, a guy I’d dated two years earlier. He was sweet enough, but he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the limitations that came with dating Bernice Gordon’s baby girl, particularly the “No Boys in the House When Mama’s Not Home” rule and especially the “She’s a Virgin and Will Stay That Way” decree. Let’s just say I wasn’t all that surprised when my first boyfriend, who was already sexually active when we began dating, announced he was calling it quits because he didn’t want to cheat on me. I was fine with his decision. I wasn’t ready for all the stakes that came with teenage pregnancy, or single parenting, for that matter. On those subjects and many others, my mother had instilled the fear of God in me. The very thought of going against her wishes petrified me, what with all the threats to knock my teeth out of my head and to slap me into next Tuesday. My auntie would hear her talking crazy to me and she’d get genuinely concerned: “Why are you talking to her like that? You need to stop that, Bernice!” But I knew she had cause for all that tough talk: I was a young girl in a wild city, and she needed to keep me in check so the streets wouldn’t try me. She never had to make good on the threats; all she had to do was shoot me that look and I knew—I just knew—whatever it was I was doing, I better pull it together and stop it. When she cut her eyes, I knew she meant business. I wasn’t that kid who was wont to cause trouble or go against her mother’s wishes. If she said I wasn’t ready for sex and shouldn’t do it, she didn’t have to tell me but once.
Deep down, I knew I wasn’t ready then, either. By the time I met Mark, though, this caterpillar had blossomed into a butterfly who knew from the second our energy mingled in that lobby that here was someone for whom it was worth breaking a few rules. I could tell this just by looking into his eyes that night at the movie theater. It wasn’t my modus operandi to roll up on strange guys and start talking to them. But Mark? He was cinnamon brown with a mouthful of the whitest, most perfectly straight teeth that spread into the widest, most beautiful smile, the perfect complement to all that swag dripping off of him. He was stylish and different, with a hint of danger to him. I liked it. Plus, he very smoothly laid out the red carpet just for me. I figured I might as well strut on it. As we locked each other into our respective lines of vision, I walked right up to him and snatched his popcorn out of his hands.
“Is this for me?” I asked coyly.
“You can have some if you want it,” he said easily, shifting his body against the wall, looking right into my eyes.
Minutes later, he and his boys, who were there to see a different film from what my girls and I had come to see, were following us into our movie theater. I can’t even remember what we saw that night; I was much too focused on Mark, who was sitting directly behind me, flirting, whispering in my ear, playing with my hair, and giving me cute love taps on my back and shoulders like we were first-graders. He barely had to form the words in his mouth to ask me for my number; my digits were already written on a wrinkled piece of notebook paper, ready to slide his way.
He called me the next day, and we talked about everything under the sun and nothing at all, long after I’d crawled up under my covers, long, even, after my mother burst into my room yelling, “I know you’re not still on the phone!” A few days after that, right after we’d finished killing the all-you-can-eat buffet at Denny’s, he kissed me, smiled, then took off into the aisle of the parking lot and did a series of cartwheels on the asphalt. When he somersaulted for me, I fell for him. Hard.
It didn’t take long for us to become exclusive. We never really said we were, either; we just fell into it. He was my first love—the first man I gave myself to emotionally, mentally, physically. I knew he considered me his woman because he was taking me around his friends all the time and we spent quite a bit of time at his house, where his mother always welcomed me with open arms. She liked that I was polite and respectful—that the moment I stepped through that front door, I’d make a beeline to wherever she was, give her a hug, and talk to her politely and with respect. To this day, she’ll say that’s what she always loved about me—that I never acted like any of those hot-tailed girls who’d go over there and ignore her, like her son was the one paying the rent and light bill. That’s not the way I was raised. If there’s grown folk in the room, I speak.