I wanted a forever love with Mark. If that man had said he was ready to have babies and get married, I would have had a pastor and an obstetrician lined up within the hour. Without hesitation, I would have marched right down the aisle with him. I wanted to be married because that’s the one thing I was sure of: that I would make a good wife and a hell of a mother. I wanted Mark to be my husband.
Mark saw things differently.
There was some sense to it: though he was a year older than me, he wasn’t ready for “I dos” and babies. Hell, we were babies ourselves. While I was determined to move forward, Mark was still trying to find his footing in the world. College wasn’t an option; Mark tried it for a semester or two, but he hated school and wasn’t up for juggling classes and work. Of course, without a formal college education, his employment options were limited, and even when he did get hold of a decent job working in the receiving and packaging department at Washington National Airport, he barely made enough to pay rent on his own apartment, keep food in his refrigerator, pay his bills, and have a little left over to enjoy his life. He was trapped. Damn if he was going to get a wife and baby caught up in that web while he was still trying to figure it all out.
In 1987, when I went off to my freshman year at North Carolina A&T, our relationship, in my mind, was solid. Though we would be separated, we were ready to conquer the world together. But by the time I finished up my spring semester, he was already pulling away from me. Chalk it up to inexperience or being drunk in love, but I was too blind to see that we were growing apart and that his heart wasn’t in it like it was in the beginning. In just one short academic year, we were through. He tried to let me down gently, but I was intent on fighting for our love. “You’re better than me,” he said one night while I lay in his arms. “You need to leave me alone.”
His words felt like a punch to my gut. I’d seen enough men in our neighborhood give up, especially after they felt like the world had turned its back on them. Hell, I’d seen it happen with my own family, with my own father, whose temper, fired up from returning home from Vietnam to a country that refused to treat him as an equal, had landed him in jail on one too many occasions. He would get mad, get into an argument with someone, and the next thing we knew, he would be locked up. That was an entrée to his dance with poverty; a black man with a record can’t count on a good job and a paycheck—not when he has to check a box on a job application that identifies him as a former convict. Where there is no job, there is no money, and where there is no money, there is trouble. My father was a good guy, but his demons haunted him, and he struggled to escape their wrath on his own.
In my mind, all Mark needed was a hand up. I wasn’t about to leave him in the elements. That was my man. I was going to fight for him.
“Look, I know it’s hard out here, but we can do it together,” I insisted as I hugged him a little tighter. “I’m working,” I said, referring to the job I had waitressing on the boat. “I’m going to be making some decent money soon and we’ll be able to get us a place, and when I finish school, there’ll be even more for us. Let me help you.” At the time I was pursuing that engineering degree, and while I wasn’t on course to give Steve Jobs a run for his money, I always knew how to work, how to hustle.
I kissed his lips and neck and tickled him a little, looking to lighten the mood, but his energy was off. It was clear there would be no cartwheels to express his love like he’d done that time in the parking lot when we first met. Something had shifted. And then he got dark.
I didn’t mean to, but while I was trying to lighten the mood, I reached up to play with a gold chain he was wearing and accidentally broke it, and Mark got angry—the maddest I’d ever seen him. He raised his voice and said the meanest things. I couldn’t understand where the sudden rage was coming from.
“But I love you,” I insisted, crying. “I thought you loved me, too!”
He didn’t. That fight—simple yet decisive—was the end of us.
Who was I fooling? By the next weekend, I’d climbed into my cutest, shortest dress and my highest heels and made sure my hair and makeup were just right and grabbed my girlfriend Tracie and went down there to Chapter III, the hottest dance club in DC, tucked in the shadow of the Capitol. “I just need to get out this house,” I told her.
“Uh-huh,” Tracie said, laughing. “You know we’re going over there because Mark is going to be there.”
“Whatever,” I huffed. “You know the drill.”
She was right, I knew Mark would be there, and I wanted him to see me—to know what he’d given away. And I’m not going to front: I wanted to see him, too, to win him back. Today, I know that in marching myself to this lair, I was giving away all my power. But at nineteen, this seemed like a brilliant idea.
It wasn’t.
Mark got all in his feelings when he spotted me dancing and grinning in front of some guy who was smiling back at me and making it clear that he was interested. Mark marched right up to us, snatched my arm, and grabbed me up like he was my daddy and I was his errant five-year-old child.
“Don’t get cute,” he said, sneering.
“What are you talking about?” I yelled, pulling away. “You’re the one who wanted to break up.”
“That doesn’t mean you come to the club looking like that, throwing yourself at other random dudes!” he screamed directly in my face.
By now we were causing quite the scene. The crowd started leaning in to see what all the commotion was about, and there was some jostling and more yelling, and Tracie was trying to get between us to calm me down and Mark was waving his arms and roaring. It quickly escalated out of control. No punches were thrown, but there was enough of a commotion to draw the attention of the club’s bouncers, who made quick work of moving bodies to get to the center of the action.
Next thing I know, the bouncers put us out of the club, but Mark gets to stay! The bouncers didn’t touch him. But the girls? Side-eye. They had us hemmed in and pinned up and we were screaming and cursing and trying to pull back our arms and tug down our miniskirts, which had risen so high in all that ruckus that our asses were showing! I tried desperately to pry the bouncer’s vise grip off my wrist to stop him from making my new watch dig into my skin; that was a piece I’d just got from Cosmo, a trendy store where Tracie and I got our fly gear. We knew we were cute when we climbed into our outfits from Cosmo, destined for big things. But on that night, we were just some hood rats starting fights and getting booted out the club. Everybody was staring as that bouncer dragged us through the crowd. “Shut up, with your weave,” one man yelled, practically spitting at us, as we passed by. Tracie managed to yank herself away from the bouncer long enough to grab her hair and shove it toward that man’s face.
“Yo, this is my hair, bitch!” she screamed, before the bouncer grabbed her again and recommenced to pushing and dragging us to the front of the club. He pressed his man hands on our backs and shoved us out the door.
“Get out!” he said. “And don’t come back.” I was undone. I had always been the good girl. I followed the rules. Any drama I encountered was usually on the stage. This was new for me. And I wanted no part of it.