“You know . . . he had a black girlfriend . . .”
It was always whispered with an air of “this is how wild this guy is.” I had stopped being black to these folks years ago, so it was said sotto voce for the shock of it, certainly not for my benefit. But it meant I had a chance with Billy. Little Screw might be able to like me.
As brown people, Lucy and I had heretofore been ineligible for the dating dramas of middle school. We were always “the friend.” The town was made up of Mormons and Catholics, and to this day remains deeply conservative. Lucy, at least briefly, had luck with Jeremy Morley of the Mormon Morleys, which seemed like this unbelievable coup. But mostly we were always “the friend.” At the school dances, I would always have to ask somebody to dance, blurting out “JUSTASFRIENDS” before they thought I had some twisted idea. And certainly no one ever asked me. When we danced as a group and a slow dance came on, the unlucky one would end up with me. During Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” or whatever slow dance, I’d look wistfully over the guy’s shoulder, suspecting he was looking at everyone else and rolling his eyes. Dancing with me was an act of charity, a Make-A-Wish mercy dance.
I didn’t have a model for what I was feeling until I saw the black eunuchs from Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part 1. In the movie there is an extended boner joke with Gregory Hines hiding among the sexless, castrated guards allowed to be in the maidens’ chambers. He fails the eunuch test while the real ones pass with flaccid colors. In my heart, I was Gregory Hines with a hard-on, but to everyone else I was the eunuch. You can be the trusted confidante or witty sidekick, there and in the mix. But remember, you don’t appeal to anybody. Not to the whites, but also not to the very few people of color, either. The two African American boys in my grade wanted nothing to do with me. And the other two black girls steered clear of me and each other, to avoid amplifying our blackness. Because anyone brown would say, “Well, if I hang with you, then we’ll become superbrown.” So I was a eunuch. A social eunuch.
For all of freshman year, Billy was an electric current moving through my group of friends. We would trade Billy sightings. Someone would say they spotted him at lunch or in the hall. “What did he have on?” we would ask in response. “Was he wearing his hat?” He wasn’t in any AP or honors classes, so I would only see him at sporting events. He played baseball—because of course he didn’t play soccer like every other Ken doll in Pleasanton—so we made sure to go to every game. When he played basketball, we admired the muscles of his arms and his tic of pulling his shirt away from his chest after he scored. He never looked around, never held up his arms in victory if he sank a basket. He just continued on as if he’d wandered into a pickup game that he might leave at any time.
When I would run into Billy, it was usually at the Sports Park between games. I would have my bag of softball equipment and he would be lugging his baseball equipment.
“Did you win?” he’d ask.
“Yeah,” I’d say. “You?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” I’d say.
“Yeah, cool.”
Walking away, I would feel high just from that brief encounter.
Billy hung out with all the athletes, but he was close friends with Mike, whose dad was the basketball coach. Mike’s whole family was made up of great athletes—the sports dynasty of Pleasanton. To run afoul of any of them was social death. Billy’s friendship with Mike ended abruptly one night at basketball practice, when Billy got into it with Mike’s dad and told him, “Suck my balls.”
And that was that.
But Billy seemed exempt from the social hierarchy. The incident just added to the legend of Little Screw. Billy was two years older than us and already driving. His car was the only freshman’s car in the parking lot. He had a GMC truck. It was black with gold trim, with BILLY emblazoned on the back in tan paint. I wanted it to read BILLY AND NICKIE so badly. He was such a badass in that ride. His parents were always away, either taking an RV trip or busy with their store in Fremont, so he and his brother had more freedom than most kids. They threw huge parties, and my friends and I always went. Our parents all worked long hours, so they never really had a line on where we were or what we were doing. I routinely used the “I’m staying at so-and-so’s house” line when I was really out partying. There was only one parent who cared where we really were: Alisa’s mom, Trudy. You never name-dropped Alisa in any of these schemes because Trudy would go looking for her and ruin everything.
It was Lucy who lost her virginity to Billy first. I was so jealous, but I masked it. “Tell me everything,” I said, as if I was happy for her. I wanted to be the one so much that I didn’t even hear her describing what had gone down. I was too busy thinking, He had a black girlfriend, Lucy is Mexican . . . I have a shot. The door is clearly open.
Little Screw and Lucy didn’t go out or even have sex again. He just moved on to Alice, another Mexican girl. Billy claimed her. He called Alice “my girlfriend.” I had to figure out what secret pull she had. She lived near me in Val Vista, considered next-to-last in the Pleasanton development caste system. Alice was on the traveling soccer team, and she was big on wearing her warm-up pants to school, along with slides or Birkenstocks with socks. She always had a scrunchie to match her socks, usually neon pink. She would wear part of her hair up, the rest falling in curls.
A rumor went around that she was a freak in bed. “You know, she rides guys,” someone told me, “and then leans back and plays with their balls.” If you’ve never had sex, that sounds like some acrobatic Cirque du Soleil–level shit.
Everyone was having sex by this point except me. Freshman year ended and I went to Omaha, where I at least had a chance with boys. The real test that summer was when I went to a co-ed basketball camp. The black guys there had a thing for me, though I was too focused on basketball to do anything. “You’re like a white girl without the hassle,” one guy told me. He meant it as a compliment, and on some level, I probably took it as one. Nonetheless, they saw me. I was a viable option.
Being the eunuch in Pleasanton, I was still in the middle of the long, long process of being Friend to Billy. I wish I could say it was strategic. The rare times he would go to some kid’s bonfire, I would slide on over to him as casually as I could. Southern rock was massive then, so there was always a lot of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers to be heard. At every party, Steve Miller’s “The Joker” was played at least twice. You’d find young Nickie, standing next to a fire, talking to a white boy in a Skynyrd T-shirt emblazoned with the Confederate flag. These young bucks, scions of upper-middle-class families, wishing they were back in Dixie. Away, away. And then there was Billy, looking as out of place as me. He was more into driving around playing Sir Mix-a-Lot. I’d hang on to every word he said. He would complain about Alice, and I would chime in, coaching from the sidelines as only a friend could do.
“Just tell her how you feel,” I’d say, thinking, Just tell me how you feel.
They broke up, and my determination to be noticed by Billy only grew. At one of the parties at his house around November of sophomore year, Billy gave me a sign. He looked at me in such a way that I just knew.