Then his teammates started a chant:
“Just do it, you pussy. Just do it.” Over and over, and Jason kept looking at me and then back at the team and then back at me.
My dad smelled what was coming. “We should go, Nickie,” he said, as if the idea had just occurred to him. “We should just get out of here.”
“Just do it, you pussy,” the chant continued. “Just do it.”
“We need to talk,” Jason yelled to me over the reporters. They all turned to look at me.
The chant stopped, and the gym was silent except for the squeaks of sneakers as his teammates leaned forward in anticipation.
“Let’s go, Nickie,” Dad said.
“No, Dad,” I said, in my most dramatic voice. “I want to know the truth.”
But I couldn’t let go of hope.
“Um, is it positive?” I said, giving the thumbs-up sign. “Or is it negative?”
Jason gave a thumbs-down sign. The team went “OHHHHHHH!” in unison.
Condemned to death by heartbreak, I ran from the arena.
He called me that night to officially break up with me, which is exactly what he had done to the girl he dated before me. Karma is a bitch that surfaces quickly. I went into this very quick whirlpool of a downward spiral. I began writing a lot of sad, terrible poetry. I even incorporated my vocabulary words into the verse with lines like “You are the crystal sextant leading me to my fate.” Then there was a poem I called “Little Boys.”
Little boys like to play
Childish games from night to day.
They think they’re grown, but to their dismay
They’re years from where manhood and maturity lay.
The fact that I remember this, thirty years later, speaks volumes about where I was at that time. It’s just one from a full three-ring binder of musings on my despair. I asked myself if #22 gave Jason more than I did as #21? Just as Deanie tortured herself over Juanita, I wonder if I had been naïve to think he didn’t want sex. Was that the deal breaker? ’Cause, jeez, tell a girl.
I also had the terrible realization that I now had two weeks to find a date for fucking prom. I’d just been dumped by Jason Kidd, so it had to be a good date.
There was another black kid that had moved to Pleasanton, a guy named Walter. He was a senior when I was a junior, and he was the running back on the football team. He was really cute, and I decided his looks alone made him my best candidate. Even though my heart was still broken, the pictures would tell a different story. As one of my girlfriends said, “The pictures are going to last a lot longer than your memory.”
My vanity about the optics was so consuming, I even convinced myself I had a crush on him. It was him all along. To hell with Jason. I just had to actually talk to Walter first. I decided that the best way to not take another hit to my dignity was to ask him in the most casual, devil-may-care way. If I just ran into him and tossed it off . . .
Walter lived in the Val Vista development, right at the entrance to a cul-de-sac. Saturday afternoon I decided to do a drive-by in my mom’s Cutlass Ciera. I went by the house and didn’t see anybody around. I was relieved and realized that this was a fool’s mission. Worse, I realized that the problem with doing a drive-by in a cul-de-sac is that it’s actually two drive-bys. I went around the circle, and as I was a few houses down from passing again, his garage door started to open. Shit.
I gunned the engine and saw his dog flying down the driveway. This crazy dog ran right in front of my car! And I panicked: the teen driver in her mom’s Cutlass hit the gas instead of the brake. The last thing I saw was his dog jumping for my mom’s hood ornament.
I braked again and looked behind me. The dog was running in circles, fine. He had crouched under my car as I ran over him. Stunt dog. I pulled over and had the shakes. I just did a drive-by of my faux crush’s house and almost crushed his dog.
Lesson learned, I just called him. I didn’t tell him I was only choosing him for the optics. And karma got me. A week before prom, Walter got the goddamned chicken pox. He was no longer contagious on the big night, but he was covered head to toe in chicken pox scabs.
Through Splendor in the Grass, I also saw the way out. In the film—spoiler alert!—Deanie tries to kill herself and her parents have her institutionalized. This is the part you need to see, my brokenhearted one: While she’s locked up, Bud goes to Yale and completely blows it. His family loses everything when the stock market crashes and he has to come home and work the ranch. Deanie, sprung from the nuthouse, gets a new dude and goes to see Bud. She’s got her rich girl gloves on and she’s at their filthy farm with chickens everywhere. There’s Bud, working with his dirty hands and hanging out with his new girl, who looks like a mess. You see it in Deanie’s face: Whew, I dodged a bullet.
So I say to my patients, the friends going through a bad split, “You are Deanie.” We waste our nutty on people who don’t deserve it. Wait it out. He’s gonna end up dirty with chickens and #22, and you’re going to come out on top. Trust me on this one.
PRO TIP: WATCH WAITING TO EXHALE AND LIVE IN THE SOUNDTRACK
This is for when things get really messy, as they did for me in my early twenties when I couldn’t wait for my Greek-Mexican beauty school dropout to break up with me, and then would do anything to get him back.
Alex and I had moved to L.A. together, against the wishes of his parents, who called him a nigger lover. So there was that little hurdle. I was still at UCLA, and I used my own student loan and my Payless settlement money to finance his beauty school tuition. I hated the Payless money and saw it as blood money, payment for being put in an unsafe situation that allowed me to be raped. Alex had no problem with taking that money, and in many ways saw it as something he had a right to because of what, he said, we had been through.
That was bad enough, but then he dropped out. This was a habit. He’d gone to junior college to play basketball and then enrolled at California State University, Northridge, but didn’t stay. Now he didn’t even want to finish his hours to get his license from beauty school. All he had left was basketball. Every day, he would just play pickup basketball games at a court in Burbank, right around the Disney studios. Not for money, mind you. There was no hustling in the least. It was just one endless loop of pickup games. His ambition didn’t match mine, and as I completely supported him, I began to resent the other costs I was paying for being in an interracial relationship. We got snickers and stares everywhere we went, and his parents had wanted nothing to do with me until they saw the depth of his emotion when I was raped. It just wasn’t worth it if I couldn’t respect him.
I bought the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack just before I drove home to Pleasanton for Christmas break. I listened to it all the way there and all the way back. There are five stages of grieving love, and they are all there in that soundtrack: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I resolved to end things with Alex through listening to those songs, but I didn’t know how I was supposed to leave someone who was so absolutely dependent on me.
In Pleasanton I ran into Keith, who had been a senior at a nearby high school back when I was a freshman. Home for Christmas, we met up at a bar in Old Town Pleasanton. He was a star soccer player who got a scholarship to UCSB, and now he was in law school in San Diego. We hit it off and exchanged information. And we kept talking. He was very much like me if I hadn’t had those Omaha summers to undo parts of my assimilation. He was so terminally corny.