INTRODUCTION
This kind of feels like a first date.
I have that same feeling you get five minutes before you meet the other person, when you’re giddy about where things might go. But also wary, because you’ve been on enough bad dates to know exactly how this can go awry. They order the salmon and pronounce the l and you’re like, How the hell has my life come to this?
No pressure, but I have thought of you the whole time I’ve been writing this book. I have never shared these stories outside of a close circle of people, the friends you can tell all your secrets to because you know all of theirs. So I want this to be like one of those nights out with someone you can be real with. We’re sitting across from each other over drinks, and we’re in the middle of this ridiculous, hyperventilating laugh/cry because even I can’t believe I did some of these things, foolishness that made perfect sense at the time but sounds ludicrous now. “Oh no, it gets worse,” I say, taking a sip as everyone in the restaurant looks over at us losing it. These are the stories that require reinforcements. If I’m going to really get into them, we need to flag the waiter and tell him not to be a stranger and to keep pouring, because we’re gonna need more wine tonight.
Thinking of you this past year, I jotted down notes, sent texts to myself, and went back to look at some of the books that meant something to me and left me better for reading them. One of the things I marked to share was a line from James Baldwin.
“The very time I thought I was lost, My dungeon shook and my chains fell off.”
Baldwin was quoting a spiritual about the strength that comes from survival. I have felt lost plenty, stuck in the dungeons I was thrown into, and some I even locked myself into. I felt the chains of growing up trying to be someone I wasn’t, and then living in Hollywood, a town that rewards pretending. The dungeon represents so many parts of my life and all of our lives. I don’t think I’m special, or that my pain makes me unique. I’ve had a couple of moments—okay, months, maybe years—where the idea of disappearing and never being seen again seemed like an appealing option. I’ve been lucky that someone was always there to give me hope, whether it was a member of my support group at UCLA’s Rape Crisis Center or my dog Bubba crawling under my bed to find me hiding from life after public humiliation. They rescued me from my dungeons, and later I had to do the work to shake off the shackles that I had put on myself. I hemmed myself in with shame, and also with the fear of not being chosen by men. I remember the moment I realized I was free, looking in a mirror and saying, “I choose my motherfucking self.”
We’ll get to that. Right now, I should just tell you at the outset that I have trust issues. I have to wonder if I will pay a consequence for telling my truth. We’re entering a full-on relationship where I have all this hope that my words are going to be interpreted the way I intend. I don’t want you to have to guess about my intentions. I want to make you laugh/cry as we tackle some big stuff. And if you don’t agree with me, I want you to be able to say, “At least that bitch is honest.” Oh, yeah, you should know that I cuss. You never knew that, did you? Having a publicist has served me well. Let’s press on, nothing to see here.
It was terrifying putting myself back into some of the scenes you’ll find here. But it was also the essential work of finding my authentic self. As I retraced the steps and missteps of my life, I began to stop avoiding memories that triggered emotional flashbacks, and I chose to embrace them as revelations. Each revealed a bread crumb that I had dropped along the way, leading me further on my path to understanding who I truly am.
Reading all these stories together, I wondered if I was really brave enough to share all of this. Then I remembered another quote I wrote down. This one comes from Carrie Fisher.
“Stay afraid, but do it anyway.”
So cheers. Here’s to us being afraid and doing it anyway.
one
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MISS PLEASANTON
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
When I was in the second grade, my parents moved us from Omaha, Nebraska, to Pleasanton, California. My parents had spent a year living in San Francisco just after they got married, and my arts-loving mother had lived for the city’s culture and open spirit. So when my father announced he was getting transferred to go back to the Bay Area, she rejoiced. My mother pushed for Oakland, where we would be around other black families and still close to all that San Francisco had to offer. But my father, obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses, had bigger plans. He had a white work friend who had moved to Pleasanton, a half-hour drive and a world away from Oakland. “If it’s good enough for Dave,” he said, “it’s good enough for us.”
In Omaha, we were part of the largest African American extended family in Nebraska. In Pleasanton, we would be the chocolate chip in the cookie. My mother didn’t want that for her daughters—me, my older sister, Kelly, and my younger sister, Tracy. Well, she lost that battle. Everything she feared came to pass.
The residents of Pleasanton divided themselves into housing developments. And where you lived said everything about who you were. We bought a house in Val Vista, which was working middle class with upper-middle-class goals. Val Vista was considered just below Valley Trails in the Pleasanton development caste system. But neither of those neighborhoods was nearly as good as the Meadows, across town, where they had green belts that connected all the cul-de-sacs and the streets. When you told someone where you lived, it was shorthand for the truth of your family’s economic situation: good, average, or untouchable.
Since birth my family has called me Nickie, from my middle name, Monique. It took a little less than a year in Pleasanton for someone to call me nigger. It was during third-grade recess at Fairlands Elementary, and it came from Lucas. He was one of the Latino kids bused in from Commodorsky, the low-income housing development. He rode with Carmen, Lori, and Gabriel, or, as everyone called them, the Commodorsky kids. One day, Lucas decided my name made for great racist alliteration.
“Nickie’s a nigger!” he said, pointing at me with a huge smile of revelation, like he’d found me in a game of hide and seek. For one day to my face, and who knows how many days behind my back, “Nigger Nickie” caught on like wildfire. The kids chanted it, trying on the word as a threat (“Nigger!”) and a question (“Nigger?”), and then as singsong: “Nig-ger Nic-kie. Nig-ger Nic-kie.”
I couldn’t afford to stand out like that ever again. So I became obsessed with observing the Commodorsky kids, clocking all the shit they did that everyone—meaning the white ones—made fun of. I wanted to be the exact opposite. And I was clocking the white kids, too, of course. I looked at them and thought, That’s where I’m going to. And when I saw the Commodorsky kids, all I could think was, That’s where I’m running from.