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  Then in a moment of weakness, I called Sondra and she came back. I professed my love for her; she confessed that she had been miserable without me. Our attempt to pick up where we left off ended in disaster. I never thought I would hear the words, “It’s okay, it happens.” It never happened, not to me. From that point on, the relationship went downhill. Instead of admitting that she was seeing someone else, she let me catch them together. Nothing dramatic like having sex in my bed, just walking in the rain and holding hands. Just like the old Oran “Juice” Jones song.

  Afterward many of my perspectives about women changed. I had always thought women cheated in retaliation for being cheated on, but I realized like a lot of misconceptions about women, that one isn’t true. It had happened to me twice—two times too many.

  As I turned my attention to the blurry words on my laptop where I was working on my latest screenplay-in-progress, I tried to delete Sondra from my mind. The library behind me was full of unfinished scripts, and for the last week I had been working on a script about two friends on a road trip in search of their fathers. But twenty pages into the manuscript, my characters still had yet to leave Chicago. I had serious writer’s block. Ever since I had sold my first screenplay, which had won a college screenwriting competition, to a producer who had in turn totally revised the script, I was determined to make my next one a success. By the time my screenplay, which had started out as a drama about four Brothers in college, made its appearance on screen, it had become a comedy about the antics of three friends, with one token Black friend.

  “Yo, Ad-dam!”

  I turned from my computer screen just as Luciano, my closest partner, poked his head over the Japanese room divider that separated the living room and my office. Last night, after a typical boys’ night out of shooting pool and the bull, I drove him to his house where he discovered his wife had finally changed the locks, something I had been warning him would happen soon enough if he kept acting like he was still a bachelor. He pounded on the door of his house yelling Lisa’s name the way Stanley Kowalski yelled “Stella” in A Streetcar Named Desire, until his next-door neighbor threatened to call the cops. The last thing I wanted was to spend the night in jail, a place I had never been and never wanted to be. I had no choice but to offer the man my sofa bed.

  “Don’t lean on that, man,” I told him absentmindedly

  “Man, how come you ain’t got no food up in this mug?” Luciano Reed was, for the most part, an articulate, somewhat educated man, a disciplinarian at an all-boys’ private school, but when we were together, he often lapsed into the old street lingua. And it was infectious.

  “I ain’t been grocery-shopping this month.”

  “So, when you going?”

  “Don’t worry about it. You won’t be here long enough to find out.” As I looked up at his dejected face, I knew I shouldn’t have been so hard on him, but it was fun.

  He leaned against the divider, then pulled away quickly when he saw my harsh look. “Lisa’s not answering the phone; she turned off her cell. She won’t even let me in my own house to get some clothes.” Technically, since Lisa got the house in the divorce settlement from her first husband, it was her house. But I didn’t bring up this fact.

  “She better ’cause you ‘cain’t’ stay here too long,” I half-teased.

  He ran a hand through his unkempt black hair and dragged himself to the kitchen. I turned back to the computer.

  Three years ago, Luciano had married Lisa, a woman with a ready-made family, which included two kids and two dogs. Ever since his first wife had disappeared with his only son, he had become obsessed with finding another wife and starting a new family. Lisa was his third wife. He also had a lady on the side, a woman named Maya. He had wanted to marry Maya a long time ago, but, unfortunately for him, she had married someone else, and, also unfortunately according to him, was still married. I didn’t approve of his relationship with Maya, although I could understand his attraction to her. She was sexy, intelligent, and funny. He tried to explain his predicament to me many times, but nothing he said ever convinced me that there was anything right with what he was doing. Once he told me, I love Lisa, but I’m in love with Maya. To which I answered, What does that mean?

  The first time he introduced me to Maya, I knew immediately something was amiss between them. You could smell the sexuality in the air, in the way they looked at each other, the way they didn’t look at each other. He might as well have said: This is Maya, my mistress.

  I got up and went into the kitchen where Luciano was brewing coffee and toasting bread.

  “I see you found something to eat.”

  “Some of your bread’s moldy, but I found a couple of decent slices.”

  I opened the fridge and took out the half-gallon of milk. Without bothering to smell it, I could tell by its consistency that it was bad. I decided to clean out the fridge, something I had been meaning to do for the past few months.

  “You want to take my car Saturday?” Luciano asked, scraping the mayonnaise jar for enough mayo to spread on his toast.

  “I don’t think so. We’re taking separate cars. Just in case I need to make a quick getaway.” I opened a jar of spaghetti sauce and found thick balls of mold resembling a scientific experiment, so I tossed it out.

  “I told you the woman looks like Maya,” Luciano said unconvincingly. “Her hairs longer, and she’s a little darker, a little shorter.”

  “A little homelier …” I added.

  I peeled away the top layers of a head of lettuce, but it was soggy and smelly all the way through. Despite my initial protests, and against my better judgment, Luciano and Maya had insisted on having me meet Maya’s sister, who so far had remained a mystery. They wouldn’t tell me much about her, not even her name, which was kind of strange and made me suspicious.

  In spite of her infidelity, I liked Maya. After all, who was I to judge her? But if her sister was anything like her, she wasn’t the kind of woman I wanted to know. I was no prude, but I figured if Maya and Luciano were so much in love, they should both divorce their respective spouses and get together. Not like my old man who had kept two families on opposite sides of Chicago until I discovered my half sister and half brother at his funeral. Every day a woman didn’t come into my life was another day without drama like that. But I didn’t put up too much of a fight with the whole blind-date thing since I had to admit, I had been craving the company of a woman for some time.

  “What was her name again?” I asked, hoping he’d slip up.

  Luciano straddled a stool and got busy eating. I slam-dunked a couple of wrinkled, shrunken tomatoes into the trash can. “She doesn’t look exactly like Maya, just a little,” he said with his mouth full of food as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “You’ve never met her,” I accused him.

  “You’ve never had a Latina, have you?” he asked, changing the subject, which intensified my apprehension. Despite his being half-Cuban, and inheriting his mother’s Latin physical traits, Luciano rarely acknowledged that part of him, and spoke Spanish only when it was necessary, such as when he wanted to impress a woman. Like lately, whenever he spoke with Maya on the phone, he’d slip into Spanish so I wouldn’t know what he was saying.

  The first girl I ever kissed was a Spanish girl, Nilsa Ortiz. We didn’t really date since we were only ten years old; she was just a girl who let me kiss her. She taught me a few Spanish words, most of which I’ve forgotten, except besame, “kiss me.” The first thing she said whenever she saw me was, “Besame, Adam,” before she said “hello.” And I always complied.

  I had dated women of other nationalities: a Brazilian, a Trinidadian, even a White girl—though she had been French-Canadian, not American, so technically for me, she didn’t count as a White girl. For the most part, my romantic interests had been Black, cultured women. When it came down to it, women were different in some ways, but they were the same in many others. However, when I thought of my future wife, I saw a Black woman in the pictur
e, a woman like my mother and sister.

  “Marti was Brazilian,” I reminded him.

  “She spoke Portuguese, so technically, she wasn’t Latin.”

  “Brazil’s in Latin America, ain’t it?”

  “It’s different with Latinas,” he said dismissively. “They’re cool and tough like Black women, but sophisticated like White girls.”

  I couldn’t believe what he was saying. “Are you saying Black women aren’t sophisticated?”

  “You know what I mean. Black women are … melodramatic. And less forgiving.”

  “You mean, when you cheat? And Latin girls have fiery tempers, right? Stop with the stereotypes.” Luciano’s first and third wives were Black, the second one Hispanic, and each time Luciano had started the new relationship before ending the old one.

  “Man, you act like you never cheated in your life.” At any attack on his reputation, he would get defensive.

  “I haven’t,” I said proudly, but without conceit. “Whenever I get tired of a relationship, I break it off. If I meet someone new, I end the old one. I don’t string women along.”

  “That’s why you haven’t been with one in what … a year?”

  “That’s a choice.” I had told Luciano it had been a year, but it was more like eighteen months.

  “No, that’s ’cause of that mop on yo’ head,” he joked.

  He was referring to my dreadlocks; I had started growing them since my cancer’s remission and they were now down to my shoulder blades. I know a lot of people have a problem with locks because they aren’t as neat as fades or bald heads. But because it had survived the chemo treatments, I vowed never to cut my hair. I felt a connection to Samson in the Bible, whose strength was connected to his hair.

  “When are you going to cut that mess?” Luciano asked, rumpling my locks with a slap of his hand.

  I punched him. “Yo’ mama likes to hold on to them,” I joked, reverting to old college insults. He had to laugh at that one.

  I knew one thing, if he had some dream about us double-dating with the Latina sisters, he was about to get his matchmaking, Cupid-butt disappointed.

  The worst part about having cancer is that it drains you of your strength and robs you of the control and overall attitude you once had over your life. Subsequently, I became obsessed with exercise, running and weight lifting several times a week, not to look good but to gain back that power.

  After cleaning the fridge, I changed into a sleeveless T-shirt and jersey shorts, popped a Mozart CD into the joggable CD player hooked to my belt, and went for a run. Classical music gives me a sense that I am floating through a surreal world, making the confusion of the real world disappear if only for just a short time.

  I lived several miles from Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, in a rehabbed building that was once a rubber glove factory. Sometimes, during really hot summer nights, the smell of rubber seeped through the vents and I imagined the generations of working class who once toiled at the machines. With the money I had received from my first screenplay, I invested in the loft at a time when gentrification was in its infancy and White folks were still pessimistic about moving inland. Eventually I wanted a townhouse in the city, not a house in the suburbs. I was a city boy through and through. I had no problem living across the El tracks from the projects. One good thing about surviving cancer, nothing much scared me anymore, not even thugs carrying guns. I figured in this day and age of mistaken identity and Driving (or Running) While Black, I had more to fear from the cops.

  The run from my loft to the lakefront was a rather scenic route that extended from the gentrified blocks of lofts, condos, and town-homes, through the soon-to-be demolished Cabrini-Green housing projects, to the YMCA where the homeless and veterans lived, to the condos of old money and nouveau riche.

  A patrol car cruised by and immediately my feelers went up. You would think that by now I would have been used to the increased presence of cops since the upwardly mobile population had surpassed that of the old public housing residents. But I was always on guard. The cruiser turned the corner I was approaching and stopped at the curb just as I reached it. Two uniforms got out, surrounding me like the cavalry, one in the front, one in back. The one in the front was a veteran, White; the one behind was younger and a brown Latino, but he could have passed for Filipino or American Indian. As I slowly removed my headphones, a name ran through my mind: Amadou Diallo, the African brother who had been shot at forty-one times by NYPD cops who claimed his cell phone was a gun. In this age of high-tech terrorism, I didn’t want them to mistake my headphones for some kind of New Age bomb.

  “You live around here?” the White cop asked.

  “A couple of blocks down. On Larrabee.”

  “Can we see some ID?”

  If they could have seen my eyes behind the shades, they’d have seen nothing but innate contempt. With exaggerated caution, I reached into my pocket and brought out my billfold, extending my license using two fingers. I turned to glare at the Latin-Indian-Pacific Islander cop who wasn’t saying a word, standing at ease, surveying the perimeter like he was ready for anything that might jump out.

  “Mr. Black. We’re just checking on a call about a purse snatching on Halsted.”

  “Let me guess. I fit the description. Black male running.”

  The White cop smirked; the other one wouldn’t meet my eyes. I was handed back my license.

  People were strolling by, breaking their necks to catch a glimpse of the commotion, of which there was none, except for the one broiling inside of me. I recognized a couple from my building watching, and when they saw the stone-cold look on my face, they averted their eyes.

  It had happened a few times before, just as the demographics were beginning to shift from Black to White. Soon after, the patrols were stepped up as the newcomers complained about the established residents who had yet to be dispersed to scattered-site housing around the city. One time, a searchlight was blazed in my face from a slow-moving paddy wagon; another time, I had been thrust against a cruiser after I insisted I didn’t know what “assume the position” meant. After that incident, I stopped running at night, or even dusk for that matter. Now they were hassling me in the daylight.

  “Sorry to bother you,” White cop muttered insincerely. “Have a good one, now.”

  I glowered at them as they swaggered around their car, climbing in like they were gangsters who owned the hood. My chest heaving with hostility, I turned around to go back home and take out my frustration on the bench press, but then I decided they weren’t going to ruin my day.

  At the El station on Franklin and Chicago Avenue, the light changed and I ran in place. A brown-haired White girl who was also running pulled up next to me and flashed me a sweaty grin. I smiled back, concentrating on Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 16 in D Major blasting in my ears, trying to forget the encounter with the cops. When I took a second glance, I noticed she wasn’t White but an attractive light-skinned Black woman with a tan, dressed in a white Tommy Girl running outfit. Definitely not a serious runner, I thought. She was more about looking cute than getting sweaty. I saw her lips moving so I removed my headphones.

  “I’m sorry?” I said, still running in place.

  “I said, ‘how are you?’” she asked in the affected speech characteristic of the Gold Coast.

  “Alright. How ’bout you?”

  “Good. Mind if I run with you?”

  Running was a solitary activity. Though I’d seen people running together, it wasn’t for me. Not to mention that the run-in with the cops had all but killed my usual sociable nature.

  “If you can keep up.”

  When the light changed, I checked the traffic before taking off. She kept up for the most part, but only because I was holding back. I let her get ahead of me once so I could check her out from the back, but then I pulled ahead because I was starting to get behind my time. If Luciano were around, he’d tell me there was definitely something wrong with me when I didn’t seize an op
portunity to holler at a beautiful sister.

  We didn’t stop for another light until we reached Loyola University, at which time she stooped over with her hands on her knees and waved me on. I smiled pompously and moved on.

  I reached the lakefront in forty-five minutes, behind my usual time and more winded than usual. I attributed it to the woman’s interruption, disregarding the fact that I had started smoking again, and vowed not to let anything interfere the next time.

  It was a blistering summer day, furiously hot even for August, the kind of day that brought lots of people to compete for the cool breezes of Lake Michigan’s shores. All up and down the outer paths, people were running, biking, and Rollerblading. There was no sand on this portion of beach but there were still plenty of half-clad sunbathers lounging on the cemented shore. Future cancer patients, I called them. I always wore shades, a visor, and sunblock; I didn’t play. Clouds were moving in, periodically obscuring the sun, and I waited in anticipation for the impending thunderstorm that had been predicted earlier. There was nothing like watching people running away from a little rain. Another good thing about having cancer—you learn to appreciate the simple things you took for granted before.

  I removed my headphones and sat down on the nearest bench and leaned back, soaking in the rays and breathing in the fresh air—as fresh as city air could be.

  In the murky distance, I could make out Navy Pier like some mirage, the super-sized Ferris wheel barely moving. I remembered the day my father had taken me there before the pier had been turned into a tourist attraction. He told me that during World War II, it was used as a pilot-training base, and now there were about two hundred planes resting at the bottom of Lake Michigan as a result of training accidents. Then he told me he was dying of cancer.