As the party went on that Fourth of July, more and more people showed up to feast on the lobsters, shrimp, and oysters. The Sterlings had a live band perform with the lakefront in the background, and all their stuck-up friends looked ridiculous trying to dance. I wanted some ribs, chicken, and hot dogs with chili and coleslaw. No such luck. I wanted to hear some Jay-Z, Prince, and Mariah Carey. No such luck. I wanted a rum and Coke, but settled for a French Connection—Grand Marnier and Hennessy cognac.
Patrick was holding court on the side among a bunch of young socialites who wanted to take my spot. Shit, I was hoping one of them would make him dump me. I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t Brooke simply walk away? Like the saying goes, some things are easier said than done. I could have left Patrick, but there was no place better to go. I didn’t get involved with him because of his money. His wealth was an extension of his charm. I did love Patrick, but he didn’t appreciate my devotion. I believed that he loved me as well, but didn’t truly comprehend the definition of it. I was delusional enough to believe that he could, and would, change his ways for me … eventually.
Patrick beckoned me to him as he moved away from all the designer-clad hoochies and over to the overpriced patio table where his parents were seated. It looked like something you would find in someone’s dining room instead of outside, but it was typical for them. I downed the rest of my drink, desperately needing another, and went to him.
Mrs. Sterling was still determined to humiliate me, and now she had an audience. Two other couples were sitting with them. As I walked up, she said, “Here comes Patrick’s, um … play toy. Her name is Brooke.”
I strained a smile and sat down next to Patrick. The people introduced themselves, and then, one lady, who had endured way too much plastic surgery and had been damn near botoxed to death, asked, “So, Brooke, are you a lawyer like Patrick?”
Mrs. Sterling let out this hideous cackle, and Mr. Sterling gave her an evil glare. I think he had become torn between his personal outlook on me and the reality that his son had developed true feelings.
“Actually, I’m in the food industry,” I replied uneasily.
“Oh …, ” the woman said, playing with a string of luxurious pearls around her neck. “You’re a restaurateur. What’s the name of your establishment, and do you have more than one location?”
“Ernestine, the girl is not on our level,” Mrs. Sterling said. “She’s a waitress—in a dump at that. She used to work in a nicer place, where Patrick picked her up along with his doggie bag, but she lost that job. She wasn’t quite up to their standards.”
I pinched Patrick’s leg as hard as I could. He gave me a “You’re on your own” gaze and went back to drinking his top-shelf whiskey.
“Are you really going to sit here and let your mother talk about me like that?” I asked bluntly. When he didn’t respond, I tried to get up, but he pulled me back down. I wrestled with him to get my wrist free. “Let me go. I’m ready to leave.”
“Thank heaven,” his mother said.
Mr. Sterling cleared his throat. “Brooke, I apologize for anything the missus might have said to offend you, but please stay and enjoy the fireworks. They’re set to begin in less than ten minutes.”
My mouth flew open; then I gulped. “Anything she might have said to offend me? Are you for real?”
Mrs. Sterling glared at me. “Look, dear, I was only speaking the truth. You had a halfway civilized job, even if it was still beneath anything my son had any business dealing with. You gained a bunch of weight and they got rid of you. And—”
“You think I got fired because of my weight?”
She didn’t reply but she and her friends shared comical glances.
“The reason I gained so much weight is because your son has me stressed the fuck out!”
“Brooke!” Patrick exclaimed. “Watch it!”
“Oh, now you have a fucking tongue?” He finally let go of my wrist. I rose from the table. “All of you can kiss my monkey!”
“Did she say ‘monkey’?” I heard the woman with the pearls ask.
“Yeah, monkey, as in my pussy, my twat, my coochie!”
The woman’s mouth flew open in shock as I turned my back on them.
I stomped off in the direction of the front driveway, where cars were being valet-parked. I walked up to the three young men standing around in red jackets. “I don’t have the ticket but can you bring up Patrick Sterling’s Bentley?”
“Sure thing,” one of them said, then took off running.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Patrick asked, approaching me.
“I’m getting the hell away from here.”
He spotted his car pulling up. “Not in my car, you’re not. I can’t believe you told them to kiss your monkey.”
I glared at him. “Patrick, I’m taking your car. You can either call the police and report it stolen or try to physically stop me in front of all these witnesses so I can file assault-and-battery charges.”
The two young men standing there looked on while the third one was getting out of the driver’s side.
Patrick shook his head. “I would never hit you, Brooke.”
I shrugged. “At this point, I don’t know what you’re truly capable of. Until five minutes ago, I never thought that you’d sit there and let your mother talk shit about me in front of her friends. Granted, I realize she doesn’t like me and she takes potshots at me every chance she gets, but that’s in private. I can handle that, but she’s gone too far and you allowed it. You sat there and watched her humiliate me and did nothing.”
Patrick’s eyes glassed over. “She’s my mother.”
“And I’m your …” I paused. “I don’t know what the hell I am to you. Maybe you need to figure that shit out before you come home.”
I went over to get in the car, tossing my purse on the passenger seat. “He’ll tip you,” I told the valet. “He has plenty of damn money.”
“How am I supposed to get home?” Patrick asked.
I snickered. “Patrick, you’re at your parents’ house. They have a dozen cars and a chauffeur. Give me a break.”
I got settled in the car and floored it, having no clue where I was headed. I didn’t want to go home. I’d distanced myself from the majority of my friends and had no clue what they were doing for the Fourth. I decided to go see my parents. I sat there with them, on their balcony, watching the fireworks at the National Mall. Daddy had half a slab of ribs and two barbecued drumsticks left over. I gobbled them down with one of his Coronas. They were elated to see me and I them.
“You can always come back home,” Mommy whispered to me later that night as I laid my head on her lap in my old bedroom.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I thought he loved me.”
“He probably does love you, but he’s trying to satisfy everyone in his life, and no one’s ever accomplished that … not even Jesus himself.”
Mommy always had a way to make sense out of things. She was right. Patrick was trying to please everyone, and it was stressing him out. In turn, he was taking his anxiety out on me. I was determined that we would smooth things out.
“I’m going to make him happy, Mommy. No matter what it takes.”
“Only if you’re happy, sweetheart. Don’t surrender your needs for someone else’s.”
I fell asleep as she continued to play with my hair and sing softly to me. Patrick didn’t report his car stolen, but he blew up my cell phone a hundred times between midnight and noon the next day. My voice mail was full of messages from him pleading for me to call or come home. I had to work the three-to-eleven shift at the diner and decided to let him sweat. He was lying in wait when I pulled into the parking lot.
I didn’t speak when I got out of his Bentley, determined to walk right past him. He was standing beside his father’s Porsche 911 and clinched me into his arms … into a loving embrace.
“I’m sorry, baby. I had words with my mother.”
“Had
words? What does that mean?”
“She promised that she’ll never do anything like that again.”
I could feel his heart beating in his chest as he held me. I pulled away and gazed into his eyes. “Life is full of empty promises.”
“Just give her a chance. Give me another chance.”
“I’ll be home tonight. Wait up so we can talk.”
He glanced at the dilapidated diner where I worked. “You know, you don’t have to work here. You don’t have to exert yourself at all. We can get married … tomorrow … even tonight, and—”
I pressed my index finger to his lips. “We have way too many issues that need to be resolved before we can go there.”
“And I’m prepared to resolve them.”
He seemed genuine enough, but he always did after we had a blowup. After every time he called me out of my name and attacked my self-esteem, I kept telling myself that this time would be the last time, that he would see the light of day and somehow be the man that I needed.
“I’ll see you later,” I said.
We shared a brief kiss, then walked away from each other in silence.
Damon
July 12, 2007
HONEY, when are you coming to bed?” Carleigh asked from the doorway to my home office. She was wearing nothing but a turquoise thong and a matching lace bra.
“I’ll be there soon.” I stared at her for a moment.
She blushed. “What?”
“You sure know how to seduce a man.” I grinned at her. “That’s some sexy lingerie. Where’d you get it?”
“Aw, I have a secret spot.”
I chuckled. “Is it the same secret spot that most of the other women have that’s located in half the malls in the country?”
“Maybe.”
“When’s their annual fashion show?”
Carleigh frowned. “You don’t need to see it. Men watch that fashion show on television like it’s the Super Bowl, when you need to be checking out the action in your own bedrooms.”
I didn’t respond; she was right. Every year, when the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show aired on CBS, men were burning up cell-phone lines and shooting emails and text messages all over the place to remind their friends to watch. It was July and I already knew that it was coming on December 4. When I asked, I was joking. I loved Carleigh and would never forsake her for another, but, hell, all men look. If they aren’t looking, then cheating with another female is the last thing that their women need to be concerned about.
Carleigh approached the desk. “What are you up to?”
“Uploading profiles to the site. They flooded in this week. The word must be spreading like wildfire because we’re damn sure blazing.”
I heard the smirk without even glancing up.
“Why can’t you support my efforts?” I asked as I finished uploading the information for GoodBlkMan4U from St. Louis.
“It’s not that I don’t support your efforts, Damon, but be for real!”
“I am for real. This is something I set out to accomplish, and I plan to see it through. It would be nice to have my wife cosign on it.”
“That website is no different than all the other dating sites—full of men sweating pussy over the internet.”
“Humph!” I kept typing.
“All you’re doing is providing additional means for imbeciles to line up naive women from coast to coast so they can run game, obliterate their self-esteem, and then pull a disappearing act and leave them pregnant, penniless, and infected with diseases.”
I shook my head. I wanted to ask Carleigh why, if she had such a low opinion of men, she had even given me an opportunity to get next to her.
“You don’t have to respond, Damon, because there’s nothing you can say.”
“Oh, there’s a lot I could say.”
“Then say it.”
“Trust me, Carleigh; you don’t want me to go there! Not right now!”
I was so tempted to tell Carleigh about her triflin’-ass friends, all of whom had tried to bed me at one time or another. It was hard as hell to keep my lips sealed, but I couldn’t hurt her like that, not even to prove a point.
I did say, “You might think the world is full of canines, but who are they pumping from behind in the doghouses? Women who don’t care about sharing dick, or taking another woman’s man, that’s who. Some women thrive on that shit.”
“Well, none of my friends would ever go there. They’re like me. One dick per person.”
I smirked. “If you say so.”
“I know so.”
Carleigh was distracting me too much for me to finish updating the site. I logged out of the administration section and shut the system down. She stood there, eyes blazing, the entire time.
“So, are you ready for bed?” Carleigh finally asked.
I chuckled. “You go ahead. I’m going to see if I can catch some late-night episodes of Law & Order.”
“Oh, so now you have an attitude?”
“No, I need to unwind. I’ll be in later.”
Carleigh sucked her teeth, turned around, and stomped down the hallway toward the bedroom in her black, five-inch, marabou-puff mules. Her ass cheeks looked succulent in that thong and my dick was hard. I wasn’t going to make love to her that night though, come what may. Carleigh was under the impression that she could mouth a bunch of gibberish, then pounce on my dick and put it out of my mind. She had damn near perfected it over the years, but I was learning to retain the upper hand.
Thelastgoodmen.com was my brainchild. From day one, my wife had been critical of it. The ironic part is, in a roundabout way, she had planted the suggestion in my head. Our conversations during our house-hunting days had often turned to past relationships. Carleigh had been pulled through the wringer a few times, and it was hard for her to grasp that she would ever find a decent man. I was that man.
After reading a lot of blogs, comments online, and visiting websites that shone a negative light on men, I wanted to provide some insight on men who fit the other end of the spectrum. Through my unofficial research, I realized that a lot of people—both men and women—seemed to believe that they should wound a person before that person wounded them. People carry so many emotional scars that if they wore them on the outside, we’d be living in a world full of disfigured souls.
I’ll admit that a lot of men, especially since the evolution of the internet, are nothing more than predators trying to see how many notches they can get on their belt. I was on one site and men in their forties, fifties, sixties, and even seventies were on there acting like immature, adolescent boys who’d never been inside a woman. Requesting half-naked women as friends. Posting lewd or desperate comments on their profile pages. Asking when they could get inside their drawers. Sure, the women in question were putting themselves out there like that, believing that their only asset was in between their legs. Yet, when a man used them for sex, they were heartbroken. They assumed that they’d break the men off so much better than any other woman that those men would be ready to settle down. Not!
Men view women exactly the way they present themselves. If a woman portrays herself as a whore, the man is going to make her a whore. If a woman portrays herself as a lady, he’s going to make her a lady. If she portrays herself as weak-minded and undemanding, he’s going to run all over and through her, and then she’ll never hear from his ass again.
Thelastgoodmen.com was started to transform all that. It was for men who had sown all their wild oats and were ready for the bona fide thing: a reciprocal, loving relationship with one woman, for life. Men couldn’t automatically add themselves, a process that would’ve made life ten times easier for me. Instead, they had to fill out a sequence of forms and go through a screening. The screening had its limitations, as does anything in life, but at least they had to hold up to some form of scrutiny. First, they had to fill out a lot of personal information, most of which remained confidential. They had to describe their past dating history, upload at least thr
ee photos of the same person to prevent fake pictures, and provide two references from women they’d dated within the last five years, unless they were recently divorced.
Carleigh had all kinds of observations when I first described the procedure to her. Her exact words were “Are you stuck on stupid?”
She took my “brilliant” concept and made a mockery of it. She threw her entire arsenal at me.
“How do you know they didn’t write those references themselves?
“What do you plan to do? Call the women up, or email them to confirm?
“Even if they have three pictures, how do you know it’s them? It might be some dude they know.
“How do you know the pictures aren’t ten or twenty years old?
“They could make up a ton of bullshit in their profile.
“You need to fact-check everything! Their profession; their income; every damn thing!
“I bet half of those men on there are married, engaged, or shacking up.
“What if a chick meets someone on your site and he chops her into fifty pieces and throws her ass on the grill?
“This widow I sold a house to met a man online. He took her for everything. The insurance money, her house, and the low-down, dirty bastard gave her herpes!
“Are these men going to fax in a recent HIV test?
“To top it all off, you let them rate their own looks. Surprise! Surprise! All of them check off ‘extremely good-looking,’ even the trolls who crawled out from under their bridges.
“I can’t believe you wasted even five dollars on that domain! The last good men! What a crock of shit!
“You are such a Neanderthal!”