51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

dangerous. As the bar began to wind down at last call, I knew that I might not have the liquid courage of years past, but I still had an offer up my sleeve. I slipped him my number with the note, “Call me when you get off work,” and I rushed home to clean my apartment, just in case he was on his way.
     
    Three days later, I’m on my date with Nic. Braden still hasn’t called. My friend Latoya set me up with Nic with the caveat, “I’ll give you his number, but I doubt that you’ll fall in love.”
     
    Nic is a jive-talking black dude from South Central who works as a medical orderly at Cedars-Sinai. He slopes when he walks like some kind of a baller, and when he pulls out his iPod to show me pictures, they’re all of him dressed in brightly colored suits singing with his church choir. I really don’t think we’re going to have much to talk about, and I can tell he knows as much as I do that the romantic potential is lost on us.
     
    When I called Nic to set up the date, he told me, “There is only one thing you can’t make up for in this life, baby girl. See, you can go to Vegas. You can lose twenty grand, you can mortgage the house, but one day, one day, you’ll fix all that shit. The one thing you can’t get back is time…baby…time.” So I explained to him my dating experiment because I certainly didn’t want to waste his.
     
    “Hmmm…51 dates, huh?” he snorted.
     
    “That’s right.”
     
    “Which one am I?”
     
    “Four.”
     
    “Hmm…four. Okay.”
     
    Because talking about work or childhood or books or movies or music all seems out of the question, Nic leads the conversation to sex. Nic likes sex. He tells me that he spent his youth in India and learned the ways of Tantric before he was twelve. If he thinks I am going to fall for that, he picked the wrong white girl. I don’t, and Nic sees I’m not going to, so he starts bitching about women these days. He tells me about the last five girls he tried to date.
     
    “It’s a pain in the ass, baby girl.” Nic keeps calling me this, which makes me think he can’t remember my name. But Nic continues, “First woman I was into, and she was hot, on the third date, she tells me, ‘Herpes.’ And then I move on to girl number two, ‘Herpes.’ Girl #3 got ’em. Girl #4. By the time Girl #5 tell me, I’m done.”
     
    It’s set up for me. I point to myself, “Herpes.”
     
    It’s true. Unfortunate, but true. And here is where Nic and I find a common denominator: STDs. I have one, he has none, but he’s pissed and a little paranoid that everyone else seems to. I explain to Nic that I’m not psyched that I have it, but that maybe in protecting someone else from getting it, I’ve protected myself from getting something far worse.
     
    I didn’t get herpes from a one-night stand. I got it from a boyfriend, and though perhaps it sounds better that way when I am explaining it to a potential romantic partner, the truth is it took me many years not to be devastated by its occurrence. I got it the last time I had sex with my crackhead ex-boyfriend, who later went on to become a regular in San Quentin. But no matter that he was my boyfriend at the time, or that I loved him, it didn’t make its discovery any easier. I will never forget driving home from the doctor’s office the night I found out and thinking that no one would love me again because of it. I tell Nic this, and I am not quite sure how he’ll respond. He just smiles.
     
    “God’s will,” he says, so matter of fact that I don’t know what to say, even if I agree.
     
    “That’s the thing, baby girl,” Nic leans forward, “God knows what the chessboard looks like.”
     
    Holy shit. I nod blankly because he has just put my entire outlook on God into one statement.
     
    “You don’t know why the rook isn’t being moved yet,” Nic smiles. “Only God knows it’s to protect the queen.”
     
    And I forget that I don’t want to be on this date. I almost start to