Dapper Carter's 8 Rules of Dating Read online

  I chased her into the corner of the sofa, still on all fours, with my greedy cock so she couldn’t run anywhere as I mercilessly pummeled her juicy punaani into submission like a piece of raw meat.

  Caesar had long stopped Heroin from her sixty-eight and I owe you one.

  “Hey dawg, ain’t it time for that switch?”

  “Naw son, I’m good.”

  We usually do switch up but not this time. I was in a groove and didn’t want to interrupt my flow. I sadistically slid my hands around her delicate throat and began to squeeze, constricting her airflow. I fucked her like she stole something while she gasped, gagged, and flopped around like a big mouth bass. Until she went limp. At first I thought she was fooling around, but after several seconds fear crept up my spine. Oh shit, did I kill her?

  Finally, she gasped, recruiting as much oxygen as possible to fill her almost lifeless body and scaring the shit out of me as well. Then she broke out into a hearty laugh. That was her thing and she loved that shit so I had no trouble obliging.

  Cez and Heroin had stopped what they were doing to watch us. I was more of a voyeur than an exhibitionist, but I didn’t mind the two of them spying on Baton Rouge and me.

  “Can I go next?” Heroin pleaded. Why not?

  I Wonder If I Take You Home

  I got home just as the sun started to rise on my modest, Colonial style house in Edison Township. The house that was actually in my wife’s name.

  Stillness blanketed the Oak lined cul de sacs and manicured lawns of central New Jersey. Each Colonial in the neighborhood was a clone of the next. The gas guzzling SUVs and carpool-friendly minivans of upper middle class life peppered the New York City suburb. The toughest decision here was whether to buy the Dodge Caravan or the Kia Sedona and who would be hosting the next neighborhood watch meeting.

  I was still fucked up and my clothes were crumpled, looking like I was in bar fight rather than the pussy-cat fight I had actually participated in. I had fresh, deep, tiger-like scratches on my back that I had no idea how I was going to explain. I usually went to bed shirtless, so wearing a sweatshirt to bed would surely send up a red flag to my already distrusting wife.

  I struggled to choreograph the simple task of placing one foot in front of the next, causing me to stumble up the six steps leading to the front door. I stopped, momentarily recalling how I never liked the flower pot of Azaleas by the front door, so I decided that I would give them a little energy drink and pissed out the Grey Goose and Red Bull I had been consuming hours earlier onto them.

  After I finished showering Kennedy’s plants I finally tried to enter the house, but as I turned the door knob, it unexpectedly and violently swung open. As a matter of fact, it swung open so violently that my shoulder was almost ripped from the socket. It was obvious that she had waited up all night for my return.

  KC had the sweetest, most angelic face you’ve ever seen…if it weren’t so pissed off. Her eyes were beet red and her lip quivered uncontrollably. They were puffy and swollen, indicating that she had been crying for hours. I noticed how she had her tiny little fist clenched next to her side like she may actually swing on me.

  I remembered the first time I laid eyes on her. We had a dance at my high school, Saint Vincent, and the surrounding area private schools were also allowed to be there. That’s why we had girls from the three neighboring all-female high schools in attendance, which contributed to our teenage hormones raging at these dances. It was my junior year and I was pretty introverted, even though I was becoming a budding basketball star averaging just under twenty points per game. In spite of this, my bashfulness kept me from getting the attention and notoriety other athletes had.

  Lisa Lisa’s “I Wonder If I Take You Home” started to play and I caught a glimpse of my angel stand up and start to sway to the melody.

  She was tiny, standing only five foot and three inches, but solid. She was also a gymnast and a cheerleader, so she had powerfully built legs for her tumbling and somersaults she had to perform. Her auburn hair was curly and her chestnut eyes were inviting. She had a broad, cheeky smile that was contagious.

  Kennedy was an angel in every sense of the word. She sang in the glee club, read to the elderly, and fed the homeless in her spare time. She was the type of wife that if you mentioned you wanted something, the next day she would have it for you.

  I tapped my boy Trace, the star of the team, and asked him to let Kennedy know that I wanted to dance with her. I was taking a chance by sending the future Arizona All-American over to speak to her. Most girls gushed over him and he always got what he wanted.

  Despite that, she was unimpressed with him as well as my lack of courage, stating that if I want to dance with her I would have to ask her myself. Reluctantly, I began that looooong walk, dreading the possibility of her turning me down and having to take that loooong walk back across the dance floor to stand against the wall.

  Halfway into my hike across the gymnasium floor my legs grew heavy like I was dragging two tree trunks. My palms were sweaty and my mouth was dry. My fight or flight response was in full effect and it took everything for me not to act upon the latter. I desperately needed a sip of water so my tongue could cooperate with the roof of my mouth. I stopped off at the water fountain and lapped up as much of the thirst-quencher as I could handle.

  I was running out of time as the second verse to my favorite song had just started. I navigated frantically through the other desperate sixteen year olds that had already latched on to one another. I finally reached Kennedy just as Full Force kicked in with the “take me, take me, take me home” part of the song.

  Confidently, I asked her to dance. Confidence will take you places you never thought you could go. She smiled and said yes. We awkwardly danced for the last thirty seconds of the song, eight inches apart, careful not to draw the attention of the chaperoning nuns. Even so, it was magical and evidently it was enough.

  The next day in school my life went to bizarro world as everything went from Betty Boop black and white to full blown Toto-we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore color. There were notes being slipped into my locker and upperclassmen eyes being batted at me for the first time. Unexpectedly, every girl at my school started to check for me and I owed it all to Kennedy. She was one of the most popular girls in our town and every guy wanted her. Here was the first lesson I was to learn regarding women only wanting guys that other women wanted, and I was the showcase winner.

  We dated through senior year of high school, all of college, broke up during my short stint in LA, and then got married shortly thereafter. We’ve been married for eight years. None of that mattered right now because her brow was deeply furrowed into the crease between her disapproving eyes.

  I had screwed up before, but this felt different. She was seething. Usually I could sway her with an easy smile and turn her frown upside down, but not this time. Nor would I even try. I was pretentious, arrogant, and pompous—all synonyms meaning the same thing. I was an ASSHOLE!

  I thought the last straw was a year ago when she clicked on the ten o’clock news and there was my face being praised as a local hero.

  I was out on one of my “lunch dates” when this dumbass at the table next to mine began choking on a tiny jumbo shrimp (double oxymoron). As my luck would have it, I was the only person within earshot who knew the Heimlich maneuver and promptly administered it to him, saving his life. I was a fuckin’ hero.

  Unbeknownst to me, a local news crew was doing a special down in Red Bank on Healthy Lunch choices for under $10 and they happened to be in this particular restaurant of all places.

  Red Bank was fifty miles away from my home in Edison. I made it a point never to shit where I ate, so I would take my little indiscretions out of the immediate area. I slipped the busboy $20 to take credit for saving the man’s life when the news crew decided to interview the Good Samaritan.

  Of course, the Mexican immigrant barely knew English let alone the Heimlich and the jig was up pretty quickly. He folded li
ke a bad hand in poker and confessed that I was the real hero. Even when I tried to do the right thing, it somehow ended up being the wrong thing to do. And to add insult to injury, Kennedy and I were in bed making love when the story came on the ten o’clock news. Fuck!

  So there I was, plastered all over the news, and being praised as a fucking hero over one hundred miles away from where I had told her I would be. Naturally she was pissed and “preferred” to go up to Martha’s Vineyard to “clear her head” since she was sooo distraught over what I did, allegedly. Who you gonna trust, me or your lying eyes? She came home a week later and we never spoke of it again.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Nope.” And I didn’t care. She already knew where I was and what I had been doing. “The credit card company called and said you took out fifteen hundred dollars in cash advances in Chicag-hoes?” Her bottom lip trembled as it took her every ounce of composure not to slap the shit out of me.

  “So?”

  “So that’s my money, motherfucker!”

  “Whatever.”

  I chuckled as I pushed past her toward our bedroom then pivoted on my heel and spun back around. My head was throbbing and I knew I needed a shower to wash the sweet stink of coitus with Baton Rouge off of my worn out body. She had drained me of most of my bodily fluids, replacing it with her own mixture of saliva, sweat, and love juice. Since my wife was part bloodhound, it was just a matter of time before she caught wind. But just for good measure I decided to take my level of arrogance to another level.

  “If you’re so unhappy then why don’t you just divorce me?” No reply. So I poked my chest out a little further, deciding to be an even bigger prick. “I thought so.” I was confident that would never happen. Too confident.

  You’ve Been Served

  Kennedy was up and at ‘em early as she had done on every Saturday since I had been married to her. She started her morning with an 8:00 yoga class, and then she went to the cleaners and post office before going grocery shopping and returning home by 2:00 like clockwork.

  It was typical in that most women can’t stay in the house on Saturday, making lists, running errands, and doing all the stuff they couldn’t get to during the week. However, men usually won’t leave the house on Saturday, concentrating on lawn work and home improvement. I was on my brown, tattered sofa from college, passed out and cradling a half empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black. Kennedy gave me a big, juicy kiss on my lips to awaken me.

  “Happy anniversary, baby.”

  I didn’t realize that our anniversary had snuck up on me once again. It was hard to keep up with anniversary dates as many times as Kennedy and I had broken up and gotten back together. I didn’t even bother to wake up and wish her the same. I remember opening my eyes just long enough to see her grab her keys, Versace sunglasses, and gym bag as she scurried off in her dressed-in-spandex-from-head-to-toe ass.

  My cell phone hummed for what seemed like an infinite amount of times before it finally jarred me. After I could no longer ignore it I unconsciously searched for the Talk button, careful not to move too quickly as to exacerbate the tidal wave of a hangover headache I felt coming on. I felt like I had been drugged. I probably was.

  “Hello?”

  “Baby?”

  “Who's this?”

  “It's your wife. Baby, wake up. This is really important and you need to hear every word clearly and I need to make sure you understand.”

  “Huh?”

  “Wake up!” she screamed.

  The urgency in her voice finally got my attention. Very rarely did Kennedy raise her voice. Usually she spoke softly, making me crane my six-foot-three-inch frame down nearly a foot to hear her. But not this time. She spoke with conviction, bluntness, and decisiveness. Finally sensing the seriousness of the situation, I sat up to talk to my wife. “Baby, what's wrong?”

  “Everything. And it has been for a long time. The drinking, the partying, the not coming home, not being here even when you are home. I need a man who will listen to me, respect me, and grow with me, not to mention go to work once in a while. I can't do this anymore. I'm getting a divorce.”

  Those words have echoed in my mind many times. I’m getting a divorce. Not “I want a divorce” or “I’m thinking about getting a divorce.” It was “I’m getting a divorce.” The finality of it all was agonizing. I must admit that this woman had the patience of Job.

  A few years earlier during one of my drunken stupors, I passed out with one of my various email aliases still visible on the computer. My dumb ass, being technologically challenged, didn’t know that if you threw something in the recycle bin, you still had to delete its contents.

  She dug out and read every email that I had sent my mistress. Several of them detailed the many vile and disgusting things I had planned the next time I saw her at our regular rendezvous spot. Don’t you know she held onto that information for six months before finally revealing that she knew about Anastasia and me all along? What kind of sick person could hold onto that kind of info and climb into bed with me every night and not say a word? That’s scary. If the same thing happened to a man, he would blast his wife literally and figuratively the second she stepped in the door.

  It was so quiet that I could hear my carotid artery throb until I thought it would explode. I tried to understand it, but I just couldn't seem to wrap my mind around what she was saying. Or maybe I just didn’t want to.

  “Dapper?”

  Unconcerned, I drifted back asleep with the phone cradled to my ear.

  “Dapper Carter! You're such an asshole,” she screamed as she hung up.

  I really didn’t give a shit. I had heard her threats so many times before that I didn’t pay her any mind. That was my last mistake.

  Eventually the phone fell to the floor with a loud thud, awakening me. Stunned, I rambled to the refrigerator. I had a dreamlike moment, stopping in my tracks to take notice of the barren living room. The fifty-inch plasma TV was gone. The $1,000 Italian marble coffee table was gone. Every picture from the wall, including the Matisse, the Picasso print, and even the dogs playing poker hanging in the den was gone, too. The shit was there yesterday. The seriousness began to tighten like a noose as I struggled to get my heart and lungs to cooperate with one another.

  Opening the refrigerator door, I saw nothing but the rear of the empty refrigerator staring back at me. There was one thing: a Post-it hanging from one of the empty shelves. It simply read "DAPPER, IT'S OVER!"

  What? Being taken aback isn’t the usual for me but this time I was blown away. I walked through the whole house barely able to comprehend what was taking place. Everything of value was gone along with the China from our wedding, the sterling silver, the Xbox 360. Not one damn thing was left. I stumbled into the bathroom as my legs started to weaken from having realized the gravity of the situation. Another Post-it on the mirror reminded me: "I MEAN IT! IT'S OVER!"

  I thought to myself that this had to be some kind of terrible joke, but we were just getting started. The water in my nightmare was just starting to rise. The doorbell rang. I frantically rushed to the door like a chicken with my head cut off, praying that it was Kennedy, but it wasn’t.

  Things were getting worse because it wasn’t Ed McMahon coming to give me my million-dollar check from Publishers Clearing House either. It was an official-looking dude in a cheap, black suit with scuffed up wingtips and a five o’clock shadow. He looked down at the envelope he was carrying to make sure he had the right person.

  “Dapper Carter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Great name.”

  “Yeah I know. What can I do for you?” He smugly handed me an envelope.

  “You've been served. Have a good life Dapper Carter.”

  What an asshole. The asshole pivoted on his cheap wingtips, leaving me standing dumbfounded in my soon to be former doorway. I quickly opened the letter. It was an official notice of suit for divorce. I'll be damned. She actually did it. Time slowed down t
o an excruciating crawl as the magnitude of the situation began to set in. I didn't even mean what I said to her about getting a divorce, but once again me and my big mouth wrote a check that my ass was not going to be able to cash. I brokenheartedly sat on my ex-steps and began to sob.

  Find a New Best Friend?

  Caesar’s grandfather left him an enormous brownstone on 145th St. and Amsterdam Ave. in the historic Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Once upon a time it was a popular area for wealthy African Americans. Who would have thought that the day would come when Black people would be a minority in Harlem? Gone were the pimps and drug dealers, replaced by Europeans pushing blonde-haired, blue-eyed children in strollers down 8th Ave.

  But also gone were great Harlemites like Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell, Joe Louis, Billie Holliday and Puffy. I knew things were different when I witnessed a young white couple arguing on 125th St. and MLK at four o’clock in the morning without a concern in the world. But why would you be concerned if you had the advantage of a constant police presence ‘round the clock to protect your assets?

  I was going to be staying with Caesar for a couple of weeks since Kennedy had sold the house months before unbeknownst to me, so I had to get out.

  Women have a funny way of knowing the relationship is over way before you and have mentally and financially prepared for the breakup. Then they drop the bomb on the guy, and most of us never see it coming because we’re too wrapped up in our own shit to realize our wife is unhappy.

  We’re caught so off guard that there becomes a mad scramble to try and save the relationship, but it’s too late. The desperate suggestion for couples counseling eventually falls upon deaf ears.