Nice Guys

I’m currently working on something. The last time I wrote a book in my own voice, it was about love, family, and marriage. A decade later, I'm sharing how it feels to rewrite my life in midlife, after divorce. Somewhere along the way, I lost my voice. I’m sharing pieces of my journey as I write my way back. Here’s one of them.

I saw the cracks after my stripper pole crashed through the ceiling. 

Before that day, you could not have told me that Eric wasn’t The One. About a month in, after a weekend trip out of town together, I had called a friend and said as much. “I have never been so sure about anything in my life.” And that was true– that day. The days before and after had flicked the edges of uncertainty in ways that I would rather have ignored. Like the way he would slow text on weekends, or his obsession with posting on Facebook non-stop. 

I was trying to be understanding about his penchant for white women. As far as I could tell, he had only seriously dated non-Black women over the last 20 years and had been married to one for most of them, which was some color flag if not red, and felt even stickier when he made little comments about my hair. “You look like Frederick Douglass,” he’d said when my twist out had ballooned in the ocean mist, and we laughed because he always joked about everything, but I wrote it down in my journal later anyway, and thought about it the day we had that talk. 

“Where are we going with this?” I asked. 

“It’s new. I like you,” he replied. “I just want to get to know each other. Go with the flow.”

That was okay, I guessed. I had nowhere else pressing to be.  

“Just don’t string me along,” I said. “Don’t go with the flow with me and then jump into a relationship when your preference comes along.” 

“It’s not like that,” he said.  

I wasn’t sure. But those things I was learning to work through. Maybe they weren’t such a big deal. 

Things like his junky 20-year-old minivan, I could ignore. Of course, dating a man with a dusty Mom Wagon didn’t tend to be my pattern. I was never big into cars, but I always loved a man who was. Didn’t even need to be a luxury car, but something about the way a man can tend to a car, learn its details, and make it shine made me feel like he could do the same for me. Something about his cologne mixing with a clean interior, a watch on his wrist when he reached over to do one thing or another, just did it for me.

But my pattern is what got me 44 and single, and the car care had never translated to me care. So I scooted into the crumb-covered Caravan seats next to the man who only seemed to ever wear gray shorts and hoodies, and I felt fine about all the things he was not, because he was different. He was comfortable in his skin and didn’t need a car or a watch to speak to it. He didn’t have that attitude– that edge that I’d loved so much before I had realized it was just unhealed childhood trauma crumpling itself up into a big chip on a man’s shoulder. And even though he had childhood trauma in droves (because what 80s Black kid from Baltimore or DC or really any urban city up and down the 95 Corridor didn’t?), he had come through it smiling. He was just something I’d never been drawn to and certainly never had: A really nice guy.  

And two nights before the pole crashed through my ceiling, he was the nice guy who helped me pick out a new flat screen and rearrange my room. That morning, I woke up with an itch to buy a television for my bedroom and texted him to see if he wanted to help me pick one out. It was a Sunday. He reminded me that he did not leave the house on Sundays. But it was post-football season, so for me, he would. Swoon. I was special. 

He made me feel special, and after almost a decade of feeling otherwise, any drop of special was “special” special. A couple weeks earlier, we had made plans for him to come over on a Wednesday night. I was going to take off work the next day so we could stay up and spend the whole day together. I texted him that morning to see if we were still on, and as I braced myself for the flake, he replied, “Are you kidding me? I can’t wait to see you. I want to be waiting in the parking lot when you get off work.” Which he was. He didn’t know how to play it cool because he wasn’t. It was new. Refreshing. Divine.

I wondered if my family would like him when they met him. My mom would. He was funny and polite and nice to me, and that would be enough. My sister was a wild card. It depended. On her mood, what he did, or said, or didn’t do or didn’t say. My kids would be indifferent. My brother would be quiet. But I could already hear him thinking what he wanted to say.

“I’m not saying he’s a clown, but he definitely belongs in the circus.”
And I would have to agree because he might not have been a clown, but he was a cornball. An off-brand, like we used to say in high school. A coon from the moon. A clown from outta town. But I wasn’t in high school anymore, and I was free to like a cornball if I wanted to. It was different for me. And he was a really nice guy.

This is an excerpt from a longer piece in progress. I also wrote about it in my free poetry collection, I Think I’m in Love or Something. Keep in touch below, and get your copy. (The poem is also called Nice Guys).