Chocolate, Please Read online

  In the middle of my next joke, my eyes wandered to the back of the room, way back, and I saw a guy—let’s just call him Big Daddy. Big Daddy was every naughty black taboo rolled into one—do-rag, baggy pants, tank top showing muscles, dark sunglasses. I couldn’t even guess what a guy like this did for a living. He looked like a drug dealer who worked as a security guard at Staples on the side.

  I was faced with a choice. Right in front of me was vanilla. Way in the back was chocolate. In that moment, I made a decision: “I want chocolate!”

  I decided to feel Big Daddy out. I started joking around with him from the stage, saying things like, “You know you want it, beeyotch!” and pointing to my ass and saying, “C’mon, baby, I’ll give you something to hide behind when the cops start shooting.” And he looked like he was into it. Not “Man, she’s a funny bitch” into it, but “I’ll take you up on your offer” into it. I stuck my hand in my pocket and felt the bagginess of my jeans for courage. Oh, yeah, I may have had sixty pounds to lose, but that night I was skinny! I was smokin’. I was Madonna in that “Borderline” video and Tawny Kitaen crawling around on the hood of Whitesnake’s car. I was gonna go for it! I was gonna have that brownie sundae and swallow every bite.

  A few minutes later, after my set, I was standing at the bar of the Comic Strip. Lemme tell you, comics who stand at the bar after their sets are either drunks or trying to get laid, and put it this way: I don’t drink. So here I was waiting, trying to look like this was just another fabulously fun night at the club–haha har-dee-har-har—trying not to play with my hair. And who comes right at me—the vanilla pound cake, the white-bread bologna sandwich I could pick up in my sleep. And of course I got sucked into a conversation.

  “Thanks, I’m glad you liked it. Good…uh-huh, yeah, it’s great…Upper West Side—uh-huh…Originally? Trumbull, Connecticut.” Jesus Christ, where the hell is the black one??? “Your sister’s up there too. Great, great. Oh, these? The Gap.” God, I hate the white devil!

  Then I saw him. There he was—Big Daddy! Coming right through the doorway! And the conversation I was having with Mayonnaise turned to white noise. All I saw was Big Daddy, and he was looking my way. Our eyes met and then he started looking at the headshots on the wall. Oh, c’mon, that brother did not care about those pictures, and I seriously didn’t care where this white a-hole’s sister lived. Big Daddy was waiting to talk to me—I could feel it. But there was Flounder from Animal House jawin’ away: “So uh, how did you ever get up the nerve to try comedy?”

  “Actually, I am trying to work up the nerve to make a move on Snoop Dogg over there, but you won’t shut the fuck up!” I thought. Lisa! Come on, Lisa! Get yourself together. Remember what Oprah said about the Power of Now! Now! Let your pants do the walking and your ass do the talking! I said, “Excuse me, I gotta go.” And with that, Baggy Pants Lampanelli was dust in the wind.

  I sidled up behind Big Daddy. “You know you ain’t lookin’ at those pictures, dawg.” Dawg! Who the fuck was I? P. Diddy? “You know you’re just trying to work up the nerve to talk to me. Well, I am the queen.”

  “And I’ll be your king.”

  King!!! RRRRR! This was good! Twenty pounds ago, I would have looked around to see if he was talking to some other white bitch. But that night, I didn’t.

  “You’ll be my king? Oh, really, is that right?”

  “That’s right—when can I see you again?”

  Cripes, that was easy. Were all black men like this? Two sentences in, and I had practically sealed the deal.

  I played my whole hand: “That depends—do you mean see my comedy or see me? If you want to see me, I’ll give you my number, but if you mean see my comedy, call the club.”

  “No, it’s all you, girl.”

  Oh my God—he was talking “black” to me. I felt like I was in an Usher video.

  I gave him my number and tried to look cool as I walked outside. Then I raced to my car. My face was flushed, my armpits were sweatin’. I hardly got my foot in the door before I slammed it. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed: “Oh, my God!!! I just hit on my first black!!…I don’t know, I might not even bang him!…Yes, I’ll let you know…Yes, if I bang him, I’ll tell you if they’re circumcised…Mom.” I’m kidding—it was my dad. All right, it was my friend Ro. This was the first time I could ever remember a girlfriend of mine actually being interested in my sex life! This was fun. Lisa Lampanelli was having fun for once in her life. About fucking time. Who knew losing weight, going to the shrink, and doing the work to get my shit together would be fun! Thank you, Dr. Phil, Oprah, and Dr. Joy—thank you the Bald, the Black, and the Jew! I finally had the balls to flirt with a decent piece of ass! A piece of ass who wanted to date me!

  Or so I thought…

  The day of our first date, my cell phone rang at four P.M. “Hey, baby.” Oh, isn’t that sweet? He’s calling to say he can’t wait to see me later. “Listen, today ain’t gonna happen.”

  “What?!”

  “My cousin got into some trouble and I have to post his bail.”

  Bail? Oh, c’mon. I knew he was black, but there’s no way he was falling into a stereotype this soon. Those blacks! I am never talking to him again. I didn’t say a word.

  “I hope you ain’t mad at me, boo.”

  “Of course I’m mad at you! I hate you! Your cousin’s more important to you than me!”

  “Well, he’s not really my cousin—I know him since I’m five years old. We just come up together.”

  “I don’t care! I wish you both were dead!” Who the hell did I think I was? Scarlett O’Hara saying “fiddle-di-di”?

  People, don’t worry. I do realize how ridiculous this sounds now. I know I sound like a complete mental patient, but I was freaking! Every black stereotype I’d heard over the years was rattling around in my head: “Great! Is this what I’m in for? Men who cancel dates because they’re posting bond and going to child-support hearings? Oh, my God, if I commit to the Dark Side, am I committing myself to a life straight out of Ricki Lake?”

  “C’mon, baby—I can’t help it…I’m just reliable. You’d think you would like the type of brother who his friends can look to.”

  He was right. He was reliable. Wow!

  We rescheduled.

  Exactly a week later, the phone rang. It was nine o’clock at night. “Hey, baby.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Now, don’t be mad, baby. Why you got to be like that? I had some trouble with my kids.” Kids!!!!

  “You have kids?”

  “Yeah, I told you.” He told me? Oh, really, when? When had he told me he had kids? On our first date? No—’cause we hadn’t had a first date. I wanted to rip his heart out of his chest. And then I thought about that chest!

  Finally, I started to get the picture. We hadn’t had a first date because we would never have a first date. Andre—that’s Big Daddy’s real name—was never going to be my boyfriend. What was I doing? This guy had kids, he’d canceled twice, and posting bail was normal to him. It had taken me two weeks of living in denial but I started to have some perspective. This guy was undatable!!!

  Undatable, yes, but, goddamn it, he wasn’t unfuckable.

  Hey, if guys could think with their dicks, so could I!

  CHAPTER TWO

  Chocolate, Please

  Twenty minutes later, I walked into Andre’s apartment building with only one thing on my mind. We had agreed that he would take a shower and I would come up to his apartment and meet him for “a drink.” I, in the meantime, got dressed for sex—I even wore high heels! I hadn’t been on a date in a while but I was pretty sure guys still liked high heels. I buttoned my coat right up to the top so the Spanish kids on the block wouldn’t goof on me for being in their neighborhood just to bang a brother—even though they definitely would have been right!

  I walked into Andre’s apartment building and, oh, great! He was on the fourth floor—with no elevator! There was no doubt I was gonna break a freakin’ swea
t. I didn’t work out! I was just starting to get in shape. My feet were killing me, and my control-top pantyhose were bagging up in the crotch. To make matters worse, my high heels were making all this noise on the stairs! God—I had to make it upstairs undiscovered. I pictured Andre anticipating my arrival from my thundering steps, me panting, sweating, wheezing, groping the handrail like an old lady. Oh, yeah, that would be sexy! Yeah, nothing turns a man on like a fat lady sweating! No, I had to be quiet, graceful. I needed to make it up the stairs with time to spare to get myself together and maintain the illusion that I was fly.

  I don’t know how I did it, but I got to the top without being discovered. I took a minute to catch my breath, regroup. I stepped over a girl’s pink bicycle and knocked.

  “Hi, baby. You look beautiful. Let me take your coat.” Oh, my God! This mother-f-er was built! I unbuttoned the trench coat, handed it to him, and watched him walk down the hall to hang it up. I quickly checked out the apartment—my mother always told me to do that in case I had to make a quick escape, like if a guy is getting too frisky and you feel he’s gonna rape you. Then I remembered—that’s why I was there.

  “Sit down—do you want some wine?”

  “Sure!” Andre poured me a glass. I hate wine and I hadn’t had a drink in years, but I needed courage. If I slept with him, I was gonna have to wiggle out of my control-top pantyhose in a half-sexy way, so I figured I better have some wine. After I had a few glasses of wine, I could fart and think it was sexy.

  I sat on the couch—it was either that or the floor. “I’m gonna buy some furniture soon when I have the money,” Andre explained. “My wife took everything but I ain’t mad. I’m just tryin’ to be a brother that improves himself.” That was so great! We had a lot in common already—he was into self-help too. Wait a minute—what was I thinking? No furniture, no money, wife! I made up my mind to fuck this guy and run.

  “You look really sexy, girl,” Andre said to me from the kitchen, where he was standing, sipping—I shit you not—an Olde English forty out of the bottle. I was eye-level with the top of his sweatpants. I saw proof that he definitely thought I was sexy. And just as I was trying to put together a lame “Is that a plantain in your pocket or are you happy to see me?” joke to break the tension, Andre sat right down next to me with his face only an inch from mine! I smelled the malt liquor on his breath (thirty black guys later, that smell still gets me hot!). I felt tipsier and tipsier—almost buzzed enough to drown out the doubts in my head: “Oh, my God, I can’t sleep with him. I don’t love him. Isn’t sex supposed to be about love?”

  Just then, the wine started talking to me: “What are you talking about? He’s separated! Besides, look at you. You’re sitting on a Levitz couch and looking at a velvet Nefertiti wall hanging. He has three kids and he drinks forties out of the bottle! His sheets are leopard print and he has a view of a brick wall. Lisa, let’s be honest—you don’t have to worry about getting too attached or, as Dr. Joy would say, ‘enmeshed’ in a relationship with this!”

  By the way, everything I’m telling you is the God’s honest truth here. You might think it’s way too stereotypical, but it’s all true. I mean it! You can see for yourself—I’ll give you Andre’s phone number. Call him! Trust me—it’ll be disconnected.

  Still, I was terrified at what might happen next. Suppose “it” was too big, suppose he wanted to—do it different. I heard black guys loved that. Suppose it looked weird? I heard black guys’ dicks are purple. “No, no, I shouldn’t,” I thought. And as soon as I thought “shouldn’t,” everything fell into place. That’s when I heard my shrink’s voice. Dr. Judy always said, “Don’t do what you should do. Do what you want to do!”

  Well, I knew what I wanted. Screw the kids, screw the imitation-leather sofa, and screw those doubts. I knew what I wanted—I wanted out of those pantyhose and into that motherfucker’s pants.

  You know, years ago, I worked in publishing. One of my first jobs was at Us magazine, a magazine full of “beautiful people.” Beautiful! Ha! I was a real beaut myself. I was a twenty-five-year-old, size-twenty-four fact-checker. I had a two-hour commute and a diploma from a summer course at Harvard—and I worked at Us magazine! You’d think the Harvard shit would’ve at least gotten me into People!

  A lot of the female editors decorated their offices like they were on staff at Tiger Beat. Johnny Depp, Bono, Rob Lowe—all over the place. But not me! I prided myself on not liking hot guys. “Those shallow bitches,” I’d say to myself as I proofed a story on Judd Nelson’s favorite ice cream. “I hate good-looking guys. I like guys with substance, guys like Anthony Michael Hall!”

  In reality, though, let’s be honest. I didn’t hate hot guys. My problem was I never felt like I could get hot guys. Instead I hung up pictures of Jethro Tull, Simply Red, and Gerard Depardieu, and dated their unfamous equivalents.

  Well, fifteen years and one hot guy later, guess what, folks? I didn’t hate hot guys—I loved ’em! And I started going after them. Andre had gotten me hooked! They were new to me. Finally I could walk down the street with a guy and have other girls say, “Where’d you get that one!” That had never happened to me before. I know it might sound shallow, but for once in my life, I didn’t want the smart one, I didn’t want the funny one, I wanted the hot one. Andre was my first piece of fine chocolate—and I started going through men like New York City was a Godiva wholesaler. And to be honest, my mouth was always full!

  By the way, this is the point in every story where the woman says, “But don’t worry, I wasn’t a whore.” Well, guess what, folks? I wasn’t a whore either! Yeah, I hooked up with a lot of black men. Some I slept with, some I just teased. Most of them were flings, some I dated for “respectable” lengths of time. I even hit on other guys when my dude was in the bathroom. Sometimes I called them after sex, sometimes I didn’t. And I never returned calls after lousy sex. I wasn’t a whore, people. I was a “guy.”

  That was me! Six months in “guy mode.” I checked men out, I hit on them when they pulled up in their cars, and my favorite thing to do—it still makes me laugh—was to look a black guy up and down on the street and say, “Now, that’s what I’m talking about.” I learned how to flirt, how to stick out my ass, walk to the end of the bar, look around, and flip my hair—all at the same time—and I don’t wanna brag, but I hooked an average of about one in three. That’s pretty good! I wasn’t nervous anymore—that feeling was long gone—and now I just wanted to have fun. I had some lost time to make up for! I got rid of the voice that said, “Oh, Lisa, two men in two days! What are you thinking?” Thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I just bagged ’em, tagged ’em, gave myself a high five, and slapped myself on the ass.

  To my credit, I’m very goal oriented. I decided that I should approach dating like it was my job. I figured salesmen had to meet quotas and so did I. If I didn’t hit on at least three men a night, I hadn’t made my numbers and I would have to compensate for it the next night.

  But, like Oprah and Suze Orman say, life isn’t just about acquiring wealth—it’s about giving 10 percent back. So, ladies, here’s my 10 percent. This is directed at any of you white women out there who want to go to the Dark Continent, who are thinking of paying a visit to the Ivory Coast.

  Here it is: Everything you’ve heard about black men is true. That’s right—after six months on my chocolate diet, I knew every stereotype in the book. Black men have baby mama drama, they don’t tip, they don’t have long-distance phone service, and they certainly juggle more than one woman at a time. They hustle, they drink Belvedere and Alizé, they lie and look hot doing it. They yell at the movie screen, steal at work, and complain that the man is holding them down. But there’s some stuff you never hear about black men that’s also true. Black men will open the car door for you, black men write poetry and love to cuddle, and they pay their child support and practically wallpaper their houses with pictures of their kids, who they miss terribly. Oh, yeah, and there’s another stereotype that’s also tru
e. Black men give you the most passionate sex of your life, you will love that when you hold hands it looks like a Benetton ad, and you will be called the next day—in fact, in most cases, that same night—when a black man takes your number. Most important to me, though, they will never, ever be in an argument with you and say, “Oh, yeah? Well, you’re fat!”

  Instead they say magic words like “Don’t lose that ass, girl!” and they say it so sincerely and deeply that you don’t mind that they might be saying it to three other women that same night. You feel beautiful, and for that moment, it’s all good.

  Every stereotype is true and none of the stereotypes is true. It’s all about the man.

  How’d I learn all this? For the entire year after Andre, as I lost more than sixty pounds, I ran an Underground Railroad through my apartment. It was raining black men on a daily basis, and I had learned to have fun! I felt appreciated, and my size 24s shrank to 16s. My train had pulled into Brown Town, and I wasn’t leaving the station any time soon!

  And as my waist shrank, my Booty Call Book bulged.

  Let’s see—there were my size-22 guys. Andre, who you know; and Moose.

  Moose was a heartbreaker. Twenty-four years old, two kids, great dancer. He talked to me like I was a duchess: “It is my honor to be with you.” But he lied a lot and stood me up. I could get that when I was really fat. I moved on.