Tasting Caterpillars

Originally posted July 21, 2008

I got hung up on today because the guy didn't believe I was black. I'm not sure if you're keeping score, but I am black. Well, biracial, but same difference.

While he questions me, I become defensive, "We don't all talk ghetto, you know!"

Because all Asian girls say "me love you long time," and all grandmothers are secret sluts.

So, now I'm mad at this guy and he's mad at me, because he keeps saying, "I don't care what you sound like as long as you're really black."

"Well, I am really black."

"Oh, ok then. Because I called this other service and they didn't have any black girls, but this service seems like it's got a lot of black girls," he says all distracted with his Afrocentric fetish having ass.

"Yup, we do!"

"It's just, you know, when you answered, and you didn't sound...not like it matters how you sound, but..."

"You wanted a girl who sounded ghetto?" I say, in my best Ebonics accent, heavy with sarcasm. Why am I so angry? I don't know, but fuck this guy.

"Well, yea, I kinda did, I just...well, it doesn't matter how you sound as long as you're really black..."

"I am really black!"

"What color did you say your skin was?"

I know they want me to be black as the back of Whoopi Goldberg's neck, but like I said, fuck him. Instead, I say, "A nice caramel complexion," which also is the truth. I think.

"Um, can you hold please?"

"Sure," I say, brightly.

"Click."

This is pretty much the same as giving my tranny a teeny weenie. And I realize this, but I couldn't stop myself. Rather, in this instance, Charlotte lost her control over the phone and I took over.

I participated in race fantasies, and I tried to squeeze my ears past the "n" word. I tried not to take it personally, since it doesn't have anything to do with me, really. Then, I took the most heartbreaking call ever.

His name is Rufus and he's a black man from somewhere in the South, in his 30s, I think. He wanted a black woman to dominate him. He fantasy being raped by a bunch of white guys. So, I started with some frat boys, and he stopped me. He wanted to be in a field, with older white men, being punished and humiliated. He says young white men aren't like the older generation. They don't have that hatred of black men and wouldn't degrade him racially the way men from even just the generation prior would.

So, we switch, to him in a field with three white men in their 50s circling him menacingly. Even though I don't want to, I see the scene in my head. Bright hot blue sky. Fields of some sort of hazy yellow vegetation and a black man on all fours, muscled and slick. The white men are straight out of the worst images of Mississippi, white undershirts and black suspenders with dirty blue work pants, foul grins twisting their faces.

And then he started talking in the slave voice. "Oh yessir massah," and all that shit. I can't describe how awful it was to hear that. I get that it's all about debasement and being made to feel the lowest of low. I have a really hard time saying mean things to these guys. I feel bad and think they all need hugs. I try my best, but I know it sounds half-hearted. I've still mustered the audacity to laugh at some guy's cock and call it his baby dick. Even though I felt bad, Rufus took me to another level.

He fed me my lines. He told me what he liked to hear. Pretty much the most vile things you can think to say to a black man, he wanted me to say to him. So, I squeezed my eyes shut and said them. And he loved it. With every piece of filth I spewed, he screamed, "Oh yes massa!" And I hated myself.

When he finished, he started talking to me, at ease. I didn't know what to say to him. I wanted to apologize. He asked if it was difficult for me, and I admitted that it was.

He told me that he makes his living that way, being abused, degraded and raped by white men. He told me they have reenactments of auctions. If they pay extra, they can beat him up. He'll even let you "hang" him. I didn't ask how much he charged. I mostly just sat there dumbfounded.

Laughing, he told me about laying in bed for a week to recuperate from a beating. He said the money was good, and he liked it.

Then he made me do it again. He fed me some more lines. I searched my brain for every horrible thing I've heard said about black people. I tried to use my anthropology mind tricks and see it from his perspective rather than my own. He was enjoying himself, and was it really any different than the guy who wants me to put him in panties and call him my little cumfaggot or the guy who wants me to tie him up and fuck his piss-slot with a metal rod?

I tried to be accepting, he's a grown man, after all. If he gets off hearing these things, who am I to deny him that? Who am I to question it? With Rufus, I couldn't reconcile it. He was intelligent and witty, very pragmatic about his fetish. He got off. They got off. He made money, supposedly. He was happy, apparently.

When we hung up, he seemed happy as could be. I cried my face off. I felt sick to my stomach. Sad for him that he can be OK on his knees with a noose around his neck and a white man's boot on his face. Disgusted in myself that I took him there for 25 fucking cents a minute.

So, I'm sorry to all you black fetishists on the phone lines, but I'm not doing it. Serena's not having it, goddamnit. Find a white girl with a ghetto accent on the phone who'll let you call her nigger, cause we ain't doin it.