THE BLACK MALE NOTES
an excerpt

CHAPTER ONE
LIFE is the way through pain.
For so many years, I had wondered what the point of life was. Now I knew... life is the way through pain. The point of life is to transport each of us through pain; it is the only way to get through, over, or beyond the pain we all experience in our lives. For so many years I had wondered about this, and now I had learned THAT lesson with no room left over for doubt!
The concept of life being a passageway through pain is true in all of our lives, but in my current predicament, I was finding out that this is especially true if you happened to have been born a woman; which I wasn’t. It is funny how life as it cycles teaches us things we were never smart enough to know we didn’t know. In my case, life was teaching me things I still didn’t want to know; but as is so often the case, life didn’t give a damn what I wanted, it simply did what it do.
Bewildered. It was the word ricocheting inside my head, the only word that properly encompassed all of the feelings I was experiencing. In a word, I was bewildered. Shit, the fact that I was bewildered was bewildering in and of itself because I had never been the type of brotha to dedicate much time to analyzing things. How had this happened? Scratch that, could somebody please tell me what the hell happened? Finding someone who could possibly explain what was happening to me was the highest item on my list of immediate priorities, because I had no fucking clue as to what was going on. So far I was having no luck finding anyone to help me to understand my current situation. Time seemed to be rushing by and standing still simultaneously, and though I felt that I was in familiar surroundings and completely at home where I was, I was completely incapable of registering exactly what this place was. In a word, I was bewildered.
As I wracked my brain trying to grasp the wispy thread of familiarity I felt in this place and weave it into an actual memory, in walked a face I knew without question. It seemed that I had known this woman for as long as I could remember, (though at that point, I couldn’t remember much of anything until she walked in), but she seemed to look right through and past me as she and her companion took their seats.
“And so I just asked him without cracking even the semblance of a smile, ‘Have you ever worn a banana?’”
“What kinda damn question is that? Where do you come up with this stuff Chels? Girl yo ass is crazy! What did he say?”
I knew without question that it was Chelsea, I mean come on, I had only slept with this woman every night since forever. What I couldn’t figure out, was why she didn’t acknowledge me, who the hell this “him” was she was talking about, and what the hell she meant about him wearing a banana.