For the Girls In the Balcony

My first boyfriend was a boy named Mickey. And before you even ask, no, he didn’t have any sort of affiliation with mice. In fact, I’m pretty sure he dealt in corner pharmaceuticals. Though at the time, I believed all those paper sack deliveries were rib bones from his father’s BBQ joint. Mickey wore an S-Curl shag like old school, Bobby Brown and sported solid gold teeth, long before Nelly made grills popular enough to sell on QVC.


Mickey was my first kiss. We were standing on the corner of 13th street, a half a block down from my house. I considered that far enough from our neighbor, nosey Miss Briscoe. All day long she sat in her porch rocker, eating fried pork skins and hot sauce. She knew everything about everyone and would promptly tell my grandmother if she saw me talking to a boy. Mickey held my sweaty, fingertips loosely in his palms. I dug my toes into the sole of my sandals as I tiptoed to meet his lips; this was exactly how it happened in all the Sweet Valley High books. Except in those stories, their mothers didn’t pull up in her yellow, Monte Carlo right in the middle of it.

Mickey never stopped running down the street, even as I yelled that my book bag he’d carried was still on his back. Mickey wasn’t afraid of getting a D in pre-algebra, gossiping Miss Briscoe or getting bust down by the police but apparently, he was deathly afraid of my mother.

My junior high crush was a boy named Dwayne Brownlow. He had a gumby hair cut and a wandering eye. I pined away an entire year for Dwayne. I slipped anonymous love notes in the slits of his locker. I looked his number up in the white pages and called his line. If he answered, I put the receiver against the speakers of my tape deck and played New Edition love songs until I heard him yell, “Hello! Hello!” then I’d promptly hang up. My girlfriends tried to convince me that there were plenty of school boys who would date me. I was smart, pretty and a popular cheerleader. Why was I wasting my time on a boy with a cock-eye?

Dwayne asked me out for homecoming. He bought me a three mum corsage with our names scribed in gold glitter down the black and yellow ribbons. I wore my mum in the homecoming parade. I refused to take it off while I cheered, even when I thought I’d bleed to death from the stick pins gouging holes in my chest. But if it weren’t for my girlfriend, Ne-Ne, coming to rescue, Dwayne’s ex would have scalped me bald in the high school bathroom. Apparently, my mum was the first time she heard that her and Dwayne weren’t an item anymore. Oops.

But no matter how sweet Mickey’s kiss or Dwayne’s flowers, my biggest crush, by far, was none other than Michael Jackson.

I fell in love with Michael during the Off the Wall album back when he rocked a long, nappy fro and sequin socks. After grandma heard me in the tub singing, “You need some lovin’ PYT, Pretty young thang….”she took my tape player for a week. Singing for Satan, wasn’t allowed in the house and Michael was considered devil music.

I couldn’t listen to Michael at home but my best friend, Lelia had a brother who was a DJ. June had pancake stacks of albums stored in black, plastic crates all over his bedroom floor. When he was away, we were allowed to play as many albums as we liked. I sifted through the stacks, one by one, and pulled out all the MJ albums.

Got to Be There (1972)
Ben (1972)
Music and Me (1973)
Forever, Michael (1975)
Off the Wall (1979) –still wrapped in crunchy, cellophane
And my absolute favorite, Thriller (1982)

I loved the albums that opened out like centerfolds. Those albums always had the lyrics to each song type printed across the art. For those albums, Lelia and I wore her brother’s oversized headphones while we listened. We cranked the music far past “deaf” on the volume control and sang off key into Lelia’s tape player. I sang as many MJ songs as I could belt out. In turn, Lelia sang O’Bryan. Don’t remember him? That’s ok, I’ll include a picture. Lelia insisted he was much sexier and more mature than boy-toy Michael.

I begged my grandmother for a Thriller jacket, a Michael Jackson doll, a sparkly winter glove … anything Michael. I wore ankle beaters, nearly put my eye out trying to hot curl a single spiral curl and on bended knee pleaded with my hairdresser to turn my “press and curl” into a jheri curl. In the end, I got nothing but for all the small perks grandma forbade, television wasn’t one of them.

In my room I had a color TV with two knobs for the channels and a single, circular rabbit ear on top. On February 28, 1984, the 26th Annual Grammy Awards were broadcast live on CBS and I was watching.

Michael won 8 awards, Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Performance R&B, Vocal and Song. There were accolades for the video, Thriller and thank you speeches to Barry Gordy, Quincy Jones and all his fans. But there was no better moment than when Michael stood on the podium and in his shy, quiet voice looked directly at me and said, “This is for the girls in the balcony!” as he removed his ever present sunglasses. I nearly peed my pants.

I got grounded the next day.

Apparently I had woken my grandmother screaming in the middle of the night. She believed that I had fallen out of my bed, had a nightmare or even worse, a burglar, but as she got closer she realized I wasn't yelling for help or screeching in pain. I was screaming “I love you, Michael,” ……. in my sleep.

My punishment – asking for prayer during altar call at church and no TV for a week!

As time went on my tastes changed, I fell in love with Prince, Al B. Sure and LL Cool J AND his abs but no one ever compares to your first love and Michael was definitely my first.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsN_kBy3ig4

Things I Learned At Grandma's House

My grandmother was a frugal lady. She saved twist ties from the Roman Meal, wheat bread. She collected Fingerhut stamps that I licked and pasted into towers of booklets. For my sticky fingers and tongue cuts, she allowed me to open the brown paper package when the postman delivered it on the porch steps. The contents were always a curio cabinet necessity, a porcelain black angel or a lead crystal bell. Every Easter Grandma splurged and ordered out of the Sears catalog. She always settled on a picture of white Jesus, his blonde hair curled under at his shoulders and his palms touching in prayer. I once got popped in the lip for asking if Jesus was asleep. I figured if he was the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, like grandma said, who was he praying to?


Grandma’s Lesson: Sometimes Jesus talks to himself but it’s really rude to talk about it.

To save money, my grandmother made my clothes. I informed her that all the cool girls in school shopped at Macy’s in Memphis. We lived in West Memphis, which was across the suspended, steel bridge and west of the Mississippi river. Grandma said kids in her day walked 15 miles to school, got apples and oranges for Christmas and their Mamas made their clothes. But she did promise that if I saw something that another school girl was wearing and thought it was nice; she’d make it for me.

At the time, Jams were the latest fashion craze. I explained that Jams were colorful shorts with side leg pockets and stopped right above the knee. Grandma nodded quickly in recognition and told me she saw a pattern of something similar at Hancock Fabrics.

Before school one morning, grandma rushed into my room and laid what I thought was a new curtain down on the bed.

“What’s this,” I asked.

“James,” Grandma said. “Just like your girlfriends at school.”

Grandma’s Jams were a pair of pleated, polyester culottes that hung to my ankles. Seeing the scowl on my face, she explained that more than one color for short pants was wasteful and anything above the knee was for streetwalkers.

Grandma’s Lesson: Only streetwalkers wear Jams.

My grandmother was a devout Seventh Day Adventist. I considered it Jewish Light. We didn’t eat pork. We didn’t celebrate Christmas and Halloween. We couldn’t do anything from sundown Friday to Sundown Saturday. No cooking, cleaning or watching TV. We were allowed to listen to music but my grandmother only owned one album, “Rough Side of the Mountain.” On the album cover there was a man and woman in white suits walking up a craggy mountainside. I always wondered why in the world you would be dressed in your white, Sunday suit if you knew you were going mountain climbing.

But the Seventh Day Adventist rule I hated the most was that I could not wear jewelry, specifically earrings. One Saturday while I was sitting on the porch watching the other kids play I decided to find the passage in the Bible where it said, “no earrings.” After an entire afternoon of reading, I hadn’t found where Abraham, David, Sampson or Delilah said anything about not wearing earrings. Moses didn’t even say anything and he owned a stone copy of the Ten Commandments. At the next women’s bible study, I decided to voice my 8 year old opinion.

“I read the whole bible and I didn’t see anything about not wearing jewelry,” I snipped defiantly.

Dead silence.

“So why can’t I wear earrings?”

My grandmother smacked my leg with one of those green, plastic fly swatters and said,” Little girl, you save the jewelry for the streets of heaven. They are paved in silver and gold.”

Grandma’s Lesson: Don’t wear jewelry because it’s needed to pave heaven’s streets. Jesus is on a budget.

Over the years grandma taught me many more things, like:

1. Never processes a jheri curl on grey hair, it will turn green.

2. Too tight jelly sandals will give you bunions.

3. Government cheese and Velveeta are the exact same thing.

When I get to heaven I plan to tell her all the lessons I learned. Even the ones she thought I wasn’t listening to. I pray that she will remember me. I’m not 8 anymore and I don’t leave the house without my earrings on but just in case, I’ll be wearing my culottes.