KW.3.INTRIGUE

(a.k.a. Why you should give a shit)

A man sits on a couch. He’s black, like a lot of other people in the U.S. He hasn’t got a lot of money—like a lot of other people in the U.S. He’s sitting on the couch and he’s reading a book when suddenly he shouts at the top of his lungs:

“Well why tha’ fuck should we care?”

Another man comes out of the kitchen. He has sex with the man who’s reading on the couch, not currently, but frequently, unlike a lot of other people in the U.S. However, he is gay, like a lot of other people in the U.S.

“Woah, calm down. Whatchu yellin’ about in here?”

“Another white fatherfuckin’ writer’s gone and wrote another fatherfuckin’ memoire?”

“Oh, shit, are you reading that Kill The Writer shit?”

“Yeah, this fuckboy went and told us all his middle-class straight white boy problems and I’m sitting here thinkin’, ‘well why the fuck do I care about some lightskin droppin’ outta college to be a writer?’”

“Well, damn, that does sound pretty boring. Lemme see this shit… hold up. Where you read to?”

“Just up through Introduction.“

“Aight, well the next chapter is called Intrigue.“

“What? You’re fucking with me.”

“Nah. Shit’s called intrigue… Awwwh shit, you’re not going to believe this.”

“Yo, what is it?”

“Shit’s about us.”

“What the fuck you mean, ‘shit’s about us.'”

“I mean, this fatherfuckin’ son of a dick just wrote a chapter about this shit here—you hollerin’, me coming in and you telling me about this shit book, and I mean, fuck, it’s got everything in it.”

“Yo. Lemme get that… Shit, you right. How the fuck did he do that?”

“Well—hold up, what happens next?”

This:

“We should have sex.”

“I don’t think I want that.”

These are the first two lines of a conversation I had with a woman one time at dinner. She was nice. She was funny, to some people, at some time, so I’ve heard. I liked her well enough; technically speaking, I could have had sex with her. All that being said, I did not want to.

“I beg your pardon.”

“I do not think that I want to have sex with you.”

“Well why not?”

“I—,”  I was not prepared to answer this question. It’s a firmly held belief of mine, and I think of my friends as well, that I’m much better on paper than in person. I don’t do well when I’m put on the spot. So I said, “I don’t want to have sex with you, because I want to have sex with someone else.”

There is no such thing as good and evil, that I know, but there is right and wrong when you have a specific outcome in mind. For example, on that night, I’d imagined that I would not have wine thrown in my face. I’d imagined a quiet night, where no white button-ups were ruined, and my ride home was not ruined by wine flavored swamp-ass. So, factoring all those things together, I made the wrong choice in telling Delilah that I wanted to have sex with someone other than Delilah.

However, I’m an honest person. It’s my nature to a fault, and I was uncomfortably aware of that as wine crept into the fault line between my two ass cheeks.

“I want to have sex with Rose.”

Rose was our mutual friend. In fact, Rose is the one who had set us up together. She was my best friend now, and I wanted to have sex with her. Actually, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

However, more importantly than all of that, I wanted to make her happy.

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