It Feels Good to Be Bad

So, here we find ourselves again: The morning after the night before. Sprawled out, the sheets a mess. Your contacts in, your clothes half on, half gone. You've given up all preconceived notions of time and place. Your brain turned off as your senses turned on, a smile bright as the morning on your face. No longer worrying should or shouldn't, if he is or isn't. Living now only in the moment, your brain on stun as your body takes over.

To deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human. When we've acted first and thought later. When we went with the flow and lost ourselves in the moment. There are few things that unify us; one is the irrational, impractical, out-of-character impulses that we've given in to. One of those irrational impulses is a one-night stand. We've all had them. And if we're lucky, they've been great. I'm not gonna lie, I've had one or two or twelve, some great, some not. But I don't regret any of them because each has revealed not only something about myself, but about men as well. Anyway, it's not what happens that matters; it's what you do with what happens.

Brown Sugar 2 celebrates great one-night stands because the beauty of a momentous one-time encounter is that it doesn't reveal everything: the skeletons in the closet, the emotional dirty laundry, the crazy exes or the nonsense we get so caught up in that we forget to have fun. With a one-night stand all you have is each other in the here and now. Steeped in the present you can ignore the imperfections, the human frailties and insecurities. Safely coddled in the moment, you are to each other perfect in that instant.

That memory stays with you untarnished and glittering, wrapped in a ribbon of remembrance, unsullied by the day-today. A one-night stand is not about the unremarkable, the practical, or the mundane. It's about the fantasy of what could be though we know it will not be, and the beauty of not caring. Either way, it feels good to be bad, that's probably why we do it.

A Trip in the Sack

Sometimes doing something so out of the ordinary, so unlike yourself is just what you need to put things back in perspective. I can testify. Not long ago I was out of my mind. I'd been caught up with a trifling so-and-so who'd first rocked my world, then wrecked it. He'd done a slow fade out of my life and took my heart with him. Since I was already dead I took to my bed and was never gonna get out of it. I was gonna lie there forever listening to The Best of Al Green on a continuous loop: "I'm so tired of being alone, I'm so tired of being alone..." Hair uncombed, face a mess. Pathetic. I'd shuffle from the bathroom to my bed, hysterical. I'd start laughing, then burst into tears, then go back to manic laughter, then back to sobs again. Can you spell PMS? Oh, the drama.

It's probably too late to make a long story short but a friend came over, let herself in with her key. Fed my cats, opened the drapes and the windows, then dragged me from the bed and out of the house. We went out, we talked, we laughed, and I met someone. My thoughts as I gazed at his strapping six-feet-two, 200-pound frame and the downy peach fuzz of his baby-soft brown skin, are too private to share, even for me. But, as India.Arie so eloquently put it, he made me want to "Hershey's Kiss his licorice."

His name was Kevin. He was twenty-two. I was not, and I felt like a dirty old man. I hung my head in shame but I took him home anyway. Had to, Baby Boy lived in Queens; Jamaica, Queens, the last stop on the F train. That's almost as far as Colorado when you're coming from downtown Manhattan. Either way, he lived with his moms. Yes, he did. I could almost blush with shame, and I'm pretty shameless. But I digress. Though I knew it wasn't forever, it was okay for today. Did the trick. You feeling me? He was definitely a trip in the sack, that Kevin. I threw him down and sexed him up. Yep, the pep was back in my step. And, it's true: Sometimes the best way to get over someone is to get under someone. Now I'm not saying you should give it up to everybody who asks; Lord, you'd never get off your back. And I know as well as the next sister that if you lie down with "dogs," you'll get dirty. What I am saying is that sometimes it's okay to give Mr. Right Now a chance until you find Mr. Right.

The Beauty of Being Black

Since publishing Brown Sugar: A Collection of Erotic Black Fiction, I've been talking a lot about sex and it feels good. I'm meeting a lot of wonderfully evolved black men and women who've found many things to relate to in the stories because we truly represented what makes us tick sexually and emotionally. Brown Sugar became a best-seller because the stories were not just about sex; they were sexy stories about black life, in all its myriad forms. That's the beauty of being black, our diversity. And though we don't know it, our diversity is also our greatest strength.

I am a black woman born in Jamaica, who grew up in Brooklyn, reading Harlequin romances, Machiavelli, C. S. Lewis, Iceberg Slim and Sun Tzu. I am as comfortable in an auction house as I am in a rib joint. You may have been born in the North, or South, or uptown or down. You may come from the Caribbean or England, or the Caribbean via England. You may hail from the East Coast or the West, or from somewhere in the middle of America. Though you are black, you may also be French, Asian, Italian, Jewish or a mix of all of them. So to lump black people under one category called Black People is as limiting and ignorant as crediting blacks with Ebonics but not with influencing everything in America, from literature, art, dance, music and fashion to language, culture and policy. As black people, we have shaped many things about America and we have many things that have shaped us into the people we are. Those things are called our experiences, sexual and otherwise. And there are a wealth of these experiences in Brown Sugar and now in Brown Sugar 2.

Copyright © 2003 by Carol Taylor