Baby Boomers: The Strangest Generation

A Baby Boomer’s Missed Romance Across The Color Line

• John Ward

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Remember the naked gun movies in Leslie Nielsen? And he was so freaking funny. At one point in one of the movies, he takes that old meme that starts with boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, and blah blah blah. But he just takes it to an extreme, like boy meets girl, boy catches on fire, girl becomes movie star, boy is homeless and lives on the street. Boy sees girl as movie star. And it just goes on and on into this ridiculous boy meet girl kind of story. Well, I got one like that. Boy meets girl. In his life. Boy has to go to college out of his neighborhood. Boy meets girl, girl is hot. Boy is white. Girl is black. Boy meets girl. It's the romance that never happened. And it's a baby boomer tale from 1980s that gets into interracial relationships that I guess really didn't happen much in 1980. But it happened to me. It was the romance that never happened. And there was never a word spoken between the boy and the girl. So let me set it up. If you've been listening to the podcast, you know that I grew up in a Rust Belt city in a very cloistered Irish Catholic neighborhood. And I'm a baby boomer. And a lot of times I tell these stories because there seems to be a perception out there that baby boomers are like uh they they grew up like really privileged and had all kinds of stuff, and they were consumers of things that didn't matter, and they had great Christmases, and they never were hungry, and and I gotta tell you, I'm a baby boomer, and it couldn't be further from the truth. So sometimes I tell these stories to inform these younger generations that it wasn't all rainbows for us. But mostly I just tell them because it's funny and people seem to listen, and um I enjoy it. So let me get into it. Let me set the stage. 1980, barely get out of high school, right? I got the steel plant, right? It's closing. I got I'm doing anything to make some money before my father throws me out of the freaking house. And finally, my dad says, look at you're not the steel plants are cloned closing. You're not gonna find a decent job in this town because there isn't, you gotta go to college. You got to. So I go to college, I pack my stuff, I get a car, and I go to college. And when I say I go away to college, this is what I mean. I drove from the south side of the city to the west side of the city to go to a state college because I had never been out of my neighborhood because that's how cloistered we were, and that's how tight-knit we were, that's how paranoid we were and distrustful and clannish. We just never left. We had everything there. There was all kinds of stuff in the city. We would go downtown sometimes because we had to for you know government reasons or whatever, but I had never really explored any part of this mid-size northeastern city. Which means that I never got exposed to various groups of people. Most notably for this story, black chicks. So I go to college, I get in my Ford Torino, 72 Torino, drive to college. The only college that would take me was a state college, right? And so they they accept me and I go to college, and within like the second or third semester, they're having meetings with me, just tell me like like at your GPA is you know, like at 1.9. You don't even come to school. What are you doing here? What's what's going on? What why are you here wasting your money? And I I'm telling you, to to pay for this shit, I am doing uh making concrete pipes. I'm selling cable TV door to door, I'm selling tuxedos over the friggin' phone to pay for this shit. But I ain't serious, right? School ain't my thing. I hardly even went to high school. I mean, I barely graduated. So I don't know, something hits me one day. Like, I like shit. I like I want to have good shit. I always had broken shit, I always had secondhand stuff. I always had stuff that somebody gave me that didn't work right, that didn't fit right, and I wanted stuff. And one day it hit me, I think it was in the form of my father telling me, or possibly hitting me physically, and telling me, man, you gotta do something because you can't stay here forever. You know. Now, back in those days, if you lived, if you were a boy and you lived in your parents' home at the age of 18, you had to start paying rent. Right? They called it uh board. You had to pay board. And so I gotta come up with the board, the money every month to stay there. So I go to school, I'm flunking out, and I'm working and like an epiphany hit me. Like, I think I could do this shit. I think I'm capable of learning and being good at school. I just gotta give it a shot. So I give it a shot. I write, uh it was an English essay. I remember I wrote this essay for a book report for a story, and I just smoked a ton of pot, sat in my basement, and wrote this most ridiculous fucked up essay about this story, this short story I had read. And the professor, when he gave the papers back with the grades, said, I want to read one essay. And he started reading my essay. And I started to realize that this dude's reading the essay because it's good. I did it. I could be good at this shit. I could do something. Maybe I could handle this college shit. So I go in full bore, man. Full bore. Like I I ditch my buddies, I ditch my girlfriends, I I still work because I gotta pay. I work every night. I work summers at the plant, I work, I go to school, I sell cable at night, walk in the streets door to door, I make concrete pipes, doing anything to to get through. But what I'm doing is I'm pulling A's. I'm pulling A's. And what else is I'm doing is I'm meeting people that I had never been exposed to. I'm meeting people from New York City that came to our city to dorm at the college, like live there. And, you know, I drove, I lived around there, but you know, they had that kind of money where they could go and live in another city and they were a whole thing. And they had their groups and shit like that, and I, you know, fraternities, but they whatever. I couldn't do that shit because I had to go to work. And I I'm not complaining or anything. I'm not no working class friggin' hero. I'm just telling you the way I was. I'm meeting Jews. I didn't even know what a Jew was. I think I've talked about this in a uh different uh podcast, but wow, Jews are uh from New York and they are fucking funny, and they are really smart and argumentative and but I couldn't tell a Jew from an Irish guy or an Italian. It just I just they would always announce that they were Jewish. I'd be okay, you're Jewish. All right, so I met professors and smart people and doctors and black people. And I had really never prior to that had a impactful relationship with any well, a couple black dudes I knew, but never with a black woman. And I wasn't really even attracted to black women. I mean, uh Eartha Kit was Catwoman, I think in Batman. Oh, she was hot. And oh, and the other girl that was on TV, uh, she was hot, but I had no particular interest in them. Them being black women. But here I am, exposed to this whole friggin' array of women cultures, ethnicities, big city people, farm people. I'm a little Irish Catholic boy, man. I lived in a sequestered world. And I'm digging it. I'm alright. I can hold my own. I mean, I know they know shit that I don't know. I know they've been places I've never been. I know, I remember I was went for a dinner with somebody when I got smart and got good grades, they put me in uh some society and they inducted me. And I remember sitting down to eat dinner at a fancy restaurant, and the waiter said, I said, Yeah, I'll have the Caesar salad. And I said, But uh, yeah, Caesar salad, what kind of dressing is that? And the waiter goes, Well, it's Caesar dressing on the Caesar salad. And everybody kind of laughed. And I remember everybody had been places, like they knew shit that I didn't know, like they knew the best restaurant in Chicago, and they knew the friggin' how to surf in goddamn California, they knew the shit. And all I'm thinking is like I don't really fit in, but I'm not gonna be shy. You know, I'm gonna tell them what I know. And one thing I know is that I know as cultured as you are and as smart as you are, that I will outwork every one of you, and I'm not that smart. I'm kind of smart, but I can I will outwork now. I'm into it. I'm ready to get grades, man. I'm ready to friggin' be a doctor. I am ready. I'm going. I'm all in. But then something happened. It's 1980, maybe 81. I'm in a um high level 300 level psychology course. I'm really not engaging in conversations with women that much. Well, a couple of chicks I did date. But um it's the first class in psychology 301, experimental psychology or social behavior, whatever it was. And I go in, take my desk, sit on. And this chick walks in. This beautiful black woman walks in. She's got like white, like fur, like half a coat, only goes down to her midriff, all furry, high heels, tight jeans, nails done, hair perfect, skin beautiful. I can't take my eyes off her. I never saw nothing like that. I'm like, my god, look at her. I'm in love. I'm terrified. I'm scared to death. This woman sits right next to me, sits down, takes out her books, and slowly turns her head and looks right at me and smiles. And I didn't smile back. I just put my head down. Because as attracted as I was to her, it was nineteen eighty, I was in a neighborhood where this was not gonna happen. And this chick was in a neighborhood. I can only imagine, but she was in a neighbor, because it was so segregated. She was in a neighborhood where this was not gonna happen. But the thing that I loved about her, she didn't give a shit. She was gonna flirt with me, she was gonna push me and push me through the whole semester. And she did day after day. And she was smart. Oh, she would ask questions of the professor that I didn't even understand. You know, I was like, my god, this broad is hot and smart and black. Like I'm now I'm getting into the black thing. And every day she comes in, she's looking at me and smiling. But after a few weeks it starts to change. It starts to get a little passive aggressive. She's smiling, but she's telling she's putting off the vibe. When are you gonna say something to me, motherfucker? When are you gonna say hello? When are you gonna pick your head up and look me in the eye? Cause I know you are attracted to me. But it's up to you, white boy, it's up to you. And I just sat there. And I don't know if if it was because I was shy. I mean, I always had girls, and I didn't have a problem, but when they were that hot, first of all, I'm like, what is a chick this hot flirting with me for? I don't even get it. I've come to realize, I may have to edit this out, that black women are much more aggressive in romance than white women are. It's a generalization, I know what you know somebody's gonna get pissed off. But they are. White women are, you know, you come get me. Black women may see something they like, they're they're gonna put out some heavy signals. And I know this because I've had a world of experience since this, these college days, um, as a physician practicing in a um uh black neighborhood for years, uh, that black women really can be the um aggressor in a potentially romantic situation with men. So she kept it up. She kept dressing, she kept, I mean, she dressed every day. Oh, I don't know how she must have had to get up at like five in the morning to look like that, to be at an eight o'clock class. And I just kept thinking, like, what is gonna what am where is this going? I mean, what am I gonna do? Like, I want to talk to her, I want to be with her. I I want to take her to dinner, I want to, you know, marry her, you know. I want her. But she's out of my league. And she's black and I'm white, and I'm real white. You know what I mean? Just so you know, I'm married to a black woman now, so you don't get pissed off at me. I have been for years, and um it's been great. But back then, oh, it was taboo, it was jungle love, it was forbidden fruit. So I never said anything to her. Never. I never said anything. And by the end of the semester she just stopped even sitting near me and stopped acknowledging me. And I read it for what it was. It was disgust. She was disgusted with me because I would not pursue the feelings and the attraction that I had for her. And that apparently she had for me. Still can't figure that out. And then came down to the last day of class, the final exam. And she was super smart. She finished the test in like ten minutes, right? It took me the whole friggin' class to finish the exam. So she gets up and hands her paper and then leaves, semester's over. Alright, it's done, it's over. Okay, this pressure, this longing, this desire, this conflict in my mind is over. She's gone. I'll never have to think about her again. So I hand my test in, I walk out the door, and she's standing there, man. Standing there. High heels, tight jeans, figure like a model, hair braided, lipstick, eyes like an Egyptian, hand on her hip, sticking her hip out, head tilted, waiting for me, looking for me, waiting for me. And I had to walk towards her. And I walked right by her without saying anything. And the last glimpse of her that I had was one of frustration and disgust. And it's a lot to read into the story, but she knew why I didn't talk to her. She knew why. And it pissed her off, and she let me know. I never spoke a word to this woman. This is 35 years ago, and I still think about it. She was so hurt that I couldn't talk to her because of our race. When I walked by. She made me feel bad, rightfully so. It was a low point in my um in my life. I mean, I've had some really low points, but you know, in my own behavior and my own inability to exceed or overcome an issue that I should have overcome. And I imagine now she's very successful and has a great life and I wish her the best. But boy meets girl. Boy completely fucks up. What could have been something with that girl. Alright guys, it's Baby Boomers, the Strangest Generation. I'm John Ward. Just so you know, I have a beautiful flag family, and I don't mean anything by it. It's just an opportunity that I blew because of the times, because of the situation, and I'm sorry for it. I really am. I hope this was a good one. I'm not sure. Alright, I'll talk to you later. Bye bye.