Thick

My attraction to thick girls began when I was eleven and growing up in the South Bronx. For the most part I hung out with my Uncle Kove, who was ten years older than me and a master of kung fu, gymnastics, and graffiti art. He had the initial attraction to larger girls. That was also the year I discovered my parents’ devotion to the crack pipe, and Kove became the closest thing to a savior or superhero that I was going to get. I endeavored to love all that he loved.

As a boy in the boroughs, I was immersed in a male culture that adored voluptuous black, Puerto Rican, and Dominican women. It was common, if not obligatory, for men to salivate over thick thighs, asses, and breasts, all sheathed in skintight, faded jeans and slick halters. Uncle Kove naturally was attracted to these big girls, but he didn’t stop there: he went for the dark-skinned sisters, the ones mothers warned their daughters they would look like if they played too long in the sun; the ones boys dared one another to kiss as penalty for a lost bet. Many of us felt a secret longing for these girls, but we denied it because of an urban hierarchy that defined the value of a girl’s thickness by the fairness of her skin.

One afternoon Kove and I were at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, standing in a crowd that had gathered to hear a group of teenage boys beat on the underside of plastic buckets with drumsticks. Every so often Kove would nudge me and flick his chin in the direction of a plump, dark girl who had wandered into the fold. He’d lick his lips and grunt and mumble how much he wanted to “get between them crisp thighs” or “handle that black ass.” On the walk back to the train station, I asked Kove, Why those girls? It wasn’t that I found anything repulsive about their black skin, but I was too young to know much about desire. Too young to recognize that one must desire if he has any hopes of becoming something other than what he is. I needed Kove to help me understand why men and women long for each other.

He grinned and nodded as though he’d been expecting the question. At the top of the subway steps, he leaned close (I could smell the scents of permanent magic marker and spray paint on his clothes) and said, “The dark ones are the finest.”

I’d been raised by a mother who preached the importance of always wearing clean underwear, carrying breath mints in your pocket, and using lip balm in the winter, and a stepfather who threatened to whip the ass of anyone on the block who messed with his kids. But these formerly protective parents were now pipe-smoking zombies. I had no real idea what drug abuse was, only that it made people weak in the head and heart and limbs. Many years later I learned that Uncle Kove’s mother had been an alcoholic, and I wondered whether he had positioned himself in my path because we had this in common. Our relationship was more than just uncle and nephew: he was the man who made the idea of women real for me and taught me that possessing them was crucial to my existence. If Kove believed there was something grand in the darkness of thick women, or the thickness of dark women, then I’d devote my energy to cultivating that same desire.

People in the Queensbridge Housing Projects, where Kove lived, considered him odd because he spent his money on paint cans and samurai swords instead of gold caps for his teeth and beepers for his hip, but he remained a stud to all those women who felt like outcasts themselves. He wasn’t always faithful to the women who were caught up in his mystique, but these girls would tolerate his affairs (for a time, at least), perhaps because their only alternatives were loving an urban thug or being alone. And every once in a while, when Kove fell hard for a girl, he’d spray her name on the side of the elevated 7 train that traveled back and forth from Queens to Manhattan, and it moved the girl, and me, to see her identity carried across the sky in his unorthodox, elegant calligraphy.

The first steady girl I remember Kove having was a truly dark-skinned, stocky beauty named Denise. She was the kind of dark girl who, if she could have pulled off that layer of pigment and replaced it with any other color, would’ve been just as fine-looking to anyone on the block as she was to Kove. Any number of times she caught me checking her out, because I could never manage to be sly about it. But she was used to folks staring and puzzling over how someone so dark could still be so lovely.

Denise seemed aware of my attraction to her and would stand close to me when she talked and throw her arm around my shoulder. Often she promised to hook me up with her younger sister, though she never did. I didn’t care. It was enough to have Denise squeeze my biceps and tell me my arms were getting bigger every day, even though they were no thicker than garden hoses, or rebuke me for running my mouth too much about shit I knew nothing about. She treated Kove the same way, only with more sincerity and fidelity, and the more time I spent in their presence, the more obvious it was why he cared for her. I couldn’t help wondering if my mother and stepfather had been crazy about each other as well before they’d decided to live for the rock.

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