STICKY PAGES

Words by amari johnson | Image by Kwesi Abbensetts

For my seventh birthday, my brother bought me the cassette single of that Lisa Lisa joint, Let the Beat Hit ‘Em. I used to carry it in my book bag every day, and when the urge hit me, I’d take it out, slide it under the desk, and stare at the cover image: a fine ass Puerto Rican kneeling and caressing an old school microphone with the illest delicacy. Eyes closed. Slight smile. Pleather pants shining brighter than Vaseline on foreheads and clinging tight to her curves like a jealous boyfriend. But this was all an afterthought. The first thing that invariably caught my eye was the titty hanging out of her jacket.

Now, what a first-grader knows about cleavage, I’m not exactly sure. But I do know that I liked it; that I was sneaking peeks of teachers, my friends’ mothers, or whatever I could get from TV. I also know that this was supposed to be a secret and I couldn’t tell noooobody. And so it remained up through

high school, waiting until everyone went to sleep to smuggle my brother’s issues of The Source into the bathroom for...umm...reading material.

Word.

I came up during the Golden Age of the Video Vixen, so The Source was laden with late night inspiration. Glossy asses and airbrushed stomachs on every page, all prancing around in thong- tha-thong-thong-thongs. Red bone and caramel and chocolate, oh my! Living and learning in the dark. But who could look their mother in the eye after she caught them strangling a chicken no one wants for dinner? Not me nor my two eyes, which may or may not have been going blind.

This secret was gonna stay between me and those sticky pages. Melyssa Ford. Leila Arcieri. Ki Toy Johnson. These were our pin-up girls; our Pam Grier posters. And they left us disappointed as hell, grumbling outside of the Against All Odds store in Woodbridge Mall, where the girls just didn’t live up to the same measurements standards. I was looking for the juiciest ass and the biggest titties in an insatiable quest for the baddest chick. It even began to shape my language.

One night, I was over my man’s house where we was talking mad shit. You know, two virgins boasting about what we would do to these women if given the chance: “smash,” “beat,” “tear it up,” “knock it down.” You know the talk. My man’s uncle, who must’ve heard us from the next room, came walking in real slow. Cool as a fan, he turned the TV off and looked at us, waiting a few seconds before he spoke. Calmly, he said, “What y’all talkin’ about is where babies come from,” and then walked right back out.

Yo, I don’t mean to get all Drake-sensitive on you, but that had me stunned in a way I couldn’t make sense of. For mad years I had been obsessing over these chicks’ curves and folds so much that I had forgotten they were women. Don’t get me wrong, I love me a fat ass for sure (they never get old!), but years of secret peeks left me unable to see beyond that. I was so concerned with not getting caught that I wasn’t taking the time to really think about what I was getting hard over. Many of ‘em ain’t even had no faces. For better or worse, music videos was my generation’s sex ed and we was getting some foul ass lessons. That’s where babies come from.

Around this time, Bilal dropped Soul Sista (I know, I know: mad cliché. But it was so drastically different from Big Pimpin’). This was kind of like the final exam before heading off to college. I had never seen women presented like this. I mean, they was buck-ass-naked, oiled up and everything, but in a way that made me want to know their names, in a way that introduced me to new body parts even. To this day I can’t get enough of shoulders and elbows, sun.

But more than all that, this video made me realize that there is so much more to women than flesh and tissue, that I knew damn near nothing, and that my true desire was to learn as much as I could.

I haven't had to hide that since.

amari johnson is a writer and musician residing in New Orleans, La. He is the author of Spring Chicken’s Revenge: Tall Tales and Small Stories. Read more of his writings at springchickensrevenge.com.