Money: The First Nice Guy
The recent Lifetime documentary, Surviving R. Kelly, has sparked conversations about the normalization of sexual predation and the grooming of children by adults in our culture on social media that I have been teaching about in college courses for the last decade. Years ago, before I started teaching about these issues, I started writing about my own experiences in an attempt to make sense of what I thought about love, desire, and power as a young Black feminist. As a young teen an older guy in my neighborhood took an interest in me...
Summer 1993
When I was 13, I lived in an apartment community where the little kids played outside on the playground, while the kids my age mostly hung out on our stoops, swam in the community pool when it was open, or walked down to a park a few blocks away to pass the sweltering hot days. One day, I was outside with my friend T. We were standing on her stoop, trying to decide if we would walk to the park to see the boys we liked from school play basketball when her next door neighbor came outside, walked over, and gave me a $20 bill. He peeled it off from the knot of money he carried. “‘Cause you’re cute,” he said. I tried to refuse it, he refused to take it back.
He was in his early twenties. He lived with three roommates. It wasn’t clear where they worked or if they worked. They were home far more than our parents, most of whom worked more than one job. But these guys had nice cars and dressed well. We all thought they were so cool. After that first time he told me I was cute, he gave me a $20 bill nearly every time he saw me.
$20 was a lot of money to me. Not just because I was 13, but because money was tight at my house. I rarely had any cash of my own then and I had already learned what it felt like to want, need, and not have money.
He never said much about the $20s he gave me. Never did more than ask me how my day was going and give me the money, at first. He never explained why he was giving it to me beyond what he said the first time — I was cute. My friends were cute, too. He never gave any of them a dime.
13 year old me needed kindness and …. if I’m being honest, $20.
It was a running joke among my friends. One of the girls would say, “Go stand by the gate to see if he’ll come out and give you money.” The others would laugh. We often ate like queens from the 7–11 on that bill. I was able to treat all my friends to Slurpees and candy. We were still just young enough that that seemed like a big deal. We were old enough, especially given the circumstances of most of our home lives to know, that it wasn’t quite enough.
My friends started calling him Money, a play on his actual name. I never called him the nickname but I’ll call him Money now, for clarity. Truth is, I was suspicious of him. He had to want something in return. But I took the bills and I said thank you even though it never felt right. If him giving me the money made me suspicious, it made me even more uncomfortable to refuse what seemed like random kindness. 13 year old me needed kindness and …. if I’m being honest, $20.
Money’s roommates never really came over to talk to us girls when Money would give me the bills. I only remember ever talking to one of them once. One day, two friends and I were walking back from the park when a car pulled along side of us. It was Money and one of his roommates. His roommate rolled down the passenger window and asked me how old I was. It happened to be a few days before my birthday, I told him I was about to turn fourteen. Money asked me what size shoes I wore. It was an odd question, but I told him. He nodded and they drove off.
Later that day, I was sitting on T’s patio with other friends and there was a knock on the gate. She opened it and Money was there with a bag from Foot Locker. He gave me the bag and told me to try the shoes on. He’d bought me a pair of sneakers and matching socks. I was embarrassed. The boy from school I liked was also sitting outside with us. Once Money was sure the shoes fit, he gave me a $20 bill, wished me a happy birthday and left.
As soon as Money left, my friends had a field day. They all wanted to know why he’d gotten me shoes for my birthday. They all assumed something more was going on that I wasn’t telling them. My crush, in particular, was certain that Money wouldn’t have given me such an expensive gift for no reason. We argued. I hated that he thought I was having sex with Money, for money and sneakers. It was embarrassing and infuriating. My crush on him ended right then and there.
On the short walk home, I threw away the distinctive black and white striped Foot Locker bag and the shoe box. I hid my new shoes under my bed. They were more expensive than any shoe my mother would have bought me and while I wasn’t sure she’d know that if she saw them, I was 13, I didn’t have clothes she didn’t buy. There would have been no way to explain how I’d gotten them. A month later when I started my first year of high school, I would put them in my book bag and change into them on the bus. I may have not understood why he gave them to me and it didn’t feel right when he stood over me and watched me try them on as my friends watched, but I was worried about fitting in and that my clothes wouldn’t be good enough at my new school. I wore the shoes.
A few weeks after Money had given me the shoes, I was standing at my patio gate waiting for my friends to come by when he was sitting outside on the hood of his car hugged up with a woman I’d later come to know as his girlfriend. It was one of the few times he didn’t come over and give me money. He did wave. I waved back. She looked confused but then neither of them paid me much mind after the initial greeting. When my friends arrived, they whispered and snickered that I was Money’s mistress (This was before we had the word side chick. We were bookish. There were mistresses in books). I got angry. I was no such thing.
That night Money’s house had a party. They grilled out on their patio and about two dozen people descended on the space between their back gate and the walk behind it which opened out to the playground where my group of neighborhood friends, girls and boys, sat around on the equipment. They shared their bounty and fed us hamburgers and hot dogs. His girlfriend gone, Money came and sat by me but he made no advances. I was sure they would come. My friends were right, grown men didn’t give girls money for no reason. It didn’t happen that night.
“I have to keep reminding myself you aren’t sixteen yet.”
Money’s game was a long game. Fall and winter came and went. I saw him less but he still gave me money every time we crossed paths. Once he even got out of his car, came over to say hi and give me a $20 bill in front of my first real boyfriend. It was a challenge. Money smiled and seemed nice but he was daring the boy, 7 years his junior, to say something. He didn’t say anything. Though I can’t quite recall, I am pretty sure we walked to 7–11. It was only that next summer when school let out and the pool reopened, that Money made his first overt flirtation.
I was still 14 but by then I’d encountered more than my share of older men and boys who commented on my body, who said sexually explicit things to me and my friends, no matter what we wore, no matter what we were doing. I couldn’t ever quite figure out how not to attract unwanted attention. I was walking back the short distance from the pool to my house and Money appeared at my side. He put his arm around my shoulders in a friendly way and said, “I have to keep reminding myself you aren’t sixteen yet.” He was the first nice guy I realized wasn’t very nice at all.
The First Nice Guy
I met more Moneys in my teens and twenties. Older men and boys who offered me money and gifts, always with strings attached. Money was the first and, in his own way, the most persistent. He gave me money and other gifts for nearly three years, though our encounters became less frequent as I got older, started working, started hanging out in the neighborhood less. Still, he gave me money when he saw me, whether or not I wanted it. He found a reason to give me things even after he saw me out and about with my boyfriend as I got older. He gave me gifts even though I never so much as touched his hand in affection. I refused every ride in his car, every invitation to his house. He was never mean or insulting or more pushy than he was the day he gave me the first pair of sneakers, though it became increasingly clear, that he didn’t just think I was cute to look at, he was definitely interested in touching.
Wouldn’t he come to get what he paid for someday?
Some of my friends envied my relationship with Money. He might have been a little old, but he never stared at us at the pool like even older men sometimes did. He didn’t ever grab or say nasty things like the younger boys did. Plus, all of my friends thought he was good looking.
When just us girls talked about Money, we had these really confusing conversations. Sometimes friends wondered why I was so committed to my funny, awkward high school boyfriend when I could be riding around in a car with Money. The same friends also wondered if I should worry about how much Money money had given me. Wouldn’t he come to get what he paid for someday?
Money walked around with a large fold of money in his pocket in a neighborhood where that was uncommon and didn’t seemed to be the least bit worried that we all knew he had it. By then I already knew drug dealers and criminals, perhaps he was one but I never was sure. He never said much about who he was or what he was interested in other than me. I was cute. He liked me. He wanted us to hang out.
You’re probably thinking the reason I resisted Money’s advances was because along the way some adult had given me good advice about what to do if an older man gave me money and invited me to his house. You might even think I didn’t find myself caught up in a bad situation because I had people in my life that noticed and intervened even though I hadn’t said anything. None of that was the case.
I think I was wary of Money and never let his interest go to my young, attention-starved head — because he was too nice-acting. Like a lot of the nice guys I met after him, Money’s nice was too good to be true. I knew that the sort of money that the shoes he bought for me cost and the amount of it that he kept in his pocket was the sort of money that folks fought and cried over. I had seen people get into arguments over fewer coins and had sat in the dark in that same apartment where I hid the shoes he bought me when the light bill couldn’t be paid. People got angry over dollars, my mother worked long hours for hers, and here he was giving them away with a smile. I didn’t buy his nice guy act and the more he kept it up, the less it worked.
Who knows why Money wasn’t more insistent? Why he hadn’t been like some of the nice guys I would meet later who turned aggressive and angry when I didn’t return their gifts with sex?
Lest you think he wasn’t a creep who was grooming me — I saw him just once again after he moved out of the neighborhood. It was the summer of my 18th birthday. He was with a girl I knew from middle school. I was two grades ahead of her. I had been in 8th grade when she was in the sixth. They’d just had a baby.
