“Everybody wanna kno what my Achilles heel is / LOVE /I don’t get enough of it /all I get is these Vampires and Bloodsuckers”

-Jay-Z, Monster

It was around 2 am on a calm summer night in Bedford-Stuyvesant. There was still life on the streets. Senegalese men in traditional Muslim garb hung outside the twenty-four hour Halal restaurants. Homeless schizophrenics mumbled as they moseyed on down the street. And he and I walked hand in hand down Fulton Street toward the Franklin avenue train station. We had just left a friend’s house where the three of us spent hours talking about Hip-Hop, the cosmos, poetry, dreams and magic, regular topics of conversation for young, urban artists such as ourselves.

We also talked about love. Usually, when I say it aloud, love, it tastes like a cliché. In today’s consumer culture it has become more of a selling point than an actual experience. It is air brushed and glossed over in the trite plots of the romantic comedies that get pumped out of Hollywood incessantly. It gets trivialized in the empty lyrics of many songs of all genres. Using the word without any intention to concretize it with action is as trendy as sporting those god-awful Ugg boots and matching leggings. It isn’t often that I experience the unassuming affection for another. Yet there are moments like these on Fulton street.

“You’re the only girl who I hold hands with and the palms of my hands never get sweaty,” he said. He is a Mexican American kid born in Brooklyn and raised in the suburbs of Queens. He is a freestyle rapper and poet, who can write some of the illest punch lines and couplets I’ve ever heard. His hair was gelled and sculpted into a sort of pompadour, which makes him look like a Hip-Hop Sonic the Hedge Hog in high top Adidas sneakers. And on a late night on Fulton Street, in Bed-Stuy, he sticks out like a black kid on a hockey team.

I guess that is why they targeted him. As we walked holding hands, with blank stares and faint smirks, our heads still in a daze from the heavy conversation, they began heckling. One of the men, a drunkard in his late forties, cupped a beer in a brown paper bag. He and his buddy stood in the shadows on the side of the street furthest from the curb. The man with the beer looked me up and down, and licked his lips. He grabbed his crotch and screamed at the kid next to me. “Mmmm mm uh, you don’t know what to do with all a dat, nigga!”

He and I looked into each other’s eyes, clenched our palms closer together and doubled over with laughter. We kept walking. I felt the drunkard’s eyes still tattooed to my nether regions as he continued to yell nonsense behind us. We laughed all the way to the train station.

My friend, his name is El, and I weren’t dating. In fact he was on his way back to Queens to meet his girlfriend. El and I met through the youth poetry slam community, where hundreds of kids, ages 14-19, from the tri-state area would fill up venues like the Bowery Poetry Club and The Nuyorican Poet’s Café. We would perform poetry in a series of competitions in hopes of wining a spot to be on of the six poets on the NYC youth poetry slam team. Eventually El and I made it to the last six. As a team, while learning the art of writing and performing poetry we were also reminded of the art of love. It was normal for us to hold each other when we needed support and rub each other’s shoulders while we were choked up on the truths that we shared amongst ourselves.

We stood in the train station laughing until tears ran down our faces. We laughed and slapped each other’s shoulders. We laughed and leaned on the turnstiles to keep our balance. We laughed and laughed until we missed our trains.

There was no way to explain to those men, or anyone else who mistook us for a couple, that the love we shared was not the romantic kind. They would never believe that our desire to hold each other was as pure and innocent as the way children demand to be held. As we get older, we have experiences that make us cynical and that teach us to be afraid to reach out. Or we are taught that it is inappropriate to ask for love and help. But I don’t give a fuck about most rules so I reach out, often. Although, most times I get shot down rejected and sent on my way. I never stop reaching. And there are those rare moments when someone reaches back. Like that summer night on Fulton Street when we held each other’s hands and laughed at the rest of the world that was too afraid to love the way we did, purely, innocently and without asking for anything in return.