1999

It hadn't even been a day since the New York Times printed an article about our home and already the phone was ringing off the hook. "This is so crazy!" Jae groaned. "Maybe we shouldn't have agreed to that piece." She slumped down with exhaustion on our battered green couch.
The piece she was talking about was an article written about our home--a warehouse in Williamsburgh, tucked neatly between the East River and the Con Edison Energy plant. Picturesque, barely but affordable, yes. After a week of photographers and a couple of days of interviews, we were all psyched to see the result in full color. What we didn't count on, quite naively, was that our fellow city dwellers were acute enough to pick up that one of us were moving out. The phone calls were flooding in, because in the end, what that meant was, we'd have an extra room to rent. The phone rang again.
"I'm not getting it!" Jae declared, "I give up!"
"I'll get it!" I replied. I could have let the answering machine pick up but I was open for something different.
"Hey girl." It was Lola. Yes. That's her real name.
"Whatssup girl!" I was so happy to hear from her: Finally, some relief from the mundanity of city life.
"They massacred my article. I need a drink."

Lola and I were both overworked, under-partied and underpaid. We met up at Doc Sunni's for some Korean food and a healthy dose of rude waitresses. We loved the unpredictable and eclectic Lower East Side, where buildings and personalities were haphazardly thrown together. Lola was a journalist who rarely got out. Instead, her days were stretched between an 18 hour a day job at one of the newest additions to Hip Hop documentation and her very evasive boyfriend, although I am not sure you could call him that. He was one of the hottest young Hip Hop journalists around and while I agreed with Lola that he was beautiful, I wasn't so convinced where his integrity stood on the meter in relation to how he seemed to treat her. Deep down, Lola said her dream was to give up the whole rat race, settle down in the country somewhere and write her story. She was beautiful, dark and one of the most intelligent people that I knew. She wore her hair low cut and her often colorful, yet coordinated clothing garnered a respect of even the high fashion afficienados.
I always considered Lola a reflection of myself. Our lives seemed to be running parallel to the others'. If all was well with me, ditto for her. If I was going through an emotional crisis (and I had my share), not a day would go by til she went there too. In every sense of the word, Lola was my sister and I was always proud to be around her, nurtured by her presence and comraderie.

That night she was on the outs with her boyfriend and it was clear she needed a little picking up. An article of hers on Women in Hip Hop had just run and she was exasperated at the editing process and even ashamed, claiming that the article didn't even sum up her point."It's crazy, but no matter how much heart I put into a peice, it never says what I want it to say. And if I do get it, then some editor comes along and fucks it up." She signalled for another sake and I raised my eyebrow: already the heat was rushing to my cheeks and I felt a warm flush through my body. Drunkeness was creeping up the horizon of my consciousness.
"Well, what did you want it to say?" I eyed the rolled up issued of the glossy magazine. I read her article and liked it. No, it wasn't deep, but it fit with the rest of the magazine.
Like Lola, I wasn't where I particularly wanted to be in my career. In the whirlwind world of move or sink, I was getting the distinct feeling that I needed to learn how to swim. Fast. True, I worked for one of the leading publishers in the country, but for a writer, working in sales didn't count. True I took the job for research (translation: pay my measly bills), but after working a year under a quite unsympathetic boss, Lola's present complaint was wishful thinking to me: at least she was writing.
I sat back in my chair, fingering the glossy magazine. I looked around the restaurant and took in the cacaphonic mix of people that only New York could command to a symphony. The smell of ginger and fresh sea mingled with our saki and Zhinga. I looked at the small stress lines traversing the smooth of Lola's face and envied her predicament.
"Well, first of all, they edited that bit where I compared women in Hip Hop to the role women played in China during the Cultural Revolution." She took a swig of her drink and I spit out mine. "What?!"
"Look," she said while putting her drink down, "I know it sounds like a stretch, but the whole Cultural Revolution in China merely illustrates that same old story: Men need help, women join, movement success, women get screwed. It's classic, I tell you." She leaned back in her chair, triumphantly.
"So you think that the Hip Hop movement has betrayed women?"
"No, I'm saying the whole world has gone to hell. It's not even about men and women," She sat at the edge of her seat excited now, "It's like there's this pattern."
"Pattern?" I was intrigued.
"Yeah, pattern. Historical. Social. Scientific, Racial, you name it..."
"And what does this pattern reveal?"
"That people are stupid."