On Judgment Day when I stand before the Lord and he asks me what I regret most about my life, I will tell him, “Not meeting Toni Braxton.”
I can almost see the eternal cynic, Ben, rolling his eyes. But that’s the truth. That’s my impending destiny, not meeting Toni, and it hurts like a hernia.
I’m new in my thirties and as expected there have been many women in my life. Many. There was Vivica Fox, Mariah Carey, Garcelle Beauvais (of the Jamie Foxx show), Rosario Dawson, Halle Berry (predictably), Drew Barrymore, Gabrielle Union, Sanaa Lathan, Beyonce, Monica Belluci, Catherine Zeta Jones, Eve Mendez, Rosario Dawson, J. Lopez…many many hot women that gave me the hibbie jibbies. They came into my life at different times and I obsessed about them with different intensity. But I moved on and I forgot about them. Sort of. And they became just names. But Toni? My goodness, Toni won’t go away. Toni is a constant. Toni is the lighthouse that has always lit the landscape onto which women are defined. And here I exorcise not only to a great artist but to a woman with ageless beauty.
It starts in the 90’s and for me the 90’s was a musical
era. And music was important then because it offered a soundtrack to my very disturbing teenage. Note, I say disturbing, not disturbed with a good reason. A whole bunch of us were growing into men and when you start to edge into manhood you notice one thing; women; beautiful but achingly inaccessible. Women for young men that age, become a fascination, a relentless fantasy. Our sexualities although underdeveloped, were restless and persistently knocking at our gonads. We were virgins and what disgusted me more than my virginity was homework.
Stage left, enter Toni.
The year is 1993. I can’t remember the song, maybe it was Breath Again or Unbreak My heart (my God, what kind of a moron would break Toni’s heart?), but I remember catching my breath, not because I was a horny teenager but because she was a pure personification of feminine perfection. She was a unicorn. She was elegant and so bloody desirable. And to top this all, she had that deep throated voice, a voice that God uses while addressing angel Gabrielle. I believe they called it contralto vocal range, which is the deepest female classical singing voice. If Toni stood on a mountain and asked Osama to come out of his cave, he would, and he would even shave his ghastly beard for Toni.
And for that disturbing period of the early nineties I didn’t nurse any urge to write no stupid letter to some chick in high school, addressing it as a “zoom to” so that she could read it in bed under a burning candle after lights off. Nor did I harbor any intention of walking some starry-eyed girl to see 89kgs pigs down at our school farm during some school inning. They all seemed mundane, oh the tedium of it all. The tedium of teenage seduction.
I wanted Toni, and not just wanting to sit and hear her sing, but to grab her, rip off her clothes and then ravage her with that raw sexual anger that only teenagers posses. But that would have been a waste because really there is only so much a 16yr old can do to a woman, especially a woman like Toni. At 16yrs the landscape of a woman’s body is alien and strange, a landscape confusing even to herself. In hindsight I realize that the sexual exploration would have been a grave insult to Toni and even a greater embarrassment to me. Hell a woman’s body is still a Rubik’s cube now as it were, throw in Toni’s body and you are at sea without a prayer. But even though I might have found Nomenclature dull in the biology class there was never a doubt that within Toni lived a sacred crypt of desire.
My crush had officially begun.
Gents, look at that picture and lie to yourself that your chic is hotter than Toni. Come on, go ahead, lie to yourself. Lie to yourself that you don’t feel something; a stir, a breath caught sharply in your throat, a gasp…anything mate, anything that acknowledges this wonder. And I want to ask a question that shouldn’t be construed as disrespectful or taunting, to one of my readers here; Gay Nairobi Man. Tell me mate, tell me what you feel when you look at this picture. Tell me that you don’t detect something unworldly about this picture. Tell me that you look at Toni and you could as well be looking at a potted flower. Please go ahead and break my heart because I have always thought that Toni transcends all sexualities. In fact I honestly believe that that Toni can easily be the cure for erectly dysfunction. Hell I bet a few straight chicks are looking at this picture of Toni and thinking, “hmm..!” Yes, Red Velvet, I’m talking to you.
But this picture is not entirely sexual, it’s just sensual. There are women who are sexual and then there are women who are sensual. Women who are sexual are those who are prone to suggestively grandiose expressions like lick their lips or hurl their cleavages in your face under the pretense of showing you how Google analytics work. But women who are sensual are not even aware that they are sensual, they could be doing something as mundane as stirring their coffee and you instantly want to be that coffee. Now you see the irony; women who are sexual want to have sex with you, while women who are sensual make you want to have sex with them. Enough of that banter already, back to that picture above; if Foxxy Brown posed the same way, it would be sexual, pornographic even. But this is Toni; Toni makes nudity classy without being tatty. You can tell from the look on her face that she isn’t asking you to jump her bones; she is asking you to check your boner. To tame the excesses of your loins. Sit, boy.
For the duration of high school my life was marked by one large poster of Toni in my bedroom. It cost me 100 bob – one of the best things I bought in my teenage, of course not counting my first ever contraceptive…which I didn’t use. Toni was the avatar of sexuality in my childhood, a pilgrimage that always ended in hopeless awe. I wasn’t necessarily mad about her music, but I loved the fact that those beautiful ballads came from her, that they came from within her. And those times, the teenage period were tumultuous times, times when we only kissed women in our dreams, times when we got the women who said yes to us and not the women we wanted or desired (choice was a luxury) and during these trying and confusing times Toni turned a whole bunch of us into wankers. Because really, that was the reality of teenage, that was the only self expression that expelled the disturbing sexual energy that women like Toni roused in us. We knew little else but that language and for the period that it lasted (or is it lusted?) Toni was the sail that guided our boats of sexualities in those very choppy waters of sex education.
High school ended with a bang. A new chapter awaited us, new possibilities stemmed from a more informed sexuality. Sex stopped being about nibbling a woman’s ears. We were born anew. Toni continued singing. And more beauties came about, beauties who sang better, danced better and had better bums…but Toni stayed, unrivaled, graceful and all still visible. Toni became bankrupt. But still she remained Toni, no weight added, her skin still shone like raw bronze and her face, that pouty look, still tagged at heartstrings. In 2008 she went under the surgeon’s scalpel; benign breast tumor. That was two years ago and if you look at her picture now, you will see the same Toni, only more rounded in her womanhood. Only sexier. Old age agrees with her. Now she is besieged with bankruptcy, I don’t care.
All of the self confessed shrinks who read this blog will be quick to hang a tag on this piece; obsession, they will conclude. Or perhaps a teenage fantasy gone overboard. Well, nothing could be further from the truth, and the truth, if you really want to know, is that I just like Toni’s ass. And so should you, damn it!