Since I Laid My Burden Down. Brontez Purnell
any of the tragic boys he loved would mean judging himself. It already seemed exhausting. That said, he wanted to channel the dead boy’s feelings, the adrenaline pumping through him. What had he felt like when he walked in front of that car? The second he moved forward, had he regretted it? Or did he feel some form of relief?
People tend to navigate from experience. DeShawn himself had never thought of suicide, but he could understand ennui, that feeling of life as perpetual and epic but mostly for no big reason. On those really hard days DeShawn felt like a single sperm swimming around in some gay dude’s butthole, searching frantically for an egg that just wasn’t there. But suicide? Never. Homicide? Yes. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck yes, he thought. The thought of killing some rude, deserving asshole was so orgasmic it gave him a boner. But, of course, this was just a thought. Killing someone felt like a really complicated math equation. There were time variables, x’s and y’s, and where would you dispose of a body these days? A killer had to be self-sufficient and clean up his tracks. A suicide victim leaves a mess for someone else to clean up. He wondered if the EMT worker who cleaned Arnold’s body from the highway had felt a certain way about it, or if he just saw a job as a job. It’s surely never pleasant to see a body obliterated six ways to Sunday, but after the hundredth time, certainly something had to change. As a rule, as time passes all trauma has the potential to cool off in one’s mind.
Under a pile of exhausted art supplies, DeShawn found Arnold’s Nirvana shirt. It smelled like hell and sparked more memories than he cared for. Besides being one of Arnold’s favorite bands and one of his favorite shirts, there was the historical baggage loading it down. DeShawn remembered April 4, 1994. He was in sixth grade. He remembered a cold and windy pre-spring day, and his hatred of the school bus that dropped him off at home. He remembered turning on MTV and fucking losing it. Kurt Loder was on the screen; Kurt Cobain had killed himself. Shot himself right in the head.
In seventh grade, DeShawn ditched Sunday school and Bible study and started running with his middle school’s premiere group of headbanger girls, Margret Lopez, Amelia Andrews, R’ella Bollers, and one girl whose name he couldn’t remember. A year to the date of Kurt’s death the crew held a Satanic séance under the stairs by the drama room—a very, very failed effort to raise the spirit of Kurt Cobain. DeShawn didn’t care about the séance being not so successful; he was just happy that these girls had invited him in and stamped his cool card. They wore all black, smoked weed, were sort of sexually active (Margret was rumored to have been fingered the summer before), and they practiced Satanism. How fucking cool was that?
It was a rather poor séance. The coven ducked under the stairwell in as much of a circle as the space would allow. Margret lit a black candle and laid a picture of Kurt on the ground. Everyone (except DeShawn) was wearing black lipstick. They all held hands and believed together.
It became apparent to DeShawn (after two minutes) that he had no fucking clue as to what “sign” they were waiting for to tell them that Cobain had indeed intercepted their message in the spiritual realm. All he knew was that after another minute of believing, the bell rang and they were tardy to class and certainly facing detention.
They had left the stairwell feeling defeated. Why hadn’t Kurt answered them?
Now, in all small towns people talk. One of DeShawn’s bitch-ass Christian cousins ratted to his mom that he was hanging out with white girls who worshipped Satan. His mother, furious per usual, showed up to his room that night with a belt, foaming at the mouth. “ARE YOU A HEADBANGER?! DO YOU BE AT SCHOOL BANGING YOUR HEAD?!” She had said headbanger with the salty peculiarity of a woman saying, with active disdain, a word she never knew existed. She beat his ass, took all his Nirvana records, and left to spend the night at her boyfriend’s house.
The little hero inside DeShawn stood post–ass beating, all rage, his body covered in red welts. He was trying hard to catch his breath. “MY MOM IS SUUUUUUUUCH A BITCH!” In one statement, a whole new life began. In a plot twist that he would figure out when he was older, DeShawn experienced an epiphany. He didn’t like Nirvana because he knew what the fuck Kurt was talking about. He liked Nirvana because it pissed off his bitch-ass mom. Hell, hell, rock and roll. The devil’s music was still doing its job, still prompting kids to leave a nowhere life. The night of getting his ass beat by his mom would crescendo into a body of work, community, purpose.
Now those kinky banger girls from middle school were posting pictures of kids on the computer screen, a view into their normal lives. They lived in places like Texas and Kansas. They had houses now, and families. DeShawn looked up and all he knew were musicians. Every boy he had ever loved had been either a musician or a drug addict. Usually both. It was a yucky realization. But it kept to certain themes in his life, of stubbornness, of going longer, harder, of always being the last to leave the party.
“I want off this ride,” he said, really, really meaning it this time.
He didn’t want to be at this party by himself. He looked at the whirling vortex of the room. He felt like someone’s mom, minus the tits and the patience. He didn’t know whom to blame for the boy’s death—maybe nineties MTV? DeShawn couldn’t pinpoint exactly who it was that sold him and his buddies the idea that they were all gonna do a bunch of drugs and be rock stars one day. Selling this notion was like selling cigarettes to kids. I guess they sell kids cigarettes too, he reasoned.
Another angle was that Arnold and DeShawn had two different parental realities. Arnold’s parents were too high and checked out to check in with him, whereas DeShawn’s main parent, his at-times single mom, could be humorless and perma-sober—the type where a child might wish a parent would develop a drug habit to calm them the fuck down—but she checked in. All history aside, he still didn’t fully understand why Arnold was dead and he was still standing.
Within three days he finished cleaning the room and saying goodbye to Arnold. Arnold was DeShawn’s second lover to die, maybe not the last. He was still young.
Men become pieces of shit either because they’ve had their ass beat too much or because they’ve never had their ass beat a day in their life. Prime example was DeShawn’s first “boyfriend,” Jatius McClansy. Jatius had his ass beat every day of his life and that’s what killed him.
John McClansy was Jatius’s younger brother and DeShawn’s archnemesis. They played in the cotton field behind his boyhood house, and as far as John was concerned, it was always open season on DeShawn’s ass. He would hurtle dirt clods at his head and call him “faggot” so much that DeShawn started to believe he indeed was one. Sometimes when John beat him up, both boys’ mothers would come out to stop the commotion. DeShawn didn’t understand it at the time, but behind all this animus was competition, plain and simple. John hated the way his older brother favored DeShawn. Whenever the neighborhood boys played ball, Jatius would stop to help DeShawn with his throw. He’d take him on walks in the woods, or help him when his bike had a flat. In a neighborhood where dads were scarce—DeShawn’s own mom had been divorced from his stepdad about two years—male attention was a commodity, and DeShawn would sense this competition well into his adult gay life.
Jatius McClansy was what you would call a specimen. By the age of fifteen he looked like a right grown man—beard, muscles, chest hair, a towering six-foot-one frame, and a big and obvious bulge in his pants where a big and obvious bulge should be. Edna McClansy had quite a time keeping all the neighborhood single moms off her handsome son.
So it happened one summer, when DeShawn was eleven, that Jatius touched him in a way an older boy shouldn’t touch a younger one. This excited DeShawn something crazy, but confused him too. Either way, he figured he didn’t mind and that he wanted more. The McClansys lived behind DeShawn’s backyard and up the cotton field. His mom would leave for her boyfriend’s house, and DeShawn would leave his baby brother sleeping in his crib and go see Jatius. He would run up the cotton field