Since I Laid My Burden Down. Brontez Purnell
and fireflies. It looked a certain way.
That summer Jatius showed him his first porn. Jatius’s dick was the first he touched. DeShawn grabbed it and was flush with it, the way he imagined a small stroke to feel. Later that summer DeShawn watched from a tree through Jatius’s window as he had sex with T’resa Watkins. Jatius and DeShawn carried on up until the next summer, and then they would stop forever.
Edna was an overworked and overstressed single mother. One of the few women around with a college education, she had worked on the army base from the time she got pregnant with Jatius. You could imagine this woman’s head hitting the glass ceiling so hard that blood was running down her face. She was a nervous woman. DeShawn remembered sleeping over at the McClansy’s house once and Edna waking them up at 1:00 a.m. with a vicious racket. “YOU WORTHLESS BASTARDS. GET UP! GET THE FUCK UP! Y’ALL GONNA CLEAN THIS DIRTY FUCKIN’ HOUSE. YOU GONNA CLEAN THIS DIRTY FUCKING HOUSE UNTIL I GET TIRED!” DeShawn would understand later, as we always understand much later, why Jatius, despite being a teen sex god, also wore the look of a defeated man well before his expiration date.
And then, shit hit the fan.
Jatius worked as a cashier at the Piggly Wiggly. It was around the Fourth of July that Jatius was caught giving T’resa Watkins $126 worth of free meat through his checkout line. He got fired and everyone knew why. Edna came home from work early that day, and beat her son within an inch of his life. After she left the house, Jatius got her gun from her closet, went into his room, and blew away his brains.
DeShawn walked into Jatius’s room a day and a half later. He walked past John, who was in the living room staring, silent and far away, at a wall. DeShawn’s mother was among the neighborhood women consoling Ms. McClansy and cleaning the blood from the carpet. “It just wouldn’t come up,” his mother said in a tidy way as she was baking a pie for the funeral dinner.
She said one more very tidy thing.
“You don’t kill yourself over a job at Piggly Wiggly,” she spat, all glowing and prophetess-like, as she put the pie in the oven.
DeShawn, being the little ingenue he was, was still ignorant of the larger metaphors at work around him. He didn’t know the world for what it was yet—one large, conniving goddamn Piggly Wiggly.
While silently watching his mother wrap tin foil around the other baked pies, he made a mental note of her implication.
It’s okay to steal from grocery stores, but it’s not okay to die.
Arnold’s room was clean and he was buried, never to be forgotten. It was on to new heartaches now.
DeShawn saw the streetlights turning on in the city and the fog rolling over the bay and coming through his bathroom window. He stood in the mirror and buttoned the last anchor-imprinted button on his pea coat. Then—uh-oh—one gaze at the mirror lasted a second longer than it should have, followed by another, then another. Now he was lost.
The same phenomenon would happen in his youth. He would glare into the mirror and ask, Why do I look like this? until the question was on repeat and he could not leave the stare in the mirror. It was self-hypnosis. Deep reflections in the mirror, oftentimes while high, this time sober.
This particular hypnosis was filled with reflections about his self-imposed bachelorhood. There was a time, many years ago, when he held vague plans of marrying some well-behaved man, moving to the suburbs, adopting children, and calling it a day. This was before he really knew himself. There had been too many self-publicized stunts of him unabashedly expressing himself in public, not to mention all those photos of him getting fucked floating around the Internet. Any man remotely resembling husband material steered clear of him years ago. There was nothing left to do at this point but become a drag queen and own a lot of pets. DeShawn’s impending drag queen–dom loomed over his head like college loan debt. He looked even deeper into the mirror, and the current of self-hypnotism spilled further inside him. What will my drag name be? Ms. Fire? Essence Jostle? Cable Access? Precious Hyman? The possibilities were endless, and for the first time that day the future was looking creative and bright, though there were more pressing matters at hand.
It had started innocently enough. He asked himself, Who am I going to fuck tonight? and went through his mental Rolodex until two well-hung Europeans came to mind: Sven and Michael.
Now, Sven was Swedish and charming in the same way an Ikea appliance was charming: a cute, lightweight, energy-efficient, and very replaceable piece of Euro bullshit. Sven personally annihilated all notions of Europeans being intrinsically more sophisticated because of a couple thousand more years of art and culture. He exclusively listened to rap music and he only ate at McDonald’s. The first night they fucked, Sven asked, very charmingly, if DeShawn knew how to “make his ass clap like the black girls in the rap videos.” Sven then offered DeShawn a hundred dollars to demonstrate. Before he knew what was happening, DeShawn was butt naked and frantically twerking over Sven’s face, while Sven, also naked, was lying horizontally on the floor, face up, with a one-hundred-dollar bill erotically pressed between his lips. “More! More! Faster! Faster!” cried Sven. The whole time DeShawn thought, Is this really fucking happening?
But alas, Sven was back in Sweden for the summer. The other obvious choice was the German, Michael.
Michael was twenty-three years older than DeShawn and owned the anarchist bookstore in an alleyway near the train station. DeShawn was dubious as to how Michael kept the store open, particularly a bookstore selling anarchist ideas in a city where capitalism was winning more and more every day. He suspected rich parents, but never brought it up. The rule about fucking rich boys was you never, ever, under any circumstances, brought up their privilege. They hate that shit. Shut the fuck up and let them pay for dinner. He learned this lesson the hard way. And besides, Michael was generous.
“Michael, will you buy me a new record player?” asked DeShawn.
“Yes,” said Michael.
“Michael, can I have a new coat?”
“Yes.”
“Michael, can I have three hundred dollars for an art project?”
“Sure.”
DeShawn had met Michael at an antiwar art show/protest some twelve years earlier. Michael learned that DeShawn was studying dance and asked him to come to his studio. He wanted to paint him naked.
“I don’t know much about visual art,” said DeShawn, undressing in the cold studio.
“Dancers,” Michael said, giving DeShawn’s naked body the once-over, “are indeed visual artists. You need to flip your thinking.”
With that little bit DeShawn fell in love with Michael, and vice versa. They made love all night.
Michael had been married three times: once to a woman in his teen years, and twice since he and DeShawn started their thing. Michael’s third marriage was to some young man, twenty-five years old and a student at the Art Institute. It came as a crushing blow to De-Shawn’s ego. Why didn’t he ask me to marry him? Not that he necessarily wanted to be married to Michael, but it’s always nice to be asked.
DeShawn had been meeting Michael in the back room of the bookstore for ten years. One day he thought if he wasn’t careful, it could turn into another ten years of fucking some dude’s husband, and what would he have to show for it? Did he even need to have anything to show for it? DeShawn didn’t envy Michael’s new husband, this young boy who made shitty art and didn’t know his ass from a hole in the wall, this young man who had married an aging, promiscuous anarchist. Heaven help that boy, thought DeShawn. There had been so many men for him to cry over; there wasn’t really a reason for Michael to be one of them. He had Michael’s love, his attention, his generosity. And so DeShawn continued to help the aging anarchist cheat