Since I Laid My Burden Down. Brontez Purnell
allowed to fuck other men in the house,” Michael explained. All over the walls were worn yellow press clippings from when DeShawn was a young dancer in the city. Michael saved every one. DeShawn would stare at pictures of himself from a decade ago and wince a little. He was certain that the boy in those pictures didn’t exist anymore. There was also the picture of Michael and his first wife in Germany, back when Michael was a teenager. DeShawn could barely recognize him. His hair was still black then and he wore a serious expression. His wife looked even sterner. DeShawn could only imagine their life together.
One time, after he had fucked Michael’s brains out, DeShawn asked, curiously not maliciously, why Michael hadn’t picked him to marry. Michael went on what sounded like a scripted rant about DeShawn being an artist and needing freedom and experience; he said love would only hold him back. “You’re my strong, independent boy.”
“I’m not as strong as you think I am,” argued DeShawn.
This particular night DeShawn walked straight to the back room, unbuttoned his peacoat, and made his way to the bed where Michael was lying, already naked, on his stomach.
The physical connection between the two was eternal, even as the emotional connection seemed shifty. Michael was still quite a specimen of a man.
DeShawn pressed his mouth on the opening of Michael’s anus and began with his tongue. He alternated this with quick bites to his butt cheeks. Michael answered by raising his hips. DeShawn licked upward to the base of Michael’s spine and then up, up, up. Still on his stomach, Michael whipped his head around to look DeShawn dead in the eye, as if to say kiss me, please. DeShawn obliged. He rubbed saliva on his dick and pressed the head into Michael’s opening. Michael’s anatomy opened up and DeShawn pumped to frenzy and completion inside of him. As they lay there afterward and napped, DeShawn said to himself, This will never change, ever. He didn’t linger on it. He knew it was the type of heartbreak that would inevitably disappear.
DeShawn left the bookstore while Michael was still sleeping. He caught the last train to the other side of the bay and walked under the streetlights some three blocks before his front door; there, something weird caught his eye. In the partition of the road, where trees were planted, was a gold figure holding on to a tree. Or rather, a figure dressed all in gold holding on to a tree for dear life. It appeared to be an older black woman in a platinum blond wig, gold lamé windbreaker with matching bottoms, and gold-plated hooker heels. What the fuck? thought DeShawn.
“HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALP!” she yelled.
DeShawn ran over as she fell from the tree, spilled into the road, and started crawling. He helped her up. In the heels, she was a good five inches taller than DeShawn’s five-foot-nine stature.
“I’m sixty-three! I’m a TRAAAAAAAAANSEXUAL, and I want to get fucked like a WOOOOOOOMAN!” she yelled. All DeShawn could think was, Get in line, bitch. She smelled like booze. She continued, “I don’t like gay boys, I like MEN. Are you a gay boy, or are you a MAN?” DeShawn paused. Until then, it had never occurred to him in all his life that he was both.
“Does it matter?”
“Help me home, baby,” said the Gold Woman. DeShawn took her by the hand and walked her the full seven blocks in the opposite direction of his house to her apartment. She fell down seven more times.
At the apartment a sketchy looking man at the door grabbed the old woman by her stomach and gave DeShawn a curious look. “Are you okay, Dorothy?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “My little boyfriend is helping me home.”
Once inside the building, she confided in DeShawn as she took her keys out of her bra. “That man is a monster! He tried to ravage me before! Who would take advantage of an old woman?!”
The older lady opened her apartment door. She had left the radio on in an attempt to deter burglars. She was old school. DeShawn looked at the two-room flat and noticed a dirty-ass kitchen and a middle room with a bed and a black-and-white TV playing an old Western. He felt like he had stepped into The Twilight Zone. Like, what station was playing a Western at this hour? He helped the woman to the bed. She undid her track jacket to reveal a gold lamé bra and nice tits. DeShawn was impressed. Where did she get a matching gold lamé bra? American Apparel? She went in for the kill.
“You a handsome gay boy. You sho’ is handsome!”
She liked him all of a sudden.
She leaned in to kiss him and DeShawn let her. I mean, I’m already here, he thought.
“Here,” she said. Wobbly, she stood and pulled down her track pants. DeShawn was expecting gold lamé panties, but was disappointed when all he saw was white cotton. But concealed in those white granny panties was one of the biggest, hardest dicks DeShawn had ever seen in his life. He was impressed that the old bitch could still get a hard-on while wasted, and at the ripe age of sixty-three. A feat DeShawn couldn’t manage at nearly half the old broad’s age.
Shit just got real, thought DeShawn.
She kept on stuttering, “You’s a handsome gay boy, you’s a handsome gay boy.” She began to play with her dick. Oh hell no, I’m not passing this shit up, NO FUCKING WAY, thought DeShawn, and began suckling on that big-ass dick like a baby piglet on a teat. The older woman seemed to be enjoying it—“You’s a handsome gay boy, you’s a handsome gay boy”—then mid–blow job she passed out, and fell completely backward onto the ground, dick still rock hard. DeShawn, being the handsome (and greedy) gay boy that he was, entertained the notion of touching the woman’s penis one last time (when would he ever get to play with a dick that big again?), but taking advantage of a passed-out, big-dicked lady was a line he decided he couldn’t cross.
Well, that happened, he thought as he locked the door behind him and went home to sleep.
Drinking at the bar near his house in Oakland, memories of DeShawn’s dead uncle had been on repeat in his head. He remembered riding in his uncle’s ’67 Dodge pickup, his uncle driving, totally fucking wasted off bourbon, with DeShawn and his two other cousins in the cab, all four gentlemen packed in like sardines. DeShawn must have been all of eight or nine.
“Y’all wanna see Uncle cut some donuts?!”
“Yes!” screamed all three little boys simultaneously.
Uncle raced the vintage pickup to a field and did just so. On the third 360-degree turn, ol’ Uncle noticeably lost control of the truck, and that heart-stop, wait-for-disaster feeling flew through little DeShawn’s body. The miscalculation proved not to be fatal, but there it was—the origin of that anxious feeling DeShawn would come to know all his life. That punched-in-the-lungs feeling of anticipation, moments before something spun out of control.
The last thing DeShawn remembered that night was getting kicked out of the bar.
In the morning, poor DeShawn woke up on the kitchen floor in front of the refrigerator, door wide open and all the evidence splayed out around him: a half-empty jar of peanut butter, a jam jar, a rice-milk container, and half a stick of unwrapped, salted, organic (delicious, delicious) butter with teeth marks in it. He was naked and there was peanut butter every-fucking where. WAS I ATTACKED LAST NIGHT?! he thought after jerking into consciousness. He faced up to it three beats of silence later; he had blacked out and was binge eating. Again.
He left the mess on the floor, showered, and arrived at work a full forty-five minutes late.
“Dude, fuck this place,” he said as he looked around the shitty barbershop. He prayed for the courage to quit and become a drug dealer. He figured that maybe if he got put in jail he could finally find a boyfriend. He was feeling optimistic that day—maybe he was still drunk—but didn’t want those positive feelings to float too high in this place. He knew feeling good was a setup, so he sat down and waited for his bitch-ass coworkers to fuck with him.
One