Since I Laid My Burden Down Read online

  “This is the book you fall asleep reading and wake up excited to get back to. A Cult Masterpiece with so many memorable characters and phrases you’ll want to grab strangers and read paragraphs to them.”

  —KATHLEEN HANNA

  “I have always admired Brontez Purnell’s writing, and this novel is his greatest achievement yet. Purnell is never careful, never evasive. He hits you with honesty, passion, painful humor and never stops.”

  —MIKE ALBO

  “Brontez Purnell is foul-mouthed and evil. Be warned: this book will make you cackle out loud like you’ve got the Devil inside you then it will break your heart. Be careful where you read it. BUT DO READ IT.”

  —JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND

  “With epic detail and crude truth, Brontez Purnell reminds us that the lessons of survival and love are learned through life’s most fucked-up circumstances. Brontez has written a story that helps us laugh, grieve, and breathe.

  —CRISTY C. ROAD

  “Since I Laid My Burden Down has a fearless (sometimes reckless) humor as Brontez Purnell interrogates what it means to be black, male, queer; a son, an uncle, a lover; Southern, punk, and human. An emotional tightrope walk of a book and an important American story rarely, if ever, told.”

  —MICHELLE TEA

  Published in 2017 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Brontez Purnell

  All rights reserved.

  This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing June 2017

  Cover and text design by Drew Stevens

  Cover photo: Untitled #301, from the series The Parts by Evie Leder, © 2016; courtesy of the artist.

  * * *

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Purnell, Brontez, author.

  Title: Since I laid my burden down / by Brontez Purnell.

  Description: New York: Feminist Press, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016047025 (print) | LCCN 2016054862 (ebook) | ISBN 9781558614321 (Ebook All)

  Subjects: LCSH: African American men—Fiction. | Self-realization—Fiction. | Gay men—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / African American / General. | FICTION / Gay. | FICTION / Family Life.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.U785 S56 2017 (print) | LCC PS3616.U785 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047025

  CONTENTS

  PRAISE PAGE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS

  ABOUT FEMINIST PRESS

  PROLOGUE

  Hate is a strong word, but sometimes it’s not a strong enough word. DeShawn hated this.

  He knew what had brought him back to Alabama. It was all that drinking, drugging, and fucking all those fucking worthless men. It was not any one catastrophe in particular, but all his failures in general. His uncle’s death was just happenstance.

  DeShawn got the call while in bed, in California: Your uncle is dead. The sentence punched him in the stomach, hard. He stayed in bed for two days, got up, packed, got on a plane, landed in Nashville, and drove an hour straight to the church. It was tucked deep in the woods, through the cotton fields, and sat on a grassy hill. The creek where he had been baptized almost thirty years earlier ran at the bottom of the hill. He remembered the cold, dirty water, and the preacher with one leg dunking him underwater like a little rag doll.

  DeShawn peeked into the church he grew up in, and was shocked by how much hadn’t changed. Maybe it was even moving backward. He entered and was handed a fan by the ushers, the same kind he was handed some thirty years ago as a little boy. It had a wooden handle with a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. or Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington. He couldn’t believe they were still using these fans, which were a symbolic gesture, as they really didn’t protect one from the oppressive humidity. Plus, the church had central cooling. As a child in the late eighties, a time before the church had an air conditioner or even a PA system, they only had the fans in the subtropical summer heat. That heat was a nuisance. As a child he would sit on the first pew and look back at the sea of black faces, all frantically fanning.

  Before the coming of the PA system, the church choir’s prerequisite was not that one could actually sing, but that one could project their voice to the back of the church. For this reason, DeShawn had led many songs in the children’s choir. He couldn’t carry a tune to save his life, but he could project. These things become metaphors for life if you’re not careful. DeShawn learned it well; projection of voice was everything—be it literal or on paper—as was judicious use of its divine opposite, silence.

  DeShawn sat some twenty feet from his uncle’s body and thought about how all open-casket funerals are a son of a bitch. DeShawn told his mother, should anything happen, he wanted to be cremated. “Where do you want your ashes thrown?” asked his mother. “IN THE EYES OF MY ENEMIES!”

  There had been this hysterical disease in his family’s bloodline. Growing up, DeShawn watched his granddad and uncle behave like unchecked crazy people. The two men were often drunk, overly emotional, usually crying, exceptionally hysterical, and easily excitable. He remembered that his uncle and granddad had come to blows once when Uncle was eighteen because Granddad wouldn’t let him have the puppy he wanted. All hell broke loose, people took sides, and it ended in a fistfight, a bloody nose, and a gun being pulled. Some children were more susceptible to the hysteria than others. DeShawn grew up and caught the family bug like a motherfucker. Sitting in the church with his baby nephew on his lap, DeShawn wondered if he was going to be a stark raving lunatic too. Only time would tell. He cried and held the baby closer.

  Uncle was goddamn handsome as all hell, and hypermasculine. Little DeShawn would wait for him on the porch to get home from high school. He drove a green ’67 Dodge pickup truck. As a little boy, DeShawn would peek at him in the bathroom trying to see him naked. That’s what a man is. Now Uncle really was dead. He was only forty. He’d had cancer since he was thirty-two, but refused to quit smoking. He couldn’t be bothered, really.

  The congregation began to rustle in preparation for Sister Pearl. Sister Pearl had been the choir headmistress for forever and a day. She claimed many times that she lost her voice singing for the devil. Sometime in her twenties she decided she wanted to sing the dirty blues, like Aretha Franklin. She quit the church and started singing along the Chitlin Circuit in Chattanooga, Nashville, Louisville, and on u
p to Chicago. One day, she said, the Lord took her voice away, and that’s when she returned to church. Even as a boy, DeShawn modeled his singing voice after Sister Pearl’s. It wasn’t pretty—it was real. It sounded scratched, beaten, and pulsing with conviction, like she was trying to expel something. DeShawn didn’t care much for her “devil” explanation; like any unrepentant prodigal son, he held that running away with the devil was highly underrated. Sister Pearl’s voice lifted, and she sang “Since I Laid My Burden Down,” the same song she’d sung at his baptism when he was five.

  As the processional to the graveyard began, DeShawn’s Auntie Margret got the spirit in her something fierce. She fell to the ground and started screaming, grabbed the casket and wouldn’t let it go. Auntie set off the spark and everyone in the goddamn church lost it; it was a symphony of screams and hollers. Somehow, they made it to the graveyard. DeShawn saw the grave marked JATIUS MCCLANSY and a chill ran though him. But Jatius was a memory for later. He looked away, down the hill to the creek. His baptism was the memory for right now.

  DeShawn remembered being five and standing on the steps of the church in a matching white baptism gown and headwrap. All around him the adults were wearing white too. His grandmother kissed his head, and they made the procession down the hill to the creek. Some were holding lit white candles. Two of his girl cousins held his hands, the adults around him holding candles leading him on down to the creek and his uncle, who was chasing away any snakes or snapping turtles that might be lingering. The preacher at the time had lost his right leg to diabetes and had to be helped into the water. He recalled a floating feeling as he was brought midway into the creek to meet his uncles, who were deacons in the church, and the one-legged preacher. “This child has believed with his heart and confessed with his mouth,” said the preacher as he covered DeShawn’s face and pushed him under the creek water; it was cold as hell. DeShawn stood there, submerged, a feeling he could in no way explain.

  Up on the bank, Sister Pearl let out a song.

  Burden down, Lord.

  Burden down.

  People don’t treat me like they used too since I laid my burden down.

  Every round goes higher and higher . . .

  DeShawn’s little soul popped right back up out of the water, feeling cold and wet and not as new as he thought it would.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Before DeShawn left for Alabama and before his uncle’s death, others had gone. For instance, Arnold was dead. Dead, dead, dead as Latin. He sunk with the Titanic. He flew the coop. That monkey had gone to heaven. It seemed that all the wild men around him were dying faster than he could keep track. Arnold was not the first, but he was of note.

  DeShawn received the message on the morning train, on the way to classes in Oakland, and he hopped on the next train back to nowhere. There was nowhere to mourn the dead boy. Arnold had not lived in any one place for long, and had pulled so much shit that no one really loved him that much anymore. Or maybe they were waiting to love him again after he climbed out of the hole he had dug himself. Like he would appear out of thin air, a magician’s assistant with a tiara and a sash that said “Healed” or something. The dead boy died before completing that magic trick. He would be that type of memory: one to forget. Three days of crying ensued and then a phone call. Arnold’s final roommate called DeShawn and asked very sweetly if he would clean the dead boy’s room. DeShawn said yes.

  This would be his last favor to Arnold. He had loved Arnold. No one knew they were fucking, and from outward appearances it probably seemed like a casual camaraderie. Fucked-up boy loves even more fucked-up boy. It was rainy, and DeShawn showed up with supplies to clean the dead boy’s room.

  There were old clothes, new needles, crack pipes, Lorca poetry, and books by Bukowski. The dead boy was gentle-featured and very, very handsome. He had tried to get clean this last time, couldn’t, and then stepped in front of a car.

  DeShawn’s mind shifted to his faraway youth, a certain redneck boss with permed and teased hair, smoking and sharing her thoughts on suicide. She said, “If you are brave enough to jump off a building or shoot yourself in the head then you are BRAVE. ENOUGH. TO. LIVE.”

  He took it as truth because an adult had said it. And he had believed it, up until the point that he knew someone who stepped in front of a car. Up until the point he stepped in front of that car, Arnold had not been a brave person. He was fatigued, and he had made a choice. DeShawn stood over an unopened jigsaw puzzle. He wondered what Arnold felt the moment that car struck him. Had he regretted it? DeShawn believed in energy, and he believed in the other side. He lit candles, paid respect to the eight corners, and prayed—that is, hoped—that the gentle, handsome departed boy was resting in power. He asked whatever god was listening to hear him on this. He set up Arnold’s altar—a white candle and a glass of water—on the highest point in his room.

  There were, of course, people around town who liked to talk. They called the handsome dead boy a junkie, and after that they called him a thief. This was true. “He was also a loved child of God,” offered Arnold’s mother. Maybe this was also true.

  Away from the talkers and gossipers was Arnold and DeShawn’s criminally minded and largely harmless inner circle. It is a beautiful thing to surround oneself with people who have pulled too much sketchy shit to ever judge anyone. The type of people you could fuck over, as long as you prove it wasn’t anything personal. Everything around Arnold went missing—rent money, LPs, stamp collections. Naturally, there was some resentment. But then again, everyone saw in Arnold a brother who was in deep pain. Which made his trespasses not forgettable, but forgivable. Somewhere, Arnold had his wings.

  But there was still the matter of cleaning the room. DeShawn knew he couldn’t clean it all at once. It would take days, and that was fine. There wasn’t the dead boy’s laughter to hear on the phone anymore. There wouldn’t be his physical presence in the room, by the window strumming a guitar or smoking, or standing naked, with the most beautiful erection you could imagine. The place where Arnold’s life made a rude exit was now a black hole, a deterioration in the film loop. This void meant there was time. Cleaning up a mess takes time. DeShawn knew that in order to clean up the dead boy’s room, like, to really clean it, he would have to put on the armor of detachment. Detachment was a beautiful thing. You needed detachment to be nonjudgmental. He didn’t want to say that Arnold was a selfish piece of shit for dying. He wanted to feel noble about it. He stayed neutral and nonjudgmental as a strategy to keep moving, a bargaining tool to keep the darker thoughts at bay. But people make judgments. It’s the first thing people do.

  DeShawn had loved about a hundred tragic motherfuckers, and this boy was no exception. Loving this type of man meant not having opinions, judgments, or expectations. It meant being practiced in just letting things “be.” DeShawn internalized all of the boys, their fears, hopes, and mistakes. He studied them so hard he didn’t see them anymore, he only saw himself. This was either a beautiful thing or the same mistake all deep empaths make. Judging 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.