Since I Laid My Burden Down Page 10
They were all such a troubled goddamn bunch. Their love would have quite possibly destroyed DeShawn, and to be honest the inverse could just as well have been true. Maybe I didn’t lose anything, he thought. Maybe I broke even.
He felt a way he hadn’t felt in a long, long time. He felt new.
He knew it was time to go back to California.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
DeShawn had been back in California for about two months. It was a very warm February—all around Oakland people were wearing shorts and carrying on like it was summertime.
DeShawn sat on a bench near the tidal lagoon of Lake Merritt and saw the joggers and baby carriages pass by, and sea gulls dropping the clams from midair to break the shells and feast. He had missed California with all his heart and was glad to be back home.
He had talked to his mother earlier that day. Church service had been canceled and most of the Tennessee Valley was covered by a blizzard—three feet of snow and climbing. He could picture the serenity of it all—beautiful and deadly looking.
He remembered kissing his mom goodbye as he walked to the plane terminal, where he blurted out of nowhere, “Mom, do you think I’m a whore?” She shook her head silently, kissed him, and gave him the redeeming caress of a mother’s hug. “I want you to go back to California and know your own peace,” she said. They’d talked every day since.
It had been about a year since his father’s death and two years since Arnold’s and DeShawn’s uncle’s. He could still feel the trauma in his body—the way it took extra coaxing to leave the bed in the morning—but these things were becoming fainter noises in the background. Would their slight static ever turn into silence? There was a hope.
DeShawn had called Michael the day before to catch up. He had divorced the younger art student. The whole thing had not even lasted a year, but Michael was on to the next, some other man DeShawn’s age. Michael ended the phone call asking if DeShawn wanted to make love later in the week. He declined and decided never to call Michael ever again, but also not to look back in anger. He simply never looked back. It was devastating.
The day’s errands flowed steadily. He looked at his watch and saw he had enough time to make it to the grocery store, acupuncture, and then his shrink.
He caught the eyes of all the bachelors wandering around buying organic whatnots, and looked in his own basket and saw that he, too, was part of the problem; there seemed to be nothing to do but shop. He went to the grocery store every day, like his version of what he was told European village life was like. DeShawn had been fucked by Sven again three days before and again looked at the man’s floor covered in discarded fast food bags and burrito wrappers. DeShawn finally stopped judging Sven long enough to appreciate him for being a consistent fuck buddy—a measure of good character in its own right. He thought about it while they held each other after sex. It was the first time that DeShawn had had sex in a long time where it didn’t feel like something was missing, like he was learning a gradual acceptance, though of what he wasn’t quite sure.
He left the grocery with sixty-three-dollars worth of desserts. He had been eating a lot of desserts. It felt good.
DeShawn trotted down the sidewalk and into the sliding-scale acupuncture clinic. When he looked at his body all prodded with needles all he could think of was whichever saint it was that had all the daggers piercing them, and how he had to hold the position. He quickly moved to other metaphors; he didn’t want to think about religion for a long, long time.
DeShawn made his way to the shrink. He sat in the lobby looking at all the other people in the waiting room and wondering what the fuck was bugging them. He seemed, for a second, invested in thinking about the world of problems outside himself. He came back to himself as his name was called into the office.
With that little bit he breathed in, let go, and propelled his soul and flesh forward; none of the worry seemed that important anymore.
When he left, he called his mother from a pay phone, just to feel nostalgic.
“Mama, I think I just had a major breakthrough,” he said.
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRONTEZ PURNELL is author of Since I Laid My Burden Down, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger, and the zine Fag School, frontman for his band the Younger Lovers, and founder of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He lives in Oakland, California.
ALSO BY FEMINIST PRESS
JOHNNY WOULD YOU LOVE ME IF MY DICK WERE BIGGER
Brontez Purnell
A dirty cult-classic put out in a small batch by an underground publisher (Rudos and Rubes) in 2015, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger recounts the life of an artist and “old school homosexual” who bears a big resemblance to author Brontez Purnell. Our hero doesn’t trust the new breed of fags taking over San Francisco, though. They wear bicycle helmets, seat belts, and condoms. Meanwhile, he sabotages his relationships, hallucinating affection while cruising in late night parks, bath-houses, and other nooks and crannies of a newly-conservative, ruined city.
BRONTEZ PURNELL is author of Since I Laid My Burden Down, Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger, and the zine Fag School, frontman for his band the Younger Lovers, and founder of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. He lives in Oakland, California.
BLACK WAVE
Michelle Tea
It’s 1999—and Michelle’s world is ending. Desperate to quell her addiction to drugs, disastrous romance, and nineties San Francisco, Michelle heads south for LA. But soon it’s officially announced that the world will end in one year, and life in the sprawling metropolis becomes increasingly weird.
While living in an abandoned bookstore, dating Matt Dillon, and keeping an eye on the encroaching apocalypse, Michelle begins a new novel, a sprawling and meta-textual exploration to complement her promises of maturity and responsibility. But as she tries to make queer love and art without succumbing to self-destructive vice, the boundaries between storytelling and everyday living begin to blur, and Michelle wonders how much she’ll have to compromise her artistic process if she’s going to properly ride out doomsday.
MICHELLE TEA is the author of numerous books, including Rent Girl, Valencia, and How to Grow Up. She is the creator of the Sister Spit all-girl open mic and 1997-1999 national tour. In 2003, Michelle founded RADAR Productions, a literary non-profit that oversees queer-centric projects.
BEIJING COMRADES
Bei Tong | Translated by Scott E. Myers
When Handong, a ruthless and wealthy businessman, is introduced to Lan Yu, a naïve, working-class architectural student—the attraction is all consuming.
Arrogant and privileged, Handong is unsettled by this desire, while Lan Yu quietly submits. Despite divergent lives, the two men spend their nights together, establishing a deep connection. When loyalties are tested, Handong is left questioning his secrets, his choices, and his very identity.
Beijing Comrades is the story of a tumultuous love affair set against the sociopolitical unrest of late-eighties China. Due to its depiction of gay sexuality and its critique of the totalitarian government, it was originally published anonymously on an underground gay website within mainland China. This riveting and heartbreaking novel, circulated throughout China in 1998, quickly developed a cult following, and remains a central work of queer literature from the People’s Republic of China. This is the first English-language translation of Beijing Comrades
BEI TONG is the anonymous author of Beijing Comrades. The pseudonymous author, whose real-world identity has been a subject of debate since the story was first published on a gay Chinese website over a decade ago, is known variously as Beijing Comrade, Beijing Tongzhi, Xiao He, and Miss Wang.
SCOTT E. MYERS is a translator of Chinese who focuses on contemporary queer fiction from the PRC. He holds a BA in philosophy from Hampshire College and master’s degrees in Comparative Literature from New York University, in Chinese Translation from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and i
n East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. A former union organizer with experience in China’s workers’ rights movement, his translation of the diary of a retail worker in China appears in the book Walmart in China (ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 2011). Recently, he has been translating the work of avant-garde poet and novelist Mu Cao. His translations of Mu’s poems have appeared in Epiphany journal (Winter 2014), and he is currently translating Mu’s 2003 novel Outcast. Originally from California, he is a Mandarin teacher at a high school in Denver, Colorado.
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