Since I Laid My Burden Down Read online

  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 and through the moonlight. He would run so fast beside objects so dark it felt like he was flying. White cotton against moonlight 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 ref
lections 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 on all his husbands.

  They always had sex in the back room of the bookstore. DeShawn had his own key. “I’m not 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.
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  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.