100 Boyfriends Read online

  One time after I blew him he lit a cigarette and said, “You are not like the other boys—you like to stay with Daddy.” He was right.

  One weekend he took me on a hike. On the trail he pounced and ripped my pants and underwear down. He took me in the middle of the hiking trail and I felt embarrassed, like someone would walk along the trail and see.

  But I couldn’t say no to him. It excited me to get fucked on a trail with nature. It was like I was this special thing. I knew in the long run it would not last.

  I saw him in public one day walking with two young men close to my age. I had a feeling they were his sons. As I inched closer to them on the sidewalk his eyes met mine and he shook his head at me, as if to say, “No—not here, not now.” I wanted to be hurt but the fact was that that man was a stranger and not my real father. I would soon know all the ways in which men were not to be depended on. I walked away that day.

  The years crept by and so did we—his dick stopped working and I grew from hooker to waiter to college graduate. I didn’t really need to fuck for money anymore and I left it to the young boys.

  I remember the last time he saw me and how shocked he was that my hair was beginning to gray. We lost touch, of course, but whenever I think of him I am always reminded of how pretty I am.

  INHERITED WINTER COAT

  MY FATHER KILLED A MAN ONCE. It was an accident.

  He was driving a train between Tennessee and Alabama and saw a young man stand on the tracks and freeze in place—he wanted to commit suicide, it seemed.

  My father said he screamed and screamed, but it takes a full two miles to stop a train. He saw the boy explode on impact, torso torn from limbs. He also said that he saw the boy’s eyes before the train hit him—that was the part he could never forget, the part he still saw even when he closed his own eyes.

  I was having a similar feeling of internal combustion, albeit a less violent one; I was hungover and riding in a car along the Tennessee and Alabama state line and saw a train speeding alongside for a stretch and again thought about my father, who was now gone himself. He had died unexpectedly months before and I was still in mourning—sometimes the pain would dry up suddenly, and sometimes it would fall down all around me like rain. I was currently in a dry period.

  I was riding down to my grandmother’s house to rescue a peculiar inheritance: some guns of my father’s, and some of his winter coats.

  Driving the car was the man I loved. He decided to go with me—he wanted to be there for no other reason than to be a shoulder to lean on. He said he knew there would be tears.

  I had forgotten about the Appalachian foothills, the rolling blankets of trees and hills that covered the landscape with green, gold, auburn, or white, depending on the season. I’d been in California too long and forgotten about seasons, these dramatic stages—oppressive humid summers, sudden blizzards in the winter, flash floods or tornadoes. I had no internal sense of season anymore and had as of late been ignoring my own personal seasons. My life in the California sunshine was coming to an end—I felt it. I sat quietly, often, and waited for instinct to guide me to the next thing, whatever it was.

  I forgot how the mountains here bled water. Whole jutting waterfalls just shooting out of the rocks like a shower hose. I was having my own eruption of emotion.

  My lover was driving. The night before, I held him close in bed and was beside him and beside myself. Why did this feel so good? My sex life was absurd. Typically I crawled through bathhouses and felt swept aside; the sex with him wasn’t lustful or “manly” or full of unspoken rage. It was this thing that I hadn’t had in a long time. It was closer to comfort. Like, I really was right there next to him—I was THERE. Is this what love felt like?

  Back to our mission. My father had a bunker on my grandma’s land in southern Alabama. A collection of mod-era vintage winter coats and a collection of antique rifles, one with the name “Jody” engraved on it. The name of my great-great-grandfather. We were going to go to my grandma’s land, pick up the coats and rifles, go down to New Orleans for two days, and come back up to lover boy’s house in Tennessee. I would fly back to California from there. I figured if we were smuggling guns across that many state lines I should let a white boy drive—they’re good like that.

  I remembered my father—he was an OG. His coat collection was one of his prized achievements; even I as his only son could not outrank it. I asked once when I was a boy, “Die-dee”—as I pronounced his name—“can I have your coat?” He was wearing this tan-and-green houndstooth number with wooden buttons and a large collar on it; it was long, almost to his knees. His older brother had been a mod and played in soul bands in the seventies—he had stolen his style from him.

  “You can’t fit in Dad’s coat yet, son. You can have it when I die.” I couldn’t have been more than eight when he said it. He said it in a way where I knew he never intended to die. I thought about this memory as we pulled into a rest stop off the highway, and I almost cried but caught myself.

  “Hey, baby—can we stop at Popeyes?”

  “Yes, sir,” said my handsome driver.

  I had done this drive to my grandma’s all through my youth. My father would drive four hours north to get me for Christmas and summer break, and I would sit and follow the roadway markers with my eyes and just feel content. Lover boy and I stopped in Birmingham, where we found a Popeyes, and, another hour and a half south, we found ourselves close.

  The way to my grandma’s was the same as I remembered. It was all Gulf Coastal Plain Spanish moss, two-lane highways, dirt roads, and Reconstruction-era decay. Everything—even the sparse houses that were obviously lived-in—all seemed eerily vacant. I was vacant.

  My grandmother was from Gee’s Bend; at some point in history a bunch of super scared white people burned a ferry so Black people couldn’t travel to vote there. This is as much as I remembered of what my family had told me. My boyfriend was white as fuck, and he was probably (besides insurance salesmen) one of only a dozen or so white men who had set foot in this stretch of land in twenty years.

  There were so many abandoned churches. We parked and explored one a mile before my grandma’s house. It was dilapidated. I remembered my father driving me to my grandma’s house on the dirt roads of Wilcox County, where there were always cars parked on Sundays. We went in. The pews were stripped bare, there was mold everywhere, holes in the floor, wood planks strewn about the floor, and holes in the ceiling. How had it disintegrated so fast? It had been nine years since I saw it last. It seemed like that was too fast for something like that to just … all but disappear.

  My mother had explained to me that buildings needed human breath in them to keep them moist and held together. Abandoned buildings are like abandoned people—they die sooner.

  We explored it. Lover boy had a vintage camera from the sixties and there was just enough light in the abandoned church to take photos. I was staring at him and was a bit stuck. His camera was pointed directly at me.

  What’s his name again? I thought. I sat silent for a full twenty seconds. Trevor, TREVOR, Trevor, his name is Trevor … phew!

  He told me to stand in front of a stained-glass window that had a hole busted in the top of it. He liked the shattered rainbow light it was casting—it would not matter ultimately because the photo would be in black and white. But I obliged because I understood he wanted to get the feeling right.

  He took the picture and I got fearful because the floor was weak in places, so I asked him if we could leave.

  We made it to my grandmother’s house and got out of the car and walked past the backyard about some half mile through the deep woods. We stopped at a clearing my father had made to hunt deer, and under the watchtower he had built in this tree was a bunker unit that was locked up. My aunt had mailed me the key to it some weeks before. We opened it and stepped in. The bunker wasn’t bigger than a toolshed but it was neatly organized.

  There was no electricity but there was enough sun to make out everything.
His rifles were hung at the back of the shed on holders he had nailed to the wall. There were five in all, including the one from the twenties with my great-great-granddad’s name engraved on the wood. I ran my hands across it. “Jody”—it looked shabbier than I remembered as a kid, and, perhaps a little too overcome with emotion, I kissed it.

  I saw under a table to my right the old army chest my dad had in his military days in his late teens. I knew the coats were there. I just knew.

  I opened it and I saw, sitting on top of the stack, the tan-and-green houndstooth coat. He put it in last, as if he knew I was the one who was going to find it. It was still in excellent condition—he had taken great care with it. This time, before I could get overly emotional, I heard Trevor calling from the door.

  “Baby, let’s come back here on our way from New Orleans. We should hit the road because it’s getting dark soon and I want to get off these two-lane highways,” he said matter-of-factly. I began to move. I grabbed an old hunting backpack my father had and put three coats in it. We carried four rifles and vowed to get the other stuff on the trip back.

  We cut across the bridge leading to the main highway and I decided I missed California and that I would never come back to this place again. Another thirty minutes down the road Trevor asked to marry me. I said yes.

  THE BOYFRIENDS

  Boyfriend 007 / The Waiter

  He had murdered a boy for me once. Knocked that faggot right the fuck out. We were in our twenties and Samuel Myers (that ASSHOLE) made a rude comment about my body. My knight in shining armor ignored his years of good breeding and waiter etiquette (did I mention this all went down in the twenty-four-hour diner hellhole we worked in together?), ripped off his apron, and socked that asshole Samuel Myers in the face. I owed him—that Valentine’s Day I put a fifty-dollar bill in his tip jar with a note that said YOU MURDERED A BOY FOR ME .

  Boyfriend 99.5(%) / The Dreamer

  He explained to me (and he was VERY drunk), “I’ve never wanted to be a star in the sky. They all die anyway and I’m too vain for death. I’m ether, or whatever you call it. That negative blank space the stars float around in. Olbers’ paradox at play, you could say. The place that was there before the stars and will be there long after. Untouchable but you’re surrounded by it. It’s quicksand, I guess. I can explain more … Have you ever noticed how things in life always wanna leave you? Men will leave you, your looks will leave you (this is why I often practice looking like hell), your money will leave you. This is all fine. BUT. Something you build with your own two hands, that is (sometimes) always yours to keep. Let’s say you write a book. Let’s say the book is so good it outlives you, its toughest critics, and also several generations of people unaware of its existence. Maybe what I’m asking is unanswerable, but it gets back to that first feeling I was talking about—like, your immortal-ass book and the words within it are just floating forever on the page, sailing on this forever, just like a certain terrain Diddy Bopping all along the same kind of sea. Untouchable, unreachable, yet, it’s everywhere, there’s a ‘there, there’—can you imagine?” He smiled, but I was already asleep.

  Boyfriend Zero / The Fashion Editor

  The silence was deafening but that wasn’t the only cliché present in the room. The man hadn’t changed his make-out music since the nineties—it was all Cibo Matto tapes and other artifacts from his old hipsterdom that he carried around like duffel bags. The time they spent together felt like it was always in between sunsets; the red-orange final glow of the final minute of the day had not quite mixed in with the new purple of night. The sex was stuck within that same standstill. “I don’t feel like it tonight,” they both said at the same time, and giggled upon doing so. With no other reason to oppose each other, and nothing really to prove, they hopped into bed and held each other even after their skin pressed together and the bed got uncomfortable and sweaty, but neither of them bothered to change the sheets because it just didn’t feel that serious.

  Boyfriend #77 / The Chef

  He invited me to his headquarters. He cooked for the Kings and Queens of Art, making expensive vegan shit inspired by nineties rock musicians. He explained to me what my feelings were, often. Oh my god, he was everything I couldn’t have but the second I did have him I knew I didn’t want it anymore. It was like wanting a shot of whiskey and letting it sit on the bar in front of you for entire minutes, mouthwatering. It wasn’t about the whiskey per se but more about letting the anticipation build. Sooner rather than later I was knocking back shots of him like a fucking prizefighter.

  Boyfriend 2.0 / The Firefighter

  He said he wanted to set me on fire like a cigarette—he inhaled me with vigor, indulgence, and did so really, really carelessly. I was part of a pack, you see, or by knowing him I was in a carton, and most mornings seemed the same to him no matter who was there the night before. I don’t think the boys meant much to him. His chain-smoking seemed in unison (disunion?) with the other facts. He was a firefighter, a big strong one. He had muscles from the time he was barely a teenager. He showed me video clips of him skateboarding on a suburban Southern California cul-de-sac, it had made his body strong and blessed with that lean, cut muscle pattern, probably how he got so fucking cocky. I met him years ago—I was living in a warehouse near downtown. He would follow me up to my room like a puppy and it would happen: semen flying everywhere. He was way taller than me so I fit neatly into him after the squirting epic semen battle we would have. He went away at some point, lived up in the Northern California woods. He was the one who kept rural California from turning into a chuck of ashes.

  He had just finished fighting a stint of fires in Mendocino. He got naked. I could see the places where the backpack equipment was irritating his skin. But he still had it. “Sorry I didn’t give you any dick last time I was in town,” he said. (We had never really fuuuuuuuucked before.) But this time, this was the test. It all felt—and heaven help me for saying this—“sweet,” like we had waited. He was the only man I knew whose sex was that fluid: boy, girl, everyone in between, whichever race, that boy was sticking his dick in everybody and I admired the caliber of slut he was. He showed me pictures of his baby daughter and we read to each other all afternoon. He left after that for good.

  Boyfriend #33 / The Hairdresser

  I needed asymmetry, so I wanted to bleach my hair from side to side. I was disconnected from this one (spark) plug I needed to fully realize the projection. I was a filmmaker, I was about to finally find it and dream big and lucidly. What could not be imagined? Nothing, I decided. I started on my hair—it was still nonbleached. My hairdresser was sexy. Chubby angel face with a chubby angel dick. I noticed one time that his hands were cracked and calloused from all the chemicals, and the colorings, and the sewing weaves in till 2:00 a.m., as he had the only shop that took walk-ins past ten. He would sometimes take people as late as 1:00 a.m., and for a Black woman’s hair salon, goddammit, that was of note. But he was fast, could sew in a weave in like forty-five minutes flat (I saw him do it once). I watched on the movie screen in my head, from my throne of the director’s chair (but really, I was in his salon seat), as he slapped purple goop across my head. The chemicals sat so long I started to feel dizzy. “The longer you keep it on, the blonder it will be,” he said. I didn’t come to wuss out—I came to be blond, goddammit. I sweated it out. He conditioned my head and we fucked in the back of the shop. He filmed it. The next day my hair turned the color and texture of cotton candy and all fell out.

  Boyfriend #40 / The Gentleman

  They were the weirdest couple I had ever fucked. They made me slightly uncomfortable. They drank wine and fought a lot but did it in a way where you could tell deep, deep down they literally hated each other. One boyfriend was this white top who had a big-ass dick, and thank god he was hung because he was dumb as fuck. He didn’t know what calculus was. He had a deep-ass country accent and was telling us a story about how he had woken up in a jail cell covered in feces one night and he almost went
to jail for longer but luckily his mother loaned him $12,000 and it all got cleared up. His boyfriend was this Mexican artist boy who kept eyeballing me like he wanted to cut me because I was fucking his white-ass boyfriend. The top got drunker and had to go to bed and it was late so I stayed over and slept on the couch. In the middle of the night the Mexican boyfriend woke me up because he wanted to fuck, and I couldn’t get my clothes off fast enough. He came and then stood over me. I could feel the inside of my butthole, that wet squishy thick feeling, like he had left factual evidence that he had been there. He politely started folding my clothes and setting them beside me. He kissed me on the forehead and very passionately on the lips and then he whispered, “You have to go now.”

  DAMN A LOVER COMES HOME TO DIE

  HE SHOWS UP TO MY HOUSE unannounced again—he’s fresh off a however-many-day speed binge. His shoes are missing. He’s panting hard and he smells like he’s been walking barefoot in the hot streets for miles.

  My heart sinks deep. He’s different from the European cologne–wearing, fragrant dandy I once knew him to be; he had bewitched me from the first day I laid eyes on him. It was with little effort on his part, I knew this much—his wish was my command, even when he had nothing to say. He was never the boy who everyone could love. He was kind of an asshole, but more importantly he was something that God had tailor-made just for me.

  He was funny, morbidly beautiful, always horny, and if it wasn’t so sad there might have been something about his self-destruction that seemed sexy. Perhaps it was sexy when we were younger—it had morphed from sexy to demonic long ago. Yet he still had that power over me, this thing that I could never explain, like saying no to him was always out of the question.