Since I Laid My Burden Down Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  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 of the hairdressers, Lucy, was this nasty, fake leprechaun from some redneck part of California. She was the worst mix of born-again Christian and closeted homosexual. Her “husband” would come in to help her close, and from the looks of it, he suffered the same affliction. Sexually frustrated assholes as they were, DeShawn felt sorry for them. There was no reality whatsoever in which he could picture Lucy’s husband dicking her down good in any tangible way. When DeShawn looked at Lucy’s husband, he saw an anxiety-ridden homosexual with a hungry booty hole, and it takes one to know one.

  Her husband’s panic attacks were infamous (he had upward of three a week), and each time Lucy would come into work disgruntled, highly critical, and pissed at everyone. DeShawn was only a receptionist, so in accordance to natural law Lucy got to fuck with him. For instance, she once explained to DeShawn why the young black teenagers in the area made her uncomfortable; she got robbed by a group of them once. DeShawn didn’t believe this cackling bitch one bit. The ironic part was that, in this gentrified part of town, the black teenager robbing you most likely came from college-educated parents—though DeShawn knew that Lucy’s stuck ass would never see the humor in that. It also left DeShawn wondering, What kid that comes from college-educated parents would rob a sloppy white bitch in sweats? Like, wouldn’t you rob someone who looks like they have a future?

  Then there was Lucy’s lil’ gay sidekick, Juan Gomez. Juan was from redneck California too, and he and Lucy would openly bond over their fear of “outsiders.” Once at a Christmas party DeShawn got way too drunk and told Juan about when he was gangbanged by four tourists from Mexico City the night before at the bathhouse.

  “EWW! YOU FUCK MEXICANS?!” cried Juan Gomez.

  As DeShawn understood it, some gay guys are pissed or crazy because they were molested as children (as he knew from personal experience); on the opposite side of a completely different coin were fags like Juan, who were bitches because they were completely ignored as children. Juan had taken to yelling at DeShawn in front of customers, with Lucy backing him. And with Juan’s convincing five-foot-two frame and high-pitched yelp, every time Juan attacked him all DeShawn could picture was being dry humped by a barky little dog—and not a very cute one at that.

  Working at this barbershop was total bullshit. The phone rang off the hook like a goddamn headache all fucking day long; people calling for trims for their ugly-ass kids and hairdressers are the fucking worst. “You know, for people who just cut hair all day, they sure are some uppity bitches,” DeShawn found himself remarking to the general ether often.

  A month prior, DeShawn called his father crying. It was another morning where he woke up on the kitchen floor covered in condiments, empty food packages haloing his body. He told his father he was going to quit the barbershop. He forgot the way his father could derail things.

  “Son, think about them child prostitutes in Thailand, do you think they like their job? But they still get up and go! You’re a pussy!” And then the old man hung up on him.

  DeShawn wanted to call him back and explain that there’s no such thing as a “child prostitute”—these days they were referred to as “abused children.” But he quickly remembered to never, ever call his drunk-ass dad.

  It was his mother who would save his resolve.

  Some lackluster morning—that of the incident that would get him arrested and fired—DeShawn had been in the shop doing two hundred different things. Of those two hundred things, he got four wrong and Juan laid into him in front of the customers again.

  DeShawn felt that punched-in-the-lungs anxious feeling. In the three seconds before he leaped over the counter and beat that faggot’s ass, he saw his life in freeze-frame. It was as if he were standing between two mirrors, his image projected a million times on both sides of him.

  Which one is the real me? he asked himself curiously.

  DeShawn was a man that understood our actions have consequences, but, just as important, so do our inactions. He learned this from his mother one time in church nearly twenty-plus years earlier.

  Young DeShawn had seen his mother in this state before, almost too many times to count: hysterical, unflinching, an hour past giving a fuck. Like Joan Crawford driving Christina home after being expelled from school, rollers in hair and a death grip on the steering wheel, subtly swerving.

  She had been fighting with both her husband and her boyfriend that week and was feeling herself. She was over it. She meant business. She wasn’t having it.

  In the car, driving fast and swerving, DeShawn’s mother foreshadowed the coming storm. “I don’t give a fuck if he’s the preacher! He can’t tell us what to do!”

  His mother took issue with most of the new preacher’s rules. DeShawn was the last person baptized in the creek. The new preacher didn’t want to baptize in the creek anymore because of the farm next door.

  “The pigs shit in it,” explained the preacher.

  As rational as it seemed, it was still another policy change that annoyed the fuck out of his mother.

  This bitch is about to show the fuck out, thought DeShawn, butterflies racing in his stomach. He knew very well what his mo
ther bear was capable of, and knew that it was going to turn into a total fucking shutdown.

  Now, the new preacher was already corrupt as a Baptist minister. He slept with women in the congregation and embezzled money. DeShawn’s mother took issue with a man like this making rules for anybody. The war started when he announced a new policy that forbade the church elders from dipping snuff during the service and spitting the run-off into their Dr. Pepper cans. The preacher thought this was against form and fashion, and decided to ban the practice.

  DeShawn’s mother thought the old people in the church, who had lived through Southern poverty, Jim Crow, and god knows what else, should have the right to dip a little snuff in church, for fuck’s sake. They were to vote on the rule at the church meeting, but the term “voting” wasn’t exactly accurate. It was an unspoken rule that the preacher’s word was law and no one voted against him. Ever.

  “All in favor of the new rule say, ‘Aye,’” said the preacher, and everyone but DeShawn’s mother obliged him. “Opposed?” he asked.

  DeShawn’s mother stood up, eyes bloodshot, and talking cool as an axe murderer. “This is a rule YOU made,” her voice was getting louder.

  The preacher sensed this woman wanted a fight, and began to talk over her.

  His mother, even more annoyed at this, walked right up to the pulpit and started screaming.

  “YOU LET THEM DIP THEY SNUFF. THIS THEY CHURCH. THIS. AIN’T. YO. CHURCH. YOU AIN’T NO GOD!”

  The preacher pushed his mother away and, in knee-jerk reaction style, his mother slapped that rat bastard clean across the mouth.

  Immediately, ten people in the congregation—some of which were her own siblings—grabbed his mother and yanked her out of the church.

  Cool as all hell, she sat on the church steps all of two minutes, put her wig back in place, and marched right back into the church to wait for the post-meeting choir practice. No one dared bother her a second time.

  Later that day, mother and son went to Grandmother’s house. Grandmother stayed home from the church meeting and her phone was ringing off the hook.

  “Gurl, was you down at the church starting with the preacher again?” asked DeShawn’s grandmother, agitated to all hell.

  “I slapped that bitch in the mouth,” DeShawn’s mother said coolly as she passed her mother on the way to the bathroom.

  DeShawn would eventually learn exactly how much he was like his mother.

  DeShawn didn’t remember much of beating Juan’s ass. He was later told that he cried, ripped the phone out of the wall, and threw it at Juan’s head before screaming, “I have a college degree! I’m better than you!” and jumping over the counter. DeShawn tackled the man, pinned him down, and started punching him in the face.

  All DeShawn could recall was being handcuffed and dragged into the police car.

  It had all been worth it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DeShawn rolled with a furious crew of faggots: Tomas, Leo, and Devin. He was thankful for them.

  After he was fired and arrested for beating up his former coworker, he’d called in favors from his homies and was now riding down the Peninsula to Stanford University to some vague new job dealing with sex education and college freshmen, hooked up by Tomas. DeShawn felt a certain way about this gig—he was probably the last goddamn person on Earth that should be lecturing anyone on sexual health. He felt the same way about his friends.

  Tomas was one sick fuck. He had been HIV positive since the age of sixteen, when he would use his older brother’s ID to sneak into bathhouses and get banged all night. He’d meet men through party lines (an ancient form of telephone hookups where men set up anonymous voicemail accounts and left sketchy details about how and where to find them in public), and get fucked in parks and playgrounds. In his present life, just to be a total fucked-up human being, Tomas would get tested at STD clinics and not tell the nurses he already knew he was positive. The nurse would inform him and he would have a fake panic attack, start crying and throwing things, and fall on the floor and have to be carried out. He did this bullshit just for the sheer fun of it.

  Leo was an even sicker fuck. He grew up in some hellhole in rural Kansas. On a recent trip home to his father’s funeral, Leo “rekindled” an old “romance” with a man twenty years his senior—the same man that molested him when he was just a kid. Leo was in the passenger seat texting his “ex-boyfriend.” DeShawn was grossed out by the whole idea, but he had his own problems.

  He was in the backseat relating to Devin—who at twenty-two was the youngest, and coincidently the cleanest, of the crew—his anger over the night before. Young Devin listened raptly to DeShawn bitch, bitch, bitch.

  Last night DeShawn had taken a mix of drugs and decided to fulfill a fantasy he’d had for some years—the one where he goes to the back of the sex club, lies down on the floor with a towel over his head, and lets a bunch of gnarly strangers rail him. For years DeShawn had searched for the courage to make this dream real, but there were problems with its execution. DeShawn lay on the grimy sex club floor for hours, high and waiting for nothing, his pussy cold and lonely. No one would fuck him. Am I coming off too desperate? he asked as he collected what was left of his dignity and left.

  Devin giggled and returned to reading his copy of Vogue. Devin had come to the crew as a failed experiment of Tomas; they met online somewhere, but when they met in person Tomas understood quickly that he would only ruin the young boy’s dreams. So instead they became friends because Devin was just SO. DAMN. CUUUUTE. And extreme.

  Devin did shit like insisting on getting tested with all new potential sex partners. DeShawn was baffled by this bullshit; like, why the fuck would you ever? He could not move past the conundrums this would impose. What if you found out you had more diseases than your date? Not that it was a competition, but one would certainly be exposed as a whore with reckless judgment. Who the fuck needed this much pressure? And on a first date no less? Wasn’t life hard enough?

  On the inside, though, he envied young boys like Devin—boys who were smart enough to realize there was something worth protecting. This knowledge had passed by the three other men in the car completely. They had exhausted their risk.

  “You keep that pussy of yours clean and find you a real good husband. Don’t be like your older brothers here,” DeShawn would find himself saying to Devin.

  DeShawn was consistent in that he told the same lie to all his potential sex partners: he had previously been in a terrible relationship with some lying whore or another, been scared, and subsequently celibate for the past three months. He noticed that people liked hearing the word “celibate”—it implied “new” or “gently worn,” perhaps even “lightweight virginal,” and most importantly “not suspect.” Or maybe people were just turned on by the fact that someone had hurt him and that he needed rescuing. Nonetheless, DeShawn was older than Devin and past the wide-eyedness of it all. DeShawn, like any jaded bitch in her prime, made it a practice to only get tested with men who bought him dinner first. The rest of those fuckers could eat it.

  “The miracles of modern science have made it so that there is a pill for goddamn nearly everything,” remarked Tomas. “Why feel guilty?”

  “Don’t listen to Tomas, Devin. He’s gonna burn in hell,” said Leo, as he continued messaging his former molester.

  The car arrived in the parking lot of the student medical center and DeShawn was carted off to the waiting room where about seven other educators sat. The room itself was painted a pristine white, with a refrigerator, coffeemaker, computer, and water fountain. On the bulletin board were several dozen flyers for theater shows. As DeShawn understood it, this was a side job for theater people between shows, requiring some performance skills but generally an easy gig.

  After gulping unnecessary amounts of coffee, DeShawn was introduced to the team leader who hurriedly greeted him and said, “Come along.”

  He and his friends disappeared into what seemed like separate medical exam rooms alo
ng the same corridor as the waiting room. DeShawn figured the team leader was escorting him to a classroom for his lecture, so he was surprised when he was led into a room occupied by an older white gentleman.

  “DeShawn, this is Gary,” the team leader said dryly. “You will watch him for your first training.” And then he left, just as quickly as he came.

  Gary was a cute man. He looked to be in his early sixties, with ice-blue eyes, a big daddy belly, and a seemingly good nature to boot.

  “Why do you think you are right for this job?” Gary inquired in what seemed to be a doubtful tone.

  DeShawn was slightly offended. “I am the glittering example of emotional, mental, and sexual health,” he replied in a “fuck you old dude I don’t know” tone that he was sure Gary picked up on.

  Surveying the scene, DeShawn noticed that on the exam table were a hospital robe, rubber gloves, and lube. What’s all that for? thought DeShawn. Just then the door opened and in walked two students in white coats—a black boy with dreads and an Indian woman.

  “Where’s the rest of the class?” DeShawn was getting uneasy.

  Gary disrobed and donned the medical gown. DeShawn’s confusion continued to grow; as he understood it, he was supposed to be lecturing a class on sexual health. Now things were taking another turn.

  “Hello,” Gary addressed the students, “this here is DeShawn, he’s in training, so I’ll be guiding you in the procedure today.”

  That’s when shit got real weird.

  The black kid put his finger in Gary’s butt, and gave DeShawn a nervous look as if to say, “I’m a straight guy and this is freaking me out.” DeShawn winked at the boy once his finger was fully inserted in Gary. “Okay, now put another finger in,” said Gary, and after that, “Now see if you can fit three.” Afterward, the boy washed his hands looking completely traumatized. DeShawn doubted the boy’s future as a doctor.