Since I Laid My Burden Down

by Brontez Purnell

  “Some ghosts are real,” DeShawn said to himself as he pushed along the highway.

  As assistant to his mother the preacher, DeShawn cleaned the church, washed the choir robes, and took care of all the necessaries. Today he had to go to Blood of the Lamb Bible Supply in Cullman to pick up the programs for next Sunday. He hated driving to Cullman—it was Ku Klux Klan territory. As a boy, he remembered seeing “I Ride with Nathan” stickers (referring to Nathan Bedford, the first Grand Wizard of the KKK) with the text printed over Confederate flags.

  DeShawn watched the news at night and saw black churches were burning down all over the place, the latest one just some three hours away from his church. He didn’t like that all the local black churches were registered at the Bible supply in Klansville—he didn’t want them knowing their whereabouts—but then again, they had the cheapest stationery and the next Bible supply was all the way in Birmingham, so he closed his eyes, mouth, and ears to all evil and went on to Cullman.

  He stared very hard at the stationery options; he couldn’t decide if he wanted the programs printed with doves or sacred crosses. He went with the doves—the crosses seemed too literal. On his way to the checkout he turned left at the candle aisle and saw something that nearly shook him out of his bones: Skylar goddamn Prescott, plain as day and not looking at all different than he did as a teenager. Skylar was curiously examining the Jesus figurines.

  DeShawn stopped just short of a panic attack, and he ducked into the next aisle to collect himself before making a beeline for the front door. He started his car and gassed away as fast as he could. The memory choked him the same way Skylar did that one summer.

  If he had to think about it—like, really think about it—Skylar was the predecessor to Arnold, the dead white boy DeShawn loved. The main difference was that Arnold, when confronted with the mortal coil of life, did what a lot of sensitive people do, and committed suicide. Skylar, however, did what most assholes do: become a born-again Christian. Of all the white, rock-and-roll-boy dick DeShawn had tasted, he couldn’t think of anyone in that subcategory he despised more than Skylar Prescott.

  DeShawn met Skylar as a teenager when DeShawn was fifteen and was working at a surf-and-turf restaurant by the highway. He was the only black boy working there and was weird. He was 270 pounds, with a high-pitched, musical, girly voice and weird nerd glasses he copped because of his obsession with Rivers Cuomo from Weezer. Needless to say, his midnineties, rural Alabama town didn’t get it. They mostly pretended not to see him; he would bus tables and take plates from customers as if he were a ghost, the clientele seeming to stare right through him. The boss’s wife was always there to offer up a pep talk: “Why, you’re the fastest and most handsome bus boy we’ve ever had!” she would say in this sweeping way, and DeShawn would smile gratefully and work harder. He was young still, and had not built an adequate enough bullshit detector.

  After a couple of months, DeShawn got the notion he wanted to wait tables, and asked the boss’s wife if he could. She said he couldn’t because he was too young and they didn’t hire male waiters anymore because the one they hired years ago was a gay man (who the boss imitated by lisping and prancing around), and his employment went over like a lead balloon. DeShawn accepted that it wasn’t meant to be, until the day Skylar showed up. Skylar was also fifteen, but skinny, with a deep voice, and white. It took DeShawn another couple of years to figure out why Skylar got to be a waiter and he didn’t.

  Skylar and DeShawn bonded over both being devotees of Alternative Nation on MTV and playing punk music. Skylar even rolled DeShawn’s first joint. One New Year’s Eve Skylar convinced DeShawn to skip church so they could go see a ska band that was performing up the road. DeShawn was captivated by the show—the band members were dressed as mummies and throwing cake and spaghetti everywhere—when he felt a tap on the back of his shoulder. DeShawn’s mother was standing behind him in a wig and sunglasses. “Your grandmother is in the hospital. We have to go.” As he later found out, DeShawn’s mother was lying, and drove him straight to the New Year’s Eve gathering at church, where he sat right next to his grandmother, sulking.

  Skylar was an only child with divorced parents; his father was a professor and his mother a furniture dealer who’d previously been a cook. DeShawn quickly noted how different Skylar’s parents were from his own. They would quit talking whenever Skylar screamed, “Shut the fuck up!” and they also sent him to shrinks to put him on medication for his disorders. DeShawn’s parents, when they weren’t threatening him, mostly just ignored him. He eventually figured that’s why he hated Skylar. When Skylar was a depressed teenager the world came running, but when DeShawn was depressed no one gave a shit.

  Skylar’s mother was particularly baffling to DeShawn. The first night he came over to Skylar’s house he noticed all the super-old furniture and figurines. Apparently the style was art deco, as he would later learn. Skylar’s mother eventually came home black-out wasted with a friend. She looked at DeShawn and said to her friend, “Look, a handsome black man. I want him to lick my pussy.” She lifted her skirt and exposed her pantyless, shaved vagina to DeShawn. Skylar hit the wall and started yelling, and his mother fell down. DeShawn was delighted. He had never seen anybody’s mom that wasted or a vagina. He liked Skylar’s mom.

  DeShawn started hanging out at Skylar’s house more and more. His mother would cook French cuisine and let the boys drink wine. Skylar’s mother only had gay male friends, and so the two boys would dine in the company of all of the town’s drunken posh gay dudes. Sometimes they would hit on DeShawn, and a tingly feeling would run through him.

  One night after Skylar and DeShawn finished band practice in Skylar’s basement, Skylar reached over for DeShawn’s dick, which stiffened immediately. Skylar pulled it out of DeShawn’s vintage trousers and fell to his knees, sucking as if he were attempting to drain DeShawn’s soul. “Come in my mouth,” Skylar said, breath heavy and red in the face. DeShawn let it rip. The two made it upstairs to the bedroom, where Skylar put on a porn movie. It was a cheesy one with some skinny blond woman in lingerie getting choked by the guy fucking her. Skylar put DeShawn on his stomach facing the porn movie, licked his finger, and stabbed it into DeShawn’s anus; DeShawn winced.

  Skylar had talked about how he got fucked when he was twelve by this older boy in the neighborhood, and that he had wanted to try it again. Apparently, this would be the night. He spit a huge wad of saliva onto DeShawn’s butthole, aimed his hard dick, and thrust it into DeShawn full throttle. A lightning bolt of pain shot through DeShawn so hard he felt nauseous, but the feeling was overtaken by adrenaline once he realized he was getting fucked for the first time. Skylar wrapped his hand around DeShawn’s throat and began to choke him, mimicking the porn. DeShawn was crippled by stimulation. Before he could register all of the feelings he was having, Skylar let out a deep gasp, his dick frozen and pulsating inside DeShawn, and collapsed on top of him, sweating and breathing hard. DeShawn put together a sentence in his head: I just lost my virginity.

  Skylar and DeShawn continued on like this for some year and a half before Skylar started dating girls and ignoring DeShawn’s phone calls. The two would have sex one last time four years later, after DeShawn had escaped the clutches of Alabama and settled in some sleepy Midwestern college town a month or two before moving to California. Skylar’s touring band was passing through, and the two fucked on a pile of dirty laundry in DeShawn’s room.

  The years passed, and Skylar became more and more of a Christian. DeShawn figured he was rebelling against his too-liberal upbringing. Skylar began posting shit online about God, and how he was happy that he had found faith in the Almighty, and had a wife who obeyed him. Sometime after that, Skylar became a preacher at some snotty white church near the highway.

  DeShawn pulled away from Blood of the Lamb Bible Supply feeling like he dodged a goddamn bullet. It probably wouldn’t have been the worst to exchange an awkward hello with Skylar, but on this day he just didn’t have
it in him. DeShawn tapped the accelerator on his mom’s old Camaro and flung his little being up the highway, thinking about how some men were dead and buried, and other men were not, but the memory of them seemed just as buried and far away.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DeShawn was exhausted.

  He was lying on a couch in his grandmother’s living room that was positioned directly under the air conditioner. It was also his favorite spot in childhood.

  He was in a postchurch haze. He had attended morning service, and then a second service at a neighboring church, followed by dinner. To him, it was some sort of magic watching all the little old black women in two-ton church hats walking into the back of the church with covered dishes of fried chicken, fried catfish, roasted ham, barbecued beef, green beans, mac and cheese, corn, yams (the only side dish that didn’t have some form of pork in them), and carbs, dear goddess, all the carbs. There were biscuits with butter, cornbread muffins, pies, cobblers, and eight different kinds of cakes. He sampled every dish twice.

  DeShawn sat in a stupor and wondered why in fact he didn’t have diabetes yet (he had raged on this type of Sunday soul-food suicide binge since childhood), but thought it best to not provoke the gods by asking about his impending illnesses. “Maybe I’ll get away with it for a couple more years,” he said as he slumped off of the couch to get a much-needed glass of water. It impressed him how food hangovers worked, that a meal could cause a hangover that was just as paralyzing as one from drugs or drink. It was fascinating.

  He looked out of the back window of his grandmother’s kitchenette, sipping his cool lemon water slowly. He was amazed at the ruse he constructed. While at the second church program, shaking the congregation’s hands with his mother, all he had to say was, “Preacher _________ is my mother,” and people would hug him and shake his hand harder. It blew him away that all he had to do was wear a suit and a smile, and not one member of the church could begin to guess that he was a raging slut. He almost felt pure again, or maybe just got comfortable with the idea that, even as a raging slut, people should respect him like this all the time. I could get used to this, DeShawn thought, taking a sip of water.

  At church that day, just as DeShawn’s mind (inevitably) switched from his newfound purity back to sex, he saw a familiar girl walk up to him after the service. Her name was Vickie Sue Thomas, she was two grades ahead of him in school and basically a sweet girl.

  “DESHAWN!!!! HOW YOU DOIN’ BABY BOY?!?!” she squealed as she vigorously hugged him.

  DeShawn was fond of Vicki. She was cut a pretty raw deal early on in middle school. DeShawn had been in the fifth grade and Vicki in the seventh, the summer she sucked DeShawn’s older cousin’s dick and got branded a slut. She was basically shunned, and for the rest of the year Vicki would bring a Bible and a highlighter with her on the bus and sit quietly and highlight passages. “It gives me strength somehow,” she would say.

  In the years to follow, DeShawn would understand how truly fucked-up and sad that story was—not just because of the patriarchy, but also because in seventh grade Vicki still only read at a fourth-grade level. She for sure didn’t understand what she was highlighting. The other day, DeShawn, being somewhat well-read, picked up a Bible for shits and giggles, and could only shake his head at how he basically didn’t know what the fuck it was talking about.

  Either way, it was nice to see Vicki and he even got a ride back to Grandma’s with her after church.

  He was at his grandmother’s alone now—not the rarest occurrence, but one that as long as he could remember always inspired only one idea: jerking off.

  Everything DeShawn learned offhand about sex happened at his grandmother’s house. His grandfather was a huge porn fiend and kept porno magazines and movies in every nook and cranny of the house, and DeShawn had a shit-ton of older cousins who had no problem sharing the bounty of XXX artifacts found virtually everywhere. DeShawn reasoned that he had seen his first hardcore porn movie by the time he was five—quite possibly before. One time he remembered a group of his cousins, younger uncles, and neighborhood boys all gathered in the den watching porn on VHS, and his grandmother walking in on them. There was no reaction on her face; she didn’t even raise her voice. She simply walked to the VHS player, turned it off, and took the tape with her saying plainly, “Remember that the people on this tape are actors.” DeShawn—in his present—understood his grandmother’s cool angst. There were the times his grandfather would stumble home wasted and watch porn in the living room, and the matron would have to collect all the grandbabies and hold them in the back of the house so they wouldn’t witness it. “He’s watching his naked soap operas again,” she would say.

  It was also at his grandmother’s that DeShawn jacked off to completion for the first time.

  It was after church one Sunday and his mother, grandmother, aunt, and brother went to get barbecue. He stayed at his grandmother’s, and soon went riffling through a box of porn in his grandparents’ closet. Inside he found a 1986 Penthouse Forum. It contained a few pictures, but it was mostly text on worn pink paper. That issue’s “Letter of the Month” contained a story about a bisexual man who lived somewhere in California and wrote about a tryst he and his girlfriend were having with a male neighbor.

  In one scene, it described the two men, one blond and the other dark haired, jacking each other off and eventually fucking on the beach. Years later, DeShawn wondered how this had altered his mental landscape—that is, reading about gay sex as opposed to seeing it in porn. He had his tryst with Jatius, of course, but he never ejaculated. It was time now.

  He read over and over the one paragraph about how the two men were on the beach, and the blond man was jacking off for the dark-haired man, and when he came it shot clear past the dark-haired man’s head. One sentence described how the blond man stroking his own shaft, slowly, fully, and repeatedly, made the dark-haired man get off. I should try that, thought DeShawn.

  He went to the bathroom and took off his pants, but kept on his sweater. He lay on his back on the bathroom floor, got himself hard, and worked himself over the way he had read about in the magazine. His nerves felt tingly, and he lay there doing this for what seemed like an eternity. Is it supposed to take this long? he wondered. He kept at it for what seemed like another, even longer, eternity until boom, pop, and fireworks exploded. He felt the spillage on his hands. It was like a silent epiphany, that moment of oh shit, I get it!

  DeShawn could still remember that flush of feeling and the story from the book. He was aroused now.

  He went to his grandmother’s bathroom, took off his pants, and left on his Sunday shirt. He lay on his back on the bathroom floor and started jerking off.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  DeShawn’s mother hated her mother. It was a problem. DeShawn’s grandmother didn’t like her daughter much either. This certainly compounded the problem.

  He couldn’t blame either of them for the rift. As DeShawn’s mother would often explain: “I was the third daughter. I was third and female. Your grandmother wanted a boy. That bitch always made me pay for not being a boy.” DeShawn believed his mother when she said this. People often called his mom “crazy” or “hysterical,” but DeShawn believed his mom to be a psychic and a prophet when it came to dealing with people. All the “crazy” shit she predicted always had a way of coming true—never at the time—but always eventually.

  DeShawn’s grandmother was a different story. She had a quiet wisdom. She was also generally right too. DeShawn was her favorite grandchild. He couldn’t tell if it was ’cause he was a boy or ’cause he played rock and roll just like her brother and father. Maybe it was because he was the lead male soloist in the children’s choir, or maybe because out of thirty grandchildren, he was the first and youngest to be baptized. Regardless of why, she loved DeShawn the same way his mom loved his great-great-grandmother. (His grandmother hated her own mother—it was a trait that skipped generations it seemed.)

  DeShawn’s mother would say sh
it like, “Your grandmother was a baby factory. She was a slave to Granddad. She never stood up for herself.” But all DeShawn could see when he looked at his grandmother was a woman who didn’t have many choices. She lived in the rural South, the bastard child of a traveling blues musician, and started having babies in the fifties. DeShawn’s grandmother had three babies by his grandfather before he even married her. All DeShawn could say to his mother was “Dear god, Mama can we PLEASE be nice to Grandma?! Wasn’t her life, like, hard?”

  Meanwhile, DeShawn’s grandmother couldn’t deal with her daughter’s fierceness. “I’m gon’ beat that bitch’s ass if she roll up here one more Sunday starting shit with me,” Granny said very matter-of-fact from her rocking chair on the front porch as she spotted DeShawn’s mother’s car come up the road.

  And there were other points to note. DeShawn’s grandmother gave birth to fourteen children (two died at birth), and DeShawn thought it was cold for his mom to call a woman who had spent 126 months of her life pregnant, before rural women had access to birth control, a “baby factory.” DeShawn also saw it as fact that if you have that many fucking kids, you’re bound to hate some of them. Like, who the fuck can love a dozen maniacs all the time? He saw a mother-daughter feud that wasn’t going anywhere. DeShawn also knew that he and his mother were just alike. Her constant emotional flashing on her mother was a way to get her needs met. With eleven siblings, one finds a way to get attention—good or bad.