2. Moonshine Is a Hell of a Drug
a.I love alcohol more than any other drug. It’s the only one that calls me back and I always come . . . crawling. This, at times, leads to complications. As a child, my grandfather was a drunk and a bad ass. He’d pee in the living room sometimes and talk shit to Highway Patrol. I remember chopping wood with him and four of my boy cousins and two of my uncles one winter day. We’re loading the wood in the truck and Granddad (wasted as fuck) says, “He [me] has his coat on like a faggot!” I couldn’t have been more than six, and I stand there all called the fuck out, and his words punch me in the stomach and I literally can’t breathe. My uncle comes to the defense: “At least he’s helping, Dad.” I hated him for years after that—until I grew up, that is, and was ready to admit that that drunk bitch was totally on to something. I grew up to be a total doo-doo chaser. And how! He was right about the alcohol too. I left home a sober, straight-edge teen, and within a year was drinking every night and fucking anything that would fuck me back.
I came back on Xmas for the family Christmas party. It got cut short the year before when a couple of my cousins tried to shoot and kill my sister’s boyfriend. That shit got squashed though, and this time love was in the air. My uncle showed up with a milk jug full of moonshine. Sour mash whiskey, goddammit. My father used to make it and told me a morbid story once. Supposedly, country men distilled the liquid through old car radiators and one chemist hadn’t cleaned out all the antifreeze from one and ended up killing ten of his classmates. I had never tried it before, and the thought of dying instantly excited me. Bottoms up. Seven shots later I realized the mistake I had made. The last thing I remember was doing the “Cupid Shuffle” with my cousins for what seemed like two hours. Blackout.
My mom (and my cousin’s pregnant girlfriend) try to take me to Waffle House so I can eat and sober up, but I’m still acting a black-ass fool and get the cops called on us. We dash in my cousin’s girlfriend’s car to get away, but the police catch up to us on the highway off-ramp. My cousin’s girlfriend is about to shit a brick ’cause there’s an unregistered gun in the glove compartment. I don’t remember any of this, but my mom says by the time the officer clacked on the window I turned into the perfect fucking gentleman. After they let us go, I end up giving my mom full disclosure about my entire sexual history (like bathhouse stuff and sex with my HIV-positive partner forty years my senior). The next day when I’m all hungover and alcohol poisoned she asks (very cool), “Baby, why do you think people don’t use condoms? Hormones?” I shrug my shoulders and thanked fucking god I was black. Otherwise she would have noticed me blushing.
b.I learned that many people thought that my stepdad was molesting me growing up. I guess the rule is if you’re a boy who is too effeminate, clearly someone is punking you out. He was a Marine and had seen the better part of the world by his late twenties. His worldliness may have made him read as an outsider to the rural community I grew up in. I later felt sorry for my Marine-butch stepdad; all he knew was that I was effeminate, read too many books, and made him uncomfortable. He mostly avoided me. What he didn’t know (nor did most people) was that my uncle’s friend was molesting me.
My granddad was a farmer. He grew tomatoes, squash, corn, marigolds, and marijuana. Behind my grandparents’ house was this sort of field-garden that he shared with his brother and his family who lived on the other side, with a tiny dirt trail connecting the two properties. The boy who molested me (a full nine to ten years my senior—he was fifteen) would walk by me when I was alone on the trail (or sometimes when I’d pass him on the main gravel road) and would pull his hard dick out and shake it at me. I had horny older cousins and had already been exposed to porn so I knew what I was expected to do. I remember blowing him as a little boy and thinking, Are all dicks this big?? I spent the next couple of years sucking his dick on the side of houses, by the well, and on the far side of my granddad’s ’57 Chevy truck. One day I told him I didn’t want to suck his big smelly dick and he told me if I didn’t he’d tell everyone I was gay. People by then were already calling me a fag and I knew this would seal the deal. And with that empty and retarded threat, I stayed in his servitude. He eventually started having sex with older women in the neighborhood and left me alone. I forgot about it in my teens. I even danced at his wedding with the woman rumored to be my grandfather’s mistress.
I was in my midtwenties sucking dick in the back patio of the Eagle in SF. I remember the dick hitting my tonsils and the guy rubbing my ear as he asked, “How’d you get so good at that?” And I realized, Holy shit, I’ve been sucking dick for, like, twenty years. Very triggered, I swallowed.
It was another Christmas in Alabama with the family, and I got into my granddad’s moonshine. We rode by the old house where the boy who molested me used to live in and I, drunk as a Kennedy, got out of the car, threw rocks at his house and crouched down on the ground crying. We go back to Grandma’s house for dinner, and the guy who molested me shows up with my uncle. I’m still emotional and all together done with it. I took another shot of moonshine and decided to forgive him.
3. The Hunting Trip: It all started with an exercise in writing class (it always starts with an exercise in writing class). I pulled a torn sheetlet out of the hat alongside the others in my class with instructions that read: “Write about your father.” I’m immediately like, How the fuck is this a ten-minute writing exercise? Then I went to it.
My dad in too few words: He was raised forty-five minutes outside of Selma during the sixties and early seventies. Thirteen kids and he was the younger of the two boys in the clan. Selma was a hot bed of political activity, and his small rural community, Lamison, had caught some of the run-off. His older sisters took birth-control pills and road trips to the West Coast. His older brother played in bands in Selma, and one of his sisters went to study in Lebanon (she left right as the bombs were dropping). He’d get drunk (or “just buzzed son,” as he’d say) and we would go riding down the back roads. We’d listen to “All Along the Watchtower” ten times in a row, and he also loved Fleetwood Mac. As he explained, R & B radio was an urban phenomenon and didn’t hit rural Alabama well into the late seventies. Mostly the older black generation (like my grandfather’s age and up) listened to country music. Fleetwood Mac was the first thing they played on the country radio that had a bit of swing to it, and he’d play “Dreams” and explain that the song was how he felt about my mother.
He was a hunter. He killed a rattlesnake once to eat the meat and left its carcass on the bathroom floor, head smashed, nerves still going (I didn’t know snakes could still wiggle around for hours despite being dead). I could still hear its rattles. I was taking a shit, and was convinced that my dad was a Conjure and out to get me. Other times, I would step over dead deer left in the hall so the dogs outside wouldn’t get first crack at the meat. Later in life, I would come to respect a man who could kill a deer and live off of it for the winter, but as a faggy teen that didn’t eat red meat, I thought of my dad as a wild man. Why couldn’t we just go to the fucking grocery store? I remember he took me deep in the woods one day, pulled out a gun, and said I couldn’t leave until I took the gun apart, put it back together, and then fired it just like he had showed me a hundred times before. I hated guns. I started to do it, but then I froze up, started crying, and then refused in the overarching archetypal “son stands up to father in the woods” kinda way. My father said, “What are you gonna do when some redneck breaks into your house and rapes your wife? You gonna fucking cry then too?!” The latent homosexual in me gave a terrible pause: Wait a minute, my wife?!!?!
THE BROTHERS OFF THE BLOCK
1. We started fucking ’cause we lived close, and also, because men with power are always an aphrodisiac to young boys. Mexican Daddy. Hella racist, and conservative to all hell. “You don’t see me driving around wearing fucking prayer beads with the Virgin Guadalupe spray-painted on my car! And you blacks for that matter . . .” All I could think about was how I totally w
anted to fuck a dude who wears prayer beads and has a Virgin Guadalupe spray-painted on his car. Well, goddamn. How come dudes like that never hit on me? Instead I get this, this (fat dicked) Brown Archie Bunker motherfucker? Bummer. I guess. Six of one? Half dozen of the other? We fucked in different apartments in West Oakland he was fixing up and making more expensive, pricing out poor families and artist types. Sorta evil. The noticeable difference in viewpoint often played out in speedy, black-and-white, polarized after-sex talk about politics. He’d say shit like, “The people need to work harder—I can’t believe anyone would be on food stamps!” And I’d say, “We give in to the system all our fucking lives and those motherfuckers can’t shell out for some rice and beans. Dude fuck that. That’s weak.” (I was perhaps sensitive because I was on food stamps at the time.) Keep in mind, we had this argument with his dick still in me. He rolled off the top of me. “I was a hooker when I was your age and made enough money to eat and buy my first property. You got a dick. Use it.” He was always saying problematic complicated shit like that. That’s the part of him I don’t miss. But there were other things. We went driving around in Orinda near the Hills and I told him I wanted to live there. “No, mijo.” (I always giggled when he called me that ’cause it sounded sweet, felt dirty.) He continued, “These people up here. They’re separated from breath and movement. You’re an artist and you still have fire. You should stay in the heart of the city and create.” I took his advice because I didn’t really have a choice, seeing as I had no money to move to the Hills. I continued to see him because I figured I couldn’t ever really think of any time that some dude I was fucking didn’t completely piss me off in some way or another. Why torture him over it? He said he would wife me one day but I didn’t hold my breath. I knew he was never going to leave his husband, nor did I really need him to.
2. We started fucking ’cause he lived close. He was a Yemeni store owner in my neighborhood. Seemed like all the store owners in the Lower Bottoms District of West Oakland were Yemenis. I sucked this one Yemeni store owner’s dick in a van he parked in a baseball field in West Oakland a few years back and—not to be all ethnic profile-y but—I knew them to be some horny fuckers. I had been going to the store for three years, and out of nowhere dude starts hitting on me. He fingers my palm a little every time he hands me change, and I eventually give him my number. He calls me at 6:00 a.m. and I meet him at his grandfather’s house and we fuck. His room is full of religious posters written in a different language. After we fuck things cool down, but then all his other cousins at the store start making passes at me . . .
3. (He was a brother from off the block.) The night started off with a metal show at my house. I like metal and feeling my “inner bro.” My boyfriend from up the street comes over, he’s twenty-one and from someplace in China. He’s a raging commie. He yells at me about the Communist Manifesto sometimes, and I let him talk shit to me because he’s about the most beautiful thing ever seen. “Lay down, baby I’m going to watch the bands.” He does, and I leave the room wearing only gym shorts looking like I was molested by Henry Rollins circa Black Flag. (I wish!) This “art metal” band from Portland (of course) was playing the same note, for like, ten fucking minutes. I go to the bathroom, and this brother with dreads (who I’d seen earlier that day up the street) slips in behind me, closes the door, and puts his back to it. I’m trapped. Not too many brothers come to metal shows so I had noticed him—dreads down to his midback. Dark fucker. 11:30 p.m. dark. Almost purple? Why you come out here dressed like that? I thought he was going to hit me, but he ended up hitting me with his dick. He pulls out like this cray fucking dick, rubs some saliva on it, and fucks me doggy-style on the piss-smelling punk bathroom floor, gym shorts around my midthighs, and hands on the front of the clothes dryer. We don’t exchange numbers, and I go back to my boyfriend who is passed out in my room. I figured it’d be rude to hop into bed smelling like piss with another guy’s cum in my ass, so I did the morally correct thing and took a shower before I cuddled with him.
TRES FLORES
1. The only way to explain it is this particular Mr. Flores and I loved each other; we just didn’t like each other very much. I wanted him to run away with me, but then came his wife. Mrs. Flores and I always looked at each other as if we knew something that the other didn’t know. Mr. Flores and I were art partners. We went to LA once and Mrs. Flores came to meet us. We all sit down to tea when, out of nowhere, Mrs. Flores starts talking about the latest article she read out of a women’s magazine. “The article talked about Mexican men and how they have wives and keep male lovers on the side . . .” The second she said this I very loudly, and very noticeably, choke on the mouthful of tea I would’ve, under any other circumstance, certainly swallowed. Mr. Flores (being noticeably better at it than I was) neither skips a beat nor bats an eyelash. He simply looks down at his teacup (demurely), sets the cup soundlessly back on its saucer, looks his wife directly in the eye and says (as cool as any Ice Age), “That’s really interesting, honey. What else did the article say?” It was the first time I thought that that particular Mr. Flores might actually be evil, and if I was fucking Evil, what did that make me?
2. I loved this Mr. Flores in particular. He was another dancer. He danced for the company of the Postmodern Dance Hero. For this particular show, the Hero read from prose for an hour straight (as impressive a feat as dancing, I think), all flash fiction and memoir, and he was illuminated by his company dancers. Stage full of dancers. Zellerbach Hall. Row fifteen. I see him from that viewpoint. One tiny dancer-man rolled across the stage naked and I was like, “He’s the one . . .” We meet later outside. He was from Mexico and had been dancing a while. He also wanted to go get wasted. I like dancers who get wasted. In the course of the night we talk about art and gods and HIV a lot. He feels one way about it and I feel another way, I learn. I think he thought I should be more ashamed about it, and I was trying to explain to him that it’s hard to muster the energy to give a fuck about that sort of thing all the time. We simultaneously thought that things were different than in the past (the Pomo Dance Hero that led his company was rumored to have been positive since before the sun had planets) and that also, at any given moment, the government could take our meds away and let us all die. I think that’s part of the reason we fucked that night. Let anything Armageddon-like happen in the future, at least we got one in that night. We were forward thinkers. There may not be much time left so we’d better fuck right now. So, we did. I showed him a dance piece I was working on and he said when I move to New York we will marry and collaborate, but he still hasn’t called me back so I don’t know.
3. The third Mr. Flores was easy enough to love because I didn’t know shit about him. We only ever saw each other late nights on the back of the train coming from the city. The only English he knew was “You’re a little bitch” and “You like to get fucked.” I sucked his dick on a train platform, and one time hooked up with him in a parking lot close to our mutual stop. I remembered he grabbed one of my ass cheeks in this intensely loving way, and how come all the men who had ever pretended to love me never instinctually did it that way? It is of course the socially legit thing to long for the touch of that man that says, “You don’t have to be a ho anymore because I’m gonna make you a housewife.” I, and other girls I know, all of them being naughty by nature, sometimes find solace in the hands of a man who burns your skin with a touch that lets you know why you’ll forever be a ho and perhaps never a housewife. The feeling is powerful, immense, fleeting, and perhaps not for the weak of heart.
THE PROBLEM WITH COMEDY OR WHY I AM DEAD FUCKING SERIOUS
I was beginning to bum out my literary agent and my classmates with my AIDS jokes and apocalyptic bullshit. (“It’s always so heavy. Like, sooooo heavy. Maybe you should just find a boyfriend and write about that . . .”) Another boy in my writing class spoke up: “I know someone who died of AIDS.” After admitting this hard truth, everyone in class gave him a standing ovation. Someone.
My teacher was over me too. He marked in my papers all the time and it was always the same (“blah, blah, blah . . . I have a muthafuckin’ PhD . . . blah, blah, blah, ‘transgressive literature’”—I had to go look up what “transgressive” meant). I thought all these gutless bitches were sheep, and felt like they were all trying to cheat me out of the radical dialogue we should all be having about the complexity of the human condition, or “real talk” as they call it. No, fuck this. I decided to keep my swagger. I wasn’t too keen to change for the sake of people I didn’t really hang out with. It’s no real blow to the ego when someone who is a shitty writer (a shitty writer who is pleased with himself no less) thinks you’re trash. It’s hard to give a fuck about someone who doesn’t give a fuck about you, but being empathetic, it wasn’t really hard for me to understand what the fear in their hearts was about. Comedy is a very dangerous tool. It’s hard to keep people aligned with the fact that humor should never negate the seriousness of what you’re talking about. This is why I think most comedians go crazy: Chappelle, Murphy, Barr, Kinison, etc. . . . The trick of the balance for me has always been to demonstrate that, alongside the laughter, I’m still dead fucking serious.
Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger Page 6
