Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger

by Brontez Purnell

  THE ASSIGNMENT OR JOHNNY WOULD YOU LOVE ME IF MY DICK WERE BIGGER: PART 2

  As part of our treatment process in Barebackers Anonymous we had to complete weekly assignments. Assignment #1: Go buy some condoms you dirty whore. I went to the drug store and stared at the box of condoms that were my size (i.e., snugger fit). It dawns on me that I didn’t catch HIV because I was whoreishly promiscuous (per se), I caught HIV because I was too embarrassed to buy size snugger-fit condoms. Bummer. To add insult to injury Michael was in there buying condoms too! He was walking around with a box of XL-size Magnums! Smiling no less! On my way to the bathroom to kill myself, I saw a pack of mango chili peppers. It brought on memories that got me thinking about the complexities of the question of dick size.

  1. I was hanging out with Texas. Texas is a big ol’ white boy from Brooklyn. He’s hung like a (well-hung) Puerto Rican. After a recent trip to Thailand, he reported that the native boys throw themselves at white tourists under the assumption that they: a. have bigger wieners and b. more money (though personally I feel like when it comes to faggot shit fuckery, money is always a bigger motivation—maybe I’m just a greedy bitch—anywho). Texas also reported that the native tops, acclimating to this fucked-up cultural annoyance, developed a saying: “Why have big banana when you could have hot chili pepper?” Hot. Chili. Pepper. ’Cause that’s what a little one feels like! How sensory! I knew I was mentally ill because this story made me feel better.

  2. I worked at a strip joint for a bit as a jizz-mopper. I also walked the girls back and forth to the booth to make sure they didn’t get harassed. Me and this Russian stripper-girl used to talk it up all the time especially about dicks. One time she said (spy accent), “I think all guys should have their dick size tattooed on their foreheads.” At first the raging bottom in me was like “Fuck yeah . . .” but the humanitarian in me kicked in “Wait a minute, that’s some Nazi Germany shit!” All I could imagine was that one guy walking around with a negative two on his forehead talking about “At least I’m pretty.” Bummer.

  3. I was staying with a friend in New York and she asked me to pick her up some tampons and Magnum condoms for her boyfriend. I wanted to explore what it was like, so I walked around CVS for twenty minutes holding them so people would notice. No one gave a shit, especially the lady who rang me up who looked like she hadn’t had sex since the Civil War. She eyeballed me in this certain kind of way and then announced over the loudspeaker that she needed a price check on the enemas I was buying, put it all in the bag, and said “Have a good day, sir.” I took all these mental notes, walked right up to Michael, and asked him on a date. We went to see his friend’s band play and fucked at his house (with condoms!). I also learned that despite having, like, five pounds of dick he’s a raging bottom. I fucked him. We get pizza after, and I save the chili pepper packets, and just to be really obtuse mail them to him the next day. I report to my Barebackers Anonymous group that I had used a condom (everyone applauded) and that I felt like I was well on the road to recovery. But that’s about the time That Asshole joined the group and everything fell to hell . . .

  HOW TO SURVIVE SHITTY MEN AND HOW TO SURVIVE BEING A SHITTY MAN*

  (*There was a nonfiction writing contest for an up-and-coming gay youth magazine for maleidentified youth, i.e., little faggots [fagettes?], age fourteen to twenty-four. The contest called for a sort of “how-to” guide for entering/surviving adult gay life. I saw that shit, giggled a little, and submitted “How to Survive Shitty Men/How to Survive Being a Shitty Man” and was promptly rejected . . .)

  1. That Asshole. I’ll start by saying that the end of my friendship with That Asshole marked the official start of my two-and-a-half year depression. To this day, I have no clue why he had even showed up to Barebackers Anonymous since he wasn’t trying to change. Pretty soon I was skipping meetings to fuck around with him. I was struck. He wasn’t a big guy. Super fair. Big blue eyes. Intense, but delicate despite himself. He had an acid tongue to match. That little bitch had smelly breath not from the cottonmouth from all the weed he smoked, but simply because of all the shit he talked. He was pretty to look at, and the icing on the cake was that he actually lisped. Like, not ironic, not affected, but a surefire 100 percent big ol’ “I’m a queer—bash me” lisp. I thought it was one of the sexiest things about him. Though I was in my early twenties, I had some hardline politics about who I was attracted to. I didn’t give a flying fuck about “masculine” men. I wanted a faggot. Like a total fucking flamer with a tank full of sugar. Someone who understood fully what the fuck I had to go through in the world. Midfriendship he got married to a wonderful man who dressed really butch. He started to dress really butch. By this time, I saw him as a big brother who I looked up to. We started fucking more when I started dressing more butch. I was still too young when he said he wanted to fuck me but didn’t want to use condoms, ever. I was taken aback. Sometimes I would get blackout and tell the wrong people about it. Now, he was pretty buck. Went to anonymous hotel sex parties, did bareback porn—like he was really going for it. I, at the time, was still hanging out in the shallow end of the pool, and when he said he wanted to fuck me raw it sounded like a challenge. Looking back, I felt like what we had going was tantamount to a suicide pact. I learned later (as we too often do) that fucking all the time isn’t always based in “celebrating life.” It can sometimes be depression, sometimes mania, whichever. I would one day look back to see what basically was going on was two boys, misfits of sorts, accessing masculinity through sex because raw sex was “how men do it,” alongside the fact that it felt good. I gave in to his demand ’cause the thought of him not loving me or not wanting to have sex with me was scarier than any disease. It was just that pathetic, that simple, and that stupid. It started rather innocently at first. In the years that followed, he moved away for a bit, and I started getting fucked at the bathhouse without condoms too often. Started feeling new things. Like the feeling of fucking some guy who already had some other guy (or several guys) cum in them. All of the fluids mixing—it turned me on something terrible, but I never talked or wrote about it ’cause that type of thing would get you labeled a hoodlum. I went sober for a couple of years and could no longer blame my favorite pastime on alcohol or anyone but myself anymore. I look back and reason that I was trying to get back that first feeling or experience, as most addicts do. I looked for That Asshole in pieces of strangers, be it the weight of them on top of me or the intensity of eye contact while they were fucking me. It was always different because they weren’t my best friend.

  He moved back and said we could be together, like boyfriends. He lied. I remember all hell breaking loose the night he asked me to sleep on the couch—it was clear he’d changed his mind. I don’t really blame him. He hated my drinking and made me promise I would quit. I lied. Me and him were both in the habit of making promises we couldn’t possibly keep. In the time he was away, I did the whole bar thing and got rejected by quite a few guys. Keep in mind, these were guys he would fuck sometimes, but I was sworn to the secret code of best-buddyhood and could never let the cat out of the bag that we fucked sometimes. It made me hateful and jealous. In our youth, we believed we could be fairy free—be best friends and fuck—but we learned that few men you were trying to date would ever accept that arrangement. My ego couldn’t take it. Dealing with him made me learn what an evil cunt I could be. The night he made me sleep on the couch, I left, came back, and circled his car for an hour trying to resist the urge to bust out all his car windows. I started leaving abusive blackout messages on his answering machine. I was never too repentant about the messages though, I mean, at least it took me nine drinks to be a dick. He could do it stone-cold sober. Eventually I saw it for what it was: two young men that loved each other, but would always be too crazy to take care of each other the way we needed to. It seems I waited for years to hear him say “I’m your boyfriend.” It certainly didn’t have to be traditional; I just wanted to hear him say it. He never did and sometimes I s
till sit up too late at night inking up pages wondering if I miss him or not. This is what broke my heart . . .

  2. I went to dinner with my boyfriend at the time and that shit turned into a full-on class war. He paid for everything, yet again. But oh no, this time he was juuuuust wasted enough to be a bitch about it. “Where is your money?! You never have any money!!!” There was this irritation in his tone and I knew he meant business. It was hard for me to give a fuck, why didn’t he just date a lawyer? Or drug dealer? Or something . . . Saying “My artist boyfriend is always broke” is like saying “The sky is blue” or “The ocean is full of fish.” Clearly tattooed on the forehead of such statements is “DUH BITCH.” It wasn’t the first time he’d emasculated me in public. Truthfully, he had to have been one of the most castrating men I had ever loved. I was used to turning diplomat: “Let’s go home, baby.” I stayed at his house often to avoid my punk warehouse and ten roommates back in Oakland. “Home?!” he said queerly. “No. I have a home, you go back to your homeless shelter . . .” I smacked my fist against a newspaper stand, and when that didn’t satisfy, drew my hand back and punched him in the face. He fell down, nose bleeding. I know I will regret it forever, but cannot deny the three immediate seconds of silence after: how peaceful they were and how good it felt to finally shut that nagging bitch the fuck up.

  3. Pillow Talk and War Stories: It was always the boys that liked to lie in bed. I remember sitting up late at night trying to exorcise ghosts of dudes from the past. All men leave you with something different. Charles was buck. I liked Charles. Big ol’ white boy from down South (“Rammerjammeryellowhammer, Give ’em hell Alabama!” as he’d say). In bed, he’d tell me stories about his trashy (and awesome) mom. As the story goes, his stepdad would go away on business trips and his mother would have sex with her boyfriend in his car at the end of their street. Whenever Charles’s stepfather would call from the Midwest or up North or wherever he was, Charles’s job was to flick the porch light on and off all flashy like, signaling his mother to come and take the call. Charles explained that as he got older he began to “suffer” from the same “fever” as his mother.

  There was Mickey. He also liked to lie in bed. His stories were grim; his dad had molested him. I remembered never feeling like I could protect him. He eventually went crazy on drugs and his mom came to get him and said she had no idea why he was so disturbed. I confronted her about the abuse.

  I remember lying in the bed most with Jesse. He was the one I stayed in bed the longest with. I still remember the night where he, yet again, explained why I sucked at giving massages and why we shouldn’t be friends that fuck around. Ever. No, like ever. Alongside telling me that I gave the best head ever. Like, ever. Whatever. Pillow Talk. War Stories. The men I’ve shared mental space with still keep me up at night. Most people count sheep to fall asleep. I just counted all my men.

  4. The Disappearing Man: He woke up feeling invisible again. There was no excuse for him except he was over it and born over it. The days following the breakup were hard, and this particular day everything was bugging the fuck out of him. He woke up to rain and he was instantly over it. Plip. Plop. Plip. Plop. Plip . . . It was the squishy sound of soggy black sensible canvas shoes in the rain. This was the beat that propelled him down the street to the bus, to the train, though he’d rather be home sleeping. When he left the house and went down the street, no one cheered, there was no celebration of roses. Just the morning call from his mother to remind him that Jesus loved him and that he was beautiful. Well at least someone loves me, he thought. There were so many mistakes to think about on the train. Liquor bottles were piling up in his room and each seemed to have some sort of separate spiritual baggage attached. The night he had ruined his life this way, and how another night he ruined his life this other way. All the bottles denoted these failures, and keeping the bottles was evil magic that he did not fear. He was either bored or numb. He pontificated on the night everything had gone wrong. He’d had too many pills, trying to get through a party where the ex would be. Blackout. He heard the next morning that he was in the middle of the floor of the party crying and saying, “I gave _____ AIDS!”

  He hadn’t really given the boy AIDS, and he knew that. Was it the guilt of having sex with him in the first place (considering their serodiscordant relationship) that caused a freak out, or the evil-bitch side that just wanted to fuck with an ex more? (The two men had hurt each other very often, with a fucked ease as if they were playing a game of tag.) It was yet another relationship lying on the floor busted to all hell in a million fucking pieces. It was everybody’s fault. It started raining harder, and the moisturizer he used in the winter slipped off his skin and onto the pavement, mixing in the gutter with the incandescent pools of escaped motor oil, all sweeping down in the drain that goes to the bay, which goes to the ocean . . . At least he was clean. He moved defiantly forward. He didn’t fear the rain. He knew it was only water. This is how he pleasantly (yet not so pleasantly) became translucent in the rainy and gray mornings that would come in his life at times. If you stood still behind him while he was walking down the street, you would notice that as he walked away, he seemed to disappear.

  5. Me vs. the Writer: It was, of course, a mistake to date another writer. We differed and disagreed stylistically, and very, very often. He felt like I was too often sincere and forthcoming in my writing, and I thought he was too often full of shit. I took writing night classes, and he went to proper school for it so I tended to take his criticism to heart. He was often published in that New Best Gay Erotic Fiction volume what-the-fuck-ever, those books I tended to avoid. All of his stories were about the “Incredible Adventures of Two Boring-Ass White Dudes in Love,” and people actually bought that shit with money and belief. Hook. Line. Sinker. Not surprising really, most people eat at McDonald’s. I just hated the plucky, wide-eyedness of it all. Like, why couldn’t one of the precious boys be a murderer and a junkie or have an eating disorder? Anything to sex up and jazz up those boring-ass stories. I patted myself on the back for writing about real shit, like gun violence and semen addiction. Shit hit the fan the day I broke into his computer and was reading his journal, emails, and first drafts. Right there, in the middle of the screen, plain as a ten-inch boner, was something too familiar to me. He had stolen one of my ideas and put it in his own story. I knew he’d get paid for this story. The emasculation of it ripped right through me. War. War. War. Now, looking back, I think we were jealous of each other. I remember sometimes (sorta) envying his success or rather, wishing I was him; maybe my idea popping up in his story was him wishing he was me.

  I was enraged. I took his laptop to the garden out back and poured lighter fluid (holy water) on it and set that silver bullshit on fire. He never talked to me ever again and he could never really return the favor—my stories were already on fire.

  THE POLITICS OF BUG CHASING

  I joined the online barebacking site ’cause I was out of ideas. The guy came over; he was on a five-day speed binge. He looked me in the eyes and told me he was worried about me. “Were you a bug chaser too?” he asks. I pause ’cause it’s so rare I feel scandalized by something—I like the feeling. “Like, did I try to catch HIV on purpose?” Hmmmmmm. I always have a hard time with that particular question. We fags are funny. We sit in church, point fingers, call ourselves stupid and cry ourselves to sleep at night over the subject of sex. Stupid is as stupid does (of course), and if you do it more than three times it’s not a mistake anymore. The bug chaser says, “I’d rather have it so I can stop worrying about it.” This is called “extreme.” Looking back (with glasses) at certain jacked decisions in the past, I think it’s also extreme to say, “I wanna do hella sketchy shit and don’t want anything bad to happen.” Passive acceptance is a motherfucker and maybe there isn’t as much space between me and this guy as I thought. It took me three hours to kick him out because I couldn’t stop fucking him. Now I know it’s not a question of “Who’s right, me or him?” We are both, of
course, dead wrong. But the ultimate question is, who’s more wrong?

  TOUR DIARIES: TEXAS

  1. Solange: It was the best of states. It was the worst of states. It was the best state of mind. It was the worst state of mind. It was South by Southwest and I couldn’t (Kim) deal with it. It was a club situation. Me and this sister with an Afro did shrooms and went to the dying New York party that was doing a one-off nightclub in Austin that night. Ill Shapes or Cross Shapes or whatever with shapes (the name eludes me). We figured we better not cause too much trouble in the land of scary-ass white people, or Middle America as they call it, but we did, of course, and we paid the bullshit toll. I was with my bandmates and crew. We all look so good people wanna fuck with us and beat our asses. This Barbie pulled off my bandmate’s hat so I, knee-jerk reaction style, ripped her (tacky) white patent leather clutch purse from under her arm and threw it across the room. In doing so, her phone must have fallen out. She went to security and was like “that shirtless, high black guy stole my phone!” Oh shit! Right about that same time I looked over and see this cuuuute little high-yellow black girl dancing kinda close. She wants a faux vogue battle. She bewitches me. Who is this cute little black girl?! Why is she dressed like Adam Ant? (Complete with eight kinds of Burberry and a neon turquoise painted raccoon strip across her eyes—keep in mind neon turquoise as opposed to Adam’s white one . . .) Wait a minute! THAT’S SOLANGE!!!!! Beyoncé’s younger sister and black America’s new neo-soul, crossover indie mistress. Yaaaaaas! I saw her a couple of months ago in SF with Estelle; she covered “Lovefool” by the Cardigans and I decided I would gladly follow her to hell—if need be. “HEY GIRL!” (I exclaim, as if I knew her). She came up dancing and we cut a mini rug. She asked how it was going and unfortunately the shrooms were acting as truth serum, “I’m getting kicked out of the club ’cause I threw some white girl’s purse across the room.” She looked at me as if I were a shirtless, high black guy who just said “I’m getting kicked out of the club ’cause I threw some white girl’s purse across the room.” One of her friends came to rescue her right as the big white police guy and black bouncer came to take me and my crew out. Shit show. Barbie starts yelling bullshit, the sister with an Afro spits in Barbie’s face (I loved her for that) and I didn’t get in too much trouble ’cause I remember the police treating me as if I was too gay to fuck with. (“That’s right officer. I’m not gay. I’m just really, really HIGH.”) Besides meeting Solange, that was some kind of bullshit. But that too would be ripped away. I was relating this story to T’Kwa (this angry ass African girl) and she was like “Beyuuuunnncé? Solaaaaaaaage? You hear that French bullshit in their names? Faggot, them is light-skinned creole girls from Texas, they don’t represent us; hell yeah she looked at you crazy in the club, hell, she probably sided with that blond bitch! Look at how Kelly has to live!” I noticed me and T’Kwa, both broke as fuck, eating cereal, purple-tinted skin in colorful asymmetrical clothes. We looked like Nigerian new-wavers. I decided not to tell T’Kwa that whenever I looked in the mirror all I saw was a beautiful, skinny, high-yellow girl. I decided it was better to not be so forthcoming for once. I didn’t want to get my ass beat by a politically convicted black girl. They are generally not kidding, and I decided to go ahead and take it up the ass. (Ass always.) “Sure,” I said to T’Kwa. “Sure.” (I saw Solange at SF Pride two years later and gave two snaps to the Goddess when I heard her say: “I gave up my spot at the BET Awards today to be with my people today.” I recommitted my plan to follow her straight to hell, if need be.)