100 Boyfriends

by Brontez Purnell

  Even in the half a second it took for all these thoughts to flash and materialize in my mind, I sense that he’s already annoyed at the slow recognition in my eyes. Like he’s daring me not to let him in.

  He says nothing, and I’m taken aback, because the first time this happened it was an explosion—this is the second time he’s come over strung out and I tell myself it will be the last but I also said that last time and now I’m not so sure.

  * * *

  THE FIRST TIME, he was crazed and out of his mind. It was a very active disassociation. He was convulsing and dry heaving. He started breaking things and yelling at me, telling me to get the fuck out of his apartment, that he would kill me. The situation was moving so fast that I stood there silent and still. He took off his shirt and pants and the track marks on his arms and legs looked like a constellation of stars. He lay on the couch but as soon as he lay down he popped back up; he ran out of my apartment in his underwear and I ran after him, chased him down the street, shouted for him to come back, but he just ran faster and faster. This was some years ago. I just assumed that he would be dead soon, and tucked the memory away.

  This time he is quieter. There isn’t any energy left in him and he’s so thin I want to cry. I shave his head and make him a bath and throw away his smelly, mangled clothes. I go look for clean things I have for him so that he can lie in bed with me later. I turn the air conditioner on because I know he is burning up and he likes his pillow and sheets cold when his body settles into bed. I remember that much from when we lived together.

  It had been his apartment first, some fifteen years before. These days people talk about how expensive the city is but dear god, even when a one-bedroom apartment was $650 a month we basically couldn’t afford it. I got kicked out of my spot and he let me move in because he wanted me close. He wanted to play house. It just worked. Or rather it worked for longer than I thought it would.

  This boy, as far as he and I are concerned, could show up to my house with a severed head and I would still let him in—that’s how unnecessarily devoted to him I am. I remember saying to him in our youth, “No, I’ll never leave”—he held me to my words like a steel trap stabs into a bear.

  I run a bath for him and put him in. The boy who I actually missed is long, long gone. But I cannot sever myself from what remains. What was once a big beautiful star has collapsed in on its own weight and turned into a black hole.

  •••

  * * *

  I REMEMBER WHEN we were younger—he was the one who picked me. I remember it. I worked as a waiter at the diner near this spot he bartended at. We couldn’t have been more than twenty-two at the time. He would come after his shift at the bar and I remember he came in for a week in a row at 3:00 a.m. He would sit in the same place and stare at me—I’d ask him, “Is there something I can get you, sir?” And he would always say with kind eyes, “No, you’re fine,” and nurse his cup of coffee another thirty or so minutes. I would see him eyeing my every move and I always found it rude. He explained to me after I moved in with him that he wasn’t trying to be, and said, “I don’t think I had ever seen anything like you before,” and to the present day he had never really clarified that statement. Anything like me how? Did he mean a punk boy who worked at a diner? Dear god, at the time the whole city was CRAWLING with the likes of me. Or did he mean a Black boy like me? Or did he mean something outside the Venn diagram of sociopolitical identity politics?

  I can only imagine he meant Black because though he loved me I know that he did not see us as the same thing. I knew that I read as “other” to him, and I learned why one day.

  To the eye he looked like some Mission cholo dude—or at least that’s where one’s sexual desire would go when meeting him. He was Mexican, 6'3", bigger built, face of a fallen-ass angel (there were tattoos all over it), and he just had the style. Graffitied skateboard and a black hoodie and a Giants cap. He had a gold crucifix necklace that I liked to mentally fixate on whenever he wore it, which basically was every day. I had fucked enough boys with Catholic damage to know that if he’s wearing a crucifix, he’s definitely a ho. That boy was a ho. Yet still, that shit was all a crafted look ’cause his ass was as Orange County as a strip mall next to Disneyland.

  I remember the first holiday that he dragged me to Southern California to meet his folks. I expected some charged, colonially Spanish feast of tamales or mole, but his family home had a framed American flag in the living room and I think I offended his mother when I looked visibly taken aback when they served a TV dinner for Thanksgiving. They had the TV on the entire time playing the news. It felt like I was in some form of hell and it made me feel a certain way for him. How on Earth did he grow up in this?

  I remember him saying to me once, “I just like that you’re from somewhere—I don’t feel like I’m from somewhere.” I remembered the scene from Thanksgiving and understood what he meant. But this was one of the many holes he had in himself that he always made visible to me.

  I never really needed to stare deep into some crystal ball to understand what his issue was. He had this way of always laying the problem out as plainly as possible.

  Like how I was living with him in his house but he had boyfriends—a great many Daddies and some other boys our age. Sometimes I had to meet them and it was always the same. Some weird person who existed out of the realm of our life; he was always trying to “date up.” None of these men ever stayed for long and I found it rude as fuck that he even had the nerve to flaunt his whores in front of me.

  Either way he chose me as his pet and for a long time we were happy. We were happy for longer than I thought we would be.

  Our encounters blossomed into nights of us roaming the town high as fuck, well into the dawn. He would show up to my diner with bags of whatever drugs he copped at his bar and we would snort them and wait till 6:00 a.m. for my graveyard shift to end before heading to this one bar that was open all day, and we would party into the afternoon. We did this on a loop of what seems like years but in reality could maybe have been months. Time with him always seemed queered and distorted. A day with him seemed like both an hour and a lifetime. That’s the type of love we had.

  I remember one night we got drunk and got into a fistfight about nothing at a bar and got kicked out. We found a storefront several blocks later and made up—we started kissing on the ground and then I remember we had sex on the sidewalk, three different people walked past us and didn’t even stop to notice. God bless San Francisco.

  Another night he was so drunk he said that if I truly loved him I would do anything he said, and I responded, “Yes. I love you. I will do anything you say.” And so he grabbed me by the arm and we ran under an 18-wheeler stopped at a red light and made out underneath it for what seemed like forever until we heard the gears shift and sprinted from beneath it before it ran us over.

  There were rules, of course—he never called me his boyfriend. We fucked, we lived together, we almost died together partying, all that shit. But he was the lover and I was the beloved. I was to obey what he said; it was like this incestuous brotherhood where I was the younger one who was to take every cue from him, which was a strange arrangement considering we were the same age.

  My relationship to him was always a very specific kind of mindfuck—behaving as boyfriends when we weren’t but actually were. We did all the things two people who know each other too well do. We took turns being bored a lot. Whenever I was present, physically or mentally, he wasn’t—even when we were at the same table eating or in the same bed fucking.

  * * *

  IT HAPPENED THAT he just stopped coming home. He was always into the older Daddies, the ones who led him down darker paths than he had planned for me. He would brag about this one Daddy who had leather blackout curtains, and how he would sit and do drugs with him for days and not see the sunlight. I got tired of cleaning him up after his binges. I always felt like the Daddies he chased got to burn all the good parts of him up with the drugs they pumped i
nto him, like they all wanted to turn him into some drugged-up porno pup. When they were done with him I would always have to glue the pieces back together. Somewhere in the back of my head—despite all factors making it seemingly unfathomable—I thought that he would ask me to marry him. I learned that the most I would ever be was his nurse and his surrogate boyfriend. If he hadn’t rescued me all those years ago from homelessness I probably could break the spell he has over me, but his early generosity has me locked in this position like a seat belt. I was on this ride, and on this ride, I would stay. We’re both thirty-two now.

  I remember when his absence from the apartment became permanent. I didn’t hear from him and he stopped paying rent. I feared he was dead until that first time he came knocking on the door. He saw the apartment we once shared together and all he saw was me moving on with my life without him, and I guess it set him off. I didn’t understand why he chose to ignore the fact that he was the one who abandoned me.

  * * *

  I PUT HIM IN $130 white Champion sweatpants I just got at the store when I recently went on a shopping spree high on pills; I pair them with the matching $130 white hoodie because I want to wrap him in expensive things and get him to my comfortable bed.

  I trace his body with my eyes and I know he cannot sleep. The drugs are hammering through him like a freight train. I know his body like it’s my own, and along his torso are a ridiculous bunch of pro-American, Sailor Jerry–style tattoos, spread all across his chest and belly, but from the start of his left clavicle and going up you can see where his tattoos had moved into weirder Aztec imagery. He started that phase when he moved to San Francisco and became more “woke.” He had an outline of some Aztec warrior god along his clavicle and neck, and I remember the line work of the god’s hand sits perfectly on top of the part of his neck where his jugular vein would pump bloody murder whenever he was high. I would sometimes just watch it move up and down and up and down and damn near hypnotize myself.

  I get a bucket of ice water and sit it by the bed with a rag in it. I keep the lamp on the nightstand on and stay up with him. Every time I wipe his head with cold water I say, “You are going to behave yourself. You are going to come back to me.”

  BOYFRIEND #666 / THE SATANIST

  I HAD OUT-TROLLED MYSELF ONCE AGAIN. I wanted Trench Coat Mafia dick so I started putting out dating ads looking for adult players of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons—I was curious to see what would come from the net I had cast, and the answer would be standing in front of me sooner rather than later. I got a late-night text from a gentleman caller who said he was a ninth-level warlock and that he could teach me both the fantasy games and blow my back out. I got to his house and was literally so not prepared—like, I thought I was, but that fool was on his ninth-level warlock swag, SOOOO HARD. Before me stood a grown-ass man with surgically implanted fangs, a cape, red contact lenses, and an inverted pentagram tattoo on his forehead. The tattoo distracted from his gentle features; he really was a pretty guy, though he fucked in this ugly way. He asked me about my own inverted pentagram tattoo and I was like, “Oh, well, really I’m a Romantic Satanist—I believe in Satan as an allegory and as a literary vehicle and really his being a story of anarchy and patriarchal defiance—”

  “SILENCE, POSEUR!” he said, and advanced on me. Before I could realize that I had not fully consented to it I was naked with a belt around my neck and being choked to the gods—he made me repeat “FUCK GOD, HAIL SATAN!” over and over again; he also was like, “YOU ARE JUST A FAGGOT HOLE FOR SATAN’S SONS!” to which I rolled my eyes. If this was Satan’s best sex warrior it stood to reason why Satanism in general was such a PR nightmare. His stroke game was at about 58 percent and considering how much plot was involved I still felt that instead of fucking him I should have just, like, eaten a cheeseburger or goofed around on the internet. He had a box of condoms with inverted-pentagram insignia on them because apparently Satanists have their own brand of condoms? Condoms by nature seemed like such a lawful thing—why would a thrall to the Dark Lord even bother? But I said nothing and let him fuck me despite my mild latex allergy. He came in like three minutes and then showed me how to play Magic: The Gathering as promised, and though I never fucked him again I still to this day meet him every other Wednesday to play the game.

  ED’S NAME WRITTEN IN PENCIL

  “YOU LIKE TO GET FUCKED, don’t you?”

  Mickey Johnson was seven and a half years old and sitting in the back of the school bus, beads of sweat collected all around his brow and temples. He wasn’t even tall enough to see over the seat in front of him but he dared not look to his left ’cause there would be the bogeyman himself—Cortez Williams.

  Cortez was eleven, foul breathed, and bigger than most of the kids at the elementary school (he had been held back three times). Mickey knew that if he looked Cortez in the eye he would be really starting trouble and the school bus was close to Cortez’s stop. Mickey held his breath and closed his eyes, frozen. Cortez persisted.

  “You be puttin’ ding-a-lings in yo’ mouth. You a faggot.” Cortez reached over and started pinching Mickey’s nipple to the point of pain over his Hulk Hogan T-shirt and then he bit him hard on the top of his ear.

  The school bus was old and dilapidated—it was probably once the top of the line when it was made in the sixties, but some twenty years later, it was showing its wear. In the winter it was an icebox and now in the summer, one month shy of school being out, it was an oven. Even with all the windows rolled down. You could feel when the engine shifted in the floor of the bus, and at that moment, the engine gave a shift right as Mickey’s heart did. As was the rule with this ritual, Cortez pressed his advantage harder and harder the closer he got to his stop.

  “You be getting dicked in the butt.” Cortez gripped Mickey by the privates so hard that Mickey started to cry. Cortez unlatched his hand and in a swift motion took Mickey’s hand and placed it on the crotch of his shorts. Mickey noticed Cortez wasn’t wearing any underwear—Cortez never wore underwear.

  This is how it started.

  Sometime at the beginning of the year, all the classes K–6 sat in the ball field for the beginning-of-the-year speech given by the principal. The rural elementary school boasted just under two hundred students so all the classes fit comfortably on around two acres of field. Earlier that summer a drunken transfer truck driver passed out at the wheel and smacked his rig right into the school, completely destroying the sixth-grade classroom. It was probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened in that town. Mickey remembered watching the evening news with his grandparents as a white woman with a perm and a Minnie Mouse T-shirt cried and held her crucifix necklace and pointed it at the camera, saying that it was a miracle that it happened during the summer while school was out and how “the Divine worked in mysterious ways.”

  Presently, the principal was talking some jazz about how he loved each and every student and how God protects. Mickey’s mind was elsewhere. He wondered what it would be like to be sitting in a room quietly, then all of a sudden a truck ran through it—he couldn’t picture it. He lost his train of thought and turned around. Sitting on his butt, legs folded in front, was Cortez in plain view, in little track shorts with no underwear. Mickey could see Cortez’s penis. It gave him a nervous butterfly feeling and Mickey stared at it perhaps a beat longer than he should have. Cortez was sitting with his upper torso leaned back and propped up on his elbows: he wasn’t really trying to cover himself, and he noticed that Mickey had noticed. The two made eye contact and Mickey quickly turned around.

  Later there would be the first confrontation. Mickey’s class and Cortez’s class took bathroom breaks at the same time. A group of about fifteen boys would all wait in line. If the urinals were taken, the boys would crowd to the two doorless stalls that held a single toilet each. Three or four boys would urinate together at a time. To Mickey’s left was Louis Gerbins, who everyone made fun of because he pulled his pants and underwear all the way down
to his ankles to pee. Mickey undid his Superman belt and was relieving himself next to Louis when Cortez poked in the stall right next to Mickey, pulled down his track shorts (he seemed to favor track shorts), and let loose a stream of urine all across the belly of Mickey’s shirt and the front of his jeans. When Mickey was asked what happened he blamed it all on Louis, who was promptly paddled, and Mickey was sent back to the bathroom to put on the change of clothes his mother insisted that he keep in his cubbyhole year-round.

  It was now nearing the end of the school year and Cortez’s attacks were becoming more frequent. Mickey always waited to see the town sign. “Welcome to Belle Mina,” it said. It was a blip of a town off the I-65 highway. In the distant past the second governor of Alabama had made his residence there. Since the plantation slaves could not pronounce “Belle Manor,” the town was named “Belle Mina” after that. Mickey didn’t know this. All Mickey knew was that after the sign, the next stop was Cortez’s house and that’s when the torture would end.

  It was a bus of thirty kids. Four white ones who were let off first, and then the Black students who were let off in the nooks and crannies of the farm town.

  Cortez lived near the edge of the township in what they called “Camp Town”—several acres of cotton fields surrounded by woods. He lived on a plot of land that was all red clay (no grass grew there ever) and on the plot sat seven dilapidated trailers that all belonged to members of Cortez’s immediate family. Cortez lived in one trailer with his grandmother and uncle, who was drunk all the time. The bus came to a stop.

  “You gon’ be my girlfriend,” said Cortez to Mickey, and forced a kiss on his lips.