100 Boyfriends

by Brontez Purnell

  The older man looks as if he wishes to God this interaction had just been a blow job, but I can’t imagine how one would get a dick in this young man’s mouth: he talks too fucking much.

  Back when I was a young and easily corruptible homosexual, all the Daddies loved me because I knew how to shut the fuck up and take some dick.

  An older guy would take me to dinner and I would study him like a cat watching an object it was, at any moment, about to pounce on; i.e., “THIS PUSSY KILLS.”

  I would answer every question but keep content to a minimum. “I’m studying art,” I would respond, or, “I graduate the year after next,” or “I was quoted by The New York Times”—just enough to let them know that they were about to stick their dick in a young man who had self-worth and a locatable dignity, even though I have to say I wasn’t altogether interested in it (the dignity, that is).

  My good-boy routine was for the Daddy’s relief, not mine. I just wanted to get fucked good—winning the older gentleman’s respect was for his peace of mind.

  And then I would sucker punch him.

  Right as dinner was over and he signed the check, I would stretch and yawn and casually say to my host (in one breath), “Y’know, sir, I would let you cum in me.”

  Now, most of the men would be immediately disgusted. They’d give me a look of disapproval and I would never see them again, but that was well and fine because they were exactly the ones I wanted to weed out.

  It was the Daddies whose hearts you could see skip a beat and a look of exactitude would crawl across their faces.

  “Really?” they would say, standing up quickly. These Daddies would take me home, bend me in half like a pretzel, fuck me so hard that I would forget the person I was before they fucked me.

  But back to the dinner itself. During the dinner, when the Daddy would be sizing me up, I had the dual occupation of being present enough for him to assess, and also being able to sink into the background enough so as not to take up too much space at the table. I had to treat myself like I was something on the menu he had ordered. Like I was on the menu.

  And then a joint lit in my head. I was forgetting something. I had to stop all this thinking and go back. Horny Daddies … I’m on the menu … Food … Where is my food??

  I’m looking at the waitress and she is motioning as if to say, “One second, please,” and I look at the couple that I had just ripped apart for no reason and I think I am being this level of bitch ’cause my sugar is dropping.

  I don’t know why I got so addicted to the narrative of these men. I need not notice them at all.

  It’s kind of like that tree-falling-in-the-woods question. Do they exist if no one’s watching? I think not, yet still, I can’t help wanting some kind of restorative justice blow job for the victim of the date, and, truthfully, one for myself.

  Earlier that day my newest HIV counselor saw my chart and noticed I had contracted syphilis three times in one year. She was an older gray-haired straight woman—she hugged me and asked, “Have you ever considered having a boyfriend?” I started crying. Like really, really loud, ugly crying. I had to catch my breath at times I was crying-so-hard crying. Not out of sadness, or loneliness, but out of sheer exhaustion. I was just cocaine hungover and cranky, to be honest, but the echo chamber of the STD clinic was feeling like a coffin I had been submerged in, one I kept reemerging from like a tomb. I was my own personal Jesus.

  I cried so hard that she referred me to a mental health counselor who then referred me to HR who then informed me that I should have the first counselor fired for triggering me so hard. The thought of swift justice filled me with an immediate sense of purpose that faded in all of ten seconds. One thing I can truly say I love about myself is that I’m too sketch to lead a moral campaign against anybody. Also, leading a moral campaign against anything just seemed like a lot of work and I was stoned.

  Still, I remember her hugging me when I was upset and how nice it felt. Like someone actually fucking cared. No one I was fucking cared for me or hugged me, so in the end I really was a hit dog hollering. It all struck a nerve.

  The waitress comes back with three different fried items, coconut rice, and a hot tea, and I’m sitting there looking at the color palette of the food and, for what I’m sure are very specific reasons, I’m thinking about that Frida Kahlo painting where she’s in a tub and seeing, like, visions of her life or whatever. I’m thinking of this as I see the food but it’s not as poetic, beautiful, or elegant as it sounds—in fact, what I see isn’t even a vision but rather a scene, jackhammering its way into my brain, one I can see even when my eyes are closed.

  I think back to the interaction with the HIV counselor and the linger of the hug, the humanness, the warmth, the depth, and then my mind falls a little further to the smell of the old lady herself, and then kind of wishing she had a dick and had instead been a creepy old doctor dude who tried to finger me.

  I know it’s a bad thing to think, but it’s ok to think it as long as you don’t say it out loud, so I keep it to myself and don’t blurt out “I AM HAVING A FANTASY ABOUT PAINTING A DIFFERENT GENDER ON MY HIV COUNSELOR AND HAVING THEM SEXUALLY ASSAULT ME” to the people to my right who are having a terrible date.

  I also play the scene in my head of me picturing myself as a for real for real shady bitch and actually going to HR and trying to explain all of this.

  “But if I had to think about it, what’s REALLY getting my goat about the situation isn’t the fact that the doctor didn’t finger me, it’s more that she emotionally fingered me. She emotionally fingered me without my consent!”

  My dick is hard and I stare around the restaurant.

  No one here cares that my dick is hard.

  I don’t care that my dick is hard.

  I’m back to being just stoned and hungry. I go full force into all the food. I’m eating so fast that I can’t even really taste what I’m eating, it’s literally just sliding down my throat.

  The couple next to me grabs the check and leaves, and with no one left to watch I find I have a strange sense of aloneness—the person I’m waiting for is clearly not coming at this point. But I sink inside myself and remember that I am not alone. I am in a restaurant, full of people.

  EPILOGUE

  ROCK ’N’ ROLL IS DEAD TO ME— A EUROPEAN TOUR DIARY

  I SAT THERE IN THE CVS MAGAZINE AISLE shaking and crying, feeling overwhelmed and a bit beside myself. It was as if the entire fucking Earth simultaneously stood still and switched magnetic poles. Normally I only go to CVS to buy lube and taquitos but today was a bit more ceremonious—before me, I was witnessing the impossible: my band was on the cover of Rolling Stone. The article had gone as far as to declare me “The Rouge King of California Garage Rock.” I, like, gagged. The illuminated neon fluorescent thought bubble above my head was flashing between The Rouge King of California Garage Rock?! OMG! Girl! Like, THAT’S ME! and also I hope this gets me laid.

  I walked home with the magazine in hand and stared at my face again on the cover. I thought about time, placement, and lineage. My very existence in the rock matrix felt something like the past, present, and future all colliding at once. I thought about the day Robert Johnson sold his soul to Satan and the subsequent birth of rock ’n’ roll. Did Father Johnson have any clue how many times and how many waves of blues music would be repackaged and sold to the world, over and over and over again? For certain no, but here I was—I was quite possibly the last Black man playing R & B–influenced rock music. I had been to a Black rock festival last summer where the moneyed Blacks mutually congratulated one another for their obsession with anime and all their bands sounded like nineties death metal. No like really, what the actual fuck? As if that weren’t all alienating enough, I sat in mute horror as they didn’t book my band for yet another year and instead hired a full-blown Caucasian SoundCloud rapper who, in the middle of his set, yelled, “My great-great-great-grandmother was supposedly half-Black and I want to dedicate this performance to our collectiv
e struggle as stolen African peoples!” and everyone collectively raised their fists. I immediately left the festival and was ready to admit that these niggas were so literally not my crew.

  In a world where white rappers were winning and I was decidedly not, I did the only thing a person in my situation can do in America—I fucked a white dude to get ahead.

  Carl Mitchens had been the seminal underground rock boy-genius back in the eighties and nineties, and he now signed bands to his uberhip indie-rock label and pipelined them to midlevel commercial success. He was also a known closeted bisexual with a fetish for bottoms who dressed like seventies disco divas. He informed me that his hippie-ass wife and three kids were in Tibet for some invasively white religious celebration thing and I almost barfed but also seized the opportunity. I dressed up like Donna Summer in the “Bad Girls” video, complete with silk stockings and garters and a bob wig, and let him fuck me on his kitchen table. Postcoitus I slipped him my band’s demo tape, and six months later we had a magazine cover and a European tour.

  Now, if this had been the nineties, a Rolling Stone cover would have meant that you could at the very least buy a house in Los Angeles. These days it meant that you could go to Europe (Americans didn’t go to rock shows anymore), come home broke, but not starve to death on tour. It seemed like a fair enough trade—my band accepted the challenge.

  * * *

  THE DAY ARRIVES. The drummer, the bass player, this roadie I was in love with, and I meet at the airport, and we are ready to rage. We have a layover in Iceland on the way to our first stop, Amsterdam, where we’ll meet our tour manager. Carl had only hired her the day we left because someone else had pulled out last minute. We land in Amsterdam and have three days to kill before the tour starts. We meet the tour manager, a rad German woman who we crashed with. Roadie lover boy and I immediately start fighting and the bass player and drummer go to explore the city. The rock promoter Carl knows is going to meet up with us for stints in the U.K. and also Germany. Amsterdam is a blur of hookers, beer, psychedelics, and anxiousness. What would this tour be like? I end up hooking up with this famous Dutch writer, who says to me, “Well, you’re a bit overweight but you have a gorgeous face”—with his dick still in me, no less. I take him to meet up with roadie lover boy and they double penetrate me for all of ten seconds. The next day we go out of town to pick up the tour van, amps, and drums. The tour is underway.

  * * *

  BRUSSELS, BELGIUM—Our first gig is a rock ’n’ roll house party in Brussels. The kids are cool and our set is banging. There are no sluts at the show. We go to get a falafel after. Roadie lover boy and I argue but I don’t remember what about. The house gives us free beer and makes us pancakes.

  * * *

  ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS—This gig is at a big venue and it is some sort of festival with a shit ton of Dutch people dressed like sailors. The Dutch writer comes to see the show. I remember only older women dancing. We stay at a superfancy hotel by the river that looks like a forty-story, lopsided Lego block, stacked recklessly on another. The roadie lover boy is also, as it turns out, a Catholic mystic, and he makes a plan to visit all the oldest cathedrals in every city we go to starting with this one. I go out with roadie lover boy to all the gay bars in Rotterdam—they are obnoxiously clean and it makes me realize that everything in America is really fucking dirty. I’m really fucking dirty. We both get picked up by this twenty-two-year-old boy from Martinique—he looks like what would result if roadie lover boy and I had a son. We take turns fucking him until the sun comes up.

  * * *

  ANTWERP, BELGIUM—This show is at a circus-themed bar. Attendance is low and the guy who runs the club explains that the city has been slow after the terrorist attack at the airport. There are girls flirting with the bass player (as always) and after the show we stay at the band apartment upstairs. I am really intrigued by the garage rock kids in Europe. They all dress like stereotypical Californians. It’s weird. I think they think that I surf. I find myself explaining that I live in Northern California and the water is always cold there. They are intrigued by the fact that I manicure marijuana for a living. The other band is a two-piece and I think they sound like the Immortal Lee County Killers. I tell them that but they only know garage bands from the present—not seventeen years ago. After the show, I do the purest cocaine I have ever done in my life and I stay up all night with roadie lover boy. He tells me that he loves me.

  * * *

  LONDON, ENGLAND—We take a ferry over to England and it’s a shit show. I takes like three hours to get into England, and after what seems like forever customs gives us our passports back and they hand me the bass player’s, as if I look like a smaller light-skin Black boy with dreads. I’m already over it. We play a show in Camden Town. Someone tells us that Amy Winehouse lived super close to the venue but I went looking for her old apartment to no avail. I have sex with some random dude before the show at his really tiny apartment. The gig is up a flight of stairs and I’m tempted to quit on the spot—99 percent of rock ’n’ roll is carrying amps upstairs and my fat ass is over it. There is a very tall and very handsome Nigerian boy who comes to the show to tell me that he loves my band. He is easily one of the most handsome men I’ve ever seen. He looks like a young Idris Elba but even more handsome—it’s insane. I, like, can’t even talk to him. The boy in the band that is opening up for us is bisexual and from Tennessee originally; we make out while his girlfriend isn’t looking. We end up staying the night at a friend’s mom’s house. We leave after roadie lover boy visits a cathedral.

  * * *

  STAFFORD, ENGLAND—We are in the North of England and the place we play was an indie disco at some point in the late seventies and early eighties; I know this because the dad of one of the boys in the opening band told me so. We have a cool set and we sleep at the club. Roadie lover boy and I get drunk and get into a fight again. He leaves the venue to go fuck some leather Daddy.

  * * *

  BRIGHTON, ENGLAND—I love Brighton. I went there on tour for the first time some twelve years before this trip. I meet up with a boy from Bristol who I was once engaged to—we are still in love, we decide. We also finally meet up with our mysterious rock promoter man. He’s an Irish-English dude. Handsome bugger. He’s based in Berlin but his parents live in Brighton, and we go to his parents’ house. We are in Brighton for two days. The promoter’s American cousin is there and is making us a macaroni casserole dish. He is booking some other band from Austin, Texas, and we are taken off the bill of the underground queer show to play at a bigger venue with the Texas band. I’m intrigued by the Austin band because they are exactly what I expected, to a T. They are playing bar rock note for note—they are even wearing ponchos and cowboy hats. They are all really sweet guys. The night before, we did cocaine with them and the rock promoter until the drummer put his foot down. He is vegan and straight edge and will have none of these shenanigans anymore. Roadie lover boy goes on a date with an African boy and I go fuck a ginger. After the show, the bass player is mad at me; I make a joke about fucking a skinhead, again. He hates that. I get drunk and leave my guitar at the venue.

  * * *

  LILLE, FRANCE—We get to the ferry early in the morning and sail to France. On the way to the show we buy me a guitar at a music shop and get to the venue. It is a vegan café that has shows in the basement. We sound check and I go to fuck a man I met online in the basement of the restaurant where he is on break. We cannot understand a word the other is saying; we just follow a pin in the app until we see each other, and I think at first, when he is taking me to the basement, that he is leading me to my death. I’m so horny I follow. The show is cool and we party in Lille. Roadie lover boy meets another Black boy, he’s DL or something and gets nervous when roadie lover boy takes a picture of him. The Black boy takes the phone but gives it back after a few minutes. We get back to the band flat at five in the morning and the German tour lady is over it. “NO MORE TOMCATTING!” she screams. The van leaves ear
ly.

  * * *

  PARIS, FRANCE—Show is canceled.

  * * *

  RENNES, FRANCE—Show is canceled.

  * * *

  SAINT-ÉTIENNE, FRANCE—This place is fucking hilarious. The show is chill and I go home with this gay art student boy, the bass player goes home with gay art boy’s straight best girlfriend, roadie lover boy goes and fucks some dudes somewhere, and the drummer and the tour manager stay at the owner of the venue’s place. No one tells anyone where they are going. On the way to his house the gay art student boy buys a baguette out of a vending machine and I’m taken aback because it’s like, you know, so French. He takes pictures of his dick in me, and punches me in the middle of the night because I am snoring too loud. It’s daybreak and I realize I have no clue how to find my bandmates in this confusing city. I go to the venue but the bass player is missing for another two hours. He finally skateboards up and the tour manager cusses all of our triflin’ asses out. The drummer and the tour manager relay how fucking weird the owner of the venue was. He is an American from California who has lived in France for twenty or so years. He has a Confederate flag hanging up at his house and when I hear that I giggle. Like, the thought of a guy from California, waving a rebel flag in France of all places. The humor is lost on the others. We quickly get the fuck out of Dodge.

  * * *

  LISBON, PORTUGAL—This place is gorgeous. There is the smell of seafood cooking all over and I can see the ocean from, like, everywhere. The guy who booked our show is a fucking babe—we are playing some form of festival but I can’t make out what it is exactly because I don’t speak the language. Roadie lover boy and I go to a restaurant and hear fado music and then we go have sex with this really rich guy. I get fucked by him while he’s getting fucked by roadie lover boy. We get in trouble with the rest of the crew—in Europe, all the venues provide a meal for the band and it’s considered rude not to show up. I apologize to the chef when I get back to the venue. The opening act is a local teenage girl band. They sound strangely jazzy and the singer is dancing like Christina Aguilera. They are really sweet. Later that night on the way to the booker’s house he and I make out.