 I'm going to read a little bit since I laid my burden down. Just, if you haven't read it, it's about this main character, Deshaun. In this first chapter, he's talking about a lover who has committed suicide, Arnold. And then after that, he's going to be reminded of his first lover that committed suicide, Jatias. So just keep in mind with all that. In this particular scene, he is cleaning up Arnold's room. Chapter one. Before Deshaun left for Alabama and before his uncle's death, others had gone. For instance, Arnold was dead, dead, dead, dead as lad. He sunk with the Titanic. He flew the coop. That monkey had gone to heaven. It seemed like all the wild men around him were dying faster than he could keep track. Arnold was not the first, but he was of note. Deshaun received the message on the morning train on the way to his classes in Oakland, and he hopped on the next train back to nowhere. There was nowhere to mourn the dead boy. Arnold had not lived in any one place for long and had pulled so much shit that no one really loved him that much anymore. Or maybe they were waiting to love him again after he climbed out of the hole he had dug himself into, like he would appear out of thin air, a magician's assistant with a tiara and a sash that said, healed or something. The dead boy died before completing that magic trick. He would be that type of memory, one to forget. Three days of crying ensued and then a phone call, Arnold's final roommate called Deshaun and asked very sweetly if he would clean the dead boy's room. Deshaun said yes. This would be his last favor to Arnold. He had loved Arnold and no one knew that they were fucking from all outward appearances. It probably seemed like a casual camaraderie. Fucked up boy loves even more fucked up boy. It was rainy and Deshaun showed up with supplies to clean the dead boy's room. There were old clothes, new needles, crack pipes, lorica poetry and books by Bukowski. The dead boy was gentle featured and very, very handsome. He had tried to get clean this last time, could and then stepped in front of a car. Deshaun's mind shifted to his far away youth. A certain redneck boss with permed and teased hair, smoking and sharing her thoughts on suicide. She said, if you are brave enough to jump off of a building or shoot yourself in the head then you are brave enough to live. He took this as truth because an adult had said it and he had believed it up until the point he knew someone who had stepped in front of a car. Up until that point, he stepped in, up until that point that he had stepped in front of the car, Arnold had not been a brave person. He was fatigued and he had made a choice. Deshaun stood over an unopened jigsaw puzzle. He wondered what Arnold felt the moment that car struck him. Had he regretted it? Deshaun believed in energy and he believed in the other side. He lit candles, paid respect to the corners, prayed that his hope that the gentle, handsome, departed boy was resting in power. He asked whatever guy was listening to hear him on this. He set up Arnold's altar, a white candle and a glass of water on the highest point in his room. There were of course people around town who liked to talk. They called the handsome, dead boy a junkie. After that, they called him a thief. This was true. He was also a loved child of God offered Arnold's mother. Maybe this was also true. Away from the talkers and gossipers, there was Arnold and Deshaun's criminally minded and largely harmless inner circle. It is a beautiful thing to surround oneself with people who have pulled too much sketchy shit to ever judge anyone. The type of people you could fuck over as long as you could prove it wasn't anything personal. Everything around Arnold went missing. Rent money, LP, stamp collections, naturally there was some resentment. But then again, everyone saw Arnold as a brother that was in deep pain. People tend to navigate from experience. Deshaun himself had never thought of suicide but he could understand Anwi. That feeling of life is perpetual and epic but mostly for no big reason. On those really hard days, Deshaun felt like a single sperm swimming around in some gay dude's butt hole searching frantically for the egg that just wasn't there. But suicide, no. Homicide, yes, fuck yes. The thought of killing some rude deserving asshole was so orgasmic it gave him a boner. But of course there was a thought. Killing someone felt like a really complicated math equation. Like there were time variables, x's and y's. And where would you dispose of a body these days? A killer had to be self-sufficient and clean up his tracks. A suicide victim leaves a mess for someone else to clean up. He wondered if the EMT worker who cleaned Arnold's body from the highway had felt a certain way about it or if he just saw a job as a job. It's certainly never pleasant to see a body obliterated six ways a Sunday but after the hundred times certainly something had to change. As a rule, as time passes, all potential, all trauma has the potential to cool off in one's mind. Deshaun was reminded of his first lover, Jatias. Men become pieces of shit either because they've had their ass beat too much or because they've never had their ass beat a day in their life. Prime example was Deshaun's first boyfriend, Jatias McClancy. Jatias has had his ass beat every day of his life and that's when it killed him. John McClancy was Jatias's younger brother and Deshaun's arch nemesis. They played in the cotton field behind his boyhood house and as far as John was concerned, it was always open season on Deshaun's ass. He would hurdle dirt claws at his head and call him faggot so much that Deshaun started to indeed believe he was one. Sometimes when John beat him up, both boys' mothers would come out and stop the commotion. Deshaun didn't understand it at the time but behind all this animosity was competition, plain and simple. John hated the way his older brother favored Deshaun. Whenever the neighborhood boys played ball, Jatias would stop and help Deshaun with his throw. He would take him for walks in the woods or help him when his bike had a flat. In a neighborhood where dads were scarce, Deshaun's own mom had been divorced from his stepdad for about two years. Male attention was a commodity and Deshaun would sense this competition well into his adult gay life. Jatias McClancy was what one could call a specimen. By the age 15, he looked like a right-grown man, beard, muscles, chest hair, and a towering six-foot-one frame and a big and obvious bulge in his pants where a big and obvious bulge should be. Edna McClancy had quite a time keeping all the neighborhood single moms off of her handsome son. So it happened one summer when Deshaun was 11 that Jatias touched him in a way that the older boys should never touch a younger one. This excited Deshaun something crazy but confused him too. Either way, he figured he didn't mind and that he wanted more. The McClancy's lived behind Deshaun's backyard and up the cotton field. His mom would leave for her boyfriend's house and Deshaun would leave his baby brother sleeping in the crib to go see Jatias. He would run up the cotton field and through the moonlight. He would run so fast beside objects so dark it felt like he was flying. White cotton against moonlight and fireflies. It all looked a certain way. That summer, Jatias showed him his first porn. Jatias' dick was the first he touched. Deshaun grabbed it and was flushed with it the way he imagined a small stroke to feel. Later that summer Deshaun watched from a tree through Jatias' window as he had sex with Teresa Watkins. Jatias and Deshaun carried on up until next summer and then they would stop for Edna. They would stop forever. Edna McClancy was an overworked and overstressed single mother. One of the few women around with a college education she had worked on the army base from the time she was pregnant with Jatias. You could imagine this woman's head hitting the glass ceiling so hard that there was blood running down her face. She was a nervous woman. Deshaun remembered sleeping over at the McClancy's house once and Edna waking them all up at 1 a.m. with a vicious racket. You worthless bastards, get up, get the fuck up. Y'all gonna clean this dirty fucking house. Y'all gonna clean this dirty fucking house until I get tired, she said. Deshaun would understand later as we always understand much later, why Jatias, despite being a teen sex god also wore the look of a defeated man well before his expiration date. And then shit really hit the fan. Jatias worked as a cashier at the Pigley Wiggly. It was around the 4th of July that Jatias was caught giving Teresa Walkins $126 worth of free meat through his checkout line. He got fired and everyone knew why. Edna came home from work early that day and beat her son within an inch of his life. After she left the house, Jatias got her gun from her closet, went into his room and blew his brains away. Deshaun walked into Jatias's room a day and a half later. He walked past John who was in the living room staring silent and far away at a wall. Deshaun's mother was amongst the neighborhood women consoling Ms. McClancy and cleaning the blood from the carpet. It just wouldn't come up, his mother said, in a tidy way as she was baking a pie for the funeral dinner. She said one more very tidy thing. You don't kill yourself over a job at the Pigley Wiggly she spat all glowing and prophetess-like as she put a pie in the oven. Deshaun, despite being the little ingenue he was, was still ignorant of the larger metaphors that work around him. He didn't know the world for what it was yet. One large, conniving, goddamn Pigley Wiggly. While silently watching his mother wrap tinfoil around the other baked pies, he made a mental note of her implication. It's okay to steal from grocery stores but it's not okay to die. Since we have a little more time, I'm gonna read a little bit more and then I'm gonna open up the floor for questions. But like any questions, like if you're having like relationship problems or anything, I'm here to help. I can talk to you about it. I'm not a licensed counselor but I drink a lot and so I know pain, I can help heal it. Okay, so this next chapter is... So Deshaun goes back to Alabama because his uncle died and he ends up staying there for like a couple of months just to figure himself out. And so mostly the book is him confronting old memories and this is him confronting the memory of him and a really creepy principle. Or a cool principle, who knows? Creepy, cool, it's such a thin line. Deshaun sat in his mother's living room, stoned off of shitty bammer weed, staring at his mother's collection of grade school pictures of him and his brother. They were very disturbing. From the ages of five to 12, whenever there was picture day at school, Deshaun's mother had the maniacal habit of waiting at the front door of their home in her nightgown and rollers, brandishing a huge plastic jar of Vaseline. If you don't want your little baby, I don't want you little babies to be ashy in your picture, she would say, annoyed and half-waked. She smeared an ungodly amount of petroleum-based goop on their faces as they ran out of the house to the bus. Deshaun sat in his mom's love seat looking at the bizarre collection of Olin Mills' photographs, the faces of him and his brother, greasy to the gods and sweating from the lights. Goop clogging their young pours. I've had a hard life, thought Deshaun, as he went to the kitchen for a snack. He had a hell of a case of the munchies. There was a picture of him in eighth grade that he couldn't quite shake. He remembered the day too vividly. It was sometime after Jatias McClancy had killed himself. It was a picture from middle school. In it, he was wearing a Foo Fighters T-shirt. Later that day, after he had taken the picture, he had got sent to the principal's office for mouthing off. Years later, as an adult, Deshaun learned what he had always felt was true but couldn't articulate, that a lot of the schools and the deep staff still practice forms of segregation. In a middle school with a close to a 40% black population, Deshaun was one of three black kids placed in advanced placement classes. He was, as his father lovingly put it, a nigger who knew how to talk to white people. He was almost never placed with the two other black boys and had to endure, for each subject, no less, a class of 30 red-nick motherfuckers saying the craziest shit one could imagine. Self-esteem was a hard battle to fight in these conditions, not to mention the white teacher who tried to instill them with some sort of, the white teacher who had tried to instill some sort of pride in him that day. The incident was in Mr. Nash's social studies class. Mr. Nash was lovingly teaching revisionist history and skirting around the subject of slavery, though Deshaun couldn't tell if it was more for his sake or Mr. Nash's. In the middle of his southern fried bullshit soliloquy, Mr. Nash looked directly at the class and said with sympathetic eyes, you know this whole slavery thing has been really blown out of proportion. Think about it, children, if you paid $1,000 for a man, would you treat him bad? That was a lot of money back in that day. Deshaun let out a deep sigh and stopped listening. That was his fatal mistake. Mr. Nash was red in the face and teary-eyed as he talked about the war of Northern aggression and sighed at Deshaun drooling at his notebook. He slapped Deshaun's desk, startling the boy half to death and proceeded to go in on the young artist. Boy, you are just doodling away, just doodling, doodling. If you applied yourself, you could be the next Martin Luther King Jr., he said, wholeheartedly proud of himself. But I don't wanna get shot in the head, said Deshaun rather seamlessly. Get to the office, you're getting the paddling. Deshaun was well in his 20s before he learned that corporal punishment was some bullshit that mostly went down in the deep South. All of his adult friends who grew up in California winced at the mere mention of it. Deshaun also marveled at how much his young adult life was spent in a room getting spanked by dirty old white men. By eighth grade, he had been paddled some 14 times. This was, he was certain, how he came to like this kind of scene. The main thing he took away from the Alabama public school system was how to bend over and take the goddamn abuse. As an adult, this behavior had earned him coin when summer in San Francisco, but during his adolescent life, it was mostly quite literally a pain in the ass. The plot thickened. The principal of the school was a goddamn queen from hell. He was an old school faggot, meaning he had a wife and kids. At every pep rally, he would put on a wig and peckable makeup, white go-go boots, and a school sweater and pretend to be the new sex education teacher, Poopsie. Deshaun and his entire eighth grade class would go totally fucking bananas when he said sex education. The principal knew Deshaun's family all too well. He would say the same bullshit each time he paddled Deshaun. Now Deshaun, you know that I knew your great-grandpappy. He used to raise chickens for my family. He stayed on our property for years. He would say in his high-pitched musical Southern drawl, Deshaun vaguely remembered this property, and his great-granddad died when Deshaun was only about seven. All that was left of the old man's existence were photos in the old center block house in which he lived. Trees were growing through it now. Deshaun stared at the principal's face. Oh, shit, thought Deshaun. He's about to start crying again. Sure enough, he did. The principal stared in that face. The principal started in with a face full of tears. Deshaun, boy, I loved your granddaddy. I swear for God, I loved your granddaddy. I stayed by his side every day for years. He would take me on fishing and hunting. He would go silent and stare into the distance after this part, and then came the part that always made Deshaun's skin crawl. It was the way he always punctuated the speech. You know Deshaun, long, sentimental pause. You sure do look just like him, wink. Deshaun was too young to conceptualize the term, I raped, but surely it had just happened. In his later years, Deshaun began to wonder just why this spooky-ass cracker loved his great-grandfather so much, and was certain he didn't want to know. He related this story to his older cousin Tyrone on the bus ride home. Aw, man said that Tyrone shaking his head in disgust. That crazy-ass faggot still say all that bullshit. He started crying, too, didn't he? Tyrone was not having it. Listen, he used to say that shit to Kobe, Lamont, Jacob, Lula Bell, Laquisha, Andre, Shantessa, Siobhan, Natasha. He began the list off their 23 other immediate first cousins, and Deshaun stopped paying attention. Deshaun would have another notable interaction with the principal near the end of the semester. One afternoon, Deshaun jumped off of a school bench to watch five girls brawl, and in doing so, the precious contents of his pocket spilled out. The 1995 Louis Royo X-Men Spring Break trading cards. The cards depicted renditions of Iceman, Bishop, Wolverine, Archangel, and the rest in tidy, slutty swimwear on the beach. All Deshaun knew was that looking at these comic book men in their underwear made his dick rock hard. He heard through the grapevine that the teacher had picked them up and put them at the principal's office. He went to the principal and explained what he lost. Oh, said the principal quite clearly. You mean those cards with all the muscle men in their Jimmy shorts? I saved them for you. He went to retrieve the cards. Now, normally that type of thing ain't allowed in school, but I'll allow it this time, said the principal, winking, in a different kind of wink, a loving one. Deshaun remembered it as a, I know your career is hell, and it's okay, wink. In a way, Deshaun missed his creepy old principal. Deshaun said at his mother's kitchen table, stoned off his ass, eating Lucky Charms. All these goddamn memories, Deshaun said, between spoonfuls of pure sugar. Cool. So what about me? I am a cancer, Sagittarius moon and rising. I'm five, eight, 230 pounds, but on Grindr, I say that I'm five, 11, 160. My pronouns are auntie.