A queer, brash reality
Brontez Purnell says his novel overlaps his life in ‘zigs and zags’ that can’t be measured
Before the words begin, before even the title page, there’s a photograph at the beginning of Brontez Purnell’s new novel “Since I Laid My Burden Down.” It’s a blurry, blackand-white image, the horizon tilted. A little black boy, dressed in white, is being helped into a creek by two men, one on either side, holding both his arms and those of a preacher who stands behind him. The three men have their heads wrapped in white bandannas. The water moves out and away from them in rings. The boy in the photograph is Purnell. But in the next
few pages, Brontez goes on to describe this scene in detail as it happens to a different little boy, one named DeShawn. He writes about the one-legged preacher behind the boy, the uncles beside him. He talks about Sister Pearl’s singing voice (“It wasn’t pretty — it was real”) and about the preacher pushing him under the water. “DeShawn’s little soul popped right back up out of the water, feeling cold and wet and not as new as he thought it would.”
The scene is the first of a series of interwoven flashbacks through which Purnell takes the reader as we follow DeShawn, a queer black punk living in Oakland who returns home to Alabama for his uncle’s funeral. There, DeShawn can’t help but get pulled into the past — “all these goddamn memories” — as he examines a life full of women who often held it down, and men (lovers, “f— buddies,” fathers, uncles) who “were dead and buried, and other men (who) were not, but the memory of them seemed just as buried and far away.”
In the backyard of his Oakland home, Purnell says that DeShawn isn’t him but that their lives do overlap. The book is fiction, but its roots are tangled up in his life and can’t really be separated.
“It’s a squiggly line that zigs and zags all through it,” he says. “It zigs and zags so much that I actually could not give you a percentage. There’s no way to quantify it because it’s really hard, and I don’t think it would help you understand any more.”
So he won’t say whether he, like DeShawn, once woke up on the floor of his kitchen next to a half-eaten stick of butter. But he will say that while DeShawn’s “default is optimism,” his is not. “I do not have faith in the world. Not right now. I’m like: We’re so dead.”
At one recent reading, he says, a woman in the audience got mad when he gave his “zigzag” answer. “She wanted a hard percentage number of what was real and what was false.” He guesses that has something to do with “our reality TV world,” but adds “I also think that’s bull— because I think all memoirs are fiction, essentially.
“I think fiction is really powerful. And it also protects the wicked. Namely me.”
Purnell is brash and unfiltered. His writing is a lot the same. “You should write pretending like you’ve had a couple, and you’re holding court with your friends.” When he tells a story or answers a question, he keeps it short and to the point.
He’ll complain about how he hates having his photograph taken in the backyard of the house where he rents his room — an overgrown place, littered with broken bikes, rusted chairs and a grill that doesn’t look as if it’s been used in a while — because it makes him “look poor.”
But as soon as the photographer says it’s time to take a portrait, he’ll ask for a minute, run upstairs, change out of his black polo and black shorts and into a pair of short overalls, no shirt underneath, and throw on a gold chain. Then he’ll light a joint, just to play it all up.
“I mean, I had to,” he says, then laughs. (He’ll also insist that you include the fact that, at a book release party held in the Los Angeles home of riot grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna’s mother, Kim Gordon told him, “Congratulations.”)
Purnell has been a fixture of the Bay Area queer-punk-art scene for more than a decade. He has his own dance company. He’s played in various bands and fronts his own, the Younger Lovers. He’s starred in videos that frequently blur the line between art and pornography. He’s put out zines and chapbooks and an illustrated book about cruising in Oakland during the aughts. Now he’s working on a children’s book.
Still, “Since I Laid My Burden Down” feels like some sort of first for Purnell. It’s a true novel, chaptered and bound, that not only holds its own as queer literature, with its unapologetically misanthropic narrative, but also expands upon it. Part of that has to do with the intersection of identities his book explores without ever being so heavy handed as to use that sort of language while doing so. Another part has to do with his decision to examine a distant past, rather than a near past concerned only with partying and hookups.
“The past is something I always think about. Almost every day. There’s not a day where I don’t kind of look back,” Purnell says, then adds, “I have a weird thing about how much can you write about partying if you’re a gay person. You don’t just want to be a Cathy cartoon.”
Some of the relationships with men that Purnell examines last a few paragraphs; others surface throughout the novel, like one with a teenager named Jatius McClansy. He molests DeShawn when DeShawn is 11. Part of going home for DeShawn means coming to terms with that and visiting Jatius’ mother, Edna.
Purnell describes her home in Chattanooga, Tenn.: “filled with Glade PlugIns smells, candles, black Jesus painting and figurines and plasticwrapped furniture. It was spotless, dustless, and immaculate. He could smell fish frying and his mouth started watering.”
Purnell’s writing is, by turns, blunt, lyrical, funny, insightful — and almost always spare. The same could be said for the book he’s written. There’s no big arc, exactly. No extended, flowery metaphor. Purnell writes about life the way it really happens, a series of experiences that sometimes, in retrospect, might add up to something if you look at them in a certain way.
If there’s any sort of pat ending for DeShawn, it comes just as he’s leaving behind another lover, a younger guy named Andre, and catches himself thinking, “This young man doesn’t know himself very well.”
DeShawn immediately realizes he’s projecting.
“DeShawn looked in the mirror and all he saw was a man who had been absent from himself.” All the hookups and anonymous sex have left him with a feeling that “his sexual self was, more often than not, on autopilot,” Purnell writes. “Experience is the only teacher, really, and one can rack up an enormous bill along the way.”
So really, the ending isn’t much of an ending, so much as a realization that everything keeps on, but sometimes your perspective changes.
In his backyard full of broken things, Purnell stabs out his joint. He tells a couple more stories — one about fielding calls from “all the aunts” after one read the book and kicked up trouble, and another about going on tour and getting blackout drunk in front of a bunch of “prominent, white neoliberals from upstate New York. It was awesome” — before considering the lesson he left for DeShawn.
“I feel like everybody has to get to that point where you just look in the mirror and say, ‘OK. The problem is me.’ It helps sometimes to be like, ‘I have control in this. I have choices and agency.’ ”
Even if he won’t say, you get the feeling this is a lesson that belongs to him just as much as it belongs to DeShawn. Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com