100 Boyfriends by Brontez Purnell

Author:Brontez Purnell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780374538989
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2021-02-02T03:00:00+00:00

EARLY RETIREMENT

HE HAD ADOPTED THIS INSANE new beauty practice of rubbing Preparation H on the bags under his eyes. He was trying to scrub that puffy, confused, alcoholic look right off his face—it burned to all hell but goddamn if it didn’t work. There had to be some kind of fancy, faggy, antiaging, anti-inflammatory something or other at a boutique in San Francisco that, like, smelled nice and blended into the skin in a less severe way. But these days he could barely make it to the corner store, much less downtown San Francisco.

The trolley cars bothered him, the European tourists giving him that what-are-you-doing-here look on the street bothered him, effort in general bothered him—put all these factors together and what was left was a tube of hemorrhoid cream purchased at the Grocery Outlet for $1.50. He still smelled like alcohol in the morning but at least his face didn’t look all fucked-up. It was a small victory that would have to do.

He threw on shades and thought, Why am I doing this? Then, Wait, how am I doing this?

The last couple of months he had started sleeping with his feet hanging out of his second-story window. It helped to correct his shiftless moving around in bed, and as a result he could hear the cars out by the highway in the night. He started to have dreams that he was peacefully underwater—but he knew it was his brain reinterpreting the cars roaring past. From a distance, the hum of the highway sounded like waves crashing into land. From his bed, he would pull the covers over his head and dream of being in the ocean. Alone and at peace.

It had been a hard stretch.

He was an actor and had got a job that summer as the lead of this god-awful play, some drama about a murderer in a mining town during the gold rush. It bored him to tears and he hit the bottle real hard one night before the show, ended up blacking out onstage and being removed from the play the next day. It was not the first time this happened.

He relayed the story to his friend Mark over the phone.

“I got drunk and embarrassed myself in front of a bunch of prominent white neoliberals,” he offered.

“Again?!” asked Mark.

“Again,” he explained. “The stage manager was this hippie who told me I would never work in this town again! I broke down and cried.” Real tears welled up—he could feel them leaking through the film of the Preparation H.

Mark kept his cool. “I mean, that’s nice of her to threaten you and all but keep in mind you never really worked there before—who gives a flying fuck?! Meet me and the boys for lunch,” he demanded.

He and Mark were brothers of sorts. Some decade and a half ago the two of them were cast in a TV show on a fledgling gay channel about the lives of four single Black gay men in L.A. It was a

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