American Honor Killings by David McConnell

Author:David McConnell [McConnell, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781617751325
Amazon: 1617751324
Barnesnoble: 1617751324
Goodreads: 19447237
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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During his time away in Southern California, Darrell may have acquired a little Los Angeles glamour with which to impress the locals when he returned to spend the seven years before Steve Domer’s murder back in Oklahoma. This part of his story reads almost like an outlaw saga, something I don’t like. He was in misery and spreading it. It’s difficult to convey the sometimes desperate energy of self-repression. “Gay” was such a monkey on his back that Darrell was in constant existential contortion. The contrast between California and Oklahoma may only have heightened things.

In 1999, Darrell was paroled from a California prison. He’d been in on a narcotics charge. The highlife in LA had spiraled to its inevitable end. In a common arrangement called an “interstate compact,” California handed him off to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, which supervised his parole. He was monitored by an officer in the town of Purcell, Oklahoma. Darrell went to live with his mother in McClain County (a couple of years later she moved out and left the rickety yellow trailer to him). Through a brother-in-law he got a job operating heavy equipment at Huddleston Construction in Oklahoma City. The workaday world wasn’t easy for someone used to the life he’d lived. After about ten months, he got into a bad fight with his brother-in-law and quit Huddleston. He worked as a motel clerk for a year.

When money was tight he’d slip into Oklahoma City to spend a weekend night dancing naked at Tramps. He stood on a big black plywood box right by the entrance. (I tell him the box is still there, though they don’t have dancers anymore.) Even here, even dancing, even around people who knew him, he could still sometimes play “not gay” to himself. Buoyed by a cloud of contempt, he danced like he wasn’t feeling anything—like he was actually untouchable—even when some idiot was reaching into his underwear to wrap a dollar bill around his cock. Occasionally he trolled for clients at the An-Son car wash across the street. That was why he later feared recognition at the spot.

But he was getting long in the tooth for that kind of work and wanted to leave it behind. He got his real estate license and started selling for Coldwell Banker in northwest Oklahoma City. He did pretty well.

Then he met a boy. This was always much harder to accept than dancing or hustling. Darrell wanted to be straight more than anything. The masculinity that obsessed him was the adolescent kind defined as much by a studied repulsion for the boys you’re at ease with as it is by desire for the girls who make you uncomfortable. At the same time he was, almost reflexively, an expert seducer. He might have looked a touch dumb with his close-set eyes, but when he got talking, you realized how smart he was. He had a gentle, insinuating voice without a trace of a yokel Sooner accent. When he and

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