Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir

by Brian Broome

Oz. Narnia. Xanadu. Hills.

My mission was to lay my sticky fingers on every item on the sales floor and caress it with a child’s lust. Wantonly. And I wanted everything. Directly in front of me is the jewelry department and the path to the left will take me to Toyland and, if I wanted a long journey, the lawn and garden department beckoned way over there with its smell of fertilizer and shiny rubber.

banausic

The boy’s name was apparently Joe. A boy several years older than him was barking at him from the end of the aisle. A boy who had tattoos and a criminal background. A boy who looked like he ran the Tilt-A-Whirl at a pop-up fair.

I’d arrived just in time. My mother had the Layaway Lady’s eyes spinning in their sockets with confusion and surrender. She’d double-talked and triple-talked her until that woman didn’t know whether she was coming or going. My mother had gotten all of her laid-away items down to sale prices and she was busily removing items from their hangers, smiling slyly and pleased with her skills, when I approached breathless.

And it made evident to her why I tended to notice the colors of people’s eyes, instead of the strength of their throwing arms, and was forever enamored with all things “pretty.” She looked at me with a concern that no one will ever show me again in this lifetime.

Hills Department Store is gone. But I remember wandering the aisles of the poor kid’s carnival looking for myself. I even remember Joe. I feel bad for taking his shirt from him. Joe and I had more in common than I, even then, could stomach. Poor and queer. I hated him in that way we sometimes learn early to hate ourselves when we’re different. I wish I could find him and apologize for hating him so much and for stealing his shirt. I wish I could send my apology up into the night air and have it reach him through the skyscrapers of the big city I hope he moved to. Wherever he is, he’ll sit straight up in bed, waking his husband, who will ask him what’s the matter. “Nothing,” he’ll say, smiling for a reason he doesn’t understand. “I just thought I felt something move.”

I was so ashamed, that I wanted him to. I didn’t want to live anymore. It’s the first time I recall feeling this way. I wondered if God would take me in my condition. I convinced myself he wouldn’t.

There have been moments of solitude and silence when I have literally taken my right hand, placed it over my left shoulder, and patted myself on the back for surviving small-town Ohio. And if you are a Black person from small-town Ohio, you deserve it too. Go ahead. Do it now. Pat yourself on the back and be proud that you are still standing upright. Because, I may be biased, but I am fully confident that the entire state of Ohio is nothing but a racist cesspool. It wears on the Black psyche until you either leave it forever or get damn good at football. I chose the former.

On Route 76, Pittsburgh entered the frame of the car’s windshield gleaming on the horizon like a birthday present, like the Emerald City with the sun glinting off of it.

I think about my father, and the clarity that comes with age tells me that he must have suffered from these conditions as well. He was anxious. He was lonely. And he was insecure. There is no thing on earth more dangerous than a man who refuses to accept that he is carrying all of these loads, because it then becomes up to everyone else to carry them for him in one way or another.

The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. —JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire Next Time

My biggest failing in this life has been my gasping need to be loved at the expense of so many other things. I have allowed others to tell me who and what I am supposed to be and, when I failed to meet their expectations, I blamed myself.

I sat in the dark with only the occasional lightning strike to illuminate the room and I was grateful. I was thrilled. Not only because I had made it safely inside, but because I had done something I never thought I could do. I had, for a moment in time, overcome the fear and anxiety that has plagued me for most of my life. I didn’t need anyone to save me.

One of the reasons I took this trip is to prove to myself that I am allowed to take up space in the world. I used to believe that the space I occupied was conditional. That I had to please anyone and everyone around me in order to exist because I had made the horrible mistake of being different. The other reason I came here is because, lately, I have been thinking about my own death. I used to wish myself dead all the time. I’ve even tried to bring it about. But I am not thinking about my death like that any longer. Now I worry that my death will come to pass and with my final breath, I will realize that I’ve allowed my one and only opportunity to live to go to waste. So I have come to France to try to ensure that the feeling of wanting to live fully and unapologetically, like Brother Baldwin did, endures.

I have only recently begun to factor my mental health into the act of living. Black life in America doesn’t seem to allow for it. As a race, we are often admired for how “strong” we are and for how much we have endured. The truth is that we are no stronger than anyone else. We have endured, but we are only human. It is the expectation of strength, and the constant requirement to summon it, fake it, or die, that is erosive and leads to our emotional undoing.

I have no method to persuade you that the act of shoving your most tender feelings way down deep or trying somehow to numb them will result only in someone else having to pick up your pieces later.

All I have are these stories, these cautionary tales of devalorizing one’s own life in service to some standard that you are led to believe is bigger than yourself.

It is only through your own lived experience that you will learn that living on the outside of “normal” provides the perfect view for spotting insecure and flimsy principles camouflaging themselves as leadership or righteousness.

I am in the last half of my life now, not the front half. My death will come sooner than I like, and so now is the time when I want to embrace the parts of my life and the parts of the world that I’ve missed. I can only hope that it’s not too late, because I deserve the full range of human experience and so do you. My heart, in these past few days, has been full of love for humanity. The only difference now is that I am including myself in the process.