Punch Me Up To The Gods: A Memoir

by Brian Broome

My father told me that man was made in God’s image and that it was my duty to live up to that image. But my Black, male body has betrayed its manhood on many occasions. My hips have swung too freely, and my heart has allowed itself to be broken far too easily.

My father back then believed in beating Black boys the way Black boys are supposed to be beaten. For our own good, he would say. Meant to toughen us up for a world where white people feed off our pain and to teach us that we cannot give them the satisfaction. Any Black boy who did not signify how manly he was at all times deserved to be punched back up to God to be remade, reshaped. Sometimes I would look up into his face after my ass-whuppin’ and I could feel the apology radiating off of him. But he would never apologize because he wanted to teach me that the world wouldn’t.

Black boys don’t get a long boyhood. It ends where white fear begins, brought on by deepening voices, broadening backs, and coarsening hair in new places beneath our clothing. Then there’s our skin, which provides little middle ground. The world seems either fascinated or repulsed by it. Tuan right now is in a perfect place of not knowing any of this. For him, his body is merely a vehicle to run from place to place and explore the world. He is wonderfully oblivious, as I must have been at one point.

I sat day after day allowing that television to teach me that the most important thing in life was to be liked. By everybody. Between its teachings at home and social life at school, I learned that the whiter you acted, the better liked you were. So I changed the way that I spoke to mimic the characters on television. I concealed every part of myself that I deemed to be too “Black.” Because my life up until then had shown me that white wasn’t just a race, it was a goal.

Between the family sitcoms and commercial breaks, there were brief seconds when the screen would go black, and I would see my reflection in the television screen. It was then that I knew I would never get to experience the heady highs of Caucasianism. My skin was so black. I could barely make out my features in the darkness of the glass. I was just eyes looking in on a world that I’d never be invited to join. In those seconds, I wondered if Blackness was responsible for inferiority or if God just made those who were inferior Black.

In that moment, she created within me the odd sensation of laughing through a deep ache. Like remembering something funny someone you loved once said while you’re sitting at their funeral. The feeling that confuses your body in an exhilarating way and you can’t differentiate between the tears born of mirth and the ones born of sorrow. Joy and pain get all mixed together in a yarn ball of emotions.

Growing up, it didn’t take me long to learn that my gayness detracted from my Blackness. Black, gay men are punch lines to the Black community. An anomaly to be ridiculed. Relegated to the role of church choir directors. We are a nationwide family secret, courtesy of masculinity and religion. I stare at my suitcase on the seat next to me and think about why I am often afraid of my own people. Afraid all the time that I’m not “Black enough.” Not Black enough because I am not man enough. Not man enough because I like men. What do you do when your own people don’t want you? How do you become anything?

I used to believe, with the help of drinking and drugs, that I was a people person. Now, absent those crutches, I find people laid bare for what they really are. They are desperate for something, anything to cling to. I find that I am better off on my own, where there is no one to disappoint me but me. I want no more of the pain that people cause.

“Hey,” she calls after me. “You a stud or a fish?” “I don’t know what you—” “Well, if you gotta ask, you prob’ly a fish.” She laughs and shakes her head slowly as she sits back down on her stool.

Summer was taking its last breaths and the sky was the color of erased pencil on white paper.

The only thing I learned in Phys Ed was that my body would never do the things that it was supposed to do. My body was the worst bully that I’d ever had.

Alone in the dark, I sat as close to the television as I could. I wanted to see him again. I needed to know why they all hated him so much. He look like a faggot. I knew what that word meant too. A boy who likes boys. It was the word that hounded me every day at school. And now I knew that my mother hated them. It confirmed what I had been slowly realizing: that I needed to hide myself. I was twelve.

I heard her voice before I saw her. Her laugh was very distinctive. Full of broken glass and cigarette ash.

I remember something that she once said in rehab. “Maybe it’s childhood. Maybe if you don’t feel like you got no love in childhood, you spend the rest of yo life lookin’ for it in grimy places.”

We drove past so fast that I only had a second to look out the window before the calliope music would change, sounding alive and inviting as you drove up. But as you kept going, it would warp into a mocking macabre, and the lights would recede like someone slowly taking away your birthday cake.

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.

An old familiar feeling began to wash over me along with the rain. I wanted to give up. I wanted someone, anyone, to save me. I have spent a lifetime giving up in one way or another. I have believed every person who told me all the things I couldn’t and shouldn’t do.

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.

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.

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.

So many white people in America are “afraid for their lives” all the time. Far too many of them seem to prefer being “white” to being human.