The hoots and hollers of rowdy women traveled from the living room into Deon’s bedroom. Turning up the volume on his TV did no good. The women’s voices were many, and they were boisterous: a chorus of women untethered to men, their breasts free of suckling babies, their pocketbooks zipped shut, its contents theirs and theirs alone. No bosses, no bill collectors, no landlords demanding rent—this night was arranged by the women, for them exclusively, the rest of the world be damned. Laughter thickened the air—squealing, raucous, rebellious female laughter, a soft yet heavy quilt of it threaded with sass and stitched to perfection. Their laughing was so weighty and textured that Deon felt it stuffing his insides, plugging up every part of him that wanted to let out a roar. He was fourteen and decided, willfully, to confine himself to his bedroom. It was the night before Mother’s Day.
The popcorn ceiling of his bedroom and the flicker of his video games in the darkness—this was Deon’s Saturday night without his father. Kind of lonely, kind of pathetic. His father was out of town for the weekend, competing in yet another bodybuilding competition and kicking it with friends in St. Louis. Deon wasn’t allowed to spend the weekend at this father’s apartment alone. And since he had no close friends, Deon was forced to spend the night holed up in his bedroom playing Mortal Kombat on his Sega Genesis while his mother hosted a gathering of girlfriends. The party was both a pre-Mother’s Day bash and a birthday party for her friend Sharonda.
His mother, thankfully, spared him the humility of walking through a roomful of intoxicated women to get his dinner. She brought a plate freighted with barbecued ribs and potato salad to his room. Deon opened his bedroom door just enough to accept the plate then pushed Vicki back out into the hoopla. “Don’t be rude,” she admonished from the other side of the door. Seconds later he could hear his mother’s voice among the revelers. The living room, near to capacity with its current guests, was no place for a teenage boy. Gin and juice tilted the apartment in a steep angle of rumpus and whipped the women into mischief and raunchy humor. Nasty words were no longer prohibited, at least by the church-going sisters, who kept their pocket-sized Bibles and copies of The Daily Bread stashed furtively in their knock-off designer pocketbooks.
Now the women, holy and unholy alike, could leave gaps between their knees when they sat. They could leave their drinks unattended for several minutes and casually pick them up again and imbibe without fear. Before long the women, dressed in tight jeans and halter tops, teetering in stilettos, had transformed into sloppy whirlwinds, humping the air to songs by SWV, Sade, Anita Baker, Michel’le, Stephanie Mills, and others. This was music Deon never listened to—grown women’s music.
Deon heard them enter the apartment by twos and threes a few hours earlier, each group a little louder and a little more excited than the last. Some left early; new ones flocked in. And with each group a new fragrance wafted through the apartment: the sweetness of hairspray and bodies bathed in lavender, vanilla, or jasmine. Spiky heels clacked on the kitchen tiles. His thumbs punched the controller harder. The volume on his TV was as loud as it could go.
His mama’s familiar knock on his bedroom door an hour later made him tighten his grip on the controller. “You eat?” she asked, popping her head in.
Deon said yes.
“Come out and speak.”
Deon snuffled and rubbed his nose. His thumbs continued to dance on the Sega controller.
“They been asking about you,” she said. “Come on out and speak.”
This was what he dreaded. A show. He knew it was too good to be true; he couldn’t just get a hot plate of food from his mama and let that be it. His mama wanted, needed, a show. One of the women—Deon couldn’t remember her name—had two sons in juvie. Another one had a son who lived with his father in Phoenix and seldom talked to her. A third had a son a few years older than Deon who died in the hospital last year and no one said what it was he died of. Deon was the success story, and his mama wanted, needed, to show him off.
He did what he was told. Tossing the controller aside, he rose from his bed lethargically and, grimacing, padded into the living room where his mother and her guests congregated. Some of them he recognized; others were strangers. Yet they all seemed to know Deon and commented on parts of his life they shouldn’t have known about. He knew his mama was a talker, but apparently her gabbing knew no bounds. Standing in the center of a crescent of women, who eyed from head to foot and front to back, he wished he had put on his FUBU overalls and Adidas. Wearing only his gym shorts and a tank top, Deon was the least dressed person in the room.
Edie, his mama’s friend, balked. “Vicki, you said you had a little boy. This here’s a grown-ass man.” She bit into a rib to keep her mouth shut.
“He ain’t lanky no more.” This was Sharonda, his mama’s friend from high school. Sharonda had moved to Dallas around the same time Deon’s father and mother broke up, not long after he was born. When she returned to Kansas City last year, Sharonda and Vicki renewed their friendship as mysteriously as it had disintegrated years before. To Deon she was just another figure in the living room full of rump shakers.
Edie, sipping a red concoction from a clear plastic cup, eyed him suspiciously. “Vicki, you must done fed him a bucket of beans and rice. Girl! He blew up just like Briscoe.”
Deon glowered, hoping no one would ask him to flex his biceps, or worse, take off his shirt.
Vicki took a sip from her cup. Deon, standing beside her, could smell the syrupy-sweet cranberry juice and botanical gin. “He think he grown,” Vicki declared just before rolling her eyes. Deon rolled his eyes too, just for spite, as his mother playfully tugged his earlobe.
“He’s looking more like Briscoe every day,” said Patrice, his mother’s friend from the water department, where she worked.
“Girl, don’t even talk him up,” Vicki said. “I ought to take Mr. Broke Ass Briscoe King back to court. He owe about three months in child support. Say he starting a gym downtown someplace, him and a buddy.”
“For real?” Sharonda said.
“Girl, I guess. Deon be down there with him on the weekends swinging them dumbbells around. You know Briscoe be on his fitness. Trying to model, I hear. Guess Deon’s gonna be another gym rat.”
“Oh, I can see that,” Sharonda said. “He look like one big bicep.”
Deon flinched when Sharonda hopped in front of him as he turned to go back to his room. Statuesque, with cliffhanger curves and a sculped tower of black hair, she balanced a plate of food on the tips of her fingers. She thrust her hip out to receive her other hand as her eyelids, caked with mascara, fluttered. “You don’t remember me, do you?” Sharonda asked.
Deon managed a bashful, indulgent smile for her. He could feel his mama’s eyes on him from across the room: the stern mama laser gaze that always sent a tingle creeping up his spine.
Sharonda, still balancing her plate of food, rolled her neck. “Last Thanksgiving? I came with y’all to see the Plaza Lights? Bought y’all hot chocolate and Topsy’s popcorn?”
Vicki broke in: “Boy, you know my girl Sharonda. Been knowing her the longest. Sharonda, girl, he know you. He just being his teenage self.”
“Surprised he ain’t out running the streets,” one of the women from the throng shouted over the silky bass of “Groove Thang” by Zhané.
Sharonda, dressed head to toe in a Pepto-pink track suit, licked barbecue sauce from her fingers. “Nah, that ain’t Deon. Them streets ain’t got nothing he want.”
“Right!” Vicki yelled from the kitchen. “Big as he is I still got my daddy’s strap in my closet. Ain’t used it in forever but it’s waiting.”
The women concurred with calls of “That’s right, V” and “Word!”
Sharonda pursed her lips. “What you get me for my birthday, Deon?”
He shrugged.
“I’m just messing with you, boy,” she said and let him pass.
On his way back to the refuge of his bedroom—glad the women stopped comparing him to his father and grateful none of them squeezed his muscles—he glanced at his mama and Sharonda talking in the kitchen. Vicki gently patted Sharonda on the shoulder. He thought he saw Sharonda’s eyes fill with tears. Beneath the chorus of Miki Howard’s “Love Under New Management,” Deon heard his mama say to Sharonda, “Girl, stay as long as you need.” It was the same voice she used whenever Deon was sick and she gave him medicine.
* * *
After three days the living room had become Sharonda’s province. When Vicki told Sharonda upon her arrival to make herself comfortable, Sharonda obviously took her at her word. The clothing and other items Sharonda managed to salvage from the demise of her last relationship piled into the space. The apartment’s only bathroom, just like the living room, had transformed into Sharonda’s beauty emporium. The counter was cluttered with a rainbow of assorted plastic bottles of varying size, each powerfully scented: Luster’s Pink Oil, Jergens Ultra Healing Lotion, Neutrogena Face Soap, and, tucked discretely beneath the sink, Summer’s Eve. Sharonda was immodest, and her flagrant half-naked burlesques throughout their apartment made Deon feel like he was living in a video game. To win he had to make it through an entire day without suffering Sharonda’s exposures and innuendos.
When Sharonda moved in, privacy vanished. With his bedroom door ajar, Deon could glimpse Sharonda exit the steamy bathroom after a shower. She was a ball of large, jiggling breasts and frizzy hair weave, bouncing on tiptoe, wrapped in a plush cranberry red towel as she skittered into his mama’s bedroom to dress. She emerged moments later outfitted in too-tight clothing as shiny as a candy wrapper. Sharonda was not a cautious guest, not one to stand on ceremony. She burst into rooms, eavesdropped on Deon and Vicki’s private conversations, even walked in on him once when he was on the toilet to retrieve nail polish remover. After that embarrassment, he marched to the nearest hardware store, bought a slide lock, and screwed it into the bathroom door himself. He kept a twenty-pound dumbbell propped against his bedroom door whenever he was alone in the apartment with her.
Sharonda left debris throughout the apartment: half-eaten plates of barbecue (her favorite food) and potato salad, bags of Doritos abandoned on the couch, dingy cotton balls carelessly discarded after she had rubbed off her nail polish. Deon could smell Sharonda’s scent even when she wasn’t in the house: a potent, unmistakable mélange of spearmint gum, acetone, and cocoa butter. Her colonization had proved thoroughly successful.
It was tough to avoid Sharonda since her work schedule lacked consistency. From the conversations Deon overheard between her and his mother, the beauty shop where Sharonda styled hair was teetering on the verge of closure. At present, she was cobbling together a meager income from a few loyal clients while supplementing her income selling food stamps. The few times Sharonda nudged Vicki about letting her do clients’ hair in the apartment, Vicki laughed her off and abruptly changed the topic. Deon silently thanked his mother for sparing them the added burden of strangers entering and exiting their home. Sharonda consumed all the hospitality they could spare.
In the evenings, when Vicki and Sharonda arrived home from work, both of them fatigued and annoyed with the world, they immersed themselves in girl talk, sipped wine coolers on the couch, and watched TV. Saturday nights they drank Alizé as they traipsed back and forth between his mama’s bedroom and the bathroom, trying on one slinky outfit after another, crimping their hair, putting on make-up, getting ready for the clubs. They sexed themselves up like video hoes, adding jiggle and bounce to their movements as they dipped and swerved in stretchy synthetic fabrics. They were as confident and intractable as newly coronated queens. They clacked out of the apartment in four-inch stilettos around ten o’clock, eager for throbbing music, rubbernecking, hot gossip, sugary cocktails and the men who, hopefully, would pay for them.
Deon was happy for Saturday nights when he was forced to stay at his mama’s. Alone, he could eat Tombstone Pizzas, blast Dr. Dre, and play Sega Genesis all night, uninterrupted. He usually drifted off to sleep about two in the morning. He never heard his mama or Sharonda come home. The aromas of coffee and bacon roused him out of sleep the next morning around ten. When he ventured into the kitchen, he found his mother zombie-eyed and listless, standing over the stove in her gray sweats with a scarf wrapped around her hair. The dissipation from the previous night’s escapades made her face look as if it were sliding off. She’d gently tug Deon’s ear and push a plate of bacon, eggs, and toast in front of him, too exhausted to offer him a single word. Shardona lay sleeping on the couch beneath heavy blankets, snoring and drooling, every so often thrashing the mattress. Her clothes, shoes, and underwear pooled on the floor by the front door.
“How much longer?” he’d whisper to Vicki, exasperated and annoyed.
“Soon,” she’d reply, blowing on her cup of coffee. “She’s still fighting with Donnie.”
Donnie. Like so many things Sharonda had brought into their apartment, Donnie, her ex-boyfriend, had become a new word that infiltrated Deon and Vicki’s private vernacular. He was the reason Sharonda was living with them. The most recent implosion of their relationship, Sharonda had assured them, was the final break. She had been living with Donnie in his mother’s house from the time he was paroled from Leavenworth. It was eight months of cooking and cleaning another woman’s house who, by Sharonda’s account, was a mean old cow who encased her shabby furniture in slipcovers and fussed nonstop. When Sharonda discovered that Donnie was cheating she stormed out, cussing the house down as she tore off into the night. She left behind boxes of her clothes and other personal belongings: two Magnavox TVs, a glass dining room table with black marble legs, clothes and shoes, bric-a-brac, and a practically new washer and dryer she was still paying off at Rent-A-Center. She was desperate to get it all back, but Donnie was noncompliant and his mother, sadly, had been moved to a state nursing home. Besides the few clothes and cosmetics she had managed to stuff into a couple of trash bags, everything Sharonda owned was in that house, held captive by Donnie.
Once she woke up, Sharonda surreptitiously slipped on a Chief’s jersey beneath the covers and groggily staggered to a chair next to Deon. A cup of Vicki’s strong coffee was all it took to jolt her awake. She shimmied her shoulders to slough off the haze and sleep-drawn slack from her face, then dug her toes, the nails polished tangerine, into the carpet.
“Don’t be like Donnie,” Sharonda instructed Deon, apropos of nothing, as she slathered butter and strawberry jelly on a piece of toast.
Vicki asked, “Where did that come from?”
“Girl, you didn’t see him out at the club last night?”
Vicki shook her head.
“He call hisself being slick rolling in with his crew all clean or whatever. But I seen him in the back trying to avoid me. Nigga know he got my shit. He better give it back.”
Vicki put down her coffee, tapped her weave, then cast an imperious gaze at Deon, though she was speaking to Sharonda. “Deon ain’t gonna be like Donnie or his daddy or none of these no-good fools. Deon’s gonna do right. He’s my do-right man, right D?”
Deon kept his eyes on his plate as he stuffed his mouth with eggs and toast. If he didn’t look at her he didn’t have to acknowledge her, he reasoned.
“D?” Vicki said. “You hear me, D?”
He grunted.
“You can’t say good morning?” Sharonda asked him. The coffee on her breath, mixed with halitosis, puffed in his face.
Deon mumbled hello, chomped the last of his breakfast, then went back to his room to do bicep curls with the twenty-pound cast iron dumbbells his dad gave him, shutting the door behind him.
“Don’t hurt yourself swinging them weights around, D,” Sharonda said, giggling.
When he was in his bedroom, he took two dumbbells and pressed them against the door.
* * *
Coach Staples glowered at each boy as he passed out the booklets, smacking a copy into each boy’s palm just to show he was still in charge despite Dr. Crenshaw’s presence. Deon was surprised that the book was much thinner than the one the girls got two days ago. Changing: A Booklet for Boys. The glossy softcover bore an illustration of a grinning white boy cradling a basketball in the crook of his left arm. Cross-legged on the gym floor with the other eighth grade boys, Deon flipped through the booklet, nonplussed at the chapters on hair growth, mood swings, and proper social interactions with girls. His mama had already instructed him on much of what the booklet tried, in a chipper yet clinical tone, to inform him. He already used deodorant. He already had pubic hair and underarm hair. He could eat an entire meat lover’s pizza and still hunger for more. His mama told him not to pop his zits even though she would sometimes do it herself if the bump was too big. Deon began to roll the booklet into a cylinder then let in unroll flat in his palm.
The entire program was a hastily planned correction to a glaring oversight by both the school and the school board. Two years prior to Deon’s entry into middle school, the board had passed a measure mandating a minimal sex education requirement among all sixth graders. The measure passed by a sliver, having been debated ferociously at town hall meetings, city hall, and within the local news media. Deon was in sixth grade at the time, and he recalled days when he and his classmates had to file through throngs of impassioned protestors and counterprotestors outside the school just to enter the building. During one protest, a screeching white woman holding a sign that read Sex Ed = Liberation stuffed a handful of condoms into his coat pocket with so much force she ripped the seam. Days later, a preacher he recognized from TV handed him a pamphlet titled “Purity Is Salvation.” Deon’s mama trashed the condoms. His dad tore up the pamphlet.
The fracas was all for nothing. After months of additional legislative battles, Deon and his peers somehow managed make it to the end of eighth grade without “the talk,” and now his middle school had to remediate all eighth graders before they went on to high school. They would have to learn everything from puberty to procreation. All freshman girls had been led into the auditorium by Principal Bennet and Mrs. Pemberton the day before. Coach Staples and the new vice principal, Dr. Crenshaw, addressed the boys in the gym. Deon and the other boys sat on the maple floor, waxed to a high shine, and laughed when Coach Staples showed an anatomical diagram of an erect penis on the overhead projector.
Dr. Crenshaw stood beside Coach Staples at the front of the gym holding, as usual, his slender lime green Wiffle bat. From the day he started working at Deon’s school, Dr. Crenshaw could be seen charging up and down the halls with one hand in his corduroy pants pocket while the other swung the bat back and forth like a scythe slashing wheat fields. The little white man with the roly-poly shape, thinning mustard blond hair, and dead caterpillar mustache used the bat to make his presence known. Whenever he saw students straggling in halls he’d whack the bat against a locker, letting its violent whap voice his displeasure. Though Coach Staples outmatched Dr. Crenshaw in height and mass, Deon and the other boys knew very well who they really needed to be afraid of. Each man folded his arms over his chest and squared himself before the throng of boys. Their jaws were tight, their faces unsmiling. If their goal was to intimidate the boys into practicing personal hygiene they had done it. Once the boys had enjoyed their raunchy laugh at the penis diagram, Dr. Crenshaw lightly tapped his bat on the gym floor.
“It’s called a wet dream,” Dr. Crenshaw barked. Immediately, a tidal wave of laughter from the boys flooded the room.
“Shut up!” Coach Staples roared.
Silence.
“See boys,” Dr. Crenshaw resumed, calmly this time, failing to suppress a rascally smirk, “when your body builds up too much sperm it has to release it. A nocturnal emission, a wet dream, is your body’s way of alleviating it.”
Of course Deon had had wet dreams, several in fact. They occurred about once a week. In his dreams a body pressed against his. A warm, tingling sensation enveloped him. He could never see who it was, but the presence of this person into his subconscious was both welcome and disquieting. The dreams weren’t explicit, nothing like the X-rated VHS tape he swiped from his dad’s collection a year earlier. The person in his dreams was always genderless, a person with a face that lacked features or distinguishing characteristics. Some nights simply putting its arms around him was enough to bring about ejaculation. Other times the entity gave him a long, steady kiss. He had only kissed one person before, Teresa Hopkins, at a birthday party. The lips in the dream weren’t hers.
“You’re young men now,” Coach Staples said. He cleared his throat and elongated his spine. His enormous belly hung over his waist in disproportion to his spindly legs and arms. Deon often wondered how he managed to cart so much weight around and still coach the boys in all their sports.
“Young men have respect for their bodies and other people’s bodies,” Coach Staples declared.
“Exactly.” Dr. Crenshaw said.
“That means you shower every day, you wear clean clothes, you clean up after yourself.”
Dr. Crenshaw added, “Your choices have consequences. You smoke weed, you drink alcohol, you have unprotected sex, you will pay a price, gentlemen. Keep yourselves healthy. Respect yourselves and respect others. Real men show civility. Open doors for women—all women. Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and refrain from cussing in public.”
When Charlie Winslow, one of Deon’s classmates, asked, “That mean I can’t scratch my balls and shit?” another wave of laughter undulated throughout the gym.
“Settle down!” Coach Staples growled. He twisted his face into an angry question mark. Once the boys quieted, he said, “Y’all think this is funny but it’s not. You ain’t gonna be getting a woman if you smelling funky and acting a fool.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Crenshaw said.
“Y’all need to man up. And quick. Life is a motherfucker and it’s gonna pile up on your fool asses faster than a minute.”
This was the point in Coach Staples’s speech Deon was expecting, the point when he inevitably brought up the Vets—World War Two vets who had attended their school decades before when it had been a high school. A wealthy alumnus commissioned a small monument to them in a glass display case opposite the auditorium. Twenty-six eight-by-ten photos of twenty-six smiling white boys. Beneath each picture was a mortarboard and tassels in the school colors. Above the case, carved into the wall, were the words Their Sacrifice, Our Gratitude. None of the Vets lived past twenty-one.
“The Vets didn’t have a chance to go to college,” Coach Staples said.
“Some of the Vets left children behind.” Dr. Crenshaw rolled the bat in his pudgy palm as he cast a dour look at the floor. “Those guys weren’t much older than you. When you don’t live up to a higher standard, when you clown around and make fart jokes and dick jokes, you’re not only showing yourself to be a fool, you’re pissing on the Vets and all they did for you. In a way they gave you this school. Bequeathed it to you. They were high schoolers. What would they think of a bunch of eighth graders dicking around in their school?”
The boys had heard all of this many times before, yet it never failed to guilt Deon. He peered up at one of the basketball nets and traced his thumb along the spine of his booklet. Gradually, he pulled at the seam between the cover and the spine.
Coach Staples paced back and forth in front of them. “Come 1998 you’ll be graduating high school. You’ll be stepping out into the world, and ain’t no telling what you’ll be stepping into. You’ll be better off than the Vets—”
“Let’s pray,” Dr. Crenshaw muttered.
“—but you’ll still have challenges. Face them like men, not boys.”
“When are you graduating?” Dr. Crenshaw asked the boys. When they didn’t answer, he asked the question again, forcefully, and the boys answered in unison: “1998, sir.”
“Class of ’98,” Coach Staples said, half smiling. He stopped pacing and leveled a stern gaze at them. “You better be ready.”
Deon looked down into his lap and realized he had gradually torn the cover from his booklet, leaving the title page exposed and damp from his sweaty palms.
* * *
Vicki had to work mandatory overtime. She hated the extra work but needed the money. She, Sharonda, and a few of their friends were planning a girls trip to Vegas over Labor Day weekend. Deon would be with his father, which meant he would be lifting weights at the gym and playing video games at night while his dad was out working. His parents had become blurs in his life.
On the last day of school, Deon came home and felt cold air blasting from the vents. His mama was still at work, and she would never have turned on the central air so early in the summer. She had forbidden Deon from touching the thermostat, terrified at the prospect of a high energy bill. He went to his room and found Sharonda lying in his bed. She was playing Mortal Kombat on his Sega; his stereo thumped the Above the Rim soundtrack at a low decibel. The stoical expression on her face belied her sex kitten attire. The full arsenal of her allurements was on display: nubile hips and thighs accentuated by a pair of white Daisy Duke shorts, ample breasts stretching out a white Guess T-shirt, and gleaming white Jordans on her feet. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail threaded through the back of a white Malcolm X ball cap. She looked devastated, like a jilted hip hop bride. Apprehensive, Deon took a couple of steps out of the room before she saw him.
“Show me how to play this,” Sharonda said.
Tentatively, Deon stepped back into his bedroom, which no longer felt like his bedroom, and sat on the very edge of the bed. Sharonda kept punching the controller.
“Mama don’t like the air on,” he said.
“I’m hot.”
“She’s gonna be mad.”
Sharonda scratched the side of her nose with the acrylic nail of her index finger. Like the rest of her outfit, she had painted her fingernails white. Deon could smell the sweet scent of a cigarillo on her clothes. Sharonda wasn’t a smoker.
“That motherfucker still won’t give me my shit,” she spat out.
“Who?”
“Who you think?”
“Donnie?”
Sharonda nodded. The sad, faraway look on her face was new to Deon. To him she had always seemed forthright and assured. Yet her pouty demeanor reminded him of a little girl who had had her favorite toy taken away. He wanted her to leave his room, leave his home, and take her misery with her, but he didn’t know how to evict her without causing trouble. He could leave, of course, but where would he go?
“Mama gonna be mad about the air being on,” he urged.
“I live here too!” Sharonda snapped. “Sick of folks trying to rule over me. I’m a grown- ass woman. I can do what I want.”
A few moments of silence passed between them. Deon watched the screen as Goro pummeled Sub-Zero with his four mighty arms. Deon couldn’t tell which character Sharonda was. The room was chilly. He rose from the bed.
“Where you going? Sharonda asked.
“I gotta turn off the air.”
“Sit back down.”
He rolled his eyes. “You ain’t gonna get in trouble. I am.”
“You do everything your mama tell you?” The acid tone in her voice, one he’d never heard her use before, alarmed him.
She put her hand on his shoulder and motioned him back on the bed. She moved to kiss him but he turned away and told her to stop. Then she slowly rubbed between Deon’s legs, her eyes seductively narrowed, her skin glistening, her glossy lips full and moist. Despite Deon’s attempts to swipe her hand away, she reached. Despite Deon’s mumbled protests, she tugged, insisted. She drew nearer, cupped and stroked, cooed a sirenic sound into his ear that reduced him to squishy black mud pooled beneath a bird pecking for a worm. Ensnared, he felt her voluptuousness and became a mass of paradoxes. Her size and shape both enticed and repelled him. As large and muscular as he was, he couldn’t muster the strength to push her away. Her fingernails knifed his clothes off.
None of this was the way his dad and the dudes at the gym described it. He didn’t feel the way he had imagined he would feel when this moment arrived: hyper-aware, tingly, supremely alive, an amalgam of lusty sensations that contorted his emotions into a crater of snakes where his stomach should be. The heaven-hell tightness of her rent his consciousness to tatters. Deon’s body responded, yet he felt cold and numb and deeply ashamed. He wanted her to stop, tear out of the apartment and take the shameful memory of the violation with her. But her arms entangled him. The slap of her greedy, moist flesh against his virgin body scrambled his mumbled protests. Her triumphant shouts, when they inevitably blasted from her lungs, colonized his ears, then his mind, then, forever, his memories. The popcorn ceiling filled his eyes, and he did what he was told.
* * *
Deon’s dad spotted him on the flat bench press even though Deon said he didn’t need a spot. And he didn’t. He was strong and he knew it. He had been working out on his own in recent weeks. He did pyramids, hefting progressively heavier weights each rep, adding two-and-a-half pound plates to the bar, then five, then ten. A few older guys in the gym took notice and approached him about helping them train. He wound up spotting them.
“You tell them who I am?” his dad asked.
“Nah,” Deon said, panting, once he racked the bar and sat upright. “They just saw me lifting and came over.
Of course he hadn’t told them who his dad was. Some of them already knew. Any protein shake-guzzling gym rat with the latest copy of Muscle & Fitness in his locker could see them together, study Deon’s nose and jawline, and deduce their relationship. There was no mistaking Deon for anyone other than Briscoe King’s son.
His dad’s friend Jake, stout, gray-eyed, and chestnut brown, stood beside him, encouraging as he always did. “Damn, bruh,” Jake enthused, “you been shooting up ‘roids or something?”
“He ain’t stupid like us,” Briscoe said, helping Deon with the final rep whether he liked it or not. “I’ll beat his ass if he start juicing. My boy all natural.” Deon welcomed the slap on the shoulder his dad gave him after his set.
Despite his impeccable physique for a boy his age, his dad never encouraged him to enter a youth bodybuilding competition, never even brought up the subject. Deon wouldn’t have objected to competing. He didn’t care about winning, but entering a competition would have given him a chance to meet other boys his age, boys with whom he had something in common. Rather than drawing friends toward him, Deon’s bodybuilding made him more of an outcast among his peers. The fact that he didn’t utilize his muscles for sports—he didn’t play football, basketball, not even track and field—seemed strange to them. He was a child immured in a man’s body.
Briscoe and Jake were towers of muscle. On rare occasions when Vicki reminisced about her courtship with Briscoe in high school, she never failed to mention his physique. “Your daddy always been in shape,” she would attest. “Had to be in that family. His daddy was a drill sergeant—literally. They were living down in Fort Leonard Wood before they moved up here to Kansas City. Sergeant King had Briscoe and his brothers and sisters exercising outside in the snow. I mean in the damn snow. Ain’t an inch of fat on any one of them, especially your daddy. You got all that size and strength from him. Lord knows it didn’t come from my family. We all jiggly.”
Bodybuilders seldom eat for pleasure. Even now Deon knew his dad had packed two Tupperware containers of albacore tuna and brown rice for them to eat post-workout, along with glutamine and BCAAs. If Deon wanted carbs and empty calories—like his favorites: a big plate of pasta or a pepperoni pizza—he had to eat them at his mother’s house. With his daddy, the Bicep King, every meal was a carefully calibrated orgy of protein: boneless chicken breasts marinated in apple juice, flank steak with roasted sweet potatoes, scrambled egg whites deprived the luxury of salt and pepper, vanilla protein shakes so chalky and viscous they gave Deon the runs even if he sipped them gingerly. But he did drink them, willingly. Anything to get bigger and appease Briscoe. Getting bigger was the only way to appease Briscoe.
“Sharonda still staying at your mama’s place?” Briscoe asked.
Deon, trying to catch his breath, nodded. His pecs were aflame.
“Hood rats gon’ always find a hole,” Jake commented as he loaded a ten-pound plate onto each side of the barbell.
“Word,” Briscoe said. “How many times you tap that, Jake? Two, three times?”
“Shit, man, I lost count. Sharonda been a jump off since day one. What about you?”
“Aw, man.” He shot Jake a perturbed look. Deon knew that look. His dad wanted to keep him in the dark about such things. When they watched R-rated movies together, his dad still ordered Deon to look away if a sex scene came on.
Briscoe nudged Deon on the shoulder. “What you thinking about, D?”
“Huh?”
“You looking off somewhere again. You ain’t worried about anything, are you?”
Amid the gym’s clang and clatter, the primordial grunting, groaning, and bellowing of the scores of other bodybuilders, men and women alike, Deon, despite his own considerable size and strength, felt like a peewee. Despite sixteen-inch biceps and thirty-inch quads, he felt as transparent as glass.
“Nah, Daddy,” Deon mumbled.
Jake, smirking, said, “Some chick probably got him twisted. You be bangin’ them cheerleaders, D?”
Annoyed, Deon brushed Jake’s hand away when he smacked the back of his head, a jovial gesture the boy disliked. Jake liked to horse around more than he seemed to like lifting. Deon’s dad complained about it in private. Yet Jake was, to Deon’s knowledge, his dad’s best friend. He couldn’t grasp why his dad, who was so focused and by-the-book in every other aspect of his life, choose to let a fool like Jake into his inner circle.
“For real though,” Jake said, “don’t be surprised if Sharonda try to step to you, Deon. That girl can’t keep her panties from melting. And she likes young bucks like you. Hell, Donnie ain’t nothing but twenty-three his damn self.”
Briscoe grumbled, “Jake, you gonna spot my boy or run your mouth?”
“Hey, I’m just trying to hulk him up. You ready to grind, D, let’s do this.”
The ambient noise of the gym, all the clanging and grunting, became a chanting liturgy to Deon. His father had always called the gym his church, and it had become that for Deon in the three years he had been lifting with him. Deon felt more in control of himself here, calmer than he ever could be at school and certainly at home, where he had to barricade himself from his mother’s monitoring and Sharonda’s abuse.
Briscoe opened the black spiral notebook he used for a workout log and penciled in the day’s progress. He made a habit of charting Deon’s lifts in addition to his own, since Deon neglected to do it himself. Briscoe scrutinized several entries in the log then checked the barbell.
“You been stuck on that same weight too long, D,” Briscoe said. “You need to move up a few pounds.”
“I’m good, dad.”
“Good ain’t good enough.”
Briscoe and Jake removed the plates from the bar then stacked it with two forty-five plates on each side.
“What’s that look for?” Briscoe asked.
“I ain’t never lifted that much.” Deon saw a few of his dad’s friends and admirers—other bodybuilders and gym rats—spying on them. The barbell was loaded thirty pounds more than Deon had ever lifted before.
“I know you ain’t scared,” Briscoe said, raising an eyebrow. “You got this. Matter of fact, Jake, add a couple of dimes. My boy gonna Arnold-up today.”
Jake stacked a ten-pound plate on each side of the bar. Like Deon, he noticed the other guys watching and beckoned them over to watch the Bicep King’s son crush weights just like his old man.
“What you looking all sad for?” Briscoe asked Deon. “Always looking sad. You need to stop that, boy. Don’t worry. I’ll spot you. Come on. You gonna beat this bitch today, D. Bust through that plateau.”
Reluctantly, Deon laid on the flat bench beneath the stacked barbell.
A throng of muscleheads, all men, formed a semicircle around the bench. Flat on his back, Deon gazed up at the exposed duct work affixed to the ceiling and felt shamefully puny, his arms like wet spaghetti. The men who stood and watched began to shout encouragements at Deon like a coven of necromancers chanting incantations to resurrect a dead body:
“Lift it, motherfucker!”
“Man up!”
“You got this, D!”
“Push through that pain!”
“Don’t pussy out!”
“Beat that bitch, bruh!”
His muscles perishing, his lungs breathless, Deon bugged his eyes, clinched his jaw and huffed and grunted the bar up and down for three brutal reps before his arms began to shake. The barbell hovered dangerously close to his neck before Briscoe gently eased the burden; Deon felt the barbell’s weight ease slightly, just enough to give him power to complete the set. When he racked the barbell and rose from the bench, his dad, wide-eyed and smiling like a madman, slapped him hard on the back. He hugged Deon, nearly crushing the life out of him as the muscleheads hooted and clapped. “Knew you could knock that out!” his dad exclaimed. “You my man, D!”
* * *
Sharonda wanted a lot. The eagerness in her nimble fingers and her covetous eyes, like autumn twilight glowing through a curtain of dark rain, communicated her collected wants. All the boy could offer her were flat eyes and a timorous half-smile: his mother’s insistence that he always be polite and obliging to women. Sharonda demanded him only in the brief ninety minutes between the time his daddy dropped him off from the gym and his mama got home from working at the water department. Ninety minutes. Sometimes he went for a long walk through the neighborhood to avoid her. But once he was followed by a cop car, and another time some lock-up looking dudes driving past in a beige Cutlass hooptie asked him if he was looking to stack paper. He sprinted back home and Sharonda was there. And she would not be denied. Deon just lay there motionless as she used him.
Her measured panting and his bed’s voluble squeaking harmonized in his ear. Guys at school, his dad, his dad’s friends, all the men he had ever seen on TV and in the movies swore sex would be phenomenal, an experience so pleasurable he would risk his own life to get it. But the more Sharonda forced herself on him the less he liked it. They did everything, all at her insistence; they left no erotic adventure unexplored. She was an expert teacher, yet Deon didn’t want her to teach him. He was a good boy. He had to be. His mama said so.
“Be my man.”
The words oozed from Sharonda’s lips at first. For an older, experienced man, her cooing would have honeyed the situation, fortified his lust. A willing man would have called her a sweet ride, all brick house body and rocking motion. But a kid like Deon lacked such language. Sharonda was determined to teach him, like it or not. Then, as her body become more forceful, more rhythmic, she jabbed her fingernails into his chest and again whispered, “Be my man.”
Deon lay beneath her, compliant and silent. What could he say? With Sharonda and her riotous smells and her stacked body and her around-the-way-girl defiance, there was no saying no to her, no protest strong enough to drive her from his bedroom and his home. Caught between shame and pleasure, loose thoughts glided in and out of his head. His mind conjured anything to distract him from this grown woman and what she was making him do. Be my man, she whispered. What the hell was that? A man. He knew his father was a man, and also, he supposed, Donnie, from the praise and scorn Sharonda mouthed about him from sunup to bedtime. Roided-up gym rats and parolees—if they were the real men, what did that make Deon? But he could never be quite sure what made a man a man. How he could lie beneath this buxom older woman, endure her reckless lust, and feel like anything but a man, like so many things less than human in fact.
“Be my man!” Sharonda exclaimed when she climaxed, shattering the humid afternoon silence, obliterating something so deep and sacred within each of them that they both knew, consciously, for the very first time, as she collapsed sweaty and flushed on top of the boy, that this was the ultimate violation. She had taught Deon the worst lesson. She rolled over to the other side of the bed and wept.
* * *
Deon lay in bed on an afternoon in July playing Final Fantasy the day Sharonda rushed into his bedroom, slammed the door, and braced herself against it. She panted uncontrollably. The blue tube top she had on bore tiny drops of blood. Her shiny weave, which she had recently ironed flat, was tousled. He could see scratches on her shoulders and upper arms. She had the glassy-eyed look of a woman who had just run for her life.
“Roll with me someplace,” she managed to say through her panting.
“Where?”
“I just need you to go with me someplace right quick.” Sharonda placed a hand on her heaving chest, trying to catch her breath. Deon could see more scars on her forearm.
“I ain’t getting in no trouble,” he said. He kept playing his video game as if she had evaporated.
“Oh, it’s like that, huh? You gon’ leave me hanging after you done fucked me and nutted all up in me? You gon’ be another sorry ass nigga, D? I knew you was a punk. Knew your ass wasn’t no real man. Mama’s boy!”
Sharonda’s face stormed with tears after that. She slid to the floor and became a puddle of loss, a quivering, helpless heap. Deon got up from his bed and crouched beside her. “What you want me to do?”
* * *
She parked her car near the corner so they could trade places without anyone seeing. She got in the passenger’s seat and told Deon sit behind the wheel. She made him wear dark sunglasses and a Chiefs cap low over his eyes. “Move the seat back and lean,” she said. “Don’t look like somebody’s granny driving. Act like you grown. If you think you a hard motherfucker you will be. Believe it.”
On the ride over, he listened silently in the passenger seat as Sharonda launched into a screed about Donnie’s faults and her determination not only to retrieve her belongings but get the revenge she deserved. She wanted street justice and she needed Deon, with his impressive size, to help her get it. She said Donnie was a string bean, a scrub, a punk. Any man could whoop him.
“He ain’t gon’ do nothing. He a straight up punk when it come down to it. I done seen him take some ass whoopings. All you gotta do is look like a thug and don’t say shit. He’ll give me back my stuff once he see I got a new man.” She rubbed his chest and give him a kiss on the neck. Then she got out of the car, and strut toward a small split-level house in disrepair, situated in the center of the block. He watched her through the open driver’s side window; she bounded up the stairs and dashed into the house.
Moments later, a lanky, dark-skinned man with cornrows violently kicked open the screen door, flicked a cigarillo into the yard, and stomped down the stairs. He was generously over six-feet tall with ropey muscles, dressed in a wife beater and sagging black pants. Even from a distance Deon could see the redness in his eyes and his flaring nostrils. With each step, Donnie’s rage became more palpable. Sharonda chased after him, pleading with him to stop.
When he reached the car, Donnie exploded in Deon’s face. “So you the motherfucker talkin’ ‘bout kickin’ my ass over this bitch?”
Deon knew the punch was coming but couldn’t duck it. Two of his teeth flew out of his mouth followed by a gout of blood that splattered the dashboard. He tried to brace himself for the next blow. In the swift, frenetic moment before Donnie’s fist whooshed through the open driver’s side window again, Deon thought that if he let the punch land rather than flinch or punk out and scamper out the passenger side door, he would prove himself to be a real man. He could be the man Sharonda so desperately wanted him to be and the man a man like Donnie would feel threatened by. Even if he had the courage to defend himself it wouldn’t have made any difference. Despite his lankiness, Donnie yanked Deon by the collar, pulled him through the driver’s side window and tossed him on the ground.
Somewhere close by, Sharonda was screaming hysterically. Through the torrent of beatings, Deon could hear someone shout, “Donnie, they ‘bout to call the cops on you!”
The shower of blows intensified punch after punch until Deon felt himself drop into a maw of darkness. He heard sirens, more screaming, cussing, and crying. Another sock in the jaw and another tooth flew from his mouth. His face slammed into the pavement, then his body went numb. Yet just before he passed out, he felt the narrowest sliver of bliss.
* * *
After the cops finished questioning Deon and left the apartment, Vicki ripped, smashed, and tossed all of Sharonda’s belongings into the street. Deon didn’t know where she was, yet her absence spoke for itself. He remembered waking up on a hospital gurney, IVs tethered to his arm, the taste of blood in his mouth, pain wrenching every part of him. Several feet away by the nurses station, his parents’ heated argument was interrupted by questions from two police officers. Deon drifted off again then woke up in his bedroom, too agonized to move. Half of his face was bandaged, as were his torso, his left arm and left ankle. His left eye, swollen shut, had a patch over it. He tongued the gaps in his mouth, stuffed with gauze, where teeth had once been. He could see a line of amber prescription pill bottles on top of his Sega Genesis. In the living room, his mother was shrieking at someone. Then there was silence.
Deon’s dream coruscated with light. It was World War Two. He was a fighter pilot on a mission over the Mediterranean Sea. The sound of his jet razoring the sky drowned out his father’s voice crackling on the radio, trying to navigate him. The view before him was boundless sky and sea until, fast approaching, he was besieged by enemy aircraft zooming in to strike. A missile blasted off his left wing, conflagrating red, orange, blue and black flames that torched the sky. He parachuted out, and the upwind lifted him higher and higher until there was nothing but wind and sky and light.
Deon woke the next morning to find his father sitting on his bed. His dad held one of the pill bottles in his hand and stared at the floor for a long time. His other hand rested on Deon’s chest. Finally, his dad asked, “Why didn’t you say something, D?”
He couldn’t speak words he didn’t know about feelings, truths, mysteries, and ecstasies he didn’t understand. He couldn’t bring himself to speak of the shame amplifying within him, though he tried, parting this stitched-up lips to speak. But before he could answer his father, he heard his mother’s voice, plaintive and remorseful, on the other side of the bedroom door, asking if she could please come in.
Jarrett Neal’s first book, What Color Is Your Hoodie?: Essays on Black Gay Identity, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary award. His fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including The Gay and Lesbian Review, Chelsea Station, NewCity, and The Good Men Project. He lives in Oak Park, IL
