THE ORDER OF MASCULINITY
insight into his own life and upbringing, beyond his earliest memories. Broome proves himself to be a master weaver of the past and present. In a chapter titled “This Gay Life,” he juxtaposes scenes from two gay bars — one in the ’90s at a seedy place called The Holiday and the other at a newer bar, in the present — to demonstrate the incredible power of youth. At The Holiday, he rejects the advances of an older gay man, making a show of his
Brian Broome’s memoir rescues a childhood ended too soon BY KASHIF ANDREW GRAHAM AND CHAPTER16.ORG
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unch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome is a Black, gay, coming-of-age memoir. Broome, a screenwriter and poet, recounts his formative years in Ohio and his subsequent escape. “[I] patted myself on the back for surviving small-town Ohio,” he writes. Against the backdrop of Ronald Reagan’s conservative America, Broome presents scenes of Black boy initiation into the order of masculinity. His own struggles to enter this order are compounded by the darkness of his skin, his lack of athleticism and his sexuality. He is, in the white gaze, the wretched of the earth. Broome explores the nuances and contradictions of life in the Rust Belt during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s, when gay health clubs drained swimming pools for fear of AIDS transmission while copious amounts of unprotected sex took place in the same building. The departure of manufacturing jobs from Broome’s hometown renders his father an angry, unemployed shell of a man, but Broome revisits his paternal relationship with enlightened eyes. Oftentimes, he seems to conclude, Black parents’ love for their children is enshrouded in the daily grind for survival. Punch Me Up to the Gods is constructed around verses from Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1959 poem “We Real Cool.” Reflecting the structure of the poem, the first section is titled “We Real Cool,” followed by “We Left School,” and so on. Each subsequent “We
PUNCH ME UP TO THE GODS: A MEMOIR BY BRIAN BROOME MARINER BOOKS 272 PAGES, $26 ———— BROOME WILL APPEAR AT 4:15 P.M. SATURDAY, OCT. 9, AT THE VIRTUAL SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS
…” indicates both a new section and developmental shift in Broome’s narrative. Interspersed through the book is a present-day storyline that Broome calls “The Initiation of Tuan.” Here, he is a voyeur, observing the interactions of a Black boy (Tuan) and his father on a public bus. Broome soaks in the father’s aggressive redirection of his son toward Black male orthodoxy; the father uncrosses the boy’s legs and tells him to “shake off” an injury. This encounter gives Broome
A LARGER SUITCASE
Rickie Lee Jones recalls her family and career in Last Chance Texaco BY JACQUELINE ZEISLOFT AND CHAPTER16.ORG
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emoirs and biopics about famous musicians follow a common arc. It all starts with a quick summation of the artist’s humble beginnings. Then there’s the nostalgic depiction of their ascent to stardom followed by a perils-of-fame period. Ultimately, we end with heartwarming scenes of redemption and a comeback tour. But Rickie Lee Jones gives us something entirely different with Last Chance Texaco: Chronicles of an American Troubadour. Jones, who spoke with me ahead of her virtual event with the Southern Festival of Books, always meant for her memoir to be, as she explains, “the story of one American family.” “The stories of our lives had become mythology,” she says. “They had been told so many times amongst us.” Ten years ago, she had the first inkling to commit the Jones family history to the page, starting with her mother Bettye. As she writes in the book, “My mother’s stories are the heart of me, the country from which I come. Escapades of her ghastly childhood in the orphanage were the Grimm’s Fairy Tales of my own.” Readers are treated to these horrific tales of child poverty, an experience that hardened young Bettye in the Depression-era Midwest. Much of Jones’ musical world is populated with tragic, morally conflicted characters. Her dad — Richard, a World War II vet and artist — could be one of them. Richard grew up in a show-business family. His father, Frank “Peg Leg” Jones, was a famous one-legged performer on
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muscular body. “Someday you won’t look good,” the rejected man tells him. “You’re not always going to be young. Someday everything you’re so proud of right now will be gone forever, and I wish that I could be there to see it.” A few sentences and many years later, Broome experiences similar rejection by younger gays at a bar that is foreign, where “everywhere you turn is a reflective surface.” Particularly noteworthy is the testimony sequence of Broome’s mother, “Let the Church Say ‘Amen.’ “ Broome employs the Black church ritual of testifying to human-
ize his mother and to allow her to speak on her own behalf. During this testimony, it is as though time is suspended. His mother attests to “how she got over,” while highlighting her own challenged upbringing. “Sometimes you find yourself in strange waters dashed up on the rocks, and then you just have to make do,” she says. “Every woman I know done had to navigate since the time we was little girls and Black girls get set out on the most dangerous waters.” Through this break in the narrative, we are made to understand the complexities of Brian’s relationship to his mother. She has been proud of him all along, but we only learn of it through her confession. The memoir possesses a filmic quality, especially present in the chapter titled “Stall,” in which Broome writes about his final visit with his father as though they are both actors. He is cast in the role of Grieving Son and his co-star is Dying Father: The camera pans out to show me and my father sitting in the tiny plain room of a nursing home. It’s the father-son perfect shot. It’s the time when I am supposed to lean forward and take his bony hand in mine and tell him how much I love him, which will bring me and the audience to tears. I opt instead to let the clock tick long enough to convince my mother down the hallway that my father and I have had a meaningful goodbye. Punch Me Up to the Gods is a memoir for lost Black boys everywhere. It is for those who were forced to become men too quickly. It is a prayer of forgiveness from Black parents to Black children. But this book is also for anyone who seeks to rescue the child in themselves — the child that, as Gwendolyn Brooks might put it, “died soon.” For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.
swer the “siren call of the West.” the Chicago vaudeville circuit. As a boy, Richard As a teen, Jones goes full hippie and flees home, hitchhiking along hopped a train to escape the violent Peg Leg, California’s Highway 1 in the summer of 1969. She survives creeps, jail pursuing a “hobo” existence and taking what Jones describes as “the hard road of adventure.” and almost freezing to death. In 1973, the emancipated 18-year-old steps onto the dilapidated boardwalks of Venice Beach for the Richard and Bettye’s paths crossed in first time. Tanned and braless, it’s here that she starts her Chicago, where they started a family LAST transformation from nowhere girl to overnight success. and gave birth to Jones in 1954. CHANCE TEXACO: CHRONICLES OF AN In 1979, Jones released her debut album and Richard struggled with PTSD AMERICAN TROUBADOUR graced the cover of Rolling Stone. She played Saturand alcoholism. In one scene, BY RICKIE LEE JONES day Night Live, won the Grammy for Best New Artist, he beats teenage Rickie for GROVE PRESS and the record went platinum. All of this is rememwearing a supposedly immod364 PAGES, $28 ———— bered in Last Chance Texaco. But so is the fact that est outfit around the neighJONES WILL APPEAR AT she never achieved the same commercial or cultural borhood boys. A few years and 2:15 P.M. SATURDAY, OCT. 9, AT significance again. The woman with the red beret, chapters later, he drives across THE VIRTUAL SOUTHERN once deemed the “Duchess of Coolsville,” floated into the country to bail her out of a FESTIVAL OF BOOKS obscurity only two albums into her career. Detroit jail and takes her in when The memoir follows Jones as she takes the unglamorous Bettye refuses. Her “secretive” and road of recovery and overcomes a heroin addiction in the early “unpredictable” mother is the book’s most fascinating character. She’s ’80s. Inextricably tied to Tom Waits, the brooding lord of Venice Beach, a fierce matriarch, a force of love and rage. Jones writes, “One day Mom Jones schleps around the moniker “Tom Waits’ one-time girlfriend” for would fight for me like a lioness, the next she would slap me for spilling much too long, her career marked by not-so-subtle sexism and associamy milk.” Even after 100 pages of getting to know Richard and Bettye, it’s tions with a man she dated for a year. hard to know what to make of them. “I think before I wrote [the book] I might have had an ax to grind,” Jones believes she’s “sculpted” the story the best she can to keep Jones tells me. But in writing Last Chance Texaco, that time of her life as readers from harshly judging her parents. At 66, she brings new perspeca famous young woman has begun to “sparkle in a beautiful way,” she tive to her childhood: “Some of us are born to live lives on an exaggersays. The process of writing the memoir “was heartbreaking and difficult, ated scale. Even as children we have a larger suitcase in which to carry but as with all things, now that it’s over, it just seemed like it was great.” all the things that will one day be on our backs.” The suitcase is an apt metaphor. Her parents gave her the gift — or To read an extended version of this article — and more local curse — of an undying sense of wanderlust. Last Chance Texaco recounts book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publithe family taking to the road when Jones is 4. “Once they left Chicago cation of Humanities Tennessee. they never stopped moving,” she writes. They head off to Arizona to an-
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