Oscar, Would You Love Me if My Boobs Were Bigger?
Brontez Purnell’s latest book, a collection of poems titled Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt opens with the following epigraph-cum-dedication:
“To the one who burns bridges –
better be prepared to swim.”
I want you to picture me right now, as I am–a small, kind of masc-coded girl (short shaggy hair, flat-chested), blessed to be naturally tan year-round, in all my swimming glory; pink string bikini that shows off the tattoos etched into the bones between my chest, electric blue swimming goggles flush to my eyeballs.
Because I’m about to swim some laps.
Over email, Brontez tells me, “I write from the viewpoint of the hot thoughts at the front of a brain full of adrenaline”.
I am three pints deep at my local pub.
“I don't find that to be ‘dirty work’” he continues, “we live in a world that often weaponizes moral panic but has very little to do with actual morality.”
Bleary-eyed I reach for my phone and rescue the chat I’ve archived on WhatsApp as a preemptive measure (“archive jail” I call it) with Oscar, some writer asshole who’s been blowing me off for weeks, teasing me with meeting up, dangling the long, juicy carrot in front of me, just to go MIA when I ask him for a concrete time and place. He’s soft and sad and couldn’t care less about me. I push my thumbs into the screen furiously.
Oscar, would you love me if my boobs were bigger?
Oscar, would you love me if my hair were longer?
Oscar, would you love me if my writing were better?
I hit send before I have the chance to think twice.
Reading Brontez’s work is like taking a cold shower on a muggy hungover day. Your hand can hover over the tap for a couple of minutes, in trepidation of what’s to come, but once you surrender to the water’s icy consistency and it covers you, lathers your skin, you’re shocked back into your body, returned to a lucid state, clearer than you were before. You are reminded of the bad bitch you truly are at heart.
The way Brontez subverts humour and taps into its provoking power is one of the key ways of understanding the appeal of his work. He talks about humour in chapter “The Problem With Comedy or Why I am Dead Fucking Serious” in his book Johnny Would You Love Me if My Dick Were Bigger? Brontez writes, “I was beginning to bum out my literary agent and my classmates with my AIDS jokes and apocalyptic bullshit. (‘It’s always so heavy. Like, sooooo heavy. Maybe you should just find a boyfriend and write about that…’)” and then, “Comedy is a very dangerous tool. It’s hard to keep people aligned with the fact that humour should never negate the seriousness of what you’re talking about. This is why I think most comedians go crazy: Chappelle, Murphy, Barr, Kinison, etc… The trick of the balance for me has always been to demonstrate that, alongside the laughter, I’m still dead fucking serious.”
Being funny is a way of addressing the truth head-on. Comedy can lead you to the truth. And what’s so wrong with being brutally honest?
Brontez replies in an email: “’Authenticity’ I think is a hard concept especially when the world we live in has so many deep constructs- ‘honesty’ may not equal ‘truth’ and so on- honestly the older I get don't really give a flying fuck if someone ‘trusts’ a character- I think I just need people to be able to understand (with generosity) why that character made the choice they made.”
My phone dings. It’s Oscar.
Yes.
Some bridges look better burning anyway.
In 100 Boyfriends, Brontez’s horny, punk book full of imperfect intimacies that has achieved cult status among other horny, punk people, he writes, “‘I get fucked a lot, Doc,’ I said. ‘Like, SO MUCH–figuratively speaking I don’t have a mother, a last name, or a goal or purpose in life. I’m just a hole.’ I stopped short of saying, ‘My only desire is to be desired. I feel like the whole equation cancels itself out and what it really means is I have no will–I can (at will) rip out all sense of self just so a boy can have one more hole to fuck me in. I’m afraid of this terrible power I wield, I just wait to be wanted, it’s killing me, Doctor…’”
For too long I have been desiring to be desired too, and putting up with the likes of Oscar because of it. And truthfully, it’s not so funny anymore. 100 Boyfriends is a pastiche of affairs and relationships that all suggest the futile pining for an ideal: one person who will love you to completion. As I get up to order one more pregnant pint –exactly what is called for at this moment– I’m thinking of all the different ways I have experienced desire, all the ways I’ve abandoned my sense of self and the many ways men have meddled in it.
girlfriend #3 / kink party
I’m not gay. Save for special occasions when I am.
So, there I was, at some Halloween kink party, dressed in a black catsuit, sweating through my cat-eye makeup and running my hands through my damp hair every two seconds. It was the drugs that were making me so hot, and I mean in the horny way, too.
Beside me was Ned, this guy I’d slept with this one time I was blackout drunk. I’d actually fucked him to get away from another guy who’d been eyeing me up all night, and in my obliterated state, I’d gone for the better of the two options, which happened to be Ned, even though he, very unfortunately, was my housemate. Golden rule: do NOT shit where you eat–but whatever, that was in the past now.
I had enough sense in the moment to not go in for seconds with my housemate because a girl, dressed in a skimpy leather outfit, with unbelievably long ginger hair was moving deliciously a couple of people away. I joined her and her friend, danced together for a while, and soon we were in an Uber going home together.
She told me her name was Alice and her house was fluffy. She had two big, hairy cats, Siamese, and her room smelled like candles. It was awesome. I was all in. We jumped under the covers peeling off the belts wrapped around our waists, giggling, breathing the same air until her literal fucking psycho of an ex-boyfriend showed up, absolutely unannounced. Alice’s face was well between my legs at this point and this guy just stood there in the doorway not knowing what the fuck to do with himself. Then, with a coy clearing of his throat he asked if he could join in on the fun.
“Pft, asshole,” I spit as I got the hell out of there.
“The powers that be are never going to talk to you specifically, if there’s something that needs to be addressed, you yourself have to take control of it. That’s where my writing always comes from,” says Brontez in a video for Monograph.
I am now four pints deep at my local pub. I am confronting the variations of my own desire, my festering insecurities, the truth in all of its manifestations. What is the truth made up of? Is it important to tell the truth when you write?
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” says that famous Emily Dickinson verse.
The stakes of telling the truth are high and non-negotiable. No one is going to tell your story but you. And who knows who might need it, who might be seeking some glimmer of recognition. But the truth is not a monolith, the truth is not an object you can describe or pin down. What’s more important is to be understood, that the reader understands that at the core of the characters you’re describing is an ultimate human truth, a kernel of light that reflects all of us upon its shiny surface.
“One thing I can truly say I love about myself is that I’m too sketch to lead a moral campaign against anybody. Also, leading a moral campaign against anything just seemed like a lot of work and I was stoned.” writes Brontez in 100 Boyfriends.
The truth, the truth truth, is absent of right and wrong, absent of morality, insofar as you recognise your own role in your own narrative and confront it, honestly.
The stakes of living are high, which doesn’t mean life can’t be funny, but it is a deadly serious matter too. And where are we going to find any kind of reassurance, the loving feeling of being seen, but in art, the work of people expressing themselves, with nothing to lose, nothing to gain from it except an act of recognition?
Brontez emails me, “in times of great despair I don't read the Bible - I read poetry - that's something a mentor taught me.”
Epilogue
“I am often in fear of what metaphor I am becoming to people without my permission,” Brontez writes in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt and I fear it too, so I won’t make a metaphor of him now.
I packed up, stuffed Brontez’s book back into my bag, ideas swirling in my head, ideas prompted by his books, and teetered out of the pub. It wasn’t quite the time to call it a day just yet. Fishing out my phone again I searched for an available bicycle in my area. Bingo. There was one just around the corner.
The cycle to Oscar’s house was killer. I vowed to quit smoking first thing the next day. The hills were taking me out, even with the help of the powered engine of my reliable steed: the almighty Lime bike. By the time I got there I had sweated through all three layers of clothing that were keeping me warm in the dead of that London night. I stood outside of Oscar’s house for a couple of minutes, catching my breath and exhaling warm clouds of air. The more I looked, the angrier I got: all the other times I’d been here, giving, giving, giving, flashed before my eyes in quick succession. There’s something heartbreaking about how paths, commutes, streets, become routine through habit. He lived in a fucking ugly house anyway. With a wobbling hand I took the brick from my bag and with great aim and dexterity threw it straight into Oscar’s crystalline window. On it, in black marker, a very big and heartfelt: ‘FUCK YOU!!!!!!!’
Arcadia Molinas is the online editor of Worms.
