A Punch in the Face Brontez Purnell’s novel Since I Laid My Burden Down is a tale of homecoming and mourning that complicates stereotypes of the African American bildungsroman.

Sometimes a john will stiff you. Do you let them get away with it?

Not every small town redneck is a violent homophobe. In fact, some are quite the opposite.

“I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to put a dick in their mouth. Unless it ... felt good?” J.P. Tamang reflects on how his time in the monastery demystified the elusive nature of oral sex.

I realized the cop didn’t worry me. I believed that I was going to make it to New York, even if I got thrown in jail for a night. It would only be a minor delay on the way to Larson, the boy I could not stop thinking about.

I never thought of my piano teacher as a trick. When he discovered I was a hustler through an online escort agency, he told me to do something dignified and I told him to die. Years later, he did.

I wasn’t sure what I had agreed to, but I would have followed Krish almost anywhere. He taught me that when a client leaves their cash in their car they probably don’t have any and that it’s more dangerous to steal from other hookers than it is to steal from johns. He taught me that intuition wasn’t something with which you were born, or could even develop, but that it was a symptom of getting yourself into stupid situations.

With many lovers, it gets complicated. But perhaps that’s the only way to love.

At first, stealing from johns was a perk of the underworld cash economy. If I felt as though they hadn’t paid me enough I could swipe something extra. No need for collections agencies. I never called it stealing. It was “remedial compensation”.

Every john is looking to put something to rest, but good tricks keep them coming back. The story of meeting Dan, my highest paying return customer.