Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir

Review by Abeer Hoque

Punch Me Up to the Gods is Brian Broome’s memoir, an astonishing literary act of radical empathy. It doesn’t matter how differently you grew up from him, a poor dark-skinned Black gay boy in small-town Ohio. You will understand every terrible choice he makes and why.

It’s Broome’s gift of lucid, hyper-vulnerable narration that carries the reader, from childhood crushes to high school bullying to sex club desperation into an all-consuming drug and alcohol addiction. Not only is his memoir a portrait of Blackness in America, but it is also an indictment of masculinity. For example, the reader learns early on that “girl things” include “studying, listening, being “pussy-whipped,” and curiosity.”

This version of masculinity is coated, slimed if you will, with homophobia, and gutted by poverty. From race to sexual orientation to gender expression to class, Broome’s personal intersectionalities prove difficult to survive, each one compounding the others: “It didn’t take me long to learn that my gayness detracted from my Blackness.” Not many books by Black men tackle colorism but Broome’s does. He describes himself as “the color of a turned-off TV screen” and notes with despair how much more desired lighter-skinned men are.

Throughout, Broome is adamant about his life-lines: “What Black men lean on the most, whether we want to admit it or not, is Black women.” His mother is a fierce and compelling force in his book, and I adored the chapter from her point of view (Let the Church Say “Amen”).

As someone who went to high school in a tiny Rust Belt suburb, I fully appreciated his ode to the now-defunct Hills Department Store, a chain my family also frequented: “It was a roasted peanut, soft pretzel factory wrapped inside a chocolate-covered everything.” Broome’s wit and humour give the narrative a breezy feel, despite its deep and dark themes: “The full atrocity of his age is half-lit by the glow of the jukebox.”

Punch Me Up to the Gods is divided into sections headed up by lines from Gwendolyn Brooke’s famed poem, “We Real Cool.” It’s a poem I loved and memorized as a teenager before really understanding it. This organizing principle is a fantastic, creative, and non-chronological way to parse Broome’s life: singing sin, thinning gin, striking straight, lurking late…

Interspersed between each of the sections are scenes from a bus ride (the P1 bus is its own whole character!) in which a little Black boy, Tuan, is being alternately ignored and disciplined by his father. This is one of the many brilliant ways Broome shows us how early and powerfully toxic masculinity embeds in the psyche. As frustrated and frustrating as Tuan’s father may be, Broome adds on the historical and inherited realities of Black American parenting: “a Black parent showing affection toward their children was a sure-fire way to let white people know what your weakness was.”

The Tuan interludes are written as a kind of letter to Tuan, to Black boys, to anyone who is beset by patriarchy and toxic masculinity. This follows in the epistolary tradition of Baldwin and Coates, another chapter and verse in the canon of Black narratives.

We learn early on that Broome’s father teaches him, in physically and emotionally abusive ways, that vulnerability is dangerous. Luckily for us, Broome unlearns this lesson, at great cost and with great courage. His memoir is a proof of life, and ultimately that great gift of literature: an invocation of empathy.