Amen. Aśe. And All That Shit.

Admission They give you a sticker at the doorso everybody can see you paid. I smooth mine flat on my chestlike somebody might check. The guard says no flash. That’s fine. Ain’t none of these menever wanted to be seen that clear. Every room is a man I was. Every man got a card on the walltelling you what he meant. The Man Who Had Everything Figured Out Somebody squeezed two words into the title. Ba...

He kept coming back to the window. I was inside on the couch. He was outside, giving me the finger. I wanted to put his head through the glass. I’m talking WWF s**t. The Rock to Mick Foley. A metal chair across the skull. I wanted to beat the f**k out of that boy. I was ten. My mama was doing family support at a farm in Nebraska. She’d had to bring me along to work that day. While she was there he...

I was on the couch, scrolling. Not looking for anything in particular. First clip. Niggas love when you treat them like s**t. Swipe. Second clip. Men love when you’re unpredictable and they can be scared of you. It keeps them in line. I put my phone away. A week later, she was in my living room. We were still talking about exclusivity. It had already turned into an argument once. She’d said I was...

I woke up with a tube in the side of my head. Straps across me. My arms didn’t go where I told them. Three people at the foot of the bed. My mother. My grandmother, down from Detroit. My aunt, in from Hawaii. Ain’t nobody flying in from Hawaii because they heard you gon be alright. An infection had gotten into my brain. I had been unconscious three days. My father came after. No call I remember. H...

People in New York keep asking me for directions. On the subway. On the platform. Walking down the street. Somehow, in a city with millions of people, somebody will look around, find my big Black ass, and decide I’m the one who knows where they’re going. The funny part is I just moved here. I’m still learning which trains connect, which stations require a transfer, and which directions Google Maps...

She said she was gonna call me. She got some family s**t going on. I had checked in a couple times, nothing heavy, just asking how she was doing and letting her know I was thinking about her. She said she’d call and tell me what was going on. She ain’t called. A few days ago I decided I wasn’t reaching out again. Not mad. I know what she got going on. I just don’t wanna be annoying. That’s a thing...

Content note: childhood sexual abuse, sexual shame. The band was good. Really good. She handpicked every one of them, and somewhere in the middle of our wedding they took it into a praise break, and I looked out at the crowd and saw people running around, people worshiping, hands raised, people crying, all of it for us. It felt like God was literally in the room. It felt ordained. It felt so f****...

We were drinking frozen margaritas at a bar, and it was our second date. I had been in New York about a week. Before I left Omaha, I switched my Facebook Dating profile to the city, matched with her, and we talked until I landed. Our first date was the day I got here. She had invited me, and we paid separately. That night she FaceTimed me to tell me her best friend said she shouldn’t talk to me an...

I take the pruning scissors to the palm by the only window in my living room. It stands in the corner between the TV and the bird of paradise, a little thinner than it used to be because I keep trying to keep it alive. I know the brown ones gotta go. I squeeze them between my fingers first. When they’re crunchy, they’re gone. That part is easy. It’s the ones with a little green left that f**k me u...

Author’s note: This essay discusses power, consent, kink, religion, masculinity, and emotional responsibility. Details have been blurred to protect privacy. The point is not exposure. The first thing I usually noticed was how fast somebody said yes. Not the outfit. Not the room. Not the fantasy they carried in with them like a lit match. The yes. Sometimes it came too quick. Too eager. Too clean....

My mom came to school to check me out early. Everybody else had to stay. I did not. “Where you going?” “I’m leaving early.” “For what?” “I’m gonna be in a commercial.” I made sure people knew. Not just the person who asked. Anybody close enough to hear me. I’m leaving early today because I’m gonna be in a commercial. That was the part I liked before I even got there. I had somewhere else to be. It...

This essay follows I’m Not Your F*****g Husband , but you don’t need to read that one first. I had known this woman about a month when I started moving my own money around to cover her rent. Seven hundred dollars. The problem was, I could’ve used $700 too. Badly. This wasn’t me sitting on extra money deciding whether to be generous. I had bills. I had my own s**t going on. Seven hundred dollars sh...

The second time I saw her, I told her I was moving in thirty days. Before, not after. Then I went down on her and stayed there, and when she was done shaking she laughed up at the ceiling and asked me where I’d been all her life. In the church, I said. That was the truth and the whole answer. Everything she liked about those twenty minutes, the patience, the attention, the way I could tell what sh...

I’m pretty sure I was wearing a God’s Gym T-shirt. I got it from the local Christian bookstore. I was around thirteen, standing inside One Way Ministry with my friend Eric. He was a little older than me, taller, with braids. There were maybe fifty people in the room. Maroon floors. Somebody had burned our performance track onto a CD. We called ourselves the Young Apostles. The first rap I ever wro...

There are three half-drunk Coke Zeros on my coffee table right now. There's weed crumbs on the coffee table too. Tips and filters because I have asthma, which means I have somehow found a way to make smoking weed require safety equipment. Couple lighters. My medicine. My keys. There's a sock on the floor. Across the room, one of my drawers won't close all the way because I folded my clothes, put t...

There’s a bottle of laundry detergent sitting on my studio desk. A new friend asked me why it was there. Fair question. I picked it up on the way to the laundry hamper, got distracted, set it down, and never came back for it. Things that are supposed to be places don’t be places. My ex-wife would have known that. I wouldn’t have needed to explain the laundry detergent. She knew I could start clean...

Twenty-four hours, the letter said. He got a key. We both know it. I clean anyway. Call the people I ain’t called. Wipe down a stove I don’t cook on no more. Open a window. Bought plants for the sill. Same kind my mama kept. They live. They just don’t do what hers did to a room. Last year I bought the lamp. Ten thousand lux. Free shipping. It’s in the box in the closet with the laundry. He don’t k...

My father makes quilts now. Fabric art. He brought it with him when he came through Omaha last spring, laid it out the way a man shows you work he’s proud of. A white tiger. A bird. A cow. And one more. An enslaved person. I looked at it long enough to say what I said and then I quit looking. So anything else I told you about it would be me building details a year later to sound like a man who stu...

A woman stopped me after church once because her son was using again. I was twenty-six, maybe. I had just finished doing what I knew how to do. Church. Music. Talking about God in a way that made people feel like something was possible. She grabbed my arm. She needed actual help. A number. A person. Somewhere to take him. Something. I gave her a Bible verse. And I believed the verse. I wasn’t tryi...

I hate cigarette smoke. Not in the casual way people say they hate something. I mean I hate when somebody walks past me smoking and the wind decides I should participate. I hate getting on an elevator after somebody just came in from a cigarette and now the whole little metal box smells like their break. I hate when somebody smokes near the entrance to a building. Move. Take that s**t somewhere. I...

The F starts at 179th. I live four blocks away. First stop. Empty train. Seat every time. I had decided this was luck. Nobody tells you the first stop is also the farthest one. I had already changed the date once. DUMBO first. Jane’s Carousel at 7:30. Walk by the water. Gyros at a place on Old Fulton. She said it was right by her job. Then another message came through. She didn’t like gyros. Pleas...

There’s a body mirror in the corner of my living room. I like to remind myself that whatever they got planned for us this week, I’ma handsome motherfucker. Camo pants, the baggy ones. Black Goonies tee. Hat. Brown leather crossbody I got off Amazon, sixty dollars, a Christmas gift exchange from my brother-in-law four or five years ago. Six two two ninety, and I look like a nigga who found a shirt...

My therapist told me I was walking around in wet socks. I had been telling him about the heavy things. The calls I wasn’t making. The paperwork I wasn’t opening. Problems I knew how to solve and kept carrying anyway. He listened for a while and said it sounded like I had been walking around in wet socks so long I had forgotten my feet were supposed to be dry. I felt them immediately. Cold in the h...

The Garden. West Omaha. Not that Garden. Let’s not get it twisted. Nobody in New York was holding a ticket. But it was a real auditorium with a real stage, and it was the biggest room I had been trusted with in years. Black button-up, black pants, black boots, chain. One of the rappers on the bill looked me up and down and told me I looked like an R&B singer. Everybody I ever knew was in that buil...

Author’s note: This one is about my mother, my father, and a woman I used to live with. Details are changed where they belong to somebody other than me. Nobody in here comes off worse than I do. That is on purpose . Amen. Aśe. And all that s**t. is a newsletter of essays about leaving the church, the family that raised you, and the man you built in order to survive both. Free, always. If this one...