The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir by Brian Broome

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

Punch Me Up to the Gods: A Memoir by Brian Broome A poetic and raw coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity, and addiction “Punch Me Up to the Gods obliterates what we thought were the limitations of not just the American memoir, but the possibilities of the American paragraph. I’m not sure a book has ever had me sobbing, punching the air, dying of laughter, and needing to write as much as Brian Broome’s staggering debut. This sh*t is special.” —Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy “Punch Me Up to the Gods is some of the finest writing I have ever encountered and one of the most electrifying, powerful, simply spectacular memoirs I—or you—have ever read. And you will read it; you must read it. It contains everything we all crave so deeply: truth, soul, brilliance, grace. It is a masterpiece of a memoir and Brian Broome should win the Pulitzer Prize for writing it. I am in absolute awe and you will be, too.” —Augusten Burroughs, New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors Punch Me Up to the Gods introduces a powerful new talent in Brian Broome, whose early years growing up in Ohio as a dark-skinned Black boy harboring crushes on other boys propel forward this gorgeous, aching, and unforgettable debut. Brian’s recounting of his experiences—in all their cringe-worthy, hilarious, and heartbreaking glory—reveal a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. Indiscriminate sex and escalating drug use help to soothe his hurt, young psyche, usually to uproarious and devastating effect. A no-nonsense mother and broken father play crucial roles in our misfit’s origin story. But it is Brian’s voice in the retelling that shows the true depth of vulnerability for young Black boys that is often quietly near to bursting at the seams. Cleverly framed around Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool,” the iconic and loving ode to Black boyhood, Punch Me Up to the Gods is at once playful, poignant, and wholly original. Broome’s writing brims with swagger and sensitivity, bringing an exquisite and fresh voice to ongoing cultural conversations about Blackness in America.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks and fos here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in and uh wow, we've got another amazing author on the show. The books have been flying off the shelves from his book that he's put out, A Memoir.

We'll be talking about that here in a second, so you want to check that out. In the meantime, tell your friends and relatives to go subscribe to the show. Make sure you go to youtube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button. Also go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. See what we're reading and reviewing over there. Also go to, let's see, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all those different places. There's groups, massive groups all over the place. Just search for The Chris Voss Show or Chris Voss as it were. We've got an excellent author on the show.

He's written an extraordinary book. Like I said, it's been chasing me everywhere. I see ads for it everywhere. It's almost like they know that i have him coming on the show and they're just like going hey remember he's coming on the show and offering to buy me the book but fortunately i've got the press copy right here it's the book called punch me up to the gods a memoir by brian broom And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com and their micro IDSD signature. It's a top of the range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio

and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. He is a poet and a screenwriter, and he's a K. Leroy Iris fellow and instructor in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh. He has been a finalist in the Moth Storytelling Competition and won the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University's Martin Luther King Writing Awards. He also won a Vann Award for the Pittsburgh

Black Media Federation for Journalism in 2019, and he lives in Pittsburgh. We won't hold that against him. How are you doing, Brian? I'm doing pretty good. What do you got against Pittsburgh? I'm just, I don't know. I just said I'm in a really funny mood. We were having a good laugh before the show in the green room, and so I'm just being funny. No, we love the Pittsburgh. Is Pittsburgh Steelers?

Pittsburgh Steelers, man. Are they still the most winning football team in all of history? I have no damn idea. I don't follow sports at all. But if you live in Pittsburgh, you have to be able to say something about the Steelers. And the Steelers are great. That's all I got. I love them Steelers, man. So welcome to the show. Congratulations on the book. This is quite extraordinary. Like I said,

it must be doing well because I see it everywhere. It came out on May 18th. So those of you who want to grab it, pick it up at your local booksellers. Give us your plugs, Brian, where people can follow you on the interwebs. I don't have that much of an internet presence. I have an Instagram like everybody, which is BBROMB. You can follow me there. My website is brianbroom.com. And I have, because I'm an old person, I have a Facebook page that is still active. You're not going to see me on TikTok, unfortunately, but I still have a Facebook so you can follow me in those places. There you go. There you go. So you've written this beautiful book, Punch Me Up to the Gods. What motivated you to want to write this book? I was in rehab. I wrote this book. I went to rehab

for drug and alcohol addiction, and I didn't really know that I was going to end up writing a book at all. I went there because I was in a very dark time, and I needed to be there. And while I was there, I had this roommate who just snored like you wouldn't believe. He just sounded like somebody was tearing up the street with a jackhammer outside. And so I was up nights. And I used to write when I was a kid. I hadn't written in a long time, but since he was laying 10 feet away from me snoring, I just started to write again. And I decided to just write stories from my life, stories that I thought probably led me to ending up in rehab and being addicted to drugs and alcohol. That's where it started. When I got out of rehab, I continued to write and I was doing local open mics and doing the moth and doing

other things around town that were live. And one night a woman walked up to me and said, Hey, my name is Danielle. Can I be your agent? And I said, sure. I had no idea what the hell that meant at all. She said, what are you writing? And I showed her these stories that I was working on and that's how it started. Wow. That's a great story. I wish the agent will walk up to me for my book I'm writing right now. That's pretty cool, dude. Where were you when you did that? I should go hang out there. So the title of the book, Punch Me Up to the Gods, can you disclose what that's about and why you chose that title? The book is about just being black and male and the expectations of masculinity that are put on black men. We have to be, it seems culturally, the toughest guys in the room, the most masculine, the most stoic, the most cool, and how I was none of those things, like ever.

I kept trying and failing and trying and failing, and that's what some of the stories are about. But Punch Me Up to the Gods is a rewording of something that my father used to say about misbehavior or not acting correctly. He would say, I will punch you so hard you'd go back to up to god to be renamed to be remade into the proper kind of person and so the title is just a challenge go ahead punch me up go ahead you know i'll be back i'll be back the same way so that's what the title means is it is an infrared an inference of being reborn or being redone as your dad implied where in a certain way punch me up to god i'm going to come back stronger but the same way you're not going to do anything except piss me off enough to just be more me than i am it's a challenge and it's an aspiration of mine

i would love to be the kind of person we were talking about james baldwin in the green room about he took a lot of punches he took a lot of criticism the kind of person we were talking about James Baldwin in the Green Room about. He took a lot of punches. He took a lot of criticism, a lot of threats against his life, and he just kept coming back stronger, which is the thing that I admire most about him. Yeah, and the loss of his three friends that were assassinated

too. Yeah, we talked about this in the Green Room, but do you reference James Baldwin in the book? I do reference James Baldwin in the book. I don't want to give anything away, but there is a real reference to James Baldwin in the book. In a lot of ways, the book is about me aspiring to be like him in my own life and wanting to change certain things about myself that were in fact cowardly, wherein he was so brave. So yeah, definitely he's in the book. That's awesome. Yeah. We talked in the green room. I'm a big James Baldwin fan.

Zeddy Glott Jr. came on the show and introduced me to him. And I think, trying to remember the other guy, he wrote the book, Crap, there's something about the fire. It's a spin of James Baldwin's things, but he wrote the book. It was about William F. Buckley, the famous William F. Buckley debate between him and James Baldwin. And then he told the history of the two of them leading up to it and outlined their outlooks, which is interesting. A great book. The Fire. Is it The Fire this time? Yeah, I believe it is. Yeah, that's it. We've had him on the show. Yeah. And so I just fell in love with James Baldwin. He's just so amazing the way he delivered, the way he debated and everything else. And I think next to Christopher Hitchens, he's my second favorite debater and orator.

Yeah. I just love the way he delivers. And there's something about him where he delivers on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level at the same time. But yeah. So give us some other insight to some of the things we're going to find in this book. You've got some interesting chapter titles here. We Are, or I'm sorry, We Real Cool.

And then We Left School, We Lurk Late, We Strike Straight. Tell us a little bit about some of the buildup and what you've used in the chapters and the stories in the book. Sure. The book is hung on the bones of a poem from 1963, I believe, by Gwendolyn Brooks called We Real Cool. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote this poem after she walked by a pool hall in Chicago, and she looked inside the pool hall, and she saw seven boys, basically, hanging out in the pool hall during the day, during school time. And they were up to some manly business, like inside of this pool hall. They were really super young. And she thought to herself, I wonder what they think of themselves.

And she wrote this poem called We Real Cool, which is a defiant poem. And I took it to be a poem about Black masculinity. We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. And I thought I could tell a story or two or three stories about each one of these lines about how I am just the opposite of cool. And the reasons why I left school were because I was afraid, not because I was being defiant.

And so there's her lines of the poem and my story is just making you rethink those lines of the poem. That's how that's the framework of it. The stories are embarrassing as hell in the ways that I tried to live up to manliness. They are basically cautionary tales, I think, for anybody who is living their life in such a way that the only purpose of it is to make other people accept them, to make other people happy and ignoring your true nature or being ashamed. There's a lot of, one of the themes I think of the book is shame. I was ashamed of being poor. I was ashamed of being black. I was ashamed of being gay and the ways in which I try to hide those things sometimes to comic effect. And it's something that I hope people can relate

to in their own lives, or maybe they know somebody else who's suffering with this kind of shame. So was that part of what your struggle was with masculinity and being gay, or was it just masculinity in the age of like Me Too and stuff like that? I had all kinds of things I was ashamed of. One of the central themes, I think, is the masculinity issue and being called the F word all the time and being told that my interests were not acceptable. I used to like to write when I was a kid and I was told that being off in a corner writing looks gay. Don't do that. Really? Yeah, definitely.

You're supposed to be interested in sports. You're supposed to be chasing girls. You're supposed to be all these things that I was supposed to be. Really? Wow. years old. So we're talking about back in the 70s and 80s when we were far less enlightened than we are now about gender and sexuality and things like that. So yeah, I took a lot of beatings. I took a lot of punishment emotionally and physically for not living up to this expectation of the body that I was born into, not acting correctly, not being a man at all times. And then you struggled with blackness. Let's talk a little bit about what you felt about that. This is a racist culture. And I went to a predominantly white school. The kids, the white kids with whom I went to school were very certain

that they were better than me because they were white and they weren't shy about telling me that all the time. There was also the television that I watched all the time and these images of perfect whiteness and perfect families and those things influenced me. And also I got, I took a lot of guff from black children as well because I wasn't the kind of boy that I was supposed to be. So I just felt like I was caught in the middle between just homophobia from I think, black community, and just racism from everywhere else. So yeah, I struggled. I wished that I had never been born. I wish I was non existent. I wish that all the time or that I was born different, that I was a completely different person. And that's a struggle I've taken with me my whole life.

Because when you start to believe that just the way you are essentially is wrong, what hope do you have? And I think with the writing of this book, there is a hopeful message for people who may grow up believing that they are less than because other people keep telling them that they're less than. Yeah. And it's hard when we have a society. It used to be much worse, but it's up and down like this. Thank God we turned a page for the last five years.

But it's scaring me what the future is holding. Hopefully, I don't know, hopefully things stay on the right track. But no, certainly there's a lot of different aspects of things that our society does to people where people don't fit in or feel like they have inclusivity do you feel like a lot of those different issues are what led you down the road to drug abuse and and and alcoholism alcohol is like the the most efficient way to make yourself disappear i remember the first time i got the first time i ever got drunk i remember thinking like i just i want to be this way all the time because I loved myself when I was drunk.

I was, I was the party man. I was life of the party. And people seemed to like me when I was drunk. And then I found drugs and that was even better. I totally disappear into this character that I was playing for everybody. I could be witty. I could be handsome. I could be charming. Meanwhile, let's just be real. I was none of those things. I was just drunk. Being drunk doesn't really give you a great grasp of yourself, but I felt better. Like the anxiety and the depression with which I suffered would just disappear for a while until it didn't, until the drinking and the drugs didn't help anymore. And it just became really dark in my life for several years. And the only thing I could think to do was to drink more and use more drugs.

So I was in that, I was definitely in that spiral. So the fact that I hated myself, I think, I want to be clear, the fact that I am a drug addict and an alcoholic that's my doing but the fact that i hated myself enough to become that also plays into it the way that i was treated in my past and just learning how to hate myself definitely opened the door wide for the abuse of drugs and alcohol yeah we're a tortured soul it's a hard place to be man and you got your head fucking with you and the one thing i used to like about drinking was i could write better when i drank i i became more artistic i could artistic i could play piano and guitar and and stuff and so it kind of helped free up my mind and stuff but

there comes a point where you're just abusing it you're just you're just doing it and when you torture soul that's sometimes that's the only way you can get the madman in your head to shut up and leave you alone. And just you can be fun. But then it just reached a point where you're just chasing the high. And it just takes more and more. Yeah. I would wake up and that was the first thing I would reach for. Wow.

Before Cheerios, it was Jack Daniels. Yeah, just pour the Cheerios, the Jack Daniels in the Cheerios. Don't think that hasn't been tried. It's disgusting. It was a way that I had, I know now that I have pretty bad anxiety from depression and I didn't know it then. And the only way to make it quiet down was to just get my brain, every tissue of my body soaked in whiskey. And then the drugs came and it was just, it was a bleak time. And I lived that way for a very long time before I went to rehab. There you go. There you go. One of the things, some, we talked about the book, it looks, it's a compilation of just different stories and anecdotes from your life, correct?

Yes. Yes. Strung together in one narrative. Yeah. And what do you think readers are going to find the most interesting about the book? I think the book structure is unique. It's a braid within a braid in terms of narrative storytelling. I think that I am willing to just completely embarrass myself on the page. A lot of times I think sometimes you read stories that people write about themselves and they emerge the hero of the story. I am not a hero in this story at all. I tried to be as honest as I could without hurting anybody in my life and talk to people about what I was writing. And I think that people will be able to relate to this idea that they're living a life that was prescribed for them, as opposed to maybe living the life that they wanted to live or doing things the way they wanted to do.

And how societal pressures to be normal can be overwhelming. That was like my biggest wish when I was growing up. I just want to be normal. I just want to be normal. I just want to be normal. Please. I used to pray. My mother drug me to church every Sunday and every Wednesday for Bible study. And I just would pray to God, just please make me normal. I can't go on like this. I think that's relatable. Yeah. I think you definitely were being, you were just living a torture life and you need to find yourself. So do you talk in the book about where you are now and how you've,

I'm assuming come to some grips or some sort of resolutions about the place you're in? Are you still struggling? And the book is still about that struggle. Where are you at now? And, and what do you talk about the book in that field? I don't really go into where I am now in the book. I'm talking to you about that right now. I don't talk about my rehab experience a lot in the book. I think the book leads you up to a place where I think I'm going to go. I think it illustrates the struggles that brought me to rehab as opposed to the rehab experience. That might be another book.

I was just going to ask those are your next question. You led us into a second book, didn't you? Yeah, I might. Because rehab is really, it's interesting. It's an interesting place. And you definitely meet some interesting people when you go there. But where I am now is I still struggle with a lot of stuff. My mother was in town this past weekend and I spent the weekend with her and I was the whole time I was thinking, God, can I use a drink? Because my mother is beautiful. She's a wonderful woman, but she's a mother. I did not drink. Every day I wake up and I say to myself, the first thing I say is I'm not going to drink today. And it's been that way for years. And then literally what they say in recovery programs is that it's a day at a time.

And it absolutely is a day at a time. I'm learning to feel better about myself. I'm learning to forgive myself for some things. I have done the AA thing where you call around and where you write letters to people that you've harmed in your past. And some of them have forgiven me. And some of them are like, I will never forgive you for manipulating me or for lying to me or for whatever I did. And I've had to learn how to come to terms with that as well. That's awesome, man. That's awesome. Sounds like a great book. Anything more we should know about it? Everybody should buy 10 copies. Everybody buy 10 copies. there you go. No, I'm extremely proud of it. Sometimes I'll pick it up and then just flip it open to a page and think, gosh, who wrote this?

This is actually pretty good. It's just something that I'm really proud of. I had a lot of great help on it from the people at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And yeah, I hope that people enjoy it. There you go. There you go. It sounds like an awesome book. Like I said, I've been seeing it advertised everywhere. Everyone should go check it out and all that good stuff. Give us your plugs, Brian, before we go out. Just about the book. I have a wonderful review in the New

York Times that I think people could take a look at. Again, follow me on Instagram, BBROMB for updates. And if you want to use that old chestnut facebook i'm on there too but you won't see me dancing on tiktok that's just not going to happen i don't have the legs for it you and me man you and me let's take to our kids or something else all the stuff let them let them have it let them yeah they can yeah they can just have that guys check it out punch me up to the gods a memoir by brian broom you can take an order up but anywhere you find fine books may 18th 2021 just barely came off the printing presses there brian thank you for coming on and sharing your story with us man thank you very much for having me chris had a

great time thank you and continue success man we'll look forward to that second book because i want to see the rising from the ashes i want to find out how you fixed yourself and in the great place you got yourself in. So I'll look forward to that too, man. Absolutely. To my audience, take and go to youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button over there. Refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives.

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