“Age nineteen,” Dixon observed. “A little old for you, wasn’t he?”
“No,” I said. “He was the youngest one of all, in the way that mattered. He was like…”—and I hesitated, realizing I was about to bury myself, but there was no choice really, so I went on—“…he was like the boy in the Ana?s Nin story. Innocent. Or no, not innocent. Delicate. Fragile.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me what happened.”
“You already know what happened.”
“I want to hear how you tell it.”
Well, I really didn’t want to do that, but Dixon just kept staring me down, and then the tingling in the wristband started to get painful, so finally I gave in and told the story:
By the middle of fall, the pet-boy thing had started to get old. I guess the novelty wore off. The thing about teenage boys, you know, they’re actually not all that interesting as company. I mean even Miles, with all that he had going on upstairs, he wasn’t much to talk to.
So I started to get bored. And there were other things going on, too. My boss at the liquor store finally got wise to the fact that I’d been risking his license with my tip-jar scheme; he not only fired me, he kept my last paycheck and said he’d turn me in if I made any trouble about it. So because of that I got behind on my rent, and then also, I was doing a few too many drugs, which hurt my finances even more and made it hard to get out of bed in the morning, which started causing problems at my other job…
So all of this was sort of snowballing, right? And then one day out of the blue I got a call from Carlotta Diaz saying she’d just bought a house in Bodega Bay, and would I like to come visit her? And I was like, that’s great, I’ll get out of the city for a while, get straight, get my head together, and make a fresh start. So I told Carlotta yes, and we set a date.
And not long before I was due to leave, I was coming back from working a last shift at the burger joint, and that’s when I saw him.
He was a street preacher. I never found out where he came from, but it must have been some little church town out in the boonies where they raise kids under glass. What brought him to S.F. I don’t know, but he couldn’t have been off the bus more than five minutes.
He was standing on the sidewalk in the heart of the Tenderloin, testifying about Jesus to a pack of transvestite hookers. The hookers were having a grand old time cracking on him, but he was impervious to catcalls—not thick-skinned, you understand, just clueless. He called the hookers “ladies,” and from the way he said it you could tell he wasn’t being sarcastic or politically correct. He didn’t get the whole cross-dressing thing; he thought these really were women.
So I stopped to watch this travesty, right? And seeing how green this kid was, how totally out of his depth, the thought came to me: If I wanted to, I could take him home and really blow his mind.
Now you can believe this or not, but this was a departure for me. I mean, with the other pet boys it had all been about fun, and free housekeeping. This was the first time I ever consciously considered messing with some kid’s head, leaving marks… And some part of me knew that was a bad idea, that I’d be crossing a line I didn’t want to cross. Normally, I wouldn’t have. But I was leaving for Carlotta’s in less than a week, and that changed the calculus a little. It’s like, if you’re a sane person, ordinarily you’d never touch heroin. But if it’s the night before you’re going to give up all drugs, and somebody offers you a line to snort…