Cooking shows, in particular, fascinated him.
Since he couldn’t help pay for anything, Bowie did everything around the house. The way he cleaned made Martha Stewart look like a pig in its own filth. My olive green linoleum, which had been installed sometime during the civil war, gleamed when he was done with it. He also cooked, folded laundry, and made the beds. It was like living in a hotel, without the ridiculously small bottles of shampoo.
I don’t know if it was post traumatic stress or self imposed pressure to catch up with other people his age, but Bowie frequently had insomnia. Some nights, I would go for a drink of water or midnight snack and catch him on the couch with the volume turned off on the television. If he was still awake, I would join him and we’d watch reruns of bad talk shows and Court TV. As he got more comfortable around me, Bowie took to resting his head on my lap. He asked a lot of questions, especially during the talk shows. He didn’t get a lot of slang expressions or colloquialisms, having previously been exposed to a tyrant with a limited vocabulary.
“I don’t understand,” he told me one night, when the theme to an episode of Maury Povich flashed on screen.
“What part?” I asked.
Bowie squinted, and painstakingly worked his way around the words “Jail bait teens gone wild.”
“It means the show is about hot girls who are too young to have sex,” I told him. “Or guys. You never know with Maury.”
“How young is too young?”
“It depends on the state. Here it’s sixteen, so you’ll have to keep it in your pants a few more years,” I joked.
On screen, a young girl in a leather skirt called her mother a bleeped out word, probably cunt, and flashed the studio audience. Bowie and I got caught up in the show, as Maury frowned disapprovingly and asked the little tramp why she would want to behave so provocatively. I doubted she knew what the word meant.
Looking back, I can see the arc Bowie and I were on. Day by day, I was simply too close to it. The changes that happened did so gradually, so much so, that I might not have ever noticed them if one day Bowie didn’t decide to take a jump instead of a baby step.
It was October fourth, his sixteenth birthday. Later, I would wonder how long he had been planning what he did. Weeks? Years? Whatever the case, I woke up that morning with Bowie naked in my bed. He kissed me before I could say anything, not that I know what I would have said. I was surprised that he knew what to do with his mouth, and how sure he was of how to move his body. Only his hands seemed lost, like they knew where they wanted to go but not what to do once they got there.
I would like to say that I stopped him, but that would be bullshit. Sometimes, you don’t know what you want, until its tongue is in your mouth. I wanted Bowie to want me. I wanted to feel him between my legs, hot and ready. I came the first time, just feeling the length of him enter me. Bowie told me that he wanted to be everything for me, when I came again and he was still going strong.
“I’ll make you happy,” he promised.
I believed him. We spent the rest of that day in bed, alternating between making love and sleeping. During the latter, Bowie curled into me like a cat. I could see the tattoo on his hip, and a dull rage germinated inside me. It grew every time we kissed, or Bowie came inside me. I tried not to dwell on the dark thoughts, but I was angry.
Fate has a strange way of showing people its approval. If it wasn’t for the local video store going out of business, I wouldn’t have been out of the apartment the day Bowie’s dad came to claim him. I went down alone— Bowie never liked to leave the apartment, let alone the building—intent on picking a few movies up for him. On the way back, I came across a pile of someone’s ‘moving out’ crap on the sidewalk. It wasn’t an unusual sight. Lots of people preferred to abandon personal items and furniture, rather than have to transport it to a new place. Especially if the stuff was junk to begin with.
This wasn’t all junk. There was a bookcase in fairly good condition, a few wastebaskets, and three golf clubs. I didn’t know much about golf, but two of them had skinny heads and one had a big fat one. I took the fat one. I thought maybe I could buy some cheap balls and paper cups to play mini-golf around the apartment.
I noticed the apartment door was slightly open before I got to it. My body tensed, and my pace immediately slowed to cushion my footsteps. When I reached the door, I left the bag of VHS tapes in the hall and turned the golf club around so that the head was pointed up. As much as I wanted to rush in and see if Bowie was all right, I couldn’t be sure who else was in the apartment. They could have guns, which meant I needed to sneak up on them if I didn’t want to get shot.
I heard heavy breathing, the closer I got to the door. I recognized that particular staccato and my jaw clenched.
“Don’t you fucking move,” Bowie’s dad panted. “I’ll break your neck, if you fucking move.”
There was a rip of fabric followed by a heavy thump.
“Did you let anyone else touch you while I was gone?” He demanded. “Did you let anyone else fuck you?”
I was no longer concerned with strategy. I kicked the door open, and entered the apartment with the club drawn back. Bowie was pinned down, in a pile of his own shredded clothes. His father looked up, mouth agape, as I sailed the club into the side of his head. A hunting knife rolled out of his hand, and I quickly picked it up. Bowie’s father didn’t move. My first golf swing ever, and I had knocked the guy out cold.
He woke up in my bathtub, about five minutes later. I had taped his ankles and wrists together, but hadn’t gotten his mouth yet. Bowie’s father gave me a bleary look, which sharpened as soon as he laid eyes on Bowie.
“You fucking bitch,” he hissed at me. “Let me out of here!”
“No.”
I reached for the duct tape, and pulled out a foot or so.
“Did you touch him?” He asked. “Did you put your filthy bitch hands on him?”
“None of your business,” I told him.
Bowie’s father made a gurgling noise and hacked a wad of phlegm at me. I dodged to the left, and it splattered against the side of the toilet bowl.
“Do you know how much I paid for him? I sold my fucking car, and pawned my dead mother’s ring!”
I paused. “Excuse me?”
“Cute little boys don’t come cheap,” the man in the tub sneered.
“I’m not a boy,” Bowie whispered, from where his body was pressed against the bathroom wall.
The man I used to think was his father ran his eyes down Bowie’s body.
“You’ve still got some good years in you,” he told him. “I’ll bet you’re still nice and tight.”
I ripped the last piece of tape free, and slapped it over his mouth. He protested with angry grunts, until I held up the hunting knife.
“Are you going to behave?” I asked. “Are you going to be a good boy?”
He nodded frantically, his eyes wide. I leaned in and pressed a hand against his knee, to keep his leg steady.
“Tough shit,” I told him.
I read in some comic book, a long time ago, that people bled out if you cut their femoral artery. Since I wasn’t exactly sure where that was, I picked a spot on the guy’s thigh and sliced across it. I cut him one more time, for good measure, before I turned the shower on. It helped cover up the noises he was making and washed the blood down the drain before it could stain the tub.
When I turned to Bowie, he had a glazed look in his eyes.
“You don’t have to watch,” I told him, though I knew he would.
He shook under my lips, as I moved them down his body. Bowie was hard by the time I got down on my knees, and he made a grateful noise as I took his cock in my mouth. Muffled shrieks rose from behind me, accompanied by pounding against the sides of the tub. It weakened by degrees, until there was only the sound of water. A moment later I stroked Bowie’s hip, as his cum spilled across the back of my tongue.
