night before Rudy cleaned things up.
Another snapshot. When I met Gary I was already turning tricks, like four months after Daddy kicked me out of the house and I went downtown just to see the river. Nothing but boys in the street. I was so fucking hungry, yo. One of the boys was eating fried chicken. He handed me a piece and I ate the bone. Mad hungry.
A car pulled up. He got in and waved at me. Darkness was hiding everything. I turned to go back to, I don’t know, uptown, I guess, even though that would take forever. Then this car pulled up and stopped beside me. “You’re new,” the man said. I didn’t know what he meant. I asked if he could get me some KFC and he said, “Get in.” I’m not stupid. I was sixteen and I knew a lot of shit and it’s not like I was going to vomit. Part of me wanted to be in the car. He got me some chicken and when I started to eat he unzipped his pants and took it out. I thought jacking off a dude was the same as jacking myself off and I was hungry. I grabbed his cock and he said, “No, baby,” and pointed at my mouth.
Gary’s coming for me. So stupid, all the shit that lead to this.
Third snapshot. So one day, or night, rather, I’m walking down Baychester, looking for a better highway to sleep under, I guess. First mistake, nobody looks for cock on Baychester. One person in the car says, “Yo, you one of them good-time boys?” and me, I’m thinking that I’m a pro so I can show some sass, so I say, “What kind of time you think is good?” And I’m riding this moment because I get to be all witty and shit, clever, and the car stops and he tells me to get in. And I’m looking around because this is the Bronx yo, not Chelsea, and I don’t want any trouble. But the man shows me some cash and I get in. Second mistake: Don’t jump in a car with a john without checking the backseat first. And the man, another Jamaican, says him don’t buy puss in a bag so open the bag and make me see the goodies, and I zip down my pants and take it out, and then he asks me to jack off and I’m feeling weird, like this is one of those real freaks who just wants to watch me cum, so I start to rub my cock even though it feels really, really weird, and suddenly the car stops and three guys jump out from the backseat. “Fuckin’ batty boy,” one of them says, and they open my door and pull me out. I didn’t even notice that we had turned down some lane and the only witnesses would be rats. So they form this circle and one by one they grab me by the shirt, spin their arms like a whirlwind, and punch me in the face or the stomach, and every time I get hit it’s like another explosion, and I vomit and that just makes it worse. And if I fall they pull me up and punch and kick me over to the next one, who punches and kicks me in the balls and I fall to the ground again and taste the garbage on the asphalt, and my eyes are so blurry that I can’t see nothing. All I see is four blurs bent over me, then all of a sudden there are three blurs, then two. Two blurs jump up and try to fight a new blur. The new blur is black and white at the same time. The new blur flashes something shiny and plunges into one of the two. The last blur runs to the car and drives off. The new blur smells like sulphur. I see a hand coming toward me and I try to push it off, but this last blur is too strong. Then I realize that I was in the air. Gary picks me up and carries me back to this place.
I’m in this shack for I don’t know how long. Back then I thought he was a miracle, but not long after that I realized that the only reason he was on that street was that he was cruising for ass too. I would have laughed if it wasn’t so hard. A gunman on the road, Jamaican at that, looking to pick up a male whore. That said, I barely saw him. His room stunk. It was a hotel room—no, it wasn’t, it was some Christian-home thingy. I soon realized that it was not his house that stunk, but outside. One of those places where garbage is never picked up on time. I didn’t care, I would have followed him anywhere. I was there weeks or months, I don’t know. He was barely there though. Sometimes I would wake up in the night only to hear heavy breathing beside me. He would smell like sulphur and he would be fast asleep. I’m wondering if people have asthma attacks in their sleep.
For a good while I couldn’t see very good so I thought what I was seeing was not really real. I thought I was making it up, but when my eye swelling went down and I woke up and saw who was in bed beside me, I had to slap my mouth shut to stop the scream. In the bed was the whitest man I’d ever seen in my life. I wish I could say how it shocked me, I wish I could. At first I thought he was white. I couldn’t form a word or a fucking thought. He was in the bed, sorta curled up in a red brief. His hair was light yellow, lighter than any blond I know, and his eyebrows were white and his skin was just covered in white hair. I stooped down beside his face and saw that his lips were thick and his nose kinda flat. I’d never seen an albino before. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. I touched his hair, which was really coarse, and when I moved my hand he was looking at me. We just stood there. I was looking at him and he was looking at me.
Every now and then—shit, who am I fooling, every goddamn day Gary will just disappear like that and don’t come back for hours, sometimes days. And he’ll either be in a really good mood or a really fucked-up one and ask me for coke. I will tell him that I never do that shit and I can feel his punch coming before he even clenches his fist. This is so damn pathetic. I feel like the woman who loved too much. Then again,
Fourth snapshot. We’re in KFC on Gun Hill because the lighting sucks, and we’re eating and fooling around. When he isn’t pissed, or scared, or just in a mood to fuck things up, Gary is the funniest person to be around. And that place, especially in the darker corners round back, is one of those places where he can be himself. He lets out this nervous little laugh and says, “Boy, if some people ever find out, especially me girlfriend them, I don’t know if they’d kill themselves or me first. Then again, they wouldn’t believe it even if they heard it from my own mouth.”
“That you are a faggot?”
“I not no bombo raas claat faggot!” This he says to me even though, for the entire time we have been here, his hand hasn’t left my balls. This is not the kind of situation to get him mad.
“You can call a hardcore gangster
“Well, you’re not feeling up a pussy.”
I shouldn’t have said that. He grabs hard, and pain, fucking splitting pain that feels as if something is clawing its way through my stomach, causes me to double over on the table.
“Sorry, sorry…” he says, and he sounds as surprised at what he did as I am. I stomp his foot hard.
“No, you not, you son of a bitch.”
He looks at me long and hard, then lets out a loud laugh. “Well, you certainly go on like a pussy sometimes. Look, how much time you want me to say sorry? Shit, you can gwaan like girl eeh, man? All this intense fuckery. Me can’t deal with that. Look, I have to go do some business, me’ll see you when me see you.”
Three weeks later he shows up at the room we’re staying, almost unconscious, trembling and bleeding. I will never forget the look he had on his face as long as he lets me live. Almost as if he saw God or something much worse. And he’ll never forgive me for seeing him that way. I knew that he barely got away from something. I put him to bed and have to hush him three times when he wakes screaming that they’re out ? get him wid forty-four bullets. You’d think he was reduced to nothing but a little flower in the palm of my hand and all that was left for me to do was to make a fist.
