#2

a work in progress

I’m a whore from another planet.

What the fuck do you want from me. It’s so embarrassing. Writing like this. A work in progress. Where your mistakes look like planets.

But I am a fearless sort of bitch.

As I am writing, I’m actually on part 31. There is an outline. I know where I am going. But the first thing I assemble is the skeleton. The bones. I used to live in Taos (several incarnations), and Natalie Goldberg would come swooping down from Boulder to expain it all to us. She never looked all that comfortable, but she’d made it.

They say be careful what you wish for.

Be very, very careful about what you wish for.

I am not from your star to star cluster fuck.

I read from the Crow Call Press gig in Taos at the Stables Gallery and the Harwood Foundation. In order to really nail writing down the bones, you have to know a few things about human bones. They are not destroyed easily. Every time I have been handed a plastic bag filled with some lover’s ashes, there’s a lot of crunchiebone in there. The universe just takes us back. It’s a pawn shop. It takes us in only under such cosmic conditions where there is something in it for the universe. Writing down the bones is about quid pro quo.

After working on 31 for a while, it made no sense. On my planet — the Make No Sense System — everyone writes but no one has ever been published. As far as we know, but I think it might be one of those white lies editors tell. A lot of alcoholics. No one has ever been published. Who the fuck knows.

That is what we call you on my planet. A LOT OF ALCOHOLICS.

Deep into 31 (I can go back because going back is what writers do), I realized I had not yet made the case for being from another planet. I had failed. Imagine that.

Just because I write it, doesn’t mean it’s true. I am from the planet CrunchieBone we eat the dead. We rotate around Circus, Circus. What happens in Vegas is Vegas.

My paranoia extends to my Birth Planet where the only people who can get published are the people who have published previously. How is this. Easy, they own the resources.

Those of us who inhabit the lower levels eat a lot of hairy ass. Twenty, thirty, fifty times a day or more.

You don’t have any idea what this book (I don’t know what it is) is about, but I do. The other lie is that the audience does not matter. Being from a previously unpublished planet, I am here to tell you that the audience does not matter. They are insignificant. I only remember things about my Birth Planet from time to time and both the ecstasy and the acid have to be radiologically refined. We had great drugs. Other species called us the Party Planet. There’s a ton of stuff I can barely remember because I was dropped on my head by parents who didn’t really give a fuck.

I had that certain look refined, too.

What you have here is a complete mess. You have made a mess of your planet, and it’s not very nice. Other planets want to shut you down. I don’t know this to be true, I am a simple dunderhead, but I think my mission might be to report back to the massive army parked behind your moon.

The only thing I can say to the alien warships obscured by the moon is run like hell for your lives.

Elijah Shout

I never know why I write things until I know.

At 3:am this morning, it hit me like a truck. “You need to say that this is the story of a safe house,” Mary said. It was much too early for the voices to converse.

“Go to sleep, Mary.”

“I want some Jimmy Chu’s.”

“Walmart sandals will have to do.”

Mary pouts a lot.

The story of a safe house.

Actually, more than one safe house. What is safe.

It hit me: The house was never safe. I was always afraid. He beat the shit out of me all the time.

Writing is my revenge.

My father was my pimp. He sold me as his ordinary son. It was not unlike a marketing gimmick that somehow provided him with the image of himself as a manly man.

He was a manly man. And he had the guns to prove it. At sixteen, I took one and blew my guts out with it.

He was at work.

I remember screaming in the emergency room (where they knew me) and they must have called him.

Just as I was blacking out, I saw him bending down to hold me.

It took a lot of morphine to not be terrified. At him holding you. I would tighten up slick as snake oil. There is no such thing as an ordinary son.

What he was afraid of is that I might be gay.

It would be a reflection on him.

I was having sex with a boy in the basement of the house. I still dream about him.

When my mother broke into the room.

“If you are a faggot,” she screamed. “Your father will kill himself.”

And it will be my fault.

I knew he was having affairs with other women. I hated him for that. It meant we were not good enough.

There was nothing ordinary about living in that house of horrors.

To read about myself in some Los Angeles rag that our happy home was middle-class, so riled my guts, I had to throw the rag across the room.

The writer in the rag was not there.

I was there.

The writer in the LA rag was not encased in cast after cast.

I was.

Students were forbidden to ride the elevator at my high school. Students took the stairs.

Everyone but me.

They just gave me a key to the elevator because my bones were always broken.

No one at Lansing Eastern High school was ever there for me. No one had my back. I was alone.

The boy I had been fucking with in the basement told everyone we were having sex.

I beat the shit out of him. I almost killed this boy. I scared myself with how violent I could become. I just snapped not unlike a bone.

Why am I writing this.

Just yesterday, one of the Smash Street boys climbed a cyclone fence. It seems there was a car on the other side of the fence that interested him.

He’s 16.

Which should but doesn’t explain everything.

He fell and gashed his leg.

It does happen. But HIV does make it different. If the kid’s viral load is sky high, it can contribute to making the process of healing seem like forever.

There will be lots of the politically correct who are going to say that the HIV of the 16-year-old isn’t relevant. But it is. HIV does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives in the infected. Cameron had to be examined. He had to take his pants off and the nurse was going to see him in his underpants.

Fuck me.

I would have no idea what this means for a typical boy. I don’t know any typical boys. To a sexually abused adolescent boy with HIV, now living in a safe house, with moi, and other boys just like him, being out there with your junk is almost more than he can imagine volunteering to do.

But I was firm.

Antibiotics were needed. It was not an option he could ignore.

“Did you ever do anything this stupid,” he asked. We were in one of those little cubicles where the curtains were drawn. People in the lobby could see.

“I have a hard on. I don’t want anyone to see me. I don’t want to do this. Why am I hard.”

“You’re sixteen.”

“Why does that matter.”

“It just does. Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

“It’s not small.”

“I see that.”

“No one is as stupid as I am.

“Trust me. When I was your age, I broke every bone twice, and then I shot myself with a shotgun.”

“You are fucking with me, Tim.”

“Trust me. I’m not.”

Never miss an opportunity if you for once have their undivided attention.

“I wanted to die. I wanted to be dead. I wanted it to end.”

Cameron squeezed my hand.

Cameron never touches other people. Unless they pay him.

These boys are not alone, and shit happens. To everyone.

They’re adolescent. They assume none of this shit ever really happens to other people. Just to them. Petulant. And pretty.

It was breaking my bones that was ordinary. And then, my nemesis would sit there in the emergency room of Sparrow Hospital joking about how rough I played football. I played football for keeps. Because if I didn’t, he’d beat me unconscious. I read this stuff today about concussions. Concussions are not just medical dramas, they’re a way of life. If you’re going to be tackled by five male bodies, you better have the ball. If you fumble the ball while these guys are piling on, and the world goes grey, you know that he’s going to hit you harder than the five guys on top of you ever could.

We grew our own food. We had tractors and ploughs (how middle-class is that) and land. We lived next door to Arboretum park which was a buffalo preserve at that time. I had cut a small hole in the fence, crawled through, and ran with the buffalo. The bull buffalo was not amused. My summers were spent working that garden. A ploughshare is not necessarily a poetry magazine.

A ploughshare is the cutting or leading edge of a moldboard which closely follows the coulter when ploughing. It’s the part of the plough that turns the earth up. My father kept them razor sharp because he kept everything he touched in perfect working condition. Everything but me. It was dark. He was a powerful man. He threw me into the ploughshare, and it impaled me. Down to bone. I almost lost that leg. No ploughshare is exactly what you would call sterile. In fact, ours was pulled through horse manure. This time, he was afraid of taking me to a hospital. I had been there too often. Questions might get asked. But no. They never were. Not by family. Not by schools. Not by teachers. Not by anyone. No one ever questioned what went on in families. Ours was kept in terror by an alcoholic who hated us.

The wound from the ploughshare was serious. It went down to the bone and when the infection set in, my dad made it very clear that I was to take care of it myself. I was twelve. I did everything I could do to save that leg. I would pour peroxide from the bottle into the wound and scream. One teacher asked me why I limped. I showed him the wound. He just walked away. Until the day I die, I will hate that town and everyone in it.

But some writer at a Los Angeles rag says we were a happy, middle-class family. By thirteen, I was going out of my way to dare him to kill me. I wanted him to kill me. I wanted him to live with it.

I did the very thing that riled his guts the most.

My best friend was black.

And a screaming queen.

We would skip school, sneak over to my house if my parents were both working, which they usually were, and fuck our brains out in my parent’s bed.

Big. Big. Black. Dick.

Suck on it.

When I started doing sex work, married men loved picking me up and bringing me to suburbia.

Where we were surrounded by his children’s stuff.

You see it all in sex work.

When this stuff was going on with boys working urban corners, everyone will nod, and in a nanosecond we’re all off with comparing my crazy tricks with your crazy tricks.

Most people would find it odd. But this is just not a world most people could survive too long in.

I had a boyfriend sex worker who I could rim for hours, but I couldn’t touch his cock. It might go off, and you had to pay for that. Writing has rules, so does sex work. Sometimes one is the other, and the other is the other, too.

So, Journalism Boy, you want to write about my family. You weren’t there. Suck on that, you LA bitch.

When this so-called journalist’s piece came out that Nasdijj was really Tim Barrus, I admitted it immediately.

To take the wind out of this fuck’s sails.

Dissolve to California.

Push in on 729 Jones.

Elijah was a black drag queen who lived in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.

The safe house at 729 was her idea. Her nickel, too. At first, and then the rest of us whores did pitch in.

More out of some kind of displaced shame (that we had done nothing) than any weird idealism. Whores are not too idealistic. If Elijah could cough it up, so could we, and we did. Everyone was dying and idealism was in short supply.

I just want to make it very clear that it was not my idea. I am not a hero. I am no heroine. I am not a role model.

Boys looking for role models should go check out a modeling agency, but looking for a role model in any of them would be a bit pathetic.

I’m not even a nice person.

Then, why a safe house.

Because there were bodies of the dead everywhere.

For young boys doing sex work — in the middle of the AIDS dead piling up all around us — who were frequently just runaway boys being found dead, having hanged themselves, it was too much to take laying down. I do not know why all the hanging suicides, but there it was. When Show Me Your Life hit social media, there were a group of young boys playing around with drugs, strangulation, and masturbation. Which can become like death quite fast.

I had them make a video.

There was the suggestion of a hanging body. Represented by a puppet. We were testing the waters.

Did we or did we not want them to show us their lives.

They will call you on it.

Nevertheless, people were offended and appalled.

What kind of lives do you think too many children really live.

I do not know a single typical child. I cannot speak for them, I can speak to attending to whatever stage the kid is going to walk out on, and all I can be sure of is that he will be walking out there whether anyone cares what he does or not. I cannot and do not pass any moral judgemnent. They’re trying to explain that they have value, and they are frequently confused and outraged.

This is light years from typical.

Any adolescent boy being told that he now has HIV, needs at least some kind of immediate support because the facts are that he in that moment stands ten times the chance of committing suicide that night after being diagnosed than that typical boy in Neverneverland I do not, and do not wish to know. Suicide would be the biggest cause of death among them as a demographic regardless of HIV. HIV not Health in Vigorousness. It’s a viral infection. Tens of millions of people have it. You can manage things with antiretrovirals, but not everyone can take them, and not everyone has access to them. And they come with issues. The hard to reach can be reached. But you have to go out there and mess with them. You have to do it because you want to. If you want to do it for any other reason, they will eat you alive for lunch.

“That pimp on Geary who said none of it is his fault should be the one to hang himself,” Elijah said. “I hate that dumb fuck.”

Elijah did not have a pimp. No pimp could handle it.

Elijah usually popped in when he was almost ready to leave 729, and go home. He lived just up the hill on Sutter. They call it Nob Hill, but that is definitely pushing it. The boys always kept him later. People were burning out like crazy back then. I was making tuna casseroles by assembly line. Sick people hated them.

But it’s rude to just be the guy who brings the dope.

“Erotic asphyxiation.”

“What about it,” I asked. I’m still not sure I really know what it is.

“Hanging and then you cum.”

“Do it high on dope and with poppers for a thrill.”

“I don’t think I’m up to it,” I said. “I can barely walk up Nob Hill to church.”

“Mmm, what church.”

“That church up there I go to.”

“You haven’t been in a church in thirty years how’s Mary.

“She moved in with the voices with the cats.”

“Mary, explain to this white child what erotic asphyxiation is.”

“Erotic asphyxiation is when the boys make a puppet, and then they hang the puppet by the lamp in a bedroom where they film just the door barely opening so that you see what seems to be Benito jacking off and hanging from the rafters but he’s okay because it’s all fake except for the big dick part.”

“Mary.”

“Yes, Team.”

“You said big dick.”

“Mary should be ashamed of herself,” Elijah said. “A lady would never say big dick. I am a fucking lady so I ought to know do you have any meth I’m out you know, the boys.”

“Are you doing meth with the boys.”

“Honey, this is the Tenderloin what do I smell is that your tuna abomination.”

“It’s for the boys. I’ll just take it down the hall.” I lived around the corner. My top floor view was of a courtyard and trees. The boys looked out at an illegal gambling den. This was San Francisco, my San Francisco, and the Tenderloin. My Tenderloin.

“I could go get Chinese.”

“That might be a good idea.”

“That would be a bad idea,” Mary said. “You’re trying to pay the rent this month.”

“I did an extra trick today. We’ll go Chinese take out.”

“I’ll have moo goo gai pan.”

“I thought you were going home.”

“Well, honey, I am home.”

My friends were always coming for dinner, and staying six months.

“Make her leave,” Mary said.

“That is not always possible.”

“Where’s the Scotch,” Elijah asked.

Kenny had a stroke.

We had forgotten he was there.

“I just got a concealed weapon permit,” I said.

“Now that gun you carry will be legal. Like heroin is legal.”

“Heroin is not legal,” Mary noted.

“Now, I can kill whoever I want.”

“I will make a list,” Elijah said. She’s organized. Not as organized as Mary. But organized. No one has ever called me that.

There was a long list of people she wanted killed.

More than a few tricks.

“TR drank all the Scotch. She was here for the Drummer party.”

“I went to the Drummer party,” Mary said.

We ignore her.

Elijah was pawing through the cupboards trying to see if TR might have missed some liquor. But no. “You could be Paul Scofield, and I’ll be Katharine Hepburn, and Mary can be Ed Albee.

A delicate balance.

I would go out for Scotch and Chinese. We would share all of this with the boys.

It would be a party.

Some things are just too much.

Jimmy Jump

Eats the earth from airplanes.

Montage: Parachutes

Jimmy Jump worked in Community Mental Heath in the Tenderloin.

“I have 372 cases pending on my desk. That means I have 372 people on my caseload, and every last one of them is crazy.”

San Francisco acts as an MRI machine with the big girl current magnets pulling images of your guts on film like flies on shit. Most of the city’s homeless wind up in the Tenderloin because the Tenderloin was where poverty, The Life, getcher check cashing loans step right up, XXXMiss Jones inside that wayward devil, strip club, Polk Gulch skateboard boy bars, and a massage at Kims is half off, and who the fuck is Kim.

Freeze Frame: A hallway.

“I’m Kim,” she said. “I live across the hall from you.”

“Are you the owner of Kim’s Wigs down the block.”

I am wigs, titty bars, Kim’s Racetrack in Cupertino, Kim’s Church and Gospel Hour, The Kim’s beauty parlor consortium across America, Kim’s Restaurant, That Girl Kim’s Radio Hour, Kim’s fingernails. Kim’s Condos, and a talk show in Indianapolis. Why.”

“You’re a very busy, Kim.”

“You have no idea.”

I couldn’t wait to tell everyone who I lived next door to. OMFG, Kim. “Have you ever even once in your life left the Tenderloin,” I asked.

“Why would I want to leave the Tenderloin. Did you see the Jumper over on Tayler who jumped from that five star hotel, Rooms for Roach’s.

“I only heard about it. Did you know that when jumpers do it off the Golden Gate Bridge, they always do it on the side where they can see the city one last time. And then they jump. I wonder what they see in the Tenderloin as they fall to their horrible deaths.”

“The Boys Adonis Theatre Marquee Starring Hunk Hotdog and Big Mike’s Cocktails in Gone With the Wind.”

To die for.

“They went and got that guy from the Fire Department…”

“No, it’s the Community Mental Heath Clinic who is one person, Jimmy Jump.”

“Well, that guy on Taylor jumped.”

Mainly Jimmy Jumps’ jumpers jump. He’s not very good at his job. But who else is going to talk the poor souls down. The cops are really bad at it.

“Come by, baby, and get a free wig.”

“I will. I will.”

I did Jimmy Jump on Thursdays at noon. His lunch hour.

Now, we see a bedroom. I am in the bed as is Jimmy Jump. Smoking cigarettes. Drinking cans of beer.

“I’m getting called out five, six times a day. Most of them just can’t pay their student loans. I tell them that they may as well go ahead and jump because they are still going to owe the money they borrowed. Most of them are worth more dead than alive.”

“We got bodies falling from the sky in the Tenderloin.”

You couldn’t walk on Taylor with all the bodies.

Even the loan sharks were jumping.

“Why me, God.”

“Because we need you, Jimmy Jump. “We need someone who is at least out there trying.”

“But why me.”

“Because you have the degree, and you’re kinda cute. That’s all we really need is for someone cute to come along in cute shoes and say: If you don’t jump, I will pay off your school loans.”

“But it would be a lie.”

“Lies, pies, and cocaine highs.”

“If any of the boys down the hall go up to the roof, don’t call me.”

“Who am I supposed to call.”

“Call the Oakland Hot Line.”

“But this is the Tenderloin.”

“I’m fucking sick of the Tenderloin. I can’t do it anymore. I’m mad, mad, mad.”

Yada. Yada. Yada.

“No one else wants your fucking job, so just shut the fuck up, and go do it.”

I hate it when the mental health workers and the drug dealers cry.

Big girls do not whine and complain and cry. Or they are not the big girls.

On the weekends, we were all at funerals. No one could go to all those funerals during the week because no one would get anything done.

If you die on Friday, you can still have a quickie funeral on Saturday, and sometimes people cancelled their reservation.

On Saturdays, Jimmy Jump went to his weekly meeting at the Santa Rosa International Airport where the Sonoma Parachute Club flew out into the golden fields of California.

“I will take you on a jump,” Jimmy said.

Oh My Fucking God.

It was about a connection that Jimmy required as he jumped with you when you went.

It was so ultimately selfish, because now there was a face to put on someone who really did care, he was burned out, but he cared, and he had to know that it was still possible to jump, and come down kind of slowly with a big canopy above your stupid head.

It was a time of raw heartbreak and limited options and suicide was a way out of all the agony and the pain of AIDS. It was the time of darkness and the time of graves.

They always jumped and it stole pieces of him all the time. I frequently say in jest: that that was just the way of it because that was just the way of it. You could lose four or five people in a week.

And jumping out high above the vineyards was the only thing that made any sense.

Eats the earth from airplanes. Everyone made it safely to the ground. The world is coming at you quick as a cat will eat a spider, and you have this limited time to be falling through the air where you were here and now immediately and acutely alive. More alive than you usually are with both feet firmly planted on the ground. I still had my gun I kept loaded in my bag. Needles and the crunch of walking on them anywhere on Geary. All the postures of intent.

So put on all your grim shoes, agony and pain. The Tenderloin night will eat up all your baby’s wounds. I will still walk down Jones in search of all my severed hands. Dissolve to dark figures against a barren landscape. Jimmy Jump will spill himself against a sky that goes all the way to Tokyo which is the capitol of Japan.

Just Passing Through

Many of the boys down the hall were simply passing through.

I knew Drew was only passing through, but there was something in me that thought there was a way he could find to stay.

If he had wanted to stay. But he did not want to stay. He left, and I am not sure I cared about Drummer anymore. I was wasting my time at Drummer.

I avoided the boys.

I could let myself off the hook by saying I was busy writing another book. I could say I was helping with the finances keeping that apartment space safe.

But I didn’t get involved in any of the dramas or issues. They were too overwhelming.

There are two kinds of whore dramas. The first kind are the regular whore dramas. Most of these involve cost of drugs.

Then, there are the Big Girl whore dramas that involve the Federal Commission on Dirty Pictures and Jacking Off.

I kept my bag packed.

The voices were confrontative.

They would hold their own goddamn interventions.

The voices wanted me to get involved so they could mix it up with the boys. Their advice is usually faulty.

I took food over there. I popped in and ducked out. Food was a real issue. They would rather eat my food than go over to Glide to stand in line for food because they were often harassed by other homeless people.

There was an elephant in the room. Human nature, being what it is, tells itself (most of the species hears voices, they just don’t know it) that you can always tell when someone is sick, and in their gut people think they know how to recognize AIDS.

I thought this. About myself.

I was thin, and men liked fucking me. How could I be ill if I was attracting this attention.

It didn’t really matter what I looked like.

If you were coming to me through Drummer, you had already spent time and money just getting there. The flight alone.

It was strange.

My two top-paying tricks were cops and Israeli Army officers. I could have made it just from what these people paid. But I had mouths to feed.

I made these men jump through a lot of hoops.

I was careful.

There are two kinds of cops. Cops that want to fuck you, and cops that want to fuck you.

One cop will arrest you. The other one just wants a piece of ass.

So, how to differentiate.

I called it the Crazies. The cops that wanted to bust you were with the Crazies.

The Crazies wanted to hurt you. Many of these tricks will articulate one way or the other: “I need to teach you a lesson.”

Run. Get the fuck out of there as fast as you can. A disproportionate number of these people are from the suburbs, for me, this meant Marin County, and sometimes the Oakland Hills.

Sometimes Pacific Heights.

The really rich authority figures would almost universally have photographs of themselves framed, and on the wall, and always with the image of standing, and arms around Ronald Reagan. Thick friends of the family.

Other whores who played in this (dangerous) arena could extract information about things like what the DOJ was doing, or even federal commissions (they would be men who sat on the commissions). The trick is engaged in a power play — he wants the whore to be impressed — because power to these men is more erotic than actual sex.

I never kid.

The Pacific Heights tricks were more powerful than the Marin boys who would be the lawyers of middle management.

The Pacific Heights tricks would have art displayed in their homes that was on loan from places like the DeYoung Museum of Art.

Rembrants. Jade statues from Korea made in 1104. Very valuable stuff. Remarkable works of art only wealthy museums collect.

They sat on boards.

Their entire lives are predicated on a quid pro quo that rules every waking moment. The price you pay playing with these men is their deep desire to punish you and teach you a lesson.

Whores don’t mind being hurt. They’re whores. They are in your house to hurt them.

The problem with these men is that they don’t know when to stop. They will hold things like safe words in complete contempt. You are there to learn a lesson, and often, you do.

They show you how powerful, and relevant they are, and the chest does puff up, the eyes go a little glazed, and they actually give you a tour of the house because they’re proud of it, the house is always a big deal in the social hierarchy, and like a lot of people, they talk too much because they understand the whore is vulnerable and powerless. They have nothing to fear from you.

They also have the most extraordinary drugs. I never met one who didn’t.

It’s actually a good sign if he wants to fuck you. It’s the ones who don’t want to fuck you who you should be concerned about. Do NOT under any circumstances go into a basement. No matter what he says, no matter the drugs he puts into you, it is not a family room down those stairs.

Do the wives know. Depend on it. But the wives are more serious prostitutes than you are.

Do you really think she is going to throw him out into the street. He owns the street, and the cops who would show up to wipe your ass.

Wives know. Many are glad for it. Then, they don’t have to have so much sex with him.

You are simply one of the servants, and they know that, too.

Everyone knows which side the bread is buttered on. Particularly the man who owns this house, and whose tenure as a cabinet member in the last administration is something they can hang their hat on because it now gets them appointed to corporate boards. King George Bush, the First, sits on the board of directors (among many others) of a corporation that makes tanks. Enough said. The company gets the name. Prostitution is everywhere.

Tens of millions of dollars. Be very wary of these men. I prefer that the trick be a little afraid of me. Fear can be erotic, too. But I have had enough of the trick who wants to teach you a lesson.

I know something tricks don’t know because they don’t have to, and they have no experience with it, and that is how to get out of Dodge, and find another Dodge where you can disappear.

I am never where I say I am.

Location. Location. Location.

There is simply no way I will go into a basement with anyone. If you trust these men, you are an idiot. It is going to cost you.

And they love their boys.

Pretend you are one. Prtetend that you come home to 729 Jones, a safe place where no one is going to beat you up, and the other boys will tend to your wounds.

My guns were not the only guns on that floor. Buying a gun, any gun you want, is as easy as buying a baggie of meth on any corner.

Try not to shoot the Pacific Heights trick who needs to teach you a lesson.

It’s not worth the grief.

My method was to run potential tricks through the maze until they were dizzy with it. How badly do you want it. I had the numbers of every pay phone in town.

Some are still there, a few, but most are gone. This made it easier for me because I didn’t have to keep track of a hundred thousand pay phone numbers.

How do I know you are calling me from the pay phone I have directed you to call me from.

I had more than one phone.

“Code,” I’d say. Never hello.

This is the code I gave you at the airport phone I called you from.

This is where most cops are going to understand they are about to be sent on a wild goose chase.

I am never worth it. I make sure I am never worth it.

They can always find you. But is it worth it. It won’t be cheap, and it is going to be aggravating in the extreme.

Because you are not in charge of this scene.

I am.

Surrendering your authority to a whore is just not on your agenda. And you resent the maze.

You are not going to spend your valuable time to find some whore in the Tenderloin.

I know the number of the one pay phone where the little blue busses from the airport land downtown. I live downtown, and you don’t. I probably know it better than you do. I know every hotel in the city.

There are still pay phones in the Tenderloin, and I could see them (top floor) on Jones as well and the ones on Post.

They would stand in front of the pay phone on Post Street waiting for it to ring.

I could see the lobby of the hotel across the street. The trick has no idea where I am and has no idea I am watching him as he negotiates the maze.

The whole idea is based on how badly does he want it.

If I say wait on corner such and such for exactly five and then you go to some other corner, and the trick does not take the full five minutes, he never makes it to the end of the maze.

I could use call forwarding to open that door and to speak to the trick.

The trick thinks he is speaking to someone on the intercom to let him in. The ones you let in are the ones you want to lose. The Crazies. You give him a room number that will be opened by a Japanese businessman from Osaka.

The only numbers the trick has are the numbers of pay phones.

The Israeli Army officers were really good at labyrinthine games. They always did exactly what I told them to do.

No questions asked.

If I told them on the intercom to completely strip in the lobby of 729, not knowing that this would not raise a single eyebrow, they did it. They arrived naked at the door.

All of this is fun to them.

In the middle of the maze, I would requite the trick to repeat exactly what it was he wanted from me.

If he keeps articulating this, it will be fresh in his mind exactly what the contract is.

And then, there would be the contract he would have to sign, and sign off on any and all liability. By the time a really serious trick gets to your playroom, and butt naked, he’ll sign anything.

Because now he really wants it.

I would slowly type up the contract whie the trick has to sit there with his legs spread.

“Spread your legs.”

Cop tricks did not enjoy this.

If the contract is for fisting, so you fist him. Then, he wants something not in the contract.

We could go through three contracts in a night.

When you fisted them, you could always feel their heart beating.

Everyone had cocaine. Especially if I told you to bring it. The coke was not for me.

The coke is to numb his asshole even if he says that what he loves is pain.

All of this is performance art in a choreography of suspicion and resuscitation.

“You have to show the boys the ropes,” Elijah said.

He had been insisting on this for some time. I was not sure if some demented kid could absord any of it if he was consistently and deeply depressed.

Clinically depressed. Suicidal.

This was the Tenderloin.

You are 13, and from Fountain Hills, Arizona. Suburbia. Where they didn’t understand you.

You are right on that score. They didn’t and they don’t. Fountain Hills is close enough to Phoenix, but too close for comfort.

You took the bus to California. You had heard all the bullshit about how great San Francisco was. And so you went there.

The Pimp Welcome Committee can recognize a runaway when one gets off the bus.

For a while, you really think they’re kinda fun, and they care about boys like you.

And then, they put you to work.

Call it human trafficking, or call it whatever the fuck you want.

I call it rape because that is what it is.

You begged one trick with a big car to get you out of here.

Ruler Number One: Never trust a trick.

You are beaten to a bloody pulp.

You sit on a rat-eaten couch — the thousand mile stare — playing old video games.

You see no escape and then you see one.

One of the boys you do threesomes with tells you about 729.

You hope it’s real because you’ve been told numerous times that if you try escape again, they’d kill you, and flush your pieces down the toilet.

729 turned out to be real. But now you have no money.

It’s a feedback loop of violence, addiction, prostitution, malnutrition, abuse, rape, and hopelessness.

“David needs your help the most.”

Elijah would roll his eyes.

“What David needs is a guardian angel, not to learn the ropes. He’s been tied up by enough ropes. I am not the person to look to in rescuing anyone.”

I would drop food off at the boys apartment, and then try to make a quick getaway. David would detain me if he could.

“Wanna play Minecraft.”

I don’t even know what Minecraft is.

“Can I hang out with you.”

“I’m busy.”

“I could teach you how to cook. You’re a terrible cook.”

“I’m all you got, kid.”

“I know how to cook pretty good.”

“If you don’t do this, Mary said, “I’m going to kick your ass.”

“Voices can’t kick anything.”

“Try me.”

Even his smell left a sweetness the apartment did not have. He baked a lot of cookies. He knew how to bake bread.

I had no intention of learning how to bake bread. I buy the bread, take it home, and you can eat it without having to bake anything.

“I can make pizza, too.” I was handed a grocery list.

Do I look like a Safeway delivery boy to you.

I bought this stuff just to shut him up.

You sort of got used to his being around.

He did laundry.

He would steal my shirts which he would jack off with. I would find them in the bottom of his sleeping bag.

Sleeping bag.

What is a sleeping bag.

A sleeping bag is a red flag that this child had done moved in.

Elijah had a ton of old movie VCR tapes. We laughed a lot.

He liked my Scotch.

But most whores are just the summer wind barely blowing through the downtown fog. Passing through.

“I really miss David,” Elijah said.

“He said I didn’t understand him.”

“You didn’t understand him. You just don’t want to get too entangled with anyone who needs you.”

“Thank you Dr. Freud.”

“You know it’s true and I am going to kick your ass you let him go,” Mary swore. “You stupid fuck.”

The food turned quite bad again.

Even his smell of chocolate chip cookies was gone. I had tricks to fuck with. I could not afford to get all hung up with David.

Suddenly, he reappeared, but it wasn’t him. It was a police drawing of him. Definitely David.

“Do you know this missing person,” The flyer asked.

It was a visual reconstruction of a body found at Ocean Beach.

Fuck me.

Five men would that very day.

This is a work of fiction. Images and video via Show Me Your Life(Real Stories Gallery Foundation Non-Profit Initiative), Smash Street Art Program for boys at risk with HIV. Research Project: How Children at Risk Use the Internet. Non-profit Classroom Teaching Application: Fair Use: Multi-media Artistic Materials in an Instructional Setting. International Digital Millennium Act.