I’m Reckless

I have been doing sex work since I was a kid, and my parents announced that they were no longer willing to support me. We all know what sex work is. I have only written about it peripherally. Smash Street, as a group, added their two cents in Cure. These are boys who know sex work well. It fits for a few, the kid has to be emotionally able to handle it, and I have met very few of those, and scream constantly that sex work is DANGEROUS for boys even if they feel invincible.

It’s almost funny. Boys on the street are going to be dead. Boys working phones and the Internet not so much.

I am still doing sex work.

Sex work is not limited to having sex. I’m impotent anyway. Sex work can be the guy who mows the whorehouse lawn. It’s a support system.

The social worker who takes on kids busted for prostitution is doing sex work. The mission down the street that feeds boys doing survival sex is doing sex work.

I teach sex education and that is doing sex work, too. All the “nice” teachers out there will whine that they are not doing sex work. Honey, if you are teaching adolescent boys, you’re doing sex work.

In San Francisco, my tricks were cops.

I could write about it until the cows come home. There are so many angles.

My main angle is taboo. Why. Because I’m reckless. In the world of boys and whores, it is forbidden to emotionally connect to a trick, in any way, or the trick to you, but that is not how it works. People are messy. Emotional connections are made all the time doing sex work, and that is what I want to write about. The culture is conflicted. About most things. I can reach down into vivid memories and bring up stuff that happened I do not like to discuss and I do not like to look at. I do it effortlessly because I believe strongly that there really is no audience. Not one I can identify or know. I see “nice” people faint dead away, and I could really care less. They don’t mean shit to me. I posted a nude photo of myself with my punked-out mohawk on Tumblr where I’m kinda hanging from chains, and my editor at Random House had a major cow. Fuck her.

I took on the pseudonym of a Native American for several reasons.

The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams was written on LSD, with the one exception of the signature piece written under my desk on the Navajo Res, in the shadow of the ruins on a picnic table at El Morro National Monument. I was dying, and in the darker places with all the voices, I knew it, and I knew why. The place I was living on the Res was quite high. Pun intended. Let’s be real. I could hardly breathe. Just walking my dog was a struggle to breathe. I knew I was headed down a very deep hole.

A big part of my baggage was my son. I still miss him. Sometimes desperately. I always will.

I wanted to protect him even if I had returned him to the State. I adopted him thinking: I could do this.

He was very seriously neurologically disabled. Physically, he was stunning. But his brain was on fire, and his behavior was destructive in big ways. When he was presented with a brand new baby sister, who I held in my arms so he could see her, he regressed to the state of an infant himself. It was horrifying to behold. I tried, but changing the diapers of a seven-year-old at the same time as the infant’s diapers, was more than I could do. His behavior became so violent that he had to be strapped down in leather restraints on the school bus.

I began to fear for the infant.

He terrorized everyone around him. His own past included being treated quite violently as an infant, and he was one of those babies found in a baby box, abandoned, only it was a police department lobby not a baby box.

I was reckless to think I had anything to give this child. He literally tore my life apart. He could suck up all the oxygen in any room, and then shit his pants.

This was frowned upon in school where he continued to be retrained. Both chemically and physically. Neither worked. We failed him.

I failed him. That is how it was and nothing can take it back.

It was a death to me. It still is.

I disguised it in my writing.

I did not want, and do not want, journalists tracking him down. Who would seriously say to me — I’m a journalist and I won’t write about him — please.

In fact, I was correct to be concerned. Just recently…

They’re hunting him down as I write this. My friends have called me to say they have been approached for interviews.

This is like a weight I am being crushed under. I keep hoping that the State will not release his records. To date, they have not.

I had to go do something radical I had never done before simply to get away from the East-Coast. So, I drove to New Mexico and worked with Mescalero Apache children at San Filipe del Rio.

I have always worked with kids in some way, but I know of no place that pays teachers anywhere near what they are worth. I loathe traditional education. The extent to which it fails kids is breathtaking.

Sex work paid, and it was a lot of material. Not that I have mined it. To write about those people and that time, the bodies were piling up, is a place that is easy for me to access. Because, to me, they are still alive. The mask I wear to tell the truth to power protects me when I do not chose to recognize an audience. Because there isn’t one. In my book, there are only haters. Do I regret writing those books. You bet I do. I do not so much as have a copy of any of them, and I have burned all my other manuscripts that I had spent decades writing. Publishing is just this big machine that makes unholy sucking sounds. I found ALL of the people there to be mean sons-of-bitches. I do not care about any of them. I regret most things I write. I find no enjoyment in writing anything. It is just this dark star I am compelled to ride.

At El Morrow, I knew my health had slipped away. In the same manner it had slipped away from everyone I had cared about. Anywhere, Anywhere was written on a picnic table at Dick Dock, a wooden pier, in Key West. I had a column there, and wrote Genocide. It was not a particularly hopeful book.

I didn’t need hugs. I needed money. Specifically because the medications I needed to live were going to cost me a hundred thousand dollars a year. That has not changed one bit.

Nothing can be done. I drag my slow selves along like a bullsnake climss the sides to any house anywhere in the Keys. The rats are safe until the bullsnake comes, and the bullsnake always comes.

I had always known RIVER would sell. It did. I am terrible to work with. I do not care. And I moved to Random House/ Ballantine. I was in Paris when all the stupid American literary scandals were the rage and shit got real. In France, no one really gave a fuck.

I put Cinematheque Films together and populated it with junkies, boys with HIV, and artists. From all over the planet. Mainly Europe. The purpose of the group was to get boys doing sex work on the street off the street and to imbue them with the skills necessary to do photography. We had beyond great times in Mykonos. The boys take to photography quickly. We give every kid a computer. But there are always journalists around at the edges of my vision. I really hate and will fight mainstream journalists to the bitter end because I have seen what journalism can do by taking their lives, wounds, parents, and diseases out by gutting them. And then pretending that as writers, they are obliged to sometimes hurt a kid. No kid deserves to be hurt. I don’t care who they are. I knew hurt, Senator, and he was my friend.

I cannot return to New Mexico because the papers there still hound me about that fucking bronze leg. Never mind.

I have written for everyone from the New York Times to currently Flaunt Magazine in Los Angeles.

I live in the Blue Ridge. Sometimes I write about Smash Street. It is still an enormous struggle to stay alive. But I am trying. It is a very thin edge to stand on and will not take the weight of a single bag of baggage. I live out of one canvas Domke bag. Everything I own, including cameras, fits in there. Owning stuff bores me. The people who own stuff bore me. The edge I stand on complains bitterly about my one bag. But if I stand there, peering down, completely naked, the edge endures the weight of it.

Until the day it breaks.