DUST

I’m still getting used to it.  So much had happened so quickly.  I’m not dumb or anything, but when things change, I mean really big things, well, you have to think about them and make the appropriate adjustments.  I do, at least.  I think about things all the time.  I sort of live inside myself like that.  Maybe it comes from being alone a lot, or maybe it’s just the way I am. 

I watch a lot, too.  I study people, trying to figure out why they’re different from me.  I’ve never met anyone like me.  That’s probably one of my problems, the reason no one likes me.  I’m unique, and people don’t like things like that.

When they meet me, people always say I’m shy.  I don’t think I am.  I think I’m a product of my past.  I think most anyone who’s been brought up like I was would be reticent to do or say things.

OK, I need to explain that.  That’s just me.  Because I read a lot and have since can remember, I sometimes use words most 13-year-olds don’t.  Some kids at school—lots of kids at school, actually—have gotten on my case because of that, calling me stuck up and a showoff and a brown nose, and a punk-ass faggot.  Well, that last one is something they call me that doesn’t have anything to do with my vocabulary.  See, I’m small for my age, and apparently kind of pretty-looking.  Those are bad things to be when you’re thirteen and a boy.

But I was starting to talk about how my life has changed.  If I had to say when it started, I’d say it was about a week ago.  That’s not a very long time for everything you’ve known to change abruptly.  Everything.   In a week!

About a week ago, I was alone in my bedroom.  That was no change.  That was normal.  I spent an awful lot of time alone in my bedroom.  It didn’t feel lonely.  It just felt like my life.

I’d been reading, and then for no apparent reason, I’d started feeling horny.  That had been happening for the past year or so, getting horny for no reason at all.  From my reading, I knew there was nothing a bit unusual about a 13-year-old kid feeling horny, just as there was nothing unusual about how I went about fixing the problem.

I could have just stayed on the bed and taken care of it, but instead I got up and fired up my laptop.  I don’t know if that made any difference or not; I’ll never know, I guess.

I went to one of the internet sites I knew and found a video of two boys.  I sometimes wished I could find a site with boys my age, but that wasn’t legal.  Even if my father didn’t care if he did things that weren’t legal—he’d use the word ‘legit’—I did.  So I just went to sites that were legal, and that meant the boys were all 18 and older.  Some a lot older.  I guess some people would say I wasn’t obeying the law because I was supposed to be 18 to visit those sites, but who was I hurting by doing that?  The point of the law was to protect underage kids from seeing stuff that might negatively affect their perspectives on sex, life and love, I guess.  Well, they didn’t affect me negatively, and my watching them certainly didn’t hurt anyone else.  So I didn’t see that I was doing anything wrong.  Some laws are just stupid.

So I was watching the boys, and while they didn’t really seem to be enjoying what they were doing much, they were doing it, and that was enough to make what I was doing more exciting.  They were naked and I was naked and they were hard and I was hard and—

And that’s when my father walked in.  So that was the first big change.  He’d never walked in on me jerking off before.

“What the fuck!” he said.  I wasn’t sure if he was upset because I was stroking myself or because I was watching two other boys doing somewhat the same thing.  The same genre of thing, at least.

I did what I did around him.  I jumped up and ran to the other side of the room so the bed was between us.  He had nothing against whacking me if I was close and he was in the mood, and he certainly seemed in the mood; his face was all red like it sometimes got.

He looked at me, then the computer, and he picked it up and threw it against the wall.  As hard as he could, and him being a big man, well over 200 pounds, probably over 250, it sort of exploded, parts of it flying everywhere.

“You fucking pansy,” he shouted.  I got ready to leap onto the bed and race for the door if he came after me.  Sometimes that would work.

“Put your fucking goddamn clothes on and get out.  Don’t come back, either.  Goddamn fucking fruit.  Go live in the street somewhere, I don’t care.  Find some faggot and suck his dick and let him take care of you.  Fucking queer.”
He stared at me for a moment, then just turned and walked out.  As he left the room he said, “If you’re not gone in five minutes, I’m coming after you with a baseball bat and you’re dead.” 

When he saw me walking out the door, he yelled after me, “If you go to the cops, they’ll bring you back here.  Then you’ll really get it!”

So that was the second change.  I was now homeless.  At thirteen.  A small, and perhaps I could use the word ‘defenseless’, 13-year-old—even if I would be 14 next week.  Naïve and totally unable to take care of myself.

The only thing I could think of to do was go to a friend’s house and ask for help.  The trouble with that was the friend part.  I only had two friends that I knew well enough to ask to stay with them.  Both of them were boys whose fathers knew my father.  I only knew them because my father knew their fathers, and sometimes when he’d get together with them, he’d take me along, and so I got to know the boys.  They went to the school I attended, and while we weren’t even close to being best friends, we got along OK; besides, there was nowhere else I could think of to go.

But that idea didn’t work. When I showed up, their mothers told me to scram.  I guess their husbands had passed on what my father had told them about me and they didn’t want their boys infected with my gayness, which I’m sure my father had sprung on them in gory, graphic detail.  I assumed that’s what had happened.  Both women had been friendly before.

I didn’t know what to do.  So I did what I do.  I just sort of gave up and let what was going to happen, happen.

I probably should have gone to the police, but as I may have said already, I read a lot.  I knew what that would mean.  It would mean them driving me back home and handing me off to my father, maybe reading him the riot act which would have only made it worse for me.  He hated being told what to do, or being criticized at all.  He knew about criticism because he used it on me all the time.  But criticize him and he’d go crazy.  He hadn’t been joking about that bat.  I knew where he kept it.

I was really scared, of course, but that didn’t help.  I just walked.  I walked and walked.  When I got hungry I had a hamburger from a Jack-in-the-Box.  I’d taken all the cash I had when I left, about $75.  I walked some more, tried the library till they closed, and then, when it got dark and I was exhausted, I just sat down in the doorway of some shop and didn’t even known when I’d fallen asleep.

In the morning, just as I was waking up, I saw a car driving slowly along the street.  A man was driving it, and he seemed to be looking at doorways and allies and what there was along the sidewalk as he was driving.  When he saw me, he stopped.  He got out and asked me if I was hungry.  I was scared again.  I knew I shouldn’t talk to strangers.  But I was hungry, and in the  back of my head I sort of wanted someone to look out for me, and he didn’t look mean or anything; his car was nice, and so I sort of just hoped he was a nice man and saw a boy in need and everything would turn out OK.

Well, he wasn’t, and it didn’t.  He took me to his apartment, then explained if I wanted to remain living, I’d work for him.  If I refused and tried to run off, he’d kill me.  He said he’d done it before and was ready to do it again.  He said if I did what he wanted, I’d be fed and given a place to sleep, and that was better than what I had before he came along, wasn’t it?

There was a woman there, too.  She was pretty.  He told me she’d train me.  Then he made me take my clothes off.

I’d never been naked around adults before.  It was embarrassing and scary, but by then, my head seemed to be spinning.  Everything was different from what it had been before.

The man left with my clothes, and immediately the woman got very sympathetic but told me I had to do what the man wanted and that he could be really mean and hurt me if I didn’t.  She explained what I had to do with the men.  It sounded awful.  I knew I was gay, but I only wanted to do gay things with kids my age, not strange men who I was supposed to let do whatever they wanted with me as long as they could pay for it.  I was supposed to do what they wanted me to do to them, too.

The man took the woman out that night.  I couldn’t go anywhere; he’d never given me my clothes back, and he put me in a bedroom.  He had some porn there and told me to look at it and jack off all I wanted; it would get me in the mood for tomorrow.  Then he locked me in and left.

The lady never came back.  That worried the man, but he just said I’d have to take her place till he could recruit some more kids or women.  He spent a lot of time scaring me, telling me what would happen if I didn’t perform.  Then, at night, he gave me back my clothes and took me out and had me stand on the street and told me to smile at men and tell them how much it would cost them.  He’d made me memorize a price list of services.

I was so scared when he drove off I could hardly stand up.  But the first car that came, the guy turned out to be nice.  Better than nice.  He was like a savior, like an angel, even if I didn’t think so at first.

It got real exciting after that because the guy who’d taken me off the street and decided I’d make a good whore—his name was Jim—turned out to be as bad a guy as the woman had said he was.  He tried to kill us.  But Briar, the angel guy, killed him instead.  Then he took me back to his place, told me I was safe and wouldn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to, including sex, and he brought in a woman, Pat, to stay with me when he went out, and she was just as nice as he was.  She let me sleep in her bed that night when I got scared thinking about everything that had happened.

The next day, Pat went out and bought me some clothes, and she got real teen’s clothes, not the khakis and polo shirts that my father had always got me that made me look so different at school.  These were jeans and sneaks and a tee shirt like kids my age wore.  She even told me I looked really handsome in them.

Then Briar took us all to a go-kart place!  I’d never done that before, but man, it was so cool!  I loved it.  There was even this boy there, my age, and he was gorgeous—dark curly hair and really deep, expressive brown eyes—and he talked to me and wanted to race with me, and we did, and it was so cool!  Just talking with him, both of us sitting next to each other in our go-karts, I got a hard on.  No way he could see it; I’d have been so embarrassed!  The only bummer was, when we were done and both got out, a girl ran over and kissed him, and he introduced us.  She was his girlfriend.

But what happened next made up for the disappointment.  Briar bought me a snack at the go-cart place, and while I was eating it, he told me I could stay with him and Pat if I wanted to.  Or go back to my father if I’d rather.  There was no way I wanted to do that, so I told him I’d like to stay with them.  I might even have cried a little.  I’d been so scared, and now, it looked like I didn’t have to be, and things were going to be OK for me. 

I’d spoken to Briar and Pat more in one day than I had my father in a week.  They seemed to like me and listened to what I had to say.  My father hated me.  He never said anything nice to me.  Everything he said was mean and derogatory.  But Briar and Pat weren’t like that.  They paid attention to me as though I was just a regular kid who had nothing wrong with him.  Even though Briar kept reminding me at first how he didn’t like kids, I could tell he sorta liked me, and Pat made it clear that she did, too.  Well, the feeling was mutual. 

So I was going to stay with them now and maybe forever.  They didn’t say that, it was just me making stuff up in my head, but I was hoping.  Staying with them was a big change and certainly the best part of all the changes that began when my father walked in on me and caught me doing what I wished he hadn’t.  That had been the beginning.  What had come next had been really scary for a while, but now maybe the bad changes were over.  It felt that way to me.  The guy, Jim, who was going to make me into a prostitute and then tried to kill me, hadn’t died in the river after all, but he was in jail now; Briar told me he had been arrested, and he’d be tried and convicted and be inside a long time.  That’s what Briar said: inside.  He talks like some character in an old gangster movie sometimes.  I think he does it on purpose.  I really think he tries to be funny a lot, even if he isn’t.  I’ve been trying to figure him out, but I can’t pin a label on him yet.

Anyway, the upshot is I don’t have to be scared about that Jim guy.  And I don’t even have to worry about my father anymore, either, or that he’ll find out for sure I’m gay.  It’s amazing.  Briar and Pat know I’m gay, and they don’t care.  They don’t care!  So I don’t have to worry about that, either.  I’m living with adults who know I’m gay and like me anyway.

That’s about the best change of all.