Authors: Matt Ruff
How many “et ceteras”?
Let’s just stipulate that it was a big frigging wall and leave it at that, OK? It took a long time to fill up, and meanwhile I was sucking down Coke, and my wristband, which was obviously some sort of lie detector, was tingling like mad, and I just knew that whatever I said next was going to be judged really severely. So I thought, and I thought, and I was still thinking when the last picture appeared, and finally I opened my mouth and said the exact wrong thing:
“How much trouble am I in?”
“Well, let’s see,” said Dixon. The overhead light came up again, and he was holding a big red book with the words
CALIFORNIA PENAL CODE
on the cover. “Unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, a misdemeanor, three months to a year per count, 189 counts…Providing alcohol to a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, for immoral purposes, a misdemeanor, three months to a year per count, 131 counts…Providing illegal narcotics to a minor, age sixteen or seventeen, for immoral purposes, a felony…”
I started to do the math in my head, but then I was like, wait, he knows how many times I did it? And so I took another look at the picture array and saw that all the shots were framed the same way, with the pet boy sitting at the foot of my futon and the image angled like the person holding the camera was standing on the futon’s headboard, which you think I might have noticed at the time. Then the flashback ray hit me again, and I remembered that very first night with Miles, me handing him a fresh joint and then looking up at the wall above the headboard and winking, conspiratorially, at—
“My Marlene Dietrich poster.”
“Eyes Only,” Dixon said.
I was screwed. I was so screwed. I’d had that Marlene Dietrich poster since freshman year at Berkeley, it had
hung on the wall over every bed I’d ever owned, and if Marlene was a narc for Panopticon—
“I’m screwed.” The Coke can was empty now; my head felt three sizes too big, and totally detached from my body. I said to Dixon: “So when are the cops coming?”
“Why would the police be coming?”
“Because…I’m a criminal.”
“Yes, you are,” Dixon said. “And if I were an agent of law enforcement, I’d be all too happy to see you locked away in a cell. But I work for the organization, and the organization doesn’t fight crime, it fights evil.”
“So you’re saying…this wasn’t evil?”
“It was reckless. And appallingly selfish. You were certainly old enough to know better. But you appear to have acted without malice, and inasmuch as it’s possible to judge such things objectively, most of these young men were unharmed by their association with you.”
I didn’t miss the qualifier: “Most of them?”
“Why don’t
you
tell me who I’m thinking of?”
I didn’t have to guess. I turned back to the photo array, to the picture in the bottom right-hand corner, my very last pet boy: Owen Farley.
“Age nineteen,” Dixon observed. “A little old for you, wasn’t he?”
“No,” I said. “He was the youngest one of all, in the way that mattered. He was like…”—and I hesitated, realizing I was about to bury myself, but there was no choice really, so I went on—“…he was like the boy in the Anaïs Nin story. Innocent. Or no, not innocent. Delicate.
Fragile
.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me what happened.”
“You already know what happened.”
“I want to hear how you tell it.”
Well, I
really
didn’t want to do that, but Dixon just kept staring me down, and then the tingling in the
wristband started to get painful, so finally I gave in and told the story:
By the middle of fall, the pet-boy thing had started to get old. I guess the novelty wore off. The thing about teenage boys, you know, they’re actually not all that interesting as company. I mean even Miles, with all that he had going on upstairs, he wasn’t much to talk to.
So I started to get bored. And there were other things going on, too. My boss at the liquor store finally got wise to the fact that I’d been risking his license with my tip-jar scheme; he not only fired me, he kept my last paycheck and said he’d turn me in if I made any trouble about it. So because of that I got behind on my rent, and then also, I was doing a few too many drugs, which hurt my finances even more and made it hard to get out of bed in the morning, which started causing problems at my other job…
So all of this was sort of snowballing, right? And then one day out of the blue I got a call from Carlotta Diaz saying she’d just bought a house in Bodega Bay, and would I like to come visit her? And I was like, that’s great, I’ll get out of the city for a while, get straight, get my head together, and make a fresh start. So I told Carlotta yes, and we set a date.
And not long before I was due to leave, I was coming back from working a last shift at the burger joint, and that’s when I saw him.
He was a street preacher. I never found out where he came from, but it must have been some little church town out in the boonies where they raise kids under glass. What brought him to S.F. I don’t know, but he couldn’t have been off the bus more than five minutes.
He was standing on the sidewalk in the heart of the Tenderloin, testifying about Jesus to a pack of transvestite hookers. The hookers were having a grand old time cracking on him, but he was impervious to catcalls—not thick-skinned, you understand, just clueless. He called
the hookers “ladies,” and from the way he said it you could tell he wasn’t being sarcastic or politically correct. He didn’t get the whole cross-dressing thing; he thought these really were women.
So I stopped to watch this travesty, right? And seeing how green this kid was, how totally out of his depth, the thought came to me:
If I wanted to, I could take him home and really blow his mind.
Now you can believe this or not, but this was a departure for me. I mean, with the other pet boys it had all been about fun, and free housekeeping. This was the first time I ever consciously considered messing with some kid’s head,
leaving marks…
And some part of me knew that was a
bad
idea, that I’d be crossing a line I didn’t want to cross. Normally, I wouldn’t have. But I was leaving for Carlotta’s in less than a week, and that changed the calculus a little. It’s like, if you’re a sane person, ordinarily you’d never touch heroin. But if it’s the night before you’re going to give up
all
drugs, and somebody offers you a line to snort…
So I was actually contemplating this, seducing this little preacher boy. And
still
I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it, except that as I was standing there, the kid suddenly noticed me, and said: “Ma’am, can I share some good news with you?” And it must have been pretty obvious what was going through my head just then, because one of the hookers called out: “Honey, I think she’s going to give
you
some good news!”
And me, I just smiled, and stepped over the line: “I’d be happy to hear your good news, but you’re going to have to come with me.”
“Come with you, ma’am?” he said. “Where?”
“To my apartment. I need to get off my feet. Are you hungry?”
As easy as that. He fell in beside me and we started for home.
Now here’s another weird thing: I was telling Dixon
about this, right? And the whole time, he’s goggling at me from behind those glasses of his, but even so, and even knowing what ultimately happened, I started to get into it. I mean, I remembered what it was like that day, bopping down the street, the kid next to me jabbering about the love of Christ, and me feeling like the lioness leading the lamb back to her den…
So I got to the part where we were in my apartment, and I literally, God help me, offered the kid milk and cookies, and ducked into the bedroom to “change into something more comfortable.” And then the Jumbotron came alive again, and suddenly I was looking at a video of what actually happened in my kitchen that day.
It was a two-shot, a close-up and a wide-angle. For the close-up, they must have had Eyes Only on one of the Keebler elves on the cookie box, and the wide-angle, I guess that was from the Quaker Oats canister over the sink. The video picked up right at the point where I came out of the bedroom, wearing this semi-see-through kimono. And like I said before, I know I’m not God’s gift, but if you’re doing a Mrs. Robinson routine, you don’t need to be a knockout, just, you know, presentable. But on-screen, I looked really bad,
scary
bad…All those drugs I’d been doing, I guess they’d taken more of a toll than I’d realized. There were these dark bags under my eyes, and my skin was blotchy, and my hair was a freak show, and, you know, I do
not
have a mustache problem, but I swear I could see a shadow on my upper lip. I was a hag, basically.
And the kid, he was sitting there with a mouth full of cookies, terrified, and not in a good way…
Is there a good way to be terrified?
Well, you know, there’s
virgin
panic, that feeling you get when it’s your first time, and you weren’t expecting it, but all of a sudden here it is…But this wasn’t like that. It’s like I said to Dixon, this kid wasn’t an innocent. The fear on his face, you could see it in the close-up,
it wasn’t like,
Oh my God, I’m about to get laid,
or even,
Oh my God, what’s going on here?
It was,
Oh my God,
not again…
Like he’d been seduced before?
Like he was
damaged.
Like it was too late for
me
to mess with his head, because somebody else had already
been
there, and all I was doing was plugging into this old nightmare. Only I couldn’t see that, because I was a fucking stoned-out hag.
You can imagine, watching the replay on this was complete torture. Seeing just how oblivious I’d been to the way this kid was feeling. And the
things
coming out of my mouth…Thank God, after I finally took him by the hand and started leading him into the bedroom, the screen went dark.
But it wasn’t over. “What happened next?” Dixon said.
“Just kill me now,” I begged him.
“If you’d prefer, we could watch it…”
In case you’re wondering, there
are
worse fates than death.
So I got the kid into the bedroom and I started undressing him, and even at the time, I knew there was something wrong. He was too passive—not
nervous
passive, more like catatonic. And then after I got his pants off, got him onto the futon, suddenly he wasn’t passive, suddenly
I
was the one who was scared, because this kid, he might have been younger than me, but he was bigger than me too, and all at once he was on top of me, with his face like an inch from mine and this
fever
in his eyes, and now he was the one running it, right, and it wasn’t
fun,
it was starting to hurt…
And then…Ah, man, this is bad…
What?
He called me “sister.”
Sister as in a nun, or…?
What, like one is less fucked up than the other? I
don’t know, but at that point I just flipped out. I started hitting him—maybe I asked him to stop first, but probably I just started whaling on him. I hit him, punched him, four or five times, in the face, and finally he rolled off me, and I sat up, and he was just lying there on his back, shaking and crying.
And I was like, I can’t deal with this, I can
not
deal with this, so I went and locked myself in the bathroom and waited for him to leave. And a little while later I heard this thump and I thought, front door, thank God, even though the sound wasn’t right for that. So I gave it another ten minutes and came out, holding this toilet plunger like a club.
I did a sweep of the apartment. Kitchen: empty. Good. Living room: empty. Good. Bedroom: empty? The
futon
was empty, but the bedclothes were heaped in a pile on the floor on the far side, and then I saw this foot sticking out. “Oh, shit.”
Some instinct made me look over at the dresser. My drug-stash box was open. Marijuana was scattered all over the dresser top, and the pill bag had been turned inside out. “Oh,
shit
.”
I ran to him and dug him out from under the sheets and blankets. He was facedown, unconscious, and he’d thrown up at least once, but thank God he hadn’t choked on it—he was breathing, he still had a pulse. As I slapped his face to try to revive him, I ran a mental inventory of what had been in that pill bag: uppers and downers mostly—hopefully they’d counteract each other—but also some mescaline tabs I’d been saving for my last day in town. Not the healthiest mix.
The kid’s cheeks were raw from the slapping but he wasn’t waking up. His breathing was getting sketchy, and I realized I was going to have to call an ambulance. I dithered, trying to come up with an alternative.
How long?
Three, four minutes, tops—I swear—but this kid, he
wasn’t growing any new brain cells in the meantime, you know what I’m saying? At least I didn’t try to put him under the shower—I knew from experience that doesn’t work—but still…
Anyway, I finally called 911. The dispatcher came on: “What’s your emergency?” And I’m like, “Accidental drug overdose…” She went through the standard Q&A—“What kind of drugs?” “Is he conscious?” “Have you checked his airway?”—and then she asked me where I was located. This was back before they had caller I.D., right? So I was about to tell her, but then I took another look at my dresser, at all that dope scattered around.
And the dispatcher said, “Miss? Are you there?” And I said, “Yeah, I’m here,” and gave her the address of the building across the street. And she’s like, “Is that an apartment building?” and I said, “Yeah, I think so,” and she said, “You
think
so?” and I said, “I mean it is—just hurry up and get here, OK?” And she said, sounding skeptical now, “What’s the apartment number?” and I told her, “Don’t worry about it. Tell the paramedics I’ll meet them on the sidewalk.” I hung up before she could argue.