Chicken (3 page)

I take my suck, the smoke creeps into the cylinder, and when I
uncover the hole and pull in, it sledgehammers into me. It expands inside me, like someone's blowing up a balloon inside my lungs, and when I let it out I'm totally relaxed and wildly invigorated: waterfalls, Popsicles, and plasticine porters with looking-glass ties floating right before my eyes, which go to half-mast as if the president has died inside my head. And with no effort at all a huge goofy grin blooms across my face.

‘Why don't you come over here, boy, Ah got somethin' for yo' ass …' drawls Sunny.

So here it is. I knew it was coming, and now it's here. He's gonna try to do me.

‘Okay, look …' I assume the chest-puffed fist-clenched bull-monkey position. ‘I appreciate the job and, you know … everything, but … if you try to … you know … I'm gonna have to … mess you up … good …'

I'm trying to get the tough to drown out the scared-shitless, but even as it's coming out I know my attempt at badness is an extremely limp biscuit. I'm half a second from making a mad dash for the door when Sunny busts out laughing.

‘Ah hope to God you don't try that mess in public, cuz that's a good way to git yourself bitchslapped, son.' Sunny howls, one of those wake-up-the-neighbors bellylaughs that shakes a foundation, and of course that makes me laugh. Then the both of us are cackling like a couple of hyenas on laughing gas, and it feels like warm waves of sunshine rippling in an Indian-summer afternoon.

Sunny tells me he can fellate me better than any woman ever could. And the way he says it, it seems like it might be true. He tells me he loves boys, has loved boys since he was a boy himself. Countless women have tried to convert him. They always tell him he just never met the right girl. But he likes boys. Always has. Always will. ‘Unless Ah git hit by lightnin', or Jesus saves my ass, and don't think He ain't tried.'

I tell Sunny I don't want him to fellate me. I ask him if I can stay there without the fellatio. He says I can. I ask him if he's gonna try
fellating me while I'm asleep. He asks me if I want him fellating me while I'm asleep. I assure him that I don't. He tells me if that's the case, there will be no fellatio.

Into the night I lie with one eye open on the bony carcass of his sofa, listening for the sound of Sunny coming to splay me open as I doze in fits and starts.

When I wake up in the morning, panic swarms. Where am I? Boarding school? No. My dad's house in Dallas? My mom and her lover's house? No. No. Desperately I try reviving my brain while I figure out my longitude and latitude.

A snore roars from the bedroom. Snore. Sunny. I'm at Sunny's. He hasn't molested me. My ass sighs. I breathe. Not easy. But at least I breathe.

For the time being.

Holding the phone, I want to pick one of the millions of thoughts racing through my brain in the single second my mother tells me she does not want me.

‘Can't I come up and live with you? … How can you do this to me? … What's going on here? … Whataboutmewhataboutmewhataboutmewhataboutmewhataboutmewhataboutme?'

But I can't ask.

‘Whatever—' I manage to mumble. It's becoming my dysfunctional mantra.

Then I hang up. The hole in my bucket is getting bigger. I'm off to Hollywood.

I register for classes: Existentialism, humanities, poetry, math for poets. A couple of fellow Immaculate Heart College dudes let me rent their living room, and I convert it into my boudoir by making walls out of some nasty roadkill carpet I find on the street.

Turns out IHC's run by radical nuns. I like the nuns. Even though they're Catholic and I'm not, they seem to hate the Church
almost as much as I do. Later they'll get excommunicated, or made redundant, or whatever it's called when the pope kicks an order of nuns out of his church.

I fry boocoo buckets of chicken, and eat them by the stomachful. I don't talk to my mom. I want to, but there's a collection of stumps where I've been clearcut from her forest. I try to get money from my father. He seems uninterested. In me, or the idea of me having any of his money. So I pretend I'm uninterested in him. Seems to work better that way. I'm too lost in the Sea of Silence to tell anybody about my ass.

Sunny's much more loving to me than my mom or my dad. Of course, he does want to have sex with me. And in fairness to my folks, my dad's just been dumped for a lesbian and my mom's just been made a social outcast for becoming one.

I've been working at Hollywood Fried Chicken a few weeks now. It's closing time. I've shined the deep fryers so I can see myself in them. I don't like the way I look. Sunny walks over and stares right into me for a long time. Makes me feel uncomfortable, and I'm already greasy and queasy from all the extra-crispy I've fried and eaten.

I'm tired of eating extra-crispy. I'm tired of being broke. I'm tired of having a pain in my ass.

I'm tired.

‘You ready, boy?' asks Sunny.

‘Ready for what?' I ask.

‘Real Money.' Sunny smiles.

That week I deep-fried about a billion chickens. I made seventy-eight dollars after taxes. That's chicken scratch. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I know I'm ready for some Real Money.

Sunny tells me he's got rich, generous, horny friends. These friends, he explains, will pay good money to party with a boy like me. I can make the Real Money
and
have all the pussy I can shake a stick at. Not that I'm anxious to shake a stick at any pussy, but he certainly got my attention.

I started having sex when I was thirteen, and I took to it
like a well-watered carrot in fertile earth. I'm fluent in Sex. I take direction well. I love making women feel good, and I've learned the importance of a slow hand, a sweet mouth, and paying attention.

I hear destiny calling my name.

 

F
RANNIE POPPED
my professional cherry. She was my first sex job, and she turned me on to a lot of work. It's a word-of-mouth business, and between her word and my mouth, I did very well by Frannie.

Driving my motorbike down the palm tree streets that line the colossal estates, I feel right at home: an exiled caterpillar reborn a badboy butterfly. I'm rich and big in this world, an All-American success, rising from Dumpster fisher to humpster of the rich and famous.

I park my bike down the street as instructed, and steal, nerves jangling, through Frannie's reargate, past the fountain sculpture of a fat angel, and into the former servants' quarters that's now Frannie's World.

Sunny had instructed me like a black queeny 'Enry 'Iggins:

1. Don't be late.
   
2. Don't rip anybody off.
   
3. Don't speak unless spoken to.
   
4. Be clean.
   
5. Say as little as possible.
   
6. When in doubt say even less.
   
7. The customer's always right.
   
8. If something seems weird it probably is.
   
9. GET THE MONEY UP FRONT!
   

Sunny made me look him in the eyes and repeat: GET THE MONEY UP FRONT! He calls the customers tricks. It's my job to trick them.

Marie, a senior girl, is teaching me about the hypnotic power of cunnilingus. I'm fifteen. I'm in love with Gina, my sweet-hearted girlfriend who's finally letting me go both down on and into her. I'm also friends with Sheila, a wrong-side-of-the-tracks girl who heaps massive affection on me if I'm good to her, which is easy cuz she's funny smart and nice. I know if the girls find out about one another, the whole thing'll collapse. So I make sure they don't. I like the secret life. It makes the sex more exciting. The silence is familial and familiar.

Very soon the synapses that fire like copulation cannons during fornication become synonymous with love. Replace happiness with pleasure. The whole thing is great training for being a chicken.

I tramp up Frannie's stairs in my testicle-hugging elephant-bells and painted-on
GRUNT
T, hoping for the best and expecting the worst. Will I be a loverstudguy or a houseboy? There's desperation in my strut.

Entering Frannie's too-blue bedroom with the four-poster bed, stuffy flowerprint couch, and print of what I now realize was Monet's
Water Lilies
, I tremor like a scared little new boy sent to do a man's job.

Frannie's mophandle, pipecleaner, stickfigure thin. Roasted chestnut hair cut in a stylish post-pageboy. Huge ruby ringed by diamonds on her long spindle of a finger. Kindling twig arms. Perfectly manicured nails the same color as the red wine she imbibes in thin persistent sips. Designer sweatpants and over-priced sweatshirt that swallows her whole. Tony sunglasses resting on bony sandstone cheekbones. Exotic sandals engulfing emaciated X-ray toes.

Frannie's neither the nightmare nor the wet dream. She's just Frannie, perched like an anorexic bird in the plumage of her couch, motioning to the Louis Quatorze dressing table with the
inlaid mirror where a crisp new hundred-dollar bill luxuriates. My heart skips rope. I try to look Bondcalmsuave as I pick it up and pocket it. It feels good hot on my thigh, a prize for the desire I arouse, cold hard cash evidence that I'm somebody cuz somebody wants to pay to have sex with me.

Frannie seems to be going through all the motions of being a rich woman, but there's something not quite all there about her. She doesn't say much. She wants me to talk. She'll hint later in our relationship that something happened to her. Something horrible and weird. Something that would make you be not quite all there.

It's a vacancy I would grow very familiar with in the world of industrial sex.

As Frannie listens to me I wonder why this pretty rich baby would hire a whore. A seventeen-year-old boy whore at that. Months later I'll ask her about the horrible weird thing she hinted at, trying to get my mind around the whole thing. She'll look at me sharply and snap, ‘I don't pay you for
that
!' I'll feel like dirty vermin. But I'll be a professional. I'll assassinate the part of myself that cares.

Whatever.

My mom's driving the family's faux-wood-paneled station wagon. I'm fifteen, riding shotgun. We're having a pleasant chat, about nothing really, thisandthat, just easy talk. My mother's been through quite a bit of liberation by now. Her consciousness has left the kitchen and is on its way up the stairs to the master bedroom. What it will do there is anyone's guess.

She and I are transitioning from son-husband, mother-wife, to real friends.

I don't know exactly how we got here, but we're talking about girls I've had sex with. Mom's curious, I can tell. She wants to know, in a sweet, inquisitive way, if I like it. I tell her I like it very much. I ask her if she likes it. She phumphs.

But the can of worms is open. I can see the worms wiggling around inside the can, and I'm not about to pass up this opportunity to get them out and play with them.

Frannie wants to know about all the girls I've been with: their breasts, their legs, their bottoms, their vaginas, their clitorides, how they smell, what noises they make, how they like it: Spare no detail, and use all the naughty words. It's my theory that she really wants to be with a woman, but I'm not about to tell her that. Don't want to queer a good thing.

Frannie doesn't know my professional hymen is still intact. And I don't tell her. She instructs me to take my clothes off. Many many many times in my chicken career, women want me naked while they're fully clothed. Some people don't like being naked. I do.

When I catch myself in the mirror, seventeen-year-old hardbody stomach, pitprop legs, zero body fat, and power hands, I'm seduced by the glitter of my own flesh.

On the first day of my rookie season, Frannie gives me excruciatingly explicit directions in her droll monotone, detailing exactly what she wants me to do and how she wants me to do it. I'm ready. I was born for this work. I want to be good so bad I can taste it.

Frannie slips her slippers off, hunkers undercover, then wiggles out of her pants. Never removes her sweatshirt. She lies on her back, eyes clamped, legs closed tight, in the corpse position.

I crawl in under from the bottom of the bed, a manchild-beast creeping between her legs, the Silence like a sweet kissing cousin. Then I pleasure her as I love myself in the old-fashioned way.

Just as she ordered, to the letter.

I'm playing the part of a hundred-dollar-an-hour lover-studguy. Only after a while I'm not playing the character – I am the character. Feels good to pleasure the mysterious and rich Frannie. I do it for a very long time, whispering underbreath what a sexynaughtyfilthybaby she is.

As per her request.

‘Do you and Dad ever do oral sex?' I ask.

‘Oh, no … no, no …' My mom shakes her head.

‘So, you've never done sixty-nine?' I ask.

She looks at me as if I'd said, ‘How many brillig did the flipper orangutan?'

‘Do you even know what sixty-nine is?' I ask.

‘No, not really,' says my mom.

My mom's never been afraid to say she doesn't know, and I love that about her.

‘Simultaneous oral stimulation of the genitals.'

I read that somewhere.

I can see my mom putting it all together in her head like a mathematical equation. Simultaneous + Oral + Stimulation + Genitals = 69.

‘Oh, no no no!' Mom's emphatic.

‘Ma, you really gotta get out more, you're missing the party,' I say with a smile. She gives me the smile back.

Little do we know.

Coma Girl's my nickname for Frannie. She doesn't move a muscle. Doesn't make a sound. I know she's excited because her body does all the things excited women's bodies do: the swelling, the excreting, the hardening, and the melting. But she never moves a muscle.

She touches me on the ear with a finger, the signal for me to lie on my back while she crawls up on me, chest to chest, eyes tight shut. She wriggles so she's right at the tip of me. I wrap a hand around the hard bones of her whippet-thin ribs.

Oh God, what am I doing? My power fades and I droop limply. I want to go home now. I can't do this.

Change the record, boy!

A Beverly Hills babe's paying you a hundred dollars for sex.
You're the loverstudguy. A smile slides across my face, and I'm the star of my own sex movie as I hear the soundtrack in my head—

‘Oh, baby … give it to me, you nasty little baby … you love it, don't you, honey? Oh, baby, baby, baby.'

Suddenly the sixty-minute boy is back on the job.

Frannie grindgrindgrinds until her breath is short; then she hitches shallow gasps, followed by a couple of quick convulsions.

Then she disappears under the covers.

I'm supposed to close my eyes and count to ten. I close my eyes. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi … and when I get to ten I open my eyes. Frannie's gone. Dread and anxiety have replaced her. Soiled, unclean, and filthy, I'm overwhelmed by the need to flee. Without even washing Frannie off me, I whip on my clothes, grab the twenty-dollar tip she left beneath the Wedgwood egg, and bolt out the door, head down, guts rumbling.

I kick my bike started, and gun it too hard, trying to get the roar to drown out the voice in my head that says how nasty I am. As I slam into gear and skid away, my rape aches. I shove it all down, and store it in my meat locker so it can feed on me later as the hole in my bucket gets a little bigger.