Juicy (7 page)

He walked until he saw a man under a bridge. He had a shopping cart evidently filled with his belongings. There were also empty crates high up along the embankment. He supposed that it had been put there by the man as furniture. Maybe he set his beer on it after a long day of panhandling, or pretended it was a TV. He had no idea what the crates were for but he was pretty sure that the guy would be pissed if they went missing. Troy approached him but the man chased him away. Still, it gave him an idea so he started searching for places like that.

For the next few days he lived on a diet of ninety-nine cent burgers and a bottled water that he kept filled from fountains and gas station restrooms. At night, he balled himself into a small corner of some empty building, doorway, or once even a field. Eventually he found an abandoned train station. The station itself was boarded up, but there were several overpasses with crisscrossed paths which would have led the trains to different destinations throughout the country, but now unused, it just left places beneath them that were semi-private and hidden. During the day the place was vacant but at night it began to fill rapidly with bodies of the homeless. They looked at him with wary suspicion and for the most part kept their distance.

One young man did approach him. He had long brown hair, and eyes that darted everywhere at once. Troy thought that maybe he should buy a knife before his money ran out. But the man turned out to be pretty cool. His name was Blue and Blue showed him the ropes. He was a hustler, though and everything was about making money or stealing money. Once he established that Troy was unwilling to suck dick for money, Blue accepted the fact that Troy would just have to be another ally on the streets and not someone he could make an easy buck from.

Allies were almost as good as money.

For the next several months he hung with Blue and his friends. Sometimes they slept at the train tracks, which Blue nixed from happening too often; too easy to be robbed and raped. Troy had been surprised by that. Homeless people got raped? Blue had clarified that homeless BOYS got raped.

Sometimes they crashed along with other people in vacant apartments as if they were squatters. Sometimes there were impromptu parties going on with a DJ and rappers and the atmosphere was like static! They called those RAVES. He had lots of fun, not used to parties since he’d never been invited to any while at home. Of course, it wasn’t always good for him to be where there was so much movement and action as it triggered seizures or migraines.

There were times when they slept in buildings that doubled as crack houses and once some crazy man had robbed everyone by syringe point, stating that the needle was infected with HIV. Of course, he had long ago run out of money.

Once, while he was sleeping in a crack house, a woman had reached over and ran her hands up his leg and over his groin. He peeked at her to see if she might be having some dream, but no, the woman was looking right at him. She was older, not something one would consider pretty, and she was kind of dirty. But hell, he was still a virgin. He decided to roll over and have sex with her the way he’d seen other people do, quietly while everyone else slept, but Blue woke up.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Well…I-uhm-’

‘You’re not going to fuck her are you?’

‘Mind your own business!’ The woman said.

‘Well she touched my dick,’ was his response.

‘Dude, she’s got the virus. Hand job only.’

Troy had flashed her a horrified look. The woman spit at them and then hurried away, but not before Blue kicked her.

‘Bitch! You stank, anyways!’ He screamed before wiping off the spit and rolling back over. Troy just stared after the lady that was now scampering out of the building.

He nudged Blue. ‘Was she trying to give me AIDS?’ Someone yelled for them to shut the fuck up.

‘Who knows?’ Blue murmured. ‘Maybe she just wanted to get off.’ Troy lay there quietly and thanked his lucky stars that he’d found Blue.

Blue had been on the streets pretty much all of his life. He always bragged that he could get off the streets but he would rather have a hustle then a job. He taught Troy where to shower and how to eat and to always stay away from the cops.

In the beginning he had asked Blue if they ever ate out of garbage cans and Blue had been fit to be tied. He told him HELL no and explained that there was too much food around if you knew how to look. Thus came his lesson in stealing.

Troy was not good at stealing. The stress of stealing could trigger a seizure, he had the trembles and bad tics which made him not the most stealth individual, and since he also wasn’t a very fast runner, he would almost always get caught by the person that he robbed. Getting caught normally resulted in a beating.

The first time that he got beat up while on the streets happened when he pulled the wallet from the back pocket of some fat man’s pants. He was surprised to learn that even a man fifty pounds overweight could outrun him! The man punched him in the face several times and once he’d retrieved his wallet kicked him in the gut for good measure.

It was one of the reasons that Troy preferred to just work odd jobs in exchange for money or for food. At night he would go to one of the Chinese restaurants and offer to mop the floors or clean up the bathrooms for a few dollars. More then not he was taken up on his offer.

His favorite place was the bakery. He watched the guys there expertly making up the daily pastries, cakes and cookies. They always gave him free stuff because they really appreciated the fact that he would do all of their cleaning, leaving them to make tons of mess while they focused on baking.

It was the one and only time he ever felt homesick, because the smell of baking bread made him think of family. It had now been three months on the streets but he had no intentions of returning home. His new friends were beginning to feel like family to him; for instance, when Blue first discovered that he had debilitating headaches, he watched his back.

He had gotten one at one of the house parties that they were using as a crash pad. The music, the movement and the crowd overwhelmed him and soon the headache was on him full fledged so that he was unable see or hear. Blue had led him outside into the cool blackness and sat with him in the dark until it was day and he was under no risk of being accosted while alone.

When he could bear the pain, Blue asked him why he didn’t take medicine. He could get medicine for it at the free clinic.

It took him a long time to answer without becoming emotional. ‘Because, without medication I have a few episodes of discomfort and inconvenience and with it there is a lifetime of being a zombie. Which would you choose?’

‘I see what you mean.’ Troy looked at his new friend. Maybe he did know. If not, he would learn as the weeks went on. Anything could trigger a headache or a bad stuttering spell, but worse were the seizures. Troy didn’t have grand mal seizures where he would fall out and lay on the ground in the throes of a fit. No, but people understood those seizure more then they understood his.

His spells left him staring into space and semi-conscious. If he was lucky he was with Blue or one of his other friends when one hit, if not he’d come back to consciousness robbed, beaten, and once he even woke up to some guy trying to pull off his pants. Never much for fighting, Troy’s immediate rage drove him to beat the man bloody, delivering a well placed kick between his legs before he hurried off to the safety of one of the crash pads. It was the first time that he’d ever hit another human being, but it would not be the last.

Troy liked the streets, if for no other reason than the fact that he had people that he could consider friends. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t judged because of his condition. They’d all be sitting around laughing and then the world would turn sideways. He’d fade away into a seizure and when he woke up a minute or two later they would still be joking and laughing and they’d nudge him and fill him in on what he’d missed. They never made a big deal out of it; if they even noticed it happening. But his family had always made his seizures seem like a distasteful act that they had to turn their heads from; as if they were waiting to wipe a toddler’s ass after he took his first dump in the big toilet.

The months moved fast and soon it was his eighteenth birthday. He had told Blue about the social security checks that he’d been getting for years. He would need to call home in order to get the money and that was something he wasn’t up for.

‘So you got all of this money just sitting in the bank?’ Blue had asked incredulously.

‘Well in a Trust. My parents just banked it since I lived with them.’ Now he’d take the money and get a place, find a job, get off the streets, help his friends with a place to crash.

Blue had given him a funny look. ‘You’re going to go home, get your money, and come back here?’ And when Troy had nodded to the affirmative Blue had given him an even odder look. ‘Your parent’s aren’t going to give you that money…even if they haven’t already spent it up on their own. You don’t take your medicine, you don’t do what they want, so they’ll just have you committed as soon as you get home. You don’t need to go back there. Call them and make them send it to you.’

The truth of those words made him rethink everything. So instead of going home, Troy called his parent’s for the first time in eight months. Dad demanded that he come home. Troy had never stuttered so much when he told him adamantly no. The streets weren’t always easy but here he at least made his own decisions.

‘What did we ever do, Troy? We tried our best-’

‘You don’t listen! Eve-ev-even no-now you d-d-DON’T he-he…HEAR me!’ His Dad stopped talking. And he calmed a bit. ‘I don’t w-w-want the me-me-medication. I just w-w-…WANT to b-b-be norm-normal.’

‘You can’t be normal without the medication, Troy.’ Troy closed his eyes. His Dad really believed that.

‘Dad…I’ll c-c-call you back t-t-tomorrow.’ Troy hung up the phone. But he didn’t call back. Blue took him down to the Social Security Administration and he began the process of getting the checks sent to himself directly. The other money would just have to stay in Trust.

With no address he had to have his social security checks deposited into an account. Getting social security then made things both better and worse. Now he had money to blow on pay by the week motel rooms and food for him and his friends. But the money marked the end of his friendship with Blue.

He started getting robbed all of the time; several times each week. He would go into the motel and the TV would be stolen, his clothes disappeared. He had to lay down the law and keep people out of the room except when he was there.

But then one night some people jumped him and forced him to a teller machine at knife point. They cleaned out his account of the last forty dollars that he had. He never had much money after paying rent, buying food and necessities for everybody. Someone would need razors to shave for an interview, a girl needed feminine products, someone needed diapers. Money went super fast and Troy wondered how they dealt with those issues before his social security checks appeared?

The night he had been jumped, he was already on his way to the ATM machine since he’d just used his last buck to buy a cup of coffee. Someone grabbed him roughly by his long hair and pushed him forward. ‘Where’s all the money in that trust?!’ Another guy demanded and he stuck Troy in the side with the knife when Troy told him that he didn’t have access to the trust. That’s when he knew the truth of the robbery and the break-ins; Blue was behind this. He was very happy then that he had left the money in the trust under his parent’s watchful eye; very thankful.

When the robbers didn’t get the money they beat him up and ran off. He sat for the rest of the night with his back against the shop where the ATM machine was located. People who approached it would see the bloodied, battered young man and hurry off to find a different machine.

He didn’t go back to the motel to get his things. They were just things. Things came and things left…And so did Troy. With not a penny in his pocket he left Columbus and headed south. He walked some, went to truck stops and caught a ride with truckers when he could. At the truck stop diners he’d ask if he could mop or clean the bathrooms for food and they would just give him a sack of burgers and a cup of coffee and send him on his way. Sometimes the truckers would ask him to give them a blow job but he always said no. Once a trucker begged him to show his dick for fifty bucks. It was a lot of money just to show his dick so after he got the money—the trucker only had twenty on him--he showed his dick. The man tried to touch it and he jumped out of the truck and ran away.

He wouldn’t get another social security check for several more weeks but he had learned his lessons well with Blue and found places to sleep in abandoned warehouses and buildings. He avoided the shelters unless absolutely necessary. Blue said that men only got a cot and some things in order to shower in the morning, but all of your shit will be gone the first time you close your eyes; even the shoes off your feet.

When he got his next check he got a motel room for the week but discovered that the mattress had bedbugs. He switched rooms, but they all had bedbugs and the motel owner wouldn’t give him a refund. It was a waste of one hundred twelve dollars. It was too much for week by week anyways. He might be able to find an efficiency for less than that…well if he had a job, credit references…

He walked to the train station scratching at the bedbug bites on his arms and feeling like they were crawling in his hair. He knew that he looked like what he was; a bum. But the train station during the day, was a place to stay warm, so that’s where he sat. A kid looked at him. He wasn’t with anyone and he was holding a backpack and looking lost. He walked towards Troy, half scared.