Needle Freak, page 2
Phineas liked the shifty way men and women both looked at young Jack. He liked to watch.
Phineas really liked Steve. He thought Steve was a grand old time. He loved the way Jack loved him and how it tortured him. He even liked Steve’s little kindnesses to Jack because he knew, as Jack did, that they were like scraps and biscuits being tossed to a favored dog. Steve liked Jack, maybe even cared about him, but to Steve’s twisted mind, Jack was like a pet. He was a useful possession.
Jack knew it. Still, he stayed because he loved Steve no matter what Steve felt. He told himself that Steve didn’t have to love him back, that he knew that wasn’t how it worked, but he wished it was different. He had never liked stories and poems and songs about unrequited, one-sided love. And he did wonder at how really screwed up he had to be for a man like Steve Walker to be the one for him. At how crazy it was to be jealous of all the corpses.
Jack still believed that it had been Phineas’s idea to run away when he was sixteen. It had been Phineas who gave him the idea to sell himself the first time. Not bad ideas in themselves. The rich Texan had wanted the same thing from Jack that Hal and a couple of other boyfriends of his mother’s who came after Hal had wanted from Jack and his mother didn’t get tired of the man and leave him. She’d stayed. Then at sixteen, Jack was on the streets and he had to eat and he had to get out of the rain, but he had nothing. Except even when he had nothing, he still had himself and there was always someone willing to buy. It had saved him, but it had also shaped him into the wreck of a man that he was now and he suspected that Phineas had known it would from the start.
Phineas had been there in the alleys when Jack went down on his knees for money the first time. He had been there when Kate’s men were fucking him over the arm of the sofa while the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles battled evil-doers. He was there the first time Jack popped a needle into a vein and the first time he went a little nuts because he couldn’t find one and had to stick it between his fingers. He stood by and grinned when Jack met Steve.
The clown had appeared as salvation, but he had loved every minute that had twisted and broken him.
Steve had been all Jack’s doing though. He didn’t blame Phineas for that. That was all him.
“Go away,” Jack said.
Phineas stuck his tongue out at Jack, but he got up and walked out of his line of sight.
Jack closed his eyes and dozed. In the room behind the wall where he was propped a woman started screaming at someone named Jamal. Whoever Jamal was, Jamal don’t be nothing but a fucking nigger, according to the woman, who sounded like she was also black. Jamal called her a cunt. She threatened to cut his dick off and club him with it.
Jack and Steve were going to have to move on to someplace else soon. They had been living at the Last Chance Motel for a month, but they never could stay anywhere long, even if they had wanted to. If Steve settled down, Steve might get caught. The thing about keeping Jack around was, he was useful and helpful in catching the girls, but Jack more than Steve was likely to be remembered. Even now, with ten years of prostitution and eight years of moderate to serious heroin addiction under his belt, Jack was striking. He did not have a forgettable face.
He was asleep when Steve returned from the Laundromat with his newly washed bedding. In the middle of the night, Jack woke up thirsty and rolled over to see Steve sitting on his own bed smoking a cigarette while he watched Jack. The curtains were closed, but a slat of light fell between the curtains and the window and illuminated one side of Steve’s face, turned his faded denim blue eyes electric.
Jack sat up. “Steve?”
“Yeah, Jack?”
“What’re you doing?”
“Sitting here. What’s it look like?”
“Okay.”
A little disturbed by it, Jack got up and went into the bathroom to drink some water and pee. Sometimes Steve kind of tuned out like that, so maybe he hadn’t been watching Jack sleep after all, that was just the way he was facing. After he had a girl, he thought about it and played it over in his mind for a few days. Until he got the itch again and needed another one.
It bothered Jack more to think that had been what Steve was doing than that Steve had been staring at him while he was sleeping and thinking about something else. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
“You go fuck that Zane asshole for dope again?”
Jack paused on his way out of the bathroom and rolled that over in his mind. Steve wasn’t jealous, he just disapproved. He was possessive and if he didn’t like Jack whoring, that was probably the only reason why.
“No,” Jack said, walking back into the room. Then because sometimes he resented Steve a lot more than he would admit, he added, “I fucked someone else for money and bought drugs. I was tired. Zane took a suck job.”
Steve stared at him without expression. In the dark it was hard to tell, but Jack had known him a while, he recognized the way the shadows fell on his face to mean it was blank. Then he turned his head and looked away from him at the wall; disgusted and dismissive.
You can’t get it up for no one but dead girls, Steve. Who the hell are you to judge me? Jack thought with a rare spark of anger at him. He almost said it. Then he sighed and climbed back into bed without saying anything.
He lay there staring up at the ceiling, listening to the rattling A/C, watching the pale blue of Steve’s cigarette smoke curl in the dark above him. After a while he said, “You always knew what I was.”
Steve grunted in a way that conveyed both acknowledgement and irritation.
“We need the money.”
“Don’t do any good if you’re shooting the shit up your fucking arm,” Steve said. “You ain’t doing that ‘cause we need the money.”
Jack shrugged. It didn’t bother him, he’d been a whore a long time. It was what it was.
“You gonna go and get yourself killed by some sick fuck closet case faggot one of these nights, Jack, and where’s that leave me?” Steve asked. “You ever think about that?”
“I guess not,” Jack said. It wasn’t an apology though. “Guess I always figured you’d be fine. We both know you don’t need me around, Steve.”
Jack could feel Steve’s eyes on him again, but he didn’t take his gaze from the shadows of the ceiling to look at him. Eventually Steve made another of those dismissive sounds in his throat and stamped his cigarette out in the heavy marble ashtray on the nightstand between their beds.
Jack closed his eyes and was soon asleep again.
He dreamed about Shane. He dreamed about being little again and Hal taking his clothes off. He dreamed about Shane walking in and how he had flown at Hal with a plastic hockey stick like it was a sword, trying to defend Jack, his baby brother. He’d always defended Jack. He dreamed about sitting huddled over his knees and crying in the corner by the laundry hamper while Hal raped Shane and made him scream instead. Phineas was there across the room watching it all, his little teeth like pearls, his eyes like foxfire.
Jack’s real shame about hearing and seeing his fifteen year old brother naked and crying and sweaty while Hal tore into him was that he’d been glad; glad that it wasn’t him for once.
Chapter 2
The next morning Steve was gone when Jack got up. He didn’t know where; he didn’t ask and Steve never offered to tell him where he went. He figured he’d be gone most of the day though. Jack got dressed and did a shot before he went out himself.
He took the bus in toward the city. Not into it, just close. He could see the buildings but not look in the windows. There were always slums in the outlying areas and streets where whores were more common than rats in big cities like Biloxi, Mississippi. Los Angeles had Skid Row and the Sunset Strip, New Orleans had the French Quarter and the Ninth Ward; they all had them. Such places weren’t always outside of the city, but they were always in some way apart.
Mississippi was a very prostitution-friendly state; for a state where prostitution was still illegal, Mississippi had some of the least severe penalties in the entire country. If he had been more tech-savvy or had a little more class, Jack could have made a killing in Biloxi by taking his trade online. Still, he did all right.
He bought a package of mini Ritz cheese crackers for his breakfast out of a vending machine at a truck stop. The cheese sandwiched between the tiny crackers was atomic orange, like the cheese powder used to make sauce for macaroni and cheese noodles out of the box. He ate the crackers and tossed the wrapper down on the sidewalk.
He walked until the people around him started to change. Until the boys and girls leaning against buildings watched him with eyes like his own; haunted and hungry. Until he was among men and women who looked at him and really saw him but didn’t care. He walked until he found himself standing on a cracked sidewalk with his own kind and a young man with blond hair, blue eyes and a scabbed mark on his cheek caught his gaze, looked him up and down and smiled. They were in on the joke. They were the butt of the joke.
It was a funny joke.
“What’s your name, man?” the boy asked him.
“Jack,” said Jack.
“Yeah? Me, too. You new? Ain’t seen you before.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “For now.”
“Well,” the boy said with a sigh, “I bet they like you.”
Jack smiled humorlessly and looked away from him out at the street. “They do.”
He was pretty, he knew it. He’d been told so all his life. But for johns it was more than that. Jack was delicate looking, slender to the point of skinny, he wasn’t strong, he wasn’t loud or brash or demanding and what anger he possessed was buried deep enough that it went unseen by most and unrecognized by others. He was starved for affection and broken in so many places. Maybe he’d grown stronger in the cracks, but mostly he just figured he’d learned to patch them and cover them up because he had to. In many ways, Jack looked more like a whore than any of the boys in bright colored, ripped shirts or the girls in shiny red fuck-me boots who sold themselves on the streets. He looked like a toy. Something to use and play with; made to be enjoyed by others.
“You want to stand over here, I’ll shift on over a bit,” the other Jack offered.
Jack shook his head and continued to stand where he was by a NO PARKING sign and watch the traffic. A station wagon pulled to the curb down the street and a girl with short cropped blond hair leaned down to talk to the man driving it. She got in and the car drove away.
A truck pulled over near Jack and the guy driving it waved to him. Jack slipped into character. He slapped a flirtatious smile on his face and put a little sway in his hips when he walked and went around the hood of the truck to meet its owner.
His name was Blake and he didn’t look like the kind of guy respectable people would ever expect to frequent the Skid Rows of the world. Most of them looked like that in one way or another though. Blake worked in an office. He had a cubicle. He worked all day at a job that he hated with people he despised. Then he went home to his shitty little apartment where he lived alone and microwaved some kind of processed frozen thing for dinner and watched TV. Then he went to bed, got up and the whole thing started over again. Blake didn’t have to tell Jack any of this for Jack to know it just by looking at him. He was wearing the cheap dress shirt with the sweat stains under the arms that they all wore. The same cheap off the rack tie. Guys like Blake were frequent shoppers.
Jack told him how much and Blake told him to get in the truck and he drove to a no-tell motel nearby called the Moon River Inn that rented rooms to frequent shoppers like Blake. Blake turned the TV on when they got there and told Jack to take his clothes off while he flipped through channels until he finally settled on a Vietnam War movie. Jack undressed and when Blake turned to him, he reached out and grabbed him, then roughly pushed him down on the bed.
Jack went with it. Blake was one of those: control freak. A john in need of an ego boost. A guy so little on the bottom of the totem pole that he got his rocks off with someone like Jack who wasn’t even on it. Driving that point home to Jack—to himself—was what got Blake off.
Blake called him a whore and Jack could have laughed, but he didn’t. Laughing at the Blakes of the world when in a position such as Jack was in was plain stupid.
Blake was rough and Jack bit his lips against cries and moans of pain until they were sore. He used the condom Jack gave him, but he thrust right in and then he fucked like he was trying to punch a hole through Jack. Like he had something to prove.
Sometimes men with something to prove were great in bed, but those usually were not johns. Jack wasn’t a person to Blake. He was a good-looking, cheap place to put it and take out his frustrations. Every time Jack cried out in pain, it stroked his ego.
When he finished, Blake rolled off him, smacked his ass and told him to get off the bed. He wasn’t done yet, but he needed to catch his breath. Jack sat on the floor and listened to the wartime audio of the movie on the TV while he stared through the cracks in the ragged Venetian blinds over the one window in the room and waited for Blake to get his second wind.
After about fifteen minutes, Blake sat up on the end of the bed and told Jack to get over there. He wanted him to suck his cock. Blake had used a condom, but it was still kind of disgusting and unsanitary and Jack wasn’t one of those whores or junkies who didn’t think about such things. He hadn’t showered and he didn’t seem like he intended to go clean up first, so Jack hesitated, but in the end he went. It would cost Blake extra for the waiting time and Jack needed the money. He needed to eat something more than tiny Ritz crackers and he needed to fix and he only had enough of the creamy yellow powder he’d bought from Zane to last him one more day if he was careful with it. He couldn’t afford to tell Blake no.
Jack knelt between Blake’s legs and looked up at him. Blake smiled down at him, put a hand on his head and pushed his head down toward his crotch. At first it was all right. Just another blowjob. A blowjob without a condom, which wasn’t safe per se, but the spermicide in the lube on most condoms burned Jack’s mouth anyway. It was a risk without one, but he preferred it and of course the johns preferred it. Blake wasn’t fully hard yet when it started, but he got that way and the more aroused he became, the tighter his hand in Jack’s hair got.
Jack started to pull back, draw his mouth up the shaft and catch a breath. Blake held him there and started to thrust. His cock bumped the back of Jack’s throat, slid over his tongue and kept going and he couldn’t breathe. It tickled the back of his throat and though Jack didn’t have a sensitive gag reflex, the head thrusting into his throat was too much and he gagged around it.
He shoved against the side of the bed, pushing himself back. Blake’s hand was suddenly gone from his hair, taking some scalp and hair with it. Jack fell back on the floor gasping, gagged and spit and started to stand using the wall to brace himself. There was an apology already on his tongue when Blake punched him in the chest.
It knocked the wind out of him and Jack fell back against the wall wheezing. Blake cursed him, called him a useless piece of shit whore and hit him again. It caught him in the jaw and Jack’s teeth clacked together. He sat down hard on the floor, then immediately tried to crawl away from him so he could get up. Blake grabbed his leg and pulled him back, then began to kick him.
Going limp in such situations was the best thing to do. Jack had learned that a long time ago. Go limp, don’t fight back, just let it happen. Chances of survival were much higher.
Blake kicked him until Jack was sure he was going to pass out. He couldn’t catch a breath before it was slammed right back out of him again. Then Blake got tired of that, but he wasn’t done. He threw Jack over on his stomach and while he was still retching and trying to breathe, he entered him from behind and started thrusting hard and fast. No condom, no lube, no warning. It wasn’t sex, not even for Blake, it was an extension of the beating. Another way to kick him while he was down.
Jack let it happen. It wasn’t the first time he’d been raped. There was no reason to think it would be the last. It didn’t shock him anymore. It didn’t even bother him that much. He was more upset and disturbed by his inability to draw a full breath into his lungs than he was by Blake pounding away at him with his inferiority complex. Letting it happen was just easier. It would be over more quickly and he could leave. That was what Jack thought about while it was happening, while he tried to make himself breathe and tried not to think about the pain in his chest every time he did.
Blake didn’t get the response from Jack that he wanted, which made him angrier. He reached down, seized Jack’s arm and twisted it up behind his back, pulled his wrist up between his shoulders so that every time he thrust it put pressure on his arm and shoulder. He told him he was going to break it and asked Jack what he thought about that.
Jack thought that was going to be a really expensive visit to the emergency room. He wondered if Blake really did it if they’d give him some good pain killers. Probably not. He had track scars you could chart the stars by pebbling the insides of both of his elbows. Even with a busted arm or a dislocated shoulder, they’d probably think he was only there for the drugs.
Instead of breaking his arm, Blake bent his middle finger back until it snapped. Jack screamed then and that seemed to please him. He did it again with his ring finger. Then he came with a shout, humping away while he shoved Jack’s face down hard into the stained old carpet.
He stayed down on the floor and didn’t say anything or move very much as Blake got up and put on his clothes. He threw a fifty dollar bill at Jack almost as an afterthought as he left and Jack found himself angry for the first time since Blake hit him because the asshole had shorted him by half. Then he was gone and Jack pushed himself up and crawled to the little chipped table by the bed to grab the phone there.
