by Matt Ruff
“I know about the pet boys,” Dixon said.
The pet boys?
Yeah, OK, how do I explain this…You remember how, when I was talking about my twenties, I said there were times when I had a little too much fun? This was like one of those times.
It was a couple summers after I got kicked out of Berkeley. Weekdays I was working this roach-infested burger joint in the Tenderloin. On Friday and Saturday nights I had a different gig, at a liquor store across from the Golden Gate Panhandle. There were a lot of street kids in the Panhandle, and every night I’d get a bunch of them coming into the store, trying to buy booze.
Now the legal drinking age was twenty-one, which would be ridiculous in any jurisdiction, but what made it especially silly in California’s case is that we also had the death penalty, and you know what the minimum age for that was? Eighteen. So think about that, you’re old enough to get a lethal injection, but you’ve got to wait three more years before you can buy a beer. Does that sound logical?
It sounds like a novel justification for violating state liquor laws. I assume you sold alcohol to these street kids?
Well, not all of them. I used my discretion. If the kid carried himself like an adult, and didn’t come off like someone who was going to get blitzed and go leaping in front of a trolley—and if his phony I.D. wasn’t too bad—then yeah, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.
And when you say “give,” was that a free gift, or did it come at a premium?
You’re asking whether I took bribes?
That’s what I’m asking.
I might have had a tip jar…Hey, I was poor. And besides, it was part of the maturity test: if you don’t understand you’ve got to pay in order to play, maybe you’re not grown up enough to drink yet…You know, if you’re going to look at me like that, I may as well stop right now, because I’m not even at the bad part yet.
I’m sorry. Please continue.
Yeah, OK, so one night this kid came in, six foot, husky, but baby-faced, and right away I pegged him as underage: old enough for the needle, maybe, but not for the bottle. I watched him while he circled the store, to make sure he didn’t steal anything, and also because, you know, it wasn’t exactly a chore to look at him. Eventually he picked out a liter of Stoli and brought it to the counter.
“I.D.?” I said, and waited for his pitch. A lot of them had a spiel they’d go through, you know, “I was sick the day this photo was taken, that’s why it doesn’t look like me.” But this kid didn’t say a word, just handed me a driver’s license with the name Miles Davis on it. I checked the picture, and it’s this black guy with a trumpet.
Miles Davis. The jazz musician.
Yeah. So I looked at the kid, and there was maybe a hint of a smile on his lips, but other than that he was completely straight-faced. And I’m like, “Miles Davis, huh?” And he just looked back at me, cool as can be, like, yep, that’s me. So then I’m like, “You’re looking awfully pale tonight, Miles.” And he said: “I have a skin condition.”
Well, that was good enough as far as I was concerned. If you can come up with a line like that and deliver it deadpan, you deserve a drink. So I went to give the tip jar a shake, but he was already there, slipping in a dollar. “You’re the man, Miles,” I said, and rang him up.
Fast forward a couple of hours: after I locked up the store for the night, I went into the Panhandle to score some dope, and found Miles sitting at the base of a statue, smoking a joint. I went over to him: “Can I get a hit off that?” He gave me a toke and made room for me to sit.
“So Miles,” I said, taking a pull off the Stoli bottle, “do you live around here?”
“Actually,” he said, all Mr. Casual, “I’m looking for a place. What about you?”
“I’m thinking of becoming a landlady.” Which came out lamer than I intended, but it was OK—we were already rubbing shoulders, so it’s not like I needed a great line.
I took him home with me. In the morning I woke up alone in the futon, which wasn’t a huge surprise, but then I smelled smoke, and I was like, shit, did he set the place on fire on his way out?
Before I could jump out of bed, though, Miles came in, carrying this cutting board like a serving tray, loaded with goodies: an omelet, cinnamon toast, coffee, juice, even a little sprig of grapes. I’m like, “What’s this?” and he said, “Full service.” He got me all propped up on a nest of pillows like the Queen of Sheba, and put the cutting board in my lap.
I was blown away. No one had ever made me breakfast in bed before, and frankly, at that point, the food could have tasted like crap and I wouldn’t have cared. But when I took a bite of the omelet it was actually really good.
So I ate, and meanwhile Miles went over to my dresser and opened up the box where I kept my drug stash. I watched him roll himself a joint, sunshine streaming through the window while he did it, and all at once it struck me, full light of day, he was even more baby-faced than I’d thought. So I put my fork down, and I said, “How old are you really, Miles? Nineteen?” He didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at me, just went on rolling that joint, but he smiled in a way that told me the answer was no. And I’m like, “Eighteen?” Still no. So I’m like, oh boy…“Seventeen?” Still no. “Sixteen?” Finally, his smile changed a little. “Oh great,” I said. “The cops are going to love this.” And Miles reached back into the drug box and pulled out this big bag of pills I had in there, and said, “I can tell you’re really worried about the cops.”
So now that you knew he was only sixteen, what did you do?
What do you think I did? I kept him.
Kept him?
Duh, breakfast in bed, of course I kept him. Gave him a key and told him he could stay as long as he liked. We worked out a deal: he kept the place clean, cooked for me when I was home, and, you know…
And how long did this arrangement last?
A few weeks. Until one morning he took off for real, along with my stereo and half my dope. I should’ve been pissed about that, but I couldn’t get too worked up; he’d earned it, and anyway I’d have probably done the same thing in his shoes.
And after he left, there were others?
Yeah, but I don’t want you to think I was a total slut about it. I did wait a while, to see if he’d come back. But eventually, yeah. It became like a regular thing for me, all that summer and fall. Picking up strays.
Were they all underage?
They were all old enough. As far as specific ages, after Miles, I didn’t even ask.
But you referred to them as pet boys.
It wasn’t me who started that, it was Phil. He showed up one morning uninvited, and before I could get rid of him, my latest houseguest came walking through the kitchen without a shirt on. So Phil’s like: “The cat wasn’t enough? You’re keeping pet boys now?”
He didn’t approve.
Yeah, well, no surprise there. Phil always was kind of a prude…And look, I’m not defending it, OK? I know it was wrong, but you’ve got to understand, it was a different time. It wasn’t like today, where whenever you turn on the news some high-school teacher is being dragged off in handcuffs. San Francisco, 1990, picking up teenage boys in the park wasn’t this huge perversion, it was just…decadent.
But of course it’s one thing to be comfortable with that in your own mind, and a whole other thing to sell it to a cop or a judge, let alone some four-eyed freak who spends his days cataloging sin. So when Dixon said, “I know about the pet boys,” my first thought was, Jane, you’ve got some explaining to do.
Little did I know. I still hadn’t really grasped the whole Eyes Only thing, how pervasive it was. I figured Dixon must have heard stories about the pet boys, like maybe his people had tracked down one of the neighbors from my old apartment building. I wasn’t expecting video.
But then somebody hit a dimmer switch on the overhead light, and suddenly this little back room became an amphitheater. You know that Sony Jumbotron screen they’ve got in Times Square, the one that
’s like forty feet wide? Imagine that popping up on a wall in this space that you thought was maybe fifteen by twenty.
The wall lit up and started filling with this photo array of pet boys. All of them, even the one-night stands that I didn’t really consider part of the official count. The pictures were practically life-size, at least it seemed that way, and each one had a caption: MILES DAVIS MONROE, AGE 16—the 16 was flashing in red—JORDAN GRAHAM, AGE 17, VICTOR TODD, AGE 17, NICHOLAS MARTINESCU, AGE 16, et cetera, et cetera.
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.