This was originally written for speedrent and it's a Challenge 21 entry at Challenge Central.
Disclaimer: RENT belongs to Jonathan Larson. I'm just playing, please don't sue me!
Warnings: Child abuse, prostitution, obscenity
My clearest memories of childhood, the happiest memories at least, involve my father's cherry red convertible. He loved that thing, spent the weekends polishing it and tinkering with the engine. He would take it for drives, sometimes let me sit in the passenger seat next to him. I never dared speak a word on these outings, knowing exactly my place. I was a good boy, I sat quietly, never complained, no, just enjoyed the ride.
Usually, though, the rule was, Don't touch the car. And I didn't, not after my jammy fingerprints were found on the back bumper. I was maybe six or seven years old and, according to my mother, should have known better.
"Don't aggravate him," she would remind me almost constantly.
Anyway, the car. I loved that car. She was beautiful. Her engine purred pure honey. I loved to watch her shine in the morning sun, her red coat vivacious and flirty. That car was my image of glamour, of goodness, of anything purer and greater and brighter. Driving her, I knew, would be like incredible. Driving her would be like riding a cloud.
When I was sixteen, I passed my license exam with flying colors. I went home and I did fly colors. I flew red.
When I ran away from home-- hell, I don't know, because I was sick of his spit flying in my face as he told me that no son of his would write poetry. Because I was sick of his fists and his boots and sick of hearing the bedsprings squeak. Because I was sick of her. Fuck, everyone thinks only fathers are abusive. Idiots. I almost think they liked it: getting drunk together, breaking things on each, breaking each other, fucking. And when I didn't get away fast enough… you know.
They beat me soundly for my "joy ride" in the cherry convertible, but the pain of disappointment drowned the pain of weals. She didn't drive like a cloud. The gears ground. The wheel stuck. The speedometer was off. I doubt I drove half a mile, I was so disappointed. The shimmering streak of fiery hope in my life, was extinguished.
I moved to the city. For a while I lived on the streets. Oh, poetry is well and good, writing beautiful words and clever twists of phrase one thing in the spring and summer. Days turned colder and colder. I shivered in doorways, wrapped in cardboard.
This was about the time I tried to start using. I begged the cash on a streetcorner, not too tough since I was still a kid, gaunt and shivering. The dealer took one look at me and began to laugh. "I don't sell to kids," he said.
I was furious. "I got the cash, don't I?" I demanded in my harsh, affected voice, my street voice.
"Yeah, yeah. You got needles? You got a lighter?"
"What I got, is I gotta feel good."
He laughed again. "I can make you feel good."
"Yeah."
"No. That's not what I meant."
He took me back to his place. It was modest but not grungy at all: clean, neat, almost quaint as much as a big-city apartment can be. "Here." He gave me a pair of sweatpants and a long-sleeved blue top, clean. "You can put these on, for now. Take a shower, too."
I gratefully shed my torn, stained, stinking clothes in the bathroom. My face in the mirror shocked me. I was not the boy I remembered. In the shower I scrubbed and scrubbed with his glycerin soap. Did I know what I had gotten myself into? I didn't care. I was soaked to the bone, my skin chafed one layer against another, dirt buried deep. Being clean and dry was incredible.
I put on the man's clothes, didn't question him. In the kitchen, he gave me a sandwich. I devoured it.
"What's your name?" he asked.
I gave him my middle name. He gave me his spare room to sleep in. "'Night," he said, and he kissed me on the forehead.
He fed me, clothed me, housed me. And yeah, after a while, fucked me. He didn't ask me to take it up the ass or anything. At least not at first. The first night, he just crawled into bed beside me. After a few nights of that, he started touching me. Making me feel good, like he had promised, and once I relaxed it did feel good. Things progressed, as they will.
Sucking dick is fucking sick.
Told you I was a poet.
It is. It's disgusting to have some old codger ram his cock into your throat.
But there were good times. I would wait in the park while he dealt, and when he was through he would summon me with a jerk of two fingers. He would kiss me hard on the mouth before taking me out for a meal, if it had been a good day, or home for a fuck, if it had been a bad day.
And the old pervert died. He had AIDS. By that point, I did, too. He didn't know my name. I never learned his.
---
Did I mention the last thing I did before I left home? I took old red out for another little spin. And she spun. Boy oh boy did she spin… and skid… and shatter… and crunch. She made a nice wreck, damned shiny.
I would love to make myself a victim. I would love to say that my determination to destroy beauty began when I was raped of my innocence. (Clever wordplay, didn't I tell you?) I'd love to say that I'm more than just another HIV-positive member of that underworld of drugs and whores, I'm a victim. But that's a lie.
I love destroying beautiful things. My favorite, the object of my most recent affections, is a boy. Is he much older than I was? He barely looks it. His eyes sparkle with idealism and I am so very, very eager to dull them.
Envy? Certainly. And why not, when he stands on stage and plays, and his words so much more feeble than mine? Yet they swoon, girls and boys alike, and to my chagrin I feel what they feel, but unlike them I know this: I can control him. I can make him come back, because I have heaven in a little baggie in my pocket.
He comes to me, always with cash.
I am so eager for the day he has none. And now, at this moment, afraid. In five days, I haven't seen him. I've kept an eye out, and I know his absence makes me irritable. I never consider that he found someone else. No, to him I am the keeper of the keys to life itself, or at the very least the parts of it worth living.
And he's right.
END!
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