I do not own FAKE, nor do I intend to profit in any way from the
characters or the use of such.
Rating: PG or PG13. Pretty tame.
Fic contains fluff. It's been betaed, but there may still be one or
two typos. I apologize in advance.
The Rat Race
We used to race the rats when I was a kid.
Not the white rats, the kind you buy and keep in a cage. Ours were
New York City's own sewer rats. Caught and bred by the kids in
building 17.
You can laugh if you want to. I guess even now I have to look back
at it and laugh myself, but to in those days, it was serious
business to us. We ran those rats and mated them with just as much
pride and determination as any Kentucky horse-breeder.
I called my rat Whip. I don't remember why, probably because I
thought he was fast as a whip or something. I was nine, it was a
long time ago. Whip was grey, and for a rat he had a pretty good
temper. I got him off my friend Charlie, who owned the mother rat,
for a pack of my father's cigarettes. Since Whip had always been
around people and not wild, I could hold him on my lap like a cat
and he'd just sit there, watching me out of little beady eyes.
He wasn't very fast, but I loved him anyway. The prizes for winning
the rat races weren't exactly new cars and vacations. Money, cigs,
cans of beer (which I could always get at home if I wanted them).
Drugs. Not that often, though. Mostly because we were too young to
have the cash needed to buy them. The older boys had those, but they
raced cars for them instead of rats.
Anyway, I had Whip for about a year, and he was just as special to
me as Lassie was to Timmy. He was fat and happy; the rat ate more
and better than I did, plus he didn't mind eating roaches and
spiders. Our apartment was always full of those.
I lost my rat just before I turned ten. Turns out the city was
threatening to haul our landlord to jail as a slum lord, so to keep
them happy he went around putting down rat poison in all the
apartments. This happened while I was at school. Whip had never been
in a cage; he had full run of our apartment, and by the time I got
home, it was too late.
There was no place around to bury him, and I would have been
embarrassed anyway to have my friends see me standing there and
crying over my rat. Instead I put Whip in a bag and took him down to
the river. No one paid any attention as I laid the bag in the water.
I was not a religious person. Not then, not now either. I didn't
know any prayers to say; I had only the vaguest memory of my
mother's funeral from when I was barely more than a baby. What
little I knew came from old Miss Harrison, who lived down the hall
and preached to everyone about sin, salvation, and Rapture. Heaven
was a big, blurry concept for me, and I didn't think they let rats
in anyway, which was stupid because if God made everything then he
made rats too. And if he made them, he should take them in when they
died, just like everything else. At least if they'd been good, and
Whip had always been a good rat.
So all I said to him as the bag sank was goodbye. Since it was
getting dark, no one could see me crying on the riverbank, and by
the time I made it back home, I'd gotten myself under control.
About half the pet rats in the building died in the extermination,
so Charlie made good money selling off his new pups. He offered me
one for free, but I didn't accept. I would have felt disloyal to
Whip.
You know now that I think about it, I cried harder and longer for
the rat than I did when my father died. My mother, I don't know. I
remember missing her when she was gone, but I don't remember now
what it was I missed. Just my father yelling at me to shut up and
stop crying and wanting her to come and hold me.
I cried for my father because he was my father. Because I loved him,
even for all his flaws.
He wasn't much of a father. Whatever personality he had had the
drugs had eaten away. Maybe I loved him because in his lucid moments
he wasn't really that bad. I know he had loved my mother, enough to
put up with the taunts and jeers of his friends for marrying a white
woman. I believe that he loved me as an extension of her. Sometimes
he'd reach up and touch my hair for a second, and then jerk away
like it burned him.
He wasn't stupid, either. I guess you could argue that anyway who
throws their life away like that has to be, but as far as
intelligence went, he was a pretty smart guy. When he wasn't stoned,
he read stuff. He had a thing for science fiction, believe it or
not. No fantasy stuff; he thought it was "gay", but he loved stories
about outerspace and robots and laser battles. We had a VCR (yes, I
stole it, happy?) and some Star Wars and Star Trek video tapes
(stole those too), and he'd sit there all day sometimes watching and
chuckling to himself. He had a stack of Star Trek books the library
had thrown away, and sometimes he was even coherent enough to read
outloud to me.
He never hit me. I think that surprises people when I tell them
that. Never once did my father ever strike me. He yelled at me a
lot; cursed me out sometimes. Threw me out of the apartment more
than once (which I wasn't worried about because he always forgot an
hour later what he had done.) Sometimes I'd wake up, though, and
he'd be sitting on the floor next to my bed, whispering over and
over "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He didn't like who he was, what he had
become, and he hated himself for leading me down the same path, but
neither of us knew how to stop.
Society, he said once, three sheets to the wind, didn't care about
people like us. They wanted us to live by their rules, but they
didn't let us get any of the good stuff that went along with it. So
if we wanted to live, we had to break those rules. It was okay for
us to steal and lie and cheat, as long as we stole from people who
could afford it. If I came home with a skateboard I'd jacked off of
some rich kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, he never said a
single word about it. But then there was the time Miss Harrison had
hung up her laundry in the tiny backyard of the building, like she
did every week, and my friends and I swiped it all as a joke.
Everything, even her giant bras and underpants.
My father marched me right down to Miss Harrison's apartment by my
ear, and made me apologize. Then left me there while the bat gave me
a forty minute lecture on the evils of stealing (believe it or not,
this was the first time anyone had ever told me that ALL stealing
was wrong no matter who it was from). By the time I was allowed to
leave, I made a vow never to ever steal anything again. Of course
that didn't last very long, but I certainly was never again tempted
to steal an old woman's underwear.
There were some nights, especially in the summer, that I didn't go
home for days. During the rest of the year, I did make a fair
attempt to go to school. Not for any great love of education, but
because I was on a free lunch program and it was usually the only
real meal I got during the day. Most inner city schools are more
like daycare centers, I think. For 8 hours they kept us off the
streets, but they didn't teach us very much. Most of what I knew, I
learned on my own.
But summers were mine, and I ran wild through the streets of New
York with my friends. We were small soldiers in a battleground, and
it was the only world we knew. What streets were safe to go on what
time of day and what days; those were our times tables. Good
dumpsters to raid for food and other things. Even if my stomach
turns now to think of eating out trash cans, back then it didn't
phase me a bit. Food was food.
One of the neat things about New York is that so many of the
buildings are flat. There are a lot of roofs, and I did love the
roofs. I slept there when it wasn't raining, watching the world go
along below, and I felt safe. Not completely safe, no one ever was
completely safe. But content. I was surviving, I was winning the war.
Even if I was punk-tough, I was still a child, with the imagination
of one, and on those long summer nights Bikky Goldman vanished and I
was Batman and Spiderman. A far stretch; I committed more crimes
than I prevented. I used darkness to slide in and out of apartment
windows opened against the heat, windows so high up those who lived
inside assumed it was safe to leave them ajar. I left after I'd done
a reverse Santa, and stuffed my green army knapsack full of whatever
I could find. Usually the contents of their refrigerators.
Sometimes when I'd come home my father would say "Boy, been so long
since you lived here I forgot your name. What's your name?" He was
joking, of course. It was his way of saying he'd noticed I'd been
gone, and may even missed me.
When I was ten, I looked at myself in what was left of the bathroom
mirror, and realized with some fear that I was hurtling toward
adolescence. There were no outward signs of it yet on my body, but I
could sense it, just under my skin, waiting to break out.
A sophomore in high school ponders what colleges he should apply
to, what schools would best suit his talents and needs. In my old
neighborhood, a boy of ten carefully considers what gang he should
join. Not every kid joins a gang, no matter what you might hear or
be led to believe. And some that do join a lot younger. But in our
little area of New York, 11 was about the average age. I'd done well
on my own up until now, but I was getting older and my needs would
be changing. I'd need more money, a car, cash for my own apartment.
I'd need a lot more food to keep me going than I was used to now;
bigger clothing. Not stuff I could obtain well on my own; a gang
would help me with that.
Did I want to deal drugs like my father, or did I want to steal
and/or strip down cars? I mulled over these decisions in bed at
night. Cal was doing well as a pick-pocket, but Cal was cute and a
girl. People were a lot more suspicious of me.
There were numerous organizations to choose from, and I even made
notes to myself listing the benefits and drawbacks of each one. I
really didn't think I had the stomach to kill people, and I wasn't
fond of drugs, seeing what they'd done to my father. What I was good
at was stealing, and I figured that's where I should focus my
interest.
If gangs were like colleges, I can picture now the letters sent to
the leaders.
"Dear Sir, my name is Bikky Goldman, and I feel that I would be a
great asset to your automobile refurbishing industry. Enclosed are
my references and qualifications. As you can see I have maintained a
98% escape record for the last three years."
Or in the case of Charlie, who in spite of his soft spot for baby
rats did have what it took to kill someone:
"Dear Sir, I am greatly impressed by the reputation you and your
colleagues have for dismembering snitches, and I would like to offer
my self to you for membership consideration...."
Or the responses sent back would be along the lines of:
"In 500 words or less, tell us what you would do if surrounded by
the cops at the end of a pier, with only one bullet left and a
broken leg."
Besides dealing, the easiest money was made by prostitution. This
wasn't something that I ever considered. My father was terrified of
gays and lesbians; to hear him talk they were planning to the
destruction of the known universe. And even though quite a few male
prostitutes are not homosexual and just do it for the money, it
would have forever branded me in his eyes. If he'd ever found out
that Charlie was letting the building super suck him off for 5
dollars every few days, he never would have allowed the boy back in
our apartment.
I guess what I want to stress though, is that I was not an unhappy
child. I didn't spend all day sitting around thinking of how rotten
my life was or how much I wanted it to change. My life was my life,
and I lived it. If I had some vague impression that there was
something else out there, something better, I didn't dwell on it. It
was as far beyond my reach as the Romulan Empire was beyond my
father's, and just as alien to me.
Later, when my father was gone, and I was living with Ryo, and later
with Ryo and Dee, the urge for freedom would hit me so strong that
it almost brought tears to my eyes. I'd look around the apartment
and I'd feel the walls closing in. Especially if it was a summer
night and I knew that not far away were roofs and open windows, and
the thrill of being wild again. Without thinking, I'd head toward
the front door and Ryo would call me back, telling me it was too
late to go out. As much as I loved him, I hated him in those
moments, hated the tether around my neck. Hated that I was slowly
but surely losing my street edge and becoming domesticated under his
care.
When Dee moved in, that tether became even tighter. Dee wasn't
easily conned; I couldn't bs my way out of trouble with him like I
sometimes could Ryo. He knew what was in me because it was in him as
well. He saw the wildness exactly at it was; he knew how my much
fingers itched to grab things from stores, how my mind longed once
again for the thrill of outrunning cops. And since he fought so hard
to control his own urges, he wasn't about to let me get away with
things he could not.
There was a period of peace between us, lasting from the time I was
twelve until I fifteen. Not total peace, but I didn't resent him as
much during those years, I guess. It started on the night we were
home alone. Ryo was still at work, and we were doing the dishes,
arguing as usual. I slammed down a glass and it shattered, cutting
open my hand.
I was in hysterics, convinced I was going to bleed to death (and
there was blood everywhere). Dee was as pale as I was, I realize
now, but he stayed calm. He wrapped my hand in a towel and drove me
to the ER. And he held me while they put 13 stitches in my palm and
I cried like a baby. When we went home, I wanted to stay up for Ryo,
so we curled up on the couch and watched Airplane. I fell asleep
against his shoulder, and when Ryo came home, Dee lied to him, told
him that I hadn't cried at all. After that we declared a kind of
truce.
Fifteen is a hard age to be anyway, and I did not go into it easily.
There was Cal, for one thing, and the change in our relationship
from best friends to more. That alone was a lot of stress. She was
older than me; she'd already graduated high school and was starting
college. She wanted to be a social worker instead of a professional
pick-pocket. Ryo had pulled strings to get her enough grants and
loans to cover her whole tuition. I felt hurt and left out, I guess.
Her `real' life was beginning and mine still had a way to go.
For another, high school was a challenge. Not as far as the work
went; I usually didn't have any trouble keeping my grades up when I
was left in peace. But it was being left in peace that was the
problem.
Since Cal was in college, living in a dorm, Ryo decided we should
move to a better apartment. Still inside the city limits, but it
meant changing my school. The high school I'd been going to wasn't
bad, but this one was better. At least it was supposed to be.
Since I wanted to go to college, I was trying hard to stay out of
trouble. That meant no stealing, and it meant no fighting. At my old
school that wasn't a problem. The kids there had known me for years,
and they didn't have a problem with me or my background or my family
situation. I was just Bikky to them.
But there, the minute I walked through the door, I was stared at.
The school was a mixture of black kids and white kids and asian kids
and hispanic kids, but there weren't a lot of biracial kids there,
at least not ones that stood out as much as I did. I'm the first to
admit how weird I look. If I believed in God, I'd say that halfway
through making me he realized he'd run out of the right parts and
just slapped together what he had left. What did it matter to Him,
after all, if a black kid with blond hair and blue eyes got gawked
at?
That was the first of my problems. And like with most problems, it
wasn't something everyone did. I got along well with most of the
people there. But in every crowd, there are one or two who just
can't resist trying to bring someone down to their level. I'd get
bumped in the hall and I'd hear "Freak" hissed quickly at me. I had
to step quickly to avoid being tripped.
The second problem started two weeks into the school year, when we
were assigned a class project. Something on pollution. They made up
a schedule; we were supposed to work on it at home in groups,
alternating whose house or apartment we used.
So I was naïve, I guess. I didn't think anything about it when I
came home that afternoon, trailing two guys and two girls from my
science class behind me.
Ryo and Dee were still at work, so we had peace for about an hour,
working on the project. I didn't even look up when I heard the front
door open, or a minute later when Dee walked into the kitchen to
grab a beer. He said hello to the other kids and then went into the
living room, turning on the TV.
"Wow." Samantha whispered to me. "Your dad is cute!"
I turned red. "He's not my dad."
I suppose they assumed "stepfather" from that or "Mom's boyfriend."
Something they took for granted, and not much else was said. Later,
Ryo came home, greeted us, and started fixing dinner.
"Is that your dad?" Samantha asked.
"Sort of."
"Dee, where's the new bag of flour I bought?" Ryo called out.
"Above the stove, Baby." Dee yelled back from the living room, and
four pairs of eyes turned to me, widening. They looked at Ryo, who
didn't even notice, and then toward the living room where Dee still
was, and then they understood. Five minutes later, muttering
excuses, they all left.
I was embarrassed and angry and I turned it on Dee full force. I ran
into the living room and started screaming at him. "WHY? WHY'D YOU
HAVE TO DO THAT?"
He was confused, and Ryo came in to see what was wrong.
"THEY THINK I'M A FREAK NOW!" I was still shouting. "WHY COULDN'T
YOU PRETEND YOU WERE AN UNCLE OR SOMETHING?"
Ryo still didn't seem to understand what the fuss was about, but Dee
did and he was glaring at me. "Because I'm not going to pretend to
be something I'm not for anyone! Not in my own home, and not so some
little punks can pretend people like us don't exist!"
I ran back into my room and slammed the door, not coming out until
the next morning, when I refused to speak to either of them.
I spent the night trying to tell myself that it wasn't going to be
bad, that people were used to different families, and that no one
cared.
A few people giggled at me later that day, but I started to get
confident. My friends still spoke to me, but they already knew about
Ryo and Dee and didn't care. It was only in study hall, with the
people who had harassed me anyway because of my weird coloring, that
it started.
"So what's it like living with queer cops?" I heard the question
hissed behind me, and I didn't turn around.
"I bet they use the special handcuffs on him every night."
"After they make him assume the position."
"And strip-search him."
"He must like them to use excessive force."
I never turned around once, but when I left for my next class I saw
that my hands were bloody from where my fingernails had dug into
them.
I could have blamed the taunting on narrow-mindedness, idiocy, a
society hell-bent on denying basic rights, including the right of
dignity, on such a large percentage of their population. But the boy
I was blamed it entirely on Dee. If he'd left Ryo alone, Ryo would
still be.well, not straight. I knew by then it was something you're
born, not made. But he might still have it under control, might
still be hiding it, instead of just having it out there in the open
for anyone to see. Dee had forced him to admit his feelings, admit
what he was. So it was because of Dee that I was getting such grief
at school.
All my old resentments toward him resurfaced, and like before we
were constantly at each others throats. The rules I had followed
before I flaunted now, refusing to do anything he said. I was big
now; he couldn't push me around or make me do anything I didn't want
to.
The harder I rebelled, the harder he clamped down. Ryo didn't like
the tension in our apartment, clearly, but he did nothing to
interfere. He seemed to sense that it was something only Dee and I
could work out for ourselves. He did back Dee up on his punishments
and mandates though, causing me to turn my fury on him as well.
Even after the teasing at school had died down, and everyone had
accepted that my parents were gay and there was nothing to see, move
along everyone, I still held tight to my anger. Cal helped, but I
didn't see her enough for it to help much.
Once I heard Ryo saying to Dee, in a voice that nearly broke my
heart. "Sometimes I think he hates me."
And Dee responded "He's fifteen. He hates the world right now. I
went out and set a parking lot full of cars on fire once, when I was
mad at Penguin. Don't you remember what it was like to be that age?
So much going on inside of you that it just had to escape?"
"No." Ryo was honest. "I didn't mind being that age."
"Well, you were a weirdo." Dee was laughing now, I could tell. "Most
boys look back and think that 15 was about the hardest year of their
lives."
That night I slipped out of the house with a can of gasoline, and I
went to the school. I stood there for a long time, and I fingered
the lighter in my pocket, staring up at the dark building. A hour
later I went home, the gas can still full.
I wish I could say things got easier after that, but it didn't. Dee
and I continued to butt heads for the next three years, making up
things to fight about if we couldn't find anything real. Every time
I turned around he was harping at me to do my homework, or explain a
bad grade, or demand to know where I'd been when I came home late.
I look back now with the eyes of a man, and I see his rules now for
what they really were, a labor of love. It was no easier on him than
it was on me staying up until 3AM making sure I finished an essay or
a math assignment, or driving around the neighborhood at midnight to
find me. He and Ryo probably hadn't enjoyed storming into a friends'
house in the middle of a party and dragging me out (I had
conveniently forgot I was grounded).
They continued to drag me, kicking and screaming, from childhood to
manhood, ignoring the bruises I put on them along the way. Loving me
in spite of myself.
So today is as much a victory for them as it is for me, perhaps even
more so. This is their honor too, the end results of their
investment into the life of a budding juvenile delinquent.
As I stand here, I watch the people I've trained with for months now
approach the podium to be handed their guns and badges, and I hear
the names read off to bursts of applause.
"Special Agent Dawson."
"Special Agent Englewood."
"Special Agent Goldman."
I walk forward in a daze and from behind me I can hear Dee yell
out "WAY TO GO BIKKY!" And I think "I'm going to kill him." Everyone
here calls me Bik, and I can see my classmates grinning at me now,
promising that I am so going to get teased later.
They finish reading off the names and say a few more things, and
then release us. Nothing in my life, not graduating from high school
or even college has equaled how I feel right now. Cal hugs me and
kisses me, and I think that as soon as I get assigned and settled
I've definitely got to start saving up for a ring. Then Ryo and Dee
are squeezing the life out of me, and they're both crying, just like
they did at my last graduations. And then of course Dee wants to see
my gun, and says that he's considering going into Witness Protection
now that I'm armed.
"Don't you mean Witless Protection?" I ask sweetly, and he swats me.
"If it wasn't for us." He growls. "Right now you'd probably be
wanted by the FBI instead of working for them." We both laugh and he
hands me back my gun.
He has his arm around Ryo, and I'm proud of them. I don't care who
sees it, or who knows what they mean to each other.
They call life the Rat Race. You don't always win, and even when you
do, the rewards aren't always that great. But you have to keep
running anyway, you have to keep trying even if the other rats are
bigger and faster.
I named the gun Whip.
characters or the use of such.
Rating: PG or PG13. Pretty tame.
Fic contains fluff. It's been betaed, but there may still be one or
two typos. I apologize in advance.
The Rat Race
We used to race the rats when I was a kid.
Not the white rats, the kind you buy and keep in a cage. Ours were
New York City's own sewer rats. Caught and bred by the kids in
building 17.
You can laugh if you want to. I guess even now I have to look back
at it and laugh myself, but to in those days, it was serious
business to us. We ran those rats and mated them with just as much
pride and determination as any Kentucky horse-breeder.
I called my rat Whip. I don't remember why, probably because I
thought he was fast as a whip or something. I was nine, it was a
long time ago. Whip was grey, and for a rat he had a pretty good
temper. I got him off my friend Charlie, who owned the mother rat,
for a pack of my father's cigarettes. Since Whip had always been
around people and not wild, I could hold him on my lap like a cat
and he'd just sit there, watching me out of little beady eyes.
He wasn't very fast, but I loved him anyway. The prizes for winning
the rat races weren't exactly new cars and vacations. Money, cigs,
cans of beer (which I could always get at home if I wanted them).
Drugs. Not that often, though. Mostly because we were too young to
have the cash needed to buy them. The older boys had those, but they
raced cars for them instead of rats.
Anyway, I had Whip for about a year, and he was just as special to
me as Lassie was to Timmy. He was fat and happy; the rat ate more
and better than I did, plus he didn't mind eating roaches and
spiders. Our apartment was always full of those.
I lost my rat just before I turned ten. Turns out the city was
threatening to haul our landlord to jail as a slum lord, so to keep
them happy he went around putting down rat poison in all the
apartments. This happened while I was at school. Whip had never been
in a cage; he had full run of our apartment, and by the time I got
home, it was too late.
There was no place around to bury him, and I would have been
embarrassed anyway to have my friends see me standing there and
crying over my rat. Instead I put Whip in a bag and took him down to
the river. No one paid any attention as I laid the bag in the water.
I was not a religious person. Not then, not now either. I didn't
know any prayers to say; I had only the vaguest memory of my
mother's funeral from when I was barely more than a baby. What
little I knew came from old Miss Harrison, who lived down the hall
and preached to everyone about sin, salvation, and Rapture. Heaven
was a big, blurry concept for me, and I didn't think they let rats
in anyway, which was stupid because if God made everything then he
made rats too. And if he made them, he should take them in when they
died, just like everything else. At least if they'd been good, and
Whip had always been a good rat.
So all I said to him as the bag sank was goodbye. Since it was
getting dark, no one could see me crying on the riverbank, and by
the time I made it back home, I'd gotten myself under control.
About half the pet rats in the building died in the extermination,
so Charlie made good money selling off his new pups. He offered me
one for free, but I didn't accept. I would have felt disloyal to
Whip.
You know now that I think about it, I cried harder and longer for
the rat than I did when my father died. My mother, I don't know. I
remember missing her when she was gone, but I don't remember now
what it was I missed. Just my father yelling at me to shut up and
stop crying and wanting her to come and hold me.
I cried for my father because he was my father. Because I loved him,
even for all his flaws.
He wasn't much of a father. Whatever personality he had had the
drugs had eaten away. Maybe I loved him because in his lucid moments
he wasn't really that bad. I know he had loved my mother, enough to
put up with the taunts and jeers of his friends for marrying a white
woman. I believe that he loved me as an extension of her. Sometimes
he'd reach up and touch my hair for a second, and then jerk away
like it burned him.
He wasn't stupid, either. I guess you could argue that anyway who
throws their life away like that has to be, but as far as
intelligence went, he was a pretty smart guy. When he wasn't stoned,
he read stuff. He had a thing for science fiction, believe it or
not. No fantasy stuff; he thought it was "gay", but he loved stories
about outerspace and robots and laser battles. We had a VCR (yes, I
stole it, happy?) and some Star Wars and Star Trek video tapes
(stole those too), and he'd sit there all day sometimes watching and
chuckling to himself. He had a stack of Star Trek books the library
had thrown away, and sometimes he was even coherent enough to read
outloud to me.
He never hit me. I think that surprises people when I tell them
that. Never once did my father ever strike me. He yelled at me a
lot; cursed me out sometimes. Threw me out of the apartment more
than once (which I wasn't worried about because he always forgot an
hour later what he had done.) Sometimes I'd wake up, though, and
he'd be sitting on the floor next to my bed, whispering over and
over "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." He didn't like who he was, what he had
become, and he hated himself for leading me down the same path, but
neither of us knew how to stop.
Society, he said once, three sheets to the wind, didn't care about
people like us. They wanted us to live by their rules, but they
didn't let us get any of the good stuff that went along with it. So
if we wanted to live, we had to break those rules. It was okay for
us to steal and lie and cheat, as long as we stole from people who
could afford it. If I came home with a skateboard I'd jacked off of
some rich kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, he never said a
single word about it. But then there was the time Miss Harrison had
hung up her laundry in the tiny backyard of the building, like she
did every week, and my friends and I swiped it all as a joke.
Everything, even her giant bras and underpants.
My father marched me right down to Miss Harrison's apartment by my
ear, and made me apologize. Then left me there while the bat gave me
a forty minute lecture on the evils of stealing (believe it or not,
this was the first time anyone had ever told me that ALL stealing
was wrong no matter who it was from). By the time I was allowed to
leave, I made a vow never to ever steal anything again. Of course
that didn't last very long, but I certainly was never again tempted
to steal an old woman's underwear.
There were some nights, especially in the summer, that I didn't go
home for days. During the rest of the year, I did make a fair
attempt to go to school. Not for any great love of education, but
because I was on a free lunch program and it was usually the only
real meal I got during the day. Most inner city schools are more
like daycare centers, I think. For 8 hours they kept us off the
streets, but they didn't teach us very much. Most of what I knew, I
learned on my own.
But summers were mine, and I ran wild through the streets of New
York with my friends. We were small soldiers in a battleground, and
it was the only world we knew. What streets were safe to go on what
time of day and what days; those were our times tables. Good
dumpsters to raid for food and other things. Even if my stomach
turns now to think of eating out trash cans, back then it didn't
phase me a bit. Food was food.
One of the neat things about New York is that so many of the
buildings are flat. There are a lot of roofs, and I did love the
roofs. I slept there when it wasn't raining, watching the world go
along below, and I felt safe. Not completely safe, no one ever was
completely safe. But content. I was surviving, I was winning the war.
Even if I was punk-tough, I was still a child, with the imagination
of one, and on those long summer nights Bikky Goldman vanished and I
was Batman and Spiderman. A far stretch; I committed more crimes
than I prevented. I used darkness to slide in and out of apartment
windows opened against the heat, windows so high up those who lived
inside assumed it was safe to leave them ajar. I left after I'd done
a reverse Santa, and stuffed my green army knapsack full of whatever
I could find. Usually the contents of their refrigerators.
Sometimes when I'd come home my father would say "Boy, been so long
since you lived here I forgot your name. What's your name?" He was
joking, of course. It was his way of saying he'd noticed I'd been
gone, and may even missed me.
When I was ten, I looked at myself in what was left of the bathroom
mirror, and realized with some fear that I was hurtling toward
adolescence. There were no outward signs of it yet on my body, but I
could sense it, just under my skin, waiting to break out.
A sophomore in high school ponders what colleges he should apply
to, what schools would best suit his talents and needs. In my old
neighborhood, a boy of ten carefully considers what gang he should
join. Not every kid joins a gang, no matter what you might hear or
be led to believe. And some that do join a lot younger. But in our
little area of New York, 11 was about the average age. I'd done well
on my own up until now, but I was getting older and my needs would
be changing. I'd need more money, a car, cash for my own apartment.
I'd need a lot more food to keep me going than I was used to now;
bigger clothing. Not stuff I could obtain well on my own; a gang
would help me with that.
Did I want to deal drugs like my father, or did I want to steal
and/or strip down cars? I mulled over these decisions in bed at
night. Cal was doing well as a pick-pocket, but Cal was cute and a
girl. People were a lot more suspicious of me.
There were numerous organizations to choose from, and I even made
notes to myself listing the benefits and drawbacks of each one. I
really didn't think I had the stomach to kill people, and I wasn't
fond of drugs, seeing what they'd done to my father. What I was good
at was stealing, and I figured that's where I should focus my
interest.
If gangs were like colleges, I can picture now the letters sent to
the leaders.
"Dear Sir, my name is Bikky Goldman, and I feel that I would be a
great asset to your automobile refurbishing industry. Enclosed are
my references and qualifications. As you can see I have maintained a
98% escape record for the last three years."
Or in the case of Charlie, who in spite of his soft spot for baby
rats did have what it took to kill someone:
"Dear Sir, I am greatly impressed by the reputation you and your
colleagues have for dismembering snitches, and I would like to offer
my self to you for membership consideration...."
Or the responses sent back would be along the lines of:
"In 500 words or less, tell us what you would do if surrounded by
the cops at the end of a pier, with only one bullet left and a
broken leg."
Besides dealing, the easiest money was made by prostitution. This
wasn't something that I ever considered. My father was terrified of
gays and lesbians; to hear him talk they were planning to the
destruction of the known universe. And even though quite a few male
prostitutes are not homosexual and just do it for the money, it
would have forever branded me in his eyes. If he'd ever found out
that Charlie was letting the building super suck him off for 5
dollars every few days, he never would have allowed the boy back in
our apartment.
I guess what I want to stress though, is that I was not an unhappy
child. I didn't spend all day sitting around thinking of how rotten
my life was or how much I wanted it to change. My life was my life,
and I lived it. If I had some vague impression that there was
something else out there, something better, I didn't dwell on it. It
was as far beyond my reach as the Romulan Empire was beyond my
father's, and just as alien to me.
Later, when my father was gone, and I was living with Ryo, and later
with Ryo and Dee, the urge for freedom would hit me so strong that
it almost brought tears to my eyes. I'd look around the apartment
and I'd feel the walls closing in. Especially if it was a summer
night and I knew that not far away were roofs and open windows, and
the thrill of being wild again. Without thinking, I'd head toward
the front door and Ryo would call me back, telling me it was too
late to go out. As much as I loved him, I hated him in those
moments, hated the tether around my neck. Hated that I was slowly
but surely losing my street edge and becoming domesticated under his
care.
When Dee moved in, that tether became even tighter. Dee wasn't
easily conned; I couldn't bs my way out of trouble with him like I
sometimes could Ryo. He knew what was in me because it was in him as
well. He saw the wildness exactly at it was; he knew how my much
fingers itched to grab things from stores, how my mind longed once
again for the thrill of outrunning cops. And since he fought so hard
to control his own urges, he wasn't about to let me get away with
things he could not.
There was a period of peace between us, lasting from the time I was
twelve until I fifteen. Not total peace, but I didn't resent him as
much during those years, I guess. It started on the night we were
home alone. Ryo was still at work, and we were doing the dishes,
arguing as usual. I slammed down a glass and it shattered, cutting
open my hand.
I was in hysterics, convinced I was going to bleed to death (and
there was blood everywhere). Dee was as pale as I was, I realize
now, but he stayed calm. He wrapped my hand in a towel and drove me
to the ER. And he held me while they put 13 stitches in my palm and
I cried like a baby. When we went home, I wanted to stay up for Ryo,
so we curled up on the couch and watched Airplane. I fell asleep
against his shoulder, and when Ryo came home, Dee lied to him, told
him that I hadn't cried at all. After that we declared a kind of
truce.
Fifteen is a hard age to be anyway, and I did not go into it easily.
There was Cal, for one thing, and the change in our relationship
from best friends to more. That alone was a lot of stress. She was
older than me; she'd already graduated high school and was starting
college. She wanted to be a social worker instead of a professional
pick-pocket. Ryo had pulled strings to get her enough grants and
loans to cover her whole tuition. I felt hurt and left out, I guess.
Her `real' life was beginning and mine still had a way to go.
For another, high school was a challenge. Not as far as the work
went; I usually didn't have any trouble keeping my grades up when I
was left in peace. But it was being left in peace that was the
problem.
Since Cal was in college, living in a dorm, Ryo decided we should
move to a better apartment. Still inside the city limits, but it
meant changing my school. The high school I'd been going to wasn't
bad, but this one was better. At least it was supposed to be.
Since I wanted to go to college, I was trying hard to stay out of
trouble. That meant no stealing, and it meant no fighting. At my old
school that wasn't a problem. The kids there had known me for years,
and they didn't have a problem with me or my background or my family
situation. I was just Bikky to them.
But there, the minute I walked through the door, I was stared at.
The school was a mixture of black kids and white kids and asian kids
and hispanic kids, but there weren't a lot of biracial kids there,
at least not ones that stood out as much as I did. I'm the first to
admit how weird I look. If I believed in God, I'd say that halfway
through making me he realized he'd run out of the right parts and
just slapped together what he had left. What did it matter to Him,
after all, if a black kid with blond hair and blue eyes got gawked
at?
That was the first of my problems. And like with most problems, it
wasn't something everyone did. I got along well with most of the
people there. But in every crowd, there are one or two who just
can't resist trying to bring someone down to their level. I'd get
bumped in the hall and I'd hear "Freak" hissed quickly at me. I had
to step quickly to avoid being tripped.
The second problem started two weeks into the school year, when we
were assigned a class project. Something on pollution. They made up
a schedule; we were supposed to work on it at home in groups,
alternating whose house or apartment we used.
So I was naïve, I guess. I didn't think anything about it when I
came home that afternoon, trailing two guys and two girls from my
science class behind me.
Ryo and Dee were still at work, so we had peace for about an hour,
working on the project. I didn't even look up when I heard the front
door open, or a minute later when Dee walked into the kitchen to
grab a beer. He said hello to the other kids and then went into the
living room, turning on the TV.
"Wow." Samantha whispered to me. "Your dad is cute!"
I turned red. "He's not my dad."
I suppose they assumed "stepfather" from that or "Mom's boyfriend."
Something they took for granted, and not much else was said. Later,
Ryo came home, greeted us, and started fixing dinner.
"Is that your dad?" Samantha asked.
"Sort of."
"Dee, where's the new bag of flour I bought?" Ryo called out.
"Above the stove, Baby." Dee yelled back from the living room, and
four pairs of eyes turned to me, widening. They looked at Ryo, who
didn't even notice, and then toward the living room where Dee still
was, and then they understood. Five minutes later, muttering
excuses, they all left.
I was embarrassed and angry and I turned it on Dee full force. I ran
into the living room and started screaming at him. "WHY? WHY'D YOU
HAVE TO DO THAT?"
He was confused, and Ryo came in to see what was wrong.
"THEY THINK I'M A FREAK NOW!" I was still shouting. "WHY COULDN'T
YOU PRETEND YOU WERE AN UNCLE OR SOMETHING?"
Ryo still didn't seem to understand what the fuss was about, but Dee
did and he was glaring at me. "Because I'm not going to pretend to
be something I'm not for anyone! Not in my own home, and not so some
little punks can pretend people like us don't exist!"
I ran back into my room and slammed the door, not coming out until
the next morning, when I refused to speak to either of them.
I spent the night trying to tell myself that it wasn't going to be
bad, that people were used to different families, and that no one
cared.
A few people giggled at me later that day, but I started to get
confident. My friends still spoke to me, but they already knew about
Ryo and Dee and didn't care. It was only in study hall, with the
people who had harassed me anyway because of my weird coloring, that
it started.
"So what's it like living with queer cops?" I heard the question
hissed behind me, and I didn't turn around.
"I bet they use the special handcuffs on him every night."
"After they make him assume the position."
"And strip-search him."
"He must like them to use excessive force."
I never turned around once, but when I left for my next class I saw
that my hands were bloody from where my fingernails had dug into
them.
I could have blamed the taunting on narrow-mindedness, idiocy, a
society hell-bent on denying basic rights, including the right of
dignity, on such a large percentage of their population. But the boy
I was blamed it entirely on Dee. If he'd left Ryo alone, Ryo would
still be.well, not straight. I knew by then it was something you're
born, not made. But he might still have it under control, might
still be hiding it, instead of just having it out there in the open
for anyone to see. Dee had forced him to admit his feelings, admit
what he was. So it was because of Dee that I was getting such grief
at school.
All my old resentments toward him resurfaced, and like before we
were constantly at each others throats. The rules I had followed
before I flaunted now, refusing to do anything he said. I was big
now; he couldn't push me around or make me do anything I didn't want
to.
The harder I rebelled, the harder he clamped down. Ryo didn't like
the tension in our apartment, clearly, but he did nothing to
interfere. He seemed to sense that it was something only Dee and I
could work out for ourselves. He did back Dee up on his punishments
and mandates though, causing me to turn my fury on him as well.
Even after the teasing at school had died down, and everyone had
accepted that my parents were gay and there was nothing to see, move
along everyone, I still held tight to my anger. Cal helped, but I
didn't see her enough for it to help much.
Once I heard Ryo saying to Dee, in a voice that nearly broke my
heart. "Sometimes I think he hates me."
And Dee responded "He's fifteen. He hates the world right now. I
went out and set a parking lot full of cars on fire once, when I was
mad at Penguin. Don't you remember what it was like to be that age?
So much going on inside of you that it just had to escape?"
"No." Ryo was honest. "I didn't mind being that age."
"Well, you were a weirdo." Dee was laughing now, I could tell. "Most
boys look back and think that 15 was about the hardest year of their
lives."
That night I slipped out of the house with a can of gasoline, and I
went to the school. I stood there for a long time, and I fingered
the lighter in my pocket, staring up at the dark building. A hour
later I went home, the gas can still full.
I wish I could say things got easier after that, but it didn't. Dee
and I continued to butt heads for the next three years, making up
things to fight about if we couldn't find anything real. Every time
I turned around he was harping at me to do my homework, or explain a
bad grade, or demand to know where I'd been when I came home late.
I look back now with the eyes of a man, and I see his rules now for
what they really were, a labor of love. It was no easier on him than
it was on me staying up until 3AM making sure I finished an essay or
a math assignment, or driving around the neighborhood at midnight to
find me. He and Ryo probably hadn't enjoyed storming into a friends'
house in the middle of a party and dragging me out (I had
conveniently forgot I was grounded).
They continued to drag me, kicking and screaming, from childhood to
manhood, ignoring the bruises I put on them along the way. Loving me
in spite of myself.
So today is as much a victory for them as it is for me, perhaps even
more so. This is their honor too, the end results of their
investment into the life of a budding juvenile delinquent.
As I stand here, I watch the people I've trained with for months now
approach the podium to be handed their guns and badges, and I hear
the names read off to bursts of applause.
"Special Agent Dawson."
"Special Agent Englewood."
"Special Agent Goldman."
I walk forward in a daze and from behind me I can hear Dee yell
out "WAY TO GO BIKKY!" And I think "I'm going to kill him." Everyone
here calls me Bik, and I can see my classmates grinning at me now,
promising that I am so going to get teased later.
They finish reading off the names and say a few more things, and
then release us. Nothing in my life, not graduating from high school
or even college has equaled how I feel right now. Cal hugs me and
kisses me, and I think that as soon as I get assigned and settled
I've definitely got to start saving up for a ring. Then Ryo and Dee
are squeezing the life out of me, and they're both crying, just like
they did at my last graduations. And then of course Dee wants to see
my gun, and says that he's considering going into Witness Protection
now that I'm armed.
"Don't you mean Witless Protection?" I ask sweetly, and he swats me.
"If it wasn't for us." He growls. "Right now you'd probably be
wanted by the FBI instead of working for them." We both laugh and he
hands me back my gun.
He has his arm around Ryo, and I'm proud of them. I don't care who
sees it, or who knows what they mean to each other.
They call life the Rat Race. You don't always win, and even when you
do, the rewards aren't always that great. But you have to keep
running anyway, you have to keep trying even if the other rats are
bigger and faster.
I named the gun Whip.