Chapter Four
Mister Hamilton had closets full of clothes that fit Ronnie perfectly. Ronnie knew that Mister Hamilton took great pleasure in abusing little boys because he had a house full of entertainment for the kids that included video games, a virtual reality room, candies, cakes, an indoor swimming pool, and a lot of sweets. For some reason, he had some kind of fascination with suits that Ronnie didn't understand. There were several, short suit sets with matching bow ties, pants suit sets, and they all looked very expensive, but overly gaudy. Ronnie never had nice things in his entire life. All he knew was the shantytown, moldy bread, and rat meat dinners. He dreaded the entire ride to Mister Hamilton's place during dinnertime, because he missed out on the rat cuisine his Momma prepared. Over time, a person grew fond of the foods he ate the most, and he had an affinity for wild rat meat and catfish. To a surface dweller, a cuisine of wild rodent meats and bottom feeding fish like catfish probably disgusted them, but Ronnie didn't mind those lowly foods. He liked what he liked. Not even Mister Hamilton's moist chocolate cake squelched his desire for his dinner meal of grill rodent meat and vegetables that grew underneath indoor lights for clandestine marijuana plants. He pretended to enjoy the cake, but he didn't want to upset a customer, a customer with wealth. He choked down the chocolate cake, but had a desire for his wild rodent meat. After he ate the cake, Mister Hamilton bathed the boy with a hard bristled brush that reddened his brown, pecan colored skin, and caused a few abrasions on his upper back. Ronnie realized quickly that the old man had issues that surrounded cleanliness. Mister Hamilton looked more like a construction worker, but he owned several high dollar furniture stores throughout Gotham and Metro City. He wore a blue, decorative robe with his last name stitched across the back. "Wash your face good, boy," Mister Hamilton demanded, "I want the smell of that god-awful sewer off you."
Grimacing, Ronnie took the towel, rubbed his face as hard as he could, and then showed the white, face towel to Mister Hamilton. "No more dirt left."
"Good … good," he said with a whisper. Mister Leener didn't care too much for cleanliness like Mister Hamilton did. He seemed to have some kind of fetish with having the sewer erased from Ronnie's body; so, it took over an hour for the bath to take place. Ronnie spent nearly an hour washing between his toes, his backside, between his legs, under his arms, and his neck repeatedly. That wasn't the order of body parts he washed, but he hit every crevice on his body once, twice, thrice, …, until Mister Hamilton gave the "All done." The round, decorative bathtub with images of nude men chiseled into the marble had jet streams, a heater, and bubbles that entertained him. Whenever Mister Hamilton scrubbed him with the brush, he flinched because the bristles scratched his delicate skin. His knife was in his tattered pant's pockets that lay on the floor, and he felt somewhat uneasy with the strange man touching him all over. The large television screen above the bathtub covered the entire wall, and he watched cartoons on it. All the things that Ronnie liked was at his fingertips, and the foods were truly enjoyable. Mister Hamilton climbed into the bathtub, and Ronnie exited the tub, dried off with a towel, and watched a little television on a stool next to the tub. Under orders, he took the thick, oddly shaped bristled brush shaped more like the male's genitalia than a brush, and raked it across Mister Hamilton's hairy back. "I don't like this...," Ronnie said with a grimace on his face.
"You're a service," Mister Hamilton snapped. "You're bought and paid for until tomorrow." Mister Hamilton slid open a drawer attached to the tub, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and started to smoke. "So, you scrub my back until I'm tired. Understand?" "Yes, sir!" The smell of the cigarettes caused him to cough and squint his eyes, but he managed to wash the man's hairy back. He wondered if the slaves had to wash the bodies of their masters. And if they did, it meant they didn't even receive a meager wage for it. Ronnie washed every inch of the man's back; and from the hairy water, he removed a lot of the man's hair too. It looked painful. The man's apartment had marble floors with several Greek like statues of nude men that met them at the entrance. Ronnie had never experienced opulence in his entire life, and he enjoyed drinking juice from a silver chalice and eating chocolates off a silver platter. After the awkward bath and the berating, he put on a white suit that fit him perfectly. It came with a little bow tie that made him look officially silly. Unfortunately, the old, fat man put a black collar on his neck, and Ronnie gave him a weird look of disapproval.
"Don't worry about it," Mister Hamilton said, "All the little boys will have them."
"Collars? Where's this?" Ronnie asked because Dennis didn't warn him about this. At the age of twelve, he didn't care to be treated like a dog, and the whole idea of the collar disgusted him. The majority of Libertines didn't think the sewer people had a moral compass, but Ronnie did. He had his limits, and the collar pushed him to the edge.
"At the Christmas Party," he said, "All the boys will have collars." When they arrived to the Christmas party in the Concord Hotel, Ronnie didn't expect to see so many men with little boys. Since he was twelve, he was one of the older kids compared to the rest of them. Across the floor, he saw Vivian with her escort, and he was a thinning haired white man who picked her up almost every Monday. She sat at the table on the far end of the room, and Ronnie noticed that she wore a thin, diamond encrusted collar that looked very expensive. He had put a coat of makeup on her face that almost made her look like a Joker's girl. The thick eye shadow made her eyes look sharper and the red lipstick gave her mouth the appearance of a vagina. Vivian had turned thirteen last month, and Ronnie bought her a strawberry cake and a card with some of his money he kept hidden in a secret place in the tunnel. She said that she enjoyed the cake, but she lamented about being a teenage whore most of the night. Ronnie listened, gave her a shoulder to cry on, and sang a lullaby that he heard once on an old television show. He didn't realize that a culture of men existed in Gotham who preyed on the innocent kids of the underbelly, and he was nothing but a tool of that culture. When Ronnie walked into the banquet room, he noticed all the Christmas ornaments on the tables with two small Christmas trees on each table. Every table had a ton of candies on top it for the children to devour. He liked the chocolate mints more than all the other candies on the table; so, as soon as he sat down at his table, he pocketed several of the delicious confections. And just like Mister Hamilton said, all the kids wore fancy white or black dress clothes with black or white collars, and they all looked like perfect dolls. Vivian had on a white dress that made her look like the perfect China doll, and she sat on her escort's lap. Ronnie couldn't bear to look at her as she entertained her escort. An endless amount of food that looked more like an extravagant buffet surrounded the entire room. Young men of different types and colors without shirts stood behind the tables of food, and served people as much food as they wanted to eat. Some of the men were already devouring their meals at the tables, and they would go back to the buffet to stack up on more food every time their trays emptied. He recognized a kid named Benny Lo, Vivian's brother, who lived in the shantytown with him, and he stood in the far corner quietly. Benny was at least a third generation Asian kid, but his father died when he was around three, and his momma didn't have the skills needed to find steady employment. Vivian probably was no older than a few months old when her father died. Joblessness was the curse of the underbelly, and nobody in the shantytown had a legitimate job. Ronnie's Momma often told him that poverty didn't wash off with soap and water; it wore off after having a generation of wealth. When Ronnie walked over to talk to him, Benny looked at him with his cold, almond shaped eyes, and lamented about being raped repeatedly before he arrived to the banquet. This would most likely be Benny's last year to attend the Libertine Festival because he was sixteen. "They're going to rape us tonight, Ronnie," he said with a soft voice. Sometimes kids scare each other for fun, but he wasn't funning when he warned Ronnie of the possibility that the grown men would ravish his body, and possibly infect him with a disease.
"How do you know?" Ronnie asked.
"'Cause I attended this thing last year," he said, "If you can leave, leave."
"Maybe we can both leave?" Ronnie said in an asking kind of fashion. Worried, Ronnie retreated to the other side of the room, and monitored the front entrance. Two large guards in black tuxedos stood watching the entrance for any intruders, and they made escape almost impossible. Inquisitively, Ronnie glanced over at the guards as they stood at parade rest, and wondered if he could trick them into letting him outside. Unfortunately, he knew the snow continued to fall and the temperature was well below freezing. So, he wondered if he should take his chances with the potential orgy or suffer through the elements. Ronnie walked over to Vivian, as she ate some kind of white bagel with an orange dipping sauce. The way her white dress clung to her petite frame, he could see that her womanly parts had started to develop. She had the look of a child, but started to develop into a woman. When she realized he stood beside her, she had an uncomfortable look on her face. Sheepishly, she turned away from him, and said, "Don't look at me. I'm just a cheap whore."
"Aren't we all whores?" He asked with a grimace on his face. "You'll always be my favorite."
She looked up at him with her almond shaped eyes, and asked, "Promise?"
He smiled. "I'm going to leave," he said with a whisper. He had a serious look on his face, and she looked as if he said something truly horrible.
"Leave? You'll forfeit your duties," she said with a scowl on her round face. "What's the first rule, Ronnie?"
"Money over comfort," he said, "But..."
"You know the consequences," she said, "But don't ask me to break the rules, and risk my family's life."
Ronnie placed his left hand on the back of her neck, and then walked across the room to his seat. Even though Vivian repeated the rules of the game to him, he didn't want all the men in the room using him like a piece of meat. When Ronnie looked across the floor at Vivian, he watched a tall Asian man grab her by the collar, take her to a back room, and Ronnie didn't dare imagine what was happening at that point. He felt a deep pain in his heart, and he could barely contain himself. He knew what happened in those rooms, but he had an attachment to Vivian. Mister Hamilton had started devouring his meal, and people had made several speeches about the passing of laws that allowed for men child relationships for the good of society. An aristocrat with a beard walked into the room with one white boy and one black girl between the ages of ten and thirteen on collars. The black girl wore a white dress and the white boy had on a black suit. The little boy had a bruise on his left cheek, and Ronnie wondered if the man had beaten him. The two kids weren't from his sewer, but probably lived in one of the other sewers throughout Gotham. Within an hour, Ronnie counted nearly eighty naïve little boys and girls in tuxedos and dresses with a look of innocents on their faces. The majority of them had already grabbed their meals, started eating, and had a look of serenity on their faces. The seating arrangements was a child, adult, and another child throughout the entire room. The majority of kids lived in some sewer in Gotham, and he recognized nearly ten boys and eight girls from his own shantytown.
Benny's abuser looked younger than most of the pedophiles in the entire room, but he didn't smile or take any of the candies off the table or show any emotion whatsoever. He seemed indifferent to what was going on in the room. His abuser turned to him, kissed him on the mouth, and then punched him in the arm. Ronnie turned away from the violence, and tried to remove the horrors of the imminent orgy out of his mind. Vivian returned to her seat, and apparently the Asian guy left reddish marks on her neck. Her ordinary escort took the Asian man into the hallway, and exchanged some words about her marked up neck. Even though the man showed legitimate concerns about Vivian, he didn't trust him. If he cared for her, she wouldn't be attending a party where grown men raped children. There was no such thing as a good man that allowed for other grown ups to molest children. A short, balding man in his late forties named Mister Green stood at the podium with a blue banner above his head that read, "Boy Love." A tiny tot no more than seven or eight stood by his side without saying a word. The old man started taking off his clothes one item at a time, and a few of the men took off clothes in the crowd. Ronnie looked over at Mister Hamilton, and said, "I need to go the bathroom." He had a look of worry on his face, because Mister Green took off all his clothes at the podium, and tossed them to the ground. Suddenly, the majority of the men in the room stripped naked in an almost ritualistic fashion.
He replied with a grimace, "Hurry up." He wiped his mouth with a white towel, threw it on the table, and shooed the boy with the flick up his left hand. "Don't make me come after you in there either. You're missing the best part."
"Yes, sir," Ronnie said as he slid out of the bustling room full of naked old guys, and went into the bathroom. The bathroom had two windows higher up than the little eight-year-old kid could reach, but somebody had placed a solitary chair in the far corner that might give him some assistance to reach the window. It was an old building with an old style of windows that easily rose up instead of pushing out. With the height of the snow next to the building, he wouldn't have had the strength to push it out. He slid the chair next to the window, and attempted to raise it. He tried for a few seconds until he noticed the window had a latch on it. Hurriedly, he unlatched the window, slid it open, and stuck his left leg out the window. In a flash, a bare Mister Hamilton burst into the bathroom, and tried to grab the youngster, but he was too fast. Ronnie hopped out the window, rolled down the hill, and laid flat on his back for a few seconds. Once he stumbled to his feet, he raced into the wooded area behind the building. Worried, he walked through the deep, unyielding snow for over two hours before he came to a place in the city that he recognized. He knew that Dennis would kill him for skipping out on the festivities, because an unsatisfied customer never paid full price. But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't allow all those men to rape him like that. By the time he made it into the sewer, he couldn't feel his feet. He walked gingerly against the wall, and came up on Dedra, as she sat beside the enormous pod attached to the wall.
"Who are you?" Ronnie asked.
Dedra—startled from Ronnie's voice—jumped to her feet in a fighting stance. "Oh … it's just a little boy."
"Little? I'm twelve," he said in a strong, forceful voice. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm just resting," she said softly, "Go 'bout your business, kid."
He looked down the hallway for any signs of Dennis, but didn't see anybody. "You don't belong here, lady. It's a danger place..."