Bad Monkeys (13 page)

“It’s often a related transgression, rather than the exact same one,” Dixon said. “Just to be thorough, I ran a check of your reading history to see if there were any signs of inappropriate sexual interest.” He held up the batch of printout he’d been looking at when I came in. “That search was more fruitful. Tell me, do you recall stealing a book from the San Francisco Public Library when you were twelve years old?”

It was such a left-field question I almost laughed, but the funny thing was, I knew exactly what he was talking about. When he said, “Do you recall,” it was like my brain got zapped with some kind of flashback ray.

And what was he talking about? What was the book?

Anaïs Nin’s
Delta of Venus.
Moon’s mother had a copy, and Moon and I used to read it to each other during sleepovers. Eventually I decided I wanted a copy of my own, and hooking it from the library was easier than shoplifting it.

“How do you know about that?”

“Library Binding,” Dixon said.

I thought he was talking about the anti-theft strip: “But I didn’t take it out the front door.”

“No, you tossed it out of the second-floor girls’ bath
room window. That branch of the library lost a lot of books that way.”

“OK, I’ll cop to stealing it. But what’s so inappropriate? I mean,
Delta of Venus
is smut, but it’s literary smut.”

“It’s a curious sort of literature, though, isn’t it?” Dixon said. “For example, the third story in the book—the one entitled ‘The Boarding School’—concerns a young student at a monastery who is ogled by priests and sexually violated by his classmates…This is what you consider
wholesome
erotic entertainment?”

“I don’t remember
that
story.”

“Don’t you? I’d have thought it was a favorite. According to my records, you read it nineteen times while the book was in your possession.”

“According to your
records
?”

“Library Binding.” He offered me the printout. “There are some other items here I’d love to get your comments on.”

I started going through it. It was crazy: a catalog of every piece of porn and erotica I’d ever laid eyes on. Not just titles, either—there were notes about specific scenes, even specific paragraphs I’d paid special attention to. And you know, it was bullshit, what he was implying, but with all of it thrown together on one big list like that, I could see how someone with an overly suspicious mind might get the wrong idea.

What else was on the list?

Well, De Sade, of course. Assorted Victorian gentlemen—in college, I must have gone through the entire Grove Press library, I mean, who the hell didn’t? Henry Miller. William Burroughs. Anne Rice.

At first I was kind of mortified, you know? But as I got further into it—it was a
long
list—I started to hit stuff that was harder to be embarrassed about, books and stories that weren’t technically smut at all, even if they did have sex in them. Towards the end the list-maker
really seemed to be reaching—there were even a couple of Shakespeare plays, I think. And then on the last page, I found the weirdest entry of all…

“The Bible?”

“November 13th, 1977,” Dixon said. “One of the few times you were actually in church. Eyes Only caught you lingering over a passage in Genesis—the one where Lot offers his virgin daughters to the mob in Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Uh-huh…And because I
lingered
over this Bible verse, you think I might want to sacrifice a real virgin to an evil mob?”

“If you’d lingered over it
nineteen times
, I’d certainly have cause to wonder. Just the once, we can probably write off to prurient interest…Although I do find it curious you were laughing as you read it.”

“Right.” I shoved the printout back into his hands. “I get it.”

“You get it?”

“Yeah. You can tell True to get bent.”

“Ah…You think Mr. True told me to give you a hard time about this.”

“I questioned his call on Tyler, didn’t I? But this isn’t even
close
to being the same thing…”

“You are laboring under at least two misimpressions right now,” Dixon said. “The first is that I care whether you’re comfortable with Mr. True’s policy decisions. Trust me when I tell you, putting low-level operatives’ minds at ease isn’t one of my concerns in this life.”

“What’s the other misimpression?”

“That I disagree with you about Dr. Tyler. If it were up to me, the organization would deal much more aggressively with him—and
all others like him.
Unfortunately, like you, I have to defer to Cost-Benefits. And even if the decision was mine to make, my dream solution wouldn’t be feasible.”

“Why not? Because everyone has sick fantasies?”

“No. That’s just something people who have sick fantasies tell themselves, so they can feel normal. But there
are
enough of you to make a clean sweep logistically impractical…” He waited a beat before adding: “People who
act
on their sick fantasies, though—that’s a more manageable number.”

And just like that, I finally got it, what this was really all about: he knew about the pet boys.

“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. “
Six
teen?” 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.