Daddy's Boy (7 page)

I was used to seeing men
in the house, so the sight of a house full of them wasn’t what
shocked me. It was the sight of my mother, her dirty-blonde hair,
which usually hung around her face in a bedraggled, tangled mess,
was clean and framed her cheeks as if she’d washed it and gone to
the beautician to have it freshly styled. She was dressed for the
first time in a long time, wearing a bright-yellow sundress, and a
pair of white heels, looking like a suburban mother. She wasn’t
walking around in a daze, wearing her old, stained, blue housecoat,
tilting up a large bottle of vodka to her lips, her eyes red and
bloodshot as she cried and told me about how much she missed my
father and how if it weren’t for me she would just slit her wrists
and join him. And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t find
myself praying she would do us both a favor, and just do
it.

I was so surprised by her
transformation I couldn’t even be angry that she’d forgotten to
pick me up from school. She’d been busy, obviously. She’d gone and
gotten help and cleaned up her act. She was out getting her hair
done, and she’d wanted to surprise me. That’s why she hadn’t picked
me up. It made perfect sense.

“
Close the door, Beautiful,
and come and give your mother a kiss,” she told me with a bright
smile.

I didn’t hesitate.
Dropping my backpack on the floor, I raced across the hallway and
into the living room and threw myself into her arms. She laughed as
she kissed the top of my head, and the sound filled my entire
being. It was a sound I thought I’d never hear again. It was
musical and filled with such light I felt instantly at
peace.

A peace that lasted for
all of two minutes.

“
Turn around, Beautiful,
and lean back against Mother’s chest. You’re in the way,” she
said.

I’d thought she wanted us
to watch a movie. It was something we’d done all the time when my
father had been alive, and I hadn’t questioned it, so I’d turned
around and pressed myself back against her chest, my eyes riveted
on the television. The dark television screen that showed nothing
but a reflection of my mother and me as she held out her arm to the
guy next to her was all I saw as I sat on her lap.

“
Mommy? What are you
doing?” I’d asked. I cringe now when I think of how little and
scared my voice had sounded in that moment. Of how naïve I’d
been.

My mother’s hand had come
up, the one currently free, and stroked through my hair. “Nothing,
baby. I’m just making the pain go away,” she’d told me.

“
The pain about Daddy?” I’d
asked.

“
Yes, baby. That pain.” I’d
watched as the guy wrapped what looked to be a long piece of rubber
band around my mom’s thin arm, like they did in the hospital, and
then picking up a needle, he’d winked at me and stuck it in my
mother’s arm.

I can remember crying. Not
because it hurt me, but because I hated needles. I always had. I
couldn’t understand why my mother would have me sit in her lap,
while she got a shot, when she knew I hated needles. She hushed me,
saying words of comfort. Her hand brushed through the strands of my
hair, getting slower and less coordinated, until her hand fell
away, and she slumped over.

Panic seized my body, and
I’d turned around in fear.

“
Mommy?” I’d cried, shaking
her shoulders. Her eyes slid closed, and a small smile appeared on
her face as I continued to shake her. I cried for her, ignoring the
five men in the room who assured me that she was fine. They all
looked like scary bears with hair covering their faces and heads,
and their clothes all dirty. All except one, who looked almost like
one of my teachers, in a suit like my daddy used to wear. He had
brown hair, and he kept smiling at my mommy, even while she looked
as if she were dying. While she’d been threatening to kill herself
for weeks—months—and I’d even been praying she would do so to give
us both a measure of peace, I’d never actually considered the fact
that she would do it. That she would leave me. I was her child. She
was my mother. The only family I had left. Why would she leave me
like that? I continued shaking her, crying her name, until one of
the men, the biggest bear, grabbed me around the waist and pulled
me away from her and tossed me down on the loveseat.

“
Shut the fuck up!” he
yelled.

My tears cut off abruptly,
and I sniffled as I looked up at him. He wasn’t a big man. He was
tall, though thin, with tattoos all over his body, brown hair, and
a hardness in his eyes that filled me with fear. He was someone my
daddy had told me once had no problem killing anyone, even kids.
Knowing that, I covered my mouth as he stared at me.

“
She ain’t fucking dead.
She’s just high,” he told me.

When I looked at my mother
and back at him with what I was sure was confusion, he shook his
head and tossed his hands up in the air. “She’s on drugs,
kid!”

I gasped, and shook my
head. “My mommy doesn’t do drugs. Daddy said they were
bad!”

“
Well, guess what? Your
daddy ain’t here no more, kid.”

I kept shaking my head.
“Drugs are bad for you. Mommy wouldn’t do them.”

“
Now how would you know
drugs are bad for you?” he asked, his eyebrows raised as he walked
toward me. I pressed myself back against the cushions of the
loveseat, really afraid now. Not that he would kill me, but that he
would do something even worse to me.

“
Because my daddy said so,”
I told him firmly.

“
Because my daddy said so,”
he mocked me. He nodded at two of the four men with him, and before
I could blink, they were holding me down, one of them with his hand
over my mouth. The prick of the needle in my arm, filled with some
type of amber liquid inside, scared me. The burn as the drug filled
my veins made me scream against the hand over my mouth. But the
narcotic, what I would later come to identify as heroin, burned
away my senses and removed my sense of control. I was left
vulnerable and thus powerless against the evil and darkness that
began to contaminate my soul. I floated on a blissful cloud, away
from the pain of losing my father, and away from the pain of losing
my mother when I lost my father at the same time.

That was when the darkness
entered me.

That was the first moment
the filth penetrated my soul.

****

I opened my eyes with a gasp. The
water had cooled around my naked body, and the candles had burned
out. The filth was still there. I could feel it there, pulsating on
my skin like a living, breathing entity crawling along the surface.
Half its body lived beneath the skin, bubbling, moving, and
curdling like month-old milk, poisoning me from the inside
out.

I clenched my fists where they rested
on either side of my prone body and sat up in the tub before
leaning forward to press the button that drained the water. I
didn’t move. Instead, I sat there until half the water had drained;
then I pressed the button again to get it to stop and turned the
faucet handle for the hot water to refill the tub. Soaking hadn’t
worked, and since I had no clients tomorrow, maybe scrubbing my
skin until it bled would.

Stella’s voice sounded in
my head, her pleas for me to come and see her, for me to come and
“get” her so I could keep my promise, and we could finally live
together, haunted me, and all I wanted, all I
needed
in that moment was to not
feel so filthy. I just needed a moment, a minute, a second where I
felt clean.

Turning my head, I saw the
small bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide and considered it. Once a
month I seriously thought about it, and once a month I rejected the
idea of drinking it. Maybe not the entire bottle, but half of it. I
had considered bleach, but hydrogen peroxide was good at cleansing
wounds and bacteria, right? Filth and all of that? I shook my head
and looked away from the bottle with a disgusted sigh. I wasn’t
quite
there
. I’d
known other companions who’d gotten to that point. Some who had
been overwhelmed by the darkness and had overdosed or hung
themselves, some who had slit their wrists; and while most people
thought it was because of their lives as companions, what people
didn’t realize is it was usually because of the darkness and the
filth that built up long before they went in that
direction.

Or at least that’s how it was for
me.

But not my friend, Elliot. Elliot
didn’t choose to leave the world because of the filth and the
darkness clawing away inside of him; he left because of the
darkness festering away inside of twenty other people.

Elliot was the sweetest little guy.
Puerto Rican. Five foot three, with wavy, blond-highlighted,
light-brown hair and hazel eyes. He was gorgeous. He had a round
ass and a twinkling laugh. He was cute and sweet, even though his
father had practically killed him when he came out, and his mother
had burned the sign of the cross into his shoulder. Elliot remained
positive. When KuJoe started pimping him out, Elliot just smiled at
each guy he slept with and chattered happily when they left. He
brightened the little apartment we all shared, and we all looked
forward to his sunshine every day.

But slowly his bright smile started to
grow dimmer, as KuJoe started to pimp him out to meaner and meaner
customers, and instead of just one John, Elliot was taking on two,
three, and sometimes groups, until he was sent to a “going in”
party for a man who had just won a seat as a Republican Senator. As
a future senator, knowing he was going to be even more heavily
scrutinized, he was having one last hurrah, and Elliot was the
special gift.

I’d never gotten the full details from
KuJoe. All I knew was what I’d read in the news, what I knew from
KuJoe’s shady business dealings, and what I knew of my sweet
friend.

Elliot had probably arrived
at the home of the newly elected senator’s friend and knocked on
the door, thinking he was there to only service three men, because
KuJoe told all of us we would
never
have to take care of more than three at a
time.

Ever.

I was told when Elliot walked into the
room, he saw two men, and then the door was locked. I was sure that
he, being sweet and shy whenever he first met a client, probably
introduced himself and began taking off his clothes. I’d worked
with Elliot before and knew that’s how he did things. The news
reports said there was no way to determine exactly how many men
were actually there, but when Elliot was naked and completely
vulnerable, the other men showed up. When one of the men who’d been
arrested had been interviewed, news reports released his statement
saying there were twenty in all, either naked or in various states
of undress. Maybe Elliot thought they were just going to watch, I
don’t know. But at some point that night, my friend was drugged,
beaten, raped, choked, stabbed, and then tossed out of the car
toward the river. However, they were in such a hurry to dispose of
the body, they didn’t pay attention to what they were doing because
Elliot’s body landed on the edge of the shore, right in front of
three men who were fishing.

KuJoe, who had used a fake name, a
disguise, and a burner cell, and had set everything up in a
different location from where he usually did business, had gotten
away with setting up Elliot to be gang-raped and murdered. That
fucking asshole. And I had lost one of my closest
friends.

Hearing about Elliot was one of the
first times I’d almost given in to the darkness. I can remember
staring at KuJoe, as he’d shrugged and said it was just “another
dead whore,” before turning and walking back to the room I’d shared
with Elliot and grabbing my straight razor. I probably would have
succeeded in killing myself as well, too, if KuJoe hadn’t walked in
at that moment and stopped me. He’d told me he could afford one
dead whore but he couldn’t afford two.

Grasping my loofah in one hand and my
specially made shower gel in the other, I poured the liquid on the
sponge and began soaping up my wet, naked body. I started off with
slow, gentle strokes, before scrubbing harder and harder until my
pale skin turned red and started to bleed, but I continued to
scrub, trying to clean away the filth and the grime I could still
feel.

I stopped when I heard the soft knock
at my door and dropped my loofah into the now pink water. Sighing
deeply, I sank back beneath the water once more before rising from
the tub. Depressing the button to drain the water again, I grabbed
a towel to dry myself before wrapping a long black-and-gold robe
around myself and heading downstairs to the front door.

I opened the door and looked down into
the innocent gaze of my neighbor’s seven-year-old son, Allen. I
smiled at him.

“
Hi, Allen.”

“
Hi, Tyler!” He waved. “My
mom and dad went out to a fancy dinner, and the babysitter sniffed
that funny powder again that you told me to stay away from and
passed out, so can I hang out with you until they get
home?”

I smiled at Allen and stepped back to
gesture him inside. “Sure, Allen. Come on in.” Allen’s parents knew
all about me and my “chosen” career path. Not just because they
lived next door, and practically everyone in the entire condominium
knew what I did, but because Allen’s father, Aiden, used to be a
client of mine, even after he married his wife, Madison. As a
matter of fact, Aiden was one of my favorites. He wasn’t so old I
had to imagine the money when we slept together, but he wasn’t so
young I had to take on the role of teacher. Which worked out quite
well for me. I would never tell Madison, but Aiden had offered to
make me a “permanent” part of his life. I had been tempted to say
yes, but then I’d met Allen. I could never do that to this sweet
little boy, no matter how big of a bitch his mother could be
sometimes.