Out of the Woods

The young man saw a homeless guy zero in on him from all the way across the waiting room. He looked a likely prospect, he supposed, with his fine leather car coat, Italian silk shirt, Guy Laroche shoes and just a bit less jewelry than would seem ostentatious. At least he supposed he looked more able to afford a handout than his fellow bus station denizens.

He watched the man slick down his hair and straighten himself in preparation for the actual approach, a futile gesture at best. It amused him to see hope gather in the man's eyes and he smiled as the man drew closer. Sure, he could easily afford a few bucks for the less fortunate. He pulled a roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a five, careful to keep the wad itself concealed. No point in inviting trouble. He stood, greeted the man and discreetly passed him the money.

"Keep quiet, now, about where you got that, OK?" he said while trying not to inhale the man's stench. "I don't need every street person in nine blocks hitting me up tonight."

"Don't you worry, mister," he said through stained and crooked teeth. "Mum's the word."

The young man watched as he shuffled away, thinking, no, actually bum's the word. He stretched, popping a few stray vertebrae back into their God-given juxtaposition, and yawned. He picked up his newspaper and settled back into the uncomfortable seat.

It had been a slow night for a Friday without even a single prospect to be seen. This was part of the game, of course, and in fact he rather enjoyed the hunt, but it wasn't much fun if the prey didn't show up. A glance at his platinum Tag Heuer showed four am and his thoughts turned to the steak and eggs waiting for him over at the Round-The-Clock Diner across from Union Station, and the cute little waitress with the slim, boyish body. The last of the overnight buses was due shortly, though, and he might as well check it out. He'd been there five hours, he could last another twenty minutes.

His intelligent green eyes never seemed to leave the newspaper for even a second. To all outward appearance he was immersed in the financial section, and indeed he actually was skimming an article about the poor recent performance of an offshore stock fund he was moderately into, but the majority of his attention was on a constant scan of the cavernous room.

Like some predator of the veldt, Johnny was always alert for both danger and opportunity. He wasn't so cocksure as to think himself the top of the food chain. There were hazards here, for sure. His was a very specialized business with high risks that justified high rewards. This danger had made a life for him, virtually from nothing, and he was proud of his self-made manhood. Johnny was proud, too, of his reputation for knowing his stuff. He could really pick `em.

He spotted Booker moving toward him in his resolutely cool gait, as always wearing that idiotic wide-brimmed hat and ankle-length tan leather coat with mink collar and lapels. This guy got his idea of pimping out of Superfly movies. The black man was so thin the coat looked like it was still on the hanger.

Johnny had never seen Booker actually leave with anyone, but he obviously got his girls somewhere, as he somehow afforded that big silver Lincoln he was so proud of. Booker flashed a toothy, insincere smile as he approached and offered a bejeweled hand for a soul handshake. How Seventies.

"Johnny, my man," he grinned through a haze of controlled substances. "Checkin' out the night life, I see."

"Everybody's gotta be somewhere, Booker," he said, grudgingly performing the handshake ritual but never making eye contact, so as not to encourage a lengthy conversation. The Tulsa bus was due any minute and he didn't want this poster boy for Just Say No hanging around him when it arrived.

"Say, man," Booker said, looking around quickly to be sure no one could hear. "You ever get tired of them little boys you come on 'round the crib. I got me some girls could make the Pope cum in his pants. Satisfaction guaranteed. You dig where I'm comin' from?"

Johnny smiled. "Booker, I'll bet you've seen every episode of 21 Jump Street."

The pimp bristled and backed away, gesticulating with his large hands. "Oh, you're a funny white boy, huh? I get it, man, I get it." Booker turned and took a couple of long strides, his tan leather billowing behind him. "Fuckin' comedian," he muttered, then spun and took a few backwards steps, adding, "You ever decide to come over to the right side of the street you let me know. We can do some business."

Johnny waved him off, and Booker was gone. He didn't really care that another pimp was working the bus station. Booker wasn't his competition. They were fishing with different bait.

It had been a while since he had been forced to play this waiting game. For the past year or so things had been pretty stable for Johnny and his boys, which was actually quite unusual. It was the nature of the business for its practitioners to be transient, coming and going according to their whim and the vagaries of street life. He'd lost boys to drugs, gang violence, the cops, girls, and even back to their parents. But then, being a boy hustler is a temporary position from the start, just as boyhood itself is temporary.

He'd been very lucky lately to have a few top quality boys who had started very young and given him two good years or more, including one who'd kept his childish look and appeal well past what should have been his prime. Kenny was nearly sixteen now but still looked thirteen until the hawk got his pants off. The day had finally arrived, though, when even the stupider hawks wouldn't fall for the shaved-pube bit anymore. The kid had made Johnny a lot of money over the years, but now he was starting to cost more than he was bringing in, and it was time to cut losses. Business is business, after all.

This was not a job one could advertise in the Sunday Tribune. His last three or four acquisitions had been casual, chance affairs. His boys had met them on the street, chatted them up, and they were hip and met the physical criteria so Johnny tried them out. Some of these were neighborhood kids who had been turning occasional tricks for pocket money for years, and just kept right on, only now for a lot more money. But some were street kids who moved in with Johnny and worked full time, and that's where the big money was.

Johnny didn't like being in the position of having to find someone in a hurry. It was much safer when they fell into his lap, but Kenny's imminent departure had put the pressure on to get someone up to speed. Being short a kid made it hard to cover the regulars and damn near impossible to take referrals.

Already most of the guys were refusing Kenny -- he was just too damn old for Johnny's particular clientele -- and scheduling around him was becoming a pain. Johnny hated like hell to turn away business. If the chickenhawks found another place to get what they needed they might not come back. Besides, Johnny had a reputation to protect. You could find greasy, gangly, drugged-out teenagers on half the street corners on the north side, but if you wanted them young, clean and discreet -- and you were willing to pay for it -- you came to Johnny, and he was determined to keep it that way.

He drained his lukewarm coffee just as the overhead speakers crackled to life, a weary metallic voice announcing the arrival of bus number 17 from Tulsa. Johnny focused his attention on the doors marked "To Buses" and absently tipped the empty Styrofoam cup to his lips once more. With a scowl he crushed it flat. He had a bit of a short fuse but the inevitable detonation was controlled, like the demolition of a derelict building with explosives. Sometimes Johnny went off like dynamite, but he knew ahead of time where the bricks would fall.

The glass doors burst open and the first wave of unwashed and aromatic travelers poured through, looking glad to be the hell off a cross-country bus. Johnny scanned the small crowd, mentally discarding the rejects like bruised peaches in the produce section.

His trained eye barely registered the rabble: the fat man trying to chat up the disgusted young woman, the frumpy hag with the grocery bag luggage, the wide-grinning sailors with their sea bags, one of whom Johnny noticed must have been damn cute not so many years ago. It was while he was musing on this one that got away that he spotted the boy and he cursed his stupidity at nearly allowing himself to be distracted. His eyebrows went up as the kid came fully into view, his senses heightened and his pulse quickening.

Johnny stood and began making his way closer, casually folding the newspaper under his arm and taking inventory of the boy's assets. This one had the physical requisites in spades. He was eleven, maybe a small twelve, with long flowing brown hair that fell back away from his collar as he craned his neck to gawk at the high ceiling of the barn-like bus station. He had small, delicate features and his brown eyes looked clear and bright even from across the room. The shoulders were perhaps a bit too strong, but he could be softened up with the right clothes. A bulky down vest disguised his torso, but Johnny had spent his life sizing up boys and he knew prime meat when he saw it.

A few steps closer and he noticed the nasty scab across the boy's upper lip. Johnny mentally checked off another item on his list: abuse. The boy carried no luggage, no one from the bus had stayed with him and no one seemed to be waiting to meet him. More importantly, the boy wasn't even looking around as if expecting to be met. This kid was alone, period.

It all added up to a runaway, a big plus in Johnny's business. One small minus was the clothes. They were dirty, but expensive and new. Rich kids run away sometimes too, and a few had been known to make it on the game, but generally they were accustomed to getting their own way and were more pain in the ass than they were worth. Also, rich parents can afford to keep looking for the kid, and what Johnny needed was boys with no strings attached. In his business it didn't pay to advertise, and he couldn't have his kids showing up on milk cartons or some damn thing.

Johnny discreetly paralleled the boy's movements about thirty feet away. The bus station seemed to impress the kid. He was probably from a hick town, where a grain silo is considered a big building.

Johnny's eyes narrowed in apprehension as the boy strode purposefully toward a bank of pay phones. The kid had someone to call, but it was a good sign when he struggled with the huge phone book and paged through it with increasing frustration. If the call were pre-arranged he'd have the number written down already, but he had to look it up. That meant the people weren't expecting him, and from the look of things he wasn't having any luck finding them in the book. Johnny's inward smile returned as the boy shuffled dejectedly to a nearby bench, where he sat and stared at the floor with a scowl.

It was almost time to make the move. He'd just let the kid get a little more scared and a little more desperate.

Johnny took a seat a couple of rows away to keep an eye on the boy. It wouldn't do to have someone else stroll in and take this find right out from under his nose. He slipped behind his newspaper once again and began to ruminate on the education that was in store for this kid, though he would never set foot inside a Chicago public school.

This one would be taught right, Johnny would see to that. In two months this boy would be as streetwise as he is now naive, earning four or five hundred a night with no sweat. He'd smell a cop a block away, and a perv who likes to beat kids up two blocks away. He'd sniffle a little and turn on the tears, and before the hawk knew it he'd be fishing an extra Jackson out of his wallet in some pathetic atonement for abusing such a sweet little boy.

He'd make this kid one of the best, a new Kenny, and just in time, too, now that the old Kenny couldn't hack it anymore. Boys grow into men, and that's a damn shame, but there's always more coming up behind them.

There would be no street corner shit for this kid, either, not like in Johnny's day. Back then it was wide open at Clark and Diversey. Clark and Perversity the cops called it. There were kids on every corner for three or four blocks up Clark, Diversey and Broadway, and the neighboring residential streets too, and the hawks would pull up in their cars and offer "a ride" practically without a care in the world.

They drove up and down, around and around the blocks like some bizarre parade, in everything from gleaming new Cadillacs to rust-bucket pick-ups. There were guys in greasy overalls and expensive three-piece suits. They were mostly white, and mostly middle-aged, but they could be anybody.

The one thing you could always predict was that they'd be alone in their cars. Cruising for boy hustlers is not something you admit to your friends, and besides, nobody with a brain in his head would get into a car with more than one guy.

Every once in a while somebody did, some kid who was too young or too stupid or too high to know better. Sometimes they came back beaten and bloody and sometimes they didn't come back at all. Bad things could happen with just one hawk, too. To make it on the game you had to have a sense about them, had to be able to size them up with a glance. Johnny was good at it, or else really lucky. Maybe a little of both.

Most of the guys were gentle, even sweet with the boys. They were usually torn up inside about their perversion, most hardly saying anything but some of them talking incessantly, apologizing over and over and promising that they would never hurt anyone. Those were the guys Johnny could take for a small fortune, fifty or more, which was a ton of money in 1968. He only got fooled a couple of times, and got away with only a few bruises and rope burns even then, but he knew kids who weren't so fortunate.

The one boy everyone called Skinny Jim was missing for a week and then the papers were full of stories about parts of him found in dumpsters in four different neighborhoods. Clark and Perversity was a lonely corner for a week or two, that's for sure, with only those in the most dire need of food -- or a fix -- venturing out.

Johnny crashed with his nicest regular for three nights, giving it away in exchange for a bed and two meals a day until the guy's wife came home early from visiting her sister. Johnny had to climb out the fucking bathroom window so she wouldn't catch him.

He was one scared twelve-year-old on the corner that night, but after a couple of uneventful tricks he had money in his pocket and food in his stomach, and could afford his usual five-dollar flop at Tony the Pothead's apartment, and things just sort of eased back into their normal routine.

Johnny was a very successful hustler, which is to say he was alive and reasonably healthy, with no serious addictions to sap his strength and his finances. He smoked pot, buying joints from Tony for a dollar apiece, but that was it. No alcohol, no hard drugs. He kept himself clean, too, his five bucks entitling him to the use of Tony's shower each morning in addition to the few square feet of living room carpet he slept on. Looking clean and healthy, along with his genuine cuteness, gave him his pick of the steady stream of men that pulled up to his corner.

He did four or five tricks a night that first year, at ten or fifteen bucks a pop just to let some guy suck his stiff little dink, and possibly bring the guy off with his talented hand and mouth. After taking care of the big kids, who for a slight fee would refrain from kicking his ass, Johnny was left with a cool thirty or forty dollars. That seemed like a hell of a good night's work to him.

This all went on relatively openly in the late 60s. Nobody gave a shit, least of all the cops. If a patrol car did happen to cruise by the place got deserted in a hurry, but mostly they didn't come around. Any beat cops who weren't on the payroll took it out in trade, so it wasn't in their interest to interfere with business.

Hell, one of Johnny's best customers was a sergeant from Back Of The Yards precinct. They used to do it in the paddy wagon on his lunch hour. The Sarge could suck like a Hoover and he was a good guy, too. He tried his best to pull strings when Johnny got popped for those burglaries up in Rogers Park, but a sergeant from the south side just didn't have enough influence way up north and Johnny took the fall.

Three times before he had been picked up and stuck back in some foster home, and three times he'd stayed a day or two and then bolted back to his street corner. This time a lady judge called him a habitual runaway, and the next thing Johnny knew he was in the back of a big car with no inside door handles or window cranks, speeding through the cornfields to someplace called Danville. It was what they called a state school for boys, where Johnny and a hundred and sixty-two other incorrigibles were effectively held prisoner. Security didn't seem to be all that tight, and Johnny figured he could probably slip out of the place if he set his mind to it, but there was simply nowhere to run.

He got the drift of the place the very first night. The lights in the junior dormitory abruptly went out at nine o'clock. About five minutes later someone poked their head in for a quick bed check and not five minutes after that the door opened again and a large figure crept in. A boy's high voice immediately began to beg, "No, Pauly! Please don't!" and shit like that, but Pauly wasn't in a listening mood, and a few seconds later the unfortunate child was wailing into his pillow while Big Pauly pounded hard and fast into his ass.

Johnny had heard all about fucking, and in fact plenty of hawks had tried to be his first, but he'd held them all off by demanding a hundred bucks or more for it, or, as a last resort, submitting to a slick-leg between the thighs. But lying there in the dark listening to the painful sobs and the animal grunts and the squeaking springs and the horrible silence of the onlookers who must have witnessed scenes like this a hundred times before, he knew it was just a matter of time in that place.

Johnny got roughed up by a couple of tenth-graders on the third day and escaped a genuine ass-kicking only by giving them his very best head out behind the wood shop. Even after that they finished him off with a backhand across the chops, just so he'd remember who's boss. He was fairly certain their next little party would turn into a gang-bang, but he didn't hold a grudge about it. That's just how it is in juvie, and no matter what nice name they put on the place it was still juvenile detention.

The pecking order is clear. The big guys bust the little guys, and if a little guy is smart he finds a big guy who doesn't hurt him too badly and makes him as happy as he can. Johnny was smart, and in less than a week he had hooked up with a big, muscular gym rat with about half the dick a sixteen-year-old ought to have. Donnie was tough, for sure, but he wasn't cruel, and the day he took Johnny for his bunk-buddy life in the cornfields of southern Illinois suddenly got a lot easier, and Big Pauly and his ilk became no threat at all.

Getting his butt busted the first time wasn't exactly Johnny's idea of a good time, but Donnie used a lot of grease and went a whole lot slower and easier than the Wood Shop Boys would have. And though Donnie was some kind of sperm factory on full production and took Johnny from one end or the other at least once a day, the sex was reasonably gentle and occasionally passionate.

The exception was when his "Daddy" loaned him out, and even that wasn't so bad because nobody wanted to piss the big guy off by making his kid too sore to fuck. Only once some guy got carried away and put it to him too hard, and Donnie made sure everyone knew who broke the guy's nose and why.

Johnny played the part of a model student, doing well in classes and suppressing the scorn he felt for his teachers and counselors. To him it wasn't really all that different from working the street. He was still giving grownups what they wanted -- in this case good behavior instead of sex -- the whole time pretending to like it. He kept his temper firmly in check and was never in trouble even once, passing his time in patient anticipation of the day he'd blow that pop stand. Johnny even made a few friends his own age and had some pretty fun sex-play, which he came to rather miss in later years. All in all Danville wasn't nearly as bad as it might have been.

When the state reviewed his exemplary record after a year he came out of the school with his thirteen-year-old ass opened wide and well-trained for making even bigger money at Clark and Diversey. Oh, he had his usual two-day stopover at some foster home, but one midnight escape and a hitchhike later he was standing on his old familiar turf, and within fifteen minutes he was riding to a cheap motel with some flabby salesman from Denver, ready, even anxious, to cash in on his new talent.

Tony the Pothead had gotten busted, and anyway with his newfound bigger bankroll Johnny decided it was time for a better place to live. He started working out of a transient hotel on the north side, which he got at less than half the normal rate just by giving the manager a freebie once a month.

It was there that he hooked up with several other streetwise chickens, and his gift for organization soon increased their profits geometrically. As time passed and the hawks grew less interested in his maturing body he concentrated on the pimp side of the business and by age sixteen Johnny had himself a well-oiled money machine.

The machine abruptly ran out of gas when he stupidly held some cocaine for a friend and ended up back in juvenile court, where they took one look at his record and decided he needed serious attitude adjustment. This time he went to a real juvenile joint, the kind with razor wire atop the tall chain link fence and a "faculty" whose crowning academic achievement was learning three different kinds of choke holds.

What goes around comes around, though, and this time when Johnny went inside he made sure he got his share of smooth, tight ass. He smiled as he remembered that little Cuban kid -- what was his name, Carlos? -- who was thirteen but you'd think to look at him that he was only about eleven. Never shed tear one, that kid, when Johnny busted him in. He just took it biting on the corner of his pillow, but he came after Johnny with a sharpened stick the very next day. Major cojones on little Carlos, that's for sure.

Johnny made nice with the kid and took him for his boy, waiting a whole week for his sore butt to heal and giving the kid gentle head every night until cute little Carlos rolled over and offered Johnny his soft brown ass with a smile. That was the day Johnny knew he had the gift: that if he wanted a boy he could get him.

The boy shifted in his seat and Johnny jolted back to the bus station. He watched a single tear roll down one bruised cheek and his whole body heave exactly once in a barely-suppressed sob. The kid fought mightily to hold it in, but his eyes betrayed a misery so profound it nearly had Johnny going. For just a second the pimp remembered his own first night in the real world and his determination flagged, but then just as quickly his ruthless self-interest regained control and the boy's pain turned back into dollar signs.

It was time to set the hook.

Johnny casually rose and started toward the boy. He carefully avoided making eye contact too soon; this encounter had to appear accidental. At exactly the right moment he would turn with eyes full of compassion and be the white knight riding to the rescue.

It was almost too easy.

An explosion of shouts erupted from the other side of the room. It was fucking Booker trying to calm a teenage girl to whom he had said God knows what. The girl screamed in Spanish, the only word Johnny could make out through the echo being "Policia." Booker backed away, gesturing with his big hands in his signature manner. He looked directly toward Johnny and reacted in fear, which made no sense until Johnny looked behind him and saw two leather-jacketed Chicago cops hurrying toward the fracas.

Johnny veered away, keeping his back to the cops just in case they might know him from his earlier days. He had no wants or warrants he knew of but why take the chance? He turned back just in time to see a flash of Booker's tan leather disappear out a side exit and the cops break into a jogging pursuit, one pulling his nightstick while the other barked into the radio Velcroed to his shoulder. A cop busy with other things is the best kind, and Johnny eagerly turned back to his objective.

The bench was empty.

"Goddammit!" he fumed, his fuse short as ever but holding the explosion for when he could afford the time. He rushed to the nearest exit and burst outside, hurriedly checking the street and sidewalk in both directions but finding them deserted. He dashed around the corner to where he could see up and down the adjacent street and nearly ran into a pair of particularly malodorous bums poking through the dumpster.

"Motherfuckin' Booker!" he screamed, kicking the dumpster as hard as he could. "Did you see a kid?" he yelled at the bums, but they were already scurrying off in search of less dangerous trash. Light snow clung to Johnny's eyebrows as the gong-like sound of the abused dumpster trailed off into the night, and he venomously muttered the single word, "Fuck!"

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Next time:

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