*The following tale is fiction. It contains graphic descriptions, intense situations, and consenting sexual material involving
men, women, and in some cases teenagers. If this kind of material is illegal where you are, if you are underaged, or if material of this
sort offends you, you are urged to turn back RIGHT NOW.  Otherwise please enjoy.

**Questions, feedback, and constructive criticism are very welcome.  Please send it to: twisted_dreemz@yahoo.com

*** Author's note at bottom of page for those who read the first draft of this story.

D.M.C

Denn's Mobile Circus

Introduction – Life: In the Key of Transition

Like any other person, I was born into this world bound by statistics and stereotypes.

Most likely to be undereducated.

Most likely to be sexually active at a young age.

Most vulnerable to AIDS.

Most likely to drop out of high school and never see a GED, let alone college.

Most likely to be dead or in prison by age twenty-one...

Nah. I didn't get the good ones.

It was my mother who taught me how to break those bounds. She had me at age twenty-one and supported me mostly on her own. There were friends, but never family. All I knew about them was that they were people my mother didn't wish to interact with anymore, so we never did.

My father and her were together until I was one, but I don't remember him at all. He'd been kicked out when my mother discovered he'd been having an affair with another married woman since shortly after my birth. He probably thought she'd sink and come calling wanting to talk things over. She fooled him. She didn't need his money, or him, to keep business running. It had been her apartment she'd kicked him out of. Not his. Not even joint. Hers. And even if it was in the hood, it was still independently owned and kept by her.

The stigma on the hood now isn't the same as it was in the 1980's. Then, it was just: "where the black people, a couple of Mexicans, and maybe a bit of poor white trash lived". But the people or the neighborhood wasn't bad. One could safely walk its streets at night without worrying about trouble. Instead, the place had a kind of unity. Most everyone living there understood the same daily struggles.

The education stigma was clear and present however. Schools in, or nearby, the hood were still the ones with the least amount of money and resources. Teachers hated teaching at those schools. Hard to do a job when there isn't any money to do it with.

This is probably the situation that creates the statistic of under education. Kids gravitate to what they feel is teaching them the most. For me, and probably all the kids in the hood then, that left a majority of my education to come from those around me and my own experiences, instead of from school books or school teachers. Guess it would be called getting a hooducation.

Mine began when I was five when me and my best friend, Myron, were taught how to steal by his older brother, Kevin. Myron and Kev's mother had been watching me since Myron and I were babies, so to them I wasn't just their friend, I was their "play" brother. We weren't related by blood, but by time spent together. And to Kev, that meant I got the same little brother treatment and training that Myron got.

The storeowner either never caught on (or just didn't trip) on the fact that we would take things and stuff them in our underoos, while Kev would be up there paying for his stuff. Even though a boy hasn't got much down there at that age, it was still little things we took. Easier to hide, more variety, and more quantity.

If allowance was a word in our vocabulary back then, we probably never would've stole. But being that young and having money? Nope. Especially when you were on free lunch. And there was no way in hell an older brother was going to spend his hard earned money on his little brothers.

Next in my hooducation was the learning of hierarchy in the area of child socialistic structure. It went:

Little kid, (age 6-9),

Big kid, (age 10-14),

Older kid, age (15-17).

It wasn't until twelve or so when a boy underwent some kind of change that made him want to start torturing all boys in the "kid" category. It was those boys, the big boys, me and Myron had to watch out for. Those were the ones fast enough to catch up to us if we tried to run and didn't shake them fast. The ones that, (if in the correct mood), would actually hurt us and not let up. That's what happened to me and Myron one day. And even though Kev went straight out there, found those boys and scared the living shit out of them, he'd told us:

"Don't no sissies live in this house. Ya'll goan learn how to fight."

He gave us the basics, but no pro-tips. It was enough for us to be able to defend ourselves nine times out of ten when those kinds of situations arose. That kept us from getting messed with a lot more often than I know we would've.

The next lesson from our almighty sensei would come in the form of being taught how to get our hustle on when me and Myron were eight. That was mainly because Myron and Kev's mother had to change shifts at her job. She got off at the same time my mother did, which was eleven at night, so Kev was our watcher from after school until our parents made it home.

Our workplace was at the park where Kev and his boys sold weed that another friend's father grew.

Never did know if the father supported that or was ignorant of it.

People used to cruise around the park in their cars over and over, bumpin' their music, stopping to talk to people they knew, so it wasn't unusual to find a park busy at around six in the afternoon, weather permitting.

Kev and his boys had their little business all set up. Buyers would come up and give the money to either Kev or one of his boys. They would then give the buyers one of three bags of candy to make it look like that's what they were selling. Depending on the bag of candy the buyer got, me and Myron knew how much weed they'd bought and which one of us would give it to them.

Always the slick one, Kev had a way to make our end of the transaction look normal. Either me or Myron would run up to the buyer like they were somebody we knew so they could either tackle us, or give us piggy back rides. It was during that time that the trade would be made. The police never caught on when they came around, thank goodness for all of us.

Of course me and Myron thought we were big shit getting to hang out with a group of older kids. But we learned that there were cons to this as well as pros.

Cons. Hanging out with older boys meant a thickening of the skin and the dropping of our sacks, figuratively speaking. We learned how to talk just as much shit to them as they did to us. Because teenage boys do that...a lot. We also learned how to stand up to them, while still being smart enough to know when to shut up. Kev and his boys were bigger, stronger, and faster than us. Pushing it to far meant finding out how well they excelled in all three.

On top of this were the actual rules for hanging out with Kev and his boys.

Number one: we had to do what Kev or his boys said when they said it.

Number two: no whining, crying, or pestering at any time for any reason.

Number three: no snitching about the business we did at the park.

"You break that rule, and all four of us will break your ass." Kev had warned us.

We never did.

The cons did not outweigh the pros to me and Myron, though. Hanging out with older boys was a status upgrade in the hierarchy. If older boys thought that two little kids were cool enough to hang with them, then these little kids had to be cool. That meant no more worrying about any other kids messing with us. It meant getting paid. Kev was nice enough to give us each ten dollars for our work. Just enough to seem like a lot to two little boys, but not enough to do any damage with that might attract parental attention.

Being around older boys also introduced me and Myron to a lot of things we were years away from. Advanced hooducation we'll say. On the day of my tenth birthday was the first advanced lesson. It was the first time I ever got drunk. Kev was put in charge of us over a weekend, while our mothers went out of town to check on Myron and Kev's grandmother. With Myron's birthday being the day before mine, he'd been waiting for that weekend as much as I had. Kev promised he would do something to celebrate us reaching our first double digits. He'd known how big a deal it was to us. It meant the end of being little kids forever.

Since my birthday landed on Friday, the "something" was presented to us that night after our parents were on the road. Kev had brought me and Myron a single six pack of beer to share, and let us have one cigarette each. Our mighty sensei was smart enough to know that it wouldn't take much to have me and Myron on full for the rest of the night. I think we might've gone through two beers each before they just suddenly "disappeared". Me and Myron did not care. We were having the time of our life being "men".

My tenth birthday was also the day I looked at porn for the first time. Then, the only way to get ahold of it was from your father, (if he was around), have someone buy it for you, acquire it from some other source, or to steal it. And we're talking magazines. Video was an ultra rare find and not everybody had a VCR to play the tape on.

Kev's friend, Raynell, had a cousin who was nineteen years old. He'd let him borrow something from his porn stash every now and then. Me and Myron had always known they were looking at "dirty pictures". They'd told us what they were looking at, and that we weren't allowed to. If we got caught trying to look, that meant two punches to the chest.

Raynell had come to join our little party after me and Myron were happily buzzed. We'd been watching one of the Freddy Krueger movies when Raynell broke out the two magazines he had. When me and Myron continued to focus on the movie, Kev told us that we could look, but only that night.

With the porn magazine as our picture reference, me and Myron found out why boys had boy parts, girls had girl parts, and the difference between the two. We found out about body hair, (we both thought it was nasty that we were gonna get hair up our asses), breasts budding, balls dropping, dick's getting bigger, and last but not least orgasms. It was the reason boys jacked off and men had sex. The feeling of it was awesome.

Telling two ten year olds who've had a few to drink the reason why they got boners and that if they played with them it felt good, (and if they kept playing with them it'd feel really good and stuff would come out), is not the right thing to do. Immediately we wanted to try it. Kev and Raynell killed it when they told us we had to reach puberty before we could have an orgasm. That was two or so years off.

Didn't stop me and Myron from trying it anyway much later that night.

Being ten years old meant our sex drive hadn't been installed yet. Both of us thought it felt good messing with our hard junk, but we thought it was supposed to be some kind of time release thing. You get hard, you play with it, you have an orgasm. We didn't know there had to be mental effort on our parts to help things along. So never did reach that big "O" that night, but we went at it until our wieners were too sore to do it.

My hooducation would prepare to come to a close shortly after my eleventh birthday. Fortune smiled on my mother when she met a man named Steven. He was a rarity at the time. A black man who'd defied the statistics. He'd escaped his hood environment and saw that there was a whole other world beyond it. I'd met honest men, noble men, the dudes who were responsible enough to stick around and take care of their kids. These men had hustle, but they did not have the education that Steven had. He was the first truly educated black man I'd ever met. He had a job in what would come to be known as the IT field, and the money even then was stupidly good.

Stephen was the only man I'd ever seen my mother fall into sync with. The yin to his yang. And he was the first man I'd ever seen my mother fall head over heels in love with. He was the first man I'd ever seen fall head over heels in love with my mother. A year after that, we were out of the hood and into the world.

Stephen was the first man I ever came to respect and grow to love. I didn't like him intruding on my space at first. I was used to being the man of the house and did not appreciate someone stepping on my shoes. But Stephen had this uniqueness to him. It was like nothing surprised him. He always knew how to deal with whatever situation came his way.

That included a child that wasn't his.

A thing that takes a severe amount of patience.

I know my stubbornness was not a walk in the park for that man. Still, he let me know that he wasn't trying to make me or my place any less important. But I was the boy and he was the man. Until I was a man, I was expected to stay in a boy's place. Even though I wasn't his by blood, he was taking the responsibility. It was his job to show me what it was to be a man and to be that positive male influence in my life.

At twelve and a half age for me, Stephen and my mother welcomed their first child together; my little brother Dorian. At age fourteen, they welcomed their second child together; my little sister Alexis. Life was good for us all, and for once I got to see what things were like post-hood.

And that was a hell of a culture shock for me at age eleven.

There's a saying that goes like this: you can take a nigga out the hood, but you can't take the hood out the nigga. Translated, that means a black person can leave the hood, but they can't leave the hood mentality behind. And it's not that they don't want to, but until one actually leaves the hood, you don't know that it's the hood. The hood accustoms one to living a certain way and playing life's game by a certain set of rules. Outside the hood, though, one discovers just how narrow those rules really are and how broad the rule-set really is.

For some people, that broader rule-set is too much to comprehend. So they run back to what they know. What's familiar. I never thought there was any shame in that. If a person isn't ready for something then they just aren't ready for something. It doesn't mean give up and never come back to it, though. It didn't mean staying hood and not adapting because it was the only way I knew to survive.

There was no Myron of Kev to be with me. They'd moved out of town at around the same time me, my mother, and Stephen moved out the hood. Myron's grandmother had gotten worse, and his mother had been the one to transfer her job and move to where she was, despite having brothers and sisters who lived in the same place as their mother, but just didn't want to be burdened. It was always a ball going up to visit them. But it was never the same as having them there with me every day.

This leads into junior high.

What an experience.

It was the early 90's. That was when the newest version of anti-authority and rebellion showed up in the form of gangsta-rap. For black boys and black young men, it was an image and message that hit all the right notes and sucked them into the arms of ghetto mentality.

The ghetto was the dark side of the hood. If the hood was the place where some were struggling, the ghetto was the place where everyone struggled. That meant more desperation and more people willing to do undesirable things to make ends meet. It was a rougher place with darker streets that you didn't walk down alone at night. It was a place where police were the enemy, (racial profiling for the win) and oppression had reached a pitch so feverish, the victims had begun to retaliate any way they knew how.

Most black people can relate to that to some extent.

Once "Boyz n the Hood" came out, it was over from there. The mainstream picked up the trend and milked it for every single penny they could. This trend became an image so strong that it started to define and influence how young black people walked, talked, acted, and dressed. It changed the way we looked at one another and created a strong intolerance among us.

Since I'd been allowed to finish out elementary at my old school and graduate with my friends, junior high was the first school I attended that was not in the hood. I'd always been smart and a good student academically, but didn't know just how disadvantaged I'd been by going to school in a place where the money for education is lowest. Stepping into seventh grade was like stepping into the ninth grade.

This was also the first time I was at a school where my skin color was the minority. The majority was white. It's what all my teachers were. When they (along with the white students) saw the cornrows in my hair, heard the ghetto twang in my voice, my fate was automatically sealed. To them, I was every bit that six letter word that unless you're the color, saying it even today can get you killed in certain situations. And since I'd been around my own race most of the time, prejudice and racism were things I only knew as stories versus experience.

Maybe it was because they believed in those statistics about my race and gender, or maybe it was something else, but when my teachers realized how good a student I was they were in shock. It was like I was showing them something they had never seen before. Most of my teachers took to this. Glad to have me as one of their good, smart kids. Those other few teachers didn't take to it. They thought I was getting someone else to do my homework and cheating on the tests.

I told my mother about it. It honestly bothered me how little those teachers thought of me.

"They're just mad that you're smart, baby, and not some dumb little nigga that can't even spell algebra." she'd told me.

"Why does that even matter, though?" I'd asked.

"Because sometimes that's how white people can be when it comes to black people. They don't want us to be smart, have good jobs, or live in nice houses. They want us to be nothin'. And they for damn sure don't want us havin' nothin'."

Although it was dumb to me that adults would feel that way about a child, I'd understood. And as far as I'd been concerned it was an honor to go into their class and do well everyday. Until they found the non-existent evidence that I was cheating, or not doing my work, them having to write down a good grade for me was sweet revenge.

Peer wise, I was an outsider in the beginning. I didn't know any of the black kids, (they hadn't been from my part of the hood), and the kids of other color seemed afraid to even approach me. There were kids I talked to in class, but none that I actually hung out with. That would all change one day when I joined a basketball game during recess.

The junior high I'd attended started at sixth grade instead of seventh. Reputations had already been established for most students. One of those students was a boy named Jakeab York. A white boy with naturally good looks who happened to have a natural talent for most anything he did. His basketball skills rivaled even the eighth graders when he was in the sixth, and he had been faster than the seventh graders when it came to track. With him in the seventh grade, he was the fastest kid in school and his basketball skills still rivaled his upper classmen. So of course, this made the kid very self-confident.

I was on the team opposite of Jakeab. Once the other kids saw how well I could juke Jakeab's defense and storm his offense, it was like I'd walked on water to them. This led to some races on the track during lunch recess, where I beat Jakeab the three times we ran.

To have someone come along and take away both of his titles like that meant Jakeab hated me from that moment forward. I honestly didn't care if I was better than him at those two things, and hadn't been looking to take over his domination. Still, the damage had been done.

Midway through our seventh grade year Jakeab and me were put into a group together. Aside from the classes we had with each other, I hadn't seen or talked to him since the day of the races. Notice about his hatred of me had trickled down to my ears from the other boys who played basketball at recess. I figured this would be a good opportunity to bury the hatchet between us and move on.

Jakeab had other ideas.

For the first thirty minutes of the assignment we argued over every damn thing. From how to do the assignment to how to answer it. The argument ended when he said: "Why should I listen to some stupid nigger anyway?"

I responded by showing him how hard I could punch.

I expected him to be a sissy, but he was pretty tough. It was probably because I could hit harder than him that I even won.

Ten minutes after that, while we were reflecting in the school office waiting to see the principal, he broke the silence by saying:

"I didn't know niggers like you existed."

Hoping I wasn't gonna have to take him to school again, I asked him:

"What kind of nigger do you think I am?" I'd said it with the "er" on purpose.

His answer?

"You're too smart to be a nigger. Niggers are supposed to be stupid. So I guess I'm not sure what you are."

I had no idea where this kid was getting his info from, so I fed him back some of my own. I told him:

"You're tough for a white boy. I was expecting you to be a little faggot."

The meaning of that word to us then was the equivalent of girly-boy. A complete sissy that even the girliest girl could beat up without getting her dress dirty. It was the word "fag" that meant the orientation slur to us.

Jakeab had laughed and said:

"I'm rich, but I'm not that rich. I take care of myself. I fight my own fights."

Yes. I had no idea that I'd just beat up the son of a family who owned two popular and well established restaurants in town.

Jakeab's parents wanted to get me expelled. They must've thought people couldn't hear them while they were in the office, because his father called me all sorts of names. He toned that part of it down once my own mother arrived, which was a good on him. My mother would've gone to the car, gotten her bat out the trunk, and went off like Miss Sofia on that man.

Once the parental conference was over, Jakeab told his parents, my mother, and the principal that the fight was his fault for calling me a stupid nigger, so expelling me would be getting rid of the wrong one. The principal listened, suspended him for two days for using a racial slur, and suspended me for one day for fighting. That was the end of it.

I never would've thought that that would be the thing that put me and Jakeab on mild speaking terms. Then again, that's how males sometimes solved their issue. Beat the shit out of each other, go for a beer together afterward. We'd say "hi" to one another if we passed and would work together in our classes when put into groups. Every now and then, he'd ask if I wanted to join him and his friends playing basketball at recess...but wouldn't allow me to be on the opposite team.

It wouldn't be until basketball season of our seventh grade year that an actual friendship would start to develop between the two of us. Jakeab suggested I come with him to school team tryouts so that we could: "Combine our powers and use them for good". By the end of the basketball season, he became the first white kid I'd ever had as a best friend.

Originally, my mother wouldn't let me be friends with Jakeab. She eased up after getting to know his mother and aunts, who were always in attendance at the basketball games.

"If they ever treat you wrong, or say something to you, I want to know." were my mother's instructions.

Having Jakeab as a best friend introduced me to a whole other culture. He liked gangsta-rap, but was more into rock, grunge, and metal music. I was always a sucker for good beats and instrumentation, so while it wasn't what I was used to, I didn't have a problem liking it. He was also into the skater scene. That was the white boy form of rebellion and anti-authority at the time. It was something brand new to me and I found a certain coolness in it.

I also got to see how rich people lived. And boy was it good. Jakeab was the first kid I'd met who had a room so big that it made mine (which was average sized) look like a closet. Him having his own TV, computer, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (with every game he wanted), his own stereo...it just blew me away. It was the ultimate fantasy room for a boy at the time.

By the time eighth grade rolled around, I'd been introduced to Jakeab's friends, had gotten cool with them, and had gotten more into skating. I'd even started to dress like them, which was like a skater. I didn't know that I'd broken all sorts of rules with just that one move.

The gangsta rap/ghetto life movement had emphasized a term called "sell-out". A sell-out was a black dude who tried to be white. None of the other black boys at the school skateboarded. That was something the white boys did. None of the other black boys at the school hung out with white boys. What would a white boy (who gets everything handed to him) and a black boy (who has to fight to get something given to him) have in common? And the other black boys sure didn't dress like a skater. That was how white boys dressed.

Open minded has always been my way of thinking, even then at that age. I didn't care about what color a person was. I cared about who the person was. Why be so narrow-minded and restrict myself to only my race? My race wasn't the only one on the planet.

Open-minded was not what the black boys from the hood were.

They started by talking shit at me. Calling me oreo, uncle tom, sell-out...whatever name they could come up with to mean the same. Sometimes they'd even tease me in the locker room, saying stupid little things like:

"Thought yo skin was goan be white underneath when you took yo shirt off!"

For the most part I ignored them. I'd already been around boys older than them. What they were trying to do was nothing to me. Along with the fact that I didn't know any of them, why did I need to care about the things they said? When they realized their words weren't going to work, one of them tried to snatch my backpack off. That failed, so he decided to take a swing at me. I whooped his ass solo in front of all our cousins.

After that, I didn't get anything except dirty looks and glares from the black boys, and some of the black girls started talking to me. Once they found out that I was from the same place they were and that I wasn't denouncing my blackness, but that I wasn't going to let myself be restricted by it either, they were all into me. Girls at that age at that time used to like a boy with a little substance.

Substance was one of the things Jakeab liked about me. He was in love with the fact that I was everything his father said I wasn't supposed to be. According to his father, I was "an illiterate little curse on society who would never be anything more than a burden on him and other honest, hard working, tax payers."

"If my old man knew how wrong he was about you, he'd probably have a cow and the farm to go with it."Jakeab would always say.

His father was one of those people who was often correct in his judgments and advice. So much so that when he was actually wrong about something his stubbornness in accepting it was enough to make an ass wanna retire.

His mother, on the other hand, wasn't so judgmental. It's not to say that she didn't have her own opinion of me, but for her, I was innocent until proven guilty of her opinion. She was the only parent for awhile who knew Jakeab was hanging out with me. His father wouldn't hear of it officially until almost a year later, once his mother had seen for herself that I wasn't what she (or he) thought I was.

Jakeab was as book smart as they come. However, having parents of a conservative nature meant a certain kind of ignorance on his part. Especially when it came to the subject of the birds and the bees. We were finishing practice one day and he asked me if I ever had piss that was sticky. I asked him to explain it to me and found out he didn't know a thing about sex or the fact that he was going through puberty. I had to educate him.

Back then masturbation wasn't looked at as a natural thing. It was looked at as something boys who were nasty did. No boy would ever admit to the fact that he did it, liked it, felt guilty for liking it, but would do it again in a group of friends. However, when two boys are alone and the situation happens to be just right, admissions and questions come out. Questions like the one Jakeab asked me the week after I'd given him the sex & puberty 101.

"Can you, like...I dunno...show me how to do it?" he'd asked.

"As long as you don't tell nobody." I'd answered, surprised by him asking, but not put off.

Jakeab had given me a "dude, really" look.

Showing him how to masturbate was the first time anyone (except my little brother) had seen my junk since I was ten. It was also the first time I'd seen anyone else's junk (except my little brother) since I was ten. I expected him to be just like me down below and was surprised when I saw the differences. My pubes were black and curly. His were straight and sandy brown, like the hair on his head. He had more than I did when it came to that, but my sack was heavier than his. My dick was longer than his, and pointed out and slightly up when I got hard. His was fatter than mine and pointed straight up when he got hard.

We went at it for ten minutes, with him copying what he saw me doing, and nothing happened. I didn't know what he was doing wrong, since I knew I could go off by masturbating, and that he was old enough to be able to as well.

"Let me see you do it so I know you're even doing it right." Jakeab had told me.

I wasn't sure I was going to be able to, since I was going to be on display, but I did. Jakeab got his first look at a real orgasm with a nut-shot. After questions about how I was able to do it and he wasn't, Jakeab finally said:

"All right, you do it on mine then. `Cause somehow I'm doing it wrong."

Never gave it a second thought. Never thought about the fact that I was reaching out and taking hold of a penis that wasn't mine. Never thought about the fact that I was a boy and I was about to touch another boy in his most intimate spot. All that crossed my mind was:

"Heh. Guess you're not good at everything you try after all."

He was still hard, so all I had to do was wrap my hand around and go to work.

Ten. Ten tugs on his junk was all it took to set Jakeab off.

The first three tugs he said: "Your hand feels different."

Tugs four through six: "That feels better than what I was doing."

Tugs seven through nine: "..."

Nothing. He actually closed his eyes and took a few moments to enjoy what he was feeling.

Tug ten: "Oh my god, I..."

And he did. Two good, hard shots. The first one completely cleared his head. The second one went right up his left nostril. I'd never laughed so hard in my life before.

At first Jakeab was pissed and blamed me for aiming it that way.

"I didn't know you were gonna blow up like 4^th of July! I didn't even know it could shoot that far!" I told him, still rollin'.

"You never shot that far before?" he'd asked.

"Did you see me shoot that far when I did it? No. That shit came pourin' out nice `n slow."

"Guess that means I can shoot further than you, then."

"And I'm sure your nose is happy for you!"

It would be two weeks before me and him would even bring up that day. Not that we'd tried to bury it or anything, it just didn't seem like that big a deal once it was done and over with. He had discovered his father's abandoned stack of Playboys in the attic while looking for something his mother had packed away. It was all we could talk about that day at school when he told me he'd found them.

It was while we were back at his place, reading a drooling, when he asked me how many times I spanked it a day. I thought I was king with three, he trumped me with five. That led to a short baggin' match before he asked me if I thought there was anything wrong with him wanting me to jack him off again. He asked me if it was supposed to feel better when someone else did it, because nothing he'd done had matched his first. I told him I didn't know, since nobody had ever done it to me. He told me that if I'd do him, he'd do me. Not able to pass up a chance at seeing if it did feel better when someone else did it, I told him he had a deal.

I found out that day that it did feel better when someone else did it. I even shot harder and further than I ever had solo. Jakeab still shot further than me, but I shot more than he did. After we got done, Jakeab was like:

"We should do this more often."

"Yeah." I'd agreed, thinking about nothing else except how good it felt to have my junk tugged on by someone else, and how good it was going to feel the next time someone else tugged on my junk.

Being jack-off buddies was a thing me and Jakeab kept to ourselves. We weren't ashamed of it. It just wasn't something one went around advertising.

Midway through our freshman year in high school, things took a turn between me and Jakeab. Alcohol was involved, (of course), on one of the occasions when his parents had gone out of town to handle business and I'd come over to spend the night. I can't even remember how we got to the to the situation, all I know is that I was buzzin', chillin' and playing Super Mario World when Jakeab said:

"I think I might like you, Micah."

"Oh? Just now?" I'd thought he was kidding around.

"I mean like if it wouldn't make me a fag, I'd ask you to be my boyfriend."

It was like my buzz paused when I'd heard him say that and everything was crystal clear.

"Ummm..." I began.

Before I could finish, he explained his feelings toward me. He missed me when I wasn't around and looked forward to seeing me each time we met. I was the first and only person he'd ever felt comfortable enough around to be himself. He could tell me anything and I wouldn't judge him. Bag on him? Yes. Without a doubt, depending on what it was. But I never looked down on him or treated him like shit. He also said that I understood him in ways his own parents didn't. It was like I "got" him. I could make him feel better when he was down and I had his back no matter what.

It was strange to hear how I felt about someone come out of that someone to describe how they felt about me. I'd realized at that point that his words were spot on about asking me to be his boyfriend.

"How would that make us fags, though? Unless you think I'm a girl...or you really want to be a girl. I don't wanna be no girl." I'd said.

"I don't want either of us to be girls." he'd remarked.

"Then we wouldn't be fags. With fags, at least one of the dudes wants to be a girl."

"What would we be then?"

We honestly didn't know. There was no such thing as a masculine homosexual male at that time.

"I guess we'd just be boyfriends?" I'd offered.

"Yeah." he'd nodded. "I guess so."

He'd paused, then shook his head.

"So, you wanna be my boyfriend, then?"

"If you wanna be mine." I'd answered.

"I do."

"I do too, then."

We would wind up making out that night. Not like lovers, but like two people discovering each other. Both of us had ever kissed anyone before that night. Neither one of us had gotten a blowjob before that night. And on that night our first ever relationship was established.

Nothing changed between the two of us after that night. We weren't the cuddly or kissy face type, but we would sit by one another or stand next to one another when we were with our friends. When it was just us, though, that's when we wouldn't mind sitting next to each other with our arms around each other's shoulder, enjoying the closeness. Kissing was usually the doorway to a hand or blowjob with both of us, so that was part of the sex play. We never tried anything backdoor wise (it was just too nasty sticking a dick where a dude shat out of) and only swallowed nut-juice once each before that got cut out.

"I think we're both better off without a mouth fulla hot snot." he'd said on the topic, and I'd laughed and agreed.

Jakeab would move away just before the beginning of our senior year in high school, after his father made the decision to take business up north. We actually shed tears on our last night together, angry because we had to be separated and there was nothing we could do about it. Still, we promised to keep in contact, but Jakeab never did call me and let me know what his new phone number and address were. It'd hurt me that he hadn't, but I got myself to accept that maybe it was too much for him to deal with and he'd just let it go.

That's when the first downward spiral began.

I got hit with the first blow shortly after high school graduation. My mother got diagnosed with cancer.

That was hard for her. She was always used to being miss independent and getting things done by herself. She didn't like the chemo-therapy for making her sick and giving her a haircut she didn't ask for. But in her true fashion she trucked on.

I was nineteen when the cancer gave up and went into remission. Nobody was happier than my mother. She was ready to take off her wig and get back to her life.

I was twenty-one when the cancer decided it hadn't given up and came back to claim her life.

Two months after that, then final blow came. Steve would need to move himself and my siblings out of state so that he could care for his mother who'd fallen ill. Just like Kev and Myron's mother, none of his other siblings were willing to step in. He promised to stay in touch with me, and I him, but he had more than enough on his plate with his mother, my brother and sister, and whatever other issues he had. So as the years passed, the calls became less and less and we both fell out of contact with each other.

Despite being suddenly alone in the world, I made a way for myself. I went to tech school and earned a degree in computer science. Graduated top of my class. Hooked up a job at my local city organization as a computer tech. I had my own place, things, and money. Things couldn't have looked more further toward the up.

Then the damn economy went straight past hell and into the gutter.

The second downward spiral.

The amount of cutbacks and their severity was like nothing I'd ever seen. One day, my job was stable and not going anywhere anytime soon. The next, that shit was on the chopping block and the butcher was about to swing. Apparently, after almost eight years, they didn't need four computer techs. They only needed two. The two senior techs got to stay, while me and my co-worker got let go.

That fast I went from stunnin' to stunned. Employed and with money to unemployment and food stamps. I'd only picked up a job working at McDonald's because I didn't know how long I'd need to stay on them. It was also the only job I'd been able to land. I'd hooked up my resume and been job hunting for a more serious job, but I hadn't even gotten as far as an interview. It could've been the job market, or it could've been the town. It wasn't outright prejudice to the face usually, but in the thick, creamy center...it was there. Jakeab's parents were a prime example.

It was this, my latest transition that I was thinking about as I cleaned the main counters for the fifth time in an hour. I was glad my head was still well above the water, but what was going to happen if I couldn't land a good job before my unemployment ran out?

Funny how that was the biggest worry on my mind at the time.

It was a worry that wouldn't be a blip on my mental radar thirty minutes later.

Because that was the day The Circus came to town.

 *  *  *  *  *  *

 *Author's Note:

To all the people new to this story, thank you for reading, hope you enjoyed, and hope what's to come will keep you interested and entertained.

To all the people who read this story when it was first posted, thank you for coming back. I hope this intro didn't seem like too much of a retread for you, and I know the big question that's on your mind. What happened to the first draft? I had to abandon it because it went in a direction that was completely off course, and I was not happy with the results. So I went back to the drawing board and created this second draft. Some things will be familiar, while other things will be brand new. I hope you will find it a worthy successor.