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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. “Sixteen?” 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 deaclass="underline" 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.