After a year and a half on the street, I retired as a hustler, knowing that if I didn't, I was finished as a human being.
I was not yet sixteen.
PART TWO
Chapter 1
For me, high school was simply a continuation of junior high. I still played jobs at night, taking care to stay away from the after-hours clubs. I missed the easy comradeship and good music of Jack's, Streets of Paris, How Now, and some of the other places, but I had made up my mind that I was through with all that shit forever.
I didn't miss hustling.
Judo now occupied me three evenings a week, Friday night was still symphony night, and there were lots of gigs to play.
Studying filled only a little of my time but I appeared to be doing passably in school. I still read everything I could and spent hours talking or arguing with friends about what I had read.
Though the hustling was finished and my life seemed to have settled down a bit, my parents didn't see it that way. After all, wasn't I a no-go odnick, a worthless bum with a duck's behind where my yarmulke ought to be, bringing only embarrassment and dishonor to my parents, who worked and slaved so hard all day so I could have the things they never had?
My father, in a fit of anger he was later to regret, finally offered up the ultimatum: either shape up or get out. Parental control had been completely lost and he was having no more of it. My poor mother, holding back tears and keeping the two of us from mauling each other by standing between us with outstretched arms, begged him to reconsider. "After all, Al, he's our son. Good or bad, he's our son and he should live here in our house with us."
My father was adamant. "No! Study every night, home by one-thirty when he's working, a haircut, and no schvartza clothes, being a good son for a change, otherwise, out he goes!"
Negotiations broke down and I made plans to move. My shoebox held so much cash I could hardly close it; so I had buried it on a shelf in the garage under a stack of old files from my parents' store.
Although I liked earning money and having it, I had never bothered to count how much was in the box. When I needed something I just took enough cash to pay for it, clothes being my greatest expense. Now that it looked as though I'd have to fend for myself, I decided I'd better take stock and see just how much I had accumulated.
I took the shoebox into the downstairs room and locked the door. It took me forty-five minutes to sort and count the contents. Altogether, there was nine thousand, seven hundred and twenty dollars. I was amazed, dumbfounded. Never had I dreamed that I was so wealthy.
I knew that I had spent about a thousand on clothes and other things since I'd begun hustling. That would make ten thousand seven hundred, roughly. Doing some quick arithmetic, I figured that an average of twenty dollars per trick, I had been blown five hundred thirty times in a year and a half.
Over five hundred mouths had sucked my cock for money. And at an average of five cubic centimeters per load, I had spilled two and a half liters of sperm into strange gullets.
If sperm were gasoline, that much would run a Volkswagen for over one hundred miles.
The kids at school, people my own age, seemed nice children to me, not that I wouldn't have been happy to screw a lot of those fresh little chickies walking the halls with then* breasts pointing hard and young into soft, cashmere sweaters, with their trim, youthful asses covered by plaid, ankle-length skirts. It was just that they talked about boys when I had lived in a world of men, that they thought of holding hands and necking and petting, while I was used to hard-humping cunts, that they were involved in school affairs and their families and who they might eventually marry, while I had only a black, dismal past and no future worth thinking about. I found it impossible to go back.
It was the same with the boys. Their constant talk of sports and whether they had been able to feel so-and-so's boobs last Saturday night, or speculating if she might eventually "go all the way." The sports jackets with block letters, the school clubs, the football games and rallies where pimply-faced mobs worked themselves into mass hysteria over how many times an oblong leather ball might cross a chalk line on a grass field, all were new and strange to me.
To be honest, I couldn't talk to them, either the boys or the girls. I seemed to be from a different planet and we had nothing in common but our age. A lot of girls must have thought that I was shy, but it wasn't shyness at all. How do you talk to a sixteen-year-old virgin when your conversation has been geared to whores and hypes for so long?
It was lonely in school and I stuck pretty much with the guys I had been playing with professionally for the last couple of years. In varying degrees, they were having the same problems.
But I did have one stroke of luck. Our band and orchestra teacher, Ken Johnson, played with us occasionally. He did most of his work with society-type orchestras, but we had played jobs together before, when the union stuck on extra side men.
Within a month we had it knocked; Johnson would write out passes for us anytime we felt like cutting class, on the pretext that we were needed for rehearsal. He also let us use the band uniform room to smoke so that we wouldn't be having nicotine fits in class. Because I was closer to him than the others he would often bring me to the teachers' lunch room, or TLR as we called it, where I could smoke, drink real coffee, and converse with the other teachers on an adult basis. Before long I was calling the faculty by first names, and felt more at ease with them than I did with the students.
Ken was a nice guy and I've always been thankful to him because I trunk he knew how tough it was to be part-time schoolboys for those of us who were out in the world.
Conditions at home were intolerable, and I began sleeping at Herb's or Ed's house as often as possible. If I couldn't, I would sleep in the downstairs guest room at home, afraid that if I went up to my own bed a harangue would be forthcoming from my father. Apart from his yelling at me when I got home, we had slipped into a state of total noncommunication.
My fantasies, fed by my experiences, got wilder. I began dreaming about gangbangs and sex with two or three women simultaneously. Strangely, I would pick the clean cut virginal types from around school and picture them naked, getting soundly fucked by me, a number of faceless men, and other girls from school. The girls were quite clear in my mind, but the men always were faceless, like the Johns who used to blow me. I couldn't bear the thought of exposing my sexual inadequacies to anybody I knew, even in my reveries. I didn't want to think that somebody, somewhere, might have a bigger cock than mine, or fuck the girls better than I. So I would imagine myself in bed with girls who I knew, recreating the scene from the American Legion smoker. But, instead of tired old whores, it would be pretty Mary Daley from my Spanish class lying there, getting her pussy reamed by me while sucking off one phantom and jerking off two more. It would be her soft, sun bronzed skin, fresh from summer vacation, that would be soaked by the sperm of a multitude of these unknown partners.
I still hadn't learned much about women. By this tune I had made it with about fifteen, but had been successful with only two, and those by accident; I had sucked off one and the other had masturbated herself. To compound my stupidity, I didn't even know what was happening either time.
When I was with a chick, the idea of her being naked and of my actually being in her cunt was too much for me. No matter how hard I tried, my young, eager gun couldn't hold it for over a couple of minutes. Even on those occasions when I got a second shot at it, I couldn't make myself last much longer, the reality of the situation excited me too much.
But life is marked by one's own minihistoric events, episodes and adventures that change the course of your development and start you on a new, and hopefully better, road. Music was my first, Bobby the second, and Mora the third and most important step in my growth.