A scrawny red-haired kid came rushing in. He had zits all over his chin and he was obviously speeding off his nut. Dick Cheese Saunders introduced him to Mickey but no one bothered about me.
It took ages and ages to set up, I smoked five cigarettes before it even started, and Mickey came over to sit with me. Saunders wouldn’t hand over the baggy till the shoot was finished, cos he was scared Mickey wouldn’t be able to get it up if he was high, so Mickey snorted some of the E instead.
Then they were ready. A white sheet had been pinned against a wall and some crates were piled in front of it. Mickey and the red-haired kid were sitting on the crates kissing, which I knew Mickey didn’t want to do, but he seemed to be getting into it, which caused a tingling sensation in my stomach which I knew was jealousy. They had to keep stopping and starting, something to do with the cameras.
When Mickey stripped to his underwear, the director couldn’t help himself. ‘Fuck,’ he called out in admiration, pronouncing it furrk. ‘Fuck!’
Mickey is so fucking beautiful. Mickey makes the whole world go Fuck!
Mickey says his mum is from the bush and his dad was from a place overseas called Caracas, which I’d never heard of but which always makes me laugh when he says it. Carac-ass. His dad was in South Australia one year picking fruit and fucked Mickey’s mum under a full moon. She got pregnant. She wanted to get pregnant to him, even though she was only sixteen, even though he was a stranger, a backpacker travelling through, because he was dark and handsome and she thought that with his genes and her Irish blood they would create a beautiful baby. And she was right. Mickey has a photo of his brother and his sister, and they’re alright, good-looking enough, but both their dads are strictly Aussie and the kids are nothing like Mickey. They don’t make your stomach crunch up like he does.
At the Congregation — it’s not a church, they don’t call it a church — they give you free coffee and sandwiches and you can crash there for the night. It used to be a movie theatre, back in the old, old days, and I like falling asleep in the ticket box, curled up in there. The place is always full of ferals and punks and whores and druggies, and then there are the old men and women who stink of their own shit, and everyone is snoring and cursing, but sometimes they are praying and sometimes we all pray together. That’s the best, when we are all praying and then I can get to sleep because I know I’ll be safe, that Jesus is in the old picture house with me.
Sometimes Alex is there. He always seeks me out. And always takes me out and buys me a feed. He asks how I’m doing, where I’m sleeping, how I’m getting my money, and even when I tell him I’m doing fine, that Mickey’s looking out for me, tears will always well up in his eyes and that makes me feel crap, like I done something to him, and I have to look away. Alex is twenty-six but he doesn’t look that old and he has a job and rents a house and is a normal civilian. Mickey, who never goes to the Congregation, who says he can’t stand their holy God-bothering bullshit, reckons Alex is like any other mug, that he just wants to fuck me. I tell Mickey he’s wrong, but he won’t believe me. Alex isn’t like that, he’s not evil. I’m the evil one. I wish Alex would take me home, that he would fuck me. I wish I could live with him forever.
I drift back into the warehouse. Even without the scag, Mickey was taking ages getting hard and the director was starting to get pissed off. The red-haired kid was on his knees sucking Mickey off and from time to time he’d drop Mickey’s cock out of his mouth and shrug at the men filming.
‘Nothing’s happening,’ he complained, sounding bored, like he wished it was all over.
The director was getting wilder and wilder, screaming out instructions, some in English, some not, and the room was boiling with all the lights like it was a sauna. The director called Mickey a useless junkie whore and I could tell Mickey was about to lose it.
So from the corner of the room, the lights so bright that they seemed as big as the sun — it was a really trippy E — I yelled out, ‘Close your eyes, Mickey!’
Dick Cheese Saunders turned around at me and then he started yelling, telling me to fucking shut my mouth or I’d be thrown out.
I said, really scared, ‘But he’s got to close his eyes and think of girls, otherwise he can’t get it up.’
At that, Dick Cheese Saunders just started running towards me, like some wild animal in a television documentary, and it looked slow motion except for his voice, which was screaming, Didn’t I tell you to shut it, didn’t I tell you to say nothing, you ugly cross-eyed cunt, and when he reached me his boot flew up and kicked me right in the gut. My head hit the wall, and I hated myself for it but I started crying. I saw Mickey tense up but he and the others did nothing. There was nothing anyone could do. There was no one who could beat Dick Cheese Saunders in a fight. He bent down, grabbed my hair. ‘Not a word, right, not one fucking word.’ Then he turned and walked back. I wiped his spit and my tears off my face.
Later, in our flat, watching The X-Files, Mickey told me what I said wrong. ‘Poofters don’t want to hear that straight guys have to think of girls to get off. They want to believe that straight guys can get off on faggot sex.’
‘But I was right. Once you closed your eyes, you were fine.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You were right, but you shouldn’t have said it in front of Saunders. I’m not angry, I’m just trying to explain why the fag got mad at you.’ He stood over me. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, I won’t be around to look after you. Don’t forget any of what I taught you.’
‘I won’t.’
He slapped me playfully on the back of the head and smiled.
I will not get into a car without first chalking the rego on a street pole.
I will ring Mum at Christmas and on her birthday.
I will not allow mugs to fuck me up the arse without a condom and I’ll keep my eyes shut real tight when they come on my face.
I won’t jack up heroin on my own.
I will go back to school one day.
And one day, I will move away from here. Like Angie going up to Cairns or Mickey going to Adelaide. He got me to promise that one day I would move away, to somewhere smaller, further away from the world. Sydney, he always says to me, is a city of dead souls.
Mickey knows I am in love with him and he says he doesn’t mind. In fact, he jokes that he’s honoured. He’s the second guy I’ve been in love with. The first was my father’s friend Roman, who was a big loud Polish guy who lived in the same street we grew up in. Roman had been married and had two kids but he had murdered his wife when their youngest kid was still a baby. His wife had been fucking someone else. He had been locked away for thirteen years. He lived across the street from us and only Dad and my mum would talk to him. He was fifty-five when we got together. Dad would chuck me out of the house every second day, for giving lip, or refusing to speak Greek to my giagia, or just because he had drunk too much, and I’d go across to Roman’s house. At first we just watched TV together and then we started watching it in his bedroom. Then one day he kissed me and jerked me off. I wanted him to do other things to me but he said no, that it wasn’t right. Then when I was thirteen I got pubes and he told me that it was not a problem now, if I wanted to, it was alright for him to fuck me. We did, for two years, until I busted my giagia’s jaw and kicked my dad almost to death and had to run. From home, from Melbourne. I knew I had to run as far away as I could. So I ran to Sydney.