Sleeping Rough by Thomas Carver

Author:Thomas Carver [Carver, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Book III: Winter

Chapter 14

I saw my first Chicago winter sliced into diamonds by a chain-link fence.

The judge offered me deferred prosecution, which as far as I was able to follow would mean going free. But they wanted information on Cray. He'd embarrassed them, breaking through that window and escaping the cops. One of the cops had cut himself on the glass, and apparently that meant I'd also assaulted a police officer, or so they told me.

So I'd held up my middle finger, on the hand with IRRE, "crazy" in German, tattooed in the web between thumb and forefinger, and I'd said, Fick dich ins Knie. Evidently the judge knew German.

A fine of $2500. But I couldn't pay, so then and only then did they throw me in jail. I laughed when they sentenced me to sixty days. The lawyer told me it could be a year if I didn't "fix my attitude."

But they didn't want people like me in the jails. The jails were for other men, tough men, not rentboys.

They gave me a baggy orange jumpsuit and locked me in a large room with ten other men. Blue mats lay on the floor, for us to sleep on. I sat crosslegged. The lawyer had suggested I apply for protective custody, but I'd spoken profane German at him too. Enough of that good old socialist spirit was in me, and I was ready to be down with the down.

As pretty as I was.

"I know you," someone said, and settled on the met across from me.

My age, shaved head, knife scar across his cheek. "Skinhead Mike. So you are in jail," I said. It was nice to see a familiar face, even if that face was mostly familiar from across the room. "We thought maybe you were dead."x

"Nyah, not yet. Drugs. You?"

"The usual," I said, casting a glance sideways.

He knew better than to make it a big deal. I didn't need protective custody -- which I suspected was just solitary confinement under another name -- but I might if people knew I'd been a rentboy.

I was in Division III, the minimum security division. We weren't the violent or the dangerous, and I kind of wondered why we were in jail at all. If we weren't violent, weren't dangerous, what harm did we do to society that we needed to be separated from it? I gave society orgasms. That was my harm.

They could all, the whole damned edifice of them, fuck themselves in the knee with my father and that judge and that asshole he'd beaten me and broken my rib that time and -- everyone.

Everyone but Cray.

Even though, when it came time to be with me or to run, Cray had run. I didn't blame him or hate him. He was free. That was what Cray was. He could no more stand and let a cop put steel on his wrists than I could fly by farting.

"It's not so bad," Skinhead Mike was saying. "Eventually you get rotated into the general population, and you can get state blues instead of these orange things, too.

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