Daddy and I went out to find a place to live. We rode buses and trolleys here and there, to places in the city where I’d never been. The hunt didn’t take long: by late afternoon Daddy had laid down a crisp hundred-dollar bill on an apartment in a neighborhood that was a considerable step up from the cinderblock slum where we had been living. Two-story colored-stucco apartments along wide white cement streets lined with every sort of greenery, with real garages for the cars, and huge picture windows that looked out over the adjacent hills. And, in the distance, San Francisco Bay. The apartment was small, a studio with a Murphy bed behind a dark-stained wood door, a bathroom half the size I was used to, and a small kitchenette. The landlady, whose name I never learned, lived in the attached apartment next door. She was a lot older than Daddy, and lived by herself, except for a small, fat old dog she called Mutt. Mutt never barked, and his tongue hung out all the time between his small yellow teeth. I remember he snorted a lot. He followed the landlady everywhere she went; you could hear the two of them puttering around through the thin plaster wall that separated the two apartments—the dog’s paw-nails going scritch-scritch on the hardwood floors or on the kitchen linoleum.
I loved the apartment from the moment Daddy first took me there. I don’t recall once thinking of Mama or my sisters living in that world somewhere on the other side of town. I wasn’t a part of that family anymore. Now, I was better.
Daddy arranged that our landlady would be my babysitter whenever he went out, which, right off the bat, was pretty near every evening. The old lady didn’t talk much. She busied herself in her kitchen, washing dishes or baking, and I stayed out in the small living room, watching TV or playing with her guitar, which I’d found the first night, leaned up against a wall. I don’t think she wanted me playing with it: whenever I was distracted by something else or otherwise not paying attention, she’d come into the room and pick it up and put it back against the wall where it belonged, then go back into the kitchen, followed always by her snorting dog. But she never said anything angry to me. Daddy always came home late, and by then I was usually on the old lady’s couch, asleep. He’d tap on the landlady’s door with a key so as not to be too noisy; on those nights she’d read or watch TV in her room, not wanting to be asleep, I guessed, until I’d been retrieved by my father. He was usually too drunk to carry me, so it was often the landlady who bundled me up and carried me into our apartment and laid me in the Murphy bed. The few times when I was awake, I’d notice she said very little to my father, sometimes not even a good-night as she walked back into her apartment and closed the door behind her.
Being drunk didn’t do much to lessen Daddy’s sudden wolfish need to paw at me every night, to spill his cum, as he called it, onto me. I started to dread the moment he got into the bed with me, knowing that in almost no time he’d be reaching over to roll me onto my back and poke around my crotch looking for my tiny dick. He was rough (unintentionally, I am sure) when he was drunk, his fingers pinching and scratching me until I was nearly in tears. And still, despite my most heartfelt prayers asking God that it would not be so, the damned thing would grow and harden at his touch, convincing him, I knew, that I really liked what he was doing. “I love you, Billy,” he’d breathe, the liquor on his breath a sort of torture all its own. Then he’d be on top of me, straddling me, slapping the hot flesh of his own huge hard dick onto my belly for what seemed hours, until I almost welcomed the equally hot sticky wetness squirting out of him, just so it was over, and then him sounding like he was sobbing from the ordeal of it all, as if he, too, were being tortured. Afterward he’d roll off of me and tell me to go to the bathroom to get toilet paper to wipe off my belly and chest and legs, and while I was at it, bring some for him, too.
A couple of days after we moved into our apartment, Daddy enrolled me in my new school. It was a huge, single, gray four-story building made out of something like granite. It was four blocks away from where we lived. He bought me a lunch card at the office, so I got to eat in the cafeteria all week. He hugged me and told me he loved me. I sat in my third-grade class deep in the windowless guts of the building with thirty or so other strange-looking kids, trying to catch up to where the rest of them were in their various books, trying to learn new rules and new faces, trying to be invisible. None of the other kids talked to me. I wondered if it was because they could tell, just by looking at me, where I’d come from. But Daddy was waiting for me at the end of the day by the front doors of the school. The first couple of days I saw him, I felt the old fear gush into my stomach, that dread. But he smiled at me and said, “Hey, son!” and all of that just seemed to flow out of me again. He walked with his arm draped over my shoulder and asked me what neat things I learned, and listened intently while I told him.
There was something different about Daddy, now that he wasn’t living with Mama and all of us kids anymore. He smiled and laughed more, even when he wasn’t drunk. He didn’t get mad at me as easily. And he never once used the belt on me. He bought me candy bars, and took me down to the park near the Golden Gate Bridge. We’d look at all the big ships going in and out, and he’d point at them and tell me all about them. “That’s a navy destroyer,” he’d say to me, “a tin can. And that one over there’s what they call a tanker.” He put his arm around me and called me son.
But it didn’t last. Good things didn’t, I was learning. Daddy got really drunk one night. He was stumbling all over the front porch when he came to get me from the landlady’s house, and, as usual, she told him to wait outside, and a minute later came out with me half awake and my arms wrapped around her neck. She carried me into the apartment and laid me in the bed and left, all without a word. Daddy kept crashing into things, pulling off his shoes and his clothes, but finally he managed to turn out all the lights and got into bed. Now I was fully awake. Of course, as soon as he was in bed, his scratchy hands went right for my dick, and he almost pulled the thing off me. I cried out, “Ow! Daddy, it hurts!”
“Sorry, sorry, I never want to hurt you,” he said. But he kept pulling on me just the same.
“Daddy,” I said, trying hard not to anger him—but, in a way, not caring anymore if I did—“I don’t want to do this tonight. I don’t want to anymore!”
“Okay,” he said, “okay. No more. After tonight, you got it, we won’t do it anymore. Just one more time. One more time. I just want to show you how much I love you.” I could tell from his heavy breathing and how tightly he was hanging onto my hardening dick that he wouldn’t stop until he was finished. He got on top of me and, as usual, started slapping me on the belly with his rock-hard dick. I tried to think of something else: riding my bike, or climbing a tree. Thankfully, it didn’t take long. He arched his back and yelled as if he’d just been stabbed, and immediately I felt his cum gushing onto me like thick, warm syrup, over my belly, my chest, dripping slowly down my sides. He lunged forward, almost burying me under his full weight, blowing his breath that smelled like whiskey mixed with shit onto my face, making his sobbing noises, “Oh, God, Billy, I love you so much, son!”
We lay there like that for a minute or more, until he finally rolled off of me, and I was glad to be able to breathe freely again. I made a move to get up, and he asked me where I was going, and I told him I was getting up to find something to wipe off with. “That’s okay,” he said, “you just stay where you are. I’ll take care of it tonight.” He tried to get up, and instead, fell off the side of the bed with a loud thump! He laughed and hoisted himself back up to his knees, then stood up, but as soon as he started moving toward the bathroom, he careened off toward the kitchen table and bashed into it, knocking over a chair and falling onto the floor again. Now he was really laughing hard, and so was I, and he got to his feet again and tried to walk, but ran into the wall next to the window, and on his way down he grabbed hold of the curtain and yanked the rod out of the wall. He was like all three Stooges rolled into one, crashing into things and laughing like a crazy man.
This went on quite awhile before we heard a sharp knock on the front door, and Daddy called from where he was lying on the floor in the kitchen for me to answer it. But I didn’t have to. I turned on the light next to the bed and saw the door was already open. Two policemen were coming into the room, both of them holding big sticks. Behind them stood our landlady, and her snorting dog.
A half-hour later, Daddy was on his way to the pokey, and I was being delivered via a separate police car to the Child Protection Center, where I would be led to a large room with perhaps twenty beds, most of them filled with other sleeping kids. I would be at the Center for close to a week, which I would count as one of the most idyllic times of my life without a care in the world.
Mama came on the bus to fetch me and take me back to the old apartment. We sat on the bus without looking at each other or talking. She didn’t ask me anything about being with Daddy. It was as if she didn’t want to know. The closer we got to Sunnydale Avenue, the worse I felt, as if I were going back to get a whipping. It occurred to me that Mama might give me the belt for going off with Daddy in the first place. I tried not to think about it, tried not to acknowledge the sick fear bubbling up in my stomach. Instead, I thought about Daddy. Even with Daddy drunk, even with Daddy grabbing at my dick and shooting his cum all over me and beating me, it was still better than where we were going to now. Daddy loved me: he told me so, all the time. He hugged me. He called me son. Mama had never said or done those things, and never would. Never.
Mama glared at me, without smiling, as if she knew exactly what I was thinking, and then looked away.
I never saw my father again.