Chicken

This is dedicated
to all the boys and girls who have been,
and continue to be, victims of abuse
at the hands of adults
.

Ask for help. Tell your story
.

chick-en/′chi-
k
ə
n
/
n, slang:
a teenager who engages in indiscriminate sexual practices for money.

Title Page
Dedication
1: The Tall Sexy Man & The Nun
2: The Holy Poultry Grail
3: My Hymen & A Wedgwood Egg
4: Superfly & Puppylove
5: Industrial New Jersey & Georgia
6: Hueytown & The Black See-Through
7: Hardwired Into Kristy
8: Horse & King Dong
9: Jade
10: Baba Ram Wammalamma-Dingdong
11: I Love You, Mommy
12: Peas & Cornbread
13: Tinkerbell & A Baby Bulldog
14: Hoop Rage
15: Here Cum De Judge
16: Where Are My Keys?
17: The Walrus
18: Ask
Acknowledgments
Praise
About the Author
Copyright

 

I
WASN'T MOLES TED
as a child. No one beat me with a coat hanger. I was never burned by my evil baby-sitter's cigarette. I grew up in neighborhoods where kids played ball, swung on swings, and rode merry-go-rounds. Santa slid down my chimney, the Easter Bunny hid chocolate eggs in my yard, and the Tooth Fairy left a quarter under my pillow.

A rosy patina of relentless suburban niceness shimmers on the surface of my childhood: roses swimming gently in beds, summery-smelling freshly mown grass moaning, golden leaves falling like floating autumnal coins; the taste of cold waterymelon and the lick of a soft cloud of ice cream cone; toboggans and hot chocolate; Fourth of July fireworks and Tom Turkey Thanksgivings; Cream of Wheat mornings and
Cat in the Hat
nights.

You were happy where I grew up, and if you weren't, you had the decency not to mention it. I don't remember ever seeing a black person, except for the maids who magically appeared in the morning to clean up after us, then disappeared on the afternoon bus.

Into this brave New World came my mother and father, English immigrants from Newcastle, land of lily-skinned, thick-skulled, black-lunged, Broon Ale-swigging Geordies, escaping a land as hard and cold as the coal you're not supposed to bring there.

My mom and dad became American citizens the instant they could, and we had a big party to celebrate, with sparklers twinkling atop a red-white-and-blue sugarlard-icing United States flag-covered cake.

My parents are in many ways embodiments of the American Dream. They came to this country with basically nothing but the
clothes on their backs, and after twenty years of hard work, sweat, and sacrifice, they were getting divorced, totally broke, and deep in therapy.

On Friday afternoon in late Hollywood August, I'm seventeen-year-old freshmeat, just arrived to start my college career at Immaculate Heart College. Sister Liz, a wimply nun, checks me into school. She reminds me of the Singing Nun from my childhood. Only she doesn't sing. She tells me they don't have any dorms. I'm shocked. In exile at boarding school, I'd decided to go to college early; Immaculate Heart was the only place that would take me without a high-school diploma. Never dawned on my sixteen-year-old brain to ask for help with the application. Or, for that matter, to ask whether IHC had dorms. I didn't ask. After it was decided that I would live with my mom in L.A., no further arrangements had seemed necessary. But things change so quickly sometimes.

I have no place to sleep. I have twenty-seven dollars. So I call my father. He says he's having a cash-flow problem. I'm confused. My dad lives in the large lap of luxury. He seems anxious to get me off the phone, and I can hear a woman who's not my mother in the background.

‘Whatever—' I manage to mumble. Then I hang up.

I consider calling my mom. I quickly reject the idea. The fact that her young lover has in my mind replaced me as the man in her life is just too much to swallow.

I ask Sister Liz if they have a place for me to crash. She says they're not insured for student crashing, but as a last resort, if I need a place to sleep for the night, she could possibly try to arrange something, although she'd really prefer not to.

‘Whatever—' I manage to mumble again.

I store my bags. I walk out of Immaculate Heart College, seventeen, no place to sleep, twenty-seven dollars in my pocket, and an angry beehive in my skull.

The weight of it sinks me to the curb, my head coming to rest in my hands. Six months ago I was guzzling rotgut and smoking angel wings at boarding school. Now my American Dream family's exploded like a land mine in a bomb shelter, and the shrapnel is flying thick and fast all around me.

IHC sits high atop a hill looking down on Hollywood, its superstar billboards looming over thick boulevards crammed with large cars. As a sweet breeze blows, the Lost Angel Siren sings her beautiful melody to me, and I'm sucked toward that voice no man can resist.

Next thing I know I'm strolling down the hill into Tinsel Town, swallowing my pain like a poison pea pellet, and replacing it with what I intend to be a peacocky strut. I'm working hard to perfect my strut.

My hair is brown, thick, and deep, my legs have my mom's muscles, and I come with long feet and big hands, nuthugging elephantbells, a too-tight T with a Rolling Stones tongue licking the world, and red high-tops. One green sock, one blue sock.

I have no idea where I'm going, or what I'm doing, but as I bust my strut into the gut of Hollywood and float over the side-walkstars, I feel for no reason that it's a good day to be alive, with these palm trees waving at me and the afternoon sun bathing on my face in this new place, my past back there, and my future right in front of me on the Boulevard of Dreams.

I walk all the way up Hollywood Boulevard to Grauman's Chinese Theater: past turistas snapping shots; wannabe starlets sparkling by in miniskirts with head shots in their hands and moondust in their eyes; rowdy cowboys drinking with drunken Indians; black businessmen bustling by briskly in crisp suits; ladies who do not lunch with nylons rolled up below the knee pushing shopping carts full of everything they own; Mustangs rubbing up against muscular Mercedes and Hell's Angels hogs.

It's a sick twisted Wonderland, and I'm Alice.

My mom was an emotional woman who cried at the drop of a pin. At the drop of a hat. At the drop of a hat pin. Calm ivory skin, sturdy oak hair, a grand laugh, and smart dark eyes full of love. She could make a wild wailing hard-baked baby coo with the soothe of her touch. Her father, a professional athlete and amateur pedophile, was an olive-hued man of black silences, eyes, and hair.

My dad was a chemist and mathematician, distant, intellectual, racked with silence masked by my charm and snappy patter. He was one of the fair freckled folk of the North of England. Not tall, with a bony nose, he was spindly, nimble, quick, and tricky. Dad had a big brain. He was the first in his family to go to college, unheard of for a coal miner's son. And that man could work. Work, work, work. He was wound Newcastle-coal tight to begin with, and every minute he worked he seemed to get a little tighter. But at a time when being a Provider was paramount, he was a paramount Provider. My dad had love in his heart, he just had trouble getting it out.

His brain and her heart took my mom and dad from the oothooses and Broon Ale of an English pit village to the heart of America, with a beautiful five-bedroom Spanish-style Craftsman, complete with a swimming pool, servants' quarters, and a fountain spewing pompously in the front yard.

I'm standing in front of Grauman's, smack-dab in the middle of this Hollywood Friday night, staring at Marilyn Monroe's handprints.

‘Marilyn … now, there was a woman.'

A tall black man stares at me. He's the first person I talk to in L.A. who's not a nun.

‘Yeah … Marilyn …' I have no idea what I'm talking about.

‘My old lady used to say she was fat, but I like a woman with an ass on her,' drawls the tall black man, who wears a black shirt that says
SEXY
in silver sparkly letters.

‘Yeah, a woman's gotta have an ass on her.' I'm just trying to keep up.

‘Now, Marilyn, she was a movie star. Not like these bitches today. No style. Skanky, bony-assed bitches…'

The tall black man with the
SEXY
shirt starts walking. I walk with him. Seems like the thing to do.

‘Where you from?' he asks.

I don't know how to answer this question. I'm not from anywhere right now, and the panic of that punches me in the nuts. Then I remember reading in a magazine that when you feel anxious or irritated, all you have to do is change the record in your head. Replace the bad thoughts with good thoughts. So that's what I do. I change the record. I'm in Hollywood, it's packed with exciting people from all over the world, and I'm one of them.

‘I said, “Where you from?”' S
EXY
repeats.

‘All over …' I'm trying to be very Whatever.

‘I been there,' he says.

I laugh, he laughs, then we laugh together.

‘Where you live?' he asks.

‘Around …' I attempt a world-weary smile, but it doesn't work.

‘Hey, you hungry? Wanna steak?' asks S
EXY
.

Steak. Yes. Good. Steak. That's the best idea I've heard in a donkey's age, as my mom used to say.

He walks and I walk with him, talking about thisandthat, nothing really, just easy talk. We wander off Hollywood Boulevard onto a side street and into a stucco apartment building that at one time had probably been white but is now a beigy gray.

He leads me through a dust bowl of a lobby that smells of bad booze, soiled cigarettes, and stale cats; up a staircase where bogeymen peek out from the darkunder; and down a hall where a rotten orange of a bloodstained carpet crawls.

He opens a door and starts to lead me into a dark apartment. My mom and dad haven't anticipated me being in this kind of
situation, so they haven't prepared me for it, and I follow him in without blinking or batting a lash or an eye.

If I'd been watching me in a movie I would've yelled at the screen—

‘Don't go in that door!'

But I'm not watching myself in a movie, so I waltz right in. I'm really looking forward to my steak.

S
EXY
turns on a dim little light, and a poster of a Negrita with thigh-high boots, hothothotpants, a mushroomcloud Afro, and a mouth that promises untold excitement stares at me.
Foxy
Chocolate
is the title, I think, although I can't be sure.

I sit on a sad overripe couch. It's snowing inside the television. The tall man with the
SEXY
shirt disappears into the kitchen. I ponder calling my father. I look around. No phone. Corpses of ancient aluminum-foil frozen dinners, cold old chicken bones, and industrial-size malt-liquor cans standing like headstones over the graves of dead beers, but no phone. I try to concentrate on the show behind the snow, where excited people are winning something from a silvertongued devil in a shiny suit whipping frenzy into a salivating studio audience.

S
EXY
appears with two pink steaks on two green plates.

Just two pink steaks on two green plates.

‘Hunger is the best sauce,' my mom used to say. I'm hungry.

The smell invades me and my carnivore growls, salivary glands pumping a rich river of digestive fluids down my throat, as I rip into the meat of it, teeth sinking in warm flesh, bloody juice flooding my tongue, hot meat sliding down my gullet.

Before I know it, only the green plate is left.

My eyelids suddenly feel like safes being thrown from a tall building. I hadn't slept much the night before. Or the night before that. I keep having nightmares.

‘Wanna crash?' His tall baritone slides over me like a chocolate mousse smoothie.

Crash. Yes. Crash. Good idea. He leads me into his black bedroom. I'm asleep on my feet, shuffling toward the bed that
waits to embrace me. I remove my shoes and put them at the foot of a falling-apart chair that looks like my uncle Ronnie home from a heavy night boozing. An old coat in the corner resembles a large slouching rodent. A lizard shoe flicks its tongue at me. The steak is warm and yummy, resting like a hamster in the tummy of a snake as I curl into the skank of the mattress.

I'm asleep.

I'm exiled to the Elba of boarding school for being a huge pain in the ass when I'm sixteen. I don't want to be expelled from my family, but no matter how much kick I put in my scream, my mom and dad ignore me. So I suck it up, pack up my troubles, and take it like a man.

Whatever.

As a result, I'm a little unclear exactly what happened to my happy family back in Dallas, but this much is known:

1. My mom moves her friend into my recently vacated room.
   
2. One afternoon thereafter, my dad comes home from his explosives plant to install a basketball hoop for my sister's birthday and discovers my mother – his wife – in his bed with her new best friend.
   
3. All hell breaks loose.
   

Red rockets rip into me, blasting a bolt of agony up my buggered guts, splitting my heart, and burying shafts of pain in my brain. I've severed ligaments, snapped ribs, shattered toes, cracked a head, and broken a nose, but I've never felt pain like that.

I can't see anything. Can't hear anything. Can't smell anything. Can't touch anything. Can't taste anything.

All there is is pain.

I try to yank away, but I can't move. I don't know how he did it, but the tall man with the
SEXY
shirt has gotten inside
me, impossibly huge and violent, and he has me pinned, his chest pressed into my back, right arm underneath me, holding my shoulder with his hand, hot breath stenching my neck, growling into my ear like a feeding beast, punishing me with his flaming rage, tearing a hole in me.

Smell's the first sense to return, as the funk of the sour-beer old moldy body fluid mattress fills my face.

Sound's next. He's calling me a punk and a bitch and a faggot as he rapes me.

Everything slowmotions now. I pull my right arm free, ram it up hard as I can toward his face, and the hard bone of my elbow drives into the soft cartilage of his Adam's apple, a sucking pain sound jolting out of him as he yanks back, breath spasming asthmatically.

Whipping him out of me, I'm suddenly blessedly empty. I move fast now, all animal instinct, and while he wheezes from the bed, I grab my shoes, shoot from the bedroom, stumble, stub my toe on the couch. I hear my brain say, ‘Stubbed toe on couch,' but there's no pain. I slam open the door, flash down the hall, leap three steps at a time, fly out the lobby onto the street, and hit the hot pavement running fast as I can.