The man really was watching him. He really was. Dennis looked carefully behind him to see who it was. He was not a stupid man. He knew how to take precautions. One of those precautions was never to go anywhere, in a district like this one, with a black person. Dennis would have avoided going anywhere with a black person under any circumstances, if only because so many of them were either drug criminals or related to drug criminals, but very few black men were gay, and even fewer were mentors. That, Dennis decided, was what he should call himself. He was a mentor. Men like him were mentors. When he put the palm of his hand on the inside of a boy’s thigh, he was . . . he was . . .
Something in his head had fuzzed out. His balls hurt. Every part of his body hurt. He turned around to look at the man who was looking at him. He was glad at what he saw. This was not a middle-aged troll. This was not the kind of man you saw on American justice, beard grown out for a day and a half, Polo shirt stained down the front by beer. Dennis looked quickly at his reflection in the window with the leather equipment in it and felt immediately better. He didn’t have a half-grown-out beard. It was too difficult to tell if he had stains on his clothes. He had to be careful. Being on the run did things to you. You began to fall apart.
The man was young and tall and muscular, and unlike everybody else on this street he was dressed like a preppie on his way to a fraternity meeting. Dennis liked his clothes. There was a certain kind of man who looked especially good in an expensive Polo shirt, and this man was wearing a very expensive polo shirt. The Polo shirt was white, and dazzlingly clean. The trousers under it were stone chinos and also dazzlingly clean. If the Angel Gabriel could have appeared in New York on an ordinary day, Dennis thought he would look like this.
There was no way anymore to ignore the fact that the man was looking at him. Dennis wandered over, doing his best to make it look causal. “I don’t like this street,” he said, when he got close enough for the man to hear. “I’m not from New York. I don’t know how I ended up here.”
“I know what you want,” the man said.
Dennis tried to place the accent, but couldn’t. It was not an accent from the Northeast, but it was nothing so simple as “Southern.” He rubbed his hands together. The man was wearing loafers under his chinos. They were Brooks Brothers cordovans and shined so well, they gleamed.
“They’re going to be lost if we don’t save them,” the man said. Dennis’s head snapped up. “They’re going to end up on drugs, or something worse. They’re going to end up in the kind of life that isn’t worth living. The dull life. The suburban life. The life of ‘quiet desperation.’ I like Thoreau, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Dennis said. “Yes, I like Thoreau a lot.”
Dennis wasn’t completely sure who Thoreau was, but he didn’t care. This was good, too. This man was literate. And he wasn’t coming on to him. There was that, too.
Of course, there was the question of what the man was doing down here. There was that. Dennis wasn’t worried. He was down here, too. They were both down here because the prisses and the fags and the queers and the feminists had driven them down here. They’d taken a noble thing and forced it to hide in garbage dumps.
“I have a place,” the man said. “I rescue them, and then I bring them to my place. I hide them from the people who want to hurt them. But I can’t do it alone. They deserve individual attention.”
Careful now, Dennis thought. If you’re not careful, you’ll get caught. “They deserve the best in life, too,” Dennis said. “It must cost a lot of money.”
“Oh, I’ve got money,” the man said. “Can’t you tell that? I don’t need anybody else’s money. What I don’t have is time.”
Dennis relaxed a little. It was an incredible idea. Start a place for boys, a safe house where boys in danger of being prissified, or beaten up, or turned into drug addicts and juvenile delinquents, could be nurtured and educated, could be helped to mature into men. He wondered where the place was. It would be terrible if it was in a neighborhood like this, but it might have to be. The prisses policed everywhere else. He wondered how this man found the boys he helped and protected. Maybe he took them right off the streets, right away from the control of their negligent parents, who let them run in the park and paid attention only to their gossip and their newspapers.
“I could use somebody to help me with the time,” the man said. “I don’t know if you’re the one, but I could use somebody. You don’t look like you belong in a place like this.”