He looked around now, trying to gauge just how far he had walked and just how deep into the district he was, but he couldn’t. New York was not his city. For most of his life, he hadn’t even liked coming here. The place was too big, and every bit of it was rude. Getting out of Philadelphia, though, he hadn’t been able to think of any place to go. There were all those crime shows on now: Unsolved Mysteries, and Americas Most Wanted. They put your picture up and everybody saw it. Waiters and cab drivers were looking out for you. Fat house-wives with part-time jobs in the local 7-eleven prided themselves on being able to spot the best disguised fugitive. He had to be someplace where nobody paid attention, and the only place he knew like that was New York.
He was pretty sure that if anybody was paying attention to him now, they wouldn’t be in this place, where people did not pay attention even to themselves. He looked from store front to store front, and his stomach clenched. It wasn’t his fault that the world was the way it was, that the prisses and the fags and feminists had taken over everything. They were the ones who were to blame. They had taken a beautiful thing, the love of a man for a boy, the love that meant not just sex and emotion but the promise of a brighter future for the boy and a legacy for the man, they had taken that thing and made it foul. No, Dennis thought, that wasn’t quite it. The thing itself, the man-boy relationship, that was shining and pure and good and noble. Nobody and nothing could destroy its nobility. What the fags had done was to align themselves with it, to take it on as cover, and as a result people spit on it these days. They hated it. They did everything they could to paint it as foul and perverse and abnormal. It wasn’t abnormal. He’d been on the Internet, and he knew. There were millions of men out there who felt just as he did. Dateline could run as many sting operations as it wanted it, it wouldn’t change the fact that “pedophilia” was as normal as apple pie.
Pedophilia. The love of a child. The love of a boy. They had made that into a disease. They had made it into something worse. That was why Dennis Ledeski hated fags. He really did.
Just at the moment, he was surrounded by fags, and he knew he had to be careful. He’d been approached three or four times by prostitutes. The first two had been women, the kind of women who made you know that every movie depiction of a hooker was so airbrushed as to make it a fantasy. They were very young, but they were already filthy all the way through. You could see the tracks on their arms and the dirt in the folds of their skin. The next three had been men, but transvestite men. It was a kind of continuum, as if the professionals on the street knew that it was a bad idea to approach a man first off with the real deal. The transvestites had been in better shape than the girls. They were clean, and if they were junkies they weren’t injecting it any place visible from the street. Dennis had to be careful. The unmasked gay male prostitutes would come next, and they would be much more aggressive than the others had been. He knew. He had been followed through train stations by them, followed down streets by them. They came at you like vengeance, and once they started they never let go. They all had AIDS.
Dennis was just thinking that Pat Robertson, or Jerry Falwell, or whoever it had been, had been right for once, AIDS was God’s way of punishing homosexuals, when he realized that somebody was staring at him. The stare was calm and straight and unwavering, and Dennis was suddenly sure that this was going to be somebody who understood him. He could always tell the ones who understood him. They could always tell him, too. It was a secret bond, more secret even than the one between men and boys.
The store fronts were full of pornography. In smaller towns stores didn’t put their stuff right in their display windows for anybody to see from the street. A lot of them didn’t have display windows. They blocked their windows up with plain brown cardboard, lettered all over to let you know what they had inside. ADULT BOOKS! MOVIES! MAGAZINES! With all the windows open like this, Dennis didn’t know where to look. The store he was standing next to had a display of equipment that made Dennis feel a little sick, even though he had used some of it some of the time. When you dealt with boys you had to use some of it. Boys were wild. They were born untamed and undisciplined, like young horses. And like young horses, you had to train them to control themselves. It was a fern-bitch lie that you could do that by talking to them or making them sit in a corner. Boys were men. They didn’t respond to that kind of soft, suffocating ooze, except by dying inside and becoming fags. That was why there was so many fags. There were more and more each year. The prisses had gotten hold of the schools and the social service agencies. They had banned and outlawed all the natural, normal ways to bring up boys. They had made pariahs not only of men like him but even of ordinary fathers who only wanted to use the strap a little to bring their boys into line. What they got were fags, or boys who wouldn’t deal with them at all, criminals, violent and bloody for all the world to see.