The first grant I ever worked with was from the Ford Foundation.

And then…

What do I need. Today.

The past for me is so abstract that turning around to look at it takes away my energy that I need to face what will be coming at me tomorrow.

I have to choose.

We all must choose.

Last night, one of the Smash Street Boys was in bed with a trick at the trick’s house.

The trick is fucking this boy and suddenly the kid starts screaming. Really screaming.

Cut. Fade to black.

From overhead we see a hospital.

Yes. I could have written this. But I didn’t. These days, I just live it. My writing days are kinda over.

You can’t call Twitter writing.

Medical personnel cannot figure this kid out.

But I can. And did. Been there done that.

I suggested an MRI as in immediately. I don’t have a ranch. But if I did, I would bet on Avascular Necrosis.

This is a kid with a history of pneumocystis pneumonia. That means Prednisone.

The derivatives of cortisone can be directly implicated in bone death.

The trick was breaking the boys bones. You won’t be able to see it like you would with a broken ankle. Or a forearm.

It’s the joints that take the brunt of it.

How do you break ma joint.

They can crack and break like everything else. Hips are a definite problem.

This is me on the Internet with a kid who is sending me messages from an ER.

We cut to the chase, and I was right. I have seen it a thousand times. Seen it. Live it. Hold the Fentanyl.

I HATE it that my boys are doing sex work. I bite my tongue.

They lie and say they do not care what the problems are. They just want to be together.

I care what the problems are. The biggest problem ANY safe house has is in the people who are looking for the people who live there. This goes double for parents who are being released from prison and they’re pissed off for being turned in.

The kid just wants to run.

A Safe House has to be exactly that or go home.

Can you understand (Alabama comes to mind but Appalachia, hey, we take the cake) that some states are so corrupt that the cops are the ones you need to be safe from and the reality is that black boys are NEVER safe.

Our focus is to stay alive, and that means me, too. But I’m way different from these boys in one respect.

I need to stay alive FOR them. Because I need to be needed.

I fucking knew exactly how hard this was going to be.

What do I need today. I need to get this child to me as soon as I can or his other bones are going to start breaking, too.

I can only say I do have helpers. They come and go. Highly trained helpers pro bono. We can help this kid and no opiates. Especially fentanyl.

Two recent hurricanes. Both of them in my face. And a forest fire.

I am not sure how we survived the forest fire let alone the hurricanes.

I DID plan for emergencies. But not three.

This kid was cut loose. He has no way to pay.

What I need is to put him on a bus.

It was another active weekend with the whore dramas. Being beaten up by tricks who love to beat young boys up is nothing. It’s pretty close to some kind of sick status quo.

The knee jerk response is to say call the cops.

Are you fucking kidding me.

Where do you think most of these boys get raped.

Detention.

I keep thinking about stealing an iPhone because this kid has to STOP being a victim and START taking photos of license plates before he jumps in the fucking car. Send me the photo of the license plate.

Then, there will be some kind of record of who he might be tricking with.

While they’re beating you up, it’s hard to focus on answers to whore problems.

I WILL find a way to arm this kid with some tech because it’s his life. What happens is that the tricks beats you up and rob you.

Magnify this shit times twenty.

I had to cut back to twenty.

Now, I have cut back to twelve.

I could tell you things that would curl your toes. Then, there’s the kid who is thrown from a moving car into a ditch in the pouring rain. It rained hard the other night.

Here’s a surprise: They love home schooling.

I had a certified teacher. You don’t even NEED a certified teacher here in Appalachia.

Don’t even get me going about Appalachia.

I have never before seen my connection to PLACE as scary let alone terrifying.

But after natural disaster after natural disaster, I could barely get out of bed to face what was out there. This is whores, disease, and kids.

I can always feel when HIV is like a gravity pulling me down. But I am a grown man.

I don’t choose to contemplate what it is like for a 14-year-old who has to hit the streets tonight to make some money from food.

Tonight, I took some video on one of those disposable video cameras (five bucks) of our favorite dumpster. The video gives you an idea of how hard these motherfuckers are to just climb into.

Look, straight people are not going to do this for us. Allow us final 12 to be together again. I don’t care. It’s not about them. It’s about the boys.

When we can be together WE DO NOT DO SEX WORK.

The foundation that was working with us just has no more money. We made things last and stretched out until there was nothing left.

It was go back to sex work or probably the boys to jail.

Homelessness is one place where the stereotype is just plain fucking wrong. It’s HARD to be invisible and homeless. People don’t see you, they see through you.

Today, I tried fixing the roof leak. I got a tarp and pounded and pounded and pounded and pounded up there.

Electricity is back.

There’s food.

Because sex work made it so.

I have got to stop bitching at sex work. I wish I could believe it was just like working at the Post Office.

It just isn’t.

The whole HIV thing is really dicey, but when you are hungry, you are hungry.

Why would they trust me. Runaway boys. We throw around that term, – at-risk – like it was water.

“What did you do when you were my age.”

That tells the story right there.

They ALL ask it.

What we share is a past, a disease, and a desire to fight back by simply remaining alive.

I could go on and on and I can tire easily. I am tired now. And when I get this tired I will start writing about stuff and begin using real names and shit like that which would be a mistake.

Riley almost got busted for shoplifting a package of hot dogs. I don’t know why they like fucking hit dogs. Let me go find that photo of Riley and the hot dogs.

I became acutely aware that if you really want to make some cultural confrontations, or change the context of entire institutions, you will become vomit to the people with the offices and the assistants and the big paychecks and the disingenuous bullshit that they chew on on a daily basis.

The suits. They are not your friends.

These people would rather study you for twenty years. They suck.

Three events have challenged my patience.

Back to 2 hurricanes and a forest fire. Had a huge impact on our ability to maintain housing.

We became homeless.

I hate sex work but it has allowed us to pull back from the brink of a black hole that begins with hunger and grocery store dumpsters. I do not know where it ends.

Young boys with HIV doing sex work are UNDERSERVED.

I need five thousand dollars to put it all back together again. And then I need six months to crawl up the ass of every foundation in America and scream at them that boys who do sex work are WAY UNDERSERVED. I am going to build a safe house. I have built a clinic. Why not a safe house.

Underserved. Suit language.

Please. They can’t get served at all.

You wanna do it right.

Fucking do it yourself.

We are the last people on the planet that the philanthropical people should be treating with outright distain, hostility, indifference, and inappropriate contempt. I don’t care. I will do it myself.

I do believe it was Mr. Finn in Hannibal, Missouri, who said…

I have been there before. 

http://tim-barrus.format.com/