As if their outcalls were a tomb.

I am never amazed.

I am never stunned.

I am never surprised.

Yet I was all of this and more.

INTERVIEWS WITH BOYS WHO DO SEX WORK as an ongoing project at Smash Street has taken me to places I was astounded to be taken to. The best projects are the ones that assume lives of their own.

“When they’re fucking me in their homes, no one else is ever in the house, he’s fucking my hole, and I’m looking around the inside of this house he lives in. A lot of times, they’ll have kids, the photos of the kids will be on the walls, and I kind of pretend that I could live here like I was a kid, maybe their kid, my picture on someone’s wall, you know, not just a whore their dad likes to fuck in the ass. Their homes all have nice stuff.”

All of them do this.

This revolving door fantasy of home. Some boys have returned to rob the trick.

The dream of home and hills and washed skies every evening where no one was ever hungry.

The dream of home and bubbling pots of cabbage and Daddy sits at the end of the table in the Daddy Spot where all the daddies sit. When the kid called him daddy during the sex, the trick thought it was a sex game. Maybe. But not to the kid who could slip into a careful silence the way other people breathed.

The dream of home and chaotic sprawl because there was room to spare. Pools and summer died in the red rust and the night was filled with voyages that were never aimed for shore but away from it. The dream of home and being well.

All of them — each boy in his swirling bitterness — describes the way in which tricks live as if it’s a foreign country. A religious motto in flowered scrollwork, framed in burnished gold. Stoves and showers and a front porch.

“I just like it in a car and get it over with,” another Smash Street boy tells me. “We lived in a car, and we followed rock concerts. I never went to school. We were always moving around. “My dad pimped out both my mom and me.”

Each Smash Street Boy had a turn at remembering.

“I always like to sneak a peek into the fridge,” I am informed. “Just to see if they have food.”

These boys are called the Hard to Reach. The label is bullshit. I do not find them hard to reach at all. You just have to give them something to reach for.

Just lecturing to them that they should all live healthy lives and reach out to the status quo will get you spit at.

Noah, Darren, Seth, and Jake are focused on the floor. Jake’s hands are clenched firmly together yet moving as if he is washing his hands.

“The family home I lived in was violent and creepy. It creeps me out when they want to take me to their house. They pay extra for that. If it’s in the trick’s house, I am on high alert for violence. They will beat you up. One guy just threw me out of his car in the rain. I had to walk back. It took a long time. I hate tricks.”

They all hate the tricks who pay them for sex. They are conflicted.

This project is going to take some time to finish. I didn’t think it would. But I was wrong. It will. Every time we make a dent in it, some kid will plunge into a black hole of trembling, numbness, and sullen despair.

I was not expecting this stuff with houses and the wondering what it would feel like to fit in.

There can be a swallowing like death.

The other boys will reach out. Tentatively at first. Only they can do it. The kid who is treading water is simply not going to respond to anyone else, let alone an adult.

They remind me of big ocean liners. Crossing the dark water. Place to place. Following rock concerts as if their outcalls were a tomb.

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Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus Blog

Posts tagged with outcalls

While They’re Being Fucked, They Dream of Home