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When Kevin transferred to the school, few people knew him and no one cared. But after two months, boys and girls whispered in class: Kevin is a male prostitute, three hundred dollars a night; if you're good and you train with the football team or the rowing team, you can bargain down to two seventy. He also sleeps with women, but not those kinds of women—those kinds of women. The fact that Kevin was a male prostitute was written on the bathroom stall door: "Kevin Moskowitz is a male prostitute, ninth grade, six feet tall, one hundred forty pounds. Specialties: oral sex (highly recommended), penetrative sex, anal sex (plus: extra charge), foot fetish... For inquiries, please call the Nighttime Vagina Angel Hotline..." Kevin knew why they did it. It was the senior girls who acted as pimps, writing it in lipstick. Every year the old girls graduate, and every year new pimp girls are born.
The football guys were all assholes, stupid assholes; their penises were their flesh. But they were rich, living off trust funds without even realizing it, living on the Upper East Side, with their own rooms and king‑size beds. The rowing team boys were even bigger assholes, but they paid more. Some of them, responding to the educational call of the Upper East Side since they were eighteen, would even give him after‑care. So Kevin, even though he knew they were assholes, still had to sleep with them—make love—have sex, whatever, that’s what it means.
John fenced. He had won medals at the Youth Olympics and state championships. For a while, a huge purple‑ribbon banner hung on the outside wall of the school building, a silhouette of John in competition, surrounded by golden and silver trophy emblems like fish roe swimming around a big fish. John was the school's招牌, the board of trustees' darling, the children's role model. But at school, almost no one mentioned his surname. Some said he was the illegitimate son of a "big shot" kept with a mistress in Europe. Others said he was a clone his father had custom‑made to live forever. Some said John wasn’t a big deal, just the son of a rich merchant. But John was John, without a surname. John was just John—not John the Baptist, not John the Apostle, just John.
When John fucked Kevin, they were in tenth grade. Kevin had always wanted to get John as a client. He seemed richer than all the other assholes on the teams. But he heard from the girls at school that John was not "sound goods"—not physically unsound, but mentally. "John is a sex addict, the kind in horror movies who’ll fuck you to death and then chop off your thing… shh, shh, here he comes…" There were rumors that John had beaten a teacher almost to death back in eighth grade. No one knew if it was true, but everyone kept a rational attitude: false news is real. The faker, the truer. Besides, John had already beaten Kevin once, in the bathroom. A group of senior boys wanted someone to take their anger out on. It was already a miracle it didn’t turn into a gang rape. Kevin’s face was left intact, even though John said, "I hate looking at your face. I want to scratch it up." Then he washed his hands and flicked water onto Kevin’s face. John’s legs were very long; Kevin remembered his back against the bathroom tiles, John’s and the other boys’ legs swaying before his eyes.
Kevin was surprised when he got the booking text. He had just finished his shift at a strip club and was running down the street trying to catch the last subway. It was from the school’s pimp girl: "Hi, you done with your homework? John wants you to come to his house for an in‑call. This Saturday, 7 PM. Should be a group thing, he didn’t say exactly, but he’ll pay double." "Who is John?" "Just that John. PS: I need forty percent commission." Later, he took a three‑hour subway ride and walked a long way from the station to John’s mansion. Only when he got there did he realize that all the assholes from the fencing team and football team were having a party at John’s place, and they needed a public male prostitute to strip for entertainment—pretty enough, experienced enough, with sexual organs somewhere between "fresh" and "not fresh."
He went. He knew how to strip. After that, he kept having sex with John. His vagina, uterus, and eggs were monopolized by John. The tips and fees John gave him, plus his scholarships and welfare, were enough to pay the rent for his mom and himself. Until later he almost stopped living with his mom, until later he almost moved into John’s place and became John’s possession. The contact info was still there on the bathroom stall. The Nighttime Vagina Angel hotline changed numbers a few times, and pimp girls still sent texts and calls, but Kevin never went again. John had said, "That’s disgusting." Not out of possessiveness, not out of youthful affection—but because Kevin was a healthy kind of unhealthy. His vagina was convenient; he couldn’t get pregnant, so no condoms were needed. John hated the limitation of rubber covering his penis. That was Kevin’s advantage.
John’s house was huge, exceptionally clean, with endless white furniture and floor‑to‑ceiling glass. The kitchen was large, the refrigerator large, like a standing soldier. The milk inside was abundant, like a soldier’s white teeth. John had a blanket he loved very much, and he didn’t allow anyone to touch it. Kevin once heard John say to that blanket: "Mom."
The first time John and Kevin had sex was on the night of the party. Kevin knelt on John’s Isfahan palm‑leaf patterned carpet and gave three boys oral: John, the football captain, and the rowing captain. While they were getting head, they lit up weed and shoved bills into Kevin’s underwear. Then they got high, picked Kevin up, laid him on the glass dining table, and took whatever was within reach on the table and put it into Kevin’s vagina—forks, candy, straws, rotting flower stems, cigarette butts, a dinner knife, a woman’s lip gloss, psychiatric medication. Kevin didn’t cry. He just thought, I have to charge extra.
But later, he did cry. After it was over, he smoothed out the thick stack of dollars, folded them, and put them in his backpack’s secret pocket. That money could support him and his mom for a long time, even buy a season pass to the aquarium—he’d always wanted to go but never had the chance. He was too busy, busy having sex, busy collecting the money after sex. He asked John if he could use the bathroom to take a shower, because it was a three‑hour subway ride from John’s home to his place. John was sitting on the couch watching a movie. In it, a boy with blond hair was joyfully spraying bullets through a classroom, students’ blood turning into dizzying oranges, irons, pinks, blues under the lights, the soundtrack filled with cicada noise and weak, hollow sobbing of girls. John said yes, but not to get his bathroom dirty. After his shower, he should stay—John wasn’t done yet. Kevin said, okay, John. Forks, candy, straws, rotting flower stems, cigarette butts, a dinner knife, a woman’s lip gloss, psychiatric medication, condom.
Kevin lay on John’s bed, already wanting to sleep. He buried himself in the sheets, waiting for John to come. Forks, candy, straws, rotting flower stems, cigarette butts, a dinner knife, a woman’s lip gloss, fingers, psychiatric medication, dildo. John walked over. He spoke like a child chewing deworming pills. "Kevin, what are you doing?" Kevin felt like crying. He wrapped the blanket around himself, turned his face away, and closed his eyes. He could feel John’s hand under the sheet squeezing his tightly pressed thighs, his hand and body heat seeping between Kevin’s legs. Then John yanked the sheet off his face, the aramid fabric snapping over the bed and body. "Kevin, is your name Kevin? Or Kent, Kell something? Are you unhappy?" John’s fingers slid in—same pace, same frequency, same heat. Kevin had washed his vagina three times with antiseptic and feminine disinfectant. He thought, John will be satisfied, right? How much money will he give me? After tonight? Forks, candy, straws, rotting flower stems, cigarette butts, a dinner knife, a woman’s lip gloss, dildo, fingers. Kevin opened his eyes. He should treat his source of income more professionally. "Sir, my name is Kevin." He didn’t mention that they had met before in the bathroom during the assault. John didn’t even remember him, because John didn’t care who he had beaten up.
Kevin saw John’s blond hair, like the blue‑black stubble on his chin, scratching through his skin in patches. John’s other hand pressed down on Kevin’s lower belly. Kevin, from the violent pleasure inside him, tried to arch his belly upward, but John’s hand pushed it back down. Kevin could feel his pubic bone touching John’s knuckles—no flesh between them, just bone‑to‑bone sex. "You’re not happy being fucked by me?" Kevin shook his head. "No, I’m not unhappy, sir." "Do you have any STDs?" "No, sir. I get regular checkups. No STDs." "Good." Forks, candy, straws, rotting flower stems, cigarette butts, a dinner knife, a woman’s lip gloss, dildo, fingers, psychiatric medication, camera lens.
John himself was like a sleeping, violent kiss, sucking at Kevin’s back and neck. He endlessly dropped himself into Kevin’s hair, body, vagina, his breath hot as the sun. Kevin’s hair stood on end. He hadn’t known John was so strong. When John relieved his lust, his eyes seemed to turn red—not the red eyes of a lab rabbit waiting to be killed and its liver dissected, but the eyes of someone rejoicing in a massacre, like in a comic book. Kevin could feel John’s cold lips on his chest, then his cute, childish teeth biting into his flesh and bones. John had canines. Men with canines are dangerous, because canines reduce their apparent age, lowering the vigilance of their sexual partners. Balding men often neglect personal hygiene; men who inject veterinary drugs are mostly impotent; thin men tend to adore fat whores. John had an abnormal obsession with nipples and mammary tissue, a fervent, beautiful pursuit of the soft flesh of fertility.
John drank, fornicated, stole, and robbed on Kevin’s flesh, like a man, not a high school student. Kevin could smell the masculinity on John, out of balance—the smell of blood from a strong person who envied the world fiercely and bit into it. John liked using a camcorder. When Kevin knelt on the floor giving him head, John would turn on the camera, aim the lens at Kevin’s eyes, his lips stretched white around the penis, the blue veins on Kevin’s neck. Kevin performed his duty diligently. The penis tore the soft palate, leaving a bruised streak of blood. He swallowed John’s fluids with difficulty and experience. Through the camcorder, John watched Kevin—a loyal male prostitute, crouching on the ground, legs folded like a newborn lamb, glowing in the industrial sick‑green night vision, pleasuring himself. John came in Kevin’s mouth. Kevin shed physiological tears from lack of oxygen; they reached the corners of his lips and mixed with the semen, and he swallowed everything together.
After they finished, John said he was hungry and told Kevin to go find him something to eat. Kevin thought to himself that he only provided sexual services, not private chef services—besides, John’s semen was still floating in his vagina, about to leak out. But then he thought about how rich John was, and he went. John’s kitchen was very high‑end; Kevin didn’t even know how to use most of it. He found a packet of instant pasta, couldn’t find a microwave, so he boiled it on the stove. John called from the room to heat up some milk. Kevin took it from the fridge and warmed it. While he was fussing in the kitchen, John got out of bed. His arms were like two coiled pythons tightening around Kevin’s waist. Kevin could see their reflection in the metal surface of the range hood, John towering with a terrifying majesty mixed with the dignity of slaughter. In his arms, Kevin looked like a fishing boat next to a fish, a fishing boat next to an ocean liner. The water boiled, the steam of food rising. Kevin said, it’s ready. John let go.
That night, Kevin fell asleep in John’s house. He heard the sound of housekeeping vacuuming and the movie playing on John’s laptop. He heard the gunfire playing out loud, the rewinding dragged on and on, looping the screams and wails from the gunfire until they became an illusion of dripping water on stone, and also something like a home video, a man’s and a woman’s voice shouting: John, come here, come over here. John’s bed was huge, very soft. He felt like he was sinking into it, the bed turning into white, dissolving sand. After two more rounds, Kevin woke at dusk. He saw John standing at the center of the window, the cross of the window frame pressing exactly on John’s shoulders. That day, the sunlight was red with a sense of luxury, shimmering and flowing on the window lattice like a red‑hot branding iron, chasing after John’s body.
John’s preferences were: slapping, internal ejaculation, recording, biting, leaving in place, torment. Kevin took note. He was very professional about this. John liked filming what happened when Kevin’s body was at its limit—whether during orgasm or the twitching of the refractory period. But John always said he was too thin. "You’re too thin, it feels bad. I don’t like it." So Kevin started going to the gym every day, even though he didn’t like it. That day, Kevin went back to his mom’s place. He gave her all the cash he had, keeping only one hundred‑dollar bill for himself.
The next morning, Kevin still had to go to school and suffer through Shakespeare. He could barely stay awake. John was called up by the teacher to recite on stage: "Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles." Down below, Kevin lay on the connected desk‑chair, nearly asleep. He still sometimes went to the underground bar of the Nighttime Virgin Angel to strip, on nights when he couldn’t sleep and John didn’t need him. In his dream, he was in a poppy‑scented sea, John wading through the water wearing a crown, picking up Kevin who slept on a water lily, and fornicating among the pansies on the bank. In the dream, he heard the sound of swans flying over the lake, and the dull thud of a shotgun.
After the whole school knew Kevin was John’s whore, Kevin got much less abuse. He would flip off those boys who had no potential to become clients. Sometimes John would have Kevin eat lunch with him, just the two of them, because Kevin could say some pleasant but silly things to John: How was your day? John, what should I wear when we go back today? After all, he was John’s whore now. John had other whores at school, but Kevin didn’t care. He only needed John’s reputation, John’s childish authority. He could live well enough on John’s name—that was plenty.
After sex, John often talked to Kevin about his plan. He wanted to kill all the idiots, fools, morons, and retardates at school. He wanted to kill those elegant, pirouetting teachers who kept talking in class about withdrawing from Iraq, sending troops to Afghanistan, the Affordable Care Act, Clinton visiting North Korea. He wanted to kill the old, undying members of the school board. He wanted to kill the coaches, the teammates who competed with him for medals, the cheerleaders who hunted him around school. He wanted to kill Mondays. He wanted to kill the swans in the school pond. If he had a gun, he would definitely do it. Kevin knew John had guns. He had a whole room full of them. "They’re all my father’s. Gifts my father left me, toys, whatever. They’re my father’s. My father’s things are the best in the world. I’m my father’s son, so I’m the best in the world too." John had shown Kevin his candy store. So John would definitely do it.
Kevin didn’t understand why John’s disgust for this world and the people in it was so immense, almost to the point of overwhelming, conquering, and enslaving John himself. The only people John didn’t hate were his father—that handsome man in the photograph—and the mother who never appeared, and John himself. Kevin’s attachment to this world was great: his mother, the world, money. It was because of money that he was attached to this world. He couldn’t understand John. But one day he would have to understand, Kevin knew. When he discovered John in his house counting shotguns and assault rifles, he knew it was almost time—the climax of sex, the climax of love, the climax of death, the climax of blood, the climax of childbirth, the climax of freedom, the climax of rebellion, the climax of psychosis, the climax of revolution—whatever, the climax was coming.
On the day John opened fire at school, Kevin came to school too. The weather was clear, a cool scientific summer. Younger students were playing soccer on the green field. The sky was blue like the eyes of a movie hero kissing his heroine before his death, a clichéd blue. The swans on the lake fluffed up and flew, the sound of their wings beating matching the frequency of bullets piercing children’s flesh. John’s order was for Kevin to film. John laughed as he fired, walking through classrooms, the cafeteria, the hallways, the laboratories. Kevin covered one ear with one finger and walked behind John. He didn’t realize he was crying until John handed him a loaded gun, took the camcorder, turned it around, and pointed it at Kevin. John said, "Kevin, now it’s your turn." Kevin looked at John. John smiled at him piously and happily from behind the camcorder. Kevin put the gun to his own jaw and pulled the trigger.