Glory

Johnny rode into the city every day with his mother, where she dropped him off for exactly two hours. Johnny liked his mother. Johnny’s father had left them when Johnny was seven. His father left because Johnny’s mother cheated on him with a younger man. Johnny was sixteen now, and he lived with his mother in Pacifica, because his mother had married a rich man. She wasn’t attracted to Ken, but he loved her intensely. They had been in Pacifica since Johnny was twelve, but it was a month ago when he started riding into San Francisco every day with his mother. Johnny had a problem with stealing. He stole almost everything he could and sold it at school. He stole Ken’s watches, his new shoes, money clips and rings. Ken was eighteen years older than Johnny’s mother, a beautiful blonde with the face and body of a woman half her age, and it had Ken trapped. They pulled Johnny out of the system for home school, which really meant he was done with school. Jenny wasn’t a teacher. She wasn’t much of anything. She was restless in her marriage after trying to play it straight for three years. Johnny knew she had a guy downtown, but he didn’t care much about Ken. Ken was an old man screwing his mother, plain and simple.

Jenny would drop her son off at the wharf with forty dollars. She would pick him up at the same place in two hours, because she said to be there. And like clockwork she was there, Monday through Friday. Weekends were spent taking long drives or flights with Ken in his small plane. Johnny understood why his mother stayed with Ken, but he was apathetic, even while flying above the grids of trees, precipices and jade green fields of California’s coastline. He didn’t care. And Ken was pissed because when Johnny quit school the stealing stopped, and he was convinced that Johnny wasn’t a troubled teenager, that he was nothing but a fucking little con-artist. But there was Johnny’s mother, vibrant and gorgeous. And Ken knew that even the birds in the sky wanted to fuck her, and that he was lucky to have her, even if she had no true feelings for him. He’d already been down that road with his ex-wife after thirty years of agonizing bullshit and arguing. Johnny’s mother was a nymphomaniac, it was no secret. Ken reaped the rewards of it. He knew he wasn’t her dream guy or anything, but he would never do any better and he was smart in that regard, and knowing this only made Johnny care less about him. Not that Johnny mattered.

But what mattered to Johnny was Chinatown, and the glory hole in Chinatown. He’d made his way there out of boredom with the tourists in the wharf, with the boring food and the fucking sea lions. And walking down a street in Chinatown, a dirty old man had talked him into stepping inside, into giving him twenty dollars for a woman to wrap her lips and tongue around Johnny’s sex through the other side of a hole in the wall. Johnny could hear the women moaning and sucking him. The only rule being he couldn’t seek contact with the woman on the other side, which was fine with Johnny, because it was a way for him to remain unabashed on his own, though it became an addiction for him. He learned the schedules of the women, and sometimes he would go back in half an hour and spend his other twenty. The old pimp started calling him Johnny Rocket, because his favorite glory hole woman had told the pimp that Johnny’s cock was tall and red and perfect, but Johnny took it as a nickname because of his speed in getting to the spot from his drop-off point, and it never occurred to him that the pimp had no idea where he came from.

What Johnny couldn’t do was come up with a reason for his mother to drop him off closer to Chinatown, so he told her that he had met up with some friends from the old neighborhood on Fillmore, and that they’d been meeting up there every day and walked the streets and talked to girls. Jenny bought his story, and dropped him off there while she continued on her way, sometimes giving in to him and handing over an extra twenty of Ken’s money. And there Johnny walked Chinatown waiting for his time slot with his favorite girl, who sucked him dry with her mouth and hand, whose teeth he never felt once, who got him so hot he would masturbate at night to her, sometimes three or four times before he went to sleep. In his heart he felt she was a black girl, because he had seen her walking from the back of the building once after he’d been there, and the feeling was undeniable, but in his mind the woman had long red curls and electric pink lips, and he would kiss her while she touched him, then she would turn around and press him into her, before she appeared on the other side of the wall to finish him off in her throat.

Weekends were torture for him. His mother was more collected about it, because she had Ken to tie her over. Ken sensed that Jenny had something going on the side, but never mentioned it. The truth for Ken was already real enough, and his love for a woman who didn’t love him back was the ceiling for his reality. Johnny knew his mother’s type, the lost artist. The young painter, sculptor, the singer or the writer, and most of them had been in and out of his life for the five years after his father left. They moved in for a month, drained the bills and the fridge and his mother’s pocket, didn’t work a real job, took up the living space with canvasses or instruments or typewriters, while Jenny either tended bar or answered phones, or both. But Jenny needed Ken, and Johnny needed her. But Jenny also needed other men to keep herself floating mentally. Johnny had heard her tell his aunt over the phone that Ken was a great lay, but never turned her dial all the way around, and Johnny understood it.

Monday came again and again Johnny was there with his twenty ready for the pimp, who took Johnny’s money and opened the door for him. The pimp looked in and told Johnny he had to walk up the street, because the pimp had grown to trust Johnny, and his favorite lady had become used to him, and had even missed him on a certain level. The light flipped on next door and he heard her purse hit the floor. The pimp was gone now, there was no door cracked, nobody to be just outside to look in on him if they chose to. He saw the light from the bare bulb come in from the hole at his waist. He felt her turn to lock the door on her side. He dropped to his knees there. He got an eyeful of her from back to front, from face to feet, and he heard the pimp unlock the door. Johnny stood straight and stared at the wall in front of him, his cock through the hole, his eyes closed and his brow filled with sweat, him harder than ever down there, as Jenny worked her mouth, tongue and hand over and around the hard, young sex she had become addicted to since before her first husband.