Gang, Rent A Prostitute

My mom taught at my middle school. She taught 6th grade science and math classes and was always making sure I was on my best behavior. If I got in trouble for something, nobody knew about it because she would be contacted directly, immediately and discreetly. This naturally lead to my being sneaky and underhanded as a child and throughout my adolescence. I would try to find ways to cut classes or finesse free concessions at sporting events. I wasn’t very athletic myself at this point in my life so I had to find other avenues to make friends as well. My friends were hard to keep because my mom was a teacher and nobody wants to feel like they’re forever being chaperoned, especially during this time of self discovery and bad decisions that is middle school. I was in the national junior beta club, honors society, student council, show choir and gospel choir while I was in middle school, and from an outside perspective I was a model student. I copied my homework from hispanic students who didn’t get enough credit. My friends stole things and just didn’t do homework altogether. Things were really simple and easy enough to work through, all the while life was still interesting enough to keep me entertained.

I was still into early morning cartoons and not quite in love with girls yet, but I was sure by the age of 12 that I liked what they were turning into (plus my genitals were fully functioning at that point, so I was a wild man). Girls were developing into something more interesting than boys that smelled nice. They were provocative. Girls were beginning to look and speak in ways that my 12 year old mind wasn’t ready to communicate with. I was an idiot boy and had no idea what I was to do about my raging baby boners in seventh grade social studies class. My friends could all relate and were into the part in their lives in which lying about sexcapades from the fourth grade was the thing to do, as the stories of touching ambiguous, conspicuous, more than likely illiterate young girls oozed passed their Flamin’ Hot Cheetoh stained lips. I foolheartedly believed them and wanted my own story to tell. My jealousy would get the best of me a lot of times when hearing about everybody’s stories of glory and bodily exploration. Damn those kids and their confident bravado. They had so much conviction and detail in the stories you could almost see the rooms they were in. So much sensory shit in the way they described the steamy scenes of barely budding bare breasts and hairless genitalia with odors the likes of which I had never experienced. My jealousy was growing to the point that I wanted to prove a point to my friends.

My mom’s classroom was empty on Monday afternoons. Me and the miscreants I was aligned with would go to the Texaco next door and get Takis and Mr. Pure for our hangout session in my mom’s vacant classroom. My school, by the way, was right off the highway and on Lamar avenue and American Way. Lamar and American Way is a very crucial point in the city of Memphis because it’s the midway point on the “ho stroll”. There are prostitutes all the way up and down the street and there is a motel next door to Texaco which was next door to the school. Fucking terrible place to sit a middle school but it was there nonetheless. The prostitutes would talk to me and my friends in the store while they bought malt liquor with their sex money (Yes, the store next to the school sells liquor). They would talk to us about safe sex and staying in school and giving back to the community and other hyper-positive shit that you tell 12 year olds to keep them bored and resentful. My friends loved it. It made them feel cool, talking to street walkers and being engaged in street life. They felt grown-up and I felt small. I felt out of place and I think everybody who I was with knew that. They had their lies to fall back on, but all I had was my nerve and thirty-five dollars to put a down-payment on a bad decision.

I wanted someone to make me feel like a man. I wanted to feel as strong and confident as my piece of shit friends. So I was like, “Let’s just do it” . My friends were all very excited by this prospect of collectively having relations with a prostitute. I liked feeling like the main guy. I loved being the leader of the little asshole kids. When we went to the Texaco, on what felt like the longest Monday in the history of my childhood. We saw the nicest street walking woman that we would meet there and she started giving us her hyper-positive spill; before she could finish I asked her how much she needed to take us with her to the neighboring motel and make us men.

She told us for $75 she’d show us how to have sex. We put our money together and then followed her in a single file line to the third floor of this grossly grey motel. We built up this much nerve and there was no going back as the same kids that left middle school that day. We were gonna be different and what-not. She was tall, taller than me at least. She had short kinky hair that was brown with a red streak along the back right side. She had a really big butt and reeked of malt liquor and Newport Box 100’s. Her walk was slow but her stride was long so it was a bit of a task to keep up with her. She skipped steps as she walked up the stairs. This lady was either anxious or excited to have us but either way it was already going too fast for me to be comfortable. Before I had a chance to fully commit to this thing I was blurting preemptively how I was gonna go in first due to me paying the majority of our balance due to this smelly entrepreneur. We all agreed that that made sense and they were supposed to wait outside for me.

For contextual purposes we will refer to this woman as Candice for the duration of the rest of this piece.

Candice held my hand. We went into this smelly ass room and I couldn’t help but feel like I was supposed to be doing this. Not that I was excited to be doing it but I was determined to be apart of this group of people. She was my first naked lady. Her nipples were big but her breasts were smallish. Her hips wide and crotch surprisingly well groomed. She was patient with me. She took ten minutes to explain what to do and talked me through it graciously the entire time I was in her presence. Candice was actually the best part of all this. She tried to make me okay with what I had done. I put on a condom for the very first time that day and it was uncomfortable. I hate condoms to this day. They’re full of greasy stuff and they yank hairs coming off. They left a gross rubber smell on my junk and I hated that. I struggled getting inside of Candice. I couldn’t find where to go. I discovered I’m not supposed to be going straight down the middle but closer to the bottom. When I finally slid inside, the sensation was warm and moist and not at all what I expected. I honestly didn’t know what to expect to be honest. I just wanted it to be done, I didn’t necessarily care about the act itself. I had never been so scared before.

Before I could even get to a point where I could move my body while standing behind this woman I didn’t know, the other five seventh grade boys barged in and my face froze in a panic. I was fat, naked and touching a prostitute. I got so scared and embarrassed and pissed off that I couldn’t breathe. I started to cry. As tears rush down my face and my husky sized Dickies pants laid on the ground beside me, I was greeted by five kids that I called friends pulling their pants down around me and I saw my first naked guy that wasn’t me that day as well. Things are scary naked; too much spectacle. I ran out of the room hysterically sobbing and almost tumbled down the stairs on my way back to my mom’s car. It was a five minute tumble to the school. What had felt like forever was only a 45 minute experience total from the moment I left school to the time I broke down in my mom’s backseat. I didn’t have to see my mom for another hour, so i tried to gather my shit and put on a game face.

It was the last three weeks of seventh grade and I came up with a way to not go back to school until eighth grade. I was done with tests, fuck that field day, fuck that trip to Atlanta and fuck those guys who were all still in the motel room. I didn’t necessarily need to go back so I didn’t. I told my mom to let me stay home and she did because there wasn’t reason to say no. We didn’t talk about it.