the unofficial biography of a delinquent

The average youth of the day of tomorrow is eighteen-years-old. Depending on his socio-economic status, he may possess a high-school degree, though having a family inheritance really doesn't (and shouldn't) matter. He is five feet and nine inches tall. He has messy, tousled hair. No gel, because it's too fake (like plastic, which means it breaks), even for him.



He smokes Lucky Strikes, first and foremost because he thinks it makes him look sophisticated; but also because he is always in some need of luck. Deep down, he has always been an optimist. But he calls himself a cynic pessimist. Every cynic who came about was once a disappointed idealist. He might admit to knowing this.



In any given large city, there may be ten to ten thousand of these displaced youth. They are all about the same, anyhow. They speak the same talk (language), wear the same clothes, associate with the same people, fuck the same girls. They are, in short, boring and uneducated, unworthy of any attention they may garner for being young and wild. The days invariably end, and the young thus grow old. There is little fanfare. So it goes.



i.



Listen: Frederick used to know some of these people.



He used to be one of those people, actually. Started out by sitting around the bus station after dark and watching the dealings, the pros. Just a spectator; observing. Once, he watched the exchange of two girls. Their handlers were middle-aged men (nondescript, average height, squinting eyes, beer belly). The girls were around his age, maybe a little younger; they were, of course, unconscious, their faces covered with hoods, their skinny marked legs covered with sweat and tears. The men marked off a few squares on their contracts, signed the names, shared a cigarette before throwing it off to the side. Each man took one girl and then they disappeared. The entire transaction took about five minutes. Approximately ten words were spoken. The men didn't talk, they grunted: they pointed.



He used to know one of the young training-to-be-a-handler kids, used to fuck him when his schedule allowed for it. They met in the back of the liquor store on Saturday nights, the nights when there was nothing planned; Frederick used to work there part-time. And they fucked. It wasn't anything particularly memorable or worth continuing. They met maybe about three times before the handler, a real genuine British kid, got busted for being involved in a notorious human trafficking circle and was sent to a high-security prison center. The Big Kids' playpen. A few years later, he was found dead in his cell, his feet dangling midair, his eyes swimming in his head. So it goes.



ii.



He quit school a semester before his graduation and he moved out two days after becoming another high-school dropout statistic. He had a little brother who was the genius of his sixth grade class and he had a pleasant mother and an understanding father and he moved out on them. He went from respectable middle-class to detested slum kid in a matter of minutes.



"You pay by the week, on Fridays," said his first landlady. She gestured to the piano by the door, slammed her fat grimy hands over its cover. She coughed. She was old. And she didn't really care for the piano. It served its purpose as a makeshift table and it was never played, not ever. "Leave your money here. Put it in an envelope, a new one. If I don't see one with your name on it on Saturday in the morning, you're out of luck and a room. I've got kids who'd kill for a place. No exceptions." Frederick knew that there were five vacant rooms and he only ever

saw one other tenant drop her envelope on the piano cover on Friday evenings.



He didn't say anything.



The room was small, really fit for one person. He had a bed. Not that much of a bed. No furniture except for a chair that threatened to break should he delicately place his posterior on it. A cracked refrigerator with a lousy handle and a window that looked out onto an alleyway dumpster. At night, he watched the dealers hang and sometimes there would be two kids messing around because they thought no one was looking. Maybe they thought they were in love (as if ramming a girl against a brick wall with her leg wrapped around your thigh was a manifestation of pure and complete love).



They probably did.



iii.



The other tenant, a second-year college student, was French. She wore glasses, kept her hair in tidy condition, and she thought she was the absolute shit. She was a music major with an economics minor. Her envelopes always had her name written on it in fancy script, like she'd had it typed. Frederick ran his finger over it just for the hell of it and discovered that he'd smudged the fountain ink.



Oh. Well, fuck.



They spoke once.



"You are wholly despicable and an utter fool," said the girl. "The rate you're going, you'll end up in the gutter."



But he was already in the gutter. Not that she would have known. And you couldn't really go deeper than that, not on Earth. Not in this universe.



"I'm aiming for Hell, actually," he said, not really caring about she or anyone thought of him. "I'm digging my way down there. By myself, obviously. With my bare hands, if I have to. Dirt-stuffed nails. Hope they'll welcome me with open arms; 'cause, you know, I'm actually trying. . ."



iv.



When he was nineteen, he fell in love with an actress. She strung him along until she realized that driving around in a lemon or having dates at strip malls wasn't really her style, and she dumped him on a Sunday afternoon after having fucked him eleven times over a period of exactly thirty-two days, which really wasn't that often if you think about it. "I'm going to Hollywood," she said. She had a chipped tooth and pale and thin lips. Her smile was broken and probably someone in the bottling room of the Hatchery had messed up, because it seemed to be permanently taped to her face. Her English was awful and her Hungarian accent didn't help. He thought she was beautiful.



"I love you," he finally told her, after they'd cleaned up for the last time and she'd acquiesced to sitting in his lap. His fingers were wandering, touching (human to human), his lips nibbling on her left ear, and she wasn't really stopping him. She always let him do things to her. She was sort of used to it.

"That's silly. You're a silly boy. Why aren't you at home?"



And he told her that he'd run away when he was seventeen and five months from owning a high-school degree. She told him that she hadn't gone to high-school at all. She had been abducted from her country and illegally brought here, sold to a man she didn't know at a train station she no longer remembered. "That was five years ago," she told him, counting with her fingers. She was twenty now.



Coincidentally, she had difficulty counting beyond twenty. It was a good thing, then, that she had precisely eight fingers, two thumbs, and ten toes.



Oh, said Frederick. Oh.



"I don't really think about it," she said. "I'm free now." Soon, I'll be free of you, too. With a little luck, I can be free of anyone and anything.



The girl smiled and she kissed him with her mouth open and slightly wet, her warm (gentle, loving) hands pressed to his chest. He didn't really like to think about what happened after that.



It wasn't worth it.



v.



The man in the ticket-booth was dangling a toothpick in his mouth and he had a nasty set of teeth. He snarled out his words. "Ticket for one?"



"Yeah," he said," just one."



He swung his bag over his shoulder, scuttled through the lines of people like the other eight-hundred and fifty-nine commuters at the moment's time. He fought his way into a seat by the window, kept his bag close to him, and breathed.



The train took off two minutes past its scheduled time.



The man sitting next to him started talking once they'd left the city. He kept talking and talking and there was no stopping him. "You, you're a young kid. You have no obligations to the world, no worries, no nothing. I envy the young. You get to see the world without feeling like you ever have to go home. You don't want to go home, do you?"



"I haven't thought abo-"



"You don't," said the man. "You shouldn't. Why, there's the world with its arms outstretched just for you. You can eat, see, do anything"anyone"mm-hmm. Take my word for it, you're lucky. You're real lucky. I'd give anything to have my youth back. It's not that having a family isn't worth it, but"it isn't the same when you've responsibilities, a crying baby, and a nagging but well-meaning wife. You have to take care of other people. When you're young, you think about only yourself, your needs, your desires. Hurting others is okay as long as you yourself aren't touched. Who cares about the establishment when you're young? No one, that's who."



There really wasn't much else for Frederick to say, only: "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I know."