anybody. The world existed for him to get what he could out of it.
It was inevitable that his mother would find out eventually. Lenny didn’t know how it had been possible to keep things as they were for so long without her finding out. He considered it likely that she was spending her time making money in much the same way, and more than likely Carl was managing her business just as he was managing his own.
She came home one afternoon while Lenny was with one of Carl’s friends. Lenny felt the man in bed with him tense and jerk away. He opened his eyes and looked toward the door, to see his mother standing there, staring at them. She turned and walked away from the door.
When the man had left, his mother came in again, standing in the doorway with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, her voice and face emotionless. “Carl tells me you two been making a little spending money for yourselves,” she said.
“Why not,” Lenny answered her with a calmness that belied his true feelings. “It’s not a bad racket.”
“You got no beefs?” The question impressed him as a strange one, coming from her. He wondered, almost idly, if she were for the first time trying to express a motherly interest in him. More likely, he concluded bitterly, she was thinking about the legal risks.
“No beefs,” he told her curtly. He reached for the pack of cigarettes on the dresser, and lit one. This was another habit.
She shrugged, and left without saying anything more. After that they didn’t concern themselves with whether she was in or out of the house, and business picked up steadily.
No beefs? The hell he didn’t have any beefs! He’d been taken advantage of by his stepfather and by all the vile male creatures who’d come lusting into his bedroom.
It was time, Lenny decided, to start taking some advantage for himself!
CHAPTER THREE
Before long, Lenny had become highly skilled in his trade. His looks had ripened into full bloom, and the prices that Carl asked for him had risen accordingly. Lenny’s cut was five dollars now, and Carl kept the other five or ten for himself. The tin can under the bed had been replaced by a strongbox, and occasionally Lenny would take some of the money and spend it on new clothes or something for himself.
His youthful good looks also attracted girls, and Lenny was pleased that he was just as virile and physically contented with them as with his male customers. However, his female conquests were few and far between. He had all the sex he could manage right at home, and sex to him meant money. He had neither the desire nor the inclination to reduce his earning power by wasting it on sex for pleasure.
He had learned a great deal besides the art of sex. He had learned to talk to his customers, and from them he had acquired a certain rough polish. He knew how to dress, a little about manners and social niceties, and he wore a veneer of good taste that only added to his rugged charm.
He stood almost six feet, with a body that was slender but magnificently chiseled as though from fine stone. He had discovered that his looks were his big asset, and he saw to it that they were accorded the respect they deserved. He held rigidly to his insistence of a full night’s sleep, good meals, and time enough during the day for a period of working out. His arms rippled with muscles, his wide shoulders tapered to a slim waist and hips. With age the natural equipment that he possessed had grown into a treasure of splendid proportions.
He had begun, too, to supplement his regular earnings. While the men who came to see him were on the bed with him, or in the bathroom, their clothes were harmlessly draped on a chair across the room. Lenny glanced in that direction one afternoon, his eyes coming to rest on the bulge of a wallet in one pocket. From then on, the chair stood next to the bed, close enough that Lenny could reach it with one hand. He began regularly to help himself to a “tip” from each visitor, being shrewd enough to take amounts that he thought would not be noticed. If the wallet was filled with bills, he was generous with himself. If there were only a few there, he limited himself to one, or maybe two dollars.
His conscience, if he even had one, gave him no trouble. This was a business to him, and he had every right to make all that he could off of it. As for the customers, they were only so many dollar signs to him.
Sooner or later it was bound to occur to him that Carl was making an easy living off of him. He was doing the work, sweating and panting on the bed with countless men, and Carl was pocketing a lion’s share of the profit.
He no longer had to fear Carl. He was taller than his step father, and formidable in appearance. Even the knife in the pocket wouldn’t give Carl the courage to stand up to him. There was only one thing that he needed, Carl’s knowledge of picking up customers.
“I want to go with you,” he said one day when Carl was getting ready to leave the house.
“What for?” Carl asked, shooting him a suspicious glance.
“It gets kind of tedious, laying on that bed all day,” Lenny told him, making it apparent that his mind was made up. “And besides, I think I should know a little more about the business.”
Carl relented begrudgingly. He had no choice, after all, although he was shrewd enough to suspect what Lenny was leading up to.
In all this, as well as in sex, Carl was a good teacher, and Lenny was a good student as well. He accompanied Carl to the bars and parks where he made his contacts. He learned how to spot a prospect, and how to approach him, how to decide which ones were likely to be vice, and which ones weren’t worth wasting the effort on.
At first Carl had no reason to object. The prospects could see what they were getting, and Lenny’s youthful good looks, coupled with the air of innocence he learned to assume, increased their volume steadily.
The day came soon enough when Lenny felt that he was ready to move ahead on his own. He had learned all that he could from Carl, and from here on in Carl and his mother were just so much dead weight for him to carry around.
It was easy enough to get them out of the way. It took an anonymous call to the police, and a few days later the customer that Carl took home to his mother proved to be a vice officer. They were arrested, while Lenny stood across the street, out of sight behind a parked car, and watched them taken from the house. He was on his own, now, and ready to start moving.
He spent a day or two just loafing, enjoying his new freedom. Carl called once from the jail to ask Lenny to put up the money for bail and get a lawyer for them. Lenny promised he would, and promptly forgot about it when he had hung up the phone.
The second night, he decided that he was ready to go to work. He cleaned up, carefully shaving the hint of a beard that had begun to appear on his face. He picked his clothes carefully—tight fitting slacks that showed off the enticing contours of his buttocks and the impressive bulge in front. With a clean tee shirt, a sweater, and sneakers, he looked like the typical football hero—or nearly so.
He spent half an hour combing his hair, creating just the right effect of youthful abandon. Then, satisfied finally with his appearance, he left the house and set out for the park he had chosen as a starting place.
It didn’t take long. He hadn’t walked halfway through the darkened path before he was being followed. He turned off the path, heading for an area of darkness and trees where they would be unseen by passersby, and sized up his prospect with one quick glance. The man was in his thirties, nicely dressed in a conservative suit and tie, a little nervous as he hurried along in Lenny’s wake, following him off the
