From the back seat of a s Volvo station wagon, I take in the foot traffic on the sidewalk as we round the corner from Van Ness Avenue onto the boulevard of love. Santa Monica Boulevard. The meandering. The disenfranchised. The gender-challenged in high heels with bruised ankles and manufactured hair. He scampers down the block at a frantic pace, disappearing into the night as the last vestige of the golden hour dissipates. Taz, my old friend and running partner, and I are on a sort of archaeological expedition, taking a comprehensive citywide tour of my now distant past.
These people are not in good shape. Back in the day, I did my own tour of duty on this very same bleak street. My initial exposure to prostitution came at the tender age of My friends and I would hang around the playground after school until a young trollop named Tracey would happen by and take us home to her garage.
There, we would poke and sniff around at her thing for a nominal fee of 50 cents per person, per session. I was a prepubescent john. I was a Midwestern teenager who instinctively understood the commodity value of my youthful sexuality.
I knew right away that it was just the job for me. Like most other kids doing time on the street, my fate was sealed early.
When I was 7 or 8 years old, a perverted, sexagenarian relative of mine started molesting a young cousin and me. It went on for years and was one of a litany of sexual injuries I sustained during childhood in an atmosphere as toxic as the air over Hollywood. My bell was rung early on, and no one seemed to notice.
