This was my life for the next while. Have you ever noticed that once you settle into a bit of a routine, or if nothing major happens, time just seems to go, you can’t really say how long something happened when you look back. I was still pretty much on the streets, although I was staying at shelters again when I could. I slowly got to know Bette a bit better, usually she did all the talking so she still knew next to nothing about me. I kept up with the same dozen or so johns. One of them was this older guy, not really into the whole jerking off thing, more just a lonely old man looking for some company. Which was totally fine by me. He started off just asking simple questions, how I did at my “job”, what I did the rest of the day, where I crashed, stuff like that. Slowly we started talking about where I wanted to go. I wasn’t ready for that kind of a question. I never really thought of myself as having a future, let alone thinking about it. I totally lived in the then and now. I said I liked helping people, making them into what they wanted. He suggested hair dressing school. I laughed, I remember that much. I told him I wasn’t some little twink who would do well sitting there gossiping with ladies while doing their hair all day. Then he dropped the bomb, he knew I wasn’t some little twink. Before I could run, he took my hand and told me he wanted to help me. The only thing going through my head aside from “oh shit” was “why?” He and Bette just didn’t make sense to me. Up to this point in my life, my relationship to people was what we wanted out of each other. They wanted sex, I wanted money to survive. Plain and simple. When I lived in Austin, they wanted sex, companionship, the monthly check that came with fostering, I wanted to forget my life at school, at home, I wanted food in my stomach, or a roof over my head. But this whole helping and companionship thing was just foreign to me. He made a deal with me. He’d pay me to continue to meet with him, talk to him as I had for over a year now, and he’d help me get my GED and get through hair dressing school. All I had to do was promise to follow through with it and once it was over, get off the streets. Again… why? He didn’t really ever answer me, regardless of how many times I asked him over the next year. I got enough out of him to know that he was sort of like me, but he grew up in New York City. Someone helped him, and he was now in a position to help someone else out.

Clive came and went several times during this period of my life. We’d have a good time, him usually ending up much more strung out than me, and usually with mom coming to the rescue time and time again after he’d get too hooked on the drugs, or too tired from whoever he was playing boy-toy to. While I felt bad for Clive, I also would find myself getting pissed at him. Here is mom was trying to help, and he just couldn’t deliver to her. I mean, yeah, she was probably part of his problems, but at least he had someone looking out for him, caring enough to help time and time again. But that was sort-of when I realised that for the first time in my life, I had someone like that in my life too. Mind you, he was just a john, and Bette was just a casual acquaintance, but that was more than I had ever had in life since my mom, so it was something.

So by the time I was 20, I had a GED, was almost through with hair dressing school, and had saved enough money to buy this dumpy pick up truck that became my home, my transportation, and a way off Santa Monica. I still ran into Bette, and she was proud when I told her what I was doing. She was moving her gallery to a different part of town, so I wouldn’t see her at my coffee shop anymore. I was seriously shocked when she wrote down the address of another café that she frequented closer to her house in West Hollywood, telling me to drop by there to continue our chats and meet her friends. Under the address was her cell phone number. In case I ever needed anything, ever. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever go to the café or call in a favour, but I clung to that paper like you wouldn’t believe. One race down, a new starting line in front of me…