The newspaper read: “Decomposing and naked as the battered knife used to shit his throat was how they found him. His head hung on to his neck by a pissed off joke of flesh. He was tied to a chair with a brown indoor extension cord – hands snatched behind him with gray duck tape like wild hair forced into an unnatural ponytail. His body was twisted like beaten clay. His black decaying wounds still wept blood. But his face, a frozen human gargoyle screaming last echoes of pain. It was his sister who found him. A death ghost she will remember until cancer stopped playing with breasts. His murderer showed no mercy. He died horribly.”
I woke up to find Roderick’s story in paper this morning. I can’t say I was surprised. I always knew that kid end up murdered.
The night of his demise, his mother would say at the funeral that she couldn’t sleep. She said she kept dreaming about blood. Buckets and buckets of blood. In the morning she tried to call him but he didn’t answer. After two days, she begged his older sister to drive the 100 miles to his apartment and go check on him. Roderick had been known to disappear for days without word. The sister waited another two days. She got to his door and knocked, but there was no answer. She knocked harder. Still nothing. Suddenly, she could barely breathe or speak. She felt nervous but didn’t know why. Her hands shook when she put the key in the door that Roderick gave her for emergencies. She would say when she turned the doorknob her soul went cold. First there was the smell, then the horror of the sight. Roderick was home but silenced. He was there. She had found him.
The last time I saw Roderick he was in the hospital after being stabbed when he refused to pay some trick he picked up on the street. He told his family he had been robbed. I knew the truth. Of course he was very cavalier about the incident, making jokes but I could see sadness in his eyes. I was afraid for him, even if he figured himself invincible. Roderick liked testing his luck. Too many times I received a frantic call from him in the middle of the night to come pick him up from somebody’s ghetto. He never gave details. It was always something with Roderick. Maybe it started in high school. First there was Buck, Roderick's first waterfall. Even if he could smell the rotting broken bones and souls shattered on the jagged pretty rocks below, he still couldn’t help but jump. The temptation to get closer too something unattainable was too strong, like a moth playing with fire. I can’t say it was his fault. Buck could be a tease.
Buck was on the high school basketball team. He had hoop dreams, wanting to grow up and play professional basketball for the Lakers or the Bulls, but he really wasn't that good. He just looked good in his uniform. Buck and Roderick took advanced Anatomy class together. Buck was Roderick's partner when they had to dissect a cat, slice through the feline's skin and bone, rip open its chest and detach the heart to show to their teacher. They got an "A." For Roderick, Buck was so tall and sporty, always licking his lips and grabbing his dick. Buck had this way of looking into Roderick's eyes, shamelessly flirting while asking personal questions like if Roderick was a virgin, then he’d lick his lips again, or if Roderick ever had his dick sucked, of course by a girl he would say after a deep pause and smile. Roderick tried to avoid Buck's questions. He didn’t like keeping his eyes silent. He didn't know if Buck was playing games or not. Buck would say things like, "You're so pretty. Shit, I know if I was a girl, I go out with you. I may even give you some," then Buck would smile and lick those lips again and grab his dick. At night, alone and naked, it drove Roderick wild. Roderick started to become obsessed with Buck. He started going to all of Buck's basketball practices and games. He started following Buck home. He would do anything just to get closer. Roderick joined the photography club so that he could get a camera and take pictures of Buck. He would masturbate to those pictures. Eventually fantasy wouldn't be enough for Roderick, so he decided to make him and Buck real. Loneliness and a stormy afternoon caught Roderick and Buck alone in the boy’s bathroom. As usual, Buck greeted him "Wha up pretty boy." Roderick liked it when Buck called him pretty. In that boy's bathroom, it was like a fantasy for Roderick. He was wearing his Gap khakis, a pink polo button up long sleeve with a green v-neck sweater over it, looking preppy as usual. Buck was in his basketball uniform: sweaty jersey, gym shorts, Nike tennis shoes and letterman jacket. Of course, licking his lips and grabbing his dick. Roderick couldn't resist the temptation. Buck had been haunting his dreams for too long and he needed release. He walked over to Buck and whispered almost tearfully in his ear, "Can I suck your dick?" Buck quickly turned to him, and for a moment, there was a look in his eyes, almost a window, but it quickly shut. Eyes turned mean and widened, hands balled themselves into fists and Buck hit Roderick hard in the stomach. He called Roderick a "Faggot" and spit on him. Buck stormed out of the bathroom. Roderick laid there on the bathroom floor, not crying, but smiling, because he had gotten so close to Buck's lips, almost made contact, that when Buck hit him, he came.
After Buck, Roderick would be called names: "sissy" "Faggot" "deep throat." He didn’t seem phased. He also didn’t stop him. Eventually, a year later at a party he found Buck drunk and had his way with him. It turned out Buck was gay, but Roderick didn’t want him anymore.
I never understood Roderick. I hated hanging out with him because he liked playing games. He knew straight men were sensitive about their sexuality, but he liked toying with them. He liked pushing buttons. We would be riding down the street, and if he saw a cute thuggish boy, he’d stop the car in the middle of traffic and circle. He would press his solicitations until the boy picked up a rock and hurled it toward the car. In college he would cruise the Athletes showers until one day he was attacked but the school newspaper made it out to be a gay bashing. Roderick didn’t care for people’s feelings. It didn’t stop him. He used to get online with his older sister’s picture and pretend to be her. He would lure guys to obscene places like cemeteries or contruction sites. He sometimes would meet the guy. I don’t know how he never got hurt real bad. That kid was always playing with fire. Roderick acted as if rules didn’t apply to him. And then he started liking them rough. He liked them street trash. He was a good looking kid with a good job, graduated college magnum cum laude but refused to date anyone with a high school diploma. He would say that he wasn’t attracted to gay men. He wanted a man who wasn’t gay. I didn’t understand it.
Roderick found a new game. It started out very innocently, a product of lonely Friday nights at home surfing the Internet. He found a website of pictures of convicted felons, mostly rapists and murders. It was just a hobby. He said he was attracted to the danger in their eyes. He eventually ran across a website for Prison inmates looking for pen pals. He convinced himself that he was just curious. There were three guys before he met Red. There was David who was slender like wild grass blowing in the wind and dark skinned. David went to prison at age eighteen and did seven years for drug procession and car theft. David was very attractive, almost too attractive for Roderick. Roderick was getting older and started to learn the lessons, so with David, he took things really slow. They wrote letters back and forth for awhile, and eventually Roderick started accepting his collect calls, and when David got out, Roderick set up a meeting at a nearby hotel. Things worked out well. Roderick tried to get David a job, but it seemed that David didn’t care too much for working. Roderick paid for everything thing, their trips to Cancun and the Bahamas, their dinners, and even put David up in temporary apartment for a month, before finally deciding to move him into his home. As soon as David got inside, things started to fall apart. Roderick came home from a business trip that ended prematurely, to find David in bed with another man, getting fucked. It wasn’t that David was in the bed with another man, because Roderick knew and expected David to be unfaithful, but it was the fact that David was the bottom that Roderick couldn’t handle. He called the cops immediately and had David removed. One morning he walked to his BMW and found all the windows to his car knocked out and tires flatten. Roderick decided that it was just a sign that he needed a new car, so he bought a Range Rover.
Roderick would say that he was looking for something more dangerous. He said he often had fantasties about being raped. He joined bondage clubs. He was looking for something devasting. I would ask him about his childhood, if he was abused and he would say that he had the perfect childhood. He had a stay at home mother and a father who never missed a birthday or baseball game. I didn’t understand it.
After David there was Tyrone. Tyrone was in for drug procession and aggravation with the intent to kill. Tyrone didn’t stay around for too long, because Roderick moved him in too quickly, and one morning he woke up with his television, DVD player and wallet gone. That was the end of Tyrone.
After Tyrone, there was Omar, who did ten years for bank robbery. It turned out that Omar got addicted to crack in prison. Roderick didn’t mind except that Omar dick wouldn’t get hard. It was because Omar was a crack addict that Roderick never moved him in. He kept him in cheap motels, often visiting and finding him with other crack addicts. He eventually got bored of Omar and his limped dick.
Finally there was Red.
The story Roderick didn’t know was that Red spent most of his life in the system. Red first murder was when he was just 15 years old. He shot a man in a nightclub. He did a couple of store robberies after getting out in his early twenties before eventually strangling his fiancé of ten years later.
I remember the last time I spoke to Roderick, he was so happy. All he would talk about was this guy he met off the Internet. He said at first he thought he made a mistake because the guy was at least two times his size, but he said he was a teddy bear. He would go on about all the sex they were having. He said Red fucked him like a prison bitch. I told him to be careful. I decided to leave Roderick alone. I figured him to be suicidal. There were times when he could be so sweet. When I lost my job and couldn’t pay my car note, he took care of it for four months. He didn’t even want me to pay him back. He was a good son. He loved surprising his mother with exotic vacations or jewelry. Most people thought the world of Roderick. Most people didn’t know about his other side.
The police gave little details on his final moments. They just said it wasn’t a force entry because the assailant locked the door when he left. Roderick car was missing, so was some money and jewelry. I can’t understand why anyone would want to kill him like that. I tried to warn that boy. His mother didn’t even know he was gay. The media made it out to be that Roderick met some street thug off a well known “down low” sex website, of course making the story trendy. The case went unsolved. How an ex-convict went missing I’d never know. His poor mother didn’t think the police did enough to find Roderick’s murderer. She didn’t understand that to the police Roderick was just another black fag who got himself murdered. Black Fags go missing often and then found in back of trunks, stuffed in trashcans or in pieces. Jeffrey Dahmer killed a lot black homosexuals and nobody went looking for them. I try not to believe that Roderick brought it on himself. Some of us just like playing with fire.
No comments:
Post a Comment