Blood Oranges (9781101594858) Read Online Free Page A

that, only I didn’t exactly get the cool superpowers, and, I’ll tell you up front, mine’s probably gonna come off like a plea for sympathy, reading as much like a sob story as an origin story. But—and this is as good as scripture—I’ve never wanted anyone’s sympathy, and I’m not about to start in now. So, it’s just a
story
. It is what it is, take it or leave it.
    So, fade to black, and we’ll get back to the vampire’s moldy basement in due course. Fade in to me at age twelve and those third-generation Irish Catholic parents I mentioned earlier.
    * * *
    P op was a deadbeat alcoholic, and Mom was the sort who thought all the world’s ills could be solved by praying the rosary and never missing midnight mass. How’s that for perpetuating the stereotype? The first twelve years or so, we had a fairly stable routine that involved his drunken rampages, and her beads, and my doing my best to keep my head down. Sadly, that last part didn’t usually work so well. Pop would get a bellyful of Murphy’s and whiskey, and I’d get a shiner or a busted lip because there were dirty dishes, or the litter box stunk, or my left shoe was untied, or anything else inconsequential he could latch on to as an excuse to beat the living daylights out of his child.
    Oh, and I should add he was absolutely fucking obsessed with the notion that Mom was a slut who’d slept around on him, and that I was
not
, in fact, his kid. It really didn’t make much difference to me, one way or the other. Though I did sometimes like to pretend that Pop was right, and my real father was some decent, straightlaced sort of guy with a good job and nice house, who loved his wife and kids, and maybe played golf every now and then. The golf part always seemed very important to me. I watched a lot of old sitcoms on Nick at Nite’s TV Land, and I pictured that imaginary real dad as Fred MacMurray or Gomez Addams, or maybe Ozzie Nelson. Regardless, it was a clean life, my imaginary real father’s life, and he’d never even seen the likes of that roach-infested Cranston shithole where we were living, because Dad hadn’t paid the rent and we’d been evicted from our sumptuous Pawtucket shithole.
    Finally, not long after my twelfth birthday (nope, no pony), Pop laid into Mom like he’d never laid into her before. She was late with supper. He beat her with a bar of soap wrapped in a dish towel until she was unconscious, and then he used his fists. I watched the whole thing from the kitchen cupboard. When he was done, he left, and I’m the one who called the paramedics. I hid outside, keeping vigil until the ambulance showed up, and then I turned tail and ran. And, in one sense or another, I kept running for years, even if I never went any farther than the abandoned warehouses and squats in North Providence and Olneyville.
    I met other kids, and they all had stories of their own, right? On the street,
everyone
has a story. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, that sounds like a line from a Dashiell Hammett novel. Well, to my knowledge, it’s not. If I’ve plagiarized anyone, I’ve done so unwittingly. Anyway, like I was saying, North Providence, where I found a tribe of other runaways, a loose confederacy of street urchins that would have made Charles Dickens proud. Sometimes we looked out for each other. Other times, it was every urchin for him – or herself. I drifted from tribe to tribe.
    Sometimes, I made it on my own. Other times, I found men—and women—who enjoyed the company and/or carnal services of someone my age, and it would keep me off the street for a few nights. I never really felt especially exploited by the peds, though I suppose I ought to have. But after my father, shit, that was Heaven and they were almost good as guardian angels. They fed me, and let me bathe, and sometimes bought me clothes, a winter coat, a new pair of shoes. The sex