My Father's Semen by Mykola Dementiuk , in Cruising for Bad Boys

As an added bonus, CRUISING FOR BAD BOYS, edited by MICKEY ERLACH, features the bonus novella, MY FATHER'S SEMEN by MYKOLA DEMENTIUK, the disturbing story of a young man who seeks out his biological father only to be forced to survive the one way he knows how. This story will open your eyes to life on the streets of New York in the 1980s and will surprise you in the end.

266 pages

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My father lived in New York, ever since I was little, and I haven’t seen him six or seven years. Every Christmas I’d get a card from him with a check for a hundred dollars, I suppose it was his way of saying, Don’t bother me until next Christmas! My mom I never heard from; grandmother told me she was in San Francisco with her lesbian lover. Oh, I said, and shrugged. Grandmother knew a lot but didn’t say much.

The station was packed with people coming and going, but I had to take a non-descript seat and keep out of trouble. Wasn’t too long ago that I got picked up in the Greyhound men’s room, doing nothing, but the cops hauled me in anyway.

Cincinnati has no claim to fame, besides Steve McQueen in Cincinnati Kid which took place in New Orleans, and Loni Anderson in WKRP, a TV show meant more to show off Loni’s tits then her acting ability. And one time it was know as Porkapolis, before they changed the name to Cincinnati, in honor to some local Indian chief lord, hell, do you think people like to call their home a sty? Fuck off, Cincinnati, or should I say, Oink! Oink!

I only knew three things about New York: it was big, my father lived there, and whatever Joey told me about it. He had been there a year ago; having spent a week there, also running away from the therapy clinic his parents put him in because he was gay. His parents were rich enough to send a bounty hunter after him and he nabbed Joey right in the back of the NYC bus station, on his knees, and sucking cock in between two cars. Getting caught in the act was bad enough, but before he nabbed Joey the bounty hunter snapped a Polaroid of Joey sucking cock and which he used to blackmail Joey into giving him blow jobs all the way back home to Cincinnati, or else he’d give the photo’s to Joeys mom.

Which he did anyway; an envelope full of photos of Joey, kneeling before men, bent over to a standing man, sometimes sucking off one guy while jerking off two others…And of course Joey’s mom never asked why he hadn’t brought Joey home the first day he spotted him but took an entire week to amass twenty rolls of pornographic photos of her son or why there was a receipt among his bills for the Motel 6 outside of Cincinnati.

She paid him 25 thousand dollars to bring me home so he could fuck me right on her doorstep! Joey told me. No wonder he said it took him six weeks to track down Sheila (our friend) in Reno; he had her in a motel for a month, the bastard!

But my grandmother wasn’t as rich as Joey’s parents so I knew no bounty hunter or parent would come looking for me; but Ralph? Who knew how the social worker would rat me off to his respectable pig friends? Who knew what kind of all-points-bulletin would be issued on me? Warning! Child Molester on the loose! Beware of dreamy-eyes loners writing poetry! That’s him, he’s the one! So that’s why I was headed to New York, instead of Chicago, which I had tried three times before.

And since that night and day I sat on the Greyhound bus playing out my memories of Mrs. Gillette kissing me. I had never kissed a girl and Mrs. Gillette was the first woman I kissed and liked it. There were guys I had let kiss me, mostly faggot guys I’d meet and go off with them for some dollars, but with Mrs. Gillette I felt I wasn’t doing anything wrong, until the last moment, at least.

I had no idea where I was going to stay once I got there; I had already dished out $83.00 dollars from my father’s Christmas present and had about fifteen bucks to live on. But I wasn’t worried, I had seen all the movies, gazed in the books and magazines, and somehow knew I could survive on the streets of New York, or at least try doing it.

The bus station in New York is immense, and it’s called the Port Authority Building, it says so right in the front. And it stretches for three blocks, in the 40s from 8^th to 9^th avenues, and is, I guess, almost five stories high. You could probably fit all the people of Cincinnati inside and still have room for the nearby city of Paducah too.

When my friend Joey ran away to New York two years ago he told me that for the first two days he didn’t leave the building but survived on food that people threw away as they rushed to catch buses taking them out of town. But this time the cops were everywhere, and I’m sure that that even Joey, with all his smudged biker tattoos, would quickly be spotted as a loiterer and troublemaker.

There was even more people on the street outside entering the station. It’s as if everyone was leaving just as I arrived. But this was rush hour, and nothing like the morning or afternoon drives in Cincinnati. I pushed my way out of the station.

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