Page 98 of Tattooed Sweetness

You have to imagine that one can sink so low. But by then I was at a dead end.

I didn’t care about anything as I was squatting somewhere in a smelly side street of Frankfurt. It had not been enough money to travel farther away from Cologne and all the bad memories.

It was cold as hell, and to make matters worse, it was starting to drizzle.

And there my father’s antique pocketknife, which I had actually wanted to sell, slipped into my fingers as if by itself.

I proceeded very slowly to get the most out of it: I slid up my sweater and jacket sleeves and felt the raindrops on my bare skin.

Then I applied the blade, scoring my forearm. I watched the blood run and felt the pain.

It was a great feeling. That warm blood on my skin. It was there by nothing but my will. I had the power to make it run. Me. Just me.

Alright, it did hurt quite a bit at first. But with each time, it got easier. And at some point, for that one moment, it took away so much of the whole burden.

Completely crazy, but it made me feel a little bit alive. And not like the zombie I was, shuffling through the gutter of Frankfurt. If I could even get myself together to do that.

Totally absorbed in my escape from reality due to the pain, I didn’t even notice at first when a guy addressed me.

I was sunken so deeply in the intoxication of the endorphins I needed eternities to realize that he was talking to me. When I finally did look up, it took me a while to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together into a whole:

Chunky, black leather boots with rivets. The sole curved so that the rounded toe of the shoe kept almost an inch of space between it and the ground.

Washed-out blue-black jeans with half a dozen holes. The loop of a thick link chain, attached to a belt loop. A printed olive-green handkerchief poured like a waterfall from the front pocket of the pants.

Over that, a layered look of a horizontal striped T-shirt, denim shirt, charcoal gray suit vest, and leather jacket. Around the neck, three or four tubular chiffon scarves.

Over-chin-length, medium-brown strands framed a sun-weaned face that appeared almost girlish and was dominated by oversize sunglasses.

I let my gaze slide from top to bottom once more, then back up.

Even if the guy hadn’t had his right hand propped on his hip and a well-filled plastic bag dangling from his dandyish angled left: tall, lanky, and a bit of a scarecrow from the looks of it, he would have passed well as anIchabod Cranelookalike inSleepy Hollow.

Totally… queer. Campy. If I hadn’t been so worn out, I would have run screaming.

And then he leaned over, pulled his sunglasses up to the tip of his nose with tattooed fingers, and asked, “Why are you doing this, kid?”

It took me more than a moment to translate his English words in my head. This would have been my third foreign language, after all, and I had only picked up a few things from movies.

The missing Johnny Depp twin must have misinterpreted my silence. “Why are you doing this, kid?” he asked with that hot-potato-in-the-mouth R I knew from TV. “If you want to use pain to make you feel alive—there are far better ways to do it. Ones that don’t leave ugly scars on a handsome boy.”

Handsome boy…Although it wasn’t really technically possible, because it was already digesting itself from hunger, it made me feel sick to my stomach. I wasn’t stupid, after all. In the few weeks on the street, I had already seen how other boys kept their heads above water: By selling their bodies.

Three or four times I had been asked by sleazy guys to go with them.

But I had sworn to myself that I would never sink so low. Not to work the streets.

Wasn’t the only reason I lived on the streets because I couldn’t take the beatings and degradation at her hands anymore?If I gave myself to a john now, couldn’t I have stayed at home?There I had at least been materially provided for. As drunk as he was all the time, my… father had always made sure that there was a richly filled pantry. Even if he had otherwise closed his eyes to everything: gaps in the refrigerator or on the shelves he had always noticed immediately, in contrast to bloody towels and purple strangulation marks on my neck.

My stomach growled at the thought of food.

“You’re hungry,” the Johnny Depp lookalike stated consequently.

I looked at him. Scanned every square inch of his face.

Both his attitude and tattoos seemed off-putting. But his hazel eyes… didn’t give the impression that he was capable of such cruelty as…shewas.

“Uh-huh.” And even if he would… By now, I didn’t care either. I shrugged my shoulders.

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