boystown by marshall thornton Read Free Book Online Page A

and I stepped out into the street to hail a cab. Luckily, there was one a block away. After we climbed in and I told the driver to take us to Illinois Masonic, Daniel got very quiet. I was glad the moaning had stopped. But I wasn’t prepared when he said, “I’m going to tell the truth.”
    Boystown - 30

    “What?”
    “I’m not going to tell people I fell down. That’s not what happened.”
    “You can’t do that. They’ll call the police.”
    “So, we just let them get away with it?” he asked.
    “What do you think the police are going to do? Some kids beat up a couple of fags. You think that’s a high priority?”
    “If we don’t report it, nothing will ever change.”
    “You know what will happen to my job.”
    “They can’t fire you. Can they?”
    “They don’t have to fire me. Once people know, I’m not going to want to be there.”
    “You’re overreacting.”
    Daniel didn’t understand. The guys I worked with, a lot of them had been on the job going back to the sixties. They talked about raiding fag bars like it was the good old days. Like they were pissed they didn’t get to push a bar full of fruits into a paddy wagon anymore. Hell, the way my family was, my Christmas presents when I was a kid were probably bought with payoff money from the fag bars they didn’t raid.
    How was I going to work with these people if they knew I’d been bashed with my boyfriend?
    And they would know. There was no way we could report this with them not knowing.
    Everything would be over. I wouldn’t be able to be a cop anymore.
    “We’re going to tell everyone you fell,” I repeated.
    Daniel didn’t respond.
    The cabbie pulled up in front of the emergency room entrance at Illinois Masonic. Daniel got out of the cab under his own steam, and I paid the driver. I walked into the waiting room, looked around, and found Daniel standing in a short line waiting to check in. I walked over and stood next to him.
    He looked at me and dropped his hand from his left eye. His cheek was enormous, his eye swollen shut, oozing in a way that looked bad.
    “Coward,” he whispered.
    Boystown - 31

    “Daniel, I did everything I could. There were four of them. If I’d had my gun--”
    “I’m not talking about that.”
    The woman at the desk called him over, took one look at his eye, and pointed at the double doors he needed to go through.
    “You want me to go with you?” I asked.
    But he never answered. Instead he just walked through the double doors. Fifteen minutes later an officer walked in, talked to the woman at the desk, and then followed the same path Daniel had taken. I waited a moment, then left.
    I never saw Daniel again. He reported what had happened. An Officer Reilly caught me one morning before my shift, and even though I refused to talk about it, the story got around. Things got bad. I resigned two weeks later. During my last shift, Daniel let himself into our apartment and took his stuff. Leaving holes I never bothered to fill.
    I thought the harassment would stop when I quit the department. It didn’t. I get stopped two or three times a month. Driving too fast. Driving too slow. Failing to signal. I’ve gotten tickets for busted taillights that weren’t busted when I was stopped. I even got a ticket for driving with an open container, said container was thoughtfully provided by one Officer Jankowitz. If I go down to the courthouse to fight the tickets, the cops never show up, so I get off and I don’t have to pay.
    But it’s a pain in my ass, and that’s the point.
    Walt Paddington had shaken me up, and I wasn’t going to sit still for it. I had to do something, but I wasn’t sure what. I needed more information. I pulled out a file and looked up a phone number. Dialed.
    “Hello, Juan, this is Nick Nowak. Is Allan there?”
    An angry silence told me that he was.
    “Can I talk to him?”
    The phone was dropped on some kind of table, and there were some snappish voices in the background. Then