The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? by Michael Kearns Page A

covered every inch of her ample frame, one for every day of the week.
    While she instructed us on all subjects, it was her devotion to language that transformed her from a rather by-the-book teacher into an impassioned goddess of words.
    As a fledging actor, I had probably been exposed to more language than most kids my age had, but it was Miss Ellis who instilled an appreciation of words that continues to feed my creativity.
    Learning how to compose a haiku was almost as thrilling as learning how to apply the tool of sense memory to an acting assignment. As taught by Miss Ellis, in a rhapsodic voice that didn’t sound at all like her Math voice or her Science voice, the origin and meaning of haiku ignited my love affair with stringing words together.
    Bill Holmes was far more interested in bouncing basketballs than writing haikus, but since his house was directly adjacent to ours, we became friends by proximity. Bill was butch to the core. When his parents had to go out of town unexpectedly, they asked my mom if he could spend the night at our house.
    She said yes. Mommy was home more evenings and weekends those days since she had moved Charlie, one of her drunken, mongrel-faced boyfriends, in to live with us.
    Charlie had one of those W.C. Fields noses, red and bulbous, tattooed with broken blood vessels. Like many alkies, he possessed an irresistible charm until he chugged the poisonous drink that transformed him into a seething monster.
    Not unlike my father, Charlie was immobilized by the prospect of going to work. When he wasn’t replacing Daddy in the bedroom, he replaced him on the couch. My mom rarely missed a day of work.
    To avoid the inevitable mayhem that I knew Mommy and Charlie would stir up, Bill and I retreated to my bedroom, steering clear of them. I remember listening to “Take Good Care of My Baby” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” on a transistor radio.
    When it sounded as if the happy couple had passed out, Bill suggested we play a game. “You lie with your head at one end of the bed and I’ll lie with mine at the other,” he said, as if teaching me a move on the Monopoly board.
    “Then, at the same time, we put each other’s dicks in our mouths.”
    He was whispering, of course, and I felt myself getting hard. Then, he delivered the clincher. “It will taste,” he promised, “just like apple pie.”
    He didn’t have to convince me. We must have stayed in that position for hours, as one song on the radio melted into another. At one point, Charlie pounded on the door. “What’s goin’ on in there?” he slurred. Bill and I jumped up, sticking our stiff peters in our underpants, as Charlie stuck his head in the door.
    “Turn that fuckin’ noise off, girls,” he said, as if he owned the place. Girls? Had he heard us? Or was it a reference to girls having slumber parties?
    “Yeah, sure,” I said, missing the taste of that apple pie in my mouth.
    Charlie exited, and Bill and I glanced at each other, looking at each other differently than we had before the hours of cocksucking. We waited—two minutes, maybe three—and resumed the position, slurping away until dawn.
    The next time I saw Bill, we were back to the routine of being friends by proximity. It was as if it had never happened. I never tasted his creamy pie again.
    Now that I had tasted and been tasted, I wanted more. It was my father who, unwittingly, put me within reach of more cocksucking.

CHAPTER 12                
    He’d been released from the hospital and was given back his job as a maîtred’ at downtown’s snazzy Mayfair Lennox Hotel. One of the job’s perks was getting tickets to the traveling shows that played the American Theatre. While he had never come to see me in a play, he respected my interest in the theater and arranged for me to see shows, most of which were way over my head.
    I remember seeing Gore Vidal’s The Best Man , a political drama that resonated because the cast was