Nobody Rides For Free

by Neil S. Plakcy

  He drank some water. “The first Lazarus Place was founded about twenty years ago in Seattle by a Catholic priest who wanted to reach out to homeless kids. Pretty quickly he figured out that many of them were on the streets because they were gay and had been rejected by their families. That caused him to shift his focus. We usually have about twenty kids in residence at any given time. There are two dormitory rooms on the second floor, one for the boys and one for the girls.”

  We heard some cheering from the living room as one of the boys apparently won the game they’d been playing. Shane smiled.

  “Franny and I are both full-time resident counselors. We have rooms on the third floor, and we’re always available if the kids need help. I spend a lot of time talking to homeless kids and convincing them to come here. Franny runs the house and teaches life skills like money management and how to be safe on the Internet. We work with a counseling group that gets the kids under eighteen back into school, and government aid if they qualify. We have a network of doctors and dentists who see them pro bono, and we have arrangements with a couple of local thrift stores to get them proper clothing.”

  I pulled out the screen capture I’d taken of the boy’s face. “Do you recognize this kid?”

  Shane gulped. “Yup, that’s Ozzy Perez. The boy who went missing.”

  Ozzy Perez. Ohpee. Finally, a lead on who he was.

  “Where is Ozzy now?” Shane asked. “I need to talk to him.”

  “I don’t know yet. As far as you know, was he sexually active?”

  Shane crossed his arms over his chest. “Why do you ask?”

  “I think he might have been forced into doing porn.” I left out the flakka for the moment.

  “We talk a lot to the kids about having safe, responsible sex, but unless they volunteer the information we don’t quiz them on whether they’re sexually active or not.” He took a deep breath. “But I know that Ozzy was molested by a neighbor when he was younger. That kind of assault can lead kids into continued sexual activity.”

  Ozzy had mentioned that molestation to Brian Garcia—further evidence that he was the Ohpee I was looking for.

  Shane stood up. “I have Ozzy’s intake form up in my room. There might be some information on it you could use.”

  Shane and I climbed a switchback stair to the second floor, where he pointed out the two dormitory rooms—boys to the left in the larger room, girls to the right. We kept climbing to the third floor, where Shane’s bedroom nestled under the eaves with a slanted ceiling. His bed was a futon, his desk a wooden door spanning two short file cabinets.

  There was only one chair, and Shane motioned me to it while he looked through his files. “I have to fill out a form for each kid who checks in,” he said. “We never know if what they tell us is a hundred percent accurate, but at least it gives us a place to start.”

  He handed me Ozzy’s intake form, which had a photo stapled to it. Ozzy looked tired, and his hair was shaggy and plastered down to his head. He looked underfed and scared. In the video he appeared to have filled out a bit, but it was clearly the same kid.

  I was fascinated by how complicated the form was, not only in the information it requested, but in the way that the reliability of each piece of data had to be certified. For example, there were boxes to check if the client didn’t know each piece of information, chose not to provide it, or if the interviewer hadn’t asked for it.

  Ozzy’s full name was Oswaldo Yuniesky Perez, his ethnicity was Hispanic/Latino, and his race was white. The list of genders was one of the most comprehensive I’d seen on a government form, including male, female, transgender MTF, transgender FTM, other, client refused to answer, or client doesn’t know.

  That stopped me for a moment and I turned to Shane, who was sitting on his bed. “How can you not know your gender? Don’t you just look down?”

  “It’s not that easy. Gender is a lot more than the equipment between your legs, especially to teens going through puberty. I’m talking about kids who might be confused, or might eventually be trans. And then there are people who are gender fluid.”

  “Which means?”

  “It’s when your gender identity is a dynamic mix of boy and girl. Some days you might feel more masculine, and some days more feminine. But you always have parts of both. It has nothing to do with what kind of genitals you have, and it’s not about sexual orientation, either.”

  “Wow.” I shook my head, marveling at how complicated the world could be, and then went back to Ozzy’s form. His sexual orientation was “questioning/unsure,” he was homeless, and had been living in a “place not meant for habitation, such as a vehicle, an abandoned building, bus/train/subway station, airport, or anywhere outside.” I was fascinated that there were almost thirty choices, from nursing home to jail to foster care to couch-surfing.

  Ozzy had been born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, fifteen years ago. The last school he attended was Hialeah Middle, where he had dropped out during seventh grade. His overall health was good, though his dental health status was poor.

  Interestingly he had refused to answer the questions about whether he had been persuaded to have sex in exchange for anything.

  Poor Ozzy. He’d been lucky to end up at Lazarus Place, and I wondered what had caused him to leave. I looked up at Shane. “Ozzy was here for what, three months? What else can you tell me about him that’s not on the form?”

  “His mom and dad were never married, and apparently his dad died in Cuba when Ozzy was about five. His mom brought him here after that. She was some kind of engineer but she couldn’t speak much English, so the only work she could get was cleaning houses. Ozzy grew up around a lot of anger.”

  “You think his mom beat him?”

  “He had a couple of burn scars on his back, and there was something about the way he held his right arm that made me think it had been broken and maybe not set properly. But he wasn’t here long enough for us to get him a comprehensive medical exam.”

  Shane leaned forward. “Ozzy was almost painfully shy, and he never liked to look you in the eye when he spoke to you. It was hard to get him to open up, even about simple stuff, like what kind of food he liked. He told me that once he got into middle school, kids started to give him a hard time for being gay. He stopped going to class around the time that his mother got sick, maybe a year and a half ago, and when she died he had no place to go, so he started living on the street.”

  “No social services?” I asked.

  “Once he dropped out of school he didn’t have a teacher or a counselor to talk to, so he had no idea what was available. He went over to Miami Beach but he said it was too crowded and there were too many cops. Another kid told him he could live easier in Lauderdale so he came up here.”

  I went back to Ozzy’s form to check something. Under “referral source” he had checked “outreach project.”

  “What does this mean?” I asked Shane. “Did someone refer him here?”

  “He tried to hustle me one day. You know Fort Lauderdale beach at all?”

  “Some. My skin burns pretty easily so I don’t go out to sunbathe or anything.”

  “The beach area here is a barrier island between the Atlantic and the Intracoastal Waterway,” he said. “A1A runs right along the ocean, and that’s where all the big hotels are. But if you go a block or two west, you’ll find a bunch of small motels and older apartment buildings. Some of those motels have been renovated into gay guest houses.”

  I nodded. I’d seen ads for a couple of those in bar magazines.

  “Ozzy was hanging around one of the motels scrounging from guests when I met him. I convinced him to come over here and try us out. I was upset when he disappeared because I thought we could make a difference for him.”

  He leaned back against the pillows. “I think his early history of abuse, and the way he was raised—being afraid to question anything or ask for anything—might make him particularly vulnerable to being victimized.”

  I stood up and gave
him my card. “I appreciate the help.” He stood too, and there was an awkward moment when neither of us knew whether to shake hands or hug. “Can I talk to the kids? Maybe one of them has been in touch with Ozzy since he left.”

  “I doubt it, but sure, you can ask. Go easy on them, all right? Remember, they’re only kids.”

  “I’ll hold off on the waterboarding then.”

  Shane looked alarmed.

  “I know what it’s like to be a gay teen,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  He led me back downstairs and into the lounge. A half dozen kids, a mix of boys and girls, black, white, and Latin, looked up and I felt their eyes on me. “This is Angus, and he works for the FBI,” Shane said. “You guys hang here while I round up everybody else.”

  From the way they looked at me, I assumed that most of their experiences with law enforcement hadn’t been positive. “You for real?” one of the boys asked.

  I nodded. “I’m a for real FBI Special Agent.” To cover my own nerves, I told them a couple of stories about my experiences at the Bureau, and the kind of training I’d gone through at Quantico.

  Other kids began filtering in, both boys and girls, followed by Shane and the other social worker, Franny. She was a thirty-something-year-old woman with dime-sized holes in her earlobes and other piercings in her nose and right eyebrow.

  I explained that I was looking for Ozzy. “Did he say anything to any of you before he left the house? Like maybe he met someone who was going to take care of him?”

  “Shit. Ain’t nobody gonna take care of us besides ourselves,” a boy named DeAndre said. “And Shane and Franny.”

  “Anybody?” Shane asked. “Any of you have any idea where Ozzy went?”

  A slim kid in a baggy plaid shirt looked down at the floor and said, in a low voice, “He was happy.”

  My gut reaction was that they were female, but I had no idea what pronoun they preferred.

  “Happy about what, River?” Shane asked.

  “He met some guy by the beach,” River said. “The guy seemed nice and told Ozzy he could give him a place to stay, all the food he wanted to eat, new clothes, and stuff. Ozzy wanted an iPhone and the guy promised him one.”

  No one else had anything to offer, though I thought maybe the kids might open up more if I wasn’t around. “Can you follow up with them?” I asked Shane as he walked me out. “Ask any kids who weren’t there tonight?”

  He nodded. “I cover Friday nights here at the house and Franny covers Saturday,” he said. “You free this weekend?”

  I nodded, though I was confused. Was he asking me on a date? Or setting a time to check in? Either way, if he had information about Ozzy Perez I’d make it my business to see him. “I’ll call you, all right?” I said.

  He nodded. “Be careful out there.”

  As I opened the door and walked out into the humid night, I wasn’t afraid. I felt a bit like Lazarus myself. This investigation had brought me back to life after I was shot, and after I’d closed in on myself.

  I had a full name for this boy and now I was sure he was underage. From the e-mails he’d sent Brian Garcia, I knew he wanted to get out of where he was.

  Hold on, I thought. I’m coming for you. And once I get you somewhere safe, you’re going to tell me all about the flakka distribution and whatever other drugs there are in the house where you’re living.

  7.

  Jockey and Groom

  The next morning, just after dawn, I went out for a quick run before leaving for work. The houses around ours were shabby bungalows or ranches like the one we lived in, and I couldn’t help wondering what went on behind their curtained windows. We knew a few of our neighbors, including a middle-aged gay couple and an elderly black woman with a Rottweiler. But we’d never been inside anyone else’s home. Could Ozzy be living in a house in my own neighborhood?

  As I ate breakfast, I checked the latest media reports on Brian Garcia. Coverage had moved from the front page to the local section. Reporters had spoken with his father, who, like Colin had told me, had no knowledge of his son’s drug use. Co-workers cited his promptness, his good rapport with clients, and so on. They were all surprised at what had happened. An unnamed police source said that the cops were waiting for Brian to come out of his medically induced coma to interview him.

  When I got to work I wrote up another FD302 on what I’d learned at Lazarus House last night. I began with a visit to the shelter’s website and copied out some information about it and inserted it into my report. In as much detail as I could, I wrote paragraph after paragraph about speaking with Shane and the kids, and his identification of the boy in the screen capture as Ozzy Perez.

  I included everything from the intake form as well as what River, a resident of the house, had said about Ozzy meeting a man who would take care of him. I was careful to avoid the need for any gendered pronouns in River’s case.

  Then I accessed an immigration record with the date that Ozzy had come to the United States with his mother, sponsored by her sister under the Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program. I found a record of his mother’s death the year before, and verified that Ozzy had attended Hialeah Middle School and dropped out during the seventh grade. But after that, nothing. I searched all the databases I had access to in case Ozzy had been arrested or was in custody. No one of his name showed up anywhere.

  After the form was complete, I went back to the only piece of concrete evidence I had—the video of the jockey in the locker room at Hialeah Race Track. Time to use my credit card to access the full video.

  It was weird to watch porn in the office. I skimmed through the movie until I came to the place where the free preview had stopped. Ozzy finally looked at the camera and it solidified his identification as the boy whose screenshot was on the webcam site and whose photo was stapled to Shane McCoy’s file.

  He stood there naked for a moment, his purple and white silks pooled around his feet, then began to play with himself. He was getting into it when the door behind him opened with a bang, and a dark-skinned young man came in.

  He wore a western-style plaid shirt, jeans, and a black cowboy hat. They talked for a moment—it appeared that the black guy was the groom who took care of the jockey’s horse. “You’re a good rider,” the groom said. “You want to ride me?”

  He dropped his jeans, revealing a long, slim dark purple dick that was already hard. He sat down on the bench and Ozzy lowered his ass over him. They engaged in some basic sex—nothing I hadn’t seen before. I was intrigued, though, by how smoothly the black boy occupied the space around him. He had great posture, and when he stood, he kept his spine erect and moved his long legs with a sense of grace. Though I didn’t know much about classical dance, there was something about him that made me think he’d had ballet training.

  I wondered if his height, close to six feet, indicated that he’d gone through puberty already. But his body was hairless and his face was rounded, not demonstrating the angularity that came with those body changes.

  The boys romped together for a while, and then an older man walked into the locker room and started yelling at them for fooling around. He whipped out his dick and Ozzy sucked him while the man played with the black boy’s nipples. The video ended with the man pulling out of Ozzy’s mouth and spraying his face with semen.

  I hit the buttons to grab a capture of the black boy and the man’s faces, and then a screen popped up offering me more videos. None of the teasers featured either of the boys, though, so I closed the window.

  Who was the other boy with Ozzy? Was he local, too? And if he was, could he lead me to Ozzy, or to whoever was distributing the flakka?

  I did the same thing I’d done with Ozzy—I put his face into Google’s image search function. After a lot of hunting, I found him at the edge of a group shot of young male dancers, ranging in age from little boys to teenagers. I recognized the teacher with them—a guy named Nathan who I’d met a couple of times at meetings for an LGBT political action group Jo
nas and I had joined.

  It was another example of the small world of Wilton Manors. If you moved around from circle to circle—from a bar to a civic group to meeting friends of friends—you could get to know a wide range of people.

  Of course I didn’t have Nathan’s phone number; that would be too easy. But the political group had an online site, with a spreadsheet listing names and phone numbers of members so that we could coordinate rides to rallies and so on. I found Nathan’s cell number there.

  I called him and reminded him of how I knew him. “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about a boy who’s in a photograph with you,” I said.

  “This isn’t a good time,” he said. “I have a dozen budding ballerinas waiting for their afternoon class, and as soon as I finish I have to head over to the bar where I work nights.”

  “If I came up to your studio, could we talk for a couple of minutes before you have to go to work?”

  He hesitated. “What’s this about?”

  I explained that I was trying to track down a couple of boys I suspected were being abused. “One of them is in a picture with you. I’d like to find out his name and how you know him.”

  He agreed that if I met him at the studio in Pompano Beach, he could talk to me for a few minutes before he had to leave for his restaurant gig.

  When I left the office a few minutes later, the skies were gray and threatened rain. A flock of white egrets rose gracefully from one of the retaining ponds, and I was reminded of the way the boy moved in the video. You didn’t come by those moves naturally. They were the result of years of dedicated training. What had happened to turn him from that path and into the grip of a porn producer? Had he been seduced by the promise of money and security, the way Ozzy had? Had he, too, lost his home and family?

  Traffic on I-95 crept north through Fort Lauderdale onward to Pompano Beach—a grimy area of car repair shops, chain retailers, and fast food restaurants. In my Mini Cooper, I felt small and insignificant in a sea of semi-trailers, oversized SUVs, and RVs with Canadian license plates.