Freddy is not explicitly underage here but it's implied that he might be. The power imbalance in the relationship is pretty obvious and exists regardless of whether or not you're reading Freddy as underage. I'm not aiming to do lots of explicit sex but given the predatory nature of Sport's business, any sex included should be considered dubiously consensual at best.
Also this is very much set in the seventies and ResDogs characters plus Taxi Driver characters in a Taxi Driver world leads to some racially tempestuous language.
------------------------
The rain in New York is like nothing he's ever seen. Seconds after stepping off the bus Freddy's drenched to his skin, stumbling through puddles in sneakers that were on their way out when he left Bakersfield. Now he's here, the bag he packed on his way out the door feels too small to contain the building blocks of a new life, there are men in suits and ties on their way to work carrying briefcases bigger than this thing. The thousands strong hoards swell and eddy around him, insisting upon currents that he's too much of a tourist to understand.
"I need a hotel." He tells the driver when he falls into a cab. One of those iconic yellow models with the stickers on the bumper proudly advertising their commitment to their favourite radio stations. It should feel like stepping into a movie, crawling across the backseat of one of these, but all Freddy's really aware of is that he's just gotten himself out of the rain.
The cab driver watches him in the rear view mirror, wincing as he soaks the seats. "You got any money, kid?"
"Yeah I got like eighty bucks."
The driver kisses his teeth and shakes his head. His hair's neatly combed back and gelled down so that it barely moves with the motion. "Downtown's no good for you. You gotta be up in Harlem or the Bronx if that's all you got."
"Eighty bucks ain't nothing."
"It's a thirty dollar ride to ninety sixth street, and I don't know any places up there where you could stay. I either gotta drive you around till you find some place or I gotta kick you out and let you drown."
"How much is a place?"
"Depends. You'll be lucky to find somewhere half decent for less than twenty five bucks a night."
Freddy's pockets are growing lighter by the second. He smiles, like he's sure this is gonna be alright. "I can handle less than half decent."
"Whatever you say, kid." The driver rolls his eyes and starts the engine, flicking up the flag on the metre as he pulls away from the rank.
Through the rain mottled windows, Freddy watches the city grow around him. The fuzzy pictures from the papers and the half baked recreation you get on your TV screens don't do it justice. The movement, the colour, the lights. It looks like something out of the pages of Spiderman come to life. The clouds over head are such an oppressive grey that even in the middle of the day the theatres are burning through their electricity bills to keep their fronts of house lit up. When they stop at a set of traffic lights, he wipes back the steam forming on the inside of the window to get a better look at the shows they're advertising.
XXX Girls
Live Nude Girls
Girls Girls Girls
Freddy sits back. "Is that..."
"Nudey theatres." The driver says in a voice so rotten in leaves no room to imagine how he might feel about the establishments in question. "And porno cinemas. You wanna stay out of those places, y'hear? They'll rot your brain and eat through that eighty dollars of yours real quick."
"You ain't my dad." Freddy tells him, as kindly as he can. The guy's probably right, but the thrill of being able to walk into one of a dozen pornos at any time of day is enough to set his heart racing.
The driver's shrugs. "I suppose not." He's kind of thick set, with a funny round bulbous nose and enough laugh lines to let you know that he's really lived some of the years he's got under his belt. There's a ramrod straightness to his back that reminds Freddy of his grandfather's military bearing and though he's already gone grey it's not hard to imagine him holding his own in a fight. "Where you from, kid?"
"California."
"No shit? That's an awful long way to come."
"Yeah. Well."
The space in the conversation crackles with a silence poignant enough that Freddy wants to barrel out of the car and never return. The driver nods slowly, like he's trying to work out the details for himself, paint his own picture. Let him fucking try.
The lights change, and the cab sets off at a crawl. Freddy holds his breath and prays that neither of them think of anything more they need to say before they hit Harlem.
-
The place Freddy winds up staying in truly is a shit hole, right down to the leaking ceiling and the sound of some whore fucking her John in the room next door.
"Twenty two bucks a night." The girl on the front desk informs him. She's a scrawny little thing with an Afro three times the size of her head and lipstick the colour of toffee apples. She looks him up and down with a look that could be anything from 'what's the white boy doing here?' to 'why is this white boy so wet?'
The cab driver had dropped him off with a warning that the blacks run this area of town and that he ought to watch his back. Freddy had wanted to thank him for the ten dollars he knocked off the fare but his tongue got stuck in his mouth and the guy was gone before he found the words.
He sits in is room, with the bed that's little more than a mattress and the window looking down into the alley below and tries to rationalise what he does next.
If the weather is gonna be this shitty every day then he's going to need to make purchasing a half decent coat and a pair of boots his top priority. He's paid up for two night's here so that covers him while he tries to get a job. Once a paycheck or two comes in he can start properly looking for apartments, and somewhere in all of that he can think about eating something.
Freddy's stomach rumbles at the very thought. He grabbed a burger back at some roadside stop in Pennsylvania but that was more then ten hours ago. He cautiously bumps food up to top priority.
The leather jacket he arrived in is hung on the lone coat hook on the back of the door, making a puddle all of its own on the floor. The hotel sits over a launderette, and Freddy's sure that the waters just falling through the floorboards onto everybody's clean washing. In return, the steam from down below keeps his room warm, and that doesn't seem so bad for twenty two bucks a night.
He should have swiped one of his dad's suits before he left. Heading to the east coast in a white singlet and a leather duster was a bad idea, and packing nothing more to wear but a Hawaiian shirt and some clean underwear was a worse one. Freddy debates changing into dry socks but his shoes are so thoroughly soaked that it's not like it's going to make a lick of difference when he steps outside again.
Food. Dry clothes. A place to stay. Those theatres with the naked girls. Freddie grins, he likes the idea of that, no matter what the cab driver says. He has sixteen dollars to his name and two days to find a job. He can make that work, he's sure of it. Freddy Newandyke, here in the big city, no need for his parent's shit or his friends or anybody. He's here. On his own. He's going to make it work.
Freddie tracks down the hall to the shared bathroom and waits five minutes for a rakishly thin man with densely matted hair to finish taking a shit. He relieves himself, washes his hands and uses the hand towel to take the edge off the soaking he was given by the rain.
When he comes up he's facing himself in the mirror, blonde hair stained dark with damp and a tension in his jaw that he doesn't recognise. "They don't know shit. You're not going to get hurt. You're super cool."
-
Burgers just taste better in New York, Freddy decides. Nothing else could explain why a run of the mill cheeseburger eaten in a diner with worse hygiene standards than the hotel he's staying at could taste so damn good. He means to linger over it, but it slips down his throat in a matter of minutes and he's left picking somewhat sadly over his fries as he tries to draw out the time before he has to leave. He's a couple of blocks over from where he's staying, and even though he has to assume from the way the cab driver spoke of it, Harlem is a rougher part of town, the place is still full of shops ans restaurants and people moving about like they don't hate being here. He can't imagine anything like that outside of downtown Bakersfield.
"Could I borrow a pen?" He calls over to the boy sitting bored behind the cash register.
The boy scowls at him. "Whatchu want a pen for?"
"So I can write something down."
"Pens are a quarter."
"Please, I just need it for five minutes."
"And maybe I just need a quarter."
Freddy shakes his head. "Never mind."
"You better not be tormenting no customers out there, Ray!" A voice bellows from the kitchens out back.
The kid moves from bored to defensive, curling in on himself as he shouts back. "I weren't, Pops!"
"Well it sure as hell sounds like you were." The kid's father emerges, a rather portly black man striding forwards with his hair tied up in a rag and Che Guavara on his tshirt. He looks between the kid and Freddy. "You want something, sir?"
"I just wanted to borrow a pen."
The father snatches up a pen from behind the counter, smacks the kid upside the head and brings it round to pass to Freddy. "There you go." Then to the kid. "See, Ray? It's not that hard."
"He mighta stole it!"
"Aw hell no. Scrawny guy like that got no business stealing our pens. Ain't that right, white boy?"
"Right." Freddy smiles up at the cook. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it. And you best be giving that back or we ain't gonna serve you again."
Pen in hand, Freddy scrawls down the jobs he's worked in the past and tries to think up ideas for new places he could try. At the top of his list is 'Theatre Attendant' and he has to laugh to himself, thinking about spending his days sitting on his ass, watching the creeps pour in for the matinee and midnight showings, maybe slipping in at the end to catch the money shot. He can think of worse ways to earn a living.
After that he's got something about comic book shops, which he's sure there are more of here than there were in Bakersfield, and washing dishes, which any old mug can do. He never got his licence, but even if he had, he doesn't know his way round this city for shit, he couldn't drive a cab. If all goes to shit he could always ask the launderette downstairs if they need help.
It's hard to get any sense of the hour when the rain won't let up, but outside the streetlamps flicker on and a gaggle of girls around Freddy's age pour through the front door of the restaurant. They're all carrying ratty umbrellas but they look like they spend time on their outfits. Freddy's eyes get caught on the shortcut skirts and low cut tops they're all sporting, like a uniform without specifications, and he doesn't notice that he's eaten his last fry.
"Pick your jaw up off the floor." The father scolds when Freddy goes to hand back the pen. The kid, Ray, has been banished to some other part of the building.
"Sorry." Freddy smirks.
The father shakes his head. "Boy, you ain't got money for a pen. Don't go fooling yourself into thinking you've got money for them."
Money for them. With the thigh high boots and thick caked makeup. With the perfectly put together outfits and the umbrellas but you can see most of them are wet up to the knees from where passing cars have got them all the same.
Freddy blinks, smirk vanishing in an instant. "You mean...?"
"You're new in town, ain't cha?"
"Fresh off the bus."
"Then you've got some learning to do."
Freddy barks out dispassionate laughter. "You can say that again." The pen is passed back and he knows he should leave but he's not sure if he can stand to get soaked for the third time in one day. "You got any jobs going here."
"Nuh uh, no way." The father shakes his head. "This here's a family run business, and that ain't no business of yours."
"I'm happy to work out back, but I really need a job and-"
"Listen, I can ask around, see if any of my friends know anything, but there's no job here." The father brings out a stack of paper from under the till and starts scribbling something down. "What's your name?"
"Freddy."
"Nice to meet you Freddy." The father says as he scrawls down the name before offering out a hand to shake. "Name's Holdaway. Where you staying?"
"The place above the launderette round the corner."
Holdaway pulls a face. "Shit. We gotta get you out of there. Come back this time tomorrow and I'll see what I can do."
"Thanks man, I appreciate it." Freddy grins. He keeps grinning all the way out of the diner, till the wind chill hits him and his stupid sodden leather jacket isn't enough to keep it at bay. He wanders off in the direction of a cinema down the far end of the street, assuring himself that he's just going to ask about a job.
There are girls crowded around outside the cinema and some of them have umbrellas but most of them don't. Backlit by the gleaming signs advertising softcore pornography, a vision in wet denim and thin cotton. They look, almost universally, like they would rather be anywhere else than on this damp pavement.
Freddy wants to ask them if they're cold, if they're hungry, if they're scared; but as soon as he locks eyes with one she's leaning forward, trying to slip into his personal space. "Hey baby, you wanna take a walk?"
He can't answer. Freddy ducks down into the shelter of his coat and hurries inside before any of them can get the wrong idea.
Sport/Orange - shady skeevey stuff - 1/?
Also this is very much set in the seventies and ResDogs characters plus Taxi Driver characters in a Taxi Driver world leads to some racially tempestuous language.
------------------------
The rain in New York is like nothing he's ever seen. Seconds after stepping off the bus Freddy's drenched to his skin, stumbling through puddles in sneakers that were on their way out when he left Bakersfield. Now he's here, the bag he packed on his way out the door feels too small to contain the building blocks of a new life, there are men in suits and ties on their way to work carrying briefcases bigger than this thing. The thousands strong hoards swell and eddy around him, insisting upon currents that he's too much of a tourist to understand.
"I need a hotel." He tells the driver when he falls into a cab. One of those iconic yellow models with the stickers on the bumper proudly advertising their commitment to their favourite radio stations. It should feel like stepping into a movie, crawling across the backseat of one of these, but all Freddy's really aware of is that he's just gotten himself out of the rain.
The cab driver watches him in the rear view mirror, wincing as he soaks the seats. "You got any money, kid?"
"Yeah I got like eighty bucks."
The driver kisses his teeth and shakes his head. His hair's neatly combed back and gelled down so that it barely moves with the motion. "Downtown's no good for you. You gotta be up in Harlem or the Bronx if that's all you got."
"Eighty bucks ain't nothing."
"It's a thirty dollar ride to ninety sixth street, and I don't know any places up there where you could stay. I either gotta drive you around till you find some place or I gotta kick you out and let you drown."
"How much is a place?"
"Depends. You'll be lucky to find somewhere half decent for less than twenty five bucks a night."
Freddy's pockets are growing lighter by the second. He smiles, like he's sure this is gonna be alright. "I can handle less than half decent."
"Whatever you say, kid." The driver rolls his eyes and starts the engine, flicking up the flag on the metre as he pulls away from the rank.
Through the rain mottled windows, Freddy watches the city grow around him. The fuzzy pictures from the papers and the half baked recreation you get on your TV screens don't do it justice. The movement, the colour, the lights. It looks like something out of the pages of Spiderman come to life. The clouds over head are such an oppressive grey that even in the middle of the day the theatres are burning through their electricity bills to keep their fronts of house lit up. When they stop at a set of traffic lights, he wipes back the steam forming on the inside of the window to get a better look at the shows they're advertising.
XXX Girls
Live Nude Girls
Girls Girls Girls
Freddy sits back. "Is that..."
"Nudey theatres." The driver says in a voice so rotten in leaves no room to imagine how he might feel about the establishments in question. "And porno cinemas. You wanna stay out of those places, y'hear? They'll rot your brain and eat through that eighty dollars of yours real quick."
"You ain't my dad." Freddy tells him, as kindly as he can. The guy's probably right, but the thrill of being able to walk into one of a dozen pornos at any time of day is enough to set his heart racing.
The driver's shrugs. "I suppose not." He's kind of thick set, with a funny round bulbous nose and enough laugh lines to let you know that he's really lived some of the years he's got under his belt. There's a ramrod straightness to his back that reminds Freddy of his grandfather's military bearing and though he's already gone grey it's not hard to imagine him holding his own in a fight. "Where you from, kid?"
"California."
"No shit? That's an awful long way to come."
"Yeah. Well."
The space in the conversation crackles with a silence poignant enough that Freddy wants to barrel out of the car and never return. The driver nods slowly, like he's trying to work out the details for himself, paint his own picture. Let him fucking try.
The lights change, and the cab sets off at a crawl. Freddy holds his breath and prays that neither of them think of anything more they need to say before they hit Harlem.
-
The place Freddy winds up staying in truly is a shit hole, right down to the leaking ceiling and the sound of some whore fucking her John in the room next door.
"Twenty two bucks a night." The girl on the front desk informs him. She's a scrawny little thing with an Afro three times the size of her head and lipstick the colour of toffee apples. She looks him up and down with a look that could be anything from 'what's the white boy doing here?' to 'why is this white boy so wet?'
The cab driver had dropped him off with a warning that the blacks run this area of town and that he ought to watch his back. Freddy had wanted to thank him for the ten dollars he knocked off the fare but his tongue got stuck in his mouth and the guy was gone before he found the words.
He sits in is room, with the bed that's little more than a mattress and the window looking down into the alley below and tries to rationalise what he does next.
If the weather is gonna be this shitty every day then he's going to need to make purchasing a half decent coat and a pair of boots his top priority. He's paid up for two night's here so that covers him while he tries to get a job. Once a paycheck or two comes in he can start properly looking for apartments, and somewhere in all of that he can think about eating something.
Freddy's stomach rumbles at the very thought. He grabbed a burger back at some roadside stop in Pennsylvania but that was more then ten hours ago. He cautiously bumps food up to top priority.
The leather jacket he arrived in is hung on the lone coat hook on the back of the door, making a puddle all of its own on the floor. The hotel sits over a launderette, and Freddy's sure that the waters just falling through the floorboards onto everybody's clean washing. In return, the steam from down below keeps his room warm, and that doesn't seem so bad for twenty two bucks a night.
He should have swiped one of his dad's suits before he left. Heading to the east coast in a white singlet and a leather duster was a bad idea, and packing nothing more to wear but a Hawaiian shirt and some clean underwear was a worse one. Freddy debates changing into dry socks but his shoes are so thoroughly soaked that it's not like it's going to make a lick of difference when he steps outside again.
Food. Dry clothes. A place to stay. Those theatres with the naked girls. Freddie grins, he likes the idea of that, no matter what the cab driver says. He has sixteen dollars to his name and two days to find a job. He can make that work, he's sure of it. Freddy Newandyke, here in the big city, no need for his parent's shit or his friends or anybody. He's here. On his own. He's going to make it work.
Freddie tracks down the hall to the shared bathroom and waits five minutes for a rakishly thin man with densely matted hair to finish taking a shit. He relieves himself, washes his hands and uses the hand towel to take the edge off the soaking he was given by the rain.
When he comes up he's facing himself in the mirror, blonde hair stained dark with damp and a tension in his jaw that he doesn't recognise. "They don't know shit. You're not going to get hurt. You're super cool."
-
Burgers just taste better in New York, Freddy decides. Nothing else could explain why a run of the mill cheeseburger eaten in a diner with worse hygiene standards than the hotel he's staying at could taste so damn good. He means to linger over it, but it slips down his throat in a matter of minutes and he's left picking somewhat sadly over his fries as he tries to draw out the time before he has to leave. He's a couple of blocks over from where he's staying, and even though he has to assume from the way the cab driver spoke of it, Harlem is a rougher part of town, the place is still full of shops ans restaurants and people moving about like they don't hate being here. He can't imagine anything like that outside of downtown Bakersfield.
"Could I borrow a pen?" He calls over to the boy sitting bored behind the cash register.
The boy scowls at him. "Whatchu want a pen for?"
"So I can write something down."
"Pens are a quarter."
"Please, I just need it for five minutes."
"And maybe I just need a quarter."
Freddy shakes his head. "Never mind."
"You better not be tormenting no customers out there, Ray!" A voice bellows from the kitchens out back.
The kid moves from bored to defensive, curling in on himself as he shouts back. "I weren't, Pops!"
"Well it sure as hell sounds like you were." The kid's father emerges, a rather portly black man striding forwards with his hair tied up in a rag and Che Guavara on his tshirt. He looks between the kid and Freddy. "You want something, sir?"
"I just wanted to borrow a pen."
The father snatches up a pen from behind the counter, smacks the kid upside the head and brings it round to pass to Freddy. "There you go." Then to the kid. "See, Ray? It's not that hard."
"He mighta stole it!"
"Aw hell no. Scrawny guy like that got no business stealing our pens. Ain't that right, white boy?"
"Right." Freddy smiles up at the cook. "Thanks."
"Don't mention it. And you best be giving that back or we ain't gonna serve you again."
Pen in hand, Freddy scrawls down the jobs he's worked in the past and tries to think up ideas for new places he could try. At the top of his list is 'Theatre Attendant' and he has to laugh to himself, thinking about spending his days sitting on his ass, watching the creeps pour in for the matinee and midnight showings, maybe slipping in at the end to catch the money shot. He can think of worse ways to earn a living.
After that he's got something about comic book shops, which he's sure there are more of here than there were in Bakersfield, and washing dishes, which any old mug can do. He never got his licence, but even if he had, he doesn't know his way round this city for shit, he couldn't drive a cab. If all goes to shit he could always ask the launderette downstairs if they need help.
It's hard to get any sense of the hour when the rain won't let up, but outside the streetlamps flicker on and a gaggle of girls around Freddy's age pour through the front door of the restaurant. They're all carrying ratty umbrellas but they look like they spend time on their outfits. Freddy's eyes get caught on the shortcut skirts and low cut tops they're all sporting, like a uniform without specifications, and he doesn't notice that he's eaten his last fry.
"Pick your jaw up off the floor." The father scolds when Freddy goes to hand back the pen. The kid, Ray, has been banished to some other part of the building.
"Sorry." Freddy smirks.
The father shakes his head. "Boy, you ain't got money for a pen. Don't go fooling yourself into thinking you've got money for them."
Money for them. With the thigh high boots and thick caked makeup. With the perfectly put together outfits and the umbrellas but you can see most of them are wet up to the knees from where passing cars have got them all the same.
Freddy blinks, smirk vanishing in an instant. "You mean...?"
"You're new in town, ain't cha?"
"Fresh off the bus."
"Then you've got some learning to do."
Freddy barks out dispassionate laughter. "You can say that again." The pen is passed back and he knows he should leave but he's not sure if he can stand to get soaked for the third time in one day. "You got any jobs going here."
"Nuh uh, no way." The father shakes his head. "This here's a family run business, and that ain't no business of yours."
"I'm happy to work out back, but I really need a job and-"
"Listen, I can ask around, see if any of my friends know anything, but there's no job here." The father brings out a stack of paper from under the till and starts scribbling something down. "What's your name?"
"Freddy."
"Nice to meet you Freddy." The father says as he scrawls down the name before offering out a hand to shake. "Name's Holdaway. Where you staying?"
"The place above the launderette round the corner."
Holdaway pulls a face. "Shit. We gotta get you out of there. Come back this time tomorrow and I'll see what I can do."
"Thanks man, I appreciate it." Freddy grins. He keeps grinning all the way out of the diner, till the wind chill hits him and his stupid sodden leather jacket isn't enough to keep it at bay. He wanders off in the direction of a cinema down the far end of the street, assuring himself that he's just going to ask about a job.
There are girls crowded around outside the cinema and some of them have umbrellas but most of them don't. Backlit by the gleaming signs advertising softcore pornography, a vision in wet denim and thin cotton. They look, almost universally, like they would rather be anywhere else than on this damp pavement.
Freddy wants to ask them if they're cold, if they're hungry, if they're scared; but as soon as he locks eyes with one she's leaning forward, trying to slip into his personal space. "Hey baby, you wanna take a walk?"
He can't answer. Freddy ducks down into the shelter of his coat and hurries inside before any of them can get the wrong idea.