Chicken by David Henry Sterry

about switch-hitting. Baseball, not sex. Turns out Cruella was an All-Star catcher in Little League. We make plans to take in a Dodgers game. One of my great regrets is that I never took in a Dodgers game with the cross-dressing Cruella.
    Billyboy and Bobbygirl are sweet-sixteenish. They’re Dixie chickens, identical-looking redheads. They survived being very successful commercial actor kids until they were thirteen, when their alcoholic father stole all their money and ran off with a model. Dad’s in the process of drinking himself to death, and succeeding very well, apparently. They finish each other’s sentences and are perhaps the most charming people I’ve ever met. They’re great favorites of Sunny, as cash cows tend to be, and he treats them like long-lost inbred family. They’re trying to sell a sitcom based on their life, and apparently NBC is interested.
    We’re one big happy nasty family, and I bask in the creepy comfort of it.
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    The family’s on vacation in a Wild West ghost town when I’m ten. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, my mind alive with visions of Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and Wyatt Earp, with the great Roy Rogers singing on Trigger.
    But it’s nothing like that. Just old dead buildings. Not wild at all. No ghosts.
    My father, my brother, and my two sisters pose American Gothic for a family snapshot on a platform atop a scaffold the hangman used for executing cattle rustlers and low-down no-account murderous thieves and such.
    I’m standing slightly apart from everyone, noose around myneck, eyes bugging and arms stiff, a goofball kid criminal being hanged to death.
    I’ve progressed from being shot at Christmas to hanging in the Old West.
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    Horse is his name. He’s the guy I saw in the Hollywood Employment Agency waiting room. I thought I’d see him in 3-D, and here he is. Horse. He’s still tight and black, but it turns out that under all that dark ice he’s like an oversized goofy twelve-year-old, telling a story, or laughing at a joke, or saying hey to a friend. Then the next second he’s an old man.
    Sunny introduces me to Horse. ‘Show the boy why they cawll ya Horse,’ Sunny laughs.
    Horse smiles like he wants to be begged.
    So Sunny begs.
    â€˜Git it out! Come on, everybody… It’s showtime !’
    Everyone gathers around Horse, who gets a funny crooked smile on his face with a trace of sad behind it. He likes the attention, you can tell, but at the same time I can see that he feels like a freak among freaks.
    â€˜Listen here, ya better git that badboy out, or there’s gonna be trouble here ta-night!’ Sunny’s the ringmaster of bawdy debauchery, fueling the abused teenage hormones bouncing off the walls of 3-D.
    Finally Horse unzips, fishes dramatically, and folds it out.
    A baby’s arm with an apple in the fist. I believe that’s Tennessee Williams, but I’m not sure. Veins bulging like a relief map of the Amazon, it must weigh thirty pounds, and it looks like it’d take all the blood in his body just to fill it up. It’s a cock that could launch a thousand ships. The crowd gasps, mouths agape at the magnitude of the thing. I am floored, like when I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time.
    Turns out Horse has been making money with it since he was ten years old, when his big sister charged her friends a quarter tolook at it. By the time he was fourteen, that extraordinary organ was supporting his whole family. No one knows how old he is, but he makes a very good dollars.
    Man, woman, doesn’t make any difference – if you got coin, you can have some kind of sex with Horse. It takes a lot of money for him to actually put it in you, but you can pay to look at it, or touch it, or whatever else you want. If you pay, Horse will play.
    He launches into a story about some trick who paid him three Gs to rub his thing on the