Prologue
When you're young, you dream
about what you want to be when you grow up. For some, the ideas are vague and
out of focus, but for others, they're as clear as a new spring morning.
JC was one of the lucky few that knew,
from a fairly young age, what he wanted to be.
So he works hard and he gives up
things to reach the goal that he's set for himself. And one day, one incredible
day, it happens, and JC finds himself living the dream. It's everything and
nothing he thought it would be, and he's amazed and thrilled everyday at what
his life has become.
Then without warning it blows up
and it's bigger and brighter than he ever dared to envision. It takes over his
life, becomes him, and one dark rainy morning, he wakes up, looks in the mirror
and realizes that the man staring back at him isn't someone he knows anymore.
He can't go anywhere without being recognized, and when he does dare to venture out; it's not without at least two very large men beside him.
The day JC walks out his front
door, to retrieve his morning paper, and finds two girls barely old enough to
wear bras camping out on his doorstep, offering themselves to him and anyone
else he'd care to share them with for the chance, just the chance to spend five
minutes with him, something changes inside of him. JC doesn't know how they got
past the fences and gates he surrounds himself with, but what he does know, as
he escorts them off his property, the girls in tears, is that he'd lost
something he fears he'll never get back.
The others laugh when he brings
it up and call him naive. After all, they've been getting those offers for years
now, and some of them have even accepted one or two. But they know, because
they've the ones who've protected him, that somehow, in some unimaginable way,
JC has kept himself apart from the seamier side of what they do, and it hurts
them, as it hurts him, to know that he'll never be able to do that again.
It's then, barely two weeks
before his thirtieth birthday, when JC is certain that the simple dreams of a
boy have gone horribly wrong.