Rose’s Thorny Ward

Chapter 1

Recently, took a taxi ride. The driver was a garrulous older guy with a patchy beard, wispy mustache, laugh lines - all of this I saw in the rear view mirror. TG, Taxi Guy, wore a wrinkled, sweat stained Yankees baseball cap backwards. Maybe he wants to be sure his fares are properly presented with the bill. *shrug*. Where was I going? Where was I coming from? Neither is pertinent to this tale. I came from Nothing and was enroute to Nowhere. Fine - I was coming from a funeral and headed to an empty flat. A funeral decorated with a single dead rose, attended by a forlorn cast off.

TG’s old, beaten up, yellow and black checkered taxi’s radio was tuned to a classic country station … TG apparently is a big fan of Conway, Merle, George … …, and, The Statler Brothers. The garrulous, heavyset driver, TG, lustily sang - badly off key - along with pretty much every song that came from the scratchy speakers. It was after some subsequent research in the musty stacks of a cannabis store that also sold used vinyl records a week later that I decided my prophetic - or, what do you call someone who peers into the past? A Seer? - driver that day would be from thence forward dubbed TG. So named for TG Sheppard in honor of the song, “Do You Want To Go To Heaven?”

It was on that surreal ride to nowhere that I heard the story of my life. Sheer coincidence probably. Who knows? But it sparked my mind. The Statler Brothers: “This Bed of Rose’s That I Lay In…, Where I was taught to be a man” …

It’s the story of my life. Not a heroic life. No great accomplishments or citations for heroism; but, in all of its debauchery and sex/drug-crazed filth, it’s my life. My name is Bertram Jonathan Brethingt0n. Appropriately, often called B.J.. I was orphaned at the tender age of twelve years old. Subsequently, I spent a couple of adolescent years being shuffled from foster home to foster home. Occasionally, for a change of pace, I’d get incarcerated in a lovely juvenile detention facility. Amazing what one can learn in one of those;,especially from the older boys and some of the guards. Then, at fourteen years old, my path finally diverted. Instead of being in the “tender care” of some state-check-chasing drunken, heavy-handed bastard and/or greedy shrew, my new path led from one rank, musty, filthy alley to another. Dumpster to dumpster. Blow job to blow job. Then, along came … Rose. My thorny, lusty, sweet Rose. The epicenter of my salvation. The bane of my existence. The shunned of Fifteenth Street.

Still, to understand my lewd, disgusting, lurid, lonely, heartbreakingly lovely story of murder, love, and redemption I guess I have to start on the day my parents were murdered. B.J. Berthington is currently twenty-four so…, let’s see… It all started twelve years ago on the day my parents were brutally murdered.

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Stay tuned for the next chapter if this sex fueled, drug crazed, sordid tale. B.J. Shall return in Chapter 2 … So long as you all wish it to be so. So … Comment, Like, dissect, and challenge my perceptions alongside your own. Be it known - this tale will not be suitable for under 18. B.J.’s story is replete with regret, blood, age-gap sex, sexual assault, heterosexual, bisexual, and gay sex and prostitution. Despite all this, B.J., and Rose’s, tale is ultimately one of love, redemption, and valiant striving. It is a romance. It is a confession. You have been warned.