Pick Up the Pieces

Prologue

PrologueAs much as the Greek girls of our community in Tarpon Springs had their lives mapped out, so did the boys.

Once I grew up, I’d become a fisherman like my father. Eventually I’d marry a nice Greek girl, and we’d give our fathers a new grandson or granddaughter every year.

That was the way it was supposed to be, only….

When I was fifteen years old, my father threw me out for being gay.

I knew what my father thought of homosexuals, had heard him and his friends, the fishermen down at the docks, sneer and tell coarse jokes about them.

But he was my father. He was supposed to love me, just as I loved him.

Instead, and as I probably should have expected, he shouted, “Teodore Bascopolis, you stop being gay right now, or else you get the f**k out of my house!”

Ma cried and wrung her hands, and Acacia, my eight-year-old sister, threw herself at me and held on, but Poppa just stood there with his hands clenched into fists, his face set.

I had no choice. I couldn’t obey the one, so I obeyed the other, and I got the f**k out of his house.

Since that time, I’d been a rent boy.

But it didn’t start out that way…