One of the best parts of my job is working with my big brother.
Well, he’s not my actual brother, but it always felt like he was, and still does to this day.
Sometimes I still can't believe how far he and I have come. We started off kids of two single mothers who were too busy chasing dick and smoking crack to properly care for us.
Our fathers— whoever they were— had never been in the picture. Just our two BFF druggie moms, who didn’t know what they were doing when it came to being parents and never should have had us. The state stepped in and removed us when I was just five years old and Dante was eight.
But the state didn't know how to care for us any better than our mothers did. We were tossed around from one house to the next, each of them seeming to get progressively worse— or maybe it's just that I kept getting older and more aware of my surroundings.
I always had Dante, though. He was like a father figure to me more than a brother when we were younger. The only one who cared about protecting me.
The state tried to keep us together as they moved us through the foster system but there was only so much they could do, since we’re not blood brothers and since apparently it’s hard to even keep blood related siblings together all the time. Dante and I even started saying we had the same last name— Rossi, even though we obviously didn’t.
We tried to insist we were real brothers when we weren’t. The state was sympathetic but couldn’t always do much about our plight.
So there were times when we had to be separated. Those times didn't last long at all. Because Dante always found me and ran away from wherever he was supposed to be to wherever I was.
He would tell his foster parents, my foster parents, our social worker, our pathetic excuses of mothers whenever either of them was clean enough to visit us, whoever would listen at all— although no one listened to either of us very much— that he wasn't going anywhere his “little brother” didn't follow. That they couldn't keep us apart. And if they tried, they'd regret it.
Dante was as smart as he was protective. He said no brother of his was going to go to school with dirty rags as clothes. When we were really young he would steal all the latest name brand clothes from any store that didn't toss him out at first sight— which was most of them.
Then he realized he had to schmooze his way in to the places that had what we needed. So he applied for a job at a name brand clearance store warehouse, really looking the part of a hard-working strapping young man even though he was all of fourteen at the time.
They'd put him to work moving crates, stacking boxes and fixing up rickety parts of the old warehouse. All of the hard grunt work that no one else wanted to do.
And they left him alone to do it. So no one was around to see him filch a brand new leather jacket or a pair of brand name shoes. They didn’t know he’d put them in his tool box and carry them out with him when it was time to go home— or to whatever place we were temporarily calling home.
They thought he did great work and began to trust him— or ignore him— more and more. So soon he was loading whole boxes into the work truck they gave him to drive, and driving it straight to whatever pathetic excuse of a foster "home" we were living in at the time.
Every day was like Christmas. I admired him so much. As soon as the higher ups at the warehouse got wind of missing merchandise and started sniffing around, Dante was out of there.
It was easy for someone like him— like us— to disappear and never be found. Disappearing was what our whole life was based off of whether we liked it or not, so Dante just learned early on how to capitalize on it and make it a strength instead of a weakness.
His ID was fake, his stated name and age were fake, his work qualifications were fake. And when he started to be discovered for who he really was or what he was really doing, he would move on to the next job.
He re-invented himself whenever necessary. And he taught me how to do the same.
As we got older, it became clear that street smarts weren't the only thing we had going for us. We were attractive. Apparently women liked to throw themselves at us.
So we enjoyed it as much as any teenage and then young adult guys would. We had our fun. We bragged about our conquests. We shared them with our friends.
Because these girls would do anything we wanted them to do. It was like they got off on pleasing us. And we, of course, got off on that too.
Soon, though, Dante had found a way to capitalize on that just like he had always found a way to capitalize on everything. And by that point it was a necessity.
He had aged out of the system and had gotten caught with some petty theft charges a few too many times. He'd spent some time in juvie but had always managed to bust out before I needed him too badly.
But now that he was an adult they were a lot stricter with him. They threatened to lock him up for a long time if he so much as looked at a loaf of bread and thought about stealing it for us to eat on those days when whenever foster "parent" we were with decided they felt like blowing the money they got for "taking care" of us at the casino instead of at the grocery store.
He couldn't go to jail and be away from me, his minor brother who still needed him to look out for me. So it was time for Dante to find another way to support us: one that didn't involve the constant threat of criminal charges and time behind bars.
That's when the idea of The Fun House was born. That’s how we got to where we are today: having girls throw themselves at us, and getting money for having them do it.