I was a runaway. I went to Europe with my father and ran away, and I spent a lot of time just hitchhiking around, and somehow ended up in Israel. I believe that I was 14, going on 15. I was with a couple of older hippie guys who were ushering me through this life-on-the-road process.
They had a contact in Israel, so we ended up getting into Israel, and I spent a year there, a few months on a kibbutz, then just living off the streets, selling my blood, panhandling, selling drugs. I got arrested for selling drugs, so I spent a total of three and a half months in jail there. I ended up in an adult prison by some obscure miscarriage of justice, but fortunately I was pretty much protected by the American-vagabond contingent that was in there. We stayed in an old army barracks and we were mixed in with Arabs, of which there were an abundance in jail. So the Arabs would be at one end of the barracks and the European-vagabond-hippie-derelicts were at the other.
Every night, I would hear and see this young Arab boy being raped repeatedly by 20 or so different guys, in the mouth, particularly. It would be dark, and there was a huddled mass working him over, and he would be crying and protesting. Then he would shuffle across the concrete floor in his slippers, go to the communal sink, throw up, brush his teeth and shuffle back. The other prisoners would snicker a bit, and this process would repeat itself the next night. So that song is sung through my idealized, romanticized version of this young saint. It's kind of a love song in the sense that it's about sex and passion through his eyes. So in that sense it's a typical love song. I guess this experience, seeing this kind of thing at such a young age, shaped my perception of human nature, and love, in a way? Christ, I didn't even have pubic hair yet.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
