ADONIS INTRO
❛ michael b jordan, cis male, he/him/his ❜ was that adonis king i just saw clocking in? the thirty-three year old has a reputation for being short-tempered + reserved, which i guess is why they’ve been working as an escort here since february 2017. their paperwork lists that they are pansexual and into rough sex + choking.
— FULL NAME: Adonis Devontae King — NICKNAMES: Don, Donnie — PRONOUNS: He/Him/His — AGE: 33 — DOB: November 18 — BIRTHPLACE: Oakland, CA — SEXUALITY: Pansexual — OCCUPATION: Escort/Boxer
(tw: violence, prostitution, cancer, death)
—*&; the biography
Adonis King was born Adonis White in Oakland, California in 1988, to a father who had recently been arrested for armed robbery and a mother who was desperately trying to feed four children on a hotel maid's salary. From the first wail that Adonis let out when he came into this world, his mother knew he would be troubled. She had no idea the extent of it.
Growing up, Adonis' mother was working more than she was home. The welfare checks paired with her work checks were barely enough to put food on the table, let alone keep the electricity and water on or pay the rent that was due every month. She had no choice but to turn to illegal prostitution to make ends meet, and even that opened the door for more danger to come into their house. From the moment Adonis was able to walk, he started fighting. It was like he was born with this anger in his veins, an insatiable rage that, no matter how many times he punched something or someone, he could never seem to get a grip on it. Needless to say, his constant anger and violent tendencies landed him in lots of hot water when he started school. And, just as his mother had feared, he was labeled a "problem child". When his mother was caught and arrested for illegal prostitution one night, Adonis and his siblings were quickly rounded up by child services, and split up into different homes. Adonis was only seven years old, and he was alone.
The anger didn't get any better in the homes, if anything it got worse. Adonis was angry at his situation, angry that he had been ripped away from the only people he knew, the only people he trusted, and that was his family. He bounced from one home to the next, always causing trouble that the foster parents simply couldn't handle, not that most of them were trying to be positive influences in Adonis' life...or any of their foster children's' lives for that matter. He felt like no one cared about him.
One night, when he was nine years old, Adonis got into a fight on the bus. A pretty bad one, at that, and he never saw another foster home again -- instead he was staring at the cement walls of a juvenile detention center. There was a plus side to this new arrangement though, even though it was practically imprisonment. At least here, in the detention center, he knew what he was going to get, he knew he wasn't going to be tossed from one place to the next at break-neck speeds. Of course, though, he still fought, he stayed in trouble, even though he was in jail -- he wasn't learning anything about changing his behavior. That is until one man walked into his life and changed the course of it for the better: Walter King.
Walter had been told by a friend who worked as a child psychologist in the detention center that he was the only person who would be able to save Adonis. Not only that, but the psychologist felt that Adonis could become the son Walter never got to have. Walter was an older man, pushing sixty when he took him under his wing, and soon adopted him -- making Adonis White, Adonis King -- and moved him back to New York City with him.
Walter owned a flourishing boxing gym in Brooklyn. Walter had been quite the boxer himself in his day. He was someone who had been born into poverty much like Adonis, and someone who suffered from that same insatiable anger, but had made a name for himself in the neighborhood and built his little gym from the ground up. Walter had a lot of things that he taught Adonis: the craft of boxing and the art of controlling and channeling his anger into a fight. The transition wasn't easy. Adonis was a broken kid, he had been labeled a problem, and he knew that. Walter was aware of this too, though. Walter took his time. He taught Adonis discipline, he trained him, and taught him that the label he had been given was an unfair one and untrue. He wasn't a problem. Adonis was a man, a black man at that, who had been easily tossed into the narrative that many black men were thrown in to, but Walter was there to make sure that Adonis pulled himself out of it.
And Adonis did, slowly, but surely, he became the man that Walter knew he could be. Adonis learned to control and channel his anger into boxing, and a sport he quickly fell in love with. He was constantly training, pushing himself to the limits, learning, growing, and becoming the best fighter and best man he could be. Something else Walter taught him was that it's okay to be yourself, but you can only be yourself in secret -- among those who are close to you, trusted places, secret places. Walter was gay, but he was damn good at keeping that a secret. Adonis started making a name for himself in the neighborhood too, but then Walter got sick.
It was lung cancer from years of smoking cigarettes. Stage four when they caught it. It took everything in Adonis to convince Walter to fight it. They had to take a second mortgage out on the gym, the house, and plenty of other possessions to pay for the treatment. Soon, just winning fights wasn’t making enough money for Adonis. That’s when he turned to something he never thought he would -- stripping. It brought in a lot of money, he was good at it, he had the body and the moves and the swag, but it still wasn’t enough. So, at Club Iridescence, stripping bled into escorting.
It’s been three years since Walter King succumbed to his disease.
Adonis feels alone. He keeps people out of his life, he likes being alone. He’s still working as an escort to still pay the medical bills that he’s drowning in.