Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 21:52:15 -0500 From: Tom Emerson Subject: STONINGTON STORIES TIP B revised STONINGTON STORIES -- TIP B by R. Forbes Emerson (M/b, M/f, inc., mast., rom.) Proceed with confidence. If the sex wasn't there, this story wouldn't be here. "Daddy, I'm nine, " Doreen wailed, "and I'm bigger than Margaret, I bet I'm twenty pounds heavier and three inches taller." "You're my daughter," the great toad responded. There's a lot of history here. Tip McCorison was the Genghis Khan of the isolated coastal fishing town, but smart and seasoned enough not to waste his time knocking asunder and catawampus even the lesser granite footings of the town hall. Flimsy tar-paper shacks were safe from plunder, wrack and ruin from his ham-sized fists; weathered shanties and mostly-vacant summer cabins from his huffing, puffing, and blowing down. He was big, rough, and tough; just not into architectural change for the sake of change. Should he have chanced to live in a cabin on stilts, and with a trap door in the middle of the floor, directly over the mightiest herring run on the entire Maine coast, Tip McCorison would have had other fish to fry. Knocking down simply wasn't the McCorison way, and it would, in context, be shooting you know what, in a you know what, to delineate what kind of knocking applies. Hints for sleepy readers (that'll be the day): knocking having nothing to do with wood, octane, up-side the head, or "...Who's there?" Well, maybe "Who's there?" if tomfoolery were stretched to the limit. Anyhow, I wasn't sulking, I was moving. My income bounced up to thirty grand a year, after taxes, so it seemed to me I was playing some kind of artist's game by living in a house that cost seventy-five dollars a month. At the same time, an ad came over the cable for digs for two-hundred dollars a month, so now it's six bedrooms and two baths, big fenced yard -- anyone want to come and camp? -- complete with views and almost too much Belize breeze. The move, less than a mile, nonetheless entailed cutting two wires, one for the television set, and the other for the telephone, plus, digging out my library, which had spent the last eight years as the grandest imaginable roach hotel and feline latrine. Gross. And that's just the paper. No TV, no phone, a petite display of temperament over having my latest piece rejected, all-in-all just the right set of stimuli to prompt my first real binge since arriving back in Dangriga. Beginning with Lawrence Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet," I've been plowing the classics for lo these thirty days. "Of Human Bondage," "Women in Love", "The Vicar of Wakefield", Voltaire Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. ENOUGH BULLSHIT! Who taught these morons? Talk about letting the noise of their own wheels driving them crazy. Plus, if this lot doesn't utterly and forever disprove, in spades, each and every facet of each and every religion since this first human lips muttered into the first human beard, why, I'll eat every bible, icon and tract ever printed or produced. Except for Goldsmith's saga of the perils of the lesser obscene, this bunch of mad folk is about like having an entire whale sharing one's library; if only it wouldn't spout so! Yet all one has to do to encourage it is turn a page. Shift a single sheet but three or four inches, and THAR HE BLOWS!, dead ahead, at all other points of the compass, as well as up through the very keel. Durrell takes the absolute cake -- any time I don't know -- not the foggiest -- the definitions of five words -- per page -- I stop blaming myself (and my mother for my lousy education). Too bad, because the tangle of rank, raw vocabulary, very much for its own sake, actually yields a little old-fashioned storytelling, that is, if one has a high level of tolerance for psychosis, writ large enough to be read from the moon. Another example: all the themes and subplots of Maugham's so-called masterpiece can be summarized simply by pointing out that a fool and his money are soon parted, and yes, there is little point in a doctor dating a waitress. These guys don't make me look good, they make me look GREATer than Frosted Flakes. You are very, very lucky on two counts. First, passing time really passes for an artist; the older he gets the harder he works, and, second, there is a certain pleasure in doing something of extreme difficulty better than anyone else in the world has ever done it. I do find myself nonplussed, which comes from preaching reading with almost every story sent out into the world -- oops. To make amends, even though none of my friends drive Porsches, I plan, and please don't hold me to it, to write my own version of "The Vicar of Wakefield", suitable for Nifty, if Nifty is still publishing me. There can be a certain beauty in the vastly overwrought lingo of antiquity, and yarn spinning is yarn spinning, whatever the era. You kids should know this, and I'm just the jazzbo to teach you. It would be fun to write and probably pretty good fun for you to read, young and old alike. Goldsmith's book is a modest two-hundred pages, so you might look for my triple X version around Christmas -- that is, if I ever get done with my Stonington crew. Then again, with my friends the S/CUM (Socialistic/Communistic Urban Moneygrubbers -- some of who happen to be Jewish; many of whom are not) strangling today's writers, better described as media hacks almost one and all, maybe there is some value to all the blather and poobah of yore. Perhaps, if I may, it boils down to the rock and the hard place, leaving me the only show in town. At the very least CUM on my pages is mercifully free of doctrinal franchise: it's old-fashioned, it's wet, it's salty, and, in a word, seminal. Before getting back to Tip, Margaret, Doreen, and our story, I'd like to take a second to point out that my ego -- my yelping, braying, crowing overweening arrogance and numbing conceit, well mixed with nauseating haughtiness -- is my only fault. Case in point is that six Salvadorian refugees live rent, utility, and at least as far as I'm concerned, sex free, on the first floor of my big new house. Other notes for those who like dancing along -- beating along -- hey -- are, a, that I quit smoking both tobacco and our virtually free at eighteen-bucks-an-ounce Breeze, at the time of the move, and, b, that Samantha and I are hanging in there pretty well. Synching a sixteen year old with a fifty-six year old, pretty much in view of the community at large, puts me, once again, in the middle of life as a novel. To quote Freddie Einsford Hill, There's no place else on earth that I would rather be. Having had my little crow on the subject, let my point out to anyone who might be similarly inclined (like a Tom Lehrer girl scout) that Samantha's bod is no sexier, when it comes right down to it, than any other fit female's; that the apparent sensuality of pubescent tummy and juvenile thighs is neither better nor worse, when push comes to shove, than any of my girlfriends' or boyfriends' over the years. Most of us published by Nifty write -- heads up, for it could save you enduring trouble: FANTASY. FICTION. ESCAPISM Like mystery writers write murder. Like science fiction authors write warp drives. -- OKAY? -- It really is all in one's head, and, my guess is, in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, not worth the effort and risk; repeat: NOT. The reader who wrote Sex with minors should be left to minors is vastly more right than wrong -- and if you didn't hear it here first, you did hear it here. The irony in my present circumstance is that I can't imagine living with a teen without sex -- even with a lithe Caribbean charmer like Samantha, to say nothing of the typical sullen, rebellious-without-a-cause, fat American product. Yee gods and little fishes. Spare the rod and spoil the bitch. You know a good way to summarize American teens? A cause without a rebellion. As I write this my doll's taking her first solo shot at cooking up our evening mac and cheese dinner with Randy, her eleven-year-old cousin on hand to verify or disprove the adage about too many cooks. One of these days she'll have a story all to herself; after all, Anne's had several. For now, we've been experimenting with oral ways and means, and -- here's that godhead ego again -- I'm here to tell you that the be-all, end-all, nee plus ultra experience of all possible experiences in all possible galaxies is simply to peel the shorts off a young Venus, and, as your hand strokes and caresses her shorts down over her wriggling hips, come to find out her pockets are full of marbles. (Eat your heart out, Fyodor, you abusive, drunken, spinaroo cartoonist. (Though I will say this: at least Russia has a literature, where Germany has none. On the other hand, none is surely better than Voltaire, forgive the candid appraisal.)) A month without Cable is like a month without sunshine -- an analogy that reads differently in the tropics than it does in temperate latitudes. The last thing I remember hearing tickled me, though I can hardly expect David, my long-suffering editor, to share my sentiment. Because of the pervasive fear of These kids today -- you know, switchblades and marijuana cigarettes -- reefers -- vastly exaggerated to sell urbanic media of all stripes and flavors, Joshua Jones and Sashita Smith are no longer allowed to have lockers. Ninety-pound kids in the tens of millions spending several hours a day under thirty-pound backpacks. Chiropractors and osteopaths of the world, unite! your hour is at hand. Marx the festive day on every calendar. To belabor the point, a slight misunderstanding may be involved in my being editorially ostracized. In a previous story, I used the words `deport' and `kill' regarding all persons of Semitic origin (one group for insidious danger, emblemized by the death of Napster, NIMBY syndromes, coast to coast, regarding nuclear waste, the O.J. fiasco, to name three examples off the top of my head, and the other group for less subtle dangers). I used these words because the Mecca-Bobbing Monkey of Iraq set seven hundred oil wells on fire, an act his less-than porcine brain assumed would cause a nuclear winter, and possibly end civilization. The attacks of September, although only five percent as destructive as if transistor-inventing Anglos had orchestrated them, still demonstrate an obvious mortality of enmity. In self defense, NOT out of bigotry, prejudice or any kind of racism (you've GOT to be kidding), I called for fulsome response, a, for protection of our population and way of life, and, b, so the vast resources currently wasted on dyed-in-the-wool troublemakers can be diverted to those neighbors who greatly enhance our standard of living for a pathetic share. Twenty five hydrogen bombs spread over the Middle East, with perhaps one or two for Eastern Europe, would go a long way toward remaking a world according to Emerson (i.e., survivable, enjoyable, and enduring). Have to admit, dudes, my attitude may have been shaped, at least to a minor degree, by being strafed, mortared, shelled and bombed on and around Quang Tri, Dong Ha, and the DMZ. Flat-earth and knuckle-dragging though it may be, I do believe when an entity makes focused and concerted efforts to kill you, you do well to kill him first. (Think of the alternative.) Additionally, I said deport and/or kill, because these aren't merely wacko fanatics trying to kill us, they're very often Harvard folk; lawyers, teachers, editors, doctors and the like, half ptomaine, half blade. My IQ is TESTED at 300. I have read, traveled, and lived -- at street level -- vastly more than all but the most minuscule imaginable handful of my fellow Americans. If there were any way other than mass deportation, extreme isolation, and wholesale killing -- extermination - I'm pretty sure I'm bright enough to have thought of it. My last name is Emerson. One of the most renowned in world history. I live in Dangriga, Belize, and any taxi in town will bring you to my gate for $2.50.) . . . Young Stonington women were safe: more or less; by and large, and from time to time. Safe as they wanted to be. A black spot, black dot - both names were used - and `spot' or `dot', the results were so stirring: so untrammeled, wild, free, and head-over-heels they might have, just a few years after this story took place in the very early Sixties, have been sufficient to inspire a man who actually could write, one Jimmy Webb, to compose a song he ended up composing anyway: one beauty having to do with, you guessed it, rural electrification. In rare years there would be a draught; Spotless, Dotless and dull as the months rolled through autumn and into the bleakest of all bleaks, which is the winter, any winter of a million pines or perhaps a billion -- who wants to know? Sharp eyes registered a cumulative how-goes-it as a semi-conscious response to the laundry hanging on the lines around town. Scrubbing was the last of sane activities, and whiter-than-white meant nothing other than drab days yielding to nighter than night. No one drowned in ponds, because there was little skating on the ice; tire sales slumped and gasoline seemed to last forever. There were no heart attacks in such years and pencil sales, a subtle indicator of almost everything, dropped by nearly one third. In short, during dud years Stonington drew such an overall blank as to set it smack-dab next to Eastport and Jonesport, leaving basketball as the only game in town. Then, spring wound to the maximum, the clock would sprong into gear, and two or three letters in as many weeks or months -- once even on consecutive days -- would reset the balance; life would be restored to the living, and tip-fock, tip-fock, as the inevitable wits put it, things on Deer Isle would excel, then return to normal which was, at best, a balance between sighs of relief and anticipation; satisfaction and longing... So it had been for twenty-some years in times of peace and war. "And I want you to bite me, too," Doreen went on. "I want to glow with pride, just for awhile, like the other girls." These are not normal things we're talking of. They should be. No, not back then, in 1960, no real Kennedy influence had had time to gel in those days; it was all still kind of function over form - so the things Tip McCorison did were not normal. As a fourteen year old with the ego of four giants and a parade, I sketched stories galore of life on the rocks, starting with my beloved Audrey, ten, and to die for, but I never gave thought to them as anything more than finger exercises, because they were abnormal. I publish my writings forty-two years later, because now the country is at long-last restoring itself, what with the end of both religion as a paradigm appealing to other than brainwashed morons, coinciding with the final products and services of the Industrial Revolution, to a real normalcy, and so the adventures of Mr. McCorison are sane, or soon will be. Meantime, I hope they're entertaining. Doreen had always loved her huge, ugly dad, but Margaret's d-liver-d-letter-d-sooner-d-better Spot had crashed into the daughter's school-girl life with about the impact that might have been expected of a golden lobster suddenly being winched aboard in a silver trap. All at once a daisy chain of vague and far-off dreams: being alone with him: became a rabid imperative shocking her, wetting her and setting her afire. The abstract lost its abstraction, the fuzzy, mystic and ethereal became hammer and sickle, rock and stone. What might-be, could-be, should-be jumped the tracks of the academic and theoretical and plowed into the McCorison door-yard (ayah, that's what they call `em once you haul a little north of Kitt'ry, by gorry) like a locomotive fresh off a mountain. Tiny little Margaret, and nothing against her; it wasn't any kind of contest with winners, placers and also-rans; not an exhibition (well, not exactly) or a pageant; it wasn't sanctioned, authorized or officially endorsed; certified or signed-off on; tiny little Margaret, she just was -- and anything that was had limits; its wasness might be defined, unless perhaps it was the number of morons voting for Kennedys -- an exception that proved the rule. Margaret Weed, all forty pounds of her, was; Doreen, third grader, nine years old, just wanted to be waser firster -- no hard feelings. "I suppose you want to go to the dump," the huge father grumbled to his daughter. Half of his child he could make out; half was a mystery. Was that what she wanted? The Old Doe's forlorn and stained mattress, rank and raw with symbolism; a veritable allegory for the seamy, salacious, prurient and scummy side of things, which, if explored a little and talked about a lot added enough jolt to life to curb a dozen rapacious appetites and compulsive addictions, both popular and obscure? Gave it a there there, that mattress of faded pink in its alcove scooped half accidentally in the Stonington dump? Its depression. (How like a nest -- gulp.) It's unambiguous statement: yes, Virginia, there is a bottom as well as a Santa Clause; there's a place you only want to go once in your life, either in person, or vicariously -- ten gossips gossiping an hour each -- but you do want that once so you will not one day lie a-dying with a heart of lead and grief for your lack of courage in finding out. It's called knowing and substitutes are risky business. Doreen was a typical third grader, perhaps an inch tall for her age. Her hair was light brown, worn in a single long pony tail reaching half-way down her back. Suddenly her face became soft, vulnerable and beautiful. Tip gasped to himself at the change, stared into his daughter's big, hazel eyes. "Maybe [the dump] someday, Daddy," the girl whispered, "but there's a pair of birches at the top of a meadow where we can see twenty island. I picked it out last year. I was going to wait until I was ten, then I heard about Margaret Weed. "I don't want to wait anymore." "I was going to wait until your were twelve, darling," the man said. "I'm big enough for you," Doreen replied, "that's all that counts." "I want something very special with you, Doreen," Tip said, "something even more forbidden than the two of us being man and woman together. When the time comes, three or four years from now, I want to be with you again and again in the fullest possible sense of the word, which means without taking any precautions and without using any kind of protection..." "That makes two of us," Doreen whispered back to him. "Haven't done anything like that for years," Tip observed. "That you know of," his daughter reminded him. "I think mine would stand out," the mailman said, fingering his plowed face. "You made me, and I look like the other kids," the smart girl said. "Well, I guess one never knows," Tip McCorison admitted. "I'll know," Doreen responded. What is life? Not what anyone else tells you, and that's a freaking promise. What it is is a practical amalgamation of accidents, lucky ones if you're wealthy, healthy and happy, but hideous accidents to a lesser or greater degree for the overwhelming majority of those who have suffered and are suffering it. It is god-free and devil-free -- completely. Always has been, always will be. Nothing in any way mystical, transcendent, or paranormal has ever occurred, or will ever occur, full-stop. The closest we come to anything remotely spiritual is every-day, ordinary-old -- secular -- human genius coupled with an ability to work. For each and every one of us, for all of time, past, present, and future, end of ends, amen. Surely I am proof. The greatest artist in history, and what is my art? Sex between adults and minors, sex between parents and children, between siblings. If that doesn't slap the face off god and void every temple and altar, what will? They say Stalin once contemplated an H-bomb built into a big ship; a million megatons or more, capable of splitting the planet into pieces. Is that your answer? My music machine just cued up "Rag Doll". Did you ever have a puppy / that followed you around? See what I mean about god and genius? Then there are the bongos tripping half-mad through the third chorus (on the Celine Dion CD), for you doubting Thomases. That's all there is folks, and aren't you lucky to have it at all? Let us pray: our father (that's me) whose art is heaven, fallow be the name of all clerics, mystics, and pretenders. Thy tithe be done, it's time for work, not fun: chose earth and life, and to hell with faith and your faker's eleven. (Some will get the play on "bakers' dozen" contrasted with disciplemania, others may need the cleverness spelled out. An inclusive god strives to please all, which is nothing if not glib, for the perceived Deity's sandflies, with their torment vastly out of proportion to their tiny size and microscopic appetites, are a good working definition of all-inclusive: verily they discriminate not against the babe, the sick, the sweet, nor the helpless or gracious in their not giving of a single fuck when it comes to the pointless agony of their suck. Swat, slap, smack, whack: right hand, left hand, forehand and back.) Doreen gave directions to her meadow, and by four in the afternoon they were there. "We don't even need a blanket," Doreen said as her father set the parking brake. "There's beautiful grass, that's why I picked it." "It's a long way from the dump," the girl's father said, his tone acknowledging Doreen's pretty choice. "Can we leave our clothes in the car?" the girl asked, "you know, then we can pretend we're Adam and Eve." "Not many snakes in Maine," the elder observed. "We'll think of something," Doreen whispered confidently. She tumbled into the back seat of the Ford, unbuttoning her blouse as she went. "Dad," the girl whispered as she pulled down her red shorts, "I've wanted to be with you since I was six. It's not just Margaret." "There's some talk about picking the fruit before it's ripe," Tip responded, "that it can have a deleterious effect on overall development." "Yeah," the girl said the girl, pulling down her pink panties, "and years of longing for something forbidden is just great." Hands-off rape. It's happened to me a number of times, usually with young children. The aware yearning is obvious in their eyes and body language, but the law not only says no, which it should, the way it posts speed limits, but it says `not under any circumstances,' which is like saying don't speed on any road, even if you're driving a fire engine, see a semi looming up in your mirrors, or are transporting a choking baby to the hospital. It imposes the same restrictions on a new Mercedes with a factory trained driver as it does on a clapped out junker with barely legal tires and driven by a crazy kid or drooling senior.. So the sad faces on various boys and girls I wish I'd known. Hands-off rape. The bright side is that a very modest number of relationships have ended up `hands-on,' and anyone who thinks a scintilla of rape was involved is loony enough to have his own personal symphony, never mind just a tune. Studiously, the two avoided looking at each other while they undressed. When she was naked, Doreen slipped out a rear door of the car and stood, head bowed, at the verge of the meadow. Tip slipped from the vehicle, Doreen heard the springs go, and came up behind the naked child. "Are you there?" Doreen whispered, her eyes clamped shut. "Yes, angel," Tip said. "Can we walk for awhile before I open my eyes?" Doreen asked, her voice ragged and quavering. "I've got mine closed, too," Tip replied. "Are you okay?" "I'm scared. I want to see you, but when I do, the biggest thrill of my life will be over, you know, the first-time thing, so I don't want it to happen, to look at you, but I can't bear not looking because I dream about it and wake up all hot and sweaty." "Do you know what to do when that happens?" the man asked his little girl, "how to use your hands, your fingers on yourself in a gentle way between your legs; how to masturbate?" He'd used the sound of her voice to come along side her, and took her right hand in his left as he quizzed her. "No," Doreen replied "I'll teach you when we get to the birch trees," Tip said. "Will that help when I wake up?" the girl asked as they started to walk. "It will make you - " he gulped: "what they call cum; have an exciting release, what they call an orgasm, before you go to sleep," the man explained, "so you probably won't wake up as often." "That would help my grades," the wry chick observed, feeling it was a more delicate choice, under the circumstances, than asking who They were, "because it happens every night, sometimes twice." "I'm sorry angel," Tip whispered, "I didn't know." "I didn't know what to say," Doreen said; "just thank god for Margaret. When I heard she'd got a letter, I knew the time had arrived; that I had to say something. I'm glad I did, because there's no way I would have made it three more years until I was twelve." "Yes you would," Tip said, "it's just curiosity. Kids are curious about everything; boys get hung up on knives and fishing rods; dream about them, and with girls, it's dolls and dress-up, so it's natural your dreams are along the lines of babies and making babies. "After all," he concluded for the moment, "there are millions of girls in more-or-less the same boat you are..." "Sure," Doreen replied, "if I had some skimpy, half-dad it would have been different; I could dream about Kelsey, share with the other girls at school; join any number of giggling clubs or whispering societies and let it go at that." "Bad luck," Tip said, unable to wholly stifle his own mirth. "Ah, more's the pity," the girl sighed with light dramatics, giggling in sync with her father for all her supposed maturity and for all the apparent dignity and solemnity of their situation. "You really are okay, aren't you?" Tip asked, "because we can just flirt and tease a little, then go back to the car, if you want. Teaching by preaching, not by touching, as it were." "If it was freezing cold and raining cats and dogs, I might want to go back to the car," Doreen said. Since they were navigating across the field by the heat of the sun on their skin, Tip sighed happily and squeezed his daughter's pretty little right hand. "If the ground was level, we could dance," Doreen whispered. If, if, if. They were already in heaven, no ifs about that, plus there was no music, so, with slight regret about the topography, and the relative silence, they walked on, slowly, carefully, toward the birches now in plain sight if they opened their eyes. "Was it exciting, your first time, Dad?" Doreen asked. "Yes, darling," the rugged forty year old said. "Was it with a pretty girl?" the child quizzed. "No, sweetheart," Tip McCorison explained, "it happened when I was twelve. I went hunting with Judd Phillips, he lived down the street and I used to help him with his yard work. "Do a lot of boys get taught by men?" Doreen asked, her whisper tense and engaged. "Three or four out of ten," Tip replied. :"The lucky ones?" the perceptive lass asked. "For me, the answer would be Yes. Judd was young, athletic, hard-edged, but generous if you towed the line. "For other boys, it's probably a mixed bag. Relative. Conditional. Circumstantial. Judd worked as a lifeguard when he was in high school. He had a swim class of twenty boys, six to nine. He ended up showering in private with every one of them, as well as with all of them, together. Instinctively, boys love being with men for that, as well as other reasons. If it's the right person, the right time, the right place, and taken on gently, more or less casually, in the right way, all kids like it just like all puppies like to be petted; if not, it's a tangled mess of guilt, fear and regret with no more of a positive or sensual side for the adult than he would get massaging cold clay." "So it all depends," the pixie said. "No exactly," Tip answered, "it's more complicated than that. Many happy cultures hew very closely to Victorian guidelines -- Jane Austen. Under those circumstances, all men were regarded -- very astutely -- as predators. All healthy men, of all ages, and at all times. No female was ever left in the company of any male, from father to ferryboat stoker, and from birth to grave, with the sole exception of her husband and sons. There was a void of convenience concerning young boys, so they tended to have more variety as they grew, but since nothing was ever talked about with open mouths, it's a little hard to know, looking back, just what did and did not happen with younger males. Probably about a third had real experiences, much like today. Additionally, neither male nor female kissed or touched anyone other than their spouse even once in their lives. Under these guidelines, many a maiden's soft curls graced many a downy soft pillow, unblemished in any sense of the word." "Didn't a lot of them go crazy?" Doreen asked. "It took a lot of money to be a happy Victorian," Tip observed, "a thousand pounds a year -- which would be fifty thousand dollars in 1960's money -- at least. Then the girls could be watched by nannies, and a gay whirl of parties and soirees might be programmed to divert the idle and keep both boys and girls out of excessive mischief. "For the less fortunate, there were tonics and remedies, alcohol and opium, so a few were able to stupefy themselves into some sort of natural state." "And no incest?" Doreen asked, half shocking her worldly father by her bold use of the word.. "Probably about like now," Tip said after a moment's pause. "Men are inveterate hunters, and nannies were employed chickens... reasonably easy to deal with if a man had a cutie pie disappearing, however discretely bundled, up the stairs every night." "Those were the lucky girls," Doreen sighed. "Not always," Tip said, "girls were then, as they usually are today, filled with taboo about the horrors of carnality, and the doctrine takes hold in some of them, much like religious fervor or fear of the dark, or spiders, or snakes. If these girls get touched, the activation of the taboo can have devastating results; become an obsession that conveniently forgets men go off to war and bleed to death in frozen ditches. The minister says this, the preacher says that, and the priest adds his two bearer bonds. All three are doormen at the gates of Psychoses City. The church makes you sick, not the loving father or brother, and charges you ten percent of your income for its histrionics. "You may not do better than the church," the father added, "but it's history's leading fact and the world's best bet that you can't do worse." "I think we'll do better," Doreen said. "We could get dressed and be home in half an hour, and I'd think that," Tip replied. If the couple comes across as a little self-satisfied, they might be forgiven, and probably would be by anyone in a position to spy on the bulky six-two male trailing in the tiny hand of his tall, slim daughter. The closer they approached to the birches, the more tolerant the observer could hardly help becoming, and those who still find things amiss might find a back-handed solace -- albeit it probably too little too late -- in reminding themselves that what we have here is a case, in a least a wry and practical sense, of the blind leading the blind.. "Were you outdoors when it happened with Mr. Phillips?" Doreen asked. "In a deer blind," the man said, "and it was October. Not frigid, but plenty cool. That's how it happened." "Will you tell me?" Doreen asked. "Well," her father said, "do you remember what I asked you about the thing you can do by yourself when you feel excited in your bed and can't get to sleep?" "Yes, masturbating," Doreen whispered, her voice husky. "He taught me about how boys -- men -- do it. He'd been on the road a lot, so he hadn't had a chance to be with his wife, then she went off all of a sudden because her sister broke her arm, and it just so happened that the next day we went hunting." "Did he just show you, or did you talk about it?" the perky kid asked. "We talked... whispered, because we were hunting." "Did he ask you lots of questions?" Doreen said. "Compared to who," her father replied with a gentle squeeze of her hand, then added, "yes, he wanted to make sure I was ready." "Would you have been ready at six, when you started first grade, like I was?" Doreen asked. "As long as it was him, age wouldn't have mattered. As far as I know I would have been happy to take a bath with him when I was three." "Me, too," said the girl, squeezing her dad's huge hand. "and if something happens because you don't use protection, and I get a daughter from you, and you make her wait, I'll never..." She trailed off to her father's gentle laughter. "I'm a big man," Tip pointed out to the girl, "so she'll have to wait until she's at least seven." "But you could take her in the shower," Doreen said, "and take baths with her. Teach her what you're going to teach me when we get in the trees. It would be better to do some things, even if you couldn't do everything." "If you still feel that way six or seven years from now, we'll talk about it," Tip said. "It'll be the perfect thing to fight about," Doreen replied, "because it won't be exactly life and death whether the two of you start your life together when she's six or seven or eight." "If I survive being a man with you..." Tip said, releasing the girl's right hand and putting his left arm around her slim shoulders. "What are the chances?" Doreen giggled. "I'm not sure," the man replied, "the thought of waking up tomorrow and knowing I lost control inside you, and that you have my seed swimming around in your pretty tummy does not sound, at this juncture, like something that could happen outside a dream or a fairy tale -- assuredly not this side of heaven." "They can swim for three days," Doreen observed, finding it easy to be optimistic, what with the warm sun, cool coastal breeze, pleasant countrified surroundings, and good company. "Maybe longer, if they get a good start in life," Tip agreed. "All we can do is try," the nine year old said, a quiet friendliness for the moment edging out the fear welling inside her; welling and growing with each of the final steps across the meadow. She had a lot to live up to, her dad's history being what it was -- some sixty known conquest over three decades -- to say nothing of the sloe-eyed looks part and parcel of any island social event. How would she do? Would it be special for him -- memorable? Would he be holding her and wishing he were with the tiny Margaret Weed, who had to be a perfect handful for any man? Would nepotism be enough? "I think we better open our eyes," the slim beauty said. "Who should go first?" asked her father as they came to a stop. "I don't know," Doreen replied, "what do you think?" "Me," said Tip; "seeing you will make me bigger." "You mean your -- p-penis?" the normally modest and demure girl stuttered, again demonstrating a budding vocabulary that could hardly help coming as something of a surprise to her adoring papa. "Yes, darling," the father answered, years of experience evidencing themselves in his maintenance of a tone that while it couldn't exactly be described as offhand, was, nonetheless, something more finely modulated than the stammering, inarticulate croak that would almost surely have been the response of most fathers answering a similar comment from most of the world's daughters. "Will my breasts get bigger if I see you first?" Doreen queried. Tip thought of the English sentiment common in the former colony: in for a penny, in for a pound. He knew Doreen well enough to know that her responses to the developing situation were unlikely to be sullen and guarded monosyllables, sarcastic rejoinders, or reluctant, inwardly-fuming acquiescence, but her savvy and frank engagement in an almost team effort showed a balance and maturity that half melted his meaty, thudding heart on the spot. She was a thrill-a-minute kid, of that there was no doubt. "Have they begun to grow?" the man asked. "A little," Doreen replied, with a pretty and appropriate blush, wasted on her dad due to the thickness of his eyelids, "and they hurt, I mean I can feel them all big and tight, at least for me." Who would gaze on who, first; whose grand opening would follow whose? On the surface, it sounds like a Mainiac standoff such as happened from time to time in the Pine Tree State, but in the cited instance there was such a depth of comradeship and goodwill that an obvious solution could not help but be arrived at in less time than it takes to give readers a heads up, and that without indulging in any Durrell, Lawrence, Maugham, Dostoevsky Machiavellianism pointing out to readers young and readers old something so obvious as the fact that where one finds there is untrammeled and unfettered human will, at one in the same place, and at the same time, one will often find there is a way. These days, yes, we'd reduce it to Way, dude, but where, one might, if so inclined, ask, is the fun in that? "If we do it together, then we can watch each other get bigger," Doreen said, settling the matter promptly, neatly, and permanently. "How about: `get ready, get set, hello!'" Tip suggested. "Okay," the sprite replied, eyelids still tightly mashed, as were Tip's, "but there's another game... not that I'm in the mood to play... but maybe this one would be good." "What is it?" Tip asked "The one where three blind men touch an elephant and report on their impressions," replied the likely girl. "You set a high standard," Tip observed, wondering if any male under any circumstances had ever, since Time's very dawning, been so utterly and immensely flattered... "Take my hand in yours and guide me," Doreen whispered. Gently he turned the girl to him, took her hands in his, chancing endearments in the dark as he manhandled her birdlike paws. "It's not as big as a baby," Doreen observed after an initial gasp and almost immediately upon settling into a steady panting, "but just as wet. Is that because you're sperming?" "No, sparrow," Tip said, thankful at least his pet name for his daughter came spontaneously and unbidden, then choosing the rest of his words as best he could. "That's something special that happens to a man at the beginning so he can enter a female if her vagina isn't wet." "You're wasting it," Doreen said. "Not," grunted her father, calling on twenty years experience to help him read between the lines, "a tiny bit. It makes your touch more intense." "Is that why you keep getting bigger?" Doreen asked. "Yes," Tip gasped in a gravelly musk of a voice. "And you'll get even bigger when you see me?" "Yes," the man managed to repeat. "Will it be this exciting when you're with Margaret?" Doreen asked. "She's a tiny girl. That's always exciting to a man," Tip replied, "but there won't be any chance for a bundle of joy after I cum in her, and, with you, there will, at least someday... That's important to a man." "Think how it makes me feel," Doreen whispered, "and if you touch me, you know, down low, you won't have to think because you'll be able to feel." Slowly Tip removed his big, rural hands from those of the kitten. He found she was not exaggerating, that she was as ready for him as any female had ever been. For long moments they leaned into each other, half wild in mad delirium with wanting and rocketing anticipation. While it seemed impossible ever to get even half enough, there was -- more. He traced up her flat belly to her chest, then found her shocking nipples. "Oh, sparrow," he groaned. "They usually don't get bigger than raspberries," the nine year old whispered to her father, "now they're like strawberries." "We've got to look," Tip said. Even in the year 1960 there existed such a thing as a firm grasp of the obvious. On accord, and eschewing a countdown, which, by the way, would have been one of the first civilian uses of what has become something of a latter-day cliche, they opened their eyes. Doreen looked down. "Dad!" she hissed. Tip looked at his daughter, and gently whispered, "Babe!" Instinctively, they backed slightly away from each other and Doreen almost giggled at the Red-Riding-Hood wolf's line: "All the better to see you..." "Did Mr. Phillips look like that?" she whispered. "I'm only going to let a man marry you," Tip replied, "if he pays me a million dollars, cash, up front. You will be worth it." Doreen blushed with pride. Her dad might be a backwater populist, an edgy and typically-disagreeable power-to-the-people malcontent in the eyes of Stonington's middle and upper classes, with their enduring, graceful and low-maintenance standard of reason over the foment and troublesome dithering inevitable with an emotional baseline, but the mailman worked out well as a father. Low falutin', basic, and absolutely huge. "I'm glad I watched the cat have kittens last summer," the girl said, "otherwise I'd be very, very afraid." "It will hurt, darling," Tip advised her, "and you'll limp a little for a few days." "Sounds like good practice for being pregnant," the sweetie cooed happily enough, though, on close inspection, an acute observer might have noted she stood before the powerful man with her slender arms at her sides, her head bowed, and shivering as if, to be a bit on the earthy side, his pole was the North Pole. The ying and yang of children, the lash and dash of spirits pell-mell over every wall and helter-skelter behind every tree, their quick connections and disconnections; it all amounted to a wondrous hodgepodge that sadly, or, more realistically, mercifully ended when they were seven or eight, yielding individuals as capable of consistency and stability as most adults. Then came Nine. Just the age to know you truly wanted something, yet be frightened of and confused by it. -- a good age to cash in the chips gained by a girl loving her father and remaining affectionate and playful, not deliberately so he'd love her, but naturally. What else was there? For the witless masses what there was amounted to some ten years of the inappropriate and catastrophically time-wasting and expensive ritual of dating culminating in the back seat of the ubiquitous car, with plenty of fear to last out the month, for the lucky girls. The most obvious thing it the world was that there had to be a better way, yet even at the dawn of an era that would prove and re-prove everything in the bible was utter cock-and-bull, the clergy's existence depended on harassing folk with SOMETHING, so they put their empty heads together and sowed a rank and fruitless garden of skewed moral notions and bogus honorable fixations. That this denied the average girl a full decade of exploration, excitement, and intense and linear pleasure and growth, during the time of her life when it would do the most good, seemed to matter to nobody. Slam the door, swallowing the key, a, on the girl's future as a bright-eyed, well rounded woman, and, b, the cell door on any man who would share this crucial period of development. Physics hadn't come up with perpetual motion, but religion had. Set the deity as a refuge, first making sure it was worthless. Obviously such an entity would be a contributing cause of much suffering and misery, which was well and good, why? because, with the cleverness of every Jew and Jesuit since double-talk was invented, the deity was, duh-uh, a prime sanctuary. My buddy Dostoyevsky rattles this particular tambourine for 701 pages in the Bros K, setting up a veritable whirlpool of liturgical nonsense in the process. You are SO LUCKY we have other fish to fry. A good example of how things are, versus how the ought to be, since it's frequently on Cable, is "7th Heaven." The eldest girl, Mary Camden, has never been tampered with, is patently and repeatedly scripted as an all-`round virgin, to say nothing of an in-house virgin, yet she grows up to be a cruel and highly abusive lunatic. Could she be any worse for an occasional session with Matt, her admittedly loopy older brother, or her rather studly father, for that matter? Plus, it would be hard to imagine any lasting harm to little Ruthie, age ten, if she'd spent the night in a back-yard tent with Simon, her cute and friendly slightly older brother. (This adorable couple IS portrayed as sharing a bedroom in early episodes, but it's with the same dissociated wink-wink as Beaver's surname being Cleaver; too subtle by half. Fear not, the full Emersonian treatment is coming to this media household, to be added to the three manuscripts that make up my admittedly stunning Hollywood Stories collection. Yes, you can't wait, but maybe I can make the waiting easier by returning all of us to Tip and his tall, slim daughter. (Aren't great writers great?) He'd loosened Doreen's hair from its pony tail so it spilled over her shoulders. Like many a lair of many a pervert, the McCorison household was run to a high degree of Calvinistic convention. Since she was four or five Tip had almost never seen his daughter until she emerged from her room, fully dressed and groomed. The spill of her brown hair transformed her school-girl face into that of a hazy angel, soft, vulnerable, winsome, delicate and delicious. Two million dollars, and he wouldn't take a penny less. "Do you want to sit here, or find another place?" the man whispered to the girl. "This is perfect, don't you think?" Doreen responded. "Yes," the man said, and the girl sank to her knees, bringing her father to the grass with her. The man lay the girl back, her hands laced behind her neck. He moved off on his knees, found several bunches of wild flowers, and returned to his daughter, stroking her face while he wove the daisies and buttercups into her flowing, light-brown tresses. "We don't do this at the dump," he whispered. Ying and yang, id and ego, sepulcher and secular, clown and catastrophe; hardly playgrounds for the credential-free, at least in theory. On the other hand, Kunstler, Sheck and Dershowitz likely have scrolls and plaques hanging on the walls of their very toilets - and it hardly takes years in grad school to dissect with surety the integrity [?] of the degree of the mother-fucking mess they've made of everything they have ever touched. If this example smacks of blob-and-plunketism, a pet peeve described elsewhere, it's a matter of mere words to vastly expand the field of highly credentialled incompetents of great power and influence. Hmm. Let's try Iridium, Globalstar, WorldCom, Enron and Andersen, then, as if good measure were needed, add one of my very, very favorites: AOL, with it's 152 billion dollar purchase of the swimsuit issue, and recent 58 billion dollar lost -- was that for a year or a quarter? These are your leaders, folks, and as they did to Napster who's to say they won't do to you? Perhaps credentials are as credentials do, Gumpish though the model might seem to be on any review, which must end up with a discussion of -- I just know you're going to forgive me -- the forest versus the trees. As I said before, one of the two reasons I plug away incessantly at this well-worn keyboard is that there is pleasure in doing something of innate difficulty better than anyone else in the world has ever done it. Tiger drives, Bill earns, Jackie kids around, Tom writes and David publishes. Ain't it nifty? I dwell on it by way of pointing out how lucky you are, how vastly privileged, how divinely gifted (adverb, not adjective); how, in short, your cup runneth over when all you clicked for was a bit of a beatin' treat. You peeked out your western window to bid adieu to the setting sun, and lo, god himself attempted to fly in and kissed you like you never dreamed possible, but his big head creamed the sill, and he collapsed in a heap on your neatly coiled garden hose. Your fault, for tempting him with devotion, or his for inflating himself and a way that surely is a gross violation of detective novelist Ed McBain's call for literary understatement.. You pinch yourself, you go to the sink and dash cold water in your face, return to you monitor... the window may be closed and unsullied, but it hardly matters, simply because... they're baack! In what Tip said to his daughter there was something; a big difference, representing all differences, potentials, possibilities, alternatives and variations. This breezy, grassy meadow was open to the same blue New England sky as the Stonington landfill. One slim, young, naked girl looked very much like another. Daisies, buttercups, and the Old Doe's soiled mattress; a daughter and the girl from across the street and down the road, all contrasted violently, yet were so much the same it was easy to feel life was small and limited; we were alive because we were little; that life, itself, was a limiting force, and, sweet or bitter, an end of dreams. Critics would like more -- funny people, because they glow so over less. There is no more. Linguistic curlicues, literary labyrinths, peep shows of idiom, hyperbole, dialect, rhetoric, vernacular, slang and potty smarm -- all amounting to eff-all. In the thousand pages of Lawrence Durrell's wallopingly overwrought and shamelessly overwritten Alexandria Quartet, the engine races, the exhaust smokes, but the entire trip is made in first gear. Every single character is mad, has been mad, or is about to be rendered mad. "Hatters Anonymous", that's what he should have called it, with "Psychosis on Parade" as a subtitle. In the one potential story line, the hero of all four books, Mark, is on an island with a little girl, unfailingly referred to as the child, and even, on occasion, it. Durrell know words aplenty, and uses every blessed one of them, but his only talent is unabridgement. He parks a writer and a pixie in Greece, hardly a stone's throw from hedonistic Egypt, and if man and child play any games at all, it's patty-cake, patty-cake, baker's man or Connie Mack Mack Mack. At one point a character describes London as a city greater than the sum of its defects, and thee-a, a-thee-a, a-that's all folks! For all my internalizing and pissing and moaning, I'm bemused to note how easily my dedicated readers will see the influence of the Greats on my work. Not very long ago, I read five or six Simenons in a week, and things got terse and distilled -- almost as if I were paying for the paper and ink out of my own pocket -- and in a hurry. Now, with all that Durrell, Lawrence, Maugham and Dostoyevsky clattering around I'm mimicking once again. Either that, or mocking them in the grandest style imaginable. Maybe I should have another shot at "Pickwick Papers" -- charming interludes and droll tangents up the wazoo. And is there a monstrous plan underlying all? I wonder. Could it be, that the greats of the past have been allowed to die simply so they'd never come across my work and destroy themselves out of frustration and chagrin? If this is true, and I half believe it, then consider the depth of the plight of poor Stephen King. He may not be kicking much these days, but he's still alive. How absolute the horror that awaits him. Over thirty thousand readers download my stories in a good week so it can't be long before Kathy Bates comes to look like a Sandy Duncan or Jack Nicholson like a Stewart or maybe a Jerrod from the Subway sandwich ads. Let's not go out of our minds worrying, though. In the first place, he's made tens of millions and I've never made a dime off fiction, and, in the second place, I've chucked him an ultimate storyline, which, by a bit of coincidence, happens to be the diametric opposite of the theme he used when he wrote (as Bachman) "Thinner". Two-hundred-pound Cub Scouts. Six-foot Brownies. Delivery rooms equipped by Caterpillar of Peoria. If I could find anything funny in `em, I'd cop the themes for moi. Pretty big if. (Then again, by just substituting `sexy' for `funny', we end up with an `if' the size of Everest.) Again, Ed McBaine reminds us that understatement is elemental to fiction, and has been since the art was invented. It's a personal thrill to have been able to supply an example. Yes, my themes are few in number with number one on the A list being the physical size of our new generations. Attendant is the mandatory requirement that every form of genetic manipulation and State control of fertility that can be devised is universally and immediately adopted. Giant Brother, because we don't have time for Big. Without total arbitrary intervention in every bedroom and ob-gyn office, no future exists, with the road to perdition more hideous than the hellfire due Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson in the aggregate The other two queen bees in my bonnet are the importation of five hundred million immigrants to the U.S. and the conversion of seventy percent of shopping mall space to general social helpage. Number three on the list is the reduction of crime and corruptions, legal and illegal, through use of the super polygraph. Add a good, healthy dose of euthanasia, and the essentials are fully outlined so long as the immigrants are used to clean up the abiding mess we've made of our urban, suburban, and rural environments. I throw these in because other writers bitch too; I have no patent or franchise. Their solutions are, to the last man, more socialism, more populism, and people power. Trendy, politically correct, but mindless and obviously fatal. Of course, the way I recast history, this is a good thing. I mean mega death. My history reverses Hitler and Churchill as monster and savior, and brings up its own moral conundrum; specifically, is it worth killing off a dozen normal men to save one man the kind of suffering delineated by one great author after another? Tangents like this get so confusing, so fast, I soon find myself longing for the simplicity of whispering birches and coastal meadows. Don't we all? . So creaky, awkward and past-tense was the list of rules, conventions, mores and preferences bound in their decades and even centuries of dust, everyone in the town of Stonington was rendered, by the very antiquity of their guiding lights, exceedingly grateful for exceptions, the more dramatic, when push came to shove, the better. That humans actually could feel things above and beyond the flavors of a slice of warm blueberry pie or stroking a fluffy kitten, was special even at modest levels. That someone as prosaic as the village mail carrier could set rockets ablaze and act in the manner of incendiary without portfolio had taken some getting used to; now no one knew what the town would come to when Tip up and died at some time in the next twenty or thirty years. Were these extra feelings of a kind? All in one box, perhaps labeled: Extra Exciting, and it didn't matter much after that? In other words, would Tip feel the same when he went all the way inside Doreen as he would four days hence when he took Margaret Weed at the town dump; or would he driving a race car, or winning a big lottery? Was there simply a place for the big stuff, and everything in the place was the nearly the same? And what if? Did that mean, Don't go there? If each encounter wasn't fully sensitive, individualistic, and personal, have none? But what did that say to man as an animal? That he domesticated all wild freedoms -- and, if so, how did that leave a man, perchance aware of proximate death? Wouldn't he be afraid to go, knowing now, from feeling empty, he'd missed the best? Missed small measures of primal submission much akin to the salts and spices that made a meal a meal? If Doreen's hair was plated with torn ketchup packs and used tissues, would she be an iota less beautiful? If they suddenly came to their senses, blushed, hurried, separately back to the car, and drove silently home, would that make a difference? Compound the paradigm by never delivering another black spot for ten years? It's something we can just get our minds around. It's the reason for the begets fattening up the bible. What we are capable of understanding amounts, in a bit of a strained analogy, to what most of us are able to sing, given a karaoke microphone. Flat, insipid; all but absolutely nothing. As we can't sing, so we can't think; as we can't sing, so we can't understand. And this represents a danger to the writer, because as you can't sing, can't think, and can't understand, so you can't write. T-Rex might have enjoyed his stature at the top of the food chain, but I'm too smart to share his glory. Only by being hammered by critics and castigated by dissenters can I shrug off their nonsense, but if I can out-write them every day of the week and every way but loose, then what? Mustn't victory be over (preposition)? How else do we define the underdog? Real thought to the exact verge of thoughtless, as in beyond thought; that's the real art. Taking you there, not for a flash or a moment, but holding you there, page after page, story after story, and, at this point, book after book; never faltering, never slacking, never compromising. And, since most of you can write at least a little, the degree of talent necessary is, to a minute degree, accessible; you can actually try it for yourself, criticizing or augmenting, your choice, but be warned, you will come away bowed and bent in ways you may find uncomfortable. There's a difference in reading of the razor's edge, and riding it as one rides a banister. It takes such a degree of skill to do the latter, can one be panned for yelping with excitement? Remember, the challenge is to take the reader to the absolute limit of his or her real understanding, and keep him there for one thousand pages, then to show off by doubling the page count, while never dumping your guest. There is no equivalent in our times, but one analogy from recent antiquity does serve. Imagine you are wearing a clipper ship, East to West, around Cape Horn, single-handed, in June. And not that you asked, but no, it's not easy when you know how. In fact, the only easy facet of living life today, versus writing about it, is that our previously introduced S/CUM has so enervated and gelded out society with their insidious, wopshot machinations that we of a certain age get to shuffle off to Buffalo knowing, a, we lived through the most fascinating of all human times, times about a million, and, b, that either c, everyone is going to die with us in a grand social implosion resulting from a puling cowardliness or, alternatively, from the destruction of the dignity of the dollar (47-year credit cards), take your choice, or, d, that if by some unforeseen eventuality you survive, your fate will be a subsistence so leached of wonder and devoid of interest we who are fully human and fully alive wouldn't wish it on a nest of brown scorpions, Lyme ticks, tsetse flies, or even the camels of the spawn of Saddam. Is it tough being your only answer? Not really. You have let that which is noxious and stinks to high heaven amongst you from the time of FDR on, so no one can't say you don't deserve exactly what you get. More than tough, I'd call it amusing, and, sure, paradoxical in the sense that if through total and crystalline obedience you were able to pull your fat out of the fire, I'd end up, sooner or later, on a deathbed agonizing, as so many have in the past, over all I was going to miss out on when my life came to an end. In short (that'll be the day), I do myself the greatest possible favor by leaving you to your urban masters, Christian, Moslem and Jew, and dance on a griddle if I gird my loins to help. Other Great Writers string you along with the conflicts and hazards facing their heroes; me? well, my device is transparent enough to be seen through by a bright child. I simply attach real jeopardy, put your survival in question, provide a short list of answers and options, entertain with sex so I'll be published and widely read, and let it go at that. Thrills? Sure, why not. You've exhibited sterling patience and a notable tolerance for abuse. As the cosmetics ad says, you're worth it. If mine aren't your style, maybe they could be manufactured and retailed, delivered in a plain brown wrappers. All thrills, any thrills, your choice of premium or economy; just add this and that from your kitchen cupboards and dish `em out, thus doing for humanity in its psychic sense what Kraft did by packaging the macaroni and cheese dinner. Season to taste and serve spicy and steaming hot. "Oh, Daddy," Doreen sighed. Her cherry-berry pink nipples had grown from small to large strawberries at her father's first touch. Instinctively, the girl spread her legs and raised her hips. "This is what I was telling you about," Tip McCorison whispered, running his right hand back down over Doreen, finding her, and rushing his fingertips. "You can do it the same way," he said, softly. "When boys do it, they usually lie on their back on the floor so they won't squeak the bed." It was hard to tell whether the wisdom was lost on the girl or whether she understood. Not important. He could repeat the advice at any time. "I can't get pregnant from this?" Doreen whispered in disbelief. "No, darling," Tip assured his daughter, "this is masturbating; harmless and, in a biological sense, useless." "Speak for yourself," Doreen panted, adding, "can I do it with you?" "It's not useless with a man," Tip said. "If you do it with me, or a boyfriend, I'll cum or he'll cum, and sometimes that's the way for a girl to end an evening without any fear of getting pregnant or catching something, except maybe a husband if you do it well." "Teach me," Doreen, removing her right hand from behind her neck and reaching toward the man kneeling beside her. "Show me what your friend did when you were in the hunting blind." The good lord had certainly wasted a pretty face and slim body on Doreen McCorison. As a half-gone mummy she could choose from young princes. By the same token, her great ugly beast of a father would have occupied the sweating dreams of many a Stonington girl and women if he'd been endowed with a mundane five or six inch penis. A loving liveliness was worth fifty pounds of fair form, pretty face and languid eye, or three inches in length and an inch of girth on a male (simpler measurements for the simpler sex). So, as there is vast waste in all of nature, from atoms to galaxies, there was waste in Doreen's being long-legged, slim, and lovely; waste in her father's heavy, thick, circumcised nine- inch erection. Remember, this is a point of view, not necessarily the point of view. The writer acknowledges children can be raised happily under both the letter and spirit of Victorian Puritanism with expressed and implied virtue through the wedding night and into the grave. It is equally true that out of an affectionate `relationship' can come an extra dimension, meaningless, yet provocative. That is simply how it is; comes with living as humans, not fowl. Modern attitudes are shaped by a clergy with nothing else to sell; no life everlasting -- who'd want it? No central Earth, no intervention on the stone simple basis that if we have difficulty understanding god, how could he possibly comprehend the fat, narcissist lot of us -- assuming a vast improbability in which he'd be interested even if he could be interested. Ironically, this turns out to be a rather over-the-top paradox; because I think he's interested in me, else why all the talent? More, why the ability to work? The ability to shrug off the loss (to viruses) of thousands of pages -- entire novels, books, screenplays and a play; and not lose a beat over the time it took to figure out a system of work-arounds? Answer me that, preacher; answer me that, priest. Why are you -- all -- Salerie, while I dance, year-in, year-out, your devil, with Mozart? Do you think there's anything secular about talent? Genius? I don't (and I outta know, having written the book, and not only written it, but written it without the help of dictionary, thesaurus, copy editor, proofreader, secretary, typist, bookish girlfriend, or contributing animal, vegetable or mineral of any ilk, persuasion or ideology whatsoever). I think, rather, it actually defines divine, and not only defines it, but is the only definition there is. Think of the pathetic zealot of antiquity; of his trashy legends and hideous god, and think of me, you remember, the one who happens not to have infested the planet with sandflies, cystic fibrosis, Cloris Leachman, or even the common cold... Your love god, speaking of which: Doreen was barely able to speak. At some times she had strength to thrust her hips high to him, at others, she submitted lying flat on the soft grass, trying, trying to talk to him, to hear his gruff voice; oh, that would be so perfect. "D-dad," she finally managed to squeak. "Yes, love?" he replied. She signaled with her eyes she needed him to stop, so, slowly, he did, watching her breasts grow imperceptibly smaller as she regained control of her breathing. "Dad," she finally managed to whisper, "since it's my first time, I want you to pretend I'm Mr. Phillips, you know, when you were hunting. "Can we do that? You tell me everything, so I can share it, and maybe you can relive it, too." "It would be something to share," Tip had to admit. I can't believe I was smart enough to have very recently pointed out how much waste there is in nature. How much overkill. How much absurdly of the overwrought, undue and bizarrely excessive, like, for example, the thousands of hatchling sea turtles, which might live four-hundred years, but who usually end up as a snack for a white-shitting seagull before they've lived five minutes. Doreen was playful and fun; curious and intrigued; avid, engaged, even aggressive -- when all that was necessary was that she inhale and exhale. Perhaps it wasn't so much the quality or degree of excess as the time one was able to spend at that which would satisfy in an instant or a few fleeting moments that defined dizzy. That would explain incest, and wouldn't it just. Taboo, too, because however mindless and rooted in nothing more than the superstition that defined it, there had been so much of it spread so thickly over so many centuries and under such guises of charlatanism and mystic madness in the end it took on its bizarre veracity by dint of longevity, alone (assuming of course the basic human intelligence required to define and segregate that which actually was harmful, specifically including the clinical manifestations of excessive incest, and then waste no time in neutralizing such genuine dangers in the same manner one would defend himself and his own against a nest of venomous spiders). In the final analysis, it was merely superstition as another example of the spiritual perpetual motion -- aka selling you your own faith -- already defined as the pseudo-medicinal root of perpetual misery. Some sixty island girls had received black spots over twenty years. Each had been rendered by the very taboo under discussion a special and memorable event, the moreso for sake of its forbidden nature. This, admittedly, was the bright side of the syndrome, levitating that which might have been an inconvenience or an outright annoyance, if commonplace, onto it's own peculiar cloud nine for the recipient, the recipient's kith and kin, and for the community at large, with whispers, scowls (for we all like to pretend and embellish outrage, Dostoyevsky is right in that regard) and shaken heads occasionally extending as far as Blue Hill. Each encounter at the dump had lingered for years in more than a few hearts and minds, for apparently there was, inside what might constitute a chamber of special events, an Arodnap's Box, filled with angels, fairies, sprites, elves, and flights of mystical spirits delivering tender kisses on gossamer wings. At the bottom of the box was the pope, emblematic of his tin-pot church's failure to stand for its true beliefs; for belief in anything but cashly indoctrination, heavy on the cash. Unclean, yes, but without the savagery of pure evil, goodness and mercy would be rather dull, especially if they followed one for the rest of his or her days. Tip's hands moved from Doreen's flank. They'd found a swelling in the hillside where the banking was perfect. Doreen sat back, her bulky father comfortably in front of her, half in her lap, remembering and reciting -- in a word, reminiscing. "Tip," Judd asked, "do you like spending a lot of time with me?" "Yes," the twelve year old replied. The chilly hours of the early hunt had passed uneventfully; now the sun was up, the chance of a deer remote. "I feel the same. I just like being near you, like I would with a girl. Is that embarrassing?" "I always think of you when I'm in bed at night, but I never think you're a girl," Tip replied. "I only think that because you happen to be very beautiful," Judd said, "it's nothing you can help; some boys just are, you know, sort of cute, just like some girls are boyish. "In any event, it's highly attractive." "I wouldn't change anything about you, either," Tip said. "Did you know when I invited you to come hunting, I wanted to become more than friends, if you were interested?" Judd asked. "You've been pretty honest," Tip replied, trying to delineate in his mind the difference between knowing and wanting, suspecting and hoping, perceiving and yearning. His heart had begun half racing instantly at the first words of the young man's quizzing, which, if he'd had time to reflect, was a pretty good indication of his young male body's line of interest. Yes, Judd had been open and honest. He'd emphasized how long he'd been away from his wife; how he'd like to end the hunt at a fine hotel with a whirlpool in the room and a gym with a public sauna. Judd liked to touch him; never creepy about it; mostly his neck and shoulders. Tip wished he would be creepy: something creepy had happened to Eddie Roaches when he was watching a movie -- back row -- up to Bangor, and he was still talking about it two years later. The boy felt lucky. Judd Philips was a tall, craggy, Anglo/Asian, twenty-four, a Japanese prisoner of war who'd been sent to the PT Boat works in Stonington because of his half-American background and perfect English. Since Deer Isle was, especially to a foreigner, at the tip end of nowhere, and Stonington was at the tip end of Deer Isle, security considerations had become a town joke, so Judd had ended up as a customer on young Tip McCorison's paper route. This had led to gardening and casual work as a general helper, and over the months one thing had led slowly to another, with Rachel Haskell, Judd's island girlfriend, then wife, fitting him seamlessly into the rural environment. The touching and teasing mixed with absorbing stories of Japanese baths and Sumari culture had gone on for months, aided by the fact that Rachel was often away on projects related to her own war service as a buyer for the small shipyard. Resistance to the inevitable course of their friendship had never been much of a priority with the man and boy and it soon enough declined to the cursory, the token, the abstract, the inconsequential, and had ultimately leveled off at the patently non-existent. Whether this was due to a mutual lack of moral fiber, or more salacious aspects of overall turpitude, neither would have been able to say any more than they would have been able to hold forth on the whys and wherefores of magnetism, gravity, or the various psychic itches common to the yet-to-be-buried. All the couple knew was that it felt good to be around each other, the more the better, and that there was something to be said for letting taboo work its illicit corkscrew free of intervention -- after all, there was a war on.. With a first series of offhand pecking kisses they'd established a pattern of best-behavior cycles defraying incipient lust in the name of social grace and cultural conformity, with instinctive insight linked to still waters running deep. In the early days, one such goody-two-shoes run had lasted four days. Of late, it was rare for them to act with propriety for four hours. One playful series had inevitably led to another, and, with the arrival of autumn, to a-hunting-we-will-go. Nice, manly hunting; the crack of the carbine, the clatter of the antlers if they beat against rock. Both soldier and paperboy were almost overly imbued with a sensitivity that a novelist of the pre-television era might have milked for a hundred pages or more; to wit, an almost exhausting appreciation amounting to a sincere and slavish gratitude for the privilege and outright luck at their being off into the countryside, knit one to the other, armed to the teeth, yet with no greater challenges in the offing than maintaining perfect comfort while perhaps having to decide between an eight-point buck at hand or a twelve-pointer in the bush. How to give thanks, that was the question; how to acknowledge their fortune, so close to the opposite of the millions heading into the insatiable, iron-toothed munching maw of war; how to celebrate life on a day when hundreds would meet death and thousands would be half torn to pieces. Then again, one could dwell on a farm boy having to slaughter pet livestock or a mortgagee losing his family's home to foreclosure; hell, if one was a bit clever at rationalizing he could play with kids by the score and justify each interlude with poignancy and pathos. I am, therefore I commit. "Do men take boys hunting in Japan," Tip asked. Was the Japanese sky sometimes blue? Obvious, but he loved the nervous rasp of Judd's voice close to his ear as he sat in the young man's lap; he would have asked him the time, the list of four hundred emperors each schoolboy was expected to know by heart, anything. "More than here," Judd replied. "I don't mean more in quantity; our hunting is more ritualized than practical in modern times, but more in a qualitative sense, which means that far more happens between the man and the boy when they are off alone together. We talk more, and become much closer than is normal here with the man holding the boy, like I'm holding you, any chance they get." "I'm glad you're from there," Tip said. "I'm glad I'm here," the man whispered in reply. "Did you get taught like you're going to teach me?" the boy queried. "With several other boys in a bathhouse," Judd said, his voice measured, deliberate and husky "How old were you?" Tip asked. "Ten," Judd said. "That's the age we're allowed to go behind the curtain if we want to." "Do all the boys want to?" the handsome, brown-eyed child asked. "Not all are invited," Judd said. "You have to be of a certain character; what we call noshee yahama, translated, the quiet of the strong. Of yahamas, most let their mature friends take them behind the curtain; some do not. It signifies nothing more than ichi tanango, which means eating the arms of an octopus, in other words, a matter of succulent choices, individual, yet of equal quality. Judd had showed the boy a few playing-card size pictures of the bathhouse, causing the boy to wonder, just for an instant, if similar pictures were to be had of shrimp and teapots. Luckily for him, respect of elders was also a by-product of their relationship, so he kept his arch musings to himself. The blind was designed for evening hunts, to be back lit by the setting sun. If therefore caught the morning sun, warming dramatically in the early hours of the day. There was room to sit side by side but Tip felt no inclination to leave Judd's lap, and he could tell his mature friend shared the sentiment. "I've never seen you bare-chested," the black-haired athlete whispered to the boy. "I guess I'm kind of modest," the twelve year old replied. Now that the subject was broached, Tip did reflect there'd been numerous times when either of them could have stripped to the waist as they worked in the yard and gardens; neither ever had. They'd often showered after work, separately, not so much as appearing before each other in their underwear. Their history of restraint and mutual affectionate dignity intensified by tenfold the excitement of finally being alone and open with each other. "What are you like in gym class compared to the other boys?" Judd asked. "Kinda okay, I guess," Tip whispered back. "Boys are very different here," Judd said. "In Japan, males aren't circumcised; and all are about the same size." "You must have been kind of different," Tip noted. "My American father played semi-professional baseball," Judd explained, "and I got his size as well as half his color." "Good trade," Tip observed. "Anglo/Asian, to fracture your already highly fractured language," Judd replied, "is highly ultimate, and, in Japan, being circumcised was several steps beyond that, especially those steps leading me to be with my friends behind the screen." "Aha," Tip mused, "we shouldn't be fighting them, we should be marrying them." He had a point. "So," Judd went on, "you're taller, more varied in color, more varied in features, and, while Japanese are as beautiful as anyone, there is great excitement in variety. Two assets you Americans have as a nation. Lots of room for privacy, and a variety to your coltish boys." Having been raised in diplomatic circles, the alien did not bring up the happy fact that of the top one hundred possible assets -- virtues -- the USA could boast only these two. Of course, two was more than France could claim, but they were nonetheless nothing to brag about. "There's a war game we play, we can't play here," Judd went on. "As long as it's nothing to do with hiding from each other..." Tip said by way of encouraging an account. Judd laughed happily. "When a man an boy are waiting for the dawn of battle," he explained, "there may be another couple within yards of them, perhaps as little as six feet away. The objective is to be complete with each other, yet make no sound or movement that might be detected by friend or foe. "In the vastness of this place, such discipline would be academic." "Why didn't they teach that in Geography?" Tip wondered, stifling a giggle at the dumb thought. Compounding the foolish with the ludicrous he attributed academic reticence to the mysterious-ways rationalization beloved of the tithe grinders as a universal palliative for the dirty ways of their various gods. Young McCorison didn't know much about it -- at this point his overview was obviously limited -- but he did see the potential for frustration in being often together but rarely free. Then again... "There are the bathhouses of course," Judd continued, "and that's better than nothing, but it would be very rare to be as we are, in a wild place that wasn't half way up the side of some crag and with nothing more at stake than scaring a few deer, who probably aren't out and about, in the first place." "Let's petrify them," Tip chuckled to himself. Out loud, he asked: "Did they like it that you were different?" "That's putting it mildly," Judd Phillips said. "Japan was xenophobic for centuries. We, speaking with my American voice, had to blast them from pre-history into the last century with cannons, partly for deep philosophical reasons to do with the advance of civilization, in general, and partly in retribution for their cruelty in killing any sailor unfortunate enough to be shipwrecked on their vast coastline. Since the held out to the end, so to speak, they're a bit full of themselves; and, generally speaking, with good reason. It is a ferociously wondrous and at the same time a sublimely decorous culture in a hundred ways. Luckily, with not a little paradox thrown in, novelty was and still is a byword; they -- we -- crave the new and different just like most cultures..." "And they craved you?" Tip interrupted. "More than," the young man acknowledged with an embarrassed grin. "But maybe they would not have, or anyway at least quite so much, if you were dressed the way you are now." "You get the picture," Judd laughed, and taking the hint, reached in front of the boy and began unzipping his jacked. Tip's hands took over quickly, and he whispered for the tall athlete to do his own. Both stood, the taller male stooped in the constricted hunting shack, and stripped to their underwear, then, by accord, seated themselves as they had been before, except now Tip faced Judd as he sat in his friend's lap. "Do you want to try kissing?" the young man asked. "Do you think it would be okay?" Tip replied inanely. "Unlikely you'd die or even sicken," Judd said. He guided the boy's round-eyed, dead serious face to his, holding him gently with his high cheek bones pinioned between index fingers. Tip McCorison wouldn't be hit by the proverbial ugly stick until he was in his late teens. As a boy, he'd been a slender beauty; black hair in the parted-down-the-middle style of the day, huge brown eyes, and a wide and expressive mouth. "Does it hurt?" Judd whispered, his lips feathery against the child's. "Any less would be fatal," Tip whispered back. That was the end of conversation for long minutes as they explored each other, holding hands while freeing their hearts to gallop endless miles, panting with the strain. The blacks were given freedom and were still singing about it more than a hundred years later; so, in a sense, the hearts of man and boy would never lose their freedom, never mind miles, never mind hills and mountains; never mind valleys and flooding rivers. Sure, it's half poetry, but the underlying truth is that the journey is inevitably more exciting than the destination, the reggae freedom song of more beauty than any man cut loose: free. As long as two hearts beat in two breasts, they could yearn to join. [If there is reincarnation, if I'm to meet Durrell, Joyce, Lawrence, Maugham, Tolstoy and the gang on the other side, and, if they can, in the future, demonstrate that the lesson has `taken' by rendering their pontificating as just a little bit funny, we'll talk.] "Shouldn't I be facing you?" Doreen asked her naked father. "You'll just have to wait for the story to catch up," Tip murmured into his daughter's crown of soft, flowing hair. The girl settled her back against the powerful chest, and tried not to die of excitement. "I never kissed a boy before," Judd panted after a few dizzying minutes, the fresh mouth against his as rich and tantalizing as candy in paradise. "Maybe because you were some kind of infidel over there," Tip replied, showing a wit that came from extensive reading; an awareness that few would be aware of as he matured, but nonetheless a quality he'd one day share with his daughter. And a note here. On "Sunday Morning" this week they replayed the Ridgeway, New Jersey story: the town that up and declared a certain Wednesday as Family Day. In the numerous interviews of the go-for-broke sportin' families with their clusters of soccer bombs, it became apparent that the idea of setting aside one puny hour a month for gratuitous reading would have been hooted right out of committee as non-competitive. Do you suppose those kids will mature in confusion because they don't seem to know anything, or will they simply never know, and thus never know the difference? In a word: clueless. "I never thought of it that way," Judd admitted, "though infidel might be stretching the point. But you're right in so far as anything soft and romantic wasn't part of that culture, though I think the sentiments of affection and empathy, man for boy and vice-versa, were the same as they might be elsewhere. Feelings may be the same, yet expressed very differently," he added. Glancing down at the long bulge in Judd's briefs, Tip could understand how the Japanese might have overlooked kissing, or, indeed, anything else that might have been regarded as foreplay, and even be forgiven the oversight... perhaps a case of bliss leading to ignorance. "Di-iche watafuji konga-chi," Judd whispered. "What does that mean?" Tip asked. "It may be the reason Japanese males don't kiss when they make love," Judd explained. "It means `salty dew of organic soda.' Soda refers to mineral geysers, not soft drinks." Picturesque. Tip knew from National Geographic that the Japanese islands were geologically active, but he asked, anyway: "Do they have a lot of geysers in Japan?" "Once I saw a hundred in a single hour in a single bathhouse," Judd replied. "Must have been hot," Tip responded, feeling he was sort of half getting the byplay. "You just said a mouthful," Judd acknowledged. "Tell me," the boy whispered. It did seem like the time and place, so Judd complied. "Kamihazna yasoto nakamaha di-iche," the twenty four year old whispered: `to bathe in the waterfall of salty dew.' "It took a week to get it ready; send out invitations, hire a caterer, reserve a bathhouse, decorate it, lay in tables for the gifts... I didn't know what was going on -- remember, I was just ten years old at the time -- and no one would tell me anything beyond making me feel very welcome. "In the end, kamihazna yasoto nakamaha di-iche about hit the nail on the head. They'd invited a hundred young men, mostly fourteen to mid-twenties, a few older, a few younger, and four boys, my age. "It was all massively ceremonial; silk, incense, food of the gods -- never, never ask what you're eating, if you ever visit -- and then an hour of `kalade yokomama' or anticipatory swimming, as one does in the womb. "My karate instructor was my sponsor and escort for the ceremony. When the ritual `swim of focus' was over, we paddled to the far end of the pool and he led me into the ceremonial chamber, more like a chapel with candles and incense, and then there were gongs and bells. Matu, my coach, led me to a low table with a mat in the middle, lay down on it on his back, and I lay on my back on top of him. Then the guests began to arrive and the mystery of the waterfall was cleared up." "Surely there was some exaggeration," Tip commented. "There were a hundred guests," Judd reminded the boy. "Oh," Tip replied. He still wasn't sure what it was all about, but a hundred? Didn't the number speak for itself? The future Don Juan's fluid mind reviewed a score of implications, decided the odds were he'd get wet, and opted for change. "Can I take my underwear off?" he asked. "I thought you'd never ask," said his friend. It was now late morning. The September sun warmed the east-facing blind. Tip lifted his arms, and Judd skinned off his T-shirt, then his own. "Are you sure?" he whispered, placing his hands gently at the boy's hips. "Yes," Tip said, nodding his head and sliding off the young athlete's lap. Judd also stood and bid the boy go first. Tip touched and fondled his enormous friend; Eddie Roaches told some pretty amazing stories about hanging out in the back row of various Bangor movie theaters, but the boy doubted he'd ever seen the like. Tip reached around Judd, pulling down in back, first. Fantasizing on what all those Japanese boys had seen when the man was a ten year old, he murmured a silent ode of gratitude, and brought his hands to the front under the waist band. "Can I touch you a little bit, first?" he whispered. "Yes," the young athlete said. "You're really big," the boy observed. He had nothing to compare to, but it seemed unlikely he was wrong. "You can be, too," Judd said. "How?" the boy asked. "Tashawana katayana mosito hee," Judd said. "We'll have to know each other better before I can translate it fully, but basically it has to do with that which a boy might ingest, should he wish to excel." "At what?" Tip was about to ask, when his probing fingers found the iron bar of his friend, followed it what must have been eight full inches, and thus he learned what excelling was all about. This he had to see for himself. He didn't say Wow, Down Easters being reserved and all, nor did he let out a whistle, but he looked up at Judd with huge eyes that said it all, then pulled the briefs to the ground. "I'm surprised the Japanese authorities didn't confiscate your passport in the national interest," Tip said, giving us a clue as to why they were friends in the first place. "They do want me back," Judd replied. "Duh'uh," Tip said, some forty years before Ms. Silverstone. "Think of it this way," his friend said: "'karifumo dacahichi nanga dou.' Stars in all of heaven for half my time with you." "Modest, but I like it anyway," the boy observed, perhaps not realizing that should the sentiment ever be realized, celestial navigation, and therefore much intercontinental trade, would come to an end. . "It's all part of `isantu faroko-u,' which means all-of-day, all-of-night, all of a thousand years." "I'm glad I didn't wash up on one of your beaches before Perry," Tip said, "because I have a feeling those of a heavenly poetry of the heart could be downright diabolical if they put their minds to it." "Yes," Judd agreed, "axioms of purity in devotion contrasted with those regarding purity of suffering. Good point. It was nice of us to discard the bothersome aspects of ritual, and keep the more amusing sides." "I'm overdressed," Tip said, changing the subject. Judd knelt in front of the boy and kissed him softly on the belly. "You are beautiful," he whispered, then pulled down the twelve-year-old's white underpants. [Commercial message (or two). This anti-drug campaign: "I helped kill a judge, a policeman," and so on. No doubt, but the money is reasonably well focused on the poor and certainly means more to my community than all the UNICEF and CARE pickup trucks, no matter that they are gleaming new, vast in size, and driven by highly credentialled men and women. Another bone I've been meaning to pick, and might as well do so whilst the pot promises to boil: TechTV. The story is some guy name Nissan, a small realtor, owns the Domain, because it's actually his name. So they do a survey, with Leo and Pat, the hosts, going way Little Guy and thinking the realtor should win the name over the car company. Eighty percent audience agreement. That's so emblematic it deserves a place here. According to the logic, the little ma and pa diner should block the skyscraper, the old homesteader should block the new interchange. Liberals think like disgruntled cave persons, but a question arises as to how happy they will be once they have us all back in stone housing. It may be facetious to laud this as a solution to monster kids carrying -- you're gonna love it -- monster rucksacks, but it's an ill wind that doesn't blow some good.] "Do you want to sit facing me, or away," Judd whispered, settling on the bench in the shack. "Both," the boy replied. "I meant the first time," Judd deadpanned. "So did I," said the boy, finally choosing and settling into Judd's lap, his back to the young athlete's chest. They adjusted themselves so Judd's erection stood high and hard, jutting eight inches between the child's slim, milk-white thighs.. "If you were facing me we'd waste a lot of time kissing," the young man said. "Only if you started it," Tip replied, blushing at the baldness of the lie. "Lace your fingers behind my neck," Judd prompted. Tip was unsure. He wanted to touch the huge boner, to experiment using his fingers to test the copious seminal fluid oozing from the slit and wetting the pulsing purple plum-shaped glans, to see if it was as slippery and sensual as it looked. On the other hand, arching and stretching for the mature male could hardly help but arouse him further, to make even more spectacular the vivid drama beginning to unfold. In later years Tip McCorison would insist on a high degree of obedience from his young partners. One reason was the success resulting from doing things Judd's way that first time together. He leaned back against the tall athlete, arched, and wrapped his fingers behind the slim, muscular neck. "Now I know why Chinese handcuffs were invented," he whispered. It wasn't a complaint, and the boy wriggled avidly and panted openly to being molested for the first time. Judd was gentle in what he did; soft and lingering as his fingers explored ichi dango fantan (like butterflies stuporus with indolence and intoxicated on the first spring nectar of the sun-drenched lotus). "What happened?" Tip asked, proving it's not real smart to go and leave half-told tales where twelve year olds might get ahold of them. Judd twigged the reference was to his revels of the bathhouse. "This is what they did a lot of," he whispered, now molesting the child with a certainty by carefully stripping down Tip's foreskin and running his index finger in small, wet circle at the base of the boy's glans. "First the mature males did it with the young guests, then they reversed, and the boys did this to the young men." He continued the demonstration by gently beginning to masturbate Tip. "Did they stand really close to you while they were doing it?" the boy asked, his voice deteriorating like the weather in a storm. "The katasha nagomi - those who are about to fly, in a carnal sense, salute you by kneeling on towels placed all around the kirwasan, that's the guest of honor, the boy who's lying on the dais in the arms of his master. Each boy's kami, pilot, stands at his right hip, and does what I'm doing to you. It sounds awkward, but the ceremony is ages old, so it's done with refinement and exquisite grace, if I say so myself. "Six boys," Judd went on, warming to his narrative, "three on each side, with another kneeling and each foot, and two more, sometimes referred to as the dafucu naka, unseen heroes, kneeling on towels at each of the kirwasan's shoulders. Ten in all. The men hold the boys in their left arms, except at the shoulders, where lefties can reverse the hold if they want, and, after the first kafunu, or flight, wet the boys with the sewhaa -- semen -- spilled by the first kafunu. The wetness retrieved from the body of the sweating, panting kirwasan speeds the cycles up dramatically. When ten kafunu are complete, leaving the sperm of a hundred boys on the kirwasan, the boys become the kami, and stroke the mature males, who by now are in a highly aroused state. As you probably figured out for yourself, this gives credence to the waterfall analogy." If a picture takes a thousand words, the writer needs to go back to school. Tip couldn't think of a single word. Judd was stroking both their erections, squeezing them gently, wetting the boy's circumcised five inches copiously as he messaged him with the steady flow of his seminal fluid. This restricted thought, totally, rendering the otherwise likely and moderately loquacious child a mindless mute. Judd had brought a few magazines from the old country, several on sports themes. Tip tried to imagine a hundred of those beautifully colored young coltish males kneeling beside the mat of the half-Anglo cradled in the arms of his coach, and succeeded. Yes, it was another example of the overkill inherent in the natural kingdom and wild world at large, but what was his alternative? To lie back against the panting sweating young adult, to feel the mature male's left arm around his slim waist, to feel the fiery sinew of Judd's penis against his own, to feel the scalding, slick wetness of what was being so liberally shared with him, and lounge around without a thought in his bright young brain? As if. The salty-dew thing he'd have to learn about, although he was beginning to have concrete ideas on the subject, but the waterfall analogy was making more sense with each passing minute -- and really did seem to be more logical the more one thought about it, especially if one took a few moments to do a little mental arithmetic. "Can I be a kami -- a pilot?" Tip asked. He was faced with a choice. Remain mute, and what Judd was doing would soon end, he could feel that to the tip of his curling toes, or temporize; create a diversion and make it last just a little longer. "Only," the young athlete managed to pant hotly in his hear, apparently, himself wanting to molest the youth a little longer before they both ran over a field of broken shards at sixty miles an hour, or something like that, "if you are able to keep a great secret." "Yes," the boy said. "It will come as we are about to lose the war," Judd said; "young warriors of a country that recently produced fifty thousand automobiles will throw themselves against a nation that produced ten million, a ratio of might of two hundred to one. Such warriors will charge with sticks, and will be called bonzi; others will use watercraft, and a select few will be chosen to fly against you in aircraft with no fuel for a return. These will be called kamikaze. For the morale of the Japanese people, and for Japanese face among the nations of the world, the story will be put forth that kamikaze translates as Divine Wind, and a spurious legend will be propagated to fit the image. Don't believe it, for you are chosen to know the truth, though you have vowed never to share it. The reality is": and here Judd paused to add a superfluous touch of drama: "this is kami" -- and again the young man added to the experience by mimicking an ignorant sounding falsetto of a Japanese speaking crudely accented English -- "`cause-he- feel so good." If it was funny, nobody was laughing, for, after all, where is it written that every witticism attempted must come off? . "How did you pick who went first?" the boy asked. Both knew they were in the final moments of their first time together; that the approaching crescendo would never be repeated, that its memory would be as close to a forever thing as is dished out between cradle and grave, that, even though it could not possibly last even minutes longer, that every minute it did last was an epoch unto itself, and that only top-drawer horny details could add to what was beyond earthly. Tip's curiosity was as marvelous and erotic as the motions of his strong, young hands massaging Judd's neck. "My master," Judd managed to explain in a gasping whisper. "He knew many of the men and boys. He picked the first three couples, and the last three; everyone else drew numbers. "There was a name for each pair." "Naturally," Tip gasped, trying his young best to contribute to the conversation, even though by now his hips were bucking hard, his penis swollen beyond possibility. "Naturally," Judd affirmed: "Flowers of Three Damp Days, Nights of Near Thunder, Fruits of First Blossom, you get the idea." "I think you're right, Dad," Doreen whispered, "I like it this way. She was lolling against him as he had against Judd. His hand was working gently well between her slim, young legs. She was thrusting experimentally to him; sometimes freezing and gasping at a certain touch. "Now I'm sure," she moaned as he became a little more bold. I have to help my characters at times like this. It's what I'm here for. How about C-SPAN as a mood extender? Last night it was Ayn Rand. She promoted some kind of `ism,' I forget its foist name. Something to do with common sense, man as himself, not a socialistic cog distempered by altruism. I suppose it sounds good, but, then, socialism and even communism sound ever-so wonderful that one, only with some difficulty, avoids a lump in the throat. I am an absolute monarchist for the fairly obvious reason that only a king can have the capacity to rapidly pick and choose from the smorgasbord of doctrines and interpretations, choose good ones, never worry if they are absolutely the best and utterly flawless, as the Jews do, and turn the freaking page. Underlying this, I do have my own `ism,' though I'm afraid it's pretty much a duh'uh. Extensionism. It can best be described using an example. It has been reported there are one hundred million lawsuits on file in the U.S.A. Would our long term best interests be better served if there were two-hundred million? Extensionism can be used backhanded. For example, we went over a year, in the late Nineties, without a single airline fatality. I think the system should be geared to an average of fifteen-hundred fatalities a year, on the assumption that the airlines are frequently used by people seeking early medical intervention for serious problems, and every dollar in excess ticket cost means someone doesn't' get to go. Instead, we have Value Jet, a cheap little working pony, put out of business, even though the incident causing the accident was the very definition of a freak -- bolt-from-the-blue -- event (oxygen cylinders, identical to those used on the plane, carried as cargo). See, it's the job of a king to see it that way; to count the deaths and misery of evacuating two million people for an every day, ordinary old hurricane; the cost, in Central America, of dithering in the middle east instead of using extreme violence, not in vengeance, but in self defense. If we don't, they will definitely kill us; something easily accomplished with an ounce of anthrax amplified by a militant postal union. That's Extensionism. If forty-seven year credit cards, why not ninety-four year cards, so your grand kids can kick in and help with the balance? You are being led by a pack of mindless imbeciles: S/CUM. They are leading you exactly where you deserve to go, and if you think that's good news -- bid on my antique bridge. Samantha was here for two hours in her church dress. We're working on a duet of Sue Thomas' "Sad Movies (always make me cry)". Terrific piece of poetry, so it's a thrill she appreciates it. Beautiful clear voice, but she tries to force it. Anne always said I was a superb art critic; I was often able to suggest a few small changes that improved her work dramatically -- she used to get mad, but critics lead rough lives, so I bore it in good will. Samantha has an instinctive affinity for the lesser kids, which makes us peas in a bod; we've both been there and done that. Fortunately, my income just climbed to about twenty-nine thousand dollars a year, so we may not be lesser much longer. Anyway, I remind her from time to time that I fell in love with her when she was a regular-looking schoolgirl. Most of Sunday I sat on the edge of the bed staring at her, wondering if any girl could actually be so lovely. I've been thinking she'd blossom in a year or two, but I may be way off there (it sure would be nice to be wrong about something in my life). I hope not, she needs more time before she starts stopping them in their tracks. Maybe she'll turn out like Jose, my five-year, '82-'87, friend in Mexico. He was not handsome in any classic sense, but we spent our last two weeks together in Mazatlan and I never got tired of watching him go swimming and the mysterious appearance of girls as young as six, as close as they could get. Very awesome. The chance of Samantha sparing me is small, but hope is cheap. Along with Ayn Rand, Brian's nutcake network has been re-hashing Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the bottom of mankind's heap, H. Reading them is like digging up every grave in town. All of them. Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair. Let's put it this way: either they're great writers, or I am. There is no possibility of all of us: Me, or Them; read it and weep, and especially weep for the tens and tens of millions of sub-literates turned off anything to do with literature, forever, but this foul list of typing, hyping goombas and the urban filth that publishes them. Specific example: Kerouac. In the three hour presentation on him (C-Span II), most of the commentary of host, guests, archivists and callers had to do with his ability to operate a typewriter. I believe I could out write this bushel o' booze with a chisel, a hammer, and a granite wall. I see "7th Heaven" on yet another cable network. Good. I have a couple of next projects vying for attention, and it may turn out Ruthie and Simon are too tempting to resist. My other titles are "Prancerock and the Crazy Clock," a mainstream fantasy about a magic horse in the old west, and "The Tarzan Mushroom Hunters," an erotic novella lost in the great virus of April. Go ahead and write, if you want, my downloads (all files) have dropped from thirty thousand a week to about ten or fifteen thousand, so I can relax and shuffle down from the literary mountain, whereso thy scribe dwelleith, for a tete-a-tete (but no tee-hee) with a reader or two. Of course, you'll need something to write about, so maybe we'd best get back to a certain coastal Maine hunting party. You know, sometimes I fully understand that I'm copping out by writing Erotica. For example, what more primal story could there be than man and boy girding their loins to track meadow, field, forest and glade in pursuit of a noble stag? Should I blame myself for not wanting to write it, or you for not wanting to read it? Personally, I don't think I have the talent, however my work belies my modesty, leaving us stuck where we are. "There's one rule, now." Judd whispered to the sweating, bucking child in his lap. "You've got to be kidding!" the boy groaned silently to himself. It was a reaction inspired more by time, place and circumstance than mutiny. "The senior male always has his experience first," the tall, powerful athlete continued. Now Tip's feeling was chagrin for not implicitly trusting his partner. If anything could delay what was now beyond inevitable, it was a few moments considering events from an aesthetic standpoint. The tall, slim twelve year old had been so awash and swept away by vortex within vortex of feeling and sensation he'd not had the least free second to wonder at the scenic side of what was happening. To wonder, simply enough, what it would look like. His own neophytic emissions had been while half-awake in the dead of night and under the bed covers... but it must look like something, right? What it felt like was the fuse on a cherry bomb in a bottle of milk. Tip hated Timers in movies. They clicked, they blinked, they beeped; analog or digital, they went on and on, apparently included to annoy the audience with their tedious countdown to the split second, one or two infinitesimal moments from the explosion, when the hero cuts the blue, NOT THE RED!! wire. "Are you ready to go all the way?" Judd whispered. "How long before we can do it again?" Tip replied. "Just a few minutes, or we might not stop at all, at least so's anyone would notice." "What's going to happen?" the boy asked. "If you do to me what I'm doing to you, I'll cum right away," Judd panted. "My sperm will get all over you. If you don't want that, we should change positions." "Did you get out of the way, in Japan?" Tip asked. "No," Judd said. "Because your karate master was holding you?" "Hell, no!" the man retorted, immediately abashed at his unintentionally vigorous reaction to the notion that anyone would have had to have held him while he was accepting the will of the bathhouse males. `I guess we settled that, then," Tip observed, now using his hands with his left cupping Judd and his right stroking the man's swelling erection with a near savagery that couldn't last more than a few seconds.. [Sorry, honest-Injun, sorry, but there's Laura. John, Matt's black roommate's love interest on "7th Heaven." Very close. Laura Facey, of Jamaica, appears in Santa Fe Stories, maybe in Hollywood Stories, I honestly forget -- maybe in both files. (Won't it be fun for you to find out which, especially now that you can see a doppelganger of the girl in question?) But Priscilla, the "7th Heaven" character, has an American accent, while Laura's was, and presumably is, English. - - Granted, it's neither the magnitude nor the scale of Silly Peanuts' journey from Nukey-Poo Rickover to Bearded Fidel, but you may find it interesting, nonetheless.] Judd had never imagined being so close, for so long. Tip slowed, played, experimented, caressed, and fondled, often using both hands. To demonstrate -- and this was how mature the boy was -- that he'd be a good lover when he grew up he sometimes returned to stroking hard and fast like a thirsty miner at a pump, seeming to will what must happen as much as working for it. His way of coming smoothly off his pace, at the last bearable instant, and his winsomeness during the interludes marked the boy as gifted to an extent that might have rendered him a god of some past or present remote civilization. Ordinarily, Judd would think of such a lad in terms of going far in life, and he was rueful in acknowledging that with Tip's handy gifts, the boy could one day thrive as the local mailman; would never have to go anywhere. Oh, four times now, at five to seven minute intervals, oh, oh, oh. And doing the same with him, his frankfurter-size boner, feeling him tense to the edge of the delicate ice, then give him more time, let his breathing settle for some moments, listen for his private little sighs, then trade them for the hisses of jerking the boy off. Half an hour. Forty minutes. Trading paces. Flogging their minds for trivia, so it wouldn't be over; forgetting everything in the world, next instant, then remembering it all, again, just in time. "Tell me about him cumming-off, Daddy!" Doreen panted. Her father was openly masturbating her, using the same touches and stokes he had with Judd. The slim, pale girl lolled, sweating, her hair stringy and lank on his chest, low in his lap. He kissed her wherever he could reach her neck and shoulders, using his left hand to fondle her swollen nipples. "Do you want to do what I did?" the man asked the nine-year-old girl. "Yes," came the hissed reply. "Use your hands on me, like I did on Judd," Tip panted, wondering what his daughter might have inherited from him. Doreen leaned to her father, used her left hand low on him, and wet the fingers of her right hand. "In the end, we did it separately," he whispered to Doreen (we already know this, but she didn't. Careless, but then I've screwed up the ages and eras of this chronicle so badly they'll never come out right. It's been reported recently that daily use of marijuana reduces one's IQ by five percent each year. Hmm. Twenty years of smoking, and this is what you get. Between my mother's extreme abuse, the offhand savagery of my wife, my fourth rate education, and Belize Breeze at eighteen dollars an ounce (actually, seventeen-fifty), there's obviously blame to go around. Never mind. All my trials. Do the best you can to enjoy the rest of the story.) "Who did it happen to first," the girl rasped, very on the edge of knowing she was going to lose control. (Again, we already know the answer is Judd.) "Him," Tip whispered. "When a man is with a boy, he always ejaculates first, while the boy is fully excited, and so he can wet the boy's penis with his slippery semen. "It may sound clinical, but it's not." "Was there a lot when it happened?" Doreen asked. "Teaspoons and tablespoons, not liters and quarts," Tip explained. "Will I see if I keep doing it like this with you?" the girl asked. "Yes," Tip said. Tip also said Yes to Judd. The man had asked him not to stop and he'd replied, yes, he wouldn't. "It'll just be a couple of minutes." "Should I do it harder?" "No, it's never been like this before." Then they were silent, save their panting and the soft, hot sounds of a boy masturbating a young man. "I'm cumming," Judd whispered. His sperm came with a sudden, wild, waving splash and flying gush jetting with such violence it hissed as it sizzled against Tip's face. "Oh, Daddy!" Doreen half-screeched in excitement, "look!" Tip was as shocked as his daughter. Not even with Judd had he ever imagined cumming-off as the ethereal, above-and-beyond epic of time and space now jolting him like a native Texas warden's favorite chair; imagined anything half so hard or with any fraction of the delirium he felt as he spent, staggeringly, again and then again all over Doreen's slim torso, and especially all over her budding nipples. No accident, the girl was as deliberate as a surgeon in guiding him, and at the same time wanton in crying out praise and encouragement. He remembered how he'd gasped at Judd's first hard arching spray. Holding his panting, sweating daughter was marrying the Princess Heaven of Heaven. The tall Japanese-American had manhandled his child's body while his torrent of cum was diminishing, wetting him, and masturbating Tip, making the boy cum-off immediately. He made use of his daughter, in a like manner. Two hot spurts of his thick, white seed to her tender nipples, and he manhandled the girl on the grass. She spread her legs wildly and screamed as she guided his urgent thrusting, feeling it become frantic as he mounted her fully in half a dozen fast strokes, then froze, hard against her young belly, as he made her cum with the seizure-force pulsing of his ejaculation. Stonington was not entirely into the things that were going on in those days; many happy residents lived outside Tip's circle. This also must be said: that of those in the circle, at this particular moment, only two were not thinking of Margaret Weed, just as, some twenty years earlier, no one had thought of sayonara. Posted by Thomas@btl.net A few notes. First, an apology to David for the abysmal quality of the first post of "Tip Part B". This is perhaps five years premature, for it will be about that long before my work is read other than by the glow of private screens in private places, but I would like to offer the original draft to any English teachers, writers, or aficionados who might be interested in comparing it with the final submission. Therein lies a tale. (Because of spam and viruses, be sure to use appropriate wording in the Subject Line of your request.) As stated in the text, I quit all smoking some six weeks ago. The first draft, as well as all previous submissions to Nifty and other sites, was written under the influence. My commentary is as follows: I think the impact amounts to something indirect. What ganja and tobacco amount to, in my case, is a reward. After two or three hours at the keyboard, it's time for a treat -- which means a cigarette and a thimble-size bud of unextreme potency. This has the effect of extending the workday from eight or ten to sixteen or eighteen hours. Case in point is that it has taken five times longer to re-write these twenty thousand words than it took to draft a somewhat sorter MS in the first place. If this helps other writers, great. Quantity versus quality. Nothing very new. So, from the worst I've ever done, to something that stands me solo on the epic peak. Dickens may have been inimitable -- at least so he often described himself. I am unapproachable. Simply the greatest artist ever to walk the planet. This is one proof, and, vagaries aside, there will be many more. T.E., Dangriga, July, 2002 xxx