Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 11:18:51 -0600
From: Tom Emerson <tom@btl.net>
Subject: ONE FISH AT A TIME CHAPT. 12 & 13

 ONE FISH AT A TIME

 CHAPT. TWELVE & THIRTEEN



CHAPTER TWELVE

                   "I never thought we'd be having a talk like this," Niles
Banks said to his eleven year old nephew, Bing Charles.
                   "I never did, either," the boy replied.  "Was I that
gross?"
                   "We were still friends, right?" the twenty four year old
asked the boy.
                   "Best friends," the boy acknowledged.
                   "So, you weren't gross, just, well, for lack of a better
word, uninteresting, physically, which was double trouble, because in every
other way you were, and are, as they say, excellent."

                   The boy beamed happily.  "Was it the show?" his uncle
asked.  "It made me have hope, about you," Bing said, "you know, focused me
on a lot of things we didn't say, and didn't do, and why, and they spelled
out why in three letters, and said to every kid, What would you rather be,
a little bit hungry, some of the time, or way fat, all of the time?  Then
they redefined hunger, and I realized I was hungry for you, and gave that
its natural priority, and spent an extra hour in the library, instead of
eating, and both hungers sort of played around for a few days while I tried
to get used to them, and in the end, the belt went in, and only one was
left, and in some more, so I wrote to you."

                   "And now," Niles said, "there's nothing we can't talk
about without having to leave things out."
                   "It's still going to be embarrassing," the boy noted,
"but Hap and Stan, my best friends in seventh grade, say that's natural,
like being totally nervous, but after it happens, you don't feel weird, and
you think you were a baby to get up-tight, in the first place."
                   "Remember about our being friends, before," Niles
reminded his nephew, "because if you weren't nervous and uptight, you'd
come across as maybe pushy and a hustler, and they're not attractive no
matter how slim and hairless and cute they are."
                   "So, there's a lot to be nervous about," the boy
observed, "if you're pushy, nothing happens, and if you don't say anything,
nothing happens, and you have to live in between."

                   "You weren't kidding about the library, were you?" Niles
laughed.
                   "Our house is my home away from home," the boy replied,
"and it used to be the sub shop."
                   "You may find I take second place to a toasted meatball
with Swiss," Niles said.
                   "I'll have one when I reach eighty-two pounds.  Three
more days," Bing said.
                   "From the mouthes of babes," the uncle laughed, "you, my
extremely attractive young friend, will reach that goal tomorrow."
                   "How?" the boy asked.
                   "Jody Fisher," Niles said.  "He's a runaway.  Nine.  I
picked him up at a truck stop on the way here.  He's sleeping in the back
seat in the shade.  We talked as we drove, and he said he'd been to, as he
put it, Slim Boys' Playland, but he's only been with adults, and they were
all too big for the experience he wants to have, which his first partner
showed him in a video.  When I told him I was on my way to visit you, he
practically went into a trance.  He asked me a dozen questions about you,
and all of them after I told him you were under ninety pounds, which, he
was polite enough not to ask about, directly."

                   "Why's he running away?" Bing asked.
                   "They're trying to get him to testify against his
neighbor, like in `Man Without a Face', and his mother's a bad-tempered
sod, so he finally split, and he rode with a nice trucker who took it very
easy with him, so he's got, in his vernacular, two strikes against him,
without having it come out the way he wants, so, unless you've changed your
mind about what you said in your letter, I thought I'd bring him here and
wait for the dust to settle before I get in touch with his mother, and, if
I do that, judging from the stories he told about his neighbor, James, and
the trucker, Manny, you are, a, going to go a long time without thought of
food, and, b, get a ferocious amount of exercise into the bargain."

                   "I thought with Rick's show, that kind of thing was
getting a little passé," the boy said.
                   "You're partly right," Niles replied, "they aren't
making a particularly big deal out of it.  It's his mother playing the
hysterical female, a la Little Rascals, that's causing the problem.  The
cop he talked to said unless Jody reported it, and backed up the report
with resolve, they'd drop the whole thing like a hot potato."

                   "Maybe she makes great apple pie," Bing said, and yes,
it can be hard to find optimistic things to say about mothers.
                   "Maybe a few days without Jody, who happens to be, a,
likeable, and, b, drop-dead cute, and she'll resolve her priorities," Niles
responded.

                   "Is nine too young to be really interested?" Bing asked.
                   "We had some pretty serious talks when you were nine,"
the uncle reminded the boy, "and I didn't notice you nodding off."
                   "It's weird," the boy responded, "because that was so
exciting, and, to think, now we can do the things that you told me about."
                   "It adds a lot," the uncle agreed


                   Harold Homemaker to Neville Novelist, you're taking up
all my time, and you haven't earned a dime.
                   Neville Novelist to Harold Homemaker, I've kneaded and
steamed, served and cleaned, see me some other time.
                   Me?  I say on Dancer, on Prancer, on reindeers all, and
leave these dingbats under the wall.  I hope it is a new style.  I'd have
loved fifty pages of editorial intervention in "From the Terrace"; journal,
commentary, personal trivia, maybe even a few photos and documents; letters
from his editor, stuff like that.  All my favorite writers.  In my
experience, only Trevanian and Marrayatt even attempt it, and then with
terse interjections that probably, in total, don't take up a page.  Ford,
in "Independence Day", takes a different tack in that the entire novel is
highly autobiographical.  I'm not talking about that.  I mean coming
completely out of character as an artist, chatting with the readers as if
you were seated in the next booth, then picking up the story again.  Maybe
it's sort of like sex.  You get to know a kid really well, you like each
other, and once in awhile you find some time alone together.  It's works
for me in my bedroom, and I hope at least in some tangential way it works
for you in yours, or, preferably, you and yours.

                   I think of Queenie as the Nick Nolte character in "Down
and Out in Beverly Hills".  So laid-back it somehow just wouldn't be right
for her to work.  I'm not kidding a bit when I say this, there was dog
stool not only on the kitchen table, but on her bed.  She is a girl with a
dramatic upside, and that is that she'd never be too tired, or, in any way
preoccupied.  In fact, she'd never be occupied, and with so much free time
on her hands, who knows how she might work out as a mate?  How lucky I am
that Samantha is her near twin.  They're a pair of cats, lolling and
sleeping; beautiful and endlessly worth caring for.  Can it be the way to a
girl's heart is through her stomach?

                   We exceeded attractive nuisance last night.  She wore
black Speedos, maybe four sizes too small.  She looks so amazing you just
can't believe it's real.  She chatters and prattles in her lilting Creole,
and sings, not very well, all her Sunday school hymns.  While it's not a
dominating force, I can't help admitting there is some pay-back involved,
as the Rasta boys are in no ways loath to escort their trophy blonds outta
town, so the lean, gray wolf evens the score (big time).  It may be a
different kind of gamesmanship than your friends and colleagues play, but
as the literate class has it, it's important to be earnest, and Samantha in
her second black skin is enough to drive every man Wilde.
                   I've one-upped my cousins so badly, speaking of games,
it's embarrassing to tell.  In fact, what it is is a fairy tale, or,
rather, three fairy tales.  "Cinderella", "The Ugly Duckling", and, most
spectacularly, "The Tortoise and the Hare".  >From underneath the family
scrap heap, not on it, I shook of this and wiped off that and emerged a
literary Hercules, while the Ivy League crowd dithered over Vietnam and
Watergate, accomplishing essentially nothing, and leaving no legacy but a
bunch of mixed up, half-baked kids.  There are a lot of cultural profiles
in the country, but none as deep-seated as New Englander versus New Yorker.
For one thing, there actually is a difference, unlike in the proverbial
South where the poor farmers were and are identical, white or black.  New
Yorkers are bumptious and poorly educated.  New Englanders are icy and well
educated.  New England is half wrong, New York, all wrong.  I grew up with
a foot in each camp.  Essence of blue, when it came to blood, and essence
of cafeteria cooking oil, when it came to lunch.  I always assume the core
of American literature came from the Northeast because it was such a
horrible place to live, people became masters of prose so their own letters
wouldn't drive them crazy.  "The north wind's masonry," is an example.  It
takes a lot of money for any winter wind to be anything but cold.  Thoreau
writes half a page about a bed of white wildflowers, I'd be after them with
a machete, which is a lie, because I'd have Andrew do the chopping.  "Two
roads diverged in a yellow wood."  Two streams diverged in a bamboo glade.
Which would you rather travel?  And, for sure, Dangriga is less traveled
by.  There should be a city built on the reef between the two local cayes,
maybe half a million; another million or two should live up the valley with
classic colonial architecture set along the breezy flanks of the hills.
That would be sane.  Instead, there might be a hundred of us Anglos in the
whole area.  That's insane If you see the same white faces every time you
go outta town, there can't be very many of them.  I muse on this and Bill
points out the fact that most Americans get a terminal case of the
heebie-jeebies if fate or providence causes them to tarry over ten miles
from a Wal Mart.  Pathetic.  I rent a six-bedroom, two baths, house on a
walled lot with palms and banana trees, for two hundred U.S. dollars a
month.  My former breezy and perfectly adequate little house cost
seventy-five a month.  The weather is always perfect for working indoors,
the islands are always twelve miles away, the kids are all mannerly,
responsive, and adorable, half the teenagers are tolerable, and a hundred
of us live here.  I guess I should say Thanks, fellow Americans, for
leaving it cheap, quaint, and quiet, and if the artists' colony has only
one artist, perhaps that's all a delta without so much as a dunghill can
stand.  This is a bit of an insider's pun.  Dangriga was formerly Stann
Creek, `Stann' coming from `stand', as in stand of coconut trees.  Anyway,
no hills to echo the crow, and no Wellesley post grads simpering Are you
really number one in the world?  Why how wonderful, can I have your
autograph, and would it be okay if my ten-year-old daughter and I brought
over a bottle of gin and some limes?  The truth is if I cruised this kind
of action, I'd undoubtedly find it, and if I had any money not earmarked
for the insatiable schools, and didn't have Samantha, I would.  As Orson
Wells would sell no wine before its time, I will exercise no morality, any
time.  You have to be dead smart, half cute, and free of disease, after
that it's Katie bar the door.  That Samantha tames the philandering wolf,
making him half a church puppy, is that which puts her on a plane with
Anne, who did the same thing.  And never underestimate the conundrum, the
complexities of love and loyalty, they're going nowhere fast; the dynamic
partner, who strays rarely and briefly, versus the faithful bore.
                   How much of what you read do you bring into your own
life?  The same here as you would from a science fiction epic or a psycho
thriller.  In a word, nothing.  Be glad you have the entertainment option,
and let it go at that, and if it's not enough, follow the dietary
strictures and be a kinder, gentler person.  Read, and remember losing a
first wife is not only losing her, but letting someone else have her will
with her, her life, and her children.  That she will in all likelihood go
on to number three and number four is cold comfort, and, while someone like
Samantha is warm comfort, that's a chick you don't want to count before it
hatches.

                   The cats are a stitch.  Two surviving kittens.  One of
the two-year-old females thinks they're god's gift from playland, and the
other four ignore them.  Cats have more finely etched personalities than
dogs.  Daisy's five are all alike, very nice, very affectionate, but one is
exactly like the rest.  The cats are similar to each other, intensely
devoted to sleep, but should they awaken, they exhibit very individualistic
traits.  When one does something bad, you yell at it and chase all of them
around the house, throwing slippers, then none of them do it.  They are
very consistent about using their one latrine, even canny enough to pick a
spot the head wolf will clean on a daily basis.

                   Talk about worthless word count, I just discovered my
Sony tells time to the half minute.  For the first thirty seconds, the top
dot of the colon blinks, and for the last thirty seconds of the minute, the
bottom dot blinks.  What will they think of next?


                   "Would you feel nervous about showing off for me?" Niles
asked his nephew.
                   "Kind of," the boy responded, "how much do you want me
to show?"
                   "Just with your shirt off," the young man whispered.
                   "That used to be the most embarrassing part," the boy
said, "I didn't mind taking my pants off in the locker room, but I hated to
take off my shirt."
                   "How about now?" Niles asked.
                   "Hap and Stan have been encouraging me," Bing said, "but
even having been, you know, that way, is embarrassing, so I haven't let
them talk me into it, yet."
                   "How do you feel about Jody seeing you?" Niles asked.
                   "Can it be just you, the first time?" the boy said.
                   "What about another extreme?" the young uncle asked.
                   "What?" Bing said.
                   "Jody, plus your friends from school."
                   "Would you stay with me?" he asked.
                   "If you want," Niles said, "or I should say as long as
you want."
                   "I can call them," the boy suggested.
                   "I'll see if Jody wants to come in," Niles said.
                   "Uncle Niles," Bing said as his uncle left the room,
"I'm really glad you came."
                   "There had to be something good on television one of
these years," the young man replied.  Bing knew his uncle respected the
medium, and that he'd been an avid documentary watcher for years.  He was
frank in his assessment, admitting that massive repetition was inevitable,
but at the same time scathing in his criticism of condo comics and endless
use of the let's not do it, then they nod and do it, eat cheesecake, for a
bad example, double-take.  Boxes of socialistically and politically correct
cant weren't much for entertainment value, the knife all blade and no edge,
suitable for spreading butter, of which the country needed much less, but
not icing sacred cows, however dangerous and close at hand.

                   The man and boy busied themselves in the kitchen, Jody
fitting in as if to the dishtowel, born.  By the time Hap and Stan arrived
they had a plate of sandwiches and gallon of Kool-Aid ready, and they ate
what actually was a somewhat tense lunch.

                   "You can feel weird up to here," Niles said, pointing to
his solar plexus, "any higher you should go up and watch television in
Bing's room, or you can use the computer in the den.."

                   The four boys nodded.
                   "How high are you?" he asked Hap, as the elder guest.
The eleven year old grinned and placed a finger a couple of inches down
from what transport pilots call the point of no return.
                   "Rising or falling?" Niles asked, and they all laughed
as he slowly drew his finger down toward his waist.  The other boys took
his cue, repeating the gesture.
                   "It's a pretty good computer," Niles half teased, half
said to give every possible out.  Four shaking heads.  Take that, Bill
Gates.  (Just way kidding.  The man saved the world, we all owe our lives
to him.)

                   "Hap?" Niles asked, "how do you think we should
proceed?"
                   "When it happened to me, we talked quite a bit," the
handsome boy said, "and I liked it, but some people think that's sick, so
it's just a suggestion."
                   "I think it's sick that McDonald's addicts children,"
Niles said, "so I guess there's room for plenty of it."
                   "Maybe we could come up with an over-the-counter pill,"
Bing said, "you know, if you get that queasy feeling from talking taboo,
take two every four hours."
                   "The poor kid's been library-bound so long, it's gone to
his head," Stan Yawoski, like Hap, a plain, friendly-faced schoolboy,
remarked.
                   "Survival of the wittest," the other friend added, and
Stan concluded their silly bout with "Mind over fatter."


                   Some readers may be discouraged one way, some, in
another.  "So soon with another interminable essay?" you will groan, while
your screen-mate notes that there are no less than four juveniles and a
young adult in the coming scene.  And now I want to fit in Samantha?
Mercy.  You're right, of course, there's no rush.  She'll still be Nifty
age for three more years, a young friend.  Up until this afternoon, I would
have agreed; what's the hurry? stick to the story and tell her's in another
book written at an appropriate time.  Probably any other girl on earth
would warrant such cavalier treatment, but this is the island girl of
island Earth.  Plain enough on the street, she's a study in close-ups; a
mouth, lips that improve perfect so slightly, it's quibbling at its finest
to note the difference.  Remember Sambo?  [Cultural note: "Sambo" is not in
the spell-check dictionary.]  In this most dazzling of children's stories,
the tigers run around the tree so fast they turn to butter.  Well, you know
where we're going with this and can easily guess who found those
melted-down tigers, and licked up every last one of the
four-hundred-thirty-seven drops.  I don't even have to kiss and tell, it's
so easy to imagine just looking at her, and what happens when the butter
turns back into tiger it's just good old Late Night Cinemax.  We did sleep
together; she for four hours, myself for one.  It is sexier not making love
to her than pretty much the sum total of my above average, but by no means
extensive, experience.  When I met Anne, I had three girlfriends named
Penelope, and an equal number not Pennies.  Oops.  Four.  Although we all
stayed friends, in some cases close friends, I dumped all seven the day
after meeting Anne, so, with a dozen other interludes, the odd twenty
prostitutes in Wallace, Las Vegas, and Mexico, plus the odd thousand hours
in various bath houses in the States and Mexico, and perhaps two excursions
to gay bars, I've been down the first sidewalk, but am not even interested
in going around the block, while acknowledging cheap sex is probably here
to stay.  All this to say that number one stands a good chance of actually
being number one, with the number one writer thinking she's some kind of
goddess.  And that's just her mouth.

                   I saw Daisy today, first time in six or eight weeks.  I
think she realizes she's catching a bit of a break with free lodging and,
first among tenants, is actually beginning to clean up her act.  The kids,
dare I even think it, are reaching the stage of being good about bringing
back the dishes.  It's a fact of my life that I combine the two most
temperament-prone occupations, artist and chef, with less than a pitched
fit a week.  Nice kids wear well.  Why does anyone want any other kind?
They just stopped by with half a bucket of crabs, which we boiled.  The
dual mysteries of Belize are why they don't fish crab commercially, and why
they don't raise carrageenan seaweed in the vast turtle grass shallows
inside the barrier reef.  Daisy and her boyfriend catch the rati with hoop
nets on strings, and get a bucket full in a few hours, all seasons, and
small amounts of Iris Moss seaweed are harvested for a local drink.  Beats
me.  I've proselytized aplenty, and invested aplenty, and snorkeled
aplenty, so far with zero results in the "teaching them to fish"
department.  Additionally, there's likely a pretty dramatic opportunity in
high-tech lobstering, using GPS to locate traps in featureless mangroves,
and digital video to a, check to see if there are lobsters in the traps,
and, b, provide security.  All labor intense, all environmentally neutral,
all requiring light capitalization, and none executed.  When I say make
everything down to Columbia and Venezuela into a fifty-first State, I think
I've paid enough dues to know what I'm talking about as well as anyone
does.

                   Not only are Elston and crew bringing back the dishes,
they're cleaning the place up.  When groomed and petted my digs look like a
slice of an expensive resort, especially at night with the lights from the
verandas playing over the palms.  I can be judged on three things.  My
work, my girl and boyfriends, and the places I've lived.  My first
four-month stay in Belize I had a big rambling homestead on the principal
island, and a three bedroom house in town, across the street from the best
store in town, for a combined rent of eighty U.S. dollar a month, tack on
another ten for utilities.  I managed to exceed this in Torreon, where I
lived in an architect designed townhouse, again, across the street from a
supermarket, for forty dollars a month, including daily maid service and
hot water.  From there I moved into a staggeringly beautiful apartment on
Wilshire Boulevard, five miles, looking, from the twelfth floor over
beautiful residential neighborhoods, from Griffith Park.  In Iowa things
got better, because for the same rent as I'd paid in Los Angeles, I got a
small bookstore, plus heat, air conditioning, light, and water.  The
bookstore paid for everything, and hardly interfered with my writing.
Stephen and Michelle both made it from Dubuque to immortality, so I find I
wasted little time, though, at the time, I thought Iowa was a good reason
to live most anywhere else.  What I like about the state is cruising the
back roads on a motorcycle; it's the perfect blend of open rolling hills
and patches of forest, and, from time to time, mesas jutting from the
hillsides, my favorite symbol of the west.  From Dubuque, I moved back
here, to a very comfortable and convenient mini-house, to this corner of
Shangri-La.  My second house in Dangriga was my favorite, and I was lucky
to spend three years there.  It looked on the soccer field, where a dozen
sleek horses grazed, out to sea, with the town pier perfectly positioned a
the left of the view framed by the east door.  There were always thirty or
forty snowy egrets around the horses, who were deep in the lush grass
around the field surface, and, as if all that wasn't enough, who should
show up but the "Glomar Explorer", whose captain, perhaps with his own yen
for immortality, moored her precisely in my doorway.  She stayed for weeks,
brilliantly lit at night, while I, the cheap-date Yankee, sat at my dining
room table, staring east by the hour, being very sure I got the most for my
forty dollar rent.  Anne would have to put a gold star in her diary for
each day she's been with Tom Cruise to exceed one week living in Harlem
Square.  Whatever she got out of that deal, she paid for with the dream
life of dream lives, as will her children.

                   I've lived in five mansions for a total of maybe three
years.  I saw no advantage to it.  I can cook more, faster, for more
people, in my galley size kitchen (with its powerful stove), than I could
in the Kanner's kitchen which was spacious and modern.  Unless you live
with people you hate, a large house is a large nuisance, and modern
American houses are architectural jokes today, but won't be very funny when
changing economic fortunes are unresponsive to, and unsympathetic with, the
greed of Tom, Dick and Harry.  As classic a sketch as any of liberalism is
stringent building codes when it comes to insulating light switches, and
allowing one, two, or three people to occupy as many cubic feet (can't
forget those cathedral ceilings) as the moneylenders will nail their hides
to the wall for.  This is an international disgrace, and the only
mitigating factor is that myriad who dwelleith such, do so in Thoreau's
quiet desperation.  Movies about greed tend to glamorize it, as they do war
and love.  The price most pay for it is fearsome and cumulative.  Again, to
Thoreau: simplify, simplify.  Sure worked for me.  Not to have my
step-ancestor wear out his welcome, or anything, but he also wrote that he
could never finish a good book because it inspired him to act on its
message.  My vanity is sufficient to assure me I won't lose many readers
along the way, but, to be sure, it might be an idea to get back to the
story.


                   "How did you start learning about things?" Niles asked
Stan.
                   "The first time, at my dad's tennis club," the boy
replied.
                   "Who were you with?" Jody asked, all ears, and, as the
youngest present, encouraged to participate by friendly nods..
                   "A friend of my dad's," the eleven year old said, "they
played a lot of tennis and I'd shag so I could get lessons."
                   "How old were you?" Jody wanted to know.
                   "It just happened a month ago," Stan said..
                   "Did his voice get like really different when he talked
to you?" Jody asked.
                   "Yes," the older boy whispered back, his own voice
suddenly different, too.
                   "The first time Wayne's voice got like that," Jody said,
"we were in his car.  I think it made it more exciting."

                   The space program had its giant step, so, using one who
is all-too immortalized as an example, we find them new in the basement rec
room, both outer door and cellar door carefully locked.  "We have six hours
until dinner, so we don't need a feeding frenzy," Niles said, and the four
boys nodded in response.
                   He went on to repeat his caution.  "We're down here to
engage in homosexual activities," he said, "and no one has to do anything
that makes him feel uncomfortable.  It's not a case of just saying No, it's
a case of saying Yes."  He then asked each boy if he understood and agreed,
and each boy nodded, smiling shyly.

                   "Then we'll call this ceremony `B'day' Uno," Niles said,
"Bare Day One, to celebrate Bing losing forty pounds."
                   "Yeah," Stan said, "and if you ever hide from us again,
there will be trouble in Pork City."
                   "Pizza on my birthday," Bing said, smiling.  This can't
make the executive staff at PepsiCo very happy, but boys will be boys.  Now
all they need do is play Follow the Leader.
                   "And guess what?" Hap said.
                   "What?" Bing responded.
                   "Today is your B'day."
                   "I almost forgot," the world's happiest eleven year old
said.

                   "You must be really nervous," Stan said.
                   "Yeah," Bing replied in a whisper, "were you?"
                   "I was really innocent," the eleven year old said, "I
didn't know what was going to happen.  It was Friday night, and I was
staying for the weekend with Jeff Larson, the one whose voice got funny at
the club, while my dad was on a business trip.  I was just kind of curious.
Before we went out to dinner, he was going to take a shower, and I said I
wanted to take one with him, you know, because somehow I wasn't interested
in seeing my father, but I was interested in seeing him.  He said we could,
but we had to talk first, so I undressed in the guest room and he did in
his room, and I went into his room and sat beside him on the bed just
wearing my tee shirt and underpants."
                   "Is that when his voice got different?" Bing asked.
                   "Yeah," Stan replied, "and he yawned a lot."

                   "Wayne did, too," Jody said, "we were stuck in traffic,
going to the water park, and he said he knew of a private park, but it was
for mature boys, and he asked me if I wanted him to tell me about it."
                   "Did you get, you know..." Stan asked.
                   "You, too?" Jody said..
                   "Yeah," Stan said, "right away, too.  It was the first
time I really felt something."
                   "Did you feel a lot?" the older boy whispered.
                   "Yeah," the nine year old said, "as soon as he said
`mature' I felt like totally curious and excited."
                   "That's how I felt when Jeff said he wanted to talk to
me before we took a shower.  I went from a little curious to a lot
excited."
                   "I told Wayne I wanted him to tell me about the park,"
Jody said.


                   "They break the rules, Jody," the thirty-year-old
teacher said, "that's why it's private.  There's a special swimming pool
for men and boys to skinny dip together, and a forest behind it.  Does that
sound freaky?"
                   "Do they have slides and stuff?" the nine year old
asked.
                   "Everyone who goes is physically fit, and what they call
normal," Jody's neighbor explained, "so the rides are much more dangerous
than a big commercial park."
                   "Like what?" the boy asked.
                   "The Tarzan swing.  You can fly fifty feet off it."
                   "Is that in the part where they don't wear bathing
suits?" Jody asked.
                   "Both parts have them," Wayne said, "plus skimmers, they
skip you across the water at thirty miles an hour."

                   "Do a lot of people go to the part where they don't wear
bathing suits?" Jody asked.
                   "Yes," the athletic man said, "but, like anything else,
it gets tiresome if you see too much, and the truth is, even pretty cute
guys look better in bathing suits than naked, so both sides are popular."
                   "Can you walk in the woods?" Jody asked.
                   "Yes," his friend said, " there are paths, and a lot of
it's old growth so you could drive a car through it, if you had to, and
there are a lot of little tepees and log cabins, because sometimes men and
boys kind of like to play house together."
                   "Is it all boys?" the child asked.
                   "No," Wayne said, "but mostly.  Sometimes daddies bring
their little girls, and sometimes a boy will bring his kid sister, but
mostly it's young men and boys from eight to thirteen."
                   "So we can go for four more years?" Jody asked.
                   "Every week, if you like it," Wayne said, "and they have
cabins in the woods to rent by the week, so if you really liked it, and
your dad said it was okay, we could spend a week sometime."
                   "He'd say it was okay," Jody said, "he's really glad we
hang out together."
                   "Single dad's are probably the world's best parents,"
Wayne said, "but still, you were lucky."
                   "Yeah," the boy said, nodding, "and with you for a
friend, about twice moreso."
                   "I'm glad you feel that way," Wayne said, "and you
certainly make a difference in my life.  That's why my voice is funny and
I'm really nervous, because if we go to Wildest World, it may put our
relationship on a new plane.  More that we'll date than hang out together."

                   "I'd like that," the boy whispered from the passenger's
seat, "getting dressed up and waiting to hear you knock."
                   "Too much of that is gay," Wayne said, "which, I expect,
would piss your dad off no end, but just a little, a few feminine touches,
in private, are undoubtedly sexy."
                   "I just want to try being girlish a little," the boy
said.
                   "That's what the play houses are for," Wayne explained.
"They have a closet with pioneer clothing, so boys can play the sweet
little wife, and the men can play lumberjacks in from the woods."
                   "It sounds like a theater," Jody observed.
                   "It is," Wayne laughed, "I never thought of it that way,
but it's a full participation theater.  The log cabins and tepees have
cracks in the walls for spying, and that's as theater as theater gets."
                   "Can two people spy at the same time?" the boy asked.
                   "Yes," his neighbor said, "one hole is above the other,
so the boy can look on his hands and knees, and the man can get over his
body, and look through the upper hole."
                   "It must feel really good to be naked and do that," Jody
said.
                   "I does," Wayne said, "and what's really exciting, so
I'm told, is when you're around the skinny-dipping pool and a man and boy
in costumes walk by, heading out into the woods.
                   "How about Indians?" Jody asked.
                   "Yes," Wayne said, "the capital W in Wild is not
supplied by the White Man.
                   Jody giggled.  "Are you still nervous talking to me
about it?" he asked, shyly.
                   "More than ever," Wayne acknowledged, "I've never done
anything with a boy, and I've never even seen you bare chested, so it's two
and two equaling about two hundred."
                   "How did you find out about the park?" Jody asked.
                   "I had five loser students that suddenly turned around
and started doing really well.  I became friendly with one, platonically,
we never talked about details, but he told me about the park, and said all
the other boys had gone there with older friends.  Then you popped up as my
very special neighbor, and even though you don't seem to be messed up, or
punked out, I couldn't get it out of my mind to at least ask you, and hope
you wouldn't think I was a fag trying to get into your pants."

                   "I don't," Jody said, "and I won't act girly except if
you think it's okay once in awhile."
                   "If you want to kiss me after a hard day topping cedar
trees, I won't complain," Wayne responded.
                   "I think I might be more responsive as an Indian
princess kissing her brave after a busy day scalping whisky dealers," the
boy said.

                   "Carlos, he's my ace of the aces," Wayne said, "told me
we can turn out in costumes if we want, instead of hanging around the
pools."
                   "I'd really like to be an Indian with you," the boy
whispered.
                   "I'd like that, too," Wayne said, "but how do you feel
about other guys looking at us?"
                   "Maybe if we look at some, first, we'll get used to the
idea," Jody said.
                   "How about if we found a big brother playing house with
his little sister, would you want to watch that?" Wayne asked.
                   "Yes," the boy said.
                   "Good," Wayne said, "because even though I know I'm
going to like being with you, and taking you to the park a lot, if you want
to go, I can't imagine not liking at least some girls."
                   "It's a real dread, at my age," the boy said, "but Jill
Ralston is to die for, and she's got braids half way down her back."
                   "Good thinking," Wayne said.  "Carlos said the camp
isn't about being swish or lispy, or simpering, except when you play house;
even, there's a lot of navy guys and Marines who go there, because they try
to strike a balance of three or four mature males for each under-age boy."
                   "And I thought it was just going to be exciting," the
boy sighed, looking very fondly at the driver of the car.
                   "I wouldn't be risking our friendship by even telling
you about it, if I thought that," Wayne said, with a smile.

                   "I think you'd have to run over me twice before I'd take
cop any attitude like that," Jody said, with his own quiet smile.
                   "Hard on the insurance," Wayne signed in mock despair,
"we'll have to think of something better.

                   "I already have," Jody said, "or at least I think I
have.
                   "What?" the driver asked.
                   "Well," the boy said, coloring, "you know how Indians
become blood brothers?"
                   "Yeah," said the older male.
                   "Well," Jody explained, haltingly, "they taught us in
health science that when a man gets excited, something comes out of him,
but I won't have it until I'm twelve or thirteen, so, I thought if you
could share yours with me, like Indians share blood from a cut, it would be
a few years before I could share mine with you, so we'd kind of be bonded."
                   "My five stars," Wayne said, changing the subject
slightly, "all found older male companions who read to them; some from
classic sea stories, some from alternative archives on the Web.  You're
father obviously reads to you.  I just wanted to note that, because it
sounds as if we're going to begin being the most special of special
friends, anyway, the most special, with the most unique bond, I've ever
heard of."

                   "So it's a good idea?" the boy asked.
                   "Savagely brilliant, I'd call it," Wayne replied.
                   "And I thought the reading was exciting," the boy said.
                   "It's more long-haul," the teacher replied, "because
however exciting it will be for us spying in our Indian costumes, there are
twenty-plus hours a day for other things, and ignorance is boring to
everyone."
                   "So they even have a library there?" the boy asked.
                   "That's how I rooted the truth from Carlos," Wayne
explained, "he started hunting the stacks like a hound dog, and we got
talking, and he mentioned the Wildest library, maybe a little by mistake,
but in the end he told me everything, and I gave him an A-plus for
dedicated research, even though he had enough spelling errors to drop his
grade to a C."
                   "Three," the young passenger sighed, "ten points off for
each one.  And you know, Mexican kids don't have to learn to spell, at all.
If you can say a word in Spanish, you can spell it.  Syllable perfect.
It's a gyp."
                   "It teaches us to be adroit and complex," Wayne said,
"which is why we invented the chronometer and steam engine, et al, while
they were using science to determine how many beads of lead shot made the
perfect whip, w-h-i-p."
                   "But if you miss four words, you get a D," the boy said.
                   "And the next class is algebra," Wayne said, to the boys
half laugh.
                   "Will it really be funny, someday?" he asked.

                   "No," Wayne assured the child, "but it will feel so good
when it stops, you won't care if there's no lighter side."
                   "Like getting away from my mom?" the boy asked.
                   "All the horrors of childhood," Wayne said, "from the
bogeyman under your bed, to half of boy and girl issues, pretty much
disappear when you get in your teens, and begin knowing it all."
                   "Well," Jody said, "if a teen only knows a little, it is
all he knows."
                   "Just keep reading," his friend advised.

                   They spent some minutes basking.  The sign for the
commercial park rose from the traffic, big and green.  "Last chance for
good clean fun," Wayne said.
                   "Warrior Chief have heap big date with Nervous Worrier,"
the boy chirped softly, "public not invited."
                   "Then on to the wilderness," the young man said, staying
in his lane.

                   "Do you want to talk more?" Wayne quizzed his young
passenger as they passed the exit.
                   "I want to know what they call stuff," the boy answered.
"You hear all kinds of words at school, but the nice kids don't use them
very much."
                   "They use gentle-class language, Carlos said," the man
replied, "that's why is mostly white people that go there.  No eff word,
d-word, c-word, except the street word for semen, do you know what that
is?"
                   "C-u-m," the boy said, blushing, "I was going to try to
use it in an essay, see if I could get a rise out of my English teacher,
but I decided it might not be a good idea."
                   "Do you like your teacher?" Wayne asked.  "I don't
remember you saying much about him, before."
                   "Kind of, I guess," the boy replied, still colored.
                   "Then write it," Wayne suggested.  "Even when we become
special brothers, we're not married.  Anytime you really like somebody,
assuming you don't want to belong to the man-of-the week club, just tell me
and I'll do anything I can to arrange some kind of a date."
                   "Maybe I could write him a letter," Jody mused.
                   "That would be perfect," Wayne agreed, "you could tell
him you want to write an essay, or a story, with c-u-m in it, and ask him
if you could talk to him about it sometime when he has the afternoon free."
                   "Would you be nervous if I had a date with him?" Jody
asked.
                   "I guess that's as good a word as any," Wayne laughed,
"what I'd be, most of all, would be glad to have you back."
                   "Would you want me to tell you what happened while I was
with him?" the child queried.
                   "As far as I'm concerned," the young man said, "that
would mean I could share it, and you could relive it, but we'll have to
wait `till the time comes, then you can tell me or keep it private."
                   "Can I tell him about what happens at the camp?" was
Jody's next question.
                   "The only rule that makes sense to me," Wayne responded,
"is to tell the truth.  If he asks, and my guess is he will, tell him.
He'll be excited enough to know we were talking about him without your
having to exaggerate anything that happens.  But some people equate secrecy
with masculinity, or something, so take it one step and a time.  He'll
probably quiz you to find out how experienced you are, and you can play it
be ear from there."

                   "You don't think he'd tell the principal, or anything
weird, do you?" Jody asked.
                   "That's the chance you take," Wayne responded, "and
that's where your intelligence kicks in.  How good a judge of character are
you?  How close to the edge can you play?  What kind of risks are you
willing to take, for what kind of reward?  Pretty much the lessons of life;
daring slightly, being a little bold; not being different from the pack,
for its own sake, but marching to a different tempo because you're smarter,
study harder, and read more.  And the secondary upside is that if anything
does go wrong, and you have a good record, in general, you'll get off the
hook.  `Boys will be boys' covers a lot of ground, for basically good
boys."

                   "So you mean I won't end up in a psycho ward with a lot
of overly attentive orderlies?" the boy sighed, dramatically.
                   "Tough to have your life over before you reach
double-digits," Wayne responded.
                   "Why, I was rather looking forward to having my old life
over," the boy said.
                   "Once wasn't enough?" Wayne teased, and the boy giggled
at his nonsense.  Adroit was the word for the idiotic language, but if it
enabled, who cared how it dodged and weaved?
                   "With my mother, once was more than enough," Jody said.
                   "Bad moms are god's truest gift," Wayne said, "you don't
owe them anything, which can be a real family saver when they get old and
sick, and, if you ever accomplish anything, you don't have to share the
credit.  You don't care when they die.  You owe them nothing, and, if
you're really lucky, you'll have one who gives you a prison cut every ten
days, so the girls won't like you, unless prison cuts happen to be in of a
particular season, and that will leave you free to hang out in the library,
and, bucko, have the last laugh of all last laughs."

                   "Better than hanging out with you?" the boy chirped.  "I
rather think not."
                   "The ultimate laugh is living well," Wayne said, "others
call it the best revenge.  In any event, it's verification of yourself and
frustration for those who tried to stomp you along the way, assuming, of
course, they were wrong in trying to do so, which is where intelligence
comes in, just as it does when stalking your teacher."
                   "Are all the people at the park fantastically smart?"
Jody asked.
                   "Do you think you'll like hanging out with cute, naked
boys when you're my age?" Wayne countered.
                   "Yes," the boy said.
                   "Then I think it's safe to answer your question with a
Yes.  And I can embellish that by observing that I feel pretty dumb for not
finding out about it before I reached my thirties."
                   "About the park?"
                   "About boys," Wayne said, "and me, a teacher, go figure,
eh?  But they were just kids, mostly routine, a fair number of assholes of
one stripe or another, and a few dozen extra ones, but they only shine
because of academics.  Then someone sticks about a four gage shotgun in my
belly, Carlos and you, and pulls both triggers.  Blam, my guts are in an
uproar, and, at the same time, it's the best time I've ever had in my life.
It's like being twelve, but being directed; knowing, not just dreaming or
imagining."
                   "For me it's like being sixteen," Jody said, "except I
have more brains."
                   "They do deteriorate," Wayne acknowledged, "I mean, how
smart is it to give up on having your mother do all the walking and work
while you chill and daydream?"
                   "So `Born Free' means free of brains?" the pixie boy
asked.
                   "It really means free to face the challenge of somehow
correcting nature's most grievous imbalance; making life fit to be born
into, a challenge, since no sooner do you leave the womb than you're denied
the breast, which is a one-two punch in the getting-a-good-start
department."
                   "So high levels of compensation are in order," the boy
noted.
                   "High levels of performance are needed," Wayne said,
"and all the misfortunes you wish to amend are just a good rationalization
for going a little overboard when it comes to trophesizing yourself.  If a
history of downers doesn't add to the mechanics, which are byproducts of
intelligence, energy, luck, and opportunity, it severely adds, I'm pretty
sure we're going to find out, to your, or our, satisfaction with the
reward."

                   "That's complicated," Jody said.
                   "You're nine," Wayne laughed, "so I thought I'd try it
on you before you turned teen."
                   "How long does it take to get smart again?" Jody asked.
                   "Twenty years," Wayne replied, "from ten to thirty, at
least in my case.  And even that wasn't like a giant brainstorm where I
said to myself, `Aha, self, today you're going to hunt down a cute
nine-year-old boy to hang out with,' it was more There you were, helping me
move in, and Carlos, suddenly coming to life, and your dad being
cooperative, and your mom being gone, and, most of all, your being smart,
and nice, and cute enough to pass, and having something special about you,
because there are a lot of bright, cute nine year olds in the world, and
none of them have anything to do with you, so, here I am, finally smart
again."

                   The boy smiled happily.  Me?  I'm pretty happy, too.
Married, unless I'm mistaken.  Samantha has suddenly decided to become
quite passionate in the making-out department, so I asked her if she was my
wife, and she nodded enthusiastically, then I asked her if I was her
husband, and she nodded again, and I asked if she was a happy wife, and she
nodded.  Anne and I sat with some womanizing ex-service chaplain, minister
of their horrible church, and he asked us if we knew how, I kid you not,
how the plumbing worked, perhaps twenty times.  (Anne was twenty-six, I,
twenty-nine.)  Additionally, we had as long a courtship as any four or five
other couples, combined, because we both had the summer off and were able
to spend all day, every day together, most of the time.  None of it made
any difference, when Mary Blake spoke, the girl responded.  I like Samantha
and my way better.  She nodded instantly and happily, and it is my guess
that somehow, some way, given enough time, we'll figure out how the
plumbing works.  Since the big local hit song has a lyric that goes: "My
neck / my back / lick my pussy and lick my crack," and they play the
wretched thing wide open at school jump-ups, she may already know a thing
or two.  In any event, she is becoming extremely responsive and at the
border of becoming aggressive, which may be the death of me as a writer
because practicing what I preach is one thing for the moral and upright,
but something quite different for the hedonistic and depraved.  Add being
involuntarily unpartnered for nearly a quarter of a freaking century, and
it may be bye-bye keyboard.

                   I go to great pains to keep my essays neat and small,
though life often seems to want it otherwise, what with variations on the
nuptial theme, the rapidly developing sexuality of a drop-dead fifteen year
old, and related items and issues.  Since I've just mentioned practicing
what I preach, what a marvelous time to take my own advice.


                   "What do creeps do?" Jody asked Wayne.
                   "They inveigle," Wayne said, "if I was a creep, I'd
slide my hand over and start touching your left leg, without saying
anything to you; if I was sitting beside you in the movie theater, I'd
press my knee against yours, and touch your leg and try to fondle you.  I
might lure you somewhere with money or a gift, or somehow lure you into
trusting me, then do things you didn't want.  That kind of stuff, usually
involving creeping fingers and the satiny skin of a juvenile's inner
thighs."
                   "Is that what the dictionary says?" the boy asked.
                   "I doubt it," Wayne laughed, "but then, my medical book
says premature ejaculation is caused by fear of pregnancy or venereal
disease, which may be true, but leaves out the happy fact that it's also
caused by a partner being intensely exciting, usually because you are in
love with that partner."

                   "What's that like?  Will that happen with us?" Jody
wanted to know.
                   "Good question," Wayne sighed, "we'll know when we reach
the park.  With a male lover, it would mean I ejaculated while I was still
wearing my clothes, so you couldn't share it.  With a female partner, it
means you ejaculate before you've penetrated her fully and given her time
to respond fully to you."
                   "I hope it doesn't happen," Jody said.
                   "No promises, because of the love thing," Wayne said.
His voice got husky and he whispered: "Jody, how do you feel about watching
it happen? You know, seeing my sperm."
                   "I really want to," the boy whispered back.
                   "Good," the man said, "because I think that may be the
secret to being a good lover; to really want to see what happens with your
partner, half lust, half curiosity.  I really want you to watch me cum, so
I'll try to make it so we can share the experience, as the say on the
coast."
                   "Does really trying make it easier?" the child asked.
                   "It definitely helps trying to picture you and I,
warrior and tenderfoot, peering into a tepee at what's happening inside
while you ask me questions in a whisper and I fondle your bare chest and
thrust gently between your tightly clamped nine-year-old thighs."
                   "Maybe if I had a seven year old underneath me, looking
in through the bottom slit in the canvas, I'd know what you were talking
about," the cutie observed.
                   "A nine year old can go inside a younger boy without
hurting him at all," Wayne said, trying to get even with the tease riding
shotgun.

                   "If it happened while you were driving, would we have an
accident?" Jody asked.
                   "We're stuck in traffic," Wayne said.
                   "The way I feel, if we were moving at all, it would be
dangerous," the little boy responded.
                   "That probably means you will be an absolutely
outstanding, A-plus, gold star lover," Wayne said, "giving us a great deal
to live for."
                   "So when we pass the accident or whatever is holding us
up, and get on the open road, and get up to say, seventy, I shouldn't start
asking what it would feel like if a seven year old wanted me to experiment
with him for a long time?"
                   "You just said a mouthful," Wayne replied.
                   "And if the seven year old thought you were a living
doll, and was experienced, and wanted to come into our tepee and show me
what he does with his gym teacher, it would be better if I kept it to
myself?"
                   "Just as it would be if instead of seven, the boy was
eleven, and chose you to teach him," Wayne replied.
                   "If I had to vote now," the boy said, "I'd say that no
state should ever give me a license to operate anything."
                   "The disturbing thing is," Wayne said, "that you're
going to get better as you get older.  Both your wits and your body will
develop, and that's inconceivable."
                   "If I'm half as smart as you at twice your age, and if
I'm half as cute when I'm a teenybopper, I'll be happy," the younger half
of the mutual admiration society said.
                   The traffic finally did open.  "Guess there's some kid
cuter than I am; hope he's okay," the particularly clever child remarked as
they passed the obstructing, minor wreck.  Wayne looked down at the glowing
child.  "Inconceivable."  It was the only word that fit, non-word that it
was, because, first off, it meant the boy couldn't exist, if he hadn't been
conceived, and second, he couldn't exist because comprehending him was
impossible.  Oops.  Unborn?  Unfathomable?  Weren't those the principal
characteristics of a god?  He'd better concentrate on his driving.

                   They arrived safely, and, how shall we say this?
Intact.  Parked.  Were cleared through the polygraph station without having
to visit the clinic.  Spent some minutes studying a diorama of Wildest
World; decided they did like the Indian theme for their debut, and we're
fitted with costumes, men and boys using separate fitting rooms as the
management's idea of a subtle prank.  [People who run salacious enterprises
are often ludicrously prudish.  I used to go to the bathhouse a block
southwest of Hollywood and Vine.  Once, while I was in the steam room, I
spilled my bottle of amyl nitrate on my towel.  When I checked out, the
moron at the desk started yelling that I was eighty-sixed from the club; at
the same time, he was blackballing another kid for masturbating in the
shower.  The place was a sex house, nothing but, and clearly labeled so at
the check-in window.  What kind of mind does an animal like that have?  As
far as I could tell, the place needed all the business it could get, except
for a few hours on Saturday night.  I guess it's the need to bully; the
desk master was probably and ex-master sergeant.  Luckily for myself and my
showering friend, there were five more bathhouses in greater L.A., and
that, too, is worth commenting on in the name of perspective.  Only five,
for eighteen million people, and those five very often way under half
filled.  I used to frequent the one in (or near) Burbank, and though I was
in the top one percent of body types, I never got asked to be in any kind
of film, or, for that matter to a private party, or to have any contact
with children or look at kiddie porn; buy drugs, use cuffs, or anything.
Perhaps the oddest thing about these various clubs was that they were an
ideal place to catch a little sleep, at twelve dollars for eight hours, and
no one ever seemed to use them as a dirt cheap alternative to a hotel.  The
gay bar scene was dramatically more active, but not my thing, and the perv
papers, with nine-seven-six numbers were an inch thick.  More surprising
yet, and I've mentioned all of this elsewhere, was the bathhouse in
Tijuana.  Even though it was, a, highly, but not exclusively gay, b, open
to males of any age, c, very convenient, and, d, less than an hour by
trolley from the naval facilities in San Diego, during thirty or forty
visits, I met virtually no Anglos there, and never a man with a boy.  I
should note for those saying, aha, he's an addict, after all, that TJ was
half way between L.A. and San Philippe (390 miles) and so a perfect place
to break a motorcycle journey.  I think it cost two dollars and the beers
were about fifty cents.  I tipped at five times the price.  Never scored,
that I recall, and the one cute boy that did turn up was scared to do
anything where anyone might see, so we ended up as ships in the night.  One
funny aspect of Banos Vapor was trying to get out of my riding skins in the
tiny, built for Mexicans, changing rooms.  For you bikers, I had a Magna
V-45 (vanity plate: BIKEMAD) and put 28,000 miles on it my first year in
SoCal.  As I recall, it was approximately one-thousand times as nice a ride
as a Harley.  I am in no way objective on the subject.  In my view, the
Honda saved my life.  We had to wear bell-bottom pants for the bus company.
I was up at Griffith Park, for some reason in my uniform pants.  I parked
at one of the overlooks, on a slight mound beside the rode.  As usual, I
put the kickstand down as the bike came to a stop, and went to swing out of
the saddle.  The bell-bottoms caught on something, throwing me completely
off balance, and the bike crashed down on the kickstand.  If it had sheared
off, the bike would have fallen off the mound, right down on top of me.
Looking at the stand, and the tongue of metal it was bolted to, it was hard
to believe that an assembly designed for nominal loads held up under the
sever impact.  Rice burner, my ass.  I bought it in like-new condition from
Hollywood Honda for fifteen hundred dollars.  The only problem I ever had
with it was the engine cutting out in a severe cross wind from the right.
I cracked the oil pan three times on off road excursions, but that's
another book.  Anyway, my research leads me to believe that the gay scene
on the coast is a fraction of what it's played up to be.  I drove Hollywood
Boulevard, my first bus assignment, for months, until past midnight, and,
though I was looking, never saw any gay cruising, at all.  In fact, in over
three years on Wilshire Boulevard, I never had any kind of `meaningful
relationship' with anyone, male or female, which was great, because it
meant I could save money faster to get out sooner.  To me Los Angeles was
epitomized by the weird old showboat who'd thrash around off the end of
Santa Monica Pier, splashing up a storm, and going nowhere (hate to
immortalize him).  As mentioned elsewhere, the place is One stupid bumper
sticker at a time (which is a clever way of immortalizing the whole
freaking county).]

                   Half an hour after arriving, Wayne and Jody said a
nervous "hi" to each other in the lounge of the resort.  They gravitated to
a large mirror, the mature male standing behind the child with his hands on
the boy's shoulders.  "What do you think?" Wayne asked.
                   "I guess we're not chopped liver," Jody said, his eyes
glued to the pec and ab-free chest of the warrior behind him.
                   "But I just know you're going to be an Indian giver,"
Wayne responded, "and want that killer young body back after you've given
it to me."
                   "I need something to go around my heart so it won't dry
out," the boy observed with a giggle.
                   "I suppose your blood does have to go somewhere," the
thirty year old acknowledged with a sigh, "plus it will come in handy for
hunting pioneers."

                   The two left the lodge, emerging on a deck overlooking
the large pool.  "Schameel schamizal, bodyshop incorporated," Jody murmured
at they gazed down over the railing at the swimmers and loungers.
                   "And to think, they're all healthy," Wayne said.
                   "Awesome," the boy responded.  Pretty much so.  Wildest
World was not oriented toward body building or macho buff, and there were
no hunks, per se, but rather a large contingent of young sailors and
soldiers, all slim and athletic without the overtones of narcissistic
fetish.  As Wayne said, all healthy.  "Aren't older guys meant to have, you
know, like some hair down there?" Jody asked.

                   Well, pretty healthy.  Club policy did suggest a boyish
look for the adults, and such was the respect for management, compliance
was universal.  There were perhaps a hundred guests in all, with a heavy
preponderance of males in their late teens and early twenties.  "I'm glad
it's not all white," Jody said, noting the obvious mix of other races, his
eyes following a six-four variant of Benjamin Bratt.

                   While the club approach was singularly low key, a little
frivolity did intrude.  The newcomers noted a small sign on the railing and
moved over so they could read it.  "No drooling," was the message.  "That's
like posting a sign in the boiler room of a steam ship that reads: `No
Sweating'," the bookish nine year old said, checking his lower lip with a
finger.
                   "Carlos told me a lot of the sailors are officers are
officers on ships that allow cabin boys," Wayne said, "so if you ever have
a yen to take a cruise, this would be a good place to start."
                   "I'll be some of the men here touched him," Jody
whispered, cuddling next to the tall athletic male on his right.  Wayne
responded by guiding the nine year old in front of him, and pressing the
child gently against the railing.  Other men were molesting children
discreetly, mostly playing wrestling games in the pool, but several couples
were beginning tentative foreplay on the lounge chairs.  At becoming
aroused, the mature males led the young boys past a sign reading "Wilder
Yet" and down a path leading into the heavy stand of timber a hundred feet
beyond the swimming and diving pool.  A couple left every minute or so, and
an equal number returned, mostly as nudists, but some in pioneer or Indian
costumes.  While couples predominated, from time to time two or three of
the young men would escort a single boy off to where things presumably got
wilder, and a girl who looked about ten, and most pleased and content, led
a group of five, the eldest of whom was obviously her brother.

                   "Do you think you'd like watching them?" Wayne whispered
to the boy in his arms.
                   "Yes," Jody said, "I'm glad they have girls, otherwise
the picture would be in monochrome."
                   "Good thinking," Wayne said, giving him a squeeze.
"There's enough arbitrary thinking when it comes to class differences
without throwing in gender."
                   "Can a girl as small as she is be with older guys?" Jody
asked.
                   "I saw her brother take a tube of something with him,"
Wayne responded, "that's probably a lubricating gel so she'll be
comfortable if they have her out there for a long time."
                   "He looked really big," the boy said.
                   "I imagine he's bigger now," Wayne responded, "but she's
mature enough to accept a full grown male unless he's much bigger than
normal."
                   "I guess she can have a baby when she's not a whole lot
bigger than she is now," Jody mused, "but it does seem kind of impossible,
just looking at them together."
                   "The girl on the diving board is even younger," Wayne
said.
                   "Could she be with an adult?" Jody asked.
                   "If he was gentle," the man said, "most girls are
physically ready to be with a normal-size adult when they're seven or eight
years old."
                   "Does that go for the psychology part, too?" Jody said.
                   "No," Wayne replied, "and therein lies many a rub, or
non-rub, as the case may be.  Some girls are totally ready for extensive
sex play, but not having an adult inside them, when they are three, others
aren't half-ready when they're thirty."
                   "But a thirty year old girl would never even be
half-ready for a boy like me, right?" Jody asked.
                   "To repeat," Wayne laughed, "'many a rub'."
                   "Does anybody understand it?" Jody said.
                   "Not a chance," his friend said, "where would the fun be
in that?"
                   "How about cats and dogs?" the child asked.
                   "That's all they understand," Wayne replied, "they'll
half starve over a female in heat, or rip each other up, or both."
                   "So ignorance is bliss," Jody remarked.
                   "That's one way to look at it," Wayne agreed.

                   "Hi," a voice came from behind them, "mind if we voyeur
together for awhile?"  Instinctively, Wayne released the boy, and Jody
edged free as they turned.  The speaker was also costumed in a warrior's
vest and loin cloth, as was the tall, coltish twelve year old male with
him.
                   "We decided to stop awhile in paradise before we venture
on to nirvana," Wayne said, after receiving an alert nod from Jody, "and
you're welcome to join us."
                   "I met you at a convention a couple of years ago," the
man said.  "Sure," Wayne replied, "we talked about squirrel hunting with
black powder.  You're Jerry Hammersmith."
                   "Cool to see you here," Jerry said, introducing Rayray
Kendall as "the most nervous scout that doesn't wear a dress."
                   "We had our moments on the drive over, too," Wayne said
as they shook hands and gripped shoulders.  "Cool to see you here, too," he
whispered.
                   "Is it your first time?" Jody asked Rayray.
                   "Yes," the sensationally blond student warrior replied.
                   "Mine, too," Jody whispered as the men gently pinioned
the boys side by side against the teak railing.
                   "Have you talked about stuff a lot?" Rayray asked.
                   "We had to kinda stop a few times," Jody said, "but we
talked about some things.  How about you?"
                   "Quite a bit, too," the boy said "The reason I'm here is
that guys keep looking at me when I'm at the mall or in a restaurant, and
it made me nervous, because sometimes I kind of liked it and it made be
feel all different, so I told Mr. Hammersmith about it after scouts, and we
had a long talk, and he told me he knew about a place where boys could get,
you know, mature, without being like totally embarrassed about things."
                   "Welcome to the club," Jody said, and they both giggled,
looking nervously at each other.
                   "I always want to look at other boys in gym," Rayray
said, "but I'd get caught because the other boys are always looking at me."
                   "I guess I'm too young to notice," Jody responded,
"because it's only older boys and men that seem interesting."
                   "They are the most interesting," the eleven year old
agreed, "and a couple of years ago, I felt the same way.  Now I'm getting
interested in younger kids because Mr. Hammersmith says they make excellent
partners, even if you can't do everything with them that you can do with an
older boy or a man."
                   "How about the girl climbing up on the low board?" Jody
asked, "do you think she's cute?"
                   "Way so, way so," the older boy replied.

                   I'm reminded here of a story a woman told on a nature
documentary.  She'd been hiking and two mountain lions had driven her into
a tree.  She fended them off with a branch for a long time, but they were
getting ever closer.  Suddenly a deer crossed in the valley below, the cats
saw it, and were off like a shot.  As Becky Childs climbed up on the board,
the two pubescent braves quickly begged to be excused and were off down the
labyrinth of stairs leading to the pool."
                   "Remember how we talked about using retrievers when we
used to hunt?" Wayne laughed.
                   "They're a pair, aren't they?" Jerry agreed as the men
watched their little Indians approach the edge of the pool where the naked
mermaid was about to emerge.

                   Decorum.  I don't think I've used that word yet, and
this would be a great place.  Because they were new, Jody and Rayray were
allowed swift passage along the side of the pool, reaching, grinning, the
strategic zone by default.  As they neared the ladder they became aware of
their impetuousness; I mean, what if everybody charged the little
red-headed doll?  But it was too late.  Her bright eyes locked on to the
nine and eleven year olds in their toothy vests and loincloths, and
wouldn't let go.  In the friendliest manner imaginable, she gave a beaming
all-clear to any other interested parties, and, naked, climbed the ladder
and beckoned the males with her glowing eyes.  So decorum was restored,
poolside.

                   Leadership.  How, specifically, does a nine year old go
about dominating a boy two years his senior, while not wanting to one up
him in any way, because he's a pea in a pod.  Jody did it by finding an
unused towel and handing it to Rayray who wrapped the girl in it.  When
you're nine, you lead by being a very secure follower; running errands,
doing chores, and being interested, prompt, responsive, dependable, and
diligent, just like Mr. Alger says.  If you're cheerful, you get the girl,
and, if you're funny, you get the girl, the gold watch, and everything, in
the words of John. D. MacDonald.  But Jody was too young for that, and he
knew it; much better to watch and learn, and hang out loads and loads with
Wayne, while earning Brownie points to the sky.  I'm kind of the same.
Write fabulous stories at a prodigious rate, entertain rather than doing
the laundry, and suddenly I've done the most, so I've earned the most, and
you'd be moronic to trust your future to anyone who's done less.  In any
event, Jody didn't try to be funny.

                   "I'm Sandra Kelly," the girl said, once wrapped in white
terrycloth which gave her an impish sexiness that outdid even her slim,
athletic dart of a body.  The boys introduced each other and waved toward
the porch where Wayne and Jerry waved back.
                   "Who are you here with?" Rayray asked.
                   "It's kind of a secret," the little beauty said as the
found a vacant lawn chair and sat, after Sandra impatiently beckoned Jody,
side by side.
                   "What?" Rayray asked.
                   "Would you like Wayne and Jerry to join us, or we could
go up and join them?" the little errand boy asked
                   "That would be great," Sandra said.
                   "Sorry," Rayray said, "you know, in school, the first
thing you say when someone says they have a secret is What?"
                   Jody pretty well knew he'd never been so happy in his
life.  Rayray's gracious response to his check was about like eating three
hot apple pies with premium American cheese in, say, ten seconds.  Sandra
smiled happily, too, and said, "Guess what, I go to school, too."

                   "Do you want to tell?" Rayray then asked, because
interest is as high as grace on any boy's list..
                   "Wait till the awesome chieftains join us, okay?" the
girl said.
                   "That will make us happy, wherever the hunting ground,"
Rayray said, hoping the girl got it.
                   "Many moons are all I can promise, when it comes to the
spirit light, and the heart glad," the girl said.
                   "How many?" Rayray asked.
                   "How would ninety times twelve suit you?" the girl
replied.
                   "I should live so long," the eleven year old replied.
                   "Partly, it's a matter of being very highly motivated,"
Sandra said.  "In fact, that's why I'm here.  Too, as it turns out,
motivated."

                   The children stood as the adults approached, and they
shifted their location to a round table with an umbrella as introductions
were made.

                   "They were talking about longevity and motivation," Jody
said when all were seated and had ordered from the waiter.  Rayray
responded with a look that said Wait, just wait until I get you alone, and
they resumed the conversation.

                   "Okay, too motivated," Rayray said, doing his part.
                   "My mom, the industrial lead chemist, found out, and
knew about this global free spot," Sandra said, "and packed me off for six
weeks all by my lonesome."
                   "She didn't even leave you a bathing suit," Rayray
noted.
                   "Bathing suits were the problem," the girl replied,
"anytime I wore one it was like cloaking myself with human eyeballs, mostly
male, but not all.  I kind of liked it, and was kind of scared at the same
time."
                   "Rayray knows what you mean," Jody said.
                   "You will, too," the girl said, kindly.  It was
impossible not to patronize a second fiddle, but it was possible to do in
nicely.
                   "So," the girl continued, "that got me interested, and I
bought several suits so I could follow my mom's example and experiment with
variations, instead of jumping to conclusions.  The more conservative the
suit, the more eyes.  That didn't really mean anything, except that the
subject was way mysterious.  Then I was a bridesmaid, a few months ago, and
it was eyes even from the pulpit.  `Something's going on here,' I said to
myself, but, highly motivated though I was, it was nothing but blank walls.
Then along came Mastik and Molly.  They seemed to have answers to questions
I didn't know existed, and they weren't distracted by my bathing suit or
bridal gown.  Observation and experimentation are the keystones of
research, and I was feeding my turtles Fruit Loops when I was three, to see
if they'd change color.  That was a dead end, but then again, how motivated
can a little kid be?  This time, nothing was going to stand in my way.  I
made the mental leap from the eyes to Mastik and Molly, and was at the
verge of enlightenment, or at least the first step thereto, when the true
scientist in the family opened my bedroom door and told the dogs to take a
hike."

                   What?  Had they died and gone to pixie heaven?  Did she
have a guild card as an apprentice goddess?

                   "That was three days ago," whatever-she-was continued,
"and out came the cell phone, and she called somebody who knew somebody,
and, since they're all stable, meticulous people, the proper phone number
was forthcoming faster than alcohol dissolves in water, and we had a long
talk of a non-prejudicial or judgmental nature, and here I am, a squaw
fresh from the swimming hole in the clutches of three braves, with a most
promising understudy."

                   "In short," Rayray said, "your life has not gone to the
dogs."
                   "I'm going to be a scientist, too," the girl said, "so I
can't say until the research is complete, but my theory is that you're
right."
                   "What did your mom talk to you about?" Rayray asked.
                   "She said there was something about me that attracted
males, that she saw it, even though she was my mother, that it was
something hard to explain or describe, because I wasn't all that ripping
pretty in a conventional sense, but that proof was pretty much in the
pudding, said desert being tapioca, which, as everyone knows, is made up of
thousands of minnow eyes, but eyes nonetheless; that if my were with us, he
would see it, and she would accept it and let him teach me; that barring
that, since he's on a long-term contract in Chile, the best thing was to
come to grips with it, rather than wandering around wondering what the
freak was going on, and the best way to come to grips with it would be to
attend a Free Spirit resort, where the rules made sense and a lively,
athletic girl, her words, could find her own way, if a way was to be found,
in the first place."

                   "Did she talk about the physical part?" Rayray wanted to
know, Jody nodding and hanging on every word, but keeping a zipper on it,
good kid that he was.

                   "She said I might be stiff and sore," the delightful
creature in her terrycloth wrap said, "because males weren't all eyes, but
it would be no worse than a minor sports' injury.  Also, that I was
developed enough to be with an adult, and that prostitutes sometimes
serviced many males in a single night, so that I didn't have to worry if I
ended up with a small group, that I should brush my teeth and wash behind
my ears, which is probably not what you meant by `physical stuff'."
                   "Can I see your teeth?" Jody asked, glad for a respite
in a conversation he was equally glad was for older ears than his,
washed-behind, or not.  Sandra smiled at him in best schoolgirl fashion.
"Pretty good," the boy said, "but maybe we could play dentist sometime,
just to be sure."
                   "I'd rather you played bodyguard or big brother," the
twinkling beauty replied, "and stayed very close to me at all, and I do
mean all times."  Jody nodded and glowed with pleasure, hardly noting a
six-six male passing under the Wilder Yet sign, an eight-year-old moppet,
probably male, pulling him along the trail.
                   "Mom said there was no way I could get pregnant," the
seven year old went on, "which I was already pretty sure of, and that the
resort screened all members and visitors, so I wouldn't have to worry about
disease or violence, that I should try to find one partner, or a small
group, rather than going from stranger to stranger; that if I did, they'd
be welcome to come visit us -- we have a jumbo house -- and I could
visit them if they wanted; that I should write my dad about everything, and
remind him I'm a growing girl and miss him very much, and that if I'm
mostly disciplined, but a little wild in the right place, at the right
time, with the right people, that I might have a pretty interesting
childhood being my own doll instead of buying them."
                   "Bodyguard Ken," Jody said, "I think I like it."
                   "I'd prefer Brother Ken," the girl smiled, "but no one's
invited without you, because you're entirely the last person I'd ever want
to have secrets from, so I guess we'll make out."

                   The two adults and three children finished their
lemonade and scones, nervously eyeing the gold leaf on varnished mahogany
sign a hundred feet away, and the luxuriant stand of hardwood flicking and
rustling in the breeze behind it.  Club policy, and we've seen this before,
was for the youngest partner, or youngest in a party, to lead or lag.
"What comes after one tree, two tree?" She asked Jody.
                   "Tree tree," the boy said.
                   "No so fast," the girl giggled, "think of all this
lemonade.  Think off all the water I must have swallowed fooling around in
the pool.  Think of the fact I've been in the eyeball soup, better know as
said pool, for some hours now.  Then, think of all the privacy all those
trees must offer.  Add to this my willingness to color a little out of the
lines, vis a vee, Mastik and Molly, and, not to be fresh or anything, guess
again."

                   She knew how to work a crowd.  The males stared at each
other, and at their mutual inamorata.  In the long history of the world and
the human race, nature has undoubtedly called many, but this time the
mother screamed, deafening them and seeming to create a hybrid zombie class
on the spot.  They rose and followed robotically, fifty feet toward the
path, fifty-five, sixty, and, in far more time than it takes to tell, they
entered the hundred-acre wood.  Sandra sniffed carefully.  "If a lot of
people did it, there'd be a bad smell," she said, "and I'd go back to the
lodge."  It wasn't that kind of a place; the woods smelled fine, so the
pixie led on and the males followed, aware that yielding to a trancelike or
catatonic state would have regrettable consequences.
                   "Four Indians and a white girl in a shawl," Sandra said,
as they walked along, "I'll bet this scene's been played out a time or
two."  The males murmured in assent.  "I wonder what it would have been
like," she mused, "you know, one morning you're spinning linsey-woolsey,
and that night the warrior class is playing stallion with filly until the
cock crows the next morning."

                   "If the girls were nice," Jody said, "they were probably
really gentle, and the girls would have so much in their new life, they'd
have an easier time forgetting the old."  She didn't want to wait too long,
so she picked a tree.
                   "This is something we can do together," she said to
Jody, and led him away from the others and out of sight, dropping her towel
from her shoulders.  She was nice and dry by this time, and the boy was
better able to take in her lithe but slightly girlishly padded beauty.  He
shrugged out of his vest.  "Can I take that part off?" she asked, looking
at his loincloth.  "I'm just a kid," he whispered, nodding.  It didn't seem
to matter to Sandra, she knelt in front of him and stripped down the
costume.
                   The children stood behind the tree, forehead to
forehead, arms at their sides, staring down at themselves.  As far as they
could see, they looked perfect for each other.  "You will stay with me,
won't you?" she asked.
                   "Yes," the boy whispered.  "Wayne talked to me a lot
because we got stuck in traffic, so I don't think you have anything to
worry about, like your mom said."

                   "Close your eyes," the girl whispered.  Jody did and
felt her heat as she neared within and inch, then her naked belly touched
his.  "I'm trying to do it really slowly so it lasts, but it's hard for a
girl," she said, and the nine year old felt her hike her waist against his
right thigh, then the wet, prickly heat of what she was doing.  By
experience, I know eleven year olds can urinate with a hard erection, so I
assume a nine year old can.  Anyway, Jody did.
                   "Is it sexy?" she asked.
                   "Way," he whispered back.
                   "Do you want to watch it happen with Rayray?" she asked.
                   "Yes," he said.
                   "I don't feel like a virgin, doing this," Sandra said,
"so you're my first lover."
                   "You're mine, too," the boy replied.

                   For a minute they said nothing, just enjoyed being free
children and meeting the substantial challenge of making it last as long as
possible.  "That was unimaginable," Sandra whispered.
                   "I'll have to admit I'm glad you're not a bitch," the
boy said, adding a gentle woof-woof so the girl wouldn't take it the wrong
way.  This time she tinkled, verbally, in response.  They sort of shook and
wiped themselves, using some leaves from the forest floor, then a corner of
the beach towel.
                   "Are you going to stay naked?" the girl asked.
                   "I think Wayne wants to molest me while I'm wearing it,"
Jody said, slipping back into the thong and vest.  "How about you?" he
asked.
                   "I'm pretty ready for what's going to happen," the girl
said, "so maybe you could take the towel and lay it down on some moss, you
know, with where my backside is raised up a little, like a mound, because
in books it says that boys like it when girls use a pillow."

                   It was a tough assignment, but someone had to do it.
"Maybe this is why they encourage show-and-tell in school," the boy mused
as the girl shook out the towel and handed it to him.  "I'll bet we're old
enough to at least kiss by tomorrow," she whispered, squeezing both his
elbows with both her hands.  They nuzzled affectionately, and, as though
parting for the front of a forlorn campaign, he left her side to do her
bidding and his duty, the unquenchable curiosity of the nascent writer
ameliorating conflicts typical to such scenes.

                   "Spying is complicated for the CIA, too," Wayne said as
Jody rejoined the three warriors in waiting.
                   "I'll be they don't have Plan Bs as good as ours,
though," the boy replied with a smile.  The four joined in the search for a
suitable bower, and in a minute had the towel neatly spread, with the mossy
bulge of a root serving as an improvised pillow half-way along its length.
"You go get her," Jody whispered to Rayray as he coaxed Wayne to his knees
and stood in front of the tall athlete.  Jerry gave the boy a hug on the
shoulders and he went off behind the tree, emerging in a few moments with
the gamin pixie.  The couple honored Jody by standing in from of him, and
the younger boy unfastened the eleven year old's loincloth as the pre-teen
shrugged off his vest.  Wayne hugged the child to him, sliding both hands
up under his leather vest as the boy stripped his older friend.  Jerry
knelt at Jody's right and stared as Sandra guided Jody's tiny hands to the
hugely erect older boy.  Rayray nodded at Jerry and he joined in the first
touch.  While it may take three Californians to fully capture the essence
of changing a light bulb, there were other experiences a trio could share,
and, even though more heat than light was generated, Rayray, for one, was
sure they could teach Teller a thing or two about critical mass.  "I'm
sorry," he whispered as he froze, shuddering, and sprayed a hot spurt of
thin juvenile semen on Jody's bare chest.  The nine year old held the
coltish beauty's penis against Sandra's soft little belly and the boy
grunted and lost control, completely, covering the pixie with half a dozen
hard, fast pulses of his sperm.  Jerry, overcome by the children's wanton
display, slipped quickly out of his costume, and, stroking himself a few
times as Rayray watched, came heavily on the pre-teen's heaving, sweating
chest as Jody and Sandra watched, mesmerized at an adult with a nearly
seven-inch, circumcised penis in full display.  Wayne also shucked out of
his Indian garb to Jody's hiss of welcome.  Ever the kid of kids, he coaxed
Rayray to his knees in front of Wayne, and guided the man to the older
child's mouth, instinctively gripping the big, heavy, uncircumcised penis
at it's base and squeezing as Rayray's tongue and lips avidly engulfed the
swollen purple glans of the adult.  "I'm cumming," Wayne whispered after a
minute, and Jody's hand tightened so he could fill the triggering pulse as
the flow of hot sperm spurted into his friend's eager mouth.  In a matter
of seconds, Rayray hummed loudly, then brought Jody in front of him,
letting the nine year old take his place.  Free of the hot gusher now being
consumed by his younger friend, Rayray lay Sandra back on the white towel.
The girl raised her legs, gripping behind her knees, and spread herself
widely.  The ringer for Simon on "Seventh Heaven" positioned himself over
the seven year old, and, as she darted her tongue to him, let semen spill
from his lips into her eager mouth.  Jody's hot, hard sucking brought Wayne
to an end in less than a minute, freeing the boy to lie on top of his
eleven year old friend, and, after wetting his hand on Rayray's wet chest,
guide him as he kissed the girl wildly.

                   Sandra reached down between herself and her lover and
found Jody's hand, squeezing it in thanks just as the child was successful
in bringing the very mature eleven year old to her.  "Oh, Jody," she
sighed, then looked up at the handsome male above her, smiling a shy
welcome as her younger friend allowed the boy's five-inch, uncircumcised
penis to enter her hot, tight wetness just a little more on each of his
gentle, experimental thrusts of his young body against her childish thighs.
Not overstaying his welcome by a second, the boy released Rayray to have
his will, only maintaining a grip with the first fingers of his right hand
at the same place he'd felt the soft hammering of Wayne's ejaculation.
Rayray, now free, became even more gentle with the little girl glowing up
at him from the forest floor.  He cradled her in his arms, kissing her long
neck, as he continued surging rhythmically against her.  Jody found the
older boy's left nipple with his left hand and fondled him gently while the
fingers of his right partially masturbated the shaft of the gallant steel
over the inexperienced filly colt.  Wayne steadied the young threesome,
reaching in with his right hand to guide Jody's four inch, thumb-thick,
circumcised penis to Rayray's tender white cleft, lubricating his hand with
semen from the harshly panting boy's sweating, heaving chest.  As Jody had
helped Rayray, he helped Jody, making sure the panting nine year old didn't
penetrate his older friend to hard and fast.  But males did superb jobs
guiding and monitoring their partners, and soon Jerry was helping support
the three males in Sandra's arms.  Wayne also positioned himself to give
the children freedom, his fingers, like Jody's, tense on the latter male's
stick-hard erection.  Their bodies were wet and slick, but still, with the
help of the adults, the children remained successfully mounted with each
other, slowly experimenting with the intensity of their tentative thrusting
as they entered each other tenderly and carefully, Sandra's eyes locked on
Jody in a display of loyalty unmatched in any freaking fiction written by
any freaking writer freaking ever.

                   For ten then twenty minutes they swayed and surged
between the gentle arms of Wayne and Jerry.  After half an hour, the
adults, in unison, carefully inserted their again wood-hard erections
between the thighs of the mating children, ejaculating heavily and almost
immediately.  The hot wetness gushing between the sweating, straining young
bodies was like a catalyst of lightning.  Jody and Rayray cried out
together in shock, their bodies going hard and rigid as Sandra's long, slim
legs beat against Rayray's staining chest.  Frantically, she groped and
found Jody's left hand with her own, gripping him until her knuckles went
dead white.  Rayray remained motionless and shuddering for half a minute as
the girl mewed and coaxed and the two adults gently molested his straining
body.  Wayne pinned Jody's snowy, tender bottom firmly against the equally
beautiful behind of the eleven year old.  All sensed the rising strain in
the preteen's lanky, coltish body as he tensed for a final time against the
seven year old's hymen.  Then some gland in the young beauties brain
seized, the slim hips surged, Sandra yelped, tears springing to her eyes,
and he mounted her with four full thrust.

                   "Oh, Jody," the girl snuffled through her tears, "Oh,
Jody, Jody, Jody."
                   Wayne and Jerry relaxed.  Jody had a long, hard,
stuttering orgasm and Sandra gripped his hand, then Wayne gently removed
him, wet with clear seminal fluid, and still hard, from the older boy.  The
three males moved free of the young couple.  Rayray rose often over the
little girl, both looking between their beautiful young bodies at his long
penis as he gently thrust to her again and again.  Attuned to the girl,
Jody reentered the picture, helping her move her legs from the chest of her
panting mount to his heaving flanks, then he retreated.  Sandra's long,
slim legs wrapped around Rayray's gently stroking waist and her pretty,
freckled arms held his back.  The slight mound in the blanket positioned
the larger male perfectly over the tiny female, so they were comfortable
together and able to get used to what was happening between them.  For a
moment, Sandra's left hand left Rayray's back, and she again found Jody,
clasping him against the sweating back of the pre-teen.

                   With everyone comfortable, it went on and on.  Twenty
minutes, the same gentle rhythm, the same happy mews of welcome, the kisses
as he'd lower to her, then rise again so they could look down.  Thirty
minutes, and the tension began to rise.  The panting and sweating
intensified dramatically, his thrusts became faster, and he'd hitch hard at
the completion of each as the girl yelped and pulled him to her with her
strong, athletic legs.  Her eyes flashed at Jody and the boy responded
instantly, resuming his position on top of Rayray, the finger's of his
right hand at the base of the eleven year old's long, slim shaft.  Relieved
of having to try to speak, Rayray concentrated solely on holding back, but
the hot, tight wetness of the now bucking child, and the experienced
fingers of the little boy were irresistible times ten.  "I can feel his
sperm," Jody whispered into Sandra's eyes.  The girl flashed her thanks,
then again looked down between their bodies just in time to see the first
white smear pulse from between her legs.  "I can feel him, too," she
whispered to her junior lover.  "If I ever tell my husband to go play in
traffic, you'll be the reason why," she said, smiling up at the slack and
haggard face inches above her own, then she mewed `Rayray' and again the
boy lost control, lunging against her fast and hard until her eyes and
faced matched his and her body began shaking as he head with its lank, damp
hair lolled helplessly.  Wayne gently retrieved Jody, then slowly separated
the panting children, guiding Jerry to the wet girl.  The mature male held
her gently, she guided him, and he mounted fully in a series of long,
languid strokes.  She held his flanks gently and lay beneath him with her
legs spread wide.  Jerry didn't lower himself to the girl's tiny body, just
stroked rhythmically against her for five minutes before cumming gently to
her equally gentle shuddering climax.  Jody, finally able to release his
beloved to her new live, returned to Wayne, lying beside him and taking him
softly in his small, tender mouth until the adult ejaculated.

                   "Way trick camp," ....... observed.








                   CHAPTER THIRTEEN

                   It would be handy to be able to talk to the reader and
ask him or her where, exactly, we are.  Some writers get blocked, so the
legend goes, but I get lost.  How, for example, is Jody related to Niles,
who seems to have disappeared lo these many pages.  Who are Nile's friends.
Does he know Wayne?  How did we get to Wildest World?  I don't have the
foggiest.  This means I'll have to go back and read, and, while the joys of
doing so are bound to be unbounded, the time required is a
twenty-four-caret drag.  I think the memory lapse and the reluctance to
review are both products of being domestically active, and still adding
over five thousand words a day.  Something had to give, and I suppose if
the result is an hour combing through the last twenty or thirty pages, that
such a penalty phase won't raise many a tear.

                   No sign of Delton.  In a way I'm glad, because this
fiscal month is going to end up as meagerly as November, and I wouldn't
have five extra dollars for him.  Still, I'd like to know how his arm came
out.  Probably he used the thirty-five dollars to buy cigarettes and weed;
that would be typical, nice kid though he is.

                   Samantha is more a dream come true every day.  Kinda
dumb and kinda smart, in the words of the song.  She alternates, in a
completely non-manic way, between quiet, as against moody, and vivacious,
as against silly.  I honestly don't think she has a bad thought about
anyone or anything in her pretty head.  She does not hold grudges or find
fault, a most refreshing change, and, sure, a necessity for any girl who
wants to hang out with an artist rather than a banker.  She has an
intriguing way of saying, "Now, Tom," then pontificating on the virtues of
a calling card or new CD, reprising my mother almost tone for tone, but
there is a difference between Caribbean charm and Scotch bizarreness and
bleak hatred.  Even my -- and I finally figured our a word for her, for
Malcolm, and a few other people over the years whom I've gotten to know
very well, but whom I did not like and would not call friends: the word is
ha'buddy, as in ha'penny, or half penny.  Half friends -- ha' buddy
Donna, the prototypical sourpuss, says the girl is cute.  She also thinks
some boy will kill me over her.  I'll admit she's tantalizing enough,
which, by great good fortune, makes her worth the risk.  My ace in the hole
is that if Boy Bad waits, he'll get the girl and the million, but youth is
impetuous and who know how he'd feel about waiting ten or twenty years?  My
game plan is to team her up with Clarence, two days her senior, and a
dedicated and gentle boy.  Time will tell.  In the meantime, I hate is
treating her like a kid or daughter and railing up at her, but she's been a
different girl since I pushed her out the door, and her brother and
girlfriend, shortly thereafter.  I have a rough, bullying side, as my
readers know, and, however poorly Samantha adds and reads, she's smart
enough not to want to see it again.  At the same time, I'm mellowing out as
a result of having Daisy's kids here.  Queenie broke what was left of one
of my two tea mugs this evening, and I didn't even stop typing.  She
destroys the kitchen by lighting the stove, but we have so few dishes it's
easier to do them myself than get frosty.  Of course, today she managed to,
a, leave the usual mess, and, b, abscond with both my scouring pads,
leaving pots, pans, and a well-worn dish cloth.  I tell her she should go
in the US Army, and I'm not kidding.  It is a hateful organization, to the
extent that none of the hundred or more guys I got to know wanted to stay
in one hour after they had to, but it does teach the rudiments of getting
one thing done and going on to the next.  She hangs by such a thread;
twenty pounds, and she's just another girl on the street, beautiful
cheekbones and long, slim neck, notwithstanding (Samantha, on the other
hand, like her mother, has a vivid enough personality to possibly get away
with being on the plump side.).  I try coaching and cajoling Queenie but
it's so way not my business that I feel I'm treading water.  I had to land
on Samantha hard to get her off her money fixation, and I only did it
because I love her and have known her for eight years.  If Louise was
either daughter or girlfriend, I'd be after her doggedly, but she isn't.  I
guess the moral is you damn well better hurt the one you love.

                   Randy's getting cuter by the day, just reaching
thirteen.  He tags along as Samantha and I stop traffic on our way two in
from the local emporiums.  I haven't seen Rhageedha or her fire-cracker
little sister for two weeks.  My three understudies in the wings,
contrasted with Queenie, are perfect examples of all issues.  A small
number of affectionate, willing partners, with no interest in the most
beautiful of all, who, mercifully for my sanity, happens not to be
interested in me.  Plus, there's another potential special friend, Daryl,
who just turned fourteen and looks about eleven.  He's an octoroon, just
ever so slightly golden, and, with a short trim, one entirely dazzling
young male.  He's been very accepting of mild foreplay in the past, and has
the warmest, silkiest skin imaginable, but seemed reserved on his last
visit, so I didn't even invite him up.  Plus, I had no money and I usually
have a five or a ten for him, whether he hangs out, or not, so that made a
difference.  I don't like putting a price on things, but research is
research, and the only way to determine priorities in a boy like Daryl is
to offer money, and see what he says.  I tried it a couple of times with
boys in Mexico, offering ones who seemed uninterested ten or twenty bucks,
big money in their lives, and both, as I assumed, said no thanks (and got
the money, anyway).  Not interested is not interested, but what if I offer
Daryl fifty dollars and he does come up?  Does that mean he's interested,
or not?  Values are essential to civilization, and tampering with them can
be nerve wracking business.  The message here is clear.  If you'd stop
living like such unmitigated morons, I would feel less inclined to waste my
time on the presumably fruitless search for feasible alternatives to
everyone in the whole freaking country blowing up like Orville
Redenbacher's premium popping corn.

                   Well, I did my excellent-housekeeping penance and went
back to look at our story, so far.  It turns out twenty-two-year-old Niles
Banks picked Jody Fisher up as a hitchhiking runaway, inviting him to
Bing's house.  Bing Charles, his eleven year old nephew, is on the brink of
a life-changing discovery, thanks in part to child Rick Schroeder's "One
Fish at a Time", a savagely controversial and wildly popular new television
show.  Hap and Stan are Bing's school friends, also eleven years old,
invited over to celebrate his, Bing's, recent weight loss.  Jody, youngest
of the gathering, has entertained his new friends by sketching highlights
of his visit to a resort with his neighbor, Wayne, who, I believe, has
bowed out of the story.  It's a little hazy, some of the detail blurred
with the thin air of cruising in the literary stratosphere as if I owned
everything above a hundred-thousand feet, but I believe the quintet has
adjourned to the basement rec room, where, as Jody recited, they stripped
to their tee shirts (convenient, eh?) and briefs or boxers.

                   Stan Yawoski, a freckled redhead with a wide grin, has
also begun a tale, and, Jody having spoken, the second youngest takes the
stage.

                   "You've got fast hands," Jeff Larson said as he zipped
his racket into its leather case.
                   "Thanks," Stan said, "with big feet, I need them."
                   "I had the same problem when I was your age," the twenty
four year old said, "but I got over being self-conscious about it in a big
hurry, if three hours is a hurry."
                   "How?" Stan asked.
                   "Let's sidetrack, first," the older male said, "because
I wanted to tell you your dad says you really like me, and I'm very
flattered."
                   "He said you like me, too," the lanky redhead said,
smiling shyly.
                   "That's about half of it, I guess," Jeff grinned.  "The
reason I brought it up, you know, losing my sensitivity about being a
little gawkier than most of the other kids, is that it involved a very
special friend I used to hang out with when I was thirteen.  What happened
is kind of private and secret, and it would make some boys your age very
uptight to even talk about it, or, especially, to talk about it, as the
case may be, but you're a little bit in the same boat I was, so I thought
I'd at least mention it, and if you want to talk, we can."

                   "I'd really like to," Stan said.
                   "I would, too," the young man said.  "You're dad and
Bill and Adam are going out for a few beers, and I don't drink, so if you'd
like, you could come over to my place and he could pick you up this
evening, or I could drop you home, or you could spend the night."
                   "I'd like to stay over if it's really okay with you,"
the eleven year old said.
                   "More than," Jeff said, "but I should tell you that I
find you very attractive, and not just because you're smart and quick along
the net.  I have the same feelings toward you I did toward Ben Killeen when
I was thirteen and he was my age, now, you know, more than more than
friendly."

                   "I just know I really like it when you come over, and
when I see you here," the boy said.
                   "Once in awhile becoming special friends spoils a
regular friendship," Jeff said, "by bringing up issues like jealousy and
resentment, or one partner making demands on the other, so it's something
to think about."
                   "I'll bet, with the right teacher, a boy could learn to
survive," the eleven year old said, again with his shy, wide-mouthed smile.
                   "How do you feel about Rick's show?" Jeff asked.
                   "I like it," the boy said.
                   "Good," Jeff said, "if you come over, the issues will be
the same, so if you know that, understand it, and welcome it, we're on the
same page."

                   "I do," the boy said.
                   "Well," Jeff replied, "if you're completely
inexperienced, you're buying a pig in a poke, but, guess what, that's the
way it was for me with Ben, and that's the way it is for lots of kids.  The
first time.  And the joke is, it doesn't matter much, unless something
horrible happens, of course, but otherwise it seems like the most natural
thing in the world, and, the truth of the matter is it wouldn't make any
difference tomorrow whether you came over for the night, or we spent the
night together at a motel in separate rooms."

                   "So it's all for nothing?" the boy quizzed.
                   "Yeah, isn't that weird?" his older friend said.
"You'll know, yourself, tomorrow, but tonight, unless I sadly miss my
guess, you'll think going out past the moon is child's play.  Total ying,
no yang, and an hour later they're perfectly balanced, then, it's the
reverse, and an hour later, they're balanced, again, assuming they were
balanced, in the first place."
                   "Do most guys talk to a boy before they teach him?" Stan
asked.

                   "No," Jeff said.  "They should, but it's pretty rare.
Usually it's just touching, though the older male will usually ask a boy if
he's experienced.  Readers like to talk, a, b, and c, because they have
something to talk about; more perspective and context to, you know, form
kind of a grid so they can hang thoughts on it in some semblance of order,
then go on to history, biography, and all the things they know about or are
starting to know about.  Since guys like this like to talk, anyway, when it
comes to private and secret things, they are more apt to be verbal.
                   "And your dad said you like to read a lot," he added.

                   "Psychology," the boy said, "I mean there are some
patterns.  They do know some things.  Some of the tests they think up to
give are really clever."
                   "It hasn't worked," Jeff said, "because people are
fatter and more self-involved and dysfunctional than at any time in
history, but, I agree, it is interesting."
                   "Don't you think some people are happier than at any
time in history?" the boy asked.
                   "Hundreds of millions," Jeff agreed, "on a scale
heretofore inconceivable, but if that sounds sanguine, think for a moment
on who you're comparing them to.  Spend much time in Hogarth's London, and
being happier than those people is hardly a milestone State the equation
another way, and we're ten percent as happy as we should be, though, for
sure I'll make an exception for a cute eleven year old boy with a thick
tome on abnormal psychology on the desk in front of him."
                   "Who's now happier than he ever thought he could be,"
the boy responded.
                   "Takes one to know one, so you won't be surprised that I
had you a little bit figured out."
                   "But you still like it when my dad told you I liked you,
didn't you?" Stan said.
                   "My feelings were such," the young man replied, "that I
can't state them without seeming to tease, but, yes, I was thrilled to
death.  I could show you, to the square foot, where I was when he told me,
when he gave you to me."
                   "I tried to be cool, but I think he knew I was happy
when he told me you like me, too," the boy said.
                   "You're lucky in the dad department, even if his serve
half sucks half the time," Jeff said.
                   "He says you couldn't find a lob with an umbrella," Stan
laughed.

                   "But he's way cool about us being together," Jeff
responded, "and that's something a lot of fathers would get their boxers in
a bunch over, so, as I said, you lucked out."
                   "I'm beginning to realize that," the boy replied.
                   "And it's not just the Corvette, right?" Jeff grinned.
                   "When did a sports car ever hurt?" the boy rejoined.
                   "I thought you like it," Jeff sighed, retrieving his
keys from his locker and handing them to Stan.
                   "Way no way," the boy whispered, looking at the
jewel-like General Motors' key in his hand.
                   "Just think of it as a bike with advantages," Jeff said,
pointing out to the boy that district attorneys who played hard and tight
with the right-headed cops could let a monkey drive, so he shouldn't feel
overwhelmed.  "Plus," he added, "it's a good test of psychology.  Force A
will be your desire to get to our destination, which is a nicer ambience to
shower in than here at the club, and, Force B will be the advantages we
reap from surviving the trip.  Force C is four-hundred horsepower, so we
don't want to go around treating it like chopped liver.
                   "Can you think of any more Forces?"

                   "We're going home to shower, in private, and making the
trip in a Corvette, which I'm supposedly driving, and then spending the
night together, and you want me to think," the boy mused, making a
statement rather than a question of his quandary.
                   "Well, I'm not going to force you," the older male said.
"You can lead a boy to a book, but even then you can't make him think, so a
car can hardly do wonders."
                   "You're actually helping quite a bit," the youngster
said, "Force Four is love, and I love you very much."
                   "Here's to another square foot," Jeff whispered,
touching the eleven year old on his forehead, then squeezing his hand as
the two headed for the parking lot.

                   "Since we're not likely to get into lies, privacy, and
secrets," Jeff said as the boy familiarized himself with the car in the
club parking lot, "I want to tell you that I hope you'll quit tennis.
Tennis and any athletics."
                   "Why?" the boy asked.
                   "Waste of time," the man said, "plus about ten different
physical reasons having to do with joints, cartilage, tendons, and various
and sundry tissue groups, many of them located along the spinal column."
                   "But you play," the boy noted.

                   "They didn't know any better when I was your age," the
twenty four year old said, "or if they did, they weren't saying much.  I
got hooked, and it's not life-threatening or anything; just that in your
case, unless you have a real passion and are willing to sacrifice a lot in
terms of intellectual development and physical well being, it would be
better to use your time developing some other aspect of your life."

                   Stan laughed.  "If you get me off sports and dating,
you'll make a real whiz kid out of me," he said.
                   "It happened with Ben and me, but there's always room
for one more," Jeff said, as Stan eased the silver gray car onto road,
obeying Jeff's finger which pointed out of town.  That brought a grin from
the kid, and they rolled for the countryside.

                   "You can't do this with many boys or I'd have read about
it in the papers," Stan said as they passed a police barricade and headed
onto the county skid pan.
                   "I thought you read Psychology," Jeff responded.
                   "Just with one eye," the boy said, "so I don't confuse
Id and Ego."
                   "And I let you drive?" Jeff laughed, adding: "on second
thought, if I was at the wheel, and you were riding shotgun, there'd be no
eyes."
                   "Then nothing to get shampoo in," the boy said.  Jeff
looked down at him.  "You are the A in awesome," he said.  They skidded,
alright.  A great steaming crescent of a U-turn, and exited the training
facility to the puzzled expression of the guard.  "What were you saying
about the papers?" Jeff said as the car made a half-G turn onto the road
back into town.
                   "I can be an undercover operative," the boy responded,
"totally legit.  In fact," he went on, "if you think of it from an amateur
psychological viewpoint, guess what, a known tipster would be likely to
attract kids that don't dare tell anyone else about bad stuff that's
happening to them."

                   "If anyone could pull it off," Jeff said, "you could,
probably with a certain degree of style, why not?"
                   "It would give us a good reason to be together," the boy
said.
                   "I'm afraid that doesn't cut much ice in the adult
world," Jeff said, "but when it rains cherries, no law against carrying a
spoon.  But the idea is brilliant.  Just the opposite of the usual
procedure of hush this and clandestine that, when it comes to informants.
You, practically with a sign on you; legend from day one, because I think
we were doing a bit over a hundred when we passed the guard.  After the new
wears off, the kids would know who to tell, most of them could get that
far, to tell you.  You'd sort of attract telling, rather than ferreting
it."

                   "If we're working together," the boy asked, "how can we
know when it's okay to have privacy and talk about personal stuff."
                   "We might try body count," the district attorney
answered.  "If we get half a dozen raptors and scare the living shit out of
the rest, no one will want to see the logs."
                   "Just please oh please don't hire me until tomorrow,"
Stan emoted.
                   "I had Monday in mind," Jeff said, and that made the boy
happy, and predators practically jump for joy (if they'd know).

                   "Were you really nervous with Ben?" the eleven year old
asked as they entered Jeff's bathroom.
                   "Not until we took our shirts off," Jeff said, his voice
thick.
                   "Where did it happen?" the boy said.
                   "While we were playing golf," the older male explained.
"It rained for four hours.  We holed up in a shelter He was trying to get
me away from the tennis team, so we talked about that stuff for awhile.
Then we talked about other stuff for awhile, then I started really liking
him and feeling comfortable with him, but that didn't last, because after
awhile I just felt like all energy just being close to him, and I knew what
it was because I'd done a lot of reading, including abnormal psych texts
that opened to the right place when you put them on their spine and let go,
so that got me even more excited."

                   "Do you want to talk about personal stuff, you know,
girls, or just hang out until it clear up?" Ben asked the thirteen year
old.
                   "I'd like to," Jeff said.
                   "How much do you know?" the golf coach ask [millionth
character] ed.
                   "Just from reading," the boy replied.
                   "You have a very special build," Ben said, "very
attractive.  Things should start happening pretty soon, if you want them
to."
                   "I don't think I look so hot," Jeff said.
                   "There are different kinds of looks," the coach said,
"pretty and uninteresting, because pretty boys get stroked and petted by
default, and, once in awhile, a boy like you; not what you find in
underpants ads in the catalogues, because they pick models to sell
clothing, not get them in trouble."

                   "Why would some models get them in trouble?" Jeff
wondered aloud.
                   "It's a hard thing to describe," the young man said, "an
indefinable look certain boys have, as well as some girls, like the one at
the swimming pool in the ad for calcium supplements.  Most of them, like
you, think they look odd or dorky, but they're wrong.  You're wrong.
Bigger hands and feet, long legs and knobby knees may not make onto the
pages of Sears, but, as I said, they're in business to service debt, not to
turn on every guy between sixteen and one-hundred and something."
                   "So if `Playboy' meant what it said, they'd use pictures
of a kid like me?" Jeff asked.
                   "You'd be their first life-size foldout," Ben laughed.
                   "'Victor's Secret'," the tall, lanky, brown-eyed,
black-haired boy giggled in response.
                   "'Nifty'," Ben whispered in response.  The thirteen year
old met the twenty four year old's eyes for a long moment.  "Do you read
it?" the man whispered.
                   "Sometimes," Ben said, reddening, as if through some
preposterous oversight he wasn't beautiful enough, already..
                   "Do you want to talk about stuff like that, or keep to
consenting, unrelated adults, or the weather?" Ben asked.
                   "I like it," the boy allowed, still blushing.
                   "I do, too," Ben said, adding: "Would you like to do
more than just talk?"
                   "Yes," Jeff whispered.
                   "Would you be comfortable if we had our shirts off?" the
golf pro asked.
                   "No," his young friend said, stripping out of his knit
shirt and placing it on the bench of the storm shelter.
                   "I didn't think so," Ben whispered, touching the boy's
face as the child pulled his shirt from his slacks, running his hands up
under it to find his tiny nipples.
                   "You feel like a kid," the boy remarked softly.
                   "Takes one to know one," the adult said, running his
fingers along Jeff's jawline and down his long, slim neck to his
well-developed shoulders, then slipping out of his jersey and placing it
with Jeff's.  They faced each other for long minutes, touching ever lower,
their breathing becoming ragged, their eyes locked on each other.

                   "We can still stop, if you want," Ben whispered as his
fingers found the buckle to Jeff's golfing shorts.
                   "I don't want," the boy replied, finding the adult's
buckle with tense fingers.
                   "Everything very slowly, okay?" the young man said, "and
when it's over you may have a sense of being cold and let down.  That's
kinda normal, so let a little time go by before you analyze how you feel."
                   "Okay," the boy whispered as they stepped from their
pants and placed them with their shirts, then turned again to each other,
looking down at their hotly bulging underwear.
                   "Are you the biggest boy on the junior's team?" Ben
asked.
                   "I guess so," Jeff said.
                   "Do you like showering," the man quizzed.
                   "I always feel like a pervert," the boy replied,
"because I like looking at Chucky Ames, and he's only ten."
                   "And, just as a guess," Ben responded, "he's tall and
slim with big hands and feet and long legs.  Coltish."
                   "Yeah," the boy smiled as they stood close and touched
each other along the waistline of their underwear.
                   "And bigger than the other boys?"
                   "Almost as much as me," the boy said, blushing gently.
                   "Does he have any hair around his penis?" Ben quizzed.
                   "He's blond, but I think so," Jeff whispered.
                   "Do you like him?"
                   "Yes."
                   "Do you think he likes you?" the mature male asked.
                   "Yes," the boy said, "we like Louis L'Amour.  He wants
to come for a sleepover."
                   "Does that make you nervous?" Ben asked.
                   "Totally," the boy replied, "because I know I'd get like
this if we were hanging around in my room together, and he might freak
out."
                   "When you shower together, does he ever stand close to
you and rub against you as if it were accidental?"
                   "Yes," Jeff said, and Ben could see the boy's erection
swell.
                   "Has his penis ever touched your leg?" Ben asked, his
whisper quiet and husky.
                   "Twice," the boy acknowledged, "but just a little."
                   "Were there other boys in the shower when it happened?"
Ben asked.
                   "Yes," Jeff said.
                   "Did they take any notice?"
                   "They pretended they didn't, but I think they did," Jeff
said.
                   "That's your marriage license, then," Ben said, "if
they'd thought you were weird or faggoty, they'd have said something, boys
being what they are.  And I think the chance of Chucky freaking out are
about one in six-hundred billion.  Put another way, the only thing that's
likely to upset him is if you don't invite him over."

                   "I'm glad it rained," Jeff said, "because I know he
wants to do this with me, but I didn't know what to do."
                   "Part of being a kid," Ben said, "is being ten times as
scared of everything as needs be.  It does keep you alive, but it can
interfere, too."
                   "It feels really natural," Jeff said.  "After what they
tell us in school, you'd expect a fire to start."
                   "The absurdity of their position is that it's so
absolute," Ben said, "they all think this is never appropriate, ever, no
matter what, forever.  Growing up is a matter of taking dogmatic fools for
what they are, and, for the sake of convenience, running end plays, fades,
and head fakes, rather than butting your head against a wall of invincible
stupidity."
                   "Using sand wedges instead of a Big Bertha?" the boy
asked.
                   "Exactly," Ben said, "and play off the fairways,
because, after all, you're out for a high score."

                   "I'll settle for a two," Jeff said, "which, I guess,
would make a threesome, you know, if I could bring Chucky to your house,
sometime."
                   "That would be an unholy one, for sure," Ben said, "but
I give the priest class wide berth on numerous other issues, so one more,
or two more, if that's how it works out, shouldn't matter."
                   "Have you had other boys over?" Jeff asked.
                   "I'm a deep cover predator," Ben said, "so the answer is
not for two years, and only two others since I moved here, which is when my
parents had the house, six years ago."
                   "Thus the low tournament scores," Jeff observed.
                   "Another way to put it," the player said, "is that you
are the pick of a very big litter of some pretty cute pups, and, if it
hadn't rained, I would have made every effort to become at least regular
friends.  And no, none of the others on the team, or at school, or on tour,
or anywhere have any special relationship with me; no others, period, at
this point, and, in point of fact, I'm homing in on a half-way decent
chick.
                   "You are a friend, amigo, not a dish on the side,
savvy?"
                   "As long as it remains unholy," the boy said.
                   "There's a good little boy," the man responded, "going
and making me feel all warm and fuzzy about myself for being smart enough
to hang out with you."
                   "Warm and fuzzy was how I felt before it started to
rain," Jeff said, "but that feeling's all gone away.  I can hardly even
remember it."
                   "If I touch you inside your underpants, maybe the
feeling you have now will go away, too," Ben whispered, "like the feeling
half-way up the upside of the roller coaster."
                   "I think I'm more than half way," the boy said.
                   "Have you started jerking off?" Ben quizzed.
                   "I don't know how, yet," the boy whispered in reply,
"that's why I haven't invited Chucky over, because all the other boys seem
to know what it is, and I don't, so it would be really embarrassing,"
                   "How `bout at night?" the quizzing went on, "has
anything happened while you were sleeping?"
                   "Sometimes," the boy said, reddening.
                   "How recently?" Ben asked.
                   "A week, I guess," Jeff said.
                   "The reason I asked," the man explained, "is that you're
probably really extra ready to go all the way, so, if we want it to last at
least a little longer, we should sit down and keep our hands to ourselves
for a little while."
                   "Okay," Jeff agreed.
                   "Do you think you can handle being naked?" Ben asked,
"or should we wait?"
                   "I think so," the boy murmured, pulling down his
underpants, then standing in front of Ben, his mature penis jutting hugely
from his slim, boyish waist.  The tall, athletic adult also stripped, and
the two stood a foot apart, gazing down at each other, then sat, Jeff on
the left, side-by-side on the log bench, legs spread, knees touching.

                   "Don't they call jerking off masturbating?" the boy
asked.
                   "Yes," the young man said.
                   "Who taught you?" the child asked.
                   "A little boy I was baby-sitting for," Ben said.  "I was
your age, thirteen, and he was eight, but he'd gone to a progressive
daycare center after school, so he knew how to do it with older boys."
                   "Did he like it?" Jeff wondered.
                   "More than fudge with frosting," Ben said, "he was in
attack mode from the time his parents' car left the driveway.  In half an
hour he was out of his GI Joe suit and in the tub, with me in a facemask
doing underwater recon to see if I could find anything I could bring back
to the squad in the way of food, and that after cautioning me not to get
overexcited because things look one-third bigger underwater."
                   "I think I would have gotten overexcited spanking him,"
Jeff remarked.
                   "He was cute enough for it," the young man agreed, "but
when I reported back that there wasn't enough in the lake to feed an army,
he took me prisoner, so the shoe was on the other foot, discipline-wise."
                   "Did you baby-sit for him a lot?" Jeff asked.
                   "Constantly," the golfer replied, "we made our end run
by reading aloud to each other, and he improved so rapidly his mother
didn't ask and we didn't tell.  In fact, I half moved in with them, so once
in awhile we got to spend the whole night together."
                   "I don't think I'd like that," Jeff said.  "I mean,
maybe once, with Chucky, but somehow sleeping together for a whole night
with a guy just isn't my thing."
                   "Three times was enough, even with an eight year old,"
the older male expounded, "and one of us would usually end up on an air
mattress on the floor for part of the night, after the first night."
                   "Can it happen again and again?" the boy wanted to know.



                   I'm beginning to be tempted by the million word novel.
Has it ever been done?  I suppose the Waverly novels run to a higher
number, but many serials do.  Is this a serial?  In my opinion, a few
stitches here and there hold it together, allowing as how it's such finely
woven cloth.  If I was hooked up to the Net I'd try finding out how many
words there are in "And Ladies of the Club".  At a thousand pages, it would
be something like half a million words, so I don't think it's a contender.
I don't believe such a book could be printed.  Even with the smallest type,
it would be something you'd need a strap for, and it would have to be bound
with some kind of NASA adhesive.  I'm put in mind of one of my all-time
heroes, the Japanese man who learned pi to forty-thousand places to the
right of the decimal.  A connected million-word novel might, by at least a
generous soul here and there, be considered an equal achievement.  What
would be a bit of fun would be reversing it.  See if my Japanese hero could
write even a chapter of a reasonably good novel, and if I could learn pi to
twenty places in a year.  Let's hear it for the human mind.  The creative
versus the rote.  To what degree are they mutually exclusive?  To what
degree to they help or hinder each other.  Does the furious note taker ever
have time to think?  Can the brilliant dreamer conform to the meticulous
craft of laying down all-but perfect prose?  Can either handle the
eighteen-hour workdays?  And where does suffering come in?  If my
forty-thousand digit counterpart was dumped by his beloved, could his
prodigious mental energy be suddenly refocused.  If I'd had less than
hell's own hound bitch as a mother, might I not be working on pi, myself?
If Nabakov is any example, and I think he's far more than that, then
suffering and art can be proven conclusively, for he was all but executed,
then spent years in Siberia, all on top of a father murdered by his own
peasants, who went free because they were essential to the estate.  Of
course, sensitivity plays a rule.  Dickens was able to experience all the
miseries of lowest London life in the course of gluing a few hundred labels
on a few hundred jars.  My own time on the rack was interrupted by four
years of marriage, but otherwise extends half a century, though
considerably relieved by both Jose and Steven, a private income, and
somehow shambling to the forefront of all artists, probably more a result
of luck and survival than either talent or diligence.

                   First interloper vis a vee Samantha.  She let slip that
some guy from the States bought her a keyboard she's been begging me for.
About time for the subplot.  The fact she mentioned it at all, is evidence
in her favor, but I'm still skeptical.  The rules are simple.  She is
allowed one boyfriend of suitable age and background, including sex, as
long as she's here much of the time.  Any relationship with an older man,
and she's out.  Let him support her and her family.  I hope throwing her
brother and his girlfriend out sunk in, because she's going to be an awful
sad kiddo if she finds her wolf bites as well as barks.  Of course, there's
the odd chance she can hook up with someone with deeper pockets than mine,
but for how long and under what circumstances?  She has a certain
personality that I happen to love and respond to, but she's far from being
the generally cheery and effervescent type most men favor.  While she lacks
sullenness, she can be very unresponsive for long periods of time.  For a
writer, that's freaking perfect, and, when she finally brightens, it's like
the sun coming out and it's time to play.  Her mother was an excellent
prostitute and parlayed hanging around certain clubs into long-term
relationships with several men.  I don't think Samantha has that option,
because, while she's not sour, rude, or rebellious, she is stoic, and men
don't pay for stoic.  So, she gets the riot act tomorrow, and a cold-eyed
reminder that I can ferry myself out to the western border and for a
thousand dollars, one fifty-fifth of my income, ferry back a Hispanic cutie
as young as eleven or twelve.  The morality and decency laws here cover
only black girls, Latinas are on their own.  Half the town must know Jose
Schmose is raping little Karen, and he's still carting her around in the
gas truck during school hours.

                   In any event, all bets are off until the new year and my
next quarterly lump sum, so there's plenty of time to set the warning lamps
and flags and trying to prevent the wreck, rather than surviving it.
There's also the specter of her little-girl cuteness fading over time,
leaving me wanting a more mature and articulate companion.  The literature
on child brides, so to speak, on Nifty and other alternative archives
strongly indicate the new does not wear off, and I've know Samantha eight
and a half years, so I tend to be cautiously optimistic, and, anyway, Anne
was all ministers and vows and affection and love until our last hour
together, then jumped pretty much as my back was turned, so it can get a
little dog-eat-dog when it comes to romantic issues.  Fortunately, all's
fair in art, so I get my million-word novel, just keep it up girl, and she
gets the man who bought her a toy keyboard, and all the joy and pleasure he
has to offer.  It matters little to my readers of 2050, and they're the
only ones who matter to me.  To violate my own strictures on being rude and
crude, something I have zero tolerance for in others, I either lick her
pussy, or lick my chops over the next one, knowing there are at least a few
nice, young girls out there who would be thrilled to live on a good income
in a beautiful home, with a quiet, sober guy.  Even my wife didn't find me
boring, and that's a plus, too.

                   I think I like the five and five life.  Five hours of
domestic nonsense, and five-thousand words.  It's troublesome to lope along
and nearly double world-record pace, but I find many things about so much
talent so well disciplined to be taxing.  How freaking come?  Why don't
other writers get at least some?  I have not yet been able to read an
entire issue of "The New York Review of Books",.  I try, but after a few
columns end up feeling so godlike it's downright embarrassing. The writers,
or, typists for dollars, and their articles, seem variants of the hideous
cartoonist with his endless eyewear, set pieces cranked out to a Jew's
harp.  The quality of their work is not as high as might be found in a
magazine devoted to bicycling.  The same names, Buckley, Updike, Wills, and
others going back forty or fifty years, like Mailer, or foreign cogitations
compiled from hell's own dictionary, as I think I've said before, dominate.
In the latest issue there's a near as fire to a volcano endless piece on an
obscure socialist whom the Ivy League can't hire because he killed so many
people even Italy finally jailed him.  Big hair, there's the reason.
Rendering New York, David, to my wary Goliath, is literary fun, itself.
How small their stones, how predictable their path, how slow their flight,
one might almost call it ponderous; how absolutely gigantic my cannon, how
finely etched the crosshairs on the optical sight, how juicy the target,
how rhetorical all the questions, because I've already laid in my first
salvos.  See, in bombardment, the big cannons in back fire first, then the
medium howitzers, in the middle, and, finally, the smaller guns up front.
All the shells land within seconds of each other.  Even though the big guns
are a long way off, I prefer the optical sight in hopes of seeing their
expressions on seeing the incoming shell, childish, but play in the land of
writers is not your Sunday stroll in the park, and if the Jews had the
original David, I reserve the right to maintain a youthful approach, too.
Now I've become a hide nailer, pinning myself to the wall as both halves of
history's most scheming duel.  If it weren't all so silly, in the first
place, what chance would I have, and if we all laughed as loud as we should
at the silliest among us, why, we'd have a Krystal Nicht without a stone
being thrown, eh, David?  (The biblical dude, not David, my long-suffering
editor, who's certainly the most tolerant of his breed running around
loose, but who still gets the heebie jeebies when I get all peevish and
opinionated about the abrogation of the separation of splinter groups,
especially religious ones, having undo influence, as penned on the founding
parchments: "Church and state".  Luckily for them, I don't proof read all
that well, and let stand the rare convoluted sentence, so they'll have my
own stones to use against me, and, since they like to put things like
`festive occasions' into neat little socialistic boxes, sub-humans that
they are, they're very likely, in view of their overweening general
stupidity, to overlook the happy little fact that I'm massively read all
over the world, without their say-so.  For the umpteenth time in history,
at the umpteenth place, they are bringing misery, wrack, and ruin raining
down all about them.  The crucial, life-and-death difference, is that our
intricately woven, agrictultue-included technocracy can't stand it. )

                   I guess Samantha's put me in a bad mood.  In her own
way, she's the classic addlepated female, ditzy to the bone; the child one
can lead from the fairground with a stick of pink cotton candy.  She almost
undoubtedly would have sex with someone who just took it, and not only
that, but participate more or less willingly depending on, a, how much
money was involved, and, b, how attractive the suitor was.  This has its
intriguing side, because what's good for the goose is good for the gander,
so, a, we might swing a little, or, b, I'd be free to act out some of my
wolf fantasies on my own.  The northern cayes are tourist-chic rich, and in
January, I'll be a little rich, myself.  Since I get more of a kick out of
Daisy's kids than most boys get from most toys, I'd prefer the pregnant
island girl scenarios, but Plan B would sure come in handy if it turns out
I'm in for two hundred more days, or a major part thereof, at five-thousand
words a day.  Of course, if my pre-marital hunting skills have not
atrophied, it could climb back to ten thousand, and that would leave the
summer free for "The Last Farewell", my next novel, setting to coincide
with the Roger Whitaker ballad of the same name.

                   I should outline this a little more thoroughly.  Plan A
is Samantha as true blue, and we have kids starting when she's eighteen,
with herself and them getting the million when I buy the farm.  Plan B
would be that we include local friends, Rhageedha, Randy, Clarence, Daryl,
and perhaps one or two others in a discreet swinging situation, with much
of Plan A left intact.  Plan C is that Samantha spends time alone with
other older men, freeing me to try the western boarder, the northern cayes,
or even moving back to Mexico, where the banos vapor are pretty ubiquitous.
Plan D would to be to head back to the States and find a funky Arkansas
trailer park to see if readers might be interested in the results of a
Corvette and thirty-two inch waist.  In the meantime, I've done
seven-thousand words today, and I think that's quite enough.

                   Almost no words, today, Sunday.  Cute thing stayed for
six hours.  Cute?  She was wearing a red silk next to nothing with a red
bandana print blouse.  Her body hints tantalizing of the absolutely
sensational.  Queenie is classic, long-legged, long-necked perfection,
while Samantha manages to hint, as I said, at something more, and it
happens to be exactly, and I mean exactly, what Michaelangelo found in his
"Venus de Milo."  I think she's within one percent, with the rest being
guesswork, because I have yet to see her naked.  Panties all the way off,
for the second time, which leaves me wondering.  If I were younger, would I
have taken her boy now?  At fifty-six one does not run into problems, quite
the opposite, one becomes three or four times the lover of a teen's wildest
dreams, while, at the same time, becoming less ready less fast, or
something like that.  I think not.  I think, rather, the reason she strips
is she knows I won't be all over her and that she can experiment, safely.
I have to laugh at my ha'buddy, Tom Cruise.  I was inside Anne, a virgin,
cumming without a condom, in the early morning of our third date, when she
wouldn't let him touch her, at least so she said (without my asking), for
weeks as she played out her wounded-wife scenario.  I was an unemployed
scribble bum, he at the bar.  And now, unless he's one very lucky
counselor, she's an interest-free matron, and he's stuck, stuck, stuck,
while Samantha invents a dizzying new world just by making out.  The
contrast is almost cartoon-like, and the release and relief from loyalty so
profound it's akin to a childlike intellect being reborn to the cult of
religion.

                   The boys are in the living room, counting each other's
teeth, making me feel great about my chronically impoverished state due to
school fees, books, shoes, uniforms, donations, contributions, and
offerings, to delineate half the iceberg.  My sister had, I suppose, some
hundred or more boarders at her house in New Hampshire, and now lives
alone, having befriended none of them.  After fifteen tenants, I was
beginning to wonder, so it's nice to have a happily settled group.  I get
along well with excellent people, and Daisy's crew is the nicest I've ever
met, which is going some, because I hung out with some great kids in
Mexico.  They're my IRA, yet something more than something in the bank.
Samantha took Elston and Tonton gobuyinshop with her this morning, and if I
were a real literary god, instead of an ego-blown fake, I could sketch what
went on in their minds as they tagged along with Miss Red Silk Dress.  No
place for an adult, I have a feeling.

                   I haven't cross examined Samantha on Banks, the keyboard
guy.  I think Maugham wrote "The Razor's Edge", and that's a good
description of what it's like trying to protect the girl from herself,
while neutralizing my own interest.  I think I do it as well as I seem to
do everything these days, so, for the moment I'll let the sleeping dog lie.
It's easy to lose a partner by being lackadaisical, or drive one away by
acting possessive or demanding, or spoil a relationship by having it become
a relationship and thinking too much (a la Anne) about that which should be
natural, ongoing, and spontaneous.  Add the father/daughter aspect, the
incalculable difference in birth and breeding, and the race card, and
Maugham, it turns out, didn't know from razors.  Yet she is so far from
going native.  I've lived here over ten years, probably know four or five
dozen girls, and none of them has tweaked the slightest interest, save
Rhageedha, and even that's a case of her being predatory, rather than the
other way around.

                   Every time I go to the kitchen, I remind myself to write
a paragraph on color.  We have a catch-as-catch-can assortment of volunteer
(in the arboreal sense) plastic dishes, no earth tones.  Is light,
fluorescent green more hideous next to purple or blue?  Can yellow and pink
really be as horrible as they look?  It reminds me of Santa Fe.  When we
first moved into our adobe on East DeVargas Street, every room was painted
a different -- loud -- color.  It took twenty gallons of white to
change it, but when the sisters who owned it had a look, they walked around
in a trance for half an hour (another example of Tom Cruise falling for my
bait, not her's).  New Mexico is very monochromatic, although the rabbit
bush is often among the most beautiful color to be seen in nature, (along
with the indescribable blues of the Gulf Stream), and so the residents
overcompensate with bright this and gaudy that, like children, bringing us,
in the indubitable style that thrills writer and reader alike, to the
ugliest color on earth, which is the robins' egg blue of Seinfeld's
Porsche.  Oddly, the same color looks fabulous in a well-kept swimming
pool.  That reminds me of a joke from the Eighties, in fact, '87, the year
of the five-hundred point crash.  "They're not Yuppies, anymore, they're
Puppies (Previously Upwardly-mobile Urban Professionals).  What's the
difference between a Puppie and a pigeon?  A pigeon can still make a
deposit on a Porsche."  Awkward to end with an off-colored joke, but
writing never is a walk in the park.



                   "If you're in love," Ben said, "then it can go on all
night, just as you said, again and again, and, after a few hours of sleep,
again."
                   "Is it fun to wake up together?" the curious one asked.
                   "No," Jeff said, "not beyond having sex.  Maybe it's
what you say to each other when you first wake up that distinguishes gay
from straight.  Gay guys probably do like to laugh and tickle and fool
around as they're getting up, but most guys only want to do that with a
female, you know, baby talk and pillow dramatics, however much they might
like taking a boy to bed for an hour or two."
                   "So Chucky and I would each have our own bed, if we
could stay over?" Jeff asked.
                   "Your own rooms, with locks on the door, and every
permission to brood over fags, creeps, pervs, and abnormal psychology, in
isolation, if the mood strikes you."
                   "If I get depressed or confused, I think about
liberals," Jeff said, "then everything else takes on an aura of sanity."
                   "Tyne Daley works for me," Ben responded.  Both males
winced and lost a few strokes, learning, in the process, a taboo of excess
particular to their budding relationship.  (One day I may learn it too,
but, in the meantime, why Clint pulled her from behind that bazooka is the
principal mystery of my life.)

                   "Does Chucky have a sister?" Ben asked.
                   "Doris.  She's eight," the boy replied.
                   "If you have a relationship with him," Ben said, "she
might be a factor."
                   "I hadn't thought about that," the boy responded.
                   "Just be very careful," Ben advised, "kid sisters love
to spy and tattle, in some cases, in others, they become willing partners,
both with their older brothers and his special friends."
                   "Could she be with an adult?" the boy asked.
                   "If she's normal size, yes," the man said, "as long as
she likes him, and no demands, vis a vee romance and dating, are involved.
Time is what it is to a child, where adults like to plan and commit.  These
aspects can throw a juvenile lover out of kilter and mix up priorities
before they're properly formed.  Pretty Polly should not dwell, positively
or negatively, on Meddlesome Mack, but if they associate spontaneously, the
free part of Free Spirit may be exploited, no harm, no foul.

                   "The down side of underage sex is somewhat like the
downside of marijuana, " the young man went on.  "With pot, it's the cost,
not the drug; with childhood sex, it's the time and mental resources
diverted from important activities that are usually the problems, not the
physical act.  If there were cheap pot, there'd be far less problems
associated with it, and if a child has an untrammeled relationship, there's
no problem.  Just the opposite, in fact.  If a girl or boy hangs out with a
nice, educated older partner, they'll probably come off better than if he
or she spent an equal amount of time watching Ricki Lake or MTV.  At the
same time, there are degenerates who like to hump and haul-ass, so you've
got to watch out for those free lunches."

                   "Too many kooks spoil the schtoop," the little library
freak giggled.
                   "Yeah," the older male said, "and they'll let you have
their fake and eat it."

                   They remained rigidly swollen and hard, Ben, nearly
seven inches, uncircumcised, his thick penis ending in heavy purple glans,
and the lanky thirteen year old only slightly his junior in size, boyish
pink, also uncircumcised, slim, and bent slightly to his left.  Banter
though they might, slowly they were settling back on the log bench of the
shelter, spreading their legs more widely, Ben's left knee over Jeff's
opposite number.  Both masturbated slowly and hesitantly on the edge of
climax, wanting ever more and ever wanting the end.  Doing this looks sick,
lounging back, legs spread, expressions slack, sweating, panting, hugely
erect, hands stroking, not many would want to be captured thus for a
portrait, and it is quite an aesthetic oversight, when one thinks about it.
Margaret Mead writes of how tiresome it was to visit tribal villages where
young boys would masturbate each other with all the reticence of dogs or
chickens, so, anthropologically, also, the indulgent come off as losers, at
least in the eyes of straight-arrows whose lives are so often so filled
with so much utter nothing any brickbat they throw gives them something.
For the sake of word-count, let's suppose a quirk of fate has the golf
shelter in a remote location, where one healthy male, who, by the same
vagaries, happens to be nude, after another, passes by the open side.  They
pass by, look in, see an athletic young adult and a long-legged, coltish
boy, half recumbent, legs widely spread, knees overlapping, hands stroking
and fondling huge, uncircumcised erections, slowly pulling back foreskins
to show each other their wet glans, the adult's shiny and purple, the
child's, dark pink, both obviously ready to ejaculate; how many would shake
their heads and walk on, and how many would stop, become immediately and
hugely erect, move close, and cum all over the sweating young bodies?  You
can call it sick if you want, but shake your head, first.  I picture Anne's
first time with Tom Cruise.  I'm reaching Denver on the bus, unless she
called him the minute I was outta there, he's over with flowers and whatnot
for the date.

                   "Oh, Tom, they're lovely," she says as they kiss.
                   "I never can get over your place, darling," he says as
they hold hands walking through the big, white adobe with it two-foot thick
walls and genuine arches, "from the silly, over-framed poster in the red
and white bathroom, to mocking the cliché of the dentist's rubber tree
with the nine-foot beauty in back of the couch, and definitely not
forgetting the huge set of planters that look like artillery shell casings,
only made of brass at the base and exterior stone, and the set of little
ceramic houses with mullioned windows, it's better than any gallery in
town."
                   "I'm glad you like it," Anne says, able to add nothing
because not only was it my money, it was fifty-thousand miles searching
craft fairs from Juarez to Denver.
                   They adjourn to The Compound where Tom Cruise pays the
hundred and forty dollar check with a gold card, then return as my bus
passes the Springs.
                   "Can you stay awhile," she says, a little sleepy from so
much lobster, but stringing along is stringing along, and every day brings
the possibility of a pretty young client, and a broken string.  Not if she
can help it.
                   "Are you sure?" he asks, voice tender, sympathetic, and
concerned.  The girl has just turned down a life in two tropic houses with
a funny, loving guy, she needs the gentle handling of a rich but guilty
client.  Luckily, he's twenty-nine years old, so has some experience
putting the practice of handling people to numerous tests, so he just adds:
"I don't have to Anne, I love you, it can be some other time."
                   "Stay," she whispers, tear in her eyes from the strain
of finding enough wrong in our marriage to justify even a fit of anger,
much less a death sentence for our children, but this is the time and place
for discreet weeping, who knows how he'll take it? so the tears flow.  He
cuddles her, licking them gently away, and, arms around each other, she
leads him to the couch in front of the huge, perfect tree in its
twenty-gallon Chinese basket.  The television remains off as she turns out
the lamps and lights a candle purchased on the way home from dropping me at
the bus station, in a ceramic house the size of a shoe box.  They are able
to admire the realistic artwork, bonding, plus, it makes an excuse to leave
the room all-but dark.  Everything set and adjusted, the slim dancer
settles on the couch, the new man on her left.  They nuzzle and kiss
affectionately, lobster, wine, and peeping candle a string trio playing
soft and low.  She touches his face and he hers.  Her hands go to his tie
and she becomes charmingly wifely as she loosens the knot and places over
the sports jacket on the back of the couch, then returns for the collar
button.  "You're sure," he again whispers softly, reassuringly.  Why he
should be sure of anything, allowing for the stringent combination of
performance and perfection required of him, year in and year out, is a
mystery, but her teen breasts are now inches away, so that might be the
solution.  "Shh," she whispers, now on the second button.
                   "We can wait until we're married," he reminds her,
goodest of good guys, which he'll have to remain, forever.
                   "Shh," she repeats, to his groan of, "Oh, Anne."
                   Third button.
                   "Were you and Tom Emerson ever close before you were
married?" he asks, his voice soft and confidential..
                   "That's private," she says, perhaps a little quicker at
the next button.
                   "Were you a virgin with him?" her age mate says.  He
feels a twinge of discomfiture, but her first husband has been with her for
four years, has only been gone from a visit for a few hours, it's
frustrating having him dead as a doornail.
                   "Don't," she says, gently as a mother to a sick child or
a private nurse to a wealthy patient.
                   "I'm sorry," he says softly, "it's just that I love you
so much I can't help being curious."
                   Other girls would scheme: hmm, a little verbal
voyeurism, it might turn him on, set another hook, but she's given up a
brilliant career as an artist as well as an attractive, rich, sexy husband;
might have to support herself for years, rather than living in two houses
in the Caribbean, not a situation in which a prudent girl takes chances.
And the truth was not likely to help after weeks of touch-free dates, that
she'd showered with her first husband on their second date, swollen and
arched to his strong touch from behind, and held and hugged closer for the
experience, then, at seven the next morning, spread her legs wide and
arched her bottom as he entered her Brookline bedroom and stripped.  She
didn't even ask about protection, but took him hot, wet, and immediately.
He thrust slowly, twice, then entered her to the hilt as her arms went
around him and she bucked hard and fast against him.  Though he'd always be
with her at least half an hour in the future often as not, longer, she had
the wildness of a virgin in love, and in less than twenty minutes he was
straining over her, letting her have her own long, personal, special orgasm
as he restrained mightily, then, the minute she'd recovered, and I do mean
minute, let his sperm gush into her, sustained by her gurgles of happy
welcome.  In verbal voyeurism, there can be many a slip between cup and
lip, so Anne was wise to claim the dignity of privacy and hold her tongue.
Of course, avid, long-term readers will know she didn't hold her tongue,
her kiss to me, at the Greyhound station, as I leaned through the window of
her brand new car for a peck on the cheek, said she wouldn't be holding it,
which is why a consenting, unrelated-adult story is here in the first
place.

                   "It's okay," she says, the formal repartee of dating
melting into the sympathetic cadences of lovers, "he's gone, and there are
things we can do together that I never did with him, so we'll have our
privacy, too."
                   "Oh, yes, darling," he whispers, his eyes finally
leaving the beautiful little glowing ceramic house, to find hers.  She
finishes his buttons with a shy smile, and leads his hands to her own
girlish chest.  They nuzzle and kiss as he unbuttons her, taking a moment,
lips securely together, to remove both their tops and place them over the
back of the sofa.  He then breaks the kiss to look down at her breasts,
swollen and urgent against her wispy bra.  Her kiss to me had urgency in
it, and Tom Cruise is the beneficiary.  As he touches her neck and
shoulders, her hands go to the waist of his slacks.  The buckle undone,
there's a momentary awkwardness as she drops to her knees for his right
shoe and sock, the latter most important, while he strips his left foot.
In a minute he's openly fondling her as she finishes with his belt and
zipper.  Now she becomes girlish, bending to him and retracting her
shoulders.  He unsnaps the same cloth I used to, letting the straps fall
from her shoulders.  She cups herself modestly with her hands, then rises,
dropping the bra.  Her breasts are pretty as a child's, and he murmurs
softly as he finds them with his fingers, fondles her, and closes to her
for a long, tender kiss.

                   Her hands separate his trouser flaps and he lifts so she
can slide then down over his bare feet.  Here we run into a problem.  I
never met the guy, have never seen him in a picture; for all I know, we'd
be amigos from day one, all things being equal, so I have no reason to be
prejudicial.  While I arbitrarily rejected divorcees without a damn good
reason, as anything more than casual dates, he had different standards and
the training to execute on those suitable to the moment, so there's
probably some basis for antipathy if our paths should ever cross, all of
which is an exceedingly long way of saying that nothing prejudicial is
intended when I have him on the couch in his underwear, it's just that I've
been with a hundred adult males in different situations, and watched some
hundred or so more have sex, and I've never seen another male any bigger
than I am, and most are notably smaller.  As you can tell, I'm exercising
massive skill and experience in being discreet and gentlemanly here, but
there are limits, and I reach one when I attempt articulating Anne's
response to the bulge in Tom Cruise's shorts.  Let's, to keep the story
moving, say he's average, where I'm not, that there's a bulge over his
briefs (as well as inside them), which would be average.  Again, I wasn't
then, and am not, now.  Let's picture as somewhat hairy.  I'm not.  Let's
be fair, and paint his shorts as spotless, which mine probably weren't
always.

                   His hips are back on the sofa as Anne brushes aside his
slacks.  She would have had a problem in my day, because here hair was like
a girl's, half way down her back, but she doesn't now, because she's
wearing primps and curls.  She exposes him, his five inch penis hard as a
little boy's, and, sliding him forward on the sofa, and spreading his legs
even more widely then he's spread them, the looks into his eyes, then bends
to him, her tongue extended, her lips pursed.
                   "Oh, Anne," the twenty nine year old moans, "you don't
have to, baby."  She smiles graciously, and bends again to him as lolls
back in the seat, face slack, sweating, panting, and raising his hips to my
wife.  She finds him fully and takes him deeply, using the muscles of her
throat to massage his blistering, purple glans.  His hands find her crinkly
hair, where mine would have tendrilled soft, luxurious silk, but he can see
everything.  She becomes comfortable, her elbow's on his quaking thighs,
her hands on him with her mouth, and settles to her privacy with him, her
hands working beautifully, and this I do know because she was mad at me one
night and jerked me off in two minutes, flat, many happy boyfriends
undoubtedly in her past, her head bobbing and tongue clenching his achingly
swollen glans to the roof of her hot, wet mouth and sliding sensually
against him.  Nor his it just her head that's bobbing, her mind is weaving
too.  "Hmm," she thinks to herself, then articulates, to Tom's grunt, "he
likes to quiz me about Tom Emerson, let me think."  Tom's fingers are
gentle in her hair, he coaxes her sweetly, she calculates perfectly, and
slowly, tenderly breaks off, rising over his half reclining body to kiss
him, his own scent an aphrodisiac to them both.  "I never did it with Tom,"
she says, "but I did with a boyfriend in Albuquerque, a big, rangy,
redheaded guy.  Do you want me to tell you about that?"
                   "Oh, darling," he whispers into her mouth, as her hands
continue to fondle him, holding him with her left, and sensitive with his
tip with her right.. She takes it for a yes.
                   "He was almost too tall to get into the police academy,"
she whispers to him, "we dated four or five times.  He drank too much to be
serious about, but I had a big crush on him, some girls never grow up, and
I wanted to stay a virgin until I was married, so I invited him into my
apartment one night."
                   "Did you make out?" Tom whispered, knowing he was being
impetuous, but he'd seen a client or two dig him or herself out of a trap
in his career, so he was bolder than the next guy might have been.
                   "We talked," Anne responded, her voice sympathetic, "but
he was special to me, like a dog might be, and he was very attractive, and
we'd had wine, and I said I wouldn't marry him, but that he was worth
pleasing, and there was something I'd never done while I dated, and I'd
like to do it with him, in the bedroom.  He agreed.  I told him to go in
and strip and lie back on the bed.  He did.  I took my blouse and skirt off
in the living room and went into him in my bra and panties.  "We can do
this every few days until I move to Boston, but then it's over," she said
softly, taking off her bra and letting him see her teenage breast for the
first time.  She knelt between his legs, bare chested and sloe eyed, and
bent to his hard, circumcised penis, flat against the trail of reddish hair
leading to his tiny navel.  "Sorry," she whispered, rising back to her
feet, and retrieving a comb from her bureau; quickly clasping her flowing
mane of brown hair.  She quickly returned, taking him low with her left
hand, and high with her right, stroking him beautifully.  "Don't cum in my
mouth, I want to watch you and see your sperm on my right breast, like I
did with my first steady boyfriend."  "Yes," the male replied.  "Be sure
and tell me," she reminded him, now bending over as he spread his legs,
ankles over the sides of the apartment size bed, and arched to her.  The
used him a little awkwardly at first, but quickly learned to protect his
sensitive, swollen glans with her darting tongue, so she could be deep and
hard and fast with him.  His hands caressed her, then he arched, lacing his
fingers behind his neck to feast on the sight of her bobbing face, his
five-inch penis disappearing almost fully into her mouth.  She stayed with
him minute after minute, and became more avid as he began to tense
dramatically, finally becoming wanton and open in response to his riding
tidal wave of hot sperm.  "Oh, please, Anne," he mewed.  She let him go for
a moment, he was a nice guy, if she were going to stay, who knew, a nice
drunk might be a better bet than some wanna-be arteest or philandering
doctor, so who knew?  "I'm sorry," she whispered, stroking him hard and
fast, holding him against her right breast as his hips froze and he held
his breath, tensing with a final agonized groan, than ejaculated hotly and
heavily against her chest, spraying her shoulders and face with his
release, and sagging like a rag doll as her hands milked him, becoming
slick with the final gouts of his pouring semen.  "I'm, sorry," she
repeated, "but I was brought up in the church and good girls do certain
things only with their husbands."
                   "It's okay," the strapping redhead signed, "you look
beautiful."

                   "Oh, baby," Tom Cruise sighed, obviously tensing for his
last time.  Anne lowered again to him, now holding him low and hard, her
mouth half-open as she swirled her tongue fast and hard against his manly,
swollen tip.  "I', cumming, darling," Tom Cruise whispered, and moments
later his first gush of hot salt filled her mouth, sheeting of her lower
lip and spilling to his soft, hairy belly.  He spurt again with an agonized
grunt, his knuckles white as the clasped her head, then in a fast, hard
frenzy, again and again, as his gushing sperm sheeted in tendrils and globs
from her lower lip, covering his sweating belly.  "We can rinse these and
they'll be dry in the morning [New Mexico has low humidity] she said,
retrieving his briefs and wiping him carefully.  "Now take me into the
bedroom and get me pregnant."  As the couple left the living room, she
dropped to her knees by a table and blew out the candle in the sweet little
toy house.

                   My first time with Samantha has to be a lot more
dramatic than this.  Knowing her as child and girl for over eight years is
part of it, and her vitality and halting aggression help, too.  If you were
in love with a young girl, and gave her a dollar, choose from the following
list that which you'd want her to buy with it.  A) Candy.  B) Berets.  C)
Marbles.  D) Firecrackers.  Samantha calls them pot shots, while the other
kids refer to them as pop shots or fire rickets.  She has her own words for
a number of things, and is not above clobbering me over the head with a
little lightning-fast Garafuna, as if her lively, inventive Creole needed
any spicing up.  Kissing her is so remarkable and extraordinary, half an
hour lasts two weeks, easy.  I forebear here, abide, and live in wonder
than she wants to kiss, sexually, at all.  I've met precious few women in
their forties, never mind fifties, I'd want to make out with, though they
might be attractive enough for sex, so its something I leave entirely up to
her.  I've been with the odd twenty or thirty prostitutes, and only two of
them, both very young, wanted to kiss.  On the other hand, there's
Rhageedha, who was aggressive, passionate, and superb for at least ten
minutes, and Randy, likewise, so perhaps I am being cheated a tiny bit.
She's wonderfully open on other age matters.  She, from time to time, calls
me Grandpa, and says I look, a, old, b, dead, and, c, like a ghost, which
gets her into fights with Elston over the difference between ghost and
spirit.  Fortunately, these comments tend to come at the end of
ten-thousand word marathons, when, after twenty or more hours, I probably
do look a little bleary and frayed around the edges, my trade not being a
walk in the park.  She cuddles happily, and locks the door, herself, for a
private half hour together.  Sunday, she lay sleeping on her back for
hours, then suddenly attacked moments before Queenie knocked on the screen
door.  On writing this, I can't help wondering if she'd heard Louise's
footstep coming up the outside staircase.  Suspicious mind.  In any event,
cuddling with her in her red silk, with her beautifully sculpted belly
curving into her silky thighs, was good enough for the daylight hours,
before and after ten minutes of having her panties all the way off and her
smooth calves urging me to her bucking loins.  I do wonder if, when we
showered together at White Pond, in Concord, if I'd gently pushed down on
Anne's naked shoulders, she would have dropped to her knees while I turned
off the water and braced against the stall.  I guess the other Tom knows
better than I do.  She could have guided me, the same way, but didn't.
Maybe that's what both of us were making up for at seven the next morning,
and why her three roommates, and boyfriends, were all tittering around the
place for hours and she grinned and blushed.  By that time, it was too
late, being inside her was vital, hot, and always totally satisfying, even
the one time I didn't quite cum before she started getting sore.  In four
years I never experienced any urge to do anything but hold her, kiss her,
and cum before she tired or became uncomfortable.

                   I think I've discovered what may be the ultimate
literary device.  You know how they tell you in writing articles and
seminars that's a novel is meant to be centered around the resolution of a
conflict, right?  I've cheated on this, putting the reader in fear of his
own survival, then typing away.  This is probably a cheat, too, but I like
it so much I'm going to use it.  The core conflict becomes the
one-millionth word.  We passed that number of characters, some pages back,
so that would indicate we're a little under a fifth of the way down our
path together.  In my career, I've read, out of three thousand, some
hundred or more books that I wished would never end, just go on and on, so
delightful and friendly were they, so informative, so just plaint,
old-fashioned, readable.  You're too fat and messed up to warrant friendly,
but the challenge is still there, binding us and bonding us in a plot that
thickens, if just by the smallest amount, with each of the new words set
clearly on its line and properly in its place.

                   It would be easy to overplay to meet the challenge.  For
example, an hour ago I was sitting at the little table in the living room,
having a cup of tea, when I witnessed Queenie putting the tortilla dough
back in the refrigerator.  If I start off on tangents like that, next thing
you know I'll be bragging, once again, about how successful my new `ice
bottle' scheme is, not only at assuring plenty of the cold crystal, but at
getting the girl and the three boys to bring back the empties, so they can
be filled and re-frozen.  That this has spilled over into their returning
almost all our humble collection of bright, plastic dishes, and forks and
spoons, and cups, is surely more than the average reader wants to know,
unless they happen to have kids and are looking for a good training device
that has the somewhat odd side benefit of supplying large amounts of frozen
water.

                   Someone called me a stupid idiot from the street last
night.  The five, and I count them as six, went into about the fourth
frenzy of the evening, so I ran them off cussing and stomping.  The street
to the east is blocked by a palm Andrew is meant to trim before it invades
the entire front porch, so I didn't see what the dogs were barking at.  Out
from behind the huge frond comes Miss American, being led by two shepherds.
She says, "They're barking at me, you stupid idiot."  My mind works so fast
at such occasions I'm able to phrase my retort, and then decide against
uttering it, for the sake of, ironically, peace in the neighborhood.
However, I can write it: "Sorry, I didn't know they were yapping at a
bitch."  I also refrained from pointing out that I was a hundred and eighty
thousand words into an intensely difficult novel, and was being downloaded
at the rate of thirty or forty thousand files a week, which might have made
her feel stupid.  Grace under pressure is not my normal mien, I'm short
tempered and foul-mouthed, the message: "Get out of my face, so I can get
back to work," but this was a transient situation, so I put a lid on it and
allowed as to how bright she was (I meant at inciting dogs to pack
behavior, never a good idea in a neighborhood full of tiny kids, but didn't
bother explaining, just went back to work, no Sabbath for the godless)

                   Jay's always teasing Kevin Eubanks about stories from
the hood, so I hope I can get away with one or two along the way.  After
all, it's a rainy day on the golf course, and David Niven, in admitting
homosexual activities during his school years, described them as mostly
boring.  Mario was the most beautiful boy, or person, I was ever with, and
he was boring, even after several anticipatory weeks when I'd pass his
house and he'd wave and call out.  This was in Torreon.  One day he was
washing a car, bare chested, and stopped me on the sidewalk with his hose.
I was very much in love with Jose, and affair running, by this time, to
over three years, but, yes, I stopped.  Like Laura, in Santa Fe, at about
the fifth or sixth approach, my character flawed, and we spoke with Mario
inviting himself up as fast and slick as it could be done, considering the
language barrier, say, half a minute.  He came by that evening after the
landlord had closed his shop and gone home.  He sat on my left on the bed.
We talked and watched television for a few minutes, then he lay back.  He
looked eleven, white as an Irish boy, soft-skinned and exquisitely,
perfectly formed.  I lay back on my left side beside him, and, looking
down, pulled his soap spattered knit shirt from his shorts, and began
touching him around his tiny belly button.  He raced ahead, kicking off his
sneakers, then stripping off his shirt and shorts.  He had just the
faintest growth of pubic hair, so blond I could feel it with the fingers of
my right hand, more than see it, as I slowly pulled down his clean, white
underpants.  He brought his hips up for me, and I got him naked, then stood
and stripped as he watched.  He spread his legs and pumped hard,
whimpering.  I lay naked against his now sweating and panting thirteen year
old body, holding him under his shoulders with my left arm and molesting
him openly with my right hand.  He moaned and humped much too fast, getting
half-hard when I was able to meet his rhythm for a few seconds, then going
almost limp, uncircumcised and four boyish inches, while asking if I had
any porno moves and if I'd suck him.  He then stood in front of me, spread
his legs wide, and laced his fingers behind his neck, arching his
quarter-erect penis to me.  I tried again to masturbate him, because
avoiding disease has to be a specialty of embryonic writers, but it only
seemed to made him more flaccid and cold.  He made hustler efforts with me,
but by that time, I was fully turned off, so I dressed him and gave him
some money, which surprised him.  He returned twice, but both times he was
off like a greyhound, and I couldn't have hot, noisy sex with him in an
assistencia.  We stayed friends, but one thing was for sure, Jose had
nothing to worry about.  And, yes, I told him about it, as he told me of a
small number of other partners who came his way, especially, smiling shyly,
when he acknowledged to me that he'd taken the semen of an adult friend in
his mouth..  We weren't a heavy kissing couple, but that one lasted ten
minutes.  I never came in his mouth, because having him masturbate me into
the bathroom sink, his hand wet with soapy water, sometimes mixed with his
sperm, was, I damn well knew, as much sex as I could survive.  With one
exception, he was the only male I sucked in something like five years,
although I did jerk off with perhaps a dozen.  In fact, my entire list of
oral partners, before and since being dumped, runs to Jose, Steven, Andrew
and Clarence.  I used to watch cute guys in bath houses give that many guys
head in a few hours.  (Or listen through a cubical door.)  It is, always
has been, and as far as I know, always will be research, and, if that as an
artist, not a scientist, well, my report and findings should still be read,
at least for entertainment.

                   Since a constant theme, whether fiction or not, is age
and sexuality, I'll journey back to Torreon for a true kid story.  I
frequented a banos vapor about twenty blocks from my house.  The fellow
that ran it, a masseuse in his sixties, was a wary guardian, sometimes
sneaking up on the door of the sauna, and popping it open, so the
opportunities for sex were almost nil.  One afternoon I went in (I liked
the exercise of the walk, and it was like a buck for a changing room), and,
when I entered the sauna, there was a man in his young thirties with a
beautiful little three year old boy in his lap.  It was a small facility,
so I sat within a foot of them.  The child pulled away the towel they'd
apparently just pulled over themselves, and sat naked in the man's lap.
The man said I had a beautiful body, and then whispered in a stage whisper
to the boy, explaining, neither directly to me, or to the child, that he,
the child, wasn't fuerte enough to make him, the man, spill leche, aqui
(milk, here), pointing to his stomach below his belly button.  The man
molested the boy for half an hour, very gently so as not to give him an
erection, as the child lay back, beaming happily at me.  The man was able
to tamper with the boy just enough to keep both of us half hard, which was
something of an erotic feat, considering how long it went on.  Finally,
more people joined us, so they pulled the towel over themselves.  My ace
vision would be if Jose had been with me, and the place had been run by a
smart millionaire, rather than a dumb paranoid.  How dumb?  The three young
boys working for him were all highly homosexual.  I can't remember how much
of all this I may have told elsewhere, and one does not review a million
words and keep writing new ones, but, anyway, on another occasion at this
house of innocence, just as I turned into the hallway to the changing
rooms, I caught a glimpse of the pudgy little boy who worked there, perhaps
thirteen or fourteen.  He was absolutely huge, a small, soft, round body,
with a seven inch erection, so long, it half curved back on itself.  In
less than a second he disappeared into the pump room, and I caught a
glimpse of one of the other boys, a lean, slim, beauty, his head over that
of the third boy, probably mounted.  Anyway, Jose, who probably wouldn't
have been interested, in my fantasy, does.  He sits across from me in the
small room, his knees touching mine, and removes his towel.  I remove mine.
The little boy removes his, and now his adult partner is big and hard.  The
tyke looks at his erection, touches it, then smiles shyly at Jose and I.  I
lean to my left and take his tiny right hand in mine, then guide him to the
adult, providing the fuerte while his fondles the adult and sets the
rhythm.  Jose stands, spreads his legs wide, and, bracing himself of the
upper tier of teak seats, begins masturbating, his big penis quickly
becoming harder than when we have sex.  I keep helping the child, the man
lies back as half my characters seem to be doing of late, and thrusts his
hips to the now eager child.  For a few moments I slow with the two or
three year old, allowing Jose to approach and set is swollen, purple glans
on the seminal fluid spilling from the adult, then he spreads himself more
widely, hisses esperma, which, I know not if it's the proper Spanish word,
and begins spurting his thick, white semen over my hand and the little
boys.  Three big spurts jet from his sixteen-year-old waist, he does not go
on and on, like Andrew, or a boy in a story, but, by now my hand is hot and
slipper.  The little boy pants: "Leche, leche," and the adult comes fast
and hard as Jose is stripping the last drops of sperm from his still hard
penis.  As it was, I want home, put in my six hours at the typewriter, and
tried to remember the non-encounter for future reference.  Several other
misses, too.  He once brought a willowy, almost white friend, Felipe, over.
The boy flashed on me in an instant.  He was almost as attractive as Mario,
and obviously would be a hundred times the lover.  Jose wasn't interested
in him, so nothing happened.  I guess Juan, from a strictly sexual
standpoint, although we were great friends, was my most interesting
partner, and, again, my apologies if this story appear elsewhere.  He was a
very typical looking Mexican kid, perhaps five pounds heavy, but otherwise
mildly attractive.  We met at the bowling alley, where he and his brother,
Jesus, were pin boys.  Jose and I had been active for months, so these were
kids I just hung out with, mostly at the municipal pool, without more than
passing thoughts of a prurient nature.  Then Juan, by far the most
unlikely, started molesting me in the pool, and I don't mean by half.  I
was working on me first high board, so I'd get up nerve at poolside, before
climbing out, or something like that.  Juan would home in on me like a
torpedo, but his left arm around my neck, and feel me, underwater, with his
right, just like a pedophile does with a little boy.  He'd bob under water,
so he could get both arms around my teen waist, and stay down for a minute.
He never quite reached all the way into my trunks, but did touch me several
times, just quickly. Since we swam, four to six of us, every day, this
became a reoccurring event.  I told Jose about it, then invited Juan over,
giving the other boys money to go and buy something.  He'd been to my
apartment numerous times, and, our first time alone together, led me
quickly into the bathroom, where we both stripped for the shower.  He got
in with me and let me wash him to within two or three inches of his soft
penis.  He didn't want more, so we dried off, and he led me to my bed,
where I lay back, still naked, with him, also naked, on my right.  At this
point, he wouldn't let me touch him other than are arms being pressed
together.  I began masturbating, and he got a four inch boner, but still
gently refused any touching, saying it was for muchachas.  I asked if I
could cum on his belly, mi esperma en su estomacha, and he nodded.  And
that's exactly how we had sex twenty or thirty times, always with him
stripping as he walked down the hall to the bath.  In addition, he
continued molesting me from behind in the pool for a total of at least half
an hour every day.  I think this story is advisory in that it tells us boys
know exactly how far they want to go, and love going that far with someone
they trust implicitly.  A slightly event happened another time.  Five very
young boys, probably eight to ten, happened over.  I was trying to work as
they horsed around, then one went and closed and locked the door to the
hall, while another got in my lap and pulled off his shirt.  I began
fondling his bare chest as the other four gather close.  After a few
minutes, they pulled me to my feet, and led me into the bathroom.  We all
stripped out of our tee shirts and shorts.  The oldest boy stood on the
tile divider between the shower and the bathroom, and another boy led me to
him.  I went down on his thumb size erection, and sucked him gently for
four or five minutes, then gathered other naked boys to me, and started
molesting them as they took turns masturbating me.  The ten year old came
off his six inch perch, and joined the others, much to my appreciation,
because he had a strong, steady way with his hand.  Three times more, I
went down on my knees to suck his hard penis, and each time he led me back
to his original position, then submitted, his hips thrusting, his hands in
my hair.  He finally had a hard, yipping cum, leaving a definite salty
slickness on the tip of my tongue.  I stood against the wall, spreading my
legs, and he wet his hand with soapy water and in two minutes made me spray
all over the naked boys.  They stayed for another hour, then clattered off.
Three of them came over a few days later, but showed no interest in
repeating what had happened in the bathroom, so we just talked and hung
out.  As they were leaving, I succumbed, for, I think the only time in my
life, depending on how you look at it, and pulled down my shorts.  They
came back in the bedroom and pulled their down.  They were soft, but stood
close and pulled their shirts up as I started cuming within ten seconds,
then I carefully dried them with a towel before they left.  I saw them at
the pool after that, but don't recall them visiting except as part of a
group.
                   The fat man story?  It was at the same time, and makes a
fourth partner for oral sex.  I suppose I met him and the banos.  He had a
beautiful young teen of classic Mexican appearance, and was not at a loss
to invite himself and his young partner over.  That was interesting;
beautiful boy, obese man, perhaps thirty.  I said okay, and we went to my
apartment.  We all stripped without foreplay, and he lay back on my bed.
There was a hint of rape to the situation, because he was going to be
sucked, and outweighed me by fifty pounds.  He was neither attractive nor
repulsive, so, after two or three attempts to masturbate him, and the naked
boy watched, I finally went down him.  Never let your prejudices be your
guide, he was hot and fabulous, probably had never been sucked by a cute,
naked Anglo before.  He panted, and writhed, and suddenly got huge in my
mouth.  Suddenly I was as hot as he was, partly because the young boy was
looking, and became wanton and aggressive with him.  After that he lasted a
beautiful three or four minutes, then without a whisper or tremor, filled
my mouth with hot spurt after spurt of salty sperm.  As I swallowed, he lay
back, cuddling the boy to him.  They started making out while the boy began
to masturbate against the man's heavy belly.  This went on for five
minutes, with me looking on from a foot away, then the boy's hand froze,
and he spurt four streaks of crystal white semen on his lover's sweating
stomach.  I never saw them again, and wouldn't have likely invited them
over, if I had.

                   Cruising in Torreon was a lazy man's venture.  My
experiences started in all innocence.  Beautiful as my place was, I'd get
feeling house-bound from time to time and walk the mile into town.  The
plaza was well lighted, so I decided to take a book and read.  Guess again.
The first time I hadn't been seated on a bench for five minutes and a cute
fourteen year old, who looked about nine, came and sat down beside me.  My
Spanish was practically nil, but it didn't bother him and he was quickly
successful in inviting himself over, not for money, which he made clear.
Naked, he looked one stage beyond a toddler, but with ten or fifteen
minutes of gentle molestation and masturbation, he hiked his hips and
spurted a teaspoon of almost clear seed on his sweating little tummy.
Since it was too good to be true, I made rare reappearances at the park,
and, I think two or three more times, was literally led home by an eager
fourteen year old.  I don't recall ever seeing the same boy twice, and was
never hustled in any way.  I once asked Jose if he wanted to go with me,
but, again, it wasn't his thing, so it never happened.

                   It's really settled in to rain.  Golf is out of the
question.  Eventually they may have to take their soaking and return to the
clubhouse, but for now, Jeff and Ben are masturbating very carefully,
sharing with an occasional whisper the sensation of their building sperm.

                   Meantime, there was a girl.  Ten.  I can almost remember
her name, but I'll call her Tina.  I was half accosted by her mother at a
local restaurant.  She spoke perfect English, and introduced herself and
her daughter, then settled in to chat.  She was starting a knitting
business in one of the surrounding pueblos, and was interested in my
entrepreneurial experiences, so we talked at length.  She'd lived years in
Canada, and was interesting particularly because her English, which she'd
learned as an adult, was so perfect I could even detect a Canadian accent.
We met a number of times.  She was after me, with Tina as bait, but she was
pasty and overweight, so no dice.  There was a rich man she knew, call him
Francisco, and she took me over to his house.  When we left, Tina stayed.
The next day, we picked her up, this time with Jose along.  We went to my
fanciest restaurant, and had dinner.  I've seen flirting before, and I've
seen flirting, but Tina coming on to Jose was one for the books.  She
preened, she teased, she roller her eyes, she winked, she pelted him,
gently, with peas; simpered and smoldered.  He looked on like a tolerant
big brother, which did nothing to ameliorate her predatory behavior.  We
split up, after the meal, so nothing happened, but this is a fair
approximation of what might have.  Tina's mother we'll call Maria.

                   "Tom," Maria said, "I wonder if I could talk to you for
a minute."  She nodded at the sixteen year old and ten year old, and they
went to look at the desert trolley.
                   "What?" I asked.  I like her, but had no interest in
anything beyond a casual friendship.
                   "My wool got stuck Chihuahua," she replied.  "I want to
take the bus up and collect it, but I don't want to take Tina along.  She
seems to like you and Jose, so I wondered if she could stay with you."
                   "Jose usually doesn't spend the night," I replied, "but
we can ask him.  In any event, she's welcome to stay."
                   "Thanks," Maria said, "that's a life saver.  Trips like
this are hectic enough when I do them by myself, and there's no time or
money so she can have a good time."
                   "No problem," I said.  "My landlord doesn't allow
females, but I've been there for years and I don't think he'll mind.  He
probably won't even know, and I've got enough money to check her into a
hotel, if there's a problem."  That settled that.  They returned to the
table where Maria, in lightning Spanish, informed Jose of the situation.
Tina, following every word like a hungry cat, reached across the table and
held both our hands.  We paid and left, Maria for the bus station, and the
two of us with the girl for the movies, because she was fun to be with and
it was still early.  We shared sweet tamales with her, after the show, then
took her home.  By this time the landlord had gone home, and we arrived at
my apartment undetected.

                   Jose went in to use the bathroom.  I sat beside Tina on
one of the beds.  "I can leave you guys, at least for a couple of hours,
you know, see the nine o'clock show, if you want."
                   "No," she whispered, "stay."  I went down the hall to
intercept Jose as he emerged from the toilet.  I told him I could go, and
even check into a hotel if he wanted, but he just held on to me, making
translation or other charades unnecessary.  I returned to the bedroom and
sat opposite Tina as Jose took my place next to her.  She was a slim,
pretty Anglo-looking girl with big friendly brown eyes, a sweet laughing
mouth, and brown hair in a simple school-girl mop.  We talked about the
movie, she translating on the fly, and I even got to take advantage of her
by asking my male partner some questions that were too complex for our
simple dialogues.  Eventually, the conversation came to a somewhat tense
halt.

                   "Jose and I slept together on our trip to Mexico City,"
I said to her, so you can have this bed if you want."
                   "That's okay," she said, leaning now obviously against
the lanky youth.  Jose had a face much like Samantha's, a second glance
face.  She looked up into his eyes, and saw what I did; behind the slightly
generous features, and post-acne complexion, a quiet, rare, dazzling,
brown-eyed beauty.  "Do you have any candles?" she asked.
                   I did and got a pair, and holders, from the closet.
Girlish, she wanted to light them, and I turned out the lights as she
placed them on the small table between the beds, returning to nestle
against Jose.
                   I'm a writer now and I was a writer then.  "Do you want
to talk, or do you just want it to happen?" I asked her in a soft,
noncommittal voice.
                   "My mom says it's okay to tell secrets to the right
friends," the ten year old replied.  I don't know if Jose was flattered,
language barrier, but I was.
                   "Did Francisco ask you questions, last night?" I asked.
                   "Yes," she said, nodding perhaps a little shyly.
                   "Were they really personal?" I quizzed.
                   "Yes," she said, again, "he asked me about what happened
last year in Canada."
                   "Did you answer?" I asked.
                   "Yes," she said.
                   "Did you just answer questions, or did you tell him
everything?" I wanted to know.
                   "I told him about my dad," the girl said.
                   "Were you sitting in separate chairs, or were you
together?" I asked.
                   "He had me in his lap," the girl replied.
                   "Did you like that?" I asked.  Francisco was heavy, in
his fifties, but in good shape and not unattractive.
                   "I didn't feel like I do with you and Jose," she said,
"but he was gentle.  It was okay."
                   "Were you wearing a dress or shorts and a blouse?" Jose
asked, speaking slowly so I could follow.
                   "Mom gave me a bikini to wear for him," she said with a
gentle blush.
                   "How was he dressed?" I asked.
                   "In a tee shirt and his briefs," she said, adding: "He
was nice, he never took them off."
                   "Did you keep your bra on?" Jose asked, Tina translating
the word for the undergarment, then answering.
                   "No," she said, "when I started telling him about my
dad, he undid it in back, and took it off me."
                   "Did you like him looking at you?" I said.
                   "Not as much as my dad," she said, softly, "but it was
nice.  He's really helped mom a lot, and he asked me before he started
touching me."
                   "Did he try to kiss you?" Jose asked.
                   "No," she said, "just on the forehead, when mom picked
me up this morning."
                   "Did your nipples swell when he touched you?"  That
would be me.
                   "A little," she said, "but not like they are now.  Now
they're even more than with my dad."
                   "You're getting more mature," I said, "plus, if your
males don't wear condoms, they stimulate your hormones and that makes you
develop earlier than other girls."
                   "Oh," the sweetie said, then mused: "that's true.  Sadie
Nordberg and Stacy Samuels both got like I did and they both had cute older
brothers that they used to hang out with."

                   Have I mentioned I'm a writer?  I guess my copy speaks
for itself, writers are lucky that way, but I bring it up because at that
time I was a writer in need of that extra thousand words, and only a
picture would do.  "Would you like us to look at you while you're telling
us about your dad?" I asked.
                   "Yes," she whispered, standing with her back to Jose so
he could untie the simple shift she was wearing.  Without show, she
shrugged the garment into his rough, teen hands, and he folded it carefully
as she turned to face him.  Her back was white, slim and graceful, just
beginning to flare at her not-quite boyish hips.  I unsnapped her training
bra, and let the straps fall to where she caught them in her elbows.  I
stood behind her, my hands soft on her flanks, as Jose stood in front of
her and quickly stripped naked.  I'd never seen his penis so huge and
swollen, though he'd ejaculated with me numerous times.  He'd never seen me
the way I was, either, so we were even.  Since I had an inch in length him
(I'm bigger than all but two percent of males, all of them, apparently,
porn stars), I remained dressed, but joined him in molesting the slim ten
year old as she spread her elbows and let her bra drop to Jose's knees.  I
eased her to him and he quickly found her left nipple with his gentle mouth
(when we did kiss it was sensational), while I fondled her
big-strawberry-size right breast.  Her hands went to his penis jutting hot,
purple, and wetter than I'd ever seen it against the tender flesh below her
belly button.  The sixteen year old brought his legs together, and I eased
Tina onto his lap.  "I've never kissed, but I hugged my dad when we were
bare chested," the girl said, tilting her pretty face to his.  I returned
to the other bed and sat, masturbating slowly for ten minutes as I watched
her learn what I had some years earlier on his first visit to my
apartment. She was torn between masturbating him and pulling him to her,
finally reaching to me.  I found Jose huge and hot, and, wetting him,
stroked him gently as her fingers slowly, methodically, and repeatedly
raked his back, right under my eyes, leaving white trails in his beautiful
brown skin.  Jose had the most beautiful chest I've ever seen on a male,
one percent short of a body-builder physique, and somehow more essentially
rugged and masculine.  What her tender, budding nipples must have felt as
he panted against her I can only imagine.

                   Twice Jose left her mouth to turn and bite me gently on
my right arm, so I kept masturbating him as he taught her while he ran his
fingers over her chest, constantly returning to her dark pink nipples.  For
long moments, I thought he was going to lie her back on the bed, stare down
on her as she stripped out of her panties, and mount her heavily on the
spot, then she began whispering.  I changed from standing behind her,
looking down over her shoulder at what Jose was doing to her, and sat on
Jose's right so I could continue gently jerking him off as the girl settled
with a sigh against his powerful chest, her arms still around his athletic
back.

                   "It was the payments on the tractor," she said,
beginning her story.  "The last two, we just couldn't make.  If we did,
we'd be in the clear, but if we didn't, we'd be out of business."

                   "Tina?"
                   "Yes, Mom,"
                   "How was school?"
                   "Okay.  You know."
                   "Sweetheart, will you come in the parlor with me for a
few minutes?"
                   "Sure."
                   "Close the door, honey,"
                   "Sure, Mom, is anything wrong?"
                   "That all depends, sweetheart," Maria Gonzales Atlee
said.
                   "What?" the nine year old asked.
                   "Darling," Maria said, "we have to have a very big-girl
talk about something very serious, okay?"
                   "Sure," the nine year old said.  "Is Dad okay?"
                   "He's fine dear, but it's about him.  Sit down here on
the sofa beside me, okay?"  The girl, still in her blue and gray school
uniform, sat, looking up into her mother's obviously worried face.  "Come
on, Mom, what is it?" she said, trying not to whine.
                   "First, darling, I have to ask you a question."
                   "Okay," the girl said, leaning against her mother.
                   "You know Mr. Deering at the implement company, right?"
Maria asked.
                   "Sure," Tina said.
                   "How do you feel about him?" the mother queried.
                   "He's really tall," the child mused, "and Dad seems to
like him, but I don't know him very well."
                   "Well," the mother said, "it's a longish story, but the
point is his wife has been chronically sick for awhile, and, well, you're
old enough to know some of this, he hasn't been with a woman for a long
time.  He was planning to take a trip to the city, to find a girl to be
with, that's what he told your dad, and that's how it started.  He was
commenting on how much it would cost to be with a pretty young girl, which
is what gave your father the idea."
                   "What is it, Mom?" the girl asked.
                   "Sweetheart," the mother replied, tenderly, "just let me
tell this my own way, please, then we can talk, okay?"
                   "Okay," the girl said, her voice still fretful with
confusion and worry.
                   "I'm sorry, angel, but you'll understand in a few
minutes.  Part of what I want to say is that when I was your age, nine, I
went to live with my granddad.  He was a powerful, gentle, kind man, and I
fell in love with him almost from the first day, even thought he was almost
seventy."
                   "You showed me his pictures, remember?" the girl said.
                   "Yes, darling," the mother said, "I do remember, so you
know he watched his diet and stayed in good shape."
                   "In the one in his bathing suit, he looks like an
advertisement," the girl giggled softly, to her mother's hug.
                   "Sweetheart," Maria whispered, "I thought so, too.  He
had a light mat of crinkly gray hair on his chest, and I thought he was
beautiful.  Sweetheart, I began to flirt with him, and, with just the two
of us alone together, for the summer, the flirting turned into something
very special for both of us."

                   "Oh, Mom," the girl scarcely breathed, "did he try to
get you pregnant?"
                   "Yes, darling," the woman said, hugging her daughter
tightly to her side, "it happened first in a meadow as we were watching his
stallion with a new filly.  It was my idea to watch, and, darling, I wore a
skimpy sun suit."
                   "Did it happen once, or more times?" the little girl
asked.
                   "I moved in with him that night," the woman recalled,
"so it happened many times."
                   "Did you like it?" the girl asked.
                   "Yes, darling," her mother replied, "he was very gentle.
There was a little stinging that afternoon in the meadow, but after that,
it felt beautiful every time we tried to make a baby."
                   "Two of my friends at school say the same thing," Tina
said.
                   "Are they experienced?" Maria asked.
                   "Everyone says they date their big brothers," the girl
said, "but nobody cares because they're both really nice.  You know, Sadie
and Stacy."
                   "Sure," Maria said, with a gentle laugh, "one likes
photography and the other model planes, of all things.  Are you sure about
their brothers?"
                   "I'd bet, if I had to," the girl replied, "but they
don't exactly make out in the bleachers, like other couples, so it may be
just talk."
                   "You have gym with Stacy, don't you?" the mother asked.
                   "Yes," the girl said.
                   "How does she look, you know, on top?"
                   "She's the biggest," the girl said, "and the girls from
the other class say Sadie's the biggest, too."
                   "Then the stories are true," Maria said, "because when I
was with my granddad, I developed almost overnight."
                   "That must have been exciting," the girl said.
                   "It all was, darling," the mother said, "holding him in
my arms and knowing what was happening inside me, because he showed me on
my stomach while he was lying beside me in the meadow, and sometimes, when
he held me very tight and still at the end, I could feel his seed flow into
me."

                   "You were really lucky," the girl observed.
                   "Yes, darling," the mother said, "but we've got to keep
talking.  We're behind on the tractor payments.  If Mr. Deering can spend
his money here, he won't have to go to Chicago and find an expensive girl.
If he spends it with us, the bank will release the tractor for transport,
and we can do contract work in the next state.  We've had a lot of expenses
pile up, and everything has come to a head, and we're five thousand dollars
short, which is just the amount we need to release the paperwork on the
tractor."
                   "Oh," the girl said.
                   "What are you thinking?" the mother asked, gently.
                   "Kinda tingly and funny," the girl said in a whisper.

                   "Sweetheart," Maria said, "you don't have to, but, the
truth is, we'll lose the farm, if you don't, and be able to spend next year
in Mexico, if you do, so it's hugely important, or your dad and I wouldn't
be asking, but we are asking, for your sake as well as ours, and what we're
asking, darling, is that you wear the same sun suit I wore for you
great-granddad, for Mr. Deering."

                   The two stared into each other's eyes for a long moment.

                   "We want to sell you to him, darling," Maria went on,
her voice low and slow.  "For money. A few hours a week for a year, unless
you hate being with him, in which case you can walk out on the contract."

                   "Mom?" the girl asked.
                   "What?" her mother said.
                   "Can Dad be with me.  Hold my hand, especially the first
time?"
                   "Yes, angel," the mother said, tears flowing down her
cheeks, "yes."  She took her daughter's hand and led her to her bedroom
where she pointed out the orange and yellow suit, freshly fluffed and
ironed.  "They'll be here in a few minutes," she said, closing the door on
her daughter.

                   "Here's a top secret, are you ready for it?" Forest
Deering asked as Tina's father went in to pay for gas.
                   "That depends," the girl said, but nodded as children
will.
                   "The paperwork on your Allis Chalmers has been released,
paid in full, as of an hour ago.  If you want we can turn around and take
you home so you can tell your mom."
                   "Can't we call her?" the girl said.
                   "Of course we can," the tall, boyish forty year old
said, "I just want to be proof-positive sure you want to go to the motel
with us.  This started halfway as a prank, I guess you'd call it, a crazy
idea, that sort of made sense, but now that I've known you for awhile, I'm
just glad to be able to help you out and be your family-friend uncle."
                   "You can still be that," the girl whispered, taking the
tall athlete's rough hand in her tiny, soft paw.

                   "If you change your mind, say so," the man said as
Harry, Tina's rangy Norwegian father approached the car.
                   "Just let me have the phone to call Mom and tell her I'm
happy," she said to her dad as he slid behind the wheel.
                   "Forest told you?" he asked, in return, to her nod.
"You're sure, baby?" he asked, again to her nod and shy smile.  "How do you
feel?" he then asked.
                   "Like a rubber band being stretched between two tigers,
if you really want to know," she replied, "but Mom told me about her
granddad, so I guess nothing will break."
                   "You've got a good mom," Harry Atlee said.
                   "It's horrible to see her getting fat," the girl said.
                   "She's had many years of being beautiful and desirable,"
the father said, "so she's far better off than others of her type."
                   "I guess so," Tina said, "but it must be horrible for
you, too."
                   "It isn't darling," the father said, "we're still great
friends and she's still a great wife and mom.  Maybe one of these days I'll
let myself go, too.  Live to eat.  It's not the worst way to go."
                   "I'm just glad she had great-granddad, on the other
side, to sort of, you know, balance out her life as a girl."
                   "Gracious thought," the father said, gently rubbing his
daughter's long, left leg as he jockeyed the car back onto the roadway.
The ten year old responded to is first touch by spreading her legs widely,
resting her right knee firmly against Forest's muscular left leg.  She
looked up at him, then gently took his left hand, bringing it high on her
tender, white inner thigh.  "How many days are we going to stay at the
motel?" she asked.


                   "Steve and Adam are coming over to help out," Harry
said, "so for the weekend, at least, if you want."
                   "Will a lot of people see us?" Tina asked.
                   "Sure," Harry said, "especially if we hang out by the
pool a lot.  A lot of local people go there."
                   "Good," Tina said, "because Sadie and Stacy, you know,
everybody sort of knows about them and Frank and Billy, their big brothers,
so I'd like everybody to sort of know about us.  Nothing obvious, but
nothing super secretive, either."

                   "Darling," the young father said, "you'll be pretty
stiff tomorrow, so if you walk around the pool area, most of the older
people will know you've been with an adult, and when they see us together,
they'll put one and one together and figure you've been with two adults,
without knowing, because you could have slipped in the tub or been roughed
up playing lacrosse."
                   "Will I be really sore?" the girl asked.  "Mom said it
hurt the first time with great-granddad."
                   "That was a little different," Harry explained, stroking
the inside of her long, slim leg, "that was her hymen tearing when she lost
her virginity to him.  That goes away in a minute, but what Forrest and I
do with you will probably leave you with some minor muscle strain.  You'll
be a little stiff, as if you'd been riding a lot, that's all, and you're so
athletic it might not happen, in the first place."
                   "Then I'll pretend, just a little," the pixie said, her
eyes big as she looked up at her dad and pushed her knee against his leg,
encouraging his gentle touch.
                   "Are you going to be in the bedroom together with me?"
she asked, "or take me in there one at a time?"
                   "Your uncle Forrest and I used to skinny dip a lot
together when we were kids," Harry said, "so we're used to being naked
together, so we'd like to have you on the bed with both of us, but that's
entirely up to you.  You'll have your own room next to ours, with a lock on
the door and your own television, so you are mistress of the weekend, with
both of us at your beck and call."

                   "I'm too young to get pregnant from you, aren't I?" Tina
asked.
                   "Yes, darling," her father said, "but you'll mature very
rapidly after sleeping with us, so we'll have to talk about that in the
future."
                   "Will your sperms leak out of me, like when older girls
have their periods?" the precocious one wanted to know.  "I know about them
from science in school," she went on to explain, "and the girls whisper
about seeing Stacy's panties in the locker room."
                   "We're both adults," Harry said, trying to make his
voice sound normal and casual, with little success, "and neither of us have
been with a partner for awhile, so your thighs may be wet in the morning."
                   "Can I show that around the pool?" she wanted to know.
                   "Yes love," the young father said, "we bought you a
bikini with a thong bottom, so if you lie back on a lawn chair, before you
swim, and spread you legs, but maybe not as much as you are now, other
adults will probably notice that you're still a little wet."
                   "But it could be I spilled something at breakfast, so
they wouldn't really know, right?" the ten year old asked.
                   "True enough," her father laughed, "eighty percent of
Americans believe in the pristine bullet, even though te photos clearly
show it's a little bent, and almost eighty percent of blacks believe
O.J. was practicing golf all evening.  People are almost fabulously
gullible, take religion, for example, so, if you look at them all
bright-eyed and say you tripped carrying a glass of water in the
restaurant, therefore you're stiff and wet, they'll believe you, even if
half of them were in the restaurant at the same time we were."
                   "Good," the girl said, "I mean, I'm little miss perfect
with the grades and deportment and participation, and that's fine, and I'm
proud of it, at least a little, but there has to be more.  Part of us has
to stay animal or all of use ends up in the zoo, don't you think?"
                   "I think you are one sensational daughter," Harry said,
"and that leads into something Forrest and I were going to tell you.
                   "While we're there," he continued, "you are allowed to
run as wild and free as you like.  There are no rules, in the conventional
sense.  If either a male or female attracts you, you can go to their room,
or invite them to our suite, and have all the privacy you want.."
                   "Would you ask me what happened?" she wanted to know.
                   "Yes, darling," her father said, "no rules, and no
secrecy, just like your mom told you about what happened when her granddad
brought the new filly for Sultan."
                   "Will you and Forrest go to other rooms, too?" Tina
asked.
                   "Probably not very much, especially this first time," he
laughed.
                   "Isn't this all really expensive?" the girl wanted to
know.

                   "It's actually free," Forrest said, "The Playpen is a
fancy motel in the conventional sense.  It's open to the public.  But it's
run by a philanthropist who believes children should have more freedom than
they do, that if they did, the world would be a healthier, happier place,
for everyone.  Fathers with daughters or brothers with little sisters, and
men with girls under fourteen, have special complimentary suites and wear a
special ring, which you'll get when we arrive.  Anyone wearing the ring is
a safe partner, because your dad and I, for example, had to take a physical
and answer questions on a lie-detector.  People who aren't wearing rings
are probably fine, too, because the general admission policy is pretty
strict, not just pay and stay."

                   "The owner's name is Vargas Real, re-al," Harry added:
"He's a former NASCAR driver.  You'll meet him when he gives you your ring.
And sweetheart," the father's voice went on softly, "he'll probably want to
date you at some time when we're there, not on this visit, but probably our
next one.  You don't have to go with him, we won't get kicked out, or
anything, but he feels it's good for girls to know the commercial side of
their charms, so to speak; just as your date with Forrest was originally
set up to help us recover from our financial mistakes.  This does not mean
that you do things for money, but it teaches you that life is more
complicated than that, that, yes, you do things, you might not otherwise
do, because people have been good to you and helped you.  You could say
this in lots of crude and derisive ways, and anyone who says it's better to
avoid such situations, in the first place, is undoubtedly very smart and
clever, but, in the end, Mr. Real has done a lot for us, and he's a tall
handsome man, and holding him in your pretty arms for a few hours is more a
form of acknowledgement than payment."

                   "Daddy," the girl whispered in response, "as long as I
can hold you the minute I leave his room, I'll be a happy girl."
                   "One of the things that makes the place such a success,"
Harry said, "is daddy's and big brother getting their little girls back wet
from another male.  It brings out feral instincts that few men get to
experience, sort of a cream de la caviar of guess what?"
                   "Sex," the pixie giggled happily, now holding both men's
hands as they contused to stroke ever higher on her soft, childish thighs.
                   "And don't forget the love part," the father suggested.
                   "I assumed it," the girl said, kneeing the athletic
thirty year old firmly.
                   "That was very smart of you," he replied as they turned
into the entrance of the sprawling grounds.


                   Some people, so I've read, read novels for the sole
purpose of ferreting out inconsistencies.  Editors are death on them, too.
At the same time it's either, a, fun, or, b, rationalizing to let a few
stand.  We have Forrest paying for the tractor, then they're comped at the
resort motel.  It would take half an hour to sort that out, and that's a
few hundred new words.  We have Tina talking about display, when everyone
there will know why she's there, and, while they'll not be in the least
disinterested, there would be no reason to walk stiffly or lounge with her
legs open.  I patched that one up, a little, on the fly, but the flaw
remains.

                   It must be time for a new chapter.  If memory serves
"The Bird of Dawning" is the only novel I've read, without chapters.  Some
have two on a page.  Stephen King comes to mind.  One excellent book, whose
genre I've forgotten, had chapters of exactly, right to the bottom right
corner of each page, five pages long.  I thought it was a neat exercise of
craft, and am glade there's a finite amount of money in the world, so
there's not enough to pay me to try it.  I kind of measure it by every
couple of days cheating just the tiniest skosh on the word count, and
making a new one.  My tribute to conformity, also, because I deem my work
original enough, in other respects, to not want to press my luck by writing
some huge story, beginning to end, with a total disregard for literary
convention.

                   I hope others take note, not of this idiosyncrasy, if
that's what it is, but of the book, in general.  I hope it does teach
others how to write.  How important characters are, how relatively
unimportant plot is.  "Fargo", without the ditzy bargirls talking about the
real funny looking one, is a "Reader's Digest" three-pager.  Chevy Chase
and Jim Carey take silly plots and turn them into cinematic icons (how I
wish they were).  "Addams' Family Values" lets Joan Cusac do the same
thing, and the melty liberals running Camp Chippewa double up her
character.  All these films will be widely seen a hundred years from now.
The rewards of reaching into the human and spreading him or her thin on a
page, is immortality, never mind who you teach or entertain on the way.  It
is worth the effort, and you only have to guess at how it feels to wake up
every morning in the midst of a great, glowing epic to realize that for
yourself.

                   There's nothing left out there, folks.  Tech has been
and gone as far as being a force of nature goes.  Politics?  I've been six
months, now, without cable, and I honestly think if the shoe was on the
other foot, and I had to pay to keep it out of my house, I would.  Thirty
seconds of the brute ugliness of the likes of Trent Lott and Orin Hatch
would be worth a hundred dollar a month abstinence fee, in itself.  These
are cheap men, who, under no circumstances, would have been invited to my
Gran's, yet you ballot them up time and again.  They're all cheap men.
Simpson, I think, from Montana, and Fred Thompson, those are two men, and I
even half like the one with the skinny guy inside him from New York.
Rangel's kind of cool.  But Lieberman and the rest?  They could, would, and
have sell and sold everyone and everything for ballots.  They are all
emblemized by Gore not gracefully and very, very firmly backing out on his
very ballot defeat.  They are power-sick scut, and they will definitely
kill you if you let them.  Their one virtue is saving me twenty bucks a
month by making television unwatchable, rather than just dreary.

                   Democracy is like letting the children run the
household.  Now, I like children, but my experience tells me they'd spend
every dime I have in a week, which would be a bit of a trick, because, left
to their own devices, they'll bunker down in front of the television until
two in the morning, when some good stuff is actually on, then sleep `till
noon.  And, make no mistake, you are children.  Your literacy level is two
iotas above being able to interpret most signage.  Most of you voted for
either Gore or Bush.  I rest my case.  That'll be the day, but, truthfully,
how do you feel about it?  One was a prototypical, and I come from the
background, preppie, smirking, Wiseguy, lazy drunk, saved only by a
heartthrob and connected up father.  The other was nothing more than a
marionette.  When he was deemed stiff he tried, dreadfully, to make a joke
of it, then danced the manic politicians' two-step in factories so the
lenscamera would show him as lively and likeable.  Bush and Gore are part
of the problem, and have nothing to do with the solution.  They are jokes,
which ticks me off because I like to think I'm the comedian in the crowd.

                   A reminder, too, speaking of jokes, that our founding
fathers were more founlings' fathers than anything more noble.  They were
postal.  Disgruntled, because England interfered with their smuggling and
piracy.  Sam Adams and Hancock.  Tavern drunks with a press and fools
thinking they needed liberty as fodder.  George Washington, a sullen,
class-obsessed tower of a man, assassin, war criminal, and dental patient,
scoured the British from commode keeper to commandant for a commission, and
only joined the muddled mess of rebellion when some limey put a rocket up
his butt.  Cute justice for he hated the very smell of his rabble army, and
said so.  But, there was coal and oil in Pennsylvania, so the denuded
democracy scraped through to the age of Bell, Edison, Ford, and their
colleagues, and, by some miracle, the system of media-driven balloting was
not quite defective enough to bring the whole mess crashing down, wars and
depressions notwithstanding.

                   Things are different today.  We lack a dynamic.  We need
to make one up.  We need to focus and proceed, not dither and recede.  We
can't do that.  In the old day they could.  The paper barons in the cities
could go broke, but the yeomanry kept plugging away until a new swarm of
urbanites, often Jewish, repeated the paper cycle.  Today, our yeomanry are
as dependent on wire transfers and complex shipping and receiving regimens
as Silicone Valley.  Our welfare state is so insatiable in its need of mass
funding, the road to Oprah's Indiana farm is rough as a cob of Hoosier
corn.  In Europe, they're faced with euthanizing tens of millions.  I
suppose the real joke is that monarchy couldn't do much better, because
under democracy, huge numbers of substandard people have found, if for just
awhile, the proverbial life of Riley.  Their ballots have paid off, the
politicians have come through, and the sand hogs probably have a web site.
King and Letterman each signed thirty million dollar contracts, so they
say.  What does that say?  Again, neither would have been invited to
Gran's, and that makes all the difference.  (And if you think this is to do
with class, gotcha, because Gran would have doted on Bev, while probably
being cross with Samantha once in awhile.)  It's a test of humanity,
nothing more, nothing less.  You think of Heraldo as human.  I think of him
as half Jewish.  Unless you come to understand the difference, you are
hopelessly doomed to an obese, cheesy, debt-dead future, should you
survive, at all.

                   I saw Betty Zebaneh at the Price is Right market the
other day.  She's Jewish.  Her mouth takes on the shape of a braying camel,
even when she's just exchanging banalities.  The walls ring.  If she's
human, I'm not, for there is no possibility of our belonging to the same
species, except at the most base clinical level.  If I was a sportin' guy,
I'd like to chain her to the Arab camel, Old Lady Cheap Things, and take
bets on who would bray the other to death, first, like dogs or cocks.  If
you are to save your country, you must get these people out, you must
accept any means, because any other end is your massively assured
destruction.  Your king is talking.  Your god is talking.  You better tune
in, or they will tune you out.

                   If you take think I take myself seriously, gotcha,
again.  David has full permission to excise anything he chooses from my
copy.  I have no idea whether or not everything I say makes the archive,
and have little inclination to find out.  Children are the world's
children, only incidentally, yours.  Manuscripts, or at least my
manuscripts, are the world's, once I click the send icon.  If they do well,
great, if not, no one will doubt I put my best into them, and it wasn't
good enough for you, or you were not good enough for it.  Anyway, a miss.
So far, that's not happened and I spend a certain amount of time trying to
acclimate to the fact that my downloads are in the middle seven digits.
Success without the faintest hint of trappings.  Even Dad taunts me on
writing a million-page novel, and my youngest brother congratulates me on
making good use of the bandwidth.  It is the effect that this does not have
that's pungent.  I type away as if I were writing stories and a letter for
a friend I met in a bathhouse, and let it go at that.  If I weren't so
lazy, I'd recast this paragraph, because, a, I left out the deluge of
ethereal reader mail that greeted my first efforts, and, b, a friend from
the past wrote, providing an anecdote.  I was going through my mail one day
and opened a letter from a familiar name.  Within ten seconds I was
gritting my teeth.  Not anger, jealousy.  A friendly complexity dominated
the writer's style, yet, I deemed him, the writer, untrustworthy, as if he
might turn and come at you.  The talent was raw, and immediately apparent,
and my jaw tightened.  I read on.  Quick grace, funny asides, and,
overwhelmingly, a sense of labor, but never labored, commitment, not only
to his art, but to the individual reality.  Writing of this now, my
feelings were akin to looking at the anchor off the bow of our boat.  We
had some long calm stretches in the Bahamas, and the silt would settle from
the water.  I remember going forward early one morning to swap the deck,
and idly stepping out on the bowsprit.  I looked down and, a, almost
hurled, and, b, almost fell overboard.  The anchor, a seventy pounder,
looked about the size of a small flounder.  The water was so clear, it was
invisible, totally invisible.  I was seized with acrophobia, big time, and
dared anyone to go out and look down, without holding on to the forestay.
They all looked over the rail.  No takers.  So, that's how I felt reading
the piece sent to me by an old friend.  Raw disappointment in myself,
almost nauseous discouragement: "I'll never write like this."  Imagine my
relief when I read a bit further and found Bill had sent me an excerpt from
"Creative Camp".  I've never been the same, since, so perhaps success does
have its trappings, even for your humble servant.

                   I, myself, am largely subhuman, mostly an animal that
just does what it does, unable to do anything else, and certainly
unwilling.  And not just as an artist.  It's cost a fortune to take in
Daisy's crew, money I could have spent on Samantha, and could be spending
on her, this minute, making her so happy she would spend the night.  The
kids stay.  If Samantha chooses the red pickup, she chooses it.  How do you
measure that on the `humanity' scale?

                   Take it or leave it, like it or lump it, it doesn't make
any difference.  I type and submit, and, as it says on the shampoo label,
repeat.  I believe if you had over eight hundred thousand words to go,
you'd do the same.

                   My kingdom for a fork.  Well, it's not quite that bad.
About the only thing that hasn't disappeared over the last eight years, of
the very small box of stuff I brought from the States, is a wood-handled
kitchen set, and now the serving fork is missing.  It's the only thing
really suitable for fluffing hot rice, so I used it every day.  The lesson
is an important one.  No matter how much you help others, how exceedingly
Christian, in a temporal sense, you are, people will still steal and
advantage you at every opportunity.  At the heart of the purloined fork
issue, is the core defect of liberalism.  The doctrine, especially in its
Jewish implementation, puts humans in boxes marked Rights, Independence,
Liberty, Justice and Dignity, just as Jewry puts itself in a box labeled
Chosen.  That's it.  A box for everyone, and everyone in their box.  No
allowance made for excellence, and they called Dahmer, mister.  I try to
help these kids, they turn around and steal what they damn well know
happens to be precious to me, and, as a liberal, I'm meant to keep on
helping.  Well, they're lucky, as Samantha is, because I love them, but in
the wider scheme of things, I'd whip their thieving backs and chain them in
a cotton field, tomorrow.  Then they'd produce, they wouldn't steal, and
the human race would advance instead of dithering over its bellybutton.
(Of course, being a neo-oldster, I write of a time when most of us had
belly buttons.)

                   One eerie thing, I haven't lost a word to a power outage
or computer problem for some weeks.  Unheard of.  Much as I am totally
dependent on the machine, I've grown accustomed to fighting it tooth and
nail, often having to re-write pages shortly after I thought they were
complete.  In a way, I miss the challenge, and, as I've said elsewhere,
there is no greater training drill for a writer than to have to re-do
something an hour after he's created it.  I had to re-write my last novel,
"The Tarzan Mushroom Hunters", from scratch, due to a virus, and, until I
post this puppy, it's the greatest piece of fiction in the world, as well
as being a not-half-bad collection of essays and journal entries.  If
"Seinfeld" was a show about nothing, it is a book about everything, but,
astoundingly, this one's better.  Maybe I'm so retarded, I'm just starting
to get good, did you ever think of that?  Maybe it took so much to dynamite
away my mental overburden, as miners call it, that I untapped resources
previously unknown to humankind, and, if they are unknown, how can they be
measured? so maybe we yet journey on the surface.  As long as the Catholics
deem me to have cracked the brink of hell, I'll be plumb satisfied with
myself, and if the blood and butchery of their history stains my eyes
glaring red, perhaps it is the color they should be.  Out, out, foul spot.

                   I'm thinking of the delicate game I played with Jose
Armando de Lira Varela, vis a vee, the Catholic Church.  One night, just
after we reached home, I went out on the veranda and there was a monk
looking up from the sidewalk.  I think I'd vaguely noted him following us,
and we'd passed by the cathedral on the way to my place.  At first, Jose
talked of wanting to be a priest, he was fourteen.  I strongly encouraged
him, believe it or not, and, within the limits of our ability to verbalize,
asked him about it.  In my opinion, he was, in fact, genuinely
uninterested, it being more his mother's idea than his.  He was in a
stressful relationship with his father, a chemist who'd lost his job in a
political shift, and was now a farmer, because his father made him kill the
rabbits, which you do by breaking their necks.  He showed me, just with a
hand motion.  He was hanging in the arcades and pool halls, when I met him.
If the church wanted him as a priest, they were making less than a pathetic
effort to divert him from a highly pedophilic culture.  The one credit I
will give, is, although he must have been one of the most beautiful little
boys to walk the planet, apparently he had not been molested by the clergy.
He was a willing and happy partner from our tenth date, no scars, which is
not to say nothing happened, because I never happened to ask him.  I do
wonder about the priest or monk who followed us home, whether he was after
a soul that was doing fine on its own, or his one of a kind body.  And he
may have ended up lost to the street.  He was, like Linden, heavily
talented as a graphic artist.  The first time he came to my apartment, or
room, to be more accurate, was to type a letter to his cousins in the
states.  He hadn't had typing in school, and wanted to learn, so he asked
if he could draw a picture of the keyboard on my little portable.  You
could have hung the result in a good gallery.  He also wrote poetry, and, I
know, it sounds like something out of a corny romantic novel, but when we'd
go out for beers, he'd borrow my pen and write songs on paper napkins.

                   He ended up writing for either Juan Gabriel or Jose
Louis Rodriguez, I can't remember which, and I think spent time down around
Acapulco with them both.  Anyway, he spent some time on a very fast track,
always saying it was because typed out his songs.  I've described our
physical parting, elsewhere.  As a waypoint, devil or god, the devil in
this case spent thousands of hours with the boy, and god's house gave a
highly creative and active mind no alternative to the arcade and my shrine,
though it was torn down before I left the city.

                   The only thing you should fear, is yourselves.  That
just popped into my mind, sorry Jose, but don't worry, we're not done with
you yet, and the world will never be done with you, however fortune has
treated you.  It's an appropriate paraphrase of FDR's Depression speech.
The only thing we have to fear, is ourselves.  That will be true, just as
we once had fait in ourselves, until we rid our country of weeds.  If it
were a farm, we could tolerate half weeds, as long as they didn't foul the
machinery, but, as a nation, I think anything over five or ten percent
spoils the entire crop, if only by making it un-harvestable.  It's your
country, you have to do the pushing and shoving and rearrange things so
that we get on with the great projects needed to replace the Industrial
Revolution, be they perfect or imperfect.  Any port in a storm, they say,
and I offer nothing but surf and reefs at the bar mouth, but the storm is
not survivable, leaving a bad choice only maybe better than no choice of
harbor, at all.  You grace me with the option of death at the ends of
times, and I turn my back on you.  George Bush or Al Gore wouldn't do that
to you.

                   I though of a tee shirt for pedophiles: "The only thing
between men and toys is the cost of their boys."  That's a shoe that fits
so well it pinches.  My other favorite tee is a feminist creation reading:
"If they can send a man to the moon, why can't they send them all?"
Ironic, because my favorite cartoon shows a battleaxe behind a cash
register shouting at a customer, "This is a feminist bookstore," she's
yelling, "we don't have a humor section."  Puts me in mind of my ultra
drudgy caricature of a butch-dyke sister.  Imagine not being amused by a
brother like me, but I assure you, she wasn't.

                   The fork turned up, kicked under one of the counters.
How could someone be so oblivious as to have a dagger-pronged serving fork
land at their feet, and not remember it.  On the other hand, I think Louise
could have half a barbell drop on her foot, and drift on unperturbed.  I
got a good cases of the chills last night.  She stood behind Samantha, who
was in the rocking chair, petting her and playing with her hair for half an
hour, straight.  Where these thoughts lead is unsurvivable, no ground, no
sky, no walls.  If I picture an hour or two a week when Samantha slips off
to be with Queenie, and Randy slips in to be with me, and another hour or
two a week, with Samantha and Queenie, I may not have invented the wheel,
but it would still be a nice ride.  Just add Clarence to leave them wetter
and feeling moe feminine than I probably can (he'd also like Randy), and
there you have what the Jews are always seeking, perfection in a neat,
tidy, box.

                   Pure sensation this evening.  Did our usual circuit with
Samantha, only this time, check it out, she's wearing an armless white
girl's tee and tiny white terrycloth shorts that she wears down over her
hips in the same manner boys wear shorts half way down their boxer shorts.
If her legs grow an inch longer, she's simply going to be against the law.
She prattles, skips and dances, this evening trying to think up a name for
me when she dedicates a song to me on Power Mix.  She finally settled on
"Tom a/k/a Ratbat" in favor of "Tom a/k/a Ralston", which turned out to be
her interpretation of "Boston."  The ratbat thing comes from the fact I
have a family of bats in my attic, and, what I want to do is replace a
ceiling panel in the living room with a sheet of Plexiglas, then put a
light in the attic.  This is the kind of thing kids remember, so I'm Tom
a/k/a Ratbat, as soon as she gets her next calling card.  It is on the
verge of what can be comprehended.  To be the greatest artist of all time,
and out of a warm tropic evening, stars almost hot with brilliance,
following those prancing, dancing terrycloth shorts.  Sort of ruins the
less-is-more theory of existence.  I'm just glad it's me.  Many are called,
few are chosen, and one is selected.  Why it happens to be me, I have no
idea, but what I did was work harder than hard to earn a ticket in the
lottery of lotteries, and won.  Work, Talent, Birth -- why did I win all
three?  Why am I the most prolific writer, as well as the best, or vice
versa. Why the royal lineage?  The IQ of four hundred?  The teen bod in my
fifties?  Why the wife of wives, Jose, and now the girl of girls?  Surely
this is overcompensation for even my mother.  Ten minutes walking beside me
as I follow Samantha, and Mr. Gates would be signing over M'soft to follow
her home, I freaking kid you not, and laughing over getting the best of the
world's smartest man, in the bargain.  When your girlfriend is accosted by
three twelve year old boys on the way home, half because they like her,
half because she may be carrying pop shots, you know you're doing something
right.  And, speaking of cuties...



                   The girl in the yellow and orange sun dress was all
decorum and sweetness in the lobby, a princess pretty enough to go without
trappings, with an ego that didn't need them.  Only the whiteness of her
little knuckles hinted at the fact her dad and her favorite uncle weren't
taking her to the pony rides.
                   Decorum, poolside, too.  No, "Hey, babes," or, "I'd like
a piece of that."  "Vargas was in the navy," Harry explained as they walked
toward the bungalow housing their suite, "so there are a lot of sailors
here."
                   "And the girls are called, olives, I'll bet," the
sweetie giggled.
                   "What would you expect, with all these eyes popping at
you," her father responded.  Indeed, while there was no indecency,
trucker-style, something in yellow and orange was attracting its share of
attention.
                   "How much does it cost to stay for a lifetime?" the girl
asked, as they left the marble flags and began walking across the lawn.
                   "Strict limit, two weeks a year, unless you're wounded
winning the Congressional Medal of Honor, or have five stars on you lapel."
                   "Less piece time in peacetime, then," the bright-eyes
quipped.
                   "Never forgetting less is often more," her father
rejoined, with a pinch on her bare shoulder, "and lots is too often never
enough."
                   "Most of the time," Forrest said, feeling comfortable
enough to add a word between father and daughter.
                   "Amen," quoth Harry, "because we are human.  It's ironic
that the glaring defects, including murder, assassination, extreme
alcoholism, and a general pattern of abuse of underlings is described, when
it comes to Paine and most other Federalists, as All too human, yet an
adult dating a happy child is thought to inhabit the lowest pit of the
deepest shaft.  We are behaving humanly, they are getting fat.  Justice may
be fickle, but it's often absolute."

                   I think the most unnerving thing about working at my
level is being beyond justice.  Jail me, flog me, drown me, burn me, and
flush my ashes in Perth Amboy, the words live on, and I could use the
publicity.  I try to take this reality seriously, but without trappings,
I'm the devil's plaything.  The clerics have notorious levels of foppery
and folderol, I'm glad to have a pressure cooker.  They are responsible for
who and how we are, I'm suggesting what we could be.  Time is as much on my
side as it is against them.  I like for a symbol, a thorn wrapped in silk,
I guess royal blue would do.  A thorn is not a deadly weapon, but a useful
goad.  The silk should be on every just and human-hearted pillow in the
land.


                   "Silk pillows!" the pixie squealed as she dived into the
suite.  "But they don't go with my sun suit," the girl sighed in a mock
pout as she bounced on the leather sofa.
                   "Maybe you'll have better luck with the suit Vargas gave
you," Forrest suggested.
                   "Good idea," the ten year old said, "it will give me a
last chance to change, all by myself."  Both men laughed.  Harry and
Forrest settled on the sofa as the girl squealed into the bedroom,
returning moments later for her bag, then disappearing again, not quite
shutting the door.

                   "If you want, I can find another room," Forrest said.
                   "Sometimes deals come apart," Harry replied, "this one
started as one thing, which, I don't think would have been half bad, and
then there were a few phone calls from interested parties, and we ended up,
here, not a dollar on the table.  If she seemed cold or unresponsive toward
you, we probably would have gone ahead with the original plan, because so
much is at stake; since she never felt that, from years ago until now, but
rather likes you in a way I've never seen her express to another adult,
specifically, holding your hand as you molested her in the car, you are a
freaking prisoner.  Live with it."

                   "No guarantees of living the next few hours," Forrest
said, "but thanks.  As they say, I needed that."
                   "I still remember you," Harry, who was slightly the
older, said, softly.
                   "Who'd ever have thought we'd be thirteen, again?" the
twenty-eight ear old responded..
                   "If we live that long," Harry reminded his friend.
                   "I still remember you, too," Forrest said, his voice
also dropping to a husky whisper.
                   "Have you ever wanted to be together, again?" Harry
asked.
                   "No," the younger man replied, "not until yesterday when
you told me how the deal had changed."
                   "Ditto, here," Harry said, "I just thought of you as a
friend from the time we were freshmen in high school, but if you want to
touch me while we're with Tina I'd like it."
                   "I'd like to," the man whispered.
                   "Should we tell her what happened when Mr. Kohler helped
us dam up the swimming hole?" Harry asked, making his friend blush with
pleasure at the depth of his inclusion.
                   "It might make an engineer of her," the equipment dealer
allowed.
                   "Hail Mary, and pass the keystone," Harry laughed, and
thus was born (reborn) another in a series of mutual admiration societies.
                   "Do you want to stay dressed for her?" Forrest
whispered, his eyes locking on his friend's.
                   "No," the girl's father said.  Tightly cued, they
performed quickly, slipping out of their loafers and slacks, stripping off
their shirts, then, eyes as hot as thirteen year old's, they pulled down
their briefs.
                   "Should we pose like we did for Mr. Kohler?" Harry
asked.
                   "Sure," his friend said, and both adults arched,
spreading their legs slightly, and laced their fingers behind their necks.
Both were uncircumcised and hugely swollen, nearly seven inches jutting
from between their powerful legs.

                   "Oh, Daddy," Tina whispered as she opened the bedroom
door, "you're beautiful."  The girl approached within inches, looking down
intently.  She was dressed in a very conservative, less skin is more
erotic, bikini, the panties closer to those of her sun suit than a thong,
and the bra covering her discreetly.  Both males looked down at her, and
neither could help picturing their seed swimming in her lovely, soft, white
belly.  Their penises flared, they thrust their hips unconsciously, then
dropped their arms to their sides.  Instinctively, Tina stood in front of
her tall, handsome dad, but her eyes never left those of his equally
prepossessing friend.  Harry gently unfastened the strip of her top, giving
Forrest the first sight of his ten year old's bare chest.  "She's
beautiful," he whispered to the older male.  Harry gently found the girl's
slim was with both hands, moving her slightly closer to his former male
lover, and guiding her small hands to his penis.  Not to be glib or
frivolous, and certainly not to fall into the amateurs' trap of
overstating, but it was the best display of manners in world history, so
much more than allowing the guest first pour from the gravy boat.  "Oh,
daddy," she whispered to him up over her left shoulder, "males are so
beautiful," then she found Forest, her left hand guided low by her gentle
father, her right handed guided high on his foreskin.  "Now bring your
hands very slowly and carefully together," he whispered, kneeling behind
her and molesting her with both hands on her slim chest and soft belly as
Forest gazed down, his face slack from the feeling of Tina's gentle,
experimental efforts to free his glans from his bulging foreskin.
                   "Daddy, I love doing this," she whispered softly, half
to herself.
                   "You can do it with any man here," he said, "but
probably not every man here."  She giggled at the soft affection in his
voice, his gentle silliness putting no moral approbation on an act that
would have her institutionalized and both himself and Forest imprisoned for
decades if the walls had eyes.  That was pretty silly, too, but if the
State could stand the colossal cost, well, go, State, go.  Who knew, some
day they might save somebody from a fate worse than death.  And how bizarre
that notion was, Harry continued with his musing as Forest gently turned
Tina to him.  "Oh, sweetie, you really are starting to grow," he said,
being the first to gently kiss her pink, thimble-size nipples.  The fate
worse than death was so patently a fate better than life.  That was the
amazing thing about the church, and conventional morality, in general: it
was so utterly, unredeemingly, wrong.  Wrong from head to foot, wrong in
every aspect and detail, all wrong, and nothing right.  A daughter could
grow as healthily in her father's bed as in her own room, it simply, of and
by itself, made no difference where she slept, she'd learn to love
anything.  And a great society could be proof of the priest.  "Stayist thou
apart," they could chant, and sweep their arms from the pulpit, bidding:
"Look Around.  We say this is sin, and look at the beauty of our
righteousness."  Who's kidding who? now I ask you.  The very congregation
is, a, sparse, and, b, made up of fat; loungy lummoxy sinners responding to
childhood indoctrination and looking for some way out.  No argument from me
that they need one.  My philosophy is that you best avoid church, even
blowing it up, and sleep with your daughter from age three, reading to her
two hours a day for the privilege of cumming off in her tight, young body.
If you want to heap her with affection and non-manipulative, non-spoiling
presents and privileges, why, that's your business.  If it was me, I'd pad
her trust fund with however many thousands of dollars I could afford for
every pound she was not over or underweight on each birthday.  Sure, the
math's a bit tricky, but I'd figure something out.  If she came to, from
talk she heard with her ears, came to hate me for what I'd done to her when
she was a little girl, that would be better than if she adored me for my
virtue, and missed me forever when I was gone.  This is not saying rape,
what it is saying is thoroughly explore neutral territory.  If there is no
strong objection, at least try.  Tear down the arbitrary wall between
daughter and wife.  This taboo is based on clinical realities from ancient
times, and so stirs us deeply, but that's it.  It's as empty today as a
buggy whip factory.  Sensible, responsible people can avoid any possibility
of disease, or the remotest chance of a defective child, or any child, if
that's their wish.  I'm not promoting incest children, per se, however, I
will point out, in no uncertain terms, that I am one, and also happen to be
the finest writer, intellect, artist, and what have you, yet to live or
ever to live, while wasting half my time trying to prove I'm the word's
funniest comic, and the other half blaming my mother.  This is said fully
acknowledging the fact the fathers and daughters often don't like each
other.  Would such alienation, whether mild, moderate, or severe grow or
diminish if the father spent a rugged, panting hour or two a week in his
child's belly?  You figure it out, but I think, a, it would make them
closer, and, b, give each good reasons to stay as fit looking as possible
for the other.  You know, it's a little surprising such a simple message
chews up a million words like dog meat, but you are a colossally stupid,
greedy bunch.  I know how it feels being mauled, and have the scars to
prove it, but I grew up to be something, perhaps, in some tiny way, as a
result of my own experiences at the hands of my mother.  I think other
things, specifically, horses would have worked better, but, as she'd be the
first to say, "That's just Tom."  (I am so everlastingly glad she died
before watching me, in two short years, leap to the literary forefront of
the last century, and set the standard for this one.  She did not deserve
to see that.)  In any event, you're in my hands or gods.  Gods have killed
maybe even a billion.  I didn't even kill my mother.  (Actually, I claim,
elsewhere, that I did, but, on reflection, I think my brother Ted gets more
credit.  He used to invite his-friend-the-doctor, Charley Webb, physician
of Colorado Springs, to Stonington for long summer stays.  I don't think
Dr. Webb is quite as unlikable as my sister, Mary, but it's one of those
too close to call deals.  I'm just not sure.  He likes to make his lips go
like a rabbit and he has weird, ultra perfect teeth, so that was always a
little unnerving.  Since he'd played basketball since he was two, and, at
fourteen, I'd never seen one, he was able to make rather short work of his
friend's older brother on the court of prowess.  His mind fit the
Stonington school system to perfection, so he copped grades while I huddled
in my room reading, and wondering how I'd managed to totally alienate
Jeanie Maguire in three hours, saying almost nothing.  Glad for the
reading.  Anyway, it would be hard to imagine a more obnoxious houseguest
that Charley Webb, and Mom had to cook and clean for him for weeks,
undoubtedly do his laundry, probably full of hair from his fat body, and
that can't have been much fun, so, yes, I did what I could by acting loopy
and borderline dysfunctional, out of vengeance for her unrelenting and
gratuitous cruelty, but Ted and Charley probably did more, even if Mom
didn't catch them at homosexual activities, which I strongly suspect they
engaged in, with their respective children and step children.  And I'm
writing here by not saying a thing, a privilege of the virtuoso; I'm not
being a hypocrite and suddenly disallowing something because I don't like
somebody.  I'm saying they are both rotten people, exploiting their
children, using and abusing them, and the fact that they do it without
their underwear means little or nothing.  But perhaps I should be more
tolerant, mellow out with age, be more liberal in my thinking: after all,
they helped kill my mother.

                   I wonder what turned my sister into such a hard dyke,
down to the butch hair?  I'll always hope it was me, and my head rests
anight absolutely sure she'd blame me, but she was a nasty piece of work
before I ever jerked off on her stomach, so I think the credit belongs
elsewhere.  In fact, I'd put it this way.  If I could survive incest with
my sister anyone can survive it under any circumstances not involving a
chain saw.  It was horrible, but still I espouse it for others, because
they have tender, sweet, pretty daughters and sisters and if they're gentle
and loving, so openith a new world for both or all.  Again, god's word onto
your screen.  As far as making Mary a miserable wreck of a self-obsessed
moron, my guess is the other god is responsible, your dude; I mean, if he
does your craggy valleys and sunsets, he must be the general contractor.  I
tried to avoid my sister as a bossy three year old, and had my own room to
read in, so it wasn't my fault.  Mother, sister, and wife, if they spin you
hard enough, and long enough, and you survive without killing them and
having to do time, you end up a stable top with a keen set of razors at
your middle so no others will be tempted by your charm and gentle ways to
climb aboard and throw the whirligig out of balance.  At present, I'm doing
a little chopping on Queenie, who persists, despite repeated pleasant
remonstrances, in leaving the kitchen an aggressive disaster, she doesn't
even knock food off spoons before leaving them on the counter.  This
morning she was again with the fritters, flour, sugar and water pancakes
that use up all the lard when she fries them.  I won't put them on the
street because of Samantha, but I will if they're too hard headed about
learning anything.  I'd rather live entirely alone than be reduced to the
role of a caretaker, thanks.  From a personal standpoint I'm glad to see I
can get as in the face of a super model as I could Linden, or anyone who
fails to cease engaging in what I view as destructive behavior.  I never
lost a student as a flight instructors, but some of my lax colleagues lost
no less than six, and I heard about others.  I wasn't lax, in those days,
because of the danger of freaking around in light aircraft, in these days,
because ten thousand words a day is ten thousand words, and pointless
interference is something I bear with little grace.  Nor is it just
protecting my sacred keyboard time.  If Queenie doesn't learn basic
household skills and a sense of pride in a nice, if not necessarily spiffy,
home, she'll bounce from man to man with a gaggle of kids, like her mother,
thrown all the say out, and unlike Bev, who is a good housekeeper, and who
earned enough respect from her various men that they continued with some
support, until I came along.  Daisy gets nothing, from anybody, so has to
keep finding new ones, which obviously doesn't get easier as one ages.  I
used to reduce my students to ashes, much as I'd been some few years
earlier, so they wouldn't end up as ashes, so it's on Queenie's back, and
if she doesn't like it, afuera.  They got along before they met me, and
they can get along without me now.

                   I should give a heads up here, just for the fun of it.
I ran out of weed and cigarettes last night, first time in my life, in the
case of the tobacco.  So, was I mad at Queenie because I was pitching a
nicotine fit, or because I'd even given up my modest cigarette habit so
that she and her family can eat, and she's wasting lard by the pot
spoonful?  I went entirely smoke free my first month in this house, and,
other than a slight nagging feeling after eating, hardly missed either the
tobacco or he marijuana.  What did happen is my work day, as regular
readers may remember, dropped from eighteen hours to six or eight.  Two
thousand words, at this point, is so close to a day off it's like stopping
in at the office for a few minutes before hitting the links at seven a.m.
No big drug effect was involved, vis a vee uppers, opiates, or hallucigens
, just that little reward of a few tokes and a ten minute break every two
or three hours.  Writing is not a walk in the park, it's an intense and
delicate art, demanding many ducks in a long row, just to get started.
Yes, at times you can bulldoze along with little regard for your
surroundings, but if anything's seriously out of kilter, like a supermodel
threatening herself with days of hunger by misusing scarce resources, it
can crash your wave and leave you in the rocks.  And, yes, part of becoming
a virtuoso is endurance and creating under any possible circumstances,
rather than becoming flighty, neurotic and temperamental, but, still and
all, a few puffs a day make an impressive difference in allaying the
fatigue factor, not through chemicals intervention, but, as I just said, by
providing a few carrots along the path.  Repeatedly, I've connected social
attitudes toward marijuana -- Tyne Daley is my poster monster -- and
families engaging in affectionate play.  "Night fun," as it's perfectly
described in the film, "Jungle 2 Jungle".

                   Anyway, the heads-up is to see if you can tell the
difference.  Pot head or clean and sober?  Shouldn't you be able to, after
all?  If weed is this great public menace, it should be easy enough to tell
if a novelist is using the stuff, why he'd write all cranky and silly, or
loopy and irrational, anyone could tell.  On the other hand, imagine facing
almost three hundred million really, really stupid people every morning.
Now imagine doing it straight.  Any questions?  Drinking, yes, it made a
big difference, and I learned not to even turn on the machine after more
than three rum and cokes.  Pot?  Absolutely zero, except as a reward for
diligence.  Cigarettes, I'm not so sanguine about.  Many writers and
artists from the past have given tobacco great credit for their work, Freud
and Churchill, a good, writer, however monstrous a political figure, for
example, and there are many more.  I don't think I notice any difference,
but you might.  Let's go back to the bungalow and check it out, shall we?


                   It wasn't exactly like playing with a big kitten, her
finger tips left only almost-invisible white lines on their skin as she
raked and clawed them.  They had her totally naked on the bed, huddling her
between their naked, athletic bodies, wetting her with their seminal fluid,
and surging against her as she mewed and panted in welcoming response.  In
a gentle, wrestling dance the male animals passed the young female back and
forth between them, holding her for each other as they tried variations of
crouching over her and squatting legs widely spread, as she taught herself
between their legs and became ever more avid for them to lie her back and
spread her own long, slim limbs, using both their gentle hands to explore,
teach, and masturbate her.

                   "Touch each other," she whispered several times to her
young father, and then she'd lie back on the pillow, hands behind her neck,
legs spread, and watch as one powerful adult knelt behind the other,
holding with the left arm while reaching around with his right to stroke
his partner against the girl's tender, white thighs.

                   "Tell me about the first time something happened between
the two of you," she whispered during an interval that found the men lying
full length on the bed with the child cradled gently between them, lying on
her back, while they breathed into each of her ears.  Both of their hands
went gently to her inner thighs and both males gently masturbated her as
she lifted her hips generously to their touches, and Forest told her what
had happened just after her father had turned thirteen and he'd turned
eleven.

                   As he talked, by accord, one young man got from the bed
from time to time and the other moved gently on top of the slim, athletic
ten year old, letting his lover look down on her arms around an adult's
neck and her ankles against his upper rear thighs, her body almost out of
sight.  What this would like when they'd succeeded in mounting her, and
were taking turns thrusting into her welcoming body, neither male had the
nerve to picture.  That they would be ejaculating inside here, and feeling
each other's wetness against their sensitive penises further clouded
comprehension of the evening and night to come.  That this would be
followed by other nights made any future at all seem naught but fantasy,
which was just as well, because they had plenty to deal with in the here
and now.  After half an hour their play did slow and she lay languidly
between the athletes as they gently kissed and molested her while Forest
told about what had happened to her father and himself a mile up Shady
Creek.


                   You know what I forgot to do awhile back?  Start a new
chapter.  I talked about it, then, wouldn't you know it, went back to
working on the story, forgetting the very convention I was intending to
honor.  I guess it is a bit thick to prance out on stage, do a little
soft-shoe, then haul back a curtain, announcing through a megaphone,
"Ladies and gentlemen, you really wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the
world right now," and unveiling, to gasps of amazement, and happy, nodding,
laughter, one patron to the next, without further fanfare or excess of
hyperbole or the mechanizations of stagecraft:


Posted by Thomas C. Emerson, Dangriga, 12/02

xxx