Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2001 11:56:11 -0700 From: Tim Stillman Subject: "The Sex Circus" "The Sex Circus" by Timothy Stillman Cathy Sue, as usual, noogied her little brother. In this instance, as they went into the church building. "Drip." "Spaz." They said to each other. Stuck tongues out at each other. It was Friday night cub scout meeting. The meeting was held as usual in the basement of the First United Methodist Church. The basement was well lit and had a concrete floor that could be used for basketball games. There were two hoops on poles at either end of the oblong room that was also used for church socials, Boy and Girl scout and Brownie meetings. Cathy Sue was just turned 15 and she was icky as girls go, and Jetty, her 10 year old brother got tired of her pinching him all the time on his elbow and his ass, and was at the moment ticked off to a farethewell that the den mothers, his own mom and another woman had had to attend an Eastern Star meeting tonight, and had left Cathy Sue in charge. This happened occasionally. Mostly what she did, as substitute den mother, his tall thin dark haired sister with the silver braces that made her face look like an automobile grille when she grinned, was leave them to their own devices, and tell them once again, especially her brother, that they were drips and they played drip games because they were drips. And she would shake her sausage curls, she looked not unlike Margaret in the "Dennis the Menace" comic strips, and she would plow her head back into Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys books--whatever she was reading the Hardy Boys, Jetty didn't know--just that she was weird and she was the drip. And the other boys, not Jetty, were drips themselves because they were running themselves ragged in those hot cub scout wool uniforms with those yellow kerchiefs around their necks, with the wolf head clasps holding the scarves, all blue blurs, the boys, playing basket ball hard and fast and furious. To impress Cathy Sue sitting, legs crossed, pigeon toed shoes turned inward, on a metal chair on the side lines. And of course she paying no attention at all to any of them. Jetty watched her from the opposite side of the room. He watched his cub brethren turning blue in the face trying to impress, tripping each other up, diving for the basketball, getting into shoving matches, close calls for fights. And Jetty was so embarrassed by the whole thing that he could spit. What he wanted to do was get old Cathy Sue, who still didn't have titties, and as old as she was already, flat as an ironing board, her chest, and just take off her clothes and tie her on top of a mound that red ants lived in and let them do their job. Jetty and his buddies would stand by and laugh. No. They would be heroes and they were not his buddies. They would kill him or each other if she gave the word and the veins in her forehead and her neck that was slim as a pencil made her seem as though she was a wind machine and those were the machine levers. And every time a vein beat, more boys would be bent into her direction. He sat on the concrete floor in the overheated room and looked up at the dripping steam pipes in the ceiling. Right above them was the sanctuary. He didn't know if he believed in God or not. He knew he would like to take some cellophane and strangle everybody here with it. Just wrap them up in it until their breathing stopped and they were dead dead dead. Cause this was embarrassing. His buddies weren't embarrassed though they should have been. It was his sister and he was nine thousand times better than she was. He was handsome and he was sincere and safe to be around. Because he knew about the photos of them. The naked photos. Of the boys and girls he knew and a lot of the others at school too. He saw their clothed bodies in Math class and at lunch. He saw their naked ones in pictures, and they were doing all kinds of things. He figured it out, because he was swift and observed while other boys wanted just for girls to observe them. And vice versa. Evans' Drug Store was where there was this door way at the back, in shadows, and he, in surveillance, would watch the man who ran the place every so often go to it, with some customer who always seemed shifty and nervous and looking round like he, the customer, was going to rob a bank. Just an average old wood door. But something about it--sinister, intriguing. Like it should have ghostly cobwebs on it and should squeak horribly when opened. The door would be opened with a key. And with a last looksee, both men would go inside. The door would close and lock again. Jetty was the wind. Jetty was the Shadow. And finally the two would come out again. The customer with a suspicious something or other in a plain brown wrapper and getting the hell out of the store by walking fast and faster and half running to the door. So after a time of this, when Jetty kind of figured it out, (i.e. it had to do with sex, because it just had to is all, dirty magazines maybe) because he liked the Hardy Boys too, and he loved to find mysteries around him, he had a little talk with the man who ran the place. Jetty had guts too. And had led the man who ran the store to believe Jetty knew more than he did. The man looked, as the books say, askance, and he massaged the man's sweat with his words and the man let him go in that little room too. And what a trunk load of surprises were back there! If the other boys had hung round the paperback rack at the drug store, they would have noticed this furtive business going on too. He loved drug stores where he could get a soda and just looked at the book and magazine covers all day long in the summer and on weekends. This drug store was always cold in the hottest summers, and he would suck his Pepsi and dance his eyes down the rows of books. He didn't read the books themselves. Bought one occasionally. But mostly Jetty was always amazed at book covers and magazine covers. They entranced him. They seemed to direct him to other world of mystery and science fiction and horror stories and it was as though those paintings and crude drawings on the back and front of paperbacks said, after a time, hey, look over there at the door of that mysterious back room and the doings around it, so slick and nefarious--so they thought. Without their guidance, he never would have known. See, all you illiterates, he wanted to say, what you don't know about. But of course they knew about it. The pictures were of --god, he laughed himself silly when he got home with that first batch, locked his door, poured them out on his bed. Then he got excited as hell. The first he looked at was of his sister, naked as a June bug, legs spread, as she sat on a mattress before a painting of flowers in a vase, her fingers opening her snatch to the close up. Her boy chest with the tiny red dot nipples. Her lips open and her tongue tip darting out. Suddenly Jetty saw her as someone other than an annoying brat who hogged the bathroom all the time and talked on the phone endlessly and was such a snot to him. Oh, did he have something over her now. Made him hard too. The photo. And what he would do with it. Bathroom time and phone time for him forever more. Grovel, Cathy Sue, grovel big time. But he decided to not be precipitous. To see what would happen, if anything. Because not all the Polaroids were just of his sister. No, they were of a number of young girls and young boys too for that matter. Some older than Jetty. Some younger. A mix and match thing. Because this was a long time ago and it happened right beyond the paperback rack (not much traffic in that area of the place, safe to go to that mysterious room) in the drug store with its bland yellow walls and racks of Valentine candy boxes year round, and its swim and surf trunks and snorkels in summer, and its soda fountain, and the medicine counters, and the pharmacy with the step up to the glassless window the pharmacist was behind, and its medicinal smell, and such things as what would one day be known as kiddy porn were not even considered in such a small town so far away. It was fun, the photographer once told Jetty, it was fun trying to pull one over on a town that was so sleepy eyed and defenseless that it was no trouble at all. Put the things on sale in church, he told Jetty once he knew he could take the boy into confidence--the photographer, for all his wariness, was pretty sleepy eyed himself--have the girls and boys autograph them and hand them out in service, they still wouldn't see what was there. But the photographer didn't seem like he was having fun when he said it. Even when he took the pictures of Jetty. As he and Jetty came up with all sorts of creative things for the boy to do with himself while looking at stroke magazines, including, wearing only a shirt, pushed up to his armpits, and rising up on the upthrust on his back, with his butt cleared off the ground, his penis, hard and clenched and firm, in his hand trying to make a jetty to the boy's own throat, so thrusting hard and climatic that exact moment the camera captured was. So intensely personal, and all those very close up pictures the camera made of him. Some parts of his body, he wasn't sure what they were for a moment in those photos. They were like close up photos of a pink planet with odd landscape. In which he somehow lay and had his being. Mysterious and interesting in a painterly way. Jetty always requested his photos "shoots" be with no other boys. Pretending himself braver than he was. He hoped. No problem, the man had said. The man who had seemed like he always had a sore throat somewhere deep within him. A sore of sadness. Sometimes when Jetty went in for his "shoot", he thought he caught the man weeping just a little bit. But he was always pretending otherwise when Jetty, and when, Jetty believed, the other kids were around when their turns came. Sometimes the man would be angry at something Jetty didn't understand. Sometimes the man seemed so damned lost. Jetty felt a friendship for him. The man did not offer a friendship back. Politeness. Nothing else. An ear for listening, yes. He made Jetty feel good. But it began and ended there. And that was the problem. Jetty was swift, like he reminded himself, and he knew things, did things that his parents would split a gasket about if they caught any of it at all. And every other parent in town too. They didn't know he would, of a summer's eve while lying in his room with the door locked--he was not sleepy eyed--stretch his short naked body on his bed, he on his right side, extend his legs as far as they would go, cup his little hot balls, twist his nipples, elongate himself as only naked children can, feel his hard globe buttocks, rush Vesuvius in his stomach, building, kiss his inner arm, and he would rub away at his little penis, the texture of it hard and warm and comforting, while he looked at the photo of a pyramid of children, like in gym class, except these children were quite naked. And their faces were of dewy eyes and their grins were of charm, some rested their arms on the backs of the children next to them, and their little kid penises or their little girl front slits were little rosettes of splendor that seemed to caress his eyes. He had x ray eyes. The boys he had not "sexed" that he passed by in the school corridors, he knew their nakedness anyway, and it was so wonderful that he could look at them in science class as they worked away at a test problem, and he knew what was under that shirt, and which boy had a foreskin and which did not, how each brought himself off in their own individual unique way. And Jetty knowing that some day he probably would feel their bodies genuflecting underneath his, and their stomach muscles grasping hard as he pushed his penis into their abdomens and jacked off away on them. He had fallen into the lap of sexual luxury. He had to keep mum on the thing though. All of it. Because he had realized life mostly is a series of lies and kiddings. He might have been lucky to learn that early on. He especially loved the photos of the boys and girls in their respective pyramids formations from the back side. Those tender little mounds of mounds, and those sweet little anuses staring back at him. And since yesterday had been Thursday, Cathy Sue had come to his room. Knocking on his door their coded knock. On Thursday night, with their parents at the city council meeting, held in the basement where the boys were now playing basketball so desperately, so manfully, trying to get Cathy Sue's nose out of that damned book, But on Thursday nights, for three months now, solid, Cathy Sue had not been a drip and Jetty had not been a drip. Neither had been the three boys who came to the room a bit after Jetty and Cathy Sue had taken each other's temperature in various ways. The three boys were from Jetty's cub scout troop. Last night. Each Thursday, three different boys showed up. Jetty never knew how they decided among themselves. The boys always entered Jetty's bedroom through the window. Jetty and Cathy Sue were only partially disrobed. Jetty in a t shirt. Cathy Sue in panties with little roses round the rim. The boys always wore their Cub Scout uniforms because Cathy Sue loved "to see Jetty suck off a man in uniform." Last night's batch, heroes or arch villains, rapists, murderers, thieves, or the Cavalry to the rescue, entering the bedroom of Jetty to save fair damsel and to struggle manfully with Jetty while untying invisible ropes from Cathy Sue's arms and legs as she lay spread eagle in the bed. "Gar," one liberator said, "What is going on here, matey?" "Unhand her, you cad," Jimmy had called out. While Jetty caught Jimmy in a bear hug--Jimmy far stronger, larger, one year older, had pretended that he could not escape Jetty's grasp as Jetty kissed Jimmy on his rosy cheeks. Jimmy pretending outrage. And Jetty pushing his naked groin against Jimmy's crotch and legs. "Sacrifice thyself for fair maiden," Jetty said, as the other boys had come to the girl and had looked down on her with such lust, as she told them to unburden themselves with their armor and let her see the close up of their penises hard manfully so, as they stripped each other and went to her and were naked with her as she brought their penises close while she lay naked on the bed, put the tips of the uncut one against the cut one, and then hurt them as she pulled those dicks, and their owners to their knees, as she sucked them hard for a moment, then pushed them away. During this, Jimmy was "reluctantly" taking off his uniform, and playing with Jetty's uncut member at the same time. Both boys were naked soon enough, and they knelt in front of each other, their rods beating time against each other. And thus, let the games begin. Jimmy's washboard stomach, and his dick that was one inch longer than Jetty's as they turned on, with each other, playing each other to a fever pitch, as the boys and Cathy Sue moaned their soundtrack behind them. The games had begun. They had formed their own pyramid. They had examined each other. Cathy Sue loved to see the boys examine each other. Play doctor with each other and slide those little open wide sticks into little openings here and there. The play of puppies, the play of little sheep in gambol dell. And they were all rolling all over the floor, all over the rugs with cowboy stars embroidered into them. Their legs were round necks and their hands were rushing to find new stiffies before there could be a chance from soft to hard, but they never managed that. The little erector sets were always penny candy canes hard and stiff before a hand could get to them in surprise. And Cathy Sue sitting naked, playing with herself, and this boy or that, playing with himself, looking on, and Cathy Sue lying on Jetty's bed, fingering Jimmy while Jetty sucked Jimmy's long slender cock and played with those very heavy balls, while looking deeply up at his friend of blue eyes and shaggy black hair, as Jimmy put his hands to Jetty's shoulders and sighed and whistled through his mouth as he dug his dick in Jetty's mouth, knowing there was more where that came from A kaleidoscope of naked children. A kaleidoscope of children exploring like a familiar and yet unknown country that was each other in the bedroom. Looking at every microcosm of skin. Filled with the human warmth of their own sexuality. And budding power. In all sorts of positions and sharing secrets they would never otherwise have shared. Little newly formed bodies and little pink cocks that were sticks of magic that seemed other worldly. That turned and tapped and rushed feelings that were like no others had ever been. The idea of it. The fact of it. Jacking off. Watching each other. Watching Jimmy jack off Jetty's sister. All primed and ready with those sweet faces and those innocent smiles. The eyes of children watching in amazement as their own part in the world was finally coming to them. And it all depended on their bodies as much as anyone else's and that was an extraordinary thing to know. And they lay with each other and stroked each other's chests. And sometimes one of the boys would suck Cathy Sue's boyish titties, like he was a little baby and she would pretend as she held him in her lap on the bed, to rock him and tell him bedtime stores. As hands went and touched and prodded and whispered shadows. Watching three boys turn each other on. Pals. And something of hands that put love fingers crawly and tickly on the legs and thighs, the interiors of those thighs, up to their apple valleys, and the mouths that captured penises like little songs that had to be played only with smiles and laughter and great and wondrous blow jobs that seemed to seltzer the whole thing with a clowny atmosphere. And boys looking up, from the penises they sucked, to the eyes of the boys who owned those lucky penises. And sucked some more. Sure that there was only the abandoned nakedness of themselves and Cathy Sue who would flick her sausage curls back and forth, shake her torso, extend her naked body in a catlike stretching manner, though it excited Jetty far more when the boys did that same thing, sometimes next to her, mimicking her, and doing it better than she, in Jetty's opinion, and would be pink and curvy in her way as the boys were in theirs. Hot, watching a boy mimic fucking his sister. Hot, his sister watching her little brother rubbing other boys. She somehow was the catalyst for approval of anything at all. Like when they "fucked" her, they were "fucking" a part of him as well. She so prissy everywhere else. Laugh stories and sexual largess here. But they could never please her. Never. The best part of this was what she would do in retaliation. They feared one time they would please her and go on doing so, which would take the cherry out of the Coke. So they tried not to think about it. And so the paddling would commence in a while.. And the little pyramid of boys would edge upward against the movie posters on the walls and the buns would be there, trembling with excitement, and shivering in the cool wind from the bedroom open window because it was Fall now and the cool was a good respite from the endless heat of summer. They felt so wonderfully helpless and vulnerable. Though before then, Cathy Sue picking their pink bodies in her eyes and settling them down on her brother's bed, and telling them what to do. To see her brother. The boys to see their friend masturbate like when he was alone. Naked and heart pounding. Being alone. Being together at the same time. Secret interior lights on outside for everyone to see, as boys put their hands on his legs and waited for him, encouraged him like he was a private singular football team, to pop his nuts big time. Like when he had those pictures from the drug store in his mind. When he took them out later, looked at photos of the boys he had just done the night before. It made everything absolutely perfect. It formed a perfect warm circle somehow for him. He knew never ever to tell especially his sister. She would kill him. He didn't know why. Just that she would. He had seen them in photos naked in ways they would somehow never be in all this sexing. And in the sexing, he had seen them in ways no one ever would see in those graphic photos. It tickled sadly something deep in Jetty. That even in such openness, there were still secrets. There was still a closing off. It was holding secrets from them at the same time as they held theirs from him. There was complicity, and there was further to go. Keeping silent about these things and that formed a frustrating bridge between them all. And he would lie on his side on his bed, as instructed, and he would massage his tiny balls and his tiny cock that was a slant against his slanted belly. He held his left leg up in the air--"gonna piss like a dog" someone always said, and he would laugh and tell them to fuck off. As Cathy Sue would slap his butt cheeks and tell him, "Stop cussing. Momma would be so ashamed." But that was how he jacked off. That leg in the air. Who knew why? He didn't. Just that he always had. And the boys, last night, Jimmy and Joel and Ricky, other Thursday nights, other combinations of boys, never another girl but Cathy Sue, would study Jetty's penis and the way the hardness looked. She would examine it like a scientist examining a rare archeological find, up close and with patience and delicacy. Sometimes, at Cathy Sue's instructions, they would lick it on the side and in the front. While her brother kissed another boy or her, hard and tongues inserted. And that made Jetty's dick stretch almost to the bursting point, there in his house fashioned above and below him and to the front of him with sex. Sometimes, the boys would kiss Jetty's balls which made the balls shiver and contract a little. And of course Cathy Sue would tell the boys, in combination, and in no matter of fact way, which was to suck Jetty's hard barber shop pole penis, and who was allowed to kiss him and to kiss her at the same time. Sometimes Jetty wanted to tell the boys in the room, and in the basement here tonight, and his sister that "I know something you don't know," in the sing song rhyme of it. But he was having too much fun at how everybody pretended all differently. Everyone would have been ashamed, Jetty believed, especially his sister, that he was in on the picture deals. Having his taken as well. Naked and in his briefs, exposing his penis, hard and soft, a little more, and then his balls, and grinning at the camera, proud of himself even if he had lost his front two bottom teeth-it added to the fun somehow. Made it all seemed regal in a way, and then so many more pictures of him naked, as he practiced what he would do at the "shoots" while he pleasured himself without shame, what he would, in reality,, do this Thursday or the next. And the camera clicking away at him. As it had and would with the other boys and girls. On this same mattress. In this same darkened room. He communed, did Jetty, there, with the ghosts of yesterday and the coming ghosts of tomorrow. Pictures. Boys and boys. Girls and girls. Doing all manner of things. It hurt him to think they wouldn't believe he was part of that. Why would they not? After all of this? Was there even further to go? Had they? How could anyone go further than this? They would deny it to the inth degree. As, he knew, they would equally deny that their soft pink baby fat flesh was unwrapped also in Jetty's room and Thursday night was sex night. Thursday night was the bedroom light on and ears cocked for the sound of Mom and Dad driving in the garage--but that was part of the fun back then, the danger of it, like the "fun" of the photographer and of the man who ran the drug store with the back room--the thing was some knew somewhere in all of this and others might know and you never knew who to trust. So you were careful. And you had sex. Because trouble and sex went together all the time. And you learned, Jetty decided years later, that you do the best you can before you're marched out of the room in shame. To whatever fate awaits. And to see his sister sucking a boy while his best friend was sucking Jetty and getting a little jealous of it, while another boy jacked off watching the proceedings--it was to Jetty, these wordless excursions into well just what will our bodies do tonight that we aren't to blame for?--so wonderful bending down to his sister as she fondled him as he sat on the side of the bed, and his best friend in the world, last night, Jimmy, he would have another best friend next Thursday night, leaned against his back. And eventually pushed Jetty to the bed while the others watched, and cuddled him and wove his delicate lace buttocks in the shadows and light from the bedside table lamp, as Jimmy pushed into the stomach of his friend. It was like, Cathy Sue one time said, a circus of sex. There in the bedroom with its model silver planes on wires and its book shelves filled with comic books and its slim short boy's bed with the bed covers akimbo and the horror movie posters on the wall and the wood study desk in the corner. A circus where she was the ring master and how they loved to see her naked and standing in the center of the room as they went round and round her, faster and faster, and they held hands, the boys, and they got closer and closer to her. Touching their hard dicks to her snatch. To her legs. To each other's bodies as well. That circle of little hard ons, as she played with herself and with them. Some of the boys breaking out of the circle and kissing each other in mock, and sometimes real, passion. One boy pulling his friend to where he was standing and almost over as he kissed his eyes and nose and mouth, his tongue down his boyfriend's throat, while balancing him as they went into the shadows of each other, so the boy being bent backwards as he was being kissed seemed to be missing a head and the upper part of his chest in this tribute to the way manly men kiss womanly women in the movies. The kissed boy with his dick hard and the veins in his legs straining to keep him upright, as his partner plunged him into passionate sexuality. With their sighs. Their arms and hands trying to make each the other forevermore. One boy falling to his knees with his arms round the other's naked hips, looking up at his captor with such longing and such succor, his friend putting a hand on the boy's face and tracing it in such adoration, or sucking his friend and being sucked by him, with his friend looking down at his little dick in the other boy's mouth, being slurped, and putting his tiny hands on the sucking boy's head pushing his head and mouth up and down, eyes of both boys filled with wonder and sunshine morning summer excitement and something akin to awe and majesty. Then pretending to fuck his friend who bent over, while the little boy rubbed his dick on that warm slit of the behind. That little stick of flesh and such happiness it could give to someone else and to the person who was giving the pleasure too. What a nice arrangement. And the hard on of the boy thus kneeling who would be sucked next. Barber cut hair. Warm soft eyes. Little delicate noses. Petal flower lips. Giving each to the other. To find themselves there all along. She had told them that she would always be a virgin and they relaxed because then no one would get her pregnant, she wouldn't allow--that. So that took the pressure off the boys who really didn't want to fuck her anyway. That would have made the whole thing fall apart somehow. Though she let them touch her down there in her somewhat heavy muff of black hair. She let them put their penises to the tip of it, but no further. And all of it dislocating. All of it disorienting. The boys--thin shoulders, lanky long musculature, legs beginning already to be very downy, or heavy stomachs, inward pulling stomachs, nipples that were orange or red or dusky like a sunset, hands with long or short fingers, penises that would hold the cub scout kerchiefs draped over their hard dicks for as long as they could. The longest time was one hour of sheer rock hard, not even a quiver, and everybody applauded him, and Cathy Sue had then directed old hard rock Brad to polish his Samson dick with that kerchief till it shone like Sunday. He happily did so. The best thing about those Thursday nights was though Cathy Sue thought she was the star, she wasn't. Though all the boys made obeisances toward her. Though they lived it seemed for the times they would be allowed, only for five seconds, to touch her somewhere, but the thing was, they were more interested in each other. And they would dance crazy in the shadows and they would weave penises between others' legs and pretend they were fucking from the front. Sometimes they would lie on their backs on the Roy Rogers rug and they would pull their legs over their ears, and another boy would go in with his penis guiding almost into them and right at the edge, but then someone would always get scared and they would tumble out of it again. But it was never enough for Cathy Sue. They never, as she put it, "sexed" each other enough. And she always had the boys pile, all of them so giggly and eager, they scurried on each other so quickly, so expertly, these, pyramid boys. As she got the paddle out of her brother's closet--he had taken it from a teacher's room one day after school, successfully, for he was, need I remind again, swift--and would paddle their hind ends until they glowed rosy like a cherry fire in the hearth in a country inn in the middle of winter snow. And they loved it. They loved the way their blood sang. And they loved the way she would then make them paddle each other. Then pyramid falling sprawled onto each other. As she, then, made them bend over and paddle each other, not hard, not hurtful, but enough that their penises sometimes popped without their even being touched. There was such wisdom in teachers about paddling. It made you feel close. It made you feel happy. It made you feel you were a part of some sexual membrane and it kept your joint jumping for the rest of the school day, or the rest of the night, as witnessed here. Cathy Sue never invited girls to these little parties. She thought of her own accord. But it was Jetty who maneuvered her into that decision. It was fun watching the boys pile on top of her and pretend they were group fucking her and then to pretend they were group fucking each other and she watched and traced their bodies and told which parts of each body she liked the best and which she liked to think about and masturbate to when they had all left for the evening. And they wanted to sustain their youth, their goldenness, even if their hair was raven dark and their skin was tan from the summer. They loved hugging each other. They loved the being somehow one. They loved closing their eyes and hugging another person and not being allowed to touch the other's genitals at first, thus made to guess if they were hugging a boy or Cathy Sue. It was not surprising how so many guessed wrong. For the boys' skin was just as sweet. The boys' bodies were just as soft and delicate and it was good for them all to know, all the cub scouts, for they had all been initiated, that it didn't matter what sex one was, it was how much joy one person could bring another, and they loved getting close to see one penis rubbing atop the other, to see the ridges and the bands round the shaft, to see the head and for someone, the owner or not, grab the head, and press it just a little, make it dark with blood and deep with suction as the slit was made to go in and go out again. But here, now, in the church basement, the boys, all of whose bodies Jetty and Cathy Sue had known almost as intimately as it was possible to know them, they and she and Jetty too for that matter, were pretending that no Thursday nights had ever involved the children in their underwear being pulled down and dicks pulled hard on through the slit, no Thursday nights of the boys wearing some of Cathy Sue's underwear, and strutting back and forth in Jetty's room, pulling at their long pretend sausage curls, and putting a hand on a hip as they imitated their version of a woman's walk, blowing kisses to the wind. Not the paddling or Cathy Sue's or the boys' look up close as tummy met tummy and penis worked against penis as the paddle hit the buttocks of the boy on top and made him feel extra naked, even more so than having suck jobs with out his clothes, for some weird reason, and the penises quivering like little snakes or thud heavy paddle worms onto each other as hands felt chests and felt shoulders and the paddled boy lay on top of the boy he had just dry come on. Quite wonderful. Fulfilling. Deep in the heart so. They explored the differences and the sameness. And afterwards, the boys would dress, would window exit, and Cathy Sue and Jetty would dress each other for bed, kiss each other good night, and his sister would go back to her room, as like clock work their parents came home each and every time to the very second. So Jetty thought, this Friday night, and how everybody pretended that these things had not happened. The boys were shy and diffident around Cathy Sue tonight. They worked sweatily hard and panting breath and blotched shirts at the chests and underarms to get her to notice but she was too busy reading a book. And boys were once again drips. And girls were drips to boys. And never the twain would meet. Crazy. Jetty thought. He leaned against the wall and watched as he put his hand in his left pocket and massaged his hard on. He didn't wear underwear much any more. It was easier to come in school or church or Sunday school or MYF or the cub scout meetings that way. He did it delicately. Looking at the boys playing ball. Looking at his sister engrossed in her book over on the other side of the room. He would have been so terribly embarrassed if anyone had looked at him and figured out what he was doing. He kept his expression neutral. He worked his fingers on the same dick that every boy in this room, and Cathy Sue too, had sucked and rubbed at one time or another, as he had, at Cathy Sue's instructions, she was a mean one all right, sucked and rubbed every boy dick in this room. And one or two of them had eaten her clit. Jetty hadn't. That seemed too ooky. They had all together, in different groupings, jacked each other off. She kissing their butts and they hers and each other's. They had explored each other's nummies in all manner of ways and had put fingers up each other. A boy would stand with his back to the others and he would masturbate so they would see his arms working and he would throw his head back and brace his legs, his buttocks pulled back on themselves. And just work absolutely everybody up to a fever dream zenith. They had kissed each other all over. They had peed out the window once or twice just for the hell of it and everybody thought it was so funny and laughed at the boys who did it. They had taken off their clothes piecemeal and they had rubbed each other hard and fast in various stages of undress. They had held to Cathy Sue's boyish tits while other boys had rubbed their penises on the backs of the boys on her, skinny boys and weightier boys, boys with stubby little penises, boys who were beginning to get pubic hair, boys who had hard rocks and penises that seemed to be getting larger by the week, the knobs of the penises on the knobs of the boy's back spinal column knobs. Feeling the rush of each other, as they rubbed themselves to climax on the spinal columns, as the boys on top of Cathy Sue kissed her, tongue kissed her, and then she had ordered them to tongue kiss each other, and they did so willingly. Their boy bodies tight against each other. As they knelt before each other. And their arms decisively wrapped around. Then falling into each other, in a spiral on the bed or the rugs or the bare wood floor as they kissed and fondled and worshipped each other and rubbed their penises on the bellies of the boys on the bottom, and their little bottoms would go into wild spasms as they worked themselves up and out and the paddles would fall precisely, one two three, on their naked bums, as they were called in Jolly Olde, Cathy Sue told them once. Like Jetty didn't know that already. She thought he was stupid. And drippy. And he thought her so. Except on Thursday nights. They had stopped blushing at each other on those nights. But here. Tonight. In school. In Sunday school. The boys would fall all over themselves trying to speak to Cathy Sue or the other girls, whether they were plain or beautiful or half way between. It wasn't an act. They meant it. It was like amnesia took all of them the rest of the week. Like they could enter from one door to the other and never see the jarring it made. Never see how odd it was to be at opposite poles of the earth one minute past the next. Sometimes Jetty wanted to show them the pictures he had gotten from the drug store. Of himself and of them. He went every week to get some more. Jetty asked the photographer why there were no photos of boys and girls together, and why most were of individuals. The photographer said it was safer that way, though Jetty didn't know what that meant. The building where the photos were taken was about two miles outside of town at a deserted limestone quarry. Jetty rode on his bike there at certain specified times. He never saw other kids there. Jetty had not been afraid of him after a time. The man was like a butterfly at the end of the day, when the wings are harder to maneuver in the heavy late flower scent filled summer air. Jetty was afraid for the man more than anything else. Jetty came. And he watched the long blonde boy dribbling naked. And he watched the basket ace with his dark whippet thin physique, like a silver fish straining its naked body of plate like musculature into the air from a long way down in the ocean where it had been only a moment ago, with a huge hard penis that was coming in silver squirts so far and so fast, and he jumping higher than gravity would allow, this boy who slam dunked the basket ball in the hoop, knocking down a short heavy little red haired boy who was also naked and had a little plump pudding fist of a penis that the boy could twist around and around and he said it didn't hurt at all--honest. And let the others do it too, all that extra skin bending round the dick's corner and finding it meeting itself again. Curiouser and curiouser. They weren't naked of course except in Jetty's eye and memory. He would not show them the pictures. He had no idea who the pictures were for. He had not thought that far. He knew at least he suspected none of the kids knew about him, including the ones in the pictures, so he wasn't as swift as he thought. He just had never cared beyond the point of himself and his buddies and Cathy Sue and Thursday nights and how sweet Jimmy kissed him sometimes on those nights when it was Jimmy's turn to be among them. All Jetty knew was the drug store provided magic. And Thursday night was the night to live for and make the magic happen. He wondered as he came down from his orgasmic high tonight, he happily observing no one had noticed what he had been doing, remembering those pictures the man had taken of him hard and standing, hard and lying on his side, hard and the come expression on his face as he lay on the pallet with that same painting on the wall behind him as in all the other photos of the other kids. With his legs spread and his dick photographed so close up, the camera lens almost tickling his penis, from that angle, making his little hard dick (Jetty's face blurry in the background) look like a sandstone column he had seen once at a state park in New Mexico, all bumpy and massive and strong seeming, with glowy evening red going down sunlight on it of a July's evening, with the camera looking up to his face, close ups and little dollops of Burma Shave on his thigh and dick tip, to fake cum (the photographer said, lying to himself more than to Jetty, that these photos he took would make him famous some day.) That they were to be the photographer's ticket into art galleries all over the world and you will be famous some day kid, sharing in my glory, your being my model and all, what say you to that? and he added that cum shots are the best ones, for whatever reason Jetty didn't know)--who was buying them? Who was getting off on them? On him? Jetty would wonder if he had seen the man, the men?, who bought his photos in the drug store back there in the mystery room. And that thought made for an odd cumbersome feeling. Did adults have sexual feelings? Could his mom and dad? God, it was a very prickly thought. Like a cactus sitting on top of his brain. Pushing its needles inward. The photographer was very distant to him, Jetty thought, more scared of the boy, even more fluttery as the sessions went along. But in the photos of other children, the faces smiled and there was happiness in the eyes and the bodies, the abandon, and that could not be faked. Am I different to him?, Jetty wondered. Does he not like me as well? But the pictures of Jetty contained the same happiness as did those others. Do we smile more because he is so troubled? Why was he so uptight, this photographer? The man took photos that made them immortal. He listened to them. There were all sorts of loneliness, he told them. They felt such things too. There was honesty, as much as dared, there somewhere in the center of the thing. And he made Jetty and the others, though they didn't know this, feel as though they were more clothed naked with the man than being naked in front of him. The man was always willing to let Jetty talk. He never violated what they thought. He was somewhat drunk on children. He loved to listen to them. He loved to know what they thought about absolutely everything. He told them not to talk with anyone about the pictures. He said it like someone else was saying it through his words. He said it fast, mumbling. Like it was the law or something. He rubbed at the back of his neck hard as he said it. And sighed as he said that to Jetty. He narrowed his eyes to the wood flooring of this grimy room where he took such lovely sunny pictures. Jetty decided these photos had made it possible for the Thursday nights to happen. Made them, at certain times at least, unashamed of sex and their penises and vaginas and their feelings and their imaginations. Jetty had tried to talk with, at lunch, a couple of boys he had had sex with Thursday nights. Just to joke about it. But the boys looked at him as though he had gone mad and had immediately with scared eyes left the table for another. As with the photos, he believed, so with the sex plays on Thursday, everybody but he got amnesia. And he too, in a way. He remembered how Cathy Sue had come to his room at times and had acted so oddly, so awkwardly, (she had never noticed he existed before, except to browbeat him and pinch him hard--he wondered if she had been photographed naked and this gave her ideas or did she have them already? He guessed he would never know. Did it work with the boys that way as well? But he had sex feelings long before he knew about the photos, so it was anybody's guess) how she had sat on the bed with her brother, and they were close together, and she had asked him, nervously certain things. Both had blushed. Both had been embarrassed. But in that blushing and in that embarrassment, one night, the door securely locked, she had kissed him and felt his crotch and it was Katy bar the door at that point, and she and he had done things he had never seen done before. Then one Thursday night, when she was in Jetty's room and they were lying on the bed half dressed, her mouth on his navel, tickling it with her tongue, one of his cub scout friends appeared at the window. Jetty and Cathy Sue were sore embarrassed. At least Jetty was. He later learned this was Cathy Sue's idea. And the boy came into the room and the boy was strong and handsome and he caught Cathy Sue's naked butt in his hands as she tried to roll off her brother and Jetty tried to roll off the other side of the bed. "Wait," Michael commanded. Michael the star athlete of the stick ball games and the back yard basketball games. Michael who had eyes that bore into you. That willed you to do what he somehow knew was inside you. Eyes that saw more than you wanted him to. Michael and Cathy Sue working in tandem on her brother. "Say," Michael said, "What you got down there, Jetty?" And coming over to the boy and feeling him up as Jetty lay doubled over in mortification. He knew Michael would tell Jetty's parents that he had tried to rape his own sister and they would murder him but good. But Michael had other ideas. And in time, in time, Jetty came out of his fetal position and grudgingly, gurgingly, let Michael stroke him as Cathy Sue watched on, platonically so. For a time. And it felt so good to Jetty as that sure boy's hand stroked Jetty's penis and it seemed he was in warm relaxing soothing bubble bath cleansing bath water and when he popped in the boy's hand--how grand to have someone else jack you off, and you just lie there in the pleasure of it all--it was sheer heaven, to look at Michael, holding Jetty's naked thighs, and who was, it seemed, excited by Jetty. Michael stroking his own dick thrust through the opened zipper. Tongue tip stuck out just a bit. So sexy. This wunderkind boy Jetty had had such a crush on, who also had not seemed to know before that Jetty existed, who smiled down at him, and Cathy Sue embraced her brother with such ardor. They both did. Was Michael's having been photographed, the origin of his entering into these things as well? Jetty treasured the photos of Michael above all the other photos. And to actually have that little Polaroid superstar here in the flesh... And they lay with the younger boy and held him so tenderly. After that, it was Katy bar the other door, cause the last one was beaten to a pulp. And all of this was simple and inexorable and natural as mountain streams running into a collective lake. Later, another boy, nervous, and not nervous after a short time. Then another came to the window of Jetty's bedroom where he was awaited with open arms. And went inside. It just all felt so good. So good. Jetty shrugged as the game wound down and the boys, depleted, fell to the floor, breathing hard and tight and expelling sweat from their faces and arms and necks. Jetty's dick was still flexing. Ready to go again. All he knew was somehow a real old emissary (30 years old at least) of the adult world was making it all okay. That what he and his friends did was all right. It never seemed wrong to him. When the Thursday nights had started he didn't remember exactly. Only that they made him and his friends feel so close and important. Why did everything have to have an answer?, a rationale?, and spoil the good times that just were because they were? He believed they never saw his pictures (it would have embarrassed Jetty if they had seen them?, but why?) or each other's. At this point it got confusing, so he let it alone. Jetty lay spent himself against the wall, his legs spraddled out on the concrete floor. He looked over at Cathy Sue. She just happened to look over at him at that same exact time. "Drip." He whispered loudly to her. "Spaz." She whispered loudly to him. And the boys between them looked first at one and then at the other. A boy smiled at someone. Another boy frowned. Then the smile and the frown were wiped away. Just in time. "Jeez," somebody said. Coughing from the hot tough game. Cathy Sue still reading along. After a while, the kids got together some money and pooled it for Cokes out of the machine in the hall way. They hung around for a time. Then they went home. Jetty turned out the lights as he left. And Cathy Sue locked the main outside door to the church. The kids split up. Cathy Sue and Jetty walked the three blocks to home. She noogied him a couple of times. And he called her a spoiled brat a couple of times. He walked ahead of her. She called him names. He could not be seen with his sister. No boy could be seen with old toad face. And that's the end of this. Of course, there is always next Thursday. end