Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2000 06:14:28 CST From: Tim Stillman Subject: "Boy of Winter" (M/b) "Boy of Winter" by Timothy Stillman Winter has sewn in its golden patch of memory today. The first most welcome snap of the season. Nov. 1. And thus the winter fields of Ricky's arms. His thick heavy wheat colored hair. His sleek well formed downy haired parfait colored arms and legs, akimbo. To me. Pink and swirly, as though he is lit lambent from within. The softness of his welcome, running to him as I have been running to him all my life without knowing it. He, naked, and filled with a certain grace that is within his very breathing. My head on his chest, on the bonework protecting his heart. I hear its hushing, its lullaby. There was nothing in that winter but Ricky. The snows heavy then, and the coldness of the days dark, and we cuddled together in our little parabola of a world. Quiet, I remember. Like some song we were listening to in our singular mind. The heavy covers over us, and our hands on each other's hard penises, greeting cards of the season to each other. This coral winterland. This place of exploration and touching fingers and playing with each other as though we were the first two children of the world. Come with me, his hands said, as I held him near me. The boy feel of him. The boy aroma of him. We were content in our room which was our world. And he let me nestle next to him. Let me feel his warm skin next to mine. The hearth and home of his warm tight skin, the totality of his and my naked bodies. He, proud and happy with himself, he with his bright white teeth and his rosy face and the way he held the world at bay. The way he was amazed at himself and how it was no trick or joke, no laughter coming from some ventriloquising from the corners of our bedroom. The beckoning of him and the moving down to his sandy groin with my mouth, I completely under the covers now, and his hands on the back of my head, playing with my long brown hair. As I rest my face against his thick black curly pubic hair. A good patch of it and his penis surging next to my lips as I whisper to it and call it to me as a diver going down so deeply into his subconscious that he has found finally Atlantis, made of pink shells and corals and the place where all of life first bubbled forth. His penis (say "dick", he always told me), warm and soft and hard at the same time. Its rings like reddish and brown stripes of passion, and how the tip of it was like a head of magic bulging from all the slow, inferior, tiresome past there ever was. With his penis head impatient with all that nonsense, and erecting, towering through it, strong and filled with blood and happiness that said the past years did not count, nor the future when he would not be in them for me. Spears and totem poles and how he could move his dick without touching it. The way my mouth electrically drifted to it, honed in on it, as though there were soft summers down there, come see, come see. Under the darkness of the warm covers. Something that let my tongue reach out and bring its tip to the slit of that penis, as he reached to my head and pushed me further onto it, wanting me to go see saw up and down on it, until I was sucking it, and he made such pleasure in his mouth to go with the immense joy that was in my own. My own dick straining against his thigh. He filled my mouth. It was all the carnivals I had never been invited to that was now inside me. We needed no one or nothing then. We had each other. And it was all the friendships I never expected to feel. That I had never tried this at all with any boy before. Not even with him. He guessed, though. And he came to me because of it, instead of running away. All the dedicated tender hurts that were like little trap doors in my skin that said the memory of this will kill you and make you live at the same time, and which do you choose? And I said, always and always, I choose Ricky. His fingers callused a bit from working in Shop and on cars and on bikes, yearning at my shoulders, making tiny little red tombstones in them, as I sucked him, as though we had defeated time and life and death. And of these three, the most difficult to defeat is life, and thus to truly live in the real utopia that is there in its place. Right in Ricky's brown autumnal eyes. And in his great happiness that percolated through his body, as I examined it, covers pulled back, and I spread his legs and touched and licked. As he would examine mine. Would lift each of my legs and feel their heft and touch his hands down their insides, and then to my dick, feeling my erection start again. And he showed me the left tip of his penis head which had a small scar. He said his older brother had grazed him there with a BB gun bullet when Ricky was four or five. There is violence in Ricky's family. There is anger. There is too much drinking. He says my home is his haven, what keeps him sane. It is nice of him to say it, at least. At first, I loved him because Ricky was a boy. But soon, then, because Ricky was Ricky. And I hold his root between my teeth and I press my tongue over his penis. Seven inches of cock, we most happily measured on him. And there is this moment of winter where the wheat grows all around me and the scarecrows are gone, and there was no darkness in those dark days period. It seemed we were always together that year, that winter. It appeared as though we were moving through life at our own speed, for the first time, fascinated with each other. He read books I liked. And I watched movies he liked. And we had a life, do you see? And once, Ricky, whispering to me in bed, "we're having an affair, aren't we?", and I tickled his bare tits and he wrapped his legs with mine and we were a configuration, a mathematical impossibility with two beating hearts that should never have happened at all, to me certainly. We were those frozen figures on the Grecian urn rushing to each other, holding each other. Not frozen in solitude any longer. There was deep snow, then. And we would dress--after sex, or before--our lovely secret, finely formed and full measured and we would go out onto the ice porch, in our heavy clothes and coats and gloves, Ricky holding my hand and there was love enough, finally, not for a moment of imagination, or a moment of wistful if only I had asked him? Ricky was compact and a high school football player, but not bulky, not someone out there who believed physical strength was everything, for somehow in this little town with its macho bigotry, and from his family, which celebrated such things to the hilt, Army dad, Army brother, there came Ricky. And his voice was the way winter always sounded to me when I was a child, and there was no one else around to hear it. Not harsh or cold. But like a little light of promise, like a Christmas tree light at the top of the evergreen that said come see this early morning snow, come touch out to the flakes on the seer air, take your tongue tip out and taste winter and how the bad things do not cling any more, take the cleanness of it, the pure poetry of it, like stanzas and onomatopoeias falling from the sky. And take your sad little child's body underdeveloped and weak and touched by no one but your mother and only that when you were very young, and grow it some more years and thus here and now in this tapestry of sex and joy and kindness, take that same tongue tip that touched out to snow flakes, to touch the strong firm protective metal of those Januarys back then, and let the tip finally touch the taste of boy. It was like a photograph, back then, even when it was happening between us, that was so far away. I kept coming in and out of myself, as when I came the first time with him in bed with me, after a number of weeks of feints and flirts with each other, and he watched and his eyes were glued to my heaving dick, his face concentrating hard, did he want to memorize this like I did?, like I tried to memorize him, because later it would be important? And when I came, burst, and he looked at it for so long and then into my face, and we smiled and I touched him, the truth of oasis coming at last. "What are you doing, Barry?", he would ask when I looked at him so long and so hard, all of him. "Memorizing you, Ricky, for when you go away." "But I'm not going anywhere," he said with such obvious sureness. And something inside me, something pulled out of my consciousness and said you are watching this from a distance, waterworks in the rain and snow and heat chemistry of melting away of the past century, and you will never bend your arm to any angle of love again that would ever wrap a truer destiny around you and another person as long as you live. We had been friends for a year. He didn't know how much I wanted to touch him, to hold him. But I didn't, until that Friday night he was allowed to come over and spend the weekend with me. At bedtime, I told him good night, assuming he would bed down in the spare bedroom. But he said, courageously, he would like to sleep with me because the house was one he had not spent an entire night in. He was 16, and I was still so cloaked, still so disbelieving that he had anything sexual in mind, so I shrugged, and said sure he could. We talked a time, and then we slept, and the next morning I woke to find him in only his briefs, and a huge erection, the top coming out the top of his BVDs. He, lying on his back, watching cartoons on the little black and white TV. I felt fear. I felt such excitement. And I was seeing him almost naked, and asked if he would like some breakfast and by the way "you've got a hard on." "Nah!!" he responded and looked at me and the look said I could see, if I asked politely, if I promised not to touch, and he let me pull off his briefs, and his dick lay thickly on his belly, touching his navel (he told me he could suck himself when he wanted to, but I was not allowed to see), and each day when he came over to the house, we advanced a bit more. Me, unwillingly willing. He laughing at my shyness, but kindly. Wrestling on the floor of the living room with me. Sitting on my chest and bringing his face close to mine and feeling my hard on, and I his. We masturbated with our clothes on, for a time, our flies unzipped, he laughing about the fact I didn't wear briefs of any kind, and we rubbed our dicks together, but we had never come with each other until one afternoon when we had our legs locked and our dicks hard and I jacking off and then desperately wanted to cum and did, and Ricky rejoicing and there was this extraordinary warmth in me, that this time, unlike with Joel and Randy, I had come when a boy I loved was right there with me. I didn't have to wait until they left. I didn't have to hide. I felt not lonely and sad and ill after cuming, as I always did when alone. He smiled at me and put his arm round me and I felt the joy and happiness of orgasm, the word translated not ugly now, not cruel witch pall with sticks falling on me, hard and fast and hurtful, like all the times before. I didn't have to imagine a boy beside me. And I snuggled into him. The joy of community. And yet Ricky and I did hide, in our mesmerizings, in the way he and I fit together like a wonderful brook that was itching to carve itself out of the granite mountains that Thomas Mann wrote about, that was trying to find itself clear and cold and crisp and filled with that way Ricky's veins in his temples ticked so delicately, like a metronome, as though there were never other instances than he and how I loved his face. How I loved its smoothness and his cockle shell ears and the pounding surf that was him. And we giggling together, undressing under winter covers and our mouths all over each other. How he spread, like kind gingham clock hands, his naked body before me and I on my knees, on the bed, sucking his rosy nipples, dusty like, and his bare chest that seemed ample and smaller than it was, and how I would take my hand or the tip of my tongue and trace him from neck to navel and stop the tip of my tongue there. We laughing all the way. It was because there were such contradictions. Winter was meant until him to be a lonely thing. Winter was meant until him a motive for hiding in darker day dreams. And somewhere in these corridors with the advent of Ricky, the joy of hearing him rush up the steps to my porch, his great good humor, his aliveness always, the sun came out and somewhere in these corridors a boy naked ran to me and I ran away for a time, as I always ran from everyone, for I was embarrassed and frightened but one day he put his hands on me and looked me in the eye and said there were seas everywhere and if there were such in dreams, then there were those for us too, two, and he knew and it was okay. And he knew and there was not the crimping on for me, the crippling for me, not for me Von Aschenbach turning his eyes from Tadzio, and the man's heart full of autumn inside, having to run numerous directions at once while keeping still, saying I love you, when the boy was not there. But Ricky was there and it was laughter and nudity and harvest home and I kissed his navel and forded my tongue down to his groin and his pubic hair. I lay the side of my face there, after kissing it and the balls, nuzzling into it. And his penis hard and still growing, even so. And how the honor, the terrible, the frightening, the baroque halls that were legend around me as I took it in my mouth the first time, its squirming for me to take more and I almost unable to. And it was candy cane and Christmas and it was the snow blowing hard and fast with thick flakes against the bedroom window, and it was cold in our house and we shivered a bit before cover diving, and there were warm trap doors in his body in which he let me hide, wherever I wanted. To be naked with him, to hold his body onto mine and for him to hold me on his. How I counted down the hours till he would come over from school and wrestle with me out of our clothes. I with fear, maybe this afternoon he would not come over. I stood at the back door and watched him at three o'clock on the dot each school afternoon, running as fast as he could from home, over the vacant lot, and he ran with precision and unconscious beauty, he was so easy and content with himself. He did not know what was to come after and god help both of us neither did I. Those around us said they believed they believed in love and happiness and companionship. For themselves, yes a fake static brand of it. As to the rest of it, they lied. And we found out far too late, though Ricky told me he knew how they operated, he knew how they saw things, but I didn't listen to him. But before that, I would go to the living room door just as he rang the doorbell many times and then banged on the door hard, and I would open it (once, naked, even, and he shocked speechless and laughing) and he was Ricky and he rushed to me and we wrestled around and he gently letting me down on the living room floor and we would feel each other hard and my mouth would go to the crotch of his jeans and trace that blue jeaned swelling rod. And he would say, "wanna jack off?", trilling the words, and I would say, so increasingly happy, "yes, please?" like Oliver Twist asking for a little more moment of love in return after such a loveless life. After sex or before, Ricky raided the kitchen usually for cereal, the most sugary he could find. We had sex almost every school day afternoon. And almost every day come summer, sometimes more than once or twice. Indeed, he jacked me off so much one summer day, he rubbed a sore on my penis and apologized over and again, but I told him even that felt good, it felt good, the little pain of it, his authorship on me in which he seemed to take pride at having created. It was just so nice, a rosy colored little dot to thus make me believe it was just one more connect the dots that joined me with him. It is always that winter though, and not summer or spring, or autumn I remember him in mostly. I think it was because we inhabited that season so well. Because I had always hope for winter and December. I had always hoped that that iron taste in the middle of the air had something, someone marvelous behind it. And to find that I had such a gift, more than I ever dreamt a shadow of before, it did, when Ricky and I played "cock fight", each battling our stiffies against each other, and then he would examine my slit and I would examine his, and he would let me jack him off, but he always had to complete it himself, after I had sucked and massaged it, as he pulled the covers up to his groin and finished, because it took him a long time to cum and he was always self conscious about that. How grand to see him undulating under those covers, sculpting them around his cock, his hands working hard, the hidden show of it underneath, and when he pulled the covers back, the prestidigitation of thick cum on the tip of his throbbing cock, always which he let me lick off, salt and sweat, I swallowed Ricky down my throat, his cum, and he is there to this very day. Profound, I cannot say. Only that in memory I get things mixed up, imagining that we were outside in the snow, and we were taking our clothes off, and the cold did not hurt, and were naked and making love and we didn't care who saw us, our penises rushing against each other, yearning for each other, our chests meeting like we were mermen from the sea, or he and I sitting, his legs open, my dick up his ass, and pulling into him, though in truth we never did that, bursting up from our leagued tombs of domain, into the bright blurry winter sun, and our hands round each other's back, and we were swimming up into the air and were one man and boy. Our legs merged into mermen tails. Our hearts signing the insular songs of our bodies, like no songs ever were, like no songs, we believed then, would ever be again. I am over six feet tall. Ricky was five six or so. He liked to walk with me. I liked to have him by my side. We fit comfortably in those walks, I was 25, and presumably capable of knowing things that he at his age of 16 did not, but that was not the way it really was. We both kept the myths about this extant. He was a good school student. But he didn't care much for reading. I loved reading, and he became interested to it, to an extent, himself. Science fiction always. Sometimes we would read aloud to each other from books that spoke especially to us. I knew the writer Ray Bradbury then. And I wrote him, asking if he would please send a note to Ricky who had just seen the film of "The Illustrated Man" on TV, and which he said he liked, mostly it was though he knew I loved Bradbury so very much. Ray wrote him, and it was just so kind of him, and Ricky was ecstatic. To share in that place with me, not to be upset when I wept a bit, to tell me there was always tomorrow and himself, and he would never leave me, but both of us knowing otherwise, knowing how evanescent love is, and friendship, and how snow is a bit of a determination, that if it is followed wherever it leads, if the mounds of it on fences and fence posts, if the gloved hands of the boy inside me, as we made a snowman with a huge erect dick, "not bigger than mine",, Ricky made sure, in our side yard, are truly believed in, for good and all, then one comes to the outside of the glass of the snow bell and there is no way to get inside it again. And the melancholy was that it made Ricky sad too. And we held more tightly and stroked more tenderly. And that pinnacle of our final Christmas morning, he came over, bringing me a present, and then taking off his clothes in front of me, as we went to the bedroom, the little Christmas tree on the bureau, and my cock hard in my jeans as he lay me back and slowly undressed me, as he told me this time, for the first time, he had thought about it a while, and he wanted to come in my mouth. And he lay naked with me, sitting on me first and stroking my dick and pushing it and my balls underneath his own, and I sucked him and he lay me on my side, he always liked to jack me off this way, and never failed to make me cum, and then we tumbled a bit, and I went down on him as I put his hand to my dick, and he jacked me and I sucked him and I felt the tumblers go round in my groin and my balls got marble hard and my dick shot before I meant it to, and I pulled my mouth up on his dick, stopping motion and the waves of sexual promise come true washed into me. And he said he had just been about to cum. So I sucked him again, but he said sadly he couldn't. He couldn't. Ricky who was a vibrant scuffling boy everywhere but when we were making love. We matched each other's vulnerability with our own. It was the last time we had sex. He was moving away from gay experimenting. He was moving away from me and what I was. It made us sad and hurt us and angered us sometimes. And we talked about it, endlessly. And we tried without trying. And we drifted. And we clung to each other. And we pushed away. And he told me he was having trouble with his girl friend and I was the problem. And that half killed me. And I told him he couldn't come over anymore. And that half killed him. And we thought--good! But I just kept remembering Ricky's beautiful face and that thick gold hair as he went down on me that one time and I held to his naked right hip and I was in him and his tongue stroked me and I pushed myself in his mouth, to his back teeth so deeply, and though I didn't cum, I thanked him, I thanked him for letting me know how it felt, he knew I had so wanted him to. We had been friends for almost a year before we began having sex with each other. We had had a sexual relationship for almost a year then. It ended so terribly. I trusted people so easily back then. And they hurt us deeply, did to us, as cruelly and as meanly and as smugly as possible, what we had never done to each other. One Fall night shortly after the world exploded for both of us, I took a walk as I tried to piece the shattered things back together, not sure why I was bothering, and I was thinking of our laughter and our sexual hopes and the things we talked about that we never talked with anyone about before, and how he had introduced me to "Kiss" and I had introduced him to "Hair" and how we looked forward to each other's company. And there he was, riding his bike slowly down the sidewalk, past some poor rows of houses. I stopped, frightened, started to turn around as instructed, but didn't. He came to me, got off his bike, and nervously glancing round, to see if we were being watched, for we were aliens in a hostile land. We talked only briefly. He asked how I was doing. And I nodded at him, and said, "Ricky, I'm sorry." And we turned from each other. And I said something distant, something that was not me, and he walked his bike down the sidewalk. I cannot tell you he wept, though I can tell you his head was down and he walked slowly and I can tell you that I did weep. And I watched him in the too warm night and in memory walked with him, and in memory I walk with him still. I wanted, back then, to make love with him in a forest at the edge of town. But we decided that was far too risky. I think even then I saw him as a forest faun, as in those wonderful fantasy novels by Thomas Burnett Swann. I think if he had developed faun legs I would not have been surprised. He was boy forever. And will be boy in my mind for the rest of my life, even though I saw him again years later, a man who was married and in the Marines and who had one child and another on the way--Ricky had just dropped by to thank me, he said, for being his friend, and giving him someone who cared about him back then, and one more thing he told me, that before he knew me he couldn't stand fags and homos and all of that, but he didn't think that anymore or say those words anymore--and we hugged and we were to never see each other again. He is eternal in me. Dickens wrote, "O the glories of being a boy again!" And this morning, when the world seems a cold blue star and the sky is dark blue like it is boiling blood behind the blood, I sit on the edge of the bed that was once ours, and I see Ricky there. I see his great smile that was big and happy and free that always made me smile back at him. I told him my dreams. He told me his. And it was wonderful exploring the just imagine, the mechanisms of it, the interstices of it, from his age to mine, it did not cut us off, but bridged that little gap of years so beautifully, when as unsure of myself then, I am infinitely more unsure now. I quiver now. I weep easily, for no particular reason, copious box car wheel tears, I gulp them back, but can't stop them. I am frightened beyond words. I have been scared out of my heart by what those who know best did back then to me, and even madder than hell at them when later I found out what they did to Ricky. And how much he had wanted to see me again. For a minute, he had said. Just that, even. But was not allowed. I, and a part of Ricky, have been murdered in a way, raped, really. I cannot tell you what it is like. I have been told so many lies over the years, lies I've fought against so hard, but which most horribly have taken up residence in me. I have been almost conquered by them. So when I read Gregg Louganis' autobiograpy, "Breaking the Surface", in which he mentions when in high school, he had his first sexual experience ever, with a young man who was kind and brought him a certain sense of peace he had never had before. And when I read that he had asked all his other male gay friends and they too had a similar experience, it made me feel better. That though Ricky was not gay, maybe I had helped him a little in ways I didn't know. Though Ricky had had sex before me and during me, I like to think so at least. But, and no one can ever change this, not ever, for two years, and for one of them sexually there was Ricky, and I mattered to him and he was delighted that I cared for him and was concerned for him. There is winter outside my writing room window this morning. I will now end this and put on my jacket. I will go outside and join the weather, and draw in the chilly breath of sweet November, the title of a movie I love. And if I happen to, while walking down the street, turn and say a word or two to someone who used to be by my side, but now no longer is, pay no attention. None of you ever do, so that is not a problem. We get through these things as best we can. It's just me pretending I can muster a bit of word here and there from my heart, to someone gone and far away. I think I should be allowed that at least.