Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:15:35 -0800 (PST) From: Tim Stillman Subject: g/m Adult/young friend "Chad" "Chad" By Tim Stillman You might expect preternatural. You might expect tall shadows. Or deep crags. You might take the essence of this one eleven-year-old boy and bow it back, like time meeting itself, and eating itself alive. You would thus be, as I was, wrong. It was coming on Christmas break. Sorry, winter break. Forget what time of hopeless sensitivity there is in my land that is not my land. Chad was the poorest student in my grade. He was not wan. He was, however, thin. His flesh was, what his face and hands and arms, when it was warm enough to wear short sleeves, we could see, was tanned. As if he were bathed in perpetual summer sunlight. Here in grim, icy, cold, snow drifts Lansing, Michigan. A rugged inner-city school, not one for books and ideas and mathematical concepts and such. But one for sheer survival at any cost of gun or knife or fists. A place to stay alive, and if one is 11, having no friends to speak of, then it is something of a conceit that he is still alive at all, without at least one to two perpetual black eyes and a gash or two of crimson on his face. Especially with a name like Chad. His clothes were un-Chad like. He was the saddest little boy in the world.. Chad and I had been intimate and ice cold for two weeks now. It had given me shivers of fear of being discovered. He seemed not to care. Which made me more frightened. I was 32 in one month. He was a child who knew he was a child, and that seemed to be where it went wrong for him. He--knew. As he had known I was attracted to him. This beetle browed, dark curly haired, brown eyed boy with the constant urge for someone to push him down the down staircase or stick his tongue to an outdoor spigot this cold day or the next one racing for us. Chad was an accident that had not happened. He was bad news the papers kept refusing to print. He was an effigy, that should have happened, but had not, to find burned on the schoolyard lawn the first day of May, to keep the other Chads in line. Though there were no other Chads. Not here. For the others in vague approximation had no notice of him. Neither did the bullies, so, in order for the boy, not quite five ft. tall, thin, wearing thick rimmed, coke bottle bottom thick lenses, he had to start an affair with a teacher in order to prove to himself, and said teacher, me, that he was alive. That he had had something, at least, vaguely scarlet, in his childhood on which to hang his joyous memories or his neurosis or preferably both at the same time. He was a boy who wanted to read. He had trouble reading. He wanted to write. He had the worst handwriting I have ever seen. His spelling, also, was abominable. So, two weeks ago, on an ordinary Tuesday, precisely at four p.m. on a dull, cold, gray skied afternoon, when I was one of the few, so I knew, or the only one of the people still left here at the school, grading papers, Chad unexpectedly walked so deliberately, almost as though he marched into the room, and stood beside me I have no idea how long before I noticed a blur at the side of my eye, turned my head and almost jumped out of my roll wheel desk chair. I put a curse word to my lips. He stood there before the wall with the drawings scrawled of Christmas trees, of winter trees, of festivities, of Thanksgiving turkeys made out of crepe paper, thus staying past their appointed hour, the turkeys, not the crepe paper. He had put his hand on the Math textbook on the right side of my desk. His hand was made into a fist. His voice was high and piping. His flesh was July. Mine and everybody else's was January. He looked so cold. So in need of a friend. And I wanted to hold him. I wanted to have him strip. I wanted to hold his naked body against mine. I wanted to feel his small erection, first a comma on his balls bigger even than his penis, and make my hand or mouth turn that comma into a tiny exclamation mark. He knew. He looked at me directly in the eye. And that reminded me of swimmy goldfish thoughts I had had about him at night, in my bed, as I went groggily to sleep. He was afraid, of himself as much as of anyone else, but the thing of Chad was there was something in him that made him tremble by not doing so. By, for example, looking me straight in the eye, thus defeating me, and making me look away from him in a matter of seconds. Fear, mute ungovernable terror can be put into a box. It can be molded out of what it is definitely not. It can be made in flavors and shapes that are utterly at odds with what it truly feels and shivers and quivers, because when the affair began-affair with a child?---what madness--he was afraid to the point of leading my hand directly to his worn tattered jeans crotch with the fly part way opened at the top, as I felt the warm boy of him. He was hard. I think. It being, difficult to tell, and my experience, a hand at a little boy's jeans fly, save for my own, being at that point nil, I can't say for sure. The day was already darkening. The shades of the windows were down. The light in the room never was particularly bright. The halls were empty. There were no sounds. No voices. School had dismissed at two that afternoon instead of two thirty. And he sat his small poke out butt on the desk corner next to my hand. I felt my own erection stiffening. I looked away. My mouth felt like dry cotton. I would have killed for a Coke at that moment. It seemed Chad had made a print of me, an X-ray, a vein-by-vein, nerve by nerve schematic of me. He had never noticed me noticing him, but of course he had, no matter how secretive I had tried to be. I have always been attracted to the impossible, to people and things that I know will hurt me. Thus, avenging myself on me. While all round the room, magazine pictures of families before snow drawn carriages and walking in deep Norman Rockwell home for the holidays land, all there taped and pasted crookedly to the concrete walls of the class room, all the boys in the world of time fomenting down my nerve endings, down my spine, all of this was a boy, named Chad, with the heat in the other side of the room kicking on too hot still, as Chad slowly, casually unzipped his fly and took out his penis from his Underroos underwear. I imagined later the drawing of Scooby Doo sitting up and projected one paw, palm upward, toward the base of the little erect boy palm tree penis. But I was far too nervous to actually have seen that. And that would have been far too perfect. From the housing projects all round here, where pretty much all the teachers live, as well as the students, there is a poverty that is of a grinding sooty kind. You don't quite get the smell and the taste of it out of your clothes or off you skin or in it, for that matter. Or out of your mind or heart, either. It is like being rubbed in iron magnets. It makes you its compass, its magnet for life. It is like tasting powdered milk for the first time in your life. It cobwebs your tongue with particles that come into pieces of little shames to chew and swallow, your body and soul with little flecks of wrongness, with little flecks of unfairness, and love is sex and sex is fucking and sex is not love or anything but holding on to a child's penis as it sticks up and I rubbed it with my left hand index finger. Me-bemused, heartened, baffled, watching me do this in a movie of me doing this, watching a movie of me doing... Feeling more than slightly stupid, and far more than slightly aroused. As Chad said, "Let's see what you have." Instead of "let's see whatcha got." Which is how he really spoke, I had had no proof of it, even though he never spoke that way in class, or any other time, I would imagine. But in his mind, he did. His world would have, in another age, been being sold to the boot-blacking agency, but, unlike Dickens, he would not use that to become a writer of note, or any kind of writer at all. He had finesse and he put his thin long arms down at my crotch and with his right hand, always, proper, right, of course, he unzipped my black pants and rubbed me through my BVDs. He did not take my dick out. He seemed uninterested. Not fearful at all. Not uncertain at all. Just--certain and--uninterested. He held my balls and seemed concerned they were so big. In comparison with his. He studied it all. Like a test. As if comparing them with others'. And we sat there like that, as my pre-cum dampened my shorts. As we rubbed each other to orgasm, as of course he came first, his face straining a little, like a cherub with a dirty face falling from God's cruel and vengeful, yet someone sought after grace, as his little body trembled and his hand went into my briefs as he made me cum and felt the sticky stuff on his hand, squirting onto it, as his confused face, later told me that he wasn't sure quite what it was. I felt hot and relieved and non-alone and ashamed and fearful and excited. An eleven-year-old boy had come me onto, seduced with little seduction. I also felt had. I felt a little angry. But grateful as well. Which trumped the anger. In school. And then he smiled by frowning and stuffed his penis back in and zipped up. Did not look at me one single time. And hopped from the desk. It jarred me then how short he was, how little he weighed, a child, and two afternoons later, the same surroundings, the same deadly dangerous décor of sexuality in this school room, he sucked me off and almost kept all the cum inside. He did not delight in it. It was something like jacking us off. He wanted to do it. But he was mechanical. It had to be done with precision. He was Pinocchio pretending he had achieved real-boy status. It is precisely one p.m. by the Coke clock on the wall. The students are taking a test. Chad and I had not become close. I think we spoke no words really at all. He did not see me as a protector. I did not see him as someone needing protecting. There was just something--off--about him. He was not Pinocchio. I was that. I had never felt real. There were iron flecks on my skin and they became what I was, in this dismal ancient falling to pieces school building, tilted to the left like a clumsy and sloppy witch's hat. The floors gave a fraction to the right in some rooms and to the left in others. The hall was staggered, as if slightly drunk. I do not look at Chad, not anymore than a cow looks at the farmer who has been milking him. And I do not feel I have had the boy's mouth on my penis, for he had pulled the head out, as we lay on the floor, insanely, in the class room that late afternoon, as he sucked the tip of it, leaving the stem of it still in my briefs. As if it did not count that way. I had begun feeling languorous lately, dazed, sleepy, somehow stupid, more so than usual. I would have to jerk my head to keep from falling to sleep in class. Some of the students did as well, more than usual at least. As if he had been sucking cock for much of his life. Not to the point of being bored with it, for that was not the cause of him, or his tan--where did he get it? I wanted to ask, but didn't dare. It was still new to him and yet, though cum was a surprise for his hand, which we dried on the brown paper towels on my desk, and though I wanted to talk to him, to ask him how he felt about--but then I did not want to break the reverie. I did not want to break the dreamy factor. And yet it was not dreamy. It was not even clandestine. It was like-- --Chad was tan. There were tanning salons of course. Though naturally not in this part of Lansing. Chad would not have gone there, had there been. For one, he didn't have the money. And he was a tough boy. Though he liked to think of himself as gentle. He was a want to be scholar and he would have been that, had he had some breaks along the way. Had he been more fortunate. What Chad was--and what chilled me sometimes--though I considered it a window left open--to be closed immediately--though on this chilly afternoon in the last two days before Christm--winter break--this train of thought left that window open and let the cold wind blow on me, was something quite familiar, for he was something from my childhood, which made me feel quite safe, though I had no idea what it could be. And last night, it had occurred. It was ridiculous. It kept me awake all night, with all the lights on, drinking Coke after Coke, trying to convince myself it was of course, crazy. I mean, wouldn't they be fat? Isn't that where they made the mistakes? I mean, thinness to the point of emaciation, and the day glow, and what was it that kept the other students, mostly of the bully class, from pounding Chad's head into the concrete and killing him? What protected him from people he was around, from whom he distanced himself so strikingly? Is it always the obverse? Is it that simple and obvious? Is it always the flip side of the mirror image? What would the tan be? What would it be in the lunch room when kids threw their rolls and slapped each other with their sloggy mashed potatoes, with all that chaos and desperate laughter and screaming children as if their skin was to be flayed off at the end of the day? Chad, sitting there, quietly, among the tumult, looking at his tray of untouched food. And the others, stupid and worthless and a dime a dozen. As if there were nothing more than the cows coming down the slaughter ramp, their milking days over, for the poor "Them" had to eat too... And the poor "Them"-it's too ridiculous to say the actual word--had to have, if not fun sometime, before getting back to business--to see how the others do it, to see it from the cow's perspective--and if one is herded into schools, into gangs, into tenement rooms, into crowded blocks--then you are used to it, though you claim back off punk, this is my turf and junkyard dog mean. And keep in mind; Chad had only been here this year. I had never seen his family. No families ever came to socials here or to conferences, for school was a waste of time. So if in the summer, Chad would be pale, while all the other students would be red bricked hot street blazing sun charred, would that really prove anything? And if all my life, I had wanted a boy to suck me off, to take me and to have sex with me and say he loved me--then.... What did all of this prove, when you pieced it all together? In the din of the other kids and the school itself making its own crazed noises, there was a quietude about Chad that seemed to envelop him, and there was this constant slight nag in me that said, wouldn't he grow up? Had he never? And if so, then he would be mine till I died, which made me ashamed at my selfishness. Which made me ashamed of being--human. Would I be his favored pet, and be allowed to know the eternity secret too? What is so impossible to believe about that? Isn't that the concept of God and he letting you and only you into the inner workings and who cares about anybody else? I remembered the Daphne Du Maurier story, "Don't Look Now," about a distraught American couple, who had lost their young daughter, and now on a vacation to Venice, the wife sees this little girl in corners and down lanes and standing there, watching the gondolas swim past in the murky smelly deathly waters. And I think-no, not that--but-- The bell rang. The students threw their books to their desks, some threw them on the floor and got the hell, running, most of them, out of class toward their pathetic homes which had freedom as school did not, which was such a terribly cruel and stupid joke for everyone. Would they ever see that, freed of one confines, to rush to another confines, the street, the block, the apartment with the rats and the smells of dying daily, was no rush to sanctuary in the least? Jail to jail to jail. Chad of course was still here. He sat at his desk. He stared at me. I fought the fear and said to him, "Come here, Chad." Such a continental name. Such an elite name. Not Tom or Jim or Stan or Freddy, but Chad. Bringing with it the aura of blue school blazers with an orange crest over the pocket, and black pants cut off at knees. Long black socks. Black leather shoes. A Connecticut prep schoolboy, lankly, wandering cross the quad of an Autumn afternoon. On his way to watch his housemates compete in a rugby match. The air smoky and cool, with an occasionally peeking out of yellow rich sun. I don't believe in mental telepathy. At least till this very moment. When it was occurring. I brimmed silent thoughtless feelings. And Chad, taking off his clothes, the students still in the hall, the school still bustling, taking them off slowly right before me as I sat behind my desk, was brimming the feelings back that I was right as rain. I noticed that it had begun to snow again. The snow looked nice outside the windows. It looked cold and white and inviting before it picked up the black filth of the city far too soon. I was hot and very sick suddenly. The naked boy was in front of me. He had folded and creased his poor clothes as though they were for royalty. They were, after all, all that he had to wear. Perhaps ever. Had I ever seen him in any other clothes? Or had he been slumming all this time? The other students and he could have worn the same things for months for all I paid attention. He was fully tanned. All over. He looked like he needed a summer beach and clear cold blue waters and a white angry sun sky to set him off, to make him complete. And that image, those thoughts, for what he was, proved that you can't believe anything you ever read, or that I was gone totally mad, or both. He came to me. Marched his little naked body to me. He put his hand to my dick in my pants. He unzipped me and pulled my hard on totally out of my briefs and my balls too. He stroked my black pubic hair. He put my hand on his penis. He had a stiffie I yearned to touch, but could not bear the idea of it even. I said, breath caught, not in sexual fear or lust or horror at being found out--the rest of us were in the same--boat--it appeared, for everywhere there was a total oppressive blanket of silence, and I imagined the same things going on in the hall way, the principal's office, the other rooms--hell, the whole neighborhood, the whole city, country, etc.--I managed to ask, "Will it hurt?" He knelt to my penis and took it in his mouth and tickled it with his tongue, as I felt an incisor on the left and on the right. Biting. He looked up at me, that tanned brown face, and body of his, that small innocent boy child, with his heavy black glasses frames and the heavy lenses--did he need them? Was that another concession to his fraud? He studied my question for a second or two, then said, his voice still piping, perhaps just born to the corridors of time, "I don't know. It's never been done to me before. I'm on the other side of it." Then he sucked me off. A clumsy, frightening, little boy. A summer sunshine lake of what was happening all round me. I made my mind up to enjoy it. It was the final milking I would receive before the hammer between the eyes as I came, with the others down the slaughter chute, so the vampire children and adults would add some much needed meat to their liquid diets. Said liquid diet now commencing. Steak to follow. I almost laughed. His teeth felt--good. They made my lonely dick feel secure. Somehow, madly, safe. A prison of boy mouth. I wondered if he would let me keep my dick. I hoped for some kind of stupid dignity, if that could be considered such. And I did laugh at that, for it was funny. Then, Chad nicked me. I started to flow.