Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 14:52:33 -0700 From: Tim Stillman Subject: Coming Asunder "Coming Asunder" by Timothy Stillman The boy looked up at me as I sat aslant on my desk top, and brought me back to where I was. I was faking being a teacher. Trying to be a student, instead. It was not a particularly original or rare conundrum. Many first time teachers are young people who, whether they had good times or bad as students, find the world outside school windows much harder and more frightening than the ones inside. We wish to be students again. And this is the only, very mistaken way, we know how. I leaned my long legs onto the floor of concrete, pushed my hands against the glass desk top and stood up. We were discussing the Steinbeck story about a boy's harrowing journey to manhood, and getting killed for all his trouble and bravery . There was now a muddiness in my mind about the story, though Steinbeck is one of my favorite writers. His "To A God Unknown" may be the best study of everything about life that is important to write about that there is. And here I was, teacher at a small high school in a small pocket of the universe that was very poor, and I was attempting to teach children, who were nice to me, and kind, sometimes painfully so, for most had pity on me, my first year, and my last too, but about English and Lit., they just could not have cared less; impossible task-- trying to infuse them with what they saw as a pretty slow adventure story with too many words, metaphors and interior journeys that Steinbeck had the grace to describe, and I had the inability to translate to the bored, sleepy eyes looking at me. And I picked up the book we were reading from, walked round to my chair, behind the desk, before the long windows open for the already stifling hot springtime summer weather blast of heat and smell of onions, as I continued talking, sitting. Looking from the text of print that wavered. to the box of students who wavered even more. Of course I was in love with Joel, but Ricky was the boy I went to bed with, and Celesta was the girl I loved when I was a boy, when I took her blouse off one hot summer afternoon in the backyard of my house, as I straddled her, so warm and squirmy she was, as I touched her and myself, on that hot green grass, confused by the fact she did not have female breasts, but only nipples just like my own, but of course I couldn't tell this to Laura who was the woman I loved until she told the school bus driver he would be picking up our children at her new house, thus ending, for me, the sound of the doors pneumatically closing, since I would never be waiting with them each morning for the bus to take them to the brick building I tried to find again later on, blindly, by trying to be a high school teacher in a different school district from my children. Bus doors closing sounds like a stamping of a machine foot in pique, then there was the mechanical anger of rushing away, and, in my dreams at least, still and all, I stood there stupidly waving my fists and screaming curses at the departing boxy yellow thing like a container of Crayola children. I looked at the class who looked at me. There was a fan in the corner. The fan pushed the hot air around. We were all perspiring. The day was droning to a close as cheerleaders in the gym down the brown gray lockered hall were practicing their cheers, listlessly, and the day sagged and flagged, and I had to tell Ricky it was not him I loved, even though we had been having sex for a whole year now, and I could not get enough of sucking his cock, and I joyed in how the cream of his cum was so thick, it did not spurt out, but gathered on the top of his slit, for me to lick it off--and that I helped cause that--amazing-- I had to tell him that Joel was not a one time thing with me, that I held the gold god of Joel in my heart and always would, and if my kids knew these things, how could Laura not have told them?-- --so vindictive she was, then I would never be allowed to see them again, so should I drop both Ricky and Joel, and take the abuse Daniel gave me? But where was he in all of this? Which made no sense. But the senses and thoughts in my brain trundled around and floated like the floaters in my eyes. All such a time line and time distortion. All in a golden realm just over the short sleeved shirted shoulders of the students who faced me, bored they all were, though some tried not to be, who aimlessly twisted their pencils over and under their fingers, who diddled their fingers on the desk, who patted their feet and kept a hawk eye on the clock on the wall. I talked to them. A few took notes or drew faces or body parts or something. We all had our minds on anything other than we should. Till this point, I always thought it was students who could natter on, could feedback what the teacher wanted while they paid absolutely no attention, but now I discovered teachers can do and do the very same thing. I thought of Ricky's penis as a snake, thrusting out from the scratchy thick desert shrub brush, thus giving other meaning to the snake in the story I was supposedly teaching and thus making a travesty of one of Steinbeck's finest works, which made me ashamed, but I could only look at my tenth grade class and see Ricky's erect seven inch hard on against his peach and cream colored stomach, his hips firmly heavy under my hand, my dick hard and ready for him, and his chest that I sat naked on, and lay on and touched to his hair and his lips and asked him if this time, just once, I could kiss his lips, like I kissed his dick and his navel and his tits, and he shifted and said we should get some sleep now. Because the paper boy would be by tomorrow and he would want to talk to him, to take that boy away from me and make him his. I never tried to talk him out of anything. I was frightened to try. Tomorrow was today, my time frames were getting so screwed up, and Ricky would be at my house before I could get there and the paper boy would be arriving, the paper boy being Joel, and knowing that the two of them would be together and would go straight to the bedroom, take off their clothes in a hurry even quicker than Ricky and I undressed for sex, kneel on OUR bed, and they would say the soft things that neither of them said to me, that I was not allowed to say to either of them, which hard pinched my soul, and I wanted to run away with the boy in the book paper, that was far more alive than me or the reality surrounding me. I wanted the flat of desert land I saw in my world without Ricky or Joel or the paper boy who was Joel ever. I wanted the bleak mountain landscape that would hide me with the both of time gone from my life, a balloon pricked and gasping its last because the air was leaking piteously out of its rubber skin that somehow was mine as well. It was not that I loved Laura any less, or my own kids certainly, but paper boys need money and if they are poor they need love more than money and I have always been poor myself, so when Steinbeck wrote of the land and the people who were hardscrabbled living off of it, and when he wrote of morals and how easily they can be fun house mirror maligned and justified and twisted so perfectly and to the hilt by a basically good man, as in "Winter of Our Discontent," the way I looked at it at least, that meant there was nothing noble of faith or loyalty or love or promise or consistency. So if Joel wanted to go to bed with Ricky, then they should do so, and bring in the paper boy too, who of course was Joel, why can't I put them in one person blessed trinity?, because it would leave me free to talk to the children here in my class about them. About the realities of life and power and manipulation and it can be used on a person till you think it's all you're worth--"you want me to be happy, don't you?," which was from Daniel and I said of course; he made me feel so damned guilty, as soon as he found out how guilt works on me, he ran with it, as did Ricky at the end of things, when I should have said-- --"No, Daniel, you bastard, I want ME to be happy, I have as much right to being happy as you. No, I don't want you to be happy. I never want you to be happy a day in your life. I want everybody to use you. To get what they want out of you and then leave you and walk away, and before they close the door for good, I want them to say to you, 'Don't you want me to be happy, you ungrateful little prick?' "I want you to only and always know people just like you. Why do you get to make all the rules as you go along, and I get to follow them?" But no, I didn't say that. No guts. Not the heart for it. I wanted to discuss with my class what a lost and unwilling species is in the soul of some men that makes us turn to boys, to love them, to want to hold them, to caress them, to be with them so close there is no beginning or ending point. But it was hot, the words I said melted in front of me, and the words of the page print was coming off on the fingers of my hands. And I looked up to the boys on the front row and I told them to take over the class for a few minutes, I needed to make a phone call. They thought I was going to the teacher's lounge, hope to find it empty, and jack off to fantasies about them. I mean it was a given. I can keep nothing hidden, save my heart. The class was restlessly doggedly silent as they turned the wet perspiring pages of their textbooks back and forth, trying to use them as fans. Books must be for something after all. I stood up and I said this curious statement, "What if one could say Joel did not bring the news, but he was the news? That it was himself he was tossing on the porch, not the small town newspaper folded in a flat pancake shape to make the tossing it from bike to gutter or sidewalk or house roof easier? What if he came flying off his bike right at you, naked and free, and you caught him full and hard at the chest, that it made you lose your breath a moment, in your arms with that precious little ass right there in the palms of your hands and his mouth right to yours? What if you could read yourselves and each other from your very own naked bodies? What if everybody had a paper boy like Joel, a boy of flesh and blood and heart, not of paper and ink and smears, geared to yellow quickly, and what if everyone could know then what it was like to truly and honestly love someone and all the hurters leave us alone forever and a day?" Or did I say anything at all to them? The back of my head buzzed. It seemed there were bees in it. The students smiled oddly, they laughed curiously and delicately, they tensed their arms on their desks, or beside their bodies; they put their legs that had been crossed haphazardly this way or that, together, straight and closed together, like a military command had been given them. It seemed they were readying themselves for some kind of attack on themselves. By someone who had gone mad. Presumably me. I laughed damned oddly myself then. So I got out of there in a hurry. Ricky was already out of school, and I could reach him at my house easier than at his parents,' for he had a key to my door and was there as much as they would let him which was quite a lot of time because they were dealing with an older son who had gotten booted out of the Marines, a woman claimed he had raped her, which was a particular shame to the father because he had been in the military himself, though had made it only to Sergeant in the army, but very proud of it, so there was that, and other things as well. I went to the door of the teacher's lounge, down the brown dry hot stifle desert road of a straight hallway under vaguely lit light bulbs in glass cases, dotted with moth and fly and mosquito corpses who worked so hard to get inside them to die. Thank god we are smarter than they. Passed by the quite sounds of half asleep teachers in the other rooms, talking to students who might as well not have been there. And just as I started to open the door, someone came up behind me. I heard the shadow fall. I guess I was still thinking of the snake that bit the boy in the story, and Ricky's snake and thinking of the first time I put it in my mouth, and how I could not believe it, the feeling, the excitement, or that he was so almost naked before me, I refused to see, to feel; I had become my own censor, which was no surprise-- -- and how it took a few tries to get it all inside my mouth, how wet and slippery and strong and delineated and ponderous his dick was; how firm and meaning business it was, and how I enjoyed it so much (it honestly tasted sweet, like proverbial candy) and secretly, if secretly so in my world is anything but an illusion, how I compared it to younger Joel's little penis that was pink and tasty like warm milk, and shaped like a tough but bendy little leaf stem, thus making me have to decide about a large penis that had so much texture and meat to it-- -- and thinking, as Ricky pushed his dick in and out of my mouth by holding his hands to the back of my head, of Joel's little sturdy wonder worm that tickled my chin so, who I loved with all my heart and Laura would have to understand this and so would the children, my children I mean, because I considered myself a man after all, and anyone can get in a triangle like this, so if my two lovers happened to meet-- Yes, I have decided Joel IS the real paper boy, as opposed to the boys on paper I jack to; and he and Ricky would soon now at MY house in MY BEDROOM, then there would only be a kind of courtesy of mine to let them, because it did get me off the hook with Laura, (that I didn't like boys; they hurt me like I hurt you, even steven now, right, Laura?, that I found the whole thing pretty rank and sad and silly; and it would save my marriage, I mean) and I was looking forward to spending July with my kids, cause the courts had ordered it so, even though she was contesting it, with everything she knew. And she knew everything. Fear is what it's called. Deadly scary fear. But I was through with boys. Had been through with them for so long. Yes. Or yesterday at least. Time has always been tough for me to distinguish. I'm surprised every morning when I go to the mirror to shave. Who is this? Do I know him? Do I want to know him. The answer is always, no. The mirror image says, no, too. We turn gladly from each other and do not wish to meet the next morning at shaving time. Though how was I to tell Ricky and Joel? Who didn't remember me for one second anymore. No, yes they did. Yes, they do. We are still together. And then there was: A voice behind me. "Randy?" A little boy's voice. A small shy voice, like it was already ashamed of the little sound it had managed to make. Would the air the sound limped through and died in forgive it for the inconvenience that troubled its thick milk shake? This thrush usurper of minute sound waves that would dare such an intrusion? I continued to open the door to the lounge because I didn't think it was for me; my name's not Randy, and besides I was not sure I heard a voice at all, for my mind was on the problem that would this day be solved for me--I would not have to lose Ricky and or Joel when my kids visited, for I would have lost them already, starting with right now. A person deals in reality or he doesn't. I am trying to do just that. "Randy?" The voice again. Like a hand falling down into dry water. A spiderweb of a voice, blowing in a hot wind of July. I looked to see if it was directed to anyone in the shadowy hall, saw no one, so with some sort of unspecified fear, turned in the direction of what might have been. Or what was. It was hard to tell. The voice did not belong to the boy standing there using it. The voice was that of a little child, but Randy was no child; and why was Randy calling me by his own name? Randy of the university a hundred miles distant, Randy of the sweet soft featured face and the lopsided constant, it seemed, grin, and the brown eyes that had sort of rumpled eyelids, the red hair that was shaggy and always akimbo, and he stood there in the dark in his plaid shirt and jeans and tennis shoes, and his body all thin and fragile and forlorn and so huggable, and he waved real big and faraway at me even though we were so close we could have shook hands. It made me nervous, his being here. "I found your ring, Barry." And he held out his bony hand, the one with an extra finger that had been amputated when he was born, only a little hillock of a stump remaining. The ring was gold banded and thick and had a fake jewel of red mounted on top of it. My university ring. That I had lost when I had visited Randy at his room at Murray State one crisp Fall leaf crunch weekend. My god, the air now knocked out of me, and I leaned helplessly and weak against the door, and I remembered-- -- I had thought he had taken it, stolen it, though it was worthless really, though it had cost a lot, all of which I tried to hide, the suspicion and so forth, from him, but I have always been a very bad hider, and our friendship perished quickly and sadly after that. How late Fall he was. How beautiful chalk feel he was. How gray skies and brisk winds and winter on the way comfortable and warm and easy to be with he was. Oh god how I missed him. Oh god I'm being torn open inside. And this moment, this exact second, I did something I have never done in public. I exhibited total animation. I proceeded without thinking first. I put no caution in front of me to stumble over. I ran to him. I held to him. I felt his bony slender body, his arms long and angled crossed round me that held me tightly to his chest, our groins together, I felt him hard and he was strong for someone who looked as though he could shatter so easily. I knew that the kids in my classroom were seeing this, because kids always held class doors aslant and looked out to the hall way when teachers had to leave the rooms for a few minutes, and thus knowing, I did to Randy what I was never allowed to do with Ricky (except once) and Joel, or Randy either; I kissed his lips, they tasted wetly papery, they were fine and he kissed me back and we dueled tongued as I had not even done with Laura--who? He smelled sweet. He smelled sweet and free and young and wintry snow like he owned the whole country of it. We would hold hands and run through the snow together and we would laugh and balloons of our laughs would be multi colored and brightly hued and they would take off to the cotton candy colored skies, and we would save the whole world with our happiness. He looked younger than he was, but he did not have the little boy voice he had had previously. He pulled away from me and looked deeply in my eyes. "Don't lose your life over any of this. They're not worth it. They don't give a damn about anybody but themselves." Try to picture a sweet lovely teenage boy delivering a line like that, and you have to laugh with happiness because someone else is telling you what you knew all along, or did once, and now it has been confirmed, so all the past is not all my fault, I can quit beating myself up over that-- --so I laughed, only it was a very nervous laugh, a very frightened laugh, because it seemed to shiver through me that this was Joel I was seeing, not at the age of thirteen when I met him and fell so painfully in love with him, but back when he was six himself, before the days when I knew him, when I so wanted to lie, amid amber fields, snuggled there forever, on his back as he knelt on his boy bed for me, and me gripping his spine and kissing his fair smooth pale neck, and pushing myself most happily and carefully into his vanilla hips. So Randy handed me a stick of vanilla chewing gum, because reading my mind is as difficult as seeing through silk, I'm afraid. So we peeled the gum, put it in our mouths, and chewed down on the tart vanilla taste, and we leaned against each other. I heard some boys and girls from my room just three doors away giggling. I wanted a newspaper and I wanted Joel wrapped up in it, and of course Randy was now himself and Joel to me (a friend says everything and everyone reminds me of Joel, and it is true) because they were friends before I knew either of them. And I put my hands on Randy's flat chest and his abdomen and put my hands down to the top of his belt and jeans, and a little way into his briefs. Warm and hot and moist and friendly feeling. He reminded me of a kid from when I was a kid, Mickey something, who everyone called Mickey Mouse because of his first name and because he had that funny friendly happiness about him. Oh the calamitous careening of the box cars of words caught in drastic wreck and tumbling into one another and making words us and us words and forever word stabbing our hearts with golden shafted saber wounds of memory from a dictionary that can never be closed. The lances enter: In the softest parts of us that are the tenderest, the most problematic, the most savaged, the most loved, that kill us and make us live at the same time. I was finally touching Randy and through him, Joel. We were a world. He and Joel were staunchly heterosexual. I had kidded Randy, that one and only, weekend I stayed with him in his dorm room, (the lost ring forbidding me ever returning--at least I like to think that was the cause) as he went, fully dressed into the bathroom, saying he would be out after his shower. He started taking off his shirt, with one hand, while with the other, he began to close the door, shyly, awkwardly, as I laughingly, pleadingly, said that I would take a shower with him, conserve water, shower with a friend, a joke of the time, and he laughed unhappily and was not amused, but did not lock the bathroom door. It was decided then, long before the ring got lost. I must face such things. At least I did not hear the bathroom door lock. He trusted me that much, I guess. Maybe the lock was broken. Maybe he couldn't believe he had someone close by who was ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE. I wanted to take off my clothes, go in there, jump in the shower with him. It was what I did with Ricky. What I did before Ricky with Joel. I did. Didn't I? At least with Ricky. Wasn't that how it happened? I took off my clothes each time and walked naked to each boy individually in my shower. Yes, that is how it worked. Having the name I had decided to have the game. Not for me shyness and the need to be seduced by Ricky. No, that would be silly to believe that. That he slept beside me that first night, his idea, and he wanted to wear a pair of my childhood shortie pajamas, and that morning, I woke up and he had only his briefs on, and was stroking a massive hard on. His eyes hard on the cartoons on TV. He was biting his lip. Nervously. Wanting me to go first. And then I still didn't get it. Still didn't believe. No, that's not me. That's not what the books and magazines say. Not what the learned know. I am justifying. That's all. How could a boy....no this is absurd. That person I've been told so often I am, told in such simplistic terms, that's got to be me. I'm a four line paragraph in Abnormal Psych. books. Period. It's easier that way. It's easy for them. Time it was easy for me too. Thinking is a very bad thing, when you think about it. I DID THE WHOLE THING MYSELF. I SEDUCED THEM. Okay, world, you happy now, goddammit? I opened the stiff blue curtain and stood there erect with a smile on my face and a melody in my heart and a joke about Norman Bates on my lips, and they each looked at me through the water fall and each one of them smiled in their own way and received me as someone who was not half bad after all and since I insisted and so forth. As I stepped in the warm shower with shy Ricky. As Joel pulled me into the cold shivery shower, no longer shy at all. And we bathed each other. And came and came. And rushed into each other, please make this moment eternity. It had taken such fumbling guttie wucks churning courage for me to take such a risk, but I did not have that something, not yet desperation, perhaps bended knee supplication, at the time of Randy. Bullshit. They all scared the hell out of me. I just didn't want them to kill me was the main thing. But I digress. I held his basket (whose?) in my hands(whose?)--oh, Randy and me in the school hall. Hands that were now outside his jeans. He had a thick hard on. He told me that he wanted me not to go home tonight, that since this was Friday I could go back to Murray State with him, and we could spend the weekend doing what we did not do that last sad lost hope lost chance weekend. I wanted to say, you're still there? After all this time? What, are you getting every degree known to man? A real Doug Shepherd you are. I asked him, as though I was leapfrogging in fragments of an unkempt dream, "Why did you call me by your own name?, and instead of going home with you, we could be with Joel and Ricky and--" The two of us together, beget by the two of Ricky and Joel, somehow did not seem betrayal of them or any of us or any of them. It did not seem confusing, as Ricky and Joel and me together seemed, wrong somehow, but four seemed perfect. Me always horning in. Taking for granted. I felt loved. I felt saved. I felt revived. Man, break me open and I'll suture myself back together and thank you for the ride, could you do it again please? Now in the heat of cuddling on the hot floor with Randy, I felt the eyes of some of my students on me, as they had gotten out into the hall, their curiosity and laughter and need to know specific details of gossip to spread immediately and get me canned by the next day, (they liked me, remember) caused them to toss caution away, or my own tossing aside of that confining garment spurred them on. Randy said, "Laura's taken the kids for good, Barry. July visits. Any visits. They're out. Gone for good. She won't have you killed. If you leave her and them alone. Make trouble and she will see you in court. Tell him that, she told me, that would be very very bad news." How did he know her? They had never met. Time unraveled. Life pounded on the shore, then wept back into the ocean and died in its own peculiar watery way. I forgot things. Remembered others. I forgot more than I remembered. I'd like to have wires to the part of my brain that remembers and live perfectly in vivid memories the rest of my days. Life was liquid around me. It burned and stung me. Lights flash bright minnow in my eyes momentarily. I was coming asunder. It's amazing how much a person can take in their lifetime. It's amazing when you reach the end of any kind of mental competency. You think, this time, this time is the final moment of sanity and you wait for it to be scary because it has to be, because you remember it being so. "Assunder," one of my students at the door said aloud, "you're coming assunder"---none of my students liked word came--I found myself half happy one of them could do so now--wondered which one--Alton please, let it be Alton--and there was the laughter of several voices. And then I was on the floor with Randy/Joel. We were naked. He was under me. I was inside his hips. I felt so greatly gloriously good and fulfilled and a part of and loved. Then I pulled out of Randy/Joel. I pulled out of him sexually and bodily and with soul contact gone away with a distinctively dick pulling out of asshole pop, and clumsily and fearful and a sweaty tick tocking in my balls that felt so heavy as though they were weighed down with cement, and I was naked in the school hallway, definitely not a good thing to be, the old childhood nightmare of mine come true, and me a fuckin' moron stabbing up and down, and I was pulling out of them as though I was pulling myself out of clothing that had been melted around me as if they had been trying to hold me, protect me, keep me safe, not let Laura get the last word because she always got the last damned word. Dammit, everybody else always got the last word. Always. And then what would happen to my kids? Now that I was caught. Now that everybody knew for sure. There was an air of smelting. There was an air of melting downward. My dick was harder and longer and thicker than it had ever been. The kids in my class room were in the hall way now, their same clothes, the same faces, though changing from time to time to the faces I once knew and faces I had never seen before-- --and the same names I guess, but they looked at me frightened and laughing and rejoicing and impatient like the weekend would never get here and Randy would have gone off and left me again, this time taking Joel the paper boy and Ricky with him, and I would not even have Daniel the sour born slut to make me sway back promises, laughing in his silver slay way all along the journey, that I held in my pockets so tightly my fingers cramped but I never let them go, not ever. Because I had to do what he said or he would go away. So I did as told. I always did it wrong. He never missed up an opportunity to tell me so. He got fed up with me. But he honored me with staying for a little time. Stayed on a little longer cause I begged. He forgave me. I am superb at asking forgiveness. He is superb in giving it. And there was no Randy/ Joel. No Randy/Joel in me or around me, for the Randy/Joel I phoenix rose from was no longer there, melted clothes or melted sand papery wisp of a body, only the childhood shadow memories of the hexagonal twisted small town newspapers tossed by the students at me like in some third rate version of "Waiting for Godot" performed by a very bad group of actors at a college somewhere that I might have been to at one time or another. The students looked at my body, at my penis which was still hard, pushing in and out of the floor, and I was no longer scared. I was insane and insane people get to be insane, it's a law. I was in a lunatic asylum. The pieces would never fit, but I would walk from one to the other and pretend that I knew what was going on, and I would fake out the dreams, for how smart are dreams anyway?, when you come to think of it, making us figure them out while they stand smugly silent, pretending they are so wise and self satisfied, like we do, but they are faking it. They haven't got a clue what they are either. It's an old trick. Make us do all the work. We are all fakes. We are all mad. We are all coming apart at the seams. Everyone might as well fess up. Then there will be coffee and pink sponge cake served in the gymnasium and we'll join hands, stand in a circle, and sing "Come By Here, Lord." And two boys stepped from the group of observing students, looking at this stupid naked man who was not the me of then, all this so long ago, pumping his dick into the dust and scuff marks. And these two boys had transformed into Joel and Ricky. They extended hands. I put one hand in each of theirs and they hauled me up in the school hallway that was no longer a hard black marble, as tough on the knees kneeling on it, as the feet running to this destiny or that, for we were in my bedroom, in what house of mine?, in what time in my life?, and both Ricky and Joel from too long ago. I dropped the university ring Randy had returned to me--where had he gotten it,? had he really stolen it? I let it fall from my hand as though it were heated coal. Such a damned stupid thing to end a friendship of such importance to me. I would never know what might have been--I lay naked on my back on my bed. Ricky and Joel were naked now. The older boy. The younger boy. They lay with me. They kissed my nipples. They rubbed their dicks on my legs. They nestled into me as settlers into their homestead sod hut. All from somewhere over an unnamed place. When I was a young teacher, too long ago, too far to reach back and try to be a student and hide from everything that had gone so horribly wrong, even Slut Boy Daniel far far away, and they held me for a time. And don't get me started on that betraying Julian motherfucker. The room was dark. The night had come. It was Fall. The wind of cool blew into the bedroom. I felt so incredibly good, so happy to finally be home because I had been looking for it for so very long. Relax, they whispered, their voices trading throats, and lifted themselves on me and loved me. I lay there and drifted to sleep as they kissed my penis and I fondled theirs and sucked theirs, both of them at the same time. Joel's littler one permitted it. There is something to be said every now and again for coming asunder. In the dark room, I woke. Alone. I reached as I always reach for what is not there. I felt I was falling. Felt like I was like an old suit tearing down the middle and the sides and the back. Straight in half. I fell and fell until I remembered Laura and the kids. All the fights. All the friction. All the silent nights alone together. That our kids felt and it hurt them and they blamed us and each other and themselves and it was all jagged and spiky and confused and muffled and distant as the Sahara as were my dreams/memories of Ricky and Joel and Randy and Daniel, and how I needed Laura, how I needed to not cause her any more pain. How I needed my kids. I would love not to think or feel anything anymore. Thank you if you could help me out. My Joel and Ricky who were not my kids but I could not think of my children's names, my brain feeling slogged and slowing to a standstill. I could make amends. Be kind to Laura again. Not let the poison start this time. I could be a real husband, not a fake one, as I was a fake person, writer, lover, dreamer, human being trying to be everything everyone else wanted me to be-- I was the rock fan of the haunted dreamy eyed counterculture long hair Joel just getting into drugs. I was the high school football fan of Ricky stocky and the need to be so manly as I cheered him on in bed with my mouth sucking him off, and he was naked save for his orange number 32 football jersey which he always kept on when we had sex, though he let me push it up to his shoulders, because that meant the whole thing didn't count, though he had wanted to so very much and cloistered himself around me and said "you're my friend, Barry; you think I do this with just anybody?" but I had to pretend robust with him, and not romantic, just a couple of guys jerking off, doesn't mean nothin'. And with Joel I could be gentle and friendly as long as I knew the boundaries, as long as I didn't let on how sexy and seductive he seemed to me, as long as I let him lead me through my days with him, most willingly, as he explained everything to me as though I was a buffoon, as I had to pretend stupidity and then found myself becoming stupid because he needed me to be, and I loved him so and it didn't matter. He didn't mean it like that. It honestly didn't matter to me at all. We all sell things to have friends. I think. All friendships hurt and are difficult for everybody. They all have a constant sick feeling in their stomach, waiting for the ending. Don't they? I just always thought it was like that for everyone else too. Randy. Daniel. Joel. Laura. My kids, whatever the hell their names are. I was always doubled in half with each. Pretzel twisted. Was it a game to them? It was not to me. I always had to ask permission and do or not do what I was told to do or not to do. And they let me be with them for a while and then tired of me, the sycophant, "why can't you stand up to people?" each would say in their individual way, though none ever said, "and you should stand up to me sometime soon, too"--for such smart well adjusted people, they could be so bloody dumb and selfish, when of course that was supposed to be my job; god knows they told me often enough-- --so one fine day, without a backward look, they headed out the door. And I could never forget one moment of them. I rebelled only with Laura because she was safe, when she was the most unsafe of all, till she took the kids and went away too, because I did not need them, but oh god I did, that's a lie, I did. I went to the kitchen, turned on the light, walked naked to the fridge, took out a bottle of Coke and swigged some down. Too late now, but tomorrow or Sunday, yes, Sunday would be much better, I'll phone her, she would be there, where was she?, I'll think of it in a minute, the phone number is around here somewhere, and I would tell her I had so much to make up for and it would be a personal favor that I would hold in deep regard-- I put the Coke bottle uncapped back in the fridge and closed the door. I quaked. The world stood still. What if, no that's silly, a person can't go off the beam that much and still be as rational as I was. Quick check---where was I? What town? What city? What did I do, if anything, for a living? What was the name of my street? How old was I? What was my own name. Barry. But last name. Dammit. Think! What if??? all the what ifs in the world, the thoughts of reckoning wrecked. railroaded me and the clattering box cars of words were about to uncouple and fly into each other, crashing wooden words like flinders and splinters and motes in god's eye and spears in my heart, the softest part where the tenderest wounds lie unhealed and make us live and we can never forget them, ever, because what are we without them? I leaned on the fridge. My body was like a suit of clothes draped on a suddenly limp coat hanger. I began to slide down by my side against the snow white cold, making a squeaky sound as I went, what if there was no Laura?, what if I had never had children?, what if there was no Ricky or Joel,? or they existed, some of them, and I could never know who was real and who wasn't, but nothing ever happened between us, me and the real ones, it was all just pretend, but Ricky, yes, I'm sure, him at least, how had it really happened?, how did it really start?, it did start, it did, only I didn't start it, there was no shower routine, it was something else, there was no goddam game plan like people think----- As I leaned aslant on my desk; though I couldn't see it, I knew my hair was still long and was brown and I was fresh out of university, and being chewed out by my editor, a peripatetic little man in rumpled tobacco smelling clothes, with such an urge to be the Hitler of the world but could only manage to be the Hitler of his little newspaper domain, as he was telling me, his index finger pointing and tipping at me on my chest: "Could you get the story with less typos and more accuracy please? All you hippies shootin' up marijuana at home and thinkin' you can come to work the next day and have a career? Well, you got another think comin' boy." Inject marijuana? WHAT? Then he put his corncob pipe back in his mouth, sucked on his drug of choice, turned his strutting bantam rooster body away from me and walked back to his glass cubicle of an office, where he kept watch over all us reporters, especially me. He used me to prove he was a swell guy and could bridge the generation gap. I had never so much as seen any marijuana, much less smoked any, despite my hair and my bell bottom jeans. I could have told him the truth but he wouldn't have believed me, so why bother? And why kill the image? It made me assume some form at least. Therefore it was worth it. It made me feel like I did do all manner of drugs. It made me feel groovy. I would read things like "Rolling Stone" or Kurt Vonnegut's novels, or "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" at my desk on my meal-less lunch break. Didn't want to spoil it for him. Reading counterculture stuff in my constantly food starved state did make me feel a little high after all. "Slow down/ you move too fast/you gotta make the morning last.." I had been trying to make the morning last, all my life through. I was still trying. The morning never heard my commands to it. Now. I was back there. In the pain of my heart Joel and sweetly secretly forever loving him. I went back to my desk chair at the newspaper office, played "59th Street Bridge Song" through my head, and started putting paper in the typewriter. I would see Joel in two more days. It made me feel better. The elderly lady at the society desk next to me, of white hair and kind face and gentle smile, put her hand on my arm. I looked at her. "Don't pay P.K. any attention. He's like that with all of us. He's a jerk." And we laughed as the editor looked at us with his angry eyes, his hands firmly over his pot belly, pipe blowing billows of smoke, and he, scrunched in his roller leather chair, malevolent and spider like, and we got back to work. I thank her and look out my window and close my eyes. I whisper "Joel." I miss him already. "Joel" said a voice to the left of me which seemed to come straight from the fridge. I began to give it up. God, it is so good to quit hanging on. To release. To fall. It's like being in love and falling in love and falling asleep and winter coming and hateful itchy summer over with for good and all, and knowing the ending of things, that there really is an ending of things, and of me; I had believed it so long, in not believing it; that is, if I was real at all. How could someone like me be real? I was the fiction for a moment or two in all of their lives till ejection, like throwing the comic pages of the Sunday newspaper in the trash, a good laugh, then forgotten. I thought of Jim Thompson's Golden Gizmo and Mickey Spillane's the whatzit, and John Steinbeck's long valley and the snake therein the center of the soul that has to come out one way or another and can never be run from but only run toward, and I thrust up my arms at Almighty God and I screamed out curses at him. I screamed, you come down here you coward and try it on for size and see if you like it. And then, to all and sundry, a weak watered down but heartily meant, "I'm sorry."