Date: Thu, 2 Jan 2003 20:44:54 -0800 From: Tim Stillman Subject: You'll Never Know "You'll Never Know" by Timothy Stillman (for Grant) I wanted to tell him, you know. I wanted someone to unravel the skein of days and especially those of nights when all the world was a black marble revolving next to my bed, solving nothing, putting no pattern of even the most febrile of lights in my mind. He had no one, and sometimes I yawned in my weariness of him, but a part of me would not let go. A part of me wanted to hold him again, and be someone thought of even when I was not thinking of him, which, of course, was always, for he never left my mind. If there was any sort of depth to me, it had come from Jan, and if there was any part of Jan that I did not inhabit in my tiredness, my sleeplessness, my endless need, then it was a lucky part that was not of either of us. How very much I envied it. We had met. He had tried to hustle me outside a movie theater one late night, and was so bad at it, we both laughed, after my shock, and his embarrassment. He saw something in me that frightened him, as I saw something in him that frightened me, so one or the other of us suggested going for coffee instead, and then he told me he was in high school, that that was the first time he had tried to hustle, and he smiled like little sun demons were in his eyes, and his smile which looked categorically not interested in me, which of course pulled me magnetically close to him, for that I was surely used to. We began and we ended and he smiled a woebegone smile that last time, and I asked him to hold me, so he did, and finished me off for good, so I thought. But here I was, regardless, unbroken, some part of me, moving through nights that TV chatter and shifting colors won't solve, remembering us on my bed, warm as toast, chirruping in sex liaisons, making the necessary noises, and saying the required words, all of which, for me, worked because they should not have worked, because it made it so obvious I was covering something in me over, though he never asked, never inquired, for he was doing the same thing, and I never asked him. As blond and gold and peaches and cream as he was, he was a dark boy, full of brooding, and from time to time silent tears, when I was asleep, or he thought I was not watching. I believe he took pride in these tears, these little soft lambs from a childhood country that had for some reason never been his, and perhaps this was the only way he had of claiming membership, long after the fact, though he was still a teenager, he was farther flung than that word could ever mean, even considering its being fraught with discontent and melancholy rising like acne bumps on the soul. We made love on our first weekend together, in my apartment far above the noises of the vacuum of city below, with its curious implication of sound that dug into the ears and made a person go deaf almost from the inverted dichotomy of it. Or rather he made love and I had sex with him while he was doing so, for he was mechanical in details and sketchy in applying them for this dream or that half heard rumor or the sex magazines, but I truly was mechanical, though I had less experience than he; I was mechanical on purpose. And tried to make him think it the opposite. In this way I hid from him and took out some vengeance on others before him who had hurt me, while he tried to feel me, tried to let me know he was more than a beautiful boy with a willow song body and hands that were eager to embrace and try in all those sweet goofy clumsy ways of his, to be with me, while I was allowing myself only to be with him as though he was a photo, and that could be enough for me, dark rooms of the mind. Then he went away, and I knew I could love him then, I knew there was a genuineness to me, and that in itself was a sad harbinger of the only gift my experiences could tell me that I wanted, that this in itself was enough, putting a nail in water, a brace on the winter wind just the very second after it passed me by, that and melancholy, I thought were mine, but Jan owned them far more dearly and far more deeply than did I. There was always something battling in him, something that had a hunger attached to it, not for anything he knew, not for me certainly, but I could have provided for him a respite, a time to think things through, a time for rest, for I did love him, as much as I dared, as much as my having sex with him counterpoised his making love to me, and in that he was found far less wanting, far more accomplished, far more dear than anyone I had ever loved from a distance, from the kaleidoscope of my heart and filter and turn away before they beat me to it. All the colors of that kaleidoscope were Jan. All the swirly patterns and bright shiny glass shards were him, as we made love, in our ways, he as much as he dared, me scared beyond words, before the hearth turning us golden brown and ruddy in my living room of a cold winter night, with all the world hushed like a cloud bank coming in. Coming safe and free and indomitable, and he soft and kind and peacock words from his mouth as he tongued my navel and kissed my erection, and I would powder him sometimes with Johnson's baby powder, and then I would kiss and lick the powder away, and make him my baby for all of my days. Or something like that. He always thought someone had interrupted us, thought that he could have moved in here, away from a cold water flat with a slattern mother and a long absent father whose ghost never left the premises, and Jan, who she blamed for everything, from his being conceived in the first place, to his awkward bouts of colic, that she knew just kept whatever man she could find to bring home, away; only the poverty stayed, and the El, that was only a few feet from their one room flat, and the night like a beggar in the city chiming in with a million voices of hurt that got into Jan's core and being, smudged their shame there, never letting him go. My apartment, white and beige, with expensive paintings, a white Baby Grand I couldn't play worth a flip, the all of my apartment richly decorated in ice cream and autumn colors, comfortable but sturdy and expensive looking chairs, flocked walls, huge leather couch, buttery feeling luxurious cushions, large TV and large collection of DVDs and progressive scan player, and surround sound, lots of bookshelves crowded with books I had actually read and had not bought by the yard, mood lighting, wet bar, copper and brass kitchen, a huge bed just right for this boy and me to get lost in, and yes ceiling mirror above it. Even a skylight, floored him when he walked into it, this place was filled with all the gilt and precious little expensive objets d'art, and all the dreams that he had wanted to believe he did not need so desperately for himself, and what he saw there failed and paled in his beauty, his eyes that did not give up, had not quit life, but then, of course, when I knew him better, though no one could know him at all, not really, I saw it was all a sad too real game. That he did not put his mouth to my dick, or put mine to his because he really believed in anything but the dark parables that came in with the grime and sweat and odors of stale urine and all that old rank food smell from the tenement rooms, in those little box car squares that said the entire world stops here, and if you don't like it, that's your problem, because he needed physical release, but because he wanted, I think, though I shall never know for sure, he wanted some kind of surcease put around his "real" life. The life before and after me. The life that he needed someone to wrap up with a red ribbon bow, to say to him, this much is all right, this much is allowed and cannot be underestimated, not by the richest kings with the strongest holds of gold in the entire world. His school did not care if he was absent for days at a time, or weeks for that matter. His mother certainly was didn't mind. We seldom left the apartment, save for my going to work, and his sometimes to school; quick shopping for essentials; on occasion for some late night movies or hotdogs; mostly we stayed here and watched movies on TV. I bought him a Playstation along with lots of games, and he could be at that for hours. We were like the reverse of what tigers do in their prison zoo cages. They paced their confines, making their spaces as big as possible, while we paced our world inside these walls, and made our spaces as small as possible, for the city frightened us with its hugeness, though we had lived in it all our lives; we found it now dizzying and glutted with infinity, and we had become phobic about it; our world was very small, and for a time that was essential to both of us; we no longer wanted to get lost in it. He did not want to lose his poverty, he wanted instead to make it even more poor, even sparer, even filled with more senseless pain and loss and hittings and running from street gangs; he wanted to make all of this count for something, and if he and I first talked in a corner street cafe, and if we sipped coffee together, and if he could look at me and see, not a representative from a part of the city he had never gauged in his world before, except in the gauge of a gun blast of a dream perhaps, then he saw the hurts, the betrayals that floated in my eyes like marshmallows in hot chocolate that we drank in front of the fireplace of cold evenings and warm bodies. For that was the best, when it was winter, when the heat in my place was off and only the tendrils of crackle flames could scale the irregularities of cold and warm chunks of air, toasted on one side, and shivery on the other, the appointed natural inconsistencies in a world that I inhabited that had far too much consistency, and I loved him, though I never said it, never came close; neither did he, for this was a test run without his knowing it, a knowledge that I kept from myself as well, and if he whispered in my ear and if he brought the KY to me and slowly peeled off his shirt and jeans and looked at me with so categorically a come here look that I had trouble getting off my pants because my erection was so hard, if he let me go into him, then that was where the poverty started. And the giving up that was not giving up, maybe never, maybe tomorrow, maybe he already had, because life had used him and had never apologized, even in small ways, a small apology would have been nice; something past the croissants and coffee of a Sunday morning complete with the Sunday New York Times and our holding to each other in bed or on the carpeting, soft blue thick luxury that he loved to walk around in barefooted, lying naked and squirmy and sexy in it, because he never did get tired of that feel, as if he discovered for the first time that the world floor didn't have to be wood or concrete and inhospitable, a hospital floor that was always slippery and continued to make him fall, with no apology for the bones inside being broken over and again. He left one late Spring day, and as he stood at the elevator, I whispered I love you Jan, and the elevator doors opened, he entered, turned to face them, head down, and I knew he was gone forever, for some times people you love have to go away so you will know they loved you and they will miss you, but not Jan, because he was of the city, he was of its texture, its mosaic front, and he was fragile; my god was he fragile. He had had his nose broken twice by gangs, and had had his arm broken once by a third grade teacher who couldn't take the crap of the kids any longer and took it out on Jan, of course, because he was the only kid in the class who was not causing trouble, a feat of justification and cruelty Jan knew well from his mother, and which he said did not bother him, for he would tell me things about his life, small things, word slivers like stilettos in the dark, aiming for targets, the form and faces of which he could never see clearly, and all of that would make me more mechanical with him, more cliche ridden, more secure in the fact he was so damned insecure and tried so gracelessly graceful to hide it, while all I had to say was, Jan, what are you hiding?, what is there in your depth that is so obsidian that I could not take it and that it would not make me love you more? But perhaps I couldn't take it, because Jan's world was not mine, had never been, for Jan's world was filled with streets and maneuvers and dealings with people it would scare me to be within a mile of, and so I chickened, and I gave him a kind of love that hurt him in his eyes and that made me distance myself even further because I knew it hurt him and because I wanted him to be dependent on me, and not I on him, and he would lie in bed with me on an autumn Saturday afternoon, with the rain drops popping on the leaded glass of the windows, and he would have his head on my chest and I would be playing with his delicately curved butt. As he sighed into my chest and played with my penis, examining it closely and watching it harden in his skillful clumsy hands, and he would tell me these things, the broken arm, the broken bones inside that hurt a lot worse for their being non physical, and he would laugh about it, that shy deferential other people had it lots worse than me, and I would put my hand to his gold hair which was always shiny and so clean smelling after I would bathe him here, get the poor boy grime off of, but never really accomplishing that at all, and I would kiss his head, and I would put my hand to his penis, still flaccid from after love making a few moments ago, and I would feel his balls and how small they were and how finely they were textured into his body. I loved him, and I showed him love as best as I could, but mostly I showed him, far too often, a needy indifference, when it was just the opposite, because he was unawares subbing for boys in the past who could not hold a single moment of worth next to him, because I wanted to finally be the adult, after having been made a child by ostensible children, mean and grasping children who were not children at all, all the schemes, all the waveries they brought, that tangled me in their spider webs, never to break free, and if that sounds self serving, perhaps it is and is not justified, but what I was doing to, what I had done to Jan, was, I totally agree, completely unjustified. He told me I was the first man he had made love to, and though he never said he loved me, he always made sure I knew we were making love, which was not a part of it somehow in his eyes, and that hurt me, that used feeling, though that was what I was doing to him, but it felt good that it was this way for a change. God. He told me in those lazy day afternoons in my brownstone apartment as we lay quietly and felt each other casually, though I was always a tense boxspring ready for the joke, the punch line, the gimmick that had happened to me in the past, and he was always tensely at ease or trying to be the same, as we shuffled our hands and our arms and legs and penises against the sheer plastic see though curtain that was only a millimeter thick, that surely with all that grappling and fucking and sucking we should have made a hole in and been able to rip the whole thing apart, but instead we ripped ourselves apart. Though we were never angry with one another, never had arguments, he knew because he was sharp and I am clumsy and heavy-handed, that in my eyes he was a mistake, a stand in not only for the past but for the future as well, a spyglass instead of a boy, binoculars that I could look through, which was looking through him to the time when he was no longer there, and that somehow I coveted that moment, I lusted after it, because that was all I had ever known, and how do I stop the pattern? Jan loved for me to bathe him in my huge sunken tub and he liked to lie with me in the Jacuzzi and feel the water surge and bubble and tumble around him and me, and for my legs to encircle him and feel his rising penis with my own; he especially wanted me to suckle him then, my head under water, like I was a sea creature from a place that was deadly, more so than the city, but mythical, and therefore safer, and filled with bejeweled eyes and dragon's wings and the flight over tall snow kerchief mountains against a distant sky that was all blood red. No one understands anyone of course and if they say they do, they're kidding themselves or not terribly bright to begin with. I understood Jan as what he told me and the puppy dog inside him that had been beaten down so many years of his life but could still find the little flame of some nascent trust burning just a bit, and though it was not for me, it had been in my power to turn a kind hand to him, to hold my hand out, not mechanical, not a line and touch that produced this or that result, but to be someone he could count on when he could count on no one else, for he gave me that power, and made me infinitely more than what I was-- --and I failed him as I had sex with him, I did try to make love to him, I did try, but as he put himself in me and put his hands hard into my backbone, as he rode me, as I felt his hard penis pushing in as far as he could get and then staying there,unmoving for a minute at a time, not wanting to relinquish his place, wanting me to say I loved him because he needed someone to say it who might for just a second or two mean it, there in our sexual bouts where he turned as tender as a five year old, and I kidded him and I nuzzled him, and I kissed and bit gently his tits and I stroked his thighs, but the thing he wanted, the gesture he wanted for a moment, just a passing few seconds, that I could not give him, because it hurt him and I liked it, because so many had hurt me and hurt me still in memory, and that is my greedy shame, my self obsessed secret that pains me to write here and now. The first time we came to my place, the first time he saw the ostensible fable in which I live, the first time we had sex/made love, he let me undress him as he lay on the bed and the sun of early autumn was shining brown flecked through the tree branches and the shadow green soon to die and fall leaves, offering the all of him like the greatest Christmas present in the whole world, and I, breathless, amazed, everything moving in slow motion, reached down and down to him and with dizzy good fortune, kissed his penis, the head in my mouth, then the shaft, my hands and face and arms and mouth feeling the warmth of him, and then between his spraddled long gangly legs, and the ridge beneath the balls after I had held each one in my mouth, and I was moving my tongue down to lick his asshole, but he put his hands on my head, I looked up, and he shook his head gently "no." Pretty much everybody is at least somewhat ashamed of their assholes, I don't care what the sexologists and sex manuals say about that, but with him it assumed such a piquancy, such a poignancy, because he let me fuck him, but never kiss or tongue him there, because that was the shameful part of him, the shameful part of a city where he knew the factory would get him in one way or another, and the only Christmas he had ever seen or would ever see was one filled with lack and warmth and cheerlessnes, save that one Christmas he spent with me, where I gave him everything, everything but myself, at the same time giving him all of myself, my body, which coupled, when in most unwanted and most fought against tandem, for that is the worst thing one person can do to another. He took those presents, probably sold them, and I tried not to think of what he used the money for. So now, rain blistering hard down on the city, I sit in my home that is no longer mine. Occasionally I think of starting a fire in the fireplace but haven't the nerve or the energy to do it, just go to work, drag though the day and then drag home again, and if I could find him, I would, but if I could walk all the gray dead end streets in the world, I would never come upon him, for he never told me his last name, perhaps Jan wasn't his real first name either, or where he lived, and it says a great deal about the endemic culture that poverty is so massive, so pocked into the very fabric of our cities, that there were a million places where it slithers and I would never come upon him. I haven't gone near the bedroom or that bed since he left, and I doubt I ever will. I read somewhere that it is very easy to kill a person, just convince him his work is useless and unimportant. You can add to that, it is equally as easy to kill a person by convincing him his life is useless and unimportant, which is what I've done to Jan I suppose, though I hope not, for the city is a snake eating its tail, though it never devours itself completely, for then there would be nothing of it to eat itself, and Jan was street smart, tried to play act with me, tried to make me think he was at ease in my world, when both of us knew he wasn't, and I tried the reverse as well, which was equally as ridiculous. I started this story off selfishly, and I feel as selfish now as then, for many if not most people are this way, trying to hide, trying not to be hurt again, trying to in the midst of another person being as ostensibly as intimate with you as it's possible to be, the need to see past them, to the inevitably loneliness up ahead, the inevitable need to forget these lovely moments as they happen, for they will be past one day soon, and you will be past as well. A sort of see, here he is, and see, I don't really need him at all. You could make him vanish at that moment and I would never know the difference. Sure. He was a piece of grit in my eye, a few broken off cells in my eyes that I'm used to and don't need to notice anymore. Again, sure. But snake cities make a person tough, even though Jan tried to hide that toughness with me, tried to be a kid again, and when he cried, I never told him that I saw him weeping, that I saw him so sad he looked like someone of stone on the ledge of a huge bank building, trying to remember how all the way down there, he would summon up enough reserve to pretend to be one of them again. I watched Jan walk away. I hope he will come back. That was months ago when he left. He told me he would see me next weekend, as he went out the door, though he and I both knew that I had failed him and left him another moment to get through, get over, forget as soon as possible, so now I am still me and I am mechanical once more and once again believe in nothing and no one; I am filled with rue, as Jan is filled with the city, running to whatever is his fate, as I pick him apart and ferret out all the lies I tell myself trying to convince myself that it was all just a mean jokey game on Jan's part, and they were lines he said, and when he made love to me, he summoned up everything in him to make him stop from laughing at me, and I imagined what he told his friends in laughter about me and what they said back to him. I have my world; a sad bitter and hurt world. He has his world, a sad bitter and hurt world. Where it would be madness to trust anyone ever again, especially each other, because we could have, if I had believed in him and my good fortune enough, and when you could trust someone, and it is not allowed to happen, you never want to see that person ever again, cause he hurt you the very most, and how could Jan forgive me that? He might be a hustler now, though I try not to think about that. And I would not even be a memory as his first trick. Please at least let that not be so. I wait anyway. I look out the window down on the compacted rush and hurry and impatience of people and the cars and the city buses and the news stands and the stop lights, and the walkers fast in the faster downpour, all in rain glints of coming early dark evenings again. I've waited all my life, even when there was Jan, and he's been waiting for--what? I'll never know, not really, but I imagine he will learn more and more to take what he wants, and not just from me, a dollar here, five dollars there, from my apartment, a few tiny things to pawn, nothing important. I guess maybe he wanted me to call him to account for lifting these things, at least one or two, but I loved him and thought that was more important. But I loved him and did not bring up the subject, and I guess to him that meant I didn't give a damn at all, for it was petty theft and I thought him a petty thief. But it wasn't that. It wasn't. So I wait. I'm awfully good at it. Come watch me sometime. I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for Waiting any day now. I'll wait for that too.