Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 16:54:43 -0500
From: A. Cheshire Cat <kierkegaard_is_cool@hotmail.com>
Subject: Of Boys and Benches

Of Boys and Benches
By A. Cheshire Catt
March 20, 2004
E-mail comments to kierkegaard_is_cool@hotmail.com


Dad was building a bench in the shed, or at least that's what I was told.
Mom was doing the dishes and the coffee was flowing. The sun was shining in
and, being a rather warm day in early spring, the windows were open to air
out the house, and there was a smell of freshness and cool crispness in the
room. Living in the country is most beautiful on these undisturbed weekend
afternoons in the spring, when the family is content and happy and without
any worries showing. I used to write a lot on days like that. Not stories
really, not even in my diary, I'd just sit at the kitchen table, in the full
spread of sunlight, writing about the crumbs from breakfast or the smell of
the coffee or the polytheistic treasures of my natural surroundings. My
mother loves that I write, and she respects my need for peace in my
surroundings while the pen is in my hand. It doesn't need to be quiet, nor
does she have to leave, on the contrary, I love it when soft chamber music
is playing and she's at the sink doing something and there's the idle
clanging of silverware. It's all very inspiring. As the coffee finished, Mom
told me to take a cup down to my father in the shed. I really didn't like
that idea, but she blamed my disapproval on laziness and said the sunshine
would be good for me. Of course I protested, by then again, I was only
seventeen, protesting is what I do best.

Since it was so nice out I simply threw a sweater on over my tee-shirt and
slipped on a pair of loose-tied runners, taking the cup in my hand, gripping
like a warm elixir, I told her I would be right back. She nodded and I left.

Outside, the air was crystalline and seemed to giggle like Greek nymphs,
invisible to me but entirely present. I could imagine the spirits of the
forest scampering and frolicking about me, playing in the limbs of the
trees, singing along with the birds and petting the rabbits and feeding
squirrels. Through the limbs of the trees there was a strangely evocative
green tinge. The trees were budding and though each leafy sprout was so
small, and their numbers unaccountable, the entirety of their presence was
as a green fog would be in an unseen corner in the land of Oz.

The shed was built my father to house all the tools and contraptions he
uses. He builds houses. He always has. He built ours. Is he strong? Of
course he is, he's not hulking and super-muscular or anything, but he's
definitely strong enough to lift walls and fling about saws and drills and
hammers like they're feathers. I am not of that caliber. I am frail and
effeminate. My brother takes after my father in respects to construction and
physical girth, whereas, physically I am more like what my father was like
when he was young, but a writer and a smoker and more likely to stay thin.
Thank God!

I opened the shed door and found my dad listening to the oldies station, I
think it was Deep Purple or something playing at that moment. He looked up
to see who it was and smiled, "How are you, Mom sent you down here didn't
she?"

"Yah," I held out the coffee, "she told me to bring you this."

He graciously accepted it and took a small sip, it was warm, I could tell,
warm enough to prove nice on his palette and keep him drinking it.

I didn't know whether I should stay or go, he told me to hang out with him
for a minute. The only thing about living at home at that time was the
sufficient awkwardness between my parents. They were fighting lately. Not
rip-roaring, violent skirmishes, more subtle and cold and dark. Even on
sunny days they seemed to live in two different worlds. I knew more about
what was going on than my father and this was because my mother had told me
and told me not to tell. My mother was having an affair then. She was
probably in the house right then talking to the infamous character. My
father only knew he was being jilted. My father and I have never really had
a great relationship, probably only because of family dynamics and I was the
third of three, gay, a writer, and not into construction. But this situation
was letting me a different aspect of my father. I was feeling pity for him
all of a sudden. This bulky character was actually just a man grown up and I
could see myself in years to come if my heart were broken, grown up but
still helpless to matters of the heart. The worst part with all this was we
couldn't actually talk about the situation at hand, there was only this
sense of trying to avoid the topic. Whereas my mother felt it appropriate to
divulge the grossest of details, the full gambit of the plot of her
lover/former boss, my father respected my "need-to-know" reality and acted
as if everything was fine between my parents and that my parents are like
any other normal people and are happily married and would be until one of
them died. (Truth was out of all my friends, I think I might have had one
with parents that were original. The rest either had their parents divorce
or die by now.)

So there we were in the dull dampness of the shed. I was sort of shuffling
in one spot, hands shoved in the depths of my jean pockets, looking around
for nothing dangerous to talk about. My Dad was savoring his coffee while
perched on his new bench. It was done, the area was even cleaned up. He'd
just been down here doing nothing, hiding or something. He suddenly cracked
though, I could tell. It was as if I could hear his emotions straining and
then suddenly he snapped.

He said, "I hate her son."

"Who is that?"

"Your mother."

I froze. I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to tell him anything. In
fact I suddenly believed it might be best to let him do some venting for a
change.

"She's cheating on me and I'll kill the guy if I ever knew who it was."

"Don't say that," I said.

"I would, you know I would."

"I do know you would, that's why I say don't say that too loudly."

"We haven't even made eye contact in months."

He sulked and seemed to crash. Then he sat up and asked me to come sit with
him on the bench. I felt unbearably strange. I have never been this close to
my father, he'd definitely never asked me to sit with him on the same bench.
Nor has he ever seemed sad, openly, in front of me before. This was the new
father, the father I'd simply never gotten to know before. I came to the
bench and sat with him. I felt as though I were with a friend, and I liked
this feeling. My father may not accept that I am gay, that I smoke and drink
and party like mad, but we're still family and there is something
indestructible and passionate about that bond. He is my maker, it is almost
a duty to make him proud of his job. Like this bench that held up, it seemed
my function was to hold him up now.

He said, "I hate faking it."

I didn't know what it meant. What exactly was he faking at that moment? We
didn't look at each other. I should say, I was looking at him but he was
staring at the cement floor stained with old oil.

He jumped up and said, "Don't tell your mother but I've started smoking
again."

Dad had quit smoking when I was about eight years old. He used to smoke
three packs a day. He didn't smoke that much now, obviously, because he
didn't stink like it. He went over to a tool kit and from one of the drawers
he retrieved a pack of king-sized DuMaurier's. He offered me one. I took it.
I smoked too, he knew it, there was never anything said about it, and there
had been I would have simply said it was how I chose to deal with the stress
of an adulterous mother and a passive father.

He sat on the bench with me again and smiled. "This is nice, we never sit
like this."

"I was thinking the same thing."

He looked up, he looked right at me. "Sometimes," he started but then
halted.

"What?"

"Sometimes I think we have much more in common than she'd have you believe."

"Like what," I begged. I knew of a few things myself. We weren't talking
about the body-stuff or the fact that we both secretly smoked. He was
talking about the way we thought about things and had faith in things.

"Have you ever felt defeated son," he asked. "Sometimes people lose the
battle."

"Oh Dad," I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness, it was as if the sun had
just disappeared and all the nymphs and spirits had sensed the arrival of
something far more frosted and embittered. "Are you alright Dad."

He took a long, indifferent haul from his cigarette and let it out through
his nose.

"I hate her so much. I feel so alone."

"I hate her too."

"No, you shouldn't, she's your mother."

"She is cheating on you Dad, I think her disloyalty is astonishing and
wrong."

"Has she told you just about everything?"

"Oh Dad, I know everything and it makes me so mad at her."

"You have every right to hate her too I guess."

I could imagine her up there doing the dishes while laughing on the phone
with a man that fucked her up the ass and treated her like a princess in a
fairy tale, in a relationship about as doomed as they can get.

Dad put his hand on my leg, it seemed as though he'd meant to do it but then
it all seemed an accident and he pulled it off. Where it had been was now
cold as his hand had been so warm. I looked at the spot where it had been
then looked up at him, he was already looking at me too.

Our eyes locked and we held the vision of each other in the other's eyes for
a minute and then he suddenly put his hand back on my leg. It was an
electric moment. I put my hand on top of his and rubbed it. We were
mesmerized by the lack of compassion in our lives, we were aware of a sudden
need to be held, and we knew that in each other we could find solace from
her ruthlessness.

I leaned in then and simply presented my lips to his, and he hesitated then,
afraid of what it all meant. Then he kissed me. Gently at first, but then
his tongue pounded in, and put his other hand on the back of my head and
held me against his face. Things started happening quickly. He was blinded
by this need to have sex, to have the warmth of my body surrounded by the
heat of his. He was strong, so powerful, that he removed his clothes after
removing mine and in only an instant we were naked and piled on the bench
that he'd just built.

His huge cock was wider rather than longer, dark red, nearly brown, and
enmeshed in the black hair of his age. I was longer rather than wider, pale
and clean, and the hair around mine was kept trimmed. My father, obviously
new to the gay sex realm, skipped over all the oral stuff and instantly
pushed his cock toward my ass. It was going to hurt, I knew it would, but
for my father I would have torn myself in two to accommodate his manhood. I
ended up standing beside the bench, then bending over so that he could get
into my ass easily. He spit on his cock then spit on my puckered ass-lips
and fingered me gently. Without any hesitation he pushed his cock inside me.
I nearly cried, holding it all in though, and made myself into a man for my
Dad. I clawed at the bench as he started to rhythmically thump and pump me.
He held my thin little hips in his strong dirty hands and pulled my slim
body against him with each stroke of my anus. He loved this, soon he shot a
load inside me and pulled out to finish stroking it. I leaned over and
licked the rest of it, as well as the stench of my ass off his thick club.
He then told me to jerk off so he could see me doing it. Easily enough, I
came all over myself and he licked it off my shaft as I had for him. He gave
me a rag to wipe off with then told me I should probably go back in to see
Mom before she came looking for us.

As I dressed I was fine, as I walked back to the house I was still okay
(though my ass was mighty sore), but then all of a sudden, when I saw my
mother, I knew all at once what had just happened. My Dad was now cheating
on my mother with her own son. When she asked what had kept me I grinned,
feigning an interest in the sound of her voice, but ignored her and just
walked to my room. I buried myself in my earphones and fell asleep.

That evening they got into, the silent Cold War was over and now it was a
Nuclear Holocaust. I was so glad that it had come to that because the
pacifism was ridiculous. As they bitched and fought and screamed and yell,
slamming plates and doors, following each other around in the house like a
heard of elephants, I jerked off to the memory of my Dad fucking me up the
ass and me clawing at the bench, cumming for him, pleasing him. I fantasized
about a future like that. I dreamed of being in bed with my father, making
him dinner and making him happy, basically being a better wife than my
mother. It was a great thought.

I fell asleep, hungry, before the fight ended.

In the middle of the night I heard the truck start. Dad was going somewhere.
I thought, maybe he's just going to drive and smoke and cool down. I went
back to sleep. Mom was crying in the kitchen, her little delusion just came
tumbling down.

The truck wasn't leaving though, he was just sitting in the lane way. I
finally built up the nerve to look out the window. He was already looking at
my window from the truck.

He waved at me to come. I didn't know what to do.

I slowly got up out of bed, grabbing my back pack for some reason, as if I
knew what was going on here, I was not going to leave without my diaries and
writing stuff. I walked out into the kitchen and saw Mom, red-faced and
sobbing, staring at her reflection in the window above the sink. She said,
"He's leaving me."

"I know Mom. I'm going with him."

She didn't say anything. I don't know if I said good-bye to her or not. I
think I may have said See ya or something to that effect. It wasn't true
though. I would never have to see her again. There were times when Dad saw
her, regarding the divorce and stuff, but realistically I never had to deal
with her again. She ended up killing herself. The funeral was a mockery of
ritual. It was quite brutal actually.

But that night, when I got in the truck we both drove through the night to
the city. We smoked like mad. We got a room in a hotel and spent the night
staring at the strange, surreal ceiling. The next morning, after his shower,
while he sat having his cigarette, I gave him a blow job. We didn't say
anything I just sucked the cum right out of him.

I took a seat next to him and he said, "I love you son."

That was the first time I'd ever heard him say it. I recognized the moment.
I cherish that moment still. Not because we were all goo-goo soft for each
other, like young lovers or something like that, but because we were family
and there's something, like I've said, that can't be destroyed in that.
There's something crucial about that. He said it as he stared out the window
at the skyscrapers and hotels and highways and cars. The country was far
away now.

"I love you too Dad."