Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 10:26:35 -0800 (PST) From: Tim Stillman Subject: m/m incest "Wharf Rat Town" Wharf Rat Town By Timothy Stillman (A continuation of "The Royal Diadem of Maggot Hall") (Apropos of nothing but the odd workings of the mind--Maggot Hall came from a collision one day in my brain of the name of the former child actor, Bug Hall, star of the never to be forgotten Disney film "Safety Patrol" and "The Little Rascals" movie, and the title of John Fowles' brilliant novel "A Maggot"--who cares? But I thought interesting.) My brother and I have been in the States now for two and one half years. We have changed our names, having fled the horrors of England, we have tried to flee the horrors of what my brother has become; we are fiddlers; we play the saloons for pennies; we have nothing but each other and ourselves; we live in little more than a pest hole on the docks of this tumble down village in the drunken part of a land long lost to Philistines, and in the corner of my brother, Joel's, mind there stretches the dark shadows of Maggot Hall. A season in Hell that pulls at his dreams; that screams at the merciless fates he met there; and he cries in our crib of a bed and holds to me, not speaking, for he has not verbalized since our voyage away from the nightmare of created insanity for him; as made from the beauty he once had, turned into dross; his once golden flaxen hair now as though greased with axle tar, and his body emaciated to the point of almost without redemption. We are brothers the way rats are brothers; we nibble away at our days; we play, we fiddlers two; we are part of grease smoke and pained meals of stale bread and bad ale; we are nothing more than redemption come slowly as if down a dark cobble stone street; Joel, by the betrayal of his friends and the visage of standard bearers of madness come to him as if by toxic injection from wooden needles, marking him over and over again, as though he is now a frightening comic jigsaw puzzle of what he once was; made over; taken apart; pieces that do not fit but are slammed together, wedged together making no sense; as if his eyes are on his stomach, sewn there; and his heart is where his eyes used to be in his face; the once radiant face; the once seen kingdom of happiness that was as though a glade through his childhood long; nestled in networking of joys there used to be between us; now those joys are a girdle of insubstantial thickness that surround us and cinch round our waist the more tightly; and if we once loved each other, we now take surcease in hurting one another; I have to hold his hands sometimes to keep him from strangling himself; I have to hide sharp instruments, table implements, knives; I fear he will jump from the wharf one fine day and I shall know of him confined to the bottom of the deep murkiness and at the same time, keep hoping he will walk in the door; when he is still here beside me; while he is already gone away. I deed nothing at this point; I realize nothing in this juncture of life and death; our home is the darkness; from the murk of light of fishing mornings we hide as if we are ghouls; as if there is nothing left focused other than miracle ceding; as if that were a possibility; we wash with kerosene oil; our clothes smell and are rent with tears; Joel sometimes buries his head in my chest; he sometimes slavers in his sleep; and he remembers--the degradation, the filth, the squalor, where I maddeningly had placed him, thinking it would be a chamber of comfort, of sanity; this I shall take to my death bed that with all the friends he believed in; with all the hopes that fell like flintlock caps at him, that reeled him with wreathes of powdery madness and screams in the nighttime hours at our dead parents' decayed mansion, that I finally realized when I knocked that clay pipe out of the mouth of the oh so self-aggrandizing alienist that decayed my brother furthermore, when I held my Joel on the ship, and "held a memory, not a man" I ceded all rights I had to ever breathe again; save the right to make things better for him; for I thought in one lunge of hope, America would be a land of melted butter to soothe old burn wounds; but no, `twas of course not so. We meant to stay in Rutherford for only a short amount of time; we became fiddlers because a peddler sold them cheap; and I wanted to remind my ghost brother of music, such as he used to love, when we would decamp home and rent a hansom to go into London Town and listen to Chopin or Brahms and his periwinkle eyes would dance as he sat in the audience and his legs would move as though he wanted to caper and dance forever more; for he was such a light boy, such a boy of wild dreams; and hearths home must surely be waiting for him there up ahead; but they forgot; they used him; and they forgot; and I denied it for I could only turn my face to the tapestry of the hunt on the wall of my late father's library smelling of rich bound leather and pipe tobacco still though he had died two years before and no one ever smoked in there again; I denied my brother could not have what he wanted; an honest lad to a fault; but one who presumed vellum would always be his; a noxious thing that had turned inside out from a parcel of brown papered magical seeds; he waiting every day for the post that came twice a day; seeing his friends who had sampled him and gone away go away every empty of vellum day; every empty vellum with his name on the letter and starting with Dear...for he was dear; and he was my life; but I was not enough. Egress provided entrance inward, and his dour complexion, now gray, when once pale and wan and beautifully like a girl's, his giving upward; his tearing the curtains down in the great room after the depths of the humiliating trial Maggot Hall put up in their defence of their cruelty and their desire to finish my brother off, for we no longer had money, for ever after, I shall see Joel standing in that witness box; I shall see him with bent shoulders, which upon a time were thrown back in pride; I shall see the broken music box of my brother cranking down more and more haltingly as he answered in torn apart words in tortured sentences the barrister's questions, and only falteringly momentary luck as he was speeded away when the denizen of Maggot finally filled his empty head with the ultimate proof I was not lying and we had indeed gone through our inheritance to pay for my brother's misery, so a hack delivered him to me one misery ladened rainy dark as pitch day at my door step; he held to me and he was no longer alive. The f---ers had murdered him by the inch. It is a disease--giving up; it is a disease foisted like rats bringing the plague in, which is why we live in this place called Wharf Rat Town, where the rats inhabit everywhere; where there are rat holes in our room in all the other rooms, in the town, in the saloons where pain and desolation and wracked coughs and pestilence of the soul having to do with disease easy entrance, where two fiddlers make pennies sometimes with their memory of songs from a long ago when the sun shone and there was peace seemingly upon the land, but our fingers are like traitors; they take the happy songs and they pluck them dolefully; they take the lack even of anger or revenge or spite or hatred and they wash them into the deep smelly brine of the bay in this whole village which gives an aroma of puking laudanum; where waiting for death has become almost an entire cottage industry. Joel and I in our nightshirts have just had sex; a joyously awkward affair; as he held to my neck as I went down on his never hard cock; I remember the days before he found out what and who made up the world; when we loved each other and kissed and delighted in being naked with each other; in bathing Joel, where I would put warm water and soap and cloth to his small hard on and he would hold round my neck his arms as he came and he would kiss me so sweetly the berries of the hills above our home could never tasted as sweetly, for we evinced love for each other early on and loved to rush through the fields, naked, as I would fall down with him in the autumn brown grass; as I would kiss his closed eyelids; and we would stroke each other's cocks; he would say so wide eyed and smiling happy that he could not wait to grow hair down there like I had; I would kiss the palms of his hands; I would say just wait brother and it will happen soon, then I would taste his tiny almost invisible brown nipples as he would hold my head and giggle; but now tonight, we have made pretend love; love that he does not feel; love that is something I no longer feel; for it was as if with a manikins from another becoming sooner each day another manikin; we lying here, he in my arms; he hearing the screams of Maggot Hall; the screams of the news butchers on every street corner of London from Whitechapel to Camden Town; the trial and his madness on display; and how I wanted to kill them all; how I wanted to kill myself for my naietivity and for my slipshod love for my brother; the day I left him at Maggot Hall and he screamed after me will live resounding in my memory far after the day I die. Which may not be long, for I have developed a cough that has been with me two months now, and I fear it may be tuberculosis; and though some of our pennies bought at the chemist's a poultice which has this stench lost in all the other stenches that about here, round my neck, and have the foul elixir I take twice a day which almost makes me gag, I fear I am not long for this world, for then what would become of Joel" Another pest house I will be bound, but that will not happen because I will not put him through any more institutionalized sadism; so if the grippe comes to me then I shall be forced to slay both of us for that is the only answer; my Joel and I; from moneyed privilege to this circuitous route to Dante's Inferno; as the night wenches scream fake orgasms on all sides of us; and the star fish in the sea are pulling up the foulest odors of the lowest conundrums anyone can find themselves reduced to, though even I place mustard plasters on my chest, have a poultice round Joel's thin neck, and though I feed him the elixir as well, I fear death is not far off; I fear at least we will be gutted by some lunatic's knife sometime on our way into the dark and back into the dark for our fetid pretense at sleep with doors hanging crooked and locks never heard of; each squeak of a board makes me grip my own knife in my hands trembling more and more, tightly than before; so you see us here, brothers one time lovers; brothers one time together naked and joying Joel in coming in his mouth, dearest mouth, before he tried to have friends and turned away from me; but that was not the reason I put him in that mad house-- --I could not live with myself if that is ever a seed to be grown like a tumor in my heart if it is not there already and I chose this dross house in place in circumvented illogic, as I hold him, as he is in fever, as I stroke his limp penis, as I rub my hand on his pubic hair that he wished for so much, as I remember when he first noticed the down there and rushed to me, throwing up his nightshirt to show me, as I kissed the new down and marveled at it; and the first time he came; he came in me; a small emission it was, but beautiful tasting and he felt such pride in his growing body; but then the desire for vellum came and his desire was granted for a time; for he trusted his friends implicitly; till and then and his eyes grew cloudy; but he still had hope; and that hope was lingering; the hope became a sickness no laudanum could ever cure; he ached for the post; a letter one month; two another; as he quill penned each response, writing and re-writing over and over; love me he was saying; be with me; tell me I am beautiful; tell me you adore me; which devolved in time tell me you remember me; tell me you remember my name; my first name; hello? Are you out there; which devolved into trying to buy them, their love, their friendship; which worked for a time; and his nervous faltering smiles at me during this interim seized my heart, for he knew this would be the very worst time at all. As I lie here holding naked emaciated Joel; as I think of the flute of the musician in Bremen who first lured out the rats, then in payment, lured out the children; as I think of rainy cobble stone streets; as I think of a brother who once was; and a me who also once was; as I stroke my brother's testicles and then my own; our impotence complete; and remember the first time I entered him and how mysterious and soft and like velvet it felt to my penis; as I lie here knowing the monster in the piece is and always has been and always will be me; as I stroke what oily hair he has left, much of it having fallen out; I hold him till morning, once again thinking, "I hold a memory, not a man."