Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2001 15:50:03 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: young friends "Julian and Me"

			      "Julian and Me"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 I see the beach in the south of France. It is a cold gray
almost midnight where there reside warm dreams this last breath
of November before the snows begin. We walk along the sandy
strand, with the bright full circular moon and stars shining bright
as a mad cubist's dream, but smoothed at the edges and done with
love, not frenetic frightened energy or vision. It is a world of
circles this night. It is the world of circles that make up us. For our
faces and our eyes and our fingertips and our mouths that smile
more than they used to. For our stomachs and our hopes and our
balls and our blessings that are now curved like the earth. More
perfect than pear shaped Earth. The beginning is here. The
beginning waits for the sun, knowing it will come. For nighttime,
the moon is more than good enough.

 The wind is cold. We are unclothed. We are boys again.
We have forgotten what has been done to us. Or if not forgotten,
learned how not to dwell on it. Though he is far more successful at
that than am I. The water beside us roars. It is implacable. It is gray
and the waves slash into shore and make a most conducive noise
that rattles our ear drums. We are together. Our arms are around
each other's waists. I lean my head to the cradle of his shoulder
and I kiss his tender, beardless cheek. He puts his hand to my face
and he soothes the damage. For what is love but an attempt at least
to soothe past damage? We are the world tonight and the world is
alone and the world is us and we keep it past our dreams in which
it cannot share, for it wants to so much, but now it is our turn. Our
turn to say keep out, go away, not wanted, fall off into space and
good luck to you. As he once said to me. Or did not say. A long
time ago. I tamp it down into my erased memories and walk with
him. Matching him stride for stride. Our bodies are smooth and
healthy and bold as brass.

 We walk with intent and purpose and integrity. I once upon
a time had no integrity with him. For he was everything and
everything is never allowed except on rare occasions. We move
into the wind as though it might add to us, as though we might
learn from it, and not have to constantly go into our separate
hiding places where we ran and shivered and looked not at worship
but at old churches in the midst of rue and avarice and never
counted our own among what we ran from, what we ducked out of,
what we gave away with every word we said. Especially by way of
our conspicuous silences, our lying omissions. We are together and
the sky is a black bowl that is not made of cardboard or old wall
paper that tatters and tears and pulls apart to show the broken
netting underneath.

 We are now stopping and we hear a fun fair up ahead
somewhere in the mist that has begun to sling itself in from the
distance over the water highway to places we once were and never
again wish to be. The depths of the waves. The immensity of the
knowledge. The still unbridgeable gulf that held apart, held safe
when it was not safe at all. He touches me and my petals open. He
touches me and I look into his eyes which see me for the first time,
when he and I are not drunk or stoned or dusted or filled with
angst. There is delicacy for the first time in our lives, I think, here
and now. Our words are covers fine and warm of flannel as we
look into each other, as he touches me lower still and I rise to him.
It is a marvelous thing, feeling an erection building under someone
else's constructive care. It is a marvelous thing, feeling his erection
building under my no longer greedy, somewhat tired, but happy
fingers and palm, as though I have made him a world to fit, not in
my hand, but in a world that suddenly included me in it. He is tall.
Taller than I. He has a prominent Adams apple. His neck is thin.
His hair is black and cut short. He wears round wire rimmed
glasses. He is beautiful naked, wearing only glasses. They make
him mortal. That is important. I must remember he is mortal. Tell
someone they are your personal savior, and see how far and how
fast they run away from you. Accept reality. Reality is a joke.
Laugh with it. There's finally no other choice.

 He is warm and he slowly carefully pulls me to him. I wish
to kiss his mouth and I do so. I put my tongue against his tongue
and we tangle them for a time. We dwell within and without and
the wind is cold and its fingers ruffle our hopes and our dreams but
this time we keep them for ourselves. He shall not take mine away
again. I shall not take his away again by giving him so many of my
own. In a way, perhaps, without groveling about it, that too is a
theft, without accepting back. I put my hand to his chest. To his rib
cage. I lower myself and put my face against his rib ladders. I hear
his heart beat and it is the surf. It is the waves pounding. It is my
hard on throbbing against his. We don't talk. We think as little as
possible. He doesn't tell me about England. I don't tell him about
America. Our respective nightmares are ended. Death and life have
adjusted and have come homeward in this place that was for a time
his home, but never mine. Not now either, and that is why I can
accept it. That is why I can feel comfortable in it. As he puts his
hands to my buttocks. That are rounded and firm. That need a
clever touch. That are sensitive and make me feel giggles like soap
bubbles rising in me as he softly and whispery tickles them with
his finger tips. He holds the giggles against his chest as I put my
hands to his thighs. As I hold to a world that is gray and night and
somber and beautiful and profound.

 He moves downward. Until he is kneeling before me. He
pulls my forearms until I am lying down beside him. The sand is
cold. It is a trail of Morse codes, all dots and dashes and messages
relayed and relayed back, underneath us. It is good to be on it. It is
good to be what in what is to me a foreign land. The fun fair
sounds in the distance, the calliope tunes, seem like yellow
sunlight of some other summer day bathing us and no one but us. I
kiss him. I touch his glasses rims. I am immensely turned on by
this and by his unashamed nudity and his need of my own. We are
15 or so. We have been through the waves of time. We have
landed on promenades that were not are ours. We have fallen and
risen again. We have braved jokes and timorous relationships and
caught ourselves coming from the direction of dreams which now
shame us and made us end up with each other in the long run. And
it has been a long run. As he leans over and massages my shoulder
muscles and then my leg muscles. I feel a good sad distance and
accomplishment in them. Then I massage his. He is in my arms
and we hold for a time. Unmoving. Forgiving? Perhaps. I like to
think so. The sound of the calliope helps. And the crashing of
waves. And the last moment of November before the snows come.

 It is a wondrous firecrackery feeling thing to feel his hard
on. To press it against his belly. To play with it and work with it as
a child would for it is a great toy, a great invention, a magnificent
tribute to the human need to find it and care for it and tend it
properly so all the green days of summer will live in it and in him
and in me for as long as we have the time. He lies on top of me.
The moon glints in his glasses lenses. He leans up from me and
looks up at the moon. It feels as though he is an enigma who has
finally explained itself, not a selfish thought such as he is part of
me and I am part of him. But a condition, a resurfacing to air that
knew us all those long pained intervals of days and years that we
were apart, those French door years that closed on us over and
again with their muslin curtains and glass frames that shatter
sounded frighteningly every time one of the doors was closed and
closed hard they all were.

 He is and looks every bit of him, in ways I can't describe,
British. A look I used to love. With a voice I used to love. But it all
turned wrong. It turned an entire country into something needing a
huge monster like Gorgo or Godzilla to take away, thus to take him
away too. The fear and the hurt and the betrayal were a land for
both of us, each in his own way. Knowing and not knowing at the
same time, about each other or about ourselves. He moves quietly,
as if apologizing for moving at all. He is shy. He leans his long
lean body down to me and he kisses my closed eyes. I used to see
him with only closed eyes, his and mine, and in this paradox of
what is seen and what is not, in this shadow show of light and
more illumination than anyone can imagine, or perhaps that
everyone can imagine, I allowed myself to see him and allowed
him to see me. He is now himself and not an anagram and not an
image on a silver screen. He is far less to me than what he was.
Without that this could not have happened. Without the gasp of
giving up and falling into each other's arms one cold gray day that
said this is the finale, this is a last chance that is not a gambit, and
in fear, we rushed to opposite directions from where we knew the
other was, and found each other there dead on target.

 We make love. He rushes into me as though there is
summer in him and he must rid himself of it. I rush into him as
though there is winter in me and I must be rid of it. We
commingle. We become. I move to his penis with my mouth as he
moves to mine with his. We take each other. We destroy nothing
and create nothing. There will not be extra stars in the sky tonight
spun directly by us. There will be no new calliope music where
there are now and always will be only broken chords of songs
heard a long time ago playing us to sleep and past bonding
treatments, past the failures that each of us thought were victories,
for how could we live otherwise? His penis tastes of boy and of
sand and of cold winds and old times written new. I nestle it in my
grateful mouth as though I have put it into a church with windows
that sing still a little and have interesting colors in them, though
faded though more than a bit. I touch his tip with my tongue. He
holds me in his mouth and rubs my shaft. We are fiction. We are
real. We are dreams. We are yesterday and tomorrow because now
we have the knowledge that reality and fantasy are one in the mind
which does not, after a time, distinguish which resides beside
which. The feel, the intent, the joy and the pain of both genres are
the same and mixed up and a strange hallucinatory country fed by
all sorts of tributaries, real and not so.

 I push my penis into him and he pushes his into me. His
penis tastes like milk and like flowers and like little hopes that
rush into a careful deliberate wounded child's mind that does not
signify Christmas bells or trees with presents under them, for that
is from a far height, and it is far too easy to fall from it. It tastes
and feels like his own secret dreams from a trundle bed, like hopes
he might still remember though with less dulcet tone than before.
It is a commingling and it is a compromise. It is not furtive or
fervent and acted on with rash haste and the need to make him me
or me him. We are our own waves. Hiding our seas and oceans in
our own shores. We luxuriate in each other because we have
discovered that the whole world is alive, that roses really do sing,
that everything and everyone feels and is sentient and that the very
earth beneath us has runnels of nerve endings, and is crying out for
a hand extended in help and beneficence. I hold his hips. He is a
pale boy. He is a boy who lived in Seven Oaks. He is a boy who
had a lovely cat. He sent me a picture of her once, a cat who later
died for whom he mourned for a time, then stopped mourning. He
was of Kent and he worked in London and he needed no one but
whoever kept him company on any given night when his flat was
too stuffy, too close to the touch. But the service he provided all
those boys and men then, and which was provided to him by them,
is this that he is doing to me and I to him, even now. No more. No
less.

 He is a boy who breathes and who is out of sorts from time
to time, as am I. He is a boy who devours me now as I hold to his
hips and press my hands into the bony confluence of them. We are
lost in sunshine, the kind that grows only in the mind, the kind that
has to be mown a little so it can take care of itself and not become
a jungle growth of sun rays that hurt and are heavy and tangled and
make the creator of that image crawl through them like through
high elephant grass, blind as to what is on the other side, blind as
to why they are making the journey in the first place.

 I want to come now. I want him to feel my thick wad
shooting down his throat. His lips parse my penis. He sucks them
in and out somehow which gives me a funny fluting kind of
suction feel around the edges of my shaft. He will fall off the edge
of the world again. I shall never know, once again, what happened
to him and why. He shall once again be a question mark to me.
Lowering me down. He will again think of me never. There is no
magic. There is no potion or spell or deed or incantation that can
make him stay. Though he looks like Harry Potter, he is not.
Though he laughingly called me a muggle, I am not. We are lost
boys who found their way to a strip of sand and took off our
clothes carefully and slowly and with courtesy. There had been so
little of that for so long, for the both of us. It is odd how much that
counts for us now.

 The calliope plays "East Side/West Side" and "Remember
Me To Herald Square." It played "MacArthur Park" and
"Greensleeves" and it holds the summer breezes in the cold
winds--the breezes that sneak out and lave us as our legs go rigid
and straight, as our muscles coil and we release ourselves into each
other's mouth. As he holds my balls tightly. As I hold his tightly.
We come at the same time. The earth does not sigh or  break apart.
The clouds do not appear and hoist themselves back to show us the
sun. It is still cold and night and it has now begun to rain. He
kisses my head as my penis began slowly to take leave of his
mouth. He swallows my cum, as I do his. The sharing is the thing.
The sharing of dreams makes the difference. Whoever said dreams
are the only things that are free was an idiot and wouldn't have
known a real dream, odd phrase but an accurate one, if it bit them
on the butt. Dreams cost a tremendous lot. Especially, most
especially, dreams unshared, untold. They can cost your life if you
don't watch out.

 We lie still for a time. I feel the pulsing of his cock against
my cheek, as his penis ticks smaller and became conversant with
time and dynamics and reality and the way a clock's hands are the
most unforgiving, most unswerving thing man or god has ever
invented. We are caked in cold sand. The water is close. The
shingles of it build roof that only the things that live deeply
beneath have need of, or any real sight of. I kiss his wild crop of
black pubic hair. He holds my penis to his lips and blows on it
which make me feel warm and happy. We learned long ago, from
each other and from others, that love was made to go away from.
That is part of the sweet keening of it. We do not long. We will not
rue. We had done that far too long in our separate worlds. We do
not talk or kiss each other on the mouth. We feel each other's
bodies. We trace them and if there is something of emotions in
them, in us, we keep it to ourselves. We had said "I love you" to
too many people, and too many people had manipulated us and
used us and had us, so we are forever distant from saying the
words. Even if we had meant them. To each other. For we would
not have meant them.

 Boys should not have battle scars. Boys should not be sad
unto death. Boys should not be scared and in pain and in
relationships and memories of others or dreams of what would
have been, that break them from the inside. For these are such
things as Iron Maidens and they close boys inside deeper and
deeper until the darkness and the sweaty fears are the only things
you can safely love and count on. I push my finger into his arse
hole. He pushed his finger into my ass hole. The only other time I
did that was with a boy named Ricky. It felt dark and long and
deep and quiet and was such a wonderful secret that it came across
the mind like a sort of prayer written deeply in the bones. And now
we two boys hold each other and gradually crab crawl so our faces
were together again. I breath him in and he breathes me in. Our
bellows work for each other for this bit of time as well as working
for themselves. He does not smell of the moors or friendly old
books or Boxing day.

 There is no Mark Lester about him, or Jack Wild. He has
not a passing acquaintance with Oliver Twist or the Artful Dodger.
He will never sing "Where Is Love?" to me. He is only a boy I met
one time, who gladdened me and saddened me all at once. He was
to be more to me than I was to him, much more for a long time.
But the tree had gotten hoary and the branches had grown crooked
and twisted and confining until even I had had enough of them,
and decided I would after all rather live instead. So I cut it all
down one fine day and found him there standing on the beach at
St. Tropez.

 At the fun fair in the now very misty air and distance, there
is the sound of children, on rides, screaming, shouting, laughing
and full of the vocal dynamics of being alive. The boy across from
me is one of millions. He is neither special nor unique nor one of a
kind. He is not what I thought he was and, it goes without saying,
that I am also not special or unique or one of a kind either. We
have enough larceny in our souls. We knew how to catch each
other for a brief moment or two and then we will be on our way, to
our clothes, to our lives, back home wherever home is said to be,
and wherever spatial home is, it is a lie. But then everything is a
lie. The stars do not shine for us. The blue sky is not really blue or
what we think of as a sky at all.

 Beautiful voices, like the British ones I used to love but
now cannot abide, come from vocal cords which are not such
attractive things, the word sounds and the tones formed by the
tongue, not such a pleasant organ to look at either when you get
right down to it, homed by the teeth which again play their part in
a trick of fate, a trick of the heart, a moment when you think you
are safe and you are not. And knowing this, knowing there is no
safety, that every moment is transitory, gave us this, the love
making, for that was what it was, that came not with mechanical or
schematic diagrams. Just two boys who looked up from the shells
in which they had gone to ground and came here because there was
no where else to come. To each other for there was no one else to
go to. The sum and total of life. All of it, beginning, middle and
end. Mark Lester grew up, spent, Julian told me, some time in
prison, is said to have married, to have some children and to be
happy. Jack Wild almost killed himself with booze and drugs until
he found Jesus and became unbearable to read about. He aged
badly. There is no H.R. Pufnstuf, kids, not even for Freddie. The
magic flute is a lie too.

 After a time, one boy helps another one to his feet. They
embrace. The rain is getting harder,  colder, slicing. It is only the
sky giving away the secret that there are clouds up there that no
one can see, but there, nonetheless. And singing as best they can,
through the rain that comes down from them. The clocks tick
again. In finality. It is now 12:01 a.m. December the first. Not
officially winter, but to every school boy it signals winter for them.
Calendars do not count for boys. Calendars are the languishing and
silent spoiled grapes of adults put on boys who forgot to look who
will soon  be laughing next, who forgot that it would not always be
themselves doing it.

 We don't  say goodbye. Because we are, all of us, made of
nothing but good-byes. To say it is superfluous. Hermie was right,
life is only a series of good-byes. Get ready for them when
someone says hello, because that's not what he means at all. Even
if he wants to mean it, he can't. We turn from each other and walk
in opposite directions. I consider walking into the surf and into the
night as far as it would take me. But for right now, I decide against
it. I walk into my clothes. As the other boy walks into his. I am
now not sure of his name. He was never sure of mine. But for a
time we were mixed in each other. Felt the other's pain and
sadness and intrinsic happiness that this counted for nothing, and
in counting for nothing, it served as best as it and as we could, and
counts for everything.

 I'm back from there now. I came here to tell you about it. I
hope, maybe, if you too are sad and cynical and long of memories
and full of dreams, it might help in some small odd way that I
don't know about. Thank you for reading my story.

				  the end