Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 20:24:13 -0700
From: Timothy Stillman <comewinter@earthlink.net>
Subject: A Life of Midnights

			   "A Life of Midnights"

				    by

				  Timothy

Tonight, I will take midnight on my walk. I will go to Denmark. I will
see the cobblestone streets, in the rain and cold. I will stop by the
statue of The Little Mermaid. I will ponder the Danish in my soul, and
the Polish, and the Israeli, and the Egyptian, all a mosaic of the
ancientness of me. I am a boy, still and all. 17 by physiognomy and
nature of spirit. I have light gold hair, clipped short in honor of the
ancient of days. I am tall and reedy with little body hair. I have a
tender chin and a ticklish neck. I wish to be the world. I wish to be the
star blue night of the Mediterranean. I wish to be the indigo of Pakistan
mountains when the moon strikes it in such a painful arc of light, so
physical that I can almost hear it wind the world to its tightest.

Mostly though, to attendants, I am a prostitute, and a willful one. I
charge much. And much is paid. Because I am quite beautiful and I kiss
like a dream. I have little pillowy lips. I am the home everybody is
searching for. Home comes here to you. And home is me. I resent the
arrows in my penis because they need thrusting out often and endlessly.
But sex with unknowns is sex with what could have been me. My name is
Philip. I am full of myself. I see camels in the distance in the eyes of
my tricks, beneath me, always, I prefer it that way. I see these camels
loping gracelessly, but unburdened in sand mountain distance. I hear
coronation bells. I hear the stark loneliness of forever in those desert
skies, where ground and night sky blend, never to untie again.

My tricks, for they are tricks, are soiled, insignificant colored
handkerchiefs, same depth, same importance as handkerchiefs, for they are
stupid and think themselves bold; they are unlearned, and think
themselves, boys/men/girls/women/and all the mixes there are, of the
world; they think themselves young, the ones who are not; they think
themselves old, the ones who are in effect young. They tower and glower
and kiss fame into me. Their brand of fame. Which I disdain. For I am
already famous. I am languid. I have eyes of deep black. I have a body
that is eager to hold and be held. I can make you forget the times and
the heat of winter and the coldness of summer. I am the hills in my
buttocks that like to be pressed open, that like to be caressed, that
like to be felt into, and the caverns of me are never to disappoint. Not
since I was ten and discovered I was a boy photograph, glossy and fine
and California filled and smelling of green trees and Pacific placidity,
all come to life. Not come to disappoint. But to unite the country of me
with the country of anyone who pays.

And they do pay. Exceedingly. I am such a miser of money. Poverty is my
face. The riches they do not dream about are my secret. I am fey. My
fingers are delicate and long, making my customers sure that I play the
piano, or did as a young child, metronome tied, kept home in the evenings
in the house of studied hush of thick carpeting and creamy walls and high
white ceilings, while all the other children played outside their
children's games; and me on the piano bench of mahogany, agonizingly
hunching my bird like shoulders that are caught in my light gray sweater
(they almost always imagine that for some reasons, it makes me sexier to
them ), my eyes scrunched up and brow furrowed, practicing hour after
unmitigated hour, hungry to stop, and the light of diffuse blond of the
living room of my expensive house, as I try again and again to get the
sheet music notes in my head to thus deliver them to my fingers, and then
to portray what I read into the keys I delicately (always delicately,
even for the strongest hardest music) caress, into the piano below the
music holder, while the sun descends into quiescent night and the
laughing free tossed children outside, always outside, depicted, cameo
like, in the long tall clear immaculately clean living room window,
delivering shadows into the well appointed room, while all along, I never
played the piano, was never forced to, never wanted to, but it is a
common dream of me--little boy of enforced servitude to musical notes
written so nonsensically that will dive into my soul, should I be
considered to have one, that will wash me into the sad songs, as the sad
songs will mold me into themselves, and my tricks will be having sex,
making love, "doing it," fucking their precious dreams made melodies, of
meaning only to them, instead of warm living me. Don't kid a kidder.

Who has been fucked often and endlessly. Who cannot find that word a
swear word. Who cannot find delicacy in it, but only the tenderloin of
L.A. out of which I operate as though I am a private eye hired to find
those dreams that have been murdered somewhere along the way, and always
finding, though never telling my clients, they are the murderers of their
own dreams. They kill them with the death gun or knives with booze and
drugs and stupidity and giving up and in and pretending when there is
nothing to pretend with anymore. They take my cock and they think they
lengthen it, but they do not. They think it fills in their hands because
they are their hands. They are in error.

I am instead in Bedouin country. I am with a boy who has a serape on, and
the night is still and the air is like sandpaper, the sand chafes us, and
the moon is a crescent and the sands are still hot with the remnants of
the day, though cold nights are coming on. I touch my boy's neck, feel
the pulsing warmth of him, feel with my groin his cock rise. I touch the
hollows there in his neck and his cheeks and sharp shoulder blades. His
legs scissor mine and I too am hard. I kiss lightly and softly, butterfly
wings, his long lashed black pupiled eyes. I am his highway and he is
mine. The silence, long and expansive and delicate, smells sweet. And I
take him and he is naked and he takes me and I am naked and we hold our
dueling cocks together and we blend and adhere and the sand is part of us
and some times all of us and our bodies are indentations in it, in the
long slow susurrations in the movement of it. We are desert sidewinders.

These are not the indentations of the bodies of fill in the blank and me
in the broken backed strum sprung bed of tatters and too bad smells and
crumpled sheets, with noisy walls on all sides, and the fast "this is an
hour man dig it I gotta get my money's worth," and they use me like a
masturbatory device, and they kill me sometimes, not knowing I am the
golden glowing dove way up in a sky with my own personal music to
accompany me, not the crap from pianos, the strings and cat guts and the
keys struck wrongly hollow and imprecisely with a waterfall of finger
tears and blood running down them, like my tricks, and the machine of it.

Who are so desperate to get out of themselves and get into me, and they
push at my bowels, and they dig into my mouth with their cocks, and the
girls and women want me to ram my tongue up their clits so far that some
day I will find that guillotine blade and they will have won over me
instead of winning me over, when the game is winning me over of course,
know it or not, and they do know. And that is the prize, the pearl,
forever beyond them. They cum on the sheets and they come in me and I
come in them and no one is knocking on any perceptible door except the
door to my consciousness which will never open to them or to anybody. For
tonight I am in Denmark standing by the statue of the gray green seaweed
covered Little Mermaid, and if soon she is displaced by the statue of the
peeing boy in Brussels, his little dick proudly wetting the pool round
him, then it is my moveable mind. It is my signature as they try to write
their signatures in me, these sad mad desperate giving up never giving up
(so they think) people who want me to be immortal. They will get their
wish.

I am immortal. They are not. I tell them I was a winsome child. I tell
them I was a lonely child (they love that most of all; for they are
lonely too; loneliness is a palette on which to draw ones life, not to
run from and deny; they do not know this), that is why they blather
incessantly from the time they pick me up, to the time we go to the
crumble down stumble bum hotel, in which they trade in their words,
dignity a distant country, into the fuzzy moted dark dank airless lobby,
up the dark tricky cornered tumble down steps, down the moldy carpeting
to the tiny room, past all the moanings and bleak eyed hawkish failed sad
mornings being created and destroyed like sand castles in the shabby
rooms behind the cracked and gape bottomed and topped doors, to the sad
room where they will do the same, with their sand dreams, left as they
are always left with only a few granules, (their bodies all gritty and
after sex sweaty, with fear a big part of it too, unclean, while I am
always immaculate), between their fingers, the rest of it vanishing with
love found, or a reasonable facsimile of same, target hit, and the door
way hits them in the butt far too quickly for stay, hey, I just got here,
whot's happenin'?, and talk for free time, does not make the money the
next lay does, and who can afford that? I am a businessman after all. And
I am shrewd.

The walls of the hot box room are torn brown wall paper. The bed is a
malignity. The structure of it akimbo. The room reeks of sex and
cigarette smoke and cheap booze and moldable shadows of all the sick
desperation come to call here. The words of theirs are water caresses of
scared fish come to feed and knowing they will be tricked themselves even
more, the ultimate gag line they've feared all their lives is coming up
to meet them, and it is that this is not even a land of cheap gilded
gimcracks even, that this is Mecca compared to the hell they will descend
to in about a half second on the express elevator that has been going
down from day one and on which they are helpless not to ride, picking up
steam; that they will find needle marks on my arms (they do not; I do not
take drugs; I have respect for my body and my mind) as I hold point the
gun at them and take them and take them; that they will find the punch
line rapping them in the mouth, death in darkness; that there will be
nothing beyond it but the door at the P.T. Barnum museum long ago that
had a sign reading "This way to the Egress" and thus gullible fools ready
to see the next startling exhibit, (what the hell's an egress, Martha?,
I don't know, JemJohn, let's find out) and found themselves instead out
in the alley, knowing they had been yet again had by one and all, like
every moment of their damned lives, still wondering, to the end of their
days, what the hell an egress is, and where do I go to get my money back?

But they never are had by me. I am the sterility of their own paltry lack
of imagination. I am the drawing board. I am the shining sand on which
they can draw what they please. They can play with my brownish nipples
and make them hard with fingers and teeth and tongue; they can softly
kiss my brownish body; they can put their noses in my light wiry pubic
hair; they can kiss my penis to hard on, and if they wish, and the terms
of the contracts so specify, and the contract is always strictly adhered
to, strictly agreed on in advance, then I will do the same to them, or
variations of the above and below.

They have their fantasies. Usually, for some reason, they are incest
fantasies. It is what is around them, I suppose. Sex is not that
difficult to define. Fathers and their sons or daughters. Brothers and
sisters. Mothers with their sons or daughters. Children with their
parents. Mostly it is caught in the curly brown symbolic smoke I see
growing into fingers spreading apart morning dark sky, directly above the
Hague, and the building of laws is the building here then in this pecker
room of similar laws. Laws that have to be enacted in order for the
breaking of them to be a bit of giggle fun, or stern fearful churning
disgusting delight, oh such shame, and if mothers want to touch their
little boys' cocks in the bath, and if fathers want to come into their
daughter's bedrooms and explain certain things non verbally, in skull
night shadows, if all of this is the height of a summer rash caught in
mid July and never terminated until the final at long dusty last cold
winds of autumn set in, then so be it. Pomeroy is right--children can
seduce, and familial love does come with a certain amount of sexual
desire, depending all, and there is no denying that. So I become their
little children. Or their teenage children. I become their naked
confessor as they talk into my belly button. They do me. They create the
me they want. I do the mechanics. I am the palette. I am the piano.

I become, in their private minds behind minds, their son who wants to act
in a porn film with his sister and he needs his mom to help him lose his
virginity and teach him how to do the thing right, and if his brother
wants to film it all, then who is to say?.....

Then when it's over, they nestle with me, and they ask if that can hold
me `cause its a hot L.A. night and they need company more than they
bargained for, so I tell them, if this is a new clause, that holding and
hugging is ten dollars for three minutes, and ten for every minute there
after, and the ruthlessness of my words are jagged leaps of neon hot fly
killed buzz lights inches outside the tatterbox sweaty window of a too
sweaty, too dark, too brazen, room, and they want me to tell them that I
love them.

So I do; words are easy, they mean nothing; I say them like they mean
nothing; it hurts them to know it; it makes them flinch and close their
eyes short or long; this makes me happy; but I am not there, not really,
while they are imagining giving their sons their first blow jobs or
breaking their daughters' cherries (god, all the horrible words for sex,
have you ever noticed their are no beautiful words for them?, how
everyone must hate it so), I am in Clichy, I am standing across the
street from Henry Miller's former flat. I am remembering his
words--until I gave up the ghost, I never was alive--my translation--and
I think yes, and when the cum bubbles into my mouth or when the boy
penetrates me with a dick that is still too small to do any harm or any
good, or when I have a d/p session, I think of the sky.

And in the sky are the golden thrushes. Darts the Incas let rushhhhh to
the night sky. And the little birds, all heartbeaty a million times a
second, why they live so briefly, are so small and their feathers and
straw bones can't possibly give them any protection from the things of
nature that God, in his infinite mercy, do the lilies of the field toil?,
brings against them to harm them. And they fly with such effortlessness.
With such poetry and grace and ease.

They do not know tomorrow is coming up, or the sidewalk outside the
beleaguered drunken ashamed hotel is so cracked many people fall on it,
trip and fall even at high noon, and none has entered me, and none is
summer pollen and none makes me sneeze and none has had sex with me, and
I moan and sigh as I squirt or am squirted into as I am thinking you putz
I hope you fall on those rickety stairs going down to the lobby and the
half dead corpse on desk duty, what desk duty?, will just sweep you out
with the other refuse in the morning, till then the prosties and their
tricks will just walk over you, as usual, and I hope you break your
fuckin' neck, cause you are an idiot, and you will never meet anyone in
your life as beautiful and outwardly dutiful as me, and I hate them, the
tricks, the scavengers, but what is a boy to do when even the toughest
and biggest and meanest boys in the school come onto him in the locker
room, in the showers, in home room or band class before anyone else shows
up and proposition and touch secretly and eye me insanely?

Do they want my body or do they want my dreams? Would they sell the
dreams as I sell the untouched body that is somehow becoming less than
mine? Easy, break their hearts, tell them the only way I survive is on
the mercy of my own dreams, and there the ending, far beyond the diner
where the next john or johnette is buying me a cup of coffee to warm me
up in the linoleum floored, blinking strip lighted, hot close, dented
wood tabled place, warm me up?, it's for god's sake 85 out there, and
they think it's the first time for us both--god, dreams die hard--

--I don't do this often very much at all--one of the marks says--but
there was this little kid at the swimming pool today and he jumped, not
dived, off the diving board out of the blue into the blue, while his
swimming trucks, blue too, completing the color scheme of this, fell
straight off him and hit the water before he did, so my mind froze on
that naked little brown nut body of pure stick out ribbed perfection,
stuck seemingly forever in the center of the air and he's got this sweet
little hard on, a pee hard on if you ask me, cause boys love to pee in
swimming pools, makes them feel sexy daring, I did, didn't you?, and his
face is wreathed in embarrassment, his eyes wide in dawning shock, his
mouth hang open, his hands slow slow to cover himself, take me water
please hurry up and grab me up here and hide me in you, as the laughter
all round starts in warped slow motion, so hours later and hours to come,
he descends in aching slowness to the cold blue below, the water lazes
up, taking its own sweet time, to catch him, in increments by the half
inch and quarter inch, down down, but far too late, and then things were
at fast speed, and we all watched him bare assed, tear out of the pool,
and across the cement, and from there to the locker room and to his
clothes, the laughter was ear splitting, his whole body was blushing, and
it just reminded me of being a boy you know and it I'm not one of those
people I've never had a thought like that you know, but you know I just
kinda got horny with memories, not sexy memories, just--memories.

And I lean over the table and I put my hand on theirs that are usually
trembling, and I smile my most winsome, and invariably the question
arises "did you ever pay piano when you were younger?" And I nod for I
have see sadness when I tell them I never did. I ask them if they did.
No, most would say, they were incompetent even at that, "Chopsticks" do
you think I could have at least played a decent version of "Chopsticks,"
I don't know why I'm telling you all of this... Cause chatter helps. And
with it and the right prostie, you can pretend they love you, that they
will not leave when the money runs out, and then sometimes they get
violent, most cry and hold on and you have to drag them out into the hall
and throw their clothes out after them, and them outside banging at the
door, with all the shuddups through the walls. I am not a camera. I am a
taxi. I take them to a specific destination. I let them out. If they want
to pay more, we will accommodate. But their sex has to be ready almost
immediately, I'm not one to sit around for half an hour waiting, for
free. It's an old stalling trick. Fugget about it, man.

I am in the Pacific. The water is warm. The sky is high noon. The fleecy
clouds are like lost sheep ranging in orderly fashion. I am naked. I am
hard. The water is my clothes. I feel content. My penis is a little over
six inches. It is strong. It is heavy. My balls are large, but pretty. My
buttocks are a hill of globes. My face has Mediterranean features though
I am not Mediterranean. I am a million miles from shore. I see no land.
The world seems to be made solely out of water. I am so warm I feel like
I am in my bath and am a little boy, and my mommy is bathing me, and she
is still a young woman, there is the slightest hint of gray at the top of
her hairline, she is dressed in a blue wrap around. She is soaping me in
the hot water and cloth, and her warm tender culpable hands.

It is a winter afternoon. I have just come in, shivering still, the cold
in my bones, my skin still puckered, my eyes still a bit January blind,
from the thick heavy freshly fallen winter snow, and gray scudding skies.
I have been building a snow fort, with no one other than myself in the
enterprise, because I am beautiful then too, and I look like a girl, so
the boys try to make me in the cold shower room at the muny pool, when
with others of their ilk, they pretend to want to deck me, and the men
and girls and women look at me in my skimpy trunks when I play at the
pool, hoping them to fall off. And I am in the soapy bathwater and she
has put bubble bath, pink color, in the tub and she is washing my left
arm. And everything is so sensual and damp and inviting and playful. My
arms and legs are thin. I look like a waif. I look like Oliver Twist--the
dream demon of so many of my pagan customers.

I am a terror and a handful. I am always alone. I should have learned to
play the piano. It fit the image and then I would not have to lie to all
these piano obsessed johns and johnettes all the damn time. What is it
with that, anyway? She smells safe. Like summer roses. She smells of talc
and perfume and mother. Her slight perspiration is a nice aroma. The
bathroom is warm and steamy. The windows are full of frost on the
outside, and fog on the inside. It is so good to be naked with her
rubbing me all over. It makes me feel complete. It makes me feel wanted.
I play peekaboo with the bubble bath. I rush my hands up and down in it.
Making it foam around me. Half boy. Half mermaid. My penis is covered. I
do not want it to be. I want to greet her with it. I love her. I love to
try to see her naked breasts. She showed me them, she let me suckle them
as a child. Why not now?

She is sweet and kind except when I am a handful, and then she turns me
over her lap, and the spanks me but never too hard, but with such a sexy
love that makes me feel all goofy and grinny inside. Which makes me hard.
She must know it. Must feel my little boner against her legs, but she
never says anything; she accepts I am a boy; boys just get hard ons for
no particular reason; damn this modern parenting crap; she is the
particular reason; she does not know I am thinking of her, she accepts
me. I do not accept her. I love her. I do not accept her or anyone.
Because to do that would mean I would not be in the Pacific right now. In
the warm water. With bubblebath, pink, all foamy around me, like a Giant
just gargled with pink mouthwash and spit it out. It feels good. I play
with myself. I was caught one time by mother when I was playing with
myself. She only smiled and closed the door to my room very softly. Come
back, I wanted to say. It's that terribly close soft room door closing
that echoes loudest of my brain in my nightmares.

My dreams are all unreal. My nightmares are real. I am a sex machine. I
live in a dusty grimy room three buildings down. I hoard my money. I have
no friends. No acquaintances. I am a friend of two members of the club
known as rough trade. I trade with them. They see I am not messed with.
They never physically harm me. There are other ways to get the same
effect.

I stay by myself. I read a lot. I don't eat much. I work much of the
time. I watch TV some on my broken down little ten inch set or however
big it is, on which the picture roils and rolls. I spend a lot of time
washing the cum out of my mouth/hair/asshole/etc. And when it gets real
bad, when the loneliness grips you so hard with such intensity, it is a
physical being and you want to scream, then I go to the Pacific ocean,
and I think about Venice, not the one in Italy, but the one in
California, so I wonder what it was like, remodeled after the Venice in
Italy, by a man who could not go home so he brought home to him, and what
the thrill rides were like at the amusement park, ancient dinosaurs
brought back to wild screaming life, according to Ray Bradbury, and I
drift in my huge sudsy bubble bath ocean that is so friendly and close
in, remembering my childhood home that had lots of windows and was quite
large and very airy and friendly and had comfortable spacious rooms, with
even a living room fireplace that crackled flames all winter long, nice
and drowsy, hypnotized by it, lying on the thick piled carpeting, warming
and dreaming and drifting in the evenings and on the weekends, and many
windows with much sunlight coming through, with expensive little bric a
brac and nice furniture, everything tidy and in its well ordered place,
with everything smelling of Pledge and Spic and Span and Comet and air
freshener and the ineffable sadness of growing up and growing old, our
sloughed off cells swept and vacuumed from where we lived, pretending
that age was not happening, ignore it, it will go away, and a color TV
and a fridge that held food and drink for any time I wanted it, certainly
not now, even though I've got lots of money stored away in various
places--you don't think I'm going to be telling you were they are, do
you?--with which I plan to see Europe one day real soon. There is method
to my madness.

And I remember my mother, that final bath time, the way it would never be
again, pushing a damp strand of hair out of her eyes, washing the cold
winter sky and cold winter snow and winds off me, and I remember how she
touched my penis, soft hands, warm hands, and my penis grew to them like
a willow tree responding to quick and true summer, and she washed it and
my tiny balls too, and I smiled real big up at her, little devil, she did
not look at my face, but down at my penis, holding it above the suds and
the bubble bath, intent on it, curious, fascinated, she rubbed her finger
on the underside of the shaft, it trembled, it danced all on its own, o
the tickle was wonderful, my little balls got so tight, and she suddenly
let it go.

And then she heavily hugged my shoulders to her, scrunching me against
her as I could feel with the side of my face her mostly exposed left
breast, though not her nipple, and I got harder then especially, my toes
crossed I was so excited, I wanted her to pick me up and wrap a big
terrycloth robe around me, and...hold me to her naked body and...what?...
and she touched me one more time and looked at me, brought her face to
mine. I think I dry came. I don't know. I think so. It was the last time
I was to be close in any way to another human being. Back then, I thought
it was my destiny and my right. I was wrong.

I wanted to be with her forever, and she kissed me on the lips, was there
passion there?, and touched my nipples one at a time making them so hard
they became sore like my little penis did, and then she drew back slowly
like a lovely melody fading away into a gold leaf background, and she
told me in her soft musical voice, to get out of the tub and dry off and
dress (she had always done that for me, it threw me off balance, made me
scared--why this?) and left the bathroom, closing the door softly,
another one of those closed doors softly echo that will reverberate in my
skull forever.

So I did what she said. And she never touched me again. Never was close
enough to me to touch ever again. Never kissed me when I fell and scraped
my knee or did well on my report card or on Christmas or my birthday.
There was never one more human physical contact between us ever. She was
always polite. She listened to my problems. She tried to help me with my
homework. She bought me presents for my birthday and Christmas and
in-between. She was a generous woman. And she knew what she was doing as
well. She treated me from that point on as though I was someone else's
child she was looking after momentarily.

She was killing me with indifference. And she did it on purpose. The
touching that last time. And the aftermath. To punish me for the rest of
my life for that one thing. Perhaps punishing herself as well. I was a
pawn in a non-game of one. And she knew all along. God, that was the
eternal embarrassment for me. I thought I had been so clandestine.
Because she made me hard and I so longed to suck greedily the nipple of
that left breast my face lay against, that she was pushing me against it
and at that moment I would have given the whole world to do it, to have
her with me. There are many ways of killing a person. For my money,
indifference is one of the most effective methods there is. It's like
fighting against a cloud. There's nothing there.

So I lie in the ocean, my bonny (or is it body?, I hope it's bonny, for
that's nicer sounding, though neither makes any sense) lying over the
sea, and I see the room I lived in when I was small, the books on the
shelves, held by book ends I made at summer camp, the desk, the monster
models, the Laurel and Hardy poster over my bed which was small and nice
and warm and inviting, and I see the bathroom that became the loneliest
place in the house and I lived with the undisputed fact that my own
mother thought I was sick as sick could be. And had been just teasing me.
Pretending that she too was sick. To make a joke of me. I was, in effect,
her trick. I will never be a trick again. She degraded me with her late
blooming morality. I think that is all morality is good for, if you want
to know the truth. Morality is always a very mean thing.

So what you do in the bubble bath is you embrace yourself and grip your
dick and jerk it and jerk it and rub your balls and stick a finger up
your elastic ass cause it makes the whole thing more electric, and you
pinch your tits which adds to the electricity, And you dream you are in
Brussels in front of the little bronze colored boy peeing statue, at the
same time you are in Denmark, looking at the statue of The Little
Mermaid, and you keep trying to figure out a way to move them one in
direct front of the other, and you arrange and rearrange it till you
think you will die from the frustration and the fury.

As someone (a shock--someone else is here) says "turn over," and you are
not in the ocean, but on dirty sheets; it's a woman who is licking your
back and ass. Do these people even own their own names? Do they have
faces? Do they really look to themselves as water faucets as they do to
me?

You do not pretend it is her. You have never pretended that since she
told you to finish up by yourself and she never touched you again in your
soiled staticky lifetimes together. But of course, the woman with you now
could be your older sister and she says "I've always wanted to fuck my
son." Tremor in her voice; shame in her voice. Then a little more
daring-- "I sucked him off one night; he was asleep and he never knew,
thought it was a dream I guess, didn't wake up, just shot some blanks in
my mouth; but he moaned a little, squirmed a little; it was so beautiful;
to feel him in my mouth; I was so cautious; so filled with love for him;
I couldn't help it; he looked like a little tow headed angel lying there
asleep. Wake up, I whispered, oh please wake up. Then I let him go and
rearranged his penis and went away after a time after he turned away from
me. I was scared he knew. And would laugh at me. He did not. That made me
sad. Do you think I'm wrong?"

To which I said as I beckoned to her to lie next to me in the cramped
bed, she all middle aged and mealy and primpy and silly, "We've got half
an hour to do this. Fuck or suck or talk, which is it?"

She pushed away from me and fell comically on the floor. Like a big
stupid lost frumpy doll no little girl would be caught dead with. I
laughed at her as she landed there on her ass, and she pouting, near
tears, on that awful filthy floor and she a plaited doll, a matriarch
from the suburbs, looked it, too fine clothes, and Gucci smelling,
probably had her damn credit cards in her bag, and a wad of money too;
sometimes they get off being stolen from; I am not a thief; I always give
them their money's worth; they are the thieves; they keep themselves
hidden; thank god; and she too stupid to take off her expensive jewelry
before she went slumming, as she begin trying to get off the floor, after
her hand slipped three times, which made me laugh harder, down to deep in
my stomach, and she went down on one knee, cursing, her face sweating
profusely, she was already drunk, beginning to stagger anyway, the make
up that was running down her too powdered face like clown make up on an
especially hot night in an especially groady tent, and the expensive hair
style, hair that came undone and frantic, not hiding what she really was,
then finally after she amused me no end, she righted herself,
straightening the clothes she still had on, and told me, exasperated,
batting at her hair that had become all cobwebby, breathing hard, too
fat, "You're beautiful. But you could be a damn shot kinder."

""No." I said, my head lying on the pillow, my rictus smile looking at
her, my cock full of juice and hard, me naked and infinitely desirable.
"I couldn't. Leave it at that. You want me to fuck you or what? Time's
a-wastin'." I smelled the striped old musty dingy yellow sheeted pillows
and looked at her, waiting; she was deciding between dignity and lust.
She picked, big surprise, lust. She took the hand I held out and we
finished undressing her. We drank some cheap booze from the bottle on the
wobbly bedside table, they want the better brand?; they bring their own.

Then we got on with it. So she had her fuck and called out the name Teddy
at the end of it; Teddy did not hear; neither did I; and then she crushed
me to her bulgy ugly body, and tried to possess me or course; I knew she
would be a screamer and kicker and crier and yeller when her time was up,
therefore I needed to meditate as she worked me over with not a little
bit of anger and hitting me, but it wasn't serious, so I let her. I hated
her but I let her, and I went back to the Pacific and later I would walk
through Cancun and then I would see the tropics when they're wet with
rain, from the song of the same lyrics, which was my mother's favorite.
She's the one who played the goddam piano. Not well. But with fervency.
The piano was indeed in the living room. The lighting was indeed blond.
She did sit on the mahogany piano seat. The living room window did indeed
show children in cameo outside playing. She did hunch her shoulders and
concentrate with furrowed brow. Me? I was in my room reading. Trying not
to hear that music. Me, I hear music, I can't get it out of my head. It
just rat runs in my mind forevermore.

. It didn't hurt so much to hear that song in my mind lately. I didn't
have to try to turn it off as fast, like I used to, and always failed.
The woman was sucking me off, pretending I was her little boy. You trade
some. You win. You lose. And you wind up with the person you never wanted
to be with after all, especially the one you thought was heart's desire.
You see his fingernails are not trimmed as cleanly as they once were. Or
there is a little too much dirt under them. And down you go. You try not
to. Try to climb back to land. But it's become a crumbly ledge and there
is no purchase there. The devil waits in Samara. Patiently. For you to
run to him, thinking you have escaped from him way back there in
Damascus. And not the anal smell. Or the popper smell. Or the sad smell.
Or the weed smell. Ever again

And you keep in mind, you dwell therein, Europe and your own beauty and
the future and fame of life up ahead. Hey, I'm only 17 after all. I have
all the time in the world. God, she humps like a walrus.


  The end

Timothy Stillman
comewinter@earthlink.net