Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 20:17:04 -0800
From: Timothy Stillman <comewinter@earthlink.net>
Subject: A Little Laugh

			     "A Little Laugh"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


Dear Bobby,

I've always hated Connecticut in spring. Everything blue
and green and enamel looking. Phony looking. Like you. I
can see you now in your attic, after school, reading this,
laughing a little at it. But then, no, not you. You never
laughed at me. But then you weren't alone in this. No one
ever laughed at me. Like when I was forced to play in
Little League, and I played deep deep outfield, and of
course invariably the ball came my way now and then, and
I would clench my eyes, and throw my arms akimbo in the
air, waving around like a drunk wind mill, me and them,
and then I always fell down to the hot buggy grass.

But no one laughed. I kept giving them a punch line. But
no one ever took me up on it. I mean, they saw me fall in
the lunch room when I was taking the full tray to the
table, and got myself all kidney pie and potatoes and apple
sauce all over, and no one laughed. It hurt. Bobby, that
day, in the proverbial cemetery, the one the bullies always
invited the freshmen to, to kind of initiate them into high
school, all the freshmen but one, I came one night of dark
stars and velvet fall winds. And I watched you and him.
There in the dark. The good stuff always happens in the
dark. With me it does. The dark doesn't laugh at me
either. That at least doesn't bother me.

You and Timmy. Timmy the Kidder. Timmy the class
clown. He had such a knack for it. Everybody laughed at
him and it made him feel good. He liked it. He was, like
Marlon Brando got to be, a somebody. And you were
lying with him and you were holding him and you were
both shadow laughing, that kind of personal laugh close to
the bone that people do sometimes when they are in love
and no one is watching.

You saw me in class every day. You saw everybody. You
were nice to everybody. You were going to be the class
everything eventually. Going to be the star of the world
eventually. And Timmy had big jug ears and freckles and
had a cow lick that would not stay down for the world.
And you were kissing him. Velvet night. Just barely jacket
weather. In the world of the messed up teenager. And I
was one. I think I was a teenager right out of the box. I
was awkward and I never picked you, Bobby. I never
picked you to fall in love with. You and the tall legs and
the dark night hair and the sweet black eyes that could
smile all on their lonesome though they and you were
never lonesome.

I watched you and Timmy in class every day. You were
nice to him. A blanket niceness. You were nice to me. I
was someone people were nice to. That they did not want
to hurt. Until that not wanting to hurt of theirs became
something of a mania with me. I wanted to punch out a
bully. I wanted to be as tall as you. I wanted to be Robby
kissing you. I wanted a door to finally open in the night air
so I could walk through it and be with both of you.

You would have let me, the two of you. You would have
made Timmy let me. And Timmy wouldn't have liked it
but he would have let me in anyway. I jacked off watching
you those cemetery nights and did not think of the irony
of that. All I had to do was to walk over to you, to extend
over the dream boundary, and say here I am, Bobby, I'm
nothing, I'm the kid at the candy store window, face
pressed tightly against the glass. It doesn't matter whether
I'm with you or not, even being with you, would not be
with you, so what the hey, hey? And you would extend
your long thin arms up to me and you would kneel me to
you and you would put my hands on the crotch of your
briefs and you would let my frightened hands rush over
your bare chest and feel your nips and pinch them if I
wanted. And if Timmy got jealous you would have
brought the two of us together. And I would have felt bad
cheating on you with you right there. But you would have
smiled, not laughed of course, and said it's okay, don't
worry about it. For being there, I was not there at all. It
can drive a person mad? Has it done so to me? I feel the
terrible blackness close to me, cloaking me, but mad? I
don't know. Claustrophobic, that is for sure. Please let
that be a joke you catch at the end of my letter.

So there you were, just maybe a dozen feet over there,
two boys naked, coupling, two boys joying their boners
together and stroking and giggling, and I hungered for the
laugh more than for the sex. I pretended you were with
your mouth right at my sandy hard on and your breath and
laughter were tickling it hard and I was rubbing it through
my jeans fly, and you were surrounding it with the
carnival crowd of your approval and your joy and
somewhere in the background a boy named Timmy was
clapping at our acrobat eroticism and there was the smell
of want fulfilled and loneliness banished. That was what I
wanted to feel from you, more than your dick, your balls,
your warmth, your lips on me, your naked body next to
mine, your svelte hips, the entrance to your secret place, I
wanted you to laugh at me. Not mean or cruel or anything
really. Just a laugh.

And you were fucking Timmy then. You had him on his
stomach in the full moon of lunch at midnight, and you
were on top of him and easing yourself in, and he was
moving sinuously under you and you were riding the wave
of that not particularly attractive, slightly heavy boy, with
your long curvy body riding him and your hands on the tip
of his spine and your head down and your long hair
bruising the back of his head as he tried to reach his face
round to kiss you, and you threw your head back and you
panted, I could hear you almost, and your legs were
together and your toes were arched and your back a sea
shell all on its own. And you laughed. You and Timmy
laughed. And the laughter was as bright as a star. As
important as the last day of the world.  And I pulled and
pulled myself and I gloried in that laughter, real, tattered,
added to, embroidered, or heard as live recorded inside
myself somewhere, and I pulled my dick hard and quick
and it hurt and that made me laugh. And I never laughed.
I had never it seemed laughed in my life.

I was silent. In class. At lunch. At the movies. Silent.
Alone and still. Alone and wanting to get that punch line
answered. I thought I would do anything to get that
punchline answered. But you would laugh at me politely.
Timmy would scurry away. And you Bobby would laugh
at me politely. And that would be the worst of it. A have
to laugh. A fitting in pretend for me kind of laugh. And I
spurted and I fell down on my forearms and hit the left
funny bone and I laughed hysterically from the pain and
from coming and from knowing that you and
Timmy--oddly enough it was more important for me that
Timmy hear me than for you to. And I screamed laughter.
And I rolled over on my back, cum splurting every which
way. And it was like my dick was laughing. And this was
the laugh it was making.

Was that what it was all supposed to be? Love making?
Making love? Was the product of love, the produce of
love from me, this white gobstopper stuff known as cum
laughter? And I was hysterical by this point. And I knew
you and Timmy would come over. Naked perhaps? And
let me join in. Cause I was not really there. Any more than
the ever so often ghost child in "Ju-On"--seen for a half
second flashing in a mirror and then when the person who
saw him turned around, the ghost child was gone, making
it more hairpin curve chilling than if he had still been
there. Knowing you would let me love you, like a polite,
timid, weightless shadow, while Timmy loved you for real,
or kinda for real, and the next one after him and the next
one and the next, and I get to see what I can only see, and
feel what I can only feel, and I can see with blinders only,
the dust and my breath fogging the candy store window
you and fill in the blank were behind, and I can feel with
numbed fingers.

The ghost child thinks its clever darting to the mirror and
then gone a millisecond later. The ghost child is wrong.

So. I know you are reading this after school. You and
Timmy never came over to me. I lay there and laughed
until there was a stitch in my side. And I laughed and my
penis shrunk and I felt cold and sick and I cried for a long
time. Then I put it back in its harness and gathered myself
together on the Autumn brown grass, and I packed myself
onward to home.

You never mentioned it the next day. Nor did Timmy. Not
to me. Not to anyone. I knew I would not be
embarrassed. I know my being there and not there at the
same time, and never getting my reward for my I think
exceedingly clever punch lines would save the day on this
one, and it did. Timmy told me about your attic. Well. Not
me personally. I overheard him before class one day. And
he said you had about four hundred comic books up there
and they were great, mostly Marvel, mostly some DC, and
some of his dad's classic Twilight Zone Gold Key comics,
and everybody was saying to Timmy words that meant,
you just discovered this? you think this impresses us?, we
go all the time to his house to his attic, to that cedar chest,
where he has his comics and we read all Saturday long if
there isn't a movie we want to so, so Timmy where the
hell have you been?

And Timmy was sorely oppressed. I escaped that too of
course. To have been with Bobby in his attic, kneeling
next to him, looking at comic books, summer, shorts, t
shirts, his bare knees next to mine...Dusty attic. Private,
secret closed in attic...where he masturbates maybe
sometimes? Alone? Or with someone else? The dust
dances of summer shining in the hot attic windows like
they do in summer attics. Sexxxxxyyyyy beyond words.
Close together. Smelling the boy of each other. The sweat
of a summer afternoon. Personal. Private. Den of
iniquity.They told him Bobby practically lived in that attic
and that he even had Playboy magazines stashed in a
closet under some boxes, and some porno books too bet
you didn't know about that? And Timmy just doodled on
his notebook and waited for class to start, jug ears fiercely
red.

Therefore to the conclusion of my letter, Bobby. It's a
long time after school. It's a bit of time after me. I guess it
fits in, this letter and when its being delivered to you,
cemetery love, laughter hunting, laughter virgin all my life,
my written words at least finally being in your attic. Do
you still go there often? Do you remember childhood and
its largess and weep for it gone? As I do for its emptiness
also gone. . I guess I got the idea for this letter and its
timing from one of Thomas Hardy's novels. The
misplaced letter announcing felicity and love forever
more, getting to the loved one decades too late due to all
sorts of unforeseen mishaps, and finding the love was
true, but old and gone and it's all a joke inside God's skull
anyway. Pretending it would matter to you at all. But if it
did, I could have never sent it. I'm more like you than you
would think. If you even remember me at all.

You're what now Bobby--35 or so. And you did make it.
You did make that successful life. You did make that
successful marriage and the successful children. And if
school was a long time ago, you might not remember that
place in the cemetery, your spot with Timmy and then
with Julian and then with Joel and then with Daniel and
then with Jeff, the empty plot, that had such a plot in store
for it, that is if you are to read this letter. So, to a boy I
taught long ago.  To a boy I loved long ago.

To a boy I gave my heart to. And could actually have had
sex of a kind with once that wouldn't have mattered to
you at all, and would have made me feel lonelier than
ever, even though you knew after my hysteria that night, I
was probably there and watching, and you giving me a
show with your new love of the moment, you not caring,
and it all did make it lonelier, though I doubt you thought
of it that way, I apologize, as I used to in class, for giving
too much homework, for my shy mumbling, for my
inability to look any of you in the face, for my
incompetence and clumsiness, carried from those child
hood days before during and after long way after Little
League, I again apologize. For not accepting your casual
charity, because it seemed more to me like casual cruelty,
for over the years I have found that to be the one thing the
world is most full of , though you would not have meant it
to be.

This then, my fumbling has not changed, the reason I send
this to the attic of the house you still live in, is to ask,
could you go to that plot of earth where you and those
boys made fulsome love, I still remember seeing you
sucking Julian off, and how beautiful a sculpture it would
make, as you kneeled at him, both naked, and he held his
hands to each side of your head, and you sucked him like
a maestro conducting a most magnificent orchestra, and
how Julian threw back his head and moaned and screamed
and then he pulled away and shot over your face and then
he buried you with kisses...would you then, Bobby, go to
that plot of ground that now has me beneath it--I reserved
it for me so many years ago, some people have long
memories and want to imagine at least it coming a little
right in the end--would you go there sometime in Autumn,
the first kind of Autumn I saw you there with Timmy, and
would you stand there over me and would you laugh? I
guess its ghoulish, but fucking over ground that has
corpses in it is pretty ghoulish, but a teenage delight
enjoyed far and wide, so please don't feel so creeped out
by it.

Would you please at long last, someone, you most of all,
laugh at me. As hard as you can. Or a small chuckle
would do, even. I would so much appreciate it. It is silly, I
know, but it would make this whole business of life for
me, worthwhile. Because mainly it will mean I was at least
good for a laugh. You have no idea how it hurts not being
even worth that. Just, at the finality of the thing, being
good for a laugh. How ridiculous we little humans are.
How truly and absurdly ridiculous. Please. It would mean
a lot.

Yours truly,
Mr. Wallace

P.S. I LOVE YOU.

Timothy Stillman
comewinter@earthlink.net