Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 04:03:12 -0800 From: Tim Stillman Subject: Adult/Youth "On Our Journey to Here" "On Our Journey To Here" by Timothy Stillman It was morning. We were tired of fiction. We needed each other after all. Quiet snow and Christmas soon. Red and blue lights. Christmas tree tensile and tinsel in our minds. Gifts to keep quietly from each other. Not to give. But the idea of giving was enough. It was Paris. The weather was cold. We lived in a sunlit garret in the summer time. But territory, though the same, changed in winter. And we tried to comfort each other in our large expansive feather bed, soft and deep, and our jail for so many years. Once. But, today, we had come to ourselves in a surfeit of Pound and Genet and Gide. And had had enough of other writers' worlds. Our nights were cold and we lay together this morning. Snow soft silent. And holding each other. No longer dreaming of dusky Arab boys. No longer dreaming of seeing someone outside our tear down flats who would make our days worthwhile in golden coils of sunlight tomorrows. And pretend that the each of us was him. The heat in our flat was virtually non existent. We held to each other, always in the past, in an attempt to keep the heat of ourselves alive. And rising from the smell of poverty that was cabbage cooked and garbage too floridly rank in the hall ways, without the effort of the tenants to take it outside, but, beyond, within, all of that, this morning, we found ourselves in love with each other for the first time. I had always adored him. I had always loved to undress him. To see my fingers taking off his clothes. To feel the softness of his skin as I took the cloth away. The way his thready heart beat steadily under my fingers. To free his thonging dick from his pants. A dick which had begun to tremble and trembled now. As we clung together. Raft survivors of a huge winter storm that had washed each of us ashore onto our own beaches. The covers were thick and the night had gone. An in between half light outside. Morning sun was late arising. There was some mist still holding over from the night before. We were spare. We were sidewalk painters. And beggars, if the truth of it is to be known. We subsisted on dialogues in other tongues. We tried to be more than what we were. And, when we enveloped the other with our mouths, we thought of past failures. And not the current success. We were ideologues in a Paris that was more than itself. That was a certain piece of sky that seemed different. In a city of lights that seemed demure and shy. That needed to be coaxed. Under all those Monet pastel color petticoats. If we prayed with each other, it was always in somnolent refusal to admit the things that had become us. The silent eyes with the smudges beneath them. The smiles that seemed a little tired and time worn. If I was not Oscar Wilde, then he was not a young lover who sentenced me to gaol. And if Reading had let me escape, and had thrust me into my love's arms, then where was the complaint? Where were the rusty words that said "I love you" and meant them? We had always loved winter here. The hush. The cobblestone feel. The great echoes on the narrow turning streets. The lack of flower venders. The feel of something spacious moving in on us. Time turning. Clocks frozen hands moving in discreet eternities. And my fingers, my hands, on his bare back, under our bedspreads, felt no country but his own. And his hands traced adagios on my spine, and felt the country of me. We had fled from what we were supposed to be. He had been 13 when I met him, and I had been 21 when we had run into each other's lives. We had been glanced on. And glancing on means we had been used. He, already at 13, and dray horses scared us. And dark houses that were tall and forbidding, with curtains thick, black, and smothering. That touched at our towering penises that reached bridges to each other. That we took. And could not admit we took into each other for such needed sustenance. His name was Raymond. Mine was Emil. Yes, Raymond was my night visitor, who had somehow stayed. I had been dancing for two years when I saw him in the back of the smoky red club with the ear splitting tawdry tasseled music and the shouting leering sweaty beery audience. In that wet feverish brick building of sexual sickness that pretended bravado. And the night eyes that watched me and the other boys gyrating, pulsing, perspiring, making love to our hands and our audiences, our tongue tips flicking out at our lips, our bodies grinding upward and inward, were his eyes. The boy waited and longed for so greatly. O, the stomach butterflies that night, in me, that almost lifted me off and carried me away into the suety sky. Our g strings taunted off, money deposited in them, then in our butt clefts and other places. Our hard ons exposed. Masturbation for the masses. I had not been with a boy before. Only with men. Who smelled of garlic and cheap liquor. Who smelled of want, as did I. Who looked at me and saw someone else. I had always tried to see him out there. Past the lights bright and into the dark darker than the night could ever be in the blackest cave. And when I came to the audience and the thick heavy sweaty groping hurting hands flattened against me and proved me once more not their dream, I saw him in the grim background, when, before, I could not see anything but darker angels who promised me more than this. Who promised me more than a bed slept in by two, when it was all along only one. And everyone become a ghost and the bed truly empty of anyone. We talked that first night. We told and our words halted into each other in the spring rain that washed the night's clear pained, longing honesty away. And in the telling of truth, we made it all a lie. We said what we guessed the other wanted to hear. And later that night, when I went down on him in this self same flat we are in now, I pretended it was a boy from a movie. And Raymond pretended he did not mean it. We were each other's layers of onion skin. That we promised not to unpeel. We hid in not hiding. And, in our sex and our dreams, alone, we ran to the Eiffel Tower and we rushed down the boulevards and our hearts were younger than those of a young lamb. But we kept it quiet, and only to ourselves. Admitted happiness allows the barb that destroys happiness. We towered. We rushed into each other. We half ate each other alive. We were those Paris paintings you can buy on any street corner. The kind we to this day paint. Watery paintings, that style. Dots and colors and abstract worlds of sight, riotous light that suspends darkness, that bend the eye to a specific pallet. That make it see what is there and not there at the same time. We blended the night and the day and love and fear and hatred and the past and we tried to make it tomorrow. And thus made sure tomorrow would not happen. We were the painted crowd of one at a race track. We were the gin sipping alone audience at the Follies Can Cans. And we were bright colors and little painting dalliances and tricky glissandos that dizzied the eyes of watchers and baffled their brains until it all came so clear. Until it all came so simple. The faces in the seeming nebulous pattern. Of course, that's what it is. How could I not have seen it? But tourists will fall for anything. I painted Raymond nude often in our flat. By the window where the blue night came in. The curtains not drawn. Raymond hard and Raymond pressing his eyes into mine. Holding his cock. Coming sometimes. Peeing a little stream of clear, others. My name on his lips. Sometimes I dipped my dick in the paint and painted him with it. He liked it. In his fashion. In our fashions. He, then, seeing someone resembling me, in the night that was more than a staple of bread that we bought from vendors or stole sometimes in our own Continental vagabond way that we thought so much older than we ourselves. Raymond was a small boy. He had dark needing to be cut midnight hair that cascaded to his shoulders. He had a pearly white bony needing to be fed body. When I first knew him, his penis, hard, was three and some inches. Today it is the regulation six inches. His hips were the poke out kind. The pouty kind. Seemingly too big too delicious for such a tiny body. But he made them his own. As I would hold onto them as he penetrated me. As I traced the miraculous structure of him, cathedral to sex and beyond. And we pretended he was an Arab boy, out of Gide, in some forgotten dusty land. And he pretended I was a wayfarer on my road to Damascus or Trinidad or Samara. Or he was Tadzio, and I was Von Aschenbach willing to give up everything for him, to see him point the way to Heaven. We invented curlicues of paint strokes for each other. We dabbled in dreams that were safely not ours. Until he turned of age, we were always frightened of the gendarmes. Of the other street kids he hung with, and what they knew and what they could do some dark night as we ran to our building, and to the curly landing stairs where we expelled our breaths hard and heavy that we had made it through another wastrel day alive. And together. Sort of. How I loved to kneel in front of him, exposed in our blue window to the nights of Paris. To the windows of other garrets. To the world clopping by. To the music we heard or thought we did. To the accordions, and the hookers showing their thighs or cupping their baskets, and that was also a visible audible music all into and of itself. How I loved to rub his pale tits and look up at him, with his cock in my mouth, and stroke his poke out stomach. And hold his tiny balls in my hand. And how he gave into me. As my own cock rubbed against his legs as we thrust back and forth into, onto, each other. And now we lay in bed, these years later. His eyes were closed. I kissed his nose. He leaned back, crossed his eyes, smiled at me. And he kissed my nose as well. We were book readers. Half drowned in them. Bundlers of books. The ones they sell on sidewalks and outside shops. The ones they sell by the pound. All tied up with brown string. Sometimes we did not care what the ones underneath the top one were. They were books. And that was enough. Surprises always help. After a while, I no longer danced at the club. Raymond never asked me to stop. But I knew he wanted me to. I no longer went off with strangers. Though he still did. To help with the money. So we could watch rainy nights together from our window and stroke each other on our window rug and kiss so deeply and passionately. So we could have money to buy each other flowers from carts in the afternoon because the sun was especially bronzed and beautifully sculpted. We were the dots and elaborate paint strokes of ourselves, trying to see ourselves. Guessing. Always guessing. To me, Raymond was mint candy and wine and soft songs that only people much older than we should have known. We had an old victrola, picked up for a song, or less, and we played scratched, sometimes stolen, records on it. Sometimes, we danced, in our home, naked, and our cocks rubbed together. Our hands all over each other. Lost in the scent and feel, the glittering glistening texture of our bodies. And he grew older. As did I. We were still very young though we did not know it. I missed making it with a boy so young as he had once been. But he was still Raymond. And we did not have to hide as much now. If a shadow in my old nightclub in the red hell lights, murky, smoke wavery and scorched, could detach itself from the dark and come shyly to me while I was sitting naked on the lap of a drunk man at a little round table with a soiled table cloth, a man who was flipping me up and down on his lap, and grabbing me... ... And if this shadow named Raymond could put his hand on my shoulder and look at me with such adoration, then the shadow me should have helped him be not such a shadow anymore. Books and paper and covers and ink and glue smell delicious. But not as delicious as this boy. Books have a lovely form. They transport. But they miss by a mile when compared to Raymond and his form. We read to each other. We held each other naked, on our bed, meeting in the middle, as the bed cuddled us together, and we idly played with each other's bodies as we read Carson McCullers' "Member of the Wedding" about Frankie in that green and crazy summer, when she was not a member of anything, and Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" about the sexual awakening of a boy named Joel, and William Saroyan's sad sweet love songs about the human comedy and the pain of death that WW II brought small town America, and Herman Melville's Billy Budd who provoked mutiny with his stoic lovelorn beauty, and Edgar Allan Poe's mystery of murders, committed by an ape, in the Rue Morgue. And we tasted the words. Hung them on the French stars, that spoke differently than they ever could have in any other part of the world, in the night sky and gifted them to each other. We touched all parts of the earth this way. The only way a poor man and boy could see any of that world. We lingered in cold and heat and good times and bad. We hungered together. And committed petty larceny and got caught only a few times at it here and there, learning lessons each time. We fought sometimes about the boys he went off with. And we fought sometimes because we loved each other so much. And we were so frightened of each other. We drank too much wine and there was too much candlelight. We toasted other persons' Christmases. We pretended he was Tiny Tim and I was a journeyman caught in a night of Walpurgis mountains, needing to find a real boy who would put his penis in my mouth and not his fangs in my neck. We were Oliver Twist and Jack Dawkins making out, outside the pub where Nancy worked. We did things boys in books always did discreetly or not at all or only thought about. We did not, I believe, ever consider that those boys would have so envied us who had to use them for escape. When we needed none. Irony is, as someone once wrote, a real bitch kitty. We were our own quiet riots and flames and fires and burning marshmallows. We were the other's springs and summers. And the river of me that flowed and flowered into him as I finally put my dick inside his butt. Between those sweet soft mounds. Into that tight hot sweet little cave opening. As he put his hand behind and below and helped guide me in. As he whimpered and sighed in pain and peace and happiness and surrender, as I put my hands to his back, and went in and out. In and out. And exploded sexy fireworks inside my boy who I loved. We needed writers to back us up however. And in this, we turned away from ourselves. Thinking we were doing the exact opposite. Young brothers had sex in James Baldwin's "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone." Girls and women had sex in Anis Nin's stories. Henry Miller wrote so bawdily and full bloodedly about sex in his "Rosy Crucifixion" and "Tropic" books. Genet went half mad over his lust for what others would think of as trash and the dregs of the world. Writers would rhapsodize over all kinds of sex, all groupings, all ages, all mingled. "My Secret Life" was 30 volumes of endless sexual encounters from the boy's young childhood on up and up some more. Until age intervenes. And all is memory. We needed them for company. We were wrong in a wrong world. And if Balthazar B. could come along with us and not be ashamed of needing this ass or that one right after, then we had nothing to be ashamed of either. Raymond barely remembered his parents. Talked about them never. He was of the street fights and the gangs and the ruffians who beat up people like me, and people like him, unless he beat up people like me. He never told me he hurt anyone, though I always thought one does not get to age 13 in that kind of world without doing so, to prove machismo from such a feminine delicately boned and wired body. Which no doubt was used cruelly and by force by the worst and most violent of the fag beaters. I read to him in our feather soft bed, his head on my shoulder, my hand playing with his prick, of angels lost and won again. He read to me with his hand rubbing my bare legs, of a man who got lost in the Civil War and tried to find home again when it was far too late, but he still kept trying to get there, and achieved it, in a certain sense. Raymond was the angel. I was that lost man. We had to strain it all through words someone else wrote, for us to be real. And for us not to be culpable. We rode each other. Sometimes to the sound of radios or rough or quiet sex in flats next to us, above or below. Sometimes to the sound of snow or thunder storms that shook us, and sometimes to records so scratched that we could barely hear the words of Georgia Brown or the Mills Brothers. Sometimes the records would be so scratched, the needle would hang and play the same word or note over and over again to the point of imbecility, until we broke down in laughter, and one of us had to break the clinch, and get up and put on a different album. We listened to songs of boys with moonlight in their eyes. And I refused to see the moonlight in Raymond's own boy eyes. We read of proof that boys and men can make love and be kind to each other, because it said so in the Olympia Press and Black Cat books, and in "Evergreen" and what further proof did we need? We were in the sacred city of romantic lover's lights. Soft hued. Delicate lights of nimbus rainy colors. We were in the city where the enclaves of expatriates came and lived and were not only tolerated but made welcome. So we are told. Only it was hardly that way in our world. Sometimes I fought a thug off Raymond. Sometimes he fought one off me. And we learned to run fast and quick, and we learned where to meet in shadows and we learned all the secret routes to our home, designated, those routes, with numbers or letters, so we could shout to one or the other when we were chased down and we split up, trying to take the heat on our own heads instead. The police mostly left us alone. I think they pitied us. It is a terrible thing to be pitied. Nothing cores out the soul quicker. But it was never--us. Who met in the badly wall papered corners of crashing heart beats. Until this morning of snow. Until this morning when we had woken from a particularly sour night that had ended with us shouting drunkenly at each other, and someone next door beating on the plaster board, telling us to be quiet. We held in the coldness under the blankets where it all, in the past, seemed colder still. And an hour ago, or two, we stopped running. Something came to us. From inside us or outside. We would have toast with marmalade in one of the cafes today. We had saved enough francs. We would have coffee with that toast with marmalade and we would feel the warmth in our bellies. We had woken and we had made love. I had kissed his tits and rubbed myself on them. I had come on him and then he had come on me. And we held the white love of ourselves still sticky to us. Adhering us. Closing us together. Suddenly so thunderously aware of each other Like the covers of a book, finally content, at so long last, with itself, closed over, and not needing of opening again. I examined him. I pulled the covers of the bed down, chilling us with bone bladed cold, and I looked at him, his slight body, his somewhat wasted waif look, his bluish skin from the cold, his goosebumps, his soft delicately shaved pubic hair. Such a defenseless china bone body. So in need of defending. Let me. His penis that listed slightly to the right at its top. A scar on the left side of the head where he said a boy had shot him with a BB gun once. In fun, of course, Raymond had added. His eyes shy, looking at me look at him. Wanting me to. Eager for me. Amazing. We talked some. Really talked. And we did not mention books or writers or demand that this was all right, had always been all right, even though we had felt it had been just the opposite. We talked of home. Not finding it. But being in it. Having been in it all along. And Raymond was hard again and he pushed me downward with his slender hands and he put his pale lipped mouth to me and he sucked me hard like Christmas candy. I had never been so stiff and had never come so copiously. And we were sexual beings. I loved him. And I told him I loved his body and his tits and his dick and his little balls and his beautiful full rich ass and I loved riding him and I loved coming in his mouth and I loved sucking him off and painting him naked and how proud I was to walk with him through the streets of Montmartre and to have people see such a lucky fellow as I, with my love beside me. And thought, how could anyone pity us? How fuckin' dare they! And he told me he loved it with I tickled his dick head with my tongue, and how he loved to giggle when I opened his dick slit and stuck the tip of my tongue into it, that it "just went all over me, inside." We had never really talked about sex before, with each other. Or anyone else. And how sometimes he noticed a certain cry stuck in my throat when I let him enter me, a cry he always wanted me to let him hear, and felt short changed when I did not, because it would have meant so much to him. I can't say why we suddenly realized who we were, and how we were together. Perhaps a clock ticked us into being. Perhaps winter clocks do that because the wind is cold and the snow is going to be deep this year for a change, and because centuries have a way of making a man and a boy feel very small, very insignificant. And for this not only do you need words on paper. You need a human being with you. To share the words. And each other. Not to hide behind or inside them or inside ourselves or the other person. That sneaky gutless kind of approach to reality never works. It makes it not reality at all. It makes it not count. All book readers should be aware of this. We didn't have to read or say words out loud to ourselves anymore. Someone was paying attention, after all. Our clothes were poor. Our britches had patches on patches. Our window had too many cracks in it we had to stuff with oil cloths. Our paintings had not been selling well, as if they ever did. Maybe we could do better work now. We'd see more clearly perhaps. Maybe it was time to grow up. Both of us. Look for work. Maybe it was time for Raymond to admit he was not a street kid anymore. Maybe it was time to admit what we had read--the things we fear the most are the things we have already lived through, and the fact we lived through them once or more brings them down to size at least a little. I turned to Raymond and saw him. He looked at me and saw me. So very simple. So very obvious. I automatically turned away when his eyes met mine. He put his hand to my chin and turned me back to him. I lay the side of my head on his collar bone and felt the warm, real construct of Raymond. I felt so good. We were together. We might be on our way to Samara. But we would walk there side by side. The snow swirled. Day was beginning. The wind battered our window and walls. Chill came in, and that would be okay now, was welcomed. For, you see, it was the first winter of our love. And there's no winter, ever again, like that one.