Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 09:25:12 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Joel/Barry

				Joel/Barry

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


"I am not rich or famous/but who can ever tell?/I do not
know what waits for me/maybe heaven/maybe hell"
"Baby, The Rain Must Fall"


This is a horror story. It is an interior one. The most
frightening, most painful kind.

There are no ghosts, save the human ones. There is no
violence, not so's you'd notice. There is no pain, save the
ones we don't talk about. There are neither demons nor
ghouls, not where you would expect them at least. There is
no death, save the one that's ticking in all of us right this
minute. This is how it's laid out. This is the autopsy.

They felt for each other only love. They lived for the oceans
of themselves to be guided by the other's hand. They were
two in one and believed that days of deliverance were
created by the first morning hello, and the last evening good
night. Though there were always mornings, and there were
no final evenings. Things would go this way for always, as
long as Autumn followed Summer, and Winter followed
Autumn.

There was promise in their first sight of each other, an
addition to each other, at the same time, a subtraction from
each other, balanced and fair and right and just. They
sacrificed these goings away, not sublime, not important, not
the selling of even the slightest bit of a soul, not sold to each
other, but to the something in them that had never been there
before. Not since a bargain was sealed, and payment due,
with no excess, without a kinder conceit than anyone with a
bargain in the direction of the devil had ever given.

Love felt good, and it was that obvious, as they lay with each
other that first time, in Joel's bedroom, in the night, with the
Autumn approaching and brushing away Summertime, and
they held each other delicately as though they were each
china porcelain, the fingers touch, and the chests touch, and
that web of sexuality that dueled with love and fought
against it at first, for they were only human after all, but still
the trigger pulled, and still they fell. The distance was far
below and time unhinged and membranes took the place of
the lonely nights, for there were no walls anymore, not here,
this first time, not ever again.

They lay naked and close and whispery and tickly against
each other, for love demands it, love demands risks and
promises and withheld eyes behind the tremble of lids of
flesh, because they knew in that second before they were
enraptured with each other, that this was a trick, was a joke,
but love gripped them as they gripped each other, more than
a substantiation, more than a performance with someone else
engraved on the heart as the bodies tackled each other in
reckless fury, for this love allowed something they had not
allowed before, a lack of fury of sexuality, a lack of conjugal
badminton where deft serves could be negated by sweaty
pores and the continual shame that had plagued them all their
lives, when they had discovered who they were and who they
were was not what they had set out to be at all.

They did the things two naked lovers do in bed, , for love
demands exposure, and they were a gulf each of themselves,
gradually discovering the land between was not to be, that
something in their hair smelled this way, that something in
the way their hands cupped parts of each other, this sifting
night when the cool winds were starting to blow, and the
shades rattled in the windows partially open to give the night
air from the stifling fists in each of their stomachs, to allow a
partial escape of repose and not meant and over then and
away in the lonely night corners of the table pockets, there to
hide and bleed no more, singly and alone. But the sugary
parts did not happen this time, this beginning.

For Joel and Barry were not of the sentimental variety, as
though there were isotopes in their minds that were always
bleating out green lights for lack of courage or too much
insight, or the thought processes tangled in a league of
consideration that always webbed too much feeling into too
much hypotheses, and thus the escape that way as it had
always been, which was no escape, then, none at all.

They had known each other the beginning of this semester of
university. They had known and danced delicately and pulled
eye shades down on their immediate intense love for each
other, that had bristled and developed and haunted and
betrayed them in bringing them together in the library last
night with the dark drawn and the lights shaded brown, and
the books in their hands as they sat on either side of the long
horseshoe style table on the second floor, to the right of the
science book stacks.

And there was a longing past who could take which drug to
achieve which mastery that was nothing more than a shade of
tricks in the nights and the bars and the student lounge and
on the quad with the amber moon shining beacon above, and
there was more than drinks and the feeling empty in the
stomach that had made them laugh too loudly, had made
them too desperately in need of not needing each other.

Quiet Joel's room, as quiet the library, as quite Barry had put
the book of graphics down on the wooden table top and had
looked straight into Joel's hazel eyes and had seen Autumn
in him, had seen a memory of a cat he had loved all russet
and brown and filled with heavy fur and a sweet deep as
fulfillment pair of green eyes that had looked at him so
intently with love, the cat's paw on Barry's left hand, as they
lay on the boy's bed, when he had been a child, home from
school on a winter's day, sick with the flu, fully sneezing,
stuffy, weepy, and this cat was the only being who knew him,
as the TV screen had dissolved in front of Barry's eyes, the
cats' eyes so full of the boy..


And the cat had come to fill the whole world of him and
nothing could separate them again, and the boy thought this
as he looked at the boy named Joel and thought the world is
in a name like that and novenas on every planet and candles
lit and prayers said, and night was now a distant memory,
like a wish of bravery of the end of night, and then he saw it
in Joel. The same thing he felt in himself, a bare damask out
in a field somewhere of funereal blackness, blankness, and his
sight rose fast and higher and higher, and the damask that
had been the thing Barry had clung to with such supreme
tenacity became an instant, a skate left in some million years
ago childhood, seen from up high, like from the eyes of God,
and Barry felt that sickness inside himself and looked into the
attendant darkness that was cold and unclimbable and he
would not give himself away, not one more time...

And in that darkness that was inside himself, that was
subaltern, that was so elemental to people of the world who
are ready to twist a good bye into any hello regardless of the
chant of cost known so well and befriended like a hand in a
warm night soothing the sickness away, that kind of wired
sterile preamble, as always, started, and lived through and
then fallen to the earth and that dim damask there below in
the infinite tumble down, thus to rush to forest rest and
hurtle to the brutal magnificent ground again in all its
shadow removal crews that never seemed to get round to the
task, he had seen, within his own self, within his own
tortured cravings and immediate repentance for those
cravings, Joel, in his own fears, his own no not this time turn
away and walk through the door, and Joel had seen this other
boy within his own fear, his own timetable that was forever
getting scrambled, that was forever, filled with broken
destinations and train stations.

 When there were such things and they had not been
Amtracked to death, and the unknowable fevers of those
hard benches in the harder nights, sitting there with splinters
fingering your nail tips, and the night a long unbroken brook
of sealed domestication when it seemed this was the only
thing that mattered, the waiting on, the waiting for, and thus
eternity foolscap on your mind and seeming then to
intellectually win because you could bemuse the process and
no one else would mercifully, damnably, understand.

But in their secret night, Joel and Barry, peas in a pod,
planets in a suddenly close universe, suddenly a pocket
universe that did not have loneliness at its core, was not a
game of billiards of the half rungs of life that must be lived
on and cramped and twisted and deformed and consider this
the full extent of life and what you might find some day in it,
but never believed, and if a glissando was not raised on a
violin string, and if a trumpet did not sound at that moment
when Joel and Barry at that library table, the only two people
there, shadows of dangerous edged books all round them,
looked inside themselves and found the other there with him,
if no one broke into song or recited poetry of beautiful
rooms created at least in verse, then it was a silent thunder
shock in each boy.

It was a release and a drawing through and a pulling back,
but not the gravity pulling kind, only that deep thrushed body
wavering as they looked at each other that first time they
really looked at each other, and their eyes seemed to droop
at the corners, like those of tired old men, gunfighters of an
ancient age who know this time they will be killed, this time
the kid will pick them off and well done with it in that dusty
saddle tramp town with the ill wind always blowing through.

And that night, last night, how could it have simply been last
night?, count the waves of the ocean, multiply by a million,
and that was how the centuries, the millennia caressed them
in their rooms afterwards, that giving out of time, that giving
out of all that childhood loneliness and hand cradled sadness
when their orgasms singularly and lacking was only what
trees could grow in their summer minds and branch with
anything that was past human, anything that was beyond the
human experience, any frame of it, an impossibility for
humans to imagine, but the goal was at least in the trying,
and if that meant senseless objects could be abused, if penises
could be strained and mastered, and if trees in the night wind
were enough for clauses in which they could hide and be less
than themselves.

Though deep interior they knew themselves to be fully
immense though this egotism would not be felt by them for
some time to come, then here was salvation and sensation in
the form of knowing the terrible waste of other years,
because when one is one and twenty, as Auden placed the
world in that bracketed phrase of years so turned, then the
past of two so young could be the past of two so immensely
long and old, thus turn, and the turning in their single beds
last night after they left the library, Joel first, not a word said
between them, just encyclopedias at their beckonings and
their minds in silver swirls.

And now they lay, piano key boys, different tunes in the each
of them, radios, stereos playing down the distance of halls,
scuff marks of sounds come to them as undercurrents to the
electricity that had not been for them when they had drunk
together at Chelsea's Bar, when they had done acid in
Larry's room, ruthlessly lurid colored and aggressively
postured, pot smoke thick filled with twangy Sitar music,
overflowing with nodding off hippies and crowded with
psychedelia, but here in the truly  and richly drunk human
facets of themselves, in the darkness that brook no more
fancies, that said dreams stop here, and you will have each
other at your beck and call forevermore, here then the main
mast, here then the seas of themselves.

As they had peeled themselves free of their tie dyed shirts off
and their jeans and they had cuddled under the light blanket
covering and they had held each other close together as
though the lights inside in that great huge high hall of a
tunnel they had rushed upward last night was still with them,
as an engraving of moment, of motion, of moth to flame and
finding it a most friendly flame, most comforting; can a flame
smile? Oh yes indeed. Watch them.

The two flames together, their hands rushing over the other,
the silkiness of skin, the sucking of it by the fingers and the
flesh thus brought finally to a peak of life and motion, as
their blood zipped through their veins, as their nights seized
into each other as though there was a seeking of pain as the
tongue worries the cavity where a tooth has been, the
commingling, the sheer joy of legs entangled and entangled
in each other Barry in Joel and Joel in Barry, love unleashed,
and though each boy had had sex with others there was in
them this lingering lock case of love left unfounded, left
unbounded because not known, long string or short, infancy
or maturity or a lacking of even infancy, as they toothed the
others' cheeks, as they put tongues in the other's mouths and
felt that wise strength of clean boned electricity surging
through them.

And ushered into arms that held strong and arms that gave
back stronger, and the weakness in their stomachs, and the
sureness with each other as though someone had taught them
all the words all the battering and they were one up on the
game.

They were endlessly inventive lovers, and though to other
less indulged less inebriated eyes, they might not have
seemed inventive at all, to them there were motions of
Venice in them, and there were sea scapes where Martian
eyes looked at all that red all that blood all that immensity of
crystal civilization caught in these prize boxers of first rank
who need not hurt each other or expect hurt themselves and
toothing the tongue that could not find the cavity anymore
and missed with much sincerity the terrible leagued loss of it.

Then the tongue finding on its cut edge by the newly formed
enamel incisor grown not from dental mastery but from the
formation of it from both boys at once thus enticing their
bodies to give each other exactly what was required that lone
lithesome moment, a molar of love and serenity and
there-ness, a something that made the tongue lose the cut in
it almost immediately if not sooner, and then the saltiness of
the tongue, the fullness of it, the intact perfection of it, the
lack of internal betrayal which is far worst than any physical
one, as both boys knew and impeded the thought that gushed
in gusts of night wind into each other's minds the moment
they tried to hose the thought and its attendant ones back.

And they gushed into each other, they rubbed and stroked
and sighed and held and fell back and fell on top of and
rolled themselves tangled in the light, brown blanket, they
needed nothing other than the seconds that came cascading
after each other.

Too, the drowning sleepy need that was a hook inside them
that the other went for and swung on and scampered up as
their fingers tickled the other's chests, and their hands rushed
to the hips slender and with no padding and they felt the
intense oven heat and they swung back their heads and they
silently howled at the moon, silently, because they had
always been quiet reserved shy boys, and they would be this
still this night and every night of their lives because it was a
cause that the tremble inside be known only to them, and if
boy went down on boy, then the night had a special glove in
the secret compartment of a drawer that could not exist and
could not exist, the glove or drawer, because there was no
fitting them in, there was no need for them, and if boy fit
boy, and they did, then the things that did not fit, a useless
Mickey Mouse glove golden and small in a far distance.

>From a secret compartment of a drawer that had no use for
anyone in this world, then that was Joel's and Barry's logo,
that was their secret separate strengths that would unite them
when the unthinkable happened and day arrived again, and
they had to go to separate classes, and eat alone, for their
schedules did not permit them to eat together on
Wednesdays and tomorrow was Wednesday...

..thus their symbols would carry them through their endless
time alone tomorrow, already wept into this night, already
cut and woven in the fragment of the night time darkness
that made their closeness just that much more so, that made
the redeemer of train stations signal to the trains to keep in
their night corridors, that sometimes looking is the ultimate
rejoinder, that sometimes, as they did right this second,
laughter was a lute that whispered to a boy alone in his attic
reading a book forbidden, his hand secretly, almost unaware
of himself, stroking himself through his jeans in the summer
hot dust moted attic of July afternoon, his mind on secret
loons and songs that might be brave for future sexual athletes
of which he would be one, but it would only be a series of
one night stands, first names given only, a divot of a life that
would play on the golf courses that had something of
midnight oil about them and if that was the promise.

If that was the thing to be lived with almost in a lordly kind
of way, then good luck to you and godspeed, but Joel and
Barry gave in and needed, after so many long roads on their
road to one and twenty and to themselves spliced together,
mouths on each other, entering each other, dwelling on each
perfect quotient of skin pore, feeling the heft and slender
girth of one the other on top or under, working  in beautiful
spectral metronomic perches the way they would and could
only function if the other person was named Joel this Joel,
and the other person was named Barry, this Barry, accept no
substitutes even if you see actors portraying them on
television.

For though they were far from perfect, they seemed perfect
in each other's eyes, and they wove themselves into this
room in Ellington, and they lost their virginity this night, they
lost forever more the ability to protect themselves from each
other for there was simply no need, for they were most
considerate and most delicate and even handed with each
other and when Barry came in Joel's hand and Joel rubbed
the cum on his own chest like a precious ointment from the
East, when Barry felt Joel rushing into his mouth, when they
opened themselves and were finally unashamed of anything, a
little thing happened, a pinprick really, nothing important,
but because they were boys who were not parts of
themselves, not ever, because they were boys who could not
piece meal themselves, trust this person, do not trust that
one, open yourself to Joel's good morning and sleep tight.

 But do not allow the rest of the world to rush into you, to
come into a mist and descend onto you like winter in a
foreign country the lay of the land you do not understand for
a single moment, for before each other, before last night and
especially this night, everything had been alien, everything
and everyone, and if one sees nothing but alienness around
one's self, then one has to do one of two things--become the
only human thing there is in a world of gnome daddies and
pyramid babies and three headed boys and eight legged
arachnid teachers, or one has to become alien with the rest of
everyone else, these boys who were not patchwork quilts,
these boys who were allowed to see the planet of an
insubstantial planet like a bad dream caught in the fender of a
vehicle unrecognized that pulled up by the midnight train
station and unloaded freaks.

With more freaks to sit beside you on that splintered bench
and crowd you half off it and to stay on you had to reduce
them to the size of a bug or yourself, but to do that to each
other? This night, in bed, with sex and love beholden to each
other and each endemic with the other, this night in bed as
they tired and delighted in going to sleep with each other,
singing Barry or Joel a bedtime song from a childhood long
ago but somehow just as lambent and just as comfy cozy
here and now as it must have been when they were so small
and snuggled by their mothers in rooms of soft fuzzy animal
designed wall paper--


---and the night wind sang, and they said they honestly loved
each other, and there was the soft emission of a little more
from their penises, and there was the little salted mouths that
each owned containing the different the same salt as the
other boy had before this only singly and achingly and with
much heaviness of feeling and dwelling and spurious flesh
that he did not want, possess, and everybody in the world
must be smiling, and tomorrow they would greet the day first
together and then alone and then they thought together
tomorrow and they would run to each other and never leave
the skin of this sad old world crying for long again, and the
night ended them and began them, and the cost would start
tomorrow and the cost would be them as dupes for
everyone.

Believing anything anyone told them, believing the lies,
believing the sales pitches, making them vulnerable patsies
for anyone who came along, who liked to have fun with
people, who liked to jiggle with their minds and would
spread the word when such easy aces could be found, just for
the hell of it, or because both boys were handsome enough
and smart enough and had well off parents who had
important business contacts, then the skyscrapers of the
world could be put in the boys' hands and pockets.

Of course, there were, along with just the simple fun of it,
some side benefits for the to be hangers on before the boys
became men and took over their fathers' CEO positions and
their stock portfolios, and before other con artists took
advantage, before Barry and Joel ran their fathers' Fortune
500 corporations into the ground and all points below, there
was some coinage to be made, some positions to be had
thanks to these two ridiculous suckers who had never been
suckers before.

The lovers slept. The night grew cooler. Autumn was on the
way. Summer over. Their lives had been long. But they had
long to go. To turn on each other would be unthinkable. To
blame the other for the laundry list of things cooked up for
them in their to be profligate lives, their goading lives, their
turnstyle lives, their deep searching need to have sex with
anyone who moved and who could be bought, and they
could all be bought, which would be so easily found out, too
soon, far too soon, to fight and wound in the simple lack of
not withheld sex but the forgetting of a kiss or gentle stroke
or word before hand, before the armies of themselves began
the routine all too well known sexual war of the wordless,
they dreamed of each other next to each other, and they
would have time before it all began in earnest.

That would indeed be granted, the respite, at least, grace
point given, need there, could there ever be more?

This has been a horror story. This has been a love story.
Autopsies need not be brutal or graphic or heavy handed.
Termites eating into the human mind and heart can take long
to make themselves known, can be so subtle you could not
hear an irony drop for a great many years. Wish this on them.
A long time ago. When they were one and twenty, before it
was too late to quite become themselves again, all the selves
they were having been lost in the distance of tomorrow.

Just as long as they are cradled in each other's arms, here in
bed, or conjoined twins much time later on the autopsy table,
and maybe, just maybe that would make it, all of it, the
beginning to drink too much, the bellies that start expanding
too early in life, the long hair being lost and what there is of
it turned prematurely gray, the embarrassment, the fears, the
groping from one body to the next to the next, but in the
end, Barry and Joel coming home to each other, sicker each
of each other a little more each day in the places where they
were to live always in the process of down scaling,  of
making do, masking themselves to each other, more so all
the while, the impossibility of such a thing becoming a
reality, it happens, it just happens, like with pretty much
everyone else.

Their once sharp clever minds lost and strayed and
compromised and baffled and gravity scarred and human
burned and cocktail party subsumed, from penthouses to
lofts to flats to places they would never admit to, and  both
searching for a train at a deserted station, trying to find their
way home.

Not knowing how love turned to pin cushion and splinters
whenever they held each other, which would be why they
would not hold each other, which would be why they would
instead use each other, trying to remember what could not be
remembered, and they too became eight legged teachers and
pyramid shaped babies and Mars would be neither alien nor
familiar and there would be little more inside them but a
scream unscreamed, when before, they knew each the other
was forevermore their home, and the sum total, maybe
worthwhile. Maybe.


Again, this has been a horror story. Like all love stories soon
or eventually are.