Date: Sat, 2 Apr 2005 17:11:07 -0800
From: B Keeper <silvershimmer@earthlink.net>
Subject: ...it's only my life...

"it's only my life...it's only my life...it's only my life..."
by
Tilmothy Stillman

Something has been reached here. It was not just a movie...just a
movie..just a movie...like the posters and preview proclaimed.
Some nadir had been plummeted.

I was fifteen the year Last House on the Left played the theater
here in Paducah. I saw it with Joel who was fourteen and my
secret true love. Forget movie ratings. Easy as falling off a log to
get into any movie. Age doesn't matter.

We walked out with the high school and the college students, and
no one said a word. No one looked at anyone. Except I was
looking at them to see no one looked at each other. Joel didn't
look at his friends. Or at me. Hardly ever did look at me anyway.
But this was different. Everybody walked shuffling. There was no
laughter. No kidding around. No boys' arms round girls'
shoulders.

They looked like me in other words. First time that had happened.
They looked down at the floor and then the cement sidewalk they
turned on to. They moved slowly. As though they had forgotten
who they were, what anything meant. They looked sick. Wasted.
Like a bad drug trip. Or a funeral that had starred themselves.

Their faces seemed bloodless. As though this movie was a
vampire that had sucked some of the essence out of them. Joel
and I stood at the side of the theater, beside the poster for the
film. He had his hands in his jeans pockets. I had my hands in my
jeans pockets. He looked up at me. I caught his glazed eyes. First
time I had seen those eyes when they were not wide and electric
and filled with excitement and curiosity.

I turned from the eyes of my love, because I knew after this I
could not even pretend one sided anymore with a scant possibility
of hope for tomorrow in his life and mine. His life was not mine.
And now it seemed even worse. Seemed the strands of him and
me and everyone who saw that film, these sudden zombies, were
unraveling.

Something horrible had happened. Joel pulled a cigarette from his
plaid shirt pocket, and a lighter, lit up and smoked. Trying to be
casual. I had never seen him smoke before. I caught his eyes
again. They said, it seemed, I am down here far inside me and I
need assistance getting out--help me.

I moved toward him. He looked a bit--apprehensive. That floored
me. Terrified me. I stopped moving. The movie. The sadistic
sonofabitch movie about this gang of thugs and the violence they
exact on two girls and then the violence exacted on them. We had
never seen anything like it before. It was far more grotesque than
"The Wild Bunch." Far worse made. Cheap and tawdry and
inane, with hillbilly humor thrown in to make us laugh, relieve the
tension, I guess. That had made me sickest of all.

It had been a large crowd tonight. Just kids coming in to see a
movie. Now there should have been ambulances waiting for us.
Daring, taunting, laughing, filled with life, as they entered. Filled
with pain, exiting. I wondered how much business the snack bar
was doing during this film's run, after people saw the movie for
what it was. They should have issued barf bags like in "Mark of
the Devil."

I felt assaulted. Like those two girls in the movie. Like apparently
everybody here who had seen it. I so horribly angry and ashamed.
I had never seen a movie that seemed to be filmed by people as
sick and sadistic and perverted as the characters in the film. It had
upped the ante. This was not pulling wings off a butterfly. This
was pulling a leg off a dog.

Joel smoked for a time. He looked so incongruous smoking. Like
an angel puffing away. I wanted to hold him. Hold this little body
close to me and protect him from the world that somehow had
enlisted sadism as entertainment. It had elicited that as
entertainment a long time before this. We just didn't know it then.

He stood at an angle from me. The other kids had left the place.
Cars were being started. I longed for the most desultory
conversation. I pulled my jacket closed in the October wind. The
theater marquee lights were turned off, the orange glow gone.
The lights inside the lobby were extinguished. And the lights in
the entry way, tossed the night right into us.

I didn't know if the sidewalk would turn into a cobra, striking at
us. I thought it might. I wanted to say something to Joel. I felt so
much older right now. I felt I had to protect the apple of my eye.
The only hope I had back then.

He looked so huddled. So scared. A bundle of doubt where there
had been no doubt before. The skin of the world had been peeled
back. And Joel and I and others too had obviously gotten a look
at it, and it was pretty horrific.

The cold cutting wind felt good after the theater's stale air. There
had been silence early on for the audience in the movie. The
silence had stayed for the whole thing and after. Joel sat with his
hand on the arm rest, clutching it tightly. I touched his hand once
in there. He pulled it back. I pretended not to notice. He
pretended the same thing. No. That's not true. He really hadn't
noticed. And it was not the thing unrolling on the screen that
caused it either.

It was about ten thirty. We both had school tomorrow. Someone
had to say something. The silence of ourselves, the others who
had been here, the silence of no traffic now, and some time before
the bus arrived to pick us up and carry us to our individual
homes.

"I think I will never love horror movies again." That was all I
could come up with. The words were tight, too controlled. I
forgot what I said as soon as I said it.

I think we turned as automatons and walked side by side to the
end of the block, without being aware we were doing it, to the
bench, where we would wait for the bus in a while. We walked
past the light poles, the potted plants with the green dying in
them, part of a city beautification campaign. Two blocks to the
right of us was the waterfront. I would walk there some nights,
hear the distance of old songs in the water lapping, and dream of
Joel saying he loved me.

We sat for a time. The air got chillier.

"They took it out of me. It was like they had scissors and they
took it out of me," Joel said, looking out to the street and to the
Samuels Jewelry Store across from us. Cathy Sue, the daughter
of the store owner, was in love with Joel. She acted very silly
around him. He was kind to her as he was kind to everyone. But
he would laugh at the whole thing from time to time, with me, or
other friends of his. He was not in love with her. But he was in
love with someone. Only that someone was not me.

He said it again, since I didn't respond. I hadn't heard him. I kept
hearing the screams in the movie. I kept seeing things taken out
put in and then taken out one more time. Elliptical and stupid
beyond ken. Razing the soul from the inside out. Did the movie
make us think these things? Or did we do the thinking the movie
did not and could not? That seemed the most dangerous scenario
I could imagine.

"Like how?" I asked. Though I knew exactly what he meant.

"I've wanted to. have fun, dammit." His voice was reedy and high
and sweet. He was a small boy who looked younger. His hair was
long and flowing. His forehead was high. His hands were dainty.
He was so beautiful, I would have given my life for him.

"I did too, you know," I said, trying to sound big
brotherish. Trying to sound off the cuff, throwing in that "you
know."

" That movie...it's like.." a long indrawn pause, then "I saw the
city bus come  here one time," Joel said. "One autumn night. I
was out with the guys."

I hurt then. I wanted him to myself. I wanted to hold him and him
to hold me and I wanted to do all the things I imagined doing
with him. I wanted everybody in the world to see what magic
resided in the cloak of Joel right beside me.

He told me about this bus. He was waiting by himself, after he
and his friends had gotten out of the same theater we had just
been to. It was about this time of night. He told me haltingly,
hesitatingly, with fidgety hands which was unlike Joel at any other
time I had known him in the sad mad lonely happy lovely two
years of my life with him.

He said the bus had had children on it. And only child passengers.
That it had slowed down at the corner bus stop, where we were
now. Just a city bus in this small town with big town pretensions.
A bus that was red and white. With all the yellowy lights inside it
on. Which was odd, but Joel didn't think about that for a time. It
seemed to be just something to accept. Like this movie tonight
was something to accept, somehow, in all its bleak idiotic lack of
potential, or an implosion of potential.

Joel had put out his cigarette on the way to the bus stop. He now
lighted another. That concerned me. I knew he drank fruit wine
now and then, and was afraid he was getting into drugs, though I
had no proof of it. Just my fear of losing him to someone else, or
to chemicals, or to the own peculiar songs in his own peculiar
brain.

"And the bus was packed with kids," he continued, arching his
hand with the cigarette in it back and forth, punctuating the night
as though it was paper he was trying to write on, trying to use to
make some sense of things.

"I didn't know them," he said. "I mean I could see each one like I
was inches away from each individual face and I didn't recognize
one single thing about them. Like I had forgotten what eyes and
noses and mouths look like." He paused. "I should have known
one of them, shouldn't I? They were my age and all that. Weird."

I thought of the girls in the movie. I thought of the parents of one
of them taking revenge on her and her friend's murderers, in
equally sadistic ways. I thought of Joel. I pictured him as the lead
thug, the tightly coiled scary creepazoid with the big muscles and
the intent boiling evil eyes. I shook my head a little. No, that did
not fit at all. I would not let it do so.

"These kids, boys and girls, they had like these raccoon rings
round their eyes. You know," and he laughed that velvety soft
papery laugh that was his trademark and the memory of which I
would lull myself to sleep with at night when I pretended he was
there with me.

"You know, they just looked real sick, and pale, like the blood
had been sucked out of them. They were like zombies and they
just had these I don't know slack faces and they seemed like in
the twilight zone. It had to be a dream."

It had to be.

Joel suddenly was angry, threw down the cigarette and ground it
out with his tennis shoe. He jerked upright. He walked to the
edge of the curb. He turned to me. It was funny to see him do
that. I had never seen him angry about anything. He was always
cool, reasonable, level headed. The calming influence in his
upsetting of me at the same time.

"Goddammit," he said, his voice a little hoarse and red with
angry, "why do we let them do it? Why do we let them push us
around and make us see movies we hate? Why the
living hell do we let everyone else live our lives for us, when they
don't give a damn about our lives anyway?"

He was on a roll. Leaves of gold and tin foil rustled down the
sidewalk past us. I was interested in where all of this might lead.

"They said I had to like that movie; the boys at school.
They made like I was a dip if I didn't see
it too. And I had to. And I HAD TO LIKE IT. And I talked you
into seeing it with me cause it scared me that much. I thought it
would be a laugh, though. God."

He hadn't talked me into it. I was psyched to see the thing after
seeing that truly hooking print ad in the Sun-Democrat for all that
period of time. And the preview they showed on Channel Six
each night too. Though I wouldn't have been brave enough to do
it, unless I had had Joel with me. So I could pretend bravery for
him.

So I could have someone to look out for, so that someone could
really be looking out for me. I am a very selfish person. I am not,
as John Lennon put it in another context, the only one, however.

"I mean, I like horror movies okay. But that was a piece of
garbage." He was pacing back and forth in front of me now. Like
a teacher in front of a blackboard, who had something extremely
important to say.

An occasional car would toss its headlights over him before it
went on down the street.

"Everybody tells us. Teachers tell us. Like this. Do it this way.
Why? Because it's the way to do it. Read this book. I don't like
it. Then you have no taste in literature.

"Why is this movie so great? Cause Bosley Crowther of the New
York Times loathed it. Because Rolling Stone says this is a great
trip and you're not cool if you don't think so too. Why is this
movie making money? It pulled my eyeballs out and stuffed
packed smelly blood inside me. This we paid money for?
This we spent about two hours of our lives watching?
 What the hell were we thinking of? Why do
we do it?

"Why does this piece of crap fill our brains like it's important or
something? It's cause it's today, right this second, and it's
occupying my mind more than Shakespeare and all the really
good writers from a long time ago. And why? Damn, will
someone tell me why this thing beats Hamlet and As You Like It
into the top of the charts, like it or hate it, in my brain right now.
Jeez! The present is everything. No one remembers the past, like
it didn't count. People are afraid to remember. Why? Why is that
so? Like it's a sin or something to go to hell for. They're ashamed
to remember. It ain't cool, bro."

Joel's father was an English teacher at a community college, and
so Joel was inculcated at an early age with the Bard and others of
his peerage. Me, I stick with Michael Shayne and Ray Bradbury
these days.

He sat beside me. Not close enough though. He laughed and it
was an old man laugh. We knew something we hadn't known
before, though I can't exactly put my finger on what we knew
now.

"The bus, the autumn bus," he said, slowly now, almost with a
drawl he had never had before. "It wasn't a dream. It scared me. I
wet my jeans. It pulled over like it was gonna stop. I saw all these
kids on the bus, and then I felt my legs standing me upward and
walking me to it, and I almost got on the damn thing. I didn't
have the power to do anything else. The doors hissed open like a
snake sound. And I was pulled like on a fishhook and string to it,
and then, just as I got to it, the doors closed--right in my face--
the bus driver laughing silently in shadow. And it screeched off,
and I was left there screaming for it to come back. I was mad as
hell.

"I fell to the curb. I cried like a baby. I wanted to go too."

And he was crying now. Like a baby. His head was down. His
fingers were at his eyes trying to pluck away tears like grapes
from an arbor. I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders.
God, he was warm, and trembling. Like a trembly little pup.
No one else was around. We both began to weep, softly. I felt
my penis erect. It did not make me ashamed. Not this time.
It was life. That was what it had always been. Sex. Dreams.
Joel. Life. His arms went round me. We held close. Two little
kids on the edge of a cliff, no Catcher in the Rye to save us
from going over.

"I was Adam, the first of all, just beginning," he said then, always
 Joel,  "and that autumn bus, "and Eden
was going away without me, one more time. Kids shouldn't have
to face stuff like that. It's not right. To keep from fainting, keep
repeating...it's only my life...it's only my life...it's only my life."

Like I say, his father was an English teacher. The family read
books most families had never heard of. So he learned to talk like
this early on. Like a book. That was another thing that endeared
him to me.

"I don't think they were real," he said after the city bus lights
shadowed its white glows over us, scaring us, pulling us apart,
and  stopped for us to get on. The pneumatic doors opening.
A regular bus, with no lights on inside till the driver
opened the door and we got on. Empty. Save for the three
of us. We deposited our change and went to our seats. The bus
was warm. Conversely, it made us realize how cold we had been,
waiting for it. We sat down. Joel's words bubbling quickly now:

"I think the kids on it were fiction kids. Not real, actually, but..
But they hadn't been born yet. They were the new crop to be put
 in movies and books that will make us sicker than Last House. The
new thalidomide babies to be. The ones in our brains. Or the brains
of the creeps that make the new monsters for tomorrow. They
weren't ghosts. They were--what's the phrase?-- mid point--yes--
to us, to  see closer up than us, the horrors around them in movies
and stuff, and pass along the sickness. Christ." I pulled to him. He
pulled away.

He became more animated, a little stronger, more like the Joel I
used to know, in saying these things. But he was a Joel far away,
not up close like before, which had been too far away anyhow.

It was muddled, but I told him, "As best I can understand, it
makes sense." Joel was a genius in case I need mention it.

"No. It's insane. All of us. Stop telling me what to do and think
and say and feel. Stop telling me I like what I hate and hate what
I like. Stop messing with my mind. Stop rooting around in me and
taking what you please whether it's really in me or not.

"Please. God. If you don't, I'll go insane."

I didn't really pull away literally. But I did mentally and
emotionally. Was this about me? Did he know? Did he mean it
that way? I was always the center of my world, like everybody
else was the center of their own world whether they will admit it
or not, but this time I truly didn't want to be.

He had nailed me. He sat slim as a stick and as motionless as one
too. As the engine rushed and the wheels hushed through the
night streets into neighborhoods with darkened houses and a full
moon that shone bright.

I was Krug, the leader of the thugs in Last House. I was as evil as
he. Joel didn't mean it that way really. But it was there in that
ballpark somewhere. I looked out the smudged dirty blurry
window. I wanted to weep. I wanted to stop having to eat
everybody else's sins. I wanted to squirm out of my conscience
and throw it away from me. I've never been known as subtle.
I've always worn my feelings on my sleeve.

No, Joel, I am not Krug, I am me. And I love you. And I want to
protect you from the world and all the people in it who know how to
live your life, but don't give a damn about you. I do, Joel. I give a
damn about you. Please.

The bus stopped on the street corner. The doors opened.
 I  sighed, got up and pushed past my once and
future and forever former heart, without looking at him, he sitting
by the night window, without touching even his knees with my legs
 as I got to the aisle. I walked straight ahead, not looking back,
to the bus door that hissed open, and let me off.

The bus made that shushing good bye sound and began moving
away into the October night. I wanted to turn to watch him on it. The
autumn bus. Carrying another lost child to his painful practical
joke future, as for perhaps, all of us.

I wanted to watch him go out of sight. I was too afraid to do it. Too
afraid to turn around, though.


Could he have somehow known back then that I would write this
and put him in it? Had he counted my sins before they had
happened? It was possible. He was that kind of boy.

"Timothy," his voice beside me. I turned. The night was cold.
We stopped. Looking at each other. He put out his china glass hands
and zipped my jacket. I zipped his then, with hands movie steady.
There was no one around. It wouldn't have mattered, had there been.

He leaned upward and kissed me. I felt the whole of his body in my
arms. We were in a movie. Too hokey, too beautiful for real life, too
real for real life which has always seemed like third rate fiction to me
.
I touched his lips with my fingers as I pulled from him. I looked
at him in the night. Joel and I on our way to making love. Before
the war of life took us away again.

And I thought, yes, Jesus, yes, we need each other.
After that movie, we do need each other. The thing had worked
not on a date night level, but far deeper.

And I remembered he had told me he was reading "Eternal Fire"
this week, which has a hot passage about a man fucking a girl on a
midnight bus; I always read what Joel was reading, to keep us
together. I had jacked off to that scene three times this week.
Thinking it me and thinking it Joel. Me reaching out then for a
ghost. Him reaching out for reality.

There were bushes to the far side of the sidewalk. Neither of us took
the lead. We held our hands out and grasped, and went to those
bushes and on the cold ground. Beside all the unknowing, blind, dark
 houses.

He put his hand in my jeans, behind my belt. His Joel hand. One and
only. Never to be before or since, my Joel. My penis hurt for him.
All of me hurt for him. I was so scared now. The movie, our movie,
was dissolving. What would I do now? That I could see how silly this
was?

But Joel's movie was not melting away. And I was in it. He knew it.
Life is made as a movie. Or its nothing at all.. He was sacrificing
himself, to be willing at least, to be one of those kids on that nightmare
bus, heading to be in a horror film up ahead, to scare all of us for later
on at sickest bedtime fears. But no fears now. Love. And transub-
stantiation. And a gift to pull us back from the cliffs that movie had
nearly pushed us over.

He said, "Tim, I know you love me. And I want to love you. I'll show
you." He did not love me. He was scared. And so was I. He needed
anyone right now. But he knew, and he gave me this gift, this on top
of it. This to show the importance of me to him. I felt his hand going to
his jeans' fly. He opened it and pulled out his hard on. I saw it in
shadow and moon and dim street light. He opened my fly and pulled
out my penis.

They touched.  My god, to touch the penis of Joel. I gripped it.
I rubbed. I touched it so gently then like it was finest glass or the
Holy Grail. I felt his little balls. So warm and hairless. I touched
Joel's penis! God, I actually did it! I held it in my hands! It was
hard and it pulsed so magnificently. Like his very heart.

And he touched me. And I rushed to him. We held each other.
We rolled on the cold brown grass ground. One on top, then the
other. Then side by side.

 My heart pounded  like I was going to die. In his arms. Oh yes
please. And began to masturbate each other. Not awkwardly.
Metronome pulse by pulse.

He put his little bird's head on my shoulder and we moved in rhythm.
Our legs entangled. He put his hands to my face. He traced my eyes.
I kissed his mouth so hard.  He was remembering the passage from
 "Eternal Fire." Imagining himself the man on the bus. Imagining me to
be the girl. I was picturing him masturbating alone in his room with that
book, and me making him imagine the girl as me.

We breathed movie hard. We stretched movie stretch. I put my other
hand in his shirt and felt his warm bones and his nipples. They were
hard at my touch.Would he become a movie child for me? That was
what he was now. Not Joel. But the movie part of him. The secret
part of him.  I bent over and took the head of Joel's penis in my mouth.
He fucked my mouth. Like in the novel. He pushed it in and out so
hard and violently. And then he pushed my head off it. And he came.
And it was warm on my hand. And he pushed and bucked his hand
on my penis, and I came into thehand of my lovely Joel. And in time,
sweet music in the background, in time we came around, and zipped
up, and I walked him home and kissed him goodnight.And walked
away. Thus the movie ended.

And thus, the images to stay in my mind as time clocked off from
that night, for  nothing happened between us again. Krug? The
sadistic movie? The passage the novel by Calder Willingham that
Joel and I were reading and then re-enacting in separate theaters
 for ourselves and each other?

The need, now, as I write this,  to jack off now and to take
"Eternal Fire" to bed with me and pretend it is us again, knowing
he has long forgotten it? Or that image he gave me, that still haunts
me.The one about the unalive children on the bus? That maybe he
sacrificedhimself to...for, not me, but for himself, old then already
when still a boy? I stay away from horror films made today. The
ones featuring children especially. He could be one of them. Or
maybe he was just Salinger's rye catcher, practicing for saving
children running off a cliff. I think I will stick with that one.

I know it's mad, but he could be any of this..

I remember the past, Joel. And this night above all of them.
I am no longer afraid of it. I am helpless to do anything else, but
remember. I am giving up one of my deepest dreams to tell
this to you. As soon as I finish writing it, I have to forget it.
It is the way I do things. I give someone a book I love, I forget
immediately, because sure as hell, they will no longer be
my friend after a little while. It never fails. I tell someone my
deepest thoughts, they toss them away, forget me, and make
them not mine anymore. It is in its way a kind of murder of me.
I adhere in complicity.

But I do it anyway. I guess for a little while because it
keeps Joel alive for me. It's either that, or watch horror
movies with children in them. And that I do not dare; cutting
or allowing to be cut little pieces of my heart out is easier.
And safer.

. Does that at least count for something? My telling you
about Joel? Does that make him a movie person along with
me? Perhaps that is what I'm holding out for. Whether or
not the other person cares?--they never have.
So  I have to give up this and hide somewhere else. Only the
 somewhere else's are getting fewer and fewer. I guess this
is a sort of courage.

Do you remember? Or is today everything?  Do you have
the need or the courage or the cowardly or courageous
yearning  for the past, as it was,  or to rewrite it happier or even
sadder?

Making the past even sadder helps somehow, sometimes. Do you
ever fear that nightmare bus pulling up beside you? Do you wonder
who is on it? Who iswriting this, perhaps, right behind the driver,
right this second?

If the pneumatic door hissed open beside you on a windy leaf
blown October night, and you had the feeling that in the dim interior
lights your true love is waiting....would you have the audacity to try
to get on it before the doors shut for good and the bus pulls away,
leaving you screaming for it to return?

As for me, I hope I have the courage to do so. And the speed to
make it before the doors hiss shut one final time.

As we go about our daily lives, hiding away. Pretending to be brave.
For someone. Always for someone, isn't it? We are supposed to
find our happiness inside ourselves and not depend on others. That's
the current religion. To which I say utter and total bullshit. It's always
for someone else...
....Here or gone..mostly of all, I think...the ones who are gone,
but who, thank God, mercifully find sneaky little ways of saying:

here's another dream, after all, from me to you, special and secret,
let me tell you about it.....

silvershimmer@earthlink.net