Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 06:05:20 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: B/B incest "Heading for St. Paul"

			  "Heading for St. Paul"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


"Round/Round/Round/We'll watch the world go round/And if your
world breaks down/I'll be around/Round/Round"
Rod McKuen



 Tim was running track in the chilly ice box days of St. Paul,
MN., round the cinder path that was covered in mounds of pure
deep blue snow that cushioned, so if he fell he could not hurt
himself or cut his legs through his thick jeans, or his arms and chest
through his cable knit sweater or through his warm cozy fleece
jacket, as he pounded on into the snow, through the cold bite that
he was a knife slicing into and beyond. The wind gale force on him,
the ice air trying to blister his ears and the tip of his nose, none of
which he felt, not the cold of ice burn, not the exhaustion of his
body moving piston like and sure and swift and tall, with his eager
hands gathering snow flakes, perfect and thick and white like
feathers and tossing them back at themselves. The snow like a
mantle of magic on his thick wiry black hair, tasting of his long
eyelashes, covering him in safety and courage and valor there in the
dark January night. With the moon full and the stars crystal bright.
Energy becoming him and his passion was his victory and running
was all the world throbbing around him, trees and empty
grandstands wobbling by. He, pounding the world thudding inside
him. Free, oh god, free.

 Not Tim in this little grimy grungy room on Mott Street,
New York, N.Y. We've never been anywhere out of this city
before. We're eager to leave. So Tim can be a hero. Not broken,
bent, sitting on the edge of his too small bed from childhood, his
hands on either side of him, fingers and thumbs digging into the
ticking of the mattress, gripping the dirty sheet covering it, Tim lost
and Tim ditched again, and me sitting beside him was like me sitting
beside the saddest deepest well ever imagined. As I massaged his
thin shoulders and felt his brittle shoulder blades and his bones
melting in the heat of endless summer, in the heat of another
rejection, in the stasis and blush of his shame and all calling into
failure his motto, "Play it knowing you will lose, so when you do,
it's not a shock, it doesn't hit at you, it knows you and lays in your
stomach peacefully." And who needs a kid brother at a time like
this? A narrow world with only a brownish orangey shadowy light
shining up from the shadeless scarred old lamp on the floor at our
feet, on the ugly green broken spine linoleum that had no broken
spine any sadder than my brother's.

 Our little room, in our tenement, our parents dead, a tired
beaten to the core social worker letting Tim, age 17, take care of
me because it was easier to make paperwork on a dream, cut it as
small as the heart is cut in a city, and take the pulse never of this tall
boy who I adored, who I loved beyond all capacity to love, and for
who, if I could, I would be a step ladder that he could climb rung
by rung up to the top of our building, up to the roof and the top of
the city, and he could look over and find heart's desire waiting for
him, no longer this city with its constantly streaming thrumming
noises and its gaudy half hearted painted cover up that is no more
than a series of garbage can rattlings like a smeary clown face you
put on for protection, all those people in all those rooms, in all
those buildings close tightly by each other, packed together and
strangers all. Without stars to see for the city blinds them out, the
city does not need them for it has lights of its own it is jealous of,
and that is enough. And night finds me sitting on the bed with Tim,
and massaging his shoulders, and pretending I do not see him
defeated, turned into himself, giving up on his dream without
knowing it yet.

 All of this is memory, and the me of then did not know that
dreams were easily given up on, that you could steal them from
yourself with outside help, and not know it, like seeing a sad
moment of a dog hit on the street by a car and maybe no one
notices but a little kid who might have tears, the last ever to be
shed, just for a moment glistening and then gone, and then the kid
shrugs, turns, puts his hands obliviously in his jeans pockets, a fake
whistling to his lips and he is going into the teaming crowds,
thinking he has conquered, that he has won, but he has not won at
all, but has instead lost everything of any value.

 Tim was not in snow at the moment, not in his mind, not in
his hands that grasped the edge of the bed as though he wanted to
instead grasp and bring to a standstill the city, grasp the crying
babies and the smell of sweating cabbage that lingers in the hall
ways from all the rooms with their thin doors and thinner walls,
grasp the slaps and the curses and the angry shouts, and the city
that went ceaselessly by, and tell them this is not the way it was
meant to be. Tim, needing not the time to feel hunger or pain, just
divorce himself from the whole lot of it, as we sit side by side, both
of us only in our BVDs and Tim bows his head so low as I rub his
neck.  There must be kisses and lovemaking somewhere in some of
these little rooms all round us, but kisses and love are silent and
cannot be heard very well by unintentional, helpless not to,
eavesdroppers.

 As he takes his left hand to his jaw, pushes his head left and
right, making those cracked joint sounds that make me feel such
strange horrible pain deep inside; he says it feels good, I should try
it, but no thanks. The windows are open and the heat is frying, the
city impinges, and the air is something it takes effort to breathe, as
my hands work hard on the kinks in Tim's neck and shoulders, as I
push the heels of my hands into his spine as he bends forward, or
his body bends forward as if by itself needing the master's
touch--and of course that would be me. The little fan at the end of
his bed just blows hot air up at us, only half runs, is simply a joke. I
look at his feet, small and narrow, heavily blue veined, with toes
curled under a little, tuffs of black hair on each at the joints. Mine
are far too long for a boy my age. Mine are also a bit fat looking.
Okay, a lot fat looking.  Our feet are almost stuck with sweat to the
linoleum. You can hardly see any veins at all in mine. They lack the
character that Tim's does, I think.

 Our BVDs are yellowed somewhat, for boys do not think of
doing the washing often, so the wash line that depends from our
window downward is a barren thing compared to the day time flags
of clothes that stand rampart on the other lines that are made from a
string spider and fashioned of bolts and ingots and steel girders that
infect our dreams at night and make us squirm on our close
together beds, as the world sings its song of hod carriers and dirty
industrial nightmares, and for once or twice at a night time, I will
wake up and hear Tim laughing. Not shy, not sad, not caustic, but
happy and carefree and I know he is running track in St. Paul and I
know the winter wind is running with him, fast and furious and all
in a frenzy excited by the greatest track star in the known universe.
All going by at a clip that says time is kinder, that says you have a
motive inside you and it's not shameful and not secretive like my
motive concerning Tim. Of the big ears and the nose a little too
sharp and the mouth that doesn't smile well for it's had little
practice or reason to.

 Or his body that I see in swatches, when he changes clothes,
when he gets in the tub, little moments my eyes tick to him when he
does not know, as I glimpse him in stolen silhouette moments, like
a refreshing gulp of naked tummy or chest or back or butt, between
slats of almost coming on or taking off clothing, little slashes of
him, like that of  sunlight through the opened metal blinds on a
summer day, that make the white bars of brightness on the wall
opposite seem like they are winter snow shine from another part of
the world getting through, as though Tim's dream is right outside
that window and there is more out there than a moment of pulsing
longing or another boy turnaway because Tim didn't count and
knew he didn't count but thought he did anyway and it's bitten into
the heart of him so many times I can't begin to remember. Tim falls
in love an awful lot. Others do not fall in love with him. It is his
curse. Neither of us has ever seen the stars. Not really. In movies
and TV shows and in pictures, yes, and we long to see them, we
long to be on a long low wide field and to run through the grass
that is winter frosty sheathed, we long to run, me beside him, round
that track that he runs so fast, so fleet, that I can't keep up with
him, so I fall behind, gasping for air that is so thin it seems to hold
no oxygen at all, as I bend over, grasp my knees, and watch my
brother rushing into the tomorrow that he has to find or it will be
over with him for sure.

 We long for his St. Paul dream to be real. We saw a movie
set there a year or so ago, about a track runner; it was winter in the
film. Tim discussed it with me once or twice, how great it would
be, and cold and all that space to move around in and not have to
turn a corner every few feet, and I could see the unusual excitement
in him, those eyes that never sparkled, then sparkled, his voice had
true joy in it, the hands that suddenly eased and lost their grip on
pain, but it was his dream and his alone, and he cordoned it off
from me because of so many things, began to guard against it. He
knew the territory in other words. Dreams getting hurt mainly, and
never forgiving the dreamer. Those dreams never go away either.
They stick around to punish you for screwing them up. And this
one had to be his and his alone. Not real but real. Conceiving and
giving birth some day, far away, hazy and vague and distant and
precious beyond words, to a little notion that was better than all the
so called big notions of all the big shots, all the so called important
people that you could think of. But...how I wish his dream could be
shared by me.

 Tim, who needs to have me do something kid like, who
needs me not to eat the runny eggs of a morning breakfast he has
prepared on the one working eye of an ancient creaky cranky stove
with almost all the enamel flaked off; Tim, sitting across from me at
our tin card table with the morning hot and too brightly noisy that
makes us both frail as house flies--"Come on, eat that stuff, or the
welfare lady will for sure take us away from each other--" he warns,
grumpily, which he knows panics us both, so I eat my eggs, spoon
them really close to my mouth which I lower down to the plate like
shushing them into a tunnel. Then to show him I've done what he
asked, I would hold the plate up to him and all the runnies left
would dribble on the table, and he would get mad and bug his eyes
out at me, tell me to clean that stuff up, if the welfare lady sees
that--yeah, yada yada and we're fussing at each other again, so I
don't have to tell him the sadnesses, little, maybe, but not to me of
my own life, like the only time I saw stars for real was when Kenny
Buckport flattened me on the stair well one afternoon when school
was letting out cause I dared say hello to Becky (who he thinks is
his girlfriend but who is not). So four hours of practice to say hello
to her and what does it get me?, a slap upside the head. Courage is
its own reward. I know how Tim feels. He doesn't think I
understand, but I do.

 So Tim and I on the rumpled bed, this deep late Saturday
night, July 15, to be exact, and the sheet is hot and we are sweating
our usual summer sweat, so close together so far in distance, as I
touch his shoulder next to me and I trace a finger grimy, with a
ragged dirty nail (all my fingernails and toenails are like that, Tim's
too, a boy forgets about those things too until it hurts because it's
starting to be ingrown, or you half pull a finger nail off cause it
hangs on something) down it just a bit, as he looks straight ahead,
as he says, flat, listless, the fighter on the mat, no longer desirous in
any way of getting up again, "Let me tell you one thing. Don't
believe anybody. Don't believe anybody knows you're there for a
second, cause if you start figuring you have a right to your piece of
the planet too, they smell it; it's like blood to a shark, I mean no
one, guys, girls, anything at all, don't give yourself away cause
they'll drill ya and you'll know what I mean one of these days," as I
rub the small of his back, putting all my puny power into it, feeling
the bones and gristle of him, and thinking no, Tim, not one of these
days, I know now, I know how it feels to be in the school library,
and when no one's looking, who looks at me anyway?, to get one
of those old story books from the shelves, the books scrawled on
and dirty words and sex body parts drawn on them so crudely, and
those dreamy paintings, not the stupid drawings made by idiot kids,
remind me of things I never saw--princes and castles and elves, with
all those gaudy words in big bright colors, those still, after being
handled by a million tearabout kid hands, glossy covers, and you're
in there somewhere, Tim, though I don't know why or who but you
are, but, regardless, that's how it is for me.

 I think it would be nice to go get some ice cream, past the
people on the stoop, trying to get some relief from the sweat box
rooms, and the kids on the streets hanging round, trying to get
away from everything and everyone any way they know how. And
to go to Sturdy's on the corner and get some ice cream cause our
throats are dry and sandy. And also because boys don't think a lot
about eating and having food in the house and I know we gotta get
some groceries so when the welfare lady comes back she won't
depart us from ourselves, but Sturdy's seems a million years away,
impossible to walk all that distance.

 Besides, the cold ice cream only lasts a moment or two
down your throat and into your stomach, then you eat the rest, till
it's too soon gone, and it's all a painful sweet memory, the worst
kind of memory is the good kind. Best not to bother with it. Just
get an ice cream headache 'cause I eat it too fast anyway. Can't
help myself. It's all melting now, the world, like a painting held too
near a roaring fire, the colors merging, turning watery, with all the
heat roasting the night alive, with worse things promised tomorrow.
It seems as though all the buildings should be sponges that soak up
the man killing sun in the hot mercilessly blue stark summer sky,
and tosses into the night remembrances of the sun that hates our
living guts and wants to do away with us, burn us to a cinder.

 Nothing does any good, not all the men in t shirts and
dungarees, sweating on the afternoon fire escapes, reading papers,
or all the women taking care of  crying baby diaper changing on the
ironing boards, nor all the TV set chatters all over the place, all of it
discordant lines, like the clothing lines that criss cross our view of
everything, outside the buildings like it's all a piece of cloth, the
world and us and all the hard things that aren't hard at all, made
tattered and washed out, carrion for the blue vultures in the sky of a
summer day, when even the clouds look run down and timeworn,
and day and night always the smell of garbage and your own and
others' sour selves and other smells too rank to mention, where
there is no snow growing, where there is no wind harvest.

 There is only yourself, marking time, staring at a school
desk with all kinds of crap carved into it, or watching out for a
gang coming down the street so you turn the corner if you're lucky
enough to find a corner and run like hell. While in winter it's just
black gray and the snow is sad and lost, knowing far too late that it
shouldn't have fallen here, and it isn't pretty and it doesn't open
any doorways to anything but curses that the steam radiators don't
work worth an oink in this place and you huddle in cold coats and
the thickest clothes you have and you drink hot terrible tasting
coffee and you freeze instead of fry, two options, one or the other,
take your pick.

 And the snow is going away from Tim, he doesn't know it,
so I will be the snow for him, as our arms touch side to side, as I
work on the slack small muscles of his left leg, his legs are pale as
the rest of him, they are stick bird legs as are his arms equally as
bony and weak, and he can't run, he gets out of breath quickly, for
he has asthma that I have somehow so far escaped. But always, Tim
and his inhaler, Tim and his stops for rest during the day and the
night when often, he wakes up wheezing and coughing and gasping
like he's dying, rushing up through the seas of sleep, as he reaches
blindly for his inhaler and he's like an old man, and sometimes lying
in my bed next to his, I think in the light of the dim orange bulb that
sputters and clicks in feeble flickerings but does not go out for
some odd reason and in the dim moonlight coming in the large
window, I can see he has gray hair, I can see he has given up,
gotten rid of the encumbrances, like he's that little kid crying for
the hit dog and then giving up and crying no more, thinking he has
beaten the system, not knowing that's when the system has beaten
him. Giving up at seventeen is not right. Neither is giving up at 12.

 Tim has little black wiry hair on his legs that I glance at
casually which means none of my casual glances of him are casual
in the least, as I see that he has a little thread of black hair from his
navel to the top of his BVDs which are crooked at the waist now,
as I glance oh so innocently at what is in those shorts, and it looks
interesting, what's in there, for I've never seen it for real, and I
wish to touch it, I wish to show him he can trust someone, but then
I would be doing what they do to him, telling him he can trust me
and just when he does, there goes the whole ball game, and it
would be good to have the sound of a ball game on a radio
somewhere around here, or three or four radios, it would be good
to listen to the announcer getting excited at this home run or that
base steal, it would be good to hear a crowd tinny and far away
electronically cheering, so I could pretend they were cheering Tim
as he ran faster than any of the greats you would care to name, and
I think of telling Tim, let's get dressed and get some ice cream, and
we could pretend we're eating next winter in Minnesota where we
could dress bundled up on a dark drear January morning and race
the low spinning black sky to school, followed by a bowl of
steaming hot Cream of Wheat like on the TV commercials,
International Falls, the coldest place in the country the ad says, and
that would be pretty great.

 With maybe snow capped mountains in the distance and we
are in the land of frozen grass and frozen ponds, to rush through, to
skate on, to see what I think of as cold weather animals, like deer
and the elk, blowing their billowy bellows breath white at us,
animals which must be so huge and strong and majestic, like
meeting God or something, and eating right out of our hands,
before maybe eating our hands--that was a joke. I do have a sense
of humor. Honest. To be in a world that has something growing out
of it other than asphalt and poverty and getting whupped up side
the head cause you got up the courage to speak to a girl who didn't
even look at you, which is where courage takes you in this world,
what you get for your manful efforts.

 Tim next to me, my sweaty hand on his soft calf muscle,
then moving slowly seemingly without effort, though of course
trembling all the way, terrified in other words, my hand moving to
right below the BVDs opening for his left leg, feeling him warm,
feeling the blood rush, in me, in him, so I do something I've done
before, though maybe it feels different to me now, I put my head
against his chest, and I'm the winter and I'm the victory, see it in
me and only me, and I then scare myself silly by giving him just a
small baby bird kiss, right at the top of his breast bone, as I jerk my
head away--how had that kiss happened?, I didn't do it, Tim,
honest, who did that, Tim?, let's go find him and beat the hell out
of him, you hold him, I'll slug him--and I know Tim will yell at me
or cootify me or do something lame but he has his hands to the
back of my head, and one or the other, or both at the same time, in
some mock movie way that is not mocking at all, just filled with
tiredness and desperation and giving up and why not? and who's
gonna know?, we are pulled downward and find ourselves lying on
the bed he outgrew a long time ago, both of us barely hanging onto
it and we're looking at each other, not with love or anything like
that, that would be dumb. But studying each other. Seeing each
other.

 And he holds me tightly to him and he is like a hot electrical
wire. There is suddenly something more to life than the bills past
due, and the assistance program we're on, and some money every
so often from an aunt in Duluth who we never see and who might
not be an aunt at all but someone my mother knew once from
girlhood or something and we will not go to see this aunt when we
go to Minnesota that's for sure, because she makes us both angry
with her drippy syrupy little letters in scrawled blue ink on pink
paper, with perfume smells on it, always including little screw you
homilies unmeant. Tim holds me round my waist, how excellent
that feels, and puts his hands on my back and I feel the shudder of
him, and I'm thinking fast, thinking electric, cover this, make it a
joke, don't let him leave me too because of this, trying to tell him
that I will check the bus schedules and find the best cheapest way to
St. Paul, and maybe tomorrow or the day after, we'll go to the bus
station and get on that Greyhound and get out of here for good and
all...for Tim has been storing what money he can, dollar bills,
quarters and dimes and nickels, in an old big Mason jar on the
scarred kitchen counter that the ants troop back and forth on
whenever they please (Tim always gives me a curfew on school
nights--that's so embarrassing, like I'm a little kid or something,
who made him the parent?) looking for this crumb or that to take
with them on their way back into the walls or wherever they go.
But I can't get the words to work. The words are in odd bulky
shapes and won't fit through my mouth which seems to be broken
and my heart is somewhere I can't find it and this bothers me 'cause
I can't hear it beating at all, but I hear Tim's beating and that will
be enough for a kid brother to subsist on for a long time I would
think.

 And we are naked then in all of this and our legs are
together, tentatively touching, kneecaps first, then ankles, then
thighs, then we move together closer against each other, and I
think, you can trust me, but I can't say it, can't think it because
even thinking it might scare him away, might mean he will believe
I'm just playing the game with him like so many others; he says
often that he needs no one but he does and he needs someone who
will let him go to bed with them and who won't tell a soul, sure
won't tell the welfare lady, I'm not crazy, two brothers and all for
god's sake, and we are together and wrapped up and the night
suddenly turns silent, and it feels suddenly good to be hot, to be
slicked with perspiration, breathing better this way.

 And it is quiet, really and truly quiet, like all  the
pandemonium has been politely turned off. Silent like the time I got
decked by Buckport there in the stairwell, and was out like a light,
(only this happening between Tim and me is a whole lot better
feeling) seeing the stars in the swirly blackness, like someone hit a
switch, and all the kids voices and hurtful laughter, the sounds of
the street, the sounds of school and the sounds of the city and the
whole world for that matter were just clicked off, and my ears
weren't being beaten round by any of that. Just the softness of
winter, just the silence of a cold night of frost, just the little blood
beat in the back of my ears, and so beautiful, so perfectly beautifully
bell shaped, the curve of no noise. What a rare thing.

 And Tim and I are making fumbling, confusing, stumbling,
awkward as can be, love. I don't think he's ever made love before.
I certainly haven't. And it's not dirty or funny or goofy or wrong or
anything. It just is itself. It just is everything. It covers over and
makes my finger tips tingle. My scalp and my nerve endings all over
feel so--ALIVE.  We are really like one person. It's like what it
says in the Bible about that.

 And we're seeing not the dirty dingy room that is like a
mirror of all the others in the city, that passes for what people call
home. We're seeing the chalk snow falling down round us and the
blackboard sky brittle and pure and filled with tomorrow going full
throttle, and nothing wrong, they can't hurt you there or ever again.
They can't make jokes or look at you oddly and go away without
telling you why. They can't like you one minute and all of a sudden
the next they turn away, never heard of you, and you feel like a dog
that's just been sideswiped by a car, with over there on a sidewalk
somewhere, someone who tricked you once into thinking it
mattered, but they're whistling now and forgetting you and both of
you, going away going away.

 Tim and I press our hands together, flex our hands palms
together, entangling the other's fingers, what grand things I think
then, hands, and it is like he is seeing St. Paul, MN. and the cinder
track and all that vastness, in me and he kisses me on the cheeks
and on my closed eyes, hot sticky breathy hamburger and onion
smelling kisses, (we had hamburgers at a stand earlier today) as if
all that he had held in for so long is here for me now, and it's no
pretend, and if he messes up, it's his brother who will won't rag
him for it. So it's no wishing will make it so, or maybe it is, for I've
been wishing for a while, and when we are through and panting and
running with sweat, we use our hands to explore slowly, tiredly,
sadly fulfilled, each other for a time. I get up for a moment, to
move my bed, cot more like it, right next to his and I lie on it and
hold my arms to him into which he comes, rapture at that, and there
will be no gap between us, nothing like what he has experienced
and has warned me over and over about, and I touch my fingers to
his chest and I reach between his legs and it is good to feel it, still
erect even though we have just made love.

 And the air doesn't smell hot anymore. It doesn't smell
defeated and ashamed anymore. It doesn't smell of  the left over
tangs of refried beans and spoiled meat and sweaty cabbage still
ghost cooking in the sluggish air down the hall or somewhere; it
smells instead of pine needles and snow falling laughing on us and
he puts his hand on my buttocks and he squeezes and we are ready
again, as I start to say something, I've no idea what, as I strain my
neck upward, and look down at him at the same time, and he has
his eyes closed, he looks so content, oh please make him content
forever, make him happy forever, as my legs are around his and he
wiggles against me like he's a little boy again, as I move up and
down next to him, onto him, my thing there I mean, and I'm four
again and riding one of those mechanical horses that, for a dime,
goes up and down and you go up and down yourself, to pretend,
and hold to the reins and I see St. Paul or International Falls just
ahead of us, waiting but not taunting, just inside us, and bus tickets
soon in our hands, as we are already traveling down the blue and
red veined maps of the country that we will be plotting our journey
on. Right now, those map crooked curvy story book lines are the
heavy veins in Tim's arms and hands I trace carefully, almost
studiously, in our orangey brown shadowy hot room world, but it
seems tonight, now, the shadows bunched in the upper corners of
our room are not as malignant or as thick as they once were.

 I put my head again to Tim's chest, and I mumble
something like "eat this, Buckport, you and your big time girlie
friend who won't give you the time of day, you little weasel," and I
laugh softly, getting a dribble of spittle on the left side of my
brother's neck, who does not bother to wipe the saliva off. Then in
snow banks of peace, we drift to sleep, and are curled together into
each other, to stay like that until morning, (Tim didn't have an
asthma attack or a bad dream to wake me up at least, all night
long--I shall take my bows now ladies and gentlemen, my pleasure)
when the soggy heat and wilted sheet and the consuming sun
through our window and the noise of the city on full alert, woke us
once more to reality. We hold for a time. We don't talk. We know
so many things we didn't before it happened last night. We hold to
those memories, please don't let them hurt us and make for another
bite of soul to be lopped off.

 We hold to time. We'll get through this. We'll make it. I
look at Tim's eyes and there is snow and winter and a muffled with
cold white spangly diamonds cinder track in his imagination, in his
vision again. He asks me if I would like to come to St. Paul with
him. I nod slowly, letting him get used to the idea, being respectful
that he has finally considered letting me into his deepest dreams, as
I tried desperately not to blow it or be a giggly kid about it, though
that was tough to do.

 As we pull away, my flesh stuck to his, adhering, like
Scotch tape, then we are separated as our one body becomes two.
How curious and empty and bereft, that feeling. But not for much
longer. Not for long at all. Now that he knows his dream is mine
too. And we can get off these mean streets, for both of us, me and
him, I'm in the equation after all, and we both--key word--both--
have something to look forward to. And he will take me with him
when he goes. It looks like I'm really that step ladder to the top of
the world for him, after all. One that I shall climb with him and
leave all this behind us.

 YES!

				  the end