Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 15:16:40 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: masturbation "The October Stars"

			    "The October Stars"

				    by

			      Timothy Stilman


"I've got me a dream/ A beautiful dream/And that's what makes
me a man"

Hal David



 He loved the stars most of all.

 He lay in a field of them this night, late, October 1, 2001.
He was 13. He would be in space soon. He floated through it now.
It was not his fault that an entire world and all the beings on it
floated with him. He was singular. And believed there were great
massive ancient beyond all counting civilizations up there--in
unimaginable shapes and colors, made from materials that not the
sharpest most dream laden eyes on Earth had ever or could ever
dream so.

 The world was end of summer. Summer over with as dust
and pollen from butterfly wings gone caught in memory of
someone else. Not him, for he did not like that season. But this
one. Out lying on the top of a cold blue marble. Every part, inner
and outer, of a cold blue marble was right side up, even if
everyone else thought it was pointing toward the bottom always.
Not this boy who was naked and whose body was a space ship
primed in the primal darkness. The caves of sexuality in him like
the caves of space all round him virgin to other's human eyes and
hands and the touch of a heart beating somewhere.

 But not here. Not for him. Only the heart up there, heard
in the cold wind blowing. Felt in his hands at his scrotum as he
lay in the fields beyond his house. The pulse of him beat there in
him. As ancient as time before it existed as it was now. He was
thin and short and long blond of hair. He was a mirror of
whatever the stars wanted to do with him. And though he did not
believe it, he was arrogant at times, this wistful boy, to think the
stars waited for him. Up there on the silvery silk sky way that
would take him to them.

 Summer had died and Fall had been born and in the
borning there were the leaves disengaged from the trees. The
season of poetry had come again.  Oh thank you. You've not
forgotten me, the boy thought. Some leaves already were turning
golden crisp brown here and now. He was on his back on the
going brown grass. There was the susurration of dreams blowing
around him and eddying on him. He was electric. A golden glow
to light up the shiny bright beginning of the 21st century. A
century that had the need of a boy like him. Smart and good in
school. A track runner who excelled in that. Long, blowing body
in the breezes as he ran with grace and self-containment round the
circular cinder path that looped round the football field. And the
arches of the boy. The light bulbs inside that said Christmas tree
lights. The limber qualities of the boy and the ladders inside that
he walked up boldly on October nights most especially and saw
the heralding of all that was to be.

 In the magical days. The grass tickled his back and his
buttocks. His hands were round his pea small balls. His penis was
three inches, hard. His eyes were blue as the sea. He was in love.
He felt swoony and drifty. He felt as though he was already a
Nomad in space. All the glass planets. All the planets that were
filled with the mixtures of airless breath that only he could linger
in and drink deeply with his lungs. They called him names in
school. Girly boy. Limp wrist. Other things he did not like to
remember. So he lay peaceful in the center of the clock of all
creation this night. This night of the first breeze of Autumn. He
lay there and he conjured. For he was brave enough to take on the
blackness of space in order to get to the snow balls of stars and
the colors and majesties of planets where there were solar winds
and fire ball nights and molten mountains that turned into lava of
larvae of electric discharges that crunched deeply into red as
blood soil on which there were great black husks of for always
lost history not of this Earth that  he could bounce from, and go
sailing to the iced hallucinogenic colored rings that ground round
Saturn on which he would fearlessly skate. He just knew he
would. And all of it, even the molten portions, made of winter and
lingering to the coldness. Lingering to the frozen fingers of boys
on milk ladles on farms everywhere of winter morning patinas.

 He was brave enough to be sling shot out into space. Were
the other kids? The bulkier ones? The more handsome ones? The
football stars? Who needed this little sea of oxygen in which to
stay alive. How weak their strength really was. But he was
different. He had to, just had to be. And in the dark brine of air,
with the moon full and Halloween at the end of the month with
the breath all caught up and boxed in behind masks, and witches
flying their broom sticks cross the yellow moon of midnight in the
souls of children everywhere, souls that saw fear and countered it
with nervous laughter, but he saw not the bones of the dead or the
impossible to be so they probably were. He saw the bones of life
incarnate shining blink bright in the sky. He saw what he was able
to see of the immensity of it all. And there were no masks for
him. For the stars whispered his name. Even in the day time, the
stars kept watch over him. He felt linked to them as though he
were a marionette on strings that they controlled.

 Not to make him an automaton like most everyone around
him seemed to be. But to make him aware of himself. To make
him aware that soon he would start shooting something out of his
penis other than little sighs. Soon his body would develop to more
than it was now. Soon he would grow taller and the dignity would
be left behind as though it were the first stage of the space craft
that was him to disengage and to float in the black velvet to Earth
orbit to be caught in it, and circle with it, until that once part of
him disintegrated and fell and burned up and was never meant to
be again. Not even the memory of it. He felt himself a Roman
candle. He would not be able to stop the trajectory. And the candy
stick of his that would grow. And the voice of his that would
develop. He was on the verge now. Before the end of this year
was up he would look at least a bit different than he did now. And
by the end of school next year he might even not be recognizable
to himself.

 So he had to go to space. He had to go to the stars. He had
to dwell among them. There where there was no brain fever.
Where there was time enough. Where all the rituals of body and
mind and society and tradition were off. No bets. New card games
each moment and no one knew what was to happen next, least of
all, he.

 It was not sacrilegious to put the cathedral of boy in the
cathedral of space, he believed. What grander gift could each of
them give the other but themselves? He was a grain of sand.
Come to the wrong planet from the leaves of outer space. He had
been misnumbered, misnamed, misplaced. To his mother he was
a burden. Now especially that his father had left. To his school
and his church he was a joke. A cliche. An outcast. Stars, won't
you hide me? To himself, he was immensely full of wander lust.
He wanted to touch the candles up there in space. He wanted "to
bite the stars." He wanted an end to illusory freedom. He wanted
to be young forever. And he dreamed of his penis growing past its
dimensions of now and the dimensions it would ever have, to be a
huge stalactite bursting up from him. Pink and strong and marble
veined with blue and impressive. He wanted to somehow move it
from himself and climb up it to the planets and be away from this
place for good and all.

 He was still enough of a child to hide somewhere in his
honeycomb brain, though he would be embarrassed to admit it to
anyone, especially himself, the hope that when he touched down
on Mars there just might be that giant bat rat spider monster like
from the old science fiction movie. And there might be mental
rivers of gold somewhere up there where thoughts were
everything. Where he would gain the knowledge of all the gods
and all the beings and all the universes there could ever have
been. He would be so wise that he would answer every question
precisely and he would be loved. Even he would be loved.

 For in all his life, knowledge had been the only thing on
this planet that he had loved that gave him return full measure. He
was a boy weak of body and given to chest colds. He was quite
sure he would receive a doozy of a chest cold from being out here
unclothed in the chill night air. For he always did receive colds
for this reason, among many others. But that was the price. It felt
like, those sicknesses, winter burning bright inside him. Making
him all jangly and on the edge of things. He liked to think some
day soon he would use that jangly phone ringing feeling on the
edge of the table, from the inside of him, to make that leap to the
Andromeda galaxy. For that was where he would like to go first.
He dearly loved the name Andromeda.  Derived from a character
in Greek mythology,  Andromeda, who had married Perseus after
he rescued her from a sea monster. This world, the boy knew, was
his own sea monster. Rescue me! And I shall marry you. How
strong and brave of sound it was. How much he would like to be
that. To form a constellation and look at Earth down there far
below, safe within the cupped hands of his keeping.

 The boy was weak of eye. He wore thick lenses in his
round glasses. He had chosen that style last year, much to his
mother's distress because of their financial straits, but he had
talked her into it, since he needed new ones. He chose those kind,
because he had fallen in love with the Harry Potter books, and if
truth were known, he had fallen in love with Harry Potter, who
wore that style. We will greet the sun and fly on parabolas of
space and tilt at time as Quixote tilted at windmills, thinking them
dragons. But the time we tilt at, you and me, Harry, will not be
windmills or illusions of dust in the red vapor trails of jets
slashing across mid July skies in all that heat and bodily
immobility. For the dragons we tilt at will tilt back at us and we
and the dragons of space will be most real indeed.

 He had discovered that he excelled, as he excelled at most
everything, in the art of masturbation. He loved the long
languorous feelings it gave him. Like there were winter stalks of
wheat inside all of him growing and never topping off till he said
yes. That were proud against the background of the gray skies and
leafless shivery black skeleton trees of January. Not there for
anything really utilitarian. Just reminders of yesterdays and the
already foot prints of tomorrows. Tall and strong and young
against the Earth flesh of limitless numbers of fields lined up
together, handkerchiefs of farm land stretched out linked with
each other, as if grounds of dominoes were holding hands. His
penis wheat stalks against a horizon that cuts off sharp and clear
and soon. He pushed his small penis to the sky. He whispered his
incantations. He felt the all of him. The tightness of his stomach.
His legs spread out. He raised his torso and he felt his buttocks
free of the grass that was not tickling him now save in memory.

 The boy moved and gyrated slowly and then fast. Gently.
Then quickly. He felt he was glass. He touched one hand to his
left nipple and his body cantilevered down to the ground again.
He felt the canting inside himself. And he felt the canting of the
night sky so close and so distant up ahead. He would ride the
silver steed of dreams up there. Up to the mountains of forever.
Up to the mountains where the air was thin and then non existent.
But his lungs had breathed for a good long time. They would take
the memory of oxygen with them. And they would breathe on the
dream of air. Until he stepped off what he used to be, where he
used to be, entirely, and learned how to exist in a new strange
alien way. Such a good word "alien." Such a world filled with
flower boxes of mysteries and enchantments and enticements.

 Like all boys, he believed that he had been meant for
somewhere else. He believed that the life he lived, not the life he
wanted to live at all, was not a burden shared by another human
being in the world. They were of a piece, to his eyes, with the
world in which they shored up and worked with and developed
and gave time and sagacity to. They had in short "learned how to
do it." He had not and never would. He was studious and he was
an excellent track runner. And he had some friends. But mostly,
and even in all the things in which he excelled, he felt
too--different. In science class, they were all the time looking
through microscopes. At cells of peaches. At dust and motes and
insects and slides of slices of frogs and tadpoles and salamanders.
He hated doing this. For the world was already too small. The
atoms were needed of course, though he knew splitting them had
caused holy hell all over the world and was bound to cause more
holy hell sooner or later (by then he hoped to be zipping about the
ancient dead alive stars). But he didn't want to see small things
made even smaller. Components of things small already he did
not want to look at with one eye closed and the other eye going
down further and further the tunnels of life until death stepped out
to meet him.

 He wanted to look through a telescope. He wanted to be
expanded like a huge flower dropped upward into that massive
Lilly pond where the laws of Earth science didn't apply. Where
the box of crayons known as reality and immutable logic and all
the names of Latin priceless heritage of old thought and "proven"
conjecture, all the words of Galileo and Newton and Einstein and
physics, were turned over, and the crayons all spilled out and
made marks as they fell, hysterically, on the walls of
space--marks that were the true graffiti of how it all really was,
thou learned men and science and thou foolish men of religious
bunkum, to thus align science and fairy tale religion together and
show the fallacies of both. The little minds of little men and
women who thought they knew so very much but who knew
literally nothing at all.

 All of this was to him supremely sexual. The moon frosted
his body. His hands pulled at his penis. It felt warm and it was so
hard and he loved the way it moved in his hands without his
having to move it himself. He loved the way his balls would
tighten up so to his body, almost going back in the cavity from
which they had descended. One testicle, the left one, had only
descended last year--finally. His mother had been frantic about
what she called "his deformity," and had weepily blamed herself
as she blamed herself for everything. Making it clear that she
blamed her son really for everything.

 She had taken him to the doctor's over and again, to
remedy this terrible tragedy. The doctor had tried to assure her it
was normal, that the testicle would descend soon. And then
sometime or other--you would think this would have been made
aware to the boy at the exact moment it happened--a  convocation
of bells and drums--the testicle had come out of hiding and
suddenly, one night, the boy taking down his pajama bottoms in
his safely locked little bedroom, had been rubbing away, and as
usual felt his right ball, his single lonely right ball, and then, his
hand encountering something new--out of place, disjointed, an
addition there, fabric of boy all of a happy change (for he had
been worried too) with this little left nut finally there, against it's
fellow and he felt as complete as he would ever feel as a boy.
When he told his mother, vaguely, just enough, so she would quit
worrying and taking him to the doctor which was so highly
embarrassing, he gave relief to her and himself. This was one less
thing she could blame on him.

 And the stars seemed even closer for some reason, with
the ball's descent. The balance finally his. He, on this night of
October 1, played his body like a musical instrument. All of him
was of a piece. All of him was a magical stitch of the same gifted
garment. And his magician's wand, of course, was his penis. He
loved the sound of the word "penis." It was almost as good as the
word "Andromeda."  "Penis" though, was a private somewhat
secret word. It had the thread of boy hood throughout it. It was his
own. It could perform these tricks with his hands assisting or not.
He was a boy magician of masturbation. The silvery arcs in him
he felt at these times were of the same dream material the ships of
other beings used to sail through in their own wanderlust in the
star fields in which he was supine no longer. But sitting up and
looking down at his smooth crotch and legs and chest.

 He worked himself. It was a bridge, his penis. It was a
bridge that was so caught in him, that was of him, that would be
more than him sooner, and was more than himself now. The life
of it. The sperm it would ignite, please, please hurry, would be
filled to the brim with life. He dwelled in imagining that first
eruption, and how he longed for it to happen, and was always
disappointed when it didn't, for it classified him still as a little
boy--AND HE WAS NOT!, but when it happened, he wanted the
stars to shoot from it. He wanted a new sky and a new heaven that
was not laced with do's and don't's and threats of cosmic
Armageddon. But something that would explode from him to the
vast up there that would be filled with wonder and with joy and
with love like he had never experienced here on Earth. Thinking
everyone else had experienced it but he. Though of course as with
many things, he was quite wrong about that. If only he knew.

 The wind blew cold and the moon made him coated silver
sugar, like Tony the Tiger's frosted flake. It made him elf and
sprite and faun and imp and happiness and giggling and rubbing
his dick hard with his left hand, for he was left handed, which was
the first difference he noticed about himself. All the school desks
were made with right handers in mind. A teacher tried to make
him right handed. He tried his best but could not. He remembered
how the other children laughed at him. And now children said he
was too pretty to be a boy. That he looked more like a girl. He
wanted to scream at them, do you know what that makes a boy
feel like?, do you know how much that hurts?, you can't possibly.
But he didn't. For he was polite and tried to stay neutral about
everything. Except in his bedroom, or when he escaped his house
and ran here to lie in October countries. Where he explored
himself and put his hands to his hard on, yes, his hard on, no one
might believe it, but he was as sex crazy as the next boy, damn
them for their little faith in him, and their tiny almost non existent
imaginations that could only see football days for sexual prowess.
Good boys even have sex drives. Especially good boys.

 For young astronauts dream of sex and want everything
about it just like everybody else. And now he rubbed himself and
his penis arched and it trembled. His balls felt so tight like they
would almost burst. His penis tickled like crazy. It itched at the
head like the nose cone of a rocket ship powered by a Roman
candle about to thrust its trajectory into deep space, then the
candle itself falling by the way side and drifting, gone, (that
would be the hardest thing to accept, he believed, and hoped he
would not have to, in all the transformations he was to undergo on
his journeys) as the ship proper drifted alone in space and on this
ship was this boy and he was naked to the entities of everything.

 His candle of penis ready to pop. His naked vulnerability
out there already floating in the field of stars. Come to be
something and someone. Come to be better than anyone had ever
been before. He heard the horse hooves clattering on the opposite
side of the glass of space. He heard the horse hooves clattering
inside his glass body. He felt the motors of his penis and scrotum
and his crotch and abdomen begin to burn, begin to turn over. The
clicks and the unlocking of the lock. The tumblers falling into
place. Making him a spectral boy. A boy who was sex. A boy who
was all hard on. And then he rubbed that last time. And he felt his
body giving up itself. Giving up, in pleasure and permission and
home up at the top of the world and then gestation from the top of
that world to the top of creation and then perhaps, oh yes,
perhaps, even further still.

 He let the waves of space flow through him as he eased
back, and lay down again to his temporary cold brown grass
home. He felt that intense wicked glowing fulfillment in him. And
he was so grateful to be a boy. So grateful to be young. And not to
think of tomorrow the way it is thought of on this planet.
Tomorrow for him, as the doors in his body throbbed, and blew
open and closed again, and his penis squirmed still with glee, was
up there, where tomorrows are measured differently. And he lay,
perspiring a bit in the cold, feeling his chest start to seize with
sickness, but he was prepared for it, as always, the payment for
this singular time of his. He put his hand on his bony stair step
ribbed chest that was breathing hard. He closed his eyes, and felt
the rapture of earth life ending and star shine life beginning. He
felt distant. Floating. He would look upward soon in a minute or
two and find himself sailing on his new voyage that put that of
Columbus and even Neil Armstrong's first step for mankind on
the Moon, in shadow forever. He held to his penis and he felt
deliciously like a berry on a summer tree about to be picked in an
autumn land.

 And he lay there, body thrust outward, for a few minutes
more, before he grudgingly put his clothes back on and headed
home that was not home, where he would lie in bed and look up
at the stars. No matter there was the ceiling and roof between him
and them. He saw them anyway, clear as a bell. He thought yet
again of the title of a science fiction novel he had recently read at
the school library--"The Lights in the Sky Are Stars." He loved
that title as he loved the book. It was about a man who ached with
all that was in him to go to the stars, but who was, for all his
trying so desperately hard, for all his vastness of mind and spirit,
allowed only to be broken by tragedy.

 Only and always the imagination and rhymes of thought to
go into space, but not to be there actually. The writers, the
dreamers. The boy knew it would be far different for him. When
bad things encompassed the boy during the day, and he was sadly
happy for what he was, and what he would be, he would hide in
quotations he loved from his favorite books. But mostly now he
hid in that particular title. It said everything. It said what it was all
about. What was up there. What was inside him. It gave him
comfort. I'll make it for you, he told the man in the book. I'll
make it for you and you will come with me. I will not forget you.
You will join Harry and me on our grand cosmic tour. Oh, the
sights we'll see. That will make everything that has come before
worthwhile. All the obstacles. All the cinder paths run and the
hurdles jumped over. All the falls we've taken. The skinned
burned knees and the whole of it.

 And the title of the book was balm to the wounds. And it
gave him courage. To always remember, the simplicity, the
beauty, the eloquence of the words and all the wonder and magic
in them--"The Lights in the Sky Are Stars."

(in memory of Fredric Brown)

				    end