Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 12:27:11 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: M/M  young friends "Jimmy--at 13"

			      "Jimmy--At 13"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


  The devil's in the dawn. Midnight is high noon on Summer
Street. I was 10 and a member of the human race. Much to my
chagrin. I had discovered I existed. That the next corner I turned, I
would not be on the red sands of John Carter Mars. I don't think I
ever forgave them for that. For placing bones in my body. For making
an armature of musculature that made sure my eyes opened and I saw
everything. I loved him from the moment. And knew it. There were
moments now. They were strung along like sun sweat sweet corn
kernel golden to bursting beads. I would have to follow them bead to
bead for all the rest of my days.

 And it was hot. It was mid July. The little town around me
baked. The farmers were in the middle of a draught. And so were we.
So Monday came and lowered the sweat stained blue sky down to me.
As though I needed it. I had Jimmy in my eyes. He was all the sky, all
the roof, the world would ever need. And I sitting on my green flake
painted front porch swing, lazily with the toes of my sneakers pushing
myself back and forth. Sneaking sidelong glances at Jimmy's
grandmother's house across the street. Ginger bread and Hansel and
Gretel. So Jimmy tell me, what happens when I pump it up this way.
Look at the comma become a semi-colon become an exclamation
point! Imagine me, here, suddenly real, damn you. And you over there
in your sleepy bed so late of a summer morning with the sun shining
down carnival tents at us to be in and perform our wondrous magic.

 I loved Jimmy. I said it aloud. I loved him. And I would go
through swamps that were bejeweled with heat and mist and the kind
of pain I felt in my stomach last night or early morning when it came.
When I knew. Cause if I hadn't known, none of it would have made
sense. Then the circuses would have continued. Probably for forever.
But I knew. And that meant the end of everything. I felt the heat
sweat in my armpits. My shirt was already damp, even though I had
been sitting out here for only fifteen minutes or so. Waiting for
Jimmy to halloo me from that house of brown concrete and stone and
flower beds and a tomato patch in the back yard. All the green little
stamps of summer morning that we ran through in those years. Falling
on our backs. Looking up at the sun. And seeing--midnight in it.
Seeing devils dancing on the backs of house flies and the tiny gnats
and ants we put from the green lawns to our fingers. With which,
these little insects, we conjured.

 We were boys. He was not me. I was not him. And that
seemed unfair. There was the oppressive day already at me. Like
wings of songs I would never be bright enough to write, but which
hung like sacks of splendor right behind my eyeballs. Waiting for
someone to see. To call the sea monster up inside me and let the roar
out. The roar that a boy makes when he stakes a claim to life. And in
that exact moment, sees it forever gone from him. The territory of
Jimmy. The land of fabled North winds. The enchantment of his
strong large hands with the perfectly square fingernails. The eyes that
told monsters to come and get me as we lay on the heart of summer
grass and felt the pulse of the earth brightly vibrant underneath us.

 To be saved by my friend. Of the short body. Of the body that
was stronger than mine. That was more sure of itself than mine. The
body I now knew I had. And this body fell about me, the real me, like
a sack of wet cement, just--lumping there--in the swing--desultorily
pushing itself back and forth. While birds sang somewhere. Where
my ears heard Jimmy turning over in his sleep. In his only wearing
Jockey shorts sleep. Because this is my world and I will tell it my
way. And I looked down at my summer brown shorts, and the bit of a
belly of pink hanging over them and my belt. At my little package
that was raised up like a dinosaur bone that wanted plucking and
tending to. All Easter in me right down South there. Christ on the
cross. Christ on the rise.

 And Jimmy my Mount of Olives. Or my Skull Mounded
Cross. Much trouble in my short haired skull encased brain. Much
need to just go over there, to open the falling down flaked white
picket fence, to climb that little mound of dirt to it, and to open the
fence, and to start again, and to remember the street between us was
for sea monsters to sweep me up and eat me alive--please do so! Then
back to my green swing on my blue porch. To start all over again.
With summer breezes laughing at me like chocolate laughs in the
stomach as it lets you know with that sick sweet sad heavy
feeling--we've nailed you again, got you in our clutches, seduced you
into making us parts of you, and let's just see how many pounds you
put on now that you can never sweat off. And then back to the trek,
the distance of worlds, to cross to his grandmother's house.  Film
frames run forward and backward. Courage and cowardice. Up that
gray sidewalk. Past the yard where we rolled in summer green that
forever stained us, and shot cap pistol derringers at each other, all
silver in the sunlight. Then up the chocolate shadow covered porch
steps, three huge concrete slabs. To the porch that was cool in the
great gingerbread shadows of the heavy roof and its twists and turns
that covered it.

 To go to the door and knock on the fist head of madness. To
have his grandmother, a small knotty hunchbacked broken woman
who was always wearing a hairnet and whose head bent over and who
had eyes that always touched the ground because osteoporosis had
claimed her as its victim, therefore, to save herself, she always made
sure Jimmy and his friend, that would be me, drank lots of milk.
Cause you never know when the terrible magic might rub off. Either
on her. Or on us. To go into that little cool dark dogleg of a hall and
to say, "Jimmy, you is my woman." And to rush. To gather his
suntanned arms around me. There we would stand on the bare
polished wooden floor. The dark living room. Hushed. Crushing thick
furniture and dark walls. The window beside us with the blinds
mostly closed, permitting broken back ladders of the sun to fall on us
in different sized stripes. To poke my bare chest against his bare
chest. Slick and hot and ready with nerves, mine, out on stalks,
pushing into him. Against his glaze. His fire stoked shadowing into
me. To take him like all the men in all the pirate movies kept taking
all the women. Movies he loved, save for the mush stuff, when he
would unsaddle from the seat and head for the candy bar and the
Coke machine. While I sat there alone. A blob of boy. Not yet me. In
stunned, "why not me too?" Fearing he would not come back. But he
always would. To share his candy bar and Coke with me. Always.
 Not always. Not much longer. Not with me. That today
became a cohesive whole. And I looked poisoned darts over at that
house. The house that still had a fireplace and was so cozy warm in
the living room on a cold winter's day or night. Bells rung in me. I
had ears. Thongs rushed at me and told me with their mad villager
signs I was WRONG WRONG WRONG. I had eyes. I had a dick. I
too. Even so. And I had been handling it for about a year now.
Thwong! it would stand up at the most importune times. Once I know
as Jimmy and I sat on the vinyl couch at my house, as we watched
Sivad introduce the Saturday horror night movie, my dick went tent
pole. And Jimmy's eyes, his head, turned in my direction, in the
middle of delivering a joke about the idiot horror show host and his
stupid hearse, turned away from me. Plunked away from me. Turned
fast on its motor bearing break neck as he had been scanning me.
Nothing in particular. Just even his eyes had to be somewhere. As
they canvassed my shorts and there popped Eggbert because I had
named it that. Just stood up straight there in its small glory.

 Like a dog and pony show was ready to come to the big top
that was me cause I put up the pole. And like the latter day movie
said, to paraphrase, if you put it straight up, Jimmy will come. And it
was nice like sitting in warm bath water. Excuses piled into my head
like giant playing cards. Bright and red and green and purple like
bruises. Jimmy sat like a bruise beside me. Jimmy sat there with his
damned good looking face and his damned arms by his side, one hand
in his lap, right there next to Shangri La. And I was embarrassed. And
I was defiant. And I was not me. So that was okay to be. I thought of
pulling my shorts down. Or opening my fly. How long would he sit
there like an idiot, staring at "The House on Haunted Hill" while I
stroked away? Could he? I giggled, but kept it to myself. Would his
own little or not so little house rise too?

 It didn't matter. He couldn't see me. Not then, at least. But
now I was real. Now I filled a certain place in the air. And the
memory of my embarrassing him with my callous replay of a million
sprocketed film showings in the private screening room of my
masturbatory delight, singular and firm and you should have been
there, Jimbo, for real, was off the projector, touched with fire and
burned for good. Cause it was all for you. But all of that deflated. The
living room deflated. Jim turned into a plant that broke from its pot
and shrank down to the earth and then through the floorboards of the
living room a million miles deep. And I was just me back in memory
with a dick that was no great shakes. Though shaking it did make me
feel better. The thing was, the minute I knew I was something at least,
that great memory fell through a hole in my brain like a handkerchief
being pulled through a hole in a magician's hat.

 Wet sand. In a sea that was not meant to be. Damn. Jimmy
and his Northern accent. Jimmy who rode the train back home at the
end of the summer to his parents' house in Detroit--or as said here,
Deee-troit. Jimmy with the train smoke in his hair and the railway
path cinders in his clothes. As I visited his grandmother some nights
pretending that he was still there. Still sitting beside me on that
dilapidated mohair couch, where you had to turn your head to see the
TV that was at the right end of it. Jimmy who caught me before I fell.
Who told me in certain difficult to ascertain ways that I would fall.
But not what would fall out of me. And that would be him.

 I had birthed him this morning when I woke up and felt the
night grabbing at me by the fistful. I had made him real. He was two
years older than me. He knew what real was. He knew what hayrides
were and girls falling asleep late night on one of those rides.
Pretending girls falling to pretend sleep next to that muscle I ached to
make sure. That perhaps they did make sore from fun in their eyes
and his joy twinkle as he told me. So he was real. And he didn't want
to be that alone. As a certain Plastic Man arm reached this early dark
morning from his bedroom to mine. Loosening me from my
moorings. Gooney laughter woke me up. And the gooney laughter
was turned out to be mine.

 "Get me on the floor, Jimbo. Tickle me as you kneel over me.
Drive me buggy. Drive me to distraction. Give a damn. Take off my
shirt. Lower my shorts. Make me giggle. Be a little s.o.b. And make
me naked and like a little pink worm on the living room floor of my
mother's house. And find the little worm of a little worm. Designate
me. And be all the circus I will ever need.

 "Let me reach up and pull down your shorts. Let me see the
globes and pop head penis of you. Let me see what hides behind that
moat of those damned clothes. Unravel before me. Don't like it?
What's that little boy pole I see sticking out from you? Casts a nice
shadow in my memory. My memory I would like to be.

 "So there, Jimbo. So there."

 "Talking to yourself again, Barry?"

  I jumped a mile high. There was Jimmy, black shorts, bare
chest and legs and feet, standing right in front of me on the warp
boarded porch. And he was looking at me like I had lost my mind. I
hadn't known I had one before. Now I knew I did. And now I knew
that in the knowing it was lost. This is quite a cruel thing? Isn't it?
Jimmy, his arms crossed over his bare chest, his nipples like little
brown cousins from the wrong side of the tracks peeking over a
hollyhock bush that most people never knew was there. And his grin.
Straight and true. His hair brown and fairly long--one of the exotic
things about him--though one day mine would be longer--eat worms
and die over that Jimelinksi. What's the game now?

 "Termites coming out your eyeballs," he said as he milked my
heart and with his left arm shoved me and my erector set to the far
side of the swing. "Termites eating at you. And you know something.
Dontcha?"

 I know I was getting damned sick of not being able to produce
the milky delight I kept reading about in Harold Robbins novels, and
a porno mag here and there that some kid at school smuggled to the
school yard where at recess the boys would hunker down in the
shadow of an old rugged elm cross and just giggle their fannies off,
while I stood farther away from them. Listening to them telling about
something called coming, something about how they could, even
now, like their big brothers and it was white and milky and it was like
pulling the insides of you to attention. Like pajama drawstrings inside
you and just cinching them up to a farethewell. Then the rush
outward. Far better than just a little boy run through, shadow show,
pop, one two. Cause this was the real stuff. You had something to
show afterwards. To prove it, dammit.

 Thing was, I did know something. And it made the thing at
my crotch go to sleep. And it made my eyes cloud with anger. And it
made my face flush royally. The playing cards of fear and shame and
embarrassment in my head went rushing to burn and caught flames
like a house on fire that has poured the gasoline on every square inch
of it so it will no there will be no charred remains of anything.
Especially Eggbert down there. I knew. Her name was Rochelle. She
was 26 and she lived up the street. And she was our teacher last year.
And Jimmy had been porking her for two weeks now. He would tell
me. Start to tell me. To chatter proudly. Begin to begin on the quest
of words. But I always cut him off at the pass. Challenged him to a
baseball throw. He always won. Challenge him to a foot race around
the block. He always won. Challenge him to a bike ride up the tallest
hill in town. Right, again. Miss Rochelle. I wasn't even in the
contention there. This was something I saw one summer night. Maybe
right at the beginning of their affair. He naked, leaning over her frilly
lace bed, she only in bra and panties. Jimmy kissing her breasts as he
took off the bra. The odd configuration of boy and woman. His penis
sticking straight out. Long. But still a boy's. That I knew because it
had been photographed on the hot night July humid air and had been
rushed pell mell by express courier to my sleeping dreams and put
there for the duration.

 And I thought Miss Rochelle is 26. Jimmy is 13. And Lord
love a duck. How I envied both of them. There in the summer world
of no air conditioners except in restaurants and at the movie theater
where it was, the banner proudly in big bold black letters, it was
KOOL INSIDE. But to get that image, the two of them. Secrets in
secrets. Love and sex with the age barriers knocked asunder. To
know, Jimmy, before knowing. And to know all the same. Invaded.
My childhood world. Sweetly so. And that made me angrier than
ever. A boy and a woman. But it had to be Jimmy and me. And I
thought about killing her. Because unless Jimmy told me then it
wasn't true. But now he said, "I think I love her," and it was true
because he had said it. I slunk back. I breathed my last. I had thought
the way things had been going this morning that maybe I might luck
out and when he admitted it, it would not happen.

 A kid has got to have a break sometime. Other than the break
of bones. All of mine that snapped the instant he said it. I watched
him in the summer sun. He sat there strong and proud and still sure of
himself. Cause it was an act. His body inside was quivering Jello. He
had someone now. Not some girl with a skinned knee and a Band-Aid
on it. He had what I read about in novels. And I didn't have him. And
I put my arm on the back of the swing. My hand still a long way from
his shoulder. But he flicked off my non existent touch anyway. The
shadow of it. The idea of it. From my brain to his. So I was real in
there too. There was no getting over it.

 There was a radio turned on in my house. "The Swap Shop"
was on it. It was turned on low, but I could hear it anyway. Mom was
housecleaning and always listened to the radio then. Jimmy put his
hands in his lap. Hot air beat against us. We breathed of it deeply. He
seemed to shrink a little. As though he were devaluing his flower.
The flower, purple prose, she had watered and had tended and had
brought to proud crop yield. And though then I knew nothing about
sex, I remembered enough of Harold Robbins, god, where would I
have been in childhood with out him?, to know that Jimmy was
putting it in some place that seemed deeply rooted in primordial fear.
I want you in my hand, Jimmy. I want to feel it. She doesn't know
you. She's a woman. She can't begin to understand.

 Jimmy looked at me. It was like his neck was rusty. I could
hear the cogs of it slowly ratcheting his head to me. His eyes were
black as midnight. I thought of the horror stories he told me and the
devils in the mid day dust as the clothes hung out on the clothesline in
the back yard to dry from washing smelled the sweetest purest smell
there could ever be in this world, in a million life times. He was 13
and he looked far older. His smile wasn't straight this time. It was a
bit crooked. Everything seemed a bit crooked about him now. The
concrete blocks that made him up had gone off center. His body
wasn't strong and true. His dick might be even smaller than mine and
he two years older. I blushed again at this heretical thought. Though I
knew better.

 "Don't grow up," Jimmy said. Then he looked straight
forward again. Down the street, I heard the puttering of the mail
truck. "I love her. So don't grow up." Then he looked at me and there
was a desperation in his eyes. I noticed how his hairline had somehow
receded a bit and I could see the whiteness beyond his tanned sweaty
feverish looking forehead, a whiteness that, just yesterday, thick hair
had reached down for as usual and hidden. Now the seas were up for
him too. But he wasn't alone. At least not that. In the whirring of the
box fan in the bedroom window of Miss Rochelle. Okay. I looked one
night. I crept over to her house and looked in her bedroom window
and I saw something on her bed. Something like dragons fighting.
Combating each other. Blowing smoke. Whales blowing air out of
their air holes before they reached down under the surface and sank
for more mysteries to bring up and hold like jewels to the witchy
midnight moon. For a second I looked, me a shadow within a shadow.
I felt my dick hard like it had never been hard before. And then I ran
and ran home.

 "They get you. They don't let go. They love you. And they
don't care." Jimmy said as his body fell about him like a wet sack of
cement. Like mine. He, suddenly lifeless. My beautiful Jimbo doll
there in the morning sun as the mail truck came sputtering closer and
closer. Like a giant descending on us. To take Jimmy away for good,
to pillowy breasts and creamy thighs and legs that parted and opened
wide their column of strength for his penis alone. And against all
sanity, against all sensitivity, I felt my dick go hard. At the very
moment, the connect the dots broke away and fell to pieces and blew
how train scattering over the countryside cinders right at us,
pockmarking us. As a gravel truck drove by and gravel was tossed
from its open bed into the air. Like little parachuted Hail Marys
falling down round the entire world. And me the only priest about.

 Jimmy turned to me, the real me, not to the pretend me of my
dreams about us, not to that day I sprouted up with him beside me
and embarrassed him as I smiled demonically then, and thought I
could have had him though in all honesty I don't know what I would
have had, or what I would have done with it. Right here and now, on
the porch swing after he had said all he would ever say to me about
Miss Rochelle, he fell against my chest, naked to naked and he put
my arms around him in a hurry. He held to me tightly, hard, hurting
my ribs. I felt him against me as I had dreamed of it often. And it was
the saddest thing in the world, the price I would have to pay and
never stop paying, for the privilege. It was like he was sick, like
something was broken way deep inside, and knew he would never get
well again. And I put my arms around him because I thought, no, not
me who will fall. Him. He will fall. Is falling now. And there is
nothing I can do about it. As we wept into each other's shoulders.
And I begged him silently, please stay.

 Never let a hero cry on your shoulder. Nothing's ever as
frightening after that or before. It presents a line of demarcation. It
robs you of something that can never be replenished. And we need
our fears.

 I smelled the tan of him. The sudden mortality of him. The
sweat of him. The boy-ness of him. The perfume of Miss Rochelle.
The delight the first time she undressed him. Can I come too, Jimmy?
And in a heartbeat, he was pushed away from me, my arms
encompassing empty air. The postman was delivering letters at
Jimmy's Gran's house. My house would be next. Jimmy looked at
me. See me, I thought. I'm real because of you. And what the hell do
I do about it the rest of my goddam real endless life? Jimmy looked at
the postman walking across the street to here. Jimmy didn't say
anything. He got up. Turned away. And walked down the porch steps.
I was to see that often from then on.

 He said hello to the postman who nodded and said hello to
him. I turned from watching my once friend. I knew he was headed to
Miss Rochelle's house where she would unbuckle him, the summer
of him, and find the Fall waiting for her inside. That both seasons
together was what she hoped for. A single season to conquer the
other, until two were made one. But that she would only obtain each,
one on the surface, the other below it, insidious, and she not know
about the latter for a while. Which in some hail of leaves some
November up ahead would sneak into her and rush her toward old age
faster and faster. For trying to rub the summer off my friend and onto
herself.

 The postman put the mail in the box on the green front wall.
He nodded to me. I nodded back. He got in his cart and drove away,
turning the corner. I sat there for a time. Sadder than sad could
possibly ever be. Then I sighed. Heaved my wet cement self up, went
to the mailbox, opened the top of the black oblong thing, and reached
inside, to see what the world had brought me today. And all the days
to come.

				    end