Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 00:19:22 -0600
From: Tom Emerson <thomas@btl.net>
Subject: POET OF BHU BAI - NIFTY ED. FILE II
"POET OF PHU BAI" - FILE II
"What the fuck was that all about?" the private ask, dismay
rather than anger in his voice.
"You don't know?" Chuck said.
"I didn't even have time to grab the camera," the puzzled
writer replied.
"Somebody tell Sir Concord," Chuck growled, this time
friendly like.
"We've never seen them," Ed Nelson said. "None of us. Not
even one. Once I thought I saw a muzzle flash, and some movement. That's
about average.
"Well," the Army boy elaborated, "they were on the right,
starboard, that's all I can add. If they'd been brave, they'd have jumped
up five seconds earlier and stitched the cockpit, probably got two full
clips into us as we went over."
"How high were you?" Chuck asked.
"Two hundred feet," Bing said.
"Shit," everybody said.
Again the sound of rhythmic clapping, this time accompanied
by calls of speech, speech.
"They mean you, Failure-to Fly," Ch8ck grinned.
"How many are Navy?" the soldier asked.
"Over half," Ed replied,
"The hell you say," Tom muttered. Bing gestured for his ear.
"What happened yesterday is off limits for a day or two," he whispered."
"Oh," the journalist said, "I'd forgotten about that," then
slowly rose back up on his chair.
"Four score and a hundred harebrained schemes ago," he began,
"they welded Lenin in a traint, and across Germany he did roll"
With cutting torches and quaking
hands, they cut the poison free.
Sickness spread immediately.
Worse than czar, worse than king.
and now he's after Bing
It is a little thing, in a Gordian knot
A single piece of string.
A pesky nuisance, a forlorn dither
It amounts to no hill of squat
Kill it here, kill it hither,
Just kill it a little then kill it a lot.
Yeah, it's hard to figure and put together,
what with a mouth in every head;
Hippies ranting, Yippies changing,
Balls of suet, brains of lead.
But life is long, the nursing home
awaits, with millions of hours
in thousands of heads, their
souls to contemplate.
Would you rather be here, today,
now, or trade for their terminal
bed? I have a thing it would be
better to be, and that is to be quite
dead.
We could fight this in Florida,
and Texas, next, Lenin had
to be cut from his train But
it's prettier here, so let this
be the place, warm, with lots
of rain.
Blot and scrub, sand and
scrape, flush and add some
bleach. If a chisel is needed,
a chisel it is, so use every
chisel in reach.
Stop them tricky, stop them
hard, stop them in their tracks.
Ho, ho, ho, has a long way to
go, enslaving the world as his
hacks.
It may happen today, it may
happen tomorrow, but happen
it surely must. We have one
objective, from this day on;
living up to Hitler's trust.
Now don't you boo, and don't
you hiss; don't carry on at all.
He did almost the entire job,
or our job'd be ten times as tall.
This is a little thing, a nowhere
thing, we shouldn't even be
in the papers. But urban schmoes,
with lens and ink, make money
selling the vapors.
Katharine Graham, head of the
tribe, will get a president, too.
So here's to being out of there,
and with an American crew.
The private sat quietly as he had a year earlier the after
the flight school mess hall had echoed with his birthday greeting.
"He could actually be a god, you know," Chuck said to Bing.
"Sir," Tom responded, "I went to flight school in hopes of
one day being able to circumnavigate my ego in less than a week. I'd
appreciate any assistance you can render in furtherance of not adding to
the challenge."
Tense mission. "Sad Suzanne" left her holding pattern and
approached a tulies LZ with two other CH-46s.
"I'm glad they're with us," Bing said into his mic. "Misery
loves company. This outpost was called CFC, Cannon Fodder Canyon, now it's
just Charlie Fox. They like to see you come but hate to see us leave.
You'd thing they were our lovers, with that attitude, wouldn't you."
"That would be misguided, I can tell," Tom noted.
"No one here is exactly friendly," the pilot said. "Some of
our troops would kills us happily as the V.C. would, if they thought it
would get them out of the place."
"Gran always appreciated guests with a sense of departure,
remember?" Tom laughed.
"Well sure," Bing responded, "but after they'd stayed for
tea."
"Bet the popovers are like lead," the private observed.
"And her sandwiches," Bing mused on, "crusts cut off the
bread and the cucumbers peeled and I e cold. Don't ever tell anyone the
finer things in life aren't all tits and ass."
"Where I went to school," Tom responded, "that was about the
size of it. You guys were at least all New Englanders. I ended up
spending ten years just outside New York, and summers on the Cape and
holidays in Concord. Odd man out in either venue, with everyone trying to
pretend it didn't matter, in Massachusetts, and everyone on Long Island
pretty sure nothing else did matter."
"Probably a good idea to know them both, vis-a-vis
writing," the older cousin responded.
"Good point," Tom laughed.
"Something's happening at our ten o'clock, about seventy
meters," Bing said tersely. "We've got enough ammo to start a store, so
why don't you empty a could of clips. Fire about once a second. Keep
their heads down."
"Sorry cuz," the private said, "it's a court martial offence
for an information officer to handle a weapon."
"You are kidding, aren't you?" the pilot said.
"Not exactly," the writer replied, hoisting the heavy camera
to his shoulder and training it out the smaller port door of the descending
helo. "Your duty is to record, not participate. Like in nature
photography and most documentaries. You're not to be there in any sense at
any time. Medics have the same code. They start lines, they don't shoot.
Sharpens focus."
"Whatever," the major responded, now piloting the last
quarter mile of the steep approach.
"Sorry," was all the private could think of to respond.
Looking out the hatch, and aft, he could see a Phantom coming in hard.
With a few twists of his fingers he adjusted the camera, aiming it ahead of
the helicopter and focusing carefully on an out-of-place patch of banana
leaves. A sudden flash and fireball. The Phantom shooting high
explosives. Bodies in black pajamas blew fifty feet in air, a dozen or
more conical hats adding to the macabre nature of the Navy's work. A dozen
more missiles and there was nothing left to shoot at, the jet screamed by
fifty meters away, then pulled into a steep climb. Meantime, the first two
`46s had loaded departing Marines in a few seconds, and were lumbering
clear of the LZ.
"Christ Bing," Tom said into his mic, "I hate to admit it,
but the Army's right. I got that perfect, and not only got it, but I was
shooting at a hundred frames a second. Slow motion."
"Well," Bing laughed, easing the ship back into its landing
flare, "it doesn't count for Rick and me. Dead V.C. we've seen, and those
poor suckers were dead on their way up."
"Communism in its day of glory," Tom allowed, setting down
the camera and perching between the pilots' seats. Although he'd flunked
out of flight school, he had a hundred hours in light trainers and, at
about half that hour level, had absorbed -- the touch -- which amounted to
skating the aircraft gently onto the ground at about the speed of a fast
walk rather than bringing it to a grinding, fuel wasting, time wasting,
high-wear-and-tear hover, then lowering it the last two or three feet.
Some pilots have the touch, some don't; it's more instinctive than learned.
Bing didn't He bled off speed then rotated the heavy ship forward, parallel
to the ground, and began lowering it onto its wheels.
All three saw it at the same moment. At the two-o'clock
position it too flight, probably torn loose by the hard arrivals and fast
departures of the preceding helos. A one-each, as they say in the
military, poncho, which doubles as half a pup tent. Heavy canvas, thick
rubber, manufactured to armed-forces standards. Heavy, yet flying;
regrettably, not up-up-and-away. Up, probably do to local terrain
affecting the heavy rotor wash of the hovering CH-46. Up fifty feet, then
caught in the vortex above the thumping blades. Down. WHAP!! Seven
hundred miles and hour WHAP! The ship went off like a tuning fork struck
by a martial artist. KA-WANG-WANG-WANG-WANg-WAng-Wang-wang - wang!
Fifteen seconds as "Sad Suzanne" fully grounded on her wheels. Bing's fist
screamed in an arc, smashing against the instrument panel. The ship
settled fully and Rick cut the power, applying the rotor brake. The blades
stopped as all exited, Hank, the crew chief sprinting to the top of the
forward rotor tower and a minute later giving a thumbs-up and crossing to
the aft tower. Again, the miracle played out; no damage. They'd have
though they imagined the whole thing, except there were the shelter-half
halves twenty feet from the nose of the ship. Hank was just giving a
circling motion as he dropped from the rear rotor mast, yes, by all means
let's start up, pull pitch, and get the fuck outta here, when the foursome
(including Shine, the door gunner) was approached by a fellow marine
holding an AR-15 at port what seemed like a very deliberate port arms.
The corporal's name was Carlos Stone. "You mother-fuckers
are staying," he declared. "We've got two hundred Cong at half a mile, and
with the four of you, twenty in all. They're close enough to get you if
you did try to leave, but that's the last thing in the world that's going
to happen."
"I hope I don't look stupid enough to argue with you, son,"
Bing smiled. "Your show, but one thing -- the mouse in the slick sleeves
is non-combatant, no matter what. Some day you'll thank me, meantime, just
think of him as god."
"That's an asshole long overdue," the young Marine spat,
crossing himself and adding: "forgive yourself father, for you have
sinned." He nodded significantly toward "Sad Suzanne" and they boarded the
silent hulk, loading themselves with the .50, ammo, and whatever came to
hand, Tom shouldering the heavy cine camera and his backpack of film.
The terrain was rugged. Hills. Relatively open. They
followed a ridge of limestone, in a minute finding the remainder of the
detachment, two on stretchers, four with slings and meaningful bandages,
ten looking fit. Thirteen against two hundred, not including the deity who
apparently didn't find it beneath his dignity to make house calls.
"Wow, this is perfect," the photographer exclaimed.
"Maybe for you," his cousin growled, "but my duty is to be on
the way somewhere else to help someone else."
"Sorry," Tom said with a grin, "I meant the light. The
shadows are bout twenty percent of what they'd be in full sunlight. Good
modeling, great color saturation, no hot spots, no hard shadows."
"With two hundred shadows approaching," Carlos Stone said,
"they don't have to be hard. They could be watermelons."
"Well," the photographer said with a frown, "even if we get
zapped, they'll find the camera and someone will know what to do with it,
so all is not lost."
Bing gave his cousin what has to be described just as a look.
"I'll bet you look at a tombstone and say, wow, a million of those would
make a mountain."
"According to my agent," the private responded, "a temple in
my honor would be a more suitable use, but a mountain, sure, I like it; has
a certain rustic connotation." As he spoke he guided the marines with a
gesture or two, soon posing them in a ragged column along the ridge behind
them. Standing off ten feet he panned slowly from the broken field to
their north to the sheltered troops, then walked slowly forward catching
each face for a few lingering seconds in close up. With a nod, the Marines
broke their tableau and took up firing positions.
"Totally mother-fucking hold your fire," Stone barked to the
men. "We're going to be here all afternoon."
Tom raised his hand as if he were in class. "Sir?" he said.
"A talking god," the corporal intoned dramatically: "Thank
you, lord!
"What, fuckhead?"
"Well," the private said, "I was thinking about it once,
something like this, you know, being in the military and all, and I was
wondering if we couldn't kind of make a game of it?
"The game is called `Shoot the Alphabet'. You pretend it's
the alphabet approaching, you know, the opposing combatants. Each man here
shoots in the area of his letter in the alphabet. Early letters take the
left, middle, the middle, and from S on, the right flank"
"Anyone here know the alphabet?" Carlos Stone interrupted.
Everyone laughed.
"Zambini?" he barked, causing the laughter to be repeated.
"Yeah," the private said, "like I'm gonna fuck up in the
presence of god."
Incoming fire begins ricocheting off the limestone
outcroppings. The corporal addressed Bing: Christ, major," he said, I
don't like this. Both our Os are laid out. I'm Corporal Stone. I mean
we're meant to fight these fuckers, not be running a slaughterhouse in Chi.
They're not even zigzagging."
"Let me tell you a quick story," Bing responded. "A helo
crew got a sniper out of a tree one time. He had a placard around his
neck. When they had it translated they found it was instructions to always
fire in front of an aircraft. The poor bastard had emptied ten clips --
twenty feet in front of the parked bird."
"I guess uniting workers doesn't make them smart," the Marine
NCO sighed.
Tom contributed a story of his own. "In special forces," he
said, "the saying goes: `Poor bastards, they've surrounded us again.'"
Stone spat. "Cock-sucker," he groaned, "I'm a church boy.
My girl let me see her bra once."
"Hope that's something you never learn to see again," Tom
said.
"Double nuts, no sauce," the young Marine groaned, "New
Englanders. Wit. Charm. Grace under pressure, ice-blue water for blood,
and always with the droll aside. Never get tired of themselves.
Taking a breath that sounded more than half like a sigh, he
added: "Two sick Os, and two Emersons. One being Marine, and the other,
U.S. Army, they must be related."
"It's the climate," Bing noted. "Five exceedingly dreary
months a year. If it wasn't a joke, you'd have to think about it."
"Yes, yes," Stone said, "a comedy team."
"And you're from...?" the major queried.
"Bangor," the boyish Marine said, no trace of sheepish grin.
"Beats the fuck out of `up bah county,'" Tom observed, "you
know, where they grow budadoes."
"Vietnam beats Aroostook County," Carlos nodded,
"specifically including Charlie Fox."
The V.C. had closed to two hundred meters. They continued
their lock-step approach Stone gave the line a quick final inspection and
ordered his men to open fire. The riflemen aimed carefully and squeezed
off a round every two or three seconds. The approaching ranks fell in
droves but kept coming. Stone held the .50 back until the enemy was
approaching an outcropping eighty meters out, then nodded at Hank. The
door gunner opened up with the heavy WHACK-WHACK gun, strafing the
outcropping and sending a hail of ricochets and shrapnel into the middle of
the V.C. force. This broke the attack, and in two minutes the field was
clear of troops, the living sheltered behind a dense tree line at two
hundred meters, the dead and wounded strewn haphazardly in their wake.
"Use the alphabet zone system on everything that isn't
vegetable or mineral," Carlos said to his men. "the best surprise is no
surprise when it comes to wounded V.C." Indeed, the surgical fire from the
balustrade terrorized a dozen prone bodies into the tree line, perhaps
eight of them making it.
"Now they're dangerous," Tom observed. "Any chance of air?"
"You saw it just as you arrived," Stone said. "They've got a
fish fry at Khe Sanh. Thousands involved. Don't call them, they'll call
us.
"As far as command knows, you've pulled us out, but then
again as far as they knew, the enemy was five miles away." He paused and
shook his head, spitting neatly into the dirt. "I mean the stone-age
morons don't even have a mortar," he mused. "Their grenades are more
dangerous to the grenador than the grenadee. All they're good at is hiding
and digging traps. We might as well be taking on a special ed. class."
"The true wonder of communism," Tom responded, "is that it's
so precisely the opposite of cream. The adversarial, contentious, and
generally lazy, disagreeable and recalcitrant settle to the bottom until
someone with a pamphlet comes along suggesting he be empowered to invert
the bottle. The solidarity lump at the bottom of the bottle -- a vessel
best not shaken or stirred - ends up the cork. On this cork depends the
free world, because if these masses were ever placed under honest,
efficient, friendly, apolitical, agnostic, nonideological administration,
such as you find in virtually every successful capitalistic company, they'd
whip us to death with our own tradeunionist, my-belly-first, tail. And the
converse is equally true. Set GM, GE or AT&T up as a democracy, and they'd
fail in months. Castro saved Florida and Ho Chi Minh will save -- well,
not save, socialism sounds so good and promises so much, leaving `preserve'
the better word, as long as it's used in a temporary sense -- the other
forty-nine, and that's something that would not happen, close as the
economic race is being fought, with one more South Korea added to the
competitive equation."
"It's awful strange how history works," Carlos allowed,
making eye contact with the devastatingly cute Army boy for the first time.
"How much moon," the soldier then asked.
"It's up late," the corporal replied. "With this cloud
cover, it'll be dark, and if it thickens, near pitch dark. They'll be able
to see the limestone, and we won't be able to see shit or Shinola against
their tree line."
"Piss me off, or what?" Tom sputtered. "Now I've got to
think like an officer -- again, may I tell you -- on ninety four dollars a
month.
"Fuck," he continued. "Taking the film is half. Taking it
home is the other half."
He thought for a long moment as he surveyed the terrain.
"We've got to get out of here," he finally announced, handing the camera to
his cousin and instructing him in the use of the controls. "I suppose you
have an extra duffle bag or poncho or two?" he asked Stone.
"Would half a poncho work?" the young Marine asked.
"That would be perfect," the Army boy said, "where is it?"
"Right in front of your helo," Carlos said.
"Imagine forgetting," the soldier responded, and saluting his
cousin, ran off.
"Try the radios," Carlos yelled after him. "Not much good
from the canyon, but who knows?
"He must have tampered with a general's three preteen
daughters and dog to end up a slick-sleeve," he said to Bing as the private
scurried off.
"You can't imagine the half of it," Bing laughed in response,
"and the fucker's a poet. Makes it up as he goes along, edgy and hardnosed
as you please. If it's posies and primroses they're growing up out of
skull eyeholes."
"Are you guys like Concord Emersons?" the younger Marine
wanted to know. "I'm kind of a Ralph Waldo fan, and my brother likes
Thoreau, plus Annie, my sister, has read all Louisa May Alcott's books."
"Thanks," Bing said, "that's nice to hear."
"I hope he makes it," Stone added.
"Just get ready to shoot," Bing advised as his cousin
returned with a heavy Santa's pack over his shoulder.
"Fuck, look at this," Tom said, gingerly dropping his
improvised sack, "I wanted twenty grenades, I got almost a hundred.
The private entered the parked craft and turned on the master
switch. Smoke rose from the radio column and he flashed back to Bing's
hammer blow on the instrument panel. Shut off the switch. Retrieved the
closest half-poncho and returned to the firing line. The men gather around
handing over extra grenades and pistols. Two approached, grinning. "Guess
what we've got?" one chirped, but, though they had five hours stretching
until the fast tropic twilight, neither was in a mood to tease, and so both
promptly produced sawed-off shotguns with bandoleers of shells." Also six
Colt pistols and dozens of .45 clips.
"Guys kept coming in and not taking their weapons when they
left," Stone observed. "I guess they kind of piled up."
"You wanna come?" Tom asked, his eyes flicking hard on the
boyish Marine.
"Two of us could man a stretcher," the corporal allowed.
"Brilliant," his new friend said. They shook, introducing
themselves, then were shoed off to the sidelines while a stretcher was
obtained and laden with arms, water, and accessories. The two settle in
the shade of an outcropping of rock.
"The major says you're real Emersons, I mean..."
"We used to be," the private responded, "'but time the ruined
bridge has swept...'"
"'Down the dark stream which seaward creeps,'" Carlos
concluded.
"You know it?" Tom said, "that gives me the shivers."
"Thanks," Carlos responded, "that's nice to hear. Any idea
how I"M feeling?" He recited the remaining verses..
"It gets more beautiful as it goes along, doesn't it?" the
private said.
"And quickly," Carlos said, adding: "you know he's the most
quoted writer in the world, don't you. I mean Thoreau's not half bad,
shakes `em up so the cameras will have something to roll on, and
Shakespeare is always a factor, but every year the `Bartlett's' nod goes to
Ralph Waldo Emerson."
Tom tugged at a slick sleeve. "I guess my favorite," he
said, "is: `who would be a man must be a nonconformist,' which is
thoroughly ironic because adversarialism is nothing but a switched-on
grinder that gets pushed back and forth across an ice rink, like a hockey
puck. Loud mouths instead of lively minds. And the proof is right here in
Mekong River City. For once we're doing something exactly right, snubbing
instead of massacring, and our urban leftists get to publish what everyone
wanted in the first place, the full frontal nude of a ten year old girl,
and polls change by ten percent, overnight. The V.C., under all acronyms,
plays for prime time better than we do it, ourselves, and toys us into
settling it, as we have repeatedly, in the worst way possible. Most
casualties, least gained, most scars."
"Ah, but the most entertainment," Carlos said, raising a
finger and winning for himself one-each heart and mind. "I'm glad you're
coming," they both whispered at the same time, then relaxed over a fat
joint and cigarettes, resting up for their expedition behind enemy lines.
"I like the one that says if you throw out a big enough
anchor, the whole world will swing to it," Carlos said, breaking the
silence by returning to Emerson.
"That's what his grandfather did," Tom said, "but I rather
think it was a tangled line on a bloody deck, and attached to a loose
cannon, not an anchor " He reviewed the story, prompted by his friend's
questions.
"But you could apply the metaphor to Benny Goodman," he
allowed.
"How about California couples," Stone asked, giggling a
little perhaps on account of the strong dinky-dow
"Wicked," Tom agreed, "but I suppose you're right. Everyone
knows they swing, too."
"So, what did you mean, family-wise, about being swept down
the stream?" the Marine asked.
"I guess it's sort of the ultimate paradox," the private
observed. "I'm a strict monarchist, yet by my own standards, Bing's and my
grandfather should be king, his father crown prince, and Bing, himself,
heir apparent. The former two were little removed from jingoistic
lunatics, and Bing wrote me letters from Harvard that could have come from
a sixth grader. My cousin Alec, in a skanky beard being hauled by the
police across Harvard Yard. One way to get your picture in `Time'. He
writes about napalm and kids, but as a total peasant. No comprehension of
the fact that's what the V.C. have been doing for years, only they use hand
drill on the skulls of the village chief's children, instead of killing
them outright.
:"His whole family is the same way, all the princes and
princesses. So ignorant, in spite of all that Harvard for thirteen
generations, it's a wonder they aren't sold as meat."
"Loyalty obviously isn't a priority," Carlos noted.
"My family took on the Kind of England, and won," the private
said, "so the precedent for the principle has to be dubious at best." He
pointed to a black spot on his right forearm. "That's where my mother
stabbed me to the bone with a pencil," he explained. "Have you ever
watched a small, conical hole fill slowly with your own blood while trying
not to vomit? In my mind, I've demonstrated considerably loyalty by not
wielding a hatchet, but that's where it ends.
"When we picked up the shelter-half," he continued, "Bing
pounded the dash so hard he fucked up the radios; probably the gyros, too.
When he was a young teen he tormented the family dog so relentlessly he
made a dangerous animal of it.
"He had a hi-fi set. He left a window opened near it. I was
standing right beside him. He saw it that it got sprinkled with rain and
he punched, just like he hit the instrument panel, full strength, all the
way through the glass on the door. Ripped his arm to the elbow. If I'd
left the window open, he would have punched me down the stairs and killed
me. He married a girl he met in a bar. Sooner or later, he'll punch her.
"His sisters are bunch of wifty leftist flakes, prototypical
counter-culture-cookies, though always on the lookout for earning potential
of a military/industrial wholeness.
"As our illustrious ancestor's poem gets better, fast, our
story gets much worse, fast, but so far it's been survivable. As to
loyalty, in my book Hitler deserves it above all. He made life very
exciting for a German boy. What president can say that bout ours?"
"And the money?" Carlos asked.
Tom explained about that, adding: "Luckily, I have the
persona of a sponge wrapped in a dishrag, so I just cower and absorb
"Bottom line? I picture myself as a shuttlecock, which,
though an arduous circumstance for a teen, is unsurpassed when it comes to
the heart of the old adage about different folks having different strokes.
Mother, brother, and sister from hell. Split session schools with worn out
teachers, then an army staffed by schoolgirls in olive green. As Nixon's
kicked around in public, so was I in private, but he has his eye on China,
as I do on being a writer. We both slogged away behind the scenes, he,
working for his party, me, tripping back and forth over the net, testing
this forehand against that lob; this serve against that net game. Mostly
by reading, but living always reminds one of the fickle finger of fate, so
that's a useful reinforcement of the phenomenon which reoccurs so
relentlessly throughout history.
"They read me a book called `Out Jumped Boo' when I was
two. Doomed. I was a gosling following the Muses, no more control of
anything than the Man in the Moon. No loyalty, no agenda, no creed, and
the world at my fingertips thanks to the self-same money. I should have
been water-skiing on the Cape three days ago, but not, the Writer wants to
visit Phu Bai."
Carlos punched Tom's shoulder. "Cool," he said.
"Fuck me if it isn't," the private responded.
"Ah, so you've heard about out brothers in the Navy," Carlos
said with a final giggle as they got to their feet. All was in readiness.
Bing produced a large-scale aerial photo, solid gold, and they hefted the
laden stretcher, tolerable. They were about to set off when a Marine
private hollered and approached from the direction of the former base camp.
He came nervously, arms behind his back, like the original shotgun bearers,
up to the major. "Wait," he said.
"Jesus, now what?" Tom whispered to Carlos.
"Sir," the Marine said, "I know this won't look good on my
record, and I was hoping to make corporal next pay period, but, well, sir,
they're not going to shoot and waste ammo if they think you're just
carrying a casually, you know, when you pass the open area behind where the
helo's parked. I mean it's kind of something they don't do, maybe it's
even superstition."
"I'll take your word for it son," Bing said to the stammering
boy.
"I know it's rude, sir," Hennessey went on, "but things
aren't nice here, so this will probably help. I cut it off Pvt. Gutierrez.
He was killed an hour before you got here."
The young Marine held out a human arm, amputated at the
shoulder. He dropped to the stretcher and quickly improvising a strap
lashed it so the hand trailed realistically.
"Son of a bitch is right," Carlos murmured, "play it out,
Tom. Head down. Slow. Pretend your mother and sister await in yonder
cleft in the terrain."
With a last look around, they departed, Bing now wearing the
battery belt and filming with the shoulder mounted Panavision camera. They
passed through the zone of exposure as if, indeed, loved ones played on
their spirits, plodding, enjoying seventy or eighty times the transient
engagement a gambler feels at a heavy toss. Time passed slowly. Carlos
led, Tom following more bemused than angry at the follies necessary to his
chosen art, yet even more dreading the assumed future: loss of liberty and
adventure to the tyranny of the typewriter, more crucial to his trade than
any other. One day it would be the machine, ribbons, paper and carbons.
Now his entire left side contracted in a giant flinch -- the real thing, so
he called softly to his friend, slowed down and stopped. Knelt by the
stretcher and carefully placed the dangling hand under the covering poncho,
then resumed his position to the leader's low wolf whistle, and they
proceeded.
"I don't know about that," the Marine said as they gained the
shelter of an outcropping, "if you were that cool, they might figure we're
up to something."
"I look on it more as lulling them by demonstrating respect
for their traditions and discipline," Tom replied, "but you could be right.
I won't do it again."
"Not likely to be a problem," Stone said, to far off buzz to
giggle. The two retrieved Pvt. Gutierrez's arm from under the shelter half
and laid it to rest as decently as circumstances permitted. "From now on,"
Stone explained, "it's a game of lazy. We've got hours. they'll be ready
for something, for awhile, then sleep. After that, by maybe five this
evening, it'll be dinky-dow time and another charge with dark coming on.
In the meantime, we inch along, letting them relax. They may sense our
presence, but if we stop from time to time no pattern will develop and no
one will bother to investigate. They'll have sentries at their rear, but
their main purpose is to kill anyone who tries to retreat, so they won't be
thinking about their six."
"Sounds like the best way to play it," Tom concurred, "but I
could never figure out why the bad guys in the Westerns never knew Tonto
was sneaking around behind them. "
"Your great great grandfather hit it one the head when he
said a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind," the Marine
noted. "They're by the book, every day, every page, and none of them can
read."
"So much like McDonalds it really is frightening," Tom
concurred, realizing the very cog-and-wheel indoctrination of the
zombieland he was mocking was responsible for their relative security as
they flanked the grove of trees by a hundred meters. The peasant and his
book. His right hand itched for a pencil to jot down the notion, but
perhaps he'd remember it spontaneously. Bible, scrolls, tracts, codes or
manifestos, the blood was always red as long as it was fresh. Was not ink,
the very byproduct of the lowly cuttlefish, mankind's most lethal
invention? The word of the idiot had, before its use, been limited, then
Jesus H. Christ came along. On clay, on paper, ever cheaper, and finally
an alterative to repetitive squeaky music and garbled legends with which to
fill the long hours of darkness. Book and candle. Home fires. Bell.
Hell. Film at eleven. Sell. The only need remaining was an urban subset
who toasted each other to next year in their god-forsaken, scrambled-egg
homeland, who'd sell anything, and the future was a forgone conclusion, the
size of the giant merely guaranteeing a longer death, not a longer life.
Thirty four thousand, two hundred two words without an essay.
Veterans will realize the scope of the miracle, new readers might be
expected to wonder who this guy is. What it is is that I'm kind of in the
habit of tagging along as I write, layering editorial content like frosting
in a deluxe cake. These are busman's holidays or a grounds keeper's walk
in the park, and are of unspecified length, with the following payout: the
longer the essay, the more nifty the compensating Nifty scene.
I've been playing "Black & White". Read a scathing review of
it on the Web (ARC). Iconoplast, as he calls himself, managed to so vastly
miss the point, it's worth immortalizing the moron to haul his trou off an
cane his ass. "Black & White" is a game. It costs a certain amount of
money, like a movie ticket (though, unlike a theater ticket, it has at
least some, and perhaps residual trading or selling value). As far as I
can tell, a day or two in the first land are more than worth the price.
The graphics, even compared to "Morrowind" are difficult to get used to.
Art -- stunning -- you can dabble in for hours. The reviewer goes on and
on about writing; how the game lacks story value. What is he talking
about? Where in modern-day life DO you find story value? The last film
that had a decent amount was "Fargo", about five years ago. Stories are
hard to think up, okay? I'm the greatest writer of all time, and I have to
lure my readers with sex, because nothing else is interesting, least of all
fantasy and the paranormal. "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger" were the same
thing, over and over -- as Iconoplast cleverly says, lather, rinse, repeat.
In the endless "Star Wars" pix there's one one-eighth funny line, aside
from the attempted byplay between the robots, when Harrison Ford calls a
puppet a fuzz-ball. I've been reading -- glancing thoroughly at -- "The
New York Review of Books" for a year now, and no novel has broken out in
any sense of the word. So how's a game provider meant to do it? If a game
is beautiful, and a least somewhat engaging for over ten hours, it's a
seven. On that scale, I'd give "Black & White" a nine. It's okay to
compare me to some ultimate utopian standard, I'm up to it, but then I
don't have to tell my story in some-odd millions of lines of code.
I suppose this is a bit slick, as in contrived, but it does
bring up my own game. It's called "grow Pedro". Pedro is an island boy of
about twelve. He can, a, go to school, b, hang around the water front, or,
c, spend his time guiding a mercenary named Ajax on his quest to shoot a
drug lord in the buttocks with a golden bullet. The A-section, academic,
is tailored to the players scholastic level. It offers straight hardball,
no cute graphics or grinning personalities, just high-speed flash cards on
basic math functions, phonics, and foreign language. Punchy, short
sessions with a balance of new material and review. Academic performance
is key to opening new levels, so, for example, a map-reading Pedro is much
more useful on the waterfront than a waterman's pleasure boy or a tourist's
beach buddy. Ajax has a well-used J-3 Piper Cub, and much of the game is a
flight sim, only oriented toward shoe-horning the flimsy, sixty-horsepower
craft into short, rough fields, or operating it on floats rather than the
glories of the wild blue yonder. Tough, gritty, realistic; zero fantasy.
Pedro can, for example, spend a fishing windfall on a set of encyclopedias,
or a motor bike with which to impress Luscious Lola; end up governor of the
island, or a poxy, broken-toothed gin mill swamper. As the misuse of the
computer approaches the misuse of television when it comes to its role as
an educational medium it's doubtful such a game could fit in the plastic
socialist's box labeled What Kids Like, so I'll do with it what I've done
with this manuscript, use a mainstream outline (this started off as a
fifteen thousand word, R-rated screenplay) for another Nifty novel.
(Either way, Pedro grows.)
Samantha's fine. Everything's almost disturbingly normal.
Rough weather with associated blackouts. Sloggo II, my new XP machine
shrugs them off, stable as the Rock of Gibraltar. I did find one
interesting sign of eccentric legacy. My new computer came with an older
version of the word processor, and no disc to install the file conversion
programs. Tried sending them as Word docs, but guess what? Nifty,
probably the most active text archive on the Net, can't (or won't) use the
format. Hot sun, money spent, Word XP installed, files converted, and
"Beyond Brewster" published after spending a month braving the lightning on
the hard drive. Grrr. But, on balance, another trip over the net for the
shuttlecock, another stroke dissected. And another: ASSGM's gone
commercial, forty-five dollars a year. Hard on all the writers who
contributed for free, rest assured no penny will come their way (example: I
have over a million words on Nifty, but have never been offered free access
to their premium service). I wonder how many users will, a, be able to
take the hit on their cards, b, want an unexplained forty-five dollar
charge on their statement, and, c, want to leave a money trail from their
computer to a distributor of child pornography? My guess is a few thousand
takers, too few readers to interest most writers, thus no more stories.
And I do understand why sites can't pay. If they did, they'd be flooded
with copy and paste. My suggestion? Cut a healthy check to Nifty, keep it
free; if you're rich, send ten thousand bucks. The First Amendment is all
we have left, get the picture?
Big phone bill because of Kazaa. Non-schizophrenia test:
keep a `usage log' in your head, that after six weeks, is accurate to less
than two percent. Addiction test: cut usage to the bone, even after
downloading some sensational videos fully verifying my theory that loads of
kids love playing mature games with sensitive, attractive, on-going adult
partners. Of course, I speak from multiple successful personal
experiences, and no unsuccessful ones, but it's nice to see other little
swingers grinning and swinging. Who would argue that showing a rape victim
half an hour of kids as young as five fully and happily engaged with mature
males wouldn't be the best chance of giving such victims the only thing
that can cure them, and that is perspective? Planning to download more
when the October quarterly comes through, though if it's as skimpy as
July's, I'll have to forgo. Meantime, none, except for the ongoing lesson
in the law of diminishing returns. The more images you download, the more
you've seen and the fewer thrills and chills (think I'm kidding?). My
guess, after about a hundred and fifty hours on the site, is that less than
a thousand porn images make up over ninety percent of what you'd get if you
downloaded constantly. And to re-emphasize a former point ("Beyond
Brewster"), in all that time I've never uploaded anything BUT images, in
spite of having god's own playlist.
Speaking of which, "Poet of Phu Bai" was originally drafted
as an IMAX script with perhaps a third of the action shown in the super
format, loaded with Fifties and Sixties music. A good time to mention the
fact that when I write for Nifty I repair my stories, rather than revising
them. Hank, the crew chief, has with him a portable Nagra professional
tape recorder. The incident in which Bing punches through the door glass
happened exactly as described, in fact I helped my father build the
Heathkit hi-fi. His collection was heavy on Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly,
The Everly Brothers, Duane Eddy, and perhaps a hundred others we listened
to incessantly on what, in those days, was extreme fidelity (mono). His
favorite and mine was Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody." I'll be cuing
before this work ends and if you want your hair to stand on end, strongly
recommend downloading it before I do.
I wonder how I come across as a hero. Didn't you always want
to do that? Write an epic with you as deity extraordinaire? Throw in an
acute psychological study and a little political dissection, delve into the
deeper natures of good and evil; Yin and Yang (sorry for misspelling this
elsewhere), the while? Did I forget anything? Humor? Well, if I'm not a
raving schizoid, you're in shit to your lower lip, and if you see anything
funny in that you're worse off than I'll ever be. Well, drowning in your
own whatever can certainly be done without clothes, and maybe, if we put
our minds to it, we can think of something else
It was a though occupying the minds of both young combatants.
The sweltering heat below the seventeenth north parallel. The three
hundred pounds of munitions they were lugging on the sagging litter. The
intensity of their attraction for each other, far more than verbal, which
may seem incredible, but life is not merely a talk show. The time to kill.
The atavistic nature of their mission. All worked against the convention
of remaining in suits of heavy, dirty fatigues. Traversing a hundred
meters at a crouching half-run tuckered both boys out and they were happy
to find a secure alcove in the broken terrain. Taking a few moments to rig
a trip wire between themselves and the splotch of jungle, they relaxed
behind a pile of grenades with half-pulled pins, safe, once again in that
primitive spy satellite era, as houses.
"How Catholic do you think this whole shebang is?" Carlos
asked as he caught his breath.
"I pretty much loath your church," Tom said, "for emotionally
castrating women while making them whelp like puppy-farm bitches, but I
don't think it amounts to much in this case. The politics are dead-bolt
simple. Conquer by force and loads of terror, by exploiting our own
leftists, pure and simple. This doctrine or that philosophy are media
toys. Remember we're dealing with a level of moron who spent months
arguing about the shape of the conference table on the Korean DMZ.
Kissinger's the only one brain dead enough to nitpick and hair split with
them, bright for Harvard as he is, so it's all just mush; religions,
ideologies, Buddhists, Catholics, the lot. The only thing I fault Hitler
on is his obsession with Jews vis-a-vis the Bolsheviks. He was right in
gurrying and auguring them out of Germany, but I think paranoid on a wider
scale. It's talons and claws, and the peasants will head unerringly for
the loudest disco. To many extremes to give much weight to any particular
facet."
"The church does have a good side," Carlos said, "at least it
did for me."
"I don't see how," Tom murmured, thinking as he spoke.
Unable to come up with any advantage to such an exploitive, manipulative,
and plain-old fraudulent institution, he shrugged.
"It happened when I was eleven, when I was an altar boy,"
Carlos said.
"Ah," the private purred, "such a forgiving institution,
trash it and hail Mary and at least whole again, if not holy."
"You've heard stories?" the corporal asked.
"There had to be a reason," the writer replied, "a magnetic
force underlying the popular image. Same as the Revolution. Underlying,
was the need of pirates and smugglers to operate with impunity, so they
buffed up liberty, when every house was full of nothing but. As cute as
you must have been at eleven, you probably inspired an entire diocese."
"I wish I'd known you then," Carlos said.
"I feel the same," Tom said, voice faltering.
"Have you ever talked about stuff like that with anyone?" the
twenty year old asked.
"Just once," Tom replied.
"When," Carlos asked.
"Well," the writer mused, stalling, then facing facts:
"yesterday."
"Get outta town," Carlos said, pausing as he began unlacing
his boots, something Tom emulated in less than no seconds.
"It just happened," the private said, feeling for once lame
enough to match his rank.
"Did he tell you a lot?" the recomposed Marine asked.
"I think he stuck to the truth," Tom allowed, "but he's
Navy."
"O-class?: the corporal asked.
"Commander to his service, bird colonel in mine, anyway, an
O-6 "
"Hesuse," Carlos declared in the Spanish pronunciation,
crossing himself, "how old is he?"
"Twenty six," Tom said. "But he could pass for either of
us."
"How long were you together," the Marine asked.
"I'm not trying to be weird or anything," Tom said, "but it's
all classified for a few days.
"Sorry," Stone said, "but why do I get the feeling it'll be
on the cover of "Time" when the balloon goes up?"
"And yesterday's news by the following issue," the slightly
older male observed.
"Do you want to be famous?" Carlos asked.
"No way," the writer responded instantly. "Death. Few can
do it at all, and those who show early promise stack the odds ten times
more than that. Untimely discovery usually means no recovery. The
shuttlecock -- ping-pong ball -- needs to stay in play. Stroking or
petting it takes it out. Very bad news when it comes to toting up the
final score, but that's unlikely to be a problem. Trading-on-the-name is
close to bugaboo-one (anti- or a-Semitism) when it comes to attracting
editorial attention, which is ironic because they'll hype `friend of
O'Neill's cousin' in the marketing department "
"Smoke?" Carlos said.
"Never," Tom responded, pausing: "when the Sergeant Major of
the Army is present and looking for someone to account for." In Vietnam,
unlike frozen Korea, it was easy to tell the quick from the dead. He who
could make the transformation from first suggestion to first toke in under
thirty seconds, well, hold the body bag, while he who could not was due for
a toe tag."
"So how much Harvard did you guys get stuck with?" the
corporal asked.
"Nine first cousins," Tom replied, and most ancestors on both
sides going back twelve or thirteen generations."
"And you?" Stone asked.
"A significant global service would be rendered by he who
blew the place into powdered brick and shredded ivy," the writer said.
"The Japanese emperors used to order about fifteen hundred hara-kiris a
year, in the name of national unity, and LBJ can't even take a bullwhip to
the junior dean on campus."
"Maybe they'll take over the world," Carlos responded. Both
had stripped to their camo boxers because of the heat.
"Can't happen," Tom replied, for the second time in as many
days enjoying the interlude -- intellectual, pseudo intellectual, however
it might be categorized -- equally with what was in the offing. "MacArthur
was a socialist -- a closet Democrat -- and left them infested with
tradeunions. That's a maggot that dines on flesh and bone. They're
doomed, though by rights the world should be their oyster, peal and all.
Two atomic bombs, they sweep up and go, one social liberal, and it's
sayonara. "
"Here's to ambition," Carlos said, retrieving a pint of Wild
Turkey from a hip pocket of the jungle fatigues lying folded neatly at his
side.
"My ambition," Tom said, "is to live humbly amongst my
people, giving thanks, the while, that I don't have the responsibility
history claims on me Imagine actually being a king. What a colossal
nuisance. They probably wore crowns because they went bald in their
twenties, king or queen."
"So what's the perfect fit?" the younger male asked.
"Literary artist, but somehow avoiding fame," Tom replied
without hesitation. "The utopian ultimate would be to write anonymously to
a significant segment of the English-speaking population, and let them act
on any ideas you might put forth; to ring a small bell in a million ears,
and let them ring any bells they saw fit. In other words, to be a source
of ideas and reason, only, free of excessive emotion, flexible yet distinct
in reason, cynical when viewing both past and present, because being
tolerant is like fishing with too large a mesh, too many misguided zealots
escape censure, leaving us doomed to their nonsense."
"To say nothing of eviscerating what should be an American
royal family," Carlos added.
"There's something of a distinction to be made there," Tom
explained, "between how history views such a role player as my ancestor who
started the Revolution, R.W.E.'s grandfather, and how the guy actually
performed. He started the thing by using his pulpit, and those over a wide
area, to raise troops and military supplies, all this while the
pamphleteers were sitting on their pillowed stools with their pens and
whipping printer's devils for the dirty work, thus energizing a victorious
conclusion to the hostilities. Exactly the provenance of a future king,
lots of words, more action. But on the day the British came to Concord,
there is no account of his activities after early morning. None. It was
his baby, and he was the most well known figure in the area. The only
theory that fits is that he was huddled in a secluded thicket, beseeching
guidance It's probably half a wonder Thoreau didn't find his knee prints in
a remote swamp sixty or seventy years later."
"Must have been the rugged climate," Carlos responded with a
nod. The two looked at each other with a twinkle in each eye, neither
pseudo scholar completing the thought, which went something like this:
Henry David Thoreau did, in fact, find a particular patch of especially
beautiful white flowers -- "nuns sisters," he called them -- in a
wilderness area of the famous town. How great a stretch of the
imaginations did it require to attribute the alien fertility of that small
patch of swamp to a cowering non-combatant? And should anyone, for
academic or practical reasons, wish an irreducible description of the kind
of thoughts one has when stoned on fine marijuana, said scholar or
aficionado of the crisp anecdote may assure him or herself that such an
example has been rendered in the present instance. And yes, if someone was
waiting for me, at the edge of the morass, with musket and ball, future
nature lovers would one day stumble across nothing less than an herbal
boutique.
"And war's meant to be hell," Carlos sighed, stubbing out the
half-consumed reefer.
"This one will be for a lot of guys," Tom noted. "They'll get
home and the liberals will tell them this and that, no perspective, no
context, no reason, just the gouting emotion of a Jew sitting shiva and
hiring professional emoters to wail over the dead. An exact parallel of
what happened with the blacks. Slavery this, indentured that, bonded, the
other thing, blah, blah, blah, when any black American prisoner sent to
live with his nearest African cousin would be screaming cruel and unusual
punishment until his teeth flew out. Liberals. You can't live with `em,
and you can't live with `em. So stupid and so cruel. The ultimate buzz
killer."
"Not with you," Carlos smiled, "because what's a better buzz
than trying to get some grip on insanity. The extremes, like you said.
LBJ has to mince like a schoolgirl, where Stalin, a U.S. ally, killed a
thousand a day and deported the rest to Siberia. Killed at his dinner
table. Half our country wanted to impeach Johnson because he picked his
beagle up by the ears."
"And yet this war," Tom said, "to use the popular term, is
entirely sane. A low-cost blocking action, sure and steady, if imperfect,
year after year. You can't have the world as your police state, because we
won't let you.
"The Russians and communists, in general, are unable to
understand that by not annexing Canada and Mexico, or even the Islands, we
prove we're not anything to do with imperialists. They, in their
exponential paranoia, will try to play it like a game of cards, ante for
ante, and Insanity will come to sit in for the final hand. We are in the
process of winning, whatever the tactical outcome, simply by not letting
them win, in the short term, and destroying them, utterly, in the long
term, merely by giving them time for the vast distortions of the Marxist
system to do the job for us. Fifty years from now mediocrity will be
beyond the wildest dreams of all soviet victims, and yes, it will take an
ocean of vodka to achieve this, hardly a problem for even a hodgepodge that
spans eleven time zones of potatoes.
"We are in the process of winning," the private went on,
"whatever the tactical outcome, the greatest real war in history, and what
do you bet that even ten years from now, the media will try to convince us
we lost it?"
"They all wish they'd gone to Harvard," Carlos replied, "what
else would you expect?"
"Well spoken," Tom smiled, "you're more a brother than cousin
than I've ever had or even dreamed of."
"Thanks," the Marine said, "that's nice to hear."
"Hurry up and wait," is as close to an Army motto as exists.
Nobody's fault, just the nature of things. Hurry into position, then wait
for hours, then hurry again. Repeat until you hurry out the gate for the
last time without waiting for them to close behind you. And, ask any
combat troop, the waiting is the worst of all. Dawn takes a hundred hours
if it may reveal a tank, nightfall, a hundred seconds if it may conceal
one. Waiting. All you needed was a friend.
"You know," Carlos began after some moments pause, "it's not
just pot that's messed up in the judicial system. There's something else,
too."
"What is it?" the writer asked.
"It's pretty embarrassing," the Marine murmured, but when Boo
jumps out I have a feeling people are going to listen."
Tom paused a moment to make the connection. "Thanks," he
said, "but that was just a kid's book written to titillate and amuse, so I
wouldn't hold my breath."
"Well," Stone responded, "whenever and however, there's
something we're all meant to think the same about, like you said with the
socialists, where they put everything in a common-think box, and forget it,
the way they did with pesticides. They put that in the problem-solved box
when they banned DDT, and, because in their minds it's been solved, we get
Malathion and toxic cocktails that make DDT look like baby food in
comparison. Same with what I'm trying to get at. A closed box: `all think
exactly the same on the count of three.' And maybe, when you do let Boo
out, you could tackle the subject even though it's like ultra sensitive and
totally embarrassing. Something we're all meant to think identically
about, but don't."
"Not eating strychnine on Wheaties," Tom mused, "that's
something we should all think identically about. Nothing else comes to
mind, offhand, so you're on pretty safe grounds."
"You'd think so," the boyish Marine said.
"Come on, what?" Tom said. "This isn't the time for Twenty
Questions."
"It's embarrassing," Carlos repeated, "because I make as many
Navy jokes as anyone."
Tom smiled. "Rickover won't be satisfied with even a hundred
of his nukie-poos," he said, "so half the service is nothing but a
combination of the most dangerous and expensive boondoggle in human
history, and jokes don't get more obscene than that."
Encouraged by this dose of impromptu perspective, the
handsome boy continued. "I don't want to say anything specific, just that
some things happened when I was a kid, when I was eleven, you know, an
altar boy. Stuff that's against all laws in all states, in the box within
a box, but stuff that I really liked and that made a huge difference in my
life.
"All I'm asking is that if you make it, you know, as a
writer, that you take a look at happens to some boys, and be real about it.
Even have the guts to say that for a few boys out of a hundred, it's the
best thing in their lives, by a hounded times, and you can't tell those
boys, when they grow up, from anyone else."
"Suddenly," Tom responded, "I don't look on you as a brother
any more."
"Sorry," the Marine said.
"Are you out of your total fucking mind?" the private horse
whispered. "If you don't give me your home address in less than a minute,
I'll consider myself alone in all the world. And yes, his name is Sandy,
and I have his address, too. Two. Symbolic of being a writer. Limited
experience, no deep ends, but not monochrome, either."
"Go two miles North on Hammond Street," Carlos said, "and ask
around. Everyone knows us."
"Come to Concord," Tom giggled, buzz conditionally restored,
"everyone knows us."
"Did Sandy tell you about, you know, specific things?" Carlos
asked.
"It's not for everybody," the writer replied, "but sometimes
it can be kind of exciting."
"How do you feel?" he then wanted to know.
"Jesus, man," Tom responded, "I'm a writer. I want to know a
writer's little something about almost anything you can think of. If, in
pursuit of this, I come across a particularly detailed and graphic story,
well, figure that one out for yourself."
"Even about getting touched?" Carlos whispered hoarsely.
"If you don't want to tell me," the private whispered back,
extending his right hand, "maybe you could show me."
"I was standing up," Carlos responded. "Father Benedict came
up behind me."
"Okay," the soldier said as they both rose quickly to their
feet, the still coltish corporal standing with his back to the taller male.
"How were you dressed?" Tom asked, remaining a foot behind
his beautiful young friend.
"In my underwear. Tee shirt and briefs," Carlos said, "he
was, too."
"Where did it happen?" the writer wanted to know.
"In the rectory," the boy said.
"Were the two of you alone?" the whispered interview
continued.
"Yes."
"Did you know something was going to happen?"
"Yes," the Marine whispered.
"How?" Tom quizzed.
"It was just before a holiday retreat," Carlos elaborated,
"and some of the boys in the choir kind of hinted that mature stuff
happened when they stayed at his cabin, and if I wasn't interested in that
kind of thing, I should stay at the lodge."
"I want to stay with you guys," Carlos Stone, just eleven,
said to Ricky Reynolds, his thirteen year old friend and the senior alter
boy at St. James
"We want you to, too," Peter Sedgwick responded, and Chip,
Dale, and Matt, all twelve, nodded.
"It's nothing that hurts or anything," the young leader said,
"and he doesn't give us any nonsense about its being god's will or some
splinter aspect of Church doctrine."
"But," Chip added, "he said it does amount to an ancient, if
unofficial, custom. Priests who served their parishes well were rewarded
with the fairest boys in the village. The boys were thrilled to be part of
it, and nothing occurred to shock the cows out of the barn, where most of
them were doing the same things when they got a chance, half the time with
the heifers, and most of them got married like anyone else, and, in turn,
rewarded a good priest with their own sons. The most dedicated of these
staffed the monasteries.
"So," the boy continued, "it's more a vague tradition than
anything spiritual or divine, however it feels at the time."
The new boy thought for a few minutes as they continued
changing out of their Catholic finery into street clothes. "I just don't
know anything," he finally murmured.
"That's another thing Ben doesn't do," Dale contributed, "he
doesn't pretend he's teaching you. There's nothing TO teach. The physical
part is as simple as horses and dogs, though not always quite the same."
"What he does," Pete said, "is make sure you're comfortable
with what it is for what it is, a kind of strange combination of very
special and utterly meaningless. It doesn't matter if it happens a
thousand times or never with a kid, yet, at the same time, if it does
happen, each of the thousand times is at least nice, like an ice cream
cone, or special, like s five course steak dinner. He doesn't ask you to
keep it a secret, and he doesn't ask you to bring other boys over to play,
but no one says much, and if we think a nice boy has the same feelings we
do, we do invite him over, regardless of anything else."
"If something had happened to me, would that make any
difference?" Carlos asked.
"No," Dale said. "I spent a couple of hours up in an orchard
with a man who picked me up while I was hitching. That's when I was nine.
He said it didn't make any difference and that I could either share it or
keep it private."
"What did you do?" the new boy wanted to know.
"I sat on his lap in my underwear and told him all the
details," Dale said.
"Have you told these guys?" Carlos asked, nodding at all of
his companions.
"Just Ricky," the boy said, flushing slightly.
"Sometimes it feels right and sometimes it doesn't," the
leader said. "I told Pete."
"It kind of sounds realistic," the eleven year old observed.
"It kind of is realistic," Ricky said, "in fact it is,
totally. It happens, it feels like nothing else, like bathing in steak and
onions and asparagus, instead of eating them, and at the same time it's
like a ball game. When it's over, you probably don't give it much
thought."
"It like a ballgame, too," Matt said, "because it's super
exercise."
"Especially when we're all together on retreat," Chip said,
"then it goes on like from nine at night `till midnight, then we sleep to
five, and it goes on until seven, and we get up a nine, having already, a,
half starved ourselves, and, b, worked out enough for a week."
"What do you do the rest of the time?" Carlos asked.
"Read," Dale said. "We nickname it Camp Library. He reads
aloud to us. We read to each other. Only six canoes on the place, even in
summer. We read, we swim, we play softball, we goof off. It's so much
like heaven, lo and behold it does have religious connotations."
"But he doesn't try to make what happens at night religious?"
Carlos wondered.
"He explains it this way," Peter said, "if cigarettes were
actively carcinogenic, large number of smokers would get cancer on the tips
of the tongue, where the tobacco smoke is most intense. This rarely
happens. If boys fooling around with young men was similarly harmful, many
or most boys would react negatively to having a man pull down their
underpants, and, considering how unstable kids are, in general, almost none
react that way. If they don't like it, they make sure it doesn't happen
again, end of story, except to add that they know what to look out for."
"But most of the kids in the parish aren't into it," Ricky
said, "and they stay at the lodge on camps and retreats. During the day,
you couldn't observe any tension between cabin boys and lodge boys if you
stayed for years, that's how normal it is. A kid may get mad at another
kid and call his mother leavings of a goat, but nine to midnight isn't an
issue, consciously or subconsciously."
"Another thing he tells us," Chip added, "is who to watch out
for. He killed one rapist, not feeling it was wise to wait and get
evidence, and he's scared the shit out of a few others. One wouldn't scare
so easily, so we set him up and he took a twenty-year fall."
Altar boys, Choir boys. Dressed to the code of angels. But
who really knows what lurks in the hearts of boys? From a writer's
viewpoint, the last place for shadows.
"So doing girl stuff doesn't make you a girl," the new boy
mused as he digested the tidings from his young colleagues.
"It doesn't make you anything," Pete said, "reading makes you
something. Math. Geography and history. Acting like a girl with a man or
another boy is not important, except when it's happening."
"Yeah," Dale agreed, "it's really different for us. We think
about it some, knowing it's going to happen. The straight kids think about
it all the time, wondering if it's going to happen, and most of the time if
it does, they risk disease, pregnancy, and enough lingering issues to
employ a semi-private psychiatrist who still can't keep them away from the
ice cream. The narrow-minded end up frustrated and fat.
"We never do;" the acute preteen concluded, "why would we?
"Aren't there boys who want to be in the cabin, but there
isn't room?" Carlos asked.
"Nothing's perfect," the leader pointed out, "so that does
happen. If we get wind of it Ben has a list of friends he calls on to
arrange a camping trip for the boy or a weekend at a theme park. We're a
group of six, a comfortable car load, seeing as how five of us are kids.
Anything else is pretty limited, an occasional special friend he brings or
we invite, and sometimes, something happens out in the woods between
St. James and four or five other Catholic churches."
"That's really special," Matt said. "They set it up with
torches and any amount of staging and props, and we start getting molested
by the older boys and men, then we tear the whole thing down, you know,
symbolizing the phony nature of icons and theatrics, then the men molest us
all the way."
"Realistic," Carlos repeated.
"Cheaper than cards," Ricky agreed, "without the lassitude of
conversation. It's as close to one size fits all as you can get."
"But not," bright little Chip added, "all sizes fitting one,
because they never let us get on our hands and knees in front of them,
because that's bad for your body. "
"And we can't do too much with our mouths, either," one of
the boys observed, "because if we do, it makes us grow too big."
The new boy was unsure of the basics, and he'd heard god was
in the details, so he knew he had a lot to learn. "How do you do it?" he
asked.
"We have a standing ritual," Ricky explained, "and a bed
ritual."
"So it's the same every time?" Carlos said.
"Yes," several boys said, nodding. "That allows us to
concentrate on the feelings we have while it's happening," Ricky continued,
"instead of wondering if another way wouldn't be better or trivializing it,
since it's already trivial enough, by experimenting with positions and
techniques like it was some kind of new game."
"We'll have a lifetime to do that when we're older," Matt
said, "so when we're with him, it's always almost exactly the same. One
way for out in the woods, and the other for when we have privacy and can be
in bed together."
"Do you do it by yourselves, I mean with each other," Carlos
wanted to know, "or only when he's with you."
"Mostly when he's with us," Dale said, "but, as he points
out, the penalty for cheating is pretty abstract, so once in awhile stuff
happens on sleepovers or when we're out hiking with a friend."
"How about girls?" the eleven year old asked.
"Two of us have little sisters, you know, curious ones," Pete
noted.
"Wow," the new boy said.
"That's like a limited edition," Ricky said, "special games
for extreme behavior. For example, if we tear down the woods altar without
damaging anything, Kitty and Janet mate with their brothers as a reward,
and if there happens to be a new boy, well, that's exciting for them even
though it's really just kid's stuff."
"Glad I'm a kid," Carlos mused.
"After you get used to it a little," Pete said, "the reading
is more fun. We groan when it's over, even though we know what's going to
happen next is what most boys think they want more than food and water."
"That's what it's all about, according to Ben," Ricky added,
"getting it out of our lives, not with strictures and dogmatic
thou-shalt-nots centered on burning in hell for the odd trillion years;
abstinence as the joke goes, but through strict permissiveness. Allowed
some, take some, where kids who are allowed nothing tend to want all."
"Less is more," the new boy summarized.
"Sort of like Christmas," bright little Chip observed, "if it
came every day, you'd get so sick of jumping out of bed early to open
presents you'd be a Scrooge by New Year's."
"But once a year..."
"No," Pete laughed, "just not every day. Realistic. Every
few days. Maybe all night and all day, then ten days where nothing
happens."
"Or at least four or five," Matt giggled, his soft laughter
as innocent as that of a boy playing with a puppy, corruption being, as it
is, a psychological rather than a physical issue.
The air radiated welcome, a slightly flushing and dizzying
potpourri of trust, dignity, affection, and extreme excitement. "How does
it start," Carlos whispered.
"Any way you want," Ricky said, "but all of us had a dinner
date with him, then came back here to the rectory and dressed as girls;
wigs, a little makeup, and, you know, underwear, so we'd get that out of
our systems. When we were ready to go upstairs, which most of us were
since we were about eight, we changed into plain white cotton boy's
underwear, because it's the ultimate favorite of the child molester, and,
like dressing as a girl, the less confusion about what was happening to us,
the better. He dressed in white briefs and tee, too, and took us from
behind."
"That sounds like a good way," the new boy said.
"The important thing is it's complete," Dale said. "It's
half experiences and furtive groping that are confusing to a kid. With Ben
that doesn't happen. He makes sure there's plenty of time and privacy.
Once in awhile a boy has second thoughts after his first time, you know,
about being with a male, so he took each of us all the way, from behind,
before he let us pull down his jockey shorts and became openly homosexual
with him."
"Does he look nice that way?" the youngest wanted to know.
"He looks like an older boy," Peter said, "because, you know,
he's really blond and Nordic looking, and we like to shave him in the
shower and let him do it to us."
"Except he's bigger," bright young Chip observed, "not
anything monstrous like you see in weird porn, but bigger than most of the
adults who rape us in the woods."
"And he always has the most sperm," Matt said, "that's part
of what makes him so exciting. He's really disciplined about not doing
anything by himself for two or three days before he's going to have one of
us stay over. We try to do it, too, you know, save up, if you want to call
it that, but it's hard because the longer you do it the more you think
about it."
"But a lot of times we can," Dale added, "and that makes it
almost like the first time." All nodded, affirming in young Carlos's mind
the fact that though he might end up a homeless vagrant, at one moment in
his life he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
His friends and new special friends finished changing and
prepared to depart for their homes. "We have what we call coincidental
parties," Ricky said as they headed for the door, "because we don't want to
rub anyone's noses in anything, so we just sort of accidentally on purpose
get together at one of our houses, to welcome the new boy."
"And you can hear Dale's story of what happened while the man
had him alone in the apple orchard," Matt said.
"When?" Carlos asked.
"Saturday, at Pete's," Dale replied, "tomorrow."
"Okay," the new boy said with a shy smile, not knowing how
else to put it.
As they filed from the rectory Ricky hesitated and quickly
opened his school bag. "This is what we're reading," he said to Carlos,
handing him a John D. MacDonald paperback classic. "We just started it so
you can catch up before your date." With that they were gone.
The Fifties paperback was in such fine condition Carlos
kissed it, demonstrating why he's a hero in one of my stories. He sat on a
leather hassock and carefully leafing into the volume, completely forgot
his first date. Speaking of which, I recently read three or four parts of
a ranch saga from Nifty's :"Rural" archive. In once scene the brothers,
junior high (middle school) age, get all excited about a special event in
their educations. The older brother is going to read a book for school.
These are wealthy oil and ranch people. I grew up in half poverty, and by
the time I was their age had read some two hundred books, and might have
doubled that number if it hadn't been for proving several thousand times I
knew how to do long division.. The irony here, to foist another tendril of
essay, is that by having to solve these problems in such endless profusion,
I became careless, thus proving I wasn't very good at it. A fat lot
schools know. In my job with Caterpillar I had to process a million
dollars worth of work orders and invoices, about as complicated as
paperwork gets, and I never made a mistake. I never even made a typo.
Money was on the line, it was important, thus, perfection. How I reached
it as a writer, with all that math homework, is another story, and, by
wondrous coincidence, we're right in the middle of it.
"That's really like Travis, isn't it?" the friendly voice
from the door said.
"But so far he doesn't have `quicks'," Carlos said
"That much a fan, eh?" Ben responded.
"I even kissed it," the eleven year old admitted.
Do we see the shortcut here? The very writer I was just
alluding to, down on the ranch, would go on for half a page, or, in his
case, three pages, telling how much two of his characters liked each other
and bonded. Here, in four lines, is a bonding that's absolute, and merely
a favorite character from popular fiction. Do you suppose this example is
in any way related to real life? That, yes, there is a shortcut involved
to friendships that can weather the vicissitudes of romance? Do you
suppose that's why I brought it up? I punched out of the story when the
South Beach realtor begins coupling with the South Beach ranch foreman, but
I do suggest it if for no other reason than to show a writer with lots of
talent crippled by the fact he's not taken the shortcut, read the mere
thousand or so books it takes to get some grip on pacing and flexibility.
You say that's a lot, but it's not when compared with the tens of thousands
of hours of televised drivel watched by this writer. Of course, there
comes a time when you know so much, from all that reading, you can toy with
pacing if the mood suits you, but that takes three thousand books.
"We could stay in an read instead of going out to dinner,"
the handsome priest said.
"No, thanks," Carlos said shyly, "I was talking with Ricky,
Peter, and the other three, and I want it to be just like it was with
them."
"I'm not a religions man," Ben said, "but thank god, because
I'm starving and Nelson's has a wonderful Crab Louis."
"Am I dressed okay?" Carlos asked.
"I have some sport jackets and ties that would fit you," the
twenty four year old said, "if bold beyond belief suits you."
"Like in the movies?" the boy asked.
"Massive social step," his friend said nodding.
"I'm game, I guess," the boy allowed.
"Okay, good," Ben said, "and you're not the Lone Ranger at
getting hornswaggled half way into bib and tucker."
"Misery loves company, so that's a comfort the boy said as
the priest disappeared upstairs.
"It's not as exciting as the water park, but more cerebral,"
Ben said as the waiter brought their main course.
"Is that the most fun place?" Carlos asked.
"Yes," the young man said, "it's extreme adventure, you know,
looking at all the adult/child couples and groups and trying to guess which
are active and who aren't."
"The boys didn't tell me about that," the eleven year old
said.
"It's our traditional second date," his friend explained,
"stay over on Saturday night."
"Does a lot of stuff happen?" the boy asked.
"That's why we only go once a year," Ben replied. "Sort of
like dressing like a girl if you want to when we get home; a full taste of
what's out there on the theory that unrequited curiosity is more hazardous,
vis-a-vis addiction and related topics, than knowledge."
"So you go five times a year?" Carlos asked.
"Twice," Ben said. "Next Saturday, with you, then again in a
few months with all of you."
"Wow," the boy exclaimed.
"What happens at the pseudo shrine on retreats is more
dramatic," the father said, "you know, with all the Hitler stuff like
torches and Cub Scout uniforms we use to indoctrinate against
indoctrination, but Fishytown has its appeal, nonetheless."
"Can others watch while we do stuff together?" Carlos asked.
"Not in the public areas," Ben replied, "at least not too
much. I guess part of the attraction is learning how demonstrative a
mismatched couple can be without being offensive. There are a lot of
families there, innocent kids, just like at a beach or fairground, but lots
of couples, too, so the interest level stays high."
"The anticipation level isn't half bad, either," the boy
noted with a shy grin.
"Well," Ben responded, "not to gild the lily or anything, but
it often happens that a boy your age ends up teaching an older teen -- a
virgin -- because a lot of fathers take their sons there and let them ride
the two-man paddle boats, on whose route through the various pools and
waterways happens to be a tunnel of love."
"How about little boys?" Carlos asked.
"That's easier," Ben said, "but an eighteen year old's first
time is more dramatic."
"Are there lights in the tunnel so you can see what happens?"
the boy wanted to know.
"Lots of candles," the man replied, asking, "is that what
you're interested in? Seeing what happens?"
"Yes," Carlos nodded.
"That's cool," the older male responded, "It's actually
highly aesthetic, what happens between a young adult male and a child when
they make love. I guess showing it has to be illegal or it would stop
traffic."
"Maybe they're just keeping it in reserve," the eleven year
old mused, "you know, if everything else peters out, inventions, space
travel, computers, all the stuff we have, they'll wake up some day and say,
hey, this is a way to get people interested in something. Back in the
groove. Then it would be legal, and once that happened, people wouldn't be
so uptight about it, and it would spread, and that could become the new
economic engine when technology reaches the end of its rope."
"Yeah," his companion said, "but it's a slippery slope --
probably the classic slippery slope -- because of the self discipline
required not to become engulfed in a hedonistic spiral is too much to ask."
"But it might be the only option," the boy observed, "that,
or crumble out of sheer boredom."
"But wouldn't it become boring, too?" the man responded.
"Not if you do it with people who read a lot," the boy shot
back, "because then you're friends even if nothing happens, and it's even
fun to talk to them if you don't especially like them."
"Well," Ben laughed, "I'm not going to argue against a new
world order that permits considerable latitude in the behavior of literate
couples."
"It should just be reasonable," the boy mused. "I don't want
Jimmy Vargas to run up to the front of the class to be with Mr. Fox, you
know, in the middle of science class, or anything, but if one day a month
any boys who liked Mr. Fox could stay after school with him for an hour or
two, well, I hardly think that would challenge anybody's order."
"I think Fishytown is about the right half-step," the priest
responded. "If a guy's watched his weight and is half-way nice, he'll find
a boy there sooner or later. Always remember, as much as you may like what
happens when we're alone together, other kids your age would hate it with
three times the passion. Chances are, most of them are kids who wouldn't
like much of anything, but they have a right to be protected, don't ask me
why, so the status quo is victim oriented policy with no official nod to
the millions of kids who would both like and benefit from an illicit
relationship."
"Well," Carlos said after several bites of the delicious crab
meat, "I was just thinking about how I'd feel if the law did get in our
way. If someone came up to us in this restaurant and asked what we were
doing together and caused trouble. Those are the real victims, boys locked
in prison simply for wanting to get out."
"On the other hand," the young Nordic athlete said, "I've
been bringing children here for almost two years, and no one's said
anything. I brought Pete and Kitty, she's nine, and she flirted her way
through four courses until there couldn't have been a person here who
couldn't add her coo and coo and not come up with foreplay."
"So everyone knows you're going to molest me tonight?" Carlos
whispered.
"Everyone is wondering," Ben replied, "why I don't hustle you
off to the men's room while we wait for desert."
"Have you ever done that?" the boy queried.
"On my first date," the priest replied. "Jeff Till, Ricky's
predecessor. You'll meet him at our next retreat."
"Is it nice in there?" the boy asked, "I mean, you know, the
men's room?"
"Extreme," said the older male, "which is a good definition
of why you'll have to go by yourself. It's an example of something you can
get away with, once. Get it?"
"Yeah," Carlos nodded. "Reasonable, but gilded."
Intensity. To have a brief interlude with someone you think
is pretty close to out of this world, or a highly carnal relationship with
an ordinary partner; an hour of passion or an erotic lifetime, and at the
very suggestion of the enigma, all the philosophers of yesteryear end up on
a toboggan headed pell-mell for an oak, mumbling directions from sacred
texts of deviant provenances. Useless. Then why write about it? Because
by teaching you not to obey I may free the single mind capable of finding
an answer. But is an answer necessary? Well, my Inbox is riddled, daily,
with four to six adds for penis enlargement pills. So many tubby hubbies
trying to mate with their mall mamas, the need is obviously intense. I
take this as a Yes, in today's vernacular, a slam-dunk. And the pity is
the outline -- the answers -- exist, it's just we're prohibited access to
them, because, in an interesting play on intensity and extremes, it doesn't
happen to fit in with the adversarial scheme of chaos beloved of our ruling
class. Because of certain historically widely practiced facets of
Germany's National Socialism, all its principles are rejected and its
concept of wide freedom under strict control is last on every contemporary
list, an extreme position. That it worked, superbly, is the reason we are
not today an island in a sea of hammers and sickles, that it was not
allowed to fulfill its objectives is the reason we won't be here for long,
for the island is sinking under the unleashed materialism of the self-same
ruling class and its significantly insane obsession with doing anything
that isn't against the law: malls, big-box stores, and children's
television constituting the three most hideous examples of what's legal
under the system they dominate, with their (Jewish) domination compounded
by vast herds of fellow-traveling pigs, rendering irony as extreme, if not
exactly kosher. And the underlying truth is the most forbidden of all:
that, widely defined, the Aryan actually is not only superior, but capable
of being vastly so. Hugely inventive, vastly creative, single specimens of
the race outdoing by a thousand times all who have come before. Harrison's
unalloyed brilliance over half a century to perfect a chronometer the size
of two eggs; Watt's miracles with steam, and a huge list extending like a
granite spire until the present time. Stone pilers, berry pickers, and
Aryans (rockets and transistors). Yet the very word has been twisted into
what's tantamount to a cultural curse. Well, twist this: as an individual
of the race, I surpass by several times all writers of other affiliations,
and severely challenge those of my own. The programs are there, the people
are here, and denying them and us gives Adolf Hitler, posthumously, the
greatest victory of all time: the total destruction of all enemies. You
can guess what the sad little footnote is. So, be my guest. Mock us,
disobey us, quibble and nitpick us to damage our spirit and rein in our
morale; honkey us this and goyim us that at your pleasure and concern
yourself not with pleasuring yourselves with our inventions and my writing,
for a nearby Jew has clever words and a tongue a mile long with which to
balm, stroke, and pacify you, with which to indoctrinate you against us.
That's like being against your belly button: go for it, but take a little
friendly advice and be sure the knife is long, strong, and keen, you know,
to minimize what modern physicians call discomfort, meanwhile, chalking it
up to your own stupidity that you don't cherish, revere, and emulate us
every day and in every way. The melting pot is tainted, and how the poison
grows, a lady heard the news and fainted, see how her body glows. She ate
with spoon, she ate with fork, she ate with both her hands, she wasn't a
goon, she wasn't a dork, she said so and blamed her glands. The pot was
cleaned, the vessel scoured, and filled with brand new soup. The lady
leaned, her expression soured, the smell knocked her for a loop. It wasn't
the pot, is wasn't the spoon, but something in the mix. And her second
shot caused her to swoon, leaving her in quite a fix. Dinner is served at
eight tonight, please be right on time, but remember the underlying rules.
It's kosher so it's sold as right, and yes it looks real fine, but in
reality it is nothing of the kind, naught but a sup for fools.
"Are you nervous about the `girl' thing?" Ben asked as they
reached the second floor and living quarters of the rectory.
"Kind of," his young friend admitted.
"Well," the father said, "let me explain it in terms of
science, that may help.
"A friend of mine with access to a clinic, measured the
emissions of adolescent boys after various methods were used to excite
them. Boys who were molested while wearing feminine clothing had almost
half as much semen as those who engaged in alternate foreplay. This not
exactly dry statistic was enhanced by a further thirty percent when the
molestation included a lingering game of Daddy and Little Debbie. The
adult half of the experiment showed a nearly parallel response when they
were able to take their time with a preteen dressed in conventional white
underwear."
"So two sizes fit all?" Carlos said.
"The nail on the head," the older male agreed.
"Then make room for Debbie," the boy responded, and Ben led
him to a closet in one of the guest bedrooms, kissed him on the head, and
departed for his own room where he stripped to his cotton tee and briefs.
Carlos opened the door and pulled up a chair. Sat to peruse
the rainbow of chiffon and he knew not what shimmering before him. On the
inside of the door was hung a collection of quality wigs and a single
small-looking athletic supporter. How nice to have a place to start. The
eleven year old shed his jacket over the back of the chair and followed it
with his tie. A seriously modest boy, he'd previously avoided glances in
the mirror any time he was changing, and here he was faced with a full
length looking glass inside the second door of the closet. Two extremes
presented themselves. How he looked now, school clothes, an attractive but
unremarkable boy, and how he'd look in a few minutes. The addictive
quality was a factor, he could feel its nudge. How cool to vanquish it in
the name of manhood, knowing what he was doing. Quickly he stripped,
donned the tight supporter, and then, equally quickly, fingered the
lingerie. No trace of the opposite did he display as he proceeded to
mater-of-factly select this gossamer filigree and that chiffon frill,
ending up with a pink party ensemble He wriggled into matching panties,
rolled on sheer, pink hose, paused a moment over his choice of bra, but
soon had it covered with slip, crinoline, and party dress. The shoes were
a trip unto themselves, and he wobbled inconclusively for several minutes
before daring the hallway, where his strained gate became a handy scapegoat
for his shaking knees. He paused at the priest's bedroom door and knocked.
"Daddy," he whispered as he opened it a crack, "it's Debbie. Can I come
in?"
"Sweetheart," came the answering whisper through the crack,
"I was just changing. Can you wait a minute?"
"Well," the eleven year old replied, "I heard about a
scientific experiment not too long ago, and I wanted to talk to you about
it, because I think I might be headed for some kind of accident."
"Yes, darling," said the adult, "of course, if it's an
emergency." He opened the door and gazed down at the beauty before him as
Carlos, looking Debbie fit to kill, gazed back up before the tall swimmer
before her.
"Did any of the boys have accidents with you?" Carlos
whispered as he entered.
"Urban legend," the young man advised, "having it happen
prematurely in, you know, your pants."
"The way I feel," the cute, you transvestite of the moment
said, "it's urban fantasy to think that it isn't very likely to happen."
"Well, then, darling, we'd better talk more about it," Ben
suggested, leading his ersatz daughter to the bed where they sat side by
side, the female child on her stag's left. They cuddled together and the
photographer from Sears would have thought naught more than Oh, how cute as
he focused his camera.
"Did you look at the jock and the panties before you put them
on?" Father Benedict asked.
"A little," Debbie admitted.
"Okay," the father said, "let me tell you this. All the boys
you're serving with, plus three you don't know have worn them, and they've
never been washed, since they weren't worn for very long. If anything
extra exciting had happened, both the supporter and panties would be
heavily encrusted with a pearly sort of powder, you know, dried sperm."
"So then we can talk, Daddy?" the sweet child in the brown
tomboy mop whispered.
"Yes, darling."
"And I can sit on your lap?" Debbie asked.
"Yes," her father said. She did so, facing him.
The expensive party dress was cut low in front. Carlos's
slim chest was heaving, his skin milk white against the pink silk. Hard to
imagine his sensual attraction could be enhanced by a ten dollar suit of
off she shelf underwear, but science isn't in the business of lying, or at
least wasn't quite so back in '59.
"Daddy," Carlos continued the conversation, "you know what
you were telling me about Kitty at Nelson's?" the girl said.
"Yes, Debbie," Ben replied,
"Well," the boy went on, "can I be with you sometime? Help
her pull down your briefs?"
"Perhaps, love," Ben whispered in response, "but Pete is very
protective of his little sister so he'd want to help."
"Would he help with mine, too?" Carlos asked.
"Would you like him to?" the adult replied.
"Yes."
"Okay," the teacher said, "but how about if we were staying
at Fishytown and he brought a cute nineteen year old into the room, would
you help him with Kitty?"
"I think, if she wanted me to," the boy mused, raptly engaged
in familiarizing himself with the psychological side of sensuality.
"Would you help her with him?" was the next question.
"If they wanted me to," Carlos said with growing confidence.
"Which do you think would be more exciting," the adult wanted
to know, "staying with them in the room, or going back out to the park and
imagining what was happening behind the closed door?"
"I think the most exciting thing would be to be with you in
the next room, imaging what was happening part of the time, then opening
the joining door."
"Remember what we said about extreme?" Ben asked.
The boy did.
"Well," the handsome young athlete elaborated, "I think it
would be extreme to extend this part of the evening."
"I do, too," Carlos concurred, "I want to be in my underpants
with you."
"Do you want to try kissing before you go?" the adult asked.
"Yes," the soon-to-be boy said.
They remained a modest foot apart at their waists,
experimenting with lips and tongues, more holding back than having at.
"That's enough," Ben said quite quickly, easing the child back onto the
carpet. "We're going to start of slowly, then as you come back for more,
more will happen. Think of it as flying with several parachutes; you can
jump out at any time and still be an altar boy if you want, no harm, no
foul."
"I feel safe even as a girl," Carlos responded as they
experimented with a few last nibbling kisses. He skipped down the hall,
swerved into his room noting the husky lock on the door, and took a last
look at his cute female double before he changed boy quick into the suit of
cotton underwear lying on the bed and returned to his young adult partner.
"This is how the first touch usually is," Ben explained,
moving the child in front of the mirror on his closet and resting his hands
gently on the boy's long, slim neck, "and you might think of it as rip-cord
time. Punch out time. If you're uncomfortable with the person or the
situation, which can be location, time, and practical stuff like that, just
say Sorry, and move away. If you say anything more, keep it short, for
example, if the timing's wrong for any reason say Maybe later. Okay?"
"Yes," Carlos nodded.
"If you like the person and feel safe and comfortable with
the situation, just stand still. If you think the male behind you is
inexperienced, you can say That feels nice, or something nominal like that.
The thing not to do is act wanton and overenthusiastic, like a hustler,
okay?"
"I think so," the boy nodded.
"Once an adult or older boy has done this with you for a
little while, maybe a few minutes," the priest continued, "he'll probably
want to find out how experienced you are. His voice will get really husky
and he'll ask if you've ever let a man take your shirt off before,
something like that."
"What should I say?" the eleven year old asked.
"That's up to you," Ben counseled, "and you can say nothing,
you won't be pressed, or something like That's private, but if you like the
person, you'll probably want to answer his questions. The rule is pretty
absolute, like not coming across all huffing and puffing like a hooker, and
that is that you tell the truth. Don't tell stories for their own sake,
and don't make a silk purse out a sow's ear by describing something as
fantastic and unbelievable and awesome. Just tell what experiences you've
had, especially your first few times. Gild the lily by being graphic and
talking frankly about the physical and emotional aspects of what happened,
but don't lay it on so thick the gilding kills the lily."
"I'll try," Carlos said.
"You were picked by Ricky and the others from, what?, over a
hundred and fifty boys your age," the handsome swimmer said, "and we only
score looks, as long as your weight's under control, as about ten percent.
The rest is personality. Being fun but being real, and part of being real
is that you're modest and self-effacing This means when a man or older boy
takes you to his room and Fishytown, you'll probably be exactly right while
he's doing this with you. You'll answer completely, and want to hear his
story, but not make a mountain out of a molehill in the fantasy
department."
"I'm glad Ricky picked me," the boy said.
"It's as fully extreme as it gets, to be picked," Ben noted.
"If you come back in here after your time out after your first full
experience, you'll be opening the doors to a world that does in fact seem a
fantasy. You and Kitty, at some point, may very well pull down the
underpants of a virgin older teen. Nor will it be a hodgepodge of one fuck
after another until you're some kind of hump-o-matic sexbot. However
subterranean and beneath the rotted log we may be described as, in a
generic sense, as many boys from our group end up happily married as from
the congregation, at large. If we had a motto it would read: `Not all, not
none, some.'"
"That would probably sound better in Latin," the boy observed
and the adult kissed him on top of his cute head.
"Ask thee, for homework, and homework shall come to pass,"
Ben cautioned.
"Did a man do this with you when you were a kid?" Carlos
asked.
"Francis was nineteen," Ben whispered, "and I was a little
younger than you, ten years old."
"Was he part of the church?"
"No," the priest said, "he lived down the street. We used to
trade magazines a lot, then the regular babysitter moved away. I didn't
need one for late nights, but my parents judged dog shows, and I didn't
want to go to all of them, so he'd come and spend weekends."
The priest had begun openly molesting his cute altar boy. He
pulled the child gently to him and slid his hands down over the slender
shoulders and down over the slim waist to the bottom of the cotton
undershirt. "This is the last time it's fair to say No," the young man
whispered, "once the man's hands are inside your shirt, you should let him
take you all the way, okay?"
"Yes," Carlos whispered back.
"A good thing to say," the adult suggested, "is: `Will you be
really gentle with me?'"
"Okay," the tall, slim boy said as the athlete's hands pulled
up his tee shirt and began gently fondling the silky skin of the preteen's
belly.
"If you're with a virgin, especially a late teen virgin," the
lesson continued, "you might sense him hurrying. If that happens, tell him
you like what he's doing with you, but you want to go slower. At some
point he'll quiz you one how experienced you are. We've talked about that
so you know how to play it, and playing it is some part of what happens;
theater of the moment, as it were; enhancing what happened without
exaggerating it; sort of a serious comic, not a superhero comic."
"Will he want to know we talked, or just the physical side of
it?" Carlos wanted to know.
"The kind of boy you're likely to be attracted to will be
curious about everything," the man advised, "so if things aren't convenient
the first time you're together, tell you want to tell him everything when
you can spend time alone together."
"That sounds cool," Carlos whispered.
"It's scientifically verified," Ben reminded the boy, "Dan
found, anecdotally, because it can't be measured with any real precision,
that partners who had long talks had far more intense endings to their
experiences than did the strong, silent types who just went at it. Add the
costume and white-underwear rituals," he continued, "and the number of
grams per Petri dish increases by an estimated one half."
"Did you and Francis talk a lot?" the boy asked.
"At first he didn't want to baby-sit for me," the young man
said, "he told me flat out that he thought he liked me too much to be
around me, alone, for very long; that he'd watched a man molest a boy in
the woods once and didn't think he trusted himself not to want to try
something with me if we were, you know, sleeping together in an otherwise
empty house."
"What did you say?" Carlos asked.
"That if I was sure I didn't want him to wash my hair I
wouldn't leave the shampoo in the downstairs' bathroom."
"I'll bet that was the best day of his life," the likely boy
noted.
"Do you feel that way, Carlos?" Ben asked.
"Yes," the boy replied, "it was the best day, just getting to
know Ricky and Peter and the other three better. Then dinner at Nelson's,
followed by an interlude as Fifi LaFemme, and now feeling you against my
back... to not even mention the fact it's an hour and a quarter `till
tomorrow."
"I know what you mean," Ben said, "because Francis said we
could pretend about the shampoo, if I wanted to."
"That must have been good news," quotth the juvenile.
"I was game," Ben acknowledged; "we were alone in his house,
and it occurred to me we could pretend about the water in the shower, too,
so I suggested that."
"When it rains it pours, good-day-wise," Carlos observed
confidently. His tall, Nordic friend was pressed firmly to him now, his
hands gentle and thorough under his undershirt. In the mirror, they did
look a pair and the beauty thing began to sink in as far as Carlos was
concerned. As much as it can in a ten year old, passion began replacing
curiosity.
"At this stage," the adult whispered, "you can welcome your
partner by reaching up in back of you and putting your hands behind his
neck while you stand on your toes and stretch back into him."
More art. The heavy, beveled mirror framed a mesmerizing
tableau of slim, arching child and sleek young adult, both too winsome for
use as catalog models, especially for underwear, too hawkish and intense,
too inclusive of the human condition (although both "looks" and time or
wrong, a rough equivalent would be to use Charles Bronson in his twenties
and Macaulay Culkin at age ten to sell Fruit of the Loom). But as art, it
did work and the gentle molestation went on under the hot gaze of the four
eyes trained on the rectangle of the mirror. Ben's hands caressed and
fondled the boy under his tee shirt as Carlos responded by stretching
himself avidly and panting in the man's arms.
"Do you like the way it starts?" the teacher asked.
"Yes," the child whispered.
"This is the most extreme way," Ben said, "Francis and I
discovered it accidentally, because after all our cool talk we were both
shy and nervous, so I kept my underwear on when I went in the shower, and
the first thing he said when I heard the door click and he came up behind
me was that he had his on, too."
"Was he a virgin?" Carlos asked.
"Yes," Ben replied, "but he was hidden in a thicket just ten
feet away when the man was teaching the boy out in the woods, and they
talked a lot, too, so he learned quite a bit before he watched whet they
did. He knew about going slowly, one step at a time, and spending a long
time at this part so you can get to know each other and tell secrets."
"But not too long, right?" Carlos asked.
"That harkens to the issue of character," the adult replied;
liberal versus conservative, if you will. The liberal will please you one
the spot, hey, you asked; the stale, crusty, rusty old right-winger will
not. Three guesses which one is right, end of the day."
"Tell me more politics," the winning schoolboy in the mirror
said, "it makes it easier to not do it."
"You'd rather hear about that stuff than feel my hand go
further and further beneath your belly button?" Ben asked.
"I'm not sure I have a choice," the eleven year old noted,
"because if you tell me everything that happened when Francis came up
behind you in the shower, you know, it might be over for me really fast."
"He told me he wanted to molest another boy in the
neighborhood," Ben whispered, "an eight year old named Kip North, and he
asked me if I'd ever seen him, Kip, bare-chested. You can imagine how that
made me feel, with his voice all froggy and his hands on my waist."
"That's true," the boy said, "though I don't know what
imagination has to do with it."
"Well," Ben whispered, "he didn't make it happen early with
me. Even when he was asking me if I'd like to watch him touch Kip like he
was molesting me, I guess it was to temporize because he told me not to
dwell on fantasies of how he'd look, all craggy and tough and half grown
up, plus he had some scaring from acne that made him look sort of extra
like a boy, as he stood behind the kid and whispered into his ear -- and it
was so hard not to imagine him with cute little Kip that I couldn't do it,
but at least trying distracted me from they way his hands felt when they
went up under my undershirt, and he was able to keep me under control so he
could tell me that he wanted to molest both of us at the same time,
someday, and sleep all night with me when he came for the weekend, and
about one of his former teachers he really liked, if I wanted to watch him
get raped sometime, and lots of other stuff, you know, whispering, to keep
my mind off the feeling of his gentle but kind of rough hands while he
touched me and while he did what I'm doing with you for a long time, the
way the man in the woods did with his boy."
"Maybe you had to have been there," Carlos interjected with a
shy smile into the mirror.
"Yes," Ben agreed, "the feelings can be complicated. It is,
after all, the archetypal study in extremes, of wanting something so much
you don't want it."
"So," the boy asked, "is it victory or defeat?"
"Defeat," the young man said, "because even while it's
happening, even while I was ejaculating hard and fast in Francis's hand, I
was wondering how we could delay the next time it happened because delaying
the first time felt so good, so it was an exercise in negativity, in
wanting it to not happen longer so that it could happen more fully and
completely and extensively when it finally did happen, and such negativity
must be associated with defeat, don't you think?"
"Well," Carlos managed to reply, fascinated at the feelings
of giving himself openly to the tall athlete that were washing over his
eleven-year-old body, arching more, stretching more, pulling himself closer
to the adult as he spread his legs in obvious welcome, "since you brought
defeat up, I was wondering how long it took you to lose your tee shirt to
Francis, you know, so you could feel his bare chest against your back while
he was molesting you in the shower."
"If you'd been me," the man whispered, "how long would you
have let it happen, knowing what you know now?"
"I'm not sure I wouldn't have gone schizoid," the boy
replied, "and let it happen with a cute orderly at the hospital."
"Do you think you would have given any warning signs of your
impending breakdown?" Ben asked.
"I assume you mean survivable signs," the boy replied.
"Okay, then," the older male said, "have it your way."
If you utter strange things to a boy, well, that there's a
crime, and probably should be. How, on the other hand, do you measure
uttering playful and affectionate things? In most realms of life, there is
such great punishment (plus lawyers) for doing wrong, and so little reward
for doing right, that things seem a little out of kilter, so, isn't it nice
to know there's one aspect of human existence in which doing good actually
is fully and amply rewarded? The hell you say, and you may be right, for
surely there is good in a laden cart easing toward a Wal-Mart cashier, I
mean there just about has to be, doesn't there? Stack the merch, pile it
high, watch the downtown merchants die. If you don't have a smile, have
one of mine. How wondrous: a foundation of wholesome good to contrast with
the dissolute evil of an athlete's chest against a slim boy's back, and
provide a matrix of extremes appropriate for discussion and dissection at
almost any time. For example, we're gathered together to read of sensuous
things, the press of a young adult's seven-inch erection against the
nubile, coltish body of schoolboy dressed in a suit of Fruit of the Looms,
the feelings of a sensitive virgin as the athlete's hands roam ever lower
toward the band of his underpants, the breathing of the two as the boy
responds by arching the more and thrusting gently and rhythmically to the
adult's touch, the complexity of their emotions as they defer to the flight
of the heavily laden, fully fueled rocket, wondering when to jump, for the
finest view, before the dizzying height topples them, and livening the
otherwise predictable process up by teasing, not stripping. What a hoot,
eh? Virtuosity at its extreme, yet merely a joke.
I feel another essay coming on, but don't know what to write
about. Oh, good, there's one. A spam the other day alluding to a Newsweek
cover story on declining sexuality in America. I left the place, I hope,
for good, on the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, and at that time I don't
recall knowing one woman, age thirty or more, in maybe a hundred or two,
I'd want to sleep with. I mean, okay, they're not as bad as June Allison
in the perennial favorite Jimmy Stewart film, "Strategic Air Command", but
in place of the ghastly primped curls of the Fifties, we have poundage,
rank and raw, so it's a close-run race for the booby prize. Against such a
background, I write. Of a country in which I take no pride, of democracy
writ failure, of Jews absolutely everywhere, and of how Hitler must be
laughing from on high at seeing how precisely and accurately he was right.
Gather ye mongrels while ye may, too ugly and too stupid for a roll in the
hay. Well, every dog is meant to have its day, but I protest in every way.
Hey, in the Sixties it was cool, and I'm class of '68. Of course there is
a bummer: if I doth protest too much, I have no place to send you for good
news, unless, of course, Simon Wiesenthal has hunted down another
eighty-year-old Nazi. You are a very fucked-up people and my literary
mission is to see that you see the lighter side of not being able, for
example, to fornicate, and, of course, of your death by the misadventure of
gratuitous excess on extremely flexible terms. As they say in New York:
"Hey, you never know."
Yes, yes, a big cannon, aimed with finesse at a large and
ponderous target, but where's the beef? Pork and Spam we've got, and tubby
hubbies have huge wives, so the poor gunner is like a lion confronted by
milling Zebras, so many stripes, so little time. But where's the sacred
cow? I confess it's a mixafacation, but when you've loaded as much powder
and shot as I've crammed down the muzzle you'll pull the lanyard just to
hear the bang. Somewhere out there is a target, it's called faith, so, to
plagiarize just the title of a student e-book on the Columbine shootings:
Duck.
I'm writing like a real novelist these days. A thousand or
two words at a session. Skipped sessions. Far off the heady pace of eight
to seventeen thousand words at a time that I sustained for months on end
while writing "One Fish at a Time" and "Shady's Closet" along with
"Fullerton Park and Ride." and a quintet of short stories. It's like being
on vacation, a feeling enhanced by having a fifteen thousand word outline
(screenplay) of "Poet" already in the can. Another factor is not knowing
what comes next. I browsed Nifty yesterday and it seemed my stories were
all over the place -- where I would rather have them than at the Library of
Congress or B. Dalton's. How does one follow such a huge chapter? Zero
response to "Beyond Brewster" published a few weeks ago, so it's a
reasonable guess your Jewry have things in hand in the guiding-light
department, alleviating me of any responsibility, megalomania-wise, in
addition to which you're too disoriented and uppity to respond well to that
for which there is no coupon. On the home front, Linden is safe and sound
back in Dangriga and Samantha is pretty thorough in proving that sanctioned
marriage is not the only attractive option. Sweet, but boring from a
literary point of view, which is acutely ironic in a country that pays King
and Letterman thirty million apiece to show up. Any bare wall is better
than the best of both their worlds. Plus, it's the age beyond despair,
even the disquietude of British kitchen-sink films being irrelevant in an
era that gets to fall from the top knowing no one will ever make the climb
again, so wallowing in depression is unrealistic. Life as an imbecile? It
might seem attractive but there are four cats in the house, so I bow to the
competition. MSN is no help, in fact just the opposite. Michael Kinsley
outed William Bennett, about my only quasi hero, as a highly addicted
gambler, reinforcing the credo that the deeper you look, the more rot you
find. The creative artist who gave us John 3:16 has failed to add to his
culturally legacy, and O.J.'s refused to kill again. Such a little people
taking up so much space, victims of each other and racing for last place,
and lo a single king to mourn, with sad eyes and long face, the utter and
completeness of your infamous disgrace. Out of reach of poem, smothered in
Hebrew foam, indifferent to your best, and preparing for everlasting rest.
If only it was flummery, instead of a pithy summary
Where is Andy Warhol when we need him? Any image in the
mirror, rendered in discriminating detail, would satisfy the most craven
critic; the handsome athlete bucking his chin against the schoolboy's head,
bent and whispering in the child's ear; easing the white cotton undershirt
up the boy's belly and chest would have been good for ten canvases even
though the action involved took only minutes in real time, and the boy
fully bare-chested, slim, white, and common enough, but, framed by the
powerful swimmer's shoulders of the athletic adult, now also naked,
radiating a beauty so compelling and universal only the utterly mad could
fail to see and love it, be stimulated and perhaps even excited by it. In
Mexico, when you get to the lowest level of cantina, it's pretty easy to
tell because the bar doubles as a urinal, in other words, no need to leave
one's stool to go. Ben and his immature lover might, and you'll have to
use your imaginations here, be displayed under somewhat similar conditions
(if you'll put yourselves in mind of a dairy barn, that, also, would assist
with imagery. In any event, grand reproductions of their avidly twining
young bodies probably would not be suitable for public display, assuming,
once again, you're all as mad as the nutty guy in a home for aged hatters.
Juvenile carnality, however viewed socially, is engaging and beautiful;
smiling faces and smooth-skinned whippet bodies, bright, happy eyes,
natural enthusiasm (and where else do you see that, these days (oh, yeah,
sports, yawn), and focused diligence. It should be a common entertainment,
live and filmed, and it is shunned, banned, and outlawed; we, by the same
token, should be verging on utopia, and we're verging on the drain to the
sewer. Got milk?
"How long was it before you turned around and felt Francis's
chest against yours?" Carlos whispered.
"We had pretty much the afternoon alone together," Ben
replied, "so we sort of compounded and extended things."
"How?" he asked.
"We put on blindfolds," the adult explained, stroking the
arching child gently with both hands, "and he got on his knees across the
bathroom from me, and put his hands like you have yours, only behind his
neck. I did the same, then we inched forward until we touched."
"Wouldn't it last longer if we did it out in the hallway?"
the boy queried.
"Yes," Ben agreed, "plus, it's dark out so we wouldn't need
blindfolds."
"Did you both have your underpants on?" was the next of the
boy's questions.
"Yes," the teacher replied.
"I like it, except for that part," Carlos said, "I want to be
naked with you."
"I don't see how that can hurt," the twenty four year old
said. "We can make it part of the activity. You get in position, naked,
and I'll turn the last light out before I enter the hall. Maybe instead of
trying to touch, you know, our nipples together, the way Francis and I did
in his bathroom, we could find each other's penis with our own and have our
first naked touch be that way."
"Do you think we'll be able to stand up and come back in here
after we've started pushing against each other?" the boy asked.
"No," Ben said.
"Then maybe if you had a candle somewhere," the younger males
suggested, "because I think Ricky and Pete and the other would really want
to know how much sperm you had, so it shouldn't happen in the dark."
"They'll want to know about your seed, too," Ben whispered,
"so that's a great idea."
"I don't know if I have any," the eleven year old responded.
"Can you feel it?" the man whispered, "hot and high between
your legs?"
"Yes," Carlos whispered hoarsely.
"And do you have any trace of hair beginning around your
penis?" was the next panted question.
"I think so," the child allowed.
"Then you'll probably cum off like an older boy," the man
said, "especially if, you know, there's the right amount of stimulation,
both physical and psychological."
"I think your best is good enough in the department," the
panting boy murmured.
"And you know what I think?" the adult responded.
"What?" the boy replied.
"That you'll bring out the rest."
"Will I get it on me?" he wanted to know.
"I took Francis all over me," the tight whisper replied, "and
I loved it, but that's up to you. I'll try to tell you when it's going to
happen, and you can hold me so the semen goes on the carpet, if you want."
"No," the boy responded, "I want to see it on me and feel it
on my skin."
"All the boys like it when the young adults ejaculate on
their bodies," Ben encouraged, "and when we're out in the woods on retreat
where there're usually six or seven mature males for each of you children,
we don't clean up, afterwards, at least not until we return to the camp
site."
"So there's a bunch of boys with sperm all over their tummies
and chests?" Carlos wondered.
"And a bonfire, and torches; sometimes it makes us feel a
little, you know, sacrilegious disassembling the altar."
"Well," Carlos noted, "it sounds as close to another
dimension as anyone could ask for on plain old planet E."
"That's the truth," the man nodded, easing the boy from the
mirror and holding his hand as they went after a candle and lighter,
"especially the premier gathering for the summer."
"What's that like?"
"We crucify the new altar boy," Ben explained as the equipped
themselves for the dark, "and all the males ejaculate on his body,
especially his chest, shoulders, face, and upper thighs."
"I hope you use small nails," Carlos observed, "and not
galvanized, they're kinda rough."
"The joke is," Ben responded, "that Ricky and all the rest
would probably have wanted it if we did it the old-fashioned way. It's so
intense as we spend the day together building up the altar and bonfire that
railroad spikes wouldn't give the new boy second thoughts."
"And they call it `just sex,'" Carlos murmured as they walked
hand in hand in their underwear, turning out all but the wall switch in
Ben's bedroom.
Click, the old-fashioned switch cut. In the total darkness,
Ben, stripped, knelt and began easing forward to the boy leaning against
the far wall. In the darkness, Carlos slipped out of his underpants, and
spread his legs widely as he leaned back for support.
"Are your hands behind your neck?" Ben whispered down the
hall.
"Yes, I'm ready for you," Carlos rasped in reply.
"Mine are, too," the man said. They had twenty feet to go.
"Can we talk more about what happens, you know, the sperm?"
the eleven year old whispered.
"Yes," Ben said, "did you have a specific question?"
"Yeah," Carlos whispered into the dark, "when you made it
spill out of Ricky and the other boys you were still in your tee shirt and
briefs, you know, to give them a chance to escape a fate worse than death."
"I was more responsible with them," the instructor admitted,
"but you're the one who kissed the John D. MacDonald book. That brought up
a love issue. To be honest, I want to take you fully, spill my hot seed
all over your beautiful body, and I don't care if you spend the remainder
of the summer vomiting in the toilet."
"And I don't care," the boy whispered back, "if you blood and
guts come out with your sperm and you're dead as a doornail by the time I
get to the bowl."
Great minds may think alike, but great bodies have more fun.
The pitch darkness notwithstanding, their eyes were full of each other. He
Nordic, six-three, blue eyes, slightly Jon Voight ("Midnight Cowboy") face,
and now naked and ready to mate. Lesser he, five eight, ninety pounds,
big-brown-eyed fox face, black hair in the absolutely and totally universal
buzz cut of the day. Both obviously male. Both panting audibly and the
darkness.
"Tell me about Francis," the boy suggested.
"We had to get up from our blindfold game," Ben said, "so he
could get me out of my underpants, and I could pull his down."
"Did you keep your blindfolds on for that?" Carlos wanted to
know.
"We experimented with touching each other while they were
still on," the priest explained, "then we took them off."
"Who got completely naked first?"
"He did," Ben said, "What happened was we went back in the
slower, because it had a strong echo, only we took a big towel so we'd be
comfortable kneeling in front of each other. He leaned against the wall
and I knelt in front of him. I pretended Kip was with me, because teaching
him something I'd never done, myself, took more time."
"He kept doing it wrong?" the broken voice at the end of the
hallway asked.
"Just wanted to hurry, like any kid would," Ben said, "but I
was ten and I knew better."
"Did Francis like it, that you were pretending?" Carlos
wanted to know.
"Yes," the athlete replied as he moved forward on his knees
(ten feet now), "he whispered to both of us, and suggested I mount Kip from
behind so I could molest him while he was learning."
"Did you imagine the feeling of his back against your bare
chest?" Carlos whispered.
"Yes, and even more how his chest and stomach would feet in
my hands."
"If he'd really been there," the boy said, "how would you
have felt about sharing the sperm with him?"
"It would have been sexy," Ben managed to rasp.
"I feel the same," the new altar boy said, "especially if it
was Matt. He's the, you know, sort of plainest, so I bet he'd like having
it all over him even more than I would."
"That's very sensitive of you," Ben said, "and perceptive,
too. All the men on retreat take a special interest in him, because he
isn't conventionally cute, and not only that, Janet spends more time alone
with him than with any of the other males."
"I forgot about the girls," came a tense whisper in reply.
"Janet and Kitty will both be masturbating you and using
their lips and tongues on you while you're strapped to the cross," the
priest noted, "so that will probably never happen again as long as you
live."
"Did you have Kitty in front of the mirror?" the boy asked,
comforted by the returning whispers in the darkness.
"Yes," the adult said, "she and Pete."
"Had she been molested by an adult before?" the curious child
wanted to know.
"No," Ben said. "She'd made her brother spray a couple of
times, but they hadn't gone any further than that. In fact, they'd never
even been naked together because the things that had had happened happened
while they were in the back seat on long car trips."
"So she'd never seen his sperm?" the boy asked.
"Just half dried up on her tummy when she went to the ladies
room at the rest stops," the man explained, "but that was enough to get her
very excited at the prospect."
"Well," the boy mused, "I think it's cool that there are at
least some girls. I can imagine a boy being with a man, but the thought of
being with a man, when I'm a man, is not attractive, and I mean totally."
"That's very common," Ben affirmed, "of all the alumni who
come to the retreats, there isn't a single gay couple. We like being
together and touching each other around willing children, but without them
as a catalyst, there's no reaction, adult to adult."
"Good," the boy said.
"Well," the priest elaborated, "it's one of those social
mysteries that just intensifies with research. Pedophilia is almost wholly
distinct from homosexuality, to the extent most gay males don't even like
children, much less want to have sex with them, while most pedophiles are
husbands with wives who never, ever complain about what happens in the
bedroom."
"I'd just want my wife to know," Carlos said.
"We have special -- and I do mean special -- orientations for
potential spouses of our club members," Ben explained, "and the most
negative reaction that ever occurs is a few minutes of shock at the first
act of our version of a pageant. To a woman, and a few men, too, they end
up saying something like What is all the fuss about? Instead of carrying
around guilt and secrets, they now have something exciting to share, and
most importantly, a good reason to stay slim. We count Clover Club,
sometimes lewdly nicknamed Roll-Me-Over Club, a complete success as a sole
addiction, that is no food, booze, tobacco, gambling, or drugs,
prescription or otherwise, or other brands of dysfunctional behavior are
tolerated, alone. The fact that the children like it is a big bonus, but
it was started, years ago, in the name of physical and mental health and
that tradition has become so axiomatic we probably wouldn't know what to do
if anyone did break the rules, which aren't even written down in the first
place. So the simple answer is, marry a Clover girl and have clover
children."
"Is everybody Catholic?" Carlos asked.
"Most," the father said, "but it's a total non-issue. We
joke that there are no good Catholics amongst us, and about a third aren't
even bad Catholics."
"Sound healthy," the boy said.
"I think most of us wonder, at one time or another," Ben
responded, "how much health you can have without it; if the world might not
be a far better and more peaceful place if Christ had acknowledged the
vector and blessed it, and if it had been more openly practiced than it has
been."
"I guess there's comfort in knowing things couldn't have
developed any worse," the boy observed.
"No place of pride for the Catholic church," the man said,
"but that goes for a lot of other institutions, political, military, and
academic, as well as religious. All we have left are our beautiful
downtowns, and there's no law against the merchant class destroying them,
nor against the literary class rendering us dizzy dolts with the likes of
Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald."
END OF FILE II