Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2005 02:08:22 -0800
From: Timothy Stillman <comewinter@earthlink.net>
Subject: "My Song to Celesta"

			   "My Song to Celesta"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


Her name was Celesta. She was ten. I was eight. She
looked like a Mexican senorita. Her name seemed a
Mexican one. She was unique and unlike anyone I had ever
known. She was exotic. There was a Marty Robbins' song
then, "El Paso" about a gunfight in a cantina for the love of
the dancer, and for me it would be Celesta who would
whirl. She had dark hair, thick and long and to her
shoulders. She had a face like a cameo of a beautiful girl
who died a long time ago that haunted and haunts my
bones. Her skin was pale. Her eyes were brown. Her lips
were red. Her laugh was infectious. Her body was slim.
She wore ruffled blouses of white. She wore shorts. It was
summer. She was my first love.

February as I write this, but in this corner of the world,
summer is already making inroads. Summer here now, as
then, was not a pleasant season, heat wise. It is hot and
painful. The sun is poisoned butter that burns the skin, that
fries your hair, that makes you perspire. And in those days,
there were few home air conditioners. We sweated
throughout the summer constantly, except when we went
to the movie theater to get cool. Who cared what was
playing? We saw lots of movies and couldn't have cared
less about most of them.

Celesta was from Kansas. I have never known anyone else
with her first name. I have never read it anywhere, in
fiction or fact. I fear that I could google that first name in
and come up with ten thousand hits. I will not do that. She
was the girl I loved. And I will not make her one moment
less special.

She visited her grandmother across the street from us in
July and August. I was discovering love inside myself. I
was discovering this little worm that extended from my
groin and somehow it had to do with her. They were both
discovered simultaneously. To her, I was a little pest. To
me, she was the wide open world of Kansas and magic and
Oz and Dorothy and all those plains I saw in Disney
movies.

She had kind eyes. She looked at me as we talked. No one
else, my age, had, to this point. Talked to me. Or looked
into my eyes. I loved her with all the pent up fury of fear
and doubt and giggles and she had an accent I had never
heard before. A kind of no accent. A kind of dream. Once
she touched my forehead. It had been a joke, you see. I had
been lying on the couch in the living room with the big fan
oscillating from the other side of the room, half asleep. My
mom was sitting in the chair across from me watching the
soaps on TV. I heard the screen door open and someone
come down the hall.

I thought it was my elderly aunt who lived with us and who
I loved dearly. She would sometimes stroke my head and
she made me real but not as real as Celesta made me feel.
It was Celesta sitting on the arm of the couch, brushing my
hair. I was wearing only my white BVDs. I had my eyes
closed. It felt so good. The touch. The feeling that made
me a little less hot, made my half dream a little less fretful.
And I opened my eyes slowly, and it was Celesta doing it,
looking at my eyes, smiling at me. I tented immediately and
put my hands to my penis to cover it.

My mom was laughing. Celesta was smiling. And I wanted
to hide there. I think if I could have kissed her, just one
time, everything that came after would have been worth it.
I could have made it, done a better job of it all the way
round. I picked myself up from the couch, like it was on
fire, when I realized what a fool my worm had made of me,
and I ran like crazy to the bathroom where my clothes
were, slamming the door behind me.

I guess I have to tell the sexy thing now. We watched TV
though. And we went to the Ben Franklin Five and Dime
to get the board game of  the TV show "Beat the Clock"
whose host was Bud Collyer who was before that
Superman on radio. "Beat the Clock" was one of the early
television shows where average people got the hell
humiliated out of them. The current humiliation shows are,
just meaner that's all, and some not by much.

We read comic books. We went to movies. There were
some children who lived in the house next to her
grandmothers' who were friends with her too. She let me
decide if I wanted her to spend the morning with me or the
afternoon. We were sitting on the oddly cool curb in that
hot miserable sweat bee weather, she in her shorts and
white ruffled blouse, I in my T shirt and brown shorts. She
did not wear shoes in summer. Her feet were callused on
the bottom. She could walk on the rocks and pebbles in the
alley beside my house, or on the blazing hot concrete,
without burning her feet or hurting them at all. I was
amazed at that. She let me feel the calluses on her soles.
Like leather.

So I said I wanted her to stay the afternoon with me. I am
a very stupid person, but even I knew afternoon started at
noon and did not end till the sun went down, which in this
deep summer would sometimes be at nine or nine thirty,
depending on the daylight saving time thing, one summer
we would go on it, the next one we wouldn't. And she
never sweated. She must have. But memory is kind as well
as cruel. She wore a silver bracelet on one wrist and a little
watch on the other. She was woman and child at the same
time. I did not believe she would ever grow older. She was
the age she always seemed to be. Self contained, as
Whitman might say.

The sexy thing. I have to get to that because I want to, but
it makes me so damned sad writing about it. Cause she let
me. Cause it was a favor. Cause she was resigned to it. All
these reasons. None of them. I don't know. I adored her.
Her face was a slight oval and she had dimples in her
cheeks. I never saw her in a dress, till that heartbreaking
last time. Celesta brought summer and with her summer
was royal green and blue. I hated summer. But not with
her. She suspended the thing, made it better than what it
was.

I was not into masturbating yet. I knew I could rub my
penis and make it feel good. But that was as far as it went.
Mostly I wanted to dwell therein with her seeing me in my
briefs. I wanted to show her I had one too. Though I didn't
really know what that meant. Still in me was that intuitive
grasp that would come with show me yours and I'll show
you mine, but it wasn't like that really. I watched a lot of
TV, and a lot of movies, and I read a lot of comic books.
Sexuality was a muddle for me then. Still is for the most
part. I love who is kind to me. That she was beautiful too
just added to it all.

It was early August. She would go back home in a month.
I would be disconsolate till she returned. We were playing
in the root cellar of my house where my grandmother kept
canned preserves. It was a dark small place with lots of
dust and caked mud in it. There were spider webs on the
little windows that had not been cleaned ever maybe. She
was Annie Oakley and I was her young kid brother, Tad.
Sometimes I was her deputy Lofty. But mostly I was Tad.
This was a TV show at the time. I will occasionally come
across some reruns of it on satellite TV and it never fails to
make me weep.

I don't know what we talked about. How we were
together. She humored me. People when I am lucky humor
me. I fall in love with them when they do that. Love has to
have somewhere to go. So it goes there. Her hair was dark
like night. Her hands were declarative. She never talked
without moving them. Delicately. She was so perfect.
Serene and owner of  all the world, kind queen. -The
minister said we came from dust and to dust we return.
How could she be made of dust? And how could she
become dust like me and everybody else except her?

I have this photograph. I had it. Lost it over the years.
Have wrecked the house trying to find it. In it, she is
kneeling beside the oak tree in our front yard. I am
kneeling beside her. I have my Roy Rogers cowboy shirt
on and my brown shorts and tennis shoes. She has her
senorita clothes on. We are smiling at the camera. In front
of us, and we are holding mightily to his collar so he will
stay still and not squirm and run away, for he was always
squirmy and always running, was my dog Ricky, a Boston
bull dog. He didn't have a tail. My grandmother in a fit of
humor before the Alzheimer's set it, or maybe it already
had, would delight in telling me someone had cut it off
with a knife. She didn't mean to be cruel. Most people
honestly don't mean to be, I've discovered.

I have a crew cut in the photo. I hated that damn crew cut.
Looked bald. And I am smiling real big, I did and do not
do that often because my teeth are crooked and yellow and
ugly, but I was so happy to be with her, and I wanted to
make my face less shiny, and make myself older and say
love things to her that Pat Boone said to whoever in "State
Fair" and sing "April Love" and all of that, and she was my
friend. I have had few. Fewer than I realized even at the
time. They come, they take, they go. The end. Live with it.

The sexy stuff now. We were playing Annie Oakley and
Tad or Lofty as the case might be. We pretended the cellar
was the sheriff's office. The heat in there was especially
stifling. I imagine her perspiration, for she was human after
all, though I tried not to think about it, as perfume, sweet
and tangy and enticing. I lived in a world of big words
most of which I didn't know the meaning of. I still do this.
Once in early grade school, I scrawled just all over a piece
of paper with a pencil and asked my aunt if I had written
long hand? Something we would not get to yet in school.
My aunt loved me and looked at my scribbles closely, then
said that I did. I asked what I wrote. She told me. I
pretended that was what I had written. I loved her. I still
pretend to "write in cursive" and hope for someone like her
to tell me I did OK. There are very few people who were
like her. Next time, if anyone asks you if they did OK, tell
them they did, whether they did or not, cause it helps them
feel better. You'll see them smile. It will make you feel
good.

The poisoned butter sun. The green sick making slick hot
grass. The bees. The mosquitoes. The night time lightning
bugs. Celesta. All revolving round her. All there for her
consequence and her being. All there for my desire to see
her naked and for her to see me so. I loved going to sleep
imagining she was beside me and talking to me, like I
imagined Tommy Rettig as Jeff Miller on that lovely lonely
first series of "Lassie" would do when I did not have her to
imagine. I wanted to kiss her. I didn't really know why. I
was always with a hard on around her.

After the incident on the couch. I think I was never not
hard around her after that. To her, it would have been like
seeing a kid brother, no big deal, who would care? To me,
it was the only way I could see her. I felt guilty. I felt
remorse. I felt happy beyond words. I felt like I was not
me. That last part was the best part of all.

We were running through the back yard, our narrow dog
legged back yard with  its tall thick green grass, and broken
torn concrete blops every so often to form a footpath,
grass straggling through them. We were pretending to be in
cowboy chase on our champion horses, going after the bad
guys, rounding that huge rock that is in all the westerns.
Someone once told me recently that rock has made
whoever owned it and his or her descendants a fortune. It
really is the same bloody rock in each of those western
movie and TV shows.

She fell. She was in front of me. She did not fall. I reached
out and pulled her to the ground. Reticent I was and shy
and blushing at anything, a weepy boy, scared all the time,,
this is not me who did this next thing. This is me who did
this next thing. There with the house next door and the
man out mowing his lawn, right up almost against our back
yard, with just a chicken wire fence separating us. But I did
it. I pulled her down on her back. She fell. No. I pulled her
down. Me. And she lay there, and she did not move. I was
not scared. I wanted to see her breasts. I had seen
Maidenform bra commercials on TV. I wanted to see
behind those bras. It didn't occur to me why she was so
flat chested. Or that she was just ten. I didn't know. She
was a woman to me.

We were breathing hard, panting from running. It scared
me that I could hear her breathe, like I breathed. Cause that
meant she would die some day like I would.

I sat on her legs. I fell right down onto them and sat on
them. They were so warm, and soft and cuddly and friendly
and they were CELESTA'S BARE LEGS.. They felt  so
good to my bare legs, and my butt was on her legs. MY
BUTT WAS ON HER BARE LEGS. Paradise. I was so
hard then. I so wanted to show her, though not knowing
what I expected her to do then. I wanted to take out my
worm and show it to her. I honestly still did not know why.
Those were simpler, more stupid times. Even so I miss
them. Cause she is in them and will always be, even when
the world is burned by the sun or frozen to death as it flies
away from it, no matter what other dimensional `brane we
might slide into some day, she will always be childhood
summer and I will always be with her and we will love each
other.

My hands were sweaty. I was holding her down with my
legs as I sat on her. My hands were fists on the hot green
grass on either side of her. She breathed hard. Her chest
laboring as did mine. She pulsed. I imagined I could hear
her heart beat. Feel her blood vessels carrying blood
through her. Which again scared me. Her blouse was
pulled up a little now. I could see her navel. It was so
glorious. So sexy. It captured me. The key to everything.
And she had one too. Sexual? Yes. Most definitely. For me
at least. As only childhood sex can be to a child. After that,
guess as best as you can.

My whole body ached. Fevered. I felt clammy. I felt hot
and dusty and dirty and prickly. Her face was smudged
with dust from the root cellar.

My worm stood straight up. I looked at her. She had her
arms extended over her head, each fanned next to her
lovely face. I didn't think about this twice. It was noon. My
mom was in the kitchen right next to where we were. The
guy mowing the yard was so close I could spit on him. The
sky was blue. The day was open. And here am I, little
Timothy Stillman, who would not harm a fly, who was nice
and polite and quite and did his homework to the best of
his ability which sadly was never good enough. Here am I
unbuttoning Celesta's blouse. The feel of cotton. The feel
of her flesh. The feel she had of mine. I touched but only
when I had to.

And she lay there. Composed. Her face and her eyes
directed to me. Not as in, I want you to. But as in, if you
must you must, so go ahead. She could have pushed me
off. She was stronger by far than I. She could have done it
easily. She did not. She lay waiting to be inspected. I doubt
if anything went through her mind but doing me a favor.
She did not smile. She did not frown. She did not laugh.
She did not cry.

The whole of the world seemed to hush at this time. As if
we were suddenly in a very important and very sacred
church. The wooden steps to the kitchen were rickety. We
were almost next to them. There was a lace of tree
branches above us, dappling us a bit. I could hear, or so I
imagine I heard, the swap shop on the radio in the kitchen
where my mother made lunch, for that was always what
she listened to when she made lunch. And I continued
unbuttoning Celesta's blouse. Her blouse was hot. I
finished the last button and opened it wide, pushing the
shirt away from her, on each side. I did not touch her
chest. I wanted to do something but didn't know what.
This didn't know what has always been my recurring
theme. She let me. Now what. I was in charge. Though not
really. I have this chance. I wanted this without knowing. I
can do something. But she is in charge. And she will say
no, not any further. And it would ruin everything.

I had no desire to go any further. I was brushing the sweat
out of eyes and my hot scalp and the three hairs in my crew
cut (did I mention before how I hate crew cuts? I have long
hair now; it is my way of saying FUCK YOU TO ALL
CREW CUTS--it's a matter of honor with me is the thing)
and I felt itchy and sexy whatever that was and I looked at
her chest and her chest looked like mine. Little boy nipples.
Nothing to put a bra over. And I was perplexed, and here
is the curious thing. I remember the feeling. This is not
memory talking forgotten and made up.

I was delighted she had little boy nipples. I was delighted
she did not have breasts though I still did not know what
they were and why women had them and boys didn't, but it
was wonderful my Celesta was like me. Pale, almost not
visible tits.  Visible rib cage. Slim waist. Shiny chest with
hard breathing. All like me.

It was just exhilarating to think that we could have rubbed
our nipples and flat chests together and be like two boys
doing it, and that was just--magic. I did not wonder if she
had a worm. I was still in bafflement that I had done this
thing and what she had let me do and what I had found out
and who would notice us in the next second and send me
to jail. But if she was not a girl...I had always assumed she
was a girl. She looked like one. She did not look like boys
looked, especially back then. But was she a girl? Or a boy?
And which delighted decimated decamped me more? To
think of her as a boy was quite remarkable. To think of her
as a girl was quite remarkable too.

Her legs had not moved beneath my butt. Her face was
neutral. Her body was still unmoving. She looked at me as
though, now what? Though even that was faint. Then the
shame hit me. And I moved off her. She buttoned her
blouse quickly and ran through the stone gate across to her
grandmother's house and I knew I would never ever see
her again. I was so sad. I was so scared. I went up those
rickety steps, slipped on one of them, caught myself on the
unstable railing, and then inside to a desolate lunch. I don't
remember having much of an appetite. I froze the thoughts.
I would not think of what had happened. So then it would
not have happened.

Celesta always went home for lunch and dinner. It was one
o'clock when she left. My afternoon time with her. And at
two o'clock she would return. She always had and we'd
play the "Beat the Clock" game or watch TV or just talk
about whatever kids, I must have been one, talked about
back then. This time though, she would not return, she
would tell her grandmother who would tell me mother who
would kill me and then thrust me into hell where the
sinners go. The whole thing though, Celesta had been like a
mannequin. She had not been human during the part that I
wanted so desperately for her to be human. She had been
so warm and so real to me. But she had made me unreal
and that was the horror of it.

I thought later on about maybe trying to again. This time
taking off her shorts too. I wondered a long while if she
had a worm. I was eight for god's sake. What did I know?
I knew I had lost a friend. And I put elbows on the yellow
painted wooden kitchen table and I nibbled at a sandwich
and drank some Coke which was really good back then,
lots better than it is today; they put more syrup in it then. I
understand Sweden for some reason is one of the countries
that still has the fully flavored Coke. Lucky Swedes.

The time ticked listlessly. I felt as if a part of me was gone.
I knew I was dirty. I knew I should not have. I knew that if
I did this, though of course I didn't really, she would let me
and then she would never be my friend anymore. Friends
are friends and sex is not for me with them. It's just always
worked out that way for me. I try to live with it. But it
ain't easy my friends. I wish I was Horatio Stubbs in "The
Hand- Reared Boy"--one of the best jack off books ever
written. God how lucky Horatio Stubbs.

And at two o'clock while I was sitting with my bare legs
sticking to the green couch in the living room as my
mother and grandmother watched "As the World Turns,"
Celesta came a knockin' on the front door, the door itself
open all the time, she knocked on the screen door, and
came on in as was the custom. And my heart beat again
and I looked at her and she looked at me and she said,
"Can we go get some cinnamon toothpicks?" And I said,
jumping of the couch, "sure, let's go." And we ran all the
way to the little grocery store two blocks away and got
those hot as hell cinnamon toothpicks, all the rage back
then. My tongue that time burned so deliciously. Me being
next to her. And we were still friends forever.

And we never talked about the blouse thing. I never asked
her sex questions. I was a good boy again. It was a
personality of some kind at least that I had been saddled
with. We were friends the rest of that summer and I cried
myself to sleep that night and many nights to come when
she went back to Kansas. I pretended each summer that
she loved me. Till she handed me over one afternoon to her
cousin who had the unfortunate fate of looking like
Mortimer Snerd with long plastic looking banged yellow
corn hair. Buck teeth. Bulging eyes. Scared me. Like out
of a big bug science fiction movie. Celesta and her cousin
who I had never seen before came over one afternoon. I
guess I was about fifteen or so. We spent little time
together now. I stayed in my house. Sad. She stayed in her
grandmother's house. Probably bored. She spent less and
less summer vacation there.

Celesta now had breasts. I had blurred all that thing of
taking off her blouse in my mind because she was beautiful
for sure now and forever beyond me, and she shamed me
unwittingly by the mere fact she existed. She told me her
cousin's name, I don't remember, and asked why didn't I
play badminton with her, the cousin, while Celesta went in
our house and watched TV? So of course yes.

How I hated that little girl I was stuck with. Memories
grow blank about the rest of that day. It was not pretty by
any means.

Maybe the last time I saw her, she was in last year high
school, and came to visit her grandmother for a few days,
she was so incandescently lovely I thought I would never
have another erection as long as I lived, for she was gone
away from me and perhaps I had gone even further away
from her. She asked me if I still wrote. I mumbled as to a
hated adult, like a teacher, that yes I did. And in truth, I
wrote terrible screenplays of favorite books, and TV shows
and movie sequels. Dreadful stuff. Hilarious to read now.
But back then I thought them quite wonderful. Every time
I finished one, I would go on Saturday afternoon (a ritual)
to the office supply store and buy another heavy impressive
folder  with fake marble like covers and swirls in the design
(I always put each manuscript into a differently colored
folder,) then come home with much pride, snap the new
screenplay in,  flip through the pages, then stack it on top
of all the others, "well,, King, this case is closed," this
surely someone some day will recognize masterpiece  that I
had pounded out on my battered and often broken
(because I pound hard when I type) but very forgiving
Olivetti portable typewriter. One novel by Cornell
Woolrich is dedicated to his typewriter. I understand this.

We sat on the porch on this oppressively hot summer day
with desolation all around in shatters. We could have gone
in my house that now had air conditioning, serene, lovely
cool air conditioning--I beat you at something God, eat
this!--but we sat on the green painted flecked swing, not
moving, our feet firmly planted on the floor, she wore
shoes now even in summer, I felt heavy and tugged into the
earth and wanted her to go away, please stay. You've
taken Celesta. I will not have it. Give her back to me.


And we talked, like a woman will talk with her adolescent
kid brother. And I died. I tried to say something. Jokes that
didn't come off, fell flat like dead flies on the blue painted
flecked floor below me, and she tried to talk to me and I
tried to listen, then after too short/too long a while, she
said she really had to go now. She with her dress and her
way too obvious breasts that I wanted to touch and kiss,
and all those mysterious and forbidding woman
mechanisms working on the outside of her and on the
inside (why do you still have to look like the girl you aren't
anymore? couldn't you have uglied up or something?)
those damned high heeled shoes (why don't you rub it in a
little more?) and her lips that had been kissed by someone
other than me, and I wanted to remind her, wanted to
remind her of---nothing. Nothing at all.

Before she left, I asked her to come inside and sign my
autograph book, so I could have her name with me. I
blushed, knowing she would think it silly. But she was still
Celesta, still my one time friend,  and she smiled and said,
really? sure I'd be happy to, and we walked into the cool
hall way and she signed it and then she said goodbye and
she walked out the no longer screen door but glass door,
and I closed the wooden door behind her and leaned my
head against it and in all that cool cool air I wept my head
off. I weep now writing this.

She never returned to her grandmother's house. Not that I
know of. Once her grandmother brought over a newspaper
clipping Celesta had sent. She was in her nurse's uniform
and smiling with such love down at the new born baby she
cradled so delicately in her arms. Still Celesta. Still caring.
Still understanding.

Years later when I read the novel "Summer of `42" by
Herman Raucher which I loved even more than the movie
and it's one of my favorite films of all times, I thought of
Celesta as Dorothy, and me as Hermie, and to this day
when I am sad and know for sure that everything and
everyone has passed me by and there is no memory of me
in any of them, I hear that lovely Michel LeGrande
"Summer of `42" theme, and it becomes everything that I
am.

Later there were words written to the theme. They spell
Celesta to me. Hermie lost an irreplaceable part of himself
to Dorothy. But I lost more. The limpid Celesta, age ten,
flat chested, both boy and girl and woman, all and
everything, and though later I would fall in love with a boy
named Joel, it was still Celesta I think of first when I
remember my favorite childhood gay experience. So. Go
figure. I think of her sometimes as girl. But mostly as boy.
Silly as it seems. It's all so complex and unkempt, isn't it?

Take care, Celesta, I remember, and I still love you most of
all.

(Dedicated to Herman Raucher)

				  the end


Timothy Stillman
comewinter@earthlink.net