Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 15:40:09 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Making It With Jack

			   "Making It With Jack"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


The bloke upstairs is having it off with the missus again. Cry,
are they loud. Me, here in my bed sitting room, just after a
tedious day of bank clerking, and needing my rest, and there
they are, one floor above, the battling Doolans again. She
screeches and he screeches louder and their screeches meet
in the middle and do a loop de loop, circle round and come
each to the other till their voices get tangled in one another
and each is screeching out the other's throats.

Blimey, I just can't take it any more. Not when Jimmy
Doolan is all the world to me, and he natters, you should just
hear how he natters, dumb as a shrub, but sweet kinda and
going on to school sometime or other if he can ever get out
of the situation he's in, his being a kept man, and she being a
fool not to know.

All it gathers is moss and that is the underpinning in this
stupid cramped smelly rooming house that once had
pretensions about a hundred and fifty years ago when Saucy
Jack was having his own way with the ladies, and Jimmy is a
fan of Saucy Jack's, and he asks me sometimes after we've
had each other off, wouldn't it be great to go back there, to
the cobblestone streets, and the fogs and the shadows of
street lamps and their  little puny torch glows, as the sound
of silver knife slashes in the near distance?

He's all the time planning on writing the definitive history of
the Ripper, and mostly I'm all the time planning on writing
the definitive history of Jimmy Doolan, spare man (well,
more boyo than man), taut muscles, solid hard belly, kind
eyes that get a bit green round the blue edges when I look up
at him with him in my mouth and his smile a little lopsided
and his eyes closing now and then while his fish fry in the
deepest part of him, and he ejects in my mouth and it's like
male ink. Like sperm ink of an octopus and he infests me,
every nook and cranny.

And we can't take her anymore, Helen Doolan, we just can't
abide her, when it's wrong as rain indoors to be doing this,
but Jimmy and me are an item you see, and Helen is such a
bag of sourdough bed knobs that she can't figure out where
he goes late at night, which is down here with me, which is
why they fight all the time. Say what you want about
domestic abuse, but Jimmy's been given a right POW in the
eye and the kisser now and then, and I kinda look forward to
that, because that's when he holds to me all the tighter and
tells me he loves me and needs me.

Bull, of course, it is happenstance, I happen to be here and
he happens to be there one floor above me, imprisoned in
these rubbery, tissue thin sweaty walls that don't even absorb
the sweat of poverty and work and hand to mouth when you
can find them and tell them you'll be nice to them if they will
just calm down their hungers every now and then, and of
course compared to Helen, I'm a real champ. A real
Lothario. And I should tell him it's all a matter of
circumstance and comparison, but being drilled by Jimmy
makes me selfish enough to keep my cake grinder shut I can
guarantee that as a fact.

To sit in my dusty lumpy armchair in my dark room, with the
winter coming in no matter how you feed the fuse box, with
all these chinks and cracks between windows and walls and
inside the walls and all of it dirty and filled with grime of
factories in the next block, and I want my Jimmy now, and I
want him to put his fingers in my hair and draw my face to
his and he kisses me with his beery breath in mine and our
tongues fight each other and he's just seventeen years old,
him and Helen being together now for two long trying
months, and he seeing me on the stairs of the house one day
and asking if I got a fag on me, cause man I'm takin' up
smoking again.

So not only did I give him a cig and lighter, I lit the damn
thing for him, and he took a big lungful of breath and then
expelled it  right in my face, like he was daring me to cough
(I didn't) and looked half seal closed right into my eyes, as
we stood on that dark late winter afternoon stair case, real
John Garfield like, hard and long at me, parsing me, judging
me, like I'm a ham in a window or somethin',  in the golden
glow of the lighter and the oily shadows of the hall, and  he
said you want some of my dick, man? while I, already
impaled by him, unable to look away, just stared fish eyed
back at him.

He shocked me out of seven years growth. And he smiled
that wayward smile of his like he had just ducked under the
turnstile and had gotten to ride all over London on the
underground and all for free, and I snap to, and size him up
as quickly as I can, as much as anyone could do under the
dark circumstances, and I said to him I liked to be wanked
mostly but blow jobs were nice too.  You learn hard from the
rent boys. You learn not to give a damn, the response.

And he looked at me all hard enamel like and I thought for a
moment I was going to be thrashed and bashed, but then he
cut his eyes in the smoke and lowered the lids and I could
feel the heat of his face; all around us was dank cold and dust
motes and smelly carpeting that was more termite holes than
carpet, and he said there on those ramshackle stairs that were
at a too steep angle,  his voice saying, like nicked cold ice, I
noticed you before, liked the look, be at your flat at seven.
So I nodded and did my best to look nonchalant as I turned
and almost tumbled down the stairs back to my room,
waiting all the time for the laugh that didn't come, which
meant I hadn't had to duck my head in my shoulders after all.

That 1st night was glorious. I mean that first night we
just--well, afterwards, he told me that all the senses he had
were going crazy because he was making it with someone
who had more than a bit of something between his legs, and I
didn't put no claim or brand on him, and his voice lazy and
lacy with the drink I had been feeding him, and he said that
he had known her, that "retard bitch up there" since forever
and it was just assumed they'd get betrothed, and they left
school, and he had asked her to marry him, "gawd knows
why" and she had put her arms around him and she had said
she would be with him for the rest of his days, and how
stunned he was at her saying that, he just  said it cause he
wanted to get her to lower her bloomers so he could see her
arse; but now this, he was stuck with her, "real honey melon
heart I am, never wanna hurt nobody's feelings") and how he
laughed with such rueful force when he told me how it was
for someone to issue forth a curse at you, that scared you but
sounded nice too, and you are too stupid to figure it out, and
how he wished he hadn't done none of this, even lying bout
their ages, the whole ball of wax.

And we balled, and we were not made out of wax, and it was
just like electric light bulb Christmas time when I could hold
him next to me, the big beautiful longness of him, the big
beautiful longness in my short bed, our feet, and ankles
hanging off the end of it, and he liked to tie me up with his
kerchief and belt and he liked me to come on his chest (we
always made sure to spit bathe him to tidiness before he went
back to Helen--we couldn't use the communal loo, in case
she walked in the door, the lock of which was broken), and
he liked me to listen to his heart beat as I did him with my
hand, and he liked to duck into me and hide and pretend we
were both ten and were never going to be separated or come
out of hiding or grow a day again .

And he loved the Ripper. See, he told me one day, nobody
knows it really, trying to sound like an adult of 30 like I was,
pain is everything, you run from pain and what do you run to
but more pain? Right? So you run from that like the devil
was chasing after you and what do you one day or other run
into? Right. The very devil you been runnin' from. And if sex
is not meant for pain then why the cherry breaking pain, the
much prized in song and joke tradition of  busting it? And all
the other pain, the biting and entering and gouging and
tangling of sex? Ever as a little boy see your mum and dad
banging each other?  he asked me, while I wished he would
shut, so we could fuck again, but he went on--Thought they
were killing each other with all those things they did and the
screams and moans and all that, didn't you? Death's door.
Why is it called a little death? He asked that last question like
it was the most unexpected thing in the world anyone would
think of that.

And, he yarbled on, god what a talker, if we like to go up
each other's bum holes, then you got to work with the pain,
a mite or a lot, rough or gentle, you still have to deal with
some of that, and if I'm being honest, I like it when Helen
takes off on me, when she browbeats me and tells me this is
all my fault whatever "this" at the moment happens to be.

Cause, look, it's this way-- we all like scary movies, cinema,
telly, whatever, and it's good to get the old pump pumping,
we love fun fairs and haunted houses too, can't argue that,
why is being terrified fun?, it makes us cuddle close, and
when Helen and I do it and we don't do it damn bloody
often, it's like I know she's toting up all the things I'm doing
wrong, right as I'm going into her and then the old in out in
out, like the droogs said, she's trying to figure out how my
job at the meat packer's and her job at the green grocer's
gonna add up to any food at all for us this week and what a
layabout no good lecher I am and what the hell has she
gotten herself into?, martyr that she is, and she whining and
for her it's all--can't he hurry up and get it over and I'd like
to enjoy this too myself some day before I die, buster.

And that's pain. That's pain. Knowing she's letting me use
her as a receptacle, and the goddam thing of it is, I'm
grateful she's doin' the same thing to me in her own way,
which is also painful.

You know how many books have been written on the Fiend
from Hell? You know there's hundreds of the things and
everyone of 'em has got a different theory on who Jack was,
and no one knows and no one ever will know because they
don't have the documents and the facts at their fingertips.
They don't got no goddam eye witness to any of it. And
DNA--screw you me, that comed a bit later on didn't it?, old
Jimmy went on.

And, now while chatting away, he's started to using my bum
as a receptacle, and I'm grateful he is, while he's nattering on
about this hooker that was killed first and the one second and
the last who was dismembered in a hell fire of fury all over
her room, and I've become Helen, he's made me another her,
and he doesn't see it but I do and I know what he's talking
about, this pain business, because he's giving me pain.

It's emotional and physical and I love him and I promised
myself a long time ago I would never love anyone again
cause it gets you pain and I'm not a lover of it, though
maybe it comes out the other way, but Jimmy's up me and I
try to close my ears to his words and really just wish he
would shut his cake hole, and so I shout up to him I love
you, and he collapses on my back, shooting his spunk into
me, and I think my god this time too, I feel silly as hell, all
this time devoted to sex, or thinking about it, or dreaming
about it-- this silly little mongoose with the rubber hose
game? Blimey, what the hell's wrong with me?

And Jimmy sweat panting on top of me, breathing hard, the
both of us, "Don't you ever fuckin' say you loves me again?
Got it?" And he rips his dick out of me. I am afraid at this
point. I am also intrigued. He would do nothing to hurt me.
He likes to fuck me for me. I am more than another body.
Yes. Helen is a thing. I am me. That is the difference.

I tell myself that. But when I hear him and Helen fucking
upstairs, I know he's ice to me as to her, and he's taking her
out on me and all, I ain't naive; so when I hear them fucking,
I go out and take long walks, waiting for the Ripper to get
me too. I stay out late on nights like those. I am disappointed
to find myself making it back to my flat in one piece.

He is a bloke, this Jimmy. He's not a pal or a chum or a
buddy or any of that. He's an opportunist. We don't use
condoms. In this day and age, don't that tell you something?
Trying to bring something to me? Or to Helen? Or to the
both of us? And more?

He's just a daft kid who looks even younger and none of us
got no money, nobody in the whole world seems to have no
money, so there is little talk in this lousy spot on dog run of a
place, there is only yelling, only anger, from all the boarders
here. You can feel the shoe soles of the anger here. The
stamping up and down on floors all round us and on our own
as well. The shouts. The hits. The tellys too loud or the
radios. And desperation and dead end street, that smells
sour, and it sounds sour too, and at night when you hear late
walkers pounding in their rooms, looking for a way out, you
feel it in your soul. You can feel the tred marks of it.  The
prison cells of life which is what all of us here and
everywhere are. They leave tracks on the wall and floors and
in your brain.

You can see them almost, the angry walks, the sound of
them, as though they themselves are visible, beyond shoes
and floors, preternatural, supernatural-- almost they are like
an old friend, and you got to yarble with the old lady or the
old man or like those two kids up there are arguing where
were you wouldn't you like to know I've given you the best
years of my life Christ Helen you ain't even seventeen yet,
blow on, and all of that, and everybody is at each other's
throats, just like that movie "Straw Dogs,"--

--no wonder they banned that film here for so many decades,
can't break the proper Brit balloon after all--too holy for
words-- where all these Englishmen are rapists and
murderers and house breakers, with their la de da
Shakespeare accents and all literary and that, this blow hole
civilized crap is just that, crap, tear off the face of the thing
and there you find the worms and night crawlers digging out
of the sunlight of a sudden and down into the dirt, it's all dirt
here and grime and tag end life, and fuck the Queen Mother
and the horse she toddled in on, to boot, is what I say, and
Tony Fuckin Lap Dog Blair too.

But Jimmy can be kind, not often god knows, just when it's
to his benefit, and it's an odd prism glass effect to be making
love to the tune of Helen's crying right above us, and
sometimes it's like a hymn, her teary voice, almost, or a
beautiful psalm read by a plaintive voice that accompanies
our love making, our sexual roundelays, and we get more
gentle then, and he holds my hard penis and strokes the base
of it and rubs his fingers between my legs and he kisses me
most passionately then and there, and the pain gets lots less
and we can pretend that we really do care for each other
instead of what we really do care for--making someone else
unhappy for a change, which only adds to our happiness.

There are all kinds of Rippers, you know.

They didn't have to go with him, Jimmy says, they didn't
have to go with the Ripper, they didn't have any kind of
choice though did they?, got to pay the man something, even
they.

They made money as best they could, but think of it, all
those toffs from all those country estates getting their jollies
off by coming to the East End and fucking, for beans, some
trollop in her filthy clothes gunked up already by who knows
how many men, up against some suety brick wall or down in
the mud with the pigs and the sewers they were in and the
smells and the diseases, I mean a man who was well off, he
could have a courtesan, a bed boy if he liked, and if the wifey
was in the way, he could have made arrangements with the
Claridge or something, don't you think?

All gilt and gold and soft beds and warm cozy fire to cuddle
up with his mistress, but no, he goes down the rat hole of the
world and does his business there, and it's like pissing, his
business, how the hell did he even get as much as a worm
on?, and the women, those ugly ravaged ragged awful
women, how the hell did they get any business done to them
at all?  and all that smell of death and shit and there's this
diseased clit starin' up at you, like the hind end of a rat; ya
ask me, Jack from Hell did em a favor. That's where the
movies got it all wrong. Those real hookers were made out
of the ugliest mud you can imagine.

I sit in my chamber waiting for Jimmy the Raven to come tap
tapping at my door, and I wait for the arguing of my lover
and his wife, and the other quarrels going on all round me to
taper off, so Helen will cry herself to sleep and Jimmy
Doolan will come down to me so we will go up together. My
room's one of shadows and no ringring telephone, and old
second hand furniture, and a black and white telly that is
mostly a picture of snow and static, and it's cold still because
winter has hung on so long this year, and I wished I had had
something more than myself to give Jimmy, I wished I could
have gotten my guts together and picked up a rent boy for
us, it would have been nice, and Jimmy could have used him
to remind him of a boy in school he was in love with and
never had the courage to tell him so, and he just wanked off
in sad privacy because of him.

Jimmy said he finally got to hate the bastard but couldn't
stop loving him, and what the hell sense did that make?
Sometimes he cries the boy's name when he comes with me.
Sometimes it hurts me. Sometimes it prides me. Sometimes
I'd like to just curl up next to Jimmy and tell him all about
everything sexual I have done. But he thinks he was the
first'n for me, and I can't disillusion him, cause I can't hurt
his feelings, like the prosties and the Ripper--there's an off
beat theory for you, I'll bleed over here so I won't get none
on your pretty black cloak and instrument bag, kind sir, and
my word that is a sharp piece that is sir, silver and shiny and
so razor sharp, it'd be my honor, kind sir.

I wish Jimmy wasn't so gone on this Ripper thing either.
Cause now I'm thinking about it too much.

I wish he wasn't so gone on this book he was going to write
some day  (has he even read a book he wasn't forced to?; it's
not for nothing he talks like a TV programme or a movie, it's
where he gets his information from, like pretty much
everybody else, but they'd croak before they'd admit it, most
of 'em) when he didn't have anything to write about or think
about or be about because this was all of Jimmy, and when
he was naked on my bed and I kissed his little berry nipples
hard and I dug my tongue in his innie navel, I knew for a fact
this was as naked as he would ever get in his life, I knew that
he would never have his words spread naked on a page of
book paper, I knew he would never make the talk show
rounds promoting anything he had written,  that no BBC
snot critic would cut his work to ribbons, Fleet Street
wouldn't give a damn about his ratty sex life. I knew that he
and Helen would keep up the argument till they were seventy
five and dead, or until one or the other felt the Red Wind
deep in what was left of their tattered souls, and would
plunge a butcher knife, one into the other, and wonder where
oh where did it all go so wrong?

Jimmy had never had sex with anyone before Helen. He said
he had had sex with others before me, though I tried to
doubt it, but the way he just came out like that on the stairs
to me and told me he would have me if I wanted, or if I
hadn't wanted, well he had been lying or practicing for a
moment like that for a long time, and sometimes he had me
bring out the paddle with the holes in it that he had gotten
me, wrapped up in Christmas paper like a gift he presented
it, with a goofy smile, because he wanted to be spanked
every now and then for being a naughty boy and wetting his
bed in the dormitory of the boarding school,  (he never was
in no boarding school--notice how I'm beginning to talk like
him?) and he would ask me to spank him till it hurt, though I
doubt too many house masters would have been wanking
him off at the same time they whacked him, seems as it
would be confusing, like rubbing your stomach and patting
your head at the same time, but then again, all these stories
you here, quite a lot of them, must have some basis in fact.
I've always regretted not having experienced the utter sexual
terror of those places. As has Jimmy.

His lying on my lap on the bed and I'm spanking his naked
bum, and his dick is hard and digging into my leg, and his
dick is throbbing, and I'm pulling back his cheeks to see
down in there, and he's rubbing his dick on me, and his thick
wiry pubic hair are chaffing my leg, and his crying like a little
child cries when its favorite toy has been irreparably broken
and there is nothing he can do about it but wail to the gods
of Goose Lane and all its attendant gardens of fake roses that
life is not fair and he must be spanked to a rosy glow and
hurt so he can prepare himself for the world he would one
day go into. And me not having the heart to tell him, one
day? This is your world for the rest of your life.

Sometimes we would lie  together after I had paddled him
and sometimes he would weep into my shoulder and he
would say kids just want to be fucked and blown and held
and loved, it's that simple, everything else is symbolic, cars,
work, games, videos, movies, soccer, swimming, reading,
dating, clubbing, all of that is just something to do till
somebody comes along and shows you who's boss and
makes you like it at the same time too. As of course he did
with me,  though I like to think at least that the roles were
actually reversed--well the ten pence psychology ride applies
there or disapplies there as well. And all psychologists are
ten pence-ers and I wouldn't cross the street to put one of
those bum fucks off fire if they were ablaze; I hate those
puffed up pouter pigeons that much and I have my reasons.

Sometimes I think Helen is masturbating up there in her
lonely room and imagining Jimmy is fucking her at the exact
same time he really is doing it to me. Kind of a mirror of
each other. Three thus somehow becoming four and
nobody's lonely the whole world over, not ever again.

It's like, everywhere, he says once, I work in a meat packing
plant, this is animals you know, animals who are killed and
skinned and gutted and cut apart  and all smelly and
disgusting as hell and packaged and on the tables of the
finest families in the Kingdom, but all they are is meat eaters
who don't want to think about what they're eating, don't
want to think about were veal comes from, don't want to
think filet mignon and pork chops and beef steak, there so
appetizingly on their plates of bone china, were once
portions of living breathing things and they were raised with
one purpose in mind, and all their fine tea cup and linen
napkin airs that the rich meat eaters can put on will not
disguise that fact--

--or what happens to that meat when it slithers down their
throats to their stomachs to be churned as mulch and divided
up for use and as waste matter, and all that little process that
is the animal  eating animal in them they can't admit to and
can't do without as well. The gunky jungle inside that keeps
them superior and well bred. I don't care how much perfume
you daub on the beast, it's still a beast.

So who was Jack to you? I ask him one night after we've
been fucking, Jack Palance or Laird Cregar? And without a
second thought, he said Palance by a nose, but he would also
have to give a nod to Martine Beswick if it came down to
that,  'cause she was pretty damned hot even if she really did
look like a female version of Ralph Bates, and he laughed,
and I knew then the type of terror he wanted, the type of
Ripper he imagined--the popcorn kind, the soda pop in the
cardboard cup kind, the cinema kind, raised on film and
television, raised on "Night of the Ripper" and "Jack's Back"
and all that malarkey, and it had to be cinematic and he had
to be the boy in the movies running after Jack down Penny
Lane or wherever with a hard piston Hammer tune playing in
the back ground, all up and down and round the twists and
curves of cobble stones and brick walls hemming him in night
dark, with close by the lantern light of memories of bobbies
with their candle lit lamps showing the shadows new horrors
as the glowy dancy light was extended just so, with frozen
arm, to the latest victim of Jack, broken back against a wall
in the gutter and the muck of insides.

So, one night, we're having it off, see, and I'm in him and I
love the tightness, the muscles clamping me and urging me
onward and Helen soft like crying up there like the undertow
of guilt in both our consciences and making us more together
than we would otherwise have been; perhaps, just perhaps
we really were thinking of her; perhaps we were trying to be
good to her, trying to have her here with us and wiping away
her tears in the best muddled convoluted way we could.

And I think we could be animals in a hayloft somewhere, and
a boy, young son of the estate owner, all golden headed and
willow body longing for affection and stripping, could come
up on us in the barn and become quite excited by what he
sees us, us playing cornhole buddies, and the lad can't help
getting a hard on, so he has no choice but to lower his
trousers and pull down his Y flap and have at it, watching us,
and Jack is underneath me and his legs are on my shoulders,
his ankles, you know, and he sees the boy looking at us and
wanking and pushing himself back and forth in the air, and he
motions the curly haired lad over to us and he reaches out a
hand for the boy's hard on that almost jumps in Jack's hand
and another hand reaches for his creamy ass and then later
shoves the boy's dick in that good old Jack mouth--

And I am lost in the fantasy as Jack and I are fucking and he
calls out at me, Polly!, (even so,  remembering to remain
fairly quiet so Helen won't hear and figure it out) says it in
such an impassioned kind of way.

Polly was one of the savaged victims of Saucy Jack, and I
look up almost imagining the scrawled words on the ceiling,
maybe seeing the word "Jewes" up there, never to be washed
off by some stupid constable, all of it written in stage blood,
till it's all sucked in my mind,  my sponge brain just lousy
with the stuff and  I respond with breath hard and from the
pit of me, god you are one great fuck, Jack!; Christ, Jack!

Jack takes a long sharp deep breath, then runs into me over
and again hard and quick and violent and angry and he
shoots god great gobs into me, and then, we fall into each
other on the bed, and I'm frozen cold and so is he and we
pull the useless cover up over us, thin and ill and worn it is
and we huddle together, even though not wanting to touch
the now marbled flesh of the other, like we've just both been
out on a hillside, all pimple butted in the cold cold wind, and
we've looked up at the stars and have seen them turn into
big hairy tarantulas heading right our way, and we're all of a
scream inside and out, and Helen's softly crying, like
forsaken summer rain, one floor directly above our bed, the
cry that suddenly stops in the middle and does not start
again. We feel dizzy and tumbling off a ledge because, then,
the weeping cut so quickly. As with a surgical knife.

We don't say anything for a good long while.

That was last night that happened and I turned from him
eventually on my side and in time I heard and felt him get up,
wipe his dick and balls and pubic hair, get dressed, no more
heavy defeated tread from him, just a ghost in the room once
and no more, and he left, closing the door like a whisper
behind him because if he closes it softly, then it means none
of that night happened, and he is almost seventeen, already a
man, and he has got a wife named Helen, already a woman,
who I've seen, with such guilt, several times, coming in the
front door, or checking the post,  and me never looking
closely at her, and she's nice enough to look at, no raver or
anything, but nice enough, seems pleasant, and I hear them
up there now. This night.

 I hear the marriage that is a lie that they will live with as a lie
till they drop or Jack gets a knife or is given it, and he is
shouting, okay it's Polly, all right, that make you happy?, her
name is Polly, and she gives better head than you even
thought about, I'm hard with her, we fuck sometimes three
times a night, how do you like them apples? And Helen
literally screams in blood curdling hair raising agony, then the
sound of things thrown and missed, thrown and spot on.

And in the arguing of them, and the arguing of all the other
people in all the other rooms about me, in the din of them,
the excavating modality of them, the sheer painful angry
verve of crashing waves of them, I wait for a little while
longer, I wait to be Polly tonight in Jack's grip again,
because, you see, Jack will only lie naked with me, and never
with Helen or anyone else, while he's doing just that, but I
will lie naked only with Jack, and when he is gone, I will lie
naked with no one at all.

And I will contemplate for a long long time the Red Wind in
my own tattered ill fitting soul. And the curious re-birth of
Jack. Already in billions of different forms. Jack's always
been here. And more on the way. As my room gets darker
and darker, as  frosty late night comes in rushing and I can
start to see the long black tunnel. Sometimes when I stretch
my eye sight as far and as hard as possible, I can see the end
to that tunnel.

I can see it with an almost astonishingly clarity. It cheers me.
It must have cheered all those other prosties too. Making
Jack himself not much at all. But a convenient means of
suicide.

There's a knock on the door.