Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2003 14:52:33 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Coming Asunder

			     "Coming Asunder"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


The boy looked up at me as I sat aslant on my desk top, and
brought me back to where I was. I was faking being a
teacher. Trying to be a student, instead.

 It was not a particularly original or rare conundrum. Many
first time teachers are young people who, whether they had
good times or bad as students, find the world outside school
windows much harder and more frightening than the ones
inside. We wish to be students again. And this is the only,
very mistaken way, we know how.

I leaned my long legs onto the floor of concrete, pushed my
hands against the glass desk top and stood up. We were
discussing the Steinbeck story about a boy's harrowing
journey to manhood, and getting killed for all his trouble and
bravery . There was now a muddiness in my mind about the
story, though Steinbeck is one of my favorite writers.

 His "To A God Unknown" may be the best study of
everything about life that is important to write about that
there is. And here I was,  teacher at a small high school in a
small pocket of the universe that was very poor, and I was
attempting to teach children, who were nice to me, and kind,
sometimes painfully so, for most had pity on me, my first
year, and my last too, but about English and Lit., they just
could not have cared less; impossible task-- trying to infuse
them with what they saw as a pretty slow adventure story
with too many words, metaphors and interior journeys that
Steinbeck had the grace to describe, and I had the inability to
translate to the bored, sleepy eyes looking at me.

And I picked up the book we were reading from, walked
round to my chair, behind the desk, before the long windows
open for the already stifling hot springtime summer weather
blast of heat and smell of onions, as I continued talking,
sitting. Looking from the text of print that wavered. to the
box of students who wavered even more.

Of course I was in love with Joel, but Ricky was the boy I
went to bed with, and Celesta was the girl I loved when I
was a boy, when I took her blouse off one hot summer
afternoon in the backyard of my house, as I straddled her, so
warm and squirmy she was, as I touched her and myself, on
that hot green grass, confused by the fact she did not have
female breasts, but only nipples just like my own, but of
course I couldn't tell this to Laura who was the woman I
loved until she told the school bus driver he would be
picking up our children at her new house, thus ending, for
me, the sound of the doors pneumatically closing, since I
would never be waiting with them each morning for the bus
to take them to the brick building I tried to find again later
on, blindly, by trying to be a high school teacher in a
different school district from my children.

 Bus doors closing sounds like a stamping of  a machine foot
in pique, then there was the mechanical anger of rushing
away, and, in my dreams at least, still and all, I stood there
stupidly waving my fists and screaming curses at the
departing boxy yellow thing like a container of Crayola
children.

I looked at the class who looked at me.

There was a fan in the corner. The fan pushed the hot air
around. We were all perspiring. The day was droning to a
close as cheerleaders in the gym down the brown gray
lockered hall were practicing their cheers,  listlessly, and the
day sagged and flagged, and I had to tell Ricky it was not
him I loved, even though we had been having sex for a whole
year now,  and I could not get enough of sucking his cock,
and I joyed in how the cream of his cum was so thick, it did
not spurt out, but gathered on the top of his slit, for me to
lick it off--and that I helped cause that--amazing--

I had to tell him that Joel was not a one time thing with me,
that I held the gold god of Joel in my heart and always
would, and if my kids knew these things, how could Laura
not have told them?--

--so vindictive she was, then I would never be allowed to see
them again, so should I drop both Ricky and Joel, and take
the abuse Daniel gave me? But where was he in all of this?
Which made no sense. But the senses and thoughts in my
brain trundled around and floated like the floaters in my eyes.

All such a time line and time distortion.

All in a golden realm just over the short sleeved shirted
shoulders of the students who faced me, bored they all were,
though some tried not to be, who aimlessly twisted their
pencils over and under their fingers, who diddled their
fingers on the desk, who patted their feet and kept a hawk
eye on the clock on the wall. I talked to them. A few took
notes or drew faces or body parts or something. We all had
our minds on anything other than we should. Till this point, I
always thought it was students who could natter on, could
feedback what the teacher wanted while they paid absolutely
no attention, but now I discovered teachers can do and do
the very same thing.

I thought of Ricky's penis as a snake, thrusting out from the
scratchy thick desert shrub brush, thus giving other meaning
to the snake in the story I was supposedly teaching and thus
making a travesty of one of Steinbeck's finest works, which
made me ashamed, but I could only look at my tenth grade
class and see Ricky's erect seven inch hard on against his
peach and cream colored stomach, his hips firmly heavy
under my hand, my dick hard and ready for him, and his
chest that I sat naked on, and lay on and touched to his hair
and his lips and asked him if this time, just once, I could kiss
his lips, like I kissed his dick and his navel and his tits, and he
shifted and said we should get some sleep now. Because the
paper boy would be by tomorrow and he would want to talk
to him, to take that boy away from me and make him his.

I never tried to talk him out of anything. I was frightened to
try.

Tomorrow was today, my time frames were getting so
screwed up, and Ricky would be at my house before I could
get there and the paper boy would be arriving, the paper boy
being Joel, and knowing that the two of them would be
together and would go straight to the bedroom, take off their
clothes in a hurry even quicker than Ricky and I undressed
for sex, kneel on OUR bed, and  they would say the soft
things that neither of them said to me, that I was not allowed
to say to either of them,  which hard pinched my soul, and I
wanted to run away with the boy in the book paper, that was
far more alive than me or the reality surrounding me.

I wanted the flat of desert land I saw in my world without
Ricky or Joel or the paper boy who was Joel ever. I wanted
the bleak mountain landscape that would hide me with the
both of time gone from my life, a balloon pricked and
gasping its last because the air was leaking piteously out of
its rubber skin that somehow was mine as well.

It was not that I loved Laura any less, or my own kids
certainly, but paper boys need money and if they are poor
they need love more than money and I have always been
poor myself, so when Steinbeck wrote of the land and the
people who were hardscrabbled living off of it, and when he
wrote of morals and how easily they can be fun house mirror
maligned and justified and twisted so perfectly and to the hilt
by a basically good man, as in "Winter of Our Discontent,"
the way I looked at it at least, that meant there was nothing
noble of faith or loyalty or love or promise or consistency.

So if Joel wanted to go to bed with Ricky, then they should
do so,  and bring in the paper boy too, who of course was
Joel, why can't I put them in one person blessed trinity?,
because it would leave me free to talk to the children here in
my class about them. About the realities of life and power
and manipulation and it can be used on a person till you think
it's all you're worth--"you want me to be happy, don't
you?," which was from Daniel and I said of course; he made
me feel so damned guilty, as soon as he found out how guilt
works on me, he ran with it, as did Ricky at the end of
things, when I should have said--

--"No,  Daniel, you bastard, I want ME to be happy, I have
as much right to being happy as you. No, I don't want you to
be happy. I never want you to be happy a day in your life. I
want everybody to use you. To get what they want out of
you and then leave you and walk away, and before they close
the door for good, I want them to say to you, 'Don't you
want me to be happy, you ungrateful little prick?'

"I want you to only and always know people just like you.
Why do you get to make all the rules as you go along, and I
get to follow them?" But no, I didn't say that. No guts. Not
the heart for it.

I wanted to discuss with my class what a lost and unwilling
species is in the soul of  some men that makes us turn to
boys, to love them, to want to hold them, to caress them, to
be with them so close there is no beginning or ending point.

But it was hot, the words I said melted in front of me, and
the words of the page print was coming off on the fingers of
my hands.

And I looked up to the boys on the front row and I told them
to take over the class for a few minutes, I needed to make a
phone call.  They thought I was going to the teacher's
lounge, hope to find it empty, and jack off to fantasies about
them. I mean it was a given. I can keep nothing hidden, save
my heart.

The class was restlessly doggedly silent as they turned the
wet perspiring pages of their textbooks back and forth, trying
to use them as fans. Books must be for something after all.

I stood up and I said this curious statement, "What if one
could say Joel did not bring the news, but he was the news?
That it was himself he was tossing on the porch, not the
small town newspaper folded  in a flat pancake shape to
make the tossing it from bike to gutter or sidewalk or house
roof easier?  What if he came flying off his bike right at you,
naked and free, and you caught him full and hard at the
chest,  that it made you lose your breath a moment, in your
arms with that precious little ass right there in the palms of
your hands and his mouth right to yours? What if you could
read yourselves and each other from your very own naked
bodies? What if everybody had a paper boy like Joel, a boy
of flesh and blood and heart, not of paper and ink and
smears, geared to yellow quickly, and what if everyone could
know then what it was like to truly and honestly love
someone and all the hurters leave us alone forever and a
day?"

Or did I say anything at all to them?

The back of my head buzzed. It seemed there were bees in it.
The students smiled oddly, they laughed curiously and
delicately, they tensed their arms on their desks, or beside
their bodies; they put their legs that had been crossed
haphazardly this way or that, together, straight and closed
together, like a military command had been given them. It
seemed they were readying themselves for some kind of
attack on themselves. By someone who had gone mad.
Presumably me. I laughed damned oddly myself then. So I
got out of there in a hurry.

Ricky was already out of school, and I could reach him at my
house easier than at his parents,' for he had a key to my door
and was there as much as they would let him which was quite
a lot of time because they were dealing with an older son
who had gotten booted out of the Marines, a woman claimed
he had raped her, which was a particular shame to the father
because he had been in the military himself, though had made
it only to Sergeant in the army,  but very proud of it, so there
was that, and other things as well.

 I went to the door of the teacher's lounge, down the brown
dry hot stifle desert road of a straight hallway under vaguely
lit light bulbs in glass cases, dotted with moth and fly and
mosquito corpses who worked so hard to get inside them to
die. Thank god we are smarter than they. Passed by the quite
sounds of half asleep teachers in the other rooms, talking to
students who might as well not have been there.

And just as I started to open the door, someone came up
behind me. I heard the shadow fall.

 I guess I was still thinking of the snake that bit the boy in
the story, and Ricky's snake and thinking of the first time I
put it in my mouth, and how I could not believe it, the
feeling, the excitement, or that he was so almost naked
before me, I refused to see, to feel; I had become my own
censor, which was no surprise--

-- and how it took a few tries to get it all inside my mouth,
how wet and slippery and strong and delineated and
ponderous his dick was; how firm and meaning business it
was, and how I enjoyed it so much  (it honestly tasted sweet,
like proverbial candy) and secretly, if secretly so in my world
is anything but an illusion, how I compared it to younger
Joel's little penis that was pink and tasty like warm milk, and
shaped like a tough but bendy little leaf stem, thus making
me have to decide about a large penis that had so much
texture and meat to it--

-- and thinking, as Ricky pushed his dick in and out of my
mouth by holding his hands to the back of my head, of Joel's
little sturdy wonder worm that tickled my chin so, who I
loved with all my heart and Laura would have to understand
this and so would the children, my children I mean, because I
considered myself a man after all, and anyone can get in a
triangle like this, so if my two lovers happened to meet--

Yes, I have decided Joel IS the real paper boy, as opposed to
the boys on paper I jack to; and he and Ricky would soon
now at MY house in MY BEDROOM, then there would
only be a kind of courtesy of mine to let them, because it did
get me off the hook with Laura, (that I didn't like boys; they
hurt me like I hurt you, even steven now, right, Laura?, that I
found the whole thing pretty rank and sad and silly; and it
would save my marriage, I mean) and I was looking forward
to spending July with my kids, cause the courts had ordered
it so, even though she was contesting it, with everything she
knew. And she knew everything. Fear is what it's called.
Deadly scary fear.

But I was through with boys. Had been through with them
for so long. Yes. Or yesterday at least. Time has always been
tough for me to distinguish. I'm surprised every morning
when I go to the mirror to shave. Who is this? Do I know
him? Do I want to know him. The answer is always, no. The
mirror image says, no, too. We turn gladly from each other
and do not wish to meet the next morning at shaving time.

Though how was I to tell Ricky and Joel? Who didn't
remember me for one second anymore. No, yes they did.
Yes, they do. We are still together.


And then there was:

A voice behind me.

"Randy?"

A little boy's voice. A small shy voice, like it was already
ashamed of the little sound it had managed to make. Would
the air the sound limped through and died in forgive it for the
inconvenience that troubled its thick milk shake? This thrush
usurper of minute sound waves that  would dare such an
intrusion? I continued to open the door to the lounge
because I didn't think it was for me; my name's not Randy,
and besides I was not sure I heard a voice at all, for my mind
was on the problem that would this day be solved for me--I
would not have to lose Ricky and or Joel when my kids
visited, for I would have lost them already, starting with right
now. A person deals in reality or he doesn't. I am trying to
do just that.

"Randy?"

The voice again. Like a hand falling down into dry water. A
spiderweb of a voice, blowing in a hot wind of July. I looked
to see if it was directed to anyone in the shadowy hall, saw
no one, so with some sort of unspecified fear, turned in the
direction of what might have been. Or what was. It was hard
to tell.

The voice did not belong to the boy standing there using it.
The voice was that of a little child, but Randy was no child;
and why was Randy calling me by his own name? Randy of
the university a hundred miles distant, Randy of the sweet
soft featured face and the lopsided constant, it seemed, grin,
and the brown eyes that had sort of rumpled eyelids, the red
hair that was shaggy and always akimbo, and he stood there
in the dark in his plaid shirt and jeans and tennis shoes, and
his body all thin and fragile and forlorn and so huggable, and
he waved real big and faraway at me even though we were
so close we could have shook hands. It made me nervous, his
being here.

"I found your ring, Barry." And he held out his bony hand,
the one with an extra finger that had been amputated when
he was born, only a little hillock of a stump remaining.

The ring was gold banded and thick and had a fake jewel of
red mounted on top of it. My university ring. That I had lost
when I had visited Randy at his room at Murray State one
crisp Fall leaf crunch weekend. My god, the air now knocked
out of me, and I leaned helplessly and weak against the door,
and I remembered--

-- I had thought he had taken it, stolen it, though it was
worthless really, though it had cost a lot, all of which I tried
to hide, the suspicion and so forth, from him, but I have
always been a very bad hider, and our friendship perished
quickly and sadly after that. How late Fall he was. How
beautiful chalk feel he was.  How gray skies and brisk winds
and winter on the way comfortable and warm and easy to be
with he was. Oh god how I missed him. Oh god I'm being
torn open inside.

And this moment, this exact second, I did something I have
never done in public.

I exhibited total animation. I proceeded without thinking
first. I put no caution in front of me to stumble over.

I ran to him. I held to him.

I felt his bony slender body, his arms long and angled crossed
round me that held me tightly to his chest, our groins
together, I felt him hard and he was strong for someone who
looked as though he could shatter so easily. I knew that the
kids in my classroom were seeing this, because kids always
held class doors aslant and looked out to the hall way when
teachers had to leave the rooms for a few minutes, and thus
knowing, I did to Randy what I was never allowed to do
with Ricky (except once) and Joel, or Randy either; I kissed
his lips, they tasted wetly papery, they were fine and he
kissed me back and we dueled tongued as I had not even
done with Laura--who?

 He smelled sweet. He smelled sweet and free and young and
wintry snow like he owned the whole country of it. We
would hold hands and run through the snow together and we
would laugh and balloons of our laughs would be multi
colored and brightly hued and they would take off to the
cotton candy colored skies, and we would save the whole
world with our happiness.

He looked younger than he was, but he did not have the little
boy voice he had had previously. He pulled away from me
and looked deeply in my eyes.

"Don't lose your life over any of this. They're not worth it.
They don't give a damn about anybody but themselves."

Try to picture a sweet lovely teenage boy delivering a line
like that, and you have to laugh with happiness because
someone else is telling you what you knew all along, or did
once, and now it has been confirmed, so all the past is not all
my fault, I can quit beating myself up over that--

--so I laughed, only it was a very nervous laugh, a very
frightened laugh, because it seemed to shiver through me
that this was Joel I was seeing, not at the age of thirteen
when I met him and fell so painfully in love with him, but
back when he was six himself, before the days when I knew
him, when I so wanted to lie, amid amber fields, snuggled
there forever, on his back as he knelt on his boy bed for me,
and me gripping his spine and kissing his  fair smooth pale
neck, and pushing myself most happily and carefully into his
vanilla hips.

So Randy handed me a stick of vanilla chewing gum, because
reading my mind is as difficult as seeing through silk, I'm
afraid.

So we peeled the gum, put it in our mouths, and chewed
down on the tart vanilla taste, and we leaned against each
other. I heard some boys and girls from my room just three
doors away giggling.  I wanted a newspaper and I wanted
Joel wrapped up in it, and of course Randy was now himself
and Joel to me (a friend says everything and everyone
reminds me of Joel, and it is true) because they were friends
before I knew either of them.

And I put my hands on Randy's flat chest and his abdomen
and put my hands down to the top of his belt and jeans, and a
little way into his briefs. Warm and hot and moist and
friendly feeling. He reminded me of a kid from when I was a
kid, Mickey something, who everyone called Mickey Mouse
because of his first name and because he had that funny
friendly happiness about him. Oh the calamitous careening of
the box cars of words caught in drastic wreck and tumbling
into one another and making words us and us words and
forever  word stabbing our hearts with golden shafted saber
wounds of memory from a dictionary that can never be
closed. The lances enter:

In the softest parts of us that are the tenderest, the most
problematic, the most savaged, the most loved, that kill us
and make us live at the same time.

I was finally touching Randy and through him, Joel. We were
a world.

He and Joel were staunchly heterosexual. I had kidded
Randy, that one and only, weekend I stayed with him in his
dorm room, (the lost ring forbidding me ever returning--at
least I like to think that was the cause) as he went, fully
dressed into the bathroom, saying he would be out after his
shower.  He started taking off his shirt, with one hand, while
with the other, he began to close the door, shyly, awkwardly,
as I laughingly, pleadingly, said that I would take a shower
with him, conserve water, shower with a friend, a joke of the
time, and he laughed unhappily and was not amused, but did
not lock the bathroom door.

It was decided then, long before the ring got lost.  I must
face such things. At least I did not hear the bathroom door
lock. He trusted me that much, I guess. Maybe the lock was
broken. Maybe he couldn't believe he had someone close by
who was ONE OF THOSE  PEOPLE.

I wanted to take off my clothes, go in there, jump in the
shower with him. It was what I did with Ricky. What I did
before Ricky with Joel. I did. Didn't I? At least with Ricky.
Wasn't that how it happened?

I took off my clothes each time and walked naked to each
boy individually in my shower. Yes, that is how it worked.
Having the name I had decided to have the game. Not for me
shyness and the need to be seduced by Ricky. No, that would
be silly to believe that. That he slept beside me that first
night, his idea, and he wanted to wear a pair of my childhood
shortie pajamas, and that  morning, I woke up and he had
only his briefs on, and was stroking a massive hard on. His
eyes hard on the cartoons on TV. He was biting his lip.
Nervously. Wanting me to go first.

And then I still didn't get it. Still didn't believe. No, that's
not me. That's not what the books and magazines say. Not
what the learned know. I am justifying. That's all. How
could a boy....no this is absurd. That person I've been told so
often I am, told in such simplistic terms, that's got to be me.
I'm a four line paragraph in Abnormal Psych. books. Period.
It's easier that way. It's easy for them. Time it was easy for
me too. Thinking is a very bad thing, when you think about
it. I DID THE WHOLE THING MYSELF. I SEDUCED
THEM. Okay, world, you happy now, goddammit?

I opened the  stiff blue curtain and stood there erect with a
smile on my face and a melody in my heart and a joke about
Norman Bates on my lips, and they each looked at me
through the water fall and each one of them smiled in their
own way and received me as someone who was not half bad
after all and since I insisted and so forth.

As I stepped in the  warm shower with shy Ricky. As Joel
pulled me into the cold shivery shower, no longer shy at all.
And we bathed each other. And came and came.  And rushed
into each other, please make this moment eternity.

It had taken such fumbling guttie wucks churning courage
for me to take such a risk, but I did not have that something,
not yet desperation,  perhaps bended knee supplication, at
the time of Randy.  Bullshit. They all scared the hell out of
me. I just didn't want them to kill me was the main thing.

But I digress. I held his basket (whose?) in my
hands(whose?)--oh, Randy and me in the school hall. Hands
that were now outside his jeans. He had a thick hard on. He
told me that he wanted me not to go home tonight, that since
this was Friday I could go back to Murray State with him,
and we could spend the weekend doing what we did not do
that last sad lost hope lost chance weekend. I wanted to say,
you're still there? After all this time? What, are you getting
every degree known to man? A real Doug Shepherd you are.

I asked him, as though I was leapfrogging in fragments of an
unkempt dream,  "Why did you call me by your own name?,
and instead of going home with you, we could be with Joel
and Ricky and--"

The two of us together, beget by the two of Ricky and Joel,
somehow did not seem betrayal of them or any of us or any
of them. It did not seem confusing, as Ricky and Joel and me
together seemed, wrong somehow, but four seemed perfect.

Me always horning in. Taking for granted. I felt loved. I felt
saved. I felt revived.  Man, break me open and I'll suture
myself back together and thank you for the ride, could you
do it again please? Now in the heat of cuddling on the hot
floor with Randy, I felt the eyes of some of my students on
me, as they had gotten out into the hall, their curiosity and
laughter and  need to know specific details of gossip to
spread immediately and get  me canned by the next day,
(they liked me, remember) caused them to toss caution away,
or my own tossing aside of that confining garment spurred
them on.

Randy said, "Laura's taken the kids for good, Barry.  July
visits. Any visits. They're out. Gone for good. She won't
have you killed. If you leave her and them alone. Make
trouble and she will see you in court. Tell him that, she told
me, that would be very very bad news." How did he know
her? They had never met. Time unraveled. Life pounded on
the shore, then wept back into the ocean and died in its own
peculiar watery way.

I forgot things. Remembered others. I forgot more than I
remembered. I'd like to have wires to the part of my brain
that remembers and live perfectly in vivid memories the rest
of my days.

Life was liquid around me. It burned and stung me. Lights
flash bright minnow in my eyes momentarily. I was coming
asunder. It's amazing how much a person can take in their
lifetime. It's amazing when you reach the end of any kind of
mental competency. You think, this time, this time is the final
moment of sanity and you wait for it to be scary because it
has to be, because you remember it being so.

"Assunder," one of my students at the door said aloud,
"you're coming assunder"---none of my students liked word
came--I found myself half happy one of them could do so
now--wondered which one--Alton please, let it be Alton--and
there was the laughter of several voices.

And then  I was on the floor with Randy/Joel. We were
naked. He was under me. I was inside his hips. I felt so
greatly gloriously good and fulfilled and a part of and loved.

Then I pulled out of Randy/Joel. I pulled out of him sexually
and bodily and with soul contact  gone away with a
distinctively dick pulling out of asshole pop, and clumsily and
fearful and a sweaty tick tocking in my balls that felt so
heavy as though they were weighed down with cement, and I
was naked in the school hallway,  definitely not a good thing
to be, the old childhood nightmare of mine come true, and
me a fuckin' moron stabbing up and down, and I was pulling
out of them as though I was pulling myself out of clothing
that had been melted around me as if they had been trying to
hold me, protect me, keep me safe, not let Laura get the last
word because she always got the last damned word. Dammit,
everybody else always got the last word. Always.

And then what would happen to my kids? Now that I was
caught. Now that everybody knew for sure.

There was an air of smelting. There was an air of melting
downward. My dick was harder and longer and thicker than
it had ever been. The kids in my class room were in the hall
way now, their same clothes, the same faces, though
changing from time to time to the faces I once knew and
faces I had never seen before--

--and the same names I guess, but they looked at me
frightened and laughing and rejoicing and impatient like the
weekend would never get here and Randy would have gone
off and left me again, this time taking Joel the paper boy and
Ricky with him, and I would not even have Daniel the sour
born slut to make me sway back promises, laughing in his
silver slay way all along the journey, that I held in my
pockets so tightly my fingers cramped but I never let them
go, not ever.

Because I had to do what he said or he would go away. So I
did as told. I always did it wrong. He never missed up an
opportunity to tell me so. He got fed up with me. But he
honored me with staying for a little time. Stayed on a little
longer cause I begged. He forgave me. I am superb at asking
forgiveness. He is superb in giving it.

And there was no Randy/ Joel. No Randy/Joel in me or
around me, for the Randy/Joel I phoenix rose from was no
longer there, melted clothes or melted sand papery wisp of a
body, only the childhood shadow memories of the hexagonal
twisted small town newspapers tossed by the students at me
like in some third rate version of  "Waiting for Godot"
performed by a very bad group of actors at a college
somewhere that I might have been to at one time or another.

The students looked at my body, at my penis which was still
hard, pushing in and out of the floor, and I was no longer
scared.  I was insane and insane people get to be insane, it's
a law. I was in a lunatic asylum. The pieces would never fit,
but I would walk from one to the other and pretend that I
knew what was going on, and I would fake out the dreams,
for how smart are dreams anyway?, when you come to think
of it, making us figure them out while they stand smugly
silent, pretending they are so wise and self satisfied, like we
do, but they are faking it. They haven't got a clue what they
are either. It's an old trick. Make us do all the work.

We are all fakes. We are all mad. We are all coming apart at
the seams. Everyone might as well fess up. Then there will be
coffee and pink sponge cake served in the gymnasium and
we'll join hands, stand in a circle, and sing "Come By Here,
Lord."

And two boys stepped from the group of observing students,
looking at this stupid naked man who was not the me of
then, all this so long ago, pumping his dick into the dust and
scuff marks.

And these two boys had transformed into Joel and Ricky.
They extended hands. I put one hand in each of theirs and
they hauled me up in the school hallway that was no longer a
hard black marble, as tough on the knees kneeling on it, as
the feet running to this destiny or that, for we were in my
bedroom,  in what house of mine?,  in what time in my life?,
and both Ricky and Joel from too long ago.

I dropped the university ring Randy had returned to
me--where had he gotten it,? had he really stolen it?

I let it fall from my hand as though it were heated coal. Such
a damned stupid thing to end a friendship of such importance
to me. I would never know what might have been--I lay
naked on my back on my bed.

Ricky and Joel were naked now. The older boy. The younger
boy. They lay with me.  They kissed my nipples. They rubbed
their dicks on my legs. They nestled into me as settlers into
their homestead sod hut.  All from somewhere over an
unnamed place. When I was a young teacher, too long ago,
too far to reach back and try to be a student and hide from
everything that had gone so horribly wrong, even Slut Boy
Daniel far far away, and they held me for a time. And don't
get me started on that betraying Julian motherfucker. The
room was dark. The night had come. It was Fall. The wind
of cool blew into the bedroom. I felt so incredibly good, so
happy to finally be home because I had been looking for it
for so very long.

Relax, they whispered, their voices trading throats, and lifted
themselves on me and loved me.

I lay there and drifted to sleep as they kissed my penis and I
fondled theirs and sucked theirs, both of them at the same
time. Joel's littler one permitted it. There is something to be
said every now and again for coming asunder.

 In the dark room, I woke. Alone. I reached as I always
reach for what is not there. I felt I was falling. Felt like I was
like an old suit tearing down the middle and the sides and the
back. Straight in half. I fell and fell until I remembered Laura
and the kids. All the fights. All the friction. All the silent
nights alone together. That our kids felt and it hurt them and
they blamed us and each other and themselves and it was all
jagged and spiky and confused and muffled and distant as the
Sahara as were my dreams/memories of Ricky and Joel and
Randy and Daniel, and how I needed Laura, how I needed to
not cause her any more pain. How I needed my kids. I would
love not to think or feel anything anymore. Thank you if you
could help me out.

My Joel and Ricky who were not my kids but I could not
think of my children's names, my brain feeling slogged and
slowing to a standstill.

I could make amends. Be kind to Laura again. Not let the
poison start this time. I could be a real husband, not a fake
one, as I was a fake person, writer, lover, dreamer, human
being trying to be everything everyone else wanted me to
be--

I was the rock fan of the haunted dreamy eyed
counterculture long hair Joel just getting into drugs.

 I was the high school football fan of Ricky stocky and the
need to be so manly as I cheered him on in bed with my
mouth sucking him off, and he was naked save for his orange
number 32 football jersey which he always kept on when we
had sex, though he let me push it up to his shoulders,
because that meant the whole thing didn't count, though he
had wanted to so very much and cloistered himself around
me and said "you're my friend, Barry; you think I do this
with just anybody?" but I had to pretend robust with him,
and not romantic, just a couple of guys jerking off, doesn't
mean nothin'.

And with Joel I could be gentle and friendly as long as I
knew the boundaries, as long as I didn't let on how sexy and
seductive he seemed to me, as long as I let him lead me
through my days with him, most willingly, as he explained
everything to me as though I was a buffoon, as I had to
pretend stupidity and then found myself becoming stupid
because he needed me to be, and I loved him so and it didn't
matter. He didn't mean it like that. It honestly didn't matter
to me at all. We all sell things to have friends. I think. All
friendships hurt and are difficult for everybody. They all have
a constant sick feeling in their stomach, waiting for the
ending. Don't they?  I just always thought it was like that for
everyone else too.

Randy. Daniel. Joel. Laura. My kids, whatever the hell their
names are. I was always doubled in half with each. Pretzel
twisted. Was it a game to them? It was not to me. I always
had to ask permission and do or not do what I was told to do
or not to do. And they let me be with them for a while and
then tired of me, the sycophant, "why can't you stand up to
people?" each would say in their individual way, though none
ever said, "and you should stand up to me sometime soon,
too"--for such smart well adjusted people, they could be so
bloody dumb and selfish, when of course that was supposed
to be my job; god knows they told me often enough--

--so one fine day, without a backward look, they headed out
the door. And I could never forget one moment of them. I
rebelled only with Laura because she was safe, when she was
the most unsafe of all, till she took the kids and went away
too, because I did not need them, but oh god I did, that's a
lie, I did.


I went to the kitchen, turned on the light, walked naked to
the fridge, took out a bottle of Coke and swigged some
down. Too late now, but tomorrow or Sunday, yes, Sunday
would be much better, I'll phone her, she would be there,
where was she?,  I'll think of it in a minute, the phone
number is around here somewhere, and I would tell her I had
so much to make up for and it would be a personal favor that
I would hold in deep regard--

I put the Coke bottle uncapped back in the fridge and closed
the door. I quaked. The world stood still. What if, no that's
silly, a person can't go off the beam that much and still be as
rational as I was. Quick check---where was I? What town?
What city? What did I do, if anything, for a living? What was
the name of my street? How old was I? What was my own
name. Barry. But last name. Dammit. Think!

What if??? all the what ifs in the world, the thoughts of
reckoning wrecked. railroaded me and the clattering box cars
of words were about to uncouple and fly into each other,
crashing wooden words like flinders and splinters and motes
in god's eye and spears in my heart, the softest part where
the tenderest wounds lie unhealed and make us live and we
can never forget them, ever, because what are we without
them?

I leaned on the fridge. My body was like a suit of clothes
draped on a suddenly limp coat hanger. I began to slide
down by my side against the snow white cold, making a
squeaky sound as I went, what if there was no Laura?, what
if I had never had children?, what if there was no Ricky or
Joel,? or they existed, some of them, and I could never know
who was real and who wasn't, but nothing ever happened
between us, me and the real ones, it was all just pretend, but
Ricky, yes, I'm sure, him at least, how had it really
happened?, how did it really start?, it did start, it did, only I
didn't start it, there was no shower routine, it was something
else, there was no goddam game plan like people think-----

As I leaned aslant on my desk; though I couldn't see it, I
knew my hair was still long and was brown and I was fresh
out of university, and being chewed out by my editor, a
peripatetic little man  in rumpled tobacco smelling clothes,
with such an urge to be the Hitler of the world but could
only manage to be the Hitler of his little newspaper domain,
as he was telling me, his index finger pointing and tipping at
me on my chest:

"Could you get the story with less typos and more accuracy
please? All you hippies shootin' up marijuana at home and
thinkin' you can come to work the next day and have a
career? Well, you got another think comin' boy."  Inject
marijuana? WHAT?

Then he put his corncob pipe back in his mouth, sucked on
his drug of choice, turned his strutting bantam rooster body
away from me and walked back to his glass cubicle of an
office, where he kept watch over all us reporters, especially
me. He used me to prove he was a swell guy and could
bridge the generation gap.  I had never so much as seen any
marijuana, much less smoked any, despite my hair and my
bell bottom jeans. I could have told him the truth but he
wouldn't have believed me, so why bother?

And why kill the image? It made me assume some form at
least.  Therefore it was worth it. It made me feel like I did do
all manner of drugs. It made me feel groovy. I would read
things like "Rolling Stone" or Kurt Vonnegut's novels, or
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" at my desk on
my meal-less lunch break. Didn't want to spoil it for him.
Reading counterculture stuff in my constantly food starved
state did make me feel a little high after all.

 "Slow down/ you move too fast/you gotta make the
morning last.." I had been trying to make the morning last,
all my life through. I was still trying. The morning never
heard my commands to it.

Now. I was back there. In the pain of my heart Joel and
sweetly secretly forever loving him. I went back to my desk
chair at the newspaper office, played "59th Street Bridge
Song" through my head, and started putting paper in the
typewriter. I would see Joel in two more days. It made me
feel better. The elderly lady at the society desk next to me, of
white hair and kind face and gentle smile, put her hand on my
arm. I looked at her.

"Don't pay P.K. any attention. He's like that with all of us.
He's a jerk." And we laughed as the editor looked at us with
his angry eyes, his hands firmly over his pot belly, pipe
blowing billows of smoke, and he, scrunched in his roller
leather chair, malevolent and spider like, and we got back to
work. I thank her and look out my window and close my
eyes. I whisper "Joel." I miss him already.

"Joel" said a voice to the left of me which seemed to come
straight from the fridge.

I began to give it up. God, it is so good to quit hanging on.
To release. To fall. It's like being in love and falling in love
and falling asleep and winter coming and hateful itchy
summer over with for good and all, and knowing the ending
of things, that there really is an ending of things, and of me; I
had believed it so long, in not believing it; that is, if I was
real at all. How could someone like me be real? I was the
fiction for a moment or two in all of their lives till ejection,
like throwing the comic pages of the Sunday newspaper in
the trash, a good laugh, then forgotten.

 I thought of Jim Thompson's Golden Gizmo and Mickey
Spillane's the whatzit, and John Steinbeck's long valley and
the snake therein the center of the soul that has to come out
one way or another and can never be run from but only run
toward, and I thrust up my arms at Almighty God and I
screamed out curses at him. I screamed, you come down
here you coward and try it on for size and see if you like it.


And then, to all and sundry, a weak watered down but
heartily meant, "I'm sorry."