Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 09:18:45 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: gay M/B "Look Homeward, Joel"

			   "Look Homeward, Joel"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 Having a bad head cold, runny eyes, low fever,
jangling brain synapses, here on this rainy ice fall day in the
middle of January, early morning, I slip my traces and bonds
again, and go soaring back to a summery feeling. When I
was young and thin as a rake, long brown shoulder length
hair, pretending I looked like David Cassidy, back then, in a
town in Kentucky, where I worked as a newspaper reporter,
in the season of Joel. He wouldn't remember me for an
instant, but not a minute goes by that I don't try to go home
to the him of then. He was 13. He looked like Mark Lester,
like Bjorn Andresen, he especially looked like Leif Garrett.
If there was ever a Grecian lad who should not look into a
forest pond, it was Joel for he would surely have turned into
a jonquil. And I could have kept him and tended to him and
given him bright summer sunlight all his life to come.

 I never touched him, my Joel, except in my fantasies.
I wrote his name with my finger on the bus window every
time I left him to go back to work in Paducah. He sent me
his school photo, his beamish face, his golden long hair, his
blue eyes like the future of love, face thin, high cheekboned,
skin the color of pale moon milk, on the back of the photo
were these words "Once a flippy, always a flippy." Flippy
was a word I had made up to fit into titles of great works,
like "Look Homeward Flippy," "Gone With the Flippy," and
"Moby Flippy." His father was a university teacher. Joel
was bookish. He was a crescent of light in a dark world that
is now these long years later of such darkness there is no
visibility in sight anywhere I turn. I carried that school
picture of Joel in my shirt pocket every day to work. I felt it
warm against my chest. I felt an actual heat radiating out
from it. I kept it on my night table, touched it last thing
before sleep, touch it first thing on wakening. He looked a
bit askance in the picture, as though he was seeing
something so ridiculous that he couldn't hide a small pale
lipped smile. He looked as though he was restless, as
though he wanted to get back to his books and his poetry.
As though he was tired of a world far more less than he, but
he didn't want to say it, was too polite.

 I slept with my memory of him in my garage
apartment in Paducah. I jacked off so often my penis would
throb, my left ball hurt. I lay in my narrow bed, while
waiting for midnight when the trainman in his heavy work
boots would climb up the stairs in my closet to his second
floor apartment, then walk around above me for a good half
hour in those boots, while hawking and spitting and
coughing. I held my hardon, lying there, in my bed, trying to
drown those sounds out. I, dressed only in briefs, and I
pretended Joel had me in his hand and was smiling down at
me, his right hand brushing his wave of hair from out of his
eye, and he said, "Barry, I love you" his voice slightly
cracking, like a beautiful ancient mirror of some grand
worth, that you want so desperately because it is so
imperfect, because it has gilt gold round it and is of much
deep history. A musty mirror, fogged with the breath I
pretended to blow in Joel's mouth as our tongue tips would
touch each other.

 One time Joel came with me to Paducah an early
Saturday morning. I had never been alone with him there
before. He had visited me at my mother's house a few times
when she was at work. Always before this at his parents'
house, with them and his sisters nearby. I was so frightened
as I picked him up at his farm, day killing nighttime, and we
drove and talked. I felt the need of him that was never to be
the need of me, the older friend who made him feel older,
the Joel and me who were not there with us, and how I
would rush forward in life heavily into whatever dimension I
could conjure up in order to hide back there with him, the
right Joel, the other dimension one, the Joel who loved me.
We drove down the Purchase Parkway. The sun was hot
and melting the roadway. The air conditioner was on full
blast. I looked at him as often as I could. Silver slipper of a
lad. Silver slip of dream where I could worship as any man
must worship something or someone. And Joel had the key
to my heart locked up tight forevermore.

 It felt then as though I was 13 too, in the car with
him, other times I was around him. And even younger. Like
when you're four or five and you discover Crayola crayons
and you love the smell of them as you scrawl them over
paper. I especially loved the smell of the yellow crayon that
seemed to leave a Day-Glo after image on the paper. As
though I was coloring the sun, making it what it should be
all along. There was always the memory of that aroma when
I was with Joel, watching his nimble fingers write a letter to
the editor to my newspaper defending me when I had
written a column critical of the then just burgeoning Jesus
movement and the Nazi group think that was beginning to
flourish in it. We sat on his lumpy soft dumpy bed, he with
his back against the backboard, his blue jeaned legs drawn
up, licking his pencil point now and again with the tongue
that I dwelled in dream of licking me, while I sat on the side
of his bed, half turned toward him, half turned away, and we
laughed our way through his letter. The words were
ultimately his, and such an extraordinary thing when the
paper published it right under an upcoming column of mine.
There was a photo of me at the column top. The only good
one that made me look like anything. I look sad mostly. I
look in love mostly. I look like a man who has fallen in love
with a boy. I wrote columns about boys, always disguised,
always just fever blister dream memories I made up, but my
heart was there anyway if anyone could read between the
lines. And so was Joel. And that one special editorial page.
My words and picture. And his words and name further
down the page. I knew then what "Ode to A Grecian Urn"
meant.

 That day going with him to Paducah was the day of
the beginning of the slow winding down of us. I had always
kept my feelings to myself. I had never let him know. I had
never given myself away. But of course I had. I had given
myself away at every single turn. Joel was vastly intelligent.
He always knew. And that day, early morning, sun bursting
in the blue cloud veined reddish sky, I thought, we shall go
to my apartment, my stupid little one room apartment
fashioned out of one segment of what had once been a
garage, and we shall go to my door with the wood scraped
off in a square patch right under the three small frosty
oblong windows, and I shall make coffee for him, and we
shall talk an hour before I have to go to work. And I shall
say Joel I love you, I value you, I want to just hold you
once before I go, because I have to remember everything,
every wrinkle of your shirt, every tick of your smile, every
vein throb in the left corner of your marble forehead.  I want
you to sit on that stupid lonely bed of mine with me, and I
want our arms around each other, and I want to feel the
newly minted celery fresh crackle of you. I want to show
you the place where I loved you for so long, singly, only
this time I want you to be there in reality.

 An odd thing, to be driving down the Purchase
Parkway (you had to pay a toll, there fore you purchased
you way down it) with Joel in my car, when all the other
trips back and forth to my home town fifteen miles from
Joel's, were made on bus and my sad nights and lonely
afternoons and disheartened mornings when I was totally
alone, when no one had ever touched me save my mother
when I was small, bathing me, dressing me. I was literally
untouched by human hands. And Joel knew though I had
never told him. We talked above the radio that was blaring
out whatever was big at the time. I guess we talked of Kurt
Vonnegut Jr. who was a huge counterculture hero of then
and a very gifted writer still.  Joel was my cat's cradle and
in him I was happily caught, gratefully tied up. I remember
the shadow of him as we would walk round his farm. I
would remember it all too well, that morning of Saturday
when we got to my apartment, and went inside. I asked
nervously if he would like some coffee. And Joel was
nervous too. He didn't sit down, not in the old battered
leather arm chair, certainly not on the bed. He asked if he
could walk around town with me before I had to go to
work.

 I knew at that moment in that musty apartment with
the air conditioner that froze up half the time and was rarely
any good. It had frozen again and the apartment was a fly
box of heat that broke sweat out of both of us like Persian
spice containers that emitted a most human, most
distressingly real aroma that took the place of the banana
soft sweet smell of the yellow Crayola crayons I loved so
much as a young child.  He was an angle of flame in the
yellow sun smash that tried to come through the brown
paper shades over the window on top the air conditioner, he
was smudged in a knife edge of unsureness, and he was so
certain what I felt, and that I adored him... I would do
nothing but adore him from a distance. It would never cross
my mind, not really, to do anything else.

 But.  I had given myself away. I had made things
awkward for him. He had never been awkward before,
always like a superhero to me, his plaid workshirts and his
blue jeans and his work boots were part of a superhero
costume that held my heart in check. SuperJoel with the
three dimensional blocks of shadow illusion drawn behind
the curving bright red letters of his name, with DC or
Marvel logo at the left top of the comic book cover. So,
forgive me Joel, I hurried him out of the apartment where I
had wanted him to be, where I had wanted him to see in the
plainness, in the cheapness, there were books that were him,
there were dreams stacked up that I wanted to divest of him
and make the real dream true. But he hurried out the door
faster than I did.

 And outside, he changed again, he smiled again, he
did not withdraw, he was clumsy one moment as we
walked, then did kind of a little monkey dance down the
sidewalk. I said, "Ah, Joel, there comes a time in life where
you have to be dignified. What would people think if I was
beside a boy who made such a goofball of himself?"

 Joel looked at me mock perplexed, he knew what I
was to do, for he knew me more than I knew myself. So I in
my suit monkey walked just like he did, as he joined in
again. We walked that way for a quarter of a block, and we
were laughing, and nothing mattered but the moments
together. That day is a series of snapshots to me. Heat fried,
quaking, world off tilt, axis forgetting smooth rotation. Joel
coming to work with me for a few minutes before eight,
before work began. We were the only ones in the
newsroom, save for the editor, a perspicacious little man of
perpetual red face with a cigar always planted Perry White
style in his mouth, a little man always angry, always
tenterhooked nerves.

 He was sitting in his cubicle in the center of the
newsroom. The cubicle was glassed on three sides. He sat at
his desk, turned his chair, to look at Joel and me. Joel sat on
the windowsill by my desk. He draw his legs up and put his
long thin arms round them and we talked of many things.
But not the things I wanted to talk about. I did try to appear
to be a big shot. I wanted to say look at this and to produce
out of my shirt pocket the picture of Joel. I wanted to say
you count for me and if you will just let me follow you
about for a time, I won't make trouble, and I won't turn
creepy, and I won't come too close to you, just let me show
you how I held you in my arms each night in my room as
trucks and cars passed by on the street outside all night
long, how I put my arms around myself and held my chest
and shoulders tightly, and how I rubbed my penis and felt it
harden like cement and I crushed my balls till they hurt and I
offered myself to you and offered myself to you some more,
and when I lonely came, I always said, "Joel. Joel."

 But that editor, bandy legged, perplexed, sure of
himself, caught in a corner of unimportance that he thought
so important was staring at Joel and me, and I thought as I
nervously dared him to think what I hoped he was, the same
thought I had when Joel and I met for lunch with the rest of
the news crew at The Little King sandwich shop, as we
stood in line to pick up our meal, this dialogue from "The
Hustler" when Piper Laurie says about neighbors' reaction
to her coming home with Fast Eddie Felson, "Hey, I got me
a fella."

  Hey, I wanted to say then, I got me a fella and he is
Joel and Joel is the world when everything else is tired and
alone and I remembered all the late night walks around this
grimy old carelessly dilapidated town. Down to the water
front. Through sleepy neighborhoods. In hot weather and
snowy cold. Top of alpine feeling as I rushed to the
Greyhound bus station to get the next bus home Thursday
afternoon to my mom's house, and then drove to Joel's
where we would sit on his bed and read and conjure and
then I would go home and jack off in a frenzy. On my side.
Left leg in the air a bit. I could hear Joel saying, "Going to
piss like a dog, are we?" And we would crumble tumble into
bed and I could bury my face next to his stair case of ribs
and walk into the only castle that could ever be noble in the
entire universe.

 The sun glinted impatiently embarrasedly (for it
could not hold a candle) on his hair in the office that
morning. As Joel sat on the window ledge of the wide
narrow spotty glass that looked down on the street and the
appliance store where I had gotten that rotten air
conditioner, that I had had to use a company car to take
home and then lug the thing into place in my apartment in
all that crushing heat. My heart had raced for an hour
afterwards. I always did things alone. I never considered
asking anyone for help with it. It just would not have been
right to.

 The newspaper building was old and falling apart in
gracelessness. It was a place of the smell of ink, ancient
typewriter ribbons, the presses and the heat in the back
room, the smell of paste and other devices that went then to
printing a paper, in the proofreader's cubicle. I wish I could
say I was hard at this point. I wish I could say I defied all
laws of logic and reason and stood from my swivel chair,
kicked it aside, and took Joel in my arms, the small tender
aching presence of Joel, and kissed him, put my hands to the
back of his head and did one of those romance movie
endings. For I believed in such things back then. Oddly
enough, though I knew it's insane, at times I still do.

 Joel never looked in the direction of the editor who
was staring death rays at us as the man chomped on his wet
unlit cigar, leaned forward, hands over his paunch, studying
us like bugs under a microscope. He always did that to me.
Now he did it to the both of us. It made me feel good. Like
I was one with Joel. I noticed that glare every so often and I
wanted to put my hand on Joel's knee, so close to mine, just
to show the man. I was to be fired later on for various
reasons, but as this day was the official end of Joel and me,
that day was also the official end of my job.

  I often looked at Joel's crotch when he was talking
about girls, to see if I could tell if he had an erection. I
thought it must look very small and standing straight up,
and delicately veined like made out of marble.  I thought
there would be very little pubic hair and what there was
would be golden. He was a shy boy, an intractable boy, a
boy who had a rapscallion sense of humor, and I carried him
with me on my night walks in this tired waterfront town
made of the past. I carried him invisibly beside me and I
talked to thin air. I was never lonelier than when I was with
him those two years. I was never more blissed out in
happiness. He contained himself, I finally knew what
Whitman meant, and when eight rolled around and other
workers started arriving, I told Joel where I would meet him
for lunch. He hopped off the ledge to the linoleum floor that
swayed back a bit behind my chair. And he left. Three
words. And he left. And all the vast worlds of empty and
hollow they contain.

 We met for lunch and we were friends. He smiled hi
at me outside the newspaper building. Dream come true.
He's here. Right now. Not just his picture and his letters
which I treated like gold. We sat at one of the small tables
by ourselves in the little room with the drawings of the
cartoon characters from The Little King comic strip painted
on the blue walls surrounding us in all that music and talking
din. Nobody asked to be introduced to him, though all the
reporters I worked with were there. I've never been good
with friends. I thought I had one when I was a child, but he
told me years later just in passing, like saying the weather's
been good today, that he only hung around with me in July
because he was forced to visit his grandparents then, and I
was across the street, since he didn't have time to really
know any other kids, I was it. Friends have said cruel things
like this to me all the time. It imploded in me. I took it,
didn't let on, but god how I hated him for destroying
eighteen fuckin' years of memories with just a few words.

 Mid afternoon, it started to rain. A summer shower.
I had told Joel about the Ace Book Store where I hid out as
often as possible with all those  wonderful friendly vintage
paperbacks when publishers and covers meant something,
little rectangular memories of pieces of my childhood and
before me, and the proprietor who was nice to me then.
Saturday afternoon in that newspaper building while Joel
was outside, close by, not 60 miles away, was when time
dragged the most. I had taken church announcements over
the phone. Dreamed of fucking Joel. Dreamed of him
fucking me in between those calls about church raffles and
hot dog socials The incongruity of it was not lost on me. I
wanted to tell him because it would make him laugh, but of
course I couldn't. So many things I learned early on never
to say to another person.

 Nothing doing at the paper save reading newspapers
bought at noon from Readmore book store across the
street, down the block, as the rain continued, got a little
more driving, the skies got iron gray, the clouds moved in.
The building's air conditioner only worked part of the time,
so it was sticky in there, even with coat draped over chair
back, even with tie off and shirt collar opened. As I
remembered Joel's goofy sweet letters to me once a week
that I lived for. Once I wrote a jokey column about a mouse
in my apartment that I had made friends with. And Joel
liked that a lot so he sent me a child scribble drawing of a
mouse on a tricked up clipping of a comic strip where the
central character's name is changed from whatever it was to
Barry. I wished I could be my name in Joel's mouth, he
made it beautiful and not stupid like it and the owner of it
are, hidden safely behind his chicklet white teeth. I watched
the clock hands on the wall tick immutably and tried not to
think of his nervousness in my apartment that morning.
How sad that made me. I almost cried. Could we ever get
around it? No. I knew that then.

 At four thirty, quitting time, Joel came up the back
steps into the newsroom with its oldness and its gnarled feel
and the smudged cracked in places glass that covered those
heavy hardwood desks. And he smiled at me, though the
smile was a little worn, a little not him. In one hand he
carried a paper sack of books. We scrounged through them
as he knelt beside me, everyone else in the process of
getting out of there into something still left of Saturday,
how wrong it felt, to work on the weekends, a hold over
from school doubtlessly. And he was near me. Why could I
not have brushed the top of his head with my hand? Who
would it have killed exactly? He said he had been to the Ace
book store, had met the proprietor who was a funny sharp
clever man. Then he told me of a store down the block that
sold grab bag second hand stuff, but that also had a huge
load of paperbacks going for ten cents each. I've been used
by a lot of people in my life. They take what they want and
then they go. I felt that afternoon I had done the same to
Joel. I sincerely hope not, but there was a distance between
us that was not there before and would never be bridged
again.

 The air was dark and close and humid. It felt all
wrong. The rain had let up. There was a feel of gun metal in
my mouth. As we walked to the store that sold second hand
stuff. I bought some books. One was  "The Wolfenden
Report" about homosexuality and the laws in England, said
country which I used to give such a goddam lot about. Also,
"The Man Who Loved Children," not what you may think,
some kind of Victorian family drama that I never got around
to reading, like the other books I never got around to
reading because, you see, the world ended late that
afternoon, and when my world ends, all the books and
movies of the time end as well. Cordoned off. Never for me
to forage around again. I've little left you might imagine.
You would be right. Things felt poisonous that afternoon. I
would not have been surprised to see king cobras sliding
over the dark floors of that shadowy store toward me.

 . I had developed in the shop a killer headache and
my stomach was becoming upset. Joel was pulling away by
not pulling away at all. And in the car, going home, I don't
think either of us said a word to each other. I drove him
along the parkway, sick inside, fearful, wanting to
apologize, but if I did I would have to tell him everything,
what I was apologizing for. We left the radio off. The
silence was tomb like. I down the winding dirt roads to his
family's farm house, let him out, I think we said goodnight,
then I drove myself lost as usual around the tricky twisty
roads until I found my way out of the maze, a constant joke
between Joel and me. When I got to my room in my
mother's house, I took some aspirin, I lay on the bed, my
head about to come off, and I cried for a long time. I had
tried to be so good. Tried to be so normal. And this was
what it got me. Ashamed that Joel knew. That he KNEW. I
felt crawly with bugs. Though Joel and I were to remain
friends for a while, it was all gone Though he had planned
on spending a weekend with me in Paducah later on, he
backed out. Though he had come to Paducah some months
later still, he had not gotten in touch with me. He told me so
in a letter that I read when I sat in the bus station one
Thursday afternoon, eager scared forlorn, waiting to talk
with him on the phone from my mother's house, to go over
and see him like always. Casual cruelty. Scarred heart. I felt
like someone had broken my bones, as I sat in that plastic
chair, at the echoy buzzy busy loud speaker burred bus
station, reading his letter, just his by the way mentioning of
his having been in town last week, I felt as though the world
would never have a sky again.

 One winter, when there was a heavy snow fall,
heavier than normal, on a Sunday, our first winter, I was
supposed to visit him, but I drive badly in so much snow
and ice, so I had to call him and tell him I couldn't make it.
My mother's house was large, drafty, always chilly in
winter. Once he had come there, had looked at my book
collection. I had put on the soundtrack to "A Clockwork
Orange" as he sat in a chair in the living room going
through my columns. When the record got to "I Wanna
Marry a Lighthouse Keeper," I, sitting on the couch behind
Joel's chair, tried silently, with everything in me to make
him really hear that song and to know I wanted "to keep
him company. I wanna marry a lighthouse keeper and live
by the side of the sea.. maybe find a treasure too."  People
look strangely at me when I tell them the movie makes me
cry. It does. So does the movie, "Circus of Horrors"
because of the grand song "Look for a Star." Go figure. But
he didn't notice. He seemed slightly disappointed when I
phoned him that wintry snow morning that I couldn't see
him that day.

 . He gave me that, part of his friendly crowd, and I
did not use him--I DID NOT USE HIM. I know what being
used is like. I did not do that to him. My plea. Hear me.
After I talked to him on the phone, I went into my bedroom.
Among the things on my bulletin board above my bed was a
tacked up comic strip from "Doonesbury" in which a
teacher, Ms. Caucus, is kneeling and comforting a  crying
girl in the snow, telling her that even though the girl's
parents are taking her out of the school, they can still see
each other. It was because Ms. Caucus, as the name itself
implied, was too liberal in politics, that was all. I limited my
sight to that strip and pretended it meaning what it did not. I
pretended it being me and Joel in a snow world far away. I
looked at the bright blue snow outside my windows. I went
back to my easy chair by the cheery glow wall heater, and
continued reading Irving Wallace's biography of P.T.
Barnum, "The Fabulous Showman," and I felt good
pretending Joel missed me. I tried to make him there when
he was not. I almost succeeded that wintry snow blustery
day. Because I like to think he was thinking of me at the
exact time I thought of him. Wishing me there with him.

 We were to see each other a few times after the
Paducah fiasco. But it hurt and it didn't count. He was
growing up. I was going nowhere. So on this day of cold
and icy rain, now that I have a cold, I take the time to blow
my nose now and then, rub the water out of my eyes, and I
think I shall never masturbate one more time, I think I shall
never have a sexual thought again.  I shall take myself away
to a winter land where the snow and ice take pity on me and
freeze my heart too.

 But. Thank god for memory. Damn god for
memory. Especially damn god for his little jokes. I lived
then and live now in the entanglement of Joel's thin legs
caught up with mine. I lived then and live now in
imagination of undressing him. Of pulling off his jeans. Of
seeing him in his white briefs. Of his smile leaning over to
me. Of my rubbing him hard inside the cotton covering. Of
unclothing him. Of the wide eyed naked of him. Of pinching
his tits. Of rubbing my hands across his excited bouncing
penis and balls. Of touching finally the center, boy root of
Joel. Of nuzzling my mouth against his belly button and
blowing on it, making him laugh. It's all I have left you see.
Everything else has been incidental and did not count.

 I loved him. I love him. It was such a gentle tender
secretly romantic time.  What could be called "A
Sentimental Education." Now in Christ's revolving on a
cross name, will someone tell me where the monster is in
that? Pardon me, I feel a sneeze coming on.

"These long years later, it's worse. For I remember it for
what it was, as well as how it could have been."
                Rod McKuen

			  the end