Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 04:03:12 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Adult/Youth "On Our Journey to Here"

			 "On Our Journey  To Here"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


It was morning. We were tired of fiction. We needed
each other after all. Quiet snow and Christmas soon. Red and
blue lights. Christmas tree tensile and tinsel in our minds. Gifts to
keep quietly from each other. Not to give. But the idea of giving
was enough.

 It was Paris. The weather was cold. We lived in a sunlit
garret in the summer time. But territory, though the same,
changed in winter. And we tried to comfort each other in our
large expansive feather bed, soft and deep, and our jail for so
many years. Once. But, today, we had come to ourselves in a
surfeit of Pound and Genet and Gide.

 And had had enough of other writers' worlds. Our nights
were cold and we lay together this morning. Snow soft silent.
And holding each other. No longer dreaming of dusky Arab
boys. No longer dreaming of seeing someone outside our tear
down flats who would make our days worthwhile in golden coils
of sunlight tomorrows.

 And pretend that the each of us was him. The heat in our
flat was virtually non existent. We held to each other, always in
the past, in an attempt to keep the heat of ourselves alive. And
rising from the smell of poverty that was cabbage cooked and
garbage too floridly rank in the hall ways, without the effort of
the tenants to take it outside,  but, beyond, within, all of that,
this morning, we found ourselves in love with each other for the
first time.

 I had always adored him. I had always loved to undress
him. To see my fingers taking off his clothes. To feel the softness
of his skin as I took the cloth away. The way his thready heart
beat steadily under my fingers. To free his thonging dick from his
pants. A dick which had begun to tremble and trembled now. As
we clung together. Raft survivors of a huge winter storm that
had washed each of us ashore onto our own beaches.

 The covers were thick and the night had gone. An in
between half light outside. Morning sun was late arising. There
was some mist still holding over from the night before. We were
spare. We were sidewalk painters. And beggars, if the truth of it
is to be known. We subsisted on dialogues in other tongues. We
tried to be more than what we were.

 And, when we enveloped the other with our mouths, we
thought of past failures. And not the current success. We were
ideologues in a Paris that was more than itself. That was a
certain piece of sky that seemed different. In a city of lights that
seemed demure and shy. That needed to be coaxed. Under all
those Monet pastel color petticoats.

 If we prayed with each other, it was always in somnolent
refusal to admit the things that had become us. The silent eyes
with the smudges beneath them. The smiles that seemed a little
tired and time worn. If I was not Oscar Wilde, then he was not a
young lover who sentenced me to gaol. And if Reading had let
me escape, and had thrust me into my love's arms, then where
was the complaint? Where were the rusty words that said "I love
you" and meant them?

 We had always loved winter here. The hush. The
cobblestone feel. The great echoes on the narrow turning streets.
The lack of flower venders. The feel of something spacious
moving in on us. Time turning. Clocks frozen hands moving in
discreet eternities. And my fingers, my hands, on his bare back,
under our bedspreads, felt no country but his own. And his
hands traced adagios on my spine, and felt the country of me.

 We had fled from what we were supposed to be. He had
been 13 when I met him, and I had been 21 when we had run
into each other's lives. We had been glanced on. And glancing
on means we had been used. He, already at 13, and dray horses
scared us. And dark houses that were tall and forbidding, with
curtains thick, black, and smothering. That touched at our
towering penises that reached bridges to each other. That we
took. And could not admit we took into each other for such
needed sustenance.

 His name was Raymond. Mine was Emil. Yes, Raymond
was my night visitor, who had somehow stayed. I had been
dancing for two years when I saw him in the back of the smoky
red club with the ear splitting tawdry tasseled music and the
shouting leering sweaty beery audience.  In that wet feverish
brick building of sexual sickness that pretended bravado.

 And the night eyes that watched me and the other boys
gyrating, pulsing, perspiring, making love to our hands and our
audiences, our tongue tips flicking out at our lips, our bodies
grinding upward and inward, were his eyes. The boy waited and
longed for so greatly. O, the stomach butterflies that night, in
me, that almost lifted me off and carried me away into the suety
sky.

  Our g strings taunted off, money deposited in them, then
in our butt clefts and other places. Our hard ons exposed.

 Masturbation for the masses.

 I had not been with a boy before. Only with men. Who
smelled of garlic and cheap liquor. Who smelled of want, as did
I. Who looked at me and saw someone else.

 I had always tried to see him out there. Past the lights
bright and into the dark darker than the night could ever be in
the blackest cave.

 And when I came to the audience and the thick heavy
sweaty groping hurting hands flattened against me and proved
me once more not their dream, I saw him in the grim
background, when, before, I could not see anything but darker
angels who promised me more than this. Who promised me more
than a bed slept in by two, when it was all along only one. And
everyone become a ghost and the bed truly empty of anyone.

 We talked that first night. We told and our words halted
into each other in the spring rain that washed the night's clear
pained, longing honesty away. And in the telling of truth, we
made it all a lie.  We said what we guessed the other wanted to
hear. And later that night, when I went down on him in this self
same flat we are in now, I pretended it was a boy from a movie.
And Raymond pretended he did not mean it. We were each
other's layers of onion skin. That we promised not to unpeel. We
hid in not hiding.

 And, in our sex and our dreams, alone, we ran to the
Eiffel Tower and we rushed down the boulevards and our hearts
were younger than those of a young lamb. But we kept it quiet,
and only to ourselves. Admitted happiness allows the barb that
destroys happiness.

 We towered. We rushed into each other. We half ate
each other alive. We were those Paris paintings you can buy on
any street corner. The kind we to this day paint. Watery
paintings, that style. Dots and colors and abstract worlds of
sight, riotous light that suspends darkness, that bend the eye to a
specific pallet. That make it see what is there and not there at the
same time.

 We blended the night and the day and love and fear and
hatred and the past and we tried to make it tomorrow. And thus
made sure tomorrow would not happen. We were the painted
crowd  of one at a race track. We were the gin sipping alone
audience at the Follies Can Cans. And we were bright colors and
little painting dalliances and tricky glissandos that dizzied the
eyes of watchers and baffled their brains until it all came so clear.
Until it all came so simple. The faces in the seeming nebulous
pattern. Of course, that's what it is. How could I not have seen
it?

 But tourists will fall for anything.

 I painted Raymond nude often in our flat. By the window
where the blue night came in. The curtains not drawn. Raymond
hard and Raymond pressing his eyes into mine. Holding his cock.
Coming sometimes. Peeing a little stream of clear, others. My
name on his lips. Sometimes I dipped my dick in the paint and
painted him with it. He liked it. In his fashion. In our fashions.

 He, then, seeing someone resembling me, in the night
that was more than a staple of bread that we bought from
vendors or stole sometimes in our own Continental vagabond
way that we thought so much older than we ourselves.

 Raymond was a small boy. He had dark needing to be cut
midnight hair that cascaded to his shoulders. He had a pearly
white bony needing to be fed body. When I first knew him, his
penis, hard, was three and some inches. Today it is the regulation
six inches. His hips were the poke out kind. The pouty kind.
Seemingly too big too delicious for such a tiny body. But he
made them his own. As I would hold onto them as he penetrated
me.  As I traced the miraculous structure of him, cathedral to sex
and beyond.

 And we pretended he was an Arab boy, out of Gide, in
some forgotten dusty land. And he pretended I was a wayfarer
on my road to Damascus or Trinidad or Samara. Or he was
Tadzio, and I was Von Aschenbach willing to give up everything
for him, to see him point the way to Heaven.

 We invented curlicues of paint strokes for each other.
We dabbled in dreams that were safely not ours. Until he turned
of age, we were always frightened of the gendarmes. Of the
other street kids he hung with, and what they knew and what
they could do some dark night  as we ran to our building, and to
the curly landing stairs where we expelled our breaths hard and
heavy that we had made it through another wastrel day alive.

 And together. Sort of.

 How I loved to kneel in front of him, exposed in our blue
window to the nights of Paris.  To the windows of other garrets.
To the world clopping by. To the music we heard or thought we
did. To the accordions, and the hookers showing their thighs or
cupping their baskets, and that was also a visible audible music
all into and of itself. How I loved to rub his pale tits and look up
at him, with his cock in my mouth, and stroke his poke out
stomach. And hold his tiny balls in my hand. And how he gave
into me. As my own cock rubbed against his legs as we thrust
back and forth into, onto, each other.

 And now we lay in bed, these years later. His eyes were
closed. I kissed his nose. He leaned back, crossed his eyes,
smiled at me. And he kissed my nose as well.

  We were book readers. Half drowned in them. Bundlers
of books. The ones they sell on sidewalks and outside shops.
The ones they sell by the pound. All tied up with brown string.
Sometimes we did not care what the ones underneath the top
one were. They were books. And that was enough. Surprises
always help.

 After a while, I no longer danced at the club. Raymond
never asked me to stop. But I knew he wanted me to. I no
longer went off with strangers. Though he still did. To help with
the money. So we could watch rainy nights together from our
window and stroke each other on our window rug and kiss so
deeply and passionately.

 So we could have money to buy each other flowers from
carts in the afternoon because the sun was especially bronzed
and beautifully sculpted. We were the dots and elaborate paint
strokes of ourselves, trying to see ourselves. Guessing. Always
guessing.

 To me, Raymond was mint  candy and wine and soft
songs that only people much older than we should have known.
We had an old victrola, picked up for a song, or less, and we
played scratched, sometimes stolen, records on it. Sometimes,
we danced, in our home, naked, and our cocks rubbed together.
Our hands all over each other. Lost in the scent and feel, the
glittering glistening texture of our bodies.

 And he grew older. As did I. We were still very young
though we did not know it.    I missed making it with a boy so
young as he had once been. But he was still Raymond. And we
did not have to hide as much now.

 If a shadow in my old nightclub in the red hell lights,
murky, smoke wavery and scorched, could detach itself from the
dark and come shyly to me while I was sitting naked on the lap
of a drunk man at a little round table with a soiled table cloth, a
man who was flipping me up and down on his lap, and grabbing
me...

 ... And if this shadow named Raymond could put his
hand on my shoulder and look at me with such adoration, then
the shadow me should have helped him be not such a shadow
anymore. Books and paper and covers and ink and glue smell
delicious. But not as delicious as this boy. Books have a lovely
form. They transport. But they miss by a mile when compared to
Raymond and his form.

 We read to each other. We held each other naked, on our
bed, meeting in the middle, as the bed cuddled us together, and
we idly played with each other's bodies as we read Carson
McCullers' "Member of the Wedding" about Frankie in that
green and crazy summer, when she was not a member of
anything,  and Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms"
about the sexual awakening of a boy named Joel,  and William
Saroyan's sad sweet love songs about the human comedy and
the pain of death that WW II brought small town America, and
Herman Melville's Billy Budd who provoked mutiny with his
stoic lovelorn beauty, and Edgar Allan Poe's mystery of
murders, committed by an ape, in the Rue Morgue.

 And we tasted the words. Hung them on the French
stars, that spoke differently than they ever could have in any
other part of the world, in the night sky and gifted them to each
other. We touched all parts of the earth this way. The only way a
poor man and boy could see any of that world.

 We lingered in cold and heat and good times and bad.
We hungered together. And committed petty larceny and got
caught only a few times at it here and there, learning lessons
each time. We fought sometimes about the boys he went off
with. And we fought sometimes because we loved each other so
much. And we were so frightened of each other.

 We drank too much wine and there was too much
candlelight. We toasted other persons' Christmases. We
pretended he was Tiny Tim and I was a journeyman caught in a
night of Walpurgis mountains, needing to find a real boy who
would put his penis in my mouth and not his fangs in my neck.

 We were Oliver Twist and Jack Dawkins making out,
outside the pub where Nancy worked. We did things boys in
books always did discreetly or not at all or only thought about.
We did not, I believe, ever consider that those boys would have
so envied us who had to use them for escape. When we needed
none. Irony is, as someone once wrote, a real bitch kitty.

 We were our own quiet riots and flames and fires and
burning marshmallows. We were the other's springs and
summers. And the river of me that flowed and flowered into him
as I finally put my dick inside his butt. Between those sweet soft
mounds. Into that tight hot  sweet little cave opening.

 As he put his hand behind and below and helped guide
me in. As he whimpered and sighed in pain and peace and
happiness and surrender, as I put my hands to his back, and went
in and out. In and out. And exploded sexy fireworks inside my
boy who I loved.

 We needed writers to back us up however. And in this,
we turned away from ourselves. Thinking we were doing the
exact opposite. Young brothers had sex in James Baldwin's "Tell
Me How Long the Train's Been Gone." Girls and women had
sex in Anis Nin's stories. Henry Miller wrote so bawdily and full
bloodedly about sex in his "Rosy Crucifixion" and "Tropic"
books.

  Genet went half mad over his lust for what others would
think of as trash and the dregs of the world. Writers would
rhapsodize over all kinds of sex, all groupings, all ages, all
mingled. "My Secret Life" was 30 volumes of endless sexual
encounters from the boy's young childhood on up and up some
more. Until age intervenes. And all is memory.

 We needed them for company. We were wrong in a
wrong world. And if Balthazar B. could come along with us and
not be ashamed of needing this ass or that one right after, then
we had nothing to be ashamed of either.

 Raymond barely remembered his parents. Talked about
them never. He was of the street fights and the gangs and the
ruffians who beat up people like me, and people like him, unless
he beat up people like me. He never told me he hurt anyone,
though I always thought one does not get to age 13 in that kind
of world without doing so, to prove machismo from such a
feminine delicately boned and wired body. Which no doubt was
used cruelly and by force by the worst and most violent of the
fag beaters.

 I read to him in our feather soft bed, his head on my
shoulder, my hand playing with his prick, of angels lost and won
again. He read to me with his hand rubbing my bare legs, of a
man who got lost in the Civil War and tried to find home again
when it was far too late, but he still kept trying to get there, and
achieved it, in a certain sense. Raymond was the angel. I was
that lost man. We had to strain it all through words someone else
wrote, for us to be real. And for us not to be culpable.

 We rode each other. Sometimes to the sound of radios or
rough or quiet sex in flats next to us, above or below.
Sometimes to the sound of snow or thunder storms that shook
us, and sometimes to records so scratched that we could barely
hear the words of Georgia Brown or the Mills Brothers.
Sometimes the records would be so scratched, the needle would
hang and play the same word or note over and over again to the
point of imbecility, until we broke down in laughter, and one of
us had to break the clinch, and get up and put on a different
album.

 We listened to songs of boys with moonlight in their
eyes. And I refused to see the moonlight in Raymond's own boy
eyes. We read of proof that boys and men can make love and be
kind to each other, because it said so in the Olympia Press and
Black Cat books, and in "Evergreen" and what further proof did
we need? We were in the sacred city of romantic lover's lights.
Soft hued. Delicate lights of nimbus rainy colors. We were in the
city where the enclaves of expatriates came and lived and were
not only tolerated but made welcome. So we are told. Only it
was hardly that way in our world.

 Sometimes I fought a thug off Raymond. Sometimes he
fought one off me. And we learned to run fast and quick, and we
learned where to meet in shadows and we learned all the secret
routes to our home, designated, those routes, with numbers or
letters, so we could shout to one or the other when we were
chased down and we split up, trying to take the heat on our own
heads instead. The police mostly left us alone. I think they pitied
us. It is a terrible thing to be pitied. Nothing cores out the soul
quicker.


 But it was never--us. Who met in the badly wall papered
corners of crashing heart beats.

 Until this morning of snow. Until this morning when we
had woken from a particularly sour night that had ended with us
shouting drunkenly at each other, and someone next door
beating on the plaster board, telling us to be quiet. We held in
the coldness under the blankets where it all, in the past, seemed
colder still. And an hour ago, or two, we stopped running.
Something came to us. From inside us or outside.

 We would have toast with marmalade in one of the cafes
today. We had saved enough francs. We would have coffee with
that toast with marmalade and we would feel the warmth in our
bellies. We had woken and we had made love. I had kissed his
tits and rubbed myself on them. I had come on him and then he
had come on me. And we held the white love of ourselves still
sticky to us. Adhering us. Closing us together. Suddenly so
thunderously aware of each other

 Like the covers of a book, finally content, at so long last,
with itself, closed over, and not needing of opening again. I
examined him. I pulled the covers of the bed down, chilling us
with bone bladed cold, and I looked at him, his slight body, his
somewhat wasted waif look, his bluish skin from the cold, his
goosebumps, his soft delicately shaved pubic hair.  Such a
defenseless china bone body. So in need of defending. Let me.

 His penis that listed slightly to the right at its top. A scar
on the left side of the head where he said a boy had shot him
with a BB gun once. In fun, of course, Raymond had added.

 His eyes shy, looking at me look at him.  Wanting me to.
Eager for me. Amazing.

 We talked some. Really talked. And we did not mention
books or writers or demand that this was all right, had always
been all right, even though we had felt it had been just the
opposite. We talked of home. Not finding it. But being in it.
Having been in it all along. And Raymond was hard again and he
pushed me downward with his slender hands and he put his pale
lipped mouth to me and he sucked me hard like Christmas candy.
I had never been so stiff and had never come so copiously.

 And we were sexual beings. I loved him. And I told him I
loved his body and his tits and his dick and his little balls and his
beautiful full rich ass and I loved riding him and I loved coming
in his mouth and I loved sucking him off and painting him naked
and how proud I was to walk with him through the streets of
Montmartre and to have people see such a lucky fellow as I,
with my love beside me.

 And thought, how could anyone pity us? How fuckin'
dare they!

 And he told me he loved it with I tickled his dick head
with my tongue, and how he loved to giggle when I opened his
dick slit and stuck the tip of my tongue into it, that it "just went
all over me, inside." We had never really talked about sex before,
with each other. Or anyone else.

  And how sometimes he noticed a certain cry stuck in my
throat when I let him enter me, a cry he always wanted me to let
him hear, and felt short changed when I did not, because it
would have meant so much to him.

 I can't say why we suddenly realized who we were, and
how we were together. Perhaps a clock ticked us into being.
Perhaps winter clocks do that because the wind is cold and the
snow is going to be deep this year for a change, and because
centuries have a way of making a man and a boy feel very small,
very insignificant. And for this not only do you need words on
paper.

 You need a human being with you. To share the words.
And each other. Not to hide behind or inside them or  inside
ourselves or the other person.

 That sneaky gutless kind of  approach to reality never
works. It makes it not reality at all. It makes it not count. All
book readers should be aware of this.

 We didn't have to read or say words out loud to
ourselves anymore. Someone was paying attention, after all.

 Our clothes were poor. Our britches had patches on
patches. Our window had too many cracks in it we had to stuff
with oil cloths. Our paintings had not been selling well, as if they
ever did. Maybe we could do better work now. We'd see more
clearly perhaps.

 Maybe it was time to grow up. Both of us. Look for
work. Maybe it was time for Raymond to admit he was not a
street kid anymore. Maybe it was time to admit what we had
read--the things we fear the most are the things we have already
lived through, and the fact we lived through them once or more
brings them down to size at least a little.

 I turned to Raymond and saw him. He looked at me and
saw me. So very simple. So very obvious. I automatically turned
away when his eyes met mine. He put his hand to my chin and
turned me back to him. I lay the side of my head on his collar
bone and felt the warm, real construct of Raymond. I felt so
good. We were together.

 We might be on our way to Samara. But we would walk
there side by side. The snow swirled.  Day was beginning. The
wind battered our window and walls. Chill came in, and that
would be okay now, was welcomed.

 For, you see, it was the first winter of our love. And there's
no winter, ever again, like that one.