Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 18:52:55 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: "Summer of the Lion"

			   "Summer of the Lion"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 Summer, between my fifth and sixth grade sessions, was a hot
dusty pane of glass. Everything was heavier, more oppressive that
summer. The air flowed uneasily, thick with a particular foul tasting
honey. The green leaves were especially green and sick smelling,
claustrophobic making, like they wanted to suffocate you, and thick,
as was the grass on our lawns. The sun was a yellow penetration that
started before five in the morning and not ending until around nine at
night. There was that feeling of dis ease. Not disease, but something
that had no location. That was stillborn in us children, and in our
parents and teachers. It was the summer everybody of that school
system in those years remembers. A flag ship. A raging juggernaut
that slows with ice flows of heat burn. The way summer got to us
then. Mirages when we didn't know what was going on.

 Only that it was mysterious and exciting and it was as though
someone had overturned a rock where we did not know rocks grew.
Not the other children, I can't speak for them, for they have their own
echoes, their own many chambered Nautilus hearts and they have
forgotten by long now, probably. Save for that was the year IT
happened. And front porch swing for me meant more than a lazy read
of comic books in the early morning and late afternoon, when being
outside was bearable. Being inside with a few ineffectual fans was
little more bearable, but the rooms kept the sun out. And the sun was
the enemy. And I myself didn't know who to blame, only it hurt, and
it made me mad. I was seldom mad in those years. I was far more
likely to be scared and deeper fear still.

 It was in early July when I sat on the porch, around five or so
in the evening. There was a new Superman annual that I was eager to
get into, get lost in, find something of those pebbly pages that meant
reality, and out of the savage humid hot yellow green mix that was
like too strong curdled milk at my nostrils all summer long, difficult
to breathe. It took an exhalation of challenge, of conscious will to do
so. And my mother came to talk to me. To sit on the gray painted
swing at the far end of our long porch, as I swung a bit back and
forth, the tips of my Keds sliding across the green paint boards where
rested dust from the gin mill across the street and one block over
from our house. The trucks from there having made their daily run.

 But more was in the air than the dust and the heat and the
constant sweat we were all bathed in in those summers. Much later I
was to read a story called "Hands" by Sherwood Anderson in a book
called "Winesburg, Ohio." That story was about a frail, suspicious,
nervous, different school master in that little Ohio town who did
certain things with the schoolboys, who did things that were wrong
and somehow queasy making. A foil, a  foolish stunted villain, a
wispy limp wristed type who was a shadow within a shadow, a worm
of a man who was not to be feared, but to be jeered at, and run out of
town, as this man cowering trotted as fast as he could, his pale
forehead and face and his pale hands making an embroidery of
desolation wherever he went, he in his own private jail.

 But that was reading for years later. This was the time of Mr.
Carter. Principal of my elementary school. My mother never sat on
the swing with me back then. She was an always tired woman--almost
40 when I was born--she had been through a failed marriage before
the second failed marriage, this one with my father. She was scared of
me and I was scared of her. There was only summer and running and
waiting for July when my friend Jimmy visited his grandparents
across the streets, all the way from Michigan. And reading comic
books. And crying myself to sleep at night. And being so lonely I
almost died. But those last three things were not solely of the summer
season.

 She asked me questions as she put her arm around my
shoulders. I have gone through life basically untouched by human
hands and this sudden apogee of relationship scared me and I moved
from her hot arm, just a bit, to make her angry as I knew it would,
shuffling my shoulders. As I remember, she was wearing a green
house dress and slippers of some kind, this being her day off from
work. She had black hair with this large streak of gray in the front.
She wore cat's eye glasses, the popular style back then, and she
talked to me as I tried to bury my sight in the magazine--the story I
was reading was about Superman and his evil nemesis come from the
other dimension to bedevil him again--Mr. Mxytyplyck, who would
only go away if Supes, as he called him, would trick the little imp
into saying his own name backward--a very tricky deed and Supes
had to go through all sorts of machinations to do so, and a good time
was always to be had by the fans, and I was eager to find that little
story to hide in.

  To escape my mother because when she talked to me it
always was about something bad, usually something I had done,
always something to hurt me when I was at my most vulnerable.

 Her hair was covered with a hair net and she had remnants of
cold cream on her face and she had just been on the phone she said,
and the linoleum in the house was hot and green and in blocks, as I
imagined I was Little Eliza running down those green ice blocks from
Simon Legree in an ancient cartoon, as the world closed in me and on
me and I felt those linoleum blocks strangling me as I waited for her
voice of presumption and my own nodded acquisition without even
looking at her, without even hearing her. But this time, there was
something that was different. This time she oddly enough seemed to
be saying something soothing, and though it didn't soothe me, it
made me curious. The apex of the triangle was not coming from me
this time apparently.

 She was asking me about Mr. Carter. Short jabby words--"Did
he ever--touch--you? Did he ever--you know--call you in his office
and say--things?" And I put the comic book down on my bare knees
and felt a little coolness of the covers on them, and closed the book,
looking down at my shoes. I had always assumed the guilt position
and I knew I had hurt Mr. Carter, one of the few people in the world
back then who seemed to know I was alive. We weren't friends or
anything like that, but he would talk with me as he talked with
everyone else in the lunch line as we lined up to go back to class. He
smiled at me as he smiled at everybody else. Which was so great,
because that meant, in his eyes, for a moment or two, I had attained
the heady mountain top climb of being like anybody else. I had
rushed to the summit of heaven and had attained the heights, had
become more than I would ever be again in my life--average.
 I don't remember the rest of the words she said. I remember
saying no to both questions and she looked at me and I felt the
shadow of her right hand move from the back of the swing where she
had put it after I had shrugged her arm off my shoulders, and I
thought she was going to muss up the lock of hair on my forehead,
like Ellen did Jeff's in the "Lassie" series till I realized I had this
goddam crew cut that I had to endure all those childhood years, god
damn I hated it. That was all she said, I believe, and she didn't think I
had told her the truth anyway. We sat there for a time, perspiring and
listening to the world sleekly slippery shiny eye bedazzling around us,
all bright and invasive and like a doctor's scalpel cutting into us as in
an operation under bright surgeon lights in a hospital. The same
treatment every other kid in my elementary school was getting at
about the same time as I, the phone big and black and blocky and
cumbersome to handle was the octopus tentacle that one parent used
to tell another to tell another.

 I never knew how I found out what had happened. Perhaps I
overheard my mother going into some kind of detail with a neighbor
across the alley or in the back yard when she was clothespinning wet
clothing to the lines. I was told later by someone I knew vaguely then
in a chicken scrawl way, that it had been on the local radio station
and in the local and Memphis newspapers. Memphis had been where
IT had happened. About 100 miles away. But at that moment, for
reasons I couldn't know at that time, I felt a kind of sadness that was
to become a focal point of my life. As I had learned the year before to
jack off one summer afternoon and it felt so great and strong and
yearning powerful, like there were no walls anymore. As though I
could scratch between the limp wringings of hands and the
cauliflower eyes of my mother as she caught me doing bad things to
myself and to which I hailed her in one way or another to make her
feel worse than ever so I could feel worse than ever--

 But dime store psychology. And all about Mr. Carter, which
got it all wrong. Was he suddenly me? How could an adult be
something so shameful? And the thing of it was what had he done
with the boys and girls when he called them to his office? When he
was alone with them? This small man, a bit pear shaped, maybe early
30's, though he seemed quite old back then, small bland colorless
seeming eyes behind glasses of black thick rims and arms, a man of
fair complexion and almost bald, who had a wife and two little girl
children, whose goose was cooked in town for reasons I didn't know.
Only that it had to do with me. Only that I had told when there was
nothing to tell and there was no telling that I did.

 I was jealous. Did he treat other kids better than me? Did he
really like them and not like me at all?, and was I taking a hello how
are classes going?, from his weedy smelling reedy sounding voice as
the holy grail, while other kids were big shots like always, this time
with him? My mother left the swing after a time, it felt like a bag of
wet cement had been lifted off it, for she was heavy in those years as
well. I felt of all things an erection in my brown khaki shorts and it
embarrassed me and the embarrassment made the erection longer and
tighter until I thought it must be straining at my zipper like the eternal
tent pole I was always so scared of sprouting in school just before
teacher called me to the blackboard to solve a problem or answer a
history question. I felt sick inside as though the summer was within
me.

 I remembered things that had not happened, that I couldn't
imagine, because I was in love with Mickey Graham who lived five
blocks from my house and loved monster movies the same as I did
and who had the entire collection of "Famous Monsters of Filmland,"
while I was not allowed to buy or read it because "it'll give you
nightmares," and Mickey let me come to his house one time, let me
sit on the bed with him, and leaf through issues of the magazine, and
look at horror comics (they all  DID give me nightmares, and Mickey
gave me the most frightening ones of all by sitting close beside me
and I tumescent as hell). He never invited me back. And I loved him
from afar. And I wondered if Mickey had had fun with Mr. Carter. I
wondered and thought well now Mr. Carter, your neck is in the noose
and I hope you and Mickey of the great smile that made him look like
a very sweet human Mickey Mouse, which of course was his
nickname, had a great time cause now you're going to swing high I
mean to tell you.

 And that was the point, I put the comic book down on the
swing and ran to the back yard, through the garage and ducking the
laundry on the line, down to the doors to the basement, opening them
up, running from the outside down the wood stair treacherous, and
making me fall to the dusty concrete floor, all the smell of rich
fecund brown gritty in the eyes and nose dirt, and there I lay with
banged up knees and skinned elbows and there I wept and my hard on
would not go away until I brought myself off, so mad, pulling my
penis hard, trying to pull it off, hitting my balls, hurting me as much
as I dared, and it felt good, the hurt, and then the little thing was on
the rise again. As my balls throbbed away.

  The basement was filled with Mason jars of preserves and the
like my grandmother canned and it was actually cool down there
where a little girl across the street, though she was two years older
than I, had played when she visited her grandmother also in July on
the opposite side of the street from Jimmy's grandparents--a month of
friends, false or real, was what I was allowed all childhood long.

 How she would be Annie Oakley and I would be her deputy
Lofty, as in the TV series, and how once I chased her through the
narrow rutty scrambly back yard patch and I took her down and
ripped off the buttons from her blouse to find those mysterious
breasts I had seen in bras in magazine ads and jutting out of blouses
all round me and in TV and movies, (though I never dared look at the
National Geographics with the other boys in the school and town
libraries, my eyes would have fallen out seeing those naked chested
savages) but her chest was smooth as a boy's. It shocked me. It
delighted me. It confused me. She pushed away from my sitting on
her and ran away. She came back later that afternoon and we never
talked about that, not one single time. And I never did anything like
that again. Though how I wished she had done something
comparative to me like that.

 Her name was Celesta, never was I to hear or read that name
again for the rest of my life, for it was one of a kind, like that
beautiful woman/girl with her kind understanding  face and her
lustrous thick black hair and her eyes deep and dark pools of
perfection, much like memory says Diana Rigg looked as Emma Peel.
If she had gone to our school. If Jimmy had, that other friend of one
month, Mr. Carter would have had fun with them too. And if he did
then that would mean they liked Mr. Carter better than me and now I
was doubly damned and triply so, because that would mean what I
treasured from Jimmy and Celesta was nothing more than a nod of a
head to a stranger passing by and forgotten instantly.

 In the dark cellar, the windows covered with mud, caked with
it, light not possible to get in, I cried, and I had my shorts and briefs
down around my knees and I was hard again and it was such a stupid
looking little hard on, I mean, really dumb and ugly, and Celesta and
Jimmy were together in my mind and Mickey Graham and Mr. Carter
was there somehow--but how did I know or sense or feel there was
sexuality involved in this mystery world about Mr. Carter emanating
from those two questions stubbed at me by my mother?, with the
patina on each word, on each slow scalded exhalation of breath she
made between words, oh god, Barry, say no, nothing happened, I
can't deal with that on top of everything else, second marriage failed,
small Southern town, 1960, working and not dating at all cause I gave
that up for my little boy, and if my kid has been (  ) then that will be
further opprobrium on me, as I later in years pinned it all together.
And some how I was responsible. For what I was responsible, it
didn't seem to matter. Had Mr. Carter somehow gotten caught in
some of those insane adult rules too? The kind no one explains. Just
punish you for. Then change the rules next week, to catch you up
again?

 And summer was not easy back then. It was never easy. It was
pain and scares and pins stuck inside the gooseflesh of my skin. It
was always summer the enemy when I was a child and not much less
the enemy now that I am not. I called out to Mickey, not loudly,
because I could hear my mother crying herself those big sobby gasped
tears like oily sunshine in a muddy rain puddle of summer showers,
those big showy tears that were meant to impress and make me and
her mother feel even lousier than we did already, having to put up
with such a doyen of the lower dreams that kept scalding at least my
own to this very day.

 Not who was he? Did he put his hands on you? Did he do that
to my ugly flat top stupid hollow cheeked friendless talentless stupid
stupid son? And if he did, just for god's sake don't tell me about it. I
was sun raped in that cold cellar, streaming with sweat like there
were boils growing all the way inside me, like there were mushrooms
inside my mouth and they were taking over and I was becoming like
that alien in a Superman comic book who changed into an image of a
girl that Jimmy Olsen loved, Jimmy, who was stopped from going to
"her" by Superman who makes the alien show himself for this
creeping vine monstrosity with snake heads for eyelids that it was,
this monster that almost had gotten Jimmy in its grasp.

 As Mr. Carter could have gotten my Jimmy. If my Jimmy had
lived here. For my Jimmy was still young enough, just four months
older than me. And he should get down on his knees and thank me for
protecting him like I did by making him live with his stupid sister and
his stupider step mother and  dumb ass father, and then a succession
of stupider step mothers, while his real mother and his grandmother
were hopeless alcoholics and danced naked one summer night, when
Jimmy and Kathy were visiting, these two women on the front lawn
of the grandparents house, drunk as hell and hauled away by the cops.
Jimmy's sister years later told me about that. But somehow I had
known about it the day after it happened. I was sheltered beyond
belief. No one would have told me. Not my mother especially. Not
anyone. Had I seen them through the window in my front door late
that night? Perhaps I was woken to their revelry and the cops arriving
and the screeching pain all grim and slivery slovenly from their
broken defeated small town mouths? I can never say. Or does summer
put a conducive skin to children's ears and says listen?

 So the next day I began my trek. Frankie Adams wrote a book
about her green and crazy summer when she wasn't a member of
anything, called "Member of the Wedding." Well I didn't have a John
Henry or a colored maid of wise sayings and gospel singing comfort,
so I did it by myself. When Jimmy came in July, I did it early in the
morning before he woke and we spent the day together. Celesta was
absent that summer. I had this black Schwinn bike I loved more than
life itself and I rode it by Mr. Carter's house, just about four blocks
from ours. His house near the elementary school, a few doors down
from it. The house he was to sell at the end of that summer to as it
turned out someone who was vaguely related to us. It didn't matter if
I rode by early in the July misty dewy sweet hot as hell mornings, or
in the June and August afternoons, August after Jimmy and his sister
left on the bus back home and my world stopped ticking for yet
another year, though the sheer cruelty of it was made crueler years
later by Jimmy telling me he only hung around with me because he
didn't have time to get to know other kids there and I lived right
across the street, may his fuckin' soulless corpse burn in hell a
million years and then may he start getting some real pain shoved up
his ass.

 Whenever I biked past Mr. Carter's house, I knew from that
first afternoon, I had never noticed him before when I went past, he
would be there on his screened in front porch, in his counterpart
swing behind some wire mesh covering that went all round the porch.
But I could see him. And I shy to the nth degree, especially I would
have been after the suspicions vague and menacing and totally
debilitating confusion I was given about him, all the monster movies
ever made, I would have run from him instantly should I have seen
him half a mile away. I did that kind of thing when I saw anybody
back then, did it inside at least. But I knew somehow he was okay. I
knew he was in the dog house along with me and maybe every other
kid in the world. He brought me a little further from myself than I had
before been. I simply--what courage, looking back on it--waved at
him as I rode by and I smiled in his direction as he waved back at me,
though I couldn't see through the mesh enough on that darkened
moon shadow porch if he smiled at me. But I did see him every time
return my wave. Did, after a time of this ritual, he wait for me?

 It became a quest. Though I didn't know for what. Every
summer day. Until the last of August and he was no longer there.
When I stopped my bike at the curb of his house and felt like
someone had kicked me hard in the gut. I just thought it would
always go on like that. There was no one there again. That haunted
useless pained black eyed look houses that have harbored sadnesses
and then even those are taken away, that kind of thing such houses
have. Like the house itself has died. I had never even seen a moving
van there.

 During those rides by, I never even thought of stopping and
going up to talk to him. That would have been too close. I did not feel
shame or guilt for that either. The first time I didn't feel those things
for any situation at all always of my own mucking up, because I
guess, I don't know here, that I felt he was taking the rap for the rest
of us who had done things with our hands, our pale hands, and our
secrets behind doors, had somehow made me a co-conspirator with
other children, such an odd feeling for me, and the swampy guilt of
those things that I still and for many years and to this day in ways still
feel, but mostly he looked in my mind sad and small and alone. I
suppose he lost his family over this thing. Which all turned out to be a
witch hunt gotten stupidly totally wrong to begin with.

 Were it to happen now, he would be able to sue and win even
in this part of the country. He had gone one weekend in the previous
spring to Memphis, to a hotel, and at the hotel, the bell hop asked if
he would like to have anything, certain services, perhaps?, and Mr.
Carter walked right into a Big Town police sting when a man came to
his room to perform those services, and he was BUSTED and
humiliated and thrown about and made a fool of and destroyed. All
this is water color, and I again don't know how I know this. I suppose
I read it, heard it on the radio. But this is the version others confirm
for me who were there then. It had nothing to do with children. It had
nothing to do with anything but a certain species of cops who decided
to bust sad lonely little men with their sadder lonelier little dreams
and a collective heart heavy and hurting that hadn't been hurt the hell
enough already. They destroyed him all right. I hope the fuckers fry
along with my good old friend Jimmy and then get some additional
pain for their troubles for a few more million years.

 Surely there were jokes about all of this, especially when
school started and I was around other children again, though I don't
remember any. But that summer was a sea change for me in ways I
could not imagine back then. I remember thinking some time after I
had it all as straight in my mind as I would get it, of this dream world
back then, of boys and girls who looked like miniature men and
women, and teachers and parents and relatives and store keepers who
perched so far above us and looked down on us with eagle's eyes
always, at least I felt, disapproving of us and what we were and how
we breathed and walked and carried our selves in those lives back
then, this dream world that was not as it was supposed to have been.
Adults, school principals for god's sake, could get caught doing (  ),
could be destroyed, could be run out of town, with pale palsied before
their time hands and pale forehead and eyes blinking and scared in
the summer sun, don't even think about the dark midnights, chased
away by all the laughing taunts. It was more circumspect back then in
this town, I suppose. They killed him with civilized crippling.

 I think about him from time to time. I try to imagine what
happened. But it was a totally different world than now in so many
ways, and it was filled with pregnant hot sticky air that clung to every
inch of you, and it was thick jungle like leaves and tree creepers and
vines and an African veldt of dewy hot thick snake crawl lawns even
before five in the morning, and there was this little man behind the
mesh around his porch, who, for all I know, was laughing at the
whole situation, at the town, thinking well I got the bastards fooled
with a good one on this, fuck em. Though back then in that small
Tennessee town he would have said the heck or the hell with them
instead. Or f*** em. But I think not. Not for when and where it all
was. Not when civilized god fearing adults  would be burning down
churches, killing little black girls, or not far from where we lived
would stand in front of school house doors, holding sticks and clubs
as some chosen few black kids were forced to go through those doors,
through the palpable evil of the chants of the townspeople lined up,
pent up, ready to kill at a moment's notice.

 No, I doubt it was amusing in the slightest to Mr. Carter. I do
know that when I went back to school, to the next grade, the final
grade before high school, I was different. I had lost weight. Had
become a bean pole.  I was also sad. Sad as I had been before all of
this, I was sadder still thereafter. And I get sadder every single day of
the week, especially Sunday nights like this one when I'm writing
these memories. I've just lost my cat Lally whom I loved beyond
words. Who was named after the great brave boy Lally 2, from
"Bless the Beasts and Children," who knew what friendship and
honor and courage and integrity, the real kind, the deep kind was all
about. And I'm tripping over memories of him every moment of the
day and night. Still almost seeing him there, at the bed, in the
doorway, wanting me to pay attention, because it's time for his
favorite food, tuna.

  And. Waiting for school to start the next day. The fear of
other kids, of tests, of teachers, of myself. The sheer stubborn
loneliness of it all. Still thinking it will happen. Retroactive aging. I'll
be six tomorrow morning and mother will wake me up at seven for
first grade. And my heart breaks because I think, what if that
happens? And it breaks even more because I know it can't.

 Sunday night is the loneliest night of the week. And every day
and night is Sunday night for me. Late in the day, good-bye Mr.
Carter, I hope you had some good times and some peace of mind. I
hope so at any rate. Good-bye too to  my beautiful winsome sweet
smiling Celesta and to my comic Valentine Mickey, both of whom I
loved as deeply as I've ever loved anyone. And good-bye to goddam
Jimmy whom I loved as well and fuck you to hell, Van Sickel, and
piss on that smart ass Northern accent of your too that I was always
trying to imitate back then. Far away accents don't impress me one
little bit any more. Mostly they make me want to kill. You know who
your collective name is.

 Let's just say it's time for Mr. Carter and I to start paying
some people back. Long past time.  Trouble is we can't. Ever. It's
always too late. Right from the beginning, it's too late.

				    end