Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 09:19:47 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: "A Letter from Doug About the Boy from the Moon"

	     "A Letter from Doug About the Boy From the Moon"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 So Janey,

 Here I am at Litchword Academy. Having the time of my
life. Wish you were here. Instead of me. Ha. And if you think the
folks back in Newington are bending over backwards  and kissing
their butts and ours to show they aren't the B word (bigots) you
should see the teachers and little duffuses here. How Black I am. Or
how Negro I am. Or how please sir let me open the door for you I
am. They don't know what to make of me. Teachers eye me as
though they think I'm going to bring crack and rap to their little
snowy white campus. They don't know the drugs that are already
here, that I had nothing to do with. I could tell them such true
stories. All the little perfections of teachers' pets wasted every live
long day. Ha. Anyway, I suspect someone will one day soon ask me
how it was on the Underground Railroad and gosh it's lucky we
won that war for you, and my golly I am so sorry your people have
suffered so and so forth. A Black Knight in King Connecticut's
Court.

 Guess who I got for a roommate. Jeffrey Linden. Who? His
parents live three blocks from us, right there in little old
Newington, CT. Never knew them. Now I never heard of Jeffrey
either, because he has spent all his life at boarding schools and now
at the academy here. He told me once, in a fit of raging confession,
that he cramped their style, so they put him away. Jeffrey is so far
into the closet it's a wonder the raincoats don't fall off their hangers
and smother him to death. Course no one knows I'm in the closet
too. They figure I got enough strikes against me without that as
well. Which is real big of them. It's already too late to back out of
my skin color. Though everyone wishes I would. Me too, for that
matter. I got the scholarship to show mom and dad, and everybody
we left behind back in Hattiesburg of the Mississippi state of mind
that I can--as the ads say--be somebody. The thing is I don't know
who that somebody is. Yes, I know. Cliche. Sorry.

 I know who Jeffrey is. I mean his skin is as pale as
buttermilk like everybody else here (save for yours truly) and he is
cute and short and thin, while I am bulky tall and of a certain
heritage that is like the map of Africa tattooed all over me
everywhere I go, but we're alike. We're scared. Nobody thinks I'm
scared. Because I'm me. And that me is whatever they want me to
be. Again, very big, very noble of them. But Jeffrey is more scared
than I am. Of me, I'm afraid. I'm a little scared of me as well. They
bunked me with him because we are two oddballs and our room in
the corner of the last dorm on campus is way off in the shadows.
The corner room is considered a big plus because we're not
surrounded on all sides by other rooms with the CD players blasting
out most of the night. They blast out most of the night anyway.
Sometimes so loud it's impossible to sleep.

 Relative quiet, allegedly. In which to make my seduction.
Though I won't do it cause I don't know how. In spite of you and
Tommy seducing me. It was good to be led by you two. Here I have
to do the leading, and it scares me witless. I was a little boy with
you two last summer. Now I seem to be an old man. Well. Anyway.
Early in the game and the leaves are already changing and the air is
getting frosty. Sorry I've not written sooner but I had to get
acclimated. Looks like a really cold Fall this year setting in already.
Sure wish I could spend it in bed with Jeffrey. With a blanket of
snow on the ground and on the eaves, and us snuggled up together,
pressing lips. He's blonde and has these thin arms and legs and
body, almost all bone, that I would love to hug around me and let
his white white skin meld with my black black skin. I think he
would like to too.

 He's noticed it of course. My hands, I mean. We study at the
same library table (alone I might add) and I see his eyes on my
hands which are black on top, my hands, and pink on the bottom.
He seems fixated on them, though of course he doesn't say a word
about it. His silence says it all.

 It's like a sty in his eyes that he can't get out. I find myself
taking every opportunity to show him the back of my hands and
then my palms. Of course slyly I do these things. Everybody knows
he's gay. Nobody seems to mind that either. If you get my drift.
Course they mind it greatly. He is quite the outcast. And now being
forced to share a room with me. Well, I tell you. Everyone just
bends over backwards to show him they are fair with him. Course
you get around the other students in the library, you hear things they
think Jeffrey's not heard about himself, though I would imagine he
has. I'm sure he hears things about me too. I have reverted back to
the Mississippi patois. I have reverted back to missah boss man
kind of rhetoric. Because they expect it. I guess. These kids here (I
cannot think of myself as a kid, the Delta got rid of  the vast
majority of that in a hurry, hello three sheets, wanna burn the cross
on someone else's lawn tonight?) think they are so precocious.
They in their blue blazers and black ties and black pants and leather
shoes (all school regs) and that little golden crest on the blazer
pocket saying Litchword.

 That they know everything. I am Black. Or Negro. Or
African American. Depending on who is toadying up to me at the
moment. Some very self consciously refer to themselves as honkies
(as in "bet you have never seen so many honkies in one place
before--ha ha") but things have to be simplistic for the precocious
because it's too easy to fall into an ink pot (ha) of confused
identities and complexities that they would rather not deal with at
their age. Or at any age. They think too much. Posit the slightest
problem, the tiniest conundrum and their brains kill themselves
probing the depths of it. Depths which usually are only sink holes in
those interior head tissues. Because of that, their brains are always
tired. They are quite intelligent. As I like to think I am as well.
Sometimes I want to cry out to them, "I am NOT Denzel
Washington. I don't know Denzel Washington. I cannot get his
autograph for you. I cannot bring you on the set when he's making a
movie. I do not hear the jungle drums beating. I have never met
Tarzan. So go swing on your grape vine and jack off the night
away."

 They do that, you know. You can hear them far into the
night. Just humping their beds, their hands, their hearts. Some cry
out silently. Or not so silently. The walls are not thick. The dorm is
cavernous and carries sounds very nicely. But nobody ever talks
about it! You would think they would babble on and on about it.
But not one word! At least that I've heard. I do stand out like a sore
thumb, though, so to hear anything really juicy at all, I have to
eavesdrop. I hear Jeffrey jacking off each night. Our beds are
separated by a wood partition. I would love to comfort him. I would
love to show him all of me because I imagine he has never seen a
Black African American Negro boy/man naked. How I would love
to be his Promised Land.

 He's of course read "Invisible Man" and "The Color Purple"
and naturally that makes him a big shot. Well, I've read "Catcher in
the Rye" and "The Grapes of Wrath" and I am neither Holden
Caulfield nor a dust bowl Oakie, and so the hell what? That's what
academicians do--they read the right books, say the right words,
think the right thoughts. But everything is theoretical with them.
Everything is something someone wrote fifty years ago and if I
could only live inside those printed words, things would somehow
be okay. Which really means I would just one day vanish and go
away and everybody could have their lilly white school to
themselves again.

 I hear Jeffrey now. Stroke stroke. Sigh. Sigh. I'm sitting on
my bed with my tiny Tensor lamp on these pages on this book on
my lap. I think of him. There. Just a few feet away from me. I think
of his pasty somewhat wasted looking body (I sneak a peek at him
now and again in gym) that could use some loving. That could use
me. But I wouldn't fit around him. And he wouldn't fit around me. I
wonder how long his erect penis is. I wonder if it is tall and thin. Or
short and heavier. I imagine the tall and thin is more like it. When
flaccid, the sneak looks I took, it's just a little nubbin. Though I
would like to look at it closer one day. About jacking off, sis, I
don't do much of that anymore. I get sad a lot. I feel like a freak.
And because I feel like a freak, it's hurt me inside somewhere I
can't quite explain. And no I don't think your giving me my first
hand job made me gay. God, what a word. I am never gay.

 Or queer. They use queer now. The homosexuals. It's
supposed to take the sting out of the word. I don't know, maybe it
does. But the N word doesn't have the sting taken out of it when I
hear Blacks use it--on TV or in the movies, of course. Where else?
Talk about a fish out of water. But homosexuals have lots more
names for themselves or foisted on themselves than Negroes Blacks
African Americans would you please go back to Africa my man and
make it quick. Course everybody here, like in Newington, loves to
hear my stories about the Deep South and how the bigots all reside
there. But nobody here mentions homosexuality. If they don't say it,
it doesn't affect them. It seems like they hate me less than them. So
they have made kind of a tiny kind of deification out of me. They
hide behind me when Jeffrey comes around. Call it the lesser of the
two evils. I win by default. But I am the other thing as well.

 Sometimes Jeffrey calls out a name. I can't make it out.
When he's masturbating. So I am reminded now, and often, of how
I loved making it with you and Tommy that hot hot night last
summer. It was kicky, I have to tell you, out there behind the house,
in the full moonlight, and how you couldn't hold back the tears as I
climaxed on Tommy's chest. It makes me quite wistful thinking
about it. So I know I can tell you absolutely anything, Janey. It's not
that I love Jeffrey or anything. It's just--well I almost wrote that I
wanted to be friends with him. But when you're me, friendship is
measured in days if not hours. It comes with the territory of skin
surface and below that, secrets within secrets. And not trusting
anyone comes a well thought out reasoning on my part. Not to
mention experiences. I have no home in either "community." Not
really.

  It comes with a skittishness that everyone feels around me.
Like I had pink eye or something. Hey, wait a minute, I guess in a
way I do have pink eye! We can joke about ourselves at least. The
teachers and kids here take everything so seriously. Like there are
pronouncements from on high that everyone makes in the least little
thing. For instance, "pass the salt" becomes a lesson in Bohemian
uprisings against the Moneyed Class who are of course terribly
effete snobs who think a raised pinkie on the hand that is holding
the coffee cup is the height of elegance with a soiree to follow post
haste.

 Hey, you know, I feel like that psychotic sheriff in the Jim
Thompson book (how I love his novels--he could look straight into
hell and not blink twice and put it on paper just the way it is--he
didn't see a fake reality--like the one at this school or anywhere
else--he crucified Christ with every word he wrote and made me
figure the Savior of no one but Pat Robertson and the other hoo-has
got just what he deserved, and needed more)--anyway that sheriff
was just a shit kickin' good ole boy in this little Texas town who
did the town's dirty work for them and was just dumb as the
proverbial dirt, but when he went home at night he read his father's
medical books in Latin! and did complicated problems just for the
mental exercise--but the next day out on the streets it's dumb old
Lou Ford again, hail fellow well met, can I kiss your butt now, and
take care of a prostitute for you who's been making blackmail
sounds?

 Well that's what I am here. I sang a Negro spiritual tonight.
At dinner. Really. They applauded! I was looking at Jeffrey sitting
across the table from me the entire time I sang. I have a reedy voice.
They probably thought it was deep and profound. They hear what
they wish to hear, in other words, just like everybody else. His pale
face reddened as I put man my whole heart and soul into that stupid
ditty. Every word of it was saying I love you Jeffrey Linden of the
musical name and the harpsichord body on which I could strum the
most lonesome lovely music you can imagine. He couldn't stumble
run out of there fast enough. I'm truly sorry for that. He's not
spoken to me at all tonight. I didn't mean for  it to happen. Just
didn't think. Now, thanks to me, his life is going to be more hellish
than before. Damn. And I care so much for him.

 So, here and now, from Jeffrey's side of the room--one bed
creak, two bed, creak. He's getting close to the end. He's humping
like nobody's business. He thinks I'm a dumb Negro too. He slows
down his fast Northern speech pattern for me. Treats me as though
I'm brain damaged. He doesn't mean to. He doesn't make a big
thing of it. Course I guess I started it with my darkie talk. But it's
there anyway. He thinks, everybody thinks, I got in here just so the
school could get some favorable publicity after that boy sex thing
this school was embarrassed with two years ago. You remember,
upperclassmen making it with underclassmen. Been going on here
forever I suppose. But some boy talked. The administration was
shocked, shocked!, such a thing had occurred!

 And now there are strict rules. Yeah, right. Tell me all that
bed shaking in this dorm alone is shared by one hand apiece only.
God, sis, I am hard. I've moved my book I'm writing on, to one leg.
I'm sitting here in my briefs. The heat is on. And I find myself
stroking myself with my other hand. Sorry for the shaky
handwriting. I bet Jeffrey would have loved to have seen the three
of us getting it on last summer. That way he could pretend he was
turned on by you--no offense, sis, you looked great and sexy hot,
and it was just kinky as all hell--but really his eyes would be glued
to me and Tommy, who was pretty impressed with his first black
gay male lay if I remember correctly. I wish I could tell Jeffrey
about it. Really tell him. Could kind of make it woozy and off key
and he could pretend to think of you and Tommy and hide in that
little closet for a while. And if Tommy happened to be aiming a
kiss in your direction, but accidentally laid a lip lock on Jeffrey
instead, well, mistakes do happen. A bit of a nail to hold the
raincoats back from crushing him one fine day. A little more of the
story at a time.

 How do I know he's gay? Everybody says so. That's how.
And if everybody says so, then you are. I've decided to buckle in to
this. It's just easier that way. Everybody in English now is reading
Camus, so everybody is feeling a little sick these days, with the
plague. When everybody gets around to reading Kafka--I cheated, I
looked ahead in the text book--everybody will feel like they're on
the verge of turning into a bug. Everybody's a book here.
Everybody is scared spitless of the world. Hello to me, for to them,
I am the world come to say "Hi neighbor." And if a Black Negro
African American boy were to have sex with this prim and proper
white boy, well it's welcome back to Newington and the lawsuits to
follow. Money is everything. Everything and everyone can be
bought. There is the home of morality. There is home of integrity.
Money is where it all lays. And god I wish I could lay Jeffrey. Have
that sweet delicate head of his on my chest while I stroke his sun
field blonde hair. Tommy was just sex. Tommy was turned on by
you and the wildness of making it with me too. But Jeffrey. I think
there is more to him than that. I'm here. And he is too. But we
might as well be a million miles apart.

 I don't know if you've read it, but there is this novel called
"The Collector." It's about this unstable--to say the least--young
man who kidnaps this young woman and holds her prisoner,
wanting her to love him, to end his loneliness. He has collected her
like he collects butterflies, and wanted this prize specimen on his
butterfly board too. In trying to make a play for him and make an
escape that way, she appears naked in front of him, and it kills the
whole deal she was running, for he is so totally offended by her lack
of morality. I mean here he's kidnapped her, imprisoned her,
chained her, and he is offended by her lack of morality! I guess its
symbolic of a certain kind of sickness abroad in the land. And that
starts a chain of events leading to her death. There is a line in there
about how her being naked in front of him had pushed them so
vastly far apart. She was never more concealed in front of anyone
than she was when she appeared unclothed for this sad screwed up
man. She felt as though she had prostituted herself.

 I'd prostitute myself for Jeffrey. I'd pay him. I want to hold
him. I want to show him what a black penis looks like. I wonder if I
would appear to have clothes on, in his eyes, even when naked.
Especially when I'm naked. I've taken great care not to let him see
me naked. For fear he wouldn't approve. For fear that I really am a
freak. Though I'm not. I think my body is pretty good. And since
we both are victims and will always be victims of prejudice all our
lives, maybe we could band together. But, no. There are some
prejudices that are all right. Just like there are some that are not.
You have to check the morning paper for the prejudice stock
market to see what is bullish and what is bearish at the moment and
go with it.

 Jeffrey calls out the name now. I hear it for the first time.
"Daniel." He says, sighs like air being let out of a tire. Slowly.
Comfortingly. Soothingly. Who? I try to think of anyone here with
that name, and can't. He could have said my name instead. He
could have. I wish to go over there. Just get my hiney up off this
bed and go over there, knee this Daniel whoever in the dream god
groin, and kneel down beside Jeffrey's bed and tell him the lonely
nights are over. He is like a pane of glass always breaking. A little
tonight. A little more tomorrow. A little more tomorrow night. Until
he shatters away. Now for all I know he may be as straight as an
arrow. There are other boys here who seem gay, just like him (and
just like him, willing to die and burn in hell before admitting
it--we're just jackin' around, doesn't mean anything)--with the
movements, and loving Judy Garland, and wanting to be an
actor--in fact that includes pretty much every boy here, except for
me. Well, I say that Judy's voice went a long time before she did.
Swishing is from a Franklin Pangborn, or whatever his name was,
movie. They haven't done sensitive since the fifties. And anybody
wanting to be an actor is out of his mind and should just move into
their sky castles, close the door, and forget about it.

 And of course homosexual sex goes on here all the time and
always will. Like in any boarding school or any place where there
are only boys.  It's just asking for it. I remember a line from Lenny
Bruce: "Don't you love what they do with homosexuals in this
country? They put them in prison with a lot of men. Verrry clever."

 And, as you told me, Janey, the same applies to girls. But
Jeffrey--I don't know--exudes something. It goes beyond
winsomeness. It goes beyond a fey quality. It is just simply--Jeffrey.
There is just something about him that is quite--wonderful and
magical. I find myself longing for him when we're apart even a few
hours. I am sure he has never been with a boy or with a girl. And
that he would run screaming for the hills had he seen you and me
and Tommy without our clothes, rolling around in menage a trois
heaven with everybody examining everybody and sticking whatever
we could in whatever bodily orifice fit our fine fancy at the time.

 Ta da. Jeffrey has now come. The bed creaks a final time. I
feel his muscles relaxing. I feel his hand around his penis while is
pale and cool and summer breeze gliding. His legs are spread. His
briefs are around his ankles. He lies there akimbo. He is panting.
His pale thin stomach goes in and out hard. His eyes are closed. His
cum is on his hands and on his legs and bed sheets.  His penis is
once more shrinking in his lonely Hollywood boy hand. He's in a
box. We're all in a box. A box of boys who are nothing more than
books.

 A box where certain words in print give you permission
to--well, read more words in print. There is no liberation in "Sexus"
or "Nexus" or "Quiet Days in Clichy." None save for the freedom
that Henry Miller had. That I for one and Jeffrey for another don't
have. Sex is a messy business. I don't mean the obvious. Emotions
climb into you even when you don't want them to. Even when you
know there is no reason for them to. Even when you are thinking
about someone else, something else, having forgotten Jeffrey, the
irritant, the pest, the embarrassment, for instance, not dwelling on
him at any point, then--zap. Somewhere along the way, you think of
nothing else. He sneaks under your defenses, without his meaning
to either. And there it is. One sided love yet again.

  Unwanted. Unneeded. Uneducated about themselves. Just
primitive primal emotions that are unbecoming an intelligent Black
Gentleman like myself. I think Jeffrey knows about that. Well, yes,
for this goddam Daniel whoever. I like to think he might someday
feel something for me. Or maybe already does? If wishes were
horses...We have our awkward brief silly conversations. Always
about our subjects. Always about neutral topics. And I adore him.
And I live for every word he says. I live for just being in his
presence.

  But when we study together, or walk to class together,
everyone else keeping a safe distance from us, or when eat together
(they clear out for us there too, or for me; he sticks with me though,
so that must mean something--no one else sure the hell ever has) in
the cafeteria or downtown (ditto the plague years when we walk in),
he keeps taking eye snapshots of my hands. Pink on the palm. Black
on the back. I wonder if he wonders if I am naturally that color. I
wonder if he thinks I've been in a fire and I have burned the palms
of my hands. He has never seen a Black Negro African American
person up close. He does not know is my surmise. Am I an object of
intrigue to him? Or an oddity? Which? I could ask. The pane that is
him would break a little more. And this last one might shatter him
entirely. I do not want to live with that on my head.

 I've taken some time off since the last paragraph to
masturbate. I lay on my back and I pulled down my briefs. I held
my cock, which is not gigantic, damn the lie to that myth, and I
stroked it and whispered "Jeffrey" a few times and I squirmed my
butt into the bed and I bucked up to the ceiling and I felt that all
important grip in my abdominal muscles. I pinched my tits. Has
Jeffrey seen black tits before? I circled my hand round my crinkly
pubic hair and my balls. I squeezed them fairly hard which sent
waves of hurt and joy through me. And I willed myself in
imagination onto the bed with Jeffrey who is still recovering from
his night time past time.

 I put out my right hand, while jacking myself off with my
left, and I held it out to that partition that separates Jeffrey from me,
so when I came, and I came big time, I squeezed that right hand and
tensed the arm as all of me was tense and I held my fist out to him,
though he couldn't see it or me. I don't know if it was a fist of
anger at him. Or telling him I would protect him like a good darkie
servant would. Or if it was an offer of help that's all balled up
inside me, like that fist. Or perhaps I am a pane of glass too. And on
the verge of shattering. I guess maybe I can be Holden Caulfield
after all.

 So Jeffrey went to the bathroom, turned on the bathroom
light, and closed the door too quickly for me to see him--just a flash
of guttering flame--while I lay with only my dim Tensor light on,
begging him to look at me, offering my limp penis to him, come
take it, please o please. He peed and flushed the toilet. Which made
me turned on again. And he opened the bathroom door, but before
he  so rapidly turned out the light, I saw him momentarily naked.
He was so vulnerable looking. So weak chest tiny dick kid looking
that it broke my heart. How fragile and easily ended he was. How
unfair that. How deep down lonely him against the world it was.
And who do you think is going to win in that contest?

 I like to think that he stood there in the shadows with the
bathroom light off for a moment or two longer, looking at me,
vague milky moonlight coming in the small window by his bed, not
seeing me, this boy of moonglow, casting his paleness at me like
radiance. Looking directly at me, trying to see me, but I blended
black in black after all, so he couldn't. Then he went to his bed and
lay down again. This time to exhaustedly sleep. He and I do put all
we have into our little jack off rituals. I will give us that.

 So now I'm at the end of my letter (not to mention the end
of my rope--ha--and I just realized the unmeant deeply
psychologically significant pun) so go fuck yourself, Sigmund
Freud. Think he ever did? I'd pay money to see that.

 I'm enclosing a bit of my sperm--for god's sake don't use it
to get pregnant, I would not like to end up on the Springer show one
day-- on this page for you. For a gross out effect. Hope the pages
don't tear because of it. I've never read of anyone ever sending
come to his sister, or to anybody else for that matter, before. So just
consider it my plea for originality of writing. Though I probably
will read it in some book tomorrow that was written seventy five
years ago. Maybe it's a recurring theme for thousands of big name
writers down through hundreds of years. I don't know. That's how
it is when I think I've been so immensely creative.

 Anyway, don't spend your brother's come all in one place.
Pardon the stickiness of it. Thought you would get a laugh out of it.
Can I get in trouble sending this through the mail?

  I'll close, then go to the bathroom, and return to my bed for
sleepy bye. And think that tomorrow Jeffrey and I shall meet half
way like the North and the South, when the Confederates
surrendered in all that land of cotton--and have our day. Though I
know we will not. Still. Why not hope? It costs nothing. Just the
price of a soul and sanity is all. And those are bought  and sold and
thrown away cheaply and carelessly in this world. with not even a
shrug to note their passing.

 Take care, Sis, and give my love to Tommy or whoever
you're banging at the moment. Give him one for me, also. Think of
me and I'll be there.

Your little bro,
Doug

				  the end