Date: Sat, 25 May 2002 11:49:32 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: g/m masturbation  Joel in Winter

			     "Joel in Winter"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 Winter clutches at the world. It seems a silent
scream nailed down too well, too properly. I am a boy of 15
years. It is close to Christmas. There is a snow fall in the
offing. I am dressed in jeans, thick overshirt, heavy socks,
leather shoes, and leather jacket. I have my hair cut too
closely. I always part it on the left, though my barber has
said it should be parted on the right. He does so every
Saturday afternoon when I am forced to get a hair cut. I get
home, the first thing I do, is part it on the left again. He is
wrong. I am sure of this. I am in love. The other boy's name
is Joel. Like Joel Knox in Truman Capote's novel, "Other
Voices, Other Rooms." Joel in the novel is smart and
sensitive. Joel in my world is smart and sensitive and
beautiful. Joel Knox is beautiful too. Resplendent. They
seem to be each the other. Though the Joel I know lives
here in the sixties. The Joel of the novel was back in 1948. I
can't imagine anyone living that long ago. I can't imagine
my Joel living that long ago. By now he would be a middle
aged man. By now he might be dead.

 I am on the sidewalk, walking to the library. There is
no moon. The clouds are thick and black. The cold knifes
into me. The stores I pass are lighted orange it seems, dim
against the thick black curtain of the night. I love winter.
The whole world seems as though it is sad. I am always sad.
I like the company. Joel is golden and laughs and smiles a
lot. Joel Knox in the novel does little laughing, little smiling.
I am angry at Truman Capote. He has stolen my Joel. He
has put him in the pages of a book written long ago. Before
either my Joel or I was born. But he is not my Joel. I am on
a sideline for him. We talk sometimes. He tears at my heart
without meaning to. I would lie down my life for Joel. I will
lie it down now.

 There is little traffic on these side streets in this small
town. Church bells close by are ringing with Christmas
songs. We have a fake silver Christmas tree at my house, in
my living room. It is a stick, to which stick branches are
fitted in the holes. I hate that damned thing. I want a green
Christmas tree. I want a real Christmas tree. We can't afford
one. We would have to throw it out after the Day is over.
My mother says that would be sad. I wish Joel would come
to my house. I wish I could tell him I love him. I wish I
could tell him he has been written about. And Joel could
read about himself in the Truman Capote novel where it is
always summer, even in winter it is summer and Joel Knox
gets to be naked with a girl in a little pool and she bathes
him and shampoos his hair. I would love to do that to my
Joel. I would love to touch him and hold him and make him
not sad. Which is a curious thought because Joel is never
sad.

 The thing is also Joel is gay. I thought once if I
could meet a gay person, then we would be closest of
friends. This has turned out not to be the case. Joel has a
boyfriend. It crushes my heart. It clutches at me as the
winter wind scoops down on my this Friday night. I am
headed to the town library where I will hide in the stacks
and read books. That is where I found "Other Voices, Other
Rooms." It made me cry. It is beautiful and so specifically
sad that I thought I would not make it through it alive. That
it would kill me. How can a writer from that long ago know
my exact heart and put it on paper the way I would if I
could?

 I think Capote knows how it is. I think all strange
bird thoughts as I walk the night, as the wind buffets me, as
I pass the Kroger grocery store with people fighting the
wind, pushing their wire baskets of food to their cars. The
Christmas bells set off on "Little Town of Bethlehem," The
bells don't do a good job. One of them hits a sour clang and
it throws the whole song off. I wish I could have
masturbated this afternoon with Joel. Instead of by myself
as always. Fearing being caught in the bathroom. I wish I
could stop reading books. They satisfy me too well, and
then when I look up at the world afterwards, it is the same
empty desolate world. I don't know what I would do if I
didn't have my penis. I love it and it loves me. And I wish I
could just stop imagining me and Joel and Joel Knox and all
the other boys in all the other books I've read. I know it's
wrong but I imagine going to bed with Doug Spaulding and
Boy and Oliver Twist and the Hardy Boys, and I know there
are only so many ideas about boys to be thought of by me.
But other writers think so much better ideas, so many more
ideas, and I wish I could get inside the pages of these books
and be with all the boys I love who are not real. As I am not
real. As my conception of my Joel is not real. Stop saying
my Joel.

 The street corner I am standing on, preparing to
cross when the light turns red, is across from the old
deserted bus station. There should be paper flying in the
wind. There should be sounds of gunfire in the library
somewhere. There should be boys running up the aisles and
back again and they should be brandishing pistols and
screaming out, "why can't I just be a character in a book?
Why can't you just see my world which is real, from your
world which is not, and envy me?" Wouldn't that be nice? I
am what is known as a good guy. I am what is known as not
getting any. I am what is known as the nice kid with who
you will always be safe. I am tired of everyone being safe
around me. I want to tell them the thoughts I think. The
thoughts like the town. Laid out in squares. The thoughts
like the single car or two passing by as I cross at the light.
The boy who obeys the rules. The boy who is lost in this
concrete town. Where everything and everyone seems to fit.
Where boys sit at their desks at night and do their
homework. Where I sit at night and do mine too. A nice
hardwood desk. Big too. Sometimes I sit there and I am
doing math or history, studying hard in the thick books and
writing my scribbled notes in my Blue Horse Notebook.
Sometimes I sit there and I find my hand at my jeans. I feel
it feeling my boner. I feel it feeling the winter in my life. I
want to die. I want to die and show Joel how much I love
him. That much.

 I pass the deserted bus station. I look in the open
garage by it that buses uses to pull into for maintenance. I
can smell memories of the diesel fuel in there and remnants
of it that are not memories. There was much leave taking at
this place. Much coming home too. My mother and I used
to ride the bus to Memphis, 60 miles distant, every Saturday
morning to go shopping. I always felt happy when we saw
the Humco Plant at the outskirts of the city cause that
meant we had arrived and would be at the station in fifteen
minutes, almost always on the dot. I wish someone would
love me. Even if not Joel, then somebody. I wish Peter Pan
and Windy would sweep down out of the heavy thin windy
cold as kraut sky and would take me to Neverland and I
could be with the Lost Boys for all time in a magic place
where we could all lie together in a thatched hut and wait
for Boy to arrive from his tree house and we would all go
naked swimming in the bejeweled rivers and down to the
bottom of the blue where we would touch hands and lips
and eyes and never have to come home again. I tried to
make Joel Knox take the place of my Joel. Make them
change places. I want my Joel to be sad like Joel Knox is.
Like I am. Like all the boys I read about are. Not the boys
in real life. Who are too busy elbowing me away to get past
to where they want to be in the first place.

 The streets are hollow bones tonight. There seems a
lack of persons in the world. Tomorrow and yesterday get
blended together. Mixed up. I feel good in my jacket though
it is not warm enough for the 30 degree weather. My family
is not poor, but close to it if you want to know the truth. I
am too tall and too thin and too ugly with too big a nose. I
tried parting my hair on the right one time, like the barber
contends is where it should be parted, hoping it would make
my face look better, my nose less big, though I tried it one
full day--Saturday, when I always stay around the house,
and no one but my mother sees me--but it didn't work, so I
part it on the left again. My face doesn't look any worse
that way at least. I shudder with the coils of the cold. I am
in the process of reading "The Lost World" by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. I read it at my study desk in the corner of the
living room where, before I came along, the heat stove used
to be. In the ceiling above my desk is a circular patch that
hides to whole the stove pipe used to use to go through the
roof and rush out the smoke. Now we have a wall heater of
coils that turn cherry red, when on high, but you have to
stand right next to it in this too large living room to get any
warmth from it at all. The old heat stove did better, I was
told. Somehow, in a way I don't understand, it is my fault it
is gone. Much bad things, in a way I don't understand, are
my fault somehow.

 The library is in the next block. It is a low squat
brick building next to the dentist office where I get my teeth
worked on once a month. I have cavities a lot and am
always having them filled. This too is my fault somehow
though I brush twice a night with Crest (the TV ads "look
ma, no cavities" do not apply to me) and I eat few sweets,
though Coca Cola is my downfall. I have long legs but I do
not walk fast now. The library is open until nine on Friday
nights. During school assignments I have to do there, it is a
prison. Other times, when I go there to read what I want, it
is heaven. I do not understand how printed words can
transform reality into poetry and beauty. Can take terrible or
blocky or hurtful or lonely or dull or burning soul things,
and things you would never for a moment notice in real life,
and can make them into things known as transcendent, can
make them so suddenly intriguing and worth considering,
and not running away from. I' m too scared of life to look at
it directly. Writers are not. Truman Capote looked at life
head on and put it down just the way it really is. But
somehow he made it more than that at the same time.
Faithful to it,  but also, like going through it, coming out the
other side, and seeing it for what it really is. But still real
too. Odd thing, the human mind.

 I want it to snow. I want it to be in the teens. I want
to run naked out into the snow late at night and roll around
in it. I did that once last year. I did it and it scared me and I
knew I would get caught, but I did it anyway, and my little
peter almost froze off--my greatest fear in life--and I felt
like my skin has turned blue and into leather, and skin as
blue leather, take it from me, is something you do not want
to think about too much. I just did it for a minute or two,
felt like a moron and not a snow angel, and shivered in my
bed in my thick pajamas the rest of the night, and had a head
cold for three days afterwards. But then what is winter
without a head cold? I am at the library now. It adjoins the
house of pain, of the man with the drill and the shattering
pain no matter how much Novocain they use on me. The
library has a thick oak door. Or it should have. Therefore to
me it does. It has a golden door knob that you turn and it is
always warm. Or should be. Therefore it is. Even in biting
cold winter like this, when I walk with my hands outside my
pockets to freeze them so they will kill me, I can't explain it
better than that, and I put my both hands frozen solid on the
door knob and they instantly turn warm and stop feeling
pain. I wish I could stop feeling pain. That would be nice. I
feel pain all the time. It seems unfair.

 The lights inside are dim yellow. Like old tiger eyes,
that kind of color, like I know what old tiger eyes look like,
all I know about tigers are from Walt Disney nature films,
and of course Tigger. Christopher Robin was my first
friend. I met him when I was very young and had the
mumps and he turned me on and he was pretty and had
these shorts that my hands wanted to pull down and see
what was under them, and sick as I was, I got a boner,
because I guess, also, Christopher Robin was alone as I
was, and he had to make up these stories, though really
someone made them up for him, and he had to dream up
these characters to take some of the loneliness away, which
only made it worse for him, I thought, and for me too. It
just proved more how really bad and sad it was for him. The
lights inside the library are dim yellow like the lights of the
Kroger store and some of the other stores I went past,
getting here, like the lights of houses also that I passed. Like
the winter night was leaching out all the lights. Like the
world was going blind and everybody was having to strain
to see past the shadows that were getting more and more
pronounced, as though they were being drawn, these
shadows, by a thick number 2 pencil made by the hand of a
real malicious kid who didn't want anybody to see but
himself and then he could have everything for himself
forevermore. Maybe that would be me. If I could.

 The library has a small lobby and one main room
with three side rooms. The library in summer is cool and air
conditioned. The library in winter is warm as toast. I like the
warmth there. It doesn't seem intrusive like the warmth in
other places in winter. My house is always cold in winter.
I've come to like the cold. More than the hot weather for
sure. But library heat in winter is nice. It is comfortable and
friendly. When I have to come here to do book reports, it is
jangles my nerves and makes me want to leave it as soon as
I can, it muddles my thoughts and makes me feel stupid. I
am reading "The Lost World" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at
my study desk in the corner of the living room because it is
like a school book bound the way school books are in one
of those cheap greenish blue cloth covers without a dust
jacket and a frail sketchy drawing in black of dinosaurs on
the cover, like it would be wrong to make the book
attractive, like it would make it not like doing work to read.
The book is not completely work to read. Though it is
difficult to read. Though I am having fun with it. That is
why I bring that up again. That is why I like to read books
on my own in the library. I got "The Lost World" from this
library. I am taking the library home with me that way.
Pulling it around me like a comfortable shroud--why do I
say shroud? Odd choice of words.

 Anyway, that is why I like the library. Because
reading even what I want to here is like work, but it's fun
too, and if in the midst of work, a little fun seeps in, well, a
person can't be blamed for that can he? I stand in the main
room of the library. I see the librarian, a plain raisin eyed
faced gray hair bunned woman in a severe black dress, at
her little metal desk, sitting in her little black chair on
castors, looking through a newspaper. I walk quickly to the
first side room where the contemporary classics are. For
some reason 1948 "Other Voices, Other Rooms" is a
contemporary classic. But then long years ago get treated
nicer here than in the real world. You get kinder wishes
from time in here too somehow. It doesn't hurt as much. I
go to the copy of the Capote book, first row, second shelf,
take it down, it seems to like me picking it up again, it
seems to know me, and go to the corner of the empty book
filled room where I curl up with it. I never curl up anywhere
on the floor at all, ever, except here. I feel as safe here as I
have ever felt. I think it will always be that way. I turn in the
Random House hardcover copy to the passages of Joel and
the girl and how they are naked and he is getting his hair
shampooed. I think that would be very nice. For me to
shampoo Joel's hair. It does not have crude drawings or sex
words scribbled there by kids. So I'm the only kid to have
read this book.

 In all that mystery and Gothic heaviness the book is
about, Joel Knox looks out from all the greenery and heat
and sick smelling heaving flowers, and he says he is my Joel
and he doesn't mind if I wash him elsewhere too, because
he is tired of being scared and tired of being always on
guard, knowing something bad will be happening soon, and
wouldn't I like to get naked too, and sit with him in the
water and feel the coolness opening up my pores instead of
sweat streaming out of them on such a hot Southern day?
And Joel Knox gets mixed up with my Joel and I put my
hand on the page and I feel his heart beating and I want to
take my Joel and me and I want us to read this book
together and our eyes could fix on the same words at the
same time and it would be like playing hop scotch or
stepping on sidewalk cracks and breaking the backs of the
kids who tease us. But they don't tease him. They tease me.
And now my knees drawn up, the book resting on them, I
feel the words with my eyes. I wonder if my Joel would see
himself in this novel? I wonder if he would think, how about
that?, someone wrote a book about me and I wasn't even
born yet? He would lord it over me cause no one has
written a book about me. That would be okay though. I
would let him.

 I want winter magical in this room with the apple
green walls, and the smell of old books that is like friendship
that will never go away and you don't have to be frightened
of it and you can be a good guy and you can get some
action too because good guys want action and they want to
be loved and they can love, and it's the damnedest thing, I
believe, that people who know how to love, and can feel so
much, get so little chance to be allowed to openly  love, get
so little chance to prove how much they can feel, while
others who feel nothing except their nerve endings get to
play at the games of all that all the time and they're the ones
who get the littlest from it except in orgasms and stuff,  and
just keep having sex and all and it's not love and they don't
think about it twice, because they know when this one
leaves, another one will happen along, and it's just part of
their lives which they don't even look at half the time, and
the rest of us have to imagine it from books, and that too
seems pretty unfair.

  I want to have the boy from the breathtaking
Conrad Aiken story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" to explore
"the silent, sliver curve of space with me" and with Joel and
with Joel Knox. I want that boy of the broken heart who
needs snow to fill it, to take off his clothes and dive into his
bed with us, and into sweet cold snowy blowy winter that
does not exist except in his mind and go mad with us,
escape with us, or die there with us, in the clean fine
perfectly shaped Aiken words, and I want all of us to skate
on the ice of the rings of Saturn and be naked and be boys
and find the dense jungle heat world of summer of  Joel
Knox the same as the winter world of fancy and imagination
come true, even when no one else can understand it or even
begin to fathom it like in "Silent Snow.." and I want this
winter to be the winter Joel comes to me at my house one
night and when I open the door he tells me that we have to
talk and our talk will be what I want and I won't have to
hide in books anymore or have to recomb my hair every
time I get home from the barber shop or have a too big nose
or be so scared of life and people and Joel that I can't even
stand to be in his presence it makes so many stomach
butterflies for me. I want to read "Other Voices, Other
Rooms" for the first time. I want to think about the icy parts
of it and the ghosts and the fear and the refusing to grow
old when one is old already and skin might be pulling off the
bone like a turkey's ready for Thanksgiving baking.

 I read the naked passage again. I put my hand to my
jeans. I feel my boner. It feels good. It feels warm. I want
Joel Knox to reach from the book and kiss me. I want my
Joel to be jealous of that. I want them both to kiss my
mouth and face and it will be like when I rolled naked in the
snow for that one mad mournful minute with the deep sky
looking down and down at me last year. I want the snow
around me and in me and I want my mother to be outside
my room and asking the doctor what is wrong with me, and
inside I see silver skates and I see far away northern places
and I want to sleep and sleep and wake up out of the mirror
pool and see Joel Knox and Joel, mine for the first time,
waiting for me, and they will take me out of the mirror pool,
and they will let me tell them the stories I've read and the
day will be ice cold and it will be summer at the same time,
and the penis of mine ejaculates now, almost on its own
accord, and I feel the little unwell fever rushes through me,
the abandon that is like a blip on a radar screen, two or
three short dots and dashes, and then it is over, and the
book trembles on my legs, and I sit there emptied and sticky
and full and as always ashamed. I am a good guy even unto
myself. And that makes me less of a good guy. I've not the
right. Cause that is what I want to be. Not a good guy.  I
want to be the bad guys that have all the fun and don't give
a shit who they hurt and just take their pecker pleasure,
kicks alone, and walk away. They never hurt themselves for
sure. I hurt myself all the time. I can't help it.

 My left testicle hurts now. It always does when I
masturbate. I accept it as my punishment. Because on
Friday nights, the library is almost empty, save for the
librarian, Miss Delaby, and me, and it is safe to do this here,
since I really don't touch myself or make a production of it
during or after. I just close my eyes for a few seconds. It is
like a faint firecracker in me exploding far away. I apologize
to Joel and to Joel Knox and Boy and Doug Spaulding and
Oliver Twist and the boy in the private snow field of his
room, I apologize for what I feel and what I don't feel. It
will never be summer and it will never be the two Joels
waiting for me in a mystical world of green and squeaking
heat and pregnant with mysteries and horrors and
conundrums and heart breaks and revelations and things that
are so monstrous they are funny and you can't help but
laugh and being so close to life you can hear and feel the
throb of the heart of the very deepest part of the world. It
will never be. But books. And thank god for books. And
Miss Delaby who never bothers me here, who never hovers
when children are near, seeing they don't get peanut butter
and jelly stains or bubble gum bodies when they have been
chewed to tastelessness and all that other stuff  stuck on
book pages accidentally or carelessly or on full purpose. She
leaves them to the books as she leaves me to the books. I
want to cry every time after jacking. It's so lonely I can't
stand it. I wish I was as sensitive as Joel Knox. And as wise
and profound. But then no kid is every as sensitive or wise
or profound as are kids in novels. But you accept the
impossible in books. It's what they're there for.

 In time, I put the Capote book back on the shelf, and
I look for something to take home for the weekend. I've got
"The Lost World" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" on a long
loan because it will take a while to read. I'm reading it very
carefully. I go to another room, secretly guilty and happy I
have jacked off in the library again, it seems like I've
accomplished something most boys wouldn't have the guts
to do, though I pay for it with guilt and fear I will be caught
this time for sure. I pick up the hardcover copies of "The
Body Hunters," which is a Mike Hammer mystery by
Mickey Spillane, and "Too Friendly, Too Dead," which is a
Michael Shayne mystery by Brett Halliday, and I take them
to the desk and check them out. I tremble a bit, knowing
this time she will call me to account and embarrass the hell
out of me, call my mother even. But she does none of these
things. Maybe she does know. Maybe she knows what it's
like. And lets me. That would be awful. That would be
nicely awful.

 The librarian barely looks at me over her half
glasses, as she stamps them, tells me their return date. I
walk out of the library which has toasted me nicely, my
masturbation has made me deeply warm inside, a chrysalis
of warmth, and I step out into the cold night, much colder
than when I came in here a little while ago. My jacket is still
zipped up. I did not perspire in the library or get too warm.
Books know my temperature it seems and adjust it
accordingly. I hold the books in my left hand against my
side, the way I carry school books, and I start walking
home. Stores are closed now. Houses are shut up tight.
There is no traffic. Even though it is not even eight thirty
yet. The church bells have stopped. I put my hand to my
heart. I hear it beating. I am still alive. I walk down past the
deserted bus station. There is not another one here. You
have to go to South Fulton to catch the bus these days. I
remember riding the bus with my mother on Saturday
mornings early, getting going before sunrise, and how
beautiful sunrise looked through the huge panorama front
window. We always sat directly behind the driver. And how
I felt I had arrived at something important, some definitive
landmark of my childhood, when we saw the Humco Plant.
It's gone now. I don't even know what they manufactured.
Whatever it was, it's out of date or someone else is doing it
more shoddily and faster and for more money, so why
remember?

 I walk past the bus garage. I wish Joel was waiting
in my yard when I get home. I wish the snow would go on
and fall. I love it like Joel Knox and Zoo in the novel love it.
I long for it as did they. And Joel would be waiting by the
large elm in my front yard, to the left of the concrete walk
to our green front porch, and he would put his hands to me,
and we would hold each other, and he would kiss the side of
my frozen face and he would hold me tight and never let me
go, like the song said, and he would say take me into your
room and tell me of Little Hans and the silver skates and
who was the ice woman ghost Joel Knox who is really me
after all, kept seeing, and how did that mule get hung in that
deserted dance palace with a spittoon round its leg? and we
would walk into my house into my room and he would lie
with me and we would take off our clothes and we would
be covered with silent snow, secret snow, and the secret of
Joel Knox and Joel's hearts/heart would be revealed and I
would never need, we three would never need, the hand of
astrologer again to plant the stars in the skies again, for we
not need them for luck at all anymore.  Please let me go
mad in a sensuous snow world in faraway. Just, also please,
not alone.

     Make it snow tonight. And I go inside the house, to the
cold dark hallway, to my desk in the cold large living room,
where I turn on my Tensor desk lamp and its bright sharp
white light that is so much better than the dim yellow
cobwebbed ceiling light of the living room, and I put my
two new library books on my desk. I will read them this
weekend. But for an hour or so tonight, I read a bit more of
"The Lost World" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That is one
terrific name for a writer, don't you think? And as I read,
frozen inside yet again, already over the little thaw at the
library, not even remembering even now exactly what a
warm womb close by friendly feeling it was, always close
by, which is as close as I imagine I will ever get, I do not
think of Joel out with his boyfriend and whatever they're
doing, what else would they be doing?, his boyfriend who is
not worth of him, Joel, who is, himself, not worthy of Joel
Knox, who my true love forevermore could never possibly
live up to, when you get right down to it. I pick up "The
Lost World." They're just getting to the good parts with the
dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs a lot.  I huddle down in my
metal chair with the padded seat cushion. I begin to read.

				  the end