Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2003 20:30:33 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Masturbation and the Peeping Jim

		    "Masturbation and the Peeping Jim"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


I will not say I am not jealous of him. I will also not pretend
to understand the artfulness of the seemingly artless. But
when Jim's book was published to critical acclaim and an
immediate sale of 100,000 copies, with another printing on
the way, already sold to a major paperback house, along with
a movie deal in the seven figures--all virtually unheard of for
a first novel--even getting a first novel published by a vanity
house that nobody reads is difficult--and
expensive--enough--getting a first novel published by a major
hard cover house happens about as often as--well, you
choose the analogy.

To me, when I looked at the picture of Jim (formerly Jimmy
of my childhood world) so wise and knowing and clear eyed
and handsome, wearing no glasses, slight threads of gray in
his hair, his smile in something of an intense sad eyed dirge
befitting the grim roster of events in this thick thick novel
that crashed only here and there (according to one critic who
had to be a showoff and go against the sweeping tide) and
made a thoroughly befitting debut for a writer (the public and
critics, save one, agreed) with a public that likes 900 page
books upon which there are untold hills of gray matter
seemingly expended--where do they find the time to read
them?--we're all so busy after all--we are told--and what we
are told has got to be true.

And to find myself as a central character in his novel, even
though my name is changed to Horace Blankenship, insult
enough, for even my name is better than that, a central
character am I, the morose bank clerk of the summerly
passage in which the core of the novel takes place--me as a
grownup, but really me with the characteristics I had as a
child--I mean the emotions, the mopey me of back
then--well, he could have told me about this little uncredited
tribute, though I would not exactly want any kind of
credit--though when the phone rings, I do feel a little nerve
of excitement--still it is me in that book, and I for one think
he has a lot of gall.

I loved Jimmy secretly, well and truly all our childhood long,
and to think that he was even then, however unconsciously,
using me to gain material for his book--we have come a long
way from Peyton Place and The Chapman Report, certainly
(I bring back these quite old but still worthwhile books in
comparison, because Jim's novel is packaged (and written)
as one of those grand old forbidden fruits from my
childhood, as pure sexual dynamite, with just enough of the
labial puritan hangover that would catapult to the crotch, but
also to the brain in which the crotch basically lies anyway;
the front cover art that borrowed heavily from that of
Metalious's novel, bringing back half memories of those
green summer days when books were our secret friends as
long as our parents didn't find out--literature as well as
sex----hefty, involved, good to get lost in--from libraries,
book stores, dime stores, newsstands--something beyond us
on pages we could turn all by ourselves, all by our own will,
and that was something deeply important; Jim's novel is set
in a time jumble that fragments all sorts of decades that gel
into a vague watery one, ours, but something we missed in
the halcyon days of long gone secret under the covers with a
flash light reading as well--a part of and somehow before and
during and long after all the newer sexually explicit stuff,
slurpy and sloppy and degrading--but Jimmy, sorry, I mean,
Jim (why not James?, he is wearing a tweedy jacket in his
book cover photo; which befits more a James than a Jim)
used me like a scuppernong bush on a hot day; at least
according to his novel; and it has to be me; for I've read the
endless thing twice now and can only come to this
conclusion.

Jimmy knew of my love for him, and he painted the central
passage of the summer I or Horace told Jim or Dex, when I
Horace was a bank clerk, and he Dex was working in the
used car field, though neither of us "real persons" ever had
those professions; and yes, Horace (god, to name me that, he
must surely have hated me and laughed at me all these years)
confesses his love to Jim (Dex Throwaway)--well, it wasn't
really Throwaway, in such shivery detail, so what you are
reading is my revenge on Jim, and it was Jim as the character
actually named Dex,  any idiot who knew him could see him,
so leave it at that.

The novel is vastly interior, something Jimmy, Jim, James
never seemed to be when I knew him, when I loved him in
that secret love that is safe and secure and hurtful and
mysterious and involves all the lying you can imagine and
then some; think of it: to have your personal summer prince
with you all year round, but somehow especially in summer,
for he felt like the season to me, light and airy and full of
freedom and all the beautiful warm morning sunrises strung
together that anyone could ever want; and then to find he has
actually an interior; to find he has actual thoughts going on in
that beautiful head--Horace is a dupe; Horace is obsessed
with himself; Horace accepts that Dex loves him, even
though Dex is only a casual acquaintance. Horace knows this
is bullshit.

There are no sex passage between them, save one.  Kind of.
When Horace (goddam) is masturbating at about age 13 in
the privacy of his locked bathroom, and Dex, unbeknownst
to Horace till years later, is looking on peeping Tom wise
through the window, well over the tub (he has to stand on
the second rung of a ladder to see; a tall boy even then was
Jimmy Jim Dex); and inside, a little vision of a little boy with
too pale, too fleshy body and too thin hips, rubbing his
erection on a fuzzy bathroom mat, and calling out the name
of Jimmy (Dex) in his adenoidal voice pretending that it is a
lovely summery musical voice, and through the magic of his
words.

 Jim melds this little scene, he makes such a huge deal out it,
with that of the bank where fake me as a fake adult works,
mingling the very molecules lingeringly with the air and the
feel and the profound safety of the bank in July, making it a
pivotal character in the novel. The bank one Horace by
name, works in, where Dex Jim Jimmy tells him of that little
secret window peeping, years later, and Dex Jimmy laughing
silently back there in that silent afternoon when even the
birds did not sing, as he heard Horace me calling out his
name and squirting on the always at the ready crumpled
Kleenex, and feeling so extraordinarily good because Jimmy
Dex has just left the house to go have supper and come back
later to watch TV with me Horace (where in the hell did he
get that name for me? god the fury of the bastard and for
what? I ask you--for what?) and for Horace me the imprint
of Jim Dex is still in my mind and heart and eyes as I Horace
turn over and hold Jimmy Dex invisibly in his arms and rubs
his legs upon and between the legs of his true love who
would never betray him in a million years.

The thing of the confession in the novel, a "true roman a
clef" (critics look at every book one way--it will prove how
smart they alone are) , that should bring back the dry and
wooden works of Sterling Hayden, or Taylor
Caldwell--though Caldwell's work might not be a good
parallel; Taylor loved Jesus in some of the most slab sided
books you've ever read, she must have gotten Pinnochio's
wooden body and shredded it a million times to put such
dead and witless stuff down on paper--read it--try to--you
start coughing up pieces of bark--the trees that died in vain
for those books--because Jim Jimmy's novel is preacherly,
fatherly, comforting, in that way that allows sexual
descriptions that would have gagged De Sade, and yet there
is that phony lambency in the novel that makes you think in
describing especially the humiliation of Horace me(this did
not happen in real life; Jimmy Jim did not rotoscope me in
the nude in my bathroom--what kind of jerk would do such a
thing? one's friend, after all, there are certain limits, and
surely I could trust him---)the author is so supremely
seemingly understanding, when it was all hot air and mirrors;
pick up the words--look underneath--there's nothing but
mean laughter. Even I got caught up in the thing, the book,
feeling myself bettered while watching his words mark me as
road kill one feels sorry for for a brief gust, or in Jim
Jimmy's case a huge long gust, of words--

--the novel that paints Jim Dex as so sexually free--and me
Horace as so sexually up tight; so clenched as opposed to
unclenched Jim the writer and Dex the very thinly disguised
character in the novel--where as the real Jimmy (was there a
real Jimmy?) was so damned uptight, he wouldn't even use
the bathroom at my house, but ran over to his gran's house
across the street (where he and his sister lived) to use the one
there, then came back to my house--I at least from time to
time excused myself when he and I were watching TV in my
living room--to use the bathroom, when what I was using it
for was a quick jacking off knowing he was watching TV
about six feet away and not knowing what I was doing,
though sometimes when I came back out to the living room,
he looked at me with a kind of grimacing or more like it, a
not happy look for a moment in my direction--I of course am
sure I looked as guilty and forlorn as hell--I was breathing
hard too.

--but then I pretended he did not know--we pretend so
much, desperately trying not to, while hanging on to it all the
while, wanting someone to finally say they know; I always
locked the bathroom door, even when I was alone in the
house; and I never made noises while jacking off. When I sat
on the couch, after coming,  and feeling deliciously dirty and
so wanting to tell him, with Jimmy Dex, and when Jimmy
Dex came back from using his bathroom at home, I think the
awkwardness was the same; as when I excused myself to use
the bathroom the normal way, though masturbation for a boy
is highly normal to be sure, but I mean elimination, though
masturbation is elimination as well, but the hell with it;  at
such varied times, we sat, as I remember on the sofa, in our
summer shirts and shorts, staring at the TV, not crossing our
legs as we normally did, but stiff and pretending, as if waiting
to be grilled by the cops, the bodily functions we he or I had
just performed were done by somebody far else; till we eased
into ourselves again.

Sometimes I used his mad dash across the street to his gran's
house to use the bathroom, to rush to my own bathroom,
lock the door and masturbate before he got back--I was a
quick study then. But he would from time to time find me
sitting on the sofa afterwards, that breathing hard thing again
for me, eyes kind of glazed, not seeing the TV program my
face was directed toward. He breathed hard too, from the
run there and back. It never once occurred to me that he
went home to jack off. Not once did I think it. Not even
now.

--this to me seemed the essence of love; the essence of
togetherness. These things are vaguely and twisted round,
however, in the novel in its own high flown way lecturing to
the informed who have learned bigger words than Dr. Phil
exposits, (yet it is very much a Dr. Phil kind of book--it,, at
least, makes no use of psychobabble and that is a relief--ah
we need such closure from that crap, and we are in the mood
for a long tedious tour of words that MEAN
SOMETHING--but dammit to hell we've read so many
hundreds of pages, we aren't going to by god give up
now--makes a person feel positively brilliant--I don't care if
this thing is filled with Sanskrit the rest of the way, I'm
plowing through) around the soul of the writer, Jim Jimmy
never accounting for when he picked up a soul, except the
soul of self righteousness and curly headed beauty and
physical prowess and muscular legs that used to fascinate me
so.

Words that the cream chicken circuit  book clubs always
make time for, and Oprah's book club trolls for, though it
makes me slightly ill that his book has already been chosen
by her readers (does the Guru Woman actually read these
books?, what do you think?, "one billion, two billion, three
billion dollars") and of course that is what Jimmy Jim is
doing right this moment, touring the country, soon the
world, promoting a book that doesn't need promotion, but
TV sets can't get enough of his straight white teeth and his
sunny sweet face, as he describes the sweet summer of Dex
Jimmy Jim, and Horace me, the pivotal one, that is in the
middle of the book brought to a head, so to speak, by
Horace me's admission to him in the bank in which Horace
me works (I hate banks; I hate the sterility of them; the
snobbery of them; the mathematics of them that always
remind me of my utter stupidity when it comes to numbers;
Jim Jimmy always loved math; calculus, physics, all that
stuff; no need for a personal accountant, he; therefore Jimmy
Jim Dex would put me in a bank.)

As a lowly clerk, a morose lost sad man, as I was a morose
lost sad child,  (his characters all seem to be children, even
the adults, not childish adults, but as children finding all of a
sudden themselves as adults and running or trying to a game
on everybody else, without being aware of it--is the author?;
mine is the most obvious) as punishment; as a rude little slam
at me, making me this pitiful character whose faulty life,
whose fractious life has been traded in for living on the edge
of my soul and making things turn tougher and tougher for
myself (this is sadly true; I can be objective after all, but I am
an adult, not a child adult) running parallel to Jimmy Jim
Dex's life with the girls and the women and the song and the
fast life in a nearby city till he comes home to work at a used
car lot in repentance for his sins, thus making himself like the
Apostles turning from "the world" and coming toward Jesus;
or the rich man who Jesus tells to sell everything he owns
and follows the Lord; note, in the Bible the rich man loved
his money more; note: check out the millionaire and
billionaire TV evangelists for whom money is everything
there is, while telling you not to notice the obvious)--

--in short it is Jimmy Jim Dex in sackcloth and ashes who
returns home, the prodigal son who has had a life, who has
no need to associate with bank clerks who were once his
lowly casual friend who he has forgotten about, as he forgot
about me in real life also;  stupid things stick in my mind too
from years ago; I've just never had the brain to make lots of
money or any money with that trick, and it is a trick; and yet
he remembered me so seemingly accurately in his novel; I
should have gotten something out of this.

I suppose I could sell my story to the tabloids, but that
would only be me helping him sell more books, and look to
the whole world like a total moron, while the author Jim has
applied his adventures, his romps, his bouts with booze and
drugs, with every parallel any one including him, can dream
up, which makes life a certain stanza that can be fakely
applied to and played by the "authors" of the world who
pretend at being John Updike, a gentle generous writer of
measured soul and carpentered words that capture life in
cross sections and perceptions no one else can, with
descriptions that make it all seem like a wonderfully closely
knit deeply well known alien land, and dialogue and keen ear
and wit, that can hew into little pieces of Sunday church
stained glass windows perfectly seen and observed refracted
almost holy beings while still being so very human, as are
their thoughts and deeds, and somehow reshapes them as full
complete persons, so close to your heart you can feel them
under your hands, and standing right by your shoulder.

 Jim is one of those authors (I imagine there is only this one
book in him) who can't even come close but who have a
certain egregious ability, drunk on others' words, like
Falstaff on his biggest binge, to fringe characters, I am not
the only one in the book by any means, and seeming to heap
totally contradictory and see through inflated compassion on
them, as does Jimmy Jim Dex in the fake bank in which I
Horace fake works--

--a summer afternoon, after hours--no one in the bank but
me at a desk, tabulating my day's work; a cleaner, up on the
second floor smoking a cigarette and goofing off next to her
mop and broom--and Jimmy Dex knocks at the locked front
bank doors, for some time, just bangs at the damn thing, till I
fear he will break the glass and I will have to pay for it.

Till it irritates me enough to go to the door and point at the
closed sign, but then of course, seeing that it's HIM (even as
an adult it is so obviously boyishly HIM) so I have TO
WITH THUDDING HEART let HIM into the bank, this
profligate spender of life who looks as fresh and young and
handsome at 33 as when he was 20, whereas I Horace look
like death took me early and forgot to tell me about it, so we
walk across the marble floor, past the marble pillars, through
the marble arch way, back to the room where the huge bank
vault is kept, for he wants to see me after so many years, and
I on the spot right there kill me dead but I have to tell him I
love him, for not being able to say it at least has been like a
huge tapeworm devouring all the squishy organs of me and
coming into my throat lashing out at my poor old mother
with whom I, yes, in real life too, live with, whose throat I
verbally rip at, and whose heart  (mine) she verbally, through
guilt that has not assuaged, after all these years stabs into--

--he has come to save my life; come to say he is sorry I was
so morose and am still; which is the author deus  ex machina
coming through again; he has not seen me since college; how
does he know?; I still look like me, I guess, pretty
discouraging, he recognized me and all; it is that unerring
way that is with the perfectly attuned compass of knowledge
and taking of the past and furthering it into the future
without a missed second of what it has been like all these
years for me; of course I wouldn't dare, even as Horace,
even as me, tell him he got it wrong; it would be like
assuming God could make a mistake when he saw everything
unfolding beneath his loving gaze--

--he has come back to tell me that I changed his life, and how
have I done this noble thing?, as I "crashed confusedly
down" (that's how the thing's written) in a metal chair next
to the silver vault--we had come to this room, unerringly,
irrevocably, specifically to be where the most money was
kept because money was his god, next to himself-- here in
the summery bank with the green tint to the air, and the cool
air conditioning everywhere, (he seems to love banks like I
love libraries; they seem the same in our minds) even though
I still perspire being this close to him; in this bank that he
imbues with a character, with a haunted unnervingly serene
stateliness that a wise child might dream of, that had
positively a potential for just about to speak that would have
scared Henry James.

Jim Jimmy makes the bank like a shade tree by a cool June
brook on a sunshiny day laced with shadows through the tree
limbs and leaves, makes it a confessing place; so oddly, this
repository of numbers and facts and memos and character
files and every blood human facet of its depositors no other
institution, even compared with the CIA and the FBI, no
institution could have possibly accrued more data on this
town--I tell Jimmy there in my shirt sleeves and my long
brown trousers and my heavy socks and brown leather shoes
that I've always loved him--

Jim Jimmy Dex by the way is wearing a tennis shirt and
shorts, socks and white tennis shoes--the wind has ruffled his
hair, he is tanned, there is not a trace of sweat on him--it is
like he was off to the tennis courts to lob a few with Babs
and Biff, and decided to plop by here first to take care of
some unfinished business--

--and he kneels to me--Horace I think he is about to propose
and we find our hearts a flutter--the scene is played with
cruelty, if you will just look between the lines; even though
there is not a mean word that Dex Jimmy says, even though
the descriptions, the dialogue, the inner journeys of Jimmy
Dex, and me Horace (so incredibly frighteningly accurate to
the actual me--he saw into me--he knew I loved him even
though I never looked at him in the shower room at the
muny pool--even though I always turned away from him, so
awkward so scared he would have had to know--and he tells
me in the bank vault room where all the vitals and victuals
and vital organs of the town are kept--that he saw me when I
was 13 masturbating--and he describes it for Horace--he
describes it perfectly--a little boy who weeps often, a little
boy who has nothing and no one really he can be with or
own or who would give a single damn no matter how
inanimate the object and therefore mutable to all sorts of
emotions and illogic emotional and illogic humans can put on
their non objecting forms--if "we" were to die.

We?

--and he says it sad, Jimmy Jim Dex--(the "real" Jimmy was a
very unsad boy, so it seemed) he puts his hand on my
Horace's knee--and Horace is, through Jim Dex's
words--taken back there--taken back to two little boys who
wanted to be held--to two little boys, one of whom had lots
of friends, but only had lots of friends because of what he
could do for them, because of the star roles in school he had,
of the prestige he carried and how this too was a lonely
thing; how it had followed him all his life; why he had
sacrificed being a big shot business man in the nearby city
and returned here to work at a used car lot.

To do penance under the whipping stiff pennants, of the car
lot, blowing in the hot and cold breezes that came their way;
but also to do penance for what other people went through;
including me, who masturbated under the watching
protective eyes of Jimmy Dex, who, Horace I, after shooting
in the wad of Kleenex, got to his my knees and held his my
penis in both hands and pushed it down between his my legs
and pushed it clamped with the balls, almost all painfully
crumpling them out of sight, then closed his my naked legs
and brushed my crew cut as though it was a long beautiful
mane of woman hair and rushed my head backwards and
tried to say something Katherine Hepburnish and imagined
with eyes closed, my breasts were female glands, so I Horace
would be right for Jimmy Dex,  (as I Horace pretended that
Dex Jimmy was watching me! turn to the right a little
kumquat boy and see Jimmy Dex there for real looking right
at your unclothed body, and what would you think of them
apples? or more to the point, what would he think of yours?
if he could see them, hidden as they are) and how Jimmy Dex
had watched as I Horace stood and opened the bathroom
closet and got out my Horace's mother's bra and put it
round my Horace's breasts, the cups on each, not laughing,
serious as can be, and not able to fasten it in the back, how--

-- I Horace held it there with my arms over it and to the side;
how I Horace looked in the bathroom medicine chest mirror
at my (Horace's) face and body down to my navel, and how
I Horace put my his arms round myself  Horace and kissed
my Horace's left shoulder  (Jim the author even got the
shoulder right; it was always the left one I kissed; but that is
easily explained--I'm a lefty so I would favor it) and how I
let the bra fall from me to the linoleum floor, and got a
measuring stick from the bathroom closet, leaning against the
back wall it was, and then bent over, conveniently enough,
right toward him, so Jimmy could see my ass, (imagining,
Horace and I, what if Jimmy Dex could see my ass right
now? I personally fuckin' hate irony--Jim the writer eats it
up) did we and Jimmy Dex not plan this?, was this the only
way we could carry out the consummation of our affair?--

--and I  Horace inserted more of the measuring stick in my
(Horace's) ass than I Horace ever had before, and I Horace
pulled it in and out of me Horace--it was rough, the stick
was too wide, it hurt, I Horace pushed it almost to my his
prostate gland--and it felt slightly better than it had the other
times I Horace had reached in that far--

--and in the bank vault room of gray and metal and steel and
rivets and time keepers and clocks and that very impressive
looking steel udder that unlocks the cave of money, in the
vault of my memories that Jim the author had somehow
purloined and had given to the rogue thinly disguised Horace
of the book, in those sentences that somehow were
mathematically deployed, that allowed a sort of bogus poetry
to the page that the reader had to put some life to, (a kind of
writing that seems impressive the first time, but look at it
again and what you thought you read there doesn't even
exist in that book) of his own, had to put his own brain
working not to be crushed and killed by those preacherly
aesthetic, interior designed words, like a ton of dead flies on
the mantle piece of a house you are tricked into thinking of
buying, well, have already bought, without seeing the
framework, while the outside of the words seemed to take
care of themselves--he really gets you to believe reality and
money and life are incidentals to THE BIG THINGS which
are always what involves Jim Dex and no one else no matter
how many characters are with him--adds to the ambiance of
writerly loneliness, winter scape, cue act three, scene one--

--those grand tours of the human soul that rose toward me in
the bathroom and Jim Dex watching, in about the center of
the book, while the rest of the book declined to Jim Dex's
becoming a mere mortal, who had been somehow humbled,
though in a much superior manner, the writer making the
character of me Horace a schlub who would never get along
in this world of words and this world of life which was so
supremely phony in this book that it could not possibly be
anything but real and more honest than any book ever
written before or since, and the thing was, my Horace telling
him I loved him all those years ago, and Jimmy Dex
explaining that in doing so I had somehow killed something
inside him--

--something conquering and usurping, and that in putting the
yard stick in my ass I was measuring his ability, his power to
save those who worshipped him enough, who gave
themselves away to his artificial looks and superficial
sporting skills and his ability to say the right words at the
right times, that I was something of a maggot to him
because, not for the reasons you would expect, all writers
have to put something in their work you would not expect;
that's what makes them memorable, they think it anyway;
damn how could I not have seen this coming kind of way;
though usually it's received with a sigh at the stupid
cleverness certain writers pretend to have--

--and in seeing me love the chocolate frosting on the cake
and not the cake interior itself, he could no longer
masturbate freely; he could no longer benefit from knowing
what he was inside and knowing he was better than an
abstract figure that anyone could make into anything they
wanted no matter how close they were to him and get it all
wrong, of course, because to them he was opaque complex
glass frosted gray through which they could not see, no
matter how he tried to explain it on their own (lower
naturally) level; so Jimmy Dex explains to Horace me, still
Jimmy Dex on one knee, proposal like, and it was a proposal
in a sort of terrible way, why he tried to have a homosexual
lifestyle for a time--

--this is news to the reader because they've spent about 400
pages reading about him banging every girl and woman who
moves--again, scalding shock--but inside he has been
homosexual, in that incredible insightful mind of him that
even God does not possess, for he knows why he does
everything, and has in effect as he explains it for pages and
pages to Horace me, he tried to become Horace me to
alleviate Horace me from him Dex because he as of late
realizes (how did he miss it when he was a kid?) that when
he is able to masturbate and then to have sex with girls, it is
that memory of me, that accrues like mental chopped liver, in
that damp hot bathroom, with Jim Dex looking through the
window, standing on the ladder, as I try on a bra and try to
be a girl for Dex Jim who knew immediately what I was
doing and did not get the wrong idea of course--

--and this hurt him so much that Horace I was willing to do
such a humiliating thing for him, but not for him, but for my
image of him, when he thought mopey sad me would
understand him when no one else did because he knew I
loved him,  though of course he made damn clear there in the
bank that he sure as hell didn't love me, so don't go off your
trolley or anything, but  for all the right reasons other than
sexually; worshipping him was a gift he had benevolently
given me (what gift could possibly be greater?), but even if
Jimmy Dex had still decided he was gay (Jimmy Dex knew
now he wasn't, but even if he was, he sure wouldn't have
brought it around me), and he was only just another god to
another me and that hurt him terribly--such a lament party
for himself he throws here, I'm dying inside and he's too
busy comforting me to know it, but that's our little Dex
Jimmy), so he threw himself into even more perfection,
satyrism, wealth, and glory--and managed to tell me I was his
sworn enemy while being the best friend and the only friend
he had ever had--

--(this is about me and Jimmy and even I don't understand
it--critics love that kind of confused stuff of course) and the
thorny thicket of words that could weave one way and then
weave another like a forest bed in murky sea that pretended
to be so straight forward and epic and filled with a deep
sensitivity to human emotions, the real things, not the fake
things, this man who put a fake me too real in a fake bank
job too fake and cruel for the real me, a laugh at me--at the
end of this interminable passage while I'm blissed out in
nostalgia for the good old days, yeah, some good old days,
and impressed to hell and back by Jimmy Dex flailing at
himself with a whip of words he doesn't mean for a half
second--

--the caluminty is there in the very fact that I am in the book
as the namby pamby heavy ultimately, who's just a cry baby,
and who double dog dared to gave Jimmy Dex a painful life
of prosperity and sex and glory and money and being
chairman of the board of the cream de la cream; me Horace,
who broke him Jimmy Dex while he spent his life trying to
fix me, (?) though we have no passages together after the
bank one; afterwards, I am only the spirit of Horace's ghost
haunting him down all his days; goading pursing him until
Dex is finally a hopeless drunk, (see where unbridled success
gets a person? working at a used car lot because he's Holden
Caulfield age 6, and he can't take the upscale life
anymore?--damn me; how could I hurt my dear gentle friend
like that who never stopped thinking about me after all?)
picked up on vagrancy charges one too many times; he
cannot get out of his mind the naked 13 year old Horace me
giving his love to nothing; well, he didn't write he was
nothing, but the implication touched the readers' heart and
tired eyes at this point I imagine; as Jimmy Dex is even at the
end of desolution and the final at long last last word of the
novel still so understanding of everyone, you just want to
hold him and say there there laddie--

--and then the author Jim Jimmy sits gloriously on his pile of
crap that seems so filled with insight and a throwing off of
puritanical isolationism that is wrapped in symbolic wings of
an end to colonialism and a cutting off of one's self from
one's fellow man, a leap of  human arms, his arms, round the
entire world, comforting all the lonely wher'er they might be;
just pony up $30.95 cents and Random House will let him
cuddle you too; and not just characters from a small town,
but the universality of it, a man laying down his life for a
friend--(again--?)

--so when I wrote the author of GREENWOODS, one Jim
----, I will not use his last name out of deference, I have
learned to be circumspect, thanks to his betrayal, I detailed
myself, our childhood together, my resentment at his being
my big brother all his life when that was simply and
unutterably untrue; he dumped me like a bad habit; how he
took one boy, me, and lots of other friends along the way, I
had no doubt, and sucked from them what they were, the
good parts, and made himself the only aware and good man
in the book, thus he was a vampire, and not good as was
Dex, who, when even he was wrong, and Dex often was (in
a painfully human way we can all identify with of course), he
was wrong for all the right reasons, and he well aware of it
too.

I wrote the author and reminded him how I phoned him,
when I was at university, one fine day to see if we could get
together this weekend, and he told me flat out direct quote "I
have other priorities" cold and distinct, like the Arctic ice
freezing over even more, not the temperate Jimmy I
remembered. Leaving me falling into a well the size of the
totality of space, only far more claustrophobic and terribly
cramped, and me Horace, no, me, half blind it seemed for
such a long time. You don't forget horror like that. It eats at
you every day. You run from it every day too. You never
escape it. Not ever.

Then he hung up the phone, my good old true blue friend,
not another thought of me, I knew this, and would not
answer messages from me in any form, till I tired of making a
fool of myself, and he writes this goddam book with
sympathy and compassion while he makes me more of a fool
than I was, and am; but the way he played it is what really
galls;  though he did not see me masturbate, this is simply not
true; is it?, I ended my letter with, is it? Still hoping for it.
That he saw. That he saw me in a boy's most private sexual
act alone. That he knew. That his eyes magnetized to my
body, to the sexy parts, and this novel with hallowed attempt
at Sunday lazy mellow summer afternoon light descriptions
of me and his sexual conquests that just stand there on my
coffee table and mutely screams, "Fuck you"--

--this big worded little print jousting of fact and fiction and
possible and something otherworldly just out of even Jim's
grasp but the always reaching for something in a middle
ground of mist that he could almost see the outline of and
made giddy with the possibility of actually finding it, or the
shadow of it, and thus making his readers feverish and giddy
also and downright frenetic with this calm unruffable author
and his calm unruffable mathematically logical character
Dex--

--was it a love letter to me?  Did he really want to be me?
Did Dex at least? For a little while? Was that the very belated
point of this opus? Or was I like every other planet in this
book revolving round Dex, to be worn as temporary clothes
and then chuffed off for later ones? Would he come to me?
Would he hold me close? Would he finally be someone I
could love and could be loved in return?  Was the past not
for nothing after all? I could link my days and make a victory
out of all those previous failures?

So I wrote page after page of a letter, mailed it to him in care
of the publisher, that joined in the mailing throng with all the
other letters of who knows how many other besotted fans,
though I was not besotted, I clearly was not caught up in this
GREENWOOD fever that writing had capitulated toward,
given in to, and if Dex loved butt fucking women (one of
those freedom things, hetero, homosexual, bi, whatever, butt
fucking anyone or being butt fucked, even reading about it, I
can live without--not even by a yard stick) and the author
Jim loved detailing it with all the painter eye words he could
give it, and if he loved imagining the sexual things going on
in the houses around him, and through the deus ex machina
god like writing, he was always right, then it was all because
sexuality was now the place to find all the problems of the
world looking right at yo--

-- and if Dex was naked through large portion of the book
and Jim had great fun making love to himself as Dex, then
the book was one of many taking the place of TV sit coms of
the fifties and sixties where all the problems were aired (and
some solved) at the dinner table, but in Jim's world, the
bedroom was where revelations happened--

--the book was nothing more than highly literate
masturbation, and I wrote him this, I tried to be kind about
it, as he had been "kind" about Horace me--I told him that
Dex was not a lover, was not a bridge builder, was not a man
of immediacy and thoughtfulness and awareness but was a
thug who took what he wanted and did a helluva
generalization and justification about it later--

--and there was the killer--then the piece de resistance of my
letter--I told him I knew his source material. I told him that
source material was me.  Or I was a conduit at least.

The stories that I wove for him, when we were children, in
summer green grass, (he let me, bored he was, but he let me
because he was long suffering; how odd he had actually
listened and retained them; all the time I believed he was just
thinking about girls or had gone to sleep) the stories of
dreams and science fiction and crystal cities crumbling with
age and time, and robots becoming human, the stories of life
as seen by a pre pubescent boy who was far more than that,
the loves he made up and the loves he always got right in his
solitude, stories with morals, with points, as  summer stories,
as we lay in the grass on our hill, or as winter stories and Fall
that I told him on our porch swing, our bodies bracketed by
jackets, the cool and cold air whipping into us--

--stories I also told him, also made up, that had to do with
time ending, and the take over by a new species, and the
building of female robots for male robots and how they were
more human than their human inventors--stories I made up
that contained encapsulated indecipherable--or painfully
obvious-- messages of my love for Jim Jimmy, the delicacy
of a hand, the softness of an eye seen when a face was just
turning away; the chrysalis of a huge spider from space that
needed one person to believe in him...so the spider did not
have to be real anymore, and then safe and free in a winter
climate; some of them had to do with masturbation and
having sex with Jimmy and he never figured them
out--though these were probably painfully obvious too, but it
seemed he never knew what I meant in that area, he never
tumbled for it, but enjoyed the surface, the coral growing on
the sea bottom as though that was the beginning middle and
end of it--if I thought he listened at all.

--I never told him, but most of these dreams I conjured for
him were not original with me, but were from magazines and
from novels by real and important writers--so I listed them in
my letter, I took his book apart, the very structure of it he
had gotten from a Matheson story; the main thrust of it he
had gotten from a Heinlein novel;  the last third of it he had
gotten from Charles Beaumont, as well as much of the
outlook; and I explained that he was ripping off not me, but
them; he was a hack--

-- he took my words, for I have always been good at verbally
telling the plot of what I have read, for I am a failed writer,
but I don't have to polish what real books I read, and I can
change them around, loop them up and approach them from
a different angle--but the obvious center of every story that I
told in a very obvious way, even if I thought I was quite
inventive, (many stories I told him far more than once), he
tweaked and twisted a bit and made them prosaic and
pedestrian and second and third run--

-and I remembered most because though I might not have
known it at the time, I was playing quite a good joke on him,
and he returned the favor by playing a somewhat bigger joke
on me--and I nailed him with specifics, page number,
paragraph number and references, all splayed out, all
documented--

--and I wanted him to love me and to hurt me and I wanted
to dismember him and I wanted him to finish killing me, this
by the inch thing is too much, and I wanted to write about
this little revelation for a magazine, expose him for his phony
book and his phony author self; tell the world about the king
shit writer of all creation, but I am no writer, as is obvious,
and no one would dare let anyone, especially a Mr. Nobody
Charlie like me, challenge this little god--so I sent off the
letter to Jim in care of the publisher and waited and waited
and waited.

When Jimmy had to do a book report, someone else always
did it for him,  (his eyes were meant for manlier things) for a
flash of his smile, for being with him a little while, but I had
no proof that he didn't write this book at all, so I did not
include it. Jimmy was anything but a reader. He had no need
to be. For I was.

I waited two months before I heard from "him." It was a
brown long envelope in my mailbox, a mailbox that had
become my sworn enemy, that I wanted to chop down with
an ax as I impatiently waited, a mailbox that I had quaked to
with no results other than the usual bills and ads and flyers,
and then this, with his full name printed up at top corner left,
no address, god does not have an address.

The envelope was stiff, and I knew what it was before I
opened it--nothing (not a "hi buddy" or "sure I remember
you" or "get lost, loser" note or anything) but a photo of the
author Jim, the same damn one on the back of his damn
book, the book was being made at this time into a film (they
wanted Robert Wagner for the role of Dex; but he was too
old; so they used Sean Penn instead, which in what passes
for movies now, I suppose makes some kind of sense;
(Horace per se will not be in the movie, but will be a
compilation of many characters from the novel, too many to
include in the movie--lucky me or not lucky me) with the
autograph from a machine at the bottom of the glossy
print--"To my loyal fan--good luck--Jim----" Costs too much
to have the machine write even the first name of the lucky
recipient.

I have that photo pinned to my bedroom wall, to this day. I
look at it sometimes.. I don't throw darts at it. That would
be sacrilegious. I curse at it sometimes. It doesn't do any
good. It's like cursing God. He doesn't give a damn. Even if
you could find him.

I wish the critics had brains. I wish they knew something
about real books. I wish they could figure Jim's book out; I
have no idea why the writers it is so obvious to me he ripped
off, the ones still living and being published, don't rat him
out; but then as the Prisoner used to say, that would be
telling. How does he sleep at night? Very comfortably on his
expensive big round bed with his own personal bunnies,
according to the tabs.

I remember reading about a boy named Horace (damn that
name; I don't even want to think about Blankenship) on a
bath mat one hot summer afternoon, (before most homes had
air conditioners, and theaters where it was Kool Inside were
our only refuge, that and the  town's swimming pool), while
his friend Jim Jimmy went home for a hamburger before
returning, but Jimmy Dex instead went round to the back of
my house, to the bathroom window instead.

Horace did not know he was on view, and thinks, as does the
unwitting progenitor of that character, he should have been
let in on it immediately. It would have shamed him and
scared him. But it would have been something at least.

It should have been given to his heart and mind and eyes,
while it happened, if it happened at all, I am a lefty after all;
before it was given to the eyes of millions of strangers who
just make the characters facets of themselves and wish to
god there was a real Dex in the world. But at least there is
author Jim and he's on Good Morning America
tomorrow--fifth time around. Gotta set the clock.  Dianne
Sawdust Head gets to grovel at him this time.

Five minutes of Jim and it's a good day all round. Yeah, I
used to think that too.