Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 21:15:10 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: college/masturbation  "A Waif at Christmastime"

			 "A Waif at Christmastime"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 Ted sat bare late that night in his single dorm room, with
the door to it and that of the connecting bathroom firmly locked,
as outside, winter snow whispered on in the ghost of Christmas
past or soon to come, for the life of himself he could not
remember which. The dim desk light was on, as Ted, a human
parallelogram, sat spidery, hunched over, his bottom on the cold
leather seat of the chair, his face supported on each cheek by his
fists, elbows on the desk, his eyes swimmingly reading the text of
the book his face loomed close to because he had poor vision and
refused to wear glasses when he was naked.

 He was naked when he was by himself because he was so
terribly shy and because he was so terribly plain, for it was a joke
to him that even bare he was barely there, or especially when he
was bare, for his mind drifted all the time, and was in a snow
hush even in the middle of a cradled July with the oracle hot
sweaty sun staring down at him and staining him as more than a
child and less than a man, even though he was now a college
junior, and he was not Teddy, beloved child of parents who
adored him and sheltered him and smothered him, and he was no
longer that boy of high school senior age who led a Sunday
School class of senior citizens because the minister thought it
would be cute that a little child would lead them, though they got
quite bored with their young charge's stodginess and lack of zest
for pretty much anything at all.

 Ted was stroking his hard on now, in the middle of the
night, the shadows cold in the colder room, for he was always on
the advent of winter, and it seemed as though, for him, life was a
crystallized flame that would one day burn bright or one day burn
cold and he for the life of him did not know which he wanted,
though he did know he wished to be younger than he was, for he
wished that he could be ten or so, for in memory that seemed a
nice age, when even the iciest Christmases counted warm
somehow, and it was all right to be alone with his penis and balls
and his hands that loved them so and nestled them in the night
hours as he had lain in his child's bed with the Laurel and Hardy
poster grinning and hugging the wall above him making him feel
safe.

 Ted was a lover of no one and was in love only when he
was alone, for when there was someone else even distantly near
him, that he loved, he found himself quite unable to feel a single
thing, but alone in his room as he stripped off his clothes and
twirled his emaciated pasty body round in circles till he became
so dizzy he almost collapsed and would fall like a haystack
unending on his bed, he was Byron and Shelley and Keats, and
god could he rhapsodize. But always with other people's words,
for this was the Ted of now, this was the Ted of the short black
hair and the too small somewhat squinty eyes, who would
masturbate himself to distraction each night in his dorm,
whispering for the snow in him to come and collect him.

 For life had to begin and cars could not always shine their
headlights into his dorm window covered by curtains, for cars had
to receive themselves into the slots in the parking lot behind the
dorm, and engines cut, doors opening and closed, as inevitably,
snow had to be snapped off into a kind of rum and Coke tonic that
would take two different people and somehow splice them
together and let them hold the night in each other's chests and
think the night quite wonderful, quite magical. But here was old
Ted and he was older than he had been even as a child when he
had been quite aged enough, and he was rubbing his regulation
six incher almost unawares as he studied the book before him and
tried to read the words in the dimness and in the gullies of
memories that seemed to snap their own glasses on their eyes and
rise themselves from the words and the pages and shout at him
that it wasn't such a bad life as things go, that someone would
like to suck him and if he was not careful, he might find that out
one day for himself, but Ted trusted only words because Ted was
so very much in love with life, and he stroked the hardness and he
held first one tight ball and the next, he sighed almost without
himself, and he wished someone could see him now right this
second. For thin was in and he was dreamy minded enough and he
had a flat stomach, and even his legs were not bad as legs go for
someone who was known as Teddy once, now named Ted.

 In the dorm room, which he looked about in a moment of
realization that the building was so preternaturally quiet, and for a
time he wondered if this was Christmas break, and if he was here
by himself, but he felt a certain kindling of fear at the thought, so
turned himself studiously back to his book whatever that book
might have happened to be, since it was really more a prop in
effect, as he wished someone would massage his shoulders and
draw a fingernail down his spine, sort of luminous tickling, sort of
delicate like a ghost trying to break through to another dimension
which had tucked Ted inside it in order to protect him but which
was instead smothering him.

 And Ted spread his legs and he took both hands now and
held to the inner of his thighs which were softly and sparsely
haired, as he looked into the shadow cup that held his groin, and
made his stand up penis move a little just by willing it to do so,
which caused Ted to smile in spite of himself, as he wondered
what it would be like to be with some boy this way, and make two
of one, instead of this grim insistence that some day, hadn't
happened yet, a boy might come along who would be waifish and
standing alone in the blue snow of the cold mountain peak off in
the distance of reality or fantasy, and might ask Ted, who just
happened by, finally at the right place and time, if those creamy
frozen little arms could hold round the man's neck and just bring
in a horizontal bed of body the young boy might lie himself on for
Ted's landscape seemed the right one to get warm with and to
touch silently, and Ted would reach for those upraised arms and
help the boy put them round Ted's, the man's, oddly enough,
neck, and they would swing that way, sighing, swaying out in the
snow which was good to be bare in because the night was always
quivering nakedness this time of year.

 There seemed in Ted this interdependence that the need
for a boy was, this desire that was a quiet snow flower that needed
blue eyes or green or brown ones to hold to his own as they would
lie on his dorm bed, this narrow slat where dreams came, with the
boy of winsome dread and constant fear that something might go
wrong, and Ted would put his whisper snow fingers on the boy's
face and in the boy's hair and Ted would still the fears, and tell
him the world would still go round, and Ted would be happy to
stay on the merry go round with the boy as long as he was wanted.


 Ted stroked himself and opened the little slit in the top of
his penis, touched it with the tip of his right index finger, felt the
gentleness of it, the defenselessness of it, and wished to have it
sucked by the boy he would find by the side of the road or in a
snow field long distant of stars that would look like burning ropes
as he would spin round and round in a dervish to see the doors
opening up for a child to come through and be a victim of a
world, a victim of a love that hurt so terribly sweetly, a run
through of arrows from Cupid, tough taskmaster, chockablock
with smiles, the boy, to whom Ted could not give a name just yet,
the boy who would be a leaf fall of autumn, the last one of the
season, who would sit all warm and light and cozy on Ted's lap
and kiss Ted's dim little rose nipples as though Ted had become
the child's mother, and had something in his life that the boy
needed to nurse out of him, for then how giving Ted would be,
how less quailed and shaky, and how the road in him would be
strong and straight and full of moonlight that the night didn't
distance and cut into pieces, as Ted and the boy would make
tender love together, for the first time, the both of them, and
everyone else who had seen them without knowing the poets in
their souls or their own souls could go hang.

 There was a surety in him at this moment, as though
making part, as though the finding out, as though the heedless
happiness of almost cuming was the crystallized life inside him
that had fed him on winter, that had fed him on limitless snow
fields and cars in an icy distance out caught between vague
threats of bright lights coming to face them and blind them and
thus doing so, just the thought of them, the possibility of bright
beamed lights making the drivers run off the roads, making the
eyes squint already when there was nothing to squint at yet, and if
the boy could be sickly and Ted could nourish him back to health,
if the boy had been so sad and turned out of a sea captain's home
because the quotient of masculinity and normalcy had not come
to the boy even at the advanced age of ten and that produced
humiliation in the hearts of the sea captain and his wife, then light
houses once known as homes could be left, and the lights could
be walked away from, and not to sniffle always then, because
lights were artificial snow, but Ted could produce the real thing.
And if the boy only knew Ted was the goal, the prize up ahead,
then the boy could look through the blinding night snow itself,
which was only symbolic of Ted to begin with, and what a nice
thing that would be to look forward to, for the both of them.

 Ted imagined movie boys and television boys when he
masturbated, and now, as he pushed his chair a bit back from the
desk, and tilted that wood chair on its legs a little, as he caressed
his tits and tickled his stomach and belly button, and just felt so
good as he imagined his legs in the air and a boy between them,
sucking him off, and feeling the goodness of a throat of velvet
perched and willing and ready to receive Ted's jism, then the
world could melt or freeze or fry, for it did not matter, as he dug
his hips into the seat of the chair and closed his eyes, and opened
his mouth a bit, his head tilted back, and a sigh, just one single
slight quiet sigh coming from him, as he tried to be more than a
little moment that wished to be remembered and would not be
remembered any more at all than the little moment that
surrounded him, for it surrounded everyone else as well, and they
wished to be remembered too, but who is, really? Shakespeare is
not remembered. His works are. No one, no matter how famous or
how talented or how boorish or how villainous or how glorious or
how beautiful or how wise or how well loved and adored is
remembered, other than, for the fortunate ones, their work or a
memory of a shadow of what one is told they put on paper or
canvass or screen, and even that was divided up in hundreds or
thousands or millions and was used by each of those persons as
their own reconstructed private bids to be remembered their own
selves, and Ted pretended at ten, and he imagined his childhood
friend, Jimmy, and him, making love, kissing on the sofa on an air
conditioned summer evening as they watched TV, orange sherbet,
melting, still left in their bowls on the TV trays in front of them in
Ted's empty house, for his parents worked nights, and passion
sustained the boys and their jeans and their shirts and tennis shoes
were a part of them, an epic of summer heraldry, designs of boy
trees, a moment of verve and flags and battles with centaurs
beyond the stars, as he and Jimmy were brought together by
forces that were solely of them and no one else, as lips lingered
warm and hands excited traveled and jeans strained to keep their
hard ons in check.

 How sweet, now, Ted, lost in reflection, in the cold and
dark that did not protect him or shelter him or give him comfort,
while outside the snow was not his mantle or his dream work or
his hope or his moment before the New Year passed by once
more, for always he had tried to hold the seasons of autumn and
winter together around him, for he had constantly loved them so,
like big warm hands of protection and camouflage and age so
distant he could not conquer it and did not fear it ever, but these
months went rushing by so rapidly, dwindled fast and furious and
Christmas over or almost over and New Year's antic eyes not
stopping to blink before whish it was already Valentines and the
stores were stocking up then for Easter and summer had arrived
again so fast, and Jimmy would no longer return in that sacred
July, for the childhood friend was no conquering hero but a
memory who had drunk himself to death in his Ann Arbor dorm
room one year ago because Jimmy was tired and happy and free
and clever and loved by friends and had a great future ahead of
him in the space industry and Jimmy did not care because it had
all been so easy--school and girls and love and the way he
positioned himself like a chameleon, being everything to
everybody, one at a time, till the snowball started gathering more
thickly on its downhill race,  but before then, in the earlier years,
to peer out so seemingly confident at every stage of development,
Jimmy the athlete and the writer of school newspaper columns
and the winner of science awards and the praised and the proud
and the perfect and the beautiful.

 And Ted needed a boy to keep the cold inside him, for
winter was like a fever inside Ted, when forms get sketchy, and a
boy/man sits naked in his dorm room, playing with himself and
singing old songs from his childhood, softly, so no one would
hear him and laugh at him, if there was anyone still round now to
laugh, as he whispered to the snow world that he was going to
come and wouldn't you like to see?, wouldn't you like to see it's
different from any boy or man you've ever known, it's different
from yourself no matter how many times you fuck your image in
the mirror, because Ted was for all the good and bad, mostly all
bad, still himself, and that means different than you, and you will
never know if you've tacked the final corner of the world down
unless you give Ted a try, unless you can see past his goofiness
and his clumsiness and how he can't walk across the room
without bumping into the edges of things, and that with his thick
lensed glasses firmly affixed to his face, the boy who laughed in
class periodically at nothing really and who did not know where
the moon beams came from and the thought that they were
tangible tickled him inside where the heaviest snows of life lay
waiting to burn hot or to burn frozen.

 Ted's missile took off and the lift bucked him out of his
chair for a moment before he came heavily down, his muscles and
abdomen, and chest and even his neck for god's sake seemed
soaked in sweaty difficult sexuality, this boy who never crossed
another person's summer lawn in the running of childhood and its
environs unless Ted had had explicit permission, and Ted's penis
raised and spat and the cum was gluey and he didn't have a
Kleenex and it sprayed everywhere on his abdomen, on his
trembling left leg, on his desk, on the book embattled on that desk
that he had been pretending to read for he read all the time and
did not know how would he cope with the world otherwise,
fearing always one day to go blind and then what would he do
with the sterility of reality come inside him, the world of prosaic
that he hated that was fixed with dots and dashes and signal beeps
that made no sense to him, that seemed to send out fronds of
creeping plants that wanted something from even Ted and he had
no idea what that would be, but for the moment Ted came and
came, and he wanted to shout out to boys everywhere, come and
see My Vesuvius Erupting, come and see the lava flow, come and
bathe in it and taste it and warm your winter hands over the
massive molten heat of it, come see the boy/man who can love
only when he is alone and who, when someone he cares for is
even vaguely with him, freezes into a frozen icicle from a
dilapidated spigot in an old foundry in an ancient industrial park
in a neglected part of town that has been unused so long it is form
and function gone astray almost as though a creature of sawdust
and corrosion and broken and twisted apart brick and steel were
ashamed and near dying, all as one, belly crawling off, sliding like
Puff's dragon tail into the cave after Johnny Paper goes and grows
up on him.

 Come and see wanderlust, come and see the boy with the
dripping dick and the wick that needs no cropping and no
tapering, that functions well and perfectly, for the fountain has
formed on Ted as well as any other boy/man and you might like
what you see and feel if you could just get the Byron out of the
man and make him face the fact that he too is of bone and muscle
and brain and fluids and sexual lust and filthy thoughts and nails
that need cutting and a body that needs showering and hair that
needs shampooing; some boy on the snow line tonight coming
forward to this university, lost in the snow drifts, in the night that
seems to be coming at him a million directions at once, come see
Ted the dick king, come and stroke your young penis in front of
his face and dare him to take it in his mouth even though you are
still wearing only your briefs, and your dick is erect in them, as
Ted bites at it in the cottony snowy material that seems like a
giggle all in itself.

 And feel the delicious thrill of your penis and what covers
it that makes it more than what it is, that makes it a little
fireworks that needs to come out the opening, that needs to come
out of the little slit of boy house, and Ted would then tongue
tickle your penis, your giddily leaded pencil, your supreme
number two Ticondoroga, with which to write all the sonnets of
greed and need and happiness and excitement as the boy would
stand there and let Ted suck him, the waif, the child pushed away
from the lighthouse and into the true beams of snow from Ted's
eyes, as he would feel your so warm so soft bare tummy with his
hands and press his face against your crotch as you would
delicately lead him to you and shy for you to be, for then Ted
would be ten times shyer and that would make it all the more
gyroscoping, that would make it all the more giving and taking
and giving some more, for Ted thinking of these things, as he
comes down the sexual ladder a bit at a time, as the snow boy
moves away from him until he is not there at all, the boy who had
worn only white bright BVDs and had put the whole of him in the
mouth of Ted who loved him so, this boy who would never know.

As Ted felt the fields inside his mind come into stark delineation
again, as he saw roads and fences and walls and houses and
windbreaks and snow drifts harder and more able to keep him out
than any of the man made barriers, here in the too silent dorm
with the wind gale outside building its force, and no more car
lights in the parking lot to shine their light moth structures in his
window and then turn off for good, and Ted as always feeling
foolish that he was bare, always that feeling after having come,
after having felt so warmly cocoa good for such a brief, but for
such a brave time, and he proceeded to clean himself up, after
making sure no one from the adjoining room was in the bathroom.
He washed himself with a warm cloth and he massaged his penis
and balls which always felt so tender afterwards, the warm wet
cloth on his genitals making it all so secure and safe and
encompassing and little boy feeling, then he went back to his
room, closed the bathroom door, locked it, and put on his briefs
hurriedly as though someone were there scolding him, his loving
parents, his dead friend, the dream out on the snow world who
would never be with him, and he got into bed and pulled the
rough covers over him like a monk in penitence, shivering now
that the cold and darkness had finally penetrated him.

 From his bedside table, he took his glasses and put them
on, for this was part of his life, that he always slept in his glasses
so he could see his dreams better, so he could make the dreams
know he was paying attention, so they would be good and they
would let him escape because he had a Byronic soul, a broken
glass heart, a steel will, a sad face, a snowy mind, the need of
love, and the memory of Jimmy who would haunt him
forevermore, even with the glasses on Ted's face as he slept, and
on waking he would usually find the glasses had fallen off in the
night, or had been pulled off by sleeping movements and friction,
so on awakening he would have to carefully get out of bed, to find
them, and hopefully not have broken them, and he never had
broken them that way, not once, though he had from time to time
bent one of the earpieces, but he always could delicately
straighten it out, so tonight Ted closed his eyes, and remembered
a quotation from Shakespeare, the last line of it at least, "so quick
bright things come to confusion." Not yet, not right away, he
thought, his eyes not protected at all behind his glasses, and he lay
himself down to sleep which came on him in the dark and the
snow continued its sibilant hiss as the rest of the night passed him
by.

				  the end