Date: Thu, 14 Mar 2002 12:50:48 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: b/b no sex  "Love Letter to Jimmy Jim"

			"Love Letter to Jimmy Jim"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman

 Hi Jimmy Jim,

 Blithe we were, and young, Jimmy Jim. Fall cool cider bite
around us, Jimmy Jim. Running our special love high ways through
the town with tin cans anchoring our dreams. Yours of tomorrow.
Me of fettle yesterdays. Come with me, return with me when no
boy was alone and every day was a song. Sing my heart, Jimmy
Jim, and let me recall one fall day when I fell for you and fell the
rest of my life, Jimmy Jim. Catch the sunny smile rhythm of those
days when I climbed on the stone fence in my back yard of weeds
and crescent of grass summer gone and browning beautifully. Still
me and find me at the top of the stone fence and you on the other
side looking up in the claret of the sun, known vintage that you
made just for me. Catch me in the brown wind, the glow sun, the
season of plenty, when there were streets of blue to cast down
before us in our spectral ghost stories.

 And our happy top of roof town where you could breathe
deeply and rejoice in multiply cries. All helloing down in the great
parachutes where a hand reaches out to morning glories and soft
heliotropes and a dimension or two of time warp is planned deep
in the heart that grows like tumbleweed in the cowboy movies at
the Capitol Theater on Saturday afternoons. Make nothing after
Jimmy Jim have happened. Make skinned knees and sinking into
the off blue of the municipal swimming pool tickets to ride other
horses that clomped so stately in dream and fancy. And you beside
me, Jimmy Jim, running faster than I could. Running with alacrity
and the speed of cold winds from the north side of town where the
windows rang sweet and berries could be picked straight from
invisible air. Come the town and dive in the pool and find the vast
Atlantis murky and wavery and waiting just for us.

 You beside snow white me, you bronze Coppertone
without need of artificial aid. The air you could drink and the air
that lit the bonanzas in our hearts that dazed with crinkle smile that
wet the side of the heather that was growing just beyond our
vision, just down the street. Where the rivers brocaded and
tapestried and tap danced. When there was more than vision.
There was purpose behind it. And poetry in the making where love
sang its song of innocence and justice. And it was just so good
being in that town with you Jimmy Jim. Where there was no
betrayal and no ruse and no lies. Only you and what you spent
your coins on when it came to Moon Pies and deflection, when it
came to DC comics for me and Marvel for you, and trading bright
snap pop colors back and forth on pages that held men who were
super powered for cleansing crime from Gothams and River Cities
all in our domain. All in the clasp of our eyeballs. That would seem
sufficient.

 And take the town--the film developing store, the drug
stores where we looked at paperbacks and magazines and inhaled
the cold medicinal aroma, the news stand where we bought our
comics, the houses we ran to and ran past and ditched the lawns
and landed on our feet and our elbows and our knees. Where there
was the moving hand that was your hand of conjure and conquer
and you conquered me, Jimmy Jim. You with your sky blue shirt
and your sea blue dreams and your eyes that found clouds in
Autumn skies and scanned them with your bejeweled imagination.
Where there were harvests and we ran the early Morning grid of
streets all sleepy still. All illusion and you and me in a soap bubble
of possibilities. You and me before the north winds that we ran to
with a certain string of granteds given. With the home movies
developed at the film store, and played on the Castle film projector
hot and small and wheezing and crackling, but working
nonetheless, and laughing our joists and our wrestlings there on
jerky film summer lawns with the falling down white picket fence
across from us. Ruffle of lace wood at the bottom of the camera
frame.

 Come home to Dungan's Dinette for an early morning
breakfast, skip the curls and breast the waves of Saturday morning,
Saturday different than any other day of the week. Us in our zip up
jackets and our ears bouncing off the transom of offices that we
plugged into in our dreams and imagined us some day far away
men and important businesses to run and never forgetting
yesterday, merging it all somehow in one fine concoction. Here,
Jimmy Jim, feel my heart and hear it thumping. Here, Jimmy Jim,
tell me I'm young again and you are too and we never shall part
any more than the Red Sea ever really parted. Or your long hair or
mine. And discoveries were pennies of days thrust out before us,
rusty and rustic and small town and detailed into overseeings by
the league masters of the universe which of course would be us.
Run into tomorrow and find tomorrow friendly and furry and
playful.

 Catch me by Speed's TV repair store and run with me up
to Lafonte's drug store and we shall cast our nets wide and work
in our tomes that were written on our flesh and my secret love for
you and all that you stood for, graceful and honest and foursquare
and with a clarity of wisdom that never backfired on me. You said
things that were meant. You never dissembled. You never
deserted. And we ran in the wings of wonder of coming winter
through the corridors of fears that we loved like chocolate ice
cream on a hot summer's stifle night. And we longed to take the
very top of the tallest building down town, a hotel for old folks,
and we would in our reality climb up to it on steps and steps of
empty air. We would hold our hands up there on the flat tarred
roof and we would implore the heavens to stop being so mean. We
would wish everyone to be children again. We would wish paraffin
bottles of grape juice on everyone, rain them down like soft
summer in the last of November.

 Give heart and home a name and make the name real. And
we walked to the high school where we would be going next year.
We counted houses and we took snap shots with our minds of
them and imagined growing and glimmering TV screens in the
darkened living rooms of  flickering shadows off the damp dark
porches. We would whistle up witches to take the people inside
watching those TV screens and give them scream after scream
miracle. We would make everything and everyone puppy dog
friendly and as fresh and as new as we were. We were in love,
Jimmy Jim. Me with you. And you with the world you were
always running to. You were my morning windows through which
I watched the day that was you as well. You were Christmas to
me, Jimmy Jim, and warm arms I imagined round me. You were
the streets of tomorrow you were rushing down while I still
foolishly believed you were running down the streets of today with
me. Cold wind and cold frost and tomorrow one day closer to
winter break and how I wanted to hold your hand Jimmy Jim and
pledge my troth. And the day of winter that we trundled out of our
beds to see this morning of Saturday which was a whole different
animal lurking powerful and fragile and free in the midst of those
other days of school and homework and church and boredom.

 You made Saturday for me, Jimmy Jim, as we rushed past
windows where were people hiding in. Getting close to their TVs,
their newspapers, their books, and all wishing to be us as we
whooshed past the fire station with its spiffy fresh red fire truck
and its brick building that housed the famed firepole you and I so
longed to slide down some glimmer day. And the sun was up now
and red as red ink spilling over everything. You were my life,
Jimmy Jim. Each morning I prayed to you and each night I said I
loved you, to my empty small bed that had only me in it. Turn
away tomorrow, it does not deserve to come, and make me with
Jimmy Jim dashing through the dots of Morse code that got us
into the theater without having to pay the dime required. But
Jimmy Jim like the 4-D Man, melting through wood and brick and
steel. And always on the point of a magical incantation of an
answer that was fleet of thought and had to do with mathematics
that he understood and which he planned to use to open the door
to fantasy.

 And Jimmy Jim to the hill outside of town, past October,
still beating and fluttering candle to tomorrow that would be my
childhood pillow that I nestled down into and dreamed and said
my prayers to the lonely god for lonely boys who were to never be
as lonely as I was, especially around Jimmy Jim. Who knew where
the seas fell off the edge of the flat world. Who knew where there
would be monsters. Who I imagined making love to in all manner
of ways before I knew what love was. Now that I know what love
is, I know love is a lie. But then it was a sweet deception that was
more than the thing itself. The cream of the jest. When the cream
was milky and thick and full bodied and was more than anything
else in the world. Because it hadn't been told it was meant to be so
much smaller, which meant it was nothing at all. But atoms danced
in the wind as we ran through its zephyrs to the top of the brown
grass hill. And we surveyed master of the world spyglass to our
eyes as our air ship floated in majesty and grandeur all the splendid
whorls of our fingers and the world spread about us in glittering
domain.

 Climb the hill with me again, Jimmy Jim. And put your
strong kind arms around me for I am sore afraid. Let me tell you
of gods I made from you and how I cast anyone who came after
you. thus, out of your image. Turn the bars of soap to the wall and
tell the bathtub it's not to breathe a word of anything I am about
to say--and I said it all in my high pitch whisper of a voice. And I
loved the way the walking happened. And I loved the precision of
clouds that were mountebanks of the blue and then the gray and
then the grayer still and long later blue slowly gradually again, I
loved the way they moved their shadows over us. I loved the
houses and the different architecture and the colors--chocolate and
with eaves, red and with curlicues and porticoes, attics of dark and
cold and thin and small and low ceiling where boys looked out as
we darted passed, and considered how lucky I was to be with the
great Jimmy Jim, the only one of his kind, the only friend a guy
would ever want to have, and so I would never ever in my life be
lonely, because he would be my side. Sleepy Jimmy Jim now on
the hill of November morning when the day is beginning to
Saturday mourn its cud. When the day stretches out to long
infinity and into melancholy late afternoon when the shadows get
all mixed up and can't tell their sources, when they tangle in tears
wept alone. Because Jimmy Jim would have never understood.
Though I always pretended that he would.

 Jimmy Jim of jam and doors and screens on windows and a
voice across the universe waking me at crack of dawn Saturday
and us dressed in ourselves and tickling the street, full run, full tilt,
down the middle, with our tennis shoes. And muscles and phones
in our stomachs that were always ringing. That were mettle urging.
That was the need to get into life and hear an old woman down the
distance calling in front of her white box little square home, "Pepe,
come in here right now, Pepe I mean it." And her voice trembling
a little. The day taken Pepe? The day taken into its center never to
let him come back? Only memory and memory lags and laughs and
torments the days to come for all time? Then the small terrier
barks from around the brown dead bush to the side of her little
lawn, and runs to her and she scoops him up and holds him to her
chest and she loves on him and she smiles that kind of secret smile
that says be with me and I will never be afraid. I shall hold you
bundled to me in the cradle that is me and I shall tell you things I
never told another soul because you're the one for me and I would
fall down dead if you ever went away.

 And Jimmy Jim, fall leaves whisking past her, the stooped
shrunken old woman in the house coat and blue fuzzy mules as she
takes her dream source into her house, and we laugh into the wind
because the wind is a good thing. Because, we thought then, the
wind takes, but it gives back in time, and that the wind was a good
thing. It develops devotion. It summons houses to gather close
round it. To tell them stories that have nothing to do with the First
Methodist Church a few blocks down from that woman's house.
That has nothing to do with the brown brick high school a few
blocks in the other direction. That has nothing to do with the
Popular Library edition of "War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells,
that I will buy this afternoon at Evan's Rexall Drug Store, and
read in one huge scared delighted gulp in my bedroom/sunroom
that Saturday night after Jimmy Jim has gone home across the
street from me.

  It has nothing to do with the houses in which we live. Or
the dreams of witches cast from TV sets into the black and white
blur of the watchers tilting time and trying to get into an angle of a
cross section of a detective show or of "Thriller" or "Way Out"
and live there forever more because a good scare, a good
deduction by one of Robert Taylor's detectives is worth more than
a mile of news print of who died and who lives to die another day.

 It has nothing to do with the Dairy Queen and its blizzard
of frosty on deliciously tongue dripping hot July afternoons, or
with the bus station in the run down part of town two doors down
from the film developing store; the bus station where people leave
and then come back again, or leave and get stuck somewhere and
never come back again as long as they live. It has nothing to do
with Jimmy Jim's eyes blazing stormy sky when he is mad, or the
car dealership with its flag pinnacles of yellow and blue and green
snapping their salutes over and again in the brisk military martial
air. It has everything to do with how we perceive all of this.
Bundles of life getting by. Bundles of life trying to be happy.
Bundles of Jimmy Jim and me done up in our nice neat boy
packages come to town to save the day.

  And to sit on our brown hill and cast the runes and look at
the sky and turn our pivoting eyes round and round it and making
our heads swim with the hot chocolate memories of breakfast at
the little Dungan's restaurant this morning there in all that hot air
and hotter grilles behind the counter and us sweating out our lives
on those red stools. While the adults, so called, chattered around
us about nothing at all and thought it was everything there was to
know. While Jimmy looked at me, nodded, as he picked up his
cup, and smiled to me. And we knew. Knowing nothing, we knew
everything. But we were far more benevolent about it.

 Jimmy Jim with his hail of friends of which I was one.
Jimmy Jim who let me have all Saturday morning with him, before
he went to see his other buddies that afternoon, then dropping by
my house for a while in the evening, all Saturday soaked and
cleansed of memory and time and human form, such a proud
animal he was. So stately and full of ease. Having played round the
grain bins that afternoon with his friends and entangling himself in
that farm smell of silos too, and fields they ran. Being the boy I
never was. Pieces of grain on his clothes. In his hair. And he could
talk about endlessness and all the boy things I've long forgotten.
He could get into your soul and walk around in it, and know how
to do everything you could not do at all. You would look at him
angled on the couch, legs crossed, at his ease, or pitching a
baseball in a summer yard against the side of his house or
sometimes to me, though mostly to his friends who were far better
coordinated. And you would think--that's it. That's as perfect as it
can be. That's all she wrote. Enough said for the human race. It
has evolved to Jimmy Jim and it can never possibly get any better
than him. Oh Jimmy Jim do you remember me? No, no reason to.
No reason to remember when you have yourself and others have
Jimmy Jim.

 You were my carol. My wide wintry streets. You were
snow in happy lark December when the freezing dark got close
and friendly and comfortable and not scary. You started my heart
working when I woke in the morning. You eased me into dreams
at night when I most unwillingly fell asleep. You were the October
and November hill that was our right, our land, our territory. You
were my Boston bulldog when he lived and was so happy to be
loved by me even. And you were my Boston bulldog when the
doctor had to put him to sleep. You stuck by me then and you let
me cry in front of you. You didn't hold me. Boys just didn't do
that, especially not then. You were respectful of my sadness. And
somehow or other, Jimmy Jim, I forgot to thank you. So right
now, I try to make up for that, and I thank you. And this is all by
way of telling you I loved you deeply and truly and real before I
knew what love is and therefore that love was bigger and shinier
and grander and more encompassing and richer and truer, because
I was stupid and didn't know it could never exist, and can never be
yours, not even yours, Jimmy Jim, because you were like Burt
Lancaster in that you were heroic and wise and thoughtful and far
larger than life, so grand and more than that not the biggest movie
screen in the whole world could ever hold him or you, not if a
million movie screens were sewn together and tried their very
hardest.

 You are my heart, Jimmy Jim. You are my home town.
You are the barber shop where I was forced to go every Saturday
afternoon for my weekly scalping, a torture you were never made
to go through, where I sat in a metal chair and read "Sgt. Rock"
comics which I hated, but those were the only comics the barber
shop had, so it was either that or "Guns and Ammo," and I had to
do something to get my mind off the razor to come. And if I am
sad sometimes, it is a sweet melancholy, Jimmy Jim. It is touching
home and going back for a visit in mind at least. I run through the
streets, not as well as I once did. I look at the buildings much the
same as they were, but now with different businesses inside. I run
through our old neighborhood and find the houses well kept and
really to be better looking than they were when they held us in
their cocoons. I rush through the day of Fall and I count the cars
and I see the people in them, many cars, big town now, but still
small enough, though frenetic, easy to adjust to it though if I had
to. How do those contemporaries of ours who still live there,
though, stand it, knowing it's mostly gone from them into fall
leaves that they have too much propriety to jump into any more?

 I'll see you in my dreams, Jimmy Jim. I'll pray to you each
morning, and say your name each night right before I unwillingly
go to sleep. I'll see you in the high school gym where you were a
wizard in all those shadows with a basketball, and I'll see you with
me eating our Moon Pies at the swimming pool. And I'll run to the
bus station of a midnight moon with its street lamp gleaming and
buzzing with summer moths and flies and mosquitoes, and I'll wait
by the side of the old building that once was the bus station but
now is up for sale, all the bus station seats and ticket window and
the smell and sound of far away cleared out, leaving an empty
hollow gourd of a room. And I shall wait for some princely bus to
arrive some time soon, and you will get off. Boy Jimmy Jim. And
boy me. And we will put our arms around each other for the first
time ever. And you will say you are sorry my Boston bulldog died.
And this time I shall cry on your shoulder. And you shall cry on
mine. For by now, we both have need and endless amounts of
cause.

 And we shall run home in midnight, Jimmy Jim, and you
shall run faster than me. And I shall stand and watch you. And
think you are perfect. There can be no better. Evolution stopped
with you for it had no more need to grow. And then I shall run
while you pause to let me catch up. So this is my love letter to
you. To tell you that, though you forgot, I never did, and am
keeping the candle in the night window burning for you. And if I
might be so bold, for me too.

              Love,
              Barry

              214. W. College
              Willoughby or Homewood (either one is my true address,
Jimmy Jim, and always has been)

				  The End