Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 07:28:55 -0700
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: M/M Adult friends "The Morning to Come"

			   "The Morning To Come"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


"I'll pray to go quite mad/
live in long ago/
when you and I were one/ 
so very long ago."

Janis Ian

"Tea and Sympathy"


 Passion, I thought, irony's knife at my neck.

 And nothing but a ghost of the reality sat across from me
every morning at the breakfast table, behind the Cheerios box, over
the plates, and the steaming coffee cups--congrats, I got what I had
always wanted. But the template was broken and hanging by a
painful looking wedge, and it was always too early or too late to
move. Something building, and that thing never acknowledged.
Runny eggs and nothing to talk about. Past favors and failures into a
modicum of middle class that had Joel in it.

 Joel of the thinning sandy hair and the long once lascivious
body and the eyes that were 'pon a time blue the way the sky
supposedly get in summer, though you couldn't prove it by me.
Besides summer sky doesn't really glower the way those eyes do
these days, blue with a storm in them--or echoes of one. Joel, lust,
sex, body, ecstasy--a soggy fuse gone out for good.

 There might as well be a Greek chorus of mice in the corner
singing the coming of Christmas blues, which is more than one
man, or two, could take. Something like shimmering lake,
something like nothing nose dived on plane trip, just that terrible
little abundance of cake walk space between us, like from here to
the Andromeda galaxy.

 Flattened newspaper pages turning on the table top as Joel
thumbs his way through the news of the Mid South as the smudgy
print coming off on his hands and fingers. Newspaper that I wish
would form a small and tenuous world in little paper castles. and
hide us from us for the rest of our lives.

 Desultory conversation now, as though we aren't aware of
what we are saying and don't care about the response. Calm anger,
peaceful in a way. Compared to all the fights we have had over the
years--runnels of anger that we jibe, one to the other. Riding on a
terrible crust of blackened toast I bite down on and hurt the left side
of my jaw where my bad tooth has been giving me fits the last week
or so, and know I will have to have the damned thing pulled, since
we don't have the money for dental work and a crown. It's come to
that.

 Flowing gold sunshine on the table in front of us, mock full
of the promise of cream, where love languished for a time and
turned the fronts of all pictures to the wall. Pictures that are
constantly sliding slowly down the buttery yellow walls, and the
thing was, it was love, it was the real McCoy and that was the
terrible pity of it.  We weren't mistaken. That and something
furnished about more than the future that was pink and plastic and
believed in because of it. The thing was, there was all the straight
forwardness of it, there leaning backward and into the future as
well.

 Days had been, once, long ago, as we had made them, and
nights had come on soft and sweet and full of a tenderness which
used to make our eyes weep. It seemed somehow all those years we
were racing toward this, toward dissolution, and there seemed to be
nothing but the glint of freedom in our eyes for such a long time,
for the want of it. All the country roads we traveled and all the
delight we excited in each other were only precursors to this little
slip of time, the building blocks of all of it. That turned us upside
down when I first met him and fell in love with him and a long time
later when he fell in love with me.

 There is no wistfulness now in that thought,  no jungle
adventure that is quiet and quick and full of burgeoning summer
sun like a blood blister in the high and buttressed sky as though the
sky was up to me, and  I could paint it any color I liked. How a
world he used to be and now the world he is and that is the terrible
joker in the pack. That is the terrible trump card we both played so
heroically and this time is ours and we made it as a Frankenstein
monster.

  I take another determined bite of blackened toast, and Joel
says, "You can't fix breakfast worth a damn." Off handed, flipping a
page, irritated, like an emotional hang nail that never gets well, and
I can't rise to the bait, because I can't endure another argument like
last night's. For he might leave for good then. And where would we
be at that point? I chew with my mouth open, like a third grader,
being kid brave, at some bully, during institutional lunch, and he
doesn't notice and I don't care.

 His voice is Northern. It used to send my spine into
convulsions of rapture. It used to come prickling down into the
heart of me and make me feel as though I was going to explode in a
million glory song directions it was so beautiful. Every word he
said, every laugh he made, was composed of all the madrigals of
all the winters and Christmases I had spent so terribly sad and alone
before he came along.

 Just being in his presence and his words soft and whispery
being directed to me--all of it was hope and a catcher's mitt and a
safety net and a greeting on each syllable, as though he had carved
out the accent and the words from a language that he had personally
invented for me and only I was allowed to understand. It filled my
mind with all the shimmery and sensuous, sturdy and durable--a
verbal visible touchable series of furnishing, no longer walnut size
and frozen and dying inches. He made the world suddenly cozy. We
were  each other's  lyricism. His voice, that first kiss, god--it sent
me to silken lands beyond imagining--he deduced and solved all our
problems. Once upon a time.

 But I put on weight, as did he. I started losing my hair. As
did he. Reality caught up with us and bit us hard in the neck. One
became slowly painfully two again. Joel's dreams of being a famous
poet fell through, and we each blamed the other and we found that
something to cling to--the anger. We used it to coast for a few
years, believing we had our success in each other ,and our failure in
all the other regards was just gilt painting of ourselves. But that
justification didn't last long. That cove we both ran to was a kind of
feasting on the other's eyes and hands for a time. Because that was
childhood's last hurrah, and we learned to take pleasure in its
destruction.

  I ached a bit and delighted a bit at one or the other of us
leaving, perhaps unannounced, secretly, while the other was at work
or running errands. Then houses would be lonely again. It was a
world, a territory I knew quite well. And better than this it seemed,
seeing my dream die right in front of my eyes. And knowing what I
had been to him, if I had been anything at all to him, his seeing me
dissolve as well.

  The world would be cold again. No one to warm it up for
either of us. Age had taken him too and it would not be easy even
on this former golden boy. Everybody would know he had left
me--for of course, I would never leave him.  We would have to run
the gauntlet of their knowing and clever and superior eyes--"I told
you they couldn't be monogamous"--and we would each fall,
because we had picked up traits, electric arcs from each other, and
that was the really terrible thing--we knew each other too well and
that was become the gun that was aiming back at us and getting
ready to pull the trigger at any second. We were each other's
property and we were helpless to lust within it, as w used to and
make it so much more than even then we knew it was.  Before our
joys and our arms stopped being fledglings, and became too tired,
and it shamed us to see how little distance we had traveled in the
last 35 years.

 Joel mentions something he's reading in the paper,
crumpling the edge of it in the fingers of his right hand, next to the
plate of food untouched, his silent rejoinder for my lack of cooking
ability. His fingers that used to be tapering and gentle and tallow
warm. Tapping those now cold pendulous human utensils on the
paper edge, maybe trying to beat out a desperate SOS, but no one is
listening, save for me. I am not the one anymore, if ever. I didn't
count the numbers of nights he didn't come home back then. I
especially don't count the numbers of nights he stays at home with
me now. Don't think of the reason.

  That is standard operating procedure because he is the one
for me and I am the one for him and that is the thing that is killing
us dead, because it's become childish doggerel. Even that had once
been beautiful. So it seems.

  As we sit scant inches from each other hearing the other's
words, but in a cynical manner, in a laconic manner, correcting
grammar for each other and correcting in sad scared patrician arch
voices, the thoughts expressed by the other. But more and more, the
terrible stumbling humbling silence, where we both blunder about
the edge. Someday soon to fall in. We have been in free fall for a
good many years now and we need to escape each other in whatever
hurtful way we can think of.

 Joel is talking (impersonal, newscaster like, killing time--his
voice has turned gravely, where is that lilt and trill I remember--was
it ever really there?) about the November 3 election in which there
were some serious blows dealt the religious right, which we call
Nazis or Christers, and how maybe things are loosening up in the
Bible Belt mentality this country has been steeped in for a number
of years now. That perhaps the Clinton persecution is having a
backlash effect, which is of course a good thing, he says, as he sips
some lukewarm coffee.

 "If the dreaded Monica had been a 17 year old man, the
lynching of both would have been at dawn. There would be no
backlash. Ever." I respond.

   Joel sigh, looks up a bit vaguely in my direction, then falls
his eyes back into the eye sanctuary of news print a moment, then
gets up, goes to the counter, to the coffee maker.

 "Trouble maker," he says. Not kidding. He does little of that
any more. The coffee maker he pours from is to the right of the sink
which is stacked with unwashed dishes (neither of us has the time
or the energy or the inclination to tidy up the house anymore)--one
more queer myth that bites the dust.

 "Trouble maker?," I say, kiddingly, and caustically
alarmed--hoping the twist of my words hides my fear at what he has
become, the fight he has given up, his not remembering, "Joel of
long hair and pot and LSD? Joel before the three piece business
suit. Joel forever in jeans and over sized over shirts and boots. Joel,
protester of the Vietnam War? Joel with the American flag patch
sewed to the seat of his pants? Joel, of demonstrations and long
endless talks of Right On!. Joel?" But he just pours more coffee,
wordlessly.

  I try to remember us both young. I can't, and I can't
remember us so afraid of telling our parents about us. I can't
remember how it was so difficult at first, overcoming the prejudices
and fears of homosexuality that were surprisingly mostly inside
ourselves when we had thought we had had a clear view of it all our
lives ever since we had known. The awkwardness of it, and then
over a gradual period of time, when the awkwardness left the
premises and we lay in bed, comfortable and sexual and free, and
held each other and felt the other's beating heart and perhaps we
wept a bit, knowing things would never get better than this. We
were right.

 Joel, back at the table, with his hot coffee.

  I say, "Joel, let's get away next weekend."

 He goes back to the paper, doesn't respond, doesn't hear me,
doesn't care?, losing his hearing?, which would I want it to be?
Once again, here is the great old party of selfishness I have
entertained in my stuffed stuffy mind from the day of my delivery
into this mad sad scary and lonesome world, and odd that the
lonesome I feel now is the lonesome I've always felt, even with
Joel. Even at the first meeting when he looked at me and smiled
quicksilver. Even when he put his hand in mine. Even when he said,
"please adore me." He's had others, all during our relationship,
because he has always felt, I think, the same way.

 We gave each other the bonfires of our previous rather
melancholy years and here we are as if the other had never
happened, so I say the sentence again, a little more loudly. Joel
crumples the paper with his fingers and slams his left hand down on
the scarred old wood table top, "Dammit, I heard you the first time."

 I cringe and I want to lash out and I want to tell him that I
count for something in this world too, that he can spend hours every
night wringing some damn poem out of his brain, a poem that he
will never send off because it is crap of the highest order, taking up
our time at night, hiding in his curvy and tenacious and twisty
thoughts, going down there in those poesy snake coils somewhere
where I sure as hell can't find him, and I at the same time want to
run to him and kneel beside him and put my head in his lap and
have him put my hands on his shoulders and massage them a little. I
want him to tell me everything is okay and maybe get hard with me,
because I miss him so much. Instead, I just sip my now cold coffee,
hoping not to cough on it.

 We don't look at each other anymore, not really. We see
what we see and maybe it is a blot on our imaginations, he the
failed poet, I the failed journalist English major, whatever the hell
good that ever did. We should be cobbling together our lives and
changing and rearranging the blocks when we don't like what we
see, for we are both prodigious readers, something like five books a
week,  but we do not read the same writers, not the same genres. I
read the spook books, and he the historical biographies. I read old
books that we used to read together. They remind me of him. He is
right here in front of me. That is why. I wish he would read those
old books we once loved together, because he would like to be
reminded of me. We never read in the same room at the same time.

 We should use other writers words to make that golden
threat that hangs on the outside of impending old age less of a
poseur at a masquerade ball, that would get us past past youth. But
was there ever Joel, especially when youth left us alone? Why could
it not hold us before it like a second chance of young skin full of
laughs and light and weightlessness, nothing crimson about it or
heavy handed or heavy stomached? Just the memories that would
peruse us as we pursue them and would be standing at a corner in
our love making (when was the last time we made love or just had
sex?) and would say what took you so long, guys? You don't have
to feel guilty for leaving us. We'll protect you. Blend you with us
here. All the time in the world. Here, slip again into your teens or
twenties and go at it like no one else in the whole world would
understand, but these days, these days, the poseur behind the mask
is Lon Chaney, Sr., wearing a skull face in "The Phantom of the
Opera." It breaks your heart, I'll tell you plain and simple and
straight out, it breaks your heart.

 "What do you think?" I ask, "about going away for a few
days?" I pester him. It makes him grumbly. I seem unable to help it.
If I annoy him, then I know I'm still with him. He tears a page, he
turns the sheet of newsprint so hard.

  I take my fork and play with the remnants of my runny egg.
Joel tells me the traffic will be helacious with the holiday weekend
coming up and besides "you know how much I hate to travel and we
never really have any fun with it anyway."

 All the hurrying, and me, afraid we'll miss our flight, "up
tight"--antique phrase no more used-- or that we'll get robbed or
mugged or that relatively new and most embarrassing affliction that
comes to smile on people around our age that says wherever you
are, always locate the nearest restroom because as sure as you don't
have one in sight, you will have to go. I think this is our main
reason we stay home all the time, this cruel little disjunction of
bodies breaking down, when all these years, long ago, we had
mastered each other's genitals, and sang to them and loved them
and kissed them--mixed up our pulse and heart beats. Unable to
distinguish which was our own.

 O, how I loved him then, so extraordinarily, so rousingly
naked, there before my eyes and hands, and real, God, real, the
curve of his long willowy back, the standing out butt with the pale
cheeks so kisssable. His thin straining abdomen and chest reaching
up to me, like a poem become flesh. The way his sensitive knowing
hand fit so beautifully on my stomach as though we were made to
fit perfectly, his thin alabaster  smooth as glass legs draped around
my larger ones. The beautiful blue vein in his left temple that beat
delicately and reminded me of a baby bird all translucent and
alabaster. How his lips met mine. It was like kissing velvet smoke.
It was home. And home was a great and marvelous place to dwell
for a time, but our bodies had begun, so soon, so far ago, dying. We
had become Fall in front of each other. And we are ashamed.
Perhaps that was really the key to the problems now, our shame.
We are dying, and we weren't wise enough or imaginative enough
or caring enough to stop this stupid cruel heartless mindless process
from happening to each other. My Joel, I can't stop it. I don't know
how. I want to put my hands to the wall of time and press hard.
Press on the break. Make a fireworks of friction. Break the clock.
Stop the acceleration. Nullify time's engine. Disable the machine
for you.

 And we blame each other--if you had cared, your fault. So
we don't care anymore. It's a terrible round robin-- like slow murder
or slower suicide. All has seemed to be for nothing, thus loneliness
sits like a little demon from hell on the table before us, two headed,
two faced, one looking at me, one looking at Joel, and the demon
says, "Hey, Slick, how's it going?, thought you'd beat the rap, win
the game? Everybody always thinks that. I'm here now, though.
always have been. You just refused to see it before. Aw, hell, I'm a
nice guy. Trust me. Think about what I've got comin' up for ya?
Makes this look like a sandlot ball game, it does. Can you say
'prostate cancer'?"

 How I loved Joel's penis, key word, loved, how I carried the
sweet image of it in my thoughts all day long like a golden key to
open what I had always used to think of as the impossible. And
there for me. Magic.

  How it grew and arched to meet me as though it were a
lonely heart's club bridge rising against time and eager and silken
and strong and how I used it to keep the barking world at bay. How
it flinched in my hand and how it entered with grace and delicacy
my mouth. Holding it, sucking it, was holding on to the very center
of him, sucking every thing he was into me. How he would whisper
love to me and how there was no greater happiness extant in the
world at those times than this, but there are no bridges. Even the
days of its just quick and duty bound was a long time ago.

 I no longer trace the brown rings round his penis heart.  I no
longer coax him and limn the blue veins in its marble halls that go
into making it the miracle I once thought it was, and I wish I had
been smart enough to know there are no bridges, not really. I wish
there was no Joel. I wish he had turned me down so long ago.
Because this shell being here, as well as the shell once known as
me, is hampering my search for Joel, just as perhaps I am
hampering his search for--not me, but someone else. As he has
always been, probably. It is long past time to face it. And no one
left in this aging young world for him. So there is no where else for
him to go. There is only me. Who will take him back again. Always
have. Always will. He's my Joel after all. Somewhere in there.
Somewhere.

 There will not be a denouement. There will not be a specific
ending. We will go on this way, until time in whatever manner it
chooses, ends us, one before the other. He's still handsome, pale
like chalk, not the lovely periwinkle pale he used to be. He has put
on weight and he has too many ragged facial lines, but still good
looking. I think he has stolen the boy Joel, though, and some day I
hope to trick him into telling me where he has put him. So I can run
to that Joel again.

 Joel checks his watch, says he's late, and begins preparing to
head out the door, going to the living room, tightening his tie,
putting on his suit coat and overcoat, checking papers in his brief
case, muttering something I take as "so long" and heads out the
door. My job starts later than his, so I have this hour each morning
to myself  in all that huge emptiness that is like a scream. I think
back to last night when we held each other in bed a moment, before
slight sleep. Our trying to hold someone else,  trying to pull
translucent membranes over us like warm blankets or large
encompassing butterfly wings of summer over us, to keep out the
chill we make away. How can he compete with what he used to be?
How cruel I am.

 We drifted, turned away from each other. I thought of how
we used to talk--how we chattered like magpies, and giggled, and
had such word duels with each other, jokes and memories and
tomorrows in them, when we first knew each other and knew each
other all over again every night-- about movies we loved, and about
our childhoods, when, in those days, we were still children, and
how we wished we had known each other then. And how in those
early days of sex and love, we would fall asleep, cupping the
other's balls. Now though, he snores. He tells me I do too. I choose
not to believe him.

 I thought, when I was a young child, there might--just
might-- be something more than poetry writing at night and books
to read and TV to watch, that there might be a Joel ahead. I would
pray--oh please. I had created him only in my mind, before I met
the real article. I had not known his name before. But Joel was a
perfect name. He could have been named nothing else.

  I thought of our search that had traveled down all the cold
paths of the world and how there was something longing in both of
us, something virginal, that had never been touched, had never
really been expected at all--not seriously, and how to find it and
how to find it soon before it died of neglect, and maybe it was all a
ruse, all a charade. It became all so ordinary all too soon. We tried
to prevent it. But did not know how.

 We did what everyone did, when they, scared and shy and
skittery, fell in love with something, as well as someone. And so
early on, earlier than we would ever admit, then or now, made love
to get the little death, the rush, then over with. For in truth, we must
have made love because the right strings had been pulled and the
right combinations of fluids had been correctly stirred and emitted.
There was only Joel for me. But if that Joel had not come along,
there would have been another somewhere. How it shames me to
admit that. How untrue it seems. But it is true, no matter how
impossible. The same for him as well. I happened along at the right
time. Lucky us. There was no sorcery. There was no "wolf winter,"
not Lord Dunsany silver tapestry of poetry. We had made it so
because it was the right thing to do. We worked with what we had.
Do not hold onto the joyous lies of first love. They shall devour you
in the most monstrous ways. They age very badly indeed.

 The thing that was in each of us, maybe in everybody, even
Christers, was screaming out in a high pitch we couldn't hear, "find
me and make the stars less cold and make the night less certain;
even the cruelty that comes with it--I will take that as well." We
talked so big in those days. About things we are only now just
beginning to understand. Maybe we never knew each other at all.
Our physical closeness was an excuse to remain strangers to each
other.

 Maybe, I think, finishing my coffee, and sitting back and
stretching arms and legs, maybe every time we touched, every time
we thought we were easing life for each other, we made that hidden
thing, nameless and shapeless, lonelier and lonelier. Maybe we
sewed into ourselves the malcontent and alienation and discontent
and rue every time we took each other into our arms.

 Was it love we had felt for so many years?, or a comfortable
melancholy that was sad because it wasn't alone and missed that so
terribly? But isn't that what love--true love--really is? Is really
founded on?  That's the twisted golden threaded beauty of it.
Maybe in a very real way we were killing each other with third rate
while the real beauty aged before our eyes, or our true loves we had
never found, and they now aging, none of us knowing what we
missed. Just fumbling groaning sex stacked like wheatcakes on top
of each other, fault on fault.

 I stand and go to the straight backed painted yellow flaking
chair Joel vacated a few minutes ago. I sit on it and feel his warmth
still there and wish for a boy with a little beating vein in his
forehead, a vein that I kissed when he said he loved me, for the first
time, and I remember he said then, we will never be transient, we
will never forget.

  I held him against me, his warmth on that cold night and he
put his arms round me and we were the whole world and every
galaxy sliding in whatever quadrant of space you can name. His lips
kissed mine and the flavor was autumn because it had been autumn
then and it had been good to think of growing old with him, of not
being alone in crowds, like at the mall at Christmas, seeing couples
and friends and people in groups of threes and fours, laughing and
being together and communicating and sharing bagels or Christmas
cookies fresh and warm from the Cookie Shop.

 Us then, there among the throngs and the piped in Christmas
music and the bright seasonal lights and decorations and Salvation
Army pots and bells and some jerk dressed as Santa bouncing kids
on his lap. Buying gift wrapped presents that crowded shoppers'
arms that were never long or wide enough to carry all, thus,
dropping and picking up packages here and there.

 All of the people, being one, rushing down the days with
each other and making every minute count, though of course I know
this was a very idealized image, but still and all, and I, alone and of
singular life, for so long. That only a bad memory though, when we
were still one, and not yet two again, but our coming home to each
other, when there was still Joel--everyone in the world, I thought
then, (how can all of this be so long ago?), can have all the joy, all
the happiness, all the magic they want, it's puny stuff as far as I'm
concerned, and the hell with them, I need none of it, because I turn
out to be the winner, after all. Because Joel is my love and I don't
have to pretend anymore.

 I run to him, because I'm loved and I love and it is
appreciated and Christmas isn't sad anymore, and never will be
again. It will never leave me feeling my arms have been amputated,
and there is no longer liquid darkness all around through which I
will forever have to swim, no. Joel won't let me. And I won't let
him, either.

 His warmth is fading from the chair seat, and there is all the
Joel who is left. I begin to get ready for work. We will be together
again tonight. Separate and apart. We have no where else to go.
Thus, this evening, he scratching his pen of poetry on notebook
paper and I plowing through Joyce Carol Oates' latest literary heart
operation, on the sofa in the living room, and perhaps, just perhaps,
I will stop reading for a moment, and he in the bedroom will stop
writing at that same moment, and in the membrane of our house,
we will hear each other breathing, softly and with whispers that
only we can interpret.

 Then, with exhaled breath in tempo, we will continue on
with what we were doing before. And maybe, for a little while, it
will comfort us and let us know we are still together and still trying,
though we perhaps don't know it, in all our fumbling and all our
clumsiness and chagrin and sometimes short fuse anger. We still
try, because there is simply nothing else we know to do about it,
about us, the enigma of ourselves and each other. The screwy loopy
enigma that still and all, has a few laughs now and then, a few
kindnessness and soft touches every so often. And that carries us
on, if we are lucky, perhaps the rest of the way,  to morning.

				  the end