Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 16:43:20 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: "Rain Story"

			       "Rain Story"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 Rain, and his choirboy face, bed shadows, temptations in the
joining of ourselves and midnight ticking to eight a.m. when he
would go off on a plane and we would be apart for seven weeks.
Love, he told me again and again, it's only seven weeks, can't help
it, it's my big break, it's the shot at the golden ring I've always
wanted, you wouldn't begrudge me that, would you? And me, no,
of course not, I can't tell you how happy I am and in time, if it
works--no--when it works--I'll come out there and we'll be
together in happy southern Californ-i-a. And we hugged and he
went to sleep peacefully. I had no idea how to tell him he wasn't
himself. I had no idea how to tell my love that he was not even me.
But something less, something apart.

 I held him against my left shoulder, feeling him dizzy and
drugged with dreams, the ones that perpetuate, the ones than
incubate inside a person who is adept at being an adaptee, who is
adept at being a psychic morph, who is himself as long as it is
formed of pieces of others, an empath who is not at loggerheads
with self or with this formless identity that hides in the shells under
eyelids that do not see, shells that pretend at eyes. And in the raven
dark night, in the tapping politely of raindrops, I see nothing but the
mottled pebbly ceiling of our bedroom. I feel the warm of him. I
feel the characters he portrayed to keep me happy, to keep me with
him.

 His name this week is Julian. Last week it was Joel. The
week before that, Daniel. Then back and forth. There is nothing of
time in him, in my friend whose real name I can no longer
remember. We lie in a cubicle, a surrender that is made of plywood
and plaster and longing and an inability to heed the past and move
from its cradle, all nailed in by ten penny gleaming silver staubs. He
thinks he is a would be actor. I think I am a would be writer. He
thinks he is a would be human being who fell in love with a man
who had never laughed, for that was to be his job, his duty, his one
life goal, to make me laugh. To break the stone face. I tricked him.
He thinks he did make me laugh, but I made me him and he was the
one who felt the lightness of soul, the feather giddy tickle of
happiness, but I in him felt nothing but the stoniest of silences. He is
no one. I am him. I am the dream in him that is not his dream.

 This is the last night of winter. The cold is in rags, has been
for some weeks, little snippets of winter whir in and then warm
weather beats them back and into submission, they fall without
whimpering. Julian was a man who hurt me, therefore Julian last
week hurt Daniel, while Joel looked on, and in the body of one was
the body of four, the fifth one, the man beside me, in the dark,
whining, while we played larks inside his body that was no longer
his. I am a thief. In a way I am a murderer. I didn't intend to be. We
thought we would have some fun. The Village has always been a
nice place to me. Always been colorful and filled with bright lights
of brass dreams that can come true on sidewalk easels under the
artist's palette, while strolling couples with their handkerchiefs in
the correct back pockets of their tight blue jeans stroll past, eating a
hot dog or drinking a cup of warm beer. The sun on the shanties of
the mind and strollers become minstrels, while there always seems
to be music about from radios in apartments of open windows and
from cars and from stores with doors open for the noon day sun
and people in their peasant clothes that seem inviting and cool. At
least they did when my love and I met at an outdoor cafe, as he
found me frowning, sitting at a metal oval, drinking a glass of wine,
as he sat down sinuously, like a carved snake, coiling down into the
wicker chair next to mine, but his face was kind and unscarred, his
eyes were friendly, his voice sounded like it had butterscotch in it.

 Mostly in the past what I have attracted is pain, but that
early Fall afternoon with the blue and green and magenta and
orange marmalade colors all around us, with the music soothing us
in upbeat, and the sidewalk crowded with people who had found
someone at least for a time, a world of no shutters or screens and
the calling out of first names met with cheer, met with the wave of
hand and the touch of lips to cheek that gives me even a heartening
feeling, he sat there and he put his elbows on the table of circle, his
cambric shirt with its sleeves rolled up past those elbows, as he put
his somewhat pointed chin in his hands and looked at me, it made
me feel good. It made me feel that he knew and it didn't matter at
that point, that he knew he would be a sacrificial lamb. Not to the
slaughter but to my airy room with its wide opened windows and
the linen curtains blowing in the cooling September breezes, as we
lay on my bed, as he put my Snoopy doll to the side, as he leaned
over to my face, as we began our celebration of the day and how it
would be. He didn't become the first of the pain until mid October
when he became Daniel. He never knew. He never knew he was am
empath or that people loved him and would have always loved him
because he was the second chance that really came. In himself. But
bogus nonetheless, because most people have little imagination and
began to resent his power after a time. It made them feel cheated.
Like they had been tricked.

 When what was needed was a torque on their own
imagination, in order to meet his. I saw Daniel Green Eyes in him
when he first looked at me, this man here, once named Mark,
beside me in bed, after he had kissed me and we had held each
other and dusted each other with love and sexual teasing, and then
as we lay perspiring in the cool room with the wave of cresting and
receding voices outside that reminded me somehow of milk
deliveries in the early morning city in old movies I had seen, and
how nice it had seemed to imagine lying in bed when it was still
dark and the clinking of the milk bottles being put on the front
porch or inside the hall, the door opened and closed furtively, and
then the carriage or the truck moving away for its next delivery
down the silvery little misty morning streets. Daniel Green Eyes
always for a laugh, always for a joke, always for a need of being
approved of, and I would approve of him for a time, watch him
preen against the blue skies of his dreams, till he believed it himself,
till he knew he could make it with better goods, had gotten his
patter down, had tested and utilized and then had gone into the
world to make his fortune.

 For we are not talking about dead of night here. We are not
talking about fights and squabbles and who is dancing with who too
close to the boom box last night at Freddies' Steel and Girder Bar
and Lounge, no, we are talking about the little turns eyes take when
they want out, when they feel the fever that is brought in waves of
something not quite right. A look not quite interested enough. A
touch not tentative and appealing and suggestive as it once was,
but, instead, too familiar, not shadowy, too possessive even in the
slightest sense. There is a Daniel Green Eyes in everyone's life. A
fabric of pattern and crosses and arms akimbo leaning out on the
window ledge just as you get home from work, the body turning
away from the window too quickly, the face too surprised, if only a
bit, enough to throw the scales off, and you know he hasn't been
chatting with Mrs. Grady across the street about the block's new
launderette. And that first night of Mark's and mine, he slept, and I
said hello Daniel Green Eyes.

 Though I hadn't figured it out yet, he was already more to
me than a desire to have sex, to be with someone attractive, to have
on my arm at the spring soiree or whatever, he was not Mark, he
was Daniel and in time I saw that he was Julian the personable but
with the knife hidden behind the polite words, the bite in the eyes
looking for a way not to hurt but to have, and if it meant having me
for a time, then he had put up with that, because there is more than
a certain season with one person, there is always an admixture,
there is always a knitting skein that connects everyone. I would
think later on it might be funny if Mark once Mark no more Mark
were to meet any of the triumvirate who had changed my life and
embittered me and captivated me and filled me with such rueful
love, if he met them while he was still him, would they know the
difference? They were years from me and were not themselves
anymore, as neither was I, and neither was Mark. That is the human
condition and since nature sets it up that way, I had decided I was
not to be blamed for my little games with my loves' empathic
abilities. But then what was not funny was if they did not see
themselves in him, if it could be close enough for them to
recognize, and they would not, what about me in Mark? Would I
recognize me?

 Mark had been in several off Broadway plays, loft plays,
cause it got Dustin Hoffman "Midnight Cowboy" didn't it?, he
would say endlessly. Mostly though he liked the light stuff, the Neil
Simon and the old musicals, he loved to sing and dance for he was
lithe of limb and almost as tall and willowy and graceful when
dancing, as Tommy Tune who Mark had met once and could not
stop babbling about to me, and in his babble as I fixed coffee and
grilled cheese sandwiches, the room cool in October night with the
winter grip just in the wings to flay down on us unfettered in
canyon reverie, I saw Joel, my Joel, sweet and young and wide eyes
and supple and boy enough still and open for anything and
everything because he believed the whole world was a playbox of
toys made just for him in mind. A boy who loved to be tauntingly
giddily babblingly naked and loved to do all the sex things and see
the raunchiest videos and then imitate them, making them somehow
sweet and endearing, on the projector of his body which was filled
with gold and silver currents and which took me to the mountains
of winter and left me quite adrift when the snows came and went
and Joel went with them one fine early Spring day and left me
huddled and more scared than I had ever been in my life. He had
been the center of me and when he held me and kissed the nape of
my neck, I had never known how alone I had been before him.

 And Mark became them, one at a time, slowly, subtly,
clumsily, because I was slow in learning how to work Mark, how to
use his powers for my own purposes. We always had fun and we
were together as often as our day jobs let us be and his nighttime
plays and afternoon run to auditions a million of them each week it
seemed, allowed us.  I saw Mark disappearing in others, the
memories gotten wrong, the puzzles gotten badly put together, the
pieces some of them jammed into the whole of it because they
wouldn't snugly go down at all though I racked my memory trying
to get it correct, and Mark was not a Frankenstein monster in any
of this, and we were warm and caring and we ate cheese and
crackers in bed while watching TV and listening to Mrs. Abbertone
in the apartment below us say, in one form or another, to her cat,
"Anton, if you would like to live elsewhere, then you are given the
freedom to do so, but if you would like to live with me, I would
prefer that you not play polo in the sandbox every day when I am at
work." And we would laugh and we would listen to that thick
Italian accent, and Mark would dream his dreams of being in a
European film, being a huge important European star of the
CINEMA and he would not forget the little people who made it
possible and he would tap me in the center of my chest with the
holding end of the cheese knife and we would giggle and tickle and
wind up of course making love.

 And all this time, he was from S. Fulton, he was from New
Jersey, he was from London, and he was so rarely himself, and yet
there was more of him there than I had thought, because I believe
he had always been prismatic, had always been not himself, because
everybody used him, and this is the thing--not to steal from him, but
to add to him, not to make him yearn for what he could not have,
but to give him their greatest gifts, until they realized that he had
been turned not into a projector of their second chances come
again, but into a trash sack in to which they had tossed their left
over dreams, making him something of a sin eater, and thus their
disillusionment with him steps up to a deeper level of discontent.
But I knew him somehow almost from the start, so when I added
Joel's boyishness and cuddly toy sex, and mixed it with Julian's
proper very stable very reasonable and logical way to everything,
adding that subtext of the silken knife ready for my chest at any
moment ("my real friends stab me in the front"--Ambrose Bierce)
and when I touched them up with Daniel Green Eyes' obsession
with his looks and his appealing qualities and how he could make
them more appealing, his coquettishness that had calculation like a
dress pattern all over it, I did not take away from Mark. I was not
disillusioned.

 I was enthralled. Then I put me inside him, to chase after
those other ghosts and I put Mark in me to be alone in vastness and
fear and doubt and more than a little shame, and tonight, I lie inside
him and he inside me as he dreamed his dreams of Californ-i-a
where I would be heading tomorrow on the great silver bird in the
sky and he would be left back here to live in the illusion that I
would be living in reality. I had lived in my illusions of others, now
it was my turn to have someone live in mine. It is a terrible thing to
always have someone as a dream and that alone even when they are
with you, why not, for once, let me be the dream? I would let Mark
live in me in L.A. and when he would be seeing studio secretaries
who would show him the door out to the glittery sidewalk with the
stucco palm trees and the toy yellow/red smoggy sun, he would
think it was him in actuality, but he would be hooked up to me
instead. I would not leave him alone and flat, and that would be an
important thing for me to keep reminding myself of.

 He stirred in the night, and there was laughter down the
corner or round the corner and there was some music over in a
distance, the always traffic sounds of course, the flash of lights on
our bedroom wall, the flash of cold shivering me making me climb
under the percale sheet with Mark, sushing to him, putting my head
on his chest, hearing the rapid heart beat, remembering going with
him to auditions where there were maws bigger than the lofts, like
huge other dimensions, to drown and gasp and swallow dozens of
actors or legions of actors who trooped through with their
"Dramatists Play-Service" or "Samuel French" gray bound plays in
their hands, the covers half worn off, the pages dog eared, the
books open to the passage they would read to the director, their
favorite Odets or Inge or Williams or whatever, the speeches and
dialogue marked with pencil and sweat and fear, their knees
knocking and their voices trying oh so carefully oh so actorly,
which is what it's all about, being someone else, being more than
someone else all at once, that is acting par excellence, and that was
my Mark who would take me into worlds I had never heard of
before, who would put me before film cameras and make me 40
feet tall on the silver screen, and I would be rich and live in a
mansion and I would be able to see the tallest building around and
know that my talent was taller. Hadn't enough people stolen from
me after all? Wasn't I being far kinder about it?

 Because in L.A. I would be me, for I would have to be, for
Mark could not act worth anything, and naturally that's funny as
can be because he was fulfilling all these parts for me, in addition to
all the other parts he was ad hoc already fulfilling for former lovers
and friends no longer in the picture, but he could not act. On stage
he was clumsy and stilted and his tongue stuck to the roof of his
mouth and he looked like Robot Boy from fifties kiddy show TV,
and he was a stumblebum walking, speaking, for even a moment,
but when he was in "real life," and when he danced, on stage or off,
he was always with clarity and sparkle and joyousness, the kind of
joyousness that was in his soul even in the down periods during our
time together, for he always believed that those warm brass carriage
lamps that lit up the entrances of brownstone townhouses not far
from us but miles away from us, would be the carriage lamps that
would light us home from his first world premier, but since dancing
is not the greatest calling card for movies these days, I knew I
could tackle the acting, because I saw the depths in him that he did
not, and perhaps that is my great shame, my only shame over all of
this. All along, I knew Mark, the real one, was there too, begging
to be let out.

 When I kissed him, when we embraced, when we held each
other on our first cold winter night in our brass bed with the
sagging mattress under our quilted blue and red and green covers,
when we lay naked on top of each other and our tongues
intertwined, when we were the ocean and sea fitting together so
perfectly it seemed we were meant to be the same road after all
under the comforting moon seeing us home, when we made love
and I went down for him, I saw the depth behind the Daniel Green
Eyes Seduction 101 and hope they don't get to Seduction 102 till I
get a look at the test, I saw beneath the Julian I am so proper and
so world weary and you tire me with your talk of love and faith and
charity when you have to be a much stronger man if you mean to
hold me longer than you will be allowed, and beneath the Joel love
and fun and giggles and arm noogies and seltzer bottles squirted at
each other and hide the salami and who gets to hold onto your ding
dong today teacher?, behind all of the facades, I saw vague and
distant but somehow distinct still and all, Mark, what he was, the
richness of him, the fullness of him, and tonight I think as I put a
hand to his flat stomach and massage him gently so as not to wake
him, were the others types?, were they little characters inside their
tight black lines and never meant to get outside them?, or did I just
see them as that?, character actors with no character but gimmicks
and prizes and needs that were so longing they virtually hung off of
their bodies like silly tassels on the huge breasts of blow up female
sex dolls? Was Mark more than them? Or was I wrong about the
whole thing?

 If Mark could incorporate them inside himself, as he
undoubtedly did so many others for all his life probably, was it
because he was more than them in total? Was it because he had
actor inside him, the real kind, the empathic kind, who was kind to
strangers and small dogs and smiled at little children and made them
feel wanted and loved when no one else did? Mark once told me
that there was a sentence he had heard on a TV show once that
summed me up perfectly. It was that of two young men, an older
brother and a younger one who was so lost and frightened and
followed his brother around like a puppy: "You're just a little kid
with a great big broken heart." Mark repeated that to me as we
knelt on the bed as we held each other, and I put my face beside his
o so warm, and we stayed like that for a time, silent and
contemplative, and he was no one other than Mark. Mark who
would go to L.A. tomorrow, who might not have known what I
was doing all the time we knew each other, who might have
intuited it, a secret even to himself, and as I thought these new
things, how brave Mark was and how cramped I had made him, all
of us who had stuck our dreams in the personas of those who were
far less than he was, that we has pushed inside him and he had been
gracious enough to let us, and how I was filled suddenly with a rush
of love and sadness and need and want. Him. Mark.

 I would wait for him. I would stand at the airport tomorrow
and I would say goodbye to him. And he would say it's only seven
weeks, it's enough to find my dream, my golden ring on the merry
go round, and I would believe him because this night I hereby give
Mark to Mark and he will be the best damned actor there ever was.
And me going away after watching the plane rise off, me lonely to
my apartment for one. But lonely for a reason and that makes it a
whole different kind of animal altogether. Gives it a purpose. A
form. Makes it something I can live with.

 I held Mark, gently put his head to my neck and I told the
ghosts to begone and they were, and I fell asleep beside him, and
this time, there were only two of us, for anyone beyond that number
is a subtraction, not an addition, and makes too much of an
unneeded crowd whose business none of this is, for they are too
superfluous by far..

				  the end