Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 21:44:08 -0700
From: B Keeper <silvershimmer@earthlink.net>
Subject: Cry for Me

			       "Cry for Me"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


Give a horror writer the cry of a child in the night and he's
apt to do anything with it imaginable and especially
unimaginable. Sadly, I am no horror writer. I do not like
horror movies, books, TV shows, or stories. I am too sane
and too set in my ways. Still at the end of a work week, I
like to relax, and the crying of  a child in the night sets my
teeth on edge.

So I am forced to confront horror. Which is better than
being bored to death. Since my wife and I had our last
blow out, this time because I was blowing the paper boy
when she walked in on us, though the boy tried to cover
his nakedness with his paper carrier satchel, she pretty
much figured out what had been going on. It was not a
surprise to her. It had happened a few times before. She
had always forgiven me. This time she did not.

So here I am in suburbia in this lonely far too expensive
house in Connecticut, away with my drink in my favorite
books, all about history and dull as can be to make me feel
I am doing something important when I read, other than
reading.

It is Friday night, after eleven, my eyes bleary as I try to
read in my lounger in my den of wood, pipe smoke and
animal heads mounted on my walls. I do not kill animals. I
bought their heads from a taxidermist to make it seem as
though I do. I do not know why I do this. I just do it, is all.

I put my book in my lap. The crying child, it must be a
child, starts at ten sharp every Friday night, and continues
all night long, stops during the days of Saturday and
Sunday, but at sunset each day, the crying commences and
does not let up till the wee hours of Monday morning, just
in time to wake me up with its cessation (it does lull me to
sleep sometimes, and sometimes the rest of the week
evenings I find I miss it; but when it starts click clock time
tock on Friday night again, it sets my teeth very much on
edge again) to wake me up, hurry me to coffee in the
kitchen nook (no nookie in the nook these days) and then
heading out in my woody wagon to the train station and
the five a.m. to New York to start it all bloody over again.

The child does not cry shrilly. The child does now bawl.
The child does not cry impatiently. The child cries
somehow politely. And that is the thing--the politeness,
making me feel like I'm politely bored at an office party,
checking my watch, wanting to get out of there, and head
to the nearest dirty movie. I have enough of them on video
and DVD and all of that, but the thrill of it is sitting
through one of those movies in the scrunzier parts of
Manhattan, away from Disneyfication. Kind of a dare to do
it and get out with my life.

I imagine the child. I do not think it an infant. I suck on my
pipe and I put it in the ashtray of a merman with a heady
head, and I think of the child as five or six. I try to imagine
a cartoon word balloon, or cry balloon, over his head and
move my eyes down from it, extrapolating as I go. I live on
a cul-de-sac. There are no children in this neighborhood
that I know of. That is why it is so expensive. And that is
why I so look forward to Saturday morning every first of
the month when the paper boy comes for his delivery and
we take off our clothes and each get delivered--hail glory! I
love newspapers, I really do. Worked on one one time long
ago. This paper boy is far more fun though. We seem
blissfully ignorant of the news however. If they nuke us or
we them, I figure we'll know at the appropriate moment,
and this will cut down on the worrying beforehand. We do
give each other hand jobs too, as long as I'm on the subject
of hands. He's a little bull muffin if you want to know the
truth.

So since it is two weeks before the first of the month, I sit
and listen to the polite crying, and twiddle my dreams. I
wish I liked football. I've got this 50 or so inch Sony TV in
here, plasma screen, though things burn into it; they never
tell you about that, so I've got some of last year still here
and I wish it would go away, irritating. The child's cry
though is irritating and refreshing, at least lately, and its
begun to remind me of horror.

You know, all the rage after "Rosemary's Baby" and the
eighteen thousand Zebra knock offs of it and all the other
publishers cashed in on it too of course, and the movies. I
do not think this is the devil's child crying. I don't know
whose ruddy child is crying. I have met my neighbors at
parties. There are only four houses on our very expensive
very chichi block. They have no children. I have no
children. Moses is not on a fig leaf floating baby time down
the river Jordan or wherever. So who the bloody hell's
crying.

I cried a lot as a kid. I cry a lot when Jeffy makes me come.
He's the paper boy. He is a real cut up. Sometimes he and I
just wiggle together and its fun and I forget how old I am
and how he would not be doing this without a big fat tip,
which makes him a hooker, but he's underage, which
makes me a pervert, which is a laugh the whole thing
anyway. I just wish the bleddin' baby would stop. The
bleedin' five year old.

Could be me. Don't have fiction background to back me
up on theories of course. Don't like the stuff, like I've said.
I pull my cardigan sweater down over my pleated pants
and stand up, knocking my pipe to the floor, and scattering
the ashes on the beige carpeting. I be sure there is no flame
and walk out to the front door, big elaborate house, takes a
while to get there, and I open the door into the mid
October air. The wind is brisk and bracing. The street
lights glow yellow. The stars are sharp and glittery. The
moon is nice and yellow and full.

I wish the paper boy would come. He's a muscular little
devil. And he's just got the sweetest eyes--yes, Clancy, I
say in the board room, we've got to get the percentage
point up or the graph will just sink into the bottom of our
sky scraper and we will be desolate with the loss totally of
bonds and stock options becoming more and more
prohibitive, while inside my gray business suited mind and
body I am thinking, god will someone get Jeffy to me
immediately and stick his dong in my  mouth so I can shut
up with this idiot business prattle.

The cry is the same outside as it is inside. Which makes no
sense. We're dealing with physics at this point, and this is
impossible. My hearing is still sharp, though my hair is
gray, and I've got this damned problem with my left
eye...but you don't want to hear about that. I wish this
crying would move up or down in volume as I walk up and
down the street, which I do periodically, trying to find the
source of the sound. Well, I know the source of the sound,
I just don't know the source of the source, in other words.
I play these word games at work to give me time to think
of something to say, something powerful and impressive
cause I'm that kind of guy, I kid you not, and its all kind of
leeched into my thoughts at home as well.

I miss Dina. I wish I was strumming her banjo tonight or
she strumming mine. I always wanted to get the two of us
involved with a boy. Mainly Jeffy. When she walked in on
us on the living room couch, I got harder than I had been
for a long time. While she was stuffing things in the
suitcase, after she pushed past naked Jeffy (see him Dina?
wouldn't you like to fuck that hard iron little ass of his?
thought but not said, propriety even in this situation, that is
me) as Jeffy dressed and skidded out the door, and I rushed
upstairs to the bedroom as she came huffing downward and
out the door as I stood there. And that was the Saturday
morning before the Saturday night that I noticed the child
crying. And realized very late that it had been crying on
this schedule long before this. You get used to things
before you know you have gotten used to them.

The child's not crying as if its sad. Or happy. Or lost. Or
lost something dear to it. There are nice full trees, though
not full now, and the ground is brown and the wind shivers
me. And  the cry goes on. I have thought of asking the
neighbors, who I see on a fairly regular basis in the yard or
at get togethers, but they never inquire of me, therefore, I,
the quiet one, the careful one, (cept for keeping things
from Dina, though did I ever want to?, I love cheap
psychobabble) do not ask.

I wonder if the child is more than five. I wonder if the child
is six or seven or maybe eight. I wonder if the child lives
far away. Some trick of the fillings in my teeth and I'm
picking him up or dental radar or however that worked on
an "I Love Lucy" show once. It must be a him. Because it
sounds like a boy. It might be a girl though I doubt it. It
has begun to occasionally scare me.

Not the crying. That's normal enough. But because I'm
afraid I'm cracking up. Afraid that there are, might as well
say it, words in that crying. If I could go back to nineteen
fifties science fiction stories, I could invent a machine that
could pick up the words and figure this thing out. Speaking
of figure, Jeffy has a neat one. And a long cock.  I know,
always the size of the thing, but it is long and I can't help
it, but its not too long and its nice and full and it stands in a
patch of small yellow pubic hair that is so downy to the
touch---

--so I go back inside, close the door, lean against it, rub my
hands together. I wish I had a cat or something I could
stroke and tell him everything will be all right. The air
outside is like glass. That would make sense, sound
carrying a far distance in cold air. But this has been going
on long before autumn and cold air got here. Sometimes I
think I will ask Jeffy, but then I do not want to lose Jeffy,
whose mom is getting suspicious, according to Jeffy which
is a lie, I suspect, but I have to pay him more for the
danger the darling innocent little angel straight from heaven
above might be risking for me and only me--uh huh--little
hooker. He propped me. I didn't prop him. It was not the
first time for either of us. Lots better though than in a grind
house or a park or the back of a car I will tell you, here in
this nice cushy house.

With Leroy Neiman paintings on the walls, and chamber
music on the CD player--OK so I'm a cliché, everybody's
gotta be somethin', as Jeffy puts it so eloquently, and its
fun for him to boff the head of one of the city's biggest ad
agencies, so I put on for him and he puts on for me, but
dammit, I would have liked to have guided his cock
between Dina's opened legs. Whoa!! Got a woody just
thinkin' bout it, as Jeffy yadayada....

So the child, could be a boy, must be, might be even eight
or nine, children that young still cry like infants. The
modulation is the same everywhere. I turn on the TV
loudly or the CD player, I still hear the crying just as loud
as always. I sleep to its sounds. I wake to its sounds. Then
I wake to the emptiness of it, and the silence of its cut off
like fallen from the edge of the world, and once that made
me weep, made me feel I had lost my very best friend.
Explain it? I can't. It has become a friend to me I guess,
and mid week I find myself more and more afraid it will not
start its serenade Friday night on time as usual.

That's the way life is. You get used to something,. You
really get used to it and depend on it and it goes away.
Dina for example. A tasty piece of ass, nice and shivery
shapely and blond haired and a boy's young butt and all of
that. And she went away. If it had been a woman she had
found me with--well, she was raised on the John O'Hara
novels, like I was raised in my twenties on those gloriously
stupid Gordon Merrick novels--so there.

I love it when Jeffy sits on my in my study, me on the beige
carpeting and guiding that throbber into my mouth and tells
me in no uncertain terms, I had better swallow the whole
meaty thing or he will stop rubbing my hard on and start
ripping it, and of course he could, I have no idea where he
is from, he looks tough, he talks tough, but he has cow
eyes that give him away, or so I think..he dresses grungy,
the whole nine yards, cliché meet cliche...

Could it be Jeffy? Jeffy crying? His soul crying? Oh good
god. I stomp the idea out of my head and go up stairs to
get ready for bed. I hate these pastel walls. Dina's idea. I
want wood walls with animal heads in here too--I'm a real
man dammit, I have hair on my chest, I really do, not that
you could tell it far away, but up close, and zap there it is.
My body is not falling down. Its just in a momentary
slump. Baseball will fix that up again. The kind Jeffy and I
play. He loves me. Bullshit. I love him. Bullshit.

The Lord Won't Mind.

Uh. huh.
The phone in the hall way rings as I'm taking off my shirt.
This late at night. Bad news. Divorce papers. Lawyers.
Jeffy's mom wants some of her son's cut and therefore the
take is increased.

I go out to the powder blue phone and pick up the little
thing, off its damned ruffled lace doily, bed's got pink
Valentine sheets too I gotta get rid of--yech-- in my big
tough hands (OK, well under a certain drunkenness, they
could look big and tough and hairy too, to make up for my
balding head--dammit I hate aging):

"Hello." I say gruffly. I practice gruff all week. Mostly
because I'm constantly scared of all varied things.
Especially of Jeffy's mom finding out, or having put him up
to his johns, let's be brave and face it, that's what I am,
and wanting more and more money--like everything I own
and I will have to move to a tenement and die alone with
champipple by my drunken sodden mattress, and my hands
crippled with D.T.'s.

"Hello," this drunken female voice says, "I'm Jeffy's mom
and I know you two's been fuckin' up a storm, hurtin' ma
baby boy's future and makin' him think he's a pansy, and I
wanna tell ya----"

Hey, am I a prophet or what? A dead duck prophet. John
the Baptist got his head chopped off, remember? And those
other prophets didn't have much of a ball either.

I tremble. I shiver. She wants not part of the cut. She
wants the cops. But why call me? Why not call the cops?

"I want my baby boy to get more muney fer the act'on, ya
git me? We gotta tak..."

Is she making up this way of talking? Sadly, I think not. I
could deal with her on my level, perhaps, but not this
level--money's everything.

And I fell against the gray hall wall, and my heart is
throbbing with fear. Goodbye life, for a suck a month, this
is payment time. And then I heard it. Cutting through the
fog fear. I like that--fog fear--kind of says it succinctly,
doesn't it?

Nothing new about the sound of the child crying.  The very
same child I've been hearing forever by now. But different
this time. This time the child was crying out of the phone.
The child was crying in the background of this drunken slut
who sold her son for booze money, and the child was--I
took the phone away from my ear--the child cried muffled
in the phone. It did not cry anywhere except in the phone,
and I muffled it more by putting my hand over it. And then
took my hand away. The child cried more and more as I
put the phone, the source finally discovered, back to my
ear. This child cried in pain, in rage, in anger, in fear. But
the same one.


"You ah have another child, do you?" I asked. I  asked
about four of five times cause she was three or eight sheets
to the wind, and there were sirens and traffic din in the
background; for those who think this state is all rolling hills
and lush landscape of endless fields for summer children to
play in and great snowfalls to last from here to forever, the
Currier and Ives routine, all polish and country side, that it
has no poverty and no slums and no pain and no back alley
floozies, you can kiss those fantasies goodbye, it is not all
"Christmas in Connecticut" I will tell you that; and from
the poverty came that woman's voice. You could smell it
on her words. The pain and dirt rode them piggyback.
Well, that's a little much. But I'll leave it in anyway.

"Yeahh..got a kidd...you wanna fuck him too......?"

"No, ah, no."

"Good. Got some smarts buster. When can ya meet me?"

I could feel and smell the dirt and grime of the place and
the people, and wondered if Jeffy was in the hall where the
phone was, surely they didn't have one in the flat, though
all of that would be improved very soon, hello bank
account, goodbye love, and I could see that crying child in
a filthy smelly crib he was too big for and I could almost
taste his rancid soiled from days of dirt diapers that no one
would ever change, and he too big to wear them anyway. I
could see Jeffy leaning against the wall by his mother and
the phone and laughing his ass off, silently. This was
nothing new for them.

I was dead. Jeffy was through. I would be cleaned out. The
house would be sold. My wife would get it in lieu of the
alimony I would not be able to pay her. And Jeffy's cock
would no longer be in my mouth and I would no longer see
that sweet/mean face staring down at me, with his Gene
Simmons tongue straining out at me and imitating his
penis..

Well, at least I got the crying child thing figured out. We
made arrangements, the broad and me we come eye to eye,
as Jeffy would say, and I hung up, sweat drenched, and
there was no sound of a child crying. Well, that was the
final straw. That was it. I had come to like that sound. I
was not going to be here when push came to shove, and I
slammed into the bedroom and packed my bag, and called
a taxi and got the hell out of that neighborhood, and onto
an Amtrak heading anywhere at all.

I wanted to hear that kid cry again. That's what I kept
thinking as the train wheels beat their steady and unsteady
beat and the train jangled around me and I put my head
back and tried to get some sleep. I wanted above Jeffy,
above Dina, above still being in the dough and successful
and not on the run apparently for the rest of my life, I
wanted to hear that goddam kid crying.

That was the part that really got my goat.

Speaking of goats, I had a goat head on my den wall. It
was the one I liked the most. Sometimes when I was
snockers I thought it talked to me. I drifted off thinking
how I could get that goat's head, but even if I could, I
would look pretty stupid, and pretty obvious on the run.

I wished that goat would cry.

I thought as I went beddy by for a second or two before
being lurched full awake again, the process to repeat itself
all night long.

I wished that goat would cry like that kid as Dina fucked
Jeffy's brainless, wouldn't have too far to go there, as he
sucked me off, and we just all fell over spent on the den
floor, all panting and breathing hard and sighing and
covered with us, on the beige carpeting and under the
Leroy Neiman painting of a race track and the crowds and
the horses. All done with daubs and dots.

I'm a Hefner man to the end. So shoot me, I just am, is all.
wish I had some bourbon and branch water. Is there really
such a thing as Champipple? I have a horrid feeling I'm on
my way to finding out.

Gotta have an ending, I guess, though there never are
endings. OK, here it is, the crying child, Jeffy's bro, was
really a harbinger of things to come. And since the mo of
Jeffy's bro is something of a devil, then I guess the crying
child really was the spawn of Satan after all.

So there. It's the best pay off I can give you. I'm no horror
writer. I'm no writer, as is obvious, I just like to suck teen
boys' dicks, so if that offends you, send your stable over
and I'll take care of them too.

So old to be a satyr? What satyr is not old, dammit? Thus,
my affinity with the goat's head is explained. Me. A satyr?
A sexual devil from the dawn of time? Mythology come
real in me and my pelt and my huge ding dong the forest of
forever calling.  Ha! The devil's been unleashed in me. You
ain't seen nothin' yet. Boy cocks and boy asses of the
world, get ready, I laugh silently, cause I'm a cummer. By
damn. And I bet you are too. And I bet I can make you
shout like you have never shouted before.

Hey, clakety clack, I guess I've written a horror story after
all. And a sex story too. Tied up all the loose ends on top
of it. Not bad, if I do say so.

Wonder if Zebra Books ?..we do ads for them and other
publishers...or at least I used to be part of that we...the
CEO of that we I used to be...still maybe they would, I
mean it would really work, but....nah, no murder angle.
The hell with it..but then you never know.

				  the end

B Keeper
silvershimmer@earthlink.net