Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 12:20:24 -0500 From: Timothy Stillman <comewinter@earthlink.net> Subject: Elves Can't Lie "Elves Can't Lie" By Timothy Stillman "..showed me a ticket for a Greyhound bus; his head was lost in time; he didn't know who or where he was, and anyone who helps me is a real good friend of mine." "Point Me in the Direction of Albuquerque" Mornings are a sacred painting. I never want them to leave. Cool they are, this time of year, and the sun friendly and dimly lit, like a night candle leading me onto the day, and this time everything will be all right, and he will love me. Not that I want his love, but of course I do; I can't keep piling memories up on top of memories, so I've taken a bus ride. The bus that once carried me home every week for a day to Joel, now takes me far away. The hum of the bus is nice, the wheels sliding in the dim frosty rain, and I have dozed most of the night. Sleepy, but not so much. Someone told me yesterday I was 25, and I really wished they hadn't. I've missed so much by holding onto memories of him, and then memories of others to take his place, secretly, who never took his place and I wonder what will I be 10, 20 years from now? I wonder, will the hurt start hurting then? Or will it finally stop? And how do I handle that? It has become my closest friend. The world is a ball of mist and soft sun in a far distance, fog lifting, sleety rain nice, though it can't be heard drumming on the bus because of the bus sounds, but the aroma of the bus is good and far away lands like, and the smell of it is new; the sound of the gears, the rushhhhh of the wheels, the motors, the massive mechanisms that make this mechanical Mastadon still ride the roads makes a kind of important feeling in me; like its gears have in a way become part of me; like they see the mechanics, the mechanism of time and years and loss and deep happiness and once contentment; and they've come to comfort me. To push their mech minds into mine and into my body, their complicated mathematical perceptions, to take me, to make me the lifeless robot who I long to, or what I long to, be. But for now I'm heading to Michigan, and that's far away from Joel who is far away from Joel, though not as far as I am, and was, even when I knew him, though he never knew me; I'm not pretending to be catty with this; it's just the way I've learned to express myself-carefully-I think sometimes I am a mechanism, a gear, a cog. I think I left my humanity back there with that wondrous golden cream of two years that I thought I could turn into the landscape of the world and the world of it forever. I'd like to masturbate. The bus has only three passengers. I'm sitting at the back. I've wanted to do that on a bus ever since, when a teenager, I read a book called "Eternal Fire" by Calder Willingham, with that passage of a man and a girl having sex on a crowded bus, and no one but they the wiser. I've wanted to do something like that, to make a fool of myself, to break out of the non-cauldron of me. But I used to be a cauldron, all in secret, and all in diamond panes when alone, and all in my lover's arms when I circled the world and came up on the only person I've ever known who could make me smile and mean it. I'm hard. The bus is crowded with my sleepiness. No one up front is talking or moving. The driver drives somnabulantly, is apparently a machine himself. I put my hand to my jeans crotch. Joel showed me his penis outlined in his jeans, made it hard just by willing it, and then cupped his hard on with his hands like parenthesis, and smiled at me, as I smiled and turned away from him in the car, as I drove him home from the movie we had just been to see, and he poked me in the ribs with his elbow, as I pushed away from him. I knew so desperately I was in love with him. I knew I would find someone to love somewhere ahead and put my love for him into them. Transference, it's called. I seem helpless not to do that. Only with Joel I did not. Before him. And after him. Yes. I joked sometimes with myself that I really had fallen in love with his sister, but since I needed someone who would be impossible to return my love and thus cause me pain, I pretended to fall in love with him, and then pretend became real. God. What if it's so? No. I refuse to believe it. We're going through farm country now. Brown grass. Brown stubs of corn stalks. Brown cows and a pen with pigs or hogs blurring by, and I think of roads and they always seem heading home and I wish I could just pull out my penis, which is not hard now that I've thought this about Joel's sister and wondered if the whole thing has been God's practical joke on me, or mine on myself, but I would like to pull out my penis and rub it to stiffness. What would be the terrible thing about that? I mean what makes walls and doors semi-okay to do it inside, but not in a bus or outside in the open country? They'd have to make a concerted effort up there to see me. I always do it quietly and it would be a kind of opening to the door of celibacy I've been not trying to batter down, because if I had really looked at Joel's penis in his jeans that time I was driving him home from the movies, if I had looked like I wanted to touch it, he would have killed me. I wish time would stand still like I wish morning would stand still. Mornings are fresh and clean and beautiful and filled with soft hued blue hills even when there are none in sight. I wish I could hurt someone who's hurt me, but they are impervious to hurt because they don't care, so this makes me angry, thinking of how people just don't care, and I unzip my jeans, and pull my penis out of my BVD slit. I hold it, warm and scared, I look up front. The driver has a mirror to see all the bus interior, but so what? What's the difference? He's seen lots worse stuff on busses he drives, I bet. I mean, why could I not be allowed this? I've been so quiet and good and shy and careful and unhurtful, you'd think a guy with a lifetime of that could masturbate on a bus for god's sake without the whole frickin' world coming to an end. Jesus. I mean.. Back in college, my roommate told me of a sex show a friend of his had taken him to. The friend was in this fraternity, and he had gotten Stacey into see it. Stacey told me all about it. Two people. Male. Female. Naked. Having sex with each other. Doing everything. The fratboys with their prongs out. Jacking off. Having fun. Just watching. And she had a muff..and he had a dick..and they were just incredible..and everybody was as drunk as skunks and it was just terrific when he.and when she. And it made me so sad, for all sorts of reasons, that I couldn't have seen it for one thing; that he saw it, for one thing; that I would have given anything if it had been Joel and me.and everyone was watching.and it would be warm and flowing summer ponds and we'd be delicate as naids, and have little elf ears, and we would be running through ponds and summer meadows and we would kiss and feel and feather touch with our eyelashes, and we'd do sex as I always imagined it, like poetry, like sweet and glowing, as though the night stars little kids wish on in the summer time yards, when they're stupid enough to believe this will make their dreams come true; god, how could anyone ever really believe such a thing?;' and we'd have that wish light from those stars of long ago inside us, and we would lie down and we'd be golden from the inside out.. ..and the stupid frat boys would down Bud and Schlitz and just think they were seeing a sex show, but they weren't.and they didn't know Joel and I could make all their fondest, the deepest dreams really happen.and it didn't go with muff diving.or big cocks.or three day beard growths..or ugly morning illusion shattering like I always was reading about.but it would just be, like, forever, and we would never get tired and it would be the smell of daisies around us and the sun was kind to us; we would kiss and circle tongues on tongues and graze the other's lips; we would be all the night star nursery rhymes I still have glowing in my heart; we would be safe; age couldn't take us; the fear of saying, of telling him couldn't stop it; the knowledge of rejection could not make me feel like the fool it would make me feel; we'd be everything, the way a person feels when spring rolls round. .the way birds sound when you're just waking up and you remember something so wonderful in the day before or the week before that, or whenever, and it makes you smile and put your hands to your chest and your abdomen, and you feel like you're a part, instead of apart, and the beery drunk men would look at us and never see us.and never know we were their only salvation.. ..and Joel would feel me and he would smile like the moment you realized Bambi was going to survive and would make it into a proud fine stag and be the forest king; like when you're a stupid little kid and you think cartoons are real-well you know they're not of course, but part of you knows they're realer than real; and you fly into the night sky with Peter Pan and Wendy and you want to be with them when they sleep together because when you, when I, saw the movie and read the comic book, I was that age that I wanted to do sexual things with both of them, without really knowing what, just that my terrycloth bathrobe and my flannel pajamas were much fun to rub my little penis on in that wonderful snow grin winter. .and these stupes, those drunk college jerks, you know, the ones with dads with the right connections, and with the cheerleader girlfriends Janis Ian wrote about in "Seventeen," and you know all the right business connections they will have, and marriages shortly up ahead, and kids to have and lives to live, and some stupid man still wearing his heavy coat is lying with his head back against the head rest on this Greyhound bus-"leave the driving to us"-is masturbating, has somehow conquered fear, embarrassment, terror, knowing the bus will pull off to the road side in any minute and State Troopers will come whooping up to haul his ass away to jail---but for now I'm lost in time, and the times in my morning mind are sweet, as I close my eyes and then open them, looking out the bus window at farms misty rain in the distance. I think of Joel, and how he showed me the outline of his penis in his jeans; not caring, I could have looked at it; not caring; I might have been allowed to touch it; not caring; but I did care; I do; and that, more than the sexuality itself, that is the thing that is wrong; that is the thing not permitted; that is the ultimate evil to which there can never be any defense, not ever. It's the worst thing ever in the entire world. Believe me on this. It is so. And it will send you straight to hell. It has done this to me. Be careful. Don't give a damn and you'll be protected and okay. And I came. I caught it in the palm of my right hand while my left one held my penis that was like a Mexican jumping bean. And I felt such a release, so close to Joel, so close to our elf selves, away from our human disguises, from our adult disguises, and I felt him a bridge to me that no one else could see, out in our forest world and our grass world and we were so hard and so horny and we knelt before each other. Examining. Kissing, tingling, touching, tasting, exciting, comparing, compartmentalizing, and then eyes to eyes and mouth to mouth, arms round each other, friends and buddies and pals and comrades and love was us and love was make believe come true, love was a boy looking out his winter window in the night time, shortly before Christmas, hoping for snow, for there had been none all winter long, and he desired snow, as he looked out the window, face pressed against the screen, as he sent up a half believed prayer to anyone extant up there who would help him out; he said, he knew it was to no one in particular, "please God, please let their be snow." My palm overflowed. I had some tissue in my shirt pocket, for in case I did dare what I thought, but never believed really I would try, and I held our souls in that puddle and the puddle became the spring pond that we lay beside, on our stomachs, our legs up, our legs entangling with each other's, as we gazed at our elfin faces in the water, and knew those men in the frat room right now were just seeing raunchy sex to get their gonads off.and didn't know.as Joel didn't know.as I put bee pollen on his lips..as he put morning dew on my eye lids..as we became morning ourselves, and I lay back, my body tingling, my chest heaving, my jeans tipped with cum of course, for I was so nervous I could not deflect it from all pouring out on them; I just would keep my coat buttoned till they dried.or would I? I look to the buttery warm looking sun now, as the frosty rain is ceasing, and the fogginess is lifting, as we are coming into some suburb, I guess, of Detroit. I've come cross country because I had a summer friend, when we were children, who had come from Michigan, who I saw once a year, in July, and then he was gone home till the next July. I've no idea where he is, and don't really miss him too much, but I worshipped him as a child, but when Jim came to see his grandparents across the street from me, that final time, this time with his new wife, I couldn't wait to go back to my mom's house and phone Joel, for I was already giddily in love with him, and it took the pain of the going away of Jimmy from me completely; this experiment is to make sure; and as the other people on the bus are stirring and coughing and stretching arms and the driver is telling us where we are and how soon we would get to the depot, I knew, soon to confirm, that I had not transferred my love from Jimmy to Joel, that Joel was not one in a chain of people I pretended to love because of a previous secret love who was based on a previous and a previous, and for the rest of my life doing that.. .But Joel was inside me and was fucking me in our fairytale meadow and he was leaning all of himself against me and his face on my neck, kissing it, as we were metronomes moving with full humanity, not clocks, not robots, not things of mechanisms, because in that beautiful naked open land of impossible, he whispered something to me right as we were together the most intimately two bodies can be together, and it was something private, something so wonderful, something that made me on that bus feel so alone and close and alien and the center of everything and the edge of the crowd and the Martian helpless from the center of the stars who knew what would save man from himself, and it wasn't "Klatu, Barada, Nicto" after all.but as we pulled into the business district, and I stood up to get my bag from the carrier, I can tell you this one thing about the secret.. I know which star to turn at, should you ever wish to fly to Neverland. Sorry, nope, not that star. James Barry got it wrong. You'll have to find a certain field with two elves with star wishes magic inside them first, and they will be happy to tell you, but it will take you a bit of doing to find us. As the bus stops, and the driver pulls to the side. ...Oh god I've been found out..he saw me and waited till the station to tell the cops where it was safe and he could keep his eyes on the road.but he only told me to wait till the bus had stopped before I stood up to get my luggage. He said it like a robot. I blushed and was ashamed. Heads turned to look at me. I'm sure they laughed or smiled and degraded me. I did not look or let myself hear. I should have known that. I sat quietly, as he pulled the next block or two to the Greyhound station. I closed my eyes, and turned my face to the window. .Please be outside my window, Joel. Please let this bus have come home to you, that I have not gone here to prove here in the place where Jimmy lived, where he is no longer, that much I know, the loneliness I think I will feel for him will only last a little while, and you will be the loneliness I feel far more, my odd way of winning, as I walk by Jimmy's old high school, and where he lived with his dad and stepmom, these things he told me years ago, I made a map of my viscera, and now I come to have that map of desolation expunged. To say to Joel what I have to say. I open my eyes. He is not there, of course. I stand, see the driver turned round in my direction as the pneumatic door hisses open and the people grab their bags and get off. The driver is staring at me, as I button my coat, avoid his eyes, get my damned bag, and hustle off the bus, head down, eyes averted. "Next time, better not," the driver said, as a warning to my back as I all but ran off the bus and away from the station, not wanting to think what he had meant. I ran two blocks, my breath frosty in cold Michigan, where Joel had never been. I stopped and caught my breath. Bent over. Put my hands on my knees. Felt my hurt throbbing. Where Joel now was. So in the loneliness of the absence of Joel, not of Jimmy in his own home town, means Joel won, and we'll tell you the right star. We promise. Elves can't lie. Or be anything other than us.