Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 17:37:25 -0800
From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com>
Subject: Side Pocket

			       "Side Pocket"

				    by

			     Timothy Stillman


 Bartleby, they called him. After the character in the
Melville story. Modified in the boy's frame of reference. The clerk
who stays after he is fired. And stays some more. And turns
invisible and a dust witch there in the cloudy realms of a boy who
is not one thing or another. A device, more than a staid friend even
unto himself.  Spider boy, they also called him. Nothing precise
like Peter Parker scaling building sides. But here, because they let
him watch. They let him come nearer than any pencil he had  so
shakily wielded before or since has ever done. But just.

 They told him not to scrape them with his eyes. That they
would be most severe with him if he did so. The boys of his dorm
room, here in the boarding school with its tight white collars of
mid day and boychoirs in front of parents. As they stand on the
bright black stage with the red deep vampiric blood curtains
behind them, and they dwell within their own particular zest with
whom to be sleeping with that night, in this creaky bed or that, in
the dorm where Bartleby also stayed, call Thistle Down. Because
the younger boys have to be met with resurgence by the older. And
the younger boys are like thistles in the wind. Being held down in a
gale of hands that are square usually and big and bruising and
knowing and sheer stupid from knowing.

 As they stand there on the stage of the chapel in the
darkness. As they become liquid night that is all fizz with sexuality
binges that dress them up in our choir robes and make the
under-class lick the stage floor, bare hard black painted wood, and
shuffles of voices delegating who is to whom? in a shiny word
silence as the boys wheel under under-classmen under then, and
hold their legs up like wheelbarrow struts chushing them all over
the stage. While some of the other boys sing some of the school
Christian songs and not sonorously, not lugubriously, and not high
pitched, as our choir master, a man with tall and a man with a deep
and bright red Adams apple that seems to intercut one segment of
his neck from the other, veins inscribed on it like writing that no
one's ever been close enough to read, but here and now sung with
vulgarities thrown in, all the swear words known.

 Here in the night as Bartleby is always in the night. As he is
always in the pageant of a nine tenths stropping boy. A boy who is
held down often and not on friendly terms or friendly turfs. Little
seedlings that seem to have been blown here from other fields that
were not sacrosanct with knowledge or true wisdom or any kind of
umbrage that would take the place of this world and its wooden
bafflements, its baleful eyes of some boy whose just been
buggered the first night of the first semester, and how the cheery
though heart pitted sweaty eyes of the other boys, there in their
furtive butterfly hands that weave back and forth, oh god, and
suggest anyone to the deposit of how boys got this way had better
think again and think again some more. How they lingered into a
kind of stereopticon that was forever making ancient the days of
this moment, this now.

 With somehow, Bartleby, the dust catcher here in the
spume of things, being here with out being here at all. This
cheerless sexual junction as robes and then tight black school coats
and then the tight black school pants are laid down on the dust
bunny stage as the boys do their walking the naked young barrows
home after a night's simple rendezvous that started with the grave
yard a mile from campus where tombstones formed bed head
boards that arms went to the sides of, and clung to, and songs like
night sores went through the air. Songs that denigrated and
solemnized and made the worst images possible, possible.

 Here, wood cuts and formed lanes. There, penis stropped
harder than they thought, the owners of before, and then the
pressing of the meat of them, just below the head. Just below the
little mushroom clouds that always thistled past Bartleby who was
placed down there to each boy in the grave yard, and here in the
chapel on the choir stage. Always the older boys. The taller boys.
The heavier boys. Propping. Plopping it into indecision. Into a kind
of ruse that could have been needled to other clouds than the eyes
of the boys so laid and so runneled over the naked grave yard. And
popped into bones of other naked bodies as they were ladled into
each other, two, sometimes three at a time, and the bigger boys,
the upperclassmen rushing round the fields of  stage wood with
them. Making them eat their undies too, at the same time.

 And Bartleby, to whom would be said, "what do you think,
invisible man?, dust catcher?, unerring inability to exist at all, what
do you think?", and they would throve an erect little three or four
inch penis under his wondered eyes, as though those eyes were
eaves of night that could detect with the promise, with the
purloined partial surprise that such things could occur under its
healing ministrations. But then of course that wasn't it at all. They
gave not a fig what Bartleby thought, for the boy thought too much
and that was for too many vines twining into a mulch field that
was cold these late November nights.

 Not letting Bartleby touch the little hard on right in front of
him. Making him take the eyes of the older boy fondling the littler
one naked in dirt or naked on stage, and all those other very humid
very human eyes round about, as though they were in a kind of
stylized purge that no one but Bartleby could figure out. That no
one but Bartleby could figure out the purse or the prize or the
planet that they were on. The first time they let Bartleby look--
Even the boys his own age made fun of him. Hazed him.
Unmercifully. From the very beginning.

 Yes, the first time, he had been so seemingly conjoined. It
was the first night he spent at the boarding rooms of this institution
somewhere in Virginia, and he had been amazed that all his puzzle
piece dreams would come true in such a real and tactile way, but
the key word was tactile, because it was not Bartleby, boy of bones
that rubbed too easily, head of thick black virtually impossible to
comb hair, Bartleby who was of wide eyes and mouth that never
opened no matter how many back hand slaps he would take to it
over the years. Over the years that he stayed and stayed here, and
never seemed to ever advance. Being young and younger.

 Not that first night, to have sex laid on him or into him. Not
that first graveyard spurge where the boys had Bartleby stripped in
a second, and tied him to a gravestone that read "Amy
Waters--died age 3--so soon was she done for, who knows what
she was begun for?," tied his hands to the sides of the cold stone
marker that identified dust from the late 1800's both on the grave
top and beneath it. And he had found his churlish body, his too
pearl white, too pale, too weakened, too sickly body there under
the eyes of the boys that he had looked at, they and their
equivalent, for most of his life, as he would come to the gates of
this cemetery near his home, from when he was a little child on, to
look in at them, the boys, and the fraternity of black suits that
doffed themselves off, or so it seemed, like black eaglets stripping
down to their essentials in the black grass blades of the place.

 How the upperclassmen indoctrinated the younger boys,
their heads still wet, the younger ones, with nursery rhymes and
cauls half on their faces that the older boys had to pull with all
their might, to rip the rubber rumors from them, that partitioned
childhood with a certain popular ante room known as adolescence
when the voice is neither gawky nor heralded, but a kind of nether
scope that would forever lame anyone but the bearer in question to
the life's work that just getting out the gilded scope of the breaking
voice from girl seed striving for man goal did the injuries to the
boys to whom such consecrated sexuality should be ensconced on
them in and at the very same time.

 And how Bartleby, always Bartleby, always Bartleby by the
Sea where his washerwoman mother did her work in other
women's, other family's so fine and fancy houses, including the
families who sent their sons to school here, and Bartleby there in
summers helping her, and Bartleby laughed at by the very boys
who would soon see or had already seen, outside the gates as he sat
stroking himself, as these very boys their white puck asses in the
air going in and again downward as though made of flashing
human waves, digging their dicks into the mouths of boys far older
than Bartleby then, and then not quite so much older, and then at
approximately the same age, and then the very same age. As his
mother worked hard enough, long enough, was demeaned enough
and had her water basket kicked over enough times by recalcitrant
boys who always said a mock "oh pardon me" to her as she was on
her knees scrubbing their filthy bathrooms, and the boys tripping
over her son indentured servant surely he too was, and hurting him
and scrambling up from him, and putting their hands to his crotch
and ripping on his balls while they stood themselves to good
purchase.

 But the graveyard, with Bartleby's fear deep and stuck like
cane in his throat, Bartleby wondered what they would do with
him first. The need of the stave from the books of Dickens he had
read. The need of one of them to at least be the Artful Dodger, and
he of course Oliver Twist, this time the Dodger introducing him
into the world of sex and sucking and buggery and the like instead
of how to steal and how to die and how to murder. This needing of
the graves end of Clarrow Town. The need of the stove pipe hat to
be put to the side and the man's clothes, the coat of black with tails
to be pulled off, and the Dodger standing there in his dirty grime of
a body and his long uncut cock sliding up and up into the air of the
cobble stone alley way, as Oliver's eyes got bigger and bigger and
his heart pounded, as he knew where love would always be for
him, no matter how old he had gotten...

 But Bartleby was allowed only to--watch.  He was nothing
but their masturbatory mirror, in which they looked at themselves
doing others, and found themselves most supreme.

 They had tied him down, that first time, his humiliatingly
small dick rock hard, and his body bereft of clothes as his eyes
were casting aside their tears of encroachment and happiness and
ache that he was so close but so far away when he was not of this
place, when he was at the gate, and watching each fall and then
every other weekend or so, and sometimes he was brave enough to
sneak up to the windows of the chapel when the boys did their
barrel racing and their bone ups that the littler boys had to go to
one after another, like down a line of human boy trees--these boy
trees the oldest, having pubic hair, some already having chest hair
and a kind of mustache on their upper lip if you took a quick look
and didn't study it too hard to see it was more like a series of little
patches of grass not knowing to form toward one another at all. To
have the littler boys, in chapel, go down the line of older boys who
were naked as well, lying on their backs with their legs and cocks
in the air, and for each boy to suck a dick for one minute, then go
to the next tree dick to suck for one minute, and so forth. And
Bartleby got to watch--close up. Close up. And it broke his heart in
half. Then the big boys would have communal sperm shooting
over the faces of the under-classmen.

 Thinking, Bartleby, that first night of his being impressed
into the rituals, this will end, and I will soon participate as well.
Tied his arms to the cold chilly grave stone. And each
upperclassman bringing each little boy, same age as Bartleby,
bringing each boy to him and pushing the little boy cocks, so white
in the moonlight, so thin and so needing love as Bartleby's own
had needed love for so long but had never had it, not even for
himself, for he had never been able to "do it" in front of a mirror.
Always by himself of course. Had never heard the term "circle
jerk" or "The Maginot Line" (at least not in this context). Had
always dreamed of lurping the dick of a boy who was not too kind
to him. Who would make him see what was what whether he liked
it or not. And of course he knew he would like it.

 And each cock held inches from Bartleby's eyes. Each boy
being forced to kneel next to the tied up boy on the ground that
was cold and hard and puckered his anus even more, as his cock
growled to be taken and to take. Each upperclassman saying, "So
Bartleby, do you think it long enough? Do you think it ready to
cum? Do you think it ready to do these things you have only read
about in 'My Secret Life'?" For that was the only dirty book
Bartleby had ever read. Or at least the expurgated Grove Press
paperback that he had filched from a book store in a daring day
that made his heart pump fear for weeks thereafter, knowing that
his foot prints as he ran from the store with his cache had turned to
marble and each one of them had his name and photo on them and
his address and phone number, and he would be in jail any second,
though it never happened.

 He had put the sweat stained read and re-read broken
spined book on top of his clothes in his suitcase. When he was in
his room that he shared with six other boys, he made sure they
were looking in the direction of the bed where he opened the
suitcase, so they could see the book, with the drawing of the highly
respectable Victorian gentleman on the cover, and surely they
would pick it up and they would find from the beginning of the
book to the end there was nothing but hot hot sex on each and
every page, from the time the anonymous writer was first diddled
as a little boy by the maid, to the very end of his life after he had
had thousands, maybe tens of thousands of girls and women. And
this was only part of the volumes which contained thirty or more
books, as thick as this one. And thus the boys would initiate him in
his penis climbing dreams all this time to this day when he would
be one of something. When he would fit in. When he would count.

 But the boys with the sly eyes. With the catcalls in mouths
and the signals and braces and code works of their hands. The new
boys. And the old ones. They caught on to Bartleby pretty quickly.
Many of them had known him as the ragamuffin kid of the washer
woman, so though he tried to think otherwise, Bartleby had never
stood a prayer with any of this.

 He was forever a child. He had to say which penis looked
the best. Then the older boys would suck it and the little eye of the
sucked penis would come dryly and sometimes right in the eyes of
Bartleby. The eye tickling itself back and forth. Shivering happily
in silver glade. On the graveyard ground. On the chapel stage. And
the little eye would pucker and the little head would shake and
Bartleby would, at least for a time at first, try to grab the treasure
with his hungry mouth. Would try to incise his tongue around it,
and sometimes he could almost taste the tip of it in his tongue, and
then the older boy would haul the littler one away from him.
Bartleby pretended for a time that the upperclassmen and the boys
his own age when they were allowed to sex it up like their older
brethren, and not just in fear enclosed mutual or solitary
masturbation in their beds at night--each boy was a slave of an
older boy, they were not meant to have sex with themselves or
with another, except the master so designated--

 --pretended for a time the upper-class men would come to
him before that evening's sex show and ask him what he would do
to a boy if he had a chance. Sometimes there were things done
which were done only in private, between an older and younger, or
two younger and older, or whatever very small combination,
because there was need to hide these particular exhibitions, and
Bartleby was, alone, of those not participating, allowed to watch,
allowed to suggest, to be a scrivener in the real sense--to write
scenarios for them that they would read and if approved, would
perform to the letter. And the other boys Bartleby's age would ask
him what they had done, that only he outside the group had been
allowed to see, to take part in, in a way--and he would not tell
them. Because this made him--IMPORTANT. This made
him--SOMEBODY.

 But it wasn't of course. It was to make him into dust. And
it did, as a hand reached to the body of a young boy who only had
his briefs on, and the hand went inside the briefs and grasped the
little penis not yet hard and the owner of the hand, a junior or
senior, maybe still dressed in his school uniform, would still and
the face would look up  from his young charge, and would say,
"Bartleby, if you let me cum in your beanie" (for all the freshmen
had to wear beanies every day of their freshmen year, and be
laughed in the faces for it) "and if you wear it round an entire day,
morning to night, I'll let you touch my dick as this pagan sucks it"
and Bartleby's heart soars at the thought, "for three seconds." And
Bartleby's heart sinks to the ground. And he agrees, nodding, yes,
three seconds is after all three seconds, and maybe the sex play
would make the owner of most precious cum forget and it would
be longer. So Bartleby skivvies off his clothes, puts his beanie
down on the floor next to the older bigger boy, and proceeds to
reach out a trembling hand to the cock of the boy, the cock like a
huge standing up fakir rope, but the boy pushes Bartleby's hand
back. "No," says the boy, "forget about it. Go to your room."

 So Bartleby started to put on his clothes, but then "Wait!
Go naked to your room. Let us laugh at your flat tiny silly flanks."
And Bartleby would do so, for he could do nothing other. And
laugh they did, at his flat tiny silly flanks.

 This night, after the wheelbarrow concerto and the licking
of the tree dicks and hanging over the crotches of the trees, licking
the asses the talking trees told them to, all were dismissed, save for
one young boy and his master, and for Bartleby. The senior was
Ted. Bartleby was dust. A corner of shadow. Side pocket. Easy as
pie. Never to miss. Never to be missed. The little boy, same age as
Bartleby, had no name. Only for class. Only for teachers in class.
But in the world of boys, in the real world, he had no name. The
other boys, unwillingly, wanting to stay around, curious as to what
happened in these "private sessions" slid on their clothes and
gradually, being forced to by those who were being forced to, and
left. The younger, or those without permission to be anything but
slaves, in front, under the lashes of invisible whips of the older
ones and the younger who had been allowed privileges.

 Ted said, "Bartleby, this frog had not been pronged. If you
will come up here and supervise us, like the cantilevered bridges
of Brigston being formulated first in thought and then in body
metal and thus twisted and scourged and plugged in and laid across
and into this particular chasm, I will let you for the first time, get
off--" (that humiliation always known about Bartleby without his
telling a soul) "though you must never tell me, you must never let
me know in any way, not even the first words of 'I did it' or letting
me know thanks for it. For it will put me off my food. For you are
ugly. You are skin and bones. Your face is toad like. Your heart is
a little piece of wood. You will go through life imagining. And that
will break you apart.

 "And you will try for this boy or that man. And sometime,
maybe one time, you will have succor. You will have peace. And
then you will go on from this boy or man, and you will walk the
edges of life. And you will be no one and nothing. No one will
know you even exist. You will walk the edges of eternity which
will not grab hold of you for a long long time. You will use films
and books and magazines, and they will cleave your heart that is
not a heart but a little piece of wood that will never even catch fire.
Never even burn. Think of it, Bartleby the Scrivener, you will only
write cold and colder. Because you will only be cold and colder.
And it will be no one's fault save your own."

 Ted took the slave and he reached over on the floor to a
black dog collar that had been used earlier this evening. He put the
collar round the alabaster neck of the beautiful boy, the boy with
tight black ringlets and a face that even the hardest shell Baptist
preacher would fall in love and lust for, as Ted stroked the boy
who was sitting in front of him, as he stroked the naked supple
chest, and put his hand to the boy's hard cock, longer than one on a
boy that age should be, and he entangled his fingers in the boy's
chest nut tiny balls. He rubbed the little ridge that ran from the
balls to the asshole. He said to Bartleby, "dream us up and we are
yours to command. And if you stand far enough back, after you
have given your commandments, you may whank off, looking at
us--just--keep--it--to--yourself."

 So Bartleby, standing there naked, standing there forlorn,
right at the bodies of the other naked boys who were his, yes, fire
of light in his mind, and again, yes, his, why not? And he thought
this-- if there is something in me that has over the long years I've
been here, my endless scrivener years, if there is something that
has taught me at last, it is that there is a certain dimness in these
boys, most all of the time. They have used me as their whipping
boy, they have used me to dream up them and their exploits, they
have pulled me on my marionette strings, for so long--would it be
possible for me to pull them on their marionette strings? For
perhaps these strings are not one way directly to me. But go the
other way directly to them as well. The mirror sucks them into its
depths from which they will not return and the inhabitant of that
mirror walks out. Walks free.

 So. Bartleby said, in a suddenly for the first time, sure and
satisfied and confident voice that breaks only a little,

 "Yes, then there is this I've read of. This involving the
Marquis de Sade.  Both of you love de Sade, don't you?" The boys
smiled at each other, the boys on stage, as Bartleby moved off
stage and further back in the darkness. "All that fucking and
sucking and little boys pronged by grown men and grown women
and little girls made to suck little boys and bite them in most
improper places. How could any boy here not love de Sade?" For
though this was mostly a Christian boarding school, boys had been
known to smuggle his and other pornographic books in and
re-enact passages from them. "120 Days of Sodom" being the most
popular. Most all the boys had read "My Secret Life" long before
Bartleby had brought his copy. They had had quite a laugh on him
with that.

  But because it was a Christian school mostly, certain
things written about the Marquis, and many other books, of course,
but in this case about the Marquis, had not been known by the
boys. Certain things that caused that most dreaded mental
process--thought--in order to read. Save by Bartleby, because he
was after all an omnivorous reader of books that the town library
had  that was unknown to boys who did not like to read, who did
not like to hide themselves in the stacks, from early childhood on,
reading word after word, books, that perhaps even the town library
council and the librarian had not known were there, for if they had,
then certain of those books would not then be there.

 This though that Bartleby had in mind, was a play. This
was a play set in an insane asylum. And Bartleby, walking
backward down the aisle past the seats of the chapel, pulling his
dick with his left hand, the first time he had allowed him to do that
much to himself in all his lonely years of eternal boyhood, oh how
he ached for the red and brown leaf fires of autumn one day, some
day!--saying, changing the story of  the play to fit his needs here
and now, "Ted, you are Jean- Paul Marat. You are the hero. You
are a Greek god. You are a statue of perfection come to winsome
life.

 "You are taking a bath in front of the insane asylum of
young boys who want to do you, who want to do everything you
have ever wanted to do to them and more,, but this time all at
once, and you will always be hard and spurting as will they. An
eternal orgy. But it is more fun to taunt them, first. To torment
them first. To drive them half buggy first.  Here is how you will do
that-- this freshman boy with you is a woman you loved--tender
and delicate and filled with madness that she can't have all the
boys you see and have. That she can't have you! You've made it
with them in front of her. You've made her watch. And not let her
be anything but a washerwoman. She is devoted to you. It is now
her turn!

 She is your older sister. She has eyes that do your bidding.
That love you. That never stop the nibbling of nimble thoughts her
brain has constantly about you. The eyes that drink you in whether
you are there at the moment or not.

 "She strokes you." The boy in the dog collar turns round to
his master and strokes the sky high penis. "She loves you. And she
wants you to see that the auditorium of the mad house is not filled
with hundreds of naked boys, tied to their seats, their hands tied
away from their rampant throbbing penises. They are nothing but
charges of a million volts of electric sex need and panting and their
bodies are thrusting out to you. And it makes you so happy,
Jean-Paul. It makes you so giddy with happiness that they are
there, so shackled, so in need, their voices screaming your name,
screaming, 'Marat', "Marat, my love," please, my master, Marat."
But you turn your back on them.

 And now the boys on stage are doing everything that
Bartleby says. His words are the strings on which the marionettes
dance. "You need to take a bath, Jean-Paul, in that tub over there.
You need to take a bath and you need Sara to wash you up. To
wash your penis. To wash the tip of it. To soap it up. To make you
cum in pain and sperm. For what is sex without a little pain? And
the boys watching this are screaming and turning to dust, turning
into dusts of desires not allowed, into dusts of desire mocked and
ridiculed and insulted and hurt beyond bearing. Bathe, Marat.
Bathe!"

 Sara helps Marat into an invisible tub and begins to scrub
him with an invisible bar of soap and a wash cloth. The boy kneels
behind Marat, as he puts his chin on Marat's shoulder. Both the
young boy's hands are at the crotch of Marat/Ted. And they soap
invisible lather up the shaft and Marat/Ted groans and claws in all
his great power, doing everything Bartleby/de Sade tells him and
tells Sara to do. And if Bartleby can be magic. If Bartleby is able to
stay in this school for leagues of years. If Bartleby is able to do the
opposite of spontaneous combustion, and make its fire create him
and re re create him over and again, then why could not a certain
knife, a certain dagger, not stage rubber but razor sharp and with a
pointed blade, appear in "Sara's" hands? Why could not Bartleby
have entire control of this school? Not just the boys, as he had
finally figured out? But why had not all this din of hurt and
exploitation and cruelty and lust somehow come to Bartleby
himself? And have said, do with me what you will. Then he could,
after finishing here, have an eternal feast on these boys, making
them immortal as well. Vanishing the teachers. The town. The
world around them. Making the boys pay by making love to them.
Giving them someone they could believe in. Who they could give
their hearts to safely and surely and always, and who did not have
to face the fact the boy beside them was just scoring a number and
then moving on.

 "Give him his reward, Sara" said Bartleby, "Sara" being his
mother's name, for reasons he would not allow himself to go into,
"give Marat our always and forever thanks." And Marat coming
and Marat squirting seed all over his belly and legs and pubic hair,
thinking the little boy behind him would be putting a cock into
Marat's yearning mouth, was most astounded that instead, there
was now a dagger in his chest, and the blood wealing out, and
"Sara" stabbing him over and over until there was no more life in
him at all.

 Bartleby came, watching. He came watching. While
Marat/Ted would always be the outsider from now on. While
Bartleby would love all the boys here, the kind ones and the ones
not so kind,  the damaged ones and the ones who had done the
damaging, for that was the only thing he could think of to do. The
boy who had stabbed Marat/Ted, for he had had no choice, stood
by the body. Bartleby, his cock seizure having ended, his seed
having arched up like a little white fountain in the dark cloaks of
the chapel and the night herein and outside as well, after he
stopped glorying in the feeling of it, the sheer deliciousness of it,
when he had gathered himself,  rose from the carpeting, as he
walked to the stage, took the boy's hand, turned the boy's face
away from the body, by cupping the little boy's chin with his firm
steady hand, and said, "never mind him. He doesn't count."

 They walked away together off the stage. Holding hands.
The boy once Sara was not perplexed now. Not hypnotized. Not
frightened. But calm and peaceful and full of smiles. They both
then. The first time ever, happy. Naked. Things would now be as
they should have been all along. It was Bartleby's call to make.
The dusty corner was a chrysalis of moth wings from which this
eternal beautiful regal golden child had emerged. They had the
duty to make other students here happy too.

 They stopped in the stage wings. Bartleby asked the boy,
"And your name?"

 The boy had to think for a long time.  He had quite
forgotten he had one.

 "Jack," he said, his voice growing different than it had
been before, stronger, with laughter and japes in it. A roll of the
shoulders. A raising of the eyebrow. Mock taunt. Lop sided grin.
"But they call me the Dodger."

 Unabashed this time, no longer shy and retiring, Jack put
out his left mitt.

 Unabashed this time, no longer a dust boy in a shadow,
Bartleby put out his own mitt and the boys shook hands.

 " And I'm Oliver," Bartleby said, chirruping. "Oliver
Twist." We jump from Melville to Dickens, Oliver thought, for
there is far more heart in it.

 And they put their arms around each others' shoulders and
walked off the stage on which was Ted. And then there was no Ted
at all. Even the very shadow of him was gone. There never should
have been a Ted in the first place.  For he had always been the
meanest of the lot. And that was truly saying something. So now,
finally, someone was getting it right.

				  THE END