A Box of Autumn

"A Box of Autumn"

by

Timothy Stillman

I was 12 when I found the box of Autumn.

My summer friend had left for another year. It was mid September and school was in session again.

I was a good kid.

I never cut through Ms. Bransford's lawn on my way home. I never missed a day of Sunday School my whole childhood long. I had the stupid long link of medals to prove it. I could be trusted. I was safe.

But when a boy is 12, sex is everything. Jimmy was everything to me. He was sex. He was my lonely sheaves of masturbation. My offering his penis the world. And all the time in it. Which I've been doing in various ways ever since. Not mine. His. It was so lucky to be connected to him.

I held his photo in my wallet all those years. I prayed to him sometimes. I saw or could have seen him naked in the shower room at the municipal swimming pool. But I would have gone hard at the sight of him. I also would have gone mad. So I always turned away.

No one could ever have loved him as I did. And sometimes in spite of myself, I still do. I do not know why it is wrong for boys to be turned on by other boys. I do not know why I could not have leaned to his tanned face and kissed his cheek. Just to feel the warmth of him close to me. Who would it have killed?

He would have killed me of course.

I would have loved to compare our bodies as we aged. I would have loved to have checked if he had more pubic hair that July than was I did.

I would have loved to take a bath with him. To soap his rubbery firm skin. To touch his erection in the soapy water. To let the Ivory water rush down his chest to the place I coveted of all adventure lands.

I was hard for him all the time. But it was more than that. It was a longing so deep inside it became more me than me.

If there are distances, I don't know them. If there are other worlds spinning in the dark out there, the hell with them. I would be nothing without him. I am nothing with him in my memory. If he was hollow, so was I.

He may have been hollow after all. But I filled him. He may have been different than anyone ever knew him. But I accepted all the secrets he never told me.

It is when a boy gets that close to you that he becomes a season, that he becomes a page of the calendar that you know when you have needed true love. And true love has passed you by.

His arms were summer brown. His face had eyes that saw things I never did, even when we were looking in the same direction. He was July. I needed him in autumn mostly. But he was never there.

Good boys can't have erections all the time. I did. Good boys can't be lost in eyes in which he has no business in being. I did. Good boys read their school books and keep their glasses cleaned and never ever think of what it would be to wrestle another naked boy down by the river and to fall into it and make love in the cold blue. I did. They go to bed at nine or ten and they dream wholesome thoughts. They don't get up in the middle of the night, and jack off in fear and trembling of being discovered. I did.

Good boys are not what you think. Good boys do lust. Sometimes they lust after other boys. People who don't believe it? Bite me. And they do masturbate, thinking of erect penises other than their own. Even if they don't have and never will have a gay bone in their bodies. And they do feel sexual so much of the time. They hunger after the boy sitting directly in front of them in church. They do forget that spring means baseball supposedly and nothing else.

There are so many lies about good boys. We are caught in amber. Our stomachs make wavy butterfly dreams too. And if you are caught in the bole of a tree some long summer day and need a friend who is on the top branch of that tree, then do me a favor. Smile upwards and I will return it. Because I'm neither here nor there. But chasing lost dreams that have entered me. And the name of all of those lost dreams is Jimmy, so you should know what chimera you are dealing with. Hot and cold. Summer pool and close humid miserable summer day. I am there always. Therefore in a way, so is he.

Jimmy whose dick I dreamed of sucking. Who I imagined I was fucking. This from the best little boy in the world. Me. So you should know.

Now to the September of my 12 year.

I found autumn in the warm weather, in the dark woods just outside of town. The trees thick and heavy with leaves still green and ponderous. The sun fried green grass and the bushes and the copse of wildflowers blessed and blossoming in a sun that could not get into what I always thought was Delphi splendor.

It was always dark in there. Though here, in the South, it was not cool even in September in that dark place of forest. Woods more like it. But to my small body and my imaginative eyes, it was an enchanted forest. It was blazing that afternoon, the sunless sun, the dark woods, the breathless humid heavy air when I went there to the smell of trees and dusty dreams.

There against an elm with gnarled old roots like arthritic wooden fingers curled and slashed over each other was where the box of autumn lay.

Only then I didn't see it as anything more than a cardboard box. A fairly large one, and of course I thought it might hold the door to another dimension, a relatively small one though. Enough for me. But I never guessed what drew me to it. What made me think somehow my summer friend was in there.

Stupid. He was in Michigan, Jimmy, and would not be back to visit his grandparents across the street from me until July of next year--a ceaseless turntable of eternity to me then--I knew, however, there was magic in that box that had to do with him.

I've been looking over the first sentence of this story. This truth. And it sounds sparse and spare saying autumn was in a box. Box for coffin. Autumn was in there for burial. But there was no containment of red and gold fire autumn leaves shivering in witch claw grasps of cold long distance coming Canadian air, like it got only around late November or so.

I had no one then.

My mother was distant.

My grandmother was in a crazy house.

I had no friends.

Everything was static and staccato. Which is why I'm writing this truth this way. Because the words clump together in my mind too much. Because I get lost in gumballs in hot summer sun thoughts. And everything gets tied up with twiny yarn till I can't remember even the kernel of what I started out to say. Like this paragraph for instance.

I walked to the box in the high hot ant walked highways of the summer grass and I knelt down to the box, no sunlight shining on the box like a spot light. Just dull on dull.

And not caring that my jeans knees would get grass stained and I would get yelled at when I got home. I unzipped and pissed a bit too close to the box. I've always loved pissing in public, though always away from any possibility of anyone seeing me. The memories of it get me hard now.

But I stayed my trajectory away from the box. The thing was the box was wet as if from rain and we hadn't had a drop of rain for a good month and a half now. The grass was like I imagined sand at the beach in Florida. Heavy and soulless and decaying around me. Like it was a series of interlocking games that would just push me further and further into puzzle after puzzle, all green and scaly looking somehow and--but here I am getting tangled in thoughts again.

The box was, in as clean and precise tones as I can manage--when did I stop having the belief I had the right to be me anyway? who got to own me? and tell me to second guess everything so I've been disappearing from view all these long years?--back then?--always?--probably always--anyway, the box was pretty shabby dirty looking.

But anyway I knelt before it. Some holy grail it was. That wet cardboard box that had no writing on the sides I could see. That did not have a manufacturer's name stamped on it. That did not get mislaid somehow when it was supposed to be delivered by mail to someone's house.

It was sad, that box. Bumpy and smelly. And it had to do with residue. Like skull dust. Like the dusk that always came to me when my friend left again. And how I wanted him to stay. How I would have done anything to have kept him from getting on that bus, each July 31st, heading back to Michigan.

I know what you're thinking.

I killed my friend.

And buried him in that box.

And the wet is not rain.

The wet is blood.

His blood.

Sad to say, that's not the truth.

Oh, I thought about killing him to keep him with me.

I figure with corpses, they're not going anywhere. I had seen enough murders in movies and on TV. Of course back then I never thought of the rotting factor, though I had seen enough of that in movies and on TV. I loved horror films.

I thought naturally of other things to keep him with me, before I came to the killing alternative. Didn't mean to make a joke there.

I thought of just convincing him to stay and run away with me, though where we would run I had no idea. And why he would do so, I had no idea. He had made clear to me that the only reason he hung around me was because I was across the street and handy. And he had no time to make friends with other kids in town.

So.

Why would I want him to stay? When he said things like that? Well, he said kind things too. And we had fun together. Liked the same movies. But always I knew, after he said what he did, that he was just making the best of a court ordered bad situation.

I've not had a problem with pride.

I'll pay a person to be my friend.

I'll give them whatever they want.

I'll do whatever they want.

There is no shame in me in that regard.

But I won't kill a person because I want them to stay around. So get that out of your noggin' right now. A fellow can't help thoughts, however.

My hands pressed down gently on the box that was a big square. In the darkness it was darker still. I wondered if it might suck me through the wet circumference. I wondered if maybe I were to open it and find myself in there all doubled up or all cut up, then would that be what autumn was destined for me from that day forward?

I wondered if I would be a chronic masturbator all my life. My dick was as good as anyone else's. Maybe better than some. But good guys are born to play their roles. Still it was a good firm young strong hard penis. The balls were nice too. You should have seen them.

I've always loved autumn.

The sound of the word that has all that susurration of russet leaf loneliness in it. Autumn is a going away that stays with me. It has future and distance in it and it opens itself to me like a brave kind wintry door and asks me if I want to go through. And I can't tell you all the times I wanted to. That I started to move for it.

Then stopped.

Autumn stayed with me anyway. It knew sadness can cut like a knife. It knew the hurt of the thing and it let me dance on its coattails, telling me in its creased secretive voice, anytime I wanted to go through I could. To what I didn't know.

But autumn had always treated me fairly.

And if you can't trust your favorite season of the year, who and what can you trust?

In this world, I've since learned, not much of anything or anyone at all and if you do, if you're like me, and maybe if you're not like me, you will spend the rest of your life kicking yourself for being such a fool.

But, anyway. There I was in September of my 12th year in a woods that, truth to tell, and since this is about truth, supposedly, the woods which was not a forest wasn't much of a woods either. Just some scrawny trees and actually the sun glared and blared down into it and it was not dark at all in there.

Just in my mind. Just in my mind.

And I didn't really pee there. I just said that so you would think I was a big shot. I would have though. If Jimmy had been with me and dared me. But that's not true. I wouldn't have. I would have just turned myself away is all. Good boys are all very well connected with turning one's self away. It's what we do best. Come watch me spin round 180 degrees and no further.

A box of cardboard, maybe large enough to hold one of those kinds of small TVs they had back then. A box with a lid that crushed under my lightly pushing hands as they went completely to the bottom as I closed my eyes and imagined.

Imagined colors in that box, like Sunday night before school started the next morning, when the colors are like those of whey, and the air has little danger signs in it and you can't sleep cause even the bed sheets are accusing you of not studying hard enough for that Math test tomorrow, while instead you, I, had been goofing off.

Autumn was grim and business like. It had carnival in the coming cold and in the dying into beauty and splendor of the leaves and the green grass turned brown and the coming of snow clouds. It said death was lovely and getting to death was lovelier still. It said work was panacea. Good boys know about work. Especially in the autumn years. And true, it does help. This for instance is work.

My grandmother, victim of stroke, crippling arthritis, and senility, there in the county home which I do not want to talk about--the sad ugly shameful horrors that surrounded her there and which were in her as well that she could do nothing about--talk about a horror movie!--and this from the God who loves us so--might disagree on the loveliness of getting to death.

But I was a kid. With no death in the offing. Kids can be greedy about things. Till they are faced with the reality themselves. Just like adults.

I could think in those stupid terms. I didn't know anything about anything in other words.

But autumn. Autumn was when I wore first a light jacket then a heavier one and then heavier still as the cool cold colder still days marched on like a series of exclamation points. Autumn was school and pencil smells and work and homework and fear of grades and hoping to do well enough in classes to squeak by.

It was my savior.

For I loved it so. Cause it made me so sad and desolate I almost died all the time during it. Byron was right. Let death win and make you a poet of the ages forever more.

Summer was my enemy. For that was when my summer friend returned. And after I knew how he felt about me, that casual conversational tone that he tossed that lap bomb at me about how I was a matter of convenience across the street from his grandmother's, no more, no less. When he said it, I just shoved it inside and didn't say anything, though I wanted to explode, I can't tell you how much from that moment on I hated and hate summer. It belongs to him. Not me. There are all kinds of theft.

So, I knew he wasn't the best friend in the whole world. And knew then that he did not sit in his room in his house in Ann Arbor all year long, pining away for me, straining to bring July on its way, so he could rush to me. I knew he did not have sperm dreams about me. And that he did not look forward to jack off contests with me that he didn't have the nerve to tell me he wanted. That was my domain. Not having nerve. Knowing there is no need for nerve. We good boys do these things so well, they should hand out awards.

That one month, because I lived for it and almost solely for it, became a thing of such soreness, knowing he didn't live for it too.

Jimmy, who I loved. And still do love.

Go figure human emotions.

Go figure me. Cause I can't.

I could tell you about the forest loam under me and the box of miracles my hands has pushed their way through, like, I thought then, I had just fallen over a magic box and all the inner springs of wonder fell out all over me. As I opened the box and threw out all the wild and riotous colored confetti out to the whole world.

With glimmering rubber eyed snakes and fourth of July sparklers brighter than the stars. Roman candles gilding the horizons. And the sparks of electricity that charged the whole earth.

Dreams come true that were wavy and distorting feeling, all bright and dancy and beautiful butterfly shaped colors that would go spinning up through the box lid to my hands. My rampant little pink hard on would be tickled at its chin by them and I would follow it into the air, higher and higher, and there would be all these giggles in me that I had been afraid of releasing before.

What gay boy worth his salt has not imagined being Superboy, flying naked over Smallville, jacking off to the school kids below, faster than a speeding bullet. Wanna see it again? Telling Pete Ross, I want to see you in my secret rooms now! And Lana Lang, go take a red headed hike, would you, please?

And the little images of naked Jimmy, in the most wonderful obscene hot poses imaginable, some of them even with me by his side and at other places, in the soap bubbles the box released would have their own magical new shades of colors and they would lift me up with the butterflies which had once settled to earth and made somber serious riotously colored autumn all the years I had been alive and all the years before and the ones to come.

Only now, autumn would be mine. IT would be my friend. Autumn would make me its assistant. It was autumn I threw at the world. A most peculiar individual kind. But autumn still and all.

I would blow the cold air in personally. I would make the season come earlier and earlier each year. I would send down snow earlier and see that there more drifts and days and days of it non stop. I would abolish summer altogether.

And in doing so, I would kill July.

And since Jimmy put his life on hold for one month of the year, for July over which he had no choice, sucking in his breath, and paling around with tree rot like me because there was nothing else for him to do, he would be vanished too.

He didn't like July.

He didn't give a damn one way or another about me.

So, he really didn't consider July existed.

Or that he existed in it. So, there. I can be as goddam petty as I please. And if you have never felt like that before in your life, you are lying through your teeth.

But for me, July was only when he existed. It was impossible to imagine him in cold snowy Michigan winter or cold snowy spotty winter down here. It was impossible for me to imagine himself in heavy school winter clothing. Or his being with other friends there. Ice skating with Jimmy in the blue night of winter. Bundled up, with mittens on our hands. Hot coca when we come in from the cold. Long looks at each other. His leaning over to kiss me. To make me a part of him. To look, I mean, really look at me.

But no. Laughing about me, this dumb jerk kid down South who idolized him.

God.

So. If I couldn't imagine him wrapped in autumn and winter coming cloak, he couldn't imagine me in anything other than summer either.

Not that I'm stupid enough to think he ever tried. He forget as soon as he got on the bus, reality mavens out there. I sure want you to be satisfied. For I love reality and you so very much.

Course the box held neither the corpse of autumn, nor the corpse of Jimmy. Didn't hold my corpse either, if you were running ahead of me there. The box held--

Nothing.

As you've known all along.

For that's where the little joke comes along. Because at that very instant, I forgot everything. Went into a deep most unrestful sleep. Passed flat out. For, I am told, about six more months. Because when I came to again all of a sudden it was as though fate had snapped its finger to wake me as it had snapped its finger to make me sleep in that scrawny woods in that hot bleary sun, and me keeling over on the box and squishing the whole thing flat, it was around March.

I had been in a hospital for a time before I woke up. Then I was taken home to my bed. They didn't know what else to do with me. Still in my coma or whatever it was.

It so happened the doctors made house calls back then. And it so happened that when I woke, he was sitting in a chair by my bed examining my chest with a stethoscope.

I opened my eyes, I guess, like vampires open their eyes in movies when their coffins lids are pushed off and the vampire hunter with the stake is there. I think I scared him. I think he jumped back in his chair. Amazed. I remember laughing. Feeling good for maybe the first time ever.

The eyes flick open fast and scary and red hell like, as though they are cobras who have surprised you and will strike out at you in a half second. Fangs bitten deeply to come.

It would have been nice, I suppose, if the coma I for fallen into--the doctor could never figure out why--my health was perfect, nothing wrong with me, they just couldn't wake me up, as could not the kids who found me in the woods that evening--or whatever it was had lasted until July 1 and I could have woken up to Jimmy sitting by my bed beginning his hated chagrined one month visit.

From the fantasy of the autumn box to the reality of my friend being there, keeping guard.

But life has no neat corners or pat solutions. We have to do that for ourselves. So this elderly paunchy man with little hair and a nice sweet face with a contagious smile looked at me and put his warm papery heavy hands under my chin, pulled out a pen light of some sort and examined my eyes.

He said the first words I had consciously heard for around seven months.

"Good afternoon, Barry. Where oh where have you been?"

I thought of the doggerel of course. Maybe he expected me to. I felt a million pin scratches and prickings and hammer blows in my brain and in my stomach as though my entire body was turning on the lights again and I was going through the process of having been dead.

And now being alive. A tough climb. It took a good two months to be acclimated to the world again. The world that never seemed the same.

And I had missed autumn and winter and Thanksgiving and Christmas and January first and snow and cold and Christmas break and the excitement of Christmas Eve and all the great stuff to eat on Thanksgiving. I would have to wait more months for them to come round again.

Autumn had betrayed me.

Autumn was no longer my friend.

Eventually, I was ambling about pretty much on my own, and had no more need for a wheelchair and then I used a cane, then no more need for that either, though I was out of school that entire year save for the first two weeks in September and would have to repeat the grade and that would be a pain. Cause kids always laughed at kids who got left behind.

But I had a reason other than being dumb. They might let me off the hook.

But I was wrong.

They didn't.

So by mid May I was pretty much back to normal. And still a month and a half to go before July and Jimmy. Life has no clean cut corners. When you think about it, life is one sloppy unimaginative creature.

Good boys have the same anatomical equipment that bad boys have. And when you think about it, bad boys put a lot of wear and tear on that equipment. They get jaded too. It's like, I'm told, subsisting on a diet of Hershey bars and nothing else. Bad boys do not have to use imagination. Therefore they do not have any. Good boys have to use all sorts of imagination. They have imagination you would not believe. And the things that come into their heads...Caligula would blush. Examine the penis of a good boy. It and he will be most appreciative. And if you can get him to stop his 180 degree turning game, you will be quite surprised as well. Course I wanted to tell that to Jimmy. No good. You can though to your own friend. There's still time for you.

I wondered if in my dreams those months--I could remember nothing, if I dreamed, it was gone to me immediately on awakening--I had ventured to Ann Arbor to kill Jimmy. And if I had succeeded. I wondered if I had taken secret bath tub or shower pictures of him and had explored every inch of his body with every inch of mine. It could have happened. No proof that it didn't.

I wondered if I had taken that traitorous box of autumn butterfly colors, the skeletal structure, of the season of skittery leaves and Halloween masks worn by trick or treaters on the black marble of the world that Halloween night became, when children all slide around in monster gusts of bravado and candy drunkenness and fear and greed, while Halloween night opens its doorway to Christmas, always for me spent alone--my mother didn't count for me, I didn't count for her, we left it at that--if I had taken the lonely times of the year, the regal and peacock times of the year lost in the brownness of autumn and the huge whiteness of snowy January, all those bright bountiful colors that shown through the surface of the seeming sober sided, monotone colors that I see these seasons now--and tossed it and Jimmy away.

Sorry. My thoughts tangled in that paragraph. But you get the idea.

As he tossed me away like a tired chewed piece of gum tossed from a bus window as he rolled out of town and I standing there like a multiple amputee suddenly, falling to the sidewalk, weeping and sad like God would be if he could feel one quarter of this stuff. Really and truly feel it. It would drive him mad. He would be so ashamed of himself.

But it didn't drive me mad.

I guess.

Others might say differently.

But I didn't kill Jimmy.

He turned up again on July first. I didn't know how I felt about that.

My stomach in flip flops.

My dick in hiding saluting him.

My heart hating him.

Me needing him so terribly much. Kids can't fall in love forever? Kids can't have their hearts broken? Kids can't feel to the marrow of their bones? Where did you read that?

"What's been going on?" he asked as I walked him from the bus station, helping him carry his bags.

I mentioned my little adventure. It interested him for a while.

For about five minutes. And then he forgot about it. People forget so easily. I wish I could, too.

I thought about finding that cardboard box of autumn wherever it was, probably totally disintegrated long before now. Nothing in it anyway.

And putting it over his head, fast and hard and my hands holding it there. His struggling to get out. And unable to do so. Which was a daydream for sure because he was much stronger than me. I thought about unzipping him when he was otherwise occupied and finding that he had a dick smaller than mine. That it would rise in my hand, regardless of his thinking about anything else. Or because of it. A little caterpillar I could call my own.

And letting him say good bye to his damn autumn and winter and spring--seasons he loved because he was at home in them and I wasn't around to pester him and try to be his shadow every second of the day.

And I'd say, "Jimmy," as he was not going anywhere. "I give you your dream. I cut July out of your life because you want it that way. I'll even let you have June and August. But I have to kill July for me and for you. Because you hate it so. And I hate you so. And you are so cool and smart and seeming wise and heroic and hollow inside."

But it was a pipe dream.

We lugged his luggage to his grandparents porch.

He rang the doorbell.

He jaggered words. I was suitably impressed. Gran came to the door immediately and she hugged him and he hugged her back.

And it was then I knew he had taken July forever from me. There were more to come for us, but when he hit the age of 18 and the court order was null and void I never saw him again or heard a word from him again.

It's been the next to saddest thing in my life.

I never spend an autumn or winter without waiting for July.

And I never got hugged once in those days.

Save by my mother. But that was when I was working back to health. And that hug was obligatory on her and my part.

Jimmy got to be the season of July.

And I get to live in it at his sufferance.

I love autumn.

Even though it betrayed me.

Lots of other people have betrayed me along the way.

It doesn't stop me from missing them.

It doesn't stop me from being willing to do anything to have any one of them back in my life for five minutes.

I have, as I've said before, no shame in this regard.

But I remember Jimmy best in autumn and winter.

The times for remembering. The longing for him in those childhood years has become friendly again. Welcoming again to me.

But July itself?

He's with me then. So I am free of the ghost box of him for one glorious month. He exists then and he does not exist at the same time.

I can only feel he's with me when he's not. Distant memories of distant memories when I imagine way up ahead in time. Running forward and ducking and sneaking back all at the same time. Echoes of feelings. Echoes of child laughter and summer pain in me in the lonely months. But not in the loneliest month of all. How I've learned to love July again for that.

For autumn is when it hurts the most beautifully. When it half drives me mad. I fear it. I live for it. Another autumn coming up soon. My last? Hopefully. Like a character in a Joyce Carol Oates story, I too anticipate "a winter death...bright and quick as a January morning."

Like some day that box of autumn butterflies will be deposited at my front door by the UPS man in his brown uniform, driving his brown truck. And autumn and I can start over. And get the thing right this time. So I don't have to be a good boy anymore. That is an Iron Maiden, that role I was born into. Avoid it.

But it won't happen. What I dream.

It just won't. Though it might. There is a sweet hopeful longing in that I can live with.

But that's autumn for you. Filled with wood smoke and cold air that says wouldn't you like to be somewhere else?

Gone for good. Even when it's here. It's how I've managed survival.

Like I say, if a good boy doesn't have his imagination, he doesn't have anything.

THE END