"A Life of Midnights"
by
Timothy
Tonight, I will take midnight on my walk. I will go to Denmark. I will see the cobblestone streets, in the rain and cold. I will stop by the statue of The Little Mermaid. I will ponder the Danish in my soul, and the Polish, and the Israeli, and the Egyptian, all a mosaic of the ancientness of me. I am a boy, still and all. 17 by physiognomy and nature of spirit. I have light gold hair, clipped short in honor of the ancient of days. I am tall and reedy with little body hair. I have a tender chin and a ticklish neck. I wish to be the world. I wish to be the star blue night of the Mediterranean. I wish to be the indigo of Pakistan mountains when the moon strikes it in such a painful arc of light, so physical that I can almost hear it wind the world to its tightest.
Mostly though, to attendants, I am a prostitute, and a willful one. I charge much. And much is paid. Because I am quite beautiful and I kiss like a dream. I have little pillowy lips. I am the home everybody is searching for. Home comes here to you. And home is me. I resent the arrows in my penis because they need thrusting out often and endlessly. But sex with unknowns is sex with what could have been me. My name is Philip. I am full of myself. I see camels in the distance in the eyes of my tricks, beneath me, always, I prefer it that way. I see these camels loping gracelessly, but unburdened in sand mountain distance. I hear coronation bells. I hear the stark loneliness of forever in those desert skies, where ground and night sky blend, never to untie again.
My tricks, for they are tricks, are soiled, insignificant colored handkerchiefs, same depth, same importance as handkerchiefs, for they are stupid and think themselves bold; they are unlearned, and think themselves, boys/men/girls/women/and all the mixes there are, of the world; they think themselves young, the ones who are not; they think themselves old, the ones who are in effect young. They tower and glower and kiss fame into me. Their brand of fame. Which I disdain. For I am already famous. I am languid. I have eyes of deep black. I have a body that is eager to hold and be held. I can make you forget the times and the heat of winter and the coldness of summer. I am the hills in my buttocks that like to be pressed open, that like to be caressed, that like to be felt into, and the caverns of me are never to disappoint. Not since I was ten and discovered I was a boy photograph, glossy and fine and California filled and smelling of green trees and Pacific placidity, all come to life. Not come to disappoint. But to unite the country of me with the country of anyone who pays.
And they do pay. Exceedingly. I am such a miser of money. Poverty is my face. The riches they do not dream about are my secret. I am fey. My fingers are delicate and long, making my customers sure that I play the piano, or did as a young child, metronome tied, kept home in the evenings in the house of studied hush of thick carpeting and creamy walls and high white ceilings, while all the other children played outside their children's games; and me on the piano bench of mahogany, agonizingly hunching my bird like shoulders that are caught in my light gray sweater (they almost always imagine that for some reasons, it makes me sexier to them ), my eyes scrunched up and brow furrowed, practicing hour after unmitigated hour, hungry to stop, and the light of diffuse blond of the living room of my expensive house, as I try again and again to get the sheet music notes in my head to thus deliver them to my fingers, and then to portray what I read into the keys I delicately (always delicately, even for the strongest hardest music) caress, into the piano below the music holder, while the sun descends into quiescent night and the laughing free tossed children outside, always outside, depicted, cameo like, in the long tall clear immaculately clean living room window, delivering shadows into the well appointed room, while all along, I never played the piano, was never forced to, never wanted to, but it is a common dream of me--little boy of enforced servitude to musical notes written so nonsensically that will dive into my soul, should I be considered to have one, that will wash me into the sad songs, as the sad songs will mold me into themselves, and my tricks will be having sex, making love, "doing it," fucking their precious dreams made melodies, of meaning only to them, instead of warm living me. Don't kid a kidder.
Who has been fucked often and endlessly. Who cannot find that word a swear word. Who cannot find delicacy in it, but only the tenderloin of L.A. out of which I operate as though I am a private eye hired to find those dreams that have been murdered somewhere along the way, and always finding, though never telling my clients, they are the murderers of their own dreams. They kill them with the death gun or knives with booze and drugs and stupidity and giving up and in and pretending when there is nothing to pretend with anymore. They take my cock and they think they lengthen it, but they do not. They think it fills in their hands because they are their hands. They are in error.
I am instead in Bedouin country. I am with a boy who has a serape on, and the night is still and the air is like sandpaper, the sand chafes us, and the moon is a crescent and the sands are still hot with the remnants of the day, though cold nights are coming on. I touch my boy's neck, feel the pulsing warmth of him, feel with my groin his cock rise. I touch the hollows there in his neck and his cheeks and sharp shoulder blades. His legs scissor mine and I too am hard. I kiss lightly and softly, butterfly wings, his long lashed black pupiled eyes. I am his highway and he is mine. The silence, long and expansive and delicate, smells sweet. And I take him and he is naked and he takes me and I am naked and we hold our dueling cocks together and we blend and adhere and the sand is part of us and some times all of us and our bodies are indentations in it, in the long slow susurrations in the movement of it. We are desert sidewinders.
These are not the indentations of the bodies of fill in the blank and me in the broken backed strum sprung bed of tatters and too bad smells and crumpled sheets, with noisy walls on all sides, and the fast "this is an hour man dig it I gotta get my money's worth," and they use me like a masturbatory device, and they kill me sometimes, not knowing I am the golden glowing dove way up in a sky with my own personal music to accompany me, not the crap from pianos, the strings and cat guts and the keys struck wrongly hollow and imprecisely with a waterfall of finger tears and blood running down them, like my tricks, and the machine of it.
Who are so desperate to get out of themselves and get into me, and they push at my bowels, and they dig into my mouth with their cocks, and the girls and women want me to ram my tongue up their clits so far that some day I will find that guillotine blade and they will have won over me instead of winning me over, when the game is winning me over of course, know it or not, and they do know. And that is the prize, the pearl, forever beyond them. They cum on the sheets and they come in me and I come in them and no one is knocking on any perceptible door except the door to my consciousness which will never open to them or to anybody. For tonight I am in Denmark standing by the statue of the gray green seaweed covered Little Mermaid, and if soon she is displaced by the statue of the peeing boy in Brussels, his little dick proudly wetting the pool round him, then it is my moveable mind. It is my signature as they try to write their signatures in me, these sad mad desperate giving up never giving up (so they think) people who want me to be immortal. They will get their wish.
I am immortal. They are not. I tell them I was a winsome child. I tell them I was a lonely child (they love that most of all; for they are lonely too; loneliness is a palette on which to draw ones life, not to run from and deny; they do not know this), that is why they blather incessantly from the time they pick me up, to the time we go to the crumble down stumble bum hotel, in which they trade in their words, dignity a distant country, into the fuzzy moted dark dank airless lobby, up the dark tricky cornered tumble down steps, down the moldy carpeting to the tiny room, past all the moanings and bleak eyed hawkish failed sad mornings being created and destroyed like sand castles in the shabby rooms behind the cracked and gape bottomed and topped doors, to the sad room where they will do the same, with their sand dreams, left as they are always left with only a few granules, (their bodies all gritty and after sex sweaty, with fear a big part of it too, unclean, while I am always immaculate), between their fingers, the rest of it vanishing with love found, or a reasonable facsimile of same, target hit, and the door way hits them in the butt far too quickly for stay, hey, I just got here, whot's happenin'?, and talk for free time, does not make the money the next lay does, and who can afford that? I am a businessman after all. And I am shrewd.
The walls of the hot box room are torn brown wall paper. The bed is a malignity. The structure of it akimbo. The room reeks of sex and cigarette smoke and cheap booze and moldable shadows of all the sick desperation come to call here. The words of theirs are water caresses of scared fish come to feed and knowing they will be tricked themselves even more, the ultimate gag line they've feared all their lives is coming up to meet them, and it is that this is not even a land of cheap gilded gimcracks even, that this is Mecca compared to the hell they will descend to in about a half second on the express elevator that has been going down from day one and on which they are helpless not to ride, picking up steam; that they will find needle marks on my arms (they do not; I do not take drugs; I have respect for my body and my mind) as I hold point the gun at them and take them and take them; that they will find the punch line rapping them in the mouth, death in darkness; that there will be nothing beyond it but the door at the P.T. Barnum museum long ago that had a sign reading "This way to the Egress" and thus gullible fools ready to see the next startling exhibit, (what the hell's an egress, Martha?, I don't know, JemJohn, let's find out) and found themselves instead out in the alley, knowing they had been yet again had by one and all, like every moment of their damned lives, still wondering, to the end of their days, what the hell an egress is, and where do I go to get my money back?
But they never are had by me. I am the sterility of their own paltry lack of imagination. I am the drawing board. I am the shining sand on which they can draw what they please. They can play with my brownish nipples and make them hard with fingers and teeth and tongue; they can softly kiss my brownish body; they can put their noses in my light wiry pubic hair; they can kiss my penis to hard on, and if they wish, and the terms of the contracts so specify, and the contract is always strictly adhered to, strictly agreed on in advance, then I will do the same to them, or variations of the above and below.
They have their fantasies. Usually, for some reason, they are incest fantasies. It is what is around them, I suppose. Sex is not that difficult to define. Fathers and their sons or daughters. Brothers and sisters. Mothers with their sons or daughters. Children with their parents. Mostly it is caught in the curly brown symbolic smoke I see growing into fingers spreading apart morning dark sky, directly above the Hague, and the building of laws is the building here then in this pecker room of similar laws. Laws that have to be enacted in order for the breaking of them to be a bit of giggle fun, or stern fearful churning disgusting delight, oh such shame, and if mothers want to touch their little boys' cocks in the bath, and if fathers want to come into their daughter's bedrooms and explain certain things non verbally, in skull night shadows, if all of this is the height of a summer rash caught in mid July and never terminated until the final at long dusty last cold winds of autumn set in, then so be it. Pomeroy is right--children can seduce, and familial love does come with a certain amount of sexual desire, depending all, and there is no denying that. So I become their little children. Or their teenage children. I become their naked confessor as they talk into my belly button. They do me. They create the me they want. I do the mechanics. I am the palette. I am the piano.
I become, in their private minds behind minds, their son who wants to act in a porn film with his sister and he needs his mom to help him lose his virginity and teach him how to do the thing right, and if his brother wants to film it all, then who is to say?.....
Then when it's over, they nestle with me, and they ask if that can hold me `cause its a hot L.A. night and they need company more than they bargained for, so I tell them, if this is a new clause, that holding and hugging is ten dollars for three minutes, and ten for every minute there after, and the ruthlessness of my words are jagged leaps of neon hot fly killed buzz lights inches outside the tatterbox sweaty window of a too sweaty, too dark, too brazen, room, and they want me to tell them that I love them.
So I do; words are easy, they mean nothing; I say them like they mean nothing; it hurts them to know it; it makes them flinch and close their eyes short or long; this makes me happy; but I am not there, not really, while they are imagining giving their sons their first blow jobs or breaking their daughters' cherries (god, all the horrible words for sex, have you ever noticed their are no beautiful words for them?, how everyone must hate it so), I am in Clichy, I am standing across the street from Henry Miller's former flat. I am remembering his words--until I gave up the ghost, I never was alive--my translation--and I think yes, and when the cum bubbles into my mouth or when the boy penetrates me with a dick that is still too small to do any harm or any good, or when I have a d/p session, I think of the sky.
And in the sky are the golden thrushes. Darts the Incas let rushhhhh to the night sky. And the little birds, all heartbeaty a million times a second, why they live so briefly, are so small and their feathers and straw bones can't possibly give them any protection from the things of nature that God, in his infinite mercy, do the lilies of the field toil?, brings against them to harm them. And they fly with such effortlessness. With such poetry and grace and ease.
They do not know tomorrow is coming up, or the sidewalk outside the beleaguered drunken ashamed hotel is so cracked many people fall on it, trip and fall even at high noon, and none has entered me, and none is summer pollen and none makes me sneeze and none has had sex with me, and I moan and sigh as I squirt or am squirted into as I am thinking you putz I hope you fall on those rickety stairs going down to the lobby and the half dead corpse on desk duty, what desk duty?, will just sweep you out with the other refuse in the morning, till then the prosties and their tricks will just walk over you, as usual, and I hope you break your fuckin' neck, cause you are an idiot, and you will never meet anyone in your life as beautiful and outwardly dutiful as me, and I hate them, the tricks, the scavengers, but what is a boy to do when even the toughest and biggest and meanest boys in the school come onto him in the locker room, in the showers, in home room or band class before anyone else shows up and proposition and touch secretly and eye me insanely?
Do they want my body or do they want my dreams? Would they sell the dreams as I sell the untouched body that is somehow becoming less than mine? Easy, break their hearts, tell them the only way I survive is on the mercy of my own dreams, and there the ending, far beyond the diner where the next john or johnette is buying me a cup of coffee to warm me up in the linoleum floored, blinking strip lighted, hot close, dented wood tabled place, warm me up?, it's for god's sake 85 out there, and they think it's the first time for us both--god, dreams die hard--
--I don't do this often very much at all--one of the marks says--but there was this little kid at the swimming pool today and he jumped, not dived, off the diving board out of the blue into the blue, while his swimming trucks, blue too, completing the color scheme of this, fell straight off him and hit the water before he did, so my mind froze on that naked little brown nut body of pure stick out ribbed perfection, stuck seemingly forever in the center of the air and he's got this sweet little hard on, a pee hard on if you ask me, cause boys love to pee in swimming pools, makes them feel sexy daring, I did, didn't you?, and his face is wreathed in embarrassment, his eyes wide in dawning shock, his mouth hang open, his hands slow slow to cover himself, take me water please hurry up and grab me up here and hide me in you, as the laughter all round starts in warped slow motion, so hours later and hours to come, he descends in aching slowness to the cold blue below, the water lazes up, taking its own sweet time, to catch him, in increments by the half inch and quarter inch, down down, but far too late, and then things were at fast speed, and we all watched him bare assed, tear out of the pool, and across the cement, and from there to the locker room and to his clothes, the laughter was ear splitting, his whole body was blushing, and it just reminded me of being a boy you know and it I'm not one of those people I've never had a thought like that you know, but you know I just kinda got horny with memories, not sexy memories, just--memories.
And I lean over the table and I put my hand on theirs that are usually trembling, and I smile my most winsome, and invariably the question arises "did you ever pay piano when you were younger?" And I nod for I have see sadness when I tell them I never did. I ask them if they did. No, most would say, they were incompetent even at that, "Chopsticks" do you think I could have at least played a decent version of "Chopsticks," I don't know why I'm telling you all of this... Cause chatter helps. And with it and the right prostie, you can pretend they love you, that they will not leave when the money runs out, and then sometimes they get violent, most cry and hold on and you have to drag them out into the hall and throw their clothes out after them, and them outside banging at the door, with all the shuddups through the walls. I am not a camera. I am a taxi. I take them to a specific destination. I let them out. If they want to pay more, we will accommodate. But their sex has to be ready almost immediately, I'm not one to sit around for half an hour waiting, for free. It's an old stalling trick. Fugget about it, man.
I am in the Pacific. The water is warm. The sky is high noon. The fleecy clouds are like lost sheep ranging in orderly fashion. I am naked. I am hard. The water is my clothes. I feel content. My penis is a little over six inches. It is strong. It is heavy. My balls are large, but pretty. My buttocks are a hill of globes. My face has Mediterranean features though I am not Mediterranean. I am a million miles from shore. I see no land. The world seems to be made solely out of water. I am so warm I feel like I am in my bath and am a little boy, and my mommy is bathing me, and she is still a young woman, there is the slightest hint of gray at the top of her hairline, she is dressed in a blue wrap around. She is soaping me in the hot water and cloth, and her warm tender culpable hands.
It is a winter afternoon. I have just come in, shivering still, the cold in my bones, my skin still puckered, my eyes still a bit January blind, from the thick heavy freshly fallen winter snow, and gray scudding skies. I have been building a snow fort, with no one other than myself in the enterprise, because I am beautiful then too, and I look like a girl, so the boys try to make me in the cold shower room at the muny pool, when with others of their ilk, they pretend to want to deck me, and the men and girls and women look at me in my skimpy trunks when I play at the pool, hoping them to fall off. And I am in the soapy bathwater and she has put bubble bath, pink color, in the tub and she is washing my left arm. And everything is so sensual and damp and inviting and playful. My arms and legs are thin. I look like a waif. I look like Oliver Twist--the dream demon of so many of my pagan customers.
I am a terror and a handful. I am always alone. I should have learned to play the piano. It fit the image and then I would not have to lie to all these piano obsessed johns and johnettes all the damn time. What is it with that, anyway? She smells safe. Like summer roses. She smells of talc and perfume and mother. Her slight perspiration is a nice aroma. The bathroom is warm and steamy. The windows are full of frost on the outside, and fog on the inside. It is so good to be naked with her rubbing me all over. It makes me feel complete. It makes me feel wanted. I play peekaboo with the bubble bath. I rush my hands up and down in it. Making it foam around me. Half boy. Half mermaid. My penis is covered. I do not want it to be. I want to greet her with it. I love her. I love to try to see her naked breasts. She showed me them, she let me suckle them as a child. Why not now?
She is sweet and kind except when I am a handful, and then she turns me over her lap, and the spanks me but never too hard, but with such a sexy love that makes me feel all goofy and grinny inside. Which makes me hard. She must know it. Must feel my little boner against her legs, but she never says anything; she accepts I am a boy; boys just get hard ons for no particular reason; damn this modern parenting crap; she is the particular reason; she does not know I am thinking of her, she accepts me. I do not accept her. I love her. I do not accept her or anyone. Because to do that would mean I would not be in the Pacific right now. In the warm water. With bubblebath, pink, all foamy around me, like a Giant just gargled with pink mouthwash and spit it out. It feels good. I play with myself. I was caught one time by mother when I was playing with myself. She only smiled and closed the door to my room very softly. Come back, I wanted to say. It's that terribly close soft room door closing that echoes loudest of my brain in my nightmares.
My dreams are all unreal. My nightmares are real. I am a sex machine. I live in a dusty grimy room three buildings down. I hoard my money. I have no friends. No acquaintances. I am a friend of two members of the club known as rough trade. I trade with them. They see I am not messed with. They never physically harm me. There are other ways to get the same effect.
I stay by myself. I read a lot. I don't eat much. I work much of the time. I watch TV some on my broken down little ten inch set or however big it is, on which the picture roils and rolls. I spend a lot of time washing the cum out of my mouth/hair/asshole/etc. And when it gets real bad, when the loneliness grips you so hard with such intensity, it is a physical being and you want to scream, then I go to the Pacific ocean, and I think about Venice, not the one in Italy, but the one in California, so I wonder what it was like, remodeled after the Venice in Italy, by a man who could not go home so he brought home to him, and what the thrill rides were like at the amusement park, ancient dinosaurs brought back to wild screaming life, according to Ray Bradbury, and I drift in my huge sudsy bubble bath ocean that is so friendly and close in, remembering my childhood home that had lots of windows and was quite large and very airy and friendly and had comfortable spacious rooms, with even a living room fireplace that crackled flames all winter long, nice and drowsy, hypnotized by it, lying on the thick piled carpeting, warming and dreaming and drifting in the evenings and on the weekends, and many windows with much sunlight coming through, with expensive little bric a brac and nice furniture, everything tidy and in its well ordered place, with everything smelling of Pledge and Spic and Span and Comet and air freshener and the ineffable sadness of growing up and growing old, our sloughed off cells swept and vacuumed from where we lived, pretending that age was not happening, ignore it, it will go away, and a color TV and a fridge that held food and drink for any time I wanted it, certainly not now, even though I've got lots of money stored away in various places--you don't think I'm going to be telling you were they are, do you?--with which I plan to see Europe one day real soon. There is method to my madness.
And I remember my mother, that final bath time, the way it would never be again, pushing a damp strand of hair out of her eyes, washing the cold winter sky and cold winter snow and winds off me, and I remember how she touched my penis, soft hands, warm hands, and my penis grew to them like a willow tree responding to quick and true summer, and she washed it and my tiny balls too, and I smiled real big up at her, little devil, she did not look at my face, but down at my penis, holding it above the suds and the bubble bath, intent on it, curious, fascinated, she rubbed her finger on the underside of the shaft, it trembled, it danced all on its own, o the tickle was wonderful, my little balls got so tight, and she suddenly let it go.
And then she heavily hugged my shoulders to her, scrunching me against her as I could feel with the side of my face her mostly exposed left breast, though not her nipple, and I got harder then especially, my toes crossed I was so excited, I wanted her to pick me up and wrap a big terrycloth robe around me, and...hold me to her naked body and...what?... and she touched me one more time and looked at me, brought her face to mine. I think I dry came. I don't know. I think so. It was the last time I was to be close in any way to another human being. Back then, I thought it was my destiny and my right. I was wrong.
I wanted to be with her forever, and she kissed me on the lips, was there passion there?, and touched my nipples one at a time making them so hard they became sore like my little penis did, and then she drew back slowly like a lovely melody fading away into a gold leaf background, and she told me in her soft musical voice, to get out of the tub and dry off and dress (she had always done that for me, it threw me off balance, made me scared--why this?) and left the bathroom, closing the door softly, another one of those closed doors softly echo that will reverberate in my skull forever.
So I did what she said. And she never touched me again. Never was close enough to me to touch ever again. Never kissed me when I fell and scraped my knee or did well on my report card or on Christmas or my birthday. There was never one more human physical contact between us ever. She was always polite. She listened to my problems. She tried to help me with my homework. She bought me presents for my birthday and Christmas and in-between. She was a generous woman. And she knew what she was doing as well. She treated me from that point on as though I was someone else's child she was looking after momentarily.
She was killing me with indifference. And she did it on purpose. The touching that last time. And the aftermath. To punish me for the rest of my life for that one thing. Perhaps punishing herself as well. I was a pawn in a non-game of one. And she knew all along. God, that was the eternal embarrassment for me. I thought I had been so clandestine. Because she made me hard and I so longed to suck greedily the nipple of that left breast my face lay against, that she was pushing me against it and at that moment I would have given the whole world to do it, to have her with me. There are many ways of killing a person. For my money, indifference is one of the most effective methods there is. It's like fighting against a cloud. There's nothing there.
So I lie in the ocean, my bonny (or is it body?, I hope it's bonny, for that's nicer sounding, though neither makes any sense) lying over the sea, and I see the room I lived in when I was small, the books on the shelves, held by book ends I made at summer camp, the desk, the monster models, the Laurel and Hardy poster over my bed which was small and nice and warm and inviting, and I see the bathroom that became the loneliest place in the house and I lived with the undisputed fact that my own mother thought I was sick as sick could be. And had been just teasing me. Pretending that she too was sick. To make a joke of me. I was, in effect, her trick. I will never be a trick again. She degraded me with her late blooming morality. I think that is all morality is good for, if you want to know the truth. Morality is always a very mean thing.
So what you do in the bubble bath is you embrace yourself and grip your dick and jerk it and jerk it and rub your balls and stick a finger up your elastic ass cause it makes the whole thing more electric, and you pinch your tits which adds to the electricity, And you dream you are in Brussels in front of the little bronze colored boy peeing statue, at the same time you are in Denmark, looking at the statue of The Little Mermaid, and you keep trying to figure out a way to move them one in direct front of the other, and you arrange and rearrange it till you think you will die from the frustration and the fury.
As someone (a shock--someone else is here) says "turn over," and you are not in the ocean, but on dirty sheets; it's a woman who is licking your back and ass. Do these people even own their own names? Do they have faces? Do they really look to themselves as water faucets as they do to me?
You do not pretend it is her. You have never pretended that since she told you to finish up by yourself and she never touched you again in your soiled staticky lifetimes together. But of course, the woman with you now could be your older sister and she says "I've always wanted to fuck my son." Tremor in her voice; shame in her voice. Then a little more daring-- "I sucked him off one night; he was asleep and he never knew, thought it was a dream I guess, didn't wake up, just shot some blanks in my mouth; but he moaned a little, squirmed a little; it was so beautiful; to feel him in my mouth; I was so cautious; so filled with love for him; I couldn't help it; he looked like a little tow headed angel lying there asleep. Wake up, I whispered, oh please wake up. Then I let him go and rearranged his penis and went away after a time after he turned away from me. I was scared he knew. And would laugh at me. He did not. That made me sad. Do you think I'm wrong?"
To which I said as I beckoned to her to lie next to me in the cramped bed, she all middle aged and mealy and primpy and silly, "We've got half an hour to do this. Fuck or suck or talk, which is it?"
She pushed away from me and fell comically on the floor. Like a big stupid lost frumpy doll no little girl would be caught dead with. I laughed at her as she landed there on her ass, and she pouting, near tears, on that awful filthy floor and she a plaited doll, a matriarch from the suburbs, looked it, too fine clothes, and Gucci smelling, probably had her damn credit cards in her bag, and a wad of money too; sometimes they get off being stolen from; I am not a thief; I always give them their money's worth; they are the thieves; they keep themselves hidden; thank god; and she too stupid to take off her expensive jewelry before she went slumming, as she begin trying to get off the floor, after her hand slipped three times, which made me laugh harder, down to deep in my stomach, and she went down on one knee, cursing, her face sweating profusely, she was already drunk, beginning to stagger anyway, the make up that was running down her too powdered face like clown make up on an especially hot night in an especially groady tent, and the expensive hair style, hair that came undone and frantic, not hiding what she really was, then finally after she amused me no end, she righted herself, straightening the clothes she still had on, and told me, exasperated, batting at her hair that had become all cobwebby, breathing hard, too fat, "You're beautiful. But you could be a damn shot kinder."
""No." I said, my head lying on the pillow, my rictus smile looking at her, my cock full of juice and hard, me naked and infinitely desirable. "I couldn't. Leave it at that. You want me to fuck you or what? Time's a-wastin'." I smelled the striped old musty dingy yellow sheeted pillows and looked at her, waiting; she was deciding between dignity and lust. She picked, big surprise, lust. She took the hand I held out and we finished undressing her. We drank some cheap booze from the bottle on the wobbly bedside table, they want the better brand?; they bring their own.
Then we got on with it. So she had her fuck and called out the name Teddy at the end of it; Teddy did not hear; neither did I; and then she crushed me to her bulgy ugly body, and tried to possess me or course; I knew she would be a screamer and kicker and crier and yeller when her time was up, therefore I needed to meditate as she worked me over with not a little bit of anger and hitting me, but it wasn't serious, so I let her. I hated her but I let her, and I went back to the Pacific and later I would walk through Cancun and then I would see the tropics when they're wet with rain, from the song of the same lyrics, which was my mother's favorite. She's the one who played the goddam piano. Not well. But with fervency. The piano was indeed in the living room. The lighting was indeed blond. She did sit on the mahogany piano seat. The living room window did indeed show children in cameo outside playing. She did hunch her shoulders and concentrate with furrowed brow. Me? I was in my room reading. Trying not to hear that music. Me, I hear music, I can't get it out of my head. It just rat runs in my mind forevermore.
. It didn't hurt so much to hear that song in my mind lately. I didn't have to try to turn it off as fast, like I used to, and always failed. The woman was sucking me off, pretending I was her little boy. You trade some. You win. You lose. And you wind up with the person you never wanted to be with after all, especially the one you thought was heart's desire. You see his fingernails are not trimmed as cleanly as they once were. Or there is a little too much dirt under them. And down you go. You try not to. Try to climb back to land. But it's become a crumbly ledge and there is no purchase there. The devil waits in Samara. Patiently. For you to run to him, thinking you have escaped from him way back there in Damascus. And not the anal smell. Or the popper smell. Or the sad smell. Or the weed smell. Ever again
And you keep in mind, you dwell therein, Europe and your own beauty and the future and fame of life up ahead. Hey, I'm only 17 after all. I have all the time in the world. God, she humps like a walrus.
The end
Timothy Stillman comewinter@earthlink.net