And When the Sea Was Life To Breathe

"And When the Sea Was Life to Breathe"

by

Timothy Stillman

(for Randy and Jo--when we were our own version of "The Terrible Trio")

It was Aquaboy I jacked off to back then, he and I in a kingdom of the sea.

He was my greatest jack off fantasy, with his smooth swimmer's body, his naked chest, his penis bobbling, waving in the blue waters. His dick was sometimes soft, mostly always hard, a crescent of pink flesh reaching sometimes up to his navel, and his eyes smiling and his face crinkly with happiness and good times. His chest hairless and there only being a thatch of beginning pubic hair at the base of his cock, with his balls tightly and perfectly formed ovals.

All a dream with his golden hair long and full of seaweed with love, as he danced above the coral shells of pink that could not match his love instrument, and his arms thin and long and fingers full of water that was warm, that came to me unescorted, flirting with me with his puckered fingers that seemed in my nights then of restless singular masturbation and coming, when I always wept afterwards, to be so, and so alone, fingers that seemed to have sucker pads on them, that made him more than alien of sea and partners with Aquaman whom I killed and took the place of.

Always living under false pretenses, then, I. Always living where there were no more rounds of drinks and hopes placed under my belt, so then they would have a chance of coming true, when the night ate into the darkness and high school was a sore place somewhere at the back of my shoulders, and nothing in my head but keeping that placid lovely sexual memory of Aquaboy and his merman legs being that of a fish, the scales of them, the tightness as they fit upward to the V of his small groin.

And all for my bed as I ran down corridors, my hard on almost a constant in those years, think of it, I, whom my friends thought was asexual, I who thought I would escape that way, and into darkness that had nothing breathable in it, save Aquaboy and his sucker pod fingers which sometimes I dreamed took life out of me, and sometimes put life into me. Sunset promises of a wintry sea and rainbows that were guided to that soft penis that he and I held in trust, that he and I shared in wonderful conjoining, thus to always be Siamese twins down there held in firmament by the sea.

And his hands exploring me, with those pruny waterlogged fingers and his face soft and kind and always ready for a smile or a laugh, there in our silent love making, my hands on the shells of pink that were his buttocks, and his hands on mine, stroking, caressing, all safe and all free and all unreal forever, in the star fish of his eyes that made thunder and lightning at the back of my head somewhere, that brought me into night and made it fourth of July sparklers bright as the live long day of high summer noon. His face of golden skin next to my chest, his red lips open a bit and his rabbit teeth biting softly my nipples in electric arc display that was my interior in the cave of secrets that Aquaboy peeled back one by one.

All of this second thought, second skin, until I went to prep school and roomed with Randy by chance not by choice, and came into the first squiddy inkling of love and how twisty it can be and how wondrous and giddy and sad and laughing, and how Randy seemed to have finger tips that were so somehow water logged, they looked as though they might be sucker pods of someone else who in comic book time never aged or left or had one hair out of place or one moment of unable to cum, comic book artist charged with the former, I charged in all ways by the latter.

But Randy, last name of Tosh, and watery boy, Aquaboy I thought the first time I saw him, his face seeming a bit pruny,as did his fingers, as though he really came from the sea, the brine of which I thought I could detect in his presence, as though he were the waves off a costal town of soft pastel hues, from which, out in the distance, there was the sound of lonely, the sound I always imagined the sea making, wash boards set up and denied and rubbed against and then the clothes of going away forever rubbed down them in great pain and soreness that, on discovering Randy, I had discovered had been with me all along. I looked for gills on his neck at times. And more than once I seemed to see them there.

But this was no comic book idealized boy. This was reality. He was real and reality suddenly held ideals to me, closely.

Randy who had fingers with little webs between them. And a bony knot at the side of his left little finger. He told me later that this was an extra finger he had been born with and which had been amputated. This was the magic caul for him. This was the proof along with his face that seemed to have a bit of folds in them as though the flesh had been so used to deep water and lack of sunlight that made him immediately otherworldly to me.

Certain children take pleasure in pain. They take pleasure in the solitariness of autumn all year long, when the world is too sober and too brown and too cold and getting all of those things more and more by the minute which is a series of heavy hollow things ticking by relentlessly, and dream boys have fish tails and not legs to twine with mine, for in the comic books, Aquaboy did not have a fish tail, but willowy legs, shapely and delicately muscled, but I could not give him them, for my mind has never been my own, someone else running it. As someone else was running it when Randy and I met for the first time, in our secret room.

He got there first and was putting away clothes when I arrived at the open door in the white painted concrete hall, the floors of the rooms were also made of concrete, for some reason in my memory, though not in reality, and were painted blue, and Randy was a small wondrous elf and Randy turned from the closet where he was hanging up a sweater, and I fell in love, immediately, I fell in love with his shoulders which were bony and sharp and I fell in love with his mouth which was smile sunshine and affectionate and in which I longed to laze my tongue, I fell in love with his thin almost dainty body that I knew he had and his almost concave seeming stomach, and I tried not to look at the crotch of his jeans, something I had done with other boys all the previous high school years and some of the grammar school years before, and he walked over to me, gave me his name in an accepting kind of voice that did not mar the form of him that looked a few years younger than he was, and he held out his hand.

As though he were used to personal contact, as though he were not fearful of having that hand chopped off if he dared tried physically or mentally or emotionally to reach out to another human being, as though he had never been introduced to the fragility of such a dangerous terrible much longed for contact, and I looked at his eyes which were brown, eyes I longed to kiss softly and his skin alabaster, though others would describe it as pasty, and I standing there like an idiot who had been brain dead for life and my eyes tracked down his arm to the hand held out and I somehow managed to fire my brain enough to reach and take it and look at it, at the sucker pads that held round my hand, leaving a ringlet of love I pretended later, and I went hard and went hard fast and my penis must have been standing straight up in my jeans and my head went so cloudy that it seemed a sea of red mist surrounded me.

He did not act strangely to my so obvious fear of him. All of this took a matter of fleeting seconds and was not as bumpy and weirded out as it seemed to me then and now, for I had learned a cover early in life and Aquaboy was standing there and he had two legs encased in Wranglers, and a chest hidden beneath his orange shirt. He had a form and he was real with only his fingers to give him away, the origin of his secret, and I wanted to hug him, to reach out and put my arms around his winged shoulders and never let him go and he would put his arms around my rounded shoulders and he would hold me tightly and we would make love and a boy's mouth would finally find my penis and hold it and maybe I wept then, or maybe not. But Randy showed me round the campus after he helped me, blind as a bad, put my stuff away, and it was good walking with him.

It was good being, just being. It was early September, the breeze a little cool, and late afternoon and there were some wintry looking clouds scudding through the sky, little thin layers of clouds, as though they had been sheered off, sheered close by a razor, as though they were potato shavings to be passed out to the science class, and to be put on a slides under microscopes, the best to study nature's wonders, and Randy of the name Tosh, and me of the name Aquaman, walked the twining sidewalks of campus of hills and peeks and soft amber lighting of a chandelier of a sun already being hung with the jovial crepe paper glow of coming close autumn in this Northern clime.

Randy my undersea land, Randy my island, and his jokes and his looking at me that day and all the ones to come with him, as though I existed, and though he would have many friends here, he never forgot me, and none of this had ever happened before. I felt blood vessels sprout in me. I felt bones grow where none had been before. I felt skin suddenly on and around me. And though I had masturbated since I was eight or nine, on a very regular basis, I had never known, until Randy, name of Tosh, that I had a penis and that it could give me such celebration and joyous abandon and glee, for I had always thought, afterwards, it was supposed to be me girded with guilt and lucky that was all it was too.

Randy was soft and his skin was downy and I imagined easily his penis with its smooth almost base and just a touch of autumn hair down there, and his penis would be slim and it would be regular length, and he could make it move when hard without touching it, as I could do the same, and we would live the love under the sea, on our cots pushed side by side. I would wake up one morning,

I prayed, soon and soon, with him beside me, before we had had any kind of sexual encounter, I turned from him, sleeping, not dreaming for a moment he would be interested, and I would turn over in the over lay of morning first sun and open my eyes and he would be standing over me. He would be completely naked, masturbating hard and fast, looking fixedly at my penis which he had made hard somehow without my knowing it. I somehow turned naked too. And he would touch me. And I would touch back to him. Really so.

Randy of night seas, Randy of serrated dreams, of horror books and horror movies, and a dick I had longed to see for so long now and had not yet, in this now end term of our freshmen year, (I swam all those months with him beside me, gathering up all the dreams I could) and how beautifully he haunted me, and how achingly real my sea boy ghost was while being a real boy at the same time, see Pinocchio grow, oh yes, oh yes and please do a million times, over. Randy of lanky body that longed to be naked in the sea where the coral castles bloomed, where it was down deep in the abdomen, the thing I felt for him, the pillow thing of nestle and holding and laughing against his naked stomach right below his innie navel and feeling his cock blooming to me, growing to meet me as a stranger on an Irish dusk road in the middle of the winter night, just seeking a place to stay, and willing to use even my poor mouth as a hovel.

The last night of term now, these thoughts, this summing up, the last night before he goes home for the summer, as do I, and we might room together next fall or he might move in with his boy friend and I turn over in my hot bed in the hot room, the air conditioner being broken for the last week or so and not to be fixed till much later since we were to be out of here tomorrow anyway and Randy slept in only his tight white briefs, while I slept in pajamas and felt stupid as hell doing it, but I couldn't sleep in my street clothes and of course not in my briefs or naked. I dreamt of it, you know, being naked, getting out of bed and going over to sleeping Randy of the somehow more and more watery eyes, from what cause?, I wondered, and turning on the light above his bed, to make me of light and shadow show, and to bend over, my hard on against his naked shoulder, and touch him gently on the side of his sleeping face and he waking up with my hard dick right in front of him, begging him.

Dancing for him like Fatima of the gypsies on a cold November night by a warm campfire, castanets in hands and clicking away and colorful full gingham gypsy dress swirling in the night, and the songs of far away and unfamiliar accent, to me anyway, as the night time forests listened to the music of seduction and of the spheres, and my voice saying I know he's better than I, and nicer and smarter, and it goes without saying that he's far more handsome, but please Randy, let me know what it's like, let me know what it is like, just one time. But no of course, he would laugh or run down the hall and tell everybody and then the whole world would know that I was not welcomed in the gay world either, there thus being absolutely no other place to go.

Except in my mind. Except in my imagination. I had once thought if I found other gay people, we could be a community, we could band together against the rest of the world, but it's been a long time finding out I was so terribly wrong about all of that, and so many years made becoming ashamed that that was what I was, but then of course if I could have seen it earlier, that was not what I was after all, because in the act of non conformity, must we conform?, and if so, then where is the sense of saying we don't believe in conforming?

But all of this up ahead, not back here where one day I believed I would meet someone, someone who (unlike Randy) did not have more than one boyfriend, someone who did not sometimes come to the dorm room until early morning or not at all for a couple of days at a time, and certainly never on the weekends, which I used, keeping the room door unlocked of course, to masturbate in Randy's bed and catch my cum in a Kleenex or my hand, daring myself to let a bit of it get on the bed and to my mind somehow or other blossom into me lying in Randy while he lay sleeping one night, while I in my bed on the other side of the small endlessly wide room watched me making out with him, knowing as I knew all my life that was the closest I would ever get.

And in the month of October of last year, Randy who was good at including me in his group, always making sure that I had the chance, wanting me to say no more than a few times, when he wanted to be alone with them--in what?, a circle jerk?, a Maginot Line, Randy?, and why not invite me?, I could be what I've always been, the self centered egotistical clown who comes by rubbing himself against your dream body, by rubbing my chest against his and stroking my penis yearning against a penis not there, and moaning in your empty bed and feeling your pillow and trying to scent your aroma there and saying your name when I cum, sad and funny, you are the clown Randy, always with the jokes, always with the good humor, always with the plans to have a good time, to score weed, to get plastered and to run naked cross campus while others watching, laugh away--as I found out later that he really did that one night, and I in our room asleep, not knowing till after.

And thus then imagining you all the more--naked in the moonlight, your swift proud young illusion legs running perfectly as a metronome, your arms stroking through the cold November air, the night and prep school's campus security lights and those from heaven blending down on you, making your skin seem black and white, Randy running through the sea of the night, bracing it and his soft penis bouncing up and down as though cresting small and then larger waves, his fingers were the fingers of Aquaboy, fingers that could look in the little cubits of water.

And find in them precious things, gold and silver and dreams and fantasies and he would take them into himself for they would make him the treasure chest at the bottom of his and unknown to him, my, sea dreams, and his tight balls bouncing, and also his firm tight buttocks as he ran round the pliant campus in all that cold under the cobalt sky, with the driving thick laced chalk colored snow that fell on him and around him, turning him into an immortal boy in a forest of mine. Such dreams of him I had that he never did feel, in all that cold that induced in him a warmth, one that came from my lying in bed imagining when he was there running naked and his body unencumbered, or lying next to me, mere feet away, and how I wanted to go to him in the night and put his penis in my mouth, take it out of the BVDs he slept in each night, and feel the warm wet hardness of it, to put it against my front teeth and to feel the liveliness the stirring of it, and find it rising like a fakir's snake to the rhythm of my heart.

Something should have called to me that November night, something should have told me he was out there, naked in the moon, so I would have gone to him and would have seen him and would have jacked myself off one more time, not imagining, as I did each night in our room in the dark, whether he was there or not. And I laying awake some nights, while he slept in his bed on the opposite side of the book case desk partition. Rubbing myself, pinching my nipples, being silent, wondering, does he hear me?, is he masturbating too?, could I say his name?, and would he come over to me?, and smile at me his sea face anemone of a smile, and ask me if I wanted any help with that.

I never looked at him at night when he stripped to his briefs, except one brief glance the first time, because he didn't see it, didn't know it, and I was always shy and this was the only way I knew to make anything about me erotic at all, for I knew nothing of that and in a real way never would. Oh Randy, why couldn't you have gone for girls instead? That ache I was familiar with. Then I wouldn't even dream of having a chance with you. That was what was so horribly damned unfair about the whole thing. The old pain feeling good compared with this new one.

So this last night with him, I lay on my side, looking to his bed, trying to see it through the partition desk book case, and he in it, a shadow drinking in shadows of a shadow, his body in a kind of smudged watery mark outline, his breathing soft but I could hear it, his chest moving gently up and down and his warm and generous heart keeping him alive, and I took my hard on out of my pajama bottoms, and stroked it and begged him to let the sea of himself cover both of us in pink skies and winter winds that gale for two boys shivering in the warmth of each other forevermore.

Left so often, when he was out with his boyfriend(s), when he and they were drinking up whatever was around and there was a great deal around, when there was grass and there was coke (Randy talked about this with others when I was around, it was no big deal then) and then there might be acid and he had told me once he had had his bad trips and good and that if I were to try it sometime in the glorious Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds days, then I needed to have someone with me, someone I could trust, to guide me back to a kinder sky if the trip took a wrong turn. I liked to think he had meant himself, and I liked to think that thus tripping, I could kiss him, fondle him, then on the pretext of I didn't know what I was doing, but I was far too tight assed then to try it, even for him, though of course there is always that nagging doubt--

If I had, if I had just even asked him, if I had come into the shower while he was in there, if I had just put my hand on his water cascading crotch in the shower, held my chest to his back, or one morning when he was dressed for classes, if I had put his hand on my hard on and had asked him hey, Ace, this feel like I'm a eunuch to you. But I was a romantic even then.

And romantics watch from shadows. Romantics are shadows. And Randy had been out drinking this last night and had come home in the early morning hours--and he had been so loaded he acted drunk, he sang drunkenly, he stumbled to the bathroom and threw up several times. I sat up in bed, not having been asleep, frightened that he was this way, for I had never seen him or heard him drunk in any way before, even when he had been on some real binges. And I watched him this sea level night. As he lay where he had tumbled into bed, finally breathing a bit heavily, but still softly enough, as I heard a little bubble or two of words from him, in his sea drunk night of dreams and I, helpless to comfort him. Randy who was so soft and had such downy hair on his arms and legs, his boyfriends and girlfriends called him "Bunny".

I thought, why do you do it?, get like this? The desperation of you? When you have so much? When you have the world I would kill for? To hide from what? To escape from what? Rocks and shoals and crashes went he that night and I waited for morning and more placid seas for my friend.

I lay on my side. I thrust my groin at him. I begged him to eat me. To take all of me in his mouth. To float on the sea of my cum directed to him all that school year. Where the beauty lay, and the drunkenness felt good and no old shores and timbers to climb between and cheat time or yourself.

To let me shoot off in that glorious Aladdin's genie magic room of untold delights, of underwater green trees. To let me shudder into him and put my hands on the back of his head and push him up and down on me as I rubbed his cock of heft and girth and dreamed of entwining legs around my neck as I plunged my so soon to be non virgin dick into his beautiful pink hairless asshole, like turning the key that was me all the time, in the bottom of the ocean and freeing all the fish and mammals that swam now beside me, thinking rainbow, thinking safe, thinking home, thinking love.

And I came into my hand and I came some on the bed and my cum smelled like the sea, that little sea we all carrying around inside us, a human attempt to make what he can of his part of the ocean that is our bodies almost in toto, the ocean that powers our hearts that we grew when we crawled out of that primeval sea bed and swamp, and had to carry our oceans inside us, for life, instead of having to live inside them, and all our secrets in there too, in us, in our private hearts, in our mental cataclysms, in our hopes that can have no words except puerile and best not to say anything.

And Randy turned over on his side. I saw in my imagination. And his sucker pod fingers, I imagined him as naked Aquaboy, and he was turning me on my stomach and tying my hands to the bed with seaweed, and he was pulling off his briefs and his dick was small and powerful and sweet and so proudly hard and he pushed into me after setting me, I, happily protesting all the way, on my knees, he entered me and his sea pushed into mine and he was all there was forever and it was oceans of myth and fire and reality and dream laden and coming together and he rode me and he was the all of me and I was nine again and it was a hot summer's day, which I spent for some reason, I hated heat, in the attic of my house where you could cook your brains in the midday and early afternoon hours, but there I would be found each mid day, in a blue spring sprung rocker by the attic windows, looking down at the grape arbor and the garage, and reading my latest batch of DC comics. Aquaman in his own comic book after a few years being a supporting player at the back of the book.

Or Aquaman in the Justice League of America. And on occasion he and Aquaboy of the sea green eyes and the seed pod lids would team up with Superman or Batman and Robin, and I at eight, goggling at the bare and willowy legs of Robin and Aquaboy, Aquaboy in his sea green shorts, and Robin in his own red shorts, both cut high on their legs, giving a lovely detailed views of their thighs, including their inner thighs. I taking out my penis and rubbing it before that window, begging the boy next door to see me doing it. And I so young, cumming without shooting. Warm and watery all over me, though. The excitement of being looked at at those times. Let someone else be furtive for a change.

And Randy was sea and Randy was gills on each side of his neck, and the sea can smother and kill quickly, because the water is a warm and guilt free and sleepy grave, which I sank into each night of watery dreams where he swam to me in comic book colors and comic book art work not nearly as sophisticated and lovingly and artistically done then as it is now, and he was a whisper and the sea was a congregation and I would see him evolved from his comic book drawing, and he would be a real boy and I would be also and both our cocks would grow and grow and I would hold him to me and we would be naked and the world around us would be land that the sea didn't count, that we needn't ever pay a bit of attention to.

And moon shown on Randy, of the name of Tosh, and his face was the face of a swimmer, and his body and he was rushing through the sea of dreams to find a rusty old sailor on a vessel that had not been sea worthy from the beginning. And Randy slept off the drink and morning ticked restlessly on and I, hard again, did the unthinkable. Randy said he might move off campus next fall, though he was careful not to say with Joseph, but I knew. I got out of bed softly as I could imitate a shadow leaving stealthily its owner, and I walked to Randy's bed and slowly oh so slowly lowered myself to the concrete in the hot room and I stripped, I was scared and sad and excited and giddy and out of my mind to do such a thing. But there I was naked beneath his breathing, beneath the shadow of him I could make out above.

And I lay on my back and I stroked myself hard and I spread my legs and I touched myself between them and I bit my lip and I pushed my hard dick down between my legs till it started hurting, then I let go and it popped back up.

I squirmed and I silently called his name and silently said I loved him and my naked buttocks I pressed into the brick flooring in the floor's impossible to enter sea and I wanted him to wake up and I wanted to overpower him if I had to, and I thrust my dick up and held my balls and bounced up and down as though I was riding him, and I felt every inch of my body and I put a finger up my asshole and pretended it was his finger instead and I got harder than I had ever gotten in my life, and I exploded my sea to his sea never to know and I shot silver in the moonlight all over my abdomen and chest and laughingly though, "chemical spill, everyone on high alert, chemical spill" and I lay there with my cum on me and on my hand. I lay there naked and spent. And I was terrified every second that he would see me, sense me, wake up and laugh at me. And such a thing, against all reason, had made me hornier than ever.

But all Randy did, which scraped every nerve ending in me, was turn over, to me or away from me, I never knew, just as I never knew if he saw me at any of this time. I was trembling, perspiring to beat the band, and I knew this was the last time I would see him, except round campus with his friends and he would be friendly to me but this was for me goodbye, as I've said goodbye all my life in one way or another, but never like this. And I smiled then and I got up, my legs trembling jelly, and walked naked back to my bed where I lay for a time before putting on my pajamas. I didn't wipe the sperm off me because I wanted to pretend that it was his.

And for a few hours before dawn, I lay dreamily next to Randy, and our seas met, our seeds met, as closely as they ever had or would. And sometimes, on that final night of the world, I closed my eyes, but mostly I left the lids open and I wept some, little tears that were each an individual ocean of themselves, and Randy swimming from tear to tear from my eyes down my cheeks, and using those tears to swim away from me, leaving me only some photos of him in the year book, tragic maudlin memories and dreams that never came true.

Years later, my mother died. On the afternoon following her funeral, I had gone by her house, our house, to finish clearing it out, for I was having to sell it. I saved till that afternoon to get my comic book collection of my childhood. They were, in all their lurid carnival color and cheap paper and ink, up in the attic subbing for me because I went there little at all on visits, after moving away. The hundreds of comic books were in a cedar chest near the old rocker where I used to sit when reading them.

The attic stairs were treacherous, the stairwell dark. It would be a dangerous chore getting those comic books down and out to the car. When I opened the chest, there were no comic books, only a huge raft of old newspapers in their place. I know who took them, but I could never prove it. I felt my heart stop a second or two as I saw the latest thievery in my life, not knowing there would more to follow, even worse. I didn't fall to my knees then, or scream in anger or agony.

I just thought of those forever stolen comic books that were my childhood and of the Aquaman comics especially and knew now, without single doubt, for I had had a hope all those years, though unaware of it, that Randy would come back, that Randy would hold me and tell me it was wrong I had to do that by myself, and here, he would say, unbuckling my belt, let me show you how, then we shall swim to the sea, to the sea, and you and I forever more.

But Randy had swum off in my tears long before and the attic was hot and I let the cedar chest lid slam down on itself and considered the baffling mystery of why were there all those newspapers in there?, to weight it down so I wouldn't know it was full of newspapers and not comic books, as I used my superhuman strength to carry the massively heavy thing down those slippery narrow dark stairs?, and down the hall way, and out to my car?, and who could have been that crazy?

And so that autumn afternoon, I went to the old blue spring sprung rocker by the attic window and I sat in it and looked down at where the grape arbor used to be, and the falling down garage and the little brick wall extending from it to the side of the house, where a girl and I when very young used to climb over and play cowboy and Indian. I had meant to say good bye to Randy, to her, to everybody. But I felt myself in a comic book. Imagining Aquaboy coming out of one of the panels, as I sat in the attic when I was a young boy, looking at him, his coming out of the page, to hold me and kiss me.

But for a time I did feel myself drawn as a comic book character back in the primitive artist days. And I found myself not a superhero of any sort, but me as me, and swimming down to the bottom of the sea and further down than that, and the sea gathering itself up to say goodbye to me instead of the other way round. And there was nothing more, so I got up out of the chair, with a sigh and, walked down those steep attic stairs the last time, more alone than I had been in all the previous times of my life put together and multiplied by twenty, and I went out the front door and locked it myself one more time, standing on the blue wood porch a moment, looking round in finality, before heading to the lawyers' to hand over the keys, to hand over a goodly portion of my life.

In my car, I started the motor, and I said, prayerfully, "Randy." The name for me magic as Maria's was for Tony, when he said it softly, long ago, in those slum canyons of a desperately hot and painful New York summer, at a time when he was strong and perfect and free and so very happy, for love surely could be granted for him and the girl he had just kissed.. Neither of them knowing what monstrous events lay ahead of them.

For even I have to have someone, or some thing to believe in, even when I've had enough of what has been and is to be, even when, for the sake of my sanity, I no longer believe in any one or any thing anymore. Especially at times like that. Especially at times like now. So that day, I put the car in drive and went on my way.