"Childe Gurley's Pilgrimage"
by
Timothy Stillman
M. T. Gurley was a preponderance of nothing much really. Only that shadows fell less deeply this summer and his childhood shame was in being known as Gurley Boy. Because he was a minister's son and because he had been caught breaking no one's heart, but instead had his own broken by enough boys, by enough lies. So he came to this island with his parents, because there was a lighthouse here, and there were shoals and a rushing sea coast, where summer clung in fierce iron gray blueness, and he stayed in his parents' summer house until sundown which was late even in Maine this time of year. He would run into the sawgrass and past the dune fences and he would tumble his eyes to his lighthouse, proudly standing there all slate and gray and important and made of steel and dreams cast as warnings to ships at sea. Warning one: Do not mess with me.
M. T. Gurley had long black hair and he had a nose fleas could ski down, and he had a body that was not much to look at, but he had love in his heart, in spite of everything, in spite of the let downs and the push downs and the taunts of Gurley Boy and no one called him anything else, not even the teachers, because he was a minister's son and not anything in the world really except that. Oh, he loved Jesus and he loved church and he loved his father and the Bible and he loved the things in the Bible that were so twisted no preacher had the guts to even admit they were there. But M. T. Gurley knew about God commanding the boys and men to cut off their foreskins and build a mountain out of them to His Honor out in the desert, and if that wasn't sick enough, there were lots of other things in the Good Book too. But he was a dreamer and he was not a gurley boy because he was not of a girlish figure or demeanor but he had all the stars for himself in June when he came to the island that was in the shadow of the lighthouse. Where he was permitted to walk its widows walk at night and have the run of the place if he wanted, since it was all mechanized and required no human hand to operate it, and if there was one thing M. T. was not, and recognized far and wide for it, that was human.
So he would run into the lighthouse door, like into the bolted belly of some massive comforting safe and secure whale, and he would run up the clanging stairs and it would be the light of gray old navy inside there, all feelings assure and all blotches of the outside world left caulked at the door, and up the stairs in circular he would run and he would doff a piece of clothing at each curve, because he loved to be naked there in this machine that warned of danger. And he was a danger to be warned about, caught fulsome in the eyes of the night that were the yellow beacons going round and calling round again and again, until at the top of the lighthouse he was a naked boy and he did not have skin sallow and his face was not pockmarked, for he was of shadows and his hair would stream out on the heavy breezes of night, as he stood on the walk, under the beacons clacking and clicking circle and down into the depths of the sea calling all wrecks to be before their own time and thus save their souls and manifests before the crash on the rocks happened.
He would thrust his hard on to the night, he would shout out, look at me you perfect world you world of blot splat football heroes and liars and braggarts and pigtail pullers and silly ass boys with your silly ass rules, look up to me, see my big balls banging against my crotch, see my dick as long as from here to the grave of Moby DICK, and he would laugh at the joke and he would scream out, see how puny you all are down there, I could fart you out of existence any time I wanted to, and he would run around the walk way and he would feel the bareness of his feet and body and flanks and he would put his arms to the sides and windmill them, he was whatever stars came down and birthed a god because there was time to be a god, because there was the necessity of having one. There M.T. Gurley with the machine of light inside you, thrumming into you, using you as the cockleshell hero that was forever getting it wrong on purpose, forever failing Math tests and biology tests because there was a method in your madness. And that was to ring your left hand around your cock, good size for a boy your age, nice springy thing, M. T. said to M. T. Gurley, and to hold it like this, thwack it, palm it, hide it, can't hide that massive member, stick it between your legs, then let go and it flaps up so painfully fast and hard and thick and ponderous that it almost takes your navel off your stomach with its force.
Matthew T. stick with me the best is yet to be, and he would dance in the fairy dust his blocky body could not create in reality, and he would hear the moans of lost sailors down there on the shoals, the slippery shoals, the actuality and the slippery sound of the word "shoals" like sheep gathering, like sheep lost, like shoats in the misty dumpy dawn getting it all wrong and clunky and hind quarters where the fore quarters should be, and life is not a meat parade, though Matthew T. Gurley had a massive amount of meat between his thighs, this you should know, because every morning before he got out of bed, he would have the task, so disagreeable, of which side do I hang it on today and which jeans' leg do I have to cram it in so they won't call me Pegleg Pete, but they never did call him that, but a fellow can dream. And here butt naked under the fulsome moon he thought there should be sailors to rescue and damsels in distress and there would be an end to the nursery rhyme that was made of his name and dad said pay them no mind, you are not a queer, you are not a girl, perish the thought, in dad's mind, one was the same as the other, both equally as bad, and just go out there and play football like God intended you to with a build as yours, and Matthew tried every year for the team--but did not make it. Because who wants a gurley boy running touchdowns and getting hugged by the chesty cheerleaders anyway? Not even Matthew T., think what a screw up that would make of a screw up who was trying to get used to being a screw up in the first place. One extra screw would do him in, for sure.
But I want Dad to be proud of me, he thought, as he stood this first vacation night, his hands rubbing himself, pinching his titties which did not look like anything but boy titties and he would not have to wear a bra like Cubby Breathwait, who should talk, said he would because Cubby Breathwait was just a jerk trying to be like all the other jerks, and Matthew wanna see my boner? and Matthew saying get away from me Cubby because your breath is like six month old broken baby wren eggs, and thinking these cubical thoughts, Matthew T. Gurley pondered the fate of jumping off this widows walk even though no one would be widowed with his passing, but to think to jump into the briny sea with thee and what would happen when the Davy Jones eyes are forced open by a curious crustacean or two on their midnight walks in the briny blue, what would those eyes see and would they see me up there caught in proud reverie?
Would they see me asking have you seen Gurley Boy today? and if you have then please know he is the finest lay you will ever luck into, for this was the spot where Gurley first came, this was the spot something worth a damn shot out of his peter and it was milky and warm and it just oozed down like buttered okra the throat of the night to the uncomplaining ground below, the shoals and the sand and the sea and me who was waiting out there for M. T. to decide whether he would be able to fly like Wendy and Peter and all the crews that winged his heart because he had long hair that could not cover up the sadness that was a blind cross he carried because it felt good and minister's sons, he was lead to believe, follow the sea wherever it will lead them, and M.T. Gurley screamed out at an unhearing, uncomprehending world, I wish I was a girl, I wish I had boy paws prints all over me, I wish I was a heating bag the school team mates could toss to one another in their jalopies, in between brewskies, on lovers lane which was really just an old cow pasture back home long devoid of cows, do you girls know how you have got it made in the shade with a spade?
And the night cawed back to the boy naked on the lighthouse now pirouetting so eloquently, in the walk way, now a shadow of butterfly in moth boy form against the round huge yellow lights batting back and forth, and the night cawed, those girls though, be glad you are not they, for they are getting used and taken and passed around and no one respects them or remembers them or knows their names, and you are bright and better than the other boys and you have a heart in you, as Gurley cried back, fuck you oh night of mortal destiny, I want to be used I want to be tromped on I want to be passed around like an old sandwich that's gotten salt in it that no one wants, use me, night, come to me and take away my rubicund of loneliness and I will find you a ton of foreskins and pile them up in a mountain to You like nobody's business if you will just help me get my dick into something besides my hand, my briefs, my jeans, my swimming trunks, on cold winter nights my longjohns, and once when I was really desperate a watermelon, come on night come on deliver I got a quiver I wanna show all of youuuuuuuuuuu. And the night answered M. T. Gurley not, and the night did not wash up any merboys down there half beached to drown in the air, for M. T. to kiss to life again and salve and salvation was not for preacher's boys because preacher's boys had a lot of moxie, had a lot of pluck and Matthew T. was pretty if you want to know the goddam truth about it sick of having pluck, and he touched the warm yellow. And it seemed the warm yellow touched him back, and he felt stupid here naked to the world, but he bent over and he felt his backside and it was pretty good considering, it was warm and hilly and kind of nice if you wanted to know the truth about it, if Matthew T. had been looking for a backside for fun and profit then this would have been the one he picked, only it was his so he had no choice. If he only had a choice. If he only had a brain.
He had to duck every so often, so the lights would swing around him. He imagined a million candles lighting the mechanism, he imagined night coming in pieces through the machine presses inside the lighthouse, and tearing the sheets in half and then in quarters, the night from all parts of the world in all parts of centuries near and far, imagining what was in the night pieces, imagining what came to the people in the houses caught in night and night caught in the houses, where women and men and children ate and slept and worked and dreamed and cried and laughed and had their little worlds all mapped out for themselves and he imagined all those boys in all those bridled beds jacking off with elan, with fortitude, with the sure and certain knowledge that no other boy in the world could possibly ever do it like they did, with such clean lines and such machine sharp precision, in such lineage and such trajectory that caught the cum on the Kleenex dead center every single time like God intended it to.
He wondered about girls masturbating, they must, he supposed, but he had no idea what they had since there was nothing there there, but they did and he wondered if brothers and sisters ever got it on together and if there were any sex roundelays next to those clunky wooden shoes in tulip fields in Holland so far far away where little Dutch boys were mistaken for little Dutch girls, the hair and the same kind of thing they wore on their heads, and how nice it must be to make out where all the tulips were and the wooden clogs next to them sturdy and chipper, and the windmills going round and round like the beat of their genitalia (he had learned the word this year and thought it had a nice ring to it) and oh how he would love for a boy to put a ring in his balls, though he knew, did Matthew T., that that would hurt like mad but then it would also mean he was spoken for, and he wondered now that he was leaning his stomach against the railing and now that his penis was comfortably rolling along with a hard on he could bring to fruition any time he wanted just almost by thinking so, if somewhere or another a boy's mother might be interested in her son a little--too- much. Not some old hag of a mother, not that, but more like an older sister, and maybe she could teach him things. A very pretty older sister.
Like where to hang the moss when the door opens and you have to explain yourself to the sex twist detectors because you know they are out there somewhere, just waiting to burst in, so you let the moss hang on your hard on and your mother's nakedness, as opposed to the Bible's injunction against daughters seeing their father's nakedness, cause when you get right down to it, fathers and daughters getting it on really doesn't come in for a lot of criticism in the Bible, Noah not withstanding, and all of this brought on because some kid, Jack Lacy by name, had brought a book of nudist photos to school one day and Matthew T. had seen exactly one and three quarters photos before Miss Smicer, what a name, right?, had confiscated it to use to pull her pud that late night lonely in her little house by the railroad tracks, or so the boys in the group that Matthew T. over heard, surmised, but it would be great to have a sis and it would be great if sis could find him up here at the lighthouse and it would be greater still if sis had a bro who would be his bro too of course and there would be a kind of sick happiness in the whole thing, and all of this would outsell all the wooden shoes in Holland and the tulips that were perfect purple color which in truth was the color that Matthew T. hated most in the world, next to pink, but anyway if he had a family like that, then the little Dutch boys and the little Dutch girls would have to traipse on their little way home because they could never have a touch of closeness that Matthew T. had with bro and sis if there was a bro and sis to have closeness with though it would be groady and Matthew T. would rather have Sara Grady and her bro Dirk (Dirk for god's sake!, and they make fun of Gurley??) for naked swim buddies, and--Matthew T. idly pulling his penis--did they ever get it on? They looked kind of the same, facially, bodily too for that matter. Matthew T. thus thinking grew a little longer. Son of a bitch! Wouldn't that put the peachy in keen? A new jack off fantasy!!!!! Thank you Mr. Lighthouse and all the ships at sea.
When Matthew T. came this time, he came big, really a lot, a whole dump of a load. Boy wonder if Dirk (God, Dirk!!) came this big with Sara his sis then she must be drowning in the stuff by now, what if Dirk (gotta be queer, name like that) did it with Sara and Matthew walked in on them and Dirk and Sara know it and they pretend they don't see him, and just keep going at it, but then suddenly there is Matthew, his clothes magically disappeared, tongue kissing Sara or is it Dirk? (hard to tell, though not when they're naked hahahahahahha, or maybe, yes) and then the three of them fall in the pool where it's cool and all sorts of great stuff happens.......Matthew leaned against the railing, spent, boy gody was he ever spent. Nothing wrong with me, Matthew T. Nothing wrong with my equipment. Nothing wrong with my imagination. Nothing wrong with me the night and the summer island and this dopey lighthouse wouldn't cure if I could figure out how to get pieces of the darkness in there like sheets of paper and toss all the inhabitants of those sections of different nights around, toss people in England into Amsterdam, toss people in the Cayman Islands into Alaska (freeze their little tukies off by damn ha), might toss their Gods around a little too--here you go Allah, here you go God, Jesus to Hell, Devil to Heaven, Elvis to Nirvana, Mr. Spock to the Pope House, Pope to the "bridge, steady as she goes, yoeman"- yes, there would all sorts of deviltry this sweaty boy could do if he could do what he wanted. If a woodchuck could chuck wood.
But mostly christ on an ugly stick damn but he was alone. Matthew T. with the brain on fire, kinetic wisdom, heart throb and groin thruster extraordinaire, if he could only be the girly boy they called him and if he was willowy and blonde and fine and a sensuous animal little faun dear on his very own, then all the toughest meanest straightest boys in school would be out to peg his hole because they wanted that, because Matthew T. knew they did not like girls, boys did not like girls, they liked boys, they wished girls were boys; girls, who knows how to act around them?, but if they were boys, you are a boy, you know how to act with other boys but yetch that's gay stuff, slow down that puppy a bit...but boys thought girls were hot, at least their hormones and gonads did, thus tricking their owners into thinking it was their own idea, boys thought girls gave great head, they thought they squealed nice like the boy at the moment was the only one in the world for them, but they did not like girls, and if Matthew T. was really a girly boy, hell, might as well try him, who knows? Matthew T. did not like boys or girls, but he thought them really hot and lusted after them, but he did not like them, and he told the night around him the warm close night air with the cool of distant ocean wafting in on him this secret--he had never known a boy or girl no matter how distantly, or closely, even he had had one or two friends of the same and opposite sex for a small amount of time here and there, and they were, quite simply, not worth the trouble; they could not turn him on because they were not what he wanted. They just scared him. Played him. They were irritating. They had to have their own way. They had to be curried like horses and dogs. They had to think they themselves were the great prizes, but it was just their bodies and/or their momentary friendship that was important; friendships which they would withdraw at a moment's notice or without a moment's notice; while they were still his friends, they were already gone, but they themselves were--nothing. It was what they represented that was important. They were just stand ins for the real thing. But the real thing would never arrive. Period. They were the salami wrapping and when you took the wrapping off, you had seen enough, you found these great and glorious dream merchants were wanting and almost as pathetic as you, and you didn't give that much of a crap that they ditched you in the first place. Who wants the M&M wrapper after the candy's all gone?
And that was Matthew T. Boner Gurley's new found discovery. And he told the night and the night said you're just trying to justify your non existence in this world, and Matthew T. Boner Gurley said right back to it and right out loud, guess what, chief?, so the fuck are they. Dancing around on the head of a pin hoping to god they never get this revelation, and Matthew found himself laughing, found his bumpy warty hands all over his chest and pinching his tits and rubbing his stomach, and rubbing his penis and gathering his balls together, and he thought he might be getting more than a little hysterical about the whole thing, but the plaintiff cry of the moment was this--they're all cutting off the other guy's foreskins and they're putting them in a big pile in the desert and they're going to see what God Almighty does with them, since what God did with them was not mentioned in the Bible, and it's counting scalps and it's getting so you can't see anything but the pool the Grady twins represent, because it's not them at all and you could leave them behind in a heart beat, and take their pool and the great sex they must have in it--for Matthew T. was most sure brother and sister were AN ITEM--old Dirk and Sara G.--but they themselves?-- there's another brother and sister act due in five minutes, be on it or be square. And it is damned scary thinking stuff like this. Where does that leave anybody? Does the center of the lighthouse, the center of the world, the engine of everything just come crashing out the bottom?
And Matthew T. smiled and he puffed out his chest and he fingered his penis which was rock hard rock steel what else? one more time and he thought about what God did with that mountain of foreskins out in the middle of the desert, and then decided he didn't want to think about that anymore. He was glad he had a foreskin. He was glad his father refused to let him be mutilated so. He wondered if his father was getting any. Men of god still have prongs after all. Under all the mufti and purple robe and garb and crosses and genuflecting and eating of the sacred body and so forth, there must be some mortal sacred body that Dad was getting down with; after all everything was a unit, some women get turned on by the preacher units, some by the football units, some by the nerd units, and then there were the classifications and subclassifications and categories and subcategorize. Build your own damn robot and pretend he is real. But why? These other preening idiots have already built them for you, Matthew T. thought, preening. It's of themselves and they think they win!
I pretend thus myself, saith Matthew T. Gurley, I say my penis wants your mouth, your cunt, your ass, my mouth wants to suck you off, to eat you, to penetrate to your soul, I want to know the all of it, the Hera and Wonder Woman of it, I want to know the Robin the Boy Wonder (wonder if he's a....yada yada and who cares?, the "real" Robin long dead and gone, the fake Robin was a robot the last time M. T. looked, and Batman a decrepit drunk hi ho), I want to sit on your face and for you to sit on mine, I want to stroke your cock and put it inside my mouth on the left, and put another's in my mouth on the other side, I want to fuck you and duck you and luck you and pluck you and go like there is no tomorrow and go until tomorrow and then we take a five minute break and back in the sack. Cause here's the deal, M.T. thought, as he walked back inside, daintily, mind you, the lighthouse, to sit in the old leather chair, by all the instruments man has devised to measure time in his image, in the main room in its cool shadows and heartily booming device sounds, the till of the clock ratcheting round the earth and keeping it all on steady true and sound course, here's the deal--you can't break a heart when there's no heart to break, or if it's of chromium steel made. So don't worry about doing so.
That should be Asimov's fourth or is it fifth? law of robotics. Keep that in mind (as well as some blackmailable information) and you're set for a party with whosomever you can rope in. And after all, if anyone should know how to do it, M. T. Gurley thought, as he leaned over, and flipped with his left hand the back of his hair, it's me, Gurley Boy, keeper of the night pieces, lighter of the scary black hall way that leads to one thing and one thing only, those dark confines, bursting into a ball of jasmine scented autumn flair flame fire, one word and one word only, this his stanchion and his creed forever more:
SEXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXX.
Blessings on Thee, Proud, Wild Gurley Boy. (As J.P. Donleavy said it about the Ginger Man, so might we say it here about our own dear hero)
the end