"I of Newt"
by
Timothy Stillman
JBS Brown was not a man who believed in anything. Halloween was Christmas was Arbor Day was St. Switzen's Malarkey as far as he was concerned. All he knew this angry red hot sweat sticky afternoon in mid August was that he was hot and tired and sick and he was just heading up the stair well to his walk up to bake and fry in that tiny fan flensed bug trap of an apartment when he stopped, looked at the painted green (once upon a time) wall of darkness and heard him again.
Newt. Damn Newt. I of Newt JBS Brown had begun calling the little boy who wasn't there I do not like thee little boy fair so would you please get out of my hair et. al. Because Damn Newt. I of Same was not there. He was Brown's sweaty grimy white shirt collar. He was the stench Brown carried home from the pretzel factory in this ass end of L.A. (City of the Angels, City of the Anglos, not that many any more; mostly Spics, wetbacks, dark skin all round, like Brown was dark from the sun of his dreams--not from the sun of broil, because he unlike most of the denizens of this fire hazard hole of an apt. building made of stucco and ground round and Fritos and failed dreams and boiler plate antics of sex that stud through the paper walls of one prison cell to the next here in Ratville Arms-- worked all day long, and didn't sun bathe on the fire escapes or the stoops but from the inner sun of himself.
The inner sun he could not shut down. Where it was green and wet with rain kissed skies, and you could lose yourself in a paper moon at night all white and eerie in the dark tacks up there, when you believed there was something behind all of this, and you could rip away the shroud and see for yourself. The inner sun of a childhood movies long ago made the child once JBS Brown believe in, if he could only get there, wherever there is. And there was where I of Newt lived.
And in that sun, I of Newt flourished. And he was not florid and beefy like the man who had to come home to the naked little boy crying every night almost, save for comic relief when Brown brought home some hooker who was more bedraggled and betrayed by life than the last, then I of Newt kept his distance. And shamed Brown. Like the broken antenna cry up there. Soft. Plangent. Like other soap had washed the boy and he was forever guarded by it. Forever lost and adrift.
If the kid wasn't so damn cute. If his pecker didn't stand up and lean to the left a bit like it did. And Brown not knowing if he was seeing the self he could have been. Or a movie kid who haunted microscopically his dreams, all subconscious screaming tiger like to get out. Or if it was a real kid. Some kid of weed heads. Some kid hooker. Some kid who was forever beyond his reach. The kid's eyes were blue as a sea at a beach you saw on travel posters.
And it was always the same. The awayness of the boy. The little boy Newt witches should gobble some time and get him away from Brown. Away from that landing three or four more steps to get to. Right outside Brown's cantilevered board door. Curled up as in a comma. Curled up as in a pain that had a name and a form and a face. Legs drawn up. Little balls beneath and little asshole open in the shadow.
Because the boy in the shadow was so bright it half burned Brown's eyes out of their sockets. It hurt to look at him. The boy brighter than the sun. But Brown and his aching eyes could not turn away. The boy was what was called by the French as surreal. And that was more than real. And it made Brown mad. It made Brown mad because he had had to name the boy Newt. Why Newt? he had no idea. He just knew the boy was a little bundle of bone and pink tantalizing flesh. And he was wrong here. In the grimy air, on the gummy punked up peeling off linoleum. In the sweat of the day that never ended. The boy who never talked. Or cried aloud. Just who never knew Brown was there or anyone at all was seeing him. Could there be other I's of Newts elsewhere bedeviling people, though?
Standing again before the kid. Brown's shoulders sagging. His coat on his left index finger, coat slug over his back, given up, given in, waiting eternally for the boy who seemed to be eternally there. Some poem maybe he forgot a long time ago. Something that made the boy become almost everything to the man. And soon, everything.
This was not Brown's M.O. This was not the rap sheet the great gods had on Brown, had they anything on Brown at all. Brown was no poet. He was like his name. Initials and muzy coloring. Between dusk and night. Neither one thing nor another. A working stiff at a pretzel factory who hoped Newt (Newt Minnow?, nah, not the reason, some other name from TV probably he had heard once and forgot) would choke on a pretzel some day and faint and that would be the end of Newt (the beginning of a frog?, would the boy turn less beautiful, turn from gold to green?, start bloating up?, getting frog legs and frog head and eyes?, and a ribbit instead of crying?--change of pace at least.)would just kindly depart the premises.
and let a man read his dime store paperback and sleep some few soggy hours, dreaming about dames who had begun to have sex with little boys who looked uncannily like the one curled comma with the big feet and the jug ears and the corn gold hair and the bony butt, and the little stick penis that Brown could not stop thinking about.
He had asked Newt the pertinent questions--What the hell you doing naked in front of my door?, get away `fore the vice squad shows up! Reaching down, that first time, after which he no longer tried to touch him, to tug him away and send him somewheres else, Brown's hand went straight through the knifeblade shoulder and then straight through on its downward trajectory to the boy's rib cage and straight onto the boy's crotch, as did the remainder of Brown, who fell headlong through the boy right to the thud on the floor of green and yuck.
And Brown tangled up in a boy like no one had ever been before. He screamed, Brown, Newt took no notice of the man lying in the same space, the same body, closer than Brown thought anyone could get to anyone, before Brown began hauling himself up and stifling the scream that had started way down deep in his bones, as he tumbled away and slammed his back into the opposite wall, heart pounding, scared shitless.
After that, he had gulped, tried to steady himself as best he could against the wall, and had rushed through the boy, to his door, unlocked (steal away, anyone) and had bounded into his flat, thrown himself on the little ugly beer unwashed smelly cot, shook its tentative foundations, put his hands over his eyes, then over his ears, then curled up into his own comma, and went into a high fever. That never really left. Through various stages of fear, of things of the night, of himself, of his brain corroding, of possible DT's, of some kind of blackmail--he half expected some photog to rush up and take a snap shot for Keyhole magazine, but who was JBS Brown to appear in the august pages of Keyhole magazine? (and blackmail for what? for a fast haul of black-market pretzels?), through eventually to sexual thoughts, admit it, the kid turns you on like blue blazes, man you would like to suck that peppermint stick, it had taken days weeks who knows? But he had stopped thinking about anything else, except, be there, don't be there, tonight, go away, stay, never let me see you. And then the boy had started jacking.
Off. In front of the man's door. No one had ever caught them together in that hall. Brown, if he had thought about it, would have considered it an obvious blunder of cheap detective novels, or not a blunder at all, just needless details to hinder the plot from bubbling fast and faster, but there was more on his mind and today like recent days before, in the dust motes, from the little yellow window at the end of the truncated hall, in the golden insouciance the boy carried round his body halo gold, the boy had pulled his legs down flat in front of him, and had begun touching himself, his face still, his body quiet, his expression muted, his eyes of blue sea sad as could be. As Brown felt that tickle down deep in his stomach. The excitement. The butterflies. The relief. The frustration.
The boy's penis was still enveloped and its little golden head was sticking sweetly out of the foreskin. The boy delicately rubbed with his left hand, not pulling the foreskin down all the way, using his thumb and index finger on either side of the shaft, and it seemed to Brown that I of Newt was trying to have as little fun at this as he possibly could, and it seemed the boy was succeeding admirably, as again and again Brown day tripping watched the little boy dry cum, and his penis jerk a bit, as the boy closed his eyes momentarily (and Brown was convinced I of Newt could see through the lids; he didn't know how he knew, he just did) and the boy's bony ribbed chest would heave once or twice a bit and then he would stop, maybe a soft half sigh, then he would draw his left knee up and lean down and kiss it just lightly, part of a code, part of a ritual the boy's penis took part in, but the park of pleasure was not for any of the rest of him.
The boy in summer. In green grass, in a summer shower, but the sky still vermilion blue. Brown expected to see Lassie bounding over the green hills of England to her master at any moment, and the dog would bark and the boy's face would come to life, and he would get up on his knees and hug his dog and everything would be right as rain again and Brown would see that hot little butt unhindered. But no go. Here in the pit of L.A. that was smog and heat and sweat and haze and don't let that dry weather crap fool you it was sweaty as an ancient gym sock never washed and smelled the same too, where the shadow show was so impossibly lighted and bright and highlighted that Brown could count the pores in the boy's pink skin..
It about broke Brown's heart--this kid, the silent crying, the way his face didn't change or shift even then. The tears just rolled down his face and lingered at his mouth where sometimes the boy's red tongue tip would take a bit of the tear and touch to it, take it inside, while the rest of them rolled on to his chin and a few made it to his chest and a fewer still to his crotch where now his tiny penis was shrinking even tinier. Brown's heart was not one for breaking. He just wanted it to all go away. He didn't want to feel what he was feeling. In the pocket of his tired old rubby grubby coat that was slung over his shoulder on that index finger that he vaguely realized was getting pretty tired being pointed backward like that, was a new Jim Thompson novel, "The Killer Inside Me."
Brown loved Thompson. And he wanted to read about the grifters and the killers and the way Fate doesn't give a damn about anyone expect the bastard who don't deserve their riches which were pretty meager, but consider the contrast if you will, and you just have to throw your arms to the skies and laugh and forget the whole damned stacked deck. So thinking, Brown merged, "The Boy Inside Me," or, literally, that first day he fell for the kid, "The Me Inside the Boy," and he thought he would just step through the boy who remained there hunched, pained, dispirited, fingers idly ticking away on the roiled ugly stained floor that was green grass and ground of summer to him, beside Brown's broken brown and black streaked dirty door, but I of Newt was always gone the next morning when Brown left for work.
Which worried Brown all day long, more and more, pretending he didn't care, in the pretzel factory dust and the dough as he loaded the crap into boxes and the boxes into trucks, what if I of Newt doesn't come back?, what if I never get to lean against the wall and be excited and hurt and sexed by watching that kid fondle himself as though he doesn't know he is there, Newt, at all? What will I do? Take a hooker. God no can't stand them. Dirt and sad and angry and red fury and sick in the guts with drugs and crap. Never again. The disparity. The dual language. The symbolic finery that gets into the blood of a man and makes him want to tear his skin off to get that finery out, all molded and torn and rained on and ancient with despair. Never that again.
Oh kid, Brown said or thought, there in that hall seemingly forever empty save for I of Newt and himself, why can't I touch you?, why can't I hold you while you play with yourself, you in all that gold, you delineated (thank you Jim Thompson and Richard Matheson and Lion Books for teaching me real words they never heard of at Podunk U all hot shots and Shropshire bore Auden and "Jane" Mansfield and gobbledegoop who cares poetry; this was the real stuff, the stuff everybody hides from in their fake "reality" so they can go about their hidey ho lives like they got the guts for it, like hell) little beautiful freak. You little golden rain drop you don't even know how to do it right. To jack.
Off. You gotta fist it. You gotta put a piston to it. You gotta get the body in coordination. You got to get the legs moving. Have fun. Finger your ass. Move around. Pinch your titties. Rub with both hands. Fist and fist some more. Play with your balls. Sink your teeth into your tongue. Imagine fucking. Imagine being fucked. Hold up your legs. Feel the dick going inside. Scream. Pant. Sweat. Come on. Get some life into it kid play ball. PLAY BALL. You look so damn lonely and I'm here and you're in some kind of parallel dimension or something and I gotta look at you not knowing I am looking at you, and I'm nothing that's for sure, just a big beefy guy with a flat top and a little yen to look at young boys when I shouldn't cause it'll warp their psyches or something, and one night recently, sorry to break your heart sweetheart, but I had this dream.
I was walking around in Kresge's or somewhere and there was this boy--not you I'm sad to say, not a boy I thought particularly good looking even--dream within a dream, and instead of turning away from him, I looked right at him, right into his eyes, the eyes that looked at me, looked away, then looked back, and I was still looking at him, scared to death I was, in my own private dream mind you where they can't kill me for anything--but I have no doubt the moral thought police are working overtime to correct that situation--and he looked so angry, as he passed by, turning his head to still look at me, and my eyes were still fastened on him, and his face was getting red and sweaty and his eyes were getting big and angry, and I woke up and I wanted to come out here to look at you.
To see if you were still there. I lay in that sog log of a bed and my heart about came out of my chest, and I wanted to know if you were out here since in was only midnight or so, but then I couldn't get myself to do it, because I thought, if you weren't, then I couldn't have the illusion you were guarding the door and keeping me safe, like I was the Newt and you were the JBS, WITHOUT THE DT'S YET, Brown--
And if I become you then I become you and that's all there is to it, if you are in some other dimension, and we switch places and you become me, then I will remember you, and I will make you see me, because I am now aware of you and you are not of me, and I will reach out to you, I in Newt, and you in JBS--
--and you will pull me out of wherever and whatever summer planet I am in and on, and we will be in the same world and we won't be stuck like this, and I'll hold you and you can hold me and we can go inside my room and I will be golden and you will be the big beefy that once was me, and we'll change bodies back again or we'll stay in the same bodies, it doesn't matter, not to me, but the thing is, which ever one you wind up in in whatever necromancy we conjure together, you, I of Newt will always be the hottest lay of all time, God, how I want to curl my legs around yours and protect you from harm forever--
-- and special and sexual and important and the best and the bravest little kid in the whole of creation, and I will teach you love and you will teach me solitary masturbation and I will reach over while you are stroking yourself if you are in your own I of Newt body, and I will take your hand off your penis, and say, no, here, try it like this....
Water falls happen in L.A. too, Brown guessed. He might have just come from a dunk in a very hot ocean. The boy never perspired not one bead. But Brown...
...He felt done in. He felt caved in. The boy was there in the green and the gold and soft summer friendly air and the rainy blue sky, painted there in vivid proto colors, beyond human, beyond imagining, so extraordinarily beautiful, the realization was coming in layers to Brown's mind, that I of Newt should have angel wings, and maybe that was what the boy was becoming, and maybe that was why Brown had named him I of Newt.
Now a boy evolving into even more than a boy soon to be ethereal soon to be angelic soon to rise to the sky and there realize forever more his extraordinary majesty, his wondrous nakedness, his unashamed hard penis, his face not of scorn and censure but understanding and true warmth, not of bare bones and stubby fingers and toes and jug ears and eyes that now wept soundlessly and almost with no self pity at all, as though I of Newt was crying for all the Browns of the world, and some day knowing JBS Brown got as close to touching perfection as anyone could ever reach out and touch it and that was not close enough.
For boy would always find himself alone. And wanting. When he was so extraordinary and the center of creation. Who thought himself ordinary. Or less than ordinary. Rejected. Revoked by THOSE WHO KNOW BEST. Or all alone from his beginning to his ending. Never having seen another being like himself. Or any being at all. And would never know that Brown and everyone else if they could see him, could see to the boy's golden molten core, would die for him in a heart beat without a second thought. And that Brown thought, was so ineluctably, so unbearably sad, the tears from his eyes beginning the fall, he had not cried ever he could remember, even when he got beat up in a street gang on Olivera a long time ago, and the tears were of course silent as well as the boy's.
I'm here. See me. From one to the other. For sure.
I'm here. See me. Please from one to the other. Please.
Thanks a helluva lot for the irony, God, Brown said aloud, bitterly, with knives in the words, as he stepped through the boy, momentarily hating him, and slammed into his apartment, threw his coat off his aching index finger, sending the paperback flying across the room, and throwing himself on the threadbare moth-eaten old burgundy or something colored couch with the wild spring in the middle and the sagging where he bounced--ouch--his head.
Thanks, God, for the great big favor. Laughing your royal ass off at this right this minute I bet. And then Brown laughed and it was a scary laugh he had never produced before, and then his heart thumped harder for a different reason. Let I of Newt still be out there. Please God. I'm sorry. Then, this is me begging God???? What is happening to me? Boy they are going to put you in a nut farm yet. But till then and then after:
Let him be there tomorrow night. Let me be a Peeping Tom. Let me get my jollies out of watching him at least. What a perfect set up for a guy like me. Me invisible to him. That was an old dream of Brown's. Lap of luxury, what more could I want?, he thought, getting up with pain in his legs and the small of his back, and going over to the window, raising the brown paper shade, and turning on the desultory little half working silver fan. Then he went over the side of the crackerbox room where the book he had thrown lay and brought it back to the couch.
The light from the window hazy but strong and yellow good for late on a summer night, he opened the book, careful not to crack the spine or crease the pages--books deserved respect, so did people, but that rarely ever happened, so you should treat books nice at least--and he turned to the first sentence, first page--"As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop, his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony."
Yeah, Jim, yeah, the man thought. How can you say it any better? Then, settling in, Brown read the second sentence, and found out, and then the third and for awhile forgot a little about the boy outside the door, guarding the man, who had no need of being guarded, who had always taken care of himself in this man's world, from monsters in front of his eyes, in his head, in his dreams, and out on the streets, in the City of Angels and day ticked to night and you hope it never ends.....
the end
Timothy Stillman comewinter@earthlink.net