"Joel in Winter"
by
Timothy Stillman
Winter clutches at the world. It seems a silent scream nailed down too well, too properly. I am a boy of 15 years. It is close to Christmas. There is a snow fall in the offing. I am dressed in jeans, thick overshirt, heavy socks, leather shoes, and leather jacket. I have my hair cut too closely. I always part it on the left, though my barber has said it should be parted on the right. He does so every Saturday afternoon when I am forced to get a hair cut. I get home, the first thing I do, is part it on the left again. He is wrong. I am sure of this. I am in love. The other boy's name is Joel. Like Joel Knox in Truman Capote's novel, "Other Voices, Other Rooms." Joel in the novel is smart and sensitive. Joel in my world is smart and sensitive and beautiful. Joel Knox is beautiful too. Resplendent. They seem to be each the other. Though the Joel I know lives here in the sixties. The Joel of the novel was back in 1948. I can't imagine anyone living that long ago. I can't imagine my Joel living that long ago. By now he would be a middle aged man. By now he might be dead.
I am on the sidewalk, walking to the library. There is no moon. The clouds are thick and black. The cold knifes into me. The stores I pass are lighted orange it seems, dim against the thick black curtain of the night. I love winter. The whole world seems as though it is sad. I am always sad. I like the company. Joel is golden and laughs and smiles a lot. Joel Knox in the novel does little laughing, little smiling. I am angry at Truman Capote. He has stolen my Joel. He has put him in the pages of a book written long ago. Before either my Joel or I was born. But he is not my Joel. I am on a sideline for him. We talk sometimes. He tears at my heart without meaning to. I would lie down my life for Joel. I will lie it down now.
There is little traffic on these side streets in this small town. Church bells close by are ringing with Christmas songs. We have a fake silver Christmas tree at my house, in my living room. It is a stick, to which stick branches are fitted in the holes. I hate that damned thing. I want a green Christmas tree. I want a real Christmas tree. We can't afford one. We would have to throw it out after the Day is over. My mother says that would be sad. I wish Joel would come to my house. I wish I could tell him I love him. I wish I could tell him he has been written about. And Joel could read about himself in the Truman Capote novel where it is always summer, even in winter it is summer and Joel Knox gets to be naked with a girl in a little pool and she bathes him and shampoos his hair. I would love to do that to my Joel. I would love to touch him and hold him and make him not sad. Which is a curious thought because Joel is never sad.
The thing is also Joel is gay. I thought once if I could meet a gay person, then we would be closest of friends. This has turned out not to be the case. Joel has a boyfriend. It crushes my heart. It clutches at me as the winter wind scoops down on my this Friday night. I am headed to the town library where I will hide in the stacks and read books. That is where I found "Other Voices, Other Rooms." It made me cry. It is beautiful and so specifically sad that I thought I would not make it through it alive. That it would kill me. How can a writer from that long ago know my exact heart and put it on paper the way I would if I could?
I think Capote knows how it is. I think all strange bird thoughts as I walk the night, as the wind buffets me, as I pass the Kroger grocery store with people fighting the wind, pushing their wire baskets of food to their cars. The Christmas bells set off on "Little Town of Bethlehem," The bells don't do a good job. One of them hits a sour clang and it throws the whole song off. I wish I could have masturbated this afternoon with Joel. Instead of by myself as always. Fearing being caught in the bathroom. I wish I could stop reading books. They satisfy me too well, and then when I look up at the world afterwards, it is the same empty desolate world. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have my penis. I love it and it loves me. And I wish I could just stop imagining me and Joel and Joel Knox and all the other boys in all the other books I've read. I know it's wrong but I imagine going to bed with Doug Spaulding and Boy and Oliver Twist and the Hardy Boys, and I know there are only so many ideas about boys to be thought of by me. But other writers think so much better ideas, so many more ideas, and I wish I could get inside the pages of these books and be with all the boys I love who are not real. As I am not real. As my conception of my Joel is not real. Stop saying my Joel.
The street corner I am standing on, preparing to cross when the light turns red, is across from the old deserted bus station. There should be paper flying in the wind. There should be sounds of gunfire in the library somewhere. There should be boys running up the aisles and back again and they should be brandishing pistols and screaming out, "why can't I just be a character in a book? Why can't you just see my world which is real, from your world which is not, and envy me?" Wouldn't that be nice? I am what is known as a good guy. I am what is known as not getting any. I am what is known as the nice kid with who you will always be safe. I am tired of everyone being safe around me. I want to tell them the thoughts I think. The thoughts like the town. Laid out in squares. The thoughts like the single car or two passing by as I cross at the light. The boy who obeys the rules. The boy who is lost in this concrete town. Where everything and everyone seems to fit. Where boys sit at their desks at night and do their homework. Where I sit at night and do mine too. A nice hardwood desk. Big too. Sometimes I sit there and I am doing math or history, studying hard in the thick books and writing my scribbled notes in my Blue Horse Notebook. Sometimes I sit there and I find my hand at my jeans. I feel it feeling my boner. I feel it feeling the winter in my life. I want to die. I want to die and show Joel how much I love him. That much.
I pass the deserted bus station. I look in the open garage by it that buses uses to pull into for maintenance. I can smell memories of the diesel fuel in there and remnants of it that are not memories. There was much leave taking at this place. Much coming home too. My mother and I used to ride the bus to Memphis, 60 miles distant, every Saturday morning to go shopping. I always felt happy when we saw the Humco Plant at the outskirts of the city cause that meant we had arrived and would be at the station in fifteen minutes, almost always on the dot. I wish someone would love me. Even if not Joel, then somebody. I wish Peter Pan and Windy would sweep down out of the heavy thin windy cold as kraut sky and would take me to Neverland and I could be with the Lost Boys for all time in a magic place where we could all lie together in a thatched hut and wait for Boy to arrive from his tree house and we would all go naked swimming in the bejeweled rivers and down to the bottom of the blue where we would touch hands and lips and eyes and never have to come home again. I tried to make Joel Knox take the place of my Joel. Make them change places. I want my Joel to be sad like Joel Knox is. Like I am. Like all the boys I read about are. Not the boys in real life. Who are too busy elbowing me away to get past to where they want to be in the first place.
The streets are hollow bones tonight. There seems a lack of persons in the world. Tomorrow and yesterday get blended together. Mixed up. I feel good in my jacket though it is not warm enough for the 30 degree weather. My family is not poor, but close to it if you want to know the truth. I am too tall and too thin and too ugly with too big a nose. I tried parting my hair on the right one time, like the barber contends is where it should be parted, hoping it would make my face look better, my nose less big, though I tried it one full day--Saturday, when I always stay around the house, and no one but my mother sees me--but it didn't work, so I part it on the left again. My face doesn't look any worse that way at least. I shudder with the coils of the cold. I am in the process of reading "The Lost World" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I read it at my study desk in the corner of the living room where, before I came along, the heat stove used to be. In the ceiling above my desk is a circular patch that hides to whole the stove pipe used to use to go through the roof and rush out the smoke. Now we have a wall heater of coils that turn cherry red, when on high, but you have to stand right next to it in this too large living room to get any warmth from it at all. The old heat stove did better, I was told. Somehow, in a way I don't understand, it is my fault it is gone. Much bad things, in a way I don't understand, are my fault somehow.
The library is in the next block. It is a low squat brick building next to the dentist office where I get my teeth worked on once a month. I have cavities a lot and am always having them filled. This too is my fault somehow though I brush twice a night with Crest (the TV ads "look ma, no cavities" do not apply to me) and I eat few sweets, though Coca Cola is my downfall. I have long legs but I do not walk fast now. The library is open until nine on Friday nights. During school assignments I have to do there, it is a prison. Other times, when I go there to read what I want, it is heaven. I do not understand how printed words can transform reality into poetry and beauty. Can take terrible or blocky or hurtful or lonely or dull or burning soul things, and things you would never for a moment notice in real life, and can make them into things known as transcendent, can make them so suddenly intriguing and worth considering, and not running away from. I' m too scared of life to look at it directly. Writers are not. Truman Capote looked at life head on and put it down just the way it really is. But somehow he made it more than that at the same time. Faithful to it, but also, like going through it, coming out the other side, and seeing it for what it really is. But still real too. Odd thing, the human mind.
I want it to snow. I want it to be in the teens. I want to run naked out into the snow late at night and roll around in it. I did that once last year. I did it and it scared me and I knew I would get caught, but I did it anyway, and my little peter almost froze off--my greatest fear in life--and I felt like my skin has turned blue and into leather, and skin as blue leather, take it from me, is something you do not want to think about too much. I just did it for a minute or two, felt like a moron and not a snow angel, and shivered in my bed in my thick pajamas the rest of the night, and had a head cold for three days afterwards. But then what is winter without a head cold? I am at the library now. It adjoins the house of pain, of the man with the drill and the shattering pain no matter how much Novocain they use on me. The library has a thick oak door. Or it should have. Therefore to me it does. It has a golden door knob that you turn and it is always warm. Or should be. Therefore it is. Even in biting cold winter like this, when I walk with my hands outside my pockets to freeze them so they will kill me, I can't explain it better than that, and I put my both hands frozen solid on the door knob and they instantly turn warm and stop feeling pain. I wish I could stop feeling pain. That would be nice. I feel pain all the time. It seems unfair.
The lights inside are dim yellow. Like old tiger eyes, that kind of color, like I know what old tiger eyes look like, all I know about tigers are from Walt Disney nature films, and of course Tigger. Christopher Robin was my first friend. I met him when I was very young and had the mumps and he turned me on and he was pretty and had these shorts that my hands wanted to pull down and see what was under them, and sick as I was, I got a boner, because I guess, also, Christopher Robin was alone as I was, and he had to make up these stories, though really someone made them up for him, and he had to dream up these characters to take some of the loneliness away, which only made it worse for him, I thought, and for me too. It just proved more how really bad and sad it was for him. The lights inside the library are dim yellow like the lights of the Kroger store and some of the other stores I went past, getting here, like the lights of houses also that I passed. Like the winter night was leaching out all the lights. Like the world was going blind and everybody was having to strain to see past the shadows that were getting more and more pronounced, as though they were being drawn, these shadows, by a thick number 2 pencil made by the hand of a real malicious kid who didn't want anybody to see but himself and then he could have everything for himself forevermore. Maybe that would be me. If I could.
The library has a small lobby and one main room with three side rooms. The library in summer is cool and air conditioned. The library in winter is warm as toast. I like the warmth there. It doesn't seem intrusive like the warmth in other places in winter. My house is always cold in winter. I've come to like the cold. More than the hot weather for sure. But library heat in winter is nice. It is comfortable and friendly. When I have to come here to do book reports, it is jangles my nerves and makes me want to leave it as soon as I can, it muddles my thoughts and makes me feel stupid. I am reading "The Lost World" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at my study desk in the corner of the living room because it is like a school book bound the way school books are in one of those cheap greenish blue cloth covers without a dust jacket and a frail sketchy drawing in black of dinosaurs on the cover, like it would be wrong to make the book attractive, like it would make it not like doing work to read. The book is not completely work to read. Though it is difficult to read. Though I am having fun with it. That is why I bring that up again. That is why I like to read books on my own in the library. I got "The Lost World" from this library. I am taking the library home with me that way. Pulling it around me like a comfortable shroud--why do I say shroud? Odd choice of words.
Anyway, that is why I like the library. Because reading even what I want to here is like work, but it's fun too, and if in the midst of work, a little fun seeps in, well, a person can't be blamed for that can he? I stand in the main room of the library. I see the librarian, a plain raisin eyed faced gray hair bunned woman in a severe black dress, at her little metal desk, sitting in her little black chair on castors, looking through a newspaper. I walk quickly to the first side room where the contemporary classics are. For some reason 1948 "Other Voices, Other Rooms" is a contemporary classic. But then long years ago get treated nicer here than in the real world. You get kinder wishes from time in here too somehow. It doesn't hurt as much. I go to the copy of the Capote book, first row, second shelf, take it down, it seems to like me picking it up again, it seems to know me, and go to the corner of the empty book filled room where I curl up with it. I never curl up anywhere on the floor at all, ever, except here. I feel as safe here as I have ever felt. I think it will always be that way. I turn in the Random House hardcover copy to the passages of Joel and the girl and how they are naked and he is getting his hair shampooed. I think that would be very nice. For me to shampoo Joel's hair. It does not have crude drawings or sex words scribbled there by kids. So I'm the only kid to have read this book.
In all that mystery and Gothic heaviness the book is about, Joel Knox looks out from all the greenery and heat and sick smelling heaving flowers, and he says he is my Joel and he doesn't mind if I wash him elsewhere too, because he is tired of being scared and tired of being always on guard, knowing something bad will be happening soon, and wouldn't I like to get naked too, and sit with him in the water and feel the coolness opening up my pores instead of sweat streaming out of them on such a hot Southern day? And Joel Knox gets mixed up with my Joel and I put my hand on the page and I feel his heart beating and I want to take my Joel and me and I want us to read this book together and our eyes could fix on the same words at the same time and it would be like playing hop scotch or stepping on sidewalk cracks and breaking the backs of the kids who tease us. But they don't tease him. They tease me. And now my knees drawn up, the book resting on them, I feel the words with my eyes. I wonder if my Joel would see himself in this novel? I wonder if he would think, how about that?, someone wrote a book about me and I wasn't even born yet? He would lord it over me cause no one has written a book about me. That would be okay though. I would let him.
I want winter magical in this room with the apple green walls, and the smell of old books that is like friendship that will never go away and you don't have to be frightened of it and you can be a good guy and you can get some action too because good guys want action and they want to be loved and they can love, and it's the damnedest thing, I believe, that people who know how to love, and can feel so much, get so little chance to be allowed to openly love, get so little chance to prove how much they can feel, while others who feel nothing except their nerve endings get to play at the games of all that all the time and they're the ones who get the littlest from it except in orgasms and stuff, and just keep having sex and all and it's not love and they don't think about it twice, because they know when this one leaves, another one will happen along, and it's just part of their lives which they don't even look at half the time, and the rest of us have to imagine it from books, and that too seems pretty unfair.
I want to have the boy from the breathtaking Conrad Aiken story "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" to explore "the silent, sliver curve of space with me" and with Joel and with Joel Knox. I want that boy of the broken heart who needs snow to fill it, to take off his clothes and dive into his bed with us, and into sweet cold snowy blowy winter that does not exist except in his mind and go mad with us, escape with us, or die there with us, in the clean fine perfectly shaped Aiken words, and I want all of us to skate on the ice of the rings of Saturn and be naked and be boys and find the dense jungle heat world of summer of Joel Knox the same as the winter world of fancy and imagination come true, even when no one else can understand it or even begin to fathom it like in "Silent Snow.." and I want this winter to be the winter Joel comes to me at my house one night and when I open the door he tells me that we have to talk and our talk will be what I want and I won't have to hide in books anymore or have to recomb my hair every time I get home from the barber shop or have a too big nose or be so scared of life and people and Joel that I can't even stand to be in his presence it makes so many stomach butterflies for me. I want to read "Other Voices, Other Rooms" for the first time. I want to think about the icy parts of it and the ghosts and the fear and the refusing to grow old when one is old already and skin might be pulling off the bone like a turkey's ready for Thanksgiving baking.
I read the naked passage again. I put my hand to my jeans. I feel my boner. It feels good. It feels warm. I want Joel Knox to reach from the book and kiss me. I want my Joel to be jealous of that. I want them both to kiss my mouth and face and it will be like when I rolled naked in the snow for that one mad mournful minute with the deep sky looking down and down at me last year. I want the snow around me and in me and I want my mother to be outside my room and asking the doctor what is wrong with me, and inside I see silver skates and I see far away northern places and I want to sleep and sleep and wake up out of the mirror pool and see Joel Knox and Joel, mine for the first time, waiting for me, and they will take me out of the mirror pool, and they will let me tell them the stories I've read and the day will be ice cold and it will be summer at the same time, and the penis of mine ejaculates now, almost on its own accord, and I feel the little unwell fever rushes through me, the abandon that is like a blip on a radar screen, two or three short dots and dashes, and then it is over, and the book trembles on my legs, and I sit there emptied and sticky and full and as always ashamed. I am a good guy even unto myself. And that makes me less of a good guy. I've not the right. Cause that is what I want to be. Not a good guy. I want to be the bad guys that have all the fun and don't give a shit who they hurt and just take their pecker pleasure, kicks alone, and walk away. They never hurt themselves for sure. I hurt myself all the time. I can't help it.
My left testicle hurts now. It always does when I masturbate. I accept it as my punishment. Because on Friday nights, the library is almost empty, save for the librarian, Miss Delaby, and me, and it is safe to do this here, since I really don't touch myself or make a production of it during or after. I just close my eyes for a few seconds. It is like a faint firecracker in me exploding far away. I apologize to Joel and to Joel Knox and Boy and Doug Spaulding and Oliver Twist and the boy in the private snow field of his room, I apologize for what I feel and what I don't feel. It will never be summer and it will never be the two Joels waiting for me in a mystical world of green and squeaking heat and pregnant with mysteries and horrors and conundrums and heart breaks and revelations and things that are so monstrous they are funny and you can't help but laugh and being so close to life you can hear and feel the throb of the heart of the very deepest part of the world. It will never be. But books. And thank god for books. And Miss Delaby who never bothers me here, who never hovers when children are near, seeing they don't get peanut butter and jelly stains or bubble gum bodies when they have been chewed to tastelessness and all that other stuff stuck on book pages accidentally or carelessly or on full purpose. She leaves them to the books as she leaves me to the books. I want to cry every time after jacking. It's so lonely I can't stand it. I wish I was as sensitive as Joel Knox. And as wise and profound. But then no kid is every as sensitive or wise or profound as are kids in novels. But you accept the impossible in books. It's what they're there for.
In time, I put the Capote book back on the shelf, and I look for something to take home for the weekend. I've got "The Lost World" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle" on a long loan because it will take a while to read. I'm reading it very carefully. I go to another room, secretly guilty and happy I have jacked off in the library again, it seems like I've accomplished something most boys wouldn't have the guts to do, though I pay for it with guilt and fear I will be caught this time for sure. I pick up the hardcover copies of "The Body Hunters," which is a Mike Hammer mystery by Mickey Spillane, and "Too Friendly, Too Dead," which is a Michael Shayne mystery by Brett Halliday, and I take them to the desk and check them out. I tremble a bit, knowing this time she will call me to account and embarrass the hell out of me, call my mother even. But she does none of these things. Maybe she does know. Maybe she knows what it's like. And lets me. That would be awful. That would be nicely awful.
The librarian barely looks at me over her half glasses, as she stamps them, tells me their return date. I walk out of the library which has toasted me nicely, my masturbation has made me deeply warm inside, a chrysalis of warmth, and I step out into the cold night, much colder than when I came in here a little while ago. My jacket is still zipped up. I did not perspire in the library or get too warm. Books know my temperature it seems and adjust it accordingly. I hold the books in my left hand against my side, the way I carry school books, and I start walking home. Stores are closed now. Houses are shut up tight. There is no traffic. Even though it is not even eight thirty yet. The church bells have stopped. I put my hand to my heart. I hear it beating. I am still alive. I walk down past the deserted bus station. There is not another one here. You have to go to South Fulton to catch the bus these days. I remember riding the bus with my mother on Saturday mornings early, getting going before sunrise, and how beautiful sunrise looked through the huge panorama front window. We always sat directly behind the driver. And how I felt I had arrived at something important, some definitive landmark of my childhood, when we saw the Humco Plant. It's gone now. I don't even know what they manufactured. Whatever it was, it's out of date or someone else is doing it more shoddily and faster and for more money, so why remember?
I walk past the bus garage. I wish Joel was waiting in my yard when I get home. I wish the snow would go on and fall. I love it like Joel Knox and Zoo in the novel love it. I long for it as did they. And Joel would be waiting by the large elm in my front yard, to the left of the concrete walk to our green front porch, and he would put his hands to me, and we would hold each other, and he would kiss the side of my frozen face and he would hold me tight and never let me go, like the song said, and he would say take me into your room and tell me of Little Hans and the silver skates and who was the ice woman ghost Joel Knox who is really me after all, kept seeing, and how did that mule get hung in that deserted dance palace with a spittoon round its leg? and we would walk into my house into my room and he would lie with me and we would take off our clothes and we would be covered with silent snow, secret snow, and the secret of Joel Knox and Joel's hearts/heart would be revealed and I would never need, we three would never need, the hand of astrologer again to plant the stars in the skies again, for we not need them for luck at all anymore. Please let me go mad in a sensuous snow world in faraway. Just, also please, not alone.
Make it snow tonight. And I go inside the house, to the cold dark hallway, to my desk in the cold large living room, where I turn on my Tensor desk lamp and its bright sharp white light that is so much better than the dim yellow cobwebbed ceiling light of the living room, and I put my two new library books on my desk. I will read them this weekend. But for an hour or so tonight, I read a bit more of "The Lost World" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That is one terrific name for a writer, don't you think? And as I read, frozen inside yet again, already over the little thaw at the library, not even remembering even now exactly what a warm womb close by friendly feeling it was, always close by, which is as close as I imagine I will ever get, I do not think of Joel out with his boyfriend and whatever they're doing, what else would they be doing?, his boyfriend who is not worth of him, Joel, who is, himself, not worthy of Joel Knox, who my true love forevermore could never possibly live up to, when you get right down to it. I pick up "The Lost World." They're just getting to the good parts with the dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs a lot. I huddle down in my metal chair with the padded seat cushion. I begin to read.
the end