Just Don't Let Joel Find Out"
by
Timothy Stillman
A fever is a fragile thing. It's sort of like friendship. You want to keep it around. But you fear it's finding out all your secrets as well. Not that I'm in the CIA or anything. Just that when you're 13 or so, you want to fight something. You want to show them something, even though there's no one to show and you don't know what you're thinking about half the time. You just want to die. Though of course you don't want to die. Cause that would be dumb and you wouldn't show anybody anything doing that, even if you knew what you wanted to show anyone and you don't have anyone to show.
So here I am, laid up in bed. Thinking of getting laid. I've noticed that more and more. Those thoughts. Like ragged bats flying around the belfry which has become my brain. The world is at tilt at the moment. There are flying catfish in my dreams. My dreams seem pregnant these last few days. What with my fever and all. I wish I could just step out of my body till my fever's done. I wish this wasn't my island and my family was not here. I wish I was not sick when I'm at our magical cottage where the magical surf laps almost to the side of it. I wish the house would float into the ocean and everything would be carried away including me. So maybe I could go to a land where I could show somebody something and they would tell me what I showed.
"Well, he sure showed us, didn't he?"
"Can't deny that."
A show me island. Where the show me people sit at my feet and are amazed and the sky is blue and I'm not burning up and sweating poison and have all this salve on my chest and up my nose and don't say it where else it's up. I want to jack off. I need to. Need it, man do I ever. But my body's a bow string that manages to be taut and manages to be flaccid at the same time. I wish somebody would drop by. That cute boy three sand dunes over would be nice. I would like to show him things. I would much rather he show me things. I wish I could just climb out of this bed and run naked down to the surf and let the water eat at me. Even a shark attack would be better than this.
I'm in love. Blush and sigh and round the town. But I don't know who I'm in love with. Joel down the beach three sand dunes away I guess. I mean if I had to pick someone or something. I only see him in the summer when we're on our island. I don't think about him at all the rest of the year. But here, when we're flying in (yep, dad is Mr. Hardy and I'm one of the Hardy Boys and we are off to fun and adventure and mystery every other week--NOT) I think, good deal, Joel's here. And Joel is 14 and cute as a bug and he knows where the star fish are beached and we go and look at them. There might even be a jelly fish or two beached also. We stand on our long legs and look longly down at them. While I try not to be moony and look at Joel longingly. Longingly? I read books. So kill me. I can't help it.
Now that I'm over my sneezing fit--thank god for Kimberly- Clark--but the wastebasket's getting awfully full--I turn my heavy head to the window. There aren't sea gulls out there now. But there are at times. I wish I could tell Joel I love him. I wish I could be disgraced. I wish he would laugh at me. I wish my arms would stop hurting. I wish I could stop saying I at the beginning of every damned sentence. It would be nice to swim with him in the ocean. Not that old scaredy kat mom would ever let her precious little boy swim out there with all the ocean creatures or anything. Maybe Joel and I could re-enact the beginning of "The Blue Lagoon." Maybe Joel could bring his girl friend to the beach right outside my window and do the side by side calculus that I've been hearing about at school. One plus one equals ADVENTURE INTRIGUE and most of all SEX. I used to pray the sex thoughts would go away. So I could show God. That I'm not going to be ruled by my gonads like every other boy in the world. Because I'm--goooooddddddd.
"Well, he really showed me, that kid down there, what's his name?"
Mostly I'd like to show Joel. I'd like to show him my package. I have one, you know. Sorry. Stole that from Ellen De Generes. I wish Stephen King would stop having these oh so obvious boy characters in his books and come out of the closet. A friend pointed that out to me once and we had a big laugh about it. I wish I could show Stephen King I know where he steals his material. Hint: start with Richard Matheson. I wish Joel would come along. In his red hot bikini bathing suit that scoops down just above his pubic hair, makes such a glorious maddening show of his smooth chest and hard muscled abdomen and a belly button you would die for, and rides just a whisper up to his balls, cupping them and his outlined penis--that sometimes I swear turns to a boner--that I try not to stare at-- mostly it lies tame on the left side--so neatly, and that all but screams his lovely strong gotta grab it ass to perfection, including the outline of his crack, sorry, declivity, with the beginning Word of God that is the bottom of his hips showing. I wonder if he has pubic hair. Subtle way of finding out:
"Say, Joel, pubic hair coming in okay? Mine is. Wanna trade?"
Not. He's sleek. If he was a porpoise he would be the greatest looking porpoise in the universe. But he's not. He's a boy. Which makes him the greatest looking boy in the universe. So why don't I think of him when I'm off this island and back in Islip doing my homework and watching summer die, Fall turn to winter and winter turn to snow? I don't know. I'm superficial, okay. But I don't think of boys at all when I'm back home. I do the old one two with my hand and that's enough. I guess I save the jangly stuff for when I'm close to HIM. And I don't mean god. Or maybe I do.
Speaking of jangly, will someone get that phone? It seems to be ringing in my head. Makes these pretty red stripes in front of my eyes when it rings. Maybe my bones are ringing. Maybe I'm radioactive and the crab monster giants are right outside my house ready to devour me, last survivor in the world of no longer humans or something. Okay, I watch too many old horror movies too. So sue me. Or screw me. Or take off your clothes and undo me, Joel. Girls aren't everything, I could say to him, they don't have that miraculous little handle that you can crank up and let some of the love juice out. Okay, I read the occasional porno novel too. So Ha your own self.
It would be nice seeing him now. We've been here four days. I've had this damned fever for two of them and I haven't seen him once. Have my parents figured it out at long last and sent him away? Don't get paranoid. It's the fever talking. His flesh must taste beautiful. It must touch like velvet. He's slender and wise and has gray eyes and he has hands that are always painting invisible miracles in the air in front of me. He gets carried away and has a brain that runs like a sonofagun. He knows where the secrets of the ocean are and plans to excavate them some day soon. His girl is Larie. She is summer too.
Joel and his family stay on the island all the time. They are, he says, "lifers" and get to the mainland hardly at all. He says he ENVIES me getting away from this place. He says it's fun here in winter when it snows. I can't picture it snowing here where it's always summer. He says there is time for weenie roasts (I won't make the joke) and cuddling round a bonfire with his girl (me me me) and warming each other with their heavy coats and their bodies. He never gets crude or anything but boy howdy love a duck I wish he would. I just wish he would unload on me (I've noticed this double entendre thing for the last year or so, teachers and other kids haven't picked up on it yet, so I'm lucky there) but man I wish we could make love.
I wish we could strip and dive into the ocean and just feel the water warm on surface, colder down below, just caress us and kiss us and envelop us and our arms around each other and his penis hard and bobbing in the foamy blue and our chests colliding and our mouths stabbing at each other. Course then we would have to breathe, and break the surface, like two porpoises of sleek and noble and efficient and poetical design rushing up to the sun, breaking out of the top of the world, volcano boys rushing to meet forever. Be nice in other words.
I guess I can jack off about five times a day. I mean in summer when I have the time. Always loved summer. Always felt there was something about it that I should be noticing, but I'm not. Like I should be doing something. Be reading something or thinking something I'm not thinking. It all seems important but it's beyond me what is important or why. I'm a pretty good jack off kind of guy. I can mimic making love, you know, the F thing, when I'm doing it. Watching myself in the mirror as I'm humping a fuzzy rug. Seems a good thing in summer. Not as good in fall or winter. Don't know why though. Sun out there hot and buttery and the beach so close by our house that is shingled and on stilts underneath which the shadows and the mud kings reign. I'm twisting the covers with my hands now. Wearing my stupidsucker pjs. Body flushed. And if life is like this I'd like to flush the thing away for good and all. But then where would I be. Like I say, a good cum is a noble animal. Well I said it somewhere or other. I just enjoy it so much. I wish Joel and I could do it. I wonder if he gets that same sad sweet sob in the center of his abdomen and chest that I do when I cum. And I do cum. I want that clearly noted and for the record.
I wish I hadn't read all my comic books on the plane. I'm a fast reader. I'm also a fast jack off artist. I'm also quick with the eyes so I could take fleeting indelible snap shots of Joel when he's not looking at me or noticing, and that's almost never anyway. But I love his profile against the sun. Like he's a Mayan god or something on a great yellow sunny beaten gold coin, all noble and bare and with his arm extended to the ocean as though he knows the secrets of himself and it resides in the deeps. And all my life I will be exploring the deeps to find him, to find the island boy who never notices how beautiful he is. How rapturous he is. His golden hair to his shoulders. His body like a warm parfait you can buy in summer and it cools you off in all sorts of satisfying ways. I wish I could buy Joel in summer. I wish he could be my slave. I wish I could tell him things and show and tell him things. I wish I would just break out into hives and the bees could come and live inside me and make honey all day that I could give to my true love.
Hey, come on, I'm sick as a dog. I'm doing the best I can here. Give me a break. I never have broken a leg or an arm. I don't know a boy back home, yes, I know, I don't really know any boys, who hasn't broken an arm or a leg at one time or another. What is wrong with me? Am I not a boy as well? Do I not have a fever? Do I not need to go to the bathroom and piss?--yes, piss, not pee pee, we're grown ups at heart here after all--but I ache and throb and almost pass out--note I did not say faint--George W. faints--real men pass out--and I'd rather let my kidneys take the road trip test and see how long they can manage to hold it in.
Horrible thought--Joel's not on the island anymore. He's a male go go dancer at the Chandelese Bar (who knows?, made it up) and he's dressed only in feathers under red and blue and green hot spot lights in all that gray smoky overheated sweaty air and he's bucking and grinding and undulating and caught up in his own sexiness and he's imitating the old one two one two and he's almost exposed with all the other go go boys with who he is simulating sex (or the real thing, hurts to know it is with someone else not me but I figure I better get used to that hurt, live with it, hello heartache, sit right down, how's it goin'?) and the music is congas or something and a subwoofer is throbbing along with Joel's now naked featherless body, exposed exposed for everyone--save me--to see, and his pubic hair is black, forms a neat little curvy of thrush--why you Miss Clairol liar you-- and there is the prize of the gods--his hard on he's pushing back and forth to the crowd, his hands on it loving it and the balls beneath which are nothing to sneeze at--which of course, at the thought, makes me sneeze-- with everything going crazy. and the other boys are up against him and pressing their dicks against his legs and his belly and he's doing the same to them. Group grope. Group sex. Sigh.
As they all start jacking off and their tongues are out of their mouths licking their own and others' lips and they are leaning on each other and rubbing each other and their legs get all entangled and they are feeling up each others' thighs and legs and butts and one boy is kneeling down to suck the dick of Joel and it all goes on to the beat of Barry Manilow signing "Copacabana" (okay a little joke to lighten the load--well, there he goes again, Ronnie Wilson Reagan--I know a lot about Presidents too--ha ha) and they're getting it on. Some are on the floor and they are writhing like snakes and they are pressing their mouths everywhere and there is on that grimy bar floor all this stuff going on and it's somewhat grody if you want to know the truth but hey sometimes grody works. Anyway. Enough of that. Can't get a boner if I tried. And for me, that's really saying something.
I wonder if I've got the mumps. I wonder if I will die before the summer's out. I wish the scene outside my window wasn't so beautiful. I wish the sun was not so hot and the day so gorgeous. I wish my mom and dad didn't love me as much as they do. I wish they wouldn't buy me every damn thing I ask for, and I ask for a lot, and think that shows me how much they love me. I wish they didn't have fights more and more all the time with each other. They wait till I'm in bed asleep, though I'm not asleep at all. They throw invectives at each other like javelins. They get to screaming sometimes, then they remember me, and their voices are turned lower. I think Dad's seeing someone on the side. I think that's why Mom cries all the time. Though she pretends she doesn't and that she's feeling good. But those dark shadows and bags under her eyes aren't Samsonite luggage that she's packing to go away on a trip. Though maybe she's going on a trip after all. I wonder who I will live with. I wonder if I get to have a say in it. I wish Joel was here. I couldn't talk it over with him. I just wish he was here. I wish I didn't have the epizoodics or whatever it is I have. I wish the sunshine wasn't as thick and bright and hot. I wish I was anybody else but me.
I wish Joel and Larie would drop by. Sit on the sides of my bed. Joke with me. Make me feel like a big shot. Or a little shot. I wish I had a shot glass and in this shot glass I could put Scotch or whiskey though I have no idea what either tastes like. I wish I could get drunk or could get high. Toby's the main drug connection at school. He sells the stuff pretty cheap. You know who are his biggest buyers? The honor roll students. The goody goods. The heads of all the clubs are the biggest heads in school. Toby joke: "See all those bumper stickers that read 'my child is an honor student at fill in the blank school' ? I want to have a bumper sticker on my dad's car that reads 'my child is your honor student's drug connection at the fill in the blank school. And he's got a lot more money than your kid'll ever have.' Law of supply and demand, my friend. Ha."
I'd like to get really wasted. Let my secrets spill. Just get wasted with Joel and Larie and maybe they could make love on the beach, get all sandy and everything and I could just sit there beside them like I'm a boy god or something. It would be sad and nice and funny and fun and sweet and maybe we could make it stay night and warm and the surf washing up friendly like and musical and chimes in the soft night currents of air and they could hold each other after it's over and I could hold the both of them. And it might not even be sexy for me. It would just be close to me. And I could be a part of something. Okay, book title stealing here, a member of the wedding. I'm tired of being Frankie, and not a member of anything. I want my own green and crazy summer. And I want it to be this one. Hey, Stephen King's never this honest about his thefts.
Where every day is like a paintbox turned over and making the greenest grass and the bluest water and sky and summer itself having a color, many colors, that are the variegated colors of the things of summer but with colors of its own that are separate and apart from the other shades and hues and blendings. A summer color that cleaves your heart and makes you feel you're at the center of something more than running barefoot on the beach or darting around man o wars washed up and waiting for the kill before they too die, or lying in the tall wild grass watching the heavy bright light big white clouds drift on their way to no where in particular in the sky high way. A color that means parents don't hate each other and think you're so dumb that you haven't figured this out by now, how they really do hate each other and how they would like to just split and not have a memory of each other again. But hello me. The bug in the carpet. The lug in the center of the room. The son they have to do something with. Who is causing them all by himself to go through hell. What an ingrate. What a loser. What a bed jacking off no account he is. He should go down to the ocean and wade out into it and meet Tadzio and they could both look for heaven together and he should go deep into the ocean and get on the down elevator which makes you go up at the same time, so they say, senseless stupid adult things they pretend make sense. Horrible thought--what if these insane things really do make sense to adults? God what a world to grow up in. Check your brain at the door.
Joel's parents could adopt me. I could threaten to tell him about his feather dance at the bar. Course they might be all right with that. But not to his having hot group sex to the tunes of Barry Manilow records for god's sake; that would be the Ace in the Hole; no parent could endure the shame of that. I could say, Joel--god I'm hot--no not that kind, fever hot--but of course he really doesn't dance with feathers, though I'd pay to see it, how's about yourself?, and you can't use a stupid day dream as leverage cause I'm sick and that's so lame I should throw myself out of your apartment window in Islip; we're on the sixty third floor, drop by sometime and watch me drop out).
I just wish he would come by and Larie is a nice girl. She always treats me well. I wish Joel and I could be the Hardy boys, god, to be Joel's brother and live with him, that would be better than being married to him, playing pin the tail on the donkey, Skittles, Go Fish or Monopoly, (like with my parents who still think I'm three) and we could sleep in the same room and I could jack off real silently and he'd never know, as I look at his profile sleeping in the darkness with the city glow coming in the window just making these most intriguing shadows on him and that'd be pretty cool and one night while I'm doing it, not looking at him, I would feel the mattress with an extra weight on it and I could turn over--real scared like, but it's my dream so I'm not scared--and Joel could have his left knee on my bed and he could be leaning over and would say, "let me help with that." Yeah. I'd have a better shot at that with Barry Manilow and don't you dare, Barry!!!!!! Christ, what a pissy little first name that is. I pity anyone named that, fool.
Mom and Dad are at the beach now. I think I can hear the house breathing. Don't laugh. Houses do breathe. Listen to them sometime. This is a great time to jack off. But my little willie's left the building and I feel like hell and the fever is taking over and burning me up and I will burn to a cinder any second now, internal conflagration of the soul of a boy trying to get to the ocean so he can go swimming with Joel and Larie who is sexy too, in a different way from Joel, and already has nubbins on her chest which I would not mind seeing and to tell you the truth sucking on, sorry, I mean suckle, just a little, god what a sicko I am, and we would just swim out there forever and find our own little island where there is no tension to cloud the beauty, no sadness and anger and fights to scrawl up the perfect blue sky days of us and we wouldn't let adults push us around anymore or try to pretend they are young again or any of that crap. Using us like we are their own personal toys or something. Though I don't know, Joel's parents and Larie's seem nice when I'm around them, joking and friendly and all, but you can't tell anything by that because so do my parents when other people are around.
I don't know. I just have to get up to go to the bathroom, fever land locks a person so, or piss the bed and my stupidsucker pjs. But I can't work up the energy to move. I feel like dead weight. Like I'm caught inside a dead beached whale and no one will let me out. I'm having trouble breathing and it feels like there is an anvil on my chest. My arms and legs feel like cotton. I'm lost and scared. And that's been happening for a while, fever or not. So I piss the bed. I never have been a bedwetter, not once in my life. I've never had a wet dream either. Talk about repressed. They should invent a new word, cause repressed ain't the half of it. It feels silly pissing in bed. Like I'm that naked little boy statue pissing in the fountain in wherever it is. I feel dumb and stupid and it feels good too. Like I'm pissing all this warm wet in my pjs, on the sheets, on the covers, on myself, and I bet if you put a mirror in front of my face, I would see I have a shit eating grin. Like the Mona Lisa, the big deal of which I've never understood. Whose expression always looked to me like she had just farted and hoped no one noticed. Or now, I think, who is pissing herself and wants someone to notice.
Like Mom and Dad, when they come home. And feel sorry for me because I never would do this unless something was really bad wrong with me. And they'll rush me to the little island hospital and they won't be mad at each other and I will pull through and pull them together to me and they will see that I'm their salvation and not their albatross. Oh god, this feels yucky. I can't stand this. I am the biggest dork in the universe. I have to haul myself to the bathroom and clean up. Course I won't be able to do anything in time about the sheets and the mattress. God, I pissed a geyser. It must be floating the mattress down deep too. It won't bring them together. This is not a "Lassie" movie ending. They'll yell at me. Mom will say she didn't come here this summer to be a maid to me and how embarrassing and she should put this stuff outside so everyone could see what a jerk I am. She would show Joel and Larie. She gets to show them. Not me.
"Well, Larie, guess she showed us."
"Yep, Joel, guess she did."
"What a drip."
"I heartily concur."
"And to think we were going to do it with him tonight."
"Ra-ther."
I hate life. I gotta tell you, I really do.
the end