"Of Late I Think of My Forest Faun"
by
Timothy Stillman
I remember Joel and snow. They are indivisible for me. Snowy Sundays and his face turned sideways to mine. Joel of fair skin and long blonde hair. A morning perhaps, suggested by the blueness of the deep whiteness of his transiency and the harsh snow sun from the ground outside the bedroom windows. All of windows, and all of winter in them. Harsh and heavy gray sky. Barren glass sheathed tree branches in the back yard. Nothing was the same with him. As he studied my books from my book tree in the corner, the books spread round on my bed and his looking into my past, recent and ancient. And I falling deeper in love with him as he touched the little rectangles of words that I tried to lose myself in before I knew he existed. Before he did exist.
He was slim and preferred logger's shirts, heavy on his thinness, and thick jeans, Wranglers, with heavy black socks and trainmen's heavy work boots. He brushed his blond raven hair wave back from his eyes. His hands touched the books delicately, like they were leaves from some private summer of his that he did not want anyone, especially me, to know about. He turned pages and his brown eyes and his thin pale lips and his face so delicately turned out, the little blue pulsing veins in it I could see, this close, and no closer. One hand now supporting him as he leaned on the bed. As he looked like a daydream lying scalloped on an ocean of lost innocence, but whose?, his?, or mine?
It was Joel then and the snow, before everything got tattered and ill used and wrong headed. And his voice, a small chirruping voice, and he laughed a lot, a sort of inturned laughter, as though he wasn't sure he should be doing it. As though it were also private within him, within the small circumference of his body, now clothed and now wintered. As though he knew something beyond The Circus of Dr. Lao and the October Country, which he had put in a stack to his left on my too small bed, books for taking home and reading. Books that I had placed my love in from my own eyes, begging that his see, and respond.
There was us, as we talked lightly. As I watched the snow in the long narrow windows of this sunroom that was my bedroom from my childhood till now. And in him was the smell of distant trains, and in him was the flesh that was secret, coveted by me, and dwelled on that would take my mouth to it, and winter was promise and winter was a certain dichotomy of fears and love and goings away. And he was snow, and I put my hand near his bloodless seeming body. And in my mind, I scaled up him. I became a mite, an atom. A shadow that had never been before. I touched at the nape of his thin long neck with its prominent Adams Apple.
I dwelled within him. I wrote poems on his pearly evening flesh. I begged for the summer not to come again. For we had met in early Fall, and this was the magic. This was the little concern that in a great wave of passion, in a great wave of not me only, I would fall to his neck, and I would kiss the warm flesh, the flesh to the bone, and back to only the world as he would hold me, and let me feel his ear against my cheek and put his arms around me. And it would be love making. And it would be nothing but the name and the sound and the beautiful bell jar that would be placed around us. Without mirrors. Without tricks. Or twist endings.
And Joel would say I love you and only you. And I would unbutton his logger's shirt, the deep red and gray of it, and I would kiss his rosy nipples that I saw back in the first times I met him, before the weather turned too cold for him to be bare chested, there in the basement of his farm house, where he had his train set and he was letting me be impressed by it, and by him though he didn't know it.
The light of the sky was nil. The smell of winter was fresh and newly bought. The light of the snow was bright. Joel seemed translucent in that light. It glowed within him. Even before he became a ghost in my haunted dreams. And I wanted him to come to me naked. To let me see his soft hairless chest again, as though it were a piece of moonlight that had gotten away from the fairy tales young mothers read to their children. To let me see his ribs so visible, so strong, as though they were the clatter of hooves on cobblestone streets that sometimes I put myself to bed with, thinking. I wanted forever to be almost 21 and for him forever to be 13. I wanted his heart next to mine. A fast heart he would have. For he was a hummingbird.
He was all movement and gaiety and celebrations and purchases of air that his hands darted through and his legs danced even as they dangled on my bed. He was the moment when everything changes. When everything is brighter than the roads have a right to be. The road to him, the road I wanted to take and close the door behind us. This stillness, and his voice that was thready. As though it were something of a needle being threaded. Not sure yet. Not sure of the world or his way in it.
But there, Joel, naked, before me. There Joel, and his body unashamed. And his hands reaching out to the girls he had had before. To the jewels he made in their eyes. That he made of their eyes. And the smile ever present on his lips. As though he knew nothing more than the favorite, nothing more than how they held his hands when he walked down the school corridors. When there was no darkness and there was a promise of love tonight or the next. And make me a girl, Joel. Make me forever yours. I'll walk on broken glass. I'll sweep the ocean out of its bed. I will do anything for you, my love. I will die for you. Would any of them? Would any of them die for you? Say the word, and let me hold you, and then I'll go.
He remembered that Sundays were ours. Between his school week and my work week. Between moments, with the baskets of snow pushed up in the joints of the trees so dark out there, and the intensity of wanting to touch him. Wanting to touch his hand and hold it, the chewed to the quick nails. The fingers that were always restless. The veins like road maps to love, if I could only do it, if I could only make him see it. And the two of them, the real Joel, forever beyond my grasp, the real Joel who would look at me while I talked to him, look directly at me, and the love I saw was the love for others, the right ones who were never to be me. The joke was his kindness to me. Because he knew. And tried not to let it bother him.
And the other Joel, standing beside him as he lay like a comma now on the bed, using my pillow for his head, while I sat ramrod straight on the opposite side of the bed, too close still and all. But the other Joel, the Joel of the deft laughing eyes and the blonde long hair that came past his shoulders, that lay bunched up, some of it, on his winged shoulders, touching tentatively to his shoulder blades. That naked tender body so proudly undressed for me. It was fresh cold, to the point of dying, waves of water that had been tossed on me. Waking me up for everything beyond this world. I became instantly shamefully hard.
And his groin was a v, a tenderloin of should I turn my eyes away?, but impossible to do so, and the pubic hair of it was dark and soft and sparse. His body was etched, sculpted together perfectly, the veins of it, visible in it, the chest and the stomach and the belly button and his ivory stick thin legs. Joel naked so much more than I had imagined. To go to him, to go to the many trap doors and trails to travel with his hands guiding me. Braille lifts blind eyed cataracts and drops them to the floor. His balls were like tiny billiard balls. I could see their warmth. Their excitement. I watched his penis rise. For me? I watched it in the snow and in my heart and in my most private places that no one was ever to know about. It jumped. It straightened. It laughed as only a penis can laugh.
I saw it erect and it turned upward to his stomach, concave stomach of course, and his belly button. His penis welled and it was filled with such a tracery of thin blue lines, and it had a pale shade to it and a darker shade above that and a somewhat blue shade above to the slender mushroom head of it. I thought of ice cream bars and cold treats from the ice cream truck on a hot summer day. I thought of the hard and soft feel of it, as though I had ever touched his penis, or anyone's but my own. Joel smiled at me and he put his hands to the sides of his penis and he stroked himself and the world stopped. The world stopped and there was no more reason for anything. If I could sit there in time and enough of it, like the snow outside. To carry the snow angels away. To carry love where it was designated. And to then reach over, to caress the pubic hair with my lips, dusty smell of it, and take hold of it and bring it to me and look it in the singular eye and then to guide it into my mouth and the loneliness like dark devils would flee from me and all would be well yet again. To take these thoughts and put them in Joel's head, so close by, so forever far away.
And I watched, in my dream within a dream, as Joel touched Joel who looked up a bit startled from the book he had been leafing through, the book that slid now from his hand as liquid gold. And there was only that time of recognition. And my fear, don't make me leave, don't make me leave again and again as doors shut in my face time after time. And one golden boy kissed another golden boy, his twin. And the beautiful boys looked into the faces of their own forest wells and did not turn into jonquils but only remained themselves, untouched, untouchable, proud Grecian lads. And here where there was the tug of the white chenille bedspread, that took the books from the bed and carried them to the polished wooden brown floorboarding.
And they were next to me. The dream and the real. And there was the need of flesh for flesh. There was the need of me then as their shadow. Trailing after. Always the place where there would be a large gasp of air, and then only what it was before. And clothing removed, including mine. And the way the eyes were the symbols. Like old log fires of long ago. Or candle street lamps from a London of my dreams. And they worked their words into their flesh. And their words were of smiles, the soft summer kind. The kind that Joel always gave to me every time I was with him for these months of ours. The days of his. That he let me share.
And I a few years older than they, and they far older than I would ever see. All the straws of their farm house's barn here then. Their limbs. Mine. Twining around theirs. Seeing their mouths coming to mine. Seeing their chests in my cold bedroom, become flush and hot with the heat of love making. their tits hard little berries from the biting. From the promise and excitement of what was to come.
Stillness. And the blinds of the window open though not raised. The house across the back yard from mine empty for a year after the old couple who had lived there all during my childhood, had taken sick, and had died one directly after the other. From coming loss. From giving up. From an ocean that could never be swept out of its bed, no matter how hard they might have tried. There was only an accumulation of years in the trying of it.
Our shirts off now. Our jeans, socks, and shoes. Our bodies glistening. And words were arms and words were nipples that were licked and bitten softly, delicately. And the Joel real became the Joel unreal, and our penises were hard--dick, Barry, Joel said, say dick, it sounds better--and each boy said go down on me, please me, need me, and need only me. And there were the flesh fields I ran in then. The flesh fields without alarm clocks or phones or televisions or books. Only the need of a fast moving silver cold stream in the mountains at the top of the world.
Where time entered in softly. Where time entered in and expanded and didn't mind that the mouths that held each dick in turn were male. And there were tickles and grabs and bites and gasps. And first time for everything, in this honeycomb world that had to do only with sex and love and the pungency of it. The sheer and masterful joy of watching them lie, one atop the other. Watching them wed this way. And my stroking my penis for the first time in the presence of anybody.
The boy on top, buttocks kneaded under my hand. His back, the small of it, the neatly mounded buttocks, like an etching of a series of perfect mountain ranged off in the distance. Off in the uncrucified latch keys that had to do with morning coming already. Of doors pulled unlocked, pulled open--forever. We were all so very young then.
And the winter sun dusty and bursting open and having Joel inside it. The name like colloquy. The name like mantra and sage and the dearest corners that a person could turn round and find the mazes were easy. Find the mazes were nothing to conquer, but hands that brought themselves and me closer together. And there not sure which was belonging to which. Only the wonderful ease of rubbing my erect penis--dick--on the back of the legs of the Joel above the other.
And then that Joel coming from his need of feeling penis against penis--dick against dick--of his star crossed lover. To mine. To kiss me and make my tits hard, to hold me, to tease my dick with his red tipped tongue, and sit on my legs like the moon coming down. The moon that was filled with gold cream and night magus. As though he would be taller then than I. Taller then than the house roof. Than the world. Here come along and take my hand, he said, and he held my hand to his hardness. To that wonderful soft ache of wet warm little boy steel that managed to be opposites at the same time, and managed to be the same wonderful instrument all apiece at once. I cupping his balls in my hand. Marveling at these eggs.
Then the boy of gold pushing my hand up and down on his shaft. Making me into his winter and the Joel next to me rubbing himself, masturbating himself, and putting his lips to the side of my cheek and then leaning over and butterfly kissing my eyes. And I close my eyes and am land locked in those little motives that all snow falls have. The secret blue of them. The way they have such a mute happiness inside them. The way they are a carnival. A carnival of love and found souls. This need happen again. This need be the merry go round and the gold ring of love caught in to it. Caught in to the means of it and the sureness of it was the soft wheat colored hair, the hair I leaned up and kissed and it was sun and it was the soft friendly taste of his father's and mother's farm house.
And there was Easter in there, and golden shafts of sunlight that I would hold onto in the deep winter nights like poverty scattered down round me. Down there in the oldest semicircle there could be. There where the eyes ache in mid day. And there is nothing but the concentration of fact and fancy, and having my love, my Joel, say I love you, and have him weep, when I say I love you Joel, I love you and am with you for all of my life to come.
And the boys blend, become one, become whatever magic could instigate round the moment that I reach out to him and pull him to me, and pull him inside my mouth that gasps and sucks him in deeper and feels ever curve and vein and shade coloring his penis has to offer, the tip of my tongue playing with the eye of his penis, and he gasps and giggles that little inturned giggle, and it is more than gymnastics and it is far superior to mathematical configurations, and it is Sunday afternoon and it is January and there is this boy lying sensuously and cat like, almost purring, putting his naked body against mine, fitting into me, on top of me and he puts the top of his head against the wall behind the bedboard, where hangs my large poster of Laurel and Hardy, a huge poster from which those comic geniuses stare out into my world, smiling and with their hands on each other's shoulder, Stan's goofy sweet grin. Oliver's hearty one, his bowler hat pushed rakishly back on his head. Joel strains and whimpers and sighs.
And next to the poster, a Sunday cartoon of "Doonesbury," a winter scene on school grounds, in which Miss Caucus is comforting a little girl whose mother is taking her away from this feminist foil. The girl is weeping. The woman holds her and says we'll see each other again, soon. I made it Joel and me. Cartoons and comic strips are sometimes the saddest things in the world. There the two of them, bereft in the snow. There the two of us, likewise. But not even that hope.
Joel holds my long brown hair (I pretend I'm someone else, in love beads and nothing else) in the fingers of his left hand as he pushes his star gazer into my strained mouth, and in again, as the other Joel puts my dick into his mouth, and we are one, as I push up into him, getting delightfully confused, and it seems as though the whole of all the nights that were ever to be are in my richly filled mouth. It seems as though there is nothing verbose that could ever be said that could explain anything any better, even by his excited mouth as he talked me through his life and his joys and his girls and his books and that he would be a great and wonderful writer himself one day. More than Joel, as I held to his naked butt, awful word, lush scenery, as I pushed my hands on the mounds pert and fine and like tight little boulders that had always excited me, there in his Wrangler jeans, that I had for so long desired so achingly to touch, to explore them and in them, the most secret part.
And because he was whispering now, whispering like justice that had arrived at someone else's house, because he was telling his girls good bye, even at that moment, because he was stretching his short limber body against mine, because it was no more train stations and no more going home and no more fear that he might forget me as soon as he leaves me again this Sunday and I prepare for heading back to work the next day, because he is in my mouth and he whispers I'm cumming, and then the salty sweet pearls come out, and they are mine. And I dwell in them as though in a friendly cave with a magic wand that is a golden diamonded snake that is my Joel that is my life, and hold the root of him, hold the essence of him that had been baking in him, and was meant for only me, because of that, I touch to the warm shadow of his hand, and he jerks it away from me.
And I turn. And we are clothed. And it hadn't happened. And the books are on the bed. And he looks at me with sadness. And I feel my hard on and cover it with my hands and a book, hopefully not too obviously, but I know, yes, it was too obvious. And we look outside at the snow for a while. And we both know. In our own sad ways. I see Joel, the naked Joel, at the foot of the bed. I see his dick hard still and heaving from the cum he had just shot into me. I see his delicate little balls still tight, still able to go again. And I see him vanishing on me. I see him getting more and more ghostly. And I want to follow him. Have to follow him because the nimbus of light is disappearing, and the need rages, the need is a million screaming bright dying bees in my mind, and I will have to desert the Joel beside me for this boy. Where the future is. Where the love that I never found then could be found.
Where it would wait like galleon ships in the heavy winter thick steel forboding clouds. And it wouldn't move again, and it moves all the time, and I feel the spent dream cum in my throat, and it makes me realize there were so many times that were not to be times, no love for me, and so many days of pretending and ruing the pretending, and I look to this world's Joel, and then, my real Joel who too is vanishing. He is shadow upon shadow. He was real once and not real again. And I call out to the both of them, now conjoined. Now, forever linked in radiant embrace of each other. Their arms around each other.
And I see their girls with them. Their girls and later on, when they were older, their women then. And I lean forward and I see the corridors that are too sterile too frightening and too plaid painted, too fakely gay that was in a joke that would have a few times other pairs of arms that would be holding me down, arms that had not occurred yet, that I was to make, as with Joel's, more of than they were, for what else could I do? And in gerbil cage of memory, over and again, never stop. Meant to be my freedom that became instead my claustrophobic prison cell. And Joel vanishes, with his loves, the right ones, the real ones. They vanish as though they were varnish on a bare wall, on the walls of the sun room where there is no sun, where there is no snow glare from the line of perpendicular windows.
"Joel!" Then: "Don't." Old record. Old friend words. Give up words.
And there is a smile backward in my direction. I do not know if it is from him or the dream of him or one of his girls or women. There is a decentness to tiredness. There is a little rubbery feel that comes from touching on memories. There is the monstrousness of them. The place where they all fit in a person's brain, as though they are parlor tricks, as though they are surprise snakes that spring up at you when you open up a box of candy bought at a magic store. And you laugh and you are the fool and you are done with, and then there is something else gone to.
There was, when I was very young, a boy my age who lived across the street from me. We were good enough friends that we pelted each other with pebbles from our side of the street, his front yard, my side yard, and I ducked and got hit and he ducked and got hit. I only remember us doing this once or twice. I don't know. I think we were just learning how to say hello. And somehow knew this was always what, for me at least, hello always offered, so might as well get used to it early. Good-byes have never hurt worst than hellos.
He was a square little tank of a boy. He had a crew cut and a foul mouth and he was always stealing things, comic books from me, whatever money he could find in the house. Later he would wind up in jail a few times, but by then I had completely lost track of him. Once, he offered to give me his Justice League of America annual because I hadn't gotten to the grocery stores in time and the comic book was all sold out, and I was so downhearted about it, had waited so many months for it to be published.. He was so kind about it. His voice had been gentle. You learn to pay close attention to things like that if you're me.
So, at his suggestion, he went to the groceries with my mother in a town close by to see if they had a copy. They did. He gave it to me. She told me he had paid the quarter for it, cause he knew how hurt I had been because comic books, those especially meant a lot to me in those days. Once he lent me a Playboy he had gotten from somewhere. The pictures tore at me. Made me excited. Made me sad. Enveloped me, looking at them, pretending I was with him, by myself for he let me keep it a day or two. Early one morning before my mother and grandmother had gotten up, I woke with an incredibly hard erection. I had been dreaming of him, perhaps, I don't remember.
One morning, in this place of repressed sexuality, I woke in the still dark, long before my mother and grandmother would awaken, and I took the Playboy he had let me borrow, from under my bed, and went to the bathroom, locked the door, and took out as usual the fuzzy bath mat from the side of the tub, slipped off my pajama bottoms, and lay down on the mat, and began rubbing my penis, as I phrased it then, on the soft rug. I did it that way because my mother had scared me to death by telling me that if I DID THAT with my hand, my penis would get cancer and I would die. But that urge was way too strong for me to obey even her. So I tried to work my way round it. It always worried me in those days though. I also learned, a few years later, that if I squeezed my penis head hard when I came, that the semen would not come out. That way, it didn't count, and cancer and mom stay away from my door. It caused me, I suppose this was the cause, a terrible ache for an hour or so in my left testicle every time I did it, and held the semen in. That and God scared me in equal amounts. As they were supposed to.
I prayed to Jesus a lot. I prayed mostly to him for forgiveness for my getting a hard on imagining him up on that cross naked, and me seeing his hard cock and ball bearing balls.
So that cold fall morning endless years ago, I took the Playboy and opened it to the centerfold, and I pretended the boy across the street was naked with me, and I was telling him the parts of a woman and how to please her and giving him instructions on how to masturbate. Though of course I'm sure he needed no instructions from me on either masturbation, or what to do with girls. He was already doing it, I imagine. Girls terrified me. I know nothing about them. Still. It was my mind's way, I guess, of going through convolutions such as this, and including what I wanted to deny and a million other reasons I've been analyzed to death on, of getting off as best I could.
I never saw Joel naked. I never said I love you to him. I looked at him clothed and deeply and as closely as I dared at his crotch, desperately willing my eyes to have X ray vision, on his bed or mine. To be on his bed where he masturbated--how had he looked?, did he use magazine pictures?, how long did it take?, were there stains on the sheets if I could look beneath the coverlet? I was there, yes. But always at the wrong times. Did he close his eyes at the climax? Did he sigh? Did he hold to invisible air as I did, afterwards?
I thought to him a million times I love you. I dreamt of him. I imagined waking up to him and turning over and seeing him in his briefs, with his cock--say, cock, Barry, it sounds better, hard and waiting. And a smile of innocent pride on his face that for me would always be remembered in winter soft light. I masturbated to him. And in a way he became me. Became what I never was or am or will be again. And I guess for such a one as me, he cared for me as best he could. And these long and dusty panoply years later, it's those Sunday afternoons of winter I come back to, when he came to my house or I went to his and we read and talked about books and Lord Dunsany and sprites and fauns and things of mythic proportions and forests.
In which I always put him first. He thought in this area of discussion, we were both talking fantasy. I however was talking fact. And he, the faun of forever. The lost child who found a lost youngman way back then, and now a man not young anymore and bleeding inside, and he will put his hand in mine and led me off, soon oh please soon, in his proud yet diffident way into that forest of winter. Into the dreams of there. I wait for him still.
And I have hope that the windows of pictures in magazines some day stop. And the models go away, for they are never what I want, never him. And the windows will open and there is the sound of Joel hitting his stride on my front porch, of a house no longer mine, and he calls out my name that always sounded so sweet to me in his mouth, and I can go out one of those windows, and he will be the faun who once sat on my bed with me, and who let me sit on his bed with him (god, how that hurt so beautifully) , and it will be the first morning of snow fall winter, and he will say, "I've been waiting for you for ever so long." He will smile love at me, and solely me. And I will be young again, as young as then, and younger, and he will be how he was then, only this time, in love with me, and we will run into forever, and the years between quaffing the dreams when he was truly beside me and now the moment of returning to them in a true and safe and snow cone reality of it, with these long dead years in the interim will be as not having happened at all.
And then the nightmares will stop. The nightmares of those always in absentia, but the dreams about them hard edged and break heart all the same, the absent stars still the stars, as in the manner of the never seen but always fully present and maddeningly distantly intimately alive, constantly right there in your mind, though forever gone away, "Rebecca." Someone will finally turn off the far too bright, far too killing klieg lights. For since he left, you see, I've not had a home again, and I've so much to tell him. For real, this time.
THE END