"The Photos"
by
Timothy Stillman
However, Spencer. Ricky's friend and mine. So bodily unlike Ricky of the high school football player's build. Ricky's open friendly smiling chipmunk face. His peaches and cream complexion and his big hands that had been so warmly all over me for so long. His easy laugh. His tender ministrations. Ricky and I had been jack off buddies for some time before the crazy summer afternoon when we stripped, all three of us, and took photos.
Spencer who was 15 to Ricky's 16 years was raw boned and pale. He was shorter than Ricky and had a long serious looking face. He had tight pecs and his body was molded hard. He was a sad kid. Poor. Poverty covered him in that way that was ragged and unfair and with much hurt. Ricky had taken him into his heart and so soon did I. Spencer one time sat in the living room watching TV while Ricky and I lay in bed watching the small television. It was wrong, of course, to let Spencer sit there by himself and as I recall we only did leave him alone that one time. It just felt bad that way. But we wanted to be together, Ricky and I, we wanted to hold and touch each other--it was the sexiest time of our being together--but we knew our own particular loneliness too and thus knew Spencer's.
He was kind of tough to everyone around him except Ricky and I. There were criminals in Spencer's family. Of whom he was most proud. He and his grandmother and mother lived in a housing project some blocks away. Spencer was a sickly pale boy, thin as a rail. He told me that all he had to do to lose weight was to sit in his apartment on a summer day, there was no air conditioning, and he would drop two or three pounds right there. He had long thick black hair that went raggedly to the bottom of his neck. He was a gamin with a pained face, a face that had creases in its cheeks because he was always seeming to squint up at the sun. Symbolically, too. As though there were things in life he had to figure out. Deals and angles and games and devils to appease and make the bad luck he was born into work for him. Always then on the run. Always then on the con. But never to us. Never to Ricky and I.
But about those photos we took. It was one crazy summer afternoon, when the three of us were watching TV, I suggested, fearing Spencer might kill me, we knew how he felt about "fags", but I felt a bit safer asking, because Ricky and I had been jacking off for some time, and he would protect me, so I said, my throat lumped, my palms sweating, not looking at them, but straight ahead, that we take some photos of each other naked. I closed my eyes. I waited for the dum dum bullets. But just the opposite. It was incredible! They both jumped off the couch, shouting, laughing, falling into each other and onto each other, "Where's the camera!?" over and again.
And they started taking their clothes off there and then. I went hard and went into shock at the same time. I said, wait, wait, I don't think there is film in the Polaroid. And they said for god's sake man, go see. So I did, maneuvering my tent pole in my jeans as best I could. Through their little invisible balloons of delight and giggly depravity that had them beating each other on the back and shouting wolf calls at a moon that was burning brightly in my eyes as I found the camera in a closet, checked, no film. So they half pushed me out the door, telling me "hurry, man, hurry" and they in a state of shirts off and jeans unbuckled. I rushed to the car and somehow or other, groggily, dreamily, pin wheels in my eyes, the weather of close to a hundred degrees eating like acid in my skin, as I drove like a bat out of hell to Wal Mart and managed to stumble in and stumble my eyes to the right film, all the time fearful, the clerk knows what we're going to do, my minutes on this earth are numbered. But I did get the film, so grateful to my two friends, so damned delighted, all the way there and back. When I got back in the house, they still had their jeans on only. What then had they been doing with each other? So, after I loaded the camera and handed it to Ricky, both boys paroxysm of wickedness at that moment, I took off my clothes in front of them.
They laughed and fell in each other's arms yet again--boy sandwich-- when they discovered I didn't wear underwear. Ricky had put the camera down on the couch and he and Spencer stripped the rest of the way. Ricky was hard and he touched himself. Ricky in BVDs was Ricky hard on and Ricky supreme and almost unwrapped and then totally unwrapped, his penis like a huge rubber musket bouncing back against his stomach as he stood totally naked. Spencer stripped down to his somewhat tatty boxer shorts and unashamed as though he had done this before, mmm?, Spencer was naked in front of me the first time ever. And the last time. He had a washboard stomach, the first I had seen in person. He looked like a miniature Adonis lit vaguely pearl from within. His partly hard penis was uncut and looked like a hose. It was long and he had a massive amount of black thick pubic hair. Ricky's balls were large and I could take only one of them in my mouth at a time. Spencer's balls were like tiny eggs.
The v of his crotch was defined and like drawn in ink. Ricky kept his glasses on to see through the viewfinder of the camera. How incredible that was. Beautiful naked Ricky dressed only in glasses and watch. We went in the kitchen where Ricky took Spencer's pictures, during one of which Spencer, standing in front of the refrigerator in that sun lit kitchen with the light like liquid butter pouring through the windows, pretended to be the Incredible Hulk.
He did that body builder's pose where he bent over and brought down his arms in power grabs at the floor and snarled and made his arms parabolas linked one to the other. Flexing his somewhat daunting chest and arm muscles. He had very crooked and yellowish, somewhat greenish teeth with black cavities never to be filled visible in his front teeth. It broke your heart is what it did. But this was to be fun. This was to escape reality and poverty and hard luck and hard times and kids who never had a chance at life though I hope desperately he did, though he moved away soon after this and I tried finding him but couldn't.
And then for the next photo, I , knowing for sure I would get killed now, threw myself on my knees at Spencer's crotch and gobbled him up, that long semi hard hose of a penis uncut with the foreskin which I didn't push back because, okay, laugh, I didn't know how, and he has a musky boy flavor to him. And this to be seen by Ricky's eyes. God.
The photo shows Spencer's eyes widened in mock horror and his smile huge and surprised and his hands companionably on my shoulders. I held him in my mouth for a time, trying to suck him, trying to think of some way I could say to Spencer, what is my mouth doing here?, I have no idea, and Spencer let me for a time, We did not grab at each others' butts, or at each others' penises. There was such an odd decorum to all of this that baffles me to this day. After a time, Spencer gently disengaged me from his bright red head of a cock. How great it was after the pictures were taken, each one, to watch them develop and we stood there and looked at the print and how grand it was to see these ghost visions, these fantasy visions vague at first, but then clearer and sharper and colored and real and true. The door to imagination had been opened wide. Two boys stepped through. And they let me step through with them.
I took a photo of Ricky in the bedroom, in shadows. His dick hard and he proudly in profile holding it with his hand and pushing his whole mid section forward, with his other hand up and fisted outward like a boy who had just won most happily the sexual lottery of all. It was so good to walk about naked with these boys. To know that Ricky had been sucked to completion by me so many times and that I had just had Spencer in my mouth. We kidded. Laughed. Felt good. I was 26 but I felt like 15. I felt like I was a child for the first time. Far younger this time than I had ever felt when I had been literally that age. I had had to be an adult as a child for various reasons. I finally was allowed a true childhood thanks to Ricky and Spencer.
Then the final photo. The ultimate photo. Spencer and Ricky suggested it and Ricky got down on all fours, preparing to lie on his back, but while he was in that first position I kneeled on him, my penis on his butt and he shouted, laughingly, no not that, and pushed me kiddingly off--though if he had let me have intercourse with him then, I would have, I was that hot and excited, even though both of us had discussed it before and decided we didn't want to do that, at that moment I very much did want to. To imagine it. To imagine making love to Ricky while Spencer watched. Stroking himself as he sat on the couch. As I went down on Ricky and Ricky put his hands to my hair and massaged the top and sides of my head, like we had done so many times before. How very lovely to think Spencer might have joined us and I could have greedily had both of them at once.
Ricky on his back beside me, said wait a minute, went into the bathroom, how round how full and curved his butt was, and he went past Spencer and the camera, Spencer not erect but pulling on his penis anyway, Ricky not erect at that point either. He came back with some shaving cream. Lay down. Stroked himself hard, put the some shaving cream on his beautiful thigh and said we could pretend he just came. To watch Ricky masturbate, with Spencer and I in the room, so sensual, Spencer and my eyes glued to him, and my eyes glued to Ricky and also on Spencer, standing beside him, fiddling with his penis with one hand and holding the camera to his eye with the other, was so magnificent. I put a little shaving cream on my own leg. I don't know why I didn't touch Ricky. Have sex with him there and then. I think of course it was shyness on our parts. But other things too. It was a boy game. It was not serious. It was allowed I think for that reason in Spencer's mind.
Spencer took the picture. We knelt on the carpeting, watching the picture develop. Ricky asked Spencer if he would like to jack off with us. Spencer said he didn't think so. I've always wondered what that would have been like. Two horny naked boys and me on the bottom and everywhere else. Watching them suck each other off. Have sex with me in between. Some time before this, Ricky had been with Spencer at his, Ricky's house, when no one else was there. Ricky had been using a massager on his penis and accidentally went too far and came in front of Spencer. It was probably this story of theirs that finally gave me the courage to suggest photographs. In fact Ricky was going to bring the massager over to my house but for some reason it never happened. Anyway.
That's a bit on those photos. And on Spencer. I never saw him naked again. He skipped school some and would stay the day at my house. We watched TV. Read books. Talked about space and science fiction. I didn't ask him again to strip. I wanted to but did not. I think it would have meant the end of our friendship, had I. And I was not going to risk that. Ricky and I still had sex, but only when Spencer was not around. And he didn't mention our crazy summer afternoon. Though he and Ricky liked to look at those photos a lot.
I and they had kind of a tussle over the photos. Ricky wanted to take them to show his girl friend. Of course that sent my heart to the bottom of the deepest well in the world with fear. I managed to talk him out of it. Years later, all but one of those photos were stolen by a "friend" who tried to blackmail me with them. I've only one remaining picture. The one of Ricky in the shadows of the bedroom. That has left me deeply angry and embittered. It frightened me. It made me want to commit violence. Belinda made it all seem dirty and wrong and malevolent. Put her own squirrely twisted mind on me. Tried to at least.
When of course it was anything but--the creamy July sunshine coming in the kitchen windows, my two friends and I reveling in being naked as all boys revel in being naked, pretty much any time, pretty much any where, if they are allowed and sometimes especially when they are not allowed. Boys are most proud of their bodies. And if whom they can show them off to is another boy or a man, they will do so. It is a fact very much of the time, I don't care what anyone says.
I think I write this to remember of course. As a tribute to two great boys I knew once. As an antidote to the cobweb pains brought on by the picture thief and thief of so much more and others of her kind before and since. To remember summer and friendship, the way it's supposed to be, and to, on this sad cold wintry day, remind myself that good things do happen, that kind persons are out there and what they need most of all is a little hug. Which maybe in some way is the point of this whole thing here and everywhere.
Thanks for listening.