"They Just Happened to Be There, is All"
by
Timothy Stillman
When I was a kid, the hottest book I knew of then, at least the hottest that ever made it to Evans Drug Store, was "The Harrad Experiment" (Harrad was just down the road from Harvard) by Robert Rimmer. It was a novel about a university devoted to nothing but sex, getting it, improving on it, breaking down inhibitions, etc. The heterosexual boys who read it of course drooled over the girls. I drooled over the boys in the novel. It was an incredibly exciting, somewhat terrifying thing, this seemingly then most daring book that allowed young people to have sex, and older people, the dean of the school, the teachers, helped them out, all in the hopes that they would not become damaged like their parents, grandparents, etc. before them.
There were several other jack off books of the time. None as great at that one. But a series of novels involving a teenager with his very young and very hot aunt, (and later on, hello "Sweet Marpessa" )as well as some soft core porn from the usual, Harold Robbins, and so forth, who made my dream boy Laddy Buck so vivid and real to me, and he had such fun coming in his handkerchief that I carried a handkerchief with me everywhere I went, just in case I had three private seconds and could jack off. Well, I could always jack off. Now that I think about it, there were a helluva lot of soft core porn books published by big houses back then, by name writers. "The Hand Reared Boy" by Brian Aldiss, science fiction favorite, I was fond of, especially the passages about Maginot line of the circle jerk. Cum stains on the pages leave their lasting impression. Of course "Playboy" magazine and their story collections could always be counted on. Naturally, Ian Fleming too. They knew what we wanted. No they knew what other adolescent boys wanted. I had to adjust it all to me.
Mostly, no, always, I had to rearrange the sexes of the persons in books having sex. I was so used to this I learned to do it without any effort. Now, this brings me to the current yada yada concerning gays and the Boy Scouts of America. I was in the boy scout pack in my home town. I absolutely, categorically, hated it. If I had known I could have gotten out of it by using the dreaded H word, or more likely the dreaded Q or F word, then I would have done so. The F word I mean to be fairy. Check out my first name. My mother named me Barry so I wouldn't be teased by kids rhyming some cruel word with it and hurting me. I appreciate the thought, but Mom was a little off kilter. But no one, to my face, called me Fairy Barry. I was just another kid in school. That was the all of it.
Because I did so poorly in the scouts, rope tying, climbing a tree, making a fire, and I hated the costumes, especially that kerchief that embarrassed me to death, and because I was in love with one of the boys in the scouts who didn't know I existed and who remained mute when I screwed up with yet another granny knot, because no one reacted to me one way or another, it was all just kind of a flat, knew he couldn't do it anyway response, if it was a response at all, it was kind of a vacuum for me.
Now, and yes I'm getting to some sex passages now, well, kind of. In about the tenth grade we scouts were meeting at the MYF Hall at the United Methodist Church. That night we congregated in the basement/basketball court/social/dining room underneath the sanctuary. The man who lead the group was called to the phone, came back and told us there was something he had to attend to and we could just hang around for a time or go on home. So there we were. My boyfriend who didn't know I was alive. And the other boys who didn't know either. And I wonder now if they only knew they were alive a little more than they knew I was.
The thing was after a while shooting hoops, and talking, someone suggested that they break out the cards and play strip poker. I was sitting in the far corner, leaf curled, and when I heard that, I think the blood left every part of me and went into another dimension. The idea of it had never occurred to me. The daring of it, under the sanctuary after all, the temerity, the self righteousness I felt then--all of these different emotions and angers and hurts collided inside me. I thought they were kidding. They however knew themselves not to be. The thing I feared most was being raped by them. Now why this occurred to me then, I think because of fear, but also because I desperately wanted someone to knock me to the floor and have their way with me. Just that far and then I would take over. What a tiger, sex fiend, I was in my masturbatory fantasies.
These were boys I had known from grade school on. They had always been civil to me, had never caused me any problems I can remember. So my eyes focused on them there in that little sexual knot as they frogged each other and titty twisted nipples here and yon, and broke out the cards and sat in a semi-circle and played poker, periodically taking off a kerchief. Then taking off a shirt. All of it was books I had read, pictures in comic books I had seen, mostly my hero then was Robin the Wonder Boy and Aquaboy, come true, but the aroma of the basement was the aroma of the church, sacramental wine (i.e. grape juice) and the way the dull sermons of Sunday always smelled, like they came complete with mothballs made it all seem sacrilegious, for I was incredibly moral back then. For more of the laugh's on me, see "The Jack Off Book" elsewhere on the Nifty story list, every weird little word of it is true.
I was in love with so many boys, the one in the scouts especially, and I jacked off at least two times a night thinking of him, and holding various paperback books in one hand, as I stroked with the other, making boys I knew into characters I loved with all my heart. I didn't feel deprived. I just felt this was the way it will always be and that was the way it was. But seeing those boys stripping there on the hard wood floor in the corner by some chairs, doffing their official boy scout clothes made it hotter, scarier to me, one boy chest bare, and the boy I loved getting around to taking off his kerchief, I wanted them to know I was there. I wanted them to see I was hard too. Were they even? I vote yes. I was never to wear that damned uniform after that without it being incredibly sexual for me. That wet wool suddenly transformed itself against my body. For the first time my anonymity that I never invented or wanted but seemed to own by dent of lack of personality was a terrible burden on me, was a pressing discourse of pain in flames inside me, and it felt like that, like hot coals growing hotter in my stomach.
And I did what I've always done in times of stress and pain and rejection, I ran like hell. Well, I walked steadily to the basement door to the hall, hoping someone would stop me, trying to remember what the shirtless boy looked like though I could see him and other boys in the gym during changing period or in the showers at the municipal pool in summers, naked as jaybirds, whenever I wanted, but I never dared look at them. For then they would know. And I wanted them to know because then they would throw me down on the wet pooly water floor among the showers where they gathered naked in their herd and laughed at each other's dicks and pushed each other around, or beside the lockers, and they would give me a personality by hurting me, stripping me and hurting me. Now, I never in my life have wanted to be hurt in any way. The rapes I had in mind came with soft kisses and gentle breezes blown on my cock. But to me, back then, that was rape. The bodice rippers are fond of that kind of thing. So was I.
But all of that was only a wistful thought even then. Warm summer breezes blew through it and I was so old when I was a kid I can't begin to tell you. So I got out into the church hall way, out the door to the outside, and ran like hell. I ran all the way home and I hurt and I cried and I ran the four blocks to my house and sat on the front porch steps under the bug light that was yellow and the moonlight which was bone bare white, and I wondered what they were doing back there, how far they would go, what sights I would have seen, all that kind of come on ballyhoo you could find in carnivals and back then in print ads for movies like "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad"--see the giant roc, see the Medusa, see the shrunken doll size maiden, see the Harpies lure men to their death.
Now, fast forward a number of years to the first year I was out of the university and working at a newspaper job in Kentucky. On the weekends I would come home to my mother's house, always to return on Sunday night to Kentucky, by bus. One summer night, hot as the South gets, wilted, clothes become skin, sweat is king cobra with wet hot rags around the whole of you, I was waiting on the ten o five bus, with a couple of other people, they were maybe a husband and wife and their kids. We had to sit outside the Greyhound station that was closed. So I sat on the window ledge. The other persons stood around or sat on the curb. After a time, the bus being late, because it always was, my mind drifting to of course Joel, who I've written about elsewhere, and I was eager to be in my apartment--hell, apartment--room!--and jack off in his honor, when I started noticing a car on the dark street in front of the station, slowly going by. Then after a time, it slowly went by again. Another time, it did the same thing. This time I was interested. Scared. A part of something. Maybe.
The car pulled over to the side of the curb, stopped. After what seemed a long time but probably wasn't, someone got out of it, and stood looking at us under the dim bus station and lamp post bug buzzing lighting. It was a man. He came to me. He looked tentative, and said tentatively, as though just realizing who I was, "Ah---Barry?" I recognized him. It was Jack. Jack one of my old classmates, one of the high school's tough guys but like the rest of that muted group, he too was muted and I never knew what he was tough about. I remember smiling, feeling superior, and saying, friendly, buoyantly, "Hello, Jack" always careful not to say "Hi Jack" cause he must be sick to death of that by then even. He kinda sort of made a moment's conversation with me, really awkward he was, and I was not. Then he said "seeya" and got back in his car and drove away. I was crushed. Take me too. And when you talk about this, and you will, be kind.
I don't know if he was gay. I don't know if he was cruising the bus station. I doubt that he was trying to decided where or not it was his old school chum and he was just wanting to renew old ties and was delighted as all get out to see me. He had girl friends in school, I remember. I know, big deal. He was in the Boy Scouts with me. I'm getting to a meaning about all of this. I don't remember if he was the boy I saw in the church basement without his shirt. But he was there that night. I have no idea how far the boys went with stripping after I had left. God knows I tried to hear about it at lunch but no one ever said a word I could catch about it. I like to think they had a circle jerk, and used their kerchiefs to, when they were totally naked, tie up their balls with and make them hard and firm and tie up their cocks and make them hard and purple and just went to town on them. It was just such a devilish thing to do--in church!!! What would Phyllis Shitfly say about this? And old Stick up the Butt Kennedy? And old Herr Doktor Dobson? Would it finally kill Fat Pat's smirk and the smarmy face underneath?
I was there. It really happened! It probably devolved however into nothing at all. Now to the best of my knowledge all of them were straight as an arrow and they were only having sex play of a sort, what else did they do with each other I never knew about?, because back then doing it to a girl, hell, asking out a girl was truly an act of a giant of great courage. But with boys, just jacking around. But to me, just try to jack around with boys was like their fear of asking out a girl. So they were kind of in the same bind I was, but in a different way. Not that they didn't, some of them, fuck girls and do everything else to them and vice versa silly. But still, I heard tell, it was more of a strain than a pleasure. Still is to a lot of them, I've read.
Okay, rewind to when I was in university. When I was a junior, I moved from home to the dorm, roomed with a really nice guy who I went to elementary school with. He was not homosexual. And yet we kidded round with it, talking about it, that is, all the time. We both flounced about the room, talked in falsetto voices from time to time, and once got so loud and shrill the guy who lived next to us shouted out he was going to kill us queers if we didn't knock it off. I remember at that time looking at Steve who was dressed as I remember only in his briefs, as was I, and his eyes were like these sweet deer eyes you see in Disney movies. A boxy young man with hairy chest and shoulders and back and thick as tree trunk strong legs.
Steve had a girl friend, Sue. They eventually married. On Friday nights, I would go home for the weekend, and after a couple of hours Steve and Sue would visit me there because we had only seen each other constantly all week long and we needed to see each other. At that point, I had never seen a woman naked except in "Playboy." Steve, who though he was brawny and hairy and muscular, I still remembered as a young child with a very gentle soft face and happy grin, the happy grin he maintained, though it was hard to see it round his beard and mustache, was after a certain novelization of the movie "De Sade" because he couldn't find it, and I had it. He pestered me about the book and other books and magazines, we had always made some kind of a trade, he always got more than I did in the bargain. I lost one full year's copies of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" in a trade to him for his copy of that magazine's Ray Bradbury tribute issue. I later found I could have bought the thing for four of five dollars. But he was my friend and that was okay.
So, though I had never dated a girl in my life, though Steve and I kidded about being gay (Once Sue had had enough of it and told us, "all right, then kiss each other." We looked at each other. I closed my eyes for a half second. We turned away from each other, and said "No, I don't think so.") Steve told me that if I would give him the book, he would let me see Sue's breasts totally naked. I went hard. Not because of Sue. Here came into play my ability developed through the years of reading books and transposing the sexes of characters fucking each other or giving each other head (Steve provided me with my very first picture of a naked teenager, in a sex book about male and female sexuality) so I could get off on them too. It never occurred to me that I was a second or third class citizen in this. So I transposed Sue into a boy my own age.
Sue was incredibly pale, almost vampircally so. She was thin at the time. Muddy, crinkly black hair worn short. She was like a little flame from a gas heater that was just about to go out. She looked like, all of a sudden, because I was going to see her breasts, in my mind, Oliver Twist, (it happened automatically for me) though Oliver was far prettier and far more desirable. But the idea that in my mother's house, a girl who I could for a moment pretend was a boy was about to bare her breasts for ten whole seconds before she covered up--Steve timed it with his watch--and crazy as it sounds I could pretend that seeing her breasts, which looked like two milk jugs made out of moon glow color or lack of color, was really like seeing a boy's cock hard and ready for me and only me. So the thing happened in the kitchen. I just stood mute and still and stared at them. Hard.
The little boy in me was queasily waking on Christmas morning, unsure of where the burn places on the Christmas packages were and what I should say when and if I was lucky enough to touch them. They were true to their word. I wanted my book back immediately because it didn't turn out to be anything at all that I was interested in. Oliver quickly dissolved.
Over this period, Sue out of the blue, with Steve's permission, suddenly took my head in her arms as they were preparing to leave, and pulled my mouth to hers and stuck her tongue in my mouth and rolled it round. Again I shot hard, pretending that she was a boy. It was not real, any more than words on a page, but I had this idea that they were both, Steve and Sue, interested in me. I let her. I stepped back when she was through. I said, did, nothing. They were sort of like James Dean and Natalie Wood in "Rebel Without a Cause" and I was like Sal Mineo, Plato, wanting to hang around them and be taken care of by them and important to them. But when Sue let my mouth go it was filled with her cigarette breath, I looked at Steve to see if he was going to kill me, and he was laughing, just as was Sue. I clue in very slowly.
Now for this to work, remember Sue, in these sort of sex times, is a boy to me. I tried to see her as this at least. I always failed. I tried to pretend that she was like Emma Peel dressing as Oliver Twist" in an "Avengers" episode. But Sue was no Diana Rigg. Diana Rigg was infinitely more beautiful and stately and wonderful and had a smile that could break me in half, as well as far more brilliant and witty and alive and kind and friendly and tender and she only hurt bad guys. I was no bad guy. Sue was incredibly arrogant, read only the classics, talked down to everyone, including Steve who just took it. When one Friday night at my home, in the living room, we were watching TV, and Steve said, "Ah Barry, could we use that bed in your attic to have sex in?" Why not? The whole damned world was having sex all over the place, save for me. Why not in my house too? That bed that I wanted to have sex with Joel in so very much. I was ready to say no, ready to tell them to leave.
So Steve said, "we'll let you watch." Then he said he would give me a demonstration. I thought on me. It scared me. It delighted me. I wanted to take Steve from Sue so badly I didn't know what to do. So with Sue's assistance, he stripped her to her bra and panties, and then stripped himself to his Jockeys, lay her on the floor in front of the TV set, oh the virginity of my house was to be popped and I would be in there somewhere for sure, and lay on top of her. I could hide in and around the both of them. Be the third wheel to the life they lived and I would only come out for the good stuff and never never get hurt. They were the book covers. I could write anything between those covers I wanted. So I thought. Then.
She put her hands down the back of his briefs, stroked his butt, stroked her finger tips up his spine. He had a thick erection I could see lying against her abdomen. He took off her bra and tossed it aside and kneaded her breasts. They posed like in mid fuck for me. And there before me I saw, I did my best to see, Laddy Buck, restless horny teen, and Oliver Twist who I just know made it with the Dodger, and I pleaded with myself to see the boy and girl in "The Harrad Experiment" who were just learning how to have wild passionate guilt free sex under the tutelage of the teachers. I sat in the easy chair that was turned to the side of them. I turned my face to them. I said, heart gulping, no. I said no, because I realized it then, in addition to knowing that they had no right to have sex in my house, even with me looking on, and I've no doubt they would have allowed this. I said no, because they were posed before me just like the covers of the books I had read all those years. The models or the paintings in mid fuck, passion lengthening, their groins artfully hidden by shadows and the positioning of arms and legs just like Steve and Sue were doing. And the covers, the books, now seemed like Iron Maidens. And I was their throw away. It was like all the books of this sort I had read in my life and which I had treasured were each all at the same time, laughing at me.
I said no because it occurred to me, kind of, not for several years did my massive ego figure it out, that they were treating me like the biggest joke in the world and proceeded to do so for the long years we were to know each other thereafter. I put up with it because I had no choice. Steve often compared me to a man in the movie "Beneath the Valley of the Dolls" who was like a cardboard cut out that a beautiful girl was always trying to seduce, but he was like me--lumber, wouldn't say a word about sex, wouldn't have a sex hormone in his or my body for love or money, for if I had one it would have died of loneliness. Steve called me "Dumbo." He meant it kindly. They offered to let me see a little more that night. I wanted to feel Steve's cock. I wanted to see Sue see me feeling him and I wanted to have sex with the both of them, and I wanted them to rape me, in my own way, mentioned earlier. I was a third wheel in their having sex. And it would be okay. Third wheel taken to the extreme.
I was Heironymus Merkin, from a movie Steve and I liked, looking on while his faceless double, made love to Heironymus's conquests. The double had a key in his back that needed to be wound up every now and then by Heironymus, who would do so dutifully. I was in that symbolism, crossed and confused, somewhere. They needed the house for sex so they wouldn't have to keep doing it in the car or in a secluded meadow not far from the dorm. That was the main thing for them.
I wanted Sue to ask me if I would take off my clothes. But she didn't. I wanted Steve to ask me too. But he didn't. Dejected and somewhat angry at me, how can you get really angry at a puppy?, they dressed (they made me turn away, I did) and we watched some TV and then they went home and things were as they always were with the there of us. A few years after we graduated from university, they were married and living in an apartment building owned by the university. They invited me over one night. And here we come full circle. We toasted their new apartment and Steve and Sue got a bit drunk. I had only a glass of wine. We didn't talk about those days of their taunting me sexually. That had been over for a time. But after they were considerably drunker, one or the other of them suggested we play strip poker. We were sitting at the shiny dining table in the attempt at a kitchen alcove. And I was excited. Though I didn't say it. Never did. Thought then someone would know I was there. Because I knew now that they really wanted to get it on with me. I pretended to know. We were out of university. Steve had a job. I was looking for one. We were officially adults. We could proceed as adults. However unorthodox it was.
Not that I was that unsure about what turned me on, I still had those book covers in my mind, those sex and age games I could play with the characters--I remember "Philly" was really terrific, about a boy and the sexy French maid--made into an equally hot movie, "Private Lessons" that still gets me going, even now. I just knew I would have to do that kind of thing all my life long. And I always knew my place. I never knew it though. And that has hurt me all my life. So I agreed. We went to the living room, got on the floor, broke out the cards. They put on some soft classical and chamber music. And we played enough to take off this piece of clothing or that, and it was quite fun because this time I was in on it, not just watching like a window peeper. It was coming off--all our clothes--like in the novels and stories I read--except there were three of us, and that was even hotter-- shirts and blouse and then slacks and jeans and then underwear and I sat there in the soft candle light with them, the only light there was, except for a little rosy glow of light from the kitchen area, naked, with my hard on. Steve didn't have a hard on. His cock was impressive nonetheless. I wondered if he was embarrassed that I could get stiff and he hadn't.
But it was like a bake off or rummage sale with them when I was around. My half there presence was at least. They kissed and made out fully clothed on my couch often when I was there, as I sat in the arm chair, studiously watching TV. I was a joke that got real old and they didn't know what to do with me. They wanted me to watch. For kicks. Sue had a large muff which impressed the whey out of me for reasons I don't understand. They drank more, smoked some, and I was so desperate to see Laddy Buck feel up the boy in "The Race for Home," a novel by J.P. Miller (a real writer) about a chronic masturbator that swelled me and took me down the other side a zillion times. Miller also wrote "The Days of Wine and Roses." "They are not long," the female character in it quotes, "the days of wine and roses...." I knew all about that too.
We displayed ourselves. I showed them my hernia scar from when I was ten or so. They crawled over to look at it close up. They were looking at my hard on with their bleary eyes. I told myself. Though they weren't. Or if they were, it was to make fun of it later. They were too drunk to now. They asked me one or the other, if I minded if they went into their bedroom and fucked. They didn't ask me if I wanted to watch. No need. It was their home. My dick throbbed. I wanted so to masturbate in front of them. To take Steve right there on the floor. To hold him down till he raped me. And to tie Sue up with silken cords and make her watch. To say to both of them, see I'm not a store window mannequin after all, I'm real too, just like you, and maybe even more so.
But I requested they wait till I leave to have sex. Just like old times. They drank some more and said it was okay with them. It was just sad and melancholy extra ordinary being naked with them and sitting on the couch and lying on my back with my erection straight up and Sue (remember, Oliver, the Dodger) coming over to me to look at it closer, and my turning on my stomach in spite of her entreaties to stay as I was, and the good feel of their shag carpet on my dick, and I so wanted to let myself go. But it's always been like that with sex and me--the sex real or imagined has always been enclosed with barbed wire. I don't know any other way.
That was pretty much it. We just weren't wearing clothes. We did the usual things. Sat around and talked. Watched TV. So forth. home, driving like a bat out of hell, I couldn't masturbate fast enough. Came gobs.
Now. The point of all of this. The strip poker the Boy Scouts engaged in with laughter and cursing and kidding around and none of this meaning anything and we will every last one of this die and fry before we admit we were turned on by it or did anything even at all. The strip poker of Sue and Steve and me. The sex play they enacted before me for several years each Friday night. The fact that the next morning after our strip poker session, I went to their apartment, hoping to catch Steve before he left for work, to thank him for a terrific night. I hadn't slept at all that night, I was so excited. He was gone. Sue wasn't. She was wearing only a bathroom. Had just gotten out of the tub. She sat on the couch, I sat beside her, could see the curve of one pale breast top. I started to thank her for a great time, when she said, not even looking at me, "last night was the dullest night of my life. I can't think of any night that was more boring than when you were here then."
So I talked with her a moment about nothing and then I went on my way. I think all of this was like a paperback novel written by respectable writers published by respectable paperback houses like Bantam and Dell. I think all of us, the scouts, Jack in his cruising by, if that was what it was, and god why didn't he ask me to go home with him?, the sex shows Steve and Sue gave me, all of it was a series of repressions, all the petting and sex and intercourse that kids surely did have even back then. All of it was a series of attempts to make a play for somebody, anybody, without anybody involved the wiser. Just whoever happened to be there became the gold ring on the merry-go-round. That's why alphabetical seating in classrooms eventually brings together heterosexual couples with similar last names, rather than other characteristics they might have.
It was not that I was wanting to be literally raped. It was that all of us were raped. By our parents and the times and the fear and the guilt and the loneliness that back then I thought I was the only one to experience. I think all of us just hurt like hell. And if Aaron in William Goldman's magnificent novel, "Boys and Girls Together" was to wind up in a sadistic masochistic homosexual relationship, it was at least, horrible as it was, a relationship of sorts. That was the first novel I ever read that had homosexuality as one of its chief topics. Pretty grim stuff. But it fit in me somewhere. And I've loved Goldman ever since.
It was a Peyton Place ( a pretty hot book, itself) kind of time. It was a series of scarves taken off slowly by a beautiful boy such as in "Caravan Tonight," written and sung by Steve Grossman, that has been so terribly forgotten, one of the best songs ever about what it is to be a gay man in love with a man who is, even in sleep, especially so in dreams, entranced by the boy in scarlet sashes who left his lovers here once before, lovers like the man who watches over his soon to be former lover who has no heart for anyone but that boy in scarlet sashes, as this untouchable faun dances in the wildwood to a tambourine beat and who whispers that love and sex and being are yours, can be yours if you can be the right one, if you can be that everyone else you are lied to is out there. The ones who dammit know so much about everything.
There. That's what I have to say. I think, for me at least, it makes some kind of sense. We were all singly in our own bathrooms or bedrooms, pulling on our puds, or fingering our pussies, and holding a magazine or a book in one hand, or just imagining how that boy or girl across the street would feel if they only knew we were thinking about them, and maybe just maybe on our little quiet summer street of shade trees and badminton games on the side yard, trips in the unbearably hot stinging afternoon steam heat to the Dairy Queen for a dilly bar or a milk shake, those other kids might be thinking the same thoughts about us. We just wanted to have sex with each other without each other or ourselves knowing about it. The barrier became a very important sexually charged thing. It itself made us horny.
Thank you if you've read this. I'm sorry it's not specifically about sex, though I think that is the whole core of it. As I remember these things, it makes me mad as hell that I've, along with so many others, and I lay odds this is something that is still going strong today as well, wasted my time in dreaming dreams without someone else being there. Without at least trying harder. I made love to Ricky. It took forever for him to convince me he wanted to. And even then, he always lead the dance. I kissed and held his penis and sucked him till he came, such a lovely salty taste, in one reckless magnificent year, for he was my true friend and he was so gentle in bed, so kind and adventurous, but it was really Joel I thought of all that time. Joel, whose body I held. I had phone sex with Daniel during a summer, but it was really Ricky and Joel I thought of. Not Daniel at all who was the ultimate manipulator. My memories saved me that time. My secret self. That no one ever touches or comes near to. If Daniel is still out there and makes a grab at you, watch out. He's got what no Acid Queen in a rock song could possibly have in store for you.
It's just easier to know your place. And be grateful for it. Sadder, but easier. Books, you see, can break your heart with their dreams and possibilities, but they can't kill you. Persons on the other hand can kill you. It's kind of like their job. That's the problem, you see. That's the problem.