"A Letter from Doug About the Boy From the Moon"
by
Timothy Stillman
So Janey,
Here I am at Litchword Academy. Having the time of my life. Wish you were here. Instead of me. Ha. And if you think the folks back in Newington are bending over backwards and kissing their butts and ours to show they aren't the B word (bigots) you should see the teachers and little duffuses here. How Black I am. Or how Negro I am. Or how please sir let me open the door for you I am. They don't know what to make of me. Teachers eye me as though they think I'm going to bring crack and rap to their little snowy white campus. They don't know the drugs that are already here, that I had nothing to do with. I could tell them such true stories. All the little perfections of teachers' pets wasted every live long day. Ha. Anyway, I suspect someone will one day soon ask me how it was on the Underground Railroad and gosh it's lucky we won that war for you, and my golly I am so sorry your people have suffered so and so forth. A Black Knight in King Connecticut's Court.
Guess who I got for a roommate. Jeffrey Linden. Who? His parents live three blocks from us, right there in little old Newington, CT. Never knew them. Now I never heard of Jeffrey either, because he has spent all his life at boarding schools and now at the academy here. He told me once, in a fit of raging confession, that he cramped their style, so they put him away. Jeffrey is so far into the closet it's a wonder the raincoats don't fall off their hangers and smother him to death. Course no one knows I'm in the closet too. They figure I got enough strikes against me without that as well. Which is real big of them. It's already too late to back out of my skin color. Though everyone wishes I would. Me too, for that matter. I got the scholarship to show mom and dad, and everybody we left behind back in Hattiesburg of the Mississippi state of mind that I can--as the ads say--be somebody. The thing is I don't know who that somebody is. Yes, I know. Cliche. Sorry.
I know who Jeffrey is. I mean his skin is as pale as buttermilk like everybody else here (save for yours truly) and he is cute and short and thin, while I am bulky tall and of a certain heritage that is like the map of Africa tattooed all over me everywhere I go, but we're alike. We're scared. Nobody thinks I'm scared. Because I'm me. And that me is whatever they want me to be. Again, very big, very noble of them. But Jeffrey is more scared than I am. Of me, I'm afraid. I'm a little scared of me as well. They bunked me with him because we are two oddballs and our room in the corner of the last dorm on campus is way off in the shadows. The corner room is considered a big plus because we're not surrounded on all sides by other rooms with the CD players blasting out most of the night. They blast out most of the night anyway. Sometimes so loud it's impossible to sleep.
Relative quiet, allegedly. In which to make my seduction. Though I won't do it cause I don't know how. In spite of you and Tommy seducing me. It was good to be led by you two. Here I have to do the leading, and it scares me witless. I was a little boy with you two last summer. Now I seem to be an old man. Well. Anyway. Early in the game and the leaves are already changing and the air is getting frosty. Sorry I've not written sooner but I had to get acclimated. Looks like a really cold Fall this year setting in already. Sure wish I could spend it in bed with Jeffrey. With a blanket of snow on the ground and on the eaves, and us snuggled up together, pressing lips. He's blonde and has these thin arms and legs and body, almost all bone, that I would love to hug around me and let his white white skin meld with my black black skin. I think he would like to too.
He's noticed it of course. My hands, I mean. We study at the same library table (alone I might add) and I see his eyes on my hands which are black on top, my hands, and pink on the bottom. He seems fixated on them, though of course he doesn't say a word about it. His silence says it all.
It's like a sty in his eyes that he can't get out. I find myself taking every opportunity to show him the back of my hands and then my palms. Of course slyly I do these things. Everybody knows he's gay. Nobody seems to mind that either. If you get my drift. Course they mind it greatly. He is quite the outcast. And now being forced to share a room with me. Well, I tell you. Everyone just bends over backwards to show him they are fair with him. Course you get around the other students in the library, you hear things they think Jeffrey's not heard about himself, though I would imagine he has. I'm sure he hears things about me too. I have reverted back to the Mississippi patois. I have reverted back to missah boss man kind of rhetoric. Because they expect it. I guess. These kids here (I cannot think of myself as a kid, the Delta got rid of the vast majority of that in a hurry, hello three sheets, wanna burn the cross on someone else's lawn tonight?) think they are so precocious. They in their blue blazers and black ties and black pants and leather shoes (all school regs) and that little golden crest on the blazer pocket saying Litchword.
That they know everything. I am Black. Or Negro. Or African American. Depending on who is toadying up to me at the moment. Some very self consciously refer to themselves as honkies (as in "bet you have never seen so many honkies in one place before--ha ha") but things have to be simplistic for the precocious because it's too easy to fall into an ink pot (ha) of confused identities and complexities that they would rather not deal with at their age. Or at any age. They think too much. Posit the slightest problem, the tiniest conundrum and their brains kill themselves probing the depths of it. Depths which usually are only sink holes in those interior head tissues. Because of that, their brains are always tired. They are quite intelligent. As I like to think I am as well. Sometimes I want to cry out to them, "I am NOT Denzel Washington. I don't know Denzel Washington. I cannot get his autograph for you. I cannot bring you on the set when he's making a movie. I do not hear the jungle drums beating. I have never met Tarzan. So go swing on your grape vine and jack off the night away."
They do that, you know. You can hear them far into the night. Just humping their beds, their hands, their hearts. Some cry out silently. Or not so silently. The walls are not thick. The dorm is cavernous and carries sounds very nicely. But nobody ever talks about it! You would think they would babble on and on about it. But not one word! At least that I've heard. I do stand out like a sore thumb, though, so to hear anything really juicy at all, I have to eavesdrop. I hear Jeffrey jacking off each night. Our beds are separated by a wood partition. I would love to comfort him. I would love to show him all of me because I imagine he has never seen a Black African American Negro boy/man naked. How I would love to be his Promised Land.
He's of course read "Invisible Man" and "The Color Purple" and naturally that makes him a big shot. Well, I've read "Catcher in the Rye" and "The Grapes of Wrath" and I am neither Holden Caulfield nor a dust bowl Oakie, and so the hell what? That's what academicians do--they read the right books, say the right words, think the right thoughts. But everything is theoretical with them. Everything is something someone wrote fifty years ago and if I could only live inside those printed words, things would somehow be okay. Which really means I would just one day vanish and go away and everybody could have their lilly white school to themselves again.
I hear Jeffrey now. Stroke stroke. Sigh. Sigh. I'm sitting on my bed with my tiny Tensor lamp on these pages on this book on my lap. I think of him. There. Just a few feet away from me. I think of his pasty somewhat wasted looking body (I sneak a peek at him now and again in gym) that could use some loving. That could use me. But I wouldn't fit around him. And he wouldn't fit around me. I wonder how long his erect penis is. I wonder if it is tall and thin. Or short and heavier. I imagine the tall and thin is more like it. When flaccid, the sneak looks I took, it's just a little nubbin. Though I would like to look at it closer one day. About jacking off, sis, I don't do much of that anymore. I get sad a lot. I feel like a freak. And because I feel like a freak, it's hurt me inside somewhere I can't quite explain. And no I don't think your giving me my first hand job made me gay. God, what a word. I am never gay.
Or queer. They use queer now. The homosexuals. It's supposed to take the sting out of the word. I don't know, maybe it does. But the N word doesn't have the sting taken out of it when I hear Blacks use it--on TV or in the movies, of course. Where else? Talk about a fish out of water. But homosexuals have lots more names for themselves or foisted on themselves than Negroes Blacks African Americans would you please go back to Africa my man and make it quick. Course everybody here, like in Newington, loves to hear my stories about the Deep South and how the bigots all reside there. But nobody here mentions homosexuality. If they don't say it, it doesn't affect them. It seems like they hate me less than them. So they have made kind of a tiny kind of deification out of me. They hide behind me when Jeffrey comes around. Call it the lesser of the two evils. I win by default. But I am the other thing as well.
Sometimes Jeffrey calls out a name. I can't make it out. When he's masturbating. So I am reminded now, and often, of how I loved making it with you and Tommy that hot hot night last summer. It was kicky, I have to tell you, out there behind the house, in the full moonlight, and how you couldn't hold back the tears as I climaxed on Tommy's chest. It makes me quite wistful thinking about it. So I know I can tell you absolutely anything, Janey. It's not that I love Jeffrey or anything. It's just--well I almost wrote that I wanted to be friends with him. But when you're me, friendship is measured in days if not hours. It comes with the territory of skin surface and below that, secrets within secrets. And not trusting anyone comes a well thought out reasoning on my part. Not to mention experiences. I have no home in either "community." Not really.
It comes with a skittishness that everyone feels around me. Like I had pink eye or something. Hey, wait a minute, I guess in a way I do have pink eye! We can joke about ourselves at least. The teachers and kids here take everything so seriously. Like there are pronouncements from on high that everyone makes in the least little thing. For instance, "pass the salt" becomes a lesson in Bohemian uprisings against the Moneyed Class who are of course terribly effete snobs who think a raised pinkie on the hand that is holding the coffee cup is the height of elegance with a soiree to follow post haste.
Hey, you know, I feel like that psychotic sheriff in the Jim Thompson book (how I love his novels--he could look straight into hell and not blink twice and put it on paper just the way it is--he didn't see a fake reality--like the one at this school or anywhere else--he crucified Christ with every word he wrote and made me figure the Savior of no one but Pat Robertson and the other hoo-has got just what he deserved, and needed more)--anyway that sheriff was just a shit kickin' good ole boy in this little Texas town who did the town's dirty work for them and was just dumb as the proverbial dirt, but when he went home at night he read his father's medical books in Latin! and did complicated problems just for the mental exercise--but the next day out on the streets it's dumb old Lou Ford again, hail fellow well met, can I kiss your butt now, and take care of a prostitute for you who's been making blackmail sounds?
Well that's what I am here. I sang a Negro spiritual tonight. At dinner. Really. They applauded! I was looking at Jeffrey sitting across the table from me the entire time I sang. I have a reedy voice. They probably thought it was deep and profound. They hear what they wish to hear, in other words, just like everybody else. His pale face reddened as I put man my whole heart and soul into that stupid ditty. Every word of it was saying I love you Jeffrey Linden of the musical name and the harpsichord body on which I could strum the most lonesome lovely music you can imagine. He couldn't stumble run out of there fast enough. I'm truly sorry for that. He's not spoken to me at all tonight. I didn't mean for it to happen. Just didn't think. Now, thanks to me, his life is going to be more hellish than before. Damn. And I care so much for him.
So, here and now, from Jeffrey's side of the room--one bed creak, two bed, creak. He's getting close to the end. He's humping like nobody's business. He thinks I'm a dumb Negro too. He slows down his fast Northern speech pattern for me. Treats me as though I'm brain damaged. He doesn't mean to. He doesn't make a big thing of it. Course I guess I started it with my darkie talk. But it's there anyway. He thinks, everybody thinks, I got in here just so the school could get some favorable publicity after that boy sex thing this school was embarrassed with two years ago. You remember, upperclassmen making it with underclassmen. Been going on here forever I suppose. But some boy talked. The administration was shocked, shocked!, such a thing had occurred!
And now there are strict rules. Yeah, right. Tell me all that bed shaking in this dorm alone is shared by one hand apiece only. God, sis, I am hard. I've moved my book I'm writing on, to one leg. I'm sitting here in my briefs. The heat is on. And I find myself stroking myself with my other hand. Sorry for the shaky handwriting. I bet Jeffrey would have loved to have seen the three of us getting it on last summer. That way he could pretend he was turned on by you--no offense, sis, you looked great and sexy hot, and it was just kinky as all hell--but really his eyes would be glued to me and Tommy, who was pretty impressed with his first black gay male lay if I remember correctly. I wish I could tell Jeffrey about it. Really tell him. Could kind of make it woozy and off key and he could pretend to think of you and Tommy and hide in that little closet for a while. And if Tommy happened to be aiming a kiss in your direction, but accidentally laid a lip lock on Jeffrey instead, well, mistakes do happen. A bit of a nail to hold the raincoats back from crushing him one fine day. A little more of the story at a time.
How do I know he's gay? Everybody says so. That's how. And if everybody says so, then you are. I've decided to buckle in to this. It's just easier that way. Everybody in English now is reading Camus, so everybody is feeling a little sick these days, with the plague. When everybody gets around to reading Kafka--I cheated, I looked ahead in the text book--everybody will feel like they're on the verge of turning into a bug. Everybody's a book here. Everybody is scared spitless of the world. Hello to me, for to them, I am the world come to say "Hi neighbor." And if a Black Negro African American boy were to have sex with this prim and proper white boy, well it's welcome back to Newington and the lawsuits to follow. Money is everything. Everything and everyone can be bought. There is the home of morality. There is home of integrity. Money is where it all lays. And god I wish I could lay Jeffrey. Have that sweet delicate head of his on my chest while I stroke his sun field blonde hair. Tommy was just sex. Tommy was turned on by you and the wildness of making it with me too. But Jeffrey. I think there is more to him than that. I'm here. And he is too. But we might as well be a million miles apart.
I don't know if you've read it, but there is this novel called "The Collector." It's about this unstable--to say the least--young man who kidnaps this young woman and holds her prisoner, wanting her to love him, to end his loneliness. He has collected her like he collects butterflies, and wanted this prize specimen on his butterfly board too. In trying to make a play for him and make an escape that way, she appears naked in front of him, and it kills the whole deal she was running, for he is so totally offended by her lack of morality. I mean here he's kidnapped her, imprisoned her, chained her, and he is offended by her lack of morality! I guess its symbolic of a certain kind of sickness abroad in the land. And that starts a chain of events leading to her death. There is a line in there about how her being naked in front of him had pushed them so vastly far apart. She was never more concealed in front of anyone than she was when she appeared unclothed for this sad screwed up man. She felt as though she had prostituted herself.
I'd prostitute myself for Jeffrey. I'd pay him. I want to hold him. I want to show him what a black penis looks like. I wonder if I would appear to have clothes on, in his eyes, even when naked. Especially when I'm naked. I've taken great care not to let him see me naked. For fear he wouldn't approve. For fear that I really am a freak. Though I'm not. I think my body is pretty good. And since we both are victims and will always be victims of prejudice all our lives, maybe we could band together. But, no. There are some prejudices that are all right. Just like there are some that are not. You have to check the morning paper for the prejudice stock market to see what is bullish and what is bearish at the moment and go with it.
Jeffrey calls out the name now. I hear it for the first time. "Daniel." He says, sighs like air being let out of a tire. Slowly. Comfortingly. Soothingly. Who? I try to think of anyone here with that name, and can't. He could have said my name instead. He could have. I wish to go over there. Just get my hiney up off this bed and go over there, knee this Daniel whoever in the dream god groin, and kneel down beside Jeffrey's bed and tell him the lonely nights are over. He is like a pane of glass always breaking. A little tonight. A little more tomorrow. A little more tomorrow night. Until he shatters away. Now for all I know he may be as straight as an arrow. There are other boys here who seem gay, just like him (and just like him, willing to die and burn in hell before admitting it--we're just jackin' around, doesn't mean anything)--with the movements, and loving Judy Garland, and wanting to be an actor--in fact that includes pretty much every boy here, except for me. Well, I say that Judy's voice went a long time before she did. Swishing is from a Franklin Pangborn, or whatever his name was, movie. They haven't done sensitive since the fifties. And anybody wanting to be an actor is out of his mind and should just move into their sky castles, close the door, and forget about it.
And of course homosexual sex goes on here all the time and always will. Like in any boarding school or any place where there are only boys. It's just asking for it. I remember a line from Lenny Bruce: "Don't you love what they do with homosexuals in this country? They put them in prison with a lot of men. Verrry clever."
And, as you told me, Janey, the same applies to girls. But Jeffrey--I don't know--exudes something. It goes beyond winsomeness. It goes beyond a fey quality. It is just simply--Jeffrey. There is just something about him that is quite--wonderful and magical. I find myself longing for him when we're apart even a few hours. I am sure he has never been with a boy or with a girl. And that he would run screaming for the hills had he seen you and me and Tommy without our clothes, rolling around in menage a trois heaven with everybody examining everybody and sticking whatever we could in whatever bodily orifice fit our fine fancy at the time.
Ta da. Jeffrey has now come. The bed creaks a final time. I feel his muscles relaxing. I feel his hand around his penis while is pale and cool and summer breeze gliding. His legs are spread. His briefs are around his ankles. He lies there akimbo. He is panting. His pale thin stomach goes in and out hard. His eyes are closed. His cum is on his hands and on his legs and bed sheets. His penis is once more shrinking in his lonely Hollywood boy hand. He's in a box. We're all in a box. A box of boys who are nothing more than books.
A box where certain words in print give you permission to--well, read more words in print. There is no liberation in "Sexus" or "Nexus" or "Quiet Days in Clichy." None save for the freedom that Henry Miller had. That I for one and Jeffrey for another don't have. Sex is a messy business. I don't mean the obvious. Emotions climb into you even when you don't want them to. Even when you know there is no reason for them to. Even when you are thinking about someone else, something else, having forgotten Jeffrey, the irritant, the pest, the embarrassment, for instance, not dwelling on him at any point, then--zap. Somewhere along the way, you think of nothing else. He sneaks under your defenses, without his meaning to either. And there it is. One sided love yet again.
Unwanted. Unneeded. Uneducated about themselves. Just primitive primal emotions that are unbecoming an intelligent Black Gentleman like myself. I think Jeffrey knows about that. Well, yes, for this goddam Daniel whoever. I like to think he might someday feel something for me. Or maybe already does? If wishes were horses...We have our awkward brief silly conversations. Always about our subjects. Always about neutral topics. And I adore him. And I live for every word he says. I live for just being in his presence.
But when we study together, or walk to class together, everyone else keeping a safe distance from us, or when eat together (they clear out for us there too, or for me; he sticks with me though, so that must mean something--no one else sure the hell ever has) in the cafeteria or downtown (ditto the plague years when we walk in), he keeps taking eye snapshots of my hands. Pink on the palm. Black on the back. I wonder if he wonders if I am naturally that color. I wonder if he thinks I've been in a fire and I have burned the palms of my hands. He has never seen a Black Negro African American person up close. He does not know is my surmise. Am I an object of intrigue to him? Or an oddity? Which? I could ask. The pane that is him would break a little more. And this last one might shatter him entirely. I do not want to live with that on my head.
I've taken some time off since the last paragraph to masturbate. I lay on my back and I pulled down my briefs. I held my cock, which is not gigantic, damn the lie to that myth, and I stroked it and whispered "Jeffrey" a few times and I squirmed my butt into the bed and I bucked up to the ceiling and I felt that all important grip in my abdominal muscles. I pinched my tits. Has Jeffrey seen black tits before? I circled my hand round my crinkly pubic hair and my balls. I squeezed them fairly hard which sent waves of hurt and joy through me. And I willed myself in imagination onto the bed with Jeffrey who is still recovering from his night time past time.
I put out my right hand, while jacking myself off with my left, and I held it out to that partition that separates Jeffrey from me, so when I came, and I came big time, I squeezed that right hand and tensed the arm as all of me was tense and I held my fist out to him, though he couldn't see it or me. I don't know if it was a fist of anger at him. Or telling him I would protect him like a good darkie servant would. Or if it was an offer of help that's all balled up inside me, like that fist. Or perhaps I am a pane of glass too. And on the verge of shattering. I guess maybe I can be Holden Caulfield after all.
So Jeffrey went to the bathroom, turned on the bathroom light, and closed the door too quickly for me to see him--just a flash of guttering flame--while I lay with only my dim Tensor light on, begging him to look at me, offering my limp penis to him, come take it, please o please. He peed and flushed the toilet. Which made me turned on again. And he opened the bathroom door, but before he so rapidly turned out the light, I saw him momentarily naked. He was so vulnerable looking. So weak chest tiny dick kid looking that it broke my heart. How fragile and easily ended he was. How unfair that. How deep down lonely him against the world it was. And who do you think is going to win in that contest?
I like to think that he stood there in the shadows with the bathroom light off for a moment or two longer, looking at me, vague milky moonlight coming in the small window by his bed, not seeing me, this boy of moonglow, casting his paleness at me like radiance. Looking directly at me, trying to see me, but I blended black in black after all, so he couldn't. Then he went to his bed and lay down again. This time to exhaustedly sleep. He and I do put all we have into our little jack off rituals. I will give us that.
So now I'm at the end of my letter (not to mention the end of my rope--ha--and I just realized the unmeant deeply psychologically significant pun) so go fuck yourself, Sigmund Freud. Think he ever did? I'd pay money to see that.
I'm enclosing a bit of my sperm--for god's sake don't use it to get pregnant, I would not like to end up on the Springer show one day-- on this page for you. For a gross out effect. Hope the pages don't tear because of it. I've never read of anyone ever sending come to his sister, or to anybody else for that matter, before. So just consider it my plea for originality of writing. Though I probably will read it in some book tomorrow that was written seventy five years ago. Maybe it's a recurring theme for thousands of big name writers down through hundreds of years. I don't know. That's how it is when I think I've been so immensely creative.
Anyway, don't spend your brother's come all in one place. Pardon the stickiness of it. Thought you would get a laugh out of it. Can I get in trouble sending this through the mail?
I'll close, then go to the bathroom, and return to my bed for sleepy bye. And think that tomorrow Jeffrey and I shall meet half way like the North and the South, when the Confederates surrendered in all that land of cotton--and have our day. Though I know we will not. Still. Why not hope? It costs nothing. Just the price of a soul and sanity is all. And those are bought and sold and thrown away cheaply and carelessly in this world. with not even a shrug to note their passing.
Take care, Sis, and give my love to Tommy or whoever you're banging at the moment. Give him one for me, also. Think of me and I'll be there.
Your little bro, Doug
the end