...it's only my life...

"it's only my life...it's only my life...it's only my life..." by Tilmothy Stillman

Something has been reached here. It was not just a movie...just a movie..just a movie...like the posters and preview proclaimed. Some nadir had been plummeted.

I was fifteen the year Last House on the Left played the theater here in Paducah. I saw it with Joel who was fourteen and my secret true love. Forget movie ratings. Easy as falling off a log to get into any movie. Age doesn't matter.

We walked out with the high school and the college students, and no one said a word. No one looked at anyone. Except I was looking at them to see no one looked at each other. Joel didn't look at his friends. Or at me. Hardly ever did look at me anyway. But this was different. Everybody walked shuffling. There was no laughter. No kidding around. No boys' arms round girls' shoulders.

They looked like me in other words. First time that had happened. They looked down at the floor and then the cement sidewalk they turned on to. They moved slowly. As though they had forgotten who they were, what anything meant. They looked sick. Wasted. Like a bad drug trip. Or a funeral that had starred themselves.

Their faces seemed bloodless. As though this movie was a vampire that had sucked some of the essence out of them. Joel and I stood at the side of the theater, beside the poster for the film. He had his hands in his jeans pockets. I had my hands in my jeans pockets. He looked up at me. I caught his glazed eyes. First time I had seen those eyes when they were not wide and electric and filled with excitement and curiosity.

I turned from the eyes of my love, because I knew after this I could not even pretend one sided anymore with a scant possibility of hope for tomorrow in his life and mine. His life was not mine. And now it seemed even worse. Seemed the strands of him and me and everyone who saw that film, these sudden zombies, were unraveling.

Something horrible had happened. Joel pulled a cigarette from his plaid shirt pocket, and a lighter, lit up and smoked. Trying to be casual. I had never seen him smoke before. I caught his eyes again. They said, it seemed, I am down here far inside me and I need assistance getting out--help me.

I moved toward him. He looked a bit--apprehensive. That floored me. Terrified me. I stopped moving. The movie. The sadistic sonofabitch movie about this gang of thugs and the violence they exact on two girls and then the violence exacted on them. We had never seen anything like it before. It was far more grotesque than "The Wild Bunch." Far worse made. Cheap and tawdry and inane, with hillbilly humor thrown in to make us laugh, relieve the tension, I guess. That had made me sickest of all.

It had been a large crowd tonight. Just kids coming in to see a movie. Now there should have been ambulances waiting for us. Daring, taunting, laughing, filled with life, as they entered. Filled with pain, exiting. I wondered how much business the snack bar was doing during this film's run, after people saw the movie for what it was. They should have issued barf bags like in "Mark of the Devil."

I felt assaulted. Like those two girls in the movie. Like apparently everybody here who had seen it. I so horribly angry and ashamed. I had never seen a movie that seemed to be filmed by people as sick and sadistic and perverted as the characters in the film. It had upped the ante. This was not pulling wings off a butterfly. This was pulling a leg off a dog.

Joel smoked for a time. He looked so incongruous smoking. Like an angel puffing away. I wanted to hold him. Hold this little body close to me and protect him from the world that somehow had enlisted sadism as entertainment. It had elicited that as entertainment a long time before this. We just didn't know it then.

He stood at an angle from me. The other kids had left the place. Cars were being started. I longed for the most desultory conversation. I pulled my jacket closed in the October wind. The theater marquee lights were turned off, the orange glow gone. The lights inside the lobby were extinguished. And the lights in the entry way, tossed the night right into us.

I didn't know if the sidewalk would turn into a cobra, striking at us. I thought it might. I wanted to say something to Joel. I felt so much older right now. I felt I had to protect the apple of my eye. The only hope I had back then.

He looked so huddled. So scared. A bundle of doubt where there had been no doubt before. The skin of the world had been peeled back. And Joel and I and others too had obviously gotten a look at it, and it was pretty horrific.

The cold cutting wind felt good after the theater's stale air. There had been silence early on for the audience in the movie. The silence had stayed for the whole thing and after. Joel sat with his hand on the arm rest, clutching it tightly. I touched his hand once in there. He pulled it back. I pretended not to notice. He pretended the same thing. No. That's not true. He really hadn't noticed. And it was not the thing unrolling on the screen that caused it either.

It was about ten thirty. We both had school tomorrow. Someone had to say something. The silence of ourselves, the others who had been here, the silence of no traffic now, and some time before the bus arrived to pick us up and carry us to our individual homes.

"I think I will never love horror movies again." That was all I could come up with. The words were tight, too controlled. I forgot what I said as soon as I said it.

I think we turned as automatons and walked side by side to the end of the block, without being aware we were doing it, to the bench, where we would wait for the bus in a while. We walked past the light poles, the potted plants with the green dying in them, part of a city beautification campaign. Two blocks to the right of us was the waterfront. I would walk there some nights, hear the distance of old songs in the water lapping, and dream of Joel saying he loved me.

We sat for a time. The air got chillier.

"They took it out of me. It was like they had scissors and they took it out of me," Joel said, looking out to the street and to the Samuels Jewelry Store across from us. Cathy Sue, the daughter of the store owner, was in love with Joel. She acted very silly around him. He was kind to her as he was kind to everyone. But he would laugh at the whole thing from time to time, with me, or other friends of his. He was not in love with her. But he was in love with someone. Only that someone was not me.

He said it again, since I didn't respond. I hadn't heard him. I kept hearing the screams in the movie. I kept seeing things taken out put in and then taken out one more time. Elliptical and stupid beyond ken. Razing the soul from the inside out. Did the movie make us think these things? Or did we do the thinking the movie did not and could not? That seemed the most dangerous scenario I could imagine.

"Like how?" I asked. Though I knew exactly what he meant.

"I've wanted to. have fun, dammit." His voice was reedy and high and sweet. He was a small boy who looked younger. His hair was long and flowing. His forehead was high. His hands were dainty. He was so beautiful, I would have given my life for him.

"I did too, you know," I said, trying to sound big brotherish. Trying to sound off the cuff, throwing in that "you know."

" That movie...it's like.." a long indrawn pause, then "I saw the city bus come here one time," Joel said. "One autumn night. I was out with the guys."

I hurt then. I wanted him to myself. I wanted to hold him and him to hold me and I wanted to do all the things I imagined doing with him. I wanted everybody in the world to see what magic resided in the cloak of Joel right beside me.

He told me about this bus. He was waiting by himself, after he and his friends had gotten out of the same theater we had just been to. It was about this time of night. He told me haltingly, hesitatingly, with fidgety hands which was unlike Joel at any other time I had known him in the sad mad lonely happy lovely two years of my life with him.

He said the bus had had children on it. And only child passengers. That it had slowed down at the corner bus stop, where we were now. Just a city bus in this small town with big town pretensions. A bus that was red and white. With all the yellowy lights inside it on. Which was odd, but Joel didn't think about that for a time. It seemed to be just something to accept. Like this movie tonight was something to accept, somehow, in all its bleak idiotic lack of potential, or an implosion of potential.

Joel had put out his cigarette on the way to the bus stop. He now lighted another. That concerned me. I knew he drank fruit wine now and then, and was afraid he was getting into drugs, though I had no proof of it. Just my fear of losing him to someone else, or to chemicals, or to the own peculiar songs in his own peculiar brain.

"And the bus was packed with kids," he continued, arching his hand with the cigarette in it back and forth, punctuating the night as though it was paper he was trying to write on, trying to use to make some sense of things.

"I didn't know them," he said. "I mean I could see each one like I was inches away from each individual face and I didn't recognize one single thing about them. Like I had forgotten what eyes and noses and mouths look like." He paused. "I should have known one of them, shouldn't I? They were my age and all that. Weird."

I thought of the girls in the movie. I thought of the parents of one of them taking revenge on her and her friend's murderers, in equally sadistic ways. I thought of Joel. I pictured him as the lead thug, the tightly coiled scary creepazoid with the big muscles and the intent boiling evil eyes. I shook my head a little. No, that did not fit at all. I would not let it do so.

"These kids, boys and girls, they had like these raccoon rings round their eyes. You know," and he laughed that velvety soft papery laugh that was his trademark and the memory of which I would lull myself to sleep with at night when I pretended he was there with me.

"You know, they just looked real sick, and pale, like the blood had been sucked out of them. They were like zombies and they just had these I don't know slack faces and they seemed like in the twilight zone. It had to be a dream."

It had to be.

Joel suddenly was angry, threw down the cigarette and ground it out with his tennis shoe. He jerked upright. He walked to the edge of the curb. He turned to me. It was funny to see him do that. I had never seen him angry about anything. He was always cool, reasonable, level headed. The calming influence in his upsetting of me at the same time.

"Goddammit," he said, his voice a little hoarse and red with angry, "why do we let them do it? Why do we let them push us around and make us see movies we hate? Why the living hell do we let everyone else live our lives for us, when they don't give a damn about our lives anyway?"

He was on a roll. Leaves of gold and tin foil rustled down the sidewalk past us. I was interested in where all of this might lead.

"They said I had to like that movie; the boys at school. They made like I was a dip if I didn't see it too. And I had to. And I HAD TO LIKE IT. And I talked you into seeing it with me cause it scared me that much. I thought it would be a laugh, though. God."

He hadn't talked me into it. I was psyched to see the thing after seeing that truly hooking print ad in the Sun-Democrat for all that period of time. And the preview they showed on Channel Six each night too. Though I wouldn't have been brave enough to do it, unless I had had Joel with me. So I could pretend bravery for him.

So I could have someone to look out for, so that someone could really be looking out for me. I am a very selfish person. I am not, as John Lennon put it in another context, the only one, however.

"I mean, I like horror movies okay. But that was a piece of garbage." He was pacing back and forth in front of me now. Like a teacher in front of a blackboard, who had something extremely important to say.

An occasional car would toss its headlights over him before it went on down the street.

"Everybody tells us. Teachers tell us. Like this. Do it this way. Why? Because it's the way to do it. Read this book. I don't like it. Then you have no taste in literature.

"Why is this movie so great? Cause Bosley Crowther of the New York Times loathed it. Because Rolling Stone says this is a great trip and you're not cool if you don't think so too. Why is this movie making money? It pulled my eyeballs out and stuffed packed smelly blood inside me. This we paid money for? This we spent about two hours of our lives watching?

What the hell were we thinking of? Why do we do it?

"Why does this piece of crap fill our brains like it's important or something? It's cause it's today, right this second, and it's occupying my mind more than Shakespeare and all the really good writers from a long time ago. And why? Damn, will someone tell me why this thing beats Hamlet and As You Like It into the top of the charts, like it or hate it, in my brain right now. Jeez! The present is everything. No one remembers the past, like it didn't count. People are afraid to remember. Why? Why is that so? Like it's a sin or something to go to hell for. They're ashamed to remember. It ain't cool, bro."

Joel's father was an English teacher at a community college, and so Joel was inculcated at an early age with the Bard and others of his peerage. Me, I stick with Michael Shayne and Ray Bradbury these days.

He sat beside me. Not close enough though. He laughed and it was an old man laugh. We knew something we hadn't known before, though I can't exactly put my finger on what we knew now.

"The bus, the autumn bus," he said, slowly now, almost with a drawl he had never had before. "It wasn't a dream. It scared me. I wet my jeans. It pulled over like it was gonna stop. I saw all these kids on the bus, and then I felt my legs standing me upward and walking me to it, and I almost got on the damn thing. I didn't have the power to do anything else. The doors hissed open like a snake sound. And I was pulled like on a fishhook and string to it, and then, just as I got to it, the doors closed--right in my face-- the bus driver laughing silently in shadow. And it screeched off, and I was left there screaming for it to come back. I was mad as hell.

"I fell to the curb. I cried like a baby. I wanted to go too."

And he was crying now. Like a baby. His head was down. His fingers were at his eyes trying to pluck away tears like grapes from an arbor. I went to him and put my hands on his shoulders. God, he was warm, and trembling. Like a trembly little pup. No one else was around. We both began to weep, softly. I felt my penis erect. It did not make me ashamed. Not this time. It was life. That was what it had always been. Sex. Dreams. Joel. Life. His arms went round me. We held close. Two little kids on the edge of a cliff, no Catcher in the Rye to save us from going over.

"I was Adam, the first of all, just beginning," he said then, always

Joel, "and that autumn bus, "and Eden was going away without me, one more time. Kids shouldn't have to face stuff like that. It's not right. To keep from fainting, keep repeating...it's only my life...it's only my life...it's only my life."

Like I say, his father was an English teacher. The family read books most families had never heard of. So he learned to talk like this early on. Like a book. That was another thing that endeared him to me.

"I don't think they were real," he said after the city bus lights shadowed its white glows over us, scaring us, pulling us apart, and stopped for us to get on. The pneumatic doors opening. A regular bus, with no lights on inside till the driver opened the door and we got on. Empty. Save for the three of us. We deposited our change and went to our seats. The bus was warm. Conversely, it made us realize how cold we had been, waiting for it. We sat down. Joel's words bubbling quickly now:

"I think the kids on it were fiction kids. Not real, actually, but.. But they hadn't been born yet. They were the new crop to be put

in movies and books that will make us sicker than Last House. The new thalidomide babies to be. The ones in our brains. Or the brains of the creeps that make the new monsters for tomorrow. They weren't ghosts. They were--what's the phrase?-- mid point--yes-- to us, to see closer up than us, the horrors around them in movies and stuff, and pass along the sickness. Christ." I pulled to him. He pulled away.

He became more animated, a little stronger, more like the Joel I used to know, in saying these things. But he was a Joel far away, not up close like before, which had been too far away anyhow.

It was muddled, but I told him, "As best I can understand, it makes sense." Joel was a genius in case I need mention it.

"No. It's insane. All of us. Stop telling me what to do and think and say and feel. Stop telling me I like what I hate and hate what I like. Stop messing with my mind. Stop rooting around in me and taking what you please whether it's really in me or not.

"Please. God. If you don't, I'll go insane."

I didn't really pull away literally. But I did mentally and emotionally. Was this about me? Did he know? Did he mean it that way? I was always the center of my world, like everybody else was the center of their own world whether they will admit it or not, but this time I truly didn't want to be.

He had nailed me. He sat slim as a stick and as motionless as one too. As the engine rushed and the wheels hushed through the night streets into neighborhoods with darkened houses and a full moon that shone bright.

I was Krug, the leader of the thugs in Last House. I was as evil as he. Joel didn't mean it that way really. But it was there in that ballpark somewhere. I looked out the smudged dirty blurry window. I wanted to weep. I wanted to stop having to eat everybody else's sins. I wanted to squirm out of my conscience and throw it away from me. I've never been known as subtle. I've always worn my feelings on my sleeve.

No, Joel, I am not Krug, I am me. And I love you. And I want to protect you from the world and all the people in it who know how to live your life, but don't give a damn about you. I do, Joel. I give a damn about you. Please.

The bus stopped on the street corner. The doors opened.

I sighed, got up and pushed past my once and future and forever former heart, without looking at him, he sitting by the night window, without touching even his knees with my legs

as I got to the aisle. I walked straight ahead, not looking back, to the bus door that hissed open, and let me off.

The bus made that shushing good bye sound and began moving away into the October night. I wanted to turn to watch him on it. The autumn bus. Carrying another lost child to his painful practical joke future, as for perhaps, all of us.

I wanted to watch him go out of sight. I was too afraid to do it. Too afraid to turn around, though.

Could he have somehow known back then that I would write this and put him in it? Had he counted my sins before they had happened? It was possible. He was that kind of boy.

"Timothy," his voice beside me. I turned. The night was cold. We stopped. Looking at each other. He put out his china glass hands and zipped my jacket. I zipped his then, with hands movie steady. There was no one around. It wouldn't have mattered, had there been.

He leaned upward and kissed me. I felt the whole of his body in my arms. We were in a movie. Too hokey, too beautiful for real life, too real for real life which has always seemed like third rate fiction to me . I touched his lips with my fingers as I pulled from him. I looked at him in the night. Joel and I on our way to making love. Before the war of life took us away again.

And I thought, yes, Jesus, yes, we need each other. After that movie, we do need each other. The thing had worked not on a date night level, but far deeper.

And I remembered he had told me he was reading "Eternal Fire" this week, which has a hot passage about a man fucking a girl on a midnight bus; I always read what Joel was reading, to keep us together. I had jacked off to that scene three times this week. Thinking it me and thinking it Joel. Me reaching out then for a ghost. Him reaching out for reality.

There were bushes to the far side of the sidewalk. Neither of us took the lead. We held our hands out and grasped, and went to those bushes and on the cold ground. Beside all the unknowing, blind, dark

houses.

He put his hand in my jeans, behind my belt. His Joel hand. One and only. Never to be before or since, my Joel. My penis hurt for him. All of me hurt for him. I was so scared now. The movie, our movie, was dissolving. What would I do now? That I could see how silly this was?

But Joel's movie was not melting away. And I was in it. He knew it. Life is made as a movie. Or its nothing at all.. He was sacrificing himself, to be willing at least, to be one of those kids on that nightmare bus, heading to be in a horror film up ahead, to scare all of us for later on at sickest bedtime fears. But no fears now. Love. And transub- stantiation. And a gift to pull us back from the cliffs that movie had nearly pushed us over.

He said, "Tim, I know you love me. And I want to love you. I'll show you." He did not love me. He was scared. And so was I. He needed anyone right now. But he knew, and he gave me this gift, this on top of it. This to show the importance of me to him. I felt his hand going to his jeans' fly. He opened it and pulled out his hard on. I saw it in shadow and moon and dim street light. He opened my fly and pulled out my penis.

They touched. My god, to touch the penis of Joel. I gripped it. I rubbed. I touched it so gently then like it was finest glass or the Holy Grail. I felt his little balls. So warm and hairless. I touched Joel's penis! God, I actually did it! I held it in my hands! It was hard and it pulsed so magnificently. Like his very heart.

And he touched me. And I rushed to him. We held each other. We rolled on the cold brown grass ground. One on top, then the other. Then side by side.

My heart pounded like I was going to die. In his arms. Oh yes please. And began to masturbate each other. Not awkwardly. Metronome pulse by pulse.

He put his little bird's head on my shoulder and we moved in rhythm. Our legs entangled. He put his hands to my face. He traced my eyes. I kissed his mouth so hard. He was remembering the passage from

"Eternal Fire." Imagining himself the man on the bus. Imagining me to be the girl. I was picturing him masturbating alone in his room with that book, and me making him imagine the girl as me.

We breathed movie hard. We stretched movie stretch. I put my other hand in his shirt and felt his warm bones and his nipples. They were hard at my touch.Would he become a movie child for me? That was what he was now. Not Joel. But the movie part of him. The secret part of him. I bent over and took the head of Joel's penis in my mouth. He fucked my mouth. Like in the novel. He pushed it in and out so hard and violently. And then he pushed my head off it. And he came. And it was warm on my hand. And he pushed and bucked his hand on my penis, and I came into thehand of my lovely Joel. And in time, sweet music in the background, in time we came around, and zipped up, and I walked him home and kissed him goodnight.And walked away. Thus the movie ended.

And thus, the images to stay in my mind as time clocked off from that night, for nothing happened between us again. Krug? The sadistic movie? The passage the novel by Calder Willingham that Joel and I were reading and then re-enacting in separate theaters

for ourselves and each other?

The need, now, as I write this, to jack off now and to take "Eternal Fire" to bed with me and pretend it is us again, knowing he has long forgotten it? Or that image he gave me, that still haunts me.The one about the unalive children on the bus? That maybe he sacrificedhimself to...for, not me, but for himself, old then already when still a boy? I stay away from horror films made today. The ones featuring children especially. He could be one of them. Or maybe he was just Salinger's rye catcher, practicing for saving children running off a cliff. I think I will stick with that one.

I know it's mad, but he could be any of this..

I remember the past, Joel. And this night above all of them. I am no longer afraid of it. I am helpless to do anything else, but remember. I am giving up one of my deepest dreams to tell this to you. As soon as I finish writing it, I have to forget it. It is the way I do things. I give someone a book I love, I forget immediately, because sure as hell, they will no longer be my friend after a little while. It never fails. I tell someone my deepest thoughts, they toss them away, forget me, and make them not mine anymore. It is in its way a kind of murder of me. I adhere in complicity.

But I do it anyway. I guess for a little while because it keeps Joel alive for me. It's either that, or watch horror movies with children in them. And that I do not dare; cutting or allowing to be cut little pieces of my heart out is easier. And safer.

. Does that at least count for something? My telling you about Joel? Does that make him a movie person along with me? Perhaps that is what I'm holding out for. Whether or not the other person cares?--they never have. So I have to give up this and hide somewhere else. Only the

somewhere else's are getting fewer and fewer. I guess this is a sort of courage.

Do you remember? Or is today everything? Do you have the need or the courage or the cowardly or courageous yearning for the past, as it was, or to rewrite it happier or even sadder?

Making the past even sadder helps somehow, sometimes. Do you ever fear that nightmare bus pulling up beside you? Do you wonder who is on it? Who iswriting this, perhaps, right behind the driver, right this second?

If the pneumatic door hissed open beside you on a windy leaf blown October night, and you had the feeling that in the dim interior lights your true love is waiting....would you have the audacity to try to get on it before the doors shut for good and the bus pulls away, leaving you screaming for it to return?

As for me, I hope I have the courage to do so. And the speed to make it before the doors hiss shut one final time.

As we go about our daily lives, hiding away. Pretending to be brave. For someone. Always for someone, isn't it? We are supposed to find our happiness inside ourselves and not depend on others. That's the current religion. To which I say utter and total bullshit. It's always for someone else... ....Here or gone..mostly of all, I think...the ones who are gone, but who, thank God, mercifully find sneaky little ways of saying:

here's another dream, after all, from me to you, special and secret, let me tell you about it.....

silvershimmer@earthlink.net