Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2005 20:17:04 -0800 From: Timothy Stillman Subject: A Little Laugh "A Little Laugh" by Timothy Stillman Dear Bobby, I've always hated Connecticut in spring. Everything blue and green and enamel looking. Phony looking. Like you. I can see you now in your attic, after school, reading this, laughing a little at it. But then, no, not you. You never laughed at me. But then you weren't alone in this. No one ever laughed at me. Like when I was forced to play in Little League, and I played deep deep outfield, and of course invariably the ball came my way now and then, and I would clench my eyes, and throw my arms akimbo in the air, waving around like a drunk wind mill, me and them, and then I always fell down to the hot buggy grass. But no one laughed. I kept giving them a punch line. But no one ever took me up on it. I mean, they saw me fall in the lunch room when I was taking the full tray to the table, and got myself all kidney pie and potatoes and apple sauce all over, and no one laughed. It hurt. Bobby, that day, in the proverbial cemetery, the one the bullies always invited the freshmen to, to kind of initiate them into high school, all the freshmen but one, I came one night of dark stars and velvet fall winds. And I watched you and him. There in the dark. The good stuff always happens in the dark. With me it does. The dark doesn't laugh at me either. That at least doesn't bother me. You and Timmy. Timmy the Kidder. Timmy the class clown. He had such a knack for it. Everybody laughed at him and it made him feel good. He liked it. He was, like Marlon Brando got to be, a somebody. And you were lying with him and you were holding him and you were both shadow laughing, that kind of personal laugh close to the bone that people do sometimes when they are in love and no one is watching. You saw me in class every day. You saw everybody. You were nice to everybody. You were going to be the class everything eventually. Going to be the star of the world eventually. And Timmy had big jug ears and freckles and had a cow lick that would not stay down for the world. And you were kissing him. Velvet night. Just barely jacket weather. In the world of the messed up teenager. And I was one. I think I was a teenager right out of the box. I was awkward and I never picked you, Bobby. I never picked you to fall in love with. You and the tall legs and the dark night hair and the sweet black eyes that could smile all on their lonesome though they and you were never lonesome. I watched you and Timmy in class every day. You were nice to him. A blanket niceness. You were nice to me. I was someone people were nice to. That they did not want to hurt. Until that not wanting to hurt of theirs became something of a mania with me. I wanted to punch out a bully. I wanted to be as tall as you. I wanted to be Robby kissing you. I wanted a door to finally open in the night air so I could walk through it and be with both of you. You would have let me, the two of you. You would have made Timmy let me. And Timmy wouldn't have liked it but he would have let me in anyway. I jacked off watching you those cemetery nights and did not think of the irony of that. All I had to do was to walk over to you, to extend over the dream boundary, and say here I am, Bobby, I'm nothing, I'm the kid at the candy store window, face pressed tightly against the glass. It doesn't matter whether I'm with you or not, even being with you, would not be with you, so what the hey, hey? And you would extend your long thin arms up to me and you would kneel me to you and you would put my hands on the crotch of your briefs and you would let my frightened hands rush over your bare chest and feel your nips and pinch them if I wanted. And if Timmy got jealous you would have brought the two of us together. And I would have felt bad cheating on you with you right there. But you would have smiled, not laughed of course, and said it's okay, don't worry about it. For being there, I was not there at all. It can drive a person mad? Has it done so to me? I feel the terrible blackness close to me, cloaking me, but mad? I don't know. Claustrophobic, that is for sure. Please let that be a joke you catch at the end of my letter. So there you were, just maybe a dozen feet over there, two boys naked, coupling, two boys joying their boners together and stroking and giggling, and I hungered for the laugh more than for the sex. I pretended you were with your mouth right at my sandy hard on and your breath and laughter were tickling it hard and I was rubbing it through my jeans fly, and you were surrounding it with the carnival crowd of your approval and your joy and somewhere in the background a boy named Timmy was clapping at our acrobat eroticism and there was the smell of want fulfilled and loneliness banished. That was what I wanted to feel from you, more than your dick, your balls, your warmth, your lips on me, your naked body next to mine, your svelte hips, the entrance to your secret place, I wanted you to laugh at me. Not mean or cruel or anything really. Just a laugh. And you were fucking Timmy then. You had him on his stomach in the full moon of lunch at midnight, and you were on top of him and easing yourself in, and he was moving sinuously under you and you were riding the wave of that not particularly attractive, slightly heavy boy, with your long curvy body riding him and your hands on the tip of his spine and your head down and your long hair bruising the back of his head as he tried to reach his face round to kiss you, and you threw your head back and you panted, I could hear you almost, and your legs were together and your toes were arched and your back a sea shell all on its own. And you laughed. You and Timmy laughed. And the laughter was as bright as a star. As important as the last day of the world. And I pulled and pulled myself and I gloried in that laughter, real, tattered, added to, embroidered, or heard as live recorded inside myself somewhere, and I pulled my dick hard and quick and it hurt and that made me laugh. And I never laughed. I had never it seemed laughed in my life. I was silent. In class. At lunch. At the movies. Silent. Alone and still. Alone and wanting to get that punch line answered. I thought I would do anything to get that punchline answered. But you would laugh at me politely. Timmy would scurry away. And you Bobby would laugh at me politely. And that would be the worst of it. A have to laugh. A fitting in pretend for me kind of laugh. And I spurted and I fell down on my forearms and hit the left funny bone and I laughed hysterically from the pain and from coming and from knowing that you and Timmy--oddly enough it was more important for me that Timmy hear me than for you to. And I screamed laughter. And I rolled over on my back, cum splurting every which way. And it was like my dick was laughing. And this was the laugh it was making. Was that what it was all supposed to be? Love making? Making love? Was the product of love, the produce of love from me, this white gobstopper stuff known as cum laughter? And I was hysterical by this point. And I knew you and Timmy would come over. Naked perhaps? And let me join in. Cause I was not really there. Any more than the ever so often ghost child in "Ju-On"--seen for a half second flashing in a mirror and then when the person who saw him turned around, the ghost child was gone, making it more hairpin curve chilling than if he had still been there. Knowing you would let me love you, like a polite, timid, weightless shadow, while Timmy loved you for real, or kinda for real, and the next one after him and the next one and the next, and I get to see what I can only see, and feel what I can only feel, and I can see with blinders only, the dust and my breath fogging the candy store window you and fill in the blank were behind, and I can feel with numbed fingers. The ghost child thinks its clever darting to the mirror and then gone a millisecond later. The ghost child is wrong. So. I know you are reading this after school. You and Timmy never came over to me. I lay there and laughed until there was a stitch in my side. And I laughed and my penis shrunk and I felt cold and sick and I cried for a long time. Then I put it back in its harness and gathered myself together on the Autumn brown grass, and I packed myself onward to home. You never mentioned it the next day. Nor did Timmy. Not to me. Not to anyone. I knew I would not be embarrassed. I know my being there and not there at the same time, and never getting my reward for my I think exceedingly clever punch lines would save the day on this one, and it did. Timmy told me about your attic. Well. Not me personally. I overheard him before class one day. And he said you had about four hundred comic books up there and they were great, mostly Marvel, mostly some DC, and some of his dad's classic Twilight Zone Gold Key comics, and everybody was saying to Timmy words that meant, you just discovered this? you think this impresses us?, we go all the time to his house to his attic, to that cedar chest, where he has his comics and we read all Saturday long if there isn't a movie we want to so, so Timmy where the hell have you been? And Timmy was sorely oppressed. I escaped that too of course. To have been with Bobby in his attic, kneeling next to him, looking at comic books, summer, shorts, t shirts, his bare knees next to mine...Dusty attic. Private, secret closed in attic...where he masturbates maybe sometimes? Alone? Or with someone else? The dust dances of summer shining in the hot attic windows like they do in summer attics. Sexxxxxyyyyy beyond words. Close together. Smelling the boy of each other. The sweat of a summer afternoon. Personal. Private. Den of iniquity.They told him Bobby practically lived in that attic and that he even had Playboy magazines stashed in a closet under some boxes, and some porno books too bet you didn't know about that? And Timmy just doodled on his notebook and waited for class to start, jug ears fiercely red. Therefore to the conclusion of my letter, Bobby. It's a long time after school. It's a bit of time after me. I guess it fits in, this letter and when its being delivered to you, cemetery love, laughter hunting, laughter virgin all my life, my written words at least finally being in your attic. Do you still go there often? Do you remember childhood and its largess and weep for it gone? As I do for its emptiness also gone. . I guess I got the idea for this letter and its timing from one of Thomas Hardy's novels. The misplaced letter announcing felicity and love forever more, getting to the loved one decades too late due to all sorts of unforeseen mishaps, and finding the love was true, but old and gone and it's all a joke inside God's skull anyway. Pretending it would matter to you at all. But if it did, I could have never sent it. I'm more like you than you would think. If you even remember me at all. You're what now Bobby--35 or so. And you did make it. You did make that successful life. You did make that successful marriage and the successful children. And if school was a long time ago, you might not remember that place in the cemetery, your spot with Timmy and then with Julian and then with Joel and then with Daniel and then with Jeff, the empty plot, that had such a plot in store for it, that is if you are to read this letter. So, to a boy I taught long ago. To a boy I loved long ago. To a boy I gave my heart to. And could actually have had sex of a kind with once that wouldn't have mattered to you at all, and would have made me feel lonelier than ever, even though you knew after my hysteria that night, I was probably there and watching, and you giving me a show with your new love of the moment, you not caring, and it all did make it lonelier, though I doubt you thought of it that way, I apologize, as I used to in class, for giving too much homework, for my shy mumbling, for my inability to look any of you in the face, for my incompetence and clumsiness, carried from those child hood days before during and after long way after Little League, I again apologize. For not accepting your casual charity, because it seemed more to me like casual cruelty, for over the years I have found that to be the one thing the world is most full of , though you would not have meant it to be. This then, my fumbling has not changed, the reason I send this to the attic of the house you still live in, is to ask, could you go to that plot of earth where you and those boys made fulsome love, I still remember seeing you sucking Julian off, and how beautiful a sculpture it would make, as you kneeled at him, both naked, and he held his hands to each side of your head, and you sucked him like a maestro conducting a most magnificent orchestra, and how Julian threw back his head and moaned and screamed and then he pulled away and shot over your face and then he buried you with kisses...would you then, Bobby, go to that plot of ground that now has me beneath it--I reserved it for me so many years ago, some people have long memories and want to imagine at least it coming a little right in the end--would you go there sometime in Autumn, the first kind of Autumn I saw you there with Timmy, and would you stand there over me and would you laugh? I guess its ghoulish, but fucking over ground that has corpses in it is pretty ghoulish, but a teenage delight enjoyed far and wide, so please don't feel so creeped out by it. Would you please at long last, someone, you most of all, laugh at me. As hard as you can. Or a small chuckle would do, even. I would so much appreciate it. It is silly, I know, but it would make this whole business of life for me, worthwhile. Because mainly it will mean I was at least good for a laugh. You have no idea how it hurts not being even worth that. Just, at the finality of the thing, being good for a laugh. How ridiculous we little humans are. How truly and absurdly ridiculous. Please. It would mean a lot. Yours truly, Mr. Wallace P.S. I LOVE YOU. Timothy Stillman comewinter@earthlink.net