"A Waif at Christmastime"
by
Timothy Stillman
Ted sat bare late that night in his single dorm room, with the door to it and that of the connecting bathroom firmly locked, as outside, winter snow whispered on in the ghost of Christmas past or soon to come, for the life of himself he could not remember which. The dim desk light was on, as Ted, a human parallelogram, sat spidery, hunched over, his bottom on the cold leather seat of the chair, his face supported on each cheek by his fists, elbows on the desk, his eyes swimmingly reading the text of the book his face loomed close to because he had poor vision and refused to wear glasses when he was naked.
He was naked when he was by himself because he was so terribly shy and because he was so terribly plain, for it was a joke to him that even bare he was barely there, or especially when he was bare, for his mind drifted all the time, and was in a snow hush even in the middle of a cradled July with the oracle hot sweaty sun staring down at him and staining him as more than a child and less than a man, even though he was now a college junior, and he was not Teddy, beloved child of parents who adored him and sheltered him and smothered him, and he was no longer that boy of high school senior age who led a Sunday School class of senior citizens because the minister thought it would be cute that a little child would lead them, though they got quite bored with their young charge's stodginess and lack of zest for pretty much anything at all.
Ted was stroking his hard on now, in the middle of the night, the shadows cold in the colder room, for he was always on the advent of winter, and it seemed as though, for him, life was a crystallized flame that would one day burn bright or one day burn cold and he for the life of him did not know which he wanted, though he did know he wished to be younger than he was, for he wished that he could be ten or so, for in memory that seemed a nice age, when even the iciest Christmases counted warm somehow, and it was all right to be alone with his penis and balls and his hands that loved them so and nestled them in the night hours as he had lain in his child's bed with the Laurel and Hardy poster grinning and hugging the wall above him making him feel safe.
Ted was a lover of no one and was in love only when he was alone, for when there was someone else even distantly near him, that he loved, he found himself quite unable to feel a single thing, but alone in his room as he stripped off his clothes and twirled his emaciated pasty body round in circles till he became so dizzy he almost collapsed and would fall like a haystack unending on his bed, he was Byron and Shelley and Keats, and god could he rhapsodize. But always with other people's words, for this was the Ted of now, this was the Ted of the short black hair and the too small somewhat squinty eyes, who would masturbate himself to distraction each night in his dorm, whispering for the snow in him to come and collect him.
For life had to begin and cars could not always shine their headlights into his dorm window covered by curtains, for cars had to receive themselves into the slots in the parking lot behind the dorm, and engines cut, doors opening and closed, as inevitably, snow had to be snapped off into a kind of rum and Coke tonic that would take two different people and somehow splice them together and let them hold the night in each other's chests and think the night quite wonderful, quite magical. But here was old Ted and he was older than he had been even as a child when he had been quite aged enough, and he was rubbing his regulation six incher almost unawares as he studied the book before him and tried to read the words in the dimness and in the gullies of memories that seemed to snap their own glasses on their eyes and rise themselves from the words and the pages and shout at him that it wasn't such a bad life as things go, that someone would like to suck him and if he was not careful, he might find that out one day for himself, but Ted trusted only words because Ted was so very much in love with life, and he stroked the hardness and he held first one tight ball and the next, he sighed almost without himself, and he wished someone could see him now right this second. For thin was in and he was dreamy minded enough and he had a flat stomach, and even his legs were not bad as legs go for someone who was known as Teddy once, now named Ted.
In the dorm room, which he looked about in a moment of realization that the building was so preternaturally quiet, and for a time he wondered if this was Christmas break, and if he was here by himself, but he felt a certain kindling of fear at the thought, so turned himself studiously back to his book whatever that book might have happened to be, since it was really more a prop in effect, as he wished someone would massage his shoulders and draw a fingernail down his spine, sort of luminous tickling, sort of delicate like a ghost trying to break through to another dimension which had tucked Ted inside it in order to protect him but which was instead smothering him.
And Ted spread his legs and he took both hands now and held to the inner of his thighs which were softly and sparsely haired, as he looked into the shadow cup that held his groin, and made his stand up penis move a little just by willing it to do so, which caused Ted to smile in spite of himself, as he wondered what it would be like to be with some boy this way, and make two of one, instead of this grim insistence that some day, hadn't happened yet, a boy might come along who would be waifish and standing alone in the blue snow of the cold mountain peak off in the distance of reality or fantasy, and might ask Ted, who just happened by, finally at the right place and time, if those creamy frozen little arms could hold round the man's neck and just bring in a horizontal bed of body the young boy might lie himself on for Ted's landscape seemed the right one to get warm with and to touch silently, and Ted would reach for those upraised arms and help the boy put them round Ted's, the man's, oddly enough, neck, and they would swing that way, sighing, swaying out in the snow which was good to be bare in because the night was always quivering nakedness this time of year.
There seemed in Ted this interdependence that the need for a boy was, this desire that was a quiet snow flower that needed blue eyes or green or brown ones to hold to his own as they would lie on his dorm bed, this narrow slat where dreams came, with the boy of winsome dread and constant fear that something might go wrong, and Ted would put his whisper snow fingers on the boy's face and in the boy's hair and Ted would still the fears, and tell him the world would still go round, and Ted would be happy to stay on the merry go round with the boy as long as he was wanted.
Ted stroked himself and opened the little slit in the top of his penis, touched it with the tip of his right index finger, felt the gentleness of it, the defenselessness of it, and wished to have it sucked by the boy he would find by the side of the road or in a snow field long distant of stars that would look like burning ropes as he would spin round and round in a dervish to see the doors opening up for a child to come through and be a victim of a world, a victim of a love that hurt so terribly sweetly, a run through of arrows from Cupid, tough taskmaster, chockablock with smiles, the boy, to whom Ted could not give a name just yet, the boy who would be a leaf fall of autumn, the last one of the season, who would sit all warm and light and cozy on Ted's lap and kiss Ted's dim little rose nipples as though Ted had become the child's mother, and had something in his life that the boy needed to nurse out of him, for then how giving Ted would be, how less quailed and shaky, and how the road in him would be strong and straight and full of moonlight that the night didn't distance and cut into pieces, as Ted and the boy would make tender love together, for the first time, the both of them, and everyone else who had seen them without knowing the poets in their souls or their own souls could go hang.
There was a surety in him at this moment, as though making part, as though the finding out, as though the heedless happiness of almost cuming was the crystallized life inside him that had fed him on winter, that had fed him on limitless snow fields and cars in an icy distance out caught between vague threats of bright lights coming to face them and blind them and thus doing so, just the thought of them, the possibility of bright beamed lights making the drivers run off the roads, making the eyes squint already when there was nothing to squint at yet, and if the boy could be sickly and Ted could nourish him back to health, if the boy had been so sad and turned out of a sea captain's home because the quotient of masculinity and normalcy had not come to the boy even at the advanced age of ten and that produced humiliation in the hearts of the sea captain and his wife, then light houses once known as homes could be left, and the lights could be walked away from, and not to sniffle always then, because lights were artificial snow, but Ted could produce the real thing. And if the boy only knew Ted was the goal, the prize up ahead, then the boy could look through the blinding night snow itself, which was only symbolic of Ted to begin with, and what a nice thing that would be to look forward to, for the both of them.
Ted imagined movie boys and television boys when he masturbated, and now, as he pushed his chair a bit back from the desk, and tilted that wood chair on its legs a little, as he caressed his tits and tickled his stomach and belly button, and just felt so good as he imagined his legs in the air and a boy between them, sucking him off, and feeling the goodness of a throat of velvet perched and willing and ready to receive Ted's jism, then the world could melt or freeze or fry, for it did not matter, as he dug his hips into the seat of the chair and closed his eyes, and opened his mouth a bit, his head tilted back, and a sigh, just one single slight quiet sigh coming from him, as he tried to be more than a little moment that wished to be remembered and would not be remembered any more at all than the little moment that surrounded him, for it surrounded everyone else as well, and they wished to be remembered too, but who is, really? Shakespeare is not remembered. His works are. No one, no matter how famous or how talented or how boorish or how villainous or how glorious or how beautiful or how wise or how well loved and adored is remembered, other than, for the fortunate ones, their work or a memory of a shadow of what one is told they put on paper or canvass or screen, and even that was divided up in hundreds or thousands or millions and was used by each of those persons as their own reconstructed private bids to be remembered their own selves, and Ted pretended at ten, and he imagined his childhood friend, Jimmy, and him, making love, kissing on the sofa on an air conditioned summer evening as they watched TV, orange sherbet, melting, still left in their bowls on the TV trays in front of them in Ted's empty house, for his parents worked nights, and passion sustained the boys and their jeans and their shirts and tennis shoes were a part of them, an epic of summer heraldry, designs of boy trees, a moment of verve and flags and battles with centaurs beyond the stars, as he and Jimmy were brought together by forces that were solely of them and no one else, as lips lingered warm and hands excited traveled and jeans strained to keep their hard ons in check.
How sweet, now, Ted, lost in reflection, in the cold and dark that did not protect him or shelter him or give him comfort, while outside the snow was not his mantle or his dream work or his hope or his moment before the New Year passed by once more, for always he had tried to hold the seasons of autumn and winter together around him, for he had constantly loved them so, like big warm hands of protection and camouflage and age so distant he could not conquer it and did not fear it ever, but these months went rushing by so rapidly, dwindled fast and furious and Christmas over or almost over and New Year's antic eyes not stopping to blink before whish it was already Valentines and the stores were stocking up then for Easter and summer had arrived again so fast, and Jimmy would no longer return in that sacred July, for the childhood friend was no conquering hero but a memory who had drunk himself to death in his Ann Arbor dorm room one year ago because Jimmy was tired and happy and free and clever and loved by friends and had a great future ahead of him in the space industry and Jimmy did not care because it had all been so easy--school and girls and love and the way he positioned himself like a chameleon, being everything to everybody, one at a time, till the snowball started gathering more thickly on its downhill race, but before then, in the earlier years, to peer out so seemingly confident at every stage of development, Jimmy the athlete and the writer of school newspaper columns and the winner of science awards and the praised and the proud and the perfect and the beautiful.
And Ted needed a boy to keep the cold inside him, for winter was like a fever inside Ted, when forms get sketchy, and a boy/man sits naked in his dorm room, playing with himself and singing old songs from his childhood, softly, so no one would hear him and laugh at him, if there was anyone still round now to laugh, as he whispered to the snow world that he was going to come and wouldn't you like to see?, wouldn't you like to see it's different from any boy or man you've ever known, it's different from yourself no matter how many times you fuck your image in the mirror, because Ted was for all the good and bad, mostly all bad, still himself, and that means different than you, and you will never know if you've tacked the final corner of the world down unless you give Ted a try, unless you can see past his goofiness and his clumsiness and how he can't walk across the room without bumping into the edges of things, and that with his thick lensed glasses firmly affixed to his face, the boy who laughed in class periodically at nothing really and who did not know where the moon beams came from and the thought that they were tangible tickled him inside where the heaviest snows of life lay waiting to burn hot or to burn frozen.
Ted's missile took off and the lift bucked him out of his chair for a moment before he came heavily down, his muscles and abdomen, and chest and even his neck for god's sake seemed soaked in sweaty difficult sexuality, this boy who never crossed another person's summer lawn in the running of childhood and its environs unless Ted had had explicit permission, and Ted's penis raised and spat and the cum was gluey and he didn't have a Kleenex and it sprayed everywhere on his abdomen, on his trembling left leg, on his desk, on the book embattled on that desk that he had been pretending to read for he read all the time and did not know how would he cope with the world otherwise, fearing always one day to go blind and then what would he do with the sterility of reality come inside him, the world of prosaic that he hated that was fixed with dots and dashes and signal beeps that made no sense to him, that seemed to send out fronds of creeping plants that wanted something from even Ted and he had no idea what that would be, but for the moment Ted came and came, and he wanted to shout out to boys everywhere, come and see My Vesuvius Erupting, come and see the lava flow, come and bathe in it and taste it and warm your winter hands over the massive molten heat of it, come see the boy/man who can love only when he is alone and who, when someone he cares for is even vaguely with him, freezes into a frozen icicle from a dilapidated spigot in an old foundry in an ancient industrial park in a neglected part of town that has been unused so long it is form and function gone astray almost as though a creature of sawdust and corrosion and broken and twisted apart brick and steel were ashamed and near dying, all as one, belly crawling off, sliding like Puff's dragon tail into the cave after Johnny Paper goes and grows up on him.
Come and see wanderlust, come and see the boy with the dripping dick and the wick that needs no cropping and no tapering, that functions well and perfectly, for the fountain has formed on Ted as well as any other boy/man and you might like what you see and feel if you could just get the Byron out of the man and make him face the fact that he too is of bone and muscle and brain and fluids and sexual lust and filthy thoughts and nails that need cutting and a body that needs showering and hair that needs shampooing; some boy on the snow line tonight coming forward to this university, lost in the snow drifts, in the night that seems to be coming at him a million directions at once, come see Ted the dick king, come and stroke your young penis in front of his face and dare him to take it in his mouth even though you are still wearing only your briefs, and your dick is erect in them, as Ted bites at it in the cottony snowy material that seems like a giggle all in itself.
And feel the delicious thrill of your penis and what covers it that makes it more than what it is, that makes it a little fireworks that needs to come out the opening, that needs to come out of the little slit of boy house, and Ted would then tongue tickle your penis, your giddily leaded pencil, your supreme number two Ticondoroga, with which to write all the sonnets of greed and need and happiness and excitement as the boy would stand there and let Ted suck him, the waif, the child pushed away from the lighthouse and into the true beams of snow from Ted's eyes, as he would feel your so warm so soft bare tummy with his hands and press his face against your crotch as you would delicately lead him to you and shy for you to be, for then Ted would be ten times shyer and that would make it all the more gyroscoping, that would make it all the more giving and taking and giving some more, for Ted thinking of these things, as he comes down the sexual ladder a bit at a time, as the snow boy moves away from him until he is not there at all, the boy who had worn only white bright BVDs and had put the whole of him in the mouth of Ted who loved him so, this boy who would never know.
As Ted felt the fields inside his mind come into stark delineation again, as he saw roads and fences and walls and houses and windbreaks and snow drifts harder and more able to keep him out than any of the man made barriers, here in the too silent dorm with the wind gale outside building its force, and no more car lights in the parking lot to shine their light moth structures in his window and then turn off for good, and Ted as always feeling foolish that he was bare, always that feeling after having come, after having felt so warmly cocoa good for such a brief, but for such a brave time, and he proceeded to clean himself up, after making sure no one from the adjoining room was in the bathroom. He washed himself with a warm cloth and he massaged his penis and balls which always felt so tender afterwards, the warm wet cloth on his genitals making it all so secure and safe and encompassing and little boy feeling, then he went back to his room, closed the bathroom door, locked it, and put on his briefs hurriedly as though someone were there scolding him, his loving parents, his dead friend, the dream out on the snow world who would never be with him, and he got into bed and pulled the rough covers over him like a monk in penitence, shivering now that the cold and darkness had finally penetrated him.
From his bedside table, he took his glasses and put them on, for this was part of his life, that he always slept in his glasses so he could see his dreams better, so he could make the dreams know he was paying attention, so they would be good and they would let him escape because he had a Byronic soul, a broken glass heart, a steel will, a sad face, a snowy mind, the need of love, and the memory of Jimmy who would haunt him forevermore, even with the glasses on Ted's face as he slept, and on waking he would usually find the glasses had fallen off in the night, or had been pulled off by sleeping movements and friction, so on awakening he would have to carefully get out of bed, to find them, and hopefully not have broken them, and he never had broken them that way, not once, though he had from time to time bent one of the earpieces, but he always could delicately straighten it out, so tonight Ted closed his eyes, and remembered a quotation from Shakespeare, the last line of it at least, "so quick bright things come to confusion." Not yet, not right away, he thought, his eyes not protected at all behind his glasses, and he lay himself down to sleep which came on him in the dark and the snow continued its sibilant hiss as the rest of the night passed him by.
the end