Andy and the Boys He Loved

"Andy and the Boys He Loved"

by

Timothy Stillman

"Well, here we are in the mud again, Captain Sloppy."

The boy who had just written that was 17 and he tried to see through the pasted hot world of summer dust brown roads, with the green trees, hedges, and the blue skies pressing at him like inequality. Like he tried to understand them. As this world--no school, freedom, the day and night to do what he wanted to with-- seemed a prison. So he sat on the side of the dusty road on a lip of grass, in the afternoon stultifying heat, writing in his Blue Horse notebook, using a Number 2 pencil. He pretended he was still in school. He pretended he was enclosed in brick and concrete and unable to get out the class room door any time he wanted to.

Because school you could get out of. Summer you could not get out of. You were there until it left you. It encased you in a semblance of illusion that was real. You couldn't kick the sky, though god knows sometimes you wanted to. You could play with yourself. You could amuse yourself with drawing pictures of boys you wanted but who did not want you. And sometimes you could only sit by the hedges next to the dust road that cars rarely came down, this little farmland right outside of the small town, and you could write yourself silly and draw whatever you wished, no matter how badly done, no matter how ill conceived.

You could be named Andy, perhaps. And you could be wearing jeans that had been cut off at the knees. You could have plump knees. And legs that had only downy hair to sheen on them in the summer sun. You could be tall and clumsy as could be. You could wear a lime green shirt. Sweating, Andy, to beat the band. You could wish a car, any old jalopy would eel down the road, so you could know there were other people in the world and you weren't suddenly in charge of a planet of graveyards.

You could hover down, hunker down, and write with the notebook on your lap, pulling your knees up. You could wish for cold and Halloween when everybody else wore a mask too. You could remember the day you knew, and in the knowing you were not Andy anymore. You could get rid of your Pooh books and your "Wind in the Willows." You could put aside the things of childhood, because you knew full and well you would never be anything more than a child. At least on the inside. At least when nobody could see. You knew that particular early spring day last year what you were. And what you were was a leper.

You could see the line of redly brown rusty colored ants marching soldierly right beside you on the buzzing alive grass. You could consider making your hand with which you wrote into a fist and smashing it down on the ants, crushing them, bleeding them out of their ant blood. Because the same thing had happened to you. Not because of anything but what you were. You learn fear. You learn it fast and hard. You tell no one. You wait for the summer day endless in its garments of a road that goes round a curve a few yards from you in either direction. You look over at the bushes across the roadway. You look up at the slender telephone pole wires whirring in dead heat when no one could hear the voices they carried. They carried voices though, anyway.

You are not Andy and you are not a boy and you are not a writer or an artist. Mostly what you are this summer afternoon, god, still June, not even clocked around to July yet where time comes to a total grinding halt and everything is seen through the screen doors of your house and the screens of your windows, mostly what you are is nothing speakable. The house, where he can barely stand to be at any time, has screens to keep the bugs and flies and skeeters out. Keep the world out. Turn up the air conditioner. Watch a movie on TV about Alaska. Do anything to keep cool. Drink Coke, Dr. Pepper, limeade. Do anything to keep the world at bay. For it howls and you have to pretend it doesn't.

Now about Andy. The boy with the haunted eyes. The skeleton body and the hands that always flutter about when no one seems to be looking. Like in that first story in "Winesburg, Ohio" about the homosexual school master who was run out of town because of something one of his students said about him that was not true. Not true, in the oh let's forgive him pathetic creature tone of the story. And not true in Andy's mind, for he could not accept it either, as how could he not? But it was true. He didn't care anymore, Andy. He cared greatly, Andy. They let the school master live. Andy was just marking time, cooking out here with only a hedge to block a little of the sun, as he cast his shadow hot sweaty umbrella underneath him. A fake black blot of heat that pretended other than what it was. Pretended to be the night that Andy cast in day time. The mirror image of himself that he could not reflect. Others went ahead. Andy could not. And had stopped pretending.

The sun was insidious, a creeper vine of light that seemed somehow to be flesh as well. It sparkled in the sky. It dwelled inside Andy. It told him he wanted to live, even if he was a leper. Andy of scrawny hair cut scrawnier for summer, much against his wishes. Andy who could not be a homosexual that might have a chance. He was the wrong kind. None of it fit him. He was the square peg, always. It was like when Uncle Max asked him what he wanted to do with his life, and Andy would say he wanted to write. Uncle Max nodded his heavy head with its double chin and asked then, oh so wise a man, yes, what newspaper you gonna write for? Homosexual boys went for boys their own age. Heterosexual boys went for girls their own age. But advanced past cocoon stage. Andy had not.

I don't want to write for a newspaper, Andy would want to say. It's like that. You tell them however vaguely you want something, want it so much your heart will explode from the pressure on it, and they come out with these obvious answers, these two sentence solutions to your life and you have to not hurt their feelings, so you nod and you lie and that seems to satisfy them. They don't mind hurting your feelings, though. For they have the right, somehow. You try to do what they say. But sometimes you just want to throw the Blue Horse tablet in the road and you want some tractor, driven by some grizzled farmer in overalls, red as a beet in the summer heat fry sun to come along and just run it over. You know defeat early on, if you are Andy. You know what "those kind of people" are like. You hear all the apologies, all the disclaimers on TV, with gay spokesmen for this cause or the other saying we aren't like that, you mistake us, for they repel us also. God how that hurt to hear that all the time. You think for a moment they are including you and then they drop you on your head and break you one more time. And the audience cheers.

So you go deep inside. You go there and you try not to be that. You think to yourself you are not a lurker, not a molester, that this is not you. That it is deeper and far more complex. But Uncle Max says you gonna work for what newspaper? And you make up something for him so he can feel like a big shot. And making others feel like a big shot takes a lot out of a person. So you learn to delegate. You learn to feather dance. You learn to make excuses. If only Jimmy were older, I would still love him, want him, want to hold him, want to caress him. And maybe so. But not so. No. You run in concentric circles. You want someone to push you off the jungle gym of the elementary school, just shove you hard into the ground.

Shove you until they can't bury you any deeper in the soil that you taste with tongue and teeth and cannot stop tasting. Because you should like what is known as beefcake. You should be turned on by rippling muscles and a half day growth of beard on a lean hawk-like face. You should be turned on by lots of body hair. You should be eager to walk into a gay bar and to find yourself flattered that you might be old enough looking not to seem like a kid, because you are eager to get away from that. Eager to be a man. To have sex with a man. You must. You're one of us or not one of us. How sadly familiar all of this was already. He could walk the dock blindfolded.

Andy was writing love poems in his notebook. The sun glared on the words. Made them a lie. I don't want to be you, he wrote. I don't want to be in the military and be massively bodied and linger at the sights of other manly men who need to do what the stories say. So you be Andy. You be Andy as a dirty word sitting by the dirty road and you walk down that road and you see everyone already passing you by. Because you fell in love with Mark Lester. Because your heart broke when Jeremy Gelbwaks left "The Partridge Family," the reruns of which you watch religiously. And it is not a crush. It is not a phase. It is not something that someone will knock out of you. It is not to ever be met with kindness that will ever happen to you. There will only be opprobrium. With ladders you climb. With ladders to the moon high in the coming night sky. Let me in, Andy wanted to scream, let me in and don't let anybody ever laugh at me again.

He didn't want to be what the books said. What the makers of normalcy handed down from on high. He didn't want to be misnamed. He didn't want to be lost in a certain brain that was of course totally wrong from the beginning. He was still turned on by the drawings of Christopher Robin. He was still turned on by the memories of boys in their worlds of violence, who took off their shirts to fight him, to come to him menacingly, as he,, so tremblingly, unable to run away, gets a hard on watching their naked smooth chests. As he got so excited as their mean faces above those haunting chests come toward him and how he wished they would take off their jeans too before they beat the holy crud out of him. How their fists hit and how he couldn't see anything but their berry nipples so close to his face, before it was Andy Andy down we go, yet again. It was contact, though!

He had told a friend once. Had thought, because they had known each other since third grade, and his friend had told Andy that he, Robert, believed he was gay, and he hadn't told this to a soul but Andy. So Andy had told him his feelings, his objects of heart throb, flat out, hoping in Robert's trusting frightened daring eyes Andy would be noticed and be taken in. If not for shelter at least for an arm around the shoulder before the parting. For he knew Robert would have nothing to do with him, when Andy told him the specifics, told him Robert, I like boys. Me, too, Robert said amazed, smiling, more friendly than Robert had ever looked at him. Was there a chance?

Then of course Andy clarified it for Robert. Had to go and do that. But I like boys, Robert, I mean, boys. And Robert, smile lost, face hard, eyes gone insane, had decked him. Just hauled off and decked him. And walked away, Robert did, feeling superior and assured that whatever he was, he was not an Andy. And he spread the word through out the school. Everyone knew now, save Andy's mother, who refused to know anything, except pity for herself.

So Andy on a biting summer day. Andy the Leper. Where could he get his sack cloth and ashes? Why couldn't he be what he referred to as normally abnormal? How it broke him when he heard himself being put down in the name of freedom and equality, the likes of him not included, left behind, not going forward to a better tomorrow. How he knew he would have to be this person, which might not be so bad now, for he could have done something with it at this and younger ages, but fear had told him not to. And what he was would be quite bad ten or god forbid twenty years from now. Unthinkable. This being. This evil incarnate. How he would have to spend his life turning away. Like with Robert, he would have to dissemble, and keep the photos of Mark Lester from the teen magazines he bought covertly in used book and magazine stores discretely hidden in his chest of drawers. Waiting for mother to find them. Waiting to have the reason to do away with himself. Making it all the same as with the straight boys. And the right kind of gay boys. But all so different for Andy.

Sometimes there are not snakes. Sometimes there are just country roads and the air is filled with the smell of heat and there is no out for anyone like Andy. Is there anyone like Andy? Sometimes he thought he would tell Robert that he lied to him. That he was just joking around. What would I want boys for? What would I do with them? I want a huge man dick. That's the thing. That's what I want. Forget what is inside me. Forget my dreams and illusions. Let me just string along with you and pretend that what you want is automatically what I want and we can be friends again. But no. He could not. He had learned from Robert, from the boys who beat him up on the riverbank that time, after Robert had told the world Andy's little secret, thus giving Robert a free pass, after all in relation to Andy, Robert was not all that bad come to think of it--there were all kinds of prejudices and narrow pointed little heads.

So he would go out on his own. He would have nothing but his hand to jerk himself off at night. Mark Lester, the British child actor with the high piping voice that sent shivers through Andy. Mark's thick golden hair and the red lipped smile and the pink and honey complexioned face. Andy would be the kestrel in "Run Wild, Run Free," tied to the boy's arm as Mark ran fast hard thrilled through the day, almost crazed because he had found his lost wild white pony again, forgetting the kestrel he had been training, that was bouncing helplessly, caught, beside him, attached to his arm by a leather strap, the bird flopping its wings, trying to jerk itself into an upright position, trying to escape. And how Andy had hated that scene, for it appeared the bird truly was being killed, this was no movie double talk. This was real.

And it made Andy run out into the night away from the living room where he had seen the movie, run into the night so mad, so furious that a white pony should command the boy's full attention, while the kestrel was killed without the boy thinking twice, the boy who had murdered it in carelessness, in omission. The kestrel could fly, could be of use, could be of beauty and grace, with as much right to live as the white pony. There were all kinds of beauty in the world and you just don't kill a noble bird because you forget. Andy had fallen to his knees that cold bitter autumn night and he had wept until he went almost into spasms. He had screamed with all the anger in him.

"Hey, Andy, how little do you like your boys?"

"Hey, Andy, Robert says you ain't no homo, so you better never say you are, or he'll kill ya."

"Hey, Andy, you really hang round the grade school picking up kids?"

"Hey, Andy, didn't I see you on 'America's Most Wanted' last night?"

And they hit him and he blacked out after a time. He felt this deep loathing in himself. He felt as though he would forever be squalid even in his own eyes. They would send him to mental health hospitals if he weren't careful. They would cut him and mold him and fix him and shape him, gays or straights, so he could be in the correct box within the correct lines, with nothing hanging out of it, and if there were something hanging out, then it could be cut off easily, one two and no more for you, because prison is too good for you, because they will put you under the jail, right before they cut off your balls. Andy my man, but then you ain't a man, you are a panty waist, you make it hard for the rest of us. Go to hell, Andy. Go to jail.

See what men in prison do to people like you. They don't waste time with your kind. Get ready for pain you never thought possible. On TV talk shows, they always sent recalcitrant children to jail so they could see what it was like. There were always prisoners telling the girls, or the boys, what they would do to them if they were put in the cells with them. It seemed, at such sights, that this at other times professed nobility of men in prison for murder and rape and brutalization, was somewhat contradictory and a pardon me all to hell and back bullshit lie.

They had left Andy in the water after they had hurt him, the boys who had beat him up. He woke, on his back, with the water round his face, almost covering it. Sand. Grit. Vomit. He had soiled himself is the polite way to put it. And Andy was always polite. They left him hurt and bleeding. His friend Robert had stood there somewhere around. Or maybe Andy imagined it only. But he knew Robert represented lots of people on one side. And the thugs represented lots of people on the other. And they were all against Andy because he wanted to kiss Mark Lester's sweet mouth and hold the young boy close to him and never let the warmth of him go again.

This was small town and this was the South but there were the magazines and the videos and the cable TV shows here like anywhere else. Sometimes Andy would buy a magazine and he would look at the naked men in it and they did not do one single thing for him. They did not move him or touch him or eager him or make him sad with the knowledge that he would never know them. The stories in these magazines seemed always cold and mechanical and filled with booze and drugs and more than a little hatred for what they were. There was always a razored edge of danger in them. Was this better than he?

Those naked beefcake models would back away from him if they did know what he was. They would have nothing to do with him. Have him put away just for just being himself. They would want the truth. But not that truth. That they in their liberation could not handle. Did he not have the right to be himself? Who gets to decide? Wasn't this what everyone was supposedly fighting against? Labeling? Name calling? There were just Robert, who would not look at Andy ever again, even when they passed by each other in the school hall, and beatings and fears and the tears of midnight and the hopeless penis in his jeans which would not do what he wanted it to do for the right wrong reasons.

What was the difference whether heterosexuals bedeviled him or homosexuals bedeviled him? What was the difference, which the villianization came from, it still hurt all the same. And everybody was so self righteous about it. He was right now, even though he had done nothing, even when he had been kind and respectful and kept his hands to himself, while all about him, other kids and adults he saw were having a terrific time, and not bothering with any of that, yet somehow they were more moral than he who was Jack the Ripper, Landru, Dr. Crippen, the Moors murderers, and Giles de Rais all rolled into one. He was the most noxious plant that grew on the planet.

All he had was masturbation. All he had was the memory of those furious boys coming toward him, their chests bare, the sun glinting off them, and he just wanted to kneel to them and to kiss their feet and their legs and their nipples and he would have let them kill him if they would have allowed him that. Because lepers are just that. There is nothing to me but that, Andy thought. And when he came, he whispered "Mark" or "Jeremy" and he curled into a comma of defeat on his bed and he prayed again uselessly for the night to go away. They wrote no stories for him. They wrote no songs for him. No poetry. No movies. He had found some old copies of Gordon Merrick's novels about these two gay super studs, and he thought them funny and overblown and thoroughly ridiculous. But he tried to jack off to some of the passages. He did his very best.

What newspaper are you going to work for? asked Uncle Max in the comfortable deep seated arm chair, what newspaper you gonna work for?, the reading lamp beaming down yellow glow on the man's bare bald topped head. And Andy told him what he wanted to hear. The New York Times is a fine paper, Andy, but you will have to work hard to get there. Yes, you dumpy dumb jerk bartender from the lower depths, Andy wanted to say, I shall heed your boundless wisdom.

Why did he have to tell Robert what he wanted to hear? Robert got to be Robert. Andy did not get to be Andy. Why? Robert felt good. Andy felt bad. Wasn't this a tune of some resonance? Some other shadows down through the thousands of years? The truth. Confinement. Summer and freedom. Confinement. Pictures from teen magazines in the years before they turned to doing fully clothed shots of actors and groups and single singers who were adults, because there had been that whole big thing about naked chested kids in them and who really was buying this stuff, and why. Thank god for Aaron Carter, Andy thought. And Hanson. Goodbye Aaron and Hanson. You've been lingering on the vine too long. And thy collective tooth has gotten too long and tired. It's life, Andy had written once, they don't want to admit it, but the whole thing is played that way and beyond our control. Everybody wants someone young, as young as possible. They settle. And pretend it is not so. But it is.

It's too close to the bone to admit it, too close to the bone that there might be as much truth and beauty and tenderness and caring, from my own heart, along the gentle riverbanks in the afternoon summer flood of sun. As I hold and kiss Mark, and remove that damaged kestrel from the strap it was held to the boy's arm with, as I take the bird into hands that are gentle and wise and I see it is still alive, we both see that it can fly again, that it can be nursed back to health. What could be wrong with that? Everything Andy had seen and read and heard, and he had seen and read and heard a great deal of it, and the whole of it said it is better to just go ahead and cast yourself down to hell rather than be what you are. How to be old and need a boy. The sad forlorn image of it. The funny lonely feel and imagining of it. How?

Andy read a sonnet he had written. And he looked at some of the drawings he had made of boys he had crushes on. The ants were marching past him. He let them live. Thought it was quite magnanimous of him to do so. Had they reasoning powers, and had they been fire ants, they would have bitten the holy hell out of him. The green trees and their green heavy leaves, the green hedges, the telephone pole right beside him, the country road that was never traveled down, the memories of boys beating him up, memories that he had turned into sexual fantasies because he knew he would have to use the horrors to make whatever joy he could find in it--all of them converged.

Vectored into him. Vectored into what he was writing, had written, had drawn in his Blue Horse notebook. He never could get Christopher Robin right in his drawings. He had never been able to copy the wistfulness of the character, the socks fallen down round his ankles, the shorts ending high up, the limpedness in the eyes, the water color feel of him, the breath of freedom the boy could breathe into Andy if he could make Christopher rise real from the page, or more hopefully if Andy could go into the page himself, into the Hundred Acre Wood and be safe with his friends. I feel so much. I feel so much that I sometimes think I shall burst. Do not let me grow up. Do not let me grow old. Do not let me look pathetic and sized all wrong for what I love and will never have.

I have such kindness in me and such goodness in me and I don't want to hurt a soul and I'd pay a boy just to say hello to me now and then, and I have to justify everything I feel and do and say and want. I have to be the "good nigger." The one you let live. The slavemasters are everywhere. Trust no one. Believe nothing. Be hard as concrete. Go along. Get along.

Lie and deceive and pretend and go about everything in a corkscrew way. Pretend that the only way I can jack myself off is to imagine weight lifter body builders. Feel their muscles. Imagine their abs. Their biceps. Think of getting lost in all that man flesh. Let it absorb me. Let me not be different. Try. Try. And rubbing himself in bed late night, and trying to see only that sweating glistening body taking him. And losing my erection constantly, the more I strive. The more I try. Until, in the corner of my eye, over there in the shadows of the weight room, I see Mark and Jeremy standing there watching.

And Christopher Robin and Charlie Buckets, as they call to me, as I make my way to them, and leaves the stud alone--so how do you like it?--why should I have to pretend when they don't?--or maybe some of them do?--did some virtuous bone in their body make them what they were?, and I am only a mixture of sicknesses and psychoses and mommy doing the deed with daddy while I watched from my baby crib? He had seen gay psychologists on TV debate what he was, how disgusting he was. They were so pious and so perfect and so glistening with the rightness of themselves, he wanted to kick in the picture tube, and scream out, you don't know a goddam thing about nothin'.

Sometimes boys played basketball at the hoops in the play ground of the elementary school of a summer day or late afternoon after school. Sometimes Andy, when he worked up enough courage, would go and watch for a little while. Hiding behind the trash cans. Crouched down. Like a nocturnal beast sizing up his prey. Christ, Andy thought, don't they know how bigots treat them? Can't they see it in themselves? He would watch the boys with their delicate legs and their large heads on slender stalk necks, go about performing their gyrations in the air and their leaps and the basketballs going through the hoops, as the boys seemed almost at times for a second or two, to fly, and they would be patting each other on the back, blocking, guarding, and shouting out in their child voices.

Trying to pretend they were such real men. Don't be so eager for that, Andy would think. You'll miss it too one day and try to climb back in no matter what you tell yourself. When Andy had been them, not that long ago, he had never been with them, for they had known without the knowing, and he had known without the knowing too. Turning away from them in the showers in the pool or after gym later on. Afraid. Protecting. He could never have had his time. Never. But that would haunt him the rest of his life. The possibility not taken.

Robert had had it bad being what he was. He had not hidden it well at all. He had known his own share of beatings. Humiliations by teachers and kids and parents. But Robert now had another gay friend. They protected each other. Looked out for each other. They were leaving boyhood behind and much good riddance to it too. Robert had it lucky. The discrimination he would face, the fear, the hatred, the tough times, the verbal threats, the shunning--but he was the right kind, and if this friend of his left, there would be another, and then another. They would do okay. They were strong and they would do it and they would have lots of writers and filmmakers and psychologists and prominent philosophers on their side. It was getting better for them. They had power now. They had national and international groups fighting for their equal rights under the law. Things were changing for the good. For them. It was always for them. And you can't complain. You don't dare.

Here, then, Andy, tossing his notebook into the dusty road, wishing for a tractor or truck or van or car to roll down it and tear his dreams apart. But there was no one and his dreams were not even worth being torn apart. Not even that. He was too beneath contempt for them to even bother. Andy sitting in the heat, sweating in the sun, knees now drawn up to his chest, wanting to masturbate, wanting to go to his bedroom and take off his clothes and jack off to Mark Lester's sweet smile and brown sad eyes, in a picture from so long ago; Mark's tousled hair and his russet autumn colored sweater, the football tucked under his arm, as he leaned into the camera.

As Andy jacked off to a picture of Aaron Carter topless in a fan magazine, a picture that surely had slipped by the censor's eyes, as Andy strained to feel a boy next to him, to hear the words that straight people and gay people at least have a chance of hearing. But not such as Andy. Who was not them. Who was not anything at all. And it was with the years only to get worse with him.

So he sat there, and he watched the Blue Horse notebook he had thrown in the middle of the dusty lane, as what it contained was, like a wound, opened by a brief hot breeze, and the pages ruffled a little. He felt shame that he had put his boy loves in that notebook. Felt he had shamed A.A. Milne for the things Andy imagined doing with Christopher Robin. Felt shamed that he had never been a child and needed childhood so much, that it was always to be touched phonily, with much fear, with head always bowed, just as it was each time he brought himself off in the darkness of his bedroom, with only his little bedside tensor lamp shining on the photos of boys not boys for a long time now, and he said what he always said then, in whisper, both places, "Please, sir, I want some--more??"

Thinking, now, who made me me and who made you you? Timid tiger. Lusty lamb. Pretend though, otherwise, forever more. Or it's off with your head.

end