Creative Camp

This is a long, complex story, written for those over forty with a significant, but not high-falutin', literary background. While it contains explicit scenes of juvenile and adult sexual activity, such scenes develop slowly.

A central theme of "Creative Camp" is intellectual property in various forms. The author lives offshore and has limited access to research facilities. Apologies are offered if any material herein substantially duplicates any i.p. under development or in use by any individual or organization. The author will do his best to revise and repost any material which creates a conflict, upon email notification.

Except where in use by or registered to others, the author reserves first rights to all ideas, names and concepts detailed herein, and in chapters to come.

No restriction is placed on dissemination of this story, but please include author's email address. No inference should be drawn from any use of public figures in this story.

Creative Camp (M/b) By Feather Touch

Charles Hastings was right on time reaching the bus station. The ten-mile ride in from camp had been routine. As anything could be, anyway. He had a lot on his mind and only the chirping voice of boy on phone had dragged him from his work. Blissy Scopes. Eleven. At the maximum range of husky for Creative Camp, at least according to the month-old picture that formed Charles' frame of reference. Cute smile. That had won the day. Brains, personality and appearance with no ridged order other than keeping out louts.

His organization's name helped. No one with an extra hep bone was likely to take much interest in the retro flatness of "Creative Camp." Where were the whispering pines, raging waters, or, for that matter, anything verging on daring, exciting or even worthwhile? Though not advertised, there were trees, water and a skin of campy motif. It was just a pretty place, no more and no less. Leaving adventure and daring-do out of the brochure allowed for a thousand words of text that sketched organized and highly disorganized activities in inventing and writing.

Charles had run the camp for ten years and some months. Starting with a dozen boys it now was a home away from home to just over a hundred young males who came and went more or less as they saw fit. Ages ranged from eight to thirteen with a small number of boys slightly outside these bounds. By fifteen almost all boys had moved on to Camp Two, hardly a mile distant.

It was late June. The Scopes boy was the last arrival of a summer influx that quintupled the general population of the facility. Charles asked him to come a day late; the boy looked on the verge. You couldn't always tell but usually you could. There was a self-assured look to the normal boy; hands-off written in countenance, body english, and a host of lesser indicators that equaled no way, Jose. The photo of Blissy showed an eleven year old apparently right on the knife-edge; half of him, indeed, seemed the self-confident image of normalcy, but, wasn't there, even on a fairly quick second glance, a hint of wonder about the child? Curiosity? A certain vibrancy and light, even a still photo didn't quite hide?

These were the delicate cases; not cases really, situations; circumstances; perhaps even paradigm fit. However modified, the noun was tough when it came to feeling out a particular new boy. Was the light a deep curiosity; a burning intelligence than needed to be crammed more than stimulated? It was bright enough, seen through the windows to the soul; the optician's source of his daily bread, but that light could be mischief; the quick dirty kind that could easily turn to a sugar-daddy's-pup outlook.

There had never been such a boy at Creative Camp. Pictures and long telephonic interviews; long stories by the applicants submitted on the Net. One hundred percent. Not an attitude case nor a troublemaker had ever made it past the sign which read Creative Camp (An enterprise of Plunkett Associates). Personality. Zero theatrics in the smile. An unsure look. Charles searched for this, above all. All his team did. Only a moron on steroids could have any confidence between eight and thirteen years of age. What was there to be confident about other than one's own baloney? No. You knew almost nothing at that age. And it was that knowledge that was vital at Creative Camp. Self doubt. Am I, young child that I am, forty or fifty atoms in the entire universe? How little can I possibly matter? Is there infinity to smallness; unimportance and lack of self- esteem?

These were the brains. They knew. More accurately, they hungered to know. Hungered. One and all, every boy selected to attend, minus those that fell to the winnowing blade of disease, accident and misadventure, came with his doubts, his hungers and his passion to know at least a little more. Over the varying periods of time they were likely to stay they continually learned more of their littleness and pallid insignificance, and, fortunately for the moral of the institution, other things as well. In summary, after four or five years at the camp every boy simply knew more than his peers. Brains to learn hard and fast, personality to make the experience fun, and an appearance that fit the temperament, if temperament could be specifically held to preclude any significant tendency toward gluttony. Brains, a real smile and an unindulged body. A small list, but Charles had come to respect it as durable - and yet, for all its success, two flanks remained open; two gaps in the wall. One was a 'tude case making it in and dropping whatever kids of the present dropped in lieu of the dated dime; the other, more frightening - from the former, one could just run - was the possibility of falling in love with its inherent limitation of even an option to move a fucking foot..

Each new camper and stranger to the setting arrived with the potential twin claws of the scorpion. The tattling troublemaker, or any love, subsequent maintenance high, low or medium. The claws. The fangs. With every boy, however vetted and interviewed; however dissected through readings of submitted stories, there was the chance of a wrong choice and disaster for the entire Plunkett organization.

Charles was getting too old for the thrill of this chase. More and more, over the past three years, he'd retreated into art for its own sake; invention, for its own sake. He was so very old. A full thousand years older than those born in 1948. As a military journalist he'd spent ten or fifteen hours as the northernmost soldier in South Vietnam. And he was a thousand and fifty-five years of age.

Boys were a cure for this problem; this ancientness above all who have ever lived. To actually be old in the ultra-information age was the rarest of rare situations. To have entered the ultra-information age, vastly read, put him in the top one-millionth of one percent of all who had ever lived. He used this knowledge, first, to select his young males, and also to set an intellectual pace that would strain and loosen, like a giant rubber band, making his staff and juvenile charges scramble to keep up, then chill to let stuff sink in and enjoy being human.

As he got older, Charles drew back from relationships with his young campers. He remembered the quote from the lady that ran the Little Rascals center in Manhattan Beach; "Heavens," she had said, "I'd never let one of those children even see me." He grinned a bit wryly at this, knowing he was being disingenuous. The daycare lady had been heavy and blodgy; he was anything but. At the almost weird age of double-nickel, he had all his hair, plenty of teeth, knock on wood, and a thirty two-inch waist. He'd had his chin tucked, just on the basis of what the hell. Fully clothed, he passed as boyish middle age; in a bathing suit, he was simply boyish. Every pubescent male who had ever attended Creative Camp had thought, many times, I hope I look like you when I'm half your age; most had said it out loud.

But for this youthful quirk, Charles would never have placed himself in a position of being alone for any period of time with any of his young charges. He knew his personality was very softly and gently charismatic. Quiet chuckles, half grins, and a hair trigger wit worked strong magic and could very easily be used to lure a boy out of his underpants, to the later misgivings of the child simply for having been with someone old enough to be his grandfather. But he'd been first in line at the gene pool, and so, very guardedly, he allowed reality to intrude because if something happened the child would bear no strangulated emotional scars. Cute simply provided its own options and short of putting his face through a window or gaining fifty pounds there was precious little he could do about it other than be exquisitely careful. This care was manifest in his quiet clothing, his gentle ways, and in never appearing in a swim suite or even shirtless. Nor was lurking mysterious his game. On campus, he pretty much became wallpaper; often around, seldom noticed, even absent for extended periods when a new story was boiling mad to get itself all nice and tidy and written down.

It was a beautiful camp. Tropic colonial architecture with its wide verandas and dark, soft interiors: Shaker, topping the highest plane of design. Off the green grass of a wet summer the buildings stood with a touch of first drama. This did not last. It was almost instant comfort that took over. No one was trying to kid anyone else with polygons on blueprints; the quads of quiet dorms and facility buildings flanked the various pathways and the one gravel drive modestly, standing sun, rain, fog and night with equal dignity. They were not for snow, but there was no snow at the latitude of Creative Camp.

The bus station was where it always was. Charles sometimes got so lost in a story it was almost a physical thing to come back to a world of buildings and roads; cars and bus stations. And there was the boy. Waving. Smiling. What a challenge; to see that same smile on the same boy a few months down the road, when he would likely be waving good-bye.

How accidental was it? his coming by himself to pick up the new eleven-year-old camper. Everyone else was busy; true. Still, if he hadn't seen the slight husk in the young male's build mightn't he have dispatched a staffer and taken on some duty at the camp, himself? Just for two or three hours?

Charles hadn't done a first trip in over three years. Graham Ketchum had been the last. Charles always thought of him as the silver boy; the cross, a gift from a priest who had gently and continually molested him for almost a year before the ten-year-old had arrived at the camp. With Graham, Charles had felt the very breeze of the love fang. It brought up, as he reminisced, the stunning amateur video of a gazelle leaping over a tangle of fallen trees and hauled out of the air by a springing lion. The great cat had fielded the flying deer with a single claw and slammed the careening animal into the ground. Graham had been the springing gazelle, but Charles's claw had somehow missed by the thickness of a razor blade. They wrote each other a dozen times a year, more or less, and incredibly it worked for them, as friends.

"What kind of car is this?" Blissy asked.

Charles pulled a comic face. "This son, is a Dodge; mightiest of man's machines. Don't you know a Dodge when you see one?"

Blissy giggled. "That's Bundy," he said. "Al, Peggy, Kelly and Bud. I thought the Dodge was a legend. You mean it was real?"

"From where the rubber meets the road, proceeding upwards, until the antenna finally yields its length to the wild blue yonder, this car is real. It has a serial number, so it must be."

"Well," Blissy responded, "for a minute there I thought it was like the Family Truckster. I mean, I guess I always thought that; like it was legendary."

Charles pointed out that the car was real enough. That the child was interested meant a lot. Blase and hep; lord the world was full of their stale cant and ludicrous posturing. At Creative Camp a boy was deemed A-list if he was at least a little interested in four or five things. It was a camp for writers; for inventors, fucking only. It was, at the same time, probably the farthest campus in the world from the banal sterility grinding infinitely small the trash leftist profs had admitted so they wouldn't have to fight a land war in Asia. The intellectual irony of the situation was that it was said such a war could never be won when in fact it was aggressively and deliberately lost on a thousand campuses. That this had all happened decades ago simply meant that sons and grandsons of morons were ruling the roost, and that summary was prejudicial for not counting the daughters. Few students, even decades later, escaped inferior instructors, a multitude of whom insisted on factory-fresh text editions with each new academic year. Charles could never quite determine whether there was spiff involved, or just a cruel stupidity with one mitigating factor. That factor was the highlighter. The devil's yellow in the beginning and now available in a multitude of shades. So modern. But you did have to leave academia after you'd seen dozens of once-used texts with thousands and even tens of thousands of lines striped with the moron's mark. He had never beheld a book in which the entire text, save the important stuff, had been yellow-striped, but he felt it was just a matter of time.

The wise head looked at the young boy beside him. Blissy lived up to his photo. Plain, nice-kid face. Bare chested he might look very similar to a boy in a commercial where a bunch of kids cavort around a picnic table. Just, as the photo suggested, a softness. Extremely attractive. Hard bodies were nice and all, a little like hard work, but there was something even more erotic in a slightly lazy Grecian mellowness than even the most chiseled torso. Of course, slim boys often came with long legs and big feet and knees, both of which, for some obtruse physiological or psychological reason, were erotic in the extreme. As a teen, the child would have to slim down a bit, but as a boy he was exciting more than he was perfect.

"So," Blissy asked, "what'll this smoke-pot do on the open road?"

"One hundred fifty three miles per hour."

"Oh, sure," the boy responded.

"There's a long downhill on the way into camp. Three miles; almost straight. The Dodge will just nudge one seventy five on a calm day."

"I hope it's a lonely road," Blissy said.

"If I'd ever met anybody, I wouldn't be here bending your ear, would I?"

The young camper agreed with the logic and said so. "How come it goes so fast?" he asked.

"Well," Charles replied, "we try to delve into the mysteries of genius from all sides at c-camp. Practical stuff; saving money and resources; living happier. One of those practical exercises is to take a Bundymobile like this and make it into a car that will last twenty or thirty years."

"How do you do that?" Blissy asked. "By replacing the factory running gear with after-market products designed for racers. These will last forever on a street car, and as a bonus you get vastly increased performance as well as safety, reliability and longevity. Would you like to drive and see for yourself?"

Bliss looked at Charles wide-eyed. "You're kidding, I'm eleven."

"Not a problem; we installed the adjustable pedals Ford's using on the Mercury; little touch of genius there, so you'll fit just fine. Do you want to?"

"I heard it was the best camp in the world but it's nice of you to prove it," Blissy said. Charles thought to himself You haven't been clued to the half of it, but he let the notion ride in silence and instead of conversing turned off on a secondary road, pulling the docile looking Dodge in under a tree where its radiator clicked and a surge of insect and bird sounds intruded through the open windows.

"Buck up, kiddo," he said as the boy regarded him with a stunned look., "we let you guys be kids most of the time, but we throw adult stuff at you, as well. Challenge. I want you not only to drive, but circle the area and make you way back to this spot five times in the next couple of hours. A safe driver is a comfortable driver and a comfortable driver is one who knows where he is. You learn that by venturing and retreating to the home point, then venturing, again, a little further, and retreating to a known point. If you learn that before you learn to pop the clutch and burn rubber you've won half the battle."

His speech concluded, Charles opened his door and walked around the front o the car.

"In the future," he said, "I will expect your young and agile self to get out and do the leg work." He gazed at the stunned boy through the passenger's window. Momentarily, the child let the message sink in and shuffled across and under the steering wheel. Charles opened the door and seated himself, making no show of slipping into his belt. "Mirrors, first," he instructed, then corrected: "In your case, do the peddles first, then the seat, then the mirrors. Take your time. Teach yourself how all the stuff works."

Bliss found the obvious rocker switch for the pedals and a small motor hummed as they jacked all the way to the rear. The seat was manual and he soon had that hauled forward on its track, then he worked on the mirrors. In a couple of minutes he was as ready as he'd ever be, belts secured, face white.

"Are you scared?" Charles asked.

"I'm eleven," the boy responded.

"Yes," the man acknowledged, "and undoubtedly you've got a few hundred hours on a bicycle, right?"

"At least," the boy acknowledged.

"Okay, " Charles said, "think about it from the common-sense point of view. You and your shirt against the world, on a bike; or you belted into two tons of steel and safety glass."

"Yeah," answered the boy, "but the two-ton thing goes 175 miles an hour."

"Bliss," Charles said, "that's only downhill under ideal conditions. It's nothing to worry about. You've got big tires, rack and pinion steering, and four-caliper disks on all four wheels, plus the latest ABS technology. The only way you can get in trouble is to drive like they do in comedies to make the six-year-olds laugh. My guess is you will have little desire to slam things about, so we should be safe enough. Let's go."

"I think I'm going to really, really, really like this camp," the sweet young voice exclaimed.

"You won't be the first one," Charles replied.

Chapt. 2

For an hour and a half they drove their practice missions. The time together gave Charles an opportunity to feel out the new camper. First, the child was not overconfident. That would have been a trip back to the bus depot. Fortunately, a bold look in a boy's eyes could be seen in a photograph, so the accident prone were eliminated without further consideration. But it was too important a principle to leave any margin of error, so, no matter how mild the look, the driving test was still completed with each new camper. Bliss did well. Venturing a mile or two, then returning to the shade tree; trying a turn and a mile or two. After the first hour was up, he was able to circle the starting point and find it from any point, enroute, by the most direct path home. Charles said little during the experiment, except on one long straight stretch where he demanded that the child accelerate under full throttle to 130 mile per hour. The kid poured on the coal and burst into a grin after about three minutes at very high cruise. That was perfect. One minute was brash, five minutes was simply not getting it. Stood to reason, Charles thought to himself, as he gave Bliss a perfect three. A gold star was added when they pulled under their starting-point tree for a last time and the boy focused on the instrument panel. "It uses a lot of gas," he said. "This kind of driving, you bet," the man replied. "But it's got a five speed lockup tranny, so it gets over twenty miles per gallon on the cruise control; tall rear end."

Bliss turned the engine off and once again there were the sounds of breeze, bug and bird. The view was of miles down the secondary road, in either direction; fields in all other directions. It was a sneak proof location.

"You did well," Charles said to the boy. "That's a good thing, because the life of a genius is fraught with economic peril and it's nice to be able to drive a cab if you have to."

"Why is it so bad to be smart?" the boy asked. It was a longish subject; started in kindergarten and dogged one forever; was a main them of campfire discussions. The short answer would have to do for now. "Because very few people will understand you; smart and literate takes you into a different world, where truth rules absolutely, as it will ultimately rule us absolutely. In an era of spin, hype, posturing and game playing the truth will get you fired, lose you your friends, and prevent you from being published. Political correctness rules; a saccharine banality of intellect selling the lowest grade of populist socialism with each putrid breath of every voice at every mic and every pen on every page. Before O.J. it was critical, now it's mortal. A deep social insanity that would be difficult to survive in primitive times and is impossible to survive in complex times. "Knowing this, and speaking of it does not make you a cheery addition to the normal fun-loving American crowd: I mean try calling football 'Clunk' and see how many birthday cards you get, even from Vince's losers (aka, nice guys). Your buds will be waxing emotional over the Super Bowl and you'll be sitting there trying to figure what it costs, over how many decades, to get some hundred thousand people together for three hours. "Wouldn't they be happier if they spent the money on books and magazines for their kids?' you'll be thinking, while ninety-eight percent of the people are worried about a first down or laughing at a VW falling out of a tree. "Our mission at Creative Camp is to help you harness your brain in an environment where truth is never forbidden from any tongue, while, at the same time, buffing you up all pretty-like for society so you can function in conventional backgrounds if you choose to do so." "Wow," said Blissy. "It's intense, but there is nothing else like it. Even a few weeks free of lies, distortion and flapper mentalics will be a revelation. When you connect Imus of the Dirty Hat with General Electric and realize the doom it represents for all of us, you inhabit the real world. It's intense, alright; with two long, sharp prongs. One is that you're a lucky eleven year old to live in the most utterly magic of all times, and the other is that the whole thing will collapse sooner rather than later, so you might as well grab for all the gusto you can get as long as you can do so without upsetting anyone else's apple cart. We'll let the socialists kill us; too late to do anything to prevent it, but, by god, we're going to have ourselves a time in the meantime. "Is that okay with you?" "When are we going to die?" Blissy asked. "We should have in 1989, but then Bill Gates came along and provided an operating system that sold a hundred million computers in ten years, plus who knows what to go with them. Regrettably, he so overpowered all in his drive for perfection the industry came up with a machine that is almost perfect and lasts almost forever. Additionally, it is a machine, especially in the laptop variant, that require less labor to manufacture than a shirt. Its essential value is next to nil. When K-Mart sells a loaded laptop for three hundred dollars, we die - perhaps 2005, if we make it that far, of course." "Jeepers," said the boy. "It's just a matter of attitude," Charles explained. "You are lucky to live in the most fabulous time in history, and no one will live much above the early iron age, of the very few who live after you at all. You see and do more in an average week than a prince who died fifty years ago would have seen and done in his lifetime. Plus, on the bright side, there is not really much point at straining yourself, accomplishing anything, or excelling in any way. Why bother? It was said from the earliest conceptualizing of any variation of what we call democracy that once you put the vote in the market-place, any populist-based society will collapse. Since these ancient Greeks and Romans, et al, invented the system it stands to reason they may have been right in predicting the one weakness that will infallibly cause its collapse. Tyranny of the masses. And now we've got motor voter so no angry man or woman will miss their opportunity to do their ballotary bit and bring the whole mess down by voting for the lead promisor." "I'd like to hear more about not trying and accomplishing anything," Blissy finally interrupted the longwinded spiel of the camp director. "Yes, that is the best part," Charles said with a nod. "Beloved laziness. She should have the highest column in the courtyard." "Why?" asked the child from the driver's seat of the Dodge. "Two reasons. First, it takes a long, long time to think up good stuff, and most of us have to be pretty passive for the process to work with any efficiency at all. Second, we only put out the best, because we're too lazy too fuck with the rest. This goes for inventions, manuscripts and our behavior on a day-to-day basis. In the end, we're just too slothful to do much but sit around and think and scratch something on paper once in awhile. We think, therefore we clam." Blissy giggled at that. His eyes sparkled from the thrill of driving the four hundred horsepower Dodge and in anticipation of a summer of just lying around thinking while simultaneously being free to say anything he wanted. Eleven. Hardly enough years to handle so much unadulterated pleasure; to be, at long last, because years pass slowly at that age, among people who had read and who did think; not of the symbolism of white whales or mysticism of noisy ravens, but of how a thirty year old car could be made into a breathtaking highway animal for half the cost of the cheapest new ride. The very car he sat in was launching pad for a tumble of thoughts; fast reviews of the ideas he had, as well as fascination with this boyish genius who'd practically forced the keys to heaven into his relatively tiny hand. "Blissy?" Charles said, his voice taking on a slightly strained lower note that sliced through the boy's reverie. "Yes?" he answered. "We bring all the new campers out here to drive. After that we have a mature talk about some of the things that happen at camp; not the stuff we put in the brochures and guidelines." "What kind of stuff?" the boy asked, curiosity a leaping flame in his already bright eyes. "Well," Charles said, "stuff that has to be approached from the tedious intellectual side, first. Perspective, context and adherence to a philosophy that holds many thing subjective, relative and conditional. Part of the formulae is genius; more accurately, a sophisticated and well-read genius, perhaps even literary; a brilliance yielding an almost instinctive contempt for superstition, taboo and trammeled thinking, in general. Another part of the formulae is the fact that we are pretty much at the end of our rope, culturally speaking, and so may as well indulge ourselves as long as it's no skin off anyone else's nose." "Indulge ourselves in what?" the boy asked. Charles was glad for the response. The paragraph of the preamble had been long and complex; the child had tracked and pulled the salient thread from the convoluted weave. "Picture it," the camp director responded. "About one hundred boys. Nothing held, arbitrarily, as taboo, prurient, or unclean. No worries about reputation, for the best will die with the rest. And since this is the case, every good reason to follow any whim, indulge in any fantasy, play at any game, and to follow it, not pell-mell and wildly, but nonetheless with reasonable dispatch." The boy grinned just impishly enough so as not to cause alarm. "I liked the part about dispatch," he commented after a moment of thought. "That means about the same thing as get-to-the-point, doesn't it?" "Wow! Did I ever win that argument," Charles thought to himself as he looked at the child whose hands were tensely gripping the custom steering wheel of the British Racing Green Dodge. The argument in question was his insistence on meeting Blissy, himself. The staff, though circumspect, had thought the slightly chubby youth was worthy of one of the junior's attention and were loath to let their master go on what seemed a lesser mission. This new camper was dynamite, and the same subtle pull of intellect that had rendered brilliance from sloth for many people over many years had brought the man to the boy. Blissy was looking expectantly but not impatiently for an answer. Charles went on with a speech which was carefully outlined but never delivered rote. "Let's try you out with two words, okay, Blissy, and we'll see if that brings us close enough to the point to lead to more intelligent questions on your part. How would that be?" "Great. What are the two words?" "No girls." The Dodge had been great. Zero to sixty in just over five seconds. Extreme on the corners, though surely no Porsche. Great car. Great fun. He though of the silly line about it not getting any better than this from the retromercials on TV Land. No girls. No taboos. Sin, apparently exorcised to the churches which cashed in on it. No girls. A hundred boys. Twenty five staffers. The senior boys' camp a short walk away. No girls. "No girls," the child finally echoed in a half-whisper. "Is that okay?" Charles queried. He was absolutely sure, but nonetheless wanted to hear it from the child's lips. "Awesomely," the boy replied. He didn't need ramifications of intellectual rationalization, nor was he interested, for the moment, in the going-out-happy aspect of the overall situation. What mattered was being amongst males with no females. No one to posture and fuss for. No one to lust after and lose to an older or cuter boy; no one to get lovesick over. He gloried in being only eleven and never having gone through the limitless trials and tribulations of slightly older boys who danced to the tune of social convention and accepted morality. That was no life for anybody, even if they had ninety years to live. He tried to put his thoughts into words and did a fair job of it. "It didn't exactly say 'no' in the camp literature," Blissy said. "But I hardly dared really hope. I never knew such a short word could be so fine." Charles patted himself on the back, once again. The famous keeper. Five years a lover, many more a companion and friend. Just what he needed for old age, ha, ha, or, to live out the end with, whenever and however it came. All but perfect as he sat there, and a few evenings among his fellow campers and young staffers and the boy would be a human edition of Secretariat. In the meantime, he was a lot less than half bad. "So you feel okay with the male thing?" Charles asked the boy. "It sounds perfect. Good atmosphere to focus." "Much of the time," Charles agreed. "Much of the time." There seemed to be an opening and Blissy took a shot. "And the rest of the time?" he asked. "Do you want me to tell you? Or, if you if you'd feel more comfortable, you can wait until we get there and learn from the younger guys." "Those children?" the boy retorted in mock disgust. Charles laughed out loud at the child's instant responsiveness. He was like a jump to 128 Megs of ram; push a button, get a light. In his way a spectacularly erotic variation on Jackie Chan. Blissy chewed his lip for a moment, then asked, "How long do we have before we have to be there?" "A couple of hours. More if you want. I kind of let others run the place, so it really doesn't matter. We can swing back to town for lunch, for that matter. Okay?" This sounded great to the young male and unobtrusively he pinched himself to be sure he wasn't dreaming. No sad old padre. It was real. The ripping Dodge, the laid-back hangout for nice boys with extreme IQs and several thousand hours, each, in various libraries and bookstores. And now what on top of all that? That which was missing; that of great direct and indirect nuisance value; not to put too fine a point on it, that which was female. Other things made the "not" list. Virtue; it must hold its noble head near the top. Chastity? LOA. Decency? Fidelity? Purity? All to be not counted along with the girls. And what coin was offered for the loss of these noble characteristics? Concentration, focus, application, diligence, productivity, accomplishment - even happiness, though this seemed gilding the lily. Blissy had a lot ahead of him and he was practically squeaking with excitement. Like a girl? Heaven forbid.

"Have you ever done anything?" Charles asked the eleven-year-old. "With men or boys, I mean. Would you like to talk about stuff like that?" "Yes, Blissy said. "I mean, no, but I'd like to talk about it. I haven't done anything ,but I've seen some stuff. I like those old Rambo movies (here Charles winces for just a second. Blissy notices and giggles, interjecting a quick Sorry) so I like to play like him, especially in the parish park a mile from where I live. So, about a year ago I track this man and boy. He's about twenty and the boy looked just my age then, ten. "Do you want me to tell you what they did?"

"If you want to, sure," said Charles, then he added: "Would you get uptight if I took your shirt off so I can look at you bare chested while you're telling me?" "Will you let me take your shirt off, too?" the child responded. "No," Charles said. "I'm too old." Blissy persisted but Charles was gently adamant. "Looks count in our selection process," he explained to the new camper. "I mean, we're going to be spending a lot of time together, and even though ninety-nine percent of appeal is character over characteristics, things are livelier with better looking boys and young men. I think you'll be happier, in the long run, if you take their shirts off." Blissy chewed his lower lip for a few moments, then moved from under the steering wheel. His fingers found Charles's top button. The man sighed and gently removed them. "For later," he whispered. "Please," the boy also whispered. "Sorry. Does that mean you don't want me to take yours off?" "I don't think you'd have accepted me if I were subject to fits of childish logic such as that." The voice of an angel, the plain, open, boy's face. The sizzling mind. Even by the vaulting standards of the camp, Blissy was a find. Twice that. "At least kiss me," he finally conceded, dropping the nudity issue for the time being. "Are you sure?" Charles asked. He knew he had beautiful eyes; no point in false modesty, the mirror did not lie about such thing. Kissing, yes. But being naked with the young boy was going to have to wait, if it ever happened at all. Blissy's hands traveled from button to cheeks. It had been years since this had happened. Like Michaelangelo before him, the artist had eschewed carnal activity in later years. There was so much more to the world: inventing, writing, creating, entertaining, watching for satisfied smiles on happy faces of both camper and crew. His celibacy was rewarded by hair-trigger responsiveness from his staff. Since boys at the camp generally told the truth about their sexual experiences, is was simply known that Charles never fooled around with his charges. Hadn't for years. It was an interesting distinction; the total tolerance of illegal behavior and even encouragement of highly lewd and lascivious activities, with, personally, a hands-off approach that was not so much strict as ambient. "Let other call it character," he sometimes thought to himself, "it's really just a "Word" addiction mixed with about three parts laziness." "Too bad," he also thought, "to see such a durable streak of abstinence come to an end." And end it did, under that country tree. The boys lips were soft as warm jelly. "Ever done that before?" he quizzed after just a few second, checking his child. "Just the family way," he replied. "But I the people I spied on did it a lot. They used their tongues, sometimes, can we try that?" For a genius, the boy asked some pretty easy questions. Good thing he defined sexy so exquisitely. "Go slowly," Charles suggested, and again they touched. "Do you want me bare chested, now?" the child asked. Charles replied that he had a blanket in the trunk and started into a long-winded explanation of how, with the bench seat of the Dodge, and a pillow and blanket in the trunk, one could drive back to back twenty-hour days when the urge for big Merlin six and miles of pavement to think on became overwhelming. Children always led in the felonious activities that occurred at Creative Camp. One hundred percent control to the junior partner. Blissy seemed to know this and drew Charles forth from the automobile and to the trunk, which was duly opened. In a minute the man and child were on the grass verge at the border of the tree's shade. Blissy lay flat on his back and seemed to know instinctively to lap his hands behind his neck. Charles lay on his left side, his head supported by his elbow. He stared into the boy's grayish eyes. "Hi," he said. Blissy stared back and his voice was neither bold nor timid when he said Hi, back. "Start unbuttoning and I'll tell you about that ancient-Rambo mission," the youngster suggested. Charles touched the warm butter lips with his and fingered the ears. He felt, he realized in less than an instant, not love, but fear. Real fear. It was a sudden dawning. In his solicitous behavior in the boy's interest, he'd managed to lose sight of the fact that he was the finest living artist of the English language; owed his readers a full remittance of his gift. So the devil of rationalization had three tines on his fork. Laziness, dedication and ego. This fork had, these several past years, kept his hands to himself, and not often were they even employed so. This made for an astonishing twenty pages a day on light copy, and four or five a day when he was engaged in the highly intricate and involved task of displaying outright virtuosity. How would this child under his fingers fit in? How would the new life gel? For there was going to be a new life. The boy would go with his peers and the young staffers, but he would always be back. Forever. Whatever that meant. His ego was not quite so inflated he imagined groans and moans from his public at the intrusion of this barely husky eleven-year-old child, but it was a close thing. He kissed the young boy again; lingeringly, tenderly, gently and sweetly. From the impossible syrup of warm lips there was a sudden banana. Pushing against his lips, his teeth, and then his tongue. A wriggling, probing, seeking banana. Warm. Slippery with banana spit, but texture, too. Charles sucked the forbidden fruit with a slow, carnal rhythm and the boy's hands came up from their resting place and found the back of his neck. The pull was timid and inexperienced; nice, nevertheless.

Chapt. 3

Charles looked down at his common boy. He rose to his knees to better view the entire child lying on the light woolen blanket. His thought went back to an episode of "Spin and Marty," and bare chested boys, just Blissy's age, standing around a corral. He had the same short hair. Did they call it a buzz cut now, or was it still a crew cut? No girlish look, anyhow. A very slight personal preference. Some of his young geniuses were effeminate, and the more charming and winsome, for it. But, though it was by a micron, this boy was the ultimate. A young utopian male, fit to lead a cult just because he looked right for the job. Charles winced at his thought. The only cult he'd ever had the remotest interest in had to do with Chevrolet Corvairs; he'd been a bit crazy about them for many years. Other than that, the very word was next to socialist and liberal on his list of extreme Nots. On the other hand, with Blissy it sure would be easy to start one, and, as L. Ron had said, the easiest way to the big bucks was to hammer out one's own religion. Charles was bemused at the notion of putting his new boy up against the Christ child. The thought tickled his intellect as an exercise in quality over quantity. Conventional church icons and personalities were simplistic and one dimensional; about on par with Ronald McDonald. Created when the earth was flat, they reeked of Machiavellian superficiality as well as the fakery of the gypsy. Counter with this hundred pounds of absolute genius; this common boy with his common boy's smile, and what might you get? Charles took the notion to the extreme of almost thinking out loud, "I'm going to package you and sell you by the ounce," but the thought was truncated by the certainty that this child lying on wool before him would be capable of selling himself. Probably, infinitely so.

"Are we morons in love," he asked his child.

"Our combined IQs equal that of the average county," the boy responded with his brightest smile. "If we're making a mistake, I doubt it's a big one."

A simple yes would have filled the bill, but it is so that soul mates are made. Vast reading and knowledge of the world and the people running around loose in it. Unvarnished respect for some few, and bemused contempt where it so often fit. A quality of wit, gentle and persistent. Attention to appearance, which, for the most part, meant no hairy faces and very few excess pounds. Serious respect and regard, one for all, each for each, and all for one, through all weathers expressed with simple good manners and gentle speech and action. A soft, languorous togetherness, almost lolling at times. And an eleven year old with his pedal to the metal as the Dodge blazed through the quarter mile awful close to ten seconds after the kid floored it. Soul mates were complicated; they had to be, otherwise, they were roommates.

It was all so much work. Incessant binges, one after another, of twenty hours at the keyboard, with six hours of sleep, and twenty hours more. Subtract an hour a day for running the camp, socializing, meals, and a shower. Yet, simultaneously, so very lazy. Lying in bed all the livelong day as page after page slowly materialized on the monitor - totally free of stress by virtue of always being laps ahead of what might be considered reasonable. Lazy body, lazy mind. Lazy life. Charles hadn't been inside a store for years; it was hard to remember how many. The poet shall not dig, nor the novelist shop. He didn't know what the inventor shouldn't do, but hoped whatever it was that was discouraged had nothing to do with loving a bright eleven-year-old. Let society castigate him for that, if they ever found out; he was too inert to bother dissing himself. This thought pleased him as an example of sloth as a requirement of the artist. No, he would not bother to write of the dark side of what he was going to do to Blissy on the blanket. That was the easy shot; the kind that attracted energetic scriveners. Publisher's paid for this output; the market was huge, all that was needed was fast typing. Ah, but a lazy a writer would have no thought of money; not even understand the concept of a deadline or an assignment. He'd even be vague on syntax, spelling, grammar and typography. Anything that would interfere with the slow crystalline growth of each paragraph was a burr under the saddle. The senior of the two geniuses under the rustling boughs of the June morning swept tree was glad for this thought. Saddle. Burrs. He almost shook with the knowledge that of the thousand or more hours he'd spent at dressage, he'd never used a saddle, was always mounted bareback.

As Charles's fingers touched the top button of his shirt, Blissy moved his arms straight above his head and arched slightly to the sly work that was being done to him. He wanted his chest naked for Charles so he could be touched the way he'd seen the boy touched when he'd been out spying. The buttons yielded to the bottom in a minute, and Charles opened the child's shirt. He'd been correct in equating his young beauty with the boy in the finance-services commercial. A supple sleekness of pubescence that properly tamed and maintained would last until the boy was fifteen years old. An hour or an hour and a half a day, five or six days a week, and Blissy would maintain a glowing perfection that would threaten to lead to so much of a certain tawdry exercise routine it might threaten to muscle him up and yield the dreaded six-pack, so often associated with the pecker. Well, problems crept into all relationships; all he could do was be on his guard and hope for the best. Since his young boy was obviously the best, he was optimistic. A man with a boy in a crackpot, soon-to-implode culture was the luckiest man there could be.

With a sit-up and a shrug, Blissy was naked to the waist. He lay back down and arched again. Charles returned to his first position, lying beside the boy with his head on his elbow. It was totally cornball but he reached off the blanket and plucked a blade of grass and used it on Blissy's ear. "Are you hinting you want something for your ear?" the new camper responded. "Why do you ask that?" Charles said.

"Well," the boy answered, "the couple I spied on talked a lot before they did anything. The man, Keith, got really excited when Randy, he was the kid my age, told him about getting molested by his priest, and Randy really seemed to like telling his secrets. I thought it was awesome, so I thought, also, you might like me to tell you about it."

"Sounds like a topic," Charles said. "If you want, you can tell me what Keith did to Randy and I'll do it to you."

"Cool," quoth the youth. "Lie flat on your back, and I'll lie on top of you. Is that okay?"

Charles lay back, and the child rolled on top of him, coming to rest with the back of his head under the man's chin. "Start with you hands on me right here," the boy said, indicating points on his young flanks. "Like that?" Charles said, touching the boy's nakedness with his fingers. "Exactly," he replied, stretching his arms over his head and arching to his lover's touch.

It had been a long time. Charles was almost shocked at the beauty of the boy's tender skin; an electrifying glissade of supple, hot delight. It was impossible to believe that there could be more than a few square inches of such cat-like warm velvet on the entire planet, yet this one boy had inches to spare. Enough for ten men. The delicious softness would go, to be replaced by hard muscle. One hundred twenty five young males would see to that in short order. Charles moved his hands in over the soft stomach and the boy sighed in pleasure. "It feels better than I thought it would," he whispered, adding, "I'm glad you're the first one to do this to me."

"Me, too," the man said. He was enjoying the child immensely, and, at the same time, was immensely proud of himself for his long hands-off years; the six thousand hours a year in the traces that had been required to translate genius into enough of an empire that he could start and maintain his particular zoo. What he had not anticipated, and what had stretched the years of celibacy, was his metamorphosis from inventor to artist. The first had been magnetism while the latter had eventually become a very life source, apparently as necessary as food, water and air. It wasn't a bummer, though even from the first touch, the silky soft youth arching gently against his roaming fingers he realized he'd missed out on a lot; no, it had been worth it, not only for the long shelf of completed manuscript stashed on his hard drive, but also for the overwhelming tactile sensation of his first act of molestation in a long, long time. "Oh, babe," he whispered to the child.

"Can I sleep with you, tonight?" Blissy asked in his sweet voice.

"If you want," Charles replied.

"I want," said the boy.

Charles gave the boy a squeeze. "Easy for you to say now," he said, "but you haven't been to camp yet. It's a rather foxy place, if I say so myself, and you might find more excitement than bunking with me."

"If I'd wanted excitement I would have spent the summer bungee jumping, or I'd join a terrorist cell in the sand lands; blow up diplomats and make pipe bombs for school yards. But, I was feeling lazy and liking it, and, since there was nothing in your brochure about activities, I decided to apply."

"I should have named it Camp Little or Nothing," Charles said.

"That would fit," the sweet child replied. "I had little objection to driving the Dodge, and nothing could be better than what you are doing to me now."

Let Imus have his dirty hat if it was essential to his nature; let Howard make giant noise come out of his huge face for years to come. There were rights and wrongs in the world and it was for each to choose his own. Legal Imus, legal Stern, illegal eleven-year-old wriggling happily on his chest. The Monster General had sent Ilian back to the tender mercies of a worker's paradise, allowed Napster's back to be broken, O.J. to wind up free and clear for his next killing, and Bill Gates to be harried by warrens of talk-for-pay lawyers. Japan's silver haiku blade was a full inch in, proceeding; it must, at some point, reap the whirlwind for sending two thousand sweet boys out on the Yamato; no ammo, little fuel, full speed ahead. Well, the tradeunionists were doing a great job energizing the silver blade so it was likely a done deal. Kamikaze bankers and MacArthur's legacy of solidarity, globally hooked up. That couldn't be good news. Where was any? For twelve years the Fed had patted itself on the back, Greenspan never varying from the consensus of the media pundits, while riding Microsoft's economic tsunami. No good news from those people.

The NEA had lingoed the school system eighty percent to death by engendering a daisy chain of rap sessions that taught as close to nothing as could be measured. The AARP focused fifty million geezers where they would do the most damage. What good news was there in programming a nation's wise old heads to live out their golden years grabbing for everything they could get, with lots of spare time to do the grabbing? He thought harder. Twenty-six thousand out of two-hundred-eighty million had purchased HDTV receivers. Hmm. An optimist would call it a start, but Charles, a man who'd rather watch "Fargo" on a nine-inch fuzzy black and white set than virtually all other filmed entertainment on 65-inch high definition, could find little optimism. In HDTV-land Imus's hat would be dirtier and he'd have to make less radio-school noises come from his diaphragm into the microphone; there was something rootin' tootin' about that, he supposed, and Howard; if his face was even bigger, clearer and sharper his jock shock would be less likely lost on the average ten-year-old. In the end, beauty was in the eye of the beholder; if one worked extraordinarily hard, willingly in the hands of the beholder. In his life Charles didn't need, optimism, but, large hearted as he was, he did wonder if others might be as lucky.

Molesting Blissy was heavenly. Charles slowly stroked and fondled the youth as the boy stretched and arched gently into his hands. It was interesting that there was a precise point the ugliness of modern America had started; a fully witnessed and recorded moment in time when a certain journey had ended, and another begun. The former had been a path of lumps and bumps; pacifists and mobsters who'd both dealt in gratuitous bloodbaths, yet, through many an act of perfidy and venality, a certain dignity and stability had endured. This was lost when Teddy White threw his professional pen to Harvard Johnny. Emotion over reason, and Teddy said it himself (Quote from "Life Magazine:" He Had Me. (Round-bellied Teddy had been had, alright.) Well, the new road had emotion, one didn't need that hat of Imus to know that, but for what purpose? Peasants had emotion. Lots of it. Trailer trash literally wept over soaps and the cauliflower Jell-O that did each other dirt on shows like the one where the host is famous for red lensware. So much emotion, all starting with a bum whose father used Lend Lease ships to back haul whiskey. Cute bum. Family of bums. Emotion in bums. Who can pass a bum on the street, and feel nothing?

It took one to know one. Here he was, openly fondling a child, both hands loving the silken brilliance of the boy's skin, according to a clip of a script from NYPD Blue, the one maggot of all skels, mopes and perps Sipowicz and his detectos liked that should take his own life, and feeling just great. Right at home. To think he was abnormal, and real-nasty, almost-always, Andy, with his garish relationship with little Theo, was normal, put things in an up-to-date frame of reference. Emoting Andy, bouncing off a dozen or more walls over everything over an inch high, and the rest of the time bamboozling the hapless kid with enough phony, jittery hype and nonsense to kill even the bacteria left by the death of a human spirit. [NB. No kid in last night's episode. Apparently even those of the extraction of most producers finally realized how ugly their Andy/Theo obscenity.] Charles's thanks went back over the years to Johnny Harvard. Being a bum was sensational, literally. Every sensation possible in the pink skin of a wriggling boy. No wonder Creative Camp attracted such an astounding level of talent.

And for them all to be bums?

How about that.

The reality found it's way into his writing. It was ironic, knowing how many writers strained far beyond their talent to add artistic nuance to their work, so it would boast the merit not to be deemed pornographic. Now, the shoe was on the other foot; let every page be meritorious to the very heavens, sperm was what brought readership, and for good reason. In his native land of well over a quarter billion souls, there was not a single writer. Zero. None that had the least influence, in a national sense, on anything. Reading had been lost; bookstores, marketplaces for paper printed about crystals and mimeographed incantations on self-help and trendyism; all writers desperate to create a buzz like the "Weakest Link" guy prayed and prayed for with his: "You-are-the-weakest-link-good-bye!" promo. [I hear your prayers, my fellow of the keys, I hear your prayers. Die knowing that "Final Answer" was simply the catch phrase of the new decade and nobody could come up with anything better, except, of course, for yours truly, who will title his second book: "And You Think You Hate Me Now."]

Into this creative void had come the likes of Nader and delegations of hard scrapple fellow travelers, arms of an industry, cogs in a machine. Rotten to the core, but loud about it, and the media valued loud, over all. It was all desperately, incalculably, head-over-heels - sick. Or, maybe he was; after all, chief of a hundred under-age boys cavorting naked, at the proper time and in the proper place, with each other and young adults...

A hundred thousand years in jail if Urban Andy was the judge. The fact that every c-camp mind was focused on and devoted to real and long-term solutions to utter problems would not shave an hour off his personal thousand year's in the brig; only those blessed with big noisy theatrical faces got to pull a Fonda and play felon as free spirit. Of course, the faces in question could be hired by the hour. Was that good news? The one hundred million lawsuits on file - what news were they?

Was doom to be heralded by a crack, or a rustle; how fast the ending, if the garrote be brief?

Chapt. 4

Blissy was into his Rambo adventure. The picture he painted was shades of camo. From the direction Keith and Randy had taken from their parked car, the spy had determined their destination. Two shortcuts at a lope brought the boy to a thicket at the verge of a partially hidden clearing a hundred feet off the common trail. Something in the way the boy led the man had attracted the young scout's attention, and he'd been right. Within ten minutes, the couple had arrived and seated themselves on a fallen tree. The camouflaged kid had managed to hold a position within five feet of them. He was wearing a birdwatcher's amplifier; stereo. "Looking back," he said, "I guess it was curiassity."

Charles laughed politely. He liked them to dazzle. The dreadfully tired old US of A needed dazzling like air. Cher singing from inside her big Coke bottle was no longer filling the bill. The publishing arms weren't up to the task. No weeds in their garden; everyone was a wondrous flower needing but a few golden drops of Fonda water to bloom forth into decades of health, happiness and prosperity. Socialism. Sold it all to a society in which the lout's vote carried all the weight of the doctor's and teacher's. A line in an Altman film goes, We must be doing something right to last two hundred years.

Since our toybox was richly endowed with fish, fur, forest and vast fertility we might choose, wisely, to be modest in any cultural backpatting. Eight million stone age souls had lived here for ten to twenty thousand years, that's how many berries there were to pick, fish to catch, deer to hunt, and acres to reap. Pride has become a rote institution exemplified by a janitor's union locking down schools to do with lines written on a contract. And the problem went to the core; to the founders of the institution. Largely, they had been the tavern crowd; recalcitrant, contentious, adversarial, disagreeable and ugly, even sober; descendents of deported criminals and undesirables. They should have been whipped, long and hard, but they won. The winners stamped their victory with papers full of rights. These had evolved to rights to pensions and rights to social security and enough thises and that's to dull the most basic instincts of half the population, rendering them liberals and Democrats.

If a pedophile could rack a culture, what did it say of the culture? That it was time for some fun?

Blissy was five feet from Keith and Randy as they came to rest on the fallen tree.

"Randy, what's the big hurry?" Keith asked.

"We can see down the trail, if anyone comes, right?" the boy responded.

"Absolutely," said Keith. "It's plenty private, so give; what's the big deal. You're like a race horse in search of a urinal."

"Don't make jokes, Uncle Keith," the boy retorted.

"Don't drag me by the reins and I won't ask any questions, at all," said Keith.

"I'm sorry," the boy replied.

"Take it easy. I was just kidding. I could out-run you and be there laughing at the finish line. I was just trying to break the ice. Make conversation. Adults are big on that, because, lo and behold, it lead to making friends and having a good time. Now, what gives?"

"Some stuff's been happening to me. In church."

"I hate your church and I hate your part in it. I'd rather talk about something else," Keith said to the ten-year-old sitting in front of him.

"I've figured that one out for myself, Uncle Keith. Honest. That's not what it's about. You've got to listen. You're the only one I can talk to. Please, don't be a bigot."

"Lord, child," Keith rejoined, "your holy fathers spent many a good-old generation, adding up to many centuries, if my history serves me, devising machines, both hot and cold, to render unto god what was god's. It's hardly bigotry to hate something with such a foul and indecent history, nor is there anything worthy in your doddering old dirt kisser to this very day. Twelve hundred saints. Hundred of foreign visits. The popemobile. Since the church has never, since time began, spoken a single word of truth, it would seem the least they might do is maintain a show of dignity. All your geezer has done is left legions of spiffed up husks so rotten they stink on the hoof. You ought to know better.

"I shall not blaspheme further, least the devils of your tribe find me chief amongst them, and, being the devils they are, arrange a fiendish plot, but you'll die and mold before I'll issue kudos."

"Fucker," said the boy; "Grow up. Your show has wrapped. You've been out west long enough to know what that means. No mics. No lights. No cameras."

"Just a confused nephew. Your church is your business. Explain to me why your god created the sand fly to torment the child of the poor, and we can move on to page two. Otherwise, shut your stupid little-boy mouth."

The two sat for several moments before Randy broke the silence. "That's only half the story. You should listen to the other half."

More moments passed, and finally Keith said Okay.

"They tell us just what you just said, in private," the explanation began. "At least Father does. He has a church within the church and says that it's a Disneyland within a Disneyland. He talks us out of any serious involvement with doctrine, dogma, beads or box. They're for peasants and old women to whom a phony hope is better than no hope at all. What keeps the institution alive, in his own words, is the special things that happen with the clergy and the choirboys and alter boys."

"You're kidding," said the uncle. "An honest priest?"

"Well, I told you not to be a bigot. Yes, he's honest. "His day job is fleecing dowagers without worthy dependents and using the money to help kids through school. His hobby is putting on boy shows for rich guys, so he can get his hands in their pockets. He even rents us out, for a thousand dollars a night; ten times that for the farts. It's nothing to do with god; that's just a franchise, like communism; a tested means to wealth and power all packaged and neat, like a little kiosk, with the spiel; the tracts and pamphlets dreamed up and set down by others, ready to go. Turnkey. Useless, but of-the-masses. Once god is out on his ear, common sense can find a home. When I get older, I'm even going to go with a coot, to bring in a ten grand, just to prove I've got the chops. And as for the masses, all they have to do is get pissed to the max and organize. They're in a fabulous position, richly empowered to do unto themselves."

Charles cut into his boy's story. "They liked to talk a lot?" he asked.

"Yeah," responded Bliss. "Is that okay? Do you want me to tell you about the other stuff?" "In due time," the man said to his secular novitiate. The most beautiful thing was serious talk between man and boy; the most important thing, too. Listening to Blissy go on and on would have been a delight through a metal grate; to hold the bare-chested boy gently to him, to feel his every breath and the slight vibrations of his voice was a compendium of sensations, intellectual and physical, that was stunning almost to the point of being numbing. He'd wanted to use their first intimate time to flesh out the child's submission to the camp; a quiz-show rewrite, but decided to let little Blissy prattle on, in his merry way, about saint and savior. He bade the boy continued telling what he'd seen on his secret mission.

"Keith sort of chewed Randy out; not big time, more instructional like."

"You should have dramatized more sophisticatedly," he said. "If Lassie, gets lost, gets run over, gets snake bit, or gives one bark, and ten people run with rope, Timmy might as well have stayed away from the well in the first place. You derailed me by talking about the church. To cut to the quick, you seemed to be headed for a story of salvation, ecstasy, babbling in tongues, miracle cures, saints, sinners, and the enduring rack of televangelism. If all of the above are indeed left out of your tale, feel free to proceed." "Well," the growing boy said, "perhaps there was ecstasy, but I assure you it was on a temporal plane, at least for my part." "Probably good that you speak for yourself," Keith said with a wink. The boy smiled back, happy to have the conflict with his handsome young uncle resolved. "Have you been rented?" Keith asked his little nephew. "Three times, but only once all night." "Was it okay?" "They were nice; gentle. They didn't try to make me do anything. Kind of funny, when you think about it, I guess. Honor amongst perverts. I mean they were breaking every law in the book even having me in the shower with them, but they acted like I was a Sunday guest. Gave me tips. Made more dates. Never forgot the Rush. I think that's from the talking, not from the physical stuff. I mean, my body is the same as any kids'. "What do you think? Uncle Keith" "I think it's a good lesson to learn at your age. Personality does count. Sure, productivity so the industrial revolution can continue, but charm and a sense of humor; good manners, nice ways, generosity - as long as they're not used to manipulate, are an asset, no bun intended." "Nice of you to demonstrate, Uncle Keith. Bet you couldn't do that again." "There was a boy on the run, who teased his uncle o'er a pun; the uncle got pissed, a stroke was thus missed: and now the poor nephew can't cum." "Fuck. I heard it but I don't believe it. Nobody is that quick." "Well," Keith deadpanned to the child sitting inches from him on the fallen tree. "It was you who mentioned Rush." "You know," the boy said after a few moments musing, "I'd pay you to stay overnight. A thousand just for a shower." "Call my agent; we'll ink something tomorrow." "But we get to do something today, right? And I don't mean lunch." "You negotiate well, my son." "Probably out of a free meal," the boy noted, with mock glumness. The two sat in a silence which Keith finally broke. "How did he get you started?" he asked. "When I was nine, last year. The other boys had been begging me to be an altar boy. I said I thought religion was pretty thin soup, but they hinted there was more to it. Said I'd probably really like it, and if I didn't, that would be cool, too. "Anyhow, finally I went to Father Francisco. He was up front and said the boys sometimes like to do adult stuff when they had a chance, and would I be uptight about anything like that? I told him I wouldn't too much, I didn't think. He said he'd like to do a ceremony with me in Eden's lesser garden. His voice got kind of husky when I said I would do that with him and he asked if he could ask some personal questions. I said it would be alright, so he said we could go to the rectory, and get ready for the ceremony, while we talked. "When we got upstairs, we sat on an old steamer trunk in the hall and he asked me if I'd ever been touched by a man. I said I hadn't. Then he asked about girls and boys and I told him I hadn't done anything yet. He asked me if I got boners, and I said quite a bit. Lot of stuff like that. Then he got two silk robes out of the trunk, cut from a bishop's underwear, he said, and he took one and went to his bedroom and sent me to the bathroom to change. "I was so excited I could hardly stand. There was a full length mirror in the bathroom and I thought I looked kind of dorky in it. I was skinny and my legs were too long and my knees and feet were too big. A carrot-topped geek. "I was glad to put the robe on and wondered what he'd look like out of his church clothes. After a couple of minutes he tapped on the bathroom door and asked if he could come in. I opened it and he came into the bathroom with me and closed the door so we could see the mirror. He came up close behind me and put his arms around me. He asked how I thought we looked together, in the mirror. I said he looked awesome but no one was going to build me any hall of fame. "He asked who my favorite boy was and I said Richie, (he's eleven). He told me Richie was getting molested by a cop, Jerry, and asked if I'd like to watch a video of what they did together. So we went into the not very secret chapel and turned off the lights and lit a bunch of candles; then he went on the computer and found the video file with Richie and Jerry, and he pulled me into his lap to watch it. "I got excited, even more than I already was, and let him molest me all he wanted while we watched what Jerry did to my friend. At the end, we masturbated each other and then made out while we were all covered with his cum. After that, he told me about hustling for the church and especially what a nice touch of morality was involved in selling boy ass to guys who'd otherwise gamble or drink the same loot; how the money would be laundered into my college account, less twenty percent, which was the organization's cut. I've got seventy thousand, but most of that is tips, so it's not like I'm all that prodigious in the selling department." "Have you been with Richie?" Keith asked. "He was the first one inside me. Later that night. He and Jerry both came over. That was the most awesome party any boy ever had. Straight kids are missing out, colossal time." "You just said a mouthful," Keith said. Randy paraphrased his lover of the cloth: "If the world hadn't turned out to be a religious pretzel there'd be sex safety centers in every mall and a sex safety channel on television. At the centers guys could satisfy themselves while they watched kids, even touched them through a hole in the wall. And if there was good kiddy porn on the tube, that would keep the rapist types glued to their sets and off the street; plus, the channel could have ten minutes each half hour of safety oriented programming, linked to other resources. If it was honest and said in many cases incest and pederasty are fine, and in other cases, not fine at all, then people would respect it and it could actually help in getting at least some, maybe a lot of kids, out of lousy situations and take the guilt trip off the kids that are having relationships they might otherwise enjoy or at least tolerate." "Sounds," Keith said, "as if your sessions with your priest went far beyond masturbation and group sex." "I suppose," the boy responded. "He stresses it's just a point of view. Some straight kids grow up healthy and well adjusted, but that takes a consistent, high level of family input. Hard to maintain when showboating with giant houses and huge road machines soak up all the money, time, energy and spirit. Since there are fall-outs by the millions, we'd all be happier if they were allowed to ho if they wanted to. Give them something to do in life, and it would be a hell of an incentive to keep one's weight down. "But it's not likely to happen. When Updike visited his home town of Harrisburg, he groaned on camera over all the churches. They were spread along the highway and made it a lazy-box road to perdition. Pederasty is a strong force. It will make a man toil valiantly in the vineyard and raise from the very soil an edifice of his own, that one day a sweet child might congregate, or, if the lord is good to him, twins. Thus the churches, but they're long-buried in a grave of lies and lassitude; do a pound of harm for each ounce of good.

"I mean it's ironic of him to say that, being ordained as he is, but that's Father. I'll bet he's right, too. He says in the Catholic church pederasty is a seventy percent influence, at least; possibly even over ninety percent. If they'd be honest about it, they'd stop screwing up kids by preaching one thing and either tolerating, or actively engaging in, another. The bible has nothing to say about sex in the context of a close and ongoing relationship between any two people, regardless of the sex or age or relationship to each other of the parties involved. It only rails against lewd and lascivious behavior where everybody lies around doing it all the time, and society collapses.

"Think of what it would be like if the church took an active and humane role, but, then, if the church had taken an active role in family planning from the turn of the last century, South America, as one example, would be a true, sustaining paradise, and what need would such happy people have for the stale church and its dour power?"

Charles interrupted for a second time. "One thing I'm hoping," he said to the eleven year old sharing his view up through the branches to the almost dizzying blue of the sky overhead, "is that you know who Keith and Randy are; know some way to get in touch with the. Do you?" "I never heard their last names, but I was not discouraged. When they left, I extracted myself from my lair - have you ever operated from a liar? Every boy should, at least once in his life - and ran to their car, where I proceeded to jot down such particulars as license number, VIN, dealer name and parking sticker stuff. Enough data to put Holmes off the case. I've got it in my backpack. Plus, I've seen Keith on television; but he's not a star, and he may use a stage name."

"Good boy," said Charles, giving the child's naked chest a tender squeeze. Blissy resumed his spy story.

"The church and the Democratic party are identical." Keith said. "Defective systems that create misery then offer balms against it, or, the promise of balms. It's like the Asimov story where the first inoculation actually infects you with the disease, which the state then controls month by month as long as the citizen behaves. Liberalism sells out to short-term greed, engendering long term problems, for which it promises yet more short-term palliatives.

"For example, at this moment in time we collect forty billion in inheritance taxes and want to spend forty billion on drugs for the elderly. One program empowers the younger generation with the assets their family has built, and the other extends the lives of people who are parasites on the body politic. Here the difference between correct and politically correct is thrown into stark relief. Long-term, versus short-term. Reason versus emotion. And the media. They will dwell on the oldster without their morning tray of pills; it's the cheap, easy, sell, and ignore the fourth generation taking over the family farm or business, because the story lacks the graphic appeal and heartstrings impact of the eighty-five-year-old granny waiting for the tray of pills that never comes."

"You and Father could be twins, Uncle Keith," Randy said. His uncle replied: "All intelligent, well educated, well traveled and well rounded people are twins. There is truth and there are true courses of action and a brotherhood that fucking well knows it. Good and bad, right and wrong; they also exist. It's not a game, it's not an experiment; if we lose our way in the high tech jungle we've built, where three percent of us live on farms, we simply die. All of us. Yet look how we live.

"Home computers have been common for over a decade. Everyone knows the average kid would rather live in a dumpster with a good computer, than a mansion without one. Yet houses are thirty percent bigger than they were in 1990 and getting bigger every year, for ever smaller families. Then the guy from the inspection department comes out and measures the Styrofoam around every light switch to be sure you won't waste energy, while permitting one person all the cubic feet they have the price for.

"Since computers are cool, the state now allows you to buy one with a CPU that burns seventy-five watts of power. The new Windows kernels are built to always-on standards, and high bandwidth connections charge flat fees, which again encourages always-on usage. Suddenly, the friendly little 'puter is drawing three hundred watts of power, twenty-four/seven, all of which is instantly converted to heat, which must often be removed by compressor. Of such compounding insanities are dark ages made."

Randy broke in with a grin: "Adding millions of giant recreational vehicles will get us there faster, and over any obstacles."

Keith hugged the boy to him and kissed him gently on the lips.

"As long as I'm with you, Uncle Keith, hell can freeze over; you, and Father Francisco and a few of the guys he rented me to. Every day seems like ten years when you're with somebody you really like. I've been a really lucky kid."

"You spread some of that around," Keith said, "so don't feel guilty about getting a share for yourself." They kissed again and the boy bowed his forehead to the man's shoulder. Keith pulled the child's shirt to his shoulders, and the boy raised his arms. As the garment came clear of his hands, he kept them aloft, and arched to his uncle. "I've never seen you bare-chested," Keith said as he stared at the stretching, half-naked youth.

"Just don't get carried away and forget my personality," the boy rejoined; "The thing was a bitch to develop properly. I'd hate to think I wasted the effort."

"What personality speaketh thee of, my child? I have detected none-such characteristic though the clock marks a multitude of hours since we escaped the threshold of your domicile. Why, compared to what I see before me, your wit, your whimsy; the arch drollery of your attempted forays into the realm of the humorist or light-hearted companion pale away as to nothing it all. Like you're fucking beautiful."

"And," replied the child, "that wouldn't be anything to do with the eye of the p-holder?"

"Less his eye," Keith played along, "and more his finger tips." Keith began his molestation on the flanks of the stretching child; ran his fingers to just under the boy's arms, then gently across the exposed breast to the tiny nipples, where he lingered as the boy stared into his eyes. "Take yours off, too," Randy whispered. Keith peeled off his own shirt and dropped it on the log behind him. For long moments the two males started at each other; into each others' eyes, then downwards at their respective naked torsos. Randy reached to his uncle and they explored each other.

"Have you done this to a boy, before?" Randy asked.

"Only in my imagination." Keith said. "I never knew what I was missing. How about you, have you ever done this with a younger boy?"

"Just a couple of times. He's six."

"Was he a virgin?"

"Yeah. But he was like totally curious and he kept pulling his shirt up so I could see his stomach; then the wanted me to come in and wash his back when he was taking a bath."

"Were you scared?" Keith quizzed his child. "Sort of. He said if I went down and locked the door, I could get in with him, so I was really sure he wanted to do stuff. Still, I had to kneel against the side of the tub when he started pulling my underpants down."

"Had he seen a big boy before?" Keith asked.

"No. He was just as excited as I was. When he got to my hair he whispered Awesome, and got out of the tub so he could kneel down on the bathmat. Then he couldn't wait any longer, so he pulled them down and got me naked."

"Did he make you cum?" Keith asked.

"Yeah," it was the third time I spermed. The first two were with Father.

"Did you tell Francisco about what you did to the boy?"

"Yeah," Randy said. "He'd set me up to baby sit there. He told me about playing Frog; it's a game for really little kids that want to experiment."

"Did you play it with..."

"Petey? Yeah. After we looked at each other and he touched me, I got him down on his knees, with his arms on the side of the tub, then I got on top of him and played the boy frog."

"Did you go up inside him?" Keith quizzed.

"Yes. But just about half. Father says boys have to be really carefully about getting stretched back there, but I wasn't even five inches then, and I'm kind of slim in that department, so he said it would be okay because Petey is big for six."

"Have you ever had a man inside you, Randy?"

"Just Mark. He's sixteen; built kind of like me; real long, but not too thick. He's been inside me twice, but just in the shower so Father can hold him so he doesn't hurt me." "Do you like it when he does it to you that way?" Keith asked. "It hurt some at first but I'm starting to like it. I knew how good it felt for Mark, because I'd done it to Petey just a few days before, so that was the best part. Making him happy." "Were you alone in the shower with your priest?" Keith asked. "No, Father had brought over a special contributor who wanted to watch Mark do it to me for the first time. That's where half my college fund came from." "Is he a nice guy?" asked Keith, thinking whatever else he was he was a bargain hunter. "Oh, yeah. They all are. Father is most unchristian about any kind of rough trade; physical, verbal, psychological, spiritual, or otherwise. You don't have to be super cute, but you do have to be super nice. I was lucky; Jason, he's the one who rents me, is handsome. I like it when he plays with me, and I was really glad he was there when Mark went inside me. It was my best time except for my first time with Father."

"Good," Keith replied. "I hope that covers sex for now. We'll get back to it before the audience gets bored, but, in the meantime, lets take a shot at ripping Erin Brockobitch apart, since it's playing. [I rarely drink and write; don't drink much at all, for that matter. The following was written under the influence of six rum and Cokes. It's peeled from the film as it plays.]

The undertalent that did schtick on LA Law shows upon the scene. We know her for the thirty-second scene.

Woebegone as she is, Erin's now hustling her schmo out of a job.

The obligatory black is playing the role of a Xerox machine expert. A line goes: "We'll see.?"

Before a minute of work has been done, on an afternoon identified as Friday, the manipulative female, looks, and looks only, is hustling the boss-man for an advance.

Go waitress. Scenes of mamma, the barfly, kissing babies, and responding, instantly, to bikes revved in the yard. Contact is redoubled and absolute.

The biker in the yard scores points with every word, or non-word. A sexy little daughter, even this early in the program, is mentioned. These possibilities will be stillborn, leaving enough variations on conventionality to sicken a camel with the same-old hay.

"You're a girl."

Albert Finny says that to Julia Roberts. As a writer I like to think I have a grip on the obvious, but compared to Albert Finny I seem but an amateur.

The scene now is her, Julia, unbuttoned a full big button down.

Jeepers, now she's developing an attitude because someone has disappeared with her sprat.

These scenes show many responsible for jumping through her hoops.

Charm, wide-open patent smile, family scenes. No law against them.

A Harley is described as the best motorcycle ever built. This particular writer put forty-thousand miles on a Magna, and says Harleys eat all shit, only shit, and total shit.

This film is getting arty. Julia and biker are mumbling at each other. Since neither has read a single book since high school, the yada is banal, mundane, hackneyed and cloying. But film is running through the camera gates, and film ain't cheap, so we get to see what should have graced any floor.

Cleavage now a full foot below the throat. So gracious this is all on film so we can share. My guess is the cheeseball trailer trash wrecking ball of society, with Colombo style car, catching a break from..

Even a woman on woman talk her bags hang in scanty leather or vinyl. As she finds the Company has been responsive to medical misfortunes she decides those that might be involved in the inch must be guilty of the mile.

Complex medical talk with a schmo that would sell the entire planet, tomorrow, for a one percent elevation in income or status, today, no questions asked.

We're now thirty-four minutes into the film, and if the tits have been buttressed, it's only physical.

Big wide smile. Two. Three. Guy picking his teeth.

Remember, we're talking Oscars (trade mark) here.

Tits against the environment.

She's only been gone form her post of duty for a week, and the establishment is pissed. So many all wrong, the tits so right. O, ye Academy. Now we find it doesn't' make One Fucking Bit Of Difference whether she showed up, or not. Academy Award. Academy Award. Academy Award.

Beard against her face.

Academy Award.

Hey, hey, hey. Quick takes like "Homicide, Life on the Streets." Quack takes, choppy, in-your-face cutting. No traces of vomit on the print; must be Billy Bates' "Oxyclean" (trade mark).

Academy Award.

Whooping luck. Thrashing around for any reason she finds pieces of paper.

Tits with a cause and a cause with paper. What greater thrill can the rest of the film offer?

Whistle blower interested in a raise and benefits.

There are lots of other places "She could do her work." Has anyone forgotten the teeth? How about the tits.?

If one single word, thought, or idea of the film is true, shouldn't Erin Brokovich be elected regent for life over the entire planet? Just a thought.

Paper and machines.

The hair. The everlasting tits. The giant data base of chemistry that is largely responsible for us living a hundred feet from the mouth of the cave, and something about a certain variant of chromium.

More tits on parade. Fuck, I write about men molesting little tiny underage illegal boys, and doing it again and again, but do I have to use pubescent boners on parade?

No.

So, intellectually, why are Julia Robert's chest organs amounting to seventy-five trombones in the big parade?

"You've been reading for hours." That's a line from the script. She's in her thirties, a mother, and she's been reading for hours? How does that fit?

Pictures of dead chickens.

There is much emotion trying to come from the screen. Mother and child; Please don't be mad at me, I'm doing this for us.

The lighting director is plainly seen.

More teeth. What do Julia's Roberts giant teeth have to do with issues of chemical liability, lawyers, retainers, and the overall perfidies and variances of a game playing, empire-building system?"

Big teeth? Shouldn't Tony Robbins be king of the universe, if this is the standard?

Stories of medical misfortune now occupy our time, though people live far longer than they have ever begun to live in all of human history.

Must be serious, only half the tits are above the buttoned jeans-vest.

She just looks so udderly stupid. They gave her an Oscar; I wouldn't waste the price of a Pepsi on all she has been, all she is now, and all she ever will be. Note, note, and note that I have never been paid a single dime for my work, and she is paid tens of thousands of dollars an hour.

One of the two of us is a turd circling in a bowl. Ironic, isn't it, that your very life depends on making the choice. Certainly my life does, and I come from the oldest American money there is.

A dead frog. The plot desperately needed a deed frog; thank god we have one, because, lacking it, we're left with more tits and more teeth, and these can only be stretched so far.

I don' t know how this would have made it as a high school play. Homilies, bromides, sophistry and cant amounting even to rumbling bikers. (But, credit where do, and appreciation for the discipline of my fellow artists, there has been no note in a bottle.)

By this time the message is fairly clear, however delivered. Dissect every company over every memo and stop everything. Air travel, rail travel, auto travel on faulty Firestones. Medicine, research, daycare centers, farmers, et al.

A delicious microcosm is reported in New York as I write these words. The liberals have decided to get rough on cabs. From forty medallion revocations a few years ago they are up to almost eight-hundred revocations.

Can't get a cab, but, know you to your very bones, for every hundred cabbies we take off the road for about thirty years, each, we will save a human life. Plead with every citizen who catches pneumonia and dies of it to understand that the small number of highly vetted cabs is in their interest.

Now our beloved Erin is refusing twenty-million dollars, listing medical woes in their very multitude.

So, we have before us PG&E, the lifeblood of millions on millions of homes, who apparently invented rarest disease in the interest of profit. Little hard to figure, since their children live with all other children, but, if O.J. could be figured, there is apparently no limit to the art of figuring.

This interruption in my camp tale is simply to demonstrate, scene by scene, to the degree the scenes hold even a spark of interest, how sick you are. Erin's poison. The teeth, the hair, the tits. Go America. Go hair. Go teeth. Go tits. And rest utterly and for all of time absolutely assured that teeth, hair and tits will lead you exactly where you deserve to go.

Excuussee Me! The film has degenerated to desert mumbling and a ratty car. Overexpose the negative by half a stop; that is the art director's contribution; makes things look a bit funky and rural. Remember that, overexpose by half-a-stop.

Now Erin is a secret weapon.

I have one, too. Thousand of books and magazines plus fifty channels of cable. Living in three countries. Tens of thousands of hours of keyboarding, just for practice.

Believe as your Constitution allows, but at least know there are two sides to the story, a life story and a death story. I represent one and Erin Brockovich represents the other. Your life depends on your choice, so be cool about any orientation or hasty allegiance, and remember your writer has stature in no field, whatever, except as the monarch of pornographers.

It's a sorry situation, all will agree on that, leaving only a question of fact. Erin and her tables of lawyers are right, and I am wrong, or, vice versa.

Now our Erin is reciting phone numbers like Dustin with his matches. Is the fact she knows, or fails to know, phone numbers, relevant? Ask yourself. I've lured you in, young boys and attractive young men, few holds bared, but if I started reciting phone numbers, how long would you read - me with a titless boy's body?

Fun to see the conservative female draped with a skull-cap of dated hair; the embodied cliche has its place in literature.

Less tits now, the story must be getting interesting. Disregard, for you own well-being, that I have displayed more insight, perspective, context and reference, per paragraph, than Erin Brockovich has displayed in almost a hundred pages of populist wallop...

Was I wrong? Julia is coughing right there on camera.

If the military/industrial complex could somehow poison her (and Sally Fields) would it, or would it not, be worth half a million innocent deaths? Bad math. Population is over a quarter billion. Populist empowerment will result in such confusion as to, slowly perhaps, kill all. Bad math.

Dreary scenes of Albert Ninny and folding chairs. Another bike on desert pavement. What mood is the director trying to sell me? Are five thousand dollars worth of sun glasses the theme of the picture? There must be something more, or they wouldn't have awarded all the Oscars (trade mark).

Cute. Finally. Here is the twenty-something biker with the seven year old daughter, just plump enough, and long-legged enough. The little boy is future stuff, but coming to the verge. If I called the story "The Once and Future Happy Biker" would anyone option it for a dime?

Tits out again, at the roadhouse. The kids apparently safe with the biker. More story to be told. A barfly motif; if one runs out of words through desperate lack of talent, practice, experience, and love, throw in a barfly bromide. Demonstrate your skill with twists and turns by making him say something.

Wait, here comes some dialogue over a stale cell phone. How lucky for the Academy a pay phone is on site. It means a run across the parking lot, awkward for a tit wagon, but the message eventually gets on through.

Thank god. Someone's intestines were eaten away.

A stage mannerism. Gray-faced informant blowing through his fist.

More paper now comes into our story. Memos. Stuff from files. Personally, as a trust baby living fat and happy in the Caribbean, I'm saying go, Erin, go. Shut Pacific Gas and Electric down, tomorrow. Pay one billion dollars on each claim. Let me live, back on the island, as I once did.

All those teeth are back.

Three hundred thirty three million, and, you guessed it, the teeth are back. Laughing people and Your girl's girl's needs. Three hundred, thirty-three million dollars for culpability on medical stuff.

LET ME ASK YOU, AMERICAN, THIS VERY SHORT QUESTION. IF ERIN WINS, HOW CAN YOU LOSE?

Oh, fuck; she's won her money, and still with the tits. Sorry, folks, I missed the whole point.

And the climax? A direct steal, voiding all copyrights for all time, form Paul Newman's "The Verdict." (Hint: Her tits get her everything she sued for, and more, played out cute as a thousand bugs in a hundred rugs.)

Final credits rolling, and I view the film as total filth. How about you?

Since you live in it, and I live very much out of it, your vote counts a hundred to one over mine. Sleep well, and back to our story. (I only thought I was done. Upon the final ending of Erin we are delivered unto that which was written and produced by Alan Alda. Hands for Alan Alda, or, do I have better use for your hands?) (Since it is far, far, beneath me to write for money, I probably do.)

I'm going to insert a chapter break here; it's high time, in a literary sense, even if measured by raw page count. Some of you have written claiming me to be odd or mad. The terror is that you bet your very life on whatever I am. If I am insane, O.J. walks in his rightful world. If I am sane, you will die slowly of a hundred insidious embodiments of your rapacious greed, and get to watch your children die slowly beside you, which might make it all worthwhile.

Intelligent comment, and especially proofing, are welcome. (If you can't write your own, help with mine.) Thomas@btl.net

xxx

Chapter five.

Well, that was half fun. A nice drunken rant. I wonder if Julia will survive. Actually, she seems personable - but why the Marxist, tear-down-everything-for-any-reason script? The way I read it, you've got one chance, only, and that's Creative Camp. Now this could either be vanity rampant beyond the absurd, or the truth as told by perhaps the only person fully and utterly qualified to tell it. But, let's face it; what could be more pointless than saving the necks of a culture circling the porcelain throne? I mean you've done this so deliberately; sold out so easily. It must be what you want, the cradle- to-grave hand to hold, complete with checks in the mail; the very extensive ravagization of the kids so the votin' geezers never miss a tray of pills. Anyhow, my various writings are your trail of breadcrumbs out of the labyrinth. Share them. Someone step forward to edit them; hell, Tiger works with his coaches constantly; writing is one thousand times more difficult than flog; leaving me before you bare-assed, speaking of which, aren't there some characters involved in pretty extreme misbehavior somewhere around here? I vote for getting back to them. Getting them bare-assed.

For those joining midstream, we have three man/boy setups working, at least storywise, at the same time. Blissy is being molested by Charles, under a tree. Blissy is telling his man about spying on Keith, man, and Randy, boy, who are stripped to the waist in a clearing. Also, Randy has been telling Keith about special things that have happened to him as an altar boy. Another labyrinth, I suppose, but more enjoyable than the tedium of saving your not very scrawny necks.

"Uncle Keith," Randy asked, "have you ever been to a nudist camp?"

"No," replied the young man. "Have you?"

"Yes," said Randy. "I thought maybe you'd like to take me sometime. Or are you too famous. Would people cause trouble if they recognized you from television?"

"I don't think so," Keith replied to his young nephew. "Chevy Chase works at a summer camp; Jay teases him about it, but that's about as far as it goes."

"So then you might take me?" said the young male.

"I might not if I wrap the Beemer around a tree; I might not, if an embolism ruptures; I might not if there's a nine-point-five earthquake. Given lots of time I could probably come up with several more reasons I might not take my willowy nephew to a nudist camp."

"How about if I told you there were lots of virgins there? Some even eighteen years old. Perhaps if I added a graphic description of what happens when a mature teen, who has never even had his underpants off, except maybe after gym, takes his first walk into the woods with a naked little boy, you'd be interested."

"Now," replied Keith, "if the boy was tall and slim, and had milk-white skin, and curly red hair, and happened to be intelligent, eager and responsive, it might be a story worth hearing."

"I think 'responsive' might be understating it," Randy said. "Highly aggressive would be closer to the truth. If the boy was really aggressive, would you take him then?"

"Well," came the answer, "I guess I might not leave him behind."

A giggle, and Randy said: "He wouldn't want you to leave his behind." "Oh!" exclaimed Keith, "a funny boy. An aggressive, funny redhead." "And deep woods, replete with clearings much like this one." "Okay, okay!" Keith wailed in mock despair; "You're going to tell me whether I want you to, or not. So get one with it." "Can we start by getting off with some stuff?" came the wide-eyed query from the child. "I don't think personalities come off," said the uncle with a tight grin. "And that's what I'm interested in, you know; out of respect for the energy you put into yourself." "Not this?" the child asked, gaining his feet and pulling his uncle also off the log, avid fingers going to the man's belt buckle. Keith groaned at the urgency of the child, and let him do his will, their will. In moments the young actor was clad only in his underpants and the boy was standing, suddenly shy, before him. "Almost eighteen?" the man whispered, causing the child to blush at the memory of his first time alone with a mature virgin male. "Get my pants off, while I tell you," Randy responded out loud. Keith now went to his knees. He couldn't help, for the life of him, kissing the smooth, white child's belly. Randy looked like a slightly older brother of the boy who is just on camera for a second in a dietary supplement ad; the one were a woman is making funny with some cucumber eye patches. There was enough treasure between the boy's belly button and the upper hem of his shorts to occupy an invading army for a month. It was no place to hurry, and Keith didn't. He fingered, fondled and caressed the child, kissing around his own fingers as he went. "Robbie," said the sweet voice, no husking from Keith's touching. "He had acne, kinda bad, I guess. It made him look lonely, so I swam over to him. When he stood up he was six four; no body hair, no fat, and six four. Seventeen. He could have had green-dripping fistulas, but he didn't. Just a really nice smile. We talked about computers for awhile, then I asked him if he wanted to go for a walk up in the woods. He turned really red, but said okay. That was soo cool, because I knew he was thinking about stuff like being naked alone with me. I wanted to piggy-back him right on the spot, and it's a damn good thing I didn't, considering what happened a few minutes later." Randy seemed to need no encouragement to continue. He was now, also, in his underpants with his uncle fondling his child's body willfully and openly. But Keith didn't want to take any chances; his activities on the tender ten-year-old skin might be distracting. "What happened a few minutes later," he asked Randy. "We went to where the cold water comes into one end of the pool. I knew why Robbie wanted to go there, but I was as cool as the incoming water. We talked there for awhile; he'd come with his dad who was at the pool on the other side of the camp. He'd read a couple of books, and read a few stories on the Net, but otherwise he was clueless, because of the acne. Stupid females. But I guess I'm being cynical; after all, they drove him right smack dab into my arms. "So, after we'd been by the cool water for awhile he said he was ready to go for a walk. Except for the first time Father came all over my tummy and chest after I'd only masturbated him for a minute, and the first time Mark went inside me, seeing Robbie get out of the pool was the most awesome experience of my life. I mean he wasn't huge, like in a story, just big, big, big. He was blond and his hair, there was actually very little of it, was almost as red as mine. I thought I was going to get so bogged down in how stupid girls are that I'd lose it, but I didn't, and I climbed out with him. "As soon as we got past the first tree, I asked him if he wanted to hold hands with me while we walked. He didn't say anything, but took my right paw in his left. As we walked we tickled each other's palms. I could have made it as far as Timbuktu, it felt that special, but Robbie couldn't. He got a huge boner even faster than I did. Before we got even two hundred feet from camp he suddenly stopped and said I'm sorry. I was just about to ask what was wrong, when he started to ejaculate. I couldn't believe it; it was so flattering. Just holding hands and suddenly he was a blown well of gushing hot sperm." "What did you do?" asked Keith. "Nothing. He grabbed me against him, then we fell together and he landed on top of me. 'How long does this last?' he asked as he was covering me absolutely all over. I was too busy hugging him and feeling him up and sucking his right nipple to answer, so I just grunted, and that got him started grunting back. "I didn't wipe the sperm off, and every time we met another couple out in the woods he'd haul me behind a tree and cum on me, again. Of course, as the afternoon wore on, I had to help a bit, but together we made it happen five times for him and twice for me." "Well," Keith said, "scratch what I said about the major earthquake unless I'm standing under a bridge. I'll get you to camp, somehow." "Or," the child replied, lightning in his eyes, "we could go visit Robbie at his house. He only lives half an hour from here. His parents are as cool as mine aren't, plus, he's got a nine-year-old boy down the street so we could double date in a single room. I love the looks a boy gets when he checks in with a cute man, and the drop-of-a-hat room service. Add my Hollywood uncle, who looks hardly more than a boy, himself, and we'll have hot and hot running bellboys 'till dawn." "I guess my only options is to stand and be counted," Keith commented. "What's really cool is 'puters," Randy said. "That gives him a reason to hang with Stacy, that's his nine year old. Plus, he can write and tell me everything; even pictures. I can't wait..."

Blissy finished his story by saying that's all there was, there was no more. The two males in the clearing had started dressing of one accord, and the little spy had begun his retreat under the noise of the surrounding forest and the lack of attention the uncle and nephew were paying to anything other than each other and the evening ahead of them. "So you never saw any sperm?" Charles asked his young beauty. "No," said the boy. "Randy lay on him like I'm lying on you, and they kissed a lot, and stripped to their underpants, but that was all." "Oh, was that all," said the camp owner.

Chapt. 6

Blissy lay still on top of Charles for a few minutes, letting the man take his young body as he would. Charles nibbled the boy's husky shoulder and the base of his strong neck as he let his hands roam slowly and tenderly over the child'' nakedness.

"Can I at least turn over and unbutton your shirt, if you don't want me to see you?" the boy asked, adding, "I just want to feel you a llittle bit naked against me. Please."

Which was the more dangerous fang? A cop caller, or love? A century ago Charles had this very thought tug at his mind. Way back, when he had a mind. With a boy, who needed a mind? By this time, anything other than his two petting hands seemed superfluous to his existence.

Regrettably for dear reader, my character, Charles Hastings, is a flat-out, no-holds-barred, genius. The lesson he has learned over the past hour, as Blissy has told his multi-layered spy tale, has to do with the carnality of waiting; temporizing. Coming off a ten-day writing blitz, the man had as much sperm as three normal boys. He longed to strip his new child, and let the child stroke him until he was streaked all over his pubescent nakedness with rope and ribbon of tangling semen. Dripping it from his face with more congealing in the short boy hair of his rugged head.

The big brain came with a big clutch. Charles engaged it slowly, but the child in his arms immediately sensed a change.

"What's wrong?" Blissy asked.

"Nothing, Blissy," Charles replied, "but I've got to get you to camp. You've simply got to be around younger men and boys for your first real time. Trust me, okay? Then, if you still want, my door is always open.

"Meantime, I want you to tell me again about your quiz show idea."

"You're just trying to change the subject," said the boy with a quaver in his voice and tears dripping down his cheeks.

Charles rolled his eyes and exhaled a non-verbal Du'uh. But the wisdom that comes with age, when built on a rock-solid foundation, is the best there is, and he stuck to his guns, gently retrieving the child's shirt and easing him back into it with petting, fondling and kissing. The boy sighed and played a bit of a role, as boys are wont, but, deep in his eyes, beyond visibility, was a glow of admiration and respect, the kind that builds to-the-death loyalty (not necessarily a good thing).

Rolling once again in the green Dodge, Charles let the boy sulk. This lasted two minutes, then a small voice came from the passenger's seat.

"I thought of something on the bus, on the way down here. I think it's better than the quiz show thing. Do you want me to tell you?"

Chalk one up for c-camp, Charles thought to himself, and simply nodded at the boy.

"Okay," said the boy, quickly brightening to his subject. "It's sports, how much do you know about sports?"

"I know how to keep my heels down, my hands quiet, and the horse between the knees; other than that, I watched 140 games of the '84 Cubs season. That's about it."

"How about golf?" asked the sweet young voice, so quickly free of the recriminations that had brought tears five minutes before..

"I love it, especially when the course is green and it's cloudy so the lighting is soft. Beautiful game. I've even played a few rounds, years ago; why?"

"Well," said Blissy, "it's kind of a golf thing I invented. [Author's note: The following description is not copyrighted.]

"I mean," the boy continued, "what's the first thing about sports, in general?"

"They cripple people when they age," came the sardonic response. And so soon was Charles repaid for his discipline with the young boy. His eyes hardly blazed to half indignation a the flippant comment before he remembered who he was talking and the look softened.

"Seriously,:" was his response.

"Fitness, teamwork; I suppose there's a list. What are you getting at?"

"Size," said Blissy. "Think of it. The basketball is just the right size, he hockey puck, both the softball and the baseball. Everything in sports is just the right size; jumping skies, slalom skies, to the freaking thousandth on an inch - except one thing."

"The golf ball? answered Charles, having had a pretty good hint.

"No," came the answer. "The cup. The hole. It's too small."

"Good point," said Charles. "How big should it be, six inches, eight?"

"No, no," said the little camper, "twelve inches, by four-and-a-half, by however deep the present cup is. I think it's four inches."

Charles thought with the boy for a minute. Chalk one up for c-camp. It was like a hammer on the head. Of - freaking - course! Twelve by four and a half.

The boys voice broke into his thoughts. "Oriented, magnetic north and south on odd numbered holes, and east and west on even numbered holes.

Fuck, that made it perfect. Could anything so simple, be so perfect? He thought of the short game; an entire layer of strategy and tactics, ball striking, to stick the ball as close as perpendicular to the trough as possible.

More exciting because it amounted to a little more skill over a little less luck at the professional level, and faster play on crowded amateur courses.

Charles almost had a palpable sensation of smelling smoke. He realized his big clutch was slipping to the point of burning. Could this boy possibly show up in his bed tonight? Possibly? He wanted to jam on the big four-caliper brakes, slew the car to the shoulder, and have and have and have the boy on the wide, comfortable bench. seat. Every boner he'd ever had blistered his pants. But, a mind was a terrible thing to waste. Charles didn't rent his boys; their earnings came from signing fees and royalties, exclusively. This kid was brilliance, personified; a golden goose perhaps full of diamond eggs, not, not, not to be hurried, pressured, inveigled or tampered with. Easily worth a million dollars a pound; perhaps many times that in an era where writing code was a common denominator to invention, with results that in all probability would destroy LAWKI. "All I ever wanted," Charles thought to himself, "was a kid that could re-invent and vastly improve an ancient sport, and do it in a minute or two."

"Can I still sleep with you," the boy asked, "or is it a dumb idea?"

Virtuoso yes; virtuoso, no, sometimes all a writer can do is start a new chapter (even if it's premature [one smiley face]).

Chapt. 7

Charles was amused to note, minutes later, he was cruising five miles an hour slower than he had traveled the same road on the trip in. Must be the precious cargo. They covered the miles chatting about life in general. Subjects ranged from the trauma of living in an aggressively sub-literate culture to the vagaries and inconsistencies of genius, in general. They mutually detested the box-faced bearded one with the knit sweaters. Backed by the NEA his cow-flop prose had turned some hundred million kids, perhaps more, off reading, forever, apparently. If this lifestyle on wheels was good, how fucking horrible were the rest? Few wanted to find out, much to the delight of the producer class, because now they could turn out condo-speak banality, season after season, and a vast, bovine sub-class would not only watch it, but slap plastic in cadence with the sponsor's demands. The talk of writing quickly circled to Blissy's application sketch. The quiz show. [Author's note: This is my stickiest one, as far as rights go. The following sketch is a significant modification to a popular quiz show. The author fully acknowledges all rights of existing copyright holders, and, with no intention of infringing thereon, copyrights the following variation to be licensed only to the original copyright holders.] "There the audience sits," the boy began, "two hundred dollars on the line, a question that's usually humorously imbecilic, and a stage hound goes through three lifelines before flubbing out; or flubs out two questions later. Again, and again, and again, making the show at least half un-watchable. "What they should do, is start the ten contestants at the same time. Put each low value question, with all four answer choices, up on the screen for, say, twenty seconds; long enough for the audience to play along. Go through the first bunch of questions this way. The secret is to measure the time it takes each contestant to answer each question. That way there will probably be a never be a tie, because the points will be awarded in an equivalent of hundredths of a second. "This would make a fun horserace out of it. Instead of having ten in the beginning, it would be better to have nine; three rows of three. Each contestant would have an indicator on their desk, showing the audience how they were faring in the race through the first ten questions. I'm not sure exactly the best way to score this part; probably the way they do it now, if you miss one, you're out; or, they could split a purse amongst the top three finishers. "Okay, now we're about ten questions in. We have a winner. They take the hot seat, and begin at the $32,000 level. Then, and only then, the lifelines kick in, the host interviews the contestant, and so on. From the $32,000 point on, the game would be identical to what is now on the air. "And the kicker is, you'd get a much higher quality of play. As it is now, if you're a member of the first group of ten, you have a one in sixteen chance of being selected, just by pushing the buttons as fast as you can, assuming others players are trying to answer accurately. If four are chosen for the hot seat, your random-luck chance becomes one in four. Doing it my way, the best of the ten, or nine, as it should be, gets to play on, which is also as it should be. Result: much better game." "Result," paraphrased Charles, "much bigger bills." Here he imitated a smaller-bills television catchphrase from an insurance company. "For the producers, I mean. A lot more people would win a lot more money. Before we submit it, we should try to find out what percentage of the budget the prize money is, that might be a problem, but other than that A-plus in gold stars. Blissy got a pat on the head. Simple, clean, superb. A six-inch putt and a twelve-inch trough. (Blissy wanted to name his improved ball trap the Tiger Lair; he'd had experience in a lair, but Charles preferred the bone-deep grace, stature and manners of Vijay Singh, so he did not bubble over with enthusiasm, though, to be honest, he did not hesitate to think of himself as the Tiger Woods of contemporary English prose. (Better, actually, because Tiger often had dozens of players a few strokes behind him, and Charles never had anybody even on the course. That is what Hemmingway and liberals had done. That's what they had done. Hadn't done it to Blissy, though.) "I've got a completely original quiz show, too," said the boy, then he changed the subject. "Can you tell me a sex fantasy while we drive?" Charles almost choked. Tell him one? What the hell was he living, chopped liver? He sputtered a bit, then began. "It's the movie where the young kid goes away, and comes back as an adult, and something happens to him. In Africa. I just saw half of it..." "Yeah," said the boy, I saw some of it too, I can't remember the name either. That's an excellent starting place; the boy was kind of a blondish moppet; thin face, big teeth, long legs for his age." Charles began his tale.

"Is that you, Norry? Are you home?" "Yes, little cousin, it's me, and I'm glad to hear you call it home."

The blond nine year old charged half way down the stairs, leaped the log banister, and skidded to a stop on an east Indian rug. Norry caught the boy, and both pivoted, half dancing to an armchair.

"I'm too big to kiss," said the child in a mock man's voice.

"Then you'll soon be too dead to tickle," Norry laughed, going to the child's lean flanks.

"Come on, let's go riding," the boy chirped, kissing his seventeen-year-old cousin on the neck. "We can both ride Hack Attack, but I want to be in front, because I need to ask you some questions and I want to be able to hear what you say without you running us into a ravine or over a snake. Okay?"

"That should get the city out of my lungs; you're on. Give me ten to stow my gear and kiss your mom and we'll be off like a dirty shirt."

The scratching of iron gave way to a nearly silent tread as Hack Attack cleared a ridge and brought his boys onto a sweep of African pasture. It was too hot to even lope, so the big gelding settled to a near plod. Norry sensed tension in Billy; rigid and silent in contrast to his first bouncing greeting.

He would have said What's up under other circumstances, but felt the interrogatory might not fit the circumstances. "I was nine only seven years ago, so you don't have to try to communicate across any big gulf, okay?"

"Well," Billy said, "we don't get into town much, and I hardly ever spend time with boys my age, so, well, there's a lot I'm confused about. I mean, I know some stuff from living on the plantation, but, you know, that's just physical; cats in a row. How old do you have to be for it to start making sense?"

"Two or three hundred years might give you a grip," Norry replied, "if you live that long; before then, it's kind of an every-person-for-themselves deal, vastly complicated, but there you go."

"Yeah," said Billy, "but that's the problem. It's all really complicated, and I should be talking to someone about it, so I don't get wrong ideas, I guess, but there is no one out here to talk to. I mean the African kids know stuff, but we don't take our friendship to that level; you know, where I could talk about really personal stuff with someone from a different culture. Is it okay to be that way?"

"You're probably right, but things like that can change. It's all massively individual, misery in the rules, splendor, without, and, definitely, vice-versa. Sticking to your own culture probably makes sense, and certainly does if that's your choice."

"At least to start," said Billy.

As they rode, Billy's eyes scanned the ground. Hack Attack's thin blanket and a place free of ants.

"Do you want to ask me some questions?" Norry asked his young cousin, "or, I could just hold forth with a sermon with everything arranged to my personal preference."

The rode on for a few moments and Billy scanned the ground. "I mean," he finally said, his voice shaking, "boys sometimes really talk a lot about it, right?"

"Yes," Norry said, "especially if they're really close friends. It can be really scary, because after so much talking, one boy might want to do a little more than talk, and he won't know if the other boy would like to do stuff, or get really mad and split up and maybe even rat him; that's what they call it in the States."

"Do boys do stuff a lot there?" Billy asked.

"It's getting pretty common. Especially with computers. That gives kids a strong common interest, and that leads to friendship, and I guess about a third of boys end up doing some physical experimenting. Maybe more. Probably more all the time, in any event."

"Do they keep it really secret?" the nine year old asked.

"Mostly, except some boys come out in their later teens. Usually, it's pretty secret though, especially when boys do things with mature males. That could lead to trouble. In all it's kind of catch-can. Don't ask, don't tell is actually intelligent and spreading; besides, some of the excitement a man gets from a boy is just because it's naughty, and about a hundred percent of the excitement a boy gets from a man is the same thing."

"Is it really exciting when you do it?" Billy asked.

Some of the tension was going out of the child. Norry felt him lean more freely into his chest.

"I'll answer your question with a question," the older cousin said; "do you see a lot about it on television and in the movies?"

"All the time."

"I guess that's the answer. Pretty exciting. I've even read married couples like doing it, proving it takes all types."

Billy laughed and jabbed back with an elbow. More questions bubbled out of him.

"So, if you live in the city, and there are a lot of boys to hang out with, how do you find one?"

"Being nice is the biggest step," Norry answered. "I don't mean being phony nice as you might be around Christmas, but sort of low key and friendly. Just about like you are now. Then, once you have some nice friends you have to try to make something happen, real carefully, gently, and patiently, usually, anyhow, and most important, don 't make too big a deal of it. If things work out, excellent; probably, brilliant, and if they don't, study harder and make yourself smarter, since you probably can't be any nicer without overdoing it. Try to remember that if it happens a few times in a lifetime, with just the right person, that's more than a lot of people get. And if it doesn't, write a book about it. The Net needs content providers, so you can publish without going through the ritualistic rigmarole of the book trade."

"That's cool," said Billy; he'd seen it and other Americanisms on cable and the words sounded great in his Kenyan accent. Cool. He continued his thought: "I already know what my first story is going to be about. Can you guess?"

"Something along the line of the evil older relative coming back to seduce the lad of the plantation, I should imagine."

"Will you help me?" Billy asked. The child had settled happily against the older teen's chest, and was wriggling contentedly, his eyes never leaving the ground in their search for a perfect piece of ground.

"As long as no one finds out, I might. I'm not eighteen, but I still could get in trouble."

"I've got passwords inside passwords. Encryption is a hobby; or it was, before you came along. Safe as houses."

There it was. The younger boy quickly triangulated by blinking in a distant mountain peak and two prominent plane trees. He grabbed the reins and dropped from the horse, beckoning his older cousin. Norry also dropped to the ground and Billy secured the animal and spread the saddle blanket, which had never actually been mated with a saddle, on a shady patch of soft grass free of dung and ant trails.

"Now we can really talk," he said, dragging the mature male down on the blanket beside him. Norry looked into the eyes of the glowing child. He reached off the blanket, plucked a stalk of reed, and tickled the boy's ears.

"That's what you did to me," Blissy giggled from the passenger seat of the cruising Dodge. "I'll bet you do it to all the boys." Charles let the comment slide, time enough later, and returned to his tale of the two cousins under the tree.

"It's really private here," Billy said. The trail is almost half a mile; no one would come out here in a year. Is it okay?"

"It's outrageously beautiful," said the returned traveler. "And, yes, we could see anyone coming before they could see us."

"No spore on the whole ride out," Billy pointed out. His cousin had been out of the country and might have lost touch with the finer points of indexing predators.

"Strange," said Norry, looking into the child's bright eyes. "I could swear I was with a tiger."

Billy giggled happily. He knew who the tiger really was; he'd seen some soccer, as they called it, tapes, and a tiger had been loose on every field. Number 18. All the tiger he needed. As he thought of his cousin in his playing shorts he got a boner. Thinking back about all the things they'd talked about on the ride out made his young penis swell all the more. He'd lost his innocence. From now on, every talk that wasn't about nuts and bolts stuff was going to do this to him.

Norry looked down the slim body lying on it's back; the beautiful boy face, and the astonishing big bulge in the boy's tight short shorts.

"Oh, tiger," he said.

"I can't help it. I'm sorry..."

Norry hushed the nervous child with a gentle kiss on his lips. The boy gasped lightly and looked into his eyes. "I never thought about kissing,:" he said. "I mean, I don't really know what I did think about, but I know it wasn't kissing. Since I'm such an ignorant child, maybe you'd better give me another lesson."

Norry leaned back to the boy, and they touched lips again.

"I'm still not getting it," the child chirped, "you've got to try again."

"You mean harder?" Norry asked the boy.

"Have it your way," the boy said, coming after the teen inches above him. It was harder. Billy's hands went to the older boy's cheeks, then up in back of his head. He pulled and Norry shot his hands under the little boy's head and boosted hit with his fingers. For all his talk, Norry had never been with a boy younger than fifteen. As an MIT undergraduate he'd hardly been with anybody, for that matter, but with Anthony enough had happened so he felt confident in taking the child. Their kisses began to linger with what started as minor lateral swipes, lips against lips. Norry was astonished to feel Billy's tongue, first. He'd never have thought of doing that with Anthony, until the teenager had done it to him. He blocked the probing phallus with his teeth, then nibbled very gently as he allowed the boy entrance, gradual changing to a slow carnal sucking of the child. There were not walls on this part of the veldt; otherwise Billy would have climbed four of them.

Two full minutes went by before the young males finally separated.

"Damn," quoth the boy; "if that was just kissing, what's the rest like?" ` "I don't know," Norry replied. "I've never even seen a boy your age bare chested; I don't know what it must be like."

"Well, it's so cool I might even try it with a girl. As long as she could ride and didn't shit a brick every time there was some crummy mamba in the thatch."

"Look, Billy," Norry said, a worried look in his eyes. "Fooling around like this is something only some boys like. Other boys do not. It's totally okay to change your mind. I kid about girls and getting married, but I've never met a man I'd even like to touch, so I don't even know for sure what I am, even after four years around Boston. So you tell me if you feel uncomfortable, okay?"

"Do you ever see girls you like, you know, that way?" Billy asked.

"Yes, but it's about one in ten thousand in my age bracket. I'm as fussy as you are. If they can't ride, or the like riding and horses even a bit too much, it doesn't matter what they look like. Then they have to read; at least a thousand books by sixteen. The list goes on and on. I mean don't get me wrong. I do see some. There was a girl in Watertown, a prodigy, math whiz; she had cerebral palsy. I was patching software at the clinic where she got her pool therapy..."

"How old was she," asked Billy.

"Eleven," he said. "Was she pretty?" "She is. Lucy Terrant. Much more than pretty. The finest hair, dirty blond, you can imagine. Neck like a swan. Beautiful mouth with just the tiniest wisp of fuzz on her upper lip. Blue eyes. Very oval face. High brow, with that beautiful hair halloing like gossamer. Porcelain skin, so milky you could see veins at her temples..." "Did you ever kiss her?" the boy asked. "That's a long story," Norry said. "Make it short, but tell me some, please?" "Okay, it's mature. Promise you won't freak out, okay.? "Well, you didn't chop her up, did you?" "It's much more exciting than that." "Are you in love with her?" "Yes. We're going to write; I'm helping her with her thesis." "Awesome," said Billy, trying another gem from the tube in his lilting accent. "You guys get married, then have a boy kid; maybe a girl; and I'll teach them when they're old enough. Deal?" "It's a plan." "So, did you kiss her, or not?" "Okay, Billy, you asked. She had an older brother; nineteen. He'd cared for her since she'd started to feel the effects of the disease. The treatments consisted of a lot of time spent together in the pool, and they were often alone after the staff left, behind locked doors. Also, they had a whirlpool in their house. Anyway, they spent a lot of time together" "She told you about what happened?" "Yes," Norry said. "We'd know each other for about six months; it was pretty soon before I left. She wanted me to make love to her, and I couldn't because I'd done stuff with a boy and I wasn't sure I was clean. So then she told me about her brother, and about the things he did with her when they were alone together, and she said I could watch them, and masturbate on them if I wanted to." "Will you take me to Boston someday?" Billy asked. Norry grinned at him. "I guess we're peas in a pod," he said, and added, "sure; I'll take you anywhere in the world you want to go. I've got my teaching credentials, at least at the graduate school level, so you could play the dummy and I'd be your fountain of knowledge." "No that sounds like a plan," the boy said. "Did you watch them together; and what's that word, mas..." "Mas is more in Spanish; mas -t-u-r-b-a-t-I-o-n. Also known in the States as jerking off, among other names, and in Britain as wanking or tossing, neither much to my liking, I'm afraid." "What's not to like?" asked the boy with a giggle, parroting more of his cable lore. "Do you know what it is?" Norry asked the little boy. "No. I'm not very clued in, even with cable. We've only had it for a year." "It's usually the first part of sex, after kissing; the first part of real sex, especially between male partners, and, in that subset, especially between boys and mature males." "Are you going to do it to me?" the boy asked, his eyes wide with hope. "I thought the kissing was enough to last a lifetime, Billy; I just don't know about pulling your underpants down and masturbating you." "Will you let me pull your down, too, so I can do it to you after you teach me how?" the child asked, more hope than ever in the bright, eager eyes. "Yes," said the older cousin. "That's the way males almost always start together, after kissing like we did." "Why?" asked the nine year old. "Some males, not all by a long shot, mind you, like to watch other males ejaculate. That's when the semen comes out. Some girls like it, too, but mostly guys." "Well, I sounds like three Brady neat-o's," said Billy, quoting a very favorite movie. "It is, especially for little boys your age; awesome, in your vernacular. In anybody's, for that matter." "How long does it take," asked Billy. "Ten minutes. Half an hour. The first times with a new partner, sometimes it's over so fast it hardly really happens at all." "If I sneak into your room tonight, how many times could we do it before six in the morning?" "We'll probably do it all night long," Norry said. "Sometimes people measure by how many climaxes they have." "How many will we have?" asked the child. "There's no limit for you, because you're too young to have sperm. When you cum, only a little fluid will come out. With me, probably four or five times; especially after being out here with you this afternoon.? "Is it exciting to do it a lot, or does it get tiresome?" the boy quizzed. "It's exciting to do it a lot with exactly the right partner." "But even when it's bad it still pretty good. I remember that from cable." "That's what they say. I've never had it be less than brilliant, but I'm hardly big time. Most couples make love once a week; most homosexual partners make love between fifteen and a hundred and fifty times in their entire relationship, even if it goes on for decades. Lucy's brother, Alex, ejaculated twelve times insider her their first night together, after cuming on her breasts with his first sperm. They've been lovers since she was eight, and he still takes her several times before they go to sleep, and twice before they get up in the morning." "Wow!" exclaimed the young boy. "His penis is really big, and Lucy is very slim; her vagina is very tight. Plus, he's trying to get her pregnant before her illness interferes with her ability to bear a child." "I'm awfully glad you had a cute little boy to come home to," said Billy with a sweet grin. "That makes two of us." "Do you think Alex will get her pregnant." "Yes; I'm expecting hysterical news on the internet about a Noreen or a Norry any time." "Wow! It's too bad you played around with that boy; maybe it could be yours." "I don't see it that way," said Norry. "Alex is about as good looking as a guy should ever be; six three; swimmer. He's a Navy pilot. He's legally adopted her so she can be with him anywhere he is, at least most of the time. Now he's at MIT; probably headed to be an astronaut. I don't blame her for wanting his child; I'm just happy she lets me be any part of her life, and, if things work out, her second baby will be mine." "You'll have to think up some new names." "I'll give you that assignment." "I'll take it. Meantime, you take me. Please??" Norry lunged on top of the little boy. Their lips crashed together frantically; the boy tearing away after a few moments to say Rip it off me. I'll tell mom it was ants. Rip it off me. The mature teen grabbed the boy's shirt, and drew blood from scraping buttons as he tore it from between their writing young bodies. The nine year old didn't have the strength to rip open Norry's heavier shirt, but his fingers worked with frantic haste and in moments the two juveniles were naked chest to naked chest, kissing wildly. "Nothing can be better than this," the boy gasped through his tingling and swollen lips. "I thought so to until I watched Alex ejaculate all over Lucy's chest, then they made out." "Are you going to do that to me?" Billy asked, his eyes now openly glowing. "Every day for weeks and weeks," Norry answered. "Starting when?" "Are you asking for a date?" the teenager teased his little cousin. "Shut up and talk," the boy responded. Norry knew what the kid meant, and lifted himself off the writing young body. He lay on his back, his penis a log inside his jeans. Billy had the belt and zipper undone in moments, and soon the jeans were piled off the small blanket. His mission of the moment accomplished, Billy lay back, his penis also hard against his short shorts. Norry reached for the boy's right, inner thigh, seeking permission in the eyes as his hand moved slowly to the silky boy skin. Billy jumped at the first overtly sexual touch to his young body. He threw his hands behind his neck, and spread his legs widely, offering himself blatantly and without reservation. Norry knew he was way past the point of no return just from looking at his little cousin. Leaving the child's thighs for a moment, the powerful teen surged to his feet between Billy's splayed-open legs, and pulled down his briefs, kicking them on top of their pile of clothing. For a minute he posed for his child, emulating the boy's hands behind the neck, his big penis jutting nearly straight up as he arched his back for his little beauty to see all. "Come back to me," Billy whispered, his eyes now burning. Norry dropped to his knees, then straddled his nine year old. Stretching, he reached for his jeans, retrieving a hunting knife from a sheath on the belt. Billy winced as the blade traveled inches over his nose on its way to his groin. Looking at the spreading legs of the boy, Norry couldn't imagine closing them for any reason, even to pull down the little underpants. A couple of flicks with the blade, and the briefs became a miniature loincloth, draping the boy's huge penis. "This is masturbating," he whispered, kneeling between the thrusting young legs and stoking himself over the child's waist. "Can you do it on me?" Billy asked. "You mean my sperm on you, or do you want me to masturbate your penis?" "Yes," groaned the child. Instinctively, he moved his silky little boy's tender calf against Norry's erection, and pulsed against it, emulating the stoking he'd just seen. The mature teen groaned at the sensation, and reached for the child with both hands. He fondled the boy's white belly and ran his fingers up and down the childish flanks. If lions weren't dumber than monkeys they'd be fighting each other, tooth and claw, just to get a look at this tender eighty-some pounds of slender, very long-legged boy. That was Norry's last thought as his fingers crept beneath the remnant of the sliced underpants. The boy was a champ. Big and hard. Over four inches and thicker than a frank. Roaming his fingers gently under the cloth, Norry was shocked to discover more than a hint of fuzz just under the line of the child's underpants. He'd heard middle school gym teachers we're experts at picking out early to mature boys; that such boys often had a much higher sexual appetite than boys who matured at a normal pace. What had he found? The big powerful cock, even with hair, on a nine year old. He'd been more than half right in calling the boy a tiger. He was all of that; practically a virgin stallion. Then the child's big penis was naked; it looked like a fourteen-year-old's. Cut, and straining to five inches; awesome seen against the slim child body seeming to like almost beneath it. Norry fell forward over the boy, coming to rest on his extended left arm. Bending his wrist against the ground, he was able to use his finders to help hold the child's head aloft, while he slowly, carefully masturbated himself against Billy's big cock. Billy watched in fascination; totally enthralled at the sight of his own little-boy belly, the big log of a boner jutting toward his belly, and his mature cousin pinioned over him on a locked elbow, masturbating against his creamy thighs. Billy felt his older cousin shudder like a small bridge being crossed by a big tank. He removed his right hand from under his neck and grabbed the shoulder of his athletic lover, hoisting himself so he could see everything that had to happen, now, or the bridge was going to collapse. "I'm cuming," whispered Norry. "Always tell your partner when you feel it starting, just a tip." The teen's stroking suddenly froze, his hand sphinctering the base of his big penis. With a grunt, the actual spray started, bringing fire to Billy's eyes. It was getting all over him. He held the powerful shoulder frantically to his boy chest, instinct telling him how carnal the feeling was the male that was spurting his hot seed all over his childish torso, with some of the gush splashing all the way to his face. Then the rhythm changed; slowed dramatically, and very tenderly Norry used the last of his strength to hold himself off the boy while he guided the tip of his penis to thhat of the little boy. Billy watched his big boner get sloshed and smeared with the thick, white sperm of the older male. With a grunt, Norry released his last seed onto the child under him, then thrust himself back to a kneeling position between Billy's legs. He pulled the boy roughly, bringing the big penis against his own. The sperm in such quantity acted as a tactile catalyst between the seventeen-year-old hand and nine-year-old boner. Billy's ejaculation began so fast, Norry was able to take three watery spurts from the child before his afterglow began to fade. Both males were now covered with each other's hot seed, and the big boy lowered himself gently to the child underneath him. They kissed, and lived very happily ever after

"Turn around," said Blissy.

"Why?" asked Charles, worried that his scandalous tale might have upset the boy beside him.

"Because," the boy explained calmly, "I want to go to the camp the other way; around the world and come from the other side. Then you can tell me stories the whole way."

"And what fare would you offer for such an excursion?" Charles asked.

"I've never seen sperm," Blissy replied. "I believe this would make me willing, eager and experimentally creative. As does the boy in your story, little Billy I believe it was, I maintain a certain youthfulness of flesh and spirit that should last throughout any trip of reasonable length."

Charles was going to get rear-ended at this rate. He hadn't cruised at 45, ever in his life; well, perhaps nursing his college car home on fumes; but for a long, long time. His shoulders actually twitched at the thought; pull over, turn around; take the long way. But basic morality kicked in before he began acting out. It was criminal to mistreat a child, and not getting this boy to c-camp, asap, would be outright abuse. A trip around the world with the boy would be premature, but ending this chapter isn't.

Chapt. 8

The mood at the camp was serious. Something was afoot. The new boy. Something special about the new boy. Who'd seen him? This boy, that staffer. What was it all about? Charles? Had the ice prince finally melted? Wow! Who? What? Where? How? When?

A precept of c-camp, directly from Charles's lips, was essential to his view of his many young chares. I'm smarter than you are, but, if you learn from me, by the time you're half my age. This went hand in hand with his simplistic approach to himself as perfect, except for his conceit, which kept him from being annoyingly perfect.

At this level it was a good thing to be as good as one's word

Daliel

Sensibilities and sensations.

Work in progress. If it were a freeway overpass, you'd be in mid-air by now.

I remember transistors.