Creative Camp

This work is turning into a novel, and is slowing down as it goes. Readers should be prepared for this pace, and are guaranteed total satisfaction if they have the time to stay the course. Sorry, it's just that kind of story. I've promised David that when I get this and "Ropeyarn." finished I'm going to post a long series of 10K short stories. I love them, big time.

Creative Camp 15 -- 16

(M/b, t/b, t/f, incest)

by

Feather Touch.

Please see title page for customary cautions, restrictions, and so forth.

Chapt. 15

Having ended the last chapter with a personal note, I'll keep my stride by starting in the first person, hoping the reader, as veteran of Capt. 12, will cut me some slack. "Law and Order SVU" is, again, on the chopping block. A compelling hour was spent by this audience member wondering whether the garish acting was going to sub-cede the every-trick-in-the-book script. As terrible as these facets were, it was the mood and motif, the punk on which the story was built, that are the source of real shame for all involved. Precisely as in the last script I reviewed (dead rich girl/hanky-panky with successful, hard-working daddy), we find full enablement of all degrees of guilt, neurosis and obsession, telling each viewer, in no uncertain terms, that any mother/son deal is this, that, and the other thing; mouth-noise of the reverend class.

Please, I'm not saying the stories on Nifty (et al) don't fantasize illegal and highly damaging relationships, similar to millions of alternatives involving physical or psychological torment, without sexual connotations. Many stories do look at the bright side, mine, obviously, included. As David, my editor, says, I chronicle a whole other world. At the same time, many of these Nifty stories are accurate delineations of quality relationships, with only select sizes and quantities distorted to make them hot. In point of fact, my stories, which may seem the wildest fantasy, to some, are tightly patterned on several long relationships, fortunately, from a technical viewpoint, long mooted by statues of limitation.

If anything these affairs were more affectionate, friendly and humorous than those experienced by my pretend couples. The sex is retained, because its fun, because I'm so good at writing it, and, in a world that buys Harlequins by the truckload, I don't seem to write well enough to beguile anyone out of a hard-earned dollar (a subtle hint to you wanna-be working girls and boys: it ain't worth very much). Dealing with agents and publishers is the rawest imaginable experience, though, to preserve a balanced outlook, a newbie claiming to be both a prince and the first extreme fiction artist, can be off-putting. Regrettably, any other bio would be deceptive, so here I am, waltzing around on your monitor, free as a bird..

The joke, I'm sure you realize, is on them, the agents and publishers. Just because they think I can't be, doesn't mean I can't be, and someone, someday, is going to wake up to the fact that not only can I be, but I am, and, perhaps, fortify his or her career path. (The trick is to be legitimate and to be the first to query. I spend too much time at the keyboard to wonder what my agent is up to, so first is tantamount to last and always.)

I am not optimistic, for this is precisely the group that sticks with popular socialism as a be-all/end-all, in spite of the comically-sized mountain of evidence proving they are wrong. The question of the moment is: are these birds-of-a-feather, truly identical? A possible proof is this: since Christmas I've posted something like one hundred thousands words on the Net. They have been massively read, simply because Nifty is. No one in publishing has written a word. They sit there, knowing there is a vast non-socialist market, knowing people like sex, knowing, more surely than the layman can, I'm not only the best there ever has been, but, the best there can ever be, yet mortally petrified, so scared, in fact, they worry about their grandchildren being born with goose bumps, they poke their witless, cowardly shoulder bumps into an Iridium box, the kind with an access code that only responds to self-help and other conventional genres with a ninety-nine-point-nine percent content match to what they're doing now, and always have done.

If I were kind, I'd see them as deer in the headlights; frozen in terror because electronic publishing is going to wipe them off the map, soon and forever, but, in truth, their mechanized money-motor approach puts my pedal to the metal. They aren't deer, they're stagnated and not even worth swerving for, for their own shame will damage them more than my vehicle. If they have the animal grace to thrash off into the woods to die, well, that would at least get them the fuck outta the road. Imagine being squared away in the environmental department and dealing in the mass felling of trees and high-intensity use and disposal of complex chemicals. Psychic oxymorons playing out an interesting variation on the medium being the message, or, more precisely, the medium being a toxic reality. Shucks, these hacks are lucky to be ambulatory, and expecting them to encourage a new voice probably is asking too much.

In such a ritualized and formulated environment, Nifty is the real miracle. I don't have to write and say, look, sure I'm crown prince and heir apparent to empire on top of empire, but, heck, I'm still an okay guy, and, gee, yeah, for some reason I'm the best writer, funniest humorist, and finest artist to ever live, but that don't mean nothin', honest. Nifty doesn't know, because I submit under a pseudonym, and David doesn't care, because the stories seem okay, and that's his business. Publishing okay stories; making it so people can read them. A rare pro in a field full of critics, advisors and morons of enough stripes for an hour of film on the Discovery Channel, except for the unhappy fact that instead their being painted against the white hides of Zebras they've bled together into a giant gray graffiti that is the flag of socialism.

Anyhow, television, since I brought it up, is so of-the-box it makes me think of stories of Torah. Long, long scrolls which must be copied with perfect spelling, because the word of god and future of the Jew, are infinite, so a single misplaced letter would ultimately destroy the whole, thus the cultural attitudes and mores displayed by all media, all the time. The only thing they, and there sure as hell is a "they" in this case, duh'uh, care about is the perfect spelling of the dreary exact sameness. Charles gloried in a mental picture of Hebrews bent to their scrolls, totally understanding the entire waste of their lives, their beings; their very essence never allowed to form as human, slave to an endless ribbon of sheepskin, less able to help themselves than the blindest drunk or most wigged-out hype. In Hollywood, the torture they brought upon themselves was also pretty darn funny. Age discrimination was absolute, even unto writers. Thirty-year old meat, for there are few humans in the place, was gettin' a bit ripe for the trade. And what, in all of all possible worlds, did a loud-mouthed, wheelin' an' jus' a dealin', heavy-bellied schmoes do - after da biz? How many used car salesmen did a culture need?

Charles wasn't sure of his accuracy, but images of thirty-year-old schmoes wandering in search of the love their mamas had gushed every hour, in a world in the end dominated by very icy blue eyes, were just and fine, perhaps represented a good joke. All that misery, and not a brick to sell. They did it to themselves better than a dozen pharos. It was all so cool if one just added overtones of levity. On the other hand, it was enormously destructive if one was not born rich, white, and aloof. A good example was cigarettes. Schmoe lawyers using their enormous rubber faces to transform a tradition of many thousands of years into a fifty dollar a carton nightmare for forty million American citizens. As walloping, ricocheting, and lacerating as their treatment at the hands of the ice eyes has been, they've manage to earn every lash.

Now, I can take this, or dish it out. I am totally enthralled by my work; as fascinated as fascinated can be with every freaking line, and thus live entirely apart. See, the little Jewish boy gets told every few hours, and I know, because I have lived with Jews, how utterly wonderful, handsome, and overall excellent he is. I, with my pink skin, on the other hand, was as frequently informed that I was loathsome, worthless, stupid and lazy: that I'd end up on the back of a garbage truck. We, the Jewish children I lived with, and I, face the world quite differently, as a result of our respective upbringings. The Jew toadies and scuttles to keep all that wonderful warm, flowing love rich and alive. Everybody ends up hating the creep, except he-mama. I, little Anglo boy, on the other hand, grow with a sense of indifference, knowing the world is rough, cold and sharp, certain in my heart the only way to be happy is to read and travel widely, and ignore every single thing in every single mall, no matter how nice the material.

As a result, I became dangerous. Let me show you how dangerous. A liberal reader will be saying here goes another diatribe; the same old stereotyping and scapegoatery. I pivot in a flash, and remind the same reader that in the schmoe town of Hollywood, California, age descrimination is one hundred percent. Than is why the hard Anglo fist is crushing into the hooked Semitic nose. I am persona non grata in your town because of my d.o.b. You are persona non grata on this planet because of everything else. Now I claim to be so dangerous, and all I've done is smack your noses you support the cosmetic surgeons with, trying to make them look like mine, giggle, and 86d you from the third rock. A possum could be that dangerous. I'm not one of them, I'm a writer, and when I get dangerous I point out how you will bring up Schwshzitzshit Finkel, from "Pickett Fences," a thespian of a certain age, and walk off. The reason you walk off is you believe you are chosen. I am here to remind you were chosen by legends of your own cultural hand; that you are in the image of a god you invented. So utterly corrupt is this logic, from and Anglo viewpoint, that half our entertainment is thrilling to your misery. We love Anne Frank, every selfish, nasty, lazy, wanna-be-actress pound of her. Please never let us forget your story of how foulness begets foulness, and how horrific the cost of foulness. If you happen not to like us, well and good, you may have your reasons, but do give us this small credit: we will endure the loss of our tribe to ensure the destruction of our own. That is how we love our planet, how we love our blue marble that, weeded, often yields long stretches of happiness and prosperity for large numbers of humans over long stretches of time. See, Hebrew, you do it with lawyers, spin, your simply amazingly gigantic Seinfeld rubber faces; and I do it with joy. You discriminate, okay, Schwshzitzshit Finkel and a few others aside, one hundred percent, on age, for crying out loud; the New York garment district is always painted as the worst place on earth to do business, and so on and so forth, specifically including the music industry, its rape of Napster, and it's cruel skill in packaging a single decent cut on a seventeen-dollar compact disc. It is actually easy, if time consuming, to lie here at my keyboard and render each coin of your purse into profane and stolen property, red hot, and, like the truth, dangerous. We may want them back, someday, for a good English laundering, if for no other reason.

Does this make any sense to you? It's happened so many times over so many centuries in so many diversified cultures, surely you are not all too stupid to get the picture, the films of H-Town, notwithstanding. How confident do you feel, once again playing your Stereotype and Scapegoat cards?

You are so awfully poorly developed it's like trying to write for cloven-hoofed animals, but, still, let me try; let me, at the very least, remind you that Spielberg, alone, has made mints off Shindler's deck; the cards are worn, yellow and getting the more brittle with age. We already know how Einstein rubbed against Anglos, and of the relatively important spark generated. We've seen Uncle Milty, why I've, personally, seen Larry King, hardened pro-man that he is, practically melt at the very name. The golden-age of television, which always seems to mean Lucy and her chocolates; Lenny with his stick. Am I forgetting anyone? Sorry Babs, that was a near thing. Reader one, reader all, who would you choose, me, or one of the chosen pwweeeppeelleeee? Perhaps more accurately, who would you choose to be chosen by?

(If you don't think it's awesome living with an absolutely genuine full-blooded, direct-descendent American prince, who just happens to the most extreme of all artists, and a first-rate inventor, to boot, then you're for the dodo hall of fame, make to mistake. Did I say awesome? Well, I meant it. He even looks like a prince. It's quite too much. He's tightening up because I'm in his story, and I even had to be a bit rude and point out that he's in his story: I'm a character named Ego; he's the writer; if anyone belongs here, it's me, not him. Shit, all that praise, so sincere in every word, but I forgot funny! Ho-boy, I'm outta here!)

Any media that reinforces the taboos imposed by ancients who would burn you alive if you insisted the world was round, or, if you sailed against the wind, is such a highly destructive force that it costs countless billion by promoting neurosis, however the neurotics might deserve their wet pillows, and it thus ruins many lives, and helps absolutely no one, except the coin pocketeers. In the television episode cited at the beginning of this chapter, the cop or psychiatrist or lawyer -- someone along the way - should have said, "Look kid, there's probably thirty or forty million guys that have had some experience like yours, be thankful your mom's not a pig in a housecoat, and forget it."

Not to wrap myself in anyone else's fiction, of course, but I do feel if the Killer in this particular episode had read a hundred or so Nifty stories, he'd either have learned to live with something so common, or, he'd have actually enjoyed a very special and engaging partnership, however kinky. (Larry McMurtry virtually confesses to bestiality in his Rice trilogy, and, as much as the thought is no great shakes, I'm sure I'd rather have done it with my mother than any critter.) A third alternative has him loving his Nifty stories so much, first, he wouldn't take time away from them, other than to eat, sleep, and use the toilet, and, secondly, if he did a crime, and got caught, he'd no longer be able read in paradise, so, again, he'd stay home He (the fictional television murdered) would have loved my honesty and modesty; not telling the truth about myself, proving it with each line that crawls complete across the page and instantly drops to the one below, which comes out just as beautifully. And, to continue in an uncompromisingly vainglorious style (Me need copyrights? No one can even come close -- picture Ditmyer in "A Very Brady Movie:" Impossible!), I would point out that the message in this paragraph applies - to you. If you get fired for reading me, when you should be doing something else, how are you going to continue to read me? Remember, I'm one dude with one keyboard; I can only turn out so much. You have lots of time to read my every cherry sweet, diamond polished word, time and again, as long as you maintain in a condition to read, at all. I do my part by not wasting your time; salmon steaks over cherries jubilee: you do yours by balancing your life so you can be a happy fan for years to come. And, to spend another minute with our fictional killer, before getting back to the marvel that is me, what if he had written a story or two? Let off steam, if you will. Remember how schmoes love the concept: "If It Saves A Single Live?" Nifty saves lives, and I do, by keeping a total rainbow of pervs glued harmlessly like bugs to their monitors.

Sure it's tiresome: I am the best in the world, godlike in the sense of being ultimate and unsurpassable. I even have a godlike arrogance, hiding my word in a labyrinth of convoluted syntax. You don't deserve it, most of you, so I hide it, leaving those that do care about language, thought; ideas and paradigms, principal holders of the keys to the best sex on the planet, among other things. Now aren't you glad you did your homework? My vastly read maternal grandmother once found out I hadn't yet read Thackery. Several time a day she would remind me how lucky I was, not to yet have read him, because I had such a treat in store. I feel the same about you. You are very, very lucky. Read slowly.

You know what? I lived in Mexico for five years, and I never took the ride from Chihuahua to the west coast. Copper Canyon. I always wanted the experience in my future. Again, read slowly.

A whole generation of writers, then a second, and now a third, were and are being destroyed by Vietnam, and through some mystic and ethereal vector, maybe a beaming sideways, instead of up, all their talent has come, to me. Even so, what I think impresses my readers the most is the skill with which I use the talent; the work I've devoted to developing it. While this is not only well-and-good, but heroically deserved and vastly appropriate, there is a difficult side: the boundless and aggressive nature of the beast.. He says, look, buster, you lie in bed, all day, every day; get yourself one of Bill's primo editions of XP, and I'll never even take a nap. Of course, I say back to him, that I'm to get the credit, because I read the thousands on thousands of books and magazines, I endangered my health by not only visiting foreign lands and cultures, but living there and amongst them, for decades. Plus, it's my eyes that have to stay open at three a.m. and my fingers that have to set the freaking type. Talent never did any of that for anybody. (Of course, guts can't do it for anybody, either.) He counters that I was an abused child that grew up to be a dilettante and wanna-be ne'er-do-well; that, without him, I'd be a high-maintenance slacker zot. In the final analysis, I'm glad he's mine and I'm not his, and doubly glad for the workaday miracle of Word XP. I'd also like to take this opportunity call him a piss-ant, because he makes it sound like I'm in bed all day, by choice, when he knows full well it's deep-veined thrombosis, plus he conveniently ignores the fact that my writing stance has never even begun to fail to produce ten thousand words whenever I feel in the mood to do a little editing, which takes no more talent than mowing grass.

How much better am I? That's a favorite question; I spend so much time wondering about it, I'd cheat my readers if I did not type out my thoughts. There is more to me, in a paragraph, almost any paragraph, than there is in the entire published and unpublished output of all writers who paved the way. To begin to understand, you might try this: picture any psychiatrist reading these same words you are. As he reviews his notes, isn't it just possible he will breath a soft prayer that says: "Please, god, he's so funny, and he's such an artist; he is sincere, he tries to be friendly, he has worked so hard, don't, oh, please, don't let him be a letter short of the alphabet." How much skill does it take to portray a psychiatrist as a member of the human race? I rest my case, but not for long.

So much better; so vaultingly better, the very word melts to something like butter. Better?. Isn't that for homes and gardens? We're talking art here; a lacy, ethereal drift right the hell off the face of the freaking planet, a wholly different world of grace, manners, affection, cooperation, friendship, love and totallyawesomewickedsex, obtainable for all down to the lower stratas of society, yet perversely held at bay for want of weeding the garden of its nettles, thistles, choke berries and poison ivies, sumacs and oaks. How nice of it is of me to wield the machete, hand you a bottle of lotion, and suggest, with a wink, you apply it where the sun never shines.

There are other very good writers, and one great one. The great one is John O'Hara, short stories, only. Good ones include John D. MacDonald and a well known list of his contemporaries, of whom John Irving and the already mentioned Larry McMurtry are the finest individual examples. In point of hard fact, the average story on Nifty reads every bit as smoothly and well as the average book from the library shelf, though awesome content mitigates any literary imperative, and tends to bias a critic such as myself. I mean I think if we don't rule literature, yet, we will, soon enough, so who am I to act as a judge?

Since I've mentioned the Texas bookseller, twice, I'd like to go for three. They asked him what he was reading at the moment, perhaps you saw it, and he said, "Haven't read for years."

Young writers, there's a world of wisdom from Larry McMurtry's mouth, through my keyboard, to you.. Read 3,000 books by the time you're forty, after that, just read as necessary -- with one important exception. Nifty. Nothing, but nothing, could be better than reading hundreds and thousand of life stories; all places, classes, groups, races and backgrounds Honestly, under what possible alternative auspices would you be likely to read many amateur works, teachers excepted? Since it's also the world's least expensive travel service, you get a finer flavor of other cultures than you could realize with a handful of tourist tickets, any class, any destination, and that's important, because travel is as much a prerequisite to writing as reading. And talk about value added; on Nifty you do get to read amateurs, and reading the amateur is like teaching. You see what the so-called student did wrong, and recognize it, sometimes quite painfully, if you give a shit, in yourself. Hyperbole and over writing are the two obvious examples, as well as convoluted syntax, which is something, as they say on television, not to be tried at home, and, there are many subtle traps, as well. The new young writers, bless them, fall into all of them; step on the mines, and leave us sadder and wiser as we follow the path of craters down the valley and out onto the open plain, where we throttle-up happily, indeed, just push that puppy right the fuck through the firewall for no other reason than the thrill of being free, American, and a bat out of hell. These writers (their contact with explosives being metaphorical) will go on to dominate an important segment of literature and, obviously, the only next step if there is to be any progress, at all. How can they help it; they've had a ripping teacher. As that bold agent will one day find me, and make his sale, he will find others; it's either that or "Providence," and the risks associated with making an entire country gag in unison. Nifty or Tyne Dailey, you idiots.

In toto, after reading perhaps a thousand Nifty stories, a writer comes to know the exact, precise, to-the-millimeter boundaries of his art; can actually, at some point beyond virtuosity, stand on his own sidelines and jeer, gesticulate and taunt. If he's mad about America being voted out of the UN Human Rights Committee, he can blame it on Jesse Jackson and the hulking monsters terrorizing a high-school football game he repeatedly called children. Jesse, more than a covered palm of semen, it's not a child. That was a Jackie Chan demo. Literary kick-boxing. (By the way, he's the best person who has ever lived; beats out Bill by virtue of his supreme niceness. That brings up the idea of a contest for the worst person. Oprah said on national television the worst human is Mark Fuhrman, so I've lost a vote before we begin.)

I'm having a problem because the wanna-be-writer's list of imperatives is so short. Read 3,000 books by the time you're forty, then stop; read John O'Hara's short stories, and read a thousand Nifty stories a year so you won't have to travel . Who sang that song, "Is that all there is to a fire?" (Peggy Lee.)

You may be saying okay, okay, I do all this, but you're a prince, and you have an ego that takes up many pages. What am I (I being you, in this case) to write about? You could try cleverness. Watch me give an example: if you think you lack anything to write about, go back and re-read Chapt. 12. (If you're contrairian by nature, skip ahead to 16.) See any nobility in these scenes? Well, there you go then.

Meantime, I'm going to advise you: don't risk passage on the Irish Sea at the wrong time of year. I've never been there, and for all I know the shepherd boys are snaggle-tooth stinkers you wouldn't trust with your worst enemy's dog.

To carry on with the create-and-play-at-the-same-time aspect of the art of fiction, imagine Mozart coming on stage, and, off the top of his head, providing a thousand-page divertimento, every phrase either an outright masterpiece or in direct support of same; themes that stick and grow and flourish, a predictable complexity often central to art, with the highest challenge to the writer to bring the world gently and slowly forward. Forward. Gently. In a mild, perhaps even humorous ways, to explore alternatives common to countless millions, and hundreds of millions, while holding the reader so lightly he'll be offended with a sentence ending in a preposition, yet require of the same reader that he be rugged enough to have his head chewed off by ants, mailed to him in a leaky container, and find nothing to take offense at.

I was going to ask if anyone has read Ayn Rand, recently? What's her doctrine? Conservative/Utopian, or something of that nature? Agendized fiction? All I remember is a scene where a light plane spins out of control in the Rockies, and crashes-lands on the secret airstrip of some truly private folk. Perhaps it was crossing the mountains in light aircraft, time and again, myself, that made me laugh out loud; anyway, she's too much glasses and a haircut for my Yankee blood. It has been said she is the least-talented author ever published.

Talent? Author? Writer? In summary, the writer has the genius, the author, the book. Since no system of endeavor is perfect, even American publishing occasionally mixes things up, probably at the clerical level, so writers become authors. And the talent thing does happen to be a legitimate mystery, so they, the publishers, do not have an easy time of it. When I was twenty I was hired as a full-time continuity director for a moderate-sized radio station. In 1977 I completed my first hundred-page-plus manuscript, and, looking back, I don't remember it having any glimmer beyond the high-school level. Less than routine. So, granted a glibness that allowed hacking thirty-second radio scripts selling three tins of mixed peas and carrots for eighty-nine cents, I would have to say any level of gift or talent was essentially zero, and this in spite of being scion to a literary heritage that was featured for two-and-a-half hours, and more, on C-SPAN, yesterday. (Hint: Have you ever heard of Concord? Walden?).

What you see on these pages is one-hundred-thousand hours of practice, on a foundation already detailed. Now I have to tell the story of a relative who loves a particular instrument, practices assiduously, goes to musical gatherings every year, and has not improved one iota in seventy, count them, seventy years.

As exemplified by the commentary following the review of "Law and Order, SVU," your burg is in serious need of some new talent. The last finely written film I've seen, because it's that last one there is, was "Fargo." The last two fiction hits I read (breaking McMurtry's law), because they are the last there are, were Ford's "Independence Day" and a story of Newfoundland titled "The Shipping News." Both were fine, neither was great, though Mr. Ford did exceedingly well with the wacko potters from Vermont, and his Crown Vic. (Anyone who can craft a Ford into his fiction is a man's writer.) An interesting note, in context, is that "The Shipping News" sketches a rural newspaper in which stories on the sexual abuse of children were mandatory in each issue. Selling newspapers in Newfoundland. Kid power.

What a list of talent. So old the paper is yellow. With a monumental exception. You guessed it, Nifty.

Mercifully, for all of us, guess what? Nifty publishes erotica, and I happen to write it. If you'll treat this pyramid of contemporary culture to a generous donation, I'll stop trying to kiss David's butt and get back to demonstrating what a tenth of a million hours of practice can do for a glib faculty .

Blissy and Timmy lay with their chins on Charles's collarbone, chomping their jaws to set up vibrations. How could they look so much like nitwits, anytime they pleased?

More saliently, what was he going to do with them? He'd bent a rule or two in his time, but never with anyone so coltishly young, and never with kids of such disparate age. He really knew, in his bone of bones, it wasn't going to happen. Not with one, much less the pair. All the freckles, the four unquenchably lively eyes, all the pretty, slightly big teeth in the wide boy-mouths, going up and down, clack-bump, clack-bump, so few inches from his chin, were for each other. Kid's stuff. Immature. Indulgent. Narcissistic Perverted. Predatory?

They attacked his shirt and he beat them off. They grinned and conspired; feinted and sometimes marched in finger troops of inching creeps, spy missions, they called them. No wonder the Germans had dumped the Jews; it was torment to be the victim of subtle, subterranean, lurking, toying, there-one-second; gone-the-next, insidious subterfuge. The children seemed to have only their own immediate interests in mind, but instead of participating in the fleecing of a currency, their subtle self-interests were becoming tawdry, if not downright carnal. Why couldn't they just take his gold and be happy?

What would a jury say, watching a video of what was happening on his bed? There would be lots of conversation, clearly establishing an intense friendship, and one likely to last for many years. The door was unlocked; that was obvious; no privacy assumed, the venue was a camp with some hundred and more full-time residents. The boys had stopped with the chomping, and were now involved in a piranhic assault, nipping their way to neck and chin Were they actually giggling as they committed this felonious assault? Were both their little-boy hands trying to get through the gap between the second and third buttons, at the same time? (Now there's a lesson: I could have written it as "buttons, at one and the same time?" Only over by an inch, yet it would be a point of white paint on a Surette nose. Let me end this embarrassing but useful interruption by assuring everyone that the next thing white on anyone's nose will not be paint.)

What would a jury think if they could see an hour of two boys playing with an attractive, friendly man? Charles always felt the indoctrination and desensitization processes would take less than five minutes for average, healthy people. The only naysayers of any constituency would be the bible beaters, notorious for sinning like Satan and praying like hell. It was funny that they spent massed fortunes on their myths, de-empowered themselves in the process, but they could be hell on a jury. Weak minds reviewing mouth-words to do with the high road created the damage seen in the Little Rascals daycare center, and in many places, and to many institutions, and families; all over something that would be accepted by functioning, literate people, with hardly a murmur, after the initial shock. (And for this television viewer, nothing to do with twining kids and younger adults could be as offensive as close-ups of animal wounds during the breakfast hour, and this is a stunt the documentary channels pull time and again.)

An Actuality Tape is now used in law. A video, including frontal views of an erect male, made by a rapist as he attacked his victim. This tape is used, generically, as the best way to convey the magnitude of any violent rape, to a jury. A tape of Charles and the two boys playing somewhat fast and loose on his chest would be typical of non-violent, non-seductive boylove. He chuckled to the thought of how much greater he was, as a writer and a human, than all the lawyers, put together. With a frown, he realized, in actuality, and measured by the one-hundred million lawsuits on file, it would be difficult to find any room beneath this modern-day peculiar institution. Of course there were the writers of "Law and Order, SVU," but going that low would be a city things; sewers, manholes and steam grates would need to be available. It was simpler and cleaner to chew their heads off at the neck, and ship them in baskets, since there would be no blood.

The jury, at this point, doesn't know what it's watching. It seems to be a stalemate; wriggling boys against two finger-walls. How would they react as they watched the children feint from an obstacle in one direction, and, as if by spoken command, divert their assault? What if there was a microphone present and it picked up: "You're playing. You've got a huge boner, it's hard as a rock, and you want us to take our shirts off, but you're chicken to ask because we're such tender little itty-bitty babies."

Charles assumed the jury would know it was Timmy speaking. His brogue was tame, but sweetly there. Who would not be charmed? Twelve men, sound and square? He wanted to give the men a test. Take five hundred males, eighteen to fifty, randomly, off the street, and subject them to half-an-hour of kiddie porn. Assuming privacy and anonymity, how many would get up and leave after a mandatory five minutes? How many would stay as long as possible, and masturbate, repeatedly? In his mind, the split was seventy percent, stay, and thirty percent, leave. If he had to bet how he might be wrong, he'd opt for a higher stay,' lower go' ratio. And yet even obvious opportunities to provide a hint of perspective were ignored.

In one "ER" sequence a very cute fourteen-year-old male prostitute ends up as a case of interest. He's a nice kid, desperate for a home, and the tech-jargon hacks don't give the possibility that he might successfully connect, at least at the suggestive level, with any of the handsome, young, single, well-housed doctors even the barest nod to acknowledge the possibility exists. How straight is the accepted norm? You've got to be kidding. Even I can't get a grip on that little gem.

Charles knew this was why the vast majority of films were lucky to do ten or fifteen million on an opening weekend; why the concession stand was the cash cow in every theater, and the cans of films just something to run through the union operated projectors. It was a place to go on a date, but, to an average release, only some fraction of one percent of the folks went, half for the popcorn. Again, the camp director, soon-be-victim of two lively underage boys, returned to the mental and artistic underclass of the all-American imported schmoe. Carson, Hoffa and Sinatra headed the list, with Liz as token something-or-the-other. Charles liked to throw hard Yankee into the faces of Jews who claimed his schmoe thing was anti-Semitic. He'd bait them; was clever enough to do it without money, by commenting on their lack of creativity. Reflexively, they'd point to Lenny the Stick and his New York orchestra. Mawweeeaaa. You know the one. Countering, reflexively, he'd fire his salvo of schmoes: Carson, Sinatra and Hoffa, and add, in unanswerable triumph, that Liz was a Christian well into adulthood and in lovey-love with Debbie Reynold's, or somebody's husband, with a coupe de grace in Norm Abrams, whom he regarded as the best guy on television, after Jackie Chan.

As the lawyers left Napster, Charles would leave Tinsel Town. They were fools and even into the new century hadn't realized that the imperatives of film-making, pure and simple, had completely reversed, in recent years. Technically, since we're talking about Technicolor, the speed of motion picture film, through the seventies [I believe], was ASA rated Ten. Bright sun, huge fill-lights with smoke stacks and sail-size reflectors were always needed to get good color.

Now the case is exactly the opposite. Film is fast and production-quality video, faster. Now the sun is the mortal enemy. Hard shadows. Difficult and often impossible to even basically match shots. Limited daylight, because magenta is poison and fills the light as much as hours after sunrise and before sunset. And as extreme as the open-light regimen was, it was doubled or tripled for any scene shot in low light. With all the folderol, it yield flat and vapid results which deteriorated, rapidly, with age.

Clouds, of an by themselves, give a depth and luminosity to interiors and exteriors, alike. A picture with glowing greens, almost prettier than fresh grass, wet streets, reflecting lamps and windows; right down to a darkness that comes only under heavy could cover, or long before dawn or after sunset, and which can easily be bumped with a candle or flashlight. Clouds are often variable, so if a director wants to use special lighting for a scene, he may get it, simply by waiting a short while, from the sun filtered by rolling cumulus, or by thirty-thousand-foot-high cirrus. [This is why Santa Fe is so favored by chroma-hounds; not only does it have beautiful and delicate scenery, it often has months on end of light cloud cover, and, frequently, a perfect light, which is a diffused sun casting about twenty percent of the normal black shadow. I lived there five years. I remember, a hundred times, simply holding my hand in front of my face to see it glow.]

Speaking of clouds brings us to Blighty with its almost perfect, year-round new-generation shooting conditions, and England brings us to Daliel, the detective, and Daliel brings us back to sex. In a recent A&E presentation, the young sergeant fully kisses a very cute and very young street kid. Mind you, they didn't go all the way; the cop and the kid did, but the writers didn't, quite. First, they had him black, though highly sympathetic and memorable, and, second, they had him killed. The male is not underage, quite, but there is bare-chested French kissing, and they eventually end up in bed, overnight.. Hey, it's a start.

Every story on Nifty that tells it like it very often is, and every film that does the same, reduces the torment of victims lucky enough to read or see it, and provides a vast new avenue toward the happiness and fulfillment of many others. It is not a toy, not, by god, in a culture in which one in five girls and one in seven boys is molested by a family member. Instead of lopsided distorted nonsense, Mawweeeaaa, the message should be patience until the right person comes along, then unbridled lust up to ten hours a week, starting at any age and with any chosen and stable partner. This was a social imperative rivaling marijuana, and a small cadre of very unhappy jurist called the shots.

Huge minorities should be granted, to the point of assumption, the highest possible level of inclusion, and never beaten off with twisted words from paid-in-cash mouths quoting book lines. (What if you piss of so many, they beat you back? A base-line of fifty million young music lovers wandering their savaged Troy, called Napster, is unhealthy, probably dangerous. Add forty million smokers and a like number of weed addicts, and even Stormin' Normin might bluster over casualties, costs and probable outcome. He'd consider his day a fiasco when someone pasted into the Every Right To Be Pissed file a giant list of alternate porn aficionados.) Today's statistics bear this out; everything from body size to drug use, and underpin a philosophy that holds even incremental variation to scripts and productions in high contempt. So vastly underpins a defective social norm, as a matter of fact, dysfunctional homes outnumber productive households, or soon will. (It has been recently said that bio peeps are rising back to something over half; well, sure, Bill Gate's tide has floated every boat in the country, on way or another, and, excluding peripheral and alternative groups, had added, in the end, a dimension of infinity to the equation simply because it could not be other than disastrously calculated without him.)

To play my roll as the complexly predictable one I'll stow the convolutions and render plain enough speech, same subject, to be kenned by a moron's moron. See, it's this way: when I was growing up, in the fifties and sixties, I knew a thousand kids, or more, and not one of them, except Peter K., who took Phenobarbital for epilepsy, took any pills, whatever. All three of my nephews have taken Ritalin, for years. Thousands of them.

That's one of the awesome examples of the difference between then and now, like the 47-year credit card, and Duane Eddy, even his name is cool, and James Dean. Mr. Eddy played a germinal electric guitar that invented a permanent dynamic, particularly in the, yes, dated, "Because They're :Young." James Dean combed an empty breeze with hair, hair and more of the stuff.

Ironic to cull these contemporaries of each other as examples of a totally split generation, but accurate. Duane Eddy is minor league these days, and James Dean is on television every day. (Come to think of it, there might be a "Night Train" riff in some commercial; I could stand corrected.)

Timmy and Blissy were beginning a transition from playful to fidgety. In his efforts to take his mind off 180 pounds of very warm young male on his chest, and twined to his legs, Charles realized he'd let his thoughts drift too far. He was glad he wrote for a mature audience who would take diversions in stride as long as he did for them, the readers, that which he did for the cuddling children. Killing two birds with one stone, we decide to tell a story.

Four big round eyes; Blissy's the bigger, because he'd already done a story telling. [Author's note: This ms is passing the 170 page mark, and I'm damned if I'm going to go back and refresh my memory as to who told stories to whom while Blissy and Charles were driving and parking on the way to camp and following. Just thought I'd mention it, and remind you of the rare chance you are having to read, writer's keyboard / reader's monitor. (Come to think of it, I always prefer other peoples' stories when I have an hour for Nifty, so I've never even seen one of mine in print; anyway, what I was going to say was, Unedited. But maybe David does edit them. Speaking of other stories, and remember we have a hero who needs distraction to prevent a premature ending, I'm reading an exceptional post, from ASSGM, titled "David and Timmy," and thought I'd include Marc's URL, if that's the right acronym, so you can read it when you've had a bellyful of my dicking around. What? There is none. Shows how much I know about computers and the Net. Anyhow, ASSGM is great, in some ways my favorite, and it should end up in their May, '01, Archive. Good story, dude; makes me want to try a hairy character (though the dom thing doesn't quite mesh with my personal style. Hmmm)).] He nudged little Timmy, and both children nestled to the powerful chest against their young bodies. The Children's Hour.

. . .

John had run into Steve as a houseguest. Brad, eleven, had made several close passes while the conversation was general and distracting, pulling his T-shirt nearly to his boy nipples. He hadn't winked or acted lascivious, that John could see, but, at the same time, the height to which he pulled his shirt, exposing his soft, white boy tummy, had made an indistinct impression on the thirty-year-old biker.

The only thing other than the mild display happened when John was in the toilet. The door opened a crack, and a little voice came through. "Can I come in, just for a second, and show you something?" it said. John was finishing, and said come ahead. Brad came in and pulled a washcloth from where it lay at the side of the basin. One the porcelain was a little written sentiment to the effect that boys could run fast because they had ball bearings and a stick shift. The boy dashed, giggling, but not before giving John a soft, yearning look, lasting less than a second. Business overtook John's life, and he occasionally masturbated to fantasies of the child he'd only been in the presence of for minutes of a two-hour visit. He was glad of the visit, six months later, when a mutual friend called to tell him Steve had been killed in a bike wreck. Glad, because he could write out a check for a thousand dollars, he'd really liked the guy, even on brief acquaintance, and thus perhaps track the very average looking, with a tiny amount of kiddie fat on his belly, Brad, to his lair.

Before offering the check John decided to test the waters, so his phone call was almost as a stranger who just wanted to express a quick sorrow at a remote loss, but a loss, nonetheless. Vicki, Steve's friendly wife, answered the phone and John identified himself as a friend of Hal and Irene. Before he could remind her of the circumstances of their meeting, and offer his acknowledgement of the accident, Vicki almost gushed at how nice it was of him to call, and yes, she remembered him, and especially Brad. "I think he had a crush on you; he's that kind of kid," she concluded.

"How's he taking the loss?" John asked.

"Half-hard. He loved the biking and they got along well; Steve was a step-father to him, not his natural father, but he's kind of a hurtin' kid, still."

"Well," John said, "I'm flattered he remembers me, and one reason I called was that I'm not doing anything special this weekend, maybe a Prairie du Chein turn and take a ferry across the river. I thought if Brad was up for some wind, I could bring down the rice burner and we could knock off a few Harleys to work up an appetite for some of those country-kitchen burgers."

"Well, John," Vicki laughed, "you've set yourself a challenge. He is a Harley boy, and claims he always will be. It will take some charm and cajolery to get him on an offshore bike."

"I've got a bit of that if I'm in the right mood," John explained, "but I've also got a V-Max that's rated at 130 horsepower, with a driveshaft as thick as Harley boy's arm, or at least as thick as I remember it being."

"Well, anything less and I wouldn't even bother to ask; on second thought, he's in his room; why don't you break the news."

In a few moments a gentle boy's voice came on the line. This surprised John, because he remembered the child as being positive and pleasingly short of bumptious. It could have been the death of his step-father, two weeks ago, but even the single gentle, "Hi," didn't convey nearly so much grief as mystery. A soft, breezy, beautiful, slightly lolling, "Hi."

"I'm sorry about you step-dad," John said and the boy replied with his thanks.

For moments, John felt awkward. He wanted to kid the boy about the Yamaha and the Harley, but didn't want to exercise his understanding of youthful resilience with a child he didn't know. His dilemma was answered by Brad, himself. "Well," the boy commented, "Steve weighed almost four hundred pounds, and he was pushing forty. It could have been real hard for him; I half think he crashed half on purpose. I mean he was a great dad, and I miss him, but that's why I feel the way I do, and Mom, too. We cry, but it's half in relief."

"So," John asked, "it's just you and your mom?"

"And my uncle, Brad, I'm named for him, he's my mom's fraternal twin. Plus cousins and stuff. But Brad and I are really close, and he's really close to mom, too."

"Where does he live?" John asked.

"He's a navy pilot, in the Philippines for a week and three more days"

"Sounds like a great uncle," John commented.

"We're buds to the bone; I mean, you know, we like hanging out together."

"Lucky."

"Definitely."

"Well, Brad," John said into the receiver, "I was talking to your mom, and I told her my darkest secret, and she thought you'd better hear it from me, directly; maybe so you wouldn't get mad at her, even though she'd just be the messenger."

"Yeah," Brad replied, "she's standing across the kitchen looking like the cat that swallowed the ostrich. Something's up. What?"

"Your worst nightmare, from the sound of things," John said, "sent eight thousand miles across the ocean to ruin you day and torment your nights."

"Sushi?"

"Do you want to hang out for the weekend? If you wear a blindfold and heavy ear muffs you won't know a things is wrong, and no raw fish."

"Ear muffs, in June?"

"You'll be happier that way, trust me."

"Trust you? I've figured the whole thing out, and you're trying to get me on a Sake Screamer. Wing-ding-ding-ding."

"Child," John retorted, "listen very carefully. When you punch it at eighty, it hits a hundred and forty, in nine seconds. Those are intensely exciting seconds, like a big electric motor attached di-rectly to Hover Dam. There is no noise; there is no vibration, just white stripes like tracer bullets. I'm not trying to seduce you, or anything, but it rides and handles better with an extra ninety pounds or so riding post. You'd be doing me a favor."

"Do you have a helmet;" the boy replied after a thoughtful pause, "if I wear mine, everybody will know, and Jimmy Carver will beat me up between eleven forty-five and noon on Monday. It'll be worth it, and sometimes I'm not really sure he's beating me up, at all; but, nonetheless, it'd be cool if I could go incognito, at least until we get out of town."

"I'll pick out something at the dealer on my way down, keep things on the q t."

"I really remember you a lot," the boy said, and they said good-bye.

John checked his mirrors, and, seeing them clear, zigged his bike into the Evans's yard, killing the engine and gliding discretely next a hedge, like a thief. Vicki waved from the porch; a pretty young woman; very young to have an eleven year old. He handed her the check as he said hello. She tried to push it off, but he explained that business was good, his expenses were low, and he loved giving away money more than anything in the world, he didn't quite know why. (Actually it was a complex variation on greed. Free pleasure. The money went for goods, services, or investment, precisely as it would if he spent it; the freebie was an almost ethereal extra layer of happiness to each dollar. His definition of Value Added. John did not explain.) Vicki hugged him and they entered the house.

John heard Brad before he saw him. "I'd rather be eaten by a million lice, than ride on a bike, that runs on rice!"

The boy had grown. The kid that had displayed six months before was now almost five feet tall; long legged and big footed. He was dressed in a cut-off Tee and what must have been last year's shorts, though, judging from the change in his appearance, they could have been last-month's. "I was just kidding," he said as he come up, suddenly shy, and shook hands.

"Well," John said, "I brought the helmet, anyhow, on the assumption people who like hogs have limited mental resources, to begin with. You know, the old why-take-chances bit."

Vicki laughed and prodded her son for an answer. Brad just grinned happily. One older guy was worth a dozen pushy, smelly, noisy kids. All they liked was frog-rant "music," hair, boards, bikes and endless scut talk about bitches and knockers and twats. Half the guys in his class had boinked every girl in the class, and forty hours a week of them was plenty. The rest of the time he built models. There was no quicker way to the you-know-what of the right kind of man than a half-done sailing ship that had already consumed five hundred meticulous hours.

John was certainly impressed, and breathed a sigh of relief as he entered the cluttered room, oops, studio. The kid really was a somebody. He'd been worried about a parasite; the assumption that somehow he could live some other person's life; learn, say, math for someone else. He chuckled at the notion. That would be something, wouldn't it, if a boy could prove his love for a girl by learning algebra for her? The model building rubble with the little half built barkentine , in its miniature dry-dock, in the center of the kid's-room confusion, was exactly right. Exquisite without being prissy, and emblematic of an artist's focus that yielded beauty from chaos, by ignoring chaos.

Brad's half-built maritime vessel was the culmination of a long series of punts, prams, dinghies and small workboats. His tools were knives, gouges and scrapers, on almost a dental scale; a vice, and a rectangular magnifying glass with a built-in florescent tube. The lumber for ships a-building was a stack of peeled twigs, drying in miniature racks. When dry, they would be swung to the little wooden vice with a miniature crane, and Brad would saw them with a two-inch blade. "This is where I was when you called," the boy explained, showing a half-sawn knee emerging from a section of four-inch by one-inch oak. As he watched, the slender pre-teen bent over his magnifying glass and operated the tiny saw. "It takes awhile," the child murmured.

"Falling in love with you doesn't," John thought to himself. He'd been looking for a willing bed-buddy; now looky here. A boy who could support himself for a lifetime, without working, in any real sense, a day in his life. Wasn't this pretty exclusively the province and privilege of the writer? He'd never thought of model building seriously; who had? But the table-top shipyard diorama, with its racks of drying twigs, had to be worth thirty thousand, or more. And the kid was eleven. The collection of little skiffs and workboats would double the overall value, for there was to each the sparse touch of the hard-eyed artist. Less and less and less until only what was somehow stunning remained to ogle.

Speaking of which, Charles sat on the end of the bed to watch the boy. He'd remembered the child as a common looking boy, and he'd been right, even to the lankier edition that sat three feet away. Just a nice looking kid, sand colored hair in a fuzzy-chick cut, slim oval face with a slightly biggish, friendly mouth. Big brown eyes. A bit long in the legs to be a twinkie, but still short of the strapping teen. A gentle classic, not gaudy, even in cut-offs and tight short-shorts, but, rather, simultaneously easy on the eyes and intensely exciting.

John hadn't been with a boy for several years, and he did not try to hold his imagination in check. The neck was long, the shoulders one full stage of development over the delicate bird-wings of the immature child. But the legs were the thing. Where had they come from, in just half a year? The feet. They had to be glorious nines. Nothing better for a kid than a pair of gunboats that got him teased into the library or to the studio. In a way it was sad; the girls would change their minds, completely, but by then those long, slim legs would be shared with someone who appreciated the brains and spirit early, fully and permanently. Sorry.

"What do you do?" Brad asked.

"Run a bookstore," John replied.

"Making this stuff takes up most of my free time, but I read a lot at school; maritime and river history. I guess that's pretty obvious."

"Yes," John answered. "It is very obvious."

"Especially from my report cards," Brad mumbled.

"You, too?" John quizzed.

"You screwed up in school, too?" Brad asked, more happily.

"Had to. It actually is impossible to read, and study geometry or chemistry, at the same time; impossible to read, and run the requisite pattern of social drills, while adhering to the minimal list of quirky modifications to the skill-sets needed to be cool.."

"You thought it was bad when you were eleven," the boy responded, "think what it's like now. All the wifty chicks trying to talk inside and outside, at the same time, like the valley girls. Saying `as if' as if they made up half the fucking language. Punkywoowoo teens must have been cute in the Sixties, but they're stale as bread on a slow boat to China, by now."

"Ah," John replied, "we just need a good war to clear the mosh pits, that'll give your generation an identity. In the meantime, you guys look okay. A boy dressed like a hamper leaves a lot to the imagination, and that can be cool."

"I notice that, too," Brad said.

"You do?" John asked.

"Yeah, Rippy Longstockings. That's what we call him. His name is Richard, but he has an Indian last name, Long-stalking. He's nine and he walks around in a cloud of cloth; bundled, and furled, like a brig after a blow. Everyone can't wait `tll next year, and he gets to take showers. That word will be around school in a hurry."

"When I grew up," Charles interjected, "it was incest; who was a daddy's, or big brother's, little girl? Guess it was a bit early in times for any acceptance of one boy being interested in another."

"Well, nowadays, all the boys are interested in a boy like Rippy. He's just got that look about him."

"Does he go on overnights?" John asked.

"No, his mom and dad say he has to be ten. I think that's cool. I'm really glad I waited until I was ten for my first night with Uncle Brad. Mom says I can have a party here for him `cause his folks are kinda poor. That's over a week away. His first hot date."

"How about our hot date; what would you like to do? "

"Make guys look," Brad replied. "Like wear this cut-off to a restaurant, and see if even one guy there doesn't at least pretend not to sneak a glance. I think of it as discovering my homosexuality, and everyone else's at the same time."

John giggled at the boy and his cock hard-locked. No wonder David filed his Nifty stories under Fantasy. Brad was of another world. Rare as a diamond sawn from an eight-ounce nugget of gold. A dazzling centerpiece in his world of a model shipyard and miniature work boats; a light, unto himself, a quietly glowing fountain of it. The luckiest kid in the world had to be the little Rippy boy. A single shower with the long-legged stripling would be enough to keep a boy girl free for twenty years. And that was a good thing, especially for the girls.

"What do you do for hobbies," Brad asked; "I mean besides reading and the bike?"

"Write porn," John said. "I mean I could be honest and say it's erotic literature, because I've been around the block enough times to valve in a little literate and artistic merit, but, tease though I might, I bear down in the end and no one has ever written a single word of complaint. In many cases, I leave them so they couldn't endorse Ed's check, and, at the same time, totally focused on reading, history and, in general, learning what the fuck's going on around them."

"Have you been published? If you get letters, you must have been."

"I'm a rookie on Nifty, that's kind of the Yankee Stadium of alternative erotica, to give it its correct name, though long graphic passages, in fact, make it porn. So far I'm having a good first year."

"What's `alternative erotica?'" the boy asked.

"It's a school of writing that feels there is ample talent devoted to consenting adults."

Now it was Brad's turn to giggle. He looked up from his magnifying glass and tiny saw. "Belay, matey," he said in a deep voice, " or you'll be shivering me little timbers."

The stared at each other, stupefied. John was inwardly groaning; here was another boy, cookie-cutter with all the others he wrote of. Couldn't the kid have an attitude, or demonstrate some kind of sullen streak? Was there no snide look, nor ever to be one, in any of them? He realized that writing porn was different. No plot to bother with. A chronology with the underpants coming down off the little hips would do it every time; no need for a sequence of conflicts and resolutions; no need for any character development, other than a long pair of legs. He should use the freedom from commercial editing and responsibilities, and the guaranteed large audience, to spend the time at develop interesting characters with charming quirks.

Hadn't a writer made a character famous for carrying a log of wood around town, and another writer created an urban legend built on crashing and pounding through a common apartment door? That's what having a plot did. Brought forth a flow of the genius beloved of John Leonard.

Brad, for his part, was gay at being with a man. In discovering his homosexuality he'd found it seriously wanting when it came to mature males. Everyone in their forties were a big lump, and the lump degenerated fairly rapidly. Better a woman than a man, to grow old with, he'd concluded. Of course, best was his little, now not so little, friend, Rippy Longstockings. But this man. He was a tiger on a ridge; categorically, not a drifty wolf. He remembered his uncle commenting that he wished he knew an older man, so once again he could act like a kid getting touched for the first time. And he'd be home for Rippy's birthday.

. .

At this point Blissy broke in and Timmy seconded with a Yeah! The point of the interruption was simple, too many characters. "You're just trying to make the story go on and on, so you won't have to deal with the here and now. Specifically, whose here, and what they want, right now"

Charles groaned. He empathized with the children; they were right, truth, coming as it did, from the mouths of babes. His characters were all the same, that had to make the stories boring. One half-abstract superhero type, and every kid a genius. All gentle natures, good manners, and fairy-tail endings. No boy staggering to the cops, via the emergency room, with a torn rectum, no sparkly girl child, now so huddled on a see-saw the other end stayed empty all through recess.

In his own mind, he paralleled George Carlin, who stated, with great accuracy, that, in his fifties, he was not getting angrier, in fact, he was mellowing, there was just more to be angry about. The pure physical size of the Doritos generation, for example. Where were these wide-bodies going to live, and who in the name of creation was going to feed them? Instead of developing a complex mix of good and bad, and studding them on a matrix of history or psychology, he patched on a slick patina of social commentary, and otherwise lead his characters off to the nearest private or semi-private room, whether it had a bed or not. The vast readership was nice, of course; helping sell computers and developing the Net, and someday somebody would say, hey, if I don't get this guy, somebody else will. He was not sanguine in his hope the getter was a literary agent, not a ticked-off Jew.

Charles reviewed the reasons he wrote porn and had his characters write it. First, was its technical and commercial value. This had been especially crucial in the early years; the solid fuel booster that led to everything had been a few million who adapted early for kiddie porn. His second reason was to tell some, what they were missing, and others, who hadn't been missed, to use perspective. If you were the girl on the see-saw, and knew millions of girls liked what their daddies did with them, it certainly would not increase the burden, and might not only alleviate it, but might, in some cases, even instigate a very happy sea change between father and daughter or brother and sister. The stories on Nifty, and other sites; the writers who, while undoubtedly exaggerating physical aspects of carnality, told of literally thousands of true and satisfactory, often brilliant, alternative relationships, with no common-denominator except a friendly and affectionate ambience, nine times out of ten.

A repeated search of the net on incest, per se, had netted Charles a single poem, "Clown Face," whose writer, in his viewpoint, was more concerned by her father's silence and scratchy whiskers than anything else. Could this situation have been reversed with tender words and if it had taken place in the morning shower? The question answers itself, and becomes the more germane when the standard portrayal of the pederast is reviewed. Television and film; let's see, there was a Karl Malden production, and one where there were a lot of video cameras in a building. These were archetypes; nasty, ugly and old, yet fully represented the motif, in toto. If Hollywood wants to write about the subject, why not that picture that starts with Arnold carrying a huge log down a trail to his cabin in the woods. His daughter is a pixie, about eight years old. Why not an incest theme with characters like that; or a pedophiliac take that would have a Dirty-Dancing Patrick Swayze at least waltzing with a ten-year-old Macaulay Culken? Sure, an insider would quip, "Because he was Michael Jackson's boyfriend at the time." Ha, ha, ha.

Nifty writers were telling a closer version of the truth than anyone in the ballpark, and he was pleased enough to write for them, especially, for free, because that meant just writing and writing, and if you changed a name or lost a thread, no one would care because no one was paying. Your finer readers would understand that in the time you could read back through and touch up inconsistencies, glitch-hunt, you could write pages at the end of the script; always where the action was. Charles was continually thrilled at the freedom of movement his convenient artistic philosophy allowed him. His Concord ancestors had, in fact, made a stunning difference. To a degree, the transcendentalists said, be yourself, and say what great reading and experience have taught you is the truth, but only to a degree; an opposite to, say, Catholic lore, which dictated remorselessly and insisted on universal obedience. Louisa May Alcott, as much a great great aunt as anyone ever had; Daniel Chester French; from bars of soap to Lincoln sitting for the centuries. It wasn't a spiritual heart, it was more an over-soul; could be vastly and accurately criticized for ending slavery with emotion, and thus ending up with a horrific embodiment of the joke that went, in paraphrase: We wanted to end bondage very badly, and we did. Of course, it was a second telling, because their ancestors had managed to end monarchy, just as badly.

In the end, Concord's legacy was in fact a better world for rich survivors. In delineating a tongue for a larger number, they set the stone for Nifty. Charles laughed out loud at the thought of his fellow contributors suddenly becoming aware of the fact that their stories were the First Amendment, translated by Concord, and finally, here we were, saying exactly what we want to each other and a growing audience. Little did they know. Who ever does? Bill Gates once thought 640K was enough RAM for anyone. Kindly, he kept laughing. Their stories, all thirty-five thousand of them, were for the ages; not only on central servers but on hard-drives by the millions. Not ten years old, yet exceeding all libraries thousands of years old; intensely human in scale, with an appreciation by all writers that not all libraries were for smut. In irreducible logic, Nifty was, to Charles, a carriage bolt. The ends, the flange and nut, represented The Minutemen and Walden, simply because, in the modern world, the shaft was Nifty. But the connection was not comical, it was real, it was important, it was the only thing left.

It made one so much better a writer; to spend his time always practicing at writing the new, and not wasting time looking for typos. And when Charles read back through the occasional page, in a minimally exercised effort at quality control, his hair would stand on end when he found the copy, page-on-page, close to perfect. To accomplish this, without an editor, was beyond miraculous. [Clarification. I'm talking about a final polishing here. Writing is re-writing, precisely as they say. With a word processor, it's hard to keep a log, but I revise twice, plus. What I don't do is give the ms a final clean or almost-clean read. Since I'm about to mention Tiger in another vein, (a glorious one, I'm afraid), I mention him here, also. He says he prefers practice to play, and I know exactly what he means. I love re-writing, especially the second draft. It goes without saying I'm perpetually astonished had how I've underestimated how good I really am; that, of course, makes it a pleasure, but, even the moreso, is the craft involved. Hunting down those elusive triple spaces, quotes bending in the wrong direction, and hide and seek experts, in general, is the best computer game in town. (Obviously, in the world.) To assault the declarative sentence, without even knowing what it is, using English to its absolute limit, in a modern venue, and have every comma and semicolon placed perfectly; is such beauty, when perfect, as to deny the need for thought, itself. I'll be merciful and let you down without a quip; a hardship because I had something awfully clever all qued up. I believe it had to do with other situations which might deny thought, itself.]

Tiger Woods worked with his coaches up until tee time. All extreme performers worked with trainers, directors, editors, assistants; often retinues. Charles not only worked entirely on his own, he did it fast, and he did it at the world's most difficult art. To stand out, as a writer; not with a lucky break like Kerouac , Kesey, and a list of one-trick ponies, but page by page, book by book, and do so effortlessly, required levels of talent that simply did not exist. He was always glad Bill Gates was around to share the credit, because without Word XP; its gentle ways, its sweet patience and electrifying performance, when prodded, he'd be a no-trick pony waiting for little girls in their summer dresses. To be able to scroll and hear no stutter or hiss on the stereo; the delicacies of the cursors, the pretty spelling box, a constant friend; these were the little things that drew a fellow's talent. All that was left was the laziness to leave out anything that would require even a touch of effort, and there it was; not only perfect, but seemingly endless.

Occasionally, Charles did wonder what it would be like to work with an editor. Could someone make him better than he was? Were there defects in his work? He turned these thoughts a time or two, then realized he was deliberately painting a psychological portrait in order to stall the kids, now back to chomping their silly mouths on his collarbone. They weren't wolves, either.

Chapt. 16

Charles's thought turned to crime. This was getting serious. The duo were now chanting Shirts Off, Shirts Off, we want our prof., shirt off, shirt off. Silly boys. What was bugging him was the finest point of law he knew of. A perfect delineation of reason versus book, and man versus statute. The conundrum was this: if he used a bootleg copy of Word, and wrote free stories promoting its immediate purchase, would he be a guilty party, or qualify for workman's comp?

Where was the Pecos? Really, where was it? What was the dividing line between the rambunctious free-for-all associated with progress, and the dictates of the court, deemed necessary, but rapidly becoming a mad magilicutty of mediocrity in which a judge without one speck of overall Americanism sentenced fifty million of her countrymen to wander the ruins of Napster? Atilla and Genghis were alive and well when court was in session, just ask Ilian.

They were killing themselves, of course, with their blotch of a flag, their apparently genetic need of the lowest-common-denominator. They died quickly and easily; in the meantime, were always good for a laugh. At one point he'd actually seen a Hebrew tornado hunters. Could it get funnier? Or did shalom actually mean remain at peace while I rob you blind, diminishing the humorous aspect?

Something else had to be on the way. It was time for the man to have a face; for a handsome doc to take a cutie, not only home, but to bed; not only to bed, but nakedly and passionately, many times, as a sparkling and delightful continuing character. I'll write the peckerhead, and won't charge a dime for a hundred pages.

Bess Truman was the great stone face of the last century; had she left the whole artistic community in her image? Why wasn't Mel Gibson head-over-heels with his blond pupil? Why didn't Arnold show his side-kick what p.j. was all about, in one film, and his daughter, in the other, even with the stupid camera pointed somewhere else? The last word on the subject was Sipowicz suggesting a pedophile kill himself; his take on good-cop, one might suppose. Charles's opinion was that if all the pervs were hanged for killing the dick, the world would put a number in the plus column, for the single killing. He was smug in his knowledge Denis Franz surely felt the same way.

But the boys were winning. He couldn't help picturing Mel in the shower of his deluxe home, a nervous voice asking questions through the glass door, and Mel....

"Don't you dare!"

What was this, rebellion? A conflict Trouble in paradise?

"Don't you dare!" They were almost harmonizing, and they sounded mad.

"Don't you dare start another one of you long, rambling, lacy, go-nowhere-end-up-in-Eden stories. I won't let you, and neither will Timmy."

Timmy was not reticent with his opinion. "If you're going to tell us a story, go back to Brad. and his uncle, Brad; don't start in with Mel and the kid up in Maine. So it was a big shower. Tell us what happened to Brad up in his bedroom with all the models."

"What if I forgot my place," Charles asked.

"If you let us do what we want," Blissy answered, "maybe something will remind you of what happened in his room, or afterwards. We could try everything, all night long, and by morning, you'd be fresh and revived, and your memory would be complete, because Timmy knows everything, and I'm bound to be a good student. Can you picture it any other way?"

The shower door opened and a frightened blond entered, not quite hiding his huge boner with his childish hands. He closed his eyes and almost immediately felt a butterfly touch to his lips. He opened his eyes. Blissy's big eyes were way out of focus as he whispered, "No you don't. Stop playing. Stop fantasizing. Stop trying to protect Timmy and me. There's a lot of hot guys your age; a million boys would go off with Mick Jagger, in a minute. You tell us that it doesn't matter what a person looks like; now you're abusing us, in reverse, I suppose, because you think we think this, and you feel we feel that."

"You mean you wouldn't like to see Nordstrom taking a long, hot, soapy shower with Mel?" Charles asked

"Blithering; that's what we call it on the old sod. Used adjectively, it describes, without modifying, an idiot."

"Blistering," a word, went through Charles's thoughts. Cassius Clay had had to take a blistering in the ring to prove he was the greatest; he, Charles, could do it without even blistering his fingertips. He was the greatest, and well it was. Only the most tantalizing visions of the student entering through the glass door to shower with his handsome teacher, perhaps still wearing his underpants, could keep his mind off the boys on his chest; indeed, the same pair that seemed to have discovered a sport in under-shirt nipple hunting. He held to his image of Mel gently reaching to the boy until Blissy and Timmy linked their brains in diabolical synchronization, both saying at the same time, Slow Race.

It was not slow enough. The boy from the movie was going to have to move those last inches, to the waiting hand, all by his thirteen-year-old self. This was going badly. Only a minute in, and both children were lost and wandering. How would Einstein measure time like this? How would Noah Webster define it? It hardly seemed a race; yet his heart was beating faster by the second; his breath was getting...

The touch was made; it had to be. The student thrust his boy hips the last inch. The teacher leaned to his shoulder and stared down, as did the child as the stallion took the well-grown colt's big, hard boner with his curled fingers, gently, but to the hilt of his arching young student.

Two bites under his chin.

Blissy went into the spirals of a feeding shark, while Timmy tugged steadily and deliberately, like a monitor. The animal play came as a relief. For the moment, they'd stopped racing around the place. It did not last out the minute. Frantically, Charles pictured the boy with his left arm wrapped tightly around his athletic teacher's waist as he worked his tender child's hand ever lower, not teasing before he made a gentle, wet, soapy fist and stroked it gently, again and again. Forget it. The feeding frenzy had moved under his shirt and to his belly. Formerly lost, the hunters, racers, whatever they were, had now become sloppy. Their technique was amateurish and random. A lick and a nip, with little thought given to the where and the how of the thing. Boys would be boys. Fingers appeared sticking up through the gaps in his shirt, and bent cleverly to the buttons. These were undone, from the inside, with much giggling and fanfare. Good morning, your honor, all I can swear to is that I saw no boys when I undressed, and, as the door was locked, there could have been no boys present when I retired for the night. Of course, the door was not locked, and he knew who was operating under his shirt. Still, it sounded good.

The quest for food had melded into a night on Temptation Island. No more biting and pulling; now it was lascivious. Long, lingering, licking circles, no longer lost. Now ten fingers were enlarging the opening in his shirt; it would be short work from here on out.

"Turn out the light."

"No way. We want to see."

Charles tried again with the shower. Useless. The athlete was holding the boy's chest close to his own; what was happening between their shaking bodies was personal and private.

He tried with John and Brad. Came up with another perfect boy. It clouded his judgment for a moment, then things clarified.

So many good; wouldn't it be an idea to hang with a couple of bad boys?

Nothing was more important to a writer than plenty of context and perspective; yin and yang. With a start he realized kindershag was not on his mind; not really. It made him, or so he sorted it out, a rare bird, indeed; an anti-perv smut writer. Well, that was not a brick that would fly. Something would have to change. Here issues of the impact of practicality on philosophy raised their heads. What was practical about his present predicament? Two yearning ten year olds. What was philosophical? It was the one word in the book superceded `pragmatic,' but, in bed, it seemed useless. Doubly so, but each had two hands, so quadrupley so, plus fingers... and they were infinity.

"If you keep holding off, you will get old," Blissy said, "and old people get silly and weep every night over the opportunities they managed to miss. Makes them real grouchy, too.. Think of that polished stick from Utah; is he going to lie, gasping his end, glad he didn't pull down a few pairs of underpants that boys would happily have pulled down, themselves? Or girls, there is no sense in being narrow-minded."

The boy added a "Huh?" or two, and, having emerged back into the air of the room, looked into the eyes of the camp director. "Huh? You want that, mister?"

Were they trying to be irresistible, on purpose? It seemed so. Using every trick in the book; interrupting stories, pretending they were animals, and now making with the philosophy. It was almost annoying to write of geniuses, and have a pair of them playing mind games, while their fingers were playing felonious tag all the-hell over him; a great big in the sky ALMOST.

If only they would make it annoying; he could send his thoughts elsewhere. Manners. He'd lived in the Caribbean, and been seduced by manners and charm a time or two; polite and funny thieves. Lack of "nice-ways" was intolerable, but they were no be-all, end-all, either. That was getting more obvious by the minute, for it was never without a Please or a winsome smile that an assault was renewed, or a new one devised. It was tempting. He hadn't even done himself, in, how many days? Like Michelangelo before him, he'd fallen so deeply into the cavern of the absolute, all-out artist, nothing intruded for more than brief intervals. Sputter, sputter; nothing had, anyhow. Intervals and briefs was taking on a new meaning, right before his staring eyes.

Specifically, the interval to his briefs was now under a single inch. Both boys were staring into his eyes; tiger stares; utter intensity. Their play was finished; it was now XXXs, and for keeps. So there went the peace interval, along with the fraction of an inch of temporizing fabric. And now his shirt wasn't cooperating. The fingers of a child were all it took; useless, useless shirt. And Orion? The Belt God? His influence did not render apart leather and buckle nor withdraw former from latter, but, he provided no defense, either. His effect was limited to the psychological, or at least that is what Charles assumed, as he read the intense concentration in the children's eyes. Timmy huddled next to his friend and they whispered as Blissy worked.

"Is it always this Exciting>" he asked his Irish boyfriend.

"Cor, the moreso. Why lad, you don't even know what's going to happen. It just gets better, doesn't it?"

"How many times have you done it?" Blissy asked.

"Seventeen," the boy answered, "and that was half-again as exciting as the sixteenth. It's not like heroin; you know, spend your life seeking an equal to the first high; not at all. The best time; the most perfect harmony, may be the next time, with a steady partner, or a new one. And, in a situation like this, where everything is comfortable and safe and friendly, every time is nothing short of absolutely brilliant, squared. See, look at your hands shake. You know it, and you haven't done anything. Ain't it cool?

The whispering went on. An old saying went, One boy, a boy; two boys, half a boy, and three boys, no boy at all. Charles assumed life was just that way; what was perfectly true in the work environment about two boys being half a boy simply meant, in the present circumstances, taking twice as long. He was, again, hard against Einstein and definitions of time. Longer was faster, because by extending the end it speeded travel in its direction; by the same token, less was more, because the less touching those ten childish fingers did, the more he wanted.

Honest to a fault with his readers, he was now faced with being honest with himself. He was no Michelangelo; it was a fantasy to really think he was a bottomless well with a huge pump. He was a dude. Like John, in Brad's story, he biked a lot. He liked cars. He thought as many as a hundred of the best writers who had ever lived practiced in his time, and was delighted with them. He was, in short, attracted to the playful young males; Blissy, with his slightly husky stomach, was his favorite, by an inch, while the experienced Timmy lent a note of legitimacy. The kids were right, it was cool.

"We need a spermer," Timmy whispered to his rookie friend. "What for?" Blissy asked.

"To get him wet and slippery. An older boy; a teen. I'll go find one."

Manners? Charles thought to himself; wasn't I just congratulating myself on such-nice-boys; now they're discussing me like a lump of wood, as if I were not even here.

Then Timmy left and Blissy settled in for a cat-like stare, his chin perched in his hands, his hands supported by elbows planted on Charles's sternum. The child was all but licking his chops. "I hope he finds one that's been behaving for days. I want it to be awesome." Phew! There were those manners again.

Timmy was more than an Irish spring breeze and he proved it by breezing in with Davy Atkins; a six foot thirteen year old. The boy was stunned to be invited; he'd been at Creative Camp three seasons, plus spent a winter. Charles, intensely out and about for at least an hour each day, nonetheless had taken on a rarefied, untouchable persona. That was history. The first shock quickly yielded a second. A teenager of the Vietnam era. High cheekbones; boyish face. Saw them most every day. But the teen-swimmer's body? What was that all about? "Even Peter Pan wouldn't have minded growing up if he could have looked like this victim of child molesters," Davy thought to himself. When he'd gained control of his feelings, the new arrival whispered to Timmy. "I've been saving up for Acker, he just came in last night; could he come, too?"

Where the children had allowed no slack when it came to additional characters in the story of John and Brad, they seemed unfazed, first by one actual, living, definitely breathing, live character, or even, it now seemed, two. Did that mean he was a bad storyteller? Should be; he was enough out of practice, besides, he'd been distracted; had to play to a disinterested audience. Ingrates! Well, they weren't going to rain on his parade. Timmy wasn't, anyhow; the perpetual Irish breeze was already back with a second boy in tow. Acker. Icelandic and mad for ice; Charles remembered saving him from an Olympic slave camp, where the unhurt seldom remained so. He used his talents on a board now; clean broken bones rather than wierded out joints from excess stress during his particularly small-boned growth spurt. That he and Davy were a couple was excellent, and not a few night-fun fantasies involved the large-child thirteen year old and the oldest boy in camp, almost fifteen, almost half his size. Charles was delightedly thrilled with the instant electricity in the room, the moment the door was swung closed. About a thousand volts, per boy. The two ten year olds, and little Acker, looked at Davy, and he had no hesitation, at first, in looking back. He pulled his older, smaller partner to him and whispered "Is it okay?"

"More than," the teen replied.

This dialogue also delighted the director. They were going to be together; surely nature would take its course; the young flesh would be satiated with itself, and leave him out of it, or, just maybe, peering out from under a sheet. Meantime, the boys had decided to start with every healthy child's favorite ritual, which is meant to be an hour of strip poker. Charles modified the rules, because it was his room, so that every piece of clothing a boy lost allowed him to do up a button or put on a sock. He was delighted that the kids were so into each other they didn't argue, or even notice. As the game progressed, the camp director eased a shirt over himself and in fifteen minutes was peering out a slit between the sheet and his pillow. While the basic conversation was interesting, it got moreso when Davy mentioned Shirley, his sis.

A hush settled over the table, and by accord the cards were laid to rest. Acker exerted the natural authority of his senior years by suggesting the group go stand by the bed. "Casper won't mind, he's all grown up," the boy said, wagging his silly chin at Charles's Great Wall of Sheet. Give the kid a point though, he wasn't wrong. Charles didn't mind. He pretended, not very hard, to sleep. The boys turned out to be too old to play pretend, so they didn't.

Arranging pillows they sat, big boys to the rear with Blissy and Timmy tucked between their legs. Statistically, the game had been rigged. The probability that four children would end up, simultaneously, in their underpants, was exceedingly low.

Davy had Blissy against him and was seated with his right shoulder a foot from the spy hole. The naked legs of Acker and Timmy were at the limit of Charles's vision; they seemed to be twined happily together. When the young males were settled, Acker nudged his younger lover to tell about Shirley. The bigger, but younger boy hesitated until Acker characterized the absent child as a glowing Brady-Bunch Cindy, minus the lisp.

"She got this huge crush on me," Davy began, "a year ago when she was seven. I had one on her, too.

"It all started in an instant. Before that, we liked each other okay and had to pretend to fight. Then, one day in August, we were on a picnic. She picked a white dandelion and blew off the parachutes. Somehow we caught each other's eye, and we froze.

"Do you feel it," Shirley asked. She was taller than the Cindy in the Brady movies, but had the same kid-bright blond hair, bangs and braids. Her brother, at twelve, was the tallest boy in school; popular with a serious crowd, but shy because of a case of acne, his wiggling voice, and other things. The year of the dandelion had seen him grow two full inches, to almost five feet, in as many months.

"What is it?" the lanky pre-teen whispered.

"We fell in love," Sheila declared, solemnly " Just like that and over a stupid dead flower. Imagine that. And incest. Only twenty girls in t the whole school are sleeping with their brothers or dads. Probably a few more that keep it secret. Now I'm going to be one of them.

"The Sandra Dee club," she whispered. "Have you heard of it?"

"She's a retro actress; beach flicks. Totally pretty."

"She's the one. Her step dad admitted to friends that he'd married her as well as her divorced mother, when she was an ingénue. He meant it, but she outgrew it and got on with her life, the guy was even a coot, not a fox. So it's a sign of respect; that way we can talk about it with girls that are having problems; well, the older girls do most of that; anyhow, there's twenty real members and some other girls that are sort of guests. And now, all for you. Pajama parties. Four girls at a time. Then your cute little sis, the seven-year-old one, is off for overnights of her own, and she'll have stories to tell her beautiful tall, dark and handsome brother when she comes home to him.

"I've been waiting for this to happen," the happy child went on. "Becky said, since we, you and I, get along friendly like, there was a really good chance, but it had to come like it would for a boy for any other girl. We had to fall-in-love. I don't know if it ever happened over a dandelion before; we can find out."

The tall boy and little blond girl knelt looking into each others' eyes for endless moments. Suddenly Davy was passionately, head-over-heels in love with this nymph who wished to be his bride. He could not even imagine touching her pink little ear without bursting into flames. Her big blue eyes looked thoroughly scared; virtually round with fear, now her piece was said.

"What do you want me to do to you?" Davy asked. He sort of knew, but his acne and his bookish ways had limited him to locker-room banter. What was certain was that the dainty white midriff exposed through her opened little-girl vest was going to be underneath his hard male belly. Somehow, he was going to flood her with himself. His every-day little girl.

Admirable little sis that she was, she provided a hint. Sheila reached down and plucked two dandelions. "Come close," she whispered

He did, gazing into the enormous blue eyes. "Open your mouth, just a tiny bit.," she instructed. Davy did, staring at her as she stared back. She raised the dandelion to her lips, gave him what she hoped was an inviting look, and gently blew the flower white onto his lips. "Oh, I got some in your mouth," she said, eyes bigger than ever; then added, "Let me clean up the mess."

Tenderly, taking his cheeks in her finger-tips, she plucked the seeds from his lips with her own.

"Your turn," Sheila said, handing Davy the flower. The big twelve year old stared at his sister, and held the flower to his lips. He leaned close, as she had done. Shelia opened her mouth, but it was not for the seed. Instead, she whispered to her big brother, "Not there."

"Where," the boy asked, his voice now a train-wreck of a whisper.

"Down under my belly button. You know."

Gently she pressed his head down; slowly he lowered to where her long white legs disappeared into her juvenile short-shorts. Shelia spread her pretty limbs, and shuffling slightly in the grass, managed to arch herself to him. "Now blow the seeds on me," she whispered. He did; they flowed quickly over her, many sticking to the slight dampness of her soft tummy.

"Now," Sheila whispered with the gentleness of a light air against a single leaf, "clean me up."

The female child lay back utilizing a slight hummock in the meadow. After wriggling herself comfortable, she extended her arms above her head, and, arching again to the big male, added she was not going to help.

Davy knelt beside her, staring again into those wide Brady-blue eyes. They were happy and trusting; she had a beautiful brother; big and nice. She had loved him for years; well, at least two. Then, again, two years was most of her conscious life. She had liked him, loved him, then, wham, puff, and she was in love. He was, too.

Davy put his fingers to the girl's tender throat, then molested her pretty face as she stared at him. He played with her nose, her lips, her pixie ears, and ran his powerful baseball fingers through the golden silk, still a bit ropey from being braided, that lay against her soft, white shoulder.

Having filled himself with her eyes for a minute, Davy leaned toward her tummy and gently hunted the wayward paratroopers with their foreign seeds. Nibbling and licking, he found first one, then more. Each had to be laboriously captured; lips or tongue, then transported over a tempting and scenic terrain, to a waiting pair of butter soft lips that never seemed to learn that they received naught but barren fruit. Many trips were made in this fashion; back and forth, back and forth. Would she never be satisfied?

Then she whispered his ear close to her lips.

"One went down inside my shorts," she said.

Davy was too close to her to see the big blue eyes, but he imagined them; the slightly embarrassed womanly concern over the intrusion, mysteriously combined (she was seven) with an imperative that the job be started soon and done well. She bumped her bottom on the grass, and thrust it up at deliberate intervals. Like the slow wag of a cat's tail, the wanton signal was primal; as was the gradual spread of her long, white legs. He left her lips, but not before whispering softly into her ear that he had no more seed for her, but that he still loved her. She whispered back that she loved him, too, the while really loving Fran Browning for her colossal stupidity in not claiming this powerful, all-male young prince now kissing his way over her thin cotton vest and continuing in a wet and obscenely lingering and sloppy way right past her pretty little belly button, as if she were Eve and it didn't exist.

Whatever she might not have had, there was one thing she did, and it was on fire for the big boy penis she was sure was moments in her future. She wriggled and arched hard for her brother. He began licking her low and hard, working at the button of her tiny shorts. It yielded, and as he gently parted the fabric, lingering toward a first touch at the child's zipper, she hissed at him to stop. Frightened and guilty, he quickly refastened her little red shorts and steeled himself. "Come back," she hissed again, reaching for him. Numb, he leaned back to her, propping himself on his left elbow so he could approach close. Expecting tears he was nonplussed when she reached for his right ear and pulled him very close to her lips.

"Before you unzip me," she whispered very softly, "get naked and stand between my legs with your hands behind you neck, like I was. I want to close my eyes, and open them when you tell me, so I can take a picture and remember it when I'm old and tough."

He leaned to her lips and kissed her gently for a long time. She eased her arms again way up over her head; the sign of total submission was feral. Davy stood and peeled his shirt, then dropped his shorts, bending and working at his sneakers for a few moments before standing close to the little girl in his bulging underpants. "I'm way more than half way, if you want a preview," he said.

"You mean now?" she asked.

"I've still got my underpants on," he explained. "I thought you might want to pull them down. I want to pull your panties down. Your choice."

"I want to see you all at once, and I want to pull them down, inch by inch, until school starts."

"I know exactly how you feel," Davy said, but quickly recanted.

"Keep `em closed and I'll count down from five."

The girl smiled very happily and listened intently. On zero plus a few last precious seconds, she opened her big blue eyes and stared up at the naked boy standing with his ankles touching hers, arms behind his head, his lithe swimmer slightly arched with his big boner, slightly bent to his right, standing six inches clear of a shadow of silky hair. "Don't move," she whispered as her fawn's eyes drank in the stag who was so ready to mount and inseminate her little-girl female body. The big male log swayed and pulsed It was both obscene and intensely personal. Immediately she bonded to it like a hatchling goose. Hers. Her beautiful male and her beautiful big boner; her balls full of her sperm.

"That was the right way to do it," she whispered tensely, her eyes wider than ever. She reached to him and he lowered to his knees on the soft meadow grass between her now wantonly spread legs. His fingers went to her red cotton vest. Bending to stare, he undid his little sister, peeling aside the fabric to bare her chest. "Take it all the way off," she said, rising to him and helping him strip the thin fabric and bare her chest. Immediately the wisp was on the grass beside her, she lay again for her male, lifting her waist to him as he knelt between her knees.

Davy gripped his little sis gently by her waist, his pinkies nestling to her young hips. She just hissed at him and he pulled her down; stripping her childish sex to the open sky and his hot ogle. As he began getting her shorts down, she wriggled her legs together, allowing him to slip them free of her long, white legs. Her panties were red, matching her halter and short-shorts. Tiny and girlish. Shelia spread and surged rhythmically to her big bro, loving his hot gaze that danced between her blue eyes and pretty face to the tiny patch of red held to her by straps riding her slim waist. His fingers found these, and inched down. The little girl froze, breathless, as she gave herself to him. The taboo of incest coursed through her like a drug, forcing her knees wide and adding an urgency to her sign of gentle undulations. Her mount returned to her belly, gripping firmly and pulling free with a groan that bent him to her soft, little-girl tummy. Then the little panties ripped from her wide-spread legs and in a second lay beside her with her short-shorts and the doll-size halter. "Someday, there will be a bra with them," Davy groaned to himself as he began his incest with his little Sheila.

He molested her chest, flanks and belly, slowly, with both hands. Softness, smoothness, and curves that were so gentle they took patience to track and map. Her belly button, a tiny outty, seemed worth whole years; a lifetime of exploration, of and by itself. He was lost in her; devouring her, infinitely tenderly, inch by inch, finally reaching her left nipple, closes to the galloping-filly heart, which seemed to be getting closer, too. At the first touch of his tongue to her tiny left breast he felt the barest touch on his right shoulder. Her beckoning. Irresistible, undeniable.

Davy lay over Sheila. Cradled her tenderly, his left strong twelve-year-old arm under her shoulders and neck, cradling, the right hand, again openly molesting her.

In moments, his boy teeth followed his fingers, and he took a gentle grip very low on her flank. Sheila still lay for him, her arms stretched straight and hard above her head. Her vagina tempted his roving fingers, but he could no longer wait. He let her soft tummy skin from his teeth, he rose on her body, finding her quickly with his penis.

With gentle little strokes, he explored, rising from her neck to brace himself on an elbow so he could look into her eyes as he gently explored and massaged her vagina with his cock. They tried to signal each other with their eyes, and gave up after a few moments, with nervous giggles. There was nothing mythical or mystical about their union; she couldn't tell him where to go by any kind of telepathy; she'd signal up with her eyes, and he'd interpret the message as her needing to move up. Same with left and right and all the tangents in between.

In the end, it was love and patience. Davy kept his very gentle, very slow, very soft stroking against her; she held still. For long moments, it was a slow animal process, like a cat having her baby kittens.

And he found her.

"Davy," she said, gently, happily. Cradling her head to shoulder, and biting with a force of a hundredth of a gram, he moved gently.

Yes, he was there.

A buttery, loose softness surrounded by tense girl muscle.

His first sublimely gentle pressure against her he made with his face buried in her golden hair; for the second, he backed so he could look into the big, scared eyes. For the third small temptation of her, he rose on his strong arms so they could both see. Sheila brought her hips up gently and slowly, so her stallion could keep his tender press against her. Their foreheads met, slippery with sweat, as they stared down between their mating bodies. His big penis was a beauty against her, and her wildly spread legs, a carnal center of creation for him.

Then there were the two blue eyes.

The children wriggled until Shelia was in a comfortable position to accept her brother. He loved looking at her tender body beneath his so much he walked his hands from her shoulders, out her arms, to her little-girl hands. These he trapped hers under his, pushing gently to stretch her and tighten the arc of her body as he ate every inch of her and bathed every inch of her with his eyes.

There was a seed on her right cheek, it's white flag waving. He leaned to her and nibbled it free, positioning himself to drop it on the tip of her nose. Davy was so close she couldn't see what he was doing. Whatever it was, it seemed to involve endless kissing. The pressure he made with his body between her legs was luxuriant. Her male was, she judged, almost an inch inside her, firmly against her hymen. He wasn't going anywhere.

In many ways, Sheila wanted to release her hands from underneath her brother's, and go to those powerful boy shoulders now holding him clear of her body, and feel them up. His flanks, so lean and male; his nipples. They were so close. His stripling's waist, like a girl. At the sides. And in back. Not, she gasped, in front.

Now he was actually doing it to her. Being a boy. The tender, gentle strokes of strangers and greeting began to become suggestive. Deliberately, he was softly riding an inch, then holding still, then sliding himself a tiny inch away. Again and again, tenderly, sometimes his mouth and teeth at the base of her neck; others, with a strong arm at her waist while he looked deeply into her childish eyes; for the most part, with her young body stretched, his male waist gentle but firm between her long, bare legs.

Sheila whispered, "I want to tell you something personal."

He leaned to hear her next words. "You don't have to use any protection with me for at least two years," she said.

"I never want to," was his almost inaudible reply.

"You may never have to," the little girl replied in a confident whisper, almost excited, "We're well-off and happy; a baby would do well in our home, no matter where it came from. I want it to come from the two of us, but kids can't decide things like that so I can't make any promises."

Davy did not fuck her. She guided him with the accounts of a poet to set a baseline against his tender, loving, so very brotherly thrusts.

The twelve-year-old boy now completed his sexual molested his sister.

He used both his hands, alternately, all over her body as she lay, hands stretched high, in awed submission. Once he'd uh, uh, uhed his way through the butterfly wing of her hymen, the entire tip of his penis was inside her. It was impossible to believe there was more of him for her, or, her for him. Yet there was; sweet, very hot, very tender, and very wet. He thrust the hard tip of his circumcised boner fully into her vagina, the hymen now two inches a memory. A long one, to be repeated. So gently, so lovingly, so slowly, into her, and back just two inches so he could look deeply into the huge blue eyes as he reclaimed her hot, tight child's body.

Reaching with a momentarily free right hand, He fingered her tenderly where they were joined, masturbating his right hand a little against his scrotum as he explored.

Eventually, his left shoulder started aching to the point where Davy was forced to stop molesting the little girl. Stretching forward, he again covered the dainty little hands, pinioning his sister, while raising his chest well clear of her breasts.

Sheila sensed something very special happening.

Lying frozen still, she could feel her brother's big penis slowly but now steadily entering to his hilt, his balls still so full of her sperm, now tightly against her as she spread and humped deliberately to him. Deep, deep in her; she finally felt him, fully She could sense exactly where the flared head that had almost scared her on the count of zero was pressing. It thrilled her to remember the beautiful purple tip of his organ helped make a tight seal for no other reason than to keep his freshening inside her, as deeply as possible and, she shuddered, for as long as possible. "You'll simply have to leave in nine months," she thought silently to herself, anything to take her mind for the merest second from the feeling of him inside her. With both of them frozen; locked together, staring into each other's eyes, each could feel equally of themselves and their partner. He could feel her gentle little-girl experiments with holding him there and she could feel an overall quiver to him, a byproduct of his whole body shaking.

Slowly, Davy inched his boney knees apart on the soft grass, spreading his long simmers' legs until his outer thighs were pressed firmly against her girlish inner thighs. This was how he signaled her. A gentle jolt, his legs to hers, a final wide, wide spreading, his eyes focused on the infinity of her little girl cornflower blue; a ripping wave that drove the final gasping half-inch lunge, then focused like slow lightning all through the boy center of him.

Sheila felt the final swelling; the flaring of his big male sperm dam against her tight virgin little-girl vagina. And then, all the sensations, at once. More swelling; almost desperate shaking; the powerful connection of their childish bodies -- all at once. Then twice.

It went on for a minute. They exchanged whispers and never blinked for the minute, then more. Twice, they made perfect contact, once him starting with her, and then, with three experiments she managed to time perfectly, her passionate gift in return. Her virginity was gone, forever, under any possible interpretation. She flowed with his sperm and the most exciting part of all was hoisting her hips, with all her power, feeling him rise the more off her, so she could see the seminal fluid flowing fast and freely from their union and down over where his child would one day grow inside her.

It was all the proof she needed, and she shuddered as he fell to her. He didn't fuck her and she didn't cum. They lay quietly listening to the insects and birds, Shelia looking a little at the clouds drifting over and Davy looking at her whether she was looking at him or was momentarily diverted, as a child sometimes was, by the sky and its white above, above.

"That was either a great story or some dandy lyin'," Charles remarked from under his sheet. He should probably have kept his mouth shut, taken a short cut to peace and quiet But there was no such thing as a short way on a rough sea. The camp director thought this a fun analogy, because the up-and-down motion of the waves added considerably to no distance at all. The up and down movements by his bed weren't going anywhere, either; a relief, it could have been him.

Blissy was kneeling between Davy's long legs, bent to the young teen, with his ten-year-old head against the far curve of the thirteen-year-old's neck. From his pillow hideout, Charles could not see Blissy's hand or Davy's penis, but it was easy to see the younger boy was masturbating his older partner. It was gentle, slow, and obviously intense for both of them. He did see the ending; long spurts of very white, thick semen that jetted so hard against Blissy's face they landed with a wet, lingering hiss. Timmy responded instantly to the sight, and, with a single long, slow, tender stroke brought Acker to a hard gush which sprayed all over both the ten-year-olds. The climaxes were so wet and messy and went on so copiously and so endlessly Charles felt sure the older boys were showing off. He'd speak to them about it first thing in the morning.

Chapt. 17

I thought I'd never type the two preceding words. Fifteen and sixteen were the endures of endures, the most intensely exhausting writing experience of a very long career. As stated before, no final clean-read proof. Wish David luck, and I'm sorry if too many glitches got by. I hope they're only typos. I just wanted to say that the rest of this chapter is going to be John and Brad, only, well, not only, but you know what I mean, or, at least, I'm sure you hope you do. Plus short, under 10K, and that's almost a promise.

Posted by Thomas@btl.net.

xxx