"Cry for Me"
by
Timothy Stillman
Give a horror writer the cry of a child in the night and he's apt to do anything with it imaginable and especially unimaginable. Sadly, I am no horror writer. I do not like horror movies, books, TV shows, or stories. I am too sane and too set in my ways. Still at the end of a work week, I like to relax, and the crying of a child in the night sets my teeth on edge.
So I am forced to confront horror. Which is better than being bored to death. Since my wife and I had our last blow out, this time because I was blowing the paper boy when she walked in on us, though the boy tried to cover his nakedness with his paper carrier satchel, she pretty much figured out what had been going on. It was not a surprise to her. It had happened a few times before. She had always forgiven me. This time she did not.
So here I am in suburbia in this lonely far too expensive house in Connecticut, away with my drink in my favorite books, all about history and dull as can be to make me feel I am doing something important when I read, other than reading.
It is Friday night, after eleven, my eyes bleary as I try to read in my lounger in my den of wood, pipe smoke and animal heads mounted on my walls. I do not kill animals. I bought their heads from a taxidermist to make it seem as though I do. I do not know why I do this. I just do it, is all.
I put my book in my lap. The crying child, it must be a child, starts at ten sharp every Friday night, and continues all night long, stops during the days of Saturday and Sunday, but at sunset each day, the crying commences and does not let up till the wee hours of Monday morning, just in time to wake me up with its cessation (it does lull me to sleep sometimes, and sometimes the rest of the week evenings I find I miss it; but when it starts click clock time tock on Friday night again, it sets my teeth very much on edge again) to wake me up, hurry me to coffee in the kitchen nook (no nookie in the nook these days) and then heading out in my woody wagon to the train station and the five a.m. to New York to start it all bloody over again.
The child does not cry shrilly. The child does now bawl. The child does not cry impatiently. The child cries somehow politely. And that is the thing--the politeness, making me feel like I'm politely bored at an office party, checking my watch, wanting to get out of there, and head to the nearest dirty movie. I have enough of them on video and DVD and all of that, but the thrill of it is sitting through one of those movies in the scrunzier parts of Manhattan, away from Disneyfication. Kind of a dare to do it and get out with my life.
I imagine the child. I do not think it an infant. I suck on my pipe and I put it in the ashtray of a merman with a heady head, and I think of the child as five or six. I try to imagine a cartoon word balloon, or cry balloon, over his head and move my eyes down from it, extrapolating as I go. I live on a cul-de-sac. There are no children in this neighborhood that I know of. That is why it is so expensive. And that is why I so look forward to Saturday morning every first of the month when the paper boy comes for his delivery and we take off our clothes and each get delivered--hail glory! I love newspapers, I really do. Worked on one one time long ago. This paper boy is far more fun though. We seem blissfully ignorant of the news however. If they nuke us or we them, I figure we'll know at the appropriate moment, and this will cut down on the worrying beforehand. We do give each other hand jobs too, as long as I'm on the subject of hands. He's a little bull muffin if you want to know the truth.
So since it is two weeks before the first of the month, I sit and listen to the polite crying, and twiddle my dreams. I wish I liked football. I've got this 50 or so inch Sony TV in here, plasma screen, though things burn into it; they never tell you about that, so I've got some of last year still here and I wish it would go away, irritating. The child's cry though is irritating and refreshing, at least lately, and its begun to remind me of horror.
You know, all the rage after "Rosemary's Baby" and the eighteen thousand Zebra knock offs of it and all the other publishers cashed in on it too of course, and the movies. I do not think this is the devil's child crying. I don't know whose ruddy child is crying. I have met my neighbors at parties. There are only four houses on our very expensive very chichi block. They have no children. I have no children. Moses is not on a fig leaf floating baby time down the river Jordan or wherever. So who the bloody hell's crying.
I cried a lot as a kid. I cry a lot when Jeffy makes me come. He's the paper boy. He is a real cut up. Sometimes he and I just wiggle together and its fun and I forget how old I am and how he would not be doing this without a big fat tip, which makes him a hooker, but he's underage, which makes me a pervert, which is a laugh the whole thing anyway. I just wish the bleddin' baby would stop. The bleedin' five year old.
Could be me. Don't have fiction background to back me up on theories of course. Don't like the stuff, like I've said. I pull my cardigan sweater down over my pleated pants and stand up, knocking my pipe to the floor, and scattering the ashes on the beige carpeting. I be sure there is no flame and walk out to the front door, big elaborate house, takes a while to get there, and I open the door into the mid October air. The wind is brisk and bracing. The street lights glow yellow. The stars are sharp and glittery. The moon is nice and yellow and full.
I wish the paper boy would come. He's a muscular little devil. And he's just got the sweetest eyes--yes, Clancy, I say in the board room, we've got to get the percentage point up or the graph will just sink into the bottom of our sky scraper and we will be desolate with the loss totally of bonds and stock options becoming more and more prohibitive, while inside my gray business suited mind and body I am thinking, god will someone get Jeffy to me immediately and stick his dong in my mouth so I can shut up with this idiot business prattle.
The cry is the same outside as it is inside. Which makes no sense. We're dealing with physics at this point, and this is impossible. My hearing is still sharp, though my hair is gray, and I've got this damned problem with my left eye...but you don't want to hear about that. I wish this crying would move up or down in volume as I walk up and down the street, which I do periodically, trying to find the source of the sound. Well, I know the source of the sound, I just don't know the source of the source, in other words. I play these word games at work to give me time to think of something to say, something powerful and impressive cause I'm that kind of guy, I kid you not, and its all kind of leeched into my thoughts at home as well.
I miss Dina. I wish I was strumming her banjo tonight or she strumming mine. I always wanted to get the two of us involved with a boy. Mainly Jeffy. When she walked in on us on the living room couch, I got harder than I had been for a long time. While she was stuffing things in the suitcase, after she pushed past naked Jeffy (see him Dina? wouldn't you like to fuck that hard iron little ass of his? thought but not said, propriety even in this situation, that is me) as Jeffy dressed and skidded out the door, and I rushed upstairs to the bedroom as she came huffing downward and out the door as I stood there. And that was the Saturday morning before the Saturday night that I noticed the child crying. And realized very late that it had been crying on this schedule long before this. You get used to things before you know you have gotten used to them.
The child's not crying as if its sad. Or happy. Or lost. Or lost something dear to it. There are nice full trees, though not full now, and the ground is brown and the wind shivers me. And the cry goes on. I have thought of asking the neighbors, who I see on a fairly regular basis in the yard or at get togethers, but they never inquire of me, therefore, I, the quiet one, the careful one, (cept for keeping things from Dina, though did I ever want to?, I love cheap psychobabble) do not ask.
I wonder if the child is more than five. I wonder if the child is six or seven or maybe eight. I wonder if the child lives far away. Some trick of the fillings in my teeth and I'm picking him up or dental radar or however that worked on an "I Love Lucy" show once. It must be a him. Because it sounds like a boy. It might be a girl though I doubt it. It has begun to occasionally scare me.
Not the crying. That's normal enough. But because I'm afraid I'm cracking up. Afraid that there are, might as well say it, words in that crying. If I could go back to nineteen fifties science fiction stories, I could invent a machine that could pick up the words and figure this thing out. Speaking of figure, Jeffy has a neat one. And a long cock. I know, always the size of the thing, but it is long and I can't help it, but its not too long and its nice and full and it stands in a patch of small yellow pubic hair that is so downy to the touch---
--so I go back inside, close the door, lean against it, rub my hands together. I wish I had a cat or something I could stroke and tell him everything will be all right. The air outside is like glass. That would make sense, sound carrying a far distance in cold air. But this has been going on long before autumn and cold air got here. Sometimes I think I will ask Jeffy, but then I do not want to lose Jeffy, whose mom is getting suspicious, according to Jeffy which is a lie, I suspect, but I have to pay him more for the danger the darling innocent little angel straight from heaven above might be risking for me and only me--uh huh--little hooker. He propped me. I didn't prop him. It was not the first time for either of us. Lots better though than in a grind house or a park or the back of a car I will tell you, here in this nice cushy house.
With Leroy Neiman paintings on the walls, and chamber music on the CD player--OK so I'm a cliché, everybody's gotta be somethin', as Jeffy puts it so eloquently, and its fun for him to boff the head of one of the city's biggest ad agencies, so I put on for him and he puts on for me, but dammit, I would have liked to have guided his cock between Dina's opened legs. Whoa!! Got a woody just thinkin' bout it, as Jeffy yadayada....
So the child, could be a boy, must be, might be even eight or nine, children that young still cry like infants. The modulation is the same everywhere. I turn on the TV loudly or the CD player, I still hear the crying just as loud as always. I sleep to its sounds. I wake to its sounds. Then I wake to the emptiness of it, and the silence of its cut off like fallen from the edge of the world, and once that made me weep, made me feel I had lost my very best friend. Explain it? I can't. It has become a friend to me I guess, and mid week I find myself more and more afraid it will not start its serenade Friday night on time as usual.
That's the way life is. You get used to something,. You really get used to it and depend on it and it goes away. Dina for example. A tasty piece of ass, nice and shivery shapely and blond haired and a boy's young butt and all of that. And she went away. If it had been a woman she had found me with--well, she was raised on the John O'Hara novels, like I was raised in my twenties on those gloriously stupid Gordon Merrick novels--so there.
I love it when Jeffy sits on my in my study, me on the beige carpeting and guiding that throbber into my mouth and tells me in no uncertain terms, I had better swallow the whole meaty thing or he will stop rubbing my hard on and start ripping it, and of course he could, I have no idea where he is from, he looks tough, he talks tough, but he has cow eyes that give him away, or so I think..he dresses grungy, the whole nine yards, cliché meet cliche...
Could it be Jeffy? Jeffy crying? His soul crying? Oh good god. I stomp the idea out of my head and go up stairs to get ready for bed. I hate these pastel walls. Dina's idea. I want wood walls with animal heads in here too--I'm a real man dammit, I have hair on my chest, I really do, not that you could tell it far away, but up close, and zap there it is. My body is not falling down. Its just in a momentary slump. Baseball will fix that up again. The kind Jeffy and I play. He loves me. Bullshit. I love him. Bullshit.
The Lord Won't Mind.
Uh. huh. The phone in the hall way rings as I'm taking off my shirt. This late at night. Bad news. Divorce papers. Lawyers. Jeffy's mom wants some of her son's cut and therefore the take is increased.
I go out to the powder blue phone and pick up the little thing, off its damned ruffled lace doily, bed's got pink Valentine sheets too I gotta get rid of--yech-- in my big tough hands (OK, well under a certain drunkenness, they could look big and tough and hairy too, to make up for my balding head--dammit I hate aging):
"Hello." I say gruffly. I practice gruff all week. Mostly because I'm constantly scared of all varied things. Especially of Jeffy's mom finding out, or having put him up to his johns, let's be brave and face it, that's what I am, and wanting more and more money--like everything I own and I will have to move to a tenement and die alone with champipple by my drunken sodden mattress, and my hands crippled with D.T.'s.
"Hello," this drunken female voice says, "I'm Jeffy's mom and I know you two's been fuckin' up a storm, hurtin' ma baby boy's future and makin' him think he's a pansy, and I wanna tell ya----"
Hey, am I a prophet or what? A dead duck prophet. John the Baptist got his head chopped off, remember? And those other prophets didn't have much of a ball either.
I tremble. I shiver. She wants not part of the cut. She wants the cops. But why call me? Why not call the cops?
"I want my baby boy to get more muney fer the act'on, ya git me? We gotta tak..."
Is she making up this way of talking? Sadly, I think not. I could deal with her on my level, perhaps, but not this level--money's everything.
And I fell against the gray hall wall, and my heart is throbbing with fear. Goodbye life, for a suck a month, this is payment time. And then I heard it. Cutting through the fog fear. I like that--fog fear--kind of says it succinctly, doesn't it?
Nothing new about the sound of the child crying. The very same child I've been hearing forever by now. But different this time. This time the child was crying out of the phone. The child was crying in the background of this drunken slut who sold her son for booze money, and the child was--I took the phone away from my ear--the child cried muffled in the phone. It did not cry anywhere except in the phone, and I muffled it more by putting my hand over it. And then took my hand away. The child cried more and more as I put the phone, the source finally discovered, back to my ear. This child cried in pain, in rage, in anger, in fear. But the same one.
"You ah have another child, do you?" I asked. I asked about four of five times cause she was three or eight sheets to the wind, and there were sirens and traffic din in the background; for those who think this state is all rolling hills and lush landscape of endless fields for summer children to play in and great snowfalls to last from here to forever, the Currier and Ives routine, all polish and country side, that it has no poverty and no slums and no pain and no back alley floozies, you can kiss those fantasies goodbye, it is not all "Christmas in Connecticut" I will tell you that; and from the poverty came that woman's voice. You could smell it on her words. The pain and dirt rode them piggyback. Well, that's a little much. But I'll leave it in anyway.
"Yeahh..got a kidd...you wanna fuck him too......?"
"No, ah, no."
"Good. Got some smarts buster. When can ya meet me?"
I could feel and smell the dirt and grime of the place and the people, and wondered if Jeffy was in the hall where the phone was, surely they didn't have one in the flat, though all of that would be improved very soon, hello bank account, goodbye love, and I could see that crying child in a filthy smelly crib he was too big for and I could almost taste his rancid soiled from days of dirt diapers that no one would ever change, and he too big to wear them anyway. I could see Jeffy leaning against the wall by his mother and the phone and laughing his ass off, silently. This was nothing new for them.
I was dead. Jeffy was through. I would be cleaned out. The house would be sold. My wife would get it in lieu of the alimony I would not be able to pay her. And Jeffy's cock would no longer be in my mouth and I would no longer see that sweet/mean face staring down at me, with his Gene Simmons tongue straining out at me and imitating his penis..
Well, at least I got the crying child thing figured out. We made arrangements, the broad and me we come eye to eye, as Jeffy would say, and I hung up, sweat drenched, and there was no sound of a child crying. Well, that was the final straw. That was it. I had come to like that sound. I was not going to be here when push came to shove, and I slammed into the bedroom and packed my bag, and called a taxi and got the hell out of that neighborhood, and onto an Amtrak heading anywhere at all.
I wanted to hear that kid cry again. That's what I kept thinking as the train wheels beat their steady and unsteady beat and the train jangled around me and I put my head back and tried to get some sleep. I wanted above Jeffy, above Dina, above still being in the dough and successful and not on the run apparently for the rest of my life, I wanted to hear that goddam kid crying.
That was the part that really got my goat.
Speaking of goats, I had a goat head on my den wall. It was the one I liked the most. Sometimes when I was snockers I thought it talked to me. I drifted off thinking how I could get that goat's head, but even if I could, I would look pretty stupid, and pretty obvious on the run.
I wished that goat would cry.
I thought as I went beddy by for a second or two before being lurched full awake again, the process to repeat itself all night long.
I wished that goat would cry like that kid as Dina fucked Jeffy's brainless, wouldn't have too far to go there, as he sucked me off, and we just all fell over spent on the den floor, all panting and breathing hard and sighing and covered with us, on the beige carpeting and under the Leroy Neiman painting of a race track and the crowds and the horses. All done with daubs and dots.
I'm a Hefner man to the end. So shoot me, I just am, is all. wish I had some bourbon and branch water. Is there really such a thing as Champipple? I have a horrid feeling I'm on my way to finding out.
Gotta have an ending, I guess, though there never are endings. OK, here it is, the crying child, Jeffy's bro, was really a harbinger of things to come. And since the mo of Jeffy's bro is something of a devil, then I guess the crying child really was the spawn of Satan after all.
So there. It's the best pay off I can give you. I'm no horror writer. I'm no writer, as is obvious, I just like to suck teen boys' dicks, so if that offends you, send your stable over and I'll take care of them too.
So old to be a satyr? What satyr is not old, dammit? Thus, my affinity with the goat's head is explained. Me. A satyr? A sexual devil from the dawn of time? Mythology come real in me and my pelt and my huge ding dong the forest of forever calling. Ha! The devil's been unleashed in me. You ain't seen nothin' yet. Boy cocks and boy asses of the world, get ready, I laugh silently, cause I'm a cummer. By damn. And I bet you are too. And I bet I can make you shout like you have never shouted before.
Hey, clakety clack, I guess I've written a horror story after all. And a sex story too. Tied up all the loose ends on top of it. Not bad, if I do say so.
Wonder if Zebra Books ?..we do ads for them and other publishers...or at least I used to be part of that we...the CEO of that we I used to be...still maybe they would, I mean it would really work, but....nah, no murder angle. The hell with it..but then you never know.
the end
B Keeper silvershimmer@earthlink.net