HOLLYWOOD STORIES: NYPD BLUE

Nothing is implied by the use of media personalities in this story. Just so you know, it's written to a literary standard akin to "Frazier," minus opera and wine. (These are substituted, as you will plainly see.) The characters and the TV show NYPD Blue are trademarks of and copyright Steven Bochco Productions.

HOLLYWOOD STORIES NYPD BLUE

by R. Forbes Emerson (M/b, anal, rom.)

Now there were two Johns at the precinct. John at the phones, and the newly assigned detective. His name was John Clark, he was twenty-eight, six-two, one-eighty, brown eyes, brown hair in an un-extreme military cut, a hard duty face that one suspected would have to be considerably charmed to soften.

Sipowicz had been given a hell of a break by the teleplay writers, who put their literary necks on the chopping block to supply the fat, disagreeable detective with a dish that, in the real world, would have rejected him without hesitation; been insulted he'd even 'mentioned it.'

John Clark's first catch in his new precinct was the hottest of hot potatoes. The boy was fourteen, short hair, like John's, pleasant boy's face, perhaps three or four pounds that he could lose to advantage. His hair was black, his eyes big and brown, his countenance more child than man. His name was James. Vitaky.

Mother issues the size of greyhound busses. He came to the station house with them. Things swirled around. Was this a major embarrassment, or what? And the fat loudmouth. James was a library rat and recognized Round Andy as the reason for WW II. Sometimes life was that simple. His perpetual war room circled and disappeared, only to reappear, not mysteriously, wouldn't that have been nice, but foreshadowed by a calliope of outrage, apparently powered by an intractable furnace.

The girl, apparently another detective, played along, which, to the young observer, was an abject lesson in the power of money. Imagine acting receptive and charmed in the presence of such an overwhelming meatball. Wouldn't simply not hurling one's last three meals be grounds for an Oscar(tim), never mind any pissant little Emmy?

Sipowicz exchanged meaningful looks with Person A, Person B, and Person C. With John, the secretary, the looks seemed an odd combination of half-meaningful and half something else.

Issue of the moment seemed to have to do with John Clark's father fretting over his son hanging out with Nasty Andy. Even in half an hour sitting in a chair, James could see the writers gave Sipowicz a dedicated-to-his-friends side with classic tricks used in the 'Gruff exterior, soft interior' motif. Even polished by the most highly stoked alphanumeric pros in the business, James found the presence of the fat man distracting; he was conjuring as fast as his fourteen-year-old brain could think, and that was exceedingly fast. For example, listening to the grating cop, and picturing New York sports anchorman, Len Berman, looking thirty years younger after mere days at the Olympics, the boy was able to determine that the city just kind of sucked.

The apparent reverie of the boy was interrupted with the arrival of Baldwin. Six-six? Dead handsome, even if he was six-five. Looked like he could run twenty miles on a whim. Even John Clark paled just a trifle beside him, and this had nothing to do with the fact John was Anglo and Baldwin, a beautifully mixed black, if the term wouldn't be deemed offensive.

Sipowicz had dispensed with the attitude-case father, preposterously had appeared to half talk the attractive blond detective into a trip to Disneyworld, and then departed, noise and all, so James could pick up on the vibes between Detective Baldwin and the foxy enough District Attorney. That was more like it, and if she didn't quit moping with skels, kick off her shoes, and make Baldwin babies she was far to loony to be in the judicial system.

John, the receptionist, was it ADA? wasn't too shy in the meaningful looks department, himself. All fag, all the time. The Las Vegas neon, 24/7 kind. Imagine fathering such a glowing petunia with the jitters of a tweety-bird thrown in, just to make sure the old man would never sleep an hour beyond that necessary for survival.

Seemed a nice guy, for all that the entire freaking rainbow had apparently crashed on his head; James exchanged pleasant nods and John mimed that the other John would soon be with him.

How long James might have sat there in the hall, trying not to look at Baldwin, successfully, will never be known, because there was another significant look, and Detective Clark approached, introducing himself. They went into a room called The Tank, and the detective shut the door. He swung a paper bag onto the table, and bid the boy sit and help himself.

"Some of that circus out there was about your mom," John said.

"How is she?" James asked.

"She'll survive, physically, so they say, but it so far it doesn't seem that the rubber's meeting the road in the psych department."

"Is this going to be an SVU case?" the boy asked.

"Why do you ask?" the detective countered.

"You don't want to know." the boy said.

"It's my job to try to find out," John explained. He felt kind of stupid, knowing a firm grasp of the obvious was not likely to impress the boy.

"She's been a lot worse off of changes in her meds."

"James," John said, his voice serious, "has she been acting out with you"

"I'll never tell," the boy quipped. Something flashed in the officer's eyes, but vanished before the interviewee could tell whether it was surprise or respect.

"You're underage," John said, embarrassed at the banality of his observations, but one did have to go by the book. "If she touched you it's rape."

"Mostly, she read me stories, or made them up, herself, and told them to me," James explained.

"What kind of stories?" John asked, feeling the boy across the table was a little old for the kind of interactivity he described, but curious, nonetheless.

"Extensively Modified Fairy Tales," James said. If they knew how modified, SVU would be here in ten clicks of a zipper, so he'd better keep a lid on. "Just kidding," he added.

"But something's going on, right?" the cop queried.

"I dunno," James said; the amber light of the American teen. You could try to rush it, or wait out the inevitable red, for green.

"At this point, James, it doesn't matter. Maybe everything's cool, maybe not.

"What we have to delve into at the present juncture is locating you a place to stay. The uniforms said you didn't have any ideas on the subject; has anything occurred to you while you've been in chairs?"

"Had it freakin' ever, even before Baldwin shoed up!" the boy thought to himself. His demeanor remained calm, and he even allowed himself to look woebegone. "Not much chance," he intoned, bleakly, "one aunt in Boston, at least half as cracked as mom, with a boyfriend a little too interested in the sweet side of sixteen, with no hang-ups on gender issues."

"Which is why feminist book stores don't have humor sections," John quipped. It was a stretch, but perhaps not too bad for the unscripted environment. The boy laughed, that's what counted.

"Mad aunts out then," he said to James.

"Maybe there are more exciting options," the boy observed.

"Foster care?" John asked.

"Well, one does hear stories," the fourteen year old said.

"If you're into sports, you're high-brow in that environment," John said.

"I can't even fake that," James responded. "I see kids playing football, I wonder whose going to help them walk when they're fifty."

"They'll be too fat to know whether they can walk or not," John observed. He asked James if he worked out. "I jump rope," the boy said.

"How about that, me too," the detective said, his eyes suddenly so warm it was dizzying. Were they sharing a laugh over the morons who spent fortunes on machines all but guaranteed to cause a foot injury sooner or later, or was there something more poignant and simpatico arcing across the table?

Sipowicz came on strong up-Doppler, then burst through the door. He addressed John, but looked at James.

"If your young friend is as smart as the uniforms say, then offa that he should have no trouble spelling psycho-circus. Because I have no doubt he knows what it means."

"No doubt's an awfully small amount, isn't it?" James wondered, only half to himself. He left hanging in the air the why and wherefore of nothing, even doubt, as they related to police business.

"No doubt," Sipowicz shouted, rapidly coming to his paranoid, useless, Slavic boil, "means there's no doubt something hinky is going on between your little prince there, and the queen of Apartment 3523, now at Bellevue Psych, just in case he tells you they were out with a storybook and mother happened to end up at the center of a bunch of people, dressed in white, with everyone walking around with his or her head halfway out his or her ass was heading back to the old-fashioned funny farm."

James was surprised the raving idiot had circled as close as to bring up books; would have laid odds against it happening again in a space of five years, but kept his feelings to himself.

"Mother lives in the fast lane," he explained, not as patiently as he would to a child, on the somewhat frivolous notion that doing so might anger the galoot, "so when she goes off course the results are atypical."

John was very glad Andy happened to be looking at the wall at the crucial moment and thus didn't catch the thousand volt snap that followed the boy's casual uppercut to the soft brain in the hard head. They allowed themselves half a second with each other, then broke off on accord to pretend at the business at hand. Meantime, Andy had composed his thoughts.

"Off of something hinky, that's why we're all here. You, me, him; plus down and Bellevue Psych, plus I could name this squad and that squad how didn't happen to be taking a break in front of your building because no pizza truck broke no axle.

"Now we gather 'round, the three of us, three more behind the glass, and half the squad room not going about their usual business because your business is so un-usual it puts normal crime and your normal hinky goings-on in the back of everyone's mind, just so they can figure out, for starters, you know, just to get the ball rolling, if you're selling your old lady, or your fruitcake-without-the-cake mother is selling you."

James considered his options. He could point out to the detective that he'd make more delivering hot air into Con Ed's steam grid than he could as mayor, but it wasn't the time or place to liven up their acquaintance. If there had been something biblical about nasty people fucking up the earth, he thought he might get away with quoting it, but the bible seemed to be nothing but nasty people, so, it stood to reason, the book wouldn't be a good source.

Finally, the boy decided on something obtruse.

"One orphanage had a horse with curved rails in the foyer," he said to Andy, "and for some reason I'm really glad you're not on that horse; it made some kids seasick."

"You telling stupid stories, that's good. Tell us some more. Start with the nursery, getting tucked in, why don't you?"

James tried a glance at John, just from the very corner of his eyes, and got just a tiny flash that showed the young detective had not missed the reference to the blowhard being off his rocker.

The pretty blond stuck her head into The Tank to ask how it was going.

"We got one here separated at birth from Harvard University," Andy said.

"Let John handle him..." the woman was saying when the lieutenant joined the blond detective in the doorway. "What's going on here," she asked.

John was the first to answer: "I was talking about the old days, and riots, and the park, and telling the senior detective it was good he didn't have to ride every day."

"Well," the lieutenant said, "it sounds fascinating, and I hate to interrupt the party, but we've got radio working a DOA guarded by a belligerent mother, so would someone go take a look?"

John seated James back in the chair in the hallway, telling him to hang in until he got back, and they'd figure out something for housing. Then he was off and John at the telephone got all active, trying so hard not to pay attention it finally must have seemed ridiculous even to him.

"Not your best day, I guess," he finally said to the boy.

"Just another story in The Naked City," James intoned in response. He wasn't being deliberately wicked, just flirting with it.

"So many of those," John said, trying for manly and wondering if his long-suffering father may have been right, after all.

"Have you ever seen Detective Clark skip-rope?" the boy asked.

"Well, let's see," John mused. "Detective Baldwin, he goes with the punching bag, he's very fast. Medavoy, he probably knows the most."

"He's nice," James said.

"Yes he is," John agreed, "they can't write him out, or the lieutenant; they got rid of a lot you know; the girl who sat here and went to work for Apple, that was a little unintended humor; and me, they experiment, but I'm the right mixture of flash and sensitivity, so I take little trips, and have little issues, but I'm always back."

"Danny was nice looking," James observed.

"Oh, indeed," quoth John, trying not to blush. "When he was with that one girl, you'd think they would have stayed together just for the aesthetics of the thing. Art over romance, if it had to be."

"It's this city," James said. "I mean, think of it. Sinatra does one of his fandangos and what are the lyrics: 'New York, New York, what a wonderful town / The Bronx is up, The Battery's down / and everyone rides in a hole in the ground.'

"Not impressive."

The phone rang, diverting John's attention, and James sat back in his chair.

After an hour there was a commotion on the stairway. "I don't need the e.r." John said, his voice coming up from the lobby.

"Now what?" the lieutenant asked, her voice seeming a little weary of her squad.

John was now on the landing.

"It seems," Medavoy said, "well, I guess you'd call it the last stand at the Alamo, but Davy Crocket was eighty-three and of the distaff persuasion; .ah, but she did have a can of mace, and John, as the, well, John as the junior member of the team, according to long-standing police tradition, well, it was he that went in first, so this is what it all comes down to."

John, the ADA, managed aghast, managed atwitter, and managed to stay focused. John Clark landed in the chair besides James.

"I thought you said you were going to see me later," the boy whispered.

The blind detective pretended to laugh uproariously to hide his unseemly giggling at the sophomoric, stooge comment.

"You are a quick young thing, aren't you," he said.

"Quick enough," James responded, "to know you've solved my housing problem. I can be your seeing-eye skel or perp or material witness; you're going to need help for at least twenty-four hours. By that time, I will have faded into a corner and you'll never even know I'm there."

The other John looked like a horse prancing on its hind legs and pawing the air. His radar ears had picked up the by-play, and one thing about the fairy type, they could be perfectly delighted. It was lucky John Clark was temporarily blinded and didn't see, for it might have changed his mind. Instead, he said, "It does sound like a plan."

There was one last upheaval before end of shift; Sipowicz, seven comments footnoted by four sarcastic rejoinders in under a minute. Then with the beautiful detective once more, which seemed to do with a Theo, then Baldwin was back, that was cool, then John promised each and every living soul within fifty feet that yes, he'd keep washing his eyes, and yes, he'd call if he needed help, and yes, he'd take the next day off.

A dozen more meaningful looks from Andy, pretty much made you want to kill the guy just to turn it off, and they made a quick stop in the head for a wet towel, and were out of there.

"We'll have to take the subway, I guess," John said as they gained the sidewalk.

"Don't you have a car?" the boy asked; seemed all the other cops where heading to a parking lot.

"I can't drive like this," John said.

"I'll drive," James said.

"You're fourteen," John observed.

"But I've read the books, I've seen the movies," the boy pleaded. The whine was out of character and John saw right through it.

"And?" he asked.

"They say the blind have extra good hearing," the boy muttered, frustrated he'd been unable to put his new friend on, even just for a minute.

"And?" John repeated.

"Look," the boy said, "I lied to you in there. I didn't think you'd go all sightless and actually need me; just that we might talk, then you could kick me out when you found out the truth."

"And?" John intoned for the third time.

"And," James said, "I've got a NASCAR license. I mean, it's no good as far as you guys go, but it does show I've had a hundred hours of training and..."

"Sorry I asked," John interrupted.

"Look," James retorted, "I lied to you in there. Don't let anyone see you, but stick your hand down in my right jacket pocket."

They were walking side by side so John was able to play along without anyone noticing.

"That's money," he said.

"Ten thousand dollars," the boy affirmed.

"What did you lie about?"

"That I needed a place to stay; that I was in any kind of trouble, except being troubled over my mom. I can stay at a hotel or with about ten different people."

"And you lied because?..."

"Because I'm a wanna-be writer. Mom went off on a pharmaceutical airshow; I decided to play it for what it was worth."

"So now you want to drive."

"John?" the boy asked, "do you remember how I looked before you climbed the beanstalk and the old bat thought you were a fly?"

"You looked okay," the man said.

"What I mean is, did you get any indication that, given the opportunity to drive, I'd smoke donuts in the parking lot?"

"You looked normal," John replied, "and normal, at fourteen, means you'd like nothing better."

"What you brought my mother in for had nothing to do with normal; guess again."

"You're carrying ten thousand in cash, or so you say; you're a NASCAR driver, or so you say, and I'm meant to 'guess again'?"

"Point well taken," James intoned, but what happened is they reversed on the sidewalk and headed back to the precinct parking lot.

"Talk about just moved in," James said as he led John down the hall and into the living room.

"Last night I moved over;" the detective replied, "and that was about it."

"I'm glad you marked the boxes," James observed, "because, otherwise, we would have a genuine case of the blind leading the blind."

"Don't worry about it," John said.

"Right!" the boy said. "A blind man on moving day. What am I meant to do, take notes for Neil Simon?"

"I'd keep them, if I were you," the twenty eight year old suggested. "You may need them."

"Meaning I couldn't come up with something funny unless you crack some ribs?" the boy asked.

"I dunno," John said, "somehow I see you as more subtle."

"The long-ball humorist. Thanks. I'd like to be, someday. My uncle is."

"Who's you uncle?" John asks.

"The long-ball humorist," James giggled.

"A real Mr. Funny?"

"Much, much more," James said. "I mean he's funny; tries so hard you can't help laughing once in awhile, you know the kind; but a real mix master for all the frivolity."

"A sort of Jackie Chan of the word processor, then?"

"Precisely," James agreed. "All warm and fuzzy, like a napping panther bestirring herself occasionally to bat at her kittens."

"Until?"

"There are two 'untils'," James explained. "Until he gets going on obesity and the state of the nation, in general."

"Or?"

"You don't want to know."

Both let it ride. James brought John a freshly wetted towel, and began on the heap of furnishings and boxes in the middle of the living room floor. "This means we're married, you know," James said at one point, shaking a box, one of several, of Mueller's spaghetti. "If it had been vermicelli or that nasty angel hair, we'd be through."

"Great minds die alike," John said. It was a little lame, dough is forced through dies to form different styles of pasta, but James was happy he'd made the effort, and completely agreed with the underlying philosophy which held that spaghetti, plain and simple, was the only pasta needed. The two young males went on to discover that they agreed one never tired of pasta, only the sauce; the only durable sauce was butter; the only durable seasoning, a hint of garlic and this and that for cheese.

"Here's something you may be able to use," James said. He'd discovered John's jump rope in an upper box.

"You first," John said, handing back the rope.

James took it and immediately whipped into an intricate reverse shuffle step, half a tap dance.

"I suppose you weren't lying about NASCAR, either," John sighed.

"I got us here, didn't I?"

"Like you said, you've read the books, you've seen the movies."

James handed John the rope, explaining it was time to cook. The detective found he could see well enough to maintain his balance, and began his workout to the homey sound of pots gently clinking in the alcove kitchen.

"I wasn't expecting lobster claws," John said, sighing happily.

"Sneak attack," James replied. I didn't even have to sneak out behind your back: it's too bad we're not related, you know; you'd make the perfect father."

"Just mace me and spread your wings, eh?"

"Sure. You're obviously a sucker for lobster."

John couldn't disagree with that.

"Could you do the dishes?" the boy asked. They'd eaten in silence, and, plates totally polished, had sat for a happy ten minutes or so. "I'm way off my schedule with the rope because of mom."

By now John had half his sight back, and readily agreed, so the sound pattern was reversed, with James supplying the fast, light cadences in the living room and John clinking in the kitchen alcove. When he was done he found some Mozart and put it in the machine and went to find John.

"Can you see enough to walk around?" he asked

"Pretty soon," the young man said, drying the last tea cup.

"Where do you stand on drinking," John asked, brandishing the cup.

"Never," the boy said. Uncle Tom says there are two things to be high on; one is waking up sober every morning, not just most mornings, and the other is that if you're ever in any kind of accident or incident, alcohol will never be an issue.

"How about you?"

"I find if I have one, I want to have ten, so I steer clear."

"We're going to find, at this rate, we have so few issues we might as well not be together in the first place."

"After a shift with Andy," John said, "I'm issued out for a decade. If we want to get along, that's fine by me."

"But I'm a writer," James said, "and I don't want to end up like my uncle; writing for nothing; that means I need conflict and resolution. It's de rigure. Can't leave home without it."

"And you want to leave home for..."

"I meant my mother's place when I said that. I don't want to leave here, but you may make me."

"Why would I make you?"

"Because I'm not exactly Mr. Saturday Night around girls."

"And voila, an issue!"

"No," James said firmly. "That's the kind of thing he writes about. I want to work in the mainstream; publish on paper with cover art, have an editor, have an agent, get paid. Normal books for normal people."

"And your mother fits into all this, how...?"

"I said 'write', not 'live'," the boy reminded the detective. "I mean, if I was going to write about my home town, I'd have to visit other towns to have perspective, maybe even a hundred other towns if I wanted insight, which is probably a little high-falutin' for a kid that's hardly even half-way through being a teenager."

"Perhaps insight is where you find it," Paul said, softly.

"The library's full of it," James said. "But it's dangerous stuff; it can lead you astray."

"Give me an example," John asked.

"Teddy Roosevelt," James replied, promptly. "He had a reading list that would have poleaxed Sophocles; read freaking everything, and was all macho and bluster when he wasn't reading, fortunately, well focused on the Panama Canal and trust busting, yet, for all his reading, for all his travel, for all his insight writ large, when one of his boys was actually killed in WW I, he sickened and died like a neurotic widow.

"He wasn't even fifty," the boy went on; "my uncles 56, and he could win a bathing suit contest over 70% of the high-school boys in the U.S.A. He lost his business and his wife when he was in his early thirties, and, in the name of bugger all, bunkered down and became the best writer on the freaking planet."

"So why isn't he published and rich?" John asked.

"He works fast," James explained. "The time it would take him to think up this twist and that turn, he's done ten pages for each one; written, edited, proofed and posted.

"He says it's better than money; just publishing story after story; no plots, no conflicts, no tedious cliff-hangers."

"How does he keep his readers interested then; I mean, he must not have many."

"Not many?" the boy squealed, "according to the computer logs, thirty thousand people read his work every week."

"Let me get this straight," John intoned, "he writes stories without plot; linear; no arcing; no twists and turns, and he's more widely read than all but a few major columnists?"

"Don't forget Stephen King," James said.

"Is that a hint?" John asked. "Does he write horror? Sci-fi?"

"You'll run out in a minute," James said, "then you'll have to face the truth. That's why I didn't unpack my backpack, and, if this wasn't Manhattan, I'd slip the phone book into the back of my pants, just to be on the safe side."

"This is me, not kicking you out, or anywhere," John said.

"You're sure that's not just the lobster talking."

"He was arguing with the hundred-dollar-a-pound Swiss Cheese, so it may be as you say," John intoned, with a rueful nod.

"Have you ever been in love with a boy before?" James ask, his voice suddenly dusky and quivering.

"I was in love once, as a boy; best I can do," John said softly.

"But not with a girl?" the remainder of the voice asked.

"No," John whispered.

James didn't grin lewdly or act flamboyantly, he just sat beside John on the comfortable black leather sofa and shivered with relief.

Some minutes later he spoke.

"Can you see well enough to see if I'm fat?" James asked.

"You didn't look fat at the Fifteenth, and, even though I can't keep an eye on you, we didn't exactly overdo dinner."

"Everything's been upside down for a week," the boy responded, "and I just wanted to see if it was noticeable.

"Would it be okay if I took my shirt off, so you can look?"

Thin ice is easily broken, but John was still impressed at the boy's gentle way of bringing the undercurrent eddying gently to the surface. Impressive. His uncle must indeed be a writer and a half.

"Sounds like a plan," he was able to rasp aloud, "but only if you're sure. I can tell through your shirt, if that would be more comfortable for you."

James couldn't help being a little dismayed. Their conflict level, never robust to begin with, seemed to have sagged to less than null. His summary of the last six hours would simply read We really like each other, and where was the value in that? Most people spent most of the time liking each other. It was so boring, all you had to do was leave out the interesting parts.

"Do you want to take it off?" James whispered; "you know, stand behind me in front of the mirror on the bathroom door?

"It might help your eyes."

What was definitely helping his sore eyes was plenty of tears, and if they were triggered by the boy's fiery brilliance, so be it. He was one funny kid.

A gentle tug at as his hand, and the young athlete stood. James moved in front of him, reaching back to grab John's hands and place them on his shoulders. Funny, yes, the place was brand new to him, he'd only used the bathroom once, but had it really been a mile down the hall? Had time stood still, the previous evening, when he and his father had moved in the furniture and boxes? Had he been able to fly, twenty-four hours before? It was certainly a good think he had this boy to hold on to, otherwise he'd have been outta there.

But a journey of a thousand miles must end with a single step, and in years beyond Einstein's understanding, they arrived. James parked John against the sink, explaining he'd seen candles when he'd dashed out for the lobster and cheese, and that he'd be back.

Candles. Golden light to gild the lily Where most apartments were little more than a truckload of drywall tacked to the walls in variations of a theme by McDonald's, John's had that sacred 'pre-war' provenance humanizing those who dwelleith. Add just the candles, and even his stinging, watering eyes could see that the heavy fixtures and genuine tile work melded into a life renewing whole, even should one be brushing his teeth. And candles were on the way; pad, pad, pad, they were there.

"It's weird, asking how you are every couple of minutes," James said, entering the small room, and gently closing the door before placing the two tapers beside the wash basin.

"Nice of you to bring twenty candles," John said. "How many are there?"

"Two," James answered.

"Shoot, I thought this was the romantic part," the young officer quipped.

"And you'd have me out lighting twenty candles?"

"What if I helped?"

"Next time."

James stepped in front of John, and both again stood in front of the mirror.

"You still may want to kick me out," the boy said, unexpectedly.

"Now what?" John asked, his voice worried, not impatient or sarcastic.

"Talking," James replied. "It supposedly gets some guys really uptight; you know, telling true stories about things that have happened. They don't mind whips, and they don't mind pee-pee, but whisper a secret, and they think you're the perv of the ages."

"Have you met anyone like that?" John asked.

"Your voice is getting good," the boy whispered back, "and no, I haven't been Mr. Saturday Night with the boys, either; writers can't afford the time. But I read a lot, and I've read everything my uncle's written, so I know from that.

"And I know from the way your voice is, you want to quiz me; that says it all."

"A voice that can't talk, and eyes that can't see. Isn't life gay?"

"Not for me," James said, "I can't imagine sleeping and cuddling with a man, not night after night; I'd hate to hold hands with any guy, anywhere, and I'd deport Christopher Lowell for pure fagishness."

"We're in the same pew there," John agreed. "I mean, I'd never curb a fag, but I usually feel like it For that matter I don't like Hindus and Muslims going around looking like animated Mecca mushrooms, either."

"How about tattoos and hair o' the freak?" James asked.

"That's what you get from Hemingway," John replied; "you sicken kids on books, they grow up empty inside, like the peasants of a thousand years ago, so you, present company excepted, engage in autobarbarism and mutilate yourself in a futile search for something other than a ringing emptiness. The more you search, the less you find, until all there is is the pain, and apparently that amounts to something of and by itself, judging from what's happening on the street."

"My uncle believes in incest and history," James said. "To him, the perfect family reads mainstream history until nine-thirty, then retires to a single bed and has sex together until eleven."

"Sounds efficient," John said.

"Yeah," the boy responded, "you could save a thousand bucks on pizza in six months."

It may have been a non-sequitor, but John hardly noticed. The boy and his uncle were right. There was nothing new on the human horizon for the first time since Columbus, over five hundred years. First had come basic architecture, then waterwheels; Harrison with the chronometer and Watt with the steam engine way back in the seventeen hundreds. From 1880 to 1920 the pace had been dizzying, then television had kicked in in the 50s, and that had flown, nonstop, into the greatest revolution of all, which was the Bill Gates phenomenon of marketing over magic, the sale of a hundred million machines, and the creation of a new world. Now the computer was an appliance; it's offshoots in gaming and music also reduced to incremental improvements with nothing revolutionary on any horizon, simply, and irreducibly, because there was no more. We were in fact, vastly lucky to have what we did.

So they were right, uncle and nephew, the only thing new, as Harry Truman once said, was the history you didn't know. As for sex, with the outrageous obesity levels, addiction levels, and general layers on layers of malaise and dysfunction effecting vast segments of the population, well, it would be damn hard to do any worse than the current polyglot of pretentious religions run by expensive and self-serving clergy. They were wrong from the first page of Genesis to the drooling, doddering pope, who commanded his women to lay like logs and receive as many babies as their bodies could bear. Who needed a devil with that geezer around?

"Do you want me to take your shirt off before I ask you questions." John whispered.

"Just go under with your hands," the young teen coaxed.

"Like this," John asked, pulling the child's shirt gently from his pants and reaching under from both sides to gently hold his flanks, six inches above his waist.

"Yes," the boy breathed. "Oh, it's been such a long time; I forgot how romantic it can be, faggy or not faggy, even just getting felt up a little."

"How long has it been?" John asked, doing his best not to sound like Carson.

"I'm sure you don't mean Mom," the boy replied, not giggling. Hmm. The relationship must have been serious. It was an off-putting thought, so John dropped it. Meantime, James said, "about a year."

"How many men have done this with you?" John quizzed.

"I'm glad you said ''with'," the boy replied, sounding happy enough to giggle, then added, "four."

"That's not being much of a Casanova," John noted.

"Age of enlargement from communicable viruses," the boy pointed out.

"Phew," John whistled softly, "I thought it might be problems in the passion department."

"Lusty self-control," James said.

"Losty self'-control, the detective observed, adding, "I'm very, very happy you lost it with me."

"Why?" asked the boy, then the light dawned; "oh, proud of yourself," he said, "well, you should be because you made it so easy."

"Did your uncle do this with you?" John asked.

"That's like totally weird," the boy responded, "no, never; it was a real lesson for both of us. Libertines, at least at his level, are only triggered, if that's what you want to call it, by a complex set of stimuli, physical and psychological. For some reason, even though we were both of the physical and intellectual mold, and would ordinarily have been attractive to each other, we weren't. We could have showered together like straight guys after a ball game."

"How do you feel about that?"

"Stranger than if we'd experimented," James said.

"Do you look back and wish something had happened?" the man asked.

"No," James said, "but I do look back and wonder why it didn't. Nephews and uncles are by far the most common pedophilic vector; neither of us were virgins as far as being with other males was concerned; we spent a lot of time alone together. Maybe it's just that he's so interesting to talk to, who wanted to waste time doing what you could do with someone else."

"How about if you'd talked while you were doing it?"

"Are you sure this is an argument you want to win?" James asked, then laughed gently at his tease.

"It's a stretch," John admitted, "but maybe we should have some kind of bone of contention, and, hey, how many guys my age go around trying to seduce nephew's on their uncle's behalf."

"Tremendous point," James observed.

Wasn't it just.

"I'll tell him you're intrigued."

"Maybe that will break the ice."

"I'm not sure I want it broken," the boy said.

"And not sure you don't," John said, adding: "think of me professionally, not breaking the law by molesting you, what am I?"

"A detective." James said.

"An experienced detective," the twenty-eight year old said. "I got my shield my second week at the Academy, so I've been at it over a hundred cases with some thousand or so witnesses. It's an issue, trust me, and you ought to work on it, not because your neurotic; if you survived your mother you're neurotic-proof like a bullet is waterproof; rather, as an issue of choice, sort of an intellectual companion; company for when you're bored, that kind of thing."

"That's weird," James said, "because Uncle Tom has one, and he describes it just about the same way."

"What is it?" John asked.

"Anne Fairchild Emerson," the boy replied, "he was married to Anne from '75 to '79."

"What happened?" John asked.

"She was an artist and a nurse. He thought she was a great artist and wanted them both to spend a couple of years in the Caribbean, he writing, she painting. She refused, so he had to go alone. She dumped him and married Tom Cruse, a lawyer."

"Did he talk about it a lot?"

"What he wanted to do," John said, "was get something out of the marriage. She went to have her kids with another man, leaving him high and dry; he didn't date for over twenty years."

"What did he do?" John asked.

"Worked. Lived in Belize for three years, then wrote a novel based on the experience; wrote another and another, practicing. Pretty much wrote all day, every day."

"Never published anything?" the detective asked.

"Nothing made of trees," the boy said, "he said you reach a certain point as an artist when even the thought of dealing with the mechanics of marketing and publishing a manuscript becomes abhorrent, because in the same time, he could write a new chapter.

"Anyway," the boy concluded, "his wife is a recreational obsession; wondering where she is, how she is, what she's doing; now he writes about it."

"Have you read any of those stories?" John asked.

"He mailed me one just the other day."

"How was it?"

"Well," James replied, "put it this way, never in all of history has a cuckold made such use of his humility. Anne's in it, her brother, her second husband, Tom Cruise; Mary Blake, the archetypal marriage poisoner from the State o' Maine, and, well, to be perfectly honest, they don't play a single game of charades from beginning to end."

"Isn't he immortalizing them?" John asked?

"That's what he said," James replied; "plus, if they ever read it, Tom Cruise, if he's still married to her, is going to be wilder for her than ever.

"It made me wild for her; I'm fourteen and she's fifty-two."

"He must be some writer," John observed.

"Like Mozart," the boy responded, "only he doesn't go around drinking and carousing; just stays home and works day and night."

"You've watched him?"

"Yes," the boy said. "He's disabled from a work injury, so he has a special bed, with the computer right beside him. His secret weapon, because he can work thirty hour stretches without getting fidgety from sitting in a chair."

"Must be hard to proof read," John commented.

"Yeah," the boy acknowledged; he's always beating himself up over typos, petty redundancies, and most especially, spelling."

"No spell-checker?" the detective asked, half on-duty, as always.

"It wasn't me," the boy giggled, "but someone gave him a virus, so he has to compose in HTML; write novels like they were e-mails on the little screen."

"Well," John drawled, really getting to love the razor sharp kid, "it's a poor workman who blames his tools."

"Just the opposite," James said, "he loves it. No more red flags, nothing to slow him down. Plus, he says it helps him concentrate because there's no highlighting, no page numbering, and no Search facility."

"Must be hard on his readers," the detective observed.

"Hard on the reader is his middle name," the boy acknowledged, and it's not just the tech glitches; he tells the over-washed mob that they are finished in fifty years if they don't get obesity under control; is not even challenged in the least by the paradigm of a culture spending its entire surplus on endocrinology and urology."

"They are fat," John said.

"That goes to his Greater Incest theory," James said, "that families that have that way of sharing will, first, stay fit because they like it and want to do it a lot, and, second, that sex with unfettered partners is terrific exercise, all by itself."

"Original and eclectic," John commented.

"You are some kind of twins, you know," James said. "Maybe even identical, in spite of the apparent biological inconsistencies. That's exactly what Doubleday said about his first novel."

"Maybe they were right," John said.

"Are you crazy?" the boy replied, sharply, "we're twenty percent fatter than we were when he wrote it; and that's just obesity, one of half a dozen potential calamities that have dramatically worsened under liberalism. Like storage of nuclear waste. The left gets so involved in the nitpicking and hairsplitting, we have sixteen thousand sites storing no one will ever know what. The liberals talk about it, go out and buy nine ounce bottles of water, come back, and argue more, with highly paid Jewry somehow always on the scene."

"So when you said hard on the reader, you weren't being funny and making a joke about penises?"

"He teaches humor," James explained, "but he doesn't expect anyone to learn."

"It sounds like he expects them to die," John said.

"He points out to them" the boy explained, "how lucky they will be to die at the end of civilization; to die when there is nothing left to live for, and won't be for who knows how long."

"It is a thought," John admitted.

"Sure it is. But the real joke is that he has all the answers; a notebook full of policies and procedures that would pull, literally, the fat out of the fire."

"Such as?" John asked, somewhat startled by his question. He'd taken abnormal psychology long before joining the NPYD and had never pictured child molestation as being quite like what he was sharing with this beautiful fourteen-year-old boy.

He was infinitely that the boy, he almost thought of him as 'the nephew' seemed to think the same. It would last for hours at this rate, and hours, assuming they sat at some point, of just running his fingers over the silky skin was like a side-trip to a temporal heaven in the here and now.

James didn't disappoint, but stayed on message, very responsive to what was happening under his shirt, but even more excited that it would go on and on. Better than the dog show some kids got because of time and privacy restraints. "We're engaged in a novel, not a comic book," he explained it to himself. Out loud he answered John's "Such as?" with an example:

"For you cops," he said. "Think of it. In Germany, they were doing research to see if they could detect incipient Alzheimers with a computer, by taking some video of the upper torso while a patient underwent standard testing.

"After a few years, they found the machine was a thousand times more accurate than any observation or standard examination, so, being the inventive little folk who gave us jets and rockets, they began using the software and databases in other fields.

"Low and behold, what they had created was the super, and I do mean 'super', polygraph. Not only can it detect deception, it can detect efforts to confuse the testing. Then, is if more were needed, it can characterize people - freaking period. You can feed ten seconds of junky video into the machines, say the subject is three people meeting at an airport, and the machine will tell you, based on algorithms to do with their head and shoulder movements, what all three are up to, if anything nefarious is going down, it will just about blow the machine up in the operator's hands.

"And the operator can be almost anybody. Boot the software, import a few seconds of head-and-shoulders video, and the machine tells all."

"We need it," John said.

"Duh'uh," the boy responded. "I'm going to fall in love with you, you're going to get shot by some hell-hound everybody knows is trouble, and I'm going to end up feeding you through a straw while the schmoes free your assailant so their system and its media twin can make more money off you.

"Can something actually be worse than the church?"

"Now, now," chided the officer, "the church has thousand of years and millions of tortured innocents to answer for, high crimes and misdemeanors aren't even in the running. A few hundred dead a year. More people die from lighting."

"My hero," the boy sighed.

"Bad word since the attacks," John said firmly. "They made a joke out of the very word. Those guys were simply blind-sided; in the meantime, they lived opulently and safely. Look down at your feet to see the real heroes; in the sewers and out at the landfill. Half the fit people in the city want our jobs, we're functionaries that get in a bind once in awhile; for every one who drops, there are twenty to take his place. We're just lottery winners, that rarely draw a losing ticket."

"One thing's for sure," James observed, "and that is that the two of you would get along."

"Not necessarily," the detective rejoined, "we'd just grin at each other, and that would be the end of the conversation."

"Well don't give up," James came back, "because he's a flat-out fox. Most teens would trade bods in a minute."

"Does he have young lovers," John asked, demonstrating something complicated: James was telling him about something that could save his career or life, he was openly molesting the fourteen year old with both hands, and now, thinking of the handsome uncle, and how he might relate to young lovers; self preservation put on the back burner in exchange for abstract tales of someone he was likely never to even meet.

What did it say about him as a man, as an officer? What did it say about hanging out, what, hardly an hour with a very likely boy indeed?

For sure, it would make a memorable case file; better to leave it at that for the time being.

But trying to close out the thought, turn the page, was not as easy as it might have been in other circumstances. His life, his career, versus the cream smooth belly warm in his fingers and the functioning brain under the short black hair of the handsome boy's head that lolled left and right across his chest. Maybe it was time to at least take their shirts off.

"Can I do this?" John whispered, his hands fingering the child's top button.

"If I can turn around," the boy whispered. Why? Because John was bright eyed, fox faced, and didn't have any trace of the odd look of the guys in the various hair club commercials. He was well spoken and even sensitive. Sure, he was no hero, but it would still be dynamite to see him bare chested. Was he mad enough to have a six-pack or city pecs - from jumping rope, didn't seem likely. But it would be very nice to know; so, he turned to unbutton the athletic adult male.

"What do you think about kissing?" John asked as the delicate fingers went to work.

"I'll bet it's better bare-chested."

"Walking through fire would be better with you would be better, bare chested," John intoned.

"Just don't walk away," the boy suggested.

"This is me, walking away," he whispered, and leaned to the beautiful mouth.

"Go slow, I'm almost all virgin," the boy said, so, not to take chances with his beautiful jail bait, John proceeded like costly honey, thick and slow, wanting to pant and pillage; wanting to ravish and tear, wanting to scar lips and chip teeth, but landing, after a flight of some small number of years, with all the force of a small butterfly.

Indeed, the force of handsome man meeting beautiful boy must have been insignificant, because neither was in the least interrupted in their efforts with some twenty buttons. In fact, the meeting was so casual, with a little experimenting they found they could not only breathe, lips touching, but talk.

Since this was uncomfortable standing up, John stripped off his unbuttoned shirt as James did the same, and then guided the boy to the old fashioned high bathtub, where John seated himself, bringing the boy at a perfect height between his legs. Now they could talk and kiss in comfort, but the didn't. Farthest thing from it. They backed away from each other, almost instinctively, not wanting to talk, not wanting to touch, but, brilliant duo that they were, wanting just to look.

Bare chested, John could see what James had meant about missing a few workouts; but, truth to tell, the extra two or three pounds gave the boy a childish look that was made a hundred times more alluring by the straining bulge at the boy's waist. Non-child. James was the most beautiful sight John had ever seen; living flesh to mock all sculptors. To James, John was a ditto; all muscle, no show, the bulge in his slacks, mesmerizing.

Seated, the boy stepped close and they resumed their conversation.

"Do you think this is as good as incest," he half whispered, half nibbled.

"I think it's as good as puppy love," the boy nibbled back.

It was age reducing, of that the young man had no doubt. Half kissing, half talking, with a half and then some left over for just breathing on each other left him gasping internally at though he was a hundred, but nothing else was a day over fourteen; he'd have to grow some even to reach that, by his calculations, which seemed to mean less and less with the thick gathering of haze around what he'd recently known as conscious thought.

"What should we talk about?" James asked, not seeming to do any better in Lamaze, as the structured breathing exercises applied to young lovers, than his mature partner.

"Cabbages and kings," John suggested.

"What?" the boy asked.

John obliged the child by repeating his words, again and again and again. In the end, there was no answer, handy enough, because never in human history had there been less of a question.

Fortunately, the tactile sensations were so delicious, the playfulness of the children yielded to mature conversation, otherwise there would be nothing to write about.

"You know what?" James asked.

"No, what?" John whispered back.

"We may go from a recreational obsession to an artistic obsession."

"That sounds good for a mid-teen," John observed.

"It's good for a teen writer," the boy replied, "because an artistic obsession is one that stays with you long enough to act as an amateurs for the tendrils and byways that make up a story, plus, it's professional; does not influence, nor is it influenced by daily life, though it is based on real life."

"Just remember," the wiser head said to the younger head, "that writers are the ultimate cop-out artists. They can lie around, drifting and dreaming, and call it research."

"My uncle, David, rides to the bottom of the ocean in a submersible, and calls it research," James noted. "At least Uncle Tom doesn't bill the taxpayers.

"But you're right. He says writing is for lazy people to pick at eighteen hours a day, thirty hours at a stretch if there's any meat on the carcass."

"Since he's writing about the potential of millions and even billions of human carcasses, I guess he doesn't suffer from blockage, as most writers do."

"He's most amusing on the subject," James acknowledged, "and, since the people have brought their crises down on their own heads, he can afford to be cavalier and just look for the lighter side of cathedral ceilings and the whole merry-go-round of image and status.

"Philosophically, he believes the only way to have any positive impact is simply to laugh at the morons until they tire of the sound, reforming, so it will stop."

"But it's bound to stop, anyway, or so his theory goes."

"Where's the fun in that?" the boy asked, rhetorically; chaos and starvation. But there's worse. Much worse. Where even Stephen King wouldn't dare go."

"WE'RE where Stephen King wouldn't go," John said.

"Guess again," the boy said, "picture it, 2050, the average eight year old is six feet tall. Picture it," James continued, "2100, the average six year old is eight feet tall."

"So," John said, after a moment's thought, "he could write a story about a bunch of six-five cub scouts. It sounds a little Grimm even for King."

"That's what I said," the boy reminded the beautiful young detective he was half, but not half-heartedly, kissing with every word and phrase, even King couldn't write it. Since they'd all be so fat and unhealthy, they'd have no interest in what we're sharing, so Uncle Tom wouldn't bother, seeing how he's lazy."

"Lost to the future," John commented. It was an absurd paradigm to trivialize, but, as has been said and repeated, the folks buy the flakes, the bakes and the cakes. What was there to do but laugh at them, taunt them, tell them in no uncertain terms what they were missing, and turn the page. If you pounded one ounce of sense into one indulgent noggin, you had at least tried, and, as an absolute, no one else was.

"I'll bet we could kiss in our underpants," James whispered. John was thrilled to have his briefs referred to with the boyish word. (Not thrilled enough to keep them, mind you.)

It would have been shooting fish in a barrel to point out to the youth, that they could continue their juvenile level of making out, without them, so John let the thought slide.

"Do you want to do it the way I shared the first time?" James asked.

"Yes," the man said.

"Good," the boy whispered; "that lets you share it and me re-live it, pretty good deal, eh?"

"Yes," John said again.

"That's Uncle Tom's idea," the boy explained. "Privacy is for bankers and physical acts. Between lovers, it's secrecy and can be found in the dictionary under 'cancer'."

The phone rang. Amazing instrument, John mused; probably a company who numbered zero in customer satisfaction, which, of course, would mean less than nothing to a Jew. Ring again. Cops life. Ring again, drag me from heaven for a reminder that MCI and Sprint were engaged in manly competition for that penny-per-minute so beloved of an obese and otherwise malled, strip-malled, and wopshot culture, whatever 'wopshot' meant.

They reached it in time so it didn't ring a fourth time. James was impressed that John was duty-first underneath. Sure their game had been fun, but it was kids' stuff; when the man was needed - even the vaguest chance the man might be needed - and it didn't take four rings; probably amazing it had taken three.

John felt strongly about the phone companies and others bothering endless millions over the decades with their pitches to home plate, but, he had to admit, anything that gave him an excuse to stand, to pick up the willing child, to have the legal child wrap arms and legs around him, like a real child, and to feel the immature chest against his own as he walked into the living room, couldn't be all bad.

It was Baldwin Jones. Both recognized the rich cadences of the eighty-percent black's voice.

"John," he said, "I saw you circle back to the lot with that mother-problem kid; maybe I should call him a seeing-eye kid, so I just wanted to be sure your eyes were okay."

"Nice of you, dude," John replied into the receiver. "What are you up to?"

"Something came up with PAA John," Baldwin said, "so we've kind of been conniving."

"Hold on just one sec, would you?" John asked. He couldn't quite see the boy's eyes, read what might be there at the sound of Jones' voice, so he asked:

"Should we invite him over?" he whispered.

"He seems really nice," James whispered, wriggling happily.

"Why don't you come over?" he said into the telephone. "Believe it or not, we've got leftover linguini with lobster claws."

"You're sure?" the man asked.

"Times two," John affirmed.

"What's the kid like?" the African American asked.

"He's got ten thousand dollars in his jacket pocket, and if it were a good news / bad news joke, that would be the bad news."

"As long as the bad news isn't Sipowicz," Baldwin said, glad to be able to comment outside the boundaries toadying enforced by the writing staff.

"He's chasing after his impossible dream," Baldwin said, "I hate to play against a crock like that, but I need the gig."

"They write a good side to him," John acknowledged, "and that's a fact. Someday maybe we'll figure out why. Take a Sipowicz, add a gram of doctrine, and fifty million people go up in smoke."

"If he reads a book a year, it's green eggs and ham," Baldwin agreed, but, rather than warming to the lucrative subject, if not as lucrative as the misbegotten Kennedys, still, lucrative enough, Baldwin simply said "see you in five," and they said good-bye.

"Should we put out shirts back on?" James whispered.

Now there was something to think about. How much of a chance could he afford to take with his young rape victim. Many things came into play from his reading of the tall athlete to the fact he was a fellow cop, and cops didn't rat cops, to Baldwin as intelligent friend, precious friend. If he'd said he'd be over in an hour, they'd have a chance to tamper with the cooling, the apartment would be hot; he and James would have every reason to be half naked with each other.

Inspiration is the mother of invention, and, while women take a lowly place in the life of dynamic males, gender issues are not absolute. Her guidance was followed.

Although he ate well, John Clark did posses ketchup, not only that, ketchup in a red squeeze bottle.

Jews put things in boxes. They would talk, future tense, of a festive event, assuming, because they meant it to be festive, it would be. Rituals. Rabbis dancing because somewhere along the way, some renowned scholar had suggested there should be happiness in life. Ritual happiness. Didn't seem to work, mercifully, but it did bring up a point. Ritual playfulness. Playfulness, not spontaneous and for the nonsense of it, but more like a play date; planned, schemed, if not ponderously deliberate, nonetheless, purposeful rather than off the wall.

So with due deliberation John and James played. If there was no particular joy and laughter in their squirting of each other with the bright red sauce, the were mature enough to but aside the momentary delight of horsing around for a goal that, while not exactly academic, was nonetheless far removed from kids' stuff.

The soiled clothing had to go in the washer. Problem solved. They stripped like jocks in a locker room, carefully read the labels and puzzled the chemistry before setting the machine to its little role in their charade.

On the way back to the kitchen, they gave a few random squirts from the red bottle, and, when the doorbell rang, both had stained cloths in their hands, and, if they didn't look like charwomen in their underpants, they didn't look like they were up to no good, either.

James opened the door, trying to look unabashed as he began his duties as houseboy from heaven.

"Come in," John said. "We were playing a game of lying on the floor and seeing who could squirt the ketchup closest to the ceiling without leaving a splatter."

"Looks like you both lost," the detective said.

"Zero, zero," John affirmed, leading the six-five beauty into the living room, where both he and James resumed to their ersatz cleaning duties. Even though the phony diligence amounted to less than a one percent variance from what would have been the normal pace of activity, the visitor detected it and stood half thrilled out of his freaking mind.

Ten guesses why. Go ahead. Take a minute. It's been almost perfectly foreshadowed. It's intended to be both funny and sexy, with maybe an overtone or two of edginess for its own sake.

Why was Baldwin thrilled out of his socks at the slightly artificial nature of his hosts doing what they were doing? Will the reality live up to the hype? Will, in the end, the reader be satisfied? There's only one way to find out.

"I've got someone with me," the Afro beauty said, returning to the door. Looking to John, he received a nod, and turned to open it. He opened it. He leaned out into the hallway. He said one word that galvanized John and James, who had followed out to see what was happening, and that word was 'Theo'.

Satisfied?

"He can stay 'till midnight," Baldwin said, offering a finger to the seven-year-old and leading him into the living room.

"What are you doing?" the boy asked, seeming a little shy and nervous.

"They were playing a game, and they messed up their clothes," Baldwin explained. The washing machine obligingly began to surge and the little boy smiled in comprehension and then a childish grin of glee.

"We have to go to the basement in our building," the boy said, running to the washer and actually touching it. "It's starting to get warm," he said, "I like it when it gets warm, it makes it seem like it's alive."

Ah youth. Look, foreshadowing is meant to be subtle, woven in, say, by the master Dickens, filament by filament so when you find out who someone's father is, you sit spellbound. Sit is the operative word. They had time, those Victorians for the intricately woven arcing, unfurled over hundreds of pages. We live in a more hurried and forthright time, so it must effect our literature. (I hope not for the worse.) Thus you can take the liberty of reading into a statement "ah, youth," a certainty that it is neither there accidentally, nor is it going to be the beginning of a long, drawn-out subplot, finally resolved six hundred pages down the line. Not today's style. We like to cut to the chase.

Looking into the machine, Theo determined it was under loaded.

"Can I wash mine, too?" he asked, now sitting on the rim and peering down into the bubbly tub. How he knew how much was in the machine neither of the so-called detectives bothered to ponder, and, even if his thoughts might have traveled an inch down the right road, Baldwin was distracted by Theo pointing out there was enough room for his clothes, too.

"I want James to take my shirt off," the boy said, shyly.

The three mature males drew, each, a last breath of consciousness and James walked over to the real child and gently fondled his top button.

I learned a bad habit from Captain Marrayatt, possibly the greatest all-round writer of all time. He waltzes, without so much as a by-your-leave into his story, half the time to dis you, then thumps you back in his epic a little shaken, but reading more avidly than every. It's a talent I admire, but it takes a fiendish amount of practice, and you have to deliver. When you set the reader up, your lose if he or she doesn't thank you for it. In the present instance, there's the phrase, "Ah, youth." You may hardly have noticed, but I'd suggest going back and reading it again. Why? To help me in setting you up. Work with me.

"The water's getting cold," Theo said, "hurry up."

Baldwin Jones peeled of his polo shirt, rimming it into the tub. James opened Theo's buttons. Baldwin emptied his pockets, removed his shoes, then contributed his slacks and socks making a joke about getting them back. Urban legends. Theo hopped down, obviously happy to be bare chested with the mature males. He arched his back and displayed as James removed his shoes and socks, then his trousers.

He half followed them into the soapy water, regaining his balance as James steadied him on the rim of his apparently beloved machine.

With just the briefest intrusion to remind you that I used the word 'beloved' I'll leave you to what Theo said as he pushed the clothes under the water. Are you ready?

The seven year old looked directly at James, but made his suddenly husky voice loud enough for all to hear.

"There's room for our underpants," he announced.

Sensing the absolutely extreme discomfort of his entire audience, the little boy whispered to them all.

"You know the movie 'Auntie Mame'?" he asked.

"All three shook their heads in the negative.

"It's an old one," the boy said, "but that doesn't matter. Part of it is about a boy at a bohemian - that's what they used to call new-age - school, you know, very advanced. Anyway, the banker goes to visit the hippie schoolmaster, and finds him in the gym, and he's naked, and all the boys and girls are naked, I mean, sure, there a few years older than I am, but they're still little kids, and the naked teacher is teaching the naked boys how a fish spills on the eggs in the nest to make them grow. You know, with his sperms. So, anyway, Carlos, he's this swimmer from Mexico, and he's helping at the daycare center, this was last month, and during rest period he asked me if I wanted to see the move, "Auntie Mame," and that it was an old comedy. So I went into his cubical. He had it copied on DVD, just enough scenes to bear out his point, and his point was that he though I was really mature for my age, and that I might understand what was happening with that new-age teacher and the little boys and girls in his school. When I explained I was six years old, which I was at the time, he asked me if seeing it would mean more than hearing it, even if we didn't have a little girl with us for the sperm."

Here the boy stopped, gazing from the machine to James, then to John and Baldwin, seeming to try to drink all of them in simultaneously. The young men looked at each other, then at each other's eyes. Theo continued with his prattle.

"So," the boy said, "after we watched it and talked about it he asked me if I liked him, and I said I did, and then he asked me if I wanted to play the same game the boy in the movie played, and we could use the pillow on the sofa for the girl if we put some paper towels on it for the sperm."

The round eyes looked at them, one by one; apparently the tyke knew storytelling along with whatever other tricks he could no longer have up his sleeves, which were sitting in a lump, just under the fading bubbles, waiting for their agitation. No sleeves.

Underwear?

"Can I tell you a secret?" the boy whispered, not being coy so much as trying to get the page turned.

The three nodded hoping one day they'd again reach a status of being able to do it dumbly.

"Carlos didn't use the pillow from the sofa because I wanted to pretend a girl, just while the door was locked."

James was eventually able to whisper to John: "My uncle says he never gets blocked when he's writing, that's from all the practice, but sometimes he chokes; has so many stories in his head he can't set them down fast enough even though he's a razor typist.

"Now I know how he feels."

They all did. The soft boy body, with just the first hint of maturity in his long legs was a vacuum sucking total attention. It was beyond their scope to even imagine touching that angel soft skin, and what Carlos had shared with him behind a locked door made James think of a story his uncle told about trying to picture the precise cubic inch and space and split second in time when Tom Cruise first ejaculated in his wife. Using obsession as art he described a Mexican film on reproductive biology with scenes shot through a probe showing the male's white flood actually seeming to back and fill for just seconds, before it rushed and more rushed after it. What had Anne felt at that moment she shared with Tom Cruise? Had it been wild and tempestuous, neither of them even sensing the beginning of their all, or had it been tender, still, gentle and sweet, with the female knowing exactly and sharing fully that first divine pulse? What had she said? And afterwards, knowing it wouldn't be over for years? What had she said the next morning, half asleep?

Too romantic? That's not me asking, that's Theo, but he was asking the question of himself. Looking down at the three handsome males hardly more than a foot or two away, the child saw that, while they still bulged, they did less of it.

Carlos had had the same problem, and had taught Theo how to work around it. Where once 'sit' had been the duty word, now 'work' took its place.

"The oldest goes first, that's the rule," the cutie said, dropping from our beloved machine. Baldwin had a month on John and stood rooted so one could wonder if his legs might block the subway.

"So many molesters, so few children," the boy murmured to himself as he knelt before the tall athlete, pulling his grey briefs down.

"Sorry," he giggled when he saw Baldwin, though beautifully massive, was completely flaccid, "a case of mistaken identity. You may go."

"Sure," James thought to himself, "and they won't wait 'till the eleven news if he moves and inch. Indeed, for such a human specimen of training and discipline, the man hardly managed an inch of lifet in each of his feet so the tidy child could retrieve fodder for the maw of the machine.

John, likewise, hadn't even the vestige of an erection, and seemed uninterested in the silky child arms that reached to him, or the cute boy face at his waist. Baldwin and James had to steady him so he could lift his feet, otherwise he appeared comatose.

Did young James fare any better? Not exactly. But, in a minute or two, the job was almost done, three undergarments on the soapy pile.

Remember 'sit', remember 'work', remember how we foreshadow, as we did with 'ah, youth?' Okay, what are we up to, now? Almost is the operative word. Almost what? Almost all the underpants sitting there waiting for Theo to close the lid.

The three males stared hotly at the child and he blushed.

"I've never done it in front of strangers," he said, closing the lid of the machine, and lying back against the control panel, his belly rising and falling rapidly as he eased his bottom to the very edge of the machine, so his long legs dangled over its front.

"James," he whispered, raising himself for his new friend.

The fourteen year old was careful not to block the view of his friends as he took the child by the hips and skinned his white briefs down over the smooth pale thighs and calves, catching them as they fell off Theo's feet, then muscling the top of the washer up an inch so he could shove them in and forget about the laundry.

Theo was huge. Had to be five inches, thick as a frank. He jutted wildly and hotly, now panting openly, and lay back on the surging machine, spreading his legs as widely as he could and lacing his fingers behind his neck. James and Baldwin gently took the tiny feet, allowing the boy to display fully to John, who stood, naked, inches away.

New York City was drab and repetitious, short of a townhouse, and hemmed in. Miles to anything resembling country, and that would be as shopworn as the Meritt Parkway. James' uncle wrote drab. The boy once quipped to his virtuoso kinsman that if he wrote a story of a boy and a dog, the boy would be so depressed at the thought of getting out of the well he'd yell, "Lassie go home/1"

What Jewry had done to the ambience, most recently in Time's Square, intruded in the giant face of Seinfeld and minions no one wanted to count, crept in almost everywhere the city went, and let's have three cheers for our friend 'almost'.

Theo began to urinate, very gently. Oy veh. The golden stream staggered up a foot or so, then tumbled onto the child's soft, white belly. He held off for a few moments, then did it again. The mature males got so hard, so fast their penises clunked audibly against the washing machine.

Again the boy let a few ounces of urine splash over his chest, tummy and thighs, his young body equating the sensations with those when he was a full grown boy, he hoped, vaguely, by age nine. Whatever the child felt was a snowdrift compared to an avalanche relative to what James, John and Baldwin were thinking and feeling. This was magnified when Theo let go completely, sitting up at the same time.

Baldwin acted the hero, grabbing the fountaining child off the washer, and holding the seven year old gently so his hot stream was for John and James. Men can't pee when they have boners, boys can.

This little drama concluded with a hasty trip back to the old-fashioned bathroom, where the young males washed and dried each other with a few tentative licks to see if the activity commonly known as 'water sports' could possibly add to the pleasure they were finding with each other.

Their initial shock at the naked you beauty with his transcendentally big and beautiful penis had subsided and Baldwin now stood at an almost obscenely long and thick eight inches, his un-circumcised shaft bent slightly to his right. John was dramatically arced in the same direction, and James thought it made him nothing short of absolute in the 'interesting' department. James even at his tender and boyish fourteen years of age was the only one who was circumcised; he was a beautifully boyish slim six inches plus, his shaft arcing delicately back toward the slight softness of his still slightly childish belly.

For ten minutes the males played in the tub. John and Baldwin had never interacted with males; James had limited experience, his mother notwithstanding, because she was same-old / same-old with her original adaptation of certain fairy tales, so it was little Theo, and, in absentia, Carlos who ruled, Theo who suggested the bedroom might be more comfortable.

"Gee, guys got along good," James couldn't help remarking to himself. His months with his uncle had turned him off women; the listing of distaff shortcoming to well researched and documented to ignore while simultaneously maintaining sanity.

For example, there was the Rapp story. Anne's maternal grandmother. It went something like this. Christmas 1977, the young couple had flown back to New Jersey; done the family tour, then braved the New Jersey Turnpike to visit the grandparents. The experience had combined the bizarre, the cruel, and the sublime. Old lady Rapp, her husband sitting right beside her, trying not to grin like and idiot, had launched into a wink, wink, tale of her very close and very intimate friendships with Mssrs. Stiglitz, Stichen and Marin in her years as a New York secretary. Other artists were mentioned, and Tom had figured, with his quick old Yankee mind, that the only one of the group who could not have fathered Yvonne, Anne's mother, was Georgia O'Keefe. That little coy piece of fluff duly delivered, the moronic clatterbox went on to tell how she'd given two steamer trunks of Stiglitz negatives and original prints to a very handsome young man. Apparently she hadn't known him from Adam, but from his mouth had come those cadences of flattery and petting dear to an old woman's heart. "I set him up in business," the clatterbox summarized, not needing to add she had not so much as a telephoned her grandson (Win Fairchild, who appears in other stories) or her daughter, who just happened to be living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and whose husband happened to own a large gallery at the time, before dispensing with hundreds of thousands of dollars in art work.

The subject had been loyalty. Tom's loyalty had been called into question over a love affair which consisted of himself spending twelve hours alone with Laura Facey; the contempt shown by Rapp had been shrugged off as nothing. The story had a delicious ending. The wacky lady, mother of an artist's daughter, or something, anyhow, so utterly full of herself nothing mattered, managed to fail to dominate a patch of ice on the sidewalk and broke a kneecap, and, with that rare perfection of real justice, the following winter, managed to repeat her performance, and break her other kneecap. Cool.

These were just examples, and the writer had many more, of a general and broad-based inferiority of women. Uncle Tom had known of a dozen or more divorces where the women dumbed the bewildered and confused men, only two where the men had dumped the women, for obesity in both cases. None of the men had been anything but ordinary; none had cheated to excess, drank to excess, or did anything to excess. They were they guys in the elevator, yet each had been dumped, in some cases after years of what they thought was a mutually happy marriage.

It was a subject of extreme importance. Men were ruined by being dumped. The boy's uncle freely admitted if things hadn't worked out as they had he might have returned to pay back Anne's taunting with a rifle from a ridge.

Very cautionary, the writer was to his fellow males. Watch out! Anything can and will be used again at that female mood swing that sets her yearning for foreign sperm. Don't even think about drinking, don't even think about any form of anything that could be conceived or perceived as a dalliance or flirtation, much less affair. How one walk's the fine line between responsive and clingy will be judged by the woman, and it can become an issue in a heartbeat.

Women are flat out dangerous. James' uncle, substantially, if not vastly experienced, knew of no male friend who would not immediately take back his first wife, at least as a friend; even the two fat girls, if they'd dropped fifty pounds, could have had their men back on almost any terms at any time. On the other hand, viewing the same group of a pretty typical American dozen, the writer knew of no female who ever wanted to see the dumpee again, who would spend a night with him for a million in cash. This was unbalanced. This was extreme. This was devastating. Give women power, they didn't suffer themselves just to abuse it, they had to massacre it; use it willfully and wantonly. In Anne's case, she'd given up an opportunity to spend five years as an artist and an enduring fortune like a cat running after what looked like a bigger fish. Click and done. Of course, Uncle Tom was using the fifteen thousand a year he saved by not having to support Anne, in the highly unlikely event that might have been necessary, to support a delightful family of five replete with Samantha, a fourteen year old whose charm didn't seem to end at the edges.

The messages from Uncle Tom's work processor were crystal clear. Marry carefully, make it an all-out commitment, or you'll find the pain really starts to kick in after about twenty years, and you might not have a Samantha to pet and hold hands with. (You'll need one.) Do not do anything flakey, do not drift, do not dream, do not dally, do not cling, do not, unless you are a genuine homosexual, think any male companion, however great the friendship, however great the sex, can take the place of waking up with a sweetie pie in your arms, and maybe two if things are going well for you.

Men rarely dump women, and try to remain friends if they do. Women are all but born to dump men. It's as simple as that.

It was interesting to James that the message of the outright master of extreme erotica had for one and all the same message one heard from the pulpit. He wondered if his uncle's would translate this moral stereophonic sound into actual changes in behavior. And of course, irony was thickly interwoven; some readers became addicted to net porn, and that ruined otherwise enduring marriages. He, Tom, viewed this frankly: "I just produce the best bottle in the liquor store and try to write well enough to act as a virtual partner in hopes my readers will choose my writing, and the work of other excellent storytellers, over any flesh-and-blood partner, period. Nifty, et al, is the answer, just as limes are the answer to scurvy, and all you have to do is think of living on lime juice for a single day to put your house in order, keep it that way, and get your ducks in a row, keeping them that way.

Since much of his reader mail was from women, Uncle Tom had advice for them, too. Watch out. The grudge was building. When enough men, fallible, imperfect men, get dumped for no substantive reason by enough light-on-the-vows women, the hunt will begin. You know, the "track it down and kill it" mentality. Easy up ladies, because it's no fun bloodying up the front lawn, perhaps accompanied by man two and your children.

Could the laws be changed? Probably not; it was a question of hugs and kisses, not lines on pages. What would help would be more documentaries, more vivid imagery of what a man goes through when his wife goes to another for her children. Sure, seventy six percent of parents, if offered the choice, would chose not to have their children, but those are statistics. They say nothing of the wildness with which a woman takes a new man, flushing the old with more violence than they welcomed the new; the combination, obviously the maximum sexual experience possible unless one has engaged in willing mutual masturbation with an eleven-year-old boy. (Sorry, girls.)

When Napoleon came to power, the divorce rate in France dropped from forty percent to forty divorces. It is frivolous nonsense, and there's the proof. Nice people get along fine together, and even nasty people learn to tolerate each other; shifting and trading around is frivolous, even when it brings a lean, handsome fifty-six-year-old man a fourteen-year-old tomboy (at least I feel that way, some of the time).

What's the cause of today's devastating epidemic of abandon males? Kike women. Steinem, Jong, and a grubby ilk of scab pickers and nitpicker; giant camera mouth structures; rattle traps like old Lady Rapp. Soaps. Oprah. More kikes. Irreducible. Simply the way it was. Gratuitous human suffering on a colossal scale, typical of Jewry in charge, and, since their 'stereotype' defense plays well to leftist pea brains, its Jews as masters, goy as slaves, culturally, remember the Seventies, if not, quite yet, with gun and boot. Again, this is a subject of humor. We will die of them, everybody in the civilized world will die of them, so die happy at the end of an Anglo Saxon empire such as the world had never even begun to dream a hundred years ago.

You think that was long? I was just covering for my friends as they made their way from the bathroom to John's bedroom. Think how long that might have taken.

No Jews. No fashion over for, hype over fact, and, for absolutely sure, no reason to sell the sizzle over the steak.

For ten minutes the males sat side-by-side on John's bed. They had hours until Theo had to be home, and he could stay the night if he had to. (Had to?) So deliberate was their intention of not rushing with the child that even when the boy had laid back and traced a circle around his belly button, saying, "this is where Carlos sperms on my tummy," the simply sat and stared, picturing the gentle Mexican's hot semen spurting repeatedly as a rough circle was outlined. Then the boy told his secret. He was having oral sex with Carlos, swallowing the mature boy's semen twice a week, though, in the beginning, he'd taken it down his throat a dozen times over just a few days. The increase in hormones was responsible for his penis, which would have looked normal on a mature boy twice his age. He explained that he'd grown enough so he could only go all the way with an adult once a week or so, otherwise he might end up like the freaks in porno films who had cocks which hung, literally, not digital funny-business, to and beyond their knees, twelve to eighteen inches. Carlos had explained that most of these boys would have had gay step fathers, usually with gay friends, and so the boys, even to the age of toddlers, might swallow literally ounces of semen every week. It was interesting that apparently a well proportioned but triply enlarged penis was the only apparent manifestation of the excess, and boys who were lucky enough to have limited access to will men simply grew bigger and faster than their brothers, which, as Theo knew, was dead exciting.

"Do you have sperm?" James asked.

The boy, now sitting in the group, leaned softly against the fourteen year old and said, "since last week. I started spraying while I was asleep.

The though of watching a cute and naked seven year old cum did nothing to animate the three mature males; who were they kidding, four mature males. They sat, their imaginations smoking and steaming. If it wasn't going to be over before it properly began, each of the older males had to divert his thoughts. James reviewed what his uncle had offered as a solution to the marriage mess. Feral cruises and feral camps. Everyone vetted for disease, relevant abnormalities, mode of living, and so on, then, when the couples gather, it's a free for all, with the important enhancement that the babies produced will be linked to theri biological fathers, and these fathers will be expected to take a substantive role in the core family, outside of interference. This would satisfy the female's genetic need to bring wild seed to herself, make family life more complex and interesting, and enrich borderline marriages, in general. It was assumed by the writer that any male with an IQ of over ninety would not care who the baby came from, as long as it came from his wife. Re-instilling real sex in marriage would seem to be a no brainer, but the church was stupid and slow, so the divorce rate and rate of broken families would probably remain at the roughly fifty percent level.

"It's nothing to get particularly het up about," Tom Emerson had pointed out, "in a few years obesity will be so prevalent only splinter cults will even consider sex."

James had recognized the exaggeration, his uncle was a consummate novelist, so instead of broad-brushing the national fate as no sex at all, he, more moderate and mature, saw that only sexy sex would be lost. Scary thought. (And a special hello to Patrick Norton of TechTV, who I know reads me - I'm the funny one who writes porn, remember?)

The need for psychological distraction was becoming acute. The image of Carlos cradling the beautiful seven year old in his left arm, leaning half across his body aver propping his head with a pillow so he could see everything, even taken a moment to adjust the candles so the light would be perfect, then gently masturbating as the child stared, wide-eyed, until the hot gush of white fluid all over the tender belly made the little boy pant and moan, thrust his hips, and yield instantly and wildly to his own masturbation with a tender hand laved with dripping white cum.

James had an idea to help. Picture it, he said, "Babs and Hoffman implanted with a device that would never allow them to be more than six feet from each other, or they'd get a bad shock. Uncle Tom uses that example as a portrait of Jewry, picturing those miserable kikes over a series of Web cams. Images of the loathsome duo, and the serendipity of their being virtually chained to each other, did help, and no one came off.

Of course, under the circumstances, not cumming was no help. They were all now so monstrously aroused just watching each other was the best sex any of them, saving Theo, had ever had, and it was a close thing with the little boy, too.

James was surprised when Baldwin asked about his uncle. He rather thought he'd overdone it and everyone would be tired of someone who seemed to be a perennial wise-guy and arch know-it-all. How desperate would they have to be to bring up his name? Anne would get a kick out of that. His uncle had also pointed out the irony of Anne's getting immediate and avid attention from her husband the moment the non-artist was hoisted aloft and into immortality by her virgin husband. "It will give me more to write about," he'd explained, wryly. Would Tom Cruise, the lawyer's phone start ringing off the hook, would he one day be as famous as his actor namesake, simply for being in the right place at the right time. It had already brought him a happy lover as a wife and a sublime standard poodle name Josephus Daniels of Robins' Brook Farm, Concord, Massachusetts. Plus furnishings. The huge rubber tree, the ceramic houses, do beautifully crafted they looked real, especially at night with a candle burning from within. Had Tom Cruse first felt Anne Fairchild's breasts while looking at sculpture Tom Emerson had searched high and low for? The whole adobe was a symphony of what is commonly referred to as taste and class, the woman had not chosen any of it, the man had, and it was engorging the new man as he fondled her and whispered at all the beautiful things in every large room. For me, for me, for me. There was even the brand-new car, a spiffy Colt, supplied by man one; soup to nuts, his woman, his house, his dog, very nearly his everything, dust at a whim.

What did he imagine had actually happened, recreational fantasies aside? Sixty percent chance of rolling husbands, number four by the time of this writing; distracted but okay career; great frustration at never having tried doint that which others could not do, while taking a job from someone of lesser talent; a kid or two, probably on the better side of okay; a woman who would be among the ninety-two percent who claim happiness and that they would re-marry their spouse. (This jibes with the fifty percent divorce rate, but in a way that's beyond the math skills of the author.)

Worst scenario would obviously be disease or death, a drunken, violent husband, etc.

Best scenario? Tom Cruise turned out to be the guy she in no way deserved, lively and stable, an excellent provider, still going places in his early fifties; she, mother of four or five with an excellent nanny so she can pant with a full-time passion. Just what Tom Emerson offered, though in a Mexican or Belizean venue, because it's ninety percent less costly to live beautifully.

James remembered the Rapp lady and her broken kneecaps. Stupid was as stupid did, and the depth of the irony could be plumped when realized that Anne Fairchild would say the stupidest thing she ever did was marry Tom Emerson.

"That's your world guys," the writer had quoted to his bright-eyed nephew, "be very, very scared."

Baldwin asked how much Emerson was worth. All, however felt about their literary intruder, were glad of his presence. He really could half-kill a hard-on, and half-killing was an imperative as long as they were sitting side by side on the bed, never tiring of simply looking at each other.

James answered the African American's question. "That's interesting," he said, "because it comes out to two million dollars."

"She missed out on that?" the Baldwin whistled.

"Probably more," the boy explained, "that's dividend money, over twenty thousand dollar a year, that's been coming in for years. If you had a three million dollar portfolio and melted it into a trust, that's about what it would take to net over twenty grand a year, strictly from dividends."

"Can he cash it in?" John asked.

"No," the fourteen year old replied, "he's an artist. His wife dumped him and called his father to complain, so he was cut out of any say, he just gets the money, and it goes into his estate."

"Is that why he's never published in tree books?" Theo asked.

"He says that's part of it," James answered, "that, and having no one to write for, no one who needed the money."

"And if they'd stayed together?" John wanted to know.

"Very small chance of developing at an equal rate; Anne was way ahead in the beginning, a great, huge obvious talent, ranging to genius in oils, not particularly surprising since her grandfather if fact was probably a great artist; Uncle Tom took twenty years, but then he trucked on by Mozart, himself, so it was a classic tortoise / hare situation. He had two reservations about children, though they'd have been able to afford all the nanny help they needed, day and night, but still, as an emotional distraction even had Anne turned out to be a terrific mother, which, he would have suspected, as he expected her to stay as in-love as she had always been from their first date; plus, if he had a comely and affectionate daughter, he knew it would be better for her to hang with her mom, and eighty percent of fathers aren't like that."

"Would he take her back?" Baldwin asked, obviously, of the three more mature males, having the greatest difficulty in not simply cumming as he sat, no touching needed.

"He'd take all his girlfriends back," James said. "He was dating, living with and sleeping with six girls when he met Anne. He stopped all those relationships the day they met. He remained friends with some of the girls, others moved away or moved on; all would be welcome under the normal conditions of hospitality, at any time, Anne, included. He figures he might be welcome for a single cup of coffee by one or two of these girls, plus another one or two from his early dating years, out of approximately a dozen."

"Leaving women as the dumpers," Baldwin observed.

"Both quantitatively and qualitatively," James answered. "They dump often and the dump completely. Uncle Tom has never dated a girl he wouldn't be happy to see, at least as an occasional friend, from time to time, no sexual issues, whatever. Anne never talked about her boyfriends. When one from her former years in Albuquerque showed up at their gallery in Santa Fe, she dismissed him with hardly more than a shrug.

"Women are hollow shells. They have to be to endure the loss of children, and go on to raise more children. Turn the page."

"As the man said, 'be very, very scared,' John quoth.

Theo, apparently as much in need as any of them for diversion, asked if James thought Anne would take his Uncle Tom back again.

"He's got what you might call a severe Mainstream project under way," the boy answered, "so when it pans out he wonders what would happen if he tracked Anne down and appeared, say at her workplace, with a car and a suit, his picture in the papers, all that good stuff. He figures she'd come up, give him a seventeen second hug, and launch immediately into the small talk of dissolution. He acknowledges she would cry, but that would be over as soon as her back was turned. She would not mention the meeting to her husband, or anyone, and that would be that, except for an increase in sexual aordor which would last through three intercourses."

"What's his IQ," John asked.

"He completed the MENSA test in half the allotted time, and aced it. It can't be measured. Presumably the highest in the world, maybe around three hundred."

"Close enough," all nodded, wisely.

"What's it like living with him?" Theo asked, showing that hanging out with Carlos had enriched him, for certainly Andy Sipowicz was never going to take the lad beyond green eggs and ham, the zoo, and Disney.

"He's totally unpretentious, lives in a little house on stilts in a typical Caribbean neighborhood. He flew in the military, so he's very two-fisted at any significant cutting up, any age, either sex, but other than that, just a quiet workaholic who knows how to cook pasta."

"Does he have friends?" Theo asked, getting lots of smiles for his enthusiastic maturity and engaged participation.

"About ten," James said. "Mostly Bev Kelly and her four children. He's supported them for the last eight years. He met Bev on the islands when she was ten and living with a sixty year old fisherman. When he returned to Belize in '94, she was single and had four children, so he stood by her, and they've been an ersatz family ever since."

"Is Samantha one of Bev's children?" John asked.

"Yes," James said, "she's fourteen."

"Is he going to marry her?" Theo asked.

"He wants to," James replied, "he's known her for eight years; figures her for a beauty and a durable charmer, a terrific mother. She's interesting. She calls the radio station for songs for her friends and is something of a local personality. Uncle Tom writes radio scripts for her, but so far she hasn't really worked with them. She's immature, which is fun and makes it easy to keep their relationship on a legal and proper footing."

"What's his mainstream project?" Baldwin asked.

"Something that will put the Hobbit and Harry Potter out of business overnight," James said. "It rips, it has religion, politics, violence, and at the same time its funny. Even very funny."

"Does he want to be famous?" Theo asked.

"No," James says, "he gets lots of reader mail from what he's writing now, but not too much to answer and chat over. If it came in like a spamalanch, he'd lose contact with his readers whom he credits for much of his final climb to the level of whatever he is."

"What is he," Theo, again, asked.

"A god," James said. Baldwin and Jones had both attended many polygrraphic examinations, and pretty well knew truth and sincerity when they heard it. For this kid, they wouldn't even bother hauling out the machine. The boy continued, "I mean the chief intellectual religious belief is transcendentalism. This doctrine holds that the only palpable manifestation of god is genius and talent, everything else is superstition and taboo-driven speculation by people who thought the earth was flat, sustained by a clergy that charges ten percent plus the third pinkie of the cutest male child, like our young Theo here. Their god is war, obesity, and filthy living for vast masses, often impoverished by the very church in which they moan for their twelve children, especially little Electra, whose eyes are growing so dull."

"Sounds like he's nonchalant about being a god, in the first place," Baldwin commented.

"He isn't much into slacker miseries, and that's a fact," James replied, clarifying by adding, "God's incompetence and irreducible cruelty gives the craft a bad name, so he takes his status at least casually, and sometimes looks on it with real misgivings."

"But not denial?" the razor sharp Theo asked, reminding all of the tragedy of young minds left to wither in the shadow of the Andy Sipowicz of the world. And, yes, all nodded in psychic compact, they were definitely up for hanging out with Carlos.

"Anne was a bigot," James said, seeming to interrupt, but coming right to the point, his thoughts stimulated by the unspoken reference to Theo's Hispanic mentor. "He wrote her, wishing her the best with Tom Cruz. She wrote back, a pointless letter - 'everything comes to an end' - solely to make sure he understood she was now freeing her cervix to a lawyer name Cruise, not Cruz. Uncle Tom said he would have had more respect for her if she had married a Latino, because at least it would have been love over credentials; some remaining sign of humanity it a woman who should, at the very least, be a respected regional artist."

"Tell us more."

James blushed with pleasure. Who knew? This very morning he'd been at the Fifteenth Precinct, Sipowicz muttering around muttering like he was overdue to grill something for somebody. Not a pleasant specter for a youth who'd just spent some days watching his tormented mother mix her drugs and mix them again, until he'd been a slave in hell trying to figure out what to do. Then John Clark. Now look, they were sitting like four totems with happy owners, talking about his uncle, not just to prevent what was building up to be an apocalypse, but out of genuine interest. The four of them were bonding more accurately and completely than they could have in a long weekend of non-stop butt action, a thousand times more. Maybe his uncle had seemed to get squat from his marriage, even losing his beloved dog to the new man, but, in the end, who knew. Mayn't absolute talent need an absolute lump of clay with which to work? Wouldn't that be something good from what she had called 'the relationship'? Was it just vengeance for that last carnal, pre-fallatio kiss she'd bestowed before rushing to the new man, for calling him "Emerson" to his face, for calling him a cheap date, for telling him, during their last hug, that he was so deficient he should never marry again, or was their a higher goal to his artistic, and, as he described it, 'recreational', obsession, such as warning other men to take an aggressive but non-clingy interest in their marriage and their kids, or feel the pain of loss start to get its real grip when one reached his fifties.

What more to tell?

"He trained a catamite," James said proudly, after a moment's thought.

Life couldn't be all issues, and this sounded interesting, so three expectant gazes made James again blush at being the center of attention.

"Boy-boy, check out the name," he said, "was a classic. You know, come right up and practically hump a man on the leg. Uncle Tom took him in a number of times, but could never make him cum, or get much of anywhere. Finally he found a position with Boy-boy, who happens to be a beautiful seventeen year old, by the way, kneeling between his legs, where they could masturbate together. If finally worked and the teen came all over him. They've done it four times now, and the last time, he ejaculated first, getting Boy-boy wet, and the kid hasn't been a catamite since."

"Any more?" they asked as one.

"He lost his virginity a month ago." James replied, again, passing any need for a polygraph.

"Get outta town," his new fan club breathed as one.

"Seriously," James said, "with Andrew, Bev's second; they've been having oral sex for two years, and Andrew wanted to take the next step, so they did."

"Did he like it?"

"It was exciting because Andrew came so fast, especially the second and third times. The third time he got the boy to call out and hold absolutely still, and he felt everything that happened."

"Thinking of Anne and Tom Cruse," the ever bright Theo interjected.

"Thinking she'd get pregnant from the feeling, and kind of glad he wouldn't"

"Is that safe sex?" John asked, and James wondered if the detective might be thinking of a little vacation time, and not just to get away from Sipowicz.

"Yes," James replied; "he quizzes all his boyfriends extensively: warns them about everything."

"Big on doom and gloom." That was Theo, making fast friends at the speed of light.

"The AIDS rate alone is getting up around fifty percent in some communities, and boys will be boys, so he does the best he can. They all came to him many times before anything happened, and he's active about once a week with on of five very nice, very ordinary boys. No girls. Under the circumstances, it's as close to a gold star situation as there is."

"Does he have any pets?"

"'Sculpture," he calls them, his art collection, and they are beautiful. He also calls them Big Eyes and House Lions. Nine cats.

"Part rancher," Theo whispered as a much lesser boy might over Spiderman.

"You've read the books, you've seen the movies, you buy the toys." James quoted from an absurdly delightful television commercial, "and you know, that sounds like him. His great great grandfather, my great great great grandfather penned the line about the shot heard 'round the world; when my uncle connects, it will be twenty five hydrogen bombs dropped on the middle east, and various and assorted warmongers from Ireland to Spain to Sri Lana; try a few hundred years of real peace; of economic dissemination, just for the heck of it."

"Does he have specific ideas," Theo asked, still big and hard and wet from the discharge of seminal fluid all the males were experiencing.

"That the USA should import five hundred million immigrants from China and India, for the most part; clean up the mess, restore agricultural lands and parklands, de-suburbanize, convert seventy percent of mall space to helpage usage, deport all Semites and Eastern 'Europeans on the theory every dollar wasted on their ritual adversarialism is better spent educating a nice East Indian girl. Use the super polygraph to get the one-per-customer perps out of jail, and get the leaders of the pack, in. That's about it. A lot of small stuff, obviously, like a complete change in the military to a force very similar to that we had a the end of WW II; piston powered aircraft that can loiter over targets, then shoot with the latest missiles; small, independent carriers. 'The way it is,' he says, is that all any enemy needs to do is shoot up a few squadrons of tankers, and the air force is utterly neutered except for nuclear retaliation."

"What are his two pet peeves?" Theo asked.

"The Jew Rickover and the near trillion dollars wasted on his absurd submarines, and manned space flight, with its hundreds of billions thrown off the end of the pier for nothing. Max Factor's star on the Hollywood walk of fame; the asshole made paints, paint drew shop girls, shop girls ruled the cinema, so today we're a nation of half-formed dolts whose intellectual common totems are twisting Oreo cookies to lick the cream and the itsy bitsy spider."

Had someone mentioned doom and gloom?

"He must be amazing to live with," John said.

"Not at all. Dead common, in fact. He just works, almost ceaselessly, chats while he's doing it; I guess he's had lots of practice, but he doesn't want to do anything; you know, go back out the the islands where he lived for two years, ride around in boats, go down the Hopkins, which is the local art community. Nothing. Just works and goes into town every week for two cups of coffee at the Starlight, where he can pretend he's married to Cindy, then go home, married to nobody, and statistically, unlikely to be. No kids but thousands of pages on the Web."

"Some might envy him," John said.

"According to the best intellects in print, he's a god, and no religion condones envying the spirits, and, if they do allow it, dismiss it as self-indulgent."

Cute little Theo giggled. "Maybe he'd envy us." he pointed out.

To find out, look in Guinness under 'penis'.

The mood changed. Hey, it had to. They'd honored each other with conversation, questions and answers, tales and stories. If there minds were whirring with anything, it was how and when they'd meet again, and how soon and often after that. But even practical thought congealed and finally died out entirely.

"John," James whispered.

"Yes?" the athletic young detective answered.

"I want you to cum-off inside me, like Andrew in James' uncle, holding real still, so I can feel it."

See how soon we forget our gods, if there are other things to think about? Doesn't that tell you to kick out the church, and use the resources for secular and indiscriminate benefit. Okay?

"Have you ever watched a man cum?" Theo asked his fourteen-year-old friend.

"No," James answered; "it's happened with me, but it was inside my underpants, when I was ten, so I didn't see it."

"I asked," said the ravenously beautiful twirp, "because it's a really beautiful thing to see. Maybe I could masturbate Baldwin, so you could see what John's doing when he's holding still in you."

For an instant, James remembered how his uncle like to write extreme erotica, because there were not conflicts. This seemed to the boy like a case in point.

"I can make him cum on your bottom. Fresh semen is very slippery, so it will help him enter you, you know, of Baldwin comes on your thighs and we rub it in the right place."

John spoke: "Theo," he whispered, "I think you should be first. I've never done anything like this before, and it's his first time; wouldn't it be better for you to help him get ready."

"Well," the boy whispered back, all hearing, but it made it exciting, "one thing I can promise you and that is that I won't hold still."

Theo's friends let his remark go with a unified "Duh'uh," and slowly set about rearranging pillows on the bed. John ducked into the bathroom for a tube of gel and asked Baldwin and Theo if they needed to use the facility, reddening when he remembered Theo's adventures on the washing machine and subsequent clean up.

No? Then they were all ready so he walked back into the bedroom harder than he'd ever imagined space metal could be.

James was ready for Theo. Wanting to look into the little boy's eyes, he lay on his back as Baldwin got the child comfortable in a position so he could masturbate his powerful black friend between James' long, coltish legs.. John helped by supporting Baldwin who looked exceedingly unlikely to survive ejaculating on James' inner thighs, thus wetting him for Theo, much less watching the beautiful boy mount the teen through a waterfall of fresh, hot semen. Of course, John had not prescient vision of his own survival, and never mind that he would gently follow the seven year old.

James was propped at his head and shoulders, so he could look down over his beautiful young boy body, thinking, as he did so, that the extra three pounds didn't look all that bad, picturing what he'd look like when Baldwin came on him; thinking exactly the thoughts a healthy teenager should be thinking, between books.

"Have you done this inside Carlos?" Baldwin asked, his voice entirely changed as he squatted, legs widely spread, and felt the smooth child skin of Theo as he leaned over the man's bow-tight black let to do homosexual things with the young athlete.

With a little gentle shuffling they were comfortable, John kneeling behind Baldwin, looking intently down over his partner's left shoulder, half expecting to lose an eye for his curiosity at any moment as the straining adult sweat and panted. Theo shifted slightly, kissed Baldwin on his right arm, and whispered so all could hear, "when you know it's really going to happen, say 'Carlos' so he'll be here in spirit.

Baldwin tried to croak an affirmation, ended just nodding and sweating more than ever.

John held out the tube of KY, Theo took some on the palm and fingers of his child-sized right hand, steadied himself by wrapping his left arm around the shaking adult, and whispered:

"Carlos has a sister who could almost be James' sister; Angela, she's twelve."

The instant shock of seeing James lying there as a wet and receptive young girl, and the simultaneously overpowering shock of a little boy's slippery hand tested the powerful athlete as nothing had begun to ever test him. The vision, beautiful as it was with the big boy's boner substituted for a willing girl, the touch now a frank and purposeful fondling at his massive tip, test? this was the final exam of the entire human race."

"Angela's very shy," Theo said; '"very demure on modest, she wouldn't spread her legs wild like James, you'd have to coo and coax her, and keep repeating..."

"Carlos," Baldwin groaned, his last breath on the planet he'd known for twenty-eight years. Theo took the warning, and, maintaining his sloppy wet pace, placed the adult precisely against the base of the young white teen's penis, and they all watched the first of the flooding

It was hot, it was white, and it went on and on; pond, lake, ocean, sea. What god had messed up in six days, Baldwin made good - absolution-wise - in the minute plus a few seconds it took him to cover the boy with his scent and his seed. In a half-daze, he carefully manhandled Theo, frequently dipping his fingers in the pool of sperm on James' belly, so he could fully molest the boy, and fully wetted him, into position so he was staring hotly into the teen's blazing eyes, with his penis rock hard ageist James' bottom.

Baldwin, still in hyper afterglow, whispered of Angela as he kissed Theo and slicked him all over with sperm. Then the seven year old found the fourteen year old, and all froze. Baldwin gripped Theo gently, and whispered to give him the rhythms for a series of rapid, gentle thrusts. This worked, and James' eyes grew wild as he felt the gentle, loving surging against him.

Theo had been right about not holding still, and was perfect with the virgin, light, quick, and very gentle.

John, helping to hold the young boy in position, squatted behind the pair, gently easing his hard, straight seven inch erection through the sperm soaking James and Theo. Every tiny movement they made getting used to each other was transmitted with a sledge hammer, and he knew he could follow, if not perhaps equal, Baldwin, who was the larger male, if things went even the tiniest bit awry. He tried not to think of that; to ignore at least the trailing edge of the feeling of the experimenting juveniles flowing and surging wetly against his swollen erection.

James, for his part, lying with his legs now supported by John and Baldwin, high and spread wide, looking up at the cute naked boy panting and sweating as he made his experiments, was also trying to cast his senses adrift; make this forever event last at least a few minutes by not cumming like a wild animal all over himself, stimulated by the child's efforts to mount.

It wasn't a venue for telling stories about his Belezian uncles, sharing, but the writer was a refuge, present time, place and circumstances.

Why had he, Uncle Tom, become obsessed with Anne after twenty years.

"I though she was right," he said. "That I was a minor amateur talent, you know, a clever letter on the op ed page a couple of times a year; I mean, I knew different, but where was the proof?

"So I figure she dumped me because I wasn't making - a loser - because I couldn't. She got me so far off track, it really was years before I found out I was right all along. Not only did I have it, I had a royal flush, all in spades; more than anyone, ever. That's what angered me; not only had she taunted me and kept me from my poodle, her general attitude had stunted my career by maybe fifteen years.

"In the end, no complaints," Tom had gone on, "because if I'd had some glib early sales, like Stephen King, I may well never have developed beyond the likes of King, the commercial novelist, and that's a different breed of cat than the novelist with no adjectives, the novelist, pure and simple.

"So you owe her, even if indirectly," James had pointed out.

"The world owes her," Tom had replied. "A hundred years from now, what will anything that happened, anything I felt or endured matter? Not at all, obviously, and all that will be left is the writing. If it's half a percent better because of the annealing she put me through, claiming I put myself through it, that's the only thing that counts."

And this from a man who gave away seventy percent of his income on the theory that it felt good to be a strictly secular Christian every day of the week. This was the man who told his audience to get high on being sober every day; get high on working hard, every day; get high on tending to one's spouse and family, every day; to make a game out of giving extraordinary value to the efficient and friendly accomplishment of whatever tasks and agendas come your way. He suggested not trying to get high on an oversize house, especially when all anyone wants is a computer nook, not getting high on giant unwieldy automotive appliances, not getting high on any addictive behavior beyond one or two joints a day, and, if one's an artist, a pack of cigarettes a day.

James had called him on this. His uncle, who, by birth and talent, very much featured himself an American prince, said this was the hardest of conundrums, and pointed out his father as an example.

"My father's played the accordion since his family took him t Sweden at age ten. He's taken extensive training, and practices frequently, but he never made it above the level of party entertainer.

"Maybe it's because he didn't smoke," the author had observed. He'd gone on to explain is was a two and possibly three stage interface.

"First, nicotine sooths, which allows a frame of mind, to use archaic terminology, tolerant of the creative spirit, commonly called muses." He was unsure of whether or not nicotine actually affected mental activity, or simply aided in creating a psychic environment in which it occurred. So this was one, and maybe two. The third, Tom felt, was more obvious. The reward factor. The fact that after an hour of stress and production, you had that little reward to look forward, so, more hours. The writer buttressed his position with the writings of Freud and Churchill, both morons in his book, but productive, always working. (And Mr. Churchill was a competent historian and writer, further, if he'd been lazy in orchestrating the slaughter over which he came to lord, the population of Europe would be untenable in an immediate sense, rather than a future sense. No, he wasn't perfect, but how much could one expect from such a friend of Joe's?)

In any event, he smoked, and, if the result turned out to be personal catastrophe, well, he'd already suffered that. In the meantime, the copy poured out at a very manly rate, indeed, and the cats got fed.

Suddenly it was getting serious with Theo, and James was stunned into mental silence. The child's face was slack, his eyes burning; his young body was shaking and sweating and he was grunting and whoofing over the feeling of his tender glans entering the tight, spermy virgin combined with Baldwin's right hand gently fisting his boner to prevent him from driving into James with a single tearing thrust.

Hot, wet hand and tight anus; beautiful teen eyes staring up at him; John's big erection previewing itself between his body and James' in a very exciting invasion of their privacy.

Maybe if he'd met Mary Blake. Maybe that would draw the sword of lust and passion just enough to keep him from cumming-off prematurely. He knew the type. Stephen King was married to one; the knacky little Maine know-it-all; brittle, positive, and if it was possible, dumber than a coastal clam. His uncle said Blake had been man-to-man like a twenty year Virginia Reel. What had astounded his uncle was that his wife, a top flight nurse, had been bent by her inferior in every way. Girl poison. Perhaps instinctively laid into the female psychology as a prerequisite to the perfect reject / accept sexual act. There was an amusing footnote to this line of thinking. If Tom Cruise had been absolutely incredible his first time with her, how long before she'd want to repeat the experience, all over again. His problem. His problem knowing if he was even perceived to have made any kind of mistake, he was out. How could that not make a clingy neurotic out of any man?

America needed a series of openly sexual theme parks; where a many could take his wife and let her run wild with other healthy males. National sex week. Go girl, go, and come back to your happy home.

Unless this need was met, the Jewry was going to keep stirring the pot of adversarial misery, until society could no longer bear the outright and insidious costs of helter-skelter marriage.

Anne had committed perjury to get her paper. She had claimed abandonment. Absurd. They'd written, he'd phoned her, she knew exactly where he was and how to reach him at any time. Also knew the only reason he wasn't at least back to return their car, and talk things out, was that he'd damaged the vehicle in an accident. The system was built for her, and he was out. Lying, cheating, conniving, and off on a hot sheets rebound to a professional twister, spinner and expert in vague distortion. All fair in love and war. And face it, men were assholes. Buying useless novelty tools from Bob Villa, off here, off there with enthusiasms like Hap Loman and his mail-order radio course. Tom Emerson often felt like Willy's older brother, Ben, who'd gone off into the jungle and come back rich. Advice he'd give to no fellow man; stay home, make that your high of highs; make it like heroine. With heroine, the first high is so remarkable, junkies become addicted trying to repeat it. Make this the first day of your marriage; the first week. Make them so non-clingy perfect, you spend the next fifty years trying to equal them.

Of course, there was a terrible joke in all this. Be perfect for her; earn her genuine affection and love. Love her in like manner. What happens? You get to watch each other sicken and die, very likely over many years. God at his most eminent, assuring no happy endings.

But he was going to try. Marry Samantha when she was eighteen. Because of the damage to his lungs from a work injury, slightly worsened by light smoking, he would probably die in his sixties, leaving Samantha free in her twenties our young thirties. His death would be a natural passing, he wouldn't have to watch her die, and she'd be young enough to enjoy his money with another family, which was the cherry on top of perfection.

An interesting offshoot of his personal agenda, was a broader application of the concept. What if, for example, trouble girls were not only permitted, but encouraged to marry stable men in their fifties and sixties, starting as young as age twelve. Would they be worse off than they were on the path to the streets, which was the usual destination of the wild and willful. Had it ever been tried? How many runaways could even a big nation accept before they began to feel the pain. And how about the men? Did the pleasure, far beyond sex, such relationships would bring mean, at the end of the day, a single tiny thing?

The mormons had done this, and the girls had hated it, but the mormons were wacked in so many big and obvious ways, they made a lousy baseline.

And the same thing for boys. Use the new-generation polygraph to weed out the misfits, and put them with long-haul truck drivers, night watchmen, and other males in lonely jobs, don't ask, don't tell. But no, the ponderous walruses of the kike elite needed yesterday a thousand times and feared even the thought of tomorrow. They were fatal

James imagined a burly lumberjack doing what Theo was. It would take some getting used to, but had to be better than becoming an urban alley cat, where the same thing would happen with a score of men, not just one or a few. Even the military. Nothing was more common to history than soldier boys and sailors of a dozen stripes from bugle boys to cabin boys. Reinstate these policies.

Again, what about the pleasure and satisfaction mature men would get from these relationships. Was it really not even a feather on the scale of common sense. Were we that badly confused? Lindberg and thousand of others predicted chaos under the kikes, what level had it reached if men and boys who were happy being together, were raped apart by cop and law and judge and cell?

Pedophilia had, in human history, a, supported the chains of monasteries passing forward the knowledge of civilization, b, been the inspiration for the best men to join the Royal Navy, bringing about international communities that enhanced civilization, and, c, had created yet a final miracle in inspiring the movement of the Internet from academia and the military, out into the boyloving world. Indeed, there was an essential key ingredient to everything in the modern world, and that was the utterly natural of young men for young boys. Men went through hell, then tried the courts, to keep their sons with them. Was that the only vector there was? Bull.

An interesting offshoot of the current Catholic situation is that not a single Catholic man has written the media saying you bet I was molested, I loved it, it made me a better person, Father X is welcome in my house, and my son will be attending his next retreat. Weak little Catholic men, can't even stand up for your own clergy. If your church dies, and it definitely should, don't blame me, okay? Of course, the thick lipped, camel-nose Hebrews never do anything wrong, either, and besides, the suffered the holocaust, so you can't blame them. I hope you asshole readers are beginning to get the point. You're in a pit of your own making. You've got to clone your kids, so they won't end up ten feet tall, and vomit out the Yiddish hairball, make America take it's fair place in the world instead of using twenty five percent of the resources, and housing twenty five percent of the prisoners, while only having five percent of the population. These are your cards, read 'em, and if you spend one minute weeping, kiss your ass good-bye.

Even remembering his uncles most strident thoughts and passages wasn't helping James much now. Baldwin was beginning to free the boy from the fist loosely clenched between their sweating bodies.

He was so big for seven! His bigness hurt, in spite of his and Baldwin's best efforts to make it tender and gentle.

But hurt? When had that happened? It wasn't hurting now. The boy looked dogged and half in shock at the same time; was panting and sweating, freely, and was beginning to really partner. Penetrating - really doing it, more with each tentative, friendly thrust; more than friendliness could endure which had to make it love, but he loved John, and John was there two, panting over the naked seven year old as he shared, sweating and shaking. "I don't know if I'll ever want to be raped again, but I do now," James panted to himself.

Then he half-way was. Baldwin released Theo's thrusting young penis, and the boy lost control, entering the well prepared teen wildly, and staying wild as Baldwin and John molested him with semen-slicked hands, urging him, hissing at him, licking and biting him wherever they could reach on his wildly plunging body.

James moved his hands from the boy's straining flanks, to his tiny nipples, and, still supporting him in the push-up position, looked down between their coupling bodies. Looked at the homosexuality they were sharing, looked at the little boy's half-man-sized penis as it sawed and plunged back and forth, in and out, the joining strokes each ending in a frantic extra thrust, a real kick from those apparently childish loins.

Baldwin had ejaculated so copiously, there was still sperm, now turning viscous and sticky, all over James' belly and inner thighs. Theo knew he couldn't add anything exciting, if he came-off in James; knew the boy wouldn't be able to feel it with the wildness of their two young bodies, so he gasped, "I'm cumming," and Baldwin pulled him, free, and manhandled him quickly so he was high and proud, his big penis thrusting aloft, now spraying hard so they all could see.

Now Baldwin had him again, now John was panting hotly in his ear as he looked down, now Baldwin was giving a few tight, quick strokes, not Baldwin was holding him like a wet velvet vice, and, now, he really was cumming-off. Total loss of control. His thin, hot, watery semen spurting like his was a teen tiger, all over James and splashing Baldwin beside him, and even flying up in his own face and over his left shoulder onto John's face.

"Carlos," Baldwin whispered, then, "Angela," and the boy yelped and howled, and sprayed more of his hot juvenile cum, before collapsing on James' slick, panting chest.

Theo lay for a few moments, catching his breath while his partners petted him and whispered their congratulations. But he was a very curious boy, and likely, as well, so in a mere matter of moments he was jockeying off Jame's right flank and re-positioning himself at the teen's right hip so he could do for John what Baldwin had done for him.

'Guidance' has become something of a buzz word in market circles, and it should be noted that that offered by Theo to John was not pecuniary in nature, though, stretched perhaps a trifle, it certainly had to do with bulls.

James had hung on by a distracting intellectual thread while he accepted Theo's hot-dog size penis. John, not to be crude, was the size of a medium ear of corn. It was a blessing, the real kind, that Baldwin had left his groin and thighs so wet, wet enough to turn what might have been painful, into a tensely sensational joining, without a drop of the lubricant needed.

John looked down at him from corded arms and bunched shoulder. James stated hotly back. Theo masturbated the athlete, helping him set up cascades of fast, tender probings that allowed his big, circumcised penis to enter amidst a galloping confusion of sensations.

When he was three inches into the fourteen year old boy, the boy suddenly separated out the feelings of the man in him. Theo and Baldwin immediately recognized the connection, and, respecting its intimacy, removed their hands from the couple, shifting their positions so they could stare down over James' heaving chest and slick belly; watch John as he lost himself, minute by minute, panting, sweating, deep into the naked boy.

They'd promised each other, and it was exactly how it happened. They didn't fuck more than the tiny stokes needed to be comfortably as one. When John was complete inside James, he froze between the boy's widely spread legs, staring down into his smoking eyes.

They shared in privacy. James clearly felt even the tremulous first tiny pulses. In seconds, these had changed to a fast hard cycling rhythm, so close to the heart of a tiger beating wild in his belly, he needed no further imagery, to begin ejaculating himself.

Baldwin and Theo watched, slack faced and transfixed. Neither John nor James had given any verbal or outward indication of what they were sharing, but with fresh semen gushing from between the two young male bodies, it was obvious that they had gone all the way together. John's sperm, on the other hand, was everywhere; spraying, pulsing, flying, mostly on his sleek adolescent chest, mostly for a bed for John who, after a tense full minute, slowly lowered himself into the child's waiting arms.

Even re-heated linguini and lobster claws is delectable, yet it was almost an hour before any of the males napping on the bed even thought of food, and, while they'd never share the tender romance and silly frivolity of an engaged heterosexual couple, at least they had established bonds and loyalties of some value.

Posted by Thomas@btl.net

xxx