"Masturbation and the Peeping Jim"
by
Timothy Stillman
I will not say I am not jealous of him. I will also not pretend to understand the artfulness of the seemingly artless. But when Jim's book was published to critical acclaim and an immediate sale of 100,000 copies, with another printing on the way, already sold to a major paperback house, along with a movie deal in the seven figures--all virtually unheard of for a first novel--even getting a first novel published by a vanity house that nobody reads is difficult--and expensive--enough--getting a first novel published by a major hard cover house happens about as often as--well, you choose the analogy.
To me, when I looked at the picture of Jim (formerly Jimmy of my childhood world) so wise and knowing and clear eyed and handsome, wearing no glasses, slight threads of gray in his hair, his smile in something of an intense sad eyed dirge befitting the grim roster of events in this thick thick novel that crashed only here and there (according to one critic who had to be a showoff and go against the sweeping tide) and made a thoroughly befitting debut for a writer (the public and critics, save one, agreed) with a public that likes 900 page books upon which there are untold hills of gray matter seemingly expended--where do they find the time to read them?--we're all so busy after all--we are told--and what we are told has got to be true.
And to find myself as a central character in his novel, even though my name is changed to Horace Blankenship, insult enough, for even my name is better than that, a central character am I, the morose bank clerk of the summerly passage in which the core of the novel takes place--me as a grownup, but really me with the characteristics I had as a child--I mean the emotions, the mopey me of back then--well, he could have told me about this little uncredited tribute, though I would not exactly want any kind of credit--though when the phone rings, I do feel a little nerve of excitement--still it is me in that book, and I for one think he has a lot of gall.
I loved Jimmy secretly, well and truly all our childhood long, and to think that he was even then, however unconsciously, using me to gain material for his book--we have come a long way from Peyton Place and The Chapman Report, certainly (I bring back these quite old but still worthwhile books in comparison, because Jim's novel is packaged (and written) as one of those grand old forbidden fruits from my childhood, as pure sexual dynamite, with just enough of the labial puritan hangover that would catapult to the crotch, but also to the brain in which the crotch basically lies anyway; the front cover art that borrowed heavily from that of Metalious's novel, bringing back half memories of those green summer days when books were our secret friends as long as our parents didn't find out--literature as well as sex----hefty, involved, good to get lost in--from libraries, book stores, dime stores, newsstands--something beyond us on pages we could turn all by ourselves, all by our own will, and that was something deeply important; Jim's novel is set in a time jumble that fragments all sorts of decades that gel into a vague watery one, ours, but something we missed in the halcyon days of long gone secret under the covers with a flash light reading as well--a part of and somehow before and during and long after all the newer sexually explicit stuff, slurpy and sloppy and degrading--but Jimmy, sorry, I mean, Jim (why not James?, he is wearing a tweedy jacket in his book cover photo; which befits more a James than a Jim) used me like a scuppernong bush on a hot day; at least according to his novel; and it has to be me; for I've read the endless thing twice now and can only come to this conclusion.
Jimmy knew of my love for him, and he painted the central passage of the summer I or Horace told Jim or Dex, when I Horace was a bank clerk, and he Dex was working in the used car field, though neither of us "real persons" ever had those professions; and yes, Horace (god, to name me that, he must surely have hated me and laughed at me all these years) confesses his love to Jim (Dex Throwaway)--well, it wasn't really Throwaway, in such shivery detail, so what you are reading is my revenge on Jim, and it was Jim as the character actually named Dex, any idiot who knew him could see him, so leave it at that.
The novel is vastly interior, something Jimmy, Jim, James never seemed to be when I knew him, when I loved him in that secret love that is safe and secure and hurtful and mysterious and involves all the lying you can imagine and then some; think of it: to have your personal summer prince with you all year round, but somehow especially in summer, for he felt like the season to me, light and airy and full of freedom and all the beautiful warm morning sunrises strung together that anyone could ever want; and then to find he has actually an interior; to find he has actual thoughts going on in that beautiful head--Horace is a dupe; Horace is obsessed with himself; Horace accepts that Dex loves him, even though Dex is only a casual acquaintance. Horace knows this is bullshit.
There are no sex passage between them, save one. Kind of. When Horace (goddam) is masturbating at about age 13 in the privacy of his locked bathroom, and Dex, unbeknownst to Horace till years later, is looking on peeping Tom wise through the window, well over the tub (he has to stand on the second rung of a ladder to see; a tall boy even then was Jimmy Jim Dex); and inside, a little vision of a little boy with too pale, too fleshy body and too thin hips, rubbing his erection on a fuzzy bathroom mat, and calling out the name of Jimmy (Dex) in his adenoidal voice pretending that it is a lovely summery musical voice, and through the magic of his words.
Jim melds this little scene, he makes such a huge deal out it, with that of the bank where fake me as a fake adult works, mingling the very molecules lingeringly with the air and the feel and the profound safety of the bank in July, making it a pivotal character in the novel. The bank one Horace by name, works in, where Dex Jim Jimmy tells him of that little secret window peeping, years later, and Dex Jimmy laughing silently back there in that silent afternoon when even the birds did not sing, as he heard Horace me calling out his name and squirting on the always at the ready crumpled Kleenex, and feeling so extraordinarily good because Jimmy Dex has just left the house to go have supper and come back later to watch TV with me Horace (where in the hell did he get that name for me? god the fury of the bastard and for what? I ask you--for what?) and for Horace me the imprint of Jim Dex is still in my mind and heart and eyes as I Horace turn over and hold Jimmy Dex invisibly in his arms and rubs his legs upon and between the legs of his true love who would never betray him in a million years.
The thing of the confession in the novel, a "true roman a clef" (critics look at every book one way--it will prove how smart they alone are) , that should bring back the dry and wooden works of Sterling Hayden, or Taylor Caldwell--though Caldwell's work might not be a good parallel; Taylor loved Jesus in some of the most slab sided books you've ever read, she must have gotten Pinnochio's wooden body and shredded it a million times to put such dead and witless stuff down on paper--read it--try to--you start coughing up pieces of bark--the trees that died in vain for those books--because Jim Jimmy's novel is preacherly, fatherly, comforting, in that way that allows sexual descriptions that would have gagged De Sade, and yet there is that phony lambency in the novel that makes you think in describing especially the humiliation of Horace me(this did not happen in real life; Jimmy Jim did not rotoscope me in the nude in my bathroom--what kind of jerk would do such a thing? one's friend, after all, there are certain limits, and surely I could trust him---)the author is so supremely seemingly understanding, when it was all hot air and mirrors; pick up the words--look underneath--there's nothing but mean laughter. Even I got caught up in the thing, the book, feeling myself bettered while watching his words mark me as road kill one feels sorry for for a brief gust, or in Jim Jimmy's case a huge long gust, of words--
--the novel that paints Jim Dex as so sexually free--and me Horace as so sexually up tight; so clenched as opposed to unclenched Jim the writer and Dex the very thinly disguised character in the novel--where as the real Jimmy (was there a real Jimmy?) was so damned uptight, he wouldn't even use the bathroom at my house, but ran over to his gran's house across the street (where he and his sister lived) to use the one there, then came back to my house--I at least from time to time excused myself when he and I were watching TV in my living room--to use the bathroom, when what I was using it for was a quick jacking off knowing he was watching TV about six feet away and not knowing what I was doing, though sometimes when I came back out to the living room, he looked at me with a kind of grimacing or more like it, a not happy look for a moment in my direction--I of course am sure I looked as guilty and forlorn as hell--I was breathing hard too.
--but then I pretended he did not know--we pretend so much, desperately trying not to, while hanging on to it all the while, wanting someone to finally say they know; I always locked the bathroom door, even when I was alone in the house; and I never made noises while jacking off. When I sat on the couch, after coming, and feeling deliciously dirty and so wanting to tell him, with Jimmy Dex, and when Jimmy Dex came back from using his bathroom at home, I think the awkwardness was the same; as when I excused myself to use the bathroom the normal way, though masturbation for a boy is highly normal to be sure, but I mean elimination, though masturbation is elimination as well, but the hell with it; at such varied times, we sat, as I remember on the sofa, in our summer shirts and shorts, staring at the TV, not crossing our legs as we normally did, but stiff and pretending, as if waiting to be grilled by the cops, the bodily functions we he or I had just performed were done by somebody far else; till we eased into ourselves again.
Sometimes I used his mad dash across the street to his gran's house to use the bathroom, to rush to my own bathroom, lock the door and masturbate before he got back--I was a quick study then. But he would from time to time find me sitting on the sofa afterwards, that breathing hard thing again for me, eyes kind of glazed, not seeing the TV program my face was directed toward. He breathed hard too, from the run there and back. It never once occurred to me that he went home to jack off. Not once did I think it. Not even now.
--this to me seemed the essence of love; the essence of togetherness. These things are vaguely and twisted round, however, in the novel in its own high flown way lecturing to the informed who have learned bigger words than Dr. Phil exposits, (yet it is very much a Dr. Phil kind of book--it,, at least, makes no use of psychobabble and that is a relief--ah we need such closure from that crap, and we are in the mood for a long tedious tour of words that MEAN SOMETHING--but dammit to hell we've read so many hundreds of pages, we aren't going to by god give up now--makes a person feel positively brilliant--I don't care if this thing is filled with Sanskrit the rest of the way, I'm plowing through) around the soul of the writer, Jim Jimmy never accounting for when he picked up a soul, except the soul of self righteousness and curly headed beauty and physical prowess and muscular legs that used to fascinate me so.
Words that the cream chicken circuit book clubs always make time for, and Oprah's book club trolls for, though it makes me slightly ill that his book has already been chosen by her readers (does the Guru Woman actually read these books?, what do you think?, "one billion, two billion, three billion dollars") and of course that is what Jimmy Jim is doing right this moment, touring the country, soon the world, promoting a book that doesn't need promotion, but TV sets can't get enough of his straight white teeth and his sunny sweet face, as he describes the sweet summer of Dex Jimmy Jim, and Horace me, the pivotal one, that is in the middle of the book brought to a head, so to speak, by Horace me's admission to him in the bank in which Horace me works (I hate banks; I hate the sterility of them; the snobbery of them; the mathematics of them that always remind me of my utter stupidity when it comes to numbers; Jim Jimmy always loved math; calculus, physics, all that stuff; no need for a personal accountant, he; therefore Jimmy Jim Dex would put me in a bank.)
As a lowly clerk, a morose lost sad man, as I was a morose lost sad child, (his characters all seem to be children, even the adults, not childish adults, but as children finding all of a sudden themselves as adults and running or trying to a game on everybody else, without being aware of it--is the author?; mine is the most obvious) as punishment; as a rude little slam at me, making me this pitiful character whose faulty life, whose fractious life has been traded in for living on the edge of my soul and making things turn tougher and tougher for myself (this is sadly true; I can be objective after all, but I am an adult, not a child adult) running parallel to Jimmy Jim Dex's life with the girls and the women and the song and the fast life in a nearby city till he comes home to work at a used car lot in repentance for his sins, thus making himself like the Apostles turning from "the world" and coming toward Jesus; or the rich man who Jesus tells to sell everything he owns and follows the Lord; note, in the Bible the rich man loved his money more; note: check out the millionaire and billionaire TV evangelists for whom money is everything there is, while telling you not to notice the obvious)--
--in short it is Jimmy Jim Dex in sackcloth and ashes who returns home, the prodigal son who has had a life, who has no need to associate with bank clerks who were once his lowly casual friend who he has forgotten about, as he forgot about me in real life also; stupid things stick in my mind too from years ago; I've just never had the brain to make lots of money or any money with that trick, and it is a trick; and yet he remembered me so seemingly accurately in his novel; I should have gotten something out of this.
I suppose I could sell my story to the tabloids, but that would only be me helping him sell more books, and look to the whole world like a total moron, while the author Jim has applied his adventures, his romps, his bouts with booze and drugs, with every parallel any one including him, can dream up, which makes life a certain stanza that can be fakely applied to and played by the "authors" of the world who pretend at being John Updike, a gentle generous writer of measured soul and carpentered words that capture life in cross sections and perceptions no one else can, with descriptions that make it all seem like a wonderfully closely knit deeply well known alien land, and dialogue and keen ear and wit, that can hew into little pieces of Sunday church stained glass windows perfectly seen and observed refracted almost holy beings while still being so very human, as are their thoughts and deeds, and somehow reshapes them as full complete persons, so close to your heart you can feel them under your hands, and standing right by your shoulder.
Jim is one of those authors (I imagine there is only this one book in him) who can't even come close but who have a certain egregious ability, drunk on others' words, like Falstaff on his biggest binge, to fringe characters, I am not the only one in the book by any means, and seeming to heap totally contradictory and see through inflated compassion on them, as does Jimmy Jim Dex in the fake bank in which I Horace fake works--
--a summer afternoon, after hours--no one in the bank but me at a desk, tabulating my day's work; a cleaner, up on the second floor smoking a cigarette and goofing off next to her mop and broom--and Jimmy Dex knocks at the locked front bank doors, for some time, just bangs at the damn thing, till I fear he will break the glass and I will have to pay for it.
Till it irritates me enough to go to the door and point at the closed sign, but then of course, seeing that it's HIM (even as an adult it is so obviously boyishly HIM) so I have TO WITH THUDDING HEART let HIM into the bank, this profligate spender of life who looks as fresh and young and handsome at 33 as when he was 20, whereas I Horace look like death took me early and forgot to tell me about it, so we walk across the marble floor, past the marble pillars, through the marble arch way, back to the room where the huge bank vault is kept, for he wants to see me after so many years, and I on the spot right there kill me dead but I have to tell him I love him, for not being able to say it at least has been like a huge tapeworm devouring all the squishy organs of me and coming into my throat lashing out at my poor old mother with whom I, yes, in real life too, live with, whose throat I verbally rip at, and whose heart (mine) she verbally, through guilt that has not assuaged, after all these years stabs into--
--he has come to save my life; come to say he is sorry I was so morose and am still; which is the author deus ex machina coming through again; he has not seen me since college; how does he know?; I still look like me, I guess, pretty discouraging, he recognized me and all; it is that unerring way that is with the perfectly attuned compass of knowledge and taking of the past and furthering it into the future without a missed second of what it has been like all these years for me; of course I wouldn't dare, even as Horace, even as me, tell him he got it wrong; it would be like assuming God could make a mistake when he saw everything unfolding beneath his loving gaze--
--he has come back to tell me that I changed his life, and how have I done this noble thing?, as I "crashed confusedly down" (that's how the thing's written) in a metal chair next to the silver vault--we had come to this room, unerringly, irrevocably, specifically to be where the most money was kept because money was his god, next to himself-- here in the summery bank with the green tint to the air, and the cool air conditioning everywhere, (he seems to love banks like I love libraries; they seem the same in our minds) even though I still perspire being this close to him; in this bank that he imbues with a character, with a haunted unnervingly serene stateliness that a wise child might dream of, that had positively a potential for just about to speak that would have scared Henry James.
Jim Jimmy makes the bank like a shade tree by a cool June brook on a sunshiny day laced with shadows through the tree limbs and leaves, makes it a confessing place; so oddly, this repository of numbers and facts and memos and character files and every blood human facet of its depositors no other institution, even compared with the CIA and the FBI, no institution could have possibly accrued more data on this town--I tell Jimmy there in my shirt sleeves and my long brown trousers and my heavy socks and brown leather shoes that I've always loved him--
Jim Jimmy Dex by the way is wearing a tennis shirt and shorts, socks and white tennis shoes--the wind has ruffled his hair, he is tanned, there is not a trace of sweat on him--it is like he was off to the tennis courts to lob a few with Babs and Biff, and decided to plop by here first to take care of some unfinished business--
--and he kneels to me--Horace I think he is about to propose and we find our hearts a flutter--the scene is played with cruelty, if you will just look between the lines; even though there is not a mean word that Dex Jimmy says, even though the descriptions, the dialogue, the inner journeys of Jimmy Dex, and me Horace (so incredibly frighteningly accurate to the actual me--he saw into me--he knew I loved him even though I never looked at him in the shower room at the muny pool--even though I always turned away from him, so awkward so scared he would have had to know--and he tells me in the bank vault room where all the vitals and victuals and vital organs of the town are kept--that he saw me when I was 13 masturbating--and he describes it for Horace--he describes it perfectly--a little boy who weeps often, a little boy who has nothing and no one really he can be with or own or who would give a single damn no matter how inanimate the object and therefore mutable to all sorts of emotions and illogic emotional and illogic humans can put on their non objecting forms--if "we" were to die.
We?
--and he says it sad, Jimmy Jim Dex--(the "real" Jimmy was a very unsad boy, so it seemed) he puts his hand on my Horace's knee--and Horace is, through Jim Dex's words--taken back there--taken back to two little boys who wanted to be held--to two little boys, one of whom had lots of friends, but only had lots of friends because of what he could do for them, because of the star roles in school he had, of the prestige he carried and how this too was a lonely thing; how it had followed him all his life; why he had sacrificed being a big shot business man in the nearby city and returned here to work at a used car lot.
To do penance under the whipping stiff pennants, of the car lot, blowing in the hot and cold breezes that came their way; but also to do penance for what other people went through; including me, who masturbated under the watching protective eyes of Jimmy Dex, who, Horace I, after shooting in the wad of Kleenex, got to his my knees and held his my penis in both hands and pushed it down between his my legs and pushed it clamped with the balls, almost all painfully crumpling them out of sight, then closed his my naked legs and brushed my crew cut as though it was a long beautiful mane of woman hair and rushed my head backwards and tried to say something Katherine Hepburnish and imagined with eyes closed, my breasts were female glands, so I Horace would be right for Jimmy Dex, (as I Horace pretended that Dex Jimmy was watching me! turn to the right a little kumquat boy and see Jimmy Dex there for real looking right at your unclothed body, and what would you think of them apples? or more to the point, what would he think of yours? if he could see them, hidden as they are) and how Jimmy Dex had watched as I Horace stood and opened the bathroom closet and got out my Horace's mother's bra and put it round my Horace's breasts, the cups on each, not laughing, serious as can be, and not able to fasten it in the back, how--
-- I Horace held it there with my arms over it and to the side; how I Horace looked in the bathroom medicine chest mirror at my (Horace's) face and body down to my navel, and how I Horace put my his arms round myself Horace and kissed my Horace's left shoulder (Jim the author even got the shoulder right; it was always the left one I kissed; but that is easily explained--I'm a lefty so I would favor it) and how I let the bra fall from me to the linoleum floor, and got a measuring stick from the bathroom closet, leaning against the back wall it was, and then bent over, conveniently enough, right toward him, so Jimmy could see my ass, (imagining, Horace and I, what if Jimmy Dex could see my ass right now? I personally fuckin' hate irony--Jim the writer eats it up) did we and Jimmy Dex not plan this?, was this the only way we could carry out the consummation of our affair?--
--and I Horace inserted more of the measuring stick in my (Horace's) ass than I Horace ever had before, and I Horace pulled it in and out of me Horace--it was rough, the stick was too wide, it hurt, I Horace pushed it almost to my his prostate gland--and it felt slightly better than it had the other times I Horace had reached in that far--
--and in the bank vault room of gray and metal and steel and rivets and time keepers and clocks and that very impressive looking steel udder that unlocks the cave of money, in the vault of my memories that Jim the author had somehow purloined and had given to the rogue thinly disguised Horace of the book, in those sentences that somehow were mathematically deployed, that allowed a sort of bogus poetry to the page that the reader had to put some life to, (a kind of writing that seems impressive the first time, but look at it again and what you thought you read there doesn't even exist in that book) of his own, had to put his own brain working not to be crushed and killed by those preacherly aesthetic, interior designed words, like a ton of dead flies on the mantle piece of a house you are tricked into thinking of buying, well, have already bought, without seeing the framework, while the outside of the words seemed to take care of themselves--he really gets you to believe reality and money and life are incidentals to THE BIG THINGS which are always what involves Jim Dex and no one else no matter how many characters are with him--adds to the ambiance of writerly loneliness, winter scape, cue act three, scene one--
--those grand tours of the human soul that rose toward me in the bathroom and Jim Dex watching, in about the center of the book, while the rest of the book declined to Jim Dex's becoming a mere mortal, who had been somehow humbled, though in a much superior manner, the writer making the character of me Horace a schlub who would never get along in this world of words and this world of life which was so supremely phony in this book that it could not possibly be anything but real and more honest than any book ever written before or since, and the thing was, my Horace telling him I loved him all those years ago, and Jimmy Dex explaining that in doing so I had somehow killed something inside him--
--something conquering and usurping, and that in putting the yard stick in my ass I was measuring his ability, his power to save those who worshipped him enough, who gave themselves away to his artificial looks and superficial sporting skills and his ability to say the right words at the right times, that I was something of a maggot to him because, not for the reasons you would expect, all writers have to put something in their work you would not expect; that's what makes them memorable, they think it anyway; damn how could I not have seen this coming kind of way; though usually it's received with a sigh at the stupid cleverness certain writers pretend to have--
--and in seeing me love the chocolate frosting on the cake and not the cake interior itself, he could no longer masturbate freely; he could no longer benefit from knowing what he was inside and knowing he was better than an abstract figure that anyone could make into anything they wanted no matter how close they were to him and get it all wrong, of course, because to them he was opaque complex glass frosted gray through which they could not see, no matter how he tried to explain it on their own (lower naturally) level; so Jimmy Dex explains to Horace me, still Jimmy Dex on one knee, proposal like, and it was a proposal in a sort of terrible way, why he tried to have a homosexual lifestyle for a time--
--this is news to the reader because they've spent about 400 pages reading about him banging every girl and woman who moves--again, scalding shock--but inside he has been homosexual, in that incredible insightful mind of him that even God does not possess, for he knows why he does everything, and has in effect as he explains it for pages and pages to Horace me, he tried to become Horace me to alleviate Horace me from him Dex because he as of late realizes (how did he miss it when he was a kid?) that when he is able to masturbate and then to have sex with girls, it is that memory of me, that accrues like mental chopped liver, in that damp hot bathroom, with Jim Dex looking through the window, standing on the ladder, as I try on a bra and try to be a girl for Dex Jim who knew immediately what I was doing and did not get the wrong idea of course--
--and this hurt him so much that Horace I was willing to do such a humiliating thing for him, but not for him, but for my image of him, when he thought mopey sad me would understand him when no one else did because he knew I loved him, though of course he made damn clear there in the bank that he sure as hell didn't love me, so don't go off your trolley or anything, but for all the right reasons other than sexually; worshipping him was a gift he had benevolently given me (what gift could possibly be greater?), but even if Jimmy Dex had still decided he was gay (Jimmy Dex knew now he wasn't, but even if he was, he sure wouldn't have brought it around me), and he was only just another god to another me and that hurt him terribly--such a lament party for himself he throws here, I'm dying inside and he's too busy comforting me to know it, but that's our little Dex Jimmy), so he threw himself into even more perfection, satyrism, wealth, and glory--and managed to tell me I was his sworn enemy while being the best friend and the only friend he had ever had--
--(this is about me and Jimmy and even I don't understand it--critics love that kind of confused stuff of course) and the thorny thicket of words that could weave one way and then weave another like a forest bed in murky sea that pretended to be so straight forward and epic and filled with a deep sensitivity to human emotions, the real things, not the fake things, this man who put a fake me too real in a fake bank job too fake and cruel for the real me, a laugh at me--at the end of this interminable passage while I'm blissed out in nostalgia for the good old days, yeah, some good old days, and impressed to hell and back by Jimmy Dex flailing at himself with a whip of words he doesn't mean for a half second--
--the caluminty is there in the very fact that I am in the book as the namby pamby heavy ultimately, who's just a cry baby, and who double dog dared to gave Jimmy Dex a painful life of prosperity and sex and glory and money and being chairman of the board of the cream de la cream; me Horace, who broke him Jimmy Dex while he spent his life trying to fix me, (?) though we have no passages together after the bank one; afterwards, I am only the spirit of Horace's ghost haunting him down all his days; goading pursing him until Dex is finally a hopeless drunk, (see where unbridled success gets a person? working at a used car lot because he's Holden Caulfield age 6, and he can't take the upscale life anymore?--damn me; how could I hurt my dear gentle friend like that who never stopped thinking about me after all?) picked up on vagrancy charges one too many times; he cannot get out of his mind the naked 13 year old Horace me giving his love to nothing; well, he didn't write he was nothing, but the implication touched the readers' heart and tired eyes at this point I imagine; as Jimmy Dex is even at the end of desolution and the final at long last last word of the novel still so understanding of everyone, you just want to hold him and say there there laddie--
--and then the author Jim Jimmy sits gloriously on his pile of crap that seems so filled with insight and a throwing off of puritanical isolationism that is wrapped in symbolic wings of an end to colonialism and a cutting off of one's self from one's fellow man, a leap of human arms, his arms, round the entire world, comforting all the lonely wher'er they might be; just pony up $30.95 cents and Random House will let him cuddle you too; and not just characters from a small town, but the universality of it, a man laying down his life for a friend--(again--?)
--so when I wrote the author of GREENWOODS, one Jim ----, I will not use his last name out of deference, I have learned to be circumspect, thanks to his betrayal, I detailed myself, our childhood together, my resentment at his being my big brother all his life when that was simply and unutterably untrue; he dumped me like a bad habit; how he took one boy, me, and lots of other friends along the way, I had no doubt, and sucked from them what they were, the good parts, and made himself the only aware and good man in the book, thus he was a vampire, and not good as was Dex, who, when even he was wrong, and Dex often was (in a painfully human way we can all identify with of course), he was wrong for all the right reasons, and he well aware of it too.
I wrote the author and reminded him how I phoned him, when I was at university, one fine day to see if we could get together this weekend, and he told me flat out direct quote "I have other priorities" cold and distinct, like the Arctic ice freezing over even more, not the temperate Jimmy I remembered. Leaving me falling into a well the size of the totality of space, only far more claustrophobic and terribly cramped, and me Horace, no, me, half blind it seemed for such a long time. You don't forget horror like that. It eats at you every day. You run from it every day too. You never escape it. Not ever.
Then he hung up the phone, my good old true blue friend, not another thought of me, I knew this, and would not answer messages from me in any form, till I tired of making a fool of myself, and he writes this goddam book with sympathy and compassion while he makes me more of a fool than I was, and am; but the way he played it is what really galls; though he did not see me masturbate, this is simply not true; is it?, I ended my letter with, is it? Still hoping for it. That he saw. That he saw me in a boy's most private sexual act alone. That he knew. That his eyes magnetized to my body, to the sexy parts, and this novel with hallowed attempt at Sunday lazy mellow summer afternoon light descriptions of me and his sexual conquests that just stand there on my coffee table and mutely screams, "Fuck you"--
--this big worded little print jousting of fact and fiction and possible and something otherworldly just out of even Jim's grasp but the always reaching for something in a middle ground of mist that he could almost see the outline of and made giddy with the possibility of actually finding it, or the shadow of it, and thus making his readers feverish and giddy also and downright frenetic with this calm unruffable author and his calm unruffable mathematically logical character Dex--
--was it a love letter to me? Did he really want to be me? Did Dex at least? For a little while? Was that the very belated point of this opus? Or was I like every other planet in this book revolving round Dex, to be worn as temporary clothes and then chuffed off for later ones? Would he come to me? Would he hold me close? Would he finally be someone I could love and could be loved in return? Was the past not for nothing after all? I could link my days and make a victory out of all those previous failures?
So I wrote page after page of a letter, mailed it to him in care of the publisher, that joined in the mailing throng with all the other letters of who knows how many other besotted fans, though I was not besotted, I clearly was not caught up in this GREENWOOD fever that writing had capitulated toward, given in to, and if Dex loved butt fucking women (one of those freedom things, hetero, homosexual, bi, whatever, butt fucking anyone or being butt fucked, even reading about it, I can live without--not even by a yard stick) and the author Jim loved detailing it with all the painter eye words he could give it, and if he loved imagining the sexual things going on in the houses around him, and through the deus ex machina god like writing, he was always right, then it was all because sexuality was now the place to find all the problems of the world looking right at yo--
-- and if Dex was naked through large portion of the book and Jim had great fun making love to himself as Dex, then the book was one of many taking the place of TV sit coms of the fifties and sixties where all the problems were aired (and some solved) at the dinner table, but in Jim's world, the bedroom was where revelations happened--
--the book was nothing more than highly literate masturbation, and I wrote him this, I tried to be kind about it, as he had been "kind" about Horace me--I told him that Dex was not a lover, was not a bridge builder, was not a man of immediacy and thoughtfulness and awareness but was a thug who took what he wanted and did a helluva generalization and justification about it later--
--and there was the killer--then the piece de resistance of my letter--I told him I knew his source material. I told him that source material was me. Or I was a conduit at least.
The stories that I wove for him, when we were children, in summer green grass, (he let me, bored he was, but he let me because he was long suffering; how odd he had actually listened and retained them; all the time I believed he was just thinking about girls or had gone to sleep) the stories of dreams and science fiction and crystal cities crumbling with age and time, and robots becoming human, the stories of life as seen by a pre pubescent boy who was far more than that, the loves he made up and the loves he always got right in his solitude, stories with morals, with points, as summer stories, as we lay in the grass on our hill, or as winter stories and Fall that I told him on our porch swing, our bodies bracketed by jackets, the cool and cold air whipping into us--
--stories I also told him, also made up, that had to do with time ending, and the take over by a new species, and the building of female robots for male robots and how they were more human than their human inventors--stories I made up that contained encapsulated indecipherable--or painfully obvious-- messages of my love for Jim Jimmy, the delicacy of a hand, the softness of an eye seen when a face was just turning away; the chrysalis of a huge spider from space that needed one person to believe in him...so the spider did not have to be real anymore, and then safe and free in a winter climate; some of them had to do with masturbation and having sex with Jimmy and he never figured them out--though these were probably painfully obvious too, but it seemed he never knew what I meant in that area, he never tumbled for it, but enjoyed the surface, the coral growing on the sea bottom as though that was the beginning middle and end of it--if I thought he listened at all.
--I never told him, but most of these dreams I conjured for him were not original with me, but were from magazines and from novels by real and important writers--so I listed them in my letter, I took his book apart, the very structure of it he had gotten from a Matheson story; the main thrust of it he had gotten from a Heinlein novel; the last third of it he had gotten from Charles Beaumont, as well as much of the outlook; and I explained that he was ripping off not me, but them; he was a hack--
-- he took my words, for I have always been good at verbally telling the plot of what I have read, for I am a failed writer, but I don't have to polish what real books I read, and I can change them around, loop them up and approach them from a different angle--but the obvious center of every story that I told in a very obvious way, even if I thought I was quite inventive, (many stories I told him far more than once), he tweaked and twisted a bit and made them prosaic and pedestrian and second and third run--
-and I remembered most because though I might not have known it at the time, I was playing quite a good joke on him, and he returned the favor by playing a somewhat bigger joke on me--and I nailed him with specifics, page number, paragraph number and references, all splayed out, all documented--
--and I wanted him to love me and to hurt me and I wanted to dismember him and I wanted him to finish killing me, this by the inch thing is too much, and I wanted to write about this little revelation for a magazine, expose him for his phony book and his phony author self; tell the world about the king shit writer of all creation, but I am no writer, as is obvious, and no one would dare let anyone, especially a Mr. Nobody Charlie like me, challenge this little god--so I sent off the letter to Jim in care of the publisher and waited and waited and waited.
When Jimmy had to do a book report, someone else always did it for him, (his eyes were meant for manlier things) for a flash of his smile, for being with him a little while, but I had no proof that he didn't write this book at all, so I did not include it. Jimmy was anything but a reader. He had no need to be. For I was.
I waited two months before I heard from "him." It was a brown long envelope in my mailbox, a mailbox that had become my sworn enemy, that I wanted to chop down with an ax as I impatiently waited, a mailbox that I had quaked to with no results other than the usual bills and ads and flyers, and then this, with his full name printed up at top corner left, no address, god does not have an address.
The envelope was stiff, and I knew what it was before I opened it--nothing (not a "hi buddy" or "sure I remember you" or "get lost, loser" note or anything) but a photo of the author Jim, the same damn one on the back of his damn book, the book was being made at this time into a film (they wanted Robert Wagner for the role of Dex; but he was too old; so they used Sean Penn instead, which in what passes for movies now, I suppose makes some kind of sense; (Horace per se will not be in the movie, but will be a compilation of many characters from the novel, too many to include in the movie--lucky me or not lucky me) with the autograph from a machine at the bottom of the glossy print--"To my loyal fan--good luck--Jim----" Costs too much to have the machine write even the first name of the lucky recipient.
I have that photo pinned to my bedroom wall, to this day. I look at it sometimes.. I don't throw darts at it. That would be sacrilegious. I curse at it sometimes. It doesn't do any good. It's like cursing God. He doesn't give a damn. Even if you could find him.
I wish the critics had brains. I wish they knew something about real books. I wish they could figure Jim's book out; I have no idea why the writers it is so obvious to me he ripped off, the ones still living and being published, don't rat him out; but then as the Prisoner used to say, that would be telling. How does he sleep at night? Very comfortably on his expensive big round bed with his own personal bunnies, according to the tabs.
I remember reading about a boy named Horace (damn that name; I don't even want to think about Blankenship) on a bath mat one hot summer afternoon, (before most homes had air conditioners, and theaters where it was Kool Inside were our only refuge, that and the town's swimming pool), while his friend Jim Jimmy went home for a hamburger before returning, but Jimmy Dex instead went round to the back of my house, to the bathroom window instead.
Horace did not know he was on view, and thinks, as does the unwitting progenitor of that character, he should have been let in on it immediately. It would have shamed him and scared him. But it would have been something at least.
It should have been given to his heart and mind and eyes, while it happened, if it happened at all, I am a lefty after all; before it was given to the eyes of millions of strangers who just make the characters facets of themselves and wish to god there was a real Dex in the world. But at least there is author Jim and he's on Good Morning America tomorrow--fifth time around. Gotta set the clock. Dianne Sawdust Head gets to grovel at him this time.
Five minutes of Jim and it's a good day all round. Yeah, I used to think that too.