"Night on the Town"
by
Timothy Stillman
It was a sour smelling hot night squeaking south of the border.
End of term. End of school. And the boys brought their girls over the border to party. It was evening, late. The trees bled. The sky was black cotton. The stars were immaculate and white boned. The boys were in their car parked out side of the thriving boy bar. The girls did not want to go in. They had all been drinking. Far too much. Tequila down Mexico way. Tijuana. The bone they threw the dog that got away.
Everyone felt bubbly happy. The car seats were torn. The fuzzy dice on the rear view mirror evoked another age. The car was a bubble of smell around them. The whole place was. It liquored up the all of them and would have done so without their bottles to help.
They were making out and they touched each other hard and fast. There was no Rome of ancient in them. There was no whale of white bleak in them. There was no chemistry or math or biology. Save what they had in their intestines and what they had in the nipples of the boys and the girls who were together once more. Who passed the tongues around and tried to with closed eyes guess whose tongue belong to who. The tongues were courted. There was no spray breath here. There was only rutting and seizures and shirts unbuttoned and blouses up turned. And there was flesh.
A mighty army of flesh. There were soldier ants here and there in the car hot with the windows rolled down as the night creaked beside them and into them.
They did not speak, save for moans, they did not laugh save for wayward giggles. They were frightened. College was over. Tomorrow was not yet here. Burt there was the inexorable pity of it coming. Sometimes they felt like weeping. Patches of flesh grazing here and there as though they were all cows grazing on a field of flesh before the sun came up and found them ashamed.
They had all met in college. They had all be disparate then, as well as now. The boys with their penises hard and the girls with their vaginas wet. And still and all this tumble down Mexican night. The drunk passers by. The wavery car lights moving on. This night that had little glass sharp tatters of daggers in it. The peace was blasted by cantina music. The heart was lacerated with the fact that no one knew he was back there. In the back seat. Naked and happy. Naked and free. Freer than they could ever be. They did not know to check the back seat. They did not know who had crawled in back there at some moment's notice. At some point of the reverie. As the boys and the girls cuddled in the front. As they sat on laps in this big old boat of a white once now scuffed green and black with age and ancient wear and tear Old Cal Used Car Steals car.
They did not notice the young boy. They did not notice when he discomfited himself. They did not hear. For hearing would have brought a range they did not want to know about. Something called the human factor. Something someone read once and dreamed bigger dreams than the little boy in back. With only the sombrero on his head.
Destiny. And those who walk in it. Destiny and the humble buildings on all sides of them. On this dirt road. Out in the middle of crickets land. Out where there was a shot glasnost on a table in their minds, a table cloth of red and white. checkered. There inside where the real men were. And the real women. And the real sex show. And the real sweat would be pouring now. As a lubricant to shadowed hall ways and shattered windows. Where rooms could be had for a few dollars. Where beds creaked and the air itself dark and mottled seemed to come complete with a screen door attached.
Everything seemed far away to the young boy. Everything seemed close up to the boys and girls. Who were no longer boys and girls. The age of childhood was gone. Had they been literate someone might have remembered the novel "Childhood's End" and made at least a vague allusion to it now and then. But they were not literate. And the college they attended was a cow college.
Where they drank and had fun and had sex and believed in nothing but the hot Santa Ana winds that made them even hornier than ever and college kids become horny at the drop of a Hustler magazine. They were into sex.
The little boy in the back seat with his poor clothes piled in an embarrassed rush beside him wondered what love was. Wondered what the mirrors here came equipped for. Wondered what side of the world was in California with its date trees and its palm trees and its Movie Studios with Lions Heads and lights that seemed so wise and sparkly and bright. And decided to find out. Decided that to the gringos he was invisible. That he might as well take a deep tank breath of air and just get to it. Just get to the world as it was and young but none older than him.
The college kids not kids passed their courses as they are wont to do at certain places, and they came here to party and they were liberated and the driver, a bold looking boy with a hawk like nose and stalky shoulders made up for by pecs and tight strung muscles was sucking the breast of the wan painful girl next to him and on her right leg sat another boy who was window to everything, who was bright and sharp and funny as hell and could tell jokes like nobody's business and make everyone laugh their asses off, and then his girl, and then the couple next to them, doorways of hair and breasts and penises and vaginas and all the flesh there and in between. Soft boy, red hair, scrunchy face, girlfriend of diamond shaped face who had pendulous breasts and a cross of silver between them that he was twisting with his chubby fingers as he sucked her tits hard and fast, as she moaned streamlined and secure in the act she was performing, and it was most certainly an act.
All mingling, sharing each other's physical characteristics--blonde dishwater and black eyebrows and suntanned streaked red hair and bright wide bold seemingly intelligent eyes.
As it seemed to flesh melted together in the night. As it seemed there was nothing more than sick reality in the fear that encapsulated them here in this car. They had not gone to see the sex shows. Not even the much fabled and long remembered lady and her donkey on stage and on and on. They were fearful in their little boat of seize. The girls felt penises hard and intruding and somehow wrong, they felt and smelled each other. They were hot and hot was sex and hot was lost oasis and hot was more bottles and more lips to them and more upending of the booze. And there was the scream and there were the shots heart round the would.
And the little boy bemused. And the little boy understanding what he did not. For there were pesos to be made. And he wasn't this night making them. He was observing. He was still life, he was not part of the mass up there, the gold hair and the hawk nose and the taut bodies, and the girl with the too intelligent eyes that could not be that intelligent and the red haired boy with the squishy hands and the face with little old age wrinkles in it, and he was not the suburbs they came from, he was not the trees on the quad they had sex under. He was small and dirty and would never amount to anything.
He was the last tattered piece of cloth of his family and he was where it was to end. Because he was nothing. Subscribe to the notion that as he put his hands to his small penis he was nothing this night, or any other night. He would rather be nothing than be the meanness he saw in the front seat. He would not want to be drunk and just feeling everybody up like they were dog meat. He wanted them to be nicer to each other. He wanted them to be something special. He had picked their car with its old run down look, its ancient bumper stickers, its broken spokes, its bent hood, and he wanted them to be something before he went away, got up and walked down the dog barked street away and back to home if home was what that was.
And in the distance a train chuffed. And cars desultory led back and then back again, and women got in the cars, the stiletto heels, the tight wrap around dresses, the need for release, but releaser from what? And the cars screeched off to sex or close kin. Tomorrow the cannery would still be there. Tomorrow the waves would still suck at the sand and try to stay around a bit more but were inexorably pulled out into the mid day blasted heat and sun. And tomorrow was a million years wide without a drop to drink.
And here were the boys and the girls with their clothing almost all off. Here was the stick shift sticking in the driver boy's side. Here was his girl sucking at his navel. Here were the legs straddles and sprawled and everybody going on about how man we are our own flesh bed and those people in there in the sex shows or in the cantinas don't know what they are missing, and man if they could only see us they wouldn't ever want some wrinkled old whore all painted smeared face and diseased body, with her tits gross and flat, and down to her navel, and they giggled and the stench of them and the alcohol reminded the boy of home. So this did not repel him.
Where will you go? he thought as they bobbed and wove and bumped and said get outa my face dude, and he thought California must be cool, California must be cooler than any place in the world. He did not mean cool as in hot. He meant cool as in cool. And he straddled the wide expanse of the back seat as they straddled the wide expanse of the front, and there was bird shot shit on their windows and there was only that tongue dripping moisture up ahead where the boy would never be because he could not get an erection. He was not fearful they would look around and see him and invite the little pup drop over though their side of the world where there were air conditioners and there were milk shakes and there were TVs as big as the walls of his home, and there was nothing more than the fly night, there was nothing more than as if he was not even there.
And that was the way it was with the tourists, especially the kids who were not kids and would never be again though they would hold onto the illusion till they were about forty or so. And then they would ask where did their young years go and he would say if anyone asked him now right this second, they are captured in my lightning bug bottle, they are captured in my Mason jar, and they will be kept for you until you return and you really will be young again. If you can find me that is. Invisibility has its perils for those who search as well.
The golden gizmo you chased after will be right here in the morning of my eyes for nothing grows never, nothing does not age or change. And he wanted a hard on and he wanted to look over the divider and he wanted to see them having hard core for real sex for they were doing that now, the ahs and the ohs and names like curses of hate screamed meant that and the bustling around and the making the car bump up and down, huge sex mumps up and down.
And it made the boy feel lonely as hell., and thinking as his own sweaty body belayed him and made him a comma in this hot painful night. His mother and father would not care if he ever came home. The seas of the world would not care either. The heart would not care, and he did not understand as his ass cheeks stuck to the vinyl of the seat and the night was ;painfully hot, he did not understand, please explain, why they had to drink to get away from what they had, from the joy of flesh being touched and touching? The boy did not know what touching flesh felt like. He did not know what his own flesh felt like because you never do until someone else reaches out a hand to it. And he hated them. And he wanted to scream out my god are you people mad? Are you going to denigrate love forever? Are you going to hide in bottles like everyone else and pretend the genie is in there when it is not there at all you should search for it.
He was too young to cum, or he would have, on the vinyl sticky hot seat, in the sickness of the car, in the coming baby here it comes oh gododddddddddddddddd, and he felt nothing, because he was no moral, and he was no moral because he was no poem, he was just a kid who wanted to believe that something could be right without having to look so hard at it your eyes went blank trying to find meaning in things and people that had no meaning. Who were not really here anymore than he was.
Who were not anything at all. Who would not remember this night unless they got into a car wreck with other drunk drivers, and he would not welcome them into his country. This is mine, as poor and disheveled and black skinned as I am, as unfortunate and pink palmed as I am, as needy and as futile as the world around me , as pained and drugged as I can get sniffing glue and paint, as it all comes down to just me, my visible rib cage bulges bones, my tummy bulge from hunger, little legs that no one has ever seen though I go naked often as not, still young enough to do that in a land where there was only the tall tales of old, in a land where there were only burnishes that came with fake worthless who cares? freedom that came with a mounting lava of greed that had to be paid back even from the poorest soul.
What is your Dick doing now Mr. Driver? What is it doing in the legs of the girl beside you? What is your red haired squashy faced friend doing with the boy across from the girl who is sexing the both of them. Is this an aquarium of crazed fish? Is this what I lived for once when I led Americanos around the hacienda and said here is for the walls and here is for the pictures and the paintings and the history of my land you would not believe how many times you thought you got it right, with your dishwater minds and your raindrop deep sweetness, and there was no pearl to save the day for the old man and the boy and the seas quite and still and unrifled as mirrors, and all the days stuck inside here like cards in a magician's sleeve which he asks you kindly to keep your eyes on while he pulls the half dead drugged bunny out of his tattered top hat.
Its what they all come here fore, the boy knew without knowing, and its what sucking sounds up there mean, and its what spatters gauging on the night sliding out silver in the bright light of the sex show club to their left. It was just a moment in a precious little Jewell of a boy with bright brown eyes big as Mexico itself, it was his hands that were dainty and already callused on the other side, it was the flip side of everything, he was of the dirt and grub which they had come down here to see there fore he must be dirt and grub himself. He was a lawn gnome back in their parents' yards.
They came down the college kids they come down and they vomited sickness in someone else's home sometimes and they fell over and lay in a coma on the dry board walks and the boys would pick their pockets and their credit cards and have a field day imagining the hacienda is theirs and they do not direct with little discretion certain wealthy business men and women to these places where the heat of bodies naked makes the life here of night a bad joke And the dogs have three legs often as not. And the old men with eyes half closed from the relentlessness of the sun, and their stubble leather faces that are lined with poetry that comes from nothing but an aggrieved meanness and a knife in your guts if you don't let them have another drink of anything.
For theirs was the hunger. Theirs was the need to get drunk. There was the need to escape. And the boy in back spread his legs and he fingered his hole and it was moist and tight and it made his dick finally rise. And it was filthy in this car. It was filthy in the land stolen by those who did not belong, who would go to parties, go right in and solidly be there, and not have to hide under tables and be afraid of being seen and cadge drinks from men who would let them go for a song and a half or their abouts, and there was no future here and he was not even a comma in this dying, dead land.
He was a distant relative of himself. And he wanted the girls up there to suck his cock, he wanted to get laid, get fucked, he wanted to stop being the prize of this parents. The boy who would make them proud. The boy who was addicted to inhalants already. The boy who hid out and who watched the tourists tear through their tiaras of lies and decants and deceits and more lies and distances in their eyes as though they were balloons on the sins inside and needed so desperately to get away from the angle of the street, the shadows and the darkness, the need of the boy to run out of the car, not sneaky as when he entered, not brave and bold and then disappointed as he took of his clothes and waited to be of service to their NO.
He wanted to run to the front of the car with his little hard on brandishing and to scream out look at me before you go you will jot remember but it is the remember that counts and that would be me, and if the Aztecs had warred, and there was no proud people left, and if the lizards of the desert were pounced on and the broken clay houses had snaked crawling in and out, if this was the poverty these college graduates had come to here like ugly penance and thus trick themselves into believing that they had now hit tank town bottom, so anything else would be UP, and soon they would be home in their actual beds not straw mats, and they would sleep well in actual rooms and they would never be anything more than the ordinary and that would so suit them fine as their head bangers over the next morning would be calling cards inside memory of half, that said I must have had a good time, I must have.
But they would never understand. They would never understand about his country or his lamps or his breezes or his dreams for even the nothings have dreams, that at least is allowed them, so while they were still having sex, and finally finally he thought no one ever would, somebody said, ;lets get in the back babe, I want you all to myself, and the boy sat there naked and unashamed.
Would they notice him now? And what would they do? Would they laugh? Or would it be another drink turn on what the hell no body will ever know and then in the next day, if remembered at all, self righteously deny deny it ever had happened? There were doors opening and doors closing and there was a stumble and fall and somebody picked somebody up and there was the back door opening and the sanctuary of the boy's destroyed, and the shadows rearranged themselves and the ones in front were still partying the night away, and the boy and girl dove mostly naked into the back seat and half crushed him and came up in their bundle of bones. Baffled. Drunk giggles. And noticed him.
Sat on him, lay on him, fell on him, struggled to get their boozy bodies off of him, trying to figure out what the hell this thing was in the back seat. And somebody said hey Muffer turn on the overhead. And Muffer did.
And the boy was naked, touched, finally, it didn't matter how unwilling their touching him was, he had finally found what skin felt like, it felt like hot baked marble, it felt awful, and doughy and pathetic, and he drew himself smaller and smaller to get away from them, he, between the man and woman, newly minted, and the boy saw them staring in shock at him, and the boy was older than they ever would be, and their boozy brains tried to figure out what a skeletal batch of kid was sitting his foreign naked butt back here with a silly little funny hard on no less and somebody finally noticed him. For once. NEVER NOTICE ME AGAIN he wanted to scream.
He saw the faces of the two with him in the back, in the dim ceiling light. Bright enough the light was however for him to see the expressions on their faces, the ones beneath the shock and surprise and already curly little jokes to play on him raffling through their blood soaked brains. But over and above all, the looks, the ones that said "Hey dude this ain't my fault." He had seen this in gringos faces often. They seemed to do that better than anyone else ever. One but hopes. And hopes are lonely little boys where they are not supposed to be, who are not supposed to be, playing lonely little boy games all on their own forevermore.
So he broke into his patter--nothing else but to smile politely and wing it--And now senor and senorita, what is your pleasure? And he discovered hands, people had hands, and this was a moment and nothing more. But for a nothing, a nothing a more moment can last a lifetime. The booze sang. The music was drunk. And then what was supposed to happen next?
B Keeper silvershimmer@earthlink.net