One Fish at a Time

ONE FISH AT A TIME (Pro. Chapt. 1)

by R. Forbes Emerson

(Bi-ped, inc., rom.)

Nothing should be inferred from the use of media characters in this story.

Note: This repost contains significant revisions. If you have the original, and can live with the writer's egocentric mania for himself, why, you have a collector's item. All you have to do is keep it. For you student writers lucky enough to have a `first edition', use it to see what re-writing is all about, by comparing the first, to this. (The first posting was a draft, published for technical reasons.)

ONE FISH AT A TIME

PROLOGUE

"What's that lever do?" Nancy Schroeder asked.

"Cowl flaps," said the pilot.

"Cowl amazing!" she exclaimed.

"Cowl do you know?" the trim officer asked, playing along with the freckly, bright-eyed ten year old.

"Cowl does anyone know anything, I ask, that's cowl."

"If the cowl flaps are opened," Rob Lester explained to his passenger, "they let more air over the engine. When we're cruising, they're closed, as they are now, but when we take off, they're open for more air flow."

"Cowl cool," the girl said with a nod.

"That's the long and the short of it," Rob said.

"Do kids ever ask: `are we there yet', up here?" Nancy asked, "I mean you'd have to be awfully dumb not to know you weren't, in an airplane, wouldn't you?"

"Especially over the ocean," the pilot agreed.

"I like being up high," Nancy said, "that way we can talk to lots of people on the way down if they parked the water truck where the fuel truck was meant to be."

"I climb until the thermometer reads seventy-two Fahrenheit," the tall, blue-eyed, Nordic pilot said, "then I close the..."

"Cowl flaps."

"And we trim up this and that, and four hours later we are where we were meant to be all along."

"And ten thousand feet is seventy-two degrees," Nancy said, cross checking the altimeter, obvious as a clock, with the thermometer, obvious as a thermometer.

"We have to be at an odd altitude, plus five hundred feet, so we're just climbing trough ten thousand, but we'll level off at eleven-five."

"Two miles," the girl noted.

"Can I help you with the trim things," Nancy asked as the plane passed through eleven thousand feet.

The tall, athletic pilot guided the tiny hands to the engine controls and trim tabs, finding she sensed the subtle changes as well as he could. In a seeming instant, she learned to cross check the airspeed and altimeter, eking the craft to a fraction over two-hundred miles an hour, with the ancillary rate-of-climb indicator resting solidly on zero.

The air over the ocean was smooth, Rob pushed the button synchronizing the twin engines, and they began their passage into the Caribbean.

"Do you like passengers that talk or ones who just look out the windows?" Nancy asked.

"I like passengers who wonder where the water truck was parked," the pilot said.

"I'd like to talk, too," the girl said, blushing happily at Rob's response.

"Good," Rob said, "we have a course change in an hour, and we can switch our fuel tanks then, too, so there's nothing to do other than keep a sharp eye out for meteor showers or new volcanoes.

"Go ahead an pick a subject."

"Brothers," Nancy replied, again with a slight blush.

"If Rick was my brother, I'd want to talk about him, too," Rob allowed.

"Are you a brother?" the girl countered.

"Yes," Rob said, "Tracy is eleven and Sandra is nine."

"How old are you?" the girl asked.

"Twenty-two," Rob replied.

"You look like a teenager," the girl observed.

"I get carded like one, too," the pilot grinned.

"Do you like your sisters?" she went on.

"Super much," Rob replied.

"That's Rick and me, too," the girl said.

"He's done well," Rob said.

"It keeps us apart," the girl responded.

"Not for much longer," Rob said.

"We're headed in the right direction," came the smiling response.

They cruised for some minutes.

"You look like Rick," the girl said.

"Thanks," Rob replied.

"I think that's why he hired you," Nancy went on, "he's good at details like that. Not that medical school looked bad on your resume, or anything like that."

"He said you and I would be spending a lot of time together," Rob acknowledged, "so maybe favoring him had something to do with it."

"How do you feel about flying me back and forth?" the pixie asked.

"It beats tinker with the cowl flaps," Rob said.

"More amazing by the minute," Nancy intoned.

"Being with you is just that," Rob agreed.

"I'm meant to have a personality," the girl said; "I don't like the idea, but if it's the only way to be with Rick two or three days a week, I'll try anything."

"Maybe there's a chicken suit in the cargo," Rob laughed, "they made a movie about them, so someone must think they have personality."

"What I need is a mermaid suit," the girl replied, "that would fit in better. Rick and I can't go into a restaurant together, and never mind the celebrity thing, without people staring because somehow we look, I guess, extra right for each other. In all ways right for each other. The money is where the Olsen twins were, so, not to put too fine a point on it, there we float on the Carib sea, yours truly, since she wants what her brother wants, topless, because I'm young enough to get away with it, and Rick in a thong, and we're wrestling with leaders and gaffs and any freaking thing swimming down there with the sharks, and, on top of it all, I'm meant to stop panting over Rick long enough to grin at the camera and say, `Nice fish.'"

"Beats learning lines," Rob noted, to the girls laugh.

"Isn't that the truth," she said, "it's like a summer off of life itself not having to memorize twenty pages because some director thinks it's cute when I wrinkle my nose."

"Lot's of girls would think it was cool someone cared," Rob said.

"I know," Nancy admitted, "but I've got to keep trying on personalities until I find one that's right. Hollywood prima donna, you know the other word for it, an aloof celebrity. I think I'm done with it."

"I'm a wanna be writer," Rob said, "and our stock in trade is meant to be conflict and resolution. No way out of it, you have to fit a lot of characters with yoyo personas so they can threaten the good guys. The Joker, The Penguin, Anthony Hopkins; somebody or something nasty in every story."

"So you can't have a personality, either?" the girl asked, eyes a little wide.

"Fellow puppets, I'm afraid," Rob said, "commerce and art pulling the strings. It's best to keep your head down, least you be taken for a clown, or worse, show any lack of clown."

"I don't know," Nancy sighed, "there was Haley Mills, then the Olsen twins, now me. Am I meant to go up, or down? More Meryl Streep in Out of Africa', or Ricki Lake in Hairspray'?"

"You could study Tyne Daley," Rob suggested, "and become exactly the opposite."

"You may be a writer," the young actress said.

"When I'm forty," the pilot replied, "I'll take it seriously. Live a lot and write a little."

"And keep personality out," she reminded him.

"Save a special piano wire, just for it," Rob agreed.

"And if that doesn't work, there's the chicken costume."

"Yes," Rob said, "if you don't discover a personality before First Places on Wednesday, I may be making another trip for said item, making yours the only fishing show with a cowl mascot."

"Chicken cowl mien, and I'll have the snow peas," Nancy giggled.

"I don't know if it's okay to flirt with a ten year old," Rob said, "but I think the sweet peas would better suit you."

"Rick didn't bring us together to practice swordplay," the girl said, "so, yes, it's okay if you flirt, and, if you don't, I'm building up my courage as we go along. And I can build up a lot of courage in almost four more hours."

"Do you want to keep it light and frivolous, like a one night stand, or are you interested in something more mature. For example, me asking you personal questions about Rick."

"More mature," the girl replied, "especially as we're going to be flying together all summer."

"And you're sure it won't interfere with anything that may be going on between you?" Rob asked.

"We've talked about it, being with others," Nancy said, "he wants it for me, So I don't get lopsided, in his words, and I think he's right. It's super and it's exciting, but it's not sacred. We're humans, not gods, we live, we don't exist, and I can't see how lying with him while he quizzes me about you will put much in the way of distance between us."

"Besides," Rob added for the girl, "you need someone to marry when you're ready."

"I do," she admitted.

The plane droned on.

"Do you think Rick will marry one of your sisters?" Nancy asked.

"I think the happiest marriages tend to be where there's a strong father-daughter relationship, plus older men are much better lovers than pups, so, as far as I'm concerned, he'd be perfect for Tracy or Sandra."

"Are you a pup?" the girl asked.

"Compared to what I'll be in twenty years, yes, compared to what I was when I was sixteen, no."

"Do girls become better lovers?" the ten year old asked.

"No," Rob said, "not if their first partners teach them to use their mouth and hands. Assuming they like being with a male, in the first place, that's all a girl can do; they don't have to learn self-control; in fact, the more they abandon it, the more exciting it is. With a male, it's just the opposite. He has to hold a beautiful girl in his arms, and not lose control for a long time. Even an hour."

"Can the girl help?" Nancy asked.

"I'm glad I wasn't drinking a Coke," Rob gasped, "it would be coming out my nose."

"I can't remember," Nancy said, "from what we talked about if its good to be a clown, or to be a not clown."

"It's okay," Rob said, "it's just that the more a girl helped a man to control himself, the harder it would make it for him to do so. In fact, the only way a girl could help, that way, would be to get fat."

"So many helpful girls," the girl mused aloud, "in lard we trust. I knew there must be a reason."

"And so many boys helping the girls, all round and roly-poly. Who said chivalry is dead?"

"Nobility," the girl said, "it does a body good."

"Sixty percent can't be wrong," Rob agreed, "impossible in a democracy.

"Do you talk about stuff like this with Rick?" he asked.

"Since we're betrothed," Nancy said, "I can trust you. It's the reason for our show. From time to time we'll each comment on how trim and fit the other is. We have several closing scenes where we deliberately go off in private, letting the audience imagine the rewards we get in return for a mild case of the hungries."

"Nobility is where you find it," Rob observed.

"I know, weird stuff, against all the rules, but look at the alternatives, plus, look at who made up the rules in the first place."

"Mad killers," Rob said, nodding, "dripping altars and the sizzling irons."

"Thousands of years of it, in hundreds of cultures," the pretty girl added, "but, probably, to be fair, only when population control acted as an imperative."

"We're on the same page there," Rob said, "and there are other madmen than clerics. Revised history, or, more accurately, complete history, tells us Winston Churchill was the greatest warmonger of all time, yet, without the thirty million European casualties of World War II, there'd be standing room only."

"It's the end of time," Nancy said, "obesity, dysfunction, debt, Wal-Mart..."

"The miracles at the end of the Industrial Revolution," Rob interrupted, "reduced to appliances, commodities, and novelties."

"And on top of that, they killed Napster."

That brought a long moment of silence from pilot and passenger, though, it must be noted, the cargo seemed indifferent. The grief over what fine print could wreak on humankind passed slowly, and perhaps some drummer, somewhere, had enough for that second bottle of whisky.

"I thought of something," Rob said after ten minutes, "it may already be in your concept..."

"Sure," said the girl. She couldn't help be a little disappointed. Everybody did, think of something, have an idea, suggest this, and suggest that; it came with the territory."

"Other couples," Rob said. "Brothers and sisters or fathers and daughters. Before and after. Photos and video of before, then after they've been watching you a few months. Invite the winners for guest appearances."

"Phew!" the girl sighed to herself in relief. Out loud she informed Rob he'd just paid for another year of medical school.

"I'd rather save it for the baby," he replied, "let him master neurology."

"Daughters only, for such a beautiful father," the pixie said, staring into his eyes to be sure he got the message in its entirety.

"Let her master neurology, then," Rob readily agreed.

Two minutes went by.

"Do you suppose we'll ever fight about anything?" the girl sighed.

"Somehow I can't see your coming to me fresh from Rick and leaving me strength for combat," the young pilot said.

Nancy reached to him with her left hand, taking his right hand. "How about when I come to you with his daughter," she whispered over the drone of the cruising engines.

"I'll feel the same as he does when you go to him carrying mine," Rob said, "no harm, no foul, no challenge, no swords, no seconds."

"It must be that nobility we were talking about," Nancy said.

"However bad Churchill was," Rob replied, "the French managed to slaughter sixteen thousand a year on the field of honor, if flicking a glove in a dude's face has anything to do with honor."

"Good," the girl said, "then we've got lots of bad company. I was worried about our marriage winding down to a humdrum repetition of tedious days."

"There's always your driver's license to look forward to," Rob said, "just six short years."

"And," the girl said, "my first not having a period. That shouldn't even be two years, seeing how bad my husband and my brother are."

"Maybe you could do worse," Rob said.

"Not my style," the girl responded, "I want to be totally and wantonly wicked with two, not a little bit wicked with Tom, Dick, and Harry."

"Get it into your system," Rob quipped. Nancy got the joke, didn't mind the stretch, and smiled up happily at the handsome young adult beside her, still holding his hand.

"Rob?" she asked after a few minutes, "do you know what my big problem is?"

"What?" he responded.

"If I have to wear a top on the show. How long before that happens. When will we start getting emails from higher and higher up until someone says halter the bitch or jerk her contract on a morals clause."

"Remind me never to drink so much as a medicine cup of water while we're together," Rob choked.

"At least you'll never be drowning sorrows," Nancy rejoined.

"Drowned is drowned, my love," the medical student replied.

"Are either of you sisters wearing bras?" Nancy asked.

"Tracy, the eleven year old," Rob said.

"For physical or psychological reasons?" the girl queried.

"The latter," Rob replied.

"Does she like it?" the girl asked.

"I think it's just an excuse to have me come in her room and help dress her in the morning."

"And undress her at night?"

"Now that you mention it."

"Do you like looking at her when she has it off?" the girl asked, her hand now squeezing, her voice low and husky.

"Very much," Rob said, returning the commitment with his hand, his voice a masculine copy of hers.

"Has she started to grow at all?" the ten year old wanted to know.

"It depends who you ask," Rob answered, causing the pixie to giggle once again.

"You."

"No."

"Good."

"She's pretty awesome as she is, so you may be right," Rob acknowledged.

"And Sandra?" Nancy asked.

"She may be a little ahead. I can tell them apart in the dark."

It was Nancy's turn for a spit take. Trying not to giggle had the same effect of a girl trying not to coax her lover, but the sound was pleasing and infectious.

Tears dried, she snorted a few times. "Would it be okay if I took my blouse off?" she asked. Rob looked into the intent brown eyes, his welcome obvious. "Not up here," he replied. "I'm not into stunting and mile-high club type stuff."

He reached into the door pocket to his left and pulled out the chart. "Pick an island about a hundred miles ahead so we can do an efficient letdown," he said.

The girl started from his finger tip, chewed her lip for a moment, then stabbed an island with her pixie finger.

"Okay," he said, "now we're going to pretend I've been paralyzed by being shot by a love bolt, or something, and all I can do is talk. Your task is to get us from here, onto the airstrip, without adding power at any point. You are also to pretend a dowager empress of extreme up-tightness is sitting in back with the cargo, and she has a fresh cup of boiling tea in her hand."

"Don't tempt me," the girl giggled. Rob guided her hands to the wheel and switched off the autopilot. The plane was suddenly alive in her hands and she grinned with pleasure.

"It's stiff," she said.

"The faster, the stiffer, aerodynamics is the same way," he said, glad she didn't react to double entendre. Nerves.

"Okay," he said, "now just trim it forward until we're going about two-fifty" He was amazed to watch her use the electric button on the yoke, but reach instinctively down with her left hand to check the operation of the manually operated wheel between the pilot and co-pilot seat.

Had she flown before? No, she said, not up front.

"Call Bimini," he said, "and tell them we're diverting to Sealess Island and we'll re-file when we're airborne again."

Her only mistake was saying `hello' into the microphone, then she read the tail number, as she'd seen in movies, and gave the message. The controller designated her Angel One, and said he'd be waiting to hear from here. Rob handed her the check list and guided her through the procedures which weren't intuitive. With a taller student, he would have slid his seat back and dozed off, letting the novice figure things out for himself, but the pixie's legs didn't reach the rudders firmly enough for positive control, so he stayed where he was, and took the chart back so he could study it in detail.

"They always bounce the plane around when the passenger has to take over, in the movies," the girl noted, "am I meant to be doing that?"

"Not unless you wish to bathe in the dowager's tea," Rob said.

"I think you're just pretending she's back there to make me nervous," the girl giggled.

"Priscilla Carbola, pretend?" he aped, "she'd like to hear that news."

"What would she do?" Nancy asked.

"Criticize us for making a straight-in approach, instead of executing a traffic pattern," Rob said, "and stand by for more errors. She does not like being taken lightly."

"Did she do in the Kennedy boy?" Nancy asked,

"Just for the publicity," Rob said, returning to the perusal of his chart -- always something new to find if one concentrated.

"Too much television," he thought to himself, having almost spoken out loud. The space shuttle waited until the last second to lower its wheels, and the girl did likewise, but she did lower them. The engines sighed back to idle just when they should have, there was five or ten seconds of drifting, then a lurching, squealing touchdown, and a little wobbliness as her relatively short legs worked the brakes.

Sealess Island wasn't treeless, and the girl chose a palm grove, instinctively using heavy throttle as the plane waded through the sand. She turned it perfectly and earned her wings, in the mind of her instructor, by straightening the nose wheel for a couple of feet before bringing the machine to a smooth halt. Rob killed the engines, and they popped the doors and scrambled out to avoid the rapidly building heat in the cockpit.

"Do we need anything?" Nancy asked.

"I don't think so," Rob said. So they joined hands and walked through the grove of palms to the beach.

They stripped shyly, and walked off at angles, into the water, then she swam to him.

"What do you think?" she whispered, glad not to have to compete with the engines. Rob looked at her chest closely, and she gently took his hands and brought them to her. "I couldn't tell you and Tracy apart," he said, softly.

"No one's touched me like you are," she whispered back, just loud enough for him to hear her over the lapping water.

"Not Rick?" he asked.

"You'd be amazed how much I don't know," the girl said, shyly. "We have a ritual. It's always pitch dark. He never touches me more than he can help, except where we're together. No kissing, talking, excess touching, just him up and his arms and me lying under him with my legs spread and my arms up over my head."

"How do you feel about that?" Rob asked.

"I'm not allowed to wiggle my hips or respond in any way, even by breathing hard, to what's happening. His theory is those who break one rule do well by not making a habit of it. He's complete with me, and we've never used a condom, but everything else is off the brother and sister table, so to speak."

"Will that change after today?" Rob asked.

"Yes," Nancy said, "he's not a fanatic about it, he just thinks it's fair to leave me as much a virgin as possible."

"So you've never been kissed?" Rob asked.

"Never," the girl said.

"When Rick's with you, have you ever climaxed?" the pilot queried.

"He won't let me," the girl replied, shyly.

"You know what I think?" Rob asked.

"What?" Nancy said.

"It's a good thing he's marrying you off young," Rob replied.

"Duh'uh," the girl intoned.

"I want to feel you up from the back," Rob whispered, "like a child molester usually starts with a little boy or girl."

Nancy's eyes grew hot, and she turned away from the six-three athlete. "I won't be with you like Rick is, because of the water," he said, "but if you want to come back against me you can still feel me against your back."

The girl responded by moving a step back, and Rob encircled her with his hands low on her belly.

"They start like this," he whispered, "after they pull you blouse out of your shorts, then they move slowly higher, depending on how much privacy they have for what they're doing with you."

"But they'd have a boner, like Rick, right?" Nancy asked.

"Yes," Rob said, "you'd feel against the middle of you back."

"Do you molest Tracy and Sandra this way?" the girl asked, her voice a deteriorating whisper.

Rob husked in her ear, "I have been for a year now. All the time. In my apartment at school, in the car, in the labs and classrooms, out in the woods, beside the trail when we're skiing, in the morning, before they go to school, as soon as they come home from school, alone and together, an hour a day any time either or both are with me."

"I take it that's a Yes," the imp grinned, looking back over her shoulder, then she bowed her head to his touch and her hands rode gently on his as he found her chest and tiny nipples.

"Do you want to hold me while I get a boner?" Rob whispered.

"Yes," the girl hissed, and he felt her tense in his arms.

The young man guided the girl to shallower water and she turned to face him, wet head against his chest as she looked down between their bodies. "Touch me," the adult said. Her hands found him, her left cupping him, her right gripping him firmly and holding still.

"It takes a minute after a male's been swimming," he coaxed softly in her ear.

"No wonder they always stay on the beach in the bimbo movies," the girl whispered back.

"The beaches in Los Angeles are artificial," Rob said, "the water is cold and gray, the rocks are covered with gray slime, and it's almost always windy and cloudy, those are other reasons not to go in the water."

"It's sexy talking to you," Nancy said, "do you talk with Tracy and Sandra a lot?"

"We're a lot like you and Rick," Rob replied. "The girls display when they're receptive, and we find a private place. It's very physical, maybe even clinical, I guess."

"You hold them still?" she whispered.

"Same as you guys," he said, "I think it's the way a lot of brother mount their sisters; a love need, a physical need, but not a romantic need. Something like that."

"It's very satisfying," Nancy said, "just feeling him throbbing in me like a bow twanging, and imagining what's happening, even though I've never seen it. Imagining what his sperm looks like and how much he's leaving inside me."

"You won't feel that with me," Rob said, "I'm going to take you as a lover, not a brother."

"Just be sure to tell me," she whispered, "if I'm still conscious."

He grew suddenly and fully in her hand. Her breathing became ragged as she watched and felt him swell to seven, then eight inches, hotly thick, his glans flaring hugely as she stroked back his foreskin and held him naked against her immature female chest. "Take me up on the beach," she mewed, her legs folding. The six-four athlete picked her up like a child, waded the ten feet onto the beach, and lay her on the hard-packed coral sand.

"This is how I lie for him," she said, raising her arms fully and spreading her legs widely.

"No wonder you've never been kissed," Rob said, lying on the damp sand, perpendicular to her right shoulder and rising on his elbows to stare down into her schoolgirl face.

"That sexy, eh?" she asked, her eyes huge.

"Beyond any possibility of imagination," he said, "and that's an understatement."

"How would you feel if I'd just been with him?" she whispered.

"Animal instincts run pretty hot along those lines," Rob said, "so your first kiss would just have to wait."

"Then I'm glad we're going to him, not coming from him," she said with a soft smile that was her last on the planet with virgin lips. Rob lowered to her lips, found her, and placed his right hand low on her wet belly as she nibbled tentatively at him in welcome. Her lips warmed quickly and melted to an alluring softness, a tender trap to beguile and tantalize, with a hot eel begging freedom and frantic to escape its tomboy mouth prison. Of course, it never got very far because it met its mate almost the instant it was free, and, though the tangle and tussle was epic, it eventually seemed to accept its roots and returned home so the girl could once again speak.

"How many Fourths can one July have?" she murmured in wonder.

"Think how it would be if young Fawkes had actually blown Parliament to kingdom come," Rob whispered into her delicious little girl mouth, "that's how it feels to me. One huge kaboom after another with cannons, cymbals, and a stadium of mad brass."

"If I passed you a note during all the commotion," the school girl asked, "what do you suppose it would read?"

"I love you," he whispered into her beautiful mouth.

"I love you, too," she whispered back, her hands coming to his face and drawing him Fourth.

Early on the Fifth, their lips parted. "I don't kiss Tracy and Sandra," Rob whispered in the child's right ear, "but I do masturbate them when I molest them."

His right hand moved beyond her slim young belly. Her hands came to his powerful swimmer's shoulders, so much like her brother's, and she raised her hips high off the damp sand, walking her ankles apart and mewing encouragement.

Rob found the perfect thighs of the little girl, molested her for several long, tender minutes, then found her wetness as she gasped and shuddered against him, biting, clawing and sweating with his every movement against her bucking young loins.

Vaguely the ten year old wondered why they called in `cumming' when she was so obviously going away. Far and fast. One a rocket. Everything dropping, plummeting, crashing; so much surf, so little time, and would he never...

She screamed her brother's name twice, then howled Rob's again and again as her legs slammed together and she convulsed wildly, her head lolling, her face slack, her eyes rolled back and useless.

"He left a lot of me for you," she whispered in a half giggle some minutes later. She was beginning to breath normally, and the trade winds were drying her delicate, white skin. Rob was back on his elbow, staring down into the gamin face, adoring the bright pride in her huge, brown eyes.

"I think an eight pound daughter from me, to you, to him would be a suitable reward, what says my angel love?"

"Pul-ease,' is what the angel of the first party says," Nancy smiled. "Six pounds, and we'll bring her up on Wheaties."

"That gives me an idea," Rob said, now tickling her slightly parted lips with an egret feather."

"What?" she asked.

"Let me write an episode," he said, "when one of the winning couples has a child. They can bring her with them on a second visit and we'll hint at, but not actually spell out the baby's parentage."

"The most special surprising dear young friend of John and Debbie Doe," the girl responded, "oh, I like it ever so."

"Good," Rob said, "there's such an avalanche of old people and fat people out there, the thought of making any of them live a moment longer than they have to has lost its appeal."

"We're going to be such power hitters," Nancy observed. "Really have a show that does something. That says to millions, keep in fantastic shape, and this could happen to you. For the girls getting raped, that this isn't exactly Sunday school behavior, but it happens to one girl in five, and some girls love it. Point out the advantages. If Rick and I were an ordinary brother and sister, we'd be together every day, we wouldn't have to waste time on social posturing, take chances with disease or emotional involvement with the unfit, and anything that happened would be part of a life long involvement."

"Practice, too," Rob said, "don't forget that. The chance to be together alone for hours, so you can become really good lovers in the physical sense.'

"Not that it takes much."

She giggled happily. "Did Tracy cum the first time you took her that way?" she asked.

"No," Rob admitted.

"So it takes some," she said, wisely, "and if that's true, it follows that more is better than some. Proof is what just happened between us. That big dent in the sand didn't get there by itself. It got there because you were beautiful and urgent with me, because you stayed with me..."

"Don't forget the loving you part," he reminded her.

"How would I know about that?" she smiled, "I wasn't even on the planet."

And suddenly the soft, contented eyes blazed anew, brown and hot, "Can boys go where girls go?" she whispered.

"Yes," he said.

"Teach me," she blushed.

He lay on his back, legs spread as her's had been, guided the seventy pounds of her beautifully proportioned feminine body to his muscular right thigh. She bent to him, and he let her go, linking his fingers behind his neck and staring at the naked mermaid leaning to him.

Her tiny right hand found his glans and played, wetting. She stroked tentatively, staring into his eyes and gauging his tension between her still wet thighs. Her left hand wandered his belly and chest as she settled into a firm, rhythmic stroke, masturbating him much as he had her.

"Tell me," she whispered.

"I will," he answered.

"Is there any way I can make it last longer," she asked, feeling him cording between her slim legs.

"Not without taking a bullet," he gasped.

"Oh, Rob," she whispered, "I love how you look, how you feel, I want it to last forever, to be your girl all day. Don't cum."

"Oh, darling," he managed to pant, "you'll have to absolutely forbid me. Threaten torture, bankruptcy, exposure, think of something..."

"We could talk about the show," she said, "what it's going to be like standing at the plate and nailing a five-hundred-foot rope week after week. Watching McDonald's crash and burn as ten million kids abandon the golden arches for what you're going to do all over my chest. Turn some victims into lovers, free others by letting them say I know what it's all about, and I don't want any part of it. Empower kids to feel what I felt with you, what I feel as you tense, trying to concentrate on every word I'm saying. It should be there right. Sacred and guaranteed. Neither condoned nor tolerated, but avidly pursued. Family life isn't complete without it. Sell a million jump ropes a months, because that's what Rick and I do together. Empty the theaters, empty the malls, flood the libraries until the malls are converted into libraries. Clubs, organizations, huge attendance at parades and functions, so everyone gets the message red hot off the grill, leave us alone. Brothers being nice to their sisters, fathers to their daughters, mothers to everyone in the happy family. No secrets, no subversion, no lies, no creeps, or, at least, less of all of the above. Divorce rates through the floor. Shower babies galore. Mothers nursing daughter and sister at the same time and with the same breast. A wholesale detachment from greed and Wal-Mart with a paradigm as ancient as Egypt, itself. Not new, old. Not wrong, right. Not bad, perfect. Not over, `till death do you part. And so many millions would find new things. New facets. New techniques. Eventually, though it might be a hundred years, girls would learn how to keep their male partners from ejaculating, from cumming, from covering their chests and shoulders and necks and faces and lips with the hot spurt of their thick, white, gushing seed, and allowing some of the spray on the heaving chest so the feline little creatures will have something to lick and carry to their lovers with their pretty, pink tongues."

Now she lay fully on him, his arms softly around her. They kissed softly and gently, murmuring welcome. She indicated she could wait no longer, by biting his right nipple. Slowly they rolled on the packed, white sand and she again spread widely for him.

"Do you guide Rick," he asked, looking deeply into her eyes.

"He finds me by himself," she replied.

"Guide me," he whispered.

"Yes," she said, finding him in moments with her right hand and masturbating him, thrilling to the immediate tension bolting his body like an electric shock. She left him when she was sure, and he entered like a stallion with his first filly, penetrating slowly to her cervix, then entering gently to his hilt and staring down into her glowing eyes. Her hands came gently to his heaving flanks, cradling him just under his bunched shoulders.

"You're still wet with sperm," he whispered softly to her, "do you want to feel me against your nipples while you're slippery?"

"Yes," she whispered.

He lowered slowly as she arched, then came fully on top of her as her hands slid down his flanks to his hips, urging him fully into her womb, then returning to the corded muscles of his swimmer's back.

"For a husband, you make a great brother," she said, "if you were high over me, and my arms were like Rick always wants them, I couldn't tell you apart. You both make me feel pregnant. Saturated. Complete."

He rose to her coaxing, and he lifted his arms, one at a time, so she could stretch under him, then they froze, panting gently, gazing into each other's eyes.

"Have you molested Tracy this much?" she whispered.

"Almost," the young male said.

"Did it end while you were inside her?" she quizzed.

"On her belly," he whispered back.

"Rick will be the first?"

"Yes," he said, "and Sandra, too, I've never gone this far with her."

"Will you start cumming in them after Rick has?" she wanted to know.

"If you want," he said, lowering again to her childish body so he could kiss her still-damp hair while feeling her slim bare chest against him..

"Definitely," she smiled, and he could sense it against his neck,. "they have made a spectacular male animal of you, and quitting while they're ahead is not an option."

"Do you like talking?" he asked.

"I love it," she cooed. "It just seems to make us last forever."

"Tell me about your first time with Rick," the young male said, "how old were you."

"It was two years ago," she replied, "when he was doing `NYPD Blue', and I was eight."

"How did it start?" he asked.

"I asked him about his first time," the gamin child replied. "We were on a camping trip. He told me, and when I wanted to zip our two sleeping bags together, he let me."

"Did he help?" Rob asked.

"He wanted to, but his hands were shaking too much to be much use."

"Wonder of wonders," Rob commented, then added: "What was his first time."

"It was with a boy," she replied, "for which I cannot blame him one eensy tiny weensy itsy bitsy bit, while they were making `Lonesome Dove'."

"Rick, wait up, eh?" Allen Rigby shouted. The twelve year old reined in his animal and slid from the saddle. Rick Schroeder turned his feisty three year old, sitting calmly as the horse fooled around, then nudging the filly back to where Allen was bent over Batman's right foreleg.

"Just like in the movies," the boy said, half a grin spreading across his wide mouth, "she done come up lame." He was a freckle-faced redhead, his short hair a deep, almost brunet, auburn. Rick, for all he was worth, tried not to look again as he slid from Miss Monroe; kept trying not to look at the lanky, coltish pre-teen bent over the hoof, bare chested in his overalls, with one strap hanging down over his right arm.

They were five miles from the nearest road, ten miles from anything more than that. Allen was the wrangler's son, and the two of them were out checking the two p.m. sun to be sure there were no glints or glares from Tesuque Trailer Village [two year home of the author]. The line from the script read: "There's nothing like riding a good horse over new ground." The Sangre de Christo melted into hard rolling pinon-studded prairie so sublimely at this one spot seven miles due north of Santa Fe, the art director had insisted the entire trailer village be strung with camo netting for a pristine backdrop. They'd found no glint of aluminum siding or auto windshield, and had let their ponies run a bit as they headed back for the trailers.

"I knew it couldn't be a loose shoe," Allen said as the older teen approached.

"But it looks very loose to me," Rick said, making the boy giggle out loud. By a neat equestrian trick, Batman had picked up a rusty old horseshoe, pressing one of its nails deep into his own right forehoof. "Whoever lost this shoe probably knew Kit Carson, Wyatt Erp, John Fremont, Zeb Pike, and all of them, personally," the boy said, fingering the lightly rusted iron.

Now, just happy can a boy be? Count it up. One, he was out for the first time on the four-year-old gelding. Two, on the morrow they would bring up a camera and shoot what was probably the most beautiful single scene ever filmed. Three, he was with a famous actor, his personal choice as cutest of stage, screen and comic. Four, Batman was going nowhere in a hurry. Five, he had an epic souvenir, if he could just pry it from Batman's hoof. Six, Rick was at his right flank, trying to help. Seven, Rick was bare chested under his Oshkosh union suit. Eight, he might also have dressed without underwear. Nine was the pinon forest, trees seldom over ten feet, woods with a view, and the prospect of the vast sweep of the Rio Grande Valley between Los Alamos and Santa Fe was at once the most subtle and grandest on the planet. Even riding a not-so-good horse it shimmered and saturated, overwhelmed, seemed to ring and echo itself from the weathered intricacies of a stunted pine to a line of sight of a hundred miles. Very serious Indian country stretching to Taos, east and west to vast cattle-only wastelands, but ending twenty miles to the south as the valley yielded to the vast gravel pit that made up half of New Mexico.

The boys worked patiently as Batman looked on. From the start, they were intensely aware of each other, of each touch of the teen's well-developed upper arm to the boy's slender and delicate counterpart. Neither made any move away from the other, neither was bold enough to try anything. Finally working the stuck nail free without breaking it. Allen presented it to Rick, who refused it flatly.

"Maybe there are other things," Allen said, "if this shoe came all the way off, the rider would have had to stop." He knew it was improbable and a stretch, but Rick took up the notion and soon they'd broken off dried branches from a tree and were walking side-by-side poking at the desert floor.

"Were you embarrassed in that cathouse scene?" Allen asked after some minutes.

"Yes," Rick replied, "but I guess it was realistic. You know, if you were young and inexperienced, and someone wanted to wash you off, that's probably what would happen."

"In the book," Allen said, "your character did things with other boys when they were out on the trail. Did you read that part?"

"Yes," Rick said.

"Do you think that happened a lot? I mean out there for weeks with no girls."

"Yes," Rick said, again.

"If there were like a hundred boys, you know, just imaginary, on a long trail drive, how many do you think would want to do things together."

"A lot," Rick said.

"Do you think you would have wanted to, you know, if I was with you?"

"Yes," Rick said, his mouth dry and his voice husky and shaky.

"I would, too," the boy whispered back.

"We've got to be friends, too," Rick said, "those are scarce in this business. Best friends, okay, not just buddies, friends?"

Ten. That was a new friend.

"And it's not that you look cute in those overalls, which you do, by the way, but what you said about Fremont and Pike. That you know things like that. That they mean something to you. That you care. That's what makes me want to be with you as much as I can."

"I liked the way you stopped the second I called," the boy said, shyly. "It was like you cared."

"I do," Rick said.

"Me, too," the boy replied.

"Pretty mushy," Rick allowed.

"Too much for this `poke," the younger boy grinned.

"If we're two stallions, we'd better act like it."

"Let there be no confusion."

"Do you know what to do?" Rick asked.

"Touch each other," the younger boy suggested. "I guess sometimes they must have tried kissing, you know, if they really liked each other."

"It's not in my contract," Rick said; "there's not a single word about standing in the most beautiful single place on the whole of planet earth, and kissing the cutest and nicest boy I've ever known in my life."

"If `Variety' finds out, we're chopped liver," Allen giggled.

"My next Morals Clause will take up a full page," Rick acknowledged, shaking his head with a dramatic sigh.

"Are you old enough so it will be rape when it happens?" the boy asked.

"I'm nineteen," Rick said, "so rape it will be according to every law book and lawyer in the land."

"That makes sense," Allen said, "though, of course, when one considers the half million or so locked up for weed, it's hard to see the law as the sterling guideposts the Greeks imagined."

"I can't not rape you," Rick mused, half to himself, and half in bewildered wonder. I see them both peering at me from the screen, shrugging their bare shoulders, seeking intervention. The god that made the valley made the nightmare brown scorpion, and, if he's that confused, who am I to straighten things out?

Good little players, they shrugged it off. Millions smoked weed in peace and security, millions of boys submitted to, and often instigated, their own rape by a mature male. I should inform new readers that I essay up from time to time. All I have to do is type the word Samantha, and there's half a coronary for the veterans. So, how do you like the opening? I can't -- can not -- believe I finished "The Tarzan Mushroom Hunters" yesterday, midday, and by nine p.m., the following day am over 7,750 words into this yarn. I'm exceedingly hard to impress. Celine does it every time I push Play, but I count myself too lazy to exercise the metaphor in a more personal way. If you're impressed, it would save me a lot of troublesome back patting.

We can't return to those thrilling days of Lonesome year without a note in tribute to Larry McMurtry. Only the short stories of John O'Hara taught me more about my art. The very opening of "Lonesome Dove" is a model for the opening of this story, though, to be honest, I had no idea the novel would land us west of the Sangre de Christo. I write of this simultaneously ethereal and majestic section of the Rio Grande with the most mixed emotions. I drove it a thousand times, lived in it (or nearby, in Santa Fe) for four years, was thrilled to see it as a backdrop for the "Good horse/new country" line from the television series, yet it is the same valley my wife crossed for the seed of her new lover, that he crossed when he wanted to be coaxed into cumming between her long, slim legs. Many times they undoubtedly crossed it together, her left hand under his right thigh as he drove. I know the feeling.

Queenie and her mother were by today. They haven't moved in; meant to happen in a couple of days. Daisy flat out suggested Queenie sleep in one of my empty bedrooms, and the girl smiled happily. She is just totally stunning. Very long legged and high breasted. Total cheekbones; electric smile. An almost bizarre hypochondriac, she comes up with symptoms faster than a Los Vegas dealer comes up with a losing hand. I think it's just to obtain jinglings, as Samantha calls them, but she's wonderfully creative about the whole thing. I told Daisy I wanted Queenie as a spare girlfriend for when Samantha goes to jail. She though that was a great idea, and Queenie, properly, Lois, smiled once again. We did some dishes together. Lifetime experience. And there were two of them today. Samantha went missing looking for tea. Everyone took off looking for her, leaving Rhageedha alone with me for an hour. She was in my lap almost immediately, entirely on her own. We played solitaire. I molested her gently with both hands for half an hour, occasionally helping her with the mouse. When I pulled her back, she came in an instant, fully, no hesitation or sign of discomfort. I never look a child in the eyes for more than two seconds, but this was an exception. She gazed back from her huge brown orbs and smiled, beautifully. We made out for twenty minutes, breaking so I could see her smile from time to time. It was getting dark, still no Samantha, so I walked her home. Samantha was safe and sound when I got back, three brothers in tow. I suppose she's actually reasonably safe, if she just wouldn't run around in Speedos. Anyway, I try to make these essays short. It doesn't always work, but I try, blaming any lack of success, not on the cable, which used to be my inspiration (in quotes), but on three utterly beautiful and superbly personable young girls, fifteen, fifteen, and seven. (19,997 more and I'll equal Wilt Chamberlain.)

"And I cannot be not raped by you," the boy added, helpfully, allowing final dismissal of a subject that seemed likely to become silly.

"I think the man stands behind the boy the first time he molests him," Allen said.

"Like this," Rick whispered, pulling the coltish twelve year old against his powerful teen chest.

"Inside my coveralls," the boy coaxed.

Rick found the slightly soft belly of the freckly kid, first with his right hand, then with his left. "No wonder beef cost five cents a pound in the old days," he whispered.

"Does it really feel good?" Allen asked.

"Yes," Rick said softly, adding: "so good there was so much beef the railroads came for it."

"History and the single boy," Allen said, beginning to pant.

"Rape as paradigm," Rick added, his voice now also effected by the rush of his mature teen hormones.

"Rape as religion," the child whispered, "and yet so far above god."

"Do you want me to rape you out in the sun, where He can see?" Rick asked.

"If you think the `Enquirer' doesn't have a satellite, yes," the boy replied, adding: "Let's get naked here and we can hang our clothes on the tree."

The first stripped the horses, retrieving the Navaho saddle blankets as protection for their bare feet. The undressed on far sides of the pinon pine.

"Are you really big?" Allen whispered through the dwarf tree.

"Yes," Rick said, "you, too?"

"Yes," came the return whisper.

"We could close our eyes and pretend to wrestle on one of the blankets to get used to each other," Rick suggested.

"Okay," the boy replied, "I'm younger, so I'll be the filly. You come and find me, but go real slow on account of there might be thorns."

"Okay," Rick whispered over his shoulder.

The June breeze swept the vast valley with whispers and tendrils of rustling call; with it came an almost inaudible hiss from human lips. Rick started out on his hands and knees, eyes mashed shut. His penis jutted hard toward mother earth, like a stallion fresh over the fence. He moved slowly, reviewing in his mind the lightly freckled torso in the overalls, the shy, boy-teeth smile, and what that milk white bottom might look like in the soft cirrus-filtered light flooding the immense valley.

He listened intently, blind as a bat. Yes, a second sublimely gentle hiss on the early June breeze. He turned in the best direction he could, and moved slowly ahead on his hands and knees, half shocked to feel his erection, already the longest and hardest of his life, swell dramatically. He felt like warning his little victim that if he heard a foreign sound, it would be his sperm jetting from him onto the dry grass and sand, but he said nothing, just inched along. They had hours to file their report with the A.D., and this was obviously the entirely best game in all the whole, wide world. Creep, creep, creep.

The next hiss wasn't a mistral of the prairie breeze, but half a snake it was so close. Rick froze. He'd watched the crew play poker a time or two, and learned about raising stakes. "Okay, Allen," he whispered, "I want to find you with my tongue, then see if I can tell what part of you it is."

He was positive he heard a giggle, but so choked was it, he could tell neither from where, or how far off, it might have originated. He took it as a yes, and crawled on, an inch at a time, circling to the right, his tongue extended like that of a fabulous snake, his handsome head describing an arc from left to right, and back.

"I'm going to rape you repeatedly, for years," he whispered.

Only the soft wind. [Note: not always. The Valley could use a sign reading Wind is Hell, especially in the spring.]

"I just got religion," he tried, "Lord, can't you behoove yourself to help just this one miserable sinner find his way?"

Silence.

"It's not a big snake," Rick whispered, "but it's very close."

Wind.

Tough audience. One last effort, then it would be back to palms and knees against the thorns of long-dead cholla. "It's Tyne Daley," he intoned.

A kid can do a lot of things silently, but retching isn't one of them. The gulping distress, however manfully muffled, had to be less than ten feet away. Rick homed in, the delay by having to creep, pick out a thorn before it broke his skin, and creep again, was enraging, was making him hurt from his knees to his belly. Served him right for playing what was obviously the entirely stupidest game in the whole, wide world.

It took whole minutes. It hurt. The sun felt good on his long, naked back, otherwise, he was blind and beset. No more funny stuff. Biblical, of prick and pain. New friend, or not, he wanted to conk the kid, who seemed not even to breathe the merest path into the ocean of air from the west. Shouldn't he be able to smell something so near, so delicious. A rattler could, an animal with a brain the size of a peanut could home in, mount, and be off for dinner in the time it took him to inch three feet across the hostile desert floor.

But inch the actor did, and, as in life, succeed he did. Now there was no mistake, the boy had to breathe, just had to, and the wind obliged by calming, completely. Inches now. Then his heat, then his silky, milky skin, soft beyond belief against the nineteen year old's lips, slightly tangy with a hint of salt against his tongue. The boy began panting with the first touch, shaking as the touching went on. He was so perfect from head to foot, both coltish and padded with a sheen of juvenile fat, that it was hard to tell where he was raping the little boy.

"I can't tell," he whispered, "I give up."

Silence, other than the breathing which was so muffled the clever tyke must have grabbed a fistful of blanket to hold tight against his mouth. So, tricks weren't going to work. That left his teeth. He grabbed the child in his mouth, biting gently but increasing the pressure slowly.

Silence.

Then it was that he was touched by the miracle of inspiration. "Does your penis hurt?" he asked.

"Yes," Allen whispered. He had the boy, judging by his voice, on his right flank, near his lowest rib. He let go with his gentle teeth and completed the game. "Pretty close," Allen said.

"Are your eyes open?" Rick asked.

"Not yet," Allen said.

"Let's stand up so we can look at each other," the older male suggested, "we can put our hands behind our necks like we were posing for a body magazine, do you want to?"

"Yes," Allen whispered, hoarsely.

The blind led the blind and in a few moments they were standing on the blanket, two feet apart, posturing and arching, then, on a count of three, they opened their eyes and stood rigidly staring at each other and down at their own huge erections. Rick spread his legs and squatted slightly, lowering himself. Wordlessly, panting gently, Allen came to him, standing slightly on his tiptoes so their joining would be perfect. It was. They met with the softest possible touch, and, carefully moving their hips, caressed each other, hands still behind their necks, but bent to each other so they could see and whisper.

"Will you sperm if we keep doing this?" Rick asked the twelve year old.

"Yes," the boy whispered.

"Do you want to, or do you want me to molest you more."

"Later," the boy said, his voice so ragged his meaning was obvious.

"I'm right with you," Rick said, "so let it happen to me, first."

"Okay," the boy whispered.

"I'm going to cum on you in a minute," Rick warned. By accord, but the young males positioned themselves so their hot, swollen glans were pressing tightly against each other, pink tip of the boy to the more purple tip of the teenager.

They stared and continued their all-but motionless thrusting against each other.

"I'm cumming," Rick whispered, and in seconds a hot jet of his teen sperm sprayed from between their joined boners.

"It's happening to me, too," hissed the sweating pre-teen, and in moments neither young male could tell whose seed was splashing on their bellies and thighs. They grunted to each other, coaxing, hands still behind their necks. Inevitably, the slipped apart, and seconds later they were holding each other and kissing wantonly as they continued wetting each other's bellies with gush after gush of thick, white cum liberally mixed with the more watery semen of the pre-teen.

Slowly they sank to the wool blanket, Rick on his back, Allen in his arms, chest to chest, so they could experiment with licking each other and kissing. In minutes they masturbated each other in the classic way, Allen at the tall teen's right hip, then the mature male leaning over the shoulder of the boy, holding him in his left arm and jerking him off with his left. This brought a near total collapse back to the useful blanket with Allen trying to focus his mind on the issue of just how much luck a single, long-forgotten horseshoe could bring.

Eleven.

"Do you know how the story ends?" Nancy asked Rob.

"No," the pilot replied, half stunned at remaining so hard and so still as he listened to her melodic, ten-year-old voice.

"Rick said, `I know someone you would like to meet.'"

"Have you met him?" Rob asked.

"No," the girl said, "but they've stayed friends. Allen Rigby is our director."

"How do you feel about meeting him?" Rob asked.

"I'm a married woman," the girl said softly.

"To a much older and very tolerant man," Rob said.

"To a super man, at that," the girl agreed.

"Seriously," the young man said, "if I see you with someone else, I'll just fantasize -- you know, recreationally -- not claim you as a birthright or anything."

"Well," Nancy said, "three could work as a limit. I always thought just my brother and one husband, but maybe I construe too narrowly."

"Darling," he whispered, very intimately.

"You feel just like Rick," she smiled, then her eyes glazed at the shock of the hard pulsing deep within her

"Oh, that was so, so, close," she whispered, wet and happy from him, smiling up at him, delicious in her welcome, "tell me about your first time," she encouraged, "then we'll go all the way together."

"It wasn't with a girl, either," he responded.

"I didn't think a female could have taught you so much about being a male," the girl chortled.

"He was nine years old," Rob said, settling against the beautiful young body spread beneath him on the tropic coral sand, "and his name was Danny Fielding He was just the kid in the middle of the line," the twenty-two year old began, "I was fourteen and I had to baby-sit for him. Not much of an ego builder for a teenager, but that was then and this is now."

"Pretty cute," the doll said, "Allen made a cowboy out of Rick, and Danny made a babysitter out of you."

"So many comics, so little time," he said, kissing her, "besides, the skill sets will come in very useful one -- of -- these -- days."

"One to put meat on the table and one to cut it up for the piglets so they won't choke," the girl noted.

"Plus one to make piglets, in the first place," he added, kissing her on the forehead, and beginning his story.

"Robbie," Mrs. Lester called up the stairs, "Kitty Ellsworth broke her wrist and apparently managed to do it before skateboarding the entirety of three feet, so Abby Fielding is totally stuck for a babysitter. Danny has had his rabies shots and his teeth have been filed, so flee this house and to her rescue."

The boy wanted to be moody, and might have prevaricated at the injustice of the situation, and in the world, at large, but he'd just started his algebra homework, and no twerp, no matter how twerpish, was worse than that.

"And don't forget you maths book," she called as he donned his letter jacket. Outrage reaches a point of no retort, so he grinned at the handsome, crew-cut face in the mirror, and bore it.

"This must be the biggest pain in the butt of your entire life," Danny said moments after the front door closed. "I'm nine, and I'd hate to baby-sit for some kid, for a teen it must be so totally uncool I'm surprised you didn't come over through the woods and knock at the back door."

"I could try again," the fourteen year old said, "maybe I'd get lost in Sloeman's forest and spend the next four hours with mosquitoes one can swat without fear of reprisal."

"Don't the other ones get mad and bite you?" the boy asked, his huge brown eyes half way between smoldering and flickering.

"I play hardball," the teen said, "I need all that kind of practice I can get."

"It's pitch, pitch black in the woods at night," Danny said, "so I'd like to see you pick then out of the air under those conditions."

"Maybe I could home in on their immature, squeaky, silly voices," the teen growled, but it was far too late. Their eyes were locked, the bonding had been instantaneous and to the bone, they both felt it, and the older boy was shocked by it. To Danny, it was a chapter two.

"No television, videos, stereo, or telephone, so I'm afraid you're rather for it," the nine year old said in a perfect British accent.

"So that's why you're alive," the older boy said, adding all there was in his house were books and magazines, too. "Duh'uh, look around," the kid responded, and, indeed, once he'd somehow unhooked from those huge brown eyes, and looked around, sure enough, fourth rate furniture, first rate library, rich in periodicals. Danny picked one up at random. "They don't have anything to write about, anymore," he said, "but it's fun to watch them try." The boy blushed, his translucent English complexion pinking just slightly, "I know I shouldn't be cynical," he said, shyly, "that's why the television went. I patterned on Pinky's friend, you know, The Brain. My mom thought it was funny, but not for such a number of hours as would befit myth or legend.

"'Rule this!' quoth the lady of the pile, exchanging unto my hand ye remote for ye tome."

"So you're to develop as an amusing child," Robbie said, "I think perhaps parents do it for their own entertainment."

"You, too?" the boy asked.

"A failure, I'm afraid," Robbie sighed, "dreary texts, frightful exams, credentialled union teachers, and, to be sure there is lots of salt in every wound, algebra."

"Forsooth, it has left ye wanting, indeed," said the nine year old, shaking his head but not far enough to break eye contact. "But remember how I said I was The Brain?" the boy asked in his wonderfully soft, childish voice, "well, it's for-the-most-part true."

"And dideth thee toil aside from all, unnoted by any, forsaken evening after evening?" Robbie asked his ward of the evening.

"Not exactly," said the bright-eyes, "so stretch your mind and ride with me. Allow appearances not to deceive. Looketh upon thy dorky young neighbor, yea, with respect, for behold, it came to pass at an earlier hour of this very day that thy neighbor of the first part did willfully and wantonly, with precise foreknowledge of inevitable consequence, lend to Miss Kitty Ellsworth, of this locale, one, each, skateboard with bearings freshly lubricated by hypodermic needle forsaking all but the rarest of marine mammal oils."

"You don't look dorky to me," Robbie said.

"Just to the mirror, then," the boy said.

"Stay away from it then," the older boy advised. "Classily cute nine year olds are no better looking than anyone else when they get to be teenagers, and it's usually the plain looking boys who end up being cute."

"You looked dumb, too?" the boy asked.

"Just regular, like you," Robbie said, adding: "Good choice with Kitty."

The boy brightened. "That was the psychology part. I had to get my mom to want her, in the first place. Talk about a tightrope. I had to pretend I didn't like her, you know how mothers are, when, like all the other kids, I hated her pompous, Southern-nitwit tripe."

"Add a drop of exotic oil," Robbie said, "and here the two of us are standing for ten minutes, me roasting inside my jacket."

"Kitty's still in the emergency room," the boy observed, reaching for Robbie's jacket.

"Won't be the last time," the older boy said, finally breaking eye contact to take another look around. Good chairs with good lights, and everything else could stand in line. Nice and dusty. No one wasting time there. Not excessive; not greasy, cloying, or thick with Dickensesque decay, like the house of an old person with big dogs, just prioritized. What was called `human' before an urban subset mandated froth, glitz, and schmaltz (in case anyone misses the point) -- form over function -- as the national standard (didn't invent it, just crammed it as the easy, lowest-common-denominator, quick-profit sell).

"What are you reading?" Danny said, going to a chair and picking a paperback off the arm, indicating an opposite chair for his guest, and reading off the title of the fat volume.

Robbie held up his maths book.

"You agreed to baby-sit me, thinking you could get out of it, but your mom reminded you before you were out the door," the boy mused, sadly, adding: "Now do you see why the TV's history."

"One more episode, you'd be on cheese for the rest of your life," Robbie said.

"Or I would have cracked Dixie doll's skull instead of eight bones in her wrist."

"You wanna come over and watch, sometime," Danny said, "I mean we don't have a set either, but we could pretend."

"I'm meant to go to medical school," the older boy said, "so I could teach you how to trepan, in case there's an accident in the future."

"I'm more a poisoner," Danny said, "leave bags of this or tubs of that anywhere near her, and she'll blow up like all the others."

"The psychologist in me says that the ramifications of ego deprivation extending over a relatively minimal period of time resulting from her loss of status as a cheerleader would at least pay, in part, for her dumber-than-a-clock bigotry."

"Here! Here!" yelped the boy in his deviously precise upper, upper class accent. At heart, though, they were a nice enough pair of lads, so it is with no small pleasure we permit them to turn the page and allow the wayward miss of their acquaintance her separate passage, nor were they without guilt themselves, for they loved not the inroads of socialism nor those genetically linked with it. Loved them not at all, little bigots that they were.

They talked for awhile, coming down off the intellectual high of their initial meeting. Both seemed to realize they'd pushed the limits of loquacious wit, and that word play could be as lethal as it was beguiling. They settled comfortably on sports, high-fiving each other when they found they agreed The Intimidator got exactly what he deserved, the skuzzy little mushmouth, and wasn't it sad he didn't live long enough to realize it. They `fived' again on the bra display of the soccer girl, feeling there was justice in its setting the feminist cause back five years. Women were not much to write home about, but their moms were okay. Nice boys.

"Do you want a choice?" Danny asked.

"What kind?" Robbie said.

"Start your algebra homework, now, then give me a bath, or, give me a bath, then study."

"Kitty didn't survive through your front door," Robbie observed, "and I'm meant to bathe you?"

"Kitty didn't survive through my front door," the boy replied deliberately, "because I wanted you to bathe me.

"Weren't you a little suspicious?" the nine year old asked. "A kid my age needing a sitter, for four hours? That's The Brain again. I had to make up a story about a pair of drunk bikers loitering in the woods and checking our locks, last time I was home alone, to get Mom to take an interest."

"She thought bikers would be a danger to you? What was she, born in a cabbage patch?"

"More subtle," the boy said, "she thought it was a fake story, a call-for-help, as it were, so dawned the sitter idea."

"All so you could get the back of your neck clean?" Robbie said, too terrified to grin, too hopelessly in love, by now, not to.

"I never thought of that," Danny whispered, half to himself.

They sat gazing at each other for several minutes, radiating and receiving radiation.

"Do you really want me to?" Robbie finally asked.

"Yes," the boy replied.

"I guess that was a stupid question after all the tricks going back to the dawn of time," Robbie said.

"I spent two weeks out in Sloeman's gathering enough copperheads and timber rattlers to convince Mom to move from our old place to here," the boy said. "I had to create a whole cock-up, complete with phony footnotes, to convince her our old place was on a migratory run, and this neighborhood was not."

"Then a bath, it is," the fourteen year old responded.

"I'll go up and run the tub," the boy said, "then I'll call down pretending I left the shampoo in the downstairs bathroom, which is the last door on the left, down, that hall, then you bring it up to me."

With that, the boy was off. Robbie settled back in the comfy old chair and caught his breath, waiting for the surf crashing between his ears to moderate to the point a guy would have a chance to ride a little more than the unfortunate Kitty's three feet. Over time, as do ice ages, it happened. His thoughts drifted an inch from the upstairs bathroom door, then a foot. It did no good. The sweet, childish voice was calling, its innocent trill echoing faintly down the stairs. Well, a child in need was a child, indeed, and what would a little more foam be amongst those ever rising, higher curling, crashing, booming, surfing waves.

Robbie went down the hall, found the shampoo, slipped out of his sandals, T-shirt, shorts, and briefs, looked down at his long, slim boner, and walked slowly through the strange house, aroused more than he'd ever been in his life at just the thought of sexually molesting a little boy. He toured slowly, liking the book-proud quarters of the Fielding home. Then the stairs, then he tapped at the door.

"Come in," squeaked the brave little faltering voice from the tub. Robbie swung the door wide. The boy stared from his cloud of bubbles. For two minutes they remained frozen, eyes hot, quenched only by the sight of each other.

"I knew you'd forget it," the kid said, holding up a bottle of shampoo that had been floating under the suds. Robbie looked down at his hands, vaguely observing that the bathtub boy was right.

"Also," Danny said, "I knew you wouldn't trust me not to splash you and get your clothes all wet. I'm two for two."

"If you add the snakes, the prowlers, and the skateboard, you're about five for five."

"If I add the absolutely most beautiful male animal I have ever seen, dreamed about, or conjured consciously or subconsciously, I'm six for six."

Enough maths? Fair enough.

Robbie crossed the carpeted floor of the master bath and knelt beside the oversize tub. Danny handed him a bar of soap and a sponge, and the teen went to work on the naked little boy, soaping his face, then, inspiration being a fickle mistress when it comes to dawning love, licking his lips clean. He poured a Tupperware of water over the English schoolboy face, then amended his folly by rinsing his tongue on the same lips, as the boy helped with his own lively little tongue.

"Nice sorbet," the child said when the last trace of soap was gone. The comment made Robbie's boner swell painfully. Why would a boy who had just eaten dinner want to cleanse his pallet? He'd heard talk about perverts, as all the boys had; was this the reason the subject came up so often? And what reason was that? Technically, what? He was sure of only one thing, he was in the right place at the right time to find out.

"It was meant to be punishment for wanting to splash me," Robbie said.

"I wanted to very badly, you know," the boy trilled, "to douse you and souse you, soak you and damp you, sop you and mop you; to causeth drips and rivulets, to incite a flow, to lord over you as master of a drizzle of drops." .

"Speaketh thee with wet tongue," Robbie played along, "of damping the garb and hamper of this manly prince, and thine mouth shall ne'er again on this worldly plane belong to thee."

"Take thee of it with haste, for scant use it serves so long as my face is pocked with other air-loving orifices."

They kissed so long Danny had to take his hand from Robbie's face in order to add more hot water to the tub. Ten minutes. Half an hour. Ten more minutes, gently, fervently, lastingly. Nor did they break as the boys opened the drain and the teen brought a towel to the nine year old as the water drained, helping him dry off, then lifting him from the tub and lying him on another bath towel spread on the bathroom floor.

They lay perpendicular to each other, Robbie at Danny's right shoulder, the older boy's right hand on the nine year old's slim chest, his left fondling the boy's face as they toyed with each other's lips, tongue and teeth until almost an hour had passed.

They were far from spent with each other, but they wanted to know things. Robbie planted his elbows at the boy's right ear, and gazed down at him while the boy gazed back up.

"Can I take the towel off you?" the older boy asked.

"Yes," Danny said, raising his hips. Robbie unwrapped him, and pulled away the terrycloth.

"You're almost as big as I am," he whispered, unable to keep the thick musk from his voice.

"I do not, repeat, do not take showers at school," the nine year old said, "if I did, it would be sleepovers seven nights a week, and who can read on a sleepover?"

"How did you get so mature?" Robbie asked.

"I went to a nudist camp built on shaky morals," the boy said.

"I've heard of whispering pines and shady oaks," Robbie said, "even quaking aspen, but that's a new one."

"Actually," said Danny, "it's the morals that are new. People did just fine without the troublesome things, relying on decency in their stead."

"What's the difference?" Robbie asked.

"If you were eighteen, instead of fourteen, and did what's going to happen later, and were gentle, that would be decent, but immoral. If you'd called me a faggot freak when I said I wanted you to touch me while I was in the tub, that would have been moral, but not very decent. There is a huge difference."

"One has a clergy, the other makes do without," Robbie said.

"Thus the dog and pony show from snakes to shampoo," said the younger boy, "because you're the only boy probably in the world who would have come up with exactly the right response. I'm lying here coloring myself very, very lucky."

"I like English white, just fine," Robbie said, now openly molesting the boy's chest and belly, trailing his fingers ever closer to the slim, five-inch penis jutting from the child-like hips.

Gently he resumed kissing the beautiful gamin face, slowly his fingers found the dense growth of black peach fuzz in a crescent above the child's huge erection. He fingered the soft growth, leaving Danny's lips to whisper into his mouth.

"Does this mean you have sperm?" he asked.

"Yes," Danny said. "When I found out, I started hunting all those damned old snakes."

"I've heard it's meant to be a change of life," the older boy deadpanned.

"I'm on the extreme side of extremely early," Danny noted, "not emotionally ready for the experience, thus it was imperative for me to have one partner I could trust and love."

"And I beat out Kitty Ellsworth," Robbie said in mock wonder.

"You beat out the world," Danny grinned, "a boy can tell that kind of thing."

"If he can tell that kind of thing," Robbie observe, "he must be able to tell his best friend in the whole wide world, who loves him very much, all about being a cute little black-haired, white-skinned boy in a nudist camp built on shaky morals."

"They say an invitation's ninety percent perspiration and ten percent inspiration," Danny replied, "so Master Daniel W. Fielding requests the honor of the presence of his friend, Master Robert Paul Lester, where doth the heavenly hot rayeth shineth not upon fabrics of nimble fingers and intricate machine."

"And," Robbie replied, "the master of the second part does thank, and accept with the greatest pleasure, the kind and generous offer of his best friend in the whole world, Daniel W. Fielding, and further promises to array himself in such a dearth of fabric, cloth and material as to make the great Levi, himself, weep for lack of business."

"Who takes you to the camp?" Robbie asked. "Who's taking us?"

"Mick Jagger," Danny answered.

A Celine Dion lyric pounded through Robbie's surfing brain: "Stop the press, hold the news." Boys have stared at each other since the days of the caveman. Silly stares. One-upmanship stares. Angry stares. Friends don't stare, but lovers stare. Pitiful stares. Bold stares. Almost any kind we can think of. They come and they go, leaving only one item of note. Never had two boys stared at each other as Danny and Robbie did on that bathroom floor. The older boy actually began to sweat, waiting for the younger boy to giggle and claim a got-ya.

Did not happen. Not in five minutes, not in ten. There are unwritten but finely understood rules to boy's games; how hard an Indian burn, how close at mumblepeg, where, when, and who you wedgie, if you must, in the first place; how large a boy you manhandle into a locker. The list goes on. Danny broke them all. Just returned Robbie's intense gaze with soft eyes of depthless friendship.

"When?" the older boy finally asked.

"It depends if we want to stay here or go to Spain," Danny answered.

"Does it, now," Robbie said, and finally the dam broke and both boys giggled helplessly for minute on painful minute.

"If we go to Spain," the boy finally choked, "we can leave tonight; Mom will drive us to the airport when she gets home from her conference. He'll be here in a week, so we can wait, if you'd rather."

The canvas was turning into a mural. A smaller scale was called for. "I'd really like to watch you get molested by a cute man," Robbie said.

Danny thought of the common novelty sign beloved of office workers: "What part of NO don't you understand?" it read. He hadn't heard any part, at all. Apparently they had a priority deal. "I'd like to watch it happen to you, too," he responded.

"Should I call my mom?" the older boy asked.

"No," Danny said, "she's cool, she'll like the surprise. My mom can make up something about dark, dangerous streets to explain why you're staying overnight. In the morning we'll call from the Volcanic Eggs, which is a nice enough place however awkward its name in translation."

"Shouldn't I go and get some clothes?" the still mostly shocked boy asked.

"Picture it," Danny responded, "Mick with a nice enough looking nine year old, and a drop-dead, coltish, lanky fourteen year old, and the day to kill. Might he, or might he not, sooner or later, be in a mood to take them shopping?"

"Would I, or would I not, be in a mood to wear them?" Robbie said.

"Well, it is a nudist camp," Danny reminded his guest, "but, very discreet, for all of that. Half Ascot, half Di's last beach." They tried to deadpan it out for the sake of cool, but no, it didn't work, and in a moment they were gasping helplessly, naked in each other's arms, soft as dead snakes, in love until their toes curled. It was a pretty funny scene, but in mere moments the novelty of being flaccid in each other's presence shocked them back to reality. In a flash they'd manhandled each other and were sitting, knees touching, Indian style, staring down at one another.

"I thought it might be a year before this happened," Danny said.

"I never dreamed of it, at all," his older friend added.

Again, they challenged the level at which stupidity can no longer be ignored, and lost, falling into each other's arms and rolling gently across the floor as they wept, sawed their tongues, and thrust at each other with what had so recently been their huge, wet, circumcised boners.

"We must be really nervous to be giggling so much," Robbie said.

"I was really scared my first time," his young friend admitted.

"Was he gentle with you?" Robbie asked.

"Totally," Danny said, "but you know, even if he's really famous, when a man pulls your underpants down the first time, it's pretty scary."

"Did he have his on?" Robbie quizzed.

"No," Danny said, "none of them did."

"Did they talk to you and stuff, or was it like you were raped."

"We talked," the boy responded, "it didn't happen for a couple of hours after they picked me up. They made really sure, but, in a way, that makes it scarier, because you're letting them do the things they want to do. Tempting god to sharpen his knife and lick his chops, so to speak."

"Where did it happen?" Robbie asked.

"In England," the boy said. "I guess a roadie had taken a picture of me, and they knew I always walked along a certain road back and forth from town, so, one Friday afternoon, a year ago, there was a high-end Bugatti, my mom in the back seat, telling me it was okay to spend the weekend hanging around with the guys, if I wanted to."

"That sounds like the first day of the rest of someone's life," Robbie noted.

"When they, there were a couple of his friends along, started talking about a party at Michael Jackson's, I wasn't too sure about the life thing except to wonder if it was possible to actually die of excitement. Then they asked me questions about what bad men did with little boys, and if they looked like bad men. That was in the days before bad meant good, so I said no, they didn't look like bad men. Then they told me they wanted to take me to a special camp where there were lots of young sailors from the navy, and in some parts of the camp, nobody wore any clothes. They asked me if I'd like to visit the camp with them. It went on so long I figured I must be alive, so I started nodding my head, Yes.

"When I finally came halfway to and looked around, there were two tennis players and a red-headed boy who was an actor in London. They said it would be an hour to the camp, and asked if I wanted to talk about what would happen when I was there, or just ride through the countryside and look at the scenery.

"I said I'd like to talk about what was going to happen. They asked me if I knew anything, and I replied that I didn't think much happened at Winnie's house in Pooh Corner. They thought that was pretty funny, and we became friends. They took down all the stuff about me and put it in a book, and gave me a special card with a private number. That's how I know he's in Spain. Then they asked if I'd ever seen a man at a nudist beach, like naked, and I said no.

"They said the two tennis players, they were both fifteen, had been on a broken schedule for the last week and wanted to so something together while I watched them. They said the word `masturbate'. They asked me if I knew what it meant, and I said I'd just heard it in school, but I didn't know. The actor, Kersey, he was thirteen, came over on my seat and whispered that all older boys did it, and that it was the first step. He wanted to watch, too, so the three of us got in the rear-facing seat, and the tennis players sat on the big leather seat at the back.

"Mick was a little uptight they couldn't wait, but he'd been on broken schedules so he kind of knew how they felt. He told them not to take too long, and closed the sliding door to the front, which, he said, he didn't like to do because it reflected as being secretive on his reputation.

"The tennis players were sorry about it, but Mick was cool and ended up laughing and telling a story to make them feel comfortable while they undressed."

"Does this get better?" Robbie wanted to know. They tried avoiding each other's eyes, again, to little avail. "I wonder if we'll ever see each other the way we were, again," Danny finally mused, and went on with his story.

"Bick was from Sweden, Norris, from Oklahoma. They were both fifteen, but they were totally different. Bick was six feet, really leggy and overgrown, with big hands and feet, while Norris was like a little boy, but really wiry and tough; maybe weighed a hundred and ten, where Bick was closer to one eighty.

"They were just wearing shorts and T-shirts, so they kicked their sandals off and took off their socks, then stripped down to their underpants so we could look at them and they could look at each other. Kersey whispered to me and asked if I was uncomfortable. I said that was outrageously so, but could think of only one palliative. He laughed and said he knew exactly what I meant, then he suggested I get them naked so I'd be used to it when they got me naked at the camp.

"I got down on my knees and they let me touch them through their underpants while Mick and Kersey bent over us and looked. Then I pulled Bick's down and took them off his feet. Then Norris. Than we sat back down to look at them.

"We rode that way for quite awhile, just looking, watching them get wet from being excited. Bick wasn't circumcised, but he was so big it looked like he was. Norris looked even bigger, because he was so much smaller, like a little boy, except there, and where he had some hair growing.

"After awhile, Bick reached over with his right hand and started touching Norris. He spread his legs really wide, putting his right one over Bick's left leg, and let the big player do what he wanted. That's when the masturbating started. He did it to the little boy in a really regular way for a few minutes. Then Norris started sweating and panting and coming up off the seat, so he did it a little faster and harder with his right hand.

"Kersey whispered to me again and told me Norris was going to cum off in Bick's hand. He said I'd have the same feelings Norris was having, but there might not be anything else. Norris was really sweating and panting from what Bick was doing, then he grunted, `I'm going to cum," and started showering sperms in the back seat, all over himself and Bick.

"Before he even stopped spraying off, he got his right hand wet from Bick's chest, and masturbated him hard and fast. There was more sperm from Bick, and it was thicker and whiter. You could tell whose was whose even though they were both really wet.

"Mick got down on his knees and licked them both off while they ran their fingers through his hair, then they dried off with the towel from the bar, and dressed. We kept talking like nothing had happened, but it was more exciting than anything since the Big Bang.

"Did you get any sperm on you?" Robbie asked his cute young friend.

"Not `till later," the boy said. "Kersey got some on his right knee, but Bick and Norris really liked each other, so they were careful to satisfy each other."

"How would you have felt if they'd pulled you on the back seat with them, and ripped your shirt open, and got really hot on your chest?" Robbie whispered.

"I think it's time to watch each other," the boy said, and in a moment they were again sitting, knee to knee, Indian style. They didn't say anything, just gazed as they each suddenly grew as hard and full as they'd been when Robbie had wrapped the young boy in a bath towel.

"Mick would have licked me off," Danny continued, answering the question.

"Did he lick you off, later?" Robbie asked.

"Yes," the little boy with the huge penis replied, "then he'd kiss me."

"With sperm in his mouth?" Robbie asked.

"Yes," the boy repeated, his English skin coloring slightly.

"Nicer that soap?" Robbie asked.

"Not nicer than a little soap with a lot of you, by a long shot," the boy replied, "but still pretty okay. I'd do it again, and not only that, I'd recommend it to my very, very best friend of all my life in the whole wide world."

"Thy friend of whom thee speaketh, rather thunderstruck, sits here with you, lacking, in the paucity of his neglected mind and forgotten soul, any words with which to say, Thanks, dude."

"I stalked you the way they stalked me," Danny observed, "so it's not as random and fickle as you might imagine."

It was Robbie's turn to blush, and he did. The compliment was profound. To be picked by the one who'd been picked. If there was higher than that, he hoped he would never find out.

"So the behavior was good for the rest of the drive?" Robbie ask to get his cute little choo-choo back on track.

"The behavior was always good," the boy said, "even in the nudist area. Decency wasn't the rule, it was the only rule. Mick told me later he'd never done anything in a car. He laughed, but I'll bet it doesn't happen again real soon.

"We got there in a few more minutes and parked the car. It was awesomely cool, because no one took any notice. We had to carry in our own bags, sign at the desk, get ice, and make seatings at the restaurant. Everything was just average except that a doctor looked at every guest and they had to take a health polygraph. Condom free zone."

"I should sincerely hope so," Robbie intoned.

"It was fun to watch Mick relax. No kowtow. No, `I'll be your server, tonight', no arugala and less mesquite. We had to wait in line for twenty minutes to get the key to the nudist area become someone had lost something, and he would just say It's never like this on the road, and smile.

"Bick and Norris crashed in our suite, that, and room service, we did have, and we had retro burgers, hamburgers cooked the way used to be, on the rare side of medium that. They made you dizzy they were so juicy and good, then we kept looking at the key on the coffee table. Kersey was thirteen, and he said the tradition was that the youngest in a group pick up the key when he was ready. I was glad he told me, because I was the guest and waiting for one of them to pick it up.

I've decided I have two relationships with my brain. On the one hand, I've told it to be monumentally lazy, so it only sends me the best, and, on the other hand, I'm prickly enough it doesn't wish to risk reprimand (look at the poor Jews) for forwarding anything other than what no other brain can send. Like Judy Garland, I look on it as an entirely separate entity, which, by some flick of fate, happens to be housed in my body. I understand it no better than you. I was training it to write commercial fiction, but then I was divorced, so there seemed to be little left of the life she represented, that our family would have represented. Her mother talked of Thinking love, with her husband. Thus, under what seemed civil and morally above board, was, in fact, the very Victorian horror popularized in lurid reporting of this defective era. No kids to be embarrassed at my sobriquet of history's greatest pornographer, and, if anyone else is embarrassed, the chances are they're lucky I didn't come after them with a machete. (With the exception of Dickie Dunham in "Stonington Stories". I used him unfairly, and out of spite. It was Jeanie who threw me a vicious curve, and in vengeance against her I alluded to the mental capacity of her slickly handsome replacement for me. Dickie was allowed to grow his hair, I was stuck with prison cuts, extremely unflattering. To set the record completely straight, I'd be surprised if Dickie had read a single unlisted book by the time he finished college, where I'd read some thousand or more. Girls. And, while setting the record straight, I should acknowledge, somewhere in these texts, that, all thing being equal, Anne is likely dean of a nursing school. The horror of my reality was that not only was she a nurse, she was a highly respected practitioner, and, to rub salt in the wound, studying for her master's so she could teach. Her nobility contrasted not well at all with my slow progress as a writer, with it's variant lifestyle of reading and thinking all the time. Slacker misery against productive honeybunch. Yes, noble nurse, but that anyone can do. (And who'd want to nurse all those fat, nasty, old people, in the first place?) She probably hadn't read ten books since college, her IQ was nominal, why choose academics when she had a totally exceptional artist's talent and perhaps genius? Because she didn't want to be an artist? It's not your choice. I didn't want to read the two thousand nine hundred bad books I read, to find the hundred good ones. See the hundred of dumb movies, watch the thousands of hours of numbing television, for the one engaging hour in a lucky week. It's not something you want, being an artist, it's is the only thing you are, and if you don't race it until the rings burn our, you will lie in the most utter of agonies on your deathbed, crying out Why? and If Only. So few get what she had, at her level. In fact, my more recent theory is that she met Tom Cruise long before I left for Belize, and sabotaged from there on out. If he was worth her death as an artist, he must be the wonder guy of wonder guys.

On my behalf, I'll also point out it was a free ride and a half. I had a nice amount of money coming in from the family, so I could have dithered away in her shadow -- I think I'm a good enough lover to get away with it, plus, I'm funny -- and not only made the marriage last, but made it happy. The possible exception, of course, would have been if we'd had an attractive, flirtatious and predatory daughter. I made little secret of my liking, shared by so many millions, for very young girls, and I mean very young. I would have made every effort to leave any female child entirely in her care, but, a willing young girl is every dream of countless millions, and I could not promise best behavior under any and all circumstances. Since this is a twenty percent subset, there's a one in five chance Tom Cruise [lawyer, not actor. see other works] did what I might have.

Anyway, it would have been a nice set of coat tails; I was handy and alert around the house, good company, it could have and would have lasted for decades. At the cost of my career. Therein, aside from her taunting last kiss, and failure to return Joseph Daniels of Robin's Brook farm, standard poodle of a hundred pages in "The Pirates of Rickety Pier", or even send me a note when he died, mailed, anonymously, from a major metropolitan area, lies the basis of my anger, and her immortality. Those are the only fights I have with my brain. I tell it these people; mother, sister, wife, ignored the good and went ape over the rare scintillas of bad, considering, I am, after all, an artist, not a banker, and yet Old Wiseguy wants to immortalize them, not as corner lot tomb stones, but alive, vivid, who they were, as they were: immortality with a capital I. Granting this, while denying godlike status, means I must paint myself as troublesome, complex, mercurial, and not flinch when others say Loopy, or something worse. If that isn't complicated enough, I have to pretend none of it's happening for pages at a time, and write fiction as well as I'm always reminding you I do.

"The Samanthian" She gets so much copy, we might as well give her a masthead. She can stand against the wall and dazzle for ten minutes at a time. Rhageedha brings out the best in her, like a candle suddenly burning into loose gunpowder. Such a beauty, my Samantha, and such a riot, and so un-open about it. Mostly quiet and self involved, often silent for hours. Then a fireworks display of simple, pretty-girl personality, and back to Moodyville, where Bev says she spends most of her time. Too much television. Once you get used to it, it's heavenly. I work, not much else; don't want some cheery flower always full of happy news and sunny observations. I love cloudy days, too. Anyhow, we had our first uncontaminated visit since she stole Jessica's necklace. Tomorrow Queenie is scheduled to arrive. Also, there's meant to be a troublesome thirteen year old as part of Daisy's extended family. Met her two or three years ago, so Queenie says, but it's a blank.

Rhageedha may well be New York quality. She is electrifyingly vivid; tiny delicate face with huge brown eyes, extremely sensitive mouth, brilliant teeth, and an almost shocking quickness and responsiveness. (Something like a brighter, quicker, female version of Mark John Jeffries, of television advertising fame.) Totally the opposite of Samantha, who is more privately and subtly radiant when and if she chooses. Queenie would appear to fit exactly between my moody one and my vivid one, her beauty open, obvious, and overwhelming, no personality necessary. My long saga in search of a digital camera is meant to end tomorrow, with the arrival of quarterly funding, so, who knows, maybe I can get Malcolm or someone to post portraits on the Web. In the meantime, after a one-hundred percent romantic draught for good-old twenty-three years, there is a burst of feminine sunlight which may be as overpowering as any lighted for any man, ever. Boy, do I deserve it.

So, that's my self administered electroencephalograph for the moment. Brain and I will continue to argue about granting status as forever young to those who done us wrong, but he rules the day job, so, fare-thee-well, all who deserve to do so.

"Once I knew the key was mine," Danny continued, "I gave it to Mick and he piggybacked me and held Kersey by the hand. We unlocked the gate and went in. Mick had timed our visit to coincide with a Viking festival put on by Nordic sailors from three different navies. What was evident even in the changing room, if that's what you want to call it, was that Hitler was not all wrong in his Aryan thinking. A lot of them were cadets just a few years older than I was. They were really quiet and friendly. Most of them read a lot, which is why they were there, in the first place, and they liked to teach chess and painting, anything a boy wanted to do if they had the equipment for it. So we sat around in the lounge for awhile, getting to know some of the sailors. Finally we met Gerrend, Constantine, and five others from Iceland. Gerrend was the lieutenant, he was nineteen. Constantine was a cadet, twelve. It was lucky, because they'd been traveling a lot in the past few days, like Bick and Norris, so they got excited when Mick said he was going to take my shirt off in the lounge, then take me into the locker room."

"Duh'uh," said Robbie.

"I know it was okay, now," Danny said, "but I was nervous at the time. I had four posters of Mick in my room at home, and I didn't want to disappoint him, or be dumb and too overeager, like when I almost thought I was dead when they were talking about going to Neverland and staying over with Michael. But Mick told me he'd brought two other young boys to the club and they'd liked it, so I knew the things he wanted to do with me in front of the sailors would be okay.

"He got me in his lap, then I put my hands up, and he pulled up my jersey. Then we stood up, and he held my hand while we went through the door. Inside was really nice; simple, not fussily clean. Two sailors from another ship were getting in the shower, and they turned and looked at us."

"What happened?" Robbie asked, proving he'd one day make a great lawyer by knowing the answer to questions before he asked them.

"They got big boners," Danny said. "When I pulled Bick and Norris' underpants down, they had boners the whole time, but Raul and Phil, the sailors in the shower, got them while we all watched.

"Did you know it was because you were bare chested?" Robbie asked.

"No," the nine year old replied, "I just thought they might be looking at Kersey. He was cuter than I was."

"What happened next?" Robbie asked.

"Mick sat me on a bench and stripped in front of me. I undid his shoes and helped him take them off."

"Did he touch you while you were doing that?" the teen quizzed.

"No," Danny said, "he sort of braced his knee against the bench for balance. Once I had him barefoot," the boy went on, "he stripped out of his briefs so I could see him, then the two naked sailors came and stood close beside him, and the sailors from the "Oscard", the Icelandic ship, stripped and Kersey got naked and stood beside where I was sitting. Then he nodded in Mick's direction, so I sat in his lap and Constantine took my shorts and underpants off. Then Constantine stood in front of Mick and me, and Kersey, who was really tall for thirteen, stood behind him and put his left arm around Constantine's chest and held him while he spread his legs wide and got really close to me so he could whisper while the others listened. He was super excited because he hadn't done anything during the crossing because he'd been seasick, and they'd all crashed the minute they reached the club. Not only that, he'd only been with a man twice, and this was his first time with a younger boy.

"Kersey said he'd only been doing mature stuff for a week, so all three of us were pretty virgin. Mick molested me while we talked, just like Kersey was doing with Constantine, rubbing his chest and belly really gently, like a massage. It felt unbelievable, and looked like you wouldn't believe."

"I believe," Robbie said to the boy on the carpet of the master bath. "Do you want me to try it with you the way Mick did it, and Kersey was doing with Constantine?"

"I've never been in love before," the boy replied, "I don't know if I can stand."

"Maybe that's why they call it `experimenting'," Robbie observed.

"It would be levitation, at that," the bright-eyed child replied.

"Methinks you're halfway there," Robbie said, looking at Danny's waist.

"'Tis but to succumb to the inevitable," the nine year old acknowledged, rising on his knees. Robbie stood fast (stood up fast), lending a hand. Slowly he brought the naked young boy to his chest, gently holding him around his slim chest as Danny swung his feet to the edge of the bathtub, using it to help support his weight as he spread his legs wide.

"Like this?" Robbie whispered in the child's left ear.

"This is how it started," the boy replied.

"How long before Mick started touching you?" Robbie quizzed.

"He started when I began to buck my hips in his lap," the boy said.

"Did he touch you with his right hand, or left?" the teen asked.

"Right hand," Danny answered.

"Did Mick say anything?" Robbie wanted to know.

"He said it had happened to him when he was my age, and that nine was perfect because it gave a boy two years to look forward to being eleven, which was the best human age."

"Sounds like he knew what he was talking about," Robbie said.

"I don't waste a lot of time trying to think of something negative about it, but for-sure, nothing has popped into my head, then, or since."

"So all preachers are wrong, all the time? It wouldn't seem possible, but then Roosevelt slopped American into the mother of all cataclysms, and he's a national hero. Right and wrong. The only one who was right, was Hitler. Without him, we would not have made it to Slaughter House Six."

"But you can't blame the media," Danny said, "I mean look at Richard Jewell, the bombing guy from the '96 Olympics. He had a billion dollars worth of free advertising, and not a single job offer."

"That's why I mentioned preachers," Robbie said. Danny responded by swinging free of the teen's left arm, and turning to look at him, his brown eyes on fire. "You are the most awesome lover I ever imagined," he whispered, "you are out of this world. You are so clever and funny I'd be your dog."

"Write it with a marker on a piece of paper," Robbie suggested, "and hold the paper in front of you in front of a mirror. That's my feeling for you expressed in three letters."

The religious issue settled for the moment, Robbie gently reclaimed the child. "Tell me how he took you?" he coaxed.

"Just his thumb and index finger, a little bit," the now-shaking boy whispered over his right shoulder.

Danny spread his coltish legs more widely on the border of the tub, thrust his hips to Robbie and whispered he was ready. They both stared down as it happened.

"Really gentle, like this?" the morally-stricken teen asked in a hoarse whisper.

"Yes," Danny was barely able to respond, thankful for the athletic body that seemed tireless in holding him more gently than he'd ever been held in his nine-year life. "Kersey and Constantine moved back so everyone could get in close to see what Mick was doing with me."

"How much did he do?" Robbie asked.

"Not too much. Just a little more than you're doing. He whispered we couldn't do to much, because he wanted me to stay excited for Constantine and the other sailors."

"Same psychology the church uses," Robbie said. "Life after death, but you're dead when you find out. Then it won't be the same thing. If you went too far with Mick, it wouldn't have been the same thing, either."

"You leave the clergy no option but admitting they're a big target," Danny said.

"They'd burn us in hell -- most eternally -- for doing this," the tall athlete replied, "and have often burned others, here on earth, so, in my book, they're some kind of target."

"As they disobey their vows of poverty and eschew simplicity, we disobey and ignore them. Seems fair enough, to me," Danny said.

"Or maybe we're just selfish dilatants, rationalizing our lack of tithing on the vain assumption we could better use the funds."

"That's something we are too young for," Danny giggled. It was a nice break. Robbie was, in fact, more mortal than super, and welcomed the tensing of the boy in his arms as a signal they'd gone far enough for the moment. He let Danny back down on the floor.

"We could go in on my bed," the nine year old suggested.

"Great," Robbie whispered, "but don't forget where you were in your story."

"As if," the boy responded, and the scene changed in a few moments. Meantime:

The five from the "Oscard" joined with the young sailors just out of the shower, allowing Kersey and Constantine places of honor at the center of the crescent the males formed around Mick Jagger and Danny Fielding. The nine year old lay back on the rock star's chest and spread his legs as widely as he could, rising to meet the gentle touch of man on boy. Mick fondled the child's pink, swollen glans, turning the tip of his penis purple as Danny gasped and writhed in the powerful arms of the lanky adult. Slowly the experimental first touching became a tentative stroking, and when the boy responded readily with his hips, the older lover took a rhythm with him as the other young males, arms at their sides, heads bent to look down at themselves, each other, and the man and boy, gathered as close as they could.

"Tell me well before anything happens," Mick said, "because we don't want to go too far to stop, until later."

"It feels like the world's biggest sneeze, between my belly and my knees, no rhyme intended," Danny whispered.

"Bless you, my lad, and best we stop then," Mick responded, slowing on the boy, then gently fondling him as the older teens from the ships gently eased Kersey and Constantine back to their former positions in front of Danny and Mick. The tall redhead once again bent over the beautiful Nordic juvenile, and this time there would be no stopping. Kersey lifted Constantine, and the boy spread his legs, landing his beautiful young feet on either side of Danny and Mick, assuming a low stance so the other could watch the adult and the tall, athletic boy. His strokes were strong and fast on the youth, and Constantine responded by shaking and whinnying. "It's been so long," he whispered, "I'm sorry, I wanted it to last more for you." Then he threw his arms up behind himself, linking his finger's behind Kersey's neck and bucking his hips high in the air. "I'm cumming," he grunted.

His semen was boy thin; watery, but hot, copious, and supercharged. Guided by the sweating, panting thirteen year old, he sprayed again and again on Danny's beautiful face, in his hair and on his neck and shoulders. The other sailors bunched in close and whispered encouragement as the boy shook and bucked to Kersey, who now clenched the child's five inch penis tightly at its base, holding him tight and almost motionless as he guided the hot streaks of twelve-year-old sperm. Emulating, Constantine, Danny threw his hands up behind Mick's neck, and arched against the youngest of the sailors. This got the older boy's sperm all over the child's straining chest, and then his heaving belly.

At the end, Kersey guided Constantine to Danny's hugely swollen glans, and let the last weakening pulses wet the younger boy in a gentle, final sharing of Danny's first full experience.

The nine year old lowered his arms back to his side, half caught his breath, and allowed his imagination to be beggared. There were four more sailors of the "Oscard's" crew, all strapping older teens, all on the go for the last entire week; all fit and well rested. Beggared wasn't the word for it. Plus, Kersey's right hand was now dripping with thin cum; what would that feel like to the next of the young males?

He'd have to wait to find out (and, of course, it would be years before he'd know, exactly) because Mick pried the young body from his lap and lay it on the locker room bench, then knelt beside it, and began licking, starting at the child's navel and working up over the thin, white, panting chest to the birdlike shoulders and finally reaching the Mazda zoom-zoom boy's fine English face covered with long tendrils of still hot cum. Luckily for Danny, there was a lot of sperm on his lips, so the first kiss was a salty shock that segued in half an instant to a sizzling wonder of hot tongue and growling lips as the males went awesomely cannibalistic with one-another.

The next cadet was a mature fifteen. While literacy and grace were the A-list requirements for the Semen's Club, as the saying goes, size counted. In spite of being a slim, young teen, the fifteen year old could have measured all but seven inches, and he had a powerful thickness fully matching the length of his penis. Kersey guided him to the bench, which fit comfortably against the knees of the new boy's spread legs. Two shipmates braced the older child at his heaving flanks, and the redheaded boy guided the blond-haired, blue-eyed cadet to the lips of Danny and Mick.

This did nothing to spoil their latest, lingering kiss. Indeed, both partners lying on the bench seemed to welcome the intrusion, and eagerly laved the young sailor's swollen, purple glans with their combined tongues and lips.

Christo was able to stand it for two minutes, then three, then he began to tense rapidly and pant openly. "I'm cumming, Mick," he managed to whisper, and the three males holding his slim, writhing body could feel an almost frantic quaking. Kersey held him perfectly between the man and boy. His sperm came in a sudden, pulsing flood, both males on the bench letting much of it flow from their mouthes and down over Danny's cheeks. Both throats also worked avidly, and all the males grunted in unison at the sight of the pulsing throats and gushing semen. Even Constantine, who had every reason in the world to curl up at the end of the bench and take a nap, gazed on in awe of the spectacle. Indeed, all the young sailors were generous in exchanging positions for the best view of what was going on between the three active males. And there was time. Christo seemed to vent the pent up fury of half the Atlantic Ocean as he continued ejaculating through Kersey's clenched palm and over Danny's tender, childish mouth.

"I'm sorry," a horse voice panted from amongst the sailors. Neff Hanson, seventeen, had lost control. Luckily, he'd been molested repeatedly by a favorite uncle and two of the uncle's friends, so he was able to turn the lemon of his premature ejaculation into lemonade by arching his back, lacing his fingers behind his neck, and cumming all over everything. Danny, thinking he was in paradise, sensed Christo's slowing pulses, and opened his eyes. Guess what he saw. Same old same old, even to the same-old Kersey almost instantly taking the strapping young cadet, sphinctering him firmly and low with his thumb and forefinger, and holding him still as a motive work of art. Thus encouraged, the seventeen year old added the Pacific to the Atlantic, and, from eight swollen, uncircumcised inches, a chapter, nicely brought out, by the way, in the Semen's Club's epic history.

"This hasn't happened since my first time with my gym teacher," Neff managed to expound, and, with all the time he had, might have been able to at least outline a story, had his voice been up to the task. But no, his secrets remained with him, for the time being, as Kersey squeezed and fondled, coaxing in urgent whispers.

Ten times, ten hard sprays, almost a minute, the flying heat of his first release, dominated by Kersey, finally soaking Mick's left flank and Danny's wet belly. For another long minute, the seventeen-year-old boy leaned over the bench, as the young redhead coaxed, mewed happily, and brought the older teen's flow to a gentle end.

Mick rolled gently off Danny and stood, kissing Christo and the older cadet, first for an instant, each, then slowly, back and forth, sharing what had happened in his mouth. Danny lay back on the bench, half glad for the breather, but mostly hoping it wouldn't last out the minute. Trying not to show any signs of impatience, the nine year old copied Neff's stance, arching on the bench, hands behind his neck and legs spread wide and wantonly. Danny needn't have worried. Mick's mouth was free of sperm in half the youngest boy's sanity limit, and he returned to the little boy, bringing him once again to his lap, facing the next cadet.

While Neff had cum the hardest, Olf was the largest at nine full inches, with corresponding girth. He was not circumcised, and Danny panted at what it would feel like to make him look like a circumcised adult. The child's hand went from small to minute as it approached the swollen Nordic teen. Kersey held him for the young boy, and tender hands did the rest. They slowly peeled back the foreskin, then remained motionless as the sailor began to cum immediately. This time, the sperm was guided to Mick, who rose violently to welcome the gushing penis. Danny used both his hands, previously described, to hold the new male hard against Mick, intoxicated by the sight of the sperm flowing heavily from between his fingers. Intoxicating, like heroin, except here there would be not search to replicate the initial high, none would be needed, for nothing could top Danny Fielding's first steps into life's forever minefield. Others aren't so lucky, leaving us to ponder the wisdom of a consensus making Danny's experience more typical than exceptional. If I say maybe we should ask Mick Jagger, you'll know I'm kidding, and I seldom fool around without giving all the warning in the world.

Speaking of which, there was a Capt. Marrayatt story in one of the kid's reader, instantly identifiable because of his glass-smooth entry to and exit from his story in progress. I keep trying to get better at it, but I guess it's the same old saw; get everyone in sight downright hot and bothered, then trip in without even knocking. Some say I do it for word count, others see it as an ego issue, vengeance weapon, or bossy preaching, you know, the know-it-all kind. Me? All of the above, plus, I just think it's good manners to say howdy, from time to time; tell what's happening down home, scoff at this or that, agonize over turning out a pair of pants for six bucks, almost anything can happen, and, just as cement is dependent on aggregate, so are my novels. Dimension, texture, timbre, character, resonance, luminosity, and vitality all come from real life, leastwise, my life. For example, at the moment I'm feeding thirteen, if I count Bev twice, which would be conservative. Supporting three households, one of four, one of five, and my own, now, with the re-arrival of Linden, and his girlfriend, Melissa, numbering three.

Also, Linden and I are in the first stages of building my secret maritime weapon, "Fin Seco". A fifteen foot cross between a bass boat and another design, vastly better than the `panga' skiffs now ubiquitous in all harbors. My design is much cheaper, lighter, faster, more comfortable, easier to fish and swim from, much better looking and three times safer. So far we're at the sketch stage, with an outline taped on the living room floor. Where the money will come from, I don't know, but come it probably will. Thus, I doff my artist's beret for the cap of a naval architect, at least an hour or two a day. Think of it. What if I become famous for revolutionizing the light boating industry, and the press starts snooping around? My dirty little secret runs to one million words. (I mean, sure, there are the inevitable attempts at comic relief, but who ever heard of a funny judge?)

"The Samanthian" can afford to skip an issue. Things have settled so calmly between us, we just hum along like oldyweds. Everything I say demeaning and debunking sex as unnecessary and having little to do with happiness is evident in our current relationship. We are sex-free, beyond making out and petting, and happy as clams. If it took an ounce of pressure to move her a mile, I wouldn't push her an inch.

This is turning into a very extensive rewrite. Second day back on the job, and, you guessed it, six thousand more words. Stopping for a week was a real challenge; going back and refreshing my memory on all the characters and situations took hours. More commentary on the subject, of special interest to my fellow writers, is ahead. (I'm updating, midstream, having already done so, downstream, so to speak.) And this might be a good place to deal with a tad or two of errata. When I said, elsewhere, I was numero uno in the Web contributor's department, I meant for the year 2001, and possibly for this year; not overall, though I'd venture to say I'm high on any list in that department, too. Also, about writing -- "taking dictation" -- like Wolfgang Amadeus, I've done so much revising on this script, I'm in danger of perjuring myself. I will modify the claim by pointing out that over eighty percent stays as originally written, and, though I've made hundreds of changes in this document, I have not deleted a single sentence, and perhaps ten words, in all (while adding six thousand, and counting).

What it all means is for the reader to determine. I mention it to provide reference points for other writers, because we are always quizzed exhaustively on technique, and it does play a role. My secret weapon is actually my bed. I've mentioned this elsewhere, but it's important enough to stand repetition. The head of the bed is six inches higher than the foot, allowing a more upright reclining position. I lie on a foam pad on the left (facing the foot), with the computer and monitor at my right waist. The merit of this system can be stated very simply. It adds ten hours to my workday. The fidgets from sitting for more than five or six hours may be acceptable for a secretary typing routine correspondence, but these self-same fidgets, no matter how minor, are a chronic distraction and take the edge off the creative process. The down side of the system is that it's only perfect if one touch types. If I had to hunt and peck, I'd need a bracket to hold the keyboard at a proper angle above my stomach. Thanks to Mr. Richards, I can clatter away, blind. Another thing I've found, just these last few days, is how essential RAM is to using a word processor. Even the slightest delay is cumulative, and, to a fast typist, a great distraction because you find yourself waiting for the end of a work to appear while you're beginning the next one. With the added RAM, the cursor responds instantly, so the lag factor, however apparently minor, is eliminated, making for cleaner, faster transcription.

Neither of these are minor factors. Comfort adds hugely to productivity, because writing is a waiting game. It takes me eighteen hours to write six-thousand words. Much of the time is spent in neutral, simply waiting for the copy to surface like the fortunes in one of those toy mystery balls. This can take anywhere from a few seconds to ten minutes, to, rarely, the best part of an hour. If you're fidgeting in a chair, the words may be blocked, or you may try to hurry them because you're uncomfortable and end up using the first ones rather than the right ones.

And, to try to address the subject fully, along with the magic bed, there is a magic to do with sleep, or, more accurately, waking. I don't know if medical science has a word for it, but there comes a point when one is fully rested -- Hark! -- is the best one-word description of the feeling. This can be an elusive demon. It can come, just as an example, after six hours of sleep, being up for an hour, then taking a ten minute nap. It's like an electric switch it's so instantaneous. One moment, you're lying comfy and warm, and the very next instant, your bed is a cloying nuisance. Up you must get. This point, whatever you call it, is, to me, absolutely essential for starting a writing session. Fully rested and bright-eyed, actually excited about turning on the machine. Once you're up and running, with this start, you can go until you're numb with exhaustion (providing you don't fidget). I don't do it any more, but when I wrote "Creative Camp" (370,000) words, the sessions were often over thirty hours without food or drink, and with pauses only for the bathroom, and lighting off a pinch of herb and a cigarette every couple of hours, should I remembered. During such sessions, interruptions are not only taken in stride, as far as I'm concerned, but, on many occasions, a break of half an hour or so, when a friend drops over, leads to positive results when I get back to the keyboard.

I can't remember if I've told the story of chopping the onion in a published work or a draft. Anyway, it's a short story. I left the keyboard to start cooking. As I began peeling an onion, I thought of something for the story and dashed back to my computer before it slipped away. Back to the onion. Another thought. Back to the keyboard. Four times. I was laughing out loud at myself for being a lunatic who couldn't even chop a freaking onion without zoning off on more dialogue or narrative. Another illustration of what it's like to be a real writer happened while I was in the living room, waiting for a taxi. I'd done loads of work, already, that day and there was no reason I couldn't just relax in my favorite chair and wait for the cab. During the ten minutes, I was back at the computer time and again, a word here, phrase there, perhaps a sentence, and probably a hundred more words on the script before the horn beeped. (Taxi? Did I order a taxi?)

As far as creative technique, I use none at all. I never outline or make notes of any kind. I have no idea who is going to do or say what until I start a session. I have no dictionary, but will once in awhile check the word processor's thesaurus. I have no literary partner of any kind, and, more's the pity, no one to proof read. In previous manuscripts, I'd list a few ideas at the bottom of the file, but I've even given up this habit, so, at this point, all that appears at the end of a document is a partial list of characters. This has its amusing side, because towards the end of working on "The Tarzan Mushroom Hunters" (180,000 words) most of the twenty or thirty character names meant absolutely nothing to me. I spent several months on "Creative Camp" and, a year later, can't remember a single name or scene from the book.

Family, camera, boat, freaking awesome career. Boggling reader mail. Boggling male readers. It's a wonder I don't go all bio, all the time, like talk on a talk radio station. Isn't it? Hmm. You could be right. As stated in other works, the diligent writer strives to please all, so yes, there's another essay ahead (thankfully, already written). Meantime:

Olf kept cumming, wetting Danny at the waist and frothing Mick, under Danny's tiny hands, with thick, clotted sperm rampaging after a week and more of celibacy. Kersey whispered to Danny, "God, babe, you are so hot."

"Lot's of help," the tyke whispered back.

Olf finally waned, his hard pulsing subsiding to a final seepage, then ending as he stood, braced against the wall, sweating and shaking over Danny and Mick, the other teens supporting him at his flanks. They eased him back and to a seat on the bench as Gerrend, the nineteen-year-old lieutenant was eased in front of the boy and the musician.

"Do you want to be his lover?" Kersey asked Danny. The youngster nodded enthusiastically, and the young actor guided the last of the "Oscard's" crew within range of the child's hands, still dripping with Olf's hot spend. Mick sat forward, and helped guide the little boy, using his big hands to assist the little ones in their experimentation. The concept of all men being created equal may be an essentially meaningless sales tool of the leftist politician, but amongst the young Icelandic sailors the polemic seemed to have weight. Olf may have had half an inch in length on his commander, but Gerrend was just that much thicker and more heavily built. He jutted hugely from his slim hips, probably with good reason harder by a small degree than any of his young shipmates. Kersey and Mick guided Danny's little left hand to the lieutenant's base. "You can feel what's happening if you grip kinda hard, right here," he coached, showing the child how to place the fingers of his left hand over the base of the young man's thick, eight inch erection. "Start down here," he said, holding the little hand very low. "Fondle very gently. When he says he's cumming, move up so you can feel it, and keep masturbating him with your right hand."

It sure seemed like a sexy combination to Danny, and he was sure Mick felt so, too. Together they found this particular hold and that particular rhythm, this grip and that stroke, and in no more than five minutes they had the teen officer high on his toes, his bare, hairless chest glistening with hot sweat as he braced himself, legs spread, over the rock star and the nine year old. Since Mick was helping Danny, Kersey wet his finger's on the slim, panting chest, and began fondling the child, teaching with his hand how hard the boy should grip by vivid example. Mick supplied the rhythm, Kersey the tension, and the officer hissed and mewed his appreciation at the perfection of their teamwork.

"It would look really hot if you let him cum off on your face," the redheaded actor suggested to the young boy, not adding the simple truth which was that it would have been erotic if the straining lieutenant had ejaculated in the pitch dark.

Danny was beginning to feel comfortable with sex. Mick had molested him a lot as Kersey had masturbated Constantine and the others, and, while it was still the most exciting thing after an Indy wreck, he was beginning to learn it was a different king of thrill, one that did not have to end in ten or fifteen heart-stopping seconds. Mick helped in this, slowing the boy as they felt the beautiful blond male striving for release.

"He might be able to talk," Mick whispered to Danny, "if you want to ask him some questions." At the moment, he wasn't, but, by easing both the speed and tension of their four hands, their lover gained control of daily functions and in a ragged whisper answer Danny's questions. To create a further distraction in the `making-it-last' department, Olf hoisted Constantine gently on Gerrend's back. The twelve year old wrapped his arms around his lieutenant's neck, hissing at the feeling of the straining, athletic body sweaty against his bare, pubescent chest.

"What was it like the first time something happened with you?" the boy asked, slowing what he and Mick were doing slightly in the interest of gleaning an answer.

Nancy Schroeder reached up and gently pinched Rob Lester's cheek. "You are the lover of this century and the one before, and the next one," she said, "but, in all honesty, since we are betrothed, and very happily so, I might add, I'm not exactly sure if now is exactly the best time, and here is exactly the best place, to begin another epic."

"Sorry," the handsome medical student and pilot murmured. In the passion of the moment, he'd completely forgotten the ten year old was enroute to her drop-dead older brother, Rick, and she'd obviously want to be with him all through the coming night. Additionally, she'd ended the story of herself and her brother as they were zipping their sleeping bags together, and it had to be obvious there was more to that story. On the other hand, Gerrend, as an athletic and strikingly attractive twelve year old, had not matured under the auspices of a slut in the back seat of a car, so there was a story there. The still-rising sun had ducked itself behind the fronds of a heavily laden palm tree, cooling them and sheltering their delicate Anglo skin; they had all day to complete their flight, so maybe in lieu of a saga, a sketch would be in order.

"Just let me tell some of what happened to him," he said to Nancy, delighted when she limited him to ten-thousand words. Generous. It would be enough, though counting as he went might prove tricky.

Kersey was now sitting to the right of Danny and Mick, using his right hand to keep the boy highly -- but not overly -- excited. Mick, in turn, had helped the young boy find a perfect way of using his hands to keep Gerrend simmering tensely but not boiling.

"It was with a group of Sea Explorers from Cape Cod," the lieutenant began. "I'd come in at the top of my class, plus I liked boats and could tie a bunch of knots, and knew Morse code, so they picked me to guide them around the island and to sail with them in their forty-foot ketch. The leader was twenty-four-year-old Selsen Graham." In addition, the "Maid of Orleans" (out of Orleans, Mass.) was crewed by six teen males, aged fifteen to nineteen. Jake Nickerson, a seventeen year old, had brought Annie, his eight year old sister, as ship's mascot and she did double duty as a beauty spot on the face of the cold, gray ocean. It was the third day of July when they arrived at the Crab Cove settlement, after a six day open-sea passage from Pleasant Bay. Gerrend Nilsen, tall, muscular, blond, and almost thirteen, was rowed to the hovering home-built yacht, and guided Captain Graham to a lava cove where they were able to secure the "Maid" for and aft to the shore, safe as houses in a land where a home can turn its occupants into soup meat at the crack of a fissure or sneeze of a geyser. This would not prove to be a problem during the weeks of the Explorers' visit, but it was the Third of July, and on the morrow, the fireworks would start.

They started innocently enough. There were two Joshes in the crew, Riggs and Carrol, and both wanted to know about the huge island's hot springs and thermal vents. Annie, it goes without saying, was mad to clap her coltish legs around one of the country's famous ponies, and no one assumed she'd wait patiently. Young Gerrend, for his part, was overjoyed to see the collection of maritime literature shelved in every spare nook and cranny of the visiting boat. Seeing the light in their visitor's eyes, Selsen explained that the Explorer's were limited to three changes of summer clothing, one suit of foul-weather gear, and fifty paperbacks. The rule of the sea, as far as this vessel was concerned, seemed to be one eye for the ship and one eye for Patrick O'Brian. Bubbling mud and fat ponies for paper and ink. Who said trade is uncivilized?

They talked until all hours, the sailors, glad to be off the open ocean, the twelve year old, glad to be off the lava crust of his exotic homeland and aboard a floating library. At eleven, their young captain read a chapter from W. Clark Russell's "The Wreck of the `Grovesnor', and shortly thereafter all curled up on bunks and decks in their sleeping bags, leaving the clock to chime in the new day unheralded. It was now the Fourth of July.

"You're very handsome," Annie said back over her right shoulder. Gerrend smiled shyly at the girl. "Thanks," he said, "you're nice, too." They were riding double aboard Sparkle, bareback, and leading a train of ponies up a long, volcanic valley.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" the girl asked. She was a school-girl looking kid, page-boy brown hair falling in a neat bang toward big brown eyes, slim, and even at her tender age, with legs that seemed to go on forever.

"Kind of not, most of the time," Gerrend replied. "Do you have a boyfriend?" he asked back.

"A whole secret world," Annie said, flashing an enigmatic smile back at the boy mounted behind her.

"How secret?" the twelve year old asked.

"The jailbait warbles to the jailbird," the child replied, "though the bird doesn't know it, `till the world finds out, and that's what they call Showtime. So, not being jailbait is my ten-year, eight to eighteen, challenge. Two things are on the list: not getting anyone in trouble, and not being left out."

"Then Iceland was your idea," Gerrend observed.

"Where would take five teens, a young captain, and a brother to die for?" Annie asked.

"I'd probably have made it all the way to Greenland," the boy quipped. The girl giggled, shaking gently between his arms.

"Not if you'd seen the picture we saw on your application," Annie said, "that took every other place on earth off the list. I mean, sure, I love Sparkle and the other horses, but they were just expedient and I don't think they fooled anybody."

"How about the boiling mud holes?" the boy asked.

"I suppose there's no fool like an `ole fool," Annie prattled in a British accent, sighing comically.

"To a vice commander, aged eight years, everybody must be a little bit `ole," Gerrend intoned.

"That is an ole one," the girl countered.

"As long as it's not the same ole, same ole," the young guide said.

They rode then in silence up the vast valley, tundra sweeping to the mountains flanking the ancient man-and-animal trail, the way mottled green as clouds drew their purple shadows through the silver light and toward the sea. Tendrils of steam accented the lava slopes with fox tails of sky-pilot white, climbing as jet plumes, then blowing in the wind: not very old in this factory-fresh land, and certainly not the same.

The ponies broke between an alert walk and mile-eating trot, seeming more eager as they climbed the long slope (probably thinking of the downgrade on the return) toward the broken ledges and outcroppings of the foothills. The "Maid" was reduced to the size of an ant on the glaring water, barely visible tucked into her secret little cove. The town, in its humble entirety, had been reduced to the size of a sugar lump. The wastelands were as forbidding as they were treeless, as bald as they were grand, craggy as an old, old face, wrinkled as a crying baby's brow, a land of no options but to come, to picnic, to play, and to leave in time.

"Do you know the story, `The Most Dangerous Game'?" Gerrend asked the pretty schoolgirl .

"Where they hunt a man on an island," Annie replied

"That wouldn't work here, owing to the size of the place," the boy responded in a fine display of understatement, "but we've come up with a variation that is suitable."

"Tell me," the girl said.

"It's called Steady Eddy," the young guide explained, "a thermal fissure that's as fixed as a municipal fountain. It shoots steam and boiling water about fifty feet in the air."

"Now I know why the boys wanted to come," the foxy critter said.

"Every five minutes," Gerrend added.

"See, I was right," the girl giggled, again shaking deliciously in the arms of her young guide.

"'Round the clock," the boy observed.

"The only thing that lasts like that is love," the girl replied, nestling her pretty head against the athletic boy's chest, then realizing she'd let the subject at hand slip from the agenda. "What's so dangerous about Steady Eddy?" she asked.

"If it was dangerous, we wouldn't go within a hundred yards of it," the boy said, "but it's always exactly the same, since days of old. Doesn't play any tricks. So, the game is to see how close to the center pool you can carry a rock."

"Why not carry lobsters?" the bright-eyes asked. This time it was Gerrend who shook, his efforts to cope maturely with the girl's inanity only compounding his hiccupping gasps. She might not know much about cooking, but she was right as rain when it came to the love thing.

The ponies moseyed along, Gerrend reining Sparkle up a long draw, sans seafood but with enough of a mermaid to compensate for any lack of shellfish.

"How secret are your boyfriends?" he asked.

"The whole crew knows him," the girl replied, "because there is only one. I don't behave very well with Jake, Selsen, and the other boys, but I don't love them. We're buddies, we just wrestle a little differently."

"Does stuff happen a lot?" the boy asked.

"Just one kind of thing," the eight year old replied.

"Do you like it?" the guide quizzed.

"It's really special with Jake," Annie said, "because we've always been close and I've had a crush on him for a year. The other four, the two Joshes, Vic, and Kaffy Smith, are killer friends, but I don't date them in any sense of the word. I've been the farthest with Jake, with the others, it's every little girl's fantasy tea party; when we're swimming, or in the locker room where we play tennis, with my brother always there, and strict rules about what can happen. With you, there will be no rules."

"I was kind of hoping I was the boyfriend," the happy child admitted.

"If I could fall in love with a picture of you, think how I feel now," the girl said.

"I can just imagine," Gerrend responded.

That made her happy. They rode on, now to the periodic blast of a geyser as yet out of view. "Do you really play that crazy game?" Annie wanted to know.

"It's harmless," the young guide replied, "but, at the same time, it does challenge."

"Does someone like hold a record?" the girl asked.

"It's not that precise," the older boy replied. "It depends on the wind and other weather conditions. Some days almost everyone can get within twenty feet, then the wind changes and ten seconds later no one can get within fifty feet. It's like a game on a blackboard, erased at the end for a new game.

"Tick, tack, hole," the girl said, "no winners."

"Heavens," the boy replied, "this place is much to small and isolated for winners. Doing your best under a wide variety of circumstances is considered plenty. Since we have no winners, it stands to reason we have no losers, which is a good thing because the land is a little forbidding to support many."

"Are you going to stay?" Annie asked. From her young friend's application, the girl knew he'd been in Crab Cove for three years with his writer father and artist mother.

"Not unless you do," said the gallant young male. This response turned Annie's head half like a parrot. "What does that mean?" she asked.

"We're ready for a change, all three of us, so it's up to me, this time, since Mom got the Caribbean for three years, and Dad chose here."

"So, where then?" the girls asked.

"Where do you think?" the boy rejoined. "Artists. An underage inamorata headed for unsurvivable beauty. Count them each as a two, and see if you get four when you add them."

The girl thought for a minute, biting her lip, though Gerrend didn't see it. Quickly she brightened and turned once again over her shoulder. "Provincetown," she quoth.

"I told Dad if I like you, because I fell in love with your picture, too, he could get a Porsche to drive me back and forth to Orleans. We're a voting family, so my opinion counts."

"For sure and for certain, you know how to flatter a girl," Annie said, half taken aback "

"Besides," the boy said, imitating Rusty in `National Lampoon's Vacation', "I'm glad we're not going to Hawaii."

"The Cape's ten times better," Annie said, "Nauset is the mother of all beaches with big tide pools and inner waterways, clams in the sand, shark eggs and sand dollars; alive, and with perfect waves to pound you up but not rip you up. You can stand in the surf and let them crash down on you. It's way cool."

"So I've heard," the boy said.

"That just makes getting out as big a thrill is going in," the girl went on, "besides, the water is cold in L.A., too, and gray, and everything's covered with slimy gray algae, but they never show you that in the movies. The beaches are made of trucked-in sand, it's usually cloudy, windy, and almost cold, and just not the same thing as the crystal clean Atlantic water and endless miles of natural sand, plus the tidal areas."

"It must be something in the winter," the boy said.

"You can't stand on the beach in a Nor'easter and not half cry for all those who sailed in such conditions. The west coast is never like that, the sea in a blizzard, until you get up into Canada, then it's all rocks and cliffs and foam, dramatic in a post card, but boring in real life."

"It's like that with the people, too," Gerrend said, "shallow and monotonous, versus intricate and interesting, west and east."

"With Branson in the middle," the pixie observed. They sighed in unison and rode on, feeling if artificial everything needed a home, best keep it in the middle of nowhere.

Around a final bend and over a last ridge, and the party arrived. The geyser was just finishing its three minute boil over, spewing forth like a city hydrant, only with as much steam as water. There was an iron railing for the horses, and some minor cement work had been done to improve footing in the area. Gerrend slipped from Sparkle and gathered the reins of the other ponies as their riders dismounted. The train included two pack animals, and these were stripped along with the saddles worn by most of the beasts. Housekeeping, thanks to trestle tables and a generous lean-to, took scant minutes. Numerous overnight trips on the "Maid of Orleans" had turned its crew into focused homebodies, so recovering from the long ride up the valley was accomplished efficiently. The sun wouldn't set for weeks at this latitude, so everyone relaxed, glad the ponies would have a good rest before the return trek. The geyser thundered, then left them in peace at an interval that soon became half hypnotic. They were alone at the site, and a look back down the valley just before they'd made the final turn was proof there'd be no other visitors for many hours. All in all, it was half as out of the way as the poles, barren yet grand, mossy to a fault, and thoroughly exotic. Selsen produced two bottles of altitude medicine, a rum-tasting brew thought to ensure the sailor's return to the sea, and consumed in accordance with the height the mariner found himself above his true home. The captain, wise beyond his twenty-four years, believed in a jolt now and again for his beached crew; nothing was a greater microscope for detecting flaws and defects that could endanger a vessel, or more revealing of personal traits likely to end up as stress points on a voyage. The geyser was practically a holy grail for the captain's approach, representing, as it did, both frivolity and danger. Sober, it would be hard to tell his crew members apart, but with three or four ounces of alcohol any foolery would show, and the lesser bold would probably keep such as simpled themselves out of serious trouble, for the time being. So, it was bottoms up, all around, with Annie allowed a single modest tug at the fiery bottle. For half an hour, the seven visitors challenged the steam vent. A foul was declared on the young miss because heat rises and she was kind of low to the ground, compared to the other contestants.

"I'll ride on Jake's shoulders, and still beat everybody," the girl swore, but Jake backed out immediately, so the matter was left unresolved. As Gerrend had predicted, the breeze tended to swirl and eddy from time to time, so no winner could be chosen, though the young guide, banking on a number of visits, got his stone within a respectable fifteen feet. Selsen observed his crew with satisfaction; everyone set out with their all, and all penetrated solidly into the scalding steam before succumbing and retreating from the kitchen.

Game over. A nervous hush fell over the assemblage. By accord, they accepted the picnic area as family ground, and followed their guide on foot into a ravine well removed from the campsite, for all the world like Druids enroute to a conclave. The times don't change as much as we may think, and, though they had no sacrificial offerings for faggoty, uptight gods, it can yet be said that the seven were about a brand of worship. It was the Fourth, the good-old American Fourth of July, and, primitives that they had become for the day, they boasted no store-bought fireworks, but, rather, were intent on making their own.

Gerrend and Annie walked hand in hand. Jake, a pale, lanky seventeen year old with black hair and rough complexion followed, and then came captain and crew. Annie navigated, once her guide had shown her the general direction, and in a quarter of an hour she'd discovered a mossy outcropping in an alcove off the ravine, so sized and shaped as to serve as bench and bed.

They were all dressed the same, their guest in an honorary uniform. White shirts, khaki shorts. At Jake's direction, Annie became one of the boys, stripping out of her blouse as the males removed their shirts.

Druid-like, they gathered garlands, spelling `Annie' in petals and tiny artic buds. Jake commanded, and even the young captain -- and it takes more of a captain to navigate a ship-so-small than a supertanker -- complied happily. The liquor was now in full effect so everyone participated as happily as they would have, sober. Sober? You've got to be kidding. Gerrend could hardly peel his eyes from his beautiful doll. Such to-do and ceremony for her first time bode well for their being significant to each other, forever, however the winds and breezes of fate and chance might blow, and for however long forever might be. It was pretty hard to imagine the girl picking up the phone, ten years hence, and saying, "Oh, yes, I remember. Well, that was just kids' stuff." Nah.

Jake stepped out of his sandals and stripped to his briefs. Kneeling in front of his sister, he brought Gerrend's hands to the child's belt, then held the slim, male body gently as the twelve year old fumbled nervously with the buckle.

"What I'm doing to you is homosexual," the older boy whispered, "and if it makes you uncomfortable, just say so."

"Do you molest your sister the same way?" Gerrend whispered loud enough for the -- closely gathered -- sea scouts to hear.

"Yes," the teen replied, his whisper also lacking intimacy.

"Then it's good enough for me," the boy replied.

"What's amazing is you're good enough for her," the older boy went on, "I didn't think that would ever happen, not that eight is too late, but I could tell she'd be hard to place when she was six."

"We're probably not the first couple to fall in love over lobsters," the boy noted.

"A lot of men in P'town like to do this with young males," Jake said, "and some of them are cute enough to pull it off, so there's another reason to chose it."

"I'll be there with balls on," Gerrend said, apparently having a world of difficulty with the simple buckle, seemingly caused by said article's proximity to the milk white childish belly. His fingers played and delayed as Jake molested him more openly. Annie giggled at her lover's naughty word, and well she might remember it, for she would hear no more. It takes a lot to trip a Victorian out of his or her prudish ways, dignity and love going so hand-in-hand.

"Do you want to watch me with my little sister?" the gentle, friendly, scholarly, athletic first among perverts asked.

"Yes," Gerrend said, his heart rate soaring as if he were dashing, madly, his breath deteriorating to a ragged panting.

"If you lose control," Jake said, gently leaving the boy for the bare-chested little girl, "try to warn us, so she can at least watch, and don't be embarrassed; it happened to me our first three times in the shower."

"Before we could get the water off," Annie explained, "so I didn't really know what was happening."

"So you thought he was being bad, but you didn't know how bad?" Gerrend assumed.

"Not until it happened on my bed, all warm and dry," the girl said, "then I found out everything wicked in the whole world."

"The early setting of parameters is useful in the development of a child," Jake further explained, "so it would have been cheating to offer her less."

"As if you could have," Annie rejoined, "offered me less. The first three times were accidents as much because of my overeagerness as your inexperience."

"Getting back to the subject at hand," Jake said, "just try to tell us if you feel you're going to cum -- sometimes it's hard to tell -- and you won't be the first one if you don't get it exactly right."

Jake seated himself on the mossy ledge, his sister's back to his bare teen chest. His hands moved slowly over her bare skin as she lolled her head against the base of his neck. Gerrend stood close to the couple, leaving room for three on each side. They watched for long minutes, excited by having out in the open what usually occurred burrowed in sleeping bags in the forecastle, while the cute tyke was cuddled gently in Jake's strong arms. Each of the scouts had ejaculated repeatedly on the naked belly and chest of the eight year old, but none had seen more than a dim glimpse of her, if that, excepting her seventeen-year-old brother. In addition to the carnality of her slim, childish body, they'd had three rough final days into Iceland, so celibacy had been the order of each day for the cold, seasick crew, the forecastle, once a dream bower for the hot sailing lads, now a pitching, noisy nightmare. The result was bulges in each pair of uniform shorts so huge that wearing them a major embarrassment.

Since his first mate was a child molester -- aha, that alcohol -- Captain Graham too command of the remnant of the crew, and practically ordered them to strip by using the tried-and-true, follow-me technique of leadership. As the eldest, by five years, he was the most maturely developed, seven inches, uncircumcised, thickly set to the point he looked almost abnormal, jutting from his slim, boyish waist. The two Joshes were first to follow, then fifteen year olds, Vic, and Kaffy Smith.

(This leaves one missing, reminding us that the sea is a perilous place, but don't worry, by the time you've finished this little novel, you will have forgotten young what's-his-name, and even your own name, what a shame, too, `cause that's what I do to you, with this tool, fool. Come on, I'm just playing, I wrote a rap today, and my fingers liked the exercise. You'll come across it later.)

It was hard to tell whose eyes were hotter. Annie had cuddled each of the boys against her, and, her small hands helped by her gentle brother, wetted herself with their cum, but she'd hardly seen them since the last tennis match of last season, as they'd scarcely seen her developing young body. That was then, this was now. The girl's nipples were real buds, and probably would have been notable even if her big brother had not been doing a lingering, sensitive job of thoroughly molesting her. With his fondling, they stood hard, pink, and stark from her now sweating, panting young chest.

Gerrend watched, center of the seven, the incest he could touch if he wished, bulging his shorts as much as the now-naked teens had bulged. He'd stand up well to them, for his age, very well, indeed. Not something he wanted to wait to do. Could wait to do. Annie read this in his face, and coaxed her brother forward so she could reach her young partner. Where his fingers had labored, ultimately unsuccessfully, with her buckle, she, experienced, and more positive of the various facets of what she wanted, was deliberate, and in seconds the boy's shorts fell to his bare feet. Sensing the boy would now need all the support he could get, the scouts moved close to him, several arms joining to steady him as Jake's little sister slid her tiny hands into the band of his underpants and drew them to his ankles. Well braced, he stepped free of the briefs and spread his legs widely, arching to the rear and linking his fingers behind his long, slim neck. Annie hissed approval of her select young stallion, and the scouts, captain on down, concurred with avid stares, panting whispers, and grouping fingers.

Remembering her first shower experiences with her strapping young teen brother, Annie was responsive to the sensitivities of the twelve-year-old boy. But nothing is more erotic than reticence, and, try as she might to be restrained, Gerrend shivered for long minutes on the verge of cumming off. Yes, it was a case of un-dammed if you do, un-dammed if you don't, but, perhaps a little damned by her, he held the last half gram of control, no matter her languid lassitude in hardly touching him. What didn't help was constantly picturing what brother and sister would have looked like in that first shower, together. Would he have stood shyly against the tile wall, almost needing to be persuaded, or would she have been the shy one, insisting on the innocence of hair washing, then become numb with the beating of the hot water and the strong fingers of the striking boy creeping from her neck to her slim shoulders, and down?

Had he taken her mostly from the back, bending over her naked young body, to do his and her will as he would? At times, he must have wanted to feel her breasts against him, close, hot, and intimate. And was there more? Had she stood at his right hip, her little left arm around his thighs, and played long, sensitive games of shower buddy with him? Or had it happened quickly and shamefully with them, sin washed by the beating spray before it could even be seen?

Gerrend's efforts at self control were as noble and valiant as could be expected of a male twice his age, but it was frustrating. Thinking of Annie and Jake showering hardly seemed the place to go, due to the erotic nature of the thoughts, but any image or fantasy he could conjure was nothing compared to, a, what was already happening, two feet in front of him, and, b, what was about to happen, and would happen, more or less ceaselessly, far into the future. So, the shower it was.

Everyone was comfortable, steady, and braced. Jake took long minutes with the adoring girl in his arms, and her eyes never left Gerrend's, except for frequent trips down to where he jutted half like a bear from his childish, white waist. Slowly the scouts formed around the brother, and, as he continued his incest, raised from the moss, stripped him naked, and seated him again, his penis now standing high between the thighs of the little girl in her cute uniform shorts. Acting on raw instinct, Gerrend eased to the siblings, hands still behind his neck, and thrust slowly closer. Annie stared wide-eyed at what the males were about to do with each other, Jake displaying his welcome by copying the younger boy's display. The naked teen scouts helped in guiding them the last inches, then the young boy, purple, wet, and vastly swollen touched the raging six inches of the senior teenager. For a long minute the two males experimented with their intimate touch, knowing at some future time they'd find a private place so they could whisper together as they came to know each other.

The overt display of homosexuality broke any phobic barriers which might have existed, and in minutes the scouts started becoming active, finding and testing each other, closer than they'd ever dreamed of being.

The arching males continued, and Annie, under any other circumstances, would have giggled at the free horsey ride she was getting from her brother as he rose and fell, hands behind his neck, against the twelve year old between his long, widely spread, athletic legs. Feeling no danger, the young girl still sought the comfort of more contact with her big brother, so she, too, laced her fingers behind Jake's neck, arching wantonly at the sight of Gerrend, so close.

Well enough for foreplay, but both principal males were beginning to hurt all over from the extreme tensions building in their juvenile loins.

Annie, bless her heart, recognized her brother's beginning agony, and, assuming it for Gerrend, too, became the girl she seemed to have been born to be.

"This is what we do on his bed," she said, reclaiming her pretty little hands and leaning forward, pausing for a moment, temporarily nonplussed by the double body-slam of two big, hot boners, drooling tendrils of seminal fluid as they touched, rubbed and stroked each other. But she was a gamin lass, boyish, two snakes would be better than one in her terrarium, so, staring avidly, she reached for the familiar and beloved penis of her strapping brother. That got horsey's attention, but, soul that he was, the boy refrained from bucking the pixie to the ground.

Gerrend? He stayed where he was. As Annie's tiny right hand found her brother's purple glans, and she began tentatively to masturbate him, the younger boy lost his shower images of the brother and sister to the physical sensation of her tiny knuckles massaging the most sensitive spot on his body. How Jake could stand her firm, wet grip, the plunge and pump of that little right hand, as the left found him down very low, was beyond comprehension. Even the brother realized he was showing off a bit, calling on character and restraint he'd have bet a lung he didn't have, displaying to the girl's lover maybe even a little in jealousy over what the younger male would share with the beloved wriggling just a little in his lap as she settled down, her will neither to be denied nor much delayed.

"Have you ever seen a mature boy cum?" Josh Riggs, at Gerrend's left shoulder, whispered.

"No," the twelve year old whispered, surprised at hearing a voice he thought had been stolen by the stroking little fist of the devil's very delight.

"You have to be in the mood," the fifteen year old from Massachusetts advised, "then it's really sexy."

Gerrend nodded to his new friend, dumbly. The teen certainly seemed to know what he was talking about, but, as a practical matter, it really didn't bear talking about, or even the slightest thought. Jake was now arching half out of control, his sister's slim legs, heels down, a sinewy caliper on his sweating, heaving flanks as she jerked him off, and any image of what must soon happen would drop the clock from the mantel to the marble floor. What had they done together during that first shower? What secret had washed to the gurgling drain? What had the virgin missed, apparently by a vague error in timing? What if, in her haste, she'd turned off only the hot water? That was better. Cold water. The four a.m. to eight a.m. watch, cursing the books that had taken the place of a big, fluffy vest. Artic spray. Frigid even in July. Icy. Polar. Hot. Tropic. Spray.

It was so exciting the boy lost is erection in five heartbeats. Stroked beautifully by the experienced eight year old, the teen shot a long, fast jet of sperm three feet high.

"Oh, Jake," the girl whispered, "show him everything."

So expert was the girl's hold, her male's flying cum arched and splashed back down on her determined shoulders. Nor was the pixie greedy As she felt her big brother turn to iron for his second release, she held him against her young lover, letting the big animal's sperm gush over the quaking boy's penis, belly and chest. The threesome might not have known how to behave, but they had the bonding thing down.

Annie took her brother's third huge cum all over her bare chest, then leaned to him, his glans tucked in against her slender throat, as his hard pulses flowed down over her chest and belly, gradually subsiding to a thick, clotting flow of syrupy white.

Where before he'd been in too dazed a state to successfully tamper with Annie's belt, Gerrend now found strength and inspiration, and, faster than it can be told, he had his little wife down to her yellow panties, and nothing else. Since Jake had only seen her naked in the shower, slipping her into her underwear as he dried her, each time, Gerrend knew he was captain of a moment. He let them look as he looked, himself, fantasizing, sure in his developing mind, the scouts were fantasizing, too. But pain is a great stimulus, so it wasn't two minutes before the boy kneeled before the girl, and, at her nod, pulled her panties down and over her tiny feet.

Immediately her ankles were free, the child lay back to her brother and spread her legs to his strong hands, which he used to help. Again, Gerrend earned his scouting stripes by backing away to let the boys look. Then the strangling sensation radiating from the base of his spine overcame anything to do with manners, and he approached him and her. He guided him. He found her. The scouts found them, holding him so he could stare into her eyes and rely on them as guiding beacons, while Jake half protected his sister, and half milked and coaxed the child's circumcised, wood-hard penis deeper into the body of his lovely little sister.

"It may sting," he whispered, sensing Gerrend against her hymen, and, before the news registered, he plunged her to him with a hard thrust of his hips. The scouts gasped as one at the blood sign of the truth and success of the mounting. Annie hiccupped through her tears, her tiny hands going to Gerrend's heaving chest, stroking him in welcome.

Jake no longer protected his sister, moving his hands to the boy's waist, neither restraining nor urging. Looking down into Annie's eyes, Gerrend saw the tears clear, the beacons glow. He took her then, gently and fully, bother her hands and her brother's stroking him gently forward, sharing his tender initial thrusts, his developing rhythm.

Still holding the boy in position over the girl in Jake's lap, the two Joshes were eased in close. Willing hands helped them between the female's widely spread thighs, and the hips of her young mount. The other scouts positioned themselves on the mossy ledge to get a perfect view down between the straining young bodies. When Josh Riggs began ejaculating, Selsen, who had majority control of the straining twelve year old, eased him higher off Annie, so all could see plainly what was happening between the sweating young bodies. The first Josh sprayed hard against the second fifteen year old's penis, starting the second boy's ejaculation, immediately. For long moments, the two young teens wildly wet the child where her brother had, puddling their hot seed on her belly and thighs, surrounding the pre-teen's gently surging penis with thick, white sailor sperm.

Gerrend had reached so far past his limit it was like a memory from diaper days. He could move not one single additional inch inside the hot, tight welcome of the beautiful child. He moved with great finality to her. Jake sensed his need and pulled him forward with his powerful, athlete's arms. It had been so, so close he'd always remember the distance of having a practical value of nil; but, scout that he was, he held, Annie's hot eyes glowing into his, extravagant reward for the supreme effort.

Vic and Kaffy Smith, seventeen and eighteen, took the place of the two young Joshes, gasping at the hot slickness of the rubbery flesh left wet by the retreating young males. For both, the slow push between the body of the pre-teen and the eight-year-old girl was more than enough, and again, all eyes fastened hotly on the bellies of the coupled children. Gerrend maintained his iron stillness, but gasped and mewed at the sight of two additional long, heavy ejaculations covering his little wife and his own sweating thighs.

Annie sensed it firs. "Jake, hold my hands," she whispered very softly. The tall teenager left Gerrend's frozen, shuddering hips, and his little sister grabbed his thumbs, her wanton shaking and panting a clear signal of how much she knew about young males.

It was Selsen's time with the young couple. Still the mainstay in positioning the boy over the girl, he slowly squatted, found the way between their bodies, and thrust gently through the sperm-slick flesh until he was standing out big and hard between the young bellies. If the males had been connected by an optical port, they couldn't have shared more fully. The young captain plainly felt the dramatically rising tension in the youngest scout. All the boy needed now was the tiniest additional stimulus, and a frenzy would ensue. The child's head was hanging, his eyes slashing between the girl's eyes and her thickly slimed and clotted young stomach. This gave Selsen his idea. He started cumming, just as hot and fast as any of his teen charges. His first sperm sizzled across the pretty school-girl face of the wide-eyed eight year old, and, shocked by what he'd just done, he lost control completely, cumming hard on the boy's face, then the girl's neck and shoulders, then the boy's arched and heaving chest. It was, this time, enough.

"Oh, Jake," the girl said.

"He's cumming inside her," the captain, in the best position to know for sure, and be able to speak coherently, said.

There was a naked-boy group hug, all bracing quickly and silently against Gerrend, all quickly stilling in order to sense the boy's jolting orgasm. Probably could have felt it in a disco, a hard, sensuous throbbing; lightning bolts with trembling thunder racking the straining child and cracking his voice to an inarticulate garble as he hissed and grunted, his lost eyes saying as much to the pretty little girl as the remnants of his useless voice.

Her knuckles were white as she gripped her brother, her legs, after long moments still, so she could feel more perfectly what was happening, now wrapped the boy's shaking thighs. Her brother brought her hands to her boy, and together they hugged him and fondled his straining flanks. Finally, Jake left his sister and by accord, the scouts backed away. Annie's arms, alone, held him; her body, alone, sensed his final acts with her; her voice, alone, coaxed him slowly back to breathing life.

"Jake," he whispered as soon as he was able. The older teen sensed the urgency in the boy's single word, and showered him with gold stars. Annie hadn't cum. Gerrend followed his word with deliberate action, kissing his girl gently on the forehead, and slowly bringing her her brother, guiding him, and half lying across the little girl's heaving chest as Jake mounted fully in a single measured, deliberate stroke that brought grunts and groans from each male teen.

"Oh, Ger," the girl mewed in joyous thanksgiving as her brother quickly mastered her, setting a hard, fast lover's rhythm from his first aching penetration of the hot, tight, and extremely wet female child.

"Can you feel his sperm?" the girl asked.

"Yes," Jake grunted, now taking her fast and hard.

"I want him to cum in my mouth, will you let him?" the girl quizzed, breathlessly.

"Yes," Jake said.

"Then you can," she promised. It was the last one she'd make for awhile. Again, "Gerrend", but this time it was a choked screech. None of the boys had ever watched a female climax, and the sight of the lithe little body flailing, writhing, and bucking wildly smashed post-coital lethargy like a telephone pole through the hull. The scouts began masturbating, not even taking the time to find one another, and cumming off, instantly. This was lost, for the moment, on the eight year old. Her eyes vanished, her whole body, seized against Jake, then released, only to screech back to him, nails digging, ankles pounding, again and again. For a moment, it seemed to wane, she began to live again, then Jake whispered softly in her ear, and her brother's first spray deep within her set here wildly on fire, all over.

They reversed positions, Gerrend now holding his young bride in his lap, their legs hanging over the ledge as they partially reclined. Starting with the youngest Josh, each boy approached, Gerrend guided each, and each stood close to her between her young legs for several minutes, before leaning to kiss her forehead, and then making room for his shipmate. Selsen made her cum gently in her young lover's arms, and then it was over, and suddenly they were a full year from the Fourth of July.

"You write with a chainsaw and finish with an emery board," Mick Jagger said to the young lieutenant. Of course, he hadn't been writing in the literal sense, but the review was flattering, nonetheless. I'd add to the commentary and expound at length on yet another virtuoso performance, but we've got another essay coming up. (By the way, Gerrend's story ran about seven thousand words.)

Thought it might be awhile before we renewed our vows what with a RAM stick failure emulating a dead hard drive, but no, sixty bucks and not only are we up and running once again, but with 196 meg of RAM which does crisp things up a bit. Five days off due to the repair shop being jammed up; first break in two years. You get to a point in this craft where the addiction level becomes palpable; where not working is harder than any eighteen-hour day.

So, what's new? Five dogs moved in with Daisy and gang, adding to the existing zoo of five house lions. Daisy seems to be taking full advantage of my extreme generosity by getting to the bar earlier and staying longer, leaving me with the kids for ten-hour stretches at her druthers. This morning she pitched a fit about Linden mistreating Tonton, bringing up an interesting point of semantics. When is a machete not a machete? The reason for the question is that, according to Daisy, Linden held a machete to Tonton's throat. The weapon in question is as dull as the back of a kitchen knife; it couldn't slice an apple without squashing it, so is it a machete, or weapon, in the first place? Tonton provoked the incident by telling Linden to get off his land which shows the kid has guts even if his brain's asleep. Anyway, Daisy raved on about the mistreatment of her precious boy (wonder where mom was?) and said she's leaving. Another abject lesson in the fallacies of liberalism -- the notion you can help anyone. Other than providing food, lodging and the like, you can't. The government can't. It can't be done, and on that subject I'm a world-class expert. Over the years I've continually questioned my modus operendi; wouldn't it have been better, for example, to spend my family windfall on a new Jaguar? The answer to the question, for most of you, is yes; provide the high-end jobs, which means less people ending up like Daisy. Writer's must needs march to a different drummer. It does us no good to hear from this source and that wise old head that aiding the peasant-class poor is both useless and hopeless; the whole point is to try to find some way it can be done; some combination of money, time, guidance, friendship, tolerance, potty language, and grace that gets a problematic soul from point A at least half-way to point B. The futility of trying can't be taught, it has to be learned, and I'm just lucky that the terrific financial sacrifice as well as large doses of time and energy expended end up here, and if it means I'm paying to write, instead of being paid, that's how the cookie crumbles.

I took Queenie to the Solid Rock Academy yesterday, as she doesn't like her present school. They gave her an admissions test. One of the questions was How many feet in a mile? Her answer was "eight". She scored twenty percent, which, on a four-choice multiple choice test is not very good. Anyhow, they accepted her -- my theory is for the class picture. She sure is one totally nice girl with the most wonderful lilting contralto voice. All Daisy's gang have beautiful voices, even the local teens comment on Tonton's, and wonderful enunciation, with that perfect blend of British and Caribbean accents that is half the reason one might choose to live in the tropics.

The police. Ah, yes, they showed up, and I can't say `finally' because it was the second day all four were meant to be attending school from here. Nice young officer, after Tonton, who, the first day, circled home and hid under my wall until lunch time; tried it the next day, when I caught him, then along came the Babylon, local name for the cops. So, it was off to town, where we were headed, anyway, to buy uniforms, sneakers, backpack, underwear and the whole nine yards. Not a pleasant experience, because the pants cost six US dollars, and the shirts another six. How long does it take to cut and assemble a pair of kid's pants? There's the zipper, the pockets, the belt loops, and the shirts have all those buttons. So how can the material, the intricate and fussy labor, the shipping, and the retailer's markup possibly come to six dollars? (And I thought writing for Nifty paid badly.)

Age and sexuality. Another first-hand experience this afternoon. Samantha brought Rhageedha's little sister over. She's four, almost five. In my fifty-six years, for positive and for sure, I've never, but never seen a girl so hot-to-trot, as the crudity goes, as this particular Miss. Zounds and jehosaphat, the tyke was doing bumps and grinds with little uncertainty as Samantha and I gazed on and made no secret of being avid to share anything resembling a kiss I might have in mind for my, and I have to laugh when I write this, old lady. As with Winzie, the three year old, I know that child and I could shack up, happy as clams, and anyone who disagrees is stupid enough to make Bevis and Butthead look like Einstein and Oppenheimer, by comparison.

It was interesting trying to gauge Samantha's reaction to (I don't remember her name)'s joining in, or, more precisely, leading our usual head-butting routine that precedes a kiss, and all-but leading the kiss, itself. Samantha certainly seemed tolerant, perhaps vaguely amused, and she left pushing the little girl gently away up to me. What would she have done if I'd pulled, instead of pushed? I can't imagine her having the slightest objection to having the tyke in bed with us, when and if the time comes, and my guess is the same goes for Rhageedha. Samantha gets along wonderfully with Queenie, and display's such a level of trust (or indifference) in leaving us along together, I wouldn't have the heart (or gall) to cheat, even assuming Queenie might want to, which, fortunately for my sanity, she doesn't. As open-minded as I am about Free Spirit lifestyles, it's nice to have a pretty young girlfriend I can take as a daughter, as most people accept the relationship. Too bad, in a way, because thirteen would nicely fill out a foursome of five, seven, and fifteen. (My kind of maths.)

Back to the great computer crash. First, my machine has fifteen thousand hours on it if it has one -- myriad uses from games, to extensive downloading, sixty Napster songs (destroyed by the virus), huge text files, hundreds of pictures; pretty much massive amounts of everything with the kids playing with it every they chance they get and a minimum of one hundred blackouts and brownouts, with a dozen close lightning strikes, just for good measure. Yes, it's been in the shop six or eight times, but never for more than a few hours, and never for more of a bill than sixty dollars. The speaker fell on it. Five cats. I smoke. Pretty much you-name-it, including mis-installed ram sticks and several dead CPU fans.. And here it is, three years later, slicker and tighter than ever; bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and as raring to go as my new mini-pixie. Absolutely freaking amazing. Anyway (you can tell I'm tired when I keep using that crutch), it died immediately after uploading my last set of files for David, that was super nice of it, but, at exactly the time I was ready to plug in my new digital camera. So Christmas was postponed, once again -- it's kind of a saga, the digital camera thing -- and finally arrived today. With minimal struggle I got everything joined up and humming and pretty well blew myself away. It's been twenty-five years since I owned a camera, but at that time I was a very high-level amateur, printing color and so on. My first clicks around the house and neighborhood exceeded anything I was able to do with Tri-X Professional and a Hasselblad, and even 640X480 half frames give vivid results at sizes close to 5X7. I work almost only in black and white, and a little cloning and smudging turns good snapshots into little works of art (that last forever, unlike color, which fades). Digital images are free of the curse inherent in conventional photography, density changes caused by the physics of agitating the negatives by hand, which show up in the print as darkening at the left and right borders. I snapped a self-portrait using the timer and it's a beauty. I titled it "Million Year Veteran. Or: Hell, I even look like a great writer!" (And damned if I don't, even if it is a face only a four year old could love..) First picture of myself in many a coon's age. The historians are going to go nuts as photos of me between my late thirties and today practically don't exist. This is hardly a surprise as one does not get where I am by posing.

Samantha bought a bootleg EMINEM disc. Marshall isn't a poet, but he doesn't know it. Firecrackers do not literature make, nor cherry bombs a saga, but there's quite a market for cursery rhymes. Good vocalizing, his work would sell if he sang of "snowflakes on eyelashes / and warm woolen mittens". Great track with the record company suit being capped (by mistake). Oops. I told Linden I was good and mother-fucking glad I heard EMINEM after I'd published a million words so no one could charge me with being derivative, especially on the mother of all issues, the response to those who promise all over town, exploitation of family and friend for fun and profit, and ego, ego, ego, effing squared. Also told Linden I'd do a rap. So far, I've got a such a great title I may not even bother with further lyrics: "Attitude. Psycho Food."

Yo, there's up.

Yo, there's down.

Yo-ho, there's round and round.

You know there's hip.

You know there's hop.

And a big public for the sound.

So call it show,

And call it tell:

Show and tell from hell

`Cause it's not for here,

And it's not for there;

By now even you can tell.

Dead is the word.

Head is the place.

What's wrong Holmes?

White in your face?

So how you want us?

Griddled, poached, or diced?

Turning over the goods - no fuss?

Lying still for what? For what in the butt? What's wrong with this picture? What would fix the mixture?

That's what this song's about Whitey's ass, your fatal fixture. Never mind the rhyme You don't have the time

You dis and you play, The live-long day, But none of the guilt is truly ours And none of it's your damn business.

Listen to the East and to the Chinese, What they say about us every day. White's lived in caves, peed in the stream Savage and crude as ever you please.

Gongs for others, they beat their copper; Pyramids in Africa, and other wonders. For thousands of years, and thousands more, While we lived in the rain and worshiped the thunder.

That is the fact, The big, fat one: Anglos in stone For millennium.

Slavery wasn't our trip, Black pharos perfected it, While we shivered in skins Gnawing animal shins.

Know the history, Before you hip. Fill your head, Before you hop. Avoid the trap, Shitcan the rap.

Attitude. Psycho food. Number-one national killer. Proof of the pie Comes when you die. And your ma's tears completely fill her.

It wasn't that way, Never, never was. What do you get with your pay? Think about it, because,

Freedom's a needle Liberty a spike And they make lousy footing, Say what you like.

It wasn't us who started the trouble So why the heaping helpings; The ones that you double?

You had art, we had caves; All caves, north, all Africa, south, So you say we made ANY slaves - You put your big foot right in your mouth.

This may be a short song, But the story is long. Trouble is, You've got it all wrong.

The slave was worth dollars galore, The Irish lad, not a nickel. Had home, hearth, bond, and more, While white winds blew cold and fickle.

History is tough; The stuff is rough. Have you had enough? I'm rolling my cuff.

Because attitude's no One-way street, And the sign doesn't say slow, But serve the blacks up a treat.

Because cotton didn't get rotten It built the fucking world, And it didn't get picked by no white folk, `Cause we had to invent that world.

Two and two are four. Black and white are more. So rap this! Enough with the dis.

We got problems like a camel got piss Fatty, fatty two-by-four; Mall after mall and credit like this: Chips, cokes, dips: more, more, more.

Who we gonna call, where we gonna go? Top of the heap, eyes cast where? Sounds to me like whitey needs a bro. Any volunteers out there?

And leave each other alone, too, Every day, in every way. In death, pink tongues turn blue, And I have more to say.

Watch your liberals, As you watch your back; They're the ones You should attack.

They shade the truth And tell you lies, Sell division, Like the D sells fries.

And that's not us, Doin' that; Look for the mink In the temple hat.

Place the blame Where it belongs. They love the fame And money for songs.

`Cause it wasn't all a big mistake, We did nothing wrong, to begin with. And you're falling for their filthy fake And the wrong pair of lips to kith.

Whitey, Whitey, he's your man And all you want is his ass in a can, This ain't no good, might even be bad, `Cause he's the best friend you EVER had.

See any black trace his roots To ye olde sod, as it exists today, His Afro cousins, so far a way, How they livin' and feelin', Toots?

They go back a million years, To the dawn of human time; Lion, tiger, and leopard fears, To not even mention tribal crime.

But some were plucked and trucked, Chained and hauled, by blacks, away. How lucky can you get when you get lucked? Even Mississippi was a brighter day.

And now we come to the hand on the whip, Who did what to whom, and how. House hand out to the field did slip, Not a-lookin' to whup on no cow.

And after whipping comes lynching, And this is the truth about that. The few of the very few for the cat, And less for the rope's choky pinching.

And you know there's another side, To this worn old coin of dissension. Black men bonded with worthwhile pride, To plantations too numerous to mention.

Read both pages, not just the one, For you put the steam upon the track. Rap and hip and hop in fun, And serve the `tude as a salty snack.

And that's a wrap.

Or, should Funky, Rude, Lewd, and Crude ever become award categories, how's this? "I'm sorry Haley / I never meant to hurt you / I never meant to make you cry / but tonight / I'm making my deposit." Gimme the keys, show me where the freakin' Internet's at. Click. (Yeah... but it's funny as fuck.)

And standing in for Mr. Emerson, this evening, on the presentation of the Grammy for Significant Work of the Decade, as you in this record-breaking audience know, controversial, because the decade is so young, is Miss Samantha Eden Kelly Logan. We understand Mr. Emerson is in prison because of Miss Kelly Logan, and that the writer's regrettably young friend is planning to pawn the statuette in order to raise money so Miss Rhageedha Williams can participate in further prosecution of the belabored artist, and so, ladies and gentlemen of the viewing and listening audience, to the Academy of Recording Artists comes truth, justice and the American Way.

Marshall doesn't mention obesity (Fat America! Belly to the telly, to the ears with jelly, free of Shelly, Ned even rounder than Nelly, never pass the baker's smelly, fast track to Helly, can't you telly?) or Rickover's trillion dollars' worth of nuclear -- tits on a bull -- submarines, nor the ruling-class Hebrews, in general, but he's still a child and a work in progress. My theory is early success is almost sure death for an artist, and I'll god-damned guarantee you I got where I am by being Bobby Boring for a long, long time. It took Mozart, in the most enriched environment, imaginable, nearly thirty years to really find himself, and, as a musician, yes, he could ride a wave of popularity from early on. I'm talking about writers, an entirely different breed who measure in thousands of pages and millions of words. This said, he, Lucky, and Celine are great company and three discs make a pretty good music collection; something that hasn't been true for twenty or thirty years since ABBA and the Bee Gees ruled.

In an extremely rare exception to my no-notes policy, I wrote something with a pencil while Sloggo, my slogging computer, was getting rammed. It goes something like this: a girl can find out how good a young lover is in a minute, with an older male, it may take years..

Guess that takes care of the housekeeping (dollhouse?) for the last week or so. Love the new ram stick and the camera. The first-person-singular novel reopens in a few more hours, probably with Daisy going all black bitch - psycho food -- before running off to the Star club. I'm sure the reason she wants to leave here is simply to find a place closer to there as walking a mile, even in the tropic evening air, after ten drinks can't be much fun. If I had my druthers, I'd haul Queenie out of school tomorrow (I mean, I doubt she'll go, anyway), and set her up here watching out for her three younger brothers. That would actually work, but Daisy's enigma is that she's an absentee drunk and dope addict of a mother, with four great kids, so it would be pretty hard to claim she's unfit. Comparing Queenie to my sister, who never fails to maintain a perfect combination of petulant bossiness and aggressive stupidity and ignorance, yet who had horses and elegant schooling, where Louise is lucky to get a meal a day, opens a can of worms most wealthy parents would probably prefer leaving at the furthest recess of the highest shelf on the most out-of-the-way cupboard in the butler's pantry. My three nephews, with a liberal, involved father, are more unlikable in ten minutes than Elston, Tonton (Llewellyn), and Lindon (yes, I have a Linden and a Lindon) will manage to be during the average year. And, of course, in a thoroughly backhanded and cynical way, liberal parents get exactly what they deserve -- a lifetime of misery over dysfunctional issue and a dynasty with emphasis on the nasty. "White America!"

More is less. Here in Belize we have a perfect example. When I first lived here, '79, the country (250,000) had one radio station (FM). It was excellent. Now there are two stations in Dangriga, alone, and perhaps a dozen, English and Spanish, "nationwide". They probably suck. Who knows? They work on such miniscule budgets they are unable to maintain their equipment, so the signal quality is unlistenable, however unscientific that measurement may be. (Yes, it may be bad but it's no worse than the taxis, of which, again, there are a hundred (for 10,000) when there should be ten. (By comparison, Santa Fe, with nearly fifty thousand, had no taxi service, whatever, between 1975 and 1980 -- probably still doesn't.)) Daisy's kids get so vastly much less than their American cousins (they had no chairs `till they moved here) you wouldn't understand if I told you, and they are so much better than your kids we run into the same failure to communicate. Understand?

The pianist, Horowitz, said if he missed practice for a day, he knew it, if he missed for two days, the conductor knew it, if he missed three days, the orchestra knew it, and if he missed four days, the audience knew it. I've missed almost a week. O, mercy, will I ever write again? Fortunately, I'm catching a bit of a break here by being in the opening scene of a sensational novel. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. (If you think a little stiffness crept in let it be a reminder as to exactly how hard it actually is to practice the ultimate art. Sigh. I guess I've got to write this. A note to myself reminding me that while stiffness plays poorly in politics, it has its place. Time to get back to work)

Gerrend had grown up. He'd been married to the now fifteen --year-old Annie for far more time than was legal, but they were far happier than was legal, so it worked out well. Danny had liked the story of the Icelandic valley as well as his rock-star partner, and was experimenting with actually performing oral sex on the handsome lieutenant, instead of passively accepting the results of others' handiwork. Gerrend held the tentatively bobbing face gently in his hands, and Mick reached around in front of the boy to jerk him off. Gerrend ejaculated, first, his semen flowing openly from the nine year old's mouth in spite of the throbbing of the little boy's throat as he tried to keep up with the heavy, white, salty spurting, then the little boy lost control and convulsed, shuddering and gasping in Mick's strong arms.

Their final sex act, before setting out to explore the nudist camp gave Mick his release. The whole crew worked together to get the man and the little in perfect position, and the now experienced Kersey held the man firmly against the child's anus, allowing just the forepart of his glans to penetrate the young body before a few soft, wet strokes brought the artist to the same plane he'd have found himself on if he'd actually been able to be alone with McKenzie Phillips when she was ten years old.

Nancy Schroeder was also being liberally freshened, as they call it in animal husbandry, by the tall, athletic Rob. His pulsing was strong, and seemed to last forever, then he, still shuddering, took her hard and fast for some minutes, until she crashed in his arms, a wave washing back to the sea.

Finding two buckets in the impromptu camp side between the runway and the beach, Nancy and Rob each filled on and carried it to the airplane. They spilled the seat water in a long streak in front of the two engines. Rob guided the eight year old through the starting procedure, then watched on proudly as she gunned both throttles hard to get the wheels rolling in the sand. The damp sand protected the propellers from the abrasive sand, and soon the light twin was bouncing down the taxiway, it's primitive suspension banging gently and making the trip to the end of the runway more fun than flying. They cleared the area with a sweeping turn, again she gunned the big Lycomings, and in a minute they were talking to Bimini.

A nine thousand five hundred feet, Nancy trimmed the aircraft and the pilot and co-pilot gave each other an intimate wink. The time had come to close the cowl flaps.

CHAPTER ONE

"Mark the Ariflex. Roll video A. Roll video B. Action."

Allen Rigby clipped the radio to his belt and looked around from his perch high above the deck of the camera boat. It was a dead tricky shot, broaching the Bertram hard-over and the base of a roller, then gunning her full throttle on the reverse course, surfing back up the wave, hanging her on two thousand horsepower until just the props of the thirty footer stayed with the comber, and her bow hung three beats before crashing into the face of the following wave. Shaking this off, she had to be at thirty knots before she reached Allen's boat. Nigel's flipper flashed for a second in the Caribbean sun, right on cue. He had to dive to a submerged buoy eight feet under the surface, and film the accelerating sport fisherman with two feet between his camera and the twin screws cavitating under the torque of the big, modified diesels.

There was the sliding, slewing turn, the spray blown by the six-inch, transom-mounted exhausts as Nancy's hand set the twin throttles firmly against their stops, the staggering response to triple her design power, and, yes, oh, yes, cake and candles for Nancy, someone had taught the kid a thing or two about timing, she'd hit it to within a twentieth of a second, and there she hung in the viewfinders, foaming back, tough, and obviously ready as hell for more.

Tracking perfectly. Out of the second wave which did nothing more than throw her on a flat, hard plane as she stretched for the underwater camera. It came in seconds, then, bow down and furious, the "Salty Bitch" drove at the "A" boat, swerving hard to starboard at the last instant, then sharply back to her original course, where she disappeared, ever accelerating, until her image was too small to be meaningful.

"All cut. All cut," Allen said into his radio. "Any problems?"

"Film for the can," came one voice, "A video gets an A," came another. "Bubbles from B." Then he relaxed, pretty sure the bubbles weren't from a leaking housing.

"That's a real brother and sister team," Allen said to the boy kneeling on the crow's nest adjacent his director's podium.

"Timing's as crucial as baseball," the boy said, nodding. "I don't know how she does it. I'd see that huge wave looming in the windshield and I'd slow down, at least a little."

"And she keeps getting better," the young director added. "At everything. Perception, timing, response. Want me to prove it? Just listen."

Allen reclaimed the little r/f transceiver, holding the speaker to Lincoln's ear. He knew his girl. "Can we do another take?" came the pretty girl's happy voice. Allen laughed into the set. "Your brother's got the loot, he says we shoot, we shoot." He was kidding, but he didn't have to worry about being caught out. Sure enough, the pixie's voice came back in a few seconds: "Rick says it's too dangerous for Nigel. We got it. We were lucky. The End."

"He's a guy you think you love until you really find out," Allen whispered just over the trade wind.

"Still, I don't blame her," Lincoln said, high-fiving the young director as he dismounted from his tower seat and the two climbed back down to the deck of his barge.

"Nor I," Allen said as they made their way down the short ladder, "and the odd thing is, Nigel would be the first to volunteer to do a dozen more takes to please her."

Two ADs were running the r/f feeds on a monitor and the director and his eleven year old nephew gazed intently over their shoulders as they switched between the A and B rolls. Add the 35mm film from the Ariflex, taken from his boats p.o.v, plus two or three hundred stills taken aboard the "Salty Bitch" (name bowdlerized by virtue of a cute and obviously female poodle curled up beneath the gold leaf) and the scene was going to be an editor's dream.

The storyboard called for radio dialogue instigating the savage turn, and the principles ran their lines several times as Allen listened over a head set. Getting a thumbs up from the technician at the Nagra, he finally fell back into his chair and wiped his brow. Daylight exteriors were hot and exhausting, but when the sun sank within about twenty degrees of the horizon, they were over. He watched two of the crew wrestle the heavy film camera from it's tripod and place it in his own specially designed packing case. Within a minute of the door being latched, the humidity would be evacuated, and the camera quickly cooled with liquid nitrogen. In all, the delicate color film would be exposed to tropic temperatures for less than ten minutes before it was frozen for the trip back to New York. Treated like the rarest caviar, it would knock the lonely editor for a loop, as his footage often did.

By now the flotilla was reforming, the water vibrating to the throb and hoarse burble of the Bertram as she nestled amongst her flock of Whalers and motorized rafts. Clipboards and cassettes in waterproof plastic bags were handed aboard Allen's barge, and he spent ten minutes logging every number and note into his journal. Cast and crew work from sun to sun, but the director's work is never done.

There, the last phrase and digit. "Hi, Nancy, super nice job. You added ten year to Nigel's life."

"Rick did most of it," the girl said.

"Well, it came out in spades," the young director noted. "The new cameras are worth sleeping with. I keep thinking video can't get any better, and surprise, surprise, surprise."

"Cool," said Nancy.

"They'll have the camera tapes cued up in a minute," Allen said, "and judging from the radio images, they should be something to behold."

The monitor was carefully repositioned for the larger audience, a tarp shielding it from the lowering sun. The first AD pushed the play button and cast and crew sat in silence as the HDTV images snapped off the screen, virtually in 3D, they were so crisp and saturated. In post production, melding in film footage would highlight the electronic glory, with the traditional medium distinctly holding its own when it came to drooling quality. Add hundreds of stills and the not-so amateur footage Nancy was always shooting with her personal camera, and they'd crack the nut yet.

How were you polite to these people? They all seemed jittery. The studio and executive suites were crawling with them, assistants to this, aids to that, interns here, wanna-be's, there, none a whole heaping lot over twenty five. What good did it do for them to be scared? They weren't in town for the long haul, all they had to do was ride a single elevator to know it was twenty-eight, and out, for the overwhelming majority. Accountants, writers, editors, men and women who could have performed in their dotage, nowhere close to thirty years old. What happened to them all? How many restaurants needed a matre de who could talk about an all-night session with this star or that director? Did they drive taxi cabs? Were there a hundred doormen on Fifth Avenue who could clean up a storyboard as fast as a kid could blast zombies? Children of the Trash, Rick called them, and the only bright side to their jittery existence was the number of years the average player would do penance, and pretty extreme penance, at that, for the nervous scuttling they believed to be media careers. They were funny in a pathetic way, maybe someday someone would write their story, or do the world a favor and ignore them as they seemed to ignore anything resembling intelligence.

Rick's name got him entry, but this just ended up being a nuisance. A New York elite ruled, unaware of and unconcerned with the vastness of their mediocrity -a hundred times more likely to be interested in a Punch and Judy version of "Happy Days", with that nice Winkler boy, than anything to do with: "You are kidding, aren't you? A fishing show in prime time? Why don't you team up with Andrea Martin, and we'll get you a comedy where you raise a chimp together." Anything Rick Schroeder could conjure up concerning the horror of all screens, and a hundred-pound chimpanzee, did not smack of comedy.

Somehow the handsome, wide-eyed actor always felt an inclination to bow as he left this or that drywall hutch of an office, as if some subspecies dwelled therein, and bowing gave an excuse to keep an eye on the infernal thing until the door was closed and safely latched.

In Japan, how different. He was quickly escorted to where he wanted to be, and that was with the senior design staff and their hand-built prototypes. So vivid were these sessions that the idea dawned to approach "One Fish at a Time" from a highly technical angle. Megapixels versus Saturday night lassitude, and, boy, did Saturday night ever need a revamp. Had for years. And the island nation had not only provided the stunning new cameras, but invested solidly in the pilot. In his heart he knew it was because of the pictures of himself and Nancy, thong and bikini, bait fishing off a Caribbean pier that had done the trick for much of the financing, but in a way that was half the point.

"Nice fish." What more was there to say, whether it was a tiny rass sucked gently into a specimen jar, or a two-hundred-pound marlin. Not much. New York had a point. But art is more subtle; tones, relief tones, undertones, flat tones, harmonic tones, dissonant tones, and sharp tones. Brother and kid sister. There were millions of such couples, and most of them were missing out; sacrificing what might be the only truly spiritual experience in all of creation at the altar of superstition and salesmanship. Now that would have been a fair fight. How suggestive could he and Nancy be? How subtle and devious, or how honest and obvious? How long could his right arm be around her slim waist, how low could his hand ride on her eight year old belly, and, again, for how long. If they were to rinse in the dock-end shower, could they be shown, from the rear, of course, entering naked? Could they play kiss each other? Play date each other? Reprise favorite love scenes over a bottle of wine in obviously secluded surroundings? Tell their peers? Provide a vivid example of how fitness paid off? Change the world for the better, at least a little?

The list went on, the real list. The Japanese nodded and paid, but that was a far thing from New York Prime Time. Their tolerance was too tolerant, their love of schoolgirl's, too superficial. Nah. New York, or bust.

The First AD was playing Nigel's footage, as the flotilla took a heading for port and picked up to leisurely cruising speed. Allen had known the photographer would cheat on his safety line, but not to the point the spinning propellers actually passed at his level. His head and camera must have been within six inches of the keel of the speeding boat. Very nice work.

"We could kiss twenty-five times, a little longer, each time, then they could choose exactly what they wanted," Nancy said. Although the story board showed down time for the steam back to their island, the B camera was active. In the age of essentially free tape (it's reusable), B cameras should always be active. Nigel was using the machine to capture his boss and Nancy commenting on the propeller video. The kiss was congratulatory, at least at its beginning. Allen asked Lincoln how long? The boy didn't know, so he asked the dive master. Predictably, he suggested coming up for air after a precise interval. Other counties were heard from, cook to captain. The suggestions ranged from twenty seconds to two minutes. Obviously, it was not a fish and peck crew. Then, quick as a wink, the little girl had solved the problem. Shoot everything from a one-second buss to a two-minute passion-fest. When modern teens say hubba-hubba, you know you're on the right track. Nigel focused, Nancy grinned, and Rick kissed himself good-bye.

Young Lincoln cued the players and started the camera, took over from his uncle at logging each sequence before calling Action, again. As the sun sank lower, the crew quietly went about the business of adding one carefully filtered light after another, so the video quality actually improved as the sacrilegious young couple also improved. And irony abounded if irony can abound. A hard, hard sell it would be in New York, while the out-takes would be worth millions. Insanity where you expected normalcy, normalcy where you were told to expect insanity. It wasn't a mad world, or it would not exist, but, rather, the maddest world which could exist. So, then, what was wrong with pissing it off? Pointing to a wallow-queen and saying, flat out, if your dad had been able to express himself fully to you, you would have stayed svelte for the pure carnal pleasure of having five orgasms in half an hour, and your dad would have stayed fit for the teaching? Pointing to a future tubby hubby and saying if you don't have a hot young sister, one of your friends does, and how `bout it?

They'd compromise. Neither Schroeder had any interest in shock therapy. They didn't need it, and the audience might tune it out. Lingering looks, lingering touches, kisses that stretched propriety by a scant beat or two; the entrance to the rinse shower moved behind palm trees, perhaps with the eight year old's little bra tossed over a frond, then to a not-overly-obvious fade to black, as an edge to the edge.

Page from a draft script:

RICK, WALKING AHEAD OF NANCY, SUDDENLY RELIZES HE DOESN'T WANT TO WEAR HIS DRESS WATCH, A GIFT FROM THAT DAY'S PARTY (SCENES 34-41), AND CIRCLES TO THE LEFT TO RETURN TO HIS CABIN, PASSING NANCY BUT NOT NOTICING HER. ON HIS RETURN, HE SEES HER BRA OVER THE PALM BRANCH. HE PICKS IT UP, MUSING AT THE ARTICLE OF CLOTHING. HE PROCEEDS TO THE CLOSED DOOR OF THE RINSE SHOWER, AND KNOCKS.

NANCY

Where did you go? I thought we

were coming here together.

RICK (Through the bamboo door.)

I just forgot about the new watch,

so I went back to the cabin. But

I found something beside the

path.

NANCY

Is it pretty tiny?

RICK

Delicate.

NANCY

A gracious beast you are.

RICK

Nancy, I don't know, but

it's pretty hard to, you know,

lose something like this, isn't

it?.

NANCY

Experienced girls lose theirs.

CLOSE UP. RICK'S FACE. COPING WITH MORE NEWS FROM NANCY. TALENT SHOULD REVIEW AND REPLAY SCENES AS APPENDED DURING REHERSAL.

MORE

Sober crew. Alcohol was just to dangerous. Instead, the crew relied on old friendships and shared experiences, and nothing beat spending three or four hours a day in a good book. I take that back.

"Uncle Allen?" Lincoln asked, "can we talk, or do you want to get to sleep."

"It's all exteriors tomorrow," the director said, "so we won't have to head out until after nine. Plenty of time to sleep."

"God," the boy replied, "because I feel really talkative. Like, there's a lot of stuff I sort of half know, and Mom doesn't seem to thrilled at filling me in."

"Dad's don't do any better at it," Allen observed. "Kids are a curse from day one, then they want to know where they came from. That should end it, but they're protected by law."

"I sort of know the theme," the eleven year old replied, "so I'm interested in variations."

"Tap dancing is a variation," Allen observed, to the boy's giggle.

"Think North by Northeast," Lincoln prodded.

"That's Eventan Island," the young director said.

"Will you take me on Sunday?" the boy asked.

"I don't see nudism as a variation, it's how we all start out," Allen said.

"We all start out inarticulate, but some of learn to speak and sound dumb," quoth the boy.

"And some fall in love with young boys, say, around age eleven, and wouldn't dare be naked with them for reasons that would be obvious at one hundred yards."

"Well," Lincoln said, "boys can have the same feelings, and can be really embarrassed about them. Scared of them. I don't know which. Probably both."

"And being naked together would address the issue?" Allen asked.

"It's the only thing I could think of. I wanted to ask you to wash my hair in the shower, but it's too small and I knew you'd get suspicious."

"It's hard for me, too," Allen whispered across the three-foot gap between their beds. "Men hitting on boys is more variation than suits most circumstances."

"I'm sure it can have far-reaching legal, moral, physical, emotional, ethical, spiritual, and practical fallout and ramifications," Lincoln said, "but I brought up the island, and I know men take boys there, so you're in the clear."

"Okay," the young director said, "we go. Tomorrow and Sunday. We're three pages ahead of schedule. The ADs need to sharpen their fangs. No major safety issues. Rob will be in at ten in the morning so he can fly us over. From noon Saturday, to noon, Monday, because I'm that kind of guy."

"That sounds like a lot," the boy replied, "so I think it might be really smart and really a good idea to, you know, practice a little."

"Loving you takes less practice all the time," Allen intoned, "so I don't know what you're talking about."

"Where there is less," Lincoln said, "there should be none, but to get to none, there has to be some." Made sense.

"None's a pretty safe bet at this distance," Allen said to his nephew.

"Then we should do some-thing about it," Lincoln replied.

Both young males flung aside their sheets, then sat on the edges of their beds, knees almost touching. Ample tropic moonlight flooded the rustic shelter and a cooling breeze filtered through the bamboo of the palapa. Both were wearing only boxer shorts, and their eyes frequently double checked, and double checked, again, for signs of how they felt about each other. Each knew, himself, of course, but boxers are boxers, and one can't be too sure when it comes to sensitive issues. Tentatively, they spread their legs, making any tenting or bulging unlikely, unless...

"Have you let a man touch you before?" Allen asked, his voice a whisper.

"No," Lincoln whispered back.

"Do you know what homosexuals do with young boys?" the older male continued, excited by the excitement in the boy's voice at being quizzed in a hoarse whisper.

"They molest them," Lincoln answered.

"Do you know what sexual molestation consists of?" Allen went on.

"No," the eleven year old said.

"If we were at the camp, and you saw a handsome man and a cute boy walk off down a trail in the woods, would you like to follow them and hide in the bushes so you could watch what they did together?"

"If you were with me to explain everything," the boy allowed.

"What if you were with Rick?" Allen asked.

"I guess I'd let him guide me," the boy answered, "but I want it to be you, especially the first time."

"If Rick was with us, and went off with a boy like you, would you like to watch what happened?"

"Yes," Lincoln said. "I mean, I really like him, and I know he's dead cute, and I know he'd be gentle, so I'd like to watch what happened, you know, if it was a nice kid."

"What if he caught you spying on him and the boy he was with," the quizzing went on, "and he wanted you to come close? Would you let him pull your boxers down?"

"I think the boys that go to the camp wear regular underpants," Lincoln observed.

"Do you have any packed?" Allen asked.

"Two pairs, but they're just plain white ones. Fruit of the Loom. I don't have any bikini ones or thongs. Nothing sexy."

"Well," Allen noted, "you do have a lot to learn, but some of it is hard to explain. Sex stuff is, to put it in the mildest possible terms, to understate it to the point of being ridiculous, complicated. I mean, it begins at complicated, then lurches off to confusing, thorny, knotty, baffling, and ends with dysfunction, addiction, psychosis and suicide.

"For example," Allen said, "from your point of view, a tiny bathing or pair of underwear might seem to be erotic, but, the truth is, the most erotic thing a boy can ever wear is a pair of plain, white, regular underpants. Briefs. Any attempt to say more by flaunting only cheapens anything that happens by way of excess accessibility. The same with behavior. Being coy and artificially shy is bad; being bold and predatory, is worse.

"And, by the way, you were perfect with your first questions. You're serious about wanting something to happen between us, so what happens may last and become a real part of our you-know-what."

"The R-word."

"That's the one."

"I've got white underpants in my suitcase," Lincoln said.

"And I brought a lot of candles in case I have to work after they turn the generator off, so I could get a good look at you."

"I'll put them on in the bathroom, okay?" the boy asked.

"Yes," Allen said, adding: "Linc, bamboo walls are largely psychological. We'll have to be very quiet if you let me touch you, okay?"

"We can pretend we're creeps," the boy responded. Great answer, and Allen choked back a spontaneous giggle as the two rose from their beds to get on with the housekeeping. Even though neither tried to hurry, all was set in a couple of minutes. Four candles glowed from the posts of Lincoln's rustic bed and there was a nervous tap at the bathroom door.

"You can come in backwards, if you're embarrassed," Allen whispered through the gap in the portal.

"Thanks," Lincoln said through the crack, unlatching the hook and eye, "I've never been like this before. They don't fit too well now."

"Okay," Allen soothed. "I'll open the door and close my eyes. I was your age, too, and I know how it feels."

"Does it feel different when you get mature?" the boy asked, as Allen swung the door wide.

"Not in the least. Nine to ninety-nine. Same old same old. Pretty hopeless, eh?"

The young director sense the passage of the pre-teen, waiting for the squeak of the boy's bed, before he turned toward the youth. "You comfortable," he asked.

"I'm bad-side down," Lincoln said, "so you can open your eyes."

Allen did. The modest child had pulled the mosquito netting closed behind him. The fabric filtered the candlelight, softening it to a haze that washed delicately over the tall, handsome boy's back. Lincoln lay on his stomach, his hands under his left cheek as he faced his uncle. "Do they look okay from the back?" he asked.

"That's something you may not fully appreciate until you're a little older," Allen explained, "unless you have the same tendencies a lot of males have, and think even a six or seven year old can look pretty cute, front or back, in plain, white underpants."

"I'll take that as a yes," Lincoln said.

"'And how!' would be more precise," Allen replied, to the boy's happy giggle.

"Do you want to talk more," Allen asked, "or do you want me to come in beside you?"

"Can we do both?" the child asked. "Be together, and talk?"

"It's not a black and white situation," Allen said, referring back to his monologue on complication, "but more a matter of time. We can do both, yes, but for how long? If we're close to each other, physically, that interferes with the subtleties of verbal jousting. How many opera, wine, and sartorial quips do you think Niles would be rattling off if he had his nephew lying beside him in his little Mickey Mouse underpants?"

"Yeah," the eleven year old mused aloud, "and if John, the PDA on NYPD Blue', was babysitting for the little Sipowicz boy, Theo, and the boy wore Dragonball Z' underpants, then John might stop talking about being gay all the time."

It was a point taken as well as a point can be taken, and, who knew, with a child so bright and responsive, maybe he could enter the net, lie by the eleven year old, and they could talk like buddies, tell all their secrets, for awhile. "I'm embarrassed, too," the young director whispered through the netting, "so turn your eyes the other way."

Predictably, Lincoln complied immediately. Allen stepped out of his boxers, and, naked, rummaged quickly in his ditty bag, then slowly entered the bower, lying on his stomach, close to the nervous child.

"You can look," he whispered.

Lincoln turned and smiled softly. "Hi," he whispered.

"Hi," the young adult whispered softly in reply.

"Are you naked?" the boy asked.

"Yes," Allen said.

"Can a naked man molest a boy in underpants?" the intelligent child wanted to know. It was an interesting point of semantics, the more so because any lack of precision was traceable to the inadequacy of the root word. The Catholics used abused' as a scapegoat expression; did so-and-so abuse so-and-so? Father Harry abuse little Chipper Knobbyknees? Like morality' versus decency', the terms came with enough baggage to stump old Noah Webster after spinning him a time or two in his grave. Free will. Never alluded to in dialogue on the subject; molest', abuse', with child' a single word fitting all human beings under ages written out in books. Double the complexity if you happened to like books, to generally regard them as superior to television when it came to dealing with the intricacies of existence in widely variant cultures, as brighter, taller signs, for all their fine print, delineating whichaway one would best proceed.

Yet the answer was a simple No. A naked man could rape a boy in underpants, but if any presumption of accord was relevant, even if things went a little wrong, both molestation and abuse were nullified. Could a naked man make love to a boy in underpants? Perhaps not as completely as he might like, but he could try to get them off. Here it became seminal. He could make love to the almost naked child, go all the way with him, and coax him into going all the way, but if he pulled the waist band down one inch, against the free will of the boy, he both molested and abused the child and his decency collapsed, for once, with his morals. (Turpitude all the way.) This put the entire burden on the `free-will' phrase, leaving the language to handle it, even if it didn't exactly relish the idea. Would he have enhanced Lincoln's free will if he'd dismissed, in a friendly and tolerant enough way, any extensive mention of Eventan Island? How much free will would he subject the boy to if he simply returned to his own bed and closed and pinned the netting? What if he were in his own bed, now, gazing at the apparition four feet away, and, in a husky voice, telling the child he'd buy him a jet ski if he could come over to his bed and stay for a little while? A ten-dollar watch? A thousand-dollar watch? An A in geometry? A sprightly daughter? What did it cost to free a will? How much justice could you afford, if you got caught? Sex and the law. The law and the language. You could abuse a child without molesting him, just use a stick, but paradox was not far off, because you could abuse a child by not molesting him.. Surely, if he hightailed it back to his own bed, or stomped out demanding another room, that would be severe abuse of the child breathing nervously inches from his right elbow. And what about the morning; if the boy threatened to expose him? Morality, decency, abuse and extortion would team up with only decency, paradoxically, coming to the defense. What if the boy became insatiable, wanted encounters during working hours, and all night, every night? Free will. If this eventuality occurred with the long-legged young male breathing the more raggedly beside him, what would be the morality and decency factors in paying him not to engage in homosexual activities? And if that didn't rattle the linguistic bars, how about if the boy offered to pay him? To? Not to?

Nancy had been instrumental in having Rob Nester hired as lead writer. Allen hoped the girl knew what she was doing, because marching this dog and pony show by the standards and practices nabobs was going to require the footwork of a pixie and the kick of a mule, to somehow, make them want to be nowhere else in the world. Good. Conflict. What happens next? Yet, the story would be flawed. Resilience and fortitude, diligence, and the grace, courage, and intelligence of the hero should vanquish no end of dildacity, choreographed to a climatic resolution, to comply with prevailing market forces and artistic preferences (somehow married). They weren't going after the urban elite by hiring janitors to spy or tapping into computers, noble options exercised in modern storytelling, but through the grinding banality of creating technical perfection, in the first place, and slipping a real fat one by the censors, in the second. It would not be Eddie Murphy and the orange juice futures, it would be a tribe of Caribbean free spirits tearing at freaking everything, with any good guys so dubious it would be a hokey joke to try to pass them off as role models. And Mr. Square Jaw, himself, at the head of the triangular formation. Rick. As next-door as a boy could be. In truth, their cause, if that's what it was, would have been better served by a Sean Penn type; a feature-film Brady's sister-and-brother neighbors type, sort of half there on the street, with the rest requiring no particular stretch on the part of the audience. But Rick and Nancy? That was going all the way in a single step. No Woody Allen. No Sandra Dee. No ifs, ands, or buts, this clear-skinned boy with that clear-skinned kid sister, down-home and absolute to the loaf of Wonder Bread on the butcher-block butcher block. And Neal Armstrong thought he'd taken a giant step.

"Are all child molester as rough as you are?" Lincoln asked.

"Sorry," Allen said, trying not to let on that his nephew absolutely dazzled him. Imagine wool-gathering in the presence of such a child. Turpitude. Shame on him.

"It's going to be a triumph deluxe," the boy said in Simon Callow's voice, obviously tuned in. How easily he could have asked: "Are you thinking about another boy?" Good kid.

"If anyone sees it," Allen said.

"When everyone's seen it," the boy rejoined.

"This I would hate," the young director admitted, "going up against it on Saturday night."

"The energy savings will be colossal," the boy observed. "No one will be going anywhere."

"'What's going on with Rick and Nancy?'," Allen said. "We can start seeding it as blind classifieds. Then whisper to the tabloids. Is this really them?' How bold are they?' What would they be doing if it were legal?' How much has happened?' How much do they want to happen?' Who does this young couple turn to?' What will their children think?' Does the public matter?' Then you add the fortune tellers and soothsayers, the psychics and herbalists, and congress gets involved, calls the whole thing a colossal public nuisance, gets impeached in seventy hours and twenty minutes, goes home, tunes in, and the world makes another rotation on its axis."

"With a lot of happy young girls kissing their cute big brothers Good morning," Lincoln added.

"And...?" Allen asked. The man gazed intently into the young boy's eyes. It was impossible to see the wheels turning, for they spun with blinding speed, registering their winning combination almost immediately in the bright eyes.

"Nephews kissing their cute uncles?"

"Only ones they love," the dazed adult managed to croak.

"Will it get stronger while we're asleep, or wear off?" the child asked.

"You have an absolutely magnificent mind," Allen replied, "don't ever change it."

"You're directing an absolutely magnificent picture," the boy said, "but I do want you to change it. I want to be in it, with you. Not let Rick take all the heat. Nephew and uncle. I can sit in your lap while we bait fish. You wouldn't touch me like you're going to, tonight, but more than if we were indifferent."

"At least I wouldn't have to act," Allen mused, half to himself.

"Me, either," the boy said. "We could rip SAG of, times two. How would that look in our memoirs?"

"There's so much method in your madness," Allen said, "we might end up reputable members, after all." It was a savagely funny pun, and set Lincoln wheezing and choking, as boys are wont to do.

"I'm looking forward to working with you," the boy finally said.

"The pleasure will be all mine," his uncle replied.

"And I still say you're awfully gentle for a child molester," Lincoln said, his voice suddenly the softest whisper.

"If you turn over, I'll be gentler yet," Allen whispered back.

"You have to follow me," the boy said.

"I will," the young adult promised.

Still not touching, Lincoln rolled on his back, lying first with his arms at his side, then, feeling the hot stare of his uncle, raising his hands to link them behind his neck. Allen rolled over, and the boy gasped at the sight of his huge erection lying along the mature male belly with its trace of blond fuzz leading down from the navel. As impressed as Lincoln was, his uncle was his equal. The boy's white underpants tented dramatically, the tip of his teen penis jutting hard against a fold secured the right leg band. Indeed, the entire pair of underpants were askew as such a small garment had never been designed for such a big boy.

"Are you like me or were you circumcised?" Allen asked.

"Like you," the boy whispered back.

"I think this way's better for experimenting," the uncle noted, "but it's not very important."

"What happens when I start experimenting with you?" Lincoln asked.

"I'll cum," the young man whispered.

"What's that like?" he quizzed.

"Wet and messy," Allen whispered, "and very, very hot if you're excited."

"What's the best experiment?" the boy wanted to know.

"There are two basic kinds," Allen said, "hands, and lips and tongue and mouth. That may take getting used to."

"Is it a good idea to experiment to get used to something?" Lincoln asked.

"I wouldn't recommend hanging yourself to get used to suicide, or committing suicide to get used to death," Allen said, "but it might come in handy."

"Or mouthy?" the boy asked.

"As long as you don't hold your tongue," Allen observed.

"I just wish it was forked," the boy added, then they stared into each other's eyes for a long time, proving to themselves, if no one else, that literacy far surpassed godliness when it came to falling head-over-heels in love.

"Think of what we're thinking about," Allen said.

"I'm trying to," his nephew replied, "but I keep thinking about it." It didn't make much sense, but exemplified how lips and tongues can flirt with the facets of morality, while not breaking code one. Decent. The same organs could be used for bio release, no smiles, no words, and indecent at any age. It was hardly worth thinking about, but, as the core issue of their real project, they had no choice. Shaking the common ground was not something they looked forward to. The old adages cautions against wishing or striving for something one might actually obtain. Monkey's paw. Again, they had no choice. Rick and Rob didn't like to talk about it, but in private they admitted to seeing a scrambled-egg future for their culture, and felt the division and confusion caused by urban liberals was unsuitable as a basis for the long-term survival of an intricate and complex society. Credit, for example, was plastic fire, and food was slow-but-sure poison, yet both were served in heaping helpings and pitched hard and incessantly to the dumbest of the dumb and the youngest of the young. By very, very bad people.

But they were not a go-after crew. If millions of parents wanted to slop their kids out on catatonically vapid television fare, they were free to do so, no harm, no foul (as if), because it was legal. Don't tear down the status quo (while anticipating, with salivating tongue, it's self-inflicted demise), but, rather, set a new flag, bear a new standard, march a new route (that was actually plenty old, and world-wide in scope), then cluck over those too brain dead to follow, without raining on their ponderous, murky, dismal, what's-in-your-wallet? parade.

"Rob really has his work cut out for him, doesn't he?" Lincoln said

"Well," Allen said, "he has certain advantages. Writers get to create and perform at the same time. Painters and sculptors don't, they create, then open their work to the public. Same with musicians and all media artists, except writers. Their creation is their performance, and vice-versa. This gives them more scope, a wider canvas, so they can do a little tap dance in front of the cantina, and slip around back with a tomahawk. In a A Very Brady Movie', and all three films in the Back to the Future' trilogy the writers perform this particular stunt. Fun and games mixed with devastating commentary. Goes way back. Gilbert and Sullivan, and all the way to Gulliver and The Canterbury Tales. They used to call it satire, back when it was funny. Now things are as black as a diabetic's left foot, so we're, or, rather, Rob's stuck with substituting sex for a rubber glove on a beer bottle. Naturally, that's going to fill the In box with issues and opinions, so we're left blasting through on our freaking own. Total show, total product, totally here we totally are."

"They say Buddy Holly used to take the stage like that," Lincoln said. "Watch out, folks, you are about to be totally entertained."

"What's the most entertaining thing we've done, so far?" Allen asked his nephew.

"For a younger boy," he replied, "it's broaching the Bertram, for older boys it's the string top on the palm tree."

"If you'd been following Rick," the director asked, "and seen him take the top off the branch, then go in through the shower door, would you have tried to peek in through the bamboo?"

"Yes," said the boy, his white underpants suddenly straining to a surge of fresh excitement.

"What do you think you would have seen?" the hoarse voice asked.

"I think she might have wanted him to try it on, then they'd kind of wrestle over it."

"Would she try to get even with him?" Allen wanted to know. Once again they stared into each other's eyes, wishing they could be yet closer to each other and still focus. Again, the wheels spun like dervishes in the young lad's sublimely handsome head, and once again, all cherries.

"She'd try to get his suit off," the boy whispered in answer, "then she'd be ahead, because she would still have something on." Irreducibility equals genius.

"Would he be childish enough to let her?" Allen asked.

"He'd stop being childish, the minute he let her," the boy said with a nod, proving the point and saying a mouthful at the same time.

"Do you think she'd grow up, too?" Allen asked of his portable and personable fountain of wisdom.

"Unless her growth were somehow stunted by the sight of her brother coming after her," the young charmer said.

"Plus," Allen added, "her hair would turn white, she'd go all prune, and Rob would be flying in makeup experts from Timbuktu."

"It's a storyline," the pygmy Einstein noted.

"And a fishing show deals in lines," the mentor, managing to hold on by his fingernails, said, nodding theatrically so that his nose rubbed its pug duplicate on the boy's brown-eyed kid's face. It was their first physical contact, and the ninety pound genius did not let it go unnoted. "I like it when you touch me," he whispered.

"Do you think you're going to really give yourself to me, or be shy and reserved?" Allen asked.

"Is there a way to tell?" the eleven year old replied, "because I feel both ways."

"Kissing's a way," Allen said.

"So that's what it's for," the boy giggled.

A writer's mind is an inhabited mind. He's not the landlord and is lucky to have a key. The space sharing can be tedious. Allen wanted to kiss the soft, beautiful lips, but guess-who from the storyboard department was out for a walk. It didn't matter who, what mattered was his Thing, and his Thing was a breakthrough vision. Himself fishing for grunt (a favorite baitfish), his coltish nephew, bare chested, sitting on his lap to help. In a serious of close-ups, Lincoln is seen dipping his right index finger into the clean water of the fish bucket, then licking the finger free of the salty fluid. (No one said the rampant muses were all bad.) And against such vivid throwaways, was the necessity of complying with the mish-mash theory of writing. LaCarre is the most widely read example. Fill the work with so many characters, locations and machinations, a la "Perry Mason", "Matlock", "Murder She Wrote" and countless others, viewers can watch most episodes several times a year. Vivid scripting was too risky; once in awhile, sure, a "Pet Detective" was pulled out of the hat, vivid and enduring, but if less than perfect, it led to an "I've seen that" reaction before the first commercials air. (It appears directors have their share of nuisance muses.)

"Love's barometer, passion's thermometer," the writer/director acknowledged.

"What you need is an altimeter," the boy deadpanned, his eyes trying not to glow right out of his head.

"In love, attitude's more important that altitude," the older genius said.

"But if a boy can have a teacher with both," Lincoln said, "he can die any old time and know he didn't miss anything."

"Speaking of which," Allen said, "young homosexuals sometimes practice a thing, I've read about it, called a deathbed kiss."

"That must be a long one," the boy commented.

"Wrong," Allen was almost happy to say, "they are not more than three or four times longer than an ordinary kiss."

"They talk each other to death, first?" the boy guessed, and who could blame him? Guess again.

"No," Allen intoned, patiently, "they get beaten to death for glib misuse of mouth, tongue, and lips."

"Glad I'm not a wide-mouthed frog," quoth the boy.

"Do you give up?" his mentor asked.

"I guess so," Lincoln replied, Allen trying not to sigh with relief at the simple answer.

"Okay," the young man said, "it's totally mature. The reason it's called `deathbed' is that in all likelihood, it will be the last memory of your life."

"Aunt Tilly, fresh from her toilet," the merry child said, wiping a crust of imaginary lipstick from his cheek.

"If we slip out of first place in our first hundred episodes, it won't be your fault," the director whispered, stunned once again at the wildly rapacious beauty of a boy with a brain.

"You said `mature',." Lincoln mimicked in a pitilessly perfect imitation of Bevis.

"I meant mature," Allen explained," in the sense of what you might have seen happening between Rick and Nancy if you'd laid on your stomach in the shrubbery and peeked in through a crack in the shower for half an hour or so."

"Oh," the boy whispered, his suddenly trembling young voice as soft as a front-of-the-goose feather, "then it must be going directly to heaven; a virtual deathbed, I get it."

He was as beautiful wrong, as right, and wrong meant correcting him, and correcting him meant talking to him, and talking to him removed `virtual' from things heavenly. "It's mature and it's legitimate," he explained to the boy. "No tricks of syntax or semantics. There is a way to kiss that you will always remember, and that will be your last memory, unless you die in Rick's arms, or on your wedding night with Nancy."

"Mature, yet it lasts forever," the boy mused. "It must be awesomely perverted."

"No whips, chains, cuffs, or strangulation devices; vibrators, dildoes, drugs, liquors, scents, or potions, though a little weed, and a sniff or two of poppers never hurts anything; environmentally friendly, safe, easy, and convenient."

"You didn't mention `survivable'," the boy said.

"I'm just quoting you what I read," Allen said, "I'm not exactly an old hand with the boys, so it's an experiment. Some boys would hate it. The writer did say that, but think of their joy when they're on the brink of never having it happen again." (Directors deal in angles.)

"And the article wasn't in `The Anarchist's Cookbook'?" So much hope in the candle-lit eyes. Sweet affirmation; it was like bestowing absolution.

"No," Allen said, adding: "it wasn't," as this was not a boy to tempt with double-negatives, "and, since you've seen fit to express concern, however subtlety, over being talked to death, it might behoove pace and cadence if you'd assume survival."

"Well," the boy intoned, "we're blood, so I guess it's okay."

"How does blood taste?" Allen asked.

"They say salty," the boy replied.

"Good," said the mentor, "that gets us back on track."

"Vampire kisses. Deathbed. Should have been my first guess."

Way off course, once again. Who O who would talk this youngster back to where he belonged, take the time to refocus him for the umpteenth time?

"Pretend," Allen suggested, "one of said creatures has drawn from you every single drop of blood, down to the last pink molecule. Recalibrate, then tell me if you want me to tell you, because you might not want me to, and we could change the subject."

That got the boy's attention. "I want to," he said.

"Okay," Allen whispered, "I have to ask you some stuff about how much you know, so I'll know how to tell you. If anything's too private, just say so and I'll try to get the background I need another way."

"If I had a background," the boy said.

"You have none at all?" the director quizzed, "stuff happening on sleepovers or out in the woods or in a tree house?"

"Not even wedgies," the boy said, "just what I hear in the locker room, same as the other boys."

"Have any of them told realistic stories so you learned from them?" the director asked, as methodical in preparing the child for some pretty good news as he was in indexing the images from his cameras and the audio from his mics.

"Just about what happens at night, sometimes," the boy whispered, shyly.

"Has it been happening with you?" the young man asked.

"Twice," the boy acknowledged.

"It's that kind of thing I want to talk about with you, Linc," Allen whispered, "and I know it's really embarrassing at first, but you're not likely to freak out over anything, at this late date, so it would be cool if you'd try."

"It was the picture you sent," the boy said, "that night I was thinking about it before I went to sleep, then I had this vivid dream."

"We're you awake when it started happening?" the young uncle asked.

"I think so, because it kept happening again and again, like ten times, and it didn't seem like there could be more, in the whole world, so I must have been awake for all of it, don't you think?"

The boy had just ad-libbed the greatest sentence in the history of the English language, and, it went without saying, all other languages. Allen lay dazed looking into the surprisingly friendly and modest eyes. Where did such an absolute degree of genius come from? And it's relentlessness? It's omnipresence? It's never-off quality? Ask him the time, and he'd teach you a love of watches, wasting not a minute. His quickness? His lightning response? And what would his DNA look like? "You know what there has to be?" the uncle mused silently as the boy gazed expectantly into his eyes, "something to do with incest. Some fluke of genetics." ("After all," the uncle can be excused for thinking, "we come from the same stock, and I'm gaining with each project.")

"When's the last time it happened?" the same uncle wanted to know.

"When I got your second letter and picture," the boy said, "seven or eight days ago." Allen's eyes glazed. He'd been celibate awhile, himself, on the off chance something might develop with the boy he'd known casually over the years, but eight days?

"I think we have a lot to talk about," the older male said, "because the kind of thing that happens can be pretty intense, and if you're on the wrong track, it can take too long to stop to prevent a crash."

"That's why I wrote and asked for the pictures," Lincoln said.

"And it's why I wore just swim trunks," the man whispered.

"They came out well."

"And developed the storyline."

"That's what I'm waiting for."

"Okay," Allen said, in the tone teacher's use to review, "you know all the blood got drained out. You know different things happened to you a couple of times while you were sleeping. You made a correct statement when you said `salty'. You were wrong on an impressive number of guesses. You will have guessed it concerns an act of extreme intimacy of a homosexual nature between us. Finally, you have one burning question in that particularly exquisite mind of yours, so shoot."

"When?" the boy asked.

The thunderous applause of the audience is premature. This is not a one-night stand, this boy is freaking cross the T's, dot the I's, perfect. I mean to keep him that way. And I don't ask when, I tell it.

"Within the hour," Allen answered, "and, in the meantime, I want to find out if you have the vaguest idea of what I'm talking about."

"I guess we're going to do something very special together," the boy recited, "and it would still happen if I didn't have any blood, and some of it has happened before, and it's salty, which sounds good, and that I probably won't have my underpants on when it happens."

"You make listening in class, cheating," the fond uncle said.

"You tease me in your lectures," the boy replied, "and I'm flattered, so I try to stay awake on this comfortable bed until the very tip, tip ending."

"Better than hurling in the stool if I get it wrong," Allen said.

"You'd have to get it wrong like O.J.'s verdict to move me three feet," the boy confided.

"Picture this," Allen said, "you're looking up into the shower. You see Rick washing Nancy's hair. Then his hands go to her neck, and he massages her as the water rinses out the shampoo; but he doesn't stop. She leans back against his bare chest, then stands on her toes, reaching back around his neck with her long, slim arms. She's display as a female to her older brother, and he begins to take her as a female. His hands go from her neck to her shoulders, then down over her bare chest and her tiny, developing buds of nipples. She wriggles happily as he used both his strong, athletic hands all over her chest and tummy, working lower to her belly and her little panties. At some point, she turns. He's her brother, and she only wants to go so far on this date. She pulls down his suit as you stare through the bamboo slats, five or six feet away. Rick is huge, totally aroused by what Nancy is letting him do. There's a bench in the shower. She turns the water off, and lays her brother on her back. His waist is now three feet from you. She straddles his far thigh, and then she does something very special. Do you know what it is?"

"With her hands?" Lincoln asked.

"Yes," his young mentor said.

"That's masturbating, I think," Lincoln answered, a little timid after so many wrong guesses.

"Yes," Allen said, relieved, for all the subtlety of his efforts at instigation, to have completed a giant-step, "that's what I want to do with you, lying on our backs, side by side, with my left leg over your right leg. I want to do it while you watch, and watch you do it."

"I'll have to go second, because I don't know how. Vivid as it may have been, the story of Rick and Nancy Schroeder is fictitious, and a kid my age knows the names of a lot of things he can't exactly do."

Somewhere on the planet there probably was something the boy couldn't do, but Allen Rigby was sure it had nothing to do with being a lover.

"Like `Myst'," the young uncle said, to the boy's quick, light giggle. Without hurrying, he continued. "We lie side by side, and yes, I can start doing it. We can talk while it's happening, at least at first, and you can stop any time you like, or ask question, or experiment in any way that doesn't involve sharp blades or strong acids."

"It still sounds like fun," the bright-eyes chirped.

"The fun doesn't last," the man assured the boy.

"Maybe that's why they invented the circus," Lincoln responded, devastating his uncle once again. He was clever, this nephew of his, but writing him would be impossible. Maximum reader IQ would be two hundred, and his would test at double that. He would boggle a theater, and fights would break out between those laughing over the last line and their pew mates wanting to hear the next one. Editors sometimes did that, hung their heads, said to themselves, "If only," and slipped a rejection slip in the envelope. Their lack of courage would haunt them for years, but norms and convention paid the bills.

"I'll remind you you said that in a few minutes," Allen promised.

"Anything, as long as it's together," the obviously happy but increasingly nervous youth said. Thus it was they dropped the circus.

"According to the article," Allen said, "you have to take your own underpants off. I know we rubbed noses a little, but we shouldn't touch, except where our legs meet, until, as you said, the tip, tip end."

"I hope we get to make up for lost time, then," the eleven year old commented.

"Totally guaranteed," Allen promised, nor was he just whistling "Dixie".

"And if I'm thinking of something else my last hours in croak city, who hands me the refund?" the boy asked.

"I'll still be alive to keep both eyes on you, so not to worry," Allen answered.

"Then pay up now," the boy said, "because I'll be thinking of you, dead or alive, present or absent, period."

"I'm not being selfish here," the director said, "but that's more-or-less the whole point."

Meantime, the child was taking down his underpants. Raising his hips high, and Allen knew he'd have done so if it had been his mature hands at the waistband, then exposing himself neither horridly and shamefully, nor hokeing it up with a lingering bump and grind routine. Just getting himself completely naked for what was going to happen. The boy raised his knees, and peeled the white briefs to his ankles, then kicked them free, as anxious, now, to see himself, as he'd never been before, as the child molester at his right elbow. Completely naked, he lowered his knees, and spread his left leg wide. Allen covered his right leg with his left leg, and, using his right hand, began fondling himself in the manner of a pedagogue initiating training in a forbidden ritual.

"This is jerking off," he whispered, as the boy's right hand reached hesitantly to his huge, hard pre-teen erection. Wordlessly they stared at each other. Silently, the boy copied the young man, finding the technique surprisingly easy to master. Baited breath, half holding, half panting, his body shaking as much from watching Allen as from the feelings shocking through his body from his own wanton touch of himself. And then they were doing it. Jerking off together. Each knowing how; not racing each other, not proud, or anything, just classic mutual masturbation of the first kind.

"Later we can experiment with doing it for each other," Allen whispered, his own hips beginning to buck.

"I like the watching part," the boy whispered back, his eyes riveted to what his older partner was doing.

Minutes passed. Things were beginning to transition. Where once there'd been two buds, experimenting, enjoying freedom in each other's presence, now young lovers began appearing. As brother of the stroke, their breathing began deepening as they began to tense and tremble. In a moment they were sweating, their legs were twining sinuously, with emphasis on the sin, their hips bucking solidly against each other, as well as toward the thatched roof of the palapa.

"Do you like me watching you?" Allen hissed.

"Yes," the boy responded like a second snake.

"Are you ready to watch me cum?" the older male panted.

"Yes," the boy grunted.

"Babe, I'm going to get sperm all over you, do you want me to?"

"Yes," the boy groaned.

"Okay," the man panted, adding: "I love you," as his cum started hard and fast, spurting high over them, splashing on the masturbating child again and again.

They timed it perfectly. As he felt his final full cum bolt from his loins, Allen rolled to his left, positioned himself over the boy, and sprayed on him. The hot wetness on the eleven year old's hand had almost instant results. "Watch me," the boy gasped, "it's going to happen." The child arched, thrust his hips high, and guided his swollen penis toward the panting, sweating male at his right hip. He whispered, "I'm cumming," and began ejaculating as wildly as his mature friend. His sperm was thin; boiling hot water, and sprayed and splashed over himself, over Allen, and on the pillow.

Lincoln was still half conscious when it happened. He was still spraying when Allen lunged against him, his mouth finding the boy's tense belly. There he remained for just a second, before rising in another instant to the boy's panting mouth. His lips found Lincoln's. He kissed the panting boy tenderly, then thrust his slick, salty tongue gently between the pursed lips. He might as well have electrocuted the boy. The shock galvanized the coltish body in an instant. His left hand grabbed his rapist by the back of his head, wilding the kiss ten times. His hips froze high in the air, and he started cumming all over again, his sperm hissing against the cheek of the male kissing him to shout Thank You a hundred times in something just under a minute.

From cumming on each other, the couple half fainted into a tender routine of licking and kissing.

"You were right," Lincoln whispered, as soon as he could, "I'll never be able to think of anything else as long as I live, I'll become ineffectual, and so the deathbed looms, inevitable." He'd swallowed so much semen it had glazed his vocal cords, he hard a hard time articulating, but Allen got the message.

Eventually, they came to rest, nose to nose, and whispering about plans for the next day's shoot, fell asleep.

Posted by Thomas C. Emerson, Dangriga, Nov. 2002

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