Photoplay, File 3

by Feather Touch


      Longish essay to begin, and same-old… to boot, so yes, there’s a column of asterisks.  (Pretty Polly put on skates / And on the ice did frisk.  Wasn’t she a silly girl / Her little * (from “Reader’s Digest”).)
      
      
      
      Nothing biblical going on or anything like that, but it has been raining and raining, and so the garden grows.  I’m meant to be out working on the thousand or more photographic images I want before I select a couple of hundred for the Tropic Gems initial CD.  That’s the next duck in the row, but I’ve learned not to walk on the muddy streets in my flip-flop sandals while carrying the camera, because they tend to flip up a little sand once in awhile, and sand and zoom-lenses, well, some things don’t bear thinking about.  And I can’t say it hasn’t been fun slipping back into the writer’s groove; it does fill the day in the old busy-hands-are-happy-hands sense, and not incidentally, I suppose, is a good reason not to tackle the for-me difficult task of figuring out a folder, directory, and file system for the chosen images as against those not used.  Remember, I’m the guy who spent half an hour trying to rotate an image in PhotoShop, finally going online for help, and ultimately determining it can’t be done, though I doubt this is the case (can’t be).  Also spent a frustrating hour or two several months ago trying to e-mail an image to a friend, again, unrewarded for both patience and diligence.  Yes, I know it’s not impossible, every spammer on earth seems to know the secret, but it’s out of reach for the moment.  In life, I’ve learned it’s more rewarding to do great amounts of simple things, writing long novels, for example, than waste time learning complex things, like talking files to a digital moron.
      
      My struggles though the latest issue of “The Review” were much the same, unrewarding, but for a different reason.  I know it all.  Read some three thousand mainstream books, as your scribe has done, and you reach the substantial barrier known as the point of diminishing returns.  In other words, you have to read (or, in the case of documentary television, watch) so much to learn anything new and interesting, the time factor becomes prohibitive, to not even mention the excruciating boredom involved.  The whole September issue of the literary magazine told me nothing I didn’t already know, and I think I inherently understood how wacko and disagreeable Lawrence’s Taos mate looked without having to see the Levin caricature, ugly, even for his pen.  In fact, the whole magazine (in tabloid format) is the ugliest I’ve ever known, and especially its cover page which is nothing more than gommy big type in red and black adorned with more hideous caricatures and perhaps a chunk of a photo.  No pride outside, no brains inside, no wit, grace, or charm – anywhere.  That’s my review of “The Review” and I should note that I get the crummy thing by default, passed on by my landlord.
      
      In a way I shouldn’t complain, for isn’t it likely that the very dearth of neat stuff in the media allows a rich fantasy life, which, if delineated with a modicum of craft, might interest and engage others?  Seems plausible, so perhaps a backhanded and more than slightly ironic bow IS due.  What would I like to see?  Well, since the theme of this story, though we do tend to wander a bit, is the unfolding, everyman miracle of digital photography, why not that?  Our comics once mocked the Soviets for their tractor-factory films and I guess they won the day, because aside from the occasional snippet on “Mr. Rogers” you can watch sixty channels for a year and never learn squat about the incredible processes necessary to bring equally incredible products to market at undreamed of low prices.  That’s the kind of thing we should all be fascinated with, especially the young, and I warrant that hair fashions and the kewl lingo of hep script kiddies are a thin-soup substitute.
      
      Re: Randy.  This goes to the theme of “The Last Farewell,” colonialism and the looming disaster, amongst such a tedious list of others, of its decline.  Anyway, he wanted to borrow my screwdriver to tinker with his sister’s television set.  I said no, but he begged and cajoled so finally, after a stern lecture on how it was the only one I have, that when I need it, I need it, and so on, he split with the tool.  Not to return.  I’ve helped them with their electricity bill, costly, and the other day bought them a big box of food as things are tough at the moment, the usual non-support story.  Treated him, personally, good as gold in addition to all I’ve done for his family, in addition to which he wants a used bike, which, since it’s cheap, I was seriously considering.  Still no screwdriver.  Well, as these things go here, it’s his loss and my gain.  I’ve been cutting people off left and right not because I dislike them but simply because there is no point on earth in helping them.  “None of them starve,” to quote the line from Miller’s play, and none of them will probably live six feet from starvation.  Meantime, whether one-on-one or nation on nation, it’s useless to help.  The only charity extended by the US should be in developing farm to market infrastructure – no airports or resorts – and a base system of high quality boarding schools which take students in at age three and give them the full treatment from nutrition to nuclear physics.  All else is boondoggles for game players and empire builders; trash.  Then there’s Samantha’s new bike.  Stolen while she had her back turned for a few minutes at the local store.  Everybody knows it’s hers, a purple girls model.  She’s a highly popular young church girl.  Yet her bike was stolen where it should have been guarded.  Everything is stolen.  Yes, it does drive the economy.  I’ve personally purchased a dozen or more bicycles over the past several years, where four should have done the trick, but I think, aside from this advantage, it’s demoralizing.  Pretty hard, especially in a tropic climate, to put in a long, rough day in order to get a little ahead, then find some spronghead has cleaned you out, again.  (The local magistrate was burglarized twice in as many weeks.)   Find me a former colony that’s making it on its own, find me one.  Belize is in deep hock until the year one million and has a hundred fellow travelers.  The colonial system was good to excellent, needed, as do many complex systems, a little upgrading and modification in the name of equity.  Throwing it out was like removing the engine from a truck because the vehicle had a soft tire.  
      Dangriga is becoming a spectacular example of just what I’m talking about.  They replaced a neat old, slightly narrow, hump bridge with something off a freeway.  For ten years they had virtually no town pier, now they have about a dozen times whatever might actually be used.  It’s a delta town and they spent some millions putting in an elaborate drainage system, of practically zero effectiveness two feet above sea level.  A stone’s throw or two from my house is an American horror show, a strip-mall classic with plate glass, air-conditioning, and sliding doors.  Most of a million dollars.  Located on a lesser street in a backwater.  Caribbean colonial architecture is rated among the best, yet our airstrip boasts a Miami Beach terminal building (built by the local drug lord), and precisely what most people who venture this far off the Sandals/Club Med path are trying to get the fuck away from. A new concrete (how I hate that junk) library in our backwater, not a book in it.  A huge ‘n’ fancy new Red Cross facility that apparently deals in eye care.  A new tin hospital located by the cab driver’s union, out of reach by ninety percent of the population, where the old one was a breezy delight right downtown on the shorefront.  A new high school, built – and here’s alchemy for you –  by the United States Army and run by Catholics.  (Empty-headed ones, I happen to know, because Andrew goes there, to my considerable expense, and he isn’t educated much beyond what might suit a plum.)  A new water system that goes off instantly when the power fails, which it does several times a week.  And all this, and more, in one no-account town of ten thousand.   It really does bring into question how absolutely stupid the human mind can be.  What are the limits?  Iridium proved the grad-school elite and credentialed experts are in no way immune, and the green-roofed monster, fortunately out of sight and out of the breeze, fulfills any rainbow-coalition facet of the enigma.  Another question is how long can so many be so stupid before, you know, there’s some down-home fallout?  We’ve given over our beautiful towns to the big boxes, our parents to the senior homes, our kids to the food court, our schools to industrial tradeunionists, and ourselves to Master Charge and ‘fridge raids so, who knows, we may be experiencing some effects of our terrific mental inferiority and subhuman ruling class in the here and now.  (And as if white brains didn’t have enough problems of their own, suddenly brown brains are all the fad and fashion.  A couple of hook-noses, for example, built Mall of America, a neutron bomb in the much vaunted but generally pathetic heartland.  Now if them camel boys could just get themselves a gaming license...)
      
      I got reprimanded by my former publisher for calling Jews kikes and sheenies.  Thuggish, boorish language beneath the dignity of an upper-upper class pundit.  Problem is, you’re a thuggish and numbingly boorish and boring Brittany Spears/David Letterman subculture.  You’re a preposterous, grunting mass and would eat a mile of J. Lo’s shit to see where it came from: so what language WOULD be appropriate?
      
      The only thing it can be is funny.  The town is chock-a-block with half-built cement palaces.  The big spenders roll in, flap the green, start ‘em a-buildin’ (and it’s ant labor to build with the crap), then have to scuttle back to the States to earn more to buy the doors and windows, where they often die (of stress).  Endlessly repeated.  All you need here is a breezy exposure, simple, board house on stilts, and a nice veranda.  Paradise for ten cents on the dollar, and what to do BUT laugh at those so stupid they can’t see what’s so obvious?  The Germans, according to “The Review,” have a word for the enjoyment of the suffering of others.  What else is there to enjoy these days?  Are we NOT meant to laugh at clowns?  Is there anything but humor and enjoyment in Boston digging its, and perhaps all of our, grave(s) right across the path of Paul Revere?   Am I, as another example, meant to take my gonzo leftist brother – three out of three on Ritalin all through high school; morons of matriculated parents so imbued with liberal hogwallop they’ll fit in nowhere, ever – seriously?  Trendylibbers (formerly counter-culture cookies until their counter became the, well, for lack of a better word, culture) preach environmentalism and have in ingrained genetic compulsion to drink (as in: put into their bodies) water from almost indestructible plastic bottles.  That’s not funny?  The huge vehicles they drive to meet their think-globally-act-locally fellow travelers at the soccer field, and the correspondingly oversize drywall palaces in which they house their work stations, where they spend all their time – what are they, pray tell, if not the greatest joke in all of human history, the Spanish Armada included?  Of course, we’re talking here a very mature sense of humor.  In my mind, you have to be at least in your fifties to enjoy it, have lived an entirely full and satisfying life, because otherwise, don’t you see, death by socialism robs you before you are ready to be robbed (and think what it will mean for your kids), and that’s not even as funny as the Broward County ballot, which is not so much a joke as a profound talisman of Jewish/socialist America.  (For the foreign audience, the ballot in question included so many Green and Workers parties it was incomprehensible, cost Gore the election, though his lawyers muddied the water for weeks, and stuck the assholes of his homeland and the  world with an anti-abortionist meathead as President of the United States of America.)
      
      I keep meaning to insert, somewhere along the line, a note on commas.  My adventures in mainstream-land included reading several hundred books aloud to my century-old grandmother.  I simply found it easier, faster, and, most importantly, clearer when more extensive punctuation was used.  This is a slippery slope, because overuse is actually more confusing than under use.  One of those things one hopes he succeeds at without becoming anachronistic and assaulting, as it were, with style. (Though I have no objection at all to assaulting with style, if you see the difference.)
      
      Finally a break in the rain.  Got my first A+ image of about seven hundred, and chills from at least a dozen others, out of thirty-something, most under moderate to heavy overcast.  Sharpness issues duly noted, the Canon S400 Elph is the finest product of the human mind in all history, both a work and racehorse.  And we needn’t weep crocodile tears, for Adobe PhotoDeluxe, presumably a domestic product, is the near equal of the camera.  Which reminds me, I finally plunked down fifteen bucks for Gillette’s Mach3.  Still using the first cartridge after six weeks.  Hitler was right, we build good razors.
      
      And before I buckle back down to my unbuckled cast, another reminder that I’m the friendliest of low-key guys, mellow and laid-back as only the class of ’68 has the right to be.  I accuse.  It’s you.  You’re making a moribund hash of it on every front and in every way.  Can’t kill you, agin the law and all that yada, but I do reserve the right to enjoy the lighter side, while taking the opportunity to pass on some pretty good news.  No one reacts in any way to what I say, and that’s going on three years.  In other words, your bright side, the silver lining in your rapidly approaching wall of sullen cumulous,  is never having to live a day under my thumb or heel.
      
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      Electra’s turn?  Show of hands?  Well, that settles that.  Where did we leave our little tigress?  So many trips back and forth, studio to computer, who wouldn’t lose their place?
      
      Madonna had stuck to her vow.  Twice more had coupled successfully with Jock, feeling like a pretty lucky preteen with each of his long, salty cums, then stashed the matter on a back burner while she betook herself of other priorities, finally ending up on The Squad when she was twelve.  End of story.
      
      So the eleven year old began hers.
      
      “He was six-five,” the girl began, “and I was simply amazed by him.  Suddenly a thousand thoughts that had never even been in my dreams; had never entered my mind even when I watched a stallion take a filly, came crashing over me.  It was bad at first, then – he was playing catch, bare-chested, with his twelve-year-old cousin – he leaped for a high ball.  Bad went to dizzy and down came Electra, bicycle and all.  He ran over to help the rag doll and did manage to scrape me up and get me back on the saddle.
      “Luckily,” the story went on, “Dad had been teaching me to shoot a pellet gun so I knew where he kept in and how to use it.  The next day I hid it in my backpack, then I shot out a tire in front of his house (throwing the gun in the grass where I could get it later).  Had to do that twice, and the third time Jans got the message, which was way cool on his part, because I didn’t know what it was, myself, only that I wanted him to get every word of it.  When he got it, he got all of it, and asked me if I wanted to go for a walk in the woods.  I just put out my hand and led him across the street to show him the pistol and explain that it wasn’t exactly a coincidence I’d had blowouts in front of his house three days in a row.”
      
      
      “Mike was the same way, at first,” Jans said, “and it took me awhile to catch on.  There was something he wanted, that I could tell, but not what.  Then a friend of mine clued me in; said he had a young friend that acted kinda the same as Mike was, and it turned out he wanted to do mature stuff like take showers together and experiment.  That’s how I know from your getting dizzy and falling on your bike, because the same thing hit me.  I loved Mikey, but had never thought of touching him; just never occurred to me because he was a boy and was also my cousin.  That sure changed.  Vince, my friend, told me all about Stephen, his eleven year old friend, and after that I couldn’t think of anything else.  So I guess it’s the same with you.”
      “You don’t have to guess,” the ten year old responded.
      “Well,” the nineteen year old beauty said, “if you fell once and shot out your tires three times, I guess we don’t have to go through the part where I point out you’re just a kid and ask if you’re sure about what you want.”
      “You’ve got that right,” the girl noted.
      “And nothing’s happened with you before and you’ve never seen anything, or heard or read about the details?” the concerned teen asked.
      “It’s all you,” Electra whispered.  “I never even thought about anything, much less learned about it.  Then you jumped for that high-ball and by the time you landed I was too dizzy to lie flat on my back.”
      “It’s kind of a pain, really,” the boy said, “I was just a normal, dorky dufus until I was almost eighteen, then this happened in less than a year, and I’m still the same library numbskull but I could walk down the halls at school in a flood and never get my feet wet on account of all the books that are dropped in my path.”
      “Well, it’s very attractive,” the pixie said, reassuringly, taking her male’s hand in her tiny right paw as they entered the forest.
      “I’m just glad for Mikey,” Jans said, “he liked me even when I was five-nine and maybe even a few pounds overweight, though, I have to admit, things went from friendly to physical when I trimmed down and reached like about six feet tall.”
      
      “I’m glad you’re honest about it,” the girl responded.
      “You’re smart, and highly original,” her friend said, “and so is he.  I wouldn’t keep him a secret from you for all the tea in China.  And in case you’re worried about diseases or practical stuff like that, he’s the one and only, so far, nor am I anything to do with gay; probably not even a pedophile.  It’s just that there was one, and now there seems to be two entirely outstanding people in my life, and it’s way more than a video game to spend time touching each other, especially when we first started.”
      “That must have been so exciting for him,” the girl said, squeezing.
      “What’s important,” Jans noted, “was that it felt entirely natural while it was happening, not weird or kinky in the least, and made no difference at all in our being cousins and best friends.  It’s exactly like fire; treat it with respect and keep it under control, and all is well.  Get stupid, and there goes the house.”
      “That works for me,” the girl said, adding: “as in fireworks.”
      “It was for me, too,” the teen whispered.  “Whatever you felt while I was jumping on the lawn, I felt when I was picking you up off the grass.  I wanted to carry you deep into the forest from the first moment, and not leave until there were at least three of us.”
      “Well, I guess I didn’t shoot that all to hell,” the ten year old mused, getting a hard squeeze from her young man.
      
      It was a beautiful, old-growth stand of trees and the boy led his little friend to a secluded glade where a long-fallen and mossy tree made a comfortable bench.  (This happens in many of my stories, and for very good reason.)  Electra was wearing a pretty, yellow sun suit with separate top and skirt, Jans, denim shorts and a jersey.  Both occupied themselves with taking off their sneakers.
      “Did the physical thing with Mike happen as fast as your epiphany?” the girl asked, pulling off her socks.
      “He wasn’t quite so imaginative or overt in his displays,” Jans replied, “so we talked quite a bit first.  I led up to Vince and Stephen.  By that time we were both embarrassed, so I asked if he wanted to go to the mall.  He replied as long as we didn’t have to go in the place.  That broke some kind of invisible barrier, because there’d been a story going around about how a man got caught with two naked boys in his car out in the parking lot.  Not by the cops, but by a kid who was playing spy games with some kind of gadget camera his uncle had.  There was a picture of one of the boys, so the story went, all wet from what the man had done with him.
      “Do you know about that stuff?”
      
      “If a mare kicks a stud off, sometimes it spills in the grass,” Electra whispered.
      “Well, I had to tell Mickey,” the teen explained, “because he’d never seen anything happen, and Vince told me to be sure the boy knew because otherwise he might freak out at suddenly getting sprayed on while he thought it was just a little fooling around.  And all at once the car seemed like the best place and even being in a public parking lot seemed as if it might add something naughty to what I already knew was going to be as natural as kids wrestling and horsing around in a pool.”
      “I like being here in the woods,” the girl responded, regaining his left hand with a another squeeze.
      “It’s different with you,” the boy agreed.  “I don’t want to be adventurous, daring; anything like that, I just want to get you pregnant, ‘cause then there might be two of you, and that seems like a life goal all by itself.”
      
      “As long as you don’t make her wait until she’s ten,” the girl said.  “I’m just lucky it happened this early; pure chance, impure chance, whatever it was.  But I could be sitting here beside you as a three year old, and I’d want you to teach me whether I was your sister, your daughter, or a girl or boy from across the ocean.  I know myself that well, at least.  That with the right person it can happen at any age not involving diapers, and, yes, I’d still have had tea parties with my friends and invented cootie potions in the cellar with the boy from down the street.”
      “Mike’s still marbles champion for many and many a block,” Jans chuckled.  “Didn’t turn him into a twisted brother or skanky cretin.”
      “If he woke up screaming it would be for you, not at you or about you,” the girl observed in her turn, “assuming there was any sound other than the patter of little feet as he crept into your bedroom.”
      “Now I know who took the secret pictures at the mall,” Jans said.
      “Or maybe good spying is really just good guessing,” the girl responded.
      “Well,” it has happened a few times,” the teen allowed, “even though we have no inclination to actually sleep together, something I’d give ten years off my life to do with you.”
      “Long as you don’t go bartering away our first-born,” the girl said, a romantic light filling her big, brown eyes.
      “That’s something we have to talk about,” the male murmured, “because even if you were old enough to have a baby, there’s a sort of physical situation involved, you know, because of how much I grew, so the regular husband-and-wife way isn’t an option.
      “I mean, it might be, if we had all night together, after awhile, but it’s a combination of, well, how much I grew, plus the fact I’m like twice as excited with you as I was even parked at the mall with Mikey, and that means once it really starts it happens pretty fast – they say it’s a product of being nineteen years old – and, like I said, the combination of not taking very long at all, and needing to take long, means, well, you know…”
      “Probably safer and cheaper to fantasize about than do it,” the girl nodded, “as you say, even if I was old enough, though one word that reached my ear is that if a girl’s active with mature males it dramatically lowers the age when she can conceive.”
      “I’ll bet [and here a warning about another fiendish Lawerencian device, about as explosive as literature can get – see if I’m wrong] the Nazis must have done some cruel wicked experiments along that line,” Jans said, “you know, stuff like sequestering an eight year old with a dozen boys my age and measuring everything with Teutonic diligence.”
      “I wonder what would happen if you actually did it,” the girl mused in response.  “I mean, psychologically.  Assume attractive, friendly boys who spoiled her and treated her as a kid sis, but tried to get her pregnant at night.  How would the average chick come out of it, even if it had no clinical influence?”
      “How do you think?” the boy asked.
      “That it would be like what they say in ‘The People’s Guide to Mexico,’ she replied, “the real culture shock for long-term visitors is returning to the crass, gorged, and sterile USA.  Same with me.  The shock would come when it was over.  Other than that, I think it would take my mind off the subject just when other girls are starting to go all gaga and goo-goo.  I wouldn’t have to date to experiment or fall-in-curious and think it was falling in love.  Probably make me a cold fish; all scheming and analytical; primp up like June Allison in “Strategic Air Command” to reinforce the message that I meant ‘no.’”
      “I think that might mean ‘never,’” her friend mused.  Simultaneously, they thought back to the absurdities of a, the actresses’ clothes, b, her hair, c, her cosmetics, and, d, all of the above.  They were too tense to burst out laughing but the image was extreme retro to the point of making them quake and shudder, becoming better friends and surer of each other by the moment.  And let’s not be glib about assuming a casual attitude, that the players weren’t fully aware that their basic attraction was an exception to the rule, that for the ordinary a situation could range from disagreeable to harmful to hideous (as in suicidal).  Stick them in front of David Frost or Dick Cavette (don’t think anyone’s replaced them) and they’d have said words to the effect that it can be good, can be right, can be okay, and in millions of cases, is, thus encouraging victims to review the underlying relationship in question, distinct from public opinion, and be thus guided, either into furthering it with a will, or going to the police.  Since no one else had anything remotely resembling an answer (a twenty percent involvement takes prison out of the question, if that number could be summarily dismissed from the workforce, and if prison were free, in the first place), they might, as a result of this fantasy interview, have been awarded at least Pulitzer, and perhaps Nobel prizes.  Of course, an empire of credentialed behavioral scientists exists until there is an answer, so any solution remains rhetorical.  (Personally, I think sanity makes interesting reading, however it varies from the norm.  What do you think?)
      
      “That’s why I wore the sun suit that shows my tummy,” Electra said, too young to have anything to do with ‘never.’
      “Is there anything under the top?” Jans asked in a suddenly husky voice.
      “Yes,” the girl blushed, moving closer to the tall, slim athlete at her right shoulder.  “I even kind of need it a little, because it seems to me the Nazis might have obtained some pretty interesting measurements, because just thinking about you, and being near you the first time I fell, well, sort of all of a sudden I had to visit the girl’s department.”
      “Their experiments could have been really complete,” the too-smart-to-be-pseudo intellectual responded, “because they could have sent the girls from the boy experiment in with Himmler, Heidrich, Hitler, Hess, and Goring – any of them, and observed whether the measurements returned to normal, and how fast.”
      “Less than normal,” Electra shuddered, and for certain they were a clump of mutts, those few heroes who banded together to stop the Bolsheviks from smashing through Europe like Attila, Genghis, and Ivan, combined, and managing to rid the planet of six-odd million lowlifes as a footnote as well as recalibrating Western European population tables and providing a fifty year respite in its growth to the point of popular, pensioned oblivion.
      
      Young and eager as their fine minds were, man does not exist by head, alone, and while they could identify villains as heroes, and had no trouble seeing Roosevelt and Churchill as circus performers of unutterable stupidity, there was simply more to life, more to existence than wondering at the follies and myths of history.  For example, take this exchange on the contemporary scene.
      
      “I’m glad I’m on this side of you,” Electra noted.
      “Me, too,” the male agreed.
      “It must be easier for the English, you know, driving on left so they have their right hand free to reach across; more comfortable, at any rate.” Both nodded sagely, bright enough to assume the subject at hand was parking, not actually driving.
      “We ran into that at the mall,” Jans added “it was more comfortable for us to change positions; less elbow in the way.”
      
      That led to the nineteen year old’s left arm circling the ten year old’s waist, his right hand free to reach across and touch her flat, honey colored belly. 
      “We were right,” the girl whispered, shuddering to the tracing of the male beauty’s fingers between the bands of her shorts and halter.  
      “Do you want to be sure, and try it the other way?” the neo-Nazi suggested.
      This was fine by Electra and they slowly exchanged places so the girl could reach across her lap and slide her right hand up inside the tall athlete’s jersey.  “Did you touch Mikey a lot this way?” she asked.
      “Yes,” Jans whispered.
      “That makes it even more symbolic,” the ten year old noted.  “In England, the driver would want to dominate, parked; classical, where, in the States, the driver would want his passenger to have the more comfortable reach, while under way, which is more egalitarian.”  It actually was profound, however absurd, and that made them both stifle a fit of the giggles. 
      It’s one thing to have an arm around a bright and receptive female, another to have the same arm around a wriggling girl.  What had before felt sensuous now became irresistible and the male gently moved the child back to his left side, his hand slowly creeping up her suddenly heaving chest as he held her tightly to him.  Electra hissed and nodded, her head lolling against her lover.  Higher to her halter, then as she whispered his name, inside her training bra to the hard swelling of her nipple and supple mound of her right breast.
      “Can I?” she whispered, her right hand traveling to a place high on his leg.  The teen nodded, and it went further.
      
      
      I was gonna finish this puppy without further idiotic intervention, what they call commercial interruptions north of here, but yuze guyze messed me up.  Nearly six thousand downloads last week, and the new stories weren’t posted ‘till Wednesday or so.  Thanks.  The irony is it comes just when I’m passing the nine hundred mark on images taken with the Canon, which, with the extensive retouching almost all pictures need, has been something of a time killer.  And the icing on the ironic cake is that I got several photos of a way-cute ten year old girl and her older brother.  When first espied, they were in the window of their little house, the boy drawing a tattoo on the girl’s arm, she half in his lap and obviously loving the attention.  I don’t like going around reading people, but even so it was pretty obvious if I’d asked them to take their clothes off an play on the bed while I took pictures, they would have happily obliged.  Whatever does or does-not happen, at least there’s the next story theme, as if a pot-head like me had time for it.  Meantime, thanks again – you may not write, but you’re reading, no mistake, and that’s what counts – and back to the present tale.
      
      
      “One of the principles,” Jans managed to whisper, “is that kids rule.  Assuming the time and place are vaguely appropriate, it’s left up to the younger partner, what to do, what not to do.”
      “That makes me a masterita,” the girl mused, “I think I like it.  Little master, for awhile.  For example, where I’m touching you now, well, I don’t know much about it, but my instincts tell me you were right when it comes to what’s going to happen, and I’d be scared if you insisted on taking me the way a man usually does.”
      What could abbey these conversation powers?  Only one thing left to try, and Jans and Electra had reached a point where they were perfectly matter-of-fact about it.  “Do you want to stalk me?” the girl asked as she slipped out of her yellow halter.  “I’ll make it way easy, just lie here on the log, then you can creep out of the woods like a tiger or a wolf while retraining enough civilized behavior to emerge from the trees where I can see you, and proceed slowly enough that I’ll have a spectacle for my deathbed instead of halting memories of fragmented glimpses.”
      “I’m not entirely sure,” the nineteen year old responded, “about playing animal with a girl who schleps lead in her backpack.”
      “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ve re-tired that act.”
      “Hardly matters,” Jans shrugged as he departed, “you could shoot without deflating anything.”
      
      
      And he wasn’t talking about his ego.  He was huge, over eight inches, circumcised, and glistening hard, harder than porn players with an inch on him.  Naked, he emerged from the woods.  Electra was lying back on the wide, mossy log, fingers linked behind her neck, legs straight out, her sun suit neatly folded above her head.  They stared at each other from fifty feet away.  Kid’s ruled, so the pixie slowly spread her legs, bringing her knees against here chest in a sign of total welcome.  The teen moved forward, unable to resist looking down at himself every few steps because he’d never in his life been as he was now.  But her position was uncomfortable looking, and that wouldn’t do, even in animal-land.  He closed in taking her legs in his hands and gently easing his penis between her thighs so it lay firmly against her sweating, heaving belly.  Now her instincts played once more and she squeezed her legs together, almost, so intense was her ten-year-old mind, able to imagine how it would feel to him.  And it felt incredible to her, his pressure against her, especially when she gently bucked her hips.  Jans remained at an angle that allowed her to rest her legs against his chest so he could use his hands on her slender, childish waist as he began surging rhythmically against her.
      
      They stated hotly into each other’s eyes, eyes fogged with the extremes of their loins.  Yet neither wanted it to be over.  Electra sensed the hot, wet ending for her stag was approaching rapidly.  That would be nice, but what would be perfect?  No secrets in my stories…  “Jans,” she managed to whisper as he thrust methodically high between her young dancer’s legs, his penis slicking her lower chest and belly with a copious flow of seminal fluid, “Jans, tell me about the mall, tell me everything, how you got Mike wet the first time.”
      
      “Oh, babe,” the nineteen year old groaned over the ten year old on the wide, mossy log, “I want that too; at least to try to wait.”
      “Maybe you could start with playing marbles,” the girl panted as a suggestion.
      “That won’t help much,” the male responded, “we’ll have to change positions.”  Electra could see that and opened her legs as Jans pushed up and rolled to a sitting position, laying the young beauty across his lap, left arm around her waist and his right hand high between her legs, which she spread fully in welcome. 
      “Mikey must have been so excited,” she panted as he began rhythmically masturbating her, often bending over to kiss her and run his tongue over her budding nipples.   Electra found him with her right hand, wet, hot, and slipper, her tiny paw matching the pace he set between her thighs.
      “We both were,” the young man said of his twelve year old cousin, “and in a way it actually was a game of marbles – kid named Craig Butterfield was playing with Mikey and a couple of others, and they’d talked me into a little retro hanging out, so I was shooting too.  This was just after I’d talked with Vince so I guess I was sort of tuned in and focused where otherwise I might not have paid any particular attention, but the subject of getting molested came up and Craig said his uncle had one of those special dolls they used, and that they didn’t do girly things like dress them and make tea for them, but they did play with them.  The other boys thought that was cool and I noticed Mike blushing a little.  
      
      
      “What did Craig mean, Jans?” the boy asked his older cousin as they left the park.
      “You know my friend, Vince, right?” the teen replied, “well, he told me something that was about the same.  Not all boys learn with their girlfriends or wives, not that there’s much to learn, because there’s another way that’s very popular.  So I think that’s what he meant.  With one of those dolls they use in school.”
      
      Jans was right.  In fact, the scene had gone like this.  “Miss Williams?” young Craig Butterfield asked, “can I like check one of those dolls out, like a library book, overnight?”
      “Why would you like to do that, Craig?” the teacher asked.
      “’Cause,” the boy replied, “I know there’s stuff you can’t show us using them in class or you’d get in trouble on account of there being underdogs who might use them to get ahead or something like that, so a lot of what really happens has to get left out, but a friend of my dad’s is visiting, and if I had one of the dolls maybe he could use it to teach me more than we cover in health class.”
      “Well,” the teacher mused, “there’s nothing in the rule library about it, or at least I assume there isn’t.
      “How do you feel about your dad’s friend?” she then asked, “have you known him a long time?”
      “Yes,” the boy said.  “We get along and I’m always happy when he visits.”
      “The reason I asked,” the teacher said, “is that if you take him the doll and want him to explain what really happens, well, you’re an exceptionally attractive boy, and he might want to teach you, well, without the dolls.”
      “Would that be okay?” the child asked.
      “In my book,” Miss Williams said, “perfectly okay.  About one boy in three or four has his first experiences with another male, often an older male.  At the same time, other boys would totally freak out at even the suggestion of doing something.  It’s the world’s most convoluted subject  because it’s fraught with emotional baggage, huge opinions, ironclad viewpoints, and extremes of jealousy and confusion, while, when it actually happens, intense as the excitement before and doing is, it means less than nothing, afterwards.
      “My brother,” the teacher went on, “learned with his Little League coach when he was about your age.  He blushed once at Mr. Kevin’s name, and I knew he was having the same feelings I was starting to have about him.  Pretty good radar for an eight year old, as it turned out.  I hid under a blanket in the back of his car.  After the game they gave another boy a ride home.  That was the scary part, because if he’d gotten in the other door of the car, he would have found out I was curled up on the floor, but they were talking the whole way and he never even noticed I was hidden.  After John got out, Mr. Kevin asked Marlon if he wanted to go home or hang out together for awhile.  Marlon said hang out.  Both their voices were kind of low and froggy and that made me tingle all over the same way it will make you when you take the doll to your dad’s friend (“George,” the boy interjected).  
      
      
      “It happens a lot in rest areas,” the now fully horse voice said from the driver’s seat.  “Would you like to try that?”
      “Yes,” the eleven year old said.
      “Marlon,” the coach said, “I want to spend about an hour parked there with you and do really mature things together, is that what you’d like?”
      “Yes,” the boy said as the car headed out of town.
      “Is it okay if I quiz you one the way?” the thirty year old athlete then asked, “you know, about whether or not you’ve had any experiences with either boys or girls or if you’ve ever let a man pull your underpants down.”
      “It’s okay,” came a horse whisper in response.  “But I don’t have anything to tell about.  I’ve read some stuff in abnormal psychology books, because it’s pretty way interesting at my age, but that’s about it, aside from the locker room.”
      “Well,” Gaff Kevin responded, “you’re an extremely attractive boy…”
      “I think I look dorky,” the boy interrupted.
      “Guess again,” Gaff laughed, “because boys who look a little different are much more attractive than the same-old-same-old with the cute faces and tended hair.  And I’m not just saying that to flatter you, but for a reason.  Yes, you are far above average in the, well, sexy department, and from here on out men and older boys are going to be after you, especially for the next two or three years while you shoot up to something like six-two.
      “It’s something you should be aware of for two reasons.  To avoid, early-on, any entanglements you wouldn’t like, and to respond if someone you are attracted to hits on you.”
      “How do they do that?” the passenger wanted to know.
      “Same as boy and girl,” the coach explained, “try to be around you a lot, make reasons to be alone with you.  Probably nothing overt – hey, kid, wanna? – or anything like that, but, as the line from “Oklahoma” has it, ‘don’t laugh at my jokes to much…’  Take you swimming, for example.  That’s about the favorite way for an older male to start with a child, then you can get used to touching by wrestling and fooling around in the pool, and what starts in the pool ends up in a nice, hot, soapy shower and probably in the bedroom after that.”
      
      “Does it hurt when that happens?” Marlon asked.
      “Not if you’re with a friend,” the man said, “but it definitely can.  If some stranger gets hold of you and just wants to satisfy himself in a tight, young body, it can be extremely painful – more than a girl getting raped – especially the first few times.
      “And,” Gaff went on, “the reason I singled you out was that you seem to be maturing very early.  You’ve got really long legs and you’re embarrassed to change or shower with the other kids on the team.”
      “Yeah,” the eleven year old whispered.
      “Totally normal,” the man chuckled.  “It’s not like you’re a nine year old ready to take a wife or anything like that, but somebody has to, you know, be first on the block, so to speak.  But what it does mean is that as you mature you’ll have a stronger sex drive than other boys your age.  Embarrassing as it is when it happens to you, you know, the puberty deal, early, it means you’ll probably grow bigger than most other males, and be more responsive to being touched, assuming it’s the right partner at the right time and in the right place.”
      
      “Did it happen early with you, too?” the boy wanted to know.
      “Yes,” the man said.  “At first it was weird.  I was still a kid, but almost like a teenager when I was eleven, same as you.  Luckily, our family doctor had had it happen to him, too, so he invited me out on his boat and we had a long talk together, just like you and I are doing, then we found a cove and anchored for a couple of hours.  After that, I took showers with the so-called younger boys, and guess what?”
      “What.” Marlon said.
      “I got invited on lots of sleepovers.  That’s what I want for you.  Then you can get the whole sex trip out of your mind because it’s happening two or three times a week and that’s enough for anybody but an addict.  Lust on the back burner, algebra on the front burner, when most kids your age have it the other way ‘round, to no one’s benefit.”
      “Was it just one boy when you had a sleepover?” the child asked as the car hummed along the Interstate.
      
      “The first two,” Gaff replied.  “Then Eddy Magert had his aunt and two cousins staying with him.  She was like nothing but the coolest lady you ever met.  The cousins were twins, nine years old.  Fraternal, Theresa and Billy.  Well, Mrs. Hernandez, that was their aunt, clapped eyes on me and it was like green lights in every direction.  ‘You’re perfect,’ she said, ‘’cause we’ve reached a point in our family, and my husband and I are in perfect accord on this, where we want young Frick and Frack here to get introduced to the facts of life.  An older and probably mature boy couldn’t be better, since you passed the nice test with flying colors.’  That’s what she said, more or less, meantime, the two kids were tuning in as if she was going to give each of them an ATV and a pony to tow it around with.  
      “Know how it ended up?” the coach asked his now intense young passenger.
      “How?” the boy asked.
      “The aunt said: ‘Showers for everybody, nice long ones, but don’t use too much hot water.’  Her sister giggled and said, ‘Jessica, you’re impossible,’ but by that time I was half way up the stairs with Eddy and Billy dragging me like a goat and Theresa riding him, since no pony was in the offing.”
      
      
      “You’re mom’s something else,” the eleven year old whispered to Eddy the two nine year olds as Eddy nodded.
      
      
      
      I’ve got to take a break here and find my place.  Keep looking at the camera hanging, with my reading glasses, on the wall, and itching.  More rain.  Photographer’s holiday at the trusty keyboard.  I think I’ve covered about half the town, maybe something less.  Never can tell when it will “hit.”  Examples from yesterday.  Picture of a typical beautiful yard, foliage, my usual meat and potatoes, but when I began retouching it, I found two ducks, perfectly posed, under the house.  They’re tiny, but crystal clear, each looking at the camera, and, vitally, intact.  Otherwise I’d have blotted them with the clone tool as distractions.  In the end, they elevate a C+ to a B+.  And another.  Shooting down a lane and just as I was about to release the shutter, a bicyclist crossed the nearby bridge, then a second.  I thought I might as well try for them, because I could blot them if it didn’t work.  The first rider, dressed in blue (police) actually turned into the lane, and I got ready to shoot, deciding to wait just a second for the second rider.  He turned, too, and I snapped the camera.  Tiny, but perfectly clear, the rider in blue, and the rider in a white tee shirt up on the pedals and half through the turn into the lane.  They’re so small, that’s the amazing thing; just tiny, yet crystal clear.  Finally, a third one, as it happened, for the hour.  Right in town, across from The Price is Right market.  Old pushcart on the sidewalk, nicely lighted, and by itself worth a shot.  Next to it, on the right, a display of brightly colored plastic chairs, which made a good contrast to the bland coloring of the old handcart.  Then, avast, there she blew.  Cameras was out and ready.  Had to wait about six or eight seconds, which gave me time to compose the cart and the plastic chairs, then a lady and a little boy came into view.  Another tiny wait, and click.  Reason for all the excitement?  The mother was carrying a child’s plastic chair, bright pink, dramatically contrasting the chairs in the composition.  Bang, bang, bang; ducks, bikers, and tiny plastic chairs.
      
      Used to happen sometimes when I was writing; bolt-from-the-blue luck.  Some phrase or image that not only precisely fit a situation, but engendered a whole line to follow.  Luck favoring the prepared, the prepared able to avail themselves of tiny, tangential elements of fortune that would be generally meaningless.  
      
      In other words, lots of rain.  I should be out there now, perfect silvery sky and bright-hazy bright.  How strange that I now shrug at this.  Even in print.  My review of the S400 on C/NET goes on at length about twenty percent shadows and cirrus cloud cover.  Friends, that was for film.  The digital couldn’t possibly care less.  Also, I need to update my comments on tripods.  Again, don’t shoot film without one because an SLR has a mirror the size of a frying pan and the thing has to slam shut and then back open in a fraction of a second.  To obtain resolution you must use a tripod, lock up the mirror, then release the shutter with a cable gadget (to eliminate any shake) or with the self-timer.  I’ve been hand-holding the Elph with mesmerizing results.  In the “chairs” picture, you can clearly read “The Price is Right” sign.  I measure with bicycle hubs and spokes, also tire tread.  It is awesomely sharp, even though I’m still convinced the simple-lens camera has an edge on crispness.  So two birds with one stone.  Any light will do as long as the sun is high in the sky, and not only that, but each light brings forth new images and subdues others.  One of the major Impressionists painted the same cathedral hundreds of times, and, while he was probably just a lazy huckster who’d found his niche, there is something to be said for the variations.  In fact, my first A+ image is of a bicycle parked in front of a local rum shop.  I could shoot that not only under a variety of day and night lighting conditions, but also as different bikes were parked in front of it.  Different groups in the doorway, passers by.  Set up a kiosk and make it a full-time job.
      
      And none of it would be worthwhile without the retouching.  It’s better than the ninety percent factor.  There’s a blue house across from a palapa over the river.  About a hundred feet away, a blue van.  But the overall scene was a disaster of graphic litter.  In the end, an image VanGogh would stare at.  Tons of trees removed; people, a dog, power lines, stumps, anything and everything, and, ironically, not to tamper with it, adjust nature, so to speak, but rather to restore it to as the eye sees it.  A painter rendering Niagara doesn’t include chunks of driftwood jutting up from between rocks, because that’s not what your eye sees, it sees the falls, and excludes, to a large degree, the rest.  I saw the blue house and blue van, one dark, the other robin’s egg (actually, my least-favorite car color, though it looks great in clean pools).  In the end, I saw what I saw, the tiny van crystal clear, easily tell it’s a Ford, and the house, if rendered a tiny bit surreal by the mottled effect of extensive alteration, still bold and present, clear as clear can be (almost).
      
      Artistically, the problem is to keep the display size, whether on monitor on by print, to the approx. 4 X 6 size limit.  They can’t be larger because then the retouching becomes self-evident and distracting.  No alternative.  To retouch them, pixel by pixel, at huge enlargement would make extreme what is already a very substantial involvement of time, and the results would probably still looked tricked-up.  It shouldn’t BE an issue, because the shortcomings of the digital process are already very apparent at 8 X 10, however suitable such enlargements are for general display, and art has given way to illustration.  By my estimate it would take 50 megapixels to generate an extreme 8 X 10 print, and the best cameras out there, to date, use about ten.  These are small, gems not murals, live with it.  And as for the images being repetitive, yes, it’s primarily due to an artistic limitation in my simply not seeing anything else, but then again, what girl ever got tired of looking at diamonds, however much alike they are?  Same with my stories, by the way, and it brings up a central point.  To me, art is finding something essentially beautiful, be it tropic architecture and foliage, or attractive adults teaching willing children, and rendering it over and over, perfectly, rather than trying to get creative and make a special (restricted) club of the audience by indoctrinating them with the wacky and gonzo.  It may be a bit retro, but it works like a charm.
      
      I was going to spend the day experimenting with the Elph, trying out the manual controls and fiddling with the white balance and movie mode.  There are buttons I’ve never touched, menus I’ve never seen.  The digital zoom, for instance.  The self-timer.  Never even had it on a tripod.  The book’s 150 pages, and I’ve read about twenty of them.  Know how to turn the display off and disable the auto-off function.  Nothing else seems to matter as the pictures are unfailingly rock-‘em-sock-‘em, assuming the subject was worth shooting in the first place.  There – and I’m not kidding at all – should be a DigiCam channel on cable.  Stills, only.  Maybe music and news in the background and on closed-captioning.  (Speaking of which, I have no luck on video, at all; can’t begin to approach the smoothness and elegance of even cheap studio work.  Motion pictures require a stream of consciousness, when what calls out is an imperative to concentrate wholly on a single image.  And speaking of speaking of, the best camera work I’ve seen yet is, hurray, my much favored CCTV (China Central).  Cooking shows.  They must suspend the camera in a tub of optical gelatin and manipulate it with stands of spider web.  Way smooth.  Can’t touch this.).  Brings up birds in the hand and birds in the bush, because the staggering increase in readership is here and now, the photography very much in the bush.  Of course, the former is free and the latter might earn something, so how do you measure, then?  Guess it would ordinarily depend on whether or not one was an artist, but that doesn’t work, because the photography is at the level of the writing, so it becomes a choice of free art or paid art.  In the end, perhaps it amounts to art over scholarship; writing for the Web or learning new tricks from the User’s Guide.  (You won this time, but don’t go getting smug.  That’s my department.)
      
      
      I’m dithering away here to avoid a trap.  “One Fish at a Time,” at four hundred thousand words, and thanks to a ten-day computer problem, imploded.  It was meant to go a million words based on various Caribbean hijinks and fantasies, but the story became so layered I lost my bearings and couldn’t think of a way to come back up through six or eight levels of characters and situations, so I cut it short..  I like to finish what I start, and if I boast about a million words, deliver, but I’d like one of those two-wheel-drive Blazers with the straight six and six-cross-member frame, too.  In any event, I’ve put together a story-so-far synopsis for my own reference and, since it’s plenty short, will include it.
      
      
[[Photoplay – Plot and character notes.


Jans, the boy of the bicycles, has Electra on a log, this during a story she’s telling Renaldo and Madonna of her, Electra’s, first time, while I’m taking pictures..  

Vamping for time, before the eleven year old Special Agent, Electra, and her agent sisters, Madonna, start touching Renaldo, who has both his cousins cuddled against his chest, a cascade of stories begins.

First, Electra wants to know about Mikey, Jans’ twelve year old cousin, whom he has parked with at the local mall.  The beginning of Jan’s story about Mikey immediately segues to the story of Craig, an eleven year old boy both Jans and Mikey have been playing marbles with.  Craig has mentioned dolls, which brings up Miss Williams, his teacher, from whom he wants to borrow a pair of dolls so he can show them to an - unnamed - friend of his, Craig’s, father.  A second abrupt segue.

Miss Williams’ story takes place when she’s eight and her big brother, Marlon, is eleven years old.  She’s hidden in the back of Gaff’s car.  He’s her brother’s Little League coach.  Gaff and Marlon head for a nearby rest area and the coach questions his young player on the way, the boy, in turn, asking about what happened to him when he was a kid.  Gaff tells of visiting his doctor – unnamed – and how, after spending time on the doctor’s boat, he started taking showers after gym, and then was invited on lots of sleepovers by the other boys in his class.

The third sleepover takes place at Eddy Magert’s house.  His aunt, Jessica Hernandez is visiting Eddy’s family, with her twins Theresa and Billy, nine.  She’s delighted with the soft-spoken, modest Marlon and feels the possibly-mature eleven year old would make a perfect mentor for her nine year olds.  The twins agree and the story provides an interlude as it’s told by Miss Williams to marbles’-friend Craig about Brandon and Gaff, with Craig relating the details, at a later date, to Mikey who eventually provides his older cousin, Jans, with a graphic account.   

So, it’s Jans to Electra about Mikey, Jans twelve year old cousin, and Mikey’s marble-playing friend, Craig, including Craig’s teacher, Miss Williams (Lissa), and her experiences at age eight, hiding in back of the car in which Gaff and Marlon are headed to the rest area, and eavesdropping, while perhaps fantasizing a little, on the conversation between her brother and his coach, and the latter’s account of visiting his classmate, Eddy.]]

      They were way cute sitting on the edge of the tub like kids not waiting to bathe, anyhow right at the moment.  Gaff, sitting close in a chair,  felt a little awkward being suddenly and unceremoniously cast into the role of host in his friend’s house.  “You’re sure this is okay?” he whispered to his friend, sitting between his twin cousins.
      “Yes,” the eleven year old responded.  “Kip Castillo told me a little of what you told him about your trip on the boat, and I haven’t even seen any porn yet, so…”  Here he blushed and became silent.
      “A lot of what happened with Dr. Millard, Jeff, was talk,” the more mature boy said.  “He didn’t jump on me or anything, and it doesn’t sound like anyone’s going to be pressuring us, not in this household, so the best thing might be for you guys to ask me questions and share any experiences, as long as they’re true, or clearly identified as fantasies, that you’ve had.
      “And,” he continued, “I can start off by saying no, it didn’t hurt, not one tiny bit, and that it felt really incredible, but afterwards was like nothing had happened any more than if we’d had steak for dinner instead of burgers.  
      “That’s what Jeff talked to me about, and,” Gaff went on, “your mom seems to have the same opinion.  That it’s somewhere half-way down the Z list, except when it’s happening, then it beats anything you ever heard of by about ten times.”
      “Cool,” the twins cooed while Eddy nodded between them.
      “Great,” their ad-hoc teacher said, “and now can I ask you guys a question?”
      “Sure,” they said.
      “Okay,” Gaff said, “it’s really for you Theresa, about how you feel about your dad and whether, when you get home, you might want something to happen with him.  Jeff said a lot of his patients are having incest, brothers with their sisters and dads with their little girls, and he thinks in some cases it’s okay.  That’s a lot of what we talked about on his boat; preventing bad things from happening while staying free enough of psychic baggage to be receptive when the time is right.”
      
      “I think of him as two men,” the girl replied, “a dad who’s home every night to read to his kids, and a way cute guy who stays fit and looks wicked in a bathing suit.
      “That’s a good start,” the more mature (and slightly older) boy said to the girl, “because it will be a few years before Billy’s old enough to be your real partner, and once you get started you’ll want to have full experiences at least once in awhile, so if you get along with your dad and think he’s attractive, you should hang in there as one big, happy family.”
      “Mom’s been dropping hints,” the girl allowed, “saying things like if dad was her dad she’d need four popes and twenty cardinals to explain why she should keep her mitts off him.”
      “Then mom’s the word,” Gaff quipped to his easily amused audience, “and you can keep Billy in the loop by telling him all the details because it’s pretty rare that men take an interest in their own sons, even if they like other young boys.”
      “I’ll try,” the girl promised.
      “It shouldn’t be a problem,” the older boy said, “because you only talk about stuff the first few times.  After that, you develop a ritual, so every time is almost exactly the same, and there’s nothing too much to talk about, until something new happens with one of you, and that’s usually only good for a single telling.”
      
      Alert nods in response, so Gaff continued.  “Billy?” he asked, “how do you feel about taking your shirt of in front of Eddy and me and letting us touch you?
      “You don’t have to.  If you just want to play with your sister that’s cool.”
      “I’d like to let you look at me,” the nine year old said.
      “Well, we both want to,” Gaff told the child, “and I want to ask you something even more mature.  About your dad and your sister.  Usually a boy your age can make a girl have an orgasm by using his tongue between her thighs, but if your father’s mounted her recently, without using a condom, she may be very wet from him.  It’s the kind of thing that can have psychological impact and Jeff said that was the kind of thing to get as clear as possible during the talking stage.”
      “The best surprise is no surprise?” the nine year old asked.
      “Yeah,” Gaff replied, “and it’s important.  If he hadn’t told me what was going to happen, and suddenly I’d gotten a mouth full of hot, salty fluid I’d have been freaked.  But I knew about sperm and cum and that he might lose control without being able to warn me, so when it happened I was totally ready and it was fantastic.  Same thing with you.  If you know Theresa’s just been with her dad and wants you to share in what happened between them by bringing his seed to her on your tongue, it may make it very exciting for both of you, where if you discovered her all salty and strong tasting, without warning, you might be turned off.”
      “I understand,” the nine year old intoned.
      “And Eddy,” Gaff said, “there’s something I want to suggest to you.”
      “What.” the classmate responded.
      
      “Well,” the teacher said, “I don’t want to go on sleepovers every night, too much other stuff to do, and some of the boys I don’t like all that much, anyway, so what Jeff suggested is that I get my best friend to jerk me off in the shower, with the water turned off, so all the kids can see what happens.  Then it will just be you, Kip, Robbie Metz, and your cousins when they visit.  Big point of Jeff’s; a small circle, not a Michael Jackson routine where life is all one big, weird search for the perfect pecker and boys are only worth what’s in their package, as the rude trade calls it, and the unwrapped gift is – forever – more intriguing than any you’ve opened.”
      “Would Jeff take me out on his boat?” Eddy asked.
      “Any time you want,” his friend said; “you, me, and both the others.  Probably room for Billy and Theresa, too, if they’re going to be staying around for a few days.”
      “Would you stay with us?” the girl asked.
      “Yes,” Gaff said.  “In fact, he mentioned that small groups were common for kids who start early.  He had a boyfriend before he moved here and used to take him to a permissive nudist camp, because they ended up being monogamous in their town.
      “It’s not something to get tied down with,” he continued, “that’s the point.  And it’s less likely for a kid to take it seriously, fall in love, to use an oversimplified phrase, if the child has a number of partners and realizes, at his or her age, it’s more like a very special secret game or ritual than it is anything at all to do with what comes later in life when you supposedly – and often do – meet your ideal opposite and get married.  No more similar than mice and elephants, because even at our ages we’re human beings, not something stamped out in a factory, all identical, and if we’re reasonably intelligent and curious we can take things as they come and then pigeonhole them where they belong which is about on a par with, like I said before, a steak dinner.”
      
      
      Little time-line jolt there, vis-à-vis Michael of the slippers, as the events in this part of the story took place in the past, and Michael’s with us again, albeit, he’s something of a reference point going back to the Eighties.  In fact, there seem to be two relevant cases amongst the Perfect-Resume clutter on MSN.  Kobe.  He should get one year in a low security setting and a fifty thousand dollar fine.  The girl went voluntarily to his room and made out with him, then wanted to turn off the switch and vamoose.  This might be acceptable for a ten year old on her first date, but an adult working at a luxo resort should realize that a very great deal indeed is implied by going alone to a handsome young man’s room and kissing him.  If they give him twenty, he’s getting the same punishment as would a guy who dragged a girl out of the hall, forcibly restrained her, and raped and assaulted her.  The same applies to Michael’s latest victim.  Unless he was brought up at the center of a hard-boiled egg, any kid should know what molestation is, that its poster boy is for sure Michael Jackson, and that staying overnight and Mikey’s is tantamount to playing in the tub.  Six months and a twenty-five thousand dollar fine.
      
      A stronger argument can be made in favor of writers and other artists.  They should be, in many respects, above the law.  Why?  Because if some of us aren’t allowed to deviate from the path, how do we know we’re on the right path?  As it is now, our way is defined by biblical hysteria, and we’re doing exceedingly poorly.  Our astronauts are leading us nowhere but to the poor house, and our scientists, having outdone themselves with the Segway and digicams, offer no cultural guidance.  So it’s up to the writers, photographers, painters and sculptors; poets and philosophers, if there are any left.  The road to doom could use an alternate, and what chance do we have of finding one if a hundred percent of us are locked-down, industrialized, and politically correct?  In fact, with M.J., what they should do is conduct extensive interviews with ALL the boys he’s been with, and it would be extra cool if they could get hold of a German cyberpolygraph so we’d be sure the kids were telling what they really felt, not posturing with some phony claptrap part and parcel of skewed indoctrination.  Such a treatise would be a valuable social document and my guess is it would give pedophilia, even at Jackson’s extreme, a validity little different from that of parents who commonly neglect, degrade, and beat their children.  What if it were widely tolerated and even encouraged; teachers, coaches and like mentors commonly had students spend overnights and weekends with them?  Family nudist parks had designated rules-free zones?   Would society come crashing down as a result?  Ironic to even consider, because the crash is proceeding nicely with pedophiles universally inhabiting the scientifically-sized Jewbox labeled bogyman, one size fits all.  It’s an issue that is NEVER rationally discussed in our freedom-of-speech media.  If a boy’s answer was: “but I liked…” they’d cut to commercial.  In point of fact, as I’ve repeated numerous times, boylovers are responsible for centuries of monasteries which kept learning, however defective, alive; for populating navies which brought us the world we have, for better or worse, and for bringing the Net from its academic, military, and industrial roots to your house and mine.  These extreme contributions are entirely ignored which is especially odd behavior for a culture that stuffs its sprat so full of chips and dips and lets them tubezombie six hours a day, empowering most, male and female, never to have any sex worthy of the name in their entire lives, which, to be a little cute about an ugly subject, is, if nothing else, an interesting experiment in inclusive castration.  Perspective, and a little disquieting to me, because, as an aside, I wish both trials were being held in California so the state could go flat broke, once and for all, and never be heard from again.  Luckily Colorado is high on my list of choices for a second exclusion from the real politic, so all is not lost.
      
      Does it do the ostrich any good to bury his head more deeply in the sand?  Seems to me the moron would simply smother.  
      
      
      “And,” little Theresa added, “steak is really juicy and since we’re not using napkins, might drip on our clothes.”  With that she stood and began unbuttoning her blouse, proving at least one thing to a small audience about curious children.  The girl was a leggy ringer for Cindy, the youngest Brady, blond with huge blue eyes, her hair in twin pony tails.  Billy came across as a typical schoolboy of two decades ago, slim and tall, his brown hair cut short and his oval face home to lively eyes – brown – almost as big as his twins.  He stood along side his sister whose hands reached for his, guiding the twin to her remaining buttons.  Gaff and Eddy stood behind the nine year olds, Eddy quickly unbuttoning Billy’s shirt as the older boy reached from behind to free the girl’s blouse from her shorts.  In moments both children were bare chested, the older boys huddled over them and openly molesting them, the only sound to be captured by the sensitive digital recorder taped to the door by a curious aunt, a soft panting.
      
      “You guys okay?” Gaff whispered.  Both nodded immediately.  “This is how it started on the boat,” he went on, “down in the cabin just after we’d anchored in the cove and were getting ready to swim.”
      “Did it last a long time?” Billy asked, his hands with Gaff’s on Theresa’s chest as Eddy took him from behind.
      “Yes,” their leader said, “maybe half an hour.”
      “Didn’t he take his shirt off, too?” the girl asked, doing her best to sound an impromptu hint.
      “And shorts,” the boy replied, nodding at his classmate.
      Leaving the twins to continue experimenting with touching each other, the older boys quickly slipped out of their shirts and shorts and got rid of their shoes.  In white underpants they returned to huddling over the kids and continued molesting them as the panting in the bathroom became palpable.
      “Not that I know for sure,” Theresa whispered after a few minutes, “but Gaff, you really feel like a man standing behind me.”
      “Is it okay?” he whispered back to her.
      “Yes,” the girl said.
      “Pretty soon it will be your dad,” the boy observed, which made the child coo reflexively and reach behind her to pull her young stallion the closer.
      “And then he’ll be naked with me,” the girl panted, probably encouraged at having succeeded so readily in the hint department.
      
      By acclimation, Eddy was chosen to be first.  His three friends eased against the bathroom wall.  Theresa knelt in front of him and the males flanked him, all three running their fingers gently over his maturing, preteen body, getting ever bolder at approaching the five-inch hardness dramatically tenting his cotton underpants.  Host and hero he was a beauty, his circumcised penis probing from between his milk-white thighs and pulsing to his heartbeat.  Gently, his companions spread his legs wide apart, taking pains to be sure he was comfortable as they experimented with fondling, touching, and stroking him between his tiny nipples and his kneels, guiding each other and whispering over his beauty.
      “Show us how it happened on the boat?” Theresa whispered as she and her brother moved back, allowing Gaff unrestricted access to their naked cousin.
      “This is what he did with me,” the older boy said, kneeling directly in front of Eddy and cupping him with his left hand while he began openly masturbating the boy with his right fist.  “This is what I want him to do in the shower so the other boys can watch.”
      “It’s beautiful,” Theresa whispered, her brother nodding over the girl’s shoulder as he used both hands to play with her budding nipples.
      “And it really feels awesome,” Eddy added, thrusting his hips to meet the rhythm of his partner.
      
      The tableau remained static for some minutes, only the soft sound of Gaff’s stroking hand and Eddy’s ever more ragged panting intruding on the silence.
      
      “After awhile,” Gaff finally whispered, “Jeff and I changed places, because usually it’s the older male who sprays first, then he makes the younger male cum.”
      Eddy nodded avidly.  Incredible as was the hot rise radiating from the base of his spine, the thought of seeing his friend naked, and watching him sperm was irresistible.  Slowly he eased back, reaching for Gaff and then positioning his mature classmate against the wall, coaxing his hands behind his head and then inviting Theresa and Billy to help getting him naked.  Thanks to the generous and humane nature of Aunt Jessica, they knew nothing of having to rush and hurry.  Instead, the three knelt in front of the first-in-his-class, fondling and nipping him all over as their hands roamed ever closer to the full, thick six inch hugeness straining his briefs.
      
      
      Now would not be the time to intrude with yet another essay, so consider yourself spared.
      
      
      Then Billy and Eddy turned their attention to Theresa, molesting her and getting her naked as she pulled down Gaff’s underpants, causing them all to gasp aloud and stare in wonder at his mature fullness, even to a trace of golden fleece beginning atop his jutting phallus.
      “There’s something else that happened on the boat,” the older boy whispered, his whole body beginning to strain at the touch of the pretty, naked girl.
      “More?” the three whispered in wonder.
      “Much more,” their friend panted hoarsely.
      
      Critics of juvenile sexuality, blind in so many respects, do have a point when it comes to the issue of attention span.  One would think, in the present circumstance, it would be impossible for the kids to be distracted, what with a tall, athletic boy about to ejaculate all over them.  But he’d just gone and admitted there was more, so, if unwillingly and haltingly, diverge they did.  Theresa slowly stopped stroking as her brother and cousin eased her away from Gaff.  “Show us,” she panted.
      The leader reached for his classmate and brought him against the wall, kneeling in front of him as the twins huddled close, their hands all over the leader’s sweating torso and Billy experimenting with masturbating him, attention fully focused on “more.”
      “I was kinda shocked when Jeff did this,” Gaff said, fondling the panting boy with both hands as he moved close, “but I survived.”  With that he extended his tongue, finding the flaring crimson top of the quaking boy, and then kissing his way down over Eddy’s glans and taking the moaning child fully into his mouth.  The twins huddled en extremis as their hot friend began a smooth, steady motion on their beautiful cousin.
      
      But it was not showtime.  Gently, Gaff released Eddy, reaching to Billy whom he coaxed against the wall beside his cousin, urging the boy to emulate the pose of the older male, hands behind his head, legs spread widely.   Once he’d assumed the position, Gaff guided Theresa in front of her brother.  All activity except the panting came to a stop while the three boys stared at the girl’s pretty face as she approached her twin.  First she touched him with her tongue, taking her time, both experimenting and progressing, then she was kissing, and in a minute or two she had her mouth fully on his four inch boner, her head bobbing eagerly as the boy hissed and thrust to his sister.
      
      “I’m ready, too,” Eddy whispered after several minutes of intense staring.  He lowered to his knees as he spoke and Gaff took his place on the wall.  Theresa sensed what was happening and eased away from her brother, continuing to masturbate the nine year old as they both stared at Eddy.  Like the others, he was experimental and tentative in his approach, licking and kissing the very mature boy before sliding his mouth half way down over Gaff’s huge erection.  Almost immediately, the boy became avid with his friend, his hands going to the hips of the grunting, thrusting preteen.  More excited than ever, Theresa returned to her hot brother and for long minutes the little recorder picked up the rhythmic sounds and panting of happy campers.
      
      “I’m going to cum,” Gaff said, easing Eddy from him because he knew from his experiences with Kip and Robbie that kids loved to watch it happen.  Again, the ensemble rearranged itself.  Theresa lay back on the floor, hands behind her head.  Gaff knelt between the young beauty’s widely spread legs, Billy at his right flank, his little hand taking over on the huge penis of their teacher.  Eddy knelt at the female’s right shoulder, staring down at what Billy was doing while he jerked off against Theresa’s eager tongue.  “Lift her head when it happens so she can see,” Gaff suggested to Eddy and the boy nodded, placing his left hand under his cousin’s head.
      
      Billy was good and firm, knew instinctively they’d extended their play to its limit.  His hand surged fast and hard on his cousin’s beautiful friend, and the faster and harder as he felt the athlete tense and strain in a rapidly rising crescendo.  
      
      As it started, Theresa hissed: “Oh, Daddy!” then rested her head in Eddy’s hand as she watched the mature boy’s torrent of hot semen splash and spray in hard, long jerks all up her belly and over her heaving chest.  It went on and on as Billy and Eddy chirped with excitement and the latter ran his fingers through the slick whiteness, soon bending over to experiment with his tongue.  Billy, his physical participation concluded with spectacular success, followed the example of his cousin, and soon both boys were avidly licking the bare chest of the sopping nine year old.
      
      Gaff’s left arm went around Eddy’s waist and he coaxed the lapping boy into his position, bidding Billy remain where he was.  Even through the sweating nirvana of licking copious draughts of watery boysperm Eddy responded, taking his position above his pretty little cousin.  Billy again used his right hand, this time to guide the male to the female.  The sensation, first of the child’s hand on his raging boner, then the soft yield of the little girl broke through the cousin’s consciousness barrier and with a final series of licks he rose high over the girl so Gaff and Billy could watch as he gently and carefully stroked his almost teen-size penis ever deeper and finally, in response to her vigorous counter-thrusting, mounted fully, shuddering and panting wildly as he froze in place.  Gaff and Billy huddled against him, alternately peeking between the beautiful young bodies as the children began mating.  It was not an easy sight to get used to, but Eddy deliberated in his pace, wanting the hot, tight sensations galvanizing his loins to last at least a few minutes before he flooded the girl as her tummy and chest had been flooded some minutes before.  This gave Billy an opportunity to become accustom to the excitement of the coupling young bodies and return to his sister’s still slick chest.  He lapped quickly, then found the nine year old’s lips with his own, giving the girl her first taste of sperm.
      
      Once again the tableau froze, Theresa’s legs wrapped high on the waist of her surging young stag as Gaff and Billy huddled against them, molesting both while slowly cycling from looking to tasting to sharing the taste with the lolling, sweating, panting girl.
      “Say what you said when Gaff started cumming on you,” Eddy urged.  The girl looked into his eyes for a second, then hers were lighted with fireworks.
      
      “Oh, Daddy!” she again hissed, causing Eddy to almost immediately freeze rigidly above her, high on his arms, his hips thrust fully to the tension of her banjo string legs.
      “I’m cumming in you, Theresa,” he whispered.  Still supporting the couple with their arms, Gaff and Billy moved so their heads lay on the carped, a foot or less from the girl’s widely spread thighs.  In seconds it started, a heavy flow of thick, white fluid almost gushing from between the sweating young bodies as the act of insemination quickly surged to the full flow of stallion and filly.  
      
      With his last ounces of strength, Eddy moved away from the sopping child, bringing Billy over her and moving him forward.  Theresa, beginning to recover from a shattering orgasm that reduced her to a moaning puddle, immediately enlivened at her cute brother’s approach, craning her neck to welcome him.  Both other boys knelt beside the nine year old as Theresa’s tongue and lips found him, holding him rigidly between themselves for several minutes before the boy let out a soft scream and collapsed on top of his pretty twin sister.
      

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