Photoplay

File I

by Feather Touch


In spite of this story’s digital still photography theme, there’s plenty of action and you may read with confidence.

	

      “Should they just say ‘queso?’” I wondered as the girls stripped in my bathroom and I sat on my bed unbuttoning Renaldo’s shirt, exposing the light-coffee smoothness of his early teen skin, stroking to from his cheeks down over his neck and shoulders, then his already slightly heaving chest.  “Queso” is Spanish for “cheese” and I was getting a bit ahead of myself; besides, they’d both been smiling almost non-stop since I tracked down Renaldo’s tamale cart, and, showing him a couple of stills printed on my new dye-sub printer, had invited him and the two girls in the pictures, his cousins Electra and Madonna, over for, in my broken Espanole, “picturas desnudo.”

      “Si, buen idea,” the industrious youth had nodded and we’d made a date for today.  Yes, the equivalent of fifty dollars had changed hands, and, as I slowly exposed his young teen chest, I was feeling an extra rack of nerves twanging away as this was my first even vaguely commercial session with the under-age set.  A gale of giggles audible even through the door of the bathroom gave me to know, like the man in the most-popular story, I had nothing to dread.
      
      I’m one of those reclusive pedos.  If my memories of mathematics pegs totality at a hundred percent, I wanted to be double-that sure the money was incidental; that these kids wanted to be together and had had some previous experience.  It is, I believe, an issue demanding a near extreme in morality.  A true and bone-deep concept of right and wrong; good and evil.  I mean what exactly is the point of reading something like three thousand books, and living for more than three years each in several American cities from Boston to Los Angeles if one doesn’t graduate from the discipline with a slightly finer knowledge of what’s okay, and what’s not, than those marching lock-step to the so-often faulty dictates of the past?  
      
      “I do speak English,” Renaldo said, his accent changing so suddenly it was five seconds before I was able to resume work on the fourth button of his white, cotton shirt.
      “My readers will be ever so glad,” I noted in response.
      “So you write as well as taking pictures?” the boy asked in his turn.
      “Kind of bait-and-switch,” I mused aloud.  “Sucker ‘em in with sex, then clobber with morality and heavy doses of cultural commentary.”
      “And they like that?” the cute Hispanic wondered.
      “Only about thirty thousand a week,” I said, glad to have a chance to slip, seeing as how he knew the Stateside lingo, my numbers in modestly (actually, I’m quite proud of them).
      
      “For one story?” the child asked, and I pointed out that I’ve authored something in the neighborhood of 25 titles, while hoping he’d continue aiding my self-depreciating citing of literary statistics.
      “Does that make you number one Net contributor in the world?” he then asked, demonstrating that even an obliging nature can have its extremes.
      “What the hell are you doing pushing a vendor’s cart?” I responded, expecting, to be honest, perhaps fifty words of dialogue for the afternoon.
      “Pretty deep cover, eh?” he replied with a wink that jangled me like a Duane Eddy guitar string.
      “Deep enough so there wouldn’t be a trace of gravity at its opening,” I said.  He laughed, eyes sparkling smart-like.
      “Not to worry,” the so-called boy continued.  “Heavy uncle in close with the vermin unit of Interpol.  We bait and switch, yes, (where had I heard that usage before) but not with someone like you.  I guess you’d call it a busman’s holiday.  The girls were all: ‘I hope he comes back,’ after you pulled out your little Canon the other day.  I was on there side.”
      
      “Have you nailed anyone?” I asked as he pulled his shirt tails free and stepped between my legs so I was half nibbling his tawny, sleek skin as I spoke.
      “Two last week,” he replied, now raising his hands high over his head, arching slightly to the rear, and panting more deliberately.
      “Big jail?” I murmured.
      “Nah,” he said, “we killed ‘em.  The el-grossos are too dangerous to play with; will do more harm out on bail, so we kinda revoke it before it’s issued.”
      “Sounds like you’re pretty hard-line when it comes to parole, too,” I noted.
      “We leave that up to god,” Renaldo responded, “since nothing else to do with religion makes the least sense.”  Seriously my kind of logic.
      
      “We really, honest-Injun, don’t have to do this,” I said.
      “Electra and Madonna are dying to,” the fourteen year old said, “and I am, too.  We get all the negative stuff while we’re on duty, but not from everybody.  A few kids we’ve interviewed have thought it was hands-down the best thing that ever happened to them in all their born days.  Checking back, we found the men, two, involved were as decent as they come, however you spell it, and that got us talking; you know, kids’ stuff: what if this and what if that.  Than I freaked out over your Canon, and you seemed nice and proved it by hunting me down to give me the dye-sub print; that was nice, and it was easy for me to tell you were on the level; that the money was gratuitous and meant nothing; no pressure, just charity, which, if we were the real deal, we’d have been very glad of.”
      
      “I think you’re going to be very easy to write about, Renaldo,” I said.
      “I do rather feel I’m in the hands of a master,” the boy said, and it’s my belief he may have panted just a little harder than was justified by the actions of my fingers on his belt, snap and zipper.
      
      Writing for the Web is all-but the emptiest of experiences; tens and hundreds of thousands read, the download logs prove it, but the number who take a moment to jot a note of thanks for all the free entertainment, edification, and possible humor can sometimes be counted, months at a time, with the largest finger.  This made my new friend’s comment especially endearing, even though my status as a mastercreator is no longer much of a novelty.  Behold the jaded and shopworn, for they know not what they fail to do.  (And who ever heard a writer kicking his audience around for their lazy, shiftless ways?)
      
      The patter of little feet.
      Electra, first.  She’s the pixie; at twelve, looks maybe nine.  Slightly rounded Hispanic face arced with a fringe of pretty brown curly hair.  Something of a girl/woman, in spite of her years, but entirely flat-chested so it was unlikely she’d allowed many mature males to be complete with her.  (I’ve taken a notion that artistic license specifically includes pseudo-scientific opinions, and one of mine is that immature females don’t stay that way long after taking an active lover; this theory buttressed by the small likelihood of any adult male wanting to use a condom with such a frisky and lively child.)
      
      Then Madonna.  Taller by a head than her 4’10” sister; slim, angular face with a neat boyish look.  Her bra was more useful than Electra’s and her waist slimmed beautifully over what were probably very new hips.  (Must be strange for girls to grow, so many changes, where guys hope for only one.)  The fourteen year old’s hands were on the younger girl’s shoulders and Electra looked repeatedly up at Madonna, the eyes of both children glinting excitedly each time they met.  Yeah, I’m big on quizzing – just to be sure – but there was surety aplenty as the gaze of the females often returned to my hands at their cousin’s slim waist as I slid his shorts down over his long, athletic legs.
      
      “Pretend I’m older,” the younger sister whispered to her older sibling.  Madonna responded by bringing her hands from the pixie’s waste to her belly, then rising slowly up under her training bra.  Electra welcomed the older girl with her tiny paws, leaning back, sighing, and surging gently against the fourteen year old.  I had, by this time, relieved the still panting Renaldo of his shorts (actually, we had, for the sight of his almost naked cousins had not distracted the boy in the least; indeed, had, if anything, seemed to make him all the more cooperative when it came to the desnudo thing).  In fact, the kid was such a pro it was almost disconcerting, for as I gawked and re-gawked at the sinuous children in the doorway of my bedroom, he unbuttoned, unsnapped, and un-zippered me in short order, and in less time than it takes to tell I was standing behind him, molesting him down to the band of his white, cotton underpants as the girls eased forward, moving within inches of us.
      
      Too fast for you?  Then we must be on the same page (if you’ll allow me to slip in a little literary humor), because pace is what this art is all about and things stood on the verge of getting out of hand (and once out of my hands, how long could my little FBI-type friend possibly last, you know, considering?).  That’s where the Canon came in, and let me assure you – as if there were the remotest possibility of it – I’m not here shilling for anyone.  I believe digital photography is the ultimate implementation of digitalism and write of it for that reason, alone.  That photography is the nonpareil hobby for reasons both creative and practical.   So, yes, the girls eyes, once the two understood I wasn’t going to strip their male beauty on the spot, did stray a time or two to the Canon Powershot S400 Digital Elph hanging from a nail on the wall where it lived free of danger from four unpredictable cats or survivable earthquakes.  Looking to temporize any way I could, I sat the three of them on my bed and retrieved the fiendishly concise new toy.  Yes, they’d admired it on that first occasion when I took my candid portrait, but now they became all but enraptured.  They ooh’d at the front and ahh’d at the rear, passing it among themselves.  Since the steel on/off button is plainly marked, Renaldo fingered it, looking at me for permission.  I nodded and the camera emitted it’s friendly chime as the lens uncorked itself.  No salacious giggles at the obvious entendre of its jutting forth.  Way comforting.  
      
      Since all digicams have a Camera and a View function, Renaldo was quick in discovering the little slide switch and again looked for permission before operating it.  With a tiny click the LCD lighted up and I rose for a moment to retrieve my drugstore reading glasses from the same nail that housed the Elph.  Although the resolution is fabulous, the icons and text on the display are the size of small ants and a little simple magnification makes a big difference.  So obvious are the controls on the little steel wonderbox, R was able to begin scrolling back through the images of my previous day’s shoot, and the boy was blown half away when I touched the little zoom lever and the image in the LCD jumped in fast stages to ten times its normal size.  Yes, it’s soft at that magnification, but you can scroll through the enlargement so it still tells the story pretty well.
      
      Having mastered the basics, the three set about going back through the thirty or forty images on the memory card, flattering me considerably by keeping at it, enlarging, taking turns looking (as against glancing), then reducing the image so they could scroll back to the previous one.  There may be better ways to kill time with three cuties sharing one’s bed, but I think it’s best we leave those to the professionals at fantasy fiction.  Meantime, the boy and girls did finally reach the last stored image and I reached in and switched the unit back to photo mode so they could look at each other, live.  In fact, I was actually looking away when Renaldo whispered “holy shit,” leaving me to know he’d tried the optical viewfinder, and its exquisite ground glass system free of the normal clutter found on an SLR.  “And it zooms, too,” he whispered, in the same awed voice I used the first time I clapped eyes on this ultimate sensation (with near zero parallax because of the optical finder’s location within precisely one inch of the center of the lens).
      
      It was great to be talking of photography.  It is by so far the most useful and fulfilling of hobbies and we are fabulously lucky to be living at a time when the cost has been reduced to a modest investment for the camera, and each camera includes ten thousand free images unless one includes the cost of the electricity to charge the battery.
      
      “Is it super sharp?” Madonna asked.
      “No,” I replied, “I wrote a review of it for C/NET; in fact, I wrote two, but they’d only publish one, and in neither did I report it as sharp.  Everything but.”
      “Can I see it?” Electra asked.
      “What?” I asked in return, since the camera was, at the moment, in her tiny paws.
      “The review,” she said, leaving me pretty flabbergasted.  Tell most people you wrote anything about anything, they tune out faster than a person with a brain quits McDonald’s.  
      “I really thought you’d never ask,” I replied, doing the best I could to be a little funny (such nice kids) to cover my confusion.  
      “Well,” the cutie said, “I’d like to.”  
      
      I found the file, swung the monitor so all could see, and have to admit I re-read my gracious lingual flow as Renaldo, Madonna and Electra perused my 2,242 words.  (If you are not interested, my condolences, if you’re in a hurry and simply don’t have time, scroll down until you see a column of *s, which is where you’ll find us no less excited than we were.  And, should you happen to like it; want more, heaven forbid, log onto the excellent C/NET and you’ll find, quickly, if you search by date, it’s, duh’uh, the longest Reader Comment of the 150 or so listed under Powershot S400.)
      
      
Canon Review 2:

      This review covers the Canon Powershot S400 Digital Elph, the Toshiba PDR-M11, the HiTi 640PS dye-sublimation printer, and Adobe PhotoDeluxe.  Also mentioned, Canon A300.  It is based on one year’s digital experience and some five hundred exposures.
      
      First, there’s a fly in the ointment with the Canon Powershot.  In the crucial installation documentation it’s referred to as the “IXUS v3.”  Also in the setup dialogue screen.  Installing the drivers was a week-long, technician-involved, nightmare, but few other user-reviewers mention problems, so - don’t read the literature with its confusing names, install the driver, then plug the cable into the USB port.  (How confusing is the book?  At one point, it flat-out states you need NO drivers for the S400; that they’re only for advanced features like thumbnails and RAW  Oddly enough, the documentation is, otherwise, excellent with only “You are recommended” as a translation glitch.)
      
      When I was a kid there was such a thing as a “magic spell outfit.”  Don’t know if the term was generic or circumstantial, what I do know is that I now own such an outfit.  I’m an old film warhorse; years of experience and some hundreds of roll of 35mm and 70mm (120) film and a thousand or more prints, b&w and color, as amateur and entry-level pro.  And now I own a magic spell outfit.  Hundreds of shots taken, processed, and displayed for pennies.  If that isn’t magic then write today with what is.  In fact, even in this digital age the suite under review here, for most of us, represents the culmination of human genius in fields as diverse as chemistry, optics, mechanics and, of course, electronics.
      
      The Canon is well suited for typical assignments, which usually run to 70 or so exposures over two or three hours.  The display is easily turned off (or back on), also disable the auto-off, possibly the flash, and the camera copes well with enough battery reserve to add a margin of safety.  (Recharge, 110 minutes from flat, before you upload.)  The 32 meg included card takes 94 images at medium res.
      
      Best features of the S400, in this writer’s opinion, are the auto-rotate system and the zooming LCD, which allows close-up inspection of the image you have just recorded.  
      
      Actually, I would have preferred the Canon A300 with its non-zoom lens, but I live offshore and had to take what I could get (in fact, paid $950 U.S. for the Elph.).  The issue is sharpness.  The S400 is flat-out not as sharp as my much more basic fixed-focus Toshiba (lost).  This puts you, the reader, on the horns of a digital dilemma no less profound than the Tastes Great / Less Filling beer wars of a decade or two ago.  The Canon is a tactile pleasure to use; crisp, weapons-grade stainless steel, no hideous joystick control which, on the plastic Toshiba, infallibly went left or right when you wanted an “up” function.  It makes beautiful noises and display lights, galore.  But, dilemma time, you are trading not only sharpness but considerable sharpness.  It is this reviewer’s theory that, vaulting as it is, the tech is simply not up to a zoom/macro as plain crystal sharp as a much simpler systems of optics.  
      
      Most user and professional reviewers rate the S400 as very sharp and I wish they were right, but image to image comparisons of photos from both cameras makes the $150 clearly (literally) superior to its $500 counterpart.  My local dealer has an entry-level Kodak digital and I wish I’d opted for it as I’m compiling a portfolio of commercial images under fairly basic shooting conditions, with sharpness as a be-all, end-all, and the other absolutely cool stuff, incidental.  
      
      Digital irony.  The amateur will love the expensive Canon; look and feel unmatched, and it takes, yes, way-way rich, color-saturated pix.  The hard-eye will want the cheapy with it’s fixed focus lens and vibrant product.  And I wonder a little at this mega-pixel dance.  The S400’s rated at four.  Why?  It’s not sharp enough to handle it, the enlarged images go soft way, way before any pixilation begins, where the el cheapo stayed sharp well INTO pixelization.  Guess it’s some kind of horsepower war without the horses.  Canon should be above the fray.  A related issue is the zoom; any zoom, all zooms.  They’re status symbols, and, except in sensitive and experienced hands, which means on a quality tripod, worse than useless, magnifying body movement, greatly limiting depth-of-field,  and dulling images if not destroying them.  On top of these liabilities, they’re mechanical, delicate, and for ninety percent sure, likely to be the source of any breakdown.  The zoom on the Elph is useful primarily with the strobe, at which time it can come in handy by allowing stand-off distance for the photographer when attempting low-light portraiture.  In full daylight, where the shutter speed is very high, it may be used successfully for “framing.”   In fact, I’ve been left wondering whether one who plunks down ten thousand U.S. dollars for a top end pro body, plus another thousand or so for a zoom, might not give birth to a dozen kittens on viewing his colossally costly images next to those of a used point-and-shoot kiddie camera that cost fifty bucks.

      The HiTi printer can be comprehensively reviewed by simply suggesting you buy two so you’ll never be without.  Each packet of fifty sheets of paper comes with a fresh ribbon, a four-inch band of Saran-Wrap looking material, that, remarkably, allows, should you want it, fifty all-black images while still covering all the sheets (think what that would do to an ink supply).  These sets are beautifully packaged with distinct notches for easy tear-open.  The machine costs a way-reasonable $200 and is high-end enough that it includes a link to a monitor calibrations service in its Readme.  It accepts all memory cards and is usable as a stand-alone, with no computer at all.  The Elph on the Hiti gives sumptuous results, and, run your images first through PhotoDeluxe, and it is possible to ganar, as the Spanish say, gallery or coffee-table results ninety percent of the time.  Magic-spell totality.  
      
      
      You can shoot digital in full sun.  Who knew?  Twelve to one, highlights to shadows, and not a trace of magenta.  The darkest greens, to jet black, with no hint of purple.  Meantime, in the same image, there’s direct sun off white paint, texture intact.  Please, I don’t mean you should try portraiture in direct sun – as if…  but that other shooting may be possible.
      
      The traditional three huge, heavy barriers to great photography are simply retro, assuming 4X6 images and photo CDs are your objectives.  (If premium 8X10s are what you want, I have a single word for you, spelled f-i-l-m.)  The principal barrier was obviously the cost of a high-end camera and related equipment and consumables, and was measured both in dollars and hours.  Flexibility, convenience, tiny size, and ease of use, all make up the second barrier breaker (attention, attention: ladies and gentlemen, we have just broken the sight barrier), and, third, is the ability to shoot, when, in Hollywood, the AD would be calling for more floods and reflectors to fill in the hot-sun shadows.  In other words, there is nothing between yourself and art-book, gallery images but a cheap camera, a little software, and your own personal dye-transfer (as dye-sub was once known) printing facility (the HiTi) that hums and sings out crystals, gems, and diamonds in seventy-seven seconds and for forty cents a print.  Of course, that hoary computer caveat about junk in equaling junk out is as rigidly in force as ever.
      
      I’ve tried a number of photo editing suites and feel Adobe “PhotoDeluxe,” however basic (it takes up about 45 megs versus 150 megs for PhotoShop), is by head-and-shoulders the supreme product, especially with its intuitive, to say nothing of addictive, Clone tool.  Also, I’ve learned to trust the Instant Fix option; usually improves the image, sometimes dramatically, and rarely degrades it.  In addition to the three barriers noted above, PD opens vast new areas in terms of raw subject matter.  My specialty is cliché tropic vignettes; weathered wood houses shot through banana trees and palms.  So way quaint they’re actually cool.  Problem is, there is forever a rake leaning against the house, a plastic pail in the yard, everlasting power lines and poles, and a hundred-and-one similar distractions and elements of visual graffiti.  
      
      Cloning is like painting in reverse.  You start with more image than you want, and slowly and carefully clone (copy and paste?) in sky, grass, or sand (etc.) to mask, cover, and generally clean things up.  In hours you’ll be getting results you could have once realized only through the airbrush work of an expensive major finishing studio, and ending up with the essence of your image amazingly clutter free.  (Plus, it’s great fun.)  Minor user issues: in PD you may need to hit the Print button first, then go to Setup and choose the HiTi from your list of printers, and then, after that, Size your photo, checking it in Print Preview.  Strong recommendation, when in Photo Size, is to type in 360 for resolution and 3” width which gives 4” height and, at least to my eye, looks perfect on the 4X6 paper (with perfed, tear-off end tabs, neat).  Also, rotate landscapes to portrait orientation before printing.
      
      Notes and by-t-ways.  I use a pair of drugstore reading glasses on a neck strap; big difference.  Print the size used on billboards and LCD icons the size of whales.  And speaking of glasses, the optical viewfinder on the Canon is a fine-textured, clutter-free, ground-glass beauty, very accessible for us four-eyes, and with zoom.  The only time you’d be likely to use the extremely high-resolution LCD is in the touchiest of still-life composition; yet it’s available to view your in-camera images, magnified by the simple zoom lever, to ten times (if softly) their original size (with easy scrolling).  What a difference in portraiture to be able to show the subject, in seconds, exactly what he or she looks like, take a look yourself, then work together for the next, better, rendition.  Best single camera feature you ever saw, though with a day’s shooting to upload, the auto-rotate capability is hard not to love and love. 
      
      Canon is very slick and responsive for a digi-cam.  The “on” button does need to be held down for a beat or two, but otherwise it’s pretty quick on the draw and loads into PhotoDeluxe at the rate of about two seconds per right-side-up image.  Highly neat.  Only caveat is to pace the upload if using the (freshly-charged) battery.  Don’t know for sure, but it seems that if you try to select (transfer) uploading images as fast as you can click, you get ahead of the battery after about sixty files, leading to a Camera Not Found box, which means you get to start all over again.  AC adapter would solve this.  An ongoing minor issue is the two-step shutter release common to all digitals.  Very hard to get used to, and it’s never easier to blow it than when it counts the most.  Since practice is all but free, practice.  Many user comments on lack of battery indicator.  What the camera does have is a flashing red “low battery” indicator meaning you have a few minutes and a few shots left.  Wait ten minutes, warming the battery if applicable, and you may be able to squeeze in a few more.
                        
      The HiTi insisted on my USB (2.0) 001 port (Dell, XP).  Short e-mail to Canon’s Elph help site describing the IXUS v.3 problem, and asking for help, went unacknowledged; I feel they could have at least referred me to a technician.  (On the other hand, if I ran Canon it would have the same corporate philosophy: build the best possible product from initial design to assembly, testing, and packaging, and ignore the costly and unproductive “service” and warranty side of things.  How many computer outfits went bust because the burned their profits at the altar of tech support, one fool chewing up the earnings on a dozen sales, and likely as dissatisfied in the end as in the beginning?)
      
      Interesting little snake in the grass.  How to clean the lens?  Never much of a problem with film cameras, the glass is, relatively, the size of ashtrays, but baby lima-bean lenses come with their own special needs, and fogging with your breath and wiping with common tissue just makes things worse.  I’m hoping the answer is opticians’ lens tissue, perhaps working it with half a toothpick.  Go way out of your way to keep your lens clean, then try a pristine artist’s brush on the dust before wiping with anything. 
      
      Too early to report on battery life – as in longevity (versus duration of a single charge).  A thousand cycles would be great, but there’s probably a great variation as this is the rawest extreme of the bleeding edge. 
      
      Finally, the strobe on Elph is miraculous.  Awesome power (never use within a meter of human or animal, especially an infant).  The first time I saw a flash pix taken at three inches, exposed within a hundredth of an f-stop, I didn’t know whether to sputter or go blind.  But maybe very small and extremely bright describes the whole camera.  Now, for a magic spell so it could be called sharp…  (By: Thomas@btl.net)
      
      
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      Survivors’ Helpline: 1-800-PHOPLAY.
      
      “Is there anything you left out?” the boy asked when they were done reading.
      “It does three-minute videos with sound,” I replied.
      Electra blushed.  “What’s wrong,” her cousin asked.
      “It’s my first time, I mean real time,” the twelve year old said, “and I don’t want to go that fast.  I thought it was going to be regular pictures and we’d have all afternoon.”  Renaldo looked at me questioningly.
      “Three minute segments,” I elaborated.  “Once one is uploaded into the computer, the camera can take another, and another, and they can be edited together.”
      “Cool,” the girl said, her sister nodding as both seemed to relax.  We were turning out to like and be interested in each other, so the hurry thing was relegated to the back burner.  Way fine by me.
      
      “Do you have a storyboard?” the deputized federal agent asked.
      “I had an action-oriented one,” I admitted, “but I think I’m kinda revising it as we go along.  In fact, what I’d like to do is take you into the studio, lie you, Renaldo, between your cousins, and then we’d begin with close-ups, mouths and ears, of you whispering to the girls about exciting things that have happened to you, while they tell you any stories along that line they may have.  From there we can go to your hands as you begin with them, especially taking off Electra’s bra, then segue to my original storyboard so there will be less confusion when the girls fully welcome you.”
      
      At this juncture, no, I was not addressing a sea of nodding heads, but three-out-of-three wasn’t bad, so I continued.  All in our underwear, I guided them from my room, past the bathroom, to my second spare bedroom, opening the door.  
      Inside was as much of a Kasbah as I could jury-rig living way, way offshore as I do.  By a stroke of luck the local hardware store had stocked in a five by eight foot wall hanging, sort of a modern-day tapestry with a photo of an elephant somehow etched to the material like a gigantic tee shirt.  Fair to middling backdrop.  The bed, or more accurately, stage, was also draped with various fabrics to pleasing effect and the room was lighted with five hundred watts of those new GE natural-tone light bulbs;  very bright, yet with the light scrimmed and filtered so it glowed rather than glared.  “Cool,” both girls whispered in unison as we slowly entered and I flipped the switch.  Well, not with that many hundred watt bulbs blazing, but the worst of the heat was dissipated by a ceiling fan; slow, soundless, and atmospheric in case I got romantic at the crucial moment and tilted the camera up, like they once did on the coast.  (As if…)
      
      Madonna and Electra knelt on the bed, bounced a little on the foam, as is the wont of the young, then gathered the red satin pillows and rolled on their backs, both stretching their arms to their drop dead cousin, who joined them, lying on his back between them, his white underpants bulging hugely to the fascination of the three of us.  I started the camera on the elephant on the wall, and panned down, moving around some in what was my idea of dollying, then slowly trained in closer and closer as Electra brought her lips to the young male’s left ear.  Madonna cuddled in close and both girls ran their hands softly over the teen’s heaving and lightly sweat-sheened chest.
      
      Electra was an intelligent girl and seemed naturally inclined to respect the shooting limitations of the S400, beginning her story without preamble.  “I’ve let a man get me wet three times,” she whispered to Renaldo, “but he got too excited for it to happen inside me.”
      “Was it okay?” the boy responded.
      “Pretty super,” the twelve year old replied, “because the only thing better than watching a cute guy sperm is watching him spray all over your belly and legs, then lying back with your eyes closed and fantasizing while he slowly licks you clean.”  I wondered what, exactly, a girl might fantasize about at such a moment, but let the thought pass.
      
      “Have you seen it happen, too?” Renaldo asked Madonna, hugging his younger cousin as he ran his right hand over the older girl’s belly and lower chest.
      “Not the first time,” the fourteen year old replied, blushing sweetly.  “The boy was nineteen and had been celibate for over a week.  He was afraid of leaving his sign on me if it happened out in the open, and I didn’t love him so I didn’t want to carry his seed in my belly.”
      
      Why a storyboard, even for the simplest film?  Because of situations such has just been described.  Shooting takes full concentration, rendering the brain useless for abstractions such as “what shout should come next.”  If I’d had a board, I’d have known which girl to start with, Electra or Madonna, and here both were telling graphically fantastic stories, leaving me to figure out, on the fly, which to concentrate on, first.
      “My first time, Madonna,” Renaldo whispered, “was, if I get your meaning, just like yours.  I didn’t get to see anything, and he wasn’t behind me, if you know what I mean.”  (I don’t pay my characters to make my point for me, but that doesn’t stop them.)
      
      About now I was sore in need of luck, and the Elph came to the rescue, the cute thing, beeping to advise all of us its first file was full.  Still in our underwear we retreated back to the bedroom, where my ‘puter is, ‘cause I’m on it eighteen hours almost every live-long day, and uploaded our first take.  I grabbed a pad and pen and sat with my cast.  One word about MY first time and there would have been murder, but the subject wasn’t broached and I was able to give the matter some undivided attention.  Renaldo was by some months the eldest of the children, so I used that as the baseline; he’d tell his first, then Madonna, leaving it up to the elfin Electra to provide the final climax to our little work of art, if it were to have one.  (I added that to be funny.)
      
      Back to the pillows.  Close-up of their three faces as the boy whispered alternately to his young cousins.
      “Remember three years ago, my eleventh birthday?” Renaldo began, to twin nods.  “Uncle Gravio brought one of his cadets to my birthday party?”
      “Sure,” the older cousin chirped, “Francisco.”
      “He was twenty one,” the male cousin continued, “and I guess we kind of hit it off right away, especially because he’d been deputized when he was only ten, and that was something I wanted, too, as soon as possible.
      “Anyway,” the boy went on, “we got to talking fairly seriously, and he told me a big secret.  That deputies have to be experienced.  They have to have been, successfully, with an adult male, at least three times, and liked the experiences.  The Squad was no place for homophobes or knee-jerk reactionaries.  ‘There are lots of good relationships out there,’ he advised me, ‘and first-do-no-harm is a byword with us.’  I nodded and said that made way too much sense for any government program.  He thought that was funny and it sort of made us better friends, that I didn’t take it too seriously.  Then he asked if I still wanted to apply to The Squad, and I nodded.”
      
      Because there was a certain amount of kissing and hugging involved, this passage took up another file.  During what transpired over the next hour and a half, yes, there were many trips back and forth.  If you’ll hold the thought, it’ll save us a lot of footwork.
      
      
      “Would you like me to interview you, informally?” the veteran of the force asked the leggy boy sitting beside him in the latter’s bedroom.  It was early Sunday evening, and the brand-new eleven year old was looking forward to his new friend perhaps even staying overnight with him, instead of sleeping in the guest room as he had, previously.  Yes, there was so much to talk about, and what a place to start.
      “Yes,” Rencito, as he was then called, whispered.
      “It’ll mean answering some pretty mature and embarrassing questions,” the young man said softly.  “You can change the subject any time you feel uncomfortable; don’t have to say why or anything.”
      “No,” the boy said, “it’s okay.  I mean, yeah, like you said, it’s kinda embarrassing, but then the first time I wore my Speedos in front of an audience was, too, and I seemed to have survived that.”
      “Good sign,” Francisco said, “because the last thing we’re looking for is any show of predatory behavior; hustling.  Entrapment isn’t our game, any more than interfering where we don’t belong.  Some kid who goes out and does a bump and grind in his bathing suit is not for The Squad.”
      “I think I understand,” the eleven year old murmured.
      “Another detail that needs covering before we go any further,” the veteran cadet noted, “is our policy of killing perpetrators, not doing anything fancy to the tune of puling lawyers and pumped-up advocates.  We ferret out the worst, garrote them with piano wire, and leave a note.  Pure vigilantism and profoundly deterring.  In fact, we hit a city and usually put ourselves out of work inside a month; can’t find a creep with a microscope.”
      
      “Do I have to do the piano thing?” the boy wanted to know.
      “Yes,” his mentor said, “more so you’ll be used to it if it happens in your presence, but you never know how a particular situation might break, so, yes, we have you practice on sheep.  Not a real lot of fun, but these are in no way fun people we’re dealing with.”
      “I understand,” Renaldo nodded, shuddering slightly.
      “Well,” the man said, “the churches have managed to drive off god with their forever yammering and raging hypocrisy, like the drooling-geezer pope hanging on to power with his last iota of functioning will and intellect, so we get the cleanup detail.  Just the way it is.”
      “Do they shit and piss when they die?” the inductee asked.
      “Yes,” the twenty one year old said; “that particular urban legend happens to be true.”
      “I’m glad there’s a nice side to all this,” the boy mused, looking up at the tall athlete sitting on his right.
      “The best thing about it,” his friend noted, “is that you’re out by twenty five.  It’s not a career field, just something a few of us do on the side, and enough is definitely enough.”
      “Do you ever catch cops?” the curious child asked.
      “About ten percent,” the cadet said, “but we hold them to a lower standard.  They’re in the thick of hell and perversity as a matter of course, and if they hustle an otherwise bimbo quality boy or girl, we allow a pass or two.”
      “How can you tell about stuff like that?” Renaldo wanted to know.
      
      “With the cyber polygraph,” the adult said. “It characterizes the subject as well as delineating deception; lets us know precisely what we’re dealing with from inoffensive dabblers to Dahmer-type hellhounds.  Very comforting.”
      “Don’t the guys get nervous?” was the next question.
      “They don’t even know,” the man explained, “we just get a snippet of video, about ten seconds, head and shoulders, of them talking.  Just like a dog can smell a million times more acutely than a human, this machine – actually it’s just a computer program – can detect subtleties of body English that literally tell all; general attitudes and orientations as well as specifics concerning a particular incident.”
      “Sounds way big-brother,” Renaldo mused.
      “Handy thing to have around,” Francisco laughed, “a straight-thinking big bro.”
      “Where we really need him is at the candy counter,” the child observed, referring back to conversations they’d had on the subject of pandemic obesity.
      “And in front of every vending machine,” the older male added, modifying his comment by acknowledging that even people who ate almost nothing but a Third-World (Developing-Nation) diet of rice and beans managed to bend the scales with the best of American supermarket super-moms.  Both nodded sagely at their firm grasp of the obvious.
      
      “So you got experienced when you were ten?” Renaldo asked after a comfortable pause during which they sat just enjoying each other’s proximity, as friends.
      “As a matter of fact,” the agent in advanced training replied, “it happened on my tenth birthday.”
      “Cool,” the boy whispered.  “Are you allowed to tell, or is it a big, deep, dark, forbidden secret?”
      “A thousand monsters on a leash of corn silk,” Francisco responded, “and if even one gets loose, why, you’ll have to use your imagination because it’s beyond telling.”
      “I imagine you were pretty cute when you were that age,” the boy said, “even if only half as much as you are now.”
      “Takes one to know one,” the man chuckled, setting up another comfortable pause.  When he spoke again, his voice was husky.
      “Has anything happened with you yet?” he asked his own mentor’s nephew.
      “No,” the boy said, reddening to he rasp of the mature male’s voice but showing no signs of wanting to be anywhere other than where he was.
      “Same with me,” Francisco noted.  “From nothing to experienced in an hour, leaving me to wonder, when it was over, what the hell all the fuss was about.  Seemed the most natural thing on earth.  In fact, even now, I think half our real mission is to eliminate the bad apples, to understate it by the odd thousand times, so they don’t create an atmosphere of hysteria that intrudes on the okay relationships.”
      “So everything happened the first time?” the boy said, not overtly trying to focus his guest while at the same time keeping him sharply focused.
      
      “Except having him up inside me,” the man replied, “and I wanted that, but he wasn’t willing because of the pain issue.”
      “Did it ever happen?” Renaldo asked.
      “We were lucky enough to spend a lot of time together,” the older male responded, “so it finally did, but it’s entirely optional; doesn’t matter one way or the other.  Actually summarizes the whole thing, because none of it means anything, one way or the other.  It has no influence or effect on an underlying relationship, good, bad, or indifferent.  In fact, the only time it even comes to light, outside obvious rapes, is when some kid is losing it in other ways, then he or she blames sexual interference, if it ever occurred, and often enough when it didn’t.  Well-adjusted kids handle it just like you handled being bare-chested in front of the bleachers when you swam with your team.  In fact, if a kid CAN’T handle it, and I don’t mean to be glib, chances are he’s going to stumble over everything in the path.  Some people are just like that, most of them enabled by parents who respond to their stumbling by giving them attention for it, instead of a good swat across the butt.”
      “Dysfunction does seem to be a fad without an end,” the exceptionally alert eleven year old observed.
      “It’s trendy enough, for sure,” his older friend agreed, “livens up many a cocktail party and is a golden-egg boon to the liquor concession.”  
      
      The boy thought twice.  Beautiful as the athlete beside him was, exciting as was anticipating the immediate future, here he was getting off the subject at hand, himself.  Was the mind really that important?  Good talk even over his first time, ever?  (That he knew was about to happen from the rasp in the adult’s voice.)  It only came at certain times, and could hardly be called drooling or slobbering,  but even to his virgin ears, it was a sure sign something was going to ensue beyond a blow-by-blow discussion of sex and the single boy.  Yet he was entirely happy just chatting away as if they were eating together in a restaurant.  At least almost.
      
      “If there’s no affect on the long-term relationship,” Renaldo said, taking time to find the right words, “is there sort of like an immediate difference, before and after?”
      Brilliant question.  “Yes,” Francisco said, his eyes glinting with respect for the handsome head on the slim, eleven-year-old shoulders, “in fact, that’s very dramatic.  About the fastest change you’re ever likely to go through assuming you don’t have a heart attack.  One moment releasing yourself with your partner seems like the be-all, end-all to human existence, then the release occurs and within a heartbeat or two, you’re cast into a sub-normal state of indifference.  Some boys even go from willing and highly excited to feeling angry, exploited, and guilty.  That can last a few minutes, before things straighten themselves out until they’re again normal, and the return of excitement and receptiveness often occurs within a few more minutes.”
      “Like a rollercoaster…”
      “Only the first few times,” the man noted, “and only if the event is furtive and hasty.  After that, the hills and valleys flatten out.  It’s still just as exciting leading up, but there’s no big down after you sperm in your partner’s hand or mouth.”
      “Is that what you call it?” the child whispered.
      “It’s way Henry Higgins, I suppose,” Francisco allowed, “’prisoner of the gutter, condemned by every syllable she utters.’  To a boylover listening to a South Beach hunk hissing ‘suck that dick’ is offensive and talk of packages and meat is more suitable to the A&P.  We don’t believe in over-romanticizing, a trap festooned with eel teeth, but a certain rhetorical dignity and distance still has its place.”
      
      “I’ve never said it,” the child whispered, blushing.
      “It was hard for me, too,” his friend responded, “but my teacher was thrilled when I did – I mean the argot actually is that important – so, in the end, I was happy, too.”
      “Did you have your clothes on when you said it?” Renaldo quizzed.
      “Just my underpants,” the mature male whispered.  “Carlos was naked and I was in his lap.  He said I should say it when I wanted to be naked and go all the way.  ‘Show me your sperm,’ I was meant to say, but it was okay to say ‘cum,’ if I wanted.  And I thought I would until me turned me in his lap, so I was facing him and could feel his bare chest against mine and his penis was up inside my briefs.  At that point I knew his way was best…”
      
      “Hold that though,” Francisco suggested, causing the boy to choke and giggle over the absurdity of there being room in his head for any other.  Once he’d regained his composure, his mature friend spoke again.
      
      “Renaldo,” he whispered, “if we’re just going to talk about, you know, things, we’d better, sort of, you might say, in the name of humanity, stop where we are.  You’ll understand fully when you’re a little older.
      “So,” he went on, “we can go downstairs and see what’s on television; go out for something to eat; go to the zoo, or for a drive; pretty much anything you like, while, on the other hand, if you do want to stay up here in your room with me, or have me stay with you, to me more gracious about it, we might consider a reprise of the physical events related to those activities I’m narrating, if you follow me.”
      “If we stay here, I won’t have to follow you,” the child observed, and, since the boy was hardly the lazy type, his friend took this as a good omen.
      “You’re sure?” he asked.
      “As sure as I’m overdressed for the occasion,” came the response.
      
      Does anyone hear clacking?  Even if only in the mind’s ear, you should.  The clack-clack-clack of the pawl on the roller coaster, a sound that becomes exponentially more dramatic with the passage of time.  On the other hand, two participants who’d not be expected to hear it are our central characters, because in both cases their chests were heaving and both were panting openly.  
      
      The most modern antique term is “over-clocking.”  Francisco didn’t know exactly why the random thought popped up, unless it had something to do with seeing and touching the slim, brown-eyed beauty sitting at his left.  Even the thought of it stripped the gears and melted the springs, which was perhaps the mind’s way of dealing with a totality of excess to be piled on the excess of simply having such a winsome young friend.  “A couple of things I have to tell you,” he whispered, looking down at Renaldo who, in response, raised his hands over his head, the better to have his polo shirt removed.  “First, is to remind you of the downside that comes when you’ve ejaculated, or climaxed if you don’t have sperm yet.  The second is that I’ve wanted something to happen between us ever since I’ve been here, and, to tell you the whole truth and nothing but the truth, since you uncle showed my your picture.  What this means is that I haven’t done, by myself, the things males do from time to time in the normal course of events; specifically, masturbating or jerking-off, as boys are likely to say.  Why bring up the subject, you ask?  Because that means the ending is going to be, well, excessive.  When you whisper to me to sperm, it’s going to be like whispering Free Beer at a coronation.  This happened in Russia at the beginning of the last century, and over a hundred thousand were killed in the ensuing rush.  So I just want you to be ready.  A lot of kids like the play, the touching and fondling and caressing and stroking, the kissing and whispering, but suddenly they’re being covered with a thick, slick fluid, maybe on their chests or even in their face, and it’s a freak-out; not the kind you get over in a few minutes.”
      “How about if it happens inside a kid’s mouth?” the winsome one asked.
      
      “Semen tastes heavy, cloying, and salty,” Francisco replied.  “Some love it, some tolerate it, and some don’t like it in the least.”
      “If it was anyone else,” the boy responded, “I’d want to see it my first time; keep it more objective and detached.  But you’re way neat; way-way neat, and nothing would be so cool as having you be mature on my tongue, if you want to.”
      
      There is, of course, a time when the clack-clacking comes to an end.
      
      Francisco removed the eleven year old’s shirt.  The boy, sensitive and artistic, kept his arms high as the man stared him up and down while he quickly stripped out of his own jersey.  Then his fingers went to the youth’s cheeks, traced back to his ears, slowly meandering down over his neck and shoulders.  Renaldo’s hands went higher, as if he’d suddenly realized it was Billy the Kid on the south side of the north-facing .45; and he simultaneously, arched his chest in modest display.  
      
      
      I come crashing into my stories.  Everybody knows it.  Ego me-go (and, if you wanna-go, remember the secret of the column (*) and scroll away). But this time it is not I who’ve brought myself, again, crashing aboard, but my hugely regarded Larry McMurtry sounding off on my beloved John O’Hara; frying him up as if he, the reviewer, owned a series of burger stands, not used bookstores.  John O’Hara is flat-out, hands-down, unequivocally my only competition in the world as a writer.  (Say it isn’t so.)    And poor Larry fries, in the end, naught but himself.  In the first place, J.H. is no way, never was, never could be, weren’t nohow no novelist.  Yes, he was better than the Hideous H or Foul F; that entire dreary list stuffed into coast-to-coast high-school English courses, its disastrous impact and influence un-noted because the list is set like a plunketts of Talmud, not to even be misspelled much less in any other way finagled with, but better than Faulkner is John Q. Public, so big deal..  
      
      John O’Hara wrote short stories.  They are the best writing in the world.  I once nailed six ten-thousand words stories, five less than two hundred words over, one fifty words short of the target, in a row.  I do believe, since they are all as good as Mr. O’Hara’s, though I’d call none better (me-ego lets me-go very rarely, so read and rejoice at actually having seen it happen), I know a thing or two about the subject, and, veteran of four hundred thousand published words under a single title, something, to boot about the novel.  Mr. McMurtry hardly mentions the short stories and wastes a third of his article on a headstone anecdote.  Seems not able to equate the literary sloth now running to three generations with his H-list of stars who are, in fact, black holes sucking all life out of any lit for all readers and especially all wanna-be readers (to define total tragedy).  Turn a thousand sixteen year olds loose with O’Hara’s small masterpieces and you’d be serving Kool-Aid to withering teenagers waiting their turn inside the library, which, since we’re talking baked-plains Texas, happens not to be air conditioned.  (And yes, there’s shade aplenty down at the dancehall which has video games along the walls and is run by a tolerant sheriff.)  That’s a big difference; that’s what Salinger and H. have done to thirty years of kids.  
      
      John O’Hara should have been awarded every Nobel Prize, or at least a couple of dozen.  He was sorely abused by cruel people and mocked and called a shit when he objected.  The shit was what mister pockets at “The New Yorker” paid him for his vaulting chain of masterpieces that made the magazine for years, then decades.  It makes me feel plumb lucky is all I can say; I had the great good fortune to try dealing with N.Y. back in the eighties with a huge novel that raw from my portable probably wasn’t quite good enough for the mainstream; some close calls, but it never led to a check.  Rapidly enough, practice made perfect and I became too good for the place, and now take occasional pleasure in winding the crank handles of my excessively bored cannon, aligning the cross hairs on Park Avenue, and tugging the lanyard to an almightily resounding concussion and then perhaps twenty seconds of wonderful pleasure as I contemplate the trajectory of the giant shell and imagine the devastating crash of its arrival.  It’s all fun.  The aiming, the first tremendous bang, and the distant thunder of arrival.  It’s real sad Mr. O’Hara never had the pleasure of kicking the crummy giant, blasting a huge hole in it, chopping something off it, and doing all in the comfort of his own home, just thousands of miles away, as is my privilege, knowing they won’t shoot back, because they can’t.  He should have shared that, if only by virtue of the fact he was good enough to.  
      
      He sought recognition and it was denied.  I write porn in obscurity, well, ahem, except for the unflagging actual readership of twenty to thirty thousand downloads a week, and I wouldn’t know what to do with recognition if it bit me on the nose.  To turn the tables, methinks I’d recognize it as dangerous and kill it with a hoe.  I like firing my cannon; brings out the boy in me, and if the city got all lovey-dovey, where would I aim the massive beast?  (The Middle East should be dispatched with twenty five high-yield hydrogen bombs, so don’t even think about that scuz land.)
      
      He was great, they didn’t even treat him as good, and laughed when he cried.  I’m made of sterner stuff, patrician heavy old-money New England Yankee, so indifferent to Yoik I wrote and published the following joke within an hour of the collapse of the second tower.  “Who put the sky back in skyline?”  Three years later, life in the backwater of Belize not only continues – as ever – but I’ve recently been able to purchase a high-end Canon tourist camera and indescribably fine HiTi printer from my local dealer.  Whatever they were trading in the Trade Center is apparently stuff we can do nicely without, leading this scribe to wonder if we might not do without them all, starting with the editors.  I mean, don’t they sort of identify themselves that way?  Lauding the cretinous H and Nabakov, Fitz., Gertrude, and yuk, yuk, yuk, while treating John like that of the shingle?  Well, they don’t treat me at all.  But how shivereth they, knowing? By the thousands, as my reader count approaches three million at a lively and undiminished clip, they know.  Do they picture me busy and my cast-iron wheels with the oak handles, training?  How big IS the bore?  They know I served with 155s on the DMZ, and somehow survived.  Does that mean I’m some kind of a – you know, from all those resounding and proximate concussions –  “Yamato” freak; nothing less than eighteen inches?  Into Daisy Cutters?  Don’t rightly know.  Don’t rightly care.  Yoik is free to ignore me as it will, I’m free to blow the stagnant, entirely too Jewish, place to all the smithereens that come to pass, and if I choose to do it a cherry bomb at a time, maybe it just seems more efficient than some big blast with a derivative mess to clean up.  
      
      On to more practical matters.  I’ve been off on a photography tangent, and won’t be seeing my socks for awhile as they’ve been blown plumb outta sight.  I lived a mile or so from Eliot Porter back in the mid to late Seventies.  Never met him but a fellow photographer told me much about what were then called “dye-transfer” prints.  These were famous, at the time, as Mr. Porter published a number of Sierra Club art books using the dye-transfer technique and amounting to a whole new generation of popular lithography as well as original photography.  More about it than that I don’t really know because I was very much the journeyman with a camera, not the artist.  (In fact, my memory is that the Eliot Porter books, and I spent some hours looking at them but can’t say for sure if I ever owned one, were routine work, only published because they were, a, of wildlife and nature, and therefore appealing to the Sierra Club, and, b, a spectacular jump in the quality of the printed photographic image.)  All of which is a short-enough, thank you, way of coming up to the subject at hand, which is owning a dye-transfer printer.  
      
      Alex is neat; the total diplomat, way noncommittal, as a State official must be least his personal likes or dislikes be mistaken for policy.  Still, he spent a long time looking at each of my now thirty prints, spontaneously saying “you’ve got to sell these to tourists.”  When I explained you could put two hundred of them on a CD, and two thousand on a DVD, he seemed to think the idea even better, diplomatic reserve, notwithstanding.  The images are stunning.  They get better with review.  I’m as excited looking at them for the umpteenth time as I was the first time they passed from the rugged rollers of the HiTi.  They, each and every one, not only fully realize the technical quality of Mr. Porter’s work, they are beautifully composed images of precisely the same tropic-island rustic motif that’s forever inspired artists.  Palms, banana trees, simple wood structures both painted and weathered, and, like the girl in Harry Bellefonte’s song, they jump, jump, jump Delilah   I remember a film in which the girl looks through the boy’s collection of images, finally commenting that he never takes people   Lifeless.  Good lesson, and so there they are.  Life.  
      
      The counter passed 650, and I guess it doesn’t fib, so it sounds like I’ve been a busy little boy on this hiatus from the keyboard.  My keeper file, images probably good enough to go on the first CD, numbers about four hundred.  Now, most of the credit goes to Dangriga, with its cornucopia of gem-quality images, but still that’s a lot for no more than seven shoots, plus the odd noodling.  “Tropic Gems Studio” is the best I can come up with for a name, though I suppose “PhotoCaribe” might do in a pinch.  Plus, another challenge: somehow remaining un-intimidated by the chance of success on the field of dollar play.  
      
      Yes, my ego knows no bounds, nor is there any reason it should, but at some point enough has to be enough, and sure enough, I had no idea history would repeat itself.  See, it goes something like this: for years, I was a better photographer than writer.  Make that decades.  Although not imbued with the creative flash of the true artist, I was becoming competent indeed in rendering what is naturally beautiful, and had an almost extreme eye for what that beauty was, in the first place.  For years, great pix, so-so writing, though I only really stank at fiction.  Took twenty years, camera free, to reverse the skill sets, but, as I said, history repeats itself, and here I am, equipment and chemistry removed from the equation, camera on a par with keyboard.  Dye-transfer (now called dye-sublimation) prints to go with the svelte prose, to say nothing of four hundred images neatly filed a few clicks away on PhotoDeluxe.  Not a better photographer than writer; I’ve been at the latter virtually non-stop for the last twenty years, but vastly better than I was.  
      
      Once again, it’s the computer to the rescue.  Talk about life rings.  I couldn’t write without it.  Supporting a family of five, plus myself, plus helping others, I couldn’t have afforded the ribbons, paper, carbon, and repairs, to say nothing of the tedium of working with all of the above (except the typewriter, itself, which I dearly loved).  With the computer, I can lie semi-reclined, necessary for medical reasons, keyboard on my stomach, and work eighteen hours out of twenty four, and for bouts of thirty hours.  Six hours in a chair, and I’d be on Heparin.  Simply the capability of practicing for free, that’s what it amounts to, and the same thing with photography.  The Canon, with it’s tough little rechargeable battery, allows a hundred shots at a go, at no discernable cost.  PhotoDeluxe saves – makes possible, in the first place – image after image, nine or more out of ten, that otherwise would be discarded (not captured in the first place) because of utility lines and a hundred other varieties of eyesore that the editing suite allows to be cloned away, click-poof, gone.  The very definition of a dynamite combination, and add the crystalline vignettes common on the back streets of a poor Caribbean town, and dynamite becomes the only word.  The fourth stick, as if one were needed, is the ability to stash two hundred high-resolution images (2.5M each) on a fifty cent compact disc, ten times that number on the digital video.  
      
      Oddly enough, the only overt success I’ve had in my life was as an entrepreneur, overt success defined as a two hundred dollar a day net off a gallery in Santa Fe.  Didn’t last, and I never pushed the photography (laziness, plus the distraction of writing), and, as far as the writing goes, to date, I’ve made forty dollars.  But “Friendly Jungle” poured and gushed money from its first ever-lovin’ hour (building sold out from under me).  So, since the photography, as an art, has re-emerged, is it unreasonable to think the venture capitalist spirit might be a fellow traveler?  Then I could be garish and recognized.  But, my.  Pop this wolf between the eyeballs, skin it, and nail the skin on the outermost fence post.  Think of the fun involved.  Suddenly this newbie artist/entrepreneur giant, and it turns out he has a dirty little secret stretching 1.2 million words back over Nifty and ASSTR, for three years.  Is, in all probability, the number one Net/Web contributor.  On top of this, lo and behold, he turns out to be of patently royal birth with a steel claw connection to the very outbreak of the Revolution and a family tree of branches running the gamut of The Bell System and Bell Labs, The Burlington Route, and other involvements chronicled in modest and sometime succinct detail in other writings.
      
      A right-between-the-eyes commercial success, off of art.  Has to be just the ticket at my stage in life, and the only way I can keep it to myself is to display such a ferocity of arrogance and superiority everyone holds their nose and circles wide, thus allowing ample time to solidify myself as a practicing, practical genius in an exponentially self-compounding paradigm guaranteed to both further and enhance itself.  Do you suppose the Muslims have a saying: “the ignored ass brays”?   Probably the hungry one.  Thus John O’Hara, and, deliciously, thus me with the opportunity to wreak vengeance in his name.  And nothing Faulknerian or abstract here; symbolism and innuendo are wastes of my ethereal time.  Yoik is poisoning the young with Irish-Sweater Ernest and his Gertrude Stein ilk.  That is my charge.  They wrote emoting trash, crummy bums with Gatsby the superstar.  Actually, not to put too fine a point on it, John O’Hara did, too.  “Butterfield 8,” in addition to making a mockery of Mr. McMurtry’s supposition that O’Hara never had a break-from-the-pack “hit” (to say nothing of “Pal Joey”), is a horrible, just-what-I’m-talking-about novel.  But, to again teach Larry and New York a li’l something, Liz played the role.  Okay? 
      
      Why do I dislike the novel?  Because the guy drugs the underage girl with ether to rape her; the smarmy, seedy side assumed.  Liz takes to the paddle wheel.  It’s all funk.  Sure, it happens, but so do unspeakable scenes inside burning cars – you know, the ones with kids in them – and it’s the cheap shot to categorize and castigate along the shopworn path to moral nowhere.  One brush for all colors.  Gray and finally black.  John O’Hara is the most brilliant executioner of the short story, and uses the vehicles, in their scores, to establish himself as without peer in any language (though Pushkin’s always to be counted) until I published “Jimmy and Frogger.”  End of review.
      
      Is there any other domestic stuff?  Switched from macaroni and cheese dinners to Perfect Burgers (Samantha definitely agrees).  Astounded at how fast I’ve edged back into photography, what with broken camera, stolen camera, and two monitors and a computer giving up the ghost over the past eight months.  In six weeks I’ve done a year’s work, and, much like my characters, am having to deliberately bide my time until taking the next step.  In fact, for the moment things are so perfectly and beautifully arranged they can all come flying apart today or tomorrow and I’d just shrug and hope I have time to appreciate what’s behind me, published and out there for all of civilized time, a final time before the curtain closes the last inch.  I want PhotoGems to take time, to nurse it along slowly from stage to stage during the ramp-up, avoiding entanglements with the excessively mercantile.  It’s been no fun, writing.  Recalcitrant editor (on Nifty), no mail, no feedback from family or household, zero recognition, no fun beyond the abstract thrill of success.  Let others die of envy, what good does that do me?  I need joy, pleasure, toys, diversion, entertainment, music, dance and a bushel of the lighter things of life; to make contact with my ego at the ATM.  On second though, I don’t so much need them as view them as the only available option, having accomplished everything else.  Nothing left to do BUT succeed on the commercial front, to sell beauty for money.  
      
      Meantime, I’ll pick away at this story while feeling a little silly that I’ve got two or three mss. ready to post and simply have not gone through the minor thrash of clicking them onto my list.  It may not be fun being a writer, but the writing, itself, is, so I fill the odd moments, such as today’s rainy day, with typing along for lack of anything better to do, wishing “better to do” included “The New York Review of Books,” but I get bogged down so.  The close-mindedness of it all.  The ad-nauseum rehashes of the same very-old antique and vastly antiquated.  I rarely reach the square, the little boxy that signifies you’ve endured, travailed, persisted, and ground on to the end.  D.H. Lawrence was a wacko – certifiable – with a quirk of the settin’ of the word of no more interest than the weird abilities of some poor sumabitch who earns his or her fame as a contortionist, yet on and on with him and for the umpteenth time.  He wasn’t much, why try making him less, played agin the absurdity of making him more.  Couldn’t make it to the box on that piece, and I wanted to in hopes of learning whether or not he could type.  Not vital, but important – especially in an essay largely addressed to my own ego.  It goes something like this: he’s documented as having written “Women in Love” at the rate of three thousand words a day.  I recently wrote and published “Electric Letters” at the rate of ten thousand words a day, but can hardly claim something in excess of three times the world speed record for published fiction if Lawrence was using a pencil.  Alex pointed this out, and my response was, “ah, yes, but he had an editor.”  If I didn’t have to review and revise, or at least partially correct my work, I’d rap it out at twelve thousand a day, an insignificant achievement when the quality is considered.  (You know, the by-play and humorous little jabs.)
      
      Huge throne, empty palace.  Would I prefer the drone of others, or echo of myself?  From whence comes the next word?  
      
      Samantha made it through the ninety or so images we took Saturday.  Andrew also tuned in for the entire show.  I was shaken, again, by how good they are, what an extreme marvel the little camera – precisely the size of a pack of cigarettes – is.  It’s taking lots of getting used to; everything from the huge color to the fact it’s so close to free the cost of a thousand images can be measured in terms of a penny or two.  Today’s computers are said to be on a scale of a million times better than the first consumer models and I think this ratio might apply to digital versus film photography.  Far higher quality, assuming small images, at one zillionth the cost, allowing for a modest initial investment as a starting point.  We have “Survivor” and “Idol” type shows; any chance of one devoted to photography?   Probably not, it’s always been kind of an oddball hobby.  I attended a medium size high school and college and was the only photographer on either campus; had both darkrooms entirely to myself, two years at each.  No one read at either institution (also had both libraries to myself); no one struggled with chemicals and images.  Mayhaps they all grew beards to express themselves.  Doesn’t seem like they’ve made much of a life, in any event, class of ’68, but what would I know, dwelling in an empty palace?  At the time it meant no one to talk to; no mentors, no tutors, no guides or pathfinders (took up with motorcycles so I’d know what a “wheelie” was and could talk to someone about something; also big on horses, and, to the quake of Yoik, guns, for the same reason, though I had a natural enough passion for all three).  No one to quash, no one to direct, suggest, hint, cajole or meddle in any way, though from time to time it was suggested I work and earn my own way.  And, in the end, what?  The way I read and see it, an ethereal broth, all flavor no fat.  All protein, no carbs.  All vitamins and nutrients, no starch.  Nothing to please anyone other than myself; no interest, yippee.  
      
      In horse racing, it would be, as the bromide goes, “out of Texas, by truck.”  But that’s not the case.  I’m not some mustang off the register, exactly the opposite; of a Bostonian blue beyond comprehension with more money and accomplishments to its credit than several entire ethnic groups.  Tuned down, not up.  Knowing all, not some.  Permanent, not transient.  True, not fake.  Ignored, not adored.  Happy, not sad, and arrogant to the point of its becoming something of a joke.  If I believe myself a god, well, I’ve been rewarded and compensated in accordance, so what interpretation would I make?  Silence to work in, toys to work with, and Samantha to break the silence.  Is there more?  I unplugged from the cable eighteen months ago because it was becoming increasingly obvious as time went on that no, indeed, there is no more than I have, not a trace of it in a billion dollars.  Imagine, if you will, having all the talent for an entire generation, a small collection of pretty good film and television scripts aside.  That must be a reward by somebody for something, wouldn’t you guess?   Yet what does the reward really consist of?  Well gosh-darn if it isn’t as mundane as simply knowing the plain-old truth.  That lots of kids like playing sex games with attractive adults, that in toto, the Jewish influence on our culture is both extreme – children’s television the most heinous of a long list of examples – and highly negative.  That an obsession with materialism and food redefine clear-and-present danger, and would were these compulsions paid for with cash on the barrel-head rather than over the forty-seven years they say it takes to clear a charge from the installment plan, at the rate of two percent a year.  I find humor in all this, but you may be fat, be in debt, have wifty, flap-about cartoon kids (useless for anything BUT sex, and not very good at that beyond a few hyper jackoffs), be so intellectually stunted you actually like Irish-Sweater Ernest, and find the laughs to be few and strained, and even find yourself wondering how someone who kicks god like the dog (as in simultaneously vicious and sniveling cur) he is and preaches civil disobedience and downright felonious experimentation when it comes to boys in white underpants and huffing up a pound or three of pot over a year’s time.  How come I get the idyllic tropic existence, going on two decades now, the petite minx of an African super-girl with sufficient wit and charm to occupy manuscript after manuscript, and, once again, at least most of the talent for at least one and maybe two generations.  (O’Hara died in ’70.)?  
      
      At this juncture, three years into the fray, tens of thousands of New York publishing figures have read me.  Many realize I could punch up their mainstream pieces so they’d make money; many could acknowledge this and offer that, yet, ease of e-mailing notwithstanding, total and absolute silence.  Might as well have a big apple sitting on top of my monitor, rotting soundlessly.  Well, no matter, I’m having the time of my life (and at fifty-seven am fully mature enough to appreciate it), sufficient if not ample for the same generations for which I received all the talent, and, at least in an artistic sense, all the brains.  That really is reward enough for a god, and if I scare Yoik, and especially hymie Yoik, because I think it should be scrubbed from the face of the planet, maybe New York isn’t as dumbfoundedly dumb as I make the place out to be (as it appears to me).  Regrettably “be very afraid” applies to the whole country, the whole culture, the whole of civilization above the Bedouin and his tea pot and camel, so prejudice attaches, as the lawyers say.
      
      Molded prose.  Even from McMurtry.  Every brick all but identical.  Like a Jew following a Bedouin’s camel with a wooden box, which, once the box is filled, he covers by tap-tap-tapping for a perfect fit.  The money of the day.  Suppose that’s the reason.  A cash flow attends he of the large bore gun and squared-off chops’ mat, so he’s perpetuated and promoted regardless of the civil cost.  Only a certain subset of the intellectual world could tolerate this, put money above health, and so they have Bill Gates’ leftovers and we get the sick.  So it is in the land of the Semite, and I protest.  Disenfranchise them, confiscate all they own in reparation, and deport them.  Or die.  So simple.  If Dershowitz says they’re Not Guilty, then we are, but we still can’t tolerate their cheap standards and divisive finagling.  It’s that time.  Also, time to get back to our story.
      
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      “Do you think you’re getting ready to say it?” the older male asked as Renaldo shuddered and panted to his touch, “to lean close to me so our bare chests are touching and whispering the word in my ear, then being quick if you really want to try taking the spray on your tongue?”
      The eleven year nodded as solemnly as if being instructed in the fine points of arming a grenade, his eyes huge as his master experimented with his fingers, touching the eleven year old everywhere as the youngster kept his hands high and all but moaned aloud.  
      “If you didn’t want it to happen in your mouth,” Francisco whispered, tracing the child’s nipples, “it would happen here.  Do you think you’d like that?”
      “Yes,” the boy managed to whisper, shuddering at the very though of seeing a hot, strange fluid pumping heavily over his heaving, birdlike chest.
      “If you were my age, do you think you’d like to splash on a cute young boy?” was the next panted quizzing.
      “Very much,” Renaldo replied.
      
      “It’s very artistic,” the older male went on.  “That’s something they don’t bother covering in all the naysaying, harping and prejudicial allegory, that it’s just plain beautiful, the heavy smear of seed spurting all over a willing child, male or female.  Completely ignore the entire aesthetic aspect while they’re off on some moral crusade, too fat to ride horses so they need four-wheel-drive, and certainly nothing to do with cute or even appealing, much less gorgeous and much-much less wondrous.”
      “So,” the younger male allowed, “you don’t have to be contrarian to ignore them, a rebel for the sake of rebellion.”
      “No,” Francisco agreed.
      “Good, ‘cause I hate that shit,” the boy nodded, “it’s embarrassing having you look at me and touch me, especially when you look down, but it certainly feels natural enough, so going-for-it seems aligned with the truth and what’s organic and functional, not some perverse alternative practiced to draw attention to one’s self by pissing people off.”
      “Well spoken,” the mentor said, showing incipient ability as a writer, himself, by virtue of his almost-droll understatement.  
      “Are we going to be lovers?” Renaldo then asked, “I mean never anything faggy where anyone might see or hear, but when we can be alone together?”
      
      “I’d like that,” the young adult said, “for it to happen again.  Many times.  But we live in an insular age, in flux and on the go.  It’s not good to depend too much on others as the loss usually more than offsets the gain, so we should count ourselves pretty lucky if we can take it month by months over hour by hour or day by day.  Perhaps even year by year, but not permanently, as marriage is meant to be.  Not monogamous, not permanent, but restricted and enduring for all of that.”
      “So it’s okay if this happens with other guys?” the boy whispered.
      “Men trade boys very willingly,” the adult answered, “and, with pretty strict limitations, include them in group situations, while the boys, in their turn, usually like making other mature males cum.  It’s a freedom that tends to bind, most man/boy couples lasting the longer if some allowance for alternate adventure is preserved as part of the basic relationship.”
      “The smaller or the larger?” Renaldo wanted to know.
      
      “Smaller,” his friend said, “partly from the standpoint of disease and common-sense issues like that, but also from the point of view of convenience.  Same in marriage.  Affairs rip into a marriage when they remove the spontaneity; ‘we can’t visit your sister because I’ve got a date with Bambi,’ that kind of thing.  Same with us.  If we have to juggle each other past this and around that and through the other thing, a good deal of strain becomes attached and things break down.  On the other hand, ‘never’ means captive.”
      “What would be perfect,” the younger male said, “is if we could, you know, stray together.  Like an open weekend once a month or so, where you play with other boys while I watch and other men touch me while you watch.”
      “Well,” Francisco mused, “now that you mention it, there is a certain nudist camp where the clientele is carefully selected and the rules are left to the more civilized.”
      “Awesome,” the child whispered.
      “You say so now,” Francisco chuckled, “but wait ‘till I tell you.  Six or eight young men, mostly Navy boys, for every child your age.”
      “I might get used to saying it under circumstances like that,” the boy responded with a shy smile.
      “You’d have lots of help,” the adult allowed, “in fact, so I hear, boys come back from the woods, having been with possibly as many as a dozen mature males, without cleaning up.  It’s pretty bestial, I suppose, and one wouldn’t want to show up at Mickey D’s that way, but in its place and time its supposedly an ultimate in erotic art.”
      “Just hearing about it meets those standards,” the eleven year old noted.
      
      “I think you’re right,” Francisco said, “right as rain.  Just picturing you emerging from the trees and crossing the patio of the pool in my direction, wet and slick almost to the point of dripping, and standing shy and embarrassed in front of me, well that’s an image and a half, let me tell you.”
      “Would you kiss me to let me know it was okay?” the child whispered.
      “Cheek by cheek and tooth by tooth, if you wanted me to,” the older male answered.
      “Show me,” the willowy tyke hissed.
      
      “Let’s be naked,” his friend panted to a vigorous nod from the colt.  “This is how it usually starts,” the man said, standing and easing the half-naked youngster in front of him, then ruffling his hair from behind and going on to stroke his neck and shoulders, finally openly molesting him by running his fingers sensuously over the arching child’s heaving flanks, belly and chest.  Then the tall athlete leaned over the five-three boy, running his hands low on his flat belly, and finding the buckle of the child’s belt.  Renaldo eased his slim hips forward to the touch, instinctively, ‘cause he was that kind of kid, welcoming but not hurrying.  In a minute, it was the zipper, and in another he was in only his underpants as Francisco experimented with touching his creamy upper thighs and running his hands down over what they call in the trade his bubble butt.  Five minutes, and he turned the child to face him.  By this time Renaldo had figured out what do to and his small hands went to the heavier belt of the young man, opening the buckle, struggling with the slide-catch, then making careful work of the zipper.  “Keep going,” Francisco whispered, explaining that the boy was now in charge, and by custom the adult was usually the first to be completely naked.  The staining cotton briefs occupied Renaldo for some minutes as he experimented and explored, allowing himself to be molested, again from behind, several times as his panting grew more forceful and he began to shake and tremble with a dozen fantasies closely related to what was happening and his boyish abstractions of what was about to happen.  Clever to the bone, he moved behind the taller male, reaching blind in front of him for his first foray inside the elastic of the undergarment.  Both gasped at the first contact, the boy at the heat of the huge hardness, the man at the touch of the immature fingers which shyly found their way around, and seemed to follow some primal instinct in finding his front and retracting his foreskin.  Both shuddered and quaked in place as it went on to the point where Renaldo was actually experimenting with masturbation while he repeatedly thrust his own bone-hard five-inch erection against the muscular leg of his tall, athletic friend.  Then the tableau changed, the boy, no longer able to resist seeing as well as feeling, moving back in front of Francisco, and pulling down his briefs.  Gaping as he dropped the final garment to the floor, then hugging against the young adult to feel the hot hardness against his tender, little-boy breast.  
      
      Both were beyond thoughts of any more nakedness.  Francisco moved to the bunk beds, leaning against the top, his elbows on the quilt, and spreading his legs wide as his young friend made himself comfortable on the lower bunk and began kissing and licking the seven-inch penis jutting from his partner’s rugged waist.  More lips, more tongue, less tentative and exploratory, more accepting and deliberate.  Then the boy was doing it, taking almost half the length in a long series of hot strokes, his tongue wriggling as he fell to the rhythm of his first full encounter.  His hands likewise remained busy, cupping the adult low, finding a natural place to squeeze with his left, while his right worked in conjunction with his bobbing head.  As a base activity, it was intensely exciting to the child, and any baseness to the activity was enhanced many times by his sensing the man in front of him tensing dramatically with each passing minute.  A feeling of very definitely going somewhere, of working toward an end actually challenging the boy who knew, at one and the same time, that rushing would make it faster and maintaining would make it better.  Yet so true were his juvenile instincts, and he was by no means the Lone Ranger in this department, he was able to have his cake and eat it.  He lingered slightly as the minutes passed, then became ready to end it in a frenzied rush.  Maintaining a strong rhythm with both his hands, he removed his mouth from the hot, straining adult, whispering hoarsely but a single word, returning immediately to sucking fast and hard.  Half a minute went by, during which his partner tensed and strained until his breath was ragged and every muscle in his body corded and bow-tight.  And with a hot, salty rush the virgin had his sperm, a first shocking taste, then a long series of repeated gushes that went on and on, his throat working avidly to swallow, until he was thrilled, exhausted, satisfied, and content.  Somehow, they’d completely overlooked kissing in the passion of the moment, and, in a final acquiescence to instinct, he held the last of the heavy ejaculation on his tongue, rose to his feet, half pinned to the bunks by his exhausted partner, found the young adult beauty’s lips with his, and sent both of them into a final, shuddering ecstasy that dropped them to the lower bunk, where they remained for half an hour before either could move a muscle or whisper a word.
      
      
      Yes, there’s more to the story, but they tell me big files are not convenient for Web TV users, and it’s beneath me to cheat anyone.  Hope you liked this, and if you’re too lazy to write, to end with some good news, I’m not.  
      
END – Photoplay – File I

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