“POET OF PHU BAI” - FILE II
              
              
              “What the fuck was that all about?” the private ask, dismay rather than anger in his voice.
              “You don’t know?” Chuck said.
              “I didn’t even have time to grab the camera,” the puzzled writer replied.
              “Somebody tell Sir Concord,” Chuck growled, this time friendly like.
              “We’ve never seen them,” Ed Nelson said.  “None of us.  Not even one.  Once I thought I saw a 
muzzle flash, and some movement.  That’s about average.
              
              “Well,” the Army boy elaborated, “they were on the right, starboard, that’s all I can add.  If they’d been brave, they’d have jumped up five seconds earlier and stitched the cockpit, probably got two full clips into us as we went over.”
              “How high were you?” Chuck asked.
              “Two hundred feet,” Bing said.
              “Shit,” everybody said.
              
              Again the sound of rhythmic clapping, this time accompanied by calls of speech, speech.
              “They mean you, Failure-to Fly,” Ch8ck grinned.
              “How many are Navy?” the soldier asked.
              “Over half,” Ed replied,
              “The hell you say,” Tom muttered.  Bing gestured for his ear.  “What happened yesterday is off limits for a day or two,” he whispered.”
              “Oh,” the journalist said, “I’d forgotten about that,” then slowly rose back up on his chair.
              
              “Four score and a hundred harebrained schemes ago,” he began, “they welded Lenin in a traint, and across Germany he did roll”
              
			With cutting torches and quaking
			hands, they cut the poison free.
			Sickness spread immediately.
       
       Worse than czar, worse than king.
       and now he’s after Bing
       It is a little thing, in a Gordian knot
       A single  piece of string.
       
       A pesky nuisance, a forlorn dither
       It amounts to no hill of squat
       Kill it here, kill it hither,
       Just kill it a little then kill it a lot.
       
       Yeah, it’s hard to figure and put together,
       what with a mouth in every head;
       Hippies ranting, Yippies changing,
       Balls of suet, brains of lead.
       
       But life is long, the nursing home
			awaits, with millions of hours
			in thousands of heads, their
			souls to contemplate.

			Would you rather be here, today,
			now, or trade for their terminal
			bed?  I have a thing it would be
			better to be, and that is to be quite
			dead.

			We could fight this in Florida,
			and Texas, next, Lenin had
			to be cut from his train  But
			it’s prettier here, so let this
			be the place, warm, with lots
			of rain.

			Blot and scrub, sand and
			scrape, flush and add some
			bleach.  If a chisel is needed,
			a chisel it is, so use every
			chisel in reach.

			Stop them tricky, stop them
			hard, stop them in their tracks.
			Ho, ho, ho, has a long way to
			go, enslaving the world as his
			hacks.

			It may happen today, it may
			happen tomorrow, but happen
			it surely must.  We have one
			objective, from this day on;
			living up to Hitler’s trust.

			Now don’t you boo, and don’t
			you hiss; don’t carry on at all.
			He did almost the entire job,
			or our job’d be ten times as tall.

			This is a little thing, a nowhere
			thing, we shouldn’t even be
			in the papers.  But urban schmoes,
			with lens and ink, make money
			selling the vapors.

			Katharine Graham, head of the
			tribe, will get a president, too.
			So here’s to being out of there,
			and with an American crew.

              The private sat quietly as he had a year earlier the after the flight school mess hall had echoed with his birthday greeting.
              “He could actually be a god, you know,” Chuck said to Bing.
              “Sir,” Tom responded, “I went to flight school in hopes of one day being able to circumnavigate my ego in less than a week.  I’d appreciate any assistance you can render in furtherance of not adding to the challenge.”
              
              
              Tense mission.  “Sad Suzanne” left her holding pattern and approached a tulies LZ with two other CH-46s.
              
              “I’m glad they’re with us,” Bing said into his mic.  “Misery loves company.   This outpost was called CFC, Cannon Fodder Canyon, now it’s just Charlie Fox.  They like to see you come but hate to see us leave.  You’d thing they were our lovers, with that attitude, wouldn’t you.”
              “That would be misguided, I can tell,” Tom noted.
              “No one here is exactly friendly,” the pilot said.  “Some of our troops would kills us happily as the V.C. would, if they thought it would get them out of the place.”
              “Gran always appreciated guests with a sense of departure, remember?” Tom laughed.
              “Well sure,” Bing responded, “but after they’d stayed for tea.”
              “Bet the popovers are like lead,” the private observed.
              
              “And her sandwiches,” Bing mused on, “crusts cut off the bread and the cucumbers peeled and I e cold.  Don’t ever tell anyone the finer things in life aren’t all tits and ass.”
              “Where I went to school,” Tom responded, “that was about the size of it.  You guys were at least all New Englanders.  I ended up spending ten years just outside New York,  and summers on the Cape and holidays in Concord.  Odd man out in either venue, with everyone trying to pretend it didn’t matter, in Massachusetts, and everyone on Long Island pretty sure nothing else did matter.”
              “Probably a good idea to know them both, vis-à-vis writing,” the older cousin responded. 
              “Good point,” Tom laughed.
              
              “Something’s happening at our ten o’clock, about seventy meters,” Bing said tersely.  “We’ve got enough ammo to start a store, so why don’t you empty a could of clips.  Fire about once a second.  Keep their heads down.”
              “Sorry cuz,” the private said, “it’s a court martial offence for an information officer to handle a weapon.”
              “You are kidding, aren’t you?” the pilot said. 
              “Not exactly,” the writer replied, hoisting the heavy camera to his shoulder and training it out the smaller port door of the descending helo.  “Your duty is to record, not participate.  Like in nature photography and most documentaries.  You’re not to be there in any sense at any time.  Medics have the same code.  They start lines, they don’t shoot.  Sharpens focus.”
              
              “Whatever,” the major responded, now piloting the last quarter mile of the steep approach. 
              “Sorry,” was all the private could think of to respond.  Looking out the hatch, and aft, he could see a Phantom coming in hard.  With a few twists of his fingers he adjusted the camera, aiming it ahead of the helicopter and focusing carefully on an out-of-place patch of banana leaves.  A sudden flash and fireball.  The Phantom shooting high explosives.  Bodies in black pajamas blew fifty feet in air, a dozen or more conical hats adding to the macabre nature of the Navy’s work.  A dozen more missiles and there was nothing left to shoot at, the jet screamed by fifty meters away, then pulled into a steep climb.  Meantime, the first two ‘46s had loaded departing Marines in a few seconds, and were lumbering clear of the LZ.
              
              “Christ Bing,” Tom said into his mic, “I hate to admit it, but the Army’s right.  I got that perfect, and not only got it, but I was shooting at a hundred frames a second.  Slow motion.”
              “Well,” Bing laughed, easing the ship back into its landing flare, “it doesn’t count for Rick and me.  Dead V.C. we’ve seen, and those poor suckers were dead on their way up.”
              “Communism in its day of glory,” Tom allowed, setting down the camera and perching between the pilots’ seats.  Although he’d flunked out of flight school, he had a hundred hours in light trainers and, at about half that hour level, had absorbed – the touch – which amounted to skating the aircraft gently onto the ground at about the speed of a fast walk rather than bringing it to a grinding, fuel wasting, time wasting, high-wear-and-tear hover, then lowering it the last two or three feet.  Some pilots have the touch, some don’t; it’s more instinctive than learned.  Bing didn’t  He bled off speed then rotated the heavy ship forward, parallel to the ground, and began lowering it onto its wheels.
              
              All three saw it at the same moment.  At the two-o’clock position it too flight, probably torn loose by the hard arrivals and fast departures of the preceding helos.  A one-each, as they say in the military, poncho, which doubles as half a pup tent.  Heavy canvas, thick rubber, manufactured to armed-forces standards.  Heavy, yet flying; regrettably, not up-up-and-away.  Up, probably do to local terrain affecting the heavy rotor wash of the hovering CH-46.  Up fifty feet, then caught in the vortex above the thumping blades.  Down.  WHAP!! Seven hundred miles and hour WHAP!  The ship went off like a tuning fork struck by a martial artist.  KA-WANG-WANG-WANG-WANg-WAng-Wang-wang - wang!  Fifteen seconds as “Sad Suzanne”  fully grounded on her wheels.  Bing’s fist screamed in an arc, smashing against the instrument panel.  The ship settled fully and Rick cut the power, applying the rotor brake.  The blades stopped as all exited, Hank, the crew chief sprinting to the top of the forward rotor tower and a minute later giving a thumbs-up and crossing to the aft tower.  Again, the miracle played out; no damage.  They’d have though they imagined the whole thing, except there were the shelter-half halves  twenty feet from the nose of the ship.  Hank was just giving a circling motion as he dropped from the rear rotor mast, yes, by all means let’s start up, pull pitch, and get the fuck outta here, when the foursome (including Shine, the door gunner) was approached by a fellow marine holding an AR-15 at port what seemed like a very deliberate port arms.
              
              The corporal’s name was Carlos Stone.  “You mother-fuckers are staying,” he declared.  “We’ve got two hundred Cong at half a mile, and with the four of you, twenty in all.  They’re close enough to get you if you did try to leave, but that’s the last thing in the world that’s going to happen.”
              “I hope I don’t look stupid enough to argue with you, son,” Bing smiled.  “Your show, but one thing – the mouse in the slick sleeves is non-combatant, no matter what.  Some day you’ll thank me, meantime, just think of him as god.”
              “That’s an asshole long overdue,” the young Marine spat, crossing himself and adding: “forgive yourself father, for you have sinned.”  He nodded significantly toward “Sad Suzanne” and they boarded the silent hulk, loading themselves with the .50, ammo, and whatever came to hand, Tom shouldering the heavy cine camera and his backpack of film.  
              The terrain was rugged.  Hills.  Relatively open.  They followed a ridge of limestone, in a minute finding the remainder of the detachment, two on stretchers, four with slings and meaningful bandages, ten looking fit.  Thirteen against two hundred, not including the deity who apparently didn’t find it beneath his dignity to make house calls.
              
              “Wow, this is perfect,” the photographer exclaimed.
              “Maybe for you,” his cousin growled, “but my duty is to be on the way somewhere else to help someone else.”
              “Sorry,” Tom said with a grin, “I meant the light.  The shadows are bout twenty percent of what they’d be in full sunlight.   Good modeling, great color saturation, no hot spots, no hard shadows.”
              “With two hundred shadows approaching,” Carlos Stone said, “they don’t have to be hard.  They could be watermelons.”
              “Well,” the photographer said with a frown, “even if we get zapped, they’ll find the camera and someone will know what to do with it, so all is not lost.”
              Bing gave his cousin what has to be described just as a look.  “I’ll bet you look at a tombstone and say, wow, a million of those would make a mountain.”
              “According to my agent,” the private responded, “a temple in my honor would be a more suitable use, but a mountain, sure, I like it; has a certain rustic connotation.”  As he spoke he guided the marines with a gesture or two, soon posing them in a ragged column along the ridge behind them.  Standing off ten feet he panned slowly from the broken field to their north to the sheltered troops, then walked slowly forward catching each face for a few lingering seconds in close up.  With a nod, the Marines broke their tableau and took up firing positions.
              
              “Totally mother-fucking hold your fire,” Stone barked to the men.  “We’re going to be here all afternoon.”
              Tom raised his hand as if he were in class.  “Sir?” he said.
              “A talking god,” the corporal intoned dramatically: “Thank you, lord! 
              “What, fuckhead?”
              “Well,” the private said, “I was thinking about it once, something like this, you know, being in the military and all, and I was wondering if we couldn’t kind of make a game of it?
              “The game is called ‘Shoot the Alphabet’.  You pretend it’s the alphabet approaching, you know, the opposing combatants.  Each man here shoots in the area of his letter in the alphabet.  Early letters take the left, middle, the middle, and from S on, the right flank”
              
              “Anyone here know the alphabet?” Carlos Stone interrupted.  Everyone laughed.
              “Zambini?” he barked, causing the laughter to be repeated.
              “Yeah,” the private said, “like I’m gonna fuck up in the presence of god.”
              
              Incoming fire begins ricocheting off the limestone outcroppings.  The corporal addressed Bing: Christ, major,” he said, I don’t like this.  Both our Os are laid out.  I’m Corporal Stone.  I mean we’re meant to fight these fuckers, not be running a slaughterhouse in Chi.  They’re not even zigzagging.“
              “Let me tell you a quick story,” Bing responded.  “A helo crew got a sniper out of a tree one time.  He had a placard around his neck.  When they had it translated they found it was instructions to always fire in front of an aircraft.  The poor bastard had emptied ten clips – twenty feet in front of the parked bird.”
              “I guess uniting workers doesn’t make them smart,” the Marine NCO sighed.
              Tom contributed a story of his own.  “In special forces,” he said, “the saying goes: ‘Poor bastards, they’ve surrounded us again.’”
              Stone spat.  “Cock-sucker,” he groaned, “I’m a church boy.  My girl let me see her bra once.”
              “Hope that’s something you never learn to see again,” Tom said.
              
              “Double nuts, no sauce,” the young Marine groaned, “New Englanders.  Wit.  Charm.  Grace under pressure, ice-blue water for blood, and always with the droll aside.  Never get tired of themselves.
              Taking a breath that sounded more than half like a sigh, he added: “Two sick Os, and two Emersons.  One being Marine, and the other, U.S. Army, they must be related.”
              “It’s the climate,” Bing noted.  “Five exceedingly dreary months a year.  If it wasn’t a joke, you’d have to think about it.”
              “Yes, yes,” Stone said, “a comedy team.”
              “And you’re from…?” the major queried.
              “Bangor,” the boyish Marine said, no trace of sheepish grin. 
              “Beats the fuck out of ‘up bah county,’” Tom observed, “you know, where they grow budadoes.”
              “Vietnam beats Aroostook County,” Carlos nodded, “specifically including Charlie Fox.” 
              
              The V.C. had closed to two hundred meters.  They continued their lock-step approach   Stone gave the line a quick final inspection and ordered his men to open fire.  The riflemen aimed carefully and squeezed off a round every two or three seconds.  The approaching ranks fell in droves but kept coming.  Stone held the .50 back until the enemy was approaching an outcropping eighty meters out, then nodded at Hank.  The door gunner opened up with the heavy WHACK-WHACK gun, strafing the outcropping and sending a hail of ricochets and shrapnel into the middle of the V.C. force.  This broke the attack, and in two minutes the field was clear of troops, the living sheltered behind a dense tree line at two hundred meters, the dead and wounded strewn  haphazardly in their wake.
              
              “Use the alphabet zone system on everything that isn’t vegetable or mineral,” Carlos said to his men. “the best surprise is no surprise when it comes to wounded V.C.”  Indeed, the surgical fire from the balustrade terrorized a dozen prone bodies into the tree line, perhaps eight of them making it.
              “Now they’re dangerous,” Tom observed.  “Any chance of air?”
              “You saw it just as you arrived,” Stone said.  “They’ve got a fish fry at Khe Sanh.  Thousands involved.  Don’t call them, they’ll call us.
              “As far as command knows, you’ve pulled us out, but then again as far as they knew, the enemy was five miles away.”  He paused and shook his head, spitting neatly into the dirt.  “I mean the stone-age morons don’t even have a mortar,” he mused.  “Their grenades are more dangerous to the grenador than the grenadee.  All they’re good at is hiding and digging traps.  We might as well be taking on a special ed. class.”
              “The true wonder of communism,” Tom responded, “is that it’s so precisely the opposite of cream.  The adversarial, contentious, and generally lazy, disagreeable and recalcitrant settle to the bottom until someone with a pamphlet comes along suggesting he be empowered to invert the bottle.  The solidarity lump at the bottom of the bottle – a vessel best not shaken or stirred - ends up the cork.   On this cork depends the free world, because if these masses were ever placed under honest, efficient, friendly, apolitical, agnostic, nonideological administration, such as you find in virtually every successful capitalistic company, they’d whip us to death with our own tradeunionist, my-belly-first, tail.  And the converse is equally true.  Set GM, GE or AT&T up as a democracy, and they’d fail in months.  Castro saved Florida and Ho Chi Minh will save – well, not save, socialism sounds so good and promises so much, leaving ‘preserve’ the better word, as long as it’s used in a temporary sense – the other forty-nine, and that’s something that would not happen, close as the economic race is being fought, with one more South Korea added to the competitive equation.”
              “It’s awful strange how history works,” Carlos allowed, making eye contact with the devastatingly cute Army boy for the first time.
              
              “How much moon,” the soldier then asked.
              “It’s up late,” the corporal replied.  “With this cloud cover, it’ll be dark, and if it thickens, near pitch dark.  They’ll be able to see the limestone, and we won’t be able to see shit or Shinola against their tree line.”
              “Piss me off, or what?” Tom sputtered.  “Now I’ve got to think like an officer – again, may I tell you – on ninety four dollars a month.
              “Fuck,” he continued.  “Taking the film is half.  Taking it home is the other half.”
              
              He thought for a long moment as he surveyed the terrain.  “We’ve got to get out of here,” he finally announced, handing the camera to his cousin and instructing him in the use of the controls.  “I suppose you have an extra duffle bag or poncho or two?” he asked Stone.
              “Would half a poncho work?” the young Marine asked.
              “That would be perfect,” the Army boy said, “where is it?”
              “Right in front of your helo,” Carlos said.
              “Imagine forgetting,” the soldier responded, and saluting his cousin, ran off.
              “Try the radios,” Carlos yelled after him.  “Not much good from the canyon, but who knows?
              “He must have tampered with a general’s three preteen daughters and dog to end up a slick-sleeve,” he said to Bing as the private scurried off.
              “You can’t imagine the half of it,” Bing laughed in response, “and the fucker’s a poet.  Makes it up as he goes along, edgy and hardnosed as you please.  If it’s posies and primroses they’re growing up out of skull eyeholes.”
              “Are you guys like Concord Emersons?” the younger Marine wanted to know.  “I’m kind of a Ralph Waldo fan, and my brother likes Thoreau, plus Annie, my sister, has read all Louisa May Alcott’s books.”
              “Thanks,” Bing said, “that’s nice to hear.”
              “I hope he makes it,” Stone added.
              “Just get ready to shoot,” Bing advised as his cousin returned with a heavy Santa’s pack over his shoulder.
              “Fuck, look at this,” Tom said, gingerly dropping his improvised sack, “I wanted twenty grenades, I got almost a hundred.
              
              
              
              The private entered the parked craft and turned on the master switch.  Smoke rose from the radio column and he flashed back to Bing’s hammer blow on the instrument panel.  Shut off the switch.  Retrieved the closest half-poncho and returned to the firing line.  The men gather around handing over extra grenades and pistols.  Two approached, grinning.  “Guess what we’ve got?” one chirped, but, though they had five hours stretching until the fast tropic twilight, neither was in a mood to tease, and so both promptly produced sawed-off shotguns with bandoleers of shells.”  Also six Colt pistols and dozens of .45 clips.
              “Guys kept coming in and not taking their weapons when they left,” Stone observed.  “I guess they kind of piled up.”
              “You wanna come?” Tom asked, his eyes flicking hard on the boyish Marine.
              “Two of us could man a stretcher,” the corporal allowed.
              “Brilliant,” his new friend said.  They shook, introducing themselves, then were shoed off to the sidelines while a stretcher was obtained and laden with arms, water, and accessories.  The two settle in the shade of an outcropping of rock.
              “The major says you’re real Emersons, I mean…”
              “We used to be,” the private responded, “’but time the ruined bridge has swept…’”
              “’Down the dark stream which seaward creeps,’” Carlos concluded.
              “You know it?” Tom said, “that gives me the shivers.”
              “Thanks,” Carlos responded, “that’s nice to hear.  Any idea how I”M feeling?”  He recited the remaining verses..
              
              “It gets more beautiful as it goes along, doesn’t it?” the private said.
              “And quickly,” Carlos said, adding: “you know he’s the most quoted writer in the world, don’t you.  I mean Thoreau’s not half bad, shakes ‘em up so the cameras will have something to roll on, and Shakespeare is always a factor, but every year the ‘Bartlett’s’ nod goes to Ralph Waldo Emerson.”
              Tom tugged at a slick sleeve.  “I guess my favorite,” he said, “is: ‘who would be a man must be a nonconformist,’ which is thoroughly ironic because adversarialism is nothing but a switched-on grinder that gets pushed back and forth across an ice rink, like a hockey puck.  Loud mouths instead of lively minds.  And the proof is right here in Mekong River City.  For once we’re doing something exactly right, snubbing instead of massacring, and our urban leftists get to publish what everyone wanted in the first place, the full frontal nude of a ten year old girl, and polls change by ten percent, overnight.  The V.C., under all acronyms, plays for prime time better than we do it, ourselves, and toys us into settling it, as we have repeatedly, in the worst way possible.  Most casualties, least gained, most scars.”
              “Ah, but the most entertainment,” Carlos said, raising a finger and winning for himself one-each heart and mind.   “I’m glad you’re coming,” they both whispered at the same time, then relaxed over a fat joint and cigarettes, resting up for their expedition behind enemy lines.
              
              “I like the one that says if you throw out a big enough anchor, the whole world will swing to it,” Carlos said, breaking the silence by returning to Emerson.
              “That’s what his grandfather did,” Tom said, “but I rather think it was a tangled line on a bloody deck, and attached to a loose cannon, not an anchor “  He reviewed the story, prompted by his friend’s questions.
              “But you could apply the metaphor to Benny Goodman,” he allowed.
              “How about California couples,” Stone asked, giggling a little perhaps on account of the strong dinky-dow 
              “Wicked,” Tom agreed, “but I suppose you’re right.  Everyone knows they swing, too.”
              
              “So, what did you mean, family-wise, about being swept down the stream?” the Marine asked.
              “I guess it’s sort of the ultimate paradox,” the private observed.  “I’m a strict monarchist, yet by my own standards, Bing’s and my grandfather should be king, his father crown prince, and Bing, himself, heir apparent.  The former two were little removed from jingoistic lunatics, and Bing wrote me letters from Harvard that could have come from a sixth grader.  My cousin Alec, in a skanky beard being hauled by the police across Harvard Yard.  One way to get your picture in ‘Time’.  He writes about napalm and kids, but as a total peasant.  No comprehension of the fact that’s what the V.C. have been doing for years, only they use hand drill on the skulls of the village chief’s children, instead of killing them outright.
              :”His whole family is the same way, all the princes and princesses.  So ignorant, in spite of all that Harvard for thirteen generations, it’s a wonder they aren’t sold as meat.”
              “Loyalty obviously isn’t a priority,” Carlos noted.
              “My family took on the Kind of England, and won,” the private said, “so the precedent for the principle has to be dubious at best.”  He pointed to a black spot on his right forearm.  “That’s where my mother stabbed me to the bone with a pencil,” he explained.  “Have you ever watched a small, conical hole fill slowly with your own blood while trying not to vomit?  In my mind, I’ve demonstrated considerably loyalty by not wielding a hatchet, but that’s where it ends.
              “When we picked up the shelter-half,” he continued, “Bing pounded the dash so hard he fucked up the radios; probably the gyros, too.  When he was a young teen he tormented the family dog so relentlessly he made a dangerous animal of it.
              “He had a hi-fi set.  He left a window opened near it.  I was standing right beside him.  He saw it that it got sprinkled with rain and he punched, just like he hit the instrument panel, full strength, all the way through the glass on the door.  Ripped his arm to the elbow.  If I’d left the window open, he would have punched me down the stairs and killed me.  He married a girl he met in a bar.  Sooner or later, he’ll punch her.
              “His sisters are bunch of wifty leftist flakes, prototypical counter-culture-cookies, though always on the lookout for earning potential of a military/industrial wholeness.
              “As our illustrious ancestor’s poem gets better, fast, our story gets much worse, fast, but so far it’s been survivable.  As to loyalty, in my book Hitler deserves it above all.  He made life very exciting for a German boy.  What president can say that bout ours?”
              
              “And the money?” Carlos asked. 
              Tom explained about that, adding: “Luckily, I have the persona of a sponge wrapped in a dishrag,  so I just cower and absorb
              “Bottom line?  I picture myself as a shuttlecock, which, though an arduous circumstance for a teen, is unsurpassed when it comes to the heart of the old adage about different folks having different strokes.  Mother, brother, and sister from hell.  Split session schools with worn out teachers, then an army staffed by schoolgirls in olive green.  As Nixon’s kicked around in public, so was I in private, but he has his eye on China, as I do on being a writer.  We both slogged away behind the scenes, he, working for his party, me, tripping back and forth over the net, testing this forehand against that lob; this serve against that net game.  Mostly by reading, but living always reminds one of the fickle finger of fate, so that’s a useful reinforcement of the phenomenon which reoccurs so relentlessly throughout history.
              “They read me a book called ‘Out Jumped Boo’ when I was two. Doomed.  I was a gosling following the Muses, no more control of anything than the Man in the Moon.  No loyalty, no agenda, no creed, and the world at my fingertips thanks to the self-same money.   I should have been water-skiing on the Cape three days ago, but not, the Writer wants to visit Phu Bai.”
              
              Carlos punched Tom’s shoulder.  “Cool,” he said.
              “Fuck me if it isn’t,” the private responded.
              “Ah, so you’ve heard about out brothers in the Navy,” Carlos said with a final giggle as they got to their feet.  All was in readiness.  Bing produced a large-scale aerial photo, solid gold, and they hefted the laden stretcher, tolerable.  They were about to set off when a Marine private hollered and approached from the direction of the former base camp.  He came nervously, arms behind his back, like the original shotgun bearers, up to the major.  “Wait,” he said.
              “Jesus, now what?” Tom whispered to Carlos.
              “Sir,” the Marine said, “I know this won’t look good on my record, and I was hoping to make corporal next pay period, but, well, sir, they’re not going to shoot and waste ammo if they think you’re just carrying a casually, you know, when you pass the open area behind where the helo’s parked.  I mean it’s kind of something they don’t do, maybe it’s even superstition.”
              “I’ll take your word for it son,” Bing said to the stammering boy.
              “I know it’s rude, sir,” Hennessey went on, “but things aren’t nice here, so this will probably help.  I cut it off Pvt. Gutierrez.  He was killed an hour before you got here.”
              
              The young Marine held out a human arm, amputated at the shoulder.  He dropped to the stretcher and quickly improvising a strap lashed it so the hand trailed realistically.
              “Son of a bitch is right,” Carlos murmured, “play it out, Tom.  Head down.  Slow.  Pretend your mother and sister await in yonder cleft in the terrain.”
              
              With a last look around, they departed, Bing now wearing the battery belt and filming with the shoulder mounted Panavision camera.  They passed through the zone of exposure as if, indeed, loved ones played on their spirits, plodding, enjoying seventy or eighty times the transient engagement a gambler feels at a heavy toss.  Time passed slowly.  Carlos led, Tom following more bemused than angry at the follies necessary to his chosen art, yet even more dreading the assumed future: loss of liberty and adventure to the tyranny of the typewriter, more crucial to his trade than any other.  One day it would be the machine, ribbons, paper and carbons.  Now his entire left side contracted in a giant flinch – the real thing, so he called softly to his friend, slowed down and stopped.  Knelt by the stretcher and carefully placed the dangling hand under the covering poncho, then resumed his position to the leader’s low wolf whistle, and they proceeded.
              
              “I don’t know about that,” the Marine said as they gained the shelter of an outcropping, “if you were that cool, they might figure we’re up to something.”
              “I look on it more as lulling them by demonstrating respect for their traditions and discipline,” Tom replied, “but you could be right.  I won’t do it again.”
              “Not likely to be a problem,” Stone said, to far off buzz to giggle.  The two retrieved Pvt. Gutierrez’s arm from under the shelter half and laid it to rest as decently as circumstances permitted.  “From now on,” Stone explained, “it’s a game of lazy.  We’ve got hours.  they’ll be ready for something, for awhile, then sleep.  After that, by maybe five this evening, it’ll be dinky-dow time and another charge with dark coming on.  In the meantime, we inch along, letting them relax.  They may sense our presence, but if we stop from time to time no pattern will develop and no one will bother to investigate.  They’ll have sentries at their rear, but their main purpose is to kill anyone who tries to retreat, so they won’t be thinking about their six.”
              
              “Sounds like the best way to play it,” Tom concurred, “but I could never figure out why the bad guys in the Westerns never knew Tonto was sneaking around behind them. “
              “Your great great grandfather hit it one the head when he said a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind,” the Marine noted.  “They’re by the book, every day, every page, and none of them can read.”
              “So much like McDonalds it really is frightening,” Tom concurred, realizing the very cog-and-wheel indoctrination of the zombieland he was mocking was responsible for their relative security as they flanked the grove of trees by a hundred meters.  The peasant and his book.  His right hand itched for a pencil to jot down the notion, but perhaps he’d remember it spontaneously.   Bible, scrolls, tracts, codes or manifestos, the blood was always red as long as it was fresh.  Was not ink, the very byproduct of the lowly cuttlefish, mankind’s most lethal invention?  The word of the idiot had, before its use, been limited, then Jesus H. Christ came along.  On clay, on paper, ever cheaper, and finally an alterative to repetitive squeaky music and garbled legends with which to fill the long hours of darkness.  Book and candle.  Home fires.  Bell.  Hell.  Film at eleven.  Sell.  The only need remaining was an urban subset who toasted each other to next year in their god-forsaken, scrambled-egg homeland, who’d sell anything, and the future was a forgone conclusion, the size of the giant merely guaranteeing a longer death, not a longer life. 
              
              Thirty four thousand, two hundred two words without an essay.  Veterans will realize the scope of the miracle, new readers might be expected to wonder who this guy is.  What it is is that I’m kind of in the habit of tagging along as I write, layering editorial content like frosting in a deluxe cake.  These are busman’s holidays or a grounds keeper’s walk in the park, and are of unspecified length, with the following payout: the longer the essay, the more nifty the compensating Nifty scene.
              I’ve been playing “Black & White”.  Read a scathing review of it on the Web (ARC).  Iconoplast, as he calls himself, managed to so vastly miss the point, it’s worth immortalizing the moron to haul his trou off an cane his ass.  “Black & White” is a game.  It costs a certain amount of money, like a movie ticket (though, unlike a theater ticket, it has at least some, and perhaps residual trading or selling value).  As far as I can tell, a day or two in the first land are more than worth the price.   The graphics, even compared to “Morrowind” are difficult to get used to.  Art – stunning – you can dabble in for hours.  The reviewer goes on and on about writing; how the game lacks story value.  What is he talking about?  Where in modern-day life DO you find story value?  The last film that had a decent amount was “Fargo”, about five years ago.  Stories are hard to think up, okay?  I’m the greatest writer of all time, and I have to lure my readers with sex, because nothing else is interesting, least of all fantasy and the paranormal.  “Superman” and “The Lone Ranger” were the same thing, over and over – as Iconoplast cleverly says, lather, rinse, repeat.  In the endless “Star Wars” pix there’s one one-eighth funny line, aside from the attempted byplay between the robots, when Harrison Ford calls a puppet a fuzz-ball.  I’ve been reading – glancing thoroughly at – “The New York Review of Books” for a year now, and no novel has broken out in any sense of the word.  So how’s a game provider meant to do it?  If a game is beautiful, and a least somewhat engaging for over ten hours, it’s a seven.  On that scale, I’d give “Black & White” a nine.  It’s okay to compare me to some ultimate utopian standard, I’m up to it, but then I don’t have to tell my story in some-odd millions of lines of code.
              I suppose this is a bit slick, as in contrived, but it does bring up my own game.  It’s called “grow Pedro”.  Pedro is an island boy of about twelve.  He can, a, go to school, b, hang around the water front, or, c, spend his time guiding a mercenary named Ajax on his quest to shoot a drug lord in the buttocks with a golden bullet.  The A-section, academic, is tailored to the players scholastic level.  It offers straight hardball, no cute graphics or grinning personalities, just high-speed flash cards on basic math functions, phonics, and foreign language.  Punchy, short sessions with a balance of new material and review.  Academic performance is key to opening new levels, so, for example, a map-reading Pedro is much more useful on the waterfront than a waterman’s pleasure boy or a tourist’s beach buddy.  Ajax has a well-used J-3 Piper Cub, and much of the game is a flight sim, only oriented toward shoe-horning the flimsy, sixty-horsepower craft into short, rough fields, or operating it on floats rather than the glories of the wild blue yonder.  Tough, gritty, realistic; zero fantasy.  Pedro can, for example, spend a fishing windfall on a set of encyclopedias, or a motor bike with which to impress Luscious Lola; end up governor of the island, or a poxy, broken-toothed gin mill swamper.   As the misuse of the computer approaches the misuse of television when it comes to its role as an educational medium it’s doubtful such a game could fit in the plastic socialist’s box labeled What Kids Like, so I’ll do with it what I’ve done with this manuscript, use a mainstream outline (this started off as a fifteen thousand word, R-rated screenplay) for another Nifty novel.  (Either way, Pedro grows.)
              
              Samantha’s fine.  Everything’s almost disturbingly normal.  Rough weather with associated blackouts.  Sloggo II, my new XP machine shrugs them off, stable as the Rock of Gibraltar.   I did find one interesting  sign of eccentric legacy.  My new computer came with an older version of the word processor, and no disc to install the file conversion programs.  Tried sending them as Word docs, but guess what?  Nifty, probably the most active text archive on the Net, can’t (or won’t) use the format.  Hot sun, money spent, Word XP installed, files converted, and “Beyond Brewster” published after spending a month braving the lightning on the hard drive.  Grrr.  But, on balance, another trip over the net for the shuttlecock, another stroke dissected.  And another:  ASSGM’s gone commercial, forty-five dollars a year.   Hard on all the writers who contributed for free, rest assured no penny will come their way (example: I have over a million words on Nifty, but have never been offered free access to their premium service).  I wonder how many users will, a, be able to take the hit on their cards, b, want an unexplained forty-five dollar charge on their statement, and, c, want to leave a money trail from their computer to a distributor of child pornography?  My guess is a few thousand takers, too few readers to interest most writers, thus no more stories.  And I do understand why sites can’t pay.  If they did, they’d be flooded with copy and paste.  My suggestion?  Cut a healthy check to Nifty, keep it free; if you’re rich, send ten thousand bucks.  The First Amendment is all we have left, get the picture?
              
              Big phone bill because of Kazaa.  Non-schizophrenia test: keep a ‘usage log’ in your head, that after six weeks, is accurate to less than two percent.  Addiction test: cut usage to the bone, even after downloading some sensational videos fully verifying my theory that loads of kids love playing mature games with sensitive, attractive, on-going adult partners.  Of course, I speak from multiple successful personal experiences, and no unsuccessful ones, but it’s nice to see other little swingers grinning and swinging.  Who would argue that showing a rape victim half an hour of kids as young as five fully and happily engaged with mature males wouldn’t be the best chance of giving such victims the only thing that can cure them, and that is perspective?  Planning to download more when the October quarterly comes through, though if it’s as skimpy as July’s, I’ll have to forgo.  Meantime, none, except for the ongoing lesson in the law of diminishing returns.  The more images you download, the more you’ve seen and the fewer thrills and chills (think I’m kidding?).  My guess, after about a hundred and fifty hours on the site, is that less than a thousand porn images make up over ninety percent of what you’d get if you downloaded constantly.  And to re-emphasize a former point (“Beyond Brewster”), in all that time I’ve never uploaded anything BUT images, in spite of having god’s own playlist.  
              
              Speaking of which, “Poet of Phu Bai” was originally drafted as an IMAX script with perhaps a third of the action shown in the super format, loaded with Fifties and Sixties music.  A good time to mention the fact that when I write for Nifty I repair my stories, rather than revising them.  Hank, the crew chief, has with him a portable Nagra professional tape recorder.  The incident in which Bing punches through the door glass happened exactly as described, in fact I helped my father build the Heathkit hi-fi.  His collection was heavy on Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, Duane Eddy, and perhaps a hundred others we listened to incessantly on what, in those days, was extreme fidelity (mono).   His favorite and mine was Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody.”  I’ll be cuing before this work ends and if you want your hair to stand on end,  strongly recommend downloading it before I do. 
              
              I wonder how I come across as a hero.  Didn’t you always want to do that?  Write an epic with you as deity extraordinaire?  Throw in an acute psychological  study and a little political dissection, delve into the deeper natures of good and evil; Yin and Yang (sorry for misspelling this elsewhere), the while?  Did I forget anything?  Humor?  Well, if I’m not a raving schizoid, you’re in shit to your lower lip, and if you see anything funny in that you’re worse off than I’ll ever be.  Well, drowning in your own whatever can certainly be done without clothes, and maybe, if we put our minds to it, we can think of something else 
              
              
              It was a though occupying the minds of both young combatants.  The sweltering heat below the seventeenth north parallel.  The three hundred pounds of munitions they were lugging on the sagging litter.  The intensity of their attraction for each other, far more than verbal, which may seem incredible, but life is not merely a talk show.  The time to kill.  The atavistic nature of their mission.  All worked against the convention of remaining in suits of heavy, dirty fatigues.  Traversing a hundred meters at a crouching half-run tuckered both boys out and they were happy to find a secure alcove in the broken terrain.  Taking a few moments to rig a trip wire between themselves and the splotch of jungle, they relaxed behind a pile of grenades with half-pulled pins, safe, once again in that primitive spy satellite era, as houses.
              
              “How Catholic do you think this whole shebang is?” Carlos asked as he caught his breath.
              “I pretty much loath your church,” Tom said, “for emotionally castrating women while making them whelp like puppy-farm bitches, but I don’t think it amounts to much in this case.  The politics are dead-bolt simple.  Conquer by force and loads of terror, by exploiting our own leftists, pure and simple.  This doctrine or that philosophy are media toys.  Remember we’re dealing with a level of moron who spent months arguing about the shape of the conference table on the Korean DMZ.  Kissinger’s the only one brain dead enough to nitpick and hair split with them, bright for Harvard as he is, so it’s all just mush; religions, ideologies, Buddhists, Catholics, the lot.  The only thing I fault Hitler on is his obsession with Jews vis-à-vis the Bolsheviks.  He was right in gurrying and auguring them out of Germany, but I think paranoid on a wider scale.  It’s talons and claws, and the peasants will head unerringly for the loudest disco.  To many extremes to give much weight to any particular facet.”
              “The church does have a good side,” Carlos said, “at least it did for me.”
              “I don’t see how,” Tom murmured, thinking as he spoke.  Unable to come up with any advantage to such an exploitive, manipulative, and plain-old fraudulent institution, he shrugged. 
              “It happened when I was eleven, when I was an altar boy,” Carlos said.
              “Ah,” the private purred, “such a forgiving institution, trash it and hail Mary and at least whole again, if not holy.”
              “You’ve heard stories?” the corporal asked.
              “There had to be a reason,” the writer replied, “a magnetic force underlying the popular image.  Same as the Revolution.  Underlying, was the need of pirates and smugglers to operate with impunity, so they buffed up liberty, when every house was full of nothing but.  As cute as you must have been at eleven, you probably inspired an entire diocese.”
              
              “I wish I’d known you then,” Carlos said.
              “I feel the same,” Tom said, voice faltering.
              “Have you ever talked about stuff like that with anyone?” the twenty year old asked.
              “Just once,” Tom replied.
              “When,” Carlos asked.
              “Well,” the writer mused, stalling, then facing facts: “yesterday.”
              “Get outta town,” Carlos said, pausing as he began unlacing his boots, something Tom emulated in less than no seconds.
              “It just happened,” the private said, feeling for once lame enough to match his rank.
              “Did he tell you a lot?” the recomposed Marine asked.
              “I think he stuck to the truth,” Tom allowed, “but he’s Navy.”
              “O-class?: the corporal asked.
              “Commander to his service, bird colonel in mine, anyway, an O-6 “
              “Hesuse,” Carlos declared in the Spanish pronunciation, crossing himself, “how old is he?”
              “Twenty six,” Tom said.  “But he could pass for either of us.”
              “How long were you together,” the Marine asked.
              “I’m not trying to be weird or anything,” Tom said, “but it’s all classified for a few days.
              “Sorry,” Stone said, “but why do I get the feeling it’ll be on the cover of “Time” when the balloon goes up?”
              “And yesterday’s news by the following issue,” the slightly older male observed.
              “Do you want to be famous?” Carlos asked.
              “No way,” the writer responded instantly.  “Death.  Few can do it at all, and those who show early promise stack the odds ten times more than that.  Untimely discovery usually means no recovery.  The shuttlecock – ping-pong ball – needs to stay in play.  Stroking or petting it takes it out.  Very bad news when it comes to toting up the final score, but that’s unlikely to be a problem.  Trading-on-the-name is close to bugaboo-one (anti- or a-Semitism) when it comes to attracting editorial attention, which is ironic because they’ll hype ‘friend of O’Neill’s cousin’ in the marketing department  ”
              “Smoke?” Carlos said.
              “Never,” Tom responded, pausing: “when the Sergeant Major of the Army is present and looking for someone to account for.”  In Vietnam, unlike frozen Korea, it was easy to tell the quick from the dead.  He who could make the transformation from first suggestion to first toke in under thirty seconds, well, hold the body bag, while he who could not was due for a toe tag.”
              
              “So how much Harvard did you guys get stuck with?” the corporal asked.
              “Nine first cousins,” Tom replied, and most ancestors on both sides going back twelve or thirteen generations.”
              “And you?” Stone asked.
              “A significant global service would be rendered by he who blew the place into powdered brick and shredded ivy,” the writer said.  “The Japanese emperors used to order about fifteen hundred hara-kiris a year, in the name of national unity, and LBJ can’t even take a bullwhip to the junior dean on campus.”
              “Maybe they’ll take over the world,” Carlos responded.  Both had stripped to their camo boxers because of the heat.
              “Can’t happen,” Tom replied, for the second time in as many days enjoying the interlude – intellectual, pseudo intellectual, however it might be categorized – equally with what was in the offing.  “MacArthur was a socialist – a closet Democrat – and left them infested with tradeunions.  That’s a maggot that dines on flesh and bone.  They’re doomed, though by rights the world should be their oyster, peal and all.  Two atomic bombs, they sweep up and go, one social liberal, and it’s sayonara. “
              
              “Here’s to ambition,” Carlos said, retrieving a pint of Wild Turkey from a hip pocket of the jungle fatigues lying folded neatly at his side.
              “My ambition,” Tom said, “is to live humbly amongst my people, giving thanks, the while, that I don’t have the responsibility history claims on me   Imagine actually being a king.  What a colossal nuisance.  They probably wore crowns because they went bald in their twenties, king or queen.”
              “So what’s the perfect fit?” the younger male asked.
              “Literary artist, but somehow avoiding fame,” Tom replied without hesitation.  “The utopian ultimate would be to write anonymously to a significant segment of the English-speaking population, and let them act on any ideas you might put forth; to ring a small bell in a million ears, and let them ring any bells they saw fit.  In other words, to be a source of ideas and reason, only, free of excessive emotion, flexible yet distinct in reason, cynical when viewing both past and present, because being tolerant is like fishing with too large a mesh, too many misguided zealots escape censure, leaving us doomed to their nonsense.”
              
              “To say nothing of eviscerating what should be an American royal family,” Carlos added. 
              “There’s something of a distinction to be made there,” Tom explained, “between how history views such a role player as my ancestor who started the Revolution, R.W.E.’s grandfather, and how the guy actually performed.  He started the thing by using his pulpit, and those over a wide area,  to raise troops and military supplies, all this while the pamphleteers were sitting on their pillowed stools with their pens and whipping printer’s devils for the dirty work, thus energizing a victorious conclusion to the hostilities.  Exactly the provenance of a future king, lots of words, more action.  But on the day the British came to Concord, there is no account of his activities after early morning.  None.  It was his baby, and he was the most well known figure in the area.  The only theory that fits is that he was huddled in a secluded thicket, beseeching guidance   It’s probably half a wonder Thoreau didn’t find his knee prints in a remote swamp sixty or seventy years later.”
              
              “Must have been the rugged climate,” Carlos responded with a nod.  The two looked at each other with a twinkle in each eye, neither pseudo scholar completing the thought, which went something like this: Henry David Thoreau did, in fact, find a particular patch of especially beautiful white flowers – “nuns sisters,” he called them – in a wilderness area of the famous town.  How great a stretch of the imaginations did it require to attribute the alien fertility of that small patch of swamp to a cowering non-combatant?  And should anyone, for academic or practical reasons, wish an irreducible description of the kind of thoughts one has when stoned on fine marijuana, said scholar or aficionado of the crisp anecdote may assure him or herself that such an example has been rendered in the present instance.  And yes, if someone was waiting for me, at the edge of the morass, with musket and ball, future nature lovers would one day stumble across nothing less than an herbal boutique.
              
              “And war’s meant to be hell,” Carlos sighed, stubbing out the half-consumed reefer.
              “This one will be for a lot of guys,” Tom noted. “They’ll get home and the liberals will tell them this and that, no perspective, no context, no reason, just the gouting emotion of a Jew sitting shiva and hiring professional emoters to wail over the dead.  An exact parallel of what happened with the blacks.  Slavery this, indentured that, bonded, the other thing, blah, blah, blah, when any black American prisoner sent to live with his nearest African cousin would be screaming cruel and unusual punishment until his teeth flew out.  Liberals.  You can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t live with ‘em.  So stupid and so cruel.  The ultimate buzz killer.”
              “Not with you,” Carlos smiled, “because what’s a better buzz than trying to get some grip on insanity.  The extremes, like you said.  LBJ has to mince like a schoolgirl, where Stalin, a U.S. ally, killed a thousand a day and deported the rest to Siberia.  Killed at his dinner table.  Half our country wanted to impeach Johnson because he picked his beagle up by the ears.”
              
              “And yet this war,” Tom said, “to use the popular term, is entirely sane.  A low-cost blocking action, sure and steady, if imperfect, year after year.  You can’t have the world as your police state, because we won’t let you.
              “The Russians and communists, in general, are unable to understand that by not annexing Canada and Mexico, or even the Islands, we prove we’re not anything to do with imperialists.  They, in their exponential paranoia, will try to play it like a game of cards, ante for ante, and Insanity will come to sit in for the final hand.  We are in the process of winning, whatever the tactical outcome, simply by not letting them win, in the short term, and destroying them, utterly, in the long term, merely by giving them time for the vast distortions of the Marxist system to do the job for us.  Fifty years from now mediocrity will be beyond the wildest dreams of all soviet victims, and yes, it will take an ocean of vodka to achieve this, hardly a problem for even a hodgepodge  that spans eleven time zones of potatoes.
              “We are in the process of winning,” the private went on, “whatever the tactical outcome, the greatest real war in history, and what do you bet that even ten years from now, the media will try to convince us we lost it?”
              
              “They all wish they’d gone to Harvard,” Carlos replied, “what else would you expect?”
              “Well spoken,” Tom smiled, “you’re more a brother than cousin than I’ve ever had or even dreamed of.”
              “Thanks,” the Marine said, “that’s nice to hear.”
              
              “Hurry up and wait,” is as close to an Army motto as exists.  Nobody’s fault, just the nature of things.  Hurry into position, then wait for hours, then hurry again.  Repeat until you hurry out the gate for the last time without waiting for them to close behind you.  And, ask any combat troop, the waiting is the worst of all.  Dawn takes a hundred hours if it may reveal a tank, nightfall, a hundred seconds if it may conceal one.  Waiting.  All you needed was a friend.
              
              “You know,” Carlos began after some moments pause, “it’s not just pot that’s messed up in the judicial system.  There’s something else, too.”
              “What is it?” the writer asked.
              “It’s pretty embarrassing,” the Marine murmured, but when Boo jumps out I have a feeling people are going to listen.”
              Tom paused a moment to make the connection.  “Thanks,” he said, “but that was just a kid’s book written to titillate and amuse, so I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
              “Well,” Stone responded, “whenever and however, there’s something we’re all meant to think the same about, like you said with the socialists, where they put everything in a common-think box, and forget it, the way they did with pesticides.  They put that in the problem-solved box when they banned DDT, and, because in their minds it’s been solved, we get Malathion and toxic cocktails that make DDT look like baby food in comparison.  Same with what I’m trying to get at.  A closed box: ‘all think exactly the same on the count of three.’  And maybe, when you do let Boo out, you could tackle the subject even though it’s like ultra sensitive and totally embarrassing.  Something we’re all meant to think identically about, but don’t.”
              
              “Not eating strychnine on Wheaties,” Tom mused, “that’s something we should all think identically about.  Nothing else comes to mind, offhand, so you’re on pretty safe grounds.”
              “You’d think so,” the boyish Marine said.
              “Come on, what?” Tom said.  “This isn’t the time for Twenty Questions.”
              “It’s embarrassing,” Carlos repeated, “because I make as many Navy jokes as anyone.”
              Tom smiled.  “Rickover won’t be satisfied with even a hundred of his nukie-poos,” he said, “so half the service is nothing but a combination of the most dangerous and expensive boondoggle  in human history, and jokes don’t get more obscene than that.”
              Encouraged by this dose of impromptu perspective, the handsome boy continued.  “I don’t want to say anything specific, just that some things happened when I was a kid, when I was eleven, you know, an altar boy.  Stuff that’s against all laws in all states, in the box within a box, but stuff that I really liked and that made a huge difference in my life.
              “All I’m asking is that if you make it, you know, as a writer, that you take a look at happens to some boys, and be real about it.  Even have the guts to say that for a few boys out of a hundred, it’s the best thing in their lives, by a hounded times, and you can’t tell those boys, when they grow up, from anyone else.”
              “Suddenly,” Tom responded, “I don’t look on you as a brother any more.”
              “Sorry,” the Marine said.
              
              “Are you out of your total fucking mind?” the private horse whispered.  “If you don’t give me your home address in less than a minute, I’ll consider myself alone in all the world.  And yes, his name is Sandy, and I have his address, too.  Two.  Symbolic of being a writer.  Limited experience, no deep ends, but not monochrome, either.”
              
              “Go two miles North on Hammond Street,” Carlos said, “and ask around.  Everyone knows us.”
              “Come to Concord,” Tom giggled, buzz conditionally restored, “everyone knows us.”
              “Did Sandy tell you about, you know, specific things?” Carlos asked.
              “It’s not for everybody,” the writer replied, “but sometimes it can be kind of exciting.”
              “How do you feel?” he then wanted to know.
              “Jesus, man,” Tom responded, “I’m a writer.  I want to know a writer’s little something about almost anything you can think of.  If, in pursuit of this, I come across a particularly detailed and graphic story, well, figure that one out for yourself.”
              
              “Even about getting touched?” Carlos whispered hoarsely.
              “If you don’t want to tell me,” the private whispered back, extending his right hand, “maybe you could show me.”
              “I was standing up,” Carlos responded.  “Father Benedict came up behind me.”
              “Okay,” the soldier said as they both rose quickly to their feet, the still coltish corporal standing with his back to the taller male.
              “How were you dressed?” Tom asked, remaining a foot behind his beautiful young friend.
              “In my underwear.  Tee shirt and briefs,” Carlos said, “he was, too.”
              “Where did it happen?” the writer wanted to know.
              “In the rectory,” the boy said.
              “Were the two of you alone?” the whispered interview continued.
              “Yes.”
              “Did you know something was going to happen?”
              “Yes,” the Marine whispered.
              “How?” Tom quizzed.
              “It was just before a holiday retreat,” Carlos elaborated, “and some of the boys in the choir kind of hinted that mature stuff happened when they stayed at his cabin, and if I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing, I should stay at the lodge.”
              
              
              “I want to stay with you guys,” Carlos Stone, just eleven, said to Ricky Reynolds, his thirteen year old friend and the senior alter boy at St. James 
              “We want you to, too,” Peter Sedgwick responded, and Chip, Dale, and Matt, all twelve, nodded.
              “It’s nothing that hurts or anything,” the young leader said, “and he doesn’t give us any nonsense about its being god’s will or some splinter aspect of Church doctrine.”
              “But,” Chip added, “he said it does amount to an ancient, if unofficial, custom.  Priests who served their parishes well were rewarded with the fairest boys in the village.  The boys were thrilled to be part of it, and nothing occurred to shock the cows out of the barn, where most of them were doing the same things when they got a chance, half the time with the heifers, and most of them got married like anyone else, and, in turn, rewarded a good priest with their own sons.  The most dedicated of these staffed the monasteries.  
              “So,” the boy continued, “it’s more a vague tradition than anything spiritual or divine, however it feels at the time.”
              The new boy thought for a few minutes as they continued changing out of their Catholic finery into street clothes.  “I just don’t know anything,” he finally murmured.
              “That’s another thing Ben doesn’t do,” Dale contributed, “he doesn’t pretend he’s teaching you.  There’s nothing TO teach.  The physical part is as simple as horses and dogs, though not always quite the same.”
              “What he does,” Pete said, “is make sure you’re comfortable with what it is for what it is, a kind of strange combination of very special and utterly meaningless.  It doesn’t matter if it happens a thousand times or never with a kid, yet, at the same time, if it does happen, each of the thousand times is at least nice, like an ice cream cone, or special, like s five course steak dinner.  He doesn’t ask you to keep it a secret, and he doesn’t ask you to bring other boys over to play, but no one says much, and if we think a nice boy has the same feelings we do, we do invite him over, regardless of anything else.”
              “If something had happened to me, would that make any difference?” Carlos asked.
              “No,” Dale said.  “I spent a couple of hours up in an orchard with a man who picked me up while I was hitching.  That’s when I was nine.  He said it didn’t make any difference and that I could either share it or keep it private.”
              “What did you do?” the new boy wanted to know.
              “I sat on his lap in my underwear and told him all the details,” Dale said.
              “Have you told these guys?” Carlos asked, nodding at all of his companions.
              “Just Ricky,” the boy said, flushing slightly.
              “Sometimes it feels right and sometimes it doesn’t,” the leader said.  “I told Pete.”
              
              “It kind of sounds realistic,” the eleven year old observed.
              “It kind of is realistic,” Ricky said, “in fact it is, totally.  It happens, it feels like nothing else, like bathing in steak and onions and asparagus, instead of eating them, and at the same time it’s like a ball game.  When it’s over, you probably don’t give it much thought.”
              “It like a ballgame, too,” Matt said, “because it’s super exercise.”
              “Especially when we’re all together on retreat,” Chip said, “then it goes on like from nine at night ‘till midnight, then we sleep to five, and it goes on until seven, and we get up a nine, having already, a, half starved ourselves, and, b, worked out enough for a week.”
              “What do you do the rest of the time?” Carlos asked.
              
              “Read,” Dale said.  “We nickname it Camp Library.  He reads aloud to us.  We read to each other.  Only six canoes on the place, even in summer.  We read, we swim, we play softball, we goof off.  It’s so much like heaven, lo and behold it does have religious connotations.”
              “But he doesn’t try to make what happens at night religious?” Carlos wondered.
              “He explains it this way,” Peter said, “if cigarettes were actively carcinogenic, large number of smokers would get cancer on the tips of the tongue, where the tobacco smoke is most intense.  This rarely happens.  If boys fooling around with young men was similarly harmful, many or most boys would react negatively to having a man pull down their underpants, and, considering how unstable kids are, in general, almost none react that way.  If they don’t like it, they make sure it doesn’t happen again, end of story, except to add that they know what to look out for.”
              
              “But most of the kids in the parish aren’t into it,” Ricky said, “and they stay at the lodge on camps and retreats.  During the day, you couldn’t observe any tension between cabin boys and lodge boys if you stayed for years, that’s how normal it is.  A kid may get mad at another kid and call his mother leavings of a goat, but nine to midnight isn’t an issue, consciously or subconsciously.”
              “Another thing he tells us,” Chip added, “is who to watch out for.  He killed one rapist, not feeling it was wise to wait and get evidence, and he’s scared the shit out of a few others.  One wouldn’t scare so easily, so we set him up and he took a twenty-year fall.”
              
              Altar boys,  Choir boys.  Dressed to the code of angels.  But who really knows what lurks in the hearts of boys?  From a writer’s viewpoint, the last place for shadows.
              
              “So doing girl stuff doesn’t make you a girl,” the new boy mused as he digested the tidings from his young colleagues.
              “It doesn’t make you anything,” Pete said, “reading makes you something.  Math.  Geography and history.  Acting like a girl with a man or another boy is not important, except when it’s happening.”
              “Yeah,” Dale agreed, “it’s really different for us.  We think about it some, knowing it’s going to happen.  The straight kids think about it all the time, wondering if it’s going to happen, and most of the time if it does, they risk disease, pregnancy, and enough lingering issues to employ a semi-private psychiatrist who still can’t keep them away from the ice cream.  The narrow-minded end up frustrated and fat.  
              “We never do;” the acute preteen concluded, “why would we?
              “Aren’t there boys who want to be in the cabin, but there isn’t room?” Carlos asked.
              “Nothing’s perfect,” the leader pointed out, “so that does happen.  If we get wind of it Ben has a list of friends he calls on to arrange a camping trip for the boy or a weekend at a theme park.  We’re a group of six, a comfortable car load, seeing as how five of us are kids.  Anything else is pretty limited, an occasional special friend he brings or we invite, and sometimes, something happens out in the woods between St. James and four or five other Catholic churches.”
              “That’s really special,” Matt said.  “They set it up with torches and any amount of staging and props, and we start getting molested by the older boys and men, then we tear the whole thing down, you know, symbolizing the phony nature of icons and theatrics, then the men molest us all the way.”
              “Realistic,” Carlos repeated.
              “Cheaper than cards,” Ricky agreed, “without the lassitude of conversation.  It’s as close to one size fits all as you can get.”
              “But not,” bright little Chip added, “all sizes fitting one, because they never let us get on our hands and knees in front of them, because that’s bad for your body. “
              “And we can’t do too much with our mouths, either,” one of the boys observed, “because if we do, it makes us grow too big.”
              The new boy was unsure of the basics, and he’d heard god was in the details, so he knew he had a lot to learn.  “How do you do it?” he asked.
              “We have a standing ritual,” Ricky explained, “and a bed ritual.”
              “So it’s the same every time?” Carlos said.
              “Yes,” several boys said, nodding.  “That allows us to concentrate on the feelings we have while it’s happening,” Ricky continued, “instead of wondering if another way wouldn’t be better or trivializing it, since it’s already trivial enough, by experimenting with positions and techniques like it was some kind of new game.”
              “We’ll have a lifetime to do that when we’re older,” Matt said, “so when we’re with him, it’s always almost exactly the same.  One way for out in the woods, and the other for when we have privacy and can be in bed together.”
              “Do you do it by yourselves, I mean with each other,” Carlos wanted to know, “or only when he’s with you.”
              “Mostly when he’s with us,” Dale said, “but, as he points out, the penalty for cheating is pretty abstract, so once in awhile stuff happens on sleepovers or when we’re out hiking with a friend.”
              “How about girls?” the eleven year old asked.
              “Two of us have little sisters, you know, curious ones,” Pete noted.
              “Wow,” the new boy said. 
              “That’s like a limited edition,” Ricky said, “special games for extreme behavior.  For example, if we tear down the woods altar without damaging anything, Kitty and Janet mate with their brothers as a reward, and if there happens to be a new boy, well, that’s exciting for them even though it’s really just kid’s stuff.”
              “Glad I’m a kid,” Carlos mused.
              “After you get used to it a little,” Pete said, “the reading is more fun.  We groan when it’s over, even though we know what’s going to happen next is what most boys think they want more than food and water.”
              “That’s what it’s all about, according to Ben,” Ricky added, “getting it out of our lives, not with strictures and dogmatic thou-shalt-nots centered on burning in hell for the odd trillion years; abstinence as the joke goes, but through strict permissiveness.  Allowed some, take some, where kids who are allowed nothing tend to want all.”
              “Less is more,” the new boy summarized.
              “Sort of like Christmas,” bright little Chip observed, “if it came every day, you’d get so sick of jumping out of bed early to open presents you’d be a Scrooge by New Year’s.”
              “But once a year…”
              “No,” Pete laughed, “just not every day.  Realistic.  Every few days.  Maybe all night and all day, then ten days where nothing happens.”
              “Or at least four or five,” Matt giggled, his soft laughter as innocent as that of a boy playing with a puppy, corruption being, as it is, a psychological rather than a physical issue.
              
              The air radiated welcome, a slightly flushing and dizzying potpourri of trust, dignity, affection, and extreme excitement.  “How does it start,” Carlos whispered.
              “Any way you want,” Ricky said, “but all of us had a dinner date with him, then came back here to the rectory and dressed as girls; wigs, a little makeup, and, you know, underwear, so we’d get that out of our systems.  When we were ready to go upstairs, which most of us were since we were about eight, we changed into plain white cotton boy’s underwear, because it’s the ultimate favorite of the child molester, and, like dressing as a girl, the less confusion about what was happening to us, the better.  He dressed in white briefs and tee, too, and took us from behind.”
              “That sounds like a good way,” the new boy said.
              “The important thing is it’s complete,” Dale said.  “It’s half experiences and furtive groping that are confusing to a kid.  With Ben that doesn’t happen.  He makes sure there’s plenty of time and privacy.  Once in awhile a boy has second thoughts after his first time, you know, about being with a male, so he took each of us all the way, from behind, before he let us pull down his jockey shorts and became openly homosexual with him.”
              
              “Does he look nice that way?” the youngest wanted to know.
              “He looks like an older boy,” Peter said, “because, you know, he’s really blond and Nordic looking, and we like to shave him in the shower and let him do it to us.”
              “Except he’s bigger,” bright young Chip observed, “not anything monstrous like you see in weird porn, but bigger than most of the adults who rape us in the woods.”
              “And he always has the most sperm,” Matt said, “that’s part of what makes him so exciting.  He’s really disciplined about not doing anything by himself for two or three days before he’s going to have one of us stay over.  We try to do it, too, you know, save up, if you want to call it that, but it’s hard because the longer you do it the more you think about it.”
              
              “But a lot of times we can,” Dale added, “and that makes it almost like the first time.”  All nodded, affirming in young Carlos’s mind the fact that though he might end up a homeless vagrant, at one moment in his life he was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
              
              His friends and new special friends finished changing and prepared to depart for their homes.  “We have what we call coincidental parties,” Ricky said as they headed for the door, “because we don’t want to rub anyone’s noses in anything, so we just sort of accidentally on purpose get together at one of our houses, to welcome the new boy.”
              “And you can hear Dale’s story of what happened while the man had him alone in the apple orchard,” Matt said.
              “When?” Carlos asked.
              “Saturday, at Pete’s,” Dale replied, “tomorrow.”
              “Okay,” the new boy said with a shy smile, not knowing how else to put it.
              
              As they filed from the rectory Ricky hesitated and quickly opened his school bag.  “This is what we’re reading,” he said to Carlos, handing him a John D. MacDonald paperback classic.  “We just started it so you can catch up before your date.”  With that they were gone.
              
              The Fifties paperback was in such fine condition Carlos kissed it, demonstrating why he’s a hero in one of my stories.  He sat on a leather hassock and carefully leafing into the volume, completely forgot his first date.  Speaking of which, I recently read three or four parts of a ranch saga from Nifty’s :”Rural” archive.  In once scene the brothers, junior high (middle school) age, get all excited about a special event in their educations.  The older brother is going to read a book for school.  These are wealthy oil and ranch people.  I grew up in half poverty, and by the time I was their age had read some two hundred books, and might have doubled that number if it hadn’t been for proving several thousand times I knew how to do long division..  The irony here, to foist another tendril of essay, is that by having to solve these problems in such endless profusion, I became careless, thus proving I wasn’t very good at it.  A fat lot schools know.  In my job with Caterpillar I had to process a million dollars worth of work orders and invoices, about as complicated as paperwork gets, and I never made a mistake.  I never even made a typo.  Money was on the line, it was important, thus, perfection.  How I reached it as a writer, with all that math homework, is another story, and, by wondrous coincidence, we’re right in the middle of it. 
              
              “That’s really like Travis, isn’t it?” the friendly voice from the door said.
              “But so far he doesn’t have ‘quicks’,” Carlos said  
              “That much a fan, eh?” Ben responded.
              “I even kissed it,” the eleven year old admitted.
              
              Do we see the shortcut here?  The very writer I was just alluding to, down on the ranch, would go on for half a page, or, in his case, three pages, telling how much two of his characters liked each other and bonded.  Here, in four lines, is a bonding that’s absolute, and merely a favorite character from popular fiction.   Do you suppose this example is in any way related to real life?  That, yes, there is a shortcut involved to friendships that can weather the vicissitudes of romance?  Do you suppose that’s why I brought it up?  I punched out of the story when the South Beach realtor begins coupling with the South Beach ranch foreman, but I do suggest it if for no other reason than to show a writer with lots of talent crippled by the fact he’s not taken the shortcut, read the mere thousand or so books it takes to get some grip on pacing and flexibility.  You say that’s a lot, but it’s not when compared with the tens of thousands of hours of televised drivel watched by this writer.  Of course, there comes a time when you know so much, from all that reading, you can toy with pacing if the mood suits you, but that takes three thousand books.
              
              “We could stay in an read instead of going out to dinner,” the handsome priest said.
              “No, thanks,” Carlos said shyly, “I was talking with Ricky, Peter, and the other three, and I want it to be just like it was with them.”
              “I’m not a religions man,” Ben said, “but thank god, because I’m starving and Nelson’s has a wonderful Crab Louis.”
              “Am I dressed okay?” Carlos asked.
              “I have some sport jackets and ties that would fit you,” the twenty four year old said, “if bold beyond belief suits you.”
              “Like in the movies?” the boy asked.
              “Massive social step,” his friend said nodding.
              “I’m game, I guess,” the boy allowed.
              
              “Okay, good,” Ben said, “and you’re not the Lone Ranger at getting hornswaggled half way into bib and tucker.”
              “Misery loves company, so that’s a comfort the boy said as the priest disappeared upstairs.
              “It’s not as exciting as the water park, but more cerebral,” Ben said as the waiter brought their main course.
              “Is that the most fun place?” Carlos asked.
              “Yes,” the young man said, “it’s extreme adventure, you know, looking at all the adult/child couples and groups and trying to guess which are active and who aren’t.”
              “The boys didn’t tell me about that,” the eleven year old said.
              “It’s our traditional second date,” his friend explained, “stay over on Saturday night.”
              “Does a lot of stuff happen?” the boy asked.
              “That’s why we only go once a year,” Ben replied.  “Sort of like dressing like a girl if you want to when we get home; a full taste of what’s out there on the theory that unrequited curiosity is more hazardous, vis-à-vis addiction and related topics, than knowledge.”
              
              “So you go five times a year?” Carlos asked.
              “Twice,” Ben said.  “Next Saturday, with you, then again in a few months with all of you.”
              “Wow,” the boy exclaimed.
              “What happens at the pseudo shrine on retreats is more dramatic,” the father said, “you know, with all the Hitler stuff like torches and Cub Scout uniforms we use to indoctrinate against indoctrination, but Fishytown has its appeal, nonetheless.”
              “Can others watch while we do stuff together?” Carlos asked.
              “Not in the public areas,” Ben replied, “at least not too much.  I guess part of the attraction is learning how demonstrative a mismatched couple can be without being offensive.  There are a lot of families there, innocent kids, just like at a beach or fairground, but lots of couples, too, so the interest level stays high.”
              “The anticipation level isn’t half bad, either,” the boy noted with a shy grin.
              “Well,” Ben responded, “not to gild the lily or anything, but it often happens that a boy your age ends up teaching an older teen – a virgin – because a lot of fathers take their sons there and let them ride the two-man paddle boats, on whose route through the various pools and waterways happens to be a tunnel of love.”
              “How about little boys?” Carlos asked.
              “That’s easier,” Ben said, “but an eighteen year old’s first time is more dramatic.”
              “Are there lights in the tunnel so you can see what happens?” the boy wanted to know.
              “Lots of candles,” the man replied, asking, “is that what you’re interested in?  Seeing what happens?”
              
              “Yes,” Carlos nodded.
              “That’s cool,” the older male responded,  “It’s actually highly aesthetic, what happens between a young adult male and a child when they make love.  I guess showing it has to be illegal or it would stop traffic.”
              “Maybe they’re just keeping it in reserve,” the eleven year old mused, “you know, if everything else peters out, inventions, space travel, computers, all the stuff we have, they’ll wake up some day and say, hey, this is a way to get people interested in something.  Back in the groove.  Then it would be legal, and once that happened, people wouldn’t be so uptight about it, and it would spread, and that could become the new economic engine when technology reaches the end of its rope.”
              “Yeah,” his companion said, “but it’s a slippery slope – probably the classic slippery slope – because of the self discipline required not to become engulfed in a hedonistic spiral is too much to ask.”
              “But it might be the only option,” the boy observed, “that, or crumble out of sheer boredom.”
              “But wouldn’t it become boring, too?” the man responded.
              “Not if you do it with people who read a lot,” the boy shot back, “because then you’re friends even if nothing happens, and it’s even fun to talk to them if you don’t especially like them.”
              “Well,” Ben laughed, “I’m not going to argue against a new world order that permits considerable latitude in the behavior of literate couples.”
              “It should just be reasonable,” the boy mused.  “I don’t want Jimmy Vargas to run up to the front of the class to be with Mr. Fox, you know, in the middle of science class, or anything, but if one day a month any boys who liked Mr. Fox could stay after school with him for an hour or two, well, I hardly think that would challenge anybody’s order.”
              “I think Fishytown is about the right half-step,” the priest responded.  “If a guy’s watched his weight and is half-way nice, he’ll find a boy there sooner or later.  Always remember, as much as you may like what happens when we’re alone together, other kids your age would hate it with three times the passion.  Chances are, most of them are kids who wouldn’t like much of anything, but they have a right to be protected, don’t ask me why, so the status quo is victim oriented policy with no official nod to the millions of kids who would both like and benefit from an illicit relationship.”
              
              “Well,” Carlos said after several bites of the delicious crab meat, “I was just thinking about how I’d feel if the law did get in our way.  If someone came up to us in this restaurant and asked what we were doing together and caused trouble.  Those are the real victims, boys locked in prison simply for wanting to get out.”
              “On the other hand,” the young Nordic athlete said, “I’ve been bringing children here for almost two years, and no one’s said anything.  I brought Pete and Kitty, she’s nine, and she flirted her way through four courses until there couldn’t have been a person here who couldn’t add her coo and coo and not come up with foreplay.”
              
              “So everyone knows you’re going to molest me tonight?” Carlos whispered.
              “Everyone is wondering,” Ben replied, “why I don’t hustle you off to the men’s room while we wait for desert.”
              “Have you ever done that?” the boy queried.
              “On my first date,” the priest replied.  “Jeff Till, Ricky’s predecessor.  You’ll meet him at our next retreat.”
              “Is it nice in there?” the boy asked, “I mean, you know, the men’s room?”
              “Extreme,” said the older male, “which is a good definition of why you’ll have to go by yourself.  It’s an example of something you can get away with, once.  Get it?”
              “Yeah,” Carlos nodded.  “Reasonable, but gilded.”
              
              Intensity.  To have a brief interlude with someone you think is pretty close to out of this world, or a highly carnal relationship with an ordinary partner; an hour of passion or an erotic lifetime, and at the very suggestion of the enigma, all the philosophers of yesteryear end up on a toboggan headed pell-mell for an oak, mumbling directions from sacred texts of deviant provenances.  Useless.  Then why write about it?  Because by teaching you not to obey I may free the single mind capable of finding an answer.  But is an answer necessary?  Well, my Inbox is riddled, daily, with four to six adds for penis enlargement pills.  So many tubby hubbies trying to mate with their mall mamas,  the need is obviously intense.  I take this as a Yes, in today’s vernacular, a slam-dunk.  And the pity is the outline – the answers – exist, it’s just we’re prohibited access to them, because, in an interesting play on intensity and extremes, it doesn’t happen to fit in with the adversarial scheme of chaos beloved of our ruling class.  Because of certain historically widely practiced facets of Germany’s National Socialism, all its principles are rejected and its concept of wide freedom under strict control is last on every contemporary list, an extreme position.  That it worked, superbly, is the reason we are not today an island in a sea of hammers and sickles, that it was not allowed to fulfill its objectives is the reason we won’t be here for long, for the island is sinking under the unleashed materialism of the self-same ruling class and its significantly insane obsession with doing anything that isn’t against the law: malls, big-box stores, and children’s television constituting the three most hideous examples of what’s legal under the system they dominate, with their (Jewish) domination compounded by vast herds of fellow-traveling pigs, rendering  irony as extreme, if not exactly kosher.  And the underlying truth is the most forbidden of all: that, widely defined, the Aryan actually is not only superior, but capable of being vastly so.  Hugely inventive, vastly creative, single specimens of the race outdoing by a thousand times all who have come before.  Harrison’s unalloyed brilliance over half a century to perfect a chronometer the size of two eggs; Watt’s miracles with steam, and a huge list extending like a granite spire until the present time.  Stone pilers, berry pickers, and Aryans (rockets and transistors).  Yet the very word has been twisted into what’s tantamount to a cultural curse.  Well, twist this: as an individual of the race, I surpass by several times all writers of other affiliations, and severely challenge those of my own.  The programs are there, the people are here, and denying them and us gives Adolf Hitler, posthumously, the greatest victory of all time: the total destruction of all enemies.  You can guess what the sad little footnote is.  So, be my guest.  Mock us, disobey us, quibble and nitpick us to damage our spirit and rein in our morale; honkey us this and goyim us that at your pleasure and concern yourself not with pleasuring yourselves with our inventions and my writing, for a nearby Jew has clever words and a tongue a mile long with which to balm, stroke, and pacify you, with which to indoctrinate you against us.  That’s like being against your belly button: go for it, but take a little friendly advice and be sure the knife is long, strong, and keen, you know, to minimize what modern physicians call discomfort, meanwhile, chalking it up to your own stupidity that you don’t cherish, revere, and emulate us every day and in every way.  The melting pot is tainted, and how the poison grows, a lady heard the news and fainted, see how her body glows.  She ate with spoon, she ate with fork, she ate with both her hands, she wasn’t a goon, she wasn’t a dork, she said so and blamed her glands.  The pot was cleaned, the vessel scoured, and filled with brand new soup.  The lady leaned, her expression soured, the smell knocked her for a loop.  It wasn’t the pot, is wasn’t the spoon, but something in the mix.  And her second shot caused her to swoon, leaving her in quite a fix.  Dinner is served at eight tonight, please be right on time, but remember the underlying rules.  It’s kosher so it’s sold as right, and yes it looks real fine, but in reality it is nothing of the kind, naught but a sup for fools.
              
              
              “Are you nervous about the ‘girl’ thing?” Ben asked as they reached the second floor and living quarters of the rectory.
              “Kind of,” his young friend admitted.
              “Well,” the father said, “let me explain it in terms of science, that may help.
              “A friend of mine with access to a clinic, measured the emissions of adolescent boys after various methods were used to excite them.  Boys who were molested while wearing feminine clothing had almost half as much semen as those who engaged in alternate foreplay.  This not exactly dry statistic was enhanced by a further thirty percent when the molestation included a lingering game of Daddy and Little Debbie.  The adult half of the experiment showed a nearly parallel response when they were able to take their time with a preteen dressed in conventional white underwear.”
              “So two sizes fit all?” Carlos said.
              “The nail on the head,” the older male agreed.
              “Then make room for Debbie,” the boy responded, and Ben led him to a closet in one of the guest bedrooms, kissed him on the head, and departed for his own room where he stripped to his cotton tee and briefs.
              Carlos opened the door and pulled up a chair.  Sat to peruse the rainbow of chiffon and he knew not what shimmering before him.  On the inside of the door was hung a collection of quality wigs and a single small-looking athletic supporter.  How nice to have a place to start.  The eleven year old shed his jacket over the back of the chair and followed it with his tie.  A seriously modest boy, he’d previously avoided glances in the mirror any time he was changing, and here he was faced with a full length looking glass inside the second door of the closet.  Two extremes presented themselves.  How he looked now, school clothes, an attractive but unremarkable boy, and how he’d look in a few minutes.  The addictive quality was a factor, he could feel its nudge.  How cool to vanquish it in the name of manhood, knowing what he was doing.  Quickly he stripped, donned the tight supporter, and then, equally quickly, fingered the lingerie.  No trace of the opposite did he display as he proceeded to mater-of-factly select this gossamer filigree and that chiffon frill, ending up with a pink party ensemble   He wriggled into matching panties, rolled on sheer, pink hose, paused a moment over his choice of bra, but soon had it covered with slip, crinoline, and party dress.  The shoes were a trip unto themselves, and he wobbled inconclusively for several minutes before daring the hallway, where his strained gate became a handy scapegoat for his shaking knees.  He paused at the priest’s bedroom door and knocked.  “Daddy,” he whispered as he opened it a crack, “it’s Debbie.  Can I come in?”
              
              “Sweetheart,” came the answering whisper through the crack, “I was just changing.  Can you wait a minute?”
              “Well,” the eleven year old replied, “I heard about a scientific experiment not too long ago, and I wanted to talk to you about it, because I think I might be headed for some kind of accident.”
              “Yes, darling,” said the adult, “of course, if it’s an emergency.”  He opened the door and gazed down at the beauty before him as Carlos, looking Debbie fit to kill, gazed back up before the tall swimmer before her.
              “Did any of the boys have accidents with you?” Carlos whispered as he entered.
              “Urban legend,” the young man advised, “having it happen prematurely in, you know, your pants.”
              “The way I feel,” the cute, you transvestite of the moment said, “it’s urban fantasy to think that it isn’t very likely to happen.”
              “Well, then, darling, we’d better talk more about it,” Ben suggested, leading his ersatz daughter to the bed where they sat side by side, the female child on her stag’s left.  They cuddled together and the photographer from Sears would have thought naught more than Oh, how cute as he focused his camera.
              “Did you look at the jock and the panties before you put them on?” Father Benedict asked.
              “A little,” Debbie admitted.
              “Okay,” the father said, “let me tell you this.  All the boys you’re serving with, plus three you don’t know have worn them, and they’ve never been washed, since they weren’t worn for very long.  If anything extra exciting had happened, both the supporter and panties would be heavily encrusted with a pearly sort of powder, you know, dried sperm.”
              
              “So then we can talk, Daddy?” the sweet child in the brown tomboy mop whispered.
              “Yes, darling.”
              “And I can sit on your lap?” Debbie asked.
              “Yes,” her father said.  She did so, facing him.
              The expensive party dress was cut low in front.  Carlos’s slim chest was heaving, his skin milk white against the pink silk.  Hard to imagine his sensual attraction could be enhanced by a ten dollar suit of off she shelf underwear, but science isn’t in the business of lying, or at least wasn’t quite so back in ’59.
              “Daddy,” Carlos continued the conversation, “you know what you were telling me about Kitty at Nelson’s?” the girl said.
              “Yes, Debbie,” Ben replied,
              “Well,” the boy went on, “can I be with you sometime?  Help her pull down your briefs?”
              “Perhaps, love,” Ben whispered in response, “but Pete is very protective of his little sister so he’d want to help.”
              “Would he help with mine, too?” Carlos asked.
              “Would you like him to?” the adult replied.
              “Yes.”
              “Okay,” the teacher said, “but how about if we were staying at Fishytown and he brought a cute nineteen year old into the room, would you help him with Kitty?”
              “I think, if she wanted me to,” the boy mused, raptly engaged in familiarizing himself with the psychological side of sensuality.
              
              “Would you help her with him?” was the next question.
              “If they wanted me to,” Carlos said with growing confidence.
              “Which do you think would be more exciting,” the adult wanted to know, “staying with them in the room, or going back out to the park and imagining what was happening behind the closed door?”
              “I think the most exciting thing would be to be with you in the next room, imaging what was happening part of the time, then opening the joining door.”
              “Remember what we said about extreme?” Ben asked.
              The boy did.
              “Well,” the handsome young athlete elaborated, “I think it would be extreme to extend this part of the evening.”
              “I do, too,” Carlos concurred, “I want to be in my underpants with you.”
              “Do you want to try kissing before you go?” the adult asked.
              “Yes,” the soon-to-be boy said.
              They remained a modest foot apart at their waists, experimenting with lips and tongues, more holding back than having at.  “That’s enough,” Ben said quite quickly, easing the child back onto the carpet.  “We’re going to start of slowly, then as you come back for more, more will happen.  Think of it as flying with several parachutes; you can jump out at any time and still be an altar boy if you want, no harm, no foul.”
              “I feel safe even as a girl,” Carlos responded as they experimented with a few last nibbling kisses.  He skipped down the hall, swerved into his room noting the husky lock on the door, and took a last look at his cute female double before he changed boy quick into the suit of cotton underwear lying on the bed and returned to his young adult partner.
              
              “This is how the first touch usually is,” Ben explained, moving the child in front of the mirror on his closet and resting his hands gently on the boy’s long, slim neck, “and you might think of it as rip-cord time.  Punch out time.  If you’re uncomfortable with the person or the situation, which can be location, time, and practical stuff like that, just say Sorry, and move away.  If you say anything more, keep it short, for example, if the timing’s wrong for any reason say Maybe later.  Okay?”
              “Yes,” Carlos nodded. 
              “If you like the person and feel safe and comfortable with the situation, just stand still.  If you think the male behind you is inexperienced, you can say That feels nice, or something nominal like that.  The thing not to do is act wanton and overenthusiastic, like a hustler, okay?”
              “I think so,” the boy nodded.
              “Once an adult or older boy has done this with you for a little while, maybe a few minutes,” the priest continued, “he’ll probably want to find out how experienced you are.  His voice will get really husky and he’ll ask if you’ve ever let a man take your shirt off before, something like that.”
              
              “What should I say?” the eleven year old asked.
              “That’s up to you,” Ben counseled, “and you can say nothing, you won’t be pressed, or something like That’s private, but if you like the person, you’ll probably want to answer his questions.  The rule is pretty absolute, like not coming across all huffing and puffing like a hooker, and that is that you tell the truth.  Don’t tell stories for their own sake, and don’t make a silk purse out a sow’s ear by describing something as fantastic and unbelievable and awesome.  Just tell what experiences you’ve had, especially your first few times.  Gild the lily by being graphic and talking frankly about the physical and emotional aspects of what happened, but don’t lay it on so thick the gilding kills the lily.”
              “I’ll try,” Carlos said.
              “You were picked by Ricky and the others from, what?, over a hundred and fifty boys your age,” the handsome swimmer said, “and we only score looks, as long as your weight’s under control, as about ten percent.  The rest is personality.  Being fun but being real, and part of being real is that you’re modest and self-effacing   This means when a man or older boy takes you to his room and Fishytown, you’ll probably be exactly right while he’s doing this with you.  You’ll answer completely, and want to hear his story, but not make a mountain out of a molehill in the fantasy department.”
              
              “I’m glad Ricky picked me,” the boy said.
              “It’s as fully extreme as it gets, to be picked,” Ben noted.  “If you come back in here after your time out after your first full experience, you’ll be opening the doors to a world that does in fact seem a fantasy.  You and Kitty, at some point, may very well pull down the underpants of a virgin older teen.  Nor will it be a hodgepodge of one fuck after another until you’re some kind of hump-o-matic sexbot.  However subterranean and beneath the rotted log we may be described as, in a generic sense, as many boys from our group end up happily married as from the congregation, at large.  If we had a motto it would read: ‘Not all, not none, some.’” 
              
              “That would probably sound better in Latin,” the boy observed and the adult kissed him on top of his cute head.
              “Ask thee, for homework, and homework shall come to pass,” Ben cautioned.
              “Did a man do this with you when you were a kid?” Carlos asked.
              “Francis was nineteen,” Ben whispered, “and I was a little younger than you, ten years old.”
              “Was he part of the church?” 
              “No,” the priest said, “he lived down the street.  We used to trade magazines a lot, then the regular babysitter moved away.  I didn’t need one for late nights, but my parents judged dog shows, and I didn’t want to go to all of them, so he’d come and spend weekends.”
              
              The priest had begun openly molesting his cute altar boy.  He pulled the child gently to him and slid his hands down over the slender shoulders and down over the slim waist to the bottom of the cotton undershirt.  “This is the last time it’s fair to say No,” the young man whispered, “once the man’s hands are inside your shirt, you should let him take you all the way, okay?”
              “Yes,” Carlos whispered back.
              “A good thing to say,” the adult suggested, “is: ‘Will you be really gentle with me?’”
              “Okay,” the tall, slim boy said as the athlete’s hands pulled up his tee shirt and began gently fondling the silky skin of the preteen’s belly.
              “If you’re with a virgin, especially a late teen virgin,” the lesson continued, “you might sense him hurrying.  If that happens, tell him you like what he’s doing with you, but you want to go slower.  At some point he’ll quiz you one how experienced you are.  We’ve talked about that so you know how to play it, and playing it is some part of what happens; theater of the moment, as it were; enhancing what happened without exaggerating it; sort of a serious comic, not a superhero comic.”
              “Will he want to know we talked, or just the physical side of it?” Carlos wanted to know.
              “The kind of boy you’re likely to be attracted to will be curious about everything,” the man advised, “so if things aren’t convenient the first time you’re together, tell you want to tell him everything when you can spend time alone together.”
              
              “That sounds cool,” Carlos whispered.
              “It’s scientifically verified,” Ben reminded the boy, “Dan found, anecdotally, because it can’t be measured with any real precision, that partners who had long talks had far more intense endings to their experiences than did the strong, silent types who just went at it.  Add the costume and white-underwear rituals,” he continued, “and the number of grams per Petri dish increases by an estimated one half.”
              “Did you and Francis talk a lot?” the boy asked.
              “At first he didn’t want to baby-sit for me,” the young man said, “he told me flat out that he thought he liked me too much to be around me, alone, for very long; that he’d watched a man molest a boy in the woods once and didn’t think he trusted himself not to want to try something with me if we were, you know, sleeping together in an otherwise empty house.”
              
              “What did you say?” Carlos asked.
              “That if I was sure I didn’t want him to wash my hair I wouldn’t leave the shampoo in the downstairs’ bathroom.”
              “I’ll bet that was the best day of his life,” the likely boy noted.
              “Do you feel that way, Carlos?” Ben asked.
              “Yes,” the boy replied, “it was the best day, just getting to know Ricky and Peter and the other three better.  Then dinner at Nelson’s, followed by an interlude as Fifi LaFemme, and now feeling you against my back… to not even mention the fact it’s an hour and a quarter ‘till tomorrow.”
              “I know what you mean,” Ben said, “because Francis said we could pretend about the shampoo, if I wanted to.”
              
              “That must have been good news,” quotth the juvenile.
              “I was game,” Ben acknowledged; “we were alone in his house, and it occurred to me we could pretend about the water in the shower, too, so I suggested that.”
              “When it rains it pours, good-day-wise,” Carlos observed confidently.  His tall, Nordic friend was pressed firmly to him now, his hands gentle and thorough under his undershirt.  In the mirror, they did look a pair and the beauty thing began to sink in as far as Carlos was concerned.  As much as it can in a ten year old, passion began replacing curiosity.
              “At this stage,” the adult whispered, “you can welcome your partner by reaching up in back of you and putting your hands behind his neck while you stand on your toes and stretch back into him.”
              More art.  The heavy, beveled mirror framed a mesmerizing tableau of slim, arching child and sleek young adult, both too winsome for use as catalog models, especially for underwear, too hawkish and intense, too inclusive of the human condition (although both “looks” and time or wrong, a rough equivalent would be to use Charles Bronson in his twenties and Macaulay Culkin at age ten to sell Fruit of the Loom).  But as art, it did work and the gentle molestation went on under the hot gaze of the four eyes trained on the rectangle of the mirror.  Ben’s hands caressed and fondled the boy under his tee shirt as Carlos responded by stretching himself avidly and panting in the man’s arms.
              
              “Do you like the way it starts?” the teacher asked.
              “Yes,” the child whispered.
              “This is the most extreme way,” Ben said, “Francis and I discovered it accidentally, because after all our cool talk we were both shy and nervous, so I kept my underwear on when I went in the shower, and the first thing he said when I heard the door click and he came up behind me was that he had his on, too.”
              “Was he a virgin?” Carlos asked.
              “Yes,” Ben replied, “but he was hidden in a thicket just ten feet away when the man was teaching the boy out in the woods, and they talked a lot, too, so he learned quite a bit before he watched whet they did.  He knew about going slowly, one step at a time, and spending a long time at this part so you can get to know each other and tell secrets.”
              “But not too long, right?” Carlos asked.
              “That harkens to the issue of character,” the adult replied; liberal versus conservative, if you will.  The liberal will please you one the spot, hey, you asked; the stale, crusty, rusty old right-winger will not.  Three guesses which one is right, end of the day.”
              
              “Tell me more politics,” the winning schoolboy in the mirror said, “it makes it easier to not do it.”
              “You’d rather hear about that stuff than feel my hand go further and further beneath your belly button?” Ben asked.
              “I’m not sure I have a choice,” the eleven year old noted, “because if you tell me everything that happened when Francis came up behind you in the shower, you know, it might be over for me really fast.”
              “He told me he wanted to molest another boy in the neighborhood,” Ben whispered, “an eight year old named Kip North, and he asked me if I’d ever seen him, Kip, bare-chested.  You can imagine how that made me feel, with his voice all froggy and his hands on my waist.”
              
              “That’s true,” the boy said, “though I don’t know what imagination has to do with it.”
              “Well,” Ben whispered, “he didn’t make it happen early with me.  Even when he was asking me if I’d like to watch him touch Kip like he was molesting me, I guess it was to temporize because he told me not to dwell on fantasies of how he’d look, all craggy and tough and half grown up, plus he had some scaring from acne that made him look sort of extra like a boy, as he stood behind the kid and whispered into his ear – and it was so hard not to imagine him with cute little Kip that I couldn’t do it, but at least trying distracted me from they way his hands felt when they went up under my undershirt, and he was able to keep me under control so he could  tell me that he wanted to molest both of us at the same time, someday, and sleep all night with me when he came for the weekend, and about one of his former teachers he really liked, if I wanted to watch him get raped sometime, and lots of other stuff, you know, whispering, to keep my mind off the feeling of his gentle but kind of rough hands while he touched me and while he did what I’m doing with you for a long time, the way the man in the woods did with his boy.”
              
              “Maybe you had to have been there,” Carlos interjected with a shy smile into the mirror.
              “Yes,” Ben agreed, “the feelings can be complicated.  It is, after all, the archetypal study in extremes, of wanting something so much you don’t want it.”
              
              “So,” the boy asked, “is it victory or defeat?”
              “Defeat,” the young man said, “because even while it’s happening, even while I was ejaculating hard and fast in Francis’s hand, I was wondering how we could delay the next time it happened because delaying the first time felt so good, so it was an exercise in negativity, in wanting it to not happen longer so that it could happen more fully and completely and extensively when it finally did happen, and such negativity must be associated  with defeat, don’t you think?”
              
              “Well,” Carlos managed to reply, fascinated at the feelings of giving himself openly to the tall athlete that were washing over his eleven-year-old body, arching more, stretching more, pulling himself closer to the adult as he spread his legs in obvious welcome, “since you brought defeat up, I was wondering how long it took you to lose your tee shirt to Francis, you know, so you could feel his bare chest against your back while he was molesting you in the shower.”
              “If you’d been me,” the man whispered, “how long would you have let it happen, knowing what you know now?”
              “I’m not sure I wouldn’t have gone schizoid,” the boy replied, “and let it happen with a cute orderly at the hospital.”
       	“Do you think you would have given any warning signs of your impending breakdown?” Ben asked.
              “I assume you mean survivable signs,” the boy replied.
              “Okay, then,” the older male said, “have it your way.”
              
              If you utter strange things to a boy, well, that there’s a crime, and probably should be.  How, on the other hand, do you measure uttering playful and affectionate things?  In most realms of life, there is such great punishment (plus lawyers) for doing wrong, and so little reward for doing right, that things seem a little out of kilter, so, isn’t it nice to know there’s one aspect of human existence in which doing good actually is fully and amply rewarded?  The hell you say, and you may be right, for surely there is good in a laden cart easing toward a Wal-Mart cashier, I mean there just about has to be, doesn’t there?  Stack the merch, pile it high, watch the downtown merchants die.  If you don’t have a smile, have one of mine.  How wondrous: a foundation of wholesome good to contrast with the dissolute evil of an athlete’s chest against a slim boy’s back, and provide a matrix of extremes appropriate for discussion and dissection at almost any time.  For example, we’re gathered together to read of sensuous things, the press of a young adult’s seven-inch erection against the nubile, coltish body of schoolboy dressed in a suit of Fruit of the Looms, the feelings of a sensitive virgin as the athlete’s hands roam ever lower toward the band of his underpants, the breathing of the two as the boy responds by arching the more and thrusting gently and rhythmically to the adult’s touch, the complexity of their emotions as they defer to the flight of the heavily laden, fully fueled rocket, wondering when to jump, for the finest view, before the dizzying height topples them, and livening the otherwise predictable process up by teasing, not stripping.  What a hoot, eh?  Virtuosity at its extreme, yet merely a joke.
              
              I feel another essay coming on, but don’t know what to write about.  Oh, good, there’s one.  A spam the other day alluding to a Newsweek cover story on declining sexuality in America.  I left the place, I hope, for good, on the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, and at that time I don’t recall knowing one woman, age thirty or more, in maybe a hundred or two, I’d want to sleep with.  I mean, okay, they’re not as bad as June Allison in the perennial favorite Jimmy Stewart film, “Strategic Air Command”, but in place of the ghastly primped curls of the Fifties, we have poundage, rank and raw, so it’s a close-run race for the booby prize.  Against such a background, I write.  Of a country in which I take no pride, of democracy writ failure, of Jews absolutely everywhere, and of how Hitler must be laughing from on high at seeing how precisely and accurately he was right.  Gather ye mongrels while ye may, too ugly and too stupid for a roll in the hay.  Well, every dog is meant to have its day, but I protest in every way.  Hey, in the Sixties it was cool, and I’m class of ’68.  Of course there is a bummer: if I doth protest too much, I have no place to send you for good news, unless, of course, Simon Wiesenthal has hunted down another eighty-year-old Nazi.  You are a very fucked-up people and my literary mission is to see that you see the lighter side of not being able, for example, to fornicate, and, of course, of your death by the misadventure of gratuitous excess on extremely flexible terms.  As they say in New York: “Hey, you never know.”
              
              Yes, yes, a big cannon, aimed with finesse at a large and ponderous target, but where’s the beef?  Pork and Spam we’ve got, and tubby hubbies have huge wives, so the poor gunner is like a lion confronted by milling Zebras, so many stripes, so little time.  But where’s the sacred cow?    I confess it’s a mixafacation, but when you’ve loaded as much powder and shot as I’ve crammed down the muzzle you’ll pull the lanyard just to hear the bang.  Somewhere out there is a target, it’s called faith, so, to plagiarize just the title of a student e-book on the Columbine shootings: Duck. 
              
              I’m writing like a real novelist these days.  A thousand or two words at a session.  Skipped sessions.  Far off the heady pace of eight to seventeen thousand words at a time that I sustained for months on end while writing “One Fish at a Time” and “Shady’s Closet” along with “Fullerton Park and Ride.” and a quintet of short stories.  It’s like being on vacation, a feeling enhanced by having a fifteen thousand word outline (screenplay) of “Poet” already in the can.  Another factor is not knowing what comes next.  I browsed Nifty yesterday and it seemed my stories were all over the place – where I would rather have them than at the Library of Congress or B. Dalton’s.  How does one follow such a huge chapter?  Zero response to “Beyond Brewster” published a few weeks ago, so it’s a reasonable guess your Jewry have things in hand in the guiding-light department, alleviating me of any responsibility, megalomania-wise, in addition to which you’re too disoriented and uppity to respond well to that for which there is no coupon.   On the home front, Linden is safe and sound back in Dangriga and Samantha is pretty thorough in proving that sanctioned marriage is not the only attractive option.  Sweet, but boring from a literary point of view, which is acutely ironic in a country that pays King and Letterman thirty million apiece to show up.  Any bare wall is better than the best of both their worlds.   Plus, it’s the age beyond despair, even the disquietude of British kitchen-sink films being irrelevant in an era that gets to fall from the top knowing no one will ever make the climb again, so wallowing in depression is unrealistic.  Life as an imbecile?  It might seem attractive but there are four cats in the house, so I bow to the competition.  MSN is no help, in fact just the opposite.  Michael Kinsley outed William Bennett, about my only quasi hero, as a highly addicted gambler, reinforcing the credo that the deeper you look, the more rot you find.  The creative artist who gave us John 3:16 has failed to add to his culturally legacy, and O.J.’s refused to kill again.  Such a little people taking up so much space, victims of each other and racing for last place, and lo a single king to mourn, with sad eyes and long face, the utter and completeness of your infamous disgrace.  Out of reach of poem, smothered in Hebrew foam, indifferent to your best, and preparing for everlasting rest.  If only it was flummery, instead of a pithy summary
              
              
              Where is Andy Warhol when we need him?  Any image in the mirror, rendered in discriminating detail, would satisfy the most craven critic; the handsome athlete bucking his chin against the schoolboy’s head, bent and whispering in the child’s ear; easing the white cotton undershirt up the boy’s belly and chest would have been good for ten canvases even though the action involved took only minutes in real time, and the boy fully bare-chested, slim, white, and common enough, but, framed by the powerful swimmer’s shoulders of the athletic adult, now also naked, radiating a beauty so compelling and universal only the utterly mad could fail to see and love it, be stimulated and perhaps even excited by it.  In Mexico, when you get to the lowest level of cantina, it’s pretty easy to tell because the bar doubles as a urinal, in other words, no need to leave one’s stool to go.  Ben and his immature lover might, and you’ll have to use your imaginations here, be displayed under somewhat similar conditions (if you’ll put yourselves in mind of a dairy barn, that, also, would assist with imagery.  In any event, grand reproductions of their avidly twining young bodies probably would not be suitable for public display, assuming, once again, you’re all as mad as the nutty guy in a home for aged hatters.  Juvenile carnality, however viewed socially, is engaging and beautiful; smiling faces and smooth-skinned whippet bodies, bright, happy eyes, natural enthusiasm (and where else do you see that, these days (oh, yeah, sports, yawn), and focused diligence.  It should be a common entertainment, live and filmed, and it is shunned, banned, and outlawed; we, by the same token, should be verging on utopia, and we’re verging on the drain to the sewer.  Got milk?
              
              “How long was it before you turned around and felt Francis’s chest against yours?” Carlos whispered.
              “We had pretty much the afternoon alone together,” Ben replied, “so we sort of compounded and extended things.”
              “How?” he asked.
              “We put on blindfolds,” the adult explained, stroking the arching child gently with both hands, “and he got on his knees across the bathroom from me, and put his hands like you have yours, only behind his neck.  I did the same, then we inched forward until we touched.”
              “Wouldn’t it last longer if we did it out in the hallway?” the boy queried.
              “Yes,” Ben agreed, “plus, it’s dark out so we wouldn’t need blindfolds.”
              “Did you both have your underpants on?” was the next of the boy’s questions.
              “Yes,” the teacher replied.
              “I like it, except for that part,” Carlos said, “I want to be naked with you.”
              “I don’t see how that can hurt,” the twenty four year old said.  “We can make it part of the activity.  You get in position, naked, and I’ll turn the last light out before I enter the hall.  Maybe instead of trying to touch, you know, our nipples together, the way Francis and I did in his bathroom, we could find each other’s penis with our own and have our first naked touch be that way.”
              
              “Do you think we’ll be able to stand up and come back in here after we’ve started pushing against each other?” the boy asked.
              “No,” Ben said.
              “Then maybe if you had a candle somewhere,” the younger males suggested, “because I think Ricky and Pete and the other would really want to know how much sperm you had, so it shouldn’t happen in the dark.”
              “They’ll want to know about your seed, too,” Ben whispered, “so that’s a great idea.”
              “I don’t know if I have any,” the eleven year old responded.
              “Can you feel it?” the man whispered, “hot and high between your legs?”
              “Yes,” Carlos whispered hoarsely.
              “And do you have any trace of hair beginning around your penis?” was the next panted question.
              “I think so,” the child allowed.
              “Then you’ll probably cum off like an older boy,” the man said, “especially if, you know, there’s the right amount of stimulation, both physical and psychological.”
              “I think your best is good enough in the department,” the panting boy murmured.
              “And you know what I think?” the adult responded.
              “What?” the boy replied.
              “That you’ll bring out the rest.”
              “Will I get it on me?” he wanted to know.
              “I took Francis all over me,” the tight whisper replied, “and I loved it, but that’s up to you.  I’ll try to tell you when it’s going to happen, and you can hold me so the semen goes on the carpet, if you want.”
              “No,” the boy responded, “I want to see it on me and feel it on my skin.”
              
              “All the boys like it when the young adults ejaculate on their bodies,” Ben encouraged, “and when we’re out in the woods on retreat where there’re usually six or seven mature males for each of you children, we don’t clean up, afterwards, at least not until we return to the camp site.”
              “So there’s a bunch of boys with sperm all over their tummies and chests?” Carlos wondered.
              “And a bonfire, and torches; sometimes it makes us feel a little, you know, sacrilegious disassembling the altar.”
              “Well,” Carlos noted, “it sounds as close to another dimension as anyone could ask for on plain old planet E.”
              “That’s the truth,” the man nodded, easing the boy from the mirror and holding his hand as they went after a candle and lighter, “especially the premier gathering for the summer.”
              “What’s that like?”
              “We crucify the new altar boy,” Ben explained as the equipped themselves for the dark, “and all the males ejaculate on his body, especially his chest, shoulders, face, and upper thighs.”
              “I hope you use small nails,” Carlos observed, “and not galvanized, they’re kinda rough.”
              “The joke is,” Ben responded, “that Ricky and all the rest would probably have wanted it if we did it the old-fashioned way.  It’s so intense as we spend the day together building up the altar and bonfire that railroad spikes wouldn’t give the new boy second thoughts.”
              “And they call it ‘just sex,’” Carlos murmured as they walked hand in hand in their underwear, turning out all but the wall switch in Ben’s bedroom.
              
              Click, the old-fashioned switch cut.  In the total darkness, Ben, stripped, knelt and began easing forward to the boy leaning against the far wall.  In the darkness, Carlos slipped out of his underpants, and spread his legs widely as he leaned back for support.
              “Are your hands behind your neck?” Ben whispered down the hall.
              “Yes, I’m ready for you,” Carlos rasped in reply.
              “Mine are, too,” the man said.  They had twenty feet to go.
              
              “Can we talk more about what happens, you know, the sperm?” the eleven year old whispered.
              “Yes,” Ben said, “did you have a specific question?”
              “Yeah,” Carlos whispered into the dark, “when you made it spill out of Ricky and the other boys you were still in your tee shirt and briefs, you know, to give them a chance to escape a fate worse than death.”
              “I was more responsible with them,” the instructor admitted, “but you’re the one who kissed the John D. MacDonald book.  That brought up a love issue.  To be honest, I want to take you fully, spill my hot seed all over your beautiful body, and I don’t care if you spend the remainder of the summer vomiting in the toilet.”
              “And I don’t care,” the boy whispered back, “if you blood and guts come out with your sperm and you’re dead as a doornail by the time I get to the bowl.”
              
              Great minds may think alike, but great bodies have more fun.  The pitch darkness notwithstanding, their eyes were full of each other.  He Nordic, six-three, blue eyes, slightly Jon Voight (“Midnight Cowboy”) face, and now naked and ready to mate.  Lesser he, five eight, ninety pounds, big-brown-eyed fox face, black hair in the absolutely and totally universal buzz cut of the day.  Both obviously male.  Both panting audibly and the darkness.
              
              “Tell me about Francis,” the boy suggested.
              “We had to get up from our blindfold game,” Ben said, “so he could get me out of my underpants, and I could pull his down.”
              “Did you keep your blindfolds on for that?” Carlos wanted to know.
              “We experimented with touching each other while they were still on,” the priest explained, “then we took them off.”
              “Who got completely naked first?”
              “He did,” Ben said,  “What happened was we went back in the slower, because it had a strong echo, only we took a big towel so we’d be comfortable kneeling in front of each other.  He leaned against the wall and I knelt in front of him.  I pretended Kip was with me, because teaching him something I’d never done, myself, took more time.”
              
              “He kept doing it wrong?” the broken voice at the end of the hallway asked.
              “Just wanted to hurry, like any kid would,” Ben said, “but I was ten and I knew better.”
              “Did Francis like it, that you were pretending?” Carlos wanted to know.
              “Yes,” the athlete replied as he moved forward on his knees (ten feet now), “he whispered to both of us, and suggested I mount Kip from behind so I could molest him while he was learning.”
              “Did you imagine the feeling of his back against your bare chest?” Carlos whispered.
              “Yes, and even more how his chest and stomach would feet in my hands.”
              “If he’d really been there,” the boy said, “how would you have felt about sharing the sperm with him?”
              “It would have been sexy,” Ben managed to rasp.
              “I feel the same,” the new altar boy said, “especially if it was Matt.  He’s the, you know, sort of plainest, so I bet he’d like having it all over him even more than I would.”
              “That’s very sensitive of you,” Ben said, “and perceptive, too.  All the men on retreat take a special interest in him, because he isn’t conventionally cute, and not only that, Janet spends more time alone with him than with any of the other males.”
              “I forgot about the girls,” came a tense whisper in reply.
              “Janet and Kitty will both be masturbating you and using their lips and tongues on you while you’re strapped to the cross,” the priest noted, “so that will probably never happen again as long as you live.”
              “Did you have Kitty in front of the mirror?” the boy asked, comforted by the returning whispers in the darkness.
              
              “Yes,” the adult said, “she and Pete.”
              “Had she been molested by an adult before?” the curious child wanted to know.
              “No,” Ben said.  “She’d made her brother spray a couple of times, but they hadn’t gone any further than that.  In fact, they’d never even been naked together because the things that had had happened happened while they were in the back seat on long car trips.”
              “So she’d never seen his sperm?” the boy asked.
              “Just half dried up on her tummy when she went to the ladies room at the rest stops,” the man explained, “but that was enough to get her very excited at the prospect.”
              “Well,” the boy mused, “I think it’s cool that there are at least some girls.  I can imagine a boy being with a man, but the thought of being with a man, when I’m a man, is not attractive, and I mean totally.”
              “That’s very common,” Ben affirmed, “of all the alumni who come to the retreats, there isn’t a single gay couple.  We like being together and touching each other around willing children, but without them as a catalyst, there’s no reaction, adult to adult.”
              “Good,” the boy said.
              “Well,” the priest elaborated, “it’s one of those social mysteries that just intensifies with research.  Pedophilia is almost wholly distinct from homosexuality, to the extent most gay males don’t even like children, much less want to have sex with them, while most pedophiles are husbands with wives who never, ever complain about what happens in the bedroom.”
              “I’d just want my wife to know,” Carlos said.
              “We have special – and I do mean special – orientations for potential spouses of our club members,” Ben explained, “and the most negative reaction that ever occurs is a few minutes of shock at the first act of our version of a pageant.  To a woman, and a few men, too, they end up saying something like What is all the fuss about?  Instead of carrying around guilt and secrets, they now have something exciting to share, and most importantly, a good reason to stay slim.  We count Clover Club, sometimes lewdly nicknamed Roll-Me-Over Club, a complete success as a sole addiction, that is no food, booze, tobacco, gambling, or drugs, prescription or otherwise, or other brands of dysfunctional behavior are tolerated, alone.  The fact that the children like it is a big bonus, but it was started, years ago, in the name of physical and mental health and that tradition has become so axiomatic we probably wouldn’t know what to do if anyone did break the rules, which aren’t even written down in the first place.  So the simple answer is, marry a Clover girl and have clover children.”
              
              “Is everybody Catholic?” Carlos asked.
              “Most,” the father said, “but it’s a total non-issue.  We joke that there are no good Catholics amongst us, and about a third aren’t even bad Catholics.”
              “Sound healthy,” the boy said.
              “I think most of us wonder, at one time or another,” Ben responded, “how much health you can have without it; if the world might not be a far better and more peaceful place if Christ had acknowledged the vector and blessed it, and if it had been more openly practiced than it has been.”
              “I guess there’s comfort in knowing things couldn’t have developed any worse,” the boy observed.
              “No place of pride for the Catholic church,” the man said, “but that goes for a lot of other institutions, political, military, and academic, as well as religious.  All we have left are our beautiful downtowns, and there’s no law against the merchant class destroying them, nor against the literary class rendering us dizzy dolts with the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald.”
              
END OF FILE II

