If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls

LIFE AT SAINT ALBANS

CONTINUED

Flip Sanders was hornier than usual. Being up late all night, meeting new people, being introduced to them as bisexual just made him feel more sexual. He didn’t want to think about the girls he had dated and or slept with before. It had been in the last few years he’d started to be interested in guys, only in the last year, when he was leaving the football team that he’d taken up with Andy. They weren’t together together, and they weren’t always having sex sex. But he loved to shower with him, kiss him, sleep in the same bed with him, work his way up to other things.

This was a world that hated sex... or was just afraid of it. People would put up with heterosexuality for the sake of grandchildren and the economy and the Holy Church, but anything beyond that was off limits. Or else he would have found out about himself sooner. He wished he’d found out sooner. Then things would be easier between him and Andy. He could have loved a boy the way he had never loved a girl, but was supposed to. He had always been sexual, and it had always terrified him, the thundering force of lust. But it wasn’t lust. It was power. It was curiosity. It was a flowing force like a river. It was desire. Imagine a world where he had just been told early on that all this was natural.

Aside from Andy, Flipper loved Ross Allan because Ross was so dedicated. There was no nonsense in him. Attending Mass daily, well read, having covered the Bible, the Beats, the Iliad, Lord of the Rings and the Kama Sutra thoroughly and understanding every music and movie reference anyone made, not batting an eyelash at sex and pornography, Ross was something to be admired, and so was this girl who had come with him, lovely, lovely Anigel Reyes.

And Flipper loved Jimmy. He loved Jimmy for his sadness. He loved him for how deeply he felt shit, including the penitence he felt for using the girls he couldn’t help but fuck. He loved his soul because it lived in some sort of high romance like the highest vibrating string on a violin that led him to these midnight bonings. He reminded Flipper of something out of Jack Kerouac or out of an Alan Ginsberg poem. He loved Jimmy for his joy, his laughter, his dancing, his singing, his desire for life, the wifebeaters he wore on his skinny frame, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and he loved Jimmy because Jimmy was the most sexual person he’d ever known.

The year that Flipper had been telling his friends he thought he was bi, Jimmy had been one of those who said it didn’t matter cause sex was sex and lust was lust. He didn’t say love was love, which would have made Flipper vomit, which didn’t quite say what he needed to hear. They’d gotten drunk on vodka, Coral and Money were there along with Ross, and Flipper had gotten hot and something more than horny that wasn’t satisfied till he and Jimmy made out for a half hour. He knew Jimmy wasn’t gay, or really bi. But Jimmy just liked to offer and take what was offered, and Flipper always remembered that night, in the semi dark room where everyone was too drunk and more than too drunk, too grown up to care about the two boys kissing.

They’d never brought it up again. Not out of shame, Flipper felt that distinctly. Jimmy had never distanced himself after that night, and Flipper was almost sure that, despite the number of girls in and out of Jimmy’s room, Jimmy would have made out with him again. Things had just gone differently.

This Russell boy... Tall, one could almost see that his body was new, that it must have been a kid’s body not long ago, and all the filling out, the beginnings of manhood were just that. Russell reminded Flipper of Jimmy and Ross at the same time. He walked like a man, if that meant anything, had the torso, the almost broad shoulders, the high little ass of a man. Flipper would have loved to see his long legs, his thighs...

But there was something fey and beautiful about the tilt of his head, the thick, shoulder length deep red hair, something in those glass green eyes. Last night Flipper had stood outside Jimmy’s door, listening to him fuck Marianne, knowing Russell was there too, wondering if maybe they were both doing her, sending himself into crazy lust till he went into the darkness of his bedroom and masturbated, his semen a fountain that sprinkled across his chest

 

Flipper arrived at breakfast in time for the end of the eggs and the last of the doughnuts.

“Flipper’s here,” Macy pointed out.

“Which is unusual because he never wakes up till he has to,” Jimmy pointed out.

“And I had to,” Flipper said. “We have guests.”

He gestured to Russell and was aware of his own furious boner.

“So, what’s going on in the world of high school?” he asked him.

“Not much,” Russell said. “Cause it’s high school.”

When Flipper laughed, Russell said, “That’s not really true. This is the first year I’ve gotten to take what I want, and I’m really into European history. I mean, I guess you could argue all history that gets taught is European history, but…And lit class is good.”

“Really?” Flipper said. “Whaddo you like?”

“I like T.S. Eliot.”

 

  “Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherized upon a table;

  Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,”

 

Flipper quoted.

    

  “The muttering retreats

  Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

  And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

  Streets that follow like a tedious argument

  Of insidious intent

  To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

  Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

  Let us go and make our visit.”

 

Russell had wanted Flipper the moment he saw him and was surprised that this boy, this grown man was flirting with him, and flirting with him through poetry and intellect. He told himself to remember Jason, to remember Cody, to put a rein on himself and quit being such a slut.

“If Coral was here,” Jimmy noted, “she would call that showing off.”

“Where is Coral?” Anigel wondered.

“Student teaching,” said Ross.

“Eliot is great,” Flipper said to Russell, not much caring where Coral was, and sounding like he was about to say he didn’t care where T.S. Eliot was either, “but Ginsberg is better.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Russell said.

“Howl?” Flipper said.

He was standing beside Russell as they walked together, had leaned against him and touched the palm of his hand. Ignoring the tingling in his own balls, Russell shook his head at Flipper’s question.

“Oh, my God. Well… no, they wouldn’t teach that in high school,” Flipper went on as if he didn’t have an erection and Russell wasn’t getting one, and they were knocking shoulders more than necessary on their way to breakfast.

“You haven’t met poetry yet. In Ginsberg, you’ll meet it for the first time... It’s…. what are you doing today?

“What am I doing today?” Russell said.

“I had thought you could just have the run of campus and do whatever,” Ross said, looking to Jimmy and Anigel for confirmation. “My room is yours. You can go in and out of it if you want, and of course there’s the parlor downstairs. We’ll all meet back here for lunch?”

“If you want,” Flipper said to him, looking not arch, but very humble, a little uncertain, which touched Russell all the more, “we can hang out. Anigel and Ross can catch up on stuff, and everyone else has finals. Mine are pretty much done.”

Russell wanted to kiss Flip Sanders on his mouth.

“You’ll show me that poem.”

“Howl? Yes.”

 

 

 

From the moment when Flipper opened up his English book, laid out on his half made bed and began to read:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…

 

Russell felt like he knew it. He had the immediate understanding that up until now he’d never done anything or been anywhere, and this trip was only the beginning of an adventure, that out in the world there were those who were ruined by their desire, ruined because of longing, and that he just might end up being one of them. When he heard the lines:

 

…who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

 

he thought of Cody, but he thought of tall, hollow eyed Brad Long too, and he thought of Nehru and Chayne and realized the world was not a home for saints,, that the world just might eat you and that all of these whom he loved were saints in their own way and maybe he was too. He almost knew what he was talking about.

 As Flipper read, Russell’s mind groped toward something, and looking at the long tall, well made boy whose jeans and sweater molded his body, whose red lips moved over the pages, and whose eyes shone through long lashes while he pushed his black hair away, he was in love with him. No, no, he loved him.

 

…went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,   

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

 

That train passed through Geschichte Falls. The ghost of those hobos got off and lived in that town. However tame it might seem, however tame it was, they were kin to these people, His  mother with her cigarettes and tangle of hair who had dated Chuck Shrader but couldn’t stop loving Thom. Thom, his dad, who had made such a mess of things because such a mess had been made of him. The Dwyers next door, Cameron’s dad, stealing his son’s pot and getting high in the back yard. The whole doomed world, Everyone waiting for redemption, or for the Second Coming. Jimmy, who he’d seen fucking girls against walls twice. Jimmy and his family the Nespreses, his own cousins in Chicago and Baltimore… The rain whizzed on by, dropping them off there too.

Flipper sat up, half of his black hair sticking up wildly after he’d raked a hand through it. He didn’t know he was performing. He was overcome by Ginsberg the way only a twenty year old or an eternal hippy can be.