"Making It With Jack"
by
Timothy Stillman
The bloke upstairs is having it off with the missus again. Cry, are they loud. Me, here in my bed sitting room, just after a tedious day of bank clerking, and needing my rest, and there they are, one floor above, the battling Doolans again. She screeches and he screeches louder and their screeches meet in the middle and do a loop de loop, circle round and come each to the other till their voices get tangled in one another and each is screeching out the other's throats.
Blimey, I just can't take it any more. Not when Jimmy Doolan is all the world to me, and he natters, you should just hear how he natters, dumb as a shrub, but sweet kinda and going on to school sometime or other if he can ever get out of the situation he's in, his being a kept man, and she being a fool not to know.
All it gathers is moss and that is the underpinning in this stupid cramped smelly rooming house that once had pretensions about a hundred and fifty years ago when Saucy Jack was having his own way with the ladies, and Jimmy is a fan of Saucy Jack's, and he asks me sometimes after we've had each other off, wouldn't it be great to go back there, to the cobblestone streets, and the fogs and the shadows of street lamps and their little puny torch glows, as the sound of silver knife slashes in the near distance?
He's all the time planning on writing the definitive history of the Ripper, and mostly I'm all the time planning on writing the definitive history of Jimmy Doolan, spare man (well, more boyo than man), taut muscles, solid hard belly, kind eyes that get a bit green round the blue edges when I look up at him with him in my mouth and his smile a little lopsided and his eyes closing now and then while his fish fry in the deepest part of him, and he ejects in my mouth and it's like male ink. Like sperm ink of an octopus and he infests me, every nook and cranny.
And we can't take her anymore, Helen Doolan, we just can't abide her, when it's wrong as rain indoors to be doing this, but Jimmy and me are an item you see, and Helen is such a bag of sourdough bed knobs that she can't figure out where he goes late at night, which is down here with me, which is why they fight all the time. Say what you want about domestic abuse, but Jimmy's been given a right POW in the eye and the kisser now and then, and I kinda look forward to that, because that's when he holds to me all the tighter and tells me he loves me and needs me.
Bull, of course, it is happenstance, I happen to be here and he happens to be there one floor above me, imprisoned in these rubbery, tissue thin sweaty walls that don't even absorb the sweat of poverty and work and hand to mouth when you can find them and tell them you'll be nice to them if they will just calm down their hungers every now and then, and of course compared to Helen, I'm a real champ. A real Lothario. And I should tell him it's all a matter of circumstance and comparison, but being drilled by Jimmy makes me selfish enough to keep my cake grinder shut I can guarantee that as a fact.
To sit in my dusty lumpy armchair in my dark room, with the winter coming in no matter how you feed the fuse box, with all these chinks and cracks between windows and walls and inside the walls and all of it dirty and filled with grime of factories in the next block, and I want my Jimmy now, and I want him to put his fingers in my hair and draw my face to his and he kisses me with his beery breath in mine and our tongues fight each other and he's just seventeen years old, him and Helen being together now for two long trying months, and he seeing me on the stairs of the house one day and asking if I got a fag on me, cause man I'm takin' up smoking again.
So not only did I give him a cig and lighter, I lit the damn thing for him, and he took a big lungful of breath and then expelled it right in my face, like he was daring me to cough (I didn't) and looked half seal closed right into my eyes, as we stood on that dark late winter afternoon stair case, real John Garfield like, hard and long at me, parsing me, judging me, like I'm a ham in a window or somethin', in the golden glow of the lighter and the oily shadows of the hall, and he said you want some of my dick, man? while I, already impaled by him, unable to look away, just stared fish eyed back at him.
He shocked me out of seven years growth. And he smiled that wayward smile of his like he had just ducked under the turnstile and had gotten to ride all over London on the underground and all for free, and I snap to, and size him up as quickly as I can, as much as anyone could do under the dark circumstances, and I said to him I liked to be wanked mostly but blow jobs were nice too. You learn hard from the rent boys. You learn not to give a damn, the response.
And he looked at me all hard enamel like and I thought for a moment I was going to be thrashed and bashed, but then he cut his eyes in the smoke and lowered the lids and I could feel the heat of his face; all around us was dank cold and dust motes and smelly carpeting that was more termite holes than carpet, and he said there on those ramshackle stairs that were at a too steep angle, his voice saying, like nicked cold ice, I noticed you before, liked the look, be at your flat at seven. So I nodded and did my best to look nonchalant as I turned and almost tumbled down the stairs back to my room, waiting all the time for the laugh that didn't come, which meant I hadn't had to duck my head in my shoulders after all.
That 1st night was glorious. I mean that first night we just--well, afterwards, he told me that all the senses he had were going crazy because he was making it with someone who had more than a bit of something between his legs, and I didn't put no claim or brand on him, and his voice lazy and lacy with the drink I had been feeding him, and he said that he had known her, that "retard bitch up there" since forever and it was just assumed they'd get betrothed, and they left school, and he had asked her to marry him, "gawd knows why" and she had put her arms around him and she had said she would be with him for the rest of his days, and how stunned he was at her saying that, he just said it cause he wanted to get her to lower her bloomers so he could see her arse; but now this, he was stuck with her, "real honey melon heart I am, never wanna hurt nobody's feelings") and how he laughed with such rueful force when he told me how it was for someone to issue forth a curse at you, that scared you but sounded nice too, and you are too stupid to figure it out, and how he wished he hadn't done none of this, even lying bout their ages, the whole ball of wax.
And we balled, and we were not made out of wax, and it was just like electric light bulb Christmas time when I could hold him next to me, the big beautiful longness of him, the big beautiful longness in my short bed, our feet, and ankles hanging off the end of it, and he liked to tie me up with his kerchief and belt and he liked me to come on his chest (we always made sure to spit bathe him to tidiness before he went back to Helen--we couldn't use the communal loo, in case she walked in the door, the lock of which was broken), and he liked me to listen to his heart beat as I did him with my hand, and he liked to duck into me and hide and pretend we were both ten and were never going to be separated or come out of hiding or grow a day again .
And he loved the Ripper. See, he told me one day, nobody knows it really, trying to sound like an adult of 30 like I was, pain is everything, you run from pain and what do you run to but more pain? Right? So you run from that like the devil was chasing after you and what do you one day or other run into? Right. The very devil you been runnin' from. And if sex is not meant for pain then why the cherry breaking pain, the much prized in song and joke tradition of busting it? And all the other pain, the biting and entering and gouging and tangling of sex? Ever as a little boy see your mum and dad banging each other? he asked me, while I wished he would shut, so we could fuck again, but he went on--Thought they were killing each other with all those things they did and the screams and moans and all that, didn't you? Death's door. Why is it called a little death? He asked that last question like it was the most unexpected thing in the world anyone would think of that.
And, he yarbled on, god what a talker, if we like to go up each other's bum holes, then you got to work with the pain, a mite or a lot, rough or gentle, you still have to deal with some of that, and if I'm being honest, I like it when Helen takes off on me, when she browbeats me and tells me this is all my fault whatever "this" at the moment happens to be.
Cause, look, it's this way-- we all like scary movies, cinema, telly, whatever, and it's good to get the old pump pumping, we love fun fairs and haunted houses too, can't argue that, why is being terrified fun?, it makes us cuddle close, and when Helen and I do it and we don't do it damn bloody often, it's like I know she's toting up all the things I'm doing wrong, right as I'm going into her and then the old in out in out, like the droogs said, she's trying to figure out how my job at the meat packer's and her job at the green grocer's gonna add up to any food at all for us this week and what a layabout no good lecher I am and what the hell has she gotten herself into?, martyr that she is, and she whining and for her it's all--can't he hurry up and get it over and I'd like to enjoy this too myself some day before I die, buster.
And that's pain. That's pain. Knowing she's letting me use her as a receptacle, and the goddam thing of it is, I'm grateful she's doin' the same thing to me in her own way, which is also painful.
You know how many books have been written on the Fiend from Hell? You know there's hundreds of the things and everyone of 'em has got a different theory on who Jack was, and no one knows and no one ever will know because they don't have the documents and the facts at their fingertips. They don't got no goddam eye witness to any of it. And DNA--screw you me, that comed a bit later on didn't it?, old Jimmy went on.
And, now while chatting away, he's started to using my bum as a receptacle, and I'm grateful he is, while he's nattering on about this hooker that was killed first and the one second and the last who was dismembered in a hell fire of fury all over her room, and I've become Helen, he's made me another her, and he doesn't see it but I do and I know what he's talking about, this pain business, because he's giving me pain.
It's emotional and physical and I love him and I promised myself a long time ago I would never love anyone again cause it gets you pain and I'm not a lover of it, though maybe it comes out the other way, but Jimmy's up me and I try to close my ears to his words and really just wish he would shut his cake hole, and so I shout up to him I love you, and he collapses on my back, shooting his spunk into me, and I think my god this time too, I feel silly as hell, all this time devoted to sex, or thinking about it, or dreaming about it-- this silly little mongoose with the rubber hose game? Blimey, what the hell's wrong with me?
And Jimmy sweat panting on top of me, breathing hard, the both of us, "Don't you ever fuckin' say you loves me again? Got it?" And he rips his dick out of me. I am afraid at this point. I am also intrigued. He would do nothing to hurt me. He likes to fuck me for me. I am more than another body. Yes. Helen is a thing. I am me. That is the difference.
I tell myself that. But when I hear him and Helen fucking upstairs, I know he's ice to me as to her, and he's taking her out on me and all, I ain't naive; so when I hear them fucking, I go out and take long walks, waiting for the Ripper to get me too. I stay out late on nights like those. I am disappointed to find myself making it back to my flat in one piece.
He is a bloke, this Jimmy. He's not a pal or a chum or a buddy or any of that. He's an opportunist. We don't use condoms. In this day and age, don't that tell you something? Trying to bring something to me? Or to Helen? Or to the both of us? And more?
He's just a daft kid who looks even younger and none of us got no money, nobody in the whole world seems to have no money, so there is little talk in this lousy spot on dog run of a place, there is only yelling, only anger, from all the boarders here. You can feel the shoe soles of the anger here. The stamping up and down on floors all round us and on our own as well. The shouts. The hits. The tellys too loud or the radios. And desperation and dead end street, that smells sour, and it sounds sour too, and at night when you hear late walkers pounding in their rooms, looking for a way out, you feel it in your soul. You can feel the tred marks of it. The prison cells of life which is what all of us here and everywhere are. They leave tracks on the wall and floors and in your brain.
You can see them almost, the angry walks, the sound of them, as though they themselves are visible, beyond shoes and floors, preternatural, supernatural-- almost they are like an old friend, and you got to yarble with the old lady or the old man or like those two kids up there are arguing where were you wouldn't you like to know I've given you the best years of my life Christ Helen you ain't even seventeen yet, blow on, and all of that, and everybody is at each other's throats, just like that movie "Straw Dogs,"--
--no wonder they banned that film here for so many decades, can't break the proper Brit balloon after all--too holy for words-- where all these Englishmen are rapists and murderers and house breakers, with their la de da Shakespeare accents and all literary and that, this blow hole civilized crap is just that, crap, tear off the face of the thing and there you find the worms and night crawlers digging out of the sunlight of a sudden and down into the dirt, it's all dirt here and grime and tag end life, and fuck the Queen Mother and the horse she toddled in on, to boot, is what I say, and Tony Fuckin Lap Dog Blair too.
But Jimmy can be kind, not often god knows, just when it's to his benefit, and it's an odd prism glass effect to be making love to the tune of Helen's crying right above us, and sometimes it's like a hymn, her teary voice, almost, or a beautiful psalm read by a plaintive voice that accompanies our love making, our sexual roundelays, and we get more gentle then, and he holds my hard penis and strokes the base of it and rubs his fingers between my legs and he kisses me most passionately then and there, and the pain gets lots less and we can pretend that we really do care for each other instead of what we really do care for--making someone else unhappy for a change, which only adds to our happiness.
There are all kinds of Rippers, you know.
They didn't have to go with him, Jimmy says, they didn't have to go with the Ripper, they didn't have any kind of choice though did they?, got to pay the man something, even they.
They made money as best they could, but think of it, all those toffs from all those country estates getting their jollies off by coming to the East End and fucking, for beans, some trollop in her filthy clothes gunked up already by who knows how many men, up against some suety brick wall or down in the mud with the pigs and the sewers they were in and the smells and the diseases, I mean a man who was well off, he could have a courtesan, a bed boy if he liked, and if the wifey was in the way, he could have made arrangements with the Claridge or something, don't you think?
All gilt and gold and soft beds and warm cozy fire to cuddle up with his mistress, but no, he goes down the rat hole of the world and does his business there, and it's like pissing, his business, how the hell did he even get as much as a worm on?, and the women, those ugly ravaged ragged awful women, how the hell did they get any business done to them at all? and all that smell of death and shit and there's this diseased clit starin' up at you, like the hind end of a rat; ya ask me, Jack from Hell did em a favor. That's where the movies got it all wrong. Those real hookers were made out of the ugliest mud you can imagine.
I sit in my chamber waiting for Jimmy the Raven to come tap tapping at my door, and I wait for the arguing of my lover and his wife, and the other quarrels going on all round me to taper off, so Helen will cry herself to sleep and Jimmy Doolan will come down to me so we will go up together. My room's one of shadows and no ringring telephone, and old second hand furniture, and a black and white telly that is mostly a picture of snow and static, and it's cold still because winter has hung on so long this year, and I wished I had had something more than myself to give Jimmy, I wished I could have gotten my guts together and picked up a rent boy for us, it would have been nice, and Jimmy could have used him to remind him of a boy in school he was in love with and never had the courage to tell him so, and he just wanked off in sad privacy because of him.
Jimmy said he finally got to hate the bastard but couldn't stop loving him, and what the hell sense did that make? Sometimes he cries the boy's name when he comes with me. Sometimes it hurts me. Sometimes it prides me. Sometimes I'd like to just curl up next to Jimmy and tell him all about everything sexual I have done. But he thinks he was the first'n for me, and I can't disillusion him, cause I can't hurt his feelings, like the prosties and the Ripper--there's an off beat theory for you, I'll bleed over here so I won't get none on your pretty black cloak and instrument bag, kind sir, and my word that is a sharp piece that is sir, silver and shiny and so razor sharp, it'd be my honor, kind sir.
I wish Jimmy wasn't so gone on this Ripper thing either. Cause now I'm thinking about it too much.
I wish he wasn't so gone on this book he was going to write some day (has he even read a book he wasn't forced to?; it's not for nothing he talks like a TV programme or a movie, it's where he gets his information from, like pretty much everybody else, but they'd croak before they'd admit it, most of 'em) when he didn't have anything to write about or think about or be about because this was all of Jimmy, and when he was naked on my bed and I kissed his little berry nipples hard and I dug my tongue in his innie navel, I knew for a fact this was as naked as he would ever get in his life, I knew that he would never have his words spread naked on a page of book paper, I knew he would never make the talk show rounds promoting anything he had written, that no BBC snot critic would cut his work to ribbons, Fleet Street wouldn't give a damn about his ratty sex life. I knew that he and Helen would keep up the argument till they were seventy five and dead, or until one or the other felt the Red Wind deep in what was left of their tattered souls, and would plunge a butcher knife, one into the other, and wonder where oh where did it all go so wrong?
Jimmy had never had sex with anyone before Helen. He said he had had sex with others before me, though I tried to doubt it, but the way he just came out like that on the stairs to me and told me he would have me if I wanted, or if I hadn't wanted, well he had been lying or practicing for a moment like that for a long time, and sometimes he had me bring out the paddle with the holes in it that he had gotten me, wrapped up in Christmas paper like a gift he presented it, with a goofy smile, because he wanted to be spanked every now and then for being a naughty boy and wetting his bed in the dormitory of the boarding school, (he never was in no boarding school--notice how I'm beginning to talk like him?) and he would ask me to spank him till it hurt, though I doubt too many house masters would have been wanking him off at the same time they whacked him, seems as it would be confusing, like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time, but then again, all these stories you here, quite a lot of them, must have some basis in fact. I've always regretted not having experienced the utter sexual terror of those places. As has Jimmy.
His lying on my lap on the bed and I'm spanking his naked bum, and his dick is hard and digging into my leg, and his dick is throbbing, and I'm pulling back his cheeks to see down in there, and he's rubbing his dick on me, and his thick wiry pubic hair are chaffing my leg, and his crying like a little child cries when its favorite toy has been irreparably broken and there is nothing he can do about it but wail to the gods of Goose Lane and all its attendant gardens of fake roses that life is not fair and he must be spanked to a rosy glow and hurt so he can prepare himself for the world he would one day go into. And me not having the heart to tell him, one day? This is your world for the rest of your life.
Sometimes we would lie together after I had paddled him and sometimes he would weep into my shoulder and he would say kids just want to be fucked and blown and held and loved, it's that simple, everything else is symbolic, cars, work, games, videos, movies, soccer, swimming, reading, dating, clubbing, all of that is just something to do till somebody comes along and shows you who's boss and makes you like it at the same time too. As of course he did with me, though I like to think at least that the roles were actually reversed--well the ten pence psychology ride applies there or disapplies there as well. And all psychologists are ten pence-ers and I wouldn't cross the street to put one of those bum fucks off fire if they were ablaze; I hate those puffed up pouter pigeons that much and I have my reasons.
Sometimes I think Helen is masturbating up there in her lonely room and imagining Jimmy is fucking her at the exact same time he really is doing it to me. Kind of a mirror of each other. Three thus somehow becoming four and nobody's lonely the whole world over, not ever again.
It's like, everywhere, he says once, I work in a meat packing plant, this is animals you know, animals who are killed and skinned and gutted and cut apart and all smelly and disgusting as hell and packaged and on the tables of the finest families in the Kingdom, but all they are is meat eaters who don't want to think about what they're eating, don't want to think about were veal comes from, don't want to think filet mignon and pork chops and beef steak, there so appetizingly on their plates of bone china, were once portions of living breathing things and they were raised with one purpose in mind, and all their fine tea cup and linen napkin airs that the rich meat eaters can put on will not disguise that fact--
--or what happens to that meat when it slithers down their throats to their stomachs to be churned as mulch and divided up for use and as waste matter, and all that little process that is the animal eating animal in them they can't admit to and can't do without as well. The gunky jungle inside that keeps them superior and well bred. I don't care how much perfume you daub on the beast, it's still a beast.
So who was Jack to you? I ask him one night after we've been fucking, Jack Palance or Laird Cregar? And without a second thought, he said Palance by a nose, but he would also have to give a nod to Martine Beswick if it came down to that, 'cause she was pretty damned hot even if she really did look like a female version of Ralph Bates, and he laughed, and I knew then the type of terror he wanted, the type of Ripper he imagined--the popcorn kind, the soda pop in the cardboard cup kind, the cinema kind, raised on film and television, raised on "Night of the Ripper" and "Jack's Back" and all that malarkey, and it had to be cinematic and he had to be the boy in the movies running after Jack down Penny Lane or wherever with a hard piston Hammer tune playing in the back ground, all up and down and round the twists and curves of cobble stones and brick walls hemming him in night dark, with close by the lantern light of memories of bobbies with their candle lit lamps showing the shadows new horrors as the glowy dancy light was extended just so, with frozen arm, to the latest victim of Jack, broken back against a wall in the gutter and the muck of insides.
So, one night, we're having it off, see, and I'm in him and I love the tightness, the muscles clamping me and urging me onward and Helen soft like crying up there like the undertow of guilt in both our consciences and making us more together than we would otherwise have been; perhaps, just perhaps we really were thinking of her; perhaps we were trying to be good to her, trying to have her here with us and wiping away her tears in the best muddled convoluted way we could.
And I think we could be animals in a hayloft somewhere, and a boy, young son of the estate owner, all golden headed and willow body longing for affection and stripping, could come up on us in the barn and become quite excited by what he sees us, us playing cornhole buddies, and the lad can't help getting a hard on, so he has no choice but to lower his trousers and pull down his Y flap and have at it, watching us, and Jack is underneath me and his legs are on my shoulders, his ankles, you know, and he sees the boy looking at us and wanking and pushing himself back and forth in the air, and he motions the curly haired lad over to us and he reaches out a hand for the boy's hard on that almost jumps in Jack's hand and another hand reaches for his creamy ass and then later shoves the boy's dick in that good old Jack mouth--
And I am lost in the fantasy as Jack and I are fucking and he calls out at me, Polly!, (even so, remembering to remain fairly quiet so Helen won't hear and figure it out) says it in such an impassioned kind of way.
Polly was one of the savaged victims of Saucy Jack, and I look up almost imagining the scrawled words on the ceiling, maybe seeing the word "Jewes" up there, never to be washed off by some stupid constable, all of it written in stage blood, till it's all sucked in my mind, my sponge brain just lousy with the stuff and I respond with breath hard and from the pit of me, god you are one great fuck, Jack!; Christ, Jack!
Jack takes a long sharp deep breath, then runs into me over and again hard and quick and violent and angry and he shoots god great gobs into me, and then, we fall into each other on the bed, and I'm frozen cold and so is he and we pull the useless cover up over us, thin and ill and worn it is and we huddle together, even though not wanting to touch the now marbled flesh of the other, like we've just both been out on a hillside, all pimple butted in the cold cold wind, and we've looked up at the stars and have seen them turn into big hairy tarantulas heading right our way, and we're all of a scream inside and out, and Helen's softly crying, like forsaken summer rain, one floor directly above our bed, the cry that suddenly stops in the middle and does not start again. We feel dizzy and tumbling off a ledge because, then, the weeping cut so quickly. As with a surgical knife.
We don't say anything for a good long while.
That was last night that happened and I turned from him eventually on my side and in time I heard and felt him get up, wipe his dick and balls and pubic hair, get dressed, no more heavy defeated tread from him, just a ghost in the room once and no more, and he left, closing the door like a whisper behind him because if he closes it softly, then it means none of that night happened, and he is almost seventeen, already a man, and he has got a wife named Helen, already a woman, who I've seen, with such guilt, several times, coming in the front door, or checking the post, and me never looking closely at her, and she's nice enough to look at, no raver or anything, but nice enough, seems pleasant, and I hear them up there now. This night.
I hear the marriage that is a lie that they will live with as a lie till they drop or Jack gets a knife or is given it, and he is shouting, okay it's Polly, all right, that make you happy?, her name is Polly, and she gives better head than you even thought about, I'm hard with her, we fuck sometimes three times a night, how do you like them apples? And Helen literally screams in blood curdling hair raising agony, then the sound of things thrown and missed, thrown and spot on.
And in the arguing of them, and the arguing of all the other people in all the other rooms about me, in the din of them, the excavating modality of them, the sheer painful angry verve of crashing waves of them, I wait for a little while longer, I wait to be Polly tonight in Jack's grip again, because, you see, Jack will only lie naked with me, and never with Helen or anyone else, while he's doing just that, but I will lie naked only with Jack, and when he is gone, I will lie naked with no one at all.
And I will contemplate for a long long time the Red Wind in my own tattered ill fitting soul. And the curious re-birth of Jack. Already in billions of different forms. Jack's always been here. And more on the way. As my room gets darker and darker, as frosty late night comes in rushing and I can start to see the long black tunnel. Sometimes when I stretch my eye sight as far and as hard as possible, I can see the end to that tunnel.
I can see it with an almost astonishingly clarity. It cheers me. It must have cheered all those other prosties too. Making Jack himself not much at all. But a convenient means of suicide.
There's a knock on the door.