" The Leaving of University"
By
Timothy Stillman
(for Michael, far better writer than I shall ever be, and fine kind friend as well)
He consoled himself, because he had to. He had to because no one else would. He was 21 and this was his last day at university and he was so terribly afraid. He was in his dorm room, alone. His roommate already left for home. He locked the door and walked with purpose to the mirror on his side of the room. On the concrete wall behind him were taped posters for "Lionel Bart's OLIVER!" and print ads, along with fan magazine photos and stills from Mark Lester and Jack Wild movies. How humiliating it had been to buy Tiger Beat and the other fan mags, but he was in love, and that was the only thing he really had ever believed in. Photos and stills and articles of boys he would never meet, of lives he would never know.
He would luxuriate in sexuality in this room today. In the past here, he had always to fear his roommate coming back at a wrong time or his roommate's friends or his own. Not now. This was for him and he would not be hurried.
He began to take off his shirt. It was a blue soft short sleeved shirt. He took it off slowly, looking at himself in the mirror, with the pin ups on the wall behind him looking over his shoulder. He pulled the shirt out of his jeans. He looked at his now naked chest. It was slightly concave. His nipples were pale orange and small. He had no chest hair. He turned his head so he could look a bit at his face from the side. He had long hair that was brown. He had a lean jaw and an aqualine nose. His eyes were ice chip blue. His face was clear finally at long last of pimples. He turned his eyes back full on the mirror. His eyes looked sad. He had not known they looked sad until his girlfriend, well sort of girl friend, told him they did. He had never noticed it before.
He took off his shirt and looked at his shoulders. He leaned down and kissed his arm high up as he could. He told himself in his Mark Lester imitation voice that he would be all right, that love would come calling soon. The oblong window next to him blew in the spring air. This was the top floor. Over the parking lot. No one could see him if they tried even. No one had ever tried to see him. He sang bits and pieces of "Where is Love?" He sang in whispers as he did everything in his life in whispers and silently and quietly and secretly. He could not believe he was leaving university. He never called it the university or a university, because that's how they said it in England, as the same with hospital. His roommate kidded him about his trying to have a British accent. Such as saying "gulls" when he meant "girls" but he did not let that deter him.
He stood in this room in the last hours of here. He remembered when his mother drove him here to this dorm his freshman year and helped him up the stairs with his suitcase. He put his hands on the wall and bent over. He felt as though the universe was collapsing. He put his hands, quickly, little thought, to his jeans, his belt was brown and thick. He unbuckled it. He opened it and then unsnapped the top button of his jeans and lowered them just a bit to his bony hip tops. He did not wear underwear this day. This was to be his sexual day. He had never had sex before, so he had to do it this way. Cusp of childhood long gone. Cusp of teenage years long gone. And now cusp of adult hood. He lowered his jeans slowly.
His penis was erect. It stood upward. He kissed his left shoulder and then his right. Pretending that he was kissing Mark's shoulders, one at a time. He took off his glasses, so that he might look like David Cassidy in the mirror. He ruffled his hair at his shoulders and threw his head back a bit, as though motoring in the Kent country side in Steed's Bentley, with Mark golden sunshine child next to him, and all the hills were hills of soft serene summery air and sky and green green grass. And they were laughing and Mark had his hand in the young man's lap and it was wonderful and all the songs played were being played for them and the young man fit, finally, and smiles were soft sunshine pleasure and night was for love and moon and stars and Mark from the movie screen, from the posters and posed photos for him.
He took his left hand, for he was left handed, and put it to the tip of his upraised penis that had a sort of golden glow to it in the afternoon hot buttery sunshine, and he touched the underside of it that was little bumped here and there, and he touched his pubic hair, black and not thick, and he put his left forefinger there and felt the pulse of his groin. He remembered when he was a young boy, when he was in hospital, there was a waiting room where he had sat for a few minutes while his mother admitted him. There was a large painting on the wall in front, of a doctor or nurse, in lab coat and safe doctor office, examining a boy his age then, who was naked and front forward, but the painting cut off at the very top of the V of the groin of the boy, and he had been so warmed by that, like caramel candy in his mouth and everything safe and nice and hopeful, for he was there to have his tonsils taken out and he had been very frightened, but this took his mind off that. It was not sexual and it was sexual and it had him holding out his hand for just a second to that painting and wanting to go inside there and be friends with the boy, and then his mother came to get him.
He posed like he remembered the boy had been, though the painting boy had been far more beautiful. He lowered his jeans to the concrete floor that was cold with the cold air conditioning that caused his tits to be hard, and he remembered pieces of his time here, people he had known, teachers he had liked, articles he had written, laughs with his roommate before bed time, how they had laughed hysterically when reading that awful dialogue in "Desire Under the Elms" aloud-mebbee and ayhea---and could barely control themselves in class the next day when the teacher asked what every student thought of the teacher's favorite play in the whole world.
He stood there with his feet bare now in front of the mirror. He took off his jeans, almost falling, catching himself by hands on the wall. He tossed the jeans and shirt to the bed. He remembered students he had masturbated to here. He remembered their beauty and his own plainness and being quiet and inside. He stood now with his legs spread apart a bit. He stood back from the mirror so he could see almost to his knees. His penis was springy and he could make it move without touching it. It was six inches and hard to bursting, for he had been saving two weeks worth of wanks for this moment, and his balls were tight. The left ball had finally descended when he was eleven. It had provoked such fear from his mother that he would be deformed and it would never come down. So he was marched off to the doctor's office every little while, so she could be reassured. And finally the miracle happened. He touched his balls now. They were round and warm and felt beautiful. He touched his penis with both hands. He had Jergen's Lotion on the ledge in front of him for this reason. He oiled his penis and it just tickled not only it but also his groin and his abdomen and his legs and his chest. Even his tight nipples were tickled.
He did not want to go from this room. This university. He had finally found friends here. He had finally found people who liked having him around. Who enjoyed going to movies with him. His roommate was nice even about this obsession with Mark Lester, and that "Run Wild, Run Free" poster with Mark's face on it, that had been at the downtown theatre for at least half a year, but the movie was never to be played, much to his frustration, but there were jokes about it between his roommate and him and that made it okay too. He put his head down. He looked straight down at his abdomen and his navel and his pubic hair and his hard on. He stood against the bed frame and pushed in and out as though he were having mouth sex. He rubbed his penis with his lotioned hands and it just seemed to behave like a fish having triumphant pleasure rippling. and jumping out of the water warm into even warmer sunlight summer, and he made it all last. He made it slow, and he made it official and important-that he had once had this room.
That no matter who would have it next, he had been here, and here he had written screenplays for some of his favorite books, "Jordi," "Dandelion Wine," and songs like "Puff the Magic Dragon" and a novel that he never finished about a young boy in love with a beautiful young woman and how they lived in New York, and one fine summer night, had decided that with him covered by a painting, for she was wealthy and lived in a brownstone, they would spend the night going round the city by taxi and walking and would see movies and have dinner somewhere, with him totally naked; their aim being no one would ever notice. It was a good idea, he thought, but he kept getting a hard on writing it, but still hoped to complete it some day.
He lay back on the bed, with his legs on the floor and he rubbed his penis, what he had called it as a little boy, rubbed his penis, and looked at the photo of Mark from "Run Wild, Run Free" as Mark posed, sitting on the ground, holding the reins of the white pony he falls in love with and which cures him of autism. He felt his hair draped around his shoulders. He played with himself a long time. The air conditioner was almost freezing him out but he would not let it best him. He called the almost Talmudic names of boys he loved, ones who had been around him actually, and the ones in movies and books and dreams, and he said penis I love you and he smiled as though he were in a warm bath and wanking off with soap and warm water and everything was like that painting of the naked boy in the safe doctor office. It was as it should be. He thought he was sorry to his penis, because it had never had anyone but him, and knew if anyone would look at it, they would think it not bad looking and kind of intriguing in its way actually, no foreskin, brown rings round the middle of the shaft, pink head, endearing little slit, nice balls that held tightly together and thinking these things, he moved his legs back and forth a little and pumped his penis with his hand. Not really pumped. But using the thumb and the forefinger, so it seemed safe that way and not as pleasurable as he imagined it would be with full force, all that sin stuff from all that seemingly long ago
And he held in and came slowly and held back and came slowly and he began to weep as his penis finally came and he shot over his chest and the floor and the desk, for he had been saving up for a while, and his whole body was like a bow string that was made to just keep the ejaculation flying, and he luxuriated in the carnival body he had turned into, because for the first time ever it had felt actually good, in spite of himself, it had felt as though he had landed into a beautiful little silver sleep land where he was so young he could not remember an ancient 21 year old man way up there remembering what that 21 year old man could not possibly remember either the other way. And he held his legs, nice legs, strong, sculpted with muscles, straight out and he kept pouring himself into the room, so some of him might remain, some memory might attain itself and stay here and he might come back here when things in the unimaginable outer world could and no doubt would go so horribly wrong. Like Oliver Twist imagined in "Who Will Buy?" And he lay there and the afternoon ticked on in its hollow odd silence. No music from the other dorms. No one running down the hall screaming CHICKENFUCKER, no knocks and threats on their wall from the adjacent room when he and his roommate talked in girly voices when they were feeling silly. And he lay there and actually slept for a few minutes. Then woke. Startled. Someone had rattled the knob on the door. He made a dive for his clothes. Dressed in all the stumbling haywire gawky way of things that he was master of.
And then guessing it was someone checking the dorms to see if everyone had left, he was dressed. He had most of his stuff packed in suitcases he had put on his roommate's empty bed, the Playboy bunny head sewed onto a head and back rest that his roommate's mother had made for her son, also gone, and that alone, not seeing that there or ever again, the bad reproduction of the bunny headm and no posters from Playboy on that wall above that- bed, as if his friend had died, made him reel with hurt.
So he took his photos and posters and cut outs from his own wall, not looking at them, not daring to, putting them in one of his suitcases, and getting ready to leave. Something happen, he pleaded silently with the dead room in the dead building on the suddenly dead campus in the too alive too real too monstrous to face real world, please let me stay here and read books and make book reports and fail Math, and just anything. He stood there with his head bowed. He could still see some of his cum at various places. It made him smile evilly a little bit.
Then, he unlocked the door, and struggling with his suitcases, prepared the ritual of leaving. He had never left before. He was always left by someone else. He had wondered how it would feel to do this, to leave himself if no one else. It felt quite sad. It felt quite awful.