by Ryan Kamstra
(05/21/03)

There are moments in life when I fear I take on too much light. I feel helpless over the past, over now, over what is coming. Some days a pale pink insinuation binds me to those crags of rose-grey low-rises, to the smog-lavender high-rises, to the neighbourhoods of power lines I walk along, and then I feel as if something is trying to remember me to the light.

Even the present can be a billboard. You can't help but remember yourself to yourself -- on a billboard, an inner city kid in big shoes. After so many shifts in time and location, after so much emotion and let-down, all that remembers him to me, almost absurdly.

Terry had size 13 shoes and the shaken stir-crazy curls of an archangel. I was raised Catholic, take note of his face: chaste, handsome, but always insolent, cocksure. Everything I was not.

He was my archangel, my protector. As with all meaning and resemblance I cannot gauge now how much of this is true and how much of this has been deposited here to remind me of something. His pale blue eyes echoed in sky, his stale breath, the black pulsations of his heart when I lay near his chest. The feel at the back of my throat of being filled with him. His thickness. His thrust and motion.

I breathe in and remember myself, under this blue lean-to, walking a sidewalk next to new construction. I become aware of how many people I jostle among, in-transit lives paralleling mine. So many feet, so much earth. How large the future is.

We were self-consciously Big then. Hairdo, blue sunglasses, our vibe always on.

Terry had a basement room with a lot of old stereo equipment. He lived at the end of a long shabby road, in a shabby house that his mother spent her off-work hours renovating. They never had much money. Terry's body wore the wolfish cunning of one who had gotten by from an early age without much cash.

Black jean jacket, big white sneakers fat with tongue: we were the unkillable children of the poor. Terry was so big overall I feel ungenerous remembering his feet. Size 13, and he wore them big, dirty, sloppy, like boys in big shoes do.

Much of what went on between us was unacknowledged. I was fifteen, he was eighteen, and we were already famous-or at least he was. He could be by turns a bitch and charismatic, moody and wild, but he was always protective of me. Other boys feared him as crazy, or worshipped him for something that was impossible to pin down but that everyone knew.

But I remember his voice, the easy puppy play, the ease I felt in his physical presence. We were just boys in jean jackets and too-big sneakers, with hard edges: pushy, cagey, arrogant, incomplete boys.

I studied his jaw while we created our own albums of rolling, ill-bent noise. The way he shaved, the clean severe strokes, leaving the slightest blush on the gaunt recesses of his cheeks.

He swung his feet when he was trying to figure out a certain sound. At those times what I didn't know manifested as confused fidgeting. He looked so serious presiding over our noise. I watched him as closely as only a sentimental teenager lying with socks crossed on a mattress could, waiting for the world to wash down on us through headphones.

As we recorded, getting more and more boozed, he kept kicking me whenever I fucked up -- playing the wrong sample, recording over the wrong portion of the tape. A tup on the chest or the knee, a pat on the ass. Small gestures that led everywhere.

After, with heads full of beer, we fenced. By the river or in the field outside his house, with sticks: two boys playing at warriors.

Often he hit me broadside as we fought, shirts off. I would crumple "like a girl," yet he would not make it an issue. I would savour my red welts with pride of achievement, dismissing the stinging pain to his apologies and laughter. They were love marks.

He's gone. I write this in a petrified state of semi-arousal. I draw on these memories knowing what I cannot bring back: the white sun of that day we waded the river with our jeans and army fatigues rolled, our sneakers in hand (I wore a measly size nine). How heavy the future seemed. Him before me. We'd drunk straight vodka and smoked up until we were too cloudy to see. We couldn't stop laughing over how muddled our sound had become -- low-fi, twisted, intransigent, earthbound. He lobbed through the river ahead of me, his hips cutting the water, and I watched the line of his back as he balanced with thrown-out arms.

His foot sank into a soft spot on the riverbottom. He began to go down, comically lopsided. We laughed as he sank down, down, down.

He reached for a branch -- which broke. His back muscles twisted. We were both in hysterics until he gave a cry that pierced me. It drew me toward something I did not want to acknowledge.

"Fuck!" He shouted. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"

"What?" I was moved with curious shyness as I drew close to his naked back.

"I just stepped on glass. Ah, fuck!"

I don't know what I thought I was hearing. There are some revelations you don't take hold of until you are able to.

"Help me out. Fuck!"

He threw his arm out, and I hurried under it, soggy up to my crotch. He smelt good, a musky sun-smell. Between his strength and mine we wriggled him free. He laughed and cursed, limping to the bank glistening with mud all down his trouser leg.

He hopped across the field. Peeled down his army fatigues with their heavy coating of mud. He tore off his boxers and tugged off his shoes.

This last detail: I see him rendered blind in pain, caked in filth, sturdy legged, the hair all over him like the slight down of an animal, carrying those shoes like a trophy. He looked predatory but hurt, vulnerable. His pubic mound, his river-shrivelled dick, wet and dripping. His pair of big white muddy shoes. It cut me.

His shoes dropped, and I remembered myself. He was just another naked boy again and not a creature starkly contoured in his own sex.

Throwing himself on the grass, he massaged his foot. He had left a whisper of blood on the earth. He grimaced and cried again, and I felt a chill at the back of my neck. He had perfect breasts. Slight, protruded grey nipples.

"Fuck man! Take a look if there's any glass still in there."

Fuck. That syllable filled me with trembling. I sat down with him on the grass, trying not to acknowledge his open legs, his sudden reliance on me. And his long -- now shockingly long -- cock, twirled like a snail on the wet grass. I took his mud-soaked foot in my lap. I examined the cut, thin and long, bleeding profusely. His long, wounded foot in my hand.

His cock had swollen slightly. I took it as an accident, but the word fuck was repeating in me. He rested his foot in my lap, groaning.

I pressed his foot between my thighs, thinking my muddy jeans would stop the bleeding. He grew more erect.

I looked into his face. "No glass." My voice was shaking; he was staring at me. "But you should still wash your foot off."

And I began tenderly wiping his foot with my naked palm, careful of his pain. I wiped the blood and mud on my own jeans. I don't know why this struck me as useful. His cock seemed as if it was reaching for my throat. Unfolding like a rose.

He kissed me full mouth and I left his foot, in a conspiracy of desire. His free leg curled around me. It happened as suddenly as if we had rehearsed it. Then he had me locked in his legs.

At first, I didn't want to touch his cock, to jerk him off. I just wanted to hold it. To feel the warmth from it. I wanted just what I discovered I had been all along: a teen groupie, sick with sex, swollen from the dangerous attention of a boy. I went limp like a doll.

He took my pants off. Laid me down. He crawled over me. In the Big of the sunlight he let his cock dangle down to my parted lips. His ass was in my face. My heart hammered.

He said, "I'm gonna treat you so good, bro."

Then took my own cockhead in his lips. I was fifteen -- I didn't even know it was possible for boys to do this. But the sunlight gripped us. We were famous, and suddenly anything was allowed.

The hard salt hit the back of my throat and perhaps I would have swallowed his cock too if he had not pushed me away when he did.

Afterwards he did not hold me. He screamed, laughed, and ran away crazy -- ran to the river and jumped in. I carried his shoes to the river. I could taste his cum and blood for days.

Fate would not be kind.

There followed after poverty, jail, drugs, violence: time would empty events. I am guilty in later life of having tried to destroy others who had not gone through as much as Terry or I had. Or who did not carry around ghosts in sneakers. I wonder sometimes how much of this is connected to what we once had and what we can never have again. We were nobody, but Terry and I, for all of that, had been Big.

I had known then it was going to be him who was going to make it. All those years ago but I still carry his semen at the back of my throat and hold his feet.

I remember him through the cracks. In the white light that remembers me to something, I love this place. I'm not leaving.

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