I realize now, at thirty-seven, that I was a strange little boy. But this place I remember was a strange little town, full of strange little people, all related though no one certain exactly how -- evolution gone awry. All the women at the church for which my dad was pastor wore their hair in tight little buns, off their shoulders and never cut, their elbows covered and no makeup -- except my mom. She was a rebel, cut her hair, wore her jewelry, proudly showed her elbows. They refused to speak to her for months after we moved into the dreadful little parsonage next door to the church. She didn't care. The house was originally built as a three-room structure in the shape of a T, a gable over each of the T's three legs. At some point, the house had given birth to two little bastard additions, conceived like most of the kids I'd gone to school with in the rusty metal building up the road -- no one knew how it happened or who was responsible, they just popped up on either side of the T. Little shed roof bastards, one a kitchen, the other a bedroom. The remaining three rooms acting as living room, bedroom and hallway. Oh, and a bathroom stuck on the back like the afterthought it was. It was a torturous place for a boy like me to grow up; the well-off members of my dad's flock had real wood veneer paneling on their living rooms and sculptured carpet. Our sacred hovel was papered in five-and-dime wall paper that simulated the veneer wood paneling in their houses. A coal stove heated the house in the frigid West Virginia winters and dusted my Mom's second-hand furniture with a fine black mist. We kept the coal in the basement with the potatoes we'd harvested from our garden in the fall. I was charged with keeping the stove burning, which meant a trip outside, in the snow, past the well, lifting the snow-dusted trap doors to the basement and past the spiderwebs lining the steps down. I'd flirt with the perfectly symmetrical Mason jars of peaches Mom had canned -- smiling vermilion lips suspended lazily in a clear syrupy dream. A few summers there I remember lucidly -- long days full of honeysuckle breezes bouncing across freshly cut morning-dew lawns and trees too big to put my seven-year-old arms around. My cousin had come to stay with me one of those summers and we'd spent hours walking the train tracks from one end of town, across the rickety bridge over the creek next to the poor families' shacks, through the older part of town where the rich people used to live, and all the way to the far end, where the tracks disappeared into the thicket of trees past a trailer park where my old baby sitter had lived. She was a redhead, a bit of a slut from what I remember -- had callers when her husband worked the night shift at the steel mill thirty miles up the road. By this particular summer I remember though, she'd been borned-again; holy-roller now, red hair all tightly wound up in a little bun on top of her bordello head, elbows covered. Still had that look in her eye though -- like she'd suck me off in the basement of the church if I was fourteen, and interested. I wasn't. My bedroom had been partitioned off in a corner of the living room -- two by four studs with paneling on the living room side, the room with the coal stove; inside bare two by fours and the back side of the wood paneling with its black ink pattern label staring at me. Dad had fashioned shelves between the two by's out of one by fours for my model cars, G.I. Joe and Big Jim. I remember really liking Joe's beard and butch look but loving Jim's abdominal development. If I had to choose when I grew up, which would I be? One Christmas, after Mom started working as a nurse's aide at the hospital fifteen miles down the road, I'd gotten a Barbie-sized Winnebago camper under the tree -- a gay boy's Tonka Toy. Joe and Jim had great times in the camper. They'd drive it off into the cornfield behind the house, deep beyond where the other kids played, and they'd camp nude, jerk off to Gordon Merrick novels and read Architectural Digest, scouring its pages for decorating ideas for the camper's monochromatic, yet sophisticated interior. One such trip when Joe was giving Jim a full body massage on a blanket in front of the camper, I snagged a copy of Architectural Digest from them. Joe was so distracted, the way the oil was glistening on Jim's lithe body, his nine inch cock rigid and dripping precum into those canyon abs, that he didn't take notice of my petty thievery. I must admit, I found it a bit hard to focus my nine-year-old eyes on the Upper East Side apartment featured that month, what with Jim's cock quivering the way it was. I'd never seen such perfection; cream colored walls framed by glossy white baseboards, crowns and door and window casings, tightly upholstered matching sofas perpendicular to a dark green hand-carved fireplace mantle with a seventeenth-century Flemish Tapestry hanging proudly above it. Through the six-foot tall windows, Central Park stretched off to the edge of the horizon. A miniature purebred dog was draped graciously across the Oriental rug on the parquet floor and smiled snobbishly away from the camera. I remember staring at that picture for what seemed like hours, eyes not believing the grandeur, the perfection, and trying not to remember the fake-wood-paneling wallpaper I'd wasted no time in coming to hate. A window had opened for me, and another world, for the first time, I realized, existed beyond the inbred ditch I knew as my hometown. Flipping the pages, I marveled at a sprawling summer house in Upper New York and a turquoise summer retreat in a place called Key West, with angel-hair-white billowing cotton draped across open windows with a matching sea sleeping in the summer heat beyond. The demure movie star pad in Hollywood with white carpet and white leather sofas seemed rather tacky by comparison, but still worlds above our second-hand furniture. I couldn't help but imagine my red-haired babysitter taking it up the ass on one of those sofas, cigarette dripping from smeared lipstick lips, her sex-wet red matted hair, eyes rolling back in her bordello head, saggy tits blowing in the dry Santa Winds, and the Hollywood sign out the window beyond. An uninvited gasp escaped my lungs as I turned the page, while at the same moment, a long guttural groan came from over my shoulder as Jim's cock shot out a thick white stream of steaming cum onto his overdeveloped stomach. I turned to look, and Joe winked at me as he leaned down and licked the jizz off Jim's belly. They kissed long and deep and lay there staring up at the giant stalks of corn waving green in the summer sun, sixty feet over their heads. I tried not to intrude on their moment and turned back to the page before me -- a tiny shadowy apartment in Paris, an eclectic grouping of antique furniture arranged around a rectangular cube of a table covered in perfectly square white ceramic tiles, alabaster marble floors and windows that seemed to be twenty feet tall with Notre Dame in the far beyond, and walls papered in pages from a French newspaper; headlines that defied understanding but seemed so chic, so foreign and so unlike the fake-wood-paneling-paper I suddenly remembered. It was a pivotal moment in my youth, my virgin eyes opened to the world and the rare beauty just beyond my reach, a seed firmly planted. I grew more sullen as summer came to a close that season and winter came bearing down; it was too cold for the boys to camp nude and we were all three relegated to our somber little paneled, coal-dusted cell, them sitting on the shelves nestled between the two by fours and me on my single bed in the corner, bored, the lack of privacy denying them chances to massage each other to climax. I imagined that they at least made out while I was in Sunday school, and I somehow thought they enjoyed that summer, having sex repeatedly in front of me, shooting their warm white streams onto each other, and I longed for them to do it again. Winter had quieted their carnal urges, or they'd taken other lovers secretly or something beyond my nine-year-old imagination had quelled their desires. It had all passed too quickly though, and my co-dependence took hold, and like my mother's rearranging the furniture after a fight with my dad over her refusal to stop wearing makeup or her recent haircut or her sordid exposed elbows, the seed planted that summer before germinated as an idea unfolded in my pre-pubescent mind. I didn't offer an explanation as I packed the boys into the Winnebago and drove them through the living room, past the coal stove and into my sister's bedroom; she didn't notice as I parked them in her closet between a flannel nightgown and a long winter coat. Jim looked at me strangely, but didn't say anything as I closed the door leaving them in the darkness of the closet, unwilling to share with them the surprise I'd planned. It was Saturday night, and Dad and Mom were going to a church up the road on a pastor-exchange program that next day. We kids were to be left alone, and I knew I could sneak out of church the next morning and that a few hours alone would be plenty. Tonight, I'd scour the house for the supplies I'd need and squirrel them away beneath my bed. For three hours the next morning, I labored behind the closed hollowcore door of my bedroom, my ears fitfully attuned to any noise, in case one of my sisters left church and came looking for me. I imagined the red-haired slut singing Amazing Grace, her red lips parted wide like they'd been in her past life for other reasons, her hair bun perched righteously on her bordello head, eyeing the lithe nineteen-year-old blond boy across the aisle. My mind drifted off in a hallucinogenic varnish-induced haze and I strolled along the Seine as Judy Collins cooed on the banks below me and a seductive Catherine Deneuve stopped to ask me for a light. I stopped at a small café near the Arch de Triomphe and sipped an espresso in a Lavazza demitasse and I spoke perfect French. For three solid hours I worked uninterrupted, obsessively, intuitively, until I'd come full circle, back to the corner I'd started in, the last piece of fake-wood-paneling-paper covered in last week's front page of the Point Pleasant Express: "Midget-Woman Found Dead In Ohio River" the headline read from the upper northeast corner of my bedroom. My fingers sticky from the varnish that had dripped from the brush, I stepped back, slowly turning round, surveying my work -- all the walls, between the two by fours and around the wood shelves, covered in the last four months of the only local paper, slightly aged and coal dusty from their nest in the basement waiting to kindle the coal fire and now granted reprieve from their sentence. My father was mortified, my mother amused, and I was grounded for I don't remember how long. My oldest sister thought I was perhaps mentally ill and much time was spent contemplating the work that would have to be done to repair my "damage," as I overheard them speaking of through the thin but elegantly papered walls separating me from them beyond. Huddled in the corner of my room, however, with printed story after printed story whispering to me from every side, of infidelities and petty thefts, layoffs and promotions, deaths and countless illegitimate births, I could only smile shyly, trying demurely not to seem obvious as I watched Jim and Joe on the shelf across from my bed. The redecorating had rekindled their lust and they seemed rejuvenated by the sordid stories around them, and most importantly, they seemed to enjoy each other again, spending hours staring at each other, playing strip poker, ignoring the winter beyond, and bringing each other to climax, albeit quietly, over and over again, while I watched, a cigarette dangling from my mouth, and Notre Dame off in the beyond out my window.
	T.M. Cowboy is a Los Angeles based writer and webmaster of Kinkla.com, a site dedicated to observations on male sexuality -- with a power exchange bent. He is the son of a Southern Baptist preacher.Wallpaper is his second story to appear in Nightcharm. His first story, All That Was, is archived in Nightcharm's Inner Circle. He has also appeared twice in the Inner Circle's exclusive VIP Galleries. Members will find his newest photos here.
	Wallpaper ©2002 by T.M Cowboy. All content and design ©1998 - 2002 Nightcharm, Inc. unless otherwise specified. All Models are at least 18 years old. In accordance with the Federal Labeling and Recording-keeping law (18 U.S.C. 2257), the records required by Federal Law for this website are kept on file.