Working Preface: The Notebooks of Thomas Anonymous

When you’ve been around as long as I have… back in the early to mid 1990s [it] was a sort of renaissance for boylove culture due to the advent and functionality of the Internet. We had passed through the early activist days of the pedo-gay alliance, navigated through NAMBLA’s polemic of the 80s and entered a “low-tech” wonder, newsgroups and the new word of hypertext and GUI. It was then that I had the fortune of meeting a mysterious boylover in one of the many underground bunkers—it was the cyberspace bunkers at first, and then later in real life.

We became good friends over a period of two years. He was somewhat older than me, and then I was “young” and recently out of the university with a go-nowhere degree in Human Culture. However Thomas was always aloof; just when you thought you had come to know him a little better, he’d go deeper into himself, his art or his science (he used both words back then). He was a writer to say the least, an artists to some degree. He once told me that he dropped out of a university in Chicago to further pursue what he once fleetingly called his “project”, the project that I now know of as “The Notebooks…”

The first time I met Thomas was in Rome, the summer of 2004. We met in a dark little bar in a dark little alley as you go across Circus Maximus towards the Vatican. If anybody knows, it is just over the river, to your left… We spent the day gazing and being gazed at by the little Roman boys, flirting cautiously on the Spanish steps. I was in Rome because I had a week’s extension on my student ticket, he was there because he lived there. T.A. lived light. “I can be on my way anywhere in an hour.” And he could. Three days later I went looking for him at his apartment and it was empty except an unused notebook and a glass of water. A day later I received an email from him; he said he was in Tangiers and that he hoped to see me the next time he got back into the States. The next email came a year later in 2005. Attached was a picture of him and a boy of perhaps 11 or 12 on a camel. Thomas was wearing an American Gotcha t-shirt and a white head scarf, the boy was probably Berber and likewise dressed for the desert. Beneath that photo he wrote “Going native. The password and the link are —– — — — —.”

The notebooks were all neatly scanned into an encrypted PDF document housed at one of the trillions of file sharing hosts. Untitled and unnumbered, the they seem not to fall in any particular order, though there is a narrative development to some of the entries, particularly the rather large number of entries about David. In some of the books T.A. never mentions Clement again, even when he’s talking about David. Some entries are obsessively neat while others are haphazard, filled with doodles, begin on page 8 and continue on page 64.

My effort on this website is to simply post, with a minimum of editing, what I’ve been able to transcribe from the handwritten accounts, in as linear an order as possible. I will also refrain from making any in-text edits unless it is absolutely needed for clarity or if I could not read a word I might footnote a couple alternatives or simply voice my uncertainty.
Further, I plan on consistently updating this preface as my own ideas on the work develop, and more clues arrange themselves. The last time I heard from T.A. it was in a brief email in 2006. It read, “Publish all, if you want. The boy is doing well but I am sick.” Signed T. The best I could do was trace an email back to a server in Fez, but as it its nature, all remained bafflingly anonymous.

…

The Notebooks of Thomas Anonymous
By T.A.
Edited by Raven

1.

The morning that I accepted (no, “embraced”) my sexual attraction to boys was (un)like any other morning in my past, indeed in all of history. We, Clement and I, had traveled to a village at the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, up in true north of Aroostook County, Maine, where they speak a French dialect called Vallée. Perhaps it was Ste. Agatha, or even Madawaska, or the neighboring town on the Canadian side of the border. Nonetheless it was a severely vivid event and even now, years later, runs through the caverns of my memory like a piece of cinema, vibrant for a stay, then tapering off into the dark waters of Lethe that haunt either side of man’s conscious island. Clement was a man of 55, a quiet, unassuming a boy-lover—an item I never broached explicitly with him but suspected from the very beginning, from the moment he extended a hand of friendship and gingerly guided me through one of the most psychologically tremulant years of my life.

A Tremblay cousin, an aunt, had died, a “teacher” friend of Clem’s, and we were staying in one of the guest rooms in the “Tremblay House” awaiting her burial that was supposed to be a “somber event”, though Clem had informed me that she, or “Miss” as she was called by family and friends, was by no means a dour soul as the old abode might suggest of its inhabitants. Our “chambre”, about the size of a motel room and similarly unadorned, was tucked into the fourth floor attic of the chateau and was perfectly square and whitewashed except for a miniature “chamin de ronde” that was either preserved or excavated by the last renovators. This small addition to the room was faced with in an old drippy glass that allowed us see both east and west across the grounds, an expanse of grass, oak, maple and cedar that in the last decade went unattended as the family wealth migrated from the romantic to the post-modern generation. “They all have eyes for the place.” Clement told me. I could tell that the man was in love with the building. As a childhood friend of Miss he was adopted son or adopted truant (depending on who you were talking to during those funeral days) and passed many summers exploring relics, the forest, and swimming naked (always naked) in the pond that was fed by a tributary to the Allagash River.

I woke the early, predawn morning of the funeral from a restless night in a new place. Clem was still sound asleep and I thought, as it was early enough, that I might get a good jog in before the twenty-or-so guests arrived. I walked down the narrow back steps that had, in the family’s glory days, been the servants’ passages. Clem said that he could not recall any “help” but that he and Miss and the infamous Tremblay boys would play “war” and “love” in these halls. But now, I was alone. Only two of the five “boys” (now grown men with sons or grandsons of their own) had returned, and the house was quiet except for an aching joint here or there that protested the unflinching earth of its own foundation.

When I turned left into a small dining room I did hear a noise coming from the room beyond, closed off not by a door but by a curtain of fancy beadwork hung from the arch. The beads were each an amber jewel, cut and polished, heavy and cold to my touch. And just as I raised my hand to part the curtain the amber started to glow with immense shimmering golden light, from somewhere beyond the sun was rising—as must have been planned—passing through a window and striking the lovingly hung jewelry. Clem was heartbroken over Miss’s death; he loved her dearly and deeply. “There are places in this house that are hers.” He told me the night before. “You will know them when you see them.” They say that every boylover gets his woman, that there is that one love of his life from the Amazon, and for Clem that was Miss. Miss who knew his deepest, darkest secrets, and who did not reject him. And they say on a very rare occasion, a certain man and a certain boy will meet, just as stars collide, the earth shakes and still us. I parted those hippie beads and slipped through breathlessly into the house of the rising sun.

Slowly my eyes adjusted to his boudoir, it seemed that every corner was asparkle, as if the red pearl had been captured in its ascent by some mischievous hand, and shattered upon the shadowy rocks. The voices I heard before were actually from a large television flashing a Saturday morning cartoon. And the blistering sparks of electricity were from thousands of tiny, crystal ornaments hung precariously in the tall lattice of the windows. The boy himself gazed upon me like a young hawk would eye the stealthy fox, both cock-sure in their domains, rarely ever meeting save for the midnight hours every thousand years or so when the great sphere kisses the heavenly elliptical. I was speechless; in the potent still I heard the curtain cease its whispering behind me. Closed eternally, that bridge hand been burnt. I had crossed over. I was reborn. I am Thomas, I said. I am David, said he. But in the sweet music of the New France drawl, “shui David.” The room descended around the pillar, so when I painfully moved my leg I found the steps and stepped down into the room so that I left the main force of the morning sun behind and entered a dim meta-chamber that had been roughly fashioned into a young boy’s bedroom. Here the suns glinted like little flashes in our eyes; I was about two yards away from him and eye level, if slightly below, his intense, curious gaze. “Qui est tu?” he asked almost accusing, almost blessing. In my pathetic French I said, I am here for the funeral. At this last word I thought I saw some intensity, of grief I cannot say, move across his delicate brow, and his eyes spoke. “Tz’st anglais.” He said with the intonation that spoke histories, volumes of personal histories, debts and grievances. I’m American I said. “Tz‘st l’ami de Clement?” He spoke the last part of Clem’s name slowly, cautiously, as if he needed to say the man’s whole name out of a sense of distance or unfamiliarity. I nodded. Do you like cartoons, he asked? Yeah, some of ‘em. He smiled shyly at the way I suffered to navigate his native language, even mimic his accent. “Tz’parles bien Français.” He said encouragingly. I smiled at this this, this sudden filament of communication. I loved French but was always awkward about actually speaking it to anyone, especially a native. I need to practice a lot, I replied slowly. He cocked his head at this, as if the concept of practicing were completely foreign to him, as if all the world were written in his fiery tongue, and tinged with the essence of his consciousness.

I can tell you how God dresses, that is if David is a god, and to this day I have no doubt that he is, though you must experience it for yourself to understand that God is also suffering, that much of the experience is sack cloth and ash. God wears a tank-top, and a pair of old pajama bottoms that have been cut off a man’s hand width above the knee. God wears three ankle bracelets, and sits lotus like Buddha. God wears a piece of leather rope that slops across his breastbone the color of the ashen sky. And God wears nothing else.

I like Transformers, I said in response to his question. On the screen behind him a red sport car was turning into a humanoid robot, and the techno theme song immediately cultured our experience. God climbed down from his throne, all boy bone and muscle and skin. The PJ bottoms were snug, last years fabric existing on his growing body like a ghost, like that ether matter that will wash away in a summer rain. The tank-top was little better, and the boy stood before me, limb to limb, perfect in his construction. Come here, he said, and turned and walked to a deep couch upon which he tumbled, his attire a whiteness against the dark suede like the moon I will know him to be years later. I stood. Then I sat. I could literally feel my blood pressure coursing through my body, as if every never of me was turned on to my environment. The cartoon manifested before me like a vision, and the room darkling, a cloud passing over the morning sun, and a wind filling my lungs with the humid Allagash. David leaned into the arm of the couch, his legs pulled to his chest and spread open allowing me to envision all, if I wanted. I was trying to find the front exit, I said, do some jogging. He pointed across his room a set of stairs at the opposite end from where I had gained sanctuary. There, he said. Is this your room? I asked. He looked at me as if to find some reason I had been privileged to ask him such a question. He shrugged, It’s Miss’s room, he said finally.

…

[Note: T.A. has mentioned this elsewhere as “the David encounter” or the “theophany”. In one notebook the course of events have changed and neither is Clem or Miss mentioned. He gives no reason for his being at ‘Maison Tremblay’ – an place whose existence I question, but also a place that I must accept as editor. The David encounters continue here and there, always beautifully written. Thomas never answered my question if his work was fiction or not, I don’t think he made a distinction between the real and the marginalized unreal. To him, I always felt, everything was surreal.]