Message-ID: <7846eli$9804140012@qz.little-neck.ny.us> From: john_dark@anon.nymserver.com Subject: {SJR}"The Adventures of Me and Martha Jane 7A"( bf mF mF+ )[22/52] Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d X-Note: This message was posted by a secure email service. Please report MISUSE OR ABUSE of this automated secure email service to . Path: qz!not-for-mail Organization: The Committee To Thwart Spam Approved: X-Moderator-Contact: Eli the Bearded X-Story-Submission: X-Original-Message-ID: <6gs5ob$bh6$1@sparky.wolfe.net> The following story is posted for the entertainment of adults. If you are below the age of eighteen or are otherwise forbidden to read electronic erotic fiction in your locality, please delete this message now. The story codes in the subject line are intended to inform readers of possible areas that some might find distasteful, but neither the poster nor the author make any guarantee. You should be aware that the story might raise other matters that you find distasteful. Caveat lector; you read at your own risk. These stories have not been written by the person posting them. Many of those e-mail addresses below the author's byline still work. If you liked the story, either drop the author a line at that e-mail address or post a comment to alt.sex.stories.d. Please don't post it to alt.sex.stories itself. Posting the comment with a Cc: to the author would be the best way to encourage them to continue entertaining you. The copyright of this story belong to the author, and the fact of this posting should not be construed as limiting or releasing these rights in any way. In most cases, the author will have further notices of copyright below. If you keep the story, *PLEASE* keep the copyright disclaimer as well. This particular series is by Santo J. Romeo. That might even be his real name. The version that I have copied used his initials, and I have followed suit. It is more a tragic story of coming of age than simply a sex story, and individual segments might not contain any sex. The entire story, however, is a hot one. ======== **** WARNING **** WARNING **** WARNING **** THIS DOCUMENT IS A SEXUALLY GRAPHIC STORY ABOUT AN INTENSE SEXUAL, EMOTIONAL AND INTELLECTUAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A TEENAGE GIRL AND A YOUNG BOY AND THE COURSE OF THEIR RELATIONSHIP OVER A PERIOD OF 10 YEARS. IT IS A DRAMATIZATION ABOUT REAL PEOPLE AND THEIR CON- FLICT WITH SOCIAL EXPECTATIONS. IF THIS SUBJECTS OFFENDS YOU OR IF SEXUAL LANGUAGE UPSETS YOU, OR IF YOU DON'T WANT THIS MATERIAL SEEN BY UNDER-18 OR OTHERWISE UNQUALIFIED PERSONS, DELETE THIS DOCUMENT. THIS DOCUMENT IS COPYRIGHTED 1994, 1996 BY SJR. SO--HEY, YOU CAN COPY IT BUT YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT OR SELL IT UNLESS I SAY SO. ==================================== THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE by S.J.R. sjr <73233.1411@CompuServe.COM> ============ PART 7A: My mother scowled as she stood in the doorway of my new bedroom in our new house in the new suburb on Macon Road. She warned me, "This room better be straightened up before your daddy gets home." As she turned to leave I said, "Can you close the door, please?" Her frown deepened. "Why do you always stay in here with the door closed?" "I just do," I replied, sitting on the floor and pouting, surrounded by the artifacts and tools that I had collected during the past few months in my large room. She closed the door, sighing impatiently. I remained on the floor and pondered how I might organize the mess around me. I had books, comics, magazines, drawing supplies, record albums, newspapers, theater magazines, brochures, copies of theatrical scripts, research papers and mementos of plays and movies. Now and then I bought a copy of the New York Sunday Times at the Union Station newsstand when I visited my godparents, as I still did almost every weekend. Several issues of the Times, with all sections intact, stood piled in one corner of the room. And there were reams of lined looseleaf paper filled with schoolwork and drama club notes and the thousands of words of novels and stories that I had begun writing since the move to the new house. Unfortunately I had only a single chest of drawers and one small two-shelf bookcase, my bed, a small table with a record player, a desk large enough only for a book and small pad, and an eight-inch knickknack shelf screwed into the wall near one of the two windows. Knowing my stepdad would be home within the hour, I began stuffing the loose papers into a couple of cardboard boxes. I found room for the boxes in my closet, along with many other things. Even more of my keep- sakes and projects were slid under the single bed, and several books were lined up along the floorboards on either side of my small desk. Just as I was looking for a place to stow the Black Lady -- my prized Underwood typewriter, with which I had typed my make-believe newspapers and my new crop of stories and novels -- I heard the kitchen door squeak and slam shut. My stepdad Tony had arrived with the familiar heavy stride that rattled the prefab windows in my room as he approached. "You finish cleanin' this up yet?" he asked, his voice as always noisily and deeply resonant. He looked tired, overworked and impatient, his strong and darkly-haired arms bulging from the white shortsleeved shirt, his large hands parked on his hips. Sweaty from working quickly, I was kneeling on the floor, pushing the old typewriter along the floor. I stopped and looked up at him. "Almost," I said. "Still looks like a lot of junk left in here." He strode heavily into the room and went directly to the closet. Pulling the door open with a quick swish of air, he grunted unpleasantly at what he saw. "In the Navy they would have kicked you overboard for a mess like this. And in the Navy, we don't stuff goods under the bunks..." Stooping, he saw what I had placed under my bed. Without pause, he glowered at me and pointed a finger at each thing he named as he spoke. "Okay, mister...all of this goes. This goes out in the trash...and this..this...and all that crap piled on the floor in that closet." Amazed and shocked, I gulped hard. "Throw it away?" "This ain't the Lauderdale Courts housing project," he bellowed, "and it ain't gonna look like it, either. Throw those boxes away, throw those newspapers away, and get this place straightened up. *Before* you eat!" Without another word, he stomped out of the room. Having lived with this intractable man for half a year, I knew resistance was futile. He had mentioned earlier that my projects were junk and that sooner or later they'd have to go. I sat on the floor for five minutes or so, looking at each article that would soon be gone. I knew I had no choice. While I was thinking about it, spending a last few minutes with my belongings, Tony growled from the doorway, "Let's MOVE it, mister! Get rid of that crap or you don't eat." An armful at a time, I carried one load of newspapers out of my room, through the living room where my stepdad sat watching Bishop Fulton J. Sheen talk about Communists on tv, past the dining room table, through the kitchen, out the squeaking aluminum back door, down the steps and across the narrow driveway, where I dumped the load into the dark green fifty-gallon garbage drum by the carport. Then back into the house, past my stepdad who sat engrossed in Bishop Sheen's warnings about the threat of godless enemies, and into my room. Then another armload, back through the house and out the back door, without a word between the two of us, until I had emptied four armloads of my belongings into the big green can. He stepped into the doorway to check on me as I gathered another load. Behind him, my mother peered past his broad shoulder. "All those damn record albums, too," he said. "They must be twenty years old and the seams are falling apart." "Better keep those, Tony," my mother reminded him. "Most of them belong to his Aunt Frances." "Then next time you go to see your Aunt Frances, take them outta here and give 'em back to her." "Yessir," I said tonelessly, loading up an armful of brochures and magazines. "And all that paper you got in that box over there, if ain't schoolwork, throw it away!" I looked up at him. "That's stuff that I drew myself." "That 'stuff' is foolishness nobody needs, and we don't have room for it." The raw sternness of his voice and face told me there would be no compromises in my bedroom that night. "Yessir," I said quietly. "I don't see why you cain't be like any other boy and play ball with the rest of 'em. It ain't no good for somebody your age to just come home after school and close yourself up in this room every day. Put away that art crap away and grow up like everybody else." "Yessir." "You have schoolwork to do, and that's what you're supposed to do. Not all this art crap and newspapers from I-don't-know-where." I mumbled, "I already have an A average." "What?" "...nothin'...sir." "You don't have no time for backtalk, buster. Just get rid of this mess and clean this place up." "Yessir." They both left for the living room. I passed them with several more armloads, wordlessly, as they both watched Bishop Sheen and exchanged concerned whispers to each other about the Communist threat. More armsful of my history and my time and my effort tumbled into the dark green can, which began to look like a great black hole as the sun fell and the evening turned to night. Soon I passed them with what I thought was the last armful, which I soon dumped into the top of the growing heap in the can. I stood there sweating, looking at the pile, and took a long breath. Well. I had lived through that, anyway. Perhaps they were right: there was not much future in the way I'd spent my time. I passed them once more as I went back to my room and closed my door. After a moment my stepdad opened the door again and looked around. He pointed directly at the Black Beauty. "And get rid of that." "That's my typewriter," I argued feebly. "It's junk. Get rid of it!" I said nothing. I looked directly at him, aware that I was ready to jump at him and rip his throat open. But I stubbornly concealed every- thing I thought and felt. "You heard me," he said threateningly. "Yessir," I said. I rose to my feet, pretending that I was tired rather than reveal that even my own body resisted me. I stooped down. The Black Beauty came into my arms heavily, reluctantly, and I lifted it like an overweight child to my chest, and cradled it. I walked past them into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, silently telling myself that I had to be prepared soon for the instant when its weight and its keys and its words and memories and its secrets that I had typed out on paper would soon disappear into a barrel of trash. I banged open the kitchen door with one foot, stumbling and scuffling under the Black Beauty's heft, and moved into the cool night under the power of the obedient little boy whom I knew was not really me at all. And the real Me watched and the sadly drifting lightning bugs watched and the angrily flittering moth at the back porch light watched as another Me let the Black Beauty slip out of my arms and settle with a dull crunch, half- hidden in the paper and drawings and books and pieces of crayon. Instead of going inside to dinner I walked to our front yard and leaned on the head-high cyclone wire fence that girded our front and side yards. I listened to the sound of cars swishing past in the street and watched the automobiles full of people who did not know what had just happened and who couldn't have done anything anyway. After a moment I could not see the cars very well through the liquid gathering in my eyes. As soon as I felt one eye overflow I brushed the wet from my cheek and whispered aloud to myself, "You have to be tougher than this." "....Speedy, every time I call, you aren't home," Martha Jane said over the phone. "What have you been doing all this time?" "I called a few times myself," I answered, checking in all directions to make sure no one was listening -- not because I expected an embarras- singly intimate conversation with Martha Jane, but because I had been increasing my isolation from everyone I lived with. "Your mother keeps giving me different telephone numbers." "I know," said Martha Jane, and her breathing and sounds of movement on her side of the line told me she was talking and doing other things at once. "I am so, sooo damn busy, it's pathetic. Moving around like a chicken with my head cut off. I moved twice in one month, I had a room- mate that I didn't know hadn't paid the rent for months and we got kicked out before I was finished moving in, and now...now I'm moving AGAIN!. I don't believe it. I'm packing books in a box right now, but... Anyway, how *are* you?" "I'm...okay," I lied. "When can I see you?" "Oh my, I don't know, the next couple of weeks are--Oh god I wish I could just get a day off or something, I -- " "Need some help moving? I'd be glad to help." "Oh, Speedy, these books are so heavy, you'd break your back." "I want to help you." "If you'd like to spend a day together or something, that would be fine later on, but -- how are you gonna get all the way into this part of town from way out there on Macon Road?" "I'll get there." "How?" "Bus," I insisted. She laughed. "*BUS*? Speedy, that'll take hours. And I can't come get you, I'm borrowing princess Evelyn's car for just a few hours." I repeated, my voice audibly shaky with a need I couldn't subdue, "I wanna come see you and help." She paused on the other end, then her voice sweetened with concern. "What's wrong, hon?" "I just...I just wanna help you, you never let me help you." "No, something's wrong." "You're just so...far away, and I want to know I'm helping you." "Well...I've been so busy for so long, and I really don't have anyone to help. I can't ask the guys I know, they think if they help me move I oughtta let them into my pants." "Well," I said, making up something quickly, "I'm bored! It's so boring out here in this neighborhood. I want to do something. And you shouldn't have to move by yourself." "Oh, you're sweet...well...you're sure this bus ride won't wear you out?" "I can handle it." She gave me directions. I would have to transfer to two other city buses. I would meet her after my own classes, on a Friday afternoon in the student center at the college. "Are you sure you're all right?" she asked. "Yes," I lied. "I'm fine." "OK. Next Friday, then. You know where to meet me." That Friday seemed a month away and in no great hurry to arrive on time. Days in our new prefab home started as they always did. Mom in her bathrobe and slippers would make hotcakes in the kitchen, then serve them dripping with Aunt Jemima syrup. I once remarked that such a breakfast was all empty starch and sugar, at which Mom irritably shot back, "What do you want? Steak? We have to eat what we can afford." I didn't mention my misgivings again, realizing that for some reason she seemed to be growing more irritable by the day with some sort of ail- ment. I would spoon away the syrup and eat what remained, watching my stepdad sit silently across from me and hurriedly sip his coffee while he tied his shoes and got ready for work. On one morning Mom had to leave the table, and soon I heard her retching in the bathroom. "Is Mama sick?" I asked my stepdad. He dismissed my question testily. "Aw, that female problem stuff is all in her head." He got up without another word and left for work. Mom returned shortly after he left, sitting with her coffee and staring tiredly out the window. No words passed between us until I said goodbye as I left for school. One night during that week I awoke from my shrinking universe night- mare and found myself panting in the dark, standing confused and shaky in the middle of my room near the bed. The pillow had just slipped from the bed to the floor, telling me that I must have just then bolted from bed; my body was poised for a dash into nowhere, but I had waked almost immedi- ately. I stood deathly still, listening for signs of anyone else who might be up. Nothing and no one moved. I crept into the living room and stood near the front window, looking out at the still and empty street while I settled down. I did not understand my recurring dream of a crushing, wildly buzzing universe. We had kept the old Philco radio, which sat on a small table near the tv. I turned it on, keeping the volume all the way off, and stared into the bright green tuning eye. What voices might that green eye be hearing now? What was life like out there, how far away was the source of the voice? What were the colors and the thoughts and the lives out there? After a while sleep overtook me again, and I went back to bed. On Friday at precisely 2:30 PM I left my last grammar school class and broke into a full run. With my school bag flung around my shoulder and slapping against my side, I barely made it to a bus three blocks away that waited for me to dash across the main thoroughfare, The suburbs to which my family moved lay fourteen miles directly east of the old housing project. Fourteen miles of long, straight, unbending, undifferentiated city boulevards. The trip began with four miles of gas stations, soft-serve ice cream drive-ins, barbecue restaurants, and auto dealerships. Then four miles of look-alike firebrick school complexes, look-alike shopping centers, look-alike office towers. And then five miles of look-alike, quickly built, instantly GI-mortgaged homes. I remember thinking of it as monotony raised to the level of science, made all the more bland and pointless by the terrain of this part of Tennes- see, which was almost ruler-flat. Even my own neighborhood, broken at least partly by the vast open but treeless fields of an unadorned recrea- tion area called Geisman Park, seemed a universe of its own with long curveless streets, no visible beginnings, no visible ends. Across from my new home the supermarket and the drug store, both of which were con- tained within a single, one-story, squared-off, plate-glassed building made from the same brick of the same colors as all the bricks in all the look-alike houses around it, looked like the same supermarket and the same drug store and the same building on mile after mile of other look- alike streets. But as I boarded the third and last bus in the long trip, and as the gasoline engine roared under the load of passengers, a different city entered my view. It was the older Memphis, the Memphis of its heyday in the 1920's, the streets lined with elegant estates and thick, dark green trees. The Memphis in which my dead father had grown up, with old bungalows and quaint corner shops and undulating roadways. The edges of the college campus soon appeared, its magnolia trees, open pastures and Georgian buildings filling my eyes and crowding out the memory of the numbing suburbs. I knew Martha Jane lived somewhere within a block or two of the campus. As the bus rattled past the streets I wondered how she looked while strolling down the sidewalk past the cherry trees and the neat old homes on her way to class. I wondered what it might be like to be surrounded by ideas, by art, by talkers and teachers and learners. It seemed as exotic as a vision of a perfect Pacific isle. The bus squealed to a halt at Patterson Avenue. I jumped out and walked in long stretching steps down the three blocks toward the campus center. The walkway soon became crowded with students going in all directions: yelling, chatting, or alone in a hurry with an armload of books. Again, I began to feel very, very young and childlike among these people. I caught myself staring in wonder at a man who crossed my path a few yards ahead of me, a man with a pipe and two books under one arm, a man wearing a tweed sport jacket with leathered elbows, a man frowning in thought. Why his image remained permanently in my mind, I don't know; but within a few years from that day it would come to pass that I would be in that very college and I would have several classes taught by the man that I saw that day. Perhaps, I think now, I had known that he would be one of my principal teachers in later years. Perhaps, I think now, he would have been someone whom I wanted as the father I didn't have instead of the unyielding and exacting replacement with whom I was confronted. Or perhaps he embodied an image of the person I might one day like to be. Even though I knew my way, I felt lost. I was besieged by sights and sounds from a world that was, on that day, completely unlike anything in my daily life. The odor of pine and magnolia in the breeze almost made me feel drugged. Being surrounded by so many people was disorienting, and all of them were completely foreign to my experience of others. These were adults who could read and converse about concepts and events I knew nothing about and couldn't possibly imagine. I felt completely out of my element, and yet I felt I was in a world that I was compelled to enter and explore. I slowed my pace to a normal walk, feeling I would be less conspicuous if I adopted the ways of those who inhabited this strange new planet. But I averted my eyes from theirs, looking down at the sidewalk as I moved along. Then I heard her voice, calling to me from the massive steps of the Administration Building. I looked up and saw Martha Jane, in a plain gray ankle-length overcoat with her pert face smiling broadly and one arm waving at me. I waved back. I smiled. I attempted to seem undaunted and casual. It struck me at that moment, as I observed my own behavior, how I was beginning to simulate a kind of calm and unaffected front-- when, in fact, I almost jumped out of my shoes at the sight of her. She met me halfway across the driveway to the building and gave me a hug and a kiss. "So there you are!" she said. "Right on time, too, I was afraid you might have trouble on the bus. Come on with me to the student center, we'll get coffee or something before we start." I agreed and stayed closely at her side as we walked to the center. She noticed me staring at the many students passing everywhere. She laughed. "You look like a tourist." I blushed. "Martha Jane...I shouldn't be here. I mean--" "I know what you mean, Speedy, but don't let them intimidate you -- one day you'll be here for classes every day yourself and you'll find out how dumb most of them really are." It was late in the afternoon and the crowd in the student center was a thin one. Martha Jane led me to a long table near the middle of the vast, resonant room and sat across from me and opened her overcoat. "What do you want, Speedy? Coffee? A coke? I don't know what you like anymore." I deepened my voice into a macho growl. "Coffee!" "You sure? The coffee here is more like dark brown kerosene. Has quite a kick. I *need* that kick, but you might not be used to it." "Coffee," I repeated, and she went into the serving line to bring back two steaming cups of very dark stuff that didn't look like any coffee I had ever seen before. She caught me looking into the cup before I took a drink. She smirked. "Just take a deep breath, and swallow." She took a little gulp of it, sighed wearily, and settled back into her chair. "Speedy, I hope you hurry and grow up faster so you can get into school here. You'd certainly add a lot of class to the male population. Don't look now, but there's a guy behind you, walking toward us, and he's going to come over here and try to put the make on me. Watch closely, and learn how the lower classes do it." ==================================== THE ADVENTURES OF ME AND MARTHA JANE by S.J.R. ============ PART 7A -30- -- +--------------' Story submission `-+-' Moderator contact `------------+ | story-submit@qz.little-neck.ny.us | story-admin@qz.little-neck.ny.us |