Miodrag Kojadinovic
Unpublishable 2014
Miodrag Kojadinović is a Canadian/Serbian writer, editor, poet and translator between English, Serbian, French, and Dutch. He is also a polyglot who has lived in seven countries on three continents in the last 15 years. His work has appeared in print in the US, Serbia, Canada, Russia, the Netherlands, Slovenia, India, France, China, Australia, Montenegro, the UK, and Croatia. Until a month ago he taught at a university in Southern Mainland China, 45 minutes drive from the boundary of Hong Kong. Now he is taking an “unpaid Sabbatical” — read: time off China to fill batteries in a country where people eat cheese.
When Tim Danced,
Decades Ago
There was this walk-in-your-nether-garments-and-get-free-booze evening at the shabby (but at least old, and that gives it a great advantage on the ugly novelty continent of North America) Lux Theatre. Ah, well! — thought I, there I might get a spankable slave “boy” (18+, of course) for the night. It’ll be cosy to pull his drawers down his thighs and crisscross his butt on the first balcony. It’ll be, oh, so hot! (and just to remind you, there is no ventilation on the premises) I was even ready to volunteer as a bouncer (now, that’s a psycho-power play).
On the stage, sweaty go-go boys had been writhing languidly for some time, mimicked by slightly more virile quasi-tough guys squirming in the audience, when several just-out-of-their-late-teens boys (one Black) and a girl (race and gender tokenism thus satisfied) flung onto the stage to dance to the tune. They did homage to Umberto Ecoesque (or rather: Enigmaesque) obsession with choral singing and monks’ tormented bodies under the coarse habit and one of the young men, with his fair skin naked under the spotlight, had a likeness to punished proud little princes in Anne Rice’s Beauty trilogy. But, then, maybe just because I had just finished reading it?
Tim danced too, but he was not a part of the whole. His soft uncoördination, cloaked with the cockiness of youth that has just hardly budded, his blond thigh hairs which stood on end (was he cold, or just horny?), the lines of his body, arched like those of Pegasus still being tamed, his “professional aloofness” concurrent with an obvious strong awareness of the place singled him out as a lamb dancing his way out of the forest before the hungry eyes of a pack of wolves.
He was so much what I could / would / should have been, ... if only ..., and what I was too, and I knew I had to shield him from the vile world.
I know, I know, I’ve written so much of my fondness for Philip and Bow Wow, about young and old men I whipped, about the YMCA clerk and local comedians, I have. But second only to the most amiable Michael-who-speaks-Dutch-and-claims-to-be-straight is Tim.
Tim, when you are reading this, you will know. Thou shalt know. Thou shalt seek me. Thou shalt lift thine eyes and find me. Thou shalt have no other men but me. And I shall bless thee among men of the nations and I shall lead thee into the realm of the rainbow if thou keepest my commandments. And thou shalt dwell in the House of Feelings forever.