She read: Handbook of Mathematics. Introduction to Analytic Geometry. Advanced Topics in Linear Algebra. Elements of Calculus. Introduction to Non-Linear Statistical Analysis. Chaotic Numerical Systems. Introduction to Discrete Mathematics. History of Mathematics. Men of Mathematics. Change & Motion; Calculus Made Clear. On and on. Plus audio and DVD courses in Accent Reduction for Korean Speakers of English.
My tiny girlfriend, 4' 9", was devouring increasingly heavy-weight books on math on a daily basis. She was filling up flip-top notebooks and making up files on the computer. She'd stopped talking about her discoveries to me, except in the most general terms, when I showed increasing incomprehension. I cooked and shopped (she cleaned and did dishes, so it was 50-50).
Boh took a private driving course, where I paid cash, and was cautiously learning to drive in suburban San Diego, California. She'd given in, and now had a small closet-full of casual and sexy clothes, plus two 'small' custom bikinis ... small due to her petite size, but more so because of the amount of golden Asian skin displayed: one for actual swimming, and one for creating a long, slimy trail of male drool, as guys followed her along the beach.
She had her own credit & debit card, with $$ supplied by me, and her own driver's license for ID. She had her own e-mail account with gmail, too.
That's what started the question that led to my own background.
I remember she commented, looking up from the computer, about an Urban Myth she read on-line. It was the one about the Bristol Zoo parking lot:
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From The London Times:
Outside the Bristol Zoo, in England, there is a parking lot for 150 cars and 8 coaches, or buses.
It was manned by a very pleasant attendant with a ticket machine charging cars 1 pound (about $1.40) and coaches 5 pounds (about $7).
This parking attendant worked there solid for all of 25 years. Then, one day, he just didn't turn up for work.
"Oh well", said Bristol Zoo Management - "we'd better phone up the City Council and get them to send a new parking attendant..."
"Err ... no", said the Council, "that parking lot is your responsibility."
"Err ... no", said Bristol Zoo Management, "the attendant was employed by the City Council, wasn't he?"
"Err ... NO!" insisted the Council.
Sitting in his villa, somewhere on the Coast of Spain, is a bloke who had been taking the parking lot fees, estimated at 400 pounds (about $560) per day at Bristol Zoo for the last 25 years. Assuming 7 days a week, this amounts to just over 3.6 million pounds ($7 million).
And no one even knows his name.
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Boh said, giggling, "That's just so unbelievable. Everybody would know it was a fake. He not last a week! What? Hey, you, get up off the floor! You crazy man. You getting sick? Why you having trouble breathing? Why you rolling around on the floor? You want sex? No! What you doing? Why you laughing?"
I managed to get myself back under control, to say, "No sex right now. I'm just freaking out."
I added, "Do you want the short version or the long one?"
My Boh, nude, of course, giggled and pulled me up from the floor and led me out to the patio. There, she arranged pillows on the lounge, and said, legs spread wide open, reclining across my lap, "Gimme!"
So I started to tell why I laughed so long and hard.
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"When things fell apart at home," I said, "it was 1970, and I was 2 months of being 18, in my senior year at high school. Just one more semester to go. I had a steady girl, Connie (herself just 18), but she was really prissy and up-tight, frequently talking about 'saving-herself-for-marriage' and 'Finding-Mister-Right'."
"Connie started insisting that we spend more time at my house, especially with my Dad."
"This was a trial, 'cause Mom was increasingly crazy, flipping back and forth between talking goo-goo baby-talk around me, like I was supposed to be five-years old, and screaming that I was an immoral, perverted, delinquent teen, scheming and plotting against her ... making her cry."
"As of the last two or three years, Mom cried whenever she didn't get her way on nearly anything. Then Dad would come in and punish me for making her cry, whether it was my fault or not. I tried to stay away as much as I could, but I had to be home sometimes, to eat and sleep ... and to transport Connie to and from our house, morning and evening."
"On that last day, things got really bad. I came home, after dropping Connie off to stay with my Dad, staying out all morning, to find that Mom had washed all my clothes in something like 10 gallons of bleach, so just about everything I had, except what I was wearing, was shredded, bleached rags and dissolved threads. Even my wool dress suit and leather shoes were slashed with a knife and torn apart."
"Instead, she'd laid out a little set of short-pants, a sailor-suit top, a cloth diaper and a pair of buster brown shoes and socks, that would have fitted a little kid of five. She'd also trashed all my books and music, and substituted Little Golden Books, like Little Toot, The Taxi That Hurried and Thomas the Tank-Engine."
"In other words, Mom had gone fucking nuts into little baby-kid fantasy!"
"When I yelled at her about what she'd just done, she went all goo-goo baby-talk on me again. She said that I was 'her muhdu's baby boy, her oochums-smoochums, witto boy, who needed his muhdu to do everyting for him, an' read to him from his witto baby-boy books, and even hold his witto pee-pee so he didn' mess hisself'."
"When I told her to start talking like a normal human, she flashed over into rage, and slapped me with her fingernail out, leaving four long bloody trails on my cheek. Then she screamed and said that I was thinking nasty, dirty, immoral thoughts and plotting against her."
"As fast as she could—but without any tears—she started to cry, loudly."
"Then Dad came charging up the hall, cursing, with Connie, my girl, close behind. Dad yelled something about me making mom cry for the last time, and, without any warning, he slugged me hard, twice, low in the gut, and then high, on my face. I went down, and he started kicking me in the gut and face, but mostly in the balls. I screamed, gagged and threw up all over myself."
"Last thing I remember, before he kicked me in the head and I was knocked out, was Connie, laughing like a fiend and telling Dad to kick me in the balls some more and make me throw up again."
"When I came awake, aching all over, terrible pain in my balls, with blood and vomit drying on my face and the floor, I heard Mom, crying and shrieking paranoid goo-goo baby-talk in the bedroom. She'd 'taken to her bed,' neo-Victorian' style, and was doing a combination of baby-talk and crazy, mad speech. I struggled to my feet, and managed to get to the door of the spare bedroom, when I heard voices there."
"Easing the door open, I saw my Dad, his pants down around his ankles, being sucked off by my not-so-prissy, suddenly ex-steady-girl. Connie, just 18 that last week, who was bare to the waist. As I looked and listened, Dad pulled out of her mouth, and then pinched and mauled her breasts, while she moaned and twisted her body."
"Then she stripped down naked, got on her back, and he started to fuck her on the spare guest bed ... and she humped him back, while Mom shrieked crazy things in the bedroom, not 30 feet away."
"I listened as Connie, still humping like a fiend, got Dad to say he'd take my car away from me and give it to her. Dad promised that and to take away all my savings in the bank, 'cause I was still a minor, and he'd give her all my money, too."
"I knew I had to leave. Right then. I packed the few things that Mom hadn't ruined, put them in my old Boy Scout backpack, grabbed up a light blanket and left the house where I'd grown up, probably forever. I took the bus into Point Loma, and got all my savings (a few hundred dollars) out of my account, and then took another bus into downtown San Diego. I got a cheap room for the night at the YMCA (they still had single-person rooms, back in the early-70's), using a phony name and age. It was homo-haven but I had a bed and a shower down the hall."