Amor Fabula Ep. 02

*** This story is in the speculative fantasy fiction genre. ***

Get A Job, Motherfucker!

"You are a grown man now and you need to go out there and get yourself a job!" The angry black woman paused from her pacing and screamed. "How many times am I going to have to tell you before it sinks into that hard fucking head of yours?"

Sammy had known his mother had been in a foul mood earlier. That's why he'd carried his bowl of cereal out of the kitchen in the first place. The problem was that the irate black woman had followed him into the living room and refused to give him a moment's peace.

"I have been looking for a job." He said, more or less pleasantly.

"Well, you haven't been looking hard enough!"

"Whatever you say. I can apply for jobs all day long, but that doesn't mean anybody is going to take the time to call me back. I don't know why you're making such a big fucking deal out of this anyway. You don't even like the job you have."

"I have bills to pay." She said, evenly and angrily.

"See, that's where you're wrong." Sammy pointed a spoon at her. "You don't want me to get a job because we need the money all that bad. You want me to get a job because you want to start spending the money I'm going to be making. How about you do this? Stop spending so much money and shut the fuck up."

He couldn't help but start giggling.

The woman looked angry enough to jump on him and pummel him with her fists. "You son of a bitch!"

Sammy's chuckles graduated into laughter. "Did you just call yourself a bitch? You're so dumb!"

"Fuck you!" She stormed away from him.

In case she tried to throw something at his back, Sammy tracked her progress across the living room and until she disappeared up the stairs. She hadn't thrown anything at him recently, but in the past he'd ducked away from missiles such as ashtrays, cordless phones, and even spatulas.

Sammy had a moment to imprint the woman's form in his mind. She was thirty-six, with skin the color of milk chocolate, and a figure that was thick around the waist, but not fat. Her breasts were the size of oranges, her hips flared out nice and large, and her thighs were big and meaty. She could be considered pretty, too, when she took the time to put on some light make-up. If she went too heavy, which she did often enough, she ended up looking like a street whore. He shouldn't be checking out his mother like that, he thought, because of the way other people would consider it wrong.

"Whatever." He said to himself. "Other people are stupid, anyway."

Sammy knew one thing; he liked looking at older women, and if he got the chance, flirting with them too. He was more of an intellectual than anybody else his age, light years past the girls in his neighborhood. The girls were just as primitive as the guys in his age bracket. No, Sammy got more mental stimulation from talking to an older woman than he did when talking to anyone else his age.

Still, this was his mother he was thinking of. When he finished his bowl of cereal, he dutifully took it over to the kitchen and rinsed it out. After this, he trotted up the steps to the second floor, with his bedroom on the left, his mother's room on the right, and the bathroom right in the middle. The apartment was cozy enough for the two of them, even if the walls were thin enough that they could hear their neighbors or their neighbor's TV when they got too loud.

Sammy stepped into the bathroom and looked into the large mirror over the sink. There was a time when he'd been a smaller and more timid creature, when his mother would chase him around the house and smack him for no reason other than him being at the wrong place when she went off. That was the past, he thought, as he flexed his arms and saw the taut muscles budding there.

He was eighteen now and taller than she was. He did his push-ups every day. Since his buddy EZ had a weight bench set up right outside the apartment he lived in, and since the homies hung out there so much, they all ended up getting their regular workouts.

Sammy thought back to the last couple of times his mother had jumped on him and tried to give him a ghetto beat-down. He was strong enough that he could out-wrestle her now. Twice already, he'd rolled her over and started laughing when she couldn't get the upper hand on him. His mother still tried fight back. The first time she'd worn out her anger trying, and the second, she'd realized she wasn't going to win and simply gave up.

Since his mother could no longer threaten him physically, she was resorting to her first line of attack, which was to constantly harangue, pester and torment him in order to bully him around. What she didn't understand, and probably wasn't even capable of understanding, was that Sammy was on a higher evolutionary level now, where simple words wouldn't shake the extraordinary mental balance he had achieved.

Sammy took a few deep breaths to clear his mind and his lungs, before stepping out into the hallway again. As an exercise to further his mental awareness, he simply stood there and took in what it meant to be standing there, to be in that hallway at that precise moment in time, to breathe in the air that gathered there, and to experience what there was to be experienced. This is something that Buddha would have done, he thought.

He was still standing there several minutes later, when his mother bustled out of her room adjusting an earring. She worked at a laundry service that cleaned up uniforms for hotels and security guard companies. Her work attire was a short-sleeved button shirt with green and white pinstripes, and green Dickies pants.

"Why are you always standing around like that?" She snapped at him. "Do you think standing around is going to pay the bills around here?"

"Bills are meaningless." He said.

"You're meaningless." She retorted, as she started down the stairs. "Get a job, motherfucker!"

Instinctively, Sammy's head cocked at an angle to watch his mother bound down the stairs. His eyes specifically went to her big, round butt. When Sammy straightened his head again, he wondered why he'd done such a thing. He pondered over what was meaningless and what was meaningful, and he wondered if both things might really be the same thing.

"Do we really need a job?" His best friend EZ asked, as the two young men stepped into a busy supermarket a couple of hours later.

"No. I don't think so." Sammy casually replied. "Not unless we tell ourselves that we need one."

"Do we want a job?"

Sammy shrugged. "Ask yourself this; why do people want to get jobs?"

"So they can buy stuff."

"How important is buying stuff?"

This caused EZ to ponder things for a moment. He'd been around Sammy long enough that he'd end up exercising his mental muscles often. "Well, people need to buy food, and they need to pay off utilities like the water and the light. After that, they need money to buy stuff that they want, like a cell phone or a car or whatever. Or in our cases, to impress girls."

"If we need money to impress girls, are they impressed by us or by the money?"

"They're impressed because we can get the money and we can use it to buy things for them. I know what you're going to say. They've been conditioned to believe that money is the most important thing there is."

"Not only that, but it's the law of the jungle." Sammy added. "It all comes down to reproduction. The male vies for the attention of the female, and the female selects the male most suitable for procreation and strength. Think about this; in nature, the female only gets close to the male for reproduction, and they she goes her own way until it's time to reproduce again. Some animal parents will guard their eggs or feed their young when they're born, but most mammals walk away from each other with no strings attached. Why does the human male have to stick around and have a house, and a job, and a car, just to keep the human female happy?"

"Because of the conditioning from the society they live in." EZ replied, as he scanned the crowded aisles of the store they were in. "You know, all I see is Mexicans in here. Mexican workers, Mexican shoppers, Mexican things to buy. I don't think we're going to get a job here."

"Don't look at it that way." Sammy instructed. "Turn it around. Tell yourself you're going to be the first black person to work here."

"All right, I'll do that." EZ agreed, as he knew what his best friend was capable of. "There's their little kiosk where we can put in our applications."

After they were done, they both went into the store's restaurant section for chips and soda. Once they finished eating, and because they had nothing else to do for the entire day, they strolled around the aisles and watched the people, and especially the cute young women that worked there.

A lot of these young women would stop and stare at them, as if they were trying to figure out if they knew the two young blacks, or as if they were about to ask the young men something.

"Are you doing that, Sammy?" EZ queried.

"Yes. Mentally, I'm telling them that we're nice and friendly and that it's okay if we end up working here. Some of these people I can reach with my thoughts, but some of them are really stubborn."

"I don't understand how you can do all that."

"It's all in the mind." Sammy replied, as they made their way to the registers.

At the checkout, Sammy gave the cashier a twenty to pay for a couple of sodas to go. The woman made change and was about to hand it over to him.

"I handed you a ten, not a twenty." He said.

The woman looked at her register, which still had his ten-dollar bill resting on its open drawer. She stared at the bill for a long moment, positive it had just been a twenty just a moment ago, before she made the correct change and passed it along. As the two young black men stepped away, the cashier held the currency note up to the light, as if it had changed right before her eyes, and very effectively, it had.

There was a time when EZ would have insisted that Sammy do things like that, just so they could get more money for themselves. Sammy had gone on to explain that at the end of their shift, the cashiers they'd short-changed would have been off on their till, and what if they ended up getting fired? That was bad karma, Sammy had explained. Still, Sammy did such things to keep his strange, hypnotic mind in practice.

They went on to visit a few more places, but Sammy didn't get a good vibe from any of them. These included a sub sandwich shop and a cell phone retailer, both run by Mexicans, and a fast food eatery with some blacks, but mostly Mexicans. There weren't all that many businesses owned or run by blacks, the two teens noticed. Of the ones that were owned by people of their race, like the bail bonds and the hair salon, they weren't qualified to work at.

"You could use your power to make somebody hire us." EZ suggested.

"If I was desperate I might do that." Sammy acknowledged. "But tell me, are you that desperate for a job, when you might not like that job later? And think of all the free time you have now. Do you really want to give all that up, just so you can stand somewhere and do the same thing over and over, and make money for somebody else?"

This was what Sammy always said. Although EZ had racked his brain for some way they could make money for themselves, honest, steady money, he still hadn't come up with anything solid yet.

Sammy did stop a couple of people on the street. This is what he did for money. He'd stop somebody at random, and ask them for ten dollars in exchange for a psychic reading. If the person agreed and handed the money over EZ to hold, Sammy would delve into that person's open and willing mind. He spent two or three minutes giving accurate details of that person's life, enough to convince them he was legit, and then he'd give them what he called The Big Shocker. This was their biggest secret, or their biggest worry, or the biggest obstacle in that person's life.

Not only that, but Sammy would tell them how to fix things. Some of these people became angry with him or started crying. The infinitely patient Sammy would stand by their side calmly and allow them to vent or grieve. It didn't matter if these were blacks or Hispanics, or even the occasional white, he'd stand by all of these people. A few of them, Sammy was comfortable enough that he could cradle his arm around their shoulders, or hold their hands until their stronger emotions dissipated. It was a rare occasion when someone demanded his or her money back after a reading.

Afterward, the two young men walked over to the continuing education center. They both browsed through the free technical courses being given there, when Sammy pointed out one major deficiency. They would have to attend nine hundred hours' worth of hands-on training and instruction in some cases, in order to prepare for a job that paid close to minimum wage. Why go through all that trouble, when the job at the grocery store paid the same money?

For the rest of the afternoon, they hung out at the park or kicked it with the homies by EZ's apartment. It was only when it started getting late that Sammy walked back home.

He found his mother, sullen and quiet, sitting on their one couch and staring into the television screen like a zombie. She had a couple of beer cans sitting on the coffee table in front of her.

"Are you still in a bad mood?" Sammy asked.

"Fuck you."

"Why don't you turn the TV off so we can talk to each other?"

"Why don't you get out of my face? Did you even try to find a job today?"

"Yes, I did. I applied at the supermarket over on 43rd Street. The big supermarket."

"You wasted your time. They only hire Mexicans at that store."

"You never know." He said.

She ignored him then, by facing away from him rebelliously, by drinking her beer.

Sammy went upstairs. He did his meditation for a while and he did his push-ups. He had some books to read on lucid dreaming and astral projection, and on how ancient cultures viewed such things. He studied those, too.

It was nearing eleven that night, when he went back down the stairs for a drink of juice or milk, or bottled water if he couldn't find the others. He observed that the TV was still on, although the sound had been muted. His mother was lying on the couch asleep.

Sammy didn't like going into people's minds without their permission. He sighed and told himself he could make an exception for his mother. She was having a dream, he discovered. In that dream his mother was wearing her work uniform. It was stained and worn as if it hadn't been washed in a long time. His mother was chasing dogs around, small dogs, big dogs, dogs of different colors and shapes. All those dogs were running away from her. She never caught up to any of them.

Sammy went into the kitchen for his drink, before he went back upstairs to consider his mother's dream. She saw herself as unwanted and bedraggled, he realized. She didn't like her job, either. The dogs in the dream represented men. His mother was desperate to catch one, because she had erroneously convinced herself that she'd be happy, that her life would have meaning, if she did catch one. Sammy knew he could fix that problem if she was willing to listen. But no, she was too temperamental and stubborn, and would probably only scathe him with profanity if he tried.

Still, maybe he would make the attempt, the next day.

Sammy didn't need much rest. Five or six hours were all it took. He woke up at around seven feeling refreshed and content. His mother would still be sleeping, he knew, as she didn't get up until nine or so. He made his way into her bedroom to see if he could catch another of her dreams. Finding his mother's bedroom door ajar, he gently pushed it open and stepped in.

Unexpectedly, he found her lying there with the covers tussled around her feet. She had on a long white tee shirt that had crept up to her waist. The string of her red thong started off at her lower back and disappeared into the large crack of her butt.

Sammy couldn't help but stare at his mother's big, rounded ass. It was a huge swell of brown meat, and it excited him in a way that he couldn't readily dismiss. In the past, he'd allowed his eyes to settle on his mother's behind, if only to compare it with the backsides of other women. He found that his mother's backside had more merits than many other specimens he'd seen.

Now that he was seeing it past the negligible cover of her thong, he wanted to put his hands on it. To make matters worse, his cock was pressing hard against the front of his shorts.

He stared at his mother's ass for as long as he dared, before he retreated back to his room. Even then, the lust that had been inspired by it would not go away. His cock might have even gotten harder than before, harder than ever, just by fantasizing about it. There was only one way that he could think of to alleviate his aroused state. Sammy went on to masturbate in his room, with the image of his mother prominent in his mind.

That day, Sammy hung out with EZ and a couple of other homies. They spent much of their time at the park, joking around and laughing, and talking shit.

Two of the homies nearly got into a scuffle, over a girl as usual, before the cooler heads prevailed and broke them up. It was only when Sammy got the two of them to discuss why they were mad at each other, that the two men figured out that the girl was playing one against the other.

"That's some fucked up shit." One of them said. "That bitch straight set us up!"

This is why Sammy didn't care to have a girlfriend his age. The women in his social circle were all too self-centered, to begin with. Besides, he tended to scare them away when he read their thoughts and told them what was wrong with their way of thinking.

Later, they all walked over to a small shopping center where Sammy did a couple of random readings. He used the money to treat his friends at a taco shop.

While they were eating and his homies were getting loud, for the attention of course, Sammy thought about his mother, and of what he would say to her when he got home.

Sammy knew her schedule and when he could reasonably expect his mother to get home. He was sitting on the couch, with the TV off and daydreaming, when she opened the front door and walked inside.

"What the fuck are you doing there?" She scolded, the moment the door was shut behind her.

"I want to talk to you."

"We don't need to talk." She resisted him, as she always did. "What you need is to find yourself a fucking job, instead of mooching off of me all the time!"

"Why do you always have to butt heads with me like that? Why can't you just listen to what I have to say for once?"

"You think you're Mister Know It All now?" She hissed back. "You don't know shit!"

It was always force with her, always domination. Always aggression.

"I'm going to make you listen to me." Sammy decided.

He left the couch, going straight to her and trying to get his arms around her. She got one shot in, hitting him on the shoulder and stinging him, before he managed to grab her wrists. They wrestled for a moment, with Sammy trying to drag his mother over to the couch and his mother refusing to budge from her spot. He managed to trip her down on the carpet and kept her down with his weight, while he stretched her arms out so she wouldn't be able to hit him again, or worse, to have at him with her nails.

Oh, his mother was furious. She strained and nearly bucked him off a couple of times. She screamed every vulgarity she could think of at him and made every threat. In the end, her steam sputtered out; she faced away from him and refused to meet his eyes.

"Are you ready to talk now?" Sammy said, gently.

She gave no answer.

"I'll make it short. You're giving out a lot of bad energy right now. No guy is going to want to get close to you while you're like that. What you need to do is make yourself happy first, and then you might find somebody that'll be good for you."