(In which I come into fortune, and conspire to deceive my family and bed my mother.)
My name is Bill Jacobson, and just a few short years ago I considered myself a relatively ordinary young man. For the last month, I have been regularly fucking my own mother, and she doesn't even know it! I know that sounds crazy, and to be honest, it probably is – incest alone is crazy enough, but that a guy could be fucking the woman who raised him without her knowing that it was him? You'll see.
To make sense of all this, let me first tell you a little about my family.
My mother is Janice Barnes, her maiden name, which she uses between husbands. She is the older of two daughters, raised in New Hampshire almost solely by her mother, owing to the relatively early death of her elderly husband. I don't really know much about Janice (the name she has insisted I use ever since I turned thirteen) before she was in high school, but I do know that she hit that stage of life convinced that her assets were almost entirely physical and that her goal should be the ensnarement of a rich man. Her photo albums show her hanging with a steadily older crowd until finally, at just fifteen years of age, she met and seduced James Jacobson, the decade-older scion of a moderately successful clan of car dealers. James, my father, supposedly did not know her age at first, and did not much care once she passed the age of consent (16) already pregnant with me. They were hastily wed, and with his assignment as the manager/owner of a few of the family dealerships in Massachusetts they settled into what I think they both hoped would turn into a happy marriage.
It didn't.
The years of their marriage waxed, waned, and ended before I was even into big-boy pants. It turned out that my mother did not really even want kids, she just wanted to use pregnancy and parenthood to help her snare a rich husband, unlike my father, who came from a large family and wanted the same. She hated being a mother, she hated being a housewife, and she hated being married to a man who worked long hours and expected to come home to a smiling wife, a clean house, and a hot meal. From what I have heard, they spent their time either arguing or fucking, the latter of which managed to produce my sister just 18 months after I was born. Their divorce apparently surprised nobody, but the fact that Janice fought for and got full custody of my sister and I surprised many – it took them a while to realize that she was leveraging us for more alimony. Janice took my sister, myself, and James' money and moved back to New Hampshire, near enough to her old haunts to be comfortable, but far enough to have some distance from her mother and her ex.
Of course, it did not take Janice long to realize that even her generous alimony would not pay for the lifestyle she wanted, especially with all the work of two young children, so after a couple of years she married Tom Waite, who was a nice, naïve guy who loved kids and worked from home. Tom was the closest thing to a real parent that either my sister or I ever really experienced, but once we were both in school Tom's days were numbered. He took it well, and was such a hopelessly nice guy that he did not even contest contributing more alimony to the cause of Janice's happiness.
After that came a few boyfriends, off and on. Janice liked fucking and liked money, and after Tom we were old enough to mostly (by bad parent standards) take care of ourselves, so she devoted herself to seducing all the rich and singleish men in town she could. She briefly married a douchebag named Mark, a male version of herself – shallow, sex-crazed, and interested in rich idleness – but after a while he found someone younger and prettier, escaping somehow without having to add to her financial support.
During most of this it was just me and my sister Alexi – we took care of ourselves, looked after each other, were much closer than it seemed most siblings were. Janice? She wasn't really a mom, she was just this lady who showed up every now and then to sign things, but groceries, or bang some guy late at night in her room while Alexi and I spied through the door. I didn't really think this was all that weird, or even bad, until Alexi turned 15.
That was 3 years ago, not long after Mark left. Janice suddenly started paying a lot more attention on Alexi, doting on her, buying her new clothes, taking her to parties. I am not sure if Janice wanted more introductions to the increasingly younger men she was pursuing, or if she felt that turning Alexi into her disciple would somehow validate her existence, but in just a few short months Alexi went from being my closest confidante to being, well, younger Janice. I was shocked at Alexi's conversion – we had always despised what Janice represented, and was stunned to see how much stronger was her need for parental attention. I lost her.
I had gone from being one of a pair of neglected children to being the lone outcast. Despite living in the same house, the activities of Janice and Alexi were known to me only by rumor, and my life become one of sullen solitude. My anger at Janice's continued neglect and Alexi's sudden betrayal poisoned the few other friendships I had, and in an effort to shut out the world I focused entirely on academics and the kind of art favored only by the brooding and lonely. I wrote modern jazz, and went to poetry sessions. Not proud of it now, but I did it.
Regardless, my anger bore surprising fruit. Those were my last two years of high school, and seeing sustained academic improvement and artistic bent (and not knowing my family situation), the college admissions boards apparently thought I was a hot prospect on the rise. I was accepted into several universities, even a couple of great ones, leading to one of my few real attempts to get something out of Janice – money. It was hopeless. Her alimony was going to go down when I graduated high school, and she sure was not going to spend party money on my tuition when some cow college in the Midwest was willing to give me a full ride. Unable to move Janice to generosity, and unwilling to join the military, I took the best path out of town and went West.
My first semester at college sucked. Away from the constant source of anger that was my family, I lost much of my passion, and somewhat bereft of social skills I had trouble fitting in with my peers. I wound up hanging around with a band of high-achieving misfits, the kind who drank a little, smoked a lot, and tried just hard enough to remain in that academic band that showed you were smart but not a nerd (at least not to each other). It was not fun, it was just coping, self-medicating with a group of people who thought depression meant you were deep, and among whom I was the deepest of all. Neither Janice nor Alexi ever visited, or called, or wrote, and I was constantly unsure how I felt about that. By going to college, it was like I had ceased to exist for them.
I lost my virginity with Carol, the first of the several random stoned hookups that characterized that group's attempts to balance lust with apathy. None of them worked out. Even in that group I stood out as off-kilter, and none of them wanted to get too close to me. Loveless, depressed, tolerated only by the intolerable, God only knows where I would have wound up if not for my 18th birthday.
See, the misfits had a tradition for birthdays that you had to follow – whatever that new year let you do, you had to go do it (unless it was permanent and uncool), just so you could show how you yourself were unchanged and thereby prove that the milestone was meaningless. At eighteen, this meant you had to get a tattoo, and buy cigarettes, and gamble, and do a few other things that sounded cool when you were younger. My tattoo was the grim reaper on my shoulder (stolen subconsciously, I now realize, from Airheads), and I was amazed at how much I actually enjoyed the pain. The cigarettes were Camel non-filters, and tasted like ass – I mostly smoked pot, being more interested in the high than in the cancer. And my gambling, out in the flat, corn-saturated, casino-bereft vicinity of my school, was a handful of lottery tickets. Whoop-de-fucking-woo, was I ever an ironic adult badass.
