When I was five, I saw my mother kill my father. I watched as she sat over him yelling, and stabbing him in the chest. She then called 'uncle' Jerry who came over and took him away. We never talked about that night. On the few occasions I mentioned him without thinking, she just said, "He's gone, and we have to get on with our lives."
I knew why she did it. It was because he used to beat her almost every night. I remember that she was nice to me and gave me a lot of things, but that didn't stop me from being afraid. For years I thought that if I did something wrong, she would kill me too.
Mom went over to 'Uncle' Jerry's house a lot for a few years, and then one day she said that he had left and that we wouldn't be seeing him any more. I asked her, "Do you mean he's 'Gone'?"
She looked at me strangely and said, "Yes." So I figured she'd killed him too.
As I got older, I spilled juice on the rug, broke her glass unicorn, and once even set a fire in her closet -- and still remained alive. My fears subsided. When I got into my early teens, I decided she'd done the right thing to kill him since he was beating her.
That was about the time I started getting into the computer. Mom had shown me how to use it but I wasn't that interested until then. So one day I 'Googled' my name just to see what would happen, and references came up all over the place. They were about a person in the movie business who had my name. They named a few movies he had produced and there were some pictures of him. It was my father. I didn't really remember what he looked like, but I'd seen some photos in a box in mom's closet. There was an article that said he'd died of a heart attack at age thirty-one. What the hell?
Mom had told me almost nothing about him, but I was filled with a thousand questions. I printed out a few pages and went to find her. She was in the backyard. Our house was in the California hills and the closest houses were hidden behind bushes and hedges. It always felt that we lived in a world of our own.
I said to mom, "This says that dad was a producer, that he made movies. It says he died from a heart attack...but I thought you killed him?"
My mother looked at me as if I was crazy. "What? What are you talking about?"
I said, "I remember mom; I saw you, you were screaming at him and you were on top of him and you were stabbing him, I remember, I saw it."
She covered her mouth for a moment and her eyes opened wide. "You saw me? Oh my God. Listen to me Jason...you saw me trying to bring him back...I was pounding on his chest, I didn't think you remembered any of it."
The reversal was almost as shocking as the time I thought it happened. I said, "You didn't kill him then...did you?"
Mom said, "Of course not. I loved him so much; I couldn't even talk about it... I never wanted to. If it wasn't for you, I don't know what I would have done. I thought you were too young and I didn't want to burden you with my unhappiness. All this time you thought I..." She had an astonished look on her face.
I said, "Well, I thought because he used to beat you at night and make you...yell because he was hitting you."
"When?" She asked. "When did you see dad ever hit me? He was the sweetest man. Everything we have is because of him. What are you talking about?"
I said, "At night...when you thought I was asleep...I heard you."
"Oh my God..." She was laughing and covering her mouth. She kept laughing until she saw I getting upset. "This is unbelievable...one day you're going to laugh about this too Jason. He wasn't beating me. We were having sex." She blushed when she said; "I just made a lot of noise with him." She covered her face again and said with another laugh, "Oh my God, all these years you thought...and you never said anything?"
I said, "Well I thought if you did it, he deserved it."
She came over to me and hugged me and said, "Oh sweetie, I'm so sorry, I should have talked you about him...it just hurt me so much...I'm sorry baby, can you forgive me?"
I said, "Sure mom. I'm glad you didn't..."
She squeezed me to her and said, "Oh you crazy boy."
And what stuck in my crazy head the most from all of this? The part where she told me about her making noises while having sex. Maybe I wasn't ready to hear it, and maybe it was that I was too ready. But that was when that sex switch flipped up in me, and I was turned on and ready to go. The girls in my class looked different, women on the street looked different, and my mother looked different.
Besides my attention to her, my mother really did look 'Different'. It was probably because of the mixed blood. She was ΒΌ Cherokee and somehow it made her look almost Eurasian, with long straight dark hair and a smooth dusky complexion. She even had a Cherokee name, Inali, which referred to a fox. She went by Nali because she told me that whenever I heard someone call her by name, I repeated, 'Nali' over and over.
Mom told me about my father who had made some films that we were still getting money from, but that what we had mostly came from what he had inherited from his father. I knew we had money because mom never said no if I asked for some, and she would go to an expensive spa every week and get this treatment or that from someone named Janice.
After our talk, I began having 'The Dream' at least once or twice a week. In the dream, I'm in the woods and it's getting dark. I'm not sure how to get out. I'm hearing noises and I start running. Finally I find a dirt road and there's a black car sitting there. I can't see in the windows. I'm cold. The back door opens and a woman motions me in. She's dressed in black with a black hat and I can't see her face, but I think it's my mother.
I lean up against her breasts and close my eyes. Her hands are warming me. They go between my legs and they stay there. I fondle her breasts over the black dress. She massages my cock. We touch like that until I come. The dream triggered my first nocturnal emissions.
That was also about the time I began drawing seriously. I had always doodled, and people said they liked what I drew, but Miss Canava, the art teacher, saw something more. She gave me lessons. Mom insisted on paying her, and in a few years I had technique and an individual style. I could do a pencil portrait of someone in about ten minutes that were surprisingly accurate at capturing at least an aspect of a personality.
For a while it was a fun thing. In high school I was invited to lots of parties. I knew why. When I got tired of being the trained seal that could do his 'tricks,' I stopped going. I did the sidewalk art fairs and made great money, which I didn't need, so I stopped that too. I didn't stop drawing. And I had hundreds of my mother. I did it so much she didn't even notice if I was drawing her as she read, or fixed dinner, or watched TV.
When I started college, we often talked during the week, and I came home on weekends and holidays, because I was only eighty miles away. When the weather warmed, we spent all our time at the beach. Her creamy cleavage always turned me on. I often asked her to wear her white two-piece, even though I knew it would engender stares from others. You could just see a hint of the dark nipples through the fabric. I'd seen them a few times when she'd bent down and wasn't wearing a bra.
I flirted with her and she flirted back. I thought about crossing the line many times and never did. She stood in front of the mirror one day and said, "God, I'm falling apart."
I said, "Stop it mom, you've got a killer body." We both laughed after an awkward moment, and after that, I'd jokingly call her 'Killer' sometimes. Once in a while I'd bring a girl home that I was seeing. Sandy a particularly big-boobed brunette, that I was with the longest, seemed to annoy mom more than others.
On the phone she asked me, "Are those things of hers real?"
I laughed, "Of course not. Mom, you've got the last pair of real boobs around, and probably the best." Mom really did have great boobs.
She said, "Oh go on." She sounded pleased. Then she said, "Are you serious about her?"
I said, "No mom, we both see other people."
She said, "Good, it's too soon, and I don't think she's the one for you anyway."
I said, "Why not?"
She said, "She's not smart enough, or pretty enough...or good enough for my boy." That was the first time she had ever said anything negative about a girl I was with.
I laughed, "Mom, by your criteria, the only one that would be okay for me, is you."
She said, "Well, if I was a little younger, and not your mom, you'd be in trouble."
I said, "I wouldn't be in trouble, you'd be the one in trouble mom."
That was when I started drawing her from memory, and from imagination. I drew her in the white bathing suit, and turned it into a string bikini, which clearly showed the darkened circles of her nipples. And then I drew her asleep on the lounge chair, without the string bikini. And then there were a hundred different pictures of her in every possible position I could imagine her nude body.