Chapters fifteen, sixteen, seventeen & Afterword
Chapter Fifteen
We didn't spend our entire honeymoon on the waterbed. We also found time for concerts, museums, long walks, and food from around the world. We did Manhattan.
We'd heard so much about street crime there, but had no problems. As irony would have it, right after we returned to Denver I got mugged.
My high school and the one next to it had a constant feud going. My school was in a middle-class neighborhood and was named after a US president. The other school was in a poor neighborhood and was named Manual Arts, as if the kids there could only work with their hands. They knew what their chances were in life, so many of them were bitter and had chips on their shoulders. If we came into their turf, they might beat us up. They usually beat us in football too. These were the only times in their lives they would have more power than we did.
I didn't know them, didn't like them; they felt the same way about me. The idea that we were divided into these separate neighborhoods and schools so we wouldn't get to know and like one another and work together for change never occurred to me, until Diana explained it later. It probably occurred to some of them, but they couldn't do anything about it. Except beat me up.
Four of them surrounded me as I was coming home from a friend's one evening. They shoved me in the chest and bounced me back and forth among them like a basketball, then pinned my arms behind by back, hit me in the face, and took my money, three dollars. I staggered home, scared, hurt, humiliated.
I hadn't cried, but as soon as I saw mom I burst into tears and told her the story. She knew exactly what I needed. Sitting on the couch, she stroked my sobs away, opened her blouse, and gave me her breasts. I nuzzled and sucked and snuffled there while she patted my head and whispered calm words of comfort. Her soothing balm rose from within and flowed into me through those nipples that had once kept me alive and now were easing the pain and trauma away. As I got hard, my strength and self-respect returned. I was a man again, and she reacted to me as that, lying back and letting me take charge. I took the rest of her clothes off, gazed gratefully at her naked splendor, and skinnied out of my jeans.
Mom gave my erection an awed, almost fearful look and turned away a little, as if to protect herself. I put my hand on her to claim her. Pulling her legs gently apart, I could see the desire drops shining on her labia. Her pelvis canted up in surrender. Her mouth was open, eyes closed, waiting. With a gasp of gratitude I entered her and my troubles were over.
This woman knew how to heal.
But she didn't take any crap either. If I slacked off on chores, made a mess, or left dirty dishes, she became the dominant one and showed me her power. Once I carelessly washed my red sweatshirt with her laundry on hot and turned her clothes pink. Diana was righteously pissed.
Without saying a word, she pulled off my clothes, pushed me face down on the bed, and spanked my bottom. Her open hand made loud, stinging smacks on my buns and thighs, turning my rear end hot and red, almost hitting my scrotum. While spanking me, mom took off her own clothes. She rolled me over, sat on top of me, and drilled me right in the eye with a stern, no-nonsense stare. I felt very little but my rod was very big. She slid her crotch back and forth over it, then rose up and worked herself down onto it, her thick russet hair splashing across her breasts. When my pole was all the way in, she straddled me with her hips and rode me domineeringly until we both came. I had been duly punished.
Whenever I needed discipline, she ran some variation on this theme, and it always brought me back into line.
*****
Our relationship couldn't be all bliss—it was too complex. The husband-wife and child-parent roles sometimes clashed, and we'd fall apart in confusion. But most of the time things went smoothly. When problems did come up, we'd talk them over and try to change. Even if we were angry, we could always communicate.
Since we'd gotten rid of so much psychological and physical frustration, we both had more energy now. We were so fulfilled that we didn't have much need of distractions. Compared to what we did with each other, most entertainment and socializing seemed just silly. Since there are limits on how often one can do it, we had lots of time left to work.
Diana became such a skilled defense attorney that she regularly got offers from private firms, but she declined them, saying she liked poor crooks better than rich crooks. She also became the co-director of Lawyers for Peace, doing what she could to ban war and the manufacture of weapons.
Although I was a bit of a loner at school, I had some good friends, more girls than boys, actually. Maybe the girls liked me because I didn't hit on them. There was a lot of peer pressure to go to school dances. I discovered if I went with a different girl each time, they didn't get romantic ideas and mom didn't get jealous.
I really got into learning. Every subject had its own fascination now, and I could focus on it without difficulty. I discovered that thinking was fun. Since mom and I had overthrown the rules and found them to be a sham, I began to see that many of the assumptions that run people's lives are nonsense, so I particularly enjoyed challenging the conventional beliefs about an issue. I wasn't always popular with the teachers, but my grades were high.
I could've gotten into an Ivy League school but decided on the University of Colorado, mom's alma mater. They gave me a good scholarship, but I actually took it to be close to her. I came home on the weekends, riding the bus an hour on the Boulder turnpike, bringing my dirty clothes and clean cock back to get washed.
I grew a beard that I was quite proud of, but I really felt adult when I finally grew enough taller than mom so I could take her standing up from behind without having to stand on a cushion.
One of my first courses was anthropology, which had been Diana's undergraduate major. I became fascinated by tribal and prehistoric cultures. Now when I gazed at mom's nude body I felt like an ancient male worshipping at the shrine to the black, ruby-lipped cunt of Africa, humanity's mother, or to the yoni of the Vedic Prakriti, consort of the Creator, the Divine Mother and female half of God, who holds us all in Her cosmic embrace, giving us life and taking it away.
Reading on my own, I learned that in the old matriarchal civilization it was the duty of opposite sex parents to initiate their offspring into sexuality at puberty, to prepare them for their mates by teaching them the skills of tender loving. This was a ceremonial rite, the final crowning of the parent-child relationship.
With the triumph of patriarchy, this incestuous energy was deemed subversive and was outlawed. Rather than sexual celebrations, initiation rites for young people became brutal ordeals. The warrior replaced the lover.
Religion and mythology took on a new cast. The oracles fell silent. With his invention of the Oedipus story, Sophocles propagated a message of fear that left a deep mark on Greek civilization, which eventually became ours.
Back then, though, this prohibition had a reason. Before birth control, the danger of familial sex was real: the offspring of such close unions can be unhealthy. More genetic variety is needed to keep the species fit.
Now that pregnancy is avoidable and reproduction a matter of choice, the danger is gone but the fear remains. This superstition is obsolete and irrational but still powerful, having been ingrained for thousands of years.
I was thinking about all this in the bloody years of the Vietnam War as the patriarchal males on both sides had built a death factory that was mass producing corpses. In Vietnam the Buddhists were opposing the war with self immolation, and in the US the women and new males were opposing it with music and hair and sex. To render the old males extinct, I foresaw a legion of mother-son lovers on an incest crusade to overthrow patriarchy. This would be more revolutionary than politics as usual. It would really change the culture—root and branch.
I burned my draft card, but rather than fleeing to Canada or going to jail, I stayed in college getting my master's in computer science until the war was winding down. Mom and I were active in the peace movement; we attended and helped organize demonstrations and were immensely glad when the troops finally came home.
Without the war to unify it, the movement splintered into many factions: political, feminist, ecological, black power, gay and lesbian rights, mystic, artistic, back to nature. After this parting of the ways, some said the establishment had managed to divide and conquer us, others that it was just a blossoming of diversity. Diana focused her efforts now on opposing the death penalty, trying to have it declared unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment.
One night we saw Jacquot on TV. It turned out he'd been fighting the system in his own way. He'd taken part in the Attica uprising and was one of the few rebels who weren't killed when Rockefeller's troops stormed them. We saw him being led away in chains. "He'll never get out now," Diana said, and we both cried. Crying was all we could do, though. Neither one of us wanted him out and storming us.
As time wore on, the music and the drugs got harder, people stopped meditating, the mood slipped into retro, the big chill came on. Bumper stickers that read, "Peace begins within you" gave way to "The one who dies with the most toys, wins!" Many people gave up working for change and settled for making money. Guys started wearing not just suits but suits with suspenders like their grandfathers. Business was back in. Politics became a branch of corporate public relations.
Eventually Bill Gates replaced John Lennon as the generational hero. Since I knew something of the world of computers, I was particularly disappointed by this.
I became a software engineer in Denver, and at work I'd often find myself daydreaming about new ways of engineering my hardware into mom's software.
Silicon Valley was just getting started, and I could've made more money there, but Diana was running the Public Defender's office by then and loved her job. She could decide which cases were worth fighting, which defendants had a chance of changing, and plea bargain the others. I loved to see her argue cases in court, so proud of her. She designed and taught a course, Criminal Defense of the Indigent, at the law school.
