love.
My mother laid a mind fuck on me in conjunction with the gift. She told me I was a young man now. I was old enough to decide who I wanted to live with.
I told her I wanted to live with my father.
She slapped me in the face and knocked me off the living-room couch. I banged my head on a coffee table.
I called her a drunk and a whore. She hit me again. I made up my mind to fight back next time.
I could brain her with an ashtray and negate her size advantage. I could scratch her face and ruin her looks so men wouldn’t want to fuck her. I could smash her with a bottle of Early Times bourbon.
She pushed me over a very simple line.
I used to hate her because my father did. I used to hate her to prove my love for him.
She just bought my own full-tilt hatred.
El Monte was prison camp. Weekends in L.A. were brief paroles.
My father took me to movies on Hollywood Boulevard. We caught
He took me by the Hollywood Ranch Market and gave me a crash course in homos. He said fruits wore mirrored shades to measure crotch bulges covertly. Fruits served one good purpose. Their presence expanded the pool of available women.
He wanted to know if I liked girls yet.
I told him I did. I didn’t tell him that full-blown women jazzed me more. Divorced mothers were more precisely my type.
Their bodies had these neat imperfections. Heavy legs and bra-strap markings drove me crazy. I liked pale- skinned, red-haired women especially.
The concept of motherhood excited me. I was up-to-date on the facts of life and was titillated by the fact that motherhood began with fucking. Women with kids had to be good at it. They were practiced. They developed a taste for sex during holy matrimony and couldn’t live without it when their ordained unions went kaput. Their need was dirty, shameful and thrilling.
Like my curiosity.
Our bathroom in El Monte was tiny. The bathtub faced the toilet at a right angle. I caught a glimpse of my mother drying off after a shower one night.
She saw me looking at her breasts. She told me that the tip of her right nipple got infected after my birth and had to be removed. Her tone was in no way provocative. She was a registered nurse explaining a medical fact.
I had pictures in my mind now. I wanted to see more.
I spent hours in the bathtub, feigning interest in a toy submarine. I saw my mother half-nude and nude and stripped to her slip. I saw her breasts sway. I saw her good nipple pebbled up from the cold. I saw the red between her legs and the way steam made her skin flush.
I hated her and lusted for her.
Then she was dead.
7
Monday, June 23rd, 1958. A bright summer day and the start of my sunny new life.
A nightmare woke me up.
My mother did not appear. Tony Curtis and his black stump-guard did. I shook the image off and let things sink in.
The boo-hoo stuff was behind me. I spilled some tears on the bus—and that was that. My period of mourning lasted half an hour.
I’ve got the look of that day memorized. It was incandescent powder blue.
My father told me the Wagners were coming out in a few days. Mrs. Krycki had agreed to look after my dog for a while. The funeral was next week—and my attendance was not mandatory. The Sheriff’s Crime Lab was set to shoot him the Buick. He planned to sell it for my mother’s short-term equity—if the provisions of her will did not bar the sale.
Mrs. Krycki told my father that I stabbed her banana trees to death. She demanded restitution—pronto. I told my father that I was just playing a game. He said it was no big thing.
He was coming off somber. I could tell he was really happy and in some state of serendipitous shell-shock. He was closing out his ex with postmortem minutiae.
He told me to amuse myself for a while. He had to go downtown and identify the body.
The Wagners arrived in L.A. a few days later. Uncle Ed was composed. Aunt Leoda was near distraught.
She worshipped her big sister. A style gap separated the Hilliker girls—Jean had the looks, the red hair and the sexy career. Her husband was superficially dashing and hung like a mule.
Ed Wagner was fat and stolid. He brought home the bacon. Aunt Leoda was a Wisconsin hausfrau. She was
