When I was thirteen, my mother fucked me, three times. Never did a word about it pass between us.

Which isn't surprising, because I grew up under a code of silence. It wasn't written down, and it wasn't told to me. It was just the way it was. In my family, nobody talked about themselves, who they were, what was important to them, which of their doings were triumphs and which were disappointments, or how they felt. Above all, nobody talked about how he felt. Bitterness, anger, frustration, joy, love, despair, even mere happiness were emotions I read about in books and suspected I felt, but I had no guidelines from the adults around me. Probably I felt like other people did-or people in books, anyway-but the fact was that either I had the range of feelings that other people did or I was all alone in the world. For the most part, it felt like I was all alone in the world. In my house, there was occasional laughter and more often anger, but nothing in between. Like most kids, I assumed that my family was normal, that all families were like my family. I didn't learn until much later that I grew up in a strange atmosphere, indeed, and learned phrases like "flat affect."

When I was very young, before I'd internalized the code like everybody else had, I'd tell my mother when I was unhappy, when I felt sad, when the world wasn't going my way, and her response invariably was, "Think happy thoughts, and the sadness will go away." I didn't understand until much, much later that that must have been my mother's way of coping with a life that consisted of a good deal of unhappiness.

With the expression of emotion so heavily proscribed, whatever I felt as a child stayed inside. I didn't know what to do with what I felt. It had nowhere to go. I think that, because I was never able to vent emotions, they stayed there and built up, so that small emotional events were magnified many times, and, during the course of a day, I'd whipsaw between dejection and elation, murderous anger and infinite love. Still, as a child, in a child's body, with a child's perception of the world, with a child's belief in the normalcy of his life, the pent-up emotions were not terribly troublesome. I could sneak off and climb trees or throw rocks or sing to myself, out of sight and earshot of my parents, not silenced for being what I felt. The pressure didn't really start to build until early adolescence, when flowing hormones added their force to relief valves that had been welded shut. The greatest pressure-it seems no surprise now-came from the strongest drives, the strongest emotions, the most prohibited of expressions: sex.

It wasn't as if I were ignorant. As a precocious reader, I'd looked up all the dirty words in the dictionary, I'd read some old textbooks I'd found around the house, and I'd read a variety of "growing up" books I'd found in the homes of relatives and friends. I understood the differences between male and female anatomies, and I understood the general Tab-A-in-Slot-B nature of sex. What I had no help with at all was the welter of feeling that surrounded sex, to say nothing of its physical expression.

Most of my sex "education" came from the other boys in the neighborhood. There were about a half-dozen of us, separated four to six year in age from youngest to oldest. I was the youngest. When I was ten or eleven years old, the older boys had learned about masturbation, and they'd have honest-to-God circle-jerks. They didn't stand. Rather, they'd lounge around the walls of somebody's garage or in a "fort" or treehouse one of them had built, whip out their cocks, and pound away. I was too young to understand either the attraction of the activity or the thrill. Nonetheless, they'd urge me to join them.

"C'mon, Mike," one of them would taunt, "pull out that little pecker and let's see what you can do with it."

So I'd pull out my little pecker, which would be hard. I'd grasp it between thumb and fingertips and stroke away. But I didn't feel much of anything. Before too long, one of the older boys would announce, in a strained voice, "I'm getting The Feeling!" and then spurt his semen unabashedly. The others would spurt their spurts, too, in fairly quick succession, and that would be the end of the activity for the afternoon. We'd all put our peckers back in our pants and get back about more publicly acceptable boy-play.

Of course, masturbation made sense to me eventually. One night when I was twelve, nearing thirteen, as I was lying in bed having a difficult time going to sleep, I suddenly started thinking about girls, women, female sexual organs, breasts. My adolescent penis became rock hard, and, remembering the motions of the circle-jerks, I started stroking myself. And, oh, my! So that was what The Feeling was. From that point on, I could barely wait until bedtime. I'd jack off and jack off and jack off. At that age, my cock wouldn't go down after I came, and I could do it four or five or six times before I was ready for sleep. More than once, I jacked off so much that I abraded sores on my prick, and would have to endure several days of abstention until I could once again beat my meat without pain.

I had no sisters and no female cousins. There were no girls in the neighborhood. No girl pals, no tomboys to climb trees or wrestle with, no accidental hands in the wrong places, no embarrassing exposure of very private parts, no opportunities for furtive glances or sneaked peeks. I never saw girls my age changing their clothes, running around in their underwear, going to the bathroom, or soaking in a bathtub. The only female around me was Mom.

Where was Dad? At work. At a meeting. Playing golf. Hunting or fishing. Out for a game with the men's softball league. For all intents and purposes, he wasn't there.

Although we respected each other's privacy, nobody made a big deal out of incidental nudity around the house or got upset if unintentionally interrupted while in a state of undress. That was just the way it was. As with most everything else, nobody said anything about it. I habitually walked nude from my bedroom to the bathroom and back when I went to take a bath. One rule that had been established verbally was that the bathroom door never be locked, in case somebody got sick or slipped in the bathtub and needed help. If I needed to talk to my mother when she happened to be in the bathtub, I'd just walk into the bathroom and address her, as if she'd been sitting at the kitchen table.

Mom was a handsome woman. Not beautiful, and not plain. Just good looking. Her one vanity was her body shape. She always took great pains to maintain what she referred to as "my figure." She would often skip desserts or make dietary choices with the announcement, "I have to watch my figure, you know." She was not voluptuous. She was proportionate. Her breasts were of medium size, and her hips never widened beyond what was appropriate for her height. She always had about her an aura of health and wholesomeness. When I spoke to her while she was in the bathtub, it seemed that she was always relaxing, just soaking, and she never made an attempt to cover herself. She was just there, speaking to me. I looked at her, of course, taking in all of her body, but I don't think I stared or gaped. Her nipples would be exposed as her breasts became buoyant, and her pubic hair would be raised in the water. I didn't know what little girls looked like, but I knew what a woman looked like.

Mom's nightgowns. Mom always wore the same kind of nightgown. Always. The only variation was that they were ankle-length during the winter and knee-length during the summer. If the weather were particularly cold, she'd wear a bathrobe; if not, just the nightgown, in which she'd move about the house freely. They were made of nylon, and she never wore anything underneath them. The part that covered her chest was lace, opaque, and rigid enough that neither the shape of her breasts nor the darkness of her nipples was visible, but the rest clung to her body like a second skin. Every nuance of her body and movement was transmitted through the cloth, the hollow of her navel in the slight swell of her stomach, and a softly raised area over her pubic hair. From behind, I could see every vertebra, the dimples at the small of her back, the beginnings of her gluteal cleft, and the gentle indentations at the sides of her buttocks. And, if she bent over, the shape and contour of what was between her legs.

One evening, during the time I was just coming to understand my sexuality and to appreciate it by masturbating several times a night, I walked into the bathroom to talk to my mother, and found her sitting on the closed toilet, cutting her toenails. She had one foot on the floor, and the other heel on the edge of the toilet seat. Her legs were spread slightly, and her cheek was against the inside of her raised knee as she leaned forward to pay attention to her toes. It was from that position that she spoke to me, not moving her head, but only raising her eyes to look at me. Her nightgown had slipped down her raised thigh so that her entire pubic area was exposed and open to my view. In the process of casually looking down at her foot as part of taking in the whole scene, I could not avoid seeing her genitals, which were right next to her heel.

For the first time, I saw not just a hazy triangle of pubic hair floating in bath water but all of her, the skin beneath the hair and the folds of flesh. And, right in the middle, a dark spot. In a rush, all the books I'd read, all the jokes the boys had made, all the coarse references to women's genitalia, all the disparate pieces of information I'd gathered, came together, and I realized that I was looking directly into my mother's vagina, slightly open because of her position. Her pussy, her cunt, it, the place, her hole. The understanding of what I was seeing impacted my hormone-generation machinery with such force that I nearly fainted. I suddenly felt hot and prickly all over. My mouth went dry, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to speak. Almost certainly, I must have flushed visibly, but Mom didn't move a muscle. She just looked at me, with her eyebrows raised in her typical, "Yes?" facial expression. Even in my state of distraction, I knew that I didn't want Mom to change her position. I wanted to be able to look and look at her, and I knew that I had to maintain an ordinary demeanor. So I spoke to her. And she spoke to me, never changing her position, never moving her chin and closing her legs, never putting the raised heel on the floor. We had our exchange, and I left, with my heart still pounding so ferociously that the whole world had a pink hue. I went to my bedroom and stood for several minutes, supporting myself with one hand on my desk as my heartbeat slowed and I caught my breath. That incident may have been wholly innocent. Mom may not have realized the degree to which she was exposed. Or she might have thought that it was better for her not to make sudden moves to hide herself, as if she were embarrassed or ashamed, as if there were anything wrong. All I know is that that scene from childhood is indelibly etched on my brain. Indelibly.

Just after I turned thirteen, my father decided to take a new job in Denver, about a thousand miles distant from where were living on the coast of California. Of course, there was no discussion of the matter. Dad announced his decision as a fait accompli, then merely gave directives for what was going to happen next. He would go on ahead to Denver to start the job, leaving Mom behind to deal with movers and clean up the house. Of course, I stayed behind with Mom.

Mom hated long drives. Driving made her nervous and tense, and tired her quickly, so she decided to split the trip into three segments of about 300 miles each. That was okay with me, because I hated long drives, too. At that age, there was nothing in the world more boring than just sitting, hour after dreary hour, in a moving automobile.

The first leg of our journey took us across California's Central Valley, up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, and down into Nevada. I'd been through the Central Valley before, and I didn't care much for it. Having been raised in the cool greyness of coastal fog, I considered the heat of the valley virtually unendurable. It was August, and the temperature was well above 100. We had all the windows in the car down, and, to me, it felt like we were driving into a furnace. The hot wind seemed to suck the air from my lungs and the moisture from my lips. As we drove, with the car undulating hypnotically over the slabs in the concrete road, I drowsed, went into an almost trance-like state, neither wholly awake nor fully asleep, adrift in a state of consciousness where fantasy and reality were not easily distinguishable.

In that state, I became aroused, and my thoughts turned to my mother, in her bath, and sitting on the toilet seat, calling to me with her open vagina. I imagined us together, both nude, touching one another, gently, lovingly, exploring one another. Mom was not being wanton or lascivious; in fact, not acting in a particularly sexual way. Because I'd had no sexual experience, I knew nothing of sexual behavior, so I couldn't fantasize it. We were just there, touching, Mom being present, loving, and caring in a motherly way... but more, something more I was able to sense, but not fully realize. I fixed on her pubic hair and mine-pubic hair was a novelty to me at the time-and I imagined our pubic hair rubbing together, just enough to be aware of it, another kind of caress, a slight tickle. And then... and then, it was inevitable. Mom wanted me and I wanted her, all that could happen next would be for me to slip inside of her, and I could see her smile broaden as we joined. I must have floated through this dreamworld of utter innocence and extreme sexuality for more than an hour, re-experiencing Mom's and my joining over and over.

I've always found the scent of evergreens particularly pleasant, stimulating, as if a memory of them were buried in my cells someplace, as if the mountains were somehow part of a past I didn't remember, and I left my dreamworld when we reached the treeline in the Sierra. The temperature dropped to a comfortable level instantly as we passed from one layer of air to another. Mom was hunched over slightly, her attention fixed rigidly ahead, both hands gripping the steering wheel almost to the point of white knuckles. Her skirt was hiked halfway up her thighs, and her legs were spread. I could not re-enter the dream-state, but I could remember it, and I thought about what I'd been thinking about, truly wondering if the impossible could become possible.

We continued up the mountains, around Lake Tahoe, into Nevada, and down the barren eastern slope of the Sierra to hot, dry, wretched, boring desert. We reached Austin, the end of our first day of driving, late in the afternoon. Mom checked us into to only motel in town, a ramshackle collection of warped clapboard cottages that was probably a survivor of dustbowl days. She took a room with a double bed because it was cheaper than one with two single beds. She and Dad had had words about her wanting to take three days to make the drive when Dad thought she should be able to do it in two, so she was trying to economize wherever she could to compensate for what Dad had called her "indulgence." We parked the car, dropped our bags in the room, washed up, and walked next door to the only cafe in town, where we ate a dinner of what tasted like grilled cardboard as we contemplated the fly-specked walls.

The motel room was almost as barren inside as the desert was outside. Rough studs stood naked along the unfinished walls, and three small, hazy windows were covered by yellowed curtains. The bed, one rickety chair, and a side-table whose surface was laced by generations of cigaret burns barely left room for two people and two suitcases. The bed was an ancient affair, a mattress on steel springs, shaped more like a hammock than a bed. In the bathroom were a severely stained toilet, a rusty tin shower, a rusty sink, and a mirror with half its silver missing in a rusty metal frame.

Mom was nearly catatonic after her day of driving. Her eyes half closed with exhaustion, she said, "We'd better take showers and go to bed. We have a long day of driving ahead of us tomorrow." For the next few minutes, we shuffled around each other, arranging suitcases and trying to stay out of each other's way, while Mom got out her travel kit and nightgown. I sat in the rickety chair and waited, thinking about Mom in her bathtub at home and thinking about Mom in the shower a few feet away. Once again, I remembered my fantasies of the afternoon, and, once again, I became aroused.

In moments, it seemed, Mom was back in the room, wearing only her nightgown-short, of course, since it was summer-stuffing her dirty underwear into a laundry bag and wrestling her suitcase into the alcove that served as a closet. I got out my ditty bag and my pajamas, and took my turn in the shower. Although Mom's shower produced nothing but the sound of running water, mine was punctuated by thumps and bongs as I elbowed the walls of the tiny stall. And I had a dilemma. My hard-on wouldn't go away, and I was desperately afraid that the single-snap fly on my pajamas wouldn't afford me the modesty I would have preferred. Quickly, furtively, I jacked off, coming as quickly as I could. After I came, I didn't immediately get soft. I thought about school, I thought about mowing lawns, I thought about playing baseball, I tried my best to ignore visions of Mom's pussy on the toilet seat, I tried my best to put myself in a frame of mind to share a bed with my mother without embarrassing myself. By the time I'd dried, with a moth-eaten piece of cloth that barely had enough terry loops left to be called a towel, my cock had gone down to about one-third mast, and as long as I didn't think about pubic hair, as long as I didn't flex the muscles...

Mom was in bed, flat on her back, her arms outside the threadbare cover, nearly asleep, when I came back into the room. She rolled her head in my direction. "What took you so long?" she said.

I must have blushed from head to foot; fortunately, the room was so dim in the dubious light of the 25-Watt bulb in the bedside lamp that it probably didn't show. "I'm not used to showering," I offered. Which was true, since we had only a bathtub at home, even if not the real reason.

"I can't stay awake much longer," Mom said. "Hop in. Be sure to stay on your side of the bed, now."

I got in, clinging to the edge of the mattress to stay as far on my side as I could. Mom turned out the light, said "Good-night," rolled away from me, exhaled one long sigh, and was instantly asleep.

I didn't fare so well. Between my having dozed during the day, the bed's being strange and uncomfortable, the room's being strange, my never having shared a bed with anyone, and Mom's admonition to stay on my side of the bed and my apprehension about what would happen if I didn't, I couldn't get sleepy. I lay there the way you do when you're a kid trying to get to sleep and your brain won't shut off. I thought about stuff. All kinds of stuff. But no matter what I thought, my thoughts would return to breasts and pubic bushes and pussies; to Mom in her bathtub, to Mom sitting on the toilet, looking at me with the eye between her legs. I got a disastrous hard-on. It wouldn't go away. It just kept getting worse and worse, so hard I thought it was going to pop. I couldn't jack off as I would have at home, and I was afraid to get up and go into the bathroom for fear of waking Mom or her asking if I was sick or something. To make matters worse, every time I relaxed my grip on the edge of the mattress, I slid down against Mom's back. That bed didn't have sides. It only had a middle.

The third or fourth time I slid down against Mom and then clawed my way back up to my side again, she turned her head toward me and hissed, "Lie still!" I lay still, my shoulders against Mom's shoulders, my butt against Mom's butt, in total agony. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't turn my brain off, and I couldn't make my hard-on go away. In pained silence, I lay there, suffered, and hoped that sleep would eventually come.

Apparently, sleep did come, because the next thing I knew, I was awake again, in pitch darkness, and my cock felt wet and warm and wonderful. I was completely disoriented. In the darkness, I couldn't get a fix from my surroundings. I only knew that I wasn't at home, in my own bed. And then both memory and awareness flooded into me: Mom and I had driven from where we used to live to Austin, Nevada; we were sharing a sagging bed in a falling-down motel.

My hearing switched back on, and I registered my mother's voice, saying, "Oh, no. Oh, no. No. No. No."

What had happened, I reasoned-though I could hardly claim to be reasoning logically-what I intuited was that, during sleep, I rolled over so that my front was against my mother's back. Her nightgown must have hitched up as she slept, my perpetual erection escaped from the barely closed fly of my pajamas, and, somehow, found its way into my mother. I had no idea whether I had pressed forward into her or she had pressed back onto me. It didn't matter. Fantasy had become reality.

With each "no," Mom rocked her hips and pressed against me. Between no's, she rocked her hips forward and pulled away. Three rocks of Mom's hips after I became fully aware of what was going on, I came, helplessly and uncontrollably. With the first pulse of my ejaculation, Mom rocked her hips back against me, squeezed her ass cheeks together hard, and didn't move. I heard her inhale through her teeth, then hold her breath. For my part, involuntarily, I think, I drove my hips forward and pushed as deeply into her as I could. That was a come like I'd never experienced before. I felt like I'd discovered heaven and eternal bliss in an instant, like I was going to die and was afraid I wouldn't, like I was going to live forever in a state of utter ecstasy. I came so hard and so long that I got a cramp in my asshole. Only after I'd spurted my last spurt did Mom exhale and relax her grip on my cock.

And then I was scared shitless. My brain felt like it was split into two warring pieces, one reveling in the exquisite feelings of the moment, wanting that moment to last forever, wanting to have more moments like it; the other telling me that I had done something awfully wrong, awaiting punishment, knowing that my mother was at any moment going to ask me what in the world I thought I was doing, telling me to get back to my side of the bed. The half of my brain that was telling me I'd done something wrong was also telling me to pull out of Mom, to turn my back to her, to climb back up my side of the bed and cling to the edge, to shut my eyes as tight as I could and pretend that nothing had happened. The half of my brain that was basking in delight was telling me to kiss the back of my mother's neck, to stroke her skin, to press back into her, to live the moment more. Part of me tried to imagine that my mother was fully asleep and didn't have any idea what had happened, and I was afraid that if I moved, she'd wake up, and I'd be in big trouble. Part of me didn't want to move. In fact, I was paralyzed, torn between the warring factions in my brain. I neither pressed forward nor moved away. I stayed put, right where I was.