Chapter 12

Since my luck lately (outside of bed) had been all bad, it didn't surprise me to learn that I couldn't get a plane flight to Huntsville, Alabama, or to anywhere else for that matter. Most of the various airline unions had gone out on a sympathy strike for the independent truckers protesting obscene diesel fuel costs. Airplane fuel wasn't very cheap at the moment either! All of the stews, baggage handlers and even most of the pilots had taken 'industrial action' and walked off the job. No planes were going anywhere, so that left driving there in my old battered Dodge truck ... and the insanely high cost of diesel fuel!

Fuck me very much!

I cashed out my emergency PayPal rainy day fund, electronically transferring it into my checking account and I figured that this ought to give me enough pocket money for at least the drive there. I had a couple of gas station credit card, but I was still likely to need cash for everything else. Getting back again was going to be another issue. I'd never asked my mother for a dime in my entire life and damned if I was going to start doing so now ... even to haul her crazy ass home. Worse even still, to live with me, or rather us!

I never could stand being around my mother for longer than five minutes and leaving for college on my football scholarship was pretty darned near the happiest fucking day of my life! She was crazy, wild mondo crazy batshit howling at the fucking moon loony right from day one. Always had been, and growing older hadn't improved her one little bit. I have no clue why my father married her, let alone stayed with her for forty something years!

This complicated my plan for unloading my lodestone of a house! Damn it ... it completely pooched that clever and cunning plan entirely! Garry loved me as a brother, but no one even for either fraternity, love or even cold hard cash would put up with my mom! For now, or at least another few weeks, I need to keep the house ... just to have some damned place to park the old crazy bitch! Assuming I could pay that ten thousand dollar bribe to the inspector in order to get our residency permit! I didn't have any other options, I didn't think that even our other two batty senior citizen neighbor, Arlene or Larry Collins, could put up with her as a roommate ... even for just overnight!

No ... I now needed to keep the house, and thus I needed to make that fucking ten grand bribe payment ... and that meant another two weeks of bumping and grinding for my girls, or worse - begging for money from my mom! The two worst possible things left in the world that I didn't want to happen! Maybe I could lock the old crazy bat away in some seniors' motel, but where would I get even that cash?

Why did the gods fucking hate me?

I gathered up an overnight bag and drove the old Dodge pickup down to the nearest cheap (or relatively so) gas station on the feeder road at I-35. I even filled up the portable lawn mower gas jerry can with diesel too, just in case prices along Interstate I-10 looked too scary, or worse, no diesel was even available! While pumping, I first gave Garry a quick phone call to say that I was out of town for a minimum of four days and possibly a few more, and to try, god bless him, to keep the women from going crazy ... or any crazier in the case of Trixie.

Next I called Amy. She was the most sensible and practical of the two women, at least in emotional matters. She had transferred back over to work at Kathy's bank branch again so that the two women could carpool together. Now I was quite afraid I'd now fucked up even that simple arrangement as I gave her the bad news.

"Please ... lover, master ... let me give notice and quit my teller job. Right now! I can earn more dancing full time at the club, weekday afternoons and evenings too than working here and just stripping on weekend evenings. Please ... we need the money and I'm our best hope. I can dance ... and if I dance I can make the money we need. I'll make Kathy keep her job here and I'll see that she toes the line at the club. I can say that I've got a family problem and need at least a two week leave of absence, or even move my work schedule to just part-time in the mornings, seven until noon only. If they won't give it to me, I'll threaten to quit. I can get another job later, but I've been with the bank long enough that they'll want to keep me anyway and they'll give me the leave time. Let me dance for you, for us... please?"

I think I whispered 'ok', but I was already too brain dead to really notice. I'd loved Kathy and I'd already more or less lost her to her crazed alter-ego Trixie. Now I was falling in love with Amy and I was going to soil her with my desperate irresponsible financial needs!

To make it worse, she asked me if I had enough cash to make the trip, and I couldn't lie and say that I did. She had $500 of leftover dancing "emergency money' left in her purse and she told me, flat out ordered me in fact, to come by and collect it from her before I started the long drive. I couldn't say no. Already, I was a kept man living upon her earnings, with a shitty job that paid even less than her daytime banking job, and debts that seemed at the moment to be crushing.

Actually, now I didn't even have that crappy job at the antique mall anymore! I needed the whole week off and when the asshole owner wouldn't give it to me I loudly told him to fuck off and I quit over the phone! Actually, that was the happiest moment of the day and it was one tiny little weight off of my shoulders!

I took the money from Amy. It wasn't like I had much if any real self respect left anyway. She loved me and was willing to give or sacrifice anything for our happiness and I was terrified at how utterly this devotion was likely going to destroy her in the end.

It was all going to end in tears. We were doomed and I didn't see any hope of escape from it.

I would like to say that the long day and half drive to northern Alabama gave me enough quiet meditation time to clear my head and think of some cunning plan that would save us all from certain damnation, not really in the actual biblical sense, but how I could at least maybe recover a tiny smidgeon of my own self respect and look at myself in the mirror without a feeling of self-loathing. I wanted to return to being the man that Amy believed I was, but damned if I could figure out how to find that place in the darkness that I was in.

And now a few days spent with my bizarro mother wasn't likely to improve my mood one little tiny bit!

Let me try and explain something about my mother, although I rather wished that I could have spared you. She spent her entire thirty-three year career working at NASA starting in 1963 at the brand new Manned Spaceflight Center, what would become the Johnson Space Center, near Houston. It was her first job out of high school and she was one of the very first people hired to work in what would become the Public Affairs office. She had a two digit employee number and worked in the same office for her entire career! NASA was going to put a man on the moon, and the first Mercury astronauts were like rock gods in those days. Everyone wanted a signed photo or to schedule a public appearance and her office handled those sorts of things. She knew all the astronauts intimately ... yes, in both senses of the word!

Later in the 1960's it was fashionable for groupies to want to fuck rock musicians and my mother, already 'eccentric' even in her young days (and actually quite astonishingly cute and pretty then too), got an early start and she spread her attractive young legs for virtually all of America's space heroes (and at least two Russian cosmonauts too), early and often ... and met them regularly long after their NASA careers were over too! As a boy I once sneaked a peak into one of her many scrapbook binders, one allotted for each astronaut, and delved into the goodies inside. Naturally at the front there was a personalized signed 8x10 color glossy photograph, or even as many as six or ten different ones from different missions of their careers. Next came a listing of dates, and sometimes also hotel room numbers. Sometimes lots and lots of dates. My mom was getting more rocket jockey action than Trixie the Slut! Other mementos (such as dried up used condoms and similar sorts of things) filled later pages, not to mention some rather explicitly candid bedroom photos. Yep, tits, cunt and cocks (albeit just one at a time – unlike the Slut, my mom didn't do trains ... except for perhaps the crew of Apollo 12 ... maybe), mostly in B&W but some color snaps too, just as if she were gone on holiday.

My mom married my dad, a NASA rocket scientist right about the time the Gemini space missions started, but she had most of that second group of rocket jocks nailed too ... and the majority of the Apollo astronauts as well for good measure! Then in the 1970's came the Skylab missions (she'd banged most of them as well) and then starting in the eighties she made a run at collecting the Space Shuttle pilots as well. She nailed a few of them too, but had diminishing success with them until her retirement in the mid nineties. Those guys could get much younger and nicer poon than hers by those days.

Ergo, taking her nearly forty year career of cuckolding my father left right and sideways, and twice on Friday nights, I had to assume that neither myself nor my siblings were fathered by dad's sperm. She was certainly getting the vast majority of it elsewhere other than home. Even I could tell as a fairly young kid that mom stayed out alone most weekend nights, and often worked late on weeknights too and came home sometimes drunk, often disheveled and nearly always with smudged lipstick and wrinkled skirts.

Face it. Mom was a slut. A cheating adulterous whore of a slut who apparently flaunted her conquests right in dad's nose, which unfortunately never once got out of joint, at least within my hearing. For a devout southern Baptist, my father was certainly absurdly tolerant of a lot of blatant infidelity, not to mention plenty of space jocks all coveting thy neighbors' handmaiden, and so forth.

Anyway, dad never did a thing about it, and really as a direct result of this, none of us kids had much if any respect for the wimp. I don't know if he was sterile and unable to get an erection for medical reasons or if he got his private jollies slurping down someone else's cream pie leftovers. They slept in the same bed, but as far as I know they only slept in it. Kids know when their parents fuck, we've got a perverse radar for that sort of thing, and ours didn't.

Ergo again, this probably meant that our sperm donors were all macho dudes with all of the right stuff, space studs ready and able to service a favorite bit of well-used ass, on the job or off, assuming they couldn't nail anything else younger or choicer. The one scrapbook I'd peeked at was for an Apollo astronaut with over one hundred different listed dates that mom had written down to record their assignations. If this was just an average stud book, then my mom had taken enough astronaut splooge to float a space capsule splashdown!

One date in that particular book had been circled, and if you added exactly nine months to it, then you'd have my late brother's birthday, her first child born in the mid 1970's. Interesting fact that! Having superior military hero, test pilot and moon walking genes didn't benefit Duncan all that much though. When he was eight he rode his bike like a screaming meteor through a stop sign and got creamed by a passing car. DOA at the hospital. I was just a newborn at the time and my older sister was four years old.

I wasn't curious enough to check out any of the other scrap books to perhaps try and find a matching circled date that would record my own conception, and learn what aerospace hero provided half of my genetic material. No ... I didn't want to know then, or even now, but they were some pretty studly genetic genes, enough to get me a football scholarship away from home and give me enough charismatic good looks to attract three women who all wanted to now live with me. I guess my brain, when it's working, isn't bargain basement quality either. Maybe I should have made more of my life ... I probably could have been a great Air Force pilot, or something like that, but I decided to become 'me' instead, and stayed something of a slacker who just loved collecting and selling old stuff!

Thanks dad, whomever you are, but stay the hell out of my life! It would just be far too creepy to wander up to some old space hero at a public appearance and ask him to sign a picture, 'Love, Your Natural Father'. Nope, that's just way too weird!

The top notch astronaut semen was wasted on my older sister, who virtually all of her genetics from her mother, and she's crazy enough herself that we're not close. She was diagnosed seriously bipolar about the time I was just starting middle school and she would never take any of her meds even then. She'd also probably sue her biological sperm donor for thirty-four years of back child support in a heartbeat, if there was a dime to be made out of it. Yeah, she's just that sort of petty bitch. She's on husband number four now and living up in Michigan, far away from the rest of us ... may it continue ever so!

Anyway, Mom retired from NASA right after I started high school and she and dad moved back to his old home in Alabama about five minutes after I packed off for college. He retired there from the Marshall Space Flight Center after forty plus years but still I think he worked there off and on afterwards as an consultant right until the very end. For a retirement day job he also worked as a purchasing manager for a supermarket chain and on Sundays he was a lay deacon at his local Southern Baptist church. My dad had a strong work ethic and never could sit around at home and never knew how to do just put in a 40-hour work week. Hell, living with my mother would drive anyone out of the house as much as possible!

Again, I wasn't close with my father. We just had nothing in common with each other. He wasn't a bad man, neither angry of disposition nor even often drunk, but his idea of time spent with the kids was either at the dining table reading a newspaper or in his arm chair reading a scientific journal while watching TV. I could probably count the number of sincere conversations I'd had with him over the years on one hand, and probably have several fingers left over.

He was never an important part of my life to miss, now that he was dead. In a vaguely generic way I could feel the loss, but at best my only sincere regret was that my mother outlived him. That's pretty cruel, but if my attitude towards my father was mere indifference, then her own more pointed indifference towards her own children was much more cutting.

No, I'm not on good terms with mom and probably never, ever will be. She's a skilled pathological manipulator, possibly even to a sociopathic level, who thinks of herself only - first, foremost and always, from sunup to bedtime. Anything or anyone else was a bloody inconvenience!

Now I had the distinct feeling that I was being set up for something nasty and unpleasant. That's my mother, right to her heartless core. I knew that my troubles were about to become even worse, but even my most pessimistic guesses didn't quite prepare me for the rat fuck I was about to inherit, literally!

"Ok, let me get this absolutely clear now in my head, mom. Your preacher from the pulpit one Sunday revealed that God had told him that the world was coming to an end this year just before Christmas, and that the lord would then summon the faithful in a flash of light, leaving the ungodly behind who would ravage the world into its final apocalyptic destruction! Burn baby, burn! Accordingly, you and dad sold the house at terms that would make a stick-up bandit blush with shame; you then also sold all of your worldly goods, more or less, and spent the money... all of it, upon survival 'doomsday' preparation supplies. Two and a half goddamned fucking forty foot long shipping containers worth! All neatly lined up right here in the driveway for me to just toss onto the back of my truck to haul your worshipfulness home! How fucking thoughtful! But it shows some percipience that the angels of the fucking Almighty weren't going to be visiting your address to take you to his happy new home ... I guess they're filled up with their quota of adulterous sluts already!"

The ungrateful bitch then slapped my face and warned me not to take the Almighty's name in vain. I repeated the oath and more than a few more and threatened to slap the crazy old woman back. Yeah ... I'd do it too ... I had to take her craziness while I lived under her roof when I was kid but I swore when I left home that I'd never again be subjected to her egotistic self-centeredness.

"That's your father's truck too, you ungrateful swine. You never did appreciate anything that he did for you!"

"What are you raving about? Your husband didn't want to take his nearly thirty year old pickup truck back with him here to Alabama when you moved here after I went to college, and since he couldn't find another sucker, and rather than just leaving it behind, he sold it to me ... and at full actual market value too! He never even warned me that the beat-up old thing needed both a new motor and transmission, not to mention complete replacement of all of the shocks and struts, and virtually every other mechanical part! I've only kept the damned thing because I've dumped a fortune in repair costs into it and no one with any sense would give me a dime for it! If you can name anything that he ever did for me gratus, without a catch, quid pro quo, or other payback, I'd drop over with shock!"

She couldn't of course, so she changed the subject and started discussing how she already contacted all of the collection agencies representing her credit cards, to tell them that'd be assuming all of her various debts. She positively gloated with glee as I couldn't disguise the look of absolutely utter abject horror on my face and the news of this fresh outrage. Nope, dealing with reality had always been an alien concept for my mother! Everyone else on this planet merely existed as tools for her to use and abuse, and now after over a decade of relative peace and quiet, she had decided that it was time to try and ruin my life once more.

Yeah, I hadn't missed anything. Mom had proudly declared she didn't have a penny to her name and now she (and her zombie apocalypse prep supplies) were all going to merrily trundle along home with me, to stay with her faithful obedient son. Fuck her! I was in horrific debt and had needed to borrow money just to drive here and now the selfish old cow couldn't even cough up a dime for gas money! Hell, she was chuckling and as pleased as punch that now all of her problems were now mine ... and mine alone!

I was a millimeter ... and perhaps just a nanosecond from just spitting upon her and driving off back home without her ... and without the slightest regret. It didn't help that she was gleefully goading me on, misquoting some Old Testament jibber-jabber about faithless sons and something about certain torment in scorpion pits in the hereafter. Shit ... if I could find a scorpion pit, her ass would already be chucked inside it, except that this might be considered cruel punishment for the scorpions.

I counted to ten quietly to avoid saying something vile and nasty that I really, really would have meant every single word of, and when that didn't calm me down I just stomped off to the back yard to ponder why the Gods wanted to utterly destroy me. 'Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad', is the quote, or something very much like it ... and I was mad enough to gibber or run amok with an axe!

Since I couldn't find a handy axe (I did look), I settled for calling Amy to blubber for psychic moral support, if nothing else. Checking the time and the time zone difference I thought it likely that she'd be at work, at the Platinum Girls either dancing onstage or jiggling her bare tits for tips. Still I decided to give her a call first anyway. It was a Friday night and Kathy, along with the other girls would also be getting ready to work as well. Luckily, Amy picked up her cell phone on the second ring. She was taking a break backstage and chatting with the Stage Mom, the woman responsible for managing the dancers. She was expecting to be called out on stage next in about ten minutes for a half hour of dancing upon three separate stages and then she'd have an hour or more of lap dances and drink hustling before her next dance rotation. As the new star performer, the management liked to keep her busy!

"Hi love," I muttered sadly, "I'm here, but things are at least as bad as I predicted. Worse really ... mom's totally blown all of her money and now apparently I'm also now on hock for at least seventeen thousand dollars more on mom's maxed out credit cards that have already gone to collections! Otherwise, I can't get any straight answers out of her about what other sorts of trouble she might now have me mixed up in. She's also got three shipping containers she wants ported to our home, and of course with the trucker strike no one's going to haul them unless the shipping fee is outrageous ... and from the estimates I've seen, it is! There's no way we can pay it ... or even should! She's being abominable, again!"

"She's your mother, and now that she's a widow it is your responsibly to care for her." Amy calmly stated. Damn! In Asian culture family is everything. There are unspeakable oriental hells for ungrateful children like me who do not honor their parents adequately. There was also no convincing my lover that this particular parent deserved her own special hell, and an express ticket there! Mom had burned her last bridge with me a long time ago and she was positively gloating over the trouble that she knew she'd made for me. There wasn't a prayer of her ever earning my filial respect ... she never done anything once in her life to deserve any!

"She's your mother!" Amy just repeated louder and more firmly with the sort of tone that suggested that her mind had been quite firmly made up, thank you very much and that I would be wise to follow likewise. Damn, I hate it when women do that ... my ex was a genius at this and other guilt games. At least this time my lover meant her gentle criticism in a more kindly way.

"We're really fucked then love. Worse now than ever! To get those containers here, my mom's found some local brothers with a private trucking company willing to do the run for five thousand each ... that's fifteen K! Cash in hand too. Maybe they'll take it on delivery, but who knows. I'll have to beg as it is! Just maybe we can quickly turn around and resell the shipping containers. They're supposed to run about four thousand each, but I'm willing to bet that with the fuel hassles and the strikes that this market is depressed too, but we can take what we can get ... but I just can't see us getting fifteen thousand by next weekend, when they'd likely deliver. Oh God, we're totally screwed!"

"Love, I think I just heard the standby notice for my name, so I'm on-stage in less than five minutes. Love, there is something I can do ... that we, your girls can do ... and yes, it would be all for you! There are two big private parties here this weekend, tonight in a couple of hours and an even bigger one tomorrow night. Lots of big VIP's and management offered us some really huge tip guarantees plus an appearance fee just for the dancing, not counting the extras. Kathy and I can go, and I'm sure that Anne-Marie will agree as well. The decision is yours my love and master, but remember that I love you and would do anything for you ... including this."

I remained silent on the phone for perhaps a full minute, just too broken with sadness and depression to utter a sound. My lover was indeed willing to give anything for us, including her body for the amusement of strangers. How could I live with myself if I said yes?

"My love I have to go now," she whispered to me in a hurry, "and unless you tell me explicitly 'No', we'll then do what we need to do, for you and for us... all of us, your lovers. Please master, I must go now for my show!"

"Amy ... I love you, more than you can possibly understand. I don't deserve you ... especially now. Be safe!"

"I will ... I love you too and so does Kathy, and even Anne too!"

Amy disconnected the line and as the sun began to set here in the back yard trees in northern Alabama the last feeble bit of hope and happiness was also sucked right out my heart.

I hadn't slept during the entire long non-stop drive and I'd had little sleep the days before, but now, disheartened and exhausted beyond tears, I found that sleep wouldn't come at all this night either. With my eyes either open or shut, all I could see was the vision of the women I loved offering themselves to strangers, to smile and perhaps giggle while men who were not either their friends or lovers sexually used them, all because the man they were enamored of was too useless to be able to provide for them.

I could just about handle the thought of Trixie the Slut at last unleashed, free to whore herself with gleeful abandon, taking cocks and semen into every orifice she possessed, giggling like an insane woman as every conceivable indignity was performed upon her ... and for ready cash. Oddly this thought didn't bother me in the slightest anymore.

Worse though, was envisioning Anne-Marie, the now much merrier widow, trying to match the psychotic slut cock for cock, lost in rapture from the recent release of her long enforced celibacy. While she would probably love the raw sex, she couldn't possibly be as slutty as Trixie, but I could see her giving it an attempt. What would she think of herself afterwards? What regrets would she have? Surely I was the only possible person to blame.

The most terrible still was imagining Amy's abject surrender as she gave herself with a stoic smile to service the sexual needs of the VIP's. She was already the star dancer and every limp dicked motherfucker at the party was going to want a piece of her, perhaps as nearly simultaneously as was possible. She'd do them all, every last one until her cunt and ass were too ravaged to plunder anymore and she'd swallowed all of the semen that her stomach could hold. They'd gang bang her for hours tonight, probably even still this very moment. Then my shy lover would wearily throw a few clothes on, clean herself up and then mentally prepare to have it all done again to her tomorrow, perhaps by twice as many men. Her soul would be shattered by this experience; I would have destroyed her and probably also our love.

There was no way she could look at me again with the same relatively innocent eyes. There was no way she could look at me ever again with adoring love and affection.

I'd lost everything and for nothing ... nothing at all. All because I couldn't say 'No' tonight, either to Amy or my mother. Nor could I find a proper object to perform this entirely necessary matricide either.

Things just couldn't get any worse, and then I remembered I'd be trapped in the truck with my mother driving home for over twenty-four straight hours!

Regarding the shipping containers, since one of the forty-foot standard shipping containers was only about half full, I had the minor brainstorm of arranging to get a smaller twenty-foot one with a trailer instead in trade for it so I could repackage the partial load into this lighter one instead. Since my old truck had a powerful v8 engine and a trailer hitch, I could then port this smaller container myself home upon the relatively lightweight wheeled flatbed. It took a day to make the trade and repack the smaller container, but I least now I only had to pay for two containers to be transported, instead of three, but it didn't help me as much as I'd hoped.

I obtained three separate quotes but they were all appalling. To defy the independent truckers strike, even the cheapest estimate was probably triple what the expense ought to have been in kinder days. Even the lowest quote now was about the same as the one offered to my mother less than a week ago for the original three containers! It was blatant robbery, but like the crooked housing inspector back home, I was backed into a corner once more without any other options. They also wanted half of the payment in advance. Not a fucking chance! I could just see it in their greedy faces that they'd instead rob the contents and pull a no-show, certain that I couldn't shit about it! Instead, I had a safer compromise ... and a trivial way of getting some slight revenge upon my mom!

"Nope! Cash payment upon delivery, only ... and if you cut the locks and do some cherry picking, then some of our Texas boys would be delighted to compare firearms with you! Now, for just a bit of encouragement to play nice and fair instead, I can offer you something of an alternative down payment!"

I grabbed mom's left hand and with a swift jerk, slipped off from her finger her wedding ring and tossed it to the elder of the trucker brothers. It was a rather big gaudy gem encrusted monstrosity that dad had bought for her on their twentieth anniversary. Worth at least ten grand then and God knows how much now! Mom started to protest, but I cut her complaint down cold.