Have to call my mother. Haven’t spoken to her in three weeks. This puts a lot of pressure on the conversation. No doubt she has done things in the past three weeks, and I will hear about those things. It will now take three times as long to hear about all the things. Meals she has prepared; Amnesty International meetings she went to. Things pertaining to yoga, her yoga instructor. Her yoga instructor’s husband. He is a musician. He plays in a band; perhaps my mother will have gone to see the band perform, typically at an Italian restaurant. I will hear about the quality of the show.
Then I will be expected to say things. My things should also, logically, take three times as long as normal to say because of the lacuna in our communication. But I don’t talk about work. I hate talking about work; I am ashamed of how menial and unrewarding my job is, plus, bringing it up in any detail makes the humiliation and trauma fresh to me, and I don’t want her to hear this in my voice. I don’t want my mother to know that my life is mostly horrible. I also can’t talk to her about the thing that makes me the most happy, which is having unprotected sex with women much younger than me, right after I meet them. I can’t tell her how I’m extremely good at this and I’m pleased that I have become so practiced at it. That I had feared that as my age advanced and my hair turned gray and yet I still didn’t have any success or money, that the type of woman I am attracted to, which is ones that are over fifteen years younger than me– I had feared that I would lose my access to these women, that they would see me as a gross boring old pervert. But in fact it is easier when you are thirty six years old to have unprotected sex very fast with nineteen year olds than it has been at any other time. It is unbelievably easy, like a joke, and I can see this going on for ten more years, and their bodies are so beautiful, their pussies just lightly musky and fresh-tasting; I love when I’m fucking them to pretend that I’m going to ejaculate inside them and my copious seed will find purchase in their fertile and healthy young wombs and they will be pregnant and their lives will be ruined; this gives me so much happiness and pleasure. I cannot tell my mother about this. She likes to hear about the cat though.
I can tell her about birds I’ve seen and days I’ve spent in the park or mountains, and meals I’ve prepared. We can discuss different techniques for roasting a chicken, though frankly, I have absolutely perfected roasting a chicken and it should be a one sided conversation. But she tipped me off to a side dish where you simply halve a baguette and sit the chicken right on top of it, allowing fats and juices to soak into the bread which becomes a moist, rich, crusty sort of toast. This was revolutionary for me because previously roasting a chicken was a day long labor due to the side dishes: mashed potatoes or pommes Anna; drunkenly wrestling with wet slippery tubers and sharp blades– having an effortless yet delicious starch means a chicken can be roasted after work on a Tuesday night. Just because you have a stressful career is no reason you shouldn’t live well.
I kind of want to tell her: Ma, I’m all fucked up, I’m trapped in this job and it’s crushing me and I have no way out, and I’m a sex addict and I always hurt people and I’m going to get AIDS; I drink like a hobo and wake up on weekdays so hung over that my eyeballs hurt; sometimes I get so drunk on work nights that I break things and cry. I don’t know what I’m gonna do and please please help me. And if she knew that was how I felt she would desperately want to hear it. But I don’t want to worry her. I don’t want her to be sad. And it’s true, you know, I do like cooking chicken and looking at birds.
I wonder what shit she has going on that she’s keeping from me. Maybe she’s fucking nineteen year olds too, who knows.