Redemption: Part I

I.
   Although by the time you finish reading this story you might think otherwise, I am not a pervert. In fact, I don’t think I’ve even ever

actually met a pervert. I mean nobody I know has come out and said that they were, and I haven’t ever seen any evidence of perversity. And even if some people are perverts, if I don’t know about it, then I guess it’s not really perverted. You need two people to be a pervert––the pervert and the person who finds the pervert perverse. And maybe people have decided to label what I did as perverse, but I have never been a pervert. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I know how everybody’s sick of listening to excuses, but, like most of the people I know, I too have a screwed-up family. The funny thing is though that it didn’t get screwed-up until recently when my father got hooked on internet chat rooms. Ever since then it has been downhill for my mother, and when it’s downhill for my mother, it’s downhill for me. Anyway, awhile back my father actually organized and hosted a wine and cheese party for all his chat-room friends. He figured it would be nice to get everyone together and actually meet these people face-to-face. He planned for as many as sixty-seven people (the number who said they’d come), but when the day of the party arrived, only four sloven men showed up. One of them propositioned my mother and followed her around the kitchen insisting that he was a 

trained chef and wine taster. The other three drank merlot on the rocks out of plastic tumblers salvaged from a college football game. Then they sat around my father’s computer chatting with the people who hadn’t attended. The evening ended after the men, the chef included, traded pornographic website addresses. Needless to say, Mom left him the next morning. 

I’m not choosing sides here, so don’t go jumping to conclusions, but allowing yourself to get so hooked on chat rooms that it ruins a marriage of twenty-six years is pretty nuts in my book, and that is what my father did, but you might say my mother overreacted. I mean she could have forbade the party or kicked the chef in the nuts or busted up my father’s computer with a hammer, but instead she just left. Maybe she was looking for a way out anyway. So she’s probably responsible for the split too. It does take two people to do it, you know. Come to think of it, maybe they were both looking for a way out, but my story’s not really about my parents and their screwed-up ideas about relationships. I would not even be telling you about it, except that when Mom left Dad, she moved in with me and Janice, and, to tell you the truth, that’s what started this whole mess I’m about to tell you about. 

When I say moved in with me and Janice, I guess what I really mean is she moved in to Janice’s house, a place where I too lived, but where, and Janice will back this up, I fiscally contributed nothing, and where chores were an issue I tended to shy away from. But Janice got the house cheap when her grandmother died, and so I figured that she didn’t really do much toward actually buying the house either, and even though she was the one who worked, and it was her money that paid the bills, I still think she knew that I was good to have around, at least up until my mother moved in that is.

First off, our sex life was completely over once Mom moved in. It’s not like Janice and I were doing it every night before, but at least we could if we wanted to and then all of the sudden we couldn’t, and I guess that is part of this whole story too, because a guy can sort of get weird when you take away his potential. Girls seem to handle it better, but guys need to know there’s a possibility. Without that hope, we mostly dwell on the issue until we drive ourselves crazy. So at first I still tried to talk Janice into sex, but she said that it was creepy and that it made her feel like she was back in high school and that there was no way she was going to feel that way again. She is a home-owner for God’s sake was what else she said. And the couple of times I did talk her into it, I was all-of-the-sudden worried about noises so much that I really couldn’t get into anything at all.

It wasn’t just the lack of regular sex that got to me though, it was the lack of privacy in general. Not that Mom meant to get in the way or anything, but I just never felt right walking through the living room in my underwear like I did before she moved in. And you know how sometimes you wake up at four in the morning and you need to go so bad you think you’ll burst, well when that happened, and Mom was around, you can bet I made sure I was decent before I ran to the toilet, after all, Mom was too unpredictable for me to really feel confident that I wasn’t going to run into her.

So it was bathrobes and slippers and make the bed and clean the dinner plates right after dinner instead of waiting a few days until enough got dirty that you’d do a major washing

and get it all over with at once that all kind of added up to why I did what I did. Like I said though, Mom never said anything about being offended or anything, and I guess it was more me feeling self-conscious than anything she actually did. I mean she must have felt strange too, kind of like a weird sort of third wheel or something. I think maybe that was why she started hanging out with Frank.

I’ll be the first one to tell you that Mom certainly has a right to date. She is kind of separated, and I’m still not sure Dad even knows she’s left, but Frank, Frank’s got a family. Joyce and Janice even went to high school together, and their son Josh was mowing our lawn for ten bucks a cut. I told Janice that if this whole mess ended up by exploding in Mom’s face, we were going to lose the best lawn care bargain in town. Janice said that that might be a blessing in disguise, after all it would get me off my lazy butt and out there getting some exercise. I told her how you can’t get exercise riding the mower, but she said that I knew what she meant, and I guess I did.

About the only thing Mom ever nagged us about was how she thought me and Janice needed to lose weight, exercise more, and quit smoking, but she was on that kick way before she moved

in. Along with junk food and beer, Mom has always claimed to be allergic to cigarette smoke, which meant that everything from potato chips to oatmeal pies had to go and that Janice and I had to stand out on the porch to smoke at our own house. Smoking outside isn’t so bad, but you had to break out the robe and slippers and all that or Mom gave you a what for about how a person’s likely to catch malaria or some other awful disease if he isn’t properly covered, after all, it’s bad enough we smoke, she would remind us. 

Josh and Frank were never there at the same time. Frank mostly slid over in the evenings, and Josh certainly wasn’t going to be spending his evenings cutting grass. That Frank and Josh were on different schedules was really lucky for us because Mom would just let Frank in whenever he could sneak over without even worrying about Josh maybe being there. Joyce doesn’t work, so Frank was not free that often, but she did suffer from bad headaches (or so she said) which landed her in bed and gave Frank a chance to hang out with my mother.

I have never really been what you’d call friends with Frank, but we were always good neighbors as far as that stuff went. I would bum beer and junk, and he invited us to a few cook-outs over the years, although I suspect that that was more of Joyce’s doing than anything else. Yet, Frank seemed to think that our association was strong enough for me to keep my mouth shut about what was going on between Mom and him. I guess he knew I’d lose my lawn boy if I said anything, and he must have figure that that was a pretty good reason for me to keep my mouth shut. But Frank doesn’t know me that well. I wouldn’t have told even if it did mean I’d have to cut my own grass. What people do is their own business. I didn’t care if he wanted to get something going on the side. If he could get away with it, more power to him. To tell the truth, after Mom moved in, and Janice and I went stale, I had started thinking about some side action too, the only problem was that I never was very good at that sort of thing, the girl’d always either tell on me or make me feel like a low-down idiot when it came time to end things. I know you’re sitting there saying to yourself that if I know how I always get screwed when it comes to fooling around, why in the hell did I let myself get into that bedroom, but you got to remember that a guy can get under stress sometimes and that’ll make him do stuff that he mostly wouldn’t do otherwise. I mean you try living with your mother for a few weeks and see how you like it.