Sick & Tragic Bastard Son Read online

  Sick & Tragic

  Bastard Son

  a novel by

  Rowan Massey

  Book cover designed by BetiBup33 Studio Design

  SICK AND TRAGIC BASTARD SON

  Copyright © 2019 by Rowan Massey

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ASIN: B07W3NLPTZ

  For information contact : RowanMassey.com

  For more about the author, please visit RowanMassey.com.

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  “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”

  ―Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

  Chapter One

  Zander Age 18

  MOM HELD THE photos to her chest like tarot cards. I imagined her with a hairy mole and a scarf over her head, about to lay them out on our old kitchen table to tell me all about my past. Her stubby fingers held them so that I couldn’t see the images. I rested my hands on the table. In the roughened texture of the wood grain under my fingertips, decades of food had become hairline cracks full of sticky grime.

  Mom had just come inside from smoking. There was still a wafting cigarette smell around her like a bad aura. We observed each other with awkward anticipation. Her lips pinched together. Her gray eyes, which matched mine, slid out of eye contact.

  The first photo was chosen and placed on the table. She nervously arranged it so that it lay perfectly straight, facing me.

  “Clay Corden,” she stated. “That’s us when we met.”

  I picked up the photo and blinked at it. At first, I was looking at nothing but melted shapes and colors. Sometimes that happens because my brain is wacky, especially when I’m emotional. I couldn’t make my brain comprehend that I was looking at my biological father. All I could do was keep staring until the slow waves of distortion dissipated.

  Mom and I weren’t the sit-down-and-talk types. We communicated with nods and grunts, yes’s and no’s, notes on the fridge, and—if we felt affectionate—tentative pats on the shoulder. But it was Christmas, which also functioned as my eighteenth birthday. We always celebrated both events on Christmas since the dates were only four days apart. She’d been muttering for a handful of months about college. I knew I was in for a talk about my impending adulthood. She seemed to be pretending I’d do college even though my grades weren’t promising. I didn’t have any plans and didn’t want to make them. Before sitting me down at the table, she’d told me I might need his help to get my “start”. The way I saw it, the only thing in my future was a bunch of endings.

  “I don’t look like him,” I said, surprised. I didn’t look like my mom much either, so how was that possible? The man in the photo was smiling, but didn’t look particularly happy. It was the smile you put on when somebody shoves a camera in your face and orders you to say cheese. A young version of Mom was smiling for real and leaning into his shoulder. They sat in the booth of a restaurant, probably across from friends. I’d seen old pictures of Mom, so that part was nothing new. With the image close to my face, I tried to see myself in his white skin, light-brown hair and eyes, and thick, strong arms. He was pretty generic. My skin was more like my Mom’s—the light brown of mixed-race people, only my features were slightly more on the white side, so that most people thought I was purely white. My hair wasn’t capable of an Afro like hers, but it was curly and nearly black. I absently felt at my bicep and wondered if I should take working out more seriously to see if I could get as big as the man in the photo.

  “I told you, you look like your grandad,” Mom said, still holding onto the other pictures. Mom was right, my slightly slanted eyes and large lips were from my black grandad. “But you have that square head. See?” She tapped at the photo in my hand, then pointed at my forehead. I’d been one of those kids with a big skull that looked like it would tip me over, but I’d grown into it, especially after I’d gone through a phase of lifting weights in middle school. I should have kept it up, but at least I still did some push ups every day.

  “I guess so…” I put the photo down and waited for the next one.

  She put it next to the first and squared them both neatly.

  “I got pregnant with you when I was twenty-three and he was nineteen. We’d been dating exactly a year,” she said, and it was just a picture of her standing awkwardly next to my father, arms holding her large belly. She seemed to be about halfway to my big day, not that I knew much about what pregnant ladies looked like. They were standing in a parking lot, and I couldn’t imagine why that was a good time for a snapshot. He was about the same height as me, as compared to my mom.

  “Then he bailed on us before you were born.” Her voice turned bitter. I almost expected a picture of her alone in the maternity ward, but the next picture was of my grandparents with their arms around my mom, who was holding me in a hospital bed. I’d just been born. Mom didn’t look good, already beginning her rapid aging. “But we took care of ourselves.” She patted the faces of her parents. They had each died many years back. Grandma had had a heart condition, and Grandad had dropped dead of a stroke after drinking himself half to death for two years out of grief.

  I nodded at her impatiently, waiting for the point where I got to ask some questions. I’d never seen pictures of her pregnancy or of my birth, but it wasn’t interesting to me. She cleared her throat and let loose a smoker’s cough.

  Not caring if it was rude, I snatched the last two photos from her hands. They were a different kind of paper, freshly printed, not faded.

  “I found those online,” she said. “I thought, if you went looking for him, you might need to know what he looks like now that he’s older. I wrote the information I found on the back.”

  He’d aged much better than she had. He wasn’t overweight, his hair wasn’t gray, his hair hadn’t thinned, his skin wasn’t sun damaged, and there were no fine lines in his face. But then, he was younger than her. In one photo, he was wearing a dark suit and tie, posing for the kind of picture taken for some stuffy office job where it would hang in the waiting room after he made employee of the month. In the other, he was standing shirtless by a swimming pool. There was a large and well-kept house in the background. A girl in a frilly, pink and purple swim suit stood with her arm around his waist, grinning just as brightly as he was.

  “Who the fuck is the kid?” I asked.

  Mom sighed and hunched over the table, making it squeak and wobble. “I found out about that shit when you were still a baby. He’d gone out and knocked up a new girlfriend right after he left me, and he was doing right by her…” This part was obviously hard on her, and I tried to respect that but only managed a second of silence before asking for more information.

  “So he liked the other woman better than us?”

  She shrugged and shifted in her chair. “I don’t know what to tell you. This is why I’ve never wanted to talk about it. I say he’s just an asshole, and an idiot, and you shouldn’t worry too much about him, only you might need some money.” When I didn’t respond, she added, “That’s your half sister.”

  “Yeah, I figured tha
t out.” I glared at the image of her stupid little sunburned face. She had curly, strawberry blonde hair and freckles over her nose. I have freckles exactly like them every summer. “Wait, how old is this picture? Wouldn’t she be a year younger than me?” I slapped the picture down on the table.

  “Not even a year.” Another big sigh. “Just before she was born, he called me up and said he wanted to start doing his part and raise both of you together. You be pissed all you want about this, but I told him to fuck right off.”

  I sat back in my chair and gaped at her. That wasn’t part of the story I’d been hearing all my life.

  “We were doing okay without him,” she said defensively, not looking at me. “I didn’t want him popping in and out of our lives whenever he wanted, giving us money when he felt like it, and treating that new baby better than you. And he…told me some things. I just could not do it, Lysander.”

  I sat quiet for a bit, a dangerous silence deep inside myself growing much vaster than the anger and hurt. Anger had always been what I felt about my father. He’d ditched us and never came back. We were poorer, worked harder, and lived on the edge much more often than if there had been another adult to help take care of things. Mom had been too lonely and depressed all my life to take care of me half the time. I’d been raised mostly by my grandparents until they died. We’d lost both of them by the time I was nine, and then, I’d been watched out for by Mom’s friends from church, but they would only do so much. I’d always understood from my whole family that everything was my father’s fault. If I didn’t get what I’d wanted at my Christmas-birthday when I was eight, it was his fault. If Mom lost her job because she couldn’t make herself get up in the morning, and we almost got evicted, it was his fault. It was as if he were always there in our lives, invisible and pretending we didn’t exist.

  My mind went over all the things he might have prevented if he’d given half a shit. Mom was making gestures with her fingers as if she needed to hold onto a cigarette for dear life.

  “What things?” I asked, but she seemed confused. “He told you some things?”

  “Oh, Lysander,” she said quietly, almost in a groan. She was the only one who still called me that. I was Zander to everyone else. She breathed deep, in and out, so that her sour breath reached my face. Her mouth worked at getting words out, but it didn’t happen.

  “Mom,” I said, my voice dead. “Just spit it out. What?”

  “He told me he was…gay. And this girl—this girlfriend of his—had accepted it, and they were going to be a family anyway.”

  “He’s gay?” My neck tensed, and I leaned in towards her. “My dad is gay. You didn’t think that was relevant enough to tell me?”

  Mom had known I was gay for years, ever since she’d caught me in my room dry humping an older guy when I was fifteen. She hadn’t freaked. She’d made a face like she’d gotten a surprise bill she couldn’t pay and then just walked away, leaving us to finish what we’d been doing. I’d avoided her a while after that, and the house had been deafeningly quiet, but she knew me well enough not to try and tell me what to do or be.

  “Where does he live now?” I picked up the more recent pictures and read the scrawl of information she’d written on the back.

  “An hour or so from here. In town. I’m not sure.” She waved a hand as if it didn’t matter. “I’ll show you what I found online. You sure you want to meet him?”

  No, I didn’t want to fucking meet the bastard. I shook my head.

  In town. As often as I wandered into the city looking for things to do, I felt like I lived there myself. What if I’d run into him? It was a big place, but still.

  Oh god. What if…

  The images in my hands turned into distortions again. Chins stretched and foreheads widened grotesquely as I tried to sort out my mixed up memories and find a face in my recent past that matched his. Starting to panic, I realized I just didn’t know. A lot of my memories were fake, kind of like mistaking a daydream for reality, and sometimes the fake ones overlapped reality until I got confused. I wasn’t always confused, but right then, I knew I was mixed up.

  I pressed my palms to my forehead and made a frustrated sound through my teeth. Doing stupid things was my best skill, and one of my favorite stupid things was finding older guys to hook up with. I didn’t overanalyze why. I had a lot of little kinks like that, and being into “daddies” was about as common a kink among gay guys as it got. Anything even slightly taboo attracted me. It wasn’t that hard to find men who would believe I was eighteen because they wanted to believe it. I appeared just mature enough to pull it all off. I’d gotten myself in plenty of trouble doing shit like that and other moms might have been freaked out but my mom used a hands-off approach with me. Since she had put me through plenty of pain throughout my life, I wasn’t sorry about it.

  Point being…what if I’d fucked my father?

  It didn’t matter how likely it was. Once the thought was in my head, it wasn’t going to go away easily. My brain loved tormenting me with things I didn’t want to think about.

  “Lysander,” Mom said in that voice she used when she knew I was going over the edge. “I’ll find a phone number. You can call his job to get more information. Easy.”

  “Fucking easy?” I snapped, and swept the pictures off the table onto the floor. I knew she wouldn’t care about them now that their job was done, but I did it anyway. They would probably lay there for days or weeks before they got picked up and dumped in a junk drawer. Pretty much everything about living in our house was like that.

  “Do you know if being gay is hereditary?” she asked, already forgetting to use her calming voice. She picked at something on her tongue. “I don’t think it is. Just a coincidence.”

  I stood, kicking the chair so that it teetered for a moment before slamming down. I stalked down the hallway to my room.

  How many basic, forty-something dudes had I hooked up with? A small handful, and faces were so difficult. Ever since I’d gotten my car a year back, I’d been whoring all over, never too tired to drive out to anybody who looked halfway decent and could host. There was nothing else I wanted to do more in my spare time. Downtown wasn’t a whole hour away when the traffic wasn’t bad, and it was ripe with real gay guys, not the hesitant, jumpy boys in high school. I liked men who were experienced and ready, guys who could teach me things and expected to be teaching because I was young. They liked that dynamic. I did too. If I acted a little shy, a lot of them would ask if it was my first time. I liked telling them yes, but I think most of them knew I was lying. It was a game. On the other hand, it had backfired at least once. He’d told me to go home.

  One particular time, it had gone down the way I liked, and I couldn’t forget it—not for a single day. I’d acted shy and cute, he’d asked if he was my first, I’d told him no but made it look like a lie, and he’d softly insisted I answer honestly. He’d told me I was nuts to do my first time that way— not even planning to tell him. But after sitting around talking and kissing a while, he’d been convinced to keep going. He’d assured me it would be a good idea after all, because he would take care of me better than the next guy. It had been the best sex I’d ever had.

  First, he’d looked me in the eye with real affection and explained everything that he needed to make sure I knew: what being filled up would feel like, that I could stop at any time, that I needed to breath, and relax, and all that. I’d never had a conversation with anyone that felt so intimate. Intimacy hadn’t been a word I’d fully understood before.

  His voice had been low and sweet, his hands rubbing my arms, waist, neck. Everything he’d done, he’d done with caring and had taken forever, making sure not to hurt me, but when I would have usually gotten impatient and moved things along, I’d just kept up that delicious eye contact and let him do his teaching. He’d fingered me a long time, making out the whole while, putting kisses on my face and chest. Then he’d slipped it in slowly and just stayed there waiting for me to tell him I’d adju
sted enough. He kept saying I was doing so good, asking how I felt, and expecting more of a response than “fine” or “good”. His hands ran slowly up and down my body until the rhythm of it almost made me drowsy. By the time the real in and out of things got started, I was so hypnotized that if you’d told me the rest of the world existed I wouldn’t have understood the concept. It was just me, and Mr. Intimacy, and the bed.

  The intensity of the whole thing had freaked me out so much in days following that I’d never answered the texts he’d sent checking up on me. I often wished I hadn’t ghosted him.

  Sometimes, when I remembered and thought about it, I had a moment when I puzzled out that it hadn’t been my first time. My first time bottoming had been painful garbage. I had just wanted it to be otherwise so badly that it’d messed with my head. That’s how my brain made false memories all the time—by taking my wishes and nightmares and running with them.

  Other nights, I found college guys who wanted to be topped and treated a little rough. I learned from the way the older men treated me, and turned it around, using it on the ones my age. A lot of people who were new to sex appreciated somebody who knew what to do with them.