Summer of '74

Joe was sitting on the porch of the tiny rental house he and his brother shared. His brother was at work. Joe was drinking a PBR and smoking a Winston at 11:30 in the morning. I could see tattoos peeking out of his T-shirt on both biceps; a skull, and something else.

"Hiya Joe," I said.

He looked up at me, instantly grinning, young, stocky, blond, sweating charisma. The grin faded when he failed to recognize me. Nor would he ever. The very expensive theatrical makeup would see to that.

"Hey," he said. "What can I do for you?" Beaming like an angel. Little bastard would rob you down to the fillings if you looked away long enough.

"You got it all wrong Joe," I said. "I'm going to make you a very happy boy. I've got a big stack of cash in my pocket, and all you have to do to earn it is do something kinda terrible."

"Hey man, I'm not robbing a bank or nothing."

"Relax sport. It's nothing too illegal. Just immoral."

He looked at me sideways, the gears in his little brain turning double speed. "How much we talking?"

"Ten grand," I said.

"Jesus," he said. "That's-"

"Enough to keep you drunk and stoned and tweaked in royal fashion for a year. Here's what you have to do to get it. You know your sister?"

"Yvonne?"

"No, Tammy."

"She's a spoiled little teacher's pet. Kisses up to mom and dad bigger'n life."

"All that may be true. But to earn that money, you're going to do three things to her. You're going to get her totally addicted to cigarettes, you're going to buy her breast implants - very large ones - and you're going to get her about fifty or sixty tattoos."

"How in the hell do you expect me to manage all that?"

"Three reasons, Joe. One, Tammy's an isolated, nerdy teenager with a pass-out drunk mother and an absentee father; she's desperate for peer approval. Two, you're a natural born conman. Three, and most important, your girlfriend, Pam, is madly in love with you, and Pam happens to be Tammy's number one role model. If you can convince Pam to do it to herself, Pam can convince Tammy."

"Twelve," he said. "Since I'm disfiguring my girl. Hell, I'll probably have to marry her to get her onboard."

"Fine," I said. I opened the briefcase I was carrying and laid it on the porch rail. Besides twenty grand in cash, there was an address book and a jewelry box.

"What's with this?" Joe asked.

"The cash is your fee, plus expenses. The book has the name, address, and phone number of a plastic surgeon who does tit jobs. There's a diamond ring in that box for Kim."

Joe whistled. "Sounds like a lot of work."

"That's why I'm paying you enough to buy a goddamn Cadillac," I growled. "Twice what a fucking dropout like you could make doing straight work. Now, let me explain something to you. If you try to fuck me, if you even try to sPam more than your twelve grand, I will come back and break your arms and legs so that they bend both ways."

"No, no, we're cool," he said. Joe talked a big game, but he wasn't much good in a fight. He grinned; I punched him in the mouth hard enough to knock him off the porch.

"Do your goddamn job," I said.

********

I came back to the present suddenly and painfully. My ability, cultivated over many years, to briefly step back in time was still far from refined. I couldn't have stayed back in '74 two minutes longer than I did. So it was no surprise that I found myself sprawled on the floor with a bloody nose and a migraine the size of Greenland.

I got up unsteadily, wiped blood from my face, and stumbled into the kitchen for a migraine pill. I chased it with three glasses of water, saw the blood on my shirt, stripped naked in the kitchen and went to remove my makeup and take a shower. I was home from college on summer break, and the house was empty. Mom was at work, and there had never really been a dad.

I checked my watch. Jesus, 4:15. It hadn't even been noon when I left '74. I had only recently begun going more than a few weeks back in time, but already I was experiencing significant time loss. Whether I was passed out in my room for the missing hours, or stuck in transit between the two realities, I didn't know.

I was playing 360 on the couch when mom got home. She is a chubby, but not obese, medium-tall brunette. She was in her work clothes, a dark pantsuit with a white shirt, one button open. Practical low heels. American Spirit hanging from her lip.

"Hey mom," I said.

"Hey baby," she said, and stooped to kiss me. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes. Her full breast touched my shoulder.

Dinner was takeout, eaten from the cartons. We watched TV and smoked cigarettes until ten. When mom went to get ready for bed, I followed. These are the times that try men's souls.

"Mom," I said. "Why do you always wear long sleeves? You know I've never seen you in a bathing suit? Or even a t-shirt and shorts?"

She turned and looked at me very intently and grimly, then sighed. "Do we really need to get into it? Can't we just let this one lie?"

"I want to know, mom. Whatever it is, it's not fair for you to be carrying it around by yourself, shut off from the world."

The strength went out of her. She sagged visibly, sat heavily on the edge of the bed and stared at her groin. After a moment, she lit a cigarette.

"What have I told you about my teenage years?"

"Not much. I know you were a cheerleader in 9th grade before you had to give it up."

"Your uncle Joe was always wild. Drinking, partying, drugs. He did his first stint in jail when he was seventeen. His girlfriend, Pam, was three years older than me and I just adored her. She let me hang around with them. And, well, Joe got her into some stuff, and I was only fourteen and didn't want to be left out."

"What stuff, mom?"

"Joe came into a lot of money - I don't know how - and blew it on us. If it wasn't for that money. . ."

"What stuff?"

She slowly unbuttoned her shirt and let it fall off. Her arms were scattered with faded, nearly forty-year-old tattoos. Her left upper arm was dominated by a six-inch Winnie the Pooh. She had a rose on her right shoulder, "Mom" and "Dad" hearts crowding her right biceps, a Chinese dragon running the length of her left forearm, a spray of butterflies on her right; bands of lilies encircled her wrists.

She had large, heavy breasts, straining against the minimizer bra that concealed them from the world. Just above each nipple, a three-inch rose perched. Her stomach was a mass of haphazard tattoos, distended by weight gain.

"You got tattooed?" I asked.

She nodded, crying now. "They got me drunk for my first one, and then they told me how great they looked and how grown up I was and how they wanted to go out and get tattooed again, and, I hated the tattoos but I didn't want to disappoint them."

"How many do you have?"

"More," she choked. "A lot more. I don't really know. They kept me drunk and high every weekend until I was seventeen, and I got one or two tattoos almost every weekend. Maybe - a hundred?"

"Can I see them?"

She nodded and wriggled out of her pants. Her pale, chubby legs were nearly covered, roses and butterflies and crosses and birds and dragons and snakes competing for space with the eight-inch-tall, huge-breasted nude woman tattooed on each thigh.

"And the back?"

"It's the worst," she said.

She turned over and showed it to me. It was literally covered from the bottoms of her buttocks to the top of her shoulders, but not with a coherent design. Dozens of tattoos ran together, blurry with age.

"What about your breasts?" I asked.

"They're my fourth set of implants," she said, and her voice was now detached. "Pam and I got ours done in the summer of '74. I cried when I saw them, they were so big: 800ccs. And they used the old silicone implants, the ones with thin shells that break easily, so I had to get them redone when they ruptured, and I couldn't get them smaller since the skin was all stretched out. Those hardened, so I got them done again. And then the last set, you were twelve. You have to replace them every ten years or so, you know? No one told me when I got them done. I had a creepazoid boyfriend who wanted them a little bigger, so now they're 1200cc, saline, high profile."

"How big are they?" I asked.

She almost smirked. "They used to be a 34F when I was skinny, but since I've put on weight and upped the size they're a 40I. Absurd, absolutely absurd."

"Can I see them?"

She nodded and undid her bra. They spilled out gloriously, huge and milky white, rippling with blue veins, full but not perky, with a softness and hang not common to large implants. Her areolas were the size of coke cans.

I stepped to her without thinking, wrapped her in my arms, and kissed her like I was trying to tickle her intestinal tract. She realized what was happening and pushed me away.

"Tom, what are you-"

"I think you're the most beautiful woman in the world," I said. "And I don't care that you're my mother. I want to marry you and love you and tell you how beautiful you are every minute of every day."

She cried harder than ever. "Tom-"

"Now you wait. I know that you feel ugly because of your breasts and your tattoos. Maybe to some people you are. But not to me. I think they're sexy as hell. I don't want anyone else. I just want you, you understand? If you reject me I will keep trying. I will never move on."

She nodded, and I moved to her, picked her up, 180 pounds of her, and held her to me, her legs locked around my lower back, and kissed her until we ran short on air. I laid her down on the bed and ripped her panties off. She was hairy, but I didn't much mind. I licked her until she orgasmed. Before she even had a chance to catch her breath, I was on her and inside her, pushing, and when I came, it was like never before in my life. We lay beside each other on the bed, so spent we could scarcely breathe.

"That was amazing," she said. "I've never. It's never."

"You're amazing," he said.

"Aww, thanks honey." She waited a long moment. "Tom, where is this going? Was that all just talk to get inside me?"

"No ma'am. It wasn't. As soon as I'm done with college I want to set up housekeeping."

"I'd like that," she said.

"Would you do one thing for me?"

*****************

We left the tattoo studio all over each other. Tammy's shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and one breast was out of her bra by the time we reached the car. We fucked in the driver's seat, Tammy riding me, her huge breasts slapping my face.

"Are you happy baby?" she asked.

"Let me see it," I said. She pulled down her pants and showed me the cellophane taped over her pubic mound. A huge red heart bore a banner: Tom.