Free Secrets Of A Gay Marine Porn Star by Rich Merritt

complications are bound to come up. With us, they started relatively early.
    Because we were so close, she felt comfortable asking me to help her in the kitchen. I wouldn’t do it because even I realized that, in the South at least, that was considered woman’s work. She wanted me to cook or clean up and I refused because it was starting to cross the line into overtly doing what a woman does. For once I stood my ground and would just let her pout. At some point, she succeeded in making me do the dishes. Okay. I would do the dishes but I would never help her cook. Eventually she quit pouting about it because she came to realize it was something I just wasn’t going to do. Now, of course, I wish I knew how to cook.
    There was an unspoken, maybe even an unacknowledged, burden of having to fill too many needs in my mother’s life. Needs that no one else in the family seemed to be able to meet.
    Her relationship was strikingly different with me than it was with my father or brother. She would confide things in me. She would tell me things, especially about her sister Lydia, how she drove her crazy. She would tell me about her mother, about how her mother overlooked her and favored her brother. I was her confidante about a lot of things.
    She was easily upset and needy. My dad didn’t show emotion and my mom wanted to know how people felt. She wanted people to express themselves, so she could express herself, and I was the only one who did that. I also did almost everything I could to ensure she was happy. My dad wanted her to be happy, too, but he didn’t go to the lengths I went to to make sure it happened.
    She probably trusted me more to be sensitive and to understand her fears. She herself was very sensitive. She knew I was very sympathetic. Jimmy didn’t seem to be sensitive to anything. Looking back I think he was, but I think he dealt with it in a very different way. He dealt with it by acting out; instead of crying he would fight. He would rebel. Jimmy deliberately antagonized her.
    My brother was more typically a “boy.” That’s how our parents differentiated between us. “Jimmy’s definitely ‘boy.’” Well, what does that mean about me? I was left to wonder. “Richie is studious and smart and plays the piano. But Jimmy’s definitely boyish.”
    Everyone started telling me how much I reminded them of my mother. I took after her side of the family and looked like her. The similarities weren’t just in how we looked, though. I was starting to develop a very strong, controlling side of my own. And because I couldn’t exhibit that control in my relationship with my mother, I took it out on poor Jimmy. The little guy essentially had two mothers, two very controlling, domineering mothers! No wonder he was so desperate to stake out his own turf.
    Jimmy and I slept together in an old queen-sized bed made of wood that was painted white. It had a fancy design carved into the headboard. Before I’d go to sleep I would pick my nose and put the boogers on the back of this headboard. When I was eight, our parents bought us a nice new set of bedroom furniture with bunk beds. We thought that was really cool.
    We fought a lot, mainly because Jimmy wouldn’t do what I would tell him to. This was probably normal brother stuff at this age, although sometimes it might have gotten out of hand. On one summer evening, we were sitting outside at our grandparents’ house next door with our aunt and uncles and cousins, eating watermelon and waiting on someone to make some homemade ice cream.
    I was rolling in the grass about halfway down the hill. Jimmy was seated on the back steps of the house with Grandpa Merritt, holding medium-sized set of hedge trimmers. All I can plead now is temporary insanity, but I decided to dare my younger brother.
    “Hey, Jimmy! I dare you to throw those at me. I bet you won’t do it.” He was only four years old. How far could he throw them?
    In a nanosecond, all I saw was a pair of hedge