Free Rock Bottom by Michael Shilling Page A

fuck girls on camera, but that didn’t matter, because she looked like she should have been emblazoned across the Mexican flag: pneumatic tits and ass, mocha skin, a smile that could start a revolution, and black hair that rose over her head like storm clouds. She stood just over six feet tall. Her license plate was
Inca Fire.
    That didn’t last long. By the time Darlo was three, she had left her husband and young child, pulled a Linda Lovelace, gone Moral Majority. She remarried, to an oilman, got a J.D. from Texas Christian, and worked for a right-wing legal organization determined to stamp out everyone’s constitutionally guaranteed right to watch complete strangers rut on each other. She wrote to Darlo once a year, on his birthday, but aside from that, Ann Atchison was a stranger.
    “Your mother’s the poster child for all the suppression and rage of American sexual life,” his dad would often say. “When I met her she was a lovely flower, the softest of sweet red petals, the most delicious glass of
agua fresca
I’d ever tasted. Now she makes Ed Meese look like a friend to the industry. But don’t let me stop you. You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”
    Darlo saw his mother as the crazy woman who’d abandoned him, and considering that sex had always been waiting for him, a best friend and a comfort, any enemy of its free-flowing goodness was highly suspect. His dad seemed to live a happy polygamous life, rich and rejoicing 24/7, while she sat in the middle of
west fucking Texas
with the idiots who had tried to impeach President Clinton for doing only the most natural thing in the world: getting a little on the side. How could anyone turn down a hot piece of twenty-year-old intern ass?
    But when Darlo was seventeen, his mother gave up being all God Squad, got divorced, and moved to Iowa to become a farmer. She met a man there, an Allstate agent. She mellowed and tried to make things right with her son.
    “Your father has surrounded you with the trappings of Sodom,” she wrote in a letter. “You think that pleasure is holy. Pleasure as an end
and
a means. Pleasure at all costs. Satisfaction without accountability. That is the thrust of your father’s philosophy. It is a dead end: morally, spiritually, ethically. You must think about your actions in life. Do they serve a higher end? Do they enrich the lives of others beside yourself? Do they connect you with a higher purpose? Ask yourself. We would love to see you anytime here in Iowa. Fares are cheap. American has very good fares. Have you ever ridden a horse? We have many beautiful fillies in our stable. But ask yourself, seriously, Darlington, if —”
    Darlo crushed the letter. His mother was a crank. But when he went to tear it up, his hands went still. Deep in that thick young-pirate head of his, he knew she was on to something. That awareness reached up through the tar of his testosterone.
    She was on to something. He kept the letter.
    She wrote again. “We were out in the meadow today, Darlo, and I was thinking of you. I was with John and Robert, your stepbrothers, and the wind was in our faces, cold and crisp and fresh, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great for you to be with us? I remember when you were a little boy, how we would go to the park in Encino and you’d love the bees and the birds, the flowers and the grass. You were a clear nature baby. You were Adam in his garden, and had His blessing. How I wished, I said to your stepbrothers, that you could be out here on the plain and see the real unfolding of nature, as opposed to the false idols that are daily painted upon your young eyes. Eyes so inured to kindness. Idols drawn across them, a jaded shroud.”
    Darlo was fun-loving. He had a party-hearty nature like his dad. But he was not his dad. Who was this strange woman, from whom half of him had sprung?
    “Your mother,” his father said, smoking at the pool. A blonde massaged his shoulders. “She was peaches and cream. Peaches