Here's a story that's been kicking around in my head for many years and finally decided it had to be written. I'm not sure what to make of it other than my reoccurring oedipal issues are back...lol.
I look forward to hearing your comments and criticisms, both positive and negative. As always, this is a work of fiction and all characters exist only within the confines of my imagination. Enjoy!
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Maybe it's my Irish blood that makes me an optimist -- that helps me believe that no matter how bad things can get, there is always hope for a better day. I'm sure my Da would disagree. He was always a dark soul -- morose and brooding and wishing he could return to the "Old Country" one more time. With his dying breath, he was grousing and complaining about the raw deal that life dealt him.
Maybe that's why I married, Jimmy Halloran. He was the exact opposite of my father -- a happy go lucky charmer and an up and coming police officer in the small city I grew up in on the Northeast Atlantic coast. He was always smiling and laughing and his brilliant blue eyes and easy smile literally charmed me out of my panties and off my feet. Alas, Jimmy was no great lover -- I enjoyed the sex, but I always felt it was missing something and my orgasms were far and few between -- not that I ever let him know. I made him think he was the finest lover in the world. In my optimism, I always thought he would get better at it.
I remained an optimist even when the marriage went sour. My Jimmy lost interest in me sexually after I gave him his long desired son, the apple of my eye, James. I think Jimmy had mother issues and gradually could not bear to be with me sexually after I gave birth and became a mother. In the end, when he was with me, he was completely impotent. He blamed it on me of course. I wasn't woman enough anymore -- I'd let myself go, were his accusations. I'd stand naked in front of my bedroom mirror and know that that charge was a bald lie!
I'm not an immodest person, but I know that I am a good looking woman that got as many longing glances from a man when I was thirty-five as I did when I was twenty! My bright red hair betrays my Irish heritage, red as a fire truck and hanging down in wavy tresses past my shoulders -- a thick mane of red hair and my best feature. My face is pleasant enough, with brown-green eyes and pale skin and a wee, button nose. I've got a luscious figure that would tries to run to fat, but with lots of work and a hard life, I've kept the same twenty-six inch waist I had before I gave birth to my James. I am amply endowed in the tit department -- with my heavy, teardrop shaped 38D breasts being what attracted my husband to me in the first place! I stand five foot, nine inches and I'm not ashamed of my legs, although Jimmy forbade me to wear a hemline above the knee.
All in all, I'm a fine looking woman most of the time. Of course, as things went bad between Jimmy and me, there were times I dare not leave the house for fear of someone seeing just how rough Jimmy treated me. Jimmy changed. His happy go lucky attitude vanished to be replaced by something angry and hard bitten. Maybe it was the job -- I've no illusions about police work -- Da was a beat cop for thirty years and many's the night I sneaked out of bed and heard him pouring his pain out to my mother. What I didn't know then was how bad a cop Jimmy had become...but that's getting ahead of myself.
Maybe it was me -- that having given him a son and now being a mother, he couldn't bring himself to fuck me and he could never ask for a divorce and that in the end he was disappointed by James, a quiet and sensitive boy who was totally uninterested in his father's obsessions with football and boxing. Jimmy declared his feelings often, "The better part of you, boy, ran down your mother's leg!" The gulf between Jimmy and James widened over the years as James realized what his father was doing to me and resented it. Whatever it was that created Jimmy's anguish and anger, it provoked in him a terrible hatred and when the hate grew too strong and he was liquored up, well -- I wore a lot of sunglasses and long sleeve shirts and stayed indoors for days or weeks at a time.
By the time, James turned ten things seemed to grow worse with each passing day. Jimmy would stay away for days, even weeks at a time and then show up drunk and pissed and oh, Jesus, how he could make me hurt! One would think I'd relish his absence, but James and I lived in constant fear when he was gone of finally hearing his footsteps on the porch, the creaking of the front door opening and what he'd be angry about this time. I found no solace in the Church -- my priest admonishing me to "Be a better wife to the man, Charlene! He deserves that much doing the job he does."
I pressed charges once, after a brutal beating landing me in the emergency room with three cracked ribs, a sprained wrist and a bruised kidney. For one fleeting moment, I thought I might be free of the man -- but that was the day I learned of the "thin blue line" where the police force protected their own. All that came of that was Jimmy getting a stern reprimand from his precinct commander about minding his personal life with more discretion and Jimmy teaching me that there is lots of ways to inflict terrible pain without leaving marks...at least those that could show. They say the police are better about dealing with spousal abuse these days -- I hope so.
Still, I believed that someday, somehow, things could and would change for the better. James was fifteen when I first thought this happened. Jimmy was off duty and sitting in his favorite bar when one side of his face began to sag and he fell off his stool with a massive stroke. The doctors told me he would never completely recover -- that he was likely remain paralyzed completely on one side, bedridden for life. Despite all the beatings, it broke my heart to see him so and I accepted my new role as his caretaker, one I would have worked at to my grave, but my troubles were just beginning.
Three months after Jimmy's stroke, the city prosecutor announced the findings of a police corruption probe and at the heart of it was a small cabal of cops including my Jimmy. He had been neck deep in drugs, gambling and protection scams. He lost his pension/disability and his insurance. We lost our house and our car to something called the RICO statutes. Then it was revealed that Jimmy was also involved in prostitution, running a small string of women out of a sleazy apartment in the worst part of the city.
To add to my humiliation, it was to this apartment that Jimmy had leased for a year in advance where we were forced to retreat to when they seized our home. Can you imagine how it felt to clean that pit up? It was a miserably small one bedroom walk-up apartment on the fourth floor of an apartment building that we shared with drug dealers, hookers, and more roaches and rats than I ever dreamed could exist.
It was a crowded existence too. We had Jimmy in a hospital bed situated in the living room and I would sleep on the couch while James slept on a small bed in the one small bedroom. James and I learned to co-exist within the crowded place and of all the things I think I missed the most -- it was having my own bathroom.
