Fred Sasaki

Our Lady of Guadalupe is a glorified vagina. Picture the ovular shape of her halo, the golden hairs emanating from around her entire body. The cloak draped over her like the silken outer lips of the labia. Her inner robe flushed red. The clit her clasped hands in prayer. Standing on the slivered moon where God did her we see an angel emerging from under her skirt. The annunciation is Mary, roseate, reeling, and grateful for being fucked by God. And perhaps He is the premier motherfucker of them all.

I first learned the word "motherfucker" on the way home from first grade. An older classmate traced it letter by letter on the seat before us. After three times I still didn't get it, so he whispered it into my ear. A hushed "motherfucker." I still didn't get it.

"Just don't ever say it," he said.

Once off the bus I asked my mother, "Mommy, what is a mother-fucker?"

She smiled nervously, touched my back and said, "Oh, Fred-John, that's a very bad word and you should never say it."

Ask any man if he's ever dreamt about having sex with his mother and he'll answer in one of two ways. He'll either give an abrupt "NO" before you even finish your sentence, denying that the thought ever entered his mind while hiding his eyes, or you'll find full-on admission.

My best friend once confessed one of these dreams to me with an unlikely scene. He was playing with his toys and storming around the house as young boys often do.

"How much longer?" he asked.

"Just a minute dear, I have to finish doing the laundry," she said.

"Come on Ma! Are we going to have sex or what?"

"Oh God," she moaned, "Will you please just give me a minute? I have to fold these clothes and set the stove on for dinner. Your father will be home any moment," she went on distractedly.

"Exactly," he said, "come on, let's just do it before dad gets home."

On "County Z" highway, my father and I talked about Freud for the first and last time the summer after my fifth grade. The same best friend had learned about Sigmund from his parents as part of his second-wave hippie upbringing. He translated Oedipus to me the best he was able. I got, more or less, the gist and tried to impress my father with it. The conversation went like this:

"Dad, did you know that all boys love their mothers when they are little, like sexually? That they want to have sex with them?"

"Yea, that's right. That's true," he said. "And you know what? If you don't stop, then you become gay!"

Years later, I asked my father, with adolescent anger, "Have you ever even loved a woman beside your own mother?"

"Oh Fred-John! What kind of question is that to ask?"

"Why don't you just answer me, YES or NO?"

"Of course," he moaned.

I never caught my parents having sex; my father lived with his mother for many years after he left. I can't remember one moment, one stroke between them that was amorous. I wish I had caught them making love, for even just one glorious moment, if only to know what I was made of.

"What gets the baby in, gets the baby out," my wife's midwife told us months into our baby's gestation. The hormones inspired by a kiss, the warm excretions, and orgasm act as catalyst not only to conception, but labor," she said. "Just as a woman's cervix dips into ejaculate at climax, her cervix opens with cum's familiar cajoling. It's just the way it works."

Most men are afraid of sex during pregnancy, or, as in my case, are disinterested. It just happens. Some claim that they are afraid of poking the baby in the head (the wishful buggers) and others simply worry about making the baby a poster-child for the March of Dimes.

It's not that my pregnant wife and I didn't have sex. We did, but only occasionally. A woman's vagina becomes enormous, elongated and always very hot. Between her legs it seemed that, with one slip, I could loose my head inside her and be sucked up into the womb. And this, maybe, is what I was afraid of. Was it there, tangled in the hair, hiding behind the engorged folds, that my mother waited for me? Would I bump her nose or hear her echo? Looking back I wish we had gone down more often and mounted the enormity of it all, if only to sooth her belly. And my baby.

I once saw a pregnant woman play a violin concerto at the Symphony Center. With her red cheeks and the spotlight shining down on her she bore a striking resemblance to the virgin full-term. I not only marveled at her virtuosity, but also at the fact that her baby, nested safely inside, was surrounded by the tremulous rubbing of her mother's bow and the permeating ebb and flow of the orchestra. Slowly ascending, then faster and faster they came to the crescendo. Wonderful shudders must have been running through the baby with round after round of ovation.

My mother-in-law, Mary, clapped at her son after he said something about bitches and ho's.

"What is that?" she asked. "Why do you talk like that? Where did you learn that?"

"I don't know," he said. "What?"

"What? What, you think a woman is a whore just because she likes to have sex?" she said.

"No. I don't know. Yes," he said.

"Don't you know that all women have a little whore in them?"

"Even you, ma?" he said laughing to us.

"Yes, of course! What, you think that just because I'm your mother I'm not a woman?" she said, visibly upset. He smiled and turned to my wife and me watching with awe.

"My mother's a ho."

My own son can only mutter, "Muh muh muh," but "mother" and more is around the corner. If and when he asks me, one day home from first grade, "What is a motherfucker?" I hope I'll be able to say, "Son, I am one. I am a motherfucker. But just don't say it, it's a very bad word."

(2005-02-08)

Also by Fred Sasaki

Fiction Review
There is something embarrassing about carrying around this collection, like toting a cartoon lunchbox, but it's just irresistible. With a flash the book announces the latest editorial travail of Michael Chabon billed as an "Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories," no less
(2005-01-04)

Nonfiction Review
This book makes a good stocking stuffer so long as the sock is filled with a nice vintage wine, cigarettes and sordid party favors
(2004-12-14)

Okay life
Something like self-help for the semi-fortunate, all of the shorts in Erin McGraw's "The Good Life" could have been born from episodes of Oprah
(2004-07-20)

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