Absolute Jay episode one part three

Absolute Jay a soap opera episode one part three

Absolute Jay: One

From Disappointment to the Pie House

Three: Hurricane Dre


Dreanna Price was best known for her soft blue eyes and ability to deliver a powerful "bitch line." During her days on the big screen she had been compared to Streisand, Taylor, and Vivian Leigh. None of those comparisons had made her happy or seemed true to her, but those comparisons and the big screen were now behind her. She was a real woman running a real empire, and still found occasion to use her soft blue eyes and deliver a bitch line.


Her son knew her as an unreasonable force of nature, hurricane-like in her will and wield. As a child he learned to give into her. Whatever she wanted of him, he did, not because it was the right thing or best thing for him, but simply because there would ultimately be no other way for him.


Dreanna had been groomed by her father, Manny Thornburg, to be bold, aggressive, charismatic, and above all interesting. "Never let them see you're ordinary," he had always told her. She carried that message onto her son, but always sensed it falling onto deaf ears.


Dreanna waited for her son at the Tropic Slice. The restaurant was a meeting place for the wealthy weight-conscious. Dreanna ate there because she genuinely liked the food and drink. It was a hodge-podge of tropical styled dishes from an array of tropical cultures.


The waiters, familiar with her, always bubbled around her like fairies, topping her wine glass, and never mentioning how much she drank. They flirted with her, adoring her for her past works. Even the ones that she herself rated as droll pieces of cinema. They asked about her husband the senator and assured her that he would be the next governor of Texas, to which she replied with a wink, "He hasn't even decided if he will run," though he had made the decision to run long before he became senator.


Her son finally walked across the restaurant to join his mother in her private corner. "Mother." He kissed her cheek.


Before they could speak a waiter appeared, "Would you like to order?"


"I'm not hungry. I'm fine with water. Thank you." Eric took a seat.


"I'll let you know if we need anything." Dreanna waved the waiter away. "I miss having you at home." She grabbed Eric's hands and held them across the table.


"I've only been gone for two weeks, Mother. I need to be my on my own." He pulled his hands gently away from hers.


"You don't call me. You're only here because your father told you to come." She sipped her wine. "I was a good mother, wasn't I?"


"Mother, I love you dearly. I adore you. I just need to learn who I am. I can't do that at home. At home I am what ever you want me to be."


"I never left you with nannies. I tucked you into bed myself. I read you bedtime stories. I supported your decision to break from law school. What did I do that so wrong?"


He fidgeted with his water glass. "Nothing, Mother," he said quietly not wanting to have this conversation with her.


"Then why can't you even look at me? We used to talk about everything."


He sat quit for a moment. His lips tensed. He looked sternly at her. "I went to school to escape you, Mother. Then you followed me there. Bought a house and forced me to move in with you." He decided that if she wanted the truth he would give it to her. "You never let me out of your sight for a moment, Mother. You wanted me to be one of your gay 'girl' friends. For as long as I can remember you have chattered on and on about the inane world of fashion and acting and super-stardom. You dressed me up and shoved me down runways. You tested lipsticks on me because we have the same skin tone, and I don't even care what tone my skin is. I was a puppy, a rag doll that you toted around, exposing me to every pointless aspect of yours, Father's, and Grandfather's greedy, self-absorbed industries. I am an empty, faithless, confused, incapable offspring of charismatic, huge, oxygen-absorbing parents. And, Mother, if I don't escape that gravity, that overwhelming gravity, I'm going to crash into nothingness." He saw his mother's eyes weaken and tear up. He regretted immediately having let the truth out.


"Maybe I needed you too much. I don't know how to apologize to you for loving you so much. I never had that closeness with my parents. They left me to be raised by strangers." She dabbed her eyes with her napkin. "You never told me."


"I never could, Mother. You were always talking."


"I'm listening now." She reached out for his hand. "Please don't hate me."


He grabbed her hand and held it tight. "Mother, I don't hate you. I just need some time to myself."


"Tell me about this girl that you've been seeing."


"It's nothing really."


"Have you and she...."


"Don't ask me about my sex life mother. That's what I mean. That's where I draw the line."


"I just know that you've had issues with sex in the past. I just want to understand."


"That's just not appropriate for a mother and son to discuss. It's an emotional incest."


"You make me sound disgusting." She turned her head. "I just want to help you fix what ever is wrong."


"Just because I don't sleep with every model I meet and run around like a rich playboy on Ecstasy doesn't mean that there is something wrong with me."


"Of course not. But at some point in a relationship a woman expects a physical intimacy or she begins to doubt herself, her man, her bond to you."


"I don't want to have this conversation, Mother."


"Is it because I put lipstick on you when you were a boy?"


"No, Mother." He chuckled at the thought.


"If your not interested in women, you can tell me."


Eric laughed. "I know you would love it if I were gay. It would suit you, but I'm not gay, Mother."


Dreanna looked into her son's eyes. A question sat heavy on her tongue, built up and held onto for years. The answer she thought might break her. "Eric, did your grandfather ever..." Her eyes teared up again, "touch you?"


"Oh my God mother, no. How could you think that about Grandfather? I know he's eccentric, but he's not a pedophile."


"Thank God. I've wanted to ask you that for years."


"Why would you even think that?"


"You don't know him the way I do. I love him dearly, but when a man thinks he is god he has few inhibitions."


"Well put your mind at rest. He has never been anything more or less to me than a loving grandfather."


"Well when you watch your father seduce your best friend, it tarnishes your view of him."


"Hansel is the most sane thing in Grandfather's life."


"But twenty-nine years ago, when I was a girl, it was devastating. My lesbian mothers were in Jamaica jamming to Bob Marley when I walked into my father's office and discovered my best friend sitting in my father's lap. Both of them wearing only Crisco." She smiled warmly at her son. "I am proud to have been a part of my parents' turbulent, twisted passions. Don't get me wrong. I am who I am because of their hunger for everything on the planet. They are big people who spun the world on their fingertips, but I'm proud that your father and I kept the world big for you. I just hope it's not so big that it swallows you."


He smiled back at her, feeling for the first time that she heard his cry for space. "If it overwhelms me, Mother, I know where home is."


"Are you sure your not hungry? The food here is amazing."


"I'm sure. I had a hot dog from a convenience store earlier."


"I'm not sure what that means or if I want to, but ok. I hope you mean that metaphorically." She grinned.


"There is something else that I want to discuss with you."


"Just don't make me cry. It's hard to be a diva when your son brings you to tears." She pretended a pout.


"I want to leave Thornburg Media. I want a real job."


"Your grandfather has asked you to work on the contracts for the  Qetesh Network for a reason. He wants to give you the opportunity to struggle. Isn't that what you want?"


"Yes, but I want to struggle for something that I can believe in."


"Give it a little time. If you want to leave the company after giving it a chance then I won't stop you. But remember one day, it will all be yours. You can make of it what you want. Make of it something that you can believe in. I'm not happy that we have a porn network under the Thornburg umbrella, but it is very profitable. And when you do become a lawyer you will have a wealth of experience to draw from."


"Contracts bore me. And the negotiations with those people are outrages. They want lavish hotel rooms and prostitutes when they come out here. And they bitch about the Texas heat. I'm never going back to LA, and I live for the day that I don't have to deal with LA coming to Houston. Sometimes I think about moving out to the ranch and raising cattle, just to escape the stench."


"Your grandfather would love to have you move out to the ranch. I would prefer that to you living in the penthouse in Thornburg Tower. I think about you passing by Rev. Laud every time you come in and out. He has silver bullets loaded for our family you know. Thanks to your grandfather's purchase of that disgusting network."


"Laud is a media hound. He doesn't even believe in what he says. And I was talking about my grandmother's ranch."


"I forbid you to move that far, and in with that crazy boring woman. Its her fault that you and your father have no interest in art, love fried foods, and mosey about in blue jeans. She had you convinced that my family was on a path to hell for the longest time. You used to come home from her house begging me to change my wicked ways."


Eric laughed. "I don't remember that."


"I put an end to her attempts to indoctrinate you by the time you were five. I won't scar you with the details of that conversation." Dreanna smirked. "It's hard to believe that your father's father and my father were best friends when they were boys. The good Catholic and the evil genius were like brothers urging the other to join in acts of sin and savior."


"I can't imagine my two grandfathers playing together."


"They were on and off as friends every other decade. When your grandfather teamed up with the lesbian duo and created his smut mag and me, they didn't speak for a long time. But lucky for your father and I they were bound together by Reina and her charities."


"I don't know much about her, even though I've seen her with both of my grandfathers often. And Grand Hans doesn't talk about his mother much."


"Grand Hans." She paused for a second and scrunched her brow, "When did you start calling him that?"


"Since I could talk."


"I just don't remember how you came to call him that."


"It would have never felt right just calling him Hansel. He has always meant more to me than that."


"I'm glad. Out of us all, let him be your role model."


"I just don't understand why Grandfather married Shaundra. It must hurt Hansel."


"He claims he married her so that his baby isn't a bastard, but with a bitch of a mother, what else could it be?"


"It's not the baby's fault."


"Hansel is very forgiving. If I were he I would have murdered your grandfather in his sleep on more than one occasion. Slowly, painfully. Hansel has told me though, Shaundra is wife in name only, and she keeps her distance. Except for trying to befriend him. He of course wants nothing to do with his husband's wife. In what other family what that make sense?" She grimaced. "Would you visit me in prison if I get caught forcing that cheap gold digging hoochie to choke on pennies."


"Let grandfather deal with his own demoness."


Dreanna looked at her watch. "I need to meet your father."


"We never really talked about me leaving the company. So I think we should have lunch again soon."

He stood up and kissed his mother on the cheek.


"I would love that." She stood up and held her son in an embrace. "I will wait for an invitation."


They looked at each other for a moment. He smiled at her. "I do love you, Mother."


Her eyes teared up again. "I love you enough to do the hardest thing that a mother has to do."


"What is that?"


"Let you live your own life." She gave his cheek another peck and then let him walk away.