by Clare Morgan
After so many years of her deceptions and the constant emotional turmoil caused by her divorces, I’d had enough. I wanted nothing to do with my mother’s lifestyle and I decided I wanted a normal life. I wanted to go to school, have a career, a permanent home, and perhaps even a husband and children of my own. But I would marry and have children out of love, and not as a means of extracting more alimony and child support payments if and when we divorced.
The whole problem was, because of my mother's lifestyle choices, I wasn't exactly equipped to lead a "normal life". The simple fact was, despite my distain and rebellion against all of the things my mother cared for and valued, I had little or no experience in what a "normal life" was except for what I saw on television. Growing up, I didn't even have friends who I could model myself after. You see, the biggest problem with being the daughter of a trophy wife is that these vacuous and highly desirable beauties tend to flock together and compare bank books, jewelry, and vacation homes. And being the child of a trophy wife meant I was surrounded by nothing but the children of trophy wives. Young men and women who were being groomed to seduce and beguile.
So, when I finally went out on my own, I wasn't exactly what you would call prepared for the trials and tribulations of the real world. There were so many details that I never had to deal with living with my mother. I never had to pay rent, buy groceries and clothing, cook, clean, or have a job. I never even had to do something as simple as address and mail a letter. But when I left Mother, I was determined to make a go of things. Luckily, over the years my various stepfathers had set up trusts for me, so I wasn't exactly going into the big bad world completely empty handed.
But, unfortunately, I went into the real world empty-headed and naive. Within a year of leaving my mother, I blew through $50,000 in trust fund money. The fact is, whether I liked it or not, I was my mother’s daughter and I’d picked up more than a few of her habits. Namely, the absolute need for near constant retail therapy. In the end, I had a closet full of $500 dresses and $250 heels, but I didn’t have enough money in the bank to make rent. But I was determined never to go back to Mother, so instead of crawling back on my belly, I did what so many 18-year-old girls do, I started stripping.
Now before you start shaking your head and clucking your tongue in disgust because stripping just so happens to be a step or two lower down the decency ladder than what my mother does. But, I’ll tell you this, being an exotic dancer isn’t that bad. Particularly when you look like I do. I’m a near carbon copy of my mother with the one difference being that every piece of me is the equipment I was born with and my hair is a brilliant, deep red and my skin is a flawless china doll white thanks to my real father’s Irish ancestry. And because of this, I don’t dance at the sleazy, bunker-like caverns that seem to occupy freeway off ramps in every major city in America. I dance at the high-end clubs where there’s a $50 cover and a lap dance will cost you $200 and a bottle of Dom Perignon.
The other difference between my mother collecting husbands and dancing is this: For the five minutes I possess a man, he is mine and mine alone. For five minutes, I am his fantasy, a woman who haunts his dreams, who touches him, teases him, but who he is not allowed to touch. I am an idea and during those short minutes, I can take anything from him that I want; his money, his love, his desire, and I give him none of it back in return. I think of it almost as a form of torture.
You have no idea how many times I found myself in the VIP room, the taste of champagne foaming on my lips as I slowly rub my pale skin with baby oil. My small, delicate hands slowly caressing every inch of my body and feeling power surge through me as I hear a man’s sharp intake of breath as I tease my pink, swollen nipples. With the slightest touch, I can feel their bodies tense, their heart rates set to bursting as I spread my legs, allowing them a small glance at what they can never have.
No, what I do and what my mother does are two completely different animals. My mother is always at the beck and call of a man. She may have money and comfort, but she is a slave. I, however, am a master.
Chapter 2:
Mother landed on my doorstep on a sweltering August afternoon. It was my night off—A Monday, which I never worked because the only men who would come to the club at the beginning of the week were typically nothing more than angry drunks who didn’t have a nickel to their name other than the cover charge—and I planned to do nothing but sit around my apartment watching old movies and maybe ordering in a pizza. But, Mother’s appearance, of course, changed all of that.
She was, as usual, dressed to the nines and her wrists and fingers sparkled with around $50,000 worth of jewelry, which wasn’t exactly a smart idea in my neighborhood. But then again, mother had always been oblivious to classes outside of her own, which was in its own way admirable, but also very naive and dangerous. It wasn’t that I lived in a bad neighborhood, but I couldn’t help but think that an unaccompanied older rich white lady would be an extremely easy target no matter where you lived. Other than of Beverly Hills, of course.
She craned her head from left to right to get a better look at my apartment without actually stepping inside of it and quietly clearing her throat; this was mother speak for: “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” But instead, I asked:
“What are you doing here, Mother?”
Her jaw dropped indignantly.
“Emily, where are your manners? I raised you better than that!”
I wanted to say: No, Mother, you didn’t raise me. A long series of nannies raised me and they all taught me the best ways to deal with people I had no desire to be around. But instead of saying this, I moved away from the door and motioned for her to come inside. Mother daintily stepped inside as if she was walking a tightrope and she took in the single room that was my apartment. After my disastrous first year on my own, I parsed down to the point that I almost lived like a monk. I had taken my possessions down to only a mattress and large tablet which I used as both my computer and TV. But other than those two things and my street clothes, I only had my work gear, which was an array of cheap lingerie, string bikinis, and an array of come fuck me heels.
“It’s very … quaint, dear.”
I could tell that she wanted to run screaming from the apartment dragging me behind her by my hair. As humble as it was, it was mine, and I was completely happy with my life whether she approved of it or not.
“Once again, mother. what are you doing here?” I asked petulantly.
I also wanted to ask how, exactly, had she found me? I had been incredibly careful in covering my tracks when I left mother, particularly after the first year. I had moved cross country, I didn’t use credit cards or even have a bank account any longer. But, of course, I did have to provide my social security number to the club, which is most likely how she tracked me down. I know how paranoid all of this is, but I really wanted nothing more to do with mother and that meant disappearing completely. Of course, with mother’s considerable resources and connections, tracking me down was probably as easy as simply picking up the phone and making a single call. Or better chances than not, she never lost track of me at all and had just kept her distance, thinking that I was only going through a phase and that I needed to work it out on my own without her interference.
“Well, other than the fact that I’ve missed you,” She said as she began picking some imaginary dust off of her coat. “But I also wanted to let you know that I’ve gotten married.”
Mother never used the word “again” when describing her latest marriage. For her, she considered each new marriage to be something fresh and clean. There were no ex-husbands, no divorce settlements, nothing but the latest man who had somehow landed in her web.
“I’m absolutely shocked,” I said sarcastically. “I thought you said you were never going to marry again after Kyle.”
Kyle had been the husband and step-father who had lasted the longest—an amazing 5 years—and he was my favorite step-father. Kyle had made his fortune creating and manufacturing a deer c
all and bottling deer pheromones. Unlike the hundreds of products like it on the market, Kyle’s inventions actually worked and were incredibly popular with hunters. What made Kyle so great was that he was a simple man. He loved the outdoors and spent as much of his time as he could out in the wilderness. Mother, of course, abhorred this part of his personality, but I loved it. During the summer months, Kyle and I would go camping almost every weekend, and he actually considered me his daughter unlike the 7 other—including my own biological father— pretenders who had crowded my life.
But Kyle was like most middle age, working class men, he wasn’t exactly all that careful when it came to his health and he ended up dying of a sudden and entirely unexpected heart attack two days after I turned 18. Since he had never been married before meeting my mother, his entire $10-million-dollar estate was willed to my mother and I was provided with the bulk of my aforementioned $50,000 trust fund. Of course, my mother ended up doubling her new found fortune by selling Kyle’s hard-won business to his competitors a mere week after we’d buried him.
I considered her selling the business to almost be a betrayal of some sort. I mean, I know my mother is about as far from a business woman as they come, but at least she could have waited at least a few months after his death to unload the business. It was as if she’d been planning to sell it all along and was just waiting for Kyle to keel over. This was the other reason why I had to get away from my mother because I knew that she only loved one person and one person only:
Herself
She smiled at me politely, batting her eyes, her typical condescending battle mask.
“Well, you know that I loved Kyle very much, darling,” She said as she moved towards the center of my small studio. “But, as they say, life goes on. Besides, if you understood who my husband was, you’d completely understand why I married him.”
Yeah, she was baiting me, and I totally swallowed it down without hesitating.
“And who might your new husband be, mother?” I asked.
“Boyfriend, actually. We haven’t exactly made it to the alter just yet.”
“Okay, so who, exactly is your new boyfriend?”
“Why, Dylan Powell, and he very much wants to meet you.”
Chapter 3:
So in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past 20 years, let me fill you in on who exactly Dylan Powell is. During the begins of the computer age, there were three key people who moved the industry forward and into the homes of millions of Americans. They were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Dylan Powell, albeit his innovations would come decades after Gates and Jobs . Most people know who both Gates and Jobs are. I mean, even if you don’t own a computer or a smartphone or any other kind of electronic device manufactured in the last 20 years, you know who Gates and Jobs are. But, without Dylan Powell, neither one of those men—or their iconic companies—would exist, especially their mobile divisions.
You see, Gates and Jobs's teams mostly concentrated on creating the hardware of their various machines and they more or less outsourced the software development to Powell and his team of code monkeys. Luckily, unlike the teams that worked with Gates and Jobs, Powell didn’t work for peanuts and held onto the copyrights of all of the software he developed for both companies. It was only after the personal computer boom was in full effect that he sold out to Bill Gates and Microsoft for a cool $5 billion dollars. The sale of his products was one of the tech booms truly legendary stories, especially since 6 months after, the dot.com bubble burst and Powell came out of it completely unscathed.
After that, Powell started more than a few successful startups, but none of them in the tech industry. He opened an airline, a publisher—he was also one of Amazon’s earliest investors—a chain of movie theaters and was one of the top financiers of two incredibly popular streaming services. Yes, Dylan Powell is a true capitalist hero in every sense of the word. But on top of all those money making accomplishments, he’s also a dedicated philanthropist who supports several climate change and underwater preservation organizations. Like Gates, he was the type of billionaire who you couldn’t help but admire for all they’d done for the world other than just exploit it. So when mother asked me to come and meet my new, soon to be step-father (Albeit he was only two years older than I was. Yeah, it’s kind of gross), there wasn’t a chance and hell I was going to say no.
But one thing bothered me about the whole situation. How did mother meet Powell and how the hell had he been caught under mother’s spell? I, of course, couldn’t resist asking her this as we made the cross country trip in one of Powell’s—and now my mother’s—dozen or so private aircraft.
“Do you remember the plot of land Kyle owned in Tennessee?” She asked.
“The Ranch? Of course, I remember it! Kyle and I spent a few weeks every summer there.”
The “Ranch” as Kyle called it, was 3000 acres of pristine, undisturbed forest and wetlands located in northern Tennessee. Kyle had grown up on the land in a small house that his great-grandfather had built and subsequent generations add onto over the years. And when he heard the state was planning to sell the land off to developers, he swept in and offered double the price what the developers were buying it for, and the state wasn’t about to turn down that kind of money. It was easily one of the most beautiful areas of the country I’d ever stepped foot on. Suddenly, I started internally fuming, wondering if mother had decided to sell off the land?
“Well,” she continued, “last year I decided to turn the whole thing into a nature preserve dedicated to Kyle’s memory. One of Dylan’s organizations maintains the area, so we met on the day of the dedication and have been together ever since.”
Who was this woman standing in front of me? Had Powell’s influence changed her so much that now at this late stage in her life she had somehow developed a soul? We spent the remainder of the trip discussing her new life with Powell and all of the causes they sponsored together.
As we began to descend down to the Powell compound just outside of Hartford, Connecticut, I marveled at the vast green swaths of land and the massive mansion equating right in the middle of it. I’d never seen such a large home before. It was hard to believe that only my mother and Powell occupied it.
As we departed the jet, we were greeted by Powell and perhaps the single most handsome man I’d ever seen.
Powell and mother gently kissed one another. She then turned to me and made my introductions.
“Dylan, this is my daughter, Emily,” She said.
“It’s very good to meet you at long last,” Powell said as he leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, which lingered just a bit too long. Not that I minded, because when it comes right down to it, I knew that Dylan Powell was the man of my dreams.
Chapter 4:
Thanks to my mother’s various divorce settlements—and from a small inheritance from my grandparents—my mother has always been well-off. But the fact is that well-off is the type of money that you can blow through during an extravagant weekend in Las Vegas. It’s what most American’s would consider rich, but the truly wealthy consider it nothing but pocket change. My mother has always aspired to be one of the truly wealthy, the elusive 1%, and now she was. All of her base wants and needs were now completely fulfilled and you could tell that she was bored to tears by it. With Mother’s ambitions now completely fulfilled, the spark of life had now left her. There were no more challenges, and even though she would never say it out loud, she passionately hated it. Her pursuit of her ideal was what drove her, and now that she had it in her grasp, she found it utterly abysmal.
Personally, I found Powell to be absolutely fascinating. Yes, I had been around money all of my life, but nothing like this. The 1% do live differently than the middle class. For most people, every moment of the day is about survival. You don’t go to work because you enjoy what you do for a living, you go to work because you need to eat, you need to keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back. But with everything the 1% does, it has no value t
o it, because it is nothing but a leisure activity. Work, play, volunteering, it’s all one in the same to them; they’ve made their money—or their grandparents or parents did—so therefore they don’t have to contribute to society if they don’t want to. They can spend their days confined inside of their homes, never venturing into the outside world and never having to worry about a single thing.
Admittedly, Powell was far humbler about their wealth than I imagine most of the 1% are. Dylan came from a middle-class background like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, well off, but not rich. He understood the struggles of everyday people, even though his parents were able to provide him with a house in a good neighborhood and send him to good schools and had most likely never gone hungry a day in his life. But he understood people worked hard, and he’d instilled his moral beliefs in his son. So much so that Dylan was incredibly passionate about income inequality and the need for a fairer society, and he did everything in his power to make it fairer.
A month after I arrived at the Powell compound, Dylan hosted a charity gala/birthday party for himself. Dylan’s birthday parties were legendary because of the sheer number of people who showed up for it. Actors, musicians, scientists, and politicians came from all over the world to pay their respect to Dylan and, of course, drink and dine on the finest food the world had to offer. But along with being a decadent evening of celebration, but it was also a $15,000 a plate fundraiser that benefited several of Dylan’s charities. Growing up—when all of these social events still mattered to me—I dreamed of attending one of his parties. They were basically the Moby Dick of social occasions and invitations were highly sought after even though they came at such a hefty price tag.
Being the newest member of the family, I was acting as a co-hostess along with Dylan. We were put front and center and greeted each of the guests as they arrived by limousine or via the Powell’s private airfield. As each guest entered, I was literally star struck because I knew that nearly 80% of the world’s wealth was present. These were people you read about in celebrity magazines, or in financial journals and on television talk shows. These were people who not only populated the dreams and aspirations of most Americans, but they were also held up as our finest examples. After everyone had arrived and Dylan and I retired to the party, I almost felt drunk.