Mayhem Monica - Absolute Mayhem: secret confessions of a porn star

M y dad shoving soap into my mouth for swearing thats my earliest childhood memory, and I was only three years old. If that sounds weird, consider the next thing I remember after that: masturbating when I was five.

And it all went downhill from there.

I was born in Brisbane in the suburb of Brookfield, in the district of Moggill, some ten kilometres west of Brisbane city proper. It was a conservative suburb, with a small population but lots of land and some big Queenslander houses. There were places to go and ride horses and a farmers market with locally grown fruit and vegetables, that type of thing.

My mother was born and raised in Wales. She had blue eyes, dark-brown hair, which she always kept short, and an olive complexion. When she was 19 and living in London, she jumped on a ship to Australia and ended up in Sydney. She met my dad in London, after moving back there from Sydney, which was an odd sort of parallel because my dad is actually from a coastal town in New South Wales a couple of hours north of Sydney. They got married in London and eventually made their way back to Australia, via Madrid, where my mother gave birth to my brother at the age of 30. Then, two years later, she gave birth to me in Brisbane.

My mother was six years older than my father and she was always bossing him around and putting him down. This was in spite of the fact that he was the breadwinner of the family he worked in the music business as a recording engineer and radio DJ. Mum wasnt at all a big woman she stood just five feet tall but she certainly made up for her lack of physical stature with a quick temper and an angry disposition. She was an alcoholic, too. My father put up with it for seven years, for the sake of us kids, until my mother kicked him out in a fit of rage one night. They divorced when I was three years old.

At the time, we were living in Kenmore, adjacent to Brookfield. It was a good suburb, and after my dad left we clearly couldnt afford it. I remember a lot of hills, a lot of trees and a lot of really beautifully kept gardens. In the houses my mother rented, we had our own bedrooms, and some places even had a swimming pool. Kenmore was really my mothers way of keeping up with the Joneses almost literally, since Jones is a very Welsh name!

After the divorce, my mother won custody of me and my brother (who has requested his name be withheld from this book), so we were left alone with her incessant smoking and drinking. She smoked Martin Blues quite a rare brand, whose scarcity often made her settle for Benson & Hedges or Dunhills in the blue box. As for the booze, she drank the worst, most awful white wine usually a Riesling or a sweet, fruity Lexia that came from a cask. Since it was cheap, and she was on the welfare, she would drink this crap all day and all night, and basically stayed drunk the whole time as her means of getting through life. She was also a serious pill popper. I dont recall a time when she wasnt hooked on pills. Dont ask me what they were, since I never checked the labels, but she had so many of them.

The remainder of her government welfare money she would spend on fine foods and other treats for herself, without ever thinking of me and my brother. On that account alone, I guess, anyone could consider her to have been selfish and cruel. But that was her nature. She was a very cold, bitter, aggressive woman.

She had this habit of always sitting outdoors on the verandah or on the plastic patio furniture in the back yard smoking and drinking and reading Stephen King novels. She would do this for hours, and you couldnt talk to her. Every time I tried, she would tell me to go piss off. And then shed chain-smoke her cigs everywhere, even though she knew I was a chronic asthmatic, and whenever I started to choke and cough shed just tell me to shut up.

In the mornings, she used to ring a bell from her bed and ask me to bring her tea or wine, often from as early as eleven. I was not allowed to sit down and talk to her until I had delivered it. Then she would watch old British comedies on TV The Benny Hill Show , Fawlty Towers and Monty Python . Sometimes, I would watch them with her, and I grew to love them too. Mum seemed happier when she was watching these funny shows, and she was certainly less scary to be around. I tried so hard to get her to love me, and these seemed like the best times to be in her company.

She did work occasionally, but every time she got a secretarial job she would quit for some stupid reason such as she didnt like the tea or she thought her boss was an asshole. She couldnt get on with anyone, really, and she didnt have many friends. The ones she did have, she ended up pushing away because of all the drama she brought into their lives, and people can only take so much. I only recall her ever having had two boyfriends after dad left. One was when I was five. Exactly who this guy was, I dont remember, but I know that he didnt last long. The other man was a Chinese scientist, whom she worked with in Brisbane. That was also short-term, only about a six-month relationship, because he ended up going back to China.