Jake Johnsons

Chapter 1 - Knocking at the Door

Jake Johnson heard knocks on the door. Jake jumped out from the bed and went to the door, looking into the peephole. It was Jessica.

Jake had texted her earlier to come over.

Chapter 2 - At a Hotel Room

When Jake plopped onto the well-made twin bed, after spending hours forcing himself to transit from one terminal to vehicle to vehicle, be it a taxi, a bus, or an airplane, it was well past 8 PM. The hotel room looked clean. It had a postmodern futuristic theme to it: touch panels, everywhere for conventional electric switches.

When Jake finally was able to stick that security key card into the slot and push himself into the room, Jake was tapped out, his energy bar frenzily blinking red nearing 0%. Jake saw a clean minimalistic kitchenette with a small refrigerator to his right, and a sofa. There was a super-thin smart TV on the wall to his left.

The room was boxy in shape and felt very small with all the modern niceties. When Jake opened the entrance door, he could see the window with the curtains at the far end, which was drawn up to reveal the night skyline of the city, sprinkled with RGB colors emanating from the neon lights and buildings afar. At the very end of the room, next to the window, there laid a twin bed, with a corridor of space from the window, just wide enough for one person to slide by. As Jake's body landed down on the bed, he felt his body sucked into the soft cushion of the bed as if it were quick sand. Jake meant to watch some free complimentary hotel cable movies, but as he reached out for the remote, he felt as if all the energy was getting drained out of him, and he immediately fell asleep.

When he woke up, it was about 10 PM. As he had skipped dinner on the plane, he made a quick run to the Seven/Eleven located a couple of blocks away and bought some hearty junk food along with some beer and wine. He quickly quaffed down the food, while lying leisurely on the bed. He left the TV on, watching VH1 music videos, flashing scanty clothed fly girls. Of course, he had to imbibe an ample amount of alcohol to wash down the junk he was consuming. His body commanded it. As the alcohol kicked in, however, his libido shifted gear, and his hormones seemed to have taken over the parts of his brain responsible for self-restraint.

Jessica Altman was a friend, an X, who he had dated seriously for a couple of years or so "with marriage in mind," as people used to say. She was pretty with luscious brunette hair, and a seemingly voluptuous body but for an A breast size. She used to joke with some sadness in her eyes that they were like two fried eggs, Grade AA.

They met through a colleague at the office. Jake worked as senior consultant at Wakefield & Forrester, LLC., a mediocrely well-known trade compliance consulting firm, and Peter McVeigh was a middle-level office manager there, married with kids. Apparently, he was secretly dating a woman working at a consumer services center for an organic cosmetics company, which was conveniently located on the same floor (the 9th floor), across the hallway from Wakefield & Forrester. She was a redhead with a bit of freckle, which would have been cute had she been a teenager. Her name was Nina Harrison, also married with kids. She was a tad on the plus side but in all the right places, which held up pretty well, Jake thought, considering her age. Since there were only two offices on the 9th floor, Jake sometimes ran into her in the elevator and greeted her with a friendly yet professional smile, which was graciously returned by Nina.

While Jake did not put Peter in his inner circle of friends, which was reserved for his buddies from his hick hometown. Nonetheless, Jake considered Peter as a close working or drinking buddy. On some of the drinking binges they went on together after a full day of work, Peter enjoyed telling him lurid details of his affairs with Nina. After a few rounds of shots, the conversation usually turned to, what else, sex, explicit, TMI.

Peter, while looking like a Harvard man, who had played varsity football, he was in truth remarkably ordinary in terms of his academic or professional background. But, he was affably talkative and approachable, which was an ideal trait for a middle-level office manager for a non-Fortune 500 company. Nina, while looking like a state schooled woman, had an impressive Ivory pedigree. Jake thought of Nina as a professional woman, who had her life in a definite and well-planned career trajectory. Almost as impressive as her resume was her physical feature that popped out (her F-cup breasts) from the page, which were usually revealingly hidden under the Gucci or Chanel business suit. Jake also thought that, like a pro as she was in the industry, Nina wore her makeup really well, like a supermodel in a photoshoot. However, somehow, Nina reminded Jake of one of those wannabe-sorority girls that had hung around fraternity parties well into the night for a chance for hooking up with an alpha greek stud.

Her direct report below was Jessica. At one of the binge drinking sessions, Peter suggested to Jake that they should hang out together (like a double date) one night after work. So, this was how Jake met Jessica. The first double date started out with taking a few at a steakhouse in the city, followed by clubbing, as if that was their routine course. At this one club in downtown, called Black Ruby, with the music pounding away in the near darkness with dizzying psychedelic lighting, they got into more hardcore drinks.

They sat in one of those cheesy half-moon shaped sofas. Jake couldn't see what he was drinking exactly, but it tasted either like Jim Bean or Johnny Walker. Peter sat at one end of the sofa, and Jake the other. Nina and Jessica were sandwiched in between. Jessica said something into Jake's ear, while the music was thundering away. Jake could only pick out a word or two, but he bobbed his head up and down as if he understood. Just going along with the flow, as everyone was in the club, the four were carried along with the music into the psychedelic orgies.

Peter and Nina started doing the so-called love shots, where they cross-locked their arms and drank shots. Peter urged Jake to do the same with Jessica, which he willingly obliged.

The Black Ruby Club had a typical dance floor set-up: the DJ box located at one end, the floor jam-packed with people in the center, and tables alongside the wall. The music was banging hard, where Jake felt every beat of the bass, as if synchronized to his heart beats. People came and went around Jake's table, and Peter sometimes eyed scantily dressed women, walking by, especially with those with what Peter called bubble butts.

From the stories of conquests told by Peter, Jake surmised that Peter liked his women curvaceous with big butts but not too fat, the type of which Nina seemed to fit into.

Peter had told Jake that he married young, when he was in college. He knocked up his sophomoric girlfriend and was shotgunned into marriage. On more than one occasion, Jake had been invited to Peter's home for dinner and had met his wife, Marilyn Jackson. Peter lived in a house with a white picket fence in the suburb, about an hour commute door-to-door. There were two kids, already grown up to be handsome young adults; one girl in community college, and the younger brother in high school. Jake thought on his first visit to Peter's home that this is what an ideal house with a white picket fence looked like.

The two kids, Jake thought, were dressed in model images of young adults, like those seen in a department store catalogue. They sat with Jake at the dinner table. Marilyn had prepared a pot roast for the occasion. There were mashed potatoes and other green vegetables as side dishes. There were a few rounds of wine with the dinner. The conversation turned to, as usual, sports, school stuff for kids and other current events, with a hefty dose of jokes mixed in.

Marilyn was a high school English teacher. She taught mostly AP classes. She was passionate about English literature, especially about Chaucer and Shakespeare. She had platinum blonde hair with some dark lines thrown in here and there. Her hair came down to her shoulder, usually tied in the back with some sort of elastics.

Marilyn had put on more than the usual amount of makeup for Jake's visit. When she shifted her weight to the right side at the table, under the ceiling lighting, Jake could see, through the thin layer of cosmetics, the paleness of her skin. Jake could also see through the makeup a glimpse of virile beauty she had once retained.

Peter had told Jake in confidence that they hadn't had sex for years and that Marilyn particularly didn't seem to enjoy sex.

Meanwhile, Peter was a kind of guy that really needed to dump out a certain amount of semen, daily, one way or another. Except for cracking cynical jokes once in a while, Peter and Marilyn as a couple just looked tired of being together. They rarely looked at each other nor smiled at the table.

With a change of a DJ, Jake was awakened from his fond memory of meeting Marilyn to the reality of the dance floor at Black Ruby.

Peter shouted out, "Hey, this is our song!"

Nina nodded and instinctively stood up, and the two rushed to the floor to dance, a bit out of step, to the "A-Ha" remix club version.

Peter, looking over to Jake and Jessica at the table, beckoned them, "Come on, Jake!"

Moving along with the flow of the night, Jake and Jessica too mossied down to the dance floor. Jake knew the grooves. He knew the moves. Jessica passively swayed her body to the rhythm, but compared to her dancing, Jake looked almost like a professional dancer, which impressed Jessica, further enticing her towards Jake.

[p]

Jake had been an aspiring musician, some time ago, when he was a young man.

A bit unusual for the day in his neighborhood, Jake had earlier played piano, "semi-professionally," he liked to say. He was never good at it. One of the reasons being, Jake rarely practiced, and most of the time, he was late to his lessons. But, his piano teacher, Debra O'Neill, did not snitch and made no fuss about the absentee and tardiness, as long as the tuition was credited to her bank account at the end of the month.

There were two lessons a week, one on Tuesday after school at 4PM, and another on Thursday at the same time. Jake kept the whole piano lesson situation secret. Asked by his friends where he went on Tuesday and Thursday after school, Jake just replied, "I got some shit to do at home."

And, that was the end of the discussion. Jake took a zigzag route to Mrs. O'Neill's so that he could not be followed by his friends to the piano school. The mood of the era in that neighborhood was that, if found out, he would have been forever branded as a sissy, which was almost like a social death sentence for teens in school. While Jake was bored out of his mind of practicing scales, he did enjoy the company of a feminine sort in the music school. The music school was the only game in town, as it were, since, there, the music of playing piano was being taught, albeit in a makeshift garage piano lesson room. Back in the day, people didn't have pianos; even the upright kind was rare. The grand piano was unheard of. Debra had one baby grand piano, that probably made her the most qualified person to teach piano for miles around.

Besides, objectively speaking, she probably was the most qualified piano teacher in the state, being a Juilliard graduate. Like most of the girls that entered Julliard, she had won dozens of concours awards and trophies, touring the world, which had been decorated the one whole side of her bedroom in a typical Victorian house in South Hampton, in the good side of the neighborhood, where she grew up. Now, however, they served as ornaments collecting dust in her small two-bedroom house in the not so good side of the town.

Unaware of the details of Mrs. O'Neill's tribulations at that time, Jake gleaned most of the facts from the memoirs that Mrs. O'Neill published years later, titled, "A Wife of a Lawyer Who Failed the Bar Seven Times," and reconstructed the story of what was going on with her music school, years ago.

Being only the game in town, the families with a bit of disposable income sent their daughters to Mrs. O'Neills'. It was somewhat of a status symbol of the newfangled haves in their nascent form.

The girls of Mrs. O'Neill's formed a clique of a sort of the popular girls in school. They were best dressed, did well in school and deemed pretty overall by the kids in school.

Although Jake couldn't stand banging on those keyboards, he did enjoy going to Mrs. O'Neill's school. For a house that was located in the border area to the wrong side of track, Mrs. O'Neill's house was reasonably well maintained. There was a white picket fence, albeit the color of the paint was now fading grey, some portions peeling off, revealing the bare wooden texture.

Once Jake swung open the fence door, he could see a bit of lawn patches, or more accurately, weeds that looked like lawn, and a concrete pavement, cracked on some places with patches of different varieties of weeds, looking more menacing. The pavement led to the pale green door. The whole house was colored in various shades of this green color due to the natural wear and tear over the years.

The door was usually unlocked. Jake could usually hear the piano, clanking away, at that point. The living room opened up, with a typical setup for that time: a TV, a coffee table and a sofa, and shelves around the walls. There were usually two or more kids, watching TV, like zombies, with various plastic toys strewn about in the room. Usually, there was a baby or two. The older sisters or brothers in teens were supposed to watch over them.

As Jake entered the living room, he did not bother to say hello or something to that effect. The kids of Mrs. The O'Neill's were just too immersed in TV or whatever they were doing at that moment. Maybe they just had bad manners, Jake sometimes thought. Jake knew that at least three of the kids were Mrs. O'Neill's by birth, but as to the others, they were neighborhood kids that Mrs. O'Neill was supposedly babysitting for some side income. Or, they were just vagrant kids that just walked in, or the kids of her friends or relatives, Jake could not really tell. It was like a daycare center went awry.

In any event, upon entering the house, Jake hurried into the makeshift piano lesson room, which was a few steps to his right in the living room. He managed to capture the scene of chaos in the living room, without making any eye contact with the kids there.

In the piano lesson room, there was a sofa to his left against the plaster wall, and the baby grand piano to his right. There was a window at the far end of the room, which was draped with a brownish linen of some thickness. Jake had never seen the drapes drawn up, for all the years spent in Mrs. O'Neill's school.

Jake saw three girls sitting on the sofa, and one girl playing the piano. All the girls were older than Jake, who seemed to have matured much faster. The girls were in that age bracket, when the curiosity of the opposite sex peaked, with a bountiful of feminine hormones.

Jake was the center of attention because he was the only boy in Mrs. O'Neill's school. Jake, while a few years younger than these girls, was a few years matured and bigger than his average male peers in school.

While these girls were known for their bitchiness in school, they were pretty friendly to Jake, at least within the boundary of Mrs. O'Neill's music school, for two reasons: mainly, one, the girls wanted to know more stuff about the boys in school and their anatomies, and two, the help with their school work.

To the girls sitting on the sofa, Jake said, "Hey," in a deeper than his usual voice, jutting out his chin.

The girls almost in unison said, "Hi, Jake," giggling in a typical way that the girls used to do in those days.

Jake checked them out. From his left, sitting on the sofa, was Jennifer Demoir, a pale skin, with a reddish blonde hair, semi-curly that dangled down to her shoulders. She had greenish blue eyes that seemed to switch color back and forth, depending on the day. Jennifer put on more than average makeup with long eyelashes. Perhaps, that was to hide a little bit of freckles on her cheeks or to put some vibrance to her pale skin. It seemed that she did not tan well, like other girls. She was about five feet four in height, with an hourglass figure of a fully matured woman. She wore tight clothes, Jake thought, or maybe she was growing out faster, or maybe she just wanted to flaunt her bodacious curves.

Jake felt that she used a tad too much perfume or whatever chemical that emanated overly perfumely odor. She was friendly, artificially, somewhat like her perfume, but Jake didn't mind.

Then, sitting in the middle, there was Michelle Bowen, a light brunette with hazel-brown eyes. She had straight hair, with a slight wave in the front. Of all the girls in Mrs. At O'Neill's school, Jake thought she was the prettiest. She was about two or three inches taller than Jenniffer and had an average figure for her age. Michelle was not that talkative with Jake although Jake did try to strike some meaningful conversation with her. She wore virtually no makeup but almost had a photoshop clean skin.

Jake thought she was smart too by the way she carried herself. As far as Jake could tell, she always wore those tight-fitting jeans, which accentuated her figure well.

To the farthest right, there was Christina Wayward. She was a flaxen blonde, with sapphire blue eyes. She was the shortest of all and on the side of under-development figure-wise, as compared to the other two girls. She was one of those girls that seemed to be active in all aspects of school life, as cheerleader, student vice-president, etc. She was "cute like a Barbie doll," as the people used to say. She probably was the nicest of the three.

Jake sat on the armrest of the sofa on the left side, next to Christina, and asked the girls, "Hey, been waiting long?"

Jennifer said, "Yah," with a Valley-girl drawl.

The girl, who had been playing "Turkish March," finished the piece, turned around and said, "Hi, Jake!" with some enthusiasm.

Her name was Nova Taylor. She had a sensual husky voice, almost as if she constantly had a cold. Nova didn't hang around with the three girls on the sofa. She was a transfer student, who lived on the wrong side of the track. She had long hair as if she had never had a haircut in her life. A long true blonde, straight hair drooped down to her hips. Just by looking at her, she looked a way older, belying her true age.

[p]

In the beginning, Nova paid no attention to Jake. She came in late to class and left as soon as the bell rang. Jake sat right behind Nova in English literature class, which Jake remembered always waiting eagerly.

When Nova was around, Jake felt pulled into her ambience by the sensual fragrance of her hair, which Jake guessed was the scent of popular Prell shampoo, from its mind-numbing repetitive commercials on TV. Bent over, Jake crossed his arms flat on the desk, forming a pillow for his head to rest. Hidden from the view of the teacher, from that POV, Jake could only see the ruffle of Nova's hair with the slightest movement in her posture, which reminded Jake of willow tree leaves swaying in gentle wind. Although her blonde hair was lighter in color than his, Jake thought in a hypnotic wonderment that she had a more variety of texture.

Nova was really into music, hard rock music, in particular. In fact, her usual cache of T-shirts, which she wore skin-tight, had various prints and logos of trending rock bands.

Meanwhile, there came a chance, a lucky break, built upon the grueling hours of piano lessons Jake had to endure for years, and his acquaintance, Shawn Sheffield, who was Nova's boyfriend at that time, the tallest and buffest dude in school.

[p]

They were called Kurrent. None of them were any good although they were under the mistaken impression that they were pretty good with room to grow. None of them had formal music training, nor could read notes. They tried to play covers for Top 10 hard rock songs. When Jake brought his Yamaha synthesizer to play "Jump" by Van Halen, Kurrent was blown away, totally out of their minds.

They all had known one another, one way or another, from elementary and junior high school, and all three of the band members had some common threads that ran through their lives. All came from broken homes. Paternal figures were absent from their lives. All of them lived on the wrong side of the track or around the borderlines. They played a sport or two but not good enough to move on to the collegiate levels. They were either not into academics or not good at it. Their mothers kept semblances of domestic homes while working full-time to make ends meet, but inevitably, frozen and fast foods became a mainstay of their diets.

[p]

Kurrent and Jake practiced in the garage of Shawn's home, which was always disheveled, strewn with various motor parts and other junks. After school, the band members, now including Jake, walked about a mile or so along the rail tracks to Shawn's house. Jake taught them some chords and the basics of melody and rhythm, which the band members were appreciative and eager to learn. Jake thought that it was a lucky break in his life at that juncture to finally make use of seemingly zillions of hours he had spent on clunking away on piano. Then, again, he recalled it wasn't a complete waste in that there were those Mrs. O'neill's girls who were undeniably pleasure to be with.

Jake finally felt that he belonged to somewhere or some place. As to Shawn, John Johnson and Sam Perosiki, Jake knew them from elementary school, but they had never let Jake into their inner circle of the so-called "cool kids."

Practicing almost everyday after school for about three months, Kurrent became pretty good, Jake thought. Jake knew a handful of bands of the same genre in the neighborhood, but none of them had the cool synthesizer sound nor the formal musical discipline, which Jake had brought to the band.

Around this time, Kurrent played dozens of gigs at local events and bars, paying anything from forty bucks to one hundred, which were just enough to cover the cost of musical equipment and a few pairs of over-hyped basketball shoes.

After a couple of months with Kurrent, Jake had more occasions to casually run into Nova and to strike conversations with her, each time getting longer and more meaningful, of course, when Shawn was not with her, which Jake made sure of. Jake and Nova talked about the books they were supposed to read for their English literature class, like Crime and Punishment, Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, and their implications in their young budding lives.

To an outsider, Nova may look aloof and distant, but she was a groupie of a sort nonetheless. Jake had thought the same in the beginning. She stuck out from other high school girls, who usually wore a cake of makeup, in that she wore none but was naturally beautiful. She was definitely a head-turner, everywhere she went.

Once Jake got to know her a little bit, with the help of a go-between by Shawn, Nova opened up to Jake, who was eager to lend his ears to her. Jake thought that she was unlike any of the girls he had met before. Nova talked a little bit like a regular Joe, except for her extreme dislike of sports.

She liked to write poems and essays, which she exclusively shared with Jake. Jake gave her positive and honest feedback, which Nova very much appreciated.

In one of those long conversations with Nova, she talked about not knowing her dad, who had left her when she was just a baby and disappeared or passed away. Nova was unclear on that point, and Jake did not push further into that sort of topic.

Nova was very curious about going to college but fuzzy about the means to achieve that goal. None of her close friends nor relatives had gone to college. The topic never came up around her. She just assumed that she would be working at Barneys, where she worked part-time, perhaps becoming a full-time sales representative, eventually. To Nova, it was simply unimaginable to think beyond that point. This was when Jake started talking about taking prep classes for college and so forth, including advanced English literature classes. This piqued her interest. And, with a gentle encouragement from Jake, she ended up taking the same AP English literature class with Jake in her Junior year.

It seemed to Jake that he was spending more time with her, talking to her about the topics beyond the mere school work, getting more personal, which were deemed confidential just between the two.

Sometimes, there were moments when the two came into physical contact, unintentionally, during their rendezvous, while doing homework together. Sometimes, Nova's arm would naturally come in contact with Jake's, sitting next to each other on a study table in the library. Back then, Jake naively thought that Nova was not aware, completely oblivious of the "unintentional" touches. Later in life, fully cognizant of the extent of the feminine mind games, Jake realized that all those touches were perhaps intentional on the part of Nova.

There was this local library located next to the city hall, where Jake went to do homework. It was open until 8PM. Nova too went there to do homework. There was this small table with four seats, which was blocked off from the general study area of the library, where Jake sat. And, Nova came around and sat there too, very naturally, nonchalantly, as time went on. Jake and Nova sat side by side at the table, in the bubble of their own space and time, surrounded by the wall of bookcases. One night, they both were doing reports on Macbeth. They were to select a certain passage and analyze it in the context of the story arc. They both selected the same passage, the famous line that started with "Life is but a walking shadow." Naturally, the conversation went back and forth about the text but sometimes sidetracked to the personal stuff that was happening in their lives.

On that night, Nova asked, "Hey, Jake, you're going to that state college, right?"

Jake said, "Yah, sure, if they accept me," followed by an awkward half-laugh, "Ha, ha."

Nova said, "Hey, Jake, I was wondering..."

"I was wondering, do you think I can go to college too?"

Jake looked at her, feeling sucked into her piercing emerald green eyes.

Jake replied, "Yah, yah, sure. Why not? I mean, you're smart, and it seems to me, you got your shit..., I mean, your stuff together."

Nova said, "Yah, but seriously, you think I can go?"

The two stared at each other for a while. From the dead serious focus in her eyes, Jake instinctively felt it and turned towards her, facing her straight, placed his right hand on her right hand on the table, and said, "Yes," with the same seriousness.

[p]

A couple of days later, during some slacking-off time, Jake went into the mechanical counseling mode and regurgitated to Nova what he had been told from his own academic counselor a few months earlier.

Nova sometimes complained to Jake that all that Shawn wanted to talk about were his interests in music and cars. There seemed to have been a sports phase for Shawn, when he was doing reasonably well at the state level as a running back, but after several injuries, he sank into oblivion with no chance of moving onto college football. After that, he lost interest in sports and started to spend more time on guitar, forming a ragtag rock band, which now included Jake. Jake thought in passing that Shawn was now going through his rock music phase, which like his sports phase might not last that long.

Being top of the alpha males for so long, purely on his looks and physique, Shawn seemed to have lived in a wholly different world, as compared to a regular Joe in school like Jake. Yet, after a heart-wrenching nasty divorce of his parents when he was freshman in highschool, along with serious alcoholism on the part of Shawn's father, with a streak of being a ladies' man, Shawn perhaps went down a notch, mentally and socially. Shawn ended up living with his mother, who was working at a high-end retail outlet with lots of overtime to make ends meet. Shawn's mother, a head-turner blonde, still in her late thirties, had plenty of men chasing after her, but they never seemed to be a homely type. With a hefty usage of alcohol and drugs on her part as well, they rapidly fell into poverty. While Shawn still maintained a facade of alphaness, Jake could see gradually the darkness looming over Shawn. Still, Jake heard rumors floating around in school, mainly dealing with Shawn's sexual conquests, such as his affairs with some of the good-looking female teachers, including Jake's English literature teacher.

Although Jake had hung around with Shawn and his clique and played hoops a few times with them, Jake did not, nor Shawn, considered the other as a close friend. After formally joining the band, after a year or so, though, Jake thought that Shawn came pretty close to being his real friend. They talked about his music mostly, but with tidbits of personal stories mixed in.

Although not cognizant at the time, Jake thought years later that Shawn must have been under extreme stress, with all that was going on in his life at that time, as a young man coming of age in a small hick town. Looking back, Jake thought that under such a stressful situation, the only outlet, perhaps, for Shawn, to sort things out might have been through music.

Although Shawn himself was known for his sexual prowess as a ladies' man, most of that was just a rumor that got amplified along the grapevine, and as far as Nova was concerned, as his steady girlfriend, Shawn was surprisingly monogamous and tried very hard to contain his sexual desires, which many of his peers and relatives had failed to do, including his father.

Sometimes, Nova brought her girl friends with her to Shawn's place, while Kurrent practiced in the garage. As always, the place was incredulously messy, but Nova usually sat in front of TV, smoking some weed with beers, and sometimes sprinkled with more hard stuff. Jake thought in passing that they ought to at least clean after themselves, instead of making the place messier, but none did.

WIP, to be continued.