You Can Call Him Jake
They told me I could call him “Jake,” but that just seemed strange. Jake was just a large and ostentatious oil painting, after all. Hanging there, staring at all of us from his lofty perch in the great room of an old single story ranch style home in Tustin. I had been invited to “The Sanctuary” by my friend Peter, and I was hoping to learn something profound on this cold and rainy February evening.
Jake seemed to emit some sort of ancient wisdom with his hollow and handsome brown eyes. Up there on the wall, Jake was wearing a green Adidas jogging suit with black stripes running down the arms and legs. Bright white leather K-Swiss shoes with no laces covered a pair of stubby, wide feet. Light brown, curly and disheveled hair covered an oddly shaped cranium. The front of Jake’s forehead sloped backward, as if the world’s strongest hurricane had caught him off guard one day while sailing. The back of Jake’s head was flat, leading up to an eventual point at the top of his skull. Upon close inspection, you could tell that Jake paid big bucks for the best hairstylists of his era to create the optical illusion that his head was normally shaped. The front and sides grew long and bushy, while the hair on top was closely cropped.
Of course, I only realized the unusual shape of Jake’s skull because I have an obsession with physical symmetry. Eyebrows, lips, nostrils, thumbs, fingernails, toenails, kneecaps, earlobes — they all must be perfectly symmetrical, you see. Otherwise, I will stare at you. Probably not long enough for you to notice, but I will definitely gaze at you and your lopsided body parts until I figure out exactly what needs fixing. My preoccupation with physical symmetry is part of what brought me to The Sanctuary on this damp evening. Constantly noticing the flaws in others is absolutely exhausting, especially for someone with my special aptitude for spotting physical faults from great distances. I had high hopes that the folks at The Sanctuary could help me live a normal life without this peculiar burden.
Anyway, there stood Jake. With his arms folded and his head looking to the right, peering straight into each of our confused souls. In a better era, Jake could have been the fourth member of Run DMC. Jam Master Jake. The look on his face was not necessarily arrogant, but it certainly was not an expression of humility. Jake’s face was weathered but not beaten, with lush and perfectly symmetrical aristocratic eyebrows, and a shave so close that one might suspect electrolysis had been involved.
“You’ve got a friend for life in Jake. A real bro, someone you can always go to for advice, even if he has been dead for 35 years,” said Peter, swaying in front of the oil painting with a beaming smile and an intoxicated look in his eyes.
Peter was a true believer in Jake and all things Jake. A small group of Jake’s disciples had found Peter at The Beatnik Bar in San Clemente, the day after Valentine’s Day. Peter came stumbling out of the bar wailing about Mona, who had dumped him for no reason at all (that’s Peter’s version of events, anyway). Peter promised that if I could keep an open mind, Jake’s disciples could teach me how to “open my eyes to the world” during a series of seminars at The Sanctuary.
“Come on Sam, let’s mingle. Just hang loose and let me do the talking. I think you’ll like the people here,” said Peter.
I slid over to the bar and grabbed a White Russian, just to level myself out. That milky booze went down like velvet butter, and I finally felt ready to meet some new people and hear all about their unique bullshit.
Peter and I flipped to our right and almost smashed into a couple of young ladies, maybe in their early 30s. A brunette and a redhead. One short and the other even shorter. Both of them damn good looking, though. Before I had a chance to start in with the typical small time chat about freeway routes and urban over-development, I scanned the crowd. It was sure a motley looking crew. Old, young, big, small, professional, blue collar, boisterous, and mousy. They had all gathered together in this one little room. It reminded me of the scene from Cable Guy, where Jim Carrey gathered his group of random, rag-tag friends into his buddy’s tiny apartment for the wackiest of karaoke jams.
But we all had something in common. Each of us were Searchers. What were we searching for? Most of us didn’t know, but we all knew that something had been missing from our lives since forever.
We had about 20 minutes to get a few drinks and chat amongst ourselves before the seminar would begin. “Maneuvering Through a Chaotic World” was tonight’s topic. The scheduled speaker was a tenured Humanities professor from Marmalade College. A poster on the wall showed the athletic Humanities professor casually flexing his muscles against a tight blue cotton T-shirt, with a great beaming smile revealing a row of sparkly, shiny white teeth. But the professor’s eyes were too intense and somewhat tortured, looking directly at you but not seeing you at all. No one voluntarily smiles that hard.
A man in a tweed sport coat and a crisp white shirt and a bowtie gently tapped me on the shoulder before handing me a pamphlet full of questions to guide me through the scheduled lecture. Do you lack meaning in your life? Do you believe in a higher power? Are you a spiritual person? Do you want more out of life? Are you not achieving your full potential?
I circled back to the bar to grab another White Russian for myself and a glass of Zinfandel for the short redhead girl. There was Jake again, staring at me from the wall. I gave Jake’s eyes a good hard stare this time, as I patiently waited in line for the burnt out middle aged bartender to serve me at the cash bar. Jake’s eyes were wrinkled at the corners, but his pupils were as sharp as a razor. The brownness of his eyes appeared weak and fragile, like a mudslide in Laguna Canyon after a heavy rain. The brush strokes just barely captured the tears welling up above Jake’s lower eyelids. If you looked close enough, you could almost see trembling at the corners of Jake’s eyes. I realized that Jake was horrified — not so much about what life had in store for him, but horrified that others would catch on to his game.
I handed the glass of Zinfandel to the redhead and gently placed my left hand on her back, between her shoulder blades. She was wearing a thin black tank top, and her bare skin felt warm and soft against the palm of my hand. The redhead smiled and tilted her head toward me in a way that told me that she was enjoying my touch. Her shoulder blades rotated lazily under my hand. I slowly moved my mouth toward her right ear and said something clever that made her giggle just a bit. She had these sexy dimples when she laughed that made me feel like I would melt right there in front of everyone.
We finished our drinks and walked out of The Sanctuary, and I drove us gracefully down the wet and winding road.
© J.S. Lender 2019
