The Return of Jake Alberts
by Daniel Beadle - Monday, October 19, 2009
It’s a cold winter day in upstate New York, as Stalker sits alone on the bleachers overlooking a small baseball field. He’s hunched over, trying to keep himself warm, but there’s a certain level of numbness that has taken hold of his body, then his mind. He watches his breath, then speaks softly to himself: “How do you measure the value of a life?”Stalker hears the sound of ice crunching beneath heavy feet. He looks to his right to see a thirty-year-old man light a cigarette while looking off into the distance. The man has the look of a poor-man’s Johnny Knoxville, with short, disheveled hair and a bruise on his left cheek. He gestures to a young woman on the other side of the park. “I bet it would be disturbing to see her naked. ...Like a five foot tall midget with muscles."
The man squints as he looks over at Stalker, then lets out a dirty laugh. “How the hell are you?”
Stalker searches his memory. “You’re that Jake character…”
“You got me. We met once before. You’re that morose motherfucker who lost his shit after a few drinks.” Jake walks over and sits down on the bleachers near Stalker. “How have you been?”
Stalker considers his answer, and then decides to forgo the typical lie. “I’m as close to death as I can be without having a terminal illness.”
“I know that game,” says Jake. “We all have our scars, don’t we? Some cut a little deeper than others.” He takes a drag from his cigarette, then fills the air with more words: “I was in the bookstore the other day, and I notice they have a ‘self-help’ section. They got books telling people how to get their lives together, you know. Of course, it got me wondering, ‘where the hell is the self-destruction section?’ That’s what I want to know. I just want to tear shit up… I just want to make a mess of myself. Just be a wreck.”
“Some people don’t get it,” Jake continues. “There’s not much in this world that actually matters. You find yourself with a problem too fucked up to fix, the best thing to do is make it worse. Make it so bad, that you come through the other side.” A college girl in the distance catches his eye. “Look at that one. I wonder if she takes it up the ass.” Stalker looks up. “I wonder if her boyfriend fucks her hard or soft… maybe he chokes her, slaps her around a little bit. Blows loads on random parts of her body.” Jake chuckles. “You think she’s ever taken a load to the face? These are the kind of questions that demand answers.”
Stalker is unsure of how to respond. Does this man disgust him, or is his attitude oddly refreshing?
“Or how’s about that one over there? Classy looking cunt. Just imagine her jerking you off under the table of some fancy restaurant; wearing some sultry dress with her make-up caked on like a thousand-dollar hooker. I bet she’s an expert in all types of dick-play.” Jake takes it further: “I wonder what kind of freaky shit she's done... the holes she's held open while some hairy guy pounded her like a railroad spike. What loads has she swallowed? Imagine her, sucking down some white-hot man glaze, balls twitching on her chin... Tugging on some chode of a cock, MILKING it.” Jake slams his boot down on the bleachers.
“How about that pair over there.” Jake points to a young couple, their features mostly hidden beneath winter jackets. “They probably fuck face-to-face. GOD DAMMIT.” Jake shakes his head. “I’ll tell you this, buddy. The longer you go without sex, the stranger your sexual appetites will become. Soon, you’ll want to cut off a girl’s head because it’s the least attractive part of her. You’ll see a girl in a short skirt with thick legs, and you’ll want to deep fry her thighs and eat ‘em.”
“What about love?”
“Jeeze, here I am trying to have a normal conversation, and you take it in a weird direction.” Jake lets out a plume of cigarette smoke. “But I’ll play. True love? There’s no such thing. Love is a lie,” Jake begins. “Every work of fiction, TV, movies, you get the idea… They all create this illusion and feed it to the masses. It’s like the media is shooting a load into our collective faces. It’s just a big lie. More people believe in love than in God. The concept of love has found its way into every fucking genre, every medium. Movies always include love interests. Songs… well, music’s only subject seems to be love, in one form or another.” He pauses and glances around. “Even ‘Octopus’s Garden’ was about a romantic get away.”
“So you’ve never had a broken heart?”
"No. But then again, I'm not a homo like you.” Jake flicks his cigarette. “I do know pain though. Too often have I been the reject… like that little rosebud of shit that doesn’t clump with the main log. I know. Walking alone in a crowd of strangers… all those fucking zombies whose lives don’t intersect as often as they cross. Bridges burn… relationships… they all rot and fade.
“…Lonely bastards like yerself look at happy couple, and think that you’ll have that one day, you got another thing comin’. That’s just setting yerself up for failure. If you compare yourself to other people, you will always be dissatisfied with your life. It happens every day: Poor people compare themselves to rich people. Average people compare themselves to beautiful people. Girlfriends are always buzzing in their boyfriends’ ears, ‘Other people don’t have it this way.’ Of course they don’t! If you look at other lives, you’re always gonna see a countless amount of better ones. You show me a perfect couple, and I’ll show you something that isn’t. There is no normal. Your life is your own life. There are better lives, and there are worse, but the determination of those two are subjective, I’m telling you.” He taps the end of his cigarette. “I’ll bet you think relationships are normal, right?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because…”
“Exactly. Because of comparisons. What makes you think it’s normal for two people to pair off in a relationship?”
“But… reproduction calls for it.”
“Yeah, reproduction calls for mating. But does it call for dating and couples counseling… monogamy… marriage? BULLSHIT! Reproduction is achieved through fucking. And you’ve got all these relationships using birth control methods and condoms to stave off reproduction until they know each other well enough to create a living unit. A family. Fuck that, man. I won’t do it. You want a companion? Get a dog.
“It's straight up bullshit. Sure, you got chumps out there reading those articles, and thinkin' "How can I be more like what women want?" FUCK 'EM! I don't want to give those bitches the satisfaction of changing me, GOD DAMMIT! I'm gonna be everything they don't want, so they, and all THEIR LIES will leave me alone. I'm gonna be unfunny, mean, dirty, poor, and ugly... and I'm gonna enjoy that shit!
“I'm gonna be ugly and dirty, like men aughta be. Who says I need to change my underwear weekly? FUCK IT! So I'm ugly. SO WHAT? Who isn't? Take a look in the FUCKING MIRROR!” Jake burps, and a small glob of vomit lands on his chest. He swallows, then pulls a flask from his jacket and takes a sip.
“Fucking assholes. I think about the average man, and it makes me sick. The kid who steals a kiss in elementary school. The boy who has a high school sweetheart he loses it to at the age of 17. He fucks a few girls in college, maybe does something that’ll be used against him if he ever goes into politics. He moves to a city, starts dating girls, sifting through the FILTH until he finds a girl he can bang more than a dozen times without wanting to kill himself. He’s married by 30, pops out a few kids, and starts banging young girls every time he goes on a business trip. Ten or twenty years later, the wife divorces him, takes the kids, and he marries a younger bitch who he loves half as much. He disconnects, then reconnects with his kids, but in the end, he dies with a shitload of regret. Now THAT’S the life I would never wish for. Clichéd as all hell. …Like watching a football game and drinking beer.” Jake takes another swig of his booze.
Stalker fidgets with his hands, and then casts his eyes to the horizon. The two men are silent for a full minute before Stalker speaks. “How do you measure the value of a life?” Jake turns his head slightly, as Stalker continues. “...The value of a life... measured by a simple equation... The amount of pleasure weighed against the amount of pain one has and will suffer from. If pain is greater, a life isn't worth living."
Jake joins the discussion. "Seems to me like a man who concludes that suicide is his best bet is a man who's not done thinking. 'Course, what the hell do I know? I'm drinking myself to death. Maybe we're all on a downward spiral. Shit…” He shakes his head. “Aside from massage parlors and Friendly’s ice cream… there are no happy endings for guys like you and me.” Jake flicks his cigarette into the air.
“I'd rather laugh as a fool than cry as one.”
Stalker is silent for a moment. “Happy endings… that’s not an easy thing to measure outside of fiction.”
Jake looks at the sky. “I dunno. Maybe we’re all fictional characters. …And when God runs out of material, that’ll be the end of the world.”
“What good is a long life to us if it is hard, joyless, and so full of suffering that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?”—Sigmund Freud
