"Like what?"
"I think maybe you should come over here and read it for yourself," she said. "Once you do that we can start talking about what our response is going to be."
"That bad, huh?"
"That bad," she confirmed.
"Okay, I'll be over as soon as I can get there."
He hung up the phone, wondering how what had been a pretty good day had turned so shitty in such a hurry. First his girlfriend starts puking after giving him a blowjob and now Michelle Borrows, the girl he'd written the hit song Point Of Futility about, resurfaces in his life after six years accusing him of God-knew-what.
Rachel emerged from the bathroom a minute later, still looking kind of ill. Her face was pale and her expression was of embarrassed unhappiness. "Jake, I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know what happened. I know how this must look to you, but..."
"It's okay," he told her, lighting a cigarette and taking a few deep drags. "That kind of thing happens all the time, I'm sure."
"It does?"
Actually Jake had never heard of such a thing happening before, but now was the time for diplomacy. "Sure," he said. "It's nothing to worry about. Listen, can you give me a lift over to my sister's house? Apparently there's some trouble brewing with a Catholic magazine that printed an article from an ex-girlfriend of mine."
"Trouble?" she asked. "What kind of trouble?"
"I don't know yet," he said. "I haven't read the article."
"Is it Mindy Snow?" she asked.
"No, much further back than that. A girl I used to date when I was in college and playing the clubs. Pauline wants me over there as soon as I can get there."
"Uh... well... sure," she said. "How will you get home?"
"I'll catch a limo or have Pauline take me." He walked over to her and kissed her on the cheek. "Don't worry about what happened, okay?"
"Okay," she said, sniffing a little. "I'm just so embarrassed."
"Don't be," he said. "And while I'm talking to Pauline I'll let her know to start contacting the dressmakers so we can get you outfitted for the Grammies, okay?"
"Okay," she said, the smile coming back to her face as she thought about it.
The title of the article was: A WRETCH LIKE ME, my experience as Jake Kingsley's girlfriend.
"A wretch like her, huh?" Jake said, looking at her picture above the article. She was still pretty, the six years that had passed having been kind to her. Her blonde hair was tied into a conservative bun and fashionable glasses were perched upon her face. The caption below her picture read: Michelle Rourke is a lifelong member of The Church who was educated at California State University at Heritage and who currently teaches English at Holy Assumption school in Heritage. She is a founding member of the Heritage branch of the Family Values Coalition and, as revealed in the article, dated Jake Kingsley, lead singer of the death metal band Intemperance, for more than a year from 1980 to 1981.
"A wretch like her," Pauline confirmed. "Why don't you read through that while I get you a drink? I think you're going to need it in a few minutes."
She left the office, heading for the kitchen. Jake took one last look at Michelle's picture and then started to read.
I was born and raised Catholic and I adhere strictly to the teachings of The Church. I was married in St. John's Cathedral right here in Heritage, California and I attend services there every Sunday. I teach at the oldest Catholic school in the Heritage region and I am well respected by my students, my peers, and my administrators. I am the eternal good little Catholic girl through and through but I've harbored a deep, shameful secret from my early college days. Only my closest friends, my priest, and now, as of two weeks before, my husband, knows this secret. I used to date Jake Kingsley.
This relationship started in June of 1980 when I was working on general education requirements at Heritage Community College. I was twenty years old and in the midst of a crisis in faith that is so common to younger members of The Church. I wanted to rebel against the lifestyle and the sacred rules I had been raised with. Jake Kingsley, who was then a struggling musician who attended Heritage Community College, seemed the perfect outlet for this rebellion. He asked me out one day and I accepted. Thus began the fifteen-month nightmare that scarred me deeply but that ultimately served to reaffirm my faith.
"The fifteen month nightmare?" Jake muttered. "Jesus Christ."
He read on. According to Michelle, their first date was to a rock and roll club in which he'd forced her to smoke marijuana and snort cocaine and had asked for oral sex at the completion of the date. When she'd balked at his demands he had become angry with her and took her home immediately, telling her to never talk to him again. Something inside of her, however, had been attracted to the "bad boy" persona he represented and when he asked her out a second time she'd agreed to go even though he pointedly told her what the price of dating him would be.
I did it that night with him, sinning in a way that even men and women married in the eyes of Our Lord in holy matrimony are forbidden. And to my great shame, my great consternation, some sick and twisted part of me actually enjoyed the encounter. I went out with him again and again. I smoked more marijuana with him and I drank more alcohol and I snorted more cocaine and I fell deeper and deeper into wretchedness so far removed from my upbringing that I feared I might never come back.
Soon, very soon, I gave up my holy virginity to him. Actually, I didn't really give it to him, he took it from me, plying me with enough drugs and alcohol that my resistance was reduced to nearly nothing. He then ripped my clothes off and violated me in the back seat of his car. That was the first time he hit me. I asked him to please be gentle and he laughed, backhanding me sharply across the face and calling me a name that is usually associated with female dogs.
"You fuckin' lying bitch!" Jake screamed out to the empty office. He was outraged beyond belief. He had been with well over four hundred women at this point in his life, including seven or eight serious relationships and never, not a single time, had he ever hit one of these women or abused any of them in any way. What Michelle was saying was an outright lie. Although Mindy Snow had implied that Jake had been abusive to her she had not actually come out and said he'd hit her. This was the most libelous fabrication he'd ever read.
Things did not get better in the rest of the article, they only got worse. Michelle described a relationship from hell in which Jake regularly beat her, degraded her, even had sex with other women in front of her. She described orgies of drug use that had never occurred. She described bull sessions in which Jake and the rest of his horrid band had sat around and expounded upon the virtues of Satanism and Hitlerism while degrading anything that had to do with organized Christianity.
I could not seem to break free from this relationship, no matter how much I wished to return to my old life. I've been to counseling since and I've heard the tales of a thousand battered women in abusive relationships and my experience is quite typical of these encounters. I was constantly threatened with death and dismemberment if I left him. I was told that my parents, my church would never accept me because of what I'd done. He threatened to expose every sordid detail of our lives if I displeased him in any way. And I believed him as only a twenty-year-old girl experiencing the harsh realities of the modern world could believe him.
Eventually I got to the point where I was seriously considering the most mortal of sins — that of suicide. It seemed, at times, that this was the only way out of the hell I found myself in. I could no longer feel Jesus in my life and it was my belief that He had abandoned me, that He was so disgusted with what I had become and with who I was with that even His everlasting love could not extend to a wretch like me.