A conversation this weekend turned toward "has anyone ever threatened your life?" To my surprise, I was the only one at the table with stories. I'll tell the shorter tales later, but first let me dispense with Jake.
Like most of my friends' boyfriends, Jake was a lazy fuckup who did the bare minimum necessary to keep her. Zoe was damned lucky that he would deign to mooch off of a single mother, he thought, and even luckier that he let her wash his socks.
I despised him. For a time I tried to reach out to Jake, for Zoe's sake, but even at the poker table or in a video game, he was an irredeemable sack of tepid yak shit. I could find nothing to like about the man. Worse, he made my friend feel down on herself. Unforgivable, that.
En route to a poker room one day, he let slip that he was going to Europe with another woman, a "friend" about whom Zoe should have absolutely no problem. "And did she?" I asked.
"I haven't told her yet."
Ah. Of course. And now he was expecting me to do his dirty work for him? Nuts to that. I kept my mouth shut. Three days before he departed, he finally mentioned it. Zoe blew. He yelled back that he'd already told her, that she was overreacting, that she was too controlling, that he'd even told John. She would not be mollified. He flew off to Europe, and she cried on my shoulder for a month. Pure bliss.
Soon after his return, she broke up with him and took up with his former office-mate, Ken. Ouch! But deserved. And then a curious thing happened: I got the blame. Jake became convinced that in his time away, I'd turned Zoe against him. A few psychotic phone calls, encounters and emails later, we all broke off contact with the guy.
Then Jake changed careers. To put it in reader-friendly terms, imagine that a Starbucks accountant blamed you for his relationship's demise, then took a job mopping floors at the Starbucks branch where you happen to pour coffees. That's how much he changed careers.
Around the same time, word started to filter back to me from all directions: Jake had put $20,000 on my life. He apparently couldn't stop talking about the bounty, either, if the number of people who dutifully reported it back were any indication. I'm of the opinion that only talkers talk, so I wasn't terribly worried about the bounty being real. But after a few weeks of hearing the reports, I couldn't exactly ignore them.
I discussed the situation with one of my oldest friends. d'Andre agreed that Jake was probably full of crap. "Just in case, better send me a map to his house," he added.
I did. Meanwhile, I steamed at the universe. How come Ken was getting laid and I was the one getting death threats?