Shakey Jake

I was presented with a choice at this point. Do I tell the hot hacker chick that apparently knows everything about me that the “trailhead” showed up right here? Or do I keep this shit to myself until I figure out what’s going on? From what she said, the opening salvo would eventually be heard around the world, so keeping it from her would ultimately be pointless. Still I decided to hedge my bets. “What happens then?”

“Then the players start looking for discrepancies. Things that don’t fit. Then they follow those discrepancies. One set of coincidences leads to another. After a little bit it becomes second nature.”

“So… I have another question. Follow me?”

I lead BigWig to the basement. She didn’t even blink when I went into the men’s room.

Through all of this she had been cool and composed. Pretty well seemed unshakable. That facade broke when she saw the literal writing on the wall.

“Fuck. Do you know what this means?”

“Not a goddamn clue.”

“You found the trailhead. The Inception Point,” she grinned wryly, “The Game is afoot.”

“Actually the Game is aHandjob.”

“Wait, what?”

“Look, if I tell you then you need to answer one more question.”

She looked me over speculatively, “What do you want to know?”

“What’s your real name?”

“ Hyzenthlay.”

“Gesundheit.”

“My parents were huge Richard Adams fans. You can see why I prefer to use my net handle.”

So I told her about HandJob.

She was most interested in the collages I’d collected, but I didn’t have them with me. We agreed to meet the next night, Saturday, my night off, at Club Laga, and exchange any further information. She shook my hand on the way out the door, and did I imagine that our fingers touched for a moment too long, or that her pale skin flushed a little? Either way by one AM I was alone with my thoughts.

Those thoughts were torn between BigWig’s revelations and… well… BigWig. I was most decidedly in lust. These thoughts preoccupied me throughout the rest of the shift, and I was pretty worn out by the time Kelly showed up to get the coffee brewing. I headed out right away.

Oakland in the ‘90s had a fairly colorful assortment of street characters. The lowlifes and panhandlers all had fascinating stories and colorful nicknames. Corey was a mentally retarded gentleman with a large growth, possibly a tumor on his face. Sweetest guy you ever met. JT was the guy who always had something for sale that had fallen off the back of a truck. Blind Bill would sit on his milk crate and sing gospel tunes as people threw change in his cup. Timmy was one of the most educated people I‘be ever met. And then there was Shakey Jake.

Shakey Jake was… there’s no way to sugarcoat it. He was a shell shocked Korean War vet with a crack induced stroke. His whole body would shake with tremors and his voice, on the rare occasion he spoke, we weak and weedy with an unnatural vibrato, and usually incomprehensible. I once watched him get the tip of his cane stuck in a crack on the pavement, resulting in him walking in a circle for five minutes. At the time I thought it was hilarious, but these days I look back on it and realize what an asshole I was to laugh out loud at his misery. If I saw him today I’d only be laughing on the inside.

As I was walking home that morning, Jake was staggering down the street, propelling himself forward in that way that only a mentally ill stroke victim can. I paid him little attention; the cast of characters was pretty much just set dressing in the solipsistic stage play that was my life on my surreal post-work treks. I idly noted that he was urinating on a telephone pole as I crossed the street, mentally shaking my head. He’d get brought in again, put on a 24 hour psych hold, and end up back on the street by this time Sunday.

These were my musings as I stared down at the sidewalk during my march down Meyran Avenue. It was only by chance that I glanced up in time to avoid colliding with… Shakey Jake?

I dodged around him. He was in his own world as usual, muttering incoherently, and smelling like… well, have you ever taken a tuna fish sandwich and stuck it whole inside a dishwasher, then pissed all over it, and poured half a gallon of a mixture of two parts kerosene, one part ammonia on it? Me neither, but that’s a pretty solid estimation of the smell of Shakey Jake.

After swerving to miss him I cut across Louisa heading for home and there, turning onto Louisa from McKee was again, Shakey Jake. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. Something wanted me to encounter Shakey Jake. While this thought was passing through my mind, Jake toddled off the sidewalk into the street and without warning was immediately pancaked by an F150 moving well above the 25 MPH speed limit.

Shock sets in pretty quickly when you witness a pointless casualty. I just stood and stared as the truck barreled past me and around the corner going the wrong way on a one way street. After a second I got hold of myself and started running to the crumpled heap in the middle of the brick road.

Imagine my surprise when what I found in the middle of the street was a trash bag full of aluminum cans. No sign of Jake. No blood. Just a contractor’s lawn and leaf bag stuffed to the brim with enough metal to actually buy a six pack.

Well and truly freaked out, with only the thought of home and a shot of whiskey in my head, I sped on to McKee Place only to see walking toward me with much more lucidity in his eyes than I had ever seen… you guessed it.

This time I was determined to let whatever it was that was sending the same homeless person at me over and over know that it had my attention. I walked straight on, setting a collision course for Jake. I was less than two feet away when he reached out, far faster than he should have been able to, and grabbed my wrist. What should have been brittle old man fingers tightly wrapped around it like small bars of iron. He yanked me off balance, pulling me to him, and whispered in my ear.

“David Warren Green.”

Then he let out a blood curdling shriek, pushed me away, clubbed me with his cane, and took off down the street, running far faster than I would have ever believed him capable of.

I stared in absolute shock as he sped out of sight. Clearly if BigWig was to be believed I was now playing the Game whether I wanted to or not. Seeing multiple Jakes definitely counted as a discrepancy in reality.

Who the fuck was David Warren Green though?