Although Jake sometimes enjoyed the accolades of his friends, their lofty expectations left him profoundly unsure of himself, unsure even that he wanted "to be" an artist. What others admired as his art, he knew to be fraudulent. His paintings were not really his creations, but rather surrealistic images projected onto his canvasses by some external power, which he then filled in like a child with a coloring book.
Soundtrack: The Boxer----Simon & Garfunkel
Indeed, Jake had painted such pictures ever since he was a child. They were, and always had been, merely automatic recordings of the way he, quite literally, saw the world displayed before him. Of course, in his childhood, his parents and their friends had been delighted with his portraits of the world as a paradisiacal land. They were far less pleased with the graphically erotic artwork of his adolescence. And the paintings he’d begun to produce his senior year in high school— huge, deeply disturbing apocalyptic depictions of the world in agony— well, they shocked everyone, even his liberal-minded art teachers.
During his first semester at college, even Jake (now the star linebacker on the freshman team) had become revolted, or perhaps embarrassed, by his own paintings. For a while, he tried turning away from art. In its place, he sought more concrete ways to connect with the world, ways that he hoped would blot out his special sight.
That first fall, he poured all his time and energy into freshman football, much to the delight of the coaches and fans at the U, who anticipated his elevation to the varsity when he became eligible in his sophomore year. He excelled on defense, just as he had in high school. However, only he knew that, as with his art, his successful play on the field was due as much to his special sight as it was to actual athletic prowess. His eyes would lock in on the ball unerringly, seeing it as a fiery red object to which he was magnetically drawn at great speeds. He could tell by the intensity of the red whether the opposing quarterback was going to run, hand off, or throw the ball and his body reacted accordingly, either closing in for a crushing tackle, close to the line of scrimmage, or dropping back for one of his patented record-setting interceptions for which he was beginning to be known and feared by opposing offenses across the athletic conference.
Deeply disturbed by his inability to escape his special sight on and off the field, Jake had taken a psychological leave of absence after his first semester and worked at a warehouse in the City, that haphazard conglomeration of factories, working-class tenements, and decrepit downtown stores about a half hour from U-Town by the Interstate. For almost nine months, he staved off his special sight by stacking boxes during the day, taking junior college courses at night, and drinking himself into a stupor every weekend.
However, the following fall, upon returning to the U and to football, his special sight, too, returned. At least on the playing field and with the chicks, it had its advantages. His JuCo courses had made him, technically, a sophomore, so he was eligible to play on the varsity, where, of course, he became an instant, if reluctant, star. And, as a result, almost every night a different sorority babe found her way into his bed for a seemingly endless fuck. Although Jake experienced the sex in these highly athletic bouts of screwing to be supremely unsatisfying, the almost nightly visits did have the benefit of warding off the disturbing visions of the world that otherwise assailed him. When left alone, Jake was afraid to keep his eyes open, lest a scene of unspeakable horror appear on a wall or ceiling, demanding to be immortalized in paint.
By mid-semester, Jake felt that his increasingly disturbing and insistent visions were going to drive him, quite literally, insane. That was when his roommate and good friend, Stephen, came to the rescue, suggesting that he take up boxing, of all things. To Jake’s surprise and delight, boxing turned out to be an activity in which the carefully measured violence and extremely close physical contact of another muscular, sweating body almost completely obliterated the frightening images that had been assaulting him mercilessly over the past months.
And, of course, Jake had proven to be a natural, moving quickly up the regional amateur ranks, so that by summertime, he’d decided to quit college altogether to pursue boxing professionally. Fighting with the sobriquet of “Joe College”, his career had lasted almost a year and a half until he suffered a particularly brutal beating at the hands of a sadistic former contender with a serious working-class chip on his shoulder. That fight left Jake with a serious concussion and sent him skulking back to the U… where he’d met Joanie. That was when she’d introduced him to an even better distraction from his visions: sex... but sex that was far different from the sterile acrobatic sex of the sorority sisters, sex that was passionate, deep, and, to this former altar boy, frankly, perverse.
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Simon & Garfunkel
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New Year's Eve 1968: Jake, Scene 4 "Joanie---The Love of His Life"
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New Year's Eve 1968: Jake, Scene 2 "BMOC"
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