keep up, would ya?

Some people are confused by the J. saga because they haven't kept up with it. To save your lazy souls the trouble of having to scour the archives it's available in its entirety below.

The final chapter is coming tomorrow...

Okay, I've decided to tell the J. story just because, well, the more I think about it the crazier it really was. Seriously. Paige was dead-on when she said I should write a script. It really would be good one. I picture Brittany Murphy as J.

At any rate, this thing will sort of "unfold" over what I'm sure will be many, many entries. There's a lot to it. Maybe I could also tell the M. story at some point. In many ways, it's actually crazier and might be cathartic. I'll decide on that later. With no further ado --

I worked for a large, nameless company in Atlanta. I had moved to Atlanta from Michigan as my parents moved to Athens, Georgia when I was in college. I had a political science degree. I had to live somewhere for free...

Most of my friends in Atlanta were people that I worked with or had worked with in the past. Say what you will about that company (and believe me, it's all been said before), they hire great people. It seems that I also used the company as my own personal dating service. Over the eight years that I worked there I was probably more often than not seeing someone who I worked with. Well, maybe not more often, just a lot. Choose whichever off-color adage about getting your meat where you get your bread, I paid heed to none of them and never learned my lesson.

Well, that's not true. I learned my lesson with J.

I worked in IT when our story takes place. We were a small department consisting of a handful of characters in a couple of rows of cubes. One of the characters was, not to mix words, a player. He was recently divorced and seemed to be attempting to take solace in the arms of every woman in the office. Whether he was actually receiving said comfort is a subject of much debate, but there is certainly no denying that he was making every attempt. Player was several years older than I was but had recently attracted the attentions of a young thing in another department. She was constantly hanging out at his cube flirting and making puppy dog eyes. Player wasn't interested, he insisted. She was much too young for him. Truth be told, she was much to young for me as well. But, for some reason, I was suddenly intrigued...

At some point, some sordid little point, J. and I started seeing each other. I'm not really sure, frankly, how we progressed to that status. I just know that she tired of Player and sort of worked her way down to me. Yeah, I know. That should have been clue one. It wasn't.

J. was a really cute girl. Really cute, really fun, really overly hormoned. I'm going to omit those bits because, well, they're none of your beeswax. Besides, they're not central to the tale. Really. This girl had so much goin' on, none of it good. I really found out the details as we went along.

I honestly didn't really think about her age at first. But she was 18 and was living with her parents. She also was an only child and her parents basically treated her like a peer. That's not to say they treated her like she was older than her age, they just acted like they were 18. They were super-crazed church goers and J. sang in the choir. Yeah, that's right. She was a choir girl.

I had just bought a home in Atlanta when all this transpired and J., it seems, was very excited about the possibility of moving out of her parents' place. You guessed it, she thought she would move in with me. After about two weeks of dating she came to my house with a veritable hope chest of domestic items. Silverware, vases, artwork. It all appeared on my doorstep one Saturday afternoon. Not knowing what to say, I watched as she played decorator. My parents also happened to stop by that afternoon. They loved her. Seems that J. always knew how to make a good impression.

Shortly after I started seeing J., Meredith reminded me of a story. Word on the street was that J. had, um, befriended one of the guys installing cable in the building about a year before I even knew who she was. The rumor was that one day she went to one of the nearby hotels with him during lunch. Yeah. This rumor was supported by the fact he sent her flowers the next day and that the cable vendor took him off the job. Apparently he put the hotel room on his corporate credit card. A brilliant match made in heaven, those two. At any rate, I told Meredith that wasn't true. How did I know? Right! I asked. Surely she wouldn't lie to me. So, with no worries I continued on.

J. also had an interesting side enterprise. She'd purchase clothes for the other women in her department. They'd see an outfit that she was wearing and she would tell them that she'd pick up something similar for them. Thing is, she was able to get things really cheaply. She never revealed her secret and they, apparently, never questioned her. Why look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

I, too, wasn't questioning anything at this point. That would soon change. Unfortunately, not soon enough...

Pretty soon I felt like I was living that Seinfeld episode where George leaves the Russian hat at that woman's apartment. I was surrounded by J.'s "stuff." Some of it was very nice, mind you. I still have a clock she left on my mantle. But it was also weird. Her parents kept her very busy with church on the weekends so the only times I really got to go do things with her was after work. She would come over and make herself at home. The neighbors (the decent ones in my scary neighborhood - another story for a later date) all would come over and chat with her. In short, everyone loved J. Well, except Meredith. Meredith was always suspicious. Good senses, that Meredith.

I'll fast forward through a couple of relatively stable, boring months. We continued on. The only bizarreness was her penchant for Christian rock (I mean, this girl was the ultimate hypocrite in that regard) and her connection to her church "friend" Bobby and her 12 year-old cousin to whom she was basically a surrogate mother and best friend.

J. worked in the estimating department. Her job was to enter paperwork into a mainframe. Pure data entry, but important in that subcontractors got paid based upon what she entered into the system. She also seemed to be very good at her job. She was always finishing before the other people in her department and was generous enough to take their work when she was caught up. This was probably suspicious since she seemed to spend most of her time at my desk despite, I hasten to add, the fact that I tried to keep her away so I wouldn't get in trouble.

At any rate, a problem in her department soon popped up. It seemed that some subcontractors weren't getting some of their checks. The head of that department, a guy I really liked but a guy who was also super uptight, started investigating. Next thing I knew, J. was fired. I walked her wailing little self out to her car not knowing what the hell had happened. Needless to say, I was upset. Finally, I went to her boss to ask him what happened (or maybe he came to me, I can't remember) and he told me that he'd found the paperwork that hadn't been entered. Several days worth of work, in fact. In J's wastebasket. Seems that if she didn't have time to enter her work she just threw it out. Good plan, there, sweetie...

My relationship with J. actually improved on some level after she was fired. I didn't have to try to police her presence at my desk at the office and she usually was waiting for me when I got home. Yeah, at some point I gave her a key.

J. didn't really try to get a job right after the firing. She hung out at church more, hung out with her cousin more and hung out at my place more. It was pretty good, now that I look back on it. She'd meet me for lunch from time-to-time and, because she spent more time at church during the week, she even was free some weekends.

Interestingly enough, I read a Jonathan Franzen essay on memory on the train today. In reading it, I realized that my memory on the J. saga is somewhat fuzzy. Things may be a bit out of sequence. I think I'm remembering this right: at some point J. got in an ugly car accident. It was her fault and the car was damaged just slightly less than mine was a couple of months ago. She was able to drive it but her parents were making her pay for their deductable. Of course she had no money. Her cousin was with her in the car, too, and her parents (the cousin's who were also quite wacko) forbid her from riding with J. These two turns really depressed her and she started talking about finding a new job.

She was going to use one afternoon to drop off applications at the mall and then was going to come by my house and we were going out for dinner. I got home and she wasn't there waiting for me. I thought this was a good sign. I thought that maybe she actually was talking to someone about a job. Then, however, it started to get late. By around 8:00 I was pretty hungry. Then the phone rang...

J: Hi (sobbing hysterically)
MRW: Hi. Are you okay?
J: No
MRW: Where are you? Did your car break down?
J: No (sobbing harder)
MRW: Where are you?
J: (complete hyterical sobbing)

At this point I look down at the Caller I.D. I did a double take. No, make that a triple take. I'll always be able to look at my Caller I.D. Box and see in my mind's eye what it said. It read...

Clayton County Jail

My silence must have told her that I knew where she was because our conversation continued on like this...

J: They say that I stole stuff from Wal-Mart (barely coherent through the hysterics)
MRW: Did you?
J: No! Of course not!
MRW: What happened?
J: I can't tell you now.
MRW: You need to call an attorney.
J: They called my Dad. He's on his way.
MRW: He's not going to do you any good. You need an attorney.
J: I don't have any choice. I'm so fucked.
MRW: What happened?
J: I have to go. I'll call you as soon as I can.

With that she hung up. I didn't hear from her for two days. When I did, she told me her side of the story.

J. finally called me a back a couple of days after her little incident.

She was suprisingly eager to talk about what had transpired at Wal-Mart. Her version of the events went a little something like this...

According to her, some guy in the parking lot came up behind her and said that he had a list of things for her to steal. He handed her the list and told her not to turn around. When she came back out, he explained, he'd get the stuff from her. If she didn't comply, of course, he'd be waiting for her by her car and he'd kill her. Since he came up from behind she never saw his face.

Look, you have to give the gal a couple of points for creativity. The story falls apart pretty quickly, though. I mean, the cops asked her why she didn't just find a security guard. Her answer? What was she going to tell them? She didn't see his face, remember. Where the scenario really becomes laughable is when you look at what she was stealing:

*makeup
*hair squunchies
*a mini skirt
*candles
*lotion
*a Matchbox 20 CD

That certainly would seem to be a pretty odd list unless you were, well, an eighteen year-old girl. I never was very clear on how she was trying to hide things. All she said was that they "had her on camera."

I should add that the day after she was caught was her 19th birthday. When I moved to Connecticut I found a box of stuff that I had bought her for her birthday. Anybody want a VHS copy of Grease?

When J. was fired I really wanted to believe her that she was innocent of the misdeed. Really. I knew, though, that she probably wasn't. This time she really wanted me to believe. I, of course, couldn't believe it for even an instant. It made me think about her little side venture buying clothes for her co-workers. She always seemed to get them at Sears. Sears doesn't really seem like a place for an eighteen year-old to buy clothes, does it? I have to imagine that they just had the most lax security. I doubt that even crossed the mind of her customers when this news broke. Hell, for all I know they could have been in on it from the beginning.

I pretty much stopped seeing J. after this incident. Well, not entirely. I'm not proud to say that some parts of our relationship seemed to withstand her sticky fingers. She wasn't able to visit me anymore. She really wanted to come see me but her parents had now taken away her car because she hadn't paid them for her deductible from the accident. Yeah. She now had no way to find a job and no transportation until she found one. Really bright, these people. Their solution was to have J. work for her mother who was a sales agent in a crappy neighborhood. So her mom would shuttle her to the sales office while her she basically drove all over town. It wasn't a nice neighborhood and unsavory characters would always drop in when they saw an attractive girl working there. Not a good situation. Of course, I was often one of the unsavory characters...

One day J. stayed home while her mother went to work because she "wasn't feeling well." I, too, called in sick. In all of this time I had never been to J.'s house. I never understood why. Soon I did and the end truly began in earnest.

So I called in sick to work and headed over to J.'s. I had planned to spend the day just hanging out with her. When I approached her parents' house everything looked relatively normal. They lived in a nice enough subdivision in surburban Atlanta.

J., it seemed, was constantly cleaning the house. It was how she earned her keep, I guess. Well, she should have been thrown out. The house was disgusting. Now, I'm not the best housekeeper (that's why I hire somebody to do it) I couldn't believe this place. It smelled like month old garbage and I literally couldn't get through a single room in the house because there were boxes upon boxes of crap just pilled up everywhere. J. was sitting in on the couch surrounded by dirty dishes and empty soda bottles. It really was surreal.

What really freaked me out, in retrospect, was that to meet J. you would never have guess that she lived in that type of environment. It completely shocked me.

Next to J. in the squallor sat a stack of unopened Christian rock CDs. She really loved Christian rock. I never quite understood it on many levels. First of all, everything she played for me sounded exactly the same - overly earnest boy bands who scattered a few "He's" and "amens." Not exactly the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Second of all, she went to church on a regular basis but wasn't what anyone would call a good little Christian girl. I think it had something to do with approval from her parents.

At any rate, I was baffled by the CDs appearance because she literally had no money. Literally. Where she would have gotten what had to be 10-12 new CDs was beyond me. What followed was yet another conversation that I'll never forget --

MRW - Where did you get all of those?
J - Oh. Uh. Someone got them for me.
MRW - Who? Bobby? (her church "friend")
J - Uh. A bunch of people. You know Bobby couldn't afford them.
MRW - A bunch of people?
J - Yeah.
MRW - Who?
J - A bunch of people. I don't know who they were.
MRW- A bunch of people who you don't know bought you CDs?
J - No. My friends. The Christian bookstore has a program where you can leave a list of the CDs that you want and your friends can buy them. All I had to do was go pick them up.

That's correct, my friends. She was stealing CDs from the Christian bookstore. Clearly nothing was sacred with this girl.

I made up some lame story about not feeling well and went home. I didn't call her for quite a while and pretty much lost track of her for a few months. She'd page me from time-to-time but I never returned her calls.

She made one more appearance in my life. It was quite the exit. Sometimes life lets you know that chose correctly.

Posted by mikewolf at January 25, 2003 07:42 PM