JASON'S JOURNEY
This is a story about the growing up and coming of age of a typical Ohio boy by the name of Jason as told to me through the exchange of a series of Email. It is a true story detailing true events with only the names, including Jason's, having been changed to protect the travelers we meet along the way. We pick up where we left off in Chapter 9 with twenty-two-year-old Jason having spent his last evening with his lover Ryan. Comments about the story can be sent to the author, J.O. Dickingson at authorsix@hotmail.com and those who wish to correspond directly with Jason may do so at journeyofjason@yahoo.com
CHAPTER TEN: LIFE WITH JASON AT WORK, AT HOME, AND AT SCHOOL
I've heard it said bad things occur in threes, and they certainly do that summer. Ever since my doctor's warning that my smoking could cause a flare up of my Crohn's back in July I'd been making a major effort to quit my one or two pack a day habit. Now I know you'll say that's a good thing, but when you've smoked as heavy as I have, it is pure hell trying to cut back, never mind quit. The second of course is breaking up with Ryan and realizing just how close our relationship had become, and realizing that once again as soon as I started getting intimate with someone I loved everything fell apart. The third, almost as brutal, I quit drinking in August. I just decide one day that I'm not going to do it anymore. Besides, I am out of money and can't keep up my habit. That helps.
Now believe me, it really is one hell of a time coming down after being smashed for almost a year straight. There had been times when I'd drop over $100 a weekend at the local bar on shots of everything from Tequila (big mistake) to liquid cocaine (not actually cocaine, unfortunately, but the name of a mixed shot that they make at one of the local bars.) I love the stuff. It is a mixture of 151, Rumplemintz, and Jagermeister. It has a nice mint taste to it and burns like hell the whole way down. I'd gotten to the point where I'd actually say, "just mix me something (insert color here)," another big mistake. I am not a big boy, but I have my tolerance built up like you would not believe. It is great while I am high and feeling no pain, but believe me, no matter how many times it happens, you never get used to waking up under somebody's bed. At least in their bed wouldn't be quite so bad.
I start working at Spencer's at the local mall about ten minutes from my house later that August, about twenty days after I had been fired from Shell. I am only supposed to be around for ninety days at the most because a friend of mine works there and got me the job, and they have a rule that friends can't work together for longer than that. Lucky me, she gets fired and I get to stick around.
Labor Day my ex sister-in-law, who is pregnant by this dork she has begun dating, the dork, and my nine-year-old nephew Eric come over for a cookout. This guy she is dating is so immature I actually sit and marvel how dumb he is. I can honestly say I have watched kids that were more mature than this guy. We sit at the end of the lot and have a little fire going on the cement pad and roast hotdogs and marshmallows. I have my dog Kookie sitting in the chair with me and she and I eat the hotdogs and more or less just listen in on the conversation. Later that night, I am getting cold and Eric had gotten into trouble for something and his mom had just sent him in to take a bath. Being a voyeur, of course I take advantage of the situation. We have a daybed in the family area right below a window that looks into the bathroom.
I mentioned the window before when I was talking about Caroline and Chloe staying with us. The daybed has some bars that are bent in a neat pattern and they are sturdy enough and high enough that I can stand on them and look right into the bathroom.
The blinds are not adjusted right, so I run in really quick and ask if I can go to the bathroom before he gets in the bath. I move them just so and have a perfect view right in. I go back around and stand on the bars and watch as he takes his pants off, pees, and gets in the bathtub. I keep running back and forth looking at the door making sure no one is coming, and looking through the window trying to watch Eric. I get to see him get out of the tub and start drying off, then put his clothes back on. I head to the living room without anybody knowing anything that had happened. That night I add his name to the list of guys I've seen pissing and I have a hot jerk off session reliving every second from the moment he began pushing down his pants to the moment he dried himself off and started to get dressed.
I return to Kent that fall to continue working on my degree in accounting and Nicole continues with college for her nursing degree. Five years ago, in the summer of 1996, she had gone to China as a missionary for the Methodist church for a month and while she was there she'd met a Chinese guy from one of the outlying provinces and fell in love with him, and he fell just as much in love with her. They were so in love. A match made in freakin' heaven. She went back the next summer, and then in 1999 she went back for a year. Then in March of last year they got married. That was when I was having my surgery. Nicole came home and made arrangements for him to follow in a few months. The moment I met her husband, Chiang, I didn't like him. For one, I am not too fond of foreigners, and especially Asians. To be truthful, the only countries I care for are Great Britain, Germany, Canada, and Australia, and the only reason I like Germany is the whole Hitler thing. I don't agree with what he did at all, but you have to respect a guy who thinks he can get rid of an entire group of people and become supreme ruler of the world. As far as I'm concerned, everyone else can just go to hell. The other reason I don't like him is that I just didn't trust him. As far as I was concerned, the only reason he'd hooked up with Nicole was to get into the United States. Anyway, when he got here they moved into an apartment on the edge of town and all seems to be going well for both of them. He is fluent in English and got a job at a local supermarket as a bagger. He is about five foot ten, around a hundred and eighty pounds, all muscle, with short black hair and the typical Chinese look except he doesn't have the usual slitted eyes that you normally see.
On the first day, my schedule says we are to have Astronomy class in one room but there is a note on the door that says it is in another room. We sit for about fifteen minutes, the unofficial amount of time we have to give a teacher to show up, and then we all leave. The next day of class, a Thursday, I am walking toward the classroom and this guy stops me and says that the class is in a different room, the direction he is heading. So I walk along with him and when we get there we sit together and keep talking about this and that. I find out his name is Chad and that he is an advertising major. The next week, the class is moved yet again to a different area of the building and this time I find him and tell him about it and we talk on the way and sit next to each other again.
Then comes 9/11, an event that jolts everyone's lives, not just in the US, but around the world. Like everyone else in America, my eyes are glued to the television watching the crumbling of the towers over and over and feeling such anger and such hopelessness. You know, if you look around the solar system, there are planets that are pock marked with craters, whereas the Earth doesn't have many. I think we need a big crater that stretches from say, Saudi Arabia to maybe, the Pacific Ocean. That would cut down on problems with rising oceans and we wouldn't have to worry much about global warming. It would also get rid of the middle east. You know why Columbus tried to find another way to the Indies? According to Bill Maher, it was because he was sick and tired of dealing with those people and said he would rather sail off the edge of the fucking Earth than deal with those people one more time.
It is around that time that Nicole starts telling me about how her husband treats her when they are alone and it usually isn't very well. It just confirms what I'd suspected and I really start to hate the guy. He decides to join the Navy after 9/11 and he is moved to Virginia. Nicole stays here planning on finishing her degree and then moving down to join him, though I don't know why considering the way she says he treats her. Everyone has told her that the only reason he married her was to get a free pass into the US. But Nicole says that he keeps telling her that he is sorry and doesn't mean to treat her like he does, and they are so very much in love and so they start papers for him to become a legal citizen.
That September I am in training as a supervisor which helps take my mind off New York City. I go in to talk to the manager of the Spencer's store in Canton thirty minutes or so north of here. He sits me down, tells me he is gay, and asks if it bothers me, to which of course I tell him it doesn't. He says he hopes I will be transferred there. I can make the drive in fifteen minutes (don't tell mom, LOL). Well, I get transferred up there a few weeks later and work with him one day before he is forced to quit, some shady business that is all hushed up. I meet "Attila", my new store manager, the next day. Wow what a bitch! She was an air force bitch and tries to run the store just like the military. It doesn't work and we go through about thirty people in a matter of three weeks. She and I really get into it and I tell her that if she doesn't start respecting us, she can run the store herself. By this time, I have been moved up to Assistant Manager and I am working forty hours a week. There are only two of us in management and I am only allowed forty hours, so she has to make up the rest. If I had quit, she would have had to work twelve hours a day six days a week, plus seven hours on Sunday. Well, things work out and we start working together like a right and left hand.
Chad and I become good friends and for the rest of the semester we make fun of the professor together and joke around. This professor is a real geek, like most astronomers I guess. I have nothing against them. I love astronomy actually. Anyway he looks like he fell off a truck on the way to class and always has weird stories and ideas about putting kittens into microwaves or taking a cat up to the Demon Drop at Cedar Point. The one day he is telling us about a comet that was found and how they should have seen it first in Japan but they weren't watching their instruments so the US found it. He says that if they had been watching, they would have said "Hey look, we found a comet" and the whole time he is making the mouth movements like they do in the poorly dubbed Japanese movies. I can't believe it.
Anyway, Chad is a dream. He is around twenty, about my height, really thin, short black hair, very smooth skin. He looks like he is about fifteen, and is totally adorable. He becomes the subject of many of my jack off fantasies and I try everything I can think of to find out if he might be interested. From what I know about him, he doesn't have a girlfriend or any interest, and he acts a little "different," both being encouraging indications for me. One day while at work in Canton, I am out for a smoke at lunch (I'm down to a pack a week) and as I am coming back, I see him and another guy looking into the store looking for me. I come up from behind and say hi and he about jumps out of his skin. I don't think he wanted me to know he was there looking for me. A bit later I ask him if he wants to go to Cedar Point with me but he turns me down. I try Cedar Point as a way to get together with people.
One day in late December Mom calls me while I'm at work. I tell her that I will call her back in a few minutes because I am busy with a customer, but before she hangs up she tells me that Tara's little girl has died. I almost throw up. I finish with the customer in a daze and tell the girl that I am working with that I have to make a call and I will be in the back. I call Mom back to find out what happened and find out the little girl died of meningitis. I hang up, smoke a cigarette, and just put my head down on the desk and cry. The funeral is a few days before Christmas. I go to the calling hours. God it is horrible. Seeing the little girl in that coffin is just awful. I've never been through anything so heartbreaking in my life. I meet Tara's husband for the first and only time at the funeral. He seems decent enough.
It is during the next semester that I smoke pot for my second and third time. The wife of one of my friends was a big druggy in the past and she always knew where to get stuff. Well, one night I am with them and they offer me a joint and I take it. A week later I go to their place again and we do it once more. About all I remember about the experience is that I got so paranoid while I was high thinking that I was going to forget to breathe and would die and then everyone would know I smoked pot. That was the last time I've ever smoked the stuff.
The only "illegal" drug I have ever done is pot. I would like to try Ex but I would want somebody I trust with me so I don't go jumping out a window like on that after school special with Helen Hunt. I would not do heroin or anything else like that. The jury is still out on cocaine if given the chance. If I had it, I would smoke pot as much as I could, mainly for the health effects and the pain relief I get from it.
Nicole has gastric bypass surgery that spring to help her lose weight and I am there for her through everything. I go to her house at 1:30 in the morning to get her something to eat, I change her bandages, and I just generally take care of her and her cats. Everything she needs, I am there. I just want to help. I really feel sorry for her, and she really seems to appreciate my attention. I know that despite how her husband treats her she still has feelings for him so it's not like I am trying to horn in on him or anything like that.
In April of 2002 they close the Canton store because of our sales, and because the guy before us had really fucked the store up. We are missing so much inventory it isn't even close to being funny. So I come back to work at the Spencer's store at home. The manager at this store is the best. She makes it fun and interesting, but we still get our work done.
I wind up working with the thin, mousey-looking nerd who had caught my eye while I'd been checking out videos at EB back when I'd been working at K-mart and had gone to the washroom at the mall to have a quick wank while I pictured what a monster cock he had to have. He fills in part time with us, and my curiosity about how he is hung is kindled once again. Turns out he is a nice kid, but unfortunately very homophobic, which means I'm never going to find out how big a cock he actually has. It does add a new twist to my jerk off fantasies about him though! I discover Spencer's sells a massager that is similar to the Sexplorer I'd discovered in my parents' bedroom back when I was eleven and I buy a few for old times sake.
Nicole and I both graduate on the same day, her with her bachelors in nursing and me with an associate of nothing I mean arts. Basically it says I went to class and got a piece of paper to show it. Tara graduates that spring too, surprisingly finishing her nursing degree despite everything. By the end of that semester we were getting into the higher math requirements of the accounting program at Kent and I decide fuck that and to switch to business in the fall. Nicole's husband had been coming up occasionally to visit throughout the year and she'd tricked him into having a baby. She has the baby in Virginia and shortly after, she moves back up here but her husband stays in Virginia. He starts getting worse the way he talks to her and treats her and starts saying she took his daughter away from him. I really begin feeling sorry for her.
I'm down to a few cigarettes a day and finally quit in July when I wind up in the hospital with a bad infection. It is kind of funny, my computer crashes on July 3 and as I am calling for support, my body shuts down and I go into shock. I have four blankets on me and am so cold I can't breathe. My parents want to take me to the hospital but I don't want to go. I pass out around nine and when I wake up at eleven, I finally give in and wind up back in the hospital for a few days over the 4th of July. I always said that I would go to some extraordinary lengths to get out of a family get together!
My mom joined the local YMCA that year and started taking my nephew Eric, who turned ten a few months ago, there to swim occasionally. I'd also go with them a few times but I had started feeling uncomfortable being in the pool, the first signs of my phobia regarding water, so I don't go too often. Mom also started taking him out for lunch and a movie too, to help him get his mind off his home life. There is still fighting going on with his parents, my brother and my sister-in-law, even though they are divorced. Anyway, he would stay the night and bring his swimming equipment, like his snorkel and goggles and stuff. When they go to the movie, I go through his bag to see what he brought. A few times, I take his snorkel and rub the mouth piece on my dick and use it to masturbate with, rubbing my dick head back and forth over the rubber cup and when I'm hard humping it until I'm ready to cum, thinking about Eric all the while and remembering watching him taking a piss and having his bath. On those days I go to the pool with them and I love seeing him in the water using that snorkel, knowing that it was on my dick just a few hours before. His lips are wrapped about the rubber cup that I had wrapped about my dickhead and he's sucking on it totally unaware where it had been. God, that is good for a fucking powerful jerk off session every time.
There isn't really too much that happens for some time between Eric and me. I continue trying to sneak glances at him and let him "catch" me changing. There are also a few times when he stays the night and sleeps in the family area and I sneak into the bathroom and watch him from the window. I catch him a few times laying on his stomach humping his crotch into the cushions, which I commit to memory and use for a major jerk session. After the divorce is finalized, my brother marries his third wife in a simple ceremony outside city hall. We aren't talking to him at the time so we don't attend.
Unfortunately our store manager at Spencer's has to leave because of some kind of brain tumor or something and we get stuck with the worst manager in the history of the world. If she were in charge of the Titanic, it never would have sunk because it never would have left the dock because I wouldn't have been there to tell her what to do. I run that store for almost a year, organize all of the floor changes, take care of all of the paperwork, hire and fire, throw stock, clean the whole damn store top to bottom, organize and count inventory, everything the manager should have been doing. The district manager knows who is doing all the work too because he always wants to talk to me, instead of the store manager. It really pisses her off. The only reason I am not the manager is because I have to stay at part time because of Dad's insurance.
New Years, my Celebrity sucks a rod in the engine on my way home from work and blows up. I am so crushed. That is the car I first got laid in, and I have such wonderful memories in that car. I get another car the day after New Years and have that one for about two years. I always seem to blow cars up right around the 124,000 mile mark. So far out of three cars I have had to get rid of, they were all right around that point.
Well, between blowing up the Celebrity and realizing that I'm going to have to have surgery one way or the other and being rather nervous about it, I begin smoking again. Also knowing that a surgery is coming up and wanting to get my room straightened out before I go in, one weekend that spring I just decide to pull everything out of my room and do it. I have a shit load of Spencer's stuff in my room, twenty Lava lamps (which working at Spencer's Gifts I got a good discount on), glowing electro balls, different lights and fountains, black lights, all sorts of shit. It takes Dad and me a few days to get the shelves built around the ceiling but they are very sturdy and look pretty good. It takes a lot longer to get all my stuff put back in.
I don't care what is going to happen to me and begin giving discounts at Spencer's left and right. I work until September with the intent of returning after recovery. I go in for another resection, gall bladder removal, hernia repair, and scar tissue removal. They can't use the mesh for the hernia because of the possibility of needing to go back in for the Crohn's, so they have to slice from rib to hip on both sides, and from rib to rib, and hip to hip, to relieve tension so I wouldn't split open. Due to complications from the surgery, to my great disappointment I am not able to go back to Spencer's, and have yet to be able to return to work anywhere.
The reason I have to stay on Dad's insurance is because of these surgeries. The first round cost somewhere around $35,000. The second surgery is over $80,000. There is no way I could have covered that myself, unless of course I started selling my body, and even then it would probably take forever and that would have just been a bad situation all around! To be honest, I've seriously considered trying life as a b-boy, having fun and making some money on the side. As it was, I had to file bankruptcy on my credit card and hospital bills. I have been fighting with Social Security for almost two years now to get disability and they keep turning me down. I guarantee you if I got addicted to crack tonight, I would be covered tomorrow. I hate our fucking government.
A few days after the operation while I am still recovering in the hospital up in Cleveland, one of the top clinics in the world, my dad calls to check in on us. He tells Mom that my brother had taken Eric to the police department because he had a big bruise on his arm. Turns out that his mom's new husband, Mr. Maturity, had gotten pissed and grabbed him by the arm and threw him into a chair. That is the start of another legal battle for custody between my brother and his ex-wife, with us being on my brother's side this time. It is a clear cut case and my brother gets custody.
When I get home, I am at a point where I can't even get off the couch by myself. I hadn't eaten much more than a few bites of hospital chicken in almost two weeks and almost died several times. The first real food I eat once I get home is a spicy pizza pretzel from the We're Rolling shop in Walmart, a pretzel rolled with pepperoni and cheese. It is probably way too spicy for my sensitive stomach but it is real food and I love it. Since my surgery my tastes seem to have changed, everything from food preferences to what I watch on TV. I used to hate Coke, but now I like it. I used to watch Forensic Files and the Golden Girls over and over, now I can't. It is funny what getting your gut ripped open will do to you. The one good thing about it all is that I quit smoking again. Well, Mr. Maturity calls up and asks if mom could come up and watch Eric and their two kids while he goes to work and my sister-in-law sleeps. Mom tells him that she can't leave me alone and he gets pissed and screams "well fuck you" and hangs up. That is the last we speak with them.
Nicole calls me four weeks after surgery. Her mom has locked her keys in her car and is parked behind Nicole's car and so she wants me to run her to her mom's house to get the spare keys. Four weeks after having my gut ripped open, cut from one end to the other, barely able to move, but I go out to help her. She needs me, and I want to help. Nicole is the one person in the world that I trust and that I know I can depend on.
It takes me a few weeks before I am able to get on the Internet again. I finally get back to my news groups toward the end of October and am pissed when I see some of the stuff I missed, but I do find a great little movie I had been trying to get for a while. I sit at the computer and stroke it, edging myself right to the point of cumming, and then stop. I do that a few times a day, but I never push myself over the top, remembering the pain and disappointment when I'd pushed myself too far after my first operation and remembering my doctor's warning.
Then, one Friday, I am sitting watching that movie and stroking and push a little too far and start shooting. I grab a glass that is on my desk really quick and get most of it in the glass. It feels great getting one off again finally, but I'm worried I might have hurt myself where a guy does not want to hurt himself, and I'm disappointed in myself that I let it happen. It is still about two weeks before I should have been having sex according to my doctor, but to my great relief nothing untoward happened. So, I start going all the way every fourth day, then every third, and eventually work up to once a day, and am eventually back to at least once, usually twice a day.
I send my letter of resignation to the main office in January of 04, and by the end of February, that store closes. It kind of makes me feel important. I am the type of person that puts 100% of myself into my job. Spencer's is the one job I had that I really loved. It was fun. If I do the job, it has to be perfect or I don't want to do it. This has held true from K-mart, where I was in charge of the Frozen food section, to Shell where I worked ungodly hours and quickly worked my way through the ranks, to Spencer's where I basically ran the store. I am starting to feel like I am bad luck though. Every place I have worked has either closed or changed.
As I mentioned K-mart closed a few months after I left, thank God. Shell became a Marathon a few months after I left, and both Spencer's I worked at have closed.
As if matters are not bad enough, Kookie turns really sickly and we take her to the vet. One of the first things they ask me about is her appetite. My exact words were, "she only had a bite of her chicken sandwich, she didn't touch her taco, and she threw up some pop corn." The woman looks at me like I am from another planet. That is when Kookie's diet started. Kookie is not too happy with her turn of events, and nor am I with mine. At least I have Nicole.