sorry, "Q"

I don't communicate off-line with people I don't know, especially with free, easily-gettable gmail accounts and a brand-spanking-new Blogger profile. I know how you got the information.

But nobody knows where I am NOW. Nobody knows who I'm with NOW. Nobody knows what I'm doing NOW. And clearly, or you would have emailed me, nobody knows my email address NOW.

I would say that even if that information was out there in the ether, that only someone who had freakish tendencies would trace things as you have, and do what with them, exactly? Since February, Janna has bandied my name about and threatened and bullied me with all kinds of shit under her name, the names of "Jesse's" friends and family, and other random sock puppets. So fucking what? I'm not the one who committed a crime, unless extreme gullibility is a crime. Janna St. James pretended to be more than a dozen people, used the US Mail to commit fraud, milked me for gifts, used other people's photos, and impersonated people who really do exist. I just believed her lies and was a headwreck for nearly two years. In fact, let's say for more than two years, because the aftermath was tres headwreck-y.

Nothing more can be done to me than has already been done. I have nothing to hide, really, and only keep on the downlow now because of Janna's wackadoodle nature. Who I am really doesn't matter, because I'm discovering there are thousands of Audreys out there, most of who allow the Janna St. Jameses of the world to get away with their shit, the way that fine doctor you cite is now. If this all complicates things for Janna Saint James and keeps her from perpetuating fraud on other unsuspecting people, or even just makes it more difficult for her to commit fraud, then as our Fearless Leader says, mission accomplished.

So, again, thanks but no thanks, "Q." If that is your real name.

thanks for the heads-up, sheila

Looks like Janna's back in action, being both Sifl and Olly, perhaps even Chester too.

Pegasus, heh heh heh heh.

talk about surreal

It's kind of -- well, fun is probably not the right word -- let's use educational, reading what other people think of the article, and of me.

How could I be so stupid? So gullible? So easily deceived? I ask myself that often. I am not any of those things, usually. Was I lonely? I guess I was, a bit, but any of my friends would tell you I didn't habitually trawl for love-n-stuff on the internets, or ever, really, for that matter. Even Josh would have to admit that. This "Jesse" spooled it out slow-ish, and we started out friends. Yeah, he sounded too good to believe, except for the crazy part, and the PTSD that he got from being traded as a sex toy for four years to pedophile drug dealers by his molesting hippie junkie dad behind his chilly feminist lecturer mother's back. Too good to believe except for the older brother who shot himself the first night Jesse was raped by the dealers, the night his father hooked him on heroin to help him deal with the pain. Big brother couldn't deal with not being able to protect his younger sibling, and so offed hisownself. "Jesse" may have been a journalist/fireman who loved yoga, but he was damaged. Janna had done her homework on me before "Jesse" ever made an appearance, so she knew what would prick up my ears (fnar).

Janna made a slurry of fact and fiction, hard to tell even now through the sludge how much of it had actually happened to her. I thought for sure that even though Annie Martel might not have been "Jesse's" therapist, that she must have at least known Janna from back in the John Denver days, because Janna had so many stories about them. I spoke to "Jesse" on the phone often, but he was always whispery and hoarse, because he was shy and didn't talk much in his 3D life, so his vocal cords were weak, but jesus, could he write. Now, I'm sure we all know people like that, folks who come alive in type but are pretty inept in person. "Jesse" and his family had been exposed to an internet freak who'd been stalking Janna trying to get close to Dan Fogelberg, and had gone as far as to impersonate her on the Dan Fogelberg boards and to telephone her home to freak out her daughter. "Jesse's" sister made him promise never to expose them to people like that again, so he (and Janna) were very leery of giving out any personal details to people they didn't really know. These are some of the backstories I was given, Janna covering her ass.

It would take pages and pages to explain how I got sucked in (operative word with my 20:20 hindsight being suck, of course) for as long as I did, but here are the main points in a nutshell. I was committed to a project with 100-hour workweeks for the entire year I knew "Jesse." I did try to fly to Denver early on in the "relationship" to see him, but his dog Wrinkle had just died, his grandmother was conveniently dying, and it would have been inappropriate for me to be there during such a tense time for the family. I had bought a plane ticket and was on my way to the airport when "Jesse" called and implored me not to come to Denver. He wanted our first meeting to be perfect, he was beset by anxiety, blah blah blah. We made other plans, but then of course after a weird buildup over several weeks, he shot himself and then was in a psychiatric hospital where only family and his therapist could visit. Then, of course, I couldn't cope with "Jesse's" nuttiness (he'd been diagnosed as bipolar) and we stopped talking for a while, although I was still communicating with Janna, because we'd become friendly.

Confused yet? Bored? Sorry. It's so convoluted.

We picked up again and made other plans, which were scuppered because "Jesse's" mother revealed that his father wasn't really his father, so the fact that he'd been molested by this man as a child wasn't so bad because it wasn't incest. "Jesse" then had to go on a quest for his real father, who was Irish, and a repressed Catholic, and gay, and repenting for sinning against the Scriptures (for fathering a child with a woman whose husband it was he really wanted to have sex with, being a hypocrite and marrying and fathering two more children, and of course the gay thing) by doing charity work for Concern in war- and disaster-torn nations worldwide. So "Jesse" went to Pakistan against his sister's orders, and she, being his legal guardian (since he'd OD'd after 9/11, but hey, that's another story) went to the courts so they would send authorities to pick him up at the airport when he came back and commit him for flagrantly disobeying her. There went that weekend we were supposed to meet in Laguna Beach. It was hardly ever "Jesse" canceling things, it was circumstances.

And "Jesse's" real father's name? Davian Blaine. Yes, dear readers, I know. But I was already in so deep there was no way I suspected "Jesse" wasn't real, as outlandish as that all sounded. I'd been having email conversations with other friends of his, his ex-wife and other friends of his had posted on his blog, I'd seen pictures of his friends and ex-wife and son, his sister's house and his llamas. Which, of course, turned out to be Dan Fogelberg's house and llamas.

I finished my taxing job after a year, prepared to make a move so we could try each other on. And then, well, "Jesse" died. And Janna was utterly lovely to me. Of course, most of "Jesse's" other friends were quite horrible to me, because they never understood why he was interested in me in the first place, and constantly criticized me for not making more of an effort to be with him. But Janna was always a comfort, telling me stories, and encouraging me to set up the tribute blog. I was emailing with "Jesse's" son, who was going to spend time in Spain. I had an address. I was emailing with "Jesse's" ex-wife and his best friend Cakey. And Annie Martel, "Jesse's" therapist. I met Janna, and she was real, we spent a few days together driving around Colorado and New Mexico, while she showed me some of "Jesse's" favorite places. She cried real tears when talking with me about "Jesse" on his birthday. I saw them. Seven months passed between "Jesse's" death and Janna's visit to my house, and the now much-viewed confrontation.

Now, I've known people with strangeass names, and for the offspring of hippie parents, Jesse Jubilee James isn't totally off the wall. His other siblings had stupid names too. And hey, should Sandra Bullock be worried because she's married to some guy called Jesse James? [editor's hindsight note: why yes, yes, Sandra should]  I've met Moon Unit Zappa, for fuck's sake. So, that really didn't raise any alarms, 'specially since "Jesse" was pretty goddamned embarrassed about it, the way any real person with fucked parents would be. I've known people who seem to be disaster magnets - I lived with a girl called Laura, and another called Tammy back in the 80s who were precisely that, so that was believable also. The weird life, well, shit, I've had a weird life, which I will not go into here, but suffice it to say that rather than raising any alarms, someone else with a weirder life just made me feel more like a kindred spirit.

And if that shit ain't weird enough, tell me, we have Harlan Ellison, a man whose Love Ain't Nothing But Sex Misspelled was read by me at the tender age of ten, snatched off my mom's bookshelf, which made me a fan fo-evah. Harlan Ellison, the man who bound me to the incredibly talented, funny-as-shit, far-too-opinionated, love-you-till-it-hurts, Macaulay-Culkin-lookalike Joshua Olson. Harlan Ellison, whose books I've toted around the world more than once and now fill two boxes stashed downstairs till I build my bookcase. Harlan Ellison, who has been the significant influence on me for more than three decades, whose work I still quote chapter and verse anytime the situation deems it necessary, which is quite often.

Harlan Ellison, THAT Harlan Ellison, is the fella that breaks it to me about Jesse Jubilee James. Harlan. Ellison. For fuck's sake. Now who has the weird life? Who's surreal now?

So, I can't say I blame anyone who thinks that Josh's article is a piece of internet trickery, or that this blog and the video is all part of the hoax. Would that I was as skeptical two-and-a-half years ago.

But it ain't. It was real. Horribly real.

And so I ask myself again, How could I be so stupid? So gullible? So easily deceived?

It wasn't that easy. But I have no answers for the rest of it.

uh, hi

...to all you people who are suddenly discovering this blog. I assume you're all somehow here because of the article.

Did all y'all know that Janna St. James was a licensed cosmetologist back in the 80s? I guess that explains the hair.

here it is

Well, folks, it's been a long hard slog, huh? Click here to read the article.

I will add my own corrections here, since Josh is a little wrong about some stuff, but that's what happens with journalists, eh?

1. Janna St. James lives in Batavia, which is a suburb of Chicago, I believe. It's also good to know that her married name is Priggie, just in case she starts putting herself forward as Janna Priggie, "friend" of some other celebrity or eligible beefcake out there in interwebsland.

2. Jesse and I did not exchange clothes so we'd know what each other smelled like. Eeeew. I'm strange enough without having to add to it, friends, thankyouverymuch.

3. I'd broken off with the younger man before I was even talking to Jesse again. One had nothing to do with the other.

4. I didn't ask Harlan if I could bring Janna to his house, just the new puppy. Harlan's a lovely man, fabulous writer, and I do believe this could be the first time ever in history that he's wrong about something, but wrong he is.

There're other little tiny hiccups in the article, mostly to do with timeline, and some more things to do with me, but fuckit, it's my life and I have to live with the shit I've done; I've learned to roll with the punches. The important thing is that the facts about Janna Saint James are correct. Copies of the article are on their way to all Chicago-area publications, just in case they would otherwise miss it. Did I mention it's this week's cover story?

there are Jannas everywhere

Seems as though a woman in NYC is under suspicion for not being who she says she is.

What is wrong with these people, so desperately needing attention that they have to piggyback onto tragedy?

catch you on the rebound, talk to you later when I have less time

So, then. This will be the last lengthy post, unless something utterly amazing happens, like Janna St. James suddenly coming clean in public fora.

I've given up waiting for the article about her to appear. High-powered legal beagles futzing over minor contract points is ridiculous and bound to be protracted. When the article does finally make publication, I'll post a link here. Probably in 2011, knowing the way goddamned lawyers work.

I've said a lot already, but a few things need repeating, I think, and a few things need stating.

• I think Janna Saint James really thinks she did something good for me by pretending to be "Jesse" and his random coterie of faux friends and relatives. I would like to state unequivocally that she did nothing good for me. All she did was make my job more difficult by distracting from it with "Jesse's" various trials and tribulations. All she did was disrupt my sleep with worry and eventually grief. I fully believe that she contributed to (if not outright caused) the illnesses that befell me following "Jesse's" death by weakening my immune system with all the grief and guilt and days without sleep. All she did was try to screw up friendships I had with my real-word friends. All she did was make my home life uncomfortable at best and unbearable at worst. She did not "free" me, which is what I think she comforts herself with when she's alone with her private thoughts. All it was, all she did, for nearly two years (whoops, sorry, a year and a half), was shovel the bullshit on, and it's that crap-covered yardstick I use to measure those twenty months by.
  
• Last month I sent Janna's daughter Jessica an email, to an address I believe is her own, although who knows to what lengths Janna has gone to deceive? I will assume that Jessica received it, and would hope that she read it, and this blog, and has taken appropriate action in getting her mother to the nearest psychiatric facility. Of course, it could very well be that she was in on this whole scam from the beginning, and is happily availing herself to some of the many gifts I showered upon "Jesse". Still being the cockeyed optimist that I am, I'd like to think that there's at least one normal one in the St. James family and that she's done the right thing with her demented mother. If not, well, maybe she didn't get the mail. Or maybe she doesn't care. Or maybe it really just is all Janna. Maybe there's not even really a Jessica. If there is, and she's reading this, mazel tov, move as far away from your nutjob mother as you can after the wedding. I suggest Europe. And keep her away from your kids. She's obsessed with child molestation.
  
• I have decided against pressing charges, although a lawyer in Chi-town will be sad to not soak Janna for her car, fancy Indian silver jewelry, and other assets. He'll have to make do with the retainer he's been paid. My main reason for wanting to sue Janna was to get the courts to rule that she see a shrink for at least a couple of years and to limit her computer usage, but that kind of thing is virtually unenforceable by the courts. I'm hoping that by giving Jessica the information about what Janna spent her time doing for nearly two years that she cares enough about her mother to do the right thing.
• Going through all my receipts for taxes, and going further back into 2005, I spent WAY more on "Jesse" et al than I first (and second) thought. All that stuff at the beginning, a personalized iPod and all the accoutrements for $650 (which, yeah, "Jesse" reimbursed me $300 for, but I didn't reveal how much I spent because I like gifting those I love), expensive bath stuff from Lush, the sterling silver handmade bracelet for $300 that "Jesse" asked to be cremated with, a $600 reservation at a Laguna Beach B&B that had strict no-refund cancellation policies (cancelled because "Jesse" had to voluntarily check in to a psychiatric hospital to avoid his sister committing him), that $550 R/T nonrefundable plane ticket to Denver that I never used, $100 worth of organic asparagus ("Jesse" liked asparagus), $250 for toiletries bags with the Jesse prairie dog photo on them, one for me and one for Janna, $200 to FedEx the birthday package to Spain for "Jesse's" "son," which was of course returned to me (and in fact phenomenal amounts of shipping charges for all those items I sent to "Jesse" and Janna via Priority Mail and FedEx), $600 in moving boxes/packing to put my stuff in for my move to Colorado, $400 for a few bottles of "Jesse's" favorite wine, so I could drink it in tribute after he died, $40 for a goddamned clothes shaver, and another $40 for a backup in case "Jesse's" "son" burned out the first one, horseback riding lessons and the fucking useless boots recommended by "Cakey," the entire New Mexico/Colorado trip, outfits I bought on ebay thanks to "Jesse's" prompting, and all those little stupid things that time and trauma had erased from my memory banks. Teetering at the ten grand mark. Over two years -- sorry -- a year and a half.
  
• I've gone through all the stuff I bought for "Jesse" and his "family" but hadn't had the opportunity to send before "Jesse" died, as well as some things I received. I'll be selling most of it, with the proceeds going to a couple of local organizations who help abused kids. Most of the stuff I got for "Jesse's" "son" has already gone to these shelters. The things I don't sell I'll destroy, if I haven't already - I enjoyed shredding that bullshit prairie dog giclee with the bullshit sentiments written on the sides. I'll have a pass at selling that painting of Doug that Janna did, if nobody wants it, I'll shred that too. As much as part of me thinks that I should sell these items to recompense myself for the money conned out of me by Janna Saint James, I'll just think of it as a pricey life lesson. I don't want that money, because it has the stink of bullshit on it. And especially after Janna sucked up sympathy from so many for poor poor "Jesse's" abuse by his mother's husband and the drug dealers he was traded to, I think it's about fucking time some poor kids who really did have to go through that shit get something positive from this icky negative.
• I know that I'm sane, rational, and honest, all things Janna is not. I don't even think she's that smart. I was impressed by "Jesse's" breadth of knowledge as a 35-year-old man who'd spent half his life drug-addicted. Not so much when you find "Jesse" is a fiftysomething Batavia, Illinois hausfrau who has all the time in the world to read histrionic tomes and watch Oprah while chowing down on Hot Pockets.

Janna, as "Jesse," and also as herself, didn't much rate Tom Waits, supposedly because he romanticized pain and suffering. I never thought that, more that he documents the truth of the world, and pain and suffering do exist in this world. Of course, a drama queen like Janna Saint James saw it as romanticizing pain, because that is exactly what she does. She saw Tom Waits as the competition*. She worked the pain, milking sympathy from every available metaphorical cow to feed her ego. Janna also liked criticizing me by proxy, being horrid to me as one of "Jesse's" friends or relatives, or pulling out the stops in her blog to save her own skin, still usually quoting what some other individual less saintly than herself told her to say, or telling me Madam X mocked me fiercely when I called myself a navel-gazer. But at least I seek, and I think that Janna the psycho dyke-o is just jealous because she hasn't seen her own navel since the 70s. Is that mean? Yeah. Oh well. I never said I was perfect (unlike Janna), and I'm still feeling pretty mean about her.

Janna's biggest danger is that she tries real hard to create an alternate reality that shows her as a loving, kind, unlucky person. We joked at the beginning, "Jesse" and I, about how I was probably a wizened man with bristly hair in my ears and plaid pants hiked up to my armpits, emailing from my senior care center in Sarasota, and that "Jesse" was probably an obese housewife in Chicago. Well, guess what? I think that was the first and last time that "Jesse" was ever honest with me. Janna is exactly that. Exactly that, but she'd regale me with stories about how she never weighed more than 105 pounds until she was gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead in the middle of a cornfield about ten years ago by three Mexican men. But thanks to "Jesse," he sent her to the best doctors in Europe for reconstructive surgery, and slept on the floor by her bed in the hospital room, when even her husband didn't do that. "Jesse" would always talk about how wonderful and clever and brilliant and beautiful Janna was. Blah blah blah blah blah. It goes on and on, about how tiny and petite and pretty she always was and now she's a huge hideous house and the Weight Watchers people don't understand or sympathize with her because she hasn't been fat all her life. A million stories, a million excuses for why she is the way she is. I really never gave a shit what size she was, or for how long. I never asked for explanations, but was a huge issue for her. Huge. She had to convince me that she was once attractive, desirable, sexy, and that it was misfortune rather than one too many supersized McDonalds meals that made her the way she was. We all have things we wish we could change about ourselves. I'd like racehorse ankles and calves that boots could fit over. It don't mean I'll pretend I once possessed these things (well, maybe I did, when I was nine). I'd also like to be nicer to people, but the fact is that I'm not a very nice person, and I'm happy to be a bitch when bitchery is called for, and as far as Janna is concerned, she deserves a shitload of bitchery.

Janna lied to me for twenty months, and then once she was found out by my friends, she lied for a few more months, about me. And probably still is lying now, and will lie tomorrow, and the day after that. She's probably right now studying some new fashionable illness that she can give her next Perfect Man, and god knows, she's probably absorbed some of my life into her new Mister Right. She may be sick, but she's also fully cognizant of what she's doing, because the calculated way she tried to tear me apart following her outing was utterly spectacular, and hey, talk about mean. I've spent my time since February rethinking everything I've known to be true and cannot find it in my heart to forgive Janna for any of this. I can't even say with assurance that if she'd been up-front with me prior to, or even following, her unmasking by my friends, that I would have been less angry with her than I am now. I also can't guarantee that if I ever run into her that I won't want to give her a serious slap across the face. Maybe two. I do know that she should count her blessings that so far her victims have been relatively benign, because even here, with my friends, she was thisclose to getting herself a righteous ass-kicking by a couple of my (normally pacifist) friends. Next person Janna does this to, she might not be so lucky.

I really hope that this blog serves its purpose and warns anyone else who gets tangled up in the Janna St. James web before emotional harm is inflicted upon them. But since Janna is in deep, deep denial, and who knows how much she's fucked up her own life, I reckon she'll just keep herself out of the next deception and reconfigure Mister Right for some other unsuspecting person who trusts just that little bit too much. I've done what I can, and it's up to those who love Janna to keep her from pulling this kind of cunning stunt again. I just hope that there is someone out there who loves her enough. Or at all. Otherwise, I guess I'll just see her in hell.

-------------
*note to Janna, who I know is reading this, either as herself or as a Jannafestation: I know Tom Waits and you are no Tom Waits [with apologies to the late Lloyd Bentsen]. He has talent. You have limited creative typing ability.