Prologue to Distortion Lens
by Mishka Shubaly

          As some of you may know, for the last couple of months I've been editing and compiling some of the work left on Jacob's hard drive to turn in for his MFA thesis at Columbia University.  It has been a long, strange, and moving journey.  Some days I made the trek to Butler Library, popped the zip disk in and had to leave ten minutes later, unable even to read it.  Other days I stayed up late, then ran to Allison's house and woke her up to tell her what I had been reading and thinking.  Always, it was heartening and depressing and tantalizing; even on paper, Jacob was at least seventy-five percent more alive than anyone else was in their real life.  He was such a vital guy that it's very hard to accept that this is the only way we'll know him now.

         But what a find!  Even if this was only the way we ever knew him, our lives would have been fantastically enriched.  It's Jacob in all his glory, extolling, pontificating, ranting, leaping off of the soap box and onto the podium, Jacob carefully identifying the variants of human loneliness, anger and alienation, patiently explaining convoluted theories of their origins and paradigms with which to map and explore them, Jacob cracking sharp and brutal jokes at everyone's expense.  More than once, I had to wince and smile, and I know I won't be the only one.  As in his real life though, the harshest criticism was always reserved for himself, and the most explosive humor is always at his expense.

         I've chosen a selection from his unfinished novel, Distortion Lens, to post on the website.  The novel is narrated by Joseph, a young, over-intellectualized Mormon living in New York City, struggling to preserve his belief in God and his virginity in a city that provides increasingly persuasive arguments for abandoning both.  His elder brother Gordon, troubled by, among other things, the death of their father, has become addicted to heroin.  Joseph is intent on making a documentary movie of his brother's nightly forays into oblivion, with which he intends to confront and cure Gordon's addiction and restore him to the Mormon Church, and also satisfy his thesis requirement for the Film M.F.A at NYU.  If you've read any of Jacob's writing, you know that the work itself is much funnier and much darker than my précis.  In the following excerpt, Joseph and his girlfriend Alice have adjourned a romantic dinner at which Alice proposed a dalliance from the sexual puritanism that has previously defined their relationship in order to stake out Gordon's apartment.  Joseph's wayward brother has been out of touch for over a week and Joseph is very concerned for his welfare.

         Though Jacob would at the very least roll his eyes at the thought that his fiction writing would be interpreted in light of his real life, it is clear that the characters of Joseph and Gordon allowed him to articulate the struggle between his twin impulses of rampant self-expression and rampant self-destruction.  It's clear too, in the exchange between Joseph and Gordon, and in Joseph's fealty to Gordon that, at the end, Jacob had dug his heels in against his addiction, that he was determined to rescue his darker half from annihilation and determined to make it clean.

         As of this writing, Jacob's thesis has been turned in to the Creative Writing Department at Columbia University and is now on file in Butler Library.  Soon, we hope to make copies of Jacob's work from the MFA available to all those who are interested.  For now, enjoy the cynical flash, the dark humor, and the new brave hope of our great, highly esteemed friend, Jacob Waletzky.

Best,

Mishka Shubaly