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Wanted!

After some petty larceny and pimping, Jake Jackson decided to go for broke. He used to befriend rich old men or ladies with the same lines.

"I need a place to stay."

After sex he usually fleeced them. Being brought up in church by his grandmother, Jake always told his flock, as he called them, that he had given his life to God and had gone the straight and narrow.

The thing was, Jake felt he was doing God's work by being his own type of Robin Hood. He traveled from the Upper West side to the South side in one season, making the lonely feel wanted.

He was a bigamist many times over and the son to many a sugar daddy.

Once a sexy woman whose husband was a Baptist minister asked him to be the visiting evangelist and Jake just walked off with the love offering.

At the bus corner today in the bitter cold and all wrapped up in furs Jake quietly spoke to a society lady, "You may not believe me, but I need a place to stay."

Veronica needed a man, and Jake moved in. She knew the score and it didn't matter to her because she needed company after her stockbroker husband had died.

"Jake, you needn't give me the same lines you give the others. I like the silent type anyway."

Jake looked at living room portraits of Veronica's strictly Yankee husband Mr. Tuttle and ancestors, and was silenced.

Because she knew what he was about and couldn't care less, after her social affairs, teas, Symphony on Friday and opera on Sunday afternoons Veronica would give all her love to him, even if she had stopped believing in love. They never spoke before or after sex. He got used to it and again believed he was God's angel.

After a decade of compatibility and devotion, they married and moved from the big city to rural Virginia, where Jake is a deacon, worship leader and treasurer of the local Methodist church.

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