The Jake Bennett Adventures Vol. One. Jake Bennett: L.A.P.D. Rookie

By Bayla Dornon

The Drag Queen Murders: The discovery of a murdered drag queen in Boystown's notorious Vaseline Alley unleashes a fast-paced search for the perps, as bisexual rookie LAPD officer Jake Bennet struggles to keep his cop buddies in the dark about his sex life, all while trying to stay one jump ahead of the killer! Outrageous characters compete with thrills and chills in this, the first adventure featuring the handsome young officer with a secret worth keeping.

Tomorrow is Cancelled: Unlucky rookie cop Jake Bennet has been ostracized, and now he's herding traffic. Then a huge break comes his way: a chance to work in the movies! But will his bad luck ruin his life and cost everyone on the shoot dearly? As Jake struggles to control the artistic types around him, he must also keep both of his lovers from finding out about the other.

Death in Palm Springs: Lured to Palm Springs by his current boyfriend, rookie bisexual cop Jake Bennet never dreamed he'd wind up drugged, roped, and suspended over an ant hill! But that's exactly what happens when he gets involved with a gigantic gay party in the desert, complete with illicit drugs, miscommunications galore, and the unexpected arrival of his girlfriend. Rampant drug trafficking collides with tangled personal relationships, and soon everyone is in jeopardy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bayla Dornon
• Release date: Mar 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005549152

Bayla Dornon

Bayla Dornon’s first book is “Gay Testaments, Old & New” an edited compilation of texts from both famous and obscure literature that paint a vivid and exciting portrait of men loving men.In 2020 and 2021, Dornon published the four-book RESTORATION series, the story of twenty-year old Chris Brenner, a gay man fleeing from his ultra-religious parents and their efforts to 'torture him straight' through religious conversion therapy. Escaping to the Center in San Francisco, Chris meets and befriends fellow initiates George and Mary — and falls head over heels in love with Tom Griffin, a charismatic Priest at the San Francisco Center for Restoration. The four novels follow these young adults as they struggle for independence and restoration from indoctrination and abuses of religious and patriarchal families and society.In 2022, Dornon has released the new series of “Jake Bennett Adventures”, the stories of sexy bisexual rookie LA cop Jake Bennett, trying desperately to make his way in the asphalt jungle of Los Angeles.Married to one man since late 1988, Bayla Dornon is an author, critic, playwright, former teacher, silly pagan, photographer, cat-lover and videographer. A third generation Californian, Dornon and his husband recently escaped the absurd desert of San Diego and now live happily ever after in Seattle.

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THE JAKE BENNETT ADVENTURES

VOLUME I

JAKE BENNETT: L.A.P.D. ROOKIE

by Bayla Dornon

©2022 Béla Dornon. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781005549152

All images ©2022, Béla Dornon.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Previously published as serial stories 'The Drag Queen Murders-- A Jake Bennett Adventure’, ‘Tomorrow is Canceled-- A Jake Bennett Adventure’, and ‘Death in Palm Springs-- A Jake Bennett Adventure’ on Amazon Kindle Vella.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact [e-mail]

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For information contact [e-mail]

Contents

Foreword

Prologue

ONE: The Drag Queen Murders

TWO: Tomorrow is Cancelled

THREE: Death in Palm Springs

Acknowledgements

About The Author

FOREWORD

If you're reading this foreword, it can only mean one of two things: either you're a methodical, linear person who naturally and consistently proceeds from point A to point B; or you are so f--king confused that your brain’s about to explode.

Either way, welcome to my mind.

THE JAKE BENNETT ADVENTURES, six short stories published here in three slim volumes, are both a sequel and a prequel to the RESTORATION series of novels. In RESTORATION, Tom Griffin is a character who takes a literature class at his local community college and is inspired to begin writing fiction. In addition to a few solo short stories, he eventually creates an ever-expanding series about a young cop named Jake Bennett. These stories are heavily influenced by classic film noir and the gay world of drag performance.

I've always written essays and papers and non-fiction, ever since I was very young. But, due to a trauma I suffered in fourth grade, I believed I neither could nor should create fiction. That conviction unraveled when I went through analysis, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In fact, I began writing the RESTORATION series right around the time the virus was first identified in the press, December 19, 2019. I remember thinking, Huh, a novel corona virus. Wonder what that means? Then I started writing a novel.

For the next twelve months, as the world shut down and we wore masks and worried, I wrote three full-size novels. By the end of 2020, I figured it was time to pull back a little and maybe relax. But somehow, the voice I had created for Tom Griffin, and which permeated the first three novels, remained in my mind. Efforts to relax were useless as the shutdown ground on and on. I quickly discovered that Tom’s rambunctious, powerful, funny voice had a lot more to say. In January of 2021 I started writing what became the Jake Bennett adventures. But I was still working very hard on the last novel of the RESTORATION series, THE BOOK OF THE DEAD, and didn't want to stop doing either to work on the other.

And then I had a brainstorm: what if these Jake Bennett stories I was making up could be woven into the Restoration saga as Tom Griffin's own writing? What if, in the novel, they'd been lost after Tom's death, and his grieving boyfriend learned of them and sought them out? I created a pen name for Tom, went to work, and created the stories in this volume, initially with very little plan.

One of the main themes I explore in this series, especially the first three short stories, is the pain of creating literature in silence. Since the pandemic, we've all had to learn to cope with isolation. But as a writer bereft of both a publishing house and a professional editor, and certainly without a fan base beyond my loyal husband and some friends, I have been forced to create all of these stories almost exclusively in silence and isolation.

I mirrored that experience in the meta-story itself. Tom, unlike myself, is a single man, working at a solitary job most of the time, with no one but a few friends to talk to. He reaches out to various people, offering them his fictional work, and gets no interest, except from the professor of the class he had met years ago. I tried to show how important this connection is to Tom, as it is to me.

In the final book of RESTORATION, THE BOOK OF THE DEAD, I introduced some of Tom's writing, and teased a lot more of it. Soon after I finished the RESTORATION series, seemingly by good fortune, Amazon unveiled a new platform for serial writing to be read on-line, called Vella. I was one of the first to try my luck there; but my luck was pretty lousy, and sales were worse.

Discouraged, I decided at the beginning of 2022 to take back the stories and publish them in traditional book form. What you're about to read is the latest and greatest incarnation of the sagas, complete with this Foreword and a fictional Prologue to explain a bit of where we are and how we got here.

Thanks for reading!

Bayla Dornon

Seattle, February 2022

The Jake Bennett Adventures

Volume One

JAKE BENNETT: L.A.P.D ROOKIE

Prologue

Someone else should be writing this to introduce Tom’s stories, not me. I loved him with all my heart, but I didn’t know him very long. There are others who should have this honor, but by chance or design, it’s me.

When I first came to Restoration back in December 2019 and met Tom, I didn't know how much he would change my life, or how short our time together would be. After he died, some of our co-workers found his journals, and in my grief, I devoured them relentlessly, postponing healing in favor of wallowing in his writing. Reading Tom's journals meant hearing his voice. It was no better or worse than a phone call between lovers: never satisfying, but completely real. Once I finished the journals, I was left very hungry for more of Tom's writing. Even while I moved to New York to try and get over Tom and get on with my life, I wished I could hear more of his voice.

Then in 2020 I found out that Tom had written more than just the first-person journals I had read. Tom had, over the course of four or five years before I met him, begun writing actual fiction. It made sense: as a Scout for the Center for Restoration, he spent most of his afternoons, evenings and nights alone in the city, available, watching and waiting. The analogy that he liked to use for a Scout’s job was that of a very expensive and highly trained life preserver, drifting through the water, waiting for drowning people. And Tom found a lot of drowning people, the runaways and throwaways; he loved and helped them all.

But those long hours on the job would have been very lonely for him; Tom was a gregarious and social man. Whether it was a party or an orgy or just a class he was attending, Tom Griffin loved to sparkle and shine in the spotlight whenever came his way, happy, outgoing and beautiful.

Not that he was vain or self-centered: just the opposite. He didn't seem to fully understand what a gorgeous, handsome man he was. Tom was heroically built and almost unbearably masculine looking. Men and women alike were drawn to Tom as friends and lovers, and he happily fucked them all. No surprise then that the hero Tom Griffin created, Jake Bennett, was bisexual. I would have been surprised if he weren't! Tom himself was driven out of his hometown when his bisexuality wrecked his marriage to a woman, and that haunted him for the rest of his life. In some ways, he deals with this, as he points out, in the fourth story, 'Blood Will Out'. But that's for the next volume…

The function of a Scout in the Restoration organization is to go out and look for desperate people that need our help, and bring them in to the Center if possible. Jake Bennett is a cop: some people might say a hero with a savior complex. Again, not surprising. I think that description sums up our Scouts pretty well. They are all heroes.

The first story, 'The Drag Queen Murders', Tom obviously started without a plan. Both of the prologues are interesting, and give us a clear picture of Jake at an early age. But once the story shifts to Hollywood, the timeline becomes murky, and characters come out of nowhere and disappear back into nowhere at the drop of a hat. The plot is confusing.

On the plus side, the influence of classic film noir is obvious, and very enjoyable, especially in the hard-boiled dialogue and the sultry, treacherous dames, hilariously presented here as drag queens. But most of all, Tom's voice is there: his snarky, funny, sexy big voice is all over the place in this story. And the climactic scene is exciting and thrilling.

The second adventure, 'Tomorrow Is Cancelled', shows a huge step up in planning. Tom must have sat down and plotted the whole thing out first. I feel like some of the characters are still only partially there, but a lot of them really come to life. The references to show biz and the John Waters film FEMALE TROUBLE are a lot of fun, too. Tom had real talent for pacing and suspense, and it pays off here.

'Death In Palm Springs' improves on the free-wheeling formula of the first story, and adds the element of a failed romance. All the color and excitement of the first book is there, and then some. The characters are so real in places that I have to wonder if he modeled Contessa Coyote, for example, after some actual drag act he had seen. Having never been to the desert myself, I find his descriptions intriguing, but not particularly alluring. The comedy is wonderful, and the tragedy is gripping: I remember Tom used to quote someone who said, 'Tragedy is easy; Comedy is hard!' Thank goodness Tom could do both.

A note about the emails at the end of each story: I've included some, but not all, of his emails about the stories. I think they're important for several reasons. They help me to appreciate how much Tom grew through the course of his writing experience, as both an author and a man. They also show the cumulative effect on an artist of being ignored and discounted. Tom probably wouldn't put it this way, but he was obviously dying for some positive feedback.

He definitely deserved praise for his writing, in my opinion. What a shame that he died before he ever got it!

Chris Brenner, New York City 2020

ONE

‘The Drag Queen Murders’

THE DRAG QUEEN MURDERS

A Jake Bennett Adventure

By 'Leo Adler'

Prologue One: December 1997

This isn't for you, said Tante Emma.

The boy stared in greedy envy at the special eggnog, not knowing why the tasty treat wasn't for him, not knowing that his aunt had secretly put a hefty dose of brandy in her Christmas drink.

A dish fell and broke in the kitchen where his older cousins were doing their usual half-assed job at washing and drying the dishes, and Tante Emma stormed to the kitchen to inspect the damage and inflict punishment.

Alone in the dining room, the six-year-old boy quickly downed the entire glass of eggnog, then panicked, realizing too late that of course he would be caught and punished. Quick as a cat he ran for his special hiding place, the strange little space behind the wall in the hall closet, too small for the bigger kids, just right for him. He flung himself on his belly and rolled under the fake back wall and into place just as the heavy angry feet stomped into the hall, looking for the culprit.

Four hours later, feeling sick and miserable, he woke in the cramped dark space, alone in a dark and silent house. The boy dropped painfully to his knees, and as he squeezed under the false wall a huge fart ripped through the small closet.

Now wide awake and in a big hurry, the boy raced out of the closet to find... nothing. Not one of his squawking yelling tweaking punching tripping pushing cousins was in the house. Tante Emma and Onkel Karl were gone. The lights weren't on.

The boy ran to the bathroom and vomited.

After he had washed the horrible taste out of his mouth, he crept through the house from bottom to top.

She had told him it wasn't for him.

The boy began muttering to himself, quickly evolving a theory that the cup had contained a magic potion, and in drinking it he had obliterated the entire family. That had to be it.

The boy sat down on the third step of the stairs to the upstairs and whined as tears came. His off-key concert was rudely interrupted by the slam of the front door and the tramp of many feet in the entryway downstairs as the searchers returned.

Onkel Karl's whipping was quick and efficient, not prolonged and vicious as Tante Emma's so often was. The boy's aunt enjoyed dragging it out, making sure the boy dreaded the stroke that was to come as much as the one that had just landed. Different styles, same whippings from his aunt and uncle.

The boy hated both of them, sometimes.

Prologue Two: November 2006

This isn't for you, cat-called the quarterback god as he caught the youth staring at his perfect round ass in the showers, steam rising around him like smoke in a Hollywood production number. Whatcha lookin' at, faggot? jeered the senior boy, then reached for his towel to flick it at the reddening youth. From painful experience the sophomore boy knew how hard that towel could sting; the welts could last a week.

The boy dressed with the speed of a racehorse and bolted into the boy's bathroom to masturbate furiously before Algebra.

After school the jock was waiting, with his friends. They chased him for blocks, to harass, not to kill, all the while yelling what they'd do when they caught him.

The boy couldn't eat that night, and the next morning he vomited his breakfast a block from home.

He saw the quarterback hero in the shower again, dead center of the big shower room, covered with soap, his big cock half hard, waiting for him.

Trembling with fear, the boy went quickly to the shower in the farthest possible corner, took off his towel and washed himself in record time. He was the first one out of the locker room, but the jeering laughter followed him forever after.

1

November 2013

This isn't for you, said the veteran officer, as he