Every Day: Character Sketch: Joe

Character sketch: Joe. About 50. Pissed off and in pain all the time. Washes windows for ten, fifteen bucks per business (Au Bon Pain, Koffee Too, etc.), if he can get the manager to sympathize and pay out-of-pocket on a personal basis. Someone stole his tools a month back, he laments, pissed off. Sometimes sleeps in doorways. I saw him on Palm Sunday in the rain in the dark in the town, covered with a black trash bag with holes cut out for the arms and neck.

“Hey man,” I called after him. He turned around.

“Hey man, how you doin’?” He normally doesn’t ask. Curious. We walked together.

“Hanging in there, hanging in there. You?”

His first word in response to that question is always the same:

“Terrible. My whole body hurts. I am in such pain.” It was the rain, doing a number on his various injuries, magnifying them to a brittle, shill crescendo of seeming breaking and accursed, acute specificity. He demonstrated his bastardized bones, first by gripping his jaw in two hands and wrenching it to the side so that a cracking, crunching sound was made, like a sabotaged factory machine. Spectacular.

“Oh my God,” I grimaced. “What happened?”

“Fell off the Coliseum.”

(He was referring to the New Haven Coliseum, before it was demolished early this year. The Brutalist structure was a sports arena and concert venue for the more world-famous touring acts that came through New Haven. The thing was ugly as hell, but many memories were made there. People mourned its demise. When the engineers set charges to it and brought it to the ground in an instant, the crowds cheered from rooftops, parking lots, roadsides, apartment windows. Channel 8 televised the Coliseum’s last performance. The explosions clapped in succession – clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! followed by a couple of thunderous booms! as the load-bearing concrete and steel pounded to the ground. A dust cloud bloomed brown like a dirty cauliflower and evaporated toward the Harbor in moments. Cameras flashed like a parade of paparazzi. I was there for it, because building demolitions are a minor interest of mine, due to studying a certain political event that must remain nameless here for reasons of irrelevance.)

The Coliseum had demolished Joe. Here in the rain he showed me his missing ribs on his right side and the deformed ridge of a bone on the bridge of his nose, glaring fiercely at me for emphasis.

I commented on his trash bag, “I see you’ve gotten creative with keeping the rain off.”

“Gotta be smart out here to stay alive. Remember my old shoes? All full of holes. Feet got soaked. These ones,” he lifted a foot to show me, “cost two hundred dollars new. I got ‘em for free. I’m on my way to tell ‘em I stole ‘em.”

“What? Nah, man, don’t do that. Don’t do that. You need the shoes.”

“I gotta tell ‘em.”

“What. Why. You trying to get right with God?”

“I’m right with God, been right with him for years.”

“So, what. Stealing is wrong, so you’re gonna go shoot yourself in the foot by turning yourself in? Don’t you have enough problems as it is?”

“I gotta tell ‘em.” The combination of desperation and honesty and momentum are what keep this man down, it occurred to me then.

We walked on and paused under the light and shelter of the awning outside Gourmet Heaven, an overpriced health food store, as the nearby church bells clanged the commencement of the 10:00 p.m. Compline service at Christ Church. We discussed the evils of the Grand Avenue Hotel.

“Get out of there! That place is infested with over-the-counter illegal drugs. You better pray nobody ditches their stash in your suitcase when the cops finally come to bust that whole place and burn it to the ground.”

“I’ll get out ASAP,” I assured him. I didn’t mention I had already gotten out a couple of days earlier and was staying with my dear friend Patty in Milford for a week. Joe and I bid our fare-thee-wells. He headed off into the rain. I headed off to Compline, out of sheer curiosity and to meet Patty and a few others to sit together in silence. Not being a Christian, I took the experience in its raw form, devoid of context, for my virgin eyes and ears only, and that’s the best way to do things, in my big opinion.

In the church – the same one that has fed me a dozen times – it was cold and dark but lovingly candlelit. Incense permeated the air like campfire. I inhaled the dirty sweetness. All you could see were black silhouettes, mostly just shoulders and heads in the chairs. I sat in the darkness and clasped my hands together in thoughtless meditation as the choir, unseen, hidden in the rafters or the walls or, ostensibly, meant to be emanating directly from heaven, opened up their steady repertoire of liturgical Gregorian chant or whatever it is. I listened to each song and sat and silently thanked the architects of this large building with the vastly arched interior, and wondered at the guys in the black robes – priests? monks? students? What were they? I just sat and breathed and tried to listen for that perfect silence I did not know I had been craving up until that very moment, that moment preceded by the occasional, lonely, echoing cough or a leather jacket squeaking as its wearer shuffled into a slightly more comfortable position in the hard wooden chairs, and then I found it. That perfect silence, as the choir’s sung rendition of the Our Father drew to a close, and, yes, you could have heard a pin drop, or your own heartbeat, or John Cage’s 4’ 33’’ (in which the tuxedo-bedecked pianist lifts the cover of the keys, sets a timer on the lip of the piano to four minutes and thirty-three seconds, hits the start button, positions his hands over the keys, those keys so full of potential sound, not touching those keys, hovering inches above, oh-so-close, and just sits there perfectly still until the timer runs out, and then silences the alarm, closes the cover to the piano, gets up, and walks out of the concert hall to the rapt applause of the audience, some of whom may “get it”, others of whom may not or may just not give a damn), or, again, your own heartbeat, and you thank God for that heartbeat, that percussion in your chest that signals the continuity of life, the non-stop march of the inner human drumbeat, the one that Joe has, I have, you have, Patty has, our companions have – Peter has, Kevin has, Jason has, J has, Faux Paul has – and those not in attendance, our earthly devils and angels, like my ex-landlord Chad (that devil-angel he), everyone has, while we still walk the earth, and it signifies you are still alive, assures you this is not a dream, and fills you with life and blood coursing through your veins, oxygenating your lungs, the air.

Homeless people have it, beating, beating, breathing, breathing, as they settle down into their shantytown between I-91 and I-95 here in New Haven, where the cop brings blankets in the murderous January wind to save a few lives this winter, Winter, with a capital “W”, and you can’t ignore it when it’s windy and snowy and death surrounds you and you’ve got no place to go and your landlord is but a long lost memory of eviction and responsibility shirked and guilt and regret and the raucous battle to forget the memories, memories as deadly as the cold, and you can’t ignore the cold like you can when you live an Overground life with electricity and walls and emergency candles, candles: a quaint item in a drawer full of loose batteries and extra pens without the caps and you’ve got your hot water – hot water! Praise the Lord! – and the extra blankets for the guests who may never arrive but oh boy could somebody use them tonight, my friends, oh my good Lord could somebody use those blankets tonight, for their hearts beat too, my dear, their hearts beat too for yet precious moments, moments until the candle is extinguished and.

Note: Some names were changed in honor of our universal human right to privacy and sanctity of all things personal.