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Sorrowful Joe

  Copyright 2002 by Mary Louise Quijano TXu001050459

  Sorrowful Joe

  If he wasn't so ugly I might have pitied him, but who could be expected to feel other than utter revulsion toward such an atrocity of nature as he? My initial reaction had been thus, deeply instinctual, and no amount of intellectual or moral argument seemed able to dispel this gut reaction, not until it was too late.

  The first time I laid eyes upon the man I nearly dropped my ladle into the cauldron of hot pea soup I was serving, he was that ugly. He shuffled up along the great wooden serving table, blue plastic bowl in hand, just another of the endless line of homeless derelicts that brought their hunger to the 53rd Street Mission each day. His head was bent over so far that his face was almost fully hidden between the overhanging brim of a shapeless felt hat and the turned up collar of a stained khaki overcoat. I looked up in greeting with my toothpaste-ad smile, but when the face beneath peered out from its cover and attempted shyly to return my grin, my expression transformed of its own accord into a grimace of horror, a small inadvertent shriek escaping my constricted throat. For beneath the undistinguished blue eyes, shrouded by thick long eyebrow hairs, was a hideous leer, a splitting and rending and tearing of facial structure from upper lip to bridge of nose, exposing a haphazard array of bent and broken fragments of rotting teeth askew in a mass of pulverized red flesh barely recognizable as gums. Within the ugly black cavern of mouth was a tongue that looked loose and uncontained as it writhed about the orifice like a wet pink snake, as the man attempted to thank me.

  That was when the ladle slipped from my grasp, nearly disappearing beneath the surface of the thick green broth before I recovered my aplomb enough to retrieve it.

  "S-sorry," I apologized.

  He just shrugged and nodded.

  I filled his bowl with shaking hands, trying to relocate my old smile and paste it back into place, but by the time I raised my eyes to him again the disfigured face was hidden once more beneath the hat and coat, the creature's head turned away from my view. Only a deformed hand, the fingers fused and webbed together, reached out in silence for the bowl of soup. Yet I thought I saw the glint of a tear in his eyes as he shuffled away; and I might have felt sorry for him then, were he not so damned ugly.

  He returned the next day, and the day after as well, his gait a shuffling painful limp, his body bent and twisted beneath the dingy coat, his hands mere claws of scaling flesh which reached in resignation for his meager portion. And my own flesh crawled at his approach, as if what he had might somehow be transferred to me if he got too near.

  Nor was I the only one who felt that way, it seemed. The other patrons of our little soup kitchen automatically shunned the man as well: (An irony I noted with mild amusement, considering their own shabby appearances.) They would pointedly move away if he sat too near them at one of the long wooden dining tables that line the large hall, muttering disparaging remarks only partially muffled under their breaths.

  On the third day of his arrival at the kitchen one of the bag ladies, a toothless old wreck named Molly whose most notable feature was the long gray hairs sprouting from her chin, spat on him as he limped his way meekly past her to what was now his usual spot in the farthest corner of the room. I immediately chastised the woman for her uncharitable attitude ( the capacity of these people for hypocrisy was amazing!) as well as for breaking one of the kitchen's sanitation rules.

  Yet even so, I understood too well the feelings that had motivated such an act. He's not even pleasant, I thought at the time, watching the repulsive figure trudge slowly on toward his table without so much as a glance to acknowledge the spittle hanging from the hem of his trench coat. Not that he was particularly unpleasant, but he did nothing to offset his deformities. Even his meekness was repugnant, inviting kicks. He could at least try to put on a cheerful front, I thought; perhaps make some little jokes about his situation like some of the others do from time to time to lighten their load. Actually, I suddenly realized, I'd never heard the man say a single word to anyone.

  I felt a rush of unreasonable anger towards the derelict, and voiced my burgeoning rancor to the young nun manning the vat of stew on my left side.

  "If only he'd show a little spirit," I whispered, nodding at the retreating figure; "make some small attempt to attract the friendship of others, you know? But instead he just keeps to himself, wearing his misery like he wears that shabby overcoat. How can you feel sorry for such a man when he obviously already feels so darn sorry for himself? You couldn't reach out to him even if you wanted to!"

  The young nun looked around nervously to see if any of her superiors were listening to this conversation, then nodded, crossing herself.

  The next day, feeling a little guilty I suppose, I determined to try to bring the man out of himself. So as he handed me his bowl to fill, I asked him for his name. He attempted a smile at my kindness, which only made his features more gruesome and my guilt more poignant. His answer, painfully pronounced by that writhing eel of a tongue, was a nearly unintelligible grunt, sounding something like J-uh.

  "Joe?" I queried, fixed my gaze firmly on his eyes so that whatever his face did below them remained mercifully unfocussed.

  "Nuh! Ju-uh....Ju...uh."

  Having no desire to prolong this particular conversation, I decided "Joe" was close enough.

  "Well then, good to meet you Joe? How're you doing today? Hungry?"

  But "Joe" didn't respond again after that, just took his bowl and shuffled away.

  Later, while talking to one of the other kitchen helpers, I carelessly referred to the man as "Sorrowful Joe," and the name stuck, spreading through the little mission like a grease fire on the tips of blazing tongues and irrational tempers.

  "Sorrowful Joe" - it was a title of contempt, not compassion or kinship - and within days it had been reduced by most of the regulars at the kitchen to "Sorry Joe" or simply "Sorry."

  It was about that same time when the dreams began, always the same haunting vision: a specter of this lonely miscreant limping slowly down the center of a long straight road that stretched into the horizon. All along this road, lined up on either side ten deep, were people - thousands and thousands, perhaps millions of them- all faceless in their cruelty as they jeered him on. In my recurring dream these multitudes would throw things at Joe; first insults, then garbage, rocks, even human feces. Those that did not directly attack turned their faces away, shielding their eyes from the sight of him, from the atrocities of their fellows. The road seemed to stretch on forever, growing longer with every tired but unfailing step Joe took. And I had the distinct sense that he'd been on it for a very long time already.

  I would wake abruptly from this too vivid nightmare with a cold sweat dewing on my forehead despite the heat belching relentlessly from the noisy radiator in the corner. Laying there in the neon flashing darkness of my tiny apartment, I'd struggle to regain my self-control, to still my racing heart, my sense of some profound message I couldn't quite grasp. I'd rationalize the content of the dreams as nothing more than a subconscious remix of the situation at the mission, or perhaps an attempt of my mind to resolve the inner conflicts the situation provoked between my ego and superego, my baser nature and my desire to be a good moral person.

  Whatever my rationalization, the nightly dreams soon began to trouble me more than I cared to admit, tainting my days with their residue as well as trashing my restful nights. Worse, they were starting to interfere with my ability to do my real work at the mission, and that not only troubled but angered me.

  I sat in my rented room, grousing over this one night. I hated my dreary little apartment in the heart of the downtown slums, two blocks from the 53rd Street Mission, and I couldn't wait to be done with t
his project. The situation with Sorry Joe was becoming a definite hindrance to that aim.

  During the past three years that I had been working at the soup kitchen, assisting the nuns to aid, advise and feed the broken flotsam of society that misfortune kept tossing up on their worn linoleum tile shore, I had learned a great deal about the social rituals that regularly take place in this distinct urban subculture, things my classes and textbooks on anthropology, sociology and psychology had never explored. And each evening, back in my own little flat, I had carefully transcribed these observations into my research journal using the most