The Ballad of Little Joey
I was twenty years old when on the snow-fluttered streets of Knoxville, Tennessee I met that one-eyed wonder, the greatest prize fighter East of the Mississippi, that Southern rambler and downright gentleman, the man who called himself Little Joey. I had landed in Knoxville that night for the national conference of one of my clubs, and we were sleeping at a church in the city; someone had suggested when we arrived that we throw a party and get drunk, and, when a few hours later that failed to materialize, forlorn I wandered the streets of Knoxville. I walked down one of the main avenues, a picture of small-town America: strip malls that all seemed to have a chiropractor’s office tucked in there somewhere, next to a waffle house and a Walgreens; a new brand of fast food on every street corner, the high beams of their signs overpowering all the homespun offerings that surrounded them; and, through a combination of the muffling snow on the ground and the dearth of cars and people, a serene quiet filled the air, one which you could only encounter in little cities that actually slept. It was one of the few days of the year, they said, when it would snow in Knoxville, and part of me feels like the rarity of that moment lent a hand in bringing out the rarest of men.
“Ay, man!” a sharp Southern accent called out to me. I turned to my left, and there was a man a little larger than a hobbit, and who looked like he roamed the earth at least as much, limbering out a clutch of trees in front of a tavern. He was a white guy, and he wore a navy blue hat with an orange puffball on top; a grey, sweat stained hoodie that read Titans on the front, a fitting nod to the power in his fists; gin blossoms feathered his ruddy cheeks, which the cold and biting wind had inflamed into a hot pink; the skin of his lips was almost translucent it was so chapped; the ball of his nose looked swollen and was bent to one side; and his left eye was closed shut with a purple shiner, colored so dark that the line of his eyelid looked like he was wearing eyeshadow. “You got two, three dollars? I’m trying to get myself a beer.” It occurred to me in an instant that this man could prove useful.
“How about I give you fifteen,” I pointed at the liquor store kitty-corner to us, “and you go in there and grab a case.” I took my wallet out of my pocket to prove I had the money.
He looked sideways up the street. “What’s your name, brah?”
I considered lying, but I couldn’t think of a good reason why. “Duncan. What about you?”
“My name’s Joey—little Joey, yes sir,” he nodded. “Okay, Duncan. You a cop?” he squinted with his good eye and took a step closer to size me up. He scanned me up and down, searching for some sign that would give me away as the 5-0. Little Joey was too slick for that shit, he had seen it all before. “Alright,” he relaxed. “You ain’t a cop.” He turned around and saw a yellow, slush-spattered newspaper stand against the wall of the building on the street across from us. “I’ll go grab us the beer and we can pop it in that newspaper box and drink some.”
I hadn’t thought that he would want to drink with me, and while I was conscious of the fact that I was probably walking into my mom’s worst nightmare, I decided that, if I had gone for a walk to relieve myself of boredom, I should stick to my original intention: there was no world in which my night got less interesting by having a beer with Little Joey. I gave him the money and, carefully abiding the lights of the crosswalk, he crossed the street to grab us a case.
Among those who heard his many tall tales, some would simply call Little Joey a homeless man with a big mouth. But that would be an injustice to his character: when he busted out of the liquor store with a case in his hand, he handed me the change and a receipt. Little Joey was an honest dealer. I opened the latch to the newspaper stand and he fit the case inside, clawed open the cardboard and grabbed himself and me a cold beer. “Cheers, brother,” he said as we clinked cans and leaned our backs against the wall, ever-vigilant against the cops and whatever bandits might have designs on our loot.
“So what’re you doing out here?” I asked him.
“I’m waiting for a friend of mine,” he said, rather quickly. I think a lot of people who have been discovered somewhere alone have made a similar excuse. But maybe he meant his statement in a much broader sense, like he was always out there waiting for a friend, and tonight I happened to be his.
“No,” I said, “I meant what are you doing in Knoxville?”
“I’m a boxer. I train out of a gym nearby. I’m going to be the greatest damn prize fighter you ever saw.” His glassy eye sparkled with real pride, perhaps out of true conviction in what he said, or perhaps he was soaking in this moment where he could be as grandiose as he wanted to be, because he had found someone in me who would nod along to whatever he said.
“You’re a fighter?” I was, of course, skeptical, but that would explain the black eye and a few of the cuts across his face.
“I was a D1 wrestler in college. We won the National Championship my freshman year.” (Note: unconfirmed, and yes, I did try to Google it, although for whatever reason I didn’t ask for the name of the school at the time, probably because I didn’t want to come across like I was fact-checking him.)
“You wrestled in college?” There was a guy from my high school who after graduation cracked up and started sleeping on park benches and under overpasses (I know because he wrote a long Facebook post about it, linking to his SoundCloud where he posted odd, monotonous beats that he said constituted his ‘magnum opus’), and so I was familiar with the idea that someone could veer off a path that was parallel to mine and land in a ditch, but since I was a college student I felt like I had a stake in knowing the exact breakdown of how he landed here. “What happened after your freshman year?”
“Dropped out,” he took a swig. Then a cop car appeared from behind his shoulder, and without looking at it he dropped the hand holding the beer to his side to shield it from view. Once the car passed he took another swig, rattled the can to make sure he got all of it, and popped open the newspaper stand for another. “Yup,” he said, “I wasn’t supposed to go to college. Wasn’t even supposed to graduate high school. My dad kicked me out of the house when I was sixteen.”
“Why’d he kick you out?”
“He had a real estate business.” He cracked the beer and took a sip and then watched another car roll past, creaking over the packed-down snow. He held his silence for a few beats longer than I expected, until I almost considered whether, in his own elliptical fashion, that was his explanation. “I remember he took me out onto our back porch, and he told me it was time to bring me into the business. I’d a started small, he told me, but I was too proud,” he snorted softly. “I said no. So he kicked me out of the house, told me I wasn’t no son of his. I had to work at a hotel to put myself through high school, then I got the wrestling scholarship to go to college.”
“So why’d you drop out?”
“Welp,” he threw back another swig, “I was the big hotshot on campus, ya know, all the girls chasing me,” he rolled his eyes, as if through the distance of years he could look back on that version of himself and see his folly. “I was dating this one girl at the time. We were going steady till she called me one night at my dorm, and told me she was pregnant. I remember, I had the phone in my hand like this,” he pantomimed what he was describing, “and I let my head drop against the wall. I was crushed, man. But she—she heard my reaction, and she took it back, said she was joking or something. But,” he put the beer to his lips but didn’t take a sip, “she definitely wasn’t joking.” He finally took a hurried swig. “You know how they say you got seven soulmates?”
“No.”
“Aw, come on, man. Look—” he held out the fingers of his hand and started counting at his pinky. “You got your mom, that’s one. Then you got your first love, that’s two. Then, uh. Hm. Look, you—you got seven soulmates, okay?”
“Yeah, sure, why not.” I conceded the point.
“Yep,” he shook his head with bitter disappointment, “She was definitely one of them.” He turned and looked at me directly. “What year are you?”
“I’m a sophomore.”
“No, what year were you born?”
“Oh, 1994.”
“Yep,” he looked wistfully up the road as though he were searching the horizon of his past, and he leaned back against the wall with a clouded sigh, “That was the year. You could be my son.”
I don’t know if Little Joey ever went to college, or if he did whether he wrestled there, or had a girlfriend and now somewhere there was a long-lost son of his crawling the earth, but I don’t believe he would concoct this story if it wasn’t at least emotionally true. I remember once in my senior year of college, when I lived in a house with some friends, it was late at night and we were throwing a party that had spilled out onto the front porch and lawn, and a homeless man approached us. A white picket fence surrounded the property, and it served as the symbolic and literal barrier between him and us. He had introduced himself with some shouting, and not wanting a scene to develop a few of us went and talked to him. I can remember only one thing he said, but this one line hit me in such a way that I can remember exactly how he said it. “I’m tired of being on the outside of things all the time.”
I once spent a night in New York in the middle of February at a 24 hour McDonald’s a couple blocks off Times Square, where I got a good lesson in what this man meant. I was a college senior and I wanted to visit the city’s art museums for a weekend, but after I paid for my flight I only had enough money left over so that I could choose between a nice dinner somewhere, or a night at a cheap hostel. I had wanted to know what it would be like to be unhoused for a night anyways, and so I chose the dinner. The night I arrived, I went to MOMA, carrying my bag from my flight, and saw Starry Night and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in person for the first time, and afterwards walked a few blocks to a three-story McDonald’s. The advantage I had over the truly homeless was that I was young, white, bathed and groomed, and, once I bought a cup of coffee and adopted a perch in a booth on the third floor, no one seemed to notice me. After midnight, the staff cleared from the building anyone who looked vaguely disheveled and was not mid-bite through a sandwich with a McDonald’s wrapper on it. There was an old Eastern European woman who sat at the table next to me, and when they forced her out I helped her carry her rollaway duffel bag down the stairs. “I can’t keep doing this,” she wheezed as I opened the door for her to go outside into the black freezing New York winter. She zipped her coat up to her collar, I passed her her bag, and she trundled off into the howling night. Earlier that week, I had texted a friend of mine, who had graduated already and now lived in the city, to ask what his plans were for this night, also hoping I could find a couch to crash on, and we had said that we would go out, but when I was standing in line to board my flight that afternoon he texted me: a girl had asked him to go out somewhere and now he couldn’t make it. That was the final tipping point that led to my night at this McDonald’s, and while I was ultimately a tourist in this land and could’ve reached out at any time to family who would’ve helped me, I wondered exactly how many phone calls it took before this poor woman discovered that she was homeless.
A McDonald’s employee with a headset on was standing behind the counter and he pointed at me and then the door, as though to instruct me to join her and leave. I took the receipt out of my pocket and said, “I’m a customer,” and then I bought a McDouble for safe measure. You begin to understand how poor you are when you’re homeless, when the Dollar Menu is the decider of whether or not you have shelter for the night. You’re so poor that you can’t even use your own body: if you have to go to the bathroom, most places refuse you without a purchase, and you can get thrown in jail if you do it outside. You’re so poor that McDonald’s employees, improbably, become the man and start bossing you around. When a guy says that he’s tired of being on the outside of life, I suspect that’s partly what he meant.
When I went upstairs to the third floor, I ate my McDouble and read a book as I listened to two people talk on the floor below me. I assumed they were grad students because their talk danced around Foucault and the futility of string theory, until one of them said, “Alright, I found a good bench to go sleep on. I’ll see you later.”
I know that a lot of homeless people have to be mentally ill or drug addicts, but if you consider how many people in our country live paycheck to paycheck, then probabilistically a large number of them will at some point arrive at this condition purely through a fatal series of accidents. Maybe you’ve already lost your place but you’ve managed to float around at friends’ houses in the meantime—and then a friend falls through, a job doesn’t work out, a relative dies, and now you’re on the streets, and once you make the almost necessary turn of adapting to this way of life, you lose yourself to it. But if you could wind back the clock and give a guy like Little Joey a haircut and a shower and maybe take the bottle out of his hands, he would blend into society as easily as you and I.
Perhaps, then, his story could be read another way: perhaps he wasn’t a college wrestler, but what he meant to say was that at that time in his life he felt like a champion—perhaps his father wasn’t some kind of real estate mogul, but maybe it was Joey’s pride that estranged them, and then, for a few glorious years when pride alone could sustain him, life slipped through his fingers without him noticing—and perhaps it was not a living son who he had rejected, but rather the kind of life he felt he should have led, and what he saw in me was not his offspring but another version of his past, another chance at becoming. Perhaps he wasn’t training as a fighter in Knoxville, but it was the pride in his heart that was still beating: he would be a champion again.
Perhaps.
I finished another beer with him while he told more stories about his life—among other things, he had been to prison before, and when I asked him what for all he would say was, “Little Joey’s done some things he ain’t proud of”—but eventually I checked the time and decided I had to return to the church before they sent out a search party to come find me. When I told him I had to go, he threw his arms open and gestured at the world around us,
“You know what, man? Let’s just go. You and me, I’ll take care of you—”
“Little Joey, I can’t—”
“Listen, I’m going down to the E-Trade building up the street here,” he jerked his head in its apparent direction. Then he took a flip phone out of his pocket and opened a new contact form for me to fill out, “Punch in your number, man. I’ll give you the best stock picks in the world.”
“Little Joey—”
“Come on man,” his cracked lips curled into a wicked smile, “I’ll make you a fortune.” I like to think that Little Joey invested his life’s savings into a combination of GameStop, Tesla and Bitcoin, and that he now owns a true boxing gym somewhere down South, where like Andy Dufrane sanding a boat he’ll be waiting for me. But I told him I couldn’t do it.
He understood in a way that, if I met someone at a party in college and they asked for my number and I refused, they probably would not. I pointed out, almost as compensation for the refusal, that there were still a few beers left in the box and that he was welcome to them. “Aw, man!” He waved goodbye, “I’ll leave one for ya!”
Inwardly I rolled my eyes: despite the affection I had for him, I had no faith that this man would not guzzle every drink he could get his hands on. When I got back to the church, a few people were still awake, and when they asked where I had been I told them about Little Joey. They were older than I was, and with a few exceptions the most common response was one of exasperation and scolding. “He could’ve killed you!” one of the senior girls said.
“Little Joey wouldn’t do that,” I told them.
“Oh my God, dude,” she groaned, “you didn’t even know this guy!”
Of course, they had a point. I didn’t know him, but he did leave a clue as to the kind of guy he was.
The next night, our group planned an actual party at someone’s house. About a half hour before we were supposed to leave, I made an excuse and slipped out of the church, then took a walk up the same street I had gone the night before. It was no longer snowing but there was ice and slush on the ground and the thin fabric Vans I was wearing got soaked down to my socks, but there was something I had to check. I came to the corner where I had met him, and I half-expected him to float out of the trees once more, but I had already seen him for the last time.
I crossed the street and approached the newspaper stand where we had stood, and I put my hand on its latch and took a breath of anticipation as I pulled it down, until there slowly appeared sitting inside, placed in the center of the box, a tall, proud solitary beer bottle waiting for me.
LITTLE JOEY!!! Wherever you are, in a boxcar or a boxing gym, nursing a black eye or a jug of wine, I hail and salute you, sir! This was a round that you surely won.