My Friend Joe

I first saw Joe Williams in Mrs. Dejean's class at Janie Stark Elementary in Farmers Branch. It was a fifth grade class, and Joe had been attending a different school for several years. It was far enough in the school year that we had developed our cliques: outsiders welcome by invitation only. Joe was wearing a Scout uniform... to school. He was never one for making things easier on himself.

I didn't know Joe because I was relatively new to the school. I had moved out to Texas just before my fourth grade. Actually, my parents moved to Texas, and took all of the money, so I tagged along. I settled into my new home fairly well even though I was the new kid with a pageboy haircut and an Alabama drawl (boy, that was a fun break-in period). I had actually heard snippets here and there about Joe but had no point of reference. That was about to change.

The murmurs started before he walked into the room. Mrs. Dejean braced the class first, announcing the arrival of the "new" student we all could see in the hallway. Several students near me warned me to stay away from him. "He's weird." "Psycho." "Some kind of sick genius." I was sold. Joe and I became fast friends. I remained very close to my friend Joe through much of college.

I never found out first hand why Joe went to a different school for a time, but he did announce to me that one of the girls we attended school with through graduation wore a scar on her ankle shaped exactly like several of his teeth. He neither bragged nor lamented this fact... just stated it like one might point out it's partly cloudy. That was my friend Joe.

In sixth grade we got Commodore PET computers. For those of you young enough not to be impressed with an elementary school having TWO computers, let me describe them for you. Picture your telephone with no camera, no email capacity, no internet, no permanent memory, no communications capabilities, 4k (yes, 'k') of RAM, all in a package about 900 times larger.

This was in the days of "GOTO" statements and 5 1/4" floppies (ask your parents). The computers were in our school to usher us into the computer age. Unfortunately, our teachers didn't know a thing about computers, either, so they mostly sat on a desk in the back of the classroom. The computers were of little use, either.

Except to a few enterprising students. Those of us who were so motivated worked on becoming programmers. This consisted mostly of copying down code from a little workbook. These complex lines would magically cause the computer screen to go black, or repeat a sentence over and over, or scroll a phrase in green text from left to right.

One day a filthy phrase showed up on the screen. We found out about it through a warning from the teaching staff that we would lose computer privileges if it happened again. It did. Again. And again. Except each new phrase was displayed more creatively... and was filthier. We all denied responsibility, even through the suspension of computer access, but I knew there was only one mind capable of so dastardly a deed. It took years for him to admit responsibility for The Case of the Computer Filth, but I was always jealous of my friend Joe's apparent ability to pass a lie detector test. Artistry.

There are so many random memories. That same year we had to memorize at least 14 lines of poetry. Joe memorized Jabberwochy. That was so cool. He helped me memorize 14 lines of Jabberwocky. I tried to keep up but Joe just... I don't know what his grades were like, I don't know how well he did on standardized tests. I always did as well as I cared when it came to grades and exceptionally well on standardized tests. I've been a member of MENSA and Intertel, and I've held my own in intellectual debates all my life. Some people have impressed me with their ability to utilize their intelligence. Others with their breadth of knowledge. Others with the effort they put into being an expert in their field. Joe Williams was the only person I ever met who intimidated me intellectually. My friend Joe was brilliant in every way.

In the spring of 7th grade there was a History Fair. I submitted an entry in the Literature category. Edmund Ruffin, the man who fired the first shot of the Civil War, is a distant relative of mine. I researched his life and participation in the war and wrote three letters, as if penned by him, that represented his psychological decline from that first shot on Fort Sumter to his suicide at war's end. I wrote the letters as if he was drinking more and more heavily during the composition of each, right down to glass rings on the paper, sprinkling actual liquor on them, and dripping the wax seal on the last letter very messily. I put all of my adolescent talent into this project and I was immensely proud and confident of it. It came in second place.

It is difficult for someone as competitive as I to lose when there is no extenuating circumstance available. I got beat, and beat soundly. Joe won first prize with a poem he wrote, Death at Bunker Hill - June 17, 1775. It was good... better than mine. It was a great poem. My own dad took quite a liking to it. Yes, Joe had beat me fair and square. But it wasn't enough that he bested my greatest creative achievement. In that same way he described the scar, Joe informed me he had written the poem in about fifteen minutes. Ah! Devine intervention... I couldn't have beaten God. No, he explained. He had merely forgotten to do the assignment and typed it out the night before it was due. He didn't brag and he never rubbed it in. He just beat me. And I still have a copy of the poem my friend Joe wrote.

We got separated in class often. In fact, I think Mrs. Dejean, our fifth grade teacher, had experienced enough to make sure no one ever again experienced me and Joe together. I can't think of any time my friend Joe and I were allowed to sit next to each other after fifth grade...

...except in Boy Scouts. Man, now there was a place to get truly evil. We had so much fun together in the Scouts it's a wonder any of the younger children survived! We tired of the Snipe hunting and decided to ramp it up just a bit. On a trip to Turner Falls one year - in the dead of winter - we planned a little initiation involving a branding iron. Actually, one of my history teachers had related a story as it had happened to her in college. For me it was a cool story that was fodder for discussions about what we could do to the newer Scouts. This is where Joe excelled. Left merely to me it would be a good story without any memory. Thanks to Joe it is also a memory... and perhaps a recurring nightmare to some of the kids.

What we did was wait until the Scoutmaster was busy pretending Joe and I didn't exist. He was used to this activity as he doubled as Joe's dad. He was also one of my earliest mentors and an all-around great guy. Joe and I went to the far side of a hill and built a little fire. We didn't have a branding iron so we just stuck a little coal shovel-like tool in the fire. Then we'd usher up a younger Scout, go through some rigmarole about initiation and are-you-worthy and prove your loyalty to the troop, etc. Someone (and I think it was Joe's younger brother Chris) would hold the Scout down and raise his t-shirt as we pulled the red-hot "branding iron" out of the fire and hover it above the Scout's belly.

At this point, above the screams, we'd pretend to remember the blindfold which would then be tied onto the Scout. At the last second we dropped a large piece of ice onto the Scout's belly. The sensation was impossible to distinguish from red heat for the first few seconds. (The trick called for using dry ice, but we couldn't very well get Joe's dad to stop for dry ice on the way up without raising some suspicion. Besides, I think dry ice actually will burn you, so...) Good times. This event was likely in the top five cruelest things I've ever done. My friend Joe was right there with me the whole time.

We camped together many times. We went to Philmont together. Joe would fix rather fanciful dishes on our campouts (foreshadowing for his future career in the restaurant business), some so fanciful that I remember Yo Matsushita, our acting Scoutmaster at Philmont, shouting, "Cook the damn food the way it's meant, Joe. No fancy stuff!" Joe was miffed but accepted that you can't make a good soufflé out of dehydrated beef stroganoff and trail mix. He came back at another camping trip with a wonderful dish of lasagna. We all tore into it. It was great. Can we have seconds? You really like it? Oh, yeah... great job, Joe. It was only after we finished that Joe informed us he had sliced a little more than the cheese while preparing the meal. Since we were in the woods and there was no way to hop out to the store, he merely turned the bloodied cheese over and continued to slice, open wound and all. His hand healed nicely and our retching eventually petered out. My friend Joe was quite the dedicated cook.

There was a lot of troop infighting about carrying loads during our Philmont excursion. No one wanted to pack more than the next Scout during our daily hikes. Joe volunteered to carry our biggest cook pot. It really filled out his pack. We discovered near the end of our trip that it was always empty. My friend Joe was brilliant.

We had an odd group in high school, the four of us that ran together. There was me, the football player. Alex the musician. Big Jim Smith the student. And our friend Joe. We made a pact with one another our freshman year that we'd never eat cafeteria food again, so we brown bagged it until we could drive, and went to Burger King the days we could afford to and I had gas. I always got a bacon double-cheeseburger, fries, and a Coke, although it often took two or three tries and at least one trip into the building to get the correct order. Joe wasn't a big fan of Burger King, as I remember it, but would usually find a burger or something eat. Chicken was a fairly new addition to the menu at this time.

One day we went through the drive-thru and the grill was down. This meant my bacon double-cheeseburger was off, but it also meant the inevitable blowing of Joe's lid. Joe had a temper like a keg of dynamite and the fuse of... well, I don't know if anyone ever actually identified a predictable fuse. As his friend I knew that there were certain triggers, the most touchy of which was incompetence. Unexpected change was right up there, too. This little trip was not looking good. Time to sit back and watch the fireworks.

So Joe orders, under pressure to find something new and quickly. He orders a chicken box, it was like eight or ten pieces. When he ordered it he said, "I want the 8-piece chicken." Something like that. Well, the carnival geek behind the microphone can't figure out what that means, and so asks, "You want eight pieces of chicken or eight orders-?" Click. Herewego!

"Yeah, I want f*cking 82 pieces of chicken!" And I mean to tell you my friend Joe yelled it across the car into that microphone. I imagine it echoed inside. My ears certainly rang.

We are still laughing some 21 years later about it. I'm laughing right now reading over it.

Joe had two younger brothers who, despite Joe's best efforts, managed to survive childhood. Randy was the youngest and used his brains to circumvent Joe. Chris, on the other hand, had far too much will. He was a fighter. He was hopelessly outsized by Joe (plus, Joe never seemed to give much credit just for being his relative), but held his own. I remember - again, random memories - I remember a pair of needle-nosed pliers being hurled across a room. They stabbed into the wall within inches of Chris' head. I nearly wet my pants; Chris didn't flinch, he just got mad.

One of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life occurred while we were loading the trailer for a camping trip. I was in the house for some reason, but looking out the bay window toward the trailer. The usual sounds of commotion between Joe and Chris were wafting through the air, but otherwise it was a nice morning. Then a shovel, tumbling end over end, passed by the window. I don't remember who threw it at whom, or even if it struck its target, but I remember thinking at the time, "Now there's a metaphor in action!"

I know the brothers had their hard times together just as I did with my own brothers. For that matter, Joe and I had conflict occasionally with one another, but heck, we were like brothers ourselves. We could finish each other's sentences and always seemed to know what the other was up to. Chris was closer to our age than any of the other siblings, which meant I got to know him a little better than I did Randy but - unfortunately for Chris - it also meant he was more often within arms reach. I've probably blocked a lot of things from my memory that we did to Chris. Well, at the very least it made him tough. Sorry, Chris.

Joe and I stayed close through much of college. He joined the Corps of Cadets for a time halfway through our freshman year. Joe definitely didn't have the personality for it. I never saw him enjoy being bossed around, yelled at, or physically punished. I think he just wanted to be with his friend. I know that I supported him all that I could - he eventually left the Corps - but now the second guessing starts and I ask myself if I did enough, if I could have made more of a difference in his life. I don't think I could have but I guess that doesn't really matter now... I've lost the chance.

Joe and I worked together at a Tex-Mex restaurant. He taught me dirty words in Spanish and tried to teach me to be a good waiter. (I was much better at the Mexican profanity.) Joe was an incredible waiter. All the customers loved him and requested his tables. When I sat people it wasn't unusual to run out of tables for Joe and have to sit his customers elsewhere while he handled it all with ease. He worked these people like a psychologist and raked it in with tips. He invested magic bowls and special dip and... uh, just go watch the movie Waiting and always remember to be nice to people who handle your food or work on your brakes.

Towards the end of our college careers I could see Joe starting to drift into another direction. I talked to him about it and let him know I wasn't too fond of some of his friends. Did I do enough? Could I have done more? Would it have made a difference? I don't know. I was just starting a family. I didn't know what I was doing. Who was I to tell my friend Joe how to live his life? Who was I? I was his friend. I don't know if I could have done anything more, and I never will.

Joe and I made contact a few times here and there over the last decade or so. Brief visits in Houston or a short phone call. It seems we often allow life to eat away at those things that make it worth living. Just a few weeks ago I tracked Joe down on one of the social networking sites. I had tried in the past without success, but now...

We exchanged several messages and "chatted" one evening over the computer. I was happy to see we could still, after all these years, finish one another's sentences. He told me life was going much better for him and that he was planning on moving to Tulsa before too long. I sure was happy to find my friend Joe.

When he was younger Joe rubbed people the wrong way. He always seemed out-of-step with the rest of the world. I think that's why I liked him so much. I think that had a big effect on his life. It was his defense mechanism. We all have one. Me? I always told jokes, figuring if I was making you laugh you wouldn't ask any personal questions. Some folks use athletics. Others books. Cars. Clothing. Makeup. Music. We all have a defense mechanism and with everyone you know you had to break through a defense mechanism. I broke through Joe's.

I missed a great deal in Joe's life over the last 10 years, but I can tell you how he was. As much of an agitator as Joe was, he was extremely compassionate. People hurting people hurt him so much. He hated any story about a child getting hurt or worse. As much as he picked on his brothers (as we all do), no one else was allowed to talk about them. He really did love them. He had a mind that should have brought us a cure for cancer, a new way of creating energy, or a really sick novel or screenplay. He could have done anything. But perhaps Joe's personality couldn't quite bridge his world and his future. I don't know. His brother Chris summed it up wonderfully: "he was just one of those people who moves so quickly and does so much that they can't sustain the pace for long."

I guess I'll wrap this up. I've got some chicken strips cooking in the other room in honor of Joe. He was my friend. I'm very proud to be able to say that. I loved him as a brother. There are many of you out there who never took advantage of the opportunity to get to know my friend Joe. You missed an amazing person.

I am sorry for your loss.