"Strange Joe". Memoir Attempt for Creative Nonfiction (08-01-12).

This essay is about a kid that used to live down the street from me when I was young. For some reason I am unable to go beyond what I already have below, and cannot make much more of it. I was hoping to do a memoir for this piece.

Essay about other Joe

Same name

           There was this older child Joe who used to visit his grandmother Gertie, a woman who lived by herself across the street from me when I was growing up. His appearances were thankfully short and far and few between. He would come to visit every once in a while and usually not for long.

           Grandmother Gertie lived across the street, he would visit from time to time, an elderly couple that were practically invisible, hardly ever seeing her or her husband Joe come and go from their house during the years that I lived there. The only reason she even came into my awareness at all was solely due to her strange first name.

           Once a friend of mine, Frankie, a boy who was living at the foster home that my grandmother had me baby sat, got into an altercation, home that I was being baby sat at, I tried running away to go home he would chase after me, trip me, block me from

            He seemed as if possessed by a demon, and I in my fear, believed looking him in the eye, and paying no attention to him, would save me from the infection of insanity that I felt this strange Joe was going to give to me. I hid from him as if I saw the devil inside this boy and taunting me with the knowledge of the inevitability of the bestowment of these curses of revelations that would imprint upon my soul a distorted view of my fellow humanity. For most of my life I have been but a speck of dust in the background of other people’s existences, content to my solitary, distorted, perverted world of believing that even at my most bravest, was only ever going to be invisible to the real people I cared about, and not the one’s that I had to care about.

             Sling shot in golf course, marble I was hit in the upper arm, but could have easily been hit in the face or eye. He was hunting small animals and I felt compelled to attempt to startle him, given false courage by being in the company of a younger friend. He quickly turns, probably not surprised by our approach at all. He turns when I call out and seeing he now has a target much more interesting(?) than a squirrel or a bird, he pulls back, aims, and fires, a wild look of madness in his eyes, eyes that don’t see the world through fear of consequences like the majority of us, but through a compulsion to destroy

             Swinging snake – horrified to ride by on my bike one day to find him whipping the tree in his grandmother’s front yard with a garden snake, asked me if I wanted to see it, he threw it at me when I refused and kept going on my bike

             I don’t know why I never went back and told anyone, perhaps I was somehow convinced my lack of telling would earn me some kind of credibility with the rest of the neighborhood when and if it got around.

            We found one window broken on the garage door. A hole seemed to made from a bb gun or a sling shot.

            One of the major reasons I learned that it was safer to learn how to live inside one’s mind, than to venture out into the potentially armed hostility of the neighborhood. I had my grandparents duplex apartment egged. I was punched on the bus. I was punched in school. There were two foster homes in the neighborhood, one ran by a stable family, the other one that was a morbidly obese version of the mother on Married with Children. It was blatantly obvious to anyone, even a kid who hadn’t been that she was only in it for the money. She used to lay in bed all day reading romance novels, eating, having the foster children cook and clean, berate some and aggravate others, probably. That was the second baby sitter my grandmother saw fit to have me sent to.

I wonder where he is now. In prison, in this or, some other state? In an institution where they keep the captives of their own mental instability? Or as dead as I feel I will become in the near future, dead as a man who died shortly after realizing that he never truly bothered to learn how to live, who died realizing that he had never truly lived?