"Don't steal, [but instead] drug deal." - Ted Black

Readers, friends, if you turn these pages
Put your prejudice aside,
For, really, there's nothing here that's outrageous,
Nothing sick, or bad — or contagious.
Not that I sit here glowing with pride
For my book: all you'll find is laughter:
That's all the glory my heart is after,
Seeing how sorrow eats you, defeats you.
I'd rather write about laughing than crying,
For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

- Rabelais, intro to Gargantua & Pantagruel

Joseph would walk to school in the morning. He can't remember how long it took him, but he did know that he didn't have extra time to mess about. On the walk, he would cross a nicer neigborhood and a stream on the far side of which were grapes growing on a wall. The climate never had the grapes come to ripeness that he knew of, and definitely never had them so during the winter school year. Still, they were supremely sour like a natural candy. He would usually stop to eat them on his way to school, using the cringe that the overwhelming sour provoked to propel him running up the hill. A la "Sour Power". Oh indeed.

At the top of the hill was a traffic utility box, inside of which he was certain that there were little men pressing buttons to change the lights. They did not like if you knocked impatiently on the box, so he avoided that. But he could hear them doing their work, and was always pleased when they accommodated his need to cross the street to get to school.

Once at school, for 4 of 5 days, he would sit at a desk in the back of the room and do whatever the very nice teacher who was always very nice to him asked. Spell things? Sure. Practice cursive? Sure. Read? No problem. Then one day she sent him across the hall to the grade above for reading. He felt smaller than he normally did. Still he read. That's what they asked him to do. And so he did. Then he returned to his class.

One out of 5 days, he would go to his classroom and then go back to the lobby. A big, fuckoff yellow schoolbus would pull up in front of the school and he would climb into it. Then it drove him somewhere else, where he would have other classes. Just him & the driver on the big, fuckoff bus. It was always very surreal, but as a child, everything is magical & surreal. The other students told him he was retarded. He didn't talk. There was something wrong with his shoes, they said. He didn't understand, but believed them, since they seemed to have a consensus about it.

A photo of him at this time shows him with tall white socks with colored bands around the elastic. He's wearing a shirt & tighty whities, and he has a young olive complexion with huge dark circles around his eyes. The circles around his eyes are almost blue. He looks sleepy in the photo, but you can tell it's morning. It's taken in a bedroom he lived in. His desk is very organized, with a small elevated book shelf that looks like a reappropriated dish rack.

What he did with his time he can't remember. He would buy baseball cards, not because he really cared or knew who the people on the cards were, but because they were numbered and he understood that it was good to have a complete set. And opening them to find new players that he didn't have and gum was a bonus. As much a part of that was the adventure to the store. They didn't cost more than 50 cents.

Another interest he had was experiments. You know, like attaching a paperclip or a wire to both ends of a battery and seeing how warm it all would get. Warm enough to melt crayons, not warm enough to explode as he had hoped. That was fortunate. He hadn't considered that a battery explosion would likely harm him. So he was very close to the anticipated action. He took things apart. Watches, electronics, small machines like a record player might be made of, they all held secrets. He hid things, like money. Sometimes he forgot that they existed, the hidden things, and they were totally new to him when he found them. He may very well have been retarded, and people did not make sense to him. Other children were the most confusing, but adults knew and behaved strange things & ways.

His favorite thing was falling asleep.