[joe-frank-list] 'Just an ordinary man'

[rbell at alumni.caltech.edu]

	Joe approaches a woman, Michelle Sandstrom, whom he sees
dancing at the Blue Horizon; he finds her attractive.  She isn't
interested.
	5:00: Joe writes a letter to her, lists his virtues, says he
wants to get to know her; he slips the letter under her door.
	6:50: The next morning, Joe sees her, talks to her.  She isn't
interested.
	8:50: Joe writes another letter to her, 'I'd like to screw
casters into the palms of your hands and the bottoms of your feet and
roll you down the street like an old card table and dump you into a
landfill...', slips it under her door.
	9:50: The next day, he's served with an injunction to leave
her alone.
	11:30:  He writes her a letter, apologizing.
	14:10: 'I like to go to a jazz club and have a drink and
listen to the soulful music of the black musicians...'
	15:30: 'And I love it when the sax player stands up with his
eyes closed behind his dark glasses and loses himself in the music
he's creating,...'
	16:30: 'And I love black people because they're so spontaneous
and express their emotions in a clean and perfect way.  There doesn't
seem to be a wall between their feelings and their behavior, and
that's very refreshing, very real, very human.  Not like me, so hung
up, neurotic, self-conscious, difficult, overanalyzing everything....'
	19:00: 'Because the truth is, I'm just an ordinary man with
normal human interests.  For example, I like to take a drive along the
coast, stop at a roadside inn, have a few, and strike up a
conversation with a cripple sitting at the end of the bar...'  He goes
on at length describing a conversation with 'a cripple', who finds him
annoying.
	24:00: Joe tells of living in Jacksonville, Florida, with a
wife and children.  He invites his boss for dinner, after which the
boss screws his wife then drives other their 2-year-old daughter when
he leaves.  His wife blames him, leaves him; Joe loses his job and
house.  'I was placed in a warehouse and sold to another family.  And
for six months, I stood on their front lawn dressed as a jockey,
holding a lantern with a sign inviting people to place pebbles in my
mouth.'  He ends up begging outside a Burger King.
	26:00: Joe tells a series of surreal stories about The
Fellowship of Humankind,
	26:50: his friend Bruno, 
	27:20: his father.
	30:40: Joe writes Michelle another letter.  He recounts the
trauma of his childhood, his enjoyment of religious rituals, imagines
his death.
	34:50: He recounts his dream of last night, 'I was a
paraplegic in a wheelchair....'
	38:20: He tells when he had a telescope the size of Palomar's,
came close to 'solving the mystery of the universe'.
	39:40: Joe tells of his ex-wife's visit at 1 AM.  She's
unhappy about their divorce settlement.  Her anger recedes and they
recall their meeting and marriage.
	45:20: Joe wonders how this can happen every night, especially
since he doesn't know this woman and has never been married.
	49:30: 'Lately I've been obsessed by the ring fingers on old
Japanese bridegrooms, the frilly lace collars of pampered dogs, the
unraveling thread dangling from the hooded sweatshirt of the woman
jogger who passes beneath my window every morning at five...' and more
surreal thoughts.  He imagines the birth of Seymour to Michelle and
him.
	52:10: 'Am I the navigator or the drowned man or a microbe on
a grain of sand?  While palm trees sway along the shore, and did you
get my letter slipped under your door?  By the time you read it with
pebbles in my mouth, I'll be dead while you dance all night, your
lunar face and rosewood neck blown inside out by the wind.  And I'll
pour myself a drink and try not to think of Christ on my tongue and
the ways I have sinned.'
	53:10: 'I am not a stink monkey in threadbare raiment and worn
footwear suspended in brine on the beach in Samaria.  My flesh and
blood display upon the altar and make straight what is bent and plain
things smooth.  So take this blemished offering for the hours late and
the last bottle broken.'


	Multiple times Joe goes to his room, pours a double scotch, no
ice, steps out onto the balcony, raises the glass, salutes, pours it
into the swimming pool, tosses the glass into the water, watches it
sink.  He also does this in 'Prison songs' (re-used in 'Love
prisoner').

	https://jfwiki.org/index.php?title=Just_An_Ordinary_Man

russell bell