DID YOU EVER SEE A GROWN MAN CRY?

"DID YOU EVER SEE A GROWN MAN CRY?"

Joe had just been released from the Ohio State Penitentiary after serving eight years of an armed robbery conviction. And that was seven years and eleven months too long. All Joe had done was gone into the liquor store drunk and allowed his Jimmy Cagney routine to take over. He was teasing the man behind the counter, as usual, but on that day nobody was laughing.

The day he got off the bus from Ohio State, Jenny was waiting at the station for him. In fact she had waited out the entire eight years in a two-room dungeon of her own making, entertaining Joe's rum-dumb associates who continuously wandered in and out, wondering “When's Joe coming home?” They wanted to know the schedule because none of them wanted be caught sleeping over when Joe finally did walk through that door.

Not that Joe would've minded them being there. He certainly wouldn't have harmed them. In fact, if they hadn't been waiting, he would have gone out and rounded them up himself, to keep him company on those midnight runs to the 7-11 store for sacks of cigarettes and alcohol.

The day Joe finally made it home was a festivity! Jenny had it all planned out, and while Joe, Dave and another made a quick wine run, she entered the phone booth on the corner outside their apartment building to phone in for a pizza. “That'll be about 30 minutes,” and with those words came a truck crashing through the phone booth, dragging it and Jenny several feet before slamming into the brick wall of the building. Joe was just crossing the street from the store and watched without recourse as the episode unfolded in front of him. All those painful years of longing and waiting had mounted with and incredible rage into this unforeseen climax of agony, to have to watch without reason the one he loved so dearly die at his feet without mercy.

Over the years Joe continued to watch her die. Over and over, with every passing truck or bus, his terror mounted to a crescendo. A loud noise was often enough to set him reeling. Really, it might be just the innocent gesture of a friend passing him the bottle that would trigger the violent memory.

And so we did our best to suffer with him, hoping it would somehow help to alleviate the great anguish that crushed Joe daily. You realize that these weren't the bogus tears of today's so-called sensitive man, the politically correct whining of the emasculated househusband that has so wreaked havoc on our sovereignty. No way, brother! In the vernacular of Joe, “We be talkin' real tears, little brother… This be Joe Farrell talkin'…" Talking testimonies in tears.

Before Joe disappeared, I met his brother and amazingly enough they were identical twins! They came by one night to share some wine. Indeed, they were the mirrors of one another, even sharing the same paranoid grimace that I had grown accustomed to in Joe. But that's where the similarities ended. Next to Joe, his brother came off like a two-bit actor auditioning for the part that Joe was playing for real.

Of course the Joe of this story has many twins out there, drinking and weeping and dying on every street corner, like fools are prone to do. But in spite of his advanced alcohol decay, his brother was not yet one of them. Not yet had he learned to cry like his brother. But what the hell, neither have you or I.

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