Obituary for Jesse Joseph

They found him on Easter Sunday, just a few weeks before he was reported missing from his shared cell. Floating face down in an opaque, filthy cistern behind the county jail, the fire company and coroner pulled him up in front of a small crowd of credentialed press and gawkers who somehow made it past the guard booths. They snapped photos of his now fully black bruises and lacerations in silence as they carelessly slumped his lifeless body over his mother, who knelt and held him, remaining transfixed in her grief. She couldn’t answer the reporters’ questions and insensitive microphone prods, so that image was the only picture they could print on the papers the next day. They may as well have been crows or pigeons just pecking for crumbs, because she couldn’t see or hear anything else.

I met Jesse after they put him away in jail. He couldn’t afford to post bail, so he waited for his day in court wearing orange and getting abused like me and the other guys. Even though I didn’t know him for too many years, we spent time talking in the yard and I wanted to write the parts of his story that I do know. GED and dictionary in hand, I am the best that Jesse is going to get in this town as far as an obituary goes, on account of none of the paper editors wanting anything to do with publishing this. If you can forgive my writing mistakes, I respectfully and humbly ask you to take a moment to learn about a young man that spent his short life in service to people who society clearly did not want around.

Jesse ben Joseph’s luck had just about run out in this small shit town that he called home. Jail seemed all but certain a destiny after several unfortunate runs in with local law enforcement in spite of his good intentions. Though never detained on any bookable offenses, the cops always made a point to let Jesse know he was headed “down the wrong path,” and you could sense their patience was running thin during every ride back to the precinct. With no studies under his belt, Jesse didn’t have a fancy office in which to work, let alone a car to drive or a big house to sit in. Stringing together odd jobs refinishing pieces of furniture or fixing up sheds for a few bucks, he managed to get by if you can call it that. With no siblings or close pals to fall back on, Jesse always used up the little funds he had earned to do what he called his passion projects, leaving couch surfing and park bench sleeping as his two default housing options.

Thoughtful and often quiet, Jesse was tragically inclined toward a sense of stubborn purpose he had somehow cultivated without a strong parental presence during his upbringing. If Facebook had such a thing as a relationship status for him and his father’s situation, it would be left at “complicated.” Lacking full knowledge of his family origins, he at least had certainty that he was half Jewish, thanks to his mother’s earlier insistence that he visit the local temple to appeal for a sense of community. Kind hearted and mild mannered, all of Jesse’s time spent cleaning up after parties and functions didn’t impress the community much, however. Volunteering to help some of the very sick seniors at the hospice, as well as assisting during Friday night services, were two of his favorite past times during his late twenties. Nonetheless, Jesse became discouraged and alienated over time, realizing that there was little that he could do to fully earn true acceptance. His heart often bled for the community’s misfortunes in a near literal sense. Jesse didn’t waste a moment when a plea was made to the congregation for bone marrow donations on account of two seriously ill children. Two queasy donation appointments spent smiling at the little ones, telling them jokes and playing improvised games of wink signals only amounted to a distant nod of acknowledgement from one of the fathers. Many in the community, at best, kept a polite sense of distance and never engaged with him in conversation. Suppressing a parting tear and letting the full impact of his sense of loss hit him, Jesse decided to work one last fundraiser in the party hall, cleaned several hours past the end of the function, as he always did, bidding the rabbi farewell and wishing him the best. “You’ll never really be one of us. You don’t belong here, kid. It is what it is. Take care.”

Even when Jesse spent most of his low earnings helping out all the churches, hospitals and schools in town, nobody ever really gave him the time of day for his troubles. He always shrugged when I asked him if it was hurtful that they took his money or his time and didn’t even invite him back. Looking back, Jesse’s biggest downfall was that he was likely incapable of seeing evil. In fact, Jesse’s problem was that he always seemed to be seeing the opposite of what most people in society saw. This all came to a head when Jesse found what amounted to a suicide note posted online. Authored by a young man who had been kicked out of his grandmother’s house a few months back, Jesse responded and asked to meet him to talk near the old bridge. The underage kid came out to his religious grandmother, who responded by kicking him to the streets a few months before. Turning to sex work and picking up a drug habit, he missed hot meals and having some form of a family, so he told Jesse that he wanted to put an end to all of his pain. Talking him off the bridge railings and taking him for a warm meal at a buddy’s house, Jesse bought him a cheap air mattress and took on a couple of more jobs to make sure the young man had a place to stay for at least a few weeks. Jesse appealed to the grandmother’s Christian sense of charity, as she was all the kid had in the world since his parents split and pursued overdoses or other iniquities far away from their son. She looked the other way during the entire meeting as her grandson wept, clasping onto her old, weathered bible with resolve.

Visiting the church the grandmother attended, Jesse had no success with the minister, who was new in the neighborhood and didn’t want to upset one of his senior congregants. The minister, as it turned out, ran the only shelter in town for people that had nowhere else to turn. Jesse was told that “polluting the flock with sodomites won’t do,” even though he admitted to not knowing the orientation of any of the other drunks and users he housed at any given time. Nonetheless, Jesse managed to learn of the church’s tight budget and need to fill the funding hole left by the minister’s predecessor, who met a college girl at a house party and left for Mexico after emptying the church’s bank accounts on the drive out of town.

Raising funds by doing a lot of odd jobs and trying their best to eat only a single meal a day, Jesse and the kid were able to raise enough within a few weeks to offset the amount stolen by the former pastor. The minister thanked them for their hard work and generous donation, but declined as to whether he could change his stance on the kid being able to stay at the shelter. Seeing if any leeway was possible, Jesse asked if they could at least join the congregation’s services or help out around the place, but to no avail. The new pastor fumbled through an explanation, claiming that he was hoping to get his brother elected to state senator that November, and besides, “Deuteronomy says that homosexuality is an abomination and if it’s in the good book, there’s nothing left to debate.” He told Jesse that he would try to intercede and speak to the kid’s grandmother and see if she would at least consider taking him back. Something that the pastor said must have worked, because within a day, Jesse found himself pulling up to the grandmother’s stoop, delivering the kid to his former home. “Be patient with grandma for now, kid. Get a part-time job and save up a few bucks so that you can get your own place when you finish your last year of school. You are loved more than you know; you deserve to be loved. Things will get better, but until then, I’ll be around if you need me.”

Not too many days after Jesse had last seen the kid, he found himself resting after a day’s work at the local group home. He overheard a loud thud and intermittent banging on the door at his friend’s apartment. The cops showed his friend a warrant they had obtained for Jesse’s arrest, which was prompted by the call put in by the kid’s grandmother to denounce Jesse for kidnapping the boy. Jesse asked them to corroborate the story with the church pastor, who picked up the call but decided to side with the grandmother and deny he had known Jesse’s role in her grandson’s absence from home. During his three weeks in our cell block, Jessie helped inmates who had been denied mental health services, reading whatever books were available to some of them in groups and discussing their troubled lives and hopes. He told them that they were worthy of love and as hardened as some of those guys were, many of them became quiet and listened very intently when Jesse spoke.

Unfortunately, things began to get complicated for Jesse on the inside. A sizable part of the prison’s drug trade had been disrupted after some of the inmates became more interested in the kinds of things Jesse encouraged them to do, like finish their GED classes and reconnect with their families on the outside. The central cogs that made possible the drug and smuggling rings inside the prison, between both the town gangs on the outside and the inmates on the inside, turned out to be the prison staff. Our facility is run by one of the big prison companies that funded the governor’s last successful campaign, so they can pretty much do as they please with the inmates. At least the guys that used to kick us around at state had to have qualifications and experience to work in prisons. With these companies, they hire people who used to sell cars or who got discharged from the military before working with us, which explains the interest they take in becoming the fixers for the gangs, so to speak. With Jesse, those gangs saw an opportunity to send a clear message to the inmates that had forgotten their priorities from before. The guards beat him up pretty bad a couple of times, but things became crystal clear after they stopped allowing him to do reading lessons with the guys in the yard. Jesse disappeared only a few days before his court date would have hit and we got our yard time revoked a couple of days because we asked where he could’ve gone if he still hadn’t posted bail; we all had a feeling of what had likely happened.

This is how my friend and teacher was treated after everything that he had done for this town, so I decided to write this obituary. I may have wasted my life as a hopeless drunk and criminal, but Jesse’s memory needs to be set straight by those he helped. I wasn’t religious before I met Jesse, and though he wouldn’t admit to being a Christian or a Jew himself, I confess to believing in something greater now that I had the chance to spend time with him. There is still a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, because I can’t unsee the newspaper picture of Jesse slumped over his mother on Easter Sunday. I am saddened by this all and find myself remembering my days as a young school kid, learning all those stories from so long ago in Sunday school. I used to think it was so hard to picture any of the gospels happening in modern times, but they yelled at us kids who made those kinds of remarks and we reserve those thoughts. How I wish that a lot of the upstanding and righteous citizens of this town knew that they wouldn’t know to spot God if he hit them falling out of the sky.