Jose

Jose’s Story
by Jeff McMahon

Originally printed January 31, 1985. In Ancient Greece, wanderers and vagrants were protected by Zeus. Mess with a hobo and you’d be dancing with lightning bolts. In Elizabethan England, people were not allowed to travel without the name of an affluent nobleman tattooed on their foreheads. In 1970 in Tucson, half a dozen university police decided to remove 300 street people who had made the lawn of the old library building (now the Arizona State Museum) their home. Three days of rocks, fires, clubs, and tear gas followed. Today, free spirits are difficult to find. I knew a short, dark-skinned smiling man called Jose or Joseph, according to your preference. The university area and Fourth Avenue were his haunts. He would gladly trade the story of his life for a quarter, which got him a cup of soup somewhere. The story of Jose’s life changed with every quarter you handed him, which made him, I guess, a writer. For my money, Jose was from a noble family in India. He never said he was a prince, but in India a bowl of rice a day makes you a prince. Jose had a wealthy Hindu grandfather, which seems, in itself, like a contradiction in terms. Jose himself was not a good Hindu. He enjoyed sex and red meat and would sneak away from his village and into the hills, where he would pursue his interests. Jose’s grandfather caught him once, and the old man sent Jose to America, the living hell of sex and red meat, to teach him a lesson. “When you have become a better man,” he told Jose, “you may come home.” Jose wandered through America penniless and drifted often through Tucson, a place he came to love. With the quarters he gathered Jose bought some beads and leather string, and he made necklaces from these things. Eventually Jose got his own space, a corner in the back room of an Indian jewelry store near the university. There he made jewelry, which the shop owner sold. Jose found that he had a home. He stopped eating red meat. He stopped pursuing women. But Jose and the jewelry store could not compete with the American passion for plastic and plastic fads, and one day when it seemed the business could stand no longer, the jewelry store burned down. The owner disappeared. Jose returned to the streets. Jose told me this story in the Jack-in-the-Box at Park and Speedway. He was eating a Jumbo Jack. The last time I saw Jose was two years ago on Fourth Avenue. I was on the west side of the street walking south, and he was on the east side of the street walking north. “Hello, Jose!” I shouted. He looked across at me and flashed his yellow teeth, but he did not seem to recognize me. I suppose Jose told the story of his life to many people and could not be expected to remember them all. Now I miss Jose and his story. I have many quarters I would gladly give him to hear it again. I wonder if he is in India, or if he is in an unmarked grave in the living hell of sex and red meat.
(Reprinted from Arizona Daily Wildcat, January 31, 1985)

© copyright 2006 Jeff McMahon | All Rights Reserved