Who�s Joe Blow?
Get me Joe Blow!
Get me the next Joe Blow!
Who�s Joe Blow?
Anonymous Proverb [Hollywood, California]
It was sweltering inside the library. It was sweltering outside the library too. There must have been some semblance of a breeze somewhere. This is what Joe Blow was thinking it seemed. Joe Blow would rather have been out there than stuck at his desk cooking like pork in the library. He had another four hours worth of thoughts like these. Not that being a library assistant was an uninteresting profession. It wasn�t, it had its rewards on pretty much a daily basis. It was just that, on this particular day at least, it was too hot. That�s all. Joe Blow wished it was winter.
Something else was niggling in the back of Joe Blow�s mind too. He had been systematically snubbed. Well, not snubbed exactly. Nobody turned their nose up at Joe Blow. It was not even that he was ignored from time to time. No, it was much worse than that. That kind of snub was water off a duck�s back to a man like Joe Blow. You see, if people chose to snub him, then at least he existed outside the realms of their own imagination. At least it was something palpable � a start. No, it wasn�t that Joe Blow had been snubbed; it was the simple fact that he hadn�t been noticed at all. This is what stuck in Joe Blow�s mind like a fish bone in the throat. It happened everyday, since he first set foot in the place on his very first morning. Joe Blow was sure of that.
In fact, Joe Blow was seething. As the sun burst through the window it was the Head Librarian herself who was guilty as charged in his tired eyes. Joe Blow had worked in the library for five years � he started on the same day as two other colleagues. It was custom in the library for employee�s to be taken for lunch by the Head Librarian on a specific date in the fifth year of employment. Joe Blow had just been informed that his fellow �five year� colleagues had just set off to a restaurant in the centre of the town for a long lunch. Joe Blow had not even been invited despite his five year loyalty � and when he asked his immediate line manager about his omission from the library tradition he was given the following retort:
Er, I�m sorry Joe, but it seems she didn�t know who you were�
As you can justifiably imagine, Joe Blow was left ashen-faced. He walked back over to his untidy desk, the incredulity welling inside. He just wanted the day to be over with; he just wanted to be outside, to find some fresh air, a breeze - to simply breathe different air. Joe Blow saw no real reason in protesting. What was the point in that? Nobody knew who he was anyway � or cared for that matter.
Joe Blow walked hurriedly down the steps from the library. The heat suffocated him. He gulped the air down into his lungs like a thirsty athlete sucking from a bottle of water. It felt good to be outside, but soon the humidity caught up with him causing his clothes to stick to his back and it weighed him down immediately; the very environment he existed within a heavy, burdensome Albatross around his sweaty neck. If there ever was a sword of Damocles then it was hanging directly above Joe Blow there and then. And to be quite honest with you, he didn�t care a jot if it was about to fall. He took his usual route across the playing fields towards the centre of the town.
It happened rather quickly really, as these things often seemed to do. Her scream shattered whatever vitriolic thoughts Joe Blow had. She was surrounded by three youths and one of them was holding a large knife to her throat. It glinted as it caught the sun. Joe Blow seemed to be the only other person in the vast field, the sole witness to the nefarious act before him. He looked around. The field was still deserted. He acted without thinking. He walked over to the three youths and the cowering woman. He immediately recognised her as a postgraduate from the library. A philosophy student, only that very morning had he handed her John Gray�s Straw Dogs over the counter. Joe Blow asked the question to the first youth who happened to look up.
Excuse me, but could you tell me how to get to Albert Road, it�s by the station apparently?
And that was it, that�s all he asked, that�s all Joe Blow did. The rest, as they say, is history. The three youths, dumbfounded and perplexed by the up-front temerity of this question burst into paroxysms of juvenile laughter, before finally releasing the philosophy student and giving Joe Blow a �happy slap� whilst one youth filmed it on his mobile phone. The laughter echoed in Joe Blow�s ringing ear as they ran away. The philosophy student immediately burst into tears of relief and gratitude.
The next week Joe Blow was in all the local and national newspapers � he even made it onto the local and national news. Everybody recognised him wherever he went. The story the tabloids couldn�t get enough of was even picked up by Richard & Judy on Channel 4 and Joe Blow was scheduled to make a tea-time appearance on their TV show so Richard Madeley could ask the question everyone else had been asking him:
So, Joe Blow, what made you think to ask these nasty little assailants directions to your very own street?
The four minute interview with Richard & Judy went well. Joe Blow wasn�t as monosyllabic as he first thought he was going to be. Although he found Richard Madeley a pedant, he quite liked Judy. In fact, he quite enjoyed his new found celebrity status. People, for once, actually began to ring him, email him at work, buy him drinks; actually offer him seats on buses and taxi drivers gave him free rides. But most surprising of all the Head Librarian personally took him out for dinner at a top Italian restaurant in the centre of the town � both as an apologia for not treating him to his �five year� lunch and as a celebration of his heroic deed. Joe Blow spent the entire evening listening to her eulogise in a high octave monotonous voice at how he was such a �valued member of the library�. Needless to say, Joe Blow hated his Head Librarian more than ever.
After one final magazine interview and a rather shambolic appearance on daytime TV show Trisha � in which Joe Blow was reunited with the philosophy student and found Trisha an unremitting blatherskite who reeked of too much expensive perfume � the interest in him began to slowly but surely thin and soon his life slipped back, rather quickly, into the repetitive malaise he was used to week after long, boring, tedious week; each tiresome day dissolving into the next as inertia finally took hold again. The summer came to an end.
One dark inclement day Joe Blow was sitting at his desk, minding his own business, he was extremely bored � and so bored in fact he actually felt like walking out of the library there and then for good. He didn�t, of course, he just remained where he was supposed to, staring into his flat screen monitor, pretending to do some work. He was soon woken from his stupor by some commotion inside his office. There was a bonhomie wafting across the partitions that had not reared its head in a long time. A large group of Joe Blow�s colleagues had gathered. Apparently it was the Arts & Humanities Librarian�s birthday and the entire office was preparing to leave for the pub for a boozy lunch. This was the first Joe Blow had heard about it. He hurriedly picked up his rucksack and reached for his jacket. He looked up, he was met with vacant, rather nonplussed, stares and before he could utter one syllable a new member of staff � who was considerably younger than him and had been at the library a mere four weeks � beat him to it:
Okay, er, we�re going for a tipple�Er�er�er�I�m sorry�What�s your name?
My name�s Joe Blow�Joe Blow�Joe�Blow�
Sorry Joe, we�re just going out for a spot of lunch and a tipple for Jessica�s Birthday�
Oh, I know, but don�t worry about me, I�ll stay here and man the�
Before Joe Blow could finish they had walked out of the office. They took their guffaws and loud banter with them. Joe Blow sighed and stared at his flat screen monitor. He wished it was summer again.
MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ
MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ
BLAISE CENDRARS
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
