Orange Juice John

We set up the band downtown again, in the doorway of a fire exit.

The pianos were covered in tarps like dead bodies, because the clouds looked like rain, and my sister's friend Steven opened the guitar case as I took out my ukulele and we started to tune. Steven and my sister are technically a band, both good-looking and talented kids with absolutely no romantic interest in each other, but with enough staged chemistry to get the public to think so.

Steven had brought his roommate Jonah, a fairly decent singer who bought into the 'confidence attracts' belief to an unfortunate degree. Steven's a "hardcore tenor" with substantial musical ability and knowledge, and a rare and wonderful habit of treating girls like human beings. So when he drove down here for the convention, my sister, her friend, and myself, decided to bring my mom's guitar (and my ukulele) back downtown and open the case and see what would happen.

I was the only one who had bothered to change into street clothes, the rest wore suits and dresses and badges, tweed and bowtie, vintage sheet-music-patterned dress and bow.

As soon as Steven and I opened our cases, a strange, seemingly schizophrenic and homeless-looking man approached and volunteered to tune us.

"That's no average Martin," he said, regarding my mother's guitar, which Steven held with enormous authority and appreciation. "What year is it?"

"Uhh, '73?" Steven said, pick between his teeth, tuning.

"Oh boy, how long you been playing?"

"Four years."

"You got one of these?" The man showed an impressively horrific black cyst on his middle finger.

"Oh no, but I have a friend who does."

The man wore a backwards batman baseball cap, a tie-dye t-shirt, basketball shorts, and Nike's. He shuffled off after a while of talking, Steven giving me looks of "oh boy" and "when will he leave?" Only a moment or two later, as we begun to play, the man returned, dropping a jug of orange juice into the open guitar case: our first tip.

We laughed, and thanked him, and continued playing as he shuffled off to Jonah and talked to him non-stop for the next hour.

I did not immediately feel bad for Jonah, I have to admit. But eventually I didn't know the songs Steven and Story were playing anymore, and I knew the kid was a better singer than I, and he obviously wanted to join, but was held against his will by a stranger who would not leave.

Eventually, I fell to mercy. I decided to take one for the team.

So I walked over to where they stood, nodded, listening as the man ranted about Billy Joel and human memory, handed Jonah my ukulele, nodded again, and took over. Jonah looked at me gratefully, took the uke, and left hurriedly without a word.

My plan to get rid of the man was based around a single solid truth: the only people no one wants to talk to even more than crazy strangers downtown, are Jehovah's Witnesses. I figured I would listen, steer the conversation around religion, mention who we were, and wait for him to get uncomfortable and leave. I calculated it would take around five minutes, if things went as expected.

That was my plan: preach until he leaves. That was it.

"The human brain," he said, "has infinite capacity of knowledge. Put a song on the radio, three chords in, I know it. Told my friends, they didn't believe me, but then-"

"Isn't that interesting? How our minds are capable of living forever, yet we die after 70 years?"

"That rhetorical, or you want my answer?" He nibbled at the straw of his Big Gulp, looking off into the street.

"Well, what do you think?"

"I think, I think there's a purpose to that. That mankind has the capacity to live forever and yet he dies. You look at a tree, that tree comes from a seed, and you say, 'well, where'd that seed come from?' I say it comes from a tree. But then that's the chicken and the egg question, and you ask me THAT one I say, well what came first, a man or a baby? Hahaha!"

"So do you believe you were created?"

"Well I know I came from my parents, that's for sure. I didn't come from no fish, if that's what you're asking." A man walked by holding a bright yellow sign, big black letters reading JESUS SAVES. "JESUS SAVES YOU FIFTEEN PERCENT OR MORE ON CAR INSURANCE!" the man in the baseball cap shouted, then tapped my arm with the side of his hand, "That's comedy right there," he said, and I laughed genuinely.

The message in itself was funny, these downtown sign preachers always are. It left more questions than answers. I was glad we shared a sense of humor in it, but I needed to rejoin the band.

"You know, isn't it funny, the Bible's scientifically accurate about this stuff? Even at the time it was written. You know it even said the earth was a circle, while the main belief of the time was--"

"Isaiah 40:22, Job 26:7. 'There is one who dwells above the circle of the earth'; 'He stretches out the northern sky over empty space, suspending the earth upon nothing.'"

He nibbled his straw, and stared down the street. His eyes were dark and watery, quick and wide and wonderful. His feet shuffled on the sidewalk as he spoke. I knew right then, something was about to either go horribly wrong, or terrifically right.

"Whoa," I said. "You've - you've got a terrific memory." I asked for his name, and he said it was John.

"You know, my friends and I," I said, gesturing to the kids singing in the street beside us, "We're all Jehovah's Witnesses."

And, for the first time, John stopped talking. John stopped nibbling his straw. John looked down. He swallowed. "Oh that's - that's funny," he said quietly.

"Funny?"

"Ironic I mean, not funny, it's just ironic, that's all. It's ironic." John laughed a sorry sort of laugh.

I waited for the discomfort to kick in. A biting word or two as he shuffled off, a puff of tobacco breath and a cutting opinion before he left. Then I would go back to my band, having successfully scared away a stranger the only way I knew how.

John smiled at me, quickly and honestly, eyes a flash of kindness and then a blur of scattered thought. He took a swig of his Big Gulp. "What book you people studying now?"

If it hadn't been for the strangeness of the smile, I would have said the Bible. I would have asked what he meant. But I rolled up my sleeves, looked at him sideways with a slight and suspicious frown, and said with an air of false confidence, "The Draw Close book..."

"Ah. An oldie. Published 2002, it was?"

"I, uh. I don't know the publishing dates, actually." I didn't know a lot, actually. "So I take it you've studied the bible?"

"I read the bible cover to cover about twice a year now, actually. Probably read it 30, 40 times total in my life."

"WHOA! That's - that's really impressive!"

"No, it's not. It's shameful." John's eyes darkened, cigarette limp at his side, fingers clutching his cup.

"Why is it shameful?"

He looked at me, for a fraction of a second, like I knew he wasn't crazy. He spoke each word slowly and painfully, as if etching them into stone. "To be the same man at 45 as you were at 25 is to have lived a shameful life." He was staring, I realized, at the orange juice jug in the guitar case.

I said nothing. John went on, not exactly speaking to me, but to someone else not present. "It is written, 'Become doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves with false reasoning. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, this one is like a man looking at his own face in a mirror. For he looks at himself, and he goes away and immediately forgets what sort of person he is. But the one who peers into the perfect law that belongs to freedom and continues in it has become, not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work; and he will be happy in what he does.'"

John recited James like a childhood lullaby. He practically sang the words in iambic, like a classroom poem rehearsed and read aloud. He took his pauses at liberty, retrieving the verses from file folders of an infinite memory. I realized right then, John was not an average person, and I had no place standing among the likes of him.

And then the irony kicked in. People didn't get knowledge like this from church on Sundays. John was taught to teach. "Have you ever studied?"

"I've studied with the witnesses for about twenty years now. I talk to Jehovah all the time. Never ask him for anything, though. I don't expect him to help me, it's not my place to ask for it. Not with how I've been living. I know what's true, I'm just retarded." He gestured with his cigarette, as if it agreed with him.

I didn't correct him. I hadn't the right. This wasn't the usual encounter with strangers: a word, a glance, a short feeling of unity, a far-off exchange of question marks never to be resolved. My original low and shameful intention seemed far away, and I felt like I'd known John for an eternity. There was nothing we didn't understand about each other, no distant small talk or unnecessary pretenses. I spoke to him like a brother now. He was on my side. "You've got a remarkable mind, John. You know that, don't you?"

A group of druggies closed in, which was our cue to start packing up. I zipped up my ukulele, slipped it over my shoulder. Story and Stephen picked up the tips and placed the Martin into its case.

"Could I play it?" John asked sheepishly. "Oh, I haven't touched a guitar in so long."

"I don't know if I can do that..." Story apologized, wincing.

"Don't you trust me?"

I trusted John enormously. And it broke my heart. "If it wasn't our parents', we would, I promise we would," I told him.

"Oh, it's no matter." He grinned. "I can always play in my head, just like normal. See? Listen." We listened. He smiled, eyes shining, twitching just a little, beaming with music none of us could hear. "See that? That was great!"

My heart was almost entirely broken. John walked with us down the street, limping on both feet. "What's your favorite book?" he asked.

"Proverbs, for sure," Steven said, guitar case in hand. I argued for Ecclesiastes. John just grinned.

"People try to talk to me like they know you people," he said, "I just let 'em. Pretend I don't know nothing. Let them spew their hatred all they want, they don't know a thing. Then they're obligated to listen, see? And I just lay it down, those fools speaking with the voices of frogs-"

"Ribbet," Steven grinned, and we laughed. John picked up a penny. "53 more of these'll buy you a cup of coffee! Me and my buddy, we call these little coppers spoonfuls of coffee. Look, there's another one!" He spoke of pennies on the sidewalk as if they were a wonder of the natural world. The edges of night were dusting the skies, and John beamed like sunrise on a bride's wedding day. Eyes dark and shining beyond what is scientific, smile wide and honest and child-like. For some reason, I could not find my hand capable of reaching for the change in my pocket. I somehow could not give the man anything he didn't already possess.

After hearing a bit about where he came from, Steven told him, in an effort to make a doer from a hearer, "You know, the apostle Paul said he had to pummel-"

"'I pummel my body and lead it as a slave, so that after I have preached to others, I myself should not become disapproved somehow.' 1 Corinthians 9:27. I'm not retarded."

"That's a strong word!" Steven laughed.

When we reached the parking lot and shook hands, it was almost dark. John grinned proudly.  "That was real brave of you, Shady, telling me who you all were. Those were brave words." I shrunk inside. "I haven't been doing what I know I should, and even though I don't deserve it, Jehovah's protected me from plenty in this city. I know a kick in the pants when I receive one, and I know you kids were just what I needed to pick myself back up. Know when I tell ya, I'm going back to my congregation tomorrow." Something about the authority with which he spoke made it impossible for him to be lying.

"You're a good man, John," Steven said.

"Goodnight, John," I said.

I didn't know it was possible to feel so thankful and so sorry, so priviledged and unworthy and remorseful. We were just cocky kids on a street corner with a handful of talent and a few words. He had pockets filled with pennies and a bible in his mind, shelves inside him full of records and a life he lived in vain, all with a faith I don't believe I will ever reach. Who am I to be called brave? He smiled at me in my dirty street clothes, stars penned onto the side of my hand, second-hand ukulele slung over my sweaty back, as if I were sent by angels.

He looked at me like I was sent by angels. I looked at him like there were wings behind his back.

He skipped away singing, off into the great beyond, where his streets were paved in pennies and his head was filled with song.

And I didn't know why I cried as we drove away.

Probably because Steven called the orange juice.