Joker

I once knew some­one in col­lege who used the jok­ers from decks of play­ing cards when he left notes for peo­ple. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, he was the most bor­ing per­son I have ever met. I thought the jok­er was the only cre­ative idea he ever had.

Z, [we called him Z, for no rea­son] had one of those long card box­es full of jok­ers. No one could ever fig­ure out where he got them all. Some of us thought he must obses­sive­ly buy packs of cards to keep up his sup­ply. What he did with the rest of the deck, I don’t know. He did have a bit of that kind of obses­sion to him, so this was pos­si­ble. For instance, Z would only take a prime num­ber of drinks from a water foun­tain, would only have an odd num­ber of meat­balls with his spaghet­ti and would cut his bananas long ways before cut­ting them short ways for putting in his shred­ded wheat [unfrost­ed]. Oth­ers believed that his dad worked for Hoyle and was his hook up. I nev­er knew what to believe.

His favorite jok­ers were from Bicy­cle decks because they had the most white space for writ­ing. The notes he would leave, crum­pled between the door and jamb, were pret­ty terse. ‘pack­age’ meant he had a pack­age for me in his room. ‘7:00 SDH’ meant every­one was eat­ing din­ner at 7:00 in the south din­ing hall. He nev­er signed them because we all knew the only per­son who used jok­ers for post-its was Z.

His sopho­more year, Z start­ed using jok­ers to pick up girls. It worked, well, sort of. He would walk up to them, usu­al­ly at the stu­dent union dur­ing the mid­night quar­ter­dog run, mum­ble some­thing, and hand them a jok­er with his phone num­ber on it. They would usu­al­ly call him [drunk], but we nev­er saw any come over. I think he just liked to talk to them.

He did get one date out of it, unfor­tu­nate­ly. He knocked the girl up. A bunch of us were talk­ing to him about it late one night and we found out that he lost his vir­gin­i­ty at the same time. The girl was real torn up too, she did­n’t want to mar­ry him, had real­ly only shagged the boy out of pity in the first place [she told him that]. She did­n’t want the baby either but could­n’t get an abor­tion. Z real­ly could­n’t han­dle the stress. One day the floor of the hall was cov­ered in jok­ers and each door had one jammed in it. They all read ‘good­bye.’ Z had dis­ap­peared. That is the last time we heard of him in this made-up sto­ry.