The classic joke that a homeless man told Tom Waits
Among many other things, Tom Waits is a fine comedic soul. When he appeared on David Letterman’s penultimate show, he just riffed for ten minutes about how it’s a good job he was retiring from show business and not the tire industry because when you retire from working with tires, everyone thinks you’re just singing on for more time. Maybe it’s the way he tells them.
However, Waits being Waits, the ultimate jokes he has come across are ones of the urban dispossessed—the stories of the barnacles on the underbelly of society. In fact, his masterful classic Rain Dogs near enough plays out as a musical describing the colourful happenings of the universal Skid Row. Waits doesn’t just report on such spaces, he has spent his life perusing them like a Gonzo reporter who has lost his subjectivity.
With his ear to the street, a joke happened upon his lap that he has been regaling ever since. As his story goes: “I met a guy one night who came up to me with his hand out. I said, ‘Oh, no, no.’ He said, ‘Yeah. Yeah, listen man, it’s not what you think. I don’t want any money. I just want to be your friend.’ He said, ‘My name is Charlie. What’s your name? How you doing?’ He said, ‘That’s all I wanted, see’.”
With that, the man curiously parted, and Waits continued sucking on his cigarette and watching on, slightly perplexed, as the friendly Charlie hurried up the road. This strange incident came with the following punchline: “He went all the way around the block, came all the way back, and then he came around the corner. He saw me. He said, ‘Hey, Tom, it’s your old buddy Charlie! Could you loan me a couple of bucks?’ I got a kick out of that.”
It’s certainly a trick that would cause a lot of wallets to part. For a few bucks, Waits received a perfectly Waits-esque story that he has been wheeling out ever since. I guess that’s the beauty of our concrete jungles, as David Bowie mentioned of New York’s barely civil manic expanse: if you can’t write in a space where Vikings rule the avenues, then where can you write? Waits has grasped that bizarro urban crown like no other.
Thus, this is the reason that should you choose to pass this tale on, then you ought to acknowledge that it was Waits that it happened to. The joke is one that suits him like a glass slipper and typifies the quirks of the sort of city life he perfectly captures in song.
