Whether I realize it or not, I pass empty judgments of just about everyone I meet.

On my way to a cafe this morning, I fancied my deduction that the posse of uniformed schoolboys strutting ahead of me were a certain variety of angsty, up-to-no-good punks. One of them blasted repetitive trap music, the kind that rang sour in my ears, from a speaker in his hand. They all had the same haircut; clean on the sides, long and saturated with gel on the top, combed to the side. This would surely be enough to convict them of their punkery in a court of law.

Every time a slightly-past-middle-aged man in a cafe approaches the little digital slot machines that are apparently everywhere, I figure the man has a habit, and is quite familiar with this particular machine.

Detective work well done.

At the beginning of this school year, my best friend Garrett and I befriended a character. We met Joe in Evergreen’s bouldering gym. We were both very new there, but as months passed we learned that Joe was a regular. The first day we met him, Joe sported a pair of amusingly tight climbing pants, with giant brown patches on the thighs and knees and a bright red patch across the ass. Thus we dubbed him Joe the Pants. Never just Joe, always Joe the Pants, sometimes even just The Pants.

He climbed far better than Garrett or I.
“Try this!” he would mutter, punctuated by his signature giggle, before hanging impossibly from two fingers on one hand, and launching his heavy frame into the air to the next nearly-nonexistent hold, and hanging on effortlessly. Routes set and signed by Joe the Pants were seldom worth trying.

Sometimes Joe the Pants would fall off the face of the earth for weeks at a time. Folks who had been closer with him would tell us that Joe the Pants had been “dealing with some stuff”.

Figures. Who isn’t?

He would eventually reemerge in the gym, and tell some far fetched tale of how he had lost his phone learning to surf on the coast in the dead of November. For a stretch of about a month, he suffered from four cracked ribs. We saw him in the gym climbing more often that month than any time before or after.

Garrett and I had deduced that Joe the Pants was an A-Grade badass, worthy of our admiration.

The man was an enigma.

Ask someone if they knew Joe, and their reaction was more or less the same.

“Joe!? I love Joe”.

Sometimes they would tell some crazy story about how they had watched him eat a whole pack of cold hotdogs when they were climbing in Leavenworth or maybe how he had fallen twenty feet from a tree and risen unscathed.

Garrett and I fantasized about climbing the clock tower on campus, but would always laugh and remind ourselves that it was a task better left for Joe the Pants. Once he called Garrett at 2am to invite him to do just that, but Garrett had been asleep.

The last time Joe the Pants disappeared, he left promising to return with all his climbing gear, easily a grand worth, to give to Garrett for us to use. He never explained why. Garrett and I manufactured an explanation: Joe the Pants was getting rid of extra weight so that he could move into a van and travel the country, or escape to a distant beach to bum on cyan waves for the next two decades. We admired his supposed spirit of adventure, and spoke frequently of living the same way. Garrett recently sent me an email saying that when he “grew up”, he wanted to be just like Joe the Pants. No one else understood but he knew I would.

I learned via a photo of ropes, quickdraws, webbing and cams laid for display on the dormitory floor that Joe the Pants-a-Clause had paid Garrett a visit after I had come to Spain.

This morning my phone buzzed me into consciousness. Joe the Pants was dead. He had had an infection in his blood, and had probably known for a while.

It is very likely that he wasn’t the reckless, wild, walking adventure that Garrett and I had determined to be the foundation of his character. He was running out of time, that was all.

Those “punk” kids were on their way to school in their uniforms, pants pressed and ties straight. Who gives a shit what kind of music they listen to.

The bald guy at the slot machine had just bought a cup of coffee, and probably just dropped his disposable change in, taking a silly chance.

Turns out I’m the punk kid with a bad habit.