that those awful saffron yellow robes they wear over there in
Thailand. Hooo! Those boys look like a bunch of walking wontons.”
Oscar smiled and answered, “Yeah, plus yellow makes me look
really pasty. So you were in Thailand, then?”
Joe Fortune slapped his knee and let out a resonant laugh.
“Heh! Oh yeah,” he said, “many years ago, but you see, I don’t visit
countries like that much anymore. They’re too easy. They remind me
of little holidays that are real nice, but when they’re over you have to
go home to your real, wretched little life and you just feel like crap
when you get home and start counting the days ‘till you get another
few weeks off. The problem with nice little holidays is just that they
make your real life look like total shit.”
He leaned forward to try to impress his point on us, and
gestured with his monolithic hands while the bench creaked. “You
see, what I do is go to really miserable countries and see how lousy
people’s lives are so that my life looks sweet in comparison—like a
beach in Thailand! It’s all relative, you know. Hey, if you think your
farts stink, try sniffing someone else’s!—That’s my credo!”
As he explained it, Joe Fortune started his habit of going on these so-
called Misery Toursafter his sister died seven years ago. While his
family mourned for the young woman who had been cut down in the
prime of her life by a drunk driver, Joe decided that instead of
wasting his time feeling awful and doing nothing, he would instead
feel awful and do something constructive. A phenomenal athlete and
nearly a professional football player, Joe was used to pushing himself
to his very limits of physical endurance, and he didn’t see why he
couldn’t do the same thing for his emotional stamina as well. This
was around the time when the famine in Ethiopia had suffused the
Western media and everyone was racing to get on the global
sympathy bandwagon. Although Joe didn’t want to be associated
with something as hollow and oxymoronic as fashionable charity, he
understood that there was indeed a great deal of suffering going on.
His mission was to experience it first-hand, without the barrier of a
television screen or an ostentatious rock concert to explain it to him.
And when he got there, he planned to help in whatever way he could.
Soon after his arrival Joe began to help by carrying heavy things
and stirring the faffa—a plain porridge that the village subsisted on.
He tried to understand what it was the famine victims were going
through, but he was overridden with the impression that he was still
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