Remembering Joe Sweet

PANGS FROM AN OLD HURT can surface unexpectedly, like a lost key found in your pocket while you’re searching for some spare change. That happened to me today. So I’m re-posting this 21-year-old eulogy, written at my old website in 2003, as a petty act of defiance against death and broken web links, in the hope that some old friends of Joe Sweet’s might see it and raise a glass of remembrance.

Here’s how it went:

Joe Sweet once conned me into posing semi-nude for a beefcake calendar featuring the men of our ad agency. It was not the first time that I found myself a willing prisoner of his fancy--swept up and carried aloft in some bizarre venture, like Dorothy riding a twister to Oz. On the contrary, it was a regular occurrence for Joe’s friends. And it remained his signature, right up to his death on October 4, 2002.

When Joe became a copywriter at Anderson & Lembke around 1992, he was 33 years old but seemed much younger. He had a wide-eyed gentleness, rooted not in the usual adman's desire to show off what he knew about things, but a childish curiosity to know more about people. It didn't just stand out among the usual wiseass cynics--it was actually kind of unnerving.

In a business full of people sporting masks and carefully cultivated personas, Joe was unguarded. He had drive and tenacity, and he was aware of what more jaded types like yours truly thought about matters; but all of that was somehow made to serve the things he thought it'd be "really neat" to do.

Joe would get a faraway look in his eye and say with a decisive air, "You know what'd be really neat ..." And with that you were hooked. There'd be a screenplay to help with, or an agency event to pitch in on, or God knows what.

His ultimate pied piper act was one of his last.

In November 2001, the post-9/11 recession rippled through the ad industry and led to major layoffs at Joe's agency, Fallon Worldwide. Suddenly he was out of a job after years of high-profile work for clients such as BMW and Timex.

A lot of us would have begun networking frantically while bemoaning our fates. Joe? He made a movie. He'd put together a script and rounded up a band of amateurs and semipros over the summer in Minneapolis, shooting scenes with a little digital video camera. To him, unemployment was the perfect opportunity to go all-out.

So Joe became a cameraman, a director, a film editor. He swept his friends up into that personal whirlwind, somehow managing 50 speaking parts on a $30,000 budget. When spirits flagged in the summer heat, he joked people out of it. When the challenges seemed too great, he just kept pushing in that gentle yet stubborn way of his.

When "How to Kill a Mockingbird" premiered in August 2002, Joe Sweet saw 500 people applaud a movie about inner voices and personal dreams. Because Joe always believed in his own inner voice, and he was always deeply interested in the personal dreams of others.

Not long afterward, Joe was on a train to the Cannes Film Festival with his movie and his wife when that inner voice was silenced forever. And it’s haunted me ever since.

Rest in peace, Joe. I think of you, and I smile.

EARWIGS AND ELEGIES

This all comes about because the old Harry Belafonte song, “Jamaica Farewell,” kept playing in my head this morning. When the song had entered my mind like an annoying pop-up ad once before, I mentioned it to Joe without any expectation that he’d know an obscure example of 1950s calypso music. But he brightened and said, “That was the first song I ever learned on guitar!”

It has been Joe’s Song ever since, at least to me.

Sad to say I'm on my way
Won't be back for many a day
My heart is down
My head is turning around
I had to leave a little girl in Kingston town

More random recollections:

• I remember ridiculing a terrible industrial ad about something called "Haveg Ablatives" by posting it on the walls of the A&L kitchen in New York--at which point Joe began calling me "Davidablatif," and continued to do so for nine years.

• I remember being asked to look at a horrible movie script he'd done, called "SEXXWORLD."

• I remember his funny pointed shoes and his love of diners and our endless riffing on the movie "Diggstown."

But what I remember most of all was being invited to Joe's wedding just a couple of years before his death, after we’d been out of touch for a while. It was a nice chance to catch up with him on a timeless old Rhode Island sandbar known as Block Island. It was that rare wedding one actually enjoys, and I saw an endless procession of strangers stand up at the reception and pour their hearts out about their friend Joe ... including a woman who said that he'd brought her handfuls of fresh grass while she was in the hospital with cancer, so she could smell it and know why she had to go on fighting and living, for life itself.

It was something I'd never known about Joe as we'd gone off on separate roads in life, and it made me realize that each of us actually lives many lives--not only our own sense of self, but the private slices of shared memory with each of the people we touch. And it made me marvel that Joe meant so many different things to people, in ways outside the private boundaries of our own friendship. | DC