Young Joe gradually accepted his surroundings, but as a sprightly lad of five ran away from home to meet his hero, Corbin Davies, who was a placekicker for the highly touted Sasketchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League.  He only made it as far as Seattle where, browbeaten and alone, he curled up under a bridge and waited for death to come.

His wait was in vain however, as bum Gerald Robinson found him, nursed him back to health and got him a job cleaning lint traps at the local Laundromat.  Joe worked hard and whenever he had a spare moment his mentor Gerald would tutor him in reading, arithmetic and other such things any normal five year old child would need to learn.  Their bond grew stronger and stronger until August of 1992 when poor Gerald was brutally decapitated in a bizarre ceiling-fan accident.  Alone once more, 14-year-old Joe had no choice but to hit the road again.

By the time he was 16 Joe had turned to a life of crime.  The loss of his closest friend had him fixated on the evils of ceiling fans and he routinely vandalized any that he could find.  Things came to a head in 1997 when he knocked over a Budget Power in Kentwood, Louisiana, and was subsequently caught with two track-lighting strips and 23 dollars he had stolen from the till.  No one was hurt in the robbery, but one little old lady did make quick use of her adult diaper.  Anyway, after standing trial and being convicted of robbery and "just being a general asshole" 19-year-old Smiley served four years in a medium-security New Orleans prison and moved to Minnesota after he was paroled.

Now 25, Joe Smiley has left behind his criminal ways and is an at-large executive for a toilet tissue company, and in his free time plays softball twice a week and shills for ehrenstemme.com