Super Joe Mulloy by Scott F. Grenville - If Joe Mulloy was perfect—and he was—then beyond his perfection there only could be ... Super Joe Mulloy

Joe Mulloy lounged in the plushest chair in his luxurious office. All around him, on the walls, on the ceiling, even in strategic spots all over the floor, there were mirrors. Joe sneered at the place where the mirrors were most profuse; twenty or thirty perfectly identical Joes sneered back at him. He admired his sneer from every angle, shaping and changing the contemptuous look on his face with his hands, stroking it, much as other young men in a far earlier age had stroked and twisted their fine mustachios.

As usual, Joe Mulloy was engrossed in his two favorite hobbies: narcissism and indolence.

Joe's friends, of which there were very few, could have given you a fairly accurate resume of his character in five words, his sneer and his indolence.

In the first respect they would have been right. Joseph Mulloy had been born with a sneer on his face. His whole early life had been centered around that sneer. It had enraged his father, distressed his mother, driven his teachers to tears, his playmates to tantrums. He stopped doing homework at the age of eight, but the teachers passed him on anyway to avoid complete mental breakdown.

Gradually, Joe Mulloy began to get his way in everything by virtue of his sneer. It was not merely openly supercilious; that was the beauty of it. It was so subtle, so faint, and yet such an open avowal of contempt for the entire human race, that try as the people he tormented would, to find something in his sneer to charge him with, they never found anything.