Joseph "Joey" Quintero

[Malloon]

Name: Joseph "Joey" Quintero
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: Senior
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Politics, debating, reading, comic books, video games, classic rock and RnB, cooking, fashion, administration/bureaucracy, networking, giving speeches

Appearance: Joey is obese. His height is 5'4'', but he weighs 205lbs. Ethnically he is Mexican-American, with dark tan skin, thick black hair and the hint of a black moustache that returns by evening even if shaved in the morning. His hairstyle changes often, but usually stays trimmed on the sides and longer on top. His face is round, with a prominent chin only mostly hidden by the rolls of fat responsible for his double chin. His thick neck rests on a pair of sturdy shoulders, but the rest of him is rotund. His arms and legs are thickest around their bases, and are smooth, with no darker hair on them and very little lighter hair. His hands are large, but his fingers short. He has a large mouth and very white, shiny teeth. His nose is medium sized and flat. His eyes are light brown and are very expressive when opened fully, but are usually half-closed in a relaxed and almost lazy manner.

He dresses himself carefully, having a large and varied wardrobe. He owns a couple of suits, lots of brightly-colored though monotone shirts, a number of jackets, shoes and pants for every occasion and a number of hats, though he makes a point of it never to own a trilby. In the summer and spring he generally wears cotton pants, a light-colored t-shirt and a jacket to school, to deal with the heat and prevent inevitable sweat-bands from showing. In the winter and fall he switches to dress shirts and sweaters.

Biography: Julian Quintero was the great-grandson of Mexican immigrants in 1926. Catalina Quintero (née Santos) was the daughter of Mexican immigrants in 1974. Both are Chattanooga natives. They were high school sweethearts and fellow waiters who decided to open a bar together after they graduated. To that end, they got degrees in business together at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, which were funded by their parents. After graduating with their degrees and working a couple of odd jobs, Julian received an investment from a couple of his aunts and uncles who believed in them, and they bought an establishment on the edge of Chattanooga's North Side in 1998, calling it "Julian and Catalina's." They were both 24 at the time.

They had married straight out of high school, but had decided to wait to have children until their bar was profitable enough, which they decided it was approximately two months into their second year of running it. Their son Joey was consequently born on the 3rd of February in the year 2000. They had at first wanted more children, but the stress of both raising Joey and running the bar was so much that they decided to put it off and eventually decided against it when he was ten.

At first Joey grew up in an apartment his parents rented in an apartment complex in Chattanooga's urban housing district. Though they tried their best to spend time with him, they hired a nanny for the first ten years of his life. Their hiring a bartender six years into running their business gave them some more time to spend with him, but not as much as they hoped. As a consequence, Joey learned very early on to entertain himself and to go to other children if he wanted to play or get attention.

Joey was a very outgoing, energetic and curious child, frequently tiring out his already overworked parents and even his nanny. He would howl whenever a parent had to leave him behind with his nanny, who eventually resorted to bribing him with candy and cookies to get him to stop. His parents too often fed him whatever he wanted, since they themselves usually ate whenever they could and whatever they felt like. All three Quinteros put on weight during the first few years of Joey's life, and none of them lost it, with Joey gaining proportionally even more weight later.

In kindergarten Joey made a lot of acquaintances and a few friends, but since he often vied for attention at the expense of others and could only infrequently go play with one of the other children at their house or have them come to him, he never made very lasting friendships. By elementary school he had learned to tone down his vying for attention, or at least make it less conspicuous, and he gained a few friends among his classmates. The subjects he was very good at were reading, writing and social studies, while he lagged considerably in science, mathematics and physical education. He was passable in music and art, though enthusiastic whenever he got the chance to show off.

Since the Quniteros were Catholic, they had gone to mass every Sunday since Joey was very little, but even that didn't let them spend much time with him. So when he was ten his parents bought a small suburban house a few miles from their flat so he could visit other children more easily. They had also decided to make sure they would eat dinner together as a family at least three evenings a week, and have at least one parent be home whenever he was, though the former often didn't happen regardless. That was also around the time they decided that he didn't need a nanny any more, thinking that their renewed presence would suffice. Joey appreciated being able to visit other children, but both he and his parents were unused to spending much time with each other, so they tended to spend the times they were in the house together in separate rooms.

Through elementary and into middle school, Joey branched out the ways of structuring his social life in order to further his wants. He acquired a taste for fashion in order to stand out and to emphasize whatever role he intended to play in certain events, and noticed that his girth also made him stand out, making him less inclined to slim down. He tried to get positions of responsibility in order to make himself indispensable, or at the very least uncircumnavigable. He had an opinion on everything, feeling that as long as the contents aren't too bad, it would get people listening to him. This was where his penchant for monologuing and giving speeches developed, for which his loud voice and tendency to gesture helped.

He also tried to get people to notice him, from the superintendent to the cafeteria staff, and he did this by trying to become acquainted with them. Later his motive expanded to using his acquaintances to show off in front of his classmates, and later still to make himself more popular with said classmates by being the one who could get a foot in the door with important people for them, if they had ambitions to that end. It took a while before he noticed that he could use his acquaintances to pull strings whenever someone or something was bothering him, but he took to using this newfound power with relish the moment he discovered its potential. This power contributed greatly to his growing ego, and only later would he learn that this was called "networking". But whatever his later goals, his prime motivation always remained that he enjoyed being noticed and acknowledged by basically everyone. To the end of pulling strings he developed a reputation for honesty, sometimes bluntness, but he quickly noticed he could still lie very effectively through omission, if that was needed.

During middle school Joey tried theatre, but found that he didn't enjoy acting, nor was especially talented in it. The only part he did enjoy - being on stage with all eyes on him - happened far too infrequently to be worth his time. During the rest of his middle school career he started to consider lessons and homework to be of secondary importance to his social life, despite having only a small number of people he truly considered friends, preferring to categorize the people around him based on how much they liked him and how they might help or hinder him. Despite all this he managed to scrape by with a GPA of 2.9.

When at home Joey divided his time into reading and planning, and relaxing. In his reading he didn't discriminate between fiction and non-fiction or genre, the only criteria was whether or not he could learn something useful or not. He subsequently devoured books on leadership and rhetoric, fashion, literature and later, philosophy and politics, though he often overestimated his understanding of their contents. He also read comic books, played video games and listened to a variety of old and new popular songs, though he usually read, played and listened to them in order to be able to say he had when discussing pop culture with his peers. Though that was how he stumbled across them there were a number he grew to enjoy for their own sake, including the New 52 comics, Mass Effect, StarCraft 2 and classic rock and RnB artists like Chuck Berry and James Brown. These were what he used to relax, though relaxing did not by any means mean just sitting down and consuming them, as he often liked to sing along and dance when listening to music. The games and music he played on his PC which his parents had bought for him when he was 12, largely because of their guilt for not being home enough. While Joey was not averse to spending money, he did try not to be wasteful, so he stuck to finding and downloading or streaming the music and comics online whenever he could, only buying them if that wasn't possible or illegal.

The large amount of pocket money he used to finance his clothes shopping was also born of this guilt, and would have been necessary even if his wardrobe was smaller, given his size and the difficulty of finding clothes that fit. To find clothes that fit him he shopped almost exclusively over the internet. He had learned quite early that looking groomed and well-dressed made a better impression than wearing whatever and shaving only sporadically, and while he knew his fatness made him stand out, it also sometimes detracted from that impression and decided to compensate. So he made it a small hobby of his to dress well, having outfits appropriate for every occasion and learning how to color-coordinate. He made a point of it to not to follow trends, though, given as that would make his hobby cost even more and make his wardrobe non-reusable.

His parents' absence also influenced his last hobby: Since Joey often had to prepare his own food and had a large appetite, he got into cooking fairly early, teaching himself through cookbooks and various online recipes and tutorials. He kept it up as a way of eating all the types of foods he wanted to eat, a list which he steadily expanded because of his willingness to try new flavors. These meals were of a wide range of types from all over the world. He didn't have a favorite food, but his comfort food was deep pan pizza. He even sometimes cooked for his parents on the rare occasion they ate together since, despite running a bar, they never had much interest in cooking themselves.

Leaving middle school, Joey immediately noticed how his network broke apart, since almost all his most useful contacts in it (the faculty) stayed behind. In high school he decided to build a more lasting network, consisting instead of students with various talents, ability and futures whose acquaintance would not have been a waste of time after graduation. In accordance with this he also decided to work on his own future. He eventually decided to shoot for career politician, thinking that if he failed there would still be a lot of similarly influential if lesser positions in politics he could fill, but over time the idea appealed more and more to him, and the idea of failing and becoming some lackey less and less. What appealed to him so was the ability to advance his status, increase his power and be in the limelight simply by existing and being a keen negotiator, something he also enjoyed. While working for a politician or similar would let him achieve the first two, it wouldn't help him achieve the latter.

He reasoned that politicians usually had backgrounds in law, so he would try for that, feeling he had little else to go on regarding his plan for his future. And in order to achieve a placement in a prestigious law school, he needed to get a bachelor degree in a major with a high acceptance rate from laws schools, for which he might need to improve his GPA. To his surprise, however, he couldn't manage to improve it past 3.2, which troubled him deeply and he became rather defensive about. He ended up picking philosophy as the major he would strive for, since according to his research it seemed to be the subject with the highest acceptance rate that he had a chance of getting good grades in, seeing as how a number of the books he had read on his own accord were classified as philosophical. The subjects he chose in high school were math, English, science, Spanish, physical education, art and advanced placement in social studies, and his electives were film, finance and a peer aide course.

Becoming a politician meant having an opinion on politics on local, state and federal level, because a) He couldn't do a thing to influence it, b) He could hardly get the whole picture, because a lot of the important discussion was bound to be behind closed doors, c) What he did see made him extremely frustrated at the incompetence of many, many politicians on all levels of government, d) It would not help him get into university nor law school, and e) It was mostly irrelevant for the school politics he was involved in, he didn't put much effort into following it on the news. Instead he focused on following information channels for his immediate surroundings, such as his peers' online presences and such, to give himself an edge on knowing goings on around the school.

Despite his misgivings about his future, Joey continued to work on it through networking. He joined the debate club and the student council, both of which giving him plenty of opportunities to add to his experience in politics and negotiating, and he quickly developed a leading presence in both clubs. He maintained relationships with many different students and also improved his methods of forming and maintaining the network, mostly by trying to become good friends with a number of his contacts and also not hindering himself in his own feelings towards people, letting himself become friends with people who wouldn't, by his standards, be very useful. Letting this happen meant he could simply follow the path of least resistance if he liked someone, and having people he could trust, not just use, helped him relax more. He also made himself do favors for people who he wanted to induct, not just getting to know them, so he could ask for repayment and not just favors on their end. This constant give and take also honed his negotiation skills.

In keeping with building a network out of students rather than faculty, Joey recruited classmates who were good in school for homework, willing to protect him physically in the case of bullies, could speak other languages, associated with school politics, the newspaper or those who had various miscellaneous talents that might be useful in a pinch. Because of this, he became known as the person to go to if you needed someone with a particular skill or if you needed something done but didn't know how. He also tried to introduce people to each other who he thought would appreciate it, earning himself easy favors that way.

Joey became interested in girls in high school, generally because of their prettiness, but made no bones over the fact they weren't interested in him. Despite not being ashamed of his weight and having always taken immediate action when someone tried to bully him over it, he knew on a rational level that it did make him unattractive as a romantic partner. He consoled himself with the idea that his looks wouldn't matter when he was well-known, rich and successful. Despite his love of attention he also disbelieved any hints that someone was interested in him, thinking himself irrational when he thought he saw something. As a result he never entered a relationship while in high school or before.

Currently, Joey is at the height of his fame and influence. His greatest fear however is only ever being the middleman, and being left behind after graduation. As of 2018 he has applied to multiple universities, including many ivy-league ones, and has gotten a few acceptances but has yet to hear back from any of the latter. His only back-up plan is one that his parents offered to him, to get a degree in business like them and help run the bar when he was old enough, eventually taking it over. This is not an idea that appeals to him.

Advantages: Joey is smart and charismatic, and well-versed in manipulating people. His large network means he is rather well-known and his efforts to stay on good terms with everyone means a good number of people like or at least respect him, and only few actively dislike him. He has a number of favors he can call in.
Disadvantages: His size and lack of participation in sports mean he is considerably below the normal level of physical fitness. His appetite is also very large. While he is intelligent, he tends to overestimate how much and how easy it is to outsmart his opponents.