- Joy has a twin sister called Charity.
- They are twenty-four.
- Joy owns a shitbox Honda Civic that she lives out of – she’s going to sell it at the end of summer to give her more money for a year’s study in Freiburg.
- Charity has two kids, a house and a second hand children’s clothing store.
- The father of the first child, Erin is somewhere in Texas (they think he moved back with his parents) – The fiancé, Jim is the father of the little one.
- Joy has no where to stay and is nursing a boozy day-after head under a sheet on Charity’s couch when I meet her again after she invited me to come stay on a shared Greyhound out of Winnipeg.
- Jim comes in, ‘You’ve been here all day – it’s time to go Joy.’
- Charity says ‘Fuck’ in front of the kids and then shouts at them for swearing.
- Joy’s ex-boyfriend keeps hanging up on her when she calls to get her tent back from his apartment.
- We go to Joy’s mother’s house.
- Joy tells me when we arrive, ‘I don’t get on that well with my mum’s boyfriend.’
- Joy’s mum answers the door and suggests politely we walk around back and sit outside.
- Joy asks to use the bathroom and her mum suggests she slip in the back door. But both front and back doors are locked.
- ‘It’s so stupid,’ Joy announces in frustration, making it clear what we already deduced was the work of her mother’s boyfriend.
- Joy’s mother just shrugs the way sometimes mothers just have to.
- Joy’s mother tells me Joy’s sister was lost to asthma – Joy is silent.
- Joy’s other younger sister is Crystal. She’s a telesales assistant. Joy did the same job for three days before quitting.
- We need to find Crystal to see what Joy’s friends are doing tonight.
- Joy’s mum tells us not to say she said Crystal was at work because she’ll get pissed off.
- I stay in the car when we reach Crystal’s workplace.
- Joy hasn’t spoken to her father for six years – ‘He’s evil and perverted. He sucks away the goodness and turns things to darkness,’ she says knowing she’s being evasive but that’s all she’s prepared to say.
- While studying in Germany Joy wants to spend time with the Basque people high up in the Pennines – ‘I’ll hike up to the mountains with my tent,’ she says.
- She wants to learn their language.
- She starts next week as an au pair for the summer, which is why she doesn’t have a place of her own.
- She also hopes to go back to pumping gas on weekends, ‘If I have $1000 at the end of summer I’ll be happy,’ she says.
- ‘My dad is also giving my $500 a month for study. But I had to take him to court to get that one.’
- Joy says her dad is detached and out of touch. He’s a psychology professor and part Basque. Apparently some of the shepherds emigrated from the native lands of northern Spain to the Pennsylvanian Mountains. And his grandparents put her father in a seminary for ten years from the age of thirteen.
- The ships are in port and there’s a big celebration.
- The night ends up in a gay club called Rendezvous, and Joy warns me on the threshold of entry, “You should act gay.’
- As we walk in Geri Halliwell’s version of It’s Raining Men is met with vigorous approval.
- The cliché hits me with discomfort like witnessing a fat Italian man eating pasta.
- A guy tries to pick me up. ‘You’re so photogenic – I’d love to take your photo.’
- I laugh at how beautifully bold and absurd he sounds – even I would never dare use that pickup line.
- I say I’m not from the area and travelling through.
- ‘It’s a shame,’ he says in a way which makes me nervous – because he doesn’t look in any way deflated or disappointed, and I realise I may have inadvertently loaded an honest reply with promiscuous suggestion.
- The dyke with him reminds me of a younger, more muscular Jamie Lee Curtis. She asks, ‘Who’s your friend, is she single?’
- All I know is she just broke up with a guy.
- I return to Joy who’s amorously surrounded by her gay friends – everyone trying to look like everyone else – clipped hair, head bandana and fatigues.
- I tell her a girl was asking about her.
‘Who?’ - I point out the girl.
- ‘What did you say?’
- I tell her what I said and she gets fucking furious, ‘Why did you say that?’
- I tell her I was being honest.
- ‘What was I spose to say? I know nothing about you.’
- We end up at the door to Jim’s apartment. I’m told he’s manic-depressive. ‘On the fringe,’ Joy says excited. She likes strangeness – attracted to the fringe.
- Jim is woken up by the knock at the door.
- He’s tired and incoherent. It’s 3 am and I don’t blame him.
- We sleep on the floor amid his two placid, vigilant cats, and cigarette smoke so thick and constant and stale it’s like wall paper.
- I use my trousers and jumper as a pillow.
- Jim’s up at 7am with the radio on.
- Images of pictures and thoughts scribbled on pages layer the floor and surfaces of the entire apartment.
- Jim talks like Denis Leary stoned.
- His scribbles look tortured from a disturbed mind – brilliant perhaps, but too incoherent to connect with anyone else.
- Jim needs order – he has rules – rules in his mind which he needs to follow.
- When he wakes up, he gets up.
- He drinks as much coffee as he can stomach.
- I’m still trying to sleep when Joy gets up.
- I hear Jim telling her about how he now drinks a lot of fruit juice – cranberry juice – though it’s been a week and now he’s sick of it and he can’t drink anymore coffee so he’s drinking filtered water.
- I get up because my bladder’s screaming.
- In the bathroom is a children’s book by the toilet for reading called Uncleanliness is a Dirty Dog.
- I greet Jim and Joy at the kitchen table.
- Jim needs time in the morning with music – ‘To gather your thoughts,’ I say and he seems pleased because it’s what he meant to say, ‘Yes, to gather my thoughts,’ he confirms.
- Jim stands and says he better put a t-shirt on now that he has company.
- I sit in the chair Jim was seated in and he tells me so. I apologise and move to the other spare seat.
- Joy starts looking at the scattered papers on the ground.
- Jim returns to the kitchen in a t-shirt, sees Joy and lethargically throws her an ‘Oi, what do you think you’re doin’ lookin’ through my stuff?’
- ‘Can I?’ Joy asks.
- ‘No,’ responds Jim and motions her to sit back down at the table.
- Joy asks Jim to put Tom Waits on the stereo and goes back to sleep a while longer.
- I’m left all alone with Jim drinking water – Jim and his snap-lock sandwich bag filled with few hundred unmarked cigarettes.
- Jesus he smokes a lot – one straight after the other – everyone of his fingertips are stained mustard yellow and blistered.
- I’m curious about these plain cigarettes – ‘Customs?’ I ask, ‘Reservation cigarettes,’ Jim says, ‘No markings,’ he adds.
- Jim wants to start a graphic design company. While talking about his idea he remembers a friend’s advice of applying for work experience and quickly finds a pen to write it down before he forgets again.
- Jim’s going to die frightfully young. He’s 27 with the emphysemic cough of a smoker twice his age.
- Joy wakes up.
- Jim’s sister arrives with clothes from their mum. She tells Jim both his mother and her are away for the week. And she gives him $20. She says it’s his allowance from their mum and holding out it like a carrot repeats, ‘This has to last the week, okay,’ before handing it to him.
- Joy’s hungry so we say goodbye to Jim.
- Joy’s anxious for a shower and suggests it might be possible at Charity’s.
- I hear Charity shouting something about using too much water from behind a closed back door.
- Joy decides to go to the beach and she takes a bar of soap onto Lake Eerie.
- We stop by the children’s clothes store to see if Joy’s mother wants to come to the casino with us.
- I meet Joy’s brother Johnny.
- Joy can’t believe her mother refuses an invitation to the casino.
- Johnny starts talking about the racetrack – he talks like professional.
- Johnny gets their mother excited and they start talking about the racetrack, ‘Go to the track it’s much better.’
- We pass a two storey white colonial house.
- Joy points to the house, ‘That’s where we used to live,’ Joy says, ‘when my parents were together and we had money.’
- Joy is so different yet content in this sprawling permed-mullet boarder town that’s neither Canada nor America, which is possibly the worse place of all to be.
- When Joy and I arrive at the casinos surrounding the Niagara Falls attraction I tell her I had in fact already been there with Annie, a friend from Toronto and I think she’s disappointed.
- I’m feeling relieved to be in such close proximity to a border – with a means of escaping on a bus.
- I wonder if it’s Joy’s contentment that puts her so close to slipping into white trash obscurity.
- I say nothing and feel bad that she paid for my lunch again.
- I want to wish her luck with her plans of studying abroad in Germany – I hope she makes it but a reluctant brooding takes hold, convinced some part of Joy is inescapably suborned to the effete sprawl of Bordertown USA.
- So I simply hug her the way she hugs me – good and firm and hard like a brother and tell her to email me before I say goodbye.
