- 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 nowhere to stay the night and is nursing a boozy day-after head under a white sheet on Charity’s couch when I meet her again after she invited me to come stay with her while riding the 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 a grand at the end of summer, I’ll be happy,’ she says. ‘My dad is also giving me five hundred 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 10 years from the age of 13.
- The ships are in port and there’s a big celebration for the Blessing of the Fleet.
- 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 deterred, and I realise I may have inadvertently loaded an honest reply with promiscuous suggestion.
- The woman 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, flannel, 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 amidst his two placid, vigilant cats, and cigarette smoke so thick and acrid and constant and stale, it’s plaqued the wall yellow.
- 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 like it’s a paint job.
- Jim talks acid-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 scribbles and doodles 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?’
- ‘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 — every one of his fingertips are stained mustard 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, so content and comfortable in this sprawling permed-mullet bordertown limbo between Canada and the USA — a tacky aberrance that doesn’t feel like either country.
- 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 will Joy’s acquiescence to what’s familiar jeopardise her vision of travel and escape; will the sideshow of Niagara Falls topple her over the precipice of white-trash vices and obscurity.
- I say nothing and feel bad that she insists on paying 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 pensive presage 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.
