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Rate This Contest Entry: Contest: June 30th, 2005 Author: Lynne Lewis Joi to the World Sept. 28, 2004 Today marks the end of an era. I knew her as Joi. Her real name was Harriet but Joi was her working name and I called her Joi to the World. Now, that came from a disgruntled ex-lover, trying to bring her down in front of me. And knowing her, I'm sure he had an axe to grind, but he should have known it would take more than that to tarnish her in my eyes. I met her in the Oklahoma City city jail. She was twenty-seven, or so she said, but even then, there was at least a hundred years of rough road under her wheels. She came in late at night and the slamming of iron on iron woke me up. I was there for an overnight stay, the first of many, and would get my release the next morning. I was twenty-one and nowhere near as worldly as I acted. She was full of contraband Seconal she'd swallowed when they busted her and wobbling around the cell cursing in tongues. She bounced off every wall in the joint before she found a bunk and I thought she'd never shut up and go to sleep. Jails are noisy places. You learn to ignore a lot of the crap that goes on around you there. But there was no ignoring her. I'd been in the life for a while by then, and thought I'd seen it all. But I'd never seen anything like that. The first thing she ever told me about herself was : 'I bitch.' No explanation, no apology. Just a simple two-word personality summary. I could take it or leave it. You have to hang around and find out what a person who tells you something like that will do next. It's a rule. We were friends for thirty-five years. And she was true to her word. Joi was just that. A Joy. If you could get past the bitching and the drugs and the everlasting bulls*** she dragged around with her everywhere she went. She taught me the ropes, ran off any number of would-be pimps and made me laugh. When I overdosed on Tuinal in nineteen seventy three she was the one who pushed and pulled me into the emergency room and flagged down an orderly. The protocol for overdoses in those days was to leave them where you found them. Some kinder souls might drop you off on the hospital grounds, but there wasn't an abundance of kindness among junkies. Being seen in the company of an overdose, especially if you were an already well-known police character and a user yourself, was an automatic trip to jail. Nobody cared about anybody that much. But not Joi. She swept/staggered into the ER with half of me over her shoulder the other half dragging the ground like a moth-eaten, better-days-seen mink stole, shouting obscenities and playing me off as a flu victim. She raised so much hell they treated me, just to get rid of her probably, and nobody ever got around to filing a police report. She never told me what or who she did to get the special treatment, but I woke up in a soft hospital bed instead of a jail bunk. Of course, the first thing I saw and heard when I came around was Joi, hovering about three inches from my face, already well into the drug safety rant she'd been practicing since I'd keeled over two days earlier. I remember very clearly the first words out of my mouth when I was met with that unpleasant sight, "Oh, Lord! Take me now!" She hit me in the knee with a bed pan. True story. There are a million other true stories about Joi and maybe what I'm doing here is writing them down, because they're worth telling. We survived those wilder years she and I. We got older and squarer, or as square as one gets when one has seen too much, and were separated by time and distance. We drifted apart, like old friends often do. I got married and divorced, traveled halfway cross country and learned how not to be self-destructive. She was hit by a car in seventy-nine and suffered the rest of her life. I wasn't there and I should have been. Should have taken care of her like she always took care of me. But it was almost ten years later when I found out. And she let me hear about it. Did she ever. Her body was busted up, but her attitude was intact. I caught up to her again three years ago, just in time as it turned out. We visited back and forth, flying in for a week between Houston and Ohio, bed-sitting, turning off the phone and cutting up old times, every six months or so until today. This morning she died. In f****** Massilion, Ohio of all the unlikely places. I always figured Joi to wind up on a beach in Waikiki. At least we had these last few years. When they bury her, they will also bury the last vestige of the wild thing I was. A person I wouldn't recognize now if I passed her on the street. My past is officially interred. All that's left is this old woman who thought Joi hung the moon and never properly thanked her for showing a dumb kid how to stay alive on the mean streets. The Angel of Death will have his hands full tonight. You don't find friends like Joi everyday and I'm going to miss her like crazy. I always thought I'd be the first to go. And don't worry J, honey. I'm gonna write the stories. I promise. people have rated it so far. is the current average. |
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