Joey

We’re in the last hours of my promotion on The Rift, so if you want a copy for a mere 99 cents, go forth now and find it on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords.

There is a character in The Rift who is one of my very few attempts to draw someone I’ve met in real life.  The character would be Jean-Joseph Malraux of Pointe Coupee Parish, LA, the captain of a Mississippi towboat, and who a great many readers immediately recognized as Joey “Big Reel” Grillot of New Orleans.

I describe him in The Rift as a short, bandy-legged man with walrus mustache and a “barking Acadian accent.”  The real-life Joey was a Cajun, a member of the Stage Hands Union, and an an outspoken devotee of the cinema and of movie soundtracks.  He also worked as a taxi driver, and I can’t imagine a more perfect occupation for him.  If you wanted a colorful driver to take you around town, he’d be the person you’d ask for— though he might interrupt his tourist monologue with a lengthy appreciation of Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Jason and the Argonauts.”  (In the novel, he rescues my refugee protagonists, feeds them a good meal, and then subjects them to hours of “Doctor Who” videos, with commentary.)

I encountered him at various science fiction conventions, where his cheerful, outspoken personality was very much in evidence.  He’d organize 24-hour film festivals, and bring the movies from his own collection.

Joey lived in the Ninth Ward, though I heard that sometimes, when work as a stagehand got scarce, he lost his place and lived in his car along with his projector and his precious reels of film.  He had a precarious sideline showing his movies in (mostly poor, mostly black) church and community halls.

I think I met Joey only once after The Rift was published, and he had a grin on his face that told me he’d heard that I’d put him in a book.  I asked him if he’d read The Rift yet, and he said he hadn’t got to it.  (It occurs to me now that maybe a thirty-dollar hardback was maybe a little beyond his means, and that I should have just sent him one.)

Hurricane Katrina washed him out of his place in Arabi near the Lower Ninth, and I heard he’d relocated to Atlanta.  I may be guessing here, but I’m thinking that he never quite found his feet again, though he did find his way back to Louisiana.  He died on Christmas morning, 2007, of a one-two punch of heart problems and double pneumonia.  I find out from his obit that he was 62.

When we last see Cap’n Joey in The Rift, he’s surfing his towboat along the face of a tsunami while playing a Bernard Herrmann score in his mind.

I’d like to think that Joey would have loved the movie.