Then there was Joyce.

I never knew her last name or even the spelling of her first.

I don’t think she actually had an official title.

We called her Joycee.

She could neither read nor write.

As a runner, she could make or break you.

If she wasn’t on your side, you were fucked.

She actually carried things on her head all the time in a bright dress.

Joycee was a Jamaican woman of almost indeterminate age and an accent with the viscosity of syrup.   It took me a long week to even begin to understand her.  Medium height with a pronounced pot belly and a deep chuckle.

Despite her latent power she was almost entirely benevolent yet still a powerful ally.

My first day in the magic castle I misunderstood her so completely that I walked straight into the only public women’s bathroom and there stood Sheri Lazerus.  She was adjusting her stretch pants, approaching the mirror and looked at me like I was a serial rapist on fire.

“Wrong door honey”.

My face was hot.  Fuck me I was embarrassed.

I would clean that bathroom for years.

I was off to a brilliant start.

What I understand now is Joycee was directing me to the runners closet next door.

What Joycee did, if she had your back, is cover your ass and keep you from looking stupid.  She could do everything three times as fast and way better.  If you didn’t cross her, if you respected her, she was capable of delivering you into good favor.  She worked hard.  A sweet and kind woman.  We became friends once she decided I wasn’t a fool.  It took some time because I was a fool.  I loaned her a few bucks here and there and never asked for it back.  When her sentence started with “Grant me a favor” in that humid dialect, I knew she was about to hit me up for something.  She sold me shitty Mexican pot now and then.  Occasionally she sent me home with food.  Good food.  I sometimes drove her home in my shitbox VW Bug to an awful and dangerous neighborhood instead of her taking the bus.

She was always happy.  She was almost always smiling.  It was a sad day if she wasn’t.

She ran the grill out behind the studios on Friday afternoons.

She cooked like a mom.

Just about everyone respected, trusted and appreciated her.

We were rarely at odds.  She hated it when I brushed my teeth in the runner’s closet sink.  The same place we washed the dishes for all five studios every night and the fruit for every control room each morning.  She reserved her most furious anger for when the night shift runners would get drunk and high and throw all the dishes away instead of washing them but that’s a story for another chapter.

My favorite memory of Joycee is from one early morning when I was still on the day shift.  It had been one of those nights where all the rooms went down late and the entire complex was in chaos.  I walked in and just about nothing had been done.  The night runners cheesed it.  It was ugly.  The second studio on the right after the lethal door is Stuidio A.  I was late and and probably hungover and  Joycee is already there.  We start picking up trash and collecting dishes.  I go for a cart and come back.  We were loading it up,  filling trash bags back and forth when she makes a happy noise.  I look at her and she is beaming.  In one hand is an ashtray and in the other a big fat Jeff Porcaro kind of roach.

I put on a Toni Childs CD and we fire it up.   All of the sudden it’s an easy Sunday morning on the bridge of a starship.  Beyond the console and a wall of angled glass, is the basketball gymnasium live room lit by a sun that began by banging through the only window in the entire place and down a dark hallway to just then, politely invade the east loading bay doors of Studio A. Everything is fresh and glowing.  Time passes.  We are sharing the record, laughing, singing and dancing a little as we lounge.

I love that record to this day.

Time passes and we’re back on our feet and getting it done because urgency has replaced joy.

The rest of the morning she is beside me and apart from me but we are of the same mind.  Toni Childs in our heads, doing whatever we have to do to make it all acceptable before everyone else sees it.

Saving ourselves.

One day years later, Joycee retired.  We had a big party with presents and food and it was the first and only time I ever saw her cry.  As far as I know she went back to Jamaica to open a restaurant.

It’s the last anyone ever heard of her that I know.

I can still see her and hear her in my head.

I miss her a lot.

Drinks for my friends.

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