JOEL THOMAS HYNES comes from a small town called Calvert along the Southern Shore of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. Hemmed in by spruce and rock, a collapsed fishery, a disgraced church—the usual fixings. Nothing much to do for fun but drink and fight and chase girls and fight and smash windows and run from the cops and get stoned and bust into the school after hours and put cigarettes out on each other and steal cars and get caught by the cops and go to court and blame it all on everybody else and start a band.
Time enough to move to the capital city and hunker down in a scuzzy basement apartment with no windows and a nice, quiet family living above who are likely traumatized to this day. Writing away the nights—naive, angst-ridden rants and lyrics and twisted poetry just a few bloodstains short of a prolonged suicide note. Checking in with a psychotic probation officer every Friday morning. Sleeping pills. Beer. Tattoos. Port wine because Jack Kerouac says so. Black, black coffee and Drum tobacco. Girlfriend leaves and Hynes gives chase, manages to make a nasty situation ten times worse.
Back downstairs, alone with the cat. Gets a poem published! Bob Dylan. Roddy Doyle. Irvine Welsh. No heroin in St. John’s. University. “Mature” student. English classes—T. S. Eliot, Philip Larkin, Steinbeck, Layton, Plath, Heaney—the usual fixings. Drinking hot brandy from a coffee cup in the back of the classroom and trying to figure a way under the professor’s skirt. Failing, failing. Friends falling by the wayside.
Downtown! A bar called the Spur. The last of the bona fide drinking holes. Gone now, never coming back. Drinking some more. Nick Cave. Springsteen. Dodging the landlord. Caught stealing a Snickers bar at Wal-Mart. Three days in jail. Serving one-third of his sentence and then trying to walk the straight and narrow. Writing a play. Still failing out of school. Detox. Rehab.
Answers an ad in the paper for a job in Dublin. Gets the job, miraculously. Sent to Dublin for six months to “explore career options.” Wanders the country looking for work with the IRA. Makes an arse of it all. Solidifies his alcoholism.
Back to St. John’s with a haircut and new clothes. Back to the Spur. Things is all changed around. There’s an air of excess. The new millennium breeds panic. Get it in you as quick as ever you can. “Why dont you try bartending, Hynes? You’re here every night anyhow.” Becomes overnight sensation as the angriest bartender in St. John’s. Rakes in the cash and beer tokens. Weed and wraps of blow in his tip jar. Meets a new girl, loses his mind. Detox, auditioning, writing, no more band. Has another go at his play. Spiralling, stumbling, staggering the streets. Hits the pavement at seven in the morning, comes to in the back of an ambulance with a tourniquet on his arm. Lots of blood. Two weeks on a short, short leash. Goes back out into the world and doesnt drink anymore for a long, long time. Head starts to clear up a little.
“Becomes overnight sensation as the angriest bartender in St. John’s.”
Goes back to that play. It keeps getting bigger and bigger until he finally has to admit it’s a book. Finds himself on camera now and again. Tries whole-grain bread for the first time. Eats an avocado. Spends time in the bush in Northern Ontario, treeplanting, while his girlfriend’s belly is swelling with a baby boy. Comes home and hunkers down to be a dad.
Beautiful child born in the fall of that year, changes everything. Finally gets that play produced, called The Devil You Dont Know. Co-written with S. White, starring Hynes and White together. The play is a smash hit, by St. John’s standards. Down to the Dirt, the unpublished novel the play is adapted from, wins the Percy Janes First Novel Award. Killick Press publishes the book a year later. Everything changes again. Another year later, HarperCollins reissues the novel in Canada. French and Serbian translations follow. A U.S. edition. Down to the Dirt is nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Hynes wants that hundred thousand Euros. He wants to go back to Dublin a published author and a happy, sober dad. He doesnt make the shortlist.
“Spends time in the bush in Northern Ontario, treeplanting, while his girlfriend’s belly is swelling with a baby boy.”
Gets a good job performing and writing on a CBC television show called Hatching, Matching and Dispatching. Works on another play. Starts writing another novel. Chelsea Hotel in New York, typically. Cant find no heroin there either. Down to the Dirt becomes a movie script. Hynes finds new accommodations in St. John’s, by himself, but shares his son, of course. Writing, writing. Book, play. Buys a vintage motorcycle. Finds an old abandoned house around the bay and starts fixing it up. Heads off to Los Angeles and wanders Venice Beach. Cant find no heroin there either.
Back to St. John’s. Launches audio book in Brooklyn. Gives worst reading of his life in Boston. Almost dies from mystery virus. Virus renders him deaf for a couple of weeks. While deaf, he cuts up hot peppers and rubs his eyes afterwards. Goes blind. Crawling around on the floor and shouting to his son to come help him get to the sink. Son thinks it’s hilarious that Dad is both deaf and blind. Later that night Hynes takes a shower and gets the hot pepper on his balls too. It burns. Sometimes it surprises him that he’s smart enough to write books.
Finally goes back to Ireland with a whole gang of Newfoundland writers and musicians. Tours the southeast. Lands in Dublin like a madman and completely discredits himself all over again. Same old Hynes, worse now that he’s got a book out.
Second novel comes out in May 2007. Called Right Away Monday. New play, Say Nothing Saw Wood, hits the stage a week later. About the murder of an old woman by a seventeen-year-old boy. Based on a true story. Sold-out run in St. John’s. Hynes begins to turn it into a novel. Down to the Dirt, the movie, is shot in the summer of 2007. Hynes plays the lead. Wicked, intense, very challenging. Back and forth between St. John’s and Toronto. Waiting, waiting for something big to fall from the sky.
“Sometimes it surprises him that he’s smart enough to write books.”
Writer-in-residence at the Drake Hotel in Toronto for a while. No one lines up to get his autograph. Goes out to auditions and pitches TV ideas. A few bites. Grows weary of the concept of a ladder, realizes that you’re only as good as the last time you worked. That you have to keep on going for the rest of your natural life. That you might stop to catch your breath but you cant actually stop to breathe.
Nothing falls from the sky. It seems there’s no commercial appeal in killing a poisoned cat or beating off into a bottle of shampoo. Most people want to talk about the weather. We are all alone.
Starts in on another novel. Teaches creative writing to the inmates at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s. Starts working on a screenplay. Applies for grants. Tries to be a good dad. Tries to take it all a day at a time. Sits down to write an extended bio in the third person, as if someone who knows him really well wrote it, and not him.