A month with Jay
In September 2023 I had just been fired from a customer job I didn’t like, and I’d been wanting to pivot from portrait photography to documentary photography. I texted Jay, who’d been living in his van on and off for a few years, and moving around the US and Canada, and I asked him if he was leaving Montreal anytime soon. A week later we were heading to Alberta and BC. These are the photos from that trip.
Three hours after we left westward from Montreal, Jay noticed something was wrong with the brakes. After checking for leaks and finding nothing conclusive, he got on the phone with his dad Don. Following Don's advice we bought a few supplies and ran a few more diagnoses.
Jay spent months at a time living in this van with his friend and band member, as they went busking around Canada and the US. On my trip with Jay I got a taste of what that must've been like -eating a lot of the same things everyday, sleeping in a 50cm wide corridor between the bench and the counter, having nothing but rags and a bit of soap to wash up, and having to wait for rest stops and park porta potties to go to the bathroom. It's a testament to the price they were willing to pay to be able to make a living from busking.
After driving on backroads for a couple of days to avoid using the malfunctioning brakes on the highway, Don told Jay and me to leave Kingston and meet him in Guelph, which he would be flying to from Alberta for a conference -he would help us fix the brakes once we got the part that he told us we needed.
It was beautiful seeing Don and Jay reunite after having been apart for more than a year. They caught up while working for two and a half hours on replacing the brake booster. Don was beaming the whole time, and kept saying how thankful he was that he was able to help Jay last-minute, thousands of kilometres from home.
On the road with Jay I often heard him talk about the best places to park a van to avoid having the police being called on us, and about the importance of covering up the windows so as not to attract any attention, so when I was walking back to the van one morning and spotted a lady talking to Jay, the last thing I expected was to see him eating from a plate of apple pie she'd handed him. She invited us in to her apartment and served us more pie. While she and her brother, a school bus driver, kept peeling and cutting apples, they talked to us about their ancestry, their pets, and their apple-pie making business.
Crossing the Canada-US border is always a source of worry for Jay, so he prepped me on what questions to expect. Thankfully, the ferry crossing went much more smoothly and quickly than we anticipated, as the border agents didn't search the van like they'd done with him in the past.
Here Jay is unrolling his long poem in the Chicago public library. Not long before we left Montreal, he had started writing and selling street poems in Washington Square Park until one day, in a show of protest against artists getting kicked out from Washington Square Park, a decades-long go-to spot for buskers, he started writing this 9000-line poem on one long continuous scroll of paper for 9 straight days.
Wisconsin, in a forest by a rest stop, somewhere along the highway heading to Minnesota. Every time Jay unrolled his poem, whether to type it or read it, he worried about it getting torn, but he doesn't regret any of the evidence of the poem's interaction with the world, like the autumn leaf marks, the random tears, and even the bike tyre treads now visible along its length.
When planning this trip out west, Jay said he wanted at all cost to avoid the monotony of driving through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, so we drove through a few American states instead. The gas was also much cheaper in the states than it was on the other side of the border -a welcome fact for us living on a tight budget.
Jay insisted we stop by the Mall of America, the largest mall in the western hemisphere, to record some more footage of him reading his poem in striking places. When Jay started writing his poem, he hadn't given too much thought into what the topic would be, but about two thirds of the way in, he knew he was writing about busking, about the accessibility of art, and about how busking and street art follow the tradition of the bard and the vagrant, going from town to town, doing odd jobs, spreading news, performing music, and generally entertaining locals in exchange for pay.
In stark contrast to the image of the travelling busker he portrays, Jay has a large following on Tik Tok -300k followers who watch his comedic reels -bits, he likes to call them. Jay would jump at the slightest opportunity to film himself so he can post, daily, potentially viral content on social media. He needed his following after all, so he could sell merch, make money from personalized Christmas poems, and guarantee that when he would launch a kickstarter campaign, it would get funded completely. Right after our trip, his most recent kickstarter campaign to publish his poem got fully funded, and he printed and shipped the books all over the world. In the background of the photo you'll see, Salem Sue, the largest Holstein cow in the world, and Jay's van, Tony Two-Tone, named after the mismatch between his original white colour and that of the white paint used to cover up his rusty spots.
New Salem, North Dakota, under Salem Sue, the largest Holstein cow in the world. Probably the highlight of our drive through four American states.
Every night after making dinner, we covered every window to offer ourselves some privacy, and every night I read a few pages from a book that Jay lent me -Last Call at the Hotel Imperial -a history book about American foreign correspondents in Europe and Asia during the 1920's, 30's, and 40's. It tackled, among other things, their struggle with the shortcomings of 'neutral' journalism, and the importance of the nuance between neutral journalism and objective journalism, especially at a time when atrocities were being committed in Europe, while Americans watched as they hesitated to get implicated.
Montana, by a gas station.
I was touched by Jay and his older brother's reunion. Their hug lasted a full minute as Jay's mother Shauna and I, watched.
As I got to know Jay's parents, I could immediately tell Jay got his sarcasm and his wit from his mother, and his amazing improvisation and storytelling skills from his dad -skills he puts to good use when interacting with people on the street, in order to sell them personalized poems.
Other than being a great mechanic -he's built great cars from scratch- Jay's dad has been a pastor and a life coach. I watched him listen to his son talk about his projects. He also took the deepest and sincerest of interests in my projects, as though I were family.
Here, Don is giving a moving speech at a fundraising event for a group of Albertan women who do social work among the adolescents of local indigenous communities. He raised several thousands that night, just as he had a few days prior, when took on the challenge of a walkathon.
I learnt a lot from Jay, living with him in the van. He showed me, among other things, how to properly chop wood for the fires we made by Lake Abraham in Alberta.
More importantly than teaching me to chop firewood, or teaching me the ins and outs of living in a van, Jay unknowingly taught me the importance of constantly making art, without worrying about "making it". At the other end of the perfectionism spectrum, his philosophy is built on the belief that it is faster and better to learn by doing imperfectly, than it is to wait until something is perfect before putting it out there.
When Jay was a kid, he started doodling in his school books, so his mom bought him a notebook especially for doodling. When he filled that notebook he felt sad, until his mom explained to him that there was no limit to the number of notebooks she could buy him. This is notebook #36. Jay now fills his notebooks with doodles, poems, plans, sketches, bits, and any thoughts he wants to develop before showing the world.
The view from atop Tony Two-Tone, which Jay bought for 1000$ when he was 19, and transformed over a year. Jay learned how to do everything himself, including the installation of a fridge, a stove, a heater, a water pump for his sink, a kinetic energy recovery system in his brakes, and these solar panels, which power all the appliances in the van.
Before he was writing poems in the street, Jay was a street musician. He picked up the guitar again at Adam's request and played him a song of his choosing. Jay doesn't regret leaving his street music behind; it is much harder work, the hours are longer, and the pay is much worse than it is for street poets.
At Lotus L. Kang’s ‘In Cascades’, at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. About ten days after our visit to this gallery, Jay was driving me to the airport. On our one hour drive there, I asked him about his future plans for the poem, beyond trying to get it published, or publishing it himself. I was glad to learn that he was considering making more performance-art type pieces, the way he had done with the long poem in Washington Square Park.
The last time we stopped to photograph and film Jay, in BC, on our way back to Jay's hometown in Alberta