CIVILIAN . MORGAN, JOEY

male

pansexual

twenty-six

20th april 1987

american

english and
patchy high-school spanish

joey

0.5

CIVILIAN

N/A

N/A

N/A

sam

n/a

medium

tanaka tom from durarara!!

Places to live in LA for poorly-paid pizza delivery boys are small, shared and cheap.  At best, they're sometimes even clean.  Joey would argue that he's not just a poorly-paid pizza delivery boy as he is also a comic artist, but despite his best attempts - well.  That doesn't really factor in, given that he makes no money from it.  In fact, hosting his webcomic privately is actually a drain on resources.  Some might say it's a pretty stupid drain on resources, too, seeing as barely anybody reads it.

The point is, though, that he maybe isn't living in as nice a place as he'd like, but it could be way worse.  It's a little grubby, but more so in a homely way than in a disgusting one - more 'always at least two plates in the sink' than 'hairs in the shower'.  His roommates aren't drug dealers or, as far as he can tell, any kind of criminal.

Well, unless you count downloading music.  Joey doesn't.  Joey wouldn't have any music if it wasn't for that particular indiscretion.

The pizza place, predictably, doesn't pay all that well.  He can understand it, really.  It's any easy job, and pretty much anybody could do it.  He likes driving the company's rickety old bike around, and he likes filling out the crazy little requests people sometimes put in with their orders.  You get to see a lot of different people, but it's so brief that you also get to spend a lot of time alone - and that suits Joey Morgan just fine.

Oh - but if you're his mom?  He's waiting tables at a local Italian place.  When he told her about the pizza delivery thing, she was horrified to hear that he was putting around on a motorbike; fearful for his safety, whether rightly or wrongly, she insisted that he quit and get something 'safer'.  He loves his mom and of course he wanted to give her the peace of mind, but... well.  You have to draw the line somewhere, right?

Joey is mixed-race; his father was African-American and his mother is American - or more distantly, from Italian stock.  When he was a kid, his mom used to say his skin was coffee-coloured, but for years he thought she was saying 'toffee-coloured'.  A few Christmases ago he finally admitted this, and it had her in tears.  He was bemused for a while until she eventually managed to choke out - "Aw, Joey, you are sweet."

He's not sure he's over that one just yet.

Maybe the most distinctive thing about Joey's appearance is his hair.  He wears it in dreadlocks that are usually kept shoulder-length, but he has been known to leave them longer.  Often, particularly if he's drawing or cooking or similar, he'll tie it up to keep it out of his way.  He's had a few people give him funny looks in his time, and he'd tell you freely that there's a great deal of dreadlock prejudice out there, but he wouldn't change them for the world.  They're just... him.

Clothes, however, he's not so interested in.  He'll throw on anything comfortable, tending to prefer simple t-shirts and cargo pants.  He's not above fandom shirts and the like; one t-shirt he does appreciate having in his closet is an oversized triforce shirt he was given for his birthday last year.  His friends are probably long since bored of seeing that one.  Buy him another shirt, ok?

If he remembers, you'll sometimes catch him wearing a simple pair of glasses too, but his eyesight isn't so bad, so it's really easy for him to leave them on his bedside table - and only slightly less easy to leave them up on top of his head.  If he left them on a chair and sat on them right now, it wouldn't be the first time.

Or the second.

Joey is the kind of person that you would believe accidentally tripped and fell into every aspect of his life.  Warm and happy but arguably forgettable, he is uncommonly laid-back about almost everything other people are usually stressed out by.  Job's badly paid and his career's going nowhere?  Oh, well.  Dangerously rickety work bike is, well... dangerously rickety?  Never mind - can't be helped.

This also extends over to having pretty slow reactions to things.  They don't immediately trouble him, so it takes him a while to even register them.  In the last apartment he lived in, it took him nearly two weeks to realise that someone had changed his shower gel to a kids' glittery pink one as a prank, and only then because he broke his usual automated routine and dropped the bottle.

There are, of course, exceptions.  He always notices changes in friends as long as they're significant enough - expecting him to notice your new mascara may be a little much, but a haircut or a piercing or a new eyeshadow technique are things he'll most likely spot.  He's only good at spotting changes in friends because he pays such close attention to them; the rest of his life doesn't really get that much close attention, so why would he notice if someone drank the last of the beer, and whether his socks match?  Those kind of details aren't important.  Noticing a difference in a friend, however, can make them really happy.

Of course, it can also mean he knows to check on them if it's not a good change.  He can spot the difference between 'casual day' and 'not taking care of myself' in someone he knows well.

This attention to detail may also have something to do with the fact that his go-to for doodling when he has nothing else to work on is his friends.  He'll often give little doodles as unexpected mini-gifts, whether they're two-minute pencil sketches or two-hour, fully coloured and inked figures.

It's all fine and well being disorganised and distracted in your own time, of course, but not on other people's.  He almost lost that pizza job of his once when he stopped to photograph a building ready for demolition and completely lost track of time.  He's missed more doctor's appointments and the like than he can count - and he got several detentions for missing detentions when he was at high school.  Figures, right?

Friends he's less likely to skip out on, but chances are higher that he'll turn up late than they are that he'll turn up on time.  He doesn't mean to keep you waiting; it's not a decision he makes.  He just has it in his head that it'll only take him x amount of time to get ready and get to where you're meeting, and... well.  He's not all that good at estimating.  It's never hours, but it's definitely something that's caused him a few frosty looks in the past.

He's also pretty deluded.  That laidback attitude, after all, does not extend to his comic book art.  That means the world to him, and he's totally convinced that he's going to earn his whole living off the back of it one day.  Unfortunately, the truth is that his ideas aren't really that interesting; they're just rehashed versions of things that were popular when he was a kid, and he can't write for toffee.  The standard of art is good, so he might have a job in illustration or animation one day if he goes down the right career path.

Comic books, though?  No.  Not likely.

Finally, he has a hard time with authority.  This isn't to say he'll scream and shout at people who are trying to tell him what to do; it isn't like that at all.  He just assesses every individual as they come, and respects them as he sees fit.  If someone is meant to be in control of him and yet is acting in a way he finds abrasive, well... he's not really inclined to let them control him.  Again, it's not screaming or shouting; it's just a quiet, even polite refusal to do their thing.

In short, Joey is the guy at a protest that tries to have a Logical, Reasonable Conversation with the scared-into-aggression police officer and ends up in handcuffs repeating the same bleated questions over and over - 'why am I being detained?' and 'what's your officer number?' and 'why have you physically restrained me?' in the calmest voice possible.

This isn't exactly good for him.

He isn't able to decipher this for himself, but he's also just plain difficult to be friends with sometimes.  Generosity and kindness aside, he's not exactly easy to be around a lot of the time.  Distractable, twitchy and even childlike, it might sometimes feel like being a babysitter when you hang around with him.  He needs reminding not to forget his keys, or to leave his wallet behind on the restaurant table; he'll just stop in the middle of the street and ogle at a shop window, usually if it's selling art supplies.  They're little things, but they're irritating.

And for a boyfriend or girlfriend or partner of indeterminate gender?  Even worse.  They won't take precedence over his friends, and they certainly won't take precedence over his art.  That's the main thing - his priority is the comic.  If he's not done on the page, he's going to get on with that and he's going to ask if you can reschedule that date, or if you wouldn't mind going to your aunt's birthday party alone.

Needless to say, long-term relationships are far and few between.  He's very fond and affectionate, though, when he's focused.  At least there's that.

The Morgan family was a single-mom, single-son household from when Joey was two years old.  He never really knew his dad, then; he's out there somewhere, but neither of them are too bothered about making contact.  After all, it's his dad that Joey inherited that nonchalance from.  Between them, it might never happen.  It was an amiable split between his parents, though; there's never a bad word spoken about him by his mom.

In fact, there's hardly a bad word spoken about anyone by Joey's mom, and that was the way it was all the way through his childhood.  He grew up with her calming influence encouraging him to see the very best in everyone wherever possible - except politicians.  She never really liked them very much.  He guesses he's inherited that, too; for him it's less of a hatred than an apathy.  He'll vote for the sake of wanting the lesser of two evils, but he doesn't like or trust any of them.

His mom is a cleaner at one of the local hospitals - and local, it's worth noting, is Fresno, CA.  She loves her job and always has, but it was difficult hours for raising Joey with.  Because of this, as a young child he also had a decent amount of assistance from his mom's best friend Agnes - well.  At the time he thought she was her best friend, because she never told him otherwise.  It was only when he came out to her that he found out Agnes had been her girlfriend.  She had been worried, she said, that she'd scare him.

She couldn't have, though.  Wouldn't have.  He's always adored his mom.  He really liked Agnes, too.

School wasn't easy, because he barely managed to pay attention.  He'd say it wasn't his fault, but there's no ADHD causing it; it's just his personality.  On the whole, he wasn't good at anything that didn't have a solid, black-and-white answer; he struggled with History and English.  Art was really the only thing he excelled at, but at least things like Math and Science he could manage.  With subjects like that, there was a process to learn, and once you had the process you could find the answer.  He liked that completeness; he liked that guarantee of an end.

You could slave over an essay for hours and still never be done.

It ought to be said that he didn't actually enjoy his Art lessons.  He did well at them, but it wasn't the kind of thing he was interested in; his teacher had no patience for any kind of cartoon-work, and that meant much of what Joey wanted to produce was off-limits.  Either that or he could hand it in and get a lecture about channelling his creativity into a medium that was more suitable and easier to appreciate.

As far as Joey's concerned, comics are the easiest way to appreciate art.  They're the most widespread, mainstream pieces of art in circulation.  Who else circulates that many copies of their drawings on a mass level, and entertains people on that scale?  Of course, it's not about printed comics for Joey anymore, but he still stands by the principle.  Comics are easy to appreciate.  It just so happens that it's easy for the leyperson to appreciate rather than the snobby failed artist at community college.

The move to LA at age 20 was supposed to be a strike of independence after two years of... well, barely anything but a few odd jobs waiting tables.  He'd never really liked Fresno, and with LA so close by - well.  He couldn't pass up the chance to try it out there.  He found an apartment with a spare room, hooked himself up with a job, and off he flew.  So maybe he has to scrape money together for rent, and maybe he has to take on extra shifts if he wants to afford groceries, and maybe his boss occasionally boxes up a pizza and insists that he take it home and eat - but he's out on his own and making it work, and sometimes he can even afford to go home and surprise his mom with a visit.  Who cares about the chickenscratch details?