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He will live to see them make him a national hero and he will die the only person thinking he had failed. That’s what happens when you personify hopes and dreams in one person. He becomes nothing more than a literary device.
and want to go to a studio and cut a tune and sing hit songs and ride the riddim out of the ghetto but Copenhagen City and the Eight Lanes both too big and every time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto, and you wait.
Preacher says there is a god-shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.
brio,
He said he had evidence that the Company was giving the opposition party money, which was just preposterous considering what bad form it would have been, trusting anybody in the Third World with money.
Woman breed baby, but man can only make Frankenstein.
Me want you understand something good. Me love that man to the max. Me would take a bullet for the Singer. But gentlemens, me can only take one.
He’s from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That’s the problem with midway. Up is everything and down just means all the white people want to party on your street on Sunday night to feel realness. Midway is nowhere.
Thirteen
Gun weight is a different kind of weight. Or maybe it be something else, a feeling that whenever you hold a gun is really the gun holding you.
I need to go home. But I’m outside here, waiting on him. You ever feel like home is the one place you can’t go back to? It’s like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I’ll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can’t go back because the house expects something from you.
—Aw come on, don’t bust my balls like that. It’s not like I’m some goddamn tourist. I know the real Jamaica. —Good for you. I’ve lived here all my life and haven’t found the real Jamaica yet.
I’m
pinko
After a few days, it wasn’t as if I felt I belonged, nothing as cheesy as that, but I did get the feeling, this sensation or maybe it was just a belief that said, You can stop running now. No,
To understand the ghetto, to make it real, one should forget seeing it. Ghetto is a smell. Sometimes it’s something sweet: baby powder women wear on their chests. Old Spice, English Leather and Brut cologne. The rawness of recently slaughtered goat, the pepper and pimento in goat’s head soup. Sour chemicals in the detergent, cocoa butter, carbolic acid, lavender in the soap, fermenting pee and aging shit running down the side of the road. Pimento again in jerk chicken. Cordite from a recently fired gun, poop in baby baggies, the iron in blood congealed from street kill, still there after the
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denouement
You’re so pretty when you’re angry, I say, anticipating the look before I get it. Except I don’t get it. She doesn’t even look at me, right beside her, trying to grab her hand. I think about repeating it, but don’t.
The thing about staying out here all day, the really scary part of this is just how easy it is. My mother sings One day at a time sweet Jesus, and even Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it’s some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way to not live at all is to take life one day at a time. It’s the way I’ve discovered to not do a damn thing. If you can break a day down into quarters, then hours, then half hours, then minutes, you can chew down any stretch of time to bite size. It’s like dealing with losing a man. If you can bear it for one minute, then you can swallow two,
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will only sputter, and runs through the gate. His cheek burns on the right and his temple explodes on the left. The second bullet hits him
Still you can never trust a man who look at everybody as replaceable, from wife to gunman enforcer.
This is a messy job, the real work come with the cleanup. Can’t bring in a man like Tony Pavarotti. Man with those skills rare and you have to use them again and again. Some tool make for repeated use. And some tool, you use once then destroy.
Racism here is sour and sticky, but it goes down so smooth that you’re tempted to be racist with a Jamaican just to see if they would even get it. But the Singer’s house is just standing there.
I want to say that buddy, I’ve been to Rose Town but that’s just white people mistake number ten: being proud about visiting somewhere Jamaicans would never be proud to visit.
And even when he rhyming ism with schism he still expect you to talk back, for is conversation we having, people. The reggae is nothing more than a man talking, reasoning with another man, conversating to and fro, as I would say.
January
That some people do nothing but dream and some people do nothing but act and that both good and bad. People like Josey have no vision, people like me have no drive. I’ve been thinking and I’ve been talking and I’ve been showing people a new reasoning that is just about we and only we.
Jamaicans are so unflappable, they might as well be Minnesotans.
I’d say away from his roots but then I’d become just another white man who has the presumption to think he can school black people on their roots.
I take a pad out of my knapsack and look at the empty page. You’d think I would have written down a million questions to ask him when Lansing told me he had an in. Now I’m at his gate and I’m all out of things to say. I know there’s a story and I know I want to know it, but now I’m wondering if this is what I want. I can’t figure out if I just got a sudden case of the chickenshits or if I am slowly realizing that even though the Singer is the center of the story that it really isn’t his story. Like there’s a version of this story that’s not really about him, but about the people around him,
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I don’t like Demus He look at you too long Like he writing something about you in him head
mouth I clamp my mouth shut the car pass with a rattle and roll and splash in the nasty water running down the gully waking up the rats so many rats I want to scream and aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee nobody ’round to hear me aieeeeeeeee like a girl now me gun missing I can’t find it the rats took it they going tear me skin off and eat my toes and so much garbage in the gully: Brillo box, corn flakes box, FAB detergent, reconstituted flour enriched flour plastic bags dead rat trapped in plastic bags live rats coming out of milk boxes biscuit boxes running over soft drink bottles cooking oil bottles
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look
because the stink so stink all you can think is that the stink must be easing into you like water through a strainer and now you must be stink too. And I just want to wash it off, I just want to wash the whole thing off but the water running through the gully stink too. No. Now I have to think straight. I have to think like a thinking man. I have to get out of Kingston. I have to go. I have to go somewhere, somewhere people never talk about, somewhere like Hanover, who the r’asscloth know what going on in Hanover?
Me hand behind me back I hearing earthworms and ants I hearing ants they going bite and Pavarotti start filling up the grave nooooo nooooo noooooo mud raining dirt raining kicking and kicking and kicking five feet not six feet under can’t get up can’t get up mud and dirt and dust to dust and rocks and one rock break me nose and rock bullet me eye and no more toe and noooo sweep with you head sweep it off sweep off the dirt blow hard blow hard blow hard no no no no no no no no no no no no no blow hard can’t blow gag Jesus Superman Spiderman Captain America stare hard and superpower goin’ come
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You’re wondering if I am with them or not, if they can see me or not, and if I am not real then this is not real, and even a procession towards death is just a metaphor for something else. You have never heard the word metaphor.
And he took his hat off too like he was some cowboy and said, Howdy I’m Chuck. You’re sure you not Bill from Sales who howdy’d me only three nights ago? I thought but didn’t say. Chuck. It’s like Chip, Pat, Buck or Jack. I just love these one-punch American names, they sound like apple pie and easy money and you utter them once with so little effort and you’re done. You get a yup, a howdy, a what’s shaking lil’ lady and suddenly you feel the need to tell them that no, this is not one of those local ladies who is not wearing a panty underneath her dress for your convenience, but thanks for the
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Two years since the election. Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same. You can’t change the country, but maybe you can change yourself. I don’t know who’s thinking that. I’m done with thinking, quite frankly.
He never trusted the Company to begin with. Still you gotta admire the simplicity of his worldview, that the world is populated by people with him or against him, and shit I’ve never even met the guy.
Because
You gotta wonder: How does something manage to be surprising and inevitable at the same time?
—Oh yeah, all that packing and saying goodbye. Wonderful. Poor President Ford. He was on the fucking
This is how close to the road is the sea, how close we is to the sea and Pavarotti still driving, cooler than coolness’ mother.
The bars say, There’s no way out, just cease and settle and if you ever plan to travel you better tap inside your head and tell it to start traveling. This must be how man end up reading book they otherwise wouldn’t read, and write book too. But the bars also say, Nobody can come in and stop the learning, so maybe a learning is a visitation in your head and maybe a jail make you still in the spirit so that you ready to hear it, because gentlemens, nobody—and I mean nobody—can learn nothing if them not ready to listen.
Tony Pavarotti driving
My gun rubbing my back, still warm from the shot, the barrel down right below the belt, two man who was just jury lasso the other two man like they is both cow they dragging back to the ranch and still the women stay, and watch. I watch them watching it. I want to know what would make a woman watch the evil man do. Maybe if woman don’t witness judgment then judgment didn’t happen. But Papa, you is a thinking man, me woman say.
Copenhagen City and the Eight Lanes playing domino and hugging and kissing and lovey-doving like I didn’t kill your brother, father and grandfather three years ago. What is peace? Peace is my blowing a little breeze on my daughter forehead when she sweat in her sleep. This don’t name peace, this name stalemate. I learn that word from Doctor Love.
Six
Doctor Love tell me a stale thing a year ago, to keep my friends close and my enemies closer. Stale as dog shit, yes, but every time you take a step higher that tip turn fresh. After all, the hunter don’t shoot the bird that fly low.
But
