The Origin of Waves (8 page)

I am an Amurcan. A Yankee. You seen my gold credit cards, when I showed you my family, didn’t you? A man can live there. Amurca is Amurca. And the South is the best goddamn place for a man from the Wessindies, for a man like me to live. Not that my life was always like that, a bed o’ roses. No sirree! Shit, I remember bathing with only cold water in the house, in the goddamn tap! For four goddamn months. And that wasn’t in the summer neither! Motherfuckers disconneck the fucking heat. Motherfuckers disconneck the hot water. Every goddamn convenience a man needs to live conveniently by, the motherfuckers
offed
. Heat and hotness, and lights. Don’t talk about the telephone! But I grit my goddamn teeth, swallowed my pride, and I stood under-neat’ that goddamn cold shower every morning at six, during the week. I stood like Hercules under that goddamn cold shower every morning at six as I say, “Fuck it!” and
dared
the motherfuckers to beat me, or have me buckle-under to them. Beat
me?
A man that grow up in Barbados, in the Wessindies, near Paynes Bay, by the beach where we had as role-models all those fishermen and men so strong and brave and goddamn poor that they would look a goddamn shark in the eye and say, ‘Motherfucker, I am the man! You is mine!’ Never. Never-once in my whole lifetime near the beach with that rubber tube we used to lay on in the sea,
never once
did I see any of those men, my father, your uncle, your father, my uncle, and a million cousins, second-cousins, third-cousins, cousins ten-times remove,
never-goddamn-once did I hear that any o’ those men beg for mercy! Did you?
Beg for mercy?
I stood under that goddamn frozen shower, grit my teeth, and call the motherfuckers ‘motherfuckers’! But I did not beg for mercy.”

“Strong men.”

“Goddamn! What the Southerners like to call cowboys tough-as-hide, or role-models. They was goddamn role-models!”

“Strong men. Like my uncle.”

“Like your uncle. God rest his soul.”

“Poor men, too.”

“That, too. But strong men. Like my father.”

“And strong women to back-them-up!”

“Strong goddamn women! And this may surprise you now. But when I think of my three ex-wives that it was my goddamn privilege to be married-to, I take my hat off to each and every one of them, as role-models, ’cause those three broads was three goddamn strong women! Had to be!”

“Like your Old Lady.”

“Like my goddamn Old Lady. God …”

“…  rest her soul.”

“I showed you the snapshots, didn’t I? This one of my Old Lady, I carry next to my Green Card, in a plastic thing … laminated?
Laminated
. Side-by-side.”

“Like my note to myself. Did you get sick with pneumonia?”

“From what?”

“When the hot water was cut off in the winter?”

“I was embarrass. That was the only illness I suffer. Because of the way they stripped me of my basics and my conveniences. I almost sued their ass for the inconvenience. But I change my mind. I was glad, though, that I wasn’t living with anybody, like a woman, ’cause to come home and have
that
thrown in my face by a woman, even if she was my wife, that would make me kick her ass! But I am not a violent man, normally. But it was
cold!
It was
co-o-o-ld
, Jack! I endured it. For four months, during one o’ the coldest winters Brooklyn ever faced. And with the ’lectricity cut-off, you shoulda seen my goddamn freezer! We Amurcans like bulk, and buying in bulk. And we eat that way, too. So in my freezer I had me four turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the reunion of my ex-wives and family, the biggest goddamn turkeys you ever rested your two eyes on, and I had me some pork chops, and some steaks, salt fish, cow-foot and ox-tails; and a friend who me and him go hunting together sometimes, and once we catch a deer, so I had me some game in the freezer, from that deer after we skinned the son of a bitch. Got him with two shots.
Blam! Blam!
The goddamn blood! All that blood. But the meat was tender. Well, I couldn’t cook it, and I couldn’t bake it, and I couldn’t goddamn boil it, neither. I had to throw it in the garbage, after I give-way the rest. To my landlady, and some Jamakian neighbours. Goddamn!”

“I think you were embarrassed like I was … not being able to swim.”

“So, what you think o’ me, after all these goddamn years? You think I change? You haven’t change much to me. Not really. A little grey, that’s all. From that day on the beach. The same cool motherfucker! Eh, Timmy? But in a way you
have
change. A little. But I can’t figure it out. And you walk that same street, what’s its name, at the same time every day, and you telling me you’re not going anywhere, or looking for chicks? Do you visit the girlie-shops, then? They have striptease joints here? Men our age, when we reach a certain age, and can’t get it up no more, all we do, all we can do, is
look
. Looking don’t cost nothing, man. And it don’t kill. Or a little watching to remind you to remember when you was a strong man and
could
do it. It happens to the best of us. I think this is what you do, on your walks. You can confide in me, your oldest friend, and a man on the brink of sexual disaster of being able-only to look. Looking don’t cost a penny. So, who is the Chinese chick? In your mind, or a real chick? So, where the hell you go, when you’re walking that street outside there, is your business. Just be honest, brother!”

“You used to like to talk with an English accent at Combermere School. It got worse at Harrison College. I remember your English accent. You still have a little of it.”

“You remember some real strange things!”

“I remember every thing. The day you had the cobbler in your foot, the day you lost your voice singing
“We Three Kings of Orient Are,” the first time you came first, the day you made sergeant in the Cadet Corps, the day your uncle left on the ship for the States …”

“I remember your uncle’s funeral, too. I remember the inner tube floating out. I remember trying to talk like an Englishman. Chermadene. And how you got a kiss before me. I remember dropping my accent when I got to university in England. Remember the boat I leff on. You remember the boat I leff on? And the well-wishes on the Pier Head that night? The
S.S. Antilles?
But I dropped the accent. Now, the only accent I use and like to hear, apart from Bajan, is the way Southerners talk. I would do anything to talk like a real Southerner.”

“You sound like a black American.”

“Like an African Amurcan, that’s the new word for it. We dropped the goddamn hyphen in AfroAmurcan.”

“Why didn’t you learn French? Or German? Or even Eye-talian?”

“Was all that goddamn
parlez-vous
food. German? I didn’t like
that
language. And with the Eye-talian, I didn’t have to learn that, knowing already Latin and a little Spanish. Besides, you don’t really have to know the language, if you know the woman … if you see what I’m saying! Remember? So, where did you go to university?”

“Trinity.”

“You were
so
close to me, and didn’t try to track-me-down? Trinity, Dublin? What a lovely place! Chermadene went to Trinity, too. I bumped into her in France.”

“What is Chermadene doing?”

“It was a summer in France. She is who told me you were in Trinity. She went home and went into politics and law. I hear she is now the Governor General.”

“Chermadene? The girl with the two braids?”

“Her Excellency!”

“Jesus Christ! We should have married Chermadene!”

“Both o’ we? She never got married, though. But imagine, you were so close to me!”

“Trinity College, Toronto.”

“
Not
Dublin? Well, you can’t say you went to Trinity, if you don’t mean Trinity, Dublin! I thought you were talking about the
real
Trinity.”

“The real Trinity?”

“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The real Trinity,” John says, and makes the sign of the Cross – this is the third time he has crossed himself – and he adds, anticipating that I am about to ask him why, “Something you pick up in Catholic countries, from Catholic women. I enjoyed London. How was
your
Trinity?”

“The only time in this country that I really enjoyed myself. Not every day. But three years outta forty-something. One-fifteenth of my life here. The only ones that I want to remember. I met the Chinese woman in those first three years, and ever since then …”

“Is she the same person in the snapshot? So, she’s still alive then? How come she looks so young, like a child? She looks like twenty-two.”

“She’s sixteen. But she has no age …”

“She
can’t
be! She’s a
child
. You’re into kiddy-porn, robbing the fucking cradle …”

“In the picture.”

“You’re still robbing the cradle.”

“To me, she is the same person in the snapshot, and in my mind.”

“Wait a cotton-picking minute! You confusing me. You are confusing someone who is dead with someone who is still living? In my profession, this is a goddamn serious thing, man. Are you sure you talking about a living person? My question about where you go, and now this Chinese girl, is the same thing, in my profession.”

“Let me tell you a story,” I say. “It was at University. In Trinity. And the college was empty, emptying-out at this time, dead at this particular time, a Friday. On Fridays,
every
Friday, all of us students from the West Indies and who were not born here, and who didn’t know anybody in the city, or in the University were like living deads. There was not even a person to sit down with and drink a rum. When we looked forward to the coming of Friday evenings and the stillness of Friday nights, meaning nothing more than just that, that dead peace and quiet, that deep, deep loneliness, some of us, big men, used to cry. It was another weekend filled only with studying and studies. There were no women. Women were out of the question. There were no West Indian women on the campus, and certainly no black Canadian women, so at this time on a
Friday evening, panic came with dusk. There I was, far from home, when, if I was back home, at that time o’ day, I would be sitting on the beach, or going to a picnic. And perhaps … 
not
perhaps,
for-sure
I would be seeing some lovely girls walking up and down the beach. My room at the college was not the same as my home back home. I would be, at that time on a Friday evening, I would be lifting a crystal glass in the short arc and space from the table to my waist, then to my head, to my mouth and lips. The college was like a graveyard on Friday evenings. And then, all of a sudden, I was resurrected one Friday night. On that night in question … as I remember it … and remembering it now, years after, is like it was last night. I find that I live the past as if it is the present. They mean the same to me. At my age, I prefer the past. So, what I’m telling you … the story I am telling you about last night is really the same story as that Friday night, years and years ago. Understand? They’re mixed into one.” John has stopped drinking, to listen. “It was like a night of pure fantasy. But a night of poetry, and a landscape which, when my eyes touched it, buried me by its prospect in the dales and hills and undulations and certain cervices and secretions of its topography. All this was secret previously and hidden against any exploring I could have made, until last night. Fantasy and poetry. But I tell you that, when I surveyed the scene, I had to get down on my knees before God and ask Him for five minutes and mercy. I told Him, ‘Lord,
do not take this cup from me. Do not take it outta my hands until I have sipped the sweetness and the juices, down to the dregs …’ ”

“Dregs?” John says, his eyes riveted on the story. “God-damn!”

“It was like Sodom and Gomorrah. It was like Daniel in the lion’s den, Ananias and Saphira, Adam and Eve. And the three red apples, Macintoshes they call them here. It was like Jonah in the belly of the whale. The seas parted, like the seas that rise-up and tumbled-over the bow of
Galilee
that tossed my uncle overboard. Those seas of that night’s story were filled with sharks that kill, the seas that washed-him-in, big, bloated, and bulgeous …”

“Goddamn!”

“…  and as I tell you this story now, I was like a child that was starved of seeing food. I was seeing food for the first time. It was like seeing the great cricketer, Sir Frank “Tai” Worrell, a member of the three fierce W’s. It was like seeing “Tai” late-cutting to backward-gulley so fine and so delicate that you almost missed the stroke and missed the ball if you had-looked too late. That, as you remember, is the definition and derivation of a
real
late-cut!”

“Goddamn!”

“Man, when I tell you that last night was like a song by Roberta Flack about the Reverend Doctor Lee, was …”

“Goddamn!”

“Reverend Doctor Lee was kneeling-down in front of the body of the sister in the church, facing that kind of temptation that only Satan
could-have-contrived
and created … Lang was that kind of sweet temptress!”

“Goddamn!” John says, cutting into my narrative with his exclamations of wonder, in a hissing-like sound, so that his voice would not travel to the other customers in the warm, dim, sweet-smelling bar. The bar is now filled with shopping bags and large parcels, gifts wrapped and bowed in the yuletide of the dying afternoon. All these women have those gifts lying at their feet.

“It was that kind o’ temptation that only Lucifer could confer to ole Rev-and-Doc Lee. To Reverend Doctor Lee. Words I have do not contain fullness nor nuance of meaning to clothe that experience that I experienced last night with Lang. She was beautiful last night. Although she’s dead, as I said. That landscape that I was lying-down on. With her back flat to the mattress, her two legs like two pieces of sweet sugar cane. Her bubbies, those breasts, my God! Those luscious breasts, Lord have His mercy! And sudden-so, I started to think that children and infants and babies are the luckiest sons-o’-bitches in the world,
in the whole world
. They can feed and suck on the nipples of breasts and bubbies, at their beck and call. Lang was shy about that. But at the first sign of a scream, babies are afforded these nice, fat, juicy bubbies in their mouths, as a natural gift of birth.”