It’s minutes to midnight and I am slowly walking the road my hearse will one day drive to take my body to its final resting place. It’s a humid mid-August night, clear sky, scattered stars. The silhouettes of palm trees welcome me home.
My feet carry me past the house where my dad’s childhood friend, Cheng lived. It’s painted pink, an open-layout place like one of those 90s Miami terrace houses, complete with an open balcony and lattice grillwork.
That family won the lottery three times.
Three generations of lucky motherfuckers.
I met the old man, Cheng's Dad ,Dibs. He was Cuban-Chinese, broad-shouldered, grey-haired. I remember passing him on the way to Sunday school. His shirt was always open. His face wore a hearty smile, but his eyes showed sickness. The entire house smoked . They should’ve opened a cigarette factory.
The father died first, after the initial lottery win. Then the middle sibling won the lottery. The father’s death took a toll on the family. The mom, a beautiful Indian woman with the straight nose quickly wilted as her children puffed their dad’s fortune away on elaborate parties and revelry.
I used to go to midweek prayers with my godmother and sneak looks into the shop attachedto the Miami house. Overly sexy women in lingerie were painted as graffiti on the walls. Inside I saw bar stools and the frames of men who worked construction or farmed in my community. Thinking about it now, my father was something of an anomaly when it came to the professions in our neighbourhood.
Gradually the wealth went.
The middle child started building a massive mansion. It was never finished.
The elder sister’s children were about seven years apart. The older one was a girl who inherited her mother’s and grandmother’s beauty. Then there was Carlos. He had all the features of his name. His grandmother treasured him.
My father’s friend was very introverted. He needed his cigarettes and Pepsi. He is still vivid in my memory, the way he used to hoist my brother and me onto his shoulders whenever he and my dad ran into each other, usually on those days before or after school when we walked or biked home.
Gradually he became confined behind the lattice grill of his house.
He would only come out for his cigarettes and Pepsi.
His mother got sick.
She died.
He wilted too, and died suddenly. Street murmurings suggested his heart gave out, just like his parents’.
There are three graves in the back of that yard.
I knew them.
The sister and her son’s children live there now. The daughter made something of herself. I saw her on a flight from Europe last summer. The house is in shambles from its former glory.
I remember everyone from the community gathered on that verandah, drinking. I was a child, but one could’ve sworn it was the wedding at Cana, except the booze never ran out. I still can’t decipher whether I’m remembering the old man’s wake or another lottery celebration.
Steve Lacy’s “The Feeling” plays on as the road begins to rise.
The next house sits on the right, higher up. It mimics a castle in that particular Jamaican way, the first two-storey house on my block, driveway paved with concrete.
You know those cartoons where you never see certain characters’ faces? The parents in Cow and Chicken. Or the Mayor’s secretary in The Powerpuff Girls.
The father.
Oh my God.
I just remembered.
He was just like the father in Codename: Kids Next Door.
I have never seen this man’s face.
I’ve seen his legs while he read the newspaper. His back bent over while washing his car. His hands fixing a satellite dish on the roof.
And the terror he placed on his wife’s face.
The wife I knew.
My mom did her hair. She was a slender, end-of-a-vine type of woman with coarse short black hair and a slender neck. She was a nurse with tender hands. She used to tug my cheeks when I was a kid.
There was the skinny son. Rumours said he was mugged because he was walking late at night, or because he was a creep, or because he was a funny man, depending on who told the story. To me he just seemed like a Pokémon-catcher basketball dude. Then there was the frisky little monkey of a sister they watched. I say “they” because there was an older sister whom I swear my older cousin was fucking.
Damn.
This weed is bringing up closed files.
They were cool people.
Further on, over the hill, the green-faced building comes into view, its walls overrun with vines. Several families have rented there over the years. The most infamous, at least in my childhood memory, was a giant police officer with extra-tiny pinky fingers.
As a child I was absolutely intimidated by his over-seven-foot frame. Imagine processing that: this enormous police officer towering above everybody, and then those tiny little pinkies.
He lived there with a short ,petite, Latina-looking lady who bore him a giant son, now in the healthcare field. He had a sister whom I’m sure the taxi man called “Gospel Grinder” fucked. My cousin was rumoured to have fucked her too. Apparently my cousin was busy.
Just across from that house the territory of John Crow Town begins, my grandfather’s name for it. His description of what he considered the substandard moral and social conditions of those particular families. The inhabitants were originally squatters. Women with far more children than spoons or fathers.
Tooni and her boys.
Darr, not to be confused with my aunt, Her Highness the Queen of Bullshit, who shares a similar phonetic name.
There were plenty of children, especially boys, built like robust machines. The older generations loved them for their work ethic but equally despised them for the fighting and quarrelling.
My grandad made a rule that no one in our family should have any relationship with anyone from John Crow Town outside of meaningful business. Anything beyond that and you ran the risk of being excommunicated.
Personally, I hated the fuck out of that name.
But I get the irony.
John Crows in Jamaica are basically vultures. Nobody wants them around, but without them there is no Waterloo.
And that stands.
The road bends and the Poysers’ Pride lands open up.
Generations of diligent, brilliant people.
My grandmother had nine kids and Mother Poyser had around the same. Their properties run parallel to each other, the main road separating them.
Children played. Friendships were formed, adventures had.
But within any coming-of-age story, conflict must emerge.
My grandmother once told me about a huge standoff. One of the fiery Poysers came to our gate to enquire of my grandmother about a solution to some dispute. According to Granny, the woman came boisterously.
My grandmother went for the overnight chimmy.
She splashed the piss between them.
Hung the chimmy on the gatepost.
Then whispered that it was too early for silly games.
There was never a conflict after that.
I am almost home now.
Almost, there.
I think about the pink house. Dibs. The three lottery wins. Cigarettes and Pepsi. Three graves behind the yard. A man whose face I have somehow never seen. My mother doing his wife’s hair. The giant policeman and his tiny pinkies. John Crow Town. My grandfather’s rules. Mother Poyser. My grandmother hanging a piss-filled chimmy from a gatepost because somebody had arrived too early in the morning with foolishness.
All these people.
Some dead. Some gone. Some old now. Some still living in the same houses. Their children grown. Their children having children. Houses unfinished. Houses falling apart. Vines taking the walls. Stories getting the details wrong.
And me remembering.
Minutes ago I was in a stranger’s bed.
Now my feet know exactly where they are.
I am a migratory creature now. I wander off . I change. I find myself in strange beds, strange cities, strange countries. But apparently some part of me has been here the whole fucking time.
Almost home.
All this place is home.