The Curse

When I was in high school in Cameroon, we all went to the beach for a spiritual retreat.  The program included lots of long presentations.  Some of them were pretty interesting.  The basketball coach drew a big heart on the overhead projector with a chair in the middle of it.  First he put ME on the chair, then scribbled over that and drew another one with a cross on the chair.  He drew a check mark next to that one.  Then they separated the girls from the boys and talked about sex.  This talk also involved Ven diagrams and such.  

It was a pretty good time.  There were games and good food.

So one day we all went out to the beach, by the old cannon, during our free time.  There was an island about a mile off shore.  Nothing better to do so we all swam out to the island, all us kids.  It took longer than I thought to get out there.  And way longer to walk around the periphery than I expected.  Pretty soon it was just me in the jungle, picking my way across cliffs and inlets.  Up ahead I could see Lawrence coming in and out of view.  I saw a huge orange iguana leap from a boulder and splash in the surf.  

"Did you see that, Lawrence?" I yelled.  I'm not sure he saw it.  I'm not sure I saw it either, really.  It's one of those things.

Anyway, the next day we were about to leave.  We were all sitting in the pavilion and the owner of the camp showed us old colonial slave-trading trinkets they had found on the property.   I guess he was the owner.  Maybe he was the manager or something.  He passed them around, like old pieces of metal and stuff.  He told us stories about missionaries who came all the way over there from Europe and then died of malaria.  Then he turned real serious and said that until we walked around the island, nobody had done that for two hundred years because of the curse.  He thanked us for breaking the curse.  That made me feel pretty good. 

Somebody to Talk To

Poland in October is gray buildings and pink skies and wet maple leaves skidding across the pavement.  Me and my two buddies, Arlen and J, went there just for fun.  We spent a couple days in Warsaw, long walks through the Old City.  We drank a lot of tea.  Then we got on a train for Krakow.  There were no seats.

J chatted up three girls.  The train lurched.  He plunged over to where Arlen and I stood, holding on.

“Hey, I told them that you two were trouble makers and had both been to prison,” he whispered loudly.  Then he went back and talked to the girls some more, telling them more lies.

In Krakow we got off the train.  The three girls waved at us and wished us well.  They liked that fact that we had been to prison.
 
Straight away, we went to a bar and began to drink. 

Arlen wanted to go to Auschwitz so we went: wrought iron fence and a grid of two story brick buildings nestled among the trees.  The maple trees were turning a deep red and the oaks, still green, were dropping their leaves when the wind blew in gusts.  Clouds gathered and it began to rain.  The rain turned to hail.  We hunched our coats tighter around us and began to stroll slowly through the camp.

“Hey!  Are you guys Americans?” said a girl in a blue raincoat.  We were standing at the door to the crematorium.  Her voice echoed inside.  “God,” she said, peering inside.  “It’s so morbid."

The girl recounted how she'd been working as an English teacher for two months in a small Polish village and had nobody to talk to.  It was so good to run into some Americans, she said.

Arlen walked off so he wouldn't have to talk to her.  He disappeared behind the chimneys of the crematorium.  Then I walked off so I wouldn't have to talk to her either.  I looked at the room full of shoes for a while.

In Block 11, adjacent to the shooting range, I walked down the stairs into the basement.  Down the hall at the far end of the building there was a little room with "standing cells."  Prisoners had to crawl through a tiny door to get inside then stand up in the darkness.  The cells were three feet by three feet, so they couldn't sit down, sometimes for days or weeks.

There were bars across the opening to keep the tourists out.  But the chain was unlatched so  I nudged the door with my toe.  There was nobody around.  I worked up my guts. I knelt down and squeezed inside. 

I stood up into the darkness and touched the walls with my hands.  Stood there for five seconds, six seconds, six and a half, then crouched back down to my haunches, ducked my head and backed out the door, finger tips dusty on the floor.

I wandered around the camp until someone in a uniform came and told me the camp was closed.

Back outside, Arlen and J stood there, waiting for me.  We walked to the bus stop.

Quién Sabe?

I cleaned shrimp as fast as can be, piled them up in a bucket of water.  Solomon washed the dishes, singing under his breath.  He didn't say too much to anyone but me, cause we were pals, and I didn't say too much to anyone cause I could hardly speak in Spanish.  I just minded my own business, cleaned the shrimp, cut the carrots, made the garlic bread, grilled the lobster, and heated up the soup.  But as I worked in the kitchen, cleaning the shrimp a bucketful at a time, slicing through the gray meat in the water, he was there, washing dishes.  From time to time he reached over and snagged a freshly cleaned shrimp and popped it into his mouth with a grin.

Years before, Solomon came to St. Thomas in a boat at night with forty others.  Upon beaching the boat in a secluded spot, they all jumped out and scattered in the hills.  The police didn't find a single one.  All forty to this day lived happily on the island.  Solomon found a wife for two thousand dollars and became an American citizen.  It was a good deal.  He lived with his sister, who ran a beauty parlor in the Dominican and Rasta part of town.

Across the street from where Solomon lived was a little bar with a billiard table inside.  There was no music in this bar and the cash register was left unattended.  You had to be an insider to frequent this particular bar.  In the corner sat a man who could not walk or enunciate his words.  He often he spoke to himself.  He laughed and hugged himself when a player missed a shot, grinning with his eyes squinted shut.  He lacked several of his front teeth and when he grinned, hugging himself with his eyes squinted shut, he stuck his tongue through the gap in his toothless mouth and said, "Lucky!" over and over again.  He sat in the corner and watched the men play billiards.  He was an insider.

There was a Rasta man with golden teeth and his own private billiard stick who waited for his turn out on the door step, smoking a joint.

There was a Mexican man, slight of build, with lines in his face and a swagger to his step.  He was glad to meet the friend of a friend and offered to buy me a beer.  His six year old son, Louis, sat watching him play billiards.

These people were all insiders.

One Saturday afternoon, I was playing a game of billiards against Solomon and losing miserably.

"La esquina," Solomon said, calling the shot, and sank the eight ball.  I went to shake his hand, when a woman began to growl from across the room.

"I know dem boots," she said menacingly, gesturing with a crooked finger at my big black boots.  "I knoooow dem boots," she crooned.  "Dem's traceable boots.  Dem's POLICE boots!"  At that she began to shriek, speaking curses in Patois that I did not understand.  I was speechless and it did not occur to me to try to persuade her that I was not an undercover cop.  I just stood there dumbfounded as she hissed and spat.  Solomon grinned at me and knocked on his finger with his temple as Miguel showed her to the door.

At two forty-five every afternoon, Solomon stopped at my apartment and yelled for me at my window. Then the two of us moseyed down Main Street past all the jewelry shops and cruise ship tourists and then past the bakery and then the primary school building spilling out small children dressed in blue and laughing.  Solomon always recognized a lot of people sitting in their cars with the windows down diving slowly by in the traffic jam, or standing on a street corner or walking arm in arm. He shouted his greetings as he passed.  They shouted to him and waved.  As he walked, he touched the walls of buildings, trailing his fingers against the rebounding texture of the bricks and of the light poles and trees and fences.  He stopped to pick up sticks and bits of trash and he tossed them for a time until he noticed something new.  Somberly, he paused to look at women from behind as they walked by and honored them with whispered words of praise.

As we walked to work at two forty-five every afternoon, Solomon and I asked one another many questions.  Thoughts occurred to Solomon suddenly and he quickly turned his head, grabbed my elbow and he said, "Did you play billiards yesterday?" or "Are there really two hundred distinct languages in the country of Cameroon?" or "How do you say 'fork' in English?" or really anything that came to mind.  He spoke machine gun Spanish, biting off the 'Ss.'  He loved to talk about basketball and baseball.  He knew the names and stats of all the teams.  But he often got confused about which was the city and which was the state.  Sometimes Solomon told me that he did not want me to leave the island.

I asked many questions about the Spanish language, which is the language that we spoke together because Solomon could not speak English or hardly.  But he spoke slowly and he pantomimed what he said expressively to help me understand with greater ease.

"What is it called, that animal, like a bird with hair?" I asked.

"The birds do not have hair.  They have feathers."

"Yes, but there is an animal like a rat that flies in the air."

"Oh!  A bat."

"A bat?"

"Yes, that animal that smokes," Solomon said matter-of-factly.

That confused me.  I said, "That smokes?  Like a dragon?"

"No, if you give a bat a cigarette, it will smoke," Solomon laughed.

"That small animal like a bird with hair that flies about at night?"

"Yes, it smokes."

"It smokes?"

"Yes."

"What barbarism."

These were the sorts of conversations Solomon and I had.  Every day as Solomon walked to work at two forty-five he stopped by my apartment and yelled out my name at the window.  And then I ran downstairs and the two of us slowly made our way down through the town and up that long steep hill to A Room With A View.

One afternoon I was not at home at two forty-five.  So when Solomon saw me at work, he said, "Where were you?  I went to you house and called 'Nate!  Nate!' but you were not there."

"No, I was not there.  I thought you were at the gym."

"I was playing billiards."

And then, after a long day of work, we sat outside.  I smoked a cigarette and drank a Presidente, Solomon urinating in a bush, staring at the sky, the Caribbean stars above, thousands of stars, thousands of stars.  "I wish for you not to go away," Solomon said. 

"What?"

So he repeated it in belabored English.  "St. Thomas is a good place.  It is small, but good."

"I like St. Thomas very much."

"Yes!" Solomon grabbed my elbow excitedly.  "And in May we can get a better job!  I know the one.  I used to work for Governor Schneider, cleaning the streets for ten dollars an hour.  Every day at seven thirty in the morning to four o'clock in the afternoon.  We will have the afternoons off to go to the beach or play billiards and also weekends!"

"Really?" said I, but I knew that I was leaving.  I always knew that I was leaving.

"Yes!"

"That sounds great."  Then:  "Vamos a ver."

"Quizás."

"Quién sabe?"

"Nadie sabe."

"Es posible."

"Tal vez."

We thought that talking like a thesaurus was funny.  It was a script that we went through and expanded upon every couple of days.

Behaving Responsibly

Hitchhiked to San Diego one winter night with a boot knife in my pocket and a cardboard sign that said San Diego: Please.  There were palm trees waving in the humid air and rolling mountain hills.  I called up Rachel and Stephen on a pay phone then sat down on the curb and smoked my Harley Davidson cigarettes one after the other.

When they drove up, I said, "I'll sleep in your car.  Is that all right?"

"You won't sleep in no damn car," said Stephen.

"Yeah, man, I'll sleep in the car."

"You look scary," Rachel said.

The next day we went down to Tijuana and we walked around and bought stuff.  I bought a poncho and a cow’s hoof.  We decided to get tattoos.  A knife salesman gave us the address.  It was up above a pharmacy and down an empty corridor, blank doors on either side and at the end of the hallway, on the left a wooden door had scrawled upon it the word, “Tattoo.”  Stephen knocked.

Someone inside shouted something.  Stephen opened up the door.  We went inside.

Señor Paco had long red hair, a long goatee, and a bullring in his nose.  He grinned at us, his gold tooth glinting in the dim light from the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.  

Stephen showed him the design—Africa with the colors of the Cameroonian flag, red, yellow, green. 

“Are the needles clean?” I asked.  I was behaving responsibly. 

He took a needle from his desk drawer and showed it to me.  “Is it clean?” I asked again.  He handed me a magnifying glass.  Stephen, Rachel, and I took turns peering at the needle through the glass, satisfying ourselves that there were no germs or dirt.  He pulled out inks and a small mechanical device.  He plugged the needle into the device and applied pressure to a foot pedal and the thing made a loud clacking noise.  He shaved my leg, twisted to the side, my foot resting in his lap.  He dipped the device into ink and then stepped on the pedal and applied the needle to my leg.  He held my foot tightly and began to paint, pausing time to time to wipe away the blood.  My mind wandered as I watched him work. 

Stephen was next.  He asked for the design to be put on his left shoulder.

"Is that you?" I asked, pointing to a photo in a tattoo magazine.

Señor Paco smiled.  It was a black and white photo of him in a crowd of cheering, yelling people.  He was in the center of the crowd, his mouth wide open in a snarl, his head thrown back, a beer held in the air.  "That was a tattoo convention in Nevada," Señor Paco said.  He continued tattooing Stephen’s arm.   

"What's that?" Rachel asked, pointing to a jar of dirt and yellow liquid on his desk.

"A fetish," Señor Paco said, "to protect me from my enemies."

Stephen looked up from his trance.  

"A fetish?" he asked.

"Yes, but I don't really believe that shit," said Señor Paco.  "I don't practice black magic, only white."

Stephen grinned, happy as a clam.

Señor Paco finished with Stephen and bandaged his arm.  Then Rachel took her turn and Señor Paco tattooed her lower back.  She bent over the chair and he tattooed her for a half an hour as the sun went down and Stephen and I flipped through magazines, looking for more pictures of Señor Paco.  We never found any more, though we looked through dozens, scrutinizing every page.

When she was finished she gingerly reclasped her belt and stood up to her feet.

"Oh, yeah," Señor Paco said and dug some papers from his desk.  "Sign these please."  We signed the release forms, promising that we were sober, of age, and not afflicted with AIDS or hepatitis.  

As we walked down the street towards the bridge, a man yelled at us from across the street.  It was the knife salesman from before.  "Here," he said, thrusting a butterfly knife into Stephen’s hands.  "Five dollars, okay?"

"Yeah, okay," Stephen said.  "Want to see our tattoos?"  He peeled the gauze away from his arm.

"Very good," said the man.  We walked back across the border.

A few days later, Stephen and Rachel drove me north to Los Angeles.  Then we just drove around until dark, taking random roads into the mountains to the east.  When it was dark, we stopped beside a field.  Music played on the radio and we sat in the car.  We talked for a while.  Stephen rhythmically nodded his head up and down to the music on the radio, looking out at the fields, now a gray color shimmering across the rolling landscape fading.

Valentine's Day