Author: FarJourney Caribbean

                                                  
                                        The way I heard it, this famous golfer
                                        builds a mansion, buys a yacht, 
                                        a life with high wall branded Privacy

                                        then one dark night some mysterious
                                        smashed car knocks a hole in the wall
                                        and the world storms through

                                        like the troops at Normandy
                                        with questions & chatter & blogging bayonets
                                        O yeah… Omigod… O no.
                                                                                              -  W.W.   

               From Carlos Radix found out that the building he occupied used to be one of a
            row of six originally built on that side of the street. Carlos pointed to the vacant
            lot where the three missing buildings once stood. What happened? Radix asked. 
            "Fire!" Carlos snapped his fingers and made match-igniting sounds. "Just like that
            somebody set them on fire…building #1 Boom!…then a year later building # 2
            went up Boom!..thenbuilding #3…Boom!    
                He made it sound very simple, both the task of setting the fires and the confla-
            gration itself. The charred hulks had been demolished with similar swift ease and
            the rubble cleared away. The remaining three buildings looked marooned and more
            vulnerable now within the history of the fires.
                "Check it," Carlos said,"you won't think they had fires there, right?"
                Radix looked. He didn't know what to say. He tried to imagine buildings standing
            there, identical to the one he occupied, grimy brick structures somehow spared
            the graffiti squiggles at the base of the apartment buildings on the other side.
                Noticing he had made quite an impression on Radix Carlos drew closer and 
            lowered his voice; he knew, he said, why the buildings had been torched; he was
            privy to certain information. 
                Word in the streets linked it all to a guy visiting from the Dominican Republic who 
            after the first fire had looked down from the apartment buildings on the other side
            and had this idea of turning the empty space into a car park. If somehow he could
            get control of the lot, there was a fortune to be made offering secure parking to
            baseball fans, in particular white baseball fans worried about their cars left at night
            unattended along neighborhood streets.
                Carlos shifted his body about after disclosing this. Suddenly restless, he punched
            his fist in his palms as if more information, straight from the streets, was right at
            his fingertips; but he wouldn't say more for now.
                 Radix with folded arms stared at the vacant lot, still waiting to be transformed
            into a paved parking lot; at that moment it was filled with weeds, car tires, yellow
            antifreeze containers; a baby stroller, a shiny white toilet bowl.
                 He looked up at the properties next in line for mysterious fires, building # 4 
            (Blackwelder's project) and building # 5 (the one he lived in). Had Blackwelder
           known about all this before he'd invested in his buildings? Was the dreaming man from  
           the Dominican Republic satisfied with the space now available? What if the arsonists
           with new grander  designs decided to set fire to the remaining buildings, clearing
           all in one huge final roof-leaping conflagration?
                Carlos had his own ideas for developing the space. He declared, rubbing his eyes
            as if to remove some foreign substance, that he'd held a long-cherished dream: he 
            would love to convert the vacant lot into a basketball court. It would make the world  
            of difference to the community.
     
            

             He had a labourer's rough hands; he said he was a construction worker but they'd
       laid him off; times were hard for guys like him. How you doing? Radix would ask.  Carlos
       would sigh and say Hanging in there. It sound like a working class struggle and lament.
       Radix was sympathetic.
            Carlos wore his standard hanging out clothes, spotless white vest, blue jeans tube
       socks and sneakers. He seemed in his late twenties, still a young man, with a chest
       swagger that suggested he wasn't ready yet to let go of his late teens.
            He'd step out his building every day about noon time as if he'd just that minute got up,
      made love, then showered; slapped his body liberally with cologne, eaten; and now he 
      was ready to discover what the rest of the day had to offer. 
            He was surprised to learn that Radix was a school teacher. A teacher! Right on this
      block! He'd seen him sitting on the stoop, but he had no idea…and his wife – not his
      wife? his girl friend? – anyway he'd noticed her going off to catch the bus.
            He slipped into an aggrieved monologue about the importance of education, the
      opportunities it offered which he now regretted he had missed. He'd dropped out. But
      he had a two year old son who would not, he swore, suffer the same fate as his father.
      Radix was touched by his candour, the armor of his resolve.
           Carlos was the happy fellow on the block, stern and good with the kids, an ebullient
      problem-solver shouting up intructions at faces looking down from apartment windows;
      he slipped cooly between English and Spanish, clever shuffler between both worlds.
            One morning he asked Radix if he smoked. Radix didn't. Carlos waved a hand as if it
      didn't matter, though he seemed a little disappointed.
            "What happened to the guy who used to live here?" he asked, casting a probing eye
       inside Radix' open front door.
            "What guy?"
            "Lived here before you came. He was a Corrections Officer."
            "Really?"
            "Yeah, man. Was my buddy. He had the night shift at the Corrections facility…? on
      Jerome Ave…? Used to come home late, past midnight; we'd sit right here and drink
      a beer…right on this stoop… hang out for awhile, you know."
            Radix said he hadn't met the man, didn't know the man. He disclosed he wasn't much
      of a beer drinker himself and Carlos turned away as if, again, disappointed.
                (from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
 

             [Rustling along at 79, foliage wind aided? papi?
           You'd think he'd spend his homestretch days on a park bench
           under a leaf hallowed tree in Brooklyn; shepherd dog lazing,
           smiling at school kids; at summer skirts
           worn shorter and shorter as he aged year after year.

                                                     His gods?
           "The Chinese, son." He lectures me on
           acupuncture, herb tea, organic crops to halt global hunger.

                                                          His secret?
           He takes the subway Saturdays to Chinatown (risks
           jostled body falling bones.) What game's he
           after? a kitchen steaming soups? wizened Chinese pals smoking
           glass pipes, doing Tai chi? He has no Chinese tongue.

           Ma complained (until she passed) he'd take off
           every weekend, return with a bag of scallion basil bamboo shoots
           as if he'd been shopping (if only; her folded heart, still bridal
           in trust, would not play dragon and shadow) 

           His face glowed like the first hours of Chinese New Year.
           His clothes whiffed of petal scents 
           as from popped tulip pods. Some witch,
           she swore, had switched his body. (Some kneading hands,
           upyielding lips kindle his mottled quick, I think)

           Mon. Tue. Wed. she'd feel cat growl and eyes on her. She'd turn
           & snap, deer stare and for no reason; wondering what's come
           over me? over him? old lion
           padding 'round his cage; waiting
           for Saturday: subway, the spoor; paw marked rides to hills in flower
           heavens in body]-W.W.   

                    THE HABIT OF MEN

                    Human's a habit, a man struggling
                    not to become his chair stretched and ripped
                    like a sinew, a pirate pulling
                    a cutlass on the numbness
                    of his drunken brothers bent

                    on raping one another's sisters,  
                    a monk taking hammer and chisel
                    to fashion gargoyles after the same
                    brothers who think him an ass,
                    a man pointing a path through

                    difficult mountains to his woman
                    who sweetly insists that they remain
                    on flatter ground a woman's habit,
                    a child pulling her balloons
                    behind her as she dashes

                    across green fields towards a cold room
                    in which her husband lies slabbed and tagged,
                    a bored queen lusting for the life-blood
                    of her maid about to crown
                    their king with flowers but reaching

                    instead for consolatory sweets,
                    a naked girl becoming the words
                    she reads opening her thighs to flip
                    through their leaves, a pallid girl
                    without a face who knows how

                    to read but has no desire to be
                    read, numb in her cocoon of icy
                    blue, a woman reading yet one more 
                    book of herself by the light
                    of a man's lamp hovering

                    over her like a centurion,
                    a woman kneeling before herself,
                    trying to rise out of herself by
                    herself only to be trapped
                    in webs of her own spinning,

                    a woman about to slake her thirst
                    at the spring between her lover's thighs
                    that gives more than she would surrender,
                    two women putting an end
                    to their habit numb of men.
                         (from "Gifts Of Screws" by Brian Chan)      

              When Amarelle left for work in the morning she stepped off the stoop and turned
          left. Turning right was the shortest route to the main roadway but it meant walking
          past the vacant lot and the adjacent empty building Blackwelder was working on.
         Fellows were always hanging out there, red-eyed, unshaven and unwashed; they
         looked dangerously idle. Besides, at some point in that direction the sidewalk
         disapeared. 
               She had to pick her way through tufts of grass, broken glass, dog droppings, oil
          stains, plastic garbage bags torn open by the dogs; and her eye always fell on the stuff
          people dumped in the vacant lot. Like a refrigerator, "a whole new refrigerator", she
          told Radix, who reminded her it was cheaper sometimes to buy a new refrigerator than
          to repair the old one.  
               Turning right, then, she passed the stoop of the corner house owned by ex-police
          officer McGuigan; there were idlers there, too, but they made room for her to pass,
          and the sidewalk held smooth until she got to the main roadway.
               Once at the bus stop she kept her gaze fixed on a point down the road where the
          bus, coming up a slope, pulled to the kerb at the stop before hers. This fixed look, the
          lift of head, the tightly clamped lips, was intended to put off taxi drivers prowling for
          fares to the subway station. They honked invitingly at anyone waiting at bus stops,
          shaking your composure and forcing you to signal No!  
                This brazen street hustling – acceptable on her island with its narrow roadways, and
          people who didn't mind being squashed thigh to thigh – struck her as out of order in
          this city. These Jamaicans! With their transports along the route! Those minivans with
          sliding doors and pounding music and a silent operator with one eye on his sideview 
          mirror and one hand reaching over his shoulder for the fare!
              Amarelle liked riding the buses. They were solid and safe with ample window glass
          for looking out, and designated stops along the route. They trundled along with the
          wheezing careful movement of pregnant women. They had single seats so you didn't
          have to sit beside someone. She could take out a book and read. The bus took her
          straight to the hospital on Third Avenue where she worked.
              Returning home would have pleased her if there were neighbours to wave to,
         people washing their cars, mowing lawns. She needed the friendliness of the people 
         she knew next door to feel part of any place.    
             But the moment she stepped off the bus and saw those plump young women in tight 
         shorts hanging over babies in strollers on the sidewalk, she groaned. This is a tenement
         area. Laundry  hung out on the fire escape, loud music, children with bad teeth, bright
         paper litter on the streets. This is tenement living!    
             She could have survived; she could have held her nose and stepped past the human 
         clutter; clamber over the fellows on the stoop without a murmur of protest; if only she 
         could open her door and walk into a living room she had furnished, a bathroom she had 
         fixed up; a home with hanging plants, nice curtains, simple smooth things from Ikea. 
            But Radix was indifferent to all that, to what he considered bourgeois tendencies.
                  (from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001) 
        
 

              The times he had actually seen Amarelle naked were few and far between. Some 
           sort of homegrown modesty, nurtured by her Catholic faith or her mother's upbringing,
           made it almost sinful to expose too much of her body. In the evenings after work she
           contrived to be covered, with a shiny dressing gown over her nighties. She'd put them
           on and take them off wordlessly, earnestly, as if her nakedness were changing the
           guard. 
                This morning she was sitting on the side of the bed wrestling with stockings. Radix
           noticed for the first time the spread of her bottom on the bed. It seemed her waist-
           line was expanding. If she wasn't careful, he thought, Amarelle might end up like her
           sister, with the kind of smooth plumpness that crept up on single women from the    
           islands in their thirties over many indolent winters.
               Where was she off to this Saturday morning?
               He reached out idly and touched her right buttock. She mistook his intentions and
          said curtly, "We don't have any time. I have to work this morning." Then she added,
          "…unless you want to drive me to work."
               Radix wasn't sure whether her "unless" meant she was yielding, or was just a gesture 
          of empty compromise. He didn't fancy quick intercourse, then getting dressed to drive
          Amarelle to work. Besides, she hadn't stopped dressing; hangers clattered on the floor
          as she searched the closet. In full flow like this, getting ready to step out, any detour
          for sex seemed out of the question.
               "They asked me come in this morning," she told him, her tone suggesting "they",
          her employers or supervisor, could not be turned down; nor would they accept excuses
          if she showed up late.
               He lay on his back, one leg drawn up meditatively, the world a blur through his
          myopic eyes; he watched and listened to the rest of her preparation: the head tilted
          as she fixed earrings, the body lotion routine, the carefully chosen shoes; to the bath-
          room where she gargled (there was really no need to gargle so strenuously every
          morning, but Amarelle gargled); and her teeth.
               Amarelle had fine sparkling teeth. Her daddy's close friend back on the island was
          a dentist. Thanks to their friendship and scheduled visits (expensive for most islanders)
          Amarelle's glistening teeth became a symbol of island privelege.  
               Radix listened to her furious brushing and spitting.
               How she must look forward to every morning's preparation, gauging the temperature
         outside, wriggling and wrestling with what to wear, presiding over exciting choices of
         lotions, creams, layers. How much more pleasurable all this must be than sex on      
         unwashed Saturday mornings.
               He followed her footsteps to the kitchen – couldn't leave without something hot in
         her stomach – then to the door; he heard the key turn in the double locks; he heard her
         pulling shut the outer door.  
                    (from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)

               Radix had cultivated friendships with fellows on the block. In his opinion they
            were harmless, unemployed young men who came down from hot summer apartment 
            buildings and lounged outside. It was convenient to do this on his stoop in the
            morning out of range and angle of the sun; at nights they had not much to do, no 
            place to go.
                Amarelle urged him to complain about the mess they made outside the door but
            Radix felt sympathy for their oppressed condition.
                They had a lot to say about Blackwelder. They considered him cool. He was 
            granted the status of Nigga, and what they said about him was prefaced by that
            word which had Radix bewildered at first until they filled out the meaning.
                Nigga's got crazy wheels – this in wild admiration of Blackwelder's car, a Cadillac
            Deville with gleaming silver rims and spokes. He used it, not the van, when he
            wasn't on the job. He'd show up sometimes wearing respectably stylish clothes,
            and for awhile Radix worried about his leisure image; it wasn't a working class  
            hero image; more like a slumlord showing off the fruits of his slumlordism.
                 Nigga's cheap! – this in reference to Blackwelder's curious habit of picking up
            pennies he spotted on the sidewalk. Pennies on the sidewalk, disdained because
            only the desperately poor would reach down for them, were scooped up if they
            caught Blackwelder's eye.("What's he say, no waste, no want?" one fellow joked?
            "No, it's waste not, want not," another corrected.) They couldn't reconcile the
            cadillac ownership with this rescue of pennies, which he did in casual manner,
            almost as a gesture of keeping the sidewalks clean.
                 Nigga's got a white bitch! A shattering piece of news that Radix was first inclined
            to dismiss as ridiculous until one evening Amarelle confirmed it. "There's a white lady
            in the building," she announced breathlessly as Radix came in. "The landlord drove
            up and this white lady came out and they went upstairs." Amarelle stared at him,
            amazed again at his powerlessness, and now his ignorance; he seemed to have no
            idea what was going on right under his nose, and now right over his head. 
                The fellows on the stoop didn't mince words. Blackwelder, they said, would
            arrive late at night; he'd open the car door; the white woman would step out 
            hugging her dog, a Pekinese, and say hello to everyone in a southern accent.
            Blackwelder got her bags from the car trunk, giving the fellows enough time to
            clear off the stoop so the white lady could get inside. 
                They spent a weekend, no more, then left the building just before sunrise.
                Bitch be walking 'round the house naked! Radix shook his head in disbelief and
            the fellows amended the statement. She walked around with hardly any clothes
            on, only panties; and fondling the dog; you could see her bare shoulders, breasts,
            navel. 
                How could they possibly see? Up there nigga! They pointed to the roof of the
            building across the street. You could see right in the dining room from up there.
            Every kid on the block, they swore, knew about her. She'd stand at the window
            in semi darkness late at night looking down at the street; petting the dog; all
            exposed and shit.
                      (from Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel! by N.D.Williams, 2001)

            "So who is this Blackwelder? He doesn't talk like an American."
                  From the start Amarelle was not impressed with the Bronx – she didn't like
            the area, the neighborhood - and she was sceptical of their landlord's claim to
            property ownership.
                  They lived in a two-family dwelling, occupying the first floor; but all around,
            encircling their oasis of independent housing, was the towering brick of apartment
            buildings, some occupied, others empty and boarded up. And the streets were so
            dirty; the cracked sidewalks threatening to twist your ankle; and the noise, nerve-
            shattering at all hours of the night!
                  The people she encountered walking about seemed happily jobless, dregs of the  
            earth, to be feared. Bedraggled men pushing shopping carst filled with swollen dark
            plastic bags. "In the middle of the roadway, pushing shopping carts! You have to drive
            'round them," she reported. And the children, foul-mouthed and impudent beyond
            belief! Quick to violence, disdainful of authority, intimidating even to their own
            mothers! 
                  So who was this Blackwelder?
                  Radix had spent many summer mornings and afternoons on his stoop getting
            acquainted with fellows on the block; they liked to hang out in the shade. They
            had a lot to say about Blackwelder; they'd watched him come and go about his 
            business for years; they'd even traded insults with him and gave good imitations of
            his accent.
                  Blackwelder himself showed up in a van. He was doing repair work on the
            building to the left of the one he owned. Now and then he'd take a lunch break
            and join Radix on the stoop; he'd drink a beer and chomp through an Italian loaf
            with salami; and he offered with laughter morsels of information about himself,
            for he was intrigued and flattered by his tenant's interest in him.
                 "And where he get money to actually own a building?" Amarelle asked.
                 "Well, for one thing he's glad to have us as tenants.He had problems with the
           previous tenants.They left garbage backs on the sidewalk for the dogs to tear open;
           got him cited by the city. And at one stage they didn't pay rent for months. He had
           a hard time getting them out. By the way the top floor's vacant, but he lives there."
               "How you mean, he lives there?"     
               "He doesn't really live there. It's furnished and everything, but sometimes he
           overnights there."
               "So where does he live?"
               "He has New Jersey licence plates, so I guess New Jersey. And one more thing,
           he says he found tenants for the basement, a Nigerian fellow and his wife. They
           moving in at the end of the month."
                 "Lord help us."
                 Amarelle was unhappy every day she stepped out to her job, her dignified 
           manner like steel plating on her chest.
                  "He's from the islands," Radix told her one evening.
                  "Which island?"
                  "Didn't say…but he speaks French creole with the fellow who helps him
           …which could mean he's from St Lucia or Dominica. Or Martinique. Or maybe
           Haiti."
                 "Well, he don't look like a property owner."   
       &#0
160;         "He was a fisherman back in the islands, then he came up here. Now he calls
           himself a handyman specialist." 
                 "Well, something about all that sound fishy, that's all I have to say."