The Lion's Roar
A weekly column by Lion Coore
FIND THE WIFE and BUILD A LIFE
My plane landed two hours late into Montego Bay, I was happy
to be in Jamaica but upset that my brother would have been waiting impatiently
for hours. As a matter of principle, I always used my Jamaican passport in
Jamrock but the local lines were long and the interrogation of the natives was
moving extremely slowly – Jamaican’s can’t even get a break in dem own
yard. So anyway, I grabbed my US
passport, put on my finest American accent and rushed through customs with the
other tourists to get to my brother who was waiting on the outside.
“I’m sorry bro, the flight was delayed. You must have been
waiting for a while eh”?
“No man, I just get here.” he responded. Like the airline, he too apparently was
operating on Jamaica time.
I wanted to find a bathroom to take a leak before we began
the hour and a half journey to Ocho Rios, but he said, “No mon we’ll do it on
the highway”. I hadn’t been to Jamaica
in a while, so I assumed there were newly built bathrooms on the
highway...silly me.
My brother pulled over to the side of the road and we both
began peeing in the grass. The stars above
twinkled in approval and the moon smiled down at our long dark silhouette. In a way, I felt like an environmentalist. After all, nature was designed to handle and
recycle urine, it was the plastic bottles and Styrofoam plates at my feet that
were the real problem.
A police car drove by while I was in mid-stream and my heart
didn’t go into cardiac arrest like it would in America. Here in Jamaica, the police would more likely
join us, than make an arrest, because we had clearly not been in breach of the
Man Code.
Man Code: Chapter 12 paragraph 4
"Whenever
two or more heterosexual men are urinating outdoors, each man must find his own
bush or section of a wall. If there are
no bushes or walls within 1 mile of the vicinity, then both men must pee
standing at an acute angle with space no less than 15 feet between penises. Eyes must always be affixed at the heavens or
dead forward – no exceptions."
In my last column, “Can
Lambs become Lions?”, I spoke about a transformational revolution in
Jamaica led by the young. Some of the
responses to the column were encouraging but most were critical and cynical. They said things like:
“These young people don’t know how to change a light bulb,
much less a country” Or “You really think a young yute going leave a party to
go rebel against corruption…. Dream on!” Or “Your solution to vote out the two
corrupt political parties is common sense, but common sense is a rare thing in
Jamaica, so dat nah go work”.
Nah lie, those
comments burst my bubble and I began to believe that the mission was an
impossible one. Then while having dinner
at a local restaurant, I noticed that the table was lined with place-mats
documenting the lives of our national heroes. At the bottom of the mat it said, “Study the past, and learn from it. Reach for the future, help to shape it”. Those words were all that was necessary to refocus
my energies. I started to think about people
like Nanny of the Maroons and her quest for freedom during slavery, Gandhi’s powerful
but passive resistance movement and Dr. King’s dream - all these struggles were
once considered noble but unachievable goals.
I learned
along the way that if the plan doesn’t work, then you change the plan, not the
goal. I did some introspection and I also
checked the statistic on the last blog, there I discovered that although my
writings received many hits, unfortunately, it was read seven times more in
different places around the world than it was in Jamaica. This was my shortcoming and I needed to find a
better way to appeal to the local readers. So, I decided to talk with the man in the
street in an effort to reconnect with the local people. I needed to find out what made Jamaicans tick.
Karate experts
I jogged
into the town center of Ocho Rios and the place was buzzing with activity.
People approached me trying to sell everything known to man, from Viagra pills
to building supplies. I stopped under a
bus stop shed to be amongst the common folk. I listened to a mother talking with her five-year-old
son. He was constantly pulling on the side of her dress saying, “Mummy, mummy
you can get this for me. Mummy, mummy you can get that for me.”
She spun
around and gave him a look that a son understands regardless of age, then
responded, “Listen to mi; if yuh don’t stop chat, mi going rile up and kick off
yuh face!”
To a tourist
this may seem a bit excessive, even tantamount to child abuse, but to
Jamaican’s this was simply a mother giving her son a basic lesson in karate.
No Pope, No problem. God speaks to
Jamaicans directly.
I went to the Juicy Beef restaurant to have a few of the
greatest tasting invention on earth – the Jamaican patty.
A fat woman with a round, friendly face was sitting at a
table next to mine. An old man came up
to her begging for spare change. The woman’s
face became oblong and aggressive, “Me don’t have no change; move from ‘round
here and go look work”! she said.
The old man
hung his head in shame and walked away. Then
in a twist of fate, the fat woman called him back, pulled out a tiny purse from
her bosom and gave him all the change she had. After the beggar left, I asked the woman why
she changed her mind so abruptly. Her
response was that, “God spoke to me and we all have to obey when God speaks.”
Quest for the wife
On the way
back home, I stopped and reasoned with an old man sitting outside a bar. He told me his stories and I told him mine. I then asked him for advice; I wasn’t
expecting much insight from the drunken old man. I knew that wisdom doesn’t always come with
old age, sometimes age just shows up all by itself. However, his advice to me
was simple yet profound. He said, “Find
the wife and build a life.”
Days later,
I left Ocho Rios and headed to Kingston with the added mission to find the wife
and build a life. I ended up at the Quad
night club dancing under a sexy temptress with a Coca-Cola bottle shape and a
pretty smile. She was slim built with
cleavage like Mount Everest and wearing a skirt that could’ve easily passed for
a small tube top.
I was
awkwardly leaning into a crevice on the wall, with a Guinness in one hand for courage
and the other hand gripping to a table for balance. The music got sweeter and
she positioned one of her legs in the air, as she bent over in a move
that seemed to break a few laws of physics, her tube-top
looking mini skirt began to ride up and exposed her round, chiseled, left butt
cheek.
The cheek was now out in the open and smiling at me. It was then that I visualized telling my future kids the story of how I met their mother, “Well kids, daddy was cocking up mummy pon the dumper truck (A Vybz Kartel song), when her left butt cheek made an entrance and daddy fell in love”. It didn’t seem like a particular wholesome story, so I said my goodbyes then my friends and I left the club.
The cheek was now out in the open and smiling at me. It was then that I visualized telling my future kids the story of how I met their mother, “Well kids, daddy was cocking up mummy pon the dumper truck (A Vybz Kartel song), when her left butt cheek made an entrance and daddy fell in love”. It didn’t seem like a particular wholesome story, so I said my goodbyes then my friends and I left the club.
That thoughts of the young policeman mirrored my views. The country has a big problem, with a simple solution, but no one will make the gallant moves necessary to change it. Jamaica, we must act, because unfortunately we cannot complain crime and corruption into a timely death.
Thanks for reading….Walk good and as usual, nuff respect!
Look under blog archive (at top right of page) to read more articles.
