Find the Wife and Build a Life

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.

We stopped at the Tiger Mart for a quick bite when a young policeman wearing a bullet proof vest and carrying an M16 rifle came in.  I asked policeman his perspective on how to quell the crime problem in Jamaica.  My friends and I were astonished as to how frankly he spoke.

“If Jamaica serious 'bout fixing crime, then we have to start at the top.  It is the corrupt politicians who are the real drug lords. Whenever we, the police, get a tip about the whereabouts of a druggist or a Don, we call it in over the police radio but by time we get there the politician tell the fugitive to leave.  So ultimately, I feel seh if you get rid of the corrupt politicians then we'll begin to put a dent in crime.”


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!

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