Melville Cooke

Last week's mass raid of slam and scram hotels by the police on Port Henderson Road in Portmore, as reported by The Observer on Sunday, is a massive blow to sex in the Sunshine City. The police may be concerned about the comings and goings along the famous 'Back Road', I am deeply disturbed about the coming and going of the citizens of that mass of prefabricated chaos and the effect it has on their sex life. Or, rather, lack thereof.

I encounter the going once a week in the early morning where the toll road merges with Marcus Garvey Drive, on my way to the grand old dame of North Street, and I have long learnt one cardinal lesson of survival. Do not mess with a driver, especially female, coming in very cross, very angry, very miserable from 'cross the waters'. The rule of the road does not matter. Just give way before your car gives way around you.

Lack of pick-me-upper

I am convinced that it is not only the traffic that causes this 'crossity'. It is also the lack of a certain pick-me- upper that pricks the sensibilities either the night before or on the morning of that twice a day toil in traffic between Portmore and Kingston. From conversations with persons who make the daily double commute I have worked out a sexless schedule and the conclusions are anti-climactic.

Working backways (ah, pun, pun, pun) from the destination, to have any hopes of reaching the central points of downtown Kingston, New Kingston or Half-Way Tree by 8:30 a.m., a Portmore resident has to hit the toll plaza (or Ferry, for those who are still holding out) at 7:15 a.m. To get to the toll plaza by 7:15 a.m., they have to leave home by 6:30 a.m. To leave home by 6:30 a.m., they have to be eating breakfast by 6:00 a.m. To be eating breakfast by 6:00 a.m., they have to shower by 5:30 a.m.. Which means that they have to swing their legs out of the bed by 5:00 a.m. Or earlier, if they have children to get ready as well. So, while in less urbanised areas of the country, cocks are crowing and hens clucking, chances are a Portmore resident who works in Kingston is going without coming.

It would not be so bad if they had got home at 6:00 p.m. the previous evening, done the necessary puttering, sent the little ankle-biters (I just love Tanya Batson-Savage's term for pesky children) to bed and got to put the legs up by 9:00 p.m.

But no, there is that evening traffic to fight. As one young lady put it, going into Portmore between 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. makes no sense. So, while Portmore people should be thinking of bumpers, they have to be contending with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Leave work at 5:00 p.m., get home by 7:30 p.m. - if you are lucky - and the lady of the house is in no mood for a helping hand.

There is the desperate man, trying to heat up the household (or perform his duties as head of said household). The lady is snoozing face down on the bed and he trails a finger along the back of her thigh, finger walks across her personal version of the old Causeway bridge, brushes the back of his finger on the nape of her neck. She is not responding like a turbocharged engine revving up, but then she is not coughing like a Morris Oxford either. Encouraged, he leans over, puckers his lips and munches away at the lobe of her left ear.

Bad traffic dream

Then she leaps up and says "Yu bad drive me last week! Yu same one! Me know de ol' salad! Tink me no memba yu!" Another bad Portmore traffic dream, another red light in the bedroom, another case of road rage for someone like poor innocent me to deal with in the morning.

And now the cops have gone and locked down Back Road, just when the road had been fixed so that drivers would not risk getting their cars' front-end broken on the way to getting their front ends fixed and maybe undercarriages washed. The one place where Portmore people and their visitors could halt for the pause that refreshes, without risking being carjacked, and it has been taken away.

As one Portmore resident put it in a STAR story some time ago, "We no live yasso. We only s..t an' bathe yasso." With nothing of note inserted between those run-of-the- mill activities.