Clarence Chance, ContributorWhen my father was leaving prison I did not go to see him, even though I knew that eventually I had to face him. I did not go to see him, because I was afraid. I was afraid of what I would see, and I was afraid because of what I had heard.
It was a Friday evening, about six. I was coming from work and had stepped into Miss Gee's bar to buy a phone card. The little slim man, the old prison bird they nicknamed Mackerel, was talking at the top of his voice. 'Yes, man, is the same Mr. Johnsonwho use to run the wholesale. Yu want see the man don't pay him taxes, and the man them a' prison ride him till it look like him getting crazy.'
It was right there in Miss Gee's bar that I heard that, and it took me one whole week to get my mother to confirm it. It was true, all right.
After serving nine months of a one-year sentence, they let him out.
Garvey, my father had told me, was the greatest Jamaican who ever lived my father was a brown man, he described himself as a true Garveyite.
The same week my father came home, my mother wrote a letter to the newspaper, entitled, 'What can homosexuality do for us?' She wrote of the incongruity of the homosexual lifestyle with God's plan. She said that if we were all homosexuals, a great man like Garvey would not have been born. She went on to say that any person who dared to express their displeasure with the homosexual lifestyle would be stalked and hounded into obscurity. She said in her letter that the homosexual community was carrying out the greatest witch-hunt since the Inquisition.
My mother's letter provoked six responses in the same newspaper that week: three supported and three opposed her views. That Sunday a man wrote in, expressing outrage at my mother's letter. He claiming it had come from the mind of an intellectual lightweight, and asked: 'What is God's plan? Is it God's plan to make people with a different sexual orientation and then burn them up?' He added that homosexuals play no part in 'the determination of their sexual inclinations', and that my mother might be a closeted lesbian.
My mother was livid. She cursed.
I counted 16 days before my father spoke. It was a Thursday evening and he said he wanted to watch 'Thursday Nights at the Fights'. But 'Thursday Nights at the Fights' was not being aired on TV anymore. My father was not doing well. I was depressed.
The next Sunday afternoon I fell into slavery. My sister Camille was watching the 'Oprah' show and I had taken up the Sunday paper and was reading from the back where therewas a large picture of the West Indies cricket team. As I flipped the pages going forward, I came across a series of adverts. One in particular became alive and jumped from the page and seduced me.
'Come discover yourself. Flee boredom and stress; come discover with us. High-octane massage studio, sensuous and other massages. Special services available.'
The words became a temptress. They stripped away, bulldozed away the walls of morality which had shielded me from such things in the past. I wrote down the phone numbers and went outside to the mango tree at the back of the yard. I used my cellphone to dial and when the young lady came on the line, the last curtains of restraint in me were torn down. I wanted to go. I wanted to go real bad, but I decided to wait until 7:00 p.m. I sat in my room with images of attractive young ladies dancing in my head, and at 6:37 decided I could wait no longer. I went again for the newspaper and wrote down the number of a second studio and then left home.
The address the woman had given me was somewhere uptown. I took one of the big white buses to Half-Way Tree and from there took a robot taxi and got off at the big white building on Darling Avenue, just as I had been directed. Walking, I turned left on to Dominion Drive, and had nearly reached No. 13 when a car came racing down the street. I looked away, hiding my face. Just a year ago I had been very active in church.
At No. 13, a young woman pulled the padlock on the grill, then shouted, 'Michelle!' I sat down and waited for Michelle. When the woman called Michelle came out, I said, 'Hello.'
'Johnson!' she exclaimed.
Surprised, I asked: 'Who is Johnson?' 'Chad Johnson! I would know you if I saw you in the raging flames of hell.'
It was Michelle Simmonds. I had known her from Primary School when I lived with my aunt Pauline in St. Mary. It seemed she was the proud owner of this honourable establishment.
I cooked up a story that I was a newspaper reporter trying to ascertain whether the effect such places had on society was good or bad. I told her that since she was the proprietor, and I knew she had always been responsible, I had nothing to worry about. She didn't buy it. When I turned to leave she said, in the same sophisticated, sexy voice in which she'd answered the phone, 'Okay, Mr. Chad Johnson, big time reporter. Miss Woolery from Grade Six would be mighty proud of you now!'
In the 30 or so times I went to massage parlours, I never went back there. At the time, however, I couldn't go home without being served, so I took out the paper I had written the number of the other parlour on, called, got the address and took a taxi. We had just started moving when the taxi-man asked: 'Yu think any of our athletes going to the Olympics on drugs?'
I told him I didn't think so. It seemed he wanted to go on, so I gave out with an exaggerated yawn and he said nothing for a while. Then: 'Yu know mi just coming from prison.'
'What yu did?'
He had been made redundant, he said. He had used some of the money as a down payment on a car and was operating a robot taxi when he was caught and fined $27,000. He couldn't pay it and was sent to prison for six months.
I wanted to ask him if he'd been raped but couldn't bring myself to. How can you ask a Jamaican man if he'd been raped in prison?
That night I had my first experience of what I've called enslavement. My father was not improving; he had been to the doctor three times and, if anything, was getting worse. I wondered why they had picked on him in prison; was it because he was a brown man with 'pretty hair'? One night I heard him give out with a forlorn, coyote-like cry.
One of my older cousins from St Mary came to the house, explaining that he could get my father 'fixed up'. Despite my objections, they took him to a man in St. Mary. Three days later, my father died. He simply became tired of living, I thought. One of the last things I heard him say was, 'The queers have won.'
My mother took his death to heart. Not so, Camille. Camille seemed untouched by it. Maybeshe felt Daddy was in a better place, 'liberated'. But my mother took his death hard, and started to drift away herself.
One afternoon Miss Joan's two young sons were standing near our fence when the bigger one said, 'Si the mad woman deh.'
Under the mango tree my mother had picked a dozen or so green mangoes and was playing with them, talking to them like a five-year-old girl playing with her dolls. It was that same afternoon that Miss Joan looking over the barbed wire fence and said: 'Chad, yu don't realize that hand deh pon unno. Somebody trying to destroy the whole family. Mi know a man'
I stopped her. We would be going to no man, I told her. 'Not in St Mary, not in St Thomas, not anywhere.'
My mother's cousin, whom my mother had taken care of when he was ill, had just returned from England and he heard what had happened. He came for Mummy and took her to a residential clinic in Portland.
One Friday I took the day off from work and went to visit her. It was sad to see that she didn't know me; she asked me if I was the Grim Reaper or the Avenging Angel. I wept like a lost child. She came around later that day and asked for Camille. I told her Camille was at home Camille had gone away to spend time with a friend. I must have been getting a bit mixed up in my head myself, because that same night after returning from Portland I had sex without using a condom, for the first time in almost four years.
The next day I decided I wanted to escape, just as I had escaped many times before when my father was ill. By escaping, I mean going to the massage parlour. This time, however, I wanted to escape far away. I decided on MoBay. I left in the afternoon, calculating to arrive at the parlour at night. At the parlour, I made a special request: an old fantasy of mine. I asked not to see the girl. I described the body type I wanted and asked that the room should be pitch black. I asked that she should come in and dance for me in complete silence. I would feel her presence, then her body.
In the black room the girl danced. I rose from the bed, pulled her gently towards me, and we sat down. When I felt her firm and shapely figure, I thought, 'This must be Miss World!' I wanted then to see the face that went with that beautiful body, so I rose and flicked on the light. Then I fell to the ground. I beat on the floor and howled as she fled. It was Camille.
By the time the other girls reached the room she had gotten herself dressed and was making her way out of the gate. The girls all at once started asking what was wrong, but then one young woman said that all along she'd known there was 'something strange about that girl'. She told me Camille had told her her father had gone to prison, had been raped repeatedly there, and had gone insane and started to beg them to kill him. She and her mother had resisted him initially, until they realized her father's insurance policy was about to expire. Then they discussed it, and then got hold of some insecticide and injected it into his arm. After he died, my mother didn't feel up to going through with claiming the insurance money and soon after became went mad herself.
So you see, Commissioner. When your police arrested my father for tax evasion, you not only took him away from me, you took my life away too. Why should my father have been arrested and criminal hordes be allowed to roam free across the country? Why should murderous men be allowed to overrun the city at will and a decent Jamaican who had fallen on hard times be sent to prison to be raped? Why should certain men be allowed to usurp authority over me, to decree parameters for me, to tell me when to talk and how to dress? Commissioner, should the son of a Garveyite be subjugated?
Why should a taxi man who, no differently from the lower animals, is merely seeking to provide for his progeny, be sent to prison among hardened criminals because he did not have the money to pay a fine?
Our businessmen are trapped. They are threatened by guns to pay over extortion money, which will in turn buy more guns to threaten them even further.
Now that I have gone through this case with a fine tooth comb for you, Commission, what will you do? What about my Mother and sister? Will you send for me as you sent for my father? After all, I have confessed to a crime: I consorted. I consorted, time and again.
So, will you come for us while the murderous hordes rampage?
Good-bye, Commissioner.
- Clarence Chance
