Stoosh Explainer

THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

THE GUARDS at the pillar box don’t even look up at you, once you’re light-skinned and not chattering in
español. My gym gear is new enough to pass for a resident’s, but my wife’s is a little tattered, like her husband, but she has the legs to turn their heads only in the right way.

And so we saunter unopposed into possibly Port of Spain’s most restricted and expensive neighbourhood. We hear ourselves puff because this hill is the sonic opposite of Lady Chancellor. You don’t hear a firetrucking word on this hill, unless you utter it.

Near the summit, we enter one end of a particularly quiet side street and discover it is a cul-de-sac only when we turn the left-hand bend 100 metres away, out of the corner of which, walking towards us, emerge three young mothers pushing prams. The distance between us and them narrows and the gap widens.

They are talking animatedly about something but mention only its price, which is higher than the arches of their perfectly plucked eyebrows. It would take me two months to buy it, whatever it might be.

Their outfits for the afternoon cost more than most families would spend on groceries in a month. The babies have to be borrowed, because there may be four inches between the navels of these women and their backbones. It’s like they keep their internal organs in their shoes. Or maybe their surgeon lumped liver, spleen and thing all together to pad their unnaturally large bosoms and behinds.

As we approach, my wife smiles. I open my mouth to make a charming comment.

The women breeze past without glancing at us.

We walk on in silence, made beh-beh by the blank, until we turn the corner and bump into a high concrete wall.

My wife looks out at Port of Spain below before turning to me. “It’s not that they didn’t look at us,” she says, “they didn’t even see us!”

I point with my chin towards the National Stadium complex.

“One night,” I say, “about 25 years ago, 2am, I got a red light there outside the Jean Pierre Complex. A calypso gig was ending inside, Explainer singing his greatest song.”

“Lorraine?”

I nod.

“I parked on the shoulder in time to hear him sing: Lorraine, don’t cry, I’m leaving. And I wanted to cry myself, just the sheer beauty of the moment. The whole crowd was singing along with him. Alone in the car, me and all belting out: If the bug bite you, Baby/Then you could come and join me/Inside Catelli steelband/Jammin’ with some man woman…”

And I had to gulp, that night outside the stadium, and again now, telling you about it, to stop myself from bursting into tears when I sang, in my pitiful voice, along with thousands of people in Jean Pierre, all of us singing along with Explainer, the greatest musical outro in all calypso music: All Stars/All Stars/All Stars/All Stars/Despers/Despers/Despers/Despers…

“I saw a picture of him in the papers,” I finish my story. “It must be his birthday.”

My wife touches my shoulder.

I turn to her.

“He died,” she said. “That’s what the stories were about.”

“Oh,” I say.

We turn and walk slower now out of our dead-end street.

“You know what I can’t stand about rich people in Trinidad?” I ask. It’s a rhetorical question with a lot of answers and she’s heard them all from me before, but today I go on with, “They can sing along with every Bob Marley song without ever once hearing the words. I’ve seen fat men in $5K suits in weddings that cost half a million singing, ‘Panic in the city/Wicked weeping for their gold.’”

“Totally firetrucking oblivious,” she says, “like those girls.”

I nod.

We plod on, not talking any more.

We can’t pretend we don’t know how much we’ve lost, how much real wealth has been subtracted, the worthlessness of what has replaced it.

For the rest of the walk back to our borrowed car, I hum, “Ras’ mas/Is a high mas/Is real class/We playing with Jah Jah/No band fee/Neither no whisky/Just feel free/Everybody irie.”

But choke on the words, “no vulgarity in the band.”

The thing about getting near the top of anything is that it’s all downhill from there.

BC Pires does not envy the late great calypso singer, to be doomed to explain forever to people who will never understand. Read the full version of this column on Saturday at www.BCPires.com