Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Suck the Bone

We’d been in Negril for several days and it had seeped idown under our skin.  Many lessons had already been learned, about sunburn and safety and trust, among others. Not all our experiences were positive, but we were having a good time and living richly.

One thing we weren’t doing much of was socializing.  Naturally, on our honeymoon we wouldn’t be expected to spend a lot of time cultivating outside acquaintences, but this was something more along the lines of active avoidance - the behavior of tadpoles among catfish.  We’d been scammed, scavanged, picked-over and picked-on.  The people of Negril were very poor and confronted us accusatorily with the inequity of our relative positions every time we set foot out of the door.  The heat and sun and humidity crushed down on us from all sides, but it was the poverty and importunations of the people that really felt oppressive. 

There was one notable exception: across the shabby trail of a highway on which our resort stood was a shack that served jerked chicken.  And when I say “shack,” I mean that these people lived in and worked out of something I would not have beeen allowed to use for storing old toys as a child.  The floors were dirt, the walls were cobbled together of wood, cardboard and sheets of random found materials - plastic, fiberglass, canvas, whatever.  Dusty sunlight filtered through holes throughout the rude structure.  The place had a simple painted sign out front, an oildrum jerk pit to the side, and was filled with wonderful smells and genuinely gracious people. 

We went there one evening just as things were closing down and bought the last of the chicken they had for sale, but we remained, transfixed, by the scene and hospitality and just didn’t feel like leaving for a while.  Two young children, almost nude, and a naked toddler stumbled and played in the barely-furnished room, their squeals and smiles lighting the place up.  The other primary source of light was a television set, an old beat-up model with a long skinny electric cord tail that went off under a wall to I knew not where.  The set sat ona crude low table; on top of the television sat an equally tired-looking VCR, and around these two anomolous items of decor sat several adult members of the household and neighborhood, gathered together to gape in wonderment at a screening of The Blues Brothers. 

I stood in the drifting filtered light of this absolute hovel with a group of people with whom I could barely have had less in common, all of us roaring with delight as Jake and Elwood led a festival of demolition.  We watched cars fly, explode, sink into rivers.  We watched thousands of yelping cops rappel down the face of austere government buildings.  We watched the Brothers grimace, flinch and return to stonefaced solmemnity as blues music churned the background into funky butter. 

The people in the house mentioned that they were confused, had never seen this movie, didn’t understand what was happening; we tried to fill in a few details but it wasn’t really necessary.  We all knew enough to laugh and to marvel at this window into a world of cold, industrial slapstick, there in the crushing poverty of a tropical paradise .

About this time the toddler approached Kel.  He’d been playing a game with a chicken bone, sucking on a denuded drumstick and then extending the shiny calcified knob to someone else, a brother or aunt or whomever, who’d suck on it briefly and have a little laugh with him.  He wandered around from sibling to parent to neighbor - to Kelly.  Suddenly, between herself and the television screen, was a small naked boy with a chicken bone in his mouth, which, grinning, he offered to Kelly.  Blanching, she feigned a lick or two at some distance.  The others laughed even more uproariously at her reluctance.  It was our best, most personal moment on the island.  In a tumbledown shack we’d eaten well, laughed at the surreality of physical comedy, and then even more, and together, at the ingenuousness of youth.  Leaving, I reflected that anything can be a house; if it contains nothing but laughter, it is worthy even of being called a home. 

Then again, it was just a chickenbone.  Some people take things even farther, but luckily, Jerked Chicken was the only thing on our menu that night.  Dude be running around like a chicken with its head cut off.  And not in the good way.  And with that, have a safe and comfortable day.

i came across similar settings while in the Dominican this past spring.  despite the 30+% unemployment rate and crushing poverty the people there were among the nicest and most hospitable that i’ve met anywhere.  i remember visiting the house of a local family, which too was nothing more than a two room shack with a dirt floor.  but despite the humble surroundings the place was kept up with pride.  and they too had a small tv set in the corner which was powered by two car batteries.  they could get about two hours worth out of them, before they had to haul them back into town for recharging.

There’s nothing like the blues to bring people together, eh? Oh, and the link? Made me bury my face in my hands. Sweet chicken on a trolley car!

The blues and laughter, things that all people can share. Cool story!

i read the same “chicken neck” story and it amazed me.  i think that poor man must have blanched as well!
cool story about your jerked chicken shack.  :)

Great story, now I am hungry again though. I love jerked chicken. It’s really hard to talk about around here though as when you say jerked and chicken in the same sentence it is like a re-run of Beavis and Butthead!

bill, while doing his social work internship in 1974, visited a family in lima, ohio, usa, whose home had dirt floors.  it was a real eye opener to us.  here we thought we were poor, 20 and 21, newly married, living only on my pathetic (we thought!) little paycheck.  heh.

LIMA OHIO USA???? why, chuckles and i were there in 1975!!  (and before, and since.) of course, our grandparents balked at driving us through the “bad” part of town, and if we *did* have to go there, we had to roll up our windows and lock the doors.

lima is even more depressing now than it was then.  the whole place is aging and shutting down.

and those lima dirt floors probably had petrochemical wastes percolating up through them.... “Lima, metropolis gleaming resplendent on Ottowa’s banks where the catcrackers roar...” I wonder if I’ll ever see it again.  I’ll say this: the Huddle’s fried corn mush is worth a trip into town, even apart from the Kewpie Burgers.

hey lilsis and dan:  lima will forever be to me the city that had a FOUR STORY OFFICE BUILDING!!!  holy cow.  i went for a job at a temp agency, and that’s how the receptionist gave me directions to the place.  lima figures prominently in my honeymoon (heh), too.  spent our first married night there.  in the holiday inn.  not the holidome they have there now (woohoo!).  ate our first married dinner at burger chef.  not even kewpies.  meh.  and then we went to ada and moved into our apartment.  but we were i lima every single evening so bill could play softball.  oh to be young—and stupid—again.