Kingston Noir (32 page)

I began to sniffle as I looked at the photos. She’d lost nearly fifty pounds. As a man she’d been compact. Strong in the arms. In some images her hair was slicked and parted like a movie gangster. In a few she wore a penciled-in mustache. There she was in London with Jimmy Cliff. At a bar looking chummy with Johnny Cash. Always styled in well-made suits. Yeah, she used to be someone.

“Can I have one of these?” I asked.

“You’d really want one?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“Just to keep. I like to keep beautiful things.”

Her cheeks tightened. But her lips said, softly, “The taxi man waiting. Go on.”

At this point, I needed no convincing that I owed her. Even though she’d been fully prepared to kill me earlier that morning, she had also, in one day, twice spared my life. But I was in danger. She was holding a gun. I stood up. I looked around the room. Lots was going through my mind. Just a mess of things. How many people knew her secret? Who would remember her as
her
at the end of her life? And I found myself reflecting on why I had become an actor—to preserve for all eternity the essences of evanescent lives.

My hands reached out and I held her face. She held my arms. We stood. She inched around the table and we drew each other close. And with all the deep affection that rose up in my heart, I said, “Tell me your story, in your voice, sweet love. I promise you I’ll tell it one day for all the world to hear. Tell me your story, sweet love.”

After a short pause, she began: “From I was little I knew I was a boy. I wasn’t born here, y’know. I was born in Costa Rica, a place name Port Limón, a place by the seaside with lots of houses on stilts. People there speak English and are more like West Indians than say Spanish.

“I came here to Jamaica in 1957. But I had run away from my mother long before that because she used to beat me to wear girl clothes. So I run away from her when I was around twelve and just moving round and moving round ended up in Colón in Panama, just hustling and doing odd jobs, but mostly street fighting, and from there I came to Jamaica to work.

“By that time I had found out that Abe Haddad was my father, and he had a big electronics store downtown on King Street. Same kinda setup like he used to have in Limón. So I turned up there one day and lay in wait for him and when he got inside his fishtail Chevrolet I got in there with him and acted like I had a gun and told him to turn down a lane and I showed him a picture of me and my mother and my brother and pointed at my brother and said to Mr. Abe that I was his son. I could tell he didn’t really remember us so well, so I bluff him, and he took my word. So that’s why I get away with saying my name was Joe. So he asked what I wanted him to do for me and I said nothing more really than a job. And in his own way Mr. Abe was responsible, so he forgive me for the gun thing and blood thicker than water and all that, so that is how I got my start.

“So yes, that is how I establish myself in this country as a man. I never had any hard time catching on because how we used to talk in Limón and how they were talking here was the same thing. Call it like a Canadian going to America then. You just fit in.

“So I am a man who can learn anything. My head is good. When I started working at Mr. Abe’s store now I learned how to fix all electrical and electronic things. And gradually I start to experiment with building PA systems and amplifiers and all those things with tubes, the good old vacuum tubes.

“When this whole music business started later in the ’60s now, most producers used to buy their amps from me. Go to anybody who know the business and they will tell you that I was the one who establish how this music sound. I was the one who go to Mr. Abe and say he should go into this music thing. I was the one who built everything in that studio at 4 Chancery Lane, right round the corner from the Ward Theater. Mr. Abe might have owned it, but I was the one who used to run everything, even the board. In fact, I build that four-track board. I never had any music training but I had the ears. I knew a hit song. You know how much hits I make for Prince Buster? Derrick Morgan? Bob Marley? Jimmy Cliff?

“Suffice it to say, there was a lot of jealousy, and one day I came to the studio and everything was destroyed. Two whole shelves of equipment gone. What was left was mashed up. Just mashed up. My Ampex. My Scully. Three Shure microphone. Like somebody beat them with an iron pipe. I knew who it was. I won’t call no name.

“Look, by that time I had killed about three people. People used to hire me to collect money for them and all that, because I was rough. So I knew it wasn’t a coward who did it. There was only one other producer who was bad enough to try and do such a thing, and the only reason he was so bad was because he a former light-heavyweight boxer, and on top of that, an ex-police.

“So one night I waylaid him when he was going home. His business was over on Darling Street near Coronation Market and the railway. Rain was falling. Downtown lock up. Not even ghost outside. What they call a dark and stormy night. I had a gun in my waist. A little pistol named Ernie. I trail him, watching him move under the shop piazzas with him hat and umbrella. I was wearing black from head to toe, moving mystically right against the curb, but in the street. Then, just as I was about to grab him, I slide in some gutter water and fall down and he turn around and jump on me. The gun flew outta my hand and he drew his own. And what I could do but put up my hands and beg for me life?

“By the way, thanks for rubbing my neck, miss. Thank you. Some of this is hard.

“So anyway, he put the gun in my back and march me over to his studio and open the door and push me inside. There was a back room where he used to keep old equipment and he took me in there and put one piece of beating on me. If you notice, in the front I wear false teeth.

“After he beat me up now, he made me crawl out the back door on my knees like a dog. When I got outside he admitted that he was the one who’d mashed up my studio and he took off his belt and ordered me to take off my clothes, said he was going to beat me like a little boy. Well, of course I wouldn’t do that, because he’d know. So I dare him to shoot me. I said,
Shoot me if you bad.
And he was bad. The bullet grazed my temple.

I don’t know what kinda police he could have been to graze a man point blank. But what happen really is that I fell and hit my head and while I was stunned and couldn’t help myself he took off my clothes to beat me and disgrace me, and well … you know what he saw …

“To even talk about it now just take me right back there. Truly, this is not what I really wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to talk to you about my music. I wanted to talk to you about that, but look now, look now. All these things is coming on. Maybe I’m talking too much … Is okay?

“Well, the fucker took a picture of me out there like that. I don’t know where he got the camera from. But I remember how my eyes hurt from the flash.

“One day later on now, I was working at Mr. Abe store, which is what I had to go back to again, and a man came in and drop off an envelop with the picture. Shortly after, the store phone ring and they call me and a voice say,
As long as you stay out of the music business your secret well safe with me.

“The next few months was really hard. I just feel like everybody could look at me and know. A lot of women used to like me, and I used to fool around with a few of them, but I used to mostly just keep to myself. And I started to drink hard, and fight.

“The position that I was in force me to do something I have regretted to this day, even though it end up changing the world. When you know what it is to be your own man, it is hard to go back and be just ordinary. You understand? Is like if emancipation come and then the boss come a year later and say, well, they check the date and, well, right now it look like you get let go too early so you have to come outta your hammock or whatever and go back and cut cane.

“Miss, you know what I end up having to do? Work in secret for other producers. When they do the recording they would call me in to the mix and the mastering. You see this dub thing, I was the one who invented it in 1965. People think it came later. But sometimes when I got a song to mix I used to just rub out the lyrics and remake it, and add in all kind of echoes and reverb and all that. Cause to tell you the truth, that is how I was seeing myself—like somebody whose voice got rubbed out. The echoes and all that now, that was the way my heart was trembling inside. I make that music, that dub music for myself, as a way for me to express my way of feeling, and later on they pirate me and don’t give me credit. But one day, my life took a turn.

“It was the thirteenth of May. I will never forget. I was at Randy’s mixing the whole day and a musician came in and asked if I heard what happen and I said no. Well, suffice it to say, it was all over the radio that the car lick down the same producer who did mash up my life and he was in the hospital with a broke foot—man in there can hardly walk. And I say,
Yeah
?

“By the way, my back hurting me. I need to sit. You want a cookie? Them nice, man. Eat one.

“So, remember I told you I used to collect money? Well, when you have that kind of background you know all kinds of folks. So here is what I did. I organized some men who had just come out of prison and was looking for something to do, to go to the hospital dressed in khaki shirt and pants like porters and kidnap that fucker for me.

“No joke, no lie. They followed my instructions. Waited for him to go to the bathroom on the crutches. One went in there with the chloroform to knock him out and two roll in with a laundry trolley and cover him up and bring him out and put him in the back of a Transit van and bring him to me.

“You know where I asked them to bring him? The same studio him mash up. When the chloroform wore off the fucker was so frightened. At first he didn’t know where he was. He was just lying there on the floor in his pajamas with the heavy cast.

“Don’t ask if I didn’t beat him. Don’t ask if I never kicked him. But that is not all I did. I did worse. If he was going to hold a secret over me, the only way for me to win was to have a bigger secret over him. There was a reason why I got men from prison as compañeros. They good at that thing called rape. Five of them. Two turns each. No grease. The last thing I said to him was,
You think is you alone have camera?
Snap. Snap. Snap.

“For four years that fucker stayed out of my life. I rebuilt my studio and I was riding high again. I even got married. Met a little Christian girl from the country and took her for a wife. She was so simple. I used to tell her that if I use my thing on her she would cry. But it looked like she met a man who was giving her something extra, so after a while she told me that the devil come and take her and that although she wasn’t right to be involved in adultery she just couldn’t stand the constant mouthing off for the rest of her life.

“Suffice it to say, everybody wanted to work with me. And I worked with everyone. Johnny Nash came and worked with me. Bob Andy worked with me. Everybody who wanted a hit song came to work with me. And the musicians used to love to work with me, because I used to have the best equipment. If they wanted something custom I used to sometimes even build it for them.

“But when my wife left me I felt bad in truth. Is not an easy thing to live a secret life. I used to hear people say all kinds of things about people like me. I myself see people laugh at them. Sometimes I myself used to hate them because it was like they just brought so much unnecessary attention to themselves. Especially the men.

“It was around this time—1969—the same year I bought this house, that I myself started to go to church, to St. Mary’s down the road. And for the first time in my life I started to dream about myself as a child and see myself as a girl again, in frocks. Sometimes I used to wake up frightened. I really didn’t know what this mean. Because it wasn’t like I wanted to wear woman clothes in real life. But it was a thing that just began to come up over and over again in my dreams. Most of the times, though, I used to just wake up and kiss me teeth and just go on with my life. But truly, really and truly, some of the times I used to just wake up and bawl and ask God why. And I am not sure if I even wanted to get an answer, because honestly, I didn’t know what I was asking, like why what?

“I didn’t want to be a woman. I wasn’t asking for that. I didn’t want to be something I was not.

“Oh, what did I want to be? I never really think of it that way. Well, as you put it to me that way … well … just me.

“But you cutting my story and you say you have to go. Well, one Friday morning after having one of those dreams I was telling you about, I decided to go to a different church. On top of that I decide to go as a different person. As a person in woman’s clothes.

“Luckily, I am not a tall person, so it wasn’t too hard for me to get things in my size. Saturday now, I went to look. I didn’t go downtown, though, where people knew me. I went uptown to Half Way Tree and got a purse and stockings and a hat, and a frock and everything, and I packed them up in my Zephyr Zodiac and drove from there quite all the way down to Westmoreland. It took me about six hours going over all them hills, and I found a little guest house in Negril, right up on the cliffs, looking out over onto the sea. And it was only hippies down there those days. And those kind of people I figured didn’t really care. Some of them was just walking round naked. I saw two women ones that looked like they were friends, but I couldn’t stand to look at them.

“What I didn’t know was that I was being followed, that all this time that fucker had been plotting his revenge. When I got back to the guest house to change and come back to Kingston, is three gunmen I meet up in my room. I heard one say,
Gunbutt him.
Then everything went white.

“When I woke up I was in some kind of storeroom somewhere. My clothes were gone. There was a line of breezeblocks toward the ceiling so a little bit of air and light could come in. It had no color. Just the raw concrete. Like how it is in jail.