A Brief History of Seven Killings (12 page)

The woman I live with look at how I change but I don’t care about anything as long as I get a smoke. And soon Weeper make it known that what stand between me and one big whiff of smoke was them pussyholes that need to get dead. I need to get rewarded, something anything to stop the
downpression. That is what happen now, either you’re smoking or you’re dreaming about smoking and you grieve like somebody dead and not coming back.

News spread in Jamaica that crime is out of control, the country is going to the dogs, not even uptown is safe and PNP is losing control of the country. Is two weeks before the election, and Papa-Lo send us to every house to remind people how to vote. One of the boys say he don’t take orders from Papa-Lo. Josey Wales might hiss and grumble and say something with double meaning but Josey Wales never forget that Papa-Lo became Papa by being the toughest and most brutal man in the ghetto. Papa-Lo walk right up to the little boy and ask him age. Seventeen, he said. Look like age eighteen lock off, Papa-Lo say and shoot him in the foot. The boy scream and hop and scream again. People getting testy ’round here, he shout. People forgetting who is top ranking ’round here! You! You forget? he say and point him gun at another one of the boys. The boy jump and tremble out no-no-no Papa-Lo you is the don, the don of the dons, and Papa-Lo laugh as the boy start to piss up himself. Lick it up, Papa-Lo say, and the boy look stupid for a second until Papa-Lo fire his gun and say either you clean up the piss or we clean up you blood, and the boy, seeing that Papa-Lo not joking, crouch down and start to lap up his pee-pee like a cat gone crazy.

And so we go into the street and knock on the open door and kick down the locked one and one person, old and almost mad, say he not voting for anybody, so we drag him out of him house and take out all him clothes and burn them and then we strip him naked and burn those clothes too and kick him two time and say he better know how him going vote or we start burning things in the house, and the woman I live with ask if they coming for her too since JLP and PNP is both shit and I say that we might and she didn’t say a word to me again. But when the white man come and when the man who bring guns to the ghetto come, they talk to Josey Wales, not Papa-Lo. Papa not even in the ghetto that much anymore. Spending too much time with the Singer.

Night. December supposed to be cool by now. The Singer in him house. Living and singing and playing. All Jamaica and in the ghetto talking
about how he decide to do the Smile Jamaica Peace Concert even though it’s PNP propaganda and night and day that the Echo Squad, bad man on PNP payroll, guarding him house. No police except for one car that stop early in the night. Nobody getting in and few people coming out. I watch car pass by and I watch room light go on and off and on again. I watch the stubby manager go and come and the white man with brown hair. He say one time that him life don’t mean nothing if he couldn’t help plenty people, and he help plenty people but he keep giving people what they need and young people don’t need nothing, they just want everything. We sing other songs, songs from youth who can’t afford to make song so we ride the real rock rhythm and skank because only women dance. And we sing song that we make up in our sleep that if you ride like lightning you going crash like thunder. And the Singer think Johnny was, but Johnny is, Johnny change and Johnny coming to get him. Before this night I see him smoking weed with Papa-Lo, and then give envelope to man who run with Shotta Sherrif and even people bigger than me wondering what the r’asscloth this Natty Dread up to. This Singer think because he come from where we come from that he understand how we live. But he don’t understand nothing. Everybody think the way him think when they leave and come back. That everything was exactly how they leave it. But we different. We harder than him and we don’t care. He flee before you turn into something like we.

And we? We be top-ranking bad man. Heckle mother come out one day when we controlling the street corner and playing domino saying ’bout
how she can smell all sort of nastiness in him room
so he slap her in the face and say don’t disrespect the bad man when him out’a street. The woman I live with ask if is so I goin’ treat her too but I say nothing. I don’t want to beat no woman. I just want some free C. That is all I want. That is all I need. Two day ago I walk past some woman house and see Weeper walk out naked to the standpipe ’round the back. He pull the condom off him buddy, fling it away and bathe himself. Everybody know that condom and birth control was white man scheme to kill off black people, but he don’t care. I watch him take off him glasses and scrub everywhere with rag and soap as if the standpipe and the tree build for him alone even though it wasn’t even his
regular woman house. I didn’t want to fuck him, none of that nasty batty boy business, I just wanted to go inside him like a duppy and move when he move and buck when he buck and wind when he wind and feel myself pull out little by little by little and ram back in hard then soft, fast then slow. Then I wanted to be the woman. I just need to fucking breathe.

Tonight I watching the Singer house alone, but other times I watch with company. The short man with the big mouth that manage him, he thought we was just another set of boys coming looking for either money, weed or a chance to cut a big tune, but he look at we different. And we go back to the ghetto and the white man who seem to know him tell us about every room in him house.
That everybody have their price, even the people right under him, and at the right time they will take a nice little break, no a nice long break, a good funky disco nap like funky Kingston I gotcha!
That there is only one way in and one way out. That he take a break usually at around nine, nine-fifteen, and go to the kitchen, alone, since the children not there and everybody else still in the studio or about to leave. That the steps leading up to the kitchen give a clear view but we should just shower the place to make sure. That two should drive, two go inside and four case the grounds. We don’t know what he mean, so Josey Wales say he mean take the guns around out of the case, which sound stupid. The American go red again and the man who bring guns to the ghetto says he means surround the place. They show us picture. The Singer in the kitchen, him and the white man who manage the label, him in the studio with eyes bursting out of him head from good weed, him and the new guitarist straight from America, him fucking one girl, him fucking her sister, him leaning against the stove like even the Singer now tired of the Singer. All of Jamaica waiting for the Smile Jamaica Concert. Even some people in the ghetto going because Papa-Lo say we should go for Bob, even though it’s PNP propaganda. All I could think of was one more night and I would stop being hungry. One more night and I was going to take the S off Superman chest and the B off Batman belly.

Alex Pierce

T
here’s a reason
why the story of the ghetto should never come with a photo. The Third World slum is a nightmare that defies beliefs or facts, even the ones staring right at you. A vision of hell that twists and turns on itself and grooves to its own soundtrack. Normal rules do not apply here. Imagination then, dream, fantasy. You visit a ghetto, particularly a ghetto in West Kingston, and it immediately leaves the real to become this sort of grotesque, something out of Dante or the infernal painting of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s a rusty red chamber of hell that cannot be described so I will not try to describe it. It cannot be photographed because some parts of West Kingston, such as Rema, are in the grip of such bleak and unremitting repulsiveness that the inherent beauty of the photographic process will lie to you about just how ugly it really is. Beauty has infinite range but so does wretchedness and the only way to accurately grasp the full, unending vortex of ugly that is Trench Town is to imagine it. You could describe it in colors, red and dead like old blood, brown like dirt, clay or shit, white like soapy water running loose down a too narrow street. Shiny like new zinc holding up a roof or a fence right beside old zinc, the material itself a living history of when last the politician did the ghetto a favor. Zinc in the Eight Lanes shines like nickel. Zinc in Jungle is riddled with bullet holes and rusted the color of Jamaican rural dirt. To understand the ghetto, to make it real, one should forget seeing it. Ghetto is a smell. Sometimes it’s something sweet: baby powder women wear on their chests. Old Spice, English Leather and Brut cologne. The rawness of recently slaughtered goat, the pepper and pimento in goat’s head soup. Sour chemicals in the de tergent, cocoa butter, carbolic acid, lavender in the soap, fermenting pee and aging shit running down the side of the road. Pimento again in jerk chicken. Cordite from a recently fired gun, poop in baby baggies, the iron in blood congealed from street kill, still there after the body has been removed. Smell carries the memory of sound and there’s that as well. Reggae, smooth and sexy but also brutal and spare like super poor and super pure delta blues. From this stew of pimento, gunshot blood, running water and sweet Rhythms comes the Singer, a sound in the air but also a living breathing sufferah who is always where he’s from no matter where he’s at.

Fucking hell. Shit sounds like I’m writing for ladies who lunch on Fifth Avenue.
Unending vortex of ugly
? Holy sensationalism, Batman! Who the fuck am I writing for? I could move in closer, get to the real Singer, but I’ll just fail like every other journalist before me because, shit, there is no real Singer. That’s the clincher there, that’s the real motherfucker right there, that he is something else now that he’s in the Billboard Top Ten. An allegory kinda, he exists when some girl passes by the hotel window singing that she’s sick and tired of the ism and schism. When boys in the street sing them belly full but them hungry, trailing off before the next line and knowing there’s a greater threat in not singing what everybody knows.

Out the window streetlights glow orange all the way to the harbor like these matches popping off, one, two, three. Then just as you notice them, the yellow of some, the white of others, the lights really do pop off, block by block. I blink and my room goes dark. Kingston shuts itself off for the third time since I’ve been here, but the moon is full and for a while the city is silver and blue and the sky is this sweet indigo, as if the town just turned country. The moon hits buildings on the side and walls of shiny gray rise out of the ground. The only lights come from cars.

There’s a hum from below. I’m on the tenth floor or eleventh, can never remember, and the light comes back on, this time with a buzz. My hotel switches itself on and then the hotel in front of me and then another and the fake light brings back the orange which kills our silver. But downtown is still in darkness. Blackout’s probably going to last all night. I’ve been downtown once, following Lee Scratch Perry when the lights quit. This is what every reporter hears of, the Arma in the Gideon, the point where every single criminal element in the city explodes into lawlessness. And yet it was
so quiet that Kingston became a ghost town. For the first time ever I heard the waves hit the harbor.

I don’t know what I want. I’m in over my head. Who wants to be a music writer when rock and roll is dead? Maybe there’s something to the punks or maybe it all just means rock is sick and living in London. Maybe this band the Ramones are onto something, maybe rock and roll has to keep rebirthing itself by going back to Chuck Berry. Fucking hell, Alexander Pierce, the only way to write about music is to talk like a fucking rock critic? Wenner thinks, he hopes, he hopes desperately that any second now Mick and Keef are going to wake up, put down the heroin, deep-six those shits padding the band and make
Let It Bleed
again, not sludgy shit like
Goats Head Soup
and good sweet Jesus, no reggae. Instead they’re here doing exactly that, barreling through this song of theirs near nineteen times now in shitty onedrop. I came to this country knowing I would find something. And I think I have, I know I have, but damn if I know what it is.

The lights go off and come back on, minus the hum. No shit. I don’t think anybody was expecting that. I imagine outside the city just got caught off guard. In flagrante delicto. What was Mark Lansing doing before the lights came back on? Who does he know here anyway? The guy who told me about how the ghettos run used to be a rudeboy himself until he went to prison, and came out changed, thanks to books.
Autobiography of Malcolm X
I expected, and even I have checked out Eldridge Cleaver. But Bertrand Russell’s
The Problems of Philosophy
? They leave him alone because he’s an old-school former rudie who runs a youth group and mediates between the gangs, but also because nobody expects much from a coolie.

Sometimes I envy Vietnam vets because they at least had a belief in themselves to lose. You ever want to leave somewhere so bad that the fact that you don’t have a reason why is all the more reason to go?

In 1971 I couldn’t leave Minnesota fast enough.

Every Jamaican can sing and every Jamaican learned to sing from the same songbook. Marty Robbins’s
Gunfighter Ballads
. Grab the collar of even the most top-ranking rudie and say El Paso, and he’ll follow up in a perfect croon; El Paso citeeee, by the Rio Grandeeeeheeee. It’s the Homo erectus of Jamaican guntalk, where anything you want to know about Kingston’s green versus orange war, everything you ever need to know about the rudeboy-cum-gunman is not in Bob Marley’s lyrics or in Peter Tosh’s but in Marty Robbins’s “Big Iron.”

He’s an outlaw on the loose came the whisper from each lip
And he’s here to do some business
With the big iron on his hip

This is the story of the gunmen of Wild, Wild West Kingston. A western needs a hero for the white hat and a villain for the black, but the truth, ghetto wisdom is close to what Paul McCartney said about Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
. It’s all dark. Every sufferah is a cowboy without a house and every street has gun battle written in blood in a song somewhere. Spend one day in West Kingston and it makes perfect sense that a Top Ranking calls himself Josey Wales. It’s not just the lawlessness. It’s the grabbing of a myth and making it theirs, like a reggae singer dropping new lyrics ’pon di old version. And if a western needs an O.K. Corral, an O.K. Corral needs a Dodge City. Kingston, where bodies sometimes drop like flies, fits the description a little too well. Word is that downtown is so lawless that the Prime Minister hasn’t been lower than Crossroads in years and even that intersection is up for grabs. Because come on, once the white and well-spoken Prime Minister says something like Democratic Socialism, within days you’re going to see a sudden influx of American men in suits all called Smith or something. Even I can smell a Cold War and it’s not even a missile crisis. Locals are either catching a flight out or getting killed. Either way everybody is getting the fuck out’a Dodge.