Jamaican Birthday

By Monday
the missing person flyer I designed
was unnecessary

The dogs had found you already

Everyone said you looked stunning
at Grandma’s funeral wearing the
blue Yves Saint Laurent suit I gave you
compliments of the Salvation Army thrift store

Breathtaking it would be to see you now
in moonlit rain
styled with the passion of
machete
fire
and hate
adorned in a plain bed sheet
a gift of the police

For your 39th birthday
your mother roasted breadfruit
(although you preferred it boiled)

I reopened a credit card
that flew me to you with
birthday presents
undeclared at the Jamaican Customs house

I returned to New York
with my complexion no darker
from the sun’s fire

No anti-gay fire
burned we chi chi men
even as the new CD player I carried down
blasted Carl Bean’s gay disco declaration
“I Was Born This Way”1

The dogs found you in your own yard
in a fatal reversal of your 39th birthday
to nine night in three days with
an offering of flesh to tear from bones
for guard dogs
that never barked at strangers
dogs whose tails wagged
with the satisfaction of a full belly

A boy half your age
half your size
drives your missing car

What music does a killer listen to in his victim’s car?

He wears your clothes
clothes twice his size
clothes carefully removed from their hangers
in the bedroom closet
while your body was burning
behind your house
in the bushes
underneath the birds of paradise

The blue Yves Saint Laurent suit
remains in the closet
You won’t be wearing it
at your own funeral

Breathtaking it is to see you now
skeletal
organs exposed
through browned bones
ashy skin no lotion can soothe
nor hand will touch
after the dance of flames
rode your body
to the twilight rhythm
of crickets and frogs

Quiet is fire
Loud was your voice
balling out to neighbors down the hill
who did not call the police
because your yelling stopped
before the last cutlass chop
drew blood that rain washed away
away
away
away

Four nights of rain cleared the stains
of eight cervical lacerations
but did not wash away our love
my tears
the assassin’s intent
your ashes

You are ashes
and memories
of your smile never before so painful to see

You skinned your teeth permanently
but I can’t hear your bellowing laugh
only the gasps of your name
exclaimed in horror
that four nights of rain
can never carry away
from your death night
to your earth day

On Holiday

Living on the mountain top seemed ideal.

The daytime view across the valley was calming. Fog rolled in at night, surrounding us, staying until water birds carried it away as they announced the new day’s sun.

The steep dirt road leading up to Homo Hill divides the green of ferns, creepers, elephant ears, coconut and banana trees, revealing any visitors to the property.

Most cars struggle against the unforgiving incline, sliding in directions all but forward at the fork if they don’t have rear wheel drive, leaving their passengers to hike up the hill on foot. Your Bluebird always flew to the top, in reverse on rainy days when the slippery earth yearned for the excitement of stunt driving.

Hurricane Ivan flooded the Lethe River below, raising muddy waters up over its bank and to your neighbor’s doorstep, transforming the manicured property into knee-deep swamp lands. No similar danger visited your home; not until later would your land betray you.

Months after Ivan, the power of the downpour matched the strength of your intention to return home, dry off, and relax. Driving through rural Jamaica is demanding enough under the sun, let alone with just the moon to guide you through the dark and punishing rain.

Soon after stepping from your car, the attack began. No one hangs out in their yard on a rainy night, except for a killer hiding in the damp bush—a killer who is more patient than the night-time crickets and katydids that waited all day to call out and camouflage your screams. Murder is his only calling, and your arrival is the signal for his response.

Rain steered your blood into the Lethe River, where you joined the dead who drink its waters in order to forget their time on Earth. Fog vaporized your spirit after dogs scared birds away from your burnt corpse, then ate you themselves. Water birds spread your ashes from north to south every dawn.

Kenroy killed Jimmy.
Kenroy
K-E-N-Bumba-Ras-Clot-R-O-Y
Kenroy
killed Jimmy.

Martha Reeves And The Vandellas, and Laura Nyro And Labelle sang about Jimmy, asking him when he’s coming back.2

Walking out of Frank’s Park Slope apartment, leaving Cyprian, and our conversations about Jimmy—gone two months then—I looked to the corner street signs to situate myself. Piercing the sky and my calm, in neon white letters at Tenth Street and Eighth Avenue was the sign for the bar “Jimmy Mack’s.”

My date told me of his Popeye’s quasi-chicken lunch, describing the amorphous nature of the meat, unrecognizable as real chicken. Then he suggested that we see Hellbent, “the first ever gay slasher film.” I did not want to see the trailer that he was about to play on the computer in the internet cafe that we were meeting in.

The reason I did not want to see the slasher film is not due to its implicit anti-gay theme. I won’t support it because there is no entertainment to be found in my friend being hacked to death and burned, rendered into amorphous chunks of meat no longer recognizable as human, but as food for dogs and maggots. There was no request to explain why I am a vegetarian, but that should be self-evident. This was our first and only date.

At the St. James Shoppers Fair supermarket, Mark and I sought a second choice to the incomparable Chippie’s brand of banana chips, which had become near impossible to find after Hurricane Ivan devastated indigenous banana crops. I don’t eat any of the processed snack crap whose kitsch packaging and names I admired—classics like Police Buttons, Jackass Corn, and Shirley Biscuits. We settled on generic nachos, water biscuits, and roasted, salted nuts to feed mourning friends who were visiting daily. Pushing our cart through the country-reggae muzak and out of the the snack isle, we found the coroner evaluating dinner options in the meat section.

Our bags were heavy with bottles of Guinness, Red Stripe, and Carib beer, bottled water, Pot of Gold canned ackee, brown rice, nuts, junk food, and eggs. Weighing heavier were the preliminary autopsy results: eight deep, forceful blows to the back of the neck, caused by a long, sharp implement, wielded with great force.

“Maybe he’s on holiday” said the queen who picked up the wrong boy from the street—an old trick who returned to pick up a hammer to the gyrl’s head and bloodied her locks as she slept.

A restful first day on holiday: coffee with Regis and Kelly, Noxzema on face, looking like a frosty, a duppie, a ghost.

Fifteen minutes of cutting and tiefing Merle’s wild plantain, ginger flowers, and ram-goat roses, dodging her dogs, and climbing over fences in noon-time sun provokes thirst, so Guinness and Guinness, then rum and Ting, rice and peas, and dumplings for lunch. No phone calls on this first day away nor this first night alone on vacation.

On this second day, cannot be bothered with the trifling but regular talk of no jobs or boys on your part of the island or mine; no text messages begging “call me. meh haf no credit” resulting from pre-paid cellular cards run short.

Off the island, no cellular phone roams back in this bush, not on this third day of surprise holiday. Left the country with no money, left us guessing “whey yuh dey?”

I have not heard from you in three days, did not see your car at the airport. Did your Bluebird fly away?

Day four of holiday: white over proof rum and no shaving after staying up all night with thoughts of your bad man easy mouth meeting a real bad man with easy weapon. Digicel, Cable and Worthless, and MiPhone tell of 100 arrested in Spanish Town after police dance hall shooting, riot in May Pen to protest curfew, but no “mek we talk ’bout ’ow mi feel uneaaaaasy, Anju, because mi know, mi know: Jimmy fi dead...” only the depressed silence of avoidance until we saw you again. No trip abroad with no money, but you did leave this island.

Miss Bad-Wig No-Manners at Madden’s Extortion and Funeral Home said she saw you, but: no money, no body. She demands 360,000 Jamaican dollars as ransom, but you aren’t even a whole body—only pieces and not in original condition.

A miserable woman in the church parking lot noisily curses our evil sodomite ways. Our voices are subdued into cautious whispers because we don’t know who is listening to our chi chi men su-su, who is watching how we greet each other in public with trained lack of affection, who is sitting next to us sharing a song book in St. John’s Methodist Church as we attempt to hold notes and composure, who may be living with us in the trust and intimacy of our homes, waiting to strike.

This morning, the hammerhead gyrl’s latest bed partner ran off with all her cash. Yesterday, the Gleaner’s four pages of obituaries stated that Roy’s best friend died of an auto accident, but what single-car mash-up causes a fatal bullet wound in the back of the head and no other physical injuries? Even our deaths do not truthfully honor our lives.

The funeral home memorial service programs look horrendous as expected, but this was not the time to remind friends that the professional graphic designer from New York should have designed the programs tastefully so that you are not cursing our disrespect, exhibited through tacky programs. Photos are distorted, and the text officiates that you died last year. Your real name that no one ever called you by is misspelled.

Family has traveled from Philadelphia, Miami, Mount Salem. Few of your six brothers look alike. Only you resembled your mother most; don’t know who birthed all those other children with their different complexions and morphology. But they are family, regardless of distance or difference.

No matter the darkness or size of sunglasses, fatigued swollen eyes see only peripherally, focusing on shoes, not faces. To recognize our pain reflected in each other is overwhelming.

Eerie was your house the night our three-car caravan journeyed to remove your possessions before looters did the same. Photos of you on your dresser already had been turned downward before we put them into boxes, but we anticipated you appearing at any moment. Memories and the smell of rot were equally present, forcing a confrontation that none of us were prepared for.

I feel helpless after many depositions with arrogant and incompetent police who do not respond to multiple sightings of the alleged killer standing in front of the 24-hour restaurant in Gully or selling bootleg CDs in Sam Sharpe Square throughout the week.

The investigator with the hand gun on his desk asked me what reason someone might have for killing Jimmy, as if he did not know that violence is power, for gunmen guided by police law or by a batty man’s downfall.

I am anxious after hours of driving unrecognizable borrowed cars, scoping through tinted windows, knives under seats and revenge on our minds. The shock is paralyzing every time we see a dark blue mid-’90s Nissan that looks like your car, even though it was found days ago; all of us still are expecting to see you and not your brother Richie behind the wheel.

Desperate I am to leave Jamaica and never return after sleepless middle-of-the-night telephone death threats and useless constabulary fuckery the following mornings.

I cried through the whole four-hour flight from New York and it felt like four minutes. The six months following your death have passed by unnoticed, because your death feels like a lifetime.

Eclipse

The lunar eclipse promised to be
emotionally difficult
finalizing
give or take five days

I added another 360 days of tears
to prepare for your 40th birthday
finalizing
my vision of you
your head like a coconut
husked and emptied
by machete
thrown into the bush
to catch a fire
finalizing

No temporary disappearance
no eclipse

My vision of you is permanent
even when the moon offers no visibility
I see you every night

Donahue Jimmy Bulgin: April 11, 1966-April 14, 2005

1. Carl Bean, “I Was Born This Way,” Motown, M-00008, 1977.
2. Laura Nyro and Labelle, “Jimmy Mack,” Gonna’ Take A Miracle, Columbia, CK 30987, 1971.