The Cocomucha Tree
After finishing some day in Kingston, we headed for Stuffy’s Place on Swallowfield Street, a strange kind of store made from a small cage, and set behind a fence of rough, slab-like planks. There was a hole cut in the fence for a window and a shelf for Stuffy to lean his elbows on.
Spider was there asking us for money for his wife, who’d had a baby and couldn’t leave the hospital until he paid the bill. I bought him a bag juice and gave him a hundred j.
“It’s all I got,” I told him, meaning it. “Talk to Chuck. He’s the money man.”
He looked at me with clear eyes and nodded. He asked if he could carry my camera later and I said okay.
Siley and Stuffy were there. A kid named Kao, new, younger, looking for a sucker. He didn’t know me. He sat under the cocomucha tree begging drinks from Stuffy, who told him to fuck off.
At the end of the day, before we sat into the night, we looked into the drainage ditch and saw a puppy. The drainage ditch was a kind of canal about ten feet deep, made of stone walls and a concrete bottom, that snakes through the ghetto with no easy pattern, running out the ghetto’s garbage with each rainfall. At its top, running the length, corrugated aluminum fences stood like metal mosaics of jagged squares and crooked rectangles. The ditch seemed to have no beginning and ended in the sea.
Chuck called, “Stuffy! There’s a puppy trapped in the drainage ditch.
Stuffy ran immediately and began throwing rocks at it to move it along.
“It’s been there for days, mon. Soon it will die and then it will smell.”
“Can we get it out?” I asked.
Stuffy looked at me and laughed. “Who will feed it, mon?”
The puppy was one of the basic mongrels here–medium size, short hair, pointed snout and ears, brown, white, or brown and white. A long time ago somebody brought two dogs to Jamaica and let them fuck. They’ve been breeding nonstop ever since. They are everywhere. They eat fish bones and chicken bones to stay alive. Some of them are mean as hell.
I want to remember how it grew dark while I sat on the bench beneath the cocomucha tree, with Spider on my left and terribly sweaty Jimmy on my right, rambling off the names of every road and town in the U.S. that he’s traveled through.
I had never heard of a cocomucha tree then and I don't know of one now, but we sat beneath it as the sky became black and the lights yellow.
Chuck was bored and wanted me to meet Essie.
We started walking. He finished a Red Stripe and threw his empty bottle to the ground as if it were fun and expected.
“It’s just Jamaica. It’s totally fucked,” he always said.
I stopped a Rastafarian singing to a radio and asked him for a water coconut.
"One hundred j," he said. Chuck handed it to him.
The Rastafarian lopped the top off the coconut with his machete and handed it to me, water sloshing from the whitish, eyeball shaped hole. I sat on a curb and drank, watched the people of the night, on walls, in windows, on sidewalks, and in bars, as Chuck prowled them with his camera and begged them “pitch-tahs,” refusing to pay.
The people hate him here, but he thinks they love him.
We got to Essie’s house, a box pieced together from old plywood and corrugated aluminum. Chuck walked right in without knocking to show me how respected he was here. Inside, it was barely big enough for the two double beds and the TV on top of the dresser. Four people slept in one bed, three in the other, most of them kids. I recognized Osa and Squeeze-eye from earlier in the day.
The kitchen was outside, bordered by plywood. A canvas tarp served as the kitchen's roof. There was a fire pit with blackened rocks in the middle and a few wooden shelves around the sides for pots and pans and ladles and things.
Essie got up to button her blouse for us, smiling at Chuck. The other woman was ignoring us and watching a movie courtesy of the pirated cable from the power lines on the street. Chuck said something to Essie about money and she nodded and smiled some more.
I heard the steam whistle of an approaching baked nut machine and stepped outside to watch it pass.
October, 1996
