Ex Mentis Bill Ackerbauer: December 2005

I've wrapped up my academic work for the semester and am starting to relax and rest up in preparation for the monsterous one that will start in January. I'm excited to report that I've accepted an assistantship at UAlbany for the spring, which means free tuition and a position tutoring in the Writing Center. I will be leaving the Daily Gazette in early January.
In related good news, I've been offered a teaching gig for the summer semester, which means I won't be (completely) unemployed after my assitantship is over.

At any rate, what follows is the last piece I wrote for my workshop in non-fiction prose. It was difficult stuff to write about, but I'm more or less pleased with how it came out.

Note: I’m thinking of this as the second or third “chapter” in a memoir about my experiences in Jamaica. Certain things (such as what AFS is, who the Lowes are, etc.) will have been explained prior to this section. For a previous Jamaica story, click this link.

A Milestone in May Pen
The night my youngest sister celebrated her eighteenth birthday, I wasn't able to attend the party. The whole family gathered for dinner at a swanky restaurant in Saratoga Springs, while I sat staring at copy on a flickering, monochromatic computer screen (almost as old as Kate herself) deep in the bowels of the Daily Gazette’s Schenectady newsroom. I don't think Kate was surprised at my absence, because I don't have a strong record of showing up for the significant moments in her life.
The distance between us has been mainly a matter of age. Kate was born when I was 15 years old, a sophomore in high school. My sister Nancy was 12 when she was thrust into the dreaded position of "middle child" with the new arrival. Kate was barely talking and still in diapers when I graduated from high school and promptly left home to spend a year as an exchange student in the Caribbean. That’s where I celebrated my eighteenth birthday – in May Pen, Jamaica, in the company of strangers, thousands of miles from home.
Just before the start of the school year in September, the AFS staff made arrangements for me to leave the Lowes’ home and move across town, where I would spend the remainder of the year with another couple, the Higginses. Oddly, their names were also Noel and Phyllis, though (odder still) they called each other by a set of pet names. “Bunny” was a successful land surveyor, a long-limbed, big-bellied man whose permanent gap-toothed grin and easygoing nature contrasted with his wife’s matter-of-fact propriety. “Pixie” was a diminutive, almost cherubic homemaker who maintained a dense green jungle of a garden behind the house. She directed the household servants – a live-in garden boy and a part-time laundress and house cleaner – with shrill commands and tense body language that unmistakably said: “Slackness will not be tolerated.” At six feet tall, Bunny towered over her four feet, four inches, but they had similar East Indian features and were similarly round in the middle. They had three grown children who lived together in a Kingston flat that Bunny had leased for them. Kevin, the youngest at nineteen years old, was an engineering student at the University of the West Indes. Roger, in his mid-twenties, was a doctor in residency at the university hospital. Sandra, perhaps twenty-eight years old, was an advertising executive with a Kingston agency.
At the time my birthday rolled around, in October, I had heard all about the Higgins children – especially the doctor; he had studied in London – but I hadn’t met them in person. On the morning of my birthday, Pixie served me a special breakfast: A bowl of corn flakes, a ripe mango and a tough, charred little hamburger patty on a plate. She’d heard somewhere, perhaps from friends or from television, that Americans love their burgers. I could not muster the cold frankness it would have taken to explain to her that Americans don’t often eat hamburgers for breakfast, especially when they are bone-dry and overloaded with cumin, coriander and rosemary. She stood in her apron, spatula in hand, watching for signs of my appreciation. I ate slowly and deliberately, forcing a smile and struggling to keep my eyes from watering. The situation was made even crueler by the fact that she hadn’t offered me juice, milk or water, so I had to choke down the arid beef with nothing but saliva and willpower. I popped the final bite into my mouth and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Pixie half-hummed, half-sang to herself as she turned and waddled back to her not-quite-white-tile kitchen, quite pleased to have fulfilled her role as host mother.
Looking back on it years later, I realized that that ordeal of a morning meal was the first in a series of interactions with Pixie in which our sincere attempts to understand and appreciate each other went down in flames because of cultural differences and a mutual desire to avoid overt conflict at any cost. After breakfast, we stood in the kitchen and drank tea, chatting about the significance of turning eighteen.
“Now that you’re eighteen, that means you can get license to drive car in the U.S., no?”
I told her I already had a license and had been driving for about a year. I declined to mention that the state of New York had suspended it. On the day I was supposed to appear in court to answer for a 113 mile-per-hour Prom Night indiscretion on the Thruway, I was in Jamaica.
“But now you can vote for the president and go around and drink beer and things like a big man when you go home, eh?” she teased.
Yes, I’d be able to vote, I said, but I wouldn’t be able to drink beer legally until I turned twenty-one. “But I’m going to drink as much Red Stripe as I can while I’m here,” I teased back.
“Mind you don’t let it drunk ya and cause scandal,” she said. She took a sip of lukewarm tea, and her expression grew gradually more anxious. I imagined she was visualizing her young white charge being thrown out of a rum shop on the other side of town. Or worse, being thrown out of a rum shop, beaten, robbed and left for dead in a dirty gully. Or worse still, being thrown out of a local rum shop for making amorous advances on a black girl, then beaten, robbed, etc.
Our intimate tea-talk had soured. She told me her plans for the rest of the day.
“We’re going to drive to Kingston,” she said. “Roger will be receiving a University certificate at a banquet, and all the children will be there. We’ve been looking forward to having dinner with them all, so it should be a very pleasant evening.”
I couldn’t tell whether she meant I was expected to accompany her and Bunny to a family function, or if I was being told politely that I would have to fend for myself while they went off to Kingston. Perhaps I was being offered a choice; it was my birthday, after all. The point seemed moot, in any event, because I had already made plans with Kris Koch to go to a big football match in another part of the parish. That certainly seemed like more fun than a long drive to Kingston, and sitting dejectedly through a tedious awards banquet for strangers, at which spicy desiccated hamburger would no doubt be the featured entree. I told Pixie I was going to see the football match and my ride was already on the way to pick me up. From the hardness of the look she gave, I could tell she was disappointed, perhaps even frustrated and angry. But she told me to “go, enjoy the sport,” and she’d see me when they returned. It would be quite late.
A few minutes later, Kris and his host sister arrived in a pickup, and the sound of the truck’s horn riled the Higgins’s bad dogs. There are three categories of dogs in Jamaica: bad dogs, which are what Americans call “guard dogs”; skin-and-bones strays; and good dogs, which are mere pets and much rarer than the other two types. The Higginses had two big Rottweilers, both mean as hell. If the dogs had names, the Higginses never used them; they were part of the household’s security infrastructure and decidedly not pets. They slept in the garage, at the foot of the young gardener’s grubby cot. Hearing the pickup arrive, they flew up the driveway, snarling and yapping, threatening to leap over the gate and attack the rusted old Nissan like lions on a wounded gazelle.
This sort of ruckus was the standard greeting for every caller at the Higgins residence, and I’d heard it before, so I knew what would follow: “Lascelles!” “Lascelles!” Bunny and Pixie, hollering from opposite ends of the house – his voice booming and hers keening almost a perfect octave higher – for the gardener to calm the frenzied dogs. Tending the dogs was his most important duty, and Lascelles relished it because besides Bunny he was the only person capable of keeping those Rottweilers in line. I watched from the garden gate as he padded barefoot up the drive, shooing the mutts and slapping their backsides with the flat of his machete blade. With a mumble and a wink, he waved me on – it was safe now to walk past the dogs, hop over the rusted iron gate and climb into the bed of the idling pickup.
I gave Lascelles a curt wave as we pulled away from the gate, and I exhaled with a shudder. Kris handed me a warm bottle of Guinness and a bag of peanuts. I was breathing hard, and my pulse throbbed in my neck, face and hands. I didn’t realize just how tightly I had been wound that morning until I was in the truck, riding out of May Pen, putting some distance between myself and the Higgins house. I was exhilarated at the thought of having a day away from these strange stand-ins for parents, especially the tiny, perplexing matron and her many expectations.
But there was also something about the wink Lascelles gave me as he dealt with the dogs. I recalled that I once heard Bunny order him around by the name “Mephistopheles.” It seemed a playful, if somewhat cruel, way to tease the gardener, whom I understood to be an oprhan who’d been employed by the Higginses for some years. He was a short, muscular, coffee-skinned man of African descent. His curly hair glinted red in the sun. He was roughly my age, but he could have been as many as five years younger or older. He seemed incapable of speaking in anything other than guttural mumbles. After a few months on the island, I had a passable grasp of Jamaican patois, but Lascelles was completely undecipherable. Even his employers had difficulty communicating with him. Perhaps he had a speech defect. Or perhaps he was mentally disabled and spoke his own language. He talked to himself often, and sometimes snickered or crowed like a rooster for no apparent reason. Only the bad dogs understood him.
- - -
It was after dark when the pickup turned into Heath Close and stopped to let me out at the Higginses’ house. Zombified by Guinness, Red Stripe, and the bumpy hour-long ride home from the football match, I said good-bye to my friends in a poor attempt at patois and approached the front gate. Bunny’s sturdy old mint-green Volvo was not in the driveway. They had not yet returned from Kingston.
“Hello,” I said at moderate volume, not wanting to disturb neighbors or set the dogs off. There was no response, and the house was dark. “Hello! Anybody home? Lascelles?”
No reply.
I swung one leg over the gate and was about to drop down onto the driveway when I heard the scrape of dogs’ nails on blacktop at its far end. I kept awkwardly still, straddling the gate, and listened. A quiet rasp of animal breathing. I flung my leg back and jumped down outside the gate, suddenly sober but far from steady.
Should I yell again for Lascelles? He must be here. He wouldn’t sneak off into town and leave the place unattended; he’d be fired for that. He must be asleep on his cot and didn’t hear me the first time.
But perhaps he did hear me. Perhaps he’s standing in the shadow of the garage, watching me, silently amused at my skittishness. With that machete in his hand.
I backed away from the gate and considered my options. I could wait there in the road for Bunny and Pixie to come home. Could be minutes, could be hours. I could walk downtown, about three miles away, and have a few beers at one of the bars, acting as inconspicuous as a white teenager possibly could in a working-class town far from any tourist area. I’d done that before, and with the invincibility of youth, I certainly didn’t feel like I was in any danger. But on this night that long path into town seemed sinister. Instead I walked up Heath Close, deeper into the Higgins’s quiet, upper-middle-class neighborhood. White stucco and electric-blue awnings of houses glowed in the moonlight, and intermittent street lamps splashed yellow pools onto the pavement. Frogs peeped and insects chittered, but no cars, no people. In this neighborhood, all were tucked away behind gates and palm trees and hedges and bad dogs.
At the top of a hill just a few blocks from the Higginses’, I was surprised to see a familiar place. One evening three months earlier, when I had just arrived in Jamaica and was still living with the Lowes, a group of Australians invited me to play tennis with them at the local country club. On the way there, we’d stopped to pick up another player – at this house. She was also Australian, about 40 years old, the wife of a powerful businessman in the local bauxite mining industry. The tennis outing had been friendly and casual, and I recalled that over drinks after the match, she made a point of inviting me to visit her home. I hadn’t realized that I had moved into the same neighborhood. Suddenly I found myself ringing her doorbell. It seemed as good a time as any to accept her invitation.
A maid answered the door and wasn’t sure how to react to a strange white youth who came calling after dark. She took a step back, and Mrs. Petersen appeared in the doorway. She took a moment to remember my name and how we’d met, and then invited me in. Sitting at her kitchen table were David and Nadia, the other Aussies with whom we’d played doubles at the club. Joining them, I explained that I was now living in the neighborhood, and rather than tell the situation in all its complexity, I lied that I was locked out of the house. At the time itdidn’t seem important to mention that I didn’t have anywhere else to go. It’s obvious to me now that these three must have assumed that I showed up at Christine’s door because they were the only white people I knew in the neighborhood.
The awkwardness of my sudden arrival was quickly defused by David’s off-color humor and liberal quantities of beer and rum punch. He and his fiancee were spending the winter as guests of the Petersens. In the spring, the couple said, they’d launch David’s boat, continuing the round-the-world sail he’d begun that year. It was not his first. He’d acquired Nadia as a crew member somewhere between Sydney and Kingston. They were both blonde and sunburned, in their late thirties, and even in shorts and T-shirts, they had the air of tropical aristocrats. Christine was glad to have their company because her husband, the aluminium magnate, was in Baltimore for the winter, recovering from some serious heart surgery. After some small talk about how it wasn’t quite right for a young white foreigner to be left to his own devices at night in May Pen, David began telling a series of bawdy sailing stories and ribald tennis tales. Both these otherwise healthy activities seemed to involve a great deal of liquor for Australians, so much so that even the telling and hearing of stories about them called for heavy consumption. After three or four of David’s yarns and as many bottles of beer, Nadia asked me about my family back home. I told her that Dad was an engineer and mom was a teacher, and that I had two younger sisters, one just a toddler who might not even remember me after my year abroad.
“How old are, you, Bill?” Nadia asked.
“Seventeen – no, eighteen,” I said. “In fact, today’s my eighteenth birthday.”
The ladies smiled and cooed congratulations, and David slammed both palms onto the tabletop, making empty Red Stripe bottles rattle and causing one full one to foam and spill.
“Eighteenth birthday?” he bellowed. “God, man, what are you doing here chatting up us old folks on your birthday? You should be painting the town with a girl on either arm!”
“The least we can do is have a proper toast,” Christine said. “What can I get you, Bill? Rum? Vodka? Whiskey?”
Rum was too Jamaican, vodka too Siberian. I agreed to whiskey, the poison that sounded most like home to me. I was disappointed when she returned with a bottle of Scotch. It was of very good quality considering how far we were from Glasgow, but I’d been hoping for smokey American bourbon. I drank the Johnny Walker, though, and David went on with the spinning of his sailor’s yarns. When my glass was empty, it took a great deal of effort to stand up from the table and announce thickly that I had to be leaving. My head felt heavier than it should, and the force of gravity itself seemed to be drawing me out the door, down the street and toward the Higginses’ gate. When I got there, the Volvo was in the driveway. Too drunk this time to be concerned about the neighbors, I clumsily climbed over the gate and shouted, “Hello!” The greeting was directed at Lascelles, the bad dogs, and Bunny and Pixie collectively, even though they’d surely all be sleeping at this hour. “Bring them on,” I thought. “Bring them all on.”
The dogs gave a few muffled woofs, and a moment later, Lascelles emerged from the gloom of the garage to open the gate. No machete.
“Come, sah,” he said, and grunted something about the dogs.
“Sorry to wake you,” I said. “I was out celebrating my birthday.”
“Yes, sah.” He looked me in the eye then for the first time that day, and he was grinning. Then he said something unintelligible.
“What?”
Lascelles shrugged and pointed to the house, then put an index finger to his lips.
“Ah, they’re asleep in there, huh?” I wasn’t sure if he meant the dogs or the Higginses.
He nodded and escorted me quietly through the garden and into the kitchen. I thanked him and said good night, and he turned back toward the garage. A few minutes later, I was still in the kitchen, drinking a cold glass of water and steadying myself with one hand on the counter. Lascelles poked his head in through the doorway and asked a question. Again, I couldn’t make out the words.
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that,” I said. “Ask me again tomorrow after I’ve had a chance to clear my head.” He seemed equally unsure about what I’d said. We were startled then by a frightening, anguished moan coming from the kitchen hall. Lascelles and I exchanged a glance, and suddenly Pixie’s mother shambled into our midst. Granny was a sad and horrible sight. Elderly, blind and exceedingly frail, hobbling toward us with her cane in one gnarled fist and saliva streaming from both corners of her toothless mouth. Wrinkled, mottled skin hung off her small, fragile, bony frame. The words “Alzheimer’s disease” were not inmy vocabulary then, but I’m now sure she must have been in its advanced stages. She had wet her nightgown and was desperately calling out names that were not familiar to me, perhaps the names of long dead loved-ones.
Lascelles tried to take Granny by the arm and help her back to her bedroom, but she struck him a viscious blow with her wooden cane. He staggered back and tenderly pressed fingers against the welt that formed on his forehead. He looked at me and shrugged. Should we wake Bunny and Pixie?
I approached Granny from a safer angle and wrapped both my arms around hers, partly to comfort her and partly to keep that blunt instrument out of play. I picked her up like a parent would a sleepwalking child – she weighed almost nothing, like a bundle of straw – and I carried her down the hall toward her bedroom. As I walked past the master bedroom, the door flew open and Pixie took in the scene with obvious alarm.
“What in heaven’s –?” she gasped. Here was a boozy American teenager carrying her infirm mother through the darkened house, trailed by the dirty, mentally impaired garden boy. Granny was whimpering now, a bit calmer. Behind me, Lascelles mumbled something.
“Put her down on her bed,” Pixie told me. “And put yourself down in your own.”
I arose late the next morning to a breakfast identical to the previous day’s, but cold. Bunny was standing in the kitchen in boxer shorts and a ratty T-shirt, with fuzzy, blue slippers on his feet.
“Your breakfast been there long time, Bill,” he told me. “Pixie cook it before she go shopping in town. She soon come back.”
I poured myself a tall glass of water and prepared to dive into another spicy jerkyburger.
Bunny hollered for Lascelles, who came sprinting up to the kitchen door.
“Pixie tell me you both help Granny last night.” Looking at me, Bunny said, “I doan tink she mad at you anymore. But me never know wid Pixie. ”
I nodded my pounding head and chewed a mouthful of mango. Not sure what to say about Pixie, I changed the subject.
“Hey, Mr. Higgins, Lascelles asked me a question last night and I couldn’t understand him. Could you find out what it was?”
Bunny spoke to Lascelles, who grinned a bit sheepishly and avoided looking in my direction as he gave a long reply.
Bunny chuckled as he translated: “He says he want to invite you to worship at his church on Sunday. He say you look last night like you need religion, like you got a little devil in you.”

Ex Mentis Bill Ackerbauer

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