You're there, still, in my mind's eye, sitting on the bonnet of a pickup truck, more like leaning, really, since you-and-all would have known you would almost bound to dent the truck if you only put your full weight on it, like how you dent a back or two in your time, becaw you had some size, there, Babes, your hips looking like they could borrow the "Wide Load" sign from the big truck you and your sister and your posse would be following, come Carnival Tuesday. But it wasn't the big truck you were chasing, it was the pickup truck you were leaning, and it was pan you were liming, on the Track in the Savannah, that Panorama Prelims Sunday, when I musta been, what, 30 years old, so is a good two decades now; and you died, aged 63, every bit as pretty and as sexy as you were at 30; and you had a pot of pelau on your expansive lap and a pot spoon in your hand and a grin on your face and a bearing (and a nature) that said everybody could have everything from hug-and-kiss to chicken gizzard, any member of the family of pan-lovers, wash your foot and jump een, your whole being giving them permission to mash-up the place and, if they could wait 'til you get up, they could also pelt a little waist. And, now I have that image so firmly in my mind and have set it down here on paper, I will have to be very drunk every Carnival I experience from now until I myself drop, not to see you on that pickup truck bonnet at just that corner in the Track, with those broad hips that your warm, wide smile made look maga, and those welcoming arms, and that sitting invitation to all on Sunday to come and eat ah food, veni mange, take all you want from my essence, it will always have more in the pot to spring water.
Now that you're gone and no one will spite you professionally, I can reveal you were in the know, that morning in 1987 when I posed as Cuban artist BC Montana, and came on Dateline to promote my spurious "exxy-bee-shong of modern eh-sculpture," the event that changed my own life, becaw it led to me leaving the practice of law and working full-time in the papers; well, if you count as "full-time" the six months I lasted at the Express, half-a-year of maintaining a pretence that a Cabinet minister turning on a standpipe in Never Dirty or some fat, greasy and dubious businessman opening a similar foreign fast food franchise was "news." When Keith Smith died earlier this year, I wrote, right here, that no one that big could genuinely be happy, and I believe I'm right; and you were the exception that probably proved the rule. Maybe you were miserable inside in truth; certainly you would have had your bad moods, but only those closest to you would have seen them, your sisters, your spouse, your blood family. The rest of us, the family of man, the kinship of Trinidad, we only saw your good side; and there was plenty of it. You gave me air-time on TV, taking a chance that could have got you sacked for something. (This was long before Faz and being fired for nothing). You took a chance on me for the same reason you gave your attention and your smile to everyone who came to you in good faith with a good heart: because you had a sense of what was right and hopeful about this place; and I'm not saying I was right about duping Trinis like Therese Mills into thinking that BC Montana was the real-life brother of Tony Montana, Al Pacino's character in Scarface; I'm saying you could see in a short, attention-seeking, privileged prankster the possibility of some good emerging; and, if no other good came of it, if we didn't raise five grand for the Rape Crisis Centre (which was like raising $100K now), if no one ever benefitted from your kindness but me, it was worthwhile for me alone; becaw, eef I had remained a lawyer, I would be miserable now, no matter how much money I might have had to distract myself.
How many other lives did you change, between pretend TV living room and genuine restaurant dining room, not to mention panyard, panchyat or bar? It have some people who come like what I learn in chemistry class was called "catalyst": they don't undergo any change theyself, but they speed up change in others. Two generations watched you there on the small screen, you with your big size that had to be big to hold a heart like yours; and now you slipped out quietly while no one was watching, with some of your friends racing down to the Blood Bank and all. For all that it sometimes hard to bear, something about this Trinidad makes it good all the time, even with the child murdering and the tricksters sewing long-term race for their own short-term cash crop. Something about Trinidad stops the Trinidadian from giving up completely, makes him or her turn and turn into the gyre and firetruck away with the falconer. I can't say what that thing is; if anybody could, they would plant a flag on it, and it would be a rallying point around which a movement would grow like ti-marie in football field; I can't say what it was but I do know that you had it, that thing that makes this place, this short drop through the abyss, not just bearable, but an occasion calling out for bottle-and-spoon; and that broad smile and that big heart. Plenty of them lie when they say, "All o' we is one"; but you lived it. And died it. Most people are born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the dessert air; you lived onstage in one long aria. In the warmest place in my heart/imagination, I try to think you just gone to carry Keith his pelau and corn soup. I imagine you and he liming a cloud and quarrelling over the leg-and-thigh. Oh, the loss could make a big man weep, if he didn't firetrucking well un'stand that this was one fat lady who sang out our souls.
BC Pires is in the chorus-and the wings-and Black Friday has turned blue. Read more of his
writing at www.BCraw.com