He has been on the streets, scraping and scheming for a living, often finding it in all the wrong places, for the last 30 years, just short of half his life.
After a good enough start to his education at the primary and secondary school levels; even though he cut the latter short given the pull of the environment in close proximity to the school.
How did he get to have his bedspread across a huge drain that takes water down a slope, which in the rainy season, like the present, is always threatening to take him down the river? Notwithstanding the crudity of his living environment, he has made a few additions to it, including the planting of a line of pigeon peas trees and very simple but creative and very human touches close to the drain; it says to the visitor, “My humanity has not left me completely.”
CS is not a constructed character of mine; he is someone I have known for approximately 50-plus years. We grew up in the same neighbourhood couple of streets away.
While we were never close friends, or perhaps not even just friends, on seeing him a day last week and having had a short chat with him in which he surprised me with information about the family of a decades-old very close friend, questions began to roll around my mind: “Why did he go so far off course? What were the circumstances that led to him becoming “homeless”, and the description of his status he prefers? How does he now survive through his daily foraging for the core things of life? How does he continue to live in a tunnel in which his bed, a piece of board jammed into the sides of the concrete tunnel, is just above the level of the rainwater, which flows heavily like in the present, without being washed away with his few garments, soiled and torn from overuse?
I learnt a few things about the answers in an hour-plus conversation with him, the longest and most substantial we ever had; the fact is that during his period of decline, I have mostly avoided any close contact and long conversation, even though I have extended on occasion something for old times’ sake.
It’s the kind of thing that is easy to do; it acts as a balm for the conscience. Could a more personal and humane intervention along the way have influenced change in his life? I have engaged in this column and others to come, to go beyond the generalised and even academically researched findings to ask and have CS answer the questions for those of my readers interested: “What are a few of the life experiences which have led him—I will not call his real name—to this almost non-human existence?
He identifies a drug block near his school where he got hooked first on introductory drugs: “weed, mandrax—remember that we used to take it to relax and get ah head; and then the big one, cocaine,” he told me. I asked whether he still takes the latter: “no big thing just ah little piece sometimes.”
He showed me one of his hands in which two fingers are curled permanently towards the palm. It’s the left over from a cutlass attack: “When I buy ah ten ball from (lane named) and complained that this thing ent good man; ah woman come with ah cutlass and drop it on me, Fraser.”
CS considers the chopping as a major descent into homelessness and a drug-infested and controlled life. After a few attempts at deviating from saying what was the one most fundamental reason for his struggles as a young adult, he said, “I is ah bastard child, ah illegitimate child,” he stressed with quite a measure of power and pain and repeated it no fewer than six times during this part of the conversation; he is obviously “toting” as the young people say.
“I felt nobody ent want me. My mother was married to ah Potogee man (name called) and when he died, she pick up with another man. He breed she and me and meh sister come out and then he went States (USA) side and leave we here. Boy we live everywhere since I was four years old, meh mother begging a lodging everywhere, till she family rescue we here in Belmont.”
CS said he had chances, he trained and worked as an auto mechanic, the language of which he remembers laying it on me thick. And although he claims that life started working for him as he got a job, he could not resist the pull in the other direction, which led him to known drug blocks and environments.
Inevitably, “ah get some jail time, plenty times: unlawful possession, larceny, loitering, housebreaking, accessory after the fact, plenty case. Ah had some bad gyul too and had to go down Wrightson Road, but ah never had a real woman,” he says with feeling.
To be continued.
Tony Rakhal-Fraser is a freelance journalist, former reporter/current affairs programme host and News Director at TTT, programme producer/current affairs director at Radio Trinidad, correspondent for the BBC Caribbean Service and the Associated Press, graduate of UWI, CARIMAC, Mona and St Augustine, Institute of International Relations.
