Pulphead: Essays (35 page)

When Higgs got out, he started hosting informal music sessions under a fruit tree in the open yard by his place. “Trench Town in those days didn’t have any real separation from yard to yard,” Bunny said. “There was no fence, nothing, so Joe Higgs’s yard was a place that had activities related to gambling, a table, the lady who sells fried dumplings, fried fish … It was a popular corner.”

Higgs became a mentor to the Wailers, whose potential he sensed right away. Bunny said that the older man actually put his career on hold for a couple of years to train them. “He was paying so much attention to the Wailers,” Bunny said, “he started to believe in the Wailers more even than himself.” He taught them harmony, breath control, and the rudiments of composition, which young Bob especially was hungry to learn. According to Bunny, Higgs used Mr. Miyagi–like methods. He would come knocking at one-thirty in the morning, waking them up and making them play, saying, “If you can’t sing dem hours, then you can’t sing.” He would lead them deep into May Pen Cemetery (the same cemetery where bodies are said to have been covertly buried during the Dudus riots), then demand that they harmonize among the graves, reasoning, “If you’re not afraid fe sing fe duppy [a Caribbean spirit], the audience
caaan’t
frighten you.”

“That was the kind of teacher he was,” Bunny said. “It pumped bravery in us.” He mentioned that in all the years he’d been touring, since 1969, “I’ve never sexed a woman in my work.” He laid out his theory that a man’s energy is contained in his sperm. “Every time you discharge, you’re liable to lose five pounds.” He encouraged me to try it next time, weigh myself afterward.

“Maybe
you
lose five pounds,” Llewis said. Bunny laughed.

He was getting tired. It was strange to realize, after hearing all these stories about that cradle period, that Bunny was entering his mid-sixties. Because Peter and Bob and Joe Higgs and so many others weren’t destined to become old, you didn’t expect it to happen to Bunny, somehow. He looks like a little Rastafarian wizard. He’ll live much longer; he has that skinny-man longevity. How had he done it? I asked him. How had he alone stayed alive? “I put my trust in the Most High,” he said, “Jah Rastafari.” He told us we could come back tomorrow at the same time.

*   *   *

In the morning, we pulled up to Bunny’s place as before and banged on the gates, but the scene had changed. An older Rasta, hollow chested in his thinness and wearing gnarled gray dreads, greeted us, saying, “Africa love.” When I think about it, he was probably greeting only Llewis that way.

Bunny couldn’t come out, the man explained. He was in a serious meeting. We should try again later.

We decided to see Trench Town. On the way, Llewis gave me an idea of where the different garrisons lay, which ones were PNP, which ones were JLP. We drove toward Tivoli Gardens but hit a roadblock and got turned around. “He is press,” Llewis said. “I am press,” I said. The young cop looked at us silently. He just repeated the circling motion with his finger, with his left hand over the machine gun.

Things got palpably more tense as you moved toward these neighborhood streets. Dudus’s supporters didn’t know what to do. Jamaican politics is a perpetual
1984-
style standoff meant to be endlessly perpetuated while the ministers enrich themselves. It doesn’t know how to behave in a vacuum.

I was frankly shocked by the appearance of the Trench Town Culture Yard. It’s in a slum. That’s an insensitive word, but when they have sledgehammer holes in the walls for windows, and women with babies on their arms are openly begging on the street, wanting to be paid to have their picture taken, and groups of ownerless dogs with skin diseases are going around, that’s a slum. There’s a lovely little area right there at the entrance, though, shaded with trees, and it has benches. Hummingbirds. A bunch of Rastas were hanging out. The air was sickly sweet with the smell of torched hemp.

Llewis and I talked and decided that a nice gesture would be to procure some good herb and bring it to Bunny. He’d been more generous with his time than any applicable obligations required. We soon met a young moped-riding gentleman capable of filling our need. We explained who it was for—they know Bunny well in Trench Town. They call him “Bunny Wailers” there, with an
s
. They also understood without needing it explained that he’s unlikely to be a person who plays around with dry-ass gray you-have-to-smoke-four-joints-to-feel-it rope-weed. The guy promised to bring back the best he had. I happily overpaid, as Llewis seemed to feel that the guy was not overly bullshitting us about the quality.

Back at Bunny’s, however, the same Rasta guy met us again at the gate. Jah B was sorry. The meeting looked to run longer than expected. Come back that night. Bunny did want to see us, the man said, but they were discussing serious matters.

It was late afternoon now. We were heat-drunk and fatigued and still hadn’t really even begun. We discussed some more and agreed that we should take the opportunity to smoke some of the weed I’d bought, to make absolutely sure that it wasn’t shit, that we wouldn’t be inadvertently insulting Bunny with it. We would be like the king’s tasters, I suppose. Where could this be done safely, though? Contrary to what you might think, Jamaica is not a place where you can just lie around in a park and smoke ganja all day.

Llewis said that he knew of some clubs. We drove for a while, toward the edge of the city. A security guy met us at the gate and let us through. There was a big open-air bar. “Mind if we smoke?” Llewis asked. The guy said he didn’t. We rolled a two-sheeter, under a giant sign that said
NO GANJA SMOKING.
Inside it was a strip club; out here it was just mellow. The girls inside had no customers. Dudus had killed Kingston tourism. They kept wandering out looking bored. Naturally we offered them hits from the joint, which they were evidently allowed to take, and did. We tipped them, just for existing, I suppose. They were all from the country. The cheapness of their lingerie was sad, and so was the horrible clacking eighties-era American pop they kept playing inside, real Casey Kasem nightmare stuff.

They rolled out a TV. A World Cup match was on. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that Llewis had been prepared to miss it, his beloved Germany versus Spain, had the original schedule with Bunny happened. He’d put money on this match, too, it turned out. Llewis, what a solid dude. And now, by this magic, we got to watch the soccer after all, while smoking and drinking and waiting to go see Bunny. We had hours to kill.

The weed turned out to be way up there powerwise. I was straight confused for a while. Possibly this had something to do with making Germany’s loss extra crushing to Llewis. He couldn’t take it. To him it seemed not only perverse but insane that Spain had won. The litany of explanations, both technical and moral, that he delivered to the few assembled bar patrons and dancers became a discourse. He was lecturing. He slipped entirely into patois, and that’s how the others spoke to him, so I fathomed little of what they said, while nonetheless seeing my role as to reassure Llewis of Germany’s superiority.

We had a sort of hungover dinner at T.G.I. Friday’s, Llewis somewhat morose. But on the way to Bunny’s for what we hoped would be the last time, we listened to “Diseases” again, and “Diseases” would cheer up a dry drunk at a Cabo sales retreat.

Llewis taught me something. At high school in Jamaica, he said, when your team lost, it was traditional to chant, on your way out of the grounds, “We no feel no way! We no feel no way!” Meaning essentially, we’re not sweating it, we didn’t really give a shit anyway. I sensed real psychological depth in this chant and didn’t need to be urged more than once by Llewis to beat on the dashboard and join him in it, which we did the rest of the way to Bunny’s, and in that manner Llewis seemed to exorcise his disappointment.

Now it was dark. We knocked on the gate. The same guy came back, but this time he said Jah B had given instructions for us to be let in. We stepped through, back into the patio, and saw that Bunny was sitting around a table with a number of other Rastafarians. They were having a “reasoning,” to use Bunny’s word. He gestured to us and said that the meeting was wrapping up. It had been going for seven hours.

The guy carried in two chairs and placed them in the corner of the patio, away from the table, motioning for us to sit. We sat while they continued to discuss business. Llewis and I felt out of place and awkward. A couple of the women present were vocal about not wanting us there. At one point we stood up and tried to signal our willingness to wait outside or something, but the man who’d let us in said to the women, “Jah B wants them here, they are special people to Jah B,” and everything calmed.

The meeting went on for maybe another hour. It began to rain, and we were allowed to bring our chairs closer. They prayed. Then there was an hour of goodbyes. The Rastas waved to us cordially as they were leaving. Bunny sat in his office, with the door open, conferring privately with one of the sisters. We heard crying, and then they were praying, and Bunny made curious whooping sounds. It was revivalist-sounding.

When he was done with that, he came out and spoke to us, told us he needed to bathe and freshen up, get restored. During our last visit, he’d said that he didn’t sleep much, got most of his best work done at night.

I had a couple of decent-size roaches in my shirt pocket. We huffed those in the shadows of the courtyard. We could hear singing from a church across the street, the sound of many raised voices inside a tightly closed box. Bunny had an old poster leaning against one concrete wall, a portrait of Marcus Garvey. Llewis sang Burning Spear,
Do you remember the days of slavery?
After each hit he took, he’d say, “Irie.” He wasn’t a Rasta; he was being sort of tongue in cheek, the way we might say something in a Southern accent after taking a shot of whiskey. He said he’d dabbled with Rastafarianism once, after high school, but had come to a place where he didn’t believe in religion, period.

Bunny appeared silently as a dark shape in the light from his office, wearing a full formal dress khaki Haile Selassie Ethiopian military uniform. His dreads were freshly coiled. He motioned for us to sit. “What was that a meeting of?” I asked. He explained it had been a gathering of a group calling itself the Millennium Council, which contained a representative from each of the thirteen “mansions” of Rasta (like denominations—Bunny is Nyabinghi, one of the elders of that mansion). They were meeting to discuss Jamaica’s participation in an upcoming international Rastafarian conference.

He began to tell us the story of how he had become a Rasta. “I knew of Rasta from I was a little child,” he said, “but the Blackheart Man was the name given to the Rastaman, to make every youth stay far from that individual, ’cause he’s likely to cut your heart out and eat it and all that kind of stuff. And when you disobeyed or did anything that wasn’t appropriate within the family, they would say, ‘If you don’t do this here, I’m gonna call the Blackheart Man on you.’”

In Kingston, in Trench Town, when kids were late to school, they used to run by the gullies to get there faster. Rastas lived in the gullies. The city gave them waste grounds for making their camps. “The Blackheart Man lived in the manhole,” Bunny said. “Check that—that’s Rastaman.” Sometimes one of these dreadlocked mystics would come out of his shanty “to fill his little butter pan with water,” and when the children saw him, they’d run the other way. Bunny remembered a couple of his friends getting cut and bruised, they ran so fast to get away. But for some reason—maybe it was the influence of Joe Higgs—this youth, Neville, started asking himself why he ran. He’d noticed that as he and his friends ran from the Rastas, the Rastas were calmly walking back to their holes. “So when him comes out, I took a brave heart, and he just look at me as if, ‘Aren’t you running, too?’”

Bunny questioned the man, asking what made him live like he did. “I find out he has an intellect, someone like a lawyer or a doctor when he opened his mouth,” he said. “Then he tells me that Haile Selassie the First inspired him to walk this route. ‘Seek first the kingdom of Jah, and all other things shall be added.’
Rastaman
. Not me hear them thing out no Bible—
Rasta
taught them things, and me understand immediately.”

In spring of 1966 occurred the visit of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian emperor, the black man on the cover of
Time
who had taken his place at the white man’s highest table, in the United Nations, and who many Jamaicans, on fire with a Marcus Garvey–inspired Pan-Africanist Zionism, held to be a coming of Christ. When Ras Tafari (Prince Fearless, in his native Amharic) arrived at the Kingston airport, he was so overwhelmed by the intensity of the crowd’s reception that he immediately turned and went back into the plane, worried for his life. A Rastafarian leader, dressed in a simple forest tunic like John the Baptist, gained permission to go on board, where he explained to Selassie that the surging of the crowd owed purely to their love for him. It is said that Selassie wept. Bunny Livingston was there that day. “Who didn’t see His Imperial Majesty didn’t want to,” he said. Like many in the crowd, he felt the emperor’s eyes on himself individually and at the same time on everyone. There were many other such “mystics” (showings forth of the divine). A shower passed, and thousands were soaked and flash-dried on the spot. Some Rastas lit chalice for herb, and a plane flying overhead exploded. They’d been given powers. Bunny saw a band of Moravian sisters, all dressed in white with black faces, dancing down the road waving palms and singing hosanna, “because He was Who He was,” Bunny said, “because He is Who He is.”