Learning Calypso

STT Memories, Chapter 3

Me in 1975...

 These days, most people in the world think that the islands of the Caribbean are all Reggae.  But the solid 2 / 4 back beat that came roaring out of Jamaica in the 70s and 80s from the likes of Byron Lee, Bob Marley and Toots and the Mytals  has its “roots” in a dialect and culture that was much older than the music.  Some of us remember that before there was Reggae, there was Calypso, and that behind the music was a dialect.   

Calypso is kind of like a hairstyle or clothing that a given language wears.  It is the vie de sol of French that make it “Patois”; it is the culture and lifestyle of English in the Caribbean that make it Calypso. 

In the Caribbean Basin, in a deeper sense Calypso is really the impact of the African, East Indian, West Indian, Chinese and pan-European cultures and language bases that all muscle their way into whatever language is being spoken at the time.  English European aristocrats considered it just another form of “pidgin” but it was, and is, far more than that.  Just as calypso contains some very spicy secrets for the willing linguist, it is full of “organic experiences” when the unwary tourist or not quite culturally assimilated “continental” first runs headlong into it.

When I arrived on St Thomas in 1974 I didn’t know that a totally different type of English was spoken there.  I mean, Dad lived there so the language had to be English …right?

WRONG!

We went to the Blue Dolphin the first night I was on the island.  It was a tiny bar just down the hill from “Hippy Haven” on the bad side of Government Hill. As we walked in to the bar, I heard someone bark out a something just a little slower than light speed:  “Joseph! Ha-de-hell-we-doo-win-mon?? I-tell-in-you-mon… WAIT! who-de-hell-dis-is??"  I thought about it for a few seconds and then realized what I had just heard was indeed English, though it wasn’t anything close to the nasal Californian I was used to!  The speaker was Eddie Francis, a kind of crazy but wonderful Santo Domingan man who owned and ran the bar and sold cars in Sugar Estate.  Dad explained that I was his “inside son”.  After a round of introductions I settled onto a bar stool.  After a beer or two I started to look around. 

The Blue Dolphin was pretty Spartan.  A bar, a juke box and a pool table were pretty much all there was in the place.  An old, very out of balance Hunter ceiling fan wobbled over the bar.  The walls were a kind of aqua blue and dirt the first few feet up.  There was a cheap card table with a few metal chairs around it in the corner. Dominoes were scattered about the table like fallen solders.  To my eye, there wasn’t a square corner in the place.

Behind the pool table and out the back door were the ruins of another house.  Several West Indian men were hovering just outside the door around a small charcoal brazier that had a dented aluminum pot bubbling on it.  It looked to me to be some kind of stew cooking on it and it smelled wonderful!  I had to investigate so I walked out the door. The man who was stirring it looked up, cocked a suspicious eye at me and said “Who de hell you is” he demanded (again a few seconds of pause, while I filtered down the dialect and reacted)… “urm…I’m Tim” I said.  “Well” he said, “you is Tim, who de hell dat is?”  Totally confounded now, I stood there looking really young and no doubt pretty stupid, when Eddie suddenly intervened from behind me in staccato Calypso. “Mon, wa-de-fuk?..das Timothy da son-o-Joseph ann why you nah jus tell him wha you is makin ann not be given he such?! The just as quickly Eddie turned to me and said in perfect American English, slightly New York accented, “Tim this is Lieutenant England, and he is making Conk stew.  You must have some, here”.  Eddie grabbed a chipped coffee cup from the lieutenant, ladled a bit of the buttery stew into it and handed it to me.  I slurped a little and was immediately lost in the flavor, gulping it down and not coming up for air much to the guffawing delight of the West Indians.  I realized that I was probably being rude and smiled and thanked them and went back to the bar.

That Eddie had fallen into and out of Calypso without a problem intrigued me so I asked him why it seemed so strange to me.  He laughed very hard and tried to explain some of the basics.  He started easy.  Ok Tim, you got a “tooth”, but we call it a “toot”.  You got teeth, but we say “teet”.  And if I say “da ting” I am really saying “the thing”.  A man is a mon and if I see Dianna Ross on the TV, then I say, “ah see she on de tee vee”.  By now, full of conch and beer it was all getting too fast to follow.   I was still able to pick up on a lot of it simply being where the accent was placed.  Like the old Calypso song goes, you put the accent on the second syl-LA-ble, instead of the first SYL-la-ble.  Extrapolate it to music and Reggae jumps out with a four beat measure with the second and fourth (back beat) emphasized instead of the first and third of the four.  In stead of ONE two Three four, the basic island rhythm is “wan TWO tree FAH”.  Over the next six months or so it became a lot simpler as my ears tuned down to their first major dialectic shift from the standard American English of northern California.  It only took a day to learn to always say “Good-mawnin”…

As the years followed I began to learn to more of the subtleties of the dialects (there are many) as well as where and why they came about.  For example, with an educated ear, you can tell a “Trini” (someone from Trinidad) because of the Chinese based slight sing-song lilt to their speech. Chinese Coolie labor was imported to Trinidad in the 1800s to work the sugar plantations. There is a hint of East Indian in it too (as well as their food) due to the influence of (East) Indian traders who arrived in the mid 1800s.  Barbados is a mix of many of the same components, but the result is totally different (think Belafonte vs. The Mighty Sparrow). On the other side of the accents is Antigua, and to a greater extent, St Kitts where you will hear a strong, rich back of the “Queens English” left from Queen Victoria’s colonial aspirations there.  The French “Departments”, or the French Sugar islands, have their own brand of French that is more basic than the primary language.  With a close listen I have found that it tends to differ from one island to the next as well.  For example the families on St Thomas from the north side, who originally hail from St Barths have a slightly different accent from the south side French families of Frenchtown, whose origins are more from Guadeloupe.  If you go to both those islands you might notice that the accent is recognizably different.  The Dutch islands seem to have a bit of the same, with the true resident (somebody bon dare) of St Martin sounding quite different that someone from say Curacao. 

Regardless of where ya bon, everyone seems to be able to communicate when they really want to.  But you mus neva, evah forget meson, to always say “Good-mawnin”…

The Sanitary Cup Race

STT Memories, Chapter 2

Sometime in about 1975, I think at Fat City, a bunch of bar owners and other crazy people decided life on St Thomas just wasn’t exciting enough with all the perfect weather and water and all.  At the time, there were lots of races around STT like the Rolex and others sponsored b the SORC and ST Thomas Yacht club, but most of the “townies” weren’t part of all that.   The bar crowd, however, was never to be left out, and someone, I am not sure who, came up with the idea of an unlimited race that was more befitting the bar scene in STT. 

The rules were pretty simple:

1. Racers were issued a paper (sanitary) cup at the beginning of the race.  They had to finish the race with the same cup.
2. Racers had to get to each bar on the course, order a drink, pay for it and tip the bartender then drink it down in front of a judge who was there and who would then sign their bib number.
3. The bars could be anywhere on ST Thomas, Hassle or Water Island, and in fact were.  There were no rules as to how racers got to the bars.

That was about it.  It was an unlimited race with a lot of bragging rights on it.  The first year no one really knew what it would be like except that it was going to get crazy.

It got talked up a lot and someone printed up t-shirts.  Many of the local bartenders and their best customers signed up on a lark, but soon the strategies began to come out and so did the bets.  Then it got a bit more serious.  You see, the objective of the race was indeed to finish first, but it was also to make it around the course before the impact of all the drinks hit you.  A big part of it was figuring out whether to drink what you were used to drinking or go with something lighter.  If you drank beer you ran the risk of getting slowed down with bloat and having to … get rid of the beer.  If you drank mixed drinks you could get pretty cross-eyed drinking that much in a short time.  If shots…well you might get very drunk very quickly.

Considering that the first year race saw 10 bars with at least one on each of the three islands, getting around the course, the longer it took, was pretty darned difficult.  If you made it around quickly it meant you had drunk 10 drinks in a very short amount of time.  Realizing that this could impact the race, it was rumored that the race committee passed another rule that stopping to throw up on the course was not allowed.

As we got closer to the race, the real strategies began to come out of the closet.  There were no rules about how one got from bar to bar, so the contestants with access to fast boats were looking hard to beat.  But then all kinds of crazy other things began to come out.  My sister, who had entered and was favored in some of the pools, had a boy friend with a Triumph 650 motorcycle he was going to ride her around on the back of.  The idea was that he was not slowed down by the waterfront traffic and would get her out to Morning Star faster.  One fairly wealthy racer was rumored to have had hired a helicopter to hover him over to the bars on Hassle Island (Prince Rupert’s Dockyard) and Water Island (at the Water Island Hotel). 

As I recall the list of bars was: 

The Sand Box

Fat City

Joe Kennedy’s Bar (Tinkers II)

Drakes Inn,

SIBs,

The Quarter Deck,

Bar Normandy

Prince Rupert’s Dockyard

The Water Island Hotel Beach Bar

Morning Star Beach Bar

 Finally the day of the race arrived.  The race started at about 11:00 am at Fat City.  After that the racers were free to get around the course just about any way they wanted to.  I was waiting at Morningstar in my dad’s power boat to take my sister over to Hassle and Water Island.  She made it there at about 11:45 , bolted down a Mount Gay Coke and ran for the boat, getting thoroughly sandy and wet in the bargain.  We tore out over to Hassle Island, where the scene was total mayhem of drunks and boats coming and going way to quickly.  Water Island was much better because there was more room to get in and out of the beach.  We jetted back to Avery’s at Frenchtown to drop her at the Quarter Deck (the Q.D.) where her boy friend was waiting after having made the run back from Morning Star.  By now it was pushing 1:00 and she was getting pretty drunk.

I tucked in at the bar and ordered a greenie and she got on the bike and disappeared for Bar Normandy.  As the racers came and went, a few things became apparent.  First, the little sanitary cups were not doing very well.  By the time many of the racers got to the Q.D., they were drunk and their little paper cups were leaking or torn up.  Of course it was against the rules to get another, but many of the racers were tipping lavishly and buying the judges drinks or offering bribes of one kind or another to get them to look the other way while the bartender gave them another, not so beat up one.  The girl following my sister flashed the judge to distract him while the bartender gave her a new cup.  The next guy in was a gay guy who offered the same favor and was flatly turned down, having to buy a new cup instead.  On and on it went, to gales of laughter and general debauchery.   

We left after the first beer, heading for Fat City and the finish line.  It was about 2:00pm now and as we parked up Synagogue hill and walked down to the Sandbox, the first of the racers started to arrive.  Climbing the stairs into the Sandbox I was nearly knocked flat by a couple of the men’s racers going up and down at the same time, drunk out of their minds.  Up stairs, Big John was pouting the drinks and the owners, Trent Lawrence and Sammy O’Meara were at the bar (on the safe, far side) whooping it up and enjoying the scene.  I grabbed another beer and ran through “Muggers Alley” over to Fat City just after the men’s winner made it in, having made all ten bars in a little under three hours.  The party was going strong as the racers continued to stagger in.  My sister showed up at about three hours and twenty minutes, glassy eyed drunk and totally unruly.  From then on I don’t recall much except that the racers continued to trickle in, drunker and drunker.  The final arrivals were at near 5 hours after the start, having had their boat swamp in the harbor.  In true form they had taken the time to don fake crutches and bandages to limp across the finish line in.

The Sanitary Cup Race went on for a few years after that.  The first one was widely regarded as the best, though a few years later one of the contestants actually did use a helicopter to get around to the island bars.  It finally fell apart when the local authorities insisted that it be approved and permits be issued and blah blah blah…As I recall, the three owners at Fat City, finally gave up trying to organize it in the face of the island bureaucracy and waning interest by the bar crowd (the disco era had started and the gritty Backstreet bar scene had given way to the likes of Walter’s Living Room and the Safari Lounge).   Eventually the Timex Regatta, launched out of French Town, was organized, and it was a lot of fun too…but that’s another story.

All the best,

"Normalization of Gay Marriage, a phrase rife with misnomer. What's normal and who wants to be that anyway? Like the wise one said above, it's NOT Gay Marriage, it's Marriage - that's the whole point"

Sooo  do they know what a marriage is??  really??  I am so dam tired of one sided definitions.  By their "definition" will suddenly every gay couple enter a big machine and get spit out looking just like Ozzie and Harriet?   Why don't they call it a "Christian Divorce"?  Or Christian Adultery?  This is a matter of Human rights and things that humans do.  We live, we die.  we marry, we make love (and sometimes Boink).  If they have eyes they need to open them.  If they have hearts they need to see with them.  God help them otherwise because I cant.

Tales of Morris

STT Memories

I arrived in STT on March 4, 1974 with an old friend from Eureka named John Salizzoni.  John and I had gone to High School together.  In 1973 the recession had hit Eureka hard and I was part of the chronic near 30% unemployment that plagued the area.  At 6’4” tall I weighed 175 pounds wringing wet.  I needed a few meals and John wanted to get out of town for all the same reasons.  I traded him a place to stay in St Thomas (my Dad’s place) for letting me borrow the money for a plane ticket down.  Getting there is another story, but John and I arrived penniless and in need of the basics of life:  beer and a car (and girls).

Dad knew a crazy guy from Santo Domingo who sold cars in Sugar Estate named Eddie Francis.  Eddie had a bar on the Sugar Estate side of Government Hill just below “Hippy Haven” called the “Blue Dolphin”.  It wasn’t much; just a bar, a pool table and a juke box. But the drinks were cheap (even for St Thomas in 1974!) and he had some regulars, so he was in business.

Eddie owed dad some money and I think they had agreed to make it even if Eddie gave me a car (which meant I would keep my hands of Dads!).  At any rate, we went over to his lot and he took us to the back of the lot where an old Morris Minor sat.  It was a deep maroon color with black seats and an automatic transmission and looked like it had once been a cab.  If you have never seen a Morris before think of the car they used in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” painted maroon and you have it.  It ran pretty good but I noticed a bottle of transmission fluid and another of brake fluid in the trunk.  Automatic transmissions were not the best thing to have in St Thomas in those days.  The near vertical roads made it very hard on brakes without the braking effects of engine compression to help (hence the extra brake fluid in the trunk).

We started “Morris” (as we immediately began to call the car) and the engine ran good, though the muffler sounded suspect. We drove it off the lot and the transmission started to slip, so back we went and Eddie showed us how to add fluid.  Off we went again and made it home with no problems bigger than a little fume and smoke.

Over the next few weeks John and I drove all over the island in Morris.  The tires were bald and needed air every three days or so.  The brakes ran through about a pint of fluid a week, but the transmission used a quart of fluid in about half that time, depending on how many trips up Mafolie hill we made.  The muffler got steadily worse until it fell off after a week or so.  Then the rest of the exhaust system fell off all the way up to the manifold.  Now Morris was really loud and the hot exhaust gasses tended to make the thin coating of transmission fluid that was all over the engine smoke in a threatening way so we had to do something.

With little or no money getting it fixed properly was out of the question, so I dug around the house and finally found a “Snappy-Tom” tomato juice can that fit over the manifold end.  I stuffed it with a couple brillo pads (steel wool) and poked a few holes in it then hose clamped it over the manifold pipe.  Morris was as quiet as a new Cadillac and ran without smoking.  The only problem was that the steel wool burnt out every three days or so.  That was no big thing until I used all the brillo pads and the maid got mad at us!

About that time rumors began to circulate through the bars that Timmy Ellison was working on having a huge beach concert / party.  We all talked about it in the Sand Box and Fat City for days till finally it was announced than it would be at Mandall Beach.  The days ticked off to what had now become “The First Annual Mandall Beach Festival”.  John and I were defiantly going and were not at all surprised when Dad said he was coming with us.  We were a little apprehensive when he told us there was no way he was taking his hot Toyota Celica “down that road” and that we were taking Morris instead. 

At that time the road to Mandall was dirt and near vertical for the last half mile.  Once you made it down it was worth it though.  The beach was protected and totally beautiful.  The area behind it was flat, which made it an ideal place for a large concert / party.  We got Morris down ok and arrived earlier than most. I started to park close to the stage but Dad wanted us to park back at the base of the hill so we would be able to leave any time we wanted to.  I agreed and we were off to the party.

To say “The First Annual Mandall Beach Festival” was a success was a complete understatement.  Though I seem to recall that Timmy Ellison lost a lot of money putting it on it became a legend and an annual affair.  The music was great and the night was perfect.  The party got going at about 10:00pm and kicked into high gear at midnight.  About 2am I ran into Dad and John near Morris.  We were drinking from a bottle of Crown Royal that Dad had brought when the first few drops of rain began to fall.  Then a huge flash of lightening hit with the thunder blast at the same moment.  We jumped into Morris and fired him up.  I hit the gas and pulled onto the road in front of a thousand other people who were all bent on doing one thing:  getting up the one lane dirt road to the top.  The transmission was already slipping as we careened toward the base of the dirt road up and out of the bay.  I slowed for a second, intending to let a large 4-wheel drive Dodge Ram onto the road, but dad stomped his foot down on mine pinning the gas pedal to the floor.  He was yelling something about “no dam time to be nice” and something about “our ticket out of here” but I was too busy trying to keep us out of the bush to pay much attention.

The rain was coming down in buckets now, and the dirt road had become a sticky, slippery mess of St Tomian mud.  If you have ever had to deal with the volcanic mud of the Islands you know that there is no other mud as slick or sticky or impossibly muddy as it is.  Morris’ bald tires had almost no purchase in it and as we hit the bottom of Mandall hill, I was terrified of what was going to happen next.  We were sliding and bouncing along at almost thirty miles per hour as we shot up the first part of the hill.  Morris’ transmission was delivering about half of the engine’s power,   but we were still moving up, despite the gullets of rain and mud that were flowing down.  We made it half the way up the road when the laws of physics finally stopped us.  The engine was howling as the last of the brillo pads burnt away.  The transmission was pouring smoke out from under the car and Morris was parked squarely blocking the road with a few hundred drunk,  sopping wet festival goers all desperately trying to get out behind us.

The Four wheel drive Doge Ram was still behind us.  One of the guys in it tried to get out and come up to talk to us, but as soon as his feet hit the mud he slipped and fell in it, sputtering and cussing in the rain. He got back in and the driver moved forward, engaging the huge iron bumper with Morris’ tail lights.  The lenses exploded in bits of plastic and the bumper sank six inches into Morris’ trunk, but we started to move!  Dad yelled “Just stay on the fucking road!  Don’t let him push you off!”.  I put several years of truck driving experience to use and did just that.  We skidded and swayed all over the road as I counter steered against the big trucks efforts to push us off the road.  There was no where to go but up the road so within about five minutes of smoking wrenching metal noise and muddy terror we were suddenly on the concrete road at the top!  We stayed glued to the Dodge’s bumper until we were over the top, rolling down the road toward Tutu. 

Morris barely got us home.  The transmission was gone, and despite my best efforts to drown it in transmission fluid, never moved the car again.  The trunk was caved in and the brakes were gone too.  I had used the driveway retaining wall to stop us when we finally, after rolling down Skyline Drive at two miles per hour with the engine flat out,  turned in our road at four am in the morning.  We towed him to Bovoni dump a few days later and abandoned him.  I drove by a few weeks later and there was nothing left but body.  The engine, bald tires, leaky battery… everything was gone.

I had a few other “Island Cars”, and some of those stories are pretty crazy too.  Morris was pretty special though and, if there is an eternal place where cars that people loved enough to name them go, I am certain that he is anchoring the lot.  Guzzling a never ending supply of tranny fluid and remembering that last run up the road from Mandall.

More to come…

Tim