Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Garrison Cry

A week ago I had to put my dog, Marley, down. Call me crazy, but I could tell the moment it happened…I could feel the air being sucked out of the room. I didn’t anticipate the flood of emotions. As a young shortie growing up in Jamaica, I never saw a dog inside a house; they lived out in the yard. They didn’t lie on your couch or at your feet; they didn’t lock the Dachshund in the refrigerator like Marley did. They didn’t make memories … they weren’t a part of the family.  The next day I hurried home to find an empty house. I barely made it to the top of the stairs before the phone rang. “You heard about Steely, right?” I held my breath. I wondered if all the lights were out in the garrisons of Kingston, if the ‘daggering’ had stopped long enough for the garrison to cry. I hope that’s part of their ‘gangsta’. Wycliffe ‘Steely’ Johnson was the original keyboard player of the Roots Radics, the most dominant force in reggae during the first half of the 80s. They set the pace. Their dark deep grooves can be heard on the classic Scientist and King Jammy’s dub albums released on Greensleeves. Then later with his partner, Clevie, he helped to create Dancehall music. Sean Paul, Movado, and Vibez Kartel should throw their arms up in the air in a 21-gun salute.

Later that evening as the fams came and went, I sat silently, the voice of Imogen Heap taking up all the space in my head, playing with my equilibrium: “Temporal dead zone where clocks are barely breathing/Yet no one cares to notice for all their yamming on/I calm to hold it all together.” I excused myself. TJ said, “Where you going?” “I want to play-do wave forms in the hideaway,” I answered. She does not speak Imogen. She smiled at me instead, the way she always does when she thinks I am just practicing my aim. Upstairs in my hideaway, eyes closed, I laid on the floor, listening to Dido’s ‘Grafton Street’, her soulful voice washing over me. “No more lying still while we all come and go,” she sang. “No more watching sunsets that seem like summer’s holding on.”  My thoughts drifted to my friend, Clayton Downie, the unheralded reggae producer of the seminal reggae album, Black Slavery Days (Clappers, 1980). Weeks earlier I had received a similar phone call. Clayton was an analog mind in a digital world; he had simply lost his way. Dido’s voice was beginning to catch at my heart: “No more saying goodbye for the last time again.” But strangely, I felt more at ease; my mind was beginning to slow down and rest. I felt no pain. The earth was no longer crushing me.

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