G'morning all! Happy Friday to everyone and best wishes for a wonderful, safe weekend! Last night I was thinking to myself, "what haven't I done on my blog lately?" Well, it sudddenly occured to me that I haven't given y'all a story for sometime now. So, I decided that since today is a day to relax and unwind, I'll give you a little story that I wrote the other day. Hopefully it'll help ease to work tension and put a little smile on your faces. Anyhow, without further ado, I give you my latest short story entitled:
Bad Word
Do you remember the first time you ever cursed a bad word? Did you do it out of curiosity? Did you do it to shock your family and friends? Or were you just a misguided youngster who felt compelled to repeat a strange word that you’d heard from some random schoolmate at the most inopportune of moments? As much as I’d like to perceive myself to be an oracle of great intellectual capacity, I must confess that I fell prey to the third, and most naïve, forms of cursing—carelessly using a word without a priori knowledge of the nature and context of said word.
March 8, 1985 will always stand out in my mind as the day my derriere died. My Friday morning began like any other typical weekday with my grandmother forcing me out of bed at 6:00am to take a shower and me alternating between rounds of dozing off and empathic pleas of “soon come, just give me 5 minutes more!” At 6:15am, my grandmother gets frustrated with trying to rouse me and goes for the “big guns”, in the form of my uncle, who begins the rousing process anew with a series of increasingly forceful jabs to the shoulder and kidneys, which I manage to ignore. After a while he grows weary of the jabbing technique and goes to the ticking of the feet soles routine, but I forcefully flail my legs as fast as I can, causing him to rapidly retreat from the room. I’ve learned from experience that an 8-year-old with wildly swinging feet is one of the most dangerous threats to certain “sensitive” areas of the adult male’s anatomy. He leaves at around 6:25am and I enjoy five minutes more of sleep until he returns with the glass of ice cold water, which is strategically poured down the back of my neck, shocking my entire neuromuscular system into full activity. Of course, I must pay further for my earlier transgressions, and I am unceremoniously dragged from bed by my ankles. Futilely, I attempt to maintain my grip on the bed frame, but nature is against me. In a duel of strength between a 60 lb 3’ tall 8-year-old and a 220 lb 6’4” tall 29-year-old, the 29-year-old will usually win.
As I am dragged from my bedroom to the television room to the living room and all the way through my grandmother’s bedroom to my final destination, the bathroom, I am forced to contemplate whether or not this humiliation is truly worth the additional 25 minutes of sleep. “Yes, it is”, I finally decide to myself. Half-an-hour later, I’m showered, shaved, dressed, and sitting at the table eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. Oops, sorry, wrong person, that’s my dad. I’m showered, dressed, and sitting at the table playing with my breakfast and making a wonderfully creative mess of my surroundings, much to the annoyance of my father, who believes strongly that cereal is much better as a meal than being oddly misshapen miniature automobiles smashing into each other and exploding into millions of tiny, powdery particles. Finally breakfast is over and my father and I head toward the car. It is now 7:30am.
As we drive through Hope Pastures towards Old Hope Road where my school, Mona Prep, stands prominently next to a small greenhouse and plant nursery, I feel the regular Friday morning butterflies forming in my tummy. Today is Physical Education class, and I fear and hate P.E. more than words can ever express. Will coach force me to do hundreds of pushups and sit-ups today? Or are we going to have to run lots and lots of laps around the field? Or worse yet, would we play football and I’d be on the “skins” side, thereby forcing me to remove my t-shirt and expose my horribly chubby belly and over-developed boy breasts? I try to pretend that I’m ill, but my father knows me too well, and I find myself standing in front of my classroom at 7:40am.
By 8:00am all my classmates arrive at school and the teacher arrives 6 minutes later. The first class for the morning is geometry, which I am horrible at. I’ve had a new geometry set for every year that I’ve been at Mona Prep, yet the only thing I can think to do with it is remove the compass and protractor and pretend that they’re both kung fu masters fighting each other. Usually this goes on until I either stab myself with the protractor, or my teacher, Mrs. Pink, walks over to my desk and chastises me for being an “idler of no mean order.” Reading class is much better, since I’m already quite capable of reading at a more advanced level than any of my classmates. Spelling and Dictation follows and I’m happy because this class is generally quite easy for me, whether or not I remembered to study the words or read the passage beforehand. Writing class isn’t so good, since I’ve never really been able to wrap my mind around writing in cursive or “join-up” as we call it. Math class is a nightmare, though it’s gotten quite interesting since I’ve learned how to divide, so now whenever I have a problem that I don’t understand, I just divide all the numbers and hope for the best. An attempt at an answer is better than no answer at all in my honest opinion. At around 10:30am, I realize that I’m an hour and a half away from the dreaded P.E. class and I feel the cold lump in my stomach coming back again. I’m not much of an athlete, and it bothers me to know that the pretty girls in my class are watching me make a complete idiot out of myself, while swooning over the tall, muscular athletic boys who are the bane of my existence. My Drawing and Religious Studies classes flash by too quickly and somewhere between attempting to create a drawing that captures the right amount of shadow on a green plastic cup and vaguely hearing a story about Cain stabbing his brother Abel in the belly-button with a metal spoon, though it could’ve been a knife, I’m forced to come to terms with the fact that I’ll have to go to P.E. class and actually exercise.
Finally, the appointed hour arrives, and we form a neat line and file out of the classroom toward the P.E. field where coach is anxiously awaiting our arrival to begin our torture…err, training session. Today is worse than I expected, coach is having us do some unusual drills which entails running from one end of the field to the next, doing 10 pushups, and running back to the starting point as fast as possible. I’m paired up against the “other fat kid”, one Jerome Thomas, because there is a strong belief by coach that it takes one fat kid to beat another fat kid in a race…though the logic of this argument still defies me even to this day. I decide that I don’t want to be beaten by Jerome, because I don’t want to be labeled as the “slow, clumsy, fat kid” by my classmates. As coach shouts “Go!” I take off as fast as I can, leaving Jerome in a cloud of dust. I make it to the end of the field as fast as I can and attempt to do my pushups. 1-2-3, I hear Jerome’s heavy breathing behind me. 4-5-6, he’s getting down next to me to begin his pushups. 7-8-9-10…I’m done! I attempt to rise to my feet, but my legs feel like jelly and I collapse to the ground. “Boom, Boom, Boom”, Jerome is busily slamming his fat stomach into the ground as I force my legs to move. I hear my team cheering for me in the background and the excitement causes me to work even harder to stand up. Suddenly, I hear a low chuckle, as Jerome springs to his feet almost too gracefully for a fat kid and begin his run toward the home stretch. I finally get my legs working again and take off after him. It’s a photo finish and no one is ever quite sure who won the race, though it was rumored that Jerome beat me by a stomach.
As I sit against the wall recovering from my exertion, Nicky McEwan, the most popular boy in my class comes over to me and says “Good race Evans, I think you should’ve won!” I thank him profusely, feeling a warm, mushy feeling inside of my stomach. After all, Nicky McEwan didn’t just talk to anybody…you had to be somebody for him to even look in your direction. “Hmmm, maybe he wants to be my friend and maybe he’ll be interested in introducing me to some of the pretty, popular girls that he hangs around with.” Suddenly, Nicky says to me “Hey, Evans, I have a question for you. When you cut your finger, what type of liquid comes out of it?” To which I replied, “Blood”. “OK, good, now what type of material is your shirt made out of?” “Cotton”, I said, after all that was what my grandmother told me. “No, what you call the material that they used to make your shirt?” “I guess its called fabric” I said. “No, think of another name man!” “Oh, you mean cloth?” “Exactly!” replied Nicky. “OK, Evans, when you put them together, what do you get?” “Blood Cloth”, was my reply. Suddenly, Nicky began to laugh, a loud and raucous sound it was, almost making you feel ashamed to be next to him. In a flash, he was at coach’s side, whispering something in his ear. Coach nodded and Nicky walked away from him. After class, coach called me aside, and told me that Nicky had told me that I had cursed a bad word and I had to do pushups. Of course, I had no idea why Nicky would tell coach such a lie, but it didn’t matter, no matter how much I protested, Nicky was right and I was wrong, so I made up my mind to do my 30 pushups as quickly and silently as possible.
I spent the remainder of the afternoon glaring at Nicky for telling lies on me, but I knew that I couldn’t do a thing about it, since he was bigger and stronger than me, and he was a teacher’s pet anyway. The rest of the school day flew by quickly and I managed to get over being upset at Nicky and more excited about the weekend. The end of school finally arrives and I find myself sitting outside on the freshly painted blue wall that runs around the perimeter of the playing field, waiting for my father to pick me up. As I sit reading my book, the principal comes up to me and says “Hello George, how are you doing?” “Fine miss,” was my automatic response. Mrs Vida Chambers had gone to school with my father and now she was the principal of my prep school. I knew her quite well and I’d often spend many hours in her office. She asked after my dad and spent a few minutes talking and laughing with me. Suddenly, in an awkward attempt at being funny, I remembered the joke that Nicky had given me that day and decided to try it out on her…
By the time my father arrived to pick me up, I was sitting outside on the wall gently massaging the fleshy parts of my bottom while trying to suppress my tears while contemplating how it’s possible for your principal, a close friend of the family, could turn from being friendly and playful in one instant to being the beating machine from hell in the next. When my father asks me why I’ve been crying, I quickly fabricate a story about me getting into a little fight with an older boy at school over my lunch money…there was no way in the world that I could tell my father that one of his closest friends was a child abuser!
Finally, we arrive home and my father drops me inside and heads back out to work. I hug my grandmother and tell her the usual, mundane things about my classes and how well or poorly I’m doing in them. After a while, she tells me that she needs to go and find a cloth to dust off my shoes before I set foot inside the house. Suddenly, my brain misfires and I say to my grandmother, “I bet you that you’ve never seen a blood cloth before Grandma!” In a flash, she grabs me from the chair and starts spanking me one my already sore posterior. I begin to cry and scream, asking her why she’s beating me for no reason at all and why it seems as if everyone is a child beater of late. It then dawns on her that I really had no clue what the term “Blood Cloth” meant in the context of Jamaican swear-words. Suddenly, it all made sense to me, “Blood Cloth” was a bad word and that is why I was constantly being brutalized by seemingly rational adults.
Flash forward into the evening where I’m riding my bicycle in the car port and talking to myself. “I can’t believe that I got into that much trouble today just for saying Blood Cloth”…”Blood Cloth, Blood Cloth, Blood Cloth, I didn’t know that was a bad word!” Suddenly, my aunt Penny appears from nowhere and grabs me from my bicycle. “Boy, why are you cursing bad words in this house?” “But I’m not cursing bad words auntie”, I tried to defend myself, but she would not have any of it, so I was once more subject to my third beating and fourth punishment of the day. Little did I know that the worst was still to come.
My aunt Penny got around to talking to my aunt Prudence, who was so upset at me for cursing in the house that she beat me again. When my uncle Don came home from work both my aunts ensured to tell him immediately of what I had said, so I received my 5th beating on his behalf. Finally, my father came home from work and was told of my transgressions by my uncle, which ultimately led to beating number 6. My butt has not been the same since that beating marathon and sometimes, when the nights are cold, I can feel each and every one of those six beatings over and over again.
One would think that I’ve gotten completely over the idea of cursing after all the beatings I sustained that day, but they are as far from the truth as possible. Now I curse for all reasons imaginable. I curse when I’m happy. I curse when I’m sad. I curse when I’m bored. I curse when I’m hungry. I curse when I’m in the shower. I curse when I’m in the office. In fact, I curse so much that people sometimes wonder if I’m addicted to cursing. In a way I am, since it allows me to express a whole range of feelings and emotions in a few short, simple words. After all, cursing, especially Jamaican cursing is an art as much as it is a science. While scientists busy themselves in their labs trying to decode the DNA patterns, I keep myself busy researching trends in the patterns of Jamaican swear words and evolving newer, novel ways of optimally combining the diverse sequence of words to express a diverse range of emotional structures. After all, everyone needs to release a good “blood cloth” or two when the occasion arises. After all, a Jamaican’s bad words are sometimes equally as potent in dangerous situations as a gun or a knife could be.
Do you remember the first time you ever cursed a bad word? Did you do it out of curiosity? Did you do it to shock your family and friends? Or were you just a misguided youngster who felt compelled to repeat a strange word that you’d heard from some random schoolmate at the most inopportune of moments? As much as I’d like to perceive myself to be an oracle of great intellectual capacity, I must confess that I fell prey to the third, and most naïve, forms of cursing—carelessly using a word without a priori knowledge of the nature and context of said word.
March 8, 1985 will always stand out in my mind as the day my derriere died. My Friday morning began like any other typical weekday with my grandmother forcing me out of bed at 6:00am to take a shower and me alternating between rounds of dozing off and empathic pleas of “soon come, just give me 5 minutes more!” At 6:15am, my grandmother gets frustrated with trying to rouse me and goes for the “big guns”, in the form of my uncle, who begins the rousing process anew with a series of increasingly forceful jabs to the shoulder and kidneys, which I manage to ignore. After a while he grows weary of the jabbing technique and goes to the ticking of the feet soles routine, but I forcefully flail my legs as fast as I can, causing him to rapidly retreat from the room. I’ve learned from experience that an 8-year-old with wildly swinging feet is one of the most dangerous threats to certain “sensitive” areas of the adult male’s anatomy. He leaves at around 6:25am and I enjoy five minutes more of sleep until he returns with the glass of ice cold water, which is strategically poured down the back of my neck, shocking my entire neuromuscular system into full activity. Of course, I must pay further for my earlier transgressions, and I am unceremoniously dragged from bed by my ankles. Futilely, I attempt to maintain my grip on the bed frame, but nature is against me. In a duel of strength between a 60 lb 3’ tall 8-year-old and a 220 lb 6’4” tall 29-year-old, the 29-year-old will usually win.
As I am dragged from my bedroom to the television room to the living room and all the way through my grandmother’s bedroom to my final destination, the bathroom, I am forced to contemplate whether or not this humiliation is truly worth the additional 25 minutes of sleep. “Yes, it is”, I finally decide to myself. Half-an-hour later, I’m showered, shaved, dressed, and sitting at the table eating breakfast and reading the newspaper. Oops, sorry, wrong person, that’s my dad. I’m showered, dressed, and sitting at the table playing with my breakfast and making a wonderfully creative mess of my surroundings, much to the annoyance of my father, who believes strongly that cereal is much better as a meal than being oddly misshapen miniature automobiles smashing into each other and exploding into millions of tiny, powdery particles. Finally breakfast is over and my father and I head toward the car. It is now 7:30am.
As we drive through Hope Pastures towards Old Hope Road where my school, Mona Prep, stands prominently next to a small greenhouse and plant nursery, I feel the regular Friday morning butterflies forming in my tummy. Today is Physical Education class, and I fear and hate P.E. more than words can ever express. Will coach force me to do hundreds of pushups and sit-ups today? Or are we going to have to run lots and lots of laps around the field? Or worse yet, would we play football and I’d be on the “skins” side, thereby forcing me to remove my t-shirt and expose my horribly chubby belly and over-developed boy breasts? I try to pretend that I’m ill, but my father knows me too well, and I find myself standing in front of my classroom at 7:40am.
By 8:00am all my classmates arrive at school and the teacher arrives 6 minutes later. The first class for the morning is geometry, which I am horrible at. I’ve had a new geometry set for every year that I’ve been at Mona Prep, yet the only thing I can think to do with it is remove the compass and protractor and pretend that they’re both kung fu masters fighting each other. Usually this goes on until I either stab myself with the protractor, or my teacher, Mrs. Pink, walks over to my desk and chastises me for being an “idler of no mean order.” Reading class is much better, since I’m already quite capable of reading at a more advanced level than any of my classmates. Spelling and Dictation follows and I’m happy because this class is generally quite easy for me, whether or not I remembered to study the words or read the passage beforehand. Writing class isn’t so good, since I’ve never really been able to wrap my mind around writing in cursive or “join-up” as we call it. Math class is a nightmare, though it’s gotten quite interesting since I’ve learned how to divide, so now whenever I have a problem that I don’t understand, I just divide all the numbers and hope for the best. An attempt at an answer is better than no answer at all in my honest opinion. At around 10:30am, I realize that I’m an hour and a half away from the dreaded P.E. class and I feel the cold lump in my stomach coming back again. I’m not much of an athlete, and it bothers me to know that the pretty girls in my class are watching me make a complete idiot out of myself, while swooning over the tall, muscular athletic boys who are the bane of my existence. My Drawing and Religious Studies classes flash by too quickly and somewhere between attempting to create a drawing that captures the right amount of shadow on a green plastic cup and vaguely hearing a story about Cain stabbing his brother Abel in the belly-button with a metal spoon, though it could’ve been a knife, I’m forced to come to terms with the fact that I’ll have to go to P.E. class and actually exercise.
Finally, the appointed hour arrives, and we form a neat line and file out of the classroom toward the P.E. field where coach is anxiously awaiting our arrival to begin our torture…err, training session. Today is worse than I expected, coach is having us do some unusual drills which entails running from one end of the field to the next, doing 10 pushups, and running back to the starting point as fast as possible. I’m paired up against the “other fat kid”, one Jerome Thomas, because there is a strong belief by coach that it takes one fat kid to beat another fat kid in a race…though the logic of this argument still defies me even to this day. I decide that I don’t want to be beaten by Jerome, because I don’t want to be labeled as the “slow, clumsy, fat kid” by my classmates. As coach shouts “Go!” I take off as fast as I can, leaving Jerome in a cloud of dust. I make it to the end of the field as fast as I can and attempt to do my pushups. 1-2-3, I hear Jerome’s heavy breathing behind me. 4-5-6, he’s getting down next to me to begin his pushups. 7-8-9-10…I’m done! I attempt to rise to my feet, but my legs feel like jelly and I collapse to the ground. “Boom, Boom, Boom”, Jerome is busily slamming his fat stomach into the ground as I force my legs to move. I hear my team cheering for me in the background and the excitement causes me to work even harder to stand up. Suddenly, I hear a low chuckle, as Jerome springs to his feet almost too gracefully for a fat kid and begin his run toward the home stretch. I finally get my legs working again and take off after him. It’s a photo finish and no one is ever quite sure who won the race, though it was rumored that Jerome beat me by a stomach.
As I sit against the wall recovering from my exertion, Nicky McEwan, the most popular boy in my class comes over to me and says “Good race Evans, I think you should’ve won!” I thank him profusely, feeling a warm, mushy feeling inside of my stomach. After all, Nicky McEwan didn’t just talk to anybody…you had to be somebody for him to even look in your direction. “Hmmm, maybe he wants to be my friend and maybe he’ll be interested in introducing me to some of the pretty, popular girls that he hangs around with.” Suddenly, Nicky says to me “Hey, Evans, I have a question for you. When you cut your finger, what type of liquid comes out of it?” To which I replied, “Blood”. “OK, good, now what type of material is your shirt made out of?” “Cotton”, I said, after all that was what my grandmother told me. “No, what you call the material that they used to make your shirt?” “I guess its called fabric” I said. “No, think of another name man!” “Oh, you mean cloth?” “Exactly!” replied Nicky. “OK, Evans, when you put them together, what do you get?” “Blood Cloth”, was my reply. Suddenly, Nicky began to laugh, a loud and raucous sound it was, almost making you feel ashamed to be next to him. In a flash, he was at coach’s side, whispering something in his ear. Coach nodded and Nicky walked away from him. After class, coach called me aside, and told me that Nicky had told me that I had cursed a bad word and I had to do pushups. Of course, I had no idea why Nicky would tell coach such a lie, but it didn’t matter, no matter how much I protested, Nicky was right and I was wrong, so I made up my mind to do my 30 pushups as quickly and silently as possible.
I spent the remainder of the afternoon glaring at Nicky for telling lies on me, but I knew that I couldn’t do a thing about it, since he was bigger and stronger than me, and he was a teacher’s pet anyway. The rest of the school day flew by quickly and I managed to get over being upset at Nicky and more excited about the weekend. The end of school finally arrives and I find myself sitting outside on the freshly painted blue wall that runs around the perimeter of the playing field, waiting for my father to pick me up. As I sit reading my book, the principal comes up to me and says “Hello George, how are you doing?” “Fine miss,” was my automatic response. Mrs Vida Chambers had gone to school with my father and now she was the principal of my prep school. I knew her quite well and I’d often spend many hours in her office. She asked after my dad and spent a few minutes talking and laughing with me. Suddenly, in an awkward attempt at being funny, I remembered the joke that Nicky had given me that day and decided to try it out on her…
By the time my father arrived to pick me up, I was sitting outside on the wall gently massaging the fleshy parts of my bottom while trying to suppress my tears while contemplating how it’s possible for your principal, a close friend of the family, could turn from being friendly and playful in one instant to being the beating machine from hell in the next. When my father asks me why I’ve been crying, I quickly fabricate a story about me getting into a little fight with an older boy at school over my lunch money…there was no way in the world that I could tell my father that one of his closest friends was a child abuser!
Finally, we arrive home and my father drops me inside and heads back out to work. I hug my grandmother and tell her the usual, mundane things about my classes and how well or poorly I’m doing in them. After a while, she tells me that she needs to go and find a cloth to dust off my shoes before I set foot inside the house. Suddenly, my brain misfires and I say to my grandmother, “I bet you that you’ve never seen a blood cloth before Grandma!” In a flash, she grabs me from the chair and starts spanking me one my already sore posterior. I begin to cry and scream, asking her why she’s beating me for no reason at all and why it seems as if everyone is a child beater of late. It then dawns on her that I really had no clue what the term “Blood Cloth” meant in the context of Jamaican swear-words. Suddenly, it all made sense to me, “Blood Cloth” was a bad word and that is why I was constantly being brutalized by seemingly rational adults.
Flash forward into the evening where I’m riding my bicycle in the car port and talking to myself. “I can’t believe that I got into that much trouble today just for saying Blood Cloth”…”Blood Cloth, Blood Cloth, Blood Cloth, I didn’t know that was a bad word!” Suddenly, my aunt Penny appears from nowhere and grabs me from my bicycle. “Boy, why are you cursing bad words in this house?” “But I’m not cursing bad words auntie”, I tried to defend myself, but she would not have any of it, so I was once more subject to my third beating and fourth punishment of the day. Little did I know that the worst was still to come.
My aunt Penny got around to talking to my aunt Prudence, who was so upset at me for cursing in the house that she beat me again. When my uncle Don came home from work both my aunts ensured to tell him immediately of what I had said, so I received my 5th beating on his behalf. Finally, my father came home from work and was told of my transgressions by my uncle, which ultimately led to beating number 6. My butt has not been the same since that beating marathon and sometimes, when the nights are cold, I can feel each and every one of those six beatings over and over again.
One would think that I’ve gotten completely over the idea of cursing after all the beatings I sustained that day, but they are as far from the truth as possible. Now I curse for all reasons imaginable. I curse when I’m happy. I curse when I’m sad. I curse when I’m bored. I curse when I’m hungry. I curse when I’m in the shower. I curse when I’m in the office. In fact, I curse so much that people sometimes wonder if I’m addicted to cursing. In a way I am, since it allows me to express a whole range of feelings and emotions in a few short, simple words. After all, cursing, especially Jamaican cursing is an art as much as it is a science. While scientists busy themselves in their labs trying to decode the DNA patterns, I keep myself busy researching trends in the patterns of Jamaican swear words and evolving newer, novel ways of optimally combining the diverse sequence of words to express a diverse range of emotional structures. After all, everyone needs to release a good “blood cloth” or two when the occasion arises. After all, a Jamaican’s bad words are sometimes equally as potent in dangerous situations as a gun or a knife could be.
Comments
When reading your description of how long it took you to be aroused from blissful slumber for school, I thought to myself, "They should simply have left the sleeping Dawg to lie!" ;-)
You was eight inna 1984?? I was in my second year of Nat. Sci then!
Think it was first Form that I started to cuss still. Never get nuh beating for it either!
Anyway, is Friday and later I will be linking the crew. Plenty blood cloth (of the good type) suppose fe let off still. Nice likkle story. Think I'll link it. Dr. D.
Actually a guy at primary school did a similar thing to me with another word. He said you put A, put B, what comes next. I said Put C, of course it sounds like something else when you say it a bit faster and all the kids laughed but it took me quite a while to figure out what was so wrong with saying that term.
Still yet, it sound like you get punishment fi every single time yuh cuss from den until now.... heh.
Mad Bull
;-) Dr. D.