Tres Cheap - Page 5

As the 737 streaked towards Trinidad, the cabin steward moved down the aisle spraying us with a poisonous disinfectant as nonchalantly as if it were a can of Glade.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “It only affects insects.”

Five minutes later, the tip of my tongue went numb, and I thought of Franz Kafka.

My sanity suffered even more once I landed in Trinidad, for it was the eve of Carnival, a wild bacchanal in which I was an unwilling participant.

After finding the cheapest place to stay-a small prison-like guest house in an East Indian barrio-I hopped a bus for the ten-mile trip into Port of Spain. I didn’t have much work there, just six hotels to review. I'd have some time left over to watch the beginning of Carnival.

As evening fell, I followed the streams of people heading from all directions to the Calypso competition at Queens Park Savannah. After Black Stalin beat out Sparrow for the crown, the spirited crowd spilled onto the street, which is when I noticed there wasn’t a taxi in sight. No getting out of here. Not tonight. A knife fight suddenly broke out next to me, as people pushed me out of the way, screaming, “Watch out for the white man.” So much for being inconspicuous.

I decided to lose myself for a while at one of the gambling stands where you could bet a Trinidad dollar on one of the barnyard animals painted on a roulette wheel. I put my money on the pig. And won. I put my money on the chicken. And won. I even put it on the zebra, knowing that this wasn’t even a barnyard animal, and still I won. I was on the biggest roll of my life, and with 30 Trinidad dollars to the greenback, I was drowning in paper money.

This was when people started asking me for financial loans and cash dividends to be invested in the nearby rum market. This was just too much conspicuous wealth. I couldn't even stuff it all in my pockets. I’d have to walk around all night with two giant fistfuls of money. I had to get rid of it. The easiest way to redistribute the wealth would be to keep playing, knowing that sooner or later I had to lose, which I began doing-quite successfully.

Unfortunately, I took everybody down with me. Inspired by the confidence I showed in laying down giant stacks of money, everybody threw their cash on top of mine, giant piles of worn, faded bills, all of it going to the dealer time and time again till my winnings, and theirs, were completely gone. The bankrupt crowd glared at me. If looks could kill, I knew how my eulogy would read: Here Lies the Man Who Stole Carnival.

This was when I began to drink. Every 50 yards, somebody was selling beer from iceboxes, which was how I measured my progress as I wandered down the street. Three in the morning and still no taxis. Everywhere, steel bands were playing from the back of flat bed trailers while singers rapped out commands through speakers the size of NASA satellite dishes.

“Jump up an’ wave. Jump an’ misbehave.”

This was J’ouverte, the mud festival that would last till dawn, Carnival at its wildest. As the semis moved off down the streets, I fell in behind one truck and tried to get into the spirit of it all. Before I knew it, my Permopress disguise went by the wayside, releasing my true animal spirit. After being liberally doused in buckets of gooey mud, a cardboard crest was slapped on my head. Evidently, my animal spirit was a mudhen.

The surging parade swept down the streets, setting off every car alarm in town, while the more elaborate costumes kept getting entangled in the overhead power lines. As I watched everybody writhe and gyrate with abandon, I tried to do the same, but I wasn’t on such intimate terms with my loins. Some people were Riding the Pony, a dance that involved a man wrapping his arms around a woman from behind, while both simulated the motion of riding a pony at a fast gallop. Except I never saw any ponies. I hopped my way down the street riding solo.

As dawn finally streaked the sky, all of the steel bands came together at a large city square, where each tried to outplay the others-a cacophony of calypso-while the mud-covered throng, now numbering in the thousands, broke into a frenzied finale. And there I was, after countless beers, smeared in mud, my headdress askew, trying to keep up with the frenzied hypnotic dancing, flapping my wings like a true mudhen, my mind emptied of all thoughts except for one: My plane leaves in two hours.