It seemed odd to be talking about paid sex on our honeymoon. But the conversation in this water-drenched Jamaican bar had decidedly taken a turn. Sometime during the continual drumbeat of nine hours of rain, the talk had proceeded from a failed snorkeling trip for newlyweds to the island's thriving cottage industry of Rastafarian prostitutes.
"Yahhhhh mon (yeah man)," Charlie said. "The white woman. She come for the Rasta mon. They come from all o'er the world to spread the AIDS." Charlie smiled briefly, showing brown-stained teeth. The gaps and generous gums made him look like a black, overgrown Dennis the Menace.
As though the words weren't clear enough, Charlie's friend--a thirty-year-old reggae singer who calls himself Gummy Dee--slapped his fingers against his thigh in a crude simulation of the sex act. Although my bride and I had never seen such a gesture before, we instantly recognized what it meant. So did everyone else in the bar.
Jamaicans, once they know you do not offend easily, will tell you exactly what is on their minds--no matter how vulgar. And one thing that seems to be constantly on the minds of the ones we met is sex. My pretty, young bride, Carol, was sitting on a stool in the back corner of the bar. She was far enough away from the open front not to get wet, but close enough to hear the inside dope on the fascinating scene we had been watching for a week. She flushed occasionally from the explicitness of the descriptions of male prostitution. Her eyes got wide and she giggled when one of the men would direct a comment to her. But, she made no movement to leave. And you couldn't have torn me away. It was like being behind the scenes for a steamy segment of Inside Edition.
Earlier that morning, we were having coffee on the porch of our hotel room. We were talking about the sadness of leaving Jamaica. We stayed in a small hotel in Negril on the western edge of the island. It is sixty kilometers from Montego Bay. This tropical tourist trap is seven miles of white beaches, sheer rock cliffs, clear, emerald water and has a year-round rotating population of fat, rude visitors from Chicago named Bob. Most of the Bobs stay at the Hedonism II Resort, a few miles east of us, where the nude beach and the 24-hour-a-day party is the picture of the island they will take home with them.
As we were commiserating our coming departure and re-entrance to the Arizona dust bowl, a hotel door opened on the second floor across from us. "Wrinkle," a 38-year-old Jamaican, was exiting the room with whispers to someone inside. Sarah from Boston, who had flown in the previous morning, flittered outside in a long, white undershirt. A brief kiss. The door closed.
We had seen this scene unfold every day for the past week. It was always Wrinkle. Only the women had changed. Wrinkle is the local, in-house love king. He comes with the hotel like towels or the maid.
Wrinkle walked down the stairs and continued to the stoop of our porch. By now, we were buds. We'd already taken him out to dinner. He'd spent the whole time talking about the Rastafarian religion. But we were well-aware how he made his living. "Good morning," we chimed. "Yahh mon. It be," he answered. Wrinkle stopped and talked. From his shirt pocket, he pulled out a half-smoked spliff. His ten-year growth of dreadlocks was rumpled, but he didn't seem to mind. He motioned for the lighter on the table and I obliged. Between deep drags of his "ganja," the Jamaican word for marijuana, he warned us of the coming winds and rain for the day.
Wrinkle walked to the bar where we would all soon start and end our day. Boston Sarah would follow him a few minutes later after she substituted shorts and a bikini top for the tee shirt. Passing us by, she smiled impishly and mouthed the words "good morning" too softly to hear. She appeared to be in her late thirties, early forties. Her hair was brown and getting darker and she was a little overweight. Her figure wasn't bad, but looked like it would soon become a puzzle--a body where the parts don't seem to fit.
We had met Boston Sarah the night before. She told me she was here to "recover." If you can believe an American tourist, she said she was an attorney in a Boston suburb. Her firm specialized in real estate law and bankruptcy litigation. Boston Sarah was burned out and didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. Meeting another American in a foreign bar gave her the courage to dump her woes. She was divorced with one child. She hadn't dated anyone in months and her "ex was being his typical bastard self." Her life in Boston was work, or kid and lonely. That's why she came back here to see Wrinkle. She had met him last year on a vacation with her friends. He took her around town. She liked the easy way he accepted life. He was so unlike the men she knew at home. "Wrinkle helps my mind. I don't meet Wrinkles at happy hour."
Wrinkle was drinking coffee on the veranda when Boston Sarah arrived. He was already with another thirty-something-woman tourist at a table. They were speaking within inches of each other. Wrinkle leaned back and appeared to be sizing up his next client. Boston Sarah seemed flustered by this turn of events, but sat down anyway at the table across from them. The dreadlocked escort looked over at Boston Sarah and motioned with one finger to signal her to wait until he finished his conversation. In Jamaica "just a minute" or the native speak "soon come" can mean a wait of anywhere from ten minutes to ten hours. Wrinkle and his new friend laughed and smiled. Their conversation was an obvious annoyance to Boston Sarah. But just as she was grabbing her purse to leave, Wrinkle excused himself from the conversation. He returned to his previous night's capture, but not without first telling his newfound friend he would see her later. Boston Sarah pretended nothing had happened and they both ordered breakfast.
"What do they see in him?" Carol queried. "Uh . . . I . . . uh, well," I stammered.
Gummy Dee had a better answer during that afternoon's rain shower. "They love the Rasta mon," he said. "He loves dem. They need d'utter. The bruder know, be happy . . . Irie." Irie is a catchall phrase of joy in Jamaica. It means everything is cool. Everything is fine.
Gummy Dee says things are so Irie these days that you can find a "Rent-a-dread" everywhere on the island. But the Rastafarian prostitutes no longer have a corner on this specialized market. They're now getting competition from the "ballheads" who prefer short Afros.
This body sale to tourists isn't universally popular down here. As the storm talk gets around to the nitty-
gritty, our 23-year-old bartender lets us know he doesn't approve. Johnny Gordon shakes his head in disgust at how his "brothers" make a living. For his pocket change, Johnny spends twelve hours a day, seven days a week putting up with tourists getting drunk at his bar. At the end of the day, he walks eleven miles home and is lucky to have pocketed $5 American. He can't even afford a bicycle. So it riles him to no end to see the Rastafarians make ten times his earnings just sitting around the hotel, servicing women and getting high. He rattles off about 3,000 words to Gummy Dee in about thirty seconds in an unintelligible Jamaican slang called patois. A translator interprets: "He say, `Rasta lazy mon. Rasta no work.'" SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE, Wrinkle lost his faith. When he embraced the Rastafarian religion in his teens, he was a virgin to the outside world. Rastafarians believed Haile Selassie's 1930 crowning as the king of Ethiopia was the second coming of Christ. They used the occasion to establish a moral and social code that rejected the white Christian world. They swore off meat, instead eating natural vegetarian foods; they kept their hair in a long, curled, uncut, uncombed style; they were pacifists. Rastafarians shunned the world of "Babylon," the white world of materialism and racial inequality. They used to homestead farms on mountainsides, but now live in Kingston and other Jamaican cities. They believe they are the lost tribe of Israel. The I.N.R.I. on the top of Jesus' cross which means Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews in Latin was translated by Rastafarians into "I Negro Reign Israel."
Wrinkle said he had grown up near Negril and had been there when the hippies from the U.S. discovered it in the Sixties. There was no work. There was hardly any food. For him to buy land on the island was and still is a pipe dream. In Negril, land prices are comparable to Camelback Mountain plots. Jamaican earnings are frightfully low even in tourist areas. An ad in Kingston's Daily Gleaner offers $18,000 per year for engineers. That's $2,571 in American dollars. A cook in the fanciest hotel makes $20 to $40 American per week, but to go out to dinner, the tab would be the same prices as in Phoenix. To think Wrinkle could participate in the American dream of buying a home is as far-fetched as my going from a Subaru to a Rolls.
Now, Wrinkle lives off the "people tax": the fee he gets for his bedroom services and all the food and drink checks his customers pick up. Some of his repeat customers, like Canadian Cathy, make sure he has enough change in his jeans when she leaves the island to keep him happy for a few months. For Wrinkle, business is good.
Cathy is a 42-year-old Toronto native. Carol and I met her late at night by the pool after the bar had closed. We were all having a late-night swim. Canadian Cathy and Carol struck up the usual tourist conversation of "When did you get here?" and "How do you like it?" Canadian Cathy said this was her fifth trip to Negril, she was not married and enjoyed meeting people.
"Oh, you came down here to pick up the men," I mouthed off. The crowd laughed. She swam off, miffed.
The next morning I saw her at breakfast. "You're the rude man with the questions, yes?" she asked as she sat down. "You must be an American."
"You're very perceptive. Have a seat," I said as she picked up a menu and put her foot on the opposite chair. Canadian Cathy proceeded to tell me anything and everything she perceived as repugnant about the United States, like all the men are rude, fat and dumb. And then, almost as an afterthought she said she was staying at the hotel to see an "old friend."
She met Wrinkle on her first trip five years ago and she comes down once a year to spend a few weeks with him. When I casually mentioned that Wrinkle spends time with many women, I got a sharp glance, but she proceeded with her story as if nothing had been said. She went out of her way to paint their relationship as two mutually attracted people just "spending time." She certainly doesn't want to talk about the money, the other women, her role as the sugar momma. She always leaves Wrinkle with enough money to live comfortably for a couple months, but prefers to think of that as generosity to a poor friend. "What do you see in the guy?" I'm finally compelled to ask.
"I love him."
"Then why don't you marry him and take him back to Canada? I'm sure he'd love to go?"
"Oh, I could never do that." She brushed the question aside, giving it no more thought than its needling deserved.
IT IS STILL RAINING and the pool in front of the bar is threatening to overflow. Carol is teaching Gummy Dee the lyrics to Burt Bacharach's "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head." The conversation has strayed all over the landscape, from government to religion to baseball, but returns to the Rastafarian escort service.
Gummy Dee--once a Rasta but now a ballhead--is saying that Jamaican men are better lovers. He wishes the native women were as easy to convince as the foreigners, who obviously appreciate all the exotic native customs. "No problem," he says. "There is always another plane. They will like us."
Gummy Dee wants us to listen to his new hit single "Rent-a-dread." Rastafarians, he says, hate the song. When it's played at local nightclubs, they shout obscenities at him, threaten him with fists. He keeps singing it anyway. Gummy Dee is a local hero. His reggae band has done well. His hand-tailored white-linen suit speaks of his success. They play his music on Radio Jamaica, and he has cut a couple of albums on the record label Bob Marley founded. He's waiting for an American label to pick him up. His friends think he's the next Jimmy Cliff. His entourage includes Charlie, who gets him his drinks and helps him put on his jacket when he wants to leave.
The thumping music comes on and matches the sound of the rain and Gummy Dee starts to sing:
"All of the man who is not a rent-a-dread, hold up your hands and a'say pom pom.
All of the man who is not a rent-a-ballhead, hold up your hands and a'say pom pom.
No rent-a-dread. No rent-a-ballhead.
These are the people who makes the AIDS spread.
Now you have some girls from America. Some from Canada. Some from Europa.
Come to Jamaica to look a-rent-a.
The first one they call is the Rasta.
Rasta run sharp, ballhead take over.
Mon don't wanna work.
They wanna be a-rent-a.
Mon don't wanna work. They wanna drive a Honda.
So there is nuddin going on,
but the rent-a see.
So, if you wanna be with me,
you gotta have your rental fee."
Wrinkle is the local, in-house love king. He comes with the hotel like towels or the maid.
He returned to his previous night's capture, but not without first telling his newfound friend he would see her later.
This body sale to tourists isn't universally popular down here.
Wrinkle lives off the "people tax": the fee he gets for his bedroom services and all the food and drink checks his customers pick up.
"No problem," he says. "There is always another plane. They will like us.