Jamaican Uprising - Challenge accepted
I told my dear friend Peter about starting this Substack. I’m writing a book about Mad Gab’s, about my life, a memoir of sorts. So the idea is for Substack to be a space for less thinking-about-and-more-just-writing. Pete and I noodled around what it looked like. No constraints and no rules, my sweet spot. Still, there were questions: How many posts? How long? Photos always? Sometimes? Never? Name names or protect the innocent/guilty?
Anyhoo, I told Pete about my recent organizing of photos that is helping me put images to different eras of my book. I sent him a black and white one I took of him decades earlier, we went deep in photo-land. Pete is also a photographer, or rather, he was a photographer. Like, professionally, for a long time. He had a fun habit of taking pictures and never sharing them with any of us. It was a real mystery and we loved to tease him about. I told Pete I had piles in my writing room of photos from my life, organized by era: childhood, teen years - 1980’s, Mad Gab’s starting and its evolution over 35 years, and of course, kids, and life. So many kids.
Pete challenged me to pick a photo randomly and write something about it. I decided since it was his idea, I would start with the photo I sent him, taken in 1999, in Negril, Jamaica. The one that instigated his idea.
No one had kids yet, and we were on a sort of combined honeymoon the year after our respective weddings. The reason Pete is looking so serious, whilst on a tropical vacation, is that there was an uprising, and riots had broken out all over the island.
(if you want to read about it… In April 1999, sweeping tax changes proposed by Patterson sparked a riot that left nine people dead, most killed by the police.)
We were in the office of our very cool, very un-fancy hotel: The Whistling Bird. It was the kind of place you kick off your shoes when you arrive, and don’t put them on until you head back to the airport. The sort of outfit where you help yourself to Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee at the sticky bar in the morning, and write down each cup on a clipboard with names written in pencil. No AC, no phones.
We were in the office trying to figure out how to leave the island, as smoke billowed beyond the bamboo fencing between The Bird and the main road into town. Tires were burning in the streets and roads were blocked everywhere. We ended up abandoning our rental car, finding a guy with a tiny plane (Samuel) to fly us to Montego Bay, where we begged to get on a flight to the US. It was not pretty, though the tiny flight over the island was. I happen to be in the height of my fear of flying, and Samuel told me about how he overcame his fear of snakes by watching countless videos of them slithering about. I was also afraid of snakes, so it wasn’t terribly helpful.
When we got to the airport In Montego Bay, we sweat in all the ways. Will we ever be able to leave? Where are the grownups? Ultimately, we made it off the island. There was yelling involved, and I’m convinced Jamaica simply wanted us gone because we put up such a stink. They threw us on a flight to Miami, sprinkled us about the plane randomly. I was seated next to someone who sold candles, and had a factory in Miami and Jamaica. We talked about waxes, filling molten things, customers, market potential. It’s rare to find someone who makes and sells things. Well, it was in 1999. The internet was still not really a thing; it was a different era and barriers to entry were far greater. I’m a firm believer in the universe and how things unfold. The candle-man being my seatmate for our flee-from-unrest felt like an affirmation of sorts. I was in the right place, I was safe, and pursuing a lip balm company as a job was not the craziest idea ever. Maybe just a little mad.