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My Town
You grow up in a small rural town in Jamaica, and you
read a book, it just has to be one grown-up book for your entire life, and
it sets youapart. The fact that you have read is like a letter tattooed
on your forehead, or burned into your cheek. It's not hard to be
arrogant around here. All you need to know about the people in your little
small town you know by the time you are sixteen and they start saying
that you must be gay because you haven't fathered a kid yet. All you need
to know is that this is just one of the fourteen or fifteen local
theories as to why I haven't brought another bastard into this world. The
thing is,nobody here knows my name, they don't want to know my name.
They have all the knowledge of me they need: twenty years here and he
has no kids. After spending more than half his life here, none of us are
his friends.There are about three thousand books in this house, and I
have read,maybe eight hundred of them. This makes me a freak out here.
This is what makes me a freak out here. Camus and Melville and
Phillip Roth, Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Vonnegut, Elmore Leonard and
Peter Straub,these men have contributed to making me a degenerate, a
walking obscenity. I expect a mob with pitchforks and torches any
night now.
It's not hard to be friendless here if you read. Just the
fact ofreading, nothing else. The thing is, I would have to
condescend to make friends with the watchers of Days of Our Lives. I would
have to slum to hang out with the soccer players. I would have to
pretend that the music they all listen to is profound, original, and that
the movies they like are smart and thrilling, not that I have anything
against bad dubbing and Chinese martial arts, or American
made-for-dvd/video action movies with Lorenzo Lamas. I would have to pretend that we
think about the same things, are attracted to the same women, have the
same sense of humor. I would have to pretend.
They aren't curious about anything except each other, and
me, and whoever else they feel connected to, by geography or
age-group. They have nothing to talk about among themselves but other
people's business,hence the popularity of the soaps. They get to talk about
the characters like they were real people. It's like gossip, and will make
up the time until they get to report that somebody's cousin from
Linstead has a kid with some guy from Bog Walk and the drama associated
therewith.
It's hard to not be paranoid here when you read. My town is
in Yoknapatawpha County. My neighbor, let's call him Flem, sits
in his yard and talks to his wife in the kitchen at the top of his
voice. If I choose to listen to Flem, I will hear him ranting about who
is making more money than him, and how much they don't deserve it. If
I am especially quiet, and I don't open the windows or smoke, I
can hear the latest gossip about me. He yells about how I don't deserve
the house I live in, I live alone after all, what do I need all that
space for?). I walk down the street in this town on any week day and I will pass
five or six conversations, all about other people, occasionally about TV
shows or soccer games. At least three of these conversations will
soften to whispers in the time it takes me to approach and pass by. It
all reeks of that malice peculiar to small towns the world over.
As long as I don't marry here, or have a kid here, or start
a business here, I am not one of them. I'm not tied to this town. I
want to be able to walk away and forget it.
Jeremy Tavares
E-mail Jeremy Tavares
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