Distance

They get vicious quickly, the men on the buses. I sit next to the window clinging to my purse, eyeing them sideways like a paranoid school teacher. What started with a light remark about one man sitting irritatingly close to one woman’s sleeping baby turns into spit-flaring declarations about being born and bred in Bain Town, breeding grounds for convicts apparently.

“Why you don’t smile man?” Jeers the instigator up front.
“Man aint nothing to smile about. I look like I like man aye?” Answers back the accused.
“You look like you ready to tief something.”
“I always ready to tief. Man, I aint gat no police record. I gat a album,” he sermonizes his viciousness as if he were standing on a mountain.

But this is just a bus sliding horizontally through the petri dish of the city and back past the road side gallon water sellers, past the Haitian squatting shacks and the immigrant detention center, past the twenty-five churches and their twenty-five accommodating liquor stores, past the Bacardi bat and into the coconut trees and the bougainvillae that lay unbothered next to the uninhabitable swamps. Nothing to see here. Moving right along.

I like living this far away from the loud voices of inner Nassau. I live behind the bush as they say, far from the pulse of men with a bone to pick. When I first got here in January, it took me a while to leave the house. I felt that making friends would bring home too close to me. It would be too real. Too bikeless. Where are my friends? Oh yes, on facebook. Better stay inside.

Look on any google map, and it will show you the urban history of Nassau: it started in the middle, and went east. The more you drive West the closer you are to the trees, the nice beaches with the high tide and soft sand, the tourist resorts, the white people, the airport. Closer to another country until you are standing so close to the edge you could fall off.

Back in February, I worked in Lyford Cay, the most Western and foreign point in Nassau, where obscure millionaires (and not so obscure ones like Sean Connery) build their getaway mansions. They were Russian and used me as their liaison to Bahamians so that they would never have to have direct contact with what my boss called an “uncivilized and loud” society. They had two Peruvian maids, one Cuban gardener, one Japanese teacher, and me, the only one with legal documents working for them. I wondered often why they lived in the Bahamas? Or if in actuality they did. Maybe it was all a dream they didn’t want to wake up to.

I remember biking up two mountains to get to Stanley, Hong Kong’s cleaner, fresher side. This was where the Europeans recruited by international business lived in their mansions with their Indonesian maids. This where you could stick your toes in at the edge of the sea and touch the ocean at the other side. I remember craving noodles from the dirty Cantonese shops in Kowloon, craving the itch of immigrant life.

A neighbor got robbed about a month ago just to remind us behind-the-gate dwellers that you can’t escape poverty. It lives behind the houses, on the back street, the part that they didn’t clear down to build this beauty. Everyday, I ride the bus, I get dirty again. Its hot, and other people’s sweat rubs into mine. The base beats of dancehall reggae break into my subconscious like a robber with a gun. I am shaken into consciousness. On edge. Either they love you or they hate you. There’s no “not” knowing you.

This is what it must feel like for these men so close to anger all the time as if they were clutching their hearts in their hands, so reachable and vulnerable, I could see it bleed, pierced by the roughness of their palms.

Another man whose dark complexion looks purple beneath his tight white curls, talks effusively with another man about the FNM and the PLP, the two political parties that have taken turns ruling the country since Independence, a subject that no one can ever agree on amicably. They speak as if no one else is on the bus, with the full extension of their voices, gaining momentum with their bodies, they hit the bus windows to emphasize their points. A young woman (its always the women who instigate) brazenly yells,
“Y’all aint the only ones on the bus ya know.”

There is silence as they contemplate their embarrassment which cannot simply be left to hang unlatched around their heads.
“ Man miss, this a free country….” It goes on and on from there.

Maybe all they need is a boat to make them feel better. Some fresh ocean breeze to clear their minds. Nassau summers are heating up their brains. They breathe in exhaust and sweat steam. Their mouths a quick release from the the diabolical crowd pushed closer together by the immediate need of elusive money. Now that I don’t have a bicycle or any form of transport beside the lousy bus that stops running at 8pm, I know what it means to feel stuck. Excessive waiting causes post-traumatic stress disorder. Stress pushes you to the edge. I crave mountains.