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The Long Circular Road June 12

“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know       the place for the first time.“

                        TS Eliot

The Saint James Market has plenty of fruit for sale but few customers.  There is no place to park.  If the Market were only a drive-through, the fruit bins would quickly empty, but the congested masses along the Western Main Road are all stuck in cars, separated from goods and services.  The Maxi passenger vans know how to traverse the gridlock by creating more of it.  The strategy is to squeeze into the middle of the road, forcing vehicles from all directions to halt and permit passage.  At extended stops, aggressive beggars skip the other cars and approach the nervous white man, who is faced with a decision:  whether to ignore the target he is, whether to lower the window and fist-bump in respect, or whether to blare his horn until the authorities “come go“ drag him away.  

“Go back which pat allyuh come from.“

I beg your pardon?

Past Bengal Street, the Long Circular Road climbs out of Saint James, passing the old police barracks.  For years, these twisted streets have provided the backdrop for social unrest—mutinies, riots, revolution—Canboulay in 1881, Hosay in 1884, Water Revolt in 1903, Black Power in 1970, Jamaat al Muslimeen in 1990, and the rising violence ever since, which does not yet have a name.  Gang or drug wars do not speak to the root of it.  These are symptoms rather than causes of societal disintegration.

An oversize SUV refuses to yield at the clogged intersection with Patna Street, expecting surrender of all the smaller vehicles, which remarkably comply.  Despite the tinted windows, the driver clearly is private security for some precious family in the back seat, loaded with specialty purchases from the Long Circular Mall.  Neither long nor circular, the mall is one of many decrepit structures that resemble a Kennedy Airport terminal, once considered ultramodern back when men were walking on the moon.

  “Anh ah tell she do dat arreddy. Ah go do fuh she!”

Lo Siento.  No Te Entiendo.

It is extraordinary how rare collisions are on these blind narrow thoroughfares, and I feel hopelessly inadequate behind my right-handed wheel.  As an illegal driver, even a fender bender could land me behind bars, so I yield, even to the ones who yell at me for not yielding even more.  I do not know how to get my car to bow in a prostrate position.  The light changes and almost 0.05-seconds pass before the Pendejo behind me honks his horn for me to move into an intersection still filled with cross-traffic.  I think he wants me to lift my car up and carry it out of the way.

“Why allyuh doh return back?”

I still have barely a clue what I am hearing.  Instead, I speed ahead, eyes straining, white-knuckled, dodging potholes and parked Asian jalopies, round and round and round the Long Circular Road, which finally empties into the Savannah and the largest rotary in the world.  105.1 FM spins dancehall tunes in steady rotation, while I daydream of Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game in a barefoot-clay desert canyon—“We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came.“

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