Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 09, 2008 Tony Deyal column
Port of Spain has always been a hot town
Like a pepper in a pot of rice and peas
Waiting to burst and scatter, a trap
For the unwary…
The new Hyatt Hotel in Trinidad is in the old Port of Spain, along the docks where once upon a time and perhaps even now there was a “Gaza Strip”, an area of bars and brothels that comprised a no man’s land populated by ladies of the night.
I remember a bar with the sign, “Seamen and Seawomen Welcome”. Monica Doo-Doo, a calypso by the Mighty Sparrow, has Monica explaining the departure of her child’s father with this verse:
Me eh know mih dear
Like the man don’t care
This mister does leave me home alone, for weeks he don’t come home;
I have to depend
On mih seaman friend
And when mih seaman friend bring a friend is then I have cash to spend.
I had travelled by LIAT so I arrived late and tired, my ears still hurting, my nerves jangled by the endless vibration. If you ever travel LIAT, put a cup on what the flight attendants describe as “the tray table in front of you” and you realize that the vibration causes it to move a high speed along the surface until it plummets. That is what your body undergoes on a LIAT flight and I had two hours of it.
The feeling is like the one you get when you have worn a hat for the whole day and then take it off.
You still feel it on your head. Pickpockets know about that persistence of feeling and rely on it because after they lift your wallet you don’t realize it’s gone until much later.
While the Gaza Strip might be gone and the Hyatt soars above the downtown skyline, the danger has not gone away at all.
I was hungry but had no appetite. It might have been an aftereffect of the LIAT flight or merely the tension of driving from the airport in a rented car late at night and having to practice defensive driving and some trail spotting. I speeded up, slowed down, checked my rear-view mirror, ensured that there was no car abreast of me at the traffic lights and I was not boxed in by vehicles.
I was driving a white Nissan Almera aka the Nissan Plus, the Nissan Sentra and the Nissan Bluebird Sylphy. I phoned my son George on the way into the city and he was immediately alarmed. “Dad, let them take back the car. That is the most stolen car in Trinidad. Most of the carjacking is Nissan Almera. What is the colour?”
I replied, “White.” “Dat even worse, white is the one they thief the most.” Here I was, heading for Port-of-Spain in a car that would top the most wanted list of car thieves, I was unarmed and still shaking from the LIAT Caribbean experience.
Port of Spain has always been my special town
Where I am at home and have always been…
But not that night and not these days. Go out there and ten to one its murder. I have stayed in the Hyatt before and the menu is not memorable. Going out into the night was out of the question, and certainly not in an Almera. I decided to savour the “In-Room Dining Experience”.
I ordered corn soup from Room Service with some bread. After LIAT and the drive, I was on a roll.
However, the odour lingered long after the meal had begun to work its magic and I decided to put the tray in the corridor where others could benefit from its fragrance.
By that time, I had changed into short pants. The tray was large and its contents included a water-filled tube vase crowned with a fresh sprig of greenery and a white flower. The door was heavy with enough force to damage your leg if you tried to keep it from closing. The vase fell, the water made the floor slippery, the soup bowl was heading to join it and the door got into the act leaving me in a jamb.
Relieved that nothing had broken, I placed the tray gingerly on the corridor floor and then realized, when I tried to get back into my room, that I had locked myself out. I had no key, no phone and almost no clothes.
In baseball, were I a pitcher, it would have been a shutout. In industrial relations, were I an employer, it would have been a lockout. As lock would have it, I was out of luck. I was not dressed for the lobby where a convention of Chief Justices was about to begin and I would be courting ridicule or even arrest. Hopefully, it would be a shorts sentence. I found a phone near the elevators and begged the receptionist for help.
Eventually succor in the form of a bellman appeared and he warned me that he would need identification from me to prove that I was the legitimate occupant of the room. I was a little crusty, perhaps from the bread and waiting, and pointed out that he had to wait until I was back in the room.
He came in, looked over my ID, and when I apologized for taking so much of his time, replied, “That is not a problem, Sir. A lot of big people make the same mistake.”
I retired to my room feeling small. But then I thought that at least I had avoided the Fred Flintstone fate. Fred keeps trying to put Dino outside for the night and continuously finds that Dino is inside and he is outside.
Maybe I should not have even bothered with the phone. I should have stayed in the corridor yelling, “Wilma! Wilma!” I am sure that some judge would have come to make me finish my sentence. After all, Justice is blind but not deaf.
*Tony Deyal was last seen driving a red Tiida which he enjoyed. When told he had to return it in a week he asked, “Datsun?”
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