Jazzie Chapter 1
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The following story is for adults and contains graphic descriptions of sexual content. All the characters, events and settings are the product of my overactive imagination. I hope you like it and feel free to respond.
This story is a sequel to Fourteen. If you would like to comment, contact me at eliot.moore.writer@gmail.com.
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Jazzie 1
Let Me Spot You
He seemed to have an odd problem with his Zuma 125. The hassle started the week before as he left Da Nang for work. The scooter did not fire like it should on the first start. The starter motor turned over, but it did not ignite. He made three attempts, and then on the fourth he pinned the throttle, and it finally started right up.
The old scooter was fine for a few days, and then all of a sudden it was doing it again. Once it got started, it idled and ran perfectly normal. Seems to restart no problem as long as the engine is still plenty hot, he told himself. He would need to bring it to Vinny at the marina when he went to work.
The Zuma was sixteen years old, like himself. He had only owned it for eight months; just something to run between Swetes and Da Nang in English Harbour Town, but mostly just up and down Matthew’s Road where his marina and restaurant jobs were situated. Have his own vehicle, better in the long run; that is the calculation. Now the scooter is something new to worry about. Jeremy Gates spends a great deal of time making calculations. Maintaining the old Zuma just muscled its way up the list.
He is driving into Cobb’s Cross, the crossroads of Antigua’s yachting hub. To his left, the familiar unzoned businesses and colorful bungalows fly by. Beyond them, BnBs and private villas climb the slopes of Monk’s Hill. Privilege observing privilege, because to Jeremy’s right, beyond more commerce, Falmouth Harbour is bejeweled with mega yachts, racing craft, and modest boats like Jeremy’s own twenty-nine foot sloop.
The road is narrow and not nearly as frantic as a morning drive in St. John’s. It is no longer the height of Antigua’s Sailing Week, still it is busy enough to keep a vulnerable scooter driver alert. The sailing community and the supporting service industries are still coming down from the high of the peak season. Harbors strung along Antigua’s coast are still full of the yachty equivalent of those anonymous folk you find sleeping on the couch after a stellar party. The island is a comfortable couch if you have a little money.
He pulls in at his first destination, just short of the forking road. Matthew’s Road winds on to the east, and Dockyard Drive leads south to English Harbour Town. A primary school sits at the intersection like a shabby echo of Fourteen Gates Apartments, the second half of Jeremy’s financial calculations. The neglected bachelor suite in Fourteen Gates is nicknamed Da Nang. It is more and less comfortable than his small sloop, but it has its costs. Everything has its price.
Day charters for his sailboat are drying up. He is not unprepared. It is built into the careful business plan he has with his parents. This beer run for tomorrow’s charter might be his last for the season. He tries to set that worry aside. He jams on the breaks for a herd of japping boys and girls. Green shirts and Khaki shorts, Jeremy watches them pass, then guns the Zuma over to 2SIX8 Craft Brewery. Four seventy-somethings out on Antigua’s choppy southern waters, he does not imagine his clients will drink too much.
Coming out of the brewery with his stash, Jeremy tries to feel better. It takes three charters a month to keep his Dufour 29 afloat and by the close of Sailing Week he was averaging better than that. So there is extra money in the Gravity account, and this next four-party charter will add to that. He should make it through the slow summer. If nothing breaks on Gravity, caution qualifies.
The cat-herd of students had thinned while he was in the store. Some cluster at the bus stop. A posse of boys several years younger than Jeremy trade wit and weedy weight in the gravel parking lot. Trash talk and shoving shoulders, Jeremy remembers that. They are not preening for the girls, just singing for themselves. The girls move in pairs, hatching plots as their school girl tartans swish.
It reminds Jeremy of his after school stops at Speedway or Subway, hanging with his best friends. Expected home for chores, they shared the world and the blood serge release from school structure. That was before and this is now. He is well and truly emancipated. Life on his own is a movable feast. Falmouth to English Harbours, the afternoon air is pregnant with activity and the pepper pot of the world’s cuisine dusted with exhaust and sea salt. Jeremy has cooked all day at Lekker Braai just down the road. He thinks of scrounging something back in English Harbour for himself, meh!
Money crusts Antigua’s coast like salt and pepper rimming a margarita glass. It’s all too rich for Jeremy. He licks a little when he dares. His pockets are not deep. His rumbling stomach lures him over to a nearby food cart to scan the menu. Comfort food for folk on the go, like him; Lekker Braai treads the line between this local-comfort fair and international fusion-flavors. Jeremy aspires to cook.
The woman behind the counter gives a school boy in front of Jeremy a look just short of dismissal. “Sausage and jalapeño,” the voice preteens confidently.
“Nineteen,” the woman waits. The boy digs into his pants pocket and pulls out two crumpled bills. Almost immediately he is back looking for more. There must be a pocket with something more. The boy is searching his school bag when the woman turns to Jeremy, “What would you like?”
“No, I can wait,” Jeremy smiles. The boy looks ten. Jeremy remembers the gravity of transactions at that age. Some coins surface from the bottom of the bag. From the pause, Jeremy can imagine some recalled subtraction resulting in the unexpected difference. There is a readjustment, and the boy reconsiders the menu board.
“What’s your order?” The woman smiles Jeremy’s way.
“Hey,” Jeremy asks the boy, “how much are you short?”
The unexpected question brings the boy around, “Four.”
“Let me spot you.” Jeremy peels off a ten and offers it to the boy. The boy is thinking, Jeremy can see this. “We’ll have his sausage-jalapeños and fried chicken sandwich,” he tells the woman. “Two bottles of water, okay?” She passes on the order before turning back to take his money.
This leaves an awkwardness between Jeremy and the boy. Jeremy uses it to browse his Galaxy. The boy considers $15.47ec in his hand, weighing his obligations to the teenage tourist. Prudent self interest prompts it back into his pocket, available on demand. That moral dilemma settled, the boy turns his attention to the different groups moving out from the school across the street.
Jeremy watches the boy come about with his open carton of food. They have not spoken since the order was made. Served, the boy walked off toward the street, picking at his food. Something makes him stop. He turns around and walks too casually to where Jeremy sits at a whitewashed picnic table on the lawn. The boy ends perched at one end, facing the bus stop across the street.
The boy eats the food in silence, shifting his small butt from side to side as if he is peddling a bike. Then, the brown carton gets placed carefully beside him while he opens the water Jeremy bought. Sausage and jalapeño is a tangle of greasy french fries glazed in melted cheddar. A spicy scattering of sausage and jalapeño floats on top. After a swig of water, the boy plucks some fries free and lifts them high enough so a hardening cheese string hangs over his open mouth before it cranes in.
“Where are you from?” The boy asks curiously. He gives Jeremy his full attention.
Jeremy finishes his own bite. “What makes you think I’m from somewhere?”
The boy pinches a sausage round and carries it with more fries around to point at the black scooter with a free pinky finger, before bringing it back to his mouth. He cocks his head at Jeremy. Jeremy is obviously American. The Zuma 125 is tourist-trade; not what islanders prefer.
“I’m from the States,” Jeremy concedes. The particulars are private. “I live here now.” His chicken burger encompasses the geography of Falmouth Harbour and English Harbour in a casual sweep. I’m as Antiguan as you, now. It might be said, but then the boy might not be native to Antigua and Barbuda. His family might have immigrated from any number of Caribbean islands.
“So you live up there?” The boy points toward a particularly nice villa with a sweep of patio lording it over Falmouth Harbour.
“No,” Jeremy shakes his head. If he cared to answer the question, he would tell the inquisitive boy he lives on his boat Gravity, either in Falmouth Harbour, or across the isthmus in English Harbour where the thirty-six year old sloop lies moored close by Antigua Slipway and his bachelor suite, Da Nang. “You live here in Cobb’s Cross?” He asks the boy in turn.
“No,” the boy shrugs. The talking ends and the boy returns to his box of French fries.
The boy keeps turning to look at Jeremy. His mouth stretches into a broad grin as if he has something to share. It is a toothy stretch of well-formed teeth and smile lines. The grin rounds the boy’s face, suggesting fading puppy fat. His limbs are lean and scarred by a proper boy’s tumbles. They remind Jeremy of climbing cliffs or the accidental brush of coral. The boy’s dread-mop, touched by the breeze, springs about his face; an energetic extension of an active body. The clothes are worn and have a drabness that contrasts with the boy’s healthy face. Cobb’s Cross students wear pale green. This boy’s shirt is a darker blue.
“Do you go to that school?” Jeremy finds himself asking.
The boy looks across the street, “Yes.” He shrugs away the consequence of that. “What do your parents do? They run a restaurant?” The boy points at Jeremy’s Lekker Braai work T-shirt.
“I just work there when I’m not running charters.”
The boy tosses his mop in answer and keeps his steady progress through the congealing nest of fries and cheese. Jeremy fits a pattern in the boy’s mind. This is Falmouth Harbour. If Jeremy is not a tourist, then sailing is obvious. After popping the last sausage into his mouth, the boy pauses to study Jeremy. It is a calculated look, suggesting questions like, What school do you go to?
“Do you cook food like this?”
“Sometimes.”
He is just a boy Jeremy might stop and quiz about directions. Boys this age are usually filtered out of Jeremy’s consciousness. They are bird-beings, bouncing and gliding in Jeremy’s periphery. Their songs are a jumbled high-pitched warble back and forth. Their childish thoughts hop with a turn of the head. This boy and Jeremy exist in different spheres.
“Why are you buying beer? Are you going to party?”
“No, this is for my work,” Jeremy explains. His sandwich is done and he is rolling the foil wrapper into a long spliff or a spar for an imagined sailboat.
The boy explores Jeremy’s bag of beer cans. “I found this stash of cans; old van, party van, must have been a hundred.” The boy wrinkles his nose. “Why don’t they have deposits on cars? I could fill my pockets if they did. There is no money in cans, so nobody does it.” He pulls a can out of the bag and pretends to chug it down. Then he looks at the Goat Farm label. “My Mum tried keeping goats. Dad sold them. I saw a scooter like yours. It hit a goat.” He puts the can down on the picnic table near his knee and his scooter-blade hand drives right into the side of the can. “Bahhh!” The goat bleat stops abruptly. “Beer doesn’t taste good.
“My teacher, he showed us how to make a little smoker out of aluminum cans.” The boy picks up the can and turns it on its side. “Cut it open here and here. We used wire to make little legs. We cooked hot dogs.” He frowns a little and his wide mouth pulls to the side in thought. “If I had a scooter, I wouldn’t have to take the bus to school; have to watch out for goats though.” The boy slumps, “Why do I have to go to school?”
Jeremy never questioned going to school, anymore than he questioned a winter snowfall, until, abruptly, life changed for him. “It seems you have to prove you know things, or they won’t let you do anything.” He is thinking about the certificates he needs to legally skipper charters. “So you can get a job.” God! He sounds like his grandfather. Only, in Jeremy’s family, education was always a respected thing in itself.
“How did you heat the hotdog?” he asks the boy.
“The sun,” the boy shrugs. He looks at the beer can, then puts it back into Jeremy’s bag. The brown carton of Frenchfries is half consumed and the boy is working through it with adolescent enthusiasm. Grease highlights his fingertips and lips. He seems content to sit near Jeremy and cast his curious eyes around the business of the street.
A bus comes and swallows most of the remaining uniforms. The rest have filtered out along the unzoned juncture of the intersecting roads. Jeremy is ready to move on. He pulls his phone out and checks it for alerts. Work at the marina, but they should know he has a charter. Antiguan friends chattering about the schools they go to.
“You have one of them big power boats?”
“No, a small sailboat.” Jeremy surveys the space around them. “Say about from here to the window there,” he is pointing back to where they picked up their food.
“That looks big to me.” Jeremy’s companion measures the distance with an unpracticed eye.
“Not when the waves are two meters breaking off your port bow,” Jeremy grimances.
“What does it look like?”
“Well,” Jeremy could open an image on the phone beside his hand. Instead, he pulls a crisp business card from his wallet. The boy looks at the rendered sketch of Gravity under sail. What you see is what you get, Jeremy is saying. He still crews sporadically on a 1982 GulfStar twice the length of his small sloop; necessary experience and income.
“So, where is your boat?” The face of the card displays the sailboat. The boy flips the card over. The reverse has Jeremy’s contact information.
“Right now, at Antigua Slipway,” Jeremy explains. The boy’s face flexes just enough to indicate he does not know where that is. “Down in English Harbour,” Jeremy points further along Matthew’s road.
“Some of us took a boat. Small boat, not good for fishing. We left it on the beach and walked all the way back.” There is another look at the picture of the sailboat on the card. “You live on this?”
“Pretty much.”
“If I had a boat, it would be a jet boat.”
“Can’t liveaboard a jet boat,” Jeremy observes.
Rude Boy
John Carter scratches a limpet of cheese clinging to the side of the box. It accordions along his fingernail before relinquishing its final hold. One last sausage waiting for him. He munches it with the garnish of cheese while he surveys the busy road.
The American took his sack of beer and old black scooter in the direction of John’s latest school. John has not scouted that way yet. He has walked the length of Matthew’s Road as far as the cricket pitch at the other end of the bay. Falmouth Harbour is cupped in a crescent of steep hills. Like his own neighborhood, money settles on the high ground. From where John sits on the bench he shared with the American, he can see the foam-white, coral-colorful facades of big bungalows perched amongst the dusty green. Curious, and not much interested in the long bus ride home, John spent his first few days at Cobbe’s Cross School poking about side roads. He has hiked up to the gates. Once he circled around to look at a tiled pool waiting for its absent owner; so nice!
“I do what I can, God will do the rest!” John’s mother tells him. He knows his mother would frown on the young American’s handout. Gray’s Farm folk might be poor, but they are proud. John thinks about the young American he just met. Didn’t look down his pointy nose at me, just reached in his pocket like family might (but wouldn’t). No strings, not like Pudgee Funk, who took a shine to John after he found out John was headed downtown to Foundation Mixed School in St John’s. Pudgee’s money is still weighing down John’s pocket; just a reminder that he is there to scout for the young man.
John walks along the street, one foot up on the curb, the other stepping down to the gutter. His life was the tight streets and cosy alleyways south of Deepwater Harbour. That was his world until the problems started at Gray's Crescent School; then his world expanded into the heart of busy St. John’s. Cautious shuttles back and forth till curiosity lured him down to the hustle of Heritage Quay. John walked the tourist hub, dismissed by the Ray-Ban, rednecks and the huckster-salespeople siphoning dollars into the Antiguan economy. Good money John’s parents never made.
Not ignorant, he knows the world is bigger. Charter flights screamed into V.C. Bird International right over their heads every day. Through the winter, city-sized ships bring tidal surges of beet-red tourists to the Old Town district between High Street and Radcliffe. After school, John watched the lines of tour buses ferrying the Americans off to places like Nelson’s Dockyard. At night, a boy could climb onto the roof and watch the lights of the pristine liners. Boats taller than any building in St John’s.
Walking Dockyard Drive, John decides English Harbour Town vibrates like Heritage Quay. The towering cruise ships funnel money into St. John’s jewelry shops and mouth-watering restaurants. Here along Falmouth Harbour, the shops and restaurants catch the AirB&B tourists and the owners of extravagant boats. The world comes to Antigua and carefully averts its eyes from Gray’s Farm. Nobody pays attention until election time.
John reaches a marina and turns back to reassess the road leading back to his latest school. There is a yacht refit business across the road. There would have to be, what with all the boats crowding the harbor. A right turn at the intersection brings him past another dive shop. Between buildings, he catches glimpses of white boats as big as island ferries. Sleek and pampered; John imagines the television lives of the people lazing on board.
The first day at Cobbes Cross School, John malingered along Matthew’s Road and missed his bus. With nowhere to go, he settled on the beach. Sitting in the dark, he was treated to a carnival of lights. It was a Milkyway swath along the shore and a universe of solitary boats anchored in the bay. There were no threatening clouds, just the familiar stars from home. He fell asleep inside a shipping container.
So many shops and restaurants with foreigners at their doors. More people like the young man John talked to at the food stall. The Carter family lived three generations in Gray’s Farm, probably more. Now, his father feels crowded out with non nationals from Santo Domingo. “Dey take the jobs,” his father complained defensively to his mother. Thomas Carter finished two courses in building technology. Despite the building boom, he stays unemployed. Easier to blame outsiders, but John’s mother, Susan, and the older children know Thomas brought it on himself; sexing with other women and bringing the bad sickness into the Carter house. Sins of the fathers, word gets around and John is pushed all the way across the island to Cobbe’s Cross School to finish the year. Pudgee Funk tells John, “Jazzie boy, you can read and count, what good is school going to do you?”
A boy a few years younger flashes past. His hand comes down on John’s shoulder, clutching at the blue school uniform. John’s first thought is recess play, his second that his satchel will be snatched away. The boy twists laughing across John’s path. Then he is tiptoe sliding around, eyes somewhere else. A turn to the left and there is a girl intent on catching her prey.
John is just a street lamp the game dances around. He feels the urge to pick a side; help the boy because he is a boy or help the girl because their ages match. The animated cat and mouse remedies John’s isolation. He clutches at the little boy.
The girl darts around and exploits her advantage. A contested object is pried from the boy’s fierce grip. Victorious, she pirouettes dismissively, intent on her recovered prize. John holds his grip on the little boy’s school shirt. He could let go, but the boy’s resistance triggers a predatory instinct. Dominance games, tests of strength.
With a last confirmation glance that the prize is in her hand, she turns back to the weak tussle. It was just a sibling game no different that John might play with his sister Chloe. The girl registers the action between John and her brother. Tribalism; John’s blue uniform makes him strange. His past has not yet whispered its way across the island, but he is alien.
“What’cha doing there?” It's imperious; not very personal. It resonates with the unambiguous us and them of tweens nosing into the immanent uncertainties of adolescent hunger game courtship. The not quite abstract rivalry of childhood gender, never two solitudes, but something.
The what’cha doing is not about the little brother caught up in the new game of extricating himself from the thin boy’s negligent grip. Her brother is the playful pest best left to his own devices. The stranger tresspasses in her backyard. John understands this.
John shrugs an inarticulate reply, it’s a free country. He is doing something-nothing as he explores English Harbour Town. If she will relent a little, John could favor her with his disarming grin. Shunned by childhood friends at Gray’s Crescent School, his natural shine is dulled. “Nothing,” he finally suggests.
New boy is in her classroom. Can’t say why, her teacher does not like him. It is in the sharpness to his tone which clashes with the earnest embrace the assistant head teacher gave the boy, first day. Her classroom teacher is forbidding, arms-length distant with this blue-uniformed boy. John Carter responds in kind like a feral cat waiting for the stone throw. The master is not so bad so the Cobbe’s Cross boys take a hint. No good reasons, but the boy transferred in from St. John’s is slowly being pushed out.
“Are you a rude boy?” She challenges, “Let go of T.C.” A wave in John’s direction. John gives the little boy a playful shove. Holding onto him was unconscious, impersonal. No harm, no foul, T.C. Makes common cause with his older sister. John shifts his bag and shoves his fists deep into his pockets.
Everyone knows John rides the bus across the island. It stands to reason there is a reason. He is not a bully, laughs at the right times, knows the games and players. John shrugs the question off. “What’s down there?” He points up Dockyard Drive. “Is English Harbour down this road?”
It is. John would like the company, but the conversation ends with the girl’s suspicious squint. He hardly asked her to help him rob a store. Girls are dubious beings at the best of times. John knows there is a great deal of measuring and judging now that he is in Year Six. The American he met has given him a destination, so he continues on his way, conscious that he has not been dismissed by the girl.
The properties along the street seem more select. Houses are set back, veiled by walls and flowering shrubs. The spotted shops and restaurants are more relatable. Wide open doors where you can stand as if on your front porch and chat up the neighbor walking to the store because the young one tugging on an arm wants a banana soda, and have you heard three unmarried men from Santo Domingo moved into the vacant house that always floods when it rains? “More trouble on us,” with a hum of neighborly agreement.
The neighbor will walk on, coaxed by the anticipating child, until the next familiar greeting down the street reprises news about the suspect men, or perhaps a meeting of fresh minds about the wages of sin in the Carter house; where John’s father brought the bad sickness home and the whole street hears what John’s mother thinks of that.
John moves past the forking choice to follow Falmouth Harbour’s yacht-encrusted shoreline, or continue left to Nelson’s Dockyard. He wants to see it all, imagine he is walking home. Imagine his father and mother work back up the road and he can turn into a gate welcoming him to a freshly painted bungalow that has to have a pool beyond its spacious rooms.
It is $15 dollars to get into the National Park. It is not the sort of place Pudgee will be interested in; too busy, too secure. It takes a while to find a way past the imposing white gate. Once in, he is just no-see-um. His grin is his passport.
John asks a few times about Fourteen Gates, even shares the business card the American gave him. Schoolboy blues and butternut, few care to answer him. Nothing stops John from wandering down to the yacht-gilded horseshoe dock. Tall boats are butted up along the historic worf. John is seduced by the busy beauty of the afternoon harbor. He finds that he can sit at the end of the crescent of boats farthest from the busy restaurant. Feet kick as his eyes explore English Harbour.
“Where do they all come from?” John asks a security guard who came to loom over him.
“Everywhere,” the older man replies.
John pulls the young American’s card out of his pocket once again. “Do you know where this place is?”
The guard looks at the card. He hums an equivocal response as if he needs to consider his reply. “Maybe, over there,” he tosses his head out over the crowded waterway.
“There?” John asks, pointing at white buildings with a commanding view down the length of English Harbour.
“Don’t be ignorant, you simple boy,” the man scoffs. “That’s the Governor General’s residence, Clarence House. Stand up now, look there.” He is pointing to the right of Clarence House, just opposite Nelson Dockyard. John sees a grimy shipyard and some buildings with more restaurants. “There, above the slipway on the slope, just up the road there. I think that is what you are looking for.”
Between the dockyard and the buildings pointed out, a bluff of mangroves reaches into the water. Several small sailboats are tied up along the stretch. Beyond the boats and trees, buildings like a school step up the slope to Shirley Heights.
Caribbean Sunshine
Jeremy’s sloop runs before a moderate wind, surfing on the chasing waves. Gravity is not a sportsboat skimming over the water. It is just a thirty-six-year old production boat. The run back from Half Moon Bay on Antigua’s southeast coast is an easy six nautical miles. This is the calculated treat of the day cruise. Unfortunately, a light squall caught them on the run home. Beating rain chased his elderly passengers down to the cabin. All except for one, who is relishing the spray and cold.
“Shirley Heights, right?” The man is Carl Anderson. Carl points off to starboard and up to the crown of the hill sheltering English Harbour from the Atlantic, “Quite a view.”
“Yes,” Jeremy agrees, “we’re going to turn into the harbor soon. The spinnaker needs to come down.”
The young skipper abandons his tiller and steps nimbly out of the cockpit. Carl has a panic impulse to grab the bar, as if the boat will slew around like some highway accident. Unconcerned, Jeremy is bobcat padding on a wind tossed bough toward the billowing kite of sail. Carl watches as the colorful parachute collapses on the deck in one practiced evolution. The festive nylon goes into a bag, and then the teenager retraces his steps.
“You must be soaked!” Linda calls Carl’s eyes away from the lithe young man. She climbs unsteadily up the short ladder. To the west, the rude line of rain moves away, restoring the Caribbean sunshine to their holiday.
“It just sluiced the salt off,” Carl dismisses her concern. “Shirley Heights,” he points again. The two couples have been about the island, seen it spread beneath them as their flight arrived. This sailing adventure along the wild eastern coast brings it home better than a lobster dinner at Nelson’s Dockyard. Carl will remember this Antigua, with its crenelated coast, bare rocks and secluded beaches as they moved south, and the endless reach of the Atlantic rolling in from Africa.
“It’s been a wonderful day, Carl,” Linda assures him. “It’s been very nice,” she calls over to the polite young man who brought them out.
Carl is relieved. The vacation was his idea. He searched the AirBnB in English Harbour. He fretted, because it was a risky choice. Fourteen Gates Apartments, still under renovations, but they would not be annoyed. The two bedroom unit was exactly as advertised. Linda’s friends, Terence and Pat Tollifson approve; which was more than they could say of Linda’s choice to date Carl.
Linda left her friends in Kenmore when her husband died. Carl met her at the bridge club in Grand Forks. After a few bids on his part, it turned out they suited each other. The Tollifsons thought he was a yarborough, not the winning hand Linda had with her first husband. The couple thought Linda bid too high. Best friends, so Carl played gamely on.
Terence and Pat turned out on deck right after Linda. “We’re back?” Terence asks their young skipper. “Where should we go for supper?” This last to his companions, and not the young man.
“My god, Terry, after that steak Jeremy fed you on the beach, your mind is back on food?” That comes better from Terence’s wife than from the new man in Linda’s life.
“I grow it, I eat it,” Terence replies, patting his ample stomach. He grows little these days, now his son has taken over. “Picture perfect, Jerry.”
Jeremy is on the stern, guiding the tiller with his foot like Captain Morgan on a rum bottle. The couples have the cockpit benches. No point in jibing again, just run it in, he decides. Whose treat? “Pat, will you take the tiller? Carl, I could use you on the mainsail winch.”
“Oh dear!” Pat exclaims.
“Just keep the course we are on,” Jeremy assures her. His sloop is going nowhere with the wind directly on her stern. He starts the motor and shows her how to work the throttle. “I’ll be on the coachroof stowing the mainsail away. I’ll tell you if I need it turned a point.”
“Oh dear, starboard, port,” Pat points each way to indicate she remembers.
“That’s right,” Jeremy grins. He turns to Carl at the winch. “Remember, when you take the coils off, you grip the drum with your left hand. The drum turns clockwise.” Carl nods. “Go ahead and do it now. I’ll tell you when to pop the clutch. Just let it pay out at its own speed.” This is what Jeremy does to make his charter days memorable.
Jeremy brings the boom back to center line, robbing the mainsail of its wind. Then he is on the coachroof of his sloop and four elderly clients watch. “Release the mainsail!” Arg, me maties!
Jeremy flakes the mainsail into its UV-protecting boom bag. The old Dufour 29 switched out its Volvo for a Quiet Torque 10 electric before the sailboat came to Jeremy. It is humming now, but a sailboat burns canvas, the way the old Volvo burnt diesel, so you pack it away. Everything has its price.
Take a Piss
The sun is dropping into Runaway Bay as Jeremy cuts the Zuma’s motor. He exchanges his helmet for the remaining beer the old folks left. Vegetation crowds the road along the salt pond bordering St. John’s packed neighborhoods, offering seclusion to the beach. Passing parking, he takes the broad path to white sand and emerald water. Far down the beach there is a tourist cafe, but here to the right, away from hotels and settlement, there are no tourists. A solitary ship plies south toward St. John’s and in the certain slant of light Jeremy pauses to look at the illuminated cliffs of the two barren Sisters beyond white foam breaking across a hidden reef.
Rap/hip-hop from the fete drowns out the surf sliding up the flat strand. This is a quick and dirty gathering, an end-of-school party that might go viral, might go flat. His friends' lives are bounded by family, church, and school. Distance defines Jeremy’s connections. By choice, in a meeting of minds, he is a world away. He does not think of that too much. On the beach, he is sweet sixteen, mind-muscle-master of his craft and course. You’re on the beach, Jemz, as a good friend would say with a suggestive smirk on her face. Possibilities, encounters, too right, Jeremy Gates knows.
“Jeremy,” Zion Baptiste calls out. She is a year older, but life bobcatted Jeremy farther in three precarious springs. Cats land on their feet, and Jeremy is no different. She does not come to him. He waves the net of beer and scans the anonymous mingle.
“Where’s your boyfriend, then?”
“Sulking; Go cheer him up.” Zion points down to the water where their friend Chris Aska sits on his own. “Where’s your girlfriend, Jeremy?” She turns to her companions, “Bey and Cleo.” It is an introduction. The girls size him up. “Jerry couldn’t come,” Zion adds.
Jeremy nods, understanding. There are one or two he recognizes. They merit a toss of his head. Family, church, school, and there is the beach. Little work to do and not much else to get Antiguan teenagers out. The fete will grow as the messages buzz in everyone’s hands. Where’s your girlfriend? Zion asked. Answering vibration against his thigh, Jeremy glances at his phone for reassurance.
⚫️
Night traffic is a tosser in this town. 😗
Jeremy smiles.
Chris is on his phone with Jerry Roberts. Boyfriends, if the two of them were out. “Want a beer?” Jeremy asks, dropping down beside him. He twists Chris’ wrist, “hey Jerry!” He chimes to Chris’ absent love interest.
“I’m driving. Mum would kill me if I came back stinking.”
Jeremy sighs. He cracks one anyway and offers it to Chris.
Jeremy does not think of frustrated friends in closets as he dances his freedom on the beach. The music does not drown out the currents of end-of-day conversation ebbing and flowing around him. There is a polyglot of accents. Antiguan for sure, but Trini and Jamaican are discernible to his practiced ear. His midland American flatness is the uniqueness on the beach.
He is daggering to digital-dub rhythms of ragga and Zion’s hip swing. Cabinet-covert capers as they both have eyes for others about the beach. “Cleo is it?”
“Yeah, nah,” Zion shrugs over her shoulder. She flows around and slides her hands up his chest and around his perspiring neck. “Doesn’t know, Cleo’s clio, makes me laugh, makes me tingle.” Zion appears church choir prim to her family, but Jeremy can loosen her tongue, in Jeremias veritas.
Zion is shy, popping booty till her girlfriends join in. Bey tick tocks her pelvis and Cleo matches. When the pair step back with a booty pop, Zion joins in, tossing her inhibitions. It is a communal dance Jeremy joins, but the four are not in sync. Eyes rove about the crowd as they dance out and bad. Still too soon to say if the fete is on; doesn’t matter. It is a gathering till they go their separate ways.
A young man catches Jeremy’s eye. Unlikely, with his hair natural, loose white singlet and a scruffy pair of cargo shorts, like he has just dropped off a scaffold. Maybe it is the sexy-biker tattoo on his neck. He is thrusting his crotch slow-lazy at his woman, some woman. Hard muscle, not kiss-your curl bodybuilding, just live right. A move or two, and they might be dancing with each other. Jeremy knee dabs for the man, just to compliment, maybe to show off his own curves and swells. Feet bring him closer, just ‘cause, cat curious.
The girls are in a groove, liking Jeremy’s mirror moves, but now he is sort of dancing with the man, and then he knows he is. Jeremy frogs back and feels a hand on his back, just lightly. Antigua’s tolerance is a step or two behind Jeremy, but it is okay to be out and bad with the dancehall moves. No words, the man does his slow dagger and Jeremy gyrates. When you are sixteen, your heart hammers and you look for nails.
They are down the beach where a passing freighter is just a Christmas constellation on the water. Two strangers feeling unnoticed on the beach. The man’s hand dips into Jeremy’s armpit, then strokes down to his perspiring waist when the music pauses. Jeremy turns on him, and watches the man mingle his bouquet with the dance sweat on his lips. Bobcat fierce, Jeremy snatches a challenging fistful of the man’s singlet and with a twist, lifts it to his chest. He dares the man to tango with a look. Hand released and Jeremy takes his coiled pride down the beach, the man trailing after.
It is a seduction, but who is who? They are neither prey, and words and names are irrelevant. A hand reaching for Jeremy’s hip prompts a fluid twist and then Jeremy walks backwards for a bit, leading the man further into the night. The man reaches out and his slender body is gathered in close, then he pushes off as if he could not be bothered.
Perhaps he cannot, for Jeremy’s truth is he takes or leaves now. He is past just waiting to be taken. This project is just hammers and nails. There is a licable shell about the pliable center of his tangerine sweetness. Takesearned trust to reach Jeremy’s soft center. Think corn starch; hit it hard, you’ll get deflected, give it time, you’ll sink in.
On the margin of sand and sea, politely unnoticed by all, they come together. The man finally captures Jeremy and presses his adolescent stretch back against his crotch. There are gentle thrusts daggering into the hardness of Jeremy’s ass. Surf and the party music harmonize with their thoughts. “Sometimes when you party, you just need to take a piss, you know?” Jeremy knows. “You with someone? Just visiting the island?” The man asks. His hands roam. A glance up the beach, and then he kisses Jeremy’s neck.
Jeremy cocks his head, opening his neck further to the vampire lips. “Yes, no.” The man is pressing fingers into the hardness of his belly.
“Yeah, me too.” The, with somebody, because the man’s Antiguan accent is clear. “So where’s the one you’re with? That fine girl you were dancing with?”
“No, my girl’s late.” That just makes the need more pressing. The man brushes his cock, and a thumb slides the wet trough between Jeremy’s breasts as if he is fingering Jeremy’s cleft.
Jeremy’s partner shifts so that their backs are toward the party. The music has shifted to some punishing rap/hip-hop. It is right for the man’s next move. Still pressing Jeremy close, he pulls the slack shorts down so he can grab cock. “You like that?” The man asks, and Jeremy is ready for him. He is adolescent weeping for relief and the truth of that lubricates the man’s hand.
“You’re a schoolboy, cool boy,” the man croons. A hand possessively surveys Jeremy’s ass as the other moves taught flesh over the hard shaft. “Out looking for a Wadadli man to fix you good.” It is a quick jerk. Jeremy comes and the man can feel his body quake the little death. Jeremy’s hand comes up to clasp the man’s neck, keeping them connected as he rides out his orgasm. He can feel the man’s cock pressed hungrily against him. “Gonna slip you my meat and feel your heat, boy.”
Next comes the fuck. Jeremy is still wrapped up in the hand gripping his cock as the man attempts to open his fly. Not going to happen, never like this with a stranger. You draw lines when passing time and fluids. The partners have an understanding about taking a piss when you feel the urge. He twists away and yanks his shorts back in place.
The man likes the bobcat kiss Jeremy plants on his lips; the fingers in his hair. He finds the boy hard and fierce, amusing. Jeremy bunches up his shirt a second time, fist against his heart. Jeremy is a lightweight heading into manhood. He is only sixteen, but he has handled men before. He likes this hardbody age that is not so removed from his own. He likes the strength against his strength. Holding the singlet tight, he finishes opening the man’s fly, eyes meeting eyes.
Drop down and feel the surf run over calves and up to tickle the knees. Absorb the cleanness of the shaft cantilevered free from its accustomed drapes. Jeremy has a taste for this.
“My puppy is waiting there for you, Fish. You’re where you need to be. This your thing? Wadadli cream?”
“Are you getting off on your words or my mouth?” Jeremy had been emotionally dismantled by the best. He does not like it, does not feel it. “I crewed here, now I'm liveaboard and on the beach. This isn’t my business, not yours either.”
“Breath easy, I just talk, liked the look of you, no harm. Just saying, you could make good money. I’ve got connections. Do you ting.” The man encourages.
“Well, heng up,” Jeremy replies.
Taking a cock is as simple as a hug, like a casual kiss on the lips when there is nothing on the heart-line. It is predictable, with the inevitable comparisons of textures, contours. The man’s possessive hand on his head means nothing to Jeremy. “A yasso nice!” The finger’s clench and quiver-telegraph the natural law progression from Jeremy’s mindful feasting to the man’s mindless heartbeat pulses.
Jeremy rewards the man with soft masterbations as the salts dissolve to memory on his pallet. Unconsciously, his palm resonates with the rhythm of the unsullied surf cleansing his legs and wicking up his thighs. The hand at his head is urging him back on the cock. Jeremy feels little inclination after hammer fall.
The flames are not extinguished. They are both too young for that. Jeremy signals consummation with a final friendly squeeze. He lifts gracefully from the sand, dismissing the sand clinging to his legs.
“You live on Friar’s Hill?” The man asks.
“Not likely,” Jeremy responds. He knows enough of St. John’s to recognize the upscale neighborhood. The question reminds him of the boy he talked to in Cobbe’s Corner near the school. He is an expat, and so must be in a villa somewhere. “Came in on a ketch, had reasons to stay and the right to do it.” Jeremy waves generally at the growing crowd as if to say, many do. “You pimp?”
“I like you, what’s your name?”
An old nickname is on his lips, but as they walk back to the party, he replies, “Jeremy.”
“Maybe see you around,” he eyes Jeremy for his reaction.
“Been looking for you, Tayo,” someone shouts over the music.
“Been taking a piss, man.” He turns away from Jeremy without another word. Sexy and as welcome as a cold drink after a long dance. Jeremy scans the crowd, looking for his friends.
Zion has Chris on his feet, dancing out the funk of missing Jerry Roberts. Now that work had slowed on Gravity and his part time jobs, he will invite the three of them to Da Nang. They needed safe places to be themselves. They all needed each other. Zion is feeling free, dancing amongst her friends where who you are stops mattering. “Look who's here!” Zion dabs left.
“About time!” Jeremy bares his teeth.
Amongst his A-Level friends, Theo Clarke stands out. The young man is dancing with Zion and her friends, and Jeremy’s Theo likes center stage. He is a dancehall queen tonight; form-fitting top that glitters beneath a tight lemon jacket. Theo’s mane is tamed into a tight bun. The pair are Yin and Yang, twined together in passionate embrace.
“Been looking for you, Fergus. Can’t keep a girl waiting like that.” Theo arches a carefully cultivated eyebrow regally.
“Had to take a piss, Dil; nature calls.” Jeremy looks innocent.
“Can’t help your nature, can you.” Theo agrees equitably. “Had his hands tied, did he?”
“Had to work the knot out with my teeth.”
“Clever boy.”
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