Jamaica Unbraided

What a wild week I'd had on this ribald Caribbean isle. From the moment my taxi driver called Christopher Columbus a bloody pirate, to my Blue Mountain “mountain bike"  tour down the pot-holed, cliff-hanging  road wheezing with stinky semi-trucks. Our terrifed group stood on the back-pedal brakes of our antique bicycles all the way down the mountain, while “Deadman, " our aptly named  “tour leader," followed behind leaving a wake of ganja smoke.

As they say here “ebry dark night hab it peenie-wallie.” Yes, Mon! In Jamaican patois a peenie-wallie is a firefly, and every dark night has its firefly—its silver lining.  Like the Irish, Jamaicans are roguish, eccentric, charming word-mongers who love to drink and chat and dance and joke. One of the running gags on the island seems to be HAIR.  Wilder than Frankenstein's bride—hanging loose, or stuffed into berets, or piled inside crocheted beehives and other preposterous hats. And sooner or later—by seduction or coersion—every tourist gets braided.  

Another gag seems to be the silly resort names. HEDONISM is called II, even though there is no HEDONISM I. SANDALS and COUPLES are for couples only.  MINGLES is a singles disco - And so hey Mon, let’s have a cruise bar called HANDLES... a strip club called TINGLES...  a gambling joint called JINGLES...

Gladiator spectator sex! 

At “Hedo” in naughty Negril, the world’s one-and-only all-inclusive resort for the sexually gregarious (where anything goes—anytime, anywhere, with any number of partners, of any age, race and sexual orientation) I’d seen a woman in a mini-sundress sans culottes flashing her fluffy strawberry-blonde snatch to her dancing partner, inviting him to unzip and do it-right THERE! On the dance floor. Gladiator, spectator sex! 

What an entertaining place is Hedonism II. Anthropologists should come here to study what happens when the sexual etiquette and mores of many different countries collide. My friends and I had just come for an evening's taste of the place.  (Locals frequent the Hedo Disco because for only$50 a night you can drink and grab all you want. On our way to the disco, we strolled through the tropical gardens, past segregated beaches for “Nudes” and “Prudes,” past a paunchy naked man toddling to the hot tub...past a window showing an orgy in full swing.

I had no sooner set foot on the strobe-lit disco floor, than a skinny young Argentinian just off the boat zoomed up to my face. “Oh you are zo bee-ooteeful.  I am een lovve weeth you," he announced.  "You must come outside with me, right now, por favor pleeeeeze pronto"  he said, pulling my arm off. “Five minutes pleeeze. I am so eeen love.”

Ha! His pick-up lines for the Catholic girls in Córdoba were hilariously out of place here.

“You don’t have to pretend to love anybody at Hedonism II,” I shouted over the din. “It’s just about sex. Solamente. Got that?” 

No, he didn’t get it. He kept yanking on my arm and moaning  amore and boootifull   and I only wanted to dance. Dance!  Dance! And then the irony of it hit me --  what a stressful  place for a vacation was Hedonism II.  You had to fend off guys---and maybe girls--- who didn’t turn you on at all -maybe fifty a day who knows?  And then  you had to worry whether the guys who did  turn you on would even want to make it with you. Yeow!!!

Jamaica 's hustlers and vendors appear from out of nowhere, on foot and by bicycle, canoe, raft, and speedboat -- peddling aloe vera for your sunburn,  knives, car washes, shell jewelry and baubles, and Bob Marley’s face crudely carved in black coral. But no where will you find the competition and charm tactics more fierce than in the market in Negril.