Black Passenger Yellow Cabs: Excerpts

MAKING OF A RICE KING

Back in 1989 my then girlfriend was reading Paul Theroux's 'My Secret History,' a novel about a man who engaged in unbridled sex with teenaged natives for a few years during his time as a peace corp volunteer in African villages.

"Oh my god! You should SO read this book," she'd scream. "You're so much like this guy!" What you are about to read is my own predacious history but it's no secret, because I wear my secrets like I do my skeletons: on my sleeves. Kathy knew of my childhood fantasies and the daydreams of unending sexual rampage which consumed my boyhood. At eight years old my memberette would stand at full attention at the sight of those beautiful bare breasted African women, who sometimes adorned the covers of National Geographic magazines. Most unfathomable to me was the calmness with which the men appeared to interact with them, as though the breasts were invisible. No one even sported a half woody and they seemed so capable of restraint from attacking those perfectly shaped mammaries twenty-four hours a day. It's not normal for eight year olds to harbor those thoughts, and indeed a normal eight-year old I was not, as my first sexual experience had been only a year earlier. Technically molestation, but not until initiating therapy was I made to interpret it as such. Such experiences were the norm in the East Kingston Dunkirk ghetto, and all my friends had been 'initiated' from their eyes were at knee level. This was simply breaking in the boy child, an encouraged implicit rite of passage into manhood, which in uber-homophobic Jamaica, at least proved that I wasn't gay.