So.. first of all. I love Lionel Camacho. Let the literature begin!

An irrational flicker of a thought tapped her on the shoulder. It made her raise up from the sticky armrest and look at Collin.

          “You’re not gon get shot?”

          He mean-eyed a twiggish mummy of a crack whore who’d had the audacity to cross the pot-holed street while the light was green. He accelerated and smiled, not looking at her as he replied.

          “Everyone I deal with deals in love, Mash. Dealin in love! Round da corna posin, betcha life it’s somtin dey sellin. If you see dem broken, you can get it all for nuttin!” He sang and sounded just like Sparrow. He knew it, too.

She wished he’d just watch the road. She loved old-school Calypso, but he’d had Jean and Dinah mixed so that angry West Indians yelled over the tracks. Collin played it loud so that the bass made the windows buzz.

His arm rested on the window, the sun shining on massala-tinted skin. He needed a hair cut.

          Her back hurt and she rested her head on a fist. Pictures of her cousin’s brains splattered against the passenger window made her sink lower. He rolled down the driver-side window and sang loudly, smug.

          Mashramani was the apotheosis of party. In this country Mardis Gras came close. But not close enough. There was no soca, calypso, reggae, chutney music. There was nothing in the air being jerked, curried, or stewed. It was American blacks and some stupid white kids getting drunk and carrying on like they were getting some culture.

          Mash was Guyana. Mash was something. It was like naming your child Christmas, or New Year’s.

          In this country, it didn’t matter. No one knew Mash. No one knew Guyana.

          The CD was over. The radio had cut on. Something by Led Zeppelin was playing. There was a stairway to heaven, buzzing.

Peeling her cheek from the vinyl car seat, Mash sat up slowly, massaging the pain from her side.

          She had to piss. Her kidney felt like something heavy and hot in her side, like flaming lard.

          “Me na tell him say duh!” It amazing how many degrees of patois there were. More amazing that the trained ear could hear it. Collin was currently at the far end of the broken English spectrum.

          Mash heard the two way beep, followed by an angry female voice. She sounded Jamaican. And sluttish. But Mash had to pee and take her pills, so she stuck her head out the window, leaned in and proclaimed her need to relieve herself in Collin’s ear.

          She shooed a cat out of the yard and gingerly stepped over some waist high weeds. Collin’d been right. No one could exactly see you back here. But was privacy worth risking a tetanus/rabies/ebola infection?

It hurt bad.

          The pills weren’t working, it seemed. But then, with antibiotics and kidney infections, it always seemed that way.

Collin was sitting on the El Dorado’s hood when she’d made her way from behind the abandoned house. A gray Cadillac pulled up and opened fire as he raised his hand in greeting.

She’d been wrong. They’d splattered against the windshield.

Mash was short. She was tiny, with crucial padding that came early. She was precocious and her body followed accordingly, lidding bright black eyes with secrets and sex.

Sharp Indian features were carved into dark brown skin. Her hair was long, black, shiny, wild.

She was learned. She’d read The Inferno when she was twelve. She was going Ivy League.

The ghetto was an intellectual cesspool of reinvented, commercialized, sexual pulp fiction. The lazy stewed in their own juices, basking in Bacardi 151 and Paul’s.

They blamed the system. The educated Communists, the Amnesty Internationals, the neo-Socialists and Anti-War ralliers blamed the system. Mash blamed the people. And their stupidity. The ghetto was below her.

She was going Ivy League.

She’d fucked that police officer. Had to have. Couldn’t remember how much she’d charged then, but she was sure of it. He ignored Cousin Picket, her mother, and the fragile, two year old girl child nodding off on her lap.

It all made her so jaded. To run into clients during the course of the day. He questioned her laughingly, as if her services were of any relevance to her cousin’s head being blown away four hours ago.

“Did you see the gunman?”

“I told you, I was behind the house.”

“What were you doing there?” He smiled as he asked this, as if she was fulfilling the Pope’s secret school girl fantasy behind a burnt out crack house. While peeing.

“I was relieving myself… Sir.”

Cousin Picket took over. He’d just got to the States a month ago. A world away from Guyana, but he knew inept police. It was a plague in the country.

“Look, Mister, da girl done been true a lot today. You talkin like she did da ting. She en do it, man. She scared… Da chile scared, man.” He watched the words fall on ears that chose to assume ignorance.

“What did he say?” He stared at Mash, at her bare arms, smiling at her over the baby’s head. You see what I deal with everyday? he seemed to ask.

Her mother watched all movement from the corners of her eyes, blinking unnaturally, toying with a large jumble of key chains. She’s collected them every city she’d been to. She had one from Pennachitkee, Mississippi. It was a miniature railroad spike. No help there.

“I didn’t shoot him. I been here for two hours. Go find the people who did.” She rose from the hard chair and readjusted the baby, who stirred and sighed in her sleep. She walked home. The apartment was around the corner. She left the family to deal with the loose ends.

In her room she rocked Collin’s child to sleep, kissing the curls at the top of her head.

To go to Mash was to drink rum and dance into the night. It was celebrating liberty, independence, the pride of the Caribbean.

It meant to dance. It meant whining, making love to some faceless brown stranger in the midst of other faceless, brown writhing bodies.

It meant lifting your face towards the stars, and inhaling, drunkenly.

Forgetting.

She was in Narnia. Her face was buried in Aslan’s mane. He licked her face and the world wasn’t as dark.

She was through the wardrobe, every night in a nameless hotel room with a nameless politician, stockbroker, professor.

She reigned over Cair Paravel.

They’d call her Mashramani the Honorable and at the end of the night she’d chase the stag back into the wardrobe, and tumble out into a high priced room prized for the private elevator and miniature bottles of cognac and rum.

And she’d want to forget.

Her roommate called two days after graduation. She introduced herself as Terri. With an “I.”

“Guyana. That’s like in Africa, right? It’s like near the Ivory Coast, right? Mom says my ancestors come from there. La Cote d’Ivoire, I mean. So, yeah. I don’t really look ‘African,’ though. I’m like a mutt, you know? Irish, Hawaiian, Seminole. It’s really weird.”

“It’s in South America.”

“Oh, so you’re like, Spanish, then? Yeah, I’m part Puerto Rican.”

Was this what Columbia would be like? Comparing blackness?

“I’m black. And Indian… Look, I got to get to work, Terri with an ‘I.’ Talk to you later.”

“Oh my god, do you work at Old Navy? It’s like all of my best friends work at Old Navy, it’s soo weird! It’s like… karma or something.”

“No, I bed rich Caucasian men for a large sum of money. Then blackmail them with pictures.”

But she’d really said, “I work at the Y. Lifeguard.”

Terri squealed her enthusiasm over giving back to the community and children and bathing suits and water. Mash slowly pulled the phone away from her ear, stared at the talking ear piece, and hung up.

Did she say… karma?

She lay in bed and wished her life was as simple as after school job coincidences and cars for graduation gifts.

Cousin Picket’s papers weren’t coming through. He married some Portuguese woman. The money for her new refrigerator had gone towards the service.      

She didn’t mind being called a dirty American girl so much when she watched all the shit Picket had to trudge through to become settled in this place. Not just Picket. The Mexicans who worked the Italian Ice carts in the summers. The Ghanans who owned the dollar store.

It did hurt, though. American girls were untouchable, classless, base creatures with no morals, tact, or religion. Everything she fell short of (cooking, cleaning, Scripture) was attributed to her American friends.

Even the filmy materials she donned at night that Auntie Delilah found hanging up to dry in the back.

The bitch was nosy.

“En fittin fa no girl child. Who she wearin dese tings for, nuh?”

Mash softly closed her bedroom door and turned up her CD player.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

As The Beatles played, she opened up The Prince and His Boy and read.

Guyana was another world. One of unrest more advanced, more profound than any of the bipartisan bs of the States. There was rape, mutilation, wannabe coups, assassinations.

For the all the simplicity and acceptance of village life, of a community of God fearing, rum loving Indo-Afro-Amerindians, there was ill-ratioed hate and fear.

But in Guyana there was paradise, too. Coconut trees, mango, tamarind balls, roti.

Sugar cane and star dotted skies.

Mash had never been, but as she lay on her back some nights, she went. She pretended she belonged there.

Not in a Newark.

She’d a talent for projecting herself. For being someone, somewhere else. It came in handy in her line of business. She was West Indian, modest, stank, innocent, nasty, classy, knowing, black, house nigger. She was what they wanted. It was too easy on the surface.

Here, as she lay on the extra long bed, staring at the ceiling, she pretended she didn’t make it to Columbia. That she was still pinned

underneath a council member as he whispered promises into a perfectly formed, brown ear.

She pretended she didn’t hate the bums that lined her block. That she wasn’t always a paycheck, a john or two away from them.

She pretended her SAT scores made her more human. Her Guyanese-ness made her less African-American, less a part of the shit she forced herself to rise above.

She lay in bed with new extra long sheets, across from her a new, bubbly, upper-middle class roommate, whose father she probably gave oral to.  And pretended.