Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

Still, it’s Jamaica and this place is kinda ace. Serge Gainsbourg, the ugly French dude who keeps making cheesy records and scoring hot chicks, has a story. So he comes to Jamaica because eez ere to do zee reggae and motherfuckers at the studio just laugh him off, right? Like who the bombocloth this skinny likkle frenchy think he is. Serge says but I am zee biggest pop zinger, they say we don’t fucking know you, the only bombocloth French song we know is “Je T’aime.” Serge says, “Je T’aime,” that iz me. Gainsbourg was a God in Kingston after that, square biz. So I’m at Studio One and ask one of the men here if he could get me a cup of coffee, black no cream, and he says, What? You hand sick? Go get it you bloodcloth self. Classic, man.

I’m supposed to be on Mick Jagger’s tail but nobody is going to call Black and Blue a misunderstood masterpiece, not in ten years, not in twenty, and I said so in print. Fuck him and Keef anyway and fuck Rolling Stone Random Notes gossip bullshit. I’m this close to getting the skinny on something big. “Armagideon Time,” square biz. The busiest, most vital music scene in the world is about to blow up and not on the charts. The Singer, he’s up to something and it’s not just the peace concert. It took putting in a few years uptown and downtown and some convincing to prove to people that I wasn’t some stupid white boy waiting for the limbo party for people to start talking to me. The fucking Kingston sissy at the front desk doesn’t even know who Don Drummond is, but he keeps telling me that everything I might need is in New Kingston.

There’s this too, Jamaicans and not just the ones working at the hotel, but brown and white men who are always drinking rum at the restaurant and who, when they see my camera, first ask if I’m from Life magazine, then tell me where not to go. Go where they go and you end up at the Liguanea Club where it’s fucking “Disco Duck” and boring rich bitches who’ve just finished tennis and want to ball. I tell them I’m bailing for the Turntable Club and they look at me in wonder, worse when I don’t bother asking for directions, because I know they wouldn’t know. I asked the concierge just a few hours ago, Where’s the jam session? He says and I quote and kid thee not, “Sir, why would you wanna go mingle wid them element of society?” I was this close to saying dude suck a dick already, it’s cool. But this story, it’s something.

I’m in the taxi heading to the hotel and the taxi driver asks me if I bet on horses. I’m not a betting man, but he is and who did he see at the tracks a couple weeks ago? The Singer. He was there with two guys, one of them calls himself Papa-Lo. I did some checking around on this Papa-Lo. Racketeering, extortion, five counts of murder, only one reaching trial, acquitted. Runs a shanty town called Copenhagen City. So here is the Singer, along with two hoods from a political party he’s supposed to not support and there they are chummy together like old school pals. The next few days, he’s seen hanging out with Shotta Sherrif, the godfather of the Eight Lanes, controlled by the other party, the other side. Two top goons in one week, two men who pretty much control the fighting halves of downtown Kingston. Maybe he’s just being a peacemaker. I mean, he’s just a singer. Thing is I’m catching the drift that nobody is ever just anything in Jamaica. Something’s cooking and I’m already smelling it. Did I mention there’s an election in two weeks?

And if white boys from New York are catching a whiff, then the trail is already cold. Coming on the same flight with me was that little asshole Mark Lansing, trying extra hard to not see me. No shit. Crappy filmmaker still using Daddy’s little bucks to make a movie is here in Jamaica to film the peace concert. He said the record label hired him. Maybe, but when a dim motherfucker like him suddenly shows up in Jamaica to film a concert despite no previous experience doing anything of this magnitude, my brain gets a case of the shits.

My taxi driver is just trying to win enough money so that he can fly out. He thinks that if the People’s National Party wins again, Jamaica might become the next communist republic. I don’t know about that, but I do know that just about everybody has eyes on the Singer, as if a lot of stuff is riding on what he does next. Poor brother probably just wants to release an album of love songs and call it a day. Maybe he feels it too — everybody is feeling it — that Kingston is on boil. Two nights in a row now, the concierge has slept behind the reception desk. He didn’t have to tell me, I could see it in the bags under his eyes. He’d probably say he was dedicated, but I’m betting he’s just too scared to go home when it gets late.

In May some guy named William Adler said on local TV that there were eleven CIA operatives working here in the U.S. Embassy. By June seven had left the country. Come on. Meanwhile, the Singer, never one to pull punches, sings Rasta don’t work for no CIA. In Jamaica 2 + 2 = 5, but now it’s adding up to 7. And all these loose strands knotting around the Singer like a noose. You should have seen his house today, security like Fort Knox, nobody being let in or out. Not the police guarding him either, just a posse of goons I found out are called the Echo Squad. Everybody is squad, posse or guard lately. Some poor chick was waiting out there all day, probably claiming she had his kid or something. Does Lansing have a way in? He said he was filming the concert for the label, he must be doing some behind-the-scenes shit. The only problem is to get any info would mean actually being nice to the fucker, and one can’t have that.

I’m trying to not seem so hungry. Twenty-seven years old and six years out of college my mother keeps asking when I’m going to stop being a pinko on the hustle and get a real job. I’m impressed that she’s heard of pinkos but I think she got “on the hustle” from my little sister. She also thinks I need the love of a good woman, preferably not black. Maybe she’s looking at me and smelling wannabe. I think I’m trying to convince myself that I’m not one of those white boys drifting around trying to find something to belong to, something to fucking mean something because after Nixon and Ford and the Pentagon papers and fucking Carpenters and Tony Orlando and Dawn there’s nothing to believe in anymore, God knows not rock and roll. Rolling into West Kingston, the rudies left me alone because they knew I had nothing to lose. Maybe I’m just a stupid kid bitching about the world. I think I got problems but I ain’t got no problems.

The first time I came to Jamaica we flew into Montego Bay and drove to Negril, me and a girl whose dad was ex-army. I loved that she had no idea who The Who were, but listened to The Velvet Underground because she grew up with German kids on the army base. After a few days, it wasn’t as if I felt I belonged, nothing as cheesy as that, but I did get the feeling, this sensation or maybe it was just a belief that said, You can stop running now. No, that did not make me want to live here. But I remember waking up early one morning, right at the point where the temperature finally dips, and saying, What is your story? Maybe I meant the country, or maybe I meant me.

I’m being obvious. I’m better thinking about what’s ticking in this country, right about to boom.

The general election is in two weeks. The CIA is squatting on the city, its lumpy ass leaving the sweat print of the Cold War. The magazine is expecting nothing much from me but some paragraph on whatever the Stones are recording, complete with a stupid pic of Mick or Keef with headphones half on with a Jamaican in the shot for some color. But fuck that. What kind of game is Mark Lansing running? Cocksucker isn’t smart enough to pull a total scam all by himself. I should head back to Marley’s house tomorrow. I mean, I had an appointment. Like that means anything in Jamaica. Who is this William Adler anyway?