Ah old Time Something
The Loss of Carnival (Part 2)
I did not know his name. I did not want to know his name. I thought about what my parents would think and felt silly for thinking about what my parents would think. I was no longer wearing the clothes I had left home in. I was now wearing a mini-skirt suit and platform sandals that would have not passed muster with mommy and daddy. And the events of the intervening hours had made me sweaty and hot. I was way in the back of my secondary school’s auditorium, sweating out my hairdo and throwing my waist back on…someone? It was too dark to tell. I wondered if I cared, I wondered if I was doing this right, if the practice sessions performed in front the mirror were paying dividends? If any of it mattered?
Shoulders and arms moved against me in the darkness buffeting me like a wave. The teenage boy’s hands were gripped tight to my waist as I flexed my hips, unsure if this feeling was meant to be this...vulgar? naughty? unbecoming? Whatever I was feeling felt good. The boy’s speed matched mine, perhaps he had practiced in front a mirror too. And as the music crested, his gyrations almost became something else; something dark, and carnal and sexual.
“God, don’t let my daddy find out that I in the back of the school gym behaving like a baddis!” I thought.
The music was so loud it reverberated through my slender body and I could already hear the high-pitched tinnitus commemorative of slight but permanent hearing loss. My heart raced with the thump of the beat, and with the tempo of my own sinfulness. The stranger behind me had appeared for just one song and now he was gone. A sort of cold, silly feeling of rejection washed over me as the chill of his absence alerted me to slow my dancing.
The exultant screams, that stretched-tape sound effect that indicated that the dee-jay was re-starting the tune from scratch and the confirmatory touts of the people in my vicinity told me this next song was a fan favorite. I had been too sheltered to form a dissenting opinion against the the dee-jays election and the crowd’s affirmation. I feigned exaltation, my cheers rose alongside the crowd’s while the scent of hormonal teenage sweat, weed and the occasional over-sweet waft of body splash from another girl, simultaneously overwhelmed and dulled my senses. It was dark and I liked it like that. Whenever I exited the hall, no one would know what I did, nor I what they did. It would be a perfect escape from my sin.
But surely, it was this, getting away with so many naughty things at the Carnival Jump Ups, Bazars and May Fairs in my coming of age years, that endeared me to my own culture. I still long for the rush I felt then, every time I hear a new Soca play.
