LICENTIOUS PHOENIX

Outside a bar near the Christiansted fort there was a commotion, large people wearing little clothing and a white police car flashing its blue lights, blocking the road; an unofficial instruction to turn left and head up the hill. Where the detour led was unknown. The women were waving their arms and shaking their heads; heaven only knew what had happened. Even the policemen milled around, slowly sweltering in the drenched, sticky night, as if they had no idea what the problem was, either.

I was afraid of the suburbs up the hills. Even the more respectable streets eventually became a Christiansted ghetto, more large women with even less clothing strutting in heels on the corners, whistling at cars and waggling their shiny, Lycra-clad, lumpy hips. There were chickens and kittens, bars and cafés everywhere and nasty white plastic chairs along the verandahs for patrons to sit and study the passing cars and hookers.

“A wet towel would be better, I'd have thought,” my mother said and checked that the passenger door was locked.

“I'm always scared we'll run out of gas,” I replied. “Or we'll break down and have to get out.”

In this part of town, I was scared that a lanky, inebriated local would stagger from the sidewalk into the road. If not that, a rusting, awful car would appear from an alleyway, run a stop sign and thrust its high beams into the path of the oncoming traffic. We were almost out of the ghetto and back onto the main street, almost at detour number two, when an emaciated man with wild dreadlocks, a balding moustache and no teeth walked in front of the car and, even after I stopped, collided with our bumper as though he expected to be hit anyway. A hooker appeared from Paubli's Bar and Grill and shouted at two men in Denver Broncos jerseys.

“Shit, this place is like the bleeding apocalypse,” I said. All the way home, we dodged people driving down the middle of the road and stumbling past the police station. A car had followed us since the end of the second detour, past where they were “renovating” Time Square. I was about to attempt a Monaco Grand Prix move to lose the rotting piece of crap that was crawling around town after us, but there were kids on bikes up ahead of us with no helmets and no reflector lights, pulling wheelies on and off the sidewalk. It was half past one in the morning.

My mother couldn't stand it. She lived there, sweaty and resentful, for almost a year, before she took herself, my father and her winter coats and leather gloves, back to the mainland, leaving these strange people, stickily, in the US Virgin Islands. Places like this, she said, were not meant for people like us. It was called “going troppo,” white Americans and Europeans meandering down to the eternal summer of the Caribbean colonies and losing their minds, the heat going to their heads and rum addling the parts of their brains the weather could not reach.

St. Croix , the largest and most decrepit of the Virgin Islands , bleeds the stuff, rum that is. That, and oil, finance the entire island, a towering, Jersey-esque Hess oil refinery ravaging the south coast, appearing like a skeletal city, especially at night.

America 's Paradise , they say, but it is easy to differ. It ain't no New York City , even though the town's red-light zone is called Time Square. The buildings are either dilapidated from long-past hurricanes, or house shops selling only Cruzan rum or native jewelry. Potholes in the sweltering roads are never repaired, and even the local Gaming Commission building's windows are broken, its state seemingly beyond salvage. The disrepair can be ignored: you become desensitized to chaos, the inaction, the fact that it takes twenty minutes to buy a stick of chewing gum at the infuriating grocery stores or that power-outages are as regular as newscasts.

- Swimwatch Team

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