beside worldwide nuclear proliferation, what scares the bejesus out of me these days is this not so funky feeling that I might be growing old grooveless. not the angela bassett/how stella got her groove back groove but my island groove.
this morning, my normally forgiving spinning class instructor stopped our session way into the quarter of the hour mark just to tell me, me, the island boy, this boy who grew up snoring to the cadence of the south china sea waves, that I was not into the rhythm, the palmy rhythm of her stationary biking class.
adding insult to this hard to pooh pooh injury, all she asked us to pedal along were classic island reggae tracks, not fancy mixed in some edgy south london studio bjork tracks, but can't go wrong downbeat bob marley and the wailers tracks.
you're gonna lively up yourself and don't be no drag. you lively up yourself, oh reggae is another bag.
since when did I become a drag, anyway? not that kind of drag, you dirty little bastards. I live in hip hop nation now and I am a walking, er, biking, beatless dog? fate worse than death.
it's not that I never had it. sure I had it. growing up, mama, who was the choir mistress in our little island church, was never into my voice, I could give you that. "if you could only shave that tremolo," she would tell me. but my rhythm was quite impeccable or she would not have entrusted me with the maracas.
but then I had to go to the city and of all the concrete jungles in the world, I had to end up in new all the noise in the world you cant hear yourself york.
'cause life, sweet life, must be somewhere to be found, yeah. instead of a concrete jungle where the livin' is hardest.
eking out an ethnic existence in a smothering white society, one of the very few convincing justifications I gave myself just to get me up on a cold morning and plod on, just plod on through the day, is that i have this special connection, this exclusive access to a channel, to this beat that only i, a dark skinned outsider, can hear and dance to in perfect timing. or so I thought.
there's a natural mystic blowing through the air. if you listen carefully now you will hear.
i used to take care of this reedy white boy patient who broke his left heel while training for an ironman competition. and all through his confinement in our ward, all he told me over and over, as if waiting for me to contradict him, was he would never recover his pace, his championship running rhythm. and all that I could falsely assure him was to tell him "it will come back to you when you're ready, when you are ready."
when the race gets hard to run, it means you just can't take the pace when it's time to have your fun.
after shower, I decided that I would have to enlist in another cardio class more suitable to my newly revealed out of tempo status. kwando class? nah, that still involved counting and music. how about do it alone in some dank corner of the gym stair master routine? sounds about the only option left for me.
on my way home, this suspiciously near empty bus I was riding in just whizzed through the traffic, not stopping at any of the unpeopled stops along the way. I missed the ping of the stop request and moments later the shriek of the bus pneumatic breaks. I felt so disoriented that I missed my stop by a good ten blocks.
as I walked on home, the fraying polyester handle of my gym bag kept on chafing against my leather jacketed shoulder making an indistinct screechy sound. it was only when I could see the damp red bricks of my building that I realized that the screech only came after my left foot overtook my right. right, left, screech. right, left, screech. right, left, screech.
feel it in the one drop and we'll still find time to rap…so feel this drum beat as it beats within.
right, left, screech. right, left, screech. right, left, screech.
i walked, no, jiggied, back to my apartment and all I could think of doing as soon as I am there was to call my spinning class instructor to tell her, "i am ready, i am ready."