Summers in Bridgeview (Guys hurt too)

Summers in Portmore were as you could imagine very humid but summer also meant a lot of other things like ; droves of females migrating to the scheme from country or the garrison to spend their holidays with the fam, the water war, the football, the cricket, hide and seek or hide and feel up lol. Every summer there was at least one female of the many who migrated to the scheme who left a mark. I remember this particular one that lived directly in front of me who was batteried almost every other day but didn’t seem to mind. Every man in the scheme got their time until she turned away one fellow for being too renk. Pissed off he went and informed her grand mother who beat her in front everybody and sent her away to a girls home only to return several years later reformed. Drama like this wasn’t anything new to Bridgeview as girls were beaten regularly for sexcapades when their parents found out. One of the more famous ones was when Paula, the girl ever guy in the scheme drooled over was caught on video doing the things and was labelled the Bluetooth express.

This blog post is about the story of one girl and one summer my former neighbor won’t forget anytime soon and his story goes as follows;
One summer night after some domino me and my neighbor were holding a reasoning under some white rum staring up at cars passing on the bridge when all of a sudden a girl walked in between us to go throw away some garbage. She didn’t even look at us and walked back inside his house. She had on a tight La Lakers jersey which her shape decorated. She was freakishly tall, light skinned, curvy and had really nice brown hair.

Me: “Dawg buss me pon u family nuh”

Chris: “Anuh my family enuh, my father rent the top part a the house to her and her family. Plus she older than you, my own this juvenile.”

From there on in he spent his summer days charming her and getting to know her. The three of us become real good friends and we went everywhere that summer. I never truly knew what bad mind was until then because I wanted her but was too young, so that was my first experience with the friend zone. Chris fell in love and would get jealous when she would hang with any of the other guys from the scheme as many of them had much more to offer than he did. As with all good things summer came to an end and her parents were evicted. Chris was understandably heartbroken at first however his love life was thrown a lifeline. He didn’t live with his father and only spent holidays and weekends in Bridgeview. His father told him it was okay if she came over on weekends when he was there which pleased him greatly. He would get to spend all his weekends with his love with no parents to stop him from putting in that work. Every Friday after school Chris would come to Bridgeview and she would do the same or she came on Saturdays.

Things were great and their relationship blossomed and He felt something for her that he had never experienced before and she experienced a love like no other.
He got to know this girl and Id like to think he knew her better than she knew herself. We all knew her but he did, not like most knew her. Because he knew more, he knew more than her sense of humor, he saw further than her appearance and the front she put up, he saw past those concealing smiles and forced laughter. He saw through it all and watched that girl he knew grow up. He knew and fell in love with a girl with big dreams, unshakable faith and she had a glimmer in her eyes that defined greatness. She had a realness in her walk that defied gravity and a sort of calmness about her spirit that gave him security.
He knew more than the drama surrounding her, he knew more than the exes misusing her and he knew more than the uninterested I don’t need anybody act. He knew more because he really knew her but I guess she was just growing up. He was there when tears raced down her face when she failed subjects in CXC, he saw her trust being betrayed and her spirit broken by friends and family. When he just met her she had fears of trying and change. He fought for her and he won her or so he thought. He knows the person she desired to be but not person she decided to be.

Everything seemed so perfect for the both of them but there was something off. Summer ended and the agreement was she could stay on weekends when he was there. However I noticed she would be there during the week when he wasn’t and sometimes she would even sleep over. Chris had 2 older brothers that lived there with his dad but because of the love they shared I had no thoughts of funny business going on so I just figured she stayed in one of the free rooms to get away from her family. This happened all the time for a year until the following summer and I never thought to mention this to Chris because I thought he was already aware.

The next summer came and expectations were high for all the childhood fun and sex with the summer girls. As for Chris it meant he could spend the entire summer with his love. His exams finished on the first Monday in June so he decided to go over the Wednesday rather than wait until the weekend. He didn’t tell anybody he was coming over because it wasn’t the norm to. That Wednesday night that he surely won’t ever forget was very chilly which was strange for summer. I was outside staring at the bridge watching cars pass and reasoning with friends when his mother dropped him off. He hailed us and went inside to put his bags down. On opening the door he was greeted by the scent of marijuana and the sounds of Welcome to JamRock, the soundtrack of FIFA 06 as his brothers were smoking and playing.
After greeting them and holding a small talk he went upstairs to put down his bags. He came back down to let his dad know he was there and come back outside to chill with us. He tried to push the door to enter his room but it was bolted from inside. He knocked because he figured it was a bit too early for him to be asleep and he was probably just bagging out his ganja to sell. See he would normally close the door when he was doing this incase police were to run in the house, he would have time to hide the stash and compose himself. When he was about to call out his dads name he heard a loud moan. The best choir didn’t hit a note as sweet as that moan. The moans continued and so he walked back to the living room to hang with his brothers. They were laughing and looking at him funny but being the youngest it was the norm for them to do that. After about 10 minutes and having playing one game of FIFA, his dad room door opened but it wasn’t his dad that appeared. A slim, brown and curvy female emerged from the dark room and she strolled out walking almost limp.  Immediately their eyes made contact and she stopped in the kitchen while he dropped the control.
It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be. It couldn’t be his love that was moaning in his father’s room.
Alas it was.
She turned back into the kitchen and went back into the room. His head started to hurt, his eyes were red and veins stood up in his neck. He was speechless, dumbfounded and enraged. This was sick, it made no sense as they were both virgins or so he thought. See she had told him she wasn’t ready for sex and so he never pressured her over the one year period of their relationship.  She was the love of his life whom he slept in the same bed with every weekend. He got up and pushed the door to come outside and he came outside cussing. I don’t think there was a bad word that he didn’t use that night as he chipped them one after the other.

Chris :
“Dawg u nah go believe this, me cyaa believe this, the gyal fuck me father dawg.”
But no one in the crew was really surprised apart from me, everyone else was older and had put two and two together. The only surprise was that it was his father and not one of his brothers. We had a deportee friend back then who would regularly floss the ends, he went for some bottles and we drank hard that night. That was the first time I saw a man cry over a female. He sat and looked at the bridge and just cried chugging the liqour. His face was painted all night with a screw as the tears ran down his face just as how the canal ran behind the houses in the scheme.
He was so drunk that night, he broke the chair he was sitting on and when he fell he just started rolling until he reached one of the speed bumps on the road and he just slumped over it. He was a mess and that night he had hit rock bottom. We had to lift him up and carry him to his room that night. When he woke up that morning she was on his bed and he immediately got agitated and cursed at her. He called her everything from whore to bitch and she began to cry. He wanted her to leave his room, he was disgusted as the images of her and his father proliferated in his mind.

Nickiesha:
“I didn’t mean to hurt you, I love you, you wouldn’t understand. My dad died when I was young. The guy that used to rent your house was my stepdad. He and my mother aren’t together any more but he still took care of me. My mother and your dad became friends when I started coming here on weekends and she pressured me to be with him. He gave me lunch money, bought me school supplies and groceries. Your dad didn’t know we were together only your brothers so it made sense. I love you but that wasn’t enough. I wished my situation was different but it isn’t and what we have will have to end I am with your dad now”
He grabbed her by her arm and pushed her out his room and slammed the door. The bang made his head hurt as he was still hungover from last night’s drinking. That was the worst summer in Bridgeview for him. While everybody had a summer girl, all he did was pretend to be happy and sulk at nights when alone. He had to watch the love of his life be with his father openly, sit and eat dinner around the same table and watch the same TV as her sometimes.
He made a pact from there on in that he would never love again but just have sex and move on and so did.  He migrated the following summer and the other day I got a call from Miami and one of the first things he said was
“when last u hear from dah germs deh” and I wasn’t sure who he was talking at first but then he said Nickiesha. He clearly hasn’t gotten over it to this day. He was so madly in love, I remember one time we were going to the mall and he was so caught up in her that a taxi man had stopped and asked for a call and he opened his phone and gave the taxi man who then drove off with it. LISTEN!!!!!!
The three of us were running behind the taxi from Edgewater all the way to bottom of Bridgeview until the taxi reached the round about and we finally gave up. None of that matters anymore. He got hurt and that started a cycle that saw many females being hurt along the way. Hurt people always end up hurting other people – Sterling.
Behind their rough and sometimes hoggish exterior guys do have feelings and get hurt just like females. Some guys are great at masking their hurt while others wear there hurt daily. Guys do hurt too and I learnt this because of summers in Bridgeview.

Names changed to protect identity of indviduals mentioned in this blog.