The first night we were at Tryall Golf Resort outside Montego Bay it rained. It rained the following afternoon, evening, and night, as well. God did it rain! Lightning, thunder, howling wind, and rain beating so hard on the flimsy roof of our villa that we thought the place would come down at any minute. But it didn’t. All fourteen of us gathered in the common area of one of the villas and just partied. We played games, played music, talked, and read. My buddy and I played the World Championship of Cribbage, and laughed at the size of our point debts in dollars Jamaican. And we drank – $5 cases of Red Stripe, $3 bottles of rum.
Two mornings later, when the storm had finally passed, I got up and wandered out onto the pool deck, which shared one wall with the ocean, and one with the resort’s “public” beach, I noticed that the resort had hired several local men to clear all the junk off the beach. The storm had washed all sorts of stuff down the mountains and littered the beach and our ocean frontage with trees and branches and other debris. One of the men noticed me watching, and approached me.
“You want to buy a nice piece of hashish?”, he asked me, and held out a lump of what may or may not have been hash.
“No. No thank you”.
“Well, listen mon – I’m hungry. Could you give me $20 to buy food for my family at the commissary?”
I knew if he was going to shop at the resort commissary he wasn’t talking about $20 Jamaican. “No, I don’t have it.” And I didn’t – we’d spent up all our cash on the the trip to Dun’s River Falls and stopping at the jerk shack and at the commissary afterwards. The commissary was now completely out of Red Stripe, thanks to our two villas.
I saw the look in his eyes. “But I’ll tell you what. I’m going to the resort money exchange later. I’ll give you some money when I come back.”
“Okay, mon, I look for you.”
I was sure he would. I was uneasy, and didn’t know what to say next. So I faked it.
“Oh. By the way … what do you call these things here?” The beach was littered with dark reddish-chocolate brown seeds, about the size and shape of a heart-shaped pocket watch, and I found them intriguing.
“Those called ko-kool (sp?). People in the mountains drop them in they water barrels to keep the water cool.”
I thanked him for the enlightenment, and he went back to work.
Now what? Twenty dollars? Unthinkable. I never gave that much to someone on the street at home. Even $5 was a lot, what with getting hit up so constantly. But if he really was hungry, and I didn’t doubt it, after what I had seen of Jamaica so far, then much less than $20 wasn’t really going to get him much at the commissary. Should I just avoid the beach until it was cleaned up and he was gone? Or what? I thought about it all morning.
After I’d gone to the money exchange, and cashed a couple travellers checks, I wandered back toward the beach, looking nonchalant, thinking maybe he wouldn’t notice, or maybe forgot, or maybe … something. No such luck. After a few minutes he noticed me, and came close to the pool deck.
He surprised me. “Listen, mon, let’s be fair about this”, he said, and started emptying his pockets. “I sell you all these.” He had, during the couple of hours I was gone, apparently collected all the ko-kool seeds on the beach, because he had dozens of them stashed in his pockets. “And what I tell you earlier about these – that’s not exactly right. You have the water barrels where you live?”
Huh? I must have looked stupid. Stupider than usual.
“Water barrels, you know? An’ sometimes you don’t know if the water good or not? Well, these ko-kool – you drop one in the water barrel, and if the water good the seed sinks. Water bad, and it floats. You take these home with you, and you don’t have to worry about the bad water.”
Uh … okay. “Look, man. I don’t have any American money to give you, but here’s $100 Jamaican, okay?” I’d decided earlier that giving him the equivalent of $17 would be a comfortable amount for me to give away, not quite that unthinkable $20, but at the same time still enough to make a difference up at the commissary – at least for one night. I handed it to him quickly, and our transaction was done.
He looked at it, and didn’t say anything for a moment. Then “Okay mon. Okay”. He walked off.
I watched him work for awhile, him and the others, hauling heavy logs off the beach by hand. I thought a lot about that man’s act of pride, picking up all the ko-kool seeds, to have something to sell instead of just taking a handout. I took my $17 worth of ko-kool seeds up on the patio.
From what we could gather from the people who worked at the resort, and from Winston, our driver, and Austin, our guide, the popularity of the various villas at Tryall depended in great part upon the abilities of the cooks on their staffs. The two ladies who cooked for our villas were supposedly two of the best, and we believed it. We had been alternating back and forth between villas for dinner each evening, and it seemed as though these two ladies were competing, as we were treated to feast after feast of Jamaican cuisine, each night better than the last. The night of the ko-kool seeds we ate lobster, and fresh red snapper, about five delicious vegetable dishes, fresh bread, Blue Mountain coffee, and the sweetest, smoothest rum raisin ice cream you ever tasted. We were stuffed, and there was plenty of food left on the table. No hunger in our villas.
When we left the following Saturday, I selected two of the smoothest, most perfect, most delicious-looking chocolate brown ko- kool seeds and put them in my luggage to take home as souvenirs. I left the rest in a little pile by the swimming pool.
Note: Probably “sea hearts”.
Author/Copyright: Tiger, of tigerwhip.com fame Date Written: 07/13/1994