The Hen Next Door: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea - a Caribbean 'Gayboy's ' Story

By Peter Persad

A ribald, raucous, shameless, and touching account of one Caribbean gay boys fight for recognition, acceptance, and love over five decades, several cultures, and several continents! The hen next door announces to his parents he wants a sex change at fifteen, and its all downhill after that, or flying free, depending on your point of view, gay or Christian. Or both, as this hilariously shameless, educated, and unapologetic character who thinks he is gay chats with his neighbor about a lifetime of sexual escapades and tears we wonder if indeed she didnt know that some people, even her mother, could not like her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jul 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504925327

Peter Persad

Peter Persad feels very strongly about the dilemmas Caribbean gay and transgender persons who are also religious find themselves facing. He is ready to speak out about the journeys of men and boys who have never been able to hide, who never had the choice to be seen as anything other than laughably girlish to disgustingly deviant, both within the gay world and in a publicly homophobic culture that, paradoxically, isn’t as homophobic as leaders would like us to believe. He believes that carving or accepting an identity is a struggle that begins in their homes and continues relentlessly throughout adult life and never ends. He is an essentially private and very Caribbean person, even after more than ten years living abroad in Canada and the United Kingdom, and has filled many roles, from childhood calypso singer, actor, and scholar to art teacher, horticultural nursery supervisor and landscaper, fabric and fashion designer, artist, science teacher and vice principal, gardener, and godfather and thinks he’s had enough after a lifetime of silence. This is his first novel.

Book preview

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© 2015 Peter Persad. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  07/28/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-2531-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-2532-7 (e)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are characterizations of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, locations, or events is entirely coincidental.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

About the Author

About the Book

Preview

Keynote

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter 1 The Poet

Chapter 2 His Father

Chapter 3 Phoenix Regina!

Chapter 4 Sinking in Jell-O

Chapter 5 The Matriarchs

Chapter 6 His Grandmother

Chapter 7 Church Queen

Chapter 8 The Godfather and the Gardener

Chapter 9 Life Calling Him Across the Sea

Chapter 10 Down in a Blaze of Glory! Who Said Hens Can’t Fly?!

Chapter 11 God Saved the Queen!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Persad feels very strongly about the dilemmas Caribbean gay and transgender persons who are also religious find themselves facing. He is ready to speak out about the journeys of men and boys who have never been able to hide, who never had the choice to be seen as anything other than laughably girlish to disgustingly deviant both within the gay world and in a publicly homophobic culture which, paradoxically, isn’t as homophobic as leaders would like us to believe. He believes that carving or accepting an identity is a struggle that begins in their homes and continues relentlessly throughout adult life, and never ends. He is an essentially private and very Caribbean person, even after more than ten years living abroad in Canada and the United Kingdom and has filled many roles, from childhood calypso singer, actor and scholar, to Art teacher, horticultural nursery supervisor and landscaper, fabric and fashion designer, artist, Science teacher and vice principal, gardener and godfather, and thinks he’s had enough after a lifetime of silence. This is his first novel.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A ribald, raucous, shameless and touching account of one Caribbean gay boy’s fight for recognition, acceptance and love over five decades, several cultures and continents! The hen next door announces to his parents he wants a sex change at 15 and it’s all downhill after that, or flying free, depending on your point of view, gay or Christian. Or both, as this hilariously shameless, educated and unapologetic character who thinks he is gay chats with his neighbour about a lifetime of sexual escapades and tears we wonder if indeed ‘She didn’t know that some people, even her mother, could not like her’.

PREVIEW

‘He had asked God to deliver him from lusting after strangers and looking at every man, he hadn’t asked to be neutered or expect that he’d never find love again, that he’d never go to sleep in the arms of a man he loved and who loved him except those times he could count on the fingers of one hand. No one could convince him that that was a sin or an abomination when it happened, no one. He started to become a rebel against the status quo but had to be circumspect, watch his back, as he was a teacher working in a homophobic society with enemy staff all around in an island that refused to sink into the sea where it belonged……………..’

KEYNOTE

A ‘Faggots’ from the Caribbean, or transgender tears and tantrums? You decide. The Hen Next Door charges through life, a boy and a girl simultaneously!

DEDICATION

With heartfelt Gratitude for Love and Support, this book is dedicated to my grandparents, my mother and father, my sisters, and my beloved Benny Boy.

PROLOGUE

There was a hen who lived next door to me……………………

In my Caribbean country that’s a sissy, a ‘girl boy’, a ‘little faggot’, synonymous with the Jamaican ‘Batty boy’, or the Gay ‘bottom boy’! Or a ‘gay boy’, even a ‘Babyboy’! You can refer to one as a ‘little hen’, a ‘big hen’, an ‘old hen’, an ‘auntie man’, ‘macomai man’ or a ‘homo faggot queen’, as they grow older, all pejorative and commonly used labels here. Every family has a hen or gay boy relative, school friend, neighbour, designer or hairstylist hen they’ve gotten along perfectly well with all their lives. They very often make us want to laugh, defend them from bullies, or be downright nasty if we are public or religious figures, and their mothers blush with shame.

A ‘henrietta’ would be a young hen, or one who isn’t sexually active, also sometimes called a ‘Church queen’ where a strict upbringing or religion has saved him from a life of sexual ‘sinfulness’ and he is celibate, by fear, circumstance or choice. A good and godly hen is acceptable as long as he goes to church, knows his place, and can decorate for weddings and engagement parties, or do flowerboxes and curtains.

A hen’s different from a ‘bullerman’, the southern Caribbean pejorative for a gay, bisexual, or just plain drunk and very cheap man, who is always the man, the ‘top man’, never or nearly never ever the one who’s sodomised, but enjoys the favours hens freely supply.

‘You’re such a hen!’, ‘She so REAL!’, ‘He’s such a girl…!’, ‘Lord, you is such a woman!’ and ‘me eh want dat queen around me!’ are statements of embarrassment and denigration uttered by our gays about the hens in their circle (usually not for long) especially when hunting for men in fertile ground, like in bars, pubs, parties and Carnival fetes, restaurants and resorts, on the beaches, wedding farewells(stag nights), gyms, taxis or just about anywhere really, where they have to act straight in order to hook up with a gay tolerant or ‘drunk’ butch man ‘playing dead to catch corbeaux (carrion crows) live’! Or each other. There are many places you can’t take a hen.

Most times a hen will act as a go between for young lovers, delivering love letters and messages and suchlike. He goes shopping with his sister or girl best friends so that he can dress them and help them look hot. But a hen must know his place and when to be quiet. In certain social settings he must not move around too much or draw attention to himself or even speak, but, ever helpful, finds himself bringing drinks, serving snacks, and being useful quietly and on the side. If it’s a man lime (boys night out) he might get ‘a little something’ later, after hours and hours of waiting like a faithful little dog, when the men are good and drunk, or acting so, and one can claim next morning not to remember a thing. In other social gatherings he may be the life of the party, when among his own or in a clutch, clandestinely making contacts with men for later.

He can’t go everywhere and hope not to be found beaten up, battered, gang raped or dead days later and expect anybody to care. In this beautiful island no policeman or detective is ever going to ‘het up’ (exert) themselves in no hot sun to follow a lead or suspect on a murdered or battered hen or bullerman case. They always deserve what they get is the prevailing attitude in the protective services, ‘because God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah for that’ and then everybody is quoting the Bible and ‘God made Adam and Eve’ and ‘the Bible says……’, even those who haven’t seen the inside of a church since the last funeral and can’t find a Bible or New testament anywhere in their house. They’ve heard or read in the papers religious leaders or homophobe politicians saying so, or listened to Jamaican dub. Men don’t have hens for friends once they’ve finished school unless they are bullermen.

In this country in the blue Caribbean Sea hens are fair game. They are not safe unless they are rich, live abroad, or are in the protecting bosom of a church, (or temple or mosque), subsumed into the fashion and entertainment industries, are good hair stylists or fashion designers, and live in wealthy enclaves. They’re acceptable as long as they ‘behave themselves’ and ‘don’t bring none of their shit ‘round me!’, they don’t bring a man home or sneak one in downstairs at night, and as long as IT is never acknowledged or mentioned, and they are willing to always be helpful and useful for half their price, exorbitant rents, and do things for free. Hens know this.

In ‘advanced’ societies hens would more correctly be known as transgendered persons and might legitimately seek gender realignment or not, and be afforded every equal right and consideration as members of the LGBT sector. Here on these islands everybody just calls them gay boys, ‘that hennish one’, ‘de gyurly gyurly one’, and ‘de one that does talk like a woman…’. People here still believe hens need a good ‘bullpistle’ (a whipping of their lives) or God to straighten them out.

So……!

CHAPTER 1

THE POET

It isn’t me, for sure, the hen next-door…….!

‘She’ was always watering the plants. That’s how you know a hen! His grandmother gave him a little flowerbox at the side of the house when he must have been six years old, where his ‘Song of India’ pleomele species thrives rampant today, eight feet high. Every time he waters this plant he remembers the tree-like one he once saw in town in his ‘hoeing heydays’ when he was young and beautiful - well he thought he was, and at least one or two others, okay, several others willing to say anything to get some free loving - well he thinks his ‘Song of India’ is almost as wonderful as that one.

But his doesn’t have the trunk, the thickness that made that one fabulous. Fabulous, everything had to be fabulous, and he’ll be darned if his garden isn’t fabulous one day. It has had some fabulous moments. There were times when people slowed and stared, in admiration one assumed, but not always, at something in his garden that was really a fabulous too much, maybe even at him.

Once there was the cascading pink Congea at the front gate that no one else had, there was the whimsical whitewashed rockery and birdbath another time, the guava tree with the treehouse and children in pyjamas and blankets tumbling out one night, the rose garden, his rose garden down the side of the house which some people remember even today, the roses along the front fence, the hybrid crotons, the Cereus cactus taller than the house that bore hundreds and hundreds of fragrant white flowers that opened at night and attracted thousands of insects, the orchids, oh the orchids that shot out and cascaded in sprays and sprays of dendrobium and phalanaeopsis and oncidium blooms all over his front porch, and his fishpond. And his Julie mango trees, his lime tree that never stopped bearing, that rare white mussaeanda, and that hibiscus he planted outside the fence that used to be covered with fuchsia pink flowers like no one had ever seen till his uncle walked up the hill one day when he was out there carefully pruning and fertilising it just to say to him that in all his life - and he was now retired and an expert grower himself - just to tell him that in all his life he had never seen a hibiscus shrub that beautiful and healthy and so covered with flowers anywhere in the island.

It was never easy for the hen though. Where others boasted how they had a green thumb and everything just grew and flourished with them, and he would see fabulous plants growing neglected in other people’s gardens everywhere, the hen fought tooth and nail all the time for his plants and later his garden to look like anything. Something was always attacking his plants, they needed manure and fertilizer and sprays and fungicides and careful pruning and constant watering as his house was on a hill, not in a valley, and then the snails and slugs came, the dry season, the tiredness when he began teaching and he just gave it up for weeks…..Then the dogs. And the money for the gardener. It was always too much.

But neighbours could always be assured of some entertainment when the little hen, now the big hen, was in the garden fighting or chasing the dogs, screaming and cussing at fruit or plant thieves at all hours of the day or night, or battling with branches, pests, and her drug addict gardener. The hen, now in advanced middle age, was convinced that ‘Maljo’ or the ‘bad eye’ was real, as she'd witnessed the demise of many glorious specimens over the years, gone down never to recover after someone watched them or commented on them, intentionally or not. It’s a wonder at all she’s still there. Oops! His garden is still there.

This evening she was a bit fed-up she told me. The two huge hybrid crotons she’s struggled with all through the dry season and watered and fertilised and sprayed diligently, and which had just been covered with a fabulous flush of large healthy new leaves, beginning to look like they should, the most fabulous specimens in anyone’s garden the town had ever seen, no sooner than inexplicably - or explicably if you count that both his favourite successful sister and her husband(who abhors rampant growth) - both had ‘watched’ her crotons admiringly. Now all the beautiful new leaves, all, were falling off and the fucking trees were looking a starving beat up mess. God bless them, she thought, they can’t help it (not the crotons!). A whole season’s work falling in a litter of healthy leaves, and the hen must start all over again, spraying and fertilising and watering in, or chop them the fuck down(prune back vigorously that is). But he can’t do that. One was planted in the ‘70’s, the other when he started teaching, they’ve survived much, and his sister did everything to keep them going while he was abroad for ten years…..He can’t just chop them down now, the fucking crotons. You can’t just get rid of fabulous things or things that could be or have been fabulous and wonderful he believes. Sigh!

The stupid drug addict labourer who does odd jobs for him wants him to cut down the Solanum in the back which has grown to seven feet tall and ten feet wide, but he won’t because his brother brought that home from his office when the company went bust in ‘88 and the hen had always wanted that plant which was too expensive for him to buy. He was pooor poor poor at the time, ‘self-employed’, the euphemism for ‘ketching his ass’ designing and sewing and painting fabrics, and his brother brought it home and he ‘de planted it there, just so in that spot in 1988. His brother migrated and has never come back, but every time he’s watering his garden he remembers his brother brought him that plant. And there’s the huge, much too huge, Flaming fucking Poinciana tree that’s pushed down the bloody wall and has no business to be there that his godson’s father planted. No one can get him to cut it down. It’s the only Flamboyant tree in the country he thinks with double fabulous red flowers, that continues flowering and is covered with blooms into the first week of September when school has reopened. He remembers ironing his trousers and shirt for the first day in September with the red flowers outside the louvres and thinking What the Hell, mine is the only Flamboyant that’s flowering right into September, all through the rainy season, crazy like its owner, ‘one of a fucking kind……! Won’t give up!’

Fabulous and rampant. Rampant and fabulous! Who remembers? Well the hen remembers. The hen will never forget when beauty triumphed. Others wish he would, and never mention or talk about those things. Or the constant battle. There were roses, Patsa and Picture roses, and Peace, and Queen Elizabeth and Princess Elizabeth and American Beauty, Tiffany, Tropicana, Cinderella and Whisky Mac all down the side of the garden once. Now not a single rose grows there or anywhere in the garden for that matter. Fabulous, rampant, wonderful, gone! There aint no rose petals blushing the hen’s cheeks now either. No roses there. The hen next door was once beautiful and she once was rather exciting, has lived through many exciting times. Maybe she was too exciting. Maybe excitement is only good for memories. Maybe excitement is rolling into and exploding into people’s lives as they crash into yours. Lots of exciting crashes and rolling around and explosions large and small happened in the hen’s life. She told me of some.

She always wanted to be noticed and be heard. I’ve seen the little hen next door put on a large kind of cowboy hat, and dressed in some bright, really brightly coloured jersey, brand new, and whatever else, I didn’t want to look too long, skipping up and down their front path, singing, mumbling script to herself, hoping to attract attention from passers-by or the neighbours, or me! That was when she was young. Once she tucked yards and yards of coloured crepe party streamers from her birthday party the day before into the back of her shorts and ran skipping all over the yard and lawns, wishing to be some sort of fairy or bird of Paradise or ballet dancer, then got on the seesaw to go up and down so the streamers could fly a little…… She remembers a particular day way back when when she was running up and down her aunt’s front lawn playing ‘catch’ with her brothers and sisters and she actually thought it would be much more exciting if there was screaming while being chased. Thus literally began, on that day, the hallmark screaming and shouting of playtime in that family. The entire neighbourhood became familiar with it. Led by the hen, they always put on a great show of children wildly at play, like in a movie.

She felt the eyes of the public, and relatives, were always on her and smiling endearingly at her imagination and the scripts for their games. It never occurred to her, as the years passed by, that any of it could cause embarrassment, or that anyone would ever be fed up with their noise, or hers in particular. She didn’t know that some people, even her mother, could not like her. She was very bright in school, sang at concerts and even won prizes at children’s talent shows, performed in plays, sang at birthday parties, and was ‘very helpful’, and they were rich and always well-dressed. Decades later she chuckled bitterly to a friend as they both cringed in shame over the phone, across the Atlantic, when they discussed how that phrase was a code phrase among ladies to describe other people’s gay sons. Hens were always ‘helpful’. Hens loved gardening and plants. Hens relished making decorations for Christmas, helping choose curtains, carrying the basket in the market for their mothers, sifting and picking rice, scrubbing and cleaning and painting wherever they could, making everything spotless and pretty when relatives or guests were coming. Arranging flowers! He told how he was beaten badly for rearranging furniture and ornaments once and couldn’t understand why his father and grandfather, his mother and grandmother were so angry. He laughed forty years later to his friend that it must have been a horrible thing to deal with then, a hen in the family, a visible family, and a bright and visible boy at that. He was not quiet!

Another friend told him once that no one could hide him, he could never blend in. He knew he would never blend in. He found nice words for it as he grew older. At the opening of an Art exhibition to which his father was invited - his father had started buying paintings - his father said a painting had to be ‘original’, it had to stand out, be different. The hen took it to heart and soul in everything she did. It was a happy night with him and his father in their expensively tailored suits, the oil paint smells, minced beef pies and other dainties, and his father in a good mood.

And little hens couldn’t help themselves when it came to weddings and wedding dresses, they were uncontrollable, unstoppable, their heartbeats raced, it brought out everything utterly and totally feminine in them! The little hen told me of that Christmas in the early ‘60’s when his cousin got the Barbie doll, they were the newest thing that Christmas, and it was the Barbie BRIDE, complete with glass high heels and wedding dress and rhinestone tiara with veil. And earrings! If he was a sickly boy he would certainly have died that day or had an asthma attack, as for him it was to die for. A nasty girl cousin caught him reverently playing with it in the bedroom and made it her wicked pleasure to announce it loudly to all the grownups. He was shooed outside to play Cowboys and Indians with the boys. He felt ashamed but dreamt of that Barbie. Mothers had to protect their families from further embarrassment by shooing young hens away from wedding dresses and bouquets and lace and crinolines, but somehow, like avid rats, hens would eventually end up in the heart of matters when the going became frenetic and help was needed. Little hens grew into big hens and became indispensable for weddings. When it comes to wedding dresses and bridesmaids’ dresses, corsages, bouquets and decorations, hairstyles and veils, beading and appliques, sequins, silk and satin, or silk satin and candyfloss, hens are the acknowledged experts. How could hens live without silk! Maybe it was always so since the pharaohs, the shahs and maharajahs. The hen next door has sometimes been heard singing to herself: There will always be a hen……. to the tune of There is nothing like a dame…….. as she descends into her garden on a happy morning when she feels she is still beautiful, her train languidly dragging behind in her mind as admirers gasp at her ageless and magical beauty…………….

It wasn’t till much later that the little hen began to understand that not everybody loved him all the time, and that even his beloved cousins and sisters and aunties were capable of being very fed up with him and sometimes got a wicked pleasure by excluding him from play that was suddenly only for girls. His heart sang for a tea set or kitchen set of cooking utensils at Christmas, which all the girls got but not him of course. Many a time he had to be coaxed out of a closet, this long before closets had anything to do with being gay, he had to be coaxed out from between the hanging garments behind which he could be found crying agonizingly, or from behind a bed hidden in the folds of the mosquito net. His feelings were hurt easily and deeply. He was beginning to understand that he did not belong; they could exclude him whenever they wanted. But the cousins and aunties were very kind mostly and protected him from those who called him a girlboy.

He never learned to fight. He was mortally afraid of being hit. He knew from early what being beaten up felt like, what being hit and belted felt like, when the blows of the belt or slaps or slipper rained down from every direction and stung everywhere and you scrambled and didn’t dare scream or bawl too loud as that would cause even more blows to fly. Somehow he was always found wrong or rude or lazy or greedy or forgot to do chores or hitting his younger siblings or breaking something or destroying something while trying to make it pretty ……….he was always doing something that merited licks or wrath it seemed. The neighbours certainly heard, they told him so many years later. He was so afraid of the pain, the belt marks on his legs at school, and dirty untidy clothes. He was told decades later that one day he was belted senseless, he