In my last episode I wrote about how I met Bobo on the veranda of Rev and Rini’s guest house on Sommerstown road in Port Antonio. I was staying there with my brother Jeffrey who was getting worse and worse with dementia.

Bobo and I were separated a lot because I kept going back to the States. I can’t remember how many times I was in Jamaica and how many in Vermont. I mostly just remember being dropped off at the airport and leaving him behind, over and over, and how sad that felt. He asked me to send him some money and when I asked how much, he said $130 US a month. I did this with some trepidation. I will add that Western Union had trepidation, too as they wouldn’t let me send it very easily. I guess defrauding stupid old ladies is a popular scam in Jamaica.

When I got back to Porti the next time, Bobo wanted me to stay up at his place rather than at the guest house. I installed Jeff down there and then headed up to his house.

His house was in “Cottage Lane,”up top of a hill and it was like climbing up Mount Everest for me. There were three ways to get there. The first time, because of the bags, we took a taxi to Bonnie View, a hotel that went out of business when the cruise ships stopped coming to Port Antonio. It was pitch black and very difficult going for me. Bobo carried my suitcase on his head.

Bobo’s place was on “leased land” which cost him about $100 a year. It had the advantage of having already started out with a cess-pit and a stone foundation. He and his friend Choon had gone into the bush up the hill, harvested trees, cut them into planks with a chain saw and built a “board house.” Bobo had been living there with an outdoor toilet, cooking on charcoal outside and no electricity. To accommodate me, he had added indoor plumbing, a kitchen and a verandah with a hammock. To guard his establishment, he had acquired a little puppy who we still own and has developed into “Mexico, dog of talent” for his skill in the art of escape.

The two other ways to get to the house was “the long way” and a shortcut. Bobo had hacked stairs into the hillside on the long way and had reinforced them with green bamboo that had taken root and started to sprout. The first morning down the hill, though, we took the “shortcut.” I barely made it down. It was disconcerting to see the Jamaican neighbors bounding on by! I told Bobo that the climb up and down “Mount Everest” was a deal breaker. I just couldn’t do it. I talked to Rini who was in Australia and told her I would need a room in the guest house. I think she was pleased that it looked like our relationship was not working out.

But that evening, Bobo encouraged me and insisted that I keep trying. By doing it every day, I got stronger and was able to manage. Bobo said that he felt like a “comealong” which is Patwa for “winch.” He winched me up Mount Everest.

It would have been insane to take the climb up that hill more than once a day so I spent a lot of time in the public library or working on my book in the gazebo at Rev’s place. The gazebo was connected with an extension cord and leaked when it rained. I swear that in the strata of Jamaican society where I landed, the concept of comfortable is unknown! Not an easy chair to be found! Even the bar stools are hard and tough with sharp corners.

I loved it up at Bobo’s place. There was no electricity or hot water and you had to sleep at night with a mosquito net. The bathroom was tiled with broken tiles and built on a strange sharp angle. The space was largely taken up by two huge water barrels and was populated by little singing frogs. The kitchen had a dirt floor on which was stored what the Jamaicans call “food,” that is yellow yams, and cassavas and plantains and other starchy vegetables. These are the staple and are eaten with some vegetable or curry or whatever, the most famous being, “salt fish and ackees.”

In the bedroom, Bobo had invested in a bed and a mattress. The floor was big wide uneven planks and the breeze came through the cracks in the walls. The whole place breathed. It was lovely to lie on the bed and look at the Jamaican sky which seems so much higher than the sky in the States, and full of beautiful fluffy clouds. Rainstorms were nice, too, with the sound on the “zinc” roof.

There were neighbors of various levels of respectability “all bout.” One particular family, on the way down via the shortcut, seemed to throw all their trash and old appliances right in the pathway and give parties with huge loudspeakers that blasted away all night. Across the way was a house with a single father and what looked like about 5 or 6 very sexy girls. Rocky, the mason (about whom more later) lived over there too and sometimes brought us food he had cooked. There was also an unfortunate family with a ten-year old boy whose mother was “in foreign” and who wet his bed and got screamed at all the time. This was my first exposure to the swear word “blood claat!!!” An ethereal sort of person, a Rastaman, with the two nicknames of “Skinny” and also “Jah” or “God” lived halfway down the shortcut in a little construction almost completely open to the elements.

Bobo had a little garden with his flowers and some medicinal plants for “bush tea.” I don’t know if Rastas have to take a test on plants to qualify, but they know their stuff. The neighbors would come by to beg ginger for stomach aches and once he cured a scratchy rash on my legs with a mushed-up creeper he tore off of a banana tree in the ravine.

Jeffrey was not happy in the guest house down in town. The previous year it had been quiet because the municipality had been tearing up the road to put in sewer lines. But that year the traffic got really, really noisy. On top of this, there was a national election going on with all the attendant honking and shouting and parading around in the streets. Bobo had a friend with a house in Black Rock, a suburb of Port Antonio and we moved Jeffrey there. We would go there in the day to see to him and to cook and then commute back to town and climb up Mount Everest in the evening. It was kind of grueling, especially that one evening, waiting for the mini-bus to go home, I sat down on a centipede or a scorpion or something equally exquisitely painful.

It was sweet up there at the top of Cottage Lane but had its limitations for sure. Bobo was worried about security. When he had to go out for some reason, like to special “nine night,” a funeral event, he would lock me in like some valuable possession. He started to talk about plots of land and building a house. This did not seem a practical prospect to me given our finances, but then his uncle “Doctor” told him about a “square” in the village of Sherwood Forest that was for sale for $3,000.

In my next episode, I will describe how we acquired this “square” and started to build our place. The future “Robin Hood Guest House,” as I have decided to call it.