Start by leaving the country a few days before the event (not that you know it’s going to happen). About five days is good, say, around July 22, 1990. Make sure the place you’re going is far from any established West Indian community. Northern California is a workable option.
On the morning of the event (i.e. July 27, 1990), sit down in your friend Gillian Goddard’s cottage in Menlo Park, type up a television script on Gillian’s friend Dan’s Mac Plus, print it out and take it to a nearby copy shop, e.g. Kinko’s. From the shop, fax the script to your colleagues Walt and Danielle in Trinidad, who, later that day, will use it to shoot a segment of the television show you’re working on together. The act of faxing the script also inserts you—tenuously—into Walt and Danielle’s more heroic narrative related to the event, though of course you don’t know this at the time.
Take the train into San Francisco, trawl around the city like a tourist then in the afternoon meet up with Gillian in order to hitch a ride back to Menlo Park. While sitting in the car in rush-hour gridlock on US-101, fiddle with the dial on the radio and happen upon a National Public Radio (NPR) report about an attempted coup in your home country of Trinidad and Tobago!
Marvel at the coincidence of your landing, just at that moment, upon a news report about a nation that would otherwise receive scant coverage even on public radio, but exhibit incredulity. Await the jingle at the end of the report announcing that what you just heard was a comedy segment. When, instead of a jingle, you hear another report about something bad happening in some other part of the world, freeze for a few seconds. Then try to recall whether, five days before, there had been any sign or indication that something like this was going to happen. Decide that there hadn’t.
As it would be some years yet before either you or Gillian—or most of the world’s citizens—acquires a cell phone, sit patiently in traffic until you get back to Menlo Park, but once there, rush to the answering machine which is pulsating with voice messages. Be amused at Gillian’s Washington DC-based sister’s succinct “They had a coup! Call me!”. Wonder how all the Trinidadians on the west coast had managed to get hold of Gillian’s number. Return calls. Answer new calls that come in. Lament the fact that nobody has any real information.
Even though the phone lines to Trinidad are perpetually busy, keep trying to get through to family, but make sure you have a list of questions prepared, as long distance calls aren’t cheap and Skype hasn’t yet been invented, nor has the MagicJack. Lament the absence, in northern California, of a real West Indian community such as exists in New York or Washington D.C. or south Florida or even Atlanta, and discuss how this limits your access to the choicest rumours and to folks who know folks who had managed to get through to somebody in Trinidad who knows somebody who knows what’s going on. Experience feelings of profound isolation.
Keep the radio tuned to NPR. Make sure you tune in to an NPR report in which journalist Ira Mathur is interviewed from Port of Spain about the horrors to which your homeland is being subjected while sitting on the bonnet of the car in Stinson Beach, in the atmospheric Marin Headlands, looking out at the magnificent Pacific. Note it as one of the most bizarre juxatpositions of your lifetime.
Leave California for New York. Wait it out there for what seems like—or may well be, as you don’t yet record all your trips using as-yet-to-be-dreamed-of services like Dopplr and TripIt—weeks. Watch that single, worrying image on CNN of Port of Spain with a plume of smoke wafting up from the middle of the city over and over again; listen to the West Indian radio stations; talk to folks on the phone—but still feel you have no idea what’s going on in your homeland, except that the insurgents have surrendered and there’s now a curfew. Write letters (longhand, as you’re still five years from getting an e-mail account) to friends in various places announcing that you might end up staying in the US.
Be deeply envious of your friends Walt and Danielle, who were in fact shooting your script when news of the insurrection reached them, and who, with all other work brought to a standstill by the events, report that they’ve been venturing out with the camera to capture coup-related action.
Keep harassing the airline to put you on a flight back home. Settle eventually for one that connects in Miami, even though it means spending an awful night in Miami International Airport.
Return to Trinidad. Fail to remember, 20 years later, who collected you at the airport, what you saw from the car on the way home, what you felt when you finally walked through the doors of the home you weren’t sure you’d ever see again.
Wonder if 20 years is really that long or if there’s some other reason you’ve shoved those memories aside.
