54-46 may or may not have been Toots Hibbert’s actual prisoner ID number, but I’m sticking by mine: C92. My prison is only metaphorical, of course: the CWC World Cup ticket office at the Hasely Crawford Stadium, where I sit now on a concrete staircase waiting for the ticket office people to open the door again so the 40 or 50 of us gathered here can start screaming at them once more. Well, not really screaming. More like clamouring for information that should have been given to us long ago, or at least posted on a wall somewhere, and for one of those squares of paper with a number hand-written on it. (Too bad I don’t have a Sharpie in my bag — I could have done a roaring trade in bootleg number-papers.)

Problem is, nobody knows what the numbers mean. “What time will C92 be called?” I asked the security guard. She shrugged and gave a non-answer about the tickets not having yet arrived. The saleswoman who handed out the first batch of number-papers did so with the speed and furtiveness of a drug pusher distributing gram-bags on a street corner. The next tranch was delivered by the security guard, who simply stuck a hand holding a stack of them through the grille. A man whom I’d seen slink into the ticketing area only minutes before was on hand to grab them. “Hey you!” I shouted. “I was was here long before you!” “Hold strain, hold strain,” he said, struggling to separate the tiny squares, which were loosely held together with a bent paper clip. When C92 finally reached me, the clip was still attached. I think I’ll keep it as a souvenir.

It’s now 11:16 am, which means I’ve been here nearly 45 minutes. The big orange sign on the door (still closed) says that opening hours are 8am to 4pm. I can’t say I blame the salespeople for shutting the door and hiding out. Nothing they can tell the crowd will make the us happy. They don’t seem to have either the information, or our tickets, and the supervisor is AWOL, as supervisors tend to be at times like these. Some of the people waiting here ordered their tickets online since November, which makes me feel only a little less peeved (I ordered mine–for the warm-up match between South Africa and Pakistan–two days ago).

As usual, there’s an apologist in the crowd, a self-righteous woman with permanently pursed lips who, in spite of the fact that she arrived here even earlier than me, keeps telling everybody to behave and to “use their common sense”. “It’s an international tournament,” she tells a man, a shortish middle-management type in shirt-and-tie and boots with heels just a little too high. “What do people expect?” I decide to ignore her, as earlier, in response to my comment about the lack of information, she’d pointed to a sign on the wall and retorted, “But all the information is there.” I decided that pointing out to her that the sign was the standard one posted in all the ticket offices since last year, bearing the standard info, and that we wouldn’t all be standing here bitching had things been working according to plan, would have been a colossal waste of time.

A nuts man* has entered the area, doing a brisk trade as it’s nearly lunch time. A couple of men sitting on the steps in front of me are saying, in that classic Trini style, that it’s a good thing we got “only the brown** matches”. “Look, the construction at the Oval ain’t even finish,” one says. They guffaw.

They’ve just opened the door, and I was about to pack up and join the knot of people in front of it, if only to find out what being number C92 means. But a man in a plaid shirt tells me it’s only for those purchasing tickets, not collectors of online orders. So seems I won’t be budging for a while. But the concrete’s getting a little hard now.

*peanut vendor
**early round

“. . . and their cat actually likes me,” my friend writes the day before yesterday from a B&B in Middle America. He also writes that the B&B’s owners “keep leaving little snacks for me all over the place,” though has never said where the trail of snacks leads, which leads me to suspect his hosts may be swingers, though that is beside the point. I’m more concerned about his views on the cat, which he says has “the soul of a dog.”

Now, this bothers me. Why couldn’t he have said: “Wow — a cat that likes me! Hmmm. Maybe cats are more diverse in character and temperament than the two cats I’ve ever bothered to take the time to get to know. In light of this encounter, let me adjust my views on cats“? Did he have to divest the cat of its cat-ness?

I guess if the well-meaning white American friends who told you they “didn’t consider you black” could do it, what’s to stop my friend from short-changing a poor animal he’d only just met? I kid you not, folks, people did say this, if not specifically to me (they may have, but that’s the sort of memory I might have erased to make room for a more worthwhile one), to many a Caribbean person going to school or living in the US. And they’d say it to Caribbean people who, regardless of the nuanced colour continuum they existed on in their countries of origin, as far as the laws and perceptions of the 50 states were concerned, were just plain black; but who seemed different enough from the (often very few) normative black Americans of the well-meaning friends’ acquaintance to deserve a separate category. I’m willing to bet money, for instance, that at least two people have said this to Barack Obama at some point in his life (Jeremy finds Obama’s books “slippery”, by the way).

While I’m sure there are Caribbean people out there who wouldn’t be uncomfortable with such a statement, I’m hoping it was just some sort of 80s fad and has gone out of style. I’m also thankful I never heard anybody say: “you have the soul of a white person”.

Which brings us back to cats, with or without the souls of dogs. For those who may be wondering at the sudden burst of feline advocacy, it’s actually not sudden at all. I was a cat lover long before Delphine appeared on the scene. By age four I was already the owner of Norman and Wilson, named, respectively, after a character on Peyton Place and I would like to say the Goanese manager of the Diggi Palace hotel in Jaipur, except that I met that Wilson only last month. (And speaking of which, for those of you who’ve been secretly thinking our Diggi-related rhapsodies were a little overheated, please read this. We rest our case). In fact, I’d go out and get another cat right now, except that it’s after 1am and I have no idea how Delphine would receive it — not everyone’s as tolerant as Maizy, you know.

Today is also the second day of a nationwide shut-down here in Trinidad and Tobago that some people seem to be observing, some not, so who knows if the T&TSPCA will even be open.