PLAYING WITH FIRE
“Look the woman watching you being violent to me,” the smaller of the youths declared with a laugh. I had been staring at the two teens play-fighting next to me while I waited my turn to be served under the dim streetlamp, which was casting more shadow than light on the corner shop and the few people standing in line in front of it. The second youth glanced over at me. “Don’t worry,” he said, “We only playing.” He faced his friend again, curled his right arm around towards the base of his spine, raised his shirt and drew from his pants waist, his make-believe gun. He sunk the fake weapon into his pal’s right temple and pulled its trigger. His every move was so authentic I thought I could hear the bang. The youths separated. They were both laughing as they walked away. I didn’t see the joke; I couldn’t, not when I’d ten minutes before left behind a news room, which could not keep up with the real crime that Tuesday though there were three crime reporters on Newsday’s staff.
“There’s a murder in Carenage!” an editor informed me, when at about 11 am, I’d walked through the doors of our new Chacon Street office. “Yes and a kidnapping in St James,” a reporter announced. I could smell the crime on and in the day’s air: the murder toll was single-mindedly seeking to reach 300 before October was half through. My nose was right. By mid afternoon, there was word from police sources of a body found in Cunupia, of a man’s throat slit in Maracas/St Joseph and of a daylight ride by shooting on Charlotte Street in which an innocent woman was used as a human shield by the man under fire. As we were starting to layout the paper, more reports of bloodshed. In Carenage again. A reporter had to be sent off to the scene. This while another reporter was somewhere in Gonzales trying to get a photograph of the human shield woman, now in critical condition in the Port-of-Spain General Hospital, after emergency surgery.
As I waited for everyone to return to the office with their stories, I thought of the days when a single murder was huge news and when newsrooms had only one reporter on the crime beat. As much as the public presumed that journalists lived for bad news, I longed for the time when our resources didn’t have to be employed in covering this crime scene or that one. And often the story only began at the crime scene. From there, for the tale to be complete, reporters sought out grieving families and headed to autopsies and sometimes to the Magistrates’ Court to see the accused perpetrators being charged. It was an endless circle of crime, crime, crime. Editors spent their time dispatching reporters and photographers to get the story and the photos, then sifting through gruesome facts and photographs of blood stained streets and bullet-ridden corpses, trying to convey the violence of the act without offending the public more than necessary. When we, reporters and editors, left work, we left convinced that we were living in a nation of people gone mad.
On Tuesday some of those people seemed to have gone madder than ever. Could it be that the day truly belonged as astrologers claimed to Mars, the God of War? And had Mars of late become a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago and taken up permanent residence here? On Tuesday, after the woman was pulled into the line of fire by that man there was little doubt that every citizen is now walking collateral damage. On Tuesday, it was clear that the criminals in Trinidad and Tobago hold the police in absolute contempt. On Tuesday, if you didn’t know that blood had spilled onto the capital’s streets, Port-of-Spain, dominated by construction cranes looked deceivingly like a capital on its way to the First World. On Tuesday, as the House of Representatives argued about a multi-billion dollar fiscal package for 2005/2006, citizens outside killed each other over State handouts and over profits from illicit activities. On Tuesday, reporters were already warning that next Tuesday was the 11th, a date they claimed, the Port-of-Spain bomber likes and they were observing that there would be many more killings and kidnappings in the next few months because “bandit season”— Christmas to Carnival — was just now starting.
And on Tuesday evening, as I waited my turn under the muted street light, I wondered at my response to those teens “play fighting” on that corner. Had I felt as concerned as I had about the scene solely because I was in the newspaper business? Had a crazy newsroom day caused me to overreact to a harmless game? I tried to recall my own “youth days”. Decades ago, I, a tomboy, loved “Cowboys and Indians”. I always wanted to be Indian — cowboys were the oppressors — and I played hard, giving no quarter to the enemy. The difference I concluded was that back then, while my friends and I were experts at mimicking the stars of Hollywood westerns with our toy guns, these young men might well be emulating home grown “celebrities” and had perhaps, already handled real guns. And late Tuesday night, I tried my best to count sheep and not murders, to forget that by the following Tuesday, the headlines might well be: 300 killed for 2005. That was the toughest job of the day by far.
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"PLAYING WITH FIRE"