They Thought They Were Invincible

Joshua and I stayed in because we were too broke to go to Theo’s party. Or at least, that’s what we told them. Honestly, we just couldn’t stand Theo’s music. That’s what we told ourselves.

Theo and Joshua go way back. Sometime after fifth form, they were trying to be deejays together. I think their mothers would have wanted them to finish school and to get into UWI. But Theo didn’t have the grades, so the school wouldn’t take him back for sixth form. And Joshua had the grades, but he just didn’t want to go. They thought they were invincible back then. And perhaps they could have been, if they were older, or if their families had different last names, or if they knew what the hell they were doing.

They got a job somehow because Theo knew someone who owned a strip club. Joshua told me that every year he spent a birthday without hearing from his father, his mom would hug him and tell him that one day he’d be old enough not to need him. One day, he’d grow up to be a more important man than even his father had been. “I used to imagine myself tall like a giant,” he said. “I’d picture myself living in a fancy house in the hills, so big that I’d cast a shadow over all of Kingston.” I don’t think Joshua’s mom thought that her son would ever become a deejay at a strip club, but she drove her son and his friend there anyway, and she’d pick them up when they’d finished playing their sets. Whenever I hear this story, I always wonder if my mom would have done the same for me.

His grandmother lives in the house next door. She’d stand in her upstairs window each night watching Joshua, his mom, and Theo pull out of the driveway to head to the club. Joshua said he saw her clutching her rosary and shaking her head at all three of them, her eyes as fiery as Judgement Day. He said he almost started believing in God, because in their second week, a dancer pulled a gun on them when they’d started off her performance with the wrong song. In that moment, time stopped. Joshua looked at the gun, wondering whether his grandmother would be too busy smirking with self-satisfaction to cry at his funeral. Theo looked at the stripper, wondering what else she had hiding under her bra and g-string. Joshua fumbled and found the right track, and Wildfire sauntered away, evidently pleased that she had scared these two little uptown boys shitless. It was their last night.

Theo thought himself a real gangsta. When all the ghetto boys were wearing those tight, coloured jeans, he’d wear them too, but he’d never get the timing right. When he’d start to wear something, all the other boys would have already moved on to something else. Joshua insists that they’d stop wearing something because he’d started to. Theo did nothing for their credibility. It didn’t help that his dad was white and his mom was light-skinned and that Theo was pale, almost whiter than the real white kids, and with his murky green eyes and wavy, light-brown hair, looked strikingly similar to the boy on the Foska Oats box. Joshua told me that when they were taking pictures, they’d push Theo to the front. If Theo didn’t talk, they thought they could get people to believe that he was from England or America. Maybe then, people would take the group seriously. But Theo realized he needed to talk if he wanted to get girls to come home with him, so that plan failed.

Now Joshua’s twenty-two and in his first year of the philosophy program at UWI, because after a failed music career, two crashed cars, and a string of jobs, his mom’s patience had finally run out. And Theo’s still hustling...