By Tony Deyal
I thought of my Dominican friend, colleague and boss at the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), Donald Peters, and given the number of marriages, ladies and phone that took up his days and nights, I gave him the nickname “One and Don”.
In a way, this confirms my own experience and observations of male behaviour in the Caribbean which is completely inconsistent with the conventional wisdom which, while accepting that you cannot trust a man too near, also emphasises that you cannot trust a woman too far. This is supported by the mythology of female fickleness and infidelity. I remember an old Trinidad joke about a man who was involved in a discussion with his rum-shop friends about the relationship between the colour of a woman’s eyes and her faithfulness. The consensus was that blue-eyed women were the worst of the lot, you could not trust them at all. Black-eyed women were to be trusted, but not too far.
However, brown-eyed women were the most faithful of all. Not being able to remember the colour of his wife’s eyes, having been too busy for such minor matters, the man took a hasty departure from the rum-shop and rushed home. Immediately on his arrival he raced into the bedroom where he found that his wife, already undressed, was fast asleep. Oblivious to everything else, he grabbed her eyelashes forcing open her eyes to see what colour they were. What he saw pleased him immensely and he shouted in relief, “Brown! Brown!” Whereupon a man crawled from under the bed and asked shamefacedly, “How you know ah here boy?”
It is a fact that, as the Vincentian calypsonian sang, “Man can’t take butt”, “horn”, “tabanca” or, as they say in Guyana, “blow.” Or, as this story shows, all of the above. One day in heaven, Saint Peter is said to have been simultaneously confronted by three men all demanding to get into heaven. Explaining that there were rules, he agreed to accept the most deserving of the individuals. The first man said that having heard from friends and neighbours that his wife used to entertain a lover during his absence, he left work early one day, took the elevator to his tenth-floor apartment, rushed into the bedroom, and not finding anyone there with his wife went out on the balcony where he saw a man, clinging to the railing.
He stamped on the man’s hands, beat at the man with a chair and in his rage rushed inside, took the refrigerator and while throwing it on the man, fell over the balcony and plunged to his death.
One of the other men then told his tale. He was exercising on the balcony of his apartment and while trying to do a handstand, slipped, tripped over the railing and was lucky to be able to grab the railing of the balcony below. While trying to climb up, he was suddenly attacked by a madman who beat him with a chair and then threw a refrigerator on him, knocking him to the pavement ten floors down.
The third man, who had been silent up to this point, then said to Saint Peter, “Picture this. There I am, naked in a refrigerator……” What this story shows, is what Dr Richard Allsop, in his Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, quoted from the Sunday Punch, one of the fun magazines in the early days in Trinidad. “Well-to-do wives in this country have revealed that their cool, suave husbands are deathly afraid of horn…” Dr Allsop also used The Bomb newspaper as an example of the usage of “horn”: “Some women can take a horn with dignity and others can’t. And often I have found that those who can’t are themselves playing footloose and fast, running around with men but they never would like their husbands to do the same.”
Sadly, there are some men who believe that they are far too clever to ever suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or outraged women. There is the lesson of a woman who was in bed having sex with her husband’s best friend when the telephone rang. She took the call. After putting down the phone she said, “That was Harry, but don’t worry, he won’t be home for a while. He’s playing cards with you.”
Some men are too stupid to have a problem. One man answered his phone in the middle of the night, grabbing it before his wife could get it. He heard a man’s voice asking if the coast was clear. “Hell, man,” he shouted, “how should I know? The sea is about fifty miles from here.”
The one thing all of us, men and women, should stay very far from is the truth. A father bought a lie detector which slapped people who lied. The bigger the lie, the harder the slap.
Testing the instrument on his son, daddy asked, “Where were you today?” The son answered, “At school of course.” The robot slapped him. Then the son changed his story, “All right then. I was watching Kung Fu Panda”. The robot slapped the boy even harder. The son, fearful that a third slap could knock him to the ground, admitted, “Dad, I was hanging out with a girl.” This upset his father so much that he shouted, “What! You have your schoolwork to do and you’re wasting time hanging out with girls? Let me tell you, when I was your age, I never had time for girls. Not ever.” The robot hit the father a resounding slap that left his face swollen. Then the boy’s mom started laughing loudly and said, “Why are you so upset with him? He is your son after all!” The slap from the robot floored her.
The best thing to do for men and women is to go with the flow. In the never-ending battle of the sexes, whether for fun or funds, women always have the upper hand, foot, or other parts, positions and portions. There was the newly widowed woman, Josephine, whose husband had drowned. She inherited ten million dollars. “Imagine,” said her friend, “your husband couldn’t read or write, yet he left you so much money.” Josephine smiled and confessed, “He couldn’t swim either.” Then there was Mr Jones who was so glad to return home to Trinidad earlier than he expected that he decided to surprise his wife.
She was very surprised. He too. As well as the man who was on his bed with his wife. Both were nude. Mr Jones was very angry and all he could think about was killing the man. His wife begged, “Wait darling, you know that car I told you I won in the lottery? Well, this kind man gave it to me. Remember the holiday we had in Miami? This same man paid for it. And our son didn’t get a scholarship like I told you. This man is paying his university fees.” The husband then shouted, “It’s cold in here. You better cover him up before he catch pneumonia.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen replying to a street journalist who asked him, “Mr Deyal, have you ever seen a lie detector?” He answered, “Listen, I didn’t just see a lie detector, I’m married to one!”
