I went to Jamaica with my mother, stepdad and sister when I was nineteen. We done the two-centre holiday, one week in Orlando and one week in Jamaica.
The Orlando part of it didn’t start so well as we went to, ‘Wet and Wild’ water-park on the first day and it was quite overcast, so I never put any suntan cream on. The next day I woke up with a huge blister on the end of my nose.
The blister popped and I had an open wound which led to a scab forming, so my whole week in Orlando was spent trying to cover my nose as it was an attention grabber. Not exactly ideal and again, typical of my luck.
I wasn’t that impressed with the whole Orlando scene and couldn’t wait to get to Jamaica and fortunately my scab healed just in time for us arriving there.
This was around the time I had just started smoking dope so it wasn’t that big a priority and I did get enough for a few joints, but the holiday was spent mostly drinking, ‘Mr Happy’ cocktails with my stepdad.
They done the damage alright. I did buy some dope of one geezer, and he was keen to sell me more, like when I was in the middle of a hotel activity playing table tennis. ‘Later dude, later. Let’s not make this too obvious’.
A waiter invited us to play football on some wasteland that was uneven to say the least. It looked like there was an army of moles living under it and even had a couple of cows grazing in the middle of it for good measure.
The waiter thought he was semi-professional, and although he was already at least twenty years old, he said, “I am going to play for Liverpool one day like John Barnes. I just need to quit smoking”, then he takes a huge hit of a bong as if it were his pre-match ritual.
I thought that must be good gear in that thing because this guy has seriously lost touch with reality. Just like me with my rock star fantasy. I had more chance of being a rock star than he did a professional footballer that’s how bad he was.
I did score an amazing goal there from the sideline through a very small set of goalposts that could just about squeeze the ball through. No-one could believe it went in, especially me. Maybe it was helped slightly by bouncing of a few mounds on the way in.
The best thing on that holiday was when a granny who asked me in the morning of our last day, if I would join her on karaoke that night, but I pretended I was shy and said I would think about it.
Of course, I was playing it low-key and after thinking about my song choice long and hard during the day, I asked the DJ to play ‘Islands In The Stream’ and then led the granny through the song as she wasn’t familiar with it as I was.
When it came to the line, ‘Making love with each other uh- huh’, I grabbed her close and rubbed my groin into hers. The table with her family were in hysterics. Thankfully they never realised just how desperate I was and thought I was doing it for a laugh but I had a wank over it later as it was the closest I’d come to a fanny in a while.
I went back to Scotland and told my friends that we needed to go to Jamaica and a couple of years later myself and two of them went back to the same hotel. We maybe should have chosen somewhere a bit more lively as it wasn’t party central but it was within our budget.
I took out a bank loan in my name for my friend to go, and I had to beg for the cash to pay it every month for the next year with him still not paying it all back. Cunt.
On our first night there was a Roman Toga Party. Everyone was encouraged to wear a toga for dinner but what they didn’t tell us that it was a competition and you had to put on a show of some description to win it.
When it came to my turn, I asked the band if they knew ‘Jamming’ by Bob Marley. With big smiles they were like ‘Yeah, yeah, we know that alright’. Their big white teeth shining in the dark.
I then instructed the crowd, every time I say, ‘Jamming’, they had to repeat, ‘Jamming’.
Then the band kicked off and I’m giving it ‘Jamming’ and they were joining in very well, then I got to the fast bit, ‘We’re jamming, we’re jamming etc’ which got a big laugh, then a couple more ‘Jamming’s’ with the crowd replies and I was out of there.
I got voted the Toga King and I got to dance with the Toga Queen, who was a married forty-year-old but I still tried it on with her anyway as I still wasn’t getting much pussy in the intervening years from the granny karaoke night.
The next day we had to get up for the morning meeting and then find out who was going to supply us with our dope for the next two weeks.
At the meeting we got warned, “Don’t go waltzing off with any strangers. Stay on the beaten path. It is highly dangerous out there”. We paid zero attention to that and went for a walk after the meeting, cash in hand.
One homeless looking guy approaches us, ‘Hey guys, you want to see Mick Jagger’s house?’ I think that there must be thousands of Mick Jagger’s houses all over Jamaica, at least according to the locals, but we said, “Aye sure, why not?”
Then he started walking along grabbing different fruit from trees and trying to educate us as to what they were but of course we weren’t interested in that. After about five minutes I just cut to the chase, “Look man, do you know where we can get some ganja?”
That was what he had been waiting to hear all along. At this point he took us at a right angle off the beaten path and led us to an secluded spot which was very much not Mick Jagger’s house.
He said, “How much money do you have?” We took out our collective amount of cash and as we were counting it, he just grabbed it all! “80 dollars. ok, wait here, I’ll be back”, he says. I was like, “How do we know you’ll come back?” He says, “Don’t worry, here you can keep my shoes”.
He took his shoes off that should have been put in a bin about five years ago. These ancient holey shoes that if you gave to a charity shop, they would be like, ‘Fuck off’, but they were our security that he would return.
I guess they must have had sentimental value because after fifteen minutes waiting, thinking, ‘We’ve been had here’, but he did come back with the biggest bag of grass I had ever seen. We were like, ‘Fucking result. We haven’t been scammed. Hallelujah’.
He didn’t just give the bag straight over to us though. No, he rolled a severe handful into a joint with no tobacco and then sparked up. We weren’t about to argue with him and soon enough we floated back to the hotel with a substantial amount of top quality weed still left in the bag. So much for not going off the beaten track.
I had been taking a lot of acid by this time and I swear to god every single item of clothing in my bag was radioactive psychedelic. I mean, they were LOUD with a capital FUCKING. Multi-coloured madness. Hats to match as well.
A lady at the bar one night said, “You know Billy, if anyone else put on that outfit they would look totally ridiculous, but somehow you pull it off”.
After a week there, we got invited to a nightclub by another waiter, so we thought, ‘Aye, sure, why not? We love a good bit of Dub’. However, this was the anniversary of Jamaica getting its independence from Britain and even if I didn’t wear my loud clothes, we would still have stuck out a mile with our fluorescent skin colour.
We got taken in a mini-bus which we paid for but seemed to pick up a lot of stragglers on the way to a beach party.
We asked where we could by some grass and gave over our money to the waiter. Who then gave us the grass but proceeded to take it back off us and share it with his mates and anyone else who fancied a smoke on the beach. So that was the last we saw of that!
We then got taken to a nightclub in the middle of a jungle. We sat at the bar and three women appeared on the stage and began their show.
I had never been to a strip club of any description before, so I felt a bit out of my depth. The waiter was nowhere to be seen at this point; he was probably outside smoking the rest of our stash.
These women were doing all kinds of things on the stage, I mean just getting naked was the start. They put coke bottles, cans and various other objects up their holes. I am sure they even lit their farts at one point. I just wanted to get out of there asap.
Then this big psycho guy sits down in front of us and starts staring at us …. intently. We were like three nervous Scottish ghosts by this point.
He came up to me and offered us some crack! I didn’t know if that meant he was a drug dealer or a stage performers pimp!
I didn’t ask him to clarify the situation. I just politely refused. I didn’t want hard drugs, and I would never have dreamed of shagging one of those strippers, after seeing what they had just inserted up their fannies. It would have been like putting a matchstick up a pint glass.
By the time the waiter returned the three of us looked like we had been sprayed by mace. We bolted back into the mini- bus to get taken back to the hotel and the hotel entertainment satisfied us enough after that escapade.
We did venture out the hotel a couple of more times though. I had already been to Bob Marley’s grave with my family at a place called Nine Miles where he was born, but I had to go with my friends too.
Bob is buried in a marble casing six feet above the ground and the sun rises through a Star of David stained glass window, directly onto his head every morning.
Outside there is a guy with the best job in the world. He just sits and talks to the tourists all day, while drinking rum and smoking a huge bong, singing the odd Bob Marley song from time to time and that’s it. You don’t see that advertised on Indeed.
There was about three days left of our holiday when we went there and we needed some more grass, so we got some of a geezer there, who again lit a pure grass joint for us when he returned with it. I guess that’s the custom apart from when its Independence Day celebrations and you keep it for yourself.
We smoked it with him, and he was impressed that we managed to keep up. I think he usually does it to tourists to fuck them up, but our tolerance levels were fairly high by this point, as we hadn’t touched ground since we arrived.
So, with that, he ran away and came back with a big lump of pure black cannabis. I mean, this would cost about two hundred quid back home, and he gave it to us for free, just for being such good sports.
The thing was the grass we had just bought was more than enough to last us until the end of the holiday and there is no way where we were going through airport security, especially in the US, with a big stash of hash.
Therefore, we had no option but to try to smoke it. We spent two full days in the hotel room puffing for all our worth. At one point I had to run out the room to try and escape it. My lungs physically could just not absorb any more smoke. I should have said, ok, I have completed dope now and moved on to other things but unfortunately not. It continued to play a part in my life for decades to come.
There was a guy in Edinburgh that sold me shit, one time, I mean actual shit. He showed me a good bit of gear and then done a swap. When I got home and smelt it, I knew I had been done. I still tried to smoke it though, after all I had paid for it. Only the one hit was enough, the puking put me off trying again as it certainly was, ‘bad shit’.
Cheers!
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