The Hotel Child: A Home in the Bahamas

  Actual factual pic of the hotel where my dad worked...Paradise Island Hotel and Villas...in the Bahamas.  Here in the future the huge Atlantis resort is off to the left of this location.  Notice everyone's parked the wrong way...hahaha...a poke in fun at the Brits and Bahamians....

  By Grant McGee

  It was a yard sale find, it held the promise of fun.  It ended up being a time machine.

  An electric scooter.

  It had two flat tires, a rusty chain and it wouldn’t go.

  The tires I could fix.  The chain I could clean off.

  But I didn’t know why it wouldn’t go.  It could’ve been the motor, it could’ve been the batteries, it could’ve been the computer “brain.”

  I didn’t have the time, inclination or money to fix it.

  “Take it to the Scooterman,” said The Lady of the House.

  The Scooterman was this dude who had set up shop around the corner from our house.  He seemed to be doing a brisk business in putting motors on bicycles.  Judging by the number of people who zipped up and down our streets on these things with unmuffled engines that went “BLAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTT” on down the way this was THE thing to have if you couldn’t afford a car.

  I pulled up in front of Scooterman’s place, a little hole in the wall in an old wooden building that looked like it used to be a warehouse.  A number of old, beat-up bicycles with motors on them sat in front.  I stood at the door of his shop.  He was sitting at his work table fiddling with something with wires coming out of it.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He stood up, smiled, stuck out a hand and said, “Hello, my name’s Reggie.”

  “Not ‘Scooterman’ hunh?” I said smiling.  “That’s what we call you at the house, you seem to be right popular around here.  You and I have a little in common, I used to have a bicycle shop out west.”

  “In California?”  It seems many times when you mention “The West” people think of Texas or California.

  “No, out in New Mexico,” I went on.  “But I picked up this electric scooter at a yard sale.  I was going to fix it but I don’t know what’s wrong with it.  Now we’re thinking about moving back there….”

  “To California?”

  “No, New Mexico…and I’m not gonna be able to do anything with it.  So The Lady of the House said, ‘Give it to Scooterman.’”

  “I like that name,” he smiled.  “Maybe I’ll call my shop that.  Well let’s see what you have.”

  We strolled out to my car and I opened the trunk and there it was.

  “Oh,” he said, “Nice, nice, very nice.  I can use this.”

  “Cool,” I said.  “Say, what’s that I hear in your voice?  A touch of an accent.  Where did you grow up?”

  “I am from the Bahamas,” Reggie said.

  I laughed.

  “Dude, how cool,” I said.  “I lived there for a brief bit back in 1969.”

  And then it came rushing back from all those years ago.

  My dad had taken a job running a hotel on Paradise Island, just across the water from Nassau, the Bahamas capitol city.  We had an apartment in the hotel.

  It was a different experience for a kid who had just been Boy Scoutin’…camping trips, hikes and such…in the mountains of Virginia to be plopped down in the middle of a British Crown Colony surrounded by water.

  The fishing was good.

  I would call room service and order up some raw shrimp then head out to the beach with my fishing stuff and catch pompano, yellow-tailed jacks and the wicked looking gar…a fish with a long, snake-like body, green, slimy with scissor-like jaws that bristled with teeth.

  Fishing on the beach in the Bahamas did have its drawbacks.  There were a few times I’d have my line in the water and I’d get hit in the head by a rock someone had thrown.  I’d quickly turn around and there’d be some kids behind the dunes, rocks in hands.

  It would be here on the beach on Paradise Island in the Bahamas 1969 that I, as a boy, would see my first real-live topless woman.

  I had a gar on the line, it was a big one,  I could see it as the waves rose getting ready to hit the beach, it was kinda like a window to an aquarium.

  “Have you caught many fish today?” said a voice from behind me.

  I turned around to see a topless woman standing behind me, just wearing a black bikini bottom and a smile.

  I dropped my fishing rod and it went rocketing out into the ocean.

  “Oh, did I cause you to lose your fish?” she said with a decidedly French accent.  I knew because I was taking French lessons.

  “Ah, um, oh, ah…no ma’am,” I said.

  She reached into her beach bag, pulled out a towel and gave her hair a nice fluff then draped the towel over her shoulders.

  I just stood there like a dork.

  “Well,” she said, “I hope you get your fishing pole back and catch more fish.  Au revoir.”

  There you go, she WAS French.

  I watched her walk down the beach.

  I couldn’t wait to get back to the apartment and write a letter to my buddy Catfish back in Virginia about what I just saw.

  It was also the summer my big sister was tasked with trying to cram French into my head.  If I wanted to stay on track and be in the same grade I was in in the states when school started I’d have to know some basic French.

  I guess I retained some of it but at the time I was more upset that she was stealing french fries off my plate when room service brought up lunch.

  While my folks were trying to get me to be a cosmopolitan dude by learning tennis and French I was more fascinated by the critters in the Bahamas:  Lizards everywhere…one kind was huge…about 2 or 3 feet long and super fast…the locals believing that if you could catch one and crack its head open there were gold coins inside…I think they made that up because they were so fast.  There was the occasional snake and there were these HUGE land crabs, things that dug burrows in the undergrowth and were maybe two feet across.

  One time I caught one of the land crabs using a snare on a pole and I carried it through the hotel lobby much to the consternation of some of the guests.  I was given a stern lecture by The Old Man about bringing critters into the hotel.

  It turns out adjusting to life in the Bahamas wasn’t necessary, the French and tennis lessons weren’t necessary because we’d be back in Virginia by the end of summer.

  I know that wasn’t my dad’s plan.

  I was just a kid, nobody ever told me about the REAL stuff that was going on in my family’s life at the time.  The Lady of the House tells me that’s okay, kids really AREN’T supposed to know the heavy stuff of the family’s life.

  I do know that Dad always seemed to be more tightly wound than usual at this Bahamian gig and that he spent a few days in a Bahamian hospital because his blood pressure was dangerously high.

  It came to pass that one Friday late that summer my mom tells me, “Start packing your things, we have to be out of here by Monday.”

  I would find out sometime later that my dad and the big hotel kahunas who ran the place from New York City got into some kind of dust-up over a guest at the hotel…a guest at the hotel who was unhappy about something…a guest at the hotel who was unhappy about something and he had money and he had “connections.”

  Come on girls and boys, when a boss and an employee get into a dust-up, who wins?

  My dad had held a lot of hotel jobs in my young life by then, I’d never seen us clear out of a place so fast as that.

  I flashed back to the present:  Florida, 2017, standing in front of Reggie’s place.

  “You guys in the Bahamas drive on the wrong side of the road,” I said smiling.  While we drive on the right here in the U.S., in the Bahamas they drive like the British do, on the left.

  “You Americans drive on the wrong side of the road,” he said. 

  We laughed.

  “Anyway Reggie, the scooter’s yours,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Reggie.  “When are you moving to California?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said.  “A few things have to happen, but I’m thinking maybe October or November at the latest.”

  “I would wait until next year,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “There’s a big war with North Korea coming, California will not be safe,” he said.

  “Aww Reggie, it’s okay,” I said.  “The dude’s missles can only reach Alaska at best and even then they’re not that accurate.  New Mexico will be okay.”

  “You be safe, my friend.  Thank you for the gift.”

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