Shafting

Of course I was wrong. And I knew it, before the ferry unloaded us unceremoniously at Red Hook without apology.

"Go see the agent in the harbor," we were told.

As it turned out, the agent's office was a plywood kiosk among several others, with a Plexiglas window and a little airhole through which to speak. I had to bend over both to address the opening, and to try and squint through the reflected glare of the sun on the plexi. Perhaps, also, to bow.

I intuited as much as saw a local woman absent any uniform, speaking on her cellphone.

I can only use this cliche: I shook with rage. There was not a drop of any other emotion present in my nervous system but fury. Mad blind throttling fury. I didn't manage to keep it from my demeanor when I attempted to explain that we had been assured a trip to Charlotte Amelie, but had been dropped just here without explanation or apology. I had been sent to her, as she was the Native Son representative.

The accumulated stresses of travel, poverty (ours!), and, over the prior three days, the unremittant obsequious accommodation and self-abnegation in which both my wife and I had engaged, AKA unsuccessful cultural sensitivity exercises that would have charmed the most dubious 15th century Japanese samurai; the stress--the sensation I may say, of flogging yourself, to separate yourself from the insensitive horde that must indeed descend continually upon the Tortolan locals; this flogging all to no good end, and practiced expertly and well by us, past masters of hypersensitivity to each other and others generally, desperate in our needy way to be liked and avoid being pegged as, gasp, Americans--just now I say that stress blotted out any insecure care, personal or cultural, socio-economic or racial; blotted out any concern even for fair play or just, well, common decency and politeness. Blotted out all concern of any kind except the one eclipsing desire to vent scorn and derision upon this woman, a representative of Native Son Ferries, and indeed the Incarnation of Scowling B.V.I.ians.

In the event, she deserved it . . .