My name is Richard Gibbs and I don’t worry about nothing. And I always enjoy my weekends.
I’m living Santa Cruz 28 years now but I grew up in Belmont, the Valley Road, Chocolate City, when it was nice. We used to go on holiday for two months and didn’t even have a key! Is when they walk in the house around 1978 and take a stereo that we put on locks on the door.
I went QRC but I just wanted to get out of school. I worked with my father in the air-conditioning business. Then, when he died, I took it over. Then I closed it down. Because I don’t like worries.
The only worry I have is my boss, and he worrying me since we small, because we grow up together. I working with him must be 20 years and, up to now, he still harassing me. He will hear me doing a newspaper interview and he will still call me.
I don’t worry about traffic because I leave Santa Cruz at half-past five every morning. Reach St James in 15 minutes. If you leave later, it would take 90 minutes. In just two minutes, from by Undercover all the way to Long Circular block up! Two minutes could land you in that! Like if you wait to make sandwiches, that’s the mistake: you will never do that again!
Three of us live in the house: me, my son and one of my cousins. There’s no madam any more. That’s why I have no more worries! Ladies have worries. And they’s give worries.
I’m smoking since I’m about 16 but I don’t worry about smoking, neither. Because, some days, I don’t smoke as much; and I don’t feel I will get one of them smoking disease. Nobody don’t feel that. But, if you go to the clinic, you will see everybody else just like you. And they still smoking in the clinic. When I study them thing, I mightn’t smoke for a few hours. Then I gone again.
When I moved up Santa Cruz, we were the only house, maybe not for miles, but for thousands of feet! I used to see mountains all round me. Now I have to go upstairs to look at them.
The children that get older up by us turn gangsters. Taliban and Rasta City. Some is Cuban. Where we used to have a lot of parang, we have shooting. All the time. It like Belmont now.
In the 80s, I make a trip around the whole of Trinidad. I leave to go Yacht Club from Power Boats and I just keep going and going and going and, when I reach Mayaro, I was so vexed. I was studying to park up the boat and take a taxi home. Come back for the boat. No worries. I end up making the trip right round. Take me from in the morning ‘til just before dark. After, when you think about it, it was a good trip; but not while you doing it; especially by yourself. But I had cigarette.
I especially don’t worry about dying. That does only make you die faster! Even when I used to fix air-conditioners, I didn’t worry about getting shocked; that’s less work for the mortician: you half-cooked already, so you ain’t going to spoil much.
I had a Escort and, every day, anywhere I go, “You selling that? You selling that?” You see, by next week, the next person come, I sell them it, and buy something nobody wouldn’t want. I end up giving ‘way the Escort free rather than face that. I give a fella in Tobago. Let him take the bounce. But the way he have it, nobody ent want it.
Some people does worry about the government, but why? They ain’t come to stay, they just there to hold on for five years.
I don’t stay awake at night thinking about nothing. In fact, if I stop moving, I’s drop asleep. To watch wrestling on TV, I have to go outside and stand up and watch through the window. I can’t lean on the window at all, or I drop asleep. If I sit down, I wouldn’t see no TV.
A Trini is a person who can’t wait for Christmas and Carnival and always ready for bacchanal.
I really don’t feel it have anywhere better than Trinidad & Tobago, the land of my birth!
Read a longer version of this feature at www.BCRaw.com