My Waterworks experience – teenage angst and triumph

Feb 11, 2018 Countryman, Features / Columnists

---

By Dennis Nichols

It is good to share personal stories of the not-so-good-times in one’s life. Expressing past pain and humiliation can be a cathartic process, and also a lesson to others – providing hope and encouragement to those experiencing similar disruption, especially when, as in my case, things eventually turn out better than expected.
There are periods in our lives we’d rather forget; one such being from 1969 to 1972 after I had ignominiously dropped out of high school – Queen’s College no less. I’d waded through five years there in a haze of mental confusion and failure which to this day defies explanation. Needle-sharp pricks of ridicule, insult, and humiliation were permanently stuck in my psyche. At 15, a lifetime of uncertainty stretched before me.
I didn’t confide the angst to my family. My mother was battling the aftermath of a disabling stroke and my father seemed to have resigned himself to abject disappointment where I was concerned. Having only sisters, I turned to my buddy friends for bonding. By 14, I had tasted my first beer and while at Q.C., occasionally enjoyed the guilty pleasures of cigarette-smoking with a schoolmate partner-in-crime while playing table-tennis at the nearby Legionnaires Hall or shirking school at the one ‘o’ clock matinee show. Having left school, I was also dealing with being on one hand an introverted, indecisive youth with raging acne; and on the other, having an undeniable inclination towards partying, drinking, and girls. My family seemed to know little of these leanings. My father probably sensed something, but was too paralyzed by constant headaches to ‘straighten’ me out.
I spent a few months at the Government Technical Institute in 1969, but my interest in electrical engineering was no match for my interest in a certain young lady on Main Street. A stint at the Rice Marketing Board was just as fleeting. Then in November of that year I got my first ‘real’ job as an apprentice electrician at the Georgetown Sewerage and Water Commissioners (GS&WC) in November 1969. I was the youngest employee there alongside some of the coarsest, most hardened and hard-drinking men I’ve ever had the dubious pleasure of calling my workmates. I always said I worked at the Waterworks instead of GS&WC. The reason was obvious.
‘Apprentice Electrician’ was almost a euphemism; in reality I was a member of the road gang, and my workplace was down in the manholes spread across central Georgetown. These were stiflingly-hot hell holes occasionally cooled by portable blowers. If I recall rightly there were maybe three blowers for the 24 ‘stations’ from Kingston to Albouystown. Each consisted of two floors. In the upper room were two motors attached by shafts to pumps in the lower enclosure that pumped sewage.
My job, along with two other electricians, was mainly to assist with the servicing and maintenance of the motors, but we also changed high-tension fuses on ‘lantern-post’ transformers (something I liked because of its daring) and cleaned electrodes in other manholes that contained actual sewage, which I hated, because then we were practically working in human excrement. (Maybe that’s why I felt so repulsed by Donald Trump’s recent alleged sh*thole remark)
It was while at the GS&WC that I got into serious drinking, and horse-race gambling, even as I continued partying at least every other Saturday night. With a princely wage of $9.37 a week, I really couldn’t afford any of these pastimes. Many Friday afternoons I would go home broke or in varying stages of intoxication; sometimes both. No one at home appeared to know or care, which hurt sometimes. I was acutely aware that less than two years before, I’d been attending the most prestigious secondary school in the country; possibly in the Caribbean. The macho drinking and gambling were in fact a façade for the humiliation I felt at such an abysmal comedown.
Even worse were the occasional ‘sightings’ by people who knew me, my family, and my ex-QC status. There was one particular guy, about my age, who jeered and mocked me with ‘Hey Q.C. boy’ taunts and worse. My lowest point was probably sifting through sewage grit with my workmates, looking for gold jewellery inadvertently dropped into toilets.
This was rivalled only by driving around with my road gang in one of those open three-wheel carts one Friday afternoon, all of us high, and passing round a large XM rum in full public view. The tears came that afternoon in 1971 when I wobbled up the stairs at home and saw the look on my mother’s face as she beheld the condition of her ‘one and only’ son. She and my father died a few months later, within a week of each other.
Two months after my parents’ death I was dismissed from the Waterworks for doing something (wrong) that many others were doing. Still a teenager, now orphaned, jobless, and plagued by insomnia, I briefly contemplated ending it all with a bottle of sleeping pills, but Hamlet’s soliloquy stopped me.
Then I recalled how the taunting words of one of my Waterworks colleagues, who feigned disbelief that I was a QC boy, had set me thinking about proving that the smartness which had taken me to Queen’s was still there. He practically challenged me to prove it. But I wasn’t quite ready, and for the next year or so I continued to party, drink, and gamble.
I also became somewhat radicalized by the Black power movement then sweeping America and the Caribbean, and teetered on the verge of delinquency. But one of my sisters intervened. With her guidance and example I began to change course.
By the end of 1972 I was in full study mode with private lessons aimed at the GCE ‘O’ Level. A year later with my certificate in the bag, I set my sights on teaching, and in 1974 entered the Cyril Potter College of Education. My teaching career endured with intermittent stints from 1976 to 2013, but I also found time to become a trained journalist and a National Insurance Inspector. In 2000 I won the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association Short Story Competition from an international field of some 4000 entries – the first and only Guyanese to do so. Now I’m a columnist with a national newspaper. I have a wife, seven adult children, and six grands. And even though things could be better, life has been good to me.
I realized (too late) that my parents’ love and counsel and to some extent my sisters’ when I was a young child had laid a foundation of strength and resilience that hadn’t become manifest until my early twenties. Their tacit encouragement of my open-mindedness, the memory of their words of comfort and admonition, of my mother’s stories about an idyllic childhood; even the memory of  Daddy’s wild cane on my rear end, were nothing less than consolation during my darker days.
My ‘appreciation’ of the female sex, affinity for the very young and the very old, willingness to accept censure, and my love of nature all helped to keep me balanced when the see-saw of life upset my equilibrium. Now I believe that young people, especially young adults, can find that same balance if they understand what I am saying.
The worst details of my teenage humiliation have been deliberately omitted. But I know there are thousands of young people out there who have suffered and are suffering emotional and psychological trauma that I never dreamed of. I hear it and I read it. I sometimes see it. And I hurt empathetically. If this story touches a few of them, or even one, and leads to reconciliation in whatever shape, I would consider it well worth the effort to write.

---

---