Free Remembrance and Pantomime by Derek Walcott

audience.
    JACKSON
         Mr. Trewe, I am trying to explain that I myself feel like a ass holding this tray in my hand while you standing up there naked, and that if anybody should happen to pass, my name is immediately mud. So, when you put back on your pants, I will serve your breakfast.
    HARRY
         Actors do this sort of thing. I’m getting into a part.
    JACKSON
         Don’t bother getting into the part, get into the pants. Please.
    HARRY
         Why? You’ve got me worried now, Jackson.
    JACKSON
    ( Exploding )
          Put on your blasted pants, man! You like a blasted child, you know!
    ( Silence. HARRY puts on his pants )
    HARRY
         Shirt, too?
    ( JACKSON sucks his teeth )
         There.
    ( HARRY puts on his shirt )
         You people are such prudes, you know that? What’s it in you, Jackson, that gets so Victorian about a man in his own hotel deciding to have breakfast in his own underwear, on a totally deserted Sunday morning?
    JACKSON
         Manners, sir. Manners.
    ( He puts down the tray )
    HARRY
         Sit.
    JACKSON
         Sit? Sit where? How you mean, sit?
    HARRY
         Sit, and I’ll serve breakfast. You can teach me manners. There’s more manners in serving than in being served.
    JACKSON
         I ain’t know what it is eating you this Sunday morning, you hear, Mr. Trewe, but I don’t feel you have any right to mama-guy me, because I is a big man with three children, all outside. Now, being served by a white man ain’t no big deal for me. It happen to me every day in New York, so it’s not going to be any particularly thrilling experience. I would like to get breakfast finish with, wash up, finish my work, and go for my sea bath. Now I have worked here six months and never lost my temper, but it wouldn’t take much more for me to fling this whole fucking tray out in that sea and get somebody more to your sexual taste.
    HARRY
    ( Laughs )
         Aha!
    JACKSON
         Not aha, oho!
    HARRY
    ( Drawing out a chair )
         Mr. Phillips …
    JACKSON
         Phillip. What?
    HARRY
         Your reservation.
    JACKSON
         You want me play this game, eh?
    ( He walks around, goes to a corner of the gazebo )
         I’ll tell you something, you hear, Mr. Trewe? And listen to me good, good. Once and for all. My sense of humor can stretch so far. Then it does snap. You see that sea out there? You know where I born? I born over there. Trinidad. I was a very serious steel-band man, too. And where I come from is a very serious place. I used to get into some serious trouble. A man keep bugging my arse once. A bad john called Boysie. Indian fellow, want to play nigger. Every day in that panyard he would come making joke with nigger boy this, and so on, and I used to just laugh and tell him stop, but he keep laughing and I keep laughing and he going on and I begging him to stop and two of us laughing, until …
    ( He turns, goes to the tray, and picks up a fork )
         one day, just out of the blue, I pick up a ice pick and walk over to where he and two fellers was playing card, and I nail that ice pick through his hand to the table, and I laugh, and I walk away.
    HARRY
         Your table, Mr. Phillip.
    ( Silence. JACKSON shrugs, sits at the table )
    JACKSON
         Okay, then. Until.
    HARRY
         You know, if you want to exchange war experiences, lad, I could bore you with a couple of mine. Want to hear?
    JACKSON
         My shift is seven-thirty to one.
    ( He folds his arms. HARRY offers him a cigarette )
         I don’t smoke on duty.
    HARRY
         We put on a show in the army once. Ground crew. RAF. In what used to be Palestine. A Christmas panto. Another one. And yours truly here was the dame. The dame in a panto is played by a man. Well, I got the part. Wrote the music, the book, everything, whatever original music there was. Aladdin and His Wonderful Vamp. Very obscene, of course. I was the Wonderful Vamp.