Only Jesus Has to Judge It. (And Only Smarties Have the Answer)

I never thought tuberculosis would be a recurring theme in my life, but the sneaky little cough has had a particular way of seasoning each turning point I’ve endured thus far.

The year I turned fourteen, my obsession for musical theatre underwent a significant phase transition. Having spent eighty percent of my childhood memorizing the words to “The King and I” and wishing I were Maria from “West Side Story,” I suddenly discovered there were other equally intriguing worlds where music and drama uniteas cathartically as a they do in a Rogers and Hammerstein’s movie.

These worlds are, of course, those of opera and rock opera. In grade nine,I had the opportunity to join Vancouver Technical Secondary’s very own “Opera Club,” where, for ten dollars a production, students were entitled to watch a dress rehearsal of such fine performances as Aida and La Boheme. While I certainly cried tears of empathy for the couple that got trapped in a dungeon for eternityin Aida, it was La Boheme that truly swept me away. True love raging like fire against the bitterness of winter, poverty, and tuberculosis, tuberculosis, tuberculosis—what’s not to love? It didn’t take too long before I discovered a modern, rock-opera spin-off of La Boheme (RENT), and became obsessed with it, as well. (Although, I must admit, that instead of tuberculosis, RENT’s malady of choice is AIDS—which has fortunately not played as significant a role in my life…)

Tuberculosis made its next significant appearance the moment I went from being exclusively a theatre nerd, to being an “outdoorsy” one as well—the year of TREK. On one fine morning that year, my friend Georgia and I had decided we would walk to school together—from Commercial Drive to King Edward and Macdonald—just because we could. Equipped with Nalgene bottles and power bars, we left the East Side at 5:30 in the morning, arriving just in time for our math class at 8:40 am. Like any good Trekkie, I had consumed copious amounts of h20 throughout our escapade; our teachers had warned us that dehydration was not our friend, and I believed them. Consequently, I needed desperately to go to the bathroom the moment we arrived at Mr. Beard’s class, and was excused to do so. Twenty minutes later, however, my bladder informed me that it was in fact not yet satiated, and so I asked the teacher for permission to go again.

Mr. Beard looked up from his desk, took of his glasses, squinted his hazel eyes, and cupped his hands around his mouth, as if pretending to speak through a megaphone. Clearing his throat several times so as to attract the attention of other students, he shouted spastically, “TB! TB!”

I looked around, terribly confused, searching for an answer in the faces of my classmates; they shrugged, equally puzzled by Mr. Beard’s announcement.

I looked back at Mr. Beard, and quietly inquired “Do you mean Tuberculosis, Mr. Beard?”

Without a word, Mr.Beard got up from his desk, walked towards me, hunched down and, two centimeters from my face shouted “TINY BLADDER!”

Apart from empathizing with my dear friend Michaela while she endured apoorly diagnosed case of the eternal cough, my time as a university student proved to be surprisingly tuberculosis-free, and just when I thought that ithad exhausted its presence in my life, it decided to pay a surprise visit to me here in Guadeloupe. Well, ok, not quite tuberculosis itself, but its spirit nonetheless. Last week I received a letter from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs commanding me to present myself at a hospital in Point a Pitrefor an X-Ray so as to be assured that I am not a “vector” of the illness.

After a very sweaty two-hour bus ride, I arrived at the wrong hospital. Exhausted and moody, I bought a frozen chocolate bar from thelobby vending machine, and sat down on the curb next to the parking lot, staring off into space. All of a sudden, something strange came into focus. On the bumper of a Lexus, there was a caricature of a nude woman, sitting provocatively and smiling coyly. Beside her, were written the words “Only Jesus Has to Judge It.”

I laughed out loud for quite some time, and was reminded of the time my friend Sarah and I came across a similarly absurd motif on the back of a box of Smarties; the box offered a series riddles, all of which had somewhat coherent responses except for the last one. The question went something along the lines of “do zebras like ice cream?” while the answer was a pompous “Only Smarties Have the Answer.” After many a failed attempt to integrate the phrase into our high school lexicon, Sarah and I eventually settled on keeping the phrase as our own personal mantra. Bizarre as it was, it made us laugh; laughing puts things into perspective, and in the end, that’s what mantras are meant to do.

Following the same logic, I decided to take on this strange bumper sticker’s blasphemous wisdom as my Guadeloupian mantra…at least for the day.

Thirteen Euros and a talkative taxi drive later, I found myself in the correct radiology waiting room with three other English Language Assistants. Pathetically excited to see one another (it’s a little hard to get around the island and hang out with people without a car) we began swapping stories of our first three weeks in Guadeloupe. “I live in the middle of the city, yet seeing a cow on a leash has become a normality for me,” explained Paul, who had just spent his past year in London working for a fashion magazine. “Have you ever noticed that people extend their fists, instead of their hands here, when you go to introduce yourself?” asked Melissa, who was sun burnt despite having applied sunscreen twice that morning. Just as I began explain how being in Point a Pitre felt as big as New York after having lived in a small town for three weeks, I heard a very loud “MARRRRRIACARRRRROLINA.”

I turned around to find the X-Ray technician looking impatiently in my direction, and the rest of the waiting room patients tapping their feet in frustration. Apparently they had been calling me for a few minutes now. “Oops,” I said, and apologized profusely to everyone in the room. As I made my way towards the technician, I saw a man looking in my direction. When we met eyes, he pouted his lips, made very loud clucking noises and tapped his lips with his index finger. My friend Silvia had warned meof this facial gesture upon my arrival; apparently Guadeloupians do it to demonstrate their disapproval of something.

For a moment I felt special to receive such an “authentic”, “cultural” reaction to my wrongdoing; soon after I felt remorse and embarrassment, but finally, I invoked my mantra, and smiling, I reminded myself “Only Jesus Has to Judge It.”

Well, no doubt Jesus judged it, because my bus ride back to Capesterre was, for the most part, hell on wheels. Not only did I have to stand for the first hour and a half, but the weather went from awful to worse. At first it was blisteringly sunny outside and humid inside, but we at least had a nice Caribbean breeze that slightly relieved the ubiquitous smell of B.O. Soon after, though, the tropical rain began to POUUUR, and everyone closedtheir windows. It just so happened, of course,that I was sitting next to the only person that wanted the window open, and so as the bus swerved, I got repeatedly squashed towards the window and was soon completely drenched. Concomitantly, the smell of B.O. that we had managed to disperse earlier with the breeze only worsened, as the rest of the bus windows were now closed.

My salvation came at last about 5 minutes before my bus stop, when Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” began blasting on the high-tech surround system.*Ridiculously excited to hear it, I began to hum quietly, so as not to disturb my fellow buspanions. But soon I heard another little voice singing along, and realized that it was the woman sitting next to me. I watched her from my peripheral vision for a few seconds and looked around to see if anyone else on the bus was reacting. Nothing. People didn’t care. So, I thought, “feck it, I want to sing to.” And so I did.

And this time it made sense that only Jesus had to Judge it, because no one on the bus paid any mind to our off-key yodeling; it was us and Whitney and that was all that mattered.

Why so, do you ask?

Only Smarties Have the Answer.

* Nevermind the fact that the bus looks like it should have tetanus as a result of its ridiculously rusty nature; as long as the music plays, the bus goes.