Fresh Hell Parties at a Gas Station

Welcome to the Fresh Hell Newsletter, where this week we travel to St. Croix, USVI, and a little gas station called Ziggy’s. (Fresh Hell is shorter than usual this week cause I’m tired.)

I like to party at a gas station.

It’s called Ziggy’s. In addition to the gas station, there is a huge open-air bar adjacent to the gas forecourt. We call it church because it’s where we go to see our people.

Ziggy’s is on the east end of St. Croix, the lesser known member of the U.S. Virgin Islands. St. John and St. Thomas are about 50 miles north, so people who charter sailboats rarely venture across the open ocean to visit it, very few cruise ships stop there and most mainland Americans can’t find it on a map. It’s fine. We like it quiet. Unless we’re the ones making noise.

The Boy Wonder and I own a house on St. Croix, with its azure waters, endless beaches and diverse eco-systems from rain forests to cactus-covered arid mountains. The dining is world class (though service remains on island time), its history is rich and fascinating. The architecture is historic and Danish. The air perfumed. We bought the house 10 years ago, a year before St. Croix got flattened by Hurricane Maria, a Cat 5 monster, the mention of which still makes my local friends catch feelings. Pretty sure it’s PTSD.

Those who stayed on island during that storm, most of whom did so because they couldn’t get (or afford) a seat on a plane off island because it spun up from a Cat 1 to a Cat 5 in less than a day, or they had pets they couldn’t abandon, have a certain cachet on this rock that is hard to explain. Everyone who weathered that storm had at least one moment when they were pretty sure they were going to die. The whole island looked like the moon for months afterward and the power was out for four months or longer. (We were lucky. It took Puerto Rico about a year to restore all its power.) Standing in line for ice and groceries took up a big part of folks’ time for months and months afterward. If you had a generator, you let people move in. We briefly regretted our purchase.

Many electric linemen who flew over from the mainland to help rebuild the island’s electrical grid after the storm fell in love with the place and stayed. It might have had something to do with Ziggy’s, where for the duration of the rebuild, they all had a hard time paying for a drink. People islandwide were so happy when they showed up on their streets that the linemen were treated like gods.

If you wanna meet a whole mess of the linemen, and the people who lived through Maria, and the snowbirds who flock there for months in the dreaded winter months up north, and the local people whose families have been there for generations, you go to Ziggy’s.

It’s a place where you know you’re going to see your people. You’ll catch up on the island gossip, find out whose cheating on who with whose baby daddy, find out who’s sick, who’s getting better, who had to leave, whose coming back, meet an attorney general and a billionaire and a guy who lives in the bush.

I met my island best friend at Ziggy’s and she’s become one of my best friends off island, too. Our paths never would have crossed on the mainland. She’s from deepest red east Tennessee and I, most definitely, am not.

I’ve stood in the pouring rain next to Ziggy’s gas pumps at midnight on New Year’s Eve (which we call Old Year’s Night), surrounded by 300 people of every color, size, class, size and shape imaginable, laughing and kissing and hugging and singing Auld Lang Syne. I was at a Monday night concert, seated next to an elegant elderly white woman, with her white, perfectly coiffed hair, her collection of diamonds that she wears everywhere and her $1,000 tracksuit. She was sharing the largest joint I’ve ever seen with a middle-aged rasta with his dreads piled up a foot on his head. They’ve been best friends for years. It was like watching Martha and Snoop share a doob.

Those unlikely pairings are more common than not on St. Croix and it’s what make the place so magic sometimes. The shit the island puts you through means that your island people are often more precious to you than your stateside family. You are judged there based on whether you are nice, courteous and whether you will help if asked. Because you will be asked. There is no police or medical infrastructure worth mentioning. The power goes out constantly. The public infrastructure is the butt of a long-running joke. When one of my neighbors had a heart attack, he didn’t call an ambulance. He called the people who lived next door, who drove him to the emergency room. Another friend had her life saved when another neighbor, an ER doc, checked in on her when she wasn’t feeling well and diagnosed her with a life-threatening illness that the local hospital had missed. She flew off island to a Miami hospital the next day. They told her she would have died if she’d waited another day to come.

When someone has to go off island for medical care, you donate to their Gofundme page to pay for their air fare. When the homeless man asks for food for his dogs, you give it. You lend tools, food, time, love, patience, expertise. You get it, too. You do these things in a way that you would never probably do back stateside and that’s because, on St. Croix, you know you are simply paying it forward and it will come back around to you one day—and that’s not theoretical. When asked to help, if you say no, unless you have a damned good excuse, people remember. People almost never say no.

That’s not to say the rock is paradise. There are jerks there, like everywhere, people who don’t realize how unwise it is to piss anyone off in a community this tightly connected. Others abuse the kindness of the community—they won’t pay their share of the bill, expect everything from others and offer nothing in return. They are rapidly persona non grata-fied. There are criminal gangs that run drugs on and through the island, murdering Crucians along the way. Homelessness and mental illness are widespread. Domestic violence is rampant. So is poverty, unemployment and a lack of anything resembling long-term job prospects unless you get a job working for the barely functioning, perpetually bankrupt U.S.V.I. government, which is the largest employer on the island. Most of my island family who live there full- or near-full time work remotely for stateside companies.

Despite the moments of transcendence at Ziggy’s, St Croix, which abolished slavery in 1848, is still largely segregated: black, brown and poorer in the communities on the west end, white and monied on the east. It can be very hard to live there. It can seem impossible to get anything you need—incoming parcels have to clear through U.S. Customs even though St. Croix is the United States. Everything comes by boat, so during bad weather seasons, shelves go bare. Craftspeople and reliable tradespeople are rarer than hen’s teeth. The good ones are booked solid for months. The U.S. Post Office is sort of a suggestion rather than a functioning mail delivery organization. (But increasingly, that’s true of everywhere.) And then there are those hurricanes, the Great Perspective Givers.

Ziggy’s is one of the few places where barriers and problems disappear for a few hours. It’s where you go to check in, check out, let people know you’re back on island, or leaving. It’s where you go if you need to talk to your electrician after 4pm cause you know he’ll be there even though he’s not answering his texts. It’s where we have the memorial services for friends who pass. It’s where we build and maintain our island family.

Church.

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