In early July, I flew to Jamaica in hope of contacting Bunny Wailer, the last of the Wailers, Bob Marley's original band. If you don't know who he is—and of the people who see GQ, surely a goodly percentage won't know; to the rest it will seem asinine to ID such a major figure; either way, though, this is worth doing—find a computer clip of the Wailers performing "Stir It Up" onThe Old Grey Whistle Test, a music show that used to run on the BBC. It was 1973, their first real tour. Bunny is off to Bob's left, singing the high part and doing a little repetitive one-two accent thing with brushes on snares. He's wonderfully dressed in a tasseled burgundy Shriner's fez and abstract Rastafarian sweater-vest. All three of them look like they could have been in Fat Albert's gang. Possibly no group of musicians has ever looked flat cooler. Peter Tosh was a tall, purple sphinx with an inexplicably sweet falsetto. If Elvis had walked in, Tosh might have nodded.

It had long been a dream of mine to meet Bunny Wailer—a pipe dream, sometimes a literal one in the sense that I dreamed it while holding a pipe. I don't know what it is about Jamaican music, but creatively it just seems to take place at a higher amperage. It may be an island effect. Isolation does seem to produce these intensities sometimes. You think of Ireland, for instance, a backwater in so many ways, and yet: Yeats, Beckett, Joyce, in one century—how does that happen? Consider that in Kingston, in one decade, you had the emergence of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, the Pioneers and the Paragons, the Melodians and the Ethiopians, the Heptones and the Slickers, the Gaylads, plus an index of people whose names you maybe don't know but who, once heard, are never forgotten. A vortex of world-class talents. The majority of them came from the same housing projects and were singing in large part to get out of them. Partly it's this yearning, a brilliant hungriness, that you hear. There's more to it, though. The reason the great Jamaican stuff deepens over time, over years, not with nostalgia but with meaning and nuance, is that it's a spiritual music. That's the anomaly underlying its power. It's spiritual pop—not in a calculated way, like Christian rock, but in a way that comes from within. Rastafarianism, when it took Kingston's emerging record industry as a means for expressing its existence and point of view, made this possible. In the States, rock 'n' roll is always on some level a move away from God into the devil's music, but in Jamaica the cultural conditions were different. Pop grew toward Jah.

Getting in touch with Bunny turned out not surprisingly to be hard (he's known for his reclusiveness). E-mail addresses gave back replies from other people saying to e-mail different addresses, call different numbers. Finally, at one point, I got a message. Unexpectedly it came directly from him. It said, You may come. Actually, the language of the e-mail was "Greetings. You may continue with your travel arrangements. One Love, Jah B." The name that came up on the in-box was Neville Livingston, Bunny's real name (Neville O'Reilly Livingston).

Since then there'd been absolute silence. For all I knew, the invitation had come from some stoned joker in Denmark. Also, I'd seen things saying that Bunny moves back and forth between Kingston and a farm in the mountains. What if I got there and he was somewhere in the interior, inaccessible.

···

Llewis (two l's) picked me up at the airport. We'd spoken several times beforehand, via phone. Someone recommended him to me as a person who knew Kingston. For some reason, Llewis hadn't wanted to hold a sign for me in baggage claim. Not that I requested it, but it would have been easiest. Instead, he instructed me to approach the dispatch girls, in yellow vests, and tell them I was looking for him—they'd show me where he was. I went up to them. "There he is," they said, pointing outside to a tall guy who seemed younger than he'd sounded. White polo shirt, shades. Getting closer, I noticed he had a sign after all. Someone else's name was on it.

"Hi, Llewis?" I said.

"John?" he said.

"Yes," I said.

He put down the sign. "I was just holding that for a friend," he said, "doing him an honor." He carried the sign to the parking lot.

Llewis never explained the no-sign/wrong-sign muddle in a way that made any sense, nor how he'd come to have two l's at the front of his name, a question to which he simply refused to speak. I left Jamaica still curious about those things. They were the only two enigmas of that sort, however. At all other times he made conspicuous efforts at straightforwardness. I recommend his services to anyone visiting Kingston. (P.S. He later sent me a message saying his mother had seen it spelled that way in a book, though other people told him it was an error; "LOL, I love it even if it's an error," he wrote.)

We climbed into a white box-van, for which he apologized, saying his good car had been in the shop but would be out tomorrow. I didn't mind the van, though; it gave a clear vantage point from which to see Kingston, passing through jerking freeze-frames of brightly colored intersections. Llewis had been doing research and knew the locations of certain places that dealt in secondhand vinyl records. He introduced me to some stuff from the early '80s I'd never heard. We listened to Papa Michigan and General Smiley's "Diseases" from 1982. It was lyrically disturbing and musically thrilling. It warned all those who would "worship vanities" that "these things unto Jah Jah not pleases." If you're intent on pursuing them anyway,

Mind Jah lick you with diseases!
I said the most dangerous diseases.
I talkin' like the elephantitis.
The other one is the poliomyelitis.

It was summer. The gas-and-garbage smell of the city, the starkness of Kingston's industrial shoreline, made you alert. The humidity was so high, it made the atmosphere sag, like the clouds were on your shoulders. The way General Smiley said "poliomyelitis" was beautiful somehow; he pronounced it like polya, polyamyelitis.

Llewis hadn't seemed fazed at all by the idea that a person would come to Jamaica looking for Bunny Wailer with no concept of where he lived and only the vaguest intimation of interest or consent on Bunny's part. For all Llewis reacted, it was as if I'd told him I was there to look into import/export opportunities. He'd seen Bunny perform at a festival in the city two years before and found him still electrifying. Bunny looks more and more like a desert father onstage, with his robes and white beard. Llewis quoted a talk-poem he had delivered to the crowd, something about those who want to take the fruit of reggae but don't want to water the root of reggae.

If you had been to Kingston, it would have seemed changed. "I've never seen it like this," Llewis said. "It was never like this." People had their heads down; you could tell that the city's psychic burden had been increased by the violence of what they already called "Bloody May."

What happened is this: A wave of violent gun battles overtook inner-city Kingston, creating a state of internal siege. The U.S. Department of Justice had filed an extradition request asking Jamaica's prime minister, Bruce Golding, to hand over the island's biggest and most powerful drug boss, Christopher Coke (real name). They call him Dudus, which I'd been hearing on the news as Dude-us, but Llewis informed me it's pronounced Dud-us. "Dude-us would be the fancy version," he said. "Too fancy."

A short, thick, somewhat pan-faced man who keeps a low profile and always seems to be smiling at an inward joke, Dudus is loved by thousands for his Santa Claus qualities when it comes to helping cover the rent or making sure soccer teams get jerseys. According to the FBI, his gang, the Shower Posse, has 1,400 (known) murders attached to it. The Jamaicans felt no great desire to go after Dudus. Jamaican politics is fantastically corrupt, and plenty of ministers had ties to him. Golding tried wishing it away, even hiring an American law firm to lobby against the request, but eventually Washington applied pressure.

Coke gathered his forces, calling in fighters from all over Jamaica, small-time mercenaries from the country who were good with guns. Finally the police and security forces went in to extract Dudus. He had snipers on the rooftops. He had CCTV cameras everywhere, spies among the police and in the ministry. The battle lasted a month. Scores of people were killed, including many civilians—we don't know how many, since the government in all likelihood significantly downplayed the total, desperately trying to save the shreds of the year's all-important tourist economy.

It ended in farce. Dudus got stopped at a roadblock on a highway outside Kingston. The man driving was his spiritual adviser. They claimed they were on their way to the U.S. embassy so Dudus could turn himself in, but to the Americans, not the Jamaicans. Dudus had a black, curly woman's wig on his head and a soft black Gucci cap on top of that and wore old lady's wire-rim glasses. Some said the police dressed him up this way for the mug shot, to make him look weak and to discourage his still loyal fighters, but it's likely he was using the disguise to get around. One of the soldiers present said later that Dudus had seemed strangely happy when they were cuffing him. He'd been so certain they'd kill him that when he realized it would go down legit, he experienced a rush of relief. Now he was in New York, having pleaded not guilty.

One of the weirdest things that happened during the buildup to the Dudus war was that Bunny Wailer put out a pro-Dudus dancehall record titled "Don't Touch the President." (President, or Pressy, is one of Dudus's many nicknames.)

Don't touch the president, inna di residen'.
We confident, we say him innocent.
Don't touch the Robin Hood, up inna neighborhood
Because him take the bad, and turn it into good.

Why would an elder statesman of Jamaican culture take the side of these crowds they were showing on TV, in the streets of Kingston, screaming and putting themselves in the way of justice? (The international news cameras had zeroed in on a nuts-seeming woman with a handwritten cardboard sign comparing Dudus to Jesus Christ, and this was rebroadcast in a hundred countries for weeks as a typical expression of Caribbean chaos.)

Traffic was thick now. Llewis turned up the crappy radio in the van as we moved toward the hotel. The deejay played a song called "Slow Motion" by Vybz Kartel, probably the hottest dancehall singer in Jamaica right now. At that moment, Vybz was in jail, suspected (in the vaguest terms) of having gotten involved in Dudus-related violence. "But we're hoping he'll get out soon," said Llewis as he drove. "Maybe this Friday."

This was the music Llewis loved best, not the old stuff (which he knew and respected). If the Wailers were playing now, this is what they'd be into. A young couple in a car next to us grinned and bobbed their heads to it as we rolled by. I'd never been wild about dancehall, but now I realized it was because I'd never really heard dancehall. You can't just "listen" to dancehall. It happens; you have to be there for it. The deejay was mixing together three or four different songs. Kartel's hypnotic voice floated over the top of beats that would suddenly vanish, leaving only spacey, bass-throbs, as the words kept running. "So this is now?" I asked. "Right?"

"This is right now," Llewis said, stabbing his finger at the radio. "This is Right. Now."

At the hotel, I downloaded "Slow Motion." It was somewhat limp, in this version. Vybz did not live on the computer. He was in the air over Kingston.

I called Bunny.

"Yes," the voice said. Not "Yes?" Yes.

"Mr. Wailer?" What else was one supposed to say? I wasn't going to call him Jah B.

We talked for a bit. "We can do this," he said. He gave me an address, a few blocks off one of the main boulevards, not a particularly upscale part of Kingston. We set a time. "Bless," he said.

I passed out listening to a song that had been on a loop in my head in the weeks leading up to that trip, "Let Him Go," a song Bunny wrote in 1966, when Bob Marley was off in Delaware working as an assistant in a DuPont laboratory and going by the name Donald. It's a Rude Boy number, one in a series of songs and answer-songs that took over the Jamaican sound systems between 1965 and '67. Rudies, as the growing numbers of reckless youths who terrorized and fascinated middle-class Kingston were called, had become a national menace. Half the major ska stars weighed in with a message. There were pro-Rude Boy songs, anti-Rude Boy songs, and songs that weren't clearly one thing or another. With the whole island paying attention, a focused competitiveness—never lacking in Jamaican music—elevated the songwriting.

None of them is quite on a level with "Let Him Go," the one Bunny Livingston wrote. The backing band included a few of the Skatalites, moonlighting. They laid down a buoyant, brassy rhythm that had just a little tug at the end, a little slur, a groove that, listening back, was transitional between ska and rocksteady. When I hear it start, I feel like a puck on an air-hockey table that's been switched on. Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo, the voices add to one another in layers, building a chord that becomes final right before they break into

Rudie come from jail 'cause
Rudie get bail.
Rudie come from jail 'cause
Rudie get bail.

There's a sound on that recording, a vocalized So! right between the ninety-ninth and one-hundredth seconds: The Wailers, defending Rudie as always, have just sung, Remember he is young, and he will live long. And then someone—you can't tell who—makes this noise. Intones, rather. It doesn't seem to come from inside the studio—doesn't belong, that is, to the texture of the session; it emanates from miles away and has arrived through an open window. Somewhere in the interior of Jamaica a goat herder with a staff has leaned back and loosed this sound into a valley, intending it for no ears but Jah's. Soooo!—the vowel fading quickly without an echo, pure life force. Was that Bunny doing that?

···

Llewis arrived twenty minutes early the next morning, and he did have the nice car, a blue Toyota model you don't often see in the States, somehow German-looking, which turned out to be appropriate, because one thing I'd learned about Llewis and would have occasion to learn better over coming days was that he passionately supported Germany's national soccer team and, no matter what else he was doing, avidly followed their unimpeded progress in the World Cup with half his brain. He was perhaps the only person in Jamaica who felt like that. He talked all about them, about their teamwork, as we drove around.

I asked him if he wanted to sit in on the interview with Bunny. "Sure," he said. "It might loosen him up."

"You think I'll make him uptight?" I said.

"He's pretty reclusive, right?" Llewis said diplomatically.

Bunny lived in an area with only every fourth or fifth road sign intact. I was keeping my finger on the map while Llewis counted lefts, U-turning around till we found the curving lane that had to be his. It looked like Cuba, but more drab. The roads were viciously rutted. The houses were miniature compounds; everybody who could had high walls with glass shards or wire on top. Inside, however, there might be civility, shade, nice colors. You didn't want to show any of that.

I won't say I was shocked to find that Bunny Wailer lived in a poor area. It wasn't a slum, and he has always preferred to live humbly. (When he ditched the Wailers' first world tour in 1973 over disagreements about the direction of the band, he famously went and lived in a ramshackle cabin by the beach, surviving on fish from the sea and writing songs.) Still, the degree of shabbiness surprised me, and Llewis remarked on it, too. How long has Bunny Wailer's music—songs that he participated in making—been in every dorm room, every coffee shop, and he was driving an aged and dusty Japanese sedan? That was serious baldhead math.

There were two tall corrugated-metal gates with giant Rastafarian lions on them that parted creakily to let you in. A tin sign hung on one. It read, JAH B WILL BE AWAY UNTIL MARCH 15TH. It was July 6. I was guessing he didn't mind the overall message.

He was standing there in the courtyard, small and every bit as wiry as he is in the well-known picture of him playing soccer, dreadlocked and shirtless. He had on an excellent brown collarless suit that looked like something Sammy Davis Jr. would have worn to a hip party in 1970. His beard was long, wispy, and yellowish white. He wore his dreads swirled atop his head into a crown and kept in place with bands. He greeted us with great politeness but seemed not to want to waste time. He addressed Llewis as "Soldier"!

He'd put out chairs for us under a lime tree. His wife, Jean Watt, a gracefully aged woman, brought out orange juice, saying, "Bless, bless."

"Well," I began. "It's an honor to meet you."

"Well, it's an honor to be here, on the earth," he said. "You know what I mean? So we at one. What's up with you, now?"

One was intimidated, but in a way that felt appropriate. That was Bunny Wailer, who taught Bob Marley what harmony was. When we'd come in, I had asked if we could maybe take him to lunch, anywhere he liked. Llewis had warned me to say specifically that it would be an "ital" restaurant, one that served food appropriate for Rastas. "Thanks," Bunny answered, pausing, "but...the Blackheart Man is very skeptical. He'd rather eat from his own pot."

The notebook read, "No. 1, ask him about what's happening now, the stuff with Dudus," but we hadn't even gotten through the turning-on-the-recorders part when Bunny embarked on an hour-long, historically footnoted breakdown of exactly how the Dudus crisis had come about, tracing it back to the birth of the garrisons in the '60s.

In order to understand anything about Jamaica and why it's statistically one of the most violent places on earth, you have to know something about garrisonism, the unique system by which the island's government functions. Before you turn away in anticipation of boredom, let me say that you may find yourself intrigued by the sheer fact that something this twisted is occurring on a U.S.-friendly island 500 miles from our coast. Garrisonism has been described—in a Jamaican report put out by a specially convened panel—as "political tribalism." (Bunny called it "a political tribal massacre" in his classic "Innocent Blood" thirty years ago.) The history of garrisonism can be supercrudely summarized as follows. In the 1960s, the island's two rival parties—the liberal People's National Party (PNP) and the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Jamaica's version of Democrats and Republicans—started putting up housing projects in Kingston's poorest neighborhoods. Once the buildings were up, whichever party had built them moved in its own trustworthy supporters and kicked anybody who didn't want to vote their way out of the neighborhood. Families and groups of friends were shattered. Children had to change schools because their old school's party affiliation had changed. Many of these displaced ended up in squatters' camps.

When it was all a question of local island politics, nobody much cared, just as nobody much cares today outside Jamaica, or didn't until Dudus went rogue. Things changed in the '70s, when PNP leader Michael Manley expressed sympathy with Castro. The CIA was terrified about Cuban communism spreading to the other Caribbean islands. We backed the Reaganite JLP leader, Edward Seaga. Now there were more, and more serious, guns flowing into the garrisons. It was Manley against Seaga, socialism against capitalism, PNP against JLP, with the garrisons pitted against one another, fighting on behalf of their parties for control of the island. Kingston emerged as a miniature front in the Cold War.

In the '80s, drug running enriched certain dons to the point that they no longer needed the state as much. The garrisons were becoming quasi-states. The dons could afford their own guns; they could supply forces. They started dictating terms to the ministers. That is, if the ministers still wanted all the thousands of votes the dons controlled.

"What I'm saying in 'Don't Touch the President,' " Bunny told me, "is that if you remove Dudus, there's gonna be another Dudus, until you get rid of the source," namely ministerial corruption. He said Dudus had been a good don. Actually, what he said was, "He's taking bad and turning it into good, like Jesus Christ."

I asked if he'd ever met Dudus. Maybe at one of the passa passas, neighborhood concerts hosted by the don?

"Never seen him in my lifetime," he said.

He had the metal gates chained up and padlocked again. A sweet but mean-looking mutt was patrolling the patio. Bunny sat forward on his chair, bouncing his toes. His two cell phones went off incessantly. Llewis would back me up on that. Incessant. "And the amazing thing was," Llewis said, "he never looked to see who it was, but he never turned them off, either." It was true—he just let them ring and ring. I got used to it. A little kid came by and knocked. I gathered that people did this fairly often, asking for help. "WHO THAT? WHO THAT? NO, WRONG TIME HERE, CHECK ME BACK LIKKLE MORE, HEAR, SOLDIER? CHECK ME BACK LIKKLE MORE. RIGHT NOW ME IN A SERIOUS MEETING." The kid wasn't listening. We could see his eyes through a chink in the gate. "CHECK ME BACK LIKKLE MORE!" Bunny screamed.

Every now and then one of his sons walked through the leafy patio. A poster of his daughter, the burgeoning singer Cen'C Love, stood against a wall.

It seemed he was in a mood to talk, and not only that, but to talk about the old days. I hadn't wanted to push that too hard, treat him like a fossil. He's still writing songs occasionally, going on mini-tours. With some artists, if you ask too much about their old stuff, they take it as a criticism.

Bunny started talking about the young Bob Marley, what he was like when they attended the Stepney All Age School in St. Ann together. Back then they had called Bob Nesta, his first name at birth.

"A lot of people don't know the nature of the individual," Bunny said. "From a childhood state, Bob was cut out to be this icon, this saint." The pain of being biracial had deepened his sensitivity early on. His father was a white man, a captain in the British military, Norval Sinclair Marley. The influence of this side of Bob's childhood had been underemphasized, Bunny felt. Bob had grown up "in the condition of a nobody." In the Jamaica of that time, "the biracial child was like a reproach, because he brings shame on the family of the white man and shame on the family of the black woman.

"Bob would look at you and say, 'You think God white? God BLACK!' Ah-haa!..." Bunny raised his finger. "And his father is a white person, Captain Marley, and his genes is also in Bob." Bunny had clearly worked through this. He laughed darkly, shaking his head. "Aha, still the captain," he said.

Bob was from the country, but Bunny's family had only moved to the country; they came from Kingston. Bunny brought knowledge of music—he'd been a champion child dancer. At the Revivalist church in St. Ann where Bunny's father preached, he banged the drum during the songs. "I was a great drummer, you know," he said. "Sometimes they had to use my influence to build up the vibes of the church." Bunny would play his guitar there in the village, and Bob saw how many people came to listen. "It was the only little amusement in those dark woods," Bunny laughed.

The fervor with which Bob picked up music startled Bunny. "I did it as a hobby, for entertaining the community," he said. "Bob took it as a weapon, to get him out of that kind of condition of being a nobody to being a somebody, a musician." Bunny spoke about the first, not especially successful Bob Marley singles, issued under various names (one was "Bobby Martell") by the pioneering Chinese-Jamaican ska producer Leslie Kong. One of them, a song called "Terror," is a kind of holy grail in the world of Jamaican-record collecting. No copy has ever been found. Bunny implied that it had been too radical for release, the government wouldn't have liked it. "A lot of people don't know about that song," Bunny said. "Terrible song, that." He meant terrible as in fearsome. He blew my mind by quoting a verse of it:

He who rules by terror
Doeth grievous wrong.
In hell I'll count his error.
Let them hear my song.

"Them hide it," Bunny said. "That song nobody know, them hide it. It hidden."

I realized later that these are lines, fiddled with here and there, from an Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poem, "The Captain: A Legend of the Navy." A poem Bob had been made to memorize in school, maybe? It tells the story of a ship—a phantom precursor of the ship in "Slave Driver"—on which the captain is so cruel that the men commit mass suicide, rushing in to attack an enemy vessel at his command, then laying down their arms, letting the ship be blown to smithereens. Captain Marley, seven years dead, surely haunts this song. He'd abandoned Bob as a toddler. Bob's mom became the mistress of Bunny's father. During different stretches, the two boys lived under one roof together. They knew each other so well that years later, Bunny could remember (and recorded a version of) a song that Bob had written as a boy, a sing-songy thing called "Fancy Curls."

···

At this point, Bunny excused himself and went off for a lunch/siesta retreat of some kind. Llewis and I sat there on the patio for about an hour, talking quietly. He'd been right; his presence had put Bunny at greater ease. Whenever I expressed surprise—that exaggerated surprise it's somehow impossible not to affect when you're interviewing people: "Really?!"—Bunny would point at Llewis and say, "True, soldier?" And Llewis would say, "One hundred percent true."

When Bunny returned, his mood was suppressed. He sat farther back. His eyelids were lowered, and his phones rang shrilly in his pockets, utterly ignored. His silence during the preceding month was much less baffling.

I asked about Joe Higgs, the man who made the Wailers happen. Higgs—there's a neglected genius of Jamaican music. (His 1975 Life of Contradiction, recently rereleased, is desert-island good.) He died fairly young of cancer. In 1959, during a wave of political uprisings by militant Rastafarians, he was beaten and jailed. (Bunny himself would be imprisoned on ganja charges eight years later.) When Higgs got out, he started hosting informal music sessions under a fruit tree in the open yard by his place. "Trench Town in those days didn't have any real separation from yard to yard," Bunny said. "There was no fence, nothing, so Joe Higgs's yard was a place that had activities related to gambling, a table, the lady who sells fried dumplings, fried fish... It was a popular corner."

Higgs became a mentor to the Wailers, whose potential he sensed right away. Bunny said that the older man actually put his career on hold for a couple of years to train them. "He was paying so much attention to the Wailers," Bunny said, "he started to believe in the Wailers more even than himself." He taught them harmony, breath control, and the rudiments of composition, which young Bob especially was hungry to learn. According to Bunny, Higgs used Mr. Miyagi-like methods. He would come knocking at one thirty in the morning, waking them up and making them play, saying, "If you can't sing dem hours, then you can't sing." He would lead them deep into May Pen Cemetery (the same cemetery where bodies are said to have been covertly buried during the Dudus riots), then demand that they harmonize among the graves, reasoning, "If you're not afraid fe sing fe duppy [a Caribbean spirit], the audience caaan't frighten you."

"That was the kind of teacher he was," Bunny said. "It pumped bravery in us."

He mentioned that in all the years he'd been touring, since 1969, "I've never sexed a woman in my work." He laid out his theory that a man's energy is contained in his sperm. "Every time you discharge, you're liable to lose five pounds." He encouraged me to try it next time, weigh myself afterward.

"Maybe you lose five pounds," Llewis said. Bunny laughed.

He was getting tired. It was strange to realize, after hearing all these stories about that cradle period, that Bunny was entering his mid-sixties. Because Peter and Bob and Joe Higgs and so many others weren't destined to become old, you didn't expect it to happen to Bunny, somehow. He looks like a little Rastafarian wizard. He'll live much longer; he has that skinny-man longevity. How had he done it? I asked him. How had he alone stayed alive? "I put my trust in the Most High," he said, "Jah Rastafari." He told us we could come back tomorrow at the same time.

···

In the morning, we pulled up to Bunny's place as before and banged on the gates, but the scene had changed. An older Rasta, hollow-chested in his thinness and wearing gnarled gray dreads, greeted us, saying, "Africa love." When I think about it, he was probably greeting only Llewis that way. Bunny couldn't come out, the man explained. He was in a serious meeting. We should try again later.

We decided to see Trench Town. On the way, Llewis gave me an idea of where the different garrisons lay, which ones were PNP, which ones were JLP. We drove toward Tivoli Gardens but hit a roadblock and got turned around. "He is press," Llewis said. "I am press," I said. The young cop looked at us silently. He just repeated the circling motion with his finger, with his left hand over the machine gun. Things were visibly tense. Dudus's supporters didn't know what to do. Jamaican politics is a perpetual 1984-style standoff meant to be endlessly perpetuated while the ministers enrich themselves. It doesn't know how to behave in a vacuum.

I was frankly shocked by the appearance of the Trench Town Culture Yard. It's in a slum. That's an insensitive word, but when they have sledgehammer holes in the walls for windows, and women with babies on their arms are openly begging on the street, wanting to be paid to have their picture taken, and groups of ownerless dogs with skin diseases are going around, that's a slum. There's a lovely little area right there at the entrance, though, shaded with trees, and it has benches. Hummingbirds. A bunch of Rastas were hanging out. The air was sickly sweet with the smell of torched hemp.

Llewis and I talked and decided that a nice gesture would be to procure some good herb and bring it to Bunny. He'd been more generous with his time than any applicable obligations required. We soon met a young moped-riding gentleman capable of filling our need. We explained who it was for—they know Bunny well in Trench Town. They call him "Bunny Wailers" there, with an s. They also understood without needing it explained that he's unlikely to be a person who plays around with dry-ass gray you-have-to-smoke-four-joints-to-feel-it rope-weed. The guy promised to bring back the best he had. I happily overpaid, as Llewis seemed to feel that the guy was not overly bullshitting us about the quality.

Back at Bunny's, however, the same Rasta guy met us again at the gate. Jah B was sorry. The meeting looked to run longer than expected. Come back that night. Bunny did want to see us, the man said, but they were discussing serious matters.

It was late afternoon now. We were heat-drunk and fatigued and still hadn't really even begun. We discussed some more and agreed that we should take the opportunity to smoke some of the weed I'd bought, to make absolutely sure that it wasn't shit, that we wouldn't be inadvertently insulting Bunny with it. We would be like the king's tasters, I suppose. Where could this be done safely, though? Contrary to what you might think, Jamaica is not a place where you can just lie around in a park and smoke ganja all day.

Llewis said that he knew of some clubs. We drove for a while, toward the edge of the city. A security guy at the gate let us through. There was a big open-air bar. "Mind if we smoke?" Llewis asked. The guy said he didn't. We rolled a two-sheeter, under a giant sign that said no ganja smoking. Inside it was a strip club; out here it was just mellow. The girls inside had no customers. Dudus had killed Kingston tourism. They kept wandering out looking bored. Naturally we offered them hits from the joint, which they were evidently allowed to take, and did. We tipped them, just for existing, I suppose. They were all from the country. The cheapness of their lingerie was sad, and so was the horrible clacking '80s-era American pop they kept playing inside, real Casey Kasem nightmare stuff.

They rolled out a TV. The World Cup match was on. I hadn't even thought about the fact that Llewis had been prepared to miss it, his beloved Germany versus Spain, had the original schedule with Bunny happened. He'd put money on this match, too, it turned out. Llewis, what a solid dude. And now, by this magic, we got to watch the soccer after all, while smoking and drinking and waiting to go see Bunny. We had hours to kill.

The weed turned out to be way up there powerwise. I mean, I was straight confused for a while. Possibly this had something to do with making Germany's loss extra crushing to Llewis. He couldn't take it. To him it seemed not only perverse but insane that Spain had won. The litany of explanations, both technical and moral, that he delivered to the few assembled bar patrons and dancers became a discourse. He was lecturing. He slipped entirely into patois, and that's how the others spoke to him, so I fathomed little of what they said, while nonetheless seeing my role as to reassure Llewis of Germany's superiority.

We had a sort of hungover dinner at T.G.I. Friday's, Llewis somewhat morose. But on the way to Bunny's for what we hoped would be the last time, we listened to "Diseases" again, and "Diseases" would cheer up a dry drunk at a Cabo sales retreat.

Llewis taught me something. At high school in Jamaica, he said, when your team lost, it was traditional to chant, on your way out of the grounds, "We no feel no way! We no feel no way!" Meaning essentially, we're not sweating it, we didn't really give a shit anyway. I sensed real psychological depth in this chant and didn't need to be urged more than once by Llewis to beat on the dashboard and join him in it, which we did the rest of the way to Bunny's, and in that manner Llewis seemed to exorcise his disappointment.

Now it was dark. We knocked on the gate. The same guy came back, but this time he said Jah B had given instructions for us to be let in. We stepped through, back into the patio, and saw that Bunny was sitting around a table with a number of other Rastafarians. They were having a "reasoning," to use Bunny's word. He gestured to us and said that the meeting was wrapping up. It had been going for seven hours. The guy who let us in brought two chairs and put them in the opposite corner of the patio, motioning for us to sit. We sat while they continued to discuss business.

Llewis and I felt out of place and awkward. A couple of the women around the table were vocal about not wanting us there. At one point we stood up and tried to signal our willingness to wait outside or something, but the man who'd let us in said to the women, "Jah B wants them here, they are special people to Jah B," and everything calmed.

The meeting went on for maybe another hour. It began to rain, and we were allowed to bring our chairs closer. They prayed. Then there was an hour of good-byes. The Rastas waved to us cordially as they were leaving. Bunny sat in his office, with the door open, conferring privately with one of the sisters. We heard crying, and then they were praying, and Bunny made curious whooping sounds. It was revivalist-sounding. When he was done with that, he came out and spoke to us, told us he needed to bathe and freshen up, get restored. During our last visit, he'd said that he didn't sleep much, got most of his best work done at night.

I had a couple of decent-size roaches in my shirt pocket. We huffed those in the shadows of the courtyard. We could hear singing from a church across the street, the sound of many raised voices inside a tightly closed box. Bunny had an old poster leaning against one concrete wall, a portrait of Marcus Garvey. Llewis sang Burning Spear, Do you remember the days of slavery? After each hit he took, he'd say, "Irie." He wasn't a Rasta; he was being sort of tongue in cheek, the way we might say something in a southern accent after taking a shot of whiskey. He said he'd dabbled with Rastafarianism once, after high school, but had come to a place where he didn't believe in religion, period.

Bunny appeared as a dark shape in the light from his office, wearing a full formal-dress khaki Haile Selassie Ethiopian military uniform. His dreads were freshly coiled. He motioned for us to sit.

"What was that a meeting of?" I asked as we sat.

He explained that it had been a gathering of a group calling itself the Millennium Council, which contained a representative from each of the thirteen "mansions" of Rasta (like denominations—Bunny is Nyabinghi, one of the elders of that mansion). They were meeting to discuss Jamaica's participation in an upcoming international Rastafarian conference.

He began to tell us the story of how he had become a Rasta. "I knew of Rasta from I was a little child," he said, "but the Blackheart Man was the name given to the Rastaman, to make every youth stay far from that individual, 'cause he's likely to cut your heart out and eat it and all that kind of stuff. And when you disobeyed or did anything that wasn't appropriate within the family, they would say, 'If you don't do this here, I'm gonna call the Blackheart Man on you.' "

In Kingston, in Trench Town, when kids were late to school, they used to run by the gullies to get there faster. Rastas lived in the gullies. The city gave them waste grounds for making their camps. "The Blackheart Man lived in the manhole," Bunny said. "Check that—that's Rastaman."

Sometimes one of these dreadlocked mystics would come out of his shanty "to fill his little butter pan with water," and when the children saw him, they'd run the other way. Bunny remembered a couple of his friends getting cut and bruised, they ran so fast to get away.

But for some reason—maybe it was the influence of Joe Higgs—this youth, Neville, started asking himself why he ran. He'd noticed that as he and his friends ran from the Rastas, the Rastas were calmly walking back to their holes. "So when him comes out, I took a brave heart, and he just look at me as if, 'Aren't you running, too?' "

Bunny questioned the man, asking what made him live like he did. "I find out he has an intellect, someone like a lawyer or a doctor when he opened his mouth," he said. "Then he tells me that Haile Selassie the First inspired him to walk this route. 'Seek first the kingdom of Jah, and all other things shall be added.' Rastaman. Not me hear them thing out no Bible—Rasta taught them things, and me understand immediately."

In spring of 1966 occurred the visit of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian emperor, the black man on the cover of Time who had taken his place at the white man's highest table, in the United Nations, and who many Jamaicans, on fire with a Marcus Garvey-inspired Pan-Africanist Zionism, held to be a coming of Christ. When Ras Tafari (Prince Fearless, in his native Amharic) arrived at the Kingston airport, he was so overwhelmed by the intensity of the crowd's reception that he immediately turned and went back into the plane, worried for his life. A Rastafarian leader, dressed in a simple forest tunic like John the Baptist, gained permission to go on board, where he explained to Selassie that the surging of the crowd owed purely to their love for him. It is said that Selassie wept. Bunny Livingston was there that day. "Who didn't see His Imperial Majesty didn't want to," he said. Like many in the crowd, he felt the emperor's eyes on himself individually and at the same time on everyone. There were many other such "mystics" (showings forth of the divine). A shower passed, and thousands were soaked and flash-dried on the spot. Some Rastas lit chalice for herb, and a plane flying overhead exploded. They'd been given powers. Bunny saw a band of Moravian sisters, all dressed in white with black faces, dancing down the road waving palms and singing hosanna, "because He was Who He was," Bunny said, "because He is Who He is."

I'd brought a little digital speaker setup with me. We listened to "Battering Down Sen-tence," the song he wrote during his fourteen-month stint of hard labor, much of it spent at Richmond Farm Prison in 1967. It begins,Battering down SEN-tence... with a sudden rising note on SEN. I told him what an unusual melody I thought that was, immediately gripping. Some of the senior wardens wouldn't let him sing it, he said, even when the other prisoners requested it.

"You see, the t'ing about it is," he said, "the melody has to sing the message of how you feel. In the prison, it has to have that kind of a wailing type of melody that suggests you are actually experiencing something, you're not just singing about something that you heard about."

At a certain point, I underwent what I can only assume was a momentary hallucination of some type. Strange things were happening to Bunny's face as he spoke. Different races were passing through it, through the cast of his features—black, white, Asian, Indian, the whole transnational human slosh that produced the West Indies. The Atlantic world was passing through his face. I was having thoughts so cryptocolonialist, I might as well have had on a white safari hat and been peering at him through a monocle.

Out of nowhere, Bunny started talking about fruit, all the different strange fruits that grow in Jamaica. I dug his physical love for his home, the reason he could never leave. "You're talking about soursop, you're talking about sweetsop. You're talking about naseberry, you're talking about June plum. Breadfruit. (That tree the original Wailers met under in Joe Higgs's yard was a "coolie plum." I ate one in Trench Town. Toothsome.)

"We have guinep," Bunny said. "I've never gone anywhere in the world and seen guinep. We got one called stinking toe. So dry that you gotta be careful how you eat it—it might choke you, the dust from the pollen."

He jumped up. A spry man. "I got some of it here," he said. "I got some stinking toe right here. I'm gonna put some liquid glucose on it, make jelly out of it.

"Just taste it," he said. He scooped some from the bottom of the bucket.

The West Indian locust, Hymenaea courbaril. He warned me that it would be the driest thing I would ever eat. My mouth was already cottony from the weed. I don't know how long it took to eat that single bite. The process of excavating it from my teeth afterward alone took twenty minutes. But the sweetness that is at the center of locust fruit is the strangest, most unexpected sweetness. It's like crawling through the desert for days and coming upon a tiny bush that gives extremely sweet fruit. There's a page of my life that is the eating of that bite of stinking toe, with Bunny watching me and cackling at my expressions as I progressed through the Willy Wonka-esque wonders of this fruit.

"And it's a stimulant," Bunny said, thwacking my knee. "It gives you a hard cock. It's like the shell—it makes your dick hard as a shell."

The singing across the road had stopped long before; so had the rain. It was getting very late. There was one last thing: I wanted to sit with him and listen to "Let Him Go" on the little player. While I cued it up, he ran through the other Rude Boy songs of those years. He remembered them all.

"This one, now, just ended the [Rude Boy] war," he said. " 'Let Him Go' stopped them in them tracks." It was never answered.

The song came on, and Bunny sang along. He sounded fantastic. That crackling tone.

You frame him, you say things he didn't do,
You rebuke him, you scorn him,
you make him feel blue.
Let him go....

He threw back his head. "Lloyd Knibbs," he said, referencing the Skatalites' drummer. The three of us were leaning forward. Bunny had his hands pressed between his thighs. The music, even over my little Target-bought sound system, filled the shed with a golden vibe.

As the So! approached, I caught his eye. "This thing coming up," I said over the music, "that So! Who's doing that?"

Bunny slapped his chest. "That's me, mon!" As if he were disappointed in me for asking.

He demonstrated, rising from his chair. I leaned back to take him in. "Here's Vision," he said (meaning Constantine "Vision" Walker, who stepped in for Bob in '66). Bunny moved his hand in a wavy pattern as Vision sang, Remember he is smart, remember he is strong. "And here's me," Bunny whispered. He thrust his head forward and ghosted his long-ago line into an imaginary mike: Remember he is young, and he will live long. Pulling back quickly, he pointed his finger in the air—like "Aha!"—and shouted, Sooo!

It was him.

···

Three months after my visit, relations between Bunny and me soured. Not even the mystical sweetness of stinking-toe jelly could have redeemed them. The magazine sent a world-class photographer, Mark Seliger, over to Kingston, with a crew, to photograph him. I got involved in the negotiations surrounding the portrait. Bunny didn't want to do it, but in the end (at least as I understood our conversations) he agreed. We were asking almost nothing, an hour, at his house. But we were also asking a lot: We wanted his face. I understood and tried to be delicate. But he grew increasingly hard and suspicious on the telephone. A legal letter arrived. This all happened after our crew was in Kingston. My last talk with Bunny degenerated into hostility. He called me a "ras clot" and a "bumba clot," the worst things you can call someone in Jamaica. I'm not 100 percent sure what those words mean, but apparently they have something to do with an ass rag or used tampon. He accused me of having boxed him in, with the whole photo-shoot business, and of then trying to guilt him. Possibly I did this, on some level. He ranted. He reminded me that he was a revolutionary commander. Didn't I know that he needed to hide his face? "Do you know Bunny Wailer?" he asked. "Do you know I and I?"

I admitted that no, I didn't.

He summoned a dark cloud of patois cursing. I didn't follow for minutes on end. Then he hung up. He never would call me back. I became an unanswered ring in the pockets of his marvelous suits.

I was okay with it. It felt right to be rejected by Bunny Wailer. "What can GQ magazine do for I and I?" he had demanded. The answer was nothing. We'd come from Babylon; he sent us back there, to our garrisons. The last transmission I got said, "Greetings, John, Here are photos. One Love. Jah B. Wailer." There was a snapshot of him in a parking lot, wearing a white sailor suit.

The real gift he gave me was the gift of saying no. It was the gift of remaining the Blackheart Man. That had been the hook the whole time—that he is still alive.