The following is an account of a blog reader’s experience of coming to St. John in the late 1990s. He promises to have more installments soon:

Empire State Building, New York City

From the big city to St. John
When I was in my early 20s, I was living in down town Manhattan. A friend of mine from high school had opened up a bar. It wasn’t very much to look at, very simple in fact, pool table, juke box, some tables scattered about. Pretty much your typical dive bar, cheap drinks, fun bartenders and good music.

Well for the first couple of months it was pretty much empty. Maybe some people from the surrounding neighborhood would stop in for a beer or a quick game of pinball and that would be it.

Then as if out of nowhere some how, this dark, little nothing bar became the ”place to be” and there was now a line outside and it went down the block. Besides the three bouncers, it even had its own beat cop permanently placed out front. Inside on any given night you could find various examples of New York City’s glitterati: movie stars, television stars, sports stars, supermodels, famous and up and coming authors, performance artists and drag queens. Even the people you didn’t recognize seemed to be “somebody.” Whether they were fashion designers or make up artists or future dot com multimillionaires, they all seemed to gather at this no frills watering hole. I imagine it was similar in many ways to studio 54 in the seventies.

The club was soon listed in all these, “where to go and what to do in New York” publications and before I knew it, there were people from the hinterlands of the United States, Europe and beyond were lining up to get inside. We had become a “must do” stop on the tourist trail.

Things continued like that for several years. Very long story made very short, the lifestyle became all too much for me. I was up all night and sleeping all day, spending my money as fast as it came in and suffering many of the other nasty side effects that go along with this type of career choice. After a while, I had had enough. I decided I needed to quit, or at the very least, take a long vacation.

I got rid of my two bedroom New York City apartment, which I had personally renovated and went to St. John with really no plan in mind.

Arriving on St. John, I moved into what was described as an eco tent, which was basically a small wood framed structure that was screened in to keep out the hordes of mosquitos. There it sat in the middle of a lush dense beautiful tropical, garden, set amongst the soursop trees and bird peppers. There was an outdoor cold water shower and an outdoor composting toilet. I had no vehicle, no television, no computer, no radio and no phone, cell or otherwise. There was a light bulb, however, and I had lots of books.

It was about a two mile walk to town, half of which were on small trails through the brush, and if you chose to take that walk on a moonless night you had best bring a flashlight just to see what little path there was. More than one night I had over stayed my daylight welcome only to stumble back to my glorified tree house in the bush, blind as a bat all, alone, no sidewalks, no streetlights, no fabulous New Yorkers cheering on my every move, just the occasional creepy mongoose glaring at me with is beady eyes. as if it were thinking “what on earth are you doing here?”

When I finally made it back home to my eco cottage, I would douse my self with the highest amount of deet insect repellent that was legal. I would read and sometimes sketch by the 60 watt bare bulb. Outside you could here the insects hitting the screen walls in a desperate attempt to get inside. There was blood in that tent and they knew it.

I would finally fall asleep at around 9.30, which was the time I would be normally be getting into the shower to go to work and I would wake up at the crack of dawn, which was the time I would normally be getting home.

There was no Starbucks coffee, no New York Times, just some homemade bush tea and the local weekly newspaper that was as about as informative and exciting as a high school newspaper in a make believe high school.

My mind clearing, chakra aligning, Buddhist monk retreat was starting to feel like a visitors pass to Guantanamo Bay…

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Life on St. John USVI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.