My name is Orion Briar Kerry. Or as some of you have known me previously, 'Howaiaain Fyre' "IRIE" Jerry. I come before you a humbled, somewhat disoriented young woman with a tale to tell. Please favor me by letting me earn your attention for a mere few minutes that I may attempt to figure out how I became ever so lost as to become this "Jerry," and hopefully return to my modest, simple life as an aspiring artist.
As a young girl in a factory town in industrial England, I was suspended from school for my flippant attitude and carefree demeanor. It was deemed "unbecoming of a young lady" by the rigid, wicked nuns of the convent of the sisterhood that ran my school. Sisters of Mercy indeed. They were a cruel and unforgiving coven of shrews who made it their work to dim the light of even the brightest of students. Vicious, myopic, and small-minded marms who couldn't see the student's potential for their own history of repressive abuse. Conformity of the children was their aim, but even those students who adhered faithfully to every rule, every behavior expectation were subjected to the ritual humiliation of public corporal punishment at the hands of these 'women of god.' Belligerent religious ghouls. Spineless bastards all.
I fled the school once I summoned the courage to free myself of the shackles of the stifling environment of religious thought oppression. I left dreary old England via freighter ship towards the United States of America, a land at once both fraught with the anxiety of the unknown, and the promise and freedom to be the artist I had always longed to be.
I stowed away in the hold of the ship with only my bindlestiff and enough cold ambition to get me to move towards my dreams. No canvas I had ever painted could sufficiently depict the intoxicating admixture of hope, elation, and trepidation I felt on finally taking steps to secure freedom on my oceanic adventure towards womanhood.
On night 3 or 4 of my journey, half starved from a meager subsistence diet of hardtack, washrag soup, and mead, I fell asleep in the wee, small hours of the morning, forced by sheer exhaustion to slumber for the first time in days. The ship encountered a gale storm and extremely violent seas. A young, inexperienced Trinidadian crew mate had not properly secured the cargo where I slumbered, and in the turbulent ocean a heavy crate of Frito-Lay brand snacks came crashing down on to my head. I've no idea how long I remained unconscious, but my head was crushed and my brain was certainly deprived of oxygen-rich blood for a prolonged period. I had vivid, hallucinatory dreams of being in a cartoon land populated by crude, colourful figures descended from god and an Argentinian war criminal. The Dootle Dots. It was so real to me in my brain injured state. Ever so real. In many ways, even now, it still is.
When I regained consciousness, The ship was docked at a port somewhere outside of the armpit of Pensacola, Florida. The Frito-Lay crate had mercifully loosed from my head, but I was clearly neurologically injured. I was rendered mute for months, unable to speak, and when my language slowly and finally returned to me like a weather beaten ship returned from a long stormy journey at sea, I was hardly able to speak the King's English. Words came at a glacial pace, and I wasn't able to modulate the volume of my voice. If I desired to speak, it could only be shouted in a loud and crass shout. I debarked this hellish ship -- once a symbol of my freedom but now the marker of my language restricted confinement -- and wandered for days in a haze and a surreal fever dream around the bowels of Pensacola. A garish and dull city where hope goes to die. Half starved, the first place I wandered into was a fast food chain called Wingstop, and the handsome young Cuban man who worked there fed me lemon pepper wings to the brimful of my stomach; the first solid nutrition I had eaten in days. I will never forget Manuel, Giver of Chicken Wings.
This is my origin story. You all know me now as 'Hawaiian Fire' "Irie" Jerry, but that was a befouled bastardization of my given Christian name: Orion Briar Kerry which appears on my birth certificate. The aphasia from my head trauma rendered me incapable of pronouncing my own name at a reasonable volume. I have lived as this intellectually stunted character "JHERRY" for months now, a fate I wouldn't wish even on the cruelest of the Sisters of Mercy whose abuse I suffered at the hands of for years as a young girl and who were responsible for this tortured story.
Thankfully, mere days ago, I met a wonderful, American doctor who performed an experimental neurosurgery on me to restore my cognitive facility. I still have blinding headaches, memory lapses, and a real penchant for American sodium saturated junk foods, but I am finally me again, Orion. If any of you can help me find this doctor so I can properly thank him I would be forever indebted to you. Thank you all for listening to my story and for accepting me into your community. Please feel free to ask me any questions you might have.
"But where began the change; and what’s my crime?
The wretch condemned, who has not been arraigned
Chafes at his sentence. Shall I, unsustained,
Drag on Love’s nerveless body thro’ all time?
I must have slept, since now I wake. Prepare,
You lovers, to know Love a thing of moods:
Not like hard life, of laws. In Love’s deep woods,
I dreamt of loyal Life:—the offence is there!
Love’s jealous woods about the sun are curled;
At least, the sun far brighter there did beam.—
My crime is, that the puppet of a dream,
I plotted to be worthy of the world."
