For several days recently, I have been in somewhat of a daze and even mourning for the passing of a long-time friend, Jerry Gouveia, former athlete, hunter, fisherman, etc. who died suddenly here recently. He was known as “Gov” by the many who called him friend, or “Big Jerry” to differentiate him from another Gerry Gouveia. My connection with him goes back to our days as school mates at St. Stanislaus College when some strange kindred spirit grew up between us despite my total disinterest in the hunting/fisherman side of Gov. I distinctly recall, in the years after school, when he was working at PanAm, often at Timehri for flights, and I was there in the airport building, as a Flight Clerk at IAL aeradio, that we would frequently meet (he dated my sister Cecelia for a short time before his marriage to Yvonne) and sometimes would venture into the terrain around the airport on Jerry’s formidable BSA motorbike on a joy ride. On those trips, Gov would often get up to speed and then, on a long stretch, reach back beside me to remove the air filter on the bike to make the machine go faster. On one of those extractions, the filter fell out of his hand, bounced on the tarmac, and went flying off into the parapet. Totally unfazed, he just turned around and we spent the next 15 minutes or so combing the grass looking for the missing device until we found it. We were different in most ways. He was an athlete, I was not. I was interested in Caribbean music; he was heavily into country and would suddenly give you horrible impersonations of well-known country tunes, painful to the listener, but joy to Gouveia.
After Saints, with me working at IAL and living with my sister Theresa and her husband Joe Gonsalves at Timehri, Gov and I would be often on his BSA in that area, and we would sometimes also hook up at Vreed-en-Hoop, on my days off. I recall one day being on board the ferryboat about to move off, and who comes up the stairs to the seating on the second level but Gov….soaking wet, half-covered in trench mud, and obviously not caring. Coming to Vreed-en-Hoop for the ferry, it turns out that he had been speeding and came around a curve in the road, trying to overtake, he was suddenly facing traffic heading the other way. To avoid the crash, Gov simply rode off the road into the adjacent trench. He had left the bike there and clambered out, arriving at the stelling covered in trench mud and dirty water; people upstairs moved away from him. When I moved to Toronto and started Tradewinds, Gov and I would connect on the band’s appearances back here. In the later years, after I had moved the band to Cayman and married Angela Ebanks there, the connection waned but my friendship with Gov stayed, strong and unbending; what had started basically at Saints remained strong.
Others, like Malcolm Chan-a-Sue, who know the Goveia story, that of the hunter, interior man, etc., I am sure would be able to give us similar slices of the guy. He was a larger than life figure, with an usually vivid laugh and a singular nature. I recall one instance, tooling around Atkinson on the pillion of the BSA, when Gov, without a word to me, swerved off the road, jumped off the bike, and ran onto the parapet where there was a single abandoned light pole standing with the metal foot rests to climb it still in place. Goveia shimmied up and on reaching the top he began rocking the pole back and forth trying to break it loose at the bottom, as I stood there in shock at this instantaneous attack. That single act tells you more about the Gov we all knew than anything else….spontaneous, imaginative, irrepressible.
There are, of course, many similar stories of other incredible Guyanese lives. His was the one that lives in my memory so vividly after all these years. I saw it up close. Gov was a creature apart, in almost every sense, his inclinations and his pursuits were different. One of a kind perfectly describes him. We truly need a monument to the man somewhere. He was a shining spirit; a “creature apart” indeed, living life to the fullest, defying the traditions, charting his own way and avidly inviting others to follow. Such was the man; one for the ages. Gov!
