My landlord’s son, Paul, is fascinated by me. I can tell. And you would understand why; he’s the only boy in a family of four girls (all older) and apart from his schoolmates, and his father who must be pushing 200yrs, I’m the only man he can relate to. The lad watches me like a hawk and I always feel – whenever I talk to him – that he’s a dry sponge and I’m water. When I talk to him he normally wears this look on his face, this scary look that implies that he truly believes that I know what I’m talking about. I don’t.
On Saturday as I walked over to open the gate ready to drive out, he walked over with a football tucked under his armpit and said (in verbatim), “It’s okay. I’ll get that.” He’s 10 and he speaks well, but then again, he attends a decent school. And I like the kind of kid he’s turning into; eloquent, curious, confident and contained. I could adopt him…if there was a chance I would never ever have to pay rent to his father again.
Sometimes I realize he seeks me out to create a balance because too much progesterone surrounds him: His mother smoothers him because he’s the last-born and his sisters fuss over him because he’s the only boy. I fear for his gender orientation. I hope they don’t buy him pink pyjamas. Or make him drink green tea. Or use creams on his face and lip-gloss on his lips. Or cuddle him to sleep. Or make him watch The Wedding Show, or worse, Glee or Gossip Girls. I hope they let him be a boy. A small man.
But for now, I always feel that he’s a boy swimming against these turbulent progesterone currents, swimming to the nearest shore of testosterone, which, in his proximity, happens to be me. To play my part in this scenario (that could well possibly be only in my head) I always make sure I impart something manly on him; ‘Hey Paul, kick that ball like a man!” or “Paul, don’t walk while looking at the ground, like that, who’s eyes are you avoiding?” or “ Paul, eat peanuts, not lollipop. Peanuts!” or “Okay Paul, no handkerchiefs in your breast pockets, unless you are a cateress!” (That word just reminded me of high school grab)
So anyway, Saturday he opens the gate and I ask why we have tents and chairs in the garden and he says there is a ruracio for her elder sister.
“Oh, really! That’s nice, isn’t it?” I say, “Do you know what that means?”
“It means that my sister is going to move out soon and get married?’
“Correctomundo!” I say in my worst Samuel L impressions this year. He laughs and asks, “How old are you?
I tell him and he goes “wooooooo [he likes saying that), you are old! I’m only 10!” I want to tell him that it doesn’t matter much because when it goes right down to the wire, what matters is that we can all pee while standing up.
Anyway, that got me thinking of another story that I will bridge with this Paul story. I was recently at a bar with these two guys, one who is 36yrs and another who is 32yrs. At some point one of the guys – the 36yr old – announces that some tail will be joining us briefly, which sometimes suck because then the conversation always have get all politically correct and shit. An hour later, this girl shows up. She has that archetypal Nairobi face. You know you have an archetypal Nairobi face when people keep telling you, “I think I know you from somewhere.”
Miss Nairobi Face was OK, only problem was I thought she was too young for the 36yr old. How did I suspect that she was young? Well, for one her head was bent to her phone half the time she was there, Facebooking or Twitting. Then secondly she kept asking, “So where are you guys going from here?” I was tempted to ask, “Why do we have to go elsewhere from here?” Why can’t we just drink here and go home?” Instead the 32yr old asked, “Nowhere really, why?”
“It’s so quiet here!” she pouted at the 36yr old. Quiet? What was she talking about? There was music! I told her lightly, “I can ask the manager to turn up the volume a notch, would that make it worth your while?”
She rolled her eyes and said, “It’s not the volume, silly, it’s just that this place is not happening.” Then she looked at me more closely and asked, “Kwani how old are you anyway?” Obviously not as old as your old man here, I wanted to say, but then it occurred to me that the 36yr old might have lied about his age to her. Which made me wonder who was the woman in that “relationship”. Instead I told her, “34, two months and chump change.” I said it so proudly you would have heard the National Anthem in the background of that proclamation.
“Aii, you are so old!” she groaned.
We cackled at that. “But admit it, everybody must look old when you are 22yrs old,” I told her tongue-in-cheek, which was meant to be both a compliment and a reprimand because I gathered she was 24. Do you know what she says? She retorts, “Excuse you! I’m not 22, I’m 21!” I choked on my wine and the 31yr old fell off his chair and broke a rib.
Twenty bloody one!! My word, wasn’t she supposed to be doing her homework? I stole a furtive look at the 36yr old and he avoided my eyes. I wondered what he talks to her about apart from reading her a bedtime story. Do they talk about how many friends she has on FB now? Do they discuss how great, sorry, gr8, the last jam session was? Or the fresh nostalgia of high school, perhaps? Where was their point of connection? But then she stood up and I saw her ass and I knew the answer immediately.
Anyway, at some point when Miss Nairobi Face had stepped outside to pick one of her multiple calls I asked the 36 yr old, “So, did you remember to pack diaper change and a feeding bottle?” He seemed embarrassed, especially when she, at some point, couldn’t stand the “silent and un-happening” bar and insisted that she wanted to go to Sailors Bar (that den full of tramps and killers) because all her friends were there and he had to grin apologetically and follow her out the door as she tagged on the leash tied to his neck.
It broke my heart, it really did because I wondered what they would talk about the whole night but then again, I remembered that Sailors is loud, so he would be saved of any frivolous conversation. All he will have to do is show her a thumbs up from his seat when she was shaking her ass on the dance floor and once in a while he would be compelled to lean into her ear and ask, “Another glass of milk, darling?”
Pablo Picasso said, “It takes a long time to become young,” which implies that true youth –ironically – only comes with age and it must be the same reason some philosopher once said “youth is wasted on the young.”
Miss Nairobi imagines that I’m fossilized. That at my age I’m so not in touch with the recent realities of time, that’s why I coop in “silent” bars and watch the clock crawl. Paul, on the other hand, is fascinated –not by me – but by my age. He looks at my age as a point of destination where nobody tells you when to take a bath.
But the 30s are cool. It’s a point where you have run out of excuses on why you should behave like a goat. That point where the rat race has taken a definite shape; the shape of a rat. At 20s men wonder, in their 30s they discover and in their 40s they live. Which part is not fun?
Below is my idiotic list of things that shouldn’t be done in the 30’s. I say it’s idiotic because one, it’s my list and two at 30 I should be writing about stuff that is heavier at the bottom (no pun, I swear). Stuff that can stand on their own. But heck, it’s January.
You can’t keep using your father as a prop to get credibility. One day your father will die, he will choke on a bone or overdose on Cialis and he will die then you will realize that nobody opens doors for a man brandishing a dead name. You eventually have to crawl from the shadow of the old man and create your own shadow. It will not be as big shadow, but it will be your shadow.
There is a guy I know who I bumped into in town and he was with a chic who looked about 13months preggies. So when I asked him later why he hadn’t broken the good news he said, “Ai, I don’t think that toi is mine,” and I found it both hilarious and deranged. He made me feel like I was his ex-girlfriend and he had to explain to me the pregnancy.
You can’t possibly be staying at home at 30. It doesn’t matter if you are waiting for your folks to chip so that you in inherit. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 21-roomed mansion and there is tons of space, and a pool. It doesn’t matter if your religion dictates that you live as a community. Your mother shouldn’t be handling your underwear and socks at 30.
There are guys who don’t mind having their women drag them to the car because they are totally smashed. Your woman shouldn’t ever have to be the one to worry how she is going to haul your wasted ass home. Don’t take advantage that she is a strong lunje who can effortlessly lift you over her shoulder and carry you home. (Hehe, ahem, HNY Cathy.)
Tall gallant tales of debauchery; how you hoped from Westy to Hurlinghum and to some house in Ngong, drinking, is not something you put up on a shingle. It’s great when you are 26, but not when you have blown 35 candles. Keep them under your hat.
You can’t keep kissing and telling. It ages you…
That ancient trick of going to the loo when the bill has to be sorted out was sly in campus. Now it’s cheap.
The only people who are allowed to park their tinted cars at University of Nairobi hostels at dusk to wait for those young girls with too much make-up and cheeks that smell of Johnson and Johnson baby powder are 1) Recently widowed men 2) Young rich guys from Kerio Valley who stuff loads of cash in their socks 3) Young rich politicians with erectile conundrums. If you are other 30 and take yourself half seriously, you should go through the traditional risqué way of calling up a chic and saying, “There is this new place down the road that I know you will love…” even if chances of failure are tenfold.
This one is tricky, I fall in this group. I’m guilty. I fall in this group of men who refuse to let go of their fluffy teenage fantasies. Me who cling onto long drawn whimsical and childish obsessions driven by lust in July and putrid romance the rest of the year. You know? A poster child for covetousness stuck in 1992. I should get over it already. But come on, have you seen and heard Toni Braxton lately? It’s not just another sad love song. It’s eternity, gentlemen. That broad will outlive air.
At 30 you have to start fussing less about how fast your eyebrows are growing and more about how long you can keep avoiding your landlord’s calls.
At 30 you don’t prove yourself by how many fists you can throw at another man’s face. You prove yourself by how calmly you can walk away. Unless of course, he grabbed your woman’s ass in the bar or worse, he grabbed your ass.