There are days he doesn’t close his front door, mostly Saturday mornings. I find the door ajar. At 10a.m light floods the living room, light from the gigantic full-length windows across the room. There are no curtains. He has never owned curtains. He doesn’t believe in curtains: they are for girls and gays, he likes to say. If you stand at the window you will see a backyard, and a live hedge, which means you will see nothing. The smell of nicotine is heavy in the room.
On those days, when I walk in through the slightly opened door, I will stop at the edge of his old rag – a knock-off from some car boot sale – and I will know if he has female company or not. I will look out for a purse, thrown absentmindedly on the sofa, or a half finished glass of wine and a short empty glass of whiskey, a testimony of a nightcap, a preamble to some nightly procreation activity. Or I will look out for female shoes; kicked off hastily as lips searched lips, as limbs entangled and heavy breaths
singed the air. Sometimes I will find jeans on the carpet, or a blouse, or a bra. There is always a tell tale. And when I find it, I usually grab a magazine from a rack next to TV and lie on the couch, with the television on. And I wait. If there is no tell tale sign of female company, I normally walk into his bedroom and wake his ass up.
I visit him twice a month, but lately once a month because I have things to do. On most of those Saturdays he has a female he is seeing over. Most are memorable, some are not. I remember Sandra*; who when she walked out of the bedroom to find me lying on the couch, said “He walks through closed doors like a ghost, a ghost writer. Hey.” I liked her immediately even though there was something cunning about her, she looked like she knew what she was doing even though my pal didn’t. She was a big aficionada of poetry and I’m not, so we had tons to talk about. There was Mercy*, who – barefooted and a cigarette burning between her lips – made us some kick-ass omelets wearing nothing but his long black t-shirts written “Big bosses close their doors.” Then there was the luscious Kamba female who was too shy to stay around with me hanging around, so she made some jaded excuses, smiled shyly and ran out of the house like a bat from hell. I can’t remember her name, we shall call her *Hazel. Then there was my favourite, Tracy*, and one who I sort of remember vividly. My pal fried for her sausages and she had them with a cold Sprite, which she sipped straight from the bottle. She ate slowly, chewed meticulously. Even though she wasn’t the hottest female I have seen him with, there was something very attractive about her, something sexy. She sat – like a Buddha – on the carpet, by his feet, light bounced off one side of her face, her good side. She had on a white cotton shirt; three buttons remained opened from the top, when light hit her cleavage they glowed like a dying campfire.
She had a kikoi wrapped around her but since she had to sit in that yoga position, she had to gather a lot of that kikoy between her legs and, in the process, exposed two of her knees, and a bit of thigh. Let’s just say that she had great knees. Once in a while she would cut the sausage on the plate balanced on the gathered Kikoy between her legs, and then she – without looking – would raise her fork of sausage up towards my pal’s direction who would bend slightly and have a bite. She lasted a month with him. “I liked her, man, she was really something.” I told my pal when he mentioned that it was an iced story. “Yeah, she was, but she was boring in bed,” he said and I almost wept with sorrow, I mean nothing hurts like a woman with a good body but who is dull in bed. It’s like having a turbo car that won’t go over 20km/hr.
I never shake their hands with these women when they find me lying on the couch because, well, you never know what they been touching in there. Actually, you know. And they come and go. They last four months at the most. Some last less. They are smart, short, tall, funny, smokers, non-smokers, light, chocolate, big asses, small boobs, long legs, longer nails, chewed nails, dark, short hair, weaved hair and I even met one Muslim who when I asked if her future husband will have a problem when he find out she wasn’t a virgin called me “naïve”. That stung a bit. But these women who I bump into there are very different in all ways…my pal is the only guy I know who doesn’t have a “type,”. I mentioned this one day and he said, “My type is a woman who excites me.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Even if she has a wooden leg and sports a Mohawk?”
“You’d be surprised what a wooden-legged woman can do to make up for the missing leg,” We laughed but later I thought about it…for only five secs, though.
Let’s call this guy, Jimmy. Jimmy is 32yrs old, a trained architect. He works for some small struggling architecture firm along Ngong road. Jimmy is a brilliant conversationist; deep, funny, charming. He pays 30k in rent. Drives a silver Nissan Wingroad with a long ugly scratch on the driver’s door (“Life tried to scratch me, and failed,” he explained it). He is repaying a car-loan. He drinks beer, Whitecap, but when he has money he drinks whiskey. He is an orphan. He has two sisters. Last time he had a stable girlfriend was in 2009. She left him. He doesn’t go to church much. He loves the fast life. He is risqué. He is very erratic even though his demeanor is very chilled out. Jimmy is somewhat troubled. Sometimes he spirals out of his axis and drinks a lot, prengs his car, defaults on rent, borrows heavily, misses work…he becomes dysfunctional. He gets into this dark hole which lasts a couple of months, and when he is in that hole you never can recognize him. He becomes someone else. I’ve noticed that he slips into this hole when everything seems to be going well, when he is making good money, when he is seeing a half decent woman, when he is happy. Eventually, he re-emerges from that hole, bleary eyed and somewhat apologetic…until the next time.
My missus dislikes him.
She dislikes him because she doesn’t understand him, yes, but also because she doesn’t see what we have in common. To her credit, she has her reasons because I pitch up home the latest when I’m out with him, but you would too, he is a scream. She says, he is wasting his life away, and that he is bad influence. But what she doesn’t know is that even though Jimmy and I walk different paths, we all remain on the same road. She doesn’t know that our destinies, as men, are conjoined, that even though we are different we remain similar in many ways. The major difference between me and him is that I wear my seatbelt in life while he chooses to drive in hope.
Jimmy is like a cat, he never falls on his back, always on his feet. For all his erratic tendencies he has some mad maxims that have some lessons, he seems to live by the mantra: You’d rather do the wrong thing at 100% than the right thing at 50%. And some days, I wish I had his life, for a few months. And you would too. You would wish you approached life with open arms, that you weren’t imprisoned with fear; fear of failing, fear to be less than you saw yourself to be, fear to fail the people who look at you, fear to be someone you are afraid of. Hell, I wish I had a shirt written “Big bosses close their doors.”
The curious thing about him is that people like him have more luck than the average guy. They get more breaks. Life seems to be kinder to them than the average guy. It’s like life is babies them. And the women who love guys like him love them more than they love us because perhaps he offers a challenge, I don’t know. Perhaps because they see good in him and they hope they can fix him. They want to be the one who turned him around: so they clean after him. They drain his whiskey in the sink. Hide his cigarettes. Have someone over do his laundry. Drag him home when he’s had enough to drink. They hold Jimmy’s hand. They try in the belief that they are the one chosen to transform him. They give him their all even though he isn’t giving himself his all. They stick around long enough to try and when they eventually leave, they leave not because they couldn’t but because Jimmy wouldn’t.
And they leave easily because Jimmy doesn’t close his front door. He leaves it ajar because perhaps he believes that anything that wants to stay in shouldn’t be made to stay in.