Everybody has been green around the gills. We are talking malaria, flu, bowel dysfunction, ulcers, chicken pox and even to some – like Benjaps – herpes. Hehe. But none of you can even claim to have had a bout of flu and amoebiasis at the damn same time like I did. So I had a blocked nose, fever and stomach pains. I know where I got the flu but I don’t know where I got the amoeba. I wanted to go over to mama Njunge’s kiosk, she who sells me fruit salad and confront her but thought against it because, hell, she weighs a good 100kgs. Plus she is missing the tip of her index finger, maybe she showed some dope head the finger at Wakulima market and the pyscho bit it off, who knows. Rule 23 in the books of survival; don’t start a fight with anyone missing the tip of their fingers. Rule 24: Especially if they weigh over 100kgs and are armed with, amongst other things, amoeba. I let it slide. I’m on drugs the size of a TV personality’s ego. The after-taste can knock out a baby elephant.
Irony is me having amoeba. I come from the shores of Lake Victoria. Down there, we don’t succumb to ailments like amoeba, or the flu. Men don’t fall ill, children and calves do. If you are to fall sick, it’s got to be something serious like malaria, or abject poverty. For as long as I went to shags as a kid right up to 15yrs I have drunk water from a river called river Awach, which comes through our village from somewhere over the hills in Kisii. This river that spills into the lake is brown in colour and we normally used to drink it downstream. Do you know what happens upstream if you happen to have the stomach to look? Cows and goats drinking the same water, children swimming and, further up, women washing utensils and their potbellied toddlers. And I never fell sick. Not once. Then some tap water here in Nairobi, or some fruit salad makes me fall sick? I’m getting weak, I’m becoming an embarrassment to my clansmen and for that and I apologize. Profusely.
Thus, I couldn’t post last Monday. It’s hard to write with a blocked nose and about a million amoebas throwing an end year party in your bowel. It’s hard to write when you are on drugs called Entamizole and Bascopan, yes, Bascopan, you’d think I’m in my menses and I’m cramping. Do you know what was worse? People sending me smses reminding me that it was Monday that they were tired of refreshing.
Anyway.
Remember Farouk, my ex-con cuz? I wrote about him here sometime back when Kibaki pardoned him – and a bunch of other jailbirds – some time back. If you are new in High School here is a quick recap. For a couple of years Farouk was a guest at Industrial area remand prison (I can never get over that word, remand.) His crime? A truck he was driving, containing crutches and wheelchairs, disappeared enroute to Kigali and was later found abandoned in Mubira forest in Uganda. The truck was empty. He was fingered for the heist and got the book thrown at him. He celebrated two birthdays in jail.
He is 30years old. He has a degree in engineering. He thinks employment is for sissies. He’s a hustler, I mean a true hustler, not one of these cats in town who wear pointed shoes and sell bootleg computer software and call themselves hustlers (no offence Pato.) He is the real mc coy. Farouk follows paper the same way a bloodhound sticks his nose in the wind and follows a scent: He has owned and personally driven a rickety mat for a year before some Mungiki gentlemen paid him a courtesy call one evening. He has delivered strawberries to hotels. He has relocated to Tanzania to try his hand at Tanzanite but the cartels there had carrots up their asses. He tried his hand at tenders in the Ministry of Public Works. His latest gig was driving those monstrous long distant trucks. Problem with Farouk; an unnecessary hunger to get forward fast, to hit pay dirt. He doesn’t let anything simmer. He doesn’t know when to wait it out; he doesn’t do downtime like the rest of us. But he has never held a piece on anybody’s head; he is not a violent guy, cunning yes, but not violent. He’s great with people. He’s flashy, likes the fast life and them brown girls with big thighs. But he made some wrong turns in life, made some bad decisions and the bottom fell off. Farouk is all right. Blood is thicker.
After his release he went to shags to cool off and to stand on his mother’s grave and tell her he’s out. He went to shags to get his head right. He spent time in his simba, reading an odd old book; he tilled the land, built a hen pen he is mighty proud of, fenced their boma and avoided the lethal local brew, the cancer of my village. Once in a while, he would get on a bicycle and cycle some 25mins away, to the only bar in my village that serves refrigerated drinks.
Then a month ago, when he felt he was ready to take another shot at life, when he felt he was strong enough to face the city and its demons, he came back to Nairobi. He came back to fuel a dream.
We met recently, at Shebeen, which has become a haunted bar. It was eerily empty on a Thursday. We sat inside, on long stools. We ordered our whiskies, raised our glass and toasted to something corny, can’t remember what.
Then we really caught up.
Here is the thing. When you sit down with anyone, especially someone conflicted like my cousin; you will always learn something new. There is the false strength that men wear on their sleeves… the stoicism and brevity that preserve our manhood. Forget that because the true spirit of man doesn’t reside there. If you want to see the underbelly of a man look at his fears, his insecurities and how he handles them. And Farouk is scared and scarred. Scared of starting a fresh, scared of how far his mates have gone ahead in life, scared of leaning on people in order to get up on his feet. Scared of himself and how close he can step to the edge.
Here is a guy with a decent education; a guy who you would say grew up in a Christian family, one which extolled respect, honesty, education and not talking with food in your mouth. Now run some money under the nose of this guy, put the scent of money in his blood and off he goes, chasing it and losing himself in the process. Now he’s standing in a dark hole and he is looking up, wondering how he will climb out of that hole and feel the sun in his face. Redemption. This is about redemption, about what a man has to do to get up on his feet, even if he has no clue.
So he buys a new suit. He buys it for 20k because he believes that one good suit makes a better impression than three bad suits. He buys it off one of those stalls in Kenyatta market, from a cat who says he ships them from Turkey. Then he buys three pants, four shirts and one pair of black shoes. But he doesn’t want a job. He doesn’t want an 8-5 because he’s not cut from that cloth. He is a businessman. He is the kind of guy who you call when you want a lorry full of cement or sand or 3,000 meters of electric cable. You will call him NOT because he has those things but because he knows someone who does. You will find him in the corridors of government office where men in bad broken suits touch foreheads and powwow over tenders. He will stand out because his shoes shine, but also because he always looks you in the eye even if he doesn’t know what he is talking about.
That’s Farouk. He isn’t a conman. He won’t deal drugs. He will cut corners yes, but who doesn’t in this town? He won’t pimp women or sell human body parts. He might make a truck full of wheelchairs disappear like a magician yes, but he won’t harm anyone doing it, which sort of reminds me of the TV program, Leverage. Farouk will get you what you want and in the process he will get what he wants. That’s the only life he knows. That’s all he wants to do; to straddle the unknown. To stick his nose in the wind and chase paper.
He talks about this. He talks about having to start from the bottom of the food chain because when you fall off the scene even for a few months everything changes. Faces change. Allegiances change. Bonds shift. The currency out there is not money, it’s your face. It’s your word. The rest is fart in the wind.
We drink whiskey. I listen.
If you sat with Farouk for half hour and listened to him, you will be sold. He speaks with confidence. He lowers his voice, he leans on sentences, and he leaves spaces in sentences to make them breath. He stares at you in the eye. If you are a woman and you sit with him for 15mins you will like him enough to want to meet him again. Money-back guarantee.
This is all good, this blueprint. But after an hour of listening to him I start getting restless. One question is burning in my head. I want to know only one thing. So – like a father – I place one hand on his shoulder and ask him about his first lay after he got out of jail. I want to know what sex means to a man who has just spent over two years in jail, two years with nothing but livid memories and, well, a bar of soap. Or soaps. I want to know the disposition of that man and how he approaches and handles the first sexual experience. I want to know who the girl was but more importantly how he convinced her, how he felt when she stripped off her clothes and she stood there, a glorious revelation of nakedness, a virgin canvas waiting for the artist from Industrial Area remand prison to grace it with that first stroke…pun very much intended. Whiskey does that to me, Gang, it takes my mind places, forgive me but these nuances seem awfully important when I was on my third double. The hell with redemption, mate, tell me about how you break your virginity after incarceration, I say.
Was she a hooker? I ask.
No, he says. It was one of those chicks I used to shika before the long arm of the law embraced me.
Did she know you were in jail?
Shit, everybody knew I was in jail, man!
Did you speak when you were in jail?
No. well, maybe a few times at the beginning. Like thrice then we didn’t speak again.
Let me get this straight, so you call her and say, hey gorgeous guess who is out of the can, do you want to get together, I have long juicy tales for you from jail, no pun of course?
Haha. No. I called and asked her for coffee and she surprisingly agreed.
Oh, coffee! Ati so we were being gentlemanly and all?
Okay, gang. Let me now paraphrase this story from here. So the chic agrees to meet him because, me thinks, she was curious and because she really liked him before he was locked up. I’m certain Farouk is the only “ex” she knew who was in jail, so she is fuelled by curiosity: how does he look now? Has he changed? Did he lose weight? Does he have a beard? Is he rough and hardened now? Grrrh. I don’t think she thought of jumping his bones; she just wanted to see how he was after jail.
Only he finds the same old cat, maybe a bit slimmer, but the same old cat. A cat who borrowed his brother’s clothes for the date. A cat with a clean close shave. Now Farouk is one of those guys who love women with some meat. He likes some flesh. He likes a huge ass, a decent waistline and he likes them brown. Anything below size 12 he won’t touch with a prison’s broom. And you should see him, he is lean…a strong gale would send him to Magadi and hang him atop an acacia tree. “If a chic can’t carry me, I can’t have her,” he always says, that’s his cut off point, you got to be able to carry him. So they meet for kahawa, he charms her. They meet again for drinks. She charms him. The die is cast.
How long did you last the very first time, I ask him, and please, none of that Mandingo hot air.
I did well, he chuckles taking a sip of his whisky. Stalling.
No really, how long? I will do with a ballpark figure.
First time? Very first time, uhm, like I dunno, 90 seconds?
I laugh. I laugh because I’m tipsy. I laugh because he figures he can convert minutes into seconds and get away with it.
Then I ask: Were you totally fascinated by the naked body of a woman after all these time?
He says when he removed her top; he gawped at her chest for a good one minute. Breasts have never looked better. Breasts change while you are away in prison. They looked artful. They looked happy. To use his exact words, “happy twiddles,” (prison lingo) I tell him they were just happy and relieved to see he hadn’t turned gay in jail. He laughs. He really does laugh at that even though I didn’t intend it as a joke.
Was she wearing knickers and what color were they?
Who the hell cares about the color man; I hadn’t seen or removed knickers for years, I just wanted them off!
Really? But I hear some inmates prefer those knickers with small bows at the front?
We laugh at that.
He says when her knickers came off, he felt a bit short-breathed and he had a dull discomfort in his lower stomach. “I know what you mean, it must have been like having an amoeba,” I say.
Then I say: Chief, this is important, when you finally got there some many many 90 seconds later did you scream out her name, or did you scream, “Afaaaande!”
A waitress blushed.