I remember that over his plate of Saumon fumé, we talked about his penis and, specifically, the state of its tip. I’ve spoken to many people about many things, but never about their penis, and certainly not as I’m having the deux oeufs au choix. It was 2019 and we were at Le Grenier à Pain, the French eatery, on Riverside Drive. We were talking about how being uncircumcised was a problem to one of the aunts of the woman he wanted to marry as we chomped away on eggs and smoked salmon. I remember his defiance and lingering hurt for being dismissed because of his foreskin. I also remember thinking as he spoke, ‘Oh, I wonder if the French circumcise’ and Googling “Do the French circumcise? (14% are).
I remember the centrality of his mother in his life, a hurricane of a woman, forceful and larger-than-life, ruling with an iron fist. (His dad was the silent one who hid behind newspapers). She was a civil servant who always complained about the duplicity of Kikuyus. Believed that you could only trust a Kikuyu as far as you could throw them. That the only worse thing than a Kikuyu was their women. That you would be completely out of your rockers to marry one. Because they will run away with your children if they don’t dagger you in your sleep. The very death knell of your life.
Then he met a girl called Njeri and tumbled in love with her, face first and his mom, arms akimbo, cried, “Your life will not be the same if you marry that woman, Willis. I’m telling you as your mother.” A’ngisi kaka minu. But he begged her to give her a chance. She’s different, he pleaded. She’s not like the rest of them. Njeri was already pregnant by now and marriage was in the cards but his mother was holding all the cards. He begged her to move in together as his mom sorted out her biases, “eventually she will come around. He told her” Njeri wasn’t into those come-we-stay arrangements. She was a traditional girl who wanted a white wedding and things. (A white wedding isn’t traditional, though, is it?). When his mother refused to thaw, Njeri decided to flee the country on a Green Card. Heartbroken, she jumped on a horse and rode into the sunset with his son strapped to her back.
Years passed, and he met a tall beautiful, and enterprising Kalenjin lady who could turn 1,000 bobs into 100K without ‘washing’ it. They got married in a church, they had two daughters and his career and family flourished. On the other side of the Atlantic, Njeri also met ‘Mtu wa Nyumba’ in Minnesota, a good man with a thriving logistics business. A circumcised man. They got married. Years rolled by until Njeri and Willis reconnected again and when she came down to Kenya for a visit, they met daily for the seven days she was around and things that he felt years back started bubbling to the surface and because love is essentially madness he told her, I want you back.
“Want me back?” She said wide-eyed, “I’m married. You are married!”
“Yes, but are you happy?”
“I don’t have to be happy, I just have to be content.” She told him.
“You can be content and happy with me.”
“Are you mad? Also, I don’t know if you have noticed, but I’m pregnant!”
“I will take you with the baby. I will raise him as mine.”
“This is another man’s baby!”
“Yes, but the man is also raising my son. This will be me paying him in kind.”
“Are you mad, Willis!?”
“Marry me.”
“No!
“Marry me.”
“Let go of my hand, Willis.”
“I love you.”
“Jesus. I’m expecting a baby.”
“I love the baby too.”
“Where is the bill? I can’t do this. I’m leaving.”
So she ran out of the restaurant and went back to the US and ignored all his emails. Meanwhile, she was all he thought about. For three years he sent her emails and for three years he got no reply. One day she responded and conversations started happening, crazy conversations that led to crazy decisions which saw her pack up her life and her daughter and walk back into his arms. The seismic shift was immense. His mom was certain he had been bewitched. “You want to leave your wife and family to be with someone’s wife?! Wiyi rach, nyathini? Yawa wuoda ng’ama ochieni?” His uncles tried to talk him out of it. Emissaries. Pastors prayed for him. His mom fasted. His dad pulled him aside and asked, are you sure? This is extreme. Little doing, he got divorced and married Njeri. His mom stayed away from the wedding.
The domestic situation was; that he had two daughters with his ex-wife, he was raising Njeri’s daughter with her ex-husband and he had a son who was in college in the US. Blended and -somewhat – chaotic family.
That story HURRICANE is from 2019.
***
What has happened since is that Willis is still not circumcised. That will never change, in case you are wondering. A tree will never ride a donkey. I know because when we met that’s the first thing I asked and he had a good chuckle at that. He said. “For five years that’s all that you have thought about.” I said, “little else.” The second thing is that Willis has tremendously transformed physically. It means he has added quite a bit of weight, noticeably. “I was sick for a few months, a bad back and I did nothing but lie down and eat.,” he explains, “when I recovered it [the weight] never did come off. I try to wake up very early and walk before I go to work. But I also like good food, I will confess. What do you do, you look the same?” I told him I also like food but I’ve had to sit down with chapos and have some very difficult it’s-not-you-it’s-me conversation. That and swimming. We then started talking about exercise and health which are topics I seem to have a lot with many middle-aged men my age nowadays, a good number of who are doing calisthenics. “I’m too lazy for calisthenics,” Willis said, tearing a small sachet of sugar and pouring it into his coffee. “I don’t have the discipline for it. I want to go back to cycling. I used to cycle.”
“It hurts the ass,” I said.
“It does if you don’t wear the right gear.” He said, “There are special cycling shorts for that.”
“The ones that feel like wearing a diaper.”
“But they also protect your jewels.”
“Real diamonds don’t crack.”
On and on we went, two mid-forties men jabbering about exercise and health until I finally asked, “How’s your mom?”
“My dad died.” He said.
Which should explain how his mom is. His father got Covid and was sick for a while and then hospitalised. “We couldn’t see him or talk to him because it was during the early days of the pandemic panic. We thought he’d get better but he didn’t.” One moment he was intubated the next he was dead. It was tough on all of them, and even tougher on his mom. I only realised how much my mom loved my dad after he died because it hit her so hard. Her blood pressure became a problem, and still is now sometimes because also she’s old now.” He sips coffee. We are at the Java on Lenana Road, near his office. “Also, I think it’s in the manner he was buried, it was very fast, when the sun was setting. I now realise why funerals for us, Luos, are big spectacles that last for weeks. It helps everybody come to terms with losing someone. It’s our way of saying goodbye. My mother never had that closure. She hardly saw my dad’s body. My brothers and I saw his body once, through a glass and masks. Strangers in masks and those white suits buried him.”
They had a whole prayer ceremony after all the Covid bans relating to public gatherings were lifted. The church choir group dressed in all white came and sang the whole day. A cow was slaughtered and women cooked in big pots behind the house, under a tent. In another tent from where gospel songs blared from ratty speakers that gave shrill feedback, villagers and relatives sat. The local pastor gave a sermon. People ate from linoleum plates and bottles of warm sodas were opened. “It was like a funeral without a body,” he said, “but it’s what she needed. She needed a sendoff of sorts and I think she had been denied that.”
His father’s passing has brought them closer together, the four brothers. He was a silent leader, his dad. “My mother has always been the loud parent, always shouting and being abrasive and fearless but in his passing, we have seen that perhaps it might have been my father that made the decisions in the background because of his sobriety, you know pressed the buttons low key. Over time we have seen my mom’s decision-making flounder, maybe it’s grief or maybe she was always good with enforcing, not making decisions. My brothers have had to gather around her more and help her. Every month there is always someone going to the village to make sure that all is well.”
Closer to his household, his ex-wife – the tall Kalenjin, got married to “a Kikuyu fellow.”
“Like a game of musical chairs,” I said.
“Yeah. I know the guy, he once sold us land when we were married. He’s a much older fellow.”
“How much older?”
“Like in his 60s.”
“His wife died.”
“His wife is alive. She’s the second wife.”
“Twist in the tale. Wealthy man.”
“Yeah. One of those old real estate fellows.” He paused as if contemplating the man’s wealth. “She never struck me as someone who would be a second wife but women will surprise you. I think they are happy though…she seems settled into it. The good thing about your ex-wife getting married is that all the little problems you used to disagree about are directed towards someone else. I’m glad he is there to take the heat off me.”
“They’ve got kids?”
“No. He has grown children himself, I think, way older than our daughters who, by the way, are doing great but I don’t know how this is all going to shape them when they start dating.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Maybe they will prefer much older men because they represent stability seeing as their dad rocked their boat.”
“Maybe they will prefer younger women.”
“Yeah,” he chuckled. “There is that now.”
“I’m sure they will be fine.”
“Nobody is just fine. You have to carry something from your childhood, you wrote that once.”
“What do you think you carried?”
He paused. “I think I’m attracted to strong, domineering women like my mother.” He added. “I also think because we were four boys and we had no sister, we did all the house chores, cooking and cleaning and that became natural for us, there were never duties for girls or boys, there were just duties to be done and it was upon us. Because of that, I don’t struggle with doing house chores. Which means I’m not a toxic male.” He laughs. “ Maybe my daughters will be shaped by that as well..”
“How’s Njeri?” I finally asked because this was the main reason I was there, wasn’t it? Did it work out after all that high-wire act?
“That is going good enough.” He said. “The blended thing can be tricky at the beginning when people want to make their points. All the children are quite grown now. I met my son after a very long time. He lived with us for a month when he was here. The tall guy who looks exactly like one of my uncles even walks like him.” He smiled. “ I thought this would be another Obama scenario where a boy comes back home and starts searching for his identity. He didn’t seem interested in all that. We took a trip to shags to meet my mom and spent a lot of time on the road. We were polite but there is a large wall between us, a wall of time and things that will take years to bring down. He said some honourable things about Njeri’s ex, the man who raised him.” Pause. “It was strange…we didn’t connect and not from my lack of trying. He was sitting there, my son, but he wasn’t my son, you know what I mean?”
I nodded like I knew. I suppose it’s like me and Kim. The other day he came to the car and he had no socks on because he is easily distracted and absentminded. I said, “Kim, why are you wearing different socks?” He said, “Oh,” and went back to the house to change. I thought, “he is my son, but he isn’t my son.”
So, the same thing? OK, almost.
“Would you do things the same way, if you were to turn back time?” I asked him.
“That’s an interesting question.” He leaned back and gave it a thought, his leg making rattling sounds under the table. “Yes. I think I would have found a way to marry Njeri before she took off for the US. Maybe I should have been more decisive, more firm with my mother. But of course, I was younger and what did I know about standing up for what I wanted and believed? I think part of the reason the marriage is going well is because of the kind of heat it produced when we got back together. I have been obliged to make it work. We both have. We both chose each other and, unfortunately, many people got hurt in the process. My biggest regret is not doing enough to know my son. I don’t know what more I should have done but I feel like it was not enough. He is the only son I have yet he doesn’t know me, he will never know his people. Never know me.”
“Funny, that your son was raised by a man from a tribe my mother was against.”
“Can you imagine?”
“It’s like poetic justice.”
“He seems to have turned out well.” He said.
“Do your daughters know you?”
“Oh yes. I’ve spent a lot of time with them. I still do. My relationship with their mom has improved greatly but has never been that great though, she still harbours some resentment and that’s understandable. She seems happy.”
I told him to watch a movie called Everybody’s Fine by De Niro. It’s a sad movie but it has lessons. It’s unrelated to his story but who said everything has to be related?
***
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