Bogonko Bosire: The Misery Of A Presidential Propagandists And Seasoned Blogger

BY BOGONKO BOSIRE

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Saturday Night Massacre: How My Date With A Would-Be Girl Friend Exploded On My Face

It was Friday night, the phone call came through and sent my nerve-endings into a hyper-sensitive mode. At the end of what was supposed to be a date, they were numb. Shredded. Yet another doomed attempt to be a family man, a stupid title that I have come to resent; a title deployed by cavalier men to camouflage as loving husbands yet they are certified pimps and male prostitutes.

As you can already sense, I am a bitter man; troubled man; a bloke spiralling into an avoidable bout of recrimination and emotional bloodletting, and by any chance a sexual invalid.

At around 7.30 on Friday, she called and said I had crafted sexy  stories about TV towering queen Julie Gichuru and the ambitious Samburu Senator Naisula Lesuuda. Then, like a lightning bolt, she invited me for a date. I felt a bewildering array of emotions that resulted to a bulged scrotum and a spike in blood pressure that causes an erection.

At home that night, I slept eerily earlier than usual a very excited man. In between, I descended on my knees and recited prayers, beseeching the good Lord to shepherd me as I waded into the strange and treacherous world of seeking a wife, days after my previous attempts were diabolically scorched by some dark forces that survey this human swamp called Nairobi.

SCENE ONE:

I woke up on Saturday morning extremely happy. I smoked what remained of my previous night’s Embassy lights cigarette. I took a shower. The water was cold, but my body was warm. My thoughts were elsewhere. I surveyed my body on the mirror and foolishly smiled. I concluded that I am the portrait of an African man. The African version of Brad Pitt.

I dressed up, wearing those second rags that President Uhuru Kenyatta wants to ban: Cheap blue jeans, white T Shirt and red jacket. I applied my cheap cologne but forgot to brush my teeth or what remains of my dental formula.

I careered my way to a friend’s office, sticking my neck out like a plutonium detector searching for radioactive signals, while listening to TLC’s raunchy Red Light Special, Celine Dion’s The Power of Love and Tupac’s I wonder why they call you bitch songs.

In the office, I dozed off. Until a SMS woke me up. “You,” it said rather condescendingly, leaving me with a sense of bewilderment. No, it was confusion. Again no, it’s the feeling a woman gets when she starts menstruating or a boy experiencing his first sting of wet dreams.

SCENE TWO:

At around 2 PM, I called her and reconfirmed the date. This time, my scrotum had shrunk and my blood pressure low. I headed off to Ngong Road to meet a few bastards before I venture into what I reckoned would be a venerable phase of my life.

At a plush restaurant, I pumped into a colleague and three somewhat clumsy ladies. One was as a slim as a tooth pick, the other was as dark-black as Robert Mugabe and the third in between, brilliant but without a face to match her big functional brains. They were drinking some Mohito, a concoction made of hard drinks, ginger leaves, City Council water and other strange compounds … maybe Viagra.

After negotiated myself a bottle of White Cap, we continued chatting like randy adolescents. We even watched a video of woman having sex with a black dog. And the lucky canine was damn good, partly explaining why Kenyan women do not need men. We are a species facing extinction.

I felt threatened. I though, Is this video a bad omen? The truth was nowhere within range.

SCENE THREE:

I called a buddy to drop me at Boulevard Hotel. Minutes later my date came and then sat down next to me clutching some papers. I knew my “cruise ship” hand come and praise the Lord, she was yummy. She was damn pretty. Her smile was infectious, the smile that makes strong men weak. Her skin was smooth. It was newly-made silk fabric. Her dress was designer-made. Shit, I could not see the legs because they were covered by black stockings. Whoa, English is hopelessly inadequate to describe her beauty.   

Big and small talk kicked, punctuated by flirting under the cover of the black sky, next to a small bonfire, cracking like rodents negotiating undergrowth on a dry season.  As decent of a royal butler, she excused herself and headed back to office; she had a small assignment to finish. So she left with an agreement that she would be back in an hour or so.

I told my buddy my intentions and he agreed, but after conceding that I had hit a jackpot. “Damn, if you let this woman slip from your grasp, chief, you are a total failure and your chances would be blown forever,” he said, staring at some bamboo reeds nearby, perhaps regretting why he rushed into matrimony yet the beautiful ones are yet to be born.

Silently I prayed. I did so in total faith because I needed to win her heart first first than I needed blood in my veins to power an erection; than I needed the water of life in my scrotal bags to discharge and start a new life. These other needs were secondary. Now, I doubt if they matter.

Because it was getting late, we left the mid-level hotel and negotiated our way to cheap bar; a drinking hole that was reeking of stale urine, human defecate and vomit.  We drunk one beer each and left some journalism colleagues who were complaining how poorly they are paid. My buddy left for his ghetto and I joined my date in the car. I thought the moment was approaching.

In her car, things started getting elephant. It was about 9.30 PM and I feared the evil spirits had stampeded the earth eager  to scupper chances of having a rewarding date. I hated the devil because I had made a pact with him to keep off my umpteenth attempt to become a family man. Sorry, a responsible husband. The devil never keeps his word.

SCENE FOUR

We navigated through the reeking Nairobi’s CBD, one hell of a big concrete jungle brothel, making a raft of traffic blunders and ended up in some restaurant in the pretentious Kilimani neighbourhood. At the bar, itself smelling of cheap liquor, unwashed bodies, roasted goat meat – maybe donkey – and other gutters that come when broke Middle Class men and women gather to watch football while negotiating illicit sex, while masquerading as socialising.

My date sat next to a buddy who astutely sneaked into what was expected to be a two-people romantic get-together.  I sat directly opposite her, training my eyes on her smooth face, praying and cursing at the same time, hoping these would be the day to remember; the occasion some novelist and biographers would retrace how one hell of the Bosire Clan started. Dreams. Dreams. Dreams.

When another toothpickish waitress whom I previous knew approached, smiling devilishly because she knew of my previous doomed expeditions, I smiled back, giving a fake impression that was not like those other days when hunting expeditions were successful and great zealot-warriors like me could bag home a big prey.

To impress the date, I ordered a full chicken even though it would do a massive damage on my already-malnourished pockets. Quickly, she jumped and said. “I am not eating; I am a poor eater ….”

Goddamn. I insisted fully aware that either the stupid, malicious, diabolical fire-breathing devil had taken control of the situation or the Good Old Almighty Lord had blocked us from uniting, staking our future on unknown plans, thus saving the best for the last.

Dejected. My balls deflated badly.  When I checked them, they were hanging loosely like used condoms. When the reality sunk, they disappeared into the abdomen, squeezing my kidneys a few inches upwards, thus dislodging my diaphragm. My heart – the heart that craved for her warmth – was pushed to the edge of my breast bone. I nearly suffered a fatal combination of pulmonary thrombosis and coronary thrombosis. KABOOM: Heart attack.

I needed a physician. A heart doctor. But there was none around. I temporary lost sight, but I could see the pale and ugly gnarled face and steel-wire beards of Somali warlord,  Mohamed Hersi, the evil man who acquired the an unenviable nick name “General Morgan” for annihilating thousands of Somali rebels in the 1980s in Hargeisa under the orders of a more evil dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. The last time I checked, the bastard was broke.

Although there was no doctor around; but I comforted myself that God would not abandon His faithful warrior like me. Because He works in mysterious ways,  I remembered of a great drink called Guinness. I ordered it. Slowly, each sip I took from a dick-size glass brought new life into my body. My muscles relaxed, each taking its right place in my body, the Temple of the Lord.

I was whole again. I murmured lyrics from Atomic Kitten’s heart-warming Whole Again.

 Looking back on when we first met, I cannot escape and I cannot forget, Baby, you are the one, You still turn me on, You can make me whole again. Time is laying heavy on my heart, Seems I’ve got too much of it since we’ve been apart, My friends make me smile if only for  while, You can make me whole again.

 After much beseeching and feigning a soft, caring smile on my face, even though I was bleeding inside from a non-existent internal injury, they agreed to order some food.

And the order was as provincial as it was revolting: Two plates of French fries, two smokies, two jugs of tea. These Kikuyu women who populate our Nairobi drinking holes are a strange breed of its own; uncultured, randomly underdeveloped in every aspect of life except husband-snatching, swigging cheap liquor and staying in bars late with other women’s husbands.  But, they are hot, like their Kamba sisters.

As my date and her friend munched, moving their mouth as if they were sharing dinner with Queen Elizabeth, we spoke. We spoke nothing worth talking about; nothing worth writing about; nothing worth telling my readers. Maybe, just maybe, the only sensible in the conversation was when I told them as thus:

 “Women should start fucking better.”

 They sneered at me, but I added, something to this effect, quoting award winning journalist Chris Jones:

 “The trouble is, most women act as though they’re sexual Olympians, as though they’re doing the men in their lives the greatest of favors merely by presenting themselves like a downed deer strapped to the hood of a car. Some of you are deluding yourselves. Sex is not like pizza. Only blowjobs are.”

 Even before they cleared their potato strips; they wanted to leave. Call an end to a strange date.  At least one was inciting the other. Woman will always be women. They even threatened to leave me in the bar in full view of other men who respect me as a grand knight in fighting for the rights of the skirts.

Despite her pretty face, modest job and sexy physique, my date confessed to be a poor eater. “I will carry the rest because I hate wasting food,” she said. I nodded. Thank God, she did not talk about her sex performance in our boring dead-date.

We continued with small talk, all the time, we looked each with fake affection; the fondness that comes when a prostitute is having the first orgasm of the day before she transforms her toughened crotch into a punching bag the whole night. Looking back, mine was a genuine affection, I do not know about her.

I slowly, sexily, methodically and professionally sipped my Guinness, perhaps in search of greatness as its advertisement says. Their meaty faces first turned pale, then red and finally crimson. I knew an equivalent of a verbal roadside bomb was about to explored. So, my glass went bottoms up. No greatness as the advert shitters tell us in their screwed up marketing gimmicks.

SCENE FIVE

On the road back to town, we were mostly quite; a clear sign of tension. I did not guess what she was thinking, but it was not something good.  On my side, I was just coming to terms with yet another doomed romantic expedition. Thank God, this time, I was neither tagged a prostitute nor referred to God for some punishment. I was just a statistic in a city laden with random losers. I thought of Raila Odinga and shared the pain.

We arrived in town, I had a plan. Because we had not spoken anything useful, I wanted to push for another sit-down in another bar, so I dropped a fake red herring and it would not work because it was a counterfeit. There something I wanna tell you, I whispered to her ear, she ignored me and kept driving. Her sign was failing. I felt let down. Not entirely because at least whispering is the closest I came to kissing her. And her perfume was good.

Along Moi Avenue, she dropped off her friend. A few seconds later, even before her buddy was beyond eves-dropping range, she thundered: “Where can I drop you?” It was an affirmative statement, an order from a Nazi tank commander. With that, she shredded the fake arrogance in me into bits and pieces. My brains briefly suspended operations to protest my body’s failure to implement its impulses. My vocal cords snapped. I could not talk. My eyes welled up. It was like a small-time nuclear bomb had exploded in my body.

I hated her. Yes my date. I despised her. I declared an unending war on her; a battle to restore my manhood that had been compromised by a girl who was not born when Jomo Kenyatta died.

And then, I stormed out of her cheap car: A Toyota. Banged the door, threw a tantrum the same way, in the same teenage bravado I displayed outside the Place De La Bourse train station in Paris when my former colleague, Sophie Hanna Nicholson refused to invite me to her apartment. Then crestfallen, I a Big Swinging Dick, watched her fade away into the black horizon. Her her car banked to take Haile Sellasie round-about. My face was aching and as I fought back tears, and then, I had a brainwave: I searching for Guinness, which has been my faithful companion for years.

SCENE SIX

Minutes later after gathering enough courage, I called her, but she was still on the road cruising for her digs. She told me: “I’ll call you back when at home.”  Which she did. We spoke, with me on the offensive headed to the masculine climax, I  thundered: “Never call me again.” It was a callous thing to tell a sweet girl on the phone, but I did not hear her response because our conversation was drowned by old woofers belching out distorted Bob Marley hit song “No Woman No Cry.  It was wrong to tell her that. It was those moments of madness. Silly excuse though, but it’s true.

With Guinness taking charge, I made a no-brainer decision. I toughened my nerves and headed to Simmers Bar and Restaurant to sample the asses of the many willing snakes that slither around carrying beer-spiking pills with intentions to incapacitate and strip bare pockets. As usual, the old snakes recognised me, a regular guest in their nest, and we started talking politics. We talked. We lied. We predicted, obviously powered by ethanol in our drinks.

As discussed spoke everything under the sun, a piercing pain penetrated my spine. It was unspeakable pain; indescribable pain. The twinge of a mother whose new born has been stolen by care givers and sold for a few bottle of whiskey. Then I realised the source of pain. Some drunkard had opened my notebook and started dedicating another random tramp the poem I had written but failed to deliver to my date. Again, I fought back tears.

I know the pain of failure. Raila Odinga knows the pain of failure. Brussia Dortmund knows the pain of failure. We all know the pain of pain.

EPILOGUE

Failure or no failure, now looking back, I must confess, rather grudgingly that I have come to love her because of her hope in the small things life can offer, her conscience to do things right, the depth and vision of her ability of her work.

I will not reveal my date’s name, at least not for today, because I know someday she will come to understand the pain she caused and call back. And maybe, I have I chance to touch her cheek; tell her what Richard Burton told Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra in 1963: “You are beautiful.”

 To read more of Bogonko Bosire’s interesting pieces visit his news platform: http://www.thejackalnews.com/