Shoeless in Nairobi

              On our first morning in Kenya, I made myself a promise: the next time I was robbed of everything I owned, I would at least try to be awake while it happened.

          We had been met after midnight by a smiling Kenyan employee of the agency we were going to work for, and driven to Eastleigh, a smart suburb of Nairobi. The driver unlocked the door of a two-storey house on a street that could have been in Northampton or Des Moines. Too tired even to shower away the grime of air travel, we had sunk into floral-patterned twin beds on the second floor. As I lapsed into a kindly coma, I thought how little like Africa this place looked: we had an entire middle-class home to ourselves.  So far, so good.

          As I came to, sometime after a sudden dawn, Barbara was standing at the door of the room, her hand on the knob.

          “Okay, Art, I give up.  What did you do with the key?”

          “What key?  Is the door locked?”

          “Tighter than a tick.”  She twisted the doorknob futilely. I got up slowly and tried it myself.

          “You don’t suppose what’s his name, the driver, locked us in on purpose?” I asked hopefully. Barbara just grunted. She was crossing her legs, needing the bathroom. I wrenched at the handle.  Nothing.

          “I think there was a key in the door when we came in,” I said. I dropped to my knees and peered under the crack at the bottom. Nothing but polished floor.

I went over to the window and looked out. The room let on to a sloping shed roof over what I knew was the kitchen. From there I could see a short drop to the grassy lawn of the manicured compound below. There was no one in sight.

“Go on, then,” said Barbara.

“Go on and what?”

“Yell,” she said.  “Call somebody.”

“What do I say, exactly? ‘Help!’ sounds a little extreme.”

Her expression showed she didn’t mind what words I employed, but that she expected a yell, right now.

“Hey!” I tried. “Yo!” No answer from anybody except a chained boxer dog in a yard across the street, who barked unconvincingly and went back to sleep.

The problem was that we didn’t know anybody except the driver, whose African name had already eluded my memory. I threw on my trousers and put my leg through the window.  If Barbara was impressed, she didn’t let on. I slid cautiously down the slope to the rain gutter and looked over. A man was sitting on a folding chair in the garden next door, reading a leather-bound book. It could have been a Bible.  He was a wiry man in his fifties, with a thick shock of wavy dark hair and a serious expression.

“Good morning,” he said, looking up at me.

“It will be as soon as I get down from here,” I said. The man got to his feet in an unhurried manner.

“We seem to be locked in our room,” I said.

He nodded, and disappeared around the corner.  I sat expectantly until I heard Barbara’s voice inside the room. She was talking to the man, who had unlocked the door from inside the house. I crawled back up the roof and squeezed through the window. The wiry man was alone. Barbara had lit out for the toilet.

        “My name is Howard,” the man said.

I looked around for my shoes.  I must have left them outside the bedroom, alongside my suitcase. I excused myself and went into the hall.  There was nothing there.  Absolutely nothing: no carpet, no table, no mirror, no curtains, no luggage, nothing. I spun around to see Howard leaning against the doorjamb.

“There won’t be anything of yours out there,” he said.

“Who… who would have taken everything?” I asked, unbelievingly. “What happened?”

Howard shrugged. “This area is usually all right,” he said. “You get a few robberies like this out in Karen, but Eastleigh has got a lot of private police on patrol. This is unusual.”

“We’re just lucky, I guess,” I tried to put sarcasm into my voice, but just then caught sight of Barbara’s white face. Her expression said it all.  Whoever it was had gotten all our stuff. Including, it seemed, my shoes.

“They left the kitchen cabinets,” Howard said across the table, where we were having tea in his back yard. Bored detectives in uncomfortable-looking suits had made their perfunctory report and then vanished. My main concern was trying to avoid the large red ants that threatened to crawl up my bare feet.

“They took the refrigerator, of course. It’s as good a way as any to carry off the food. The rest of the furniture will have taken them some time. They probably had to steal a truck, as well.”

“They took furniture, rugs, curtains, the fridge, for God’s sake, and we didn’t wake up?” I was incredulous. “What did they do, drug us, or something?”

Howard’s face got even more sombre. “They locked you in. All foreigners’ houses have internal door locks, for just this kind of thing. They reached in, took the key from inside and locked the door.  If you hadn’t been so tired, they might have awakened you.  That was lucky.”

“Lucky,” I scoffed. “If we’d been lucky, we’d have scared them off.”

Howard didn’t reply.  It was Barbara who got the point first.

“If we’d woken up, Art,” she said, “They would have killed us.

“Welcome to Kenya,” said Howard.

Being Agreeable

                There’s a phase when you’re first learning a foreign language when you almost understand what’s being said to you, but not quite.

                When I was teaching English in Barcelona, I worked with some businessmen who, at first glance, already spoke the language very well. We would sit and discuss the news in a British paper, and I would interrupt when they made a small mistake or used a “detour” to avoid a difficult construction they weren’t sure of.  Things like, “If I had known that by that time I would have been there for six hours…” might come out as “I didn’t know that at that time I’m already going to be there for six hours...”  Minor, but significant.

                Once I recall a man telling me, “Sorry, I slept late.”  He was a bit bleary-eyed, so I checked. “What time did you go to bed?”

              “Three-thirty," he replied. It takes years to notice the difference between what he said and “I went to sleep late.”

One danger is that the learner may partially understand something, with fatal consequences. When I was getting competent in Spanish I once had a barroom conversation with a man called Pepillo, who slurred his speech when fully sober and was basically incomprehensible when drunk. I knew he was talking about his little farm across the river.  Most farmers in that little village talked about their farms, the price of crops and the scarcity of rainfall to the exclusion of anything else. So at every pause, I just said, “Si, si.” It seemed the polite thing to do while I was waiting for unconsciousness to overtake him. We shook hands as he staggered off home.

           The next afternoon I was in the plaza, waiting for the shop to open. Pepillo rode up on his mule and shouted something angrily at me before turning up a side street.  I couldn’t decipher it, so I asked someone what he had said.

“He said you had agreed to buy his farm last night and then didn’t have the courtesy to turn up,” he told me.

          The most dangerous word in a foreign language is “yes”.

I was getting my hair cut yesterday by a bright young man from some Eastern European country or other.  He was very personable; he agreed with everything I said. He responded in the affirmative to every instruction about how I wanted my hair cut: “Yes, yes.”

           It was a pleasant experience. And then I remembered.  After a couple of test sentences, I said, “Would you please slice my ears off with your cutthroat razor, roll them up and push them up my nostrils?”

Smile unwavering, the agreeable young man said, “Yes, yes.”

          Don’t say: “Short back and sides.”

Why I Never Slept with Jack Kerouac

            The hero of my youth was sitting at a booth in Harry’s Grill, a Southern college town’s version of a bohemian hangout, flanked by a couple of young guys who looked like faces off of wanted posters. The year was 1965. My friend Marshall was there, too, waving me over.

            Ten minutes earlier, Marshall had telephoned me at the weekly newspaper where I was reporter, ad salesman and circulation manager. “Art, I would not lie to you—Jack Kerouac is sitting right here.” He had been hitchhiking when a dusty Pontiac stopped for him and he discovered that he had hit the would-be beat writer’s jackpot.  He found himself on the road with On the Road himself.

            Marshall and I didn’t know it, but we were caught up in events that deserve to be called seminal. As the sixties unrolled around us, social culture was heaving with labour pains. We were drifting on this current without knowing it, like wood chips in a swollen stream.

            Kerouac looked up as I approached the table.  He slid over and patted the seat next to him. “You sit your sweet English ass right here,” he said. I knew that Kerouac was thought to be obsessed with ethnic identity, or—as some would later claim—racism.

            He looked older and heavier than the photos on the back of his books. But I was twenty, and everyone looked older to me. He was dressed in a lumberjack’s flannel shirt and had thick forearms that took up a lot of room at the table. I was tongue-tied. Kerouac did all the talking.  He seemed to know something about everything. Words kept tumbling out of him without spaces in between, like passages from his books. He schmoozed the waitress and engaged in a heart-to-heart with Grits, the cook with the scarred face who had been wounded with a pan of scalding porridge by a waitress who had misunderstood his friendly advances twenty years before. When he turned his attention on me, all I could say was, “Man, you don’t know it, but you got me through high school.”

            My adolescence was spent in Jacksonville, Florida, where “coloured” music, like that of Muddy Waters, was banned from the radio, and “beat” meant what happened to you if you looked slantwise at a redneck at the drive-in. It was made endurable by a thirty-five cent paperback copy of On the Road, which I carried in the hip pocket of my Levis until it decomposed. The fact that people like Kerouac and Neal Cassidy existed at all was enough to keep me going until I was old enough to escape to New York.

            We made a move, and I was surprised to find that he and I were alone. We hit several student bars. In one of them, he suddenly shouted out, “Hey you—hey Negro!” The lone black man in the Tempo Room turned slowly to look at us. He was big, like a football linebacker. I was trying to make myself small.

            “What you want, honky man?” the guy growled.

            “Did you know that one of the famous gunslingers in the Old West was a Negro? A man named Jesse Sublett?” Kerouac went on cheerfully, and signalled the barman to pour a round of drinks.

            “No, I didn’t know that,” said the black guy. He accepted the drink, shook his head, and walked away muttering, but smiling.

Word got around. An emissary from the Chapel Hill literati arrived and invited Kerouac to a private party at the home of the now renowned writer, Russell Banks. It was behind Eben Merritt’s Esso Station on the Pittsboro Road. On the way we stopped at the Quick Mart and bought 28 bottles of Blue Nun Liebfraumilch, warm.

            By the time we arrived, every literary hopeful in the two nearby universities had packed the small frame house. My pretty girlfriend, Nancy, showed up too. The literary set smoked pot in the living room and listened to Dave Van Ronk on the hi-fi.  Nancy and I sat in a little den with Kerouac and his two sidekicks. We each held our own bottle of Blue Nun.

            The literary lions grew impatient. One of them, now a fabled sci-fi author, came in and abruptly asked, “Now that LSD is on the scene, things are different.  Beats are passé. What do you think about that?”

            “What do you think about the Four Horsemen of the North?” said Kerouac. The lion departed. We laughed and drank more Blue Nun.  I couldn’t understand why the local literati seemed to disapprove of him. They appeared to have generational issues, quibbles about relevance. I wanted to shout, “Man this is Jack Kerouac, don’t you get it?” It was as if JFK had risen from the grave and dropped in among us. I sat on one of Jack’s knees and Nancy sat on the other. I was starting to see double, but it seemed to be agreed: Kerouac would stay with us, in our one-room digs that had only one bed.

            He said he was on his way to Massachusetts to see Buffy Sainte-Marie, his old friend. I started to get up, to ask Russell to put some Buffy on the stereo, but was too dizzy. Lions came and went, Blue Nun corks popped.  Then I was over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift on the way to a car, where Nancy crossly nursed me all the way home. Later I heard that he had kept going all night, Blue Nun and all. I had written down Jack’s mother’s phone number in Tampa on a scrap of paper, but couldn’t find it the next day. I never did.       

         

Let it Rain?

I was painting a sign outside my Mexican restaurant once, years ago.  It was very expensive high-pigment paint and I was proceeding slowly.  The tin had warned not to let the paint get wet. About mid-afternoon, clouds formed, pregnant with North Carolina rain.  I worked faster, with a growing sense of unease.  I might be hurrying through a doomed project, but I didn’t know what else to do.

A man passed by.  I recognised him as Hey Bob, a respected local builder before his arthritis got him.  I hailed him—“Hey, Bob!”-- and began to explain my fears about the approaching rain.  I explained that the pigment in the paint was specially formulated, but that it might run and streak if it got wet.  Hey Bob listened carefully, nodding at each point.  I was still halfway up the ladder, unable to decide what to do.  At last he said,

          “You know what I’d do if it was me?”

          ”No, tell me,” I said eagerly.

          He grinned. “I’d let it rain.”

I’ve been trying to ever since.

Flash Fiction

I read this morning that tomorrow is National Flash Fiction Day.  That’s when stories of 150 words or less are published and given awards.

In case you think it’s easier to write something short, think again. If you can whip out 2,000 words in a good day of writing, it will take you two good days to cut it down to 150. I decided to have a go anyway.

 

N.B. If you find yourself counting, have a word with someone about OCD.

You’re Not Here

 He didn’t stop, just kept charging straight to the bar, big fists balled by his side. Janine stopped talking and moved aside. Her split skirt flashed smooth leg.

‘Where’s Jim?’ he growled.  Growled, like a pit bull.

‘Jim who?’ I said, and wiped some glasses. Casual.    

‘Just Jim,’ Pit Bull said.

‘He’s not here.’   

‘Tell that mf he better start wearing rear view mirrors because I’m coming up behind him.’

Then he was gone, like a summer squall. It was quieter in the bar than I’d seen it. Janine smoked and looked at the wall. I had something to say, something funny, but I couldn’t remember it.

‘I think his name’s Elmo,’ Irish Mike said over his Bud.

‘Nobody’s named Elmo.’

‘He is.’

At closing time I asked if she wanted me to walk her home. She didn’t answer. 

Later she said, ‘You’re not here, Jim--remember?’

Playing Chicken

My email this morning informed me that a legitimate transaction I made with my credit card had been declined for “security reasons”. No problem, I thought—I’ll just ring the bank.

Poor fool, you must be thinking.

What ensued was two hours of dialling and endlessly repeating my date of birth, imploring the voices on line not to leave me unattended in a queue, and being treated to a number by Girls Aloud that I want to assure you I will never buy. My only satisfaction came from responding to the stock statement that calls might be recorded for training purposes by making some pointed suggestions. Some of them may have been unseemly, but I don’t think I can actually be prosecuted.

Being ensnared by red tape and indifferent bureaucracy is not limited to modern life in this country. What’s different is the remedy.

When I worked in Botswana years ago, I was in charge of a project of helping 14 village women set up small poultry businesses. Because there were no large hatcheries in the country, laying hens had to be ordered from across the border in Johannesburg. When all the coops had been built and the organisation was all in place, I ordered 800 point-of-lay chickens.

The day of delivery came.  I drove to the border post and parked. A trickle of cars were passing through a gate that was propped open with a cement block. Two Botswana guards were waving them through, not paying much attention. Twenty yards away were the South Africans. They looked more business-like.  I thought I could see a large truck with cages stacked onto the flat bed, so I walked past the guards and presented my passport to the South Africans. Both were white, as they would have been in those days of apartheid. One of them went into a little office and spoke on a telephone. He came back to tell me that I could not cross.

My name was on a list, because I worked for an international gang of terrorists known as the Quakers, who disapproved of apartheid. I pleaded with them just to let me speak to the lorry driver, who I could see lounging under a tree, smoking. One of the guards took momentary pity on me and whistled.  He beckoned the driver over, who said that we had only a few minutes to get the truck underway or the chickens would die from heat and suffocation. He went back and started the truck.

I stood on the Botswana side, feeling relieved. The chicken truck inched forward until the Botswana guards closed the gate. One of them looked at me. He had a round face and his shirt was half unbuttoned.

“Where is your veterinary certificate?” he asked me.

This was the first I had heard about a veterinary certificate. I felt my stomach sink toward my boots. “I haven’t got one,” I said.

The two guards spoke among themselves.  One of them was friendlier-looking than the other. He reached into his satchel and handed me an official-looking document. “This must be signed by a veterinarian,” he said.

“But the chickens will all die unless we move the truck,” I pleaded.

“Take this away and have it signed by a veterinarian,” the guard said.

“But you don’t understand!” I moaned, thinking of arriving back in Mogoditshane with tons of rotting poultry corpses.

“Listen to me,” the friendly guard said. “It must be signed by a veterinarian.” He looked at me directly, as if he were planning to kiss me. I had seen that look before. You see it when you’re being stupid, like when you’ve missed a joke that makes everyone else laugh. I stood still waiting for the light to dawn.

“Oh,” I said. I went back to my truck, got out a ballpoint and very carefully signed the document A Veterinarian, being careful to dot my I’s and cross the T.

The guard took it from my hand and raised the gate without looking at it. The truck rolled through, and, that night, 792 healthy laying hens were scratching in the dirt of Mogoditshane.

I hear they’re still moving call centres to places like Kolkata. Wish they’d move them to Botswana.

How Dry I Am

It’s pouring outside, making May the sequel to the wettest April on record. There are buckets in the upstairs bathroom due to a leaking roof.  If this drought gets any worse I don’t know what we’ll do.

Yes, the government is still going on about the drought in the Southeast. Which means it’s illegal to go out in the rain and wash your car. It’s too hard to water your lawn holding an umbrella, anyway.

In a single day, I heard two explanations for why all this rain hasn’t ended the official drought.  One government voice—Agriculture, I think—said that the ground was “too hard” to allow the water to soak in, so it was all running off somewhere. But a spokesperson from Environment said that water was not collecting in the reservoirs, because it was all soaking into the ground. One of them is bound to be right, I figure. Either way, I don’t flush as often.

I’ve seen droughts in Africa, and they don’t look like this one. There you get skinny animals and clouds of dust that make little mini-tornados. Everybody walks real slow.  One season in Botswana,  the national reservoir near Gaborone got so low that yachtsmen had to stop practising for the Olympics. They were never very good at it anyway; they just needed one more sport to enter in order to qualify. The village boys I worked with had to stop growing Swiss chard in a small patch at our community centre, an important intervention in what was a virtual epidemic of tuberculosis.

One Saturday night I drove two boys to a church hall in a neighbouring village to see a film.  I don’t remember what it was about, just the looks of awe on their faces as they watched scenes of an English village. On the way home, Thabo prompted Nsimane to ask me a question.  He did, with an air of trepidation.

“Art,” he said, “Why does it always rain where white people live?”