Over the weekend, I was in one of those spots in Westy where it’s an if-you-know-you-know basis. I didn’t know. I was here on account of my friend, who seems to know everyone worth knowing, and who seems to be known by everyone who is anyone.
Anyway, if you want to know how exclusive this place is, you would not find any of these places in the original Westy, western Kenya, Kakamega Ingo, where I was born and my placenta is buried.
For context, the biggest club in Westy, Ingo, is Shinyalu Bar, where rumour has it, it’s the western Kenya nerve centre, what Nakumatt used to be for supermarkets. At Shinyalu Bar, with the right amount of lies (or promises), you can get someone to get you to meet the President; you can make a court case disappear, you can make someone disappear...
Shinyalu Bar doesn’t have no bouncers, because everyone in Kakamega is built from muscle and sinew. That’s not the only reason but never let facts get in the way of a good story. Here, there are six bouncers stationed at the gate, including a winding culvert you have to walk in through before meeting two more bouncers at the entrance, which is also where I will meet Calvo, the toughest bouncer in the world.
And all this for what? Because apparently, children of prominent Kenyan high society hang out around here. I want to tell them to shove it up their proverbial, but my mother taught me it is always good to keep quiet when you have nothing nice to say, and besides, I am trading on my friend’s reputation. The exclusivity had been bridged, or lost, depending on whether you are a dynasty or hustler. And with my dreadlocks hanging loose, I don’t want to be fodder for the gossip mills and prove the stereotypes, “sharp boys”, “forex bro”, “sugar boy”.
I might as well have been because the prices here were enough to ransom the benevolent dictator of a small third-world East African nation. There are no waiters or busboys here, not that I am complaining. In Shinyalu bar, the waiters, all women by the way, have all shaven their eyebrows just to draw them back with a pencil, and you could see from their hands all the skin-lightening creams they used, but you soon forgot all that with that cart of sins they were dragging behind them, threatening to break free from the seams of their mini-skirts.
Wiser men than I know when to leave the stage, but when have you met a wise youth? The night is still young. We get up the stairs and get God’s eye view of everyone—and everything. The view from that plane is extraordinary; God knew his business that day.
And because the Devil has no fresh ideas, and having perfected his craft and gotten smarter after 2,000 years, I found my way conversing with him in the shape of the muscled in-house bouncer, Calvo. I wanted to believe that the muscles were the result of a life of hard work, not a life in a gym with dozens of other men and tons of dumbbells.
He stood with an air of importance and authority, but the more I studied his face, the more I saw that the man would never be anything more than a guard whose job was to simply break up fights, or break up the people in a fight.
I offered to buy him a drink—he said no, niko job—and I thought he thought I wanted to pick him up. No. I wanted to know what’s the deal with this place, and why are these girls barely dressed, are they not afraid of getting pneumonia? We are still a third-world country with one of the most expensive State House budget allocations. Instead, I sent Calvo something small for chai because it's cold and he can’t drink on the job. Responsible citizenry, if I do say so myself.
We got talking. Showed me how the drugs enter the place. Told me all about the young people finding a distraction from their distractions. It was sad, really. Young people, barely fresh from their mother’s wombs, intoxicated to the point of delusion, and I saw my younger sister, N—, in them, and I wondered if she too was doing the same wherever she was, thinking life is for the living, thinking she’ll always have tomorrow. If I were one of those conspiracy theorists, I’d say we were being initiated into an occult, that we were all in a trance, an indoctrination.
Calvo said he could get me anything I want, if I could keep my mouth shut. “Bora uko na pesa ,” just to be clear. Of course. Everyone wants to make a quick shilling from you. Next to us, some guy had passed out, and I would have helped, but if he was dead and my fingerprints were on him? How do I get out of that? Nobody would believe the dreadlocked rasta guy.
For reasons I could not explain then, and cannot explain now, I asked Calvo for his number, take our conversation offline, and later, when he would not reply to my texts about whether the boy was alive, my heart would break.
As we hailed a cab home, I stared up at the sky, and remembered my grandma, Kukhu, and how she would tell us that the stars are nothing more than white tombstones scattered across a dark graveyard. I wondered whether the boy would wake up. I wondered if I was a good man for minding my business, or a bad one for minding my business.
