The Greatest Depression

Violent domestic squabbles came to dominate his life.

I vividly remember his face. As I write this, I can still see his deep-set bloodshot eyes on a long face with jetted out jaws that gave him the appearance of a fox. His laughter was somehow clumsy, often exposing a set of irregularly spaced crooked teeth, with the incisors too small for his wide mouth. His nostrils were deep and shocking, and his nose broad and flat, as if slapped against his face by a worked up creator. A pitch dark skin wrapped up the anatomy of a very unforgettable character that was Charles.

He had been lucky enough to grab something for himself after the British settlers had had enough of the Mau Mau menace and quit the Kenyan seat of power in 1963. This was the common belief in Bungoma town where he moved to from his rural home in Kiambu back in the late 1970s. But when he died, among the many skeletons that fell off his closet was that he had actually sold off his father’s land in Kiambu before growing wings. In a single swoop of greed, he had disinherited his eighteen brothers who collectively, conspired to consult a revered village witchdoctor to unleash ‘African science’ on him.

That Friday evening, I was idling with a cheap beer bottle at Comrades’ pub, trying to figure out the probability of a male gynaecologist seeing the gates of heaven when a voluptuous bar maid, perched on a tall ‘sina taabu’ bar stool, invited my attention by carelessly parting her beefy thighs. Preferring to look for trouble and not trouble looking for me, I quickly dismissed her debauched invitations by looking the other way.

I was not yet inebriated when Charles walked into the pub, accompanied by a youthful man carrying a briefcase and a flywhisk. The room all of a sudden became alive with slurred shouts of flattery. The voluptuous bar maid, jumped off her stool as if it was on fire and ran towards Charles, her plumpish buttocks jerking violently with arms held out. I concluded she wasn’t wearing an integral feminine piece of clothing. The man next to me bit his index finger, swore something incoherently and swallowed a big lump of evil passion. I just smiled at my bottle.

Soon, without warning, the sound of a slap thundered through the pub’s foggy atmosphere. I heard bottles break and glasses shatter. It was all too familiar a scene, watching a stunned man clumsily climb from under a broken table to receive his reward for bearing such brutal force from the burly man that was Charles. I watched the assaulted man limp away with a bunch of old notes and thought he must have broken a bone. The patrons cheered violently as another man, if I can remember well, walked in and offered to do something absurd in lieu of Charles’ money. He said he needed some money for his family’s rent and had followed Charles all the way from his palatial house.

“Yes my father!” the almost toothless man screamed himself hoarse, his arms raised in total surrender and his sharp knees wobbling in his weather-beaten trousers. You could easily see that life had been truly unfair to him. Charles then pointed his fat posterior at the kneeling man’s face and a loud bang escaped him, threatening the unity of his trouser’s seams and the safety of everyone around as some drunken men dunked for cover thinking a grenade had just gone off! The poor man’s muffled cries were replied by more bangs of foul flatulence. I reasoned that if his underwear could talk—that is if he ever wore any—Charles was supposed to be a guest of The Hague!

By the time Charles withdrew his offending large set of hindquarters from the unfortunate man’s face, the poor chap was at the verge of collapsing. Looking asphyxiated and his temple dotted with beads of sweat, the man’s protruding eyes, set on top of his head like a crocodile’s, darted across the room you’d think he was from a near death experience. Then he jumped up and down like an intoxicated Rastafarian and I wondered what Charles ate. Deep inside, I concluded that the indignity of being poor is indeed an enemy of man. Bemused patrons roared with laughter as the bar maid brought the sniffer four bottles of lager and he got himself busy, watering his throat, while occasionally breaking into a mischievous grin like a desert gecko. I caught a surreptitious glimpse of a neat bunch of notes tucked away in his breast pocket. No doubt the end had justified the means. I secretly licked the last drop off my bottle and walked away.

*****

The news spread like bushfire. Some celebrated, others commiserated. But at least, everybody had something to say about Charles, then lying lifeless in his rented house. Death, the equalizing coward, had finally meted out long overdue justice, so they said and proved once again that the fall of a big man is consolation to the struggles of the poor. For a man who in his lifetime was in the business of killing other people’s dignity, I was the least surprised that people had nasty things to say about him, even in death.

Among my people is a saying that money has no driver. Anybody who was familiar with the life and times of Charles must have learnt that. How Charles fell from grace to grass is interesting, as much as it’s baffling. Who could have thought that a man who openly smoked bank notes while everybody else gave up sweat and blood just to make ends meet could die a destitute?

Now, it happened that early in a September morning, Charles and one of his workers went to Kitale town to buy maize that was in surplus after a bumper harvest. They loaded a total of two hundred bags but on their way back, the lorry got stuck in a fair weather road that was pooled with mud and water after yester night’s torrential rainfall. An idling group of youths offered to assist push the lorry out of the ditch, but on condition that Charles would pay them one hundred shillings for their work. He obliged and business commenced. But once out of the ditch, he reneged and the angry youths pushed the lorry back to the ditch. Charles, mad with rage, rushed to the nearby gas station and bought five hundred shillings worth of petrol.

“I am filthy rich!” he yelled at the jobless young men, his nose twitching with arrogance of the rich and eyes threatening to pop out.  “This lorry is worth only a shilling to me…I can burn it and the insurance people will pay me,” his neck became prominent with veins, and the corners of his oversized mouth foamed. In fact, I remember a bad joke that Charles had 42 teeth!

And so, the lorry with all the two hundred bags of maize went up in a plume of smoke before a befuddled crowd. Times were hard and some people openly shed tears at seeing so much food going to waste. He stood guard, a whip in hand and disallowed anybody from salvaging anything. “It’s my property,” he snarled and waited until the entire lorry had burnt into a shell before getting himself a taxi back home, leaving his worker stranded.

When I heard about it, I was shocked to say the least. I knew he had ultimately done himself in; but surely for a hundred shillings? A good number of people in Bungoma town laughed their heads off at Charles’ apparent illiteracy. Though he vehemently denies it, man is a fool who often engineers his own end. I concluded Charles was no exception.

It was a very humbling as much as it was a humiliating fall. The worker witnessed against him and the insurance company made clear its verdict: ‘you are on your own’. In fact, it sued him for arson and he sold off one of his two prime plots at a throw away price just to bail himself out of the imminent gallows. The bank people would hear none of it, and so they mercilessly auctioned his other remaining plot that was also his home to recover their money as was agreed in the fine print that Charles had pressed his thumb against. He had forfeited his remittances for seven months yet had they not financed his purchase of the lorry?

If there is a shock therapy that has served me well over the many years, it is accepting the fact that in this life, anything can happen, especially in this country—you can spend a fortune and a lifetime in school and end up a pesky noisy small time preacher in some funny market. And so, there are no surprises in my life. Unfortunately for Charles, coping with the sudden turn of events proved a pill too bitter to swallow. How the briefcase carrier and all the hero-worshippers vanished was totally inexplicable to him. But for some of us in the know, it was plain to see that if you don’t have money—that is when you’re poor, people don’t value you, people don’t respect you, people just don’t care about you! I learnt a secret of war that when most people want to destroy you, they first befriend you. Again, I learnt that in every circle of irresponsible friendship, there is always a catalyst, a traitor and a martyr.

Now, Charles became somebody else’s tenant. Occasionally, his family would spend in the cold, him having failed to pay rent on time. He turned to friends, only to come face to face with the harsh reality that there is nothing called friendship in this world—there’s only interest. Soon, rumor mills began to spin—the wife was seen with so and so last night. Amorous men with fiery loins took full advantage of his desperate daughters and sowed in them wild oats. Violent domestic squabbles came to dominate his life.

Soon, Charles concluded that there is nothing more evil than hope: it makes everything seem very possible before melting everything into a very impossible mirage. And something else: this life is very unforgiving, especially if you’re stupid enough to pull a loaded gun into your own mouth!

 After a month of Sundays, Charles lost all hope of things ever looking up again. At the district hospital where a Good Samaritan rushed him after he collapsed under the weight of a sack of potatoes, the doctors diagnosed hypertension and manic depression. After that, I think I saw him once or twice, then a pale shadow of his former self. Another day, news came in that his eldest son had been lynched by an angry mob for stealing a bicycle on a market day.

Not a single day did I laugh at his misery borne of such a thunderous downfall. But others openly did. For me, it was a rare opportunity to learn a thing or two about this living business. As the pieces finally came together, I realized that no man has a remote control system for this life. At some checkpoints, we all make mistakes and tomorrow being a night of pitch darkness, the things we mock today could come live and knocking at our very doorsteps.

Only God, solitude and a very frail Charles were there when the lights finally went off and curtains fell on a very dramatic life that morning of December.