of Congress Control Number: 2019954622
The Cape Cod Bicycle Wars and Other Stories was first published in 2019
by Huza Press, Kigali, Rwanda.
Within Africa, to obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from this publication, please contact Huza Press, PO Box 1610, Kigali, Rwanda
E-mail: [email protected] • www.huzapress.com
Cover design: Yves Honore Bisamage
To ‘K’ for being there.
Youth, n. The Period of Possibility, when Archimedes finds a fulcrum, Cassandra has a following and seven cities compete for the honor of endowing a living Homer.
Youth is the true Saturnian Reign, the Golden Age on earth again, when figs are grown on thistles, and pigs betailed with whistles and, wearing silken bristles, live ever in clover, and cows fly over, delivering milk at every door, and Justice never is heard to snore, and every assassin is made a ghost and, howling, is cast into Baltimost! – Polydore Smith.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Contents
WE ARE HERE BECAUSE WE ARE HERE
ZONING
Outside on Tom Mboya Street, Kandle realised that he was truly in the Zone. The Zone was the calm, breathless place in which he found himself after drinking for a minimum of three days straight. He had slept for less than fifteen hours in strategic naps, had eaten just enough to avoid going crazy, and had drunk enough water to make a cow go belly-up. The two-hour baths of Hell’s Gate hot-spring heat had also helped.
Kandle had discovered the Zone when he was seventeen. He had swapped vices by taking up alcohol after the pleasures of casual sex had waned. In a city-village rumour-circuit full of outlandish tales of ministers’ sons who drove Benzes with trunks full of cash; of a character called Jimmy X who was unbeaten in about 500 bar fights going back to the late 80s; in a place where sixty-year-old tycoons bedded teenagers and kept their panties as souvenirs; in a town where the daughter of one of Kenya’s richest businessmen held parties that were so exclusive that Janet Jackson had flown in for her birthday – Kandle, self-styled master of the art of seventy-two-hour drinking, had achieved a footnote.
In many of the younger watering holes in Nairobi’s CBD, he was now an icon. Respected in Buru Buru, in Westlands, in Kile, in Loresho and Ridgeways, one of the last men standing in alcohol-related accidents and suicides. He had different names in different postal codes. In Zanze he was the Small-Package Millionaire. His crew was credited with bringing back life to the City Centre. In Buru he was simply Kan. In the Hurlingham area he was known as The Candle. In a few years, the generation of his kid brother Giant Rat would usurp his legendary status, but now it was his time.
The threat of rain had turned Tom Mboya Street into a bedlam of blaring car horns, screaming hawkers, screeching matatus and shouting policemen. People argued over parking spaces and haggled over underwear. Thunder rumbled and drowned it all. A wet wind blew, announcing a surreptitious seven-minute drenching, but everybody ran as if a heavy downpour threatened. Even that was enough to create a five-hour traffic jam into the night. The calm and the wise walked into the bars, knowing it would take hours to get home anyway.
Zanze patrons walked into Kenya Cinema Plaza and a group of girls jeered at Kandle because he was going in the opposite direction, out into the weather. Few could tell he had been drinking since noon. Kandle was not only a master at achieving the Zone, he was excellent at hiding it. The copious amount of alcohol in his blood had turned his light-brown skin brighter, yellow and numb and characterless like a three-month-old baby’s. The half-bottle of Insto eye drops he had used in the bathroom had started to take effect. He had learned over time that the sun was an absolute no-no when it came to achieving a smooth transition to the Zone. Thankfully, there was very little sunshine left outside, and he felt great.
‘Step into the p.m. Live the art of seventy-two hours. I’m easy like Sunday morning,’ he muttered towards the friendly insults. A philosopher of the Kenyan calendar, Kandle associated all months of the year with different colours and hues in his head. August he saw as bright yellow, a time when the year had turned a corner; responsibilities would be left behind or pushed to the next January, a white month. March was purple-blue. December was red. The yellow haze of August would be better if he were to be fired from his job at Eagle Bank that evening.
Kandle had tried to convert many of his friends to the pleasures of the Zone, with disastrous results. Kevo, his best friend, had once made a deep cut into his palm on the dawn of a green Easter morning in Naivasha after they had been drinking for almost a week. He had been trying to impress the crew and nearly bled to death. They had had to cut their holiday short and drive to Nairobi when his hand had swollen up with an infection days later. Kandle’s cousin Alan had died two years ago trying to do the fifty-kilometre Thika-to-Nairobi highway in fifteen minutes. Susan, once the late Alan’s girlfriend, then Kandle’s, and now having something with Kevo, stopped trying to get into the Zone when she realised she couldn’t resist stripping in public after the seventy-two-hour treatment. After almost being raped at a house party she had gone into a suicidal depression for weeks and emerged with razor cuts all over her body and twenty kilograms off her once-attractive frame.
Every month she did her Big Cry for Alan, then invariably slept with Kandle till he tired of her and she moved on to Kevo. The Zone was clearly not for those who lacked restraint.
Stripping in public, cutting one’s palm, thinking you were Knight Rider – these were, to Kandle, examples of letting the Bad Zone overwhelm you. One had to keep the alcohol levels intact to stay in the Good Zone, where one was allowed all the wishful thinking in one’s
