The following is an excerpt from the tales of myadventures and misdeeds in Kenya. Picture yourself in a over-packed, decrepit van tearing through Africa to somewhere you’ve never been…

   There were no possible directions for any limb to move unless it was flesh squeezing into new districts of my body. The only parts at liberty to exercise were my neck and dozing head, which bobbed around for three hours. After driving for two hours we spun to a stop, snapping me out of a terrifying dream about riding in a matatu, and I saw a sign which read “Nunguni” as well as some other words. I needed to get out immediately, but the passengers jamming me in looked at me strangely the moment I began to shimmy up.

   “Nunguni,” I explained, pointing to the road sign.

    Heads were wagging and the gal in my lap said, “No.” 

   No? No what? ‘No, this isn’t Nunguni’ or ‘No, you can’t get out’? It didn’t seem open to discussion. The anchovies were in charge of me now, whether they knew where the hell I was going or not. So off we rolled as I creaked my head around on a stiff neck to see if Ben was anywhere outside. The next stop had a Nunguni sign too. As did the next and the one after that and the one after that and the one after that. But each displayed a second name as well, different from the others. At all these stops one person would hop out and two or three would work their way into fissures in the crowd. And at each drop-off people would turn to me and silently swivel their heads, “no.” How did they know where the fuck I was headed? Were they screwing with the stranger? Seeing if they could make him go way, way out of his way? Boy, if I wasn’t on the splintered end of that crapstick, I’d think it was a decent prank to pull. Of course there might have been no practical joke at all with something more sinister afoot. The matatu was headed for Mt. Kilimanjaro where they’d strip, oil and scent me, then toss me off a precipice to appease the spirits of agriculture and mass transit. Maybe I was being taken by an unscrupulous syndicate to get sold into slavery. I’ll bet that wouldn’t be so bad. I’m pretty sturdy and have been known to take direction from time to time. Bet I’d be the best white slave ever, even better than Spartacus although you’d never catch me spooning up with Tony Curtis in the slave huts. Nor would I stab anybody in a slave fight just take his spot on a crucifix. Dying for days along a shadeless Roman iter for some bright-eyed pretty boy? Fuck that; stupidest thing I ever saw in a movie… Well now, as I was screwed deeper at every moment, all I could do was wrench an acid soaked neck at each stop, peering out the dusty window near me or looking through chinks in the bodies to see out others. All views were consistently Benless. Nunguni signs kept coming – the town must be huge, nearly bigger than all of Kenya itself – so there was yet a spit of hope. But I was banking more and more on riding that Judas’ Cradle to the end of the line, spending the night paralyzed in a gully before doing it all over in reverse to Nairobi, then flying the hell back home.

   But after a slow crawl up a final hill we rolled to a sign that read Nunguni and nothing else. The crate emptied as passengers motioned for me to disembark. Ohhh, all of us were going to Nunguni. What do you know? While toppling over on the bench, because my support people had left, I heard a beautiful, smiley voice:

   “Frank! Frank! Hello!”

    Thank Jesus and up yours to the rest of you. Ben was at my window, come to save my lost little ass from certain and dismal discomfort on a long ride home.  

   The return matatu was slightly less severe. We got to that van late, but it isn’t like they depart on schedule anyway. One has to be unbelievably off time to miss one’s matatu. Getting from Ben’s shamba to Nunguni (the town, not the spacious concept) meant over an hour of uphill walking, more if you encounter the aged father of a man who married Ben’s brother’s daughter. In a word, his siatawa. It’s idiomatic – doesn’t really have a parallel word in English, which is too bad since it takes my language a full, run-on sentence to explain the old gent. But thinking over it there isn’t a good reason to have a word meaning the “parent of another person wedded to a niece or nephew.” But here they’re big on matripatristratofamiliolineal blah, blah… Moving on.

   When you get caught up with siatawas you add forty-five minutes to your ambulatory ordeal while he adds the feeling that you’re going to miss the bus and never see home again. We were ascending and the geezer slowed our march. Had heart trouble, he explained. Couldn’t walk uphill and talk at the same time, yet desired to walk and talk with the two of us about money to tune up his heart and make it easier to do this all again next time around. There was the money thing again. The “white = wealthy” notion that not a few Kenyans I’d met also held. I’ve helped where I could; a few shillings here, some candy and oranges there. But the two kilos of beef (chopped right off the dangling carcass of a beef animal, no less!) bought for Ben’s family, though not appreciably expensive, pushed me up against my financial safety net. And all that toilet paper my nose ate obliged replacement. The rest of my cash was maybe enough to get another night at the Chiromo, a cab to the airport and a pack of smokes. Vittles and liquor nourishment would be at the benevolence of KLM Airlines so I’d be living lean for the next twenty-four. I felt like helping the ancient nettle by explaining that if talking uphill impeded his progress than he might just shut the fuck up and start running. Luckily, Ben skirted the money corner by prescribing kitunguu sumu, a little poison onion, which is to say “garlic,” for the knocks and pings in the siatawa’s heart. The old chump was delighted with the advice, acting that way at least. He’d overplayed the gratitude, giving off an aura of mild anxiety, as it dawned on him that he had tamped on delicate turf. Apprehending that the hand-out innuendo took swipes at both Sila’s dignity and my comfort as a friend running out of money he backed off.

   The ETA for the bus stop itself had been screwed afoul but tardiness didn’t mean missing the ride. It did mean a matatu already crammed tight with Kenya’s new breed of nomads – work commuters. No place to sit and standing would only work if I was a mere set of legs with a smidgen of torso. There was always riding on top with the luggage, but I’d had more than enough retard thrills for the year. However, Sila, ever the smoothie, actually talked people into standing themselves or getting skinnier so his new pal could sit. And they all agreed to do so with smiles on their faces. Once again, among the most hospitable people on Earth, I was sick feeling like an American who demanded service at the expense of others. What a douche! But as the largest douche bag on board, I thanked everyone humbly and took a seat with my back against the driver’s cockpit. It was a splintery board on a metal storage bin, comfortable as a dollhouse hassock studded with scorpions. But it was a seat and I was grateful and completely ashamed to have it.

  We must have caught the jet stream back since it took an hour less than it did to get out to Nunguni. It could also be attributed to not getting stopped by highway cops as often. Heading to Nunguni (the bus stop, not the nimbus of befuddlement) various members of the fuzz treated us to three fifteen minute delays. On the return we suffered lightly through a two-minute pullover. The Nairobi bound van obviously had a better deal worked out with the boys in very faded blue or just paid the requisite bribe without haggling. That’s what the cops do on Kenya’s highways – pull lots of vehicles over, threaten motorists on all sorts of quack violations until drivers kick down a little scratch to make them go away. One could debate the charge until the cops back down but that may never happen. From what I’ve gathered the cost of extortion isn’t worth the loss of time and matatus are a hilarious example of that. Cops pull them over all the time, citing them mainly for violations of passenger limits which, if you haven’t been paying attention, are right on the money. The police make people get out of the van until a legal amount remain within, then they accept payment of “fines” from the operators. Then they drive off as everybody crams back into the matatu and on it goes. Those were the fun moments en route to Nunguni (the actual hamlet, not the nebulous realm hinted at through the local signage). No such comedy going back, though we saw some matatus playing the game on the way. A lack of ethics among armed civil servants can be disheartening, especially when you’re sitting in a miserable corner of a hot van filled with sweat vapors. You think you’ll never get to where you’re headed, that your bladder will rupture without a restroom and you wonder how a developing country will ever realize its potential if it can’t even control corruption at the lower rungs of the civic ladder. Nothing but time to ponder and cast judgment during delays and the slow progress between them. You could piss yourself and wait for the urine to cool and soothe your legs or realize that cops are on the take because the payrolls aren’t on the give. The government doesn’t pay much and never on time. It doesn’t feel obliged to fill squad cars with gas and I’ll wager that sidearm ammunition is meagerly budgeted. So there’s not much in a constable’s job description that’s truly worth the effort – except sitting on the hood of a squad car waiting for motorists to strong arm. They’ve got to feed families like everyone else. However, one hopes none of them ever get promoted. From what I’ve seen of the government, Kithangathini’s java co-op or even in the Museum administration corruption, at its most vile fuck your fellow man base, is a hard habit to shake. It’s a funny thing, common in the States as well, that once somebody moves out of poverty the last thing they want is to be surrounded by poor people. Less funny is how the consuming greed of people on the way up helps ensure that the ranks of the poor never cease to swell.

   The only real terror endured going back, ignoring my Kithangathini fleas which had tagged along, was having my right leg fall asleep into a violent dream. It was no ordinary circulatory disruption. It was a freak show. My right foot was planted right above the matatu’s transmission, a mammoth, buzzing lullaby to that extremity. It was just run of the mill pins and needles at the onset. I’d wiggle my toes and pull in the arch to wake it up. It didn’t and soon enough the foot was dead numb. Neural communiqués were sent south instructing the digits to keep at it, but it wasn’t possible to tell if they were receiving the messages. I strained forward to see if I could spot some activity within the boot leather. Nothing. My tibia felt like it was poking into a spongy cobble of soapstone until it also morphed into damp, porous rock. The sensation, coupled with a lack thereof, kept scaling inexorably up my leg. As the calf lost contact with the central nervous system, panic took hold – I was going to lose all feeling on that side of my body. My head would loll, an eyelid would droop and I was gonna drool up a waterfall. At least the people who gave up their places to me would have new pity – aww, it’s okay for the mzungu to sit up front where we really should be. He’s having a stroke. I really needed the weirdness to end, closing my eyes to concentrate on moving the leg. I still couldn’t sense any results but looked down again to discover that it was indeed in motion. It was bouncing. Up and down erratically and banging wildly against the knee of a lady off to the side who was struggling not to face me. She stared intently at a speaker dangling overhead not wishing to acknowledge a foreigner losing control of his limbs all over her. My knee was bashing up her thigh quite well; was she ever going to be sore in the morning. I stood desperately, to the amusement of bemused van-mates, and began stomping my leg with the trivial control remaining in my hip. I might have been stomping all over the poor woman’s foot but sure as hell couldn’t tell and she would have never let on, saving this nightmare tale for friends later on. When feeling came back it arrived angry. A wild, crazy pain which must be what it’s like to get shot up with an automatic, rapid-fire staple gun.

   The dead appendage debacle was almost the worst that had happened. My hiney muscles did get ground to the bone again, but I’d been weaned on that kind of agony on the ride out to Koobi Fora. But there was a fresh incident to add to my list of crimes against humanity; a brief moment when I’d dozed off just enough to have my neck go slack. A jarring bump in the road let my head careen out of control to smash the man sitting at my left. Cocked him squarely in the mug with my rocky noggin. I could feel the goodwill of the commuters unraveling. They’d given me a seat and in return I’d spasmodically assaulted a lady and spastically head butted yet another innocent. Boy howdy, wasn’t I just fucking up all over. One more transgression and somebody was probably going to say something unkind.

   The next person to my front and left, and pretty darn close to kneeling in my lap, was a woman cradling an unusually clean baby. Spotless, except for a smidgen of gack at the corner of its mouth, like it had just gone through a carwash. It struck me as remarkable since the rest of us were kind of dusty and I always think of babies as muck magnets in general. And considering what ugly little freaks infants can be it always throws me off guard when one of them catches my eye to amuse me stupid with its antics and golly-goshable cuteness. I don’t want to pansy up so let’s just say me and the pup had some fun for a while. He was so interested in my shiny watch, determinedly trying to pull it off, he lost track of the meal he was having at mom’s knob. He didn’t seem to care if he was hungry or not, but he wasn’t getting anywhere with the watch either. Unhitching it was beyond his non-criminally-seasoned mind. I considered showing him how it was done, but backed up on the idea, realizing that it could fall into the tangle of legs. That would mean losing it altogether or injuring another passenger in an attempt to retrieve it. So on it stayed and I jiggled my wrist to entertain the lad while I got to leer at a big dripping tit dangling a foot from my face. My, what a well polished and silky looking thing! What a huge, tubular nipple dribbling out the dairy! Ho boy, public transit fetish porn and cigarettes for a half buck per pack! Why the hell was I leaving Kenya?