By Ted Malanda
She has been a permanent fixture at my local for as long as I can remember — dark in complexion, teeth as white as cotton, her smile so intoxicating it stopped vicious pub riots on the spot.
Which was a good thing because her role was ‘security’, never mind that she didn’t look like she could harm a fly. She only searched women’s handbags at the door.
Combat
I must, however, point out that the search did not include looking for pistols and hand grenades because women in my neck of the woods are yet to graduate to that the level of combat.
They still prefer to do it the old way, tearing each other’s clothes and wigs off, which sadly, to the chagrin of drunk men, only happens on Christmas Day.
Her security duties were, therefore, limited to searching women’s handbags for stolen drinks and glasses (I’m reliably informed women pinch them by the dozen).
Equally, when inebriated men engaged in a good old fisticuff over politics, women, football or nothing, which was daily, her role was to arrive on the scene and flash her killer smile. I’m told the men would stop still, stupefied by her curvy hips.
Cruelly, it is those curvy hips, dear brethren, which landed her in trouble — big trouble, because last week when I popped by for a fix, she was gone.
I retreated to my lonely corner at the counter to, in the words of Benson Riungu, address my drink while mulling over this catastrophe; this devastating loss.
Constitutional crisis
Whoever had fired her didn’t know this, but that pretty lass has almost occasioned a constitution crisis. In line with my rights to freedom of association, which are enshrined in the Bill of Rights, I had demanded that I would no longer be frisked by the hairy bouncer, but by this vivacious security queen. Unfortunately, my application was rebuffed with the sweetest of smiles.
Undeterred, I signed a petition demanding that she wears skirts to er, improve the general ambience of the bar and raise the quality of beer. But she sweetly told me to bounce.
In fact, a week before she left, I had been lobbying male patrons to approach learned counsel George Oraro to take up this ‘wearing skirt’ brief pro bono. But that, alas, will not be because the pretty thing has been fired.
Gangster’s shoes
Her woes began when management hired an oily manager with a penchant for loud shirts and gangster’s shoes. That oily man, I recall, would strut around with a randy leer on his face, checking out every barmaid’s bottom and, when he thought no one was looking, slapping and patting away with glee.
My journalistic eye told me he had probably bedded the lot and that he was most likely a thief — which all turned out to be true.
Now, if rumours wafting out of the urinal are anything to go by, he tried to ravish the dark female guard as well but she told him, in no uncertain terms, to take his oily butt and stuff it down the fetid loo next to the urinal. So she got fired. Just like that.
Well, if it’s any consolation, that oily man has been fired as well, for sticking his oily hands in the cookie jar.
