Bad bachelor: Struggles with ‘daddy issues’

I really like the new apartment that my white-sugar-mummy-kept pal has let me rent (for a fraction of the rent) until December.

It is in Kilimani area - and is called ‘Heavenly Heights’ (I hear the building owner is a super savedie, and wife of a top corrupt Kenyan politician). But I like the name. This bad bachelor, who lives in Apartment 10B, certainly intends to take a few ladies to ‘heavenly heights.’

I mean, which woman will resist Amacho after I zoom them into my own parking space in the basement in my blue Soob, show them the ground floor communal swimming pool, take them upstairs to the rooftop pub (with a nice city view at sunset), then tell her ‘let’s go and rest’ after a few glasses of red/white wine? That first weekend - I moved in on the 4th - I just spent time arranging things in the apartment, but I’m on so much adrenaline, I go to the in-building gymnasium in the evening and work out.

That Sunday, I sleep in late, then go and take a few lazy laps in the pool in the afternoon, hoping to meet a woman. But the only neighbour I see is a wrinkled white feller, reading a paperback novel on his deckchair.

On Monday, I work from home with many online meetings that involve my mean mzungu boss, who sadistically wants to chop me from her advertising ranks - but can’t because I have almost met the new quarterly targets she had set for the second quarter (April to June).

In the evening, as I prepare to settle in my new abode for first Monday here, I get an angry call from Sonia. ‘So you have finally answered my phone,’ my salonist ex-girlfriend rages. ‘Just know I have your baby, Art Amacho. Si you refused to send me Sh30,000 for abortion! Sasa niko two months pregnant. Jipange kuwa na mtoi by Valentine Day, 2021. And if you refuse to improvise for him or her, I swear I’ll take you to court ukatwe hio salary yenye inakufanya ujifanye manga sana na wanawake.’

Then Sonia hangs up and I wonder if she’s been talking to that lawyer who visits the barber at her salon, and visibly fancies her. Maybe she is even sleeping with him for favours, who knows? On Wednesday, as I prepare to go to work - in fact in between me coming out of the shower and climbing into my underwear - I get a WhatsApp ping, and open the text message.

‘It’s your father. I am hoping to meet and talk soon, if President Kenyatta opens for me to come to Nairobi’.

I just stand there in my new bedroom, naked as the day I was born (but with more chest hair), and wonder if the man on the other end of the text held me up in the nude, 35 long years ago. I am too stunned to reply to the text. See, my father abandoned me and my mother when I was three - and after that she acted like he was dead to her. When I finally got round, at 21, to wanting to track him down, my mother revealed she had just been diagnosed with cancer. So I abandoned the idea, took care of mom for three years, and drank lots of hard alcohol to ease my pain.

When she passed away, I got her life insurance, and blew it carefully across a coupla years entertaining the chicks. And forgot about ‘Dad.’ Maybe it is because of the loss of mother/looking for her in women, that I am such a womaniser? Ask Simon and Boke, I am no shrink!

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