Dens of iniquity where clueless men lose marbles

By Peter Thatiah

Morning is a time that Mary Muthoni and her colleagues dread at their workplace, a boarding and lodging house in Embu Town.

It is the time of day when the ribald drunkards of the town wake up to reality with swollen bloodshot eyes. For Muthoni, the scenes that unfold in the morning range from comedy to tragedy.

When it comes to lodging houses, Muthoni tells this writer, the lowly and the mighty are suddenly brought to the same level.

"The victims are almost always men. What surprises me is that they never seem to learn any lessons from the many misfortunes they suffer here because they keep coming back."

She tells about Daniel, a senior official at the local DC’s office. After every payday, Daniel relocates to the lodging, sleeping there until his money runs out about two weeks later.

Muthoni describes Daniel as a bulky man whose appetite for the many beauties in the town is legendary.

Despite having a house in one of the middle class estates in the town, he has become such a regular customer that he is allowed to sleep there on credit because he never defaults.

"The problem with Daniel is that he doesn’t have limits when it comes to spending. I have seen him offer his mobile phone to a twilight girl at our lodging house in exchange for a night together.

Nightlong affections

He usually does this when he is broke. Another day, I saw him give one of our watchmen the spare tyre of his pick-up truck to sell so that he could afford the nightlong affections of a local girl," Muthoni says of the unrepentant night owl.

But since the town is full of men like Daniel, the watchmen make more money from them than they do from their employers.

On coming upon a fight involving a skimpily dressed young woman and a watchman at the lodging, this writer decided to stop and inquire about the cause of the clash.

The watchman, holding the girl by the scruff of her neck, was thumping her against the grilled swing doors of the house. The girl was swearing and cursing in the most profane manner and it all looked like a scene made in hell.

The watchman was demanding his pay from the girl. The girl in turn was saying that she was fed up with giving a cut of her proceeds to the watchman.

It turned out that the watchman had entered into an agreement with some of the well-heeled visitors to the lodging house whereby he would supply them with girls for a small fee.

Priced item

The watchman had also entered into another agreement with the girls, where the favoured girl also gave a small percentage of her earnings to him.

This arrangement applied to the more respectable business executives and government officials who did not wish to be seen haggling with twilight girls on the street. On this day, the girl had realised that the watchman also collected a fee from the client and she was determined to stop it.

As a crowd gathered, the girl screamed and pointed to a man who was revving his car in the parking, saying he was the client and that he should confirm he had paid a fee to the watchman.

The man, who turned to be a well-known insurance agent and a political operative, zoomed away from the embarrassing scene without a backward glance.

According to Muthoni, the adage that men are clueless when it comes to reading women is true at this lodging house. A driver whose boss, an assistant minister, was attending a seminar in town, decided to spend the night with a girl at the lodging, away from the eyes of his boss who spent the night in a more expensive hotel.

He brought his boss’ laptop along to impress the girl. The girl waited until the man was asleep and then sneaked out with the priced item.

Muthoni says she has lost count of the men who have lost expensive mobile phones to twilight girls. She poses: "Have you ever noticed that twilight girls always have very expensive mobile phones? They usually say a friend gave it them as a gift."

The truth is that many men trust strangers, especially good looking young women, too much. And this does not only apply to drunken men. Even sober men are just as vulnerable, she reveals.

She has seen cases of men giving their car keys to women they had just met that evening to go and fetch something from the car. In many cases, the girls do not come back.

Wine distributor

Instead, they empty the contents of the glove compartment, which may include a thick wad of money from their places of work for assignment expenses. Trying to warn these men is like playing a guitar to a goat, says Muthoni.

However, the young women can also be victims. Muthoni says one wine distributor in the town is known for his cruelty to women. He is a thickset short man and girls who don’t know him end up paying dearly.

"He doesn’t pay for services. Instead, he beats up the women in the morning. He is strong and vicious. The problem is that no policeman dares touch him because he runs his business in cahoots with senior people in the town," she says.

Muthoni has noticed a strange trend among some drunken men. They will insist on sleeping with a twilight girl even when they don’t have money to pay for her services in the morning.

She has also noticed that when men are cornered in the morning when they are sober, the outcome is always embarrassing for them. Some women gang up to rain blows on the man and then impound his belongings, particularly the mobile phone.

After a night of sampling nature’s delights, the reality is always unpleasant in the morning. She tells the story of a senior policeman in the town who is a darling to the residents because of his folksy nature. His love for humanity is generously extended to women. One day, after a night in the lodging his wife appeared at the reception area, her verbal barrels blazing. After a tip-off from a room attendant, the policeman decided to jump from a balcony on the first floor, dislocating his ankle.

When the wife caught up with him the drama was no longer funny. When the crowd gathered, she had to be restrained by policemen as she narrated, for the whole town to hear, about the philandering ways of the town’s favourite policeman.

Shouting that she wasn’t just angry because her husband slept with other women, she told her attentive audience that her fury emanated from the fact that her man slept with the cheapest and dirtiest prostitutes in town. A police car whisked them away.

The lodging attendant says this was not a special case. When cornered by their wives, even the men with the blood of tigers are always unbelievably subdued. Men have been known to lock themselves in a room for a whole day while the wife curses and prances outside the door.

Fancy indulgences

In such circumstances, Muthoni observes, many men just zoom off at top speed.

Then there are those who will always steal something on their way out. "Our bed sheets had been disappearing at a very high rate until we noticed that this always happened when a local secondary school teacher lodged here. One day we laid a trap and caught him with a bag stuffed with our bed sheets. After handing him over to the police, it turned out that the man sold the sheets to parents of the school where he taught."

All these people are excused for their fancy indulgences because, after all, a boarding and lodging house is the one place that men cease to be themselves and become insane for a night.

Having worked in many boarding and lodging houses across the country, Muthoni says only the scene changes. The men are the same.