It wasn’t the Youth Hostel. It may have been the same price, but no one was going to give you a daily task, other than minding your own business. The Iqbal was as far from the Fairview, as Mata Hari was to Mother Teresa. For three bucks a night, you didn’t get a window that opened, your own toilet or shower, or hot water. You were unlikely to find a chocolate on your pillow and, if you did, it wasn’t a chocolate. Instead, you got a concave mattress, mosquito net, nightstand, chair, loud music until one in the morning, a guy at the door who could stop a foreign invasion, and almost certain death if you wandered too far at night. You got company you would remember for the rest of your life.
They were waiting for me when I checked in that day. The hookers who sat on the lobby sofas were the advance guard. If you checked out with Amina and Lulu, they would tease you and send cups of tea and mind-altering ‘squares’ your way when you weren’t looking. In return you added a little something to their protective envelope. The second line friends were fellow travelers. There were Australians, Shy Ray from WA, and Jules, the earringed Darwin dentist. There were Britons, naïve Greg, druggie Neil, and Leslie, who lived with a big pilot in London, but wasn’t in London right now. Portly Jeanette was there, from the port of Quebec. And then, there were the lifers, the ones that mattered the most. Sid, Romeo, and Big Stuff. They had been waiting for visas or other forms of redemption for so long, they had forgotten where they first applied. Romeo was sitting with the sofa girls when I arrived. He was so tall and thin, when he got up off the couch, you needed to watch his head. You couldn’t tell where his body ended and his hanging curtain clothes started. He was a forty-two-year-old Somali reconciled sage of sorrow. Hospitable, well spoken, better mannered, totally connected. He walked over and handed me a lit cigarette. When in Rome.
‘Hashish?’ I asked, not recognizing the taste.
‘Opium,’ he said, calmly.
‘Sweet Jeezuz.’ I coughed. ‘Doesn’t anybody use tobacco in this country.’
‘It is very bad for yoh health,’ said Amina. I conceded the point, as Sid entered to fetch Romeo.
‘We are going across to the Green Bar. You can come if you like.’ He offered.
The Brits had told me about this place. The Aussies had warned me. It was apparently opened 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Alcohol was for sale, but it was only a small component of the wonderful goods and services on tap. Those interested in the beer or moonshine would pass money between the iron bars surrounding the bar and, in return, they would get their fix back the same way. Some patrons would drink themselves unconscious on the tables, wake, and then start all over again, until they died from unnatural causes, ran out of money, or their wives found them, before they died of unnatural causes. Entire lives were lived in the Green Bar. Many had been extinguished there. The clientele was an exotic cross-section of thieves, mercenaries, whores, travelers, and drug dealers. The drug dealers had the best seats, the gunfighter ones with their backs to the wall. The main drug dealt wasn’t anything you might have heard of. It was called Khat, or Qat, and consisted of the leaves and stems of a native East African flowering plant, that you bought in bundles, and chewed. Forever. You had to chew it fresh because the active amphetamine-like ingredient, cathinone, was not very stable and broke down quickly. You had to chew it incessantly because there wasn’t much active drug concentrated in the greenery. For a dealer, it was the perfect commodity – highly addictive, short shelf and half-life, and easily controllable supply side economics. Whole countries were dependent on it. Twenty tons a day were flown in committed aircraft from Kenya to Somalia. The Yemeni government had proposed relocating large populations to the Red Sea coast, because of water shortages produced by khat cultivation. In 1980 the World Health Organization classified it as a drug of abuse that can produce ‘mild to moderate psychological dependence.’ Manic hyperactivity was a better description of its effects, and Sid, Romeo and I were going across the street. When Shy Ray warned me about the Green Bar, I asked what the big deal was.
‘Imagine a dark crowded smoke-filled room full of drunk people on speed. With guns,’ he said. I asked him why they didn’t kill each other more often.
‘They would, if it wasn’t for the hashish and the opium,’ he said.
Life is a gentle balance.
There was still nothing that prepared you for the actual experience. You could hear it before you got to it. The reggae pumped out into the street. Then you could smell it. Drug smoke and lettuce, beer and body odor, curry and shit, and hormones and dust. It was the smell of lives lived too hard, with just a whiff of death. The visuals were still on the other side of the door we went through.
Smoke drifted in clouds under the fluorescence. The color of the interior was a gradient that went from lagoon green near the floor, to brown near the ceiling. The ceiling was black. There was so much opium on the walls, a resourceful entrepreneur could have made a fortune from the tailings. People of all colors, with green teeth and sunglasses, were chewing khat. The sound of breaking bottles came from behind the iron bars of the bar. The music was raucous, the black ladies sensual, and the whole place vibrated to its own frequency. Hands rested on knees they hadn’t arrived with.
The biggest thing in the room was the black bowling ball sitting on the flesh mountain, at a table nearest the bar.
His mother’s birth canal should have been a national monument. You could hear the sonic boom in his laugh, even over the bass guitar and the trebled forks of conversation.
‘Big Stuff,’ said Romeo.
‘I see why,’ I nodded.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘That’s not why.’
As if summoned, Big Stuff turned towards us. There were horizontal scars on both cheeks.
‘Ah,’ he boomed. ‘ZL019059.’ It was my passport number.
‘How did he know that?’ I asked, unnerved.
‘He’s Big Stuff,’ said Sid. We sat down at his table. It was his table, actually two tables pushed together, for he had a following.
‘You need to see Queer Eddie tomorrow,’ said Big Stuff.
‘Who’s Queer Eddie?’ I asked.
‘He will get you the cheapest flight to Addis,’ he said. I explained to Big Stuff that I needed an Ethiopian visa to be able to purchase a ticket there.
‘You will pick it up tomorrow,’ he said.
Big Stuff was originally a refugee from southern Sudan, but now he was both a man without a country, and a man of the world. Despite the fact the Nwanjee had killed everyone in his village, he appeared to have no sharp or bitter edges. He had defined his own nobility and translated it into a code of conduct. He spoke five languages and was a raconteur in every one of them. He could speak French with a Quebecois accent to Portly Jeanette and shift back and forth into Somali to keep Romeo in the conversation. He was an excellent mimic, possessed perfect pitch, owned a deep understanding of human and current political affairs and, despite his lack of formal education, was doing just fine, although I never really learned at what. It was clear that everyone in the Green Bar treated him with reverence, and thought he was gifted in some intangible way. He was more than a little clairvoyant.
I wondered if there was an oracle in Nairobi, working the levers of the universe under his table.
The next day I got my Ethiopian visa, and a cheap flight to Addis from Queer Eddy. I spent my last Nairobi twilight with Big Stuff in the Green Bar, surrounded by his Iqbal family, marveling at how a nowhere man with nothing, could still make his own place in his own time.
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Image: Copilot AI remixed