HOW TO LIVE LIKE A MAN.
STEP ONE: GO TO A BAR
The bar had an Afro-vintage look to it. Walls covered in cheap paint with the windows always opened. Wooden counters, wooden bar stools — with metallic backrests. All painted in bright colors that don’t match — fading yellow and bright red — as all part of the magic. The ceiling, cracking at the edges, held low hanging sodium bulbs. The strong smell of barley stuck to the bar’s walls and the barmen’s clothes. Alcohol frothed whenever a bartender clanked the golden drink into mugs. It was bliss.
On the counter, there were men. There were also men propped onto the stools, others wading through the pathways, a handful dominating the pool tables and the odd ones, crouching over their own vomit. Glancing to my side, as I sat on the very first stool on the counter, was an elderly man in a bright-pink youthful t-shirt. He propped his head onto his palm that donned a yellow classical Casio watch. His face seemed to have smiled more in his life than cried. He looked back my way raised the glass he held; with a kindness I hadn’t experienced in a while. I looked away and stared at the big ancient clock above the counter. Then, I began to cry.
(Six o’clock.)
The old man moved his one-skipped seat onto the one next to mine. He still smiled. An excitable, tall bartender, banged a beer-full glass before me, spilling some over the side. I picked up the mug, tears rolling down my face, as my pink-wearing stranger patted me on the back.
“Kid, if you want to cry, cry like a man!” he said, looking at the clock on the wall.
(Seven thirty-five.)
“How?”
“One more beer for me and for the young man over here!” he ordered the bartender with an authority that comes with age, or with familiarity, or both.
We moved tables, to the one in the corner. The good corner, where there was space, air, and no puking men.
STEP TWO: BE BORN AND RAISED AS A MAN
“It is important that you are born a man for you to be able to cry like one. You need to be born properly as a man. You know, with your, eh, manly parts. Be born in Africa, and to an African man. You should be born into a household where your birth meant something, where people rejoiced. On your birth bed, a prayer should be read, calling the heavens to grant you long life. There should be a crowd with women singing songs for you, with the drums and bells.”
“Like Simba, that cartoon lion?” I said, nodding slowly.
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Yes, be born like the cartoon lion, to choruses of victory songs. You must be born a man in a family where there’s men present. Good men. Strong men. Proud men.
You particularly need a father. A man capable of teaching you from a young age, what it means to be a man. A man proud to have you as his son and willing to raise you. He must have been happy from the moment his woman told him that her periods would be delayed. On your birthday, your father must have been there, held you tightly and whispered into your infant ears his love for you. He should have done that thing where he throws you into the sky as your innocent giggles fill the air above, hold you as you fall back into his open arms.
Your father should have been the sort that laid pillows on the floor of his study-room for you, to let you to play as he worked. When you are slightly older and with the capacity to comprehend, he should induct you into the books he reads. All the books he read in his lifetime, introduced to you at a time your agemates are barely coloring into their sketched apples. You would begin to amass knowledge that had been shelved onto the study drawers, absorbing them, molding into him, his world being passed onto you. On the easy days, he should sit next to you on the floor and help you colour. The standards should be clear from then that you must always be able to know more, read more, do more, believe more, work more and be more than everyone.
On the sunny Sundays, he should spare time in the afternoon to carry you on his shoulders and walk you around the neighboring forest, answering all your questions, with kind patience. You should feel so bold, when you jump across the river stones that look too far apart. Your father should teach you bravery for when the wild dogs surround you, he should stand between you and the beasts, scaring them off. On the windy Saturdays, he should be the one at the end of the slope while you learn how to ride the bicycle down the hill. He should not stop you from falling because you need the lesson in conquering fear. But he must still pick you up because you need a lesson in reassuring love.
Your life’s milestones should be recorded by him. Your first birthday should be stuck onto the films of that grey-with-yellow-stripes Kodak camera. Your first day in school, could be found in the corners of the town’s photo studios — the ones with lamps and backdrops. Your thirteenth birthday should be at the folder of that digital camera. One day you will look back at all the photos, feel the overwhelming weight of nostalgia as the memories flood in, then sadly realize he is in none of those photos. He was always in the background.
There will be days when you will fail in life and he will be told about it. He will come home disappointed and deep down, you will want to amend it all and be the good son that you always were. Your bond will allow him to trust you to know how to fix your own messes. There will be no shouting, slapping, or kicking, just conversing and understanding. The childhood years will handover to your adolescent years, and everyone will wonder how he is still your best friend. His legs won’t be the same ones that ran with you across the fields. His strength not the same that lifted you. He will be coughing a lot more and, on the bed, much more. He would lose his smell and taste. You’ll love him. Your love for him should be like time, linear and irredeemable. But on the healthier days, you would both unwind and take a road trip down straight highways, chasing the sun.”
“Is this how you were raised?” I interrupt.
“Focus.” He says
I could tell it was his story, as he had not touched the glass he ordered. Memories of a childhood, which were fading. He took his first sip.
(Eight thirteen.)
STEP THREE: LOVE AND BE LOVED LIKE A MAN
“You’ll meet her when you don’t even want to. Maybe she’ll visit your shop. Or walk into that class. She could join the office you slave at every day. You could be in the library and she is sat on the opposite study cubicle. It could be in a party where one eye contact and a cheesy compliment, triggers magic.
You won’t love her back immediately. In fact, you won’t ever notice yourself falling in love. That is the drug that love is. If ‘love is in the air’, then you would have been breathing it for months, slowly fueling your lungs, poisoning your body and taking control.
“How would you describe her looks?”
“All the bla, bla, bla of attraction. You know? Beautiful, nice smile and long legs stories. Doesn’t matter how she looks; she will be perfect.”
The clock on the wall ticks on.
(Nine thirty)
“First rule of loving a woman, is that you have to appreciate that you are not the first person she will have known. She’ll have met others, as you would have. She will be in her world, living life and discovering herself. There will be a man in her life sending her letters and calling to say all the beautiful things. She perhaps could be wounded from the men that have been there before, and now, she sees you coming with your predictable manly approach. You try to place your best image first, doing the most for her and saying all the right things. She knows, trust me they know, that soon enough you will reveal your true self.
But for some reason, in this love story, she will choose you. She has heard the same lines many a times over, but yours are the ones, she would rather hear. And letting you in means a lot to her, because you are perfectly designed in all the things needed in a companion. She fears you can’t just be real, that there is some darkness caged. Your quiet persona being part of an alluring mystery. She will be cautious of the damage you are going to cause her, but she’ll be on free fall, sinking into the reckless void of young vain love.
She will love you. Like an absolute loving. She will be there when you need her. Not that convenient showing up and neither from the neediness that comes with solitude. She will be there when you don’t feel the weight of asking because her presence naturally flows. She will fundamentally alter your life and you will adore her existence.
Let’s assume you wanted to be president. She will be there when you dreamt it, listening carefully to your wild idea. She will be there chanting along to your plans of victory and helping you draft the blueprint of your term. She would be the one guiding you, telling you what to tweak, what to say and what to wear. When your hopes of being president start to fade and get washed away by humbling reality, she would be the one to pick up those plans you shoved aside and place them back on your study table. And should you become the president, you would walk away from the podium, having wowed the audience with your moving speech, but secretly wondering who the real president is. She will be crying at the bottom of the stage out of her overwhelming pride. You will hug her, then kiss her, then hug her some more.
“How should I love her back?”
You should love her, like a man loves — with all the innocence and purity. She isn’t doing all this loving for nothing, but because deep within her conscience, she thinks you to be genuine. Love her like a boy would love. Tell her you love her smile and mean it. Because when she smiles, so do you. You will love how she laughs, because when she laughs, so do you. There is not much that would be said about her that really matters to you. Nothing your boys say about her body will matter. Nothing her girls say about her personality will be of concern. Nothing your family says about her background will bother you. You will love her through the beauty because her unpleasant doesn’t exist. She will speak of her insecurities, but you won’t be able to understand because you can’t understand her ugly.
You will want to show her your best. You will do the dumbest things to prove that you are indeed a man. You will take her to dance, yet you have two left feet. You will switch off the lights of your one bedroomed apartment to watch a horror, yet you have the fear of ghosts. You will go out and party with her all night with absolutely no clue of how you will afford it. All night long you will hold her tightly in the middle of the dancefloor. Booming music as the backdrop, noisy lovers on the side of the room, drunks fighting on the verandahs, but peace and calm in your heart.
You should never love her the way other men tell you to. There are what other “men” think about love. They have stupid rules. “Don’t text her more than once.” “Don’t tell her you love her.” “Don’t show her any weakness.” “Don’t spend on her.” “Don’t show her off.” They think they are describing love. Never listen. They are fools, describing the prison of their own insecurities. They describe fear.
Because loving a woman is courage. It has no rules, and nobody has the script for it. Love is not bound by physics as we love with our souls. It is not wrapped to the fabric of time as we love through our existence. It has no boundaries of space, nor limits of life. It has no excuses, or curfews or pride. It has no shame. Not everyone gets to fall in this kind of love. In fact, most don’t and those who truly do, don’t care for societal standards, parental concerns, or peer reviews. They live love like it’s their truth. They are willing to be naked in each other’s lives, mind, heart, soul, and they embrace it.
“Wait, I am sorry, should I marry her when I find her?”
“If, you find her, the point should not be marriage. The point is to make the most out of her experience!”
STEP FOUR: HURT LIKE A MAN
“How would you describe bad love?”
“Toxically refreshing. Beautifully devastating. Enamoring sadness. Overwhelming bliss. Cruel passion. The oxymoron of life.” He says, smiling.
Love is the heart of humanity. And as is humanity, it is caught in the tug of war between good and evil. It is good in the sense you are loved by a good person and live your life, a heaven on earth. A version of reality that is peacefully perfect. Straightforward happiness.
Love, however, can also be evil, like an addiction. When that happens, you are as addicted as anyone would be to drugs. It’ll consume your being. It’ll change how you think, your physicality, your mentality, and your priorities. Like any drug, the highs are what will keep you alive but since you are an addict, the lows will crash you. Your lows will drive you insane. Pound you into the valleys of sadness.
In other times, love is also doused in sin. Sin in the sense, you will fall in love with the feeling she gives you. The raw passionate pleasures of her touch, and not her comfort. Love that makes you greedy, wanting her all to yourself, letting her step into your broken life where she finds a mess where she was to find a heart. You will let her try to fix your life, but you know you are going to consume her. She will be the source of your excesses. All your hard-earned salary on her, and she will drive you into drinking more than you can handle, pop pills to look cool in front of her friends and smoking your young lungs to ash. With her you will transcend reality only to crumble under the excessive vanity.
Life with her is a warping of time itself, whereby a whole week could pass without notice. Just the two of you. You will continue to be gravitated into the blackhole of dangerous love. Your work assignments will pile up in the corner of your desk. Friends will be distant, and when they reach out, to pull you off your drowning life, you will bite their hands away. You are addicted to the crisis. You want to be in the pit. Nothing else matters, not the pandemics of a decaying world nor the wars of stupid men with orange faces.
She’ll incite anger, destructive psychopathic wrath. You’ll break windows and glasses. You are not even a violent man, you were raised well, with a good father remember. You will still fight, curse with words you had never used. There’ll be days you wake up and the sun hits your face. Life outside your window moves on; the birds fly, the cars rev past, the hawkers shout their prices while you lie in the wake of destruction. These emotional battles have, sickeningly kept you running and alive. You will hate the other men that she will have after you. All the noise will end one day after you wake up from the living nightmare, she put you through. You are a man, so you are proud, but don’t be too proud to heal. Too proud to move on or to face yourself.”
He stops and looks at his drink.
“Should you hate her?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“You are incapable.”
STEP FIVE: BE A FAMILY GUY
“Let me tell you how to be a father from now, my own experience.”
“Sure.”
“I wasn’t a bad father. Just not as perfect as I should have been. I was not in love with the mother of my children. On that warm December evening when I looked her in her eyes, my right-knee bent before her, and asked her to spend her life with me, I meant none of it. I didn’t hate her or treat her badly. I just couldn’t love her. I couldn’t be able to. She was a safe space, in the twisted sense that, she couldn’t hurt me. One or two beers would wash away her memory. She was there in the background of my life, a prop to my life’s performance.
“Why not leave her?”
I couldn’t leave because I wanted to be a father. To have a family. I was selfish. To her, her life’s dream of a perfect marriage and wedding would have to happen maybe in her next life. She was doomed when she loved me. She was never to experience true love. She would be left to wonder who cursed her to such an inglorious fate. She would have dreamt of a husband that adored, desired, and cherished her. She sadly had none of it. I have forever felt sorry for her. She didn’t deserve to have died without experiencing love.
“So, you took it out on your child?”
“No, I did not. It is just difficult being a good father but a bad husband. I wouldn’t want to be home and I wouldn’t want to be in her life. And you know what was messed up about it all?”
“No”
“I actually knew I was hurting them. I knew it and did not like that I was being a bad father. I knew I should have attended my son’s milestones, because I knew how much they meant to him. I should have hugged him after he came home from being bullied and taught him to stand up for himself. But as it were, he was raised by his mother. Loved by her. Maybe one day he will be able to write about his mother’s love. Losing her, was him losing his heart’s companion. His life changed and I feel like, the lack of me as the emotional fallback drove him away.”
“So, is he alive?”
“Well, I would hope that he is. But he is on the long path to death anyway. I mean we all are on a path to death, but he is on the highway there. The sad story of trauma, leading to bad company that exposes you to the powdery stuff which leaves you hanging from the balcony some random morning.”
“Are you a grandfather?”
“Oh yes of course. He left behind a girl. And for the first time, I loved healthily. She loved me back. She and the one or two women who I’d later marry or entertain were the ones to close off my years on this earth. She is purity to me. She is my light. She is not one to drive me insane or even to tears. She is such a peaceful refuge for the torment that my life had been. Look, she even started to drive. Here she is.”
He fishes out a phone and shows me the photo of a lady smiling next to a car, her hands spread wide.
“That’s a nice color for her.”
“Yes, thank you. It is okay to say she is beautiful” the old man laughs loudly, with the same authority.
STEP SIX: CRY LIKE A MAN
“Just wanted you to know, that as a man; whether born in happiness, or living through tragedy, there is a lot to cry about. And equally so, there is still so much to look forward to. The weight of birth, life, growth, survival, and death as a man lies heavy on our shoulders. You must be strong. But strength is not your lack of tears, but your ability to rise. My life tells me that crying will happen, but so will healing…
Wait, why were you crying in the first place?”
He pauses to look at the clock once more. This time, he glances at his wristwatch as well.
(Eleven o’clock)
ADDITIONAL STEP: LIVE TO DIE LIKE A MAN.
“Well sir, today is my birthday. I am 24 turning 25. Earlier on in the day, I had gone to pick up the results of a hospital scan I had done. I didn’t like the results. My head was fuzzy. I decided to get into a car and drive the feeling away. I drove with my life on the line, my foot flat on the pedal. Going past buildings, trees, and down winding roads with my windows open. I wanted to feel the rush of life. Adrenaline in my veins as I truly feel alive. The gravity sinking me deeper into my seat, as I accelerated through cities and past people. I was chasing life, as I had felt it had slowly slipped through my fingers, like sand. Sands of time.
On the way down Lucas Street, I zoomed past everything, my fingers white from gripping to the steering wheel. The music blasted on max. I don’t even recall what the song was. I think it was ‘Love Goes’. I don’t know, it won’t matter much soon anyway. I ignored signs and lights while the sole of my sneakers never left the accelerator. Next thing I see, are my feet hanging above me. To my side, the windows are shattered, and I am staring at tarmac. The sirens cut sharply into the night, blending with the ring in my ear. The smell of petrol and I believe blood sickened me. The paramedic pulled me out of the wreck and conducted checks. Nothing. Not even a deep scar-leaving scratch to show for it. How unlucky am I, that even death takes its time with me? They encouraged me to be checked in hospital for brain damage and spend the night, I tell them not to bother, I will be spending weeks there anyway.
So, I walked into this bar, to cry.”
“Sorry. What about the other driver? Did he make it?”
“I don’t know. I really hope so. Especially because it was the exact same red car you have shown me!”
(Midnight)
