the rules of men
STEP ONE: GO TO A BAR
The bar had an Afro-vintage look. Walls covered in cheap paint — fading yellow and bright red — as all part of the magic. Wooden counters, wooden bar stools, and wooden windows that thankfully, were never shut. The tables were cracked at the edges, after years of knocking off teeth from the bar’s most trusted fighters. The metal chairs that were bolted to the floor had metallic backrests that struggled to prop the chubby backs of men who leaned back heavily with each roaring laughter. The ceiling, cracking in the middle, held low-hanging sodium bulbs. The strong smell of barley stuck to the bar’s walls and the barmen’s clothes and was enriched whenever a bartender spilled the golden drink on the countertop. The indoor climate had failed to regulate the barfs and belches of drunk men through the decades so it forever remained warm.
It was bliss.
On the counter, there were men. There were also men propped onto the stools, others wading through the tables and chairs, a handful dominating the pool tables, and the newbies crouched 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 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 and raised the glass he held with kindness I hadn’t experienced in a while. I nodded politely and turned toward the big antique 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. The excitable, tall bartender, banged a beer-full glass before me and winked. I hoped that meant it was on the house – I did not wink back. Instead, I picked up the mug feebly and took a sip off the top of the froth. I stared down and let my tears drop in, as my pink-wearing stranger patted me on the back.
“Kid, if you want to cry, cry like a man!” he said, massaging my shoulder.
“How?”
He took a quick glance at his watch, then another swipe at the one on the wall.
“Seems I have an hour to spare. And you look so shaken son. Must have had a tough day huh? One more beer for me and for the young man over here!” he ordered the bartender with an authority that must have come with age, familiarity, or both.
We moved tables, to the one in the corner. The good corner, where there was space, air, and crucially, 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 proper, with your, eh, manly parts. Be born in Africa, to an African man, and into a household where your birth is celebrated. There should be a crowd of women singing songs for you, with the drums and bells.”
“Like Simba?” I said, nodding slowly.
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
“Yes, be born to choruses of happy songs. You must be born a man in a family where good, strong, and proud men are present.
You particularly need a father; a big-built, rough-handed, square-jawed man with eyes that have seen plagues and wars – but with the tenderness to whisper his love for you, while the world sleeps. One that’s proud to have you as his son from the moment his woman told him that her periods would be delayed – all through to your first cry.
Your father should have been the sort that laid pillows on the floor of his study room to let you play as he worked. When you are slightly older and with the capacity to comprehend, he should induct you into the endless world of knowledge. All the books he read in his lifetime, introduced to you at a time your age mates still held pencils like knives, and still struggled to color within the frame of their sketched apples. You would become even more prodigious when you begin to absorb the wisdom that had been shelved in his mind, his world being passed onto you, molding into him.
The standards should be clear; you must always be able to know more, read more, work more, believe more, do more, and be more than everyone else.
On Sundays, he should spare time in the afternoon to carry you on his shoulders and walk you around, answering all your questions, with kindness. On 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 reassuring love.
Your first birthday should be stuck onto the films of that grey-with-yellow-stripes Kodak camera. Your first day in school should have been recorded in the town’s photo studios — the ones with lamps and backdrops. Your thirteenth birthday should be in 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 them. He was your conductor in this orchestra that is your life. Guiding, controlling, and inspiring, but still in the background.
There’ll be days when you’ll fail in life and he’ll be disappointed. Deep down, you’ll want to amend it all and be the good son that you always were. Your bond will allow him to trust you 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’s still your best friend. His legs won’t be the same ones that ran with you across the fields. His strength is 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 interrupted.
“Focus.”
I could tell it was his story, as he had not touched the glass he ordered. Memories of a childhood, which had faded like the paint on a coastal rooftop. These memories would wash upon the shores of his mind, each wave carrying a unique moment, but leaving as quickly as it came. He was cursed to sail the rest of his aging life, rocking back and forth, between his ever-increasing past, and reducing future. Like a banished pirate on a sinking ship, hoping for one last adventure. One last taste of treasure.
He took his first sip.
(Eight thirteen.)
STEP THREE: LOVE AND BE LOVED LIKE A MAN
“You’ll meet her when you don’t 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 sitting in the opposite study cubicle. It could be at a party where one eye contact and a cheesy compliment, trigger magic.
She won’t love you back immediately. In fact, she won’t even notice herself falling in love. That is the drug that love is. If ‘love is in the air’, then you two would have been breathing it for months, slowly fueling your lungs, poisoning your body, altering your mind, slowing its function, crippling its logic but doubling its senses.
“How would you describe her looks?”
“All the bla, bla, bla of attraction. You know? Beautiful, nice smile and long legs; perfect.”
The clock on the wall ticks on.
(Nine thirty)
“First rule of loving a woman, is to appreciate that you are not the first person she will have known. She’ll have met others, as you would have. Many men would have tried her with their wallets and bulging bellies. Others would have sung her poems of Solomonic arrangement, but still, they would all falter. She perhaps could be wounded and sees you coming with your predictable simple-minded man-brain. You try to place your best image first, doing the most for her and saying all the right things. She knows, trust me, far earlier than we as men like to believe, whether you are worth her time.
In this love story, she will choose you. She has heard the same lines many a time over, but yours are the ones, she would rather blush to. And letting you in means a lot to her, because you are perfectly designed in all the things needed. She fears you aren’t real, that there is some darkness caged. That there are demons banished to the depths of your soul. Your quiet persona – admittedly attractive - adds alluring mystery. She will be cautious of the damage you could cause her, but she’ll be on free fall, sinking into the reckless void of young vain love.
She will love you in an absolute manner. She will be there when you need her, manifesting genuine feminine desire. Her aura will diffuse into the wretched corners of your charred heart and you will adore her – perhaps even obsessively so.
Let’s assume you wanted to rule the world.
She will be your kingmaker. Carefully listening as you dream of conquest, chanting along to your plans of victory. Even as your eyes shine bright with anticipation of power, she would ask the right question to bring you back to earth. And as you walk around the village boasting to your fellow men about what you will achieve, she will tweak your campaign strategies. She would be the one guiding you, telling you what to say, where to go, who to talk to, and what to tie to wear. When your hopes start to wither through the scorching burns of reality, she would be the one to pick you up and drag your sorry self. And when you become the president, you would walk away from the podium, having wowed the audience with your moving speech, secretly wondering who the real president is. She will be crying at the bottom of the stage out of her overwhelming pride, kissing and hugging you in bountiful admiration.”
“How should I love her back?”
“You should love her like a man loves — with all the dominant authority. She isn’t doing all this loving for anything, but because deep within her conscience, she thinks you to be genuinely fearless. Love her like a boy would love his pet dog – sincerely and tirelessly - and mean it. You will love how she laughs because whenever she laughs, you feel the happiness float up your chest. There is not much that would be said about her that really matters. Nothing your boys say about her body will change how stiff you get whenever she takes off her clothes. Nothing the women gossip about her personality will influence the poetry you write for her birthdays. Nothing your family shames her for will stop you from wanting the finest ring on her finger. You will love her through fears, insecurities, and societal deprecation because you can’t see her ugly.
You will do the dumbest things to prove that you are indeed a man. Take her to dance, yet you have two left feet. Switch off the lights to watch a horror film, yet you hold the confidence of a dumpster cat. Go out and party when the most you can afford is a half-glass pint.”
He said, pointing to his half-drunk mug.
“All night long you will hold her tightly in the middle of the dancefloor. Booming music as the backdrop, noisy revelers all around you, lovers fighting on the verandahs, but peace and calm in your heart.
There are what other ‘men’ think about love. They have stupid rules. “Don’t text her more than once.” “Don’t tell her that 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. These are men whose walls collapsed in on them. And their optimism lies beneath the rubble, where rays of hope cannot reach. They describe fear.
Because loving a woman is courage. It has no rules, and nobody has the script. Love is not bound by physics as we love with our souls. It is not wrapped in the fabric of time as we love through our existence. It has no boundaries of space, nor limits of life. It has no excuses, curfews, or pride. It has no shame. Not everyone gets to fall into 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.”
“Should I marry her when I find her?”
“No.”
“Sorry?”
“Marry her, if you find her. You are not entitled to this love, the world is not as kind.”
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 said, smiling.
“Love is the heart of humanity thus it’s caught in the tug of war between good and evil.
It is good when 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 and drive you insane; pounding you into the deep valleys of sadness.
Love is also doused in sin. Sin in the sense that 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 instead of a heart. You will let her try to fix your life, but you know you are going to consume her. You’re the darkness the devil sought to spread.
She will be the source of your excesses consuming 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 smoke your young lungs to ash. Most of the time spent with her will be in worlds where trees talk, the sky moves, and your legs wobble with every step. With her you will transcend reality, soar above the stratosphere, only for the wings on your back to fall off, spiral you back to earth, ignite, and burn everything around, then crash 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 gravitate into the black hole of danger, sucked into the void where no man returns from. Your work assignments will pile up in the corner of your desk. Friends will be distant, and when they reach out, to pull you away from the drowning, you will smack their hands away. You are addicted to the crisis. You want to be in the pit. Nothing else matters, not the pandemics of our decaying world nor the wars of stupid men with orange faces, blonde fake hairs, and blue eyes.
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, and curse with words you’d be ashamed to hear coming off a mad sailor. There’ll be days you wake up and the sun will hit your face. Life outside your window will be moving on; the birds will still perch on your window sill, the cars will still rev past your house, and the hawkers will shout while you lie in the wake of destruction. These emotional battles would have you sickeningly running through the motions. Deep in the tangled web of your own depression, you will beg God for one good day.
But you have been trapped, kissed by the venomous lips of the black widow that you brought into your life. You will hate the other men that she’ll have after you. Bitterly spit at the sound of their names, and all this noise will crush your senses. And one day after you wake up from the living nightmare, you’ll stare at a blank wall, dazed and delirious, and try to map out a future that truly seems bleak.
Therapy?
Friends?
No. None of them. You are a fool, you’ll still cling to the hope that you are going to find a way. You are a man, so you are proud. But you are deceitful to your own fate, as pride has so far, only led you to the jaws of the beast.”
He stops and looks at his drink, he swigs it around, and the bubbles froth in response.
“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, 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. Her life’s dream of a perfect marriage and wedding would have to happen in her next life. Every day with her was bleak mid-winter weather. Like the labors of Hercules, each year proved even more difficult a task to tolerate her, than the last.
She was doomed when she loved me; I was foolish to keep her around. She must have leathered the skin on her knees when she knelt to pray – often and repeated. Surely, there ought to be a witch that cursed her to such an inglorious fate. No security, no affection, no absolutes. Just a shell of a man who had exhausted his love – and hate – on women he never married.
Her journals sighed over the secrets she poured into them, entries that fantasized about a husband that adored, desired, and cherished her.
I have forever felt sorry for her; she didn’t deserve to die without experiencing love.”
“So, you took it out on your child?”
“No, I did not. It is just difficult to balance being a good father and 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, but he is on the highway there. The sad story of trauma, leading to the kind of bad company that exposes you to that powdery stuff which leaves you hanging from the balcony some random morning.”
“Are you a grandfather?”
“Oh yes! He left behind a girl.”
His face beamed with a radiance of summer’s sun. His eyes danced up and down, and the wrinkles formed tighter at the edges. His hands shifted across the table, like a child being served their best meal.
I smiled.
“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 pure to me. She is my light. She is not one to drive me insane or even to tears. She is such a peaceful refuge from the torment that my life had been. Look, she even started to drive. Here she is.”
He fished out a phone and showed me the photo of a lady smiling next to a car, her hands spread wide, wearing a bright pink t-shirt. I looked at the man’s own t-shirt and saw that they were similar, or even sweeter, the same.
“That’s a nice color for her, and she looks, uh, happy.”
“Yes, thank you. It is okay to say she is beautiful” the old man laughed loudly, with the same authority cum familiarity he ordered his drink with.
“I was meant to meet up with her tonight, she must be held in traffic!” he looked at his watch once more.
“Hey, can I have a look at the photo one more time?”
I said, and he handed the phone back proudly. I took a good look at it. The emotions held in that photo spoke more than the cliché thousand words. Her eyes must have been looking at her grandfather’s as they were full of a kind of compassion that damned men like me may never get to feel. The car beside her was a character on its own. Well-parked, facing the setting sun whose rays bounced off its cherry-red bonnet, the Mazda, added depth to the image.
“She is breathtaking.” I smiled yet again. He laughed – his energy was rubbing off on me.
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. God knows how many times I have cried this week alone!” he picked off the conversation.
“Equally so, there is still so much to look forward to. The weight of birth, life, growth, survival, and death weigh heavy on our shoulders. We must be strong. But strength is not lack of tears, but our ability to rise. And as men, we are always able to rise, because we hit rock bottom harder than anybody can imagine.
My life tells me that crying will happen, but so will healing… wait, why were you crying in the first place?”
He paused to look at the clock once more.
(Eleven o’clock)
FINAL STEP: LIVE TO DIE LIKE A MAN.
“Well sir, today is my birthday. I am 24 turning 25. Earlier in the day, I had gone to pick up the results of a hospital scan I had been ordered to do. I didn’t like the results - and neither would anyone that has dreams. My head was fuzzy, life had been short-circuited for me. I got into the car and tried to drive the feeling away.
Impossible.
This was death presented in graphs and charts! I can’t run away from it, as the Grim Reaper was already in my body, waiting in the lounge for his appointment. I drove like a man whose life is literally hanging on the line, my foot flat on the pedal. Went past buildings, trees, and down winding roads with my windows open.
Each day I had lived fearing the next, holding back on my dreams, thinking I had a lifetime to figure it out.
But at that point I was free. I felt the rush of life and fueled adrenaline straight into my veins as I swerved past cars, and into lanes, without any care. The gravity pulled me deeper into my seat, as I accelerated through busy streets and frightened pedestrians. Like Vin Diesel in Fast and Furious, I was on a chase. Only I was chasing life, and life is a fast demon. It had slipped through my fingers, like sand.
Sands of time.
On the way down this street. I zoomed past everything, my fingers white from gripping 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.
The wind blew into my ear through the open windows and I couldn’t hear anything but the roar of my engine.
Then I blinked.
Silence.
The next thing I saw was my feet hanging above me. To my side, the windows were shattered, and I was staring at the tarmac. Although the world seemed to be floating above me.
The sirens cut sharply into the night, blending with the ring in my ear. The smell of petrol and I believe blood sickened me so much so that I sent projectiles of my own vomit across the scene. The paramedic that had pulled me out of the wreck had finished conducting checks.
Nothing.
I had crashed into another car. An innocent person who had nothing to do with the battles I was destined to face. Their life journey, and their dreams, the people they love and those that love them - everyone in the ecosystem of their life will have to deal with my own stupidity.
What if they were expecting good news, or had prayed to God for long life? And now…”
I burst into tears, my hands were shaking, and the man only reached out to hold them. I felt the sting in my eyes, and my throat clamped to the emotion that soared through me.
“And what punishment did God have for my sin?
Not even a deep scar-leaving scratch to show for it. How unlucky am I that even death takes its time with me? Look, not even a smudge of dirt on my shirt. Like a cruel tease.
They encouraged me to be checked in the nearest hospital for internal brain damage and spend the night, I told them not to bother. I will be spending months there anyway.
So, I walked into this bar, to cry.”
“That’s really tough for you, son.” He said raising his glass. We toasted and drank what was left in our mugs.
“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!”
THE END.
