by Atieno Mzuri
I tried but my efforts were cut short by Maurice when he realized how hopeless I was. He turned me on my back abruptly and entered from the back and I could feel him all the way up to my throat. As I lay next to him long after he had come, I thought this might just work. I didn't mind the way he had screwed me. It wasn't fine but his size and his vigor had made up for his lack of grace. I drifted off to sleep.
"Atieno, my pleasure is mostly derived from getting a good working by a woman's mouth. It's very difficult for me to come without that. You really need to learn if we are to continue this thing we got going." he said to me as we stood outside his house one night looking at the moon.
On several days, he had tried to teach me to satisfy him by using my mouth but I was proving to be a very poor student. The coyotes were howling from the distance and a few minutes ago he had been howling along with them.
"You understand that this is important to me, don't you?" he asked.
"I do."
The next day I had looked up the Cosmopolitan and to my dismay I had found out I was going it the wrong way. This is what the Cosmopolitan recommended:
"Next time you want to pleasure your man orally, start by swirling your tongue around his nerve-packed corona (the ridge where the head meets the shaft) and gently sucking the tip of his shaft. As his arousal grows, lick the length of his penis, alternating between sweeping up-anddown strokes and circular motions. You'll really make his toes curl if you caress his balls as you tantalize his manhood with your tongue. Or, lick his testicles as you manually massage his shaft."
I lay in bed that whole day wondering how I could bring myself to lick his hairy balls and testicles and I was feeling sick to my stomach and at the same time I was saying to myself, Atieno you got this, many women before you have walked this path and been great coquettes. What's so special about your mouth?
The next day Maurice and I had a date at the local Buffalo Wings and it was Double Wings night, where one paid half price for two plates of wings. We had eaten the wings and were swirling the Busch Light when his eyes grew misty and he asked me whether I loved him and how I pictured the two of us in twenty years’ time. Did I see the two of us sitting by the fireside and enjoying the tapping feet of the grandbabies as we went out into the garden to harvest our squash that we ourselves had grown? Would I grow to enjoy the venison? Might I perhaps in time learn to enjoy giving him what he really liked in bed? The blow jobs...
As I looked up into his face I knew I couldn't lie to him. There was no way I was going to ever enjoy having that schlong ramming my mouth. I looked at the gentle giant waiting on an answer and my mouth refused to move.
He took me home. On the long drive we were both quiet. Atieno, tell him you love him. Don't ruin this, Atieno. I told myself repeatedly. But still my mouth refused to open.
He went round and opened the door for me. “We had a good run, didn't we? He said as he got into his old Ford truck and stole away into the night.
I went into the house and explained to Edward that Maurice had ended it with me and also explained to him that I had tried my best to learn the blowjob techniques but I had failed.
“You didn’t try hard enough.” Edward said. “I think you have made a mistake and you are going to regret it.”
“I don’t think so.” I said confidently. “I didn’t want to lie to him anymore.”
“It’s not about lying to anyone. In time, you will come to understand.”
I did eventually come to understand. But I didn’t come to this understanding until many months later. In my arrogance, I had let a good man go. I went to bed that night thinking that all was not lost. I still could salvage my situation. But I was so very wrong. I hadn’t calculated on the events that would happen next.
For, the next week, my cousin's wife told me to get the hell out of her house...
Chapter Three (I get Thrown Out) Maurice had ended it with me. And I had gone back to Edward and explained that the affair had not been tenable because he was asking me to do stuff that I hadn’t in my entire life ever done and that I was feeling misused and annoyed and I wished that he hadn’t ever deceived me about life in America being so easy and it being such a walk in the park getting a job and building that house for mama.
So he had suggested that perhaps we might go for a drink and cool down and re-strategise. After speaking to several of his friends, the simple strategy, the way forward was to meet total strangers in pubs and hope that one of them fell hard enough for me and dearly wanted to make me his lifetime companion.
There were only two pubs in that little town. And Edward was well known in them because he played a mean game of pool. And he also drank a lot, often leaving his wife at home taking care of their baby who was now six months.
He carried me along with him on these nocturnal activities. For two weeks, we visited the pub every day, alternating between the two looking for suitable prey. To disguise it and make look like I was available, we always went to the pub with the other black people in the little city who all happened to be students. One of my dearest companions was Festu, a young boy who had dropped out of college because the international fees were just too expensive. Festu drank from morning to midnight, except for the few hours that he went to work to sustain the habit. I guess he was deeply depressed but at the time I didn’t think of it that way. I just went along with the tide. I was trying to hide my increasing disappointment and sinking deeper also into the alcoholic swing of the town. I had by this time drank over 30 brands of beer and fraternizing with Festu meant that I was soon going to be a connoisseur of the over 100 brands of beer that are sold in Iowa.
With Maurice, I had drank a lot of Busch lights. With Festu, I had sampled Bud Lights, Heineken, Corona and every beer under the Iowa sun. Iowa has 38 breweries and annual consumption is worth over $200 million and I was fast becoming a statistic as one of the greatest contributors to that beer booming economy. My only redemption is that I wasn’t drinking my money. I was drinking an endless supply of beer bought by the blacks in that little college town.
One Saturday night, we had decided to drive to Davenport, which was easily 100 miles away, as a farmers’ dance was being held there, after an agricultural show. We had arrived in style in a convoy of five cars and drank and danced as though it were our last dance. I had by now decided to relax and let nature take its course, having realized that I couldn’t just snap a man and drag him to the altar. I had said to myself that I would try to preempt stress by setting a realistic goal of meeting a guy and dating him and marrying him within a year. Anything less was out of the question and would simply cause me untold agony and stress, because it was simply unmanageable.
As we were returning from the dance, and singing the then trending weaver bird Osogo Winyo’s songs at the top of our voices, we had seen the red and blue lights flash behind us. Red and blue is synonymous with freedom in America but it’s also synonymous with police and loss of freedom when such lights interspersed with loud sirens, are sighted through the rear view mirrors. We crawled to a stop and the two cops came round to our car and asked the driver for license and vehicle registration, which he handed over, as calmly as a drunk driver can master. We had then been ordered to get out of the car slowly and stand at the front with our hands stretched out before us and touch the bonnet and…
“Please ma’am, sir, keep your hands where we can see them at all times.”
They had then gone ahead to search the car and had found our empty bottles of beer and whiskey, for which we had violated the no-open-bottle law.
“Who was drinking in the car? Step up here please.”
I hadn’t been drinking in the car, as luck would have it. Although I did have a fidgety panicky moment until the driver and Festu stepped forward. They were then led away into the police car and as it zoomed away, I realized I had had such a narrow escape and it was time to focus on achieving my goals. Surely I hadn’t come to America to go to jail for violating the drinking laws. One of the gir
ls in the car, a nineteen year old who hadn’t been drinking because she was underage was asked by the cops to drive us to our destination.
Our driver and Festu having been taken away, there remained in the car myself, Edward and the young girl. Needless to say, Edward was too drunk to know which way we were going, and the girl was driving around guessing which turn we had made as we drove to Davenport. In the end we had gotten hopelessly lost in the corn fields and the girl and myself had decided that our best chances for survival was to keep driving. A distance that should have taken us two hours ended up taking us five hours since we had to drive around until dawn to find out where we were.
When we eventually got home, we found Edward’s wife had lost her voice from crying and wasn’t talking to us anymore. She had almost reached the end of her rope. In the search for a husband, I had been gallivanting everywhere with her husband and drinking daily, and was no longer helping her in household chores or babysitting. I could see the anger in her eyes as she grew colder towards me every day and I just didn’t know what to do. It was like I was operating outside my own body, without a mind, just having a nose to smell out the beer and partake and forget the misery in my life. I sensed that something would happen but I didn’t know it would be so dramatic.
My cousin Edward and I had gone out of the house on the pretext that we were going to buy a goat from one of the farmers around our little town. In the heat of the moment, ten other fellows had joined us and we had suddenly found ourselves in a convoy of four cars going to buy the one goat. The farmer let us into his goats’ pen and we selected a fattened one, which he slaughtered and then left it to us to skin it.
Two of the other guys decided that they also wanted goats for themselves and we helped them slaughter, skin and chop. By the time the meat was all bagged as respectably as possible, it was already midnight. At which point, we all decided to go get a drink for the road. More like drinks for the road. We had been drinking since five o’clock, not in the car but we had carried whisky and beers which we drank at the farmer’s place.
It was truly a moment of insanity on our part, for which I would come to pay later and to regret for a long time. When we got done drinking at the farmer’s place, we headed to the pub and drank some more. And then a bright bird decided that we should head to his house to barbecue some of the meat that we were carrying in the car booths. And so it was that we found ourselves having an impromptu party at the guy’s house and were soon joined by ten other black students.
Soon it was five o’clock and we were staggering back into Edward’s house. The whole night his wife had been blowing up his phone and he kept ignoring it. When we got to the house and Edward was yelling at her to open, she yelled back that we could as well go back and get more goats. For who in their right mind goes to buy a goat at 4.00 in the evening and comes back at 6.00 in the morning with the goat and expects to be spoken to decently? Not her, she said. And then she opened the door and we stumbled in.
Edward was standing there sheepishly trying to explain what had befallen us when I saw the first slap land on his face. And then some more slaps and kicks rained on him. And all this time, he stood there and received the slaps as a little baby will. He didn’t protest, just stood there. And I too stood there mesmerized by the sight of the little woman beating up the tall big man and him pleading with her to stop. I decided that this was becoming too embarrassing for me and was trying to sneak away when she yelled at me to stop right where I was.
“Why are you doing this to me, Edward?” she yelled as she took a shoe and hit him. Edward stood there taking the beating. And I was wondering which America is this I had come to, where a tiny woman beat up a man and he took it without a word.
“What’s wrong with you, Edward?”
Another slap.
“You think you are going to marry me and treat me like dirt? Leaving me in the house everyday with the baby while you go out drinking like a fool? Did I make this baby on my own??”
A punch and a kick.
That was the day I learnt the power of 911. A woman could beat up a man and then call the police and they would come and take away the man because he posed a danger to the woman, never mind that the woman had just thoroughly whipped him.
Edward was pleading for forgiveness and promising that if she didn’t call 911, he would reform his ways and the first thing that was going to happen was that I, the bad influence would get out of their house.
“If this woman doesn’t leave now, (me), I am calling 911 on you!” she told him.
Edward looked at me trying to explain using his eyes. I packed my one bag. I had long ago given the skirt suits to the Goodwill second hand shop so I had only my new clothes to carry. As I looked through the window, while I was packing and saw the ground all white covered in the snow which had fallen two days before and had not melted, I felt heavy depression settle on me. I didn’t know where I was going.
But as I have previously mentioned, Edward was a chap chap guy. He put me on the Greyhound to Minnesota to go live with a different distant cousin. I was going to babysit for free as I waited to get my life together.
Minnesota was the coldest place I had ever been, colder than Iowa, and there my hatred for snow and winter and all things cold, strengthened.
I continued to babysit. And spent a lot of time crying and wondering how I was going to get my life together.
Chapter Four (Encounter with a Serial Killer) After I was thrown out of my cousin Edward’s house by his wife, Edward had called a different distant cousin who now lived in Minneapolis and she had said I could go live in her house on condition that I took care of her child for room and board. It was in the middle of the winter and I had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to return home yet. I felt that since I was here the least I could do was work at it instead of returning home in disgrace and have to start from scratch again. By this time, my baby had moved upcountry and lived with my mother. She was slowly adjusting to village life and they had enrolled her in the village school.
My very distant cousin, Rachel, a nurse was married to Joseph, a relationship that I found very peculiar. He was also in nursing school. Everybody I had met from my country so far was a nurse or a caregiver or in nursing school. He had asked me what I had studied back home and I had with great pride informed him that I had a Master of Arts degree.
And he had then gone on to pompously inform me that he too had been a primary school headmaster when he was back home and I really needed to do myself a favor and just keep away my certificates and forget about them if I was ever to succeed in America.
“These people here don’t recognize African certificates, my friend. Forget you ever went to school. You are starting afresh. Keep that in mind and you won’t get too depressed.”
I was amused. I remembered talking to my mother telling her I was coming to Edward’s diploma graduation and she had asked me, whether Edward had restarted his education from grade one when he landed in America. Because he had taken almost twenty years before he was finally graduating. At the time I had laughed hard. But slowly I was coming to understand why Edward had taken twenty years to complete his diploma. And with each bit of information that contributed to my finally understanding, I had felt like I was being hit by an invisible hammer into the ground and it was going to take me forever to get up and crawl from the hole that I was sinking into.
Rachel and I had sat down and had a woman to woman talk about my problems and she had agreed that she definitely understood my predicament, having been there herself and finally marrying the former primary school headmaster, Joseph, a man she would not have looked at twice but had ended up looking at suggestively because he had been in America for a long time and had become a citizen.
I was thus introduced to a cousin of Joseph, who had travelled from the city of Benson to view me, his prospective wife. He had then said that he didn’t have time to discuss the matter because he had to work that evening and I should get into his SUV and go to the city of Be
nson for a day so that we would have ample time to discuss what would be expected of me in this arrangement. Joseph had suggested that we might work out a buy my citizenship from him type of arrangement, where he would marry me and I would get my papers and I would pay him the staggering sum of $20,000 over a period of 2 years.
“Don’t worry.” Joseph said. “You will make more than that in the two years especially if you work double shifts the way I do. In fact since you don’t have a family, you can even work three shifts at different jobs. Go with him and work out the details.”
And thus I had gotten into the SUV and had found myself in Benson. Joseph’s cousin had gone out and bought some takeout and had suggested that I freshen up. I was surprised that we were in a onebedroomed apartment because he had indicated that he lived in a two bedroomed apartment.
“Don’t worry.” He had said when I looked perplexed. “It’s only for a night. I will sleep on the couch as a good host and you can take the bedroom.”
I had made myself comfortable. Taken a shower and changed into my pajamas, watched a bit of TV, discussed the forthcoming marriage and agreed that I would pay him a certain sum monthly until the sum was cleared.
With a smile I had gone to bed. This was a man from home and he was going to help me. Even though he was charging me, it was going to be alright.
I had dozed off, when I felt him get into the bed and begin to cuddle me, groping me and trying to pull me towards him. I sat up and asked him what the hell he was doing.
“Atieno, we are going to be man and wife, we better start getting used to each other.”
“What do you mean by getting used to each other? I am paying you for this. Nobody mentioned that sex was going to be a requirement.”
“I am a lonely man. How do you think I am going to survive and yet I have to carry on the impression that I am a married man? I can’t date anyone if I am married to you. Someone could report me to the government and we could both go in for a long time. You do know paying someone to marry you is illegal, don’t you? Allow me to help you.” He said as he reached for me.