I sat with the two women and they looked at me and smiled and chatted amongst themselves a little. Occasionally, I’d feel the eyes of others staring at me from nearby tables but I chose to ignore them; I was having a good time already, a passenger enjoying the night.
Karen lit a cigarette from her soft-pack of Sportsman cigarettes, a portrait of a bridled horse’s head in profile on the orange-and-white pack. She blew smoke at the ceiling and said, ‘Do you enjoy your Tusker?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘It’s good.’
‘It’s good Kenyan beer,’ she said.
‘You don’t like beer?’ I said to Flora.
‘I do. But I’m drinking a wine cooler because I was beginning to get a bit of a Tusker-belly,’ she said, patting her slim stomach.
The group at the other table had a small stereo and JayZ’s The Black Album played.
‘We’ll drink here,’ said Karen, ‘then go to the studio, which isn’t far. But there’s a hip-hop group recording there now.’
‘Are they good?’ I said.
‘They’re okay,’ said Flora, making a face at Karen.
‘We don’t like them that much,’ said Karen. ‘They’re a little competitive.’
We finished our drinks and Karen hailed a car out front and we drove no more than five or six minutes and pulled up to a gate. Karen opened the padlocked gate with a small key, then we pulled into a large, empty dirt lot, the apartment building set back. I paid the driver. We walked to the building and from the lot it looked a little spooky, like it had been abandoned, paint peeling, scarred. We took the outdoor stairs up to an apartment and I didn’t see a soul till Karen opened a door onto a smoky living room, where six or seven guys sat in the dark save the glow of a tv set. Hip hop played on blown speakers.
Karen and Flora said hello and introduced me and we were all greeted coldly, especially me. One guy in the corner, in a toque, with dreadlocks and bad teeth, was openly hostile toward me, sneering at me when Karen said, ‘This is John.’
Somehow, I wanted to convey to this group of young men that I wasn’t a tourist trying to sleep with their women — MC Karen and DJ Flora were very good-looking, but I was here as a friend, enjoying their company. But then again I didn’t really care.
We went to another room that had been somewhat soundproofed with foam and egg cartons stapled to the walls and there was an old mattress up against a wall, too, and a microphone in a stand.
‘This is where we record vocals and instruments,’ said Karen, and she opened a door to the adjacent room and said, ‘And this is where we record and mix,’ and there was a small mixing board and cables running into the room through a circular hole in the wall, which had been stuffed with socks and T-shirts.
‘I’ll be back,’ said Karen and Flora and I were left standing in the room.
‘Cool studio,’ I said to Flora.
‘It works,’ she said. ‘But it’s annoying always sharing it.’
Karen returned and said. ‘They’re recording till at least midnight, so tonight doesn’t look good. Let’s smoke some ganja.’
We went out on the balcony, in the front of the apartment, and Karen produced a joint from her purse the size of a tampon. At first I refused the joint, thinking of Kenya’s strict drug laws, which I’d been warned about, and thinking about Boris — that is, how embarrassed I’d be if I got in trouble with respect to drugs. Besides, I’d observed that people of a certain generation who lived in the former Soviet Union, although nonjudgmental when it came to over — indulging in spirits, were, say, e.g., extremely judgmental when it came to marijuana. But when I passed on the grass, Flora and Karen looked at me disapprovingly, like I was uncool, so I smoked some.
Staring out onto the empty parking lot, the night sky, we talked and smoked.
‘When are you here till?’ asked Flora.
‘I leave on New Year’s Eve.’
‘Oh that’s soon,’ said Karen.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s a short trip, all things considered.’
‘That’s too bad,’ she said.
‘I might be back next year this time, too. I’ll come back for the festival. And I’ll stay longer next time.’
‘That’s in a year,’ said MC Karen.
‘Yes, that’s not long,’ I said.
They both laughed.
Flora said, ‘In Nairobi, a year’s a long time.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘A lot happens in a year,’ said Flora. ‘Let’s go to a club,’ said MC Karen, and she called a car.
Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun played, ‘Penitentiary Philosophy,’ when we entered the packed, hot barroom. Karen cut a path through the crowd and got us a couple of seats at the bar. Flora saw a friend and went to talk to her. We sat on barstools and I shouted over the loud music, ‘Good job!’
When the chorus hit, MC Karen stood on the rung of her stool and sang along. I desperately wanted to kiss her and she could tell and laughed and sat back down and slapped me on the back. She lit a Sportsman.
We drank beer and talked about art mainly; MC Karen’s aspirations as an artist, specifically, bringing Kenyan music to the world, inspiring and healing the lonely, the hurt and the sick. She told me about Sheng, namely, the mixing of Kiswahili and English, in the hip-hop movement in Nairobi. Motivating people out of apathy, she said. Making people rejoice in their Creator’s glory, she said. Empathy, she said, creating a sense of empathy for her fellow man, that was the task of the artist. I asked MC Karen her last name.
‘Nyangweso,’ she said.
‘That’s a beautiful name,’ I said.
‘I’m Luo, like Barack Obama,’ she said, raising a fist. ‘Like Raila Odinga.’
MC Karen told me that as an artist she’s a warrior.
‘I’m not much of a warrior,’ I said, shyly, and smiled.
‘You’re an artist, John, like me,’ she said. ‘That means you’re a warrior.’
MC Karen ordered us a couple of samosas from the bar and we rubbed salt on them and picked at them with our beers.
‘You seem comfortable in Nairobi,’ she said. ‘You don’t find it different?’
‘Other than the portrait of Kibaki behind the bar,’ I said, pointing upward at said portrait, ‘this place isn’t much different from bars back home.’
Eventually, I had to use the restroom and wound up having to urinate in a trough with several other young men. I looked at my watch and decided I should get back to the hotel soon.
When I returned to the bar MC Karen was standing with Flora.
‘We ordered tequila shots,’ said Flora.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but then I should head back. It’s late.’
We did the shots of tequila, with salt and lemon wedges, and I paid for them and for Flora’s drinks, too, and MC Karen and I left without her. Flora stayed behind with her friends.
In the street outside the club, a small boy with burn marks on his face approached me asking for money, and I had my hand in a pocket to fish out money, when MC Karen rapidly chased him away, yelling something in Kiswahili. Her viciousness toward the boy startled me after her sermon on the importance of the artist’s empathy and love and so on. She hailed a car and opened the door for me. I climbed in the backseat.
The car sat idling outside the gate as MC Karen went into an apartment building for god knows what reasons. She said she needed to stop somewhere and gave the driver directions. Other than the building, there was nothing around but brush. I listened to the cicadas’ amazingly loud noisemakers. Or what I hoped were cicadas. Across the dark street, from behind the foliage, headlights flashed us. We heard a car door open and shut and a large man in linens leaned down to the driver’s-side window. He spoke to the driver in Kiswahili and the driver answered some questions. They spoke for what seemed a long time, so I disassociated the best I could, thinking of my night with MC Karen. The man shone a flashlight in my face. I’d been warned about men posing as policemen but the driver said that the man was in fact a policeman, a plain-clothesman, and he let us wait for MC Karen.