How Mugechi lost his head, and nearly his penis in the same minute

MUGECHI! Elder Makathimo’s giant last born son! That’s him.

Bugger might have been killed by a chicken bone and we might have covered him in a ton of soil a week or so ago, but fellow will forever be alive in the minds, hearts and curses of a certain generation.

His reign of terror ran all through our childhood. It was ended by the loss of his foreskin. Very powerful demons, that appendage must have contained. The transition happened about two weeks before news of him having beaten two students in the KCPE exams rocked the village. It was the most peaceful Christmas we ever had.

Elder Makathimo managed to get his son into a nice, provincial secondary school despite him nailing just 129 out of the 700 marks on offer.

Three years later, just as I was joining the league of men myself, Mugechi lost his head. And it happened with no warning whatsoever. He was okay one moment and the next, he was chasing his grandmother’s dogs on all fours, naked as a new-born giant.

Huge fellow nearly lost his three-year-old manhood to Chui, the dark-coated, highly temperamental alpha male in the process. The dog was least impressed by the act, it seemed, not even by the Chicago Bulls underwear on the freshly cracked head.

It took the intervention of a quick-thinking employee to separate the two. However, a ‘U’-shaped outline of a bite mark on Mugechi’s groin area that resisted any growth of hairs remained a shiny reminder of the near-tragedy.

Elder Makathimo spared no coin in an attempt to have the nuts that had gone loose in his boy’s dome bolted back. Mathari tried, gave up and expelled the bugger after he nearly killed the director, twice, in a bear hug calling him mommy. Undeterred, Makathimo had him knocked down with an elephant dart, loaded him on a plane and flew him to the world’s best mental hospital in Germany.

After months of hi-tech procedures and medication, the Germans shook their heads, sew back his skull and condemned the poor bugger to permanent insanity. Desperate for his son’s recovery, elder Makathimo temporarily, but in secret, put the Bible down and hopped from one Nigerian witch-doctor to another. But even them could not remove the demons in Mugechi’s dome. Resigned, Makathimo took him back home and stopped bothering.

The giant terror was, from then, found at the market place giving speeches of national importance to a cheering audience only he could see. You could also bump into him driving home or scolding his driver for driving over a bump too fast and spilling the coffee in his hand.

The treasured underwear

And just like that, Mugechi became the market mad man. It was also how I was able to acquire a critical piece of garment that had been missing from my killer dot.com attire. Yes, the Chicago Bulls treasure. The smog in Mugechi’s skull made it easier for me to disinherit him the prize.

Stuffed it in my pocket one day when he strung it out on a low-lying telephone cable to drive away the lice that were feasting on his buttocks. I had to boil it in several rivers of water to kill the blood-sucking parasites, then carefully hem several tents of material inwards to scale the innerwear down to my size. For the next year, I was king of the town –okay, not really, but I was up there. The label was so prized it raised my status overnight.

But you had to know how to wear it. Most favoured way for a proud owner to display it to the envious world was tucking in the Tupac Shakur T-Shirt into it.

On top of the T, the oversize basketball vest would be carefully hemmed to touch the hem of the underwear. You then let the Savko, Tokyo or Kal Khani trouser sag half way on your ass until the bull’s horns were prominently displayed.

Downstairs, you threw on a pair of Sahara walkers, Jordan Air sports shoes or the police vunja boots complete with the metallic reinforcement on the toes.

The killer look was completed by either a box or punk haircut which would be complemented by a pair of sunglasses gingerly perched on the remaining rectangular perch of African hair drowning in litres of coconut oil –or Kimbo.

But there are a few unlucky blokes like me whose heads wouldn’t accept any of the hair styles on account of being shaped like mashed potatoes. St Pauls’ domes, is what Pastor Kariuki said they are called.

Told us that St Paul was given a turn to deliver the wet skulls to the drying bay after the Maker had just moulded them. But he was an impatient fellow, this Paul, and he whipped the donkeys a little too hard to make them go a little faster. It was a terrible idea. The domes arrived for baking in varying distortions after smashing into each other during the rough ride.

That’s how the pastor explained the shape of my head after I made the impromptu decision to join other sinners on the dais at a public crusade in Kawangware a few years back. The defect, he told the cheering Christians, was the reason I could not fall down like the normal people flailing like fish out of water all around him, no matter how much he smacked the spirits into my forehead. I was very high.

I don’t know how true or not Pastor Kariuki’s story was but he sounded very convincing. Maybe you know the Bible better.

Still, if like me your St Paul’s dome rejected either of the haircuts, you shaved bald and covered the shine with a cap, slightly tilted to the left. The dark glasses would then go on the cap.

Finally, you acquired the bounce. Gosh, that springy step was the real deal. It was hard work convincing my grandmother that we had not broken something on our bodies. But the spring was not for her. And it worked magic. Gosh, those were the days. But they are gone, just like Mugechi.

I will also leave you now because I think the neighbour to my right just got home with a girl. See those five-bob-coin-size holes on the mabati partition? That’s my 3D theatre goggles.

I hope the bugger did not bring with him a grandmother, complete with wrinkles and missing teeth, like in the previous show.