Most boys grow up believing they are going to end up in the arms of a fair lady. Fair lady, because she is graceful and well-mannered is all the boys are looking for, even as most would borrow robes and dress up the one woman your mother had warned you against and had advised you not to marry. What does mama know?
After all, her time has passed, and the new dispensation has a different template…one where women can borrow from the hold-all tank loaded with the niceties of distinctions, precision and subtleties…all designed to ameliorate the haggard features, the un-womanlike comportment she carries around, even a blind man could see. Suddenly, your pick is Rhoda of the Nile, and she does no wrong.
Maybe, it is her striking beauty. Maybe, it is her dainty, nuanced smile that has your heart beating about your ribs against the use of nature. It is clear the fat, coal-tar black woman you saw on Galveston’s seawall, perched delicately, biting off slices off a coconut wafer, while seductively watching the seagulls in their notorious one-legged stands, didn’t do it for you. You sanamabitch!!! You gunslinging girl-watching creep. I will give it to you; your taste buds are supreme, grander than your persona could carry you.
You want someone supple –you know, the lithe and limbered prose of a cut. And all you have about your imposed grandiosity is a made-up stateliness inside a bigger tent that would house Rudolph Valentino. You want a trophy. You want the nonentity in the blue dress. You should know the gown was cut and designed to fit her curvatures, for one, and then to cause distress. You want Symphony, the widow maker…as against, the totally, morally packaged obese phenom of a woman with higher degrees in inter-personal relations?
How long are you going to wait for that dream girl? Symphony has her hands full with a rocking set of gigolos. Yours is empty. But you will wait on the off chance she will happen by on this day you are set to spend all day listening to the polyphony of sounds, watching the dissonance of cars passing on the Boardwalk. It’s not only Symphony you have seen on that perch: It has been the constant birdwatching of your quintessential piece of womanhood, Mama-good-draws, Angelina Crowbarr.
This was the day both women had picked to wander wickedly; they both know you had sat on the north end promontory with a pair of binoculars and watched them in the past as if you were watching a pair of cormorants in their prelude to sex. They know that today is the day your bad self will throw caution to the wind and leapfrog in your haste to reach that unearned gratification. So, you see…you have been made. The waspish crabby and irritable beauties…the Leona Bobbitt-like thinking slashers can’t wait for the music that will herald you into their realm of influence to begin.
They are leaning, with undetectable meanness, to cut you to pieces…cut you up like a panda before the wine tasting would begin…Only, you will not have a tongue to taste the full-bodied wine in white and black.
Unfortunately, you are blinded by that naked, blistering steam of a seal…your sense of smell scrubbed to the sinews of your adenoidal cartilage you couldn’t smell your own excrement. And if you did, the carnation is foreign –not sour foreign, but a native of Lavendaville and Rose of Sharon foreign. These are the cows you want to buy?
These cows that pee the milk of human unkindness, and disaster? You know you could easily milk them through the fence and not pay a dime, because there is no one about the fence watching. Call me: I know Symphony and Angelina Crowbarr too well to let you fry in their collective embrace. I am telling you, know this pair of daisies more than you would ever care to know.
♦ Professor Don Okolo is an Editorial Board member of the West African Pilot News
