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By Root 6196 0

this damn mizuah of his? They kept a few little cans for the Britishers’ tea and couldn’t understand what he meant, had never even seen a glass of milk. They did their best with a trickle of evaporated stuff, while I felt—to tell the truth, I was humiliated. This was no way to travel in the wilds. After a few days this skinny character with his hair and beard and sharp nose and completely unreasonable eyes—there was just no rapport. My health went into reverse. I began to have a bad stitch in the side of my belly so that I couldn’t sit comfortably or even lie down. The whole middle of me became inflamed, sensitive—horrible! I was trying to relate to the natural surroundings and the primitive life, the animals, etc. This should have been bliss for me. I could almost see the bliss ahead of me like heat waves in the road and couldn’t catch up with it. I had fucked myself out of it by being such a do-gooder. And it only got worse. Ezekiel had left messages along the way and Theo said we should be catching up with him in a few days. I hadn’t seen any beryllium yet. Ezekiel was supposedly making a tour of all the beryllium locations. We couldn’t reach these in our Minibus. You had to have a Land Rover or a Jeep. Ezekiel had a Jeep. So we went along like this and every once in a while we hit a tourist hotel where Louie demanded mizuah and grabbed off the best food. If there were sandwiches, he seized the meat and left me nothing but cheese and Spam. If there was a little hot water, he bathed first and left nothing but dirt for me. The sight of his skinny ass as he toweled himself filled me with one complete hot passion, either to hit him on the butt with a two by four or give him a terrific boot.

“The payoff was when he got after Theo to teach him Swahili words and the first thing he asked for, naturally, was ‘motherfucker.’ Charlie, there is absolutely no such thing in Swahili. But Louie couldn’t accept the fact that in the very heart of Africa this expression should not exist. He said to me, ‘Man, after all, this is Africa. This Theo has got to be kidding. Is it a secret they won’t tell the white man?’ He swore he wasn’t coming back to America without being able to say it. The truth was that Theo couldn’t even grasp the concept. He had no difficulty with part one, the sex act. And of course he understood part two, the mother. But bringing them together was beyond him. Several long days Louie worked to get it out of him. Then one evening Theo at last understood. He put these two things together. When the idea became clear, he jumped up, he grabbed the jack handle out of the Minibus and swung at Louie’s head. He landed a pretty bad hit on the shoulder and lamed him. This gave me a certain amount of satisfaction but I had to break it up. I had to pull Theo to the ground and get my knees on his arm and hold his head while I reasoned with him. I said it was a misunderstanding. However, Theo was all shook up and never talked to Louie again after this mother-blasphemy had struck home. As for Louie, he griped and bitched about his shoulder so long that I couldn’t continue to follow Ezekiel. I decided that we would go back to town and wait for him. Actually we had been making an enormous circle and were now only fifty or sixty miles from Nairobi. It didn’t look to me like any beryllium mine. I concluded that Ezekiel had been collecting or perhaps even stealing beryllium here and there. In Nairobi we X-rayed the young fellow. Nothing was broken but the Dr. did tie his arm in a sling. Before I took him to the airport we sat at an outdoor café while he drank several bottles of milk. He had had it with Africa. The place had become phony under civilized influence and denied its heritage. He said, ‘I’m all shook up. I’m going straight home.’ I took from him the outfit I had bought for his use in the bush and gave it to Theo. Then Louie said he had to bring African souvenirs home for Naomi. We went to tourist shops where he bought his mother a deadly ugly Masai spear. He was due to reach Chicago at 3 a.m. I knew he had no money in his pocket.