The Headboard

Let’s start off with a plug. It’s along the Munyonyo Road at a place called Baskuru’s where I have my haircut. They do a grand job and to date, I have had no reason to pick a bone with them. The lady who owns the salon – Leila, is a pleasant lady who has a wry sense of humour and is blessed with two children – a boy and a girl.

Her boy is in his teens and looking back at my days as a teenager, like all boys, I must have given Mr. and Mrs. Bukumunhe – my parents that is, a good number of sleepless nights. But I am sure that out there, there are parents who will argue to the bitter end that their teenage boys are saints and never break the rule book. And to them, I say it is time for a reality check!

When I was growing up and was at boarding school, we thought about girls and sex. And being in an all boy boarding school, there was always somebody who had access to contraband literature – literature like Playboy magazine. I can’t recall who used to smuggle it into school, but whenever it arrived, the boys in the sixth form would read them first after which they would filter down to us lesser mortals in the junior forms. Sometimes when the magazine would filter down with pages missing that I often wondered why somebody would rip out a page. Nevertheless, Playboy was savvy that to-date, I still hold Hugh Heffner as the greatest living legend to the literature industry! Playboy was the magazine I wanted to read because it made far more sense to me than George Orwell’s Animal Farm, James Joyce’s Ulysses or Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice.Even better, Playboy had pictures! They were up there and in your face seemingly inviting you to come and explore and be naughty.

And the more we looked at the lusty pictures of the naked women, rather embarrassingly and I hate to admit it, but we would head off and lock ourselves in the toilet for a private session of self-gratification.

If I was not looking at naked women in Playboy, then I was talking about sex and virginity. The pressure on a teenage boy to lose this virginity is extreme. “TB you have to ‘do it’ as soon as possible, the sixth formers would tell me. However, they never told me what I was supposed to do that for a few years I went round in a daze while trying to figure out what ‘doing it’ actually meant. And then I found out almost by accident that and for the lack of a better word to use, ‘doing it’ – meant ‘getting laid’, and for every boy in my class who had one it, we would envy that person. We would see them as ‘graduates’ and with that status, they were admitted into the ranks of the sixth form boys who of course had done everything there was to do. They had even spoken to girls – something we in the junior classes didn’t even know how to do - yet.

Years later and while at university in England, my neighbour in my hall of residence was, Henry Spader. Henry came from a town called Penzance that lay at the very edge of rural England in Exeter. Henry and by all accounts was a late bloomer in the girl and sex department that I am sure he only went to university to make up for ‘lost time’. Henry had a string of girls that it was difficult to know who he was he was dating – if indeed he was dating them or just using them for sex.

And he had this habit of coming to my room every morning to brag about how he had ‘scored’ with so and so. But it was difficult to know if he had. Okay many girls were seen going in and out of his room but did that mean he had scored? Maybe whenever they went to his room it was to study or for a cup of coffee. But Henry was adamant that he was doing the deed that he bragged till he could brag no more.
It was now time to put him into his place. While I didn’t have access to the string of girls that Henry had, my plan was simple. I moved the head of my bed an inch or so off the wall. I would then sit on a chair at the foot of the bed and with one foot, I would rock the bed so the head board knocked onto the wall.

And with a beer in one hand and television remote control in the other I would spend the night knocking the headboard onto the wall that for hapless Henry next door, it gave him the impression that I was in the sack doing my thing! The following morning and draped in nothing but a skimpy towel, I would stand in the corridor waiting for him. And when he saw me he would exclaim: “Tim how do you do it? I wish I had your black genes to enable me to have sex all night!”

Soon enough word went round campus the Ugandan chap in room 42 ‘does it’ all night long for James would invite people to his room to listen to my headboard banging on the wall. And with that came a number of girls who were interested. But boy, it was one thing banging the headboard against the wall and another thing actually trying to ‘do it’ all night long that some girls would feel short changed for they would say: “How come the other night you did it all night long and today you barely lasted ten minutes?” If only they knew!