Mr Ernest Bazanye

The model on Pinterest has a different look. It’s the look that says, “I am beautiful, like this clean street I stand posing on, this bright sky I stand posing beneath, this sports car I lean against; I am appealing, I am admirable, I am attractive; I am Paris in spring, I am Manhattan in the sixties, I am barges on the ancient Nile, I am violin strings.” That’s the Pinterest model.

Male models in Pinterest hearken to things we have already learned to admire, things we think of as graceful and elegant and holding that grace and that elegance beyond question. Like the cobbled streets of Paris by in spring. That’s the statement said and ended. No question of sewers or poor people. Sixties Manhattan is joy and jazz, not war. Cleopatra’s barges are tranquility under soft sun, not slaves. These Pinterest pictures are worlds contained completely in their frames. Nothing exists off screen.

Male models on Pinterest all look like that, no matter what different outfits they are wearing.

These days it’s sunglasses and polo shirts,  (solid colour, no stripe, tucked in) and chinos rolled up a bit at the bottom. I never notice the shoes but there is usually a beard up top that is youthful if not young. The models look like they have “creative” jobs and long-term relationship. No ex-spouses, just joy and love. They tend to be white , but ambiguously white. If you decide that they are white, they look like the white guys who play pick up ball games at night with black guys in the hood, where they are welcome even though they don’t live there. They live in a loft in the fashionable part of the city. That is a Pinterest model.

But I am looking at a Ugandan chap in Kisementi.

He has the same thing on, chinos and a polo, but the same outfit doesn’t look as good on him. He is too bulgy. 

The clothes do look expensive, however, and that is better. It’s actually the whole point.

His outfit looks like the money it cost and so he now looks like he can afford the things Europeans and Americans covet from Pinterest and, in Uganda, this means he has succeeded or is succeeding where so many of us are floundering. And that means he is better. That is the whole point.

He has the shape of a mid-thirties Kampala guy. The paunch of beers proudly drunk presents itself before him. He walks with that legs-wide-apart gait that tacitly alerts you to the presence of testicles and penis. The clothes on him fit ill. Too tight where his waist and belly bulge out, and at his crotch, where the chinos scrunch up in a lewd V. 

But he doesn’t care, or doesn’t know, or doesn’t know because he never cared to find out, and that makes the proclamation of the apparel even louder. He has way too much money to care what you think, especially if you already think he has more money than you. He has your envy and that is more valuable and more enjoyable than your admiration of his figure. It’s more valuable than the glamour of the pretty-boy Pinterest model. Beauty moves in the service of the beholder. It is here to please us and it craves our approval. Envy on the other hand? Envy works for the subject. The man in the tight shirt is a better man.

This is a elegy for something that died before I even knew I needed it. I lost something somewhere along the way to Acacia Mall and I didn’t realise until I got here that I had lost it.

I’m at the mall in a button down shirt that I didn’t buy there. 

I got there by safeboda, did some work at Endiro and am now loitering through the mall letting the cortisol dissipate.

Watching them. Them. The Acacia people.

Watching like an insect watching hawks. I am not one of them. 

I have no ambition. I just don’t. There is nothing here. I am apathy.

My life? I do nothing now, just exhale. That is what you are reading right now. Me exhaling. 

Wait. Maybe something else. I see a suspicion of myself, shifting in the hollowness, at its edges.  Perhaps this lack of ambition might be a problem. Maybe not wanting more money is costing me the things I actually do want. If I craved more wealth, more fame, more Caffessarie carbonara, more Sketchers, more iPhone earbuds from Elite, more Ovaltine from Carrefour, more Stanley Cups, more Cotton Candy, more money stuff, maybe I would make a greater effort to get them and perhaps succeed. Maybe when I had the life of Wakiki chinos and Woolworths polos I would also have peace. Satisfaction. Contentment.  

And I am not not too dull to appreciate that having more money than you need is better in many ways than having enough. I have never been poor: I have been broke. I have never been rich: I have been loaded.

In June the heater wasn’t working in the house I lived in so I moved to another place with another heater.

So one day, long ago, years ago, I moved to get married. I proposed. “Do you take this man?” And she took me to Kampala Barbieland. The Ugandan dream, the burbs. Najjera. 

Before that I had been living, as I do now, in a glorified crawlspace, badly furnished, perennially messy, a cuboard for a life, a garage for a nigga, four walls to store my laptop and notebook while I slept.

When we moved in together I began to create the life. We furnished the house. We got carpets, wall hangings, a properly equipped kitchen, a dstv dish. I traded in the kikumi for a spacio and she drove a rav 4. We would visit other couples for dinner. I would come home from work to announce that I got the promotion. She got me out of my accustomed dishevelment and into button down shirts and I contemplated kids.

Now I stand here leaning over the railing of the first floor and watch them, no longer one of them.

I pulled off fifteen years as a mall person. I had my own three D specs, a favourite pizza topping, pumas, Miniso impulse purchases, Galaxy Edge, cappuccinos, gelatos, Lacoste, Underarmor. And I played the part well. So good was my disguise I even had my own self convinced. Man.

Did I not belong there and if I didn’t, do I belong here, outside, looking in, where I feel more at ease? Where I feel that I am who I am, successfully me, not failed them?

But the concept of belonging is as firm and solid as the other shadows on that wall. It is how shadows work. Something is not there. You see its absence. But because that is what you see, you assume that something is there. A presence.

But we treat the shadow as if it is the thing.

So we have the man we started with, polo and chinos. He drives to the mall in an SUV, shepherds the boys to Adidas because they need football boots for school and he holds his wife’s sunglasses while she goes through her bag to find the card. The boys want ice cream, and he won’t mind some either, but ultimately it’s her decision. She figures, why not? Liam is still on probation after he forgot to load the dishwasher but there are times a parent just can’t say no. 

It will please me to see them among their bags at the café with their cones. I enjoy seeing families happy.

But I am not that man. If that is what man is, I am not that man.

I am not one of those men. Walking through the mall feels, to me, like solitude. It is what I do when I feel the need for a break from the real world in my laptop.