Bad bachelor: Waking up to the reality of ‘next year’

When I wake up on New Year’s Day, 2020, it is already dawn. But my Coastal hotel room – at The Breezy Bliss seaside resort – is still quite dim, curtains drawn.

The room is also very hot, and incredibly, music still thuds from the ‘Breakfast -&-Night Bar’ outside. It is where I started my New Year Eve’s party at, wearing my ‘Where art thou Art?’ T-shirt and shorts.

Because my name is Art Amacho, a 33-year-old advertisement salesman. Smooth-tongued, some may say serpentine, single, slayer of Slay Queens, and proud owner of a swift blue Subaru.

With ‘back to work’ beginning Monday the Sixth of Jan, I had my SGR long-booked for a train ride down to the Coast to cross the New Year over at this Breezy Bliss hotel, with a plane back to Nairobi at ten a.m.

I stumble, still hangovered, to my room’s bathroom, and throw water on my face which needs a shave.

Then I take off my polo shirt (the Bermuda shorts from last night are on the bedroom floor) and put on the plain white shirt and khaki trousers I’d hang there when I arrived afternoon on New Year’s Eve. Yesterday!

Back in my room, I notice something so strange that at first I rub my eyes to see if I’m dreaming. In the veiled light of my room, there is a naked woman passed out on the bed, huge in size and rump so that she looks like a giant chocolate cake just melted on my bed – msichana mfupi, round, mnono na rangi ya ‘m-brown.’

My mind does a flashback as I try to digest my eyesight!

Sunset started with me having my William Lawless whiskey at the ‘Breakfast - & - Night Bar’ by the beach – but I got bugged by the presence of a tall, thin, dark woman and a smaller girl (who looked like she got her KCSE results ten days ago) who kept making suggestive talk to me after I bought them a couple of drinks.

I’m a playboy, so prostitution is not my style.

Was happy to leave them at 8pm to their ‘sex-nanigans’ and go for dinner. But at 9pm, I abandoned my dessert to follow a pack of drunken singing youths – those private university brat types who can afford to come as a ‘group package’ for New Year’s Eve Coast Party – to the hotel disco.

I remember swiping my credit card a lot – kuikata ka msumeno – as I bought all sorts of cocktails for a bunch of Campus gals in very early twenties, and drinking Gilbey Gimlets like it was the last day of the world.

Instead of simply the last day of 2019.

I recall, distantly, the sight and sound of fireworks, a hotel bar lady saying of my last post-midnight swap – ‘Mr Amacho, hii credit card imeisha pesa. Huko na ingine?’, and me smoothly, if slurring a bit, saying ‘charge the rest of what I order to room 1503, nta-sign ...’

A cold sweat settles on my face, in spite of the Mombasa heat warming up the room, as early as 7am.

If my memory serves me right, I had about Sh48,000 on that card (40 of it rent due by fifth, every month) and eight to ‘beba’ me till Monday, when I can go to Accounts and take up to half my Jan salary. Advance.

Worse still, it hits me that I may have promised the baby elephant on my bed ‘ten K’ to ‘come with me.’

On bare feet, I sneak out of Hotel room #1503, and slip on my loafers in the hotel corridor.

‘Just going for a morning walk to cure hangover,’ I say breezily to the hotel receptionist. She smiles.

Once I’m round the corner of ‘Breezy Bliss,’ I board a boda boda and say: ‘Moi International Airport.’

[email protected]