January Bluez

January lives in a cement-block, blue-door, one-room apartment with his coworker Onesimo.  It’s small – just enough space for two beds side-by-side, and a dresser.  In the daytime, they keep one bed folded up against the wall to create some standing room.  There’s one large window, with a Masai-shuka strung up as a casual curtain, and the ever-present Tanzanian mosquito net bundled close to the ceiling.  Over the dresser is a pretty big mirror, and the dresser-top is littered with typical male necessities and vanities: un-lidded Vaseline jars, condoms, aftershave, small metal razors, one long-toothed comb, a tin of shoe-shine.

When January finally invited me to come over, I was very pleased.  Seeing the inside of a guy’s room – how he lives, the objects he keeps safe, what he lets fall to the ground, how he arranges his small domestic life – is exhilarating, illuminating.  Intimate in the same way that secret-telling is intimate.  His transistor radio takes up significant space in the tiny room, balanced on an overturned plastic bucket so it’s level with the bed.  He fiddles with the dials as we talk without even looking at the radio, finding all the right frequencies, memory or instinct in his fingertips.  

January steps outside to take a phone call, and I start examining the small things on the windowsill by his bed.  A cassette tape: Bob Marley’s Legend.  A pamphlet titled “10 Tips for Great Sex.”  One well-worn book: the autobiography of Malcolm X.   I pick up the book, and it falls open to a section that has clearly been read more often than the rest.  January comes back into the room, and I grin and hold up the book and ask him if he liked it. “Sana,” he tells me, and takes the book from my hands the way a mother takes back her baby from someone who’s been holding it carelessly. 

“But there’s a book I love even more,” he says, and reaches into a backpack hanging from the wall.  He pulls out a scrappy brown envelope, and from the envelope, a thick volume titled Birds of Eastern Africa.  He hands it to me, “My bible.”  I know January loves birds; when we’re together, even the birds that seem small or dull to me are a total distraction to him, they command his utter interest.  When we're hanging out, his eyes follow any movement in the sky or in the bushes: zoning in, analyzing, naming.  Afterwards, he tries quickly to reengage in the conversation, but it’s like talking to someone who has just had a dream or seen a spirit, someone touched by a divinity you didn’t see yourself.

I flipped through the bird-book – more than 400 pages, 4 to 5 birds to a page – and January was looking over my shoulder, mouthing things to himself as I turned pages.  It slowly dawned on me, with every worn-out page, that he had memorized every single species in the book – their colors, wing shapes, names, migration patterns.