MAN ABOUT TOWN
TEXT
JACKSON BIKO
ART
MOVIN WERE
MALT
MAN
Jackson Biko, is a lover of whisky and
people watching. He likes to walk the
shadows of the city at dusk, picking
conversations of a people spurred by the
night and by their drink.
I
prefer beer commercials to
actually drinking beers. I have
never finished a bottle of beer
in my life. In fact, the last three
years I have sipped beer once. I
will never repeat this before anyone,
but beer tastes bitter (I sound sissy,
right?). I don’t want to cringe when
I eat or sip something, especially if
it’s a weekend. God knows I cringe
enough during the week, what with
all the emails and deadlines, to
cringe again on the weekend.
Friends always tell me that the
taste of beer is an acquired one.
I’ve never known what that means:
is it that if I drunk it for a year it
would soon start tasting like juice?
Acquired? Is there a window for this
acquisition? It’s like telling a guy,
“Tony, I know this chick isn’t your
type but if you take her for 300
dates, you might just like her!” I have
never taken to beer.
Still, I admire chaps who drink
beer. There is something about a
man and his beer that says male.
Men were built to drink beer. Men
were meant to take a swig from a
bottle and wipe their mouths with
the back of their hands. There is
a lot to be said for closing a hard
day pushing paper at the office, by
climbing onto a barstool, a barman
opening a bottle of cold beer and
coasting it your way as you loosen
your tie. Beer says I’m male. Beer
says I’m proud to be a man. In fact,
you can be beardless but if you
have a beer before you, you will be
forgiven.
Being a whisky drinker, there are
many incidences where whisky
just doesn’t cut it. Picture a ragged
terrain, you have been driving
through the unending plains of
Laikipia and suddenly, as the sun
dips behind a hill, you screech your
Land Rover to the edge of a cliff,
open the cooler and retrieve your
cold sweaty Tusker Malt proceeding
to sip it thoughtfully, as the huge
orange ball of flames disappears
over the horizon. Or a hot afternoon:
you have had a meal and are
readying yourself to go back to work
and tackle the moody boss; you pour
a bubbly froth of cold beer into a
tall glass and sip it in silence, the
calm before the storm of madness
that will envelope the second half of
your corporate work day. Or you at a
party, a group of chaps are standing
around a braai, or grill, their ladies
are giggling at the end of the garden,
looking resplendent in sundresses.
One chap, always the bearded guy,
is cracking open long green necks
of cold Tusker Malts (because cool
chaps drink malts) and passing it to
the circle of boys in shorts and ashen
knees. Someone cracks a dirty joke,
laughter rips through the circle. Men.
That is how God intended it to
be. Whisky guys like me might walk
around thinking that we are the uber
males, sipping the hard stuff in a
short glass, and that is male all right.
But sometimes we look across the
yard at the chaps holding the Tusker
Malts and for a moment a flash of
intrigue cannot but get the best
of us. One kind of malt man to the
other.
49.