Diaspoman: When brawls were order of the day

While in a neighboring country recently, I visited a drinking hole with some of my hosts. The place was quite rowdy as patrons drank and ate in the late hours of the night. All of a sudden, we spotted two or more huge and burly men fighting in a manner to suggest that they had been trained by Jet Li himself. Apparently, they were fighting over some trivial issues that caused a misunderstanding. What I saw reminded me of my old days, way back in the mid-90s, where brawls were the order of the day. During those days, Aggrey and I used to visit busy drinking holes in and around Kigali. The bar owners knew that we were always loaded with real cash and that is why they used to mercilessly unleash their weapons of mass destruction upon us. These weapons were in form of nice looking ladies who would join us at the counter for serious guzzling. That kind of guzzling usually ended up in two kinds of bruises. The first type of injury was to our pockets. As we tanked bottle after bottle, our wallets would start to cough and cough until the whole salary was wiped out. The second type of bruising, that I am referring to, concerned our faces. You see, after downing several bottles of Amstels, Aggrey and I would stand up to challenge anybody in sight. Somehow, we would convince our drunken heads that we were Superman and Spiderman combined together. That is why we would climb on top of the counter and declare war on whoever touched our babes. Since the other patrons in the bar would also be highly intoxicated, they too would stand up to the challenge. The guys were usually bulky dudes. Our minds would however convince us that we were heavier than them. The next thing would be catastrophic for us. The heavy dudes would indeed proceed to disturb us by picking our chicks and proceed to dance with them in the most provocative Zoukish manner. This would drive us crazy. We would then release some nice looking flying kicks which would even make Jackie Chan ashamed of himself. The problem is that our kicks were always similar to kicks of a dying mosquito. So, whenever we attempted to fight off our competitors, we always ended up in real trouble. The dudes would give us some nice hot jabs that would leave us with bruises all over our face. The only advantage of such jabs is that we would sober up almost immediately. Once we were sober again, we would kneel down and beg for forgiveness. Our chicks would then laugh at us as they left with their new heroes. As for us, we just walked back home to nurse our funny looking faces. We would then turn all our frustrations on our poor houseboy for not having prepared our usual meal of rice and beans. “But boss, you have not bought any food for the last 3 weeks” Eventually the houseboy would pack up his belongings and flee our home. But somehow, we always found ourselves trekking back to the bars for more booze where we would end up in more brawls