Getting Fired, Miracles and the Case of the Invisible Tenant

Notes From Base Reality

Getting Fired, Miracles and the Case of the Invisible Tenant

By Daviey

A few weeks after firing me, my former boss called to ask for access to the work I had done so he could present it.

The work, apparently, was a great fit.

I would like that established before we proceed.

I had applied for the job once before, and someone else had got it. When the company needed to hire again, they invited me back for an interview. This time, I got the position.

So I moved from Ukambani to Kahawa Sukari. There were relocation costs, debts and the considerable emotional investment of a mother who could finally tell people her son was a graphic designer with a salary.

In one week, I produced what felt like three months of brand identity development.

Then Saturday came.

“Are you around? I’m just back from a gig. Can we meet?”

“Yes. I’m close to the office.”

At the meeting, I was invited to assess my performance.

“So, how do you think you’ve been performing?”

“Well, I’ve really gotten the hang of a fast-paced agency environment.”

“I don’t think you’re a great fit.”

“Please, no. I’ve just started. What can I do?”

“I just can’t work with you.”

I am leaving the “please, no” in.

It would be convenient to edit myself into somebody who received this news with a straight back and a memorable parting remark. But I had moved for that job. I owed money because of that job. I had begun arranging a life around the assumption that, having been hired, I would be allowed to work there.

So I pleaded.

It did not help.

There were people at that place who had known one another for years. I was arriving halfway through conversations that had started long before me. You can learn the work quickly. Learning how to belong is another department entirely, and nobody seems to issue a brief.

I cannot tell you exactly what my boss meant by “fit.” I can tell you that, weeks later, he wanted access to the work so he could present it.

That call has been useful whenever I have been tempted to remember the dismissal as evidence that I lacked the skill.

Whatever he could not work with, the work itself remained perfectly usable.

I also remember the people who fed me.

Einstein. Inno. Duncun.

I met them at a local miraa joint. Base ya jaba, as we call it.

They invited me into their homes for meals. God bless their hearts. I want their names here because kindness deserves to be remembered with the same precision as humiliation.

Duncun had an Ableton Push 2. I used to swoon over it with a longing other people reserve for land.

A man could be trying very hard to become a respectable salaried employee while his heart was making quite separate arrangements.

My mother could take pride in a graphic designer with a salary. An artist son was a more difficult proposition. Same son, same creative instincts, but the payslip made a tremendous difference to how the future looked.

I understood the attraction of a regular income. I had relocated in pursuit of one.

Now I was unemployed in the place I had borrowed money to reach.

Around this period, two men on a motorbike tried to snatch my phone. I was assaulted while some watchmen watched.

Watchmen.

I had been optimistic about the scope of the position.

Then a dog bit me.

My neighbour’s dog, to be precise. A dog I occasionally threw scraps to whenever I had food to spare. Apparently, it had decided to investigate whether the thrower tasted any better than the thrown.

To be fair, I had tried feeding a dog my vegan, gluten-free nonsense. There may have been a grievance.

I asked the owner whether the dog was vaccinated.

He said he had no dog.

This was a remarkable development. I had been bitten by a dog with an address but no recognised next of kin.

“Usiniulize mambo ya umbwa tena.”

Don’t ask me about dogs again.

That concluded the investigation.

My ankle still hurt.

The rabies shots cost me KES 10,000. I hate hospitals, which made this a particularly expensive way to spend time somewhere I did not want to be.

I had lost my job, survived an attempted phone snatching, been bitten by a dog and then been informed that the dog did not exist.

The week had range.

What followed was less eventful in ways that make a good anecdote, and much harder to live through.

For close to eight months, I survived without proper meals and did not pay rent.

I did, somehow, keep finding money for khat.

That sentence belongs here too.

I had started using it to manage my ADHD because I could not afford the medication or the consultation fees required to access it. That was how it began. By the time I am describing, I was dealing with an addiction.

I do not have an elegant explanation for being able to fund it while struggling to feed myself. I know how it looks on the page. It looked no better from inside the room.

There is language in recovery about admitting powerlessness over addiction. I have always had a fight with that word. For somebody already resisting other people’s definitions of what his life should be, being asked to declare himself powerless felt like a particularly offensive opening proposal.

My immediate response was, more or less: bullshit.

There is a longer essay in that disagreement. It will have to account for what the addiction was doing to me as well as why I objected to the language. A convincing argument is very little use if you are still hungry when you finish making it.

But here is the part I still struggle to explain.

They seemed to forget my rent.

Other houses were locked. Other tenants received notices. There was clear evidence that somebody remembered how rent collection worked.

And then there was me.

Still there.

Still owing.

Somehow overlooked.

I have no sensible explanation for how this continued for close to eight months. Perhaps it was an administrative oversight. Perhaps someone knew and quietly let me remain. If there was a person choosing mercy, I wish I knew whom to thank.

My preferred explanation is that God had acquired the memory-wiping device from Men in Black.

Someone would remember my room, reach for the rent records, and God would appear in a dark suit.

Flash.

What tenant?

What arrears?

Lovely weather we’re having.

I realise this is an unconventional theology of property management. You are welcome to yours. I am grateful for mine.

Before I left, I paid all the rent I owed.

That matters to me. I was not trying to vanish with the debt. For a time, I had simply been allowed to remain when I could not afford to.

There was more behind that closed door than unemployment.

I had survived a suicide attempt. I had also been taken into rehab without my consent by people my mother had paid to come for me. All of this had happened just before that job.

I believe she meant well. I do not hold it against her. I am still allowed to remember how it felt.

After rehab, I went to stay on her farm. It was one of the conditions of my release.

How dehumanising. Even getting out came with instructions on where I was supposed to exist.

Let me be a vagrant in peace!

I wanted to pursue my music. I was afraid that staying on the farm would mean giving up on the life I was trying to begin.

Being taken away without a say in the matter left its own damage. Understanding that somebody was trying to help has never automatically resolved what happened to me in the process.

The rehab stories need their own pages. I will get to them.

For now, I mention this because the person sitting in that room was carrying those experiences too. The job had not been my first encounter with having a future decided for me.

After all that, being left alone in a room I could not pay for was a peculiar form of relief.

I do not remember those months as a pleasant retreat. I was hungry, struggling with addiction and unsure how I was going to get through them. Calling anything about that period a miracle would have required more generosity than I could always manage at the time.

Gratitude arrived later.

It came when I could look back and see that, for reasons I still could not explain, I had kept a roof over my head. When I could remember the meals people had shared with me. When I could think about the debt as something I had eventually paid.

And there was art.

Even now, I weep when I encounter something beautiful enough. Sometimes I weep over something I have made, astonished that it has come through my own hands.

There is a kind of recognition in that feeling which I never managed to get from being called a good fit. I can be listening to music and remember, with embarrassing force, how much I want to be alive to make more of it.

That mattered in those months.

It still matters.

I would like to make the next body of work with proper meals and the rent paid. I have had enough practical experience of the alternative.

But I understand now why the desire to make music would not leave me alone, even when following it had become so difficult to explain to people I loved. It kept giving me something to look towards. A sound I had not made yet. A piece of work I wanted the chance to finish.

When I say art saved me, that is part of what I mean.

I believe God kept me here for something. I cannot give you a satisfactory account of the dog, the motorbike, the job or the rent records. I have had to live without a complete explanation.

What I have is the life that continued, and work I still want to do with it.

I keep coming back to the prayer.

Our Father, who art in heaven.

Yes, I know what “art” means in that sentence.

Allow me.

After everything, I like to hear a small instruction in it.

He can art in heaven.

I have work to do down here.

Fateci caso.