April Fool’s Day gone wrong — because in The Zaire nobody gets pranked
It was the eve of April 1st, just a year after Mobutu had been ousted from office, and The Zaire was brimming high with tensions.
NingoTech was the first commercially successful retailer for bathtub rubber ducklings, and their market share had spread as far as Malaysia. Despite their astounding success The Zaire market had remained virtually impregnable, and that frustrated then CEO Steve.
Kanulita was brought in, through the Eastern Media Alliance, to perform the opener for the Zaire’s Annual Unity Concert, and I was to host him in my 700 storey treehouse!
He arrived alone carrying only what appeared to be a funnel -I would later learn that he occasionally had to pee from his armpit with it! He had the rare Armpitojinsor mutation…
His first words to me after our first night were… “butulazy nyansakrobor?” … Which in local Zairian means, “Do you care to rock tonight like we have done for so long in the Americas?”
It was also at this time that Kanulita would meet Babality.
Babality was also known as Baracudras; had just transferred from NingoTech Mesoptania to NingoTech Zaire and was looking to make some money before the long winter came in with the undead.
He was in charge of feeding the rubber ducklings on the production line with mushrooms, till they became glowing pink, ready for shipping.
The two hit off an unlikely friendship, and would occasionally be found sipping flamingo intestines on the factory rooftops. This practice was against then Zairian law, but they did it anyhow.
Babality served three months with NingoTech before transferring back to the Mesopotamia. It wasn’t long before he would be bitten by the ‘applezinia’ worm, that inflicted him with the unquenchable desire to make video games.
Despite the peculiar behavior patterns, Kanulita was exceptional during his entire stay with me, and would after each night’s show return to re-enact the entire show’s events to me, as I dozed off.
A truly mellow fellow.
The afternoon he was to leave he transferred parenthood of his youngest son Kaniaboni, to me.
But Kanulita would never make it out of The Zaire.
While processing his luggage at the airport, a spy of Mobutu would erroneously ID him as an accomplice of the revolution, and have his waistline extended, thus rendering him incapable of entering the aircraft cabin.
Kanulita tried to reach me and the Eastern Media Alliance, but I had long been spewed out of the whale ship that my treehouse was built on.
I believe this was in 1982.
He was never heard from again.
