The icky finger

I went to the strip of bars in my village. Groups of stumbling men lighting the filtered ends of cigarettes hooped and hollered outside. The brick shops have rickety shelves on which stand the grocer’s wares. Beer and soap. Cheap cane liquor and soap. Cheaper cane liquor and soap. I bought beers for my teacher friends. We sat outside on a wooden bench with a precarious ability to rock back and forth as we shifted our weight. Speakers played a song about Jesus. A tiny man danced inside a large plastic bag.

A fifty-something man called me over. His face commanded respect, had some sort of earnest solemnity that reflected a penetrating skepticism about the world. I approached him and, as men affectionately do in Malawi, held his hand. He asked about his child, and I happily launched into an assessment of the student when I felt him give me the icky finger.

I don’t know specifically what it means, the icky finger. This handshake with a maverick scratching the recipient’s palm. Do people bed down in the corn? At a house? Is there handiwork involved? Lubricant? I remember walking into a grassy thicket near the shops once. There was a circle of matted and broken grass about the size of a double bed. It could have been the amorous fruit of the icky finger.

The finger’s a proposition, a coded and confidential way to signal openness toward illicit desires. The Malawian penal code lists homosexuality as an offense worthy of fourteen years hard labor. That doesn’t stop anyone. This older fellow was icky finger number four. I’ve gotten a number of other questionably friendly invites and seen pairs of drinking buddies curiously stagger off together. A teacher explained to me that the finger is an invitation to “help your friend. It gives the wife a break.” It’s not being gay, bi, or anything else apart from being a good friend and husband.

I don’t understand either.

Anyway, there by the dancing plastic bag, I pulled my hand away, suddenly aware of the gray hairs coming out my prospective hook up’s nose. There must be proper protocol, a way toward a polite but sympathetic denial, in this situation. You could scratch forward twice and back four times. You could wink funny. You could say, “No, thank you, but I’m really quite flattered.” I felt a wave a pity for him. Him, stuck in a place without the Castro, drag queens, Freddy Mercury. Then he grabbed my hand again, gave my palm the treatment, molested my delicate well-moisturized right hand.

I took my hand away, grabbed my beer, and warned the teachers that I intended to sit. Felt bad. Thought about buying another beer. Asked myself if I needed soap.