The nomadic Fulani raised me as one of their own. A Nguni-herder until the age of 189 moons, I eventually led my cattle to the river Wadi Seybouse on the Algerian coast. Fed up with my position as sex-slave to the chieftain’s daughter, I hid stowaway aboard The St. Didacus, a French cargo ship.
I lived in Perpegnan near the Spanish boarder for three years, at which time I maintained a double life as a chimney-sweep by day and graffiti poet by night. The streets were brazed blue, my color of choice, in the graffing language of the Franco-underground: English. My notoriety as an underground icon rose with my criminal infamy. Pressure from the police pushed me across the Atlantic.
In D.C., I started over. I sold my only possession, an original Gauguin that I had acquired in an ultimate fighting stint the year before, and made a bet with the senator of Massachusetts. Sadly, though, I lost the thumb-wrestling match and agreed to leave the Capitol to travel across the United States. Two months of hitchhiking led me to San Francisco, where my shepherding staff skills earned me a job as a fireknife dancer.
A year in the cirque and a fireknife fan club later, a recruiter approached me from the prestigious Old Lahaina Lu`au. I enjoyed a year as the premier attraction at the show until my spotlight was stolen by a tattooed Samoan coconut-juggler. Out of work and morale, I gathered the little money that I hadn’t spent on antidepressants and bought a ticket to Honolulu and a semester’s tuition at the University of Hawai`i where my poetic instinct led me to the editorial office of Ka Lamakua.
