Comedy and Incredulity at The Black Mamba Corner

This blog was written 01/06/08

As you all know, I recently took my first Xmas break as a teacher in the Peace Corps Burkina Faso. I wanted to trip to Morocco to see my sister who is teaching English in Andalucia, Southern Spain for those of you who don't have your degrees in geography. Due to monetary shortfalls, I tripped to Ghana with friends Becca, Clay, and Adlai while my sister ended up in Amsterdam for New Years. The details of my sister's trip not yet heard, here is a story of a crazy German woman who lives close to Busua Beach. She is married to a looped-out Rasta named Alex and owns The Black Mamba Corner, a picturesque guest house and home that sits on the rock outcropping that marks the west edge of Busua Beach. What follows is a tragicomedy, maybe even a travesty. You have to decide.

Becca, Clay, Adlai, and I went to this place and placed our order for dinner. Gabriella certainly showed us hints of here sociopathic side right there. She dominated the conversation, talking about everything from movies, Ghana, and the guest albums, where patrons leave their indelible marks for this woman who, frankly, I believe, brings disgrace to the gender! We left after making our dinner order to go have some Castle Milk Stouts at the Orkowye Tree Restaurant on the beach, which sits next to the Black Star Surf Shop:

We returned at 7, the time at which we requested our pizzas to be done. She was chatting up a nice Austrian couple in German. And there was a Rasta, at first unseen on the periphery, choppin' something. Chop is to eat in Ghana. We sat down, and this Rasta starts hollering, "Go and call the police. She will poison you!" Turns out this Rasta is Alex, her husband. Gabriella told us about this Alex's inability with automobiles. Well, apparently this Alex also has a good rapport with marijuana, booze, and whatever other kinds of mind-benders he partakes in.

So, we all get up to saluer this guy. He gets up, we shake his wrist and he says, “I’m eating here.” Then, Gabriella comes and sits with us, a look of morbid dread on her face. She says, “Please, help me. Just ignore him.” Then, Alex starts telling us to call the police. “Yes, they will come here to get you.” Gabriella then tells us never to marry a Rasta! I was incredulous! This is your husband?! Why do you put up with this?! He’s obviously high as a kite AND probably drunk! Why?! Of course, all these things are swirling around in my head.

So, we start exchanging pleasantries while Alex continues to eavesdrop and then drop seemingly incongruous retorts.

“Yes, call the police.”

“You are not safe here!, she will poison you!”

The whole time this is going on, I am thinking, “C’est une grande plaisanterie!” She gets up to get us our food. I felt a surge of relief in me, thinking there’s no way this woman will just sit here and talk to us while we eat. Well, I was wrong. BIG TIME! And the conversation seemed to digress. She would make aversions, Alex still chopping away at the other table, still throwing insidious remarks our way. The typical broken dialogue was of Gabriella’s nonsensical bullshit, the quartet’s furtive glances and looks at one another of WTF? and then Alex, in all his great ignominy, kept the tragicomedy/farce going like this:

“I tell you never mary a Rasta. Please, just ignore him. They have these magic mushrooms here. It is so difficult.”

“Call the police! You are all foreigners here!”

“Yes, we are all foreigners. Look at him, he needs a father… These people don’t know how to read and write (where’d that come from?!)… They are sitting on gold and diamonds, it is so beautiful here. (?!)

Further degeneration of the conversation. I wish I could’ve captured the looks on Clay,
Becca, and Adlai’s faces:

“Yes, I used to have 14 dogs… and 70 pigs.” She shifts in her seat, adjusts her crappy looking moo-moo, fidgets with the now broken glasses that abut a bizarre vertical 5-inch cylindrical bun that springs from the crown of here defunct, crazy head. “Now, grain is so expensive, I am getting rid of the pigs. I have 4 dogs now, and they eat a lot of pork.”

Then, Alex spouts gold: “And look at me while I sit here and eat this slop! I’m a human being, not an animal!” I almost lose it. I can barely contain myself.

“Please, oh, this is so difficult. Please, help me, just ignore him.” She then keeps weaving a beautiful loom of discursive, utterly ridiculous statements. Alex gets up, walks by us We are all incredulous listening in awe to this long gone European specimen. Alex, who put on a bou-bou, walks by, and says it:

“You and your fuck money.”

I notice Becca blink and hold, bite her lipe to stifle the internal laughter, wrinkles and creases furrowing her brow. “You foreigners.”

Gabriella, once again distraught, asks for our patience. She then continues with her craziness.

“So, I am in Mexico for two years and I never have one of these tacos! (WTF?!) Are they like pancakes?” (Are you delirious woman?!)

“And so, why do men have breast nipple? (?!) It is because woman came first. (?!?)

My patience was gone. The humor was no longer with us, the disgusting comedy in the form of Alex was passed out somewhere in a chair, a bong precariously jutting from in-between his scrawny legs.

Then, the crazy one became the crazy cashier/accountant. “Please, please help me, this is so difficult.” The same old bullshit, melodramatic to its very core. She told us of a 15% tax we had to pay (?!), did the math that looked correct, passed the calculator to Adlai(?), and he did the calculation. His was close but didn’t match hers. She snatched the calculator from him and sets it in front of me. Well, I messed up bad somewhere. She gets an air of angriness and snatches the calculator from me. Adlai calls me out. At this point, I was infuriated, so I tried to come back at Adlai nicely. We owed about 58 Cedi, Ghanaian currency, nearly $1=1 Cedi. $58 for this crap? She used imitation cheese that came in triangles, so she couldn’t even cover 50% of the pizza surface. Plus, the tomato sauce wsa too sweet. And, Alex’s words rang out with prescience: “She will poison you!”

Later that night, Becca puked and Clay got la diahrrea! We each dropped about 16 Cedi, gave her a little extra so we could shut her up real quick and bailed. Turned out we were stuck in that time warp for nearly 3 hours! We could’ve been eating fresh lobster, had 3 Castle’s, and been flirting with the Charlotte, the cute Ghanaian chica who worked at Orkowye Tree Restaurant for under what we spent a la Madame Folle’s!

What an experience. She was so quotable. However, I never wish that on anyone else. Another Burkina PCV, my buddy David (with Jenny, PCV stationed in Gorgadji and his buddy Jonathon) had a funny experience with her as well. She spoke about a trip to the health inspectors’ office for a test to get a license to do business in Ghana. She told them she had eaten something funny, probably going off for 10 minutes on the topic. She described her leftovers as her toilet. “You should have seen my toilet, it was terrible! Alex asked me, ‘What have you been eating woman?’”

PLEASE, NOT WHILE WE’RE EATING, YOU CRAZY BITCH!

Because she was so quotable, Becca and Clay would bust out at random times with her or Alex’s maniacal quotes on the latter part of our adventure. Best sixteen bucks I ever spent to get a wonderful view… of crazy.

Just don’t go to The Black Mamba Corner when you go to Busua. Get a board at Black Star or a sea kayak at the hotel, or plant your ass in a chair in the shade of the Orkowye tree and have a Castle. Don’t try and sell crazy here, we’re all filled up.