The Turkish word, muganda, is the name for the man-child. He is in his thirties or forties and still nestled in some musty room in the back of his parents’ home. It is clear that he has reached a point where he will never grow up, hold a full-time job or have a steady girlfriend. He hangs out with like-minded male friends. They dress similarly. A favorite outfit is Adidas workout sweats with the top’s zipper lowered to the navel to reveal an unsightly thicket of chest and stomach hair. There is the obligatory gold chain necklace and gaudy rings.
Muganda wears hole-ridden loafers with no socks and is too lazy to insert his feet all the way inside the loafer. As a result, his heel crushes the top of the shoe and he cannot walk properly but rather must shuffle around, which causes an annoying, distinctive noise that, as a small consolation, at least warns people of his approach.
As to be expected, Muganda has a shaggy-haired, stale-breath, just-woke-up-out-of-bed aspect about him. He and his buddies hang out in bars and restaurants where they ogle at the young ladies. With bulging eyes and wagging tongues, they gesture obscenely as attractive women pass them by and they go through life having never figured out that their rude antics make them repellent.
Muganda also likes to play sports but not with people his own age who might present a formidable challenge. Instead, he will stumble upon a group of nine-year-old boys playing soccer or basketball and he’ll impose himself into the game, cheating, using his bigger size as an unfair advantage, and enjoying the thrill of triumphing over small children whose game has been ruined by this narcissistic bully.
Of course, America boasts its own version of Muganda. In our country, he is more likely to be called a SLAM, the acronym for still lives at mom’s. You’ll see this forty-something specimen, stringy-haired and somewhat burly from a steady diet of turkey pot pies and Pop Tarts, riding an old bike late at night. Usually, he’s running an errand for his mother, going to the liquor store to buy her gin and tonic. There are variations of the Muganda or SLAM, depending on what part of the country he resides.
For example, in huge swaths of America, there is the Muganda who has a particular fondness for large trucks. These are forty-thousand-dollar raised four-by-fours with tractor wheels and flags and poles dangling so high above them that they scrape the telephone wires. To afford the payments on these bellicose monster trucks, these Mugandas must still live with their parents.
I saw one such Muganda one afternoon while pumping up for gas at an AM/PM in Bakersfield. A nearby truck was especially obnoxious because it was equipped with a novelty horn, the kind that makes dozens of farm animal calls—cows, roosters, pigs, goats. The truck's owner, a sure Muganda, was standing next to me while pumping fuel into his truck and flirting with a pair of girls whom he saw inside the mart as they swirled chocolate fudge sauce on their frozen yogurt.
This Muganda tried to make eye contact with the girls and tooted his rooster horn. When they didn’t look up, he switched to a pig, then a howling wolf. He went through the entire gamut, playing every farm animal he had, but without winning the favor of the two young women. Frustrated, he drove off, his truck making a belligerent growl, the rage of a man imprisoned by his emotional retardation.
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