I’ve never been to Eden, any kind of eden. But I’ve certainly crossed paths with plenty of serpents and not a few Adams. Tempters all, they have kick started my demise from wuthering heights. You yearn, you burn. Hence, I believe in the fruit of the poisonous tree. Most of all, I believe that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. So why would a man? I pick the fruit, twirling it in my hand, tasting it with relish and rebellion, paying homage to my favorite apple of all—Adam’s—and the falling from grace that that implies. Ah, the serpent’s kiss. And that very first bite of life. ***** My mother always said, “Earlobes can tell you everything you need to know about a man.” The larger, the more elephantine, the more giving he will be.

They speak to his spirit of generosity, his exuberance for life, his lovingness. When my parents met for the first time in Nairobi—a set up by my paternal Asian grandmother, Anita—my mother confessed: “What attracted me to your father most were his aloneness and his ears.” With lobes, I might add, as dangling as participles. They have been married for 35 years this December. But in my experience of Jesse and Salim and Frank and Liru, the Adam’s apple captures my fancy full throttle, often conveying a greater definition of maleness than does any other feature. Consider the dead giveaway of an Adam’s apple for those—transsexual, transgendered, transvestite—who would transform themselves into someone more ladylike. But there it is, bobbing away. That Adam’s apple speaks to me as loudly as any announcement.

Telling me, by swallow or gulp or flutter, that he is nervous, he is ready, he is mine. I am talking about vital points of entry. And, in my day, even a heyday of sorts, I have worshipped at the neck, that supple conduit between heart and mind, love and loin. The fat and happy, beautiful and hungry, lame and limber—they kiss and nuzzle and lick. The pulse fastens, the throat leaps with each and every caress. Once parked in a car in Westlands near Sankara Hotel, a sweet, chubby, hairless troll of a Luhya named Laurence put his lips just beneath my jaw, under my ear, on my neck, and I thought I would come undone. The sheer upsweep of necking. Ah, but the Adam’s apple, there’s the rub.

Jutting and smooth, like the sweet, perfect pit of a nectarine, suspended for eternity in his selfish throat. I move slowly down the jut of his jaw, along the slick clavicle of candy cane, the honey dip just east-west of it. Roughneck, his whiskers sear my cheek, my chin. An then, the final prize. The peak, the bobsled, the Adam’s apple. The throb and knob of it, the ever-succulent knuckle of the throat, like the Pope’s nose of a roasted chicken. Tasty. Tasting of cinnamon and chocolate and baked apple, it is, for me, the defining point of masculinity—victorious, vital, vulnerable. Yes, that’s it. The perfect speed bump along the neck’s own superhighway of modern romance, my Adam’s apple.