Cool-It-Down was larger than life in this small Ghanaian town of approximately 3,000 people. He had returned home after a six-year sojourn in the United Kingdom, bringing back with him an assortment of musical gadgets – amplifiers, giant loudspeakers, equalizers, radio-cassette players, turntables – which left this penurious community in awe. An ardent lover of music, Cool-It-Down’s favorite pop song was New Edition’s “Cool It Now,” found on the group’s eponymously named second album, New Edition. It was an amazing hit that would at once garner extensive adulation from young people and generate great reviews from music connoisseurs worldwide. But a series of unfortunate events will lead a local group in town to re-designate the song “Cool-It-Down,” in parodic honor of the protagonist in this story.

Long before Tiger Woods would take America by storm and leave its citizens befuddled by his irrepressible and gargantuan sexual appetite, Cool-It-Down had existed as a one-man predatory specimen of the scandalous kind! With a captivating smile, made more radiant by a perfect set of teeth and an aesthetic diastematic punctuation between his upper central incisors; broad shoulders; a washboard belly; and a swagger suffused with the confidence of a “conqueror,” Cool-It-Down was a veritable threat to civil society.

Even as the average family in town toiled to put food on the table every day, Cool-It-Down had plenty to spare, which in itself would become bait for attractive, yet poor, damsels in the community. Suddenly, young men blessed with pretty wives or girlfriends became fearful about the stability of their own relationships, as Cool-It-Down’s legend as Poacher Numero Uno percolated into the entire community!

Like an aged lion after defenseless gazelles, Cool-It-Down’s modus operandi was always a series of free concerts in town, each event a major attraction for the young – and sometimes the very young! As one song after another reverberated in the concert hall each night, and even as the crowds roared in excitement, Cool-It-Down made a mental note of his future victims. In fact, a more sinister reason for the free concerts was to get as many damsels as possible, who had hitherto been hidden in rafters in their own homes for fear of being “poached,” to come out into the open for “evaluation.”

Each concert would start with various genres of music, but the last song to be played was always New Edition’s “Cool It Now.” For some reason, this song tended to elicit animated sways, vivacious histrionics and indecorous derriere-shakes from the many adolescent girls and young women on the dance floor, just the perfect scenarios for Cool-It-Down to decide who needed to be “conquered” that same night – or at a later time. Even as the crowd and dancers became afflicted with paroxysms of ecstasy, Cool-It-Down went for the kill: He became transfixed by the lethal, pointy, testosterone-agitating twins in a damsel’s front – or by their more voluminous cousins in the rear: those bulbous, adipose-enhanced “rotundas” that had slain kings, princes, politicians and every other man born of a woman. In fact, the greater the sways of the “rotundas,” the more captivated Cool-It-Down became, until his victims-to-be were indelibly marked for further action.

As soon as the night’s show came to a close – usually around 10:30 p.m. – Cool-It-Down inundated his would-be victim with irresistible, albeit surreptitious, affection and attention. She was then usually invited over for some drinks – indeed a moment of great merriment for one of the town’s poor – and soon after, Cool-It-Down set in motion Part Deux of his Plan of Conquest. At first too exhilarated to understand what was happening to her, Lady Victim was quickly overcome by the stealthy, skilful, manipulative Cool-It-Down. And preferring to not raise an alarm, a not-so-willing Lady Victim succumbed to Cool-It-Down, and the two floated on petals of adulterated passion, above the ceiling and into the dark clouds outside, above the hills and over the valleys of their small town, only to return to Earth about an hour later. And there was resentment soon after!

Cool-It-Down “conquered” many damsels in this furtive manner, until he met an astringent, cantankerous, hard-nosed termagant named Akodua Banzema, a fellow sojourner who was deported from the United States of America for visa fraud. Hoping to finally nab her own man, Banzema, a woman clad in the linens of grumpiness and termagancy, would play a taciturn victim for months, only to realize that Cool-It-Down was born without any gyri of monogamy in his cerebrum. Now angry and frustrated, Banzema would galvanize some of the town’s already-angry male denizens to both punish the protagonist and cool down his throttle: Cool-It-Down’s house was incinerated one quiet night, after Banzema and her accomplices had found out that the former had traveled out of town. Somehow, the male culprits, perhaps victims themselves of Cool-It-Down’s wife- and girlfriend-poaching, had become such a strong band of irascible characters, none in the group ever divulged any names to the authorities.

Perhaps, Cool-It-Down’s loss was just recompense for reaping where he did not sow, taking what belonged to others, and breaking down membranes that should have been reserved for nobler men. Even as the billowy smoke from the burning edifice sought refuge in the desolate skies over the town, some suggested that the inferno was an overdue restitutory occurrence. Perhaps, penance for a multitude of transgressions. Perhaps, the hammer of fate and recompense smashing to smithereens the soul of a man who continually broke the sacrosanct laws of civil society.

The writer, Daniel K. Pryce, holds a master’s degree in public administration from George Mason University, U.S.A. He is a member of the national honor society for public affairs and administration in the U.S.A. He can be reached at dpryce@cox.net.