“Why do I always have encounters with staggering men. I don’t belong to their league” I said to myself when he walked up to me and started joking.
I didn’t know him from anywhere so I found his jokes offensive.
I frowned at his jokes because a drunk man is unpredictable.
“Good morning brother” he said to me.
I turned towards him with an attitude, observing his dreadlocks which came naturally because of lack of combing not so to make it, but because he did not care about his looks so his hair turned dreadlocks and unkept.
I saw his dark-brown teeth as he smiled. Cigarette definitely did its job.
His shirt, unbuttoned and flying behind him like he had been practising to play the movie role “Super Man”.
His short, was very dirty at the buttocks as though he had been sitting on soothes.
He was wearing a pair of sandals but the straps were under his heels. All these I observed in seconds, still maintaining an attitude, and yet with an attitude, I responded “Morning” hoping that would discharge him.
I was wrong. Rather he moved closer to me as though he wanted to rest his head on my shoulder.
I frowned even more but he would not get the message.
“Why does alcohol make some gregarious and others solitary?”. I wondered.
Then he said “He was a good man: Your father. You were only a child when he died yet you have not gone passed the fact that he is dead till today.”
At that point his drunken state did not matter to me. So I turned and faced him. This time, with a brightened face. A gesture that suggested ‘Now you have my attention.’
He didn’t get my attention because I needed him to give me some sets of instructions. I was only thrilled and flabbergasted that a drunk man seemed to have the gift of clairvoyance.
“I don’t know you from anywhere but I have told you this. Yes, I am drunk. I will be drunk tomorrow too and even the day after tomorrow.
“I don’t steal money to buy drinks and get drunk. I do menial jobs to get money for drinks. I am a drunkard. You don’t have to be scared to call me that.
“In my drunken state I stopped a woman few days ago but she hesitated but when I approached her and told her something I couldn’t have known, we ended up talking for hours on the road”.
Deep down I knew i was not going to carry out whatever it was, he had to say, though honestly I wanted him to thrill me some more but not to start accusing and naming names of those who did one evil or the other to me.
Whether or not what he was going to tell me would be true, I did not want to know because regardless of the authenticity of his words would be, it was going to have effect on me. With that I shifted the conversation away from me.
“Why are you always drunk” I asked him.
He moved back and sat like a tired man that he was on a stone. I did not know which really weakened him. My question or the alcohol.
He stretched out his right leg and slid his right hand into his pocket, brought out a packet of cigarette, returned his leg to its initial bended position, took the cigarette to his mouth and held it in between his lips, and collecting the lighter he hung over his left earlobe, he lit the cigarette just with one strike.
After inhaling and puffing twice, without a word, he stretched out his hand, giving me the remaining to smoke. With both hands, I shook vigorously, a gesture which suggested ‘I am good’.
He returned his hand to himself as slowly as he stretched it towards me. This time, three times he inhaled and three times he puffed.
He then dropped on the ground what was remaining of the cigarette, crushed it with his toe to quench it.
Taking a deep breath, he narrated to me his story.
“I was living and working in Malaysia.
“I was making good and honest money and as an Igbo man that I am, I brought my friend over whom I considered family. Not many months since his arrival that this guy started causing me problems. It got so bad that I had to live Malaysia for Nigeria”.
“I wanted to ask him if he was deported but on a second thought it didn’t matter. The point is he left Malaysia not because he wanted to.
“I was a good person” he said. “I used to go to church and serve God.
“I was in Malaysia just to get enough to come back and start my own business in Nigeria. So because of that I was focused. I didn’t do women nor alcohol.
“I was sending money home, giving my brother specific instructions on what to do with it. Though I was not sending monthly but I made sure I gathered enough to send chunks of it. So sometimes I sent once a year or twice.
“So even when my stay in Malaysia was cut short, painful that may have been, I found solace that I was coming back to my duplex, my cars and money.
“I reached home only to discover that the only roof I could have over my head was my father’s out-of-fashion house.
“My brother squandered all I had been sending.
“What baffled me was that the man, my brother, didn’t have a house to his name.
“I wanted to kill him. I literally wanted to kill him. Well I didn’t kill him, but that I didn’t die of frustration is still a mystery to me. I am supposed to have died long time ago.
“I did the maths and I realised that the number of times I sent money to him equaled the number of children he had with different women.
“So while I while kept my penis to myself in a self-imposed celibacy just to have money to start up life in Nigeria, my own brother gave his out, along side my hard-earned money to some women who could only be with him as long as he kept spending on them.
“During my stay in my father’s house, anytime I saw one of his children, I saw my money in them and I realised if I didn’t leave, it was only going to be a matter of time before I tore my money out of those innocent kids. They, calling me uncle destabilised my brain and to think that their mothers left them without looking back hurt even more.
“I moved to this place hoping I would die soon but I realise death has become stingy.
I don’t have the propensity to steal otherwise I would have engaged in it.
“Look at me, I, millionaire, doing every menial job to survive and those who ordinarily cannot look at me in the eye, think they are boss of me in all ramifications and they are right”.
When he finished narrating, I became very weak that I had to move back and brace my body on the wall beside him.
I had many questions to ask him. Like ‘where is your friend now? Your brother, your parents?’ but to what end would my questions be?’ I thought.
I didn’t know how to help him as it was not the right time to talk to him about the faithfulness of God so I was quiet.
He staggered up from where he was sitting and told me he was going to get drunk and I said “but you are drunk already”, “obviously not drunk enough” he replied.
As he staggered away, the only thing that was on my mind as I was looking at him was, “this man is supposed to be a millionaire. Now who could ever know that, other than an unkept drunk?”.
My heart was heavy. It bled.
The whole of that day I forgot I had my own problems.
I carried a bleeding heart for long because his story reminded me of the encounter I had with another man a week earlier whose story was not different from his.
Indeed tomorrow is a mystery.
I learnt that people must stop acting as though they hold tomorrow in their hands. You can be humbled at anytime.
I still see him around sometimes and he never disappoints. Always high like a kite.
