Chapter 36: Chapter 36
CHAPTER 31
At this point in Teju's life, 'married' had ceased to be the prefix of 'man' in speaking of one. Tiwa had unleashed the last and the ultimate blow on him. He had no other alternative than to throw his hands in the air or wave a white piece of cloth to corroborate his surrender. The war was over. The battle had been lost. He had to concede to the reality that it was about time his life took the negative bend down the slope.
After stalking his pre-considered ex-wife, it had led to the squalid pre-revelation of his marital termination. He considered it needless to hasten home to sign a paper which spelt out his doom in block letters. Sam was in utmost jeopardy too, but he might not give a damn. He could be the most cold-blooded creature on earth when it comes to marriage and its sense of faithfulness. Sam equally had done enough damage to his life to an end. Though he did not feel any form of resentment towards him, he highly abhorred his company. Sam was the last person he wanted to meet even though it had been a while they have kept the old ways.
The best place he felt he could go to, at the apex of being in the doldrums, was the bar. His problems had a high hold on him, and the best way he would want to keep himself sane was to drink to stupor. He would have to drink until when reality becomes an optical illusion. Until his problems become sediments while he floats in the air as a presupposed problem-free man.
There was no use of going to church again. He had cracked the codes. He could not bear the heavy lashes of the decrypted codes. Now, he had to flee to the bar so that he would make sure he soaked himself with alcohol until being a drunk was more real than being a pending divorcee. When he got to the bar, it was almost empty. The day was still very young and no reasonable and responsible person would sit in the bar, drinking alone at that time of the day.
He had never come to drink himself out this early. But since things which had never befallen him were befalling him at the moment, he had to change the cards and do things he had never done, even if they were wild. He sat down at a table and demanded bottles of liquor to wash off the problems which were raising an insurrection in his head. As he poured each shot of liquor into his 'drinkinglobes', he wondered how many times he had to get drunk and sober before twilight came around. He wondered if he would have the boldness to sign the papers of divorce when he gets home heavily inebriated that night.
It was quite indisputable that the end game of being wantonly inebriated as a 'married man' was sub-divided into an either two and that was violence or adultery. With the close of the day, the bar gradually turned into a nightclub. It was marked by the materialisation of a mishmash of red and blue lights bouncing in all directions, casting their condescending glow on everything that crosses their paths. It took Tejusometime to get used to the lights and their frustrating movements.
The DJ marshalled in the night with Nigerian party songs. Mixed songs of artists who were generally considered Masters and Mistresses of African party music flowed into each like rivers, creating strong tides of dancing appetite. Teju could recognise the voice from the speakers, it was Small Doctor.
African music, especially African beats have a paranormal way of sneaking on people. It makes them do what they never had intentions of doing, and like alcohol, it makes them forget all their problems for a moment. Even Teju, as sorrow-stricken, as he was, he stamped his left foot metrically to the beat. He could see a group of young men in print t-shirts and black pencilled crazy jeans trousers dancing shakiti bobo as if an angel had just told them that their problems were all gone, and they were never coming back.
As the songs pulsated from the outsized and circumspectly positioned speakers, ladies who could pass for sex traders or workers, or in fact sex apostles started rushing in at the early hours of the evening. They arrived in twos and threes with their self-indulging and adverting make-ups. Their seductive and temptation-based approach of dressing was outstanding. Their inviting and technical moves for sexually stimulating untamed men were razor-sharp. Their mouths were noisy. They chewed and blew gums. They inflated the gums like balloons before blowing them off. This ritual made their mouths sound like pinwheels.
Punctuated by the DJ’s signature –D-J Ga-ga– the voice from the speakers has transited from Olamide to Yemi Alade.Three ladies gathered around him. He had seen them a couple of minutes ago at a table with three men. They sat on each of the men’s laps, with their hands thrown around their shoulders. But they had left sooner. The men were rude. One man slapped one of the ladies’ buttocks in a sexual way, and another buried his face in another’s cleavage. On top of that, they were almost broke.
The first lady was in a black net dress, exposing her body, save her breasts and genitals. The second was rather in a blue mini-skirt and a strapless top that looked like a brassiere. And the third was in a yellow tight gown that got to her buttocks and stopped. She pulled at the gown several times as she walked like a peacock in her high-heels. They all looked skinny, like smoked sardines. One of the ladies had a bleached skin. She had bleached and the sun had burnt her skin. She had bleached again and again, and the sun had burnt her again and again. She was now like an overused two-coloured flag.
The three sex musketeers swarmed around him before he had the chance to warn them off. He would have told them he had no money to spare on their behalf. They seemed to be out of luck since he was the second broke person they would approach consecutively that night. One of them fondled his chest. Her cold hand beat into his hot torso. It was like drinking a bottle of cold beer after a hot trek. He wanted more. The second lady planted kisses on his cheeks and combed his hair with her hands. If she wanted to bewitch him, he would not have resisted. The third lady stared seductively at him before sitting on his crotch. She wanted to give him rounds of a lap dance, she said. The fleeciness of her small-sized buttocks almost made him cum in his pants.
Perhaps, Teju responded positively to them because he was soused. He was not sure of the reason why the ladies had approached him with their products, but that was not the time to ask stupid questions. It was the time to relish the little pleasure that had come his way. Probably, they had seen that he was a man drowning in his misery. Or probably, they were trained to detect victims of sexual starvation. The fact that he had zilch in his wallet aggravated him. He had spent his wallet on liquor.
He reciprocated the kisses of his kisser. His face was daubed with red lips paint. He fondled the breasts of his fondler. Sadly, her breasts had slackened due to perpetual fondling and maybe too much of adult sucking. He pulled at the buttocks that rode his crotch to the wilderness of lust. He could have reached for her vagina and drive his first and middle finger into her hole. His crotch budged violently against his trousers, like a bush rat trapped in a barred enclosure. The ladies moaned to his erotic moves. He let the rhythm of their moaning accompany the sensation he enjoyed.
The ladies would have given him mind-blowing intercourse, oral, anal and vaginal. But they had discovered he was yet another penniless drunkard. They hissed at him and vanished. One of the ladies even had the effrontery to call him asewo. Sex for a man is sweetest when he is drunk, Sam had always told him. Probably if he had had a handsome sum of money on him, he would have found out how true it was. He would have justified his unjustified crime against Simi. Without remorse, he would have had a beautiful foursome for the first, and probably the last time in his life. And he would have gone home contented with his fate of divorce.