Thirteen times of nothing
In life the undeniably true can still be hanged like a dog. It is not that difficult to land a dispatching axe on a truth that would fail as a relieving balm: I mean boldly claim that such a truth is a hogwash. Of course, the burdens we support on our lenient shoulders the next man sees without so much as glancing at us or at our shadows. Then, we should be helpless with a silly denial of their presence with us and be honest enough to not make them a falsity. But what of the burdens that occupy the heart chambers, sometimes really much heavier than the ones we support on clavicles? For all their heaviness we find the cheekiness to openly disacknowledge their very existence, mostly with phony smiles and pre-planned laughter. I had for some thirteen years been flashing the said smiles for their deceiving services and screening of depression. To the persisting man or woman with a searching eye and lips that could brave a concerned friend’s question “You know that I should believe that problems exist which, now and again, try to sneak into our lives for ruinous company. But-see-I’ve luckily not met them all my lucky life… That’s just the lucky point I should like you to grab and keep!”
For the thirteenth embarrassing time I had limply failed the New Year Resolution we fervently hope we shall keep come rain, come sunshine, the time I made the last one the final drifting five minutes of 2019. It shall no more be my portion a weekly finishing of nearly two cartons of Stallion stout beer. Without fail, I’m slashing the number of my intimate female friends from an irresponsible half dozen to just one and – very vital, now – bidding an unconditional farewell to my habitual sticking of a stick of Choice Cigarette between my lips for vain drags. Neatly, I could see that I was heading for the quickest lowering down a split-open portion of Mother Earth by refusing to surrender a craze for exhaled smoke. Not infrequently, I had had to submit to the killing breathlessness of one who has not got superb lungs but loafs around with lit cigarette. As painful, the close to two full cartons of Stallion Stout I was emptying their contents every week had begun to prove themselves the abominable causes of the special headaches I sometimes suffered days on end while the six woman I was keeping were to blame for my enduring financial crises.
Shall I ever forget it? The last vanishing minutes of 2019 saw me summon the solemn face for making a rescuing New Year Resolution and pursuing the cleaner life! Gravely, I muttered but successfully uttered the words that should steer me clear of booze, tobacco and a sexual relationship with more than a woman. Now, I shall be singularly sticking to a Stella neighbor living in the next street but liable to be spotted at a beauty shop three blocks away from our building.
Something I am sure my readers would not argue: A handsome number of my close friends, who got wind of this giant leap hastened to salute my courage. All of them without exception released me Congrats! almost all of them drunk with the excitement they could distil from the worthwhile news. They had seen in my move a positive turn-around of things in my unenviable life. The two or three men and woman who preferred to wear like a cap their rigid doubts about my remaining. steadfast on the taken-up challenge I did not try to dislike for their misgivings. Rather, I felt comfortable assuming that they were actually waiting for me to bribe them into taking me seriously on the matter while I was not ready to oblige any one of them a half penny. The eldest of them, who had the smell of a Christian father, later said to interview me on the rare steps I had taken to seek the Divine face and Grace of God on the prospect. Having not given the idea even a fleeting thought I could not answer him in the affirmative, wherefore, with a disappointed look, he stressed its necessity, voluntarily offering to pray with me over it, as soon as I was ready.
“Funny Christian father,” I mused. “He knows that what he’s asked of me I can easily do; thanks, I’m neither at loggerheads with God nor with his son!”
As you must have guessed, I never did get ready for the man’s volunteered helping prayer, let alone look twice at the notepad where I had penned down his phone number. After another elapsed one week, one full month got rounded off in which I was able to keep a distance from hard-to-turn-down Choice Cigarette and harder-to-turn-down Stallion Stout.
To me, this was Absolute Magic! Unforgettable Magic! I had not stopped swimming the rivers from which I had contracted my smoking and drinking infections. My front door I have yet to start slamming against my friends doubling as daily finishers of a full packet of their brands of cigarette nor have I yet decided to be dodging a Braimoh neighbor alcoholic who did not seem one who would soon stop drinking like a fish.
Really, I knew the Christian father’s undisguised fears, it is quite possible for an overpowering incident I had not its shock absorber to rear up its ugly head and shred like a waste paper the entire noble initiative and I will have resignedly gone back to the loathsome habits I was badly anxious to break with.
Three months into my new life of rejection of booze and tobacco I began to bask in its success, now very certain of it that the keeping of a New Year pledge is a straight business - very straight!
“No, it doesn’t require one to pull down a relationship, which one had built with either alcoholics or human chimneys and their faults are only their lifestyles…”
I had, overnight, become a consultant on the subject; a counselor sage.
“No…No… No. people don’t break their strong bonds with boisterous friends all in a bid to show that they are resolved on treading the path of commonsense.”
Eight months into 2020 with no more weakness for the acrid smell of Choice and none for the intoxicating one of Stallion, I became a merry soul and was ready to festively mark one full year of impeccable adherence to a taken decision. I just could not pretend humble unawareness of the made achievement being human and personal. Not a divine deliverance…
Stupid man! At the very last week of the last month of 2020 – do I say ‘naively’ or ‘lousily? - I bungled the whole affair, all over again backpedaling to Square One. One would be correct to sum up it was the devious sometimes conquering Power of Darkness! Not quite 6:00am of Tuesday 29th December, 2020, I opened my mahogany front door to gentle bangs on it only to meet an unsmiling face and not-to-be-challenged voice with two other unsmiling faces and not-to-be-challenged voices that would want me to accompany them back to their police station for a long or short explanation of the whereabouts of three giant KVA generators I had resold after the speedy purchase from a Titus who had just admitted that he had stolen them from an Okon dealer in the machines.
“Please, officers, double please, I’m not going to resist what you want me to do,” I heard myself assure the trio, my eyes unflinching in their stare at one of them with a packet of Choice Cigarette jutting out of his shirt’s breast pocket. The policeman whose eyes seemed to have followed mine to where they had fastened their focus, instinctively offered me a stick of it as well as promptly offered to light it for me.
“God! Isn’t this Peter while he was with Christ at the final hours?”
I was sure Satan had rushed into the policeman and almost proud of my having made a courageous discernment of the Devil’s predilection for anxious patrols around embattled men and ones soon to be handcuffed; just that I had not the important stubborn spiritual mind to hold back, under the circumstance, a welcoming right hand for the handed stick of a cigarette I had snubbed for eleven months and twenty eight days…
I must have looked beyond the immediate scene into the one on the police station, where I would soon be surfacing for harrowing interviews and a sure meeting of a face dying to see my own face and above all irreversible recovery of his still spick-and-span 2000 K V A generators…
Nigerian cops I had yet to trust their controlled use of batons and neglect of sudden delivery of blows that could permanently disfigure a face and a whole day!
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