Prince of Monkeys

by Nnamdi Ehirim

  I looked at the two new German cars, his old French car, and then at the Japanese car I had just purchased for my mother the month before, and interrupted my neighbor before he could continue.

  “Is this one of your jokes, or are you being serious?” I asked before substituting silence for ignorance, as my neighbor had done moments ago. “First, if I had any spare change, I’d rather invest in a yam-pounding machine, as you’ve always suggested, instead of suffering my mother to spend her evenings bent over pestle and mortar. Second, unlike you, all my mother owns that is of any importance to her fits perfectly into her house. And finally, if anybody was crazy enough to steal my mother’s car, I’d consider it a deed of community service, because clearly, anyone hopeless enough to overlook all your cars and steal this Japanese car needs more help than mere mortals can offer.” I walked over to my mother’s car and opened it, removed the chain with the Yemoja pendant from around my neck, and hung it from the rearview mirror. “And just in case, Yemoja right there is all the protection my car needs.”

  The neighbor moved out a few months later, and my mother said the last time she saw him, he was talking about an aptitude test he had written for a new job in a taxi. She didn’t ask too many questions.

  I turned onto the alternative road and tried to negotiate the Japanese car through the narrow lane, made even smaller by the double-parked vehicles along the entire length of the road. The digital clock on the dashboard displayed 8:50 p.m. There was no way I could make it home in time to see Effy before her nine o’clock bedtime. Knowing that my mother would not enter the kitchen to start preparing my dinner after nine, I lost every incentive to make it home that night and considered stopping off at Mama’s place, a tender euphemism for the new pub that had just opened in Omole, or maybe even the gentlemen’s cabaret, another tender euphemism, this one for a local strip club. Better the cabaret, because at least I wouldn’t have to bother about arriving home saturated in a musk of alcohol and cigarettes.

  I noticed a blockade along the narrow road and slowed down a bit. There were three uniformed men standing behind an improvised roadblock of vehicle tires, very unorthodox for both the time and the location. Two of the uniformed men approached the car, one on either side, as I slowed to a stop and wound down the window.

  “Good evening, sir,” the uniformed man by my window said a bit too calmly. “Abeg you for like comot that car and submit all your better things for here.”

  I was far more confused than my facial expressions could convey, and maybe the uniformed men mistook it for stubbornness. The policeman on the other side of the car spoke: “My colleague would not repeat himself, sir; would you please step out of your car and submit all of your valuables?”

  My first coherent thought was “Is this a robbery?” and without thinking, I uttered it.

  The uniformed man at my side pulled a gun from his back and smashed the butt into my forehead. My eyelids fluttered from the pain, which was as familiar as it was unwanted, like that glutton friend who always knocks at your door just in time for dinner. My vision blackened.

  “Pocket dey empty,” said a voice from beyond the darkness, husky and blurred. “Wallet dey empty. Make we just dump am for gutter?”

  “Money dey dashboard,” a second voice whispered with more subtlety.

  “Oya carry the leg, make I carry the hand,” a third voice joined in, softer than the previous two.

  “O boy, wait first. Make I off the guy shoe first. E go size me,” said the first voice once again.

  “Allow allow. E be like say I know this guy.” I wasn’t sure if this was a new voice or one of the previous, tenuous under strain.

  “So make we no thief the money? You dey crase abi?”

  “Allow. I know this guy. Na sure guy. We no need thief the money. The guy go dash us.” The tenuous voice was now adamant.

  “As long as we go still chop the money. So make we leave am for here?”

  My eyes opened slowly and surveyed the four men around me in police uniforms. Before I blacked out, I heard the tenuous voice one last time: “Baba no now. We go carry am reach headquarters, make e wake up small.”

  When my eyelids fluttered open, like feathers around a chicken’s buttocks blowing in the wind, it was impossible to figure out which of the absurd scenes of my environs had woken me: the dank stench of the bare mattress I lay upon, the rhythmic crank of the ceiling fan above my head, the furious keyboard clicks by the young boys peering into computer screens lined up by the wall, or the metallic squeak that suggested a bouncing spring bed hidden behind the dirty curtains opposite the computer screens—all were contending for chief absurdity. A hand supported me up as I surveyed the room and handed me a clear cup of water. I raised the cup so that it was between my gaze and the lightbulb at the side of the room to inspect the uncountable fingerprint stains on the glass for a while.

  “I don’t want to sound like those bad guys in action films, but you know if we were trying to poison you, we would have done so a long time ago instead of waiting for you wake up.”

  I took a half-gulp, and the sweltering vapor from the lukewarm liquid burst through my nose, choking me into a cough. “This isn’t water?” I asked, inspecting the glass again.

  The room erupted in laughter for a few seconds, and then the computer chaps resumed focus.

  “Vodka?” I suggested.

  “Yes,” the action-film bad guy replied. “But not any brand you have tasted before, I’m sure of that.”

  “I doubt it. I’ve done my fair share of vodka sampling in my time.”

  “This is only the second batch of this combination I’ve ever made. I distilled in the kitchen above us with potatoes from my own little farm in the backyard.”

  I doubted his claims and sipped a little more of the vodka, as if I could somehow verify his claims with my palate. I heard a woman cry in a slow ascending tone; everyone except me seemed unbothered. Then the metallic squeak from behind the curtain came to a sudden stop, and almost simultaneously, a stark-naked fellow emerged, struggling to put on a pair of jeans.

  “He is our very own chemist on campus. First-class chemical engineering graduate from the University of Lagos,” said the formerly naked fellow, as if he had been part of the conversation from the very beginning. I now recognized his tenuous voice. “Ihechi, right? It took me a while to remember your name.”

  I was sure I’d had no identification on me in the car. I drank a bit more vodka to jog my memory.

  “You don’t remember giving me this?” he continued, pointing to a little but thick scar running across his eyebrow. “It’s okay. It’s always the challenger who remembers the fight, never the champion. I’m sure if we played a sharp game of football, you would remember me. I was always the champion on the field, and you were always the challenger.”

  “Maradona?” It all came back suddenly. “Or is it Bee Money?”

  “I can’t remember the last time I was called any of that.” His pathetic American accent was thankfully absent. “It’s Capone now.”

  He had aged exactly as I would have imagined if I’d been tasked to: thick arms with sleeves of scars and dark spots, muscled out from his head through to his torso and thighs and calves, with barely any hair on his body except a few klutzy strands sparsely scattered on his cheeks. He told the room a great tale of how we had gotten into a dangerous fight with all sorts of weapons, and after he had danced through my flurry of attacks and landed a number of hefty blows on me, he had been distracted for a second by the prettiest girl he had ever seen, which was enough for me to catch him with a solid right that knocked him out. I reminded him that the pretty girl’s name was Zeenat and she was dead. The whole room toasted vodka to her memory. Then he apologized for his friends knocking me out with a gun, as casually as he would have if he’d scuffed my shoes.

  “You should thank God I was with them tonight,” he said in between sips. “It could have been worse.”

  “I should thank God my childhood buddy grew
up into a pistol-whipping robber?” I had intended my remark to contain the same wry humor that had pervaded the evening; instead, the room fell into an uncomfortable silence, and a few heads supposed to be focused on computer screens peeped over their shoulders to see what would happen next.

  Capone threw his cup of vodka into the air. Naturally, my eyes fixed on the soaring projectile, and in that split second, I heard a loud slap on my face before feeling the sting as I recovered my balance on the floor, careful not to graze any of the broken glass. Capone threw his weight on me and forced a grip around my neck, pressing a large shard to my cheek before I could take my next breath.

  “You scare so easily,” he whispered as I felt blood drip down my cheek from the tip of the shard. “See how all your veins are jumping out of your skin. I could bleed you dry with my thumbs.”

  All eyes in the room remained fixed on him, even when he slipped off my shivering body, even when he laughed and poured himself more vodka in a fresh glass, even when he dispelled the intrigue and walked out of the room, guiding me along with him. The cold breeze on the balcony stung the open wound on my face.

  “You understand, abi? The reason I have the loudest voice around here is because I’m the most feared. I would draw blood from any one of them if they disrespected me, and they know it, so it must be the same with you. We still be guys, abi?”

  I stared away his apology but tried to take control of the situation before more disrespect was assumed. “I thought you were just a yahoo boy. How did it get to the point of armed robbery?”

  “Don’t you even judge me,” he replied instantly. “A man does what he has to do to survive.”

  “Aren’t there better ways to survive? Anything is better than armed robbery.”

  “Better way? Can you remember I always got better results than you in primary school? The only difference between us right now is that your parents could afford to put you through university and my mother couldn’t. It’s not because one of us is smarter or better at heart.”

  “You’ve made enough money to get away from all of this and put yourself through school.”

  “But who would pay my mother’s hospital bills while I spend four years rotting in these shithole local universities? And I could afford to go abroad, but my mother would be dead from loneliness before I got halfway across the ocean.”

  From the balcony, a myriad of deceitful shadows were cast down on the street by the half-moon up high. The night air held a chill, and I clutched my shirt, now wet with sweat, closer to my chest. Capone handed me a dry towel from the balcony banister and continued. “And after I finish school, what next? There are more jobs in backstreet Lagos than in high street Lagos, and backstreet pays better. Those boys on the computer make thousands of dollars every month from the clients they scam abroad; all of them were jobless computer science graduates before they came here. From the robbery on you alone, the boys gained thousands of naira in cash, and your car will sell on the Cotonou black market for thousands of dollars. No high street job is that profitable.”

  “What do you mean ‘the boys gained’? I’m not getting my car back?”

  “Your car should be the least of your worries. If our unemployed doctor had been around for the job, they would have cut you open, taken your kidney to export to Malaysia, and stitched you back up tidy for some more thousands of dollars.” His reasoning knocked on the door of my conscience, but there was no budging; I would never understand his justifications. I had always heard but never understood that survival on Nigerian streets was like a game of chess, and no pieces were spared en route to checkmate. I guzzled the rest of my vodka at once.

  “I know what we do is unpleasant,” he continued, and I laughed at his understatement. “I mean, we all had lofty dreams, but we ended up worshipping the disciple when we could find our Jesus.”

  “Worshipping the disciple? More like giving the devil fellatio.”

  “I’m going to hold my cup and sip like a real gentleman, so you’ll think I’m not confused and I know what fellatio means. But if I’m to be honest with you, I’m not ashamed of what I do. I lie, I steal, and if I have to, I kill. It’s no big deal. It’s so honorable when people kill for love or for their god. Well, money is my true love, it’s my god. Why is my killing any less honorable? People can say what they like, but I’m fine because I know they wouldn’t think the same if they were sharing my profit.”

  “So you think people are vexed about armed robbery because you don’t give them a portion of the money you stole from them in the first place? I think you’ve been having too much backyard vodka.”

  The chemist joined us on the balcony, derailing our train of thought. “The bride is ready for marriage,” he announced.

  “So let’s take her to church,” Capone replied. There were loud cheers from inside, as the computer scientists had been listening for his reply; in a second, they had vamoosed from the room, hurtling down the staircase at the end of the balcony.

  “Will your padi be following us to church?” the chemist said, looking at Capone.

  “I don’t do church,” I intercepted. “I’m not a Christian.”

  “Neither are we,” Capone replied with a smile as he showed me down the stairs.

  My mind had not been bothered about my exact whereabouts while we had been upstairs, but my curiosity was piqued as the whole lot of Capone’s boys filed through a maze of unpainted concrete buildings cramped beside each other as far as sky met ground. A few of the boys paused to pick up big brown cartons from the floor below, and then the merry marauders continued uninterrupted. There was barely enough space between the buildings for walkways, which remained in perpetual darkness because the moonlight could not filter through the thicket of dense face-to-face concrete flats. The overused and undermaintained drainage had clogged up, so the narrow walkways were damp with sewage. Occasionally, these walkways intertwined with the corridors of people’s homes, causing the boys to skip and hop above and around trays of garri set out to dry.

  All until the waves of dilapidated high-rise buildings filled with lowest-income earners slowly subsided onto a shore of sandy beach littered with nylons, plastic bottles, and a million tiny seashells. Atop the stretch of beach sat unending rows of wooden sheds serving as makeshift bars with little or no furniture, just four walls and a roof full of loud people and louder music. Each shed was linked to another by a continuous stream of humans dancing from one to another. And each stream was upended only when an open dance floor served as a dam, containing the stream and creating from it an electrifying energy that powered the vibe of the thousand-man groove.

  “You may now kiss the bride!” Capone screamed above the blaring disco, and his long line of boys opened their brown cartons and twisted open the corks of green bottles, kissing them with a low, smacking “muaah!” before becoming one with the crowd and distributing their brew to anyone who cared to taste.

  “Is this church?” I asked.

  “Church?” Capone retorted. “This is Sodom, the biggest gbedu in Lagos.” It had been forever since I’d heard that word in use, but then again, it had been forever since I’d been in any scenario that demanded its use. Gbedu: a social gyration involving loud music, unashamed abuse of currency, excessive smoking and drinking and eating and intensive frolicking.

  There was none of that hip-pop obsession that had taken over the popular nightspots in Lagos or Enugu; it was strictly African dance-hall tunes that rocked the stacked speakers, and people had turned up to dance, not to pose with expensive bottles of cognac as they nodded out of sync with the beat without saying a word to anyone. It had none of the passion of the Afrika Shrine, where optimists came to find succor and pessimists came to validate their disdain for whatever; Sodom was a haven for transparent thrill seekers.

  “Where are your car keys?” shouted a girl Capone had shuffled over to dance with.

  “You want to dance in my car?” he replied.

  “Slow slow, Maurice Greene,” she said, bre
aking the exchange of questions with an actual reply. “I’m tired of trekking in this Lagos, it’s not good for my complexion. I want to contest for Miss Nigeria next year, and I don’t want to have to bleach, so from tonight I only dance with men that have cars to drive me everywhere I need to go.”

  “Only fair girls ever win that thing,” said a girl dancing with her. Apparently, they were friends, so I shuffled over to make it a quartet. “It’s too late now, even bleaching can’t save you. I keep telling you if you want a man with a car, go and stand on Awolowo Road by midnight with those other girls.”

  “You want her to trek some more because she wants to stop trekking? That defeats the whole purpose of wanting a man with a car,” I interjected.

  “At least being black is better than having tribal marks,” said the first girl, pointing at her friend, who had three horizontal scars drawn on each cheek, man-made evidence of her Yoruba heritage.

  “You would think tribal marks would be an advantage in a Miss Nigeria pageant, oh,” her friend defended with faux hurt. “I mean, anyone from Africa can be black, but only a true Yoruba queen could have my kind of marks. I don’t know what those judges are judging.”

  Capone fumbled with his pockets for a few seconds. All of a sudden, he thrust his fist into the air, dangling the keys to my Japanese car. “And look what I have here,” he announced, sending the girls into a cheering frenzy. He stuffed his hand into his pocket once again and withdrew some rumpled naira notes that, earlier that night, had been neatly folded in my pockets. He placed them in my palm. “Use these to have some fun.” And he disappeared into the crowd with the giggling first girl tucked under his arm.

  The tribally marked girl danced closer to me. She smelled like my mother’s kitchen, fresh fish and spices. Even with her artificial hair extensions and long acrylic nails, it was not hard to guess her day job. In a few hours, when day broke and she had to set up her market stall, we could be standing in front of each other, separated by a table full of fish in any of Lagos’s open markets, and she would not dare look me in the eye, let alone place her arms around my neck and grind her waist on my groin like she was doing under the moon. The realization of the truth stilled me slowly: It was the same with Capone. We had grown up in the neighborhood but had never really come from the same place. We had been headed to different destinations, and even if he’d wanted to tag along, the high society I was still finding my footing in was strictly by invitation, and the gatekeepers did not take kindly to unexpected guests. He could only pull me down. They could only pull me down.