Testimony Time, A Brief History of a Love

On drugs and cleanness

This essay has been published previously, but I took it down because the first draft was written in a rush and needed to be edited. This is the edited version of the same essay. This version has also been extended. If you read the first version, you should read this; but if you cannot find the time, you could just start reading from the sixth paragraph—if you count from the bottom. Thank you. Merry Christmas.

“Each man kills the thing he loves,” Oscar Wilde

The first time I smoked, I was maybe ten. We were living in a place called “Tere Rouge”, around Gonzaque, in Abidjan. It was a night. My mom sent me to get something at the pharmacy. Tere Rouge had this large football field and that night I saw the butt of a cigarette burning red in the dark. Whatever it was that made me stoop and pick it up, it is beyond me now: but I picked it up and I remember that I was careful enough to see that no one saw me pick it up. There were shadows trawling the field, some smoking, others maybe smooching. I drew a puff, and began to cough. It was ceaseless, the coughing. Someone began to shout something in French, I dropped the butt and ran.

I was about fourteen the first time I got drunk. It was a December in Bariga. Lil Kesh had recently dropped his single, “Lyrically”. I was a rapper, too. Lil Kesh’s street was close to ours, we attended the same primary school at some point. A street that linked my street, at the rare, to Kesh’s street was having a carnival, as several other streets do all over Bariga, and Akoka. Kesh was invited to perform and I was to perform on the same stage. Low-budget rapper that I was, though, I was one of the first rappers to do my thing. Kesh would come later. But I was assured that I would be called back later during that same night to flow again. 

In anticipation of, and in preparation for, my return, I was given a sachet of what must have been rum; the adults who initiated me amidst the frenzy of the night, they said I would be inspired. I never got my chance that night or any night after that, since a moment never returns. But I sure got drunk. I wandered, must have, and could go no further at some point. I lay down near the gutter by the roadside at the edge of a street that must have been Anike Abu or Sokunbi. That was where my cousin found me, lost. She took me home. I woke up around ten AM the next morning. The second time I got drunk it was at a beach. The same guys had invited me to be part of this beach party that included students from Federal College of Education, Akoka. It was spirit this time, not rum—I got stinking drunk and I partied all night. I could not have known what I was doing.

A girl broke my heart in 2019 and I became a consistent drinker. I think I had started drinking here and there before she happened to me, but it became worse afterwards. Every now and then, I snuck into the room and took a little shot of the Schnapps my dad used to produce some of his pills. Then I began to drink Tombo, rum. There was this night I drank it chilled and it felt nice, I kept looking all my life for chilled Tombo; that night, if I remember correctly, I rapped till we got home, and we trekked a long way. Before I graduated secondary school, I had been drinking, putting Tombo in Bigi Cola. The bottle is usually so hard when the soft drink has been manipulated, so hard it excited me to hold. I would drink some and the toughness would soften. I was drinking at literary debates. 

I drank because of fear and anxiety, but it also felt cool sometimes. However, in the days and weeks after the girl broke up with me, I drank to ease the pain. My heart was burning. It sounds stupid, but my heartbreaks have felt like marrital failures. It has been so damaging, it feels like being divorced. A few months ago, I had to make a commitment to myself that I would never say anything about the first girl who broke my heart again, that I would never touch the matter. She was still pleading with me this year, and I had to tell her I have truly forgiven her, though it is funny because we were both in the wrong. But did she wrong me? Absolutely. She nearly ruined my life, and I was eighteen. She must have been sixteen or seventeen. Since then, there have been more devastating heartbreaks. My heart still prances about like a stupid dog sometimes, wanting another. 

I started deliberate smoking in secondary school, SSII or III. The first time I did weed, I literally felt colours flooding my mind. Several colours. I wrote about it in my poem in Tinderbox, “like a birdy boxset filled with colours”; and I danced naked and did some stupid things. My juniors knew I was high. One of them would later tell the principal, who loved me so much, that I smoked in the school hostel. Our relationship, of course, turned sour, though I denied it with everything in me. We smoked cigarettes. Wet nights and Benson and Hedges. (It was at a writer’s workshop that I was first offered weed, it was at Shrine. I refused. A writer-friend made a bad prophecy; I went back to school and self-fulfilled that prophecy. Writers are terrible people. I dislike a lot of writers, including myself.)

I was not as high as some people during my reign in the Kingdom of Kushing. We say kush when talk weed: Shey you go kush? Will you smoke? Kush is also used as a noun: I no geh kush, I don’t have weed. I ran away from home when I finished secondary school, I was eighteen. I came to Lagos to live with my aunt and cousins (one of them took me home when I got drunk at fourteen). I started drinking more. I was a drunkard, bruh. I stank of Tombo all the time. I still mixed it with Bigi Cola. I would sit in this open place at the end of a street, a close, which opened up to another route. I would sit there drink and watch YouTube and cry and write sad poems. It was 2020. I was nineteen.

Some money started coming in from writing. I was heavily depressed. I was working at Creative Writing News at the time. I did more weed. Got tired of SK and did one kind of paw-paw one night that made me love paw-paw. (They tell me there is no difference between skunk, which smells horrible, and paw-paw.) That night I smoked paw-paw and stood in the balcony playing Adele’s “Set Fire To the Rain”, watching the lights in the faces of the houses on the other side of town. Let me tell you the truth: all the while I smoked, sometimes unconsciously, I was chasing that one high. I wanted to be high like that again. I bought paw-paw, stood in the balcony, played Adele, but it never was the same. Highness is like poetry, you can never rewrite the same poem by creating the same secondary atmosphere. There are variables, contingencies, in the psychological and emotional zones of being, and even in the external world, that come together to make a moment. A moment can never be repeated. Borges’ “The Aleph”, where a single moment contains all moments, negates itself simply by the summary vision of each moment: he perceives each moment only briefly, fragmentarily. It is just as impossible to live two moments at the same time as it is to recreate a moment. Each time I went and bought a bottle of Bigi and filled it with Tombo, I was expecting, too, to get the kind of purging I got from watching emotional videos while drunk yesterday. It never, ever happened that way. 

There is an element of disappointment to the high business; it keeps one going. I stopped doing SK and paw-paw because they were not getting me high (as they used to) anymore. I began smoking Marley Kush, which is not much different from SK. But I smoked that in this broken maruwa for a while. I would go there in the morning and smoke and read and write, in the hot sun. It was my life. My poems in Isele were most likely written at this time, I finished reading the curious incident of the dog in the night-time and Boy Swallows Universe in that maruwa. Money came in more, I tried colorado, which is perhaps the deadliest and most widely-used drug on the streets of Lagos. There is that popular Baloranking line, “Nothing like trips of Colorado o, but Egungun be careful, ma wo moto.” Nothing beats being high on rado, but masquerade you could die. I did rado a good deal, but compared to some guys, I did not smoke rado at all. 

One day I smoked like two puffs of raw colorado. I was supposed to escort a rado-god out, he came to my house to help wrap the rado (it is usually thin, the size of two needles, say) and who smoked with me. I walked out and on the way it felt like a ghost town. I just had run back home. Surprisingly, though, I felt terribly beautiful. I remember the day, I was in an orange shirt. I asked my brother to take a photograph of me. He took two. In one my eyes were dilated, I was not here. 

The first night I did rado, I talked with the girl I was dating for more than an hour, and I did not really feel the highness, or so I said to myself. Rado made a mess of me. It was terrifying, yet I went and invested five hundred naira every morning, sometimes I bought more than one. It was my choice because I enjoyed terror, shit was happening in my body, I believed that more terror would confuse the terror in my body and that was not bad. Also, if I could terrify myself, it was much better than to be terrified by some Other, some God. I wanted to have control over my pain. But also, rado is cheap and premium high. A puff of rado will get you to to Denver, and you could be high all day for one thousand naira. Take two puffs and leave it be. Take two puffs, wallow, and leave it be.

But colorado was hell for me. I was getting thin. I was not eating—though it makes other people eat. Even more, colorado is pointless high for me. It just sends you somewhere beyond language and beyond reason, beyond being, an intoxicating darkness. One night I got high on rado and began screaming, “I don trabaye, I don trabaye, I don trabaye.” That is the response that comes from rado, a worship that is all bones, black bones that laugh a quake. I could not write when high on rado, I made terrible shit, bones and bones and bones. G-boys use it to scam. It breaks them open to something. Writing about it now I can feel sick in my body. It made me sick. I felt unsettled in my body. I wobbled through life.

Loud was the “best” weed I did. It was good for my artistic self. Inspiration poured over me like wine. I wrote and wrote and broke the page! I was always high, and so I always heard music playing in my head. Poems came to me to be given breath. Stories, essays. I wrote like a maniac, a robotic maniac. But loud was expensive. Four thousand naira per cup, I sometimes bought two cups per day. I bought loud every morning. I did Molly. I did Tramadol. I did Codeine once. I nearly did Ice. Loud created problems in my throat; together with my antidepressants, it gave me this whooping cough. I phlegmed a lot. And pocket ran out. Yet who cares? I was in a terrible place. A thorough addict. I wanted to beat Foster Wallace at the thing: to be high for more than a decade.

Weed, drugs, they cost me a lot. They made a mess of my life. People knew I was fucked in the neighbourhood, but (as it is when you are an addict), I was oblivious to my life in two ways: (I) I did not know how I was perceived, and (II) I did not give a “fack”. Yet, sad as it is to say, there were beautiful moments when I was high, moments that still return to me. A friend and I would go to this metih to have noodles. We would take our plates into this maruwa, eat, and smoke, or smoke, and eat. The things we said in those moments, emotions made buoyant by the thing we had taken in, were beautiful, wonderfully beautiful. Deams we shared; the studded nightsky that seemed more eloquent. That friend of mine is a believer now, we talk Jesus and share Bible verses often.

The thing with drugs is the way they hold you hostage. It is captivity. You cannot function without them. I couldn’t. They stole myself from me. Once I travelled to Osun State to visit my mom’s grave. I lodged in this hotel. By the second day I had run out of weed. I planned to stay for a week and work on my chapbook. But without weed, I could not write. It was impossible. My body and mind were both confused when I was not high; I was dull. The world felt dull. (Most poets chase feeling to make poetry; and when I could not feel—I was mortified, literally, before I got on anti-depressants: I could not enjoy food or music or anything—weed was the spark that came me alive). I scoured Ejigbo looking for weed. I did not find until may be the third or fourth day. And the one I got was bad weed, it was like empty within itself. Do you get? But then I found some good one later. I did my chap. The morning I was to return to Lagos, I smoked what I had, kept the rest in my bag: but the bus had eaten only some of the road when my high began to wear off and I was so in need of weed, it felt like a possession. It was on that road that I wrote my poem in Fantasy, “The Road.” I have written poems about weed—“hay” on Olongo is about weed (“hay in the cricket’s burning chest”); my poem “15721” published this year in the journal is about the one time I got arrested for traveling with loud. Also, “Lay Me Down”, in Bodega. There are scores of other unpublished ones.

One night I called a girl I was dating and told her that I had moved from smoking Marley Kush to smoking loud. I expected—and I was stupid to expect—her to tell me something like, “Why are you doing another kind of weed? You should get help.” Or something silly like that, because I was self-destructing. Though I would not have gotten help if you told me to, I would fight you if you said shit about smokers. But instead she said, “When this one stops working, is there another one you can use?” And I ran mad. But she was right, I saw my life like that too: the drugs spectrum, you keep moving from one shade to the other to save yourself and keep yourself alive and alert. 

There is a day that returns to me often. It was a Sunday morning. I was broke. Weed was reacting badly in my body. Still, I smoked Marley Kush or SK, because I could not afford loud and I needed something. I lay on a dusty plank in a room in that uncompleted building reading David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” for the umpteenth time, crying. I was in so much pain, or agony (?) What was happening inside my body was ambiguous but resonant. Churchsong was coming, the room I was in was at the top of the building, so I could see roofs from there. But I lay on that dusty plank, on that dusty floor, crying, too arrogant to call to God. It has been one year now since that same God rescued me from myself, from a sick hunger, and what can I say but thank You, Jesus.

The delight of being sober is that you are not dependent, and you are coordinated, you are present, and you have no fear. When a writer starts feeling like he cannot write, it is almost like telling him his wife was just shot in the chest! When I stopped weed, I did not believe I would be able to write one word again. I could not believe. In my early days as a believer, I still smoked loud. It took about a month for me to flush my last weed down a drain, after a shaft of insight, and a lot of crying (because my body wanted) before I stopped. It is grace, man. Only grace. But I worried about my art a lot. A whole lot. The first poem I wrote after I became sober was “Aubergine”, it was published in a Shallow Tales anthology and is forthcoming in my chapbook. You can literally feel the cleanness in that poem. The biggest miracle is not only that I am sober, but that I am making good art sober. Do you know what it feels like to travel cross-state without being high! Bro. Once I could not dare! Do you know what it means to read without being high? I’ve read nearly fifty books this year, sober. My grades in school are getting better, and I study sober. I got my biggest acceptances this year, sober. The Holy Spirit tells me what to do, not weed. Though I used coffee for a good part of this year, I had to give it up. Now I drink water and eat apples and bananas, bro. Sometimes I have tea. I feel great!

But I would be whining if I told you I still don’t worry about the weed-effect, about the way it opens new frontiers in the imagination. I did not publish a story this year. I sold only one. Fiction is harder for me to do now, for many reasons. Even poetry is hard to do. But you know what? I am an idiot. What was that thing Randall Jarrell said? Now “you realize that genius is, among other things, a gift for making everything hard.” Let it be hard, let it be hard, Lord. Grant me the grace.