BYE-BYE, BOYFRIEND

A few weeks ago, I traveled to the East from Lagos. I was actually headed to Owerri for a personal matter, but stopped over in Port Harcourt first to attend the child dedication of a friend. I was supposed to stay in the house of another friend, Ceejay. (You would recognise him from this episode of Suits & Ties.) However, after a day at his place, his boyfriend called to notify Ceejay of his intention to come spend a few days with him. This put me in a position where my presence in his house automatically became an inconvenience. Ceejay felt bad about this and offered to pay for the hotel room I’d lodge in for the rest of my stay in Port Harcourt.

We were having this conversation in the presence of one of his employees, an assistant who was in his house for some work issue. This guy (let’s call him Ovie) is gay too. Ceejay tasked him with the assignment of getting me lodged in a good hotel. Upon hearing this, I noticed Ovie perk up, and I could read what was going through his mind from the expression on his face. He no doubt saw this as an opportunity to inhabit a luxurious space away from his parents’ house. He proved my thinking right when he asked if he could stick around with me after getting me settled in the hotel. Ceejay heard him ask this and didn’t rebuke him for the liberty he was attempting to take. However, he tried to forestall Ovie’s intent by asking him to also organize a hookup for me after the hotel runs.

But I had some office work I’d brought along with me on my trip, work I urgently needed to finish to meet a looming deadline. I told Ceejay not to bother with getting me a hookup, that I’d be too busy working in my hotel room to have time for any fun.

And so, I set off for a hotel with Ovie. On Ceejay’s dime, he got me settled, got me lunch and kept me company. We chatted, and by 5 PM, he said he had to go out for a church program. He asked if he could come back after, and I said it was okay.

Around 7 PM, he came back. And with him was a good looking young man.

“Hello, JBoy,” Ovie said enthusiastically as he ushered the guy into the room where I was already working. “I want you to meet my boyfriend.”

(I don’t remember the actual name he introduced the guy with, so for the purpose of this story, I’m going to call him Tega.)

The next few hours in the room were spent with me at the table, working with my laptop and some office papers, while the two of them occupied the bed, being all lovey-dovey with each other, making out and playing hide and seek with the bed covers. I didn’t pay them much mind. And when Ovie asked if he could connect his phone to my Mi-Fi, so his boyfriend could use the internet to stream movies online, I didn’t mind and willingly made the connection.

Around 1:45 AM, I began to feel sleepy. Ovie was already asleep at this time, but Tega was in the bed next to him, wide-eyed awake and still streaming movies online with Ovie’s phone. Feeling very knackered, I climbed into the bed and promptly slept off.

At 4 AM, my alarm beeped, waking me up. I was on vacation and could have simply shut off the alarm and return to sleep. But I remembered that my work was still unfinished, and with a groan, I got up from the bed.

I was a bit startled to see that Tega was still awake, still on the phone. I noticed some used condom wrappers carelessly tossed aside and figured that at some point in the night, Ovie must have woken up and they’d had sex. Tega and I exchanged muttered greetings and I went back to the table and to my work.

At about 6 AM, he got up and went into the toilet. When he came back out, he was wearing his trousers but was bare-chested, with his shirt slung over his shoulder. He went to the door, unlocked it and stepped out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

I didn’t pay much attention to him at any point of his movements. In fact, as he stepped out of the room without a word to me, I remember thinking he just wanted to step out for a smoke or some fresh air. I noticed that the shoulder bag he came with was still lying on the floor where he dropped it.

However, about fifteen minutes after he left the room, Ovie suddenly came awake as though he’d been jolted out of a nightmare. He had a slightly crazed look on his face as he looked wildly about, no doubt looking for his boyfriend.

“JBoy, where is that guy?” he asked, already climbing down from the bed.

“What guy?” I responded. “You mean your boyfriend?”

“He’s not my boyfriend!” he exclaimed.

“What!” I turned to fix an incredulous look on him. “What did you just say? But you introduced him to me as your boyfriend.”

Ovie looked stricken as he said, “Where is he? He has my phone.”

A feeling of foreboding came over me as I said, “He stepped out some minutes ago –”

Before I could even finish talking, with a cry, Ovie fled from the room. I followed after him, watching from a distance as he got to the reception and began querying the receptionist about anyone just leaving the hotel. When the receptionist responded in the affirmative, he ran out, no doubt hoping he could still catch Tega. When he returned minutes later, it was apparent from his distraught expression that he didn’t find anyone.

He returned to the receptionist and his anger erupted. “How can you people be so lousy like this, as to let someone just walk out of your hotel this early in the morning without finding out where exactly they are leaving from? You couldn’t stop him, ask him which room he was coming from, and call the room to verify? That guy could have killed me and left just like that, and no one would have been the wiser. Is this how lousy you are, that you don’t know how to do your job!”

He was incensed, and his rant went on and on. At a point, I turned and went back inside my room. It was obvious to me that Tega was a thief who had used this hookup as a means to get what he wanted: an expensive smartphone.

Minutes later, Ovie came back into the room. His anguish and anger had come together into a smouldering expression on his face. He saw Tega’s bag and went straight to it. He opened it and it was empty. The guy had obviously transferred its contents to the pockets of his jeans before leaving. I even began to appreciate the genius of his getaway: he hadn’t dressed fully, leaving his shirt over his shoulders, and had left his bag behind, so that I wouldn’t suspect a thing.

As Ovie slumped down on the bed in apparent despair, I didn’t know what to feel toward him: bad over the loss of his phone or mad at him for lying about who Tega was to him when he brought him into my space.

My feelings instantly swung firmly to anger when he accusingly said to me, “You should have woken me up when you saw him leaving.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said, turning my outrage to him. “Did you just try to blame this on me? You were the one who lied, who told me he was your boyfriend –”

“But I was joking –” he began to protest.

“How was I supposed to know that!” I snapped. “Do you honestly think I would have permitted you to spend the night here with him had you told me he was a mere hookup? I was accommodating because when I heard ‘boyfriend’, I assumed you two knew each other well. For chrissakes, I went to bed while he was still awake! Do you realize that he could have robbed me too, taken my laptop and devices with him if I hadn’t woken up when I did!” Thinking about this made me even more incensed.

“I’m sorry,” he said meekly. “I was just joking about him being my boyfriend –”

“You don’t joke with things like that!” I nearly shouted at him.

In the next several minutes, it became increasingly clear to me that this guy knew next to nothing about the thief he brought to my hotel room. His distress was scattered, that disorganized state of someone who didn’t know where to start from in tracking his offender down.

When we went to see Ceejay, he lamented the loss of his phone heavily, still persisting in his narrative that made me the one to blame. I suppose this played into my friend’s sense of guilt so much that he provided the money for him to go get a new phone. I was very displeased by this. I was even more displeased by the fact that Ovie either really didn’t know anything about this Tega – not his full name, not his social media handles, nothing! – or didn’t care, seeing as he’d gotten a new phone. Because when I began asking him for details about the guy so I could submit it to Kito Diaries for a kito alert post, he just kept acting clueless.

However, below is the picture of Tega (to reiterate, not his real name), for the benefit of those who stay in Port Harcourt. Beware of him and steer clear of letting your guard down with him with your valuables around.

I’m glad Ovie doesn’t have to know the pain of losing a phone. But hopefully, he has learnt a lesson about misrepresenting to others the people he hangs with. There is a lesson to be learned here about how we trivialize these relationship labels in the gay community. We are quick to talk about love, when really, we just want to shag. We make boyfriends out of people we don’t know enough about. And we turn online acquaintances into people we’re in relationships with.

These things are serious, and it because of how unseriously we take them, that we run into all kinds of trouble.

Written by JBoy