THE AFTERMATH

You’ve read the stories.

We Are Here: The Attack.

We Are Here: The Hunt.

We Are Here: The Retribution.

And I was a survivor of the experience.

In the stories, they were named Black, Cross and Herod.

In real life, they bore the nicknames Big D, Trinity and Pharaoh.

And I wanted them to hurt like they hurt me.

It was around 7 pm. I was listening to Jussie Smollett and Yazz’s Ain’t About The Money on repeat, while I was eating the ice cream that I’d been craving for quite some time now. Eating the ice cream was a guilty pleasure, because my mind was getting tortured with thoughts about how I really should cut down on my intake of these sugary treats, even though it wasn’t telling on my body yet.

With the song on repeat, I felt my mind start to sway to the music. It was an odd feeling, perhaps precipitated by the ice cream. I felt the rush of thoughts pouring in, thoughts and memories of those particularly harrowing days in school, when my friends and I were attacked.

And how the culprits were dealt with – at least, to the satisfaction of my friends.

See ehn, I’m not your average person when it comes to a lot of things, especially when revenge is involved. Sometimes I wonder how vengeful I would have been if I was Gemini or Scorpio.

Sometimes, I think about it and the only logical response I give myself is the colloquial theory of Newton’s Second Law of Motion, which states that (I’m paraphrasing here please) the force exerted and its opposite reaction must be equal. This means that the way I love with every fibre in me is the way I get vengeful when I am crossed. Very few times, I try to get logical and let it slide. And often times, I relish it and fully explore that dark part of me to the fullest.

Of course, I had to agree with my friends back then on the appropriateness of the consequence the police visited on our attackers. But I wanted more. I wanted their blood, just as they took mine. So, while I played concession in their presence, I plotted for my own private pound of flesh.

During that tumultuous period, a friend I asked over to help with the case came along with a friend of his. This friend of his, who we shall call Francis, was among the leaders of the fraternity to which some of our attackers belonged to.

He observed me and noticed that I wanted more justice than what the police gave us. He called me aside and asked me what I really wanted. I told him that he already knew we were pursuing the case through both the police and the school authority. At some point, my friends reasoned that our attackers were getting enough retribution from the police side of the case, and so, we should take away our energies from the school authority side of the case. There was a HOD who wanted to head up the case, all the way to getting the four of them rusticated from the school. My friends balked at that and simply decided to focus on the police end of things.

I DIDN’T WANT THAT!

I wanted them to suffer. I wanted them to feel pain. I wanted them to hurt for ages.

But since I was the only one who wanted more, I acquiesced to what the others wanted, all the while deciding to go about exacting my revenge my way.

So when Francis asked me if I was satisfied by the proceedings, I said NO.

He asked me what would make me satisfied, and I told him I wanted to meet Pharaoh in person, and then, I would decide what to do with him. I also wanted the same for Big D. But for Trinity, I wanted an extra year in school for him.

Francis looked solemnly at me, nodded and didn’t say anything more.

A month later, when everything seemed forgotten and I was at home still recuperating from the experience, Francis called. He told me to come to Agbani, that he and his boys had Pharaoh.

I was surprised by this. I thought Pharaoh had returned to Lagos, where he lived, seeing as school was over. “How come he’s in Enugu?” I asked Francis.

“I made you a promise,” he replied in a solemn voice. “And I take my word seriously.”

I told him I’d be on the next bus over, and we agreed on the time they should expect me.

I travelled to Enugu and chartered a keke to the location in Agbani. When the keke dropped me, I had to trek some distance to the exact location which Francis had communicated to me. I entered the building and I met Francis. We shook hands and then hugged, before he led me deeper inside the building. He took me to one of the rooms.

And in it, I saw Pharaoh bound to a chair, stark naked, with a gag stuffed inside his mouth.

Words cannot describe the savage pleasure I got from the shock I saw in his eyes when he saw me.

I walked slowly up to him.

And I began to speak to him.

I asked him how it felt to be on the other side, the side of the one getting terrorized. I asked him if he remembered how it felt to make someone powerless and at his mercy just because he could. I asked him if he remembered how he and his friends wielded their power over Mitch and I the night they allowed their bigotry and self hate overtake their sense of reasoning by attacking us, mercilessly so in spite of how much we begged and struggled against their cruelty.

“Can you possibly imagine how powerless we felt then?” I asked him. “I’m sure you can now, because you are the one feeling that way. You’ve only been held for not even up to a week, they haven’t even touched you, and here you are shaking. After all that, where has that led you?”

As I spoke to him, I was thinking hard for a way to inflict pain on him. Not physically, but psychologically. I wanted something, desperately wanted something. But I couldn’t come up with anything that would give me satisfaction.

When I was done with him, I turned to leave the room. Then he began struggling on the seat upon which he was bound, causing the chair to make a screeching sound as the legs scratched against the floor. I looked back at him. His eyes were wide and his mouth was working around the gag. It was apparent he wanted to say something.

I went to him and took out the gag. He immediately began pleading with me, that I should forgive him. I should forgive and forget, and let him go. He said he was afraid of what would happen to him when I leave. That Francis and his boys hadn’t touched him because they were waiting for me to see him, and now that I have seen him, they’d promised to rape him in turns. He also said that his capon was angry with him over what they did, and because of that, he had given Francis the go-ahead to capture him.

He begged me to plead with all these people on his behalf.

I didn’t say a word to him. I just stuffed the gag back into his mouth and walked out of the room.

I met Francis outside, and told him to keep Pharaoh there one more week, all the while doing all they can to keep him very afraid. Pharaoh had unwittingly given me my psychological torture of him, and I was only too happy to mete it out on him.

On our way out, I had a very long discussion with Francis. I was very grateful to him for keeping his word and bringing this satisfaction to me. I asked him about the other guys who attacked me and my friends. He told me he had handled Trinity; he had arranged for his exam script to be stolen. As he said this, he produced the motherfucker’s script and showed it to me. I smiled. It was a three-unit-load final-year course. He also told me that he was supposed to go to Lagos that weekend and that that was where his trailing of Big D was leading him. He would get to kill two birds with one stone: go home and deal with Big D. I told him not to inflict any physical harm on Big D. I just wanted him to know the powerlessness he and his friends had made me feel.

At the end of our talk, we hugged and then waved each other goodbye, with me promising to call him when I get back home. I told him I would keep in touch with him and visit him whenever I could.

I think it was around my second semester final year that someone chatted me up. It was Big D. He was in my chat, asking for forgiveness, blah, blah, blah. He said he didn’t know what came over him, talked about how he still regretted how involved he was with what happened to me and my friends, especially Mitch. I didn’t have the energy to hate him anymore, but I got some satisfaction from adding him on WhatsApp and then ensuring that my WhatsApp statuses were frequently filled with gay stuff. Since he was a regular at viewing my posts, I was sure he was getting to see all these things that made him so homophobic before. He seemed to handle my statuses well though; when I posted a studio photo of my nude, cake-splattered self on my birthday, he complimented the pic, saying it was dope.

One last thing I have to say is this: pain is a tricky thing. One thing these kitoers always seem to think is that they have all the power. And that their victims will always be helpless and weak. But beneath that fragility may lie a mean streak that will strike back. It is man’s actions that make man wicked.

As for me, after that experience, I resolved that no one, NO ONE, will ever get the power to treat me like I’m less human just because I am gay.

Written by Sage Philip