THE MEN OF PORT HARCOURT

There is something about this city, something that draws you in and repels you at the same time. For people like me, people from towns and small cities — places where everybody knows everybody else: retirement towns like Enugu, academic and administrative towns like Awka — this city is a slap on our senses in the way it feels like home, yet so very unlike home.

Port Harcourt is a mini Lagos. And I do not mean this in a simplistic way. It has the hustle and bustle of Lagos, its craziness and some of its traffic, as well as the quiet, measured calm of the more sedate towns of the East. For people like me, people who do not exist on either side of the spectrum, with too much fire to live sedately and too much calm to live boisterously, Port Harcourt is the perfect place.

Or, it would be. Were it not for the men.

Men!

That age-old set of people who cause all the trouble in the world.

You would think that, as a gay man with over 15 years of active service in homosexuality, nothing men would do can come to me as a surprise. You might be right if you think that, but not if you haven’t met Port Harcourt men. These ones are a different species of their own.

But, hey, don’t take my words for it. Let my experiences show you.

Take this month for example. It’s Pride Month. And, from the day it began, Pride Month had been priding itself properly in my corner.

May 31st spilling over into the 1st of June, the friend I stay with, Boma, had a small games night in his house. There were five of us, including me and him. Toward the end of the games night, one of the others – let’s call him Priest – marked me as the person he wanted to fuck. I didn’t think too much about it until after I showered and came out to the parlour, only to meet him and one of the others, Dion, with their lips locked and their bodies straining against each other. I sat down there, because Boma had taken the other boy into his room to fuck him.

Then, surprise, surprise, Dion came up to me and asked me to join them. I refused (because I get really uncomfortable in threesomes and start to have panic attacks), so they did their thing. When they were done and had showered, Priest came, landed on my body and began kissing me. We didn’t fuck, but we made out intensely. And he promised to come back to finish what we had started.

(Now, here’s the thing: this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed something like this going down in Port Harcourt. Here, almost every games night or get-together that happens ends up in an orgy or several pockets of sexual activities happening in different parts of that building. For someone like me, it is disconcerting. And wild. Because, chineke nna pụrụ ịme ihe niile, this is not a scene I am, in any guise, used to. Like I said, I am a one-person-man. Too many bodies, and I get confused.)

Honestly, when I began writing this story, it was meant to be a one-time rant about Port Harcourt men and their drama that I have seen in this short while that Pride Month has been on. However, all of these thoughts faded away upon the visit of my next subject.

He came to visit Boma the next day, being the 2nd of June. When he left, Boma escorted him out, only to come back to tell me that his friend liked me. I was like, “Ahn-ahn, why e nor tell me when e dey hia?” Boma said he didn’t ask because he felt Boma would be offended. I told Boma to send him my number.

He hit me up a few minutes later, introduced himself as Usen. We chatted for a bit. He was surprisingly intelligent, even though he threw me off at first because he’s an AMalekite. (For those who do not understand what this means, an AMalekite is a person who uses ‘am’ in their texts, typing stuff like: “am fine” or “am on my way home.” Nasty behaviour, I tell you.)

After his shift at work that day, he came back to Boma’s place. And we fucked in the night. (See, I finally believe the stereotype! Calabar boys sabi fuck abeg!!! I’ve had three Calabar boys, actual Calabar boys, and one Uyo boy. And all of them sabi fuck! Jehovah Nissi buru m n’isi, because ahn ahn!!!!)

We fucked for a long time. Then he stopped. I asked him why, and he said he wanted my body to cool down. That, apparently, my body had released some gas that made my anal chute unbearably hot. Thus, cool down time. In all my years of sexual activity, this was news to me, but he said, “If you’re Top, you’ll understand what I mean.”

OK o, since I’m not Top.

We lay together, and in a matter of minutes, he had slept off. I slept shortly after. Woke up in the morning, and I was alone on the bed.

I assumed he’d left early, so I simply started pressing my phone. A few minutes later, I went to Boma’s room, only to find Usen sleeping in his bed. Now, Boma had invited someone over the previous night, and he fucked the boy in his room, while Usen and I fucked in the other room. I didn’t think much about Usen going to Boma’s room though. I assumed they had something to discuss, or something like that.

It wasn’t until afternoon, after both Usen and the other boy had left, when Boma and I were discussing, that he clued me in on what had happened. Apparently, Usen went to Boma’s room in the middle of the night, and he fucked the boy Boma invited over.

Ha!

So what was that drama about gas release and heated anal chute all about, I wondered. Because it didn’t make sense. I understand that once some people cum, it’s over for them for the next several hours. But if you have plans of fucking someone else, it’s a very easy thing to just say it, instead of leaving another person high and dry, and telling such a pitiful lie to cover what you intend to do. Which one is gas release and heat and all that mende-mende? I found the entire thing just too trite and fucked-up.

If this was the end of my encounters with Usen, he probably wouldn’t even have made this rant. Oh, no. He wasn’t that important. I thought I’d seen it all. I had no idea how wrong I was.

Boma had another friend over, Cal, from Owerri, on the 4th of June. Cal spent the night, and I was regaled with the sounds of their vigorous lovemaking – if one can call it that – all night long. The next morning, Boma went to the gym as is his custom. But before he left, he told me that Usen would be coming over in a few minutes. I had absolutely no intention of getting down with him, not after that last stunt he pulled. But I wasn’t going to tell Boma this, or even show him anything save the barest flicker of emotion: a nod, and an okay.

I was in the parlour, working on my laptop, when Usen arrived. He said hi, sat, and talked to me for a few minutes. Maybe he took my rather short and indifferent responses to him as disinterest, or something like that, because he left me shortly after, went into Boma’s room, and proceeded to fuck Cal. Where Boma’s romp with Cal was unwittingly loud, there was a boisterousness to the sounds coming from the room between Cal and Usen that seemed pointed, like someone saying, “See what you’re missing,” or “I’m the shii! How dare you ignore me?”

When they were done, and Boma had returned from the gym, and Cal had left, the three of us were in the parlour, talking. Usen kept making pointed remarks at me, about how quiet I was, how I wasn’t his type, how he likes people with fire. I was going to respond to him, to give him an answer of peace, when this man decided to seal his ignominy in my eyes.

He launched into a tale of what had happened the previous week between him and his boyfriend. (Yes, people. He has a boyfriend.)

They had gone out, he said, to a club or some such. Bought drinks, pepper-soup and barbecued fish — all on his dime, he added, with a pointed look at me. To show me how “capable” he was or something else, I never would know — and other stuff. They were lounging and having a good time.

Then they were joined by a lady, who went up to his boyfriend and was conversing to him. After talking for some time, they exchanged numbers, an action that got him angry.

But, here’s the kicker: he wasn’t angry because he’d been ignored or slighted or anything like that. He was angry, because, in his words: “If I take you out as a man, na gay stuff we dey do. Keep your woman part away. Me sef, I fuck women too. But at that time when we’re together, na homo we be. Talking to a woman is disrespecting me!”

So he ordered — again, his words, not mine — his boyfriend to delete the girl’s number from his phone, and collect her phone and delete his number from hers. His boyfriend refused, and he, Usen, blew up, smashing bottles and threatening to beat him to a pulp. His boyfriend ran away when he became that violent, and he had to return home alone.

Then his boyfriend came back, still in a huff, and began packing his things, banging doors and, in his words, “being a nuisance”. Just as said boyfriend was about to leave, Usen’s anger boiled over. So he followed him out into the yard, to where he was about to enter the Bolt that had brought him over.

He said he dragged his boyfriend back, head-butted him, and proceeded to beat him. Right there. That his neighbours came outside, begging him to stop, trying to separate him from the man he was beating badly. They apparently knew him, knew him as Usen’s friend, and were wondering what the source of the fight between them was. And after his anger was sated, after he was done beating his boyfriend, he took his things out of the Bolt, paid the driver, took his boyfriend into the house, and proceeded to, in his words, “…fuck him real good.”

I was aghast. But he wasn’t done. Oh, no. Now, here’s the major kicker: it turned out that the girl who came over to their table and took his boyfriend’s number actually liked him, Usen, not his boyfriend. But she didn’t want to seem too forward, and decided to take his “friend’s” number, telling him that it was actually Usen that she liked, and that she’d be hitting him up to get Usen’s number from him. His boyfriend told him all these details the next morning, and he was repeating them to us, a smug smile on his face. Talking about how he was being chased even by girls, without stressing himself, and how his boyfriend told him that he could now respect him as a man, because he could beat him into submission when he was being stubborn.

Throughout his tale, all I felt was just one thing: an overwhelming urge to run into the bathroom and scrub at my skin for hours. To drink bleach or something equally corrosive. Just to wash away every trace of his skin on mine, to erase every suggestion that his dick had been inside me.

Because, my God! What sort of odious person does something this barbaric, and turns around to speak of it as a thing of pride, as something that makes him a catch?

Written by Dike