I was near-exhausted by Taiwo’s forensics on his visit to America. “Taiwo, I thought they said you can’t know a country in one month, it takes two.”
“They were wrong, O.J. If your five senses are alert you can take a usable measure of any plot of earth and gaggle of humanity in a few weeks.”
“Even if you spend a year in a place,” said Ogbuagu, “conventional wisdom would still say it takes two years to know it.”
“How about this: You can’t know a place in ten years . . . will it take twenty years or only eleven?”
“I don’t know,” said Ogbuagu. “All I know is that the lagoon waters are as brown as ever, it’s already 4 o’clock, and it will take two go-slow hours to get back to my office.”
“So why bother, then,” said Taiwo. “Mr. Steward . . . bring one Star, one Heineken and one Stout!”
“Well, that’s considerate of you, Taiwo,” I said. “At least you’re not like a certain professor of legend . . .”
“Not legend but fact,” Ogbuagu cut in. “I knew the man.”
“What did he do?” asked Taiwo.
“He would say to his houseboy: . Bring one bottle of beer and six tumblers!”
“Ogbuagu, you have to be fair,” I said. “The guy was only a primary school teacher at the time.”
“Well, aren’t you lucky times have changed,” said Taiwo. “Now you can have a whole bottle of beer to yourself.”
“But that’s not all . . .” said Ogbuagu.
“You don’t mean . . . is he the same guy? . . . I heard the story of another professor. When visitors descended on him in a mass he would send his houseboy to buy refreshments for them. ‘Don’t let a car hit you-o!’ he would shout after the boy—which they say was his secret code for the boy to disappear and not come back for two hours, by which time the visitors would be gone.”
“And the whole time,” said Ogbuagu, “he would complain to the visitors how lazy and useless the boy was . . . .”
“Can’t even buy common cabin biscuits without getting lost . . .”
“Cabin biscuits!” I shouted. “That must have been in 19-oh-oh when my grandpa was a toddler . . . Taiwo, you hear too many old stories!”
“OK, OK, I have a new story I can tell you. This one actually happened to me while I was in America. . . . One day we ran out of drinking water, so I took my cousin’s car, collected ten empty water gallons, and drove to one of those huge supermarkets, the kind that stay open all day and all night.
“As usual, the check-out lines were super-long. It finally came to my turn. I had a shopping cart with ten water gallons refilled from the refill fountain. ‘These are refills,’ I told the cashier, a teenage girl probably on summer job. ‘There are ten bottles’.”
“She gave me a funny look, took her hand-held scanner and walked around to the cart.
“ ‘Your scanner will read it wrong,’ I told her. ‘The price is 37 cents each’.”
“She simply ignored me, scanned and it read 88 cents.
“ ‘These are refills,’ I repeated. ‘The price is 37 cents.’ ”
“ ‘Are you sure they are refills?’ ” she asked.
“Then I got furious. ‘Do you dare doubt my word?’
“The poor thing looked as if she would crawl back into her mother’s womb. I went ballistic.
“ ‘Trouble with you is, you had no training for this job. And maybe no home training either. You learned nothing. There are seven visible differences between a refilled water gallon and a fresh one, and you don’t know even one. Why don’t you call your manager, fool? Security cameras are all over the store. I bet you don’t even know that. Tell your manager to go check the cameras so they can see me doing the pachanga while refilling these ten bottles. . . . You know the first thing they will do with you? They will fire you! And I will get my lawyer to sue the company for embarrassing me. Then they will up and fire all the other dummies who might rack up million-dollar lawsuits trying to save the company $5. And the Regional Manager, no less, will come and apologize and plead with me to withdraw my lawsuit . . . .’ ”
“ ‘Come on, man, you’re holding up the line!’ ”
“I swung round. It was the man behind me. I gave him a withering look. ‘Are you talking to me?—or . . .’ I wanted to say ‘or to your mother’ but I thought it might be going too far . . . .”
A chill of horror swept over me. How easily a dispute over $5 (N1,000) could lead to murder!
“Taiwo, this story is too depressing. Let’s get out of here!”
We got up.
“What color were these folks?” asked Ogbuagu. “Black, white, brown or yellow?”
“I don’t know,” said Taiwo. “I was too angry to notice. What difference would it make anyway? When Americans misbehave they’re all the same . . . .”
Onwuchekwa Jemie
