Behind Closed Doors

Chapter Six

Phoenix was seated before the vanity table of the dressing room of the Drummer Club, preparing to get ready to go onstage for his performance. As he plied black kohl on his eyelids with meticulous care, the diamond ring on his right hand flashed, catching his attention. The ring had been a stupid mistake on his part, a temporary aberration that was never to be repeated again. But he had been unable to stop himself from seeking for that ring; the ring was too beautiful and it had caught his fancy, and it was so obviously not a fake. The other guy had been very willing to part with the thing after only a moment’s hesitation when he could have refused to part with the thing, so it meant that the guy was obviously loaded with juice. Phoenix had not spent the months at the Drummer Club without developing a well-honed instinct for detecting the signs that emanated from the guys of the upper echelon of the Lagos society.

The young man who owned the ring was obviously new at the altar of gay love because of his insatiable need for their tryst and the fact that he had subsequently written a note to Phoenix, along with some money and an apology for being unable to honor their second appointment.

‘Phoenix.’

He looked up, dragging his traitorous senses from its contemplation of the rich enigmatic stranger to focus back on his immediate surroundings. A tall dark man with a sculpted body and a finely chiseled face was standing behind him. It was Ali Hassan, the Northerner who owned the snakes Phoenix usually used for his acts.

‘Can you handle the cobra even with the fact that it has had its poison sac removed?’ he asked.

Phoenix nodded, a smile appearing on his lips. His eyes met the eyes of the man through the mirror and their gaze held, and he knew that when his act for the night was over, he’d have to show the man his gratitude in bed. Without another word, Phoenix stood up and walked away from the room, and in his mind which was a large labyrinth of memories and a long corridor of events, the past and the present began to merge into one incomprehensible whole.

*

PHOENIX.

That was his name, the name that he’d chosen to merge with his identity, but it was not the name that he’d been born with. He had been born as Tochi Okoh in 1981 to Andrew and Andrea Okoh. His father was a commercial bus driver in the teeming city of Onitsha where he’d pitched tent after walking away from his life in Lagos working as a factory worker in Ikeja and his mother was a small-time seamstress with very little prospects of advancement. There was his older sister and older brother, and then his kid sister who was conceived three years after his unceremonious birth.

His earliest memory of himself was a little boy with the plump face and the very quiet disposition who people loved to carry about. As he grew up, he skipped some classes, advancing forward, and, by some twist of fate, he found himself in the same class with his older brother after he’d lost all his set mates who were not skipping up to the higher classes like he was.

Phoenix came from a higher lower-income earning family by the then Nigerian standards, with a plethora of aunts and uncles. Then, in 1990, when he became enrolled in for his junior secondary school alongside his elder brother Matthew, his problems really started. Already, he’d lost his chunkiness and the plumpness of his baby years, but his body was round, his legs curved like a girl’s, his ass full and very round, and his face was very delicate-looking as to render him very feminine, making people to wonder sometimes if he was really male. From that age of nine, his effeminacy had become really apparent, too pronounced, and he was often bullied by the boys of the school because of his fragility, and because he was too young to be in their midst.

‘You really must stop this stupid feminine behavior of yours,’ Matthew would admonish him in anger. ‘It is ridiculous.’

But Phoenix really couldn’t stop it. It was a part of his genetic make-up, and there was no way he could control that behavior. It was a deeply ingrained feature of his psyche that couldn’t be dispelled even via his greatest efforts. He was relegated to the background, a nondescript fellow who lacked the commanding presence and the hyped sense of masculinity of the other boys. He was the isolated one at school, the one no one would really associate with unless where absolutely necessary, and at home, he was treated with open contempt by his brother and the kids of the neighborhood because of the fact that his behavior was unacceptable.