Some Guys Have All the Luck
Sammy was no ordinary student.
Some guys have all the luck
Some guys have all the pain
Some guys get all the breaks
Some guys do nothing but complain
Alone in a crowd on a bus after work
and I'm dreaming
The guy next to me has a girl in his arms
My arms are empty
How does it feel when the girl next to you
says she loves you
It seems so unfair when there's love everywhere
but there's none for me
source: Some Guys Have all the Luck, a song by Rod Stewart
Humble Beginnings
Sammy was one of those guys that had all the pain. His life started with the death of his mother so he only knew her from pictures. If he had to plan it, things would have been different but he did not have any choice. Most times, when he met new friends and he told them that he never knew his mother, he always wished he could wipe the pity off their faces by adding, "... But my father more than made up for it..."
But he would be lying if he said that his father made up for the absence of his mother. Stories had it that his father was a decent man that worked as an accountant prior to his mother's demise. And that's it... Story had it. In all the time Sammy had known him, he was a mean, hopeless drunk with no sense of responsibility whatsoever. He often looked at him and tried to imagine him as an accountant. Finally, Sammy decided that his imagination was either too weak or the burden he was placing on it, too big.
However bad things were, Sammy's father was the reason Sammy had big dreams. He represented everything Sammy did not want to be. But wishing that things were different did not make them so. Everything he ever wanted, he had to fight tooth and nail, through blood and sweat to get them. He had never known what it was to be catered for.
His father had literally dumped him with his aunt Emilia, his dad's only sister, who had two children at the time. She nursed him until he was old enough to walk, old enough to be returned to his father. He did not know much to remember everything that happened those days but the curiosity of how he managed to get old enough living with a drunken father and no mother, revealed a lot to him from the mouths of strangers.
He could remember his first job. He was four years old. It consisted helping Mr Alanso remove chaff from cereals. Mr Alanso was a physically challenged man in Sammy's neighbourhood those days. He had a local store where he sold all kinds of grains: beans, rice, corn, millet and so on. Most of these came straight from local farms who did not have the equipment to properly process their produce. Sammy's work was to manually separate the chaff from the cereals. For his service, Mr Alanso, an unscrupulous businessman, often paid him with a meal.
Sammy went from that to a thousand other jobs as he went through secondary school. After secondary school, he spent another three years working in construction sites, working as a manual loader for trucks that hauled sand and gravel from a quarry to building construction sites.
Whenever he did not have a job from either construction sites or as a loader, he worked at the quarry. Due to all this hard labour, his big hands became calloused and made his grip feel like a wrench and his body carved out of stone. But he had a goal of going to school so he stayed out of trouble as much as he could. Another consequence of having to work so hard from such a young age was his complete lack of friends. He had never had a girlfriend. The girls who weren't afraid of him because he looked like a prizefighter, stayed away from him because they felt he had nothing to offer them. Well, all that would change in the university: he was going to start afresh with a blank slate.
The Blank Slate
Finally, he has made it to the University to study civil engineering. Having done several labour-intensive jobs at building sites, he became fascinated with buildings and the careful planning that went into them. He was supposed to be excited to be finally here but thinking about all he went through to get here, took all the excitement out of it.
Trouble Sleeps
Sammy was a fresher at the University of Nigeria. He was barely two weeks in the school when he went to the bar just outside the school campus to rest after a hard day's work. He never liked drinking much but he found it helped him take the edge off.
In the bar, there were about eighteen students seated at various tables. The bar was crowded. The sound of Bob Marley's Redemption Song was coming out of the speakers. At the end of the bar, stood a very beautiful girl at smiling at him. He looked at her but was not convinced that she was looking at him. He followed her eyes and looked at the space after him but there was no one after him. He walked over to her, his heart in his hands, and invited her to join him at his table.
"My name is Sammy," he said. "If I didn't just come in, I would say that I'm drunk and the alcohol is messing with my head. Aren't you the most beautiful girl ever!"
The girl just kept smiling as he guided her to his table and they sat down. "Please, may I know your name?" he asked.
"I'm Grace," she said, smiling. "I thought you'd never ask."
He had barely sat down to drink his Guinness stout when someone touched him on the shoulder and said, "Walk!"
The bar was growing cold and quiet gradually. He did not bother to turn around and look at the person but he looked around the bar and realised that the there were about three other boys walking around the bar and telling people the same single word, "Walk."
He looked at Grace and realised that her colour had changed. She was visibly shaken and scared. There was none of that initial light he saw in her eyes.
"Are you alright, Grace?" he asked.
"No, I'm sorry but we have to leave here, immediately. Those guys walking around are dangerous. They are monsters," she said.
"No, I'm the monster," he thought. He asked her who they were.
"They are members of a fraternity which students around school generally referred to as cults," she said. These fraternities had existed in Nigerian schools since the 1960's but only recently did they turn violent and oppressive. Sammy listened quietly while measuring up the five guys at the end of the bar, still chasing other students out. He told Grace to calm down and that everything would be alright. She wanted a bottle of water so he ordered one for her.
He took a drink from the bottle of stout and placed it back on the table. Immediately, one of the boys returned and tapped him on the should again, "Was it not you that I asked to leave here?" he asked. Sammy neither spoke nor looked up but he was having extreme difficulty holding himself together as he was boiling over in anger. He was seated with his elbows on the table. With the nail of his right forefinger, he repeatedly knocked on his front teeth making a strange knocking sound in the now eerily quiet bar.
The boy picked up his bottle of drink and poured the liquid content on Sammy's head. Strangely, the beer on his head calmed him down a little. Sammy ignored him. Instead, he asked the bar attendant to bring him another bottle of beer. As soon as the drink was served, the fraternity boy took the bottle and broke it on Sammy's head. Grace jumped from her seat in shock as the beer and Sammy blood mixed and flowed freely down his face, staining his dress. Yet, he did not move.
"Please, let me have a bottle of coke," Sammy ordered in calm but slightly trembling voice. The bottle had barely touched the table when it flew into Sammy's hand. Breaking the bottle on the floor and pushing it into the fraternal boy's chest happened in one swift movement. The clutched his wounded chest and fell.
Then Sammy stood up and looked around, "Who hit me?" was all he asked. The other four boys ran away from the bar with the speed of sound, leaving their friend writhing in pain on the floor. At their heels was Grace, not chasing them but going for safety. She could not decide which was the more terrifying - the boys or Sammy. She ran as fast as her legs could carry her.
Sammy lifted the wounded boy and carried him on his shoulders to the school clinic. He dropped him at the reception and left without a word. The blood on his face was too much to allow for any reasonable identification. He went home and washed, then applied first aid on his head.
Sammy did not know, but his name was circulated around the school as One Man Squad and everyone was afraid of him. The low profile he so desperately wanted to maintain was out of the window.
But becoming popular did not bother him as much as the fact that Grace would not talk to him. She avoided him like a plague for months, afraid that he was the worst kind of the dreaded cult boys. Eventually, Sammy met Grant, who was a boyfriend to Grace's roommate. Through Grant, Sammy indirectly communicated to Grace.
It took Sammy the rest of the year to convince Grace that he was neither a cult member nor a violent person. After persistent persuasion, she finally agreed to be his girlfriend. The first time they kissed, it seemed to Sammy that a special kind of sun had been shone upon the earth, giving everything a special kind of colour that he hadn't noticed before.
Gradually, she helped him forget the hell he went through to get there. He found a new reason to be alive and this gave him the motivation he needed to study well and graduate among the best in his class. Of course, he still had to work to support himself through school but it was a different kind of work and he was happier than he had ever been. He tutored his fellow students, supervised small projects and drew plans for clients.
"What do you know," he thought. "There is life on this planet after all."
Images were obtained from pixabay
Original short fiction authored by @churchboy
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