Right before the dot-com crash I cashed out all my stock and joined the Peace Corps. I didn’t see it coming; I was just seriously fed up with cubicles and Starbucks. They sent me to Calabar, in Nigeria, with a mandate to make sure pregnant women were getting plenty of folate. This wound up being a cruel joke: Women with any amount of money ate unbelievable (by American standards) quantities of greens. Women with no money basically ate starch and not enough of it. If I had been a bigger man I would have worked my ass off trying to get money together so poor women could afford to eat their greens, but instead I jacked around watching gangster videos and having Guinness Book amounts of sex.
I was having a semi-illicit affair with an Efik girl named Nsedu who was five years younger and an inch taller than me, and wore her hair in a rope of pencil-thin braids that reached to the small of her back. The braids were completely artificial and took seven or eight hours to put in, but that did nothing to weaken how hard they jerked my libido. (I have a steel plate in my head that took seven or eight hours to put in, so she and I were at approximate cyborg parity.)
We were always very careful to keep our rendezvous secret. I didn’t understand why, but shit: Braids? Big hips? Spycraft? That’s totally my cocktail. We beat the hell out of the bed in my apartment—a handmade wooden deal with a mattress like a lasagna noodle that we’d pile up with sheets and cushions and pillows. That was the unstable basis of our relationship.
Nsedu had a brother named Udom I ran into fairly often. He was some kind of shady import-export guy with all kinds of unobtainable merchandise. He drove a 1975 Winnebago Brave exactly like the one my grandma bought when her husband died. She drifted down out of Colorado and ended up in a squatter’s camp a few miles south of Ensenada, frying fish and smoking Te-Amos clear up to 1990 when she moved into a retirement home.
Anyway, Udom also had a remarkable collection of hats. Did I mention he looked pretty much exactly like Tom Mix? (I wouldn’t have known Tom Mix from Rex Allen so Nsedu had to explain it to me.) Everybody except his mother called him Mix, and his buddy Afiah painted a reproduction “Son of the Golden West” poster on the side of the Bago. This is how running into Udom typically went: You’d say, “Hey, Mix.” He’d say “Resistol” or “Borsolino” and tap his brim with one finger. That was usually all the conversation you got.
Nsedu and I had just wrapped up an epic wrestling match that ran right through breakfast and lunch, so while she was sneaking out the back I was dragging my raw self down to the corner to get my first meal of the day. Udom pulled up in his Winnebago. I said, “Hey, Mix.” He said, “Kangol,” with the tap.
We shook hands. He said, “I need you to take a ride with me.” This was something totally new. As far as I knew, he never let anybody in his Winnebago.
I said, “Sure thing,” and started to take shotgun.
He said, “No, in back,” and opened the wobbly fiberglass door for me. It was dark in there.
I said, “What’s up?”
He said, “Please,” so I climbed in and he climbed in behind me.
The van started to move. I looked toward the cab but there was a curtain blocking it off. I said, “What’s up, Mix?” again.
He pulled something from his pants pocket and held it against his thigh. “Webley .455,” he said. “Please sit down.”
I looked at the gun and edged down into one of the grape velour captain’s chairs. He took a seat in the other chair and crossed his legs. “Are you screwing my sister?” he asked.
“What?” I said, but he held up a finger.
“Answer carefully,” he said. “If you deny it I’ll let you go. If you admit it I’ll also let you go. But,” he said, “I’ll kill Nsedu.”
“Fuck you,” I said, hoping this was all a strange piece of Nigerian humor. “This is 2002. This is Calabar. It can’t be news to you that grown people are having sex.”
“So,” he said, “you admit it.”
“Wait, no,” I said, figuring better safe than sorry. “I deny it.”
“You deny it,” he said. “You deny that you are sleeping with my sister.”
“I wish I were,” I said, “but she always turns me down. Maybe I have body odor.”
“All right then,” he said.
“All right then,” I said. “Can I go now?”
“If you’re telling the truth,” he said.
“I am, Mix. You know me.”
“I’d like to check,” he said. “Didn’t Ronald Regan say, ‘Trust, but verify?’”
“Ask Nsedu,” I said. “She’ll say the same thing.”
Mix shook his head. “I’d like to check another way. An older way.”
I didn’t like the sound of this.
With one hand on the gun and one eye on me he opened a cabinet and pulled out a bowl full of peppercorns, or rat turds, or dried newt’s eyes. “Alligator pepper,” he said. “If you eat them without screaming I’ll know you’re telling the truth. If you scream I’ll have to kill Nsedu.”
“Like throwing a witch in a pond to see if she drowns?” I said.
“Drowning is for pussies,” he said. “Eat the peppers.”
This didn’t sound too much different from a drinking game I had played a few times with jalapeños and tequila. I didn’t mind eating the peppers, but I couldn’t believe he was seriously going to kill his sister. “You’re full of shit,” I said. “Let’s stop playing and go have a drink. I’ll buy you a Johnny and Wilfort.” He loved Johnny and Wilfort, so he should have taken me up on it. Instead he cocked the pistol. I dumped the peppercorns into my mouth.
“Chew,” he said.
“Udom,” I mumbled, “you’re putting me on.”
“What do you know about the Efik,” he said. “All you know about the Efik is tits and ass. We have rules, man. From before you people ever got here. Now shut up and chew.”
I chomped down. Once I got past the texture of dry rotten wood, the peppers tasted like the coffee I used to get when I worked in Riyadh. What’s the spice they put in Arab coffee? Cardamom, I think. Then the heat started up behind my ears and washed over my scalp. It passed, and left an aftertaste like foam on sand. “Can I go now?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. The van made a sharp turn and he had to steady himself with a hand. “Right after you finish this.” He produced a shot glass with more peppercorns. “Sarawak,” he said.
I have a cousin in Brunei who tells Sarawak jokes the way kids in Iowa used to tell Polack jokes. The jokes always have to do with shrunken heads and cannibalism.
I pictured Udom in a pot and knocked the peppers back. Mostly they made me feel like I needed to piss. “I call bullshit,” I said. “No way the Efik had Sarawak peppers for any ancient ritual.”
“Sichuan,” Udom said, holding out an envelope.
“This is what I’m saying,” I said. “You can’t tell me there were a bunch of Chinese traders in Nigeria back in the Wood Age.”
“You’re free to go,” he said, almost whispering. “But then I’ve got work to do.”
I shook the peppers into my mouth. I swear to god my nose went numb. “You bastud!” I yelled. “You poisud be!”
He smacked a bowl of little red rosebuds down on the table. “Ata Ijose,” he shouted. “Eat them or go!”
I scooped the peppers into my mouth and tried to show contempt. But then: Oh my god! My body jackknifed and I threw my arms around my head. “Eee,” I wheezed. Snot was running onto my chest. I tried to scrape it off with the back of my wrist.
Somewhere out there Udom muttered, “Liar,” and I heard the latch turn.
“Wait!” I yelped. “I’m okay!”
Spit was running out of both sides of my mouth. I was not okay.
Udom was holding out a saucer of reeking turds. “Ose Nsukka,” he said. “Hornbills love them. But you don’t want to step in their shit.”
My eyes were almost matted shut. I reached out a shaking hand for a turd.
Udom howled and yanked the saucer away. “You thought I was going to make you eat turds!” He pulled out a basket of carrot-sized yellow peppers. “Turds!”
I took a pepper and bit off half. My knees knocked together like croquet balls. I was barely holding my piss.
“Guyana pepper,” I think he said. Everything looked like Vaseline on the lens. I wasn’t even trying to control my tears and snot at this point. The tiny plate he was holding out held a scotch bonnet, a pepper I recognized from a vacation in Jamaica that would have been the high point of my life had it not been for six weeks of diarrhea after eating pepper soup.
I tried to say, “I can’t.”
He was smiling like the Cheshire Cat. I couldn’t see anything but teeth. Some kind of stainless torture instrument was floating off to the left.
“Isotope tongs!” he crowed. “You can’t believe the watch lists I’m on!”
I batted at the tongs and knocked them to the floor. They were down there somewhere on the utility carpet. The tongs. I picked them up.
“Don’t burn your fingers,” Udom said.
I tonged at the scotch bonnet. It took me three tries. I tried to bring it to my mouth but missed. It was like bobbing for apples. Finally my teeth hit the pepper and my lips burst into flames.
I was hovering above the Winnebago like a tethered balloon. Down on the road was a parade of beautiful girls, naked breasts swaying with every step. They were carrying bowls of stew and bottles of whiskey and it was all for me! Out in the Cross River fish were icing down coolers of beer. Birds were arriving from all over Africa to fan me with their wings. I had to thank them somehow. I had to find a way to convey my ecstasy!
“One more thing,” said Udom.
Who the fuck was “Udom?” Some sick bastard was holding out a fat little pepper on the tip of a gutting knife. He was saying something I couldn’t make out. It sounded like, “Jalokia.”
I grabbed the pepper like the Jubilee Diamond and popped it into my mouth. That monster wasn’t going to escape with the diamond! I was going to save the day! I ran around the Bago like a six-legged gibbon, ripping down Jim Morrison posters, peeling up the carpets, slashing at the upholstery. My head was round like a pumpkin and wrinkled like a leaf. I was the god of fire! Vengeance was mine!
Somewhere there was laughter, filling the world. Nsedu was climbing from the cab into the cabin, holding her sides, ringing like a bell. “You pass, boy,” she said. “You pass.”
The curtain dropped shut and the van began to move. Nsedu, still laughing, pulled her skirt up to her waist and said, “Come here. You pass.” I stretched up for her hips and she slapped the back of my head so hard it stilled the ringing in my ears. “Not with your mouth,” she laughed. “Not with your hands. Not for a long, long time.
When my enlistment was up, Udom magically produced a visa for Nsedu and she and I flew back together. We had a few years near enough to bliss, and even now that she has finished law school and gone home, every time I think of her belly I fall down in the street.
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I bought this zine from you at zinefest recently- I love it, thanks! It’s already been passed on to three people. I should have bought more of your stories- maybe at lutefisk sushi?
Thanks! I’m going to miss the LSD opening, but I hope you have a great time! The other Untold Tales are on this site, but I’ll happily send you paper copies. Let me know.