Gambling: My Addiction

“Why did you say you were brought here again?! Answer me before I use the back of my gun to make you talk. Abi you dey craze?!” She watched the saliva travel from the mouth of the police officer in front of her to the tip of her lips. It took her all the patience she could muster to stop herself from slapping the fat face in front of her. She opted for a hiss and got five slaps in return. She had expected worse. She was lucky.

“No be you I dey talk to? Abi the slap wey you don chop never do you reach?” She knew if she continued her stance of silence she would get that slap she was being threatened with. She cleared her throat and spoke up. I’m being accused of fraud.”

“Look at you opening that dirty small mouth to say you are being accused of fraud. They accuse you or you do am? Talk now before I sand you one hot slap wey go ring for your head three times.”

Omawunmi stared at the unyielding police officer in front of her. She had strolled through all the cells that hot afternoon to look for a scapegoat she could use to keep her company. She must have been bored from sitting in the rickety haunted-like chair that she called her official seat. She had stopped by her cell and called her out.

She was to be the entertainment.

Sweat dribbled down her face, avoiding her contours like the expert player it was. She needed a cold drink, she wasn’t getting any. Instead, she made the available desirable by licking the sweat off her face. It’s not like anyone would offer her lukewarm water either way. She would make do with what the universe offered her and be content. After all, she was the one that brought herself to her ruin.

She had started gambling when she was fifteen. She was still in SS1 when her mom overdosed and passed away in their family clinic leaving behind a debt that plunged the entire family’s financial health downhill. She was a gambling addict. She had bet all the funds her father had left in storage for her and her sister.

Unlike his wife, Mr. Adewunmi had been very prudent and meticulous when he was alive. He made sure to have trust funds for his daughters. Everything from health care down to even their weddings had been sorted out. He had left nothing out, it was almost as if he had known he would not live long enough.

Her mom had always been a big spender but her husband was able to keep her in check while he was alive. After he died, the demon in her let loose. She had terrible girlfriends that introduced her to gambling and in a bid to find something to occupy herself with, to cope with her grief, she had delved into it with the fullness of heart and purse.

She spent and spent. When she finally ran out of funds, she started taking from their trust funds. While they were in their final and second years respectively in the university, their mother overdosed one afternoon when she couldn’t deal with the financial pressure anymore.

***

Omawunmi sat down on the charcoal-colored floor that had served as her couch and bed for the past three weeks. You would have thought the child would have learned from her mother’s mistakes, to walk on the straight road, but not this girl. She had become a more refined gambler than her mother.

While her mother had gambled in tens and hundreds of thousands, Omawummi had chosen to work with millions. She spent even more lavishly and took even greater risks. Starting as a high schooler had given her all the experience and confidence she would ever need to become a professional in her passion. She didn’t just do it for the wins, she did it for the thrills.

While her mother gave the excuse of wanting to cater to her kids as a single mom, Wunmi gave no excuses for her weakness. She simply did it because she loved to. She could have lied to herself, like her mom, that she wanted to care for her younger sister but she didn’t. To her, “everyone had hobbies, gambling was hers.”

She picked up a crooked looking piece of stone. If she had not looked closely enough she would not have been able to identify it as it was the same color of charcoal as the ground. Her glasses had been confiscated at the counter, making life unbearable for her in the past twenty-one days.

She continued to observe the stone with squinted eyes, turning it around three hundred and sixty degrees before finally throwing it hard at the wall so it could bounce back to her to throw again. She hoped it would bounce. Again, she thought about placing a bet on whether or not it would bounce back when she remembered that the very act was what brought her to the hell she was in the first place. She resisted the urge.

With nothing left to do, she decided to engage in some flashbacks. She had all the time in the world either way. She made herself comfortable and adjusted in her seat before traveling down memory lane. Those precious moments were her life’s highlights. They were when she felt the most alive, the freest, “the most… me.”

She looked at the ceiling and traced out the map of Nigeria from the places that got stained from rain leakage. She checked to see if there was any other country or continent she could map out and closed her eyes to think when she didn’t find any.

She missed her high school days alright. She missed those days of youth where they could all bet with reckless abandon. There were no external factors to keep them in check or reconsider.

“No kids, no spouse, no reputation. Then, it was just a battle for supremacy. We did it for the fun of it. It was my purpose and my passion; an addiction that had started as a hobby.”

She thought about whether or not she had any regrets concerning it. After much thought, she concluded that she was blessed to have been introduced to something as filling as that.

For her, gambling wasn’t just a means to get extra cash or a source of thrills. For her, gambling filled a void; a dark black hole that nothing seemed to fill. It seemed to fill it and for that, she gratefully plunged into it.

She thought about resting her back on the wall so she could think comfortably but changed her mind after seeing the bedbug’s bloodstain on the wall. She had been able to rent herself a slightly comfortable cell from all the money she had harnessed. Unlike other cells where about twenty people fought for space, she shared her cell with only one woman. She had been right.

“As long as you have the right amount, all things are possible for you in Nigeria.”

She shook her head gently at how messed up and corrupt the system was. Here she was in jail for corruption when the people working in the ‘correction’ facility were even more corrupt. Left to her, they needed to be in the cells more than she did, or any other woman in any of the other cells in general.

She looked out through the iron bars and sighed. “Where was I again? Oh yeah, the good times. I guess I’ll just go back to that day when I used my school fees to gamble in L’Real at VI. Ouuuu… that was fun! Okay okay, let’s go back to that day.”

Her cellmate simply stared at her expressionless as always.

In the three weeks that the new chick had come, she had gotten used to witnessing those kinds of outbursts. She simply turned the other way on her mattress. She didn’t have the energy for any kind of drama that hot afternoon. Omawunmi noticed her, tilted her head as though she was thinking about something, and then waved it all off as though they were inconsequential and trivial compared to the euphoria she was about to experience reminiscing.

***

It was the first Friday of the new term. She was in her senior year and they were preparing for their mock exams the next week. The school had organized extra lessons for all the SS3 students because their WAEC exams were coming up. After the lesson, they decided to go gamble at L’Real in VI that evening. It turned out to be a really crazy game.

It was a card game like none other. They were not permitted to ‘fold’ and it was a winner-take-all kind of stake. Wunmi sat down in her seat tensed, her legs warm from the heat she was feeling on the inside. She wondered the kind of cards she would be dealt with and smiled rest assured when she saw that the dealer was a close acquaintance of hers.

Not that she planned to cheat though, she enjoyed the excitement that went along with the uncertainty of betting. It was a high stakes game and the winner would be going home with all her opponents win for that entire day. That was a big win alright. What would determine the win would be whose cards had a stronger hand.

The person with the higher stake got the upper hand because that person got to choose if it was a strong or weak set of cards that would be the stronger hand. They had their cards dealt to them and she looked at her cards. It needed crutches to stand. There was only one way to win– bluffing. She would have to bluff her way through and hope her opponent was not smart enough.

They started betting and after what seemed like an endless contest of who would drop the higher bid, she did the unthinkable. She bet her 2.5 million naira worth of school fees for that session. Her mom always gave her the full payment at the beginning of the term since they already had the money on the ground. She probably wouldn’t have done that if she knew that her daughter suffered the same sickness she did.

Her opponent felt overwhelmed by her bid and gave up. Wunmi was given the power to choose the order that would determine what the strong hand would be. She whispered ever so mischievously to the dealer. “Weaker please.” The dealer then dramatically shouted “showdown!”, which meant that both players had to put down their cards to determine the winner.

Wunmi won but only by sheer luck as her opponent also had a weak hand but it was not as weak as Wunmi’s.

Wunmi went home with five million naira in total that night. She knew she had a party to plan for the next weekend. The after-parties she always hosted after every win was another highlight of gambling for her.

She and her friends would get weed, codeine, shisha, spirits, and other instruments of highness so that they could get high, have orgies, and get wasted. It was always remarkable.

***

She wiggled her thighs together in excitement. Thinking about her orgies in high school brought back familiar wetness in between her thighs. She was horny and it was already dark but her cellmate held no sex appeal to her. She was too manly for her taste. She preferred thick and curvy women.

Not that she was a lesbian per se, she simply had no restriction when it came to her sexual appetite. As long as she felt aroused, she didn’t care if you were a man, woman, minor, or sugar daddy. She simply moved as she was led by her kitty.

She sighed in dismay. It was going to be another lonely hot night in the cell.

“I can’t believe I’m being locked up because of just Five Million Naira that I took from the bank. It’s not like I won’t pay it back oh. It’s just that I needed the cash urgently for a bet. I’m even their employee, how can they treat me like this?! Well, it’s not their fault. Shey, I will soon get bail? I will pay off their stinking debt and even add jara on top, those ungrateful bastards. With all the stress I undergo in their useless bank every day, they can not allow me to borrow some change from them. Bastards! Mtcheeew.”

Her hiss was long and loud enough to wake her partner up. She glared and cursed at her before going back to bed. Wunmi looked up to the ceiling. “Just a few more months girl. Maybe even shorter if Barrister Ken. plays his cards right. Just a little bit more and we will be out of this hell hole. We will be free again. Free to gamble however we want…”

She smiled mischievously and murmured a goodnight to herself before lying down on her bed and covering herself up. The mosquitoes in her cell looked like they carried AIDS instead of malaria.

All images are gotten from unsplash.com