Sonny

By

George O. Obikoya

Everyday is Christmas for him. That is what he tells his clients. He greets all in a raspy baritone with “Merry Xmas” anytime of day or year, his infectious teethy grin many say is material for commercial diodes. He admits he is a dreamer and would actually not mind being a star. Yet, he cowers to rot in the dark to feast the birds, cast in shadows of molds unknown to his immutable spirit.

Not unlike the Father Christmas some call him, he is generous beyond reproach, with which though he often contends for as they say being too kind. He says his world is flat, anachronously but insistently. One never tire to talk, something he attributes to a bug bite in utero, and clearly to the consternation of his listeners, and sometimes their amusement, such is what he calls his depth.

Perhaps he is right to an extent, since his audience grows larger each time he says he wants to verbalize, as if he does not ever until announced. Of course they say it heralds another day, one in the many celebrations of his transcendence, as he puts it, for spiritual communion, a veritable celestial intercourse played out on terra firma.

He lampoons his clients for straying from the grail, although refrains from elevating it to the level of a sanctum despite often being pressured by them so to do. He says he alone is fit enough to partake in such holiness, but he is talking about it to invite the rest to join in. For him, Bacchus deserves respect, and he is not about to engage in a holy dance with infidels.

They laugh egregiously, some bursting out in a song, a Christmas song in a peculiar manner, he says, speaks to their disrespect for the message. He tries to sing alone, the different tunes a medley way off a song, closer to the depressing gyrations of an oboe in limbo, as one curtly remarks at the end.  

He admits to be content to hear voices spoken by his clients of observers draped in nothing yet hidden from view. He says they are his friends too, when he is soaked enough to groove or have run out of booze. He dismisses them though as inconsequential in the schema he ropes around his earthling friends, of whom he says there is hope to shed the bacchanal and be neat.

Some say that he is judgmental, a tag he vigorously denies. Contrariwise, he counsels the need for salvation from the diatribe his clients often say of some stranger, in a transformation akin to a circus shell, its patrons watching from far away within. A lanky young man, he says he has no room for more invaders of his sacred heart, the temple he says of his inequities, more of which he says his clients battle with, and over which he seeks to help them prevail.

Nonetheless, he seems ill-prepared to quench his own thirst, for the spirit lurking in the bottle. He says he abhors the dark, the dungeon to which it would condemn him, for his treachery jettisoning his love, one he imbibed from long ago, since the day his father slept off with it half empty, when he was the first of his siblings, at just six years old. He says that his newfound elder brother is now in the dark, huddled by mania and treated manna in an ethereal tango, cements those thoughts.

He denies allegations of rationalizations, insisting his hands are clean, blaming atavistic forces for his predicament, leveling counter claims of worse ills plaguing his clients evident in the maze of tracks they tread in a melee of exsanguinous drones, groping in a dark abyss that floats nowhere. The combination of his and theirs seems to deprive his audience of any of whatever remains of reason. So, he holds sway in a world full of drones, himself one, he admits, although at lesser risk of being an endangered species.

He says he understands their plight is the reason he sets the place up for lost souls, although he admits his failure in not keeping from straying the very souls he seeks to mend. He says he is a preacherman without a church, albeit in name, as his temple as he prefers to term it is home to even unbelievers, in which category he says his clients belong. For him, he would be forever recovering his soul from oblivion, which makes it excusable to lapse, being as he says, only human.

When they ask him to elaborate on his weaknesses, he cites what he calls his occasional rendezvous with the spirits. They say that they are also weak in spirit is why they lack their souls. He says that sounds a little rational for a change. He looks round the room in the usual manner to see if there is a new order, or trouble. Having been in the business for long, he seems to have acquired a paranoia for all that moves, even bugs.

This time however, it seems different. The room is full, new faces at the back, introduced by one of the regulars somewhat more coherently than usual, he remarks. The exchange continues, his sermon focused on how to enter the fiefdom of the self, an ability to differentiate truth from jargon dressed up as truth, sometimes caressed in harmony for effect. His message then of a little of what he preaches against to null his own weakness must ring true to him somehow given his history says someone in the crowd with a laconic smile that sits awkwardly on his nose as he pulls off his guise.

He stops visibly shaken, staring right overhead all else, then suddenly blurting, “Dad!!!”
“Yes, its me Sonny.”

His father makes a short speech, read from a crumpled piece of paper he retrieves from his breast pocket, essentially chronicling his son’s life history, and that of himself. He says he feels guilty about what happened to his son, and what his son has done to people under his tutelage. However, he says his son is not supposed to be peddling at a rehab facility he runs, and that he being a law enforcement officer, first has to take his son in for his crimes, and later for professional medical attention. However, he admits he has already been sentenced for life, for his, in his mind, since the day he passed out leaving that half-empty bottle of spirit on the side table.