Purple Drank

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Picture The Boy – no older than 20- rolling a blunt on a wooden coffee table. He’s in a bedsit in Roysambu; small windows, cheap curtains, wooden door. He’s in a t-shirt and jeans, the official body armour for the young and free. Hiphop music is playing on the the laptop -the type you dance to while bouncing on the balls of your feet. His friend – the owner of the bedsitter – is lying on the sofa, his long legs stretched out, one arm behind his head, the other pinching the last of the burning tip of a blunt. The small room smells of weed and fresh paint and old socks. This is how boys live, in a colossal ruin of youth.
They are freshmen. I would like to be vague and mention that they are freshmen in a university “along Thika Road”, but it’s pointless as you will see as the story unfolds that this could be USIU. The previous day had been orientation where older students had impressed upon them the evils of drug abuse, after which The Boy had gone to a “fresher’s party” where the same older student who was talking about drug abuse was standing at the window smoking a blunt.
“That’s when I knew this place was mad,” says The Boy. He’s nibbling at a chicken sandwich, a cap pulled low over his face. He has white earphones dangling from his neck, a silver stud gleams from his left earlobe, and when his lips aren’t moving, they are set in a cynical grimace, because at that age you must question the world and its people a lot. Emblazoned across his t-shirt are the words “virtual obsession”, aptly ironic. He has a thread necklace with a metallic pendant of the Eiffel Tower. I wondered if it had a significance and I asked him, what it was. And he – fiddling with the pendant, had said deadpan, “This is the Eiffel Tower.” No shit. So no, it’s just a pendant, no significance. It could have been a boat or a penny or a hoe. For now it’s the Eiffel Tower. His Whatsapp picture is of his mugshot wearing a black hood pulled over his head but instead of his face is a smiley face drawn in white. Like one of the characters on the Scream movies, which I can’t bring up to him because the first Scream movie was released just about when he was born. I’m not ready to feel old. Yet.
He’s a good looking boy with great charisma and a cockiness that comes with knowing that the world will always feed out of your hand. Notably, he has his mother’s sense of humour.
Speaking of which, his mother is my friend. Actually his mother was my pal’s girlfriend, she’s a single mom of two. Things didn’t work out so they split up and normally when that happens, the rules of the jungle dictate that your relationship with your boy’s ex shouldn’t be close. Something called allegiance. (You might have heard of it.) Such a friendship should remain like a plant that shouldn’t be watered. But when they broke up two years ago I never stopped being friends with her because she’s über cool, funny as hell, unpretentious and she keeps it real all the time. I thought, “why do I have to break up with her too? I’ll keep this one.” So I did. We retained the friendship.
The Boy describes the first semester in uni as a rabbit hole filled with debauchery and the kind of decisions that only the young can make. He lived in the campus hostels but spent all his time with his boy in his bed-sit where they lounged around with the windows open and smoked weed and watched hip hop and the making of the videos and the interviews thereafter. They tried not to let school and classes intrude on this plan too often.
Everytime I see a young-un with earphones stuffed in their skull I always want to ask what they are listening to. I see the earphones as this mysterious vortex of strange callings and strange emotions, a world of secrecy and a mystifying dialect from a different tribe. Now I ask The Boy what kind of music they would be listening to, what kind of music he listened to as he was coming here.
“Travis Scott,” he says. “You know him?”
“No,” I say. “Ask me another one.”
He laughs and rummages in his memory for another artist.
“Lil Pump.”
“Why is he called Lil Punk?”
“No, it’s Lil Pump.”
Ah, never heard of that one as well.
“21 Savage?”
“Jeez, no. Never heard of him either. But I know Lil Wayne.”
He chuckles. Later I will Google Lil Pump and find a picture of his middle finger extended at the camera, colourful dreadlocks that look like a serpent’s small colon. I watched one video where he carries bags of weed and a styrofoam cup while singing “Gucci gang Gucci gang Gucci gang/ me and my grandma still taking meds/ I can’t buy a bitch no wedding ring/ rather go buy Balmain/ Gucci gang Gucci gang Gucci gang/ fucking my teacher, call it tutorial/ none of this shit be new to me/ Gucci gang Gucci gang Gucci gang/ I fucked a bitch and forgot her name…” There is a Tiger in the video that may or may not be the bitch he referenced. It was all so confusing, this Pump guy. The only
part I liked is where someone kept doing “brrrrr” in the song.
“I remember watching Lil Wayne’s interviews and he would always be so high, slurring, holding the double styrofoam cup,” he says. “He [Lil Wayne] always made passing reference to what was in his cup. That was like a new culture for us. We were curious as to what was in that cup! Lil Wayne trademarked that styrofoam cup, trademarked it, and we were dying to know, what the hell was in that cup because – ”
His phone rings. He fishes it out of his pocket and looks at it and then answers with a soft voice that I’m sure Lil Pump (or his menacing tiger) would not approve of.
“Hello, hi…yes…I’m having lunch….no, I left the house, I’m not at home….Adam’s Arcade…Mom’s friend… we are just talking….[chuckles]…he’s called Biko…I will….yes….OK, bye.”
“Who was that?” I ask like a jealous lover.
“That’s my cucu, everybody is alert now, they want to know where I am and what I’m doing….anyway, where was I?”
“Lil Wayne’s cup.”
“Yes. So yeah everyone wanted to know what is in Lil Wayne’s cup and finally one time he revealed it in an interview, it was codeine and promethazine.”
If you do a quick search on Google like I did after, you will stumble on the The Double Styrofoam Cup or Double Cup trend that he’s talking about, known to be Lil Wayne’s signature. In that cup is what they call Purple Drank which is a mixture that became popular in the hip hop community originating in Houston. It contains codeine and promethazine. Codeine is cough medicine, promethazine is used to treat allergies and motion sickness, nausea, vomiting, swollen lips from eating fish etc.
“Huko majuu it’s purple in colour because they mix it with some soft drink that is that colour. So anyway, we google the Kenyan brand names for this thing and Benylin comes up…”
So he leaves his pal in the house and walks to the nearest chemist where he hangs at the back to let a few customers finish. Finally alone, he stands at the grill and tells the lady that he needs Benylin. The chemist doesn’t have promethazine syrup so she gives him the pill form – 1o of them. He also buys the one litre of Sprite and heads back to the house. “I spent, maybe, over a gee, because the Benylin was 5 sock and the pills were 550, so yeah, a gee fifty,” he says. “Now we didn’t know the quantities of these things to mix this so we emptied half of the sprite and dissolved all the ten pills into the remaining half. We chapad a flash then a second one then we started sipping the third one pole pole.”
“How did that feel?” I ask.
“Have you ever smoked weed?”
I tell him I have, a few times. Hated it. The few times I smoked it all I wanted was to sleep, I felt like a baby. I would never hang out with Lil Pump.
“So when you smoke weed your brain become stupid and it’s always shifting. This wasn’t like weed… I don’t know how to describe it. [Pause] Everything moves so slowly, the music is slow and you get this feeling of wanting to sleep, you feel like if you sleep now you will get the best sleep in your life, but you are not supposed to sleep because then what’s the point of taking it, right? So we rolled another…..waaah. I don’t know how I felt, maybe euphoria, I don’t know. I felt like nothing was wrong. You feel so calm and chilled and when you speak you hear yourself speaking normally but people listening can tell you are high. But you don’t care. You never panic, nothing makes you anxious, life is just so easy. I could have stepped on a puppy and felt nothing. That night we put it into Sprite bottles and went to Persia to hang out…”
[Persia is at TRM (Thika Road Mall) probably a place cool children hang out] Normally they would only go to Westlands if someone had money and there was always someone with money. “A guy would win a sports gamble and say, okay, I have 30K tonight, dress up, I’m treating you all tonight. And we would all dress up.” He continues. “Guys realised that at the club we wouldn’t be drinking, we were just sipping our Sprites. At this time, this thing – just beginning of last year – had not shikad USIU, nobody knew about it. It was our discovery, we were the founders. But the thing is when you take too much cough syrup it just messes you up; you forget what you were saying mid-sentence, you doze off while talking, and that wasn’t working for us because we wanted to stay up. So we found a pill called Ritalin – it’s for people with ADHD. That drug would make us stay up for over two days!”
“When you say you found, where did you find it; on Google?” I ask.
“ No. There was a chick in Uni who used to use it to stay awake to study at night. That thing is like ten times Red Bull. We were getting better at this, improving the product. We would also get recommendations from our chemist lady on what other drugs would work. People started catching on with this thing, we were…”
A friend of mine walks over to say hello. I stand to hug her and when I turn to introduce The Boy I find he was already on his feet, like a gentleman. He stands until the lady leaves. I found that very, very strange and confusing, these good manners. On one hand is a boy listening to someone say they fuck a bitch and forget their name, and would never buy them a no wedding ring and on the other hand he’s got the breeding to stand up when a lady comes to his table.
Lil Pump’s aversion to buying a wedding ring or remembering names intrigued me. I wondered if the wedding ring in question and all the references were simply generational metaphors that the rest of us can’t comprehend. I wondered if we had missed the whole point of the message in these songs. Maybe this genre of hip hop is multilayered and nuanced as a form of high allegory that we will never appreciate as a generation.
After watching the video, I had called The Boy and asked him if he would buy “a bitch a wedding ring” and he said “Nope.” I asked why and he said, “Maybe for her pinkie.” There is a song by 21 Savage that says, ‘fuck a wedding ring I bought a necklace.”
“Do you see yourself married in future?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” he laughed.
Anyway second semester they moved into a two bedroom 27K a month apartment outside uni with a friend of his. When the mother met his roommate, because she had to know who he was going to live with, he was a very polite and disciplined boy. He was muslim, very well-spoken and quite well-behaved. “He would finish his phone-conversation with his parents by saying “Mashallah” and when I heard that I thought, baas my son is going to be in good company. Those boys just played me,” she told me.
He was getting KShs 2,500 a week in allowance and so was his roommate and so they had a 5K to play with. “His money was my money and my money was his money. We were brothers. The house we moved into, we discovered, had over 1,000 units of electricity from the former tenant who we were told was a drug dealer. So now we weren’t paying for electricity and all the money went into buying drugs. Do you know what a Trap House is?”
I say I didn’t know what a Trap House is. In fact at this point I realise that I didn’t know anything, nothing at all. I mean if I don’t know who Lil Pump is what good was I, breathing near him? I’m also weak and disgraceful to be the kind of guy who might buy a bitch a wedding ring.
“That house was a Trap House, a crazy house,” he says. “It was everyone’s house, people walked in and out, some slept there, others would leave their clothes there. We would wake up and do nothing the whole day but mix that drug, smoke weed, play video games and watch musical videos. Whole day, man! I started skipping most of my classes.”
“Did that bother you?” I ask with unrealistic hope.
“Nothing bothered me, nothing can bother you when you are on that stuff. Anyway, one morning as I was preparing to go to go to school, someone knocked on the door. It was around 7am, since our house always had people coming in and out, I thought it was one of the pals.I opened the door and there was a guy standing there. He was a short guy with a beard and all these piercings everywhere and was wearing all black; black jacket, black trousers, black shoes, man, everything black. He said, ‘ You guy, I left my stima here.” I asked him, ‘what stima?’ He said “You know what I’m talking about, don’t act stupid.’ {He laughs] I told him, ‘Ebu wait’ and then I went to wake my housemate up: “There is a guy here who says he left his stima here, I think he’s the guy whose stima we have been using.’ Of course I knew he was the drug dealer who had come back for his stima because as soon as I had opened the door, the chaps who were sleeping in the sitting room just fled from the house. Ha-ha.”
They never paid the drug dealer his money because they didn’t care or fear. He says that his house-mate’s father is in the armed forces and so he has a “reputation” so the dealer didn’t dare mess with him. Plus they were buying weed from this dealer. Weed for an electricity plan.
His mom noticed a gradual change in him whenever he went back home on Friday afternoons. He would sleep a lot. His eyes had changed colour. (“When Mom started commenting on my eyes I started using eye drops and that sorted that problem,” he says). He says she only noticed that he was high only when he would talk to her because of his lazy talk. Back in uni things were getting worse. Their house became more hectic and became a real trap house because they would not leave the house for a whole week. Girls would drift through at odd hours, looking for weed or booze or sex or all of the above. By now they weren’t bothering with making appearances in class. When they were in school they had backpacks on their backs, Sprite bottles in their hands and music in their ears, listening to Lil Pump tell them how they will be damned if they ever remember a bitch’s name.
“How much sex was happening in that apartment? I ask.
“Lots of sex, man,” he says. “There were girls who wouldn’t mind just spending over, you know.”
“Were you all using protection?
“All the time. Whenever we went to the chemist to load up we would always buy condoms. There were always more condoms in that house than the people at any given time.” A third member joined them. He was a foreign student with more money to spend. They weren’t eating because, well, food was a waste of space. When they did eat it was chips. He lost weight. He would be awake for days, high, euphoric, drinking, smoking, watching videos, staring into blank space, playing video games. Money wasn’t a problem. He says he’s very good at the FIFA video game. He would bet and play and win.
“Then Mom started asking me about my exam results, “ he says, “and since I had failed I didn’t know what to tell her. Thankfully, my uni has a system where only you have the password to access your results, nobody else can. So I started giving excuses to her and finally I heard that she was calling the school asking questions, snooping around, so I asked my friend who is an IT whiz to scramble the system if she tries to gain access to my grades and he was successful. She was locked out for a bit. Meanwhile she would call asking me about my results every day, I would tell her, “Aii mom, si you relax I will get them for you!”
Finally the truth came out and she was livid. He doesn’t recall the tongue-lashing because he was high throughout the diatribe. By this time The Boy had discovered a drug called MDMA [Ecstasy]. They were also doing Valium on top of everything else and they’d be high for eight hours straight. A few days after discovering that he had failed, his mom showed up at the apartment with movers. His things were hauled away in a truck.
He was enrolled in a small computer college to keep him out of trouble. He would buy the drugs from pharmacies in Hurlingham and load up. One day he overdid it, took a whole litre of it, and was zonked out. That evening, the mom back from work, leaned on his bedroom door, still carrying her handbag and looked at him lying in bed, unable to move. The next morning they had a mother-son talk, but he remembers little of that talk since he was still high. She begged him to talk to tell her if he was doing drugs, he finally admitted to only weed.
A few days later a friend of his came from China where he had gone for studies. He had won $2,000 dollars in a dancing competition and called him to treat him. He told his mom he would be going out but would be back by 1am.
They went to the trap house, where a party ensued. A wild one. His phone died at some point and he put his sim-card in his pal’s phone. At 11pm his friend received a text that he thought was from his brother, asking what time he would be going home. “This guy texts back and writes, “Aii kwani you are my mother?” [Laughs] “Mom gets mad and the guy says he isn’t coming back home.”
At some point he asks his friend “Yo, has my mom texted or called?” and he says, “Oh shit, I think I have been texting her not my bro.” He calls his mom who is livid. “She is shouting at me and I’m trying to tell her to calm down and she says you have to come back home now and I say “I will, Mom, just not now” and she says “Are you choosing your friends over your family?” I was so high by this time so I told her, “Mom, sikuji. I won’t come today, don’t wait up.” Then she hung up and I knew then I was on my own.
For the next ten days they stayed high, spending all this Chinese haul. “It was crazy. We would get so high that I’d black out, but not ati the blackout of alcohol where you sleep because you can’t sleep after taking all these drugs, so you are up but you don’t know you are up, your memory is blank. One day I woke up in downtown Nairobi, with no phone, no jacket, I didn’t even know how I got there. Another day I woke up sitting outside another friend’s gate. No memory at all.”
His mom reached out this time a number of times; calls and smses. “Come, please come home, everything will be fine. Come we talk.” After ten days he went back home one night after the money was finished.
“I checked into the house at 9pm. Mom was in the sitting room with my small bro watching TV. She turned and looked at me when I walked in. I was high as hell but I could tell she wasn’t angry, she just looked at me with a sad look. I said, “Hey guys?” They said “Hi.” [Laughs]. Then I said, “Mom can I go take a shower first?” and she said “Sawa” so I took a shower. We later had a talk and she asked me if I needed help and I said I did. I thought help was counseling because I used to see a counsellor in school when I joined…”
About what?
“Just life, man. I was confused about university. I was wondering why come here to study and spend all this money and then not have a job when I finish. What’s the point of education?”
A few days later his mom comes back home at 9am from work and says they are going to see a counselor. They drive to Karen and along the way she is talking to him, telling him not to throw his life away, to tell her how bad things are, that there isn’t anything they can’t solve together. He had smoked a joint, his head is resting on the head rest, trees and tables and mkokoteni and furniture and earthen pots for sale are running outside the window in Ngong Road. He’s feeling empty but also euphoric and a bit confused. His body, he feels, belongs to someone else, his decisions no longer in his hands. He’s standing at the deck, watching his ship get off the pier without him.
They get to Karen. A big house, maisonette. No signage. He smells polished wood and the sound of someone coughing. A dragging chair. A closing door. Birds. The grass is so green he needs to squint to look at it. The air is full of sunshine, but he isn’t feeling all this. He feels nothing. He says nothing and when he does, before the counsellor, his words sound old, like they have lived longer than he has. These are not his words, this is not their house, this is not his ship. “Where you going?” he asks his mom as she picks up her keys, and she says she’s going to get him fries (yeah, at 10:30am) and when the door closed behind her he realised immediately the trick. He was in rehab. And he couldn’t leave.
“Were you pissed off, did you feel betrayed?” I ask.
“No, I was high. I was very calm.”
They sedated him. But instead of waking up 12 hours later he woke up 2 hours later. He woke up in a “dirty bed” that someone “had slept in previously.” He looked around and there were seven other beds. “At first I thought I was in a morgue, because waking up in strange places wasn’t new.” But then he got his bearings. The smell of the room reminded him of high school dormitories. The windows were grilled. He walked downstairs and asked for food and he sat at the table and ate slowly with his hands.
He was in inmate, as they were called.
“What do you remember most about rehab?”
“I remember looking at the perimeter fence and thinking that I could jump over it and leave, but then what next? So I said, let’s see where this goes. The place is owned by this chick who I didn’t like. She never came regularly and didn’t talk to us when she did. It didn’t help that I was the only person with drug addiction, and the youngest. The rest (ages 30 to 50) were alcoholics and I felt like they didn’t know how to handle my case,” he says.
“Doctors would come and take my blood and pee samples and then give me the same drugs I was taking and then wean me off slowly and it didn’t make sense to me at all. If you want me to get off drugs don’t give me drugs at all. So I wouldn’t take them, I would hide them. I don’t think the staff knew what they were doing. The resident counsellor was fired while I was there; she was sleeping with one of the inmates. Of course they didn’t tell us why she was fired but we knew because at lights off we would hear footsteps going downstairs and one day we – me and this other guy – saw one of the guys going down to the counsellor’s room. You see what I’m saying, what kind of a place is this where a counsellor sleeps with someone trying to recover?”
My phone battery is now at 3%. We have been talking close to four hours. We go to my car where I plug the phone in to charge.
“I remember the boredom mostly,” he continues. “Goodness. There was nothing to do. So I started smoking cigarettes. At some point I was going crazy with boredom so I started taking the drugs they were giving me initially that I wasn’t taking. There was a time, a month in, that my mom came to see me and I was shouting at her to get me out of there. That place was mad. I celebrated my 21st birthday in there last year.”
“What did you do for your birthday?”
“I didn’t get high, for sure. [Chuckles]. I also met a girl in rehab.”
Oh, you did?!
“Yes. She was brought in by the parents for a blood test one day and it was negative but the parents had her locked in all the same. That was the third time she was in rehab. The second time she also met another boy, an inmate, and they dated…”
“Oh, and women say it’s hard to meet a man anymore.” [He misses the joke. It’s an old folks joke, I guess].
“Is there temptation to go back to doing drugs?” I ask him. He says without hesitation that it is alive. “The temptation is crazy because I can simply walk into a chemist and buy it. I have cravings but I won’t go back because I want to go places, I want to make it. I know if I start now I’m finished. In rehab there were people who had been there a few time and they say each time you go back it gets worse. I don’t know if I can get worse than I was; one doctor in rehab told me that technically I shouldn’t be alive.” We watch a lorry reverse to a construction site across the parking lot. “But I don’t like how people say I’m a recovering addict, I’m not a recovering addict, I’m recovered. I just need to stay busy.”
When he went into rehab his friends couldn’t get a hold of him. They thought he had died. He has spoken to them since he’s been out. He speaks to some of them because, like he tells his mom, they “are not all bad.”
His mother doesn’t have faith in the rehab. She feels that it didn’t have the right ingredients, that they didn’t seem capable but she had no choice. “I spent so much money but I don’t think I got value for it. I’m afraid that he hasn’t healed because the reasons he gives me for not wanting to go back to drugs is that he doesn’t want to disappoint me which is sweet but not enough. I’m afraid that his friends will come looking for him. These are boys and girls who drive expensive luxury cars and get loads of money from their parents, who by the way, don’t care what’s going on. Rich kids with means. How do I start keeping him from that temptation?” She says. “I think I might just go back to school and study a course that can help people with addiction because I have looked everywhere for someone to help him and they are so few and far apart!”
I asked the boy what he’s doing to stay clean and he said, “Been making sure that I don’t have any money in my pocket.” It broke my heart in many ways that I didn’t imagine I’d possibly hear him say that.
I think about this boy selfishly because I have a son and a daughter and this might be my problem in a few years. I also think about Lil Pump’s tiger. When I think about The Boy, I see him wearing a white linen shirt that shows his ribs and his young belly. He’s standing on a cliff, his earphone in his ears, the wind is blowing. It’s sunset, that beautiful golden hour right before darkness reigns with its demons. The Boy has blocked this beauty around him and is shouting something that he is listening to, repeating the words. He’s smiling but he’s lonely. Lonely in beauty. At the bottom of the cliff is Lil Pump squinting up, holding the double cup, his mouth full of gold, his neck a canvas of tattoos of skulls. He’s saying something to him but the wind is stealing his words.
The Boy is singing a song by Lil Pump: Foreign bitch with me/ she do anything/ Yeah, she love my diamonds/ The bitch wonna give me a brain/ Bitch it’s a Gucci gang. He’s singing the braggadocio’s anthem, but there is no bravado in his voice or in his bones, just fear. He’s scared.
Behind him his mom sobs softly in her hands.