I will not die here. I am not meant to die here, in the rain, in Togo, tonight.  But if this motorcycle taxi keeps driving at this speed, if this cascade of warm African rain keeps falling, if the sun doesn’t rise soon, if we kill one more round of aperteshie, it  seems inevitable that something bad will happen.  But it doesn’t, so I continue to breathe and we continue to ride on.

My friend Baba is on the backseat of the motorcycle across from me and he’s snapping pictures with my camera.  Baba has polio and he can’t straddle the bike because of it so he positions his legs crossways and howls like a demon as he whooshes by me.  It’s 4 a.m., the streets are dark and vacant, and I’m soaked with rain.  There’s a memorial, or a statue, or some sort of icon in the middle of the city and we pull up to it and snap twenty out-of-focus pictures and then fly off, and as usual I’m in the dark about where we’re going but that’s fine.

These motorcycle taxi drivers have quickly become our best friends.  We hit bar after bar after bar with them and my wallet becomes lighter and my mind moves faster and now I want the bike to fly and NOW I want the bike to burn the asphalt off the road!

On the back of this bike, I know that at any second we could hit a slick and go careening into the blackness of the shoulder and my life would end, and I enjoy that fear.  Thoreau dug into the marrow of life in a shack in Concord, but he should have tried a motorcycle in Togo and I’m dripping with exhilaration and Jesus this rain is really starting to come down hard.

We slam to a halt in the middle of the street.  The night freezes.  I tumble off my bike and Baba does too, but somehow neither of us are hurt.  Instead we just laugh like we’re insane and then we’re back on again and he howls and I howl and the drivers howl and our yawps boom over the engines and I feel like I’m riding into battle.

A motorcycle taxi driver pours moonshine in Lome, Togo

There is only one taxi driver who wears a helmet, which is why I picked him, because I assumed that he was the safest, and sure enough he keeps that helmet on all night while he out-drinks everyone.  And he leads us, like a pack of lions, through the fog and back to his house. There I meet his mother who is just waking up to begin the day.  Her business is selling moonshine.  My man with the helmet takes out bottle after bottle and pours and pours. “Do you sleep with that helmet on?” I crow.

My man with the helmet takes me home at dawn.  Lome looks woebegone in the morning, like a sickly child.  I want to go to the beach–”Let’s swim I shout!”- but instead we piddle back to the hotel and I climb into bed where I sleep four abreast with strangers.

When I wake up at noon, I’m still dead drunk and everyone else is gone. The night clings to my mind like a strange reverie; I know it happened, but I don’t know how and why.  I know I loved it, but I’m not sure if I’m proud or frightened by that fact.  I look at the pictures on my camera and they make me shiver.

For more pictures of nightlife in Togo, check out the photo gallery.

A body contortionist in Lome, Togo

My friend Baba says we should go to a bar called Panini because it’s the best Lome has to offer.  Lome sits on the ocean in the West African nation of Togo.  It’s a broken city, full of huge decaying buildings that point to a much rosier past.  Its main road is a long sweeping boulevard that abuts the oceanfront and is populated mostly by motorcycle taxis.  The drivers drink heavily on weekends, and wrecks are prevalent.

We charter four motorcycle taxis to the bar.  The place is packed.  The main attraction is dancing, and throngs of people clog the dirt street.  Prostitutes, most of whom are well under age, dominate the dance floor.  Two or three of them wiggle into the center at a time and gyrate wildly.  Their hips explode like cannons, from angles that seem inhuman, and with an unabashed sexuality–a fierce, wild lasciviousness that frenzies the bar.  At one point, a fat hooker bends over and displays her massive ass while her companion slams her pelvis into it.

When they finish dancing, they collapse in adolescent laughter and mingle about, chatting.  They’re just girls again, and it dawns on me, suddenly, that if it wasn’t for the ass-hugging hot pants, the massive gold hoop earrings and the thick lip-gloss, they could be at a junior high dance.

Other people are dancing, but no one dares to lay claim to the dirt road, which is acting as the main stage, until a fat man in grey sweat pants sidles by.  His eyes are coal-black, vacant and wild–the eyes of a man barely clinging to his mind.  The hookers clear a space and he swivels his hips and jiggles the fat of his gut beneath a stained white undershirt.  The crowd whoops and cheers.  They approve.

A prostitute at a bar in Lome, Togo

The jiggler has one other move, which involves grasping the drawstring on his pants and pulling it to his mouth like a microphone, and when he does this, everyone cackles, especially the hookers, who shower him with small change and scream for him to “Dance, dance, dance!”  Someone hands him a half-finished beer and he swigs it down.  He doesn’t stop dancing while he drinks, and the beer spills from the corner of his mouth and tumbles down his hairy neck and onto his shirt.

The most spectacular performance comes from a body contortionist, who suddenly appears next to me with both of his legs over his head.  He then hops, like a toad, across the road, holding this freakish posture.  I’m impressed and pay him a dollar, but no one  else is interested.  When he tries to hop back onto his chair, a security guard pulls it out from underneath him. Everyone laughs riotously and minutes later the fat man in the grey sweat pants is back jiggling his gut again by popular demand.

Baba says we should leave and go to another bar, so we stand and walk toward the roadside, but on our way out chaos erupts.  A scuffle has ensued, apparently among drunken friends, and the security guard pulls out a giant cane and menaces the participants.  At the same time, the hookers eye me leaving–the only white man in the bar–and come rushing over, their long acrylic nails groping at my arms and beneath my belt.  We round up four motorcycles on the quick and I peel the girls off me, but before we pull out of the traffic, I spy a naked man recumbent on the ground.

He is contorted into the fetal position on a patch of mud next to an open sewer.  His head is partially obstructed by the tires of a truck, but his body is visible, along with his genitals, which are pinned between his legs and twisted in a strange way.   I think he might be dead, but then see his arm twitch.  No one seems concerned, and the girls resume their shimmying feet away from his head.

For more pictures of nightlife in Lome, check out the photo gallery.

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