Man Recalls First Experience With Alcohol: ‘Friends Abandon You When Situation Becomes Worse’

The co-founder and CEO of Afri Property Ltd., a Real Estate Agency in Abuja, King Joseph Chukwudi, has narrated his first encounter with alcohol.

Speaking in an interview with THE WHISTLER, Chukwudi said the first day he started drinking alcohol was the same day he learnt his lessons the hard way: friends will abandon you when the situation becomes worse.

The CEO said he recalled a few years back when he was an undergraduate student of Mass Communication at the Federal Polytechnic Auchi, Edo state, while staying in the hostel with friends, he decided to try a bottle of alcohol, but the outcome he said was something unforgettable.

“Men! The experience I had I will never wish anyone to pass through it, not even my enemy. That fateful day was such a memory that I won’t wish for anyone, it’s a hell of a memory. It thought me a great lesson I won’t take that away.

“On that fateful day, I picked a bottle of beer with a high alcoholic percentage and began drinking it as though it’s ordinary water. It made some people ask, ‘ah what’s Joseph doing?’

“My friend Kennedy had to ask; is Joseph OK? Is he aware of the substance he is taking?’ He even sent Moses, one of our friends, to ask me again if I knew what I was doing.”

Chukwudi highlighted that when Moses met him and cautioned him to restrain from taking any more alcohol from the bottle in his hands, he began to brag telling Moses that he was a big boy, nothing would happen to him.

However, he noted that it didn’t take him long when he began to feel his eyes turning and everyone around him “looking less human.”

He explained, “I began to act very weird and strange, saying things that are not normal, so I fell to the ground. That was when my friends knew the situation had gotten so serious.

“I was hearing them: ‘get garri, get water’, they were pouring me water while I lay on the ground. They were feeding me with garri and all that. At that stage I can’t tell I know what I was doing. Each of those stages I was aware, even when I was drinking the garri. I was aware my consciousness was ok.”

The CEO narrated that at that crucial moment he began to question himself for subjecting his body to such torture. He said out of pain, he named alcohol “man-made sickness.”

He said it finally reached a stage that after his friends did all they could to make him regain his self composure and failed, “they got tired and left. Locked their rooms, slept off and left me. That was around late in the night. They left me outside!

“I think I woke up between the hours of 4 and 5 in the morning. I woke up from the ground where I was left outside, soaked with water and even the garri they tried to feed me with were all over my body. I had to rush into the bathroom, clean up myself and take a shower before going back into the compound and force myself to vomit.

“At that moment my eyes were red trying to vomit them.Then after, I felt my whole body was empty, so weak that I sat on the ground before going back to sleep for some hours in my room,” Chukwudi explained.

He lamented that that whole day was a total waste for him. He couldn’t even go to class or go anywhere. His friends later updated him with recorded videos of how he acted the previous night and he had to beg them to delete it.

He said the process was a “very good experience in a disguised manner. That day I learnt that those who hail you will still leave you when the situation becomes worse that they cannot handle it.

“Nobody will sacrifice their peace, comfort or anything for you, and if you think that anyone can sacrifice, stay with you in such a difficult situation to the end, then it’s only your mother that can do that. That’s one lesson I learnt out of many, I hope this will serve anyone.”

Chukwudi also explained that another lesson he learnt was to always check the quantity of alcohol he took beginning from that day, as despite all the troubles he went through, he still manages to take alcohol from time to time.