I Fear the Romance Electric
"What do you know about Nigeria?”
I am sitting across from my father on the first day of our annual two day bilateral summit. Dad was a high school basketball coach who later in life rebounded from a sagging career on the court with a side hustle as an Episcopal deacon. Christ, unlike his high school varsity basketball team, never had a losing season. Dad watches golf and loves Bernie Sanders. Dad does not usually ask about Africa over lunch. Yet here we are. Much like a pilot receiving a chiming warning about a storm front, I turned off the autopilot and paused meal service.
Setting aside my fork and salmon, I launch into a short precis of the Economist Country Report. In between noting the country's rising middle class and persistent electricity shortfalls, I take note that Nigeria has in some literature and a couple pamphlets been called the origin point for fraud schemes that target American seventy somethings singles like a nasty case of financial shingles.
I have a copy of the Worst Case Scenarios book. Seventy something male interest in Nigeria could be found in the back section, and it was not hard to see Dad on those pages. Even if Dad's libido had left him, the shadows of those sensations seemed to still guide him like that twenty something rake who tore up the streets of Rochester with a twelve pack of Miller -- no lite about it ! - and a killer impersonation of Daffy Duck.
"So why do you ask?" I am usually elliptical, but trenchant when on edge.
"Church. I got to know some Nigerians when I was in Liberia a few years ago." Dad's comment has an edge of plausibility, though not one broad enough to get him out of secondary screening. He had indeed seven years prior traveled to Liberia with a Liberian-American priest who had invited Dad to visit his village. Dad had never left the United States. Most people like a starter country like the UK or St. Kitts. Places where is a Hilton, a Starbucks, and even take Discover. At least a locale with a central power grid. Call him a joker, call him a fool, but there ain't no in between with Dad. He survived the encounter with Africa, falling prey to neither local gangs nor parasites. But, chatterbox thought he can be, it is still difficult to imagine Dad who was then surviving on packaged tuna striking up cross border relationships like George Clooney playing an international agent for Coca Cola. And, as a sidenote, the Liberian priest was later defrocked for defrauding the local parish. As a judge of character, my father sits somewhere between Anne Boleyn and Nicholas II.
I stared back at him. I knew there was more. Like seeing a few black dots on your wall. But, and we've all been there, do you really want to pull up the floorboards? When Netflix has just dropped the "The Diplomat?" The demarche points had been delivered, and perhaps were replicating across my father's remaining frayed instincts of cautiousness. And, this was a two day summit, there were many other points to cover before the joint statement.
Act II
"I need your help. I cannot figure out the Nigerian Embassy's website." I look down at my phone to find this message from my father, which is the beginning of a Maxim machine gun volley of texts that amount to a tick tock of his time floundering around the Nigerian visa site like a tenderfoot hacker who is half a bottle deep in their Barefoot and way over their head. Clearly two months on from my summit demarche, something had metastasized and it was not caution. I remember "Dog Day Afternoon," and draw on the best practices of cinematic hostage negotiation. My father had, at the very least, put my weekend under textual duress. Get them on the phone, develop trust, and offer lunch. Don't directly confront them.
"Hi Dad, I thought this might be easier to call. You are trying to get a visitor visa to Nigeria....?" English is also tonal. I am trying to sound helpfully curious like a customer service agent at Home Depot helping you find the grout mix, and not like a child screaming into a black abyss.
"Yeah, and I am completely lost. I really need your help, you must deal with this all the time." My father imputes a rather broad range of capabilities and skills based on the fact that I have federal health insurance. I am by his imagination capable of securing a visa from any embassy in the world, and wiring underwater explosives. It's kind of a projective Walter Mitty, despite regular clarifications that I am a file clerk. My father was never a good listener and not a man of modest expectations.
"Ok. What's the first problem?" I feel less like a hostage negotiator and more like a demining team on a long distance call. Do you cut the red or blue wire with Dad?
"My birthday. I keep entering my birthday and it won't let me do anything.” "How are you entering the date?”
"Month, Day, Year…"
"Did you try, Day, Month, Year….?"
Long pause. Curt yet chastened reply, "No."
Full stop. If you do not know when traveling abroad to invert month and day, then you my friend do not get a visa from my window. I don't even think you are ready to order the Lonely Planet Lagos.
"Well, that's a start. Thanks," his expression of gratitude delivered with the inflection of a Hussite being schooled in the correct understanding about the body and blood of Christ. "There is a lot else here...."
"Dad. I hate to cut you off...." -- because this has already been shits and scones, and Al Pacino would keep you on the line but I don't have snipers for whom I’m buying time. Somedays -- admit it - you want a kill team on retainer. "I'm with a friend on holiday. I'll call you back on Sunday night and we can sort through this." I set aside the thought that trouble, like interest, compounds with time. What would a few days matter to a man who used to ask the school librarian to open his internet browser? The Soviets won't get the bomb until at least 1960, right....?
Friend, "Are you ok? You look a bit...off?"
"Yeah, probably just one glass too many lastnight," and one parent more than I ever needed after the zygote thing. "Hey, can you pass the tabasco sauce? These eggs are a bit bland, no?”
Covid Interlude.
"Gary. It's Gary.”
Several days clear of the Abbott double line of epidemiological ostracization, I take the rare voice call and find even more uncommonly this is not another unforgettable auto insurance offer but rather my father's younger brother, Gary. I last saw Gary somewhere between Compaq, Gateway, and Vertical Horizon. We are not estranged, but rather lack any common interests upon which to forge continuing ties. Sort of like Mongolia and Paraguay, though I suppose those two pub trivia questions at least might bump every year at the UN General Assembly. Gary and my distance is likely for the best, because being too close would make daily life a Mobious loop of "who's on first" encounters.
Gary is, I should also add, a gentle artist of modest means whose life has been jazz jams and tending his brood of ever multiplying urban bohemians. Gary loves his music, and his family. Visits with Gary and his family growing up were chords of laughter, strung together ith tales about mellow nights of cannabis and the signature Rochester “garbage plate.” Gary is cool. We like Gary. Gary is, today, concerned.
"I just got off the phone with your Dad, and I didn't know who else to call." Gary must not have the number for the FBI, it's a complex organization. "Your Dad, and he may have been sipping his Chardonnay on the other end....well, he told me that he has fallen in love with a woman - err girl... in Nigeria and he is going to fly to Nigeria to meet her and her family.”
At this moment, I want to find the metaphysical sledgehammer to demo the third wall and ask, "What the fuck??" Much like the Soviet engineers at Chernobyl, you don't want to be right about some things. You hope the Marxist-Leninst major from Moscow State has a better sense for the likelihood of a hydrogen bubble in the reactor chamber. Unable to find demo equipment or countenance blackout drinking on a Tuesday night, I start looking for the metaphysical raincoat and dosimeter.
"I had a sense something like this could be going on, but I hoped it hadn’t gone this far..... Can you tell me everything you know?”
"Well, he told me they met on Facebook and her name was 'Charity Smith.' Your Dad went to a travel agent who helped him book a ticket to fly there later this month."
I was quite nauseous, but Gary insisted on pouring the after dinner digestif.
“Your aunt and I went to your Dad’s Facebook page and found her,” added Gary. “She looks about 25....”
Where might we find our Charity? Of course the internet, that marvel which unleashes our Id like Dr. Leary’s medicine cabinet and leaves us pooping toxic nonsense in the town commons. Who ever thought better connecting human beings was a good idea?
And isn't there some code of ethics for travel agents, like the Hippocratic oath? If a seventy something white male in central Florida comes calling for a plane ticket to Nigeria, isn't that when you press the button underneath your desk?? Don't tickets to some parts of the world require going into the backroom safe for the confirmation codes and double brass keys? Travel is a tough business in the age of Kayak and Orbitz but please stick to booking Disney cruises and leave the rest to Tom Cruise, Special Ops, and/or tactical nuclear weapons.
"Your father does really like to help people who look like they are in trouble....maybe it’s a bit of a savior complex and....well, maybe a little bit of that is going on." Perhaps. Just a touch. To say my father likes to help troubled people is to say that Dracula has an iron deficiency. My father never felt farther from his inner demons than when he was bathed in someone else's shit.
The Deacon Dad. How often I felt like a political prop when he would rush down from the altar to embrace us during service, a family tableau for the congregation who didn't know that was one of the few times we would see him that week. How often he would lose his patience trying to teach me any sport requiring hand-eye coordination, and storm off declaring that "your mother can deal with this.” But I also remember when he cradled me in his arms when I was five years old and vomited my weight after waking from anesthesia. I feel his hand in mine, walking me down to the local farm and then lifting me into the tractor cab. He was my father, he is my father.
To be Continued ....