A Squatter's Tale, page 16
The Hook went over to have a word with the two men who had been in the other Land Cruiser; the three girls clustered together, whispering about something and laughing. I stood to one side, watching them while pretending not to, and I decided that if I was given a choice, I would take Rhonda: the others were prettier and slightly taller, but mine—as I was beginning to think of her—had the most promising body and a mad erotic laugh. His conference with the others over, the Hook led the way into the club. The girls followed behind him, then the two men (who nodded coldly when I said ‘Hi’ to them); I brought up the rear. We stopped only long enough for the Hook to banter with the men in dinner jackets at the door. They all wanted to know where he had been; Europe on business the last few weeks, he said. It felt good walking straight into the club, past all those poor nicely dressed people waiting patiently in line, and my respect for (and envy of) the Hook grew in leaps and bounds.
We climbed a flight of wide brightly lit stairs, covered with a bright red carpet, and stopped at the broad white door of a private room, marked ‘Reserved’. The Hook showed the girls and the three men in, but when it came to my turn, he put a hand on my shoulder and led me away, closing the door with his other hand.
‘It’s kind of a private business meeting,’ he said in an embarrassed tone, ‘but I’m gonna join you upstairs later. You can have your pick of any of the other two babes later, the one who sat in front is mine but any of the others you point at is for you.’
He led me upstairs to a crowded dancing hall. A song by Aaliyah was playing deafeningly; even louder than the music was the talking and laughing. The dance floor was packed.
‘I’ll see you later, very soon; but get their phone numbers,’ the Hook whispered fiercely into my ear. ‘Dance with them a little then ask if they’re married. If they aren’t, get their phone numbers. Do it in a nice way. It’s very easy.’
And with that piece of advice and encouragement, he gave me a gentle push and ran off to join the others. The atmosphere of the place overwhelmed me, flattened my senses like a bulldozer, stopped me from feeling too bad about how I had been excluded from whatever was going on in the private room downstairs. There were more than two hundred beautiful black women in that room. They covered the entire spectrum from peat black to white, from huge and intimidating to bird-like tininess, all shapes and sizes of breasts, eyes, noses, mouths, smiles. There were a lot of sleeveless, strapless, backless, braless outfits, and the most gorgeous skins in this world were on display.
A tall, dark, slim dish on the dance floor, in a tight red top and a crazy black flared skirt, was slowly pushing her trunk forward until it touched her partner’s body, a squat man in a kente waistcoat. Then she would hiss, like water sprinkled on a hot iron, and withdraw her body as though she were rearing back to strike, cobra-like, then she would push forward again. A couple were pelvis-bumping madly, looking into each other’s half-closed eyes. A tall, slim man slithered up and down his partner’s back, whispering something into her ear each time their heads drew level, and she would laugh and slap his writhing waist. Though the beat wasn’t exactly what you would call slow, a couple stood still at a corner of the dance floor, wrapped in each other’s arms, lost to the world. I walked round the edge slowly, staring, pushing past the people massed around, stepping on people’s toes, and no one seemed to mind, or even notice.
Thinking back now, I realise that Geoffrey’s that night wasn’t much different from a happening Lagos nightclub, but I had spent so many nights in the bleak warehouses on 98th Street and in Andrew’s room of religious posters that a nightclub full of sexy beautiful women affected me like strong wine. Even as I joined the long queue to buy beer from the bar I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the dance floor, away from the lovely women chatting and laughing at the top of their voices all around me. Clutching my beer and still staring, I took up a vantage position by the bar, to try and work out a strategy for putting the Hook’s advice into action. There were a good number of unattached women, and after a third Heineken, going up to ask one of them for a dance didn’t seem like such an uphill undertaking. But I still stood there and watched, telling myself I had to select one that looked least likely to say no, someone who wasn’t in a cluster of friends talking, but at the same time it had to be someone reasonably good-looking: it would be an abomination to come to such a well-endowed place and end up with one of the few unattractive ones. It also had to be someone with a nice, friendly expression, who didn’t look bored or frustrated, and I had to make my move when a very danceable tune was playing, preferably something wildly popular, maybe something by Snoop or Aaliyah, so that anyone I asked would be willing to dance.
I was sipping a fifth Heineken and still trying to decide who to approach, still juggling my criteria, when the DJ announced that it was closing time. The next minute the hall was flooded with light. It was barely two a.m. What kind of nightclub closes at two a.m.? I wondered bitterly, as people began streaming towards the staircases.
I joined one of the streams, and on the first floor headed for the private room into which the rest of my party had gone earlier. The room was empty though the Reserved sign still hung on the door. I looked into two other private rooms on the same floor in case I had gone to the wrong one but they were all empty. I sought out one of the tuxedoed employees of the nightclub, and very nicely and patiently, he explained to me that since he had no idea who had been in which private room, he had no way of knowing where they could have gone. I went out into the street. Many of those emerging from the club still hung around waiting for the valet to bring their cars while a few diehard woman-chasers tried to make last-minute kills. I very nearly asked one of the doormen if he knew anything about two aquamarine Land Cruisers but stopped myself just in time. I hung by the door, peering desperately at every face. The cars were brought round and the crowd outside dwindled steadily.
By three-fifteen a.m. I and two of the doormen were the only people left on that stretch of 14th Street. I asked about getting a taxi.
*
Though I hungered day and night for the girl in the strappy dress, I stopped myself from calling the Hook to find out why they had abandoned me at Geoffrey’s. I had taken enough shabby treatment from him and I told myself that if he ever called I would let him know exactly what I thought of his behaviour. He did not call.
Two months later Robo told me on the phone that the Hook had suddenly turned up in Lagos the week before. The story going round, Robo said, was that the Hook had fled the US just ahead of an FBI investigation. During a raid on his apartment, which was said to be the Northern California base of a large gang involved in every conceivable kind of fraud, they’d found seven passports, one British, one Jamaican, the others from African countries, a bag full of green and social security cards, and a floppy disk which had the names and addresses of more than two hundred people—Americans, Nigerians, others—out of which about forty had already been conned in the last three years. The gang leader, who had more than fifty identities, like a monster with fifty disposable heads, had been arrested in Los Angeles, and the Hook had been extremely lucky to get away.
I still sometimes wonder if the Hook’s invitation to Geoffrey’s had been part of a plan to draw me into their gang (which would have failed for I have too little liver to be any sort of criminal), or if he’d genuinely wanted to give an old friend a good time.
Drunken-Driver Love
My sexual fortunes took a turn for the better early in May. It was a great time of year; sunny but cool, Bay Area tourist-brochure weather; but I was in low spirits—still smarting from the way the Hook had treated me, completely fed up with my life that consisted of the depressing warehouses and a host of ever-growing hungers. To make matters worse, my girlfriend, Robo, had said the last time I called her that their firm had major audits in June and July and she wouldn’t be visiting then as we’d planned and she wasn’t even sure of August. (I learnt later that, as far as she was concerned, it was over between us by then and she knew she wasn’t visiting America that year, at least not to see me.) So I must have sounded quite unfriendly when Ego rang me one Saturday afternoon and said she and her husband had been wondering why they hadn’t seen or heard from me for a while. I said I’d been busy. Then she said there was someone she wanted me to meet, a girl she knew in Lagos who had moved recently to the Bay Area from Washington DC and who’d complained of being lonely.
Disappointments and misery had dulled my faculties and it took me a while to appreciate what Ego was saying. When it registered that I might finally be about to get lucky, even if only with someone from Nigeria (not any of the lovely African-American women I saw driving by on Grand Avenue, or an exotic au pair from Austria), my brain simply rejected that possibility. It was going to be another cruel disappointment—like the Hook’s welcoming pussy, like the girl with long brown hair in Cody’s Bookshop at Berkeley (‘I’m new; I’ve just come from Africa’), the girl in the strappy dress at the back of the Hook’s Toyota Land Cruiser caressing my body with her perfume, the hundreds of women I’d slept with in my increasingly desperate dreams.
‘She’s a nurse,’ Ego was saying. ‘She has a very good job and she will soon qualify for a green card. But what she wants is a serious relationship. I know you, Obi, you are such a bad boy, so if you aren’t going to treat her well, we’d better just forget it. She’s suffered from men in the past and I know how you men are. I don’t want her to hold me responsible if you use her and dump her. So, please, I’m begging you, if you are not interested in a serious relationship, let’s just forget I called you. She has very good prospects and she’s hard-working. She’s a very good girl. If you want someone to be serious with, I think she’s perfect for you, but if you just want to play around, like you men always do, then let’s just leave her alone.’
There had to be someone, otherwise Ego wouldn’t be running off her mouth like a bloody preacher. No, there would certainly be a catch. She might be so hideous you would rather die of sexual starvation than have anything to do with her, a face like a hippo, so marriage-crazy you would have to go to the registry office first before you saw her bra. So I set off for the Ezendus’ place in Blackhawk, sure that I was stupidly embarking on a futile mission, cursing myself for not telling Ego that I just wasn’t interested.
From across the Ezendus’ vast living room, as she stood by a window admiring one of the gardens which surrounded the mansion, the nurse who would soon qualify for a green card, who wanted a serious relationship and who had been hurt by a bunch of men in the past, looked quite nice, tall and shapely, in the kind of sleeveless top male models love to pose in, tucked into a pair of faded jeans which did great things to her curves, and a face which didn’t look bad at all. But when I drew closer to be introduced, caught now between my uncertainty that there was going to be a huge catch somewhere and the rash excitement of my prick, she looked like an automobile which had been carefully restored after a bad accident but on a tight budget, so that some of the panels were not quite as smooth as they seemed from afar. Her eyes had no character; they waited, like servants, for a cue. When they made contact with mine, they seemed to wilt, like those plants which are averse to sunlight. Her face was full of lines of premature middle age; her voice shook slightly when she spoke; her accent had a high-pitched American supermarket put-on pleasantness—you heard the clatter of cash machines in the background and you expected to hear the question: paper or plastic? There was such an air of desperate nervousness about her, such an utter absence of self-confidence. When I gave her my sweetest smile and she looked like she didn’t know whether to smile back or run away or take her clothes off, I said to myself that this one would be annoyingly easy. (Considering that I hadn’t slept with anyone for nearly ten months and that even successful masturbation could no longer be taken for granted, I wonder now if I really could’ve thought her ‘annoyingly easy’ or if hindsight has rewritten my memory.)
Ego orchestrated things with amusing nervousness: stumbling over her words and the furniture in her living room as she invited us to sit down, she put Vivian—that was the nurse’s name—on the same three-seater sofa as me, and rushed off to bring drinks for us, then remembered she hadn’t asked us what we wanted. She came back and asked us with a nervous laugh, and then mixed things up, bringing a can of Coke for Vivian, who had said she wanted orange juice, and brandy for me when all I’d asked for was beer.
‘When did you come to America?’ I asked Vivian, feeling very cool in the midst of all that nervousness.
‘Two years ago,’ she said, then added apologetically, ‘such a long time ago.’
‘Two years is very short,’ Ego said, leaping to her defence. ‘I can’t believe you’ve done so much in two years. Some people spend ten years here working as security guards, and you already have a good job and you have settled down so well.’
For my benefit, Ego added, ‘The hospital here offered her almost ten thousand dollars more than she was earning in Washington, and she just made one phone call to them, not even a formal application.’
I winced inwardly at Ego’s reference to security guards, but joined her in marvelling at Vivian’s meteoric rise.
‘It is a bit easier for nurses once you’ve passed the exams,’ she said.
‘Even then you have to be willing to work hard; if you were not hard-working they wouldn’t have been so anxious to hire you,’ Ego said.
I agreed with what Ego was saying. All the while my eyes travelled over Vivian’s body. I could see I was making her extremely uncomfortable, and whenever our eyes met she gave me a shy, embarrassed smile and looked around the room as though searching for a hiding place, away from the sexual suggestions my eyes were making.
‘So what do you do in your spare time?’ I asked, my eyes still groping her body.
The way she shrank away from me, the way her eyes begged for mercy, it seemed as if I’d asked a really dangerous question.
‘I write letters home,’ she said finally, in a tone of shameful confession, ‘and I visit Ego, and I call my friends in Washington.’
‘She has only been here two months,’ Ego said, ready as ever to act as her friend’s defence counsel.
‘The Bay Area is a very exciting place to live in,’ I said. ‘There are plays and music shows and art exhibitions all the time, not just in San Francisco but even in the smallest towns, and there are lots of lovely beaches all over Northern California. There’s so much to do here often the problem is finding the time to do all of them.’
The previous September I’d been to the Grand Lake cinema to see Shawshank Redemption. I’d probably been the only one in the cavernous theatre who’d come alone and had felt so self-conscious that I hadn’t been to see a film or play or anything since then. Apart from that night at the Grand Lake and the night the Hook took me to Geoffrey’s, my knowledge of the exciting cultural life of the Bay Area, which I spoke about with so much expansiveness, came entirely from the papers and from radio and TV. But it worked.
‘My husband never takes me anywhere,’ Ego said miserably. ‘He’s always in surgery or attending conferences all over America. To be married to a doctor is so hard.’
‘I acted in some plays in school, but since then I haven’t even gone to watch any, I’d like to go sometime though,’ Vivian said, then a look of alarm spread over her face; as though she’d said something terribly wrong.
‘When next there’s something nice I’ll let you know,’ I said. ‘So how was social life in Washington?’
‘I went out very rarely,’ she said, in her tone of shame, examining her long fingers. ‘I worked long hours and I was always tired. My friends took me to the movies once or twice.’
‘Vivian,’ I said, wagging a finger at her in mock admonition, ‘you have to learn to make time to have fun. Life is not all about working hard.’
The effect of that ordinary statement was dramatic: Vivian shook all over the seat with a laughter grossly out of proportion to what I’d just said, managing at the same time to combine her great mirth with great nervousness, and even terror.
I saw admiration in Ego’s eyes, they seemed to say: you bad boy, you clearly haven’t lost it.
We talked, inevitably, about the bad news from Nigeria. They both said that in spite of everything they were missing home, Ego especially, whose husband was out of town at the time. Remembering home made her gloomy. She went into her kitchen and returned with a dewy bottle of some California champagne. But the champagne didn’t improve her mood.
‘Surgery and conferences, that’s all my husband does. People work so hard in this country you wonder if it’s worth it, you wonder what they’re working for,’ Ego moaned as she went through a second glass.
‘Bills, cars, houses, money to send home,’ I said, ‘then you have children and you want good schools for them, you want to give them good opportunities. That’s what it’s all about, and it’s not safe to wonder if it’s worth it. If you start thinking like that you never know where it’ll lead to.’
‘I am depressed sometimes and miss home, but I’m also very happy to live in America,’ Vivian said with unusual vigour, avoiding both our eyes as though afraid she was causing great offence. ‘My life here has been useful. I have helped my people back home with the little money I’ve made. If I had remained in Nigeria, I don’t think I would have achieved anything. I’m grateful for America. My life—’ She stopped abruptly as though suddenly feeling she’d said too much already.
‘You’re right,’ Ego said meekly, like a child accepting a parent’s reprimand, ‘it’s just that sometimes you wonder why people have to work so hard in this place.’
‘But there are rewards for that hard work,’ Vivian said. ‘Look at this wonderful house, look at your life. The work is hard, but at least you have something to show for it at the end of the day.’
