A Squatter's Tale, page 3
‘Of course you can stay with me until you get your own place. I have only a studio apartment, but we can manage. Just tell me where you are, and I’ll come and pick you up.’
I gave him the address and he said he would be there in about thirty minutes, that he lived at another end of Oakland but he would come by the freeway and would probably get there in less, but to be on the safe side he would say thirty minutes. As soon as I dropped the phone I went to the room where my things were and began to pack. I wrote a note for Uncle Happiness saying I’d run into a good friend from Lagos outside on the street and had gone over to stay with him for a while.
*
Uncle Happiness had finally appeared at noon the day after my arrival. He had swept into the house in a massive black coat and a bright red beret, hollering for me: ‘Oh my dear sister’s son! My own Obi!’; he was looking as round as ever. His stomach had grown even bigger, but his head seemed to have shrunk, creating a comical disproportion between head and body. He still rolled forward on boomerang legs, still bellowed out his words even when you were right there in front of him, but the nearly permanent lines of happiness on his face were gone, and when he laughed now it was as if he was merely pretending to laugh. He seemed shocked when he saw me, as though he’d entered the house expecting to see a boy of ten, the same one who went around Lagos with him in matching cowboy clothes, and saw instead a man of twenty-eight, a head taller than him, who watched him warily with the eyes of a snake. He went through the motions of hugging me, of bellowing how big I’d grown, even taller than your uncle, but he sounded unsure of himself as if I might be an impostor who had stolen the identity of his sister’s son. As he fumbled through his apologies for not being able to pick me up at the airport and for being away from home for so long, he shot nervous glances at me and stared for long moments at the filthy rug and at his shoes. He said he’d been involved in very, very important business and he, in fact, had just gotten away because of me, to see how I was managing. I wondered what sort of business kept one away from one’s home all night.
Uncle Happiness hurried off again only minutes after, telling me he still had very important business to attend to but promising to tear himself away as soon as possible. On my second evening alone with the four huge men, I tried to find out who they were and what jobs they did. They all had short English names, Sam, Ken, Bob, etc., that sounded false, names manufactured for use in America, and they all pretended not to have heard my questions about what they did. I was soon to learn that to ask my countrymen and women in America questions about their jobs was most indiscreet; the successful ones and the liars told you before you asked, others maintained a stony silence or made vague sounds, and many people have acquired lifelong enemies just by asking too insistently.
Uncle Happiness returned at about eleven, smiling like he’d won the lottery and smelling heavily of alcohol. He began hollering my name from the staircase of the two-storeyed building with six apartments, and I wondered momentarily how his neighbours coped with him. When he got back, I was alone in the living room of big, diseased furniture, trying to read a novel; the others had gone to bed. He clasped my right hand in his in a tight grip, smiling and looking into my eyes all the while. I smiled back.
‘My sister’s son, my darling sister’s son, Obi the Giant, I’m so happy to see you. You don’t know how happy I’ve been since you came. You can ask the people I was with at the business meeting until a few minutes ago, I couldn’t keep my mind on what we were discussing. So they told me, they said, “Happiness, you are no longer paying attention to what we are discussing here; you can go and see your sister’s son and leave us alone to continue our meeting.” And I thanked them and left. Let’s go out and have a drink. I’m sure you drink beer now. What is your brand? Becks? Heineken? Guinness?’
I didn’t think he was in any condition to take in more beer and I politely refused. He frowned suddenly, and I knew I had offended him.
‘Uncle,’ I said, ‘I’m very tired, but tomorrow we can go out any time you like.’
I hoped he wouldn’t be in even worse shape the next day.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, pulling my arm impatiently. ‘I left my important meeting to come and take you out, and you say you won’t go?’
The way he said it, with an angry undercurrent in his voice and a desperate look on his face, as though if I continued to decline he would throw me out on the street the next moment, left me no choice. I followed him downstairs, my apprehension increasing as he engaged himself in a violent, muttering argument on the way. His car was a wide antique Olds with as many dents and scratches as a Lagos taxi cab; the seat was so mushy it felt like sitting in a swamp.
Uncle Happiness swung the car into the road with a grunt, and we shot down the street trailed by the loud, hoarse groaning of the exhaust. We hit the junction with Martin Luther King Jr. Street at top speed and after a quick glance to his left, Uncle Happiness threw the car into the traffic, missing another wide old car that was cruising in the inner lane by inches.
‘Useless people,’ Uncle Happiness said, ‘people in this useless country don’t know how to drive. Why is he playing on the road as if it’s his father’s private property?’
He swung from lane to lane, overtaking, cutting in, flying past yellow lights and at least one red one, cursing every other driver on the road for driving like cows, pregnant women, idiots, drunkards; the ubiquitous liquor store neon signs offering Budweiser, Coors and whatnot madly racing past us. My heart pounded; I gripped my seat, and then the door handle. Now and again I muttered: ‘Take it easy, Uncle,’ but he ignored me. I wondered which of many catastrophes would befall us that night. Would he knock someone down or smash into another car? Would we be stopped by the police and he imprisoned for driving under the influence? Would he hit a truck and kill us both? But by a miracle we reached the freeway safely, and though Uncle Happiness stepped on the gas pedal with all his strength, and the groaning of the exhaust began to sound like the rumble of an earthquake, the car was unable to reach an unsafe speed. I relaxed a bit.
Freed from cursing other drivers and jumping across lanes, Uncle Happiness began to let off a torrent of words:
‘I’m so happy you are here, I’m so happy. You don’t know how happy I am. When you phoned me to say you were coming, I was overjoyed. That’s always what I wanted. You can ask your mother, I wrote to her many years ago to tell her that once you finished your first degree, you should come over here. You know, this is the greatest country in the world, there’s no place like America. With your intelligence, the money you’ll make here in one month when you’ve fully settled down is more than you’ll make in Nigeria in ten years. You know I negotiated for a big house for us, a four-bedroom house where you’d be comfortable, but they ate my money. This country is full of criminals as you will soon find out. I paid them for the house and for the furniture all at the same time, a new fridge, TV, seats, everything new; I wanted you to be very comfortable, but they took my money and disappeared. So please manage this our house for a while. I know it’s not very comfortable, but please manage the house for now. I am making many arrangements, and everything will be all right soon. Those people staying with me, I just do it to help people who have come newly and don’t know where to stay. It is a way of helping them out for a while until they can find their own houses and settle down. I had planned to get the new house, and then we would move there, and I would keep this one just for helping people, but they ate my money like I told you so we will manage this one for a short time, then I will finish the arrangements I’m making. Then everything will be all right. I don’t want you to suffer even for a minute in this country while I’m alive. Please just manage that house for a short time. I am making plans to take care of everything, and I am sure things will work out the way I have planned. You know, you and I together we’ll do a lot of things, you are very educated, that’s all I need. My greatest problem in this country is that I did not go to school for very long. That’s why things have sometimes been difficult for me. But I have tried my best. God is my witness. He knows I am not a lazy man, that I have never taken any man’s money. I have tried my best, but without education you will have problems in this country. But since you are very educated and very intelligent, I will bring my experience, to be in this country for twenty-four years is not a joke, you will bring your brain, and together we will get whatever we want. Those who have looked down on Happiness will soon know that I have people in this world, educated people.’
And thus he went on, urgent and out of control like gas rushing out of a burst high-pressure pipe. My sides hurt from the cold night air which poured in from the wound down window on his side; I bore the discomfort silently as it was unthinkable that I would interrupt his charged monologue for a matter as frivolous as winding up the window on his side.
‘You and I will do so much together. Let us just manage the house for a while, and then when you settle down, we can move to any place we want. Your mother, my sister, she does not understand. But you are a man, you will understand. I wanted a wife, yes, I wanted a wife. But you do not bring a woman all the way from home to come here and suffer. I was doing well and I had money, but there were many things I was working on at that time, and people cheated me and took my money. I have suffered in America because I did not go to school for long. They took all my money at that time, and I had to start from the beginning, but your mother will not understand. She will say get married, get married, how can you get married when you make plans and then evil people come and take your money from you, and you have to start from the beginning again. The money I have made in this country is so much you will not believe how much money I have made. I am not a lazy man, I work very hard, and I have made a lot of money, but thieves have stolen all of it. I tried to tell your mother but she will not listen to me. I know you understand better than she does, you know women are not understanding. Once they have made up their minds, you will not be able to change it for them. But you are now a man, I know you will understand. Let us just manage things for a short while.’
We drove through a night prettily sprinkled with light. Taillights and headlights and clusters of streetlights glinted off the brilliant dividers on the road, mighty hotels bursting with brilliance suddenly appeared on the tops of hills, as though by an illusionist’s trick. And the lights of a town at the bottom of a valley would hang in the air for seconds, an endless blanket of distant fireflies, and then vanish, only to re-appear at the other side of a hill. Even now when I can easily tell which distant neon light belongs to a Denny’s restaurant and which one advertises a shopping mall, my freeway nights are sometimes almost as magical as that first experience.
Uncle Happiness talked and talked. He spoke more to himself than to me, simultaneously making excuses for his failures and convincing himself that I was a new fountain of hope, and finally he managed to control the disquiet in him that he had tried to defeat with alcohol and failed, the disquiet he had vented at other vehicles in traffic and at his ancient Oldsmobile. Towards the end of the drive, as he exited from the freeway and headed home, the drink he had said we were going to have entirely forgotten, he was in a calmer mood. With growing conviction, he repeated his story about the furnished four-bedroom house he’d tried to get, and how he’d been cheated and about all the money he’d made and lost, and his hope that he and I working together (he contributing his twenty-four-year experience of America and I my intelligence and education) would make enormous amounts of money and live in luxury happily ever after. I listened to all this in silence, marvelling at this fifty-year-old child who hid away from the world that had beaten him in fantasy houses of his own construction, the way, as a child, I had escaped from the tedium of life around me by converting myself into Captain Darkie, a character in one of my boys’ comics, the leader of an invincible band of British commandos decimating the slit-eyed Japanese in the jungles of Burma during the Second World War.
When we got back to the house that smelt of stale sweat and failure, he pleaded with me once more to manage the house for a little while, that everything would soon be all right. Needless to say, I didn’t share his optimism. I felt trapped in his decayed house and repelled by the dreams in which he tried to hide. I’d come to America to seek success not to keep company with failure.
*
I phoned Uncle Happiness after I’d spent a day at Andrew’s to appease any ill feelings he might have had towards me for leaving his house the way I did. I’d given him five hundred dollars the day before I left to get me a social security card from a friend of his who he said provided documents for illegals, and I was afraid that if he felt offended at my leaving I might never get the card or get my money back.
‘I hope your friend’s place is fine,’ Uncle Happiness said over the phone. ‘Please manage with your friend for a while; everything is going to be all right soon, and we can move to another house, just you and me.’
Instead of feeling hurt, Uncle Happiness sounded rather happy that I had left. The elements of his fantasies were apparently quite easy to re-arrange; perhaps if I’d told him I now lived in the street, he might have cheerfully said, please manage the pavements for a while, everything will soon be all right, and so on.
He called me at Andrew’s about two weeks later to say that he would get my social security card later that day, and I could collect it from him at five p.m. At the time the streets were still unfamiliar to me so I left Andrew’s place a good hour before five and got to Uncle Happiness’s early. His Olds was parked outside. I went up to his apartment and rang the bell. He let me in with the habitual loud exclamations and expressions of joy at seeing me and introduced me to a man with the smooth fleshy face of an overweight child, who could easily have been a very light-skinned black man or a Latino, or a bit of each. In a cream jacket, beige shirt, red bow-tie and black trousers, he looked like he was on his way to a dinner. His round glasses gave him an academic air. He was smoking a foul-smelling pipe which had aroused all the other smells imprisoned in the living room. Uncle Happiness introduced him as Mr Cassidy—who helped people.
‘I help people all right; you can say I’m a philanthropist,’ Mr Cassidy said with great emphasis, and he then burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Uncle Happiness joined in and I joined them, too, since everyone else was laughing so hard. From Mr Cassidy’s accent I deduced he was a Nigerian trying to imitate the roller-skate rhythm of African-American English with very little success.
‘Are you the guy who needs the social security card?’
I nodded.
‘I already gave it to Happiness. Happiness is a good man, a very good man, and a darn good customer,’ and Mr Cassidy burst out laughing again. This time I let him and Uncle Happiness do the laughing.
Uncle Happiness took the card out of his pocket and handed it to me. I looked at it with excitement and fear. Armed with this little piece of paper, I would be able to work, to begin to pursue my own modest American dream (save some money, do a good MBA and then a nice job in a good corporation), but at the same time I wondered for how long I’d be able to carry around a forged document without being detected in this land of megacomputers. All it would take would be for one of them to pick up a tiny questionable aspect of the card and then—prison or deportation, both probably.
‘That’s the real thing,’ Mr Cassidy said, reading my mind. ‘It came from Uncle Sam himself, and you can ask Happiness. I’ve been getting papers for Happiness for years and none of his people has ever had a problem. Right, Happiness?’
‘That’s true,’ my uncle said.
There’s of course always a first time, I thought, and with my kind of luck that first time could be me. But, anyway, what was to be done? I couldn’t possibly to go the Immigration and Naturalization Service and say: ‘Hey guys, I came into your country on a visitor’s visa, but I really would like to stay, get a job, save some money, go to graduate school and get a nice corporate job. Can you let me have a green card to help me along?’ This peril-strewn path of forged papers and shady men was the only one open to me.
Suddenly inspired by that alert distrust of everything and everybody which Lagos teaches you very quickly, I turned to Mr Cassidy and asked in an innocent-sounding voice:
‘How much does it cost to get this card?’
‘Three hundred bucks,’ he said. ‘Didn’t Happiness tell you yet?’
I didn’t answer but looked at my uncle, who had taken five hundred dollars from me for the card. He turned away and fastened his eyes on one of the eczematous walls of his living room. He shrank even further in my eyes, became a bald-headed wrinkled worm; not just a failure who filled his head with childish fantasies but also a small-time crook who would steal from his own blood.
Christ, Gandhi and a Girl with Brown Hair
Andrew looked exactly the way he’d looked at university: the same nerdy, apologetic, dark brown, square-faced ugliness, the same thick glasses with cheap black frames, the same painful limp, even the same anonymous short-sleeved shirt, the stripes of which were so faded you could hardly tell that it had ever been striped. He smiled nervously when I let him into Uncle Happiness’s living room and hesitantly called me Oh-Bye—the hip version of my name used by friends and classmates in university—as though he was afraid I’d get angry with him for taking liberties. He held out his two hands limply in front of him. I was unsure whether he intended to take my hand in both his, give me a hug, or help me carry my things which were lying behind me just inside the door. I shook his right hand warmly; it was the least I could do for someone who had so enthusiastically offered to house me. As I left Uncle Happiness’s house, I shook the dust off my feet.
I’d seen very little of Oakland since I arrived, and the streets Andrew and I drove through were depressing: they struck me as places from which hope and ambition had been wrung out. People neglected or couldn’t afford to put a fresh coat of paint on their homes, dead and dying cars littered the sides of the streets, some of which were so empty it seemed as though everyone had been wiped out by a plague. Andrew took a long route to show me the really bad parts in West Oakland, the way a Londoner might show off the West End. At first I didn’t see much difference between what he said were the really bad drug-devastated parts and the not-so-bad areas we’d passed through earlier. Then I noticed the way the insides of some houses had been eaten up as though by a billion famished ants, leaving only outer walls, frames and roofs, the boarded-up auto repair shops covered by generations of graffiti, the empty lots on which moss was spreading, and the people, ragged and stranded, standing on pavements, sitting outside shops, staring into space.
