Love Africa Read online

  A few days later, standing with a pack of guys in front of Rockefeller Hall, I saw the same girl. She caught me looking, and as she walked by, she lifted her eyes and dropped a casual “Hi.”

  “You know her?” my buddy Ethan said, punching me hard in the arm. “She’s kinda fly.”

  The next afternoon, I returned to my room to find a note tucked in the door. I took one look at it but instantly folded it up and wheeled around.

  “Who wrote this?” I said, stomping down the hallway, brandishing the note. “Who really wrote this?”

  No girl would venture into our den, alone, in the harsh light of day, braving the one enormous groin-scratching meathead who always lounged on our front stoop with his lacrosse stick like the Cyclops guarding his cave.

  But the brothers swore that they hadn’t written that letter.

  I went back to my room and shut the door. It was an unusually bright autumn day, light flooding through the windows. I opened the note again and studied the handwriting, strong and clear, perfectly straight on lineless paper.

  “Hi, Jeff, how are you? We met the other night. Maybe we can have dinner sometime? Here’s my number. Courtenay.” Her telephone number was scribbled under her name, neatly as the rest.

  Was I hallucinating? I stepped back into the hallway to ask again if this was a prank. Part of me still hoped it was. It would be so much easier that way. It was like those colliding feelings of thrill and terror I’d always get sprinting down the side of the lacrosse field as fast as I could, wide open, in perfect shooting range, dying to crank the ball through the back of the net but hesitating to call out for it because I dreaded choking. If the letter was a fake, well, that meant I could just slip back to the safe routine of waiting for the meep . . . meep . . . meep of the beer truck backing up to the front of the house on Friday night with two thousand cans of Coors or Beast or whatever it was before a party. But if it were real, I actually had to do something.

  The brothers huddled in the hallway, eager to share their hard-earned wisdom.

  “Call her, you dumbshit,” one said.

  “This is your lucky day, asshole,” said another.

  A few nights later, I picked Courtenay up. We drove to a Vietnamese restaurant at the bottom of the hill, near the Ithaca Commons. I was wearing my typical outfit—ripped jeans, yellow-rimmed Ohio State baseball cap on backward, slightly funky sweatshirt—I prided myself on going three or four days without a shower. Of course I was eager to make an impression, but even more I was fearful of seeming anything less than nonchalant. The last thing I wanted was to come across like I was trying too hard. Evidently she was less hung up on things like that, radiant in a snug-fitting Arctic-blue Nordic sweater with big brass buttons on her chest, borrowed from her roommate, the prettiest thing either of them had in their shared closet. In the car, I smelled her still-wet hair.

  She sat down and smoothed out her napkin in her lap. She was beautiful to listen to and beautiful to look at. She didn’t wear a drop of makeup—she didn’t need to, with her dramatic coloring—pale skin, full red lips, and that very dark hair, starting from a sexy widow’s peak. Her eyes were light brown, flecked with dark spots, like tiger lilies. With those wooden chopsticks, she lifted glass noodles to her lips. She handled them like she had been born in Hanoi. I ate with my hands.

  I can’t tell you what I learned about her over those spring rolls and little bowls of noodle soup, perhaps because I was too nervous or too busy looking at her. But I don’t think it mattered. We were at an age when all key decisions are made in small parts of seconds, and we had already decided, in one of those small parts, that we wanted something from each other.

  As we drove back, I started getting nervous. What should I do when we got to her house? I pulled up along the curb, and she was just sitting there, gazing up the road. I put the car in park, eyeing those swollen lips. I leaned over, moved toward her, shut my eyes. She did the same.

  We bumped teeth.

  Two

  The World, 1992

  I set off for the airport with $5,000 wadded up in my right front pocket; an around-the-world ticket in my hands; a new backpack; a new pair of great big Italian mountain boots; several pairs of allegedly sweatproof polyester socks; thirty-eight rolls of film; and my dad’s Olympus OM-1 camera, which he had kept in immaculate condition for the past fifteen years, not a scratch or ding on it. My parents had spooled out the leash farther, much farther, God bless them, even though I wasn’t getting any college credit, and what I was about to embark on ran the risk of making me never want to come back. “What were we going to do?” my mom later told me. “After that first summer, you had gone to another world we knew nothing about.”

  This time I was going for a whole glorious year. I had been working the previous summers to make this happen. It felt very bold at the time, but once I made my decision, I never second-guessed it: I was dropping out. Dan approved. He had done the same thing, right after high school. His guidance counselor at the International School of Kenya, a beautiful school on a hillside outside Nairobi, had responded to his decision dismissively. “Oh, I see,” she had said. “You’re taking a year off.”

  “No, no,” Dan corrected her. “I’m taking a year on.”

  Nineteen ninety-two was the perfect year for a Year On. It was a new dawn, one of those hopelessly optimistic periods where past mistakes are eclipsed by a future not yet here. The Soviet Union had just said dasvidaniya to itself, the Cold War had suddenly ended, the United States was embarking on the longest-running economic expansion in its history, and al-Qaeda was barely a twinkle in Osama’s eye. People liked us, at least that’s how it felt. In Egypt, all I had to do was walk down the sidewalk, hold out my right hand, and bark “Eedack!” and I’d get the loudest, friendliest smack (eedack means “your hand” in Arabic). The ease of a high five says a lot, and in 1992, for the most part, it was a world of easy high fives. For one, none of us had a cell phone in our hands. This was right before the communication revolution—about sixteen civilians knew what e-mail was. The result was an immersion that was about to be rendered impossible for forever onward. From Chicago to New Guinea, I hit four continents and seventeen countries, spending more time in Kenya than anywhere else. I arrived in Nairobi in the spring.

  “Amazing, man, just amazing,” Dan said from his porch, where he was waiting for me. “I just heard you talking to the askari.”

  It was only the Swahili basics that I had inflicted on Dan’s guard, my accent plywood, none of that music native Swahili speakers make the instant they open their mouths. But Swahili was like a little key, unlocking that other world.

  “You learned all that, in a classroom?”

  I beamed.

  “Come on, man,” Dan said, clapping an arm around my shoulder. He was a little thicker now, some stubble on his chin. His hair was combed straight back, and he wore a white T-shirt, black jeans, and a black leather vest. He looked like a handsome greaser. “Let’s bring your shit inside, and then let’s go. Deziree has got a little problem . . .”

  Deziree—or Dez, Dan’s 1977 Land Rover jalopy—always had a little problem. It was like the safari had never ended.

  “Got my rear viz?” Dan asked.

  “Yes sir!” I answered, turning around to make sure he wouldn’t whack anything as he threw it in reverse. We backed out Deziree and roared off. I asked Dan where exactly we were going and all he said was “To see the jua kalis.”

  That confused me. From Swahili class I knew that jua kali meant “fierce sun,” but I didn’t know what it would mean plural, or in this context. We cut through downtown, past an ochre-colored skyscraper—much of Africa had the architectural misfortune to win its independence in the mid-1960s, which meant many big buildings went up with heavy cement facades and in some interesting hues—and Dan hung a hard left on River Road. The streets were teeming with people and smelled of garbage and sweetly rotting fruit. Dan stopped in front of a crowd of men in ripped jumpsuits, unbuttoned to the navel, no undershirt. We were immediately swarmed.

  Jua kali, I soon found out, refers to the artisans and craftsmen who perform their trades out on the street under the fierce sun, thus the name. The jua kalis included auto mechanics, carpenters, welders, shoemakers, sign painters, upholstery specialists, and experts in plastics and resins. They were a huge part of Kenya’s informal economy (probably bigger than the formal economy); many were highly skilled, illiterate engineers. The crumbling curbs of River Road were like their office park.

  Within seconds, twenty broad-handed men were sticking to Dez’s fenders, yelling “Unataka nini? Nini? Nini?” What do you want? What? What? My eyes jumped from man to man. What was stopping them from ripping us out of the truck, turning us upside down, and shaking all the money out of our pockets? They weren’t necessarily hostile, but they were determined. In a place like this, if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. Dez had a slight problem with her accelerator cable, and I started to wonder why Dan hadn’t taken her to a real garage.

  Dan calmly explained the issue, and from that unruly crowd stepped one man who looked right at us. “I can do it,” he said.

  He was wearing the same set of grubby, torn rags stained with engine grease, and his face radiated a certain fundamental pride. The other men dropped back respectfully.

  All eyes were on us, sitting stiffly in the front seat. Decision time.

  Dan stepped out of the truck, climbed up on the hood, and looked down at the crowd. He pointed to the man with the firm gaze and said in a loud stage voice: “Can anyone here vouch for this man’s character?”

  The men stared up at Dan. They didn’t say a word.

  “No bother,” Dan said, laughing. “You got the job.”

  Typical Dan. He loved this part of the wor
ld and slightly mocked it at the same time. He was making fun of the fact that jua kali work was a leap of faith—that anyone could say he was a mechanic and then disconnect every single engine hose and still demand payment. That tension is what made Dan particularly alive in these moments. He interacted with people, especially in crowds, in a way that I probably never would. He was able to take all their curiosity and play with it, like a toy. It was the same whenever he whipped his latex monster mask out of his backpack and pulled it over his head and sent the kids scattering like a burst of starlings, chirping with laughter. He took for granted that if he raised his hand to the sky, so too would every single African. Somehow, he did this without making a fool of himself. Or them.

  “Dude, you got to realize something,” he said as we stepped out of his truck—he could tell I’d been nervous. “With crowds, it can always go either way. You have to be respectful. But the energy of a crowd, man, the way it moves as one, there’s nothing like it.”

  He walked me around the various jua kali zones, and standing in the middle of all those handsaws munching through wood and metal tinging out against metal made me suddenly want to pound nails and saw wood. The economy here wasn’t hidden, like it was back home. When was the last time you saw someone on the street making a door? Or a coffin? “This is real life,” Dan pronounced. The men in front of us were making or fixing things, eager for work, living one day at a time, hand to mouth, without any real ability to control what happened to them or their families tomorrow but they did it with a certain moxie. That was real life, and Dan didn’t have to proselytize. I could see how growing up in this place had made Dan different from the other guys I knew. My eyes narrowed with a new envy. Lucky bastard, I thought. I would give my left nut to have grown up in Kenya like you.

  * * *

  Dan was a peer but he naturally wore the mantle of an elder. He taught me how every evening there’s a changing of the guard in the insect world: flies out, mosquitoes in. He introduced me to matatu minibuses, chicken tikka, and reggae rap. He helped me appreciate Nairobi’s dreamy climate, which made every day like a perfect September day back home, mid-seventies, low humidity, sunny with a few clouds. And he took me to White Night, apparently the thing for mzungus to do in Nairobi, which was quite segregated.

  The Carnivore disco played different music on the big nights of the week, catering to Nairobi’s segmented party scene. Saturday was disco, popular with Indians; Friday was Lingala, the sweet and smooth music from Zaire, popular with Africans; and Wednesday was Rock Night, more commonly known as White Night. From the howls of recognition I heard in the parking lot and the long hugs out on the dance floor, I deduced that White Night was something of a weekly reunion. The few blacks that attended were on the clock, in one way or another. While I was sitting at the bar and Dan was dancing, a young Somali woman came up to me and took my hand. She put it in her lap and grabbed me with two liquid-caramel eyes that said, What are you going to do now, Mzungu Boy?

  Mzungu Boy was rock-hard and terrified. This woman oozed a practiced ease. Mzungu Boy was a virgin. Mzungu Boy guarded that secret as closely as his virginity itself.

  Courtenay had been the closest, but we hadn’t even been that close. We had survived the teeth-bumping episode to go on several dates; we’d even slept in the same bunk bed a couple times, in the frat house, in what she and I called the Alcove. Once I rolled over and found her looking at me. I smiled, kissed her cheek, closed my eyes, and turned my head away, pretending I was going back to sleep. But I couldn’t. There was something growing in the Alcove, pressing against my closed eyelids, gently trying to lift them. Courtenay wasn’t scared of intimacy; I could see that staring right at me. But as much as I was intrigued by her, I wasn’t ready to open up. I rushed our good-bye in her sorority’s driveway as we sat in my car, heater blasting, windshield wet with feathery Ithaca snow. We had barely exchanged addresses before she got out and walked away.

  “Dan!” Mzungu Boy eventually blurted out. “Get your ass over here!”

  I finally extracted myself from the young woman and Dan from the dance floor, and soon enough we were back at his house, up on the second-floor veranda off his bedroom, lying out on foam mattresses in the open air.

  The air smelled like perfume.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Night jasmine,” Dan said.

  I took a big draft, trying to commit the smell to memory.

  * * *

  The three months I spent with Dan flew by. What we did in all those days, I couldn’t tell you; they were as jumbled as the journals he loved to make. He sat at his desk for hours, listening to the low, sultry tones of Edith Piaf trickling out of a boom box, turning things over in his hands that he had found, sticking things to paper, copying down phrases that meant something to him. His journals were bound collages, series of photos stuck to paper, smears of different colors and different materials, different ideas—letters, postage stamps, airline tickets, newspaper clippings, receipts, paint, feathers, blood, high-quality black-and-white images, all glued together. There was one picture I couldn’t stop staring at: Dan, in a gorge, shirt off, carrying a pretty girl in his arms. He was wading waist-high through opaque water and his eyes were fixed and dark. A single shaft of sunlight speared down behind him. The girl was clutching Dan’s neck, her head tilted back, eyes rapturously closed. It was as if she were giving her body over to him.

  I think Dan got interested in journals when he was around fourteen. At the time, his parents were getting divorced. Retreating to his room and closing the door and sitting at that desk, alone, for hours, must have been his way of finding a safe place in the world. He did his best thinking with a pair of scissors in his hands, and those three-dimensional heaps he was constantly building could have told me more about Africa and the world than the stack of Lonely Planet books and Michelin maps I lugged around with me—provided I knew how to read and interpret them, which at that point I didn’t. Dan may not have known either. Maps carefully divided things up, plotted things out, measured things. Maps were what the colonizers used; they made the conquest of Africa possible. Dan didn’t live by maps. Dan just went.

  It amuses me to remember how stubbornly intent I was to not appear as if I worshiped Dan. You never get what you want from those you admire, so I affected a pose of nonchalance. I still eschewed daily bathing and pretended not to notice the slight flare of Dan’s nostrils when he opened the door to the downstairs guestroom where I had decamped and took in a noseful of my cheese-smelling socks. I enjoyed testing things, especially in his world. Dan didn’t seem especially interested in the fact that several people, trusted family employees at that, lived in utter poverty on the Eldon property, and he discouraged us from asking too many questions. The cook, the gardener, and the guard stayed behind the main house in a cold-water shack with a rusted roof, like a piece of a slum that had somehow gotten lost and stopped behind the mansion to ask for directions. Shreds of laundry flapped on a line. It was Yoknapatawpha County back there. Dan called it the SQ, the servants’ quarters. I called it the slave quarters. I guess if you grew up with an SQ, you didn’t question it.

  One day Benjamin, the gardener, took me back there. Benjamin was my all-weather friend on the compound, always game to play soccer or teach me more Swahili. I stood in his doorway.

  “Nice room,” I said.

  I was shocked. Benjamin’s room was a dingy cell with a torn foam mattress. His few possessions stuffed in the corner—two gunnysacks, some ripped shirts, and some old newspapers—could have easily passed for garbage. There wasn’t a picture on the wall; it was a home without pride. I wasn’t supposed to be back there. Everybody here, on both sides, had his role and his techniques for overlooking the obvious. But I enjoyed poking a membrane I knew I shouldn’t touch.

  My time with Dan ended with the clicking of a slide projector. Chez Eldon was often a free hotel for talented drifters. One day it was a tall, pale Englishman who called himself an explorer and whose back was covered in scars that looked like the nuggets on a crocodile’s back—he had been initiated into a tribe in the Indonesian jungle that revered crocodiles, and part of the initiation involved being pinned down on a canoe and cut several hundred times with extremely sharp blades of bamboo. The Englishman let me run my hands over his shoulders; it felt like braille.