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America And My Stupid Uncle Willy
By WayoGuy
In the middle of a very cold and
snowy December night in Washington, I received a call from Nigeria. My mother
was on the phone.
My uncle Willy, she said, left
home two days earlier on his way to join me in Washington. She wanted to know
if he had arrived. I was instantly terrified. “Mother”, I managed to shout,
“you can’t be serious …”
Before I could find out how uncle
Willy managed to get an American visa, and why nobody warned me, the telephone
line went dead. I knew exactly what happened: my mother had hung up on purpose.
She did not want to give me a chance to say “hell no…that man is not coming to
my house.” My anxiety escalated as I sat down to recall, with horror, the
stupidity of uncle Willy.
I grew up with uncle Willy, my
mother’s junior brother.
On a ten-point scale of
stupidity, he was a ten. He was so stupid that my mother used to whisper to any
ear willing to listen that he was not really her brother. My mother very badly
wanted to dissociate herself from my uncle’s reputation. Because of my uncle,
every time my father wanted to tease my mother, my father would say “Mama
bomboy, did you know that the bad reputation of our bad relatives are just like
our buttocks, they follow us everywhere we go?” Then papa would break out
laughing.
Uncle Willy was so stupid that
one day, he voluntarily walked into the police station near our house in Enugu
and offered to pay a bribe of One Thousand Naira. When the police asked him
what crime he committed that warranted the payment of bribe, he confessed that
the Thursday before Easter Sunday, he had urinated behind the primary school
where a sign was posted stating “Do not urinate here”.
Naturally, the police took his
money and made him promise them that the next time he committed an offence,
even if nobody saw him do it, he would come to the station and pay a fine. When
the story reached our house, my father danced out of the house, roaring with
laughter while my mother sat at a corner of the kitchen pretending she was not
listening.
Uncle Willy was so stupid that he
single-handedly went to a neighboring town and married a one-legged girl,
without informing the family. We would later find out that the girl’s family
was so eager to get rid of her that they did not ask any questions but instead
waived the bride price and traditional ceremonies. While uncle Willy walked
beside her, the girl hopped on her one leg all the way from her family to our
house. My mother never forgave him.
For several months, while his wife
was pregnant with his first child, uncle Willy would wake up at night sweating
and pacing the floor. We would later find out that some mischievous teenagers,
from a local high school, playing doctors, had told him that because his wife
had only one leg, the baby too would be born with one leg. He was inconsolably
restless and fearful until the same teenagers used the opportunity to sell him,
for Five Thousand Naira, some vitamin pills that supposedly would make the baby
normal.
So, after that telephone call
from Nigeria, I sat there in my bedroom fuming with anger, angry at my mother,
angry at my uncle, angry at the world. Beyond the matter of privacy, I did not
think that my uncle had any business leaving his wife and six children at home.
I was certain that he would die
in America and my relatives would never forgive me. I was certain that he did
not have the minimum survival skills to get anywhere in America. I had seen too
many people like him end up in a cycle of abject poverty in America for decades
while their relatives in Nigeria died off waiting for their return. This man
needed to stay at home and take care of his family. We had farms …
As I paced the floor of my
bedroom, just after 2:00 a.m., my phone rang again. This time, the voice was unmistakable.
It was uncle Willy.
“Where are you calling from?” I
asked, without ceremony.
“Nna, it’s me, Willy boy,” he
responded, with a hint of frightening urgency.
“Where are you?” I asked again,
without emotion.
“I am on the street in
Washington. I am on the street. Nna, I am in Wash….”
“You’re on the street at this
time of the night? In this snow?”
“Nna, please come and get me. I
am almost dead from cold. A taxi driver that took me from the airport dropped
me on the street. He said the money I gave him was not enough to get to your
house. Please, please … my feet are frozen.”
Going to get him was out of the
question. Not only that I had no desire to leave my house at that dangerous
time of the night, I could not, even if I wanted to, because my car was in the
shop for maintenance; and even if my car was not in the shop, the snow had
piled up to three feet on the street making it impossible to drive anywhere.
Uncle Willy, as far as I was concerned, was as good as dead.
He told me that he was calling
from a public phone. He was on the street. He managed to read the street sign
to me, which gave me a very clear picture of where he was, a very dangerous
part of Washington. He was terribly cold because I could hear his teeth
knocking against each other and his breathing coming fast and furious.
“Sorry, I cannot come out of my
house,” I said, without emotion.
“Are you going to leave me here
to die? My luggage has already been stolen from me by one of the hoodlums here
on the street. These boys are wearing heavy winter clothes but I have on only a
shirt and a pair of trousers.”
Die? Leave him there to die? He
was going to die all right, but why was he asking if I would leave him there to
die? What did I have to do with it? What I really wanted to do was to hang up,
but I could not. It slowly dawned on me that if he died, my mother and our
relatives would never forgive me.
“Listen,” I said, “on that street
where you are, across from the public phones, there is a drug store that is
open 24 hours. Can you see it?”
“Yes, I have been inside that
store to stay warm. They told me to leave unless I wanted to buy something.”
“Listen to me. Are you
listening?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” he said between
frosty, cold, sustained coughs of desperation.
“You will die either from cold or
from the criminal gangs on the street if you don’t do exactly what I am about
to tell you. Are you there?”
“Yes,” he said, slightly more
feeble than earlier.
“Go back to that store, pick up
one toothpaste, one bottle of Coca-Cola, one body lotion, and one soap. Take
those items to the store clerk and tell him that you are leaving the store and
that you have no intention of ever paying for them. Then step out of the store
with the items and wait outside, near the door. Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes, yes, I will do it. I will
do it…”
I hung up. For the rest of the
night, I could not sleep.
Later that day, at exactly 12:00
noon, after the streets had been cleared of snow by the snow trucks, I took a
taxi straight to the police precinct in Southeast Washington. Sure enough, my
plan worked. The store personnel had called the police and reported a
shoplifter and, within four minutes, the police had arrived, arrested my uncle
and drove him, in a warm police vehicle, straight to jail. The jail, very warm,
safe, quiet, and less dangerous than the street, had saved uncle Willy from
certain death.
Unfortunately for uncle Willy,
and perhaps fortunately for me, the police discovered that while the passport
and visa with which he entered the United States were authentic, they belonged
to someone else because the photograph on the passport was not his.
On New Year’s Day in January,
uncle Willy was deported back to Nigeria where be rightfully belongs.
Now my sweet mother goes
everywhere boasting that her brother went to America and decided to come back
home because he could not stand the level of stupidity in that country. But
each time my father hears her boasting, he bursts out laughing and singing “The
buttocks claims that it is not afraid, but why is it always hiding behind?”
Stupid uncle Willy.
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Posted by Robot| 02.08.2007 21:31