Back to the Backseat/Back to Lagos.

That day in Lagos, the day I was mentioning before, when I was 10.

We'd spent most of the day in the car; nowhere to look but out the car window. Mounds of trash washing up on the island everywhere, the sun trying desperately to reflect off something, even if it was against the aluminum of a shredded can of Coca-Cola. The water was musty; the sky was color-less, a blank slate waiting to be puffed with the day's smoke; everywhere the rank smell of gasoline pervading, making the city feel as though it might ignite at any moment through a misled spark. And there we were, me and mom, stuck in traffic, in this love-hungry city, amid love-for sale roads on our way to the Sheraton and its 1,000-American-Dollar-a-night rooms. The cheap ones, anyway.  Not because that's where we were staying, but because of who we were meeting there, which is at the center of all of this. But I don't want to talk about him yet.

We'd heard that in Lagos you walked in barefoot and you left in a Mercedes. Mom told me later that while we were sitting there, stuck to our leather seats, that she kept thinking whether the opposite couldn't also be true. At least for me and her -- and that wasn't even our Mercedes we were riding in -- it belonged to someone else all together, to a company, actually. My father's company.  And there it is, the beginnings of the center.   

The Billboard reads "Rule Your World"