I was in London in February of 2020, filming a pilot for The Lazy Generation, a hilarious stunt show born from the mind of British daredevil and filmmaker Kurtis Bell. Every day we filmed horrible feats of bravery and stupidity: human dart boards, penises tattooed on the soles of feet, young men dressed like the villains of Funny Games facing off against a cannon that fired tennis balls. On meal breaks, we’d talk about the new virus in China and wonder if it would make it to the UK or US. These were simpler times.
At night I felt free for the first time in years. My ex and I were separated but had no idea when we’d be able to afford to split the household, so I moved into the guest bedroom and started dating for the first time since high school.
It’s awkward to start dating in your forties. It’s all the more so when it’s your first time dating trans and queer. But for a few days, my bed wasn’t in a house shared with my children; it was at the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch. I was giddy at what was possible with so much distance and anonymity. I downloaded Grindr before leaving for LAX.
At the time, I was early in my transition and rocking they/them pronouns, still looking masculine despite all my efforts with my makeup and clothes. So while Grindr did its job in providing me with a healthy stream of horny men reachable by tube, they perceived me as a dude in a way that turned me off.
I only got the highly specific, gender-nuanced flavor of flirtation that worked for me from trans femmes in the app, and they were worse in other ways - all earlier in transition than me, some still waiting to start hormone therapy. They’d pepper me with questions about estrogen, family rejection, sexual function, and on and on until they’d completely removed all erotic potential from the match. When they finally realized the spark was gone, they’d send a dick pic.
I deleted Grindr.
On Instagram, I was busy making another, more successful, definitely platonic, connection to a stranger. The connection continues today, over three years later.
It started like this:
I had won three “BMW X6 jeeps and a check for $10.5 millions USD.” It was a good day. All I needed to do was send my personal information and $500 to secure my windfall. I started screenshotting our conversation and posting it to my Instagram stories (hiding my stories from William).
Of course, I responded to his news with enthusiasm. As I had in my previous prolonged interaction with an Instagram scammer, I took on a persona. This one was a little less elaborate than my previous drug dealer persona: basically just me, but less they/them, more dude/bro, (arguably) spacier and more chaotic. When he asked me for my next of kin, I told him my dog, but if she predeceased me:
I was being a clown, and being a little loose about it, too, because I had the chaos of The Lazy Generation to occupy the most troublemaking corners of my brain. But when he identified himself with this ID, it was too perfect a coincidence to ignore:
He was pretending to be in London! I insisted that we meet to exchange the funds, and peppered in details from my actual time in the city, like working at a WeWork in Hackney:
We went back and forth, the scammer coming up with reasons William Rogers couldn’t meet me in person, and me coming up with reasons I couldn’t just send him the $500 in the form of an Amazon gift card.
Unlike previous scammers I’d interacted with, “William” was willing to have personal conversations. When I asked him for his favorite song and actor he responded charmingly:
Who was this man? I wanted to be his friend. I counter-proposed a movie night when I got my winnings. For a moment, it felt like we were truly sharing a fantasy of wealth and camaraderie:
In addition to the lovely cast of the Lazy Generation, I was spending my time with Jim Hickey, our director, a legend who had directed the iconic UK stunt show Dirty Sanchez, Eleanor Gecks, our line producer - a motorcycle enthusiast and influencer, and the team of the UK branch of the production company where I worked, lead by Donny Tourette. Donny is famous for being the lead singer of Towers of London, a rowdy hotel-room-trashing glam punk band. He is also infamous for being a short-lived cast member of Big Brother before making reality show history by breaking out of the house. He has subsequently settled into the role of music manager, creative producer, and spirtual seeker. In our downtime, I was sharing updates from my interactions with “William” with the team, but it was Donny as my fellow “suit” who had the most mental bandwidth to invest in the saga of the BMW Jeeps.
I emphasize Donny now because he became important to this story later, and because while my virtual friendship with “William” was blossoming, I was connecting with Donny in Ubers over love, heartbreak, balancing art making with money making, and on a fundamental level: what does it all mean? They were the kinds of summer camp conversations that I don’t often have outside of the context of production.
“William” started seriously pushing for a resolution to our interactions on our last day of filming the pilot. I had run out of funny ways to stall him as he asked me for the funds to process my winnings. I promised that I would make a trip to a cash machine on our lunch break, but I let him know that I was worried about my safety:
I sent the message just as we were about to film the pilot’s climactic stunt: a Rube Goldberg sequence that started with setting fire to the seat of the pants of stunt performer Phat Sam who then ran across a field to jump into a car, which then hit Kurtis’s brother Troy, who then scrambled onto his feet on the hood of the car, briefly surfing there before the car slammed on its brakes, sending Troy flying into a giant inflatable ball filled with the stinking, rotted discards from a nearby fish monger and stunt performer Aqueel, who’d flown back to London from Pakistan just for the pilot. The impact sent Aqueel, the ball, and the fish slurry rolling down a hill where they collided with a tall ladder, knocking Kurtis from his perch twenty feet in the air into a field of manure next to a sign reading “GIVE US A SHOW, MTV.” (Eat your heart out, Jacques Tati).
The stunt looked great. No one was seriously injured. We watched the playback and the slo-mo footage from people’s iPhones and the drone. We recounted every beat, laughed, and kept as much distance as possible from anyone tainted with fish goo or cow shit.
Once we’d celebrated and the work of the day was over, I returned to Instagram and sent William my punchline to our scam. In 2018, I took a selfie moments after I tripped on a crack in the pavement and broke my nose on a morning run. Now, I used it as “proof” that I’d been robbed, and attempted to scam him out of money to replace my passport and get back home:
Again, he was a total sweetheart:
Again, I was not:
I let “William” sweat for a little while, but eventually he did what other scammers failed to do: checked my Instagram feed and found evidence of my lie. I’d used another selfie with a broken nose to promote my previous stunt show, Too Stupid to Die, to my friends. He screenshotted the image and sent it back to me.
And at this point, “William” dropped his guard and started talking to me as himself (for context: in our earlier conversations, he’d sworn on his mother’s grave that he wasn’t lying to me):
He told me a little about how the scams work. He was effectively a freelancer, keeping only 30% of whatever he managed to talk Americans out of. At the time, he didn’t feel particularly conflicted about the grift. Americans have so much, on average, and Nigerians so little. I couldn’t really argue that point, except to say that the scams were so obviously fraudulent that he wasn’t taking from the Americans he imagined when contemplating that inequality, he was taking from extremely unsophisticated people who probably weren’t doing as well as I was. But parsing the mechanics or morality of international scamming was less interesting than the potential of meeting each other face-to-face.
He told me his name was Kelvin. I told him that Donny and I would call him when we wrapped.
While all of this was happening, I continued posting screenshots to Instagram. As Kelvin and I were getting acquainted as our true selves, friends were DM’ing me with questions and suggestions about where this caper might go next. One of these friends was the magical Scotty Coats, a music executive who’d overseen a video I directed for the band De Lux when he worked at their amazingly-named label, Innovative Leisure.
Scotty told me I should ask Kelvin about music. Nigeria was poised to be the next global hotspot for music and this happenstance meeting might be a conduit to that scene.
Donny and I connected with Kelvin that night over WhatsApp video and once we’d laughed about all the ways we’d deceived each other, the conversation turned to music. We asked Kelvin if he was into music. He answered with a freestyle. It was actually good. We laughed and joked about the week and how we’d met. Donny and I finished a bottle of wine at his flat and I went back to my empty bed at the Ace Shoreditch.
Our conversation set two things in motion:
The first was a strange friendship with Kelvin that continues to this day. When I returned to LA, he met my kids over WhatsApp video. We’ve talked through both of our breakups, the birth of his son, my film premieres, the founding of his beauty supply store, and other chapters from our lives too tricky and private to recount here.
The second was that Donny and I went to work helping Kelvin record his first single, a song he wrote called “My Time.” Donny manages a hyperpop artist named Jazmin Bean and enlisted their producer Dougal Drummond to help us with the effort. Dougal composed music to accompany Kelvin’s lyrics and with Kelvin helped us connect with Lagos-based producer DJ Flash.
While we made the arrangements, we were entering the thick of the Covid shutdown in the US and UK. While the shutdown in Nigeria was less dramatic, Nigerians were dealing with a crisis of their own. Young Nigerians started a protest movement against SARS, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. The unit was eventually disbanded in October of 2020 (but its membership is still active in other police organizations in Nigeria). At the time, SARS was earning this Wikipedia entry:
SARS was controversial for its links to extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, extortion, torture, framing, blackmail, kidnapping, illegal organ trade, armed robbery, home invasions, rape of men and women, child arrests, the invasion of privacy, and polluting bodies of water with the illegal disposal of human remains.
I sent Kelvin money, for transport from his village to Lagos, and a place to stay while he was there. Some friends joked that maybe this was a long con, that the single was just a ploy to turn BMW Jeep money into transportation money, but I’d spent enough time with Kelvin that I wasn’t worried. Traveling a day in a small bus on rural roads, he ran the risk of intersecting with this conflict and he and his family didn’t have the money to buy him out of a shakedown by SARS or other unscrupulous actors. I was risking a couple hundred dollars. Kelvin was risking his safety.
And, as Kelvin reported from the journey, rain and Covid detours made the roads to Lagos impassible:
Thank God, he made it. Kelvin arrived in Lagos looking the part of an artist recording his first single. He slept at a friend’s house and reported to DJ Flash’s studio the next day:
I can’t imagine the pressure Kelvin was feeling when he entered DJ Flash’s studio as a neophyte. I don’t think I appreciated the intensity of a one-day trip to the city to make art until writing this. Maybe I could have done that when I was younger, but now that pressure seems absolutely daunting. Flash mentored Kelvin, helping shape the song with notes on his lyrics and performance. By the time Kelvin was on the road back home, he’d recorded his first single, an upbeat anthem of a man finally getting a chance to be an artist. It was his earnest, optimistic “Lose Yourself.”
After Kelvin recorded the song, a lot changed in both of our lives. He had a (beautiful) son, got married, and started a business. My kids moved to the east coast, I quit my studio job, and took a job that paid less but was better for my soul. It left us with a song, but no video - a critical component to getting Kelvin viral love in the era of TikTok and Youtube. Kelvin pressured me to send money to hire professionals to shoot a video for “My Time,” I pressured Kelvin to enlist his friends to film a video that wore its budget on its sleeve. Our mutual frustration produced under a minute of a video which proved Kelvin’s case for bringing on real filmmakers. Here’s an excerpt which shows off Kelvin’s charisma and the limitations of a video filmed by amatuer videographers on cell phones:
We didn’t talk much for awhile, but Kelvin would DM occasionally to ask about my sons or to send a picture of his. We bounced back from the rough patch of our unfinished collaboration. A few weeks ago, Kelvin sent me the first music he’d sent me in a long time, the beginnings of a gospel song.
This could only happen to one person and it's you.