(Mrs. Hot is having thrilling summer adventures. The latest inspiration, titillation and transformation returns in October.)
IN WHICH THE UNIVERSE THROWS ME A BONE, BUT NOT THE BONER I WAS LOOKING FOR.
I’d involved my BFF in every step of my torrid fling with Lieutenant Hot, including forwarding his emails, which like every other news from him, she awaited with baited breath.
Now the phone rang and it was she, voice trembling in a way that sent stabs of warning terror down my spine: there was something bad she didn’t want to tell me. She’d seen a news segment on Internet scammers, and gotten the idea to google Mark’s emails.
I gripped my phone, white-knuckled, but that couldn’t stave off the truth: Mark’s emails were fake, and had been used by multiple West African scammers; she found them on a website with hundreds of testimonies from women who’d been victimized.
Remember, dear reader, Venus, planet of love, and Uranus, planet of revolution and surprise, had been going strong in my fifth house of romance. What I neglected to notice was the position and strength of Neptune, planet of illusion; yet I wasn’t supposed to be aware of it, in fact, but cleave to the delusion it brought to my life. Which I did, of course, in spades.
Reading the scamming victims’ accounts, I saw dozens of photos of Mark Lopez either under that name or many other aliases. No wonder my scammer asked me to get off OKCupid: that way, I wouldn’t run into other profiles with Mark’s hot pics under other names. Interestingly, my scammer had not asked for money, which is the M.O. of the game: either he was going to, or had just decided not to, even. In our conversations I’d told him I tutored disadvantaged kids and had always had a special place in my heart for poor children — perhaps he resonated with that, or was taken by my sad tale of the previous two decades.
I looked over our messaging history for clues and couldn’t find any, except for the accelerated pace of the relationship — Mark wanting to marry me, for example, without having met me. Still, I’d chalked that up to our deep conversations and mutual intense romanticism; anyway, delusional, I wasn’t into parsing anything at that point. But the Nigerian’s English was perfect and not at all stilted in a foreign way, which might have alerted me, nor was anything else a red flag.
That night, when he messaged as usual around 3:00 AM, I confronted him:
Me: What’s your name?
Lt.Mark: What do you mean, you know my name.
Me: You’re a fake, you’re a scammer. When were you going to ask me to send you money?
Lt.Mark: I never asked you for money and I never would.
Me: Shame on you, how dare you use another human being so. You’re evil.
Lt. Mark: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
I responded “You’re evil!” a few more times until he finally stopped messaging.
Lieutenant Hot had shocked and awed me, alright, and not in the preferred Biblical sense.
Yours truly,
