You've Never Met Mordecai Yates by Carla Damron

Facebook is a curse and a blessing. A curse because it’s a huge time suck, but a blessing because it connects you with people all over the world. People you may have lost along life’s path. People you are delighted to find again and have in your life, even if it’s just through a digital connection.

Facebook also offers occasional surprises. Like the friend request I got in 2010 from a familiar name: Mordecai Yates.

Mordecai Yates. This was definitely a “holy sh*t” moment.

I know for a fact that you never met Mordi, because Mordecai Yates doesn’t exist in the flesh. He was created by a group of Wake Forest University students doing a residency in London, England, during the late 1970s.  I was incredibly lucky to be on this overseas trip; as a scholarship/grant/loan student, I couldn’t afford to go but WFU made it possible by giving me paid employment. I cleaned the house where we lived (toilets included) and helped the host professor with whatever he needed. One task was monitoring class rolls.

British professors came to the house to teach us. They had little interaction with our host professor, and I controlled the class rosters, so Mordecai Yates came into being—a fictitious student that I enrolled in our History of British Art class. Why? I don’t remember, exactly, but it happened very late one evening when a small group of us students sat around the living room doing nothing very academic. Mordi seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.

Mordi never came to class. Whenever the British art professor asked about him, we explained that he was traveling, that he’d developed a special fondness for the town of Peterborough (our least favorite village), or that he was suffering from food poisoning after an unfortunate sausage incident. We assured the professor that Mordi would get his assignments in. I marvel still that every student in the program went along with our ruse.

Our first assignment was to write two papers: One comparing two Hogarth self-portraits, the other contrasting two landscapes, Constable’s The Hay Wain with a pastoral Gainsborough scene.  Mordi went right to work. Of course, he misunderstood the assignment. His paper compared a Hogarth self-portrait with the Constable landscape. The theme: the self-portrait looked a whole lot more like Hogarth than that hay wagon did!

Imagine a stoic scholar of British art trying to decipher Mordi’s paper. Apparently, he found it quite troubling. When he came for our next class, he requested an audience with our host professor to discuss “serious concerns about a particular student.”

Yep. We were busted. I remember being called on the carpet for adding Mordecai Yates to the class roster. I remember a vague reference to the “classroom prank” during the next art history class. But mostly I remember Mordi himself—how we kept him alive throughout the semester. He was quite the rascal. He had to be bailed out of jail more than once. If an item was missing from the communal fridge, that was Mordi. I think he was responsible for any poorly prepared shared meal. And of course, we couldn’t keep  him out of Peterborough.

The semester ended and we came home. When we returned to campus, we saw each other very little and all I heard about Mordi was that he was “back in jail.” We graduated. We moved on to our separate lives, Mordecai Yates all but forgotten.

Until he friended me on Facebook. He doesn’t have many friends, just a few of us who’d been to London (including a pastor in Canada and a Shakespeare scholar in Connecticut) and some friends and family, but he’s certainly filled us in on his interesting life. He was implicated in a Ponzi scheme. He’s asked for our credit card information and requested we send him bolt cutters. He was a suspect in a family related murder but assures us it is now a “cold case” (he’d gladly tell me the story for a large chunk of the Kindle royalties). He never forgets birthdays.

And, of course, he’s in and out of jail.

Thank you, Facebook, for connecting me with old friends.

Of course, now that I’m posting this blog, I’m pretty sure Mordi will hit me up for royalties. I DON’T GET PAID FOR DOING BLOGS, MORDECAI!

What interesting social media connections have you made?

PS Mordi did, in fact, request payment for posting this blog. The scoundrel. (He’s also promoting his new bidet business.)