Friends of Many Lands, All Missed Terribly

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I volunteered for the Los Angeles Public Library’s adult literacy programme. My first student was an LA-born busboy from Oaxaca called Isaí, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met in spite of having been raised by a hyper-abusive religious zealot father. (My best friend, Darryll, who may be the sweetest person I’ve ever known, was himself the son of hyper-abusive religious zealot father. Maybe more people ought to try it.) I also tutored Arturo, a former gang-banger from San Salvador, Ivan, a Colombian janitor who was furious at himself for having “partied” (that is, drunk) himself through high school, and was desperate to escape “monkey work”, a middle-aged Korean former politician turned acupuncturist, and a succession of young Korean moms, most of them unnervingly pretty.

I loved the work, and my students, but hate people who make noise in libraries, and didn’t want to be one of them, and coffee shops were too noisy. So I broke the programme’s rules and invited my students to study with me in my home. One of the young Korean women, by far the most outgoing of them, told me she had trouble sleeping, and I wondered aloud if she’d considered medical marijuana. The programme got wind of the fact that I was teaching in my home and offering my students drugs, and called all my students to tell them to break off relations with me. It broke my heart.

I designed a little flyer advertising my services and taped it up in Latino and Korean neighbourhoods. I got few disappointingly few responses, but one was from a Korean architect who lived in another of the high-rises on the Park La Brea estate. He was Hyuntak to his wife and Korean friends, but David to his colleagues at work, and to me. I felt that we liked each other from the first moment we sat down together to discuss his goals. He worried that he wasn’t expressing himself well professionally. In fact, his English was flawless —and better than about 99 percent of my American friends’. At our first session, I wrote two sentences. She likes swimming more than me and She likes swimming more than I, and asked which was grammatically correct. He correctly answered that both were, though with different meanings. I would guess that 19 of 20 of my acquaintances wouldn’t have passed that test.

He was a musician, a bass player and guitarist. He brought his guitar over one Saturday afternoon and we played Four Non-Blondes’ What’s Going On? at some length. He sang well. He came over a couple of weeks later to watch my band The Romanovs rehearse. We were pretty ragged that night, but David was generous with his praise.

I moved back to the UK. David and I of course assured each other we’d stay in touch, and haven’t very much.

My other favourite student was Arouna, from Burkina Faso. He too was fantastically sweet, though for the first couple of weeks I had to ask him to repeat everything he said four or five times. He was multilingual, and apparently spoke magnificent French, and his English sounded French. He found hilarious the idea of black Americans calling themselves African American. He was extremely bright, and I tried to help him get a job teaching French or at least working at L’Occitaine, but he eventually had to settle for a janitorial job at a local hospital. As were so many of my students, he was mocked by his work colleagues for his imperfect and heavily accented English. I advised him to ask his tormentors how many languages they spoke, and to point out that he spoke four, counting the two Ivorian dialects. When his colleagues, all monolingual, failed to get the point, I suggested that he advise them in one of his dialects, “I’d love to continue this conversation, but I have an appointment to fuck your mother.” I thought he might find that cathartic. He got a job at Trader Joe’s, which changed his name to Aroun because they thought Arouna sounded feminine, and has just been awarded a bachelor’s degree from UCLA. I love him to pieces, though we speak infrequently.

Soufiane [surname withheld because he’s up for a prestigious Government Position in a Middle Eastern country I won’t mention] was the concierge at the hotel at which Cowgirl Zelda and I stayed in his hometown, Agadir, Morocco, in 2016. He too was multilingual, and good enough at English to appreciate my sense of humour, laden as it is with wordplay and irony. The first night at the resort, I won the grand prize of a bottle of cheap champagne in a guest talent contest. I gave it to Souf, who I think at the time had never tasted alcohol. I gather he liked it — a lot. He’s approximately as devout a Muslim as I am a Jew.