Chapter 1 

Sebe, the African, looked like an Olympic sprinter and I would meet with him every few weeks to tutor him in English. "Eh David, your handwriting. It is art!" Sebe had come from a well-to-do family in Nigeria. I used to ask him to speak his own language in front of me and he'd gabble off on some dotted words with hardly a break to them. He never liked speaking in his own tongue because he wanted to learn English. So we read English together and go over papers he was writing and correct some tenses and pronouns. He smoked incessantly and for a period of time I lost sight of him only to have him come up from behind me and grab my shoulder. "Sebe, I thought you'd gone back to Nigeria." "No man, I was walking along and I couldn't breathe. They took me to the hospital and I had a collapsed lung. Cigarettes. I've quit them." He unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the scar they had made to get to the collapsed lung or to keep it from collapsing.

He held up a book. "This is my thing now!" He said with enthusiasm. It was a new age book of some sort. "So much better than classes!" And then he turned in a little dance down in Sproul Plaza with a wide smile. "I am free man, I am free!"

A few years later I was working at the hospital we all called The Hotel. One day on my way into it's old doors I heard a voice from the window of a car. "David! David!" It was Sebe, in the back of a car bouncing a toddler on his knee. He invited me into the car and I sat with him and asked him how things were going. "Oh, I quite school man and got a job in a furniture store in Oakland. I got married man. My wife is up there now having another baby." We talked pleasantly for a time, he expressed his happiness although I had never seen a more burdened, unhappy person in my life. We shook hands and I left to go to work. I never saw him after that but I thought about him from time to time. His parents had made him come to America because he'd gotten a girl pregnant and was, apparently, a wild kid.

David Eide
January 24, 2014