Meet the Idiots: Yusuf

Yusuf is the man who works with me as a security guard/handy man on the Saturday night shift. He is about 50 years old, although he could pass for anytime in his 40s. He came over here 17 years ago from Guinea, a country in West Africa (there are like 4 different Guineas; if you look on the map, his is the one that isn't really tiny). He has five daughters, all of whom are under ten, here in New York with his wife, who works as an African hair-braider in Harlem. He has another daughter who is older, maybe 17, in Guinea. I'm not sure if she has the same mother. In fact, from what I gather, Yusuf only learned of her existence, or that she was not dead, or something, shortly before he met me. He works every night of the week except Sunday, from 9 until 5 in the morning, although I encourage him to leave much earlier when he's working with me.

Yusuf is an ebullient, ebullient bear of a man. On Sundays, I really miss him. All the time, he is telling me these completely random things about himself. For instance, for a long time he says he played on the Guinean national soccer team. When I asked him what position he played, he said, "7, 8, or 9." which I eventually gathered meant midfield. Last night, I found out he was actually born in Sierra Leone, and that when he was younger, I'm not exactly sure how young, he worked for his father panning for diamonds. He was the one who had to watch all the other workers to make sure they didn't hide the diamonds under their tongues. Also, his name is not really Yusuf. I don't mean that in the sense that Yusuf is a pseudonym, though it is, albeit not a very good one. I mean when he came to this country he chose a random common name that he thought would be more palatable. Obviously that's not that weird. What's weird is that the name he used to go by is Ibrahim, but for some reason, he decided not to just switch it to Abraham. And then he got a little fussy when I started calling him Ibrahim.

Yusuf has a tendency to try and extrapolate larger meanings from all of the random stories he tells me, and these are a bit more hit or miss. I think about half of his wisdom gets lost in translation (English is his fourth or fifth language), and half gets lost in the gap between someone who grew up having to worry about blood diamonds and someone who grew up going to play four-square at the pool. And the other half goes into elocutions like the following: "The Indians and the Muslims [by which he meant Pakistanis; the two ethnic groups work at rival delis nearby], mami, they hate each other, Oh mygod! And all the Indians, they have the towels on the heads, and they see a cow, whoop!"

A Muslim himself, once or twice a night Yusuf finds a secluded room in order to say his prayers. Once or twice a night, he goes outside to smoke a cigarette. He spends most of the rest of the time prowling between the basement, where he sometimes does his laundry, and the stoop outside, where he yuks it up with the local deli-wallahs, and the back room, where he just sort of lies on the couch.

I feel like a lot of Yusuf's interaction with me is a bit forced. He vaguely refers to me as the boss--I can't tell if he's joking or not--and while I don't think he's trying to impress or please me per se, I do think he wants me to like him, maybe just on a personal level. A lot of the definitive observations he delivers are just bland rewordings of what someone else just said, and I would say that about half the time he's laughing, he's faking it (He has a fantastic hyena laugh, though). But he really is the only one who understands the true depravity, in one way or another, of everyone who works here, and we really do share some belly laughs at the riff and the chaff that straggle in here in the wee hours of th morning.

And once in a great while he will totally move me. Usually when he's just talking about his life, unassumingly, without trying to think of something grander. Like tonight, when he just said resignedly, "My life here is no good. I work and I work again, and then I sleep. And then I work again. How can there be nothing else?" I only recently found out that his position at the Hotel Idiotica, where he works 6 nights a week for 7 hours a night, is only his second job. During the day, he works at a factory, making...I still can't believe it, the stuff that appears on this web site: www.jeremysplace.com. Novelty food items. Fake poop. Fake vomit. Plastic ice cream sundaes. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Lately, Yusuf and I have been bonding over the universal language: guitar licks. I get through the night by playing music on the computer and while its usually bluegrass or the newest Scandinavian indie rocker, one night I decided to blast some Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Yusuf runs up to me with wide eyes, I can tell he's being serious, "Oh MyGod! What is this? I love this!" Then he mimics shredding an ax for a while. He made me play all the Neil Young guitar songs I could think of, so I played "Cowgirl in the Sand," "Like a Hurricane," "Rockin' in the Free World," "Cortez the Killer," et al., for about two hours, while Yusuf lay back on the couch with his eyes closed. Before he left, Yusuf made me promise to bring him all the rock and roll I could think of next weekend. Yusuf loves Neil Young, Guns n' Roses, Led Zeppelin, and Allman Brothers with Duane. He's not so high on Stevie Ray Vaughn, Allman Brothers with Dickey Betts, or Talking Heads (actually, I'm just not that high on The Talking Heads).

To conclude, I like Yusuf.