The story with Gene begins with the story of my friend Michael Smit. Michael is a young California guy with long-ish blonde hair who’s really easy-going, friendly, plays the bass, and always wears this newsies hat. In short, Michael is a great guy. A guy nobody could not like. He’s good people. We met him at orientation last fall when we all began working in Korea.
So Smitty worked on the Magic School Bus, which was this brand new, decked-out bus that would travel to a different elementary school each week, where students would attend class on the bus for the whole week. His co-worker was the lovely Heidi, who worked there already when Smitty began the job. As with many English jobs in Korea, his employer kept the same apartment for him where the former English teacher (who had Michael’s job before him) had lived. The previous tenant had left some stuff behind when he moved, which Michael kept out on his outside porch. The guy who had lived in his apartment and held his job before Michael had been a Korean-American dude named Gene.
Michael works here.
Sometimes when the new foreign English teacher comes to a school the school introduces them to the teacher on the way out, if he is still around. Since Gene had been fired from the Magic School Bus, Michael hadn’t been introduced to him by the school, but he had met Gene. Gene had shown up to the apartment sometime soon after Smitty moved in and talked to him about the things he had left behind, which to my knowledge, Smitty was okay with. We weren’t sure why Gene got fired, but it was rumored that he had not shown up to work and not called, and that since he had been fired, his visa was cancelled and he was therefore remaining in Korea illegally.
So Michael was settling in the first few weeks in Korea, maybe a month or two in, when he started noticing a couple of strange things going on. He would come home from work and his shower would be wet, or something would be moved around. He didn’t know what to think. Then he decided to check his internet history to see if anything weird was going on there when he pulled up Gene’s Facebook page. Apparently Gene had made a second key before he moved out and had been using the place during the day when Michael was at work. Wow. But Michael is so nice that he didn’t want to go after Gene, he just changed the locks to keep his own stuff safe. When he told us the story, he also told us some things he had heard about Gene through the grapevine, including the fact that supposedly Gene had been a member of Couchsurfing (a website where travelers can stay on someone’s couch or offer up their couch for someone to stay on) and had stolen $150 from someone whose couch he had stayed on in Seoul. He was also rumored to be wanted by the police, presumably for stealing the money from the guy in Seoul. Another story was that he had been living in jimjilbangs (public bath houses that are open all night where he could shower and keep some things in a locker).
So it makes for a good story, but nothing too bad happened to Michael, aside having his privacy totally and completely invaded. I just mean nothing lasting or too detrimental, such as having something stolen from him, happened to him.
Fast forward to New Years Eve. Marcus, Sarah, and I are at Sunset in Haeundae. A bunch of our other friends end up there too, and we end up meeting up with Smitty. He tells us that he just saw Gene here at Sunset.
“What?! Gene’s here? Gene, Gene?! Which one is he?” We all ask, looking around the bar.
But Smitty is too good a guy and won’t tell us which one Gene is. He just wants to drop the whole thing.
So what do the 3 of us do? What do we do when we have courage and indignation and champagne coursing through our veins? Our friend was wronged. We can’t just stand there and do nothing!
So we end up walking through the bar asking everyone we meet if they’re Gene.
“Are you Gene? Are you Gene? Are you Gene?” We ask, until we finally find him.
"I'm Gene."
“What’s wrong with you?” “Who do you think you are?!” “How dare you invade our friend’s privacy!” We get in his face and pelt him with questions.
I get the bold idea to smack the ski cap off his head. (Who do I think I am?) This causes him to sort of turn on me, to which Marcus reacts very protectively in my honor, even though I started it. Marcus sort of gets in his face, and he can’t do anything because there’s 3 of us and plus Marcus could easily break him in two. Soon the bouncer comes and breaks it up and we walk away from him.
Oops. This was probably something like what Michael was trying to avoid.
Oops. This was probably something like what Michael was trying to avoid.
“We’re sorry, Michael.” We say. He’s probably embarrassed by us. But he doesn’t get mad, even though he didn’t want us to talk to Gene at all. Apparently Gene is under the impression that he and Michael had an agreement about the apartment, because he had been leaving some of his stuff there. But Michael didn’t know Gene had a key to the place. He just left all Gene’s stuff outside the apartment door when he changed the locks, and now wants to just forget it ever happened. We vow to comply.
Over the course of the next month or so, we tell the story to some people, but we basically forget about the Gene thing. We see him on Facebook and note that he has invented a religion, which has a Facebook page, and tries to friend me, which I decline. I randomly poke him sometime but nothing comes of it. Gene fades into the back of our memory.
