PORtRAiT oF An ENGliSH GRoupIE

I think most professions have their groupies, not just rock stars and actors. Any job with even a trace of glamour to it. Cops and bartenders certainly do. There are plenty of girls who hang out in bars where stockbrokers congregate. Tatoo artists even do, or so I was recently told by a colleague.

And of course, as I have said elsewhere, English teachers have their fans also.

I met English Groupie S in Seoul, Korea in 1996, shortly after I arrived. I was doing placement tests for students and had noticed her immediately – she was dressed in a very short flouncy white shirt and a blue blouse and she was wearing a lot of makeup. A big change from the somber dark clothes and glasses of most of the students. She was vibrant. She was sexy.

And she was goofy.

She talked in a high-pitched Betty Boop voice, and her English was a lot better than she generally admitted. She was 22. She smoked so much she couldn’t walk up two flights of steps without being out of breath. I gather her family had a bit of money. She hadn’t gone to university, and she had a part time job as a waitress at a cafe, though she would never tell me where it was and she only worked when she felt like it.

The rest of the time she studied English and chased Army guys and English teachers.

She came into one of my classes, and flirted with me before and after class. She batted huge eyelashes at me. She wore so much makeup her every expression was greatly exaggerated, like a clown. She constantly acted the cute helpless little airhead, though of course that wasn’t too far from the truth.
Eventually she introduced me to a businessman who wanted private lessons, and that was a good earner for me. She told me that though she already had a private teacher of her own, she was considering switching. One evening she asked me to meet her at a coffee shop and over $4 coffees handed me a little note:

“excuse me teacher, i don’t speak english good so i write this. I would very much like you give me lessons but i am not rich girl. can you give me lessons, maybe 15,000 won an hour? Please tell me yes or no. Also: can I see your place tonight”

Well, 15,000 won was half what I was getting for the businessman and about what I got for a class at my institute but it seemed likely I was going to get some nooky out of it, so I said of course. She came to my tiny little room and we drank a bottle of white wine a student had given me for teacher’s day. Then she gave me a blow job.

“But I read in my LONELY PLANET that virginity is very important in Korean culture!” I said, afterwards.

“Old times,” she said. “Throw that book away.”

I was to discover two things that night: one, that she didn’t look nearly as good with clothes off as clothes on. And two, that talking like a baby is considerably less appealing after the sex act than before.

I was her fifth private teacher. I gather she had shagged most of them. Except for one she mentioned as having a girlfriend so astute that after meeting English Groupie S she resolutely refused to let her boyfriend be alone with English Groupie S during lessons.

She preferred Army guys, though, actually. She spent her weekends and a considerable amount of weeknights hanging around Itaewon, an area of clubs and bars around the American army base.

She was a frequent patron of the King Club, a hideous disco that was the most popular place for Army guys. It was decorated like a 70’s Holiday Inn lounge and was full of teenage army guys, divided roughly into three groups: inner city gang kids who wanted to learn how to kill people better, suburban wiggers who wanted to learn how to kill people better, and small-town rednecks who wanted to learn how to kill people better. They partied there in their hundreds, dancing to Tupac Shakur and Snoop Doggy Dogg, with a few dozen Korean chicks sprinkled in, and the much sought-after teenage daughters of officers. English Groupie S said most Army guys didn’t like Korean girls, so the competition there was fierce.

After a couple of “dates” it became clear that sexually speaking, English Groupie S and I weren’t really compatible, beyond interlocking complimentary genitals. I didn’t really want a girlfriend anyway, though she was certainly useful as a friend in helping me find cheap places to eat and find things I needed to buy.

I tried to explain this to her one night sitting in the black, smoky, shabby East-West club, a late-night dive where men definitely looking for Korean women went to meet Korean women definitely looking for Western men. Her response was to whine and make cow eyes at me. Then she was going to ignore me.

Going back to my little hotel, we got out of the taxi. Ignoring me resolutely, she began running across the street without looking, and got hit by a moped.

Fortunately she wasn’t badly hurt, just scraped and bruised. But the young mod type – black suit, Caesar haircut – who had been riding the scooter was incensed and demanded that she pay for the damages. Also his black suit had been torn! Outrage.

He insisted that we go to the police station. I was terrified. I’d heard Korean cops hated foreigners. Would I be looking at a night in jail? I sat quietly, legs trembling, while a quietly weeping English Groupie S and this scruffed-up little mod argued their cases to a dour cop.

Fortunately Confucianism prevailed. The cop decided English Groupie S was in the right because she was older. We were allowed to go. She cried like a baby when I got her home.

Romance was never mentioned again after that, although she would occasionally play with my penis when bored while we were watching TV or something.

In a way she ended up my only friend in Seoul. I had a colleague, English Teacher D, who was a cool enough guy but he was sort of bitter and wan about everything, and didn’t like to do much other than drink in a few small bars. He had a lot of bad luck in life, it seemed, and was always moaning about it. English Groupie S had shagged him of course, and they now hated each other for reasons they couldn’t explain.

English Groupie S could make me laugh, and I am inclined to be very lenient towards other faults in that case. She had a colorful vocabulary of curse words and rap slang she’d picked up from her Army friends, and hearing her use it in her high-pitched voice always amused me. She had gotten a strange idea of Western manners, too. She was inclined for example, to simply announce “I gotta pee” if she needed to use the facilities.

She was enthusiastic. She loved to go exploring in Seoul and show me new places. She loved to eat, too, and knew a lot of interesting cheap restaurants. She paid me 45,000 won for what was supposed to be a three-hour lesson on Sundays, but in reality we would only usually study for about 90 minutes. Then we’d go eat at a restaurant and watch a video at a videobang – you rented not only a video, but also a small room with a video player in it. I suspect now the sum she got from her parents for lessons and the amount she paid for lessons was quite different, and the remainder went into her pocket.

She was, at one point, studying English at three different institutes and with two different private teachers. Her goal in life, it seemed, was basically just to marry an Army guy. There was one guy she had met who said he would marry her, but he had been restationed in America and she hadn’t heard much from him lately.

All the time I knew her, I don’t think she knew my name. She just called me “Teacher.” Western names were hard for her to remember.

It went wrong in about October, after I’d been there six months. I was late for her lesson because I’d stayed to watch the film “From Dusk Til Dawn” on video at a bar. I’d called her and left a message on her beeper (mobile phones still being uncommon at that time) but had still shown up 45 minutes later than I said I would. Not like me, really, and the only time it happened – but she never forgave it, it seemed. When I arrived, she was sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette, a cold box of Pizza Hut pizza next to her.

She’d lost face. I guess.

The next week the time for her lesson came and went, and after about 30 minutes she called on the lobby phone and said she wasn’t coming.

I said, “You’re just doing this because I was late last week.”

“You smart teacher,” she said. “See you next week.”

She did the same thing the next week. I sighed and said, “Okay.”

I ran into her on the street a few days before the next lesson. I joked about what a bad student she was, and she laughed and swore that she would be there for the next lesson, she absolutely promised.

The time for her lesson rolled around on Sunday. She called at about 3:10. I could hear her smoking. “Uh, teacher. . . I am not in Seoul now. . .”

I blew up and screamed at her that if she didn’t want to study she shouldn’t waste my time. I had better things to do.

(Though in fact I didn’t really.)

I ran into her at a nightclub a month and a half or so later, and she came up to me all cow-eyed. “Teacher, I am so sorry, I thought you hated me. Prease call me! I want to study with you!”

“Why don’t you just study with your army friends? You’d enjoy it more.”

“They teach me bad slang! I want to study with you! Prease call me!” She had apparently moved away from home and was living with some female friends in an apartment near Itaewon. I wondered if she was working as a hooker or a B-girl hustling drinks somewhere. Such professions would suit her personality well.

I called her a few days later and we tried to schedule out a time and place to study. She finally said, “Okay, I will call you tomorrow.”

She never did. I stayed a few more months and prepared to leave. Sundays were boring and lonely without her. I admit it.

I saw her about a week before I left, at the East-West club. I was dancing with a Russian girl, a student from Vladivostok, and English Groupie S was dirty dancing with an Army type. She mostly ignored me, though she seemed very curious about my dance partner.

Finally she looked at me and said “Hello teacher!”

I stuck my tongue out at her and screwed up my eyes.

Soon she left with her Army guy.

And I never saw English Groupie S again.

What ever became of her? Did she achieve her goal, and is she living the life of her dreams in some suburban box or trailer park in America? Does she eat at steak houses, and eat powdered donuts for breakfast? Does she drive a SUV? Or is she a worn-out hooker somewhere in the red-light district of Seoul?

God only knows. . .

BaCK to RamBLinGZ MenU