reading

Prologue

Mokhtar Alkhanshali and I agree to meet in Oakland. He has just returned from Yemen, having narrowly escaped with his life. An American citizen, Mokhtar was abandoned by his government and left to evade Saudi bombs and Houthi rebels. He had no means to leave the country. The airports had been destroyed and the roads out of the country were impassable. There were no evacuations planned, no assistance provided. The United States State Department had stranded thousands of Yemeni Americans, who were forced to devise their own means of fleeing a blitzkrieg—tens of thousands of U.S.-made bombs dropped on Yemen by the Saudi air force.

I wait for Mokhtar (pronounced MŌKH-tar) outside Blue Bottle Coffee in Jack London Square. Elsewhere in the United States, there is a trial under way in Boston, where two young brothers have been charged with setting off a series of bombs during the Boston Marathon, killing nine and wounding hundreds. High above Oakland, a police helicopter hovers, monitoring a dockworkers’ strike going on at the Port of Oakland. This is 2015, fourteen years after 9/11, and seven years into the administration of President Barack Obama. As a nation we had progressed from the high paranoia of the Bush years; the active harassment of Muslim Americans had eased somewhat, but any crime perpetrated by any Muslim American fanned the flames of Islamophobia for another few months.

When Mokhtar arrives, he looks older and more self-possessed than the last time I’d seen him. The man who gets out of the car this day is wearing khakis and a purple sweater-vest. His hair is short and gelled, and his goatee is neatly trimmed. He walks with a preternatural calm, his torso barely moving as his legs carry him across the street and to our table on the sidewalk. We shake hands, and on his right hand, I see that he wears a large silver ring, spiderwebbed with detailed markings, a great ruby-red stone set into it.

He ducks into Blue Bottle to say hello to friends working inside, and to bring me a cup of coffee from Ethiopia. He insists I wait till it cools to drink it. Coffee should not be enjoyed too hot, he says; it masks the flavor, and taste buds retreat from the heat. When we’re finally settled and the coffee has cooled, he begins to tell his story of entrapment and liberation in Yemen, and of how he grew up in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco—in many ways the city’s most troubled neighborhood—how, while working as a doorman at a high-end apartment building downtown, he found his calling in coffee.

Mokhtar speaks quickly. He is very funny and deeply sincere, and illustrates his stories with photos he’s taken on his smartphone. Sometimes he plays the music he listened to during a particular episode of his story. Sometimes he sighs. Sometimes he wonders at his existence, his good fortune, being a poor kid from the Tenderloin who now has found some significant success as a coffee importer. Sometimes he laughs, amazed that he is not dead, given he lived through a Saudi bombing of Sana’a, and was held hostage by two different factions in Yemen after the country fell to civil war. But primarily he wants to talk about coffee. To show me pictures of coffee plants and coffee farmers. To talk about the history of coffee, the overlapping tales of adventure and derring-do that brought coffee to its current status as fuel for much of the world’s productivity, and a seventy-billion-dollar global commodity. The only time he slows down is when he describes the worry he caused his friends and family when he was trapped in Yemen. His large eyes well up and he pauses, staring at the photos on his phone for a moment before he can compose himself and continue.

Now, as I finish this book, it’s been three years since our meeting that day in Oakland. Before embarking on this project, I was a casual coffee drinker and a great skeptic of specialty coffee. I thought it was too expensive, and that anyone who cared so much about how coffee was brewed, or where it came from, or waited in line for certain coffees made certain ways, was pretentious and a fool.

But visiting coffee farms and farmers around the world, from Costa Rica to Ethiopia, has educated me. Mokhtar educated me. We visited his family in California’s Central Valley, and we picked coffee cherries in Santa Barbara—at North America’s only coffee farm. We chewed qat in Harar, and in the hills above the city we walked amid some of the oldest coffee plants on earth. In retracing his steps in Djibouti, we visited a dusty and hopeless refugee camp near the coastal outpost of Obock, and I watched as Mokhtar fought to recover the passport of a young Yemeni dental student who had fled the civil war and had nothing—not even his identity. In the most remote hills of Yemen, Mokhtar and I drank sugary tea with botanists and sheiks, and heard the laments of those who had no stake in the civil war and only wanted peace.

After all this, American voters elected—or the electoral college made possible—the presidency of a man who had promised to exclude all Muslims from entering the country—“until we figure out what’s going on,” he said. After inauguration, he made two efforts to ban travel to the United States by citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations. On this list was Yemen, a country more misunderstood than perhaps any other. “I hope they have wifi in the camps,” Mokhtar said to me after the election. It was a grim joke making the rounds in the Muslim American community, based on the presumption that Trump will, at the first opportunity—if there is a domestic terror incident propagated by a Muslim, for instance—propose the registry or even internment of Muslims in America. When he made the joke, Mokhtar was wearing a T-shirt that read MAKE COFFEE, NOT WAR.

Mokhtar’s sense of humor pervades everything he does and says, and in these pages I hope to have captured it and how it informs the way he sees the world, even at its most perilous. At one point during the Yemeni civil war, Mokhtar was captured and held in prison by a militia in Aden. Because he was raised in the United States and is steeped in American pop culture, it occurred to him that one of his captors looked like the Karate Kid; when Mokhtar recounted the episode to me, he called the captor the Karate Kid and nothing else. By using this nickname, I don’t mean to understate the danger Mokhtar was in, but feel it’s important to reflect the outlook of a man who is uniquely difficult to rattle, and who sees most dangers as only temporary impediments to more crucial concerns—the finding, roasting and importing of Yemeni coffee, and the progress of the farmers for whom he fights. And my guess is that this captor did look like the Ralph Macchio of the early 1980s.

Mokhtar is both humble before the history he inhabits and irreverent about his place in it. But his story is an old-fashioned one. It’s chiefly about the American Dream, which is very much alive and very much under threat. His story is also about coffee, and about how he tried to improve coffee production in Yemen, where coffee cultivation was first undertaken five hundred years ago. It’s also about the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, a valley of desperation in a city of towering wealth, about the families that live there and struggle to live there safely and with dignity. It’s about the strange preponderance of Yemenis in the liquor-store trade of California, and the unexpected history of Yemenis in the Central Valley. And how their work in California echoes their long history of farming in Yemen. And how direct trade can change the lives of farmers, giving them agency and standing. And about how Americans like Mokhtar Alkhanshali—U.S. citizens who maintain strong ties to the countries of their ancestors and who, through entrepreneurial zeal and dogged labor, create indispensable bridges between the developed and developing worlds, between nations that produce and those that consume. And how these bridgemakers exquisitely and bravely embody this nation’s reason for being, a place of radical opportunity and ceaseless welcome. And how when we forget that this is central to all that is best about this country, we forget ourselves—a blended people united not by stasis and cowardice and fear, but by irrational exuberance, by global enterprise on a human scale, by the inherent rightness of pressing forward, always forward, driven by courage unfettered and unyielding.

CHAPTER I

THE SATCHEL

Miriam gave things to Mokhtar. Usually books. She gave him Das Kapital. She gave him Noam Chomsky. She fed his mind. She fueled his aspirations. They dated for a year or so, but the odds were long. He was a Muslim Yemeni American, and she was half-Palestinian, half-Greek and a Christian. But she was beautiful, and fierce, and she fought harder for Mokhtar than he fought for himself. When he said he wanted to finally get his undergraduate degree and go to law school, she bought him a satchel. It was a lawyerly valise, made in Granada, painstakingly crafted from the softest leather, with brass rivets and buckles and elegant compartments within. Maybe, Miriam thought, the object would drive the dream.

Things were clicking into place, Mokhtar thought. He had finally saved enough money to enroll at City College of San Francisco and would start in the fall. After two years at City, he’d do two more at San Francisco State, then three years of law school. He’d be thirty when he finished. Not ideal, but it was a time line he could act on. For the first time in his academic life, there was something like clarity and momentum.

He needed a laptop for college, so he asked his brother Wallead for a loan. Wallead was less than a year younger—Irish twins, they called each other—but Wallead had things figured out. After years working as a doorman at a residential high-rise called the Infinity, Wallead had enrolled at the University of California, Davis. And he had enough money saved to pay for Mokhtar’s laptop. Wallead charged the new MacBook Air to his credit card, and Mokhtar promised to pay back the eleven hundred dollars in installments. Mokhtar put the laptop in Miriam’s satchel; it fit perfectly and looked lawyerly.

Mokhtar brought the satchel to the Somali fund-raiser. This was 2012, and he and a group of friends had organized an event in San Francisco to raise money for Somalis affected by the famine that had already taken the lives of hundreds of thousands. The benefit was during Ramadan, so everyone ate well and heard Somali American speakers talk about the plight of their countrymen. Three thousand dollars were raised, most of it in cash. Mokhtar put the money in the satchel and, wearing a suit and carrying a leather satchel containing a new laptop and a stack of dollars of every denomination, he felt like a man of action and purpose.

Because he was galvanized, and because by nature he was impulsive, he convinced one of the other organizers, Sayed Darwoush, to drive the funds an hour south, to Santa Clara, that night—immediately after the event. In Santa Clara they’d go to the mosque and give the money to a representative of Islamic Relief, the global nonprofit distributing aid in Somalia. One of the organizers asked Mokhtar to bring a large cooler full of leftover rooh afza, a pink Pakistani drink made with milk and rose water. “You sure you have to go tonight?” Jeremy asked. Jeremy often thought Mokhtar was taking on too much and too soon.

“I’m fine,” Mokhtar said. It has to be tonight, he thought.

So Sayed drove, and all the way down Highway 101 they reflected on the generosity evident that night, and Mokhtar thought how good it felt to conjure an idea and see it realized. He thought, too, about what it would be like to have a law degree, to be the first of the Alkhanshalis in America with a JD. How eventually he’d graduate and represent asylum seekers, other Arab Americans with immigration issues. Maybe someday run for office.

Halfway to Santa Clara, Mokhtar was overcome with exhaustion. Getting the event together had taken weeks; now his body wanted rest. He set his head against the window. “Just closing my eyes,” he said.

When he woke, they were parked in the lot of the Santa Clara mosque. Sayed shook his shoulder. “Get up,” he said. Prayers were beginning in a few minutes.

Mokhtar got out of the car, half-asleep. They grabbed the rooh afza out of the trunk and hustled into the mosque.

It was only after prayers that Mokhtar realized he’d left the satchel outside. On the ground, next to the car. He’d left the satchel, containing the three thousand dollars and his new eleven-hundred-dollar laptop, in the parking lot, at midnight.

He ran to the car. The satchel was gone.

They searched the parking lot. Nothing.

No one in the mosque had seen anything. Mokhtar and Sayed searched all night. Mokhtar didn’t sleep. Sayed went home in the morning. Mokhtar stayed in Santa Clara.

It made no sense to stay, but going home was impossible.

He called Jeremy. “I lost the satchel. I lost three thousand dollars and a laptop because of that damned pink milk. What do I tell people?”

Mokhtar couldn’t tell the hundreds of people who had donated to Somali famine relief that their money was gone. He couldn’t tell Miriam. He didn’t want to think of what she’d paid for the satchel, what she would think of him—losing all that he had, all at once. He couldn’t tell his parents. He couldn’t tell Wallead that they’d be paying off eleven hundred dollars for a laptop Mokhtar would never use.

The second day after he lost the satchel, another friend of Mokhtar’s, Ibrahim Ahmed Ibrahim, was flying to Egypt, to see what had become of the Arab Spring. Mokhtar caught a ride with him to the airport—it was halfway back to his parents’ house. Ibrahim was finishing at UC Berkeley; he’d have his degree in months. He didn’t know what to say to Mokhtar. Don’t worry didn’t seem sufficient. He disappeared in the security line and flew to Cairo.

Mokhtar settled into one of the black leather chairs in the atrium of the airport, and sat for hours. He watched the people go. The families leaving and coming home. The businesspeople with their portfolios and plans. In the International Terminal, a monument to movement, he sat, vibrating, going nowhere.

CHAPTER II

DOORMAN AT THE INFINITY

Mokhtar became a doorman. No. Lobby Ambassador. That was the term they preferred at the Infinity. Which meant Mokhtar was a doorman. Mokhtar Alkhanshali, firstborn son of Faisal and Bushra Alkhanshali, oldest brother to Wallead, Sabah, Khaled, Afrah, Fowaz and Mohamed, grandson of Hamood al-Khanshali Zafaran al-Eshmali, lion of Ibb, scion of the al-Shanan tribe, principal branch of the Bakeel tribal confederation, was a doorman.

The Infinity was a group of four residential buildings, each with commanding views of the San Francisco Bay, of the sun-bleached city and the East Bay hills. In the Infinity towers dwelled doctors, tech millionaires, professional athletes and wealthy retirees. They all came and went through the gleaming Infinity lobby, and Mokhtar held the doors open so they could pass without undue exertion.

City College was no longer an option. After losing the satchel, Mokhtar had to get a full-time job. Omar Ghazali, a family friend, had loaned him the three thousand dollars to make the donation to Islamic Relief. But he needed to pay Omar back, and between that and the eleven hundred dollars he owed Wallead, college would have to wait indefinitely.

Wallead helped him get the doorman job; it was the same position he’d had a few years before. Wallead had been making $22 an hour, and now Mokhtar, his older brother, was making $18. When Wallead had the job, the Infinity had been unionized, but the union was gone now and the building was managed by a polished Peruvian named Maria, who clicked across the gleaming floors in high heels. She’d liked Mokhtar’s clean-cut style and offered him a job. He couldn’t complain, making $18 an hour when the California minimum wage was $8.25.

But he was not in college, had no clear path to college now. He spent his days in the lobby of Infinity Tower B, opening doors for residents and the various members of the service economy who kept the residents fed and massaged, the people who walked the tiny dogs, who cleaned the apartments and installed new chandeliers. Mokhtar always brought a book—he was trying Das Kapital again—but reading was close to impossible for a Lobby Ambassador. The interruptions were constant, the noise aggravating. The lobby was at street level, and the neighborhood was changing, a new building going up every month, turning South of Market into a kind of mini-Manhattan. The construction rattle was arrhythmic and unsettled his nerves.

The noise was one thing, but the primary impediment to getting any reading, or thinking, done was the door itself. The lobby was a glass box, a transparent hexagon, and the Lobby Ambassador had to be alert to any human coming from any angle and toward the street-facing double doors. Most of the people approaching were people he knew—residents, Infinity maintenance workers, delivery people—but there were irregular visitors, too. Guests, trainers, realtors, therapists, repairmen. Anyone coming toward that door, Mokhtar had to be ready to leap.

If it was a delivery, Mokhtar could get up, smile, open the door, no rush. But if it was a resident, Mokhtar had a second or two to leap from his seat behind the desk, rush to the door (without seeming to be desperately rushing), open it, smile and let that person in. If their hand touched the door before his, that was not good. He had to be there first, the door swinging open, his smile wide, a question ready and spoken brightly and without guile: How was your run, Ms. Agarwal?

All this was new. This was Maria’s doing. When the building was union and Wallead was a Lobby Ambassador, the job was called a sitting position, meaning the Lobby Ambassador didn’t have to get up every time someone went in or out. But Maria’s arrival had changed that. Now the job required constant vigilance, the ability to leap up and across the lobby with elegance and alacrity.

Never mind that anyone could easily open the door themselves. That wasn’t the point. The point was the personal touch. Having a smiling man in a tidy blue suit opening the door spoke of both luxury and simple consideration. It told the residents that this was a building of a certain distinction, that this well-groomed and attentive man in the lobby not only received their packages and ensured that their guests were welcomed and that unexpected visitors were vetted or thwarted, but he also cared enough to open the door for them, to say Good morning, Good afternoon, Good evening, Looks like rain, Stay warm, Enjoy the game, Enjoy the concert, Have a nice walk. This charming man would say hello to their dog, hello to their grandchildren, hello to their new girlfriend, hello to the guest harpist hired to play while they ate dinner.

That was a real thing. That was a real person. There was a real harpist, and he operated a company called I Left My Harp in San Francisco. Mokhtar got to know him well. For a few hundred dollars he would come with his harp and play while people ate, while people drank. A certain couple living high in the building hired him once a month. He was friendly. So was the chandelier repairman—he was Bulgarian and often stopped to talk to Mokhtar. The pet nutritionist was an affable woman with blue-streaked hair and an arm full of silver jangly jewelry. Each day a kaleidoscopic parade passed through those doors. Personal trainers, a dozen or so of those, and Mokhtar had to know them all, which among them was improving the health and longevity of which resident. There were the art consultants, the personal shoppers, the nannies, the carpenters, the concierge doctors. There were the Chinese-food people on their bikes, the pizza people in their cars, the dry-cleaning people on foot.

But primarily there were the package-delivery people. The FedEx person, the UPS person, the DHL person, bringing boxes from Zappos, Bodybuilding.com, diapers.com. Some liked to talk, some were on the clock, always late, needing just a quick signature, thanks buddy. Some knew Mokhtar’s name, some didn’t care. Some liked to chat, complain, gossip. But the volume of packages that came through that door—it was hard to believe.

What do we have today? Mokhtar would ask.

We have some cashews from Oregon, the delivery guy would say.

We have some steaks from Nebraska; these should get refrigerated soon.

We have some shirts from London.

Mokhtar signed the clipboards and brought the packages into the storeroom behind the desk, and when the resident walked through the lobby, Mokhtar raised a finger and a happy eyebrow and announced that a package had arrived. The delight was mutual. One time one of the older residents, James Blackburn, opened a box and showed Mokhtar a pair of new Montblanc pens.

Best pens in the world, Mr. Blackburn said.

Mokhtar, always polite, admired the pens, and asked a question or two about them. A few months later, at Christmastime, he found a present on his desk, and when he unwrapped it, he found the same pen. A gift from Mr. Blackburn.

For the most part the residents’ money was new, and they were getting used to Infinity life. If they wanted a more formal relationship, Mokhtar could accommodate that. If they wanted to talk, he talked, and every so often there was the time and the will to have a conversation. Maybe they were in the lobby waiting for a car. Mokhtar had to be up and near the door, ready when the car arrived, so there would be those awkward few minutes, when they were both staring out into the street.

Busy today? a resident might ask.

Not so busy, Mokhtar would say. It was important never to seem flustered. A Lobby Ambassador had to project an air of calm competence.

Did you hear that new Giants pitcher moved into Tower B? the resident would say, the car would arrive, and that would be that.

But sometimes they would go deeper. With James Blackburn it went deeper. Even before the Montblanc pen, he’d shown an interest in Mokhtar. You’re a smart guy, Mokhtar. What are your plans?

Mokhtar felt for him. James, a retired white man in his sixties, was a decent man, and the encounters were awkward for him, too. If he assumed Mokhtar wanted better things than working the desk and the door, that would be diminishing his current job, which for all he knew was, for Mokhtar, a personal pinnacle. On the other hand, if he assumed this was Mokhtar’s personal pinnacle, that brought with it a more troubling set of assumptions.

Most residents didn’t ask. They didn’t want to know. The job, Mokhtar’s existence there, was a reminder that there were those who lived in glass towers, and those who opened doors for them. Had the residents seen him reading The Wretched of the Earth? Maybe. He didn’t hide his reading material. Had they seen him in the news, occasionally joining in or leading a protest demanding better relations between the police and San Francisco’s Arab and Muslim American community? Mokhtar had been in the public eye here and there, and sometimes he thought he had a future in organizing, in representing Arabs and Muslims on some more elevated stage. City supervisor? Mayor? Some Infinity residents knew his work as a young activist, and for most he was an uncomfortable enigma. Mokhtar knew they wanted their doormen slightly more docile, slightly less interesting.

But then there was James Blackburn. Where’d you grow up? he’d ask. You from out here originally?

CHAPTER III

THE KID WHO STOLE BOOKS

Mokhtar’s earliest memory of San Francisco was of a man defecating on a Mercedes. This was on his family’s first day in the Tenderloin. Mokhtar was eight, the oldest of what were then five kids. For years the family had lived in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, where his father Faisal ran Mike’s Candy and Grocery—a bodega owned by Mokhtar’s grandfather Hamood. But Faisal didn’t want to sell liquor, had never been comfortable selling it. After years of planning and anguished deliberation, finally Faisal and his wife Bushra broke free. They moved to California, where Faisal had been promised a janitorial job. He’d rather be broke and start over than be under his father’s thumb, peddling booze.

They found an apartment in the Tenderloin district, considered the city’s most troubled and poor. The day they got to the city, Mokhtar was in the backseat with his siblings when they stopped at a traffic light. He looked over to see a white Mercedes next to them, and just as Mokhtar was taking notice of the car, its immaculate paint and gleaming chrome, a man in ragged clothes jumped onto its hood, pulled down his pants and defecated. This was a block from where they were going to live.

They went from a spacious apartment in Brooklyn, from a lifestyle that Mokhtar remembered as being without want—where the kids had their own room, full of toys—to a one-bedroom apartment at 1036 Polk Street, situated between two porn stores. Mokhtar and five siblings slept in the bedroom and his parents slept in the living room. All night sirens screamed. Addicts wailed. Mokhtar’s mother, Bushra, was afraid to walk alone in the neighborhood and sent Mokhtar to the store on Larkin Street for groceries. On one of his first errands, someone threw a bottle in his direction, glass crashing on the wall above his head.

Mokhtar got used to the drug dealing, which was done out in open air, all day and all night. He got used to the smells—human feces, urine, weed. To the howling of men and women and babies. He got used to stepping over needles and vomit. Older men and younger men having sex in the alley. A woman in her sixties shooting up. A homeless family panhandling. An elderly junkie standing in the middle of traffic.

The assumption in San Francisco was that the police considered the Tenderloin the city’s illegal-activity containment zone—that just as the city designated Fisherman’s Wharf as a quarantine for tourists, they’d designated the Tenderloin’s thirty-one blocks as the city’s go-zone for crack, meth, prostitution, petty crime and public defecation. Even its name, the Tenderloin, had a nefarious provenance: in the early part of the twentieth century, local police and politicians were bribed so well in the neighborhood that they ate only the finest cuts of beef.

But there was real community in the Tenderloin, too. It was one of the city’s most affordable neighborhoods, and it had for decades attracted families newly arrived from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Middle East. Among them were Yemenis—a few hundred of them in the Tenderloin, most of them working as janitors. Among the patchwork legions who left their countries of origin to come to the United States, the Yemenis were late arrivals emigrating in significant numbers in the 1960s, finding work primarily in the farms of California’s San Joaquin Valley and in the automotive factories of Detroit. At first almost all Yemeni immigrants were men, most from Ibb province, an agricultural region. They came to California to pick fruit, but in the 1970s, hundreds of Yemenis who had been working in the fields began to come to San Francisco to work as janitors. The pay was better and there were benefits. Eventually Yemenis made up 20 percent of the janitors’ union, Local 87, headquartered in the Tenderloin.

This was Faisal’s plan, too: to work in the janitorial sector, or at least start there. He got a job, but didn’t last long. His supervisor, accustomed to talking down to immigrant employees—most of them from Nicaragua and China, most of them undocumented—was disrespectful. Mokhtar’s father was proud and knew his rights, so he quit and got a job as a security guard at the Sequoias, a residential high-rise, on the swing shift. This was the work he did throughout Mokhtar’s first years in San Francisco. His father worked odd hours, sometimes eighteen hours a day.

Which left Mokhtar free to roam. He could look in the windows of one of the adult video stores, could ignore the shirtless man screaming obscenities across the street. He could stop at one of the Yemeni markets—the Yemenis ran half the local markets, even the one called Amigo’s. He could swing by Sergeant John Macauley Park, a tiny playground across from the New Century Strip Club. Up the street, on O’Farrell and Polk, there was a mural on the side of a building, an underwater scene of whales and sharks and turtles. For years, Mokhtar assumed the building was an aquarium of some kind, and only later realized it was the Mitchell Brothers O’Farrell Theatre, one of America’s oldest and most notorious strip clubs—purportedly the originator of close-contact lap dances. The neighborhood had thirty-one liquor stores and few safe places for children to play, but there were thousands of kids in those desperate blocks, and they grew up quick.

By middle school, Mokhtar had become a fast learner, a fast talker, a corner-cutter, and a friend to an array of kids who also were fast talkers and corner-cutters. In the Tenderloin they dodged the junkies and hustlers and, when they could, they ventured out, knowing that a few blocks in any direction was an entirely different world. Just north was Nob Hill, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, home to the Fairmont and Mark Hopkins Hotels. A few blocks east was Union Square with its pricey shopping, the cable cars and jewelry stores.

Everywhere there were tourists, and with tourists there was always diversion. Mokhtar and his friends would go to Fisherman’s Wharf and give unintelligible directions to European visitors. Or they’d ask nonsensical directions. They’d find a tourist and ask, Do you know the way to Meow Meow? No? What about Ackakakakaka? They’d walk by the window of any restaurant, some place they couldn’t afford in their dreams, and push their naked asses against the glass. When they needed a few dollars, they’d go to the fountain in Ghirardelli Square and steal underwater coins.

Mokhtar knew his family was poor, but there were solutions to certain deprivations. He knew they couldn’t afford a Nintendo 64—he’d asked for one year after year for birthdays and finally stopped bothering—but the Circuit City was only four blocks from their apartment, and that place was busy and chaotic enough that he and his friends could pretend to be potential shoppers trying out a game. Usually they could get in an hour of Mario Kart before they were chased off.

Mokhtar’s neighbors were close-knit. Their building on Polk was full of Yemeni families, and they looked out for one another. The families went to the same mosque, the kids played soccer in the hallways, and for reasons beyond Mokhtar’s reckoning, most of the kids were sent to school on Treasure Island. It was where a lot of Tenderloin kids went, where a lot of kids without options went. Treasure Island Middle School. It almost sounded romantic. Treasure Island itself was bizarre, an inexplicable man-made mass of contradictions. The navy built it in 1936, sinking 287,000 tons of rock and 50,000 cubic yards of topsoil into San Francisco Bay, just off of a natural island called Yerba Buena and between San Francisco and the East Bay. The island, a military base through World War II, wasn’t called Treasure Island then. The name came afterward, when it was decommissioned and the powers that be, hoping to convert it to commercial use, named it after a book about murderous pirates.

But no postwar commercial anything happened, really, and the reasons were sensible but not insurmountable. First, there was some mystery about what might be buried in the landmass itself; the navy wasn’t telling what kind of hazardous waste was tucked away, and no one was willing to do the research and abatement necessary. Second, there was increasing concern about where the whole island, which rested only a foot or two above sea level, would be in twenty years, given rising water levels.

At school, Mokhtar found trouble difficult to avoid. Maybe he was bent toward it. Maybe he was one of the leaders. There were Black kids, Samoan kids, Latino kids, Yemeni kids, and the boys, even at thirteen, were drinking and smoking pot, and both were done on the middle school campus—a patchwork of cement yards with narrow ranch-style buildings, each one a step up from temporary. This was the height of Mokhtar’s days of cutting corners. His parents knew he was going astray. They tried to hold him accountable but he could talk himself out of any trouble. By the seventh grade they stopped listening to him.

“It’s all excuses,” they said.

But his teachers knew he had a mind. Mokhtar loved to read. At home, he even had a library. There was no room in the apartment for bookshelves, but on a shelf in the tiny kitchen pantry, below the canned goods and above the shelf that held the pasta and Sazón Goya seasoning, Mokhtar had carved out a home for the books he’d found. Or stolen. Getting the books involved some corner-cutting—he didn’t have money to buy them, but he wanted them there, at home, lined up like they would be in a regular home. A few he borrowed, indefinitely, from the public library. His collection grew. Five books, then ten, then twenty, and soon the one shelf in the pantry really looked like something, like that one dark corner of their kitchen was some kind of legitimate haven for learning.

And because he didn’t have his own room, or even his own corner of a room, the library was the one place that was his own. He collected Goosebumps books, anime, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings. But nothing meant so much to him as Harry Potter, who lived under a staircase but didn’t belong there, had in fact been chosen for great things. When Mokhtar was tired of being poor, of stepping over homeless addicts, of sleeping with six siblings in one room, his mind drifted and allowed the possibility that maybe he was like Harry, part of this hardscrabble world for now, but destined for something more.

CHAPTER IV

SAGE ADVICE FROM GHASSAN TOUKAN

PART I

The after-school program Mokhtar went to, at the Al-Tawheed Mosque on Sutter Street, was run by the Toukans, a Palestinian American family. Ghassan Toukan, just seven years older than Mokhtar, was one of the tutors, and Mokhtar knew he drove Ghassan nuts. Mokhtar did poorly in school and then did poorly after school. He distracted everyone. He did not care. And he did not see Ghassan Toukan, who seemed to excel naturally at everything he did, as the cure.

“Mokhtar,” Ghassan implored. “Sit down. Do your homework. Do something.”

Every day Ghassan hassled Mokhtar about the same things, about everything. About behaving. About homework. The wonderful advantages of completing said homework. Mokhtar couldn’t take him seriously. He couldn’t take any of it seriously. He was going to middle school on Treasure Island, a former military base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. It was a school for the forgotten. No one was getting out of that middle school and going anywhere that mattered.

So at the Toukans’ tutoring center, Mokhtar was an agent of chaos. He found a like-minded accomplice in a kid named Ali Shahin. Ali’s father was an imam at another mosque, but Ali, like Mokhtar, was given to distraction. Together they drove Ghassan around the bend. They disrupted. They disturbed. They did no work, and the younger kids saw them doing no work, and this threw off whatever delicate academic equilibrium the Toukans were trying to engender.

“Mokhtar!” Ghassan yelled. Every day he yelled Mokhtar’s name. He told him to sit, to listen, to learn.

Instead, Mokhtar and Ali snuck out of the mosque. They walked around the Tenderloin, watching out for Mokhtar’s father. After years as a security guard, and after years applying for a job at MUNI, San Francisco’s system of bus and tram lines, Faisal had gotten a job. He left his late-night security job at the Sequoias and now his hours were rational and steady, the benefits were good for a family of nine—he and Bushra had added two more to the brood—and the position suited his personality. He liked to drive and loved to talk.

For Mokhtar, though, his father’s new job was a problem. It hemmed him in. It made him paranoid. His father’s routes were different on different days, and Mokhtar could never remember where he’d be driving on any given day. So cutting corners required some care. Mokhtar and his friends would be working a hustle when one of them would look up. Isn’t that your pops, Mokhtar? His father circled his childhood as he circled the city—a kind of sixty-foot roaming conscience.

He and Ali would go back to the mosque, back to Ghassan and his attempts to control them. And then one day Ghassan snapped. He told the four boys, Mokhtar, Ali and two other disrupters, Ahmed and Hatham, to sit down.

Ghassan pointed to Hatham. “What’s your dad’s job?”

“Taxi driver,” Hatham said.

He pointed to Ahmed. “What’s your dad do?”

“Janitor,” Ahmed said.

He pointed to Mokhtar.

“Bus driver,” Mokhtar said.

“Fine,” Ghassan said. He knew Ali’s dad was an imam, but he worried about him, too. He worried about all these kids. “Your parents came here as immigrants and they didn’t have choices. Do you want to drive a taxi? Clean toilets? Drive a bus?”

Mokhtar shrugged. Ahmed and Hatham shrugged. They had no idea what they wanted to do for a living. They were only thirteen. All Mokhtar could think was that he wanted an Xbox.

“They brought you here so you could have choices,” Ghassan said. “And you’re blowing it. If you want to do something different when you grow up, you’re going to have to get your shit together.”

Also by Dave Eggers

FICTION

MEMOIR

NON-FICTION

AS EDITOR

FOR YOUNG READERS

Dave Eggers

THE MONK OF MOKHA

HAMISH HAMILTON