John Y’s Musings from the Middle: A Kentuckian in LaLa Land

My introduction to foreign doctors and how the language barrier can have serious consequences ––but also teach important life lessons.

When I was 19 years old I moved to Los Angeles, CA to attend the University of Southern California (USC), famous at the time for football more than academics, but I was shooting for the stars academically and it was the best college I could get in at that time. albeit on probation. Sure, I was excited about attending a big name school like USC, but I was a lot more excited about living in the City of Angels, Los Angeles, California.

I didn’t know much about LA and was just excited to be a kid from KY moving into the big city and trying to fit in. My first few weeks out there I watched David Letterman ever night on my rented television and one night he interviewed and exotic and eccentric writer named Quentin Crisp who commented about the differences in LA and NY City. Crisp said, almost verbatim, “Los Angeles is an endless sunny paradise where everyone is beautiful and rich and awards grow on trees. But if you want to rule the world, you have to live in NY.” Heaven knows why I remember that quote, but it stuck with me and I never quite looked at LA the same after that. Clearly, it was a “beautiful people” town and although I wasn’t really cut out for that, I wanted to try to blend in and hopefully not stick out.

My first week as I was moving in, a female student from UCLA with the guys helping me move my furniture, made conversation with me and then asked her female friend to come over with her to talk to me. I was nervous and excited —but ultimately disappointed when I realized why she summoned her friend. “Oh my God, listen to him talk. Say something. He’s got the most country accent. Say something. Anything.” They then asked where I was from and I told them Kentucky. “Is that a state?” she asked. I said, “No, Kentucky was a small city in Nashville, which was a state next to the state of Tennessee.” No one laughed so I finally explained the joke. And no one laughed again. Although I was asked to repeat parts of it for the accent affect alone.

I went to the beach a lot the first few weeks. I didn’t surf or even know how to hang out at the beach like other guys in LA my age, so I tried to up my game by using something called “Sun In” to lighten my hair making it blonder and more L.A.-ish. It worked well the first day. And second day. The third day, I rubbed it in like shampoo. And it turned my hair what I suppose is a very intense shade of blonde. But most people would just call it orange. Fortunately for me, orange hair wasn’t as out of place in LA as it would have been back home in Lexington or Louisville. I just went with it and was told it would eventually grow out and that “It wasn’t obviously orange. Just from certain angles.” In other words, from some very narrow angles, I may look a little like a blonde surfer dude. But from most other angles I looked like a Southerner who had just moved to LA and tried to bleach his hair blonde but failed and accidentally dyed it orange. 

Suffice it to say I was not off to a roaring start blending in to the LA beautiful people scene. After a month or so I was learning my way around and had a daily routine and my orange hair was starting to grow out (making an actually kind of cool looking orange with brown roots combination). Anyway, I figured it was time to find a local doc just in case I ever needed medical help. My mother suggested I get our local doctor to recommend a GP but stubborn, independent, orange-headed me wanted to pick out my own GP and did so using the yellow pages and finding a doctor just a quarter mile from my apartment. In fact, my entire basis for selecting my GP was proximity to my apartment. He had a long and funny sounding foreign name. For me, that was just further reassurance he must be very smart and an excellent doctor—and so I confidently made an appointment to meet and do a physical.

And this is where the problems began. As part of the physical, he took blood (or the nurse did) and then I was given a cup to, well, you know. The doctor explained I was to take the cup to a particular room number, but because of the language barrier I wasn’t completely clear what room number he said. I didn’t want to be rude and ask him to repeat it and figured I had a good enough idea and decided to go with what I thought I heard. I walked out of the bathroom and no one was there to confirm the room number and so I walked outside, holding my specimen, and noticing that I was two floors down from the room where I believed I was to drop off my sample. I took the elevator up two floors, and although I was dressed casually, I didn’t quite have the West Coast look down just yet. I went into the room I thought I was told to go to and knocked on the receptionist’s screen. It was about 5pm and they were closing. She opened up the screen and said, “Haallloo” in a lovely French accent (and was herself quite lovely). I swallowed hard and held up my specimen and said, “Hi” (in my unconfident Southernly manner) and added, “I think this is for you.” I paused and she smiled and then laughed. “No” she said and pointed to the sign just below me that indicated I was at a dentist’s office. “Oh, OK. I’m sorry about that. Oh, wow. I’m really sorry.” (again with full Southern accent). I wanted to add that the orange in my hair was growing out and would look normal again soon but stayed quite instead. She did give me the room number for the lab which was actually next door to the doctor’s office I just left.

So I went back to the elevator and holding my sample out in complete defeat the door opened and about 8 or 9 very LA-like attractive secretaries were all on the elevator (without any guys) leaving for the day. And there I was, in my KY version of an LA outfit and a urine specimen in my right hand. The two in front giggled but tried looking away. I thought about telling them to go ahead and I would wait for the next elevator but that would have been more embarrassing to acknowledge the object I was carrying –and exposed my accent again. I just stepped on and tried to pretend I wasn’t holding anything unusual at all. Just holding something as commonplace as car keys or a package for delivery. I did try to find a pocket on my jacket to place it in but decided to do what I was told as a child by my neighbor’s father if ever attacked by a dog—“Just freeze. Don’t look at it. Just pretend you are a statue.” It was a very quiet and seemingly long two floor elevator ride.

As I stepped off the elevator, I heard more giggling. And as the door closed, I looked down the long hall which seemed longer and narrower than it really way and walked with my head spinning and stomach turning as the harsh reality set in (much like the Quinten Crisp quote I heard a few weeks earlier) that LA was a different kind of place. But if you wanted to rule the world, you had to live in NY. And so I figured, according to Quinten’s logic, if I wanted to fit in and be happy (as opposed to being one of the “beautiful people in LA”– I would have to eventually move back to my home state of Kentucky. Which really isn’t a small city in the state of Nashville next to Tennessee. But is an awfully fine place to live. And where I fit in. I didn’t move back home immediately –but sensed after that day– it was just a matter of time before I would. In fact, I finished several semesters and even made the Dean’s List and declared a major in philosophy…but never lost my accent or became one of the beautiful people. Although my orange hair did grow out and i looked again like an Earthling. It was my moment of learning, as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz taught us, “There’s no place like home.”

And I have an LA doctor with a thick foreign accent and an awkward delivery episode and abuse of the product Sun In to thank for teaching me that. But it was one of the most important life lessons I’ve learned. “Be where you fit in.” Otherwise you may find yourself with orange hair and brown roots trying to force a dentist’s receptionist with a French accent to take a, well, you get the idea.