Necessary Roughness

by Marie G. Lee

  Mikko dragged me into the bathroom first. He’d brought some booze in trial-size shampoo bottles. We stood in the large handicapped stall and downed them. The bottles still tasted of soap.

  “I think it was a mistake to bring Cindy,” he said miserably. “Now she thinks I like her, when all I wanted to do was come to the dance.”

  “You don’t like her?” I said. Now I could distinguish between all the blond cheerleaders: she was the one with the interesting ice-cream-cone eating technique.

  “She’s just too, too—um, enthusiastic.”

  “So what are you going to do? Stay in the bathroom all night?”

  Mikko wrapped an arm around my neck. It felt as heavy as an anaconda. “You’re a cool cruiser, Chan. My whole life has changed because of you.”

  He was getting drunk. I took the bottle away, pretending to drink it myself. If I sneezed, I expected bubbles of Pert to come blipping out.

  “Come on. Let’s go dance this stuff off.”

  Rainey was an awesome dancer. I was merely okay. For all my soccer and tae kwon do prowess, I couldn’t quite get my feet to do what I wanted them to do when out on the dance floor. I liked it when they played slow songs, because I got to hold her, and I didn’t have to move around as much.

  “Look who’s with the sausage queen!” said Rom, just loud enough for us to hear. He was with one of the cheerleaders with the big boobs.

  “Get a life,” I said, pulling Rainey closer. Sometimes, if you get happy enough, even total butt-wipes don’t bug you.

  “He is the worst kind of person,” Rainey whispered to me. “Dumb and with muscles.”

  “Don’t forget evil,” I said. She laughed, felt looser in my arms. I loved everything about this girl—her teeth, her heavy lashes that gave her a sleepy, dreamy look, her hair …

  “How come we didn’t go to your house for pictures?” she asked. Apparently for Riverfest, the whole tradition was to go to everyone’s houses and manufacture Kodak Moments in four different living rooms. We only did three.

  My excuse was going to be that O-Ma and Abogee were both working at the store, which they probably were. But somehow the words wouldn’t come out.

  “Do you not want your parents to meet me?”

  I sighed. It’s not always convenient to date intelligent, perceptive girls.

  “Uh.” I rifled through a list of other possible coverups. Then I gave up. Lying can be a lot of trouble.

  “Only two things might bother them. You’re not Korean, and you’re a girl.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “My parents don’t want me to date until I get to college, and then it’s got to be a Korean girl.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed.

  “You’ll meet them someday,” I told her, pulling her a little closer, even though a fast song had begun. “We just don’t always see eye to eye on stuff, especially me and my dad. All I can do is ask you to be patient, I guess.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  We ended up dancing more and more into the shadows away from the center of the dance floor. I pushed my head toward hers in the dark. She was exactly the right height. I heard the sea in my ears.

  It’s strange how life moves in fits and starts. During the first day at school, minutes passed agonizingly slowly. Now, as we kissed, time was a bullet train hurtling through the black of a tunnel.

  twenty-four

  The coaches had decided to start watching our weekly game tapes at ALL-PRO’S house. Before, we’d watched them in the cold and damp of the gym, crammed in front of the grainy screen provided by the AV department. The Ripanens’ basement was a big improvement, fully carpeted with a complete home-entertainment center and a billion comfy seats.

  There is something excruciating about watching yourself on video. The first time I saw myself on film, it was like, who’s that? What I saw onscreen was some doofus galoomping gracelessly up to the ball and hacking at it. It couldn’t have been me—except he was wearing my number, 22. Later, I saw the same guy fumble a ball, in a manner worthy of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

  To put it mildly, it was torture being forced to sit through endless slo-mos. About the only good thing was that the guys didn’t rag on you, because soon enough the coaches would point to something they did wrong. The video eye sees everything.

  We settled comfortably in front of a wide-screen TV. Next to it someone had made a bookshelf. I admired the woodwork, definitely A+ shopwork. In the other corner was a home gym, situated so that you could watch TV or listen to music while you worked out. No wonder ALL-PRO was all-pro.

  Kearny popped in the tape of our last game with Moose Creek and yelled at us for a while. Then the homemade tape footage fuzzed out, giving way to real TV sports. Channel Five, state tournament. Moose Creek versus Elko Center. Coach Kearny fast-forwarded through the commercials and pregame show.

  The players collided on the screen. They bashed into each other like angry rams. They tackled, blocked, punched, gouged, and scored. We began to push and shove each other off the couches.

  This showing was more than a strategy session, I was realizing. If we managed to beat Moose Creek, that would be us down there at the Humphrey Dome, on TV. Talk about motivation.

  Then the coaches left. Rom dug out the videos he’d picked up at one of the video stores. Iron River, which had no bookstore, had three video stores.

  “So did you get a football movie or something?” asked Mikko.

  “Naw,” said Rom, looking sidewise at me. “I got us some kung-phooey movies.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Jean-Pierre Vandervanter. He’s good.”

  Leave it to Rom to know exactly how to work my nerves. At my tae kwon do dojang, a bunch of us had practically formed a club of guys who hated those white-guy martial-arts movies. We were sure we could beat any of their butts in a real fight. Jean-Pierre especially annoyed me because he went around claiming to be some kickboxing champion, but no one had ever seen him fight outside of a movie set.

  I knew I was going to hate this one when it opened with weird boing-boing Asian music.

  The plot of the movie was this: Jean-Pierre’s brother had been brutally tortured and murdered by some incredibly ugly Chinese martial artists. So J.P. goes to China to avenge him. He meets this beautiful Chinese woman (a girl, really) whose father is about a thousand years old and happens to be the martial-arts monk at the Shaolin Temple. She, for her part, does things like walk on J.P.’s back to help him with his “training.”

  J.P. beats all the Chinese guys, no problem, using all the tae kwon do moves—tornado kicks, somersault kicks—showy stuff you’d never use in a real fight. He earns the undying gratitude of the lotus blossom and her family because those evil guys were also the bandits who had terrorized their village for years.

  * * *

  Wouldn’t you know it, but Rom had not one but two of those movies. The next one was Kickboxer in Korea, for God’s sake. Of course the Korean guy is an ugly stupid mo-fo who wears a Korean flag on top of his head—upside down, I might add—and he tries to throw J.P.’s concentration off by doing things like kidnapping and raping J.P.’s new (Korean) girlfriend. I’d never seen a Korean guy who had a Chuckie-the-killer-doll smile or a brow thick enough to park a car on, unless it was in the Museum of Natural History.

  “Kill! Kill the chink!” Rom yelled, as the Chuckie-smiling “Korean” guy threw some powder in J.P.’s face to make him blind. “Can’t trust those lousy chinks—they cheat! You’re way better than him. Kill him!”

  Chinks. Uh-huh.

  My guts tightened. The room seemed to grow very, very still.

  Rom snuck a look at me as if to say, “What are you going to do about it, huh?”

  A few of the guys shifted in their seats. Even Mikko looked like he didn’t know what to do.

  The movie kept on going. Jean-Pierre kept pummeling the Asian baddies, who were coming out of the woodwork, all buckteeth and slit eyes, straight from
central casting.

  “Buncha chinks,” Rom growled at the screen.

  “Shut up!” I yelled, jumping to my feet. Everyone looked at me.

  “Geez, I’m just joking,” Rom said innocently. “What are you getting so uptight for? It isn’t like I’m calling you a name. I’m doing it to the guys on-screen.”

  “Yeah, like hell.”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “You calling Rom a liar?” Jimmi echoed.

  “You don’t know crap about martial arts,” I said.

  “Oh, yah, and you do?”

  “Koreans invented tae kwon do, which is the stuff Jean-Pierre is doing.”

  Rom laughed.

  “Okay, so how come there are no Korean martial-arts heroes? Who’s the Korean Jean-Pierre? Or Dolphin Lundegaard? Or Stephen Segull?”

  “They’re all fakes!” I yelled.

  There was some kind of pressure building inside me. I wanted to quit arguing with Rom and just kill him.

  “Yah,” Rom said lazily. There was a knowing gleam in his eye. “Like fer sure, if a bunch of guys jumped you, you could kill ’em, huh?”

  My mind leaped back to the raunchy taste of the towel shoved in my mouth. The guys jumping out of nowhere.

  “A little necessary roughness, huh?”

  I ran over to the pile of scrap lumber by the bookshelf and grabbed a few of the leftover boards. They were pine, sanded. Perfect.

  “Scrap?” I said to Mikko. He just stared at me.

  “You don’t need these, right?” I turned my voice up. He nodded uncertainly.

  “Okay, here, Rom, Jimmi, come up here and prove your manhood,” I said, thrusting the boards toward them. “Hold these and I’ll show you what I can do.”

  “Whoa, you’re messed up.” Jimmi took a step back.

  “You have no idea, asshole. Come on. Take them.”

  “Chan …” said Mikko, now that he saw what I was intending to do. “Don’t let these guys get to you. Look, we’re in the middle of the season. If you hurt yourself—”

  “I know what I’m doing!”

  But did I? A large knot in the grain could stop me. If Jimmi or Rom moved the boards at the last second, I’d be dead. The skinny bones connecting the knuckles to the wrist would split like twigs. I’d seen it happen before. But all I wanted to do was break those boards, as if I’d be breaking Rom’s head at the same time.

  Jimmi was starting to look relieved.

  “I knew you were chicken,” he said.

  I looked at the two of them standing there holding the boards.

  When you dive off a high board, the square of water below looks so small, impossibly small. Just like when you hit a board, it looks hard, impossibly hard.

  Crack! A horrible, terrible, splintery sound. Raw pain shot through my hand, up my arm.

  The boards fell to the floor.

  “Oh geez,” breathed Jimmi.

  “Wow,” said Leland. “If only you could do that in a game.”

  Rom just laughed.

  Everyone wanted me to show how I did it, but I went home soon after that. I somehow felt dirty, like I’d flashed everyone on a dare or something. I didn’t feel the way I thought I would. Mikko didn’t say much to me either. He seemed kind of disappointed in me.

  twenty-five

  I think the store must have been doing halfway decent, because Abogee hired a night manager, Greg, so that Froggie’s 24-Hour Express could start living up to its full name. Before, we were closing at midnight. O-Ma also declared that she would take Young and me to the mall in Little Moon Bay so we could get real jackets, now that the temperature was only in the forties and fifties during the day. I said I’d wait for my letter jacket, which, the coaches said, we juniors would get early this year so we could wear them to the state tournament. God willing.

  “Okay, guys, the F-S dinner is going to be this Saturday,” Coach announced as we all luxuriated in the stink and steam of the postpractice locker room. Rom’s newest ritual was to stop taking showers a whole week before a game so his pads— and his hide—radiated the most lethal smells. Poison gas. He smelled worse than the bums who used to come into our store for quarts of malt liquor.

  “We’re doing the dinner a little earlier this year so you juniors can get your letter jackets. Also, because we want you to spend a little quality time with your old men before we concentrate on practice. It will be this Saturday at the VFW, seven thirty. That means coats and ties, for the uninitiated.”

  “Letter jackets—sweet!” someone said.

  “What’s F-S?” I said to Mikko.

  “Father-son,” he said. “You bring your dad.”

  Father-son. For the wildest of moments, I imagined I’d ask Abogee to come to the dinner with me, and he’d say, “Son, I’d be proud to. When is it?”

  But then I realized that was only an episode of the sitcom in my head, The Lovingly Wacky Kim Family, which had absolutely no bearing on reality. For starters, Abogee would never call me “son.” And could you imagine what he’d be like at a football dinner? Especially with dads like Mikko’s around? Abogee would probably go around spouting his favorite antifootball sayings.

  “Anyone can build muscle, but building brain is more difficult.”

  “Football is so popular in this country because it provides people with an excuse to drink beer.”

  “In Korea, grown men would not waste their time fighting each other over a tiny ball.”

  Uh-uh.

  “Coach, I don’t think my dad can make it. He has some stuff to do at the store that day.”

  Coach looked at me.

  “Maybe Mikko’s dad can adopt me for the night,” I suggested.

  “Your father owns Froggie’s, right?”

  I nodded.

  “That must be a lot of work.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure is.”

  “Well, tell him I hope he can come. But if not, I’m sure Rip would love to have another son.”

  Chan Ripanen. For a second, I couldn’t help thinking how nice that sounded.

  When I asked ALL-PRO if I could go to dinner with him and his dad, he said sure, but he gave me a bit of a funny look.

  “Too bad your dad’s going to be busy.”

  “Yeah. The store takes up a lot of his time.”

  “Looks like it. Looks like you and your sister help out a lot too.”

  “I guess so.”

  Okay, I felt a little guilty about dismissing Abogee without even asking him. But it was more like I was doing it for him, doing my usual job of trying to figure out what would best please him—or at least preserve the uneasy peace between us—without actually telling him what was going on.

  * * *

  I was doing some extra-credit reading for English when Abogee emerged from the trapdoor like a jack-in-the-box.

  “How is football?” he said, hoisting himself into my room and sitting down on the floor.

  I was stunned by two things: He was speaking English, and he was voluntarily uttering the word football.

  “It’s okay,” I said, as naturally as I could.

  “I meet Coach, that man, Do-Sun.”

  “Coach?”

  “Yes-u. He come into store today.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So this man, Do-Sun, say you good at football.”

  I sat up in a hurry. Not at the news that Coach thought I was a good player—which was thrilling in itself—but something else really threw me.

  Abogee actually sounded a little proud of me.

  I had a weird sensation. It was one of those feelings where, for the fleetingest of moments, you think everything’s going to be all right. Like everything, even between me and Abogee.

  “So did Coach tell you about the father-son dinner Saturday?”

  Abogee nodded. “I will go,” he said.

  I was just about to tell him how happy I was that he was coming, when he said, “This man also be you and sister calculus teacher next year.”

  Oh.
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  “Maybe we should bring Young along, so we can butter him up at the same time.” I knew my sarcasm would be lost on him.

  “So I have Gary work Saturday evening,” Abogee said. He got up stiffly, his joints crackling and popping like mine did during morning practice. He disappeared down the stairs, and the door sprang shut behind him.

  I shook my head to clear it before settling back down to the books. I would be bringing Abogee to the father-son dinner. How about that.

  twenty-six

  “What are we expected to wear to this dinner?” Abogee said to me. He actually sounded a bit bewildered. I’d already told him nice clothes, but I guess that wasn’t enough.

  “A tie,” I said. “Nice white shirt, pants.”

  Abogee dug into his drawer and dug out a heinous turquoise-and-yellow clip-on bow tie, which looked like a butterfly poised for flight.

  “No, a real tie, like this.” I pointed to the classy red-silk number that Young had bought me last year for my—our—birthday.

  Abogee sighed, but dug out the one tie he owned, the one he wore to weddings and funerals back in L.A. He knotted it first, then slipped it over his head like a noose. I noticed that his neck no longer filled out his shirt collar, so the tie hung a little low, like a necklace.

  Abogee also seemed to have grown more white hairs since we’d been here. His hair, raven-black, showed the little white shoots really plainly to the eye. Still, when I stepped back and looked at him in his coat, tie, and pants (shoes would come later), I was struck, as I was from time to time, at how good-looking he was. Tough, sort of like a Korean Clint Eastwood. He probably doesn’t know this, but I hope my face will look craggy like that, after I get older and some of this baby fat melts away.

  I’d never been inside the VFW before. It was a brick building squatting by the side of the highway with a big sign: VETERANS OF FOREIGN WARS. In front it flew the American flag, the VFW one, and a huge black POW/MIA flag. On Saturday nights the place filled up for bingo and country/western dances. On weekdays you might see old guys in flannel shirts limping into it. ALL-PRO said that the guys at the VFW, along with the Elks and Rotary clubs, were the ones who raised the money for our new Riddell helmets.