Waylaid

by Ed Lin

  He gave me the key to the teacher’s lounge and handed a stack of our last three weekly tests to Lee.

  We walked out the door as the class made kissy sounds behind us. I saw Mr. Hendrickson take off his glasses, and I knew they were in for it.

  The lounge consisted of a shelf with a sink next to a refrigerator with a sign on it that said, “Label your lunch or lose it.” It stunk of cigarettes like some of our hotel rooms. It was empty now, since the teachers only hung out there at lunch time. Bright fluorescent lights gave a dull shine to the scuffed tile floor. A copy machine hummed in a corner next to a computer grader that looked like a change machine at an arcade.

  You had to feed in the answer key first, so the computer would know which answers were right, which were wrong, and the total number of answers. What Mr. Hendrickson didn’t realize — or didn’t care about—was that I was changing my forms to match the answer key. I was changing Lee’s answers, too. I was used to working with tables and charts from the hotel records about which rooms were being rented for how long, so lining up the answer key, my test, and Lee’s test, and erasing and filling in appropriately was easy.

  At first, I was nervous around Lee. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I talked about stupid things. I told her I wanted to be an astronaut.

  “You’re really smart,” Lee said. “I bet you’d be a great astronaut.”

  “You’re really smart, too. You get the same grades I do.”

  “That’s because we’re both cheating on the tests.”

  “Hendrickson has no idea what we’re doing in here,” I said. Lee opened the refrigerator.

  “We could eat his lunch and drink his beer!” she said.

  “You know, Lee, I remember when you drank beer in fourth grade and fell asleep.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, laughing. “My dad mixed up our Thermoses.”

  “You, you have the most beautiful eyes, Lee,” I told her. She smiled.

  “Thank you.”

  “And you’ve got such a sweet smile, too.” Her lips parted, and she ducked her head down like she wanted me to scratch an itchy spot on her scalp. Those were the dumbest, most common things to say, but they worked. I was in.

  That night, a power surge reset our alarm clocks, leaving a flashing “EE:EE” in bright red on the numerical faces. I was curled up, straddling my pillow, when I saw a semicircle of light on the ceiling around the chipped light fixture. It was usually still dark when the alarm went off. What time was it?

  Panicked, I sat up and looked at the electronic alarm clock on my night stand. “HEE HEE,” it read. I dashed to the office in bare feet. The hands of the Marlboro Man clock, which ran on a size-C battery, pointed to 8:21 — 21 minutes after attendance was taken. My mother and I had both overslept.

  I ran into my parent’s bedroom to wake up my mother.

  “Aye, yo, Jesus, my God,” she said, pulling on a bathrobe. My father grumbled and turned over on his side. “Get the car keys! They in Daddy’s pants pockets!” My father’s chinos dangled limply on the stubby bedpost like a lowered flag. I stumbled in the dim light, stepping into a bowl filled with peanut shells that felt like broken glass on my bare feet. I let out a cry of pain and fell to the floor.

  “Come on, you stupid! You late for school, you still fooling around! Still hokey pokey around!” my mother yelled. I brushed the shells off my feet. “You go change, I go warm up car,” she called after me as I went to my bedroom and pulled on my already-tied sneakers. I was still wearing yesterday’s corduroy slacks and a Sea-Shore Linen Supply t-shirt. I could handle the inevitable taunting for wearing the same clothes two days in a row, but my body felt gross. There wasn’t even time for me to shower. My hair flopped over like worn-out bristles on an old toothbrush.

  I ran to the bathroom sink and threw handfuls of water over my face. Now my hair looked like a worn-out toothbrush that was also wet. I pulled on a Mets sweat-jacket and a Mets baseball cap, both of which had been left by a Benny. On my way out of the office door, I hung up the closed sign and locked the door.

  My wet face and neck stung from the cold in the morning air. My breath plumed from my nose and mouth.

  My mother was already in the car. A cloud of frozen exhaust materialized beneath our straining Pinto, obscuring the wheels and making it look like a futuristic hovercraft. Then the motor died. My mother frantically jerked the ignition. I couldn’t help but laugh at her feeble attempts to start the car.

  She got out, her hands pulling the flaps of her bathrobe closed because the belt was missing. “You laughing me? You going walk to school!” she hissed. I didn’t know if her teeth were clenched in anger or from the cold.

  “Can’t I just stay home and say I was sick?”

  “No, you going go school! You don’t want learn? You lazy?”

  “If I walk to school, I’m going to freeze to death!”

  “Not so cold!” Our breath mingled and spiraled up.

  “It’s so cold, the car won’t even start!”

  “Car didn’t sleep late!”

  “The power got knocked out!”

  “Always have some excuse…you get up same time every day, don’t you?”

  “You didn’t wake up either!”

  “I have to work so hard every day, of course I’m tired!” My mother, still in Chinese house slippers, was shifting from foot to foot in a disco-step display of stubbornness to stay out in the cold and argue with her son. My body temperature rose with my anger, and I wasn’t feeling the cold anymore.

  “I don’t get to sleep at night! I rented out two rooms for hookers last night.” The words were out. Every letter in H-O-O-K-E-R-S sparkled and pranced in the air like tinsel streamers. My mother took a deep breath and swallowed.

  “You going walk to school!” she seethed.

  “I’ll call a cab.”

  “They open 9:30.”

  “Then I’ll wait until 9:30.”

  “You not going wait. You start walking now!”

  “I’m going to ask Roy for a ride,” I said. My mother gasped.

  “You going ride with a black?”

  “Why not?”

  “You going be killed! They going find your body! You want to die!”

  “I’m going to die if I walk!” She fumed. H-O-O-K-E-R-S was still glimmering about two inches away from my mouth.

  “Good! Go ride with the black!” My mother stormed to the office. She seemed surprised when she found the door locked. “Stupid kid, you go die!” she called over her shoulder as she fumbled with the keys and unlocked the office door.

  I slammed the door to the Pinto and walked to Room 8, where Roy lived. Roy, who looked like he was about 40, was the youngest guy who stayed at the weekly rate. He was also the only non-white at the hotel, besides us.

  My mother had two rules: no customers in our living quarters and no renting to blacks.

  “Those blacks, they dirty, they steal everything,” she explained. I saw only one or two blacks at the hotel a year, and I’d always tell them there were no vacant rooms. They seemed to know what was going on. Roy got to stay because he paid for the entire winter in advance, instead of week to week or hour by hour, like all the other customers.

  Roy had been hurt in Vietnam, and he walked by swaying his hips and swinging his legs out in front of him. His head was shaved smooth, and he had a neatly trimmed mustache and beard that looked like velvet against his dark brown skin. It was hard for him to stand straight because of his injury, but he seemed to be of about medium height and build.

  Roy stayed in his room working on speeches and poetry most of the time. I could hear the typewriter going sometimes, but I never saw it. The first time I cleaned his room, I was startled. Not by how well-kept it was, but by its bareness. All his belongings were in two padlocked suitcases under the bed. His typewriter and socks — even his razors and shampoo. Another strange thing was that his wastebasket was always empty.

  Roy and I didn’t talk much, especially compared with th
e conversations I was forced to have with the white old timers, who were stuffed into the hotel like clothes in storage. If it was an unseasonably warm day, Roy would prop his room door open with the hotel Bible and sit on his chair outside. One day when he was hanging out, he called to me as I was walking back to the office from the school bus stop.

  “Hey, what did you learn in school?”

  “I learned about the Greeks,” I said.

  He shrugged and said, “It’s all Greek to me!”

  Another time, he’d shown me an issue of Reader’s Digest. They had printed one of his poems.

  “Here, read this, tell me what you think,” he said. “They paid me $300 for it.”

  It was a short thing, maybe 10 words long, and it rhymed. It didn’t mean anything to me. I forgot it as soon as I read it.

  “I…I don’t know,” I said.

  “There’s different layers of meaning in poetry,” he said, smiling. “And I guess they missed one of them when they decided to print it! There’s different layers of meaning in life, too.” He paused. “Now, what are you? You’re Chinese, right?”

  “I’m an American.”

  He screwed his face up.“Don’t come on like that. I’m an American, too. But I’m black first. Like you’re Chinese first.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You ever been to China?”

  “Nope.”

  Roy cackled. “I’m a black man, never been to Africa. Never going to Africa. I saw enough in Vietnam and I read enough to know that some of your own kind treat you worse than anyone else. Take advantage of you more than anyone else. Your own kind. Know what I’m saying?” I nodded. I had no idea what he was saying.

  He pointed down to the space between his cowboy boots. “This is the best life you can get anywhere. The

  U.S.A. You can’t live anywhere better. That’s why your parents came here. If you were in China, you’d be barefoot and stupid for life. Me, too. But you got a place in this country. It isn’t always good, but you’ve got the chance to improve yourself here.”

  “I want to be an astronaut,” I said. He was the first adult I’d told.

  “You might have a chance,” Roy said, “but you’ve got to work. You’ve got to work harder than anybody else. And be very, very lucky. If you really want to be an astronaut, you have to understand the gravity of the situation,” he said. “That’s a joke,” he added when he saw no reaction from me.

  I knocked on Roy’s door. I heard footsteps inside.

  “Roy?” I called through the closed door.

  “Oh, it’s you.” He stumbled to the door and opened it until it caught on the chain lock. Roy’s shot a look over my head and to both sides. “What’s going on?” He didn’t sound like he had been sleeping.

  “I woke up late but our car won’t start and I have to get to school. Can you give me a ride?”

  He blinked.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “For you, anything.” He shut the door, took off the chain, and opened the door wide. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

  Roy wobbled down to the driver’s side of his Ford Fairlaine and opened the door. He swung into the seat with a motion like a pole vaulter clearing the bar. He snapped the passenger door unlocked, and I got in.

  The car was huge. I wondered how it would fit into one lane on the highway. Roy cranked the key and the car started without a problem. It hummed, and I felt the vibration run through my legs and groin.

  “You got a girlfriend yet, fellow?” Roy asked. He stroked the velvet on his chin.

  “Do you know how to get to the school? I can tell you where to go.”

  “Oh, don’t you go changing the subject! Course I know the way to your school.”

  “I kinda have a girlfriend, but I haven’t even gotten laid yet.” Roy burst out laughing and fell over the steering wheel, but the car never swerved.

  “Whoa, good-looking guy like you can’t get laid, there’s no hope for the rest of us!” He shook his head. “Don’t you worry, you still got plenty of time for that yet. Getting laid isn’t the end of your problems, it’s just the start. Sex complicates life. Keeps you from thinking straight. If I had a girlfriend with me, would I have a poem in Reader’s Digest? I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t want to write poems, I just want to get laid.”

  “You’re gonna learn, you’re gonna learn. Lot of guys I knew just wanted to get laid, hanging out all night. When they were in the hospital, though, they just wanted to see their momma one more time before they died. Just wanted to die in their momma’s arms.”

  “I think I hate my mother.”

  “Now what did you say, fellow?” I saw Roy’s grip on the steering wheel tighten. “She raised you, fed you, gave you nice clothes to wear…”

  “I found this hat and jacket in one of the hotel rooms,” I said.

  “You got a hotel. You got a place to live. Lots of people don’t have any place to stay, nothing to eat. That’s why we have so many wars, because people are hungry. They’re fighting so they can eat every day. You have to love your mother. You owe her your life.”

  “She hates black people,” I said. We pulled up to the curb of my school. Roy frowned, then broke into another loud laugh.

  “That’s okay. I hate Chinese people.” There was a tight smile on his face, but I couldn’t tell if he were joking. “Where’s your lunch?” he asked, his lips sliding back into neutral. I could feel my stomach grumble, wondering where breakfast was. Roy slipped a Snickers bar into my hands. “Study hard,” he said.

  When I reached my home room, I couldn’t believe my luck. We had a substitute, Mrs. Miller. She hadn’t even figured out yet who was in and who was absent. The attendance cards sat in four separate and unequal piles on her desk.

  “You, young man, take care of this and I won’t count you as late,” Mrs. Miller said, waving her hands over the cards. She had huge tits that served as a convenient shelf for her folded arms. But she also had a huge stomach to go with those Dolly Partons.

  I surveyed the room. The boys were rapping each other’s knuckles with pens. The girls were reading magazines and writing notes to each other. I sorted through the cards and volunteered to take them down to the office.

  “I have to take Lee Anderson with me, too. She helps me sort through stuff at the office.” Some of the boys made kissy faces and sounds.

  “That’s enough!” declared Mrs. Miller. That was her two-word phrase. All the subs had one.

  Mrs. Griffey would say: “All right!”

  Mr. Green: “Settle down!”

  Mrs. Schwarz: “People, people!”

  The hall monitor waved us through when I showed the attendance envelope. We rounded the corner, and I tried to grab Lee’s shoulder. She withdrew and folded her arms.

  “Eww, you’re wearing the same clothes from yesterday

  and your hair looks really gross. I think I see bald spots.” “I woke up late, I didn’t even have time to shower.” “Eww, scummy boy, I’m never gonna kiss you.” We’re going to do more than just kiss, I thought. A

  lot more. She was smiling out the side of her mouth.

  It was raining when I got off the school bus. I held a three-ring binder over my head as I walked down the long asphalt drive to the hotel office. Our Ford station wagon was gone. The office lights were off and the door was locked. Where had my parents gone? I couldn’t remember the last time they’d both left the hotel without telling me. I didn’t have the key, so I went to the maid’s cart room, pushed aside a few boxes of bulk-packaged cleaning agents, and slipped through a flimsy panel of sheet rock. This led to the back of the refrigerator in the kitchen. I pushed hard, and I was back in our living quarters. I shoved the fridge back against the panel and dumped my books on the table. A box of day-old pastries from Finemann’s sat on the counter.

  I was hungry, but first things first.

  I went into the office, turned on the light, and unlocked the door. I smacked the bell. BING! Open for busi
ness. The johns wouldn’t come until dark, but some real customers might come in. You never knew.

  I ate two apple turnovers standing over the sink, then brushed flakes of pastry and frosting off of my shirt and into the drain. I went into the living room and watched two episodes of “Voltron.” My parents were still not back yet.

  I took a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom and went to my room. I wrapped my cock up like a little mummy and jerked off to a hard-core magazine with words in German. The woman’s head was topped with teased blonde hair, and she was taking his cock in her ass. She must have loved it because she smiled hard — eyes shut, teeth clenched. After I cleaned up, I lay down a little while. When I thought about how tight that girl’s ass-hole must have been, I couldn’t sleep. I was hard again.

  Afterwards, no one was back yet so I went to the kitchen and scrambled up three eggs with BacOs for dinner. I took two slices of cold wheat bread from the refrigerator and made a sandwich. It was good.

  I was washing the frying pan when I looked out the window and saw a figure approaching from the highway. Even from far away, I could tell it wasn’t my father or my mother. It was a man in a brown coat and a brimmed hat. I shook off my hands and leaned against the kitchen counter. About three minutes later, I heard the office door open with a small woosh and then the BING!

  I went into the office.

  The man standing in front of me looked as worn out as his leather coat, which was missing most of its buttons. He was about 50, and his eyes were dull. Droplets of water wiggled on the brim of his hat. I knew he wasn’t a john, not only because he didn’t have a car, but because he didn’t look like a man about to get anything good anytime soon.

  He wanted to know how much a room was.

  I told him it was $30 for the night.

  He didn’t say anything, but began to fill out a registration card. I watched him write. I was good at watching people write upside down. He wrote neatly and dotted I’s and crossed T’s, something I didn’t see too often. He left the lines for the driver’s license number and car plate blank. I looked over the room schedule and decided to give him Room 7. The man put down the pen.