by Ed Lin
“That’s $30,” I said.
He didn’t blink or reach for a wallet.
“Thirty dollars,” I repeated. He put his hands on the counter and looked at me.
“Can I pay you tomorrow?” he asked.
I shook my head. His bottom lip pushed up against his mouth. His nose twitched, and he sniffed a few times.
“What’s that you’re cooking?” he asked. Then he muttered to himself, “Eggs.”
Now it was my turn to be silent. I looked at him and tried to guess his story. Unemployed and thrown out of his house? Thrown off the train at Asbury Park? He didn’t look like he was homeless. Just worn and tired. And hungry.
“God, I haven’t eaten all day,” he said. I shifted my stance and asked if he was going to pay for the room.
He repeated that he didn’t have any money now, but he could pay the next morning. More like he was planning on resting now and running out at dawn.
“I can’t rent you a room,” I said. He sighed.
“I’ve been walking around forever. What am I supposed to do?” he said.
“I’ll call a cab to take you down to the next hotel,” I told him. I called up Seaside Taxi because we used them a lot to take people away, and they were pretty good.
We stood there in the office for about 10 minutes without saying anything to each other. I pretended I was going over the schedule, running my index finger down the list of rooms. The man stood and stared at the Marlboro clock, never taking off his hat, not even stretching.
A car pulled off the highway and drifted down to just in front of the office.
“That’s your cab,” I told the man. He turned his head and I saw a thin scar on the side of his neck. He made no motion to leave.
“Get in the taxi, please,” I told him. “The next hotel is about four miles south on the highway,” I added.
He didn’t even say thank you. He slowly made his way to the door and then to the cab. He got in and the headlights swept back out to the highway. The brake lights were two sore slitty eyes in the night.
I wondered what the cab driver was going to do when he found out the man couldn’t pay.
At about 10 p.m., my parents came home.
“Where did you go?”
“Some business take care,” said my father. He was wearing a suit.
“You don’t worry about it,” said my mother. She gave me a bag from Burger King filled with loose onion rings.
At the bottom was a cold burger. I was already full from the eggs, but I could always go for a burger. I ate it all with a warm glass of iced tea I made from a powder mix. Now that they were back, I could go out and clean rooms.
I picked up two buckets filled with cleaning supplies and headed out.
All of our relatives lived in Taiwan, except for a distant cousin of my father who’d moved to Los Angeles. The Taiwan relatives shipped boxes of clothes for me that were about three sizes too small and stank from being packed with jars of Chinese medicine and creams. The one pair of socks that did fit smelled of Tiger Balm even after several washings. The L.A. cousin sent us seedless oranges.
We got word one day that the L.A. cousin wanted to visit. My father brought him and his wife back from Newark airport in the Pinto. They looked shocked and horrified as they stepped into our living quarters. Uncle and Aunty, as I was told to address them, were wearing nice shoes that looked as out of place on our shabby carpeting as a shaky fish fin on dry land for the first time. They probably expected bellhops running around, mint chocolates on the pillows, and a spacious lobby swirling in Muzak. The only thing we had that made us a legitimate hotel was the BING! BING! BING!
“You stay in Room 2,” my mother told me. “Uncle and Aunty going stay in your room.” I nodded. They were all going out to some Chinese restaurant the next town over. I had to stay to watch the office, so I fried two eggs and baked some biscuits for dinner.
I didn’t get a good look at Aunty until they came back from the restaurant and she took her coat off. Were her tits small. They weren’t even big enough to cast a shadow.
The adults went into the kitchen and my father took out a white ceramic bottle from the top shelf of the cabinet.
“Go into Room 2,” he said. “We watch the office now.” In the air there was a sense of politeness under pressure. It smelled like Tiger Balm.
I went into the hotel room, sat on the bed, and turned on the television. “Barney Miller” was on 11, the only channel that came in well. I heard some shouting. At first, I thought it was coming from one of the other rooms, but it continued, and I picked up some Chinese. The women were louder than the men. Then it stopped for a while.
A few minutes later, a Seaside Taxi pulled up to the office and honked twice. I went to the window. Uncle carried all the luggage out the door, staggering and grunting. After heaving the suitcases into the trunk, he shook a fist back at the office and shouted, then high kicked into the air like he was going for an extra point. Aunty’s head sagged with disappointment and embarrassment. She touched a hand to her hair before stepping into the cab. Then they were gone.
I went into the office and saw both my parents with their arms folded, standing behind the counter. Their faces were red from alcohol and from arguing.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing,” my father said.
“They had emergency,” my mother said.
“Can I sleep in my room tonight?”
“Yes,” said my mother. “You clean up everything in Room 2 first.”
“Where did they go?”
“They all get in argument. Stupid argument.”
“Not stupid argument. Serious argument,” said my father.
“Stupid,” said my mother.
“I’m not going to say nothing if someone wants to say bad things about Chinese people. Mainland people are our countrymen! We support them.”
“You never even been to China, how you know them? How you know they won’t attack Taiwan?”
I didn’t know what was more incredible — that my parents were arguing or that they were doing it in English in front of me.
“I don’t have to go to China to know them! I worked with mainland people at my job.”
“You don’t have job anymore!”
“My job is fixing hotel!”
“I never see you work!”
“Come down to basement!”
“You don’t want be near me anymore.” My mother was crying. My father put his arm around her. That was where the English stopped.
Thanksgiving weekend at the hotel was a depressing place to be. Commercials on television showed relatives coming together at a table set with pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, mincemeat, and other things I’d only seen at the supermarket. Kitchens and dining rooms bustling with children and a playful golden retriever. A crackling fireplace. Brassy music. And lots of love. Heaps of it.
All we had on Thanksgiving was a puny turkey. It sucked even more because instead of eating in front of the TV, I had to sit with my mother and father at the dining table. Cup-ring stains on the kitchen table in front of my father looked like the Olympics logo. The turkey was so dry, it crumbled like mummy meat as my father cut away at it. There was also rice, hot chili sauce, and string beans. Great.
I mushed all the ingredients together in my bowl, and surprisingly it didn’t taste too bad. I used chopsticks, too, but I had to use a fork for the string beans. I was going to head to the fridge to grab a Briardale cola for myself when I heard the office door open. Then heavy footsteps. Two seconds later: BING! BING! BING!
I swung open the office door and saw a man in a big puffy winter coat. A Yankees cap was pulled just over his eyebrows.
“I need a room for a few hours,” he said in a gruff voice.
“That’s $20.”
“C’mon, it’s Thanksgiving.”
“It’s always $20.”
“All right, I know how you Filipinos are,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “You know, we fou
ght in your country. We protected your people. We drove the Spanish out. But business is always business with you.”
He sighed as he pulled out a twenty. It was folded in half, and he placed it on the counter so it stood on its edge. That bill was standing straight and tall for the pride of America. Pilgrim’s pride. The fold went right through Andrew Jackson’s face.
“You have to fill out the registration card.”
“I’m just here for a little while, come on!” A wave of nausea washed over me as the man’s beer-marinated breath blasted out.
“Just put your name down.”
“That’s how it is, that’s how it always is. Fucking Filipinos. Shit.” He hesitated, thinking up a name, then scrawled it in. He turned the clipboard to me and tapped his handwriting. “You happy, kid? That do it for you?” I nodded my head, handing him the key to Room 5. “Now do the both of us a favor,” the man said, working the key into his tight back pocket, “and wipe that mouth, okay?” He turned and left.
I shook my head and read the name again. I would have thought Mr. Hendrickson could have come up with something better than “John Smith.”
That’s when I realized that despite everything, I loved being behind the front desk. People did what I told them to. The President could come in and he wouldn’t get a room until he filled out a card and paid me.
The hotel was a prison, but at least I was the top dog. Nobody came through until I got my bite.
It was December and the birds didn’t sing. Lonely old men stayed in their rooms, fiddling with the television reception. The sun never shone through the cloud cover that would roll in from the ocean. You looked at your watch and looked up to the sky, and you couldn’t tell if it was a.m. or p.m. The light that did trickle down turned everything a heavy gray. I was sleepy when I went to bed and sleepy when I got up.
The few johns that came in lacked enthusiasm, acting like they were tossing pocket change at a pay-toll basket. They were a far cry from the anxious and sweaty men with shaky hands who practically humped the counter in the warmer months.
I wasn’t feeling so hot to get laid now either. I’d read a joke about having to eat smelly pussies in the January issue of Gent, and it sort of churned my stomach when I thought of Lee Anderson finally opening her legs to me.
Then there was December 7th. I used to worry about that. I heard “jap” a lot on television, backed by blackand-white film. I guess that’s where the other kids heard it, too. When they started tagging me with it, I took it as them calling me “fag” and took care of them accordingly.
Vincent had taught me how to dish out shit when I had to.
“You ever knock a guy down,” said Vincent, pointing at the soft skin above my nose and between my eyes, “start jumping on him. Jump on his fucking knees and ankles, man. He’ll never walk right again.” I was already bigger than most of the other kids, but it never hurt to know how to shove the knobby end of your wrist into the throat or how to bring that knee into the gut. No one called me “jap” or just plain “chink” anymore to my face.
“Why did the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor?” I asked my mother once.
“Japanese, they were so cruel. They kill Chinese, burn some of them alive,” she said. “They fight on same side as Nazis.”
“How come the racists were on the same side as Japan?”
“Because they wanted to help Japan attack China and kill Chinese.”
“Their country is so small, how could they attack China?”
“Chinese fighting with each other.”
“Why were they fighting each other? You told me Chinese people were smart.”
“Chinese are smartest people in whole world.”
“Then why did they turn communist?” My mother sighed and waved the question away like it was a hungry mosquito.
“Don’t ask me that now. I have to clean rooms. Go do your homework.”
“I did my homework already. I’m taking care of the office now.”
“Then take care office.”
“I’m already here.”
“I’m going to clean rooms,” she said again, heading for the cleaning cart. “Don’t rent Room 6. Smells really bad. I think we have to shampoo rug.”
Christmas vacation found me in a lethargy, fat from overeating and lack of business at the hotel. My mother gave me extra money when I went to the hardware store so I could pick up some stuff from Finemann’s Thrift Bakery on the way home. Maybe a cake or pie could add some holiday cheer to the season.
They didn’t do any baking at the thrift “bakery,” but it smelled wonderful. Finemann’s actual bakeries were located up and down the Jersey shore, and at the end of the day, what each store hadn’t been able to sell would be trucked over to the thrift bakery. That was the law, the woman at the counter told me when I asked why the apple pies were only a dollar apiece.
“My darling little Chinese boy,” she said, rubbing my head and tugging my ears like she was peeling fruit. Jesse, as her name tag read, was about 30 years old with a fiery red swirl of hair. “It’s so good to see you again. Do you celebrate the holidays?”
“We celebrate Christmas.”
Jesse tilted her head slightly.
“And how did that happen? You’re Chinese, aren’t you? Don’t you have those holidays with the firecrackers and the dragon dances? You know. That rich, oriental
heritage?”
“I’m an American.”
“Well, you really came from somewhere else, now didn’t you?” Jesse’s questions reminded me of the first day of school of every year of my life. If she were a boy about my age, I would’ve broken her face. But she was no boy. Jesse’s breasts were ample enough to palm like the pointy ends of two Nerf footballs. Her waist was strangely small for where she worked. Her face was flabby, though. It reminded me of a roll of biscuit dough that had expired and oozed through the diagonal seams of the cardboard can. Other than that, she was a pretty damned sexy slut.
“I’m just looking for some Christmas cookies or cakes,” I said.
“Well, we don’t have any. This is a Jewish bakery,” she said, blushing, which made her face look a little better.
Jesse tried to push fluffy, fruity things on me, but I really wanted something heavy and chocolate.
I picked up three pounds of brownies, or what looked like brownies, for $1.25. On the way out, Jesse rubbed my ears again, but gently — even sensually — this time.
“No hat or ear muffs in this cold! And you need a new coat! You’re gonna freeze out there like a little bald Buddha!” she said.
“I’ll be okay,” I said, switching the heavy sack of salt rock from the hardware store to under my left armpit. When I got on my bike, I balanced the sack on the handlebars and put the box of brownies on top.
On my way home, I had to go around some icy puddles that had formed at the side of the highway. Parts of the roads fell apart in the winter. Our town only patched things up for the Bennys.
I put the brownies on the kitchen table. No one was home again. My mother was nowhere to be seen, and the light in my father’s workshop was off.
The kitchen walls were sparsely covered with Christmas cards. Most were from our institutional suppliers and had rubber-stamped signatures. The linen company, the detergent and soaps company, and the locksmiths. Three dark red and gold cards were marked with nervous Chinese scribbles, but I had no idea who’d sent them. The only word they had in English was my name at the top.
I went into the office and sat down behind the front desk. I looked at the calendar under the Marlboro clock and counted the days left in my vacation. Ten and a half. Business at the hotel was at its slowest this time of year. Because of the proximity of Jesus’ birth, johns were reluctant to come to the hotel. They were probably at home with their wives, kids, and newly bought presents. The odd john or two who would stagger in each day were the ugliest things you’d ever seen. They probably had nobody at home and no one to buy gifts for. Shame rippled in their eyes when they loo
ked up.
Looking at them, I couldn’t help but think that maybe I’d be a john someday. I already had no home and no one I really wanted to buy presents for. Maybe I’d get so desperate to just fuck that I really would end up on the other side of the counter. Years and years from now, I’d be staying here at the weekly rate with the other washed-up men.
Living in these hotel rooms was the worst thing I could imagine. Sleeping on old comestains. Looking at myself everyday in a medicine-cabinet mirror that had cracked from being slammed shut too many times. Keeping my clothes in a desk drawer with a Bible at the bottom. Watching TV with one hand on the antenna because it made the reception better. All that was in my future, assuming I couldn’t find a way out.
Our living quarters right now weren’t great, but they were a hell of a lot better than the hotel rooms. I was already sleeping on old comestains, though.
I stayed in the office for a little bit, rocking back and forth on the barstool. I opened the cash drawer and fingered the change bin, looking for pennies with wheat stalks on the back. I had a peanut-butter pail filled with them. They were minted from 1909 to 1958 and were worth a lot more than coins with the Lincoln Memorial on the reverse. Also, the U.S. mint redesigned the obverse on the later coins, lowering the profile of Lincoln’s bust to make it less subject to wear and tear. I’d found this out from a coin magazine with a feature on penny collecting. I’d studied the chart next to the article, and after a while, I’d memorized the years and mint marks of the scarcest pennies. I was constantly looking for them whenever I came across any change. There was no way the 1955 doubled-die error would get by me.
Positive that no one would walk into the office for at least the next 15 minutes, I snuck back to my room. I flipped through Busty Bitches In Heat, a hard-core magazine. It had still been shrink-wrapped with a “3 For $9.99” sticker when Crispy gave it to me. The pages smelled funny, like ripe bananas, and I had to fold them down to keep the magazine open. I looked at the last page and wondered if cocks tasted as bad as pussy. It was all skin, and not wet, so maybe it didn’t. How did come taste? I never wanted to taste my own because it smelled like salty bathroom cleaner.