Now the birds fought. They moved like boxers, circling each other, moving in, moving out. The blue-and-red cock was more aggressive and as it hopped in to attack, its wings extended to their farthest reaches, a gesture of intimidation. A swift rush in and then a hammering peck with its beak, drawing blood from the other bird’s muscular breast the third time through. The blood spot of a wound grew into a star-shaped crest across the clean white feathers, and the crowd, at the sight of blood, threw up more cheers. Tali was squeezing hard on my hand now as if to say, It’s no longer pretty, Paul. You’ve got to save it.
I found myself caught on the first of what would be many destroyed bridges between two worlds: I wanted to jump into the ring and save the white cock but this was more than a matter of courage or cowardice. The red or the yellow badge. The problem was in the fiery eyes of the bettors themselves. I knew they came from a far-off place, a place like my father’s way out in the Pacific, and that the purity of this moment had to do with their own performance in the dusty bowl of the ring, and though I couldn’t, at nine, articulate it for what it was, I could identify the code, the story, no different in substance than the springboard from which my father leapt one average suburban Silicon Valley afternoon, straight out the car to slap some Mohawked kid with a KILL YOU LATER shirt who’d casually and a propos of nothing flipped us off from the rolling sanctuary, or so the kid had thought, of his skateboard. In the cockfight world my father came from, a gesture like the middle finger was no more or less than a prelude to death, my father’s or the kid’s; one or the other, someone was going to die. That my father stopped short of killing the kid, or even closing his fist on him, but only snapped the board over his knee and ripped the kid’s dog chains from his neck and winged both objects into the bed of the creek, was a sign of his worth here or of his worthlessness there.
All through my childhood I would see it: the great divide between first- and second-generation Americans. The children of immigrants couldn’t handle the blood and guts of the old world. Every horror was buffered/negotiated/quelled by an outside agency, across the glass table in the air-conditioned office of the designated bureaucrat at large, whispering our fears from the cloudy pillows of the soiled couch. No gradation of suffering for the fattest people in the world. Where afflictions were always self-administered and always, by the law of relativity, absolutely horrifying. The craziest experiment in the history of man has an orbit of its own, an all-consuming black hole, yes, constantly increasing its mass, yes, its momentum, yes, everything spinning into nothingness, yes, no, it doesn’t matter.
And there I was, paralyzed by the in-betweeness I felt, my ability to see the promise of both shores from the bridge. These people were ruthless but tough, and we were compassionate but weak. What to do but jump over the rail and fly down into the rushing water, treasure that one moment of freedom from thought. And then if you survive the fall, let the unpredictable tide take you to one side or the other.
It was too late. The white cock had lost the use of one leg, the talon dragging. The eye on the other side of the head had been pecked out, slimy fluid mixed into the dirt. The bird hopped crookedly about, desperately trying to adjust to both handicaps. When it found its balance, the other bird pounced like a cat, delivering a vicious peck, a swipe of the wing so swift it left behind blue streaks that dissolved like mirages in the burning light. Then the aggressor seized upon the eye socket itself, pecking at it once, twice, digging in a third time. The hole deepened. Blood geysered out crimson. The blue and red cock switched tactics, brushing its wing along the ground, severing the talon from the leg of the white cock, to lie in the caked dust like the rubber souvenir of a show-and-tell slaughterhouse. Neither bird made a sound. Even the bettors had gone quiet. The white cock took its last stand on one spindly leg, pivoting about in a jerky, almost out-of-body circle.
Suddenly I remembered Tali at my side. She was crying into her hands, covering her eyes. I pried them away from her face and said, “Go outside then. Get out.”
She separated from me immediately and crawled out the flap of the tent on her knees, no one interested in her exit.
The white cock was no longer white. The blue and red cock circled. A few in the squatting crowd shuffled and repositioned their weight, but not one bettor whispered a word. The silver dust in the middle of the ring had browned into mud. The white cock extended its wings, a final salute, and the other cock sprang in decisively. It mangled the crippled white cock in a mad rush of feathers and blades, slicing one wing at the base, the last eye gone. The white cock, blind now, red in its own blood, collapsed on itself, and the crowd erupted. Everywhere in the tent cash was changing hands. Excited banter, praise for the victor.
The winning owner reached into the ring, petting and cooing his bird into calmness in the crook of his arm, removing the blades with the deftness of a surgeon. The loser, still alive, was convulsing in a growing pool of blood. Its owner sliced off the one remaining talon, the cigarette between his lips almost pure ash to the filter, and handed the spastic carcass over to the victor.
I didn’t see the second fight. I was yanked out the tent by the elbow. I couldn’t see the force behind it but I knew it was my mother. She dragged me across the yard. I was skipping along, my toes barely touching the ground. My father was waiting on the back porch with Tali cradled in one arm, her head on his shoulder like a baby six years her junior. I remember my father’s face: expressionless, without contrition or even pity for Tali’s condition, which I viewed as bogus. My mother saw this on my face. She grabbed my father’s shirt and shouted, “You brought my children to this slaughter!”
In a flash I was sent reeling across the porch. I hadn’t been hit, but my mother had. Her face was buried into her hands, just like Tali back in the tent. My sister was suddenly in my arms, pulling the back of my head down by the neck. My father stalked toward my mother, immigrant fury on his face, and I pushed Tali off of me. She fell to her knees, crying.
Does it matter that my father slapped my mother again on the porch, so hard that he bruised her cheek? Or that it took four clucking Filipino men to restrain him? Does it matter that the same thing would happen again elsewhere, repeatedly and worse: my father now determined to reestablish the patriarchal order that he’d lost in the house of his head, so distorted by the placid suburbs in which he held tightly to the old world code, my mother now increasingly secretive and dishonest, shit-talking him behind his back (“You’re better than your father, Paulie, don’t ever be like him. Promise me that, will you?”), suddenly intensely committed to charities of battered Muslim and African women millions of miles away, nosy now about the private lives of other men she knew, relatives, neighbors, how they treated their wives, their “infinitely better halves,” as she’d say? Does it matter that Tali, despite her inability to watch the cockfight, would soon preach to everyone she encountered the merits of being “down for the brown,” uniting herself with the Melanesian practitioners of Sabong? Does it matter that my parents would never recover from the episode at the cockfight, that the divide between them would only grow like a crack in concrete that widens from the force of surrounding structures intent on remaining uncracked themselves?
That each of us, however committed, good-hearted, and talented, however blessed, facile, and sharp, wherever we come from, whatever we are—each of us can only peaceably contain so much of the earth’s molten fire in our core before we blow.
20
Just for the Record, I’ve Always Believed
JUST FOR THE RECORD, I’ve always believed that of course it matters. If either my mother or my father could have held their tongues in that plastic-lined living room, their marriage would have survived. Hindsight is twenty-twenty because you can choose what you want to see, but still it’s so damned easy to psychoanalyze. To laugh at the story of the immigrant was to break my father’s golden rule: Never mock the traits of those who suffered to get here, who’ve been hungry, who’ve seen and lived through death, who left f
amily behind for the promise of America. To do so, to laugh at their trial, was despicable to my father. Because the trial was my father, immigrant by blood and experience, born of foreign dirt. And I, a little boy with no story then, agreed, the man with no story now, the same. When my mother started in, I was thinking the exact words my father laid on her. “Shut up. Shut up.”
Understand, understand! Erect the bridge between the two worlds! Lay the foundation in the thunderstorm!
But my father also broke a golden rule, that of the modern American woman, my mother: Don’t ever issue a canine directive.Domestic decisions are made by a two-vote, equal-in-weight, equal-in-insight panel. To ignore this meant flouting centuries of suffering going all the way back to the caves and the club. That’s the condition from which she and her sisters had triumphantly emerged to forge a new legacy, and nothing was lower than an attempt to reverse the course of progress, however brown and exotic you were to a white American girl raised on the Beatles and Andy Griffith. So when my father turned toward my mother, I held my breath in the impossible hope that he’d speak gently to her, cool as a summer day in Frisco, put an index finger to his lips, soothing whisper: “Please, baby.”
Each time I witnessed the problems between them, I said to myself, “Don’t do it, don’t say it,” but they did it all right, they said it, as if not just our family but everyone, the whole world, was on a churning riverboat that wouldn’t dock so its passengers could stop and think about the ride they were on. Because there was an alternative outside the paradigm of their bankrupt nuptials. Maybe there was beauty on the ride, maybe the sights were worth it. I was bright-eyed in love with both my parents, hopeful as I’d ever be, but I knew as sure as simple subtraction that they were done. I was very young when I realized how poorly we manage our gifts.
At nine going on ten, I began the process of forgetting them together, as husband and wife, as mother and father conjoined forever. Tali is right. And if I lived up to the catechism of honoring thy mother and father by refusing to judge or indict either, I failed as a citizen of this nation by blaming the place that brought them together, the land where all things—good and bad—are possible. He wanted a strong-minded American beauty he could show off to his friends; she wanted a brown-skinned savage she could show off to her friends. They both paid for the simplicity of this sin, because that’s what they got. Their circles never came together.
No one but the child figured out what had to be done, what needed to be conceded, what could be endured. The adult world said all should be abandoned, and so the story died. The father returned to Samoa to be with his people and never came back. The mother remarried for the first of who really knows how many times.
I was groomed for unfulfilled promises in the land of broken dreams.
21
The Interview Commences with a Mickey Mouse Nightlight
THE INTERVIEW COMMENCES with a Mickey Mouse nightlight on in the kitchen. The price for my bed tonight. I don’t mind. McLaughlin and Toby are both knocked out and Tali, sitting at the table with me, says, “So what have you been doing for the last two months?”
She’s gonna ignore seeing me on television in chains. She won’t lower herself to discuss such uncouth events. She’s full of shit, that’s what she is, but she is my sister and she does love me.
I say, “Just kicking it.”
“Kicking it?”
“Well,” I say, trying to think of something productive that I’ve done which doesn’t offend her sensibilities, “I was working on a poetry manuscript.”
“Poetry?”
The wrong topic. “Yeah.”
“Manuscript?”
“Yeah.”
“So how much will you make?”
“Make?”
“Money.”
“None. I don’t have it.”
“You lost the money?”
“No. I used the money, lost the manuscript.”
“So there was money?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Where is it?”
“The manuscript or the money?”
“The money.”
“Oh. It’s gone.”
“The money’s gone?”
“Yes.”
“How can you get money out of a manuscript?”
“It was a fellowship.”
“So it’s unpublished then?”
“The money or the manuscript?”
“Don’t screw around, Paul. Where is the manuscript?”
It’s best to leave La Dulce unmentioned. Somehow, opening up the absurdities of our fuckship is more embarrassing than being slapped with a hate crime when half the blood nurturing your system is brown. Plus, Tali will automatically put the lucky one into the position of poor victim swept up by my aimlessness. From a certain vantage where you’ve removed La Dulce’s eccentricities, I’m not so sure it’s untrue.
I lie. “At a Motel Six.”
“A Motel Six?”
A stupid lie. “Yeah.”
“And do you have a title?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what is it?”
The truth: “Beatrice.”
“Beatrice?”
A stupid truth. “Yeah.”
She’s digging into her purse for her keys. She wants the manuscript. For me. “Can’t you think of a better title than Beatrice?”
“Fuck that book. I officially disown it as a fraud. It was built on stilts. Toothpicks. I should have called it Against Virtue or On Phoniness.”
“So you’re just going to forget all about it then. Isn’t that just like you?”
The final truth: “It doesn’t matter.”
“Does anything matter to you?”
“I mean it doesn’t matter because I wouldn’t have made money off it anyway.” She looks up, puts the keys back into her purse. “Which is what you’re talking about. I mean, it’s poetry, man. Only Billy Collins, Billy Corgan, President Carter, and Jewel make money off their lines.”
“Leave it to you to go into a profession that makes no money.”
“It’s not a profession. That’s the point. And I don’t care if it ain’t lucrative.”
“Is there anything you care about?”
“I think I care about people so much I don’t care about myself.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“You may be right. Let me rephrase that: I love our story so much that I almost detest the story’s characters. You know, like they’re not living up to the narrative.”
“Whatever, Paul. Violence follows you around like a shadow. Everyone you meet you either fight or assault or castigate or undercut. Is there anyone you haven’t gone after on this planet?”
“Yeah. Everyone underground before September 2, 1977.”
“You have more confrontations in a week than I’ve had in my life.”
“That’s because you spend your time with handshakers.”
“Paul. In a room of a hundred happy people, you still couldn’t shake hands. You’d say they were all on Paxil or Prozac.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I’d just say they were handshakers. Only the ones who don’t blink during the handshake are on Paxil or Prozac.”
“Jesus Christ, Paul.”
“And the ones who are stuck in the smile had their faces hijacked by Botox.”
She puts a hand over her eyebrow. It hasn’t once moved since yesterday. “Is this necessary, Paul?”
“And the ones who don’t look you in the eye are either arrogant assholes or spoiled bitches.”
“You’re a misanthrope.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Why can’t you just leave people alone?”
“Look, I have no intention of getting into it with anyone again. Ever. Okay? That’s how it’s always been. Seems like things just happen that way. Often.”
“What about that girl?”
“Sharon?”
“Yes. Of course.”
�
��I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Just like everyone else: ex-girlfriend, mother, father.”
“You left out sister. Why was that?”
“You just do your own thing.”
“Not just me. People don’t spend time together anymore. They skip out before it matters. They just dress themselves up better.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, Paulie.”
“You dress it up the best.”
“You have no right to say that.”
“Okay. Well, how’s this? Now that I think it over, you’re right. Yes. I’d like to show how much I agree with you, how’s that? Yes. I want to stay with you and McLaughlin, stay for a year, spend some real time with little Toby. Get him to talk, breathe.”
She looks down into her lap, just barely, but just enough.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s what I thought.”
“We were talking about Sharon,” she says. “The girl you didn’t deserve.”
“Deserve is such a cruel verb, but you may be right there.”
“I am right. She was so pretty and nice. So giving.”
“Well, that’s about right, too: she gave too much. She gave it up too much.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Her life on the isle of Lesbos. “Who cares?”
“Well, what about the others? You always have some different girl you’re courting.”
“That’s a nice way to put it.”
“Paul! Will you shut up?”
“Okay,” I say, “that sounds about right. Can do.”
We sit in silence for a three count, four count, five. She can’t take it. She’s one of these people that lays down a law whose terms she eventually can’t accept. When everyone’s lined up, happily or not, to get what she wants done, she cancels the edict on a whim and throws out a new one, sometimes totally contradictory in concept. All without apology, without explanation, qualification, remorse, contrition, self-interrogation, self-bemusement, self-concern, humor, or irony. Et cetera, et cetera. The bet is she’ll blurt something out before half a minute’s up.
What We Are Page 18