by Mike Wehner
When I told my dad about my career as a soccer star he hopped up out of his recliner and spun me into the garage. He climbed around on the shelves and threw down blue tarps and canoe paddles. He cursed and almost fell but eventually a half-deflated soccer ball bounced once and died in the middle of the cracked garage floor. It didn’t hold air very well but we kicked it around anyways. I wore my softball cleats and he wore his slippers, we passed the flat ball back and forth for an hour in the scorched summer grass.
That fall he enrolled me in park soccer and volunteered to coach our team. I figured he had to coach because all the other coaches refused to roster a girl. Imagine my surprise that first practice when I found out I wasn’t even the only girl on my team, let alone the entire league. We had ten boys and three girls, aged ten and eleven. I was finally ten and proud of it for a month before I started longing for one more year. This is a great age for coed sports, puberty just started for me and I was taller than almost all of the boys save for one, Jimmy Becker.
Jimmy was ten too, we both went to Eisenhower Elementary but were in different classes. He was in a normal class and I was one of the pariah mob in the gifted and talented class. Kids were bussed in from around the county to be in this class, but I had gone to this school since kindergarten. The smart kids all got it bad but I feel like I was taunted a little more because I was playing for the other team on my home field.
There were two Jimmys, soccer Jimmy and school Jimmy. Soccer Jimmy called me Dot, and his voice turned up as he said it to pass the ball and down if there was someone behind me trying for a steal. At school he called me Spot, it doesn’t seem like much of a difference but at school Spot would be followed by commands, like he owned me. See Spot run, see Spot fall, see Spot cry. It was humiliating. Then at practice I was Dot again, the right wing to his left—that without the team couldn’t fly.
After the last game of the season we ate our oranges and drank our juice boxes and my dad rattled off a canned speech about what team means that he probably stole from a stupid sports movie. He asked each of us to tell the team the most important thing we learned this season and when it was Jimmy’s turn he bit his lip a little, looked at my dad and said, “girls can kick-butt too,” then he looked at me.
My heart sank along with his eyes. I thought he was apologizing and I instantly forgave him. In the shuffle of handshakes and the heartbreak of loss for the other team I stole Jimmy behind a tree and gave him my first kiss; thus began my love for divided men. I have no idea if it was his first kiss and it was the only one we ever shared.
The championship trophy from that year is still in my old bedroom at my parent’s house. They turned it into a guest room once they were sure there was no chance I’d be coming back but they left my childhood achievements sitting on the dressers as décor. Mom doesn’t let them gather dust but time has worn off some of the shine. When I visit home and see that trophy I don’t think about Jimmy Becker, but I do every time I eat an orange. Once I peel it and pull apart the halves, I dig at the pith with my nails and no matter how careful I am I always manage to break some of the skin. The smell that comes up from the meat, that’s Jimmy. I throw the pith away. That’s Jimmy too.
Twenty
When I got off the train Erin was on the platform of the red line leaning against the metal frame of the station map. She stood in the ocean, the city to her west outlined by a tangle of colored tracks and their stops. Her eyes were on me as soon as I stepped out like she knew which car I was in and which door I was going to step out of. The gauze on her hand traded for a simple butterfly bandage, she wore a more date appropriate dressing for a flesh wound.
Her hair was down and wavy as a rusted kris. Covered in the happiest green cotton with ringed leather sandals, like the roman legionnaires that carried the hammers and nails up the Appian Way.
“I realized this isn’t going to work on the way over,” she said, “the first rule of dating says I have to order a salad wherever we eat.” She tripped and caught herself on my shoulder as we turned towards the ramp.
“I think that rule has been amended,” I said. Her hand was on my shoulder and she hopped on one foot trying to jiggle her big toe back into the loop of her shoe, “the salad has to have beets and goat cheese.”
The awnings of the station covered everything in shadow, peregrine flashes of Oakland came up through the cracks between the walls on the moving train. I peered out the window trying to figure out if Erin’s body should land on the near or far side of the tracks when I pitched her in at the end of the night. We shared a ceiling strap for balance. The buzz and bounce of the car made loose strands of her hair tickle my neck.
The windows became dark in the Transbay Tube under the water. The overhead was lighting bright and our faces reflected back in windows that became black mirrors. Each time I blinked her expression changed. Expectant, reluctant, hopeful, sad.
The doors opened and she grabbed my hand and led me up, up, up into the lumps and humps of the city’s center.
“How much time have you spent here?” she asked.
“Not that much, I usually walk up Stockton and sample foods I don’t recognize from Chinese grocers I can’t understand. Then I pick a random restaurant and eat the strangest things on the menu. I spend the rest of the day trying to walk that off so I can gorge myself on ramen. On the shame filled ride home I promise myself I’ll join a gym.” The bells of a street car rang in the distance and a man with a handful of fanned gelato spoons called us into his shop for a taste.
“You’ve never even been to the wharf?”
“I don’t like Star Trek.”
“Oh, shut up. Turn around, you can’t call it stupid tourist stuff until you’ve done it. Sea lions first, I love them so much!”
She flipped me around by the wrist and dragged me back towards the water which was close enough to smell.
California was the land of dreams and beauty and money and hope to those who weren’t here but to me it was the land of lions, danger was everywhere. Lions in the hills that eat your dog. Lions in the water to eat escapees from Alcatraz. On the street, a lioness led me in bright green, beautiful and charming—a deadly disguise. I knew it and I knew it, what she was and I felt it in my wrist with her clamp so tight it hurt. It didn’t matter, I was helpless. The way the folds in her dress wound inward and then jumped out when she stepped, the way her hair carouseled up and then down, she was the leader of our pride.
Following her voice and the spin of her dress I wanted to drag her back into my body in one moment and in the next spin her into the oncoming traffic. A minute later I was standing on a giant box with a sourdough mass of tourists beneath me. Down in the water was a cuddled pile of sea lions, arphing and slapping. They didn’t look dangerous, the lions stacked themselves on AstroTurfed islands and every so often one was ejected from the bottom row. The crowd laughed, most of them watching the fray through the screen of their phones or tablets.
“Follow me,” she said and snuck around the corner. There was a huge crowd circled around a shirtless street performer. His forearms were as thick as my legs and his legs as thick as my forearms. He had on a headset microphone attached to a loud speaker and he called out to the crowd. There were four metal platforms he used for handstands and gymnastics and he executed each move with Olympic grace. The performer called up to the diners on the upper balcony of a nearby restaurant to fold twenties into paper airplanes and fly them down. People roared and his top hat filled with paper money.
Weaving through the crowd we passed a row of stalls, each one’s sign claiming World’s Best Bread Bowl. Erin told me to keep moving and we went through a set of harlequin doors that led into an expansive penny arcade. Machines were scattered about from every era of coin. Hand cranked picture shows, gypsy fortune tellers, and modern video games laid out in a path of discovery.
I had two quarters in my pocket and Erin dug one from her tiny purse. Rather than visit the bill eater in the corner we interlocked arms and deba
ted the three best machines to play. At the front of each machine was a golden tag with description, like a movie preview it was just enough information to look over and give a one word review to your date. A turn-of-the-century baseball game was, “stupid,” and the movie pinball was, “lame,” but Opium Den was, “weird,” and demanded it be the first machine to take our money.
Opium Den was a diorama that came to life when fed a quarter. A group of Chinese lords sat with offensively slanted eyes and a too yellow tinge that was a combination of racism and age. The men slapped their knees and tilted their necks back in laughter at the two white men they shared the cave with. The first white guy was wrapped in a blanket—he looked sick and sat on a broken chair holding a pipe. He jerked the smoking device from his mouth to his stomach in a disturbing way. The other white guy seized in a cubby on the back wall, he shook and kicked and it was astonishing how well the hundred year old strings mimicked the overdoses I’d seen in movies.
“If I paid for this a hundred years ago I’d be pissed,” I said.
“It’s a warning, the sick men, the seizure, the skeletons in the corner. This is the early twentieth century version of this is your brain on drugs,” Erin said.
“Look at how healthy the Asians look.”
“Prophecy man,” a broccoli haired man said behind us, “China still sellin’ us trash, still killin’ us slowly.”
I led Erin down the aisle and veggie-head stepped forward and waited for someone else to put a quarter in so he could watch the pipes rise again. I caught the salt and sweet scent of kettle corn but Erin stopped me before I could complain about being hungry. She had an expectant face and her hand was out. I set a quarter on it and she dashed to the next machine.
In the case was the front gate of a medieval castle. After Erin dropped in the coin a light came on and the door swung open to reveal a platform with a prisoner, a priest and an executioner. The priest raised his arm and foot in prayer and when he was done the executioner made a gesture at the guillotine which then lopped off the prisoner’s head into a well-placed bucket. His head landed face down and the light went out. It made justice look simple.
Erin looked in and I wondered if she saw herself as the noble executioner or the man who got what was coming. But more importantly I wanted to know which one she really was.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
I’m confused. Conflicted. Distracted. And hungry.
◆◆◆
When we walked into the restaurant the butcher behind the counter signaled with a wave of his knife that we could sit anywhere we liked. The sides of his face were different sizes and he had a dime-sized mole on his left chin with hairs growing out of it, some of them gray. The floor was tacky on our march through a collection of reclaimed fast food tables that sprung up out of the ground with connected red bucket seats. Erin was heartened by my look of extreme skepticism when I sat down. I patted my foot around the bottom of the table to see if it too was unclean.
“I said good Chinese, this place looks awful.”
There was no sign other than the meat hanging in the window. The building was somehow located at top of one hill but the bottom of another. We were a few blocks outside the neon blinks and inaudible sales pitches of commercial Chinatown at a place Erin suggested. Everyone inside was Asian except for us.
“Gail asked me if you were a germaphobe because you’re so fastidious in the kitchen, I said I didn’t know.” Erin picked up the laminated menu and pulled it open and shut, it made a Velcro sound and she grinned at me and did it again.
The man up front took down a slab of red meat from the window and lopped off a chunk with a cleaver he hadn’t wiped.
“I like things clean, that’s all,” I turned my menu towards her, “this isn’t English.”
“I’ll order.”
She waved over the waitress, a young Chinese woman. She had a perfectly round hair bun and gold chopsticks running through it in an X.
“You want English menu?”
“No thanks, we want whole roast duck,” Erin said and was cut off.
“Pei Pa?” the waitress asked.
“In the window, red duck.”
“Ah.”
“Chopped up, and Char Siu pork,” she pointed at the window and then pulled her fingers apart, “this much, rice and tea.”
The waitress looked over to me and bounced her pencil.
“Do you have soup dumplings?” She nodded but I was sure she didn’t know what I meant. “Steamed?” She nodded again and walked away, her feet very close together.
The waitress came right back with water and I dipped a folded edge of my napkin and wiped at the area beneath my elbow which turned out to be a crease in the tabletop and not grime.
“Do you always take guys here?”
“I don’t take guys anywhere, I told you it’s been a long time since I’ve been on a date.”
“How long exactly?”
“A first date? Probably four years,” she said and quickly followed up, “what about you?”
“I got out of a long relationship about a year ago and haven’t dated since.” It was true. When I left Julie and the perfectly acceptable middle-class life we’d built together I told her that it wasn’t her fault, that the life I chose to lead wasn’t fulfilling and I needed to move far away and figure out who I was. In the moment I was vomiting clichés as fast as I thought them to keep her pain to a minimum. It’s hard to accept your own lies becoming true.
The food came quickly—two platters of chopped meat, matched bowls of rounded rice and a covered steam basket I hoped was full of soup dumplings.
I was jealous of Erin’s chop stick technique as she snapped up bits of meat. She was able to keep her middle finger between the sticks as she grabbed fatty duck and sticky roasted pork.
Erin fished out the triangular ass nubbin of the duck and offered it to me like a golden prize. I motioned that she eat it and she sucked it dry then tossed the leftover nugget on her plate with a fling of her sticks.
The window meat was marvelous. It sat all day, for who knows how many days, getting beat up by sunlight and heat lamps yet it was tender and exploded with sour sweet spicy salty goodness. Measured, gentle date eating with the tips of our sticks quickly gave way to low-palmed shoveling that stained our lips red and made them stick. Once we tasted the soup dumplings it became a chicken game of politeness to see who would eat the last odd piece. I gobbled it up the moment I realized what was going on and squished it down with a greasy grin.
“What do you think they do with all the duck fat?” Erin asked.
“I know they don’t throw it out, it might be their fryer oil.”
“I’ll bet that butcher uses it is his hair.” He was balding, I looked back at Erin and she was touching her chin where his mole was.
“Gross,” I smiled.
“I guess I don’t need to ask if you like it.” I was digging through the plate of duck bones for crisp skin bits.
“I keep telling myself to save room for ramen but I can’t stop picking at it.”
“It’s all that MSG.”
“It isn’t bad for you,” I said.
“I know,” she said over me.
Then together, “you can eat by the spoonful.” I think she may have said shitful.
◆◆◆
After spending the rest of the evening trolling galleries and eating great ramen we ended our night on the same station platform it started only I was the one leaning against the map. My bladder was bursting after downing too many Japanese beers with dinner. I felt bloated and drunk, while saying goodnight I noticed the oncoming train.
“No,” Erin said and then forgot what she going to say, “really,” swaying in the too bright LED lights from the ceiling, “we should do it.”
“Wait, what are we talking about?” I stammered.
“Ramen, Essen Ramen.”
She shuffled towards me.
I grabbed her shoulders.
I dug my palms
into the top of her arms.
I looked her in the eyes.
Her nosed raised upward.
Her face charged at mine.
The train charged at us.
I pulled her in.
I looked over at the track, we were inches from the yellow line and all I’d have to do is tip her sideways. The weight of the wine and dashi and rice and meat would carry her over and all this would come to an end.
I looked back to Erin.
Her eyes were closed.
Her face came forward.
I turned my cheek.
Her lips hit me.
They were supple and soft, sticky and wet.
I pulled my face away.
I said goodnight.
I jumped into the car the moment the doors came apart.
I put my hand on my face to wipe the wet mess.
I decided against it.
I fell asleep when I got home.
I don’t remember if I saw John.
Twenty-one
I woke up Monday to a flurry texts from Erin.
Alex
ALEX
Wake up
Wake
Up
A L E X
Now
Nownow
Nownownow
UPPPPPPPP.
Shit
What type of ramen did we eat?