Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  “I’m twelve,” I said, straightening my back.

  “Yeah, whatever, you should get laid. Girls were all over me when I was like eight. I was all over them, too.” Vincent scratched his right side and his nipples visibly hardened. I never saw him with a shirt on, but he never shivered when he slipped into the frigid air of the office, wearing only a pair of tight black trunks and aquarium-blue flip-flops.

  I had on a New Orleans Mardi Gras T-shirt that I found in one of the rooms and a pair of Yankees shorts. Imitation leather slippers from Taiwan left treads on the top of my feet where the straps criss crossed.

  ED LIN, who is half Chinese and half Taiwanese, was born in New York City in 1969 and grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He has held a wide variety of jobs, including managing a financial-news Web site, moving boxes in a warehouse, and lifeguarding. He plays bass in the Asian American rock band Raven Steals the Light, which released its CD in early 2003. Waylaid, his first novel, was published by Kaya in 2001.

  “What for, Vincent?”

  “ ‘What for?’ What the fuck kind of question is that?” He punched playfully at my arm. “What for! For getting your dick wet!” I hit the reset button on the Atari and starting pounding away at Vincent’s warlord.

  “Hey hey hey!” he yelped as he fumbled to pull up the controller, which had slipped into his crotch.

  This was Vincent’s fourth straight weekend at our hotel. Vincent always wanted Room 59, because he was born that year and because it was close to the pool. It was also far from the office, which was important because he was sneaking in his two cousins with his girlfriend so he could pay the two-person rate instead of the four-person rate, which was ten bucks more. Vincent told me because we were friends and we had an understanding between us.

  Vincent was in his early twenties, with a face that was long and narrow like a skinny tree trunk. Thick black hair was cropped short and stood straight up, like magnified photos of stubble before the razor cuts the chin clean. He was “Vincent,” never “Vinny,” because “Vinny’s” was the name of some pizza joint and it wasn’t the real Italian pizza anyway. You needed a fork and a knife to eat real pizza. Real Italian pizza was thicker and had more stuff in it. Vincent had never had real Italian pizza, but that was the first thing he was going to eat when he got to Italy, where his grandfather was from. Vincent was working at some construction job his uncle got him, but at night he was studying to be a cop. He was going to take me to Coney Island in his squad car one day. We were going to ride the Cyclone and eat hot dogs.

  I had moved the Atari and the television into the office because it got so busy during the summertime that it didn’t make sense to stay inside the living quarters and walk into and out of the office every five minutes for every BING! BING! BING! of the desk bell. Nobody hit that bell just once. Besides, it was June, and the temperature was cranking up. The office was air-conditioned and our living quarters weren’t. It had to be that way because my parents said it wasn’t worth air-conditioning the living quarters. But if the office wasn’t kept cold, customers would think the air conditioners in the rooms didn’t work.

  I spent a lot of time on the office couch. Vincent would drop in to hang out and play Atari with me when his girlfriend was pissed at him, which was usually a few hours on Saturday morning and a few more hours on Sunday morning.

  I liked having someone to play games with. I was an only child and my parents could never tell if I was playing Atari or watching television, even if there were blocky tanks, planes or spaceships firing at each other on the screen. They wouldn’t have had time to play games even if they knew how. Friends, forget about it. No one wanted to hang out at our hotel. And it was too busy for me to ever leave for long enough to have friends outside of school.

  “I’m going to win again,” I yelled.

  I felt like such a loser when Vincent talked about girls. Vincent always talked about his fucking adventures—how he fucked his married neighbor who was forty but was as tight as a twenty-year-old, and how he fucked three sisters in three days and two of them were virgins. I preferred hearing his stories to having him ask me who I was fucking. I only had stories about me winning fights, which I did often enough because I was big for my age, but I knew I was letting him down.

  “I know you kids are fucking in school. I know you are.”

  “I only heard about the two retarded kids, and I don’t even think they meant it,” I said.

  Vincent laughed. “Retarded pussy! Shit, pussy’s pussy, who cares. You gotta like someone in school. I know you do. Some girls already start developing, you know? Their asses kinda turn out like fenders and the headlights, you know they’re going on high beam.” His warlord flickered and died. Defeat was drawn out in crude, blinking video blocks. “Some little Oriental girl? You been keeping her a secret? You give her some bamboo? You slip it to her?”

  “Naw, I’m the only one in my school. Anyway, Chinese girls are ugly. I like blondes. Or redheads if they don’t have too many freckles.” Vincent shook his head from side to side, keeping his pupils fixed on me.

  “I fucked Chinese girls. Goddamned cute. I fucked one last week, that’s why Patty’s pissed at me. I just told her.”

  “Then why are you still with Patty? You can just go out with someone different every weekend. She just gives you too much shit.” I was thinking that when I was old enough, I would be fucking left and right because there were so many women wanting cock in the world. Maybe I was old enough now, since I was getting hard-ons all the time. If I found a dynamite bombshell, I’d make her my girlfriend. But Patty was no bombshell. She had huge tits, but her nose drooped down like the mascot on the Moosehead Beer label. I never told Vincent that.

  “Why am I still going out with Patty? Because I love her. You know, I really do. I’m gonna marry her. We’re gonna have kids and everything.” His mouth narrowed into a scythe. “But she don’t have no chain on my dick. I don’t gotta pull in the leash until the ring’s on the finger. Then we’ll see.”

  I knew all about the powerful drive of horniness from reading the letters in Penthouse and Swank, but never having had sex lent a certain mystique to it all, especially stuff like S&M or ass fucking. It was like reading about being weightless in space; this one astronaut woke up to find a hand wrapped around his neck and tightening. But it turned out to be his own hand.

  “I know this girl here who will suck your dick for ten bucks. We used to take the same bus together. She don’t fuck, but you can cum on her tits, she don’t care. Her name’s Chris or Karen and she’s in Room 30,” said Vincent. He threw his head back like a horse tossing its mane. “I know you’ve got at least ten bucks.”

  I saw the girl in Room 30. She couldn’t ever get me hard.

  He traced my look of skepticism with his eyes and drew the wrong conclusion.

  “No, it’s okay. She doesn’t care about you Orientals.” His hands on his thighs flipped to open palms.

  I felt a pin slip into my stomach. Vincent’s a friend, I told myself, he doesn’t mean anything.

  I hit reset on the Atari and the game began again. “Hey, c’mon now! That’s not fair!” Vincent put up a fight for a few seconds, then tossed his controller onto the couch next to me.

  “So, anyway, you have to get laid,” he said, running a single finger through his hair. Vincent looked at the office clock, which was a large plastic-molded Marlboro sign with a dial in the middle of the second o. A cowboy in spurs leaned against the M. It was a quarter to eleven.

  Vincent got up and stretched, cracking bones in his lower back. “Maybe Patty’s cooled off by now. Remember what I tell you. I’ll be disappointed if you don’t get laid by the end of the summer. Real fucking disappointed.” He wagged a finger at me and pulled at his waistband. “Or maybe you’ll turn queer on me, or something. Maybe you’re fag bait already!”

  Right then, Peter Fiorello walked into the office with Mrs. Fiorello. The Fiorellos were the first regulars I’d met—they were both retire
d, and they’d been coming down to our place since we’d bought it. Each of them kissed Vincent on the cheek. They were old enough to be Vincent’s parents, maybe even his grandparents. The three of them together in a semiembrace looked like a spaghetti sauce commercial. The only thing missing were the aprons and wooden spoons.

  Peter Fiorello’s shrunken patch of short white hair looked like a knit cap. Peter would walk around shirtless in the summer, exposing old tattoos on his chest and arms, blued and blurred beyond recognition. His tits were smeared with excess red and brown paint, hanging against his chest like dried mud. Peter wore a gold chain with a religious pendant on it and dark shades. I never saw him with his shades off or without a smelly, smoldering cigar in his hand. He smiled often, flashing two rows of rotten corn kernels.

  Mrs. Fiorello was loud, large and annoying. She had big pouffy hair, with plump breasts and stomach to match. Her skin was covered with impossibly dense freckles. There must have been a thousand dark brown dots per square inch all over the massive surface area of her body. Seeing her in a one-piece bathing suit that didn’t even show that much skin took away my faith in God.

  The Fiorellos were the hotel’s only steady customers through the four seasons. They lived somewhere in New York, but there were too many loud blacks and Puerto Ricans up there. They wanted to come to our hotel at the Jersey shore where they could relax and talk to us nice Chinese people.

  “Watch this man. He’s going places,” Peter said, wrapping an arm around Vincent’s waist and stroking Vincent’s neck with his free hand. He liked Vincent and touched him so much it was worrisome.

  “Peter, you tell the boy to listen to what I say, okay?” said Vincent, making a meaningless gesture at me with his right hand.

  “You listen to Vincent, he’s going to be on top. He’s the man to look out for,” Peter said.

  “Vincent is a good boy. If you turn out like him, your mother will be really proud,” said Mrs. Fiorello. Vincent winked, extracted himself, and walked around the Fiorellos. His slippers made sucking sounds as he walked back to Room 59.

  “I used to look like that,” said Peter, standing at the office window. He leaned back and rubbed the scraggly white fuzz on his chest.

  “Now you’re twice the man, Peter,” said Mrs. Fiorello, patting at his stomach.

  “You see this? You see this? Always a compliment with a nitpick. Always a slap with a kiss.” He tapped his cigar, and his nose twitched as he winked from behind his impenetrable shades, which were as dark as a wet blackboard.

  “Oh, stop, Peter!” said Mrs. Fiorello, taking a playful swat at his face.

  Listening to the Fiorellos talk would run like an old stand-up routine, complete with elbowing and winks:

  “These cigars really aren’t bad for you,” he might start.

  “Peter never inhales. He only breathes out, so it’s okay.”

  “You know, she’ll be the death of me, not these things. Cigars are a habit you can break, but women always break you first.”

  “Peter doesn’t need to be broken. All those years of being in the navy broke you. He cleans so much around the house, I feel like I’m the one making a mess. I just watch the television and put my feet up.”

  “She puts her feet up on my back when I’m scrubbing the floors. It’s abuse, I tell ya. You people know how to treat your women. Put them in their place in China.”

  “Peter!”

  “It’s true, they can’t even walk next to their husband, they have to walk behind them.”

  “They have such pretty dresses, the Chinese women. Doesn’t your mother have any like that? She should wear them. Pretty and silk.”

  The Fiorellos would always have that angle, throw in something about China or Chinese food, as if I couldn’t follow the conversation if they didn’t. Mrs. Fiorello turned to the television screen. “This is a computer game, right? You shouldn’t play this anymore, they rot your brain. I read it in Newsweek.”

  “They develop motor skills and improve hand-eye coordination,” I said, using my prepared answer from the video-game magazines. “They also keep kids off the street and out of trouble. Video games don’t require parental supervision, unlike many movies, and nobody gets hurt playing them. They’re also good for children who don’t have any play-mates.”

  Mrs. Fiorello rolled her eyes and dropped to the couch next to me. I felt the creaky frame give a little and the seat cushion grow tight. “You think you’re so smart. Just wait until it’s too late,” she said. After a heavy sigh, she added, “Is your mother in?”

  “Hold on a sec,” I said. I turned off the Atari and walked back into the living quarters. I went into my parents’ bedroom and shook my mother awake. It was about time for her to get up, anyway. I could tell by the hotel’s log that she’d been up until five renting rooms, but six hours of sleep was more than enough. Today was going to be another busy day for the hotel, and there were rooms we needed to clean. In a few minutes, she was fully dressed and in the office. I heard an exaggerated but brief greeting exchanged amongst the three of them.

  I shut the door to the office, feeling the heat of the living quarters. I followed the worn path on the living room rug, between a lopsided couch and a bare TV stand, back to my room. Talking to Vincent had made me think about this girl from school I liked, Lee Anderson. She had blond hair and green eyes and was so cute, I couldn’t help but look away when she caught me staring, which was about every two minutes. Even though she was just twelve like me, I could tell that Lee was going to be a perfect girl when she grew up. She was already past a B cup, and her long, soft blond hair curled at her shoulders. Her body was growing in all the right places, and she was looking pretty damn sexy.

  When we were in second grade together, she’d drunk beer from her Thermos and couldn’t wake up after naptime. Maybe things would go easier for me if I got her drunk again. Beer could make a lot of things possible.

  But I got the feeling she liked me, too. Maybe she had a speck of dust in her eye the day I thought she winked at me. So what if it was. She was definitely going to be mine. I felt warm each time Lee smiled or said my name. She’d probably just let me get into her pants sober. Get my dick wet.

  I pulled out my Monopoly set and took an issue of Cheri from under the game board. I reread the letters. Women driving, walking, or sitting alone were dying to get naked and suck and fuck.

  Some mornings I woke up with my own hand wrapped around my cock.

  The hotel was beautiful once, back in the 1950s.

  I know because I’d found a box of old color pamphlets in the crawl space that ran under the complete length of the hotel. The pictures were in soft, faded colors—the blues were baby blues and the reds were pink. Flying wooden ramparts painted gleaming white connected the tips of the two parallel wings of the hotel like a big suspension bridge. Voluptuous cars iced with chrome looked like they could have driven out of Arnold’s parking lot on Happy Days. Men wore suits and hats, and women had scarves and gloves.

  Three decades went by. It was the 1980s.

  The ramparts were now rotting in stacks in the thickly wooded area that pressed up against the outside of the even- and odd-numbered wings. The hotel was laid out like the letter U, with the office at the bottom. An asphalt driveway ran the entire inside length of the letter, from the four-lane interstate highway that led to the beaches, to the office, and then back.

  The big cars had been replaced by beat-up Datsuns and Thunder-birds that crawled around the parking lot like insects with a leg or wing torn off.

  Men had ditched their suits and hats, and women their scarves and gloves. Now they wore a unisex uniform of T-shirts and jeans, or bathing suits and cut-offs in the summer. Their faces were desperate for sex, for love, for another smoke; men with a few days of stubble, women with uneven layers of makeup. Their hard eyes and harder mouths would only loosen up with booze or some pot.

  I don’t remember much of life before the hotel. I was born in New York City, but we moved ou
t to the Jersey shore and bought the place when I was just a kid. The sellers were a white couple with a son about my age.

  I remember racing slot cars with that other little boy while our parents hammered out the details of the sale. The handheld controllers smelled like blown-out birthday candles as they heated up. If you didn’t let off on the trigger on the turn, the car would fishtail and flip off the track. Our parents were talking in the kitchen with the door closed. I couldn’t hear what they were saying as the cars whined around and around, but I could see them through the plate glass window.

  My father was standing at the dining table, sleeves rolled up. He was slightly shorter than my mother, with a ruddy complexion that made him look like he was drunk or really mad, but he was never in either of those states. He had curly black hair, which was a little unusual, but his eyes and wide cheeks tagged him as Chinese. He was poring over the blueprints of the hotel, examining the structure and soundness of the plan, and figuring out how salvageable the hotel was in its current state of disrepair. Was that when my parents hammered out the details of renting out rooms to hookers and johns?

  The main reason why my father had wanted the hotel was because he wanted to have his own business. Like all his classmates from Taiwan who had come to the United States, he had been passed over for promotions at the civil-engineering company he’d been working at. His boss had told him his English wasn’t good enough, but after a few months with some textbooks, he found out that none of the engineers, including his boss, really knew proper spelling or grammar. He ended up making a lot of corrections in the firm’s reports. My mother told me they’d given him a bottle of champagne when he left, which he poured out in the street before throwing the bottle into the gutter.

  After we moved into the hotel, he was always covered with rust or flakes of rotted wood. There were burn holes in his pants, holes that corresponded to scars on his skin. He’d slip into the crawl space because of a leaking pipe or a sinking bathroom floor and solder and nail away, surfacing only for food before heading back down. I would join him down there sometimes, but my main job was handling the front desk. My father never wanted to deal with customers. Unlike my mother, he was embarrassed about his English, though his was much better than hers.