For Today I Am a Boy

by Kim Fu

  “Huang,” I said, the H nearly silent.

  “Wong,” he repeated, satisfied. Around his cigarette, his long fingers called attention to their joints. I thought they were beautiful. He could probably crack an egg, work his fingers inside the shell, and empty it with one hand, one flick of the wrist. “What are you applying for?”

  “Line cook?” It came out as a question. I couldn’t place his age. Anywhere between thirty and sixty. He had a streak of gray in his short, square haircut, and the bushy eyebrows I associated with older men. His face was young but hardened.

  “Have you worked in restaurants before, Wong?” The pectoral muscles under his tattoo flexed, making the birds twitch. I wanted to touch them, to soothe their tortured faces.

  Water beaded on my eyelashes as I blinked away the smoke. “No. But I cook for my family.”

  “Then you’re applying to be a dishwasher.” His chair continued to rock. “You look like a delicate sort of kid to me, Wong.”

  I was wearing a shirt of my father’s. The sleeves were too long. “I’m not.” I said the boldest thing I could think of: “Give me a chance. I’ll show you.”

  He let his chair fall forward so the front legs struck the dirt floor loudly. He stubbed out his cigarette on the table, leaving a mark, and then leaned across the table and grabbed my hands. A jolt flew through me. His hands were large enough to eclipse mine completely. I felt his calluses on my smooth knuckles.

  “You’ll work nights,” he said. “You’ll steam your skin off. You’ll smell like shit all the time.”

  I nodded as though these were instructions.

  He let go of my hands. I left them on the table where he dropped them, feeling suddenly rejected. “I like you, Wong. I don’t know why. I feel like I could whip you into shape. Like you’re not anything yet.” I nodded again, afraid to ruin the moment.

  That evening, my father and I washed the car. The light rain had driven mud up onto the sides and into the tire wells. He lathered up the body while I scrubbed inside the tires with a stiff brush, squatting over the gravel. Breaking the silence, I said, “I got a job.”

  I listened for pride, suspicion, anything. He threw his rag into the soapy bucket and walked to the side of the house, where I couldn’t see him, and began unraveling the hose. “What kind of job?”

  “Dishwasher, at the new restaurant.”

  Water coursed over the roof of the car without warning. I jumped out of the way a moment too late. A few minutes passed as he sprayed back and forth, and I thought the conversation was over.

  “I did that once,” he said. “When I first came to Canada. It was hard to find work. My English was good enough, but nobody cared.” I stood back, dripping. He glanced at the fresh shine of the hubcaps. “Good job.”

  The air hovered around freezing, so we had to dry the car quickly with old towels before the night—and the ice—set in. We worked side by side in short, muscular motions, a little too rough, risking the paint. A physical rhythm. My arms started to ache. Father seemed at peace.

  When I first entered the restaurant kitchen, I had to squint away from the light. The dining room had been dim, with inoffensive jazz at low volume, tinted windows, black and red leather. The kitchen was bright as an operating room, and with the same urgent efficiency. Men ran back and forth, shouting. Metal flashed. The air went wavy for an instant when someone opened an oven. The cook at the broiler casually doused a fire with a bottle of water. I stood in the archway. No one paid me any attention, and I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt them.

  Hands clamped down on my shoulders so suddenly that I jumped. “Why are you just standing around, Wong?” It was the chef who’d interviewed me. His thumbs touched the back of my bare neck. Like everyone else, he was wearing his jacket buttoned with an apron on top, checked pants, and a black cap. Mine was the smallest size jacket they had. It hung flat off my bones the same way it had hung on the coat hanger. I cinched the pants tightly, and the legs ballooned around me like I was a wasting old man.

  “I’m . . . new.”

  “We’re all new, but you’re the only one doing nothing. Let’s go.” He led me through the kitchen. “You have three basic tasks: dishes, cleaning, and fetching stuff for the cooks. Voilà, the walk-in cooler.” He grunted as he pulled the heavy metal latch to release the door. The freezer was inside, past another door; a room within a room, about the size of a closet. “There’s no light in the freezer part, so you have to hold the door open as you root around,” he explained. I stuck my head in. Some faint alarm rang at how close together the walls were, at the rush of cold, the dark, the stout icicles lining the walls.

  We walked back to the dish pit and he pointed out its parts. The high-pressure hot-water hose hanging over the double sink. The industrial dishwasher with its vertical steel doors that came down sharp as a guillotine. “All the dishes go through twice. First you wash ’em, then you bleach the fuck outta them. Any questions?” he asked.

  I pictured his tattoo underneath the apron, underneath the jacket. The birds moving with each breath. “What’s your name?”

  “You call me Chef.” He tilted his head. “Your jacket is buttoned wrong.” His fingers settled on my chest. He undid the buttons, pulled the jacket straight, and rebuttoned it on the other side. It took a long time. I could smell his hair, a sharp, cold scent, like the air before it snows. Like the walk-in freezer. He ended by patting the jacket smooth. “Men button it on the left. Women on the right.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  A voice called down the line, “A waitress wants you, Chef.”

  I started an hour later than the rest of the night shift, at six. Dishes were already stacked high enough to form precarious towers. I put on the rubber gloves that floated with the detritus and patches of grease in the sink. The gloves were filled with hot water, which ran into my sleeves.

  Chef talked to the waitress through the pass window. She was large and curvy, crushed into the uniform white button-up shirt and black pants, her coppery hair pulled into a high ponytail that exposed her forehead.

  “Birthday at table twenty-three,” she said. “The birthday girl doesn’t like any of the desserts on the menu, and she wants to know if you can make her a fruit plate.”

  “Tell the bitch to go fuck her grandmother,” Chef said.

  She waited.

  “I’m on it. Tell her it’ll be a few minutes.”

  The waitress nodded and disappeared back into the din and artful leather of the dining room. I blasted food off the plates with the hose and loaded them into the dishwasher. The skin on my forearms was already breaking out in a rash. Chef went into the walk-in cooler and came out with an apron full of fruit.

  Watching him work, I found it hard to reconcile his hands with the way he talked. He cut segments from a grapefruit, raw and pink as a baby’s flesh, so that the membranes hung off the discarded peel like pages off a book’s spine. He fanned out paper-thin slices of apple and peach, made spirals from out-of-season strawberries, cut the kiwis into stars, everything stacked toward a single citadel carved from a pineapple and drizzled with honey.

  He placed his sculpture on a square, white plate and flung it through the pass window. As the waitress moved it to her tray, he said, “Stick a candle in it and charge the bitch fifteen dollars.”

  Ollie found me eating lunch alone at my locker. He sat beside me and unwrapped what appeared to be a T-bone steak in tinfoil. I didn’t mention that we hadn’t talked since elementary school. We didn’t talk about what he’d done or what had been done to him, though everyone knew. The buzz was fading. We were coming up on the anniversary of a car accident that killed four students the year before, and the retelling of that story had taken over. Ollie acted like we had always been friends. “You work out?” he asked.

  I almost laughed.

  “I need a new gym buddy,” he said. Because you knifed your last one, I thought. He held the foil-wrapped bottom of the steak and ate it out of his hand, like it was
a banana. “I can sneak you in for free. Nobody mans the desk at night.”

  “I work nights,” I said.

  “Get out. Where?”

  “The new restaurant.”

  “Every night?”

  “Three nights a week.”

  He drank a carton of milk with his steak. “Tell your parents it’s five nights. We’ll go lift weights, have some beers, and you can just say you were at work.”

  It was a good trick. In spite of everything, I wasn’t afraid of Ollie. I felt pleased that he had thought of me. “Yeah, okay.”

  His head jerked backward as he ripped the meat off the bone with his teeth. “I’m going to get huge. Then small-dicked assholes like the coach won’t be able to pick on me. He calls me a fag just ’cause I’m skinny.” Ollie watched me peel the crust from my white-bread-and-strawberry-jam sandwich. “You aren’t a fag, are you?”

  I was supposed to shake my head, deny it up and down. He looked so cheery and simple, his cheeks stuffed with beef. I said, “I don’t know.”

  Ollie took a hard-boiled egg from his bag. It gave off a strong, sulfurous smell when he rolled it on the floor and cracked the shell. I watched him pick the shell off and drop the shards back into the paper bag. “Well, do you want guys to suck your dick?”

  I felt a revulsion so strong it was closer to hatred. “No.”

  He ate half of the egg in one bite. “Do you want girls to suck your dick?”

  The revulsion didn’t change. “No.”

  Ollie shrugged and swallowed the rest of the egg. “Then I don’t know what you are.” Perhaps from the way I sat there staring at the floor, he added quickly, “I’m not queer. I’ve got a girl up in Innisfil.” I kept staring at the floor. “Hey, you okay?”

  “I just don’t like thinking about it.”

  “What?”

  “Sex.”

  “Jeez.” He chewed thoughtfully. “What’s that like? I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  It wasn’t true. I loved the way the cooks at the restaurant talked about sex. Mapping out women’s bodies for one another like explorers who’ve returned home. Their jokes with animals, old women, and babies as the punch lines. It was over-the-top enough, absurd enough, that it didn’t feel real.

  The sauté cook had graduated from Brock Road the year before. His name was Simon Hughman, and I remembered him only because he had a notoriously squeaky voice, as immortalized on the boys’-room wall:

  Simon Hymen

  forever a virgin

  voice so high

  the girls won’t screw him.

  On our third night, Simon’s board had filled up with orders while everyone else was still going at an easy pace. Chef came up behind him and surveyed the chits. Simon tossed one pan and then another like he was juggling clubs. I had already noticed that the people who moved the fastest seemed to get the least done. “What’s the problem here?” Chef asked.

  “Just got really busy.” His voice cracked on busy. He tried to elbow Chef out of his way, but Chef stood his ground.

  “You jerking off on my time, Simon?” Chef mimed it with an empty fist. He grabbed Lyle, the garde-manger at the next station, from behind and started thrusting. “Having a good time with Lyle over here?”

  The other men, including Lyle, laughed. Simon continued to flip his pans unnecessarily, as though it would make the mushrooms cook faster. “No. Just busy. Fuck off.”

  The cooks hooted. I banged two pots together to join in the noise. Chef put one hand on the range hood to cut off Simon’s path. “You telling me to fuck off, Simon? Is that what just happened?”

  “Sorry,” Simon muttered, squeaking. “I’m just trying to work.” He tried to push past Chef again. “I need more onions.”

  Chef held him by the collar of his jacket. His voice changed. “Stop being such a macho fuckup and ask for help when you need it. That’s my fucking job, to help you. Don’t go running off to the cooler when your station looks like this—send someone. You hear me?”

  I slipped away from the pit. The dishes were almost cleared. The rashes on my arms had begun to peel and weep pus. Inside the cooler, I filled a new insert of chopped onions and brought it over to where Chef and Simon were now cooking elbow to elbow, working to finish all the sauté orders.

  “Thanks,” Chef said, surprised. He nodded at Simon. “Maybe we should give Wong your job.”

  Simon pretended to laugh in his high, wounded voice.

  In the front seat of Ollie’s truck, I changed from the work clothes that my parents saw into a T-shirt and sweatpants. Ollie ate handfuls of raw almonds out of a bag on the dashboard while he drove. My unstrapped body flung around with each sharp turn. “What are you going to do after graduation?” he asked.

  “Culinary school.” It was the nearest approximation to what was expected of me that I could handle. My parents might be able to understand. It had the word school in it.

  “My brother went to university,” Ollie offered. This was still unusual in Fort Michel.

  “So did both of my sisters.”

  “I know. We have that in common.” He gave me a moment to digest that. “I’m going to follow him after I graduate. He lives in Montreal.”

  Ollie’s gym was a storefront in one of the strip malls at the edge of town, its emptiness visible through the windows. We parked right in front of the door. “My brother says it’s, like, the best city on earth,” he continued. “The hottest women. The craziest parties.”

  We hopped out of the truck. He unlocked the door to the gym with his member’s key. Though there was no one around, it still smelled powerfully of sweat and bodies at close quarters. A poster by the door showed a woman doing some kind of twist, one foot in the air. She wore red spandex shorts and a halter bra, her defined abs and cleavage oiled. “How do you look like that?” I said aloud.

  Ollie took the question at face value. “Diet and exercise. I’m doing a bulk. If you want to look like her, you’ll have to keep your body fat quite low.” He didn’t seem to think there was anything strange about my wanting to look like her—like it was as legitimate as his desire to be hulking and large. Another thing we had in common: we wanted different bodies than our own.

  He called on me to watch and learn as he started loading weight onto a bar. My eyes kept drifting back to the poster of the girl. When I looked at it again, I couldn’t tell if was in fact oil or if she was just that slick with sweat. Droplets clouded the air around her ponytail. “What about her legs? How do you get legs like hers?”

  Ollie hoisted the bar behind his neck and started doing squats. He talked only on the exhale. “Your legs are already . . . as thin as hers. You just need to build . . . muscle on your ass.” He lifted the bar back onto the rack.

  I searched his face, looking for judgment. His expression was as resolute and unemotional as when I’d watched him running with his former teammates. He had me try squatting the empty bar. My knees bowed outward after only three, and he pulled it off me quickly.

  I continued to scrutinize her legs as Ollie did his second set. The hair on my legs grew long but relatively sparse, compared to my sisters’, and mostly on my shins. This girl was hairless as a seal. I imagined running my hands down my thighs and feeling no friction. I imagined the curve of my ass popping straight out in short shorts as hers did. Ollie made it seem achievable in the most matter-of-fact way.

  Simon dumped a pile of sauté pans into my sink. I had begun to think of it as my sink, even though the middle-aged Sri Lankan dishwasher worked fifty hours a week to my eighteen. “I need these right now,” Simon said. He hurried back to his station before I could say anything. I still hadn’t gotten used to his voice that grated like nails on a window; it made me wince each time.

  I kept on filling the glass rack; the bar had been reduced to serving wine in water glasses. Simon came back after only a couple of minutes. “Hey. I said I need these right now.”

  “I’ll get to it in a second.” I slid the rack into the dishwashe
r and went to lower the doors. “Move your hands.” Or they’ll get chopped off, I thought.

  “You should have done it when I asked you to. Now I’m completely out of pans.”

  I left the door dangling dangerously. I gave one of his pans a quick pass with the steel wool, a blast from the hose, and then held it out for Simon to take.

  “I don’t need one. I need all of them.”

  “Take one for now.”

  “Then you won’t do the rest of them for hours. Wash my pans right now.”

  At this point in the night, the scabs on my forearms were on fire, and my toes were numb from standing. “Wash them yourself. You don’t seem to have anything better to do.”

  “It’s your fucking job.” Fucking sounded like a squawk.

  Chef yelled for Simon. “What are you doing off the line? We’re getting slaughtered up here!”

  “I’m out of pans!” Simon yelled back. “Peter fucked up!”

  Chef came over, tossing shrimp in a large silver bowl. They hovered in midair at the top of their arc, spices falling around them like snow. “Get out of the pit. You piss off the dishwasher and the whole kitchen falls apart. Take the pan and get back onto the line.” It occurred to me that Chef looked the way Ollie wanted to: Nobody would fuck with him. And not merely because of the muscles and the tattoos.

  In spite of what he’d just said, Chef hung around the dish pit after Simon left. He continued to lazily coat the shrimp. That same redheaded waitress appeared at the pass to gather plates. Chef gestured at her with his chin. “Hey, Wong, would you fuck her?”

  They played this game all the time. I repeated one of the most common responses. “Too fat and too old.”

  Chef laughed. “She’s barely thirty. Women don’t know their shit until then. And did you see those tits? You could hide your head between those.”