by Ed Lin
“Did you get any éclairs?” asked Paul.
“Hey!” I said. “The first words I want to hear out of your mouth are ‘Thank you’!”
“Thank you,” said Paul.
“That’s all right, Paul,” said Vandyne. “It wasn’t much trouble at all and, hell, I even used a coupon! Actually, I should be thanking you, little man, because I know Chow didn’t have much of a hand in cooking.”
“You’re wrong there, partner,” I said. “I stirred in the tomato sauce and I added in a secret ingredient.”
Paul and I had prepared Sloppy Joe filling from the package directions, but it didn’t have enough taste, so I put in some crushed red pepper—not a lot. It was definitely a meal for guys. The sides came out of chip bags and we drank soda out of the cans.
“This is what Saturday night has come down to, Chow,” said Vandyne. “Sloppy Joe night with Paul.”
“Are you having a bad time?” asked Paul.
“Oh, no no no! I’m worried we’re boring you! You’re still in the prime of your life with a great future ahead. It’s a shame you have to spend a weekend night with two crazy vets.”
“One more doesn’t make a difference.”
We all laughed at that. Paul was growing up into a pretty decent ballbuster. Vandyne pushed his chair over to the window and cracked it open.
“You guys don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” I said.
Vandyne touched a lit match to his cigarette. He blew out the flame, dropped the match in his empty soda can, and said, “Paul, don’t you ever dare start smoking. It’s a dirty and disgusting habit and the industry that backs it is racist against men of color. All colors.”
“I’ve already tried smoking,” said Paul. “I didn’t like it.”
“Don’t ever start again,” said Vandyne.
“And don’t ever drink, Paul,” I added.
“Okay, don’t smoke and don’t drink,” said Paul. “Anything else I should remember?”
“Study hard and get into a decent school,” I said. Suddenly I noticed that I had a Sloppy Joe blotch on the arm of my shirt. I stuck it in my mouth and sucked on it.
“Chow tells me you have a shot at Columbia,” Vandyne said to Paul.
“I work there now.”
“What do you do?”
“I do a lot of things. I help catalog sea-floor sample cores and do some computer-card programming. I’m starting to build a database that will take years to finish.”
“That’s smart,” I said. “You fix it so that you’re the only one who understands how to use it and then they have to keep you around to work on it. I’m thinking this will make you a shoo-in for college at Columbia when it’s time.”
Paul shrugged. “What I do isn’t that hard. They could probably train someone else to work on it.”
“That’s why you have to develop some sort of filing system that no one else can figure out,” said Vandyne. “Then no one else can learn it.”
“But the value of the core database is so that anyone can use it. What’s the point of collecting information if only a few people know what’s going on? You guys read newspapers. How would you like it if they held back on the news they were giving you?”
“Tell me something, Paul,” said Vandyne. “What sort of application is there to knowing the sea cores?”
“There are a few. We can determine climate conditions in the past, evolution of marine life, and we can also determine stratification. That’s important for oil discoveries.”
“Now that’s where the money is,” I said.
“Yes!” said Vandyne. “That is the kind of information worth keeping from others! You could get rich from that!”
Paul sighed. “The main thing, though, isn’t where the oil deposits are, of course. A lot of them are known. The big problem is getting the oil out.”
“You just stick a straw in there,” I said.
“Great,” said Paul.
“You could study that when you get to college,” suggested Vandyne.
“I could,” said Paul. “Say, Mr. Vandyne?”
“Please call me John.”
“John, you play guitar, right?”
Vandyne exhaled heavily and dropped his cigarette into his soda can. “From time to time.”
“I saw you play at that ceremony for Robert a few months ago. You’re really good.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Do you think you could teach me how to play?”
“Wait a second,” I cut in. “Aren’t you busy enough with school and work?”
“I want to learn how to play for fun. I’m allowed to have some fun, right?”
“In all honesty,” said Vandyne, “if you’re just looking to mess around for fun, you’re not going to get far on the guitar. It’s a serious instrument that men and women have signed away their souls to.”
“You looked like you were having fun playing,” said Paul.
“I’ve been playing for fifteen years, Paul. I’m just starting to have fun now. My mother forced me to learn it to keep me off the streets. I only had about a week to learn each song and she didn’t know how to play guitar. I had to teach myself so maybe I wouldn’t be a good teacher.”
“How did you get that guitar?”
“It was my father’s.”
Vandyne looked like he was going to reach for another cigarette when Paul said, “Do you want to hear the Ramones?”
“I’ve heard of them, but I haven’t heard them. Do you like them?”
“Paul,” I said, “Vandyne doesn’t have time to listen to that crap. That stuff is for degenerates.”
“The Nazis called art degenerate, too.”
“I’m not a Nazi. Look at this album. They dress like degenerates and name their songs ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’? There’s no socially redeeming value to it.”
“You know what?” asked Vandyne. “I think I do want to hear it. A little bit, anyway.”
“You’re in for a treat,” I said. “Paul got this record from some wacko college liberal coworker.”
“I got it from my boss,” he said. “She’s a doctoral candidate in environmental engineering.”
The opening chords blasted out of the speakers and Vandyne flinched. But he was tapping his foot during the second song. Paul studied his face, but there wasn’t much to read.
“Had enough?” I asked Vandyne. “I think I have.”
“For now, that’s enough,” he said. “You know, Chow, it’s not great but it’s not as bad as you think it is. Comes across something like Chuck Berry without the guitar solos or leads. A lot of chords packed in there—a lot of the same ones.”
“I want to play like that,” said Paul.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “That’s not even playing a guitar. That’s just sliding a cheese grater across the strings.”
“I could hear a blues progression,” said Vandyne. “It’s not that hard to learn to play. Do you have a guitar, Paul?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You do?” I asked.
Paul took a padded guitar bag out of the closet, laid it flat on the ground, and unzipped it. Inside was an acoustic guitar that was a little scraped up but still in decent shape.
“Where the hell did you get that from?” I asked.
“My boss said she didn’t need this one anymore. She has three more and this one is a beginner model.”
Vandyne picked up the guitar and looked it over. He strummed it a little and frowned. “It’s missing two strings and the ones left need to be tuned, but that’s not a big deal at all. Neck is straight and all the tuning pegs are still there.”
“How are you going to pay for it?” I asked Paul.
“She gave it to me. She was going to give it to one of the Goodwill stores, but I said I would take it.”
“This thing is only worth about fifteen bucks,” said Vandyne.
“That’s still money,” I said. “Paul, you have to give your
boss something.”
“I pick up groceries for her in Chinatown so I’m helping her out.”
“I have extra strings at home that would work on this,” said Vandyne. “I could get this thing back into good shape.”
“Do you have time to teach Paul how to play?” I asked.
Vandyne smiled. “Sure.”
“Paul, when you play, I don’t want to hear chainsaws going off.”
“It’s an acoustic guitar, Robert. It’s not that loud.”
“It won’t be bad, Chow,” added Vandyne. “Paul won’t be anywhere near as loud as that record.”
“So then this is good news to me,” I said. “But Paul, if your grades or your work start to suffer, you’re going to give this thing up.”
“Let me handle it, Robert!”
“Jesus, this better not start you off on a path of smoking dope and then dropping out of school before you get to college.”
Vandyne said, “I’ll make sure he only plays the clean-cut notes.”
“Worst comes to worst,” said Paul, “I’ll just be a cop.”
“That’s it,” I said. “Vandyne, you get his legs!” I pinned Paul’s arms behind his back and he yelled like he was at summer camp.
I met my mother in a small teahouse on Baxter. A booth that sold ching-chong crap near the entrance was obnoxious enough to practically block the teahouse door with a stack of fake hair queues attached to skullcaps.
A middle-aged hostess with her hair in a bun seated us in a booth near the back and dealt us menus.
“Pardon me,” I told her. “You should tell the guy out front to move his stand back a few feet. That old buzzard’s hurting your business.”
“That’s my father!” she said.
“He looks good,” I said. The hostess glared at me and then slowly slipped away from our table.
My mother kicked me under the table. I knew what she was going to say, but I was going to have to wait a while before hearing it.
My mother lived by herself in a brownstone apartment past Bay Ridge in Brooklyn in a suburban Little Italy. She moved out there from Chinatown not too long after my father died by falling from a roof to the street. He had been drinking.
My mother never drank, and studied whenever she could. Because she had learned English so well, she had gotten a job sorting eighty-column cards in Midtown while my father was still waiting tables. Now she supervised the department.
She took off her huge shades and unwrapped her scarf. Mom kept trying for that Jackie O look.
Her face was calm as she scanned the menu, but she was good at covering up how she felt. In fact her face was as smooth as a scoop of Breyers vanilla, and her skin was about the same color with fewer black flecks. My mother was in her late forties and the only time wrinkles appeared on her face was when she was telling me what I was doing wrong with my life.
“You insulted that woman,” she said under her breath and without looking at me.
“I knew you were going to say that. But I insulted her father, not her.”
“If you insult her father, it’s an insult to her, too! If someone insulted you, it would also be an insult to me!” She looked at me directly. Her brown eyes were on fire, but they had lost quite a few flames after I had discovered a rather uncomfortable fact or two about my family a few months ago.
“I’m sorry, I forgot,” I said. “We’re all the same person.”
Still nearly whispering, my mother said, “I heard that Lonnie was the last person to see Mr. Chen. Everybody I know read that interview, but I don’t dare to tell my friends I know her or that she is my son’s fiancée.”
“Girlfriend!”
“Whatever you call it!”
“Neither of us is ready to get married, Mom.” I was annoyed at myself for also speaking softly.
“You’re never going to be ready to marry a murderer!”
“She’s not a murderer!”
“How do you know she didn’t kill that man?”
“Because I know her!”
“These girls from Hong Kong. You don’t know what they’re like!”
“She came over when she was six!”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Look at how she was raised. Look at the parents. Her father divorced his wife! What a shame that is.”
“So her parents got divorced. That makes her a killer?”
“All criminals come from bad families! You know how many people in jail had divorced parents?”
“We’re in America, Mom! Every other marriage ends in divorce.”
“You see? That’s why there’s so much crime in this country.”
I sat back in my seat and noticed that a waitress had sidled up to us. I didn’t know how long she had been there.
“Should I come back?” she asked. The uniform here was a dark blue polo and slacks, and it looked good on her. The girl would be attractive when she was older and all the acne cleared up.
“We’re ready,” I said. We got a pot of decent black tea, sandwiches, and coconut-covered toast.
“Maybe it’s time to find someone else,” my mother continued in her hushed voice.
“You’re talking crazy, Mom.”
“Don’t you understand? Her parents are divorced!”
“You think they should have stayed together?”
“Of course! If you want your children to turn out okay.”
“You would have never divorced Dad? You two weren’t happy together.”
“We would have stayed together to the end. That’s the duty of parents. Sometimes, I think . . .” She stopped and her eyes began to water. “I think if he were still here you would have turned out better.”
I took in a deep breath and let it out. “Mom, he didn’t die until I was already an adult. The war was what really screwed me up and, honestly, all my drinking.” I thought a little bit. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” I lied.
The waitress came back holding our teapot and cups in one hand while the other carried against her waist a beat-up metal tray with our food. She put down the teapot with an awkward thud and shakily transferred each dish to the table from her tray.
The teahouse’s training program was clearly slipping. Actually, they probably didn’t have a training program and they probably weren’t paying this girl shit.
“Thank you,” I said. She did a micro-curtsy with her head down and left.
“Do you think she’s good enough for you?” my mother asked, her voice a little closer to normal.
“She’s not the greatest server, but maybe, in time, we could grow to love each other.”
“Not the waitress! Lonnie! Don’t you think you could find someone better?”
“I did find someone better.”
I cut the coconut toast in half and glanced at my mother to catch her annoyed face, which suddenly turned into a look of alarm. I looked where she was looking and I saw that the guy who ran the souvenir booth was standing next to me.
“How are you doing, sir?” I asked.
“I heard you had some comments about my business.” When he was done talking, he jutted out his jaw and wrapped his bottom lip over it.
“I was just saying that it was a shame that a man of your stature had to work such long hours in the cold.”
“That’s not what I heard you said!”
“Honestly, that is what I think!”
“You young people have no manners. You think you can say anything you want without consequences. I’m going to remember your little insult and so will my entire family!”
It helps to know that saying “sorry” is useless in Chinese culture. Forgiveness isn’t seen as a value. We pray for good luck, money, long life, and happiness, but we don’t pray for those who have caused us injury. No way. We’re not even dumb enough to pray that others forgive us.
I don’t even think that Chinese Christians believe in forgiveness. They probably think the expression “turn the other cheek” means “try to hit your enemy with your cheek.”
Despite knowing all of this, I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Just you wait,” the old man muttered before leaving.
“You never think about your reputation, do you, Robert?” asked my mother.
“My reputation? He was insulting you, as well!”
“We can never come back here. Not until this place closes and someone else takes over.”
I looked at the pimply waitress serving another table as if the ground were moving.
“It might not be long, Mom.”
I walked by a dark brown Buick Regal sedan parked on the west side of Bowery. It was in front of a fire hydrant but what really got my attention were the Bicentennial diplomatic plates from Washington, D.C. That meant Taiwan because they were from the Republic of China embassy.
If the diplomatic plates were New York, that would have indicated the United Nations mission of the People’s Republic.
The windows were tinted and the only things I could see through the right rear passenger’s window were what looked like a tissue box on the backseat and a suit bag hung over the other rear passenger’s door.
It was after eleven at night. All the places that serve decent food had closed hours ago. What was left open was unfit for even the lowest-ranked foreign official.
I came around and looked through the driver’s window at the seat. I wasn’t able to glean much more except that the steering wheel was sheathed in leather. Why couldn’t people place their identification on their seats when they left their cars?
“Excuse me, sir,” asked a woman’s voice in Mandarin. I stepped back from the car and saw in the window a reflection of an attractive woman in a camel-hair coat. I turned to look at her and realized that the glass had distorted the woman’s face. She was ordinary looking, in her mid-sixties, with shiny coal eyes and a dull red mouth with smudges along the bottom lip. It was tough to tell what her hair looked like but it must have been on the short side to fit up inside her beaten brown leather cap.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Oh, I just wanted to tell you something.” No man had probably ever spoken to her roughly before. She pouted a little. “But I want to know first if you are a policeman or not.”