I'm the One That I Want

by Margaret Cho

  I grew up, left home, got famous, nearly drank myself to death, and, for a time, became the very image of Patty’s mom. Except I didn’t have curtains to draw, so the living room would be flooded with a piercing light that burned holes in my brain. I tried to sleep as much of the day as I could to avoid the unbearable morning cheerfulness of my sunny, Hollywood Hills bungalow. My pajamas stayed on all the time, and I had the same hunch, the same sick expression, the same dead-eyed stare. I should have died, too, but I didn’t. For some reason, someone or something or Jesus rolled the rock away from the front of my house and I emerged, Shroud of Turin falling away at my feet, and I, newly risen from the dead, went to Melrose and bought some fabulous new clothes to replace it.

  3

  BRAVERY

  I have always thought of myself as brave. I have also always thought there would be people, boys especially, who would admire me, look at me, fawn over me. And there were—until I was eight and did two terrible, unforgivable things in the third grade. They happened within a period of two weeks. The first was during a bell rehearsal for the Christmas program. We were all handed very expensive, delicate, rare brass bells with which to play “Greensleeves” and we were warned and warned again and threatened and warned some more about the value of the bells. We were made to wear cotton gloves so that we would not get our fingerprints on the precious fucking bells. As I was putting my gloves on, bell stuck between my upper arm and my side, I dropped the bell and it shattered on the ground. It was an E flat or C sharp or something definitely irreplaceable, so when the choir sang “What child is this . . .” the word child came without musical accompaniment, naked, the brutal reminder to me and all the rest of Grade Three of my grievous act.

  SOme time later, the worse of the two incidents occurred. During another bell rehearsal, as I had no bell to play, I sat in the back of class fidgeting and counting my fingers or something. I really had to pee, so I went to the front of the class and said to the teacher, “I have to pee.” And she said, “Just wait.” I returned to the back of class and the business of idling, when I was hit with an urgent, desperate need to pee that would not wait. I had to do it. After the rehearsal, half-midget perennial spinster Miss Cinnamon said, “Okay, you can go now.” I answered, quite wittily I must say, “I already did.”

  I think that I was so used to horror, my little life had already endured such atrocities, that I was unfazed by my “accident.” I sat there in thoroughly wet, itchy pants with a pool of urine underneath me, cultivating a “been there, done that” attitude. This highly disturbed the teachers, and when they asked if I wanted to go home and change, if I wanted my mom to come get me, if there was someone they could call—I looked down at my pee-splattered Buster Browns and said, “No. Why would you want to do that?” and went off to play kickball. And I thought nobody had wanted me on their team before.

  The taunts and the teasing came later. At this point, I think everyone was too afraid of me to make fun of me. They treated me like Damien in The Omen, as if one look of my evil eye would render them incontinent. The spell was broken soon enough. I was the pariah of the schoolyard, shunned as if I had the floor-length beard and long, curly nails of the unwashed untouchables of India. To me, “recess” meant “riot,” the time of day I stood between massive groups of eight-year-olds fighting over whether I should be called the Bell Breaker or the Pee Girl. I was stoic, silent, nonviolent even back then. I didn’t pay attention. But I stayed at that same school for five more years, which is forever when you are a kid, and I must admit, it wore me down. I think I lost something there—an interior brightness. The luster and the silver lining and the Tootsie Roll center and the brave one in me went far underground, now surfacing, twisted, perverted, deformed, with a dowager’s hump and a bad nervous tic, but tougher still.

  My family Went to church every Sunday, at first to the one by Stonestown, where my grandfather led the services, and later to the big Korean Methodist Church on Powell Street that was in the middle of Chinatown. Sometimes big Chinese funeral processions would lurch slowly down the street. There would be a brass band made up of men dressed like they were in the military, playing solemnly as they marched by. Then there’d be a black convertible, with an enormous black-and-white photo of the deceased, bordered with black bands to signify the departure into the afterlife, attached to the windshield. The hearse would follow, its windows crammed with flowers behind a white curtain, hiding the mysterious gleaming casket. I wanted to hold my breath as it went by. I thought if I got too close and looked into the hearse, a bony hand would emerge from it and drag me inside. Carloads of mourners trailed behind, and they all moved so slowly, it seemed like it would take forever to get where they were going. But it hardly mattered. There is lots of time when you are dead. These processions made me dread and look forward to Sunday at the same time.

  The church services were held in Korean, so a massive Sunday school system existed to accommodate all the exclusively English-speaking kids. It was broken down into two groups, the baby classes with Jesus coloring books and the Methodist Youth Foundation, which was for the teenagers who cut class and went into Chinatown to smoke cigarettes and talk about what they’d done Saturday night. When they did go to class, it was like a cool “rap” session, involving young pastors getting out their acoustic guitars and talking about the “downer” of premarital sex.

  They hated me there. Everyone. From the babies all the way to the teenagers. Maybe the teachers and the young pastor didn’t, because they’d spend time trying to protect me and involve me in some activities, the same ones the other kids would try to exclude me from. I don’t think anyone could have been more hated. School was bad enough, but now it seemed like the whole world was a hostile place.

  This was the ’80s and I was twelve, a preteen with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and braces. Hated. Hated. Hated. I tried to ignore it, spending summers away with cousins who lived in magical Glendale, where I would sit by their swimming pool reading a waterlogged copy of Seventeen. Lori Laughlin set the beauty standard, and as I looked at her, my troubles would melt away. “Someday I will be seventeen . . .” But the thing that I couldn’t admit to myself was that I was really wishing “Someday . . . I will be white.”

  Whenever I read those magazines and tried to plug into the teenage fantasy they were selling, I couldn’t see myself at all. I studied those pictures and the TV and movies like Little Darlings over and over. Then in the mirror I would be confronted with the awful reality that I was not that. It was almost too much to bear.

  My Koreanness, my “otherness,” embarrassed me. When I had school projects that required the use of glue, a product my family had little need or money for, my mother would substitute leftover rice. My face would get all red and I would shake and stammer, “Why can’t we have American glue!! I hate you, Mommy!!!!” Then I would stamp my feet up the stairs and throw my hot face down on my canopy bed.

  Since I didn’t really have friends who I was not related to, and the kids that were cruelest to me were other Koreans, my entire world was an exercise in not belonging. The answer seemed to lie in being white, so in my fantasy life, I chose to be Lori Laughlin. In my mind, I got ready for dances, wearing only a neat white towel wrapped under my arms, spraying myself with Love’s Baby Soft, wiping a cotton ball soaked in 10-0-6 lotion over my troublesome T-zone, lining my big, big eyes with Aziza by Prince Matchabelli, putting on a long, ruffled denim skirt with a petticoat underneath and then a puffy-sleeved blouse with a big ruffle forming aV on my ample but not slutty chest. Then finally, I’d let my naturally curly chestnut hair fall across my narrow shoulders, pulling it up close to my head with red oval barrettes. The only time the fantasy would change would be if I decided to be Charlene Tilton instead of Lori Laughlin, but this occurred less frequently because I read in Teen Beat that Charlene took forty-five minutes to blow-dry her hair, which even then I found unreasonable.

  I usually never got to the dance, because my fantasies were all about getting
ready, looking a certain way, about not being me. How sad to use such a rich and vibrant imagination to dream about grooming, and not only that, but grooming someone else.

  Sometimes, I would get so caught up in the fantasy that I would actually go to the dance, but since I’d never been to one yet, that image was rather muddled. I’d end up slow-dancing to Air Supply with the cutest guy in my grade, Steve Goldberg, a hot Jewish kid with blonde hair and a huge ass. Steve was relentlessly mean to me, perhaps because he knew I had a crush on him, but he was also in his own pain because of his big behind. Once, on a field trip, he made all the kids in the class say “Hi Margaret” to a big golden retriever as they walked by. “Hey everybody, say hi to Margaret. She’s a dog! Get it?!” I wasn’t offended. I always thought dogs were beautiful. It hurt me only because it was meant to, but it was nothing compared to the treatment I got at church.

  It started with my name. I was born Moran Cho. Moran is a Korean name, meaning peony flower, a plant that blooms even in the harshest winter. My father gave me this thoughtful, unusual name without the knowledge that someday the kids I grew up with would use it against me. It started when I was around twelve, not at school, but at church.

  “MORON!! YOU ARE NOTHIN’ BUT A MORON!!!” They said my name every chance they got.

  “Excuse me, but MORON didn’t pass the basket this way.”

  “Hey! I have my hand up. You can’t see me past MORON’S fat head.”

  “May I be moved? I don’t want to sit next to MORON!”

  “Jesus loves everyone, even MORON.”

  It was stupid, but it hurt my feelings so much. Especially since the main perpetrators had once been close friends of mine.

  Lotte and Connie Park were the daughters of my parents’ best friends. During the previous summer vacation, I had spent many days at their house in San Bruno. We listened to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. We went down the hill to Kmart and I bought my first pair of designer jeans. We watched Creature Features until we got too scared and had to change the channel to Saturday Night Live, where we’d laugh our asses off at Steve Martin doing King Tut.

  They told me their parents fought all night long, but when they prayed to God to make them stop, it got quiet. They said they were afraid their parents were going to get a divorce. I was scared that was going to happen to me, too. We were kids of the ’80s, when divorce and nuclear war loomed large. We were afraid of being abandoned by our parents, yet excited at the possibility of peace in our homes and spending our weekends with dads we never saw as long as our parents stayed together. We also had nightmares of radioactive fallout and hoped that we’d get stuck in a bomb shelter with a cute guy.

  Connie had a tendency to have sties, which gave her eyes the bubbly look of a pop-eyed goldfish, but she was thin and confident, which made her condition seem oddly attractive. Lotte looked like a Korean Genie Francis, which was exciting as this was the time when General Hospital ruled the airwaves—there was even a song about it, parodying the plotlines and the scandalous characters, and we’d call up KFRC and request it over and over again.

  We’d commiserate about our piano teachers, the strange, old white people who would come into our homes and sit next to us as we hammered out “Close to You” on the keys. Those lessons were the one luxury my family could afford, and my brother and I suffered through them for years. Lotte and Connie would make me howl with laughter at the tales of their teacher, who would use the bathroom for up to half an hour, and help herself to Sanka in the kitchen. “Best cup I ever made . . .”

  I don’t know why it was so funny. Maybe because this was the first time anybody seemed to understand me. Those girls made me feel so much less alone in the world, which made their betrayal particularly painful.

  Lotte and Connie had a cousin, a shy, awkward girl named Ronny, who started going to our church. She had two older brothers who were really good-looking, with glossy, black feathered hair and tan, hard bodies, which made her popular by proxy. I was friendly to her at first, not knowing that she was to be my replacement.

  One day Lotte came up to Ronny and me as we chit-chatted in the church parking lot. She looked at Ronny with a knowing glance and said, “Oh, I see you’ve met MORON!!!” They both started laughing hysterically and I tried to be a good sport, accepting it as some healthy ribbing among friends, even though my face got red and a knot grew in my throat. The two girls walked off and joined Connie, who was nursing a sty the size of a golf ball. They didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the day, which was suspicious, but I tried to ignore it.

  I went home and looked in the mirror to see if there was something wrong with me. My hair was too short: my mother had cut it into “Sheena Easton,” and the feathered sides wilted in the midday heat. Maybe I was paranoid. I hoped the situation would right itself before I went off to the church summer retreat, three days in the red-woods with all the kids from MYF, a chance to be away from parents, smoke cigarettes, and bond with one another. It was Little Darlings— and although the thought of losing my virginity was a rather lofty notion for me then, at twelve, it was still in the heady mix of possibilities of being away at camp.

  I could barely sleep the night before because I was so excited and worried at the same time. I tossed and turned and woke suddenly with the sun shining in my face, not having been aware that I had fallen asleep.

  My mother drove me to the church and then inexplicably burst into tears, begging me not to go. I couldn’t understand this at all. We had not been getting along lately. None of my family had. My mother and I would fight because I wouldn’t practice the piano, my brother and I would fight over the TV, and my father and mother would fight all night long. I pulled away from her as she gained control of her emotions. She was cold again as I left the big yellow station wagon. I was relieved to be getting away from the fighting.

  I’d hoped to get a ride with Lotte and Connie, but they’d already gone with Ronny. I was too afraid to ask Carl, the cute monkey-faced popular boy who lived to make me miserable, or Jaclyn and Eugene, the equally simian brother and sister who fancied themselves trend-setters because they’d started hating me long before anyone else.

  All the kids had organized themselves into groups riding up together, and since I was late, and hated, I just stood there with my cowboy sleeping bag and tried not to look scared. I reasoned with myself that the more I worried about something bad taking place, the less likely it was to happen. Since I’d been so tortured about this trip, by this law it was bound to turn out fine.

  I rode to the camp with the young minister who led the youth group. He never wore a clerical collar and was of indeterminate age—youngish, unmarried, but ageless in the way Korean men sometimes are. As his yellow Pinto puttered up the freeway, I must have fallen asleep because later, close to the camp, I woke up all sweaty.

  “You are very cute when you are sleeping.” Reverend Soo was always nice to me, in an uncreepy, comforting way. We got to the campsite around the middle of the day. It was hot and teeming with Korean kids. Ronny’s fine-ass brother had the door of his Trans Am open, and the stereo was blasting Chicago.

  “Everybody needs a little time away, just for the day . . .

  From each other . . .”

  The beautiful Jolie, who was a few grades above me, perfect in her cut-off jeans and ribbed purple tank, a red bandanna tied suggestively like a garter around her lean thigh, looked over at us and smiled. My heart beat faster. Jolie had never been mean to me, but she’d never spoken to me either. She was way too sophisticated for that. I had a crush on her, but I was too much in awe to even admit it to myself. Whatever Carl or Eugene did to me, it didn’t matter unless she saw it. If she was a witness, then the sting of humiliation would last for days. I think it was less that I wanted her, and more that I wanted to be her. With her taut brown body and baby face, she represented to me the glory of the ’80s, the idea that beauty was a powerful thing, that if you looked a certain way, you could have everything.

  Ar
ound 1985, Jolie turned preppy, and her beauty, her gleam, her youthful sensuality was lost in the translation. But back then, still in her slutty prime, she held all the boys at our church in the palm of her purple-nail-polished hand.

  She leaned over to Ronny’s brother and whispered something. He grabbed her face and they fell into each other laughing. Oh, to laugh like that, to be held by a boy and get lost in your own wondrous being. To be able to throw your head back like a pony while the boys admired you. To be the object of desire and the one doing the desiring . . . I wished that for myself. As I was lost in this reverie, someone threw a pine cone at my face.

  “Oh shit. MORON’S here!!!!”

  I tried not to cry as I looked for the perpetrator in the crowd of kids. Jolie stifled a chuckle, biting her tantalizingly glossed lip, and turned her head away. Unable to look at me because it was just too embarrassing, she nuzzled Ronny’s brother’s golden neck.

  The shards of pine cone made my eye blaze red. Half blind, I made it to the girl’s cabin without further incident.

  The cabins were made of logs. Inside, there were about ten bunk beds, which were exotic and exciting to me, as I’d never slept in one. I looked around for an unclaimed top bunk, but none was to be found. I unrolled my stained old sleeping bag that didn’t zip up all the way onto the bottom bunk near the back door.

  Jaclyn was in the bathroom complaining to no one in particular, “The food here is so baaaddd!!! I was sticking my finger down my throat trying to throw up. That didn’t work so I was on the toilet trying to crap it out. I want to go home!”

  I wanted to go home, too. This was going to be bad. I could just tell.

  Lotte came into the empty cabin and saw me. I was glad to see her and walked up.

  “Hi. I just got here. Where is your bunk? I want to be near you guys,” I said.

  She had a mean smile on her face, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye—kind of an “I can’t wait to tell my friends this . . .” expression.