L.A. Son

by Roy Choi

  Oh, it’s my bet?

  Raise, muthafucka.

  On the night of my biggest win, I was talking shit, like I always did. It was a marathon hand, back and forth, back and forth, one volley after another, until the pot reached $34,000. All the while, I walked around. Smoked a cigarette. Talked trash. Every trick in the book. In truth, I was way out of my league—the best thing I had was my high card, an ace—but I knew I could take this guy, just as I knew he knew that I was bluffing about my hand. At that last moment, with all my money on the line, invested, I saw it. I saw the next card in my mind like a lens. I knew it was coming. I knew I had him. The last card flipped. There it was. An ace.

  Raked it in. Balls deep.

  For almost a year after that, I followed the flame of my cigarette and just couldn’t lose. I was, to quote Tupac, straight muthafuckin’ ballin’. Winning hands followed by exploding roars of joy followed by victorious pats on the back and endless bowls of noodles and celebratory fruit plates.

  Mind you, the parade wasn’t just for me. When I won, everybody won, from the railbirds on the sidelines shouting, “You very lucky, man!” and receiving my tips in return, to the people who bet on my bets. The dealers loved me; the floor men loved me. Servers and porters were at my beck and call. Fetching a pack of sugar resulted in a $10 tip. I was everyone’s personal ATM, the sure stock in that underground market of highs and lows. All chips, no dips.

  I kept going, playing heavy games with yellows and blacks. Big bets, $60 to $120 a round. $5,000 pots. This was hard-core pro-level shit. I had to bring it. For myself and for the village that popped up around me.

  I hardly ever went back to the Asian games room, but the tale of my rise in poker had taken on mythological proportions there. My old trolls from Pan 9, the same ones who edged me out just months earlier, found their way to my side, giving me pats on the back and lighting my cigarettes. A guy couldn’t ask for anything more. My team was together again. I was back.

  Eventually, I began to spend more time at the casino than I did in my normal day-to-day life. Two, three weeks could fly by, and I wouldn’t even notice. I went through the entire teller-training program at the local First Federal Bank but didn’t show up on my first day behind the window. I went through jobs at CompUSA and Pick ’n Save, daydreaming about the moment I could clock out and get back into the action.

  All the while, the game permeated my being, and the whole world was filtered through the lens of luck. The number of green lights I hit on the way to the casino. The spot where I parked. The door I entered. The amount of dandruff I saw. The amount of dirt under a fingernail. The marks on a chip. The way an ice cube melted. And the way the flame lit my cig was the direction, I thought, where I needed to find my luck.

  I started getting deep.

  I grew whiskers at the tables.

  I went from the Bike to bigger, higher-limit games at other steel-city casinos. The Normandie Casino was a few streets away in nearby Gardena. Eventually I made it to L.A.’s own Vegas-style big ballin’ tuxedo illusion of opulence: Commerce Casino in the City of Commerce.

  I took in at least $1,000 a night; many times, much more. I went almost every day. About the only time I wasn’t there was when I was having fun with my winnings. That’s when I’d be dropping a G a night at Korean nightclubs in Koreatown and East Hollywood. I’d roll up in my Mazda RX-7 that I bought for cash on Robertson Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Red, dropped to the floor, Ricaro racing seats, turbo, see ya!

  In my hand, not a beeper, not a pager, but a fucking Motorola StarTAC with a thin battery pack. That shit was unheard of back in ’92. If you had the fat battery pack, you might as well stay with yo’ momma and bake Toll House cookies at home. If you had a cell phone, you better come correct.

  And I came correct.

  “Where my waiter at?!” as I rolled up to the club.

  I’d valet, light my cigarette, say what up to some other homies, give a hug and kiss to some girls looking all fine in their black miniskirts and low-cut blouses. Then my vest-wearing waiter, Peter Pan, would greet me. Korean waiters go by nicknames; it’s how we do.

  “Ahnyunghaseo” with a big-ass bow, smile, and warm welcome. Basically, “Welcome, my king, let me take you to your lair.”

  I would sink into a velvet booth with my boys. There was Yogi, drinking like he was getting ready to hibernate for the winter. Yong Tweezy, who had such a thick Frida Kahlo unibrow that we would tell him to get some tweezers and pluck them fucking umbrellas. Then there were the other guys that rounded out the crew: Davy Baby, Batako, John John Boy, Marty Party, Pong Gil.

  Within seconds, three bottles of Crown Royal, a pitcher of ice-cold Coke, a huge platter of fruit piled with watermelon, oranges, grapes, apples, bananas, strawberries, persimmons, and whatever else is in season would arrive. That’s L.A. for you: eating local, even after midnight in a K-town nightclub in 1992.

  Another silver bowl, this one filled with ice-cold sweetened milk and diced fruit, would arrive, along with the maru anju, an octagonal platter filled with dried anchovy, peanuts, wasabi peas, beef jerky, sweet and salty nori, salted plums.

  One night after spending almost $2,000 at the club, then going for some kimchi and soup at Hodori Jip on Olympic and Vermont, I was wired. Filled with whiskey, kisses, and phone numbers, I went to the Beverly Center and walked into the twenty-four-hour electronics store. Drunk, full of steam and testosterone, I bought the biggest TV on the floor. Fifty-two inches, signed, sealed, and delivered.

  Restaurants were my other indulgence. I initially didn’t know much about chefs or what the culinary world was supposed to be. I just knew that I had money, these restaurants were expensive, and I had the means to buy the access and the food. So, off we went.

  L.A. always gets short shrift as a culinary city, but if you actually lived here in the early 1990s, you would have experienced food as good as anywhere else—just without a dress code. At first it was eating just to be baller. The Water Grill had a grand space and was, as it is now, one of the best spots in town for seafood. Tiers and tiers of oysters, big shrimp cocktails, lobster tails, crab, clams. That was the first place I tasted a mignonette. It made me rethink lemon and Tabasco. I started to understand that certain people ran these restaurants. Chefs.

  Röckenwagner was my first foray into the chef world of L.A. It was a restaurant that blew me away. I picked the spot because I saw Röckenwagner on the cover of his cookbook, hugging a huge stalk of asparagus. The restaurant was a peaceful refuge from the rest of the city, a soothing space with huge, high windows, smooth concrete, pale beechwood, bamboo, and skylights.

  I immediately thought I should have dressed up more, before deciding fuck that. I had just gone to the Beverly Center and got me them new Jordans, black and Carolina baby blue. New jeans. New Mossimo shirt, worn straight out of the store.

  I met my uncle inside. Hello, hello, hello. We the only Asians up in this muthafucka, man. “No, no wine, just a Coke for me, please.”

  The asparagus was so tender and rich, yet felt so light. The potatoes—man, how did they do that? I felt like I was flying.

  “Can I have more bread, please?”

  Man, they are really nice here.

  “You are so kind, thank you. Thank you.”

  I was amazed. I was learning.

  I found Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger’s City Café and Border Grill, L.A. institutions that helped put Mexican food on the national map. At Matsuhisa, I tasted new-style sashimi for the first time. Before chef Nobu Matsuhisa, it was all California rolls and thick-cut maguros. He flipped that shit around, got the best fish, cut it real thin, and laid it flat on a plate. He’d then hit it with scorching hot sesame oil right before you ate it, splashed with ponzu and jalapeños.

  Campanile, in a building originally built for Charlie Chaplin, was unique to me. I was treated like a cockroach that had crawled out of the sewer for a tour of the city, but the food was delicious. If only I could have demanded that we be treat
ed correctly, it would have been different, but no: my pops always told me to reserve my emotions in public, be polite, be humble, shy away from conflict, be clean, respect others. Fuck that, I thought, but thank you very much is what I actually said as I was dissed, forgotten, told to move aside, seated in the sorriest table in the smallest corner, spoken to s-l-o-w-l-y and loudly.

  Despite all that, I loved the food. The table, marooned out in the boondocks, gave me a peekaboo shot right into the restaurant’s kitchen, and I saw salt falling out of hands like rain from the sky. I loved how the spoons fit in the cooks’ hands, how the chicken glistened. The salmon was moist and earthy; the mushrooms tasted of the forest. Ragout was my new favorite word. I felt like I had tasted California.

  Things were better next door at La Brea Bakery. The olive bread, baguettes, chocolate cherry bread, pugliese, Pullman loaves, all displayed on rustic wood racks, were revelations. I tasted the crust, the salt, the dense but airy texture, and was hooked. I loaded up my car with the bread and just gave it away, to share the wealth.

  No lie, these restaurants, even Campanile, were fucking amazing. The big-screen televisions were great. The girls were gorgeous. At the end of the day, though, the money and the honey weren’t the reasons I went home to the tables. The reason was the game’s action, its culture, its people, its grind. Rake that shit in, stack ‘em, smoke ’em if you got ’em, throw a humble smile, tip the dealer, wink at that girl again.

  That was my rotation. That was my addiction.

  I was a king, right? El muthafuckin’ Rey.

  What I didn’t see then, even though I could see luck and I could channel luck, was that my destiny—and the destiny of every addict—is always to lose.

  After about a year of being king of the kingdom, I got stuck, and my luck slowly drained. And with it, my riches became ashes. The rise was all Goodfellas Ray Liotta Handycam into the restaurant. The downfall was faster than a ride down the highest roller coaster at Magic Mountain. I lost the game. I lost my friends. I lost myself.

  The problem was, I winked at all the pretty ladies in the room, but I never gave that wink to my friend Lady Luck enough. I never listened to the advice and the pleas from the spirit to slow it down, to respect her power. I was too selfish. So one day, she got up and left, and I went on as if she had not left me behind. I convinced myself that it was her loss, that it was she who had lost the man of her dreams, that I wasn’t the loser. Fuck her, I thought. I run this shit.

  I could hear the little birdie saying Elvis had left the building, but I couldn’t stop. That’s when things became dangerous. I started to rush hands, force luck, make aggressive, ego-driven moves. Before that, it had all been natural. Swish.

  It started innocuously. All the elements were the same. All eyes on me. Big bets. This hand, though, I lost. And that hand, too. A few hundred dollars, gone. The air deflated. The chatter halted. Everyone quieted.

  At first those awkward moments of silence dissipated quickly, and everyone got back on my horse again. “You can do it, don’t worry don’t worry, home run next time, we make it all back, four ways four ways you bet you bet we back we back we all win, ya ya ya ya ya . . .”

  So we’d all get back on that horse. I believed that I couldn’t let my friends, my investors, down. I had to win. I had to be the man. Always.

  Every day was a new day. I’d bring back money from my hiding spots at home and briefly be on top again, only to get greedy and lose. Badly. Hundreds of dollars went, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands.

  In the meantime, new kings were crowned, and those new young muthafuckas threw chips at me like I was a has-been railbird troll, like I needed their fucking charity.

  They knew of my legend, my reign. But they looked at me as if to say, Get out of the way, old man. Your time is done. Go read a book or something.

  I couldn’t even get in the game anymore. The same floor men whom I had previously tipped thousands of dollars, the same dealers, the same waiters and porters would tell me now, “Players only around game. Excuse me. Don’t crowd the area, sir. You can’t eat or order food if you are not playing.”

  And who could blame them? No one wanted to be around a loser. The moment you become a black cat or you walk under that ladder, no one wants to touch you or talk to you. The crowd doesn’t hate you or forget about you. It just can’t afford you anymore.

  I traveled up and down the state looking for games, hoping to find my luck: Fresno, San Jose, San Mateo, San Diego Indian Reservations. But I never found it. The pros knew, even as I didn’t, that I was a balloon leaking hot air.

  It was more than just losing that was brutal. Without the game, I couldn’t breathe. I suffocated in open air; my skin felt pierced by a trillion tiny needles; white noise congested my thoughts. I just needed to get my fix, to get back in there, to feel the felt on my fingers, the chips in my hand, then . . . ah. Cigarette, gin and tonic, cards, beef chow fun, Dodgers game, pretty lady, milk shake.

  For the next year and a half, well into 1994, I was in freefall, going through the same hungry, repetitive motions. When I ran out of my own money to get my fix, I borrowed it. Asked my cousins for a hundred bucks, spit out of an ATM, taken without explanation. At home, I scrounged around for change. Every pocket in every coat, in every shirt, in every pair of pants. Behind the television, maybe, between the couch cushions, under the bed.

  My room emptied as I hit the pawn shops in West Hollywood, selling whatever I could: my Burberry pea coat, a gold necklace from my birthday, my beloved cassette tape collection of Big Daddy Kane, Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Poor Righteous Teachers. When I ran out of the good stuff, I brought in toothbrushes and other worthless crap. Soon, though, the Russians who owned the shops saw right through me. After a few visits, they asked me what the fuck I was doing and why I was bringing them this shit. Then they locked me out. I remembered Aardvark’s on Melrose took clothes. I sold the rest of my clothes and shoes.

  When I ran out of stuff to pawn or sell, I searched for shit to steal. With the exception of the rent money I collected from my roommates for our apartment, everything was fair game. That rent was my only anchor, the only thing I never touched, the one place where I drew the line.

  Instead, I stole from my parents. They had upgraded from Nolan Ryan’s house to a grand Spanish-style stucco house in a gated community on the seventeenth fairway of Coto de Caza Country Club in Mission Viejo. I’d roll right through those gates in the middle of the day, when I knew my parents were at work. I knew they had no idea what was going on with me, where I was going, how I was drowning. My mom’s food always was on the table—her kimchi, her salted fish, her fish egg soup—as if she were waiting for her little boy to come home. But her little boy hadn’t been home in months. Her little boy ignored the smiling framed family photos and went straight for his mother’s closet. Her little boy demanded to know why wasn’t there more money in her pockets? In her purse?

  Why?

  Why??

  Why???

  Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck.

  I swiped my dad’s credit cards and used them to buy gift cards, which I used to buy small dollar items, with the balance returned in cash. The cash turned into chips that potentially could be turned into millions.

  I looked around and found video games, my sister’s harp, old clocks. More things to pawn. Everything will be okay, I told myself. I’ll get it all back.

  At last, there was nothing left to borrow, find, or steal.

  And that was when I finally lifted the anchor and dipped into the rent. A little toe at first, then the whole body, until I was drowning.

  At the tables, I went back to the foods that once brought me luck. Milk shakes, fruit plates, Hong Kong–style crispy chow mein with beef sauce, ph. Soon, though, I couldn’t waste my money on food. I needed every last chip to survive. Instead I went in with others on an order of chicken tenders. Or stole a bite of a burger, humbly requested a French fry.

  I couldn’t believe it. In my heyday,
I took Telly Savalas for his last chips—that’s taking all of Kojak’s lollipops, muthafucka. I went from having cigarettes lit for me, eating my beef chow fun, getting my massage, hearing the applause, and winking at that girl to being the guy who lit the cigarettes, gave the massage, applauded the high roller for a fifty-cent chip. I once stuffed tens of thousands of C-notes under my bed, but now was reduced to a pocket empty but for a sawbuck, a fiver, and some change.

  I was back to blue chips. And struggling with my $1–2 hold ’em game. I couldn’t hold on to anything, really. But I was convinced that if I played my cards just right, if I treated my short stack of blue disks carefully, I could still win it all back. Have my cigarettes lit for me. Hear the applause. Holler at that girl.

  One night a guy won the jackpot and cashed out almost $150,000. Everyone, me included, was in awe. Envious. A few hours later someone came running in, yelling that a person had been killed in the parking lot. That was Mr. Jackpot, who, along with his girl, had been split in half with an ax on the way to his car.

  Did I say it correctly, or did you not just hear me???

  Split in muthafuckin’ half with an ax like a watermelon.

  And yet. Even a double homicide couldn’t keep me away. I still was at the hold ’em table the next day. I reeked like fungus. I hadn’t been back to my apartment in weeks. I had forgotten about my friends, whose rent money I had gambled away.

  My head was down. I counted my chips, one by one. Imagining, dreaming, that everything would be right again.

  The hand was laid out. I had a king and a seven. On the table, a seven.

  I made my bet. Head still down. Then I felt an extra beat in the script that wasn’t right. My head was still down, waiting for the next card.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. I finally looked up. Across the room, my friends, angry about being nearly evicted. My mom, an ocean of despair.

  Behind me, my dad, his hand on my shoulder. Heavy and cold as ice.