Paper Sons: A Memoir

by Dickson Lam

  Hercules completed twelve tasks as penance. His sin—slaughtering his wife and kids, a result of his evil stepmother casting a spell of madness on him. When he snapped out of it, he became distraught, suicidal. The only path toward redemption, the oracle at Delphi advised him, was to serve his archenemy, King Eurytheus, who was also his cousin.

  Many of the twelve labors Hercules was given sound heroic: capture the Erymanthian Boar, the Cretan Bull, the Golden Hind of Artemis. Slay the Nemean Lion, the Stymphalian Birds, the Lernaean Hydra. Other labors reduce the son of Zeus to a glorified thief: steal the Mares of Diomedes, the girdle of Hippolyta, the cattle of Geryon, the apples of Hesperides. The most humiliating labor: clean the Augean stables, shoveling the shit of over a thousand cattle, immortal cattle, their dung gigantic. His final and most difficult labor: enter the underworld and kidnap Cerberus.

  I wrote about this in sixth grade, a report on Hercules, part of a packet of makeup work I had to complete. I’d caught the flu weeks into the start of middle school, staying home for an entire month. I’d lie on the couch during the day with a stuffy nose, rereading the story of Hercules during commercials of sitcom reruns, Good Times, What’s Happening!!, Diff’rent Strokes, the protagonists of these shows, sons without their fathers. J.J. lost his in a car accident. Roger’s dad was MIA so long that when he returned for a visit, he mistook Rerun for his son. Arnold lived with a father, but Mr. D didn’t count to me. Not because he was white but because he was a replacement, the original elsewhere.

  My mother brought me from doctor to doctor, herbalist to herbalist, all Chinese men. Their medicine had little effect on me, a kid whose father had just moved halfway across the country.

  Hercules spent his mortal life apart from his father. His demise occurred when he was tricked into wearing a poisonous cloak. The poison ate through his skin to his bones. Before Hercules died, he built a funeral pyre and lay across it. He lit the flame and his body burned. Watching from Mount Olympus, Zeus, king of the gods, intervened. Thunder ripped the air, as if the sky itself were cracking open. A cloud formed below Hercules and carried him upwards to his father. His mortal half had perished, and he entered Olympus as a god, joining the ranks of the other immortals, the son and father finally united but only upon the son’s death.

  A flock of pigeons dawdled on Market Street, chests puffed out as if patrolling their grounds. They didn’t scatter when we approached till SHIM charged at them. I could hear skateboards, their wheels rolling on the ground.

  “If the white boy says anything stupid,” Hollywood said, “bust his shit with the quickness.” He threw a haymaker in the air.

  Skateboarders lounged on the concrete steps that rimmed the brick plaza of the Embarcadero. They took baggy pants to another level—the potato-sack look. They wore their hats perfectly backwards, not the least off-centered, as though for aerodynamic reasons. One leapt off a platform, his board flipped underneath him, rider and board reuniting on the landing. No adult in sight. This was before the Giants ballpark was built by the waterfront, before tracks were laid behind the plaza for vintage trolleys, before the ferry building across the street with its clock tower received a face-lift, the former baggage area transforming into an upscale marketplace, chic restaurants calling the renovated building home. Before all of that, the immediate vicinity around the Embarcadero Plaza would be abandoned at night, and the plaza belonged to skaters, an unintentional gift, their lair, their jungle gym.

  “Which one?” SIKE asked.

  “Don’t give them one of the little ones,” CLUE said.

  “Nah,” TYMER said, “can’t make it that easy.”

  On the far side was a fountain, a monstrous sculpture, a family of cubic tentacles that bent and twisted around each other. Water would pour from the faces of the tentacles, square holes, but this night they were dry, the basin an empty pool.

  Two skaters coasted towards us on their boards. The one with dreadlocks greeted TYMER. They knew one another. At first the guy tried to dissuade us, but when that didn’t work he asked us not to pick on his friends. Instead, he offered up a group of skaters he said nobody gave a shit about.

  “I bet one of them got some bread,” Hollywood said. “RANK, SHIM—showtime.”

  We mobbed across the plaza. Skating ceased. I tightened my fists and recalled a scene from Malcolm X where a fellow inmate explains to Malcolm that the white man is the Devil. Malcolm flashes back to the white men he has known. All seem evil. My best friend in middle school, a white kid, would pull his eyes back to slant them at me. “Go back to your own neighborhood,” a white cop had said. “Do that stuff there.” A white bus driver had testified she saw me tagging on her bus. The red marker she swore she saw me passing to Rob was actually red Play-Doh. I hadn’t written a thing and showed the judge photos of the bus. None of the graffiti was red, yet the white judge found me guilty. He’d made my mom pay a $271 fine and sentenced me to scrub buses.

  I needed more fuel. I thought historically: slavery, genocide, rape.

  “That one in the middle,” TYMER said.

  The skater he referred to sat slouched, smoking a cigarette, his board at his feet. He didn’t appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed—the only skater in his group not to notice us marching toward them—but he was bigger than me, a little on the chubby side, someone it wouldn’t be wise for me to wrestle. He didn’t look up until SHIM and I stood over him. His friends inched away.

  “What’s up, man,” he said innocently.

  SHIM looked at me as though it were my turn to go. Everything I thought of saying sounded like something from Menace II Society.

  SHIM patted the pockets of the skater’s cargo pants, and I followed his lead.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” The skater dropped his cigarette and pushed my hand away, but not with much force, as though not wanting to antagonize me.

  SHIM dug his hand deep into one of the pockets. I reached into another pocket and pulled out some change. I opened my palm: a nickel and a few pennies.

  “That’s all I got,” he said. He took out his keys and a bus transfer and turned his pockets inside out. We fingered the lining of each pocket, but there was nothing, not even lint.

  I tried to hand the coins to TYMER.

  “Fuck I’m going to do with that?”

  “He’s got to have more,” SHIM said. He patted down the skater’s socks.

  The guy apologized profusely.

  I kicked his board to the side.

  “This don’t count,” CLUE said, laughing. He shook his hand in the air, as though waving the whole thing off.

  “Bust his shit, RANK,” Wood said.

  I had seconds to make a move. The window would close and boom—RANK’s a sucka. Told you. But what if my swing missed? Or if it landed but weakly? Or if he fought back? My first punch had to be a knockout. I had to swing with anger, rage, revenge. Go bonkers.

  I thought I smelled my father, but it was just the skater’s cigarette burning on the ground. My father’s story might’ve been complicated, but my version was simple. He’d abandoned us; he was an asshole. He’d slapped my mother to the floor, her hair tied up in a bun coming undone.

  SHIM threw the first punch, his only punch, a cross that snapped the skater’s head back. His pasty neck was exposed. I pounced on him. A barrage of punches to the head. His torso fell back onto the platform, and he rolled his head side to side to dodge my blows. He tried to kick me away, but it only made me pummel him harder. When he’d lift his head up, I’d hammer it back onto the platform, his head knocking on concrete. I couldn’t let him leave. I wanted to draw blood, proof. I wanted my knuckles to scrap his soft tissue, his nose, his cheeks, his eye sockets, but he shielded his face with his forearms and then turned over face down. I pounded the back of his buzz-cut head. He was saying something, begging perhaps. He curled his body almost in a fetal position, still guarding his face with
his arms. My fists couldn’t penetrate, so I began striking his ear. His legs weren’t flailing anymore; they jerked feebly.

  I was pulled off, swallowed in a parade. Bodies heaped upon me. I was grabbed, shaken by the shoulder. I heard my name as a growl.

  “That’s my dog!” Wood said.

  “Fucked that white boy up,” TYMER slapped my hand.

  “Good shit,” SIKE smiled.

  “I ain’t never seen a Chinese dude that quick,” CLUE said and swung viciously at the air. “You should see that dude’s face,” SHIM said.

  One of the skater’s friends checked on him. The skaters in the plaza were all standing, eyeing me, as though waiting for my next move.

  “Time to bounce,” I said. I kept my fists balled up as we swaggered across the plaza. I was so amped, it was hard to imagine the adrenaline leaving my body, where it would go.

  I teach my students how to attack the king. I co-teach a course called Peaceful Warriors. We play chess. We box. We kick. We grapple. We roll. We write. We chase each other with paper knives in the school gym. “This is a real-world application,” the guest instructor says. I say, “Everything is related.” We bring in other guest instructors. One is nicknamed the Flying Lion. Another the Rhino. He trains us at a gym owned by The Pitbulls. We have the students the whole day for three weeks. We’re an obstacle, their last hurdle before summer break.

  I use a projector to show my high school students the “Opera Game,” a chess match played by Paul Morphy in 1858 at an opera house in Paris. Morphy, a twenty-one-year-old sensation, hailing from New Orleans, had embarked to Europe to challenge their top players, to claim the title of world champion. Perhaps the opera was a break from his quest. His opponents, two aristocrats teaming up against him, the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard, were only casual players, albeit strong ones.

  I push a button on my laptop, and the narrator of the chess program begins. He has John Madden-like enthusiasm. If a pawn promotes, he shouts “Touchdown!” If a king flees check, he yells, “Avoiding the sack!” The students laugh at the metaphors. They say it’s silly, but they pay attention. I show them the CD case for the program. On the cover the narrator is dressed in a white shirt and tie, his sleeves rolled up.

  “This guy’s the first Black grandmaster,” I say.

  “What that mean?” a boy with cornrows named Junior asks.

  “There’s only a thousand grandmasters in the world.”

  “Only? Sounds like a lot.”

  “Can we play now?” the other students ask. One student’s eyes fix on the crate crammed with rolled-up chessboards and zipped bags stuffed with plastic armies.

  “Watch how Morphy develops his pieces,” I say, “how they work together to ensnare the king.” I fast forward the game to a position we reach shortly after Morphy sacrifices his knight in exchange for something intangible, momentum. I ask the students what move Morphy should make next. They’re all wrong. Morphy castles queenside. His rook now covers the file adjacent to the enemy king. The Duke and Count line their rook up with Morphy’s. A flurry of exchanges ensues.

  “White to move,” I say. “Morphy has mate in two.”

  The winning move is White sacrificing its queen, but the students miss this. They hoard what they have. Their minds won’t consider a variation that begins with losing their strongest piece. But Morphy’s sacrifice involves no risk. I show them that the check- ing queen cuts Black’s king off in every direction. Black is forced to capture the queen with his knight, and White’s rook, on the next move, barrels down the file to mate the king. This two-move combination might be classified as an amateur-level puzzle, but my students have difficulty seeing even one move ahead.

  We attempt to make connections between chess and life. Develop a plan. Follow through. Persevere. Get back up. Survive. We don’t discuss the dangers of devoting your life to attacking the king. Players have gone nuts. It’s rare but an undeniable phenomenon. Bobby Fischer’s the poster child. The biggest star in the history of chess, so big that to call him a star actually diminishes his impact. The Jewish kid from Brooklyn conquered Russia single-handedly, a tale from scripture. That’s when he quit. Holed himself up somewhere, studying conspiracy theories. Next time we hear from him, he’s got the beard of a bedraggled Santa and quotes Mein Kampf.

  Vladimir Nabokov dedicated a novel to the mad-chess-player phenomenon, he himself a composer of chess problems, including ones requiring retrograde analysis, where the solver must work backwards to find how the present position was reached. In Nabokov’s The Defense, Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, based on an actual player, begins as a child prodigy and rises to become a contender for world champion, only to suffer a mental breakdown, eventually going insane. He enters a room and sees chess moves “in every corner.” A champagne bottle is “a bucket with a gold-necked Pawn sticking out of it,” a drummer is a chess knight, his head “arched, thick-maned.” Luzhin lives in a chess puzzle and realizes that mating the king is impossible. A metaphor cannot be contained. He does believe, however, that he’s found the solution, the “key to the combination.” He leaps from his bathroom window and perishes.

  Morphy’s life has a similar arc, though less dramatic. When he returned to New Orleans, he quit chess, at least professionally, and became a recluse. He believed someone was trying to poison him and would only eat food prepared by his mother. He’d roam the streets having conversations with himself. After one of these walks, he suffered a stroke and was found dead in his bathtub, forty-seven years old. We remember his “Opera Game,” the speed at which he attacks and crushes his opponent off the board, but most of Morphy’s games weren’t as thrilling. They’re slow, methodical. Attacking the king is one side of the coin. Defending it is the other.

  It can just as easily be the pressure to protect that drove Morphy, Fischer, and Luzhin mad—Nabokov’s title pointing us in that direction—the paranoia cultivated by hours over the board imagining the ways your adversary might attempt to destroy your kingdom, the stress of escaping from the blitzkrieg of a foe, and then the endgame, where the major pieces have fallen, and your king is out in the open, exposed, the piece you had been shielding from action, now expected to lead the charge in the phase of the game where checks are fired at you at every turn, sending you scrambling for shelter behind a pawn.

  When Luzhin entered the room with the bucket and drummer, he saw a knight and a pawn but no king. His majesty was elsewhere, tormenting Luzhin from afar.

  They decided to waive the last task on the list, fading on a blunt. It was getting late, and there was only so long you can keep that many of us together, but I still had to pull a runner, a bottle of malt liquor the objective. Sharing a forty would end the night.

  SHIM and I went into the liquor store alone. An Arab guy with a light beard sat behind a high counter. The store was small and cramped like we were inside this guy’s trailer home. We opened the fridge and each grabbed a bottle of St. Ides. We slithered down the narrow aisle, and the cashier glared at us.

  “Put that back!” He slammed his hand on the counter.

  We darted out the door and down the block, past a crowd of dope fiends who cheered us on. The Arab guy was giving chase. He was big, a bear. “You son of a bitch!” he said. I ducked into an alley, forcing him to commit to one thief. He stayed on my tail, close enough I could hear him panting. I tucked the perspiring bottle of malt liquor under my arm like a football, and the bear began to recede in the dark, but his roar didn’t fade. A cry sharp and desperate, it boomed through the alley, an echo I couldn’t outrun.

  fake it till you make it

  I’d just started at City, turned eighteen, when I learned Bah Ba’s name was dropped from our lease. He’d still send checks, but it was official—he was no longer part of our household. Wouldn’t have to fly back for those meetings with the housing authority, and he’d be spared from having to see us, and from us having to see him.
It was a joint decision between him and my mother, perhaps mutually beneficial, though it wasn’t clear who came up with the idea. Four years would pass before I’d see him again.

  Ga Jeh was still going to City as well, finishing up her associate degree in the Hotel and Restaurant program. I’d stop over at the cafeteria, and she’d come out from the kitchen in her chef outfit and hook me up with lunch. I didn’t know what she had planned after graduation, whether she’d be a cook or work in a hotel. All that seemed certain was that community college would be the end of her education. She was ready for a full-time job, enough money for her own place.

  I had to get used to rolling solo bolo. Rob and most of my friends were a year younger, still trying to graduate high school. The friends I knew at City, we’d see each other around and stop to chat, but hanging out at a community college wasn’t like high school. Nobody posted up in the hallways. People were in and out. They had jobs. I had two. One at a video store, the first time someone ever called me “Sir.” The other was tutoring two elementary school kids. We’d read together at the library, easy money. Sometimes their grandpa—their moms and pops were out of the picture—had to work late, so I’d take the kids for pizza. Other times he’d work so late I’d take the two of them back home to Oakland on the BART, walking them to their house in the Fruitvale, past taquerias and prostitutes.

  I got the tutoring job on the strength of my first report card at City, four As and a B. Maybe my turnaround had something to do with the collegiate atmosphere. Teachers weren’t interested in controlling you. Didn’t ask you to take off your hat, force you to spit out your gum, and no more senseless worksheets. Best of all, you didn’t need permission to take a piss. And if you thought a teacher was lame, you could drop the class with no hassle. Not like in high school, where you had to persuade a counselor who’d give you some BS, talking about how in life you couldn’t change your boss.