by Zack Love
The hologram then displayed a montage of memorable performances by Delilah Nakova, showing her evolution as an actress taking on ever more important, challenging, and high-profile roles. The mini biopic concluded with a televised interview that had particularly struck Evan, in which the eighteen-year-old A-list actress was asked about her acting plans during college.
“I’ve decided to cut back on my production schedule so that I can get the most out of my time at Brown College…What good is fame and wealth without knowledge and perspective?”
The hologram flickered and then vanished. Delilah Nakova was still sitting in front of him, enveloped by the halo. She moved closer to Evan.
“I’m so sorry about everything that happened to you tonight, Evan. You really didn’t deserve any of this.”
“I know,” Evan replied. “And now there’s no way that you’ll ever be with me…I’m even more below your level than I was before…”
“Don’t say that, Evan,” she replied warmly.
The ambulance doors in the back of the vehicle swung open and some of Delilah’s college friends climbed in. “Come on, Delilah! We’re late. What are you still doing talking to that loser?”
“Wait…Let me just make sure he’s OK.”
Evan was dumbfounded by the goodness of her soul.
“Evan, are you OK?” Delilah asked.
The image of Delilah dissolved into an indistinguishable blur, and then materialized again into the face of the female ambulance staffer next to him.
“Are you OK?” the staffer asked again.
“Yeah, I think so,” Evan said, shaking his weary and confused head a little. “What a bad trip!”
“Nah. Traffic was nothing. If it was the middle of rush hour – that’s a bad trip,” she replied. “But we’re here now. We’ll wheelchair you over to the emergency room.”
Chapter 9
Narc
Narc, Evan’s freshman-year roommate at Brown College, was quite the “bad boy” compared to Evan. Yet even Narc could not have imagined what would one day happen to Evan in the back of an SUV. But because the two longtime friends stopped talking a few months before Evan’s fang-filled-fellatio, Narc wouldn’t find out the crazy details until the two reconciled, several months after the incident.
Narc embodied a complex composite of cultural contradictions. At home with his traditional Chinese parents, he was Yi Wang, the respectful, responsible, and disciplined eldest son who lent a hand around the house and helped his younger sisters with their homework. But outside of the home, his high school buddies nicknamed him “Narc” for always being the first to procure and consume whatever new narcotic constituted the dare du jour. At age fifteen, the exotically handsome and precociously smooth-talking Narc was also the first among them to lose his virginity.
While Narc was still a “model minority” whose grades consistently ranked among the top five percent of students in all of his classes, he had a wild edge to him that most of his fellow Asian classmates seemed to lack. He also felt physically different from them. At six-two, he always stood among the tallest students in his high school class, and he would grow another inch by graduation. He was in love with the NBA and hip-hop culture, and would much rather hang out with high school dropouts “from the ‘hood” who could match him in hoops or rhymes, than discuss the physics problem set or history reading with the other high achievers in his honors classes. He had hundreds of NBA trivia and scorecard statistics memorized and would regularly debate the virtues of various players and teams with anyone who challenged his predictions about any particular game. Narc was also the only non-black member of the basketball gang with whom he regularly played ball on the court near the Newark, New Jersey home where he grew up. Indeed, the other members fondly dubbed him the “Chinese Niggah,” which they soon shortened to “Chiggah.” Narc embraced the term as a token of respect and acceptance from his basketball “brothas.” Whenever the tall, gold-chain-sporting-gangsta athletes ran into him, they greeted him with a wide-armed, high-fiving, “’Sup Chiggah?” To which Narc would reply: “Jus bein’ cool, yo.”
“You catch that tight Nets game last night?” one of them might ask.
“It was off the hizzle for rizzle my nizzle,” Narc would reply with wild gesticulations, to indicate that the game was truly something to behold.
“Word,” they would say, in agreement, with a high five.
Yi Wang artfully lived what was essentially a double life. His parents knew nothing about “Narc,” his gangsta/hip-hop friends, his recreational drug use, or his promiscuous lifestyle (by age seventeen he had already slept with eight females in the area, including two from his high school). They knew that Yi loved basketball, since he was one of the star players on his high school team, and they knew that he didn’t have nearly as many Asian friends as they would have liked, but that was all they knew of his rebellious side. Likewise, Narc’s friends knew almost nothing of Yi Wang, his desire to go to a top college primarily to please his parents, or the dutifully serious person he became while helping with his family’s laundry business. Narc kept the laundry business secret to prevent his friends from showing up and meeting his parents or seeing how humble, soft-spoken, and respectful he was around his family.
As a result of his double life, Yi effectively spoke four languages. Whenever he was in the presence of family and other Cantonese speakers, he spoke Cantonese. If he was with family and non-Cantonese speakers, then he spoke polite and proper – even subdued – English. But on the street with his basketball buddies, or in his high school clique, Narc spoke a street English that combined hip-hop vernacular with copious profanity. If he was writing a term paper or an exam, or delivering some oral presentation to his class, then he switched to high academic English.
His friends did have the impression that Narc was strangely protective of his identity and his family. On one occasion, in the eleventh grade, one of Narc’s high school friends learned of Narc’s sexual exploits with a particularly attractive girl in their class, and jokingly exclaimed, “You wanged her?!”
“Don’t disrespect family,” Narc snapped back, with a seriousness that was not to be questioned. Narc was not at all amused by the pun, which he viewed as a sacrilegious defamation of his family heritage.
His sensitivity to the issue began at age twelve, when he was regularly harassed by some fifteen-year-old students in his junior high school. The four adolescents regularly addressed him with racial slurs and taunted him about his last name until he confronted them about it one day. Narc was on the school basketball court with two friends when three of the four members of the gang appeared and began their racist insults. Two of the three kids were bigger than Narc, so they were hardly deterred when Narc threw his basketball aside, walked straight up to the largest member of the group, and said, with a cool, angry voice, “That was the last time that you make fun of my name or my race.” Emboldened by his bravado, they just sneered and shoved him.
Narc’s two friends standing nearby were too afraid to jump into the fray but ran to notify a teacher. By the time an adult came to break up the fight, Narc was badly beaten up but the three older kids who had harassed him looked just as thrashed. The school principal suspended everyone, including Narc, for two days and called everyone’s parents with a stern warning. But it was the last time that anyone ever maliciously mocked Narc about his race or his last name.
Narc’s acceptance of the nickname “Chiggah” was the only exception to his sensitivity about race, and it wasn’t until college that he would lighten up about the issue. Early in Narc’s first year of college, in the fall of 1989, Evan accidentally caught a glimpse of Narc’s eight inches of manhood and blurted out, “Wow!...Now I understand the origins of the Wang family name…”
“That’s not funny,” Narc snapped defensively at his roommate.
“Whoa, Narc. Don’t take offense, man. You’re representin’ as they say. Next time I hear anyone say that Asians are small, I’ll have them see you.�
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With that exchange, Narc became less protectively paranoid about his name, and started to take pride in the fact that he could personally undermine the stereotypical notions that people had of the Asian physique. When he and Evan went out together, he sometimes even referred to himself jokingly as a “Wangman,” if he was doing a particularly good job of making Evan more appealing to the women they approached.
Nevertheless, he stuck with the nickname “Narc” throughout college and afterwards, after growing attached to it. Evan and Narc’s other college buddies welcomed the name because it seemed short for “narcissist,” which – in their view – aptly described the stylishly dressed, mirror-obsessed college student. When he spent too much time getting ready for a night out or admiring himself in the mirror, they would pronounce his name “Narse” to tease him about his vanity. Narc in turn nicknamed Evan “Libby” as shorthand for “Evan the libido” and – when Evan was particularly out of control – Narc would call him “Whiplash Libby” to describe the neck injuries Evan suffered any time an attractive female passed by.
Although Narc had the grades and test scores to enroll in Princeton, he chose the slightly less prestigious but more liberal Brown College because it was farther from home and struck him as a less WASPy environment. It was a difficult choice for him, given how much his parents wanted him to stay local and go to a marginally more prestigious college, but he ultimately won them over with a promise to study pre-law or pre-med and get into a good graduate school.
While college provides a time and place for many people to rebel and explore their values, it had a certain moderating force on Narc, who had already done quite a bit of exploring and rebelling in high school. At Brown, Narc dabbled in drugs less often and became more intellectually and academically inclined (although he still regularly fantasized about the NBA and played for the college basketball team). In high school, hanging out with the gansta folks was a way to rebel against all of the myopic nerds of his class, but in college, he found that there were plenty of rebels among his intelligent classmates: students with crazy haircuts, whacky political views, unconventional post-college plans, and a drug record much worse than his. There were also plenty of Asians who broke the ethnic stereotype he so actively resisted in high school. Consequently, the need to rebel seemed less urgent, and being at Brown rather than Princeton was, in his mind, already a rebellion of sorts.
During college, Narc didn’t entirely abandon his “Chiggah” status; he still checked in with his gangsta friends at home during summer and holiday visits to Newark, and he had one friend and teammate from the Brown basketball team who was culturally identical to them, but with a high school diploma and stellar SAT scores.
Narc became even more of a “playa” in college, as he discovered how easy it was for him to attract women with his good looks, his mastery of pop and hip-hop culture, his impressive performances on the college basketball team, and his reputation for being extraordinary in the sack. By his senior year, several happy customers fondly referred to Narc as “Big Everlast” after learning from firsthand experience that his body was truly proportional and that he could perform as well in bed as he did on the court. Narc’s “scorecard,” as he liked to call it, improved substantially in college. And Evan, who was equally addicted to and skilled at pursuing women, made for an excellent wingman.
One vice that Narc acquired in college was collecting and consuming pornography. This bad habit actually became a point of contention between him and Evan, who was – despite his oversexed libido – somewhat opposed to the practice, for a variety of idiosyncratic and ideological reasons. Evan had enrolled in a women’s studies course thinking that he would meet enough women there to start a harem, but ironically ended up being influenced by certain feminist ideas – particularly once he started dating Zoe, a fellow student in the class.
Quite apart from any feminist objections, Evan also thought it was embarrassingly tacky to have a pornographic film playing on their living room television. He viewed masturbation as a personal activity, and considered pornography a mindless, masturbatory aid that should be viewed only privately, if at all. He was also somewhat squeamish about the possibility that someone – particularly Zoe – might come over unannounced and notice that there was a porno playing.
One time, when Evan was in the shower, Narc went out for some errands without turning off a porno that was playing in the living room. Narc had left the door unlocked and, a few minutes later, Zoe showed up unexpectedly early. When she loudly demanded an explanation from her shower-dripping date, Evan managed to convince her that he was doing preliminary research on a possible paper concerning the degradation of women in pornography.
Later that night, after she had left, Evan confronted Narc about the issue.
“What’s the big deal, yo?” Narc said passively, from the couch. “Watchin’ porn is part of my freedom.” His feet were propped up on the coffee table as he followed a basketball game blasting away on their TV. “It’s something I could never do at home. And the shit is cool. The porn professionals are smokin’.”
Narc looked over at Evan, who was sitting in the comfortable beanbag chair notorious for prompting armchair discussions and wildly speculative theories in anyone who sat in it.
“How can you call them professionals?” Evan objected. “They’re glorified prostitutes for God’s sake. And it’s totally demeaning to women, this porn crap.”
“If it’s so demeaning to women, why do you watch it?” Narc asked, looking back at the game.
“Only because you have that shit playing in the living room, so it’s hard not to notice it. But I would never go out buy a porn flick. And if you’d stop leaving those tapes lying around the house I swear to God I’d never plug one into the VCR.”
“Where’s your self control, you big hypocrite?” Narc asked derisively but lightheartedly.
“Look, I’m a little curious, but I’ll admit that it’s wrong, and I’m ready to swear off porn entirely if you’ll just help me to implement the decision.”
“I can’t believe this sanctimonious bullshit you’re tryin’ to feed me! You don’t think you’re demeaning women every time you go out and try to get laid?”
“That’s totally different.”
“Why?”
“Because there I have to deal with women as people, not sex objects.”
“You are so full of it, Evan! You’re dealing with them as people only so that you can ultimately deal with them as sex objects.”
“No. I’m dealing with them as people only so that we can deal with each other as sex objects. It’s a mutual exploitation. Whereas with porn you’re just exploiting them.”
“They’re exploiting my fuckin’ pocketbook, Evan! They’re profiting from my masturbation, so it’s a mutual exploitation. And it’s a free market system. They don’t have to become porn stars. Clearly, they like it on some level, or maybe the money makes it worth their while. But they freely chose that shit. Just like if you charm some babe into bed, she freely chose to go there with you.”
Evan got up from the beanbag chair and stood up, as if to make his closing argument.
“Look, even if you can come up with some convoluted capitalist justification for pornography, there’s no denying that it reduces women to their sexual anatomy…Imagine if you discovered that your mom or your sisters were in a porn!”
What started as a casual theoretical debate suddenly hit a raw nerve in Narc. He jumped to his feet, walked over to Evan and moved right up into his face, which was two inches below his, and said, “Don’t you ever bring my family into a conversation like this.” Narc looked as if at any moment he might use his lean and muscular arms to give Evan a facelift.
“Whoa. Whoa. Calm down, man,” Evan said, backing up a little.
“My family has nothing to do with this, OK?”
“Of course not. Of course not. Bad example. I think we need a beer for this conversation,” Evan said, backing away from Narc and moving towar
ds the kitchen. “Let’s take my family,” he continued, pulling a six-pack out of the fridge. “Imagine if you discovered that my sister – ”
“Take families out of this, OK?” Narc replied, this time less stridently.
In Narc’s mind, family was sacred and not to be combined with the profane, the sexual, or the morally dubious. As far as Narc was concerned, no man could ever go near his sisters unless he was prepared to be the most loyal, faithful, loving, caring, and providing husband of the best fairy tales he had ever heard. And, as far as he was concerned, his parents had had sex only three times – once to create him, and two more times to create his younger sisters.
While Narc’s parents seemed to him almost mechanically assiduous and asexual, particularly when it came to their laundry business or keeping the house in order, they were very much in love with each other. But their absolute devotion to each other and to their children expressed itself entirely in deeds and almost never in words or physical gestures. Only on a few, exceptionally rare occasions had Narc actually seen his parents become physically affectionate with one another.
When Narc’s youngest sister turned ten, and he was a sixteen-year-old who had more than proven himself capable of managing things in the house, his parents instituted a rule that they followed religiously ever since: after 11 p.m., their bedroom door was locked and they were not to be disturbed unless there was a bona fide emergency in the house. Narc always assumed that this was just their private time to sort out family issues, discuss private matters, and spend time alone, without the pressures of their children. It was unthinkable to Narc that anything sexual took place after 11 p.m. in their bedroom. And so Narc developed an idealized, consecrated sense of family as an impregnable, asexual unit of trust and support.
Evan had only an intuitive inkling of Narc’s complex feelings about family, but he realized that he needed to try a different tack if he was going to get anywhere with Narc on the pornography issue. Once they had each downed two beers, Evan tried a direct appeal to self-interest.