Afterparties

by Anthony Veasna So

  “Aren’t you supposed to be, like, setting up a party?” Rithy teases as he leans against the truck’s door and stretches out his legs. He’s sweating all over, probably from shooting hoops at his cousin’s house, and I can almost smell him. Everything Maly says about his body swirls in my head.

  “We’ve been exiled,” she tells him flatly. “’Cause every Ma has been a psycho since the genocide. It’s like, as long as they don’t overthrow a government and, you know, install a communist regime, they aren’t being total dicks.” Pleased with herself, Maly laughs.

  “Your Ma’s hella rad, you know it,” Rithy responds. “Old lady comes through with the beef sticks.” He raises the bottom of his shirt to wipe the sweat off his forehead, flashing that flat stomach of his. I don’t even care if it’s intentional. “What time’s the party again?”

  Maly flings both her hands toward the duplex, as though pushing it all away. “Go ask Ma Eng yourself. I’m fucking tired of her bullshit.”

  “Girl, just tell me,” Rithy says, biting his lip.

  “Look, we can be late for my dead mom’s birthday bash, okay, it’s fine.” She closes the distance between her face and Rithy’s. “We’re young and beautiful and the concept of time is a fucking buzzkill.”

  “Six is fine,” I chime in.

  “Oh, hey, Ves,” Rithy says, oblivious to my focus on the veins of his forearms. “Excited for college?”

  “You got any weed, Rithy?” Maly interjects, slamming back into her seat.

  Rithy twists his face into an even bigger smile. “You know I do.”

  With barely a nod, Maly tells me she’ll be right back, that if I leave she’ll be pissed. She gets out of the truck and walks Rithy to his uncle’s duplex, just down the block, as if leading a disoriented puppy home. His hand slides down her back to hover over her ass, which sways just enough with every step. He cocks his head slightly, to witness Maly by his side, before looking forward again. Even from here, I can tell how enraptured he is by her, how much his own dumb luck astounds him, that he should be so blessed this early in his life, all of us only three months into adulthood.

  AND HERE’S THE PART WHERE shit gets common, right? Or rather, here’s the part that makes outgrown Power Rangers twin sheets feel pretty awesome, allowing the srey to understand how men see her thick eyeliner and her fake nails, letting the proh assert power, for just a moment, over his own dark skin and his addict father with the bad, broken English. Here’s the part that seems like a revelation until it’s forgotten as life is lived, because nothing’s special about an adulthood spent in the asshole of California, which some government official deemed worthy of a bunch of PTSD’d-out refugees, farting out dreams like it’s success intolerant.

  This is the part just like the thai lakorns, those soap operas from Bangkok dubbed into Khmer and burned onto wholesale discs from Costco. The srey—raggedy and poor, flush with the blood of forgotten royalty, angry from the backstabbing of wills and inheritances—cons her way into the arms of the prince whose family is the very cause of her misfortune. She allows the scheme to redeem her family’s name to blind her to the feelings of real love developing beneath the high jinks, the pratfalls, her awkward but whimsical personality. Little does she know, everything will soon feel like a missed opportunity, as the prince enlists in the army to prove his manhood, because every Thai prince in every Thai soap, like every shitty proh in every shitty neighborhood, always craves some higher purpose.

  For now, though, the srey basks in the prince’s hot breath, the shock of secret touches, the rush of manipulation. And, hey, at least she isn’t the sidekick, the faggy best friend. Because there he is, in every episode of every different version of the same dumb story: the kteuy, sidelined to the bleachers, baking in the sun, expected to get off not by his own proh but simply by the idea of the srey he supports getting hers.

  Of course, all these depressing thoughts aside, I am relieved, regardless of how demeaning it feels, to have some peace as I wait for Maly and Rithy to finish fucking. I’m even happy for her, that on this nightmare of a day, she can find solace in her boy toy’s tight body. Though I’m assuming that’s how Maly feels about it. She hardly ever talks about her mom in a serious way.

  I look into the windows of the duplex where Ma Eng has lived since the eighties, since before Maly’s mom, her niece, committed suicide, and long before she took in Maly when Maly’s dad proved just another fuck-off Cambodian man. Ma Eng’s pointing antagonistically at the other Mas in her kitchen, instructing them on how to cook certain dishes—not amok—for the party tonight. She’s probably still pissed that Maly’s shown so little respect for the ceremony’s preparations. I wonder how Ma Eng must feel right now, clinging to the desperate wish that her dead sister’s dead daughter has another chance at life, that the forces of reincarnation are working their voodoo spells to rebirth lost souls. Especially those who died as pointlessly as Maly’s mom, an immigrant woman who just couldn’t beat her memories of the genocide, a single mom who looked to the next day, and the day after that, only to see more suffering.

  Honestly, if I think about it too hard, I get really mad. I know it’s terrible to ask, but why did Maly’s mom even have a kid? And why does only she get to tap out of living? Well, joke’s on her, I guess, because now she has to deal with yet another life, and in G Block, too.

  Ma Eng’s garage door opens, an uproar of Khmer thundering out of the house. Two Mas I recognize from the video store begin sweeping the concrete floor, where we will pray and eat during the party, on sedge mats that imprint our legs with red, throbbing stripes. Again I turn to face the kitchen windows, but Ma Eng has walked out of my sight. Wrapping my hands around the steering wheel, I think about driving off to college right now, leaving behind my worthless possessions, my secondhand clothes—all of it. I could finally start my life, with a blank slate. Only I can’t, not yet anyway, as the Mas helping Ma Eng have parked their cars behind mine, blocking the driveway indefinitely.

  I AM ABOUT TO FALL ASLEEP, the cold air from the vent and the oppressive dry heat of the afternoon competing for my skin, when Maly jumps up from under the car window and screams, “Boo!”

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I say through the coughing fit I’ve been shocked into, as Maly recovers from laughing hysterically at her own antics.

  She throws a joint into my lap. “Say thank you,” she tells me, and waves at the Mas in the garage with a fake smile. They only stare at her, clutching their brooms like they’re prepared to whack us. “Least now we won’t be sober for this shit.”

  Yet again, like all the times she hid alcohol or lube in my bedroom, offering me a share, Maly looks out for me while remaining, to the very core, self-absorbed. “Well, we can’t smoke it here,” I say. “Not in front of Ma Eng’s henchmen.”

  We agree to toke up in the closed video store, because we enjoy messing with our uncle’s stuff when we’re high, so we start walking the quarter mile to get out of G Block, passing duplex after duplex, all of them packed with Cambodian families and guarded by chain-link fences and patches of dirt where grass should be. Halfway to the store, I see the pink duplex my parents rented before we moved, and I remember that G Block used to be called Ghetto Way. I think of how lame and uninspired everything is, these nicknames, this neighborhood.

  By the time we reach the video store’s strip mall, we’re drenched in sweat. The Iranian man who owns the liquor market is smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. He ignores us, too busy leering at the Vietnamese boys outside the Adalberto’s. They are throwing cherry poppers at each other’s feet and passing around a Styrofoam cup—probably horchata, that’s the big hit at Adalberto’s—and I imagine these boys growing up into Rithys and pairing off with their own Malys. The boys now explode into laughter as one of them freaks out over the sparks of those mini firecrackers. The poor kid bolts away and Maly shouts, “Run, Forrest, run!”

  Inside the empty store, we light the joint, both take hits, and then I watch Ma
ly shuffle through the art house films our uncle inherited from the previous owner. Usually she goes straight to the back room and sprawls onto the couch, but not today. She’s pretending to be a customer, for shits and giggles, and I guess I’m also pretending, by being around her. We usually split an extra-large horchata, too, and if we have enough cash a carne asada burrito—the California kind, stuffed with french fries—but only Maly manages to never gain weight, that asshole. Really, I shouldn’t be complaining, even if the weed’s making me bloated. I’m okay, body-wise, and the handful of times I cruised in Victory Park I learned that guys aren’t picky as long as my mouth is wet and I keep my teeth in check. It was Maly, of course, who taught me how to give a proper blowjob.

  I suck in another drag and take in the front room. The tacky sales rack of ten-dollar Angkor Wat shirts. The clueless stupidity of our uncle placing the candy dispensers—which are for kids, obviously—right next to the dirt-red curtain of the porn section. The store’s supposed to look like a Blockbuster, but the shelves and bins are spaced out unevenly, with some aisles fitting only one person and others wide enough for jumping jacks. Right now, Maly’s in a small aisle and I’m in a big one, the “horror” DVD island separating us.

  Our uncle, who’s actually the cousin of both my mom and Maly’s mom, peaced out to the homeland for the month—probably to play house with his second family—leaving his younger brother in charge and us with the spare keys. With our older uncle gone, our other uncle disappears from lunch till closing on most days. He also refuses to work on the weekends, so the store’s not open right now. A week ago, we were told to burn copies of the latest shipment of thai lakorns, to make ourselves useful at work, but instead we take turns smoking weed in the alley, and then pig out on candy bananas from the dispensers. We get up from the couch to man the cash register only when the front door jingles. I’m not about to spend my last week at home ripping bootleg soap operas on DVD Shrink with a second-rate laptop. Maybe that’s why all the G Block grandmas are so cranky, so filled with contempt, like they’re on some karmic warpath of eye rolls. We haven’t burned the new thai lakorns, and thus we have cheated them of their one pleasure here in America, thousands of miles away from anything they can actually stand. At least that’s what I think to myself, now, stoned as fuck.

  “Swear to God,” Maly says, still wearing her oversize sunglasses, even here, in this illegitimate video rental business. “These movies are fucking weird.” In the dark reflection of her lenses, I see Maly draping me in her mom’s old dresses as I wobbled on high heels, our lips painted red, eyelids smeared with shadows, before we screened another movie—like Candyman, we viewed that one so many times—on the PlayStation 2 my dad bought me, even though he couldn’t afford it, hoping I’d be like the normal boys. “Earth to Ves!” she shouts. “The fuck’s a Videodrome?”

  I snap out of my daze to squint at the DVD she’s now holding, by the corner like it’s a dirty diaper. “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that one,” I say, recalling the last time I watched an actual good movie with Maly—Suspiria—and how she couldn’t stop cracking up. Fucking idiot, Maly said when a character fell into a pit of wire and got her throat slit. “It’s about this lame white guy,” I explain, “who’s obsessed with a TV station called Videodrome.” I hit the joint and blow rings of smoke into the air, which Maly studies closely, scrunching up her face. “The station plays, like, snuff porn. You know, people being sex-tortured.”

  “Why not jack off to actual snuff porn?” Maly asks. “Why even bother with a dull artsy film?”

  “It’s a metaphor,” I answer.

  “And the metaphor means . . . what?”

  “It’s about how we are constantly violated by the media and . . . like . . . TV commercials . . .” I pause to flip through the thai lakorns Ma Eng forced us to watch as kids, which makes me, stupidly, think of my college essay topic: how our Khmer lessons were dubbed Thai shows with confusing plots, shitty camerawork, and female characters who all spoke with the voice of the same voiceover actress. I wrote about that, Maly, my gay sob story. “There’s this part of the movie,” I continue, “where the white guy’s stomach turns into a vagina, you know, and then some other white guy forces a videotape into his vagina-tummy. . . . The rape of our minds, or some shit.”

  I don’t admit that when I first saw this scene, I found it tempting, and hated myself for that. Instead I pass the joint.

  “That’s fucking idiotic.” Maly breathes the smoke into and out of her lungs, leaving the joint hanging from her mouth like a French girl in a Godard film, only brown and poor. “Raped by the media,” she says, and kills the rest of the joint. “Would we even know English without Judge Judy?”

  “Guess it’s the only way we survived,” I say, still searching, absentmindedly, for a thai lakorn I might recognize, for something that really pulls, or strikes, me. “Like, we had to let ourselves be violated by all those shows we loved as kids . . . Full House, Step by Step, Family Matters—Steve Urkel fucked us in the brains every day after school on ABC Family. ‘Did I do that?’”

  “Ves . . . that’s, like, really messed up,” Maly replies, and we stare at each other in silence, for a split second, before sliding into laughter.

  We stay giggling until a thai lakorn finally catches my eye. “Oh, shit, remember Nang Nak?” I pick up the DVD and hold it over my face, covering my bloodshot eyes with the image of a demented woman, all black hair, pasty skin, and ghostly presence, like the Thai, low-budget version of The Grudge. When I lower the DVD, Maly’s face looks frozen.

  “Holy fuck,” she says, removing her sunglasses. Without much body awareness, it seems, she tries to climb over the movie bin, almost in slow motion, as though the air has turned into a thick mud. Somehow she makes it to my aisle, struggling, tumbling onto the floor, kicking the entire Kubrick section, and right after she recovers from that unnecessary stunt, she snatches the DVD from my hands. “I haven’t thought about this in years. Is this the whole thing?” She peers over the Khmer words she can’t even read. “Wasn’t it, like, ten thousand hours long?”

  “I mostly remember that crazy shrieking,” I say, and start impersonating Nang Nak as a vengeful mother spirit, but Maly doesn’t react, so I shut up, mid-haunting screech. Then I examine her expression as she contemplates the faded DVD cover, her puffy eyes locked in a staring contest with Nang Nak’s.

  An eternity passes before Maly suddenly says, with a strange sincerity, “I’ve always thought Nang Nak was a badass.” She lifts her head, and her eyes, dark orbs in the dim light, cut straight through me. “I’m serious,” she says, “like . . . fuck, man. She haunted those assholes for years.”

  Just then I wish Maly could move to LA with me, that we’d keep hanging out until one of us—Maly, obviously—got discovered by some Hollywood hotshot, and then maybe I’d make movies of her, because she’d probably be a great actor, actually, the perfect muse, and what else was she going to do? Though that’s also the last thing I want, and besides, I’m not attending film school. I applied and was accepted, but it was too expensive.

  “I know it’s stupid,” Maly adds, almost shaking, “but I want my mom, like, out there, you know? Like . . . shouldn’t she get to torment everyone, too . . . everyone who wronged her . . .”

  “Right,” I begin to say, unable to finish my thought. I’m not even sure I understand what she means. I place my hand on her shoulder—a useless move, I know, but it’s the only thing I can offer. We hold this position, not talking or making eye contact, until Maly stops trembling. Then she nudges me off and throws the DVD down the other aisle.

  She shouts in my face: “You know what we should do right now? We should play a fucking movie! One last time before you, like, leave me forever, you dick asshole. And let’s make it big this time—epic. Okay? Let’s fucking watch a porno! Seriously, stop talking about vagina-tummies and just watch some porn with me. See how long it takes for our minds to feel violated by the media, you know?”

  I’m not s
ure how to gauge her enthusiasm, but then Maly dashes for the porn section. “It won’t be weird,” she says, her voice moving farther and farther from me. “’Cause you’re gay and I’m a girl!”

  The porno Maly chooses to screen on our uncle’s digital projector comes across as standard shit—bright lights flattering to nothing but bouncing breasts and engorged clits and veiny dicks, all stilted dialogue and stilted facial expressions and stilted moans, the porn actors as enviable as they are gross. The whole shebang. Too many POV shots, too many close-ups meant to put the viewer right there. Seeing a sloppy wet penis enter a sloppy wet vagina, from above, going in and out with the practiced tempo of professionals, strikes me as yet another drama for the ages I am meant only to witness, rather than learn from, like the Olympics or presidential debates. My own penis feels faint, nonexistent, and not just because Maly’s presence has scared it into hiding but also because I can barely project myself onto the digital projection; what am I, really, but a knockoff version of the woman getting pounded, my dick vestigial and just . . . in the way?

  It’s beside the point, though, whether I see myself in this porno world—where a mustachioed plumber can unclothe a big-tittied MILF with a devious smirk, an arch of the eyebrow—because, as always, Maly is forcing herself into the center of my perspective, obstructing my view of the giant, high-def vagina.

  “Look . . . he’s literally fucking my brains out,” Maly says, standing in front of the wall we are using as a screen. From where I’m sitting on the couch, the colossal dick appears to thrust in and out of her left ear, across and through her face.

  “That’s cool,” I say, with a half-heartedness I don’t try to hide.

  “The hell is your problem?” Maly snaps. “That was hilarious,” she says, pacing back and forth, as she always does when her high peaks, her attempts to be fun crossing into belligerence. The image of straight sex contorts around her body, wrapping her in fleshy colors.