Her monologue waned as we merged onto a busier street, as Doctor Heng’s wife now listed the companies CNBC had marked as optimal investments. We passed six fast-food chains and three parking lots. Then, at El Dorado Street, Doctor Heng’s wife yelled at me to pull into the lot of Angkor Pharmacy. I parked, and as Doctor Heng’s wife was leaping out of my car and charging into the building, I considered her plan for my life. The whole premise was hilarious to me. It transformed my future into a slapstick comedy, similar to The Wedding Banquet, but this time starring off-brand Asians with dark skin.
Looking around the strip mall, I saw the Dollar Tree where I would buy my school supplies and the record store where I would shoplift from because the sheet music for my piano lessons had been, like the lessons themselves, stupid expensive. There was also the cheap sushi restaurant with amazing fatty tuna and terrible imitation crab—a combination that never made sense to me—where I had told my high school girlfriend, and prom date, that I was gay, and finally, at the edge of the lot, there was the Cambo grocery store that Mom still visited sometimes, but only when she was pissed off at the owners of the better Cambo store. A group of dark Asian kids in baggy clothes, reminding me of my childhood friends, were rushing toward the Cambo store with dollars in their hands—though I probably imagined the cash part—their limbs awkward, lanky, spastic, and as I watched them move with such speedy motion, I remembered being younger and how I so desperately wanted to rush away from the valley where my parents had been dumped, gripping whatever promise I had in my fists. Real Possibility, I had convinced myself, existed in the big cities on TV, metropolitan areas where Real Life unfolded, where I could be as gay as I needed to be. Wishing my car’s air-conditioning wasn’t faulty, I wiped the sweat off my forehead, before thinking, I can’t believe I am sitting in this beat-up Honda, a college graduate, and entertaining the prospect of marrying a Cambodian princess for money. Even so, it was such a heartfelt idea, to think an arrangement like that, the stuff of farce, could actually bridge worlds.
Inside Angkor Pharmacy, Doctor Heng’s wife was leaning against the counter, engaged in a conversation with the owner, who was just then rummaging through a pile of papers and nodding his head at such a steady rate he definitely wasn’t listening at all. When she got back in the car, I asked, “Did you get your prescription?” but she only looked at me confused, like my question was so dumb she could hardly process it.
“Prescription?—What are you talking about?” she responded. “I came to propose a new business plan for Angkor Pharmacy. They need to start selling more than just medicine. Look at how well Walgreens is doing!” And when I started laughing at that, she shot me an angry glance and said, “What did I tell you? Do not laugh at me. I am not a funny woman.”
But I couldn’t help it. Hands gripping the steering wheel, I just couldn’t stop laughing. “So there are other ‘dense boys’ you give advice?” I said, choking on my corny joke as I exited the parking lot.
“You are not my only concern,” she said.
We drove through a few more neighborhoods after that, searching for the lost truck, listening to a CD of old Khmer songs, the same CD that had been stuck in the stereo since the Honda had belonged to Mom. I barely understood the lyrics, aside from a few phrases in the choruses, but I knew the melodies, the voices, the weird mix of mournful, psychedelic tones. When I tried articulating my feelings about home, my mind inevitably returned to these songs, the way the incomprehensible intertwined with what made me feel so comfortable. I’d lived with misunderstanding for so long, I’d stopped even viewing it as bad. It was just there, embedded in everything I loved.
Back at the Shop, the owner of the lost truck was screaming at Dad, about suing us, about rallying the neighborhood to take its business elsewhere. Dad responded by explaining that the police were currently investigating the truck’s location, that he’d sent his own son to search for it, that he would take responsibility for the financial burden of buying a new car. Ohm Young and I listened from the garage. Standing there, I could already imagine Dad leaving the waiting room, masking his panic with blankness, only for Ohm Young to shrug off his blundering self, for an encore of that astounding nonchalance, and say, “Sorry, boss, I do not know what happened.”
Business went into a slump after that. The truck was never found. Some regulars stopped being regulars. When he came over for family dinners, Brian started conversations about Dad selling the Shop, ridding himself of all that business overhead, and investing instead in rental properties, which he’d wanted Dad to do for a while. At the time, Brian was a real estate agent and sold houses on the side of town with fancy gated communities, so he knew about this stuff.
“Look, this is all I’m saying,” Brian said one night, “the housing market’s as down as it’ll ever go, so now’s the time to buy. Prices are gonna jolt back up, like very soon, and I don’t want us to be kicking ourselves stupid. I’m telling you, the loans will pay themselves off in no time.”
Dad sighed, as though his oldest son had yet to learn the single, most important lesson he’d been trying to teach for years. “Why do you think the housing crisis was hitting everyone in the first place? You need live carefully. You cannot be trusting banks just like that.”
“Property is the only stable investment!” Brian cried, his mouth full of ginger pork. “When the government blows up, and society erupts into chaos, the only thing left will be land, and I for one—”
“Dude,” I said, “swallow your food before yelling apocalyptic nonsense at Ba.”
“I’m not yelling!” Brian yelled, punching me in the arm. “I’m just saying—I’m the one trying to be careful here. Ba can’t fix cars for the rest of his life!”
Brian and Dad continued to argue, with Brian launching into a crackpot theory that a newfound innovation was on the verge of making cars obsolete, Dad repeating to Brian to mind his own business, and so on. Occasionally, I stepped in as their referee, calling Brian out for getting too heated, as he often did, or interrupting Dad to say Brian had actually made a decent point, despite sounding like he believed the Singularity was bound to destroy us. Mom, who’d spent the entire dinner scrolling through her iPad, tuned this conversation out, interjecting only to scold Brian for moving into his own apartment and wasting money on rent, to which Brian responded, “Mom, no girl’s gonna date a twenty-six-year-old guy still living at home!”
Mom rolled her eyes at Brian. “Is it so wrong to want both my sons under my roof?” she said, before returning to her iPad because she hated talking about the Shop. As far as she was concerned, she’d exhausted enough of her life force begging Dad to fire those of his guys—Ohm Young, in particular—she deemed useless. Throughout my childhood, she would balance the Shop’s books late into the night, her neck craning over greasy, smudgy invoices, with those steady hands running through her hair as if money might tumble from her scalp. By my high school years, after tolerating Dad’s joking, for the thousandth time, that his guys had wives and kids and gambling addictions to support, Mom had renounced her mission of boosting the Shop’s profit margin and began working overtime shifts at the Social Security office. Now, instead of balancing the books, she binged trashy and corny gong-siams dubbed into Khmer on YouTube. She stopped talking about money, and started daydreaming about retirement and traveling to Thailand to learn how to cook authentic Thai dishes, as she had already mastered every Khmer recipe, even the ones of meals she didn’t like. “Thai food is just bad Khmer food,” she once said, “but it’s better than other kinds of food. What am I gonna do? Learn to cook pasta?”
Her future plans never referenced Dad, though sometimes she talked about a time when she’d live among Brian, me, and the grandkids she expected. “I want two kids from you, and four kids from Brian,” she’d say, and I never understood why she wanted fewer kids from me than my older brother. The fact is, I didn’t want any number of kids, really. I was content with myself as a gay man, and I knew gay men could have kids, of course, but
it didn’t seem worth jumping through all the hoops—the surrogates, or the adoption, all the paperwork. The only time I took the idea of kids seriously was when I thought about everyone who had died, two million points of connection reincarnated into the abyss, how young Cambos like me should repopulate the world with more Cambos, especially those with fancy college degrees, whose kids could be legacy admits.
Soon it was only other Cambos coming to the Shop. That was how you knew business was bad: if white or Black or Hispanic people or even mainstream East Asians weren’t walking through the doors. Our hometown had a lot of Cambos, sure, but not enough for a robust customer base. No one needed to fix their cars that often. Plus, these Cambos were usually relatives or relatives of relatives, or friends or friends of friends, so Dad gave them so many discounts, we barely turned a profit. Dad’s guys started playing card games in the back of the garage, where posters of naked Thai women competed for their attention with a Chinese zodiac calendar. Without a continual flow of customers in the waiting room, I organized old invoices and scraped crusted oil off every surface. I even tried learning how to balance the books, but Dad got frustrated trying to explain all the expenses. The waiting room was the cleanest it’d been since the Shop opened. It made me sad to think that the better the Shop looked, the worse it was doing. This seemed, in some cosmic way, unfair.
When there was no more crusted oil to scrape, I skimmed through job postings on my phone, refreshing the alumni career website over and over again. Doctor Heng’s wife lectured me about going back to school and studying pre-pharmacy. I didn’t apply for any jobs, feeling burned from all the career fairs and interviews I’d bombed in college. Still, it seemed productive to scroll through my hypothetical futures—data analyst, technical writer, user interface engineer. Though, the harder I thought about it, the less I could imagine taking any of these jobs. Dressing up in slacks and button-downs. Making small talk with coworkers about the weather and their favorite hiking trails.
Eventually, the days grew shorter, summer crawling into fall, and some nights, after working at the Shop, I hooked up with one of Brian’s old friends. We had run into each other at Costco. Mobil 5W-30 oil was on sale, but you could buy only three boxes at a time. There was some local law that limited the amount of a flammable substance that a customer could have at once. So Dad sent me to Costco every few hours to stock up, and there I was in the checkout line, hoping the cashier wouldn’t recognize me from earlier that morning, when Paul strolled over from the food court, projecting that casual angst peculiar to guys who never left our hometown, who stayed committed to a dusty California free of ambition or beaches. He asked me how I was doing, so I roped him into buying three boxes of oil for me. When I thanked him, he said, with a low-key smirk, that he was sure I’d make it up to him. After that, we fell back into old patterns of driving onto the secluded parts of the Delta’s levee. It was the safest place to have car sex, especially if blowjobs struck you as boring.
Paul was half Mexican, half Italian, and his girlfriend was Filipina. He worked as the manager of an AT&T store. Made good money, actually, if you included his commissions. He was handsome, in an unassuming way, with a constant stubble that made me go crazy when dragged across my back or stomach. His nose was huge but well proportioned. Sometimes I closed my eyes and used his nose to apply pressure to my closed eye sockets. It was weird but satisfying, like my eyeballs were getting massaged. If Paul wasn’t into it, he never said anything to stop me. During one of my winter breaks in college, I’d messaged him on Grindr, after recognizing his Mars Volta T shirt in the headless torso serving as his profile pic, and we’d hooked up here and there in the years leading up to my graduation, always in his red Sienna minivan, which used to be the minivan his older sister had driven to drop off Paul, Brian, and me at our K–8 school. That car had been infamous in our teenage mythology. High schoolers had called it the party van, because during lunch periods, Paul’s older sister drove as many friends as possible to eat at the Costco food court. Then, when Paul started high school and inherited the van, he assumed the role of shuttling fellow teenagers to cheap food. Ten years later, you could still find Paul at Costco, in the middle of the week, eating $1.50 hot dogs.
One night, after Paul finished in me, we were in the back seat of his minivan, my back still glued to his torso with sweat, lube, and cum. We stayed like this for a while, Paul burrowing his chin into my shoulder, as I watched the windows fog up from the heat of our bodies. Then, out of nowhere, he asked me if it was all right to bring his car to the Shop; he needed an oil change. Not unless he convinced the Mexican, white, and Filipino drivers of the city, I joked, to also bring their cars to the Shop.
“Thing is, I’m too white for the Mexicans and too Mexican for the whites,” Paul said, running his fingers through my hair. “And I guess I can’t get you the Filipinos either, ’cause, you know, I’m cheating around on my girlfriend with you.”
“Stop being a doofus,” I said, “you don’t have to ask.”
“Just wanted to make sure, you know,” he replied. “In case it’d be awkward.”
“It’s not awkward,” I said, remembering a time when I was younger, sitting in the same back seat of this same red minivan, and feeling awkward around Paul, his older sister driving fifty when the speed limit was twenty-five. He was only three years older than me, which felt like nothing now that we were both in our twenties; still, I felt giddy to be having sex with the cooler older guy from my youth, who listened to bands like the Mars Volta. If only my closeted, sex-deprived self from high school could see me now, I sometimes thought, before realizing, yet again, how dumb it was to think that way about Paul—a closeted gay guy too scared to break up with his first girlfriend. Plus, the Mars Volta actually sucks.
“Why are you working at your dad’s place, anyway?” Paul asked.
“Why not?” I answered. “I don’t have a job. Might as well.”
“It just doesn’t seem like your scene.”
“And what would that be?”
“It was just a question. Forget it.”
“No, it’s not like I’m sensitive about this,” I assured him. “I’m genuinely curious.”
“Man, I don’t know,” he started, “you already left for college, so why come back? I thought you’d be living away somewhere with some dope job by now, dating guys who are good guys, you know? Guys who have hella dope jobs, too. Like bankers and doctors and what not.”
“I’d never date a banker,” I said, bracing myself for Paul to get mopey. This happened sometimes when we got together. He’d get in his own head about cheating on his girlfriend, Meryl, who actually was a nice person. She was a devout Catholic who said “Oh my gosh.” She asked about my day, with a sincere intentional of listening to my response, whenever I ran into her. Obviously, I avoided her like the plague. Paul was in love with Meryl, or thought he was, but liked fucking guys too much, and when this overwhelmed him, he said cringeworthy things like “I’m not good enough for you.”
This night he was saying, “I just . . . I don’t get why you’re living at home, I guess.”
“Right,” I said. “What time is it? We should probably get to bed.”
“Naw, I’m serious,” he said. “You’d definitely kill it in San Francisco, you know that. Me, I’m gonna be here forever. I can’t give up driving places. Parking in the city is fucked.”
I didn’t know what to say. Truth be told, I could have lived like this forever, too—days at the Shop being lulled by the sounds of rusty machinery, dead bolts being bolted and unbolted, Dad and his guys making fun of American diets for being less effective than the Khmer Rouge diet of boiled grass. All I needed was the occasional hookup, a way to get off that didn’t involve my own hands.
“Did you know I went to the gayest college?” I asked.
“Sounds pretty chill,” he said, holding me tighter, as if this were the last time we would fuck, though I knew perfectly well it wasn’t.
“It was just a ton
of gay guys in the middle of nowhere, Ohio,” I said, moving away from him so I could collect my clothes. “A bunch of theater majors and aspiring musicians and artists. I actually lost my virginity to a triple major in theater, music, and art, though I think he’s in a coding boot camp now. Anyway, I had so much bad sex those first two years, my dick and ass were, like, constantly sore. I couldn’t even sit through lectures right. I had to lean onto a single butt cheek at a time.”
Paul laughed. “Why are you telling me this?”
“It was fun,” I continued. “I’m not saying it wasn’t. But, you know, when I think back to college, that’s all it really was, you know?”
“I’m not getting you,” he said.
“I feel happy—that’s all—just being here.” I maneuvered back into my pants, leaned over, and kissed him, then gathered the cum on his stomach and slathered his face with my sticky hand.
“Goddamn it,” he said, wiping the cum away, and we both started laughing.
Later, as Paul drove me home, I watched the other cars in the street. Headlights streaked through the night in flashes of yellow and white. It was too dark to see clearly, but still I looked for the lost truck. I wanted so badly for one of the passing blurs to be that golden Toyota Tundra.
A few days rolled by without us having car sex, and then Paul brought his red minivan into the Shop. Brian accompanied him. They walked in through the glass door, Brian leading the way in his best suit, the navy one he wore to close major sales. It accentuated his amiable confidence, the air of being fully able to force you into a headlock and somehow make it seem good natured, like you were the one asking to be restrained in the first place. Brian had never moved away, because he excelled in this city. It was reassuring to know that something about home allowed guys like my brother to thrive.
“I’m here to block Ba from giving this dumbass a discount,” Brian said, as he leaned toward us, across the counter, pointing at Paul discreetly with his thumb as if he ever spoke a single word that softly. “But seriously, Paul has a job. He can pay for his own oil change.”
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