by Nami Mun
In the new quiet we heard the El crawling by, the sound reminding me of Wink and that man, and it wasn’t until the train left us for good that we realized Wink was crying. He wiped his nose across his arm and took a long sip from his cup. I imagined a lump in his throat being washed over. I drank, too, wanting to taste whatever he tasted, and soon our breathing slowed and we sat there, our numbness wearing off, not really knowing what else to say, and not seeing the room or the walls or the sky outside or even one another, but only seeing the tree in front of us, for exactly what it was.
Nothing About Love or Pity
They were trying to crack my face in two. It didn’t make sense. They punched me, across the nose, up the cheek, in my ear. The back of my head struck ground, reminding me that I had a skull. I couldn’t talk. A face hovered above me. Large teeth. Slippery hair. Puffy coat. Hands pinned my shoulders and legs to the ground even though I’d given up fighting. It was still snowing. It was always snowing. Hurry up, a voice said. Then someone was laughing. Someone was singing. Someone was pulling down my pants. Their fingers metal cold. I’m thirteen, I said, and other ridiculous words. I heard me begging. It didn’t sound like me. It sounded like an old lady whispering in a cave. Someone kicked my words back in, and instantly, I saw my dad, slapping me in the parking lot behind our church. It didn’t matter. I wanted my dad to suddenly appear and save me. It seemed like a fair request. Please, I said, and took another punch. This time there was no telling where it landed. My brain felt broken. It stopped sending messages. I was trapped in my body, and my body was trapped in this empty lot with men who knew nothing about love or pity but everything else crucial. That I was lost. That I trusted strangers. That I needed to be taught a lesson. Knowledge was right. I wouldn’t make it on the streets on my own.
And then, everything froze. I wondered if I had somehow stopped time. I heard their breathing, I even heard them squinting, and soon we were drenched in a light so white I thought the moon had exploded. A car honked its horn, scaring the guy off me. The rest of them ran like drunk roaches, the slush of their footsteps melting into memory. And just like that, they were all gone.
It took a few years for them to really leave.
I reached down. My underwear was still on. They hadn’t ruined me. At least not in that way. Life’s only as bad as you make it out to be. It’s got nothing to do with the way it is. The blood in my mouth was overflowing. I wanted to spit but was afraid to move my head, so I swallowed, letting in a queasiness that didn’t feel all bad.
“You all right?”
It was a man’s voice. He put a hand on my chin and turned my head to him. A black man with a white beard. “You’re okay,” he said, trying to convince me. “I’m okay,” I said, laughing a little, needing to prove something about myself. He took off his parka and covered me. I looked at him harder, this time in little chunks. A bald head, an anchor-shaped nose, thick glasses that magnified everything behind them. He looked nothing like my father. “You’re okay,” he said again, brushing my bangs away so I could see the sky. The stars had come out of nowhere, there were too many of them. Had they been there all night and I just hadn’t noticed? “Who are you?” I finally asked, trying to sit up. He coaxed my shoulders to stay down. “That’s not really important right now,” he said, and he was right. It didn’t matter who he was or who he wasn’t. Or who they were or what they did and did not take from me. What mattered was that I could see the sky and that my body started to wake. I took a breath. I could feel every inch of me—pieces of glass stabbing my spine, cool bits of snow landing on the cuts on my lips—and I lay there, eyes wide open, naming every star as if I’d given birth to them centuries ago.
Club Orchid
Knowledge was dealing. Wink was winking. And I was in a club, sitting on a bench, listening to the Bee Gees for the third time in an hour with a laminated sign dangling from my neck.
Inside Club Orchid all the girls were chickens. On the slick vinyl bench, I sat with a lineup of black, brown, and white dance hostesses who squinted at their compact mirrors, painted their lips, teased and sprayed their bangs until they looked like trees against wind. They clucked their chewing gum and jerked their heads side to side, pointing at this and that and yakking and nudging their tails for more butt space on the bench. There was room next to me but I was new. They watched me without looking, stayed clear of me without effort. The next girl down on the bench was a country away, and I tried not to take the distance personally.
To the right of me, the cashier girl sat inside a clear, plastic cage and watched TV, the light twitching on her blank, paralyzed face. And to my left, a tall girl with spiky heels giggled her customer down a long hallway and into a private room. She was a pro. She knew the value of a leather miniskirt. I tried not to think about what went on in that room.
Out in front, about a hopscotch away, was the dance floor—a rectangular patch of shiny black linoleum with clusters of tiny tables around the perimeter. A disco ball spun over the center, smearing confetti on the mirrored walls, on the rising smoke, on the girls and their dates drinking and dancing and holding hands. Separating me from them was a gunky strip of carpet. It was green, like the bench. Jolly Rancher apple green. Olivia Newton-John sang over the speakers, and every girl had someone talking to them. I checked my armpits to make sure they didn’t smell, patted my hair to calm the frizz, and adjusted the sign around my neck. From under my thigh I took out my book and started reading, trying to fool the universe into thinking I was fine alone.
I’d pulled Gulliver’s Travels from a trash can. Half the book, actually. Through the metal mesh, I could see the other half trapped under a folded pizza. There were too many people on the streets or else I might’ve reached in for it. Half a book and still it was thick. I kept my head down, read a sentence for the second time, and waited patiently for my number to be called. I didn’t need anybody, I told myself, and read the sentence again.
But then Lana fell from the sky.
“Skanky freak,” she said, and plunked down next to me. She was tall and black and had on a denim miniskirt that barely reached the tops of her long grasshopper legs. Right away I knew she wasn’t a girl, not because of the way she looked but because she acted too much like one, too much drama in her hands and hips. Sitting inches from me, she folded her arms like a kid who’d lost a turn at something and crossed her legs tight, bouncing her foot to the beat of her anger. Even pissed off, she looked like an Egyptian princess. Her cheekbones sat high on her long, lean face, and her lashes, as thick as caterpillars, sparkled with silver dust. Lana fished a cigarette from her purse and tried to light it, but all of her trembled and the lighter kept getting lost in her giant, manicured hands. It took a few flicks before she was taking a drag so deep I thought I could feel air filling up in my own chest. I dog-eared my page and went over in my head all the things I could say to her:
Hey, the name’s Joon, like the month but spelled like moon.
Sure, you can sit next to me, only if you give me a smoke.
Oh. I didn’t know you were sitting next to me. Sure, we can talk. I can read later.
I slipped the book under my thigh. I’d never met a man dressed like a woman before and I wanted to make a good impression, I guess, prove to her that I was cool with her being different.
“Your cigarette smells like chocolate,” was what finally came out of my mouth. I hadn’t eaten that day and every smell was candy. She didn’t hear me, though, and instead stayed focused on something out in front of us—on one of the tables on the dance floor.
“Aw, poor Lana,” a girl said, about five heads down the bench. “You jealous cuz Marilyn’s got a date?” The girl laughed and that cued the others to laugh, too, in that mean, high school sort of way.
“Listen, Miss Cocksucker.” Lana pointed her cigarette at the girl. “If I was talking to you, you’d be hearing from my fist, okay?”
“Ooooo,” all the girls sang, but Lana’s gaze had already returned to the dance flo
or, where Bic the bartender weaved through a crowd and delivered a drink to a girl. The girl sat with two dates, even though she wasn’t twice as pretty. And I guessed by her outfit that she was the one called Marilyn. She had platinum blond hair and wore a white halter-top dress, just like the one Marilyn Monroe had on when she stood over that subway grate. But besides that, the girl didn’t look anything like Marilyn Monroe, nor did she have any of her manners. She sneered at Lana and gave her the finger, while mouthing Fuck . . . you.
“Fucking bitch!” Lana stood up and fireballed her purse, which completely missed the girl and instead smacked Bic on the back of his head as he was leaving the table. He took one look at Lana, picked up the purse by its gold chain, and hurled it back at her. Lana and I ducked. The purse ricocheted off the wall behind us and dropped to our feet. A lot of her makeup spilled out. The girls on the bench squealed and laughed and shouted things in Spanish. And the girl they called Marilyn chuckled with her hands and shoulders, as if to make up for the fact that we couldn’t hear her, what with all the music. Then she went back to entertaining her two customers. One of them had on a white disco suit, even though it was already 1980.
A few people checked to see what all the fuss was about. The glittery lights slid over their dark faces as the excitement began to peter, and soon, it was as if the scene had never happened. Lana got down on her hands and knees to gather her things. I bent down to help her.
“Girls can be mean,” I said, picking up a stray lipstick. “I used to get teased a lot, too.”
She snatched the tube from my hand. “Who the fuck are you?”
I laughed a little without meaning to. “I’m number eight,” I said, and pointed to the sign on my chest. Without a word, Lana went on clumping her things into both fists and jammed her purse under an armpit before getting up to leave. She was a monument, taller than anyone else in the club, maybe even Bic. When she walked away her arms flailed and her thigh-high skirt rocked side to side. I imagined walking the same way, doing the same with my hips and hands, until I noticed one of the girls on the bench staring at me.
I picked up the rest of Lana’s things—a bus transfer, a packet of mayonnaise, a balled-up piece of paper. It was a handwritten receipt from the Plaza Motel, the same place where I was staying. She had paid thirty dollars for a night, twice as much as what I was paying. When I got up to throw everything away I noticed on the carpet a greasy black-and-white photo that looked to have been torn from a yearbook. It was of a boy with a perfect globe Afro, wearing a sweater and tie. An American flag waved in the background, and the name was scratched out in ink. The more I stared at him, the more I saw the likeness. The long cheekbones gave it away. He was maybe in the sixth grade or seventh, his eyes already bored with life. He didn’t smile. He looked straight into the camera and maybe years beyond it.
I wondered when Lana had decided to start being a woman. If the change was easy or hard. If she had to forget people she loved and hated, and what piece of herself she had to leave behind. I wanted to start over, too. I’d left a bed and a mother to sleep under storefront awnings right beside men who thought a homeless girl was a warm radiator they could put their hands to. I’d slept in shelters, in abandoned buildings. I’d been beaten. And at the start of every new day, I still believed I could choose my own beginning, one that was scrubbed clean of everything past.
I shoved Lana’s picture in my jeans pocket and sat back down on the bench. I wanted to ask someone if they knew why Lana and Marilyn Monroe were fighting, but thought I’d better keep my trap shut. I fixed my sign and went back to my book. Part I, page thirty-eight. You gotta stay out of people’s heads, I told myself.
The Bee Gees came on again, asking how deep my love was, and a customer got up, took his girl by the hand, and spun her to the middle of the dance floor. He danced like a stiff gorilla in his tight jeans and bomber jacket. She danced as if he wasn’t there. I studied the customers—they were either fat and balding or skinny and short—their arms coiled around girls who wouldn’t have given them a look outside this place. This wasn’t a club. This was Fantasy Island, where for nine bucks an hour men were guaranteed to meet girls who liked them.
I didn’t care about any of that, though. I was just glad to come in from the rain. After a long day of walking around looking for work at hot dog stands, pretzel carts, and grocery stores, it was nice to hear someone say, You’re hired, just by looking at you. Like I was a model or something. Miss Mosely, the owner of the club, didn’t require forms or IDs or ask how old I was or what school I had attended. She did ask, in that deep preacher voice of hers, if I was over eighteen. I didn’t feel a drop of guilt lying to her. I needed money. Jake, the manager at the Plaza Motel, had said that since I couldn’t find it in my heart to sleep with him, I’d better come up with the dough by midnight or else he’d give up my room. I looked up at the clock above the front entrance. It read 9:30. One night with my own ceiling above me, and I knew I never wanted to sleep on the streets again. Every day I’d have to make money, and every day my goal would have to be one more motel night.
Jake charged fifteen bucks a day. The sheets were an extra two, and I definitely needed the sheets to cover up that bloodstain in the middle of the bed. The night before, I had dreamed I was sleeping on a giant maxi pad, and no matter how much I wiped the blood off my back, new blood kept fizzing up from the mattress. In the morning, I couldn’t get into the shower fast enough but then jumped right back out when I saw the black slimy fungus clinging to the tiles. I got a chill just looking at them, so I decided not to. I put on my sneakers and stepped back into the stall with my eyes shut, though it felt as if bugs were crawling all around me. Even the water smelled. All day I walked around with wet, spongy feet, but that was okay since it rained anyway.
And it was still raining.
The front door of the club burst open and an Oriental man rushed in, brushing the rain off his shoulders with the brim of his fancy hat. He had guppy eyes, a wide moon face, and a basketball for a stomach. After scouring the place, he took off his trench coat, draped it over an arm, and walked up to the cashier window. All the girls on the bench snap-closed their compacts and sat up straight. You couldn’t hear a single gum pop. I sat up, too, but only a little. I didn’t want to act like a beauty-pageant contestant. A girl next to me smiled and blew him a kiss, which seemed like cheating. He smiled back at her as he plucked the fingers of his black leather gloves, one at a time. He watched us. I thought about smiling, too, except even the idea of it felt too desperate. I went back to reading, or at least I pretended to, and peeped at the man out the side of my pages. He paid in cash. I couldn’t tell how much time he’d bought. The cashier, who was also Miss Mosely’s daughter, cut off the music, and the speakers squawked before her voice shot through.
“Number eight!” she shouted, like a diner waitress. “Número ocho!”
The music came back on. I looked at my sign to double-check. Number eight. That was me. For a second, I felt I’d won something.
“That’s bullshit,” a girl said, standing up. She lit a cigarette and went on about how she didn’t want no sorry-ass Chinaman anyhow. I got nervous. I didn’t want one, either. Not a Chinaman. Not any man. I took off my sign, shoved that and my book behind the bench, and headed for the cashier’s cage, slowly realizing with each step a few important things about me, like how I’d never been on a date, and never been a hostess of anything. I wasn’t even a good dancer.
“His name’s Eugene. Table twenty-three. Paid up for an hour,” the cashier girl said. She was light-skinned, like Miss Mosely, half-black and half-white maybe, with small wrinkled ears that reminded me of walnuts. Mesmerized by the TV screen, she ate potato chips almost unknowingly. My mouth salivated at the thought of salt and vinegar. A commercial for Riunite came on, showing a woman toasting her glass, which was decorated with a cherry and a juicy-looking orange.
A plasticized map showing the layout of the club was taped to the counter. Table twenty-three s
at in the back corner of the dance floor.
“Don’t forget to punch in,” the girl said, pointing down, her eyes never leaving the TV screen.
I said thanks, checked below the counter, pulled my card out from the rack and fed the clock, which gave it a stamp of 10:02.
I headed toward the back of the club, walked down the green carpeting, down the length of the bar, where Bic sat next to the cash register, his eyes married to a paper. A slow song came on . . . She’s out of my life . . . and some couples got up and danced, their necks hooked as one. Other girls stayed seated, looking like trophies next to their dates. I got a better look at the girl in the Marilyn Monroe dress. She sat with her arms around both her guys, leaning in close to one, and then the other, as if playing telephone. Then she stood up, fixed her breasts, and led her men down the long hallway where the light was thick and yellow.
Watching all this was Lana. She stood at the bar, smoking, her eyes fixed on Marilyn. I reached into my back pocket, only to decide that maybe now wasn’t the right time to give back the picture. So I kept walking, pointing my chin straight ahead, trying not to look at Lana, which was like trying not to scratch an itch on your nose.
“You following me?” she asked as I passed her.
