by Nami Mun
Behind the driver’s seat, a Puerto Rican woman cried and rubbed her round stomach, and sitting on the floor in the aisle, an old man screamed of a broken arm but nobody but me understood because he was crying in Korean. With all this going on, the black man finally stood up and held out his hand. “Come with me,” he said, still without a smile, and I knew exactly what he meant. He had long, dark hands with pinkish knuckles. I’d never been so scared. My heart tightened. “Come on,” he said, but I shook my head and told him I wasn’t ready to go with him. He left through the rear door.
A little while later, I realized everybody had evacuated the bus.
Outside I stumbled past the ambulance, the fire trucks, the emergency people hovering around the mother who was busy wiping down her child. The asphalt was a lace of sparkling diamonds—a beautiful, jagged doily for the crushed picnic basket, the soggy bib, the map stuck to the pavement with sticky blood. I searched for the janitor. I wanted to see where he would go. I even looked for him up in the sky, blinding myself until everything vanished.
I used to think my father was God.
That was before I’d found him passed out drunk at the Derby Motel. His Lincoln was parked in front of his room, and the manager peeked through the window blinds before unlocking the door for me.
“He has the stomach flu,” I said, walking in.
The manager stayed outside. “I understand,” he said, and closed the door.
The air smelled acidic. Something about that smell and the heat made me think he might be dead. He wasn’t. A blanket sat crumpled in the middle of the bed in a large hill, and my father lay on top of it with his back arched, his nose hissing, a newspaper tenting his chest. The TV was on. Moldy cartons of Chinese food pegged the sheets, and on the nightstand paper-bagged bottles, four of them, towered behind an ashtray jammed with cigarette butts. The smell of the room hurt my head, but at least I had found him. It was my job to get him back. Sometimes he made it easy by leaving behind clues. A ticket stub from the dry cleaners where he had a mistress. Sticks of coffee-flavored gum from a Korean restaurant, where he had another. This time, it was the Yellow Pages opened to a listing of motels, and I picked the one closest to our house.
I climbed onto the bed and rattled his arm. “Appa, wake up.”
He had on a white undershirt, Bermuda shorts—the ones I’d given him for Father’s Day—and black dress shoes with the laces undone. The shoes confused me; I didn’t understand why he had them on. They were his show-off shoes, the ones he’d worn to church or to the bank for a loan. He’d put on that exact pair to take his citizenship test at the immigration office some months back, and while we waited out in the hallway for his name to be called, he spit-shined the shoes with newspaper. I was coaching him on U.S. history and asked who our first president was. He said George Washington Bridge, and then laughed at his mistake. I’d loved him more than anything in the world right then.
Some time after the bus ride, I got into a fight with Knowledge. We were standing on our corner—Derek pushing his gold watches (wrapped six on each arm and two on each skinny ankle), Grunt dumpster-diving in the alley behind Donut King, and Reverend LeRoy standing on top of his fake alligator skin briefcase, hugging his Bible and forgiving our sins. “It is a beautiful, sunny day,” he said, “a glorious day that sheds light on your unsavory lives for God to see and judge. You are afflicted, my children, with a poverty and abandonment Jesus suffered all his life.” The reverend also mentioned that he’d been a junkie before he found God. But considering that he had OD’d once and almost died, my guess was that God had found him first. You go too far and the Lord will come looking for you, my mother said once. Wink was there, too, working across the street, sticking his head into cars and his ass up in the air, holding up traffic while trying to pick up johns. All kinds of men pulled over for him—a few grizzlies with lumberjack shirts, a few elbow patches, some neckties, and a lot of geezers with skin like pork rinds. Wink hated every one of them but he could always count on them showing up. He told me they were the only things he could count on.
It was my fifteenth birthday and Knowledge wouldn’t treat me to a nickel bag. Her buyers came up left and right, sliding money into her hands, but she wouldn’t let go of one lousy bag, not even to me. She told me she’d seen me hooking and I said, “So,” and she said she didn’t associate with no hos. That was a lie. She was jealous because I had a boyfriend. “You’re pissed because I never let you eat me,” I yelled at her, maybe for the first time. That got everyone’s attention. Derek stopped selling watches to cheer me on, “Aww shit, girl, you tell that bitch!”
Knowledge told him to shut the fuck up, and then faced me, saying how I had changed. “You’re getting strung out on the shit,” she said, calling me a slut this and slut that.
“Skanky ass cheap dyke,” I called back. As soon as I said it, I felt I had been poisoned and it was the poison saying these words to my only true friend, in the middle of the street no less.
She didn’t get mad, which frightened me. She just shook her head and waved me over. “Look.” She leaned in and clutched the back of my neck. “I’m giving you one bag, but that’s it. You’re so fucked on this shit,” she said, looking far down the street. “You ain’t turned out like I taught you.”
I nodded, I apologized. “You’re right,” I told her. “You’re the only one who knows me.”
“You can’t forget that,” she said, and I said I wouldn’t.
After making sure there weren’t any cops, she said we should hit the alley. I was glad that she was giving in, but even happier that she wanted to get high with me, something she rarely did. In the alley, we knelt behind the dumpster where I usually smoked. From inside her panties, she pulled out a baggie and dangled it in front of me. It felt good to see it so close. “You want this?” she asked, and punched me in the mouth. My head banged metal. I was about to look up when she grabbed me in a headlock. With the crook of her arm, she wrenched my neck and kept shouting, “Go ahead, say again what you called me. C’mon, say it.”
“It’s my birthday!” I reminded her.
She finally let go and flexed her arm. I rubbed my throat.
“Well, happy fucking birthday then,” she said, and kicked my thigh before leaving.
A part of me was glad to see her go, but then I was alone. Resting my head against the wall, I watched something crawl up and into the dumpster. I had bitten my tongue. My mouth tasted like spoons. On birthdays you were supposed to get gifts and cake and people were supposed to be nice to you. We used to be good friends, Knowledge and me. I wondered what had happened.
Later on I found out that Knowledge was jealous of Philly, my first boyfriend. Philly was an artist and I fell in love with him because he had brown eyes that always looked wet. He worked part-time as a rink guard at Skate World, and I only saw him during his shifts because he said we couldn’t hang out at his loft. He was forty-two. “I don’t want my neighbors talking. You’d be fine, but I could get into a shitload of trouble,” he’d said, smiling, his hand smoothing my back.
When we first met, I’d been afraid to tell him my age, thinking he would turn me in to the police, but he assured me that he didn’t mind me being fourteen, that he would love me no matter what. Tuesdays and Thursdays were usually our nights at the rink, and he always bought me hot chocolate and a cookie if I wanted. And when no one was looking, I would sneak into one of the ballet rooms, still with my skates on, where professional skaters like Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner practiced their moves on the ground. At least, that was what Philly had told me. He would come in a little while after, and we would lie in the dark under the ballet bar with the mirror behind us, his red satin Skate World jacket pillowing our heads. We’d kiss softly and fuck and the hard floor didn’t hurt because being there was better than being in some car with a date. I couldn’t even compare Philly to a date, and I didn’t care about his age, his gray hair, or the potbelly.
“Do you love me?” I asked him once.
“Sure I do.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why.”
“Don’t you have a reason?”
“Sure. I got a reason,” he said, rolling over to light a cigarette. “Because you’re a rose in a field of dirty old tires, that’s why.”
He always talked like that, as if he would’ve died if I hadn’t come to rescue him. After sex we’d smoke a line to pick us up, and for the rest of the night I’d skate circles around him, bending over to show him my panty under my skirt, knowing he’d fantasize about that for a week.
After my fight with Knowledge, I went to see him. We celebrated my birthday by snorting a ton of meth and drinking bourbon from his flask. I was glad he didn’t ask about the bruise on my lips, even though I knew he’d noticed. He hadn’t gotten me a present but I told myself that that was okay because we fucked and held each other long and he got me higher than I’d ever been. Gifts seemed silly compared to that kind of exchange. When we finished he put on his jacket, the satin still glossy even in the dark, and left the room. After waiting a few minutes—about twenty bottles of beer on the wall—I went back out onto the rink. The shock of white light surrounded me whole and I couldn’t feel anything but loved. I floated above the ice and my eyes softened, eased into reality, into colors, then shapes, then outlines, and gradually focused on smiling lips, pom-pom gloves, and finally on Philly, skating at the far end of the rink, with another girl.
She was wearing his jacket. Her arms were touching the insides of his sleeves, sucking up all of his leftover warmth. And under his jacket—she had on a white turtleneck and a white miniskirt that made her look like a slut cheerleader. She was older than me, maybe eighteen or nineteen, which meant he could take her to his loft without getting in trouble. He held her hands and skated backwards with too much tenderness, and she clung to him, pretending she might fall any second. She was a liar and a trashy whore. She just wanted him to hold her.
Before I could think about it, I was skating hockey-style toward them. I cut across traffic and the center coned section, and slammed into them. They hadn’t seen me coming and we all fell—Philly on his butt, the girl on her face. I jumped her back and punched her in the head and the spine of her neck, forgetting everything Knowledge had taught me and just letting my arms swing as if they’d been wound up to do exactly that. I thought I could fight mountains and whales, until the beauty of crystal meth wavered for a second, just long enough for Philly and another rink guard to pull me off. They dragged me to a bench and told me to stay put. I didn’t know what had come over me but was glad it had passed. “Who the fuck is she?” I asked Philly, but he left me to see about the girl. People crowded around her. I could only see her pink legs spread out on the ice.
Then it was my turn, I guess. Two or three guys came out of nowhere, pushed me to the ground, and started punching. I didn’t close my eyes, though. I looked up at each and every one of them as their fists zoomed in and hit my nose, my cheeks, my brows. When one was done, another got on so they could all take a shot. This time the rink guards weren’t so quick to the rescue. I’d been beaten up before, so it wasn’t a big deal. Sometimes, if you were down long enough, some wire in your brain got snipped and all the noise just vanished. And when the sound left, the pain left, too, leaving you flat on the floor, watching a peaceful movie of yourself taking every hit and feeling absolutely nothing. During those times, I was a superhero.
When the sound came back on, the guys were walking away, turning only to throw their soda cans and half-eaten candy bars at my head. I spat in their direction, even reached for a can and threw it back at them except I knew my anger meant nothing to them. Philly was nowhere. I guess that hurt the most. It killed me to think that he was with that girl—that she would get to be in his home. All the kids stared at me, wanting to know some secret about me. I thought about running into the bathroom and cutting my wrists with the jagged toe-stops on my skates. Then I thought about just standing up.
Later on, a rink guard told me that the girl was Philly’s niece and that he had taken her to the hospital. She was visiting from West Virginia and had come to the rink with some boys from her cheerleading squad.
Same time of day, same stop. I got on the bus again, having told no one about having seen God. If the news had gotten out, undeserving people would crowd the bus and I’d never see him again. This time, I was ready to go with. I had nothing left to give, and nothing anyone would want to take. My seat at the back corner of the bus was empty, so I sat there, hoping he would come, especially since I’d made sure not to be too high but just high enough to where I could stay still and not have my skin moving. I looked around in case he was there but had on a different disguise, but the only black person was an old blind woman up at the front.
God didn’t show that day, but one of his angels did. She was maybe five years old with lemony hair, and she sat alone, three seats to my right. That was how I knew she was special. Five-year-olds in Sunday dresses didn’t sit in the back of the bus by themselves. That, and she held in her hands an egg timer, the kind that looked like a mini sundial. It was white, like her dress and stockings and shoes. She pretended to ignore me and I kept silent, not wanting to seem too desperate. The sunlight around her looked crisp and icy. I slid over a seat to feel its temperature.
“Do you want more time?” she asked, sighing as if she had asked this an hour ago and I had failed to answer. I looked down the bus to see if anyone else had heard her. Nobody had. The bus gurgled and made a sharp turn.
“No.” I bent toward her. “I mean, no thank you. I don’t want any more time here, I want to go with you.” I said this quietly and slowly, convinced we were being recorded somehow.
She rolled her eyes and drooped her shoulders. Winding up the timer, she said, “Well, I’m going to give you more time anyway. See?” She held it out in front of me. Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen. The ticking reminded me of rats climbing into dumpsters, their claws clacking metal. I couldn’t hear myself think, so I snatched the timer from her.
“I told you already, I don’t want any more time here,” I said, as nicely as I could, while trying to turn the damn thing off. But then she screamed. How such a tiny pink mouth could be so loud! Like she was screaming from an old memory, buried in my head. She screeched and cried, her pale face melting like plastic in a trash fire, and I said sorry, over and over again, and tried to give back the timer but she wouldn’t take it. So I pulled her wrist, unfisted her hand, and placed the timer in her palm, which made her shriek even louder. She flung it onto the floor. Everyone turned to us, even the blind woman, but I couldn’t care about them. I just wanted her to shut up. I put my fingers over her mouth, just to shush her, but then a woman came and snatched her away. I didn’t see where she’d come from. Her enormous head shouted things at me, things I couldn’t hear because all I heard was the angel screaming. Then the bus stopped and they both got off. Nobody asked me to come along.
How much longer did I have to wait for Him? To get his attention?
My father was so drunk I couldn’t wake him. His shorts were soiled and the flies in the room flew crooked into walls, quiet attempts at suicide. They had nothing on us. They didn’t know how much pain we could withstand. I tried to clean up the room a little. Floating in the tub were several cigarette butts and one chopstick. His wallet was in the sink, his belt over the towel rack, and his car keys were under the toilet, next to a wet pile he’d thrown up. After I finished in the bathroom I took a dollar from his wallet and got a root beer from the motel soda machine. The can cooled my palms, so I pressed it against my ear and rolled it across my forehead and neck. When I came back, I turned off the TV, popped open the soda, hopped onto the bed, and tried to wake him again. The flies buzzed over the garbage can, over the tall bottles of vodka. Seeing my father on the bed like that made me realize how he was both weak and strong—weak enough to drink so much yet strong enough to still be alive.
I held the soda over his head
and let a few beads of condensation drip onto his eyelids until he eventually opened them. He saw me and told me to go back home. I told him I couldn’t do that. He’d been gone a week this time and Mom’s sleepwalking had gotten worse. It had become tiring, guarding her door every night and following her into the kitchen to make sure she didn’t cut herself chopping scallions for an hour. I tried rolling my father over but couldn’t, so I placed my cold palm on his forehead and told him that he had to come home, that he couldn’t leave me alone with her. “She’s sick,” I said, “and she’s not interested in me.” My father snatched the root beer and flung it behind me, the can smacking into the wall and spewing a froth of browns. Then he lay back down, saying he wasn’t interested in anybody.
It was a perfect night. I knew it was cold by the way the other girls were dressed in jackets and gloves, but my skin felt as warm as pancakes. I straightened my tube top, hiked up my miniskirt, and pinched up my fishnets.
“Hi.” I ran up to the car window before anyone else could take him. “Welcome to McDonald’s.” I smiled. “You wanna date?” The man seemed nice, almost cute, with a mustache like my sixth-grade homeroom teacher.
“Get in.”
I opened the door and waved bye to the girls. The sluts gave me the finger. I couldn’t blame them. I was on their block, taking tricks without paying Shades. Pretty soon, he’s gonna come for your ass, they all said, but fuck Shades. I didn’t care about him or the girls or what Knowledge or Philly thought of me, because right at that moment, I was in a car that smelled like watermelon Bubble Yum, sitting on sheepskin seats and feeling love from a blasting heater. My date slapped in an eight-track. The theme song from Fame came on.
“You see this movie?” He took off his wedding ring, dropped it into his shirt pocket, where he pulled out a Binaca.
