1979

by Ray Robertson

  It was Saturday night and the windows of the apartment were open and we all had somewhere to go and something to do. I’d collected for the week and homework could wait until Sunday night and I was meeting Dale at the Capitol Theatre where a new horror film, When a Stranger Calls, was playing. Angie was coming over later and she and Julie would spend a couple of hours scuttling between the bathroom and Julie’s bedroom getting ready to go to some party at somebody’s house whose parents weren’t home. Dad still had use of the owner’s key to our building and liked to take his tape measure over there after dinner and jot down the dimensions of rooms. And even if the movie wasn’t any good, and if you asked Julie and Angie about the party afterward and they invariably said it sucked, and even if Dad had already recorded the square-footage of everything there was to record by now, he always came home whistling, and sometimes with donuts from Wiersema’s Bakery. They’d be there on the kitchen counter whenever you got home and you knew they were for the family, you didn’t have to ask if you could have one. I’d put two on a plate and pour myself a glass of milk and eat them in my room. The next morning, the empty plate and the dirty glass would remind me I’d forgotten to write them down before I went to bed.

  “Who wants more chicken fried rice?” Dad said, white cardboard carton in one hand, fork in the other.

  “I’m stuffed,” Julie said, pushing away her plate, leaning back in her chair. “Beyond stuffed.”

  “Tom?”

  I didn’t say anything, but he knew what I was thinking.

  “Go on, take it,” he said, pushing the last egg roll my way. “Unless your sister wants half.”

  Julie tossed a plastic package of plum sauce in front of me. “How could I deprive a growing boy of his egg roll?”

  “Thanks,” I said, tearing open the top of the package with my teeth.

  “Just don’t eat the container,” she said.

  Dad laughed, I smiled, and there was going to be lots of leftovers for tomorrow.

  Illegal Chinese Immigrant Rises to the Top of Business World Through Hard Work and Dedication

  “Knowing in Your Head How Something Should Be Isn’t the Same as It Actually Being That Way”

  NOT THE COLD or the smell (cheesy plastic, or maybe it was plasticky cheese) or the casual bigotry or the people who all looked the same and talked the same and did the same, all the same—solecisms were what he minded most about his new country, insults to his adopted idiom that weren’t the weather’s fault or the fault of his faintly odorous samey hosts but obviously only his.

  “Bawss, you call me?”

  That’s not right, you know that’s not right. “Call” is the present participle; “called” is the correct form for past tense. You know that. Try it again.

  “Bawss, you called me?”

  You mean “Boss.”

  “Bawss.”

  Better, but…

  “Bawss.”

  Forget it. Just get a mop and pail and clean up the puke some kid just made at table six.

  Both of his parents were doctors in the military, so it hadn’t been exceptional for him to join the People’s Liberation Army when he was fourteen years old, where he served nearly five years on the northeast border with Russia. He was admitted to university just before the Cultural Revolution shut down the schools for a decade and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was all anybody needed to read, but his subject of preference—medicine—was ignored and he was assigned to study engineering instead. He was never very good at math and he didn’t want to build bridges or buildings, but he did what he was told because that’s what he was told to do.

  He graduated and was working on a project that took him to Taiwan for a conference on tailings dams when he took a taxi to the airport in the middle of the night and got on a plane and flew to Canada. It might have been America, it could have been Britain, but there was a flight leaving immediately for Toronto so it was Canada. He called his father a week later and his father told him that not only was he a widower, he now had no son, and hung up. He didn’t call back.

  Toronto and its Chinatown was the obvious choice, but he ended up in Chatham, Ontario, because of a job interview for an engineering firm (the only one he managed to gain in two months of dedicated trying, and only because the company was small and just starting up and couldn’t afford to pay much) that led to the realization that his weak English and foreign degree were double strikes against him ever being employed in the only field he was educated to work in. He’d used up most of the remaining money he’d managed to bring with him to Canada to get his only suit dry-cleaned for the interview and buy a roundtrip ticket, and after the man had shaken his hand and thanked him for his interest in the position and wished him good luck with his job search, he walked where his feet took him downtown, and wondered how he was going to pay next month’s rent. It was only a small room in a house overcrowded with seven other Chinese illegals—shared bathroom, shared kitchen, shared oxygen—but it still cost money, money he soon wouldn’t have. He kept walking.

  He saw a Help Wanted sign in the window of one of Chatham’s two Chinese restaurants and an hour later he was the Lucky Dragon’s newest dishwasher. The job came with a room over the restaurant and he only had to share the bathroom with the two waiters and one of the cooks. He didn’t have a God to thank and he didn’t believe in fate or destiny, so he settled on considering himself lucky. Lucky to find the Lucky Dragon. He did believe that life was strange.

  It’s not a lie, but it’s rare, and it happens so seldom that it lacerates like a lie to those whose lives have been bet on it and who lost and wished they’d never been born to play, but it’s not a lie—the American Dream, even slimmed down to modest Canadian size, does sometimes, intermittently, exist. Existed for him, anyway. Went from: dishwasher to kitchen staff to waiter to manager to (work work work, save save save, work work work, save save save) sweat-equity investor to ten-percent owner to full partner to actual owner, 57 years old and always attired in an open-neck white golf shirt, freshly pressed grey slacks, and with silver-streaked black hair Byrlcreamed and parted sharp to the right. He didn’t need to do it, he could afford to have someone else do it for him, but every evening he liked to answer the phone for an hour or so, just to hear his own voice.

  “Good evening, Lucky Dragon, may I take your order, please?”

  “Yeah, hi, uh, can I, uh, get the dinner for four, I guess.”

  “Certainly, sir. Will that be pick-up or delivery?”

  “Delivery. 48 William Street South.”

  “And the last name, sir?”

  “Buzby.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Buzby.”

  And someone else would cook it and someone else would deliver it and at the end of the night someone else would clean up, but he’d always count the money. He was never very good at math, but he was the boss, that was what the boss did.

  ~

  “There they go again,” Dad said, talking to the television as much as he was to me.

  “Who?”

  “Who else? The damn Soviets. Putting their noses where they don’t belong. Again.”

  You tried to avoid the news, but sometimes it just wasn’t possible. It was Friday night and Julie had skipped dinner, was out with Angie somewhere, and Dad and I were eating dessert in front of the TV. The only condition he applied to television-watching while eating—in this case, a fat hunk of Sara Lee chocolate cake—was that the channel be turned to the news and what kind of mess the planet had gotten itself into since yesterday’s broadcast. I would have preferred Hogan’s Heroes, but eating cake on the couch was worth putting up with the world for a few minutes.

  The anchorman said that the Soviet Union had long been aiding Afghan forces fighting against fundamentalist insurgent groups with names I couldn’t pronounce who were, in turn, being funded and aided by, among others, the United States. Millions, maybe bill
ions, of dollars were being supplied by each side, but the anchorman never said why, so I asked Dad.

  “Because the USSR wants to take over every country it can get its hands on and make them communist, that’s why. And the US is just trying to stop them, trying to spread democracy.”

  “The anchorman said that the guys the US are supporting are Islams, though—aren’t those the same kind of guys in Iran who took the Americans hostage?” Every news program began with an American hostage update. Behind the broadcaster would be a big black number saying how many days it had been since the hostages had been taken prisoner. Today was Day Eleven.

  Dad took the last bite of his cake; looked at his plate while he chewed. He set his fork on the plate and placed it on the coffee table. “It’s complicated,” he said.

  That part I was pretty sure of. That’s why I’d asked him what I did. “Isn’t it kind of crazy for both sides to spend all that money—and now they’re saying the Soviets might send soldiers to Afghanistan too—just for, you know, an idea.”

  “Some people hate freedom, some people love it,” he said. “Seems pretty simple to me.”

  You just said it was complicated, I wanted say. I ate what was left of my cake instead.

  We were learning about the Cold War in history class, the jittery game of nuclear chicken the two most powerful nations in the world had been playing off and on since the end of World War Two. Mr. Brown told us about 1961 and the Soviet ships on their way to Cuba stocked with nuclear-tipped missiles that were intended to be pointed at the US and the United States’ insistence that they turn around or else. Everybody knew what Or else meant. Or else didn’t happen that time—the Soviet ships circled back and headed home—but if the USSR followed through on their threat to send troops to Afghanistan and the Americans decided to do the same, maybe this time it would. All of a sudden the sun blowing up millions of years in the future didn’t seem as scary as it used to. I told Dad I was going to my room.

  “What do you say we finish off that cake?” he said, winking.

  “I’m stuffed,” I said.

  He looked at his stomach and gave it a couple gentle taps. “Probably best if we save some for your sister anyway.” He handed me his empty plate and I took it and mine into kitchen and grabbed a can of C Plus.

  I tried to read, but my eyes wouldn’t stay stuck to the Teflon words. Even Glenn Gould and Bach couldn’t stop me from thinking about Or else. Then I remembered I hadn’t recorded dinner in my Journal of Consumption yet and I felt happy. I pressed the pen hard to the page as I entered each item; I could feel the white paper soaking up the blue ink, something that hadn’t been there only an instant before now looking as if it had to exist, had always existed. When I was done, I felt sad until I spotted my can of C Plus on the corner of my desk and I wrote down that too.

  When Dad heard me in the kitchen and asked me what I was doing and I said I was getting another piece of cake, “I thought you said you were full,” he said.

  “That was before,” I said. “Now I’m hungry again.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Dad made his living giving other people tattoos and had plenty of tattoos himself, but he never talked about tattoos, not like, say, Allison’s dad, who somehow always managed to work drain-cleaning or valve installations or sewer replacement into every conversation, even when he was just talking to the paperboy. There hadn’t been any new tattoos in a while—all the ink that covered Dad’s arms was there when I was old enough to notice: a shining star on his left bicep; a flaming Phoenix rising from its own ashes on his right; a moon rising in the mist, a tiger poised to pounce, Julie’s name and mine in flowing fancy script. And Mom’s name, too, where his right arm became his shoulder. You never saw it unless you caught him with his T-shirt off, shaving in the morning or stepping out of the shower, but it was there.

  “I’ll be out in just a minute, kiddo,” he said, his Fu Manchu moustache freshly trimmed and his razor put away and just the foamy white excess left to deal with. Dad wasn’t like Julie—was an in-and-out of the bathroom user—so “just a minute” wasn’t just an expression to keep you from pounding on the door again.

  I was standing in the bathroom doorway in my pajamas and bare feet. “It’s okay,” I said.

  He looked at me while he toweled off his face and neck. “Won’t be long until you’ll be keeping your old man waiting while you’re shaving.”

  “I guess.”

  He kept looking at me like he was trying to spot evidence of an incipient teenage moustache. If he was, he was wasting his time—I’d already tried the same thing and it didn’t work. I looked at Mom’s name on his arm and wanted to ask him why he still had it, but knew I’d better not. He didn’t offer tattoo removals himself although I’d overheard him tell some of his customers that it happened all the time.

  Instead, “When did you get that star tattoo?” I said.

  “When I was young and stupid.”

  “Not as young as me, though.”

  “No, not that young. And don’t get any ideas—you know the rule.”

  The rule was no tattoos until I was nineteen, the same age as anyone coming into his shop. I wasn’t even sure I wanted one when I was old enough—anything your parents did couldn’t be all that great.

  “Why’d you get a star?” I said. Getting an eventually-exploding star stencilled on your body made about as much sense as carrying a calendar around with you everywhere you went—why would you want to remind yourself of Time’s ticking hand?

  Dad blasted the water from the faucet and used his hand to rinse the remaining whiskers in the sink. “Would you believe me if I said I don’t remember?”

  “Not really.”

  Dad laughed. “I don’t blame you, but trust me, it’s true. I suppose I just liked the way it looked, plus it was different. Everybody I knew back then that had a tattoo had either an anchor or Mom or a crummy-looking motorcycle, so I guess a star seemed kind of unique.” He turned off the tap and wiped the sink dry with a piece of toilet paper he folded in two. “Besides, a star is pretty cool, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t tell him that I thought a star was about as far from cool as the earth was from the sun, the someday-to-be-expired sun. “When did you get the tattoo of Mom’s name?” I said. I was as surprised to hear my question as he seemed to be.

  He pulled on the white T-shirt that had been hanging on the back of the bathroom door and bye-bye Mom. “A long time ago,” he said.

  “Like when you guys met?”

  “I forget, kiddo.”

  This time I knew he wasn’t telling the truth. I knew because he didn’t ask me to trust him. I’d come this close to the sun without burning up, what were a few more inches? “Did you ever want to get rid of it?” I said.

  “How about pancakes?” Dad said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean ‘What do you mean’? Your dad is going to make us pancakes this morning, how’s that sound?”

  “Good.”

  “Good. Now get cracking on that shower. They’ll be on the table by the time you’re done and dressed.”

  It was cold—the kind of cold that keeps you from going outside. Or, if like me, you had to be outside—it was Saturday after all, and assaultive winds and skin-pinching temperatures or not, The Chatham Daily News needed its money so I needed to make my collections—you hurried from house to house hoping that whoever opened the door wouldn’t have that week’s payment ready and would let you inside for a few minutes so you could at least partially thaw out before having to step back outside again. But everything was okay now. I was at home on a Saturday night doing nothing while the rest of the world was out somewhere busy doing something, but that was okay too.

  Even though it was even colder than it had been that afternoon, I was lying on the couch in the warm living room eating a bag of Lay’s barbequ
e chips and watching a midnight horror movie on channel 50. Even better, the movie was showing on The Ghoul Show, hosted by The Ghoul himself, a self-confessed “sicko” (“Stay sick,” he’d encourage his viewers) who wore a light blue lab coat and a curly blond wig and a fake black moustache and goatee and dark sunglasses with one lens missing. He looked like the kind of person who’d periodically blurt out his most famous catchphrase, “Hiya, gang. Hiya, hiya, hiya.” During breaks in the movie—always bad, but so bad it was usually good—he’d make corny jokes and blow up model cars and food with firecrackers and sometimes even a plastic frog named Froggy whom he took pleasure in physically and verbally assaulting throughout the show. The only part I didn’t like was when his voice would suddenly interrupt the movie itself, commenting on how phony a flying saucer looked or how implausible a plot turn was. For a bad movie to be a good movie, the people making it—the writers, the actors, the prop people—had to have tried to succeed. It wouldn’t have seemed ridiculous if they hadn’t been sincere. If you treated it like a joke, it wasn’t as funny.

  Julie and Angie were at a dance at CCI and Dad was at the new building, where he went when he wasn’t at work or at home. Although the deal had been delayed again—the owner had broken both his legs skiing in Colorado—it hadn’t stopped Dad from increasing his presence in the place. His latest project was refinishing the hardwood floors, first sanding them all down and then coating them with polyurethane. He’d go to work then come upstairs and eat and then head over to the building immediately after dinner, coming home several hours later covered in wood dust or smelling like sweet poison, but always happy, exhausted but happy. He’d drink a bottle of beer standing up in the kitchen, too wound up to take a shower first or to even sit down.