This Is a Bust

by Ed Lin

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, it just so happens that you’re a very special person to this house, don’t you know? As a Chinese cop, you’re very important to our image in the community.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “In fact, from time to time, I’d like to ask you to represent us at community functions and other gatherings. Just talk to people. Smile. Show them you care.”

  “Sir, I’m not one of the more experienced men. . .”

  “But, son, you’ve got the right look.” I felt honored to be asked to represent the house, but at the same time, I was being asked to be the resident wok jockey. I leaned back on my heels and stared at little Andrew Jackson.

  “You really like that woodcut, don’t you? That little lad Jackson stood up to that English bastard, and he went on to become one of the great Presidents of the United States of America.” The Brow squinted his eyes at me before continuing. “He’s the only Irish President I care for. That Kennedy was a dirty, dissolute man who got everything

  he deserved.”

  “What do you think about McKinley, sir?” I asked. I knew that William McKinley was Irish because in grade school.

  I’d gotten stuck writing a profile about him.

  The Brow’s brow went up.

  “I don’t think about McKinley!” He pounded the desk and cocked his head at an angle. “And neither should you, mister! There are crimes being committed right this second! Now go do something about it!”

  But of course, he didn’t really mean it. Well, sure he did want me to go write up tickets to bring some more money into the city. But he didn’t want me to seriously fight crime at large. That was for the real policemen.

  I was the guy who proved that the NYPD could get along with people with sing-song names and black hair. I went to graduation ceremonies, new restaurant openings, and Chinese New Year celebrations.

  It was great at first, but then I got to feeling like I was a teddy bear in a police uniform for the kids to hug, a prop for the newspaper photos. Once in a while they would let me handle a domestic complaint, the kind that broke up as soon as I rang the doorbell and resulted in nobody willing to press charges.

  The other blues thought I was a joke.

  In time I got to hating what I was doing and, worst of all, hating Chinese New Year and the rash of ceremonies I had to attend before, during, and after. That holiday used to mean a mouthful of candy to me. Now I was gritting my teeth through it. The NYPD liked us Chinese, all right. As long as we didn’t try to be more than a lowly beat cop.

  Most daytours and nighttours would end with me drinking my fucking eyeballs dry.

  —

  Directly opposite the C.O.’s office, the desk sergeant sat up in his pulpit. The muster room for roll call and assignments was farther back inside, where it was always drafty. The door to the staircase going down into the backyard and the rear tenement would never stay shut. The back wall

  of the muster room had an RC Cola machine and a candy machine. The holding cell for patrolmen was off to the side.

  When you trudged up the wooden staircase to the second floor, you’d come across the detective squad and their holding cell. The third floor featured showers, lockers, and the most diverse collection of Hanoi Jane stickers in the world.

  The fourth floor was called the lunch room, but the lights were off for the most part because cops on the turnaround and some old-timers liked to nap there. The place stank of cigarettes. The volume on the black and white TV was broken, probably on purpose, and the screen would bathe the sleeping cops in a fizzy light. The open and empty pizza boxes and crushed Coke cans on the table made the room look like a teen sleepover party that had run out of steam.

  I was glad that I lived close to the Five. When I was coming off the 1600 to 0000 I could go home and sleep, then come back for the 0800 to 1600.

  The only reason I’d go to the fourth floor was because, like a lot of the newer guys, my locker share was there. It was a big deal to get a share on the third floor when one opened up — a big enough deal to get into a pushing match.

  It never mattered to me because I lived in a walkup and my legs, numbed to climbing, could take it. One more floor wasn’t going to change my life. But if you were planning

  on doing 20 and out, one more floor every day for the next X number of years could drive you to murder. If a share on the third floor ever opened to me, I’d trade it for season Rangers tickets.

  I got changed and got down to the muster room on time. I slept with my eyes open through most of roll call. They were telling us to look out for delinquent youth activity. But kids weren’t stupid. I’d been in a gang when I was a kid. Cops might as well look for signs of witchcraft. You weren’t going to catch anyone in the act of anything here.

  I thought about my old partner, a guy named John Vandyne. He had moved on, and was now running with the detective squad of the precinct, so he didn’t have to stand for roll call anymore. Just before the layoffs and cutbacks kicked in, Vandyne and I had lost our sector car, but he’d found a way to pick up investigative assignments. He’d been on the job a year longer than me and the extra experience must have helped him.

  They’d told me to walk a footpost to get in touch with the community. Yeah, that was how they put it. In one way, they were right. Most cops on the footpost sulked around, chatting more with tourists than with the Chinese.

  The way the Chinese felt about it, talking in English to an American cop could only invite misfortune, like how visiting an American doctor can only cause you to become sick or start an entire chain of events to get you deported.

  They’d let Vandyne work in plainclothes and someday soon he was going to have a detective’s gold shield. That was what I wanted, but I was too valuable as a Chinese face in uniform. I got to collar bad guys, but most of them were older Chinese men who frankly were no match for me.

  Roll call droned on. I yawned into my fist through the last bit. Then I hit the street.

  Right away, I had to stop for someone’s car that had gotten scraped by a tofu truck off of Baxter. I lifted up a flattened cardboard box on Bowery and told the guy under it to move on now that he’d had a full night’s sleep.

  It was still cold, although the sun was bright as hell. My eyes felt raw and red. I rubbed them a little. I did a quick circuit of my footpost, just to make sure everything was set for the time being before heading for Martha’s Bakery. You don’t want buildings to burn down while you’re out for coffee.

  Martha’s makes iced coffee by pouring old coffee into a foam cup, mixing in condensed milk from a can, and spooning in sugar like it was healthy to have. They stir it before they add in the ice. After they put on the lid, they turn it upside down and give it a few good shakes.

  Two women at the counter handled several hundred customers in the morning rush hours, and neither was named Martha.

  If Lonnie is making my coffee, I’ll take two hot-dog pastries fresh from the oven and damp with steam inside the wax-paper bag. A hot-dog pastry is a unique Chinese American invention. They use the same dough as for the custard buns and taro buns, only they wrap it around an Oscar Meyer hot dog. The ends stick out like horns on a Viking helmet. They’re good.

  Lonnie was young, only 20, but very good-looking, and not too skinny. Well, how skinny can you stay working in a bakery? She had thick black hair that looked pretty okay

  by me. Sometimes she’d tie it up with a plastic hair loop that helps women style hair that perms can’t curl.

  Lonnie would shake my coffee upside down and say, “Officer Robert, how are you today?”

  I’d say, “I’m fine, Lonnie,” and ask how her classes at Borough of Manhattan Community College in midtown were going. Lonnie was a business-communications concentration because she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. She was thinking about journalism. She once showed me her review of an Alexander Fu Sheng movie for the college newspaper. They’d spelled her last name wrong, but she had that clipping laminated. Of
course, non-Chinese had no idea who Alexander was. We saw him as the new Bruce Lee, only with a sense of humor.

  If Dori ended up making my coffee, I’d take three hot-dog pastries. Dori is in her 40s, unmarried, and not real eligible. She looks like the Pillsbury doughboy with a wig and talks at you, not to you. She’d slap my change on the counter so I’d have to pick up each penny.

  I take that extra bun because Dori always made me think of what I had to look forward to in a few years. She made me not care what I looked like or what people thought of me.

  One day, some other woman with about the same physical characteristics as Dori was behind the counter. But it was Dori. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and looked like she hadn’t showered. The collars of her uniform were wrinkled. I had to ask for my change that day. Lonnie told me later that Dori’s mother back in Hong Kong had died. Dori had been devastated about not making her mother a grandmother. But that didn’t stop her from coming into work. They got no sick days at Martha’s Bakery. A day out was a day with no pay and no free mistake pastries.

  —

  After getting two hot-dog pastries from Lonnie, I went back on the footpost. I checked meters and wrote out some parkers.

  It was Monday, so I stopped by the toy shop on Mott to see if Moy wanted to have lunch. I’ve known Moy since second grade, when his family came over. He had wanted me to teach him English, but I’d referred him instead to “Hawaii Five-O.” His parents had opened a laundry at first, but they went with the toy shop when hula hoops got really big.

  His parents were good at picking up on trends. Their store was the last place in New York you could get the sold-out G.I. Joe dolls with the special Kung-Fu Grip, marked up in price, of course.

  It was just the two of them now, Moy and his dad. His mother had died of cancer when we were in high school. The lumpectomy hadn’t worked. She was nice.

  Moy worked at the store almost 12 hours every day. His father never trusted anyone else to get behind the counter except me.

  After Nam but before I got my head on right, Moy’s dad was nice enough to give me a job unpacking toys from boxes from Hong Kong. I couldn’t believe how much money kids had to spend. They were either skimming from their family businesses or selling fireworks to the tourists.

  The work was pretty mindless, but it kept you busy. Two years went by like that, and, like Moy, I didn’t meet any girls there.

  Like a lot of guys, I hadn’t had sex until I got to Nam. Some of the girls didn’t know what to make of me, but they took my money and let me go at it. It was five minutes of humping and 10 minutes of shame. I haven’t had sex since I came back to the world in 1972. I haven’t killed anyone since 1972, either. I kind of associate the two.

  Moy had never had a girl ever, and sorting out spaceship models and monster replicas doesn’t sharpen social skills. He was average looking and at 26 he was only getting older. Like me.

  The big problem with Moy was the hearing aid in his right ear. He was born with some kind of defect, but until he saw a doctor about it, he’d gotten hit on the head by various balls in gym class. Even now when you talked to him, Moy would cock his head and point his good left ear at you.

  I popped my head into the toy store.

  “Moy, you up for lunch?”

  Moy leaned back against a glass case that showed off astronaut figures. He had freckles like Howdy Doody and bushy eyebrows shaded his watery eyes. Moy reached up with one hand and played with the wire that ran from his ear to the shirt pocket of his dark blue t-shirt.

  “I’m hungry,” he said, “but I can’t leave. Dad’s at the post office and we’re getting a shipment in soon.”

  “What’s coming in?” I asked.

  “Models of robots and Godzilla.”

  I left, got some noodles from a sidewalk cart, and walked them back to the toy store. We were almost done eating when Moy’s dad came in. He was wearing a worn felt beret and holding an orange plastic bag and a cane with side legs and a tiny seat that a folded out into a tiny stool. He looked like Moy, but with about 25% less fat, and had a voice harsh enough to tear through a sheet of Reynolds Wrap.

  “You idiot, I said I would bring lunch! Why did you waste your money on that?” Moy’s dad growled.

  “I’ll eat what you brought. This is just noodles,” said Moy.

  “How are you, Uncle?” I said to Moy’s dad. “You’ve made enough money here. Time to move to California.” He frowned as he took plastic soup containers out of the orange bag.

  “What for? Everything I ever knew about America is right here. I still have my friends here,” he said. Little bits of saliva sprayed on the glass counter as he talked. “I like it here. Don’t have to change anything.”

  “You have to find a wife for your son,” I said. He laughed while Moy put his head down. I jabbed Moy’s arm. It felt a little flabby.

  “Only thing I have to do is stay away from blacks,” Moy’s dad said. “When you see a black face around here, you better watch your wallet. They can slip it out of your pocket and you won’t even feel it. The only places they know how to behave are on the basketball court or in jail.” Then he laughed like he was saying, “It’s funny but it’s true!”

  I stayed quiet. What can you say to a guy who was old and ugly, and had such a heavy accent when he spoke English it would make the white guy in “Kung Fu” cringe. He just wanted to be surrounded by Chinese faces for the rest of his life, which wouldn’t last much longer. Let him die like that.

  —

  After the 10-minute lunch, I left and walked to Columbus Park. A dark-skinned black man with a medium build was leaning against the iron fence. He was wearing a brown leather jacket with a ripped vest pocket and a Yankees hat with the brim curled down as far as blinders. He was watching men playing Chinese chess and frowning.

  “Chow,” he said, and clapped my back. We did a one-arm embrace.

  “Vandyne,” I said.

  “I got a message for you from that Willie Gee. He said he wants police protection from the protesters. And he said he wanted to talk to a Chinese cop, because I wouldn’t

  understand the cultural subtleties of running an honorable business.” Vandyne was smiling like he could prove someone wrong.

  “Yeah, I’ll stop by later today,” I said. My footpost was Sector Alpha, which took me past Jade Palace on Bowery, south of Canal. It was the biggest dim-sum place in Chinatown, and Willie Gee was the owner.

  “What are we supposed to do about the protestors?” I said. “They’ve got a permit. They’re staying behind police barricades. They’re not even that loud. And they only come out in force on the weekends for the dim-sum crowds.”

  A bunch of former Jade Palace workers and their families were picketing the restaurant for paying below minimum wage and taking waiters’ tips. What was pretty dumb on the restaurant’s part was that they had rounded up stool-pigeon dishwashers and bus boys to stage the management’s own counter-picket, which they also had a permit for. That made the protest seem twice as large to tourists coming in for dim sum, because you had two groups holding signs in Chinese and yelling at each other

  in Chinese.

  “You know what the protesters are doing now?” asked Vandyne. “They started a hunger strike. The Daily News picked up on it and the Jade asshole wants it stopped. He said nobody wants to eat in a restaurant while people are starving outside.”

  “What does he want? Someone to shove food down their throats? It’s not illegal to not eat. If they’re spray-painting the walls, then we can do something. You know, if it was white people demonstrating, they would’ve chained themselves to the doors, or something dramatic like that.”

  “Yeah, and if it was black people out there, they’d cover

  the whole block, shut that place down. They’d have to call the dogs out.”

  “I think I’m going to head over there now,” I said, checking my watch. “You looking to get a game in?”

  “I’m taking on the midget next,” he
said, pointing to a four-foot-tall man sitting on an upturned bucket that used to hold bean curd. The small man pointed back, making a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pulling the trigger.

  The midget had thick, half-opened eyelids, making him look eternally sarcastic, which he was. He kept his face unshaven, as if he were conscious of looking too much like a kid. His smooth, combed hair was shiny like wet licorice.

  Vandyne had picked up Chinese chess from a book and from playing against the midget, who had tipped off Vandyne about an upstart heroin ring a year before, when he was starting investigative assignments. Helped him a lot.

  The midget was a small guy, but no one had bigger eyes, ears, or brains. A game against him was all in good fun, because everyone knew that no one had ever beaten the midget at anything.

  I swung out from the park and walked up Bayard. Something somewhere in Chinatown hummed. It could have been sewing machines in a sweat shop. It could have been old Chinese in freezing apartments trying to clear their throats.

  —

  The gaudy gold characters on the awning of Jade Palace hit you when you were about two blocks away. If you were driving to Manhattan from Brooklyn on the bridge, you’d see it flaring in the distance like a comet streaking over rooftops cluttered with TV antennas and crooked brick chimneys. I never understood why they wanted to use gold letters. Why not make it the “Gold Palace”? Or if they didn’t want to rename the place, they should’ve made the sign as green as Oz.

  The customers didn’t care what the place was called. They knew the clams in black bean sauce were the cheapest around. They knew the place was big enough so that the wait for a table — even for four people who’d driven in from Long Island or New Jersey — would never be longer than 10 or 15 minutes. And that was all they cared to know about the place.