If it isn’t the new story, in other words, it’ll likely be from a novel in progress.

In case of rain, we’ll be reading indoors at Bar 82 instead. Free of charge. Hope to see you there either way.

The other night, in the company of Sonya Chung (author of LONG FOR THIS WORLD), my boyfriend Dustin and I went to see the opening feature presentation at the Asian American International Film Festival. There was a moderately full crowd in the theater, but I wondered where “everyone” was, as the Taiwanese delegation, celebrating the presence of many Taiwanese films in the US for the first time, finished their speeches.

I also felt I knew where “everyone” was. For some time now, major American cultural venues privilege the experiences of international writers, artists and film-makers over Americans of color in their quest for being diverse, and so a magazine or a festival or a news outlet looking for diversity will more often place an Asian or an African immigrant, 1st generation, before placing an Asian American or African American in the same spot. People of color, people of different ethnic backgrounds, are treated unconsciously, in the US, as minor regionalists of a kind, even perhaps “half-regionalists”, and so we find that Multiculturalism has oddly given us a world in which our cultural work is treated as being slightly less important than a regionalist—we end up belonging to a region that doesn’t quite exist in people’s minds, instead of to the world. I’ve addressed some of this over at the Asian American Literary Review’s forum in the last year, but what I admired in the festival’s name—Asian American International Film Festival—was that it openly embraced in both name and sensibility the way we are both of this place and not at the same time. Having said that, the crowd that was there was an exciting mix of people all the same—and there was a lot of support in the audience by way of young African American filmmakers and students, and people of mixed Asian and African heritage.

Meanwhile, the main event: Red’s film, Manila Skies, was a wrenching portrait of one man’s despair but also of a system within the Philipines that privileges 20% of the population at the expense of 80% of the population. It was hard not to see modern-day Manila as the future of America, as the parallels were constant, especially at a time when the gap between the richest and poorest here has become even worse than it was under Bush. The film begins with a young boy and his mom making baskets to sell for money for groceries, and the boy keeps asking her about when can he go to school? We then cut to the father, walking up a long road, who finds a briefcase full of money and jewelry, and stained in fresh blood. We cut back to the father joining his family, and with a haunted expression, watch as he promises to send the boy to school in Manila, but to promise in return that he won’t come back here. And we cut to the city, where a much older man, presumably the boy, is sad to learn that his father is ill, and unable to leave his job to return without being fired. He decides to apply for a job “overseas”, but we learn quickly this is a scam operation, run by local gangs who promise this help, take fees for it and then do nothing.

The film was inspired by the story of a Manila man who hijacked a plane to try to “go home” and lept to his death, having used a parachute he’d made himself. I won’t ruin the beauty of the ending for you, but it’s a bravura take on income inequality’s persistence in Manila, and I hope it will serve as a kind of warning to audiences everywhere as to the future, if governments continue to give in to corporations and policies that privilege the economy over human dignity and the environment continue unchecked.

“And what was I going to do, marry the town gay? No.”

I laughed at that against my will. I was trying to be mad at her, for not telling me about my son. But I was too happy to see her. Katie still held her cigarette the same way. She looked at me with a smile. “No. It was never going to be like that.” She flicked her ash. “You’re high if you think otherwise.”

“You could have said something,” I said.

“You were never going to stay here,” she said. “And I wasn’t going to make you.”

*   *   *   *

Punching out her brother hadn’t been the best way to find out where she lived now, but after he understood he’d insulted me, he was surprisingly okay about it. “You got a mean swing for a faggot,” he said, and grinned.

You have no idea, I thought.

He understood, though. “He’s your son? Sure about that one?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “Sure enough to ask her to her face.”

Katie and I had done it exactly once. It was after work, Derrick had neither sent Geoff nor called. “Fuck this,” she said. “Stanley, your mother still let you drive?” She liked to call me by my whole name.

I laughed. “She does. She doesn’t want to have to drive me.” The repaired station wagon sat outside a little glumly. I did feel better about driving it, though, knowing I could take it over a stone wall and live.

If you’d told me that night what was going to happen, I would have never believed it. We went by her house, picked up some beers and a few joints she had in cigarette pack and then we drove out to the places we thought the boys would be. In our town there were just a few known places: there was the cove, there was “the rock”, there was a field, another field. The kids knew them and the cops knew them. It was a small town. The cove was starting to fill up with people—it was really the parking lot for the cove—and heads turned as I drove by with Katie looking stonily through the crowd for a sign of Derrick. The rock was empty and a pain—you had to park off the road, take a short hike up to the rock and when we got there, no one was there. By the time we stood in the first field, as we thought about heading to the second one, she said, “You know what? He should be looking for me.” She tapped her joint out of her cigarettes and lit it swiftly, inhaling deeply.

“Ain’t that right,” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You got a man?”

I blinked.

“I know what’s up. I’ve seen you checking out Derrick’s ass when he comes in to see me. Hell, I don’t blame you. It’s a good ass, for now. Though if he keeps drinking like that it won’t be.”

How did she know about the future, I wondered. I knew as she said this it was true.

“No,” I said. “I…”

“Besides the whole school, who knows you’re gay? Have you told anyone?” She laughed and handed me the joint. Around us, fireflies had started up in the field. The tip of the joint glowed orange and then went grey as the ash covered it.

I lifted the joint to my mouth and as I pulled in a deep draw, she said, “You do know you’re gay, right?”

I just smiled. If I said nothing, I could wait a bit longer. Wait until I was really, really, really sure. I had never said anything to anyone. I didn’t know how else to explain what I felt, though, and here she was, making it feel sort of easy and okay but also possibly not true.

“For all I know, Derrick could very well be your man next. He and Geoff certainly spend enough time together.” She looked out into the distance to her left, back across the field toward the car, as if she could see through time and space to where they were. “You’d have to get him away from Geoff, though. God knows I can’t.”

“Next” was the operative word here. I felt a vague thrill at the idea of Derrick and Geoff intertwined somewhere in Geoff’s truck.

“Do you really think…”

She cut me off. “I don’t know what I think. I’m just not drunk and high enough, I guess, after a good day at the CVS.” She rubbed out the roach of the joint on the bottom of her sneaker and stuck it back in her cigarettes. “Waste not, want not,” she said merrily. “What do you think?”

“I think he ought to treat you better,” I said.

“That’s an easy thing to say,” she said. “Come on, now, Stanley. I’ve taught you better than that, haven’t I?” She pulled a beer up from where we’d set them on the ground and cracked the flip top as she balanced it against her hip. “It takes one to know one, right? Do you think Derrick is gay?”

I didn’t want to answer this. The answer was yes, I did think what they did, Derrick and Geoff, seemed, well, Geoff had no reason to be Derrick’s apparent servant. He had no reason to just drive her around like he was Derrick’s slave. Unless he was desperately in love with Derrick. And it made sense too that maybe the reason Derrick drank so much was that despite being with Katie, he was in love with Geoff also. Yes, they could just be best buds. But there was something terrifically sad about it.

And a year later, after graduation, would find me back in the field for a party, overhearing Derrick drunkenly telling Geoff about two girls he had lined up for them, and Geoff balking caused Derrick to say, “Tell me you’re not gay, Geoff. Tell me you’re not gay.”

“It’s okay, you’ve been through enough,” Katie said. “Where the fuck is he?”

“Why do you think I’m gay,” I said.

“Did I offend you,” she said, more of an assertion than a question.

“No,” I said. “I just want to know.”

“You’re an awfully good-looking guy to just not have anyone around doing anything about it,” she said. “I mean, you could be asexual. But I think you’re sexual. I just think you don’t like the answer to the question yet.”

I thought about this but she was right.

“I bet there’s people who like the answer, though,” she said, after watching me say nothing for a little bit.

*   *   *   *

I have never been one to notice quickly when someone was interested in me.

*   *   *   *

I could tell you about how after that night, I could no longer avoid that I was gay. Yes, Katie had turned me on sufficiently that I did the deed, but…I was 17. A lot could, then. Also, know that it wasn’t that it didn’t mean anything. Quite the opposite. To me it  ”meant” that I was gay, like a telegram direct from the universe. After the deed was done, I was incredibly embarrassed, like I’d told the most incredible lie. “Well… now we know,” Katie said, looking up at me with laughter in her eyes, and I was so relieved, we just started to laugh, and we laughed, shaking until we stopped, there on the blanket in the field I had pulled out from the back of the car.

Happier laughing than we had been during sex.

After, we were closer, but it was like a shared hurt, not the intimacy of love.

I could also tell you about how after graduation, Derrick and Geoff left for California, where they bought a condo together with money they’d saved, and Derrick went to school. What did we know? I know that I left, as she pointed out, and went looking for something I wasn’t sure I could find, at least, not as easy as Derrick and Geoff. I went off, I built a life. I repaid my mom for her share of the cost of my prank, I got into a good college, I became a professional gay, as it were, working inside of gay businesses, for gay media, for my life since. I had boyfriends, finally, I “had a man”, and then I lost him. Had another, lost him too. Found another, still had him, as of the trip back home. In my idea of my life going forward, a child, a son of my own, this was nothing I had planned for myself. I barely felt able to take care of myself. How can I explain, then, how it was to meet my son? To sit down in front of him and for Katie to say, “This is your father.” To sit there and suffer his scrutiny of me, even as I found myself holding him in a quick hug he wasn’t sure he liked. How then also to explain what it was like to walk my son into my mom’s house? To walk there with an 8-year-old son, the quiet, good-looking kid Katie had named Boomer, confident but with a slight sad streak of the kind that ran through me as well, the spitting image of me and my dad. How can I tell you what it meant to stand there, my son being kind, while a woman he doesn’t know weeps onto his little shoulder, gently rocking him from side to side. I did not know, until then, what a family was or could be, for having been in one all this time. I didn’t understand until that moment, it was something you built to keep what you could of what you loved from the depradations of time, from the way the world would lead all you loved to to ruin and lies, if it could, from the blunt and forcible separations of death that were not healed, not even a little, until you found within yourself the courage to open your arms and to hold someone again, one more time, with the trust of any child. As my mom wept on Boomer’s little shoulder, I understood, I had finally made right what I had made wrong that day. I had done something that had broken her heart the right way after breaking it the wrong way, and it had reset, like a bone that heals wrong. I had brought something in that neither of us was going to admit we needed, not until it was right there. There was a lot I didn’t know–how Katie and I were going to manage this, whether she would even let me do the three things I could probably do, if she was ready for Boomer to have a grandmother, and my big strange family, too. One thing and one thing only stared out at me as I watched my mom hold Boomer. My servitude at CVS, my punishment, this had never been about her anger at my accident and the damage to the car and the wall. It had been because how could I be so careless, after she had lost my dad, to act like I could not die?

Katie’s boyfriend was soon sending his best friend to pick her up most of the time. At work the next day she was quiet and when I asked her about how her night was, she just shrugged. She never said much more about it than she did that first night, instead taking to it not only without complaint, but soon seeming to like it. Geoff didn’t drink much, while Derrick drank more and more. And the more Derrick drank, the more Geoff seemed to like being Derrick’s go-to guy. Katie, I think, felt special, like Derrick had sent a car for her. Even if it was Geoff’s pick-up. Soon it was nothing special to see Geoff’s truck in front of the CVS at closing time, waiting for her.

Later, when people thought it was maybe Geoff’s baby, she rolled her eyes when she heard. From me–we were at work. “They would,” Katie said. “They fucking would.” And then she looked at me for a minute. “Just because he let Geoff do the driving doesn’t mean he let him do the driving.” We laughed about that one pretty hard, until we hid behind the counter, as if that meant our laughter couldn’t be heard down the aisles.

I’d overheard this at school and decided to tell her. By then we were like old friends. I was four months into the job. My checks were tiny but I knew my mother felt better every time she watched me come in from work and put my blue and white CVS vest on the barstool in the kitchen, and I, I felt a different kind of pride for being on the inside of the biggest scandal at school, which was no longer me. Katie’s pregnancy was interesting to me, a scandal partly because she not only announced it, she had no apparent shame about it: “What,” she said, of her decision to share the news. “Like you weren’t gonna know?” And then she said, “I’m keeping it, too.” In her senior photo for yearbook, she fought for the right to show how far along she was. Derrick offered to marry her but she turned him down.

I thought it was wrong, I also thought it was beautiful.  This confused me but also made it seem important. I was young, and it was my first time having that experience.

* * * *

Her brother that day didn’t seem to know much about this at all. At the bar we found near Whole Foods, we sat and talked amid several awkward silences. I worried that his sister was dead at one point, that I would find out in some way I couldn’t bear. But instead he pulled out his wallet, and he showed me the picture she’d sent recently of her and her son. Who was the spitting image of my dad when he was that age. Something he wasn’t likely to know.

I smiled as I felt my heart burn. It was me, then. All this time it had been me.

“He’s cute,” I said.

“Yeah. He is. He looks like he’s got some Indian blood, right?”

“Cherokee maybe,” I said.

“That’s what I was thinking! But she won’t say and honestly, my sister is like the Olympics.”

I said nothing, because out of something like scientific curiosity, I wanted to hear what he would say next.

“Open to countries from around the world,” he said, and then laughed like a maniac, until I punched him and sent him flying down off his stool.  He shook is head, whipping blood from his nose around him, blinking in surprise.  He had thought he was talking about Bob, her ex from before Derrick. He hadn’t thought it was me. But then no one, including me, had ever thought it was me. Except maybe Katie. And she had said nothing.

By the end of that first day at CVS, I had chalked Katie’s comment about me lasting until Friday to her being sarcastic. My duties were not strenuous to the eye. I had to ring people up, sweep the floors, restock items and price them. Count out a register at the beginning and end of a shift. I got a discount and would use it on a soda during my break. It was easy enough but it was incredibly boring, which was the hard part. The most strenuous part of the job was that you had to be there, in other words. That was what she meant. You had to withstand the killing boredom of it. She didn’t think I could take it.

And to be honest, I lacked stamina. She wasn’t wrong to see that in me. Before being at the CVS, I’d had a job for less than one day at Burger King. I’d filled out the application, the manager interviewed me, he left me to watch the BKU video (Burger King University, for the uninitiated), and then gave me my uniform to try on in the bathroom. There amid the thick scent of urinal cake, when I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, in the brown and orange polyester, only then did I realize, with horror, not just what I looked like, but what my future looked like—yes, my hair, of which I was inordinately proud, with its sunstreaks and waves, was covered by the horrible brown polyester visor, the brown washing out my skin to a sallow, sick yellowy color, my freckles suddenly maybe my only distinguishing factor, except my eyes, wide with fear. But the collar, the short sleeves, the sad weight of the shirt and the pants—I had a vision of myself behind the counter, the air slick with hamburger and fry grease slowly mixing into the fabric.

I walked out of the bathroom that day, leaving the uniform hanging on the stall, and drove home. I never went back and they never called the house to find me. In my conversations with my mother, I never mentioned Burger King. When I got to the CVS and was handed the apron and pin, that seemed like very little to bear. The air conditioned air was a nice break from the damp summer, and the florescent light made it seem as if I’d died and woken up in an afterlife where I was forced to do things like count out drawers. Which was a little how it felt outside of the CVS as well. The TAG incident had made me the wrong kind of famous at school and the administration canceled all future games of it. I’d been considered an upstanding young citizen prior to that, good grades if antisocial, and it was as if I’d gotten caught drunk in the fields around the town, where we all went to drink at night from spring through till fall. Except worse.

That was, of course, the right kind of famous at the school. But if there was anyone who knew about the wrong kind of famous, it was Katie. Or, it would be.

*     *     *

The father of Katie’s child was thought to be one of three different guys.  There was her boyfriend at the time, Derrick. There was an ex of hers, Bob. And then there was Geoff, Derrick’s best friend. She was, as I’ve said, not a notorious girl. She neither participated in the anorexia/bulimia weight-loss games the popular girls played with each other, arriving at school looking like a line drawing their little sisters drew at home, nor was she known as the sort of girl who would do anything for a ride home or a 12-pack or a handle. She was liked in part because she was so normal—not a prude, could roll a decent joint, would give you a cigarette and say hi.

Derrick, her boyfriend, loved her like it was a star-crossed romance, even though it had worked out. He seemed afraid of losing her even while in her arms. I think at first it seemed like passion to her, like this had to be love, it was so strong. But she grew tired of this intensity.

“I mean, when is he just going to get it?” she said.  We were outside the CVS, having just finished a shift, smoking her cigarettes. It was Friday, and I’d made it, lasted out the week.  She wasn’t pregnant yet–the thing that matters to this story hadn’t happened to her yet. She always smoked with her left arm across her chest, her right elbow balanced on her left hand so her arm went up at a right angle like a cigarette salute. Her hand gestures happened up there. She would swing her hand in, take a drag and swing it back out, and the words would be full of smoke as she talked. “I love him. I really do. I’m not going anywhere. But it feels like all the love I have wouldn’t make a difference to him, he’d still be there, believing I was going to leave at any second.”

I had no experience with this—I nodded, fascinated by the idea of how Derrick might lose her because he couldn’t feel the love he said he wanted from her, and that she was offering. I wanted to hear more. It seemed like the worst thing in the world, too, if it happened.  My only relationships were fantasies. I knew well enough to know I was “the gay” in the school. There might be others, but I didn’t know them. And anytime I thought a boy liked me, I quickly decided it was just wishful thinking.

The lights were off inside the CVS, and the early summer dark was slow in coming down. Her hair in the sunlight seemed extra gold contrasted against the oak forest across the street behind her.

A brown Camaro pulled up then.  ”Geoff,” she said to the driver. “Did Derrick send you?”

He grinned. “Yeah.”

“So, he’s too shit-faced to come get me?” She said this with her voice rising on the “me”. “And you’re not?”

He just nodded. “That’s about the shape of it.”

She tossed her cigarette down into the parking lot. “Well isn’t that romantic.” She crushed it out with her sneaker. “Good night,” she said to me, as she walked around the car, not looking, fishing in her purse. “See you tomorrow.”

Check back this Sunday night for Part 4.

Hey gang. Thanks for checking back for the new installment in the summer serial. I’ll have it up in the late morning, around 11AM. Sorry for the delay.

His sister and I were not the most likely of friends at our high school.  I was a pariah of a kind, a little too smart and unfriendly for my own good, and convinced that not only was I better than these people, I would always be better than them. And by “these people” I mean my whole town. It was not the sort of position you launched a successful high school social life from—it was not even the real position of anyone who was an intellectual superior. It was defense, the plan of someone with no intention of ever coming back, the plan of a quitter.  A friend of mine once described his now-ex-boyfriend during their breakup as building a wall between them while he was talking—you could see it going up, he said. I was like that, and I was definitely like it when I took my ill-fated job at the town CVS, where I worked as a cashier for a short two weeks, where I met his sister Katie.

At the time, Katie was well-liked, if not popular. She wasn’t trying to get the approval of anyone, or at least, that was how it seemed. When I walked in that first day of work, I thought of how when you weren’t looking at her, she seemed like a sweet baby-faced blond who still wore her brother’s boyjeans to school under pink knitted ponchos, jeans he’d long outgrown, but then she’d turn every so often, and her eyes let off a cool, like she was older than most of us somehow.  Not a hard cool, but a funny one, like she’d just seen the makings of a very good joke walk by.

That was the look she gave me. Because, well, it was funny, the idea I’d be working there.

“Stanley Gough,” she said, as I walked behind the counter, clocked in and pulled a nametag from my pocket. “Seriously.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You’re the one I’m training today.”

“Yes, that is correct.”

She bent over laughing, a sharp laugh that also somehow wasn’t completely humiliating. “You won’t last a week,” she said, as she stood up. “But we’ll see if we can get you to Friday.”

*      *      *

I was there because I’d driven a car through a fence while playing “TAG: The Assasination Game” up at the school, and I needed to pay my mother back for the car damage and also for the fence. A month previous, I’d walked outside and saw the boy who was winning pull up in front of my house. I jumped in my car with my exchange student, Franco, who then became an unwilling passenger in what turned out to be a frantic car chase that ended on what was known as “Dead Man’s Curve” in our town, for the obvious reasons. I had gotten up to about 65 on a 35, lost control of my mom’s Oldsmobile station wagon, and as we turned the corner, Franco’s eyes wide with terror, the car slid into the oncoming lane, where I saw the headlights of a semi. I somehow remembered driver’s ed instructions—”when losing control, turn the wheel into the turn, not against it—you can’t fight the car” and so we went out of the lane and onto the shoulder, and then off it again, until we crashed through a stone wall and came to a direct stop a few feet from an ancient oak tree.

I stepped from the car in total shock, which at that point felt like nothing, as if the fear of dying had seared all my nerve endings shut. Franco did not step out but we’d had our seat belts on. At that point, the boy I was trying to escape, Gerald Meany (his real name) pulled his little Dodge Dart up and pointed his fingers like a gun in the way that only meant one thing: I was done. And then he drove away.

*      *      *

The owner of the house and fence turned out to be the very pregnant ex-secretary of my mom’s, someone I hadn’t seen in years and who I certainly didn’t want to frighten so badly, say, by smashing an Oldsmobile wagon through her old stone wall. The car itself was in pretty good shape, somehow—keep this in mind if you ever need to drive a car through a stone wall!—but I was not. Franco, it should be said, was a cool customer. Despite his inability to ask me questions during the ride, due to his losing the command of English, he was able to laugh now that the nightmare was over and we were alive. He would eventually manage a good impression of his face during the ride for explaining to people exactly how afraid he was.

My mom was on a boat off the coast of Portland when this happened, at a cocktail party, having what she thought was a beautiful summer day, until a call came that her son had driven his car through a stone wall. She was not as cool. She had become coldly furious, which resembled calm, but was really a calm supplied by the knowledge of how much punishment is about to be brought to bear.  But worse than this was how I had just managed to replicate, in a way I wouldn’t understand for decades, some part of the accident that had taken my father’s life. History repeating, as they say, first as tragedy, and then as comedy. I was not just in debt. I was a very bad person. I had done a terrible, terrible thing, a thing I wished I could undo, and in the meantime, all I could do was go to the CVS and apply for a job.

Part 3 next Sunday night, from now through the month of June.

You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?

I didn’t answer right away. It was the sort of thing guys like him always said to me, always presuming I wasn’t from here. But I was from here, had always been from here, and always would be, no matter where I went, and what’s more, as I was tired of this place having a reputation of not producing guys like me, I was never going to lie.

He was like all the kids I’d gone to school with, sunburned, blond, tall, confident, or still capable of a good bluff. Things hadn’t turned out quite the way he’d wanted, that was clear, but he still believed they would eventually. And in that way, we were the closest we’d be to being like each other. Perhaps that was the gift of the place. When he said his name I knew right away who he was–he’d been arrested for being a coke dealer in high school and his sister had posed for her senior yearbook photo with her baby, which was more of a scandal for some reason than her actual pregnancy.  I’d left the town because I was so tired of living around people who couldn’t deal with things like this, who couldn’t just look at her and the baby and be happy they were happy and alive. But it seemed like maybe I’d have to leave this whole country to get away from that.

We stood in line at the Whole Foods Market, waiting to check out, wanting to get away from each other as we had nothing else to say to each other, and yet completely unable to leave until we were checked out.

“How’s your sister,” I asked.

He blinked. “You knew my sister?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know your sister.”

———

This is a fiction lit blog relay. Novaren Suma is up next. The order is below. We were to each begin with a first line from the last line of the most recent post, on the theme “A Stranger Comes to Town”, and use 250 words.

Updated 6/06/10: Due to the popularity of this, I’ve done it as a serial. Part 2 is here.

1. Wah-Ming Chang: http://wmcisnowhere.wordpress.com
2. Jamey Hatley http://jameyhatley.wordpress.com
3. Stephanie Brown http://scififanatic.livejournal.com/
4. Andrew Whitacre http://fungibleconvictions.com/
5. Heather McDonald http://heathersalphabet.wordpress.com/
6. Christine Lee Zilka http://czilka.wordpress.com/
7. Jackson Bliss http://bluemosaicme.blogspot.com/
8. Jennifer Derilo posted at http://czilka.wordpress.com/
9. Alexander Chee http://koreanish.com/
10. Nova Ren Suma http://novaren.wordpress.com/