gpc

One of my vendor contacts requests that we meet in person. (Up to this point we have only exchanged e-mails and talked on the phone.)

“Maybe we can meet up near the booth,” I suggest.

At the scheduled time, I notice a gray-suited middle-aged man on the expo floor waving an arm at me from about twenty yards out. He has never seen me before, never seen a picture of me, and the exhibition hall is packed. All he knows is my first and last name.

He grins as he shakes my hand: “Great to finally meet you!”

I scan the crowd for a few seconds before saying anything.

“So…pretty damn easy to find me, eh?”

No, I didn’t really say that. But I thought about it.

I get a message that the marketing team has secured a table for twenty at a steakhouse near the convention center. It ends with Join us if you can. 

Unfortunately my flight gets in late — at least that’s what I plan to say — so I miss out on a night of managers ordering martinis and predicting fallout from the next round of restructuring.

At the check-in desk, a man tells me that they had to switch rooms for my reservation. (The last time this happened to me, I had to keep the coffee maker running at night to overpower the cigarette stench from the wallpaper.)

“Down worry, Messer 張,” he says. “I get something fix up for you man.”

The fixed-up room has a long corridor leading up to a window that faces west, toward downtown. Take a right, and there’s a deluxe suite waiting to be occupied. (“How about maybe we keep this one between you and me, Messer 張.”) I sit on the floor in front of the window and consider possible beelines for dinner…

…The last time I was at a Denny’s was in Page, Arizona — fueling up for the Bryce Canyon leg of the road trip. I remember the waitress talking us into an order of pancake puppies that no one really wanted. (We were too tired to object.)

A pair of waiters are on night shift tonight; the back part of the dining room is cordoned off with the lights dimmed. I’m seated at a table that’s about an arm’s length from a booth shared by two young women who have both ordered avocado chicken Caesar salads with the dressing on the side. Their accents sound West Coast to me. They work together in the same department. One is a Chinese-American who lives with her boyfriend and their dog; the other a Greek-American who recently moved back in with her parents. Like me, they have older colleagues who flew in earlier today or yesterday. Like me, they ducked into Denny’s to keep some distance from them.

It would be easy for me to strike up conversation with them — and for this trip, you could say I’m supposed to, as they’re technically customers (or potential customers). It would go something like this: I interrupt with a question, and after they answer it, I introduce myself and steer them through a conversation that allows me to mention a few things we sell that might help them do what it is they do. I might get an e-mail or business card out of them. I pick up their check and remind them to visit our booth. And that would be the last I see of them. 

But as I listen to the two Californians with their salads, I find myself hesitating. Over the next few days they’ll be bombarded with swag and pitches and propaganda. Why should I be the one who starts the avalanche? Let someone else do it. 

The waiter takes my empty plate and asks if I want more coffee.

“Um…yeah. Just a half cup.”

I look down at the place mat, which I had not noticed earlier, and now I kind of regret passing up the chance to chat up those Californians. Instead of the standard line — “Excuse me, are you here for the convention?” — I could have chimed in with something better, something far stranger and more up my alley.

“Hey — can one of you explain to me why tomato beats bacon?”

Now healed, and feeling obligated to get the most out of my two-minute follow-up consultation, I ask a stupid question.

“So is there anything I could have done beforehand? You know, to prevent it from happening? Diet? Vitamins? Anything?”

“No,” the physician replies. “We don’t really know why it happens.”

“So it’s just bad luck.”

“That’s right,” he says. “Bad luck.”

—
Nina Simone, “Born Under a Bad Sign”
Paris, 1969

Dude, he’s got like this spiritual jazz, late-Marvin Gaye song thing going.

— A bearded guy on Frankencorner — who, it should be known, had this dismounted-bike, skewed-tweed-driver cap, Noxzema-sheen talk thing going. 

A Korean, a Hawaiian, a Filipino, and a Chinaman walk into a taco joint. (I feel the need to do this from time to time: listen to the youngsters talk.)

“I don’t date Asians,” the Korean declares. I remember hearing this spiel when I first met him a year and a half ago. 

“Why not?” asks the Hawaiian.

“White girls are just more fun,” he replies. “I mean, if we’re drinking? No Asian girl is gonna keep up with me.” (The script has not really changed. I give him a year or two before he decides to revise it.)

The waiter brings a Pacifico for the Hawaiian, a Negra Modelo for the Filipino, and a Flower Power IPA for me. Nothing for the Korean; he’s driving. After dinner, he’s off to meet up with (wait for it…) a white girl.

The Hawaiian tells us about one of her girlfriends who recently told a guy to back off after he played the I-thought-we’re-more-than-just-friends-aren’t-we? card.

“Man, that’s cold,” says the Filipino. “Why she gonna send mixed signals like that?”

“It’s not her fault,” the Hawaiian counters. “She just thought he got that she wasn’t interested in him in that way. You can’t blame her if the guy is clueless.”

“Naw naw, man, that’s on her. How he supposed to read that?”

The Korean turns to me. “Do you know either of these people they’re talking about?” he asks.

“Not the girl. I’ve met the guy once—”

“She cute?”

“She’s Chinese,” answers the Hawaiian.

“Oh. Never mind…wait, you got a picture?”

A phone is handed around the table. The picture was taken at a bar — a young, petite Chinese woman smiling and holding the arm of a towering white dude. 

“Um, no thank you,” says the Korean.

“張, what about you?” asks the Hawaiian. “She’s pretty, right?”

I wait for the rest of the pitch.

“She is super smart. She has a Ph.D., did a residency program, she’s really active and loves doing outdoorsy stuff, she is soooo funny and fun to talk to…”

I glance over at the Filipino, who looks doubtful. “I don’t know, man. I met this girl. You saying she’s active and all that but she ain’t the one being active. She’s just waiting around for someone else to suggest something active and she’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll go too.’ To me that doesn’t mean she’s active. That’s kinda boring to me.”

I hand the phone back to its owner. 

“She really needs someone younger,” I say.

“So how’s the pinkie?” asks the orthopedic resident. 

I tell him I can type okay but can’t yet finger an E7 chord. I can pick things up with my left hand, but if it’s something heavy I can’t hold it for very long.

“Yeah, you’re going to need to do some stretching exercises,” he says. “Here, make a fist with your left hand for me.”

I curl my fingers into a fist. The pinkie won’t close tightly so he clamps down on it. 

“Ow.”

“Yeah, it’ll hurt a little. Just hold it down like this with your other hand.  Force it to go down and hold it for about ten seconds” — ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow owww — “and then do that five or six times.”

He lets go and I have to think almost out loud — Brain, please unclench pinkie — in order for the finger to straighten out again.

“The other thing you can do is one of these karate chop moves.” He puts his elbow on the table, and retracts his fingers back into a vicious-looking claw — like Hong Xi-quan going for Pai Mei’s eyeballs.

“You want to tense up your fingers as much as you can, and you’re trying to get that tip of the pinkie to touch your palm.”

I try to make the same tiger-boxing “claw” with my left hand. The pinkie doesn’t quite get there, so again the doctor presses it into position. (The scar tissue laughs at us.)

“Not bad,” he says. “You’ll get there.”

“I’ll practice while watching some kung-fu movies.”

“Do you have loratadine?”

“On me? No…”

“How long before you will start sneezing?”

“If you’re this close…three minutes, give or take.”

“I am sorry — you prefer if I keep the paws off your knee?”

“It’s okay. As long as it’s under three minutes.”

“Why won’t you rub my head?”

“Sorry, can’t do it. Won’t do it.”

“Jesus, look at all this affection you’re missing out on! And all these people walking by saying, ‘Awwwww.’ Don’t I make you feel special?”

“Not really. I look at you and all I see is cute, cuddly co-pays to my allergist.”

“Why is it taking her so long to buy coffee?”

“There’s a line. Dogs don’t really get it, but humans do strange things like waiting in line.”

“Do you like her? I like her! I rrrrrrrrrreaally like her!”

“She’s cute. Nice mocassins, too.”

“Oooooh, the mocassins. She gets mad when I chew on the mocassins.”

“Way to treat the masta.”

“I’m irritated now. This is the longest I have gone without someone rubbing my head.”

“Nice try. My hands are tied.”

“Hey hey hey, where are you going? You haven’t even finished your coffee. Plus I don’t like being left alone out here on a leash.”

“It builds character. Goodbye.”

The guy at the end of the table — let’s call him Kemosabe — asks me, “So what part of the Philippines are you from?”

“Actually I’m from Indiana.”

“Oh really — your parents, too?”

“No. They’re from Taiwan.”

The man’s wife, who is sitting next to me, decides to clarify (more for her husband’s sake than mine): “You were born here,” she says. “But you are Chinese.”

“Right.”

“You ever visit your family in Taiwan?” she asks. 

“A few times but not in a while. The last time was maybe ten years ago — for Chinese New Year.”

She nods. I learn later that her time in Brooklyn is winding down; she wants to retire soon and move back to her old house, outside of Manila. 

Down at the other end of the table, two of her grandchildren are making faces at their mother, then at their uncle, and then at the three strangers in the middle of the table who were invited to the family Easter dinner at the last minute. (This seems to be a new trend among some of my friends: temporary adoption by a Filipino family during Christian holidays.)

The food arrives: sizzling sisig, lumpiang sariwa, pork adobo, grilled tilapia, pancit beehoon, ginataang manok…

“Filipino food is not spicy, not like Korean or Japanese,” Kemosabe assures us. “There’s nothing to worry about.” 

Under my left elbow, I spy a fork carefully dumping a rejected piece of meat onto my plate of rice. Mrs. Kemosabe leans in on my right: “Your friend, I think she don’t like pork adobo…”

She watches as her son scrapes together a dollop of pancit for his girlfriend. “Have some more of this, honey, I think you’ll like it.”

“Oh, he call you honey already,” she observes aloud. “You know that one, ah? Honey. And honeybee?”

“Ma,” he says sternly.

I reach for the garlic rice, and Mrs. Kemosabe pushes me to take some of her tilapia.

“You should eat more,” she says. “Take more rice, too.”

“They serve that stuff for breakfast,” Kemosabe points out. “Sausage and eggs over the garlic rice. That stuff’ll wake ya up I tell ya.”

He tells us the story of how they drove up to Canada last year. “At the border, the guy’s looking at our passports, and she’s got a Spanish last name, it’s different than mine, and they’re looking at me and looking at her and they think I’m smuggling Mexicans into Canada. Made me pop the trunk and everything.”

I look over at the plate of lumpiang shanghai. There’s one left.

“Somebody kill that,” orders Mrs. Kemosabe’s son.

A stocky Asian man in a black leather jacket appears and starts going around, chair to chair, handing out his business card. In the mirror I can see some heads perking up — including the one on the guy standing behind me with the clippers. He turns around, and the Asian man promptly opens up a thick black binder full of photos of Yamako Shears.

“Can I see a number six?” my barber asks. “Are these all hollow grind?”

He returns to my chair a few minutes later and picks up his pair of gold-plated Japanese shears.

“These cost me six-hundred dollars,” he says. “And that was twenty years ago. This guy’s got shears made in China for thirty-five.” He laughs. “Now what was I talking about?”

“Drums…Motown…fusion.”

“Right. So the drumming thing — I got out of it, I just lost interest. Got rid of the kit. Sometimes you just have to let those things go, you know.”

I nod, but in the back of my mind I know that I will probably never get rid of the Epiphone Dot I have entombed in its case at home.

“Anyway, I’m onto a different art now,” says the man with the gold-plated shears. “It keeps me busy. It always leaves me fascinated. It pays better, too.”

I do not speak German but the facial expression is the same in English.

I heard she got engaged last week. There is that phrase we tend to say about these things. How does it go…

Good for her.

Yeah — that’s what it is.

I will never know exactly what set it off. It might have been the panic I felt in the cab ride to the ER, or the sight of a syringe of lidocaine being emptied through the callus at the base of my left pinkie, or the audible squoosh as the orthopedist yanked the joint back into place. (“Makes a funny sound, doesn’t it?”) Maybe it was the tetanus shot. Or a reaction to the antibiotics. 

But something kicked in and then kicked up — first as a sharp pain in my ribcage, and then a few red bumps. A day later, it started to look like chicken pox. 

“In a way, it is chicken pox,” said the doctor. “But different.”

I remember in high school there was a rumor that one of the English teachers had shingles. (What is it, anyway? We didn’t know. We didn’t bother to look it up or ask our parents.) She was out for an entire quarter, a few months after she had graded our papers on Othello and Streetcar.

What had set it off for her? It would make more sense to me if I could trace it back to one thing — an incident, a memory, a reaction to something she heard.

I’m guessing there is a doctoral candidate somewhere who will be able to tell me the answer in a few years. There would be an interrogation: What was on your mind during the week you got sick? Was it someone? A place? A general feeling? I would be hypnotized to remember what happened during that week, and each of the days would be painstakingly reconstructed in fifteen-minute intervals on a spreadsheet. The data would be fed into a magic algorithm that would eventually spit out the one item, the one culprit, that had caused my misery.

And I am positive that I would be completely underwhelmed by the answer.

“You fine and unique”? Or…“you fine and you neat” (as in neat-o)?

This is really bothering me on a Sunday.

—
Magic Sam, “She Belongs to Me”
Crash 425
Recorded in Chicago, 1960