A Moebius strip of love and respect to Cindy, Doris, Dan, Alice, George and Cindy; nothing feels better than blood on blood. This book wouldn’t be alive without the care of Sunyoung, Julie, Jae Hee, Thai, Melinda and Jackie. Ricolasized shoutouts to Grace, Gary, Gayle, Darrell, Carla, Parag, Nhan, Gita, Katherine, Ed, Joe, Howard, Dan, Steve, Bennett and Mad Alex. The sun never sets on our backs: Kaya, AAJA, SAJA, AAWW, AAI, Peeling the Banana, Something to Say, Yellow Rage, A2BC, AAAA, 2G, CSWA, SAYA! and Uncle Teddy Happy.
Copyright © 2002 by Ed Lin All rights reserved 06 05 04 03 02 5 4 3 2 1
Published by Kaya Press, an imprint of Muae Publishing
P.O. Box 7492 New York, NY 10116
Book design by Thai Nguyen
Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers
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(800) 338-BOOK
This publication is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, as well as the JPMorgan Chase SMARTS Regrant Program and the Asian American Arts Alliance, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Soo Kyung Kim, Wook Hun and Sun Hee Koo, Eileen Tabios, Ronald and Susan Yanagihara, and many others.
I was about 12 years old when I knew I had to get laid soon. No more of this jerking off. That was for fags.
The idea had been put into my head by Vincent, a Benny from Brooklyn. Bennys were young whites who came down to our hotel in the summers to pollute New Jersey’s shores. They didn’t go to college and worked in factories or as secretaries. All of them were from Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark or New York, hence the name.
Vincent and I were sitting on the office couch playing Warlords when he turned to me and asked, “You gotten laid yet?”
“Nah. Not yet.”
“Well, why not? You’re like 11, right?”
“I’m 12,” I said, straightening my back.
“Yeah, whatever, you should get laid. Girls were all over me when I was like eight. I was all over them, too.” Vincent scratched his right side and his nipples visibly hardened. I never saw him with a shirt on, but he never shivered when he slipped into the frigid air of the office, wearing only a pair of tight black trunks and aquarium blue flip flops.
I had on a New Orleans Mardi Gras t-shirt that I’d found in one of the rooms and a pair of Yankees shorts. Imitation leather slippers from Taiwan left treads on the top of my feet where the straps crisscrossed.
“What for, Vincent?”
“What for?’ What the fuck kind of question is that?” He punched playfully at my arm. “What for! For getting your dick wet!”
I hit the reset button on the Atari and starting pounding away at Vincent’s warlord.
“Hey hey hey!” he yelped as he fumbled to pull up the controller, which had slipped out of his hands and into his crotch.
This was Vincent’s fourth straight weekend at our hotel. Vincent always wanted Room 59, because he was born that year and because it was close to the pool. It was also far from the office, which was important because he was sneaking in his two cousins with his girlfriend so he could pay the two-person rate instead of the four-person rate, which was 10 bucks more. Vincent told me because we were friends and we had an understanding between us.
Vincent was in his early 20s, with a face that was long and narrow like a skinny tree trunk. His thick black hair was cropped short and stood straight up, like magnified photos of stubble before the razor cuts the chin clean. He was “Vincent,” never “Vinny,” because Vinny was the name of some pizza joint in New York, and it wasn’t the real Italian pizza, anyway. You needed a fork and a knife to eat real pizza. Real Italian pizza was thicker and had more stuff in it. Vincent had never had real Italian pizza, but that was the first thing he was going to do when he got to Italy, where his grandfather was from.Vincent was working at some construction job his uncle got him, but at night he was studying to be a cop. He was going to take me to Coney Island in his squad car one day. We were going to ride the Cyclone and eat hot dogs.
I had moved the Atari and the television into the office because it got so busy during the summertime that it didn’t make sense to stay inside the living quarters and walk into and out of the office every five minutes for every BING! BING! BING! of the desk bell. Nobody hit that bell just once. Besides, it was June, and the temperature was cranking up. The office was air-conditioned and our living quarters weren’t. It had to be that way because my parents said it wasn’t worth air conditioning the living quarters. But if the office wasn’t kept cold, customers would think the air conditioners in the rooms didn’t work.
As a result, I spent a lot of time on the office couch. Vincent would drop in to hang out and play Atari with me when his girlfriend was pissed at him, which was usually a few hours on Saturday morning and a few more hours on Sunday morning.
I liked having someone to play games with. I was an only child, and my parents could never tell if I was playing Atari or watching television, even when blocky tanks, planes, or spaceships were firing at each other on the screen. They wouldn’t have had time to play games even if they knew how. Friends, forget about it. No one wanted to hang out at our hotel. And it was too busy for me to ever leave for long enough to have friends outside of school.
“I’m going to win again!” I yelled.
I felt like such a loser when Vincent talked about girls. Vincent always talked about his fucking adventures — how he fucked his married neighbor who was 40 but was as tight as a 20-year-old, and how he fucked three sisters in three days and two of them were virgins. I preferred hearing his stories to having him ask me who I was fucking. I only had stories about me winning fights, which I did often enough because I was big for my age, but I knew I was letting him down.
“I know you kids are fucking in school. I know you are.”
“I only heard about the two retarded kids, and I don’t even think they meant it,” I said.
Vincent laughed. “Retarded pussy! Shit, pussy’s pussy, who cares,” he said, taking his hands off the Atari controller. “You gotta like someone in school. I know you do. Some girls already start developing, you know? Their asses kinda turn out like fenders, and the headlights, you know they’re going on high beam.” His warlord flickered and died. Defeat was drawn out in crude, blinking video blocks. “Some little oriental girl? You been keeping her a secret? You give her some bamboo? You slip it to her?”
“Naw, I’m the only one in my school. Anyway, Chinese girls are ugly. I like blondes. Or redheads if they don’t have too many freckles.” Vincent shook his head from side to side, keeping his pupils fixed on me.
“I’ve fucked Chinese girls. God-damned cute. I fucked one last week, that’s why Patty’s pissed at me. I just told her.”
“Then why are you still with Patty? You could go out with someone different every weekend. She just gives you too much shit.” I was thinking that when I was old enough, I would be fucking left and right because there were so many women wanting cock in the world. Maybe I was old enough now, since I was getting hard ons all the time. If I found a dynamite bombshell, I’d make her my girlfriend. But Patty was no bombshell. She had huge tits, but her nose drooped down like the mascot on the Moosehead Beer label. I never told Vincent that.
“Why am I still going out with Patty? Because I love her. You know, I really do. I’m gonna marry her. We’re gonna have kids and everything.” His mouth narrowed into a scythe. “But she don’t have