Silence-Years
“We're gonna rumble tonight,” Cu-Den told me after school at his house.
1985. A typical day. We were juniors in high school. Cu-Den, Manh, and I were digging around the refrigerator for leftovers. We were wearing shoes in Cu-Den's house because his mom wasn't home. When she was, we bowed, left our shoes at the door, and crept meekly around her house, a couple of acolytes new to the monastery. Usually, we had the run of Cu-Den's low-rent duplex because his mom and his older brother were at work. His brother paid the bills while his mother held down two jobs so she could bribe their father out of the Communist labor camp and bring him to the States.
“Who now?” I asked.
“The fucking Mexican
cholos
, man,” said Manh, the craziest of the bunch, a natural athlete, lean and muscular but a bit on the short side, sporting the stereotypical coconut-bowl haircut. He had given up on hair spray, nothing could give life to his black mop.
“Again?” There were three major groups at school, white, Mexican, and Vietnamese. Each group claimed a different wing of the school. Fights broke out regularly.
“Yeah,” Cu-Den said. “The rest of the gang is gonna meet us here. Six on six.”
“What the fuck for?”
Manh cracked up laughing. “The
cholos
got blamed for the fucking gym job!”
A couple of nights earlier, Cu-Den and I had been watching TV when Manh exploded through the back door yelling, “Turn off the light! Turn off the fucking lights!”
The gang stormed in after him, huffing and puffing, sweating. All scraped up. They had jumped the backyard fence, which rimmed the school's soccer field. It was a six-foot chain-link fence with three strands of barbed wire.
“Hide these! The cops are coming!” Lee barreled through the door, a huge duffel bag on his lineman's shoulder. Tong and Thang trailed in, carrying similar loads.
We ran to the back-bedroom window Lights flooded the school gym and the basketball courts. Police cars everywhere, spinning redblue. Cops combed the field with their flashlights, walking the length of it and peeping into the fifty houses or so surrounding the school. We were lucky they didn't have dogs.
In the living room, Manh was beside himself, swaggering like a real bad boy. “We broke into the gym!”
“Got everything, man!” Lee exclaimed, twirling a crowbar like a baton. He was probably the biggest Vietnamese in America. Big, blindingly fast, and, in a fight, real mean. We called him The Thing and we never “rumbled” without him.
“Shiiiiiiit! You should have seen Lee, man,” babbled Manh, grinning ear to ear. “Me and Thang were like pulling on the fucking bar forever and the damn door wouldn't even open a crack. Lee came up and went ⦠gggrrrrrrrGGGGRRRAAHH!! ⦠andâKRACK! Busted door, yeah. He ripped that thing off the fucking hinges!”
“It was totally cool!” Tong shouted, pumping his arm, gyrating his touchdown dance, a skinny, floppy marionette. “Man, you guys should have seen it.”
“We cleaned the fucking place out,” bragged Thang, the only one with enough facial hair for a mustache, which he fondled continually like a real Confucius. “All the best stuff!”
“WoooooooooooHoooooooo!”
“We're RICH!”
“YeeeeeeHaaaw!”
The gang had gone ahead with their plan when Cu-Den and I bowed out. They knew we were hoping to go to college and they didn't hold our “chickening out” against us. We were cool about things like that. They pulled the job because they needed the stuff. The adrenaline was good too, but at the bottom of it was the fact that any of us was lucky to have ten bucks in our pocket on any day.
Cu-Den and I gathered round to take a peek at their loot.
Socks, tennis balls, basketballs.
Cu-Den banged us a skillet of scrambled eggs, fried Spam, and steamed rice. It was all we could rake out of Cu-Den's sorriest-looking fridge on the planet. The thing was loaded with relish, horseradish, salad dressing, teriyaki sauce, mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, and not a damn thing to slather the condiment galore on. We doused Cu-Den's special rice with fishsauce and chili paste and gobbled it up. We were going to need full stomachs to fight the Mexican homeboys who were a lot tougher than the redneck football players.
“When?” I asked Cu-Den.
“Ten tonight, behind the church.”
“After work,” Manh asserted.
We played tennis for the school, but we had to cut practice to make enough money to officially join the team. With the school's fiscal problems, athletes had to pay for their own uniforms, physical checkups, and “team fees.” When the season started and it looked like the school couldn't field a team, the principal and the tennis coach worked out a deal for the squad, which happened to be ninety-five percent Vietnamese American. Manh, Cu-Den, and I worked off a part of our fees by doing janitorial work in the classrooms after school. We still couldn't come up with the rest of the cash. Jobs, even flipping burgers,
were scarce in our neighborhood. Too many poor immigrants. Manh's uncle owned an office-cleaning business. We were all underage, but his uncle said he could give us fifteen dollars each for four hours, if we promised not to “lift” anything on the job. Bloody damn generous, actually. Glad for the work, we cut practice and school to work for him whenever he could use us.
We hung around drinking Coke. Cu-Den did two hundred curls with a dumbbell, working only his right arm. He had been doing it for two years so he was as deformed as a one-pincered crawdad. His goal was to develop a powerful tennis forehand, even though Coach routinely yelled at him to keep the ball in the courtâThis ain't baseball, son! No homers, please! Manh divided his attention between MTV and a Playboy magazine he filched from a liquor store. I was on the phone sweet-talking Mai-Ly into letting us copy her chemistry lab report. We made a couple of stabs at our homework until Manh's uncle picked us up with his van.
I didn't mind the work. It was fun, clowning around with the guys and drinking sodas we stole from the workers' refrigerators. Though, of course, if my father knew I was cleaning offices instead of studying, he'd crap a load of bricks. He had levered us off welfare and bought a house, so money was really tight at home. Mom was constantly saving, cutting corners with the groceries. Sometimes, I felt like I had to get some meat in me or I was going to go crazy. I kept on telling her,
We're in America, Mom. You can't feed a whole family on eight ounces of beef.
And my father kept on telling me,
Don't think about material things. Hone your mind. Sacrifice now so you can have later.
He told me a slew of other stuff, too, but it didn't matter to me. I had made it a point not to talk to him, never asking anything and never giving any reply other than
yes, no,
and
I don't know.
Besides, I knew every word before it came out of his mouth.
I sacrifice so you can study and make a better life for yourself ⦠blah ⦠blah ⦠blah
â¦
“Shiiiiiiiiiiiit! Check this out! Check this out!” Manh was rubbing himself all over the mahogany conference table. “This is like a whole fucking tree, man! Shit. I wanna work hereâI wanna do Tammy Tran on this table.” He bellied onto the gleaming wood and started humping the surface.
“I want Suzzie,” Cu-Den said, and laughed his dirty poodle laughâbarely audible.
I put in my dibs: “Lan is my kinda woman.”
“Naw, man. You get Mai-Ly, An.” Manh started in with his girlie Mai-Ly voice: “You and me, An, we have chemistry.”
“Guess who's gonna be doing his own chem lab.”
“Oh, fuck. Okay, okay. Sorry, I take it back.”
“Fuck,” Cu-Den breathed, spinning dreamily in the chairman's seat. “This is gonna be my chair.”
“Yeah, so you can watch me. OoooAaaaa! Yes, baby. Yes!” grunted Manh with the one-track mind. Kneeling on the table, he jizzed us with a bottle of cleaning ammonia.
“Manh, you sick son of a bitch!” Manh's uncle spat from the doorway. “Get off that table before you scuff the varnish!” Then he turned a wagging finger on us. “You want to be big men in big companies? And what are you doing?” He knew all about our sideline of misdemeanors and braggadocio. “You boys shouldn't be so dumb. Look at me, you think I got it good? Sure, I'm my own boss and I make good money, but I'm still a janitor. I clean up after the men who sit in those chairs. You boys want to be in those chairs, you study harder. You don't mess around. You listen to your fathers.”
My father and I had had a falling-out a couple of years before I started hanging with Cu-Den and Manh. I was bossing my brothers around. They didn't like it, but, too bad, I was first son. It was my right. Occasionally, they balked and sassed me back, and I caned them to teach them respect. Once Huy and I got into a big fight. He disobeyed my order and couldn't stomach lying down so I could whack his butt with a yardstick. Huy wasn't much of a fighter so I pounded him blue. My father came home and cussed me out in front of all my brothers. He dressed me down good and I lost face. I hadn't talked much to him or the rest of the family since. And I didn't stop caning my brothers until last year when little Hien came at me with a knife and made me realize how screwed up we all were.
One day, we were driving across town, Father up front with Hien. Huy, Tien, cousin Hai, and me in the backseat. I was in seventh grade. Hai got into a scuffle with Huy and Tien. Father blew up. He thought it was me, but I wasn't a rat so I didn't squeal on Hai. He pulled over to the side of the road and told me to get out.
I shrugged and got out. No idea where I was. Maybe ten, fifteen miles from home. He drove off.
It took me all day to find my way home, but once there I kept on walking. I climbed an oak-studded hill on the edge of town and I thought about going away like Chi had.
For years after Chi ran away, I read the Bible and said a prayer every night. At first, I prayed for good grades for myself; good grades for my brothers; good health, happiness, and prosperity for Mom and Dad; good health for everybody, Grandma Le in Vietnam, too; world peace; and safety for Chi, wherever she was, if she was still alive. As time passed, I realized that I didn't get a lot of the things I asked for, so I narrowed my list. I shortened it, one item at a time, until all I prayed for every night was that Chi was all right, wherever she was, if she was still alive. But because we didn't hear anything from Chi, and because I was growing up, I stopped praying. I stopped hoping for miracles. I was reverting, starting to think of the AlmightyâGod, Buddha, whateverâthe way I did when my childhood began to splinter, late in April of 1975.
It was a couple of days before Saigon fell. There was no school. The city was already beginning to crumble. People panicked in the streets. Everything had suddenly ground to a halt. Nothing for me to do. Even the book kiosks closed. I had a pocketful of change, but couldn't rent as much as a comic to read. I went out to catch tadpoles at a pond. There was no one in the park except me and a young woman. Standing on a green slope beside the water, she was very pretty in her white
ao dai
with her long black hair. She was very beautiful in her sadness. She asked me if I saw the lights in the sky. I said the sky is overcast. Look harder, Little Brother, can't you see the little
lights, millions of them floating in the clouds? I didn't tell her that everyone saw lights if he stood up too fast or if he stared into a bright sky long enough. Look harder, Little Brother, do you see them now, the angels? Do you see them? She was desperate, I heard it in her voice, saw it in the way she turned her sad face to the sky, smiling. Smiling.
Where was He?
She needed the lights so I gave her her angels.
Now, on the verge of following in Chi's footsteps, I stood on the hilltop and looked at the gray sky. And I could not find it in me to give myself the angels.
When it was dark and I was numb with cold, I went home. All along I knew I was chickenshit, no guts at all.
We did the entire office floor, twenty rooms, four lobbies, and six toilets in four hours. Manh's uncle frisked us to make sure we hadn't light-fingered anything. On the way home, he swung us through the McDonald's drive-up window. We redeemed fists of McD Super Bowl game cards for fries, Cokes, and Big Macsâcourtesy of Cu-Den's brother, who manned the grill at the Golden Arches. He had scored bags of game cards and set us all up with burgers for the whole year.
Manh's uncle dropped us off at Cu-Den's house and slapped us three fivers apiece. We bowed and thanked him like good Vietnamese boys. Cu-Den's mother was at her second job and his brother was out doing some girl. We cocked our dirty feet on the coffee table, chomped the Macs on the sofa, and smeared grease into the cushions. Cu-Den went to the stereo and cranked up “Eye of the Tiger,” the theme from Sylvester Stallone's
Rocky
, to pump us up for the fight. We sat around eating and talking about girls and sex, talking trash because despite all the marginal stuff we did, we were still geeks. We cared about grades and girls who were too cool to date us because we
didn't have as much as a jalopy to take them to the movies. Cu-Den's got the heat for Suzzie Nguyen: Suzzie's got big ones, doesn't she? Fuck yeah, Manh agreed, I get one, Cu-Den gets the other, and you can watch, An. Okay, sure, I'll run the videocam for you deviants.