“I’m not afraid of the Deceptors. They fired the second shot. After everyone dispersed, Lucy was lying on the ground. She was bleeding badly. I ran into the school and called the police.” Eddie kept shooting the basketball.
“You know the Deceptors are going to find out about this,” I said.
“I have more to worry about from rival Chinese gangs.”
Eddie asked me about my work at the café. He felt Christine needed a nice guy to be her boyfriend. I felt a little funny about his comment. He was either implying that I should date her or I should not date her. Either way I had no response. It’s hard to take advice about love from a member of the underworld.
Eddie stopped dribbling and said “You ran pretty fast yesterday.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I was watching from the park.”
I stopped myself short of telling him that only Chinese gangsters were hanging out in the park.
“I’m just happy I didn’t get attacked,” I said. I shot practice with Eddie Lo. He rarely missed a shot. “You should see me with a gun,” he chuckled.
That week at the café, Christine was not her usual loquacious self. She wasn’t speaking to me and I didn’t know why. The café gradually got busier. Mike the manager woke up around noon looking like hell.
I said, “What the hell happened to you? You look like you slept on a park bench all night.”
He answered in a groggy voice, “I slept on a park bench all night.” He then washed his face, and walked over to a pot of coffee that I had just brewed for customers. He poured himself three cups and drank them in seconds. He ate a freshly baked muffin, burning the insides of his mouth in the process. He wore the outfit he seemed to wear every weekend, a wrinkled white shirt, and wrinkled black pants.
Mike felt like talking, and asked what my plans were after high school. I told him that I would like to go away to college.
Mike asked, “What are you going to major in? What college are you going to?”
“I am not sure. He asked what field I was leaning toward and I said business.
“Business? What aspect of business? Finance, marketing? Accounting? Entrepreneurship? Real estate?” he said in a weird tone. “How could you go to Stanton and not major in engineering or become a doctor?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You go to Stanton…the finest school in the entire State of New York.” I nodded. “Make sure you get rid of your ‘I don’t know’ answers to my questions before you graduate. Don’t end up like me; I went to Stanton also.”
My heart stopped beating. Did I hear him correctly? How could Mike the sleeping manager, and my homeless supervisor, have gone to Stanton? Stanton is for the brightest minds in New York. Why was he such a loser? There must be some mistake.
A crowd of customers from a tour bus entered the café. It was great to be busy, and we worked fast to serve fifty customers.
After the crowd left, and all the mess was cleaned up, I went back to Mike the Manager.
“Did I hear you correctly…you went to Stanton? When did you graduate?” I asked. Mike said he’d graduated fifteen years before.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
Mike told me of his average grades at Stanton. He explained that he had lacked direction for his life. He had attended college in Pennsylvania, but quickly discovered that the social aspects were the only part of college that actually interested him. After a year he dropped out and went to another college.
“College is not for everyone. If you really don’t know what you want to do with your life…then don’t waste time in college. It’s better to work for a while until you decide what it is that you really want to do, and then go to college. Or not go to college. This is how it’s done in Europe. The kids in Germany and France graduate high school, and then travel throughout Europe and the world, making money as waiters or in hotels, and then come back with a sense of direction.”
I was mopping the floors, while listening intensely. Mike continued speaking.
“I left college after a year, and worked at an office here in the city. I drank too much, got fired, and started thinking that maybe I’d like to be a writer. But I didn’t know how to write. I went to another college, and I started smoking marijuana and getting high every day. I started off fine, getting high on the weekends at parties, and getting drunk as well. But after a few months, I was drunk or high just about every day. I dropped out of that college and found a job. A few months later, I was fired from that job, and then my father threw me out of the house when he found out I was using drugs. I was then homeless for a summer, sleeping on benches, until I found another job. I worked at bars or restaurants for a few months here and there. Now I work here on the weekends, for a coin dealer during the week, and take night classes at City College about writing. Finally, I have direction.”
This was disturbing news. My own lack of direction really scared me. I could end up homeless like Mike the Manager. I spent the next hour in deep thought; actually it was more like deep worry. I eventually shook it off and realized that I had some direction, and was not the type of person to abuse alcohol or drugs. That wasn’t going to be me, I’m not going to turn into Mike. I’ll have a drink or two with some of my friends, but I know when to call it a night.
“Only here in the great United States of America are we expected by the age of seventeen to make decisions for the rest of our lives. Decisions like where to go to college, or join the military or get a job, or what to major in. I wasn’t ready at seventeen to decide my entire future and you sound like you aren’t ready either,” Mike said, getting louder.
“Well, Mike,” I said. “I may not be ready today, but hopefully I’ll take some classes in college and decide.”
“College is for people that want a paycheck every week for the rest of their lives. I’m talking about doctors, teachers, accountants, office workers, pencil pushers, order takers…they take a weekly paycheck, get married, buy a house, and have kids. And then boom! Life is over.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“If you want to suffer for the rest of your life, there is nothing wrong with that at all. Don’t get me wrong; I think society needs people who get dressed in the morning, go to work, eat lunch, go home, and live for the weekends. A part time life, distracted with the demands of a mortgage, and bills, and hungry mouths.” Mike drank another cup of coffee.
“What’s wrong with it is that no one ever asks if that’s really going to make them happy. They do it because it has to be done. They need the security of knowing that they went to college and now they are getting a paycheck, and one day they start asking questions and looking in the mirror. They next thing you know they are having a mid-life crisis, getting divorced, and deciding that all along they just wanted to be photographers or writers or artists. They leave behind a spouse and kids, and they vanish.”
Mike was shouting. Everyone could hear him. Christine thought he was yelling at me. But he was yelling at himself, at his life, at his own misfortunes. It was surprising that a guy who had spent the first half of the day catatonic was now doling out advice about life.
“I would love to be one of those people with a job and a paycheck,” I said to Mike. “A member of society. A non-homeless member of society.”
“A low member of society? Without passion and thirst and pursuing your dreams? It’s better to be among the dead than live without doing what you love.” Mike walked away.
Christine asked about the shouting.
“So now you’re speaking to me?” I asked in complete amazement.
“Why would I want to talk to you? I guess you don’t want to date me, and if I needed to know anything about our friendship, I’ll just ask Eddie Lo,” she said and stormed off.
I kept working, refilling the cups, making more coffee, wiping down all the countertops. I learned not to stand around doing nothing, in case the owner ever walked in. “The secret to keeping a job is looking busy” - good advice from my father.
Late in the afternoon, Mike asked about the SATs. I revealed I have been studying but was scoring average on practice tests.
“People don’t care about the SATs in the real world…outside the bubble of high school and college,” Mike said calmly. “Its difficult for certain people to do well on the verbal part because it’s culturally skewed.”
“Culturally skewed in what way and what do you mean by certain people?” I asked.
“Well, let’s just say if you grew up in a household with college-educated parents, especially if you live in the suburbs, then the Verbal is easier. Words that you are accustomed to hearing at home are on the test.”
Perhaps I was at a disadvantage. No one in my family ever went to college. I started feeling a little depressed about my situation. Was I at a disadvantage in other areas of my life as well? I could not compete with kids that were well off. I never liked rich people, and now I liked them even less. To be truthful, I really did not know any rich people, except for Delancey. I kept thinking about my family’s economic circumstances, and how it had impacted my vocabulary, and the way I wrote. Christine seemed to sense that I was taken back by Mike’s comments.
“Don’t listen to that bum. What does he know? He’s doesn’t know anything other than how to sleep at work. Don’t listen to a loser. The SATs are not much of a test anyway. It doesn’t test science knowledge or decision making. So what if you do well on the verbal part? What does that mean…that you can be an English professor somewhere? That you can write poems. Who cares? The world needs scientists and engineers. China, India, Russia, all reward their good math and science students. But not in America…we reward poets and great speakers…with jobs in sales. As if they can create jobs for people. Poets can’t feed the mouths of the masses let alone themselves. The kids from my high school ace the math portion every year, and they can’t even speak English. If they gave the verbal test in Cantonese, I could get a perfect score. Chinese kids that do well on the SATs can’t get into top colleges. There’s a quota on Asians, you know. Like there is on immigration.” She walked towards a customer.
Several hours passed and I was thinking about the kids at Stanton. Many of them did well on the SATs by just studying hard and building their vocabulary. I went into the rest room dejected, and looked in the mirror. Was I at a disadvantage or was I going to be like the other Stanton Students and study even harder for the SATs? I was through feeling sorry for myself and my social class. I was through taking advice from Mike. I really didn’t care if I was at a disadvantage; nothing had changed since the time I arrived at work that morning. I wasn’t going to let Mike’s advice get me down.
At quitting time, Christine wanted to go for sushi. While I waited for her to get ready, Mike exchanged my paycheck for cash and I couldn’t have been happier.
We went back to the same Japanese place. Christine and I talked for a while. She was taking the SATs also, but had hardly studied. Christine had a different approach. While I had spent the past few months studying in the hopes of getting the highest possible score, she was trying to score high enough in order to get into community college. She explained how all the girls in her neighborhood went to the same college to learn accounting or bookkeeping or office skills in order to get a job. Christine planned to study computers in order to get a job in an office.
“Any job, in any office, with benefits. Why are you studying so hard for the SATs?” she asked.
“I want to do really well; I want to do my best,” I said.
“If you don’t get the score you want, will you be depressed?” she asked.
“Maybe initially, but I’ll get over it.”
“Why not get over it now? Your score on the SAT’s is just a number. It does not determine your life. Your destiny is already decided. All you have to do is show up,” said Christine.
“I make my own destiny.”
Christine laughed and said that I “drank too much of the American Kool Aid.”
I did not find this funny.
“That’s a horrible expression. Do you know where it comes from?” I asked.
“What expression?” she said.
“Drinking the Kool Aid.”
“It comes from drinking fruit punch?” she said with a smirk on her face.
“It comes from a tragedy in the South American country of Guyana. A cult leader poisoned nearly a thousand people with Kool Aid,” I said.
“Where was this cult leader from?” she asked.
“He was a minister from the Midwestern United States,” I said.
“American Kool Aid.”
I remained silent, and then she apologized.
“All I am saying is that the big things in life are predetermined by destiny. Who you marry, where you live, who you meet, your kids, your grandkids, etc. Maybe even where you go to college. And what is not determined by destiny is determined by luck,” she said.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe it or not, it affects you as well. And as for those people who drank the Kool Aid, well, religion is the opiate of the people.”
“Thank you, chairman Mao.”
“Besides, the whole college admission process is nonsense anyway. My high school had a Chinese girl who scored a near perfect score on the SATs. Her grades were very high, but she was rejected from all the top colleges. They said her essay was no good, and she failed the interviews. But I know the truth; they probably had too many Chinese people already. Instead, a guy that ran track and had average grades was accepted to the Ivy League from my school. What is he going to do after college? Run track to pay the bills, not likely.” Christine’s stories were taking a lot of the pressure off the SAT’s.