My father lost his store about six months ago. I wonder if he lost a part of himself as well. We don’t bother clearing the dishes for my mother as we never do, and sometimes I resent his lack of affection for her. I try to stand up and hug my mother sometimes. As a son should. As I wish my father would. But what can I say? He gave his life for me and my brother and sisters and watched all his children walk with caps and gowns because of that. But I can’t help but wonder if he has regrets sometimes. Does he look back and close his eyes to envision the beaches he could’ve awakened to instead of a humble store on a corner in the ghetto. I tell him don’t worry about it, but he knows what I mean when I get flustered trying to even talk at all. When I really mean thank you. But we’re men. How can we express these things properly? We don’t even speak the same language. Literally. We curse at each other a lot for this reason. But he knows and I know its all love. And I guess I was born just because.
My mom said to me once that life is always a struggle. When it’s not a struggle for money, it’s a struggle for love and always one thing or another. I always wished that I could take her pain away. What else could I do but give her aching shoulders an occasional massage and read next to her on the couch. Eat all the food she cooked for me and imitate my father with a deep grunt of satisfaction from the pit of my soul, saying chal moh guh sum ni dah! And leave the table to watch T.V while she cleared the dishes. Yeah, in some ways I’m a good son. For what I lacked in grades and obedience, I make up for in these areas to bring sunshine to our mornings when we drink coffee at the kitchen table and I dream out loud about the mansion I’m going to buy for her once I get rich and successful. And I wish God would take all her pain away. But instead, God gave all those things to me.
I can’t describe the smell of old air freshener and damp blue velvet inside that old blue Reliant, but that’s the best way to describe the man. My father was listening to the static of a barely comprehensible Korean AM news broadcast as we inched along the bumper to bumper, rain diddling the endless miles of commercial congestion, the cemetery next to exit 145. Rain, cursing, honking, followed by angry high beam provocative hand signs. Riding in the passenger-side, I remember using my fingertips to paint pictures on a foggy window. In the back of my mind I could hear my father ramble. My father cleared his throat and said something.
What? I said.
He lowered the volume and the air grew thick. Study hard… I heard him saying in Korean… I’m poor… nohmu-shim-duh-roh… study hard…you don’t want to pump gas…
he paused to ask if I understood what he was saying and I refrained momentarily from using my pointer to paint pictures on the fogged glass and gave him the yeah yeahs. He hissed backwards, something you learn to do if you’re Korean and have kids. He would then search for broken English, give up and continue in Korean…
how will you find a wife pumping gas…your friends won’t be there for you if you fuck up…study hard…
I pressed the button and my face was no longer hidden by overcast reflections on the window and simultaneously I watched my fingertip masterpiece disappear forever.
As I grew up, these were the things my father said to me. I watched his dream of flying sacrifice itself into my flight. I heard him washing his face in the early morning light as I slept. In words he can’t understand I’m going to tell him I was just flying kind of like the way that you flew. With great expectations and a heart raw and tough for when it all turns out to be something only God could imagine.
New Jersey, you could stay your whole life in one place and be happy like a rock, just bearing the weather and growing old with mossy stains forever searching for a North Star. I promise.
When you see me falling, you’ll find something shining in the sky. Lord knows the wind would take me far away from home. Yes, I am flying away, towards a destiny, away from all these things I’ve lost. These things that make me leave everything else far behind. And I bring to life the death of this monster that I’ve held inside.
When I fly too close to the sun, burning back down to Earth with fire like Icarus. Dreams of touching God this way. The ashes from the feathers fall into the sea. Put out the fire. And it’s the sky that drowns me. People have dreams of touching God this way.
My brother quit the football team after freshman year and trained his knuckles on an iron plate instead. In the summer night, he ran his nightly suicides with no shirt on, raining sweat onto the bluish orange illuminated summer streets. He shadowboxed all night under the streetlight while I sat close by on the curb, chain-smoking and smacking mosquitoes. We were always in the street during those summer nights. When we just couldn’t take it anymore, our mother chasing us out of the house throwing Bibles and SAT workbooks on the lawn. My brother never stopped dribbling his basketball. I’d drink a bottle of Robitussin and talk shit, cough syrup tripping before I’d fall.
I’d dream of becoming famous while we’d ride, just to ease my mind and pass the time- to see my name never fading from the concrete walls and the tracks that connect these New Jersey train stations, the train tracks looking like a cemetery of spray-cans. I’m trying to live forever someday.
I remember running. I remember walking to the bus stop from my house promising I was never coming back. I was really looking for something in those summer streets. Finding myself in the daily crossings of the street under the shoes that hang from telephone wires and traffic lights that guide you past corners of desire. No streetcar to get there. Didn’t pack shit for tomorrow. Didn’t tell a soul. Didn’t care about the destination, I just rode up the bus somewhere up north and walked around in strange neighborhoods all during those nights, getting on and off the bus at random, just to see where God would take me.
I remember sleeping on a sidewalk, lying there on the concrete in that green alley, the ferns and ivy dripping rain in the night. I prayed nights like that.
You need to go to church. Believe me I heard it from my mother. But after Sammy Chang got caught stealing cars in the church parking lot, she relented, figuring I would only embarrass her with my own act of crime if she kept forcing me to go. I went to the summer retreat anyhow. Those were always fun. You could really fall in love with a girl at one of those things. Just ask Henry.
They called me Master-jipo because I was good at stealing. They called me Turtle because I talked slow like the old turtle in the Tootsie-roll pop commercials. 80’s babies know what I’m talking about. There’s a lot of things your ass will never know.
I remember watching November pass through my bedroom window, the way me and my brother would put on our socks and shoes and ninja into the night’s changing seasons just to talk about the girls we liked at school and at church, watching the autumn leaves catch the smoke from our cigarettes burning away the time that eventually became ashes themselves, disappearing with the wind into the once blue air, midnight bringing the first snows in the darkness, the white breath of laughter dancing away from us, when the world turns to winter and thorns grow on the branches and we never come back.
A year later, Dimes would enter the Essex County prison system with the fierce longing for opiates and surrender to enter his veins. He hung himself in his jail-cell.
Got me thinking about Noodle. An adopted Korean kid, about two years younger than myself, a kid I used to play with in elementary school. Last I heard, he dropped out of high school and hung around Dunkin Donuts on the lower side of the avenue wearing long-sleeved T’s in the summer because of where he’d been, tracks on his arms, buses he’d been taking into the Bricks to find that same sort of surrender. A bus ride up Bloomfield Avenue will get you a stairway in a stamped plastic envelope.
I didn’t play sports and didn’t fuck with needles. I saw Requiem for a Dream before I got into any of that junk nonsense- that movie is more effective than a ten year D.A.R.E program. I smoked a lot of weed and waited for the day I would run away for life; robbing banks, escaping in a non-descript Cadillac with the top down, my beautiful accomplice with her top down- you know, daydreams like that.
I’m not going to act like it was so bad. I was accepted and hung with the white boys- wandered from group to group and had good times in every circle.
But damn, I was really wandering.
I watch the streets through the passenger-side of a New Jersey drive riding with the windows down halfway. Holding in the smoke until I can’t see anymore, then letting it all go watching the colors come back to me with milk spelling my mood through the nostrils. Feeling kind of lost in the song playing, this tape that helped us get by on those rides, on a road to fame or some kind of reasonable state of happiness.
How do you know this life isn’t a dream? I once asked my brother. We were sitting in the swings with the light of the sunset breaking through the trees, my shoes dangling just above the dirt, his were fully planted.
Because it isn’t, he said.
But how do I know?
You just do, he said.
I think about God when I wake up. Moments of yesterday with my brother taking high rides underneath the trees showering the streets with shimmering shadows that breathe, to the sunset, purple in its most faraway and distant places, blue broken by the pink pollution that paints pictures in the sky, streets under heaven and the decent lives that live in them. Live from Essex County, fuck it I’m drifting…
There was darkness. There were windows. There was music.
“Yo, this shit is done?”
“This shit is done. We’re here anyways.”
The blunt was pinched shut and became a roach flying out the crack of the window to lie somewhere in the street amongst the litter. My brother and I rolled onto the scene, flying through the streets with the taste of invincibility on our cotton lips. We arrived at Broad Avenue parallel parking somewhat diagonally. Good enough. Love that moment when the bright storefront lights mirror off your window- breaking away as you open your door. Step out into the night and breath the freedom, my friend. I’m pretty sure that’s one of the best parts. The stars were the night smiling. We were very stoned.
We walked like gangsters into the dark entrance of the bar where a lovely girl in black led us further into candlelight. We gave the bartender the old nod and followed the girl’s light footsteps while she made her decision like duck-duck-goose. She placed our menus down and disappeared with a toss of her dark red Sassoon. It’s a Korean ballad. I swear it’s in our blood to be sentimental like this. Looking for a concubine or two to stay out with and a wife to call home. Those are the sides of the rippling ribbon tied n the hair of Asian women. Sweet games of chase.
The bar was dim and decorated with small candles glowing softly in glass bowls. Atmosphere like black cherry, we laid back smooth and relaxed like cognac and the blues. We lit our cigarettes with the candle and slouched a little further into our seats. I tipped the pitcher, pouring my brother’s glass first, and then my own. The amber nectar cascaded and foamed over the frosty lip. A toast to the ones wandering- walk away from it all, I swear it’ll get better.
Most of the kids in that bar were like us, toasting friendship and saying dramatic goodbyes before they went off to college or wherever their travels would take them. You got to love that one over-emotional girl who always cries quietly and needs to be comforted in the bathroom. Maybe all the girls will be crying. But its all love, you got to feel good with that. The strong promises of brothers, whether blood or not, make a person really want to live another year or two- just to do it all over again in different clothes and the same jubilant voices. Chopsticks and shot glasses played percussion to that Korean ballad.
Damn, I wonder if Dimes had ever been to Broad Avenue.