I Swear I'll Make It Up to You (36 page)

Aaron's theory, it was a total cop-out. I didn't want to be pardoned. I didn't want to skate on a technicality. I needed the world to hear my grand apology, then punish me, excoriate me for my sins, and give me absolution. All the shit I'd done, all the nights I'd wasted, all the night's I'd
been
wasted . . . I wanted blood to flow. Surely there was someone I had wronged badly, someone who had not moved on or forgotten about it, someone who felt compelled
to receive my mea culpa with the same urgency I felt compelled to give it?

At the same time, Aaron had a point. There was one person I had abused above all others, a person who had elicited ornate cruelty from me, a person who had lived with my foot on his throat for years: me. And if that was true, how to apologize, how to forgive?

Dave Blum, my editor from the
New York Press
, emailed me. He had taken a job working for Amazon and wanted to talk to me about a writing opportunity. We met up for breakfast at the Noho Star, a café in downtown Manhattan. Amazon was launching this new platform publishing exclusive content for Kindles, and he wanted me to write for it. I had read about the Kindle. It struck me as just another expensive fad, a way for those burdened with surplus money to alleviate the strain.

“You could make some serious money,” he said.

My writing wouldn't be printed at all; nor would it be available on a website. There was no flat payment for the work, not even fifty or a hundred bucks. I would get paid only for sales of my work, seventy percent of the gross.

“Dave,” I said, “don't take this the wrong way . . . but this is the worst fucking idea I've ever heard in my entire life. It'll never work. I don't know a single person who has one of those
nerd pads
. There's so much free writing available that nobody's going to pay to read something. And if it does work, it won't work for me. Why would people buy something of mine? My mom would buy it, that's it. Besides, I'm sober now. I don't have any more stories.”

“You don't have
one
story left?” Dave said.

I couldn't think of a single thing. In nearly two years, I hadn't blacked out anywhere strange; I hadn't done any weird new drugs; I hadn't been involved in any rock 'n' roll depravity on the road. For the first time in seventeen years, my life was stable, verging on boring.

“Well . . . I did get shipwrecked that one time,” I offered.

Dave smacked himself in the forehead.

“Mishka, you asshole! That's the story.”

I had written the story of the shipwreck shortly after it happened. It had sat on my hard drive for nearly ten years. If I had ever had a writing career, it was over. But if this story made five hundred bucks, well, it was five hundred bucks I didn't have before and five hundred bucks I sorely needed. I spent a weekend giving it a spit-polish, then emailed it to Dave.

Shipwrecked
published in April. I refused to let myself hope. Five hundred dollars. I would try to make five hundred dollars. Still, I emailed every single person I knew. Nothing happened. God fucking damn it, nothing ever happened.

Then
Shipwrecked
started to creep up in the rankings. Then it crept up further. A week after publication, it hit number one. And stayed there.

After three weeks, it finally dropped to number seven. Then it roared right back up to number one and stayed there.

By my rough calculations, I was owed a decent chunk of money. Right, I'd believe it when I got the check. Best to play it safe. Or safe-ish. I mean, it would be more than five hundred bucks, right? I booked a trip out to Albuquerque to see Chuong.

As soon as I stepped outside the airport, a sporty little white car whipped up, tinted windows, bass thumping. I couldn't see into the car. This couldn't be Chuong, could it? The driver's side door swung open and a dark head popped out.

“Sup, bro?”

Chuong.

He ran over and gave me an awkward little one-arm hug, holding his cigarette away from me. In sixth grade, we'd been almost
exactly the same height. He hadn't grown an inch since then. He felt like a strong child in my arms.

I threw my bag awkwardly in the trunk, then tried to get into the front seat. It was pulled all the way forward. No way I'd fit in there.

“Oh, shit. Hold on,” Chuong said. He fiddled with a lever, and the seat slowly slid all the way back. We waited another long, awkward minute while he reclined it almost all the way back.

“Long time. Sorry.”

Finally, I was able to squeeze myself into the tiny car. I did up my seat belt, and we zoomed off.

I looked at Chuong. His skin was much darker, from the sun, and grayer, from the cigarettes. He was careful when he spoke, but I could tell that most of his teeth were gone. There were bags under his eyes, wrinkles under the bags. Ah, I couldn't have looked much better. Chuong looked at me.

“So, wassup, bro,” Chuong said and smiled. “How you been?”

How do you catch someone up on twenty years of sorrow and trouble?

“Chuong, my brother,” I said, “I been great. Lots to tell you, but I'm great.”

We loaded up a couple of cars with everyone Chuong knew—his wife, Helen, his mother-in-law, his brothers-in-law, various friends and relatives and friends of relatives—and headed to the restaurant where his brother, Chin, worked. Chin had left Vietnam after Chuong, but they'd arrived in the US around the same time, because Chin hadn't gotten stuck in the refugee camp. He had been placed with a family in Albuquerque.

Chin had been prim and proper, clever but too clean-cut and rule abiding for Chuong and me. Though he was my age, whenever he had visited us in Los Alamos, Chuong and I had treated him less like an equal as much as an annoying kid sister. He must have gone to college instead of dropping out in eighth grade like Chuong—maybe he owned the restaurant?

It was a Japanese hibachi-style restaurant, a big deal in a small city like Albuquerque. The place was packed when we walked in. The hostess looked panicked as our party grew and grew as Chuong's frail mother-in-law was helped through the door and his boys finished their cigarettes and trickled in. No way were we getting a table.

Chuong grabbed my arm and pulled me past the hostess.

“Don't worry 'bout her, bro.”

He tugged me through the crowded restaurant to the best table in the house, a huge grill with ten or twelve chairs around it. A tall Asian dude wearing chef's whites stood behind the grill, wiping a spatula on his apron. His arms were cut with muscle, covered with tattoos. He was grinning from ear to ear.

“Sup, bro.”

“Chin? Holy shit, man. You grew!”

We shook hands. His hand was nearly as big as mine and hard, like rebar in a leather glove.

“Look at you! You're a monster. Chuong, is this why you're so small? Chin ate all the food?”

“Our dad, he's tall,” Chin said. “Chuong, he a bad boy, smoke too many cigarettes.”

I remembered that. Chuong had started smoking when he was eight.

“But your arms. You a gym rat?”

“Nah,” he said, fist bumping with the guys in Chuong's family. “I had to go away a couple of times. Not a lot to do there, you know what I mean?” He winked at me.

Polite little Chin in prison? Multiple times? It really had been an eternity.

As soon as we sat down, the show began; a constant stream of dirty jokes, flying food, and sake bombs. Chin was a hell of a cook, a consummate showman, even a good dancer. And, man, he and Chuong could really throw them back.

We didn't know how to talk to each other or what to talk about, so we just remembered things out loud. Remember Mom driving us to the movie theater, blasting Guns N' Roses in the back of the Ford Aerostar? Remember when we found those old
Penthouse
magazines? Remember when you gave me fish sauce and told me it was Vietnamese beer?

The busboy kept giving me looks. Was I doing something wrong? He said something to Chin in Vietnamese.

“Bro, this guy says he knows you.”

I looked at him. Dark skin, much darker than the other Vietnamese, even Chuong, with his farmer's tan. Stocky, with kinky black hair, clearly Vietnamese but somehow less Vietnamese than Chuong or Chin. Holy shit.

Chuong had had a friend from the refugee camp, a boy named Lum who lived in a group home in Albuquerque. He was “Amer-Asian,” my mom had told me, a word I only knew from a Clash record, the son of an American GI and a Vietnamese woman. I hadn't gotten it then, but I understood now: an African American soldier and a Vietnamese prostitute. And Lum, a child neither of them wanted.

“Lum?” I said and stood up.

Lum threw his head back and laughed. Chin clapped him on the back. Lum dumped his bus tub on the edge of the table and gave me a quick, strong hug.

“You roll deep with the Vietnamese, bro,” Chin said, nodding. “You need anything—
anything
—you let us know.”

Beers had been arriving at our table steadily since we'd sat down. By the time we tucked into the food—ridiculous fare, scallops and shrimp and lobster tails, mounds and mounds of it, more than we could eat, more than twice our number could eat—there was nearly a case of Heineken sitting open next to Chuong.

“Chuong, you gonna drink all those?”

“Help yourself, bro. Mi casa . . . it's your house, too, man.”

“I'm fine, thanks. But I mean . . . are you going to drink all these?”

I had drunk a case of beer in one night many times. But I weighed twice what Chuong did.

“Respect,” he said and thumped his chest. “In Vietnam, somebody help you, when they walk ina restaurant, you send one drink, say thanks for help me. When I come to Albuquerque, I am the only Vietnamese speaking English.”

He waved an arm at the span of the restaurant. “I get
all
these motherfuckers jobs.”

Then he fixed me with his watery eyes.

“And you teaching me speak English,” he said.

He raised his Heineken. I grabbed my glass of water and clinked it against his beer bottle. We drank.

Helen drove us back to the house after dinner. Chuong was pretty lit. We sat in the kitchen and talked. He showed me pictures of his family, Chin's boys, Chase and Chandler, and his son, Charles. All boys, he said, all
Ch
names, like him and Chin. I wanted to explain to him that it was a little ironic for a Vietnamese boy to be named Charlie, but I thought better of it.

It was hot in the kitchen, so Chuong unbuttoned his shirt. I saw ink.

“You have tattoos? Let me see.”

“No,” he said, pulling his shirt closed.

“Chuong, he shy,” Helen said. She reached down and grabbed his lapels and spread his shirt. Chuong didn't resist, just rolled his head to glare drunkenly up at her.

He had one tattoo. A shaky outline that covered his entire torso, a star inside it. A handmade poke-and-stick tattoo. He had taught me how to do them when we were kids, a sewing needle stuck in the eraser of a pencil, thread wrapped around it to hold the ink. It was the outline of Vietnam, with a star for Saigon, his hometown.