I'm the One That I Want (2 page)

My father Was not around for a lot of my early childhood. He was still in Korea trying to get a visa or something. When he’d come back into town, I would welcome him by taking him into my arms and throwing up all over his back.

We didn’t have a car back then, so my mom and I took the bus everywhere. She says I was very friendly to people, always saying “hi” first, smiling, making amicable conversation, all this glad-handing at only four years of age.

“The people in the bus, sometimes don’t say ‘hi,’ or anything back. Sometimes they just look down! How can be? That so mean, mean people. You always so nice, saying ‘Hello!’ and smile and smile and so charming! Bad, bad people.”

I don’t think I was put off by people not responding to my gregariousness, as my behavior was not entirely without self-interest. I’d learned early on that if you smiled at people, it increased your chances of candy, as these were the days when you could still accept it from strangers. If they did not smile back, they did not have candy, so I moved on.

When I was five, my brother was born, and everything changed. He was the cutest thing in the world, and we kissed him so much he was smelly. We moved to a house in the Sunset District and our grandparents came from Korea to take care of us. I started elementary school at Dudley Stone in the Haight, and would come home on the bus in the afternoon and help my grandmother take care of the baby.

My parents started running a snack bar in the Japantown Bowling Alley and my brother and I got big, eating hamburgers every day.

2

MARCO AND PATTY’S MOM

For kindergarten and first and second grades, I went to Dudley Stone School in the Haight. Haight Street was still coming down from the ’60s, and it was a dirty and burned-out place during the ’70s. Highlights of these years: I put some seeds on a sponge and pushed tooth-picks into an avocado and farted in the cardboard playhouse.

I had a boyfriend named Marco Picoli, and he and I would go to his house on Saturdays. On one of these visits we went to the corner store forty-one times. He was the only straight man I ever met who liked to shop. Actually, I can’t be sure he was straight, since I had no way of confirming it back then. I had procured a dollar that day from my parents and first we had trouble deciding what to get and then trying to return the candy we bought because we were dissatisfied with our choices. They wouldn’t let us exchange the bubblegum cigar for wax lips. We even had the receipt!

He had a doll that was white and then when you flipped it over it was black, and for some reason, it would make us scream laughing. He moved to New York after first grade, and I never saw him again. Over time I’ve realized that this was probably my best relationship.

There was a girl who lived next door to us who was my friend when we were at home but not at school, a kind of separation of church and state. Her name was Patty and she had a big German shepherd named Zuzu who followed her everywhere. We were only around eight or nine, but she was already sexually active, making it with the dirty neighborhood boys in the parking garage at the end of our block. She wore very short dresses and had an overbite like some ’70s groupie. One time we were in her backyard and she took a shit in the flower box and Zuzu came up and ate the turds. She and Zuzu were so nonchalant and synchronized about it that I imagined this to be a regular thing. I told my mom, and she never let me go over there again.

Patty’s mom was an alcoholic. She wore a white slip and an orange robe all day, smoking More’s and drinking Beefeater gin out of a jelly jar in the front room. Their house was exactly like ours, the same layout, the rooms in the same order, but it could not have been more different.

My parents kept the same bottle of Cutty Sark for nearly a decade. Nobody in our family drank. They were crazy in their own repressed Korean way, but it didn’t have to do with alcohol.

Patty’s mom was mysterious to me, hunched over in the front room that was just like ours, curtains drawn to keep out the noonday sun, slowly drinking and smoking and staring at the blank space in front of her. What was she looking at? What did she see?

Patty’s Uncle Will lived with them, too. He was an uptight but friendly bachelor, with geeky, black plastic glasses and crisp, white short-sleeve button-down oxfords, forever carrying bags of groceries into the soon-to-be haunted house.

Sometime after the Flower Box Incident, I saw Will standing on the front steps. He was holding the glasses away from his eyes and crying. When he took his glasses off, he took his face with them. My mom told me that Patty’s mom had died the night before and Patty and Will were moving away.

That same week, the Shroud of Turin made the cover of National Geographic. I would lie awake all night thinking about Patty’s mom, wrapped in the Shroud of Turin, coming into my room and getting me. I thought of her long, blue-white fingers curling around my shoulders, her haggy face a mask of sadness and regret. She wore only pajamas. She was always tired. I remembered her unscrewing the metal caps of the tall gin bottles, the long ash of her cigarette breaking into the big, deep ashtray already filled with brown, skinny butts. She died in her front room that was just like ours. She’d had enough of the dark, the smoke, the booze, the crazy daughter, weird Will, the shit-eating dog, that bathrobe, everything. So she just died.

I hadn’t known anyone before who had died, so the whole process was terrifying to me. How could someone die right in their house? Didn’t that mean the place would be cursed forever? I wanted to tell the new family that moved in, but they were never friendly enough for me to want to volunteer that kind of information. They were Chinese, and very distant. They had two teenage boys and a big chow dog and they all hated my brother and me.

A couple of years later, I had taken up cigarettes and was smoking out the window of my bathroom. I would smoke and then shower directly afterward to cleanse the air. (This was before I realized it just spread the smell out into the hallway.) I heard a knock on the window of the house next door. I looked over and saw the curtains had been drawn back, revealing the naked torso of one of the boys. He held out his hard cock with one hand and pulled back the curtain with the other. Then, as if that weren’t enough, he used his elbow to keep the curtains back and flipped me off with his free hand. It was totally gymnastic and totally upsetting. I threw the lit cigarette into their yard and hoped it would start a fire.

That house was haunted all right.

I’d often see those boys working on their Trans Am in the afternoons, and neither of them ever acknowledged me.

I grew up, left home, got famous, nearly drank myself to death, and, for a time, became the very image of Patty’s mom. Except I didn’t have curtains to draw, so the living room would be flooded with a piercing light that burned holes in my brain. I tried to sleep as much of the day as I could to avoid the unbearable morning cheerfulness of my sunny, Hollywood Hills bungalow. My pajamas stayed on all the time, and I had the same hunch, the same sick expression, the same dead-eyed stare. I should have died, too, but I didn’t. For some reason, someone or something or Jesus rolled the rock away from the front of my house and I emerged, Shroud of Turin falling away at my feet, and I, newly risen from the dead, went to Melrose and bought some fabulous new clothes to replace it.

3

BRAVERY

I have always thought of myself as brave. I have also always thought there would be people, boys especially, who would admire me, look at me, fawn over me. And there were—until I was eight and did two terrible, unforgivable things in the third grade. They happened within a period of two weeks. The first was during a bell rehearsal for the Christmas program. We were all handed very expensive, delicate, rare brass bells with which to play “Greensleeves” and we were warned and warned again and threatened and warned some more about the value of the bells. We were made to wear cotton gloves so that we would not get our fingerprints on the precious fucking bells. As I was putting my gloves on, bell stuck between my upper arm and my side, I dropped the bell and it shattered on the ground. It was an E flat or C sharp or something definitely irreplaceable, so when the choir sang “What child is this . . .” the word
child
came without musical accompaniment, naked, the brutal reminder to me and all the rest of Grade Three of my grievous act.

SOme time later, the worse of the two incidents occurred. During another bell rehearsal, as I had no bell to play, I sat in the back of class fidgeting and counting my fingers or something. I really had to pee, so I went to the front of the class and said to the teacher, “I have to pee.” And she said, “Just wait.” I returned to the back of class and the business of idling, when I was hit with an urgent, desperate need to pee that would not wait. I had to do it. After the rehearsal, half-midget perennial spinster Miss Cinnamon said, “Okay, you can go now.” I answered, quite wittily I must say, “I already did.”

I think that I was so used to horror, my little life had already endured such atrocities, that I was unfazed by my “accident.” I sat there in thoroughly wet, itchy pants with a pool of urine underneath me, cultivating a “been there, done that” attitude. This highly disturbed the teachers, and when they asked if I wanted to go home and change, if I wanted my mom to come get me, if there was someone they could call—I looked down at my pee-splattered Buster Browns and said, “No. Why would you want to do that?” and went off to play kickball. And I thought nobody had wanted me on their team before.

The taunts and the teasing came later. At this point, I think everyone was too afraid of me to make fun of me. They treated me like Damien in
The Omen
, as if one look of my evil eye would render them incontinent. The spell was broken soon enough. I was the pariah of the schoolyard, shunned as if I had the floor-length beard and long, curly nails of the unwashed untouchables of India. To me, “recess” meant “riot,” the time of day I stood between massive groups of eight-year-olds fighting over whether I should be called the Bell Breaker or the Pee Girl. I was stoic, silent, nonviolent even back then. I didn’t pay attention. But I stayed at that same school for five more years, which is forever when you are a kid, and I must admit,
it wore
me down.
I think I lost something there—an interior brightness. The luster and the silver lining and the Tootsie Roll center and the brave one in me went far underground, now surfacing, twisted, perverted, deformed, with a dowager’s hump and a bad nervous tic, but tougher still.

My family Went to church every Sunday, at first to the one by Stonestown, where my grandfather led the services, and later to the big Korean Methodist Church on Powell Street that was in the middle of Chinatown. Sometimes big Chinese funeral processions would lurch slowly down the street. There would be a brass band made up of men dressed like they were in the military, playing solemnly as they marched by. Then there’d be a black convertible, with an enormous black-and-white photo of the deceased, bordered with black bands to signify the departure into the afterlife, attached to the windshield. The hearse would follow, its windows crammed with flowers behind a white curtain, hiding the mysterious gleaming casket. I wanted to hold my breath as it went by. I thought if I got too close and looked into the hearse, a bony hand would emerge from it and drag me inside. Carloads of mourners trailed behind, and they all moved so slowly, it seemed like it would take forever to get where they were going. But it hardly mattered. There is lots of time when you are dead. These processions made me dread and look forward to Sunday at the same time.

The church services were held in Korean, so a massive Sunday school system existed to accommodate all the exclusively English-speaking kids. It was broken down into two groups, the baby classes with Jesus coloring books and the Methodist Youth Foundation, which was for the teenagers who cut class and went into Chinatown to smoke cigarettes and talk about what they’d done Saturday night. When they did go to class, it was like a cool “rap” session, involving young pastors getting out their acoustic guitars and talking about the “downer” of premarital sex.

They
hated
me there. Everyone. From the babies all the way to the teenagers. Maybe the teachers and the young pastor didn’t, because they’d spend time trying to protect me and involve me in some activities, the same ones the other kids would try to exclude me from. I don’t think anyone could have been more hated. School was bad enough, but now it seemed like the whole world was a hostile place.

This was the ’80s and I was twelve, a preteen with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and braces. Hated. Hated. Hated. I tried to ignore it, spending summers away with cousins who lived in magical Glendale, where I would sit by their swimming pool reading a waterlogged copy of
Seventeen
. Lori Laughlin set the beauty standard, and as I looked at her, my troubles would melt away. “Someday I will be seventeen . . .” But the thing that I couldn’t admit to myself was that I was really wishing “Someday . . . I will be
white
.”

Whenever I read those magazines and tried to plug into the teenage fantasy they were selling, I couldn’t see myself at all. I studied those pictures and the TV and movies like
Little Darlings
over and over. Then in the mirror I would be confronted with the awful reality that I was
not that
. It was almost too much to bear.

My Koreanness, my “otherness,” embarrassed me. When I had school projects that required the use of glue, a product my family had little need or money for, my mother would substitute leftover rice. My face would get all red and I would shake and stammer, “Why can’t we have American glue!! I hate you, Mommy!!!!” Then I would stamp my feet up the stairs and throw my hot face down on my canopy bed.