Trying to Float (4 page)

STORMÉ

MY STATUS AT
school slowly changed from being a kid who was ignored to one who was bullied.

This was not easy on me, as it was not easy for the others locked in that same cage (the slow, fat, unattractive, and shy), for no matter what you did—how nice you were or how much you pretended that what the other kids said didn't bother you—you would never be released from their taunting. The sound of it was in your head when you went to sleep and there again in the morning.

The effects of this must have shown on my face, because one day, returning home from school, I heard a voice call out to me from across the lobby of the hotel.

“Come over here, baby doll.”

I knew the voice. Its owner, Stormé, was a regular in the lobby. She was someone my parents liked, but we'd never spoken.

I had been taught that children should address adults by
“Mr.” or “Miss,” and since it was unclear which Stormé was, I had decided it was better to avoid Stormé than insult Stormé. That day, for example, Stormé was dressed in military pants, a work shirt, and an opal-and-turquoise necklace.

There was the additional puzzle of Stormé's age. Her face was soft and lineless, but her hair was silver; she had an athletic build, but struggled with the crippled gait of an old person.

Then there was Stormé's race. The skin was whiter than any I'd ever seen, and yet Stormé's hair had the texture of a black person's.

I had met others who were hard to identify by age, sex, or race, but never all three at once. Stormé was a mythological creature.

I crossed the lobby.

“How you doin', baby doll?” The voice was gruff.

As uncomfortable as Stormé made me feel, Stormé struck me as the sort who would be sympathetic to someone who was being bullied.

“The girls in school are making fun of me.”

“You tell Stormé why, girlie.”

“They think I'm a murderous retard.”

“Do you know what Stormé has down there?”

Stormé glanced toward the lower half of her body.

“I'm not sure. I'm still a child.”

Stormé tugged on the left leg of her pants.

A pink revolver was strapped to Stormé's ankle.

“That, baby doll, is my best friend. And if anyone gives you
trouble, you just give Stormé a call, and my friend and I will come down there and take care of it.”

“Thank you, Stormé, but I'm not sure my elementary school allows guns.”

“Well then, young lady, Stormé will just shove her boot right up their little asses.”

From that day on I went to bed knowing that I had a sexually ambiguous and incredibly violent eighty-year-old woman watching over me. And with that knowledge, who really needs to be afraid of a couple of prepubescent girls?

BUT NOT THE FISH

I LIVED WITHIN
a twenty-minute walk of my elementary school, but despite my daily vow to arrive at school early, something always went wrong. And that something was usually my father.

My parents insisted on taking me to school. It was not that they were helicopter parents. They were the opposite. They had nothing else to do. They were like balloons that had escaped a child's grasp—pointlessly floating.

“Focus!” I would plead with my mother as she took a twenty-minute detour from making me breakfast. And my father was forever jumping from one obscurity to another. By the time he and I got to know each other, his life had become a diversion from a task long forgotten.

Each morning began with the intention of getting me to school on time, but my dad would soon get distracted, and the next thing I knew, I was in the middle of the street with him, traffic swerving and honking around us, trying to get a cab to
take us the eight blocks between our house and the school. Needless to say, I was never on time.

One day, before I'd finished breakfast, my father, heading out the door, announced that he was picking something up from his tailor (a short Korean gentleman, whose shop was across the street). He would meet me in the lobby of the hotel.

“Don't worry,” he said, “we'll have plenty of time to get to school,”

When Father didn't show up in the lobby, I walked across to the tailor. Staring in the window, I noticed the tailor and his wife, tucked behind the counter, going about their business, and there, just in front of the counter, was my father, lying on the floor. Next to him, also on the floor, was a woman. Both of them were surrounded by springing fish.

On the way to school, Father explained what had transpired so that I could better inform my teacher of why I was late:

For years he had been engaged in a “gentle back and forth” with the tailor (which was curious, since I am pretty sure the tailor spoke no English and my father no Korean) about the photographs on the walls of his shop. The photographs, according to Father, were of the tailor flying through the air, striking much larger men, often simultaneously, with his fists, feet, and head.

Father's idea of a “gentle back and forth” was to stare closely at the pictures and then insinuate that they had been doctored, created by the tailor and his wife to discourage
customers from complaining about the prices of their alterations.

The other slice of the “back and forth” was when Father would spot the Korean leaving to run an errand. He and I would sneak into the shop and hide in the dressing rooms. When the Korean returned, we would jump out and try to scare him or wait until he was with a customer and start making the noises of a child being tortured.

Contrary to father's suggestions, the tailor was a master of a little-known Korean marshal art—hapkido. In any case, just before I had arrived at the shop, Father had gone too far and the tailor had decided to teach him a lesson.

That day, my father learned that the tailor's ability to paralyze others had little to do with blows to the head, but with his knowledge of various points on the human body, which when pressed in the correct manner sent the strongest men to the ground.

When handing my father his slacks that morning, the tailor slipped his finger into Father's palm. The pain from the tailor's finger, combined with whatever my father had been drinking the night before, caused him to wobble back and forth and then collapse.

“Knowing that my head was seconds from the floor,” Father recounted, “I had the presence of mind to flip myself backwards towards a bag of clothes near the door.”

“And the woman?”

“The one on the floor?”

He was avoiding the question.

“Yes, Father, the one on the floor.”

He cleared his throat.

“She was carrying the bag.”

“So you threw yourself on top of a bag that a woman was holding!”

“Something like that.”

“And that knocked her against the fish tank?”

“The details are of no importance. Agility of mind and body, my little friend, saved me.”

“But not the fish.”

“Sadly no.”

“And the woman?”

“The tailor stitched her up.”

He paused a moment.

“Do you want me to call your teacher up and talk to her myself?”

“No, that's fine. I'll tell her you have jumping Frenchman's disease.”

“That's my girl.”

A LEG UP

“HE'S DONE IT
again!”

Mr. Crafty was in a state.

“Father?” I replied. It was not really a question.

“Yes, your father. Do you have any idea what he's done?”

“No, but it's probably bad.”

“Just ask him!”

Later that evening I did, and this is the story he told:

With Mr. Crafty's paralysis came the slow but noticeable shrinkage of his left leg. For this reason, Mr. Crafty was in frequent need of having his left pant leg lifted.

In the course of his many trips to the tailor, Mr. Crafty, while waiting for his pants, would (like my father) examine the photographs on the wall. After a particularly rough flu season, the tailor, noticing that Mr. Crafty had lost some weight, considerately offered Mr. Crafty a belt that somebody had left in the shop. The tailor assured Mr. Crafty that if he didn't gain the weight back, the tailor would take in the waist.
Mr. Crafty accepted the belt as his first on the road to a black belt, believing it to signal the beginning of his training in hapkido with the tailor as his master.

Father and the fish tank incident had so angered the tailor that he was now refusing to provide services to anyone in the hotel. Mr. Crafty, with his leg shrinking, his pant leg lengthening, and his nonexistent lessons in hapkido suspended, was furious at Father.

This, according to Father's telling, led to a confrontation in the lobby in which Mr. Crafty accused my father of insulting Mr. Crafty's “teacher.”

At this point, Uber-Crafty, who had an irrational fondness for my father and had no idea that Mr. Crafty was in imagined training with the Korean, entered the conversation.

As told by my father, the conversations with the Crafties went as follows:

“Your ‘teacher'? Who could you possibly be talking about?”

“The man who has been training me in hapkido . . .”

“Trained in
what
? You're barely toilet trained.”

“If you would shut your damn mouth, you'd learn of a great teacher. A teacher who was once the student of Choi Yong-sool and who, on Shinshu Mountain, received the wisdom of the most skilled and deadly of them all, Takeda Sokaku.”

“Nonsense!”

“I now know hand-to-hand and use of all the weapons: jool bong, dan bong, joong bong  . . .”

“And your bong, obviously.”

“While you waste your morning sleeping, others of us are productive—out each day, first thing, making the country hum.”

“Hmm. For the last ten years, half of you has been paralyzed and the other half is the laziest person I know. I don't believe you can even touch your waist, much less your toes. So tell me, who and where is this teacher of yours?”

My father didn't need to be told the answer.

Anyone who had been as beaten and humiliated as my father had been by the tailor would never think to apologize. But not Father. Off he went to beg the tailor to take himself, Mr. Crafty, and all the others in the hotel back.

That, sadly, was not the end of it, for each time that Father returned to the tailor in the following years, he would extract some bit of knowledge regarding pressure points. After a while, Father had assembled enough “lethal wisdom from the East” to believe that he could defend himself against any assault. Among the family of delusions housed in my father's mind, this was the most dangerous.

A CRUSH

ONE OF THE
reasons I wanted to get to school early each day was that in the time before class, kids played or talked outside their lockers or met in the cafeteria for breakfast. It was when kids made friends, and that year, I wanted to make friends. I especially wanted to make friends with a particular boy that I had noticed on the playground.

His name was Uhura. He had shiny, dark hair, green eyes, and was very pale and skinny. He was also short. It was the first time in my life that a boy seemed to like me.

On top of this, he was the center of interest, amorous and otherwise, of all the kids.

Oh, yes, about that name.

As reported by my mother, Uhura's mom was a fan of the 1960s television show
Star Trek,
which she watched as a child. She thought, sometimes amusingly, other times seriously, of naming her children, were she to have them, after characters in the show.

When, years later, she was told by her physician that she was having a girl, the soon-to-be mother began to tell her friends and family that her daughter would be named Uhura, giving them plenty of time to arrange for the “Uhura” diaper bags, “Uhura” engraved picture frames, and “Uhura” onesies.

And as everyone, including Uhura's mother, joked about a child named after a
Star Trek
character, they also secretly envied her, thinking that the name would give Uhura that little something extra that every competitive parent in New York wanted for their child.

When Uhura was finally born, it was obvious that she had that little something extra—a penis.

Uhura's penis had been accidentally missed by the sonogram, and then, surprise, there it was. My mom commented, “Bones would not have missed it.” Bones, I later learned, was the doctor on the spaceship USS
Enterprise
in
Star Trek
.

As my mother explained it, Uhura's mom, too proud and by now too committed, gave her son the name Uhura, knowing that few would understand its origins and confident that everyone, including herself, would refer to him as “Harry.” My mom, recognizing the reference when the two mothers dropped off their kids on the first day of school, developed a friendship with Uhura's mom.

—

One of the odd things about Harry was that whenever my dad walked into the classroom, Harry would throw a toy at
him or yell at him or even strike him with his fist. Harry made sure to do this just after his mother left the room and before the teacher arrived. My father was not especially popular with the kids in the class, but Harry was the only one who actually attacked him.

My father would brush this off. He knew, I suspect, of my infatuation.

The attacks lasted until that morning when Harry, his head bent forward, rushed full speed at my father's groin. Relying on his knowledge of human pressure points, Father waited until Harry was just within arm's reach to make his thumb disappear behind Harry's earlobe.

Harry collapsed on the floor, where he lay unconscious, surrounded by a hyperventilating chorus of children and parents.

When Harry was able to talk, he told the teacher that it was my father's fault.

Father, finding the screaming distasteful, had already departed for his morning coffee, and as a result, was not there to defend himself. I tried my best to explain the history of Harry's attacks on my father, but no one was listening. I was hustled to the principal.

The principal's office was a predictably unpleasant place. The only seat for those in trouble was a long wooden bench with no cushions.

After Harry had finished telling his lies about what had happened, the mood turned against me. Sitting on the bench, I began to sweat as the principal and his assistants battered me:

“Where's your father?”

“Was he ever violent with you?” and

“What exactly does he do for a living?”

I inhaled slowly and cracked my knuckles.

“His favorite café; only if you include sarcasm; and if you can figure that out, my mom and I would like to know.”

I had a list of real complaints about my father, which I kept in my
I Love Lucy
backpack, but none seemed relevant now.

As to what had actually happened in the classroom that morning, I provided the principal with a concise and calm explanation:

“Uhura started it!”

“Uhura?”

“The chief communications officer on
Star Trek
,
” I offered.

“Nichelle Nichols attacked your father?”

“No. Harry. He's named after her because they missed his penis.”

“He has one now?”

“So I'm told but haven't seen it.”

The principal's face told me that he was either new to the story of Harry's genitals or suffered from acid reflux. I pressed on.

“Without thinking, my father did the only thing he knew to do when his groin was threatened—hapkido.”

“An ointment?” the principal asked.

Now I was confused. I tried to set things right.

“He picked it up from a Korean.”

“Sulu?”

“Was he Korean?” I asked.

The principal felt the story was either too baffling or too close to the loose rock of racial prejudice to pursue, so he let me go. Things quickly returned to normal, except, of course, for Harry's crush on me (which, in retrospect, I suspect I'd invented).

To my list of enemies at the school, which already included the two most popular girls (Greta and Ana—the latter of whom replaced me as Greta's best friend following the pool party), my father added Harry, the cutest boy.

The only two who seemed unaffected by the Harry incident were my father (no surprise there) and mother, who believed (proudly) that her husband had administered to Harry what she referred to as the “Vulcan nerve pinch,” and that the entire affair was caused by the hubris of naming a child after a semi-sacred figure.