The Wangs vs. the World (35 page)

1: Hey, Carl?

2: That’s my name, don’t wear it out.

1: Can I borrow a pen?

2: That’ll be a hundred bucks.

1: Ha ha, thanks. Do you spell your name with a
C
or a
K
?

2: I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.

1: That’d be kind of drastic, don’t you think? You’d probably get sent away.

2: Don’t drop the soap, amiright? Huh? Huh?

Total gold. It was kind of hard to be two characters, but the routine worked better that way. The key was to keep it going until it was almost not funny anymore, and then it would be incredibly funny. Andrew headed back towards the city as he ran through other possibilities in his head. He’s smoking crack! Make that sound again! Oh, you don’t know the price? It must be free!

Oh, it would be horrible and irritating and brilliant. It wasn’t the sort of thing that his dad would be into, but Andrew’s friends would probably love it. Maybe he should start shooting videos of himself doing stand-up and put it on YouTube. Who needed a girlfriend when he had this, the trying and the promise?

In his luckiest childhood moments, Andrew had been able to make his mother laugh. It wasn’t something she did on her own. When his father came home early enough for dinner, she’d always start the meal off serving him awkward, hopeful heaps of food, then lapse into a quick silence that Andrew feared more than anything else as a little kid. Her nervousness thrummed out at him and underlined his own fear that even this semblance of closeness would be broken. Sometimes, though, he could make them all laugh—his mother, his father, and teenage Saina, too—laugh until the tension between his parents popped loose and they could just be together like he wanted.

Being homeless was really boring. That was probably why homeless people spent all the money they panhandled on cheap highs—how else would they get through the days? When you had a home, hours passed magically, spent on just being. Sitting on your couch. Straightening things on your coffee table. Stroking your luxurious piles of toilet paper like a basket of soft little kittens. Adrift like this, Andrew found himself vacillating between an unimportant A and a nonsensical B for useless swaths of time that felt like forever but turned out to be minutes: Walk to the St. Louis Cemetery so that he could see the Superdome on the way, or spend $1.25 on the bus so that he would get there in time for the free tour of the voodoo queen’s grave? Trust the guy sitting next to him at the coffee shop or lug his giant duffel into the bathroom? Eat now or wait until later, so that he would have something to do at the twenty-four-hour diner where he was planning to spend the night?

He hadn’t really slept since leaving Dorrie’s house. Last night he’d tried to make it through the uncertain time between midnight and sunrise at a weird twenty-four-hour bar with a Laundromat in back, but he’d fallen asleep against one of the dryers and woken up to his beer spilled across the floor and a shiny black boot tapping his cheek. Back on the menacing, jasmine-scented streets, Andrew tried to talk himself into sleeping tucked into a corner somewhere, but in the end, he’d stumbled across the Café du Monde, where all the waiters surprised him by being Asian, and waited out the night eating beignets very, very slowly—beignets that he thought were not quite as good as the ones at Downtown Disney’s Jazz Café—a shot of fear running through him every time he saw a flash of red hair.

Time was endless, yet it also slipped away without borders or edges. It was hard to remember what day of the week it was when the ground under your feet was constantly shifting. America usually felt like iPhones and pizza and swimming pools to Andrew. L.A. was America. New sneakers. Sunshine. Pot and blue balls. Phoenix was America. Sprinklers and blow jobs and riding shotgun. Vegas was America, all of it. But if there were monsters and magic anywhere in this country, they would be here in New Orleans. New Orleans was an ancient doppelgänger city that grew in some other America that never really existed. Dorrie belonged here. He didn’t. He didn’t, but he was going to stay until tomorrow anyway because yesterday he’d picked up a free paper and found a listing for an open mic. Right now he was holding out for Wednesday at eight thirty p.m., when he could finally sign up and do the material that had knocked him off the stage at that midnight cabaret. Once that was done, he’d decide what to do next.

Andrew knew it was probably kind of offensive to think of himself as homeless. He could stay with Nash, but he didn’t want to because then Dorrie would know where he was. He could ask Saina for money. He could ask Fred or Tak or even Mac McSpaley, any one of those guys would probably PayPal him a hundred bucks. But he wasn’t ready to do that yet, so all he had right now was what was left of the $250 he’d gotten from poor Mac for his TV. Not bad, but not really enough for hotels. If this was an ’80s movie or an episode of a Nickelodeon show, there would be a $5,000 prize for the open mic and he’d win it with a comedy routine instead of a song and it would be magically enough to buy everything back for his dad. Why couldn’t life have clearer trajectories?

He’d win it anyway. Even without a prize, he’d win it.

Church bells, always in the distance, rang out again as they had done every hour that he’d been in this city. A gust of heat and sugar and fried dough hit him as he leaned his head into the donut shop.

“Sorry! Um, can you tell me which way is downriver?” The woman behind the counter stared at him. Blinked. Tapped the glass with her long silver nails.

What the fuck?
The donuts in here were purple. All of them. Row upon delicious row of purple-glazed confections glistening behind glass. Andrew stepped in.

“Also, can I just say that this is some excellent donut styling? All the cool donuts are wearing purple this season.”

She extended a talon and pushed up her glasses. “Where you trying to get to again?”

“Just any stop on the 39 line. Someone gave me directions, but he walked away before I realized that I didn’t understand them at all.”

“You are downriver already. You’re in Bywater, so you’ll want to take the 88 past the bend to the 39.”

“Man, what do you guys have against north, south, east, west?”

She adjusted a donut that was imperceptibly out of place.

“Okay, well, thank you. That was really helpful. And I really do like your place.” He held the woman’s gaze, eyes smiling, until his emotional sonar picked up a reciprocal ping from her. There. If he was the one writing definitions, that’s what he would call love. It was just hard to keep up that same feeling with someone once you got to know them.

“Oh, and one of the donuts, please.”

“That’ll be ninety-nine cents.”

He nudged himself into her gaze again as she passed back a penny and a donut, and this time she was already open. People, Andrew knew, just wanted to be seen. And, though he felt like an asshole if he thought about it too much, he was pretty sure that people liked being seen by him. It was almost like a public service. The thought made him cringe as much as it made him puff up virtuously, but it was true—he did it because every interaction could have some sort of meaning, because he liked the moments of connection, but also because freshman year of college he and his roommate, Fred, were walking out of Quiznos, and Fred said, “Every time, man!”

“What?”

“You’re, like, a flirt, but with everyone!”

“What do you mean? There weren’t even any girls in there.”

“No, the old dude behind the counter.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“I don’t know, man. You do this thing. It’s like . . . unsexy flirting.”

“So you’re saying I was trying to mack on a grandpa and not even being smooth about it? Cool. Thanks.”

“You know what I mean—you do it with everyone. It’s okay, they love it.”

And he did know. Up until then, though, Andrew had thought that he was doing it for himself, that he was the only one who needed to be seen. But once Fred pointed it out, he became aware of how much credit he got just for not being terrible. It’s not that he was flirting, unless flirting was just about wanting to really
see
someone. People thought that someone like him—good-looking, young, cool clothes—was going to be dismissive, and when he wasn’t, when he was just easy and open with them, they glowed. It was a feeling he tried to re-create a hundred times a day, in every interaction. It also calmed him. If he looked at someone and they looked at him and there was a true connection, no matter how brief, then it meant that he didn’t need to replay the encounter anxiously afterwards, trying to find where it had all gone wrong.

Shifting his duffel onto his other shoulder, Andrew pulled the donut out of its crinkly white bag and headed in the direction that she’d pointed. Mmm. Why was everyone always going gluten-free when there were donuts in the world? He bit into a greasy edge with thick globs of icing. It was a little disappointing that it didn’t taste more purple, but sugar was sugar. One, two, three bites, and done.

Days were confusing when you spent half the night awake. Andrew balanced his bag carefully on the tops of his shoes, one arm still looped through the strap so that it wouldn’t touch the gas-station bathroom floor and squeezed his travel-size tube of toothpaste, flattening it to force out the last drib of minty freshness.

It smelled like shit in here. Literal shit. He’d been breathing through his mouth, trying not to think of the little fecal particles he was letting in, but it was really hard to brush your teeth that way. He probably looked like shit, too. The gas station didn’t even have a real mirror, just a banged-up sheet of metal screwed into the wall, some inept graffiti keyed onto the surface.

To make the act work, he had to change into a pair of sweats. He pulled his Vans out and placed them on the floor, then set another pair of shoes next to them and carefully laid his bag across all four sneakers. Next, he slipped out of his shoes and stepped on top of them in his socks, balancing on first one foot and then the other as he eased his jeans off. Folded them. Tucked them into his bag. Then, bunching up the legs of the sweats so that they wouldn’t puddle onto the floor, he poked his toes through each leg and pulled them up.

Pushing through the fluorescent-lit single aisle of the gas station’s convenience store and out into the damp night, he still felt hazy, disconnected from himself. He’d spent the loose hours of the afternoon sitting in back of an olive green streetcar, riding the line from terminus to terminus and back again, watching as the sky turned a misty dark blue before he finally hopped off. Now Andrew crossed the street, walking past a dry cleaner and a couple of small houses. The green awning of the bar was covered with beer names—Bass, Carlsberg, Harp—and a couple of guys stood under it smoking. On the other side of the street, a power plant hummed. He felt like a greaseball, dirty and unshowered, dragging along a bag that was too big and too expensive-looking for this place.

After signing up, he still had half an hour to kill. He should have been excited, sitting there in that wood-paneled bar, a whiskey and Coke in front of him, waiting to go onstage. Instead, he was lonely. The thirty long minutes felt like a weight. One extended sip through that skinny red straw and his drink was gone. All the guys around him—and it was mostly guys—they looked like people he might be friends with except they wore really lame T-shirts and they weren’t actually his friends.

Maybe this was depression. Tak took Prozac and went to a therapist. They’d talked about it once. Andrew rolled his eyes at himself. Was two days of being homeless really all it took to knock him off-kilter? He ordered another drink.

By the time the emcee finally called his name, drawling it out so that it seemed to go on forever, an endless lazy
a
sound, Andrew had already toggled his mental state back and forth between boredom and anxiety and anticipation at least half a dozen times. He’d practiced the last minute of this set over and over in front of the full-length mirror in his dorm, so even the uncertainty of working with props wasn’t enough to keep him nervous and keyed up. But he was a professional. He’d leave it all on the stage.

“Yo, is that you?” the guy next to him asked.

“Yep.”

“Good luck, man.” Andrew checked his pocket to make sure everything was in place, downed the last of his drink, and ran up the narrow room just as the emcee ribbed him. “Ain’t nothing funny about taking your time, alright!”

Andrew catapulted himself onstage and shook the emcee’s hand before turning around to look out at the room. LSU frat boys, townies, and tourists. He spread his arms out.

“So, I’m Asian. Mm-hm. Yeah.”

There were a couple cheers as he turned his head right and left, showing his profile.

“Yep. One hundred percent Asian. I know you want to know what kind. Because people always say they can’t tell the difference between Asians, right? And that goes all ways. Like, you can’t tell the difference between particular Asians, and you also can’t tell the difference between different types of Asians. You
know
right now you’re all thinking,
Is he kimchee and born-again Christian, or is he sushi and octopus porn? 
”

He leaned in and whispered, “
Oh, or is he that guy I used to work with? That real quiet one in the IT department with the Hello Kitty license plate frame? 
” Straightened up. “Except you don’t say any of it out loud because you
know
that thinking all Asians look alike is one of those stereotypes that’s supposed to be super offensive, right?”

He was starting to feel like himself again. This was different from the club in Texas, where Barbra had seen him bomb. These people were laughing. Who could say why? He saw a guy shush his girlfriend when she leaned over to whisper something.
Yes
. He pumped a mental fist and then stepped a little to the left, turned, and said, in a John-Wayne-as-frat-boy voice that sailed out of him, booming and false, “So, hey, bro, you Korean or you Chinese?”