All That Matters (29 page)

Jeff Eng put his school case down, held the cigar in as manly a way as he could and stuck it in his mouth, inhaled
one
, deeply,
two
, deeply,
three
.

“Hold it in, champ,” Frank said. “Next. Hurry up, guys.”

One after another, we took three deep breaths and held. Then, as the sickly-sweet smoke threatened to implode and eat away our semi-virgin lungs, Frank said, “Let go!”

We exhaled. Jeff gagged and spilled out his guts. Wah Duk spewed the Oh Henry bar he’d eaten ten minutes before. I grabbed Joe, and we both doubled over and retched, but nothing came out except trails of smoke. When we doubled up with spasms, Frank doubled up with laughter.

I don’t know how many minutes went past, but when I looked up, three of us were splayed against the wall; Wah Duk was still heaving into the garbage can. Frank surveyed the disaster.

“Never inhale cigar smoke. Only suck-ass kids with something to prove inhale cigar smoke.”

Jeff groaned. “You should have told us.”

“Why?” Frank said. “So I can save you the trouble of learning something? You don’t learn this shit in school books.”

“Learning
—?” I asked, fighting my nausea.

“Learning that you don’t have to grow up so fast.” Frank slammed a fist into a garbage lid and sent it flying down the alley. “Not everything has to be learned first-hand.
Catch?”

Oddly, I didn’t feel tricked. My stomach churned; my mouth tasted like a sewer.

“By the way, gentlemen,” Frank said, “did any one of you little fuckers
know
that you don’t inhale cigar smoke?”

Jeff weakly raised his hand.

“Then why the hell did you do it? Why didn’t you warn your buddies?”

He looked down at the ground.

Wah Duk stood up straight at last and started to walk home. Joe Sing followed him. Jeff wiped his mouth on his sleeve and tugged at my arm to go. I wanted to stay, to hear more. But Frank slapped me on the back, as if to say,
Get going, there’s nothing more
.

“Tell your Poh-Poh I need some more lotion. Got in a bad fight yesterday.”

He showed off his fists. The knuckles were bruised.

After that evening with the cigar, Frank Yuen didn’t seem to mind that Jeff and I liked to hang around him. Whenever we heard he was back from the lumber camps, we called up to his rooming-house window and waited to see if he would come down to join us. Sometimes he told us to fuck off, he had had a hard night; most evenings, though, he came down in his best clothes, scented with aftershave, ready to embark on a visit to a favourite sweetheart or to meet his friends at the Jazz Hut, an all-night hangout.

He would spend twenty or thirty minutes with Jeff and me, telling us stories about fights at the camps when someone called him a Chink, about his three near-death accidents with shingle-mill saws, or about the time when the two tractor pull-chains swung towards his head in the sawdust air.

He lifted his shirt and pointed out his scars, tracing the deep cuts where a ripsaw had torn past his sleeve and grazed his shoulder; where a fight with a knife ended with a slash across his back; where, on his left arm, he’d been splashed when his father had thrown boiling water at his mother while she held young Frank, trying to comfort his crying in the night. About some scars Jeff or I pointed to, he had nothing to say. Only remembered waking up in the first-aid shed cut up badly.

“Yeah,” he said, “I lose a few, too.”

I thought of my life at home, how easy everything was. Father would never throw boiling water at any of us. After our first taste of alcohol, Jeff Eng’s father had beaten him with a razor strop, but even Jeff knew that he had pushed his father too far that night.

Poh-Poh asked me if I had taken the medicine to Frank.

“Yes,” I said. “He wants to know how much for the bottle.”

Instead of answering me, Poh-Poh said, “Tell Frank Yuen I say war come soon.”

For weeks she had listened silently to Father and the elders debate the war news from China. The Imperial Japanese troops were amassing, aiming to march southward into central China.

“Poh-Poh, how much for the tonic?”

“Frank teach my Kiam-Kim everything. That the cost for Frank Yuen.”

No one in the family said anything to me about Frank. Poh-Poh told Stepmother not to worry, to leave me alone. “Frank Yuen,” the Old One said,
“good
demon-boy, not
bad
demon-boy.”

Jeff Eng’s father didn’t like his son hanging out with a boy like Frank Yuen, but Jeff snuck away to join up with me and the demon hood.

One night Frank wrestled away Jeff’s and my pack of Player’s and crushed it in his fist.

“You two look like you’re sucking on a tit,” he said.

We boasted about our third round of drinking. He spat.

“Try growing up first,” he said. “That’s the tough part.”

If he was suspicious, he would smell our breath for a whiff of tobacco or alcohol. We were slapped for our efforts to cover up with bits of licorice Sen-Sen. I didn’t mind. Being seen with Frank Yuen made us feel like big shots. We expected him to slap us around to smarten us up. To make his point, he stopped smoking in front of us.

One evening, Frank’s father, drunk again, stumbled down the rooming-house steps and pushed his way through the gang of us.

“Frank, tell them everything,” he said in Toishanese. “Just like I tell you.” He was on his way to one of Chinatown’s gambling dens. “You be their
dai-goh.”

“Yeah, sure,” Frank said. “Make sure they get into trouble.”

“First Son,” the old man said, “tell them everything.”

Jack had been working on the docks on weekends, piling goods onto lifts, shift-work that his father’s union boss got him to keep him out of trouble. That was okay with Jack: the extra money impressed the girls. I wanted him to meet Frank Yuen.

“He’s as tough as those Mafia guys,” I said. “Got more scars on him than a road map has streets.”

“Is he the guy that hangs out at the Jazz Hut? Has this scar just below his lip?”

“How’d you know!”

“Look,” said Jack, “anyone who can give a ten-spot to the guy at the door gets in. Inside, everyone thinks I’m one of the busboys.”

I was impressed.

“You should meet him,” I said.

“Already have. He asked me to clean up his table.”

“Did you?”

“What choice did I have?”

When I told Frank that he had made my best friend clean up his table, he laughed. He liked a kid who would show up at the Jazz Hut just to be there. The music was hot. The girls were hotter. Frank remembered O’Connor.

“Looks like a choirboy,” he said. “Did he like my tip?”

“Didn’t say.”

“Bastard!”

I arranged for the two to meet again one Saturday at the Blue Eagle. Jack rushed over from the docks during his lunch hour. I made it out of Chinese school with an hour to spare before I had to go to the warehouse. And Frank had said he would be nursing a hangover at the back table.

Jack was already there, turning his blond head to grin at me.

“Been listening to stories,” he said.

There were a few scummy Irishmen labouring in those work camps, Frank had told him, and they looked like Jack. They had the best swear words, in a language you could hardly bear to listen to, but when they sang,
everyone stopped. Frank had O’Connor sing one of the old songs his parents taught him. But he sang in English, which disappointed Frank.

“Where’s your blood language gone? Why sing in Limey talk? Who the hell are you?”

Jack swore in the choice Chinese words Jeff and I had taught him, blistering phrases the elders used about smelly women’s parts and loose-limbed mothers. He even repeated one of Poh-Poh’s curses.

“Goddamned Chink,” Frank said, slapping him across the head. “You’re a fuckin’ Irish Chink!”

Three tables away, people were laughing.

The more we hung around Frank, the more we came under his care. He concluded that we Chinatown boys, including Jack whenever he was with us, shouldn’t grow up ignorant about
real
life; he said he was going to give us an education, and he began by taking us around to his favourite hangouts. Sometimes he opened the door of a bar to let us peer inside. We ducked our heads in, looked at the long row of chairs and tables, at men laughing or swearing, slugging back beer. Through the doors marked “Ladies and Escorts,” we could never get a proper look.

Whenever he grew tired of his three or four donothing boys, he tossed back his thick locks, brushed his tailored cuffed pants, and said, “Piss off.”

We did.

Some of our lessons with Frank were far more interesting. He would bend a discarded coat hanger and draw anatomical pictures in the alleyway dirt, thrust his hip back and forth, laugh to see some of us amazed.

“That’s how babies are made,” he said. “You knew that, didn’t you, Kiam?”

I nodded, in my head comparing the wealth of details and guesses that O’Connor and I had thrown each other’s way: Father and Stepmother, and her swelling belly.

“You boys get
hard
, don’t you?”

With everyone else, I blushed. I couldn’t help it: I thought of Jenny, of my two hands rubbing against her, of the smell of talcum and the feel of her breasts.

“Right,” he said, looking directly at me. “You do.” His face darkened.

Frank said we shouldn’t play with our dicks or we’d be totally useless where women were concerned. He told us what desperate men did; he warned us we were always in danger of becoming pansies. Like some of those bachelor-men who went crazy or queer, stuck in wretched run-down rooming houses, worse than the one he and his father shared; those elders torn apart from their wives in China for far too many years, their “bachelor” tag, their madness following them into their graves.

“I want you guys to grow up properly,” he said. “That’s my job. So I’m going to tell you everything. You sure you know about sex?”

Frank said it was better to pay for good sex than to stay pure for a woman you weren’t going to see for years. Men who kept to themselves like that gambled everything away, clutched at other men in the night, drank themselves to death.

Frank said, “A woman’s juices keep a man sane.
And a woman needs a man’s juice, too.”

It was female
yin
and male
yang
, he said. Balance. Harmony.

One summer evening, walking with Jeff and me, Frank stopped in front of the Jazz Hut, where he said he took certain girls, danced with his sweetheart of the night, warmed her up for later. This was a certain class of girl, he said, not your regular three-buck whores.

“Tell that to your Irish pal,” Frank said. “Tell him to wear a rubber.”

We toured the back rooms of the Hastings Gym where he worked out and where even boys like us could buy emergency Frenchies for a quarter from the towel boy, who was a Ukrainian man as old, I thought, as Poh-Poh. Frank boasted about the sweethearts he visited upstairs in the East Hastings Hotel. Sometimes Jeff and I gulped some of Frank’s beer on the alleyway steps, eyes wide, catching every detail of his grown-up world. He drank in clubs where only twenty-one-year-olds could order a drink. After hours, like at the Jazz Hut, it cost underage Frank a wink of the eye and extra folding money pushed into the right palm to get in. I thought of O’Connor, tall enough, like Frank far ahead of me, getting whatever he wanted before I even knew such wanting existed.

Although none of us boys could understand everything Frank said, we would exchange knowing looks. Then one day, Wah Duk, who was the youngest among us, boldly announced, “I can shoot
juice
now.”

And Frank said, “Hey, schmuck, I told you not to
play with yourself!” He looked at each one of us. “Anybody else going to go crazy? Anyone else turn into a pansy?”

Our eyes shied away from his chuckling, piercing scrutiny.

When Frank wasn’t around, the gang of us stood in front of Ben Chong’s corner store on Princess Street, drinking pop or talking baseball scores, often repeating the sexy things Frank told us about girls, over and over again, as if talking was just like doing it, the bulge in our pants proud proof of our manhood. Desperate, playful, we grabbed each other, bashing each other with our school bags, laughing like clowns, then holding back, looking as innocent as we could, if we spotted a dress sauntering haughtily past. One day, Mrs. Chong stepped out of the store.

“You boys be good!”

We looked around, as if she meant some other boys.

“Kiam-Kim,” she said, “you come in, please.”

The others scattered. I walked into the store.

“Jenny need more help with her school work. Maybe you help a few minutes every day?”

Taught to comply with the requests of family friends, I nodded. Jenny was at the back shelving some tins. I could see her back stiffen.

“Maybe start today?”

Upstairs, Jenny and I settled in chairs facing each other across a small table. Her sweater fit her perfectly. She opened a textbook and looked up at me as if she
had a serious question to ask. I picked up a pencil.

“Are you,” she began, “going to the roller-skating party?”

“If I get away from the warehouse,” I said. “You going?”

“A bunch of us are showing up around four.”

And so Jenny and I skated together, bumping into other couples who whirled past with confidence. After, she took me into a narrow hallway behind the benches. It was a narrow hallway that seemed to go nowhere. We pushed against each other and kissed. She let me lift her sweater, and my palms eased over her breasts. She could feel my hardness against her and she responded by pressing her thighs together. Then someone started coming down the hall and we broke apart.

“You make my mother happy, Kiam,” she said. “I want to know what she sees in you.”

Mrs. Chong and Poh-Poh wanted to see us together. I didn’t mind. We could conveniently play along, let the blind hope of our families see whatever it wanted to see. Maybe one day I would love Jenny and she would love me. For now, I knew only that my hands, my body, felt a need that responded to Jenny’s hands, Jenny’s body.