The Roy Stories (27 page)

 

Chop Suey Joint

When Roy was eleven years old, he got a job delivering Chinese food on a bicycle. He was paid twenty-five cents an hour and a dime for each delivery, plus tips. He worked three nights a week from five o'clock until eight, and from four to eight on Sundays. Kow Kow Restaurant provided the bicycle, which was equipped with baskets attached to the handlebars and mounted on the rear fender. Roy was also fed dinner, for which he usually requested a hamburger on toast, vegetable chow mein and egg foo yung. He enjoyed this job except when the weather was really foul, which was when he often had the most deliveries. Riding in traffic over icy streets or in driving rain was difficult, but he was skillful enough to avoid any serious mishaps during the year or so that he worked as a delivery boy.

Every Sunday night a man came into Kow Kow at eight twenty, ten minutes before closing. This was also the time when Roy ate his dinner. The man always sat in one of the two red leather booths on either side of the front window and ordered the same items: won ton soup with extra dumplings, served extra hot; shrimp fried rice; and two pots of tea, also extra hot. He was in his late forties or early fifties, had a three or four day beard, was of medium height and size, wore the same brown sportcoat, a black shirt buttoned up to his neck and a weather-punished brown Fedora, which he did not remove while he ate.

Don Soon, the owner's son, always waited on him. Don was twenty-three, he smiled a lot and Roy liked him the best of anyone at Kow Kow, although all of the guys who worked there—waiters, cooks and kitchen help—were nice to him. No women worked at Kow Kow. Mr. Soon, the owner, tended the cash register while seated on a high stool behind a counter near the entrance.

He said the same thing to every customer after ringing up the bill: “You come back. We waiting for you.” Mr. Soon spoke Cantonese to his employees but when speaking to his son and to Roy he used perfect English. When Roy asked Don why his father spoke pidgin to non-Asian customers, Don said, “He thinks they expect it, so he does his Charlie Chan act. This is a chop suey joint—you get egg roll and atmosphere.”

One Sunday night, when Don was in the kitchen and Mr. Soon had left early, the man in the hat, as the employees called him, looked over at Roy, who was eating his dinner at a nearby table, and said, “Hey, kid, you work here, don't you?”

Roy nodded. “I do deliveries.”

“You suppose you could go in the kitchen and tell 'em I'm ready for my second pot of tea?”

“Sure,” Roy said, and stood up.

“Make sure you tell 'em ‘extra hot.'”

“Okay.”

“Sorry to disturb your meal.”

“No problem,” Roy said, and walked back to the kitchen.

He came back and sat down.

“Don's bringing it,” he said to the man in the hat.

“Thanks, kid.”

Thirty seconds later, Don Soon brought the man a pot of tea, smiled at him and walked away.

“These are nice people here,” the man said to Roy.

“They are,” said Roy.

“They pay you good?”

“Enough, I guess.”

“This waiter, he's always smiling.”

“His name is Don. He's the owner's son.”

“He reminds me of an Arab I knew when I worked in the oil fields in Saudi. His name was Rashid bin Rashid. Bin means ‘son of.' He smiled all the time, too. This Rashid, he captured falcons and sold 'em. He showed me how to do it. Took a pet pigeon and tied a long piece of string to one of its legs and the other one to a stone. We sat and waited until a falcon flew over, then Rashid threw the pigeon up into the air and we took off. The falcon swooped down and killed the pigeon and when he brought it to the ground we ran back and chased the falcon away. Then we dug a shallow pit in the sand downwind of the dead pigeon. Rashid got into the pit holding the end of the string tied to the stone. I covered him with a blanket and he told me to get far away. When the falcon came back to finish picking at its kill, Rashid slowly reeled in the pigeon. As soon as the falcon got close to him, Rashid reached out and grabbed it.”

The front window behind the man was streaked with rain. Roy was glad he had finished his deliveries before it started. The man poured himself a fresh cup of tea and took a long sip.

“The Arabs mostly drank coffee,” he said, “sometimes tea. They like it boiling hot. I got used to drinking it that way.”

“How long were you in Saudi Arabia?” Roy asked.

“Three and a half years. Made a pile. Gone now.”

Roy stood and picked up his dishes to take to the kitchen.

“Nice talking to you,” he said. “I enjoyed the story about catching a falcon in the desert.”

The man in the hat poured more tea.

“If you're here next Sunday, I'll tell you about the time I helped save a camel from drowning in quicksand.”

“I'll be here,” said Roy.

He never saw the man again. A few weeks after their conversation, Roy asked Don Soon if the man had come in at a time when he wasn't working. Don said no, that as far as he knew the man in the hat had not been back since that night.

“You must have told him about a better Chinese restaurant,” said Don.

Roy asked Mr. Soon if he'd seen him, and Mr. Soon shook his head and said, “White ghost all look same.” Then Mr. Soon smiled and messed up Roy's hair with his right hand. “Just kidding, Roy,” he said. “No, I don't know what happened to him. He always left a fair tip. I hate to lose a good customer.”

In his second year of high school, four years after he'd stopped working at Kow Kow, Roy came across a book on a shelf in the school library about falcons and falconry. He immediately remembered the man in the hat's story. Roy looked through the book to see if there was any information on capturing falcons but there was not. Most of the text was about training the birds to hunt, which seemed silly to Roy because it was obvious that a falcon knows how to hunt without a man having to teach it. He put the book back on the shelf. There were millions of pigeons in the city, Roy thought. They shit on everything. Chicago would be a better place, he decided, if more falcons lived there.

 

Significance

Roy often wondered what the significance was of having a favorite color or number. His favorite color was blue, a common enough preference, he came to learn. His mother's favorite number was eight: whenever she asked him to guess what number she was thinking of, he always said eight and he was always right. One time she asked him and he guessed eight and his mother said, No, I was thinking of the number four, and Roy said, You're fibbing, you were thinking of eight, and she laughed and said, You're right, I was thinking of eight. I can't help it. You can't fool me, Roy said, and his mother said, No, Roy, you know me too well.

Roy and his mother played this game often when they were in the car and she was driving. When his mother tried to guess what number Roy was thinking of she usually guessed three or nine and she was correct about half the time, though neither three nor nine were Roy's favorite number. As Roy grew older, he and his mother played this game less frequently, and by the time he was ten or eleven they stopped playing it for good.

Many years later Roy was walking alone at night on a street in a city his mother had never been to when he thought about their numbers guessing game. He was thinking of the number five and he wished his mother were there because if he asked her to guess she would have said three or nine. Just then Roy passed a house with an open window from which he heard a record playing: Eartha Kitt singing “April in Portugal” in French. He stopped in the street to listen. “April in Portugal” had been one of his mother's favorite songs when he was a boy; she often used to play it on the piano and sing the lyrics in English, though she could speak French passably well.

Eartha Kitt finished singing and Roy walked on. Any number divisible by three, he remembered, was in certain ancient cultures considered to have mystical or occult significance, but he could not recall why; the number eight placed horizontally was the mathematical symbol for infinity, as well as an overhand knot as illustrated in the Merchant Marine handbook.

The significance of April in Portugal, Roy knew, was that it was the month in which the people in the song had fallen in love. The importance of numbers or colors in one's cosmology was far more arcane, except, perhaps, to adherents of numerology and whatever students of color symbology might be called. (Colorologists?) Roy had an urge to stop the next person he encountered on the street and ask him or her if he or she could guess what number he was thinking of at that very moment, but he overcame it. Even if the person played along and guessed correctly, Roy knew no meaning could be discerned from it, that nothing profound would be revealed. More significant, Roy thought, was his having been reminded of his mother playing and singing “April in Portugal.” There was no doubt as to its value in Roy's cosmology.

He could still remember the photograph of Eartha Kitt on the cover of her album
That Bad Eartha,
bare-shouldered in a black cocktail dress, slinky, cat-like, a vixen amused by the charade. The significance of her come-on-and-try expression had not been lost on him. Roy wondered what Eartha Kitt's favorite number was.

 

Einstein's Son

There was a man in Roy's neighborhood who claimed he was the son of Albert Einstein. Roy was ten years old when he saw a picture of Einstein on the cover of
Look
magazine. Einstein's long white hair starfished from his head, he had a droopy ringmaster's mustache and a slightly befuddled expression on his face that made Roy think of him as a dotty but benevolent scientist who would not seem uncomfortable throwing elbows in the headslapping, eyethumbing company of the Three Stooges.

The man who told people that he was Einstein's son was in his midfifties, tall, already bald and immaculately shorn of facial hair. He wore gold wire-rim glasses and always dressed in a blue suit with a white shirt and red tie under a shabby beige trenchcoat frayed at the cuffs, and battered brown wing tip shoes. His name, he said, was Baron Otto von Loswerden, so everyone in the neighborhood referred to him as the Baron. According to Steve the Newsie, who owned the newspaper and magazine stand on the northwest corner of Dupré and Minnetonka, and from whom von Loswerden bought a
Chicago
Tribune
at eight o'clock every morning while stopping to chat for a few minutes, the Baron was an illegitimate child of Albert Einstein and his then girlfriend, Mileva, whom the young physicist later married and who bore him another child. The Baron, however, who was not yet Otto, nor, obviously, a baron, was given away to avoid scandal and financial responsibility. It was not until he was thirty years old, the Baron confided to Steve, and at the deathbed of his adoptive father, that he learned of his true parentage.

“Do you believe him?” Roy asked Steve the Newsie.

Roy's friend, Billy Murphy, who worked on Sunday mornings for Steve piecing together newspaper sections, was the only person Roy knew who had ever been in the newsie's apartment. Billy told Roy that the floor of the apartment was carpeted half a foot thick with old newspapers, and the walls were decorated with photographs of very young girls cut out of the papers.

“What difference does it make?” said Steve. “If a man wants to believe he's a baron or even a king, who am I to say he ain't?”

Steve was five foot two and weighed more than two hundred pounds. He had almost no nose, very few teeth and a cauliflower left ear. Billy Murphy told Roy that Steve's mother, whom Steve called The Army of Mary, lived in the apartment with him, but that nobody had seen her for a very long time.

“I think she died and Steve wrapped her in old newspapers like a mummy,” Billy said. “He's got a padlock on a freezer up there. I bet The Army of Mary's in it.”

Roy did not know where the Baron worked, or if he worked at all.

“Do you know where the Baron lives?” Roy asked Billy.

“No. I only see him walkin' back and forth on Minnetonka.”

“Me, too,” said Roy. “He must rent a room in a house around here.”

One gray afternoon when Billy was holding down the stand while Steve the Newsie went to drain the snake, Roy was crossing the street and Billy shouted for him to come over.

“What's up?” Roy said.

“Look at this.”

Billy showed Roy a nine-by-twelve-inch box with fancy writing on the cover.

“What is it?”

“The Baron gave it to Steve to read. He says it's a manuscript.”

Roy read what was written on the box.

“What Albert Einstein Got Wrong about the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies by Baron Otto von Loswerden, Son of Einstein.”

“Did you ever hear the Baron speak?” asked Roy.

“Yeah,” said Billy, “a couple of times.”

“Does he have a German accent?”

Billy thought for a moment, then said, “I don't think so. Why?”

“If he was from Switzerland or Germany or Austria, he'd have an accent, wouldn't he?”

“Yeah, I guess. But maybe he's been livin' in Chicago for so long that he lost it.”

“Cunningham's mother and father came over from Ireland forty years ago and they still have theirs,” said Roy.

The back door of the newsstand opened and Steve came in.

“What you bums doin'?” he said.

“I just showed Roy what the Baron gave you,” said Billy.

“Be careful with that,” said Steve, taking the box from him. “It's his masterwork.”

“Can you understand scientific stuff?” asked Roy.

“I haven't read it yet.”

“Billy and I were wonderin' where the Baron lives.”

“And how come he don't have a German accent?” asked Billy.

“My grandfather says Einstein's from Switzerland,” said Roy.

“You boys ask too many questions.”

Steve put the box on the floor under the front counter.

“Go on, both of ya, beat it before you scare off the customers.”

That night, Roy asked his grandfather if he knew that Albert Einstein had an illegitimate son who lived in the neighborhood.

“No, I didn't,” said Pops. “What's his name?”

“Baron Otto von Loswerden. He says Einstein and his girlfriend gave him up for adoption when he was a baby.”

Pops said, “Loswerden. It means ‘to get rid of.' The man may be an impostor but at least he's got a sense of humor.”

“What's an impostor?”

“A phony, a pretender.”

“He gave Steve the Newsie the manuscript of a book he wrote about something Einstein did wrong.”

Roy's grandfather looked at him and smiled.

“America is a great country, Roy. A man can be whoever he wants to be.”

“Is it a crime?”

“Is what a crime?”

“To say you're somebody you're not.”

“That depends on your purpose, why you're doing it and what you do.”

“What if someone died and nobody knew about it but you and you didn't want to give up the body and you kept it in your freezer? Is that a crime?”

“Roy,” said his grandfather, “what is it you're not telling me?”