Waylaid (9 page)

“I want to be an astronaut,” I said. He was the first adult I'd told.

“You might have a chance,” Roy said, “but you've got to work. You've got to work harder than anybody else. And be very, very lucky. If you really want to be an astronaut, you have to understand the gravity of the situation,” he said. “That's a joke,” he added when he saw no reaction from me.

I knocked on Roy's door. I heard footsteps inside.

“Roy?” I called through the closed door.

“Oh, it's you.” He stumbled to the door and opened it until it caught on the chain lock. Roy's shot a look over my head and to both sides. “What's going on?” He didn't sound like he had been sleeping.

“I woke up late but our car won't start and I have to get to school. Can you give me a ride?”

He blinked.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “For you, anything.” He shut the door, took off the chain, and opened the door wide. He was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt.

Roy wobbled down to the driver's side of his Ford Fairlaine and opened the door. He swung into the seat with a motion like a pole vaulter clearing the bar. He snapped the passenger door unlocked, and I got in.

The car was huge. I wondered how it would fit into one lane on the highway. Roy cranked the key and the car started without a problem. It hummed, and I felt the vibration run through my legs and groin.

“You got a girlfriend yet, fellow?” Roy asked. He stroked the velvet on his chin.

“Do you know how to get to the school? I can tell you where to go.”

“Oh, don't you go changing the subject! Course I know the way to your school.”

“I kinda have a girlfriend, but I haven't even gotten laid yet.” Roy burst out laughing and fell over the steering wheel, but the car never swerved.

“Whoa, good-looking guy like you can't get laid, there's no hope for the rest of us!” He shook his head. “Don't you worry, you still got plenty of time for that yet. Getting laid isn't the end of your problems, it's just the start. Sex complicates life. Keeps you from thinking straight. If I had a girlfriend with me, would I have a poem in Reader's Digest? I don't think so.”

“I don't want to write poems, I just want to get laid.”

“You're gonna learn, you're gonna learn. Lot of guys I knew just wanted to get laid, hanging out all night. When they were in the hospital, though, they just wanted to see their momma one more time before they died. Just wanted to die in their momma's arms.”

“I think I hate my mother.”

“Now what did you say, fellow?” I saw Roy's grip on the steering wheel tighten. “She raised you, fed you, gave you nice clothes to wear…”

“I found this hat and jacket in one of the hotel rooms,” I said.

“You got a hotel. You got a place to live. Lots of people don't have any place to stay, nothing to eat. That's why we have so many wars, because people are hungry. They're fighting so they can eat every day. You have to love your mother. You owe her your life.”

“She hates black people,” I said. We pulled up to the curb of my school. Roy frowned, then broke into another loud laugh.

“That's okay. I hate Chinese people.” There was a tight smile on his face, but I couldn't tell if he were joking. “Where's your lunch?” he asked, his lips sliding back into neutral. I could feel my stomach grumble, wondering where breakfast was. Roy slipped a Snickers bar into my hands. “Study hard,” he said.

When I reached my home room, I couldn't believe my luck. We had a substitute, Mrs. Miller. She hadn't even figured out yet who was in and who was absent. The attendance cards sat in four separate and unequal piles on her desk.

“You, young man, take care of this and I won't count you as late,” Mrs. Miller said, waving her hands over the cards. She had huge tits that served as a convenient shelf for her folded arms. But she also had a huge stomach to go with those Dolly Partons.

I surveyed the room. The boys were rapping each other's knuckles with pens. The girls were reading magazines and writing notes to each other. I sorted through the cards and volunteered to take them down to the office.

“I have to take Lee Anderson with me, too. She helps me sort through stuff at the office.” Some of the boys made kissy faces and sounds.

“That's enough!” declared Mrs. Miller. That was her two-word phrase. All the subs had one.

Mrs. Griffey would say: “All right!”

Mr. Green: “Settle down!”

Mrs. Schwarz: “People, people!”

The hall monitor waved us through when I showed the attendance envelope. We rounded the corner, and I tried to grab Lee's shoulder. She withdrew and folded her arms.

“Eww, you're wearing the same clothes from yesterday

and your hair looks really gross. I think I see bald spots.” “I woke up late, I didn't even have time to shower.” “Eww, scummy boy, I'm never gonna kiss you.” We're going to do more than just kiss, I thought. A

lot more. She was smiling out the side of her mouth.

It was raining when I got off the school bus. I held a three-ring binder over my head as I walked down the long asphalt drive to the hotel office. Our Ford station wagon was gone. The office lights were off and the door was locked. Where had my parents gone? I couldn't remember the last time they'd both left the hotel without telling me. I didn't have the key, so I went to the maid's cart room, pushed aside a few boxes of bulk-packaged cleaning agents, and slipped through a flimsy panel of sheet rock. This led to the back of the refrigerator in the kitchen. I pushed hard, and I was back in our living quarters. I shoved the fridge back against the panel and dumped my books on the table. A box of day-old pastries from Finemann's sat on the counter.

I was hungry, but first things first.

I went into the office, turned on the light, and unlocked the door. I smacked the bell. BING! Open for business. The johns wouldn't come until dark, but some real customers might come in. You never knew.

I ate two apple turnovers standing over the sink, then brushed flakes of pastry and frosting off of my shirt and into the drain. I went into the living room and watched two episodes of “Voltron.” My parents were still not back yet.

I took a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom and went to my room. I wrapped my cock up like a little mummy and jerked off to a hard-core magazine with words in German. The woman's head was topped with teased blonde hair, and she was taking his cock in her ass. She must have loved it because she smiled hard — eyes shut, teeth clenched. After I cleaned up, I lay down a little while. When I thought about how tight that girl's ass-hole must have been, I couldn't sleep. I was hard again.

Afterwards, no one was back yet so I went to the kitchen and scrambled up three eggs with BacOs for dinner. I took two slices of cold wheat bread from the refrigerator and made a sandwich. It was good.

I was washing the frying pan when I looked out the window and saw a figure approaching from the highway. Even from far away, I could tell it wasn't my father or my mother. It was a man in a brown coat and a brimmed hat. I shook off my hands and leaned against the kitchen counter. About three minutes later, I heard the office door open with a small woosh and then the BING!

I went into the office.

The man standing in front of me looked as worn out as his leather coat, which was missing most of its buttons. He was about 50, and his eyes were dull. Droplets of water wiggled on the brim of his hat. I knew he wasn't a john, not only because he didn't have a car, but because he didn't look like a man about to get anything good anytime soon.

He wanted to know how much a room was.

I told him it was $30 for the night.

He didn't say anything, but began to fill out a registration card. I watched him write. I was good at watching people write upside down. He wrote neatly and dotted I's and crossed T's, something I didn't see too often. He left the lines for the driver's license number and car plate blank. I looked over the room schedule and decided to give him Room 7. The man put down the pen.

“That's $30,” I said.

He didn't blink or reach for a wallet.

“Thirty dollars,” I repeated. He put his hands on the counter and looked at me.

“Can I pay you tomorrow?” he asked.

I shook my head. His bottom lip pushed up against his mouth. His nose twitched, and he sniffed a few times.

“What's that you're cooking?” he asked. Then he muttered to himself, “Eggs.”

Now it was my turn to be silent. I looked at him and tried to guess his story. Unemployed and thrown out of his house? Thrown off the train at Asbury Park? He didn't look like he was homeless. Just worn and tired. And hungry.

“God, I haven't eaten all day,” he said. I shifted my stance and asked if he was going to pay for the room.

He repeated that he didn't have any money now, but he could pay the next morning. More like he was planning on resting now and running out at dawn.

“I can't rent you a room,” I said. He sighed.

“I've been walking around forever. What am I supposed to do?” he said.

“I'll call a cab to take you down to the next hotel,” I told him. I called up Seaside Taxi because we used them a lot to take people away, and they were pretty good.

We stood there in the office for about 10 minutes without saying anything to each other. I pretended I was going over the schedule, running my index finger down the list of rooms. The man stood and stared at the Marlboro clock, never taking off his hat, not even stretching.

A car pulled off the highway and drifted down to just in front of the office.

“That's your cab,” I told the man. He turned his head and I saw a thin scar on the side of his neck. He made no motion to leave.

“Get in the taxi, please,” I told him. “The next hotel is about four miles south on the highway,” I added.

He didn't even say thank you. He slowly made his way to the door and then to the cab. He got in and the headlights swept back out to the highway. The brake lights were two sore slitty eyes in the night.

I wondered what the cab driver was going to do when he found out the man couldn't pay.

At about 10 p.m., my parents came home.

“Where did you go?”

“Some business take care,” said my father. He was wearing a suit.

“You don't worry about it,” said my mother. She gave me a bag from Burger King filled with loose onion rings.

At the bottom was a cold burger. I was already full from the eggs, but I could always go for a burger. I ate it all with a warm glass of iced tea I made from a powder mix. Now that they were back, I could go out and clean rooms.

I picked up two buckets filled with cleaning supplies and headed out.

All of our relatives lived in Taiwan, except for a distant cousin of my father who'd moved to Los Angeles. The Taiwan relatives shipped boxes of clothes for me that were about three sizes too small and stank from being packed with jars of Chinese medicine and creams. The one pair of socks that did fit smelled of Tiger Balm even after several washings. The L.A. cousin sent us seedless oranges.

We got word one day that the L.A. cousin wanted to visit. My father brought him and his wife back from Newark airport in the Pinto. They looked shocked and horrified as they stepped into our living quarters. Uncle and Aunty, as I was told to address them, were wearing nice shoes that looked as out of place on our shabby carpeting as a shaky fish fin on dry land for the first time. They probably expected bellhops running around, mint chocolates on the pillows, and a spacious lobby swirling in Muzak. The only thing we had that made us a legitimate hotel was the BING! BING! BING!

“You stay in Room 2,” my mother told me. “Uncle and Aunty going stay in your room.” I nodded. They were all going out to some Chinese restaurant the next town over. I had to stay to watch the office, so I fried two eggs and baked some biscuits for dinner.

I didn't get a good look at Aunty until they came back from the restaurant and she took her coat off. Were her tits small. They weren't even big enough to cast a shadow.

The adults went into the kitchen and my father took out a white ceramic bottle from the top shelf of the cabinet.

“Go into Room 2,” he said. “We watch the office now.” In the air there was a sense of politeness under pressure. It smelled like Tiger Balm.

I went into the hotel room, sat on the bed, and turned on the television. “Barney Miller” was on 11, the only channel that came in well. I heard some shouting. At first, I thought it was coming from one of the other rooms, but it continued, and I picked up some Chinese. The women were louder than the men. Then it stopped for a while.

A few minutes later, a Seaside Taxi pulled up to the office and honked twice. I went to the window. Uncle carried all the luggage out the door, staggering and grunting. After heaving the suitcases into the trunk, he shook a fist back at the office and shouted, then high kicked into the air like he was going for an extra point. Aunty's head sagged with disappointment and embarrassment. She touched a hand to her hair before stepping into the cab. Then they were gone.

I went into the office and saw both my parents with their arms folded, standing behind the counter. Their faces were red from alcohol and from arguing.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing,” my father said.

“They had emergency,” my mother said.

“Can I sleep in my room tonight?”

“Yes,” said my mother. “You clean up everything in Room 2 first.”

“Where did they go?”

“They all get in argument. Stupid argument.”

“Not stupid argument. Serious argument,” said my father.

“Stupid,” said my mother.

“I'm not going to say nothing if someone wants to say bad things about Chinese people. Mainland people are our countrymen! We support them.”

“You never even been to China, how you know them? How you know they won't attack Taiwan?”

I didn't know what was more incredible — that my parents were arguing or that they were doing it in English in front of me.

“I don't have to go to China to know them! I worked with mainland people at my job.”

“You don't have job anymore!”

“My job is fixing hotel!”

“I never see you work!”

“Come down to basement!”

“You don't want be near me anymore.” My mother was crying. My father put his arm around her. That was where the English stopped.

Thanksgiving weekend at the hotel was a depressing place to be. Commercials on television showed relatives coming together at a table set with pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, mincemeat, and other things I'd only seen at the supermarket. Kitchens and dining rooms bustling with children and a playful golden retriever. A crackling fireplace. Brassy music. And lots of love. Heaps of it.

All we had on Thanksgiving was a puny turkey. It sucked even more because instead of eating in front of the TV, I had to sit with my mother and father at the dining table. Cup-ring stains on the kitchen table in front of my father looked like the Olympics logo. The turkey was so dry, it crumbled like mummy meat as my father cut away at it. There was also rice, hot chili sauce, and string beans. Great.

I mushed all the ingredients together in my bowl, and surprisingly it didn't taste too bad. I used chopsticks, too, but I had to use a fork for the string beans. I was going to head to the fridge to grab a Briardale cola for myself when I heard the office door open. Then heavy footsteps. Two seconds later: BING! BING! BING!

I swung open the office door and saw a man in a big puffy winter coat. A Yankees cap was pulled just over his eyebrows.

“I need a room for a few hours,” he said in a gruff voice.

“That's $20.”

“C'mon, it's Thanksgiving.”

“It's always $20.”

“All right, I know how you Filipinos are,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “You know, we fought in your country. We protected your people. We drove the Spanish out. But business is always business with you.”

He sighed as he pulled out a twenty. It was folded in half, and he placed it on the counter so it stood on its edge. That bill was standing straight and tall for the pride of America. Pilgrim's pride. The fold went right through Andrew Jackson's face.

“You have to fill out the registration card.”

“I'm just here for a little while, come on!” A wave of nausea washed over me as the man's beer-marinated breath blasted out.

“Just put your name down.”

“That's how it is, that's how it always is. Fucking Filipinos. Shit.” He hesitated, thinking up a name, then scrawled it in. He turned the clipboard to me and tapped his handwriting. “You happy, kid? That do it for you?” I nodded my head, handing him the key to Room 5. “Now do the both of us a favor,” the man said, working the key into his tight back pocket, “and wipe that mouth, okay?” He turned and left.

I shook my head and read the name again. I would have thought Mr. Hendrickson could have come up with something better than “John Smith.”