Fresh Off the Boat (16 page)

“Yeah, he’s on the way down right now.”

Dad was a lot more savvy and knew that yelling in Chinese bugged everyone out. That was the difference between my parents. If my mom was mad, you’d hear wild and crazy Chinese. If it was my dad, he got his white man voice on.

“Eddie, would you please come down and speak with this officer? Thank you.”

I ran down the stairs.

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“Good. There was a tiki pole taken out of Mrs. Hogan’s yard this afternoon. Did you happen to see anything?”

“Oh yeah, we thought it was trash in the front of her yard! I got it upstairs.”

“Really? You thought it was trash? Because it was standing upright in the middle of her lawn.”

“I mean, yeah, I’ll give it back. It’s not a big deal.”

“She said she saw Warren from her window helping you grab this tiki pole. Where’s he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did Warren help you take the tiki pole?”

“Why don’t I just get you the tiki pole?”

“Eddie, was Warren there with you?”

“He’s across the street, you can ask him while I go get the tiki pole.”

Fifteen minutes later, we managed to drag the tiki pole down the stairs. I went outside and Warren was standing there with Mrs. Neilson and my parents.

“Look, you boys know that wasn’t trash, and you stole your neighbor’s property. Luckily she doesn’t want to press charges, but this is burglary any way you slice it. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Officer Randolph.”

“Huang Xiao Ming Gui Xia!”

I’d never heard my dad scream Chinese in front of white people. He thought it was rude.

“No, Dad …”

“GUI XIA!”

Everyone’s faces turned. My dad was a respected person in the neighborhood and always maintained his cool with people outside the family. Warren was nervous, Mrs. Neilson was dumbfounded, and Officer Randolph tried to intervene.

“Mr. Huang, is everything …”

Before he could finish, I did what my dad asked and kneeled on the concrete driveway. I kneeled right down in front of the officer and bowed three times.

“I’m sorry, Officer Randolph.

“I’m sorry, Officer Randolph.

“I’m sorry, Officer Randolph.”

“It’s quite all right, Mr. Huang, I see you have this under control. I’m sure the boys won’t do it again.”

“No, they won’t. I’m very sorry they did this. It’s not right.”

“No, it’s not, sir. We will see you around the neighborhood. Have a good evening.”

I had never seen an officer so shook in his life. Warren’s eyes got huge, looked at his mom, looked at my dad, and everyone took off still fearful for my life. I mean, in the middle of a gated Orlando subdivision, there was a Chinaman kneeling in the driveway for all passersby to see in all his shame. For hours, my dad left me out there as punishment. People had no idea what to make of it. Were we a cult? Was it religious? Was the rapture coming? I saw the faces in cars as they passed, laughing and pointing in pure shock at this ancient Chinese ritual that had somehow landed off Apopka Vineland Road. I wasn’t mad at my dad. I deserved it. For our people, this is how we paid the price and I accepted it. I’m just glad there wasn’t Instagram back then.

AROUND THIS TIME
,
Warren started dating this girl down the street, Julie. She had this red Toyota and would drive us to school, but she totally fucked up Warren’s taste in music. Dude went from Wu-Tang and the
Menace II Society
soundtrack to Modest Mouse and Incubus. I wanted to puke in my mouth every morning listening to that shit. I started bringing my Discman in the whip just so I could avoid listening to songs about water and wine or whatever it was Incubus kept going on about. In the end, some people can only keep up the “hip-hop thing” so long.

I think hip-hop is real for a lot of white and Asian kids, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. That’s when they make an upward assimilation. I didn’t listen to hip-hop for strategic reasons. I loved it, I needed it. Watching my white and Asian friends move away from hip-hop opened my eyes to this rite of passage that I was never going to join—the ascendance into whiteness. It’s a funny position being an Asian in America. You’re the dude who can cross the union line. Your community actually wants you to sell the fuck out and work in law, accounting, or banking. But I realized then that I wasn’t going to cross the picket line just to get a nut. I was down with the rotten bananas who want nothing to do with that. We live to fight the good fight.

I started kickin’ it with dudes who skipped school and skated. I couldn’t skate, but I could smoke the shit out of some weed and we liked the same music. Mike Muschewske was the ringleader and a fucking animal. This kid looked like he was eleven for most of high school, but he barely went to school, had all the video games, girls at his crib around the clock, and we all got to kick it. His mom was cool with it and kept mad food in the kitchen and he had this ill cocker spaniel that bit Austin’s nose off one night when he dropped acid and kept teasing the dog. Every day, it was me, Muschewske, Lil’ Cra, Justin, Austin, and Chaz hanging out at Chew’s.

Justin called me “Gourmet,” ’cause every time we got high, I couldn’t just eat the chips or cookies. I made ill stoner food, like Doritos sandwiches, where I took ham, turkey, and cheese and rolled it up on plates, then sandwiched them between Doritos. I’d microwave cookies and eat them with ice cream, bake macaroni and cheese with crushed Cheetos on top, real disgusting Scooby snacks. A few years later at a bachelor party in Miami, after hitting Miami Gold, pissing off the VIP balcony onto the dance floor at Voodoo, and copping frozen chimichangas at 7-Eleven, we went back to our hotel. Total fail, because we didn’t have a microwave in the room, but I didn’t give up. I told my homies, “Ay yo, let me get the ironing board and iron!”

I put the frozen chimichangas on plates and started ironing the shits. Fifteen minutes later, we were eating chimichangas with crispy exteriors and I was officially the Iron Chef.

THIS WAS MY
downward assimilating crew and my parents definitely weren’t feelin’ it. I first spotted Justin at school, walking across the campus wearing those ugly-ass Pippens with the word “AIR” plastered all across the entire shoe, and recognized him from Sea World Summer Camp when we were in third grade. We were supposed to train mice to walk through a maze but Justin and I didn’t have the patience. There was a giant python tank at Sea World so we would take the mice from class and feed them to the snake. We got caught, but even then, Justin was using the line he’d be
using seven years later: “It’s cool, man, nothing’s gonna happen. My dad is captain of the SWAT team.” Anytime we got busted for shit, if we were with Justin, we walked. He was our get-out-of-jail-free pass. So we went buck wild.

Orlando’s first Best Buy opened on Sand Lake Road around that time. It was a big deal. Our city had made it. So every Tuesday, a bunch of us would go in the spot with double-sided tape around our waists. All the mom-and-pop record stores and Sam Goody’s had big-ass alarms on rap CDs. They knew the deal, but Best Buy was slow. Every CD just had a security sticker that you could peel off. We’d just peel off the stickers and stick the joints to our waist under our clothes. Every week we brought home five or six new albums. Eventually, they caught on. Instead of putting stickers on the hip-hop joints, they put rent-a-cops at the ends of the aisle. We tried to outsmart the system: We’d take the CDs from the music section and leave them in different parts of the store. Then we’d circle the store like we were looking for something—a washer-dryer, a new coffeemaker—and pick them up on our way back out. This time, I could see a rent-a-cop following me.

He thought he was slick, but I saw that fool. I led him into the appliances aisle and ditched the CDs into a dryer. With nothing on me, I just went toward the exit, but they arrested me anyway.

“Yo, the fuck you touching me for, son? I didn’t do shit.”

“Then who put these CDs in the dryer?”

“Since when is it illegal to put CDs in dryers?”

“We have you on camera transporting these CDs into the dryer. That’s attempted robbery!”

“It’s not like I transported hookers over state lines; it’s CDs in the appliance aisle, son. You’re wildin’.”

“Don’t get fresh with me! You tried to steal a Sporty Thievz ‘No Pigeons’ single!”

Game recognize game, that rent-a-cop kinda shot me in the heart with that one. Talk about spot blown, getting called out for trying to steal the “No Pigeons” single is pretty much the Urban Dictionary definition. That was like the time Muschewske bought the Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz
album, quite possibly the worst, most anticipated album of all time, the pariah of the Bronx. #Dejavu. The rent-a-cop let me go and five years later in college, someone stole my two-hundred-CD collection out of my whip. I had never even loaded the music onto my computer. My life’s work lost, but it was fair. Karma is a bitch and I never paid for those joints.

Every weekend, Justin, Mike, and I would go to parties and wild out so much that people called us Fouls. Someone’s parents would be out of town and they’d invite the whole crew to come party ’cause we were the only ones that really threw down. These people that opened up their houses basically rented us like hookers selling “cool” but they had no idea what they were in for.

One weekend, this girl Melanie threw a party. It was kind of a dope house, there were a lot of drinks, and at least eighty people were packed in. We were having fun, but I was toe up. I’d been drinking this jungle juice Mike made and saw all these herbs with board shorts and frosted tips. Most of the people that hosted house parties were first-timers. It was the cool thing to do, but they weren’t down so we’d toss the whole crib. Why? ’Cause they never talked to us, said sideways shit when we weren’t around, and stigmatized us as black sheep. Any chance they’d get in class to tell on us for being late or being high, they would, but as soon as the parents left town, they wanted to be us for a weekend. They assumed we’d steal their shit and piss in their milk, but they STILL let us come party ’cause they needed us. For one night they wanted a “pass” to wild out with the derels. I wasn’t about to be nobody’s Bojangles 3000 so I set it off.

I went to the bathroom, where there was a long-ass line so I just whipped my dick out and pissed in the kitty litter. I never peed in a litter box before so I had no idea it would get so full, so quickly. The shit sloshed over the sides. I thought it was mad funny so I showed it to Mike and that’s what started the chain reaction. Mike and Justin would always one-up me so Muschewske took two boxes of cereal, poured them on the kitchen floor, then followed it up with a gallon of milk. Melanie’s man bugged out. “Dude, what the fuck are you doing?” Deadpan, Muschewske, with a blunt in his hand, doesn’t even trip: “I’m makin’ breakfast, bitch.”

Meanwhile, I was out back where Melanie had a bunch of rabbits in a
cage. I cut them loose. Get free. To Zion! Justin poured out a big bag of chips in the yard and the bunnies went apeshit for the Doritos. When the rabbits, roaming the yard, looked up from their Doritos buffet, their faces were dusted orange from the cheese powder. Once the party blew up, we left leaving the tourists to clean up. Welcome to Jamrock!

Warren was disappointed in me. He was friends with everyone and didn’t understand why I’d tear people’s cribs up with Mike and Justin. Part of it was just being crunk, but I hated these people. They’d judge me in class, call me a burnout behind my back, but that one weekend their parents were gone, they’d call me and my friends to party because they were fucking tourists. Warren was torn because no matter how close we’d become, his reference group was still white. He didn’t understand that I didn’t hate white people. I hated
whiteness
.

“Dude, you’re just as racist!”

“Man, I’m just getting even.”

“No, you aren’t. These people haven’t done anything to you. They invited you to their party and you fucked their house up and cut their rabbit cage open! What the fuck, man?!?!?”

“Stop being a bitch, son. They’re not like us. You’re white, but you spend time with them, you’ll see, once they know how you think they’ll toss you out with the water, too. We’re different.”

“How do you know that? You don’t even talk to these kids.”

“Man, your boy Cory told me last week he still wishes there were plantations and gentlemen! He thinks it’d be more ‘civilized,’ g. What the fuck is that?”

In my mind, Warren was too forgiving. We should have punched Cory in the face for saying that shit. The way I saw it, everyone liked Warren ’cause he was everyone’s favorite white boy and I was his wild-ass gremlin sidekick. I don’t fault Warren; we were just dealt different hands. He wanted me to play my 3, 4, off-suit like his double-cowboys
^‖
but Mama didn’t raise no fool. I could never win playing a white man’s game. Warren
never would’ve let me get away with fighting his boy Cory, so I’d organize
Fight Club
in the sparring room. That way, in the context of
Fight Club
, I got to punch a gentleman in the face.

THE PREPPY WHITE
kids would never see Warren as the “other” and they’d never see me as one of “them.” If they did try to see me as one of “them” it wasn’t in my true form; it was as a reformed, assimilated, apologetic version of myself that accepted the premise that my people were barbarians with FOB scars
^a
and they were the people on the hill. At one point, I tried to detox myself of whiteness. I hung out with Baber, Samer, Abbyshek, Neal, and my boy Kalpesh. They were the first friends I made in high school anyway. Baber was Muslim and so was this other kid in my gifted class, so I started reading the Koran just to see how others viewed religion and society. I could never be Christian, but I found some level of solidarity with Muhammad. It’s the age-old problem for Asian Americans. You dig and reach and beg for anything that was made for you, but it’s just not around.

After a few months reading the Koran and not partying, I knew it wasn’t for me, either. I had a lot more in common with Baber, Samer, and Abbyshek (who was Hindu, not Muslim) concerning family and values than Mike or Justin, but it wasn’t enough. A lot of the things that bugged me about Christianity were present in Islam, too. I realized that organized religion wasn’t going to solve my problems.