I'm the One That I Want (23 page)

His health had been declining for some time, and my mother left frequent updates on his condition on my answering machine. “Hi— is Mommy. I want to tell you two things. Number one. Grandpa is going to die. I don’t know when he gonna die. Mommy just tell you now, so when he die—you not surprised. But you don’t have to tell him. That’s not nice! And he know already. Number two. Did you get that shampoo I sent you? I send you shampoo that is good for the fine hair! You just use a little bit, and don’t use too much! You just use a little bit, and lather and rinse—but don’t repeat! That’s wasting. You don’t have to repeat!!!! To review: Number one. Grandpa is gonna die. Number two
(beep)
.” The machine always cut her off before she could finish.

I did not see him very much over those last few months. Mostly, the situation terrified me. I had not really been close to my grandparents since I was a child, but my fondness for them was beyond words. It’s just that during my troublesome teenage years, a huge chasm developed between me and my family, and later, through laziness and self-obsession, I never bothered to build a bridge back to them.

The last time I saw my grandfather was at my grandparents’ tiny apartment in Japantown, where they had used a walk-in closet as a prayer room, a telephone booth to God, a little sanctuary that my brother and I would hide in when we were small.

He was lying on the floor on a heating pad. He was so thin and frail. He looked up at me and his eyes were glassy and dark blue. He grabbed my hand and held it hard. I waited for his grand farewell, some lasting words of advice before he left this world, a piece of him I could keep in my heart forever.

“What happened to your TV show?!”

He fell back and shut his eyes, and slowly released my hand. I never spoke to him again.

We went home and my mother apologized for the fact that the funeral director was coming over. “I know that it is kind of early, he not dead yet, and I hope he can live longer but it is better to prepare— then we don’t have to worry later.” She talked of burying him kind of like packing a picnic basket. “So we can save time and beat the traffic.”

I hid out in my teenage bedroom and read the lipstick graffiti on the mirror in front of the closet. “I belong to Prince.” “I love Duran Duran.” “Adam and the Ants rule the world.”

The funeral director was in the living room with my mother and suddenly he started screaming. “It’s her! It’s her! So that means you must be MORAN!!!!!” He was quoting my stand-up act where my mother screams my Korean name, and my mother started doing it, too.

My mother called me to come downstairs (“MORANNN!!!!”) and the funeral director, a big Chinese queen, starts up again. He’d recognized my photo on the mantel and had switched gears from staid undertaker to screaming teenage girl in seconds flat.

After a few minutes of gushing and shy shuffling of feet and stammering by me, they went back to discussing the burial plots and funeral arrangements. “I am sure this is gonna wind up in your act!” he said brightly as he was leaving. The entire episode was shockingly morbid and embarrassing, but it really made my mom’s day.

My mother is not just the gateway of life to me, she is the one for death. As my grandfather lay dying, she tenderly cared for him, with quiet efficiency and grace. The rest of the family fell apart under their selfish grief, but she hung on, boiling the rice, crushing the pills, driving to and from the hospital, laying cool hands on old, soft skin.

I remember how she had beamed when he died, her phone call joyous and tired and glad that he was gone and suffered no more. She seemed almost like a midwife with her weary but ecstatic voice. I saw that in caretaking, she had found a certain calling and purpose. It was the job that no one else wanted but that she took gladly, just like the white rubbery fish eyeballs that lay on the massacred carcass of grilled fish, that the rest of the family had left behind.

At the funeral, before they closed the casket on my dead grandfather, she kissed him and kissed him. He was cold and wooden and so dead, but it was still him. She wasn’t scared or sad or anything; she was just love. I tried to copy her, but as close as I could get was touching his hand, which felt like plastic. He was hard and hollow and I had to shudder, even though I loved my grandfather so very much. I cried awful choking sobs from so deep inside that it hurt coming out. Still, I was horrified by him, by his deadness, by his open-casket state, his horror-show-quality makeup, his eyes and mouth sealed forever, how it didn’t look like him but was unmistakably him. I saw my mom as more brave then, and closer to him than anyone had ever been. She had helped him die. She gave death to him as she gave birth to me. She was wondrous to me then. She is always wondrous to me.

I remember my two aunts at the cemetery, walking up to bury my grandfather, tiny and thin, and my mother marveling at it. “Your auntie say she stay slender by eating very slowly then everybody eat and so she don’t like to sit by herself so she just finish just like that and how can be like that? I wish Mommy can be like that.” But that day, they were so frail they had to hold each other up just to walk up the path.

There was a really old lady from our funeral party walking around the gravestones by herself. She had this mad dowager’s hump on her back and she was bent almost completely over. I thought,
This is her
hood. And she’s about to pour a forty on the ground for all her dead
homies.
She cleaned up the trash that blew across the graves.

I thought of dreams that I’d have where I’d be running through the cemetery. I couldn’t get out and I would run and run and the stones would be endless and relentless underneath behind in front of above me. I would be drowning in some kind of marble death. I didn’t have that feeling, even though I was just as surrounded by graves, as I watched my little bird aunts trudge the path.

A friend of my father’s drove up, and my escort Sledge told him he’d left his lights on. He smiled, even though Sledge is white and Koreans rarely smile at white people unless they are buying something, and turned his lights off. My father’s friend went up to my aunts. He told me he’s known them their whole lives. My one aunt says about the other one, “She was once the baby. Now she is an old lady.” He says, “She’s always a baby to me.” And I thought, sometimes flirting can be heartbreakingly beautiful.

That trip, out of respect for my grandfather, I tried to quit drinking.

17

ROOM SERVICE AND RALPH

This was not the best idea. During the service, my hands shook and my mouth was dry. I was mourning and withdrawing at the same time. A black dress and a nice case of the DTs.

I held out until that night, when I went to meet friends at a café. One of them remarked that I looked like I needed a drink. That was all it took. I had only a glass of white wine to keep off the sickness, but I was drunk the next night and then the next and I did not try to quit again for a very long time.

Some mornings would be so bad that I would swear off alcohol, really meaning it for the few hours that I suffered. Usually, it would be when I had to travel, and the blinding headache and sour taste made it hard to negotiate different time zones and altitudes, not to mention early flights and coach-class service.

One day, the sickness was so bad, I thought I really meant it. It was the tail end of a big trip playing many dates across the country. The last night was to be in Monroe, Louisiana, at a university not far from New Orleans.

I arrived in such a black mood, my bloodstream slow from all the residual drugs and alcohol. Checking into the hotel, my energy was renewed with all my thoughts of sobriety and health. I attacked the salty hotel exercise room with zeal and enthusiasm. With every step on the StairMaster, I felt better, and drew closer and closer to a clean and sparkly future.

The auditorium was filled to capacity with 800 teenagers. The first act, a cowboy comedian, had them on their feet by the end in an appreciative standing ovation. This seemed like a good sign. It was not.

When I walked out onto the massive stage there was incredible silence. I don’t think they knew who I was. Maybe they thought I was a teacher. My first few jokes got a polite response. Then, I lost them. That sounds a bit mild actually. “Lost them” implies that I had once
had them
. I didn’t, and I couldn’t
get them
. It got very, very bad.

Jokes that usually got hearty laughs and applause just came out of my mouth and stood almost visible in the thick air. Suddenly, a mocking laugh came from the depths of the auditorium, and the whole crowd responded to that! They were laughing at the guy laughing at me.

Then the boos started. Howling wails came up from the crowd, and every time I would try to speak another mocking laugh would interrupt me. Pretty soon, it was a symphony of jeers and boos and hyena laughs and a mass exodus of teenagers from the auditorium. In the darkness, I could see only the outlines of their legs. From the distance, it reminded me of when ants had overtaken my sink one hot summer, and the teeming, glossy black throb of legs, of so many ants and just one of me. It made me feel faint in the same way.

I could not leave the stage. I could not accept my defeat gracefully and walk off. This just made things much, much worse.

I was on for so long trying to reason with the mad crowd, they had organized a sing-along of
“Na na na na, na na na na, h-e-he-hey—
good-bye!”
in the round.

I endured this for more than half an hour, several minutes over my scheduled time. I left to a rousing standing ovation, not because they had enjoyed me, but because they were weary of hating me and were so relieved that I was gone. The headliner went on and killed.

Backstage, everyone that had been so friendly earlier, students that had brought me to their school and now held my $8,000 check, would not speak to me or even look me in the eye.

Two female students stood by my limousine and cried hysterically, saying they were fans of mine and were so traumatized by the experience that they felt they needed to apologize to me on behalf of the state of Louisiana.

I drove back to the hotel, with the cowboy comic going on and on about how he would never stand for such humiliation. I, oddly enough, did not seem to find it humiliating at that moment. It was surreal. It was devastating, but I wasn’t embarrassed. They never even gave me a chance. There was nothing I could do, except piss them off by doing all of my time and not leaving until it was over.

The night was such a crushing blow to my ego, even though I wouldn’t admit it to myself then. I hadn’t been booed off the stage for more than a decade. It didn’t seem possible to me. I was a successful comic, I’d already paid my dues—didn’t they know who I was? I felt I had failed everywhere and that standup was the last thing I had to turn to—and now it seemed like that was gone, too, just like my TV show, just like my screenplay, just like my grandfather. There was no way I was going to let myself feel that despair. I knew it was coming and I had to do something. I was bracing myself for the pain. I wasn’t feeling it yet, it was like I was experiencing a brief amnesty. I was delaying my misery, until I had some liquid relief. Obviously, this was a bad night to decide to quit drinking.

Quickly, I called room service and had them send up four shots of tequila. Normally, I would have had the booze already cooling in my room. There would have been multiple shots laid out neatly on the table, the tops of the glasses covered with magazine subscription cards, awaiting my arrival. But, I had decided to quit drinking earlier that day, and since the Holiday Inn had no mini-bar, and I was too ashamed to drink in the bar by myself, I was lucky that room service was there and ready to take care of me.

I belted down the shots quickly and felt festive, and much better about that evening’s performance. Perhaps it was just a fluke. It would make a great story to tell back home. There was joy in my voice as I called room service again and ordered more tequila. The waiter regretfully informed me that the bar was closed and apologized before hanging up.

I panicked and searched my luggage for any loose Valium, an errant Xanax or Percodan that might have fallen out somewhere. As I emptied my purse, there was a knock at the door. It was the room service waiter, off duty, still in his bow tie but now wearing a leather bomber jacket and an “I’m off work” grin. He had a bottle of Jose Cuervo 1800 in one hand and Styrofoam cups in the other. What could I do but invite him in?

He was cute in a sad Southern way, and he told me all about his gay/lesbian theater group while we drank the rest of the bottle. We discussed Edith Wharton and how terrible Monroe was to live in, especially for queer readers. I told him how miserable the show had been, and he was not surprised at all. Drunk, I called up Sledge in California and had him join the party, with me on one line and the waiter on the extension. I don’t remember anything from that point on, so I must have passed out on the bed with the phone next to me.

I woke up late the next day. I had wet the bed, but I was too hungover to care. I just rolled to the dry side and fell asleep again. I awoke much later with only half an hour until my flight back home.

I cried repentant, shameful tears as I shoved my piss-stained clothes into my backpack. The clothes smelled oddly familiar, much like my childhood, and I felt like I was dying all the way to the airport.

I realized that I could not stop drinking. I realized that I really was going to die.