Super Sad True Love Story (7 page)

JUNE 7

CHUNG.WON.PARK
TO
EUNI-TARD ABROAD:

Eunhee,

How are you today. I hope you do not worry yourself. It is nice you write to Sally. Little sister always look up to big sister. Me and Daddy went to church and we talk together to Reverend Cho. I make sorry to Daddy that I all the time am unconsiderate of how hard he work and that he need everything just perfect, specially soon-dubu which is his favorite!
Daddy promise that if he not feel well FIRST we pray together to GOD for guide us THEN he hit. Then Reverend Cho read to us Scripture which say woman is second to man. He say man is head and woman is leg or arm. Also we pray together and specially I unclude you and Sally because you and sister are all Daddy and me have. Otherwise we never leave Korea which is now richer country than America and also not have so much political problem, but how we were to know that when we leave? Now even in Fort Lee we see tank on Center Avenue. Very scary for me, like in Korea in the 1980 long time ago when there was Kwangju trouble and many people die. I hope nothing happen in Manhattan to Sally.

So because we leave for you everything behind, you now have big responsibility to Daddy and Mommy and Sister.

I just learn how to make happy sign. Do you like it? Haha. Make me pride of you and expect of you like before.

I love you always.

Mommy

EUNI-TARD ABROAD
TO
CHUNG.WON.PARK:

Mom, why don’t you and Sally come here to Rome? She can take summer classes next year. We’ll get a bigger apartment and I’ll show you around. You deserve a break from Daddy. There’s a Christian (not Catholic) church here that has services in Korean and we’ll eat delicious food and just have a good time. Maybe it’ll help make me more focused because I know you’re safe and then I’ll be able to score better on my LSAT.

Love,

Eunice

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Sally, do you want TotalSurrender panties? They’re those sheer pop-offs that Polish porn star wears on AssDoctor.

SALLYSTAR:
The one with the fake hips?

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
I think so. I can’t get AssDoctor on my äppärät for some reason. Nothing works in Italy.

SALLYSTAR:
They’re sheer so you can wear them with Onionskins.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Why not just wear them with regular jeans. That way you can “protect the mystery” as Mom says.

SALLYSTAR:
Hahaha. Kwan says some of the FOB Korean girls in LA don’t even use condoms because they want their dates to think they’re virgins. And they’re like 28! Christmas Cake already.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
SICK. But I don’t really get it. You sound like you’re better. Everything okay?

SALLYSTAR:
Dad’s feeling better, I guess. He came in to sing with me in the shower.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
IN THE SHOWER?

SALLYSTAR:
No, the curtain was there. Duh.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
But it’s a plastic curtain.

SALLYSTAR:
Can you get the TotalSurrenders cheaper in Italy? You know my size. Actually I’m one size fatter. Gross.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Stop eating so much! And don’t let Daddy in the shower.

SALLYSTAR:
He’s not IN the shower. It’s nice to sing with him. We did “Sister Christian” and the theme song from “Oral Surgeon Lee Dang Hee.” Remember how angry Daddy used to get at that show? What’s that noraebang we’d go to?

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Something-something on Olympic. You should come to Rome for the summer.

SALLYSTAR:
Can’t. Classes. And we’re going to DC next week and there’s going to be more protests all thru the summer.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Mommy says she saw a tank in Ft. Lee. Seriously, Sally. Don’t get Political. Come to Rome! There’s this huge outlet mall just twenty minutes away and they have the Saaami fall collection and JuicyPussy’s summer line and everything at least 80 percent off.

SALLYSTAR:
I thought the dollar wasn’t worth anything.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
You still save. Hello, 80 percent off. Do the math, nerd!

SALLYSTAR:
I can’t come. I got to look out for Mommy.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Bring her with you!

SALLYSTAR:
Eunice, how do you think you can just pull things together and make everything change and everyone happy? It doesn’t work like that.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
What should I do? Pray to Jesu that he “changes Daddy’s heart”?

SALLYSTAR:
You know I don’t like Reverend Cho but the one lesson I learned in church is humility. This is how it is. This is who my parents are. And I should just accept my limitations and do the best I can with what God gave me. If you don’t think that you’ll just make yourself miserable.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
In other words, just give up on everything and let Jesu light the way. BTW, I already AM miserable.

SALLYSTAR:
I haven’t given up on anything. I’m going to be a cardiologist and I’m going to make enough money so that Daddy can retire and not have to worry about smelly white feet anymore. And then we’ll all feel a little better as a family maybe.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Yeah, I’m sure that’ll solve everything.

SALLYSTAR:
Thanks for approving my dreams. You’re so much like Dad and you don’t even know it. Stay in Rome. I don’t need two of you here.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
I didn’t mean it.

SALLYSTAR:
Whatever.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
I’m very proud of you.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
I’m the fuck up, okay?

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Are you still there? I’ll get you those TotalSurrender panties, but you’re on your own with the nippleless bra.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
Sally! You know when you just cut me off like that you really make me sad.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
You know I would do anything to make you and Mommy happy. Maybe I really WILL go to law school and I’ll work in High End Retail and we can buy Mommy her own apartment in Manhattan so that she can be safe.

EUNI-TARD ABROAD:
I’m coming home, Sally. Hello? As soon as I find a cheap ticket, I’m coming home.

THE FALLACY OF MERELY EXISTING

FROM THE DIARIES OF LENNY ABRAMOV

JUNE 6

Dear Diary,

Here’s a message from Joshie that popped up on my äppärät right after my ordeal at JFK:

DEAR RHESUS MONKEY, U BACK YET? LOTS OF POSITIVE CHANGES
AND CUTBACKS
HERE; FEEL FREE TO REMAIN ROME AS YOU FEEL NEED; FUTURE SALARY & EMPLOYMENT = LET’S DISCUSS.

What the hell was this? Was Joshie Goldmann, employer and ersatz papa, about to fire me? Had he sent me to Europe just to get me out of the way?

I still have an old Mead Five Star notebook from when I was a child, which I’ve been dying to put to good use. So I ripped out an actual sheet of paper from it, put it on my coffee table, and started writing this out by hand.

STRATEGY FOR SHORT-TERM SURVIVAL AND THEN IMMORTALITY FOLLOWING RETURN TO NEW YORK AFTER EUROPEAN FIASCO

BY
L
ENNY
A
BRAMOV
, B.A., M.B.A.

1) Work Hard for Joshie—Show you matter at the workplace; show you’re not just a teacher’s pet, but a creative thinker and Content Provider; make excuses for poor performance in Europe; get raise; lower spending; save money for initial dechronification treatments; double own lifespan in twenty years and then just keep going at it exponentially until you gain the momentum to achieve Indefinite Life Extension.

2) Make Joshie Protect You—Evoke father-like bond in response to political situation. Talk about what happened on the plane; evoke Jewish feelings of terror and injustice.

3) Love Eunice—Even if she’s far away, try to think of her as a potential partner; meditate on her freckles and make yourself feel loved by her to lower stress levels and feel less alone. Let the potential of her sweetness enhance your happiness!!! Then beg her to come to New York and let her become, in short order, reluctant lover, cautious companion, pretty young wife.

4) Care for Your Friends—Meet up with them right after you see Joshie and try to re-create a sense of community with BFFs Noah and Vishnu.

5) Be Nice to Parents (Within Limits)—They may be mean to you but they represent your past and who you are. 5a) Seek Similarities with Parents—they grew up in a dictatorship and one day you might be living in one too!!!

6) Celebrate What You Have—You’re not as bad off as some people. Think of that poor fat man on the plane (where is he now? what are they doing to him?) and feel happy by comparison.

I folded the paper up and put it into my wallet for easy reference. “Now,” I said to myself, “go make it happen!”

First, I Celebrated What I Have (Point No. 6). I began with the 740 square feet that form my share of Manhattan Island. I live in the last middle-class stronghold in the city, high atop a red-brick ziggurat that a Jewish garment workers’ union had erected on the banks of the East River back in the days when Jews sewed clothes for a living. Say what you will, these ugly co-ops are full of authentic old people who have real stories to tell (although these stories are often meandering and hard to follow; e.g., who on earth was this guy “Dillinger”?).

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books
smell
. And yet, in preparation for the eventual arrival of Eunice Park, I decided to be safe and sprayed some Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast in the vicinity of my tomes, fanning the atomized juices with my hands in the direction of their spines. Then I celebrated my other possessions, the modular-design furniture and sleek electronica and the mid-1950s Corbusier-inspired dresser stuffed with mementos of past relationships, some pretty racy and scented with nether regions, others doused in the kind of sadness that I should really learn to let go. I celebrated the difficult-to-assemble balcony table (one leg still too short) and had a pretty awful non-Roman coffee
al fresco
, looking out on the busy downtown skyline some twenty blocks away from me, military and civilian choppers streaming past the overblown spire of the “Freedom” Tower and all that other glittering downtown hoo-hah. I celebrated the low-rise housing projects crowding my immediate view, the so-called Vladeck Houses, which stand in red-brick solidarity with my own co-ops, not exactly proud of themselves, but feeling resigned and necessary, their thousands of residents primed for summer warmth, and, if I may speculate, summer love. Even from a distance of a hundred feet, I can sometimes hear the pained love-cries their residents make behind their tattered Puerto Rican flags, and sometimes their violent screams.

With love in mind, I decided to celebrate the season. For me the transition from May to June is marked by the radical switch from knee to ankle socks. I slapped on white linen pants, a speckled Penguin shirt, and comfy Malaysian sneakers, so that I easily resembled many of the nonagenarians in my building. My co-ops are part of a NORC—a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community—a kind of instant Florida for those too frail or poor to relocate to Boca in time for their deaths. Down by the elevator, surrounded by withered NORCers in motorized wheelchairs and their Jamaican caregivers, I counted the daily carnage of the Death Board by the elevators. Five residents of the NORC had passed in the last two days alone. The woman who had lived above me, eightysomething Naomi Margolis in E-707, was gone, and her son David Margolis was inviting her eclectic neighbors—the young Media and Credit professionals, the old widowed socialist seamstresses, and the ever-multiplying Orthodox Jews—to “celebrate her memory” at his house in Teaneck, New Jersey. I admired Mrs. Margolis for living as long as she did, but once you give in to the idea that a memory is somehow a substitute for a human being, you may as well give up on Indefinite Life Extension. I guess you can say that, while admiring Mrs. Margolis, I also
hated
Mrs. Margolis. Hated her for giving up on life, for letting the waves come and recede, her withered body in tow. Maybe I hated all the old people in my building, and wished them to disappear already so that I could focus on my own struggle with mortality.

In my trendy old-man’s getup, I ambled with easy grace down Grand Street toward the East River Park, stepping on each curb with the profound “oy” that is the call-and-response of my neighborhood. I sat on my favorite bench, next to the stocky, splay-footed realism of the Williamsburg Bridge’s anchorage, noticing how part of the structure looked like a bunch of stacked milk crates. I celebrated the teenaged mothers from the Vladeck Houses tending to their children’s boo-boos (“A bee touched me, Mommy!”). I relished hearing language actually being
spoken
by children. Overblown verbs, explosive nouns, beautifully bungled prepositions. Language, not data. How long would it be before these kids retreated into the dense clickety-clack äppärät world of their absorbed mothers and missing fathers?

Then I caught sight of a healthy-looking old Chinese woman ripe for celebration and, at the speed of half a furlong an hour, tailed her down Grand Street and then East Broadway, watching her feel up exotic tubers and slap around some silvery fish. She was shopping with suburban abandon, buying everything that came within her grasp and then, after each purchase, running over to stand next to one of the wooden telegraph poles that now lined the streets.

My fashion friend Sandi in Rome had told me about the Credit Poles, yapping on about their cool retro design, the way the wood was intentionally gnarled in places and how the utility wire was replaced by strings of colored lights. The old-fashioned appearance of the Poles was obviously meant to evoke a sturdier time in our nation’s history, except for the little LED counters at eye level that registered your Credit ranking as you walked by. Atop the Poles, American Restoration Authority signs billowed in several languages. In the Chinatown parts of East Broadway, the signs read in English and Chinese—“America Celebrates Its Spenders!”—with a cartoon of a miserly ant happily running toward a mountain of wrapped Christmas presents. In the Latino sections on Madison Street, they read in English and Spanish—“Save It for a Rainy Day,
Huevón
”—with a frowning grasshopper in a zoot suit showing us his empty pockets. Alternate signs read in all three languages:

The Boat Is Full
Avoid Deportation
Latinos Save
Chinese Spend
ALWAYS Keep Your Credit Ranking Within Limits

A
MERICAN
R
ESTORATION
A
UTHORITY
“T
OGETHER
W
E
’
LL
S
URPRISE THE
W
ORLD
!”

I felt the perfunctory liberal chill at seeing entire races of human beings so summarily reduced and stereotyped, but was also voyeuristically interested in seeing people’s Credit rankings. The old Chinese woman had a decent 1400, but others, the young Latina mothers, even a profligate teenaged Hasid puffing down the street, were showing blinking red scores below 900, and I worried for them. I walked past one of the Poles, letting it zap the data off my äppärät, and saw my own score, an impressive 1520. But there was a blinking red asterisk next to the score.

Was the otter still flagging me?

I sent a GlobalTeens message to Nettie Fine, but got a chilling “
RECIPIENT DELETED
” in response. What could that mean? No one
ever
gets deleted from GlobalTeens. I tried to GlobalTrace her but got an even more frightening “
RECIPIENT UNTRACEABLE/INACTIVE
.” What kind of person couldn’t be found on this earth?

Back in Rome, I used to meet Sandi for lunch at da Tonino and we’d talk about what we missed the most about Manhattan. For me it was fried pork-and-scallion dumplings on Eldridge Street, for him bossy older black women at the gas company or the unemployment office who called him “honey” and “sugar” and sometimes “baby.” He said it wasn’t a gay thing, but, rather, that these black women made him feel calm and at ease, as if he had momentarily won the love and mothering of a complete stranger.

I guess that’s what I wanted right now, with Nettie Fine “
INACTIVE
,” with Eunice six time zones away, with the Credit Poles reducing everyone to a simple three-digit numeral, with an innocent fat man dragged off a plane, with Joshie telling me “future salary & employment = let’s discuss”: a little love and mothering.

I stalked up and down the eastern part of Grand Street, trying to get my bearings, trying to re-establish my hold on the place. But it wasn’t just the Credit Poles. The neighborhood had changed since I left for Rome a year ago. All the meager businesses I remember were still there, decayed linoleum places with names like the A-OK Pizza Shack, frequented by poor patrons who pawed at the keyboard of an old computer terminal while smearing their faces with pizza oils, a moldy 1988 ten-volume edition of
The New Book of Popular Science
stacked in the corner, awaiting customers who could read. But there was an added aimlessness to the population, the unemployed men staggering down the chicken-bone-littered street as if drunk off a pint of grain alcohol and not just a bevy of Negra Modelos, their face blunted beneath the kind of depressive affect that I usually associate with my father. An angelic seven-year-old girl in braids was shouting into her äppärät: “Nex’ time I see her ass I’m gonna punch that nigga in the stomach!” An old Jewish woman from my co-ops had fallen on the sun-baked asphalt, and her friends had made a protective scrim around her as she spun around like a turtle. By the razor-wired fence delineating a failed luxury-condo development, a drunk in a frilly guayabera shirt pulled down his pants and began to evacuate. I’ve seen this particular gent publicly crapping before, but the pained expression on his face, the way he rubbed his naked haunches while he shat, as if the June heat wasn’t enough to keep them warm, the staggering grunts he spat at the direction of our city’s cloud-streaked harbor skies, made me feel as if my native street was slipping away from me, falling into the East River, falling into a new time wrinkle where we would all drop our pants and dump furiously on the motherland.

An armored personnel carrier bearing the insignia of the New York Army National Guard was parked astride a man-sized pothole at the busy intersection of Essex and Delancey, a roof-mounted .50-caliber Browning machine gun rotating 180 degrees, back and forth, like a retarded metronome along the busy but peaceable Lower East Side streetscape. Traffic was frozen all across Delancey Street. Silent traffic, for no one dared to use a horn against the military vehicle. The street corner emptied around me until I stood alone, staring down the barrel of a gun like an idiot. I lifted up my hands in panic and directed my feet to scram.