This Is a Bust (3 page)

I'
d say, “I'm fine, Lonnie,” and ask how her classes at Borough of Manhattan Community College in midtown were going. Lonnie was a business-communications concentration because she wasn't sure what she wanted to do. She was thinking about journalism. She once showed me her review of an Alexander Fu Sheng movie for the college newspaper. They'd spelled her last name wrong, but she had that clipping laminated. Of course, non-Chinese had no idea who Alexander was. We saw him as the new Bruce Lee, only with a sense of humor.

If
Dori ended up making my coffee, I'd take three hot-dog pastries. Dori is in her 40s, unmarried, and not real eligible. She looks like the Pillsbury doughboy with a wig and talks at you, not to you. She'd slap my change on the counter so I'd have to pick up each penny.

I t
ake that extra bun because Dori always made me think of what I had to look forward to in a few years. She made me not care what I looked like or what people thought of me.

One
day, some other woman with about the same physical characteristics as Dori was behind the counter. But it was Dori. She wasn't wearing any makeup and looked like she hadn't showered. The collars of her uniform were wrinkled. I had to ask for my change that day. Lonnie told me later that Dori's mother back in Hong Kong had died. Dori had been devastated about not making her mother a grandmother. But that didn't stop her from coming into work. They got no sick days at Martha's Bakery. A day out was a day with no pay and no free mistake pastries.

—

After getting two hot-dog pastries from Lonnie, I went back on the footpost. I checked meters and wrote out some parkers.

It
was Monday, so I stopped by the toy shop on Mott to see if Moy wanted to have lunch. I've known Moy since second grade, when his family came over. He had wanted me to teach him English, but I'd referred him instead to “Hawaii Five-O.” His parents had opened a laundry at first, but they went with the toy shop when hula hoops got really big.

His parents were good at picking up on trends. Their store was the last place in New York you could get the sold-out G.I. Joe dolls with the special Kung-Fu Grip, marked up in price, of course.

It
was just the two of them now, Moy and his dad. His mother had died of cancer when we were in high school. The lumpectomy hadn't worked. She was nice.

Moy
worked at the store almost 12 hours every day. His father never trusted anyone else to get behind the counter except me.

Afte
r Nam but before I got my head on right, Moy's dad was nice enough to give me a job unpacking toys from boxes from Hong Kong. I couldn't believe how much money kids had to spend. They were either skimming from their family businesses or selling fireworks to the tourists.

The
work was pretty mindless, but it kept you busy. Two years went by like that, and, like Moy, I didn't meet any girls there.

Like
a lot of guys, I hadn't had sex until I got to Nam. Some of the girls didn't know what to make of me, but they took my money and let me go at it. It was five minutes of humping and 10 minutes of shame. I haven't had sex since I came back to the world in 1972. I haven't killed anyone since 1972, either. I kind of associate the two.

Moy
had never had a girl ever, and sorting out spaceship models and monster replicas doesn't sharpen social skills. He was average looking and at 26 he was only getting older. Like me.

The
big problem with Moy was the hearing aid in his right ear. He was born with some kind of defect, but until he saw a doctor about it, he'd gotten hit on the head by various balls in gym class. Even now when you talked to him, Moy would cock his head and point his good left ear at you.

I popped my head into the toy store.

“Moy, you up for lunch?”

Moy leaned back against a glass case that showed off
astronaut figures. He had freckles like Howdy Doody and bushy eyebrows shaded his watery eyes. Moy reached up with one hand and played with the wire that ran from his ear to the shirt pocket of his dark blue t-shirt.

“I
'm hungry,” he said, “but I can't leave. Dad's at the post office and we're getting a shipment in soon.”

“What's coming in?” I asked.

“Models of robots and Godzilla.”

I left, got some noodles from a sidewalk cart, and walked
them back to the toy store. We were almost done eating when Moy's dad came in. He was wearing a worn felt beret and holding an orange plastic bag and a cane with side legs and a tiny seat that a folded out into a tiny stool. He looked like Moy, but with about 25% less fat, and had a voice harsh enough to tear through a sheet of Reynolds Wrap.

“Yo
u idiot, I said I would bring lunch! Why did you waste your money on that?” Moy's dad growled.

“I'
ll eat what you brought. This is just noodles,” said Moy.

“How are you, Uncle?” I said to Moy's dad. “You've made
enough money here. Time to move to California.” He frowned as he took plastic soup containers out of the orange bag.

“Wh
at for? Everything I ever knew about America is right here. I still have my friends here,” he said. Little bits of saliva sprayed on the glass counter as he talked. “I like it here. Don't have to change anything.”

“Yo
u have to find a wife for your son,” I said. He laughed while Moy put his head down. I jabbed Moy's arm. It felt 
a little flabby.

“On
ly thing I have to do is stay away from blacks,” Moy's dad said. “When you see a black face around here, you better watch your wallet. They can slip it out of your pocket and you won't even feel it. The only places they know how to behave are on the basketball court or in jail.” Then he laughed like he was saying, “It's funny but it's true!”

I stayed quiet. What can you say to a guy who was old
and ugly, and had such a heavy accent when he spoke English it would make the white guy in “Kung Fu” cringe. He just wanted to be surrounded by Chinese faces for the rest of his life, which wouldn't last much longer. Let him die like that.

—

After the 10-minute lunch, I left and walked to Columbus Park. A dark-skinned black man with a medium build was leaning against the iron fence. He was wearing a brown leather jacket with a ripped vest pocket and a Yankees hat with the brim curled down as far as blinders. He was watching men playing Chinese chess and frowning.

“Chow,” he said, and clapped my back. We did a one-arm
embrace.

“Vandyne,” I said.

“I got a message for you from that Willie Gee. He said he
wants police protection from the protesters. And he said he wanted to talk to a Chinese cop, because I wouldn't

understand the cultural subtleties of running an honorable business.”
Vandyne was smiling like he could prove someone wrong.

“Yeah, I'll stop by later today,” I said. My footpost was Sector
Alpha, which took me past Jade Palace on Bowery, south of Canal. It was the biggest dim-sum place in Chinatown, and Willie Gee was the owner.

“What are we supposed to do about the protestors?” I
said. “They've got a permit. They're staying behind police barricades. They're not even that loud. And they only come out in force on the weekends for the dim-sum crowds.”

A
bunch of former Jade Palace workers and their families
were picketing the restaurant for paying below minimum wage and taking waiters' tips.
What was pretty dumb on the restaurant's part was that they had rounded up stool-pigeon dishwashers and bus boys to stage the management's own counter-picket, which they also had a permit for. That
made the protest seem twice as large to tourists coming in for dim sum, because you had two groups holding signs in Chinese and yelling at each other
in Chinese.

“You know what the protesters are doing now?” asked
Vandyne. “They started a hunger strike. The
Daily News
picked up on it and the Jade asshole wants it stopped. He said nobody wants to eat in a restaurant while people are starving outside.”

“What does he want? Someone to shove food down their
throats? It's not illegal to not eat. If they're spray-painting the walls, then we can do something. You know, if it was white people demonstrating, they would've chained themselves to the doors, or something dramatic like that.”

“Yeah,
and if it was black people out there, they'd cover

the
whole block, shut that place down. They'd have to call the dogs out.”

“I think I'm going to head over there now,” I said, checking
my watch. “You looking to get a game in?”

“I'm taking on the midget next,” he said, pointing to a four-
foot-tall man sitting on an upturned bucket that used to hold bean curd. The small man pointed back, making a gun with his thumb and forefinger and pulling the trigger.

The midget had thick, half-opened eyelids, making him look eternally sarcastic, which he was. He kept his face unshaven, as if he were conscious of looking too much like a kid. His smooth, combed hair was shiny like wet licorice.

Vandyne had picked up Chinese chess from a book and
from playing against the midget, who had tipped off Vandyne about an upstart heroin ring a year before, when he was starting investigative assignments. Helped him a lot.

The midget was a small guy, but no one had bigger eyes,
ears, or brains. A game against him was all in good fun, because everyone knew that no one had ever beaten the midget at anything.

I swung out from the park and walked up Bayard. Something somewhere in Chinatown hummed. It could
have been sewing machines in a sweat shop. It could have been old Chinese in freezing apartments trying to clear their throats.

—

The gaudy gold characters on the awning of Jade Palace hit you when you were about two blocks away. If you were driving to Manhattan from Brooklyn on the bridge, you'd see it flaring in the distance like a comet streaking over rooftops cluttered with TV antennas and crooked brick chimneys. I never understood why they wanted to use gold letters. Why not make it the “Gold Palace”? Or if they didn't want to rename the place, they should've made the sign as green as Oz.

The customers didn't care what the place was called. They
knew the clams in black bean sauce were the cheapest around. They knew the place was big enough so that the wait for a table — even for four people who'd driven in from Long Island or New Jersey — would never be longer than 10 or 15 minutes. And that was all they cared to know about the place.

Of course, I'm a little biased about it, because my father had
been a Chinatown waiter. It was fifty cents an hour and he was only allowed to keep half his tips.

He came home enough times with nothing in his pock
ets
but fingers blackened with ink from the racing forms. Luckily, my mother had a job sorting punch cards for Chemical Bank, and we'd survived on her pay alone. But good Chinese people don't want to merely survive — 
they want each successive generation to have more.

—

In front of Jade Palace, two hunger strikers, a man in his late 30s and what looked like a college girl, were sitting

on flattened cardboard boxes. They had bilingual signs 
in their laps. One said, “Jade Palace Steals Our Tips,” in English and, “Jade Palace Drinks Our Blood,” in Chinese. The other, held by the girl, said, “Your Dim Sum Dims Our Hopes,” in English and, “Jade Palace Worse Than Communists,” in Chinese.

I walked by them and found three frosted glass doors at the
entrance of the restaurant. I picked one and swung it open.

Two escalators went up to Jade Palace dining room. A discreet elevator to the side went straight into the offices. A big, bored-looking man leaned against the closed elevator door, his eyes pointed like ICBMs at the hunger strikers outside. His bangs gave him a boyish look, but it would take two strong thumbs to make that face smile. He had on a suit tailored to accommodate his muscles without making him look too much like a monument.

“I'm here to see Mr. Gee,” I told him.

The big man tucked in his chin and grunted into a bulge in
his shirt pocket. He waited a few seconds before opening the elevator with a key and stepping aside. I slipped in and rode up. The doors opened directly in front of a giant rosewood desk.

“You see that sign out there?” exploded Willie Gee even
before the doors were completely open. He was in his late 50s, had hair that swept in a helmet around his head, and wore prescription shades. He looked like an evil Roy Orbison. “They're calling us communists! They're calling us murderers! My father gave all people a chance to work here! I still offer a job to anyone who wants one! Now they're calling me this? You should take them to jail now! If they want to starve, have them die in jail, not out here! They don't deserve to die here!”

Willie's
office was adorned with photographs. Willie 
with
Mayors Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, and Abe Beame. Hong Kong singers and movie stars with Willie. A signed Cosmos jersey from Pelé. Willie and Barbara Streisand.

A photograph of the grand reopening of Jade Palace (after the installation of some wall ornaments and fire sprinklers) featuring Willie in the middle of a chorus line of smiling, happy people. The jerk in the cop hat was me.