Chapter 18 The Chins #3
In his sophomore year, Jason went to a poetry reading in the Lower East Side.
Wishing to delay his return to Brooklyn, he lingered for the after-party in the garden, nursing a half-filled plastic cup of red wine and listening to the poets expound on Neo-Expressionism.
Socializing with writers was more difficult than he’d expected.
They barely glanced at him, and he wondered if this was because they assumed he had nothing witty to say.
He was adrift in his thoughts when someone poked his knee.
“Smoke?”
He turned. The woman leaning against the fence was young and petite, but with impressively muscled biceps and black hair cropped boyishly short.
She wore jean shorts and a tank top that revealed her midriff, including a belly ring with a dangling pendant the shape of the Tree of Life.
And she was Chinese, a “jook seing” like him, one hand on her thigh, the other holding out a cigarette.
“Oh. No thank you.”
“I’m Gina.” She took a puff. “You’re new. So where are you from?” She raised a jaunty eyebrow.
Understanding the joke, he nodded. “The Mayflower. You?”
She smirked. “Are you a poet?”
“I don’t know,” he laughed. She blew out her smoke, waited for him to change his mind. “I write, I guess.”
“What did you think of the reading?”
“They were great,” he said, eager now. No one else had asked his opinion. “Like that second guy? Chester. He was so good. Sounds like freaking T. S. Eliot.”
“Is T. S. Eliot your favorite poet?”
“I mean, I don’t know if I have a favorite…
Sylvia Plath is awesome. Also Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson…
” She was nodding as he listed them, her eyes on a water tower across the street.
She kept nodding like he was supposed to continue.
“And Rilke… and Ashbery… and William Carlos Williams…”
“What about Li Po?”
“Who?”
She rolled her eyes. “Tell me you know Tu Fu?”
“Tu who?”
“Poor boy.” She sighed and looked disappointed. He was starting to reply when a white man with a mohawk scooped the cigarette from her hand.
“I’m heading back to Beloved,” the man said. From the smell, Jason decided the man’s beautiful, handcrafted patch pants had never been laundered.
“Make me a bowl of lentils and don’t let Jimmy eat it,” she answered.
Jason waited anxiously for the man to depart, then followed her to the snack table.
“So tell me who I should read.”
“Read like you want to know yourself.” She stopped suddenly and turned to him, their bodies nearly brushing. “Like you’re not just studying how to be a bak gui.”
He was thrown by this. His mother tongue on her lips. Her indictment. The pendant dangling from her belly. He blinked. Looked around, but no one was watching them.
“You’re a student?” she asked.
“Columbia.”
“Okay, no excuse. They’re in Butler Library. Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ch’ing Chao.”
“Are you also at Columbia?”
“I’m a Columbia dropout.” She stuffed a handful of Doo Dads in her mouth and looked right at him without a hint of shame. Her parents had to be dead, he thought. How else to explain her existence?
She dug into the pocket of her shorts. “Come to this next week.”
A typed flyer. A hand-drawn guitar, paintbrush, and Chinese opera mask.
Basement Workshop Arts Extravaganza.
He thought about her in the days that followed, imagining the ring in her belly.
When he made it to the Basement Workshop—said to have once run out of a Chinatown basement, but now located on the twelfth floor of a loft building on Lafayette Street—he found himself surrounded by jook seing in bell-bottoms, with hair to their waists and anti-war buttons up and down their jackets.
He fit in well there, and he’d never fit in anywhere.
Gina stood out in the crowd. She was another level of rebel: jook seing in leather and fishnets.
She seemed pleased to see him—she grabbed his hand and pulled him onto the floor next to her.
They watched the widely ranging art show, which included everything from children’s fingerprint paintings to modern dance, from silk screen prints to a haunting set of portrait photographs by Gina herself.
Next, contributors to Yellow Peril magazine read poems and essays from their latest issue.
They spoke of racism and colonialism—of their anger, loneliness, and search for self. He understood every line.
The night deepened, and the crowd thinned as some of the Basement Workshop members headed to the subway station. He wasn’t ready to leave, but he’d already missed dinner, and he knew his mother would be worried.
“This is when the goody-goodies go home,” Gina quipped.
“Won’t your ba be mad?” Jason whispered.
“Ba’s in the loony bin. Mom’s in prison.”
“Wait, are you serious?”
“I live ten blocks from here. Alphabet City.”
He’d never ventured to Alphabet City before. But if she lived there, perhaps it wasn’t as dangerous as people said.
“In a squatter house. I don’t know if you’re looking, but we’re trying to fill our extra room.”
“Oh. Well, can I at least make sure you get home all right?”
They both knew it was funny that he offered, but she humored him.
Alphabet City was a menagerie of half-collapsed tenements and vacant lots.
Some lots had been converted to gardens, their fences decorated with roses and beads.
He told her that he’d loved her photograph of a blind Chinese elder who lived in the A train tunnel, and she nodded, seeming to appreciate his compliment, explaining how she’d met the man.
In one garden on Avenue D, a naked white girl with dreadlocks bathed herself with a hose. Gina waved at her; Jason looked away.
They reached “Beloved House,” a commune of some sort, ten or eleven of them in an abandoned building without electricity or stairs. Gina and her housemates had installed canvas tarps to climb from floor to floor; they tapped electricity from the lampposts. The wall paint peeled like tree bark.
He pretended not to be crestfallen when she introduced him to her boyfriend, Jim Gallagher.
He was sitting on the edge of a mattress with a guitar in his lap, and he seemed intensely focused on his new composition.
Next, they climbed to the roof to meet “the poets”—the decked-out punk he’d seen at the party, and Angelo, who was Filipino.
They were passing a joint and discussing Edward Said’s Orientalism, but by then Jason was tired.
She showed him the free room. They were standing beside the mattress when she began unbuttoning his shirt. He looked at her, then at the cracked door of the room, his heart pounding in her hands.
“Jim?” he whispered.
“Relax. We’re not the monogamous type.”
He shivered as her cold fingers grazed his chest. Considered stopping her, of demanding something more for himself. Yet he had waited forever to be in someone’s hands. When her fingers meandered down and stroked the crotch of his jeans, he lost his breath.
She removed her tank top. Beneath it she wore a lace bra, daintier than he would have imagined. He looked away again, and then back at them, her small cups. He ran his hand across her back, not knowing what was allowed.
She unhooked herself, took his hands and molded them over her breasts.
And once he was situated there, she returned her hand to his jeans, unzipped the fly, felt him through his silly cotton briefs.
It felt like playing with electric sockets; their bodies had buttons, levers, the capacity to shock.
She was cold and methodical, without kisses, as if teaching him choreography for a play.
And then, quite suddenly, something shifted: she turned around, pressed her back against his bare skin, cupped her hands over his hands.
No longer leading him; surrendering. She had pinned her small body against him.
She had even shut her eyes, leaving him to see and touch her angles.
And gradually, Jason did so like a man long starved, biting back the urge to chew her crisp black hair.
They were no longer cold. They were hot and hurried, all instinct and need.
He had worried, at various times earlier that evening, that she saw him as a little brother.
Now that felt like the most colonized thought he’d had yet.
He could smell her body odor, at once unappealing and intoxicating.
Then she drew his hand farther down, diving beneath the folds of her underwear.
He felt the curls of thicker hair, and below it, a landscape of caves and coral—slick and glossy, he imagined, as an ocean bed.
He feared himself, he wanted to know the rules, but her low moaning seemed to say that there were none.
For several months, he forgot about the Met and the black box theaters and went to Beloved House to make love with Gina—and to study.
He read the books and watched the tapes she set in front of him, became obsessed with Nam June Paik’s TV art and Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dotted nudes.
And she studied him, and sometimes took his picture on her Canon when he wasn’t looking.
If he left the room to urinate, she picked up his books and read the notes he had written in the margins.
It was flattering to be the object of someone’s gaze in this way.
To not always be the gazer. He had never felt so aware of himself as a body and as a person.
Her questions required him to explain himself, and the more he talked, the more he felt he knew himself.
He was proud to see who he was becoming.
He found a job at a bookstore near school and didn’t tell his parents about his intentions to move to Beloved House until he was clomping down the staircase with one arm around his typewriter and the other holding a suitcase packed with clothes and books. He’d never needed much.
“Where you go?” his mother asked in English.
“I got an apartment.”
She was horrified. What did he mean, what apartment?
With who? He was so young, just nineteen—who would cook for him and make sure he ate?
He would probably eat cornflakes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
He always messed up the laundry by forgetting to put in the soap, so how would he wash his clothes?
“Look what you’re doing to your ma,” his father said. “When’s the last time you thought about anyone except yourself?”
Jason disregarded his father and argued half-heartedly with his mother. He was past caring what they thought. Only his grandfather’s reaction disturbed him. Koon Lai’s raisiny face clouded over, and he shrank into his chair like he might someday dissolve into it.
Beloved House held a communal dinner that night in Jason’s welcome.
The beans and rice ran out quickly, but the beer and music kept coming, and once inebriated, the housemates took turns relating the time and place of their favorite one-night stands, then the day and streets where they’d been mugged.
He chewed on Angelo’s sunflower seeds and tried to shake off the image of Jackie, Yia Yia, and his parents sitting joylessly around a table crammed end to end with plates of fish cakes and pork ribs.
Beloved House was a slapdash, janky construction, exposing them to the changing of the seasons, the drafts of winter and the smacking wetness of summer.
It was an archeology site, littered with remnants of the past twenty artists who had come and gone with those seasons.
Roaches squirmed in the corners of the dish strainer, squiggles of corkscrew pasta fell from the kitchen ceiling, and the shower curtain was always molding over and sticking to itself, so that Jason never managed to stretch it to its full length.
The first month of his stay, they suffered a two-week gas outage.
Jason spent those weeks eating Breyers ice cream and cereal, just as his mother had predicted.
But it was better this way, he thought: to live in a house that continually reminded you of your animalness, your vulnerability to the elements.
About a year into his stay at Beloved House, Gina met someone at Club 57.
Jason never learned his name, let alone his ethnicity—only that he had a Volkswagen.
She set out with him on a cross-country road trip.
She said they would return in six weeks, but six weeks turned into six months, and when they got back to New York she stayed with him, somewhere in Queens.
When Gina finally dropped by Beloved House, she fought with Jim for hours and barely spoke to Jason at all, which made it obvious that in the hierarchy of her polyamory, Jason was at the bottom.
Going home was impossible. He couldn’t bear to return to his mother’s disappointment, his father’s violence, his grandfather’s ceaseless grief.
He spent most of his time squirreled away in his room, writing poems about outcasts who wandered in shadowed, predawn Hopperesque streets or, like Li Po, drank alone, under the moon.
The ink of spoiled pens dripped like hoisin, stained his fingers.
Sometimes he only had the energy to lie in a ball on his mattress, paralyzed with the fear of unending lonesomeness.
During these months, only his grandfather visited him.
Koon Lai would appear on the fire escape, wearing the gray suit that smelled of mothballs, and he’d spread a handkerchief on the dirty window ledge and sit there for hours with his thin knees crossed.
He’d listen to his grandson moan into a pillow, and he’d say, “Go home and visit your mother.” Sometimes he’d unwrap a dried plum and offer it to the boy.
But Jason couldn’t hear or see him. All he felt was a lingering warmth that softened him like a bowl of mushroom jook on a winter day.
It took some time before he called home and learned Koon Lai was dead.