I'm embarrassed that I'm this late in wishing my EGG FOO WHAT?! partner Mike a very, very Happy Chinese New Year with an excerpt from my first book:
I was jolted out of my dreamy haze in the living room by the doorbell, which set me off into both panic and rage since it could wake Chuck up from his nap. That was why I’d given up ordering Chinese delivery for lunch during his nap, since no matter how many times I told them to call my phone when they were at the door they rang the goddam bell anyway.
I ran to the front door cursing, and suddenly saw in front of me a young Asian woman in high heels and a short leather skirt, shivering from the cold rain that was falling on her. I quickly let her into the hallway and told her that I hadn’t ordered delivery, all while perking an ear up to hear if the bell had indeed woken Chuck.
“You call for girl?” the woman asked.
“What?”
I was half listening to her, and half listening for Chuck while holding my breath. Hearing no noise from above I resumed breathing and looked at this stranger that was, for some reason, standing in the hallway.
“You call for girl?” she repeated, shouting as if I was Asian hard of hearing, which was the exact moment I realized I had let a hooker into the house.
“Wait wait, hold on,” I sputtered. “I didn’t call you. Who called you?”
She handed me a piece of paper with a phone number I didn’t recognize, along with an address that was about a mile away.
“See,” I pointed to the address, shouting as if volume could transcend a lack of understanding the language before realizing it could wake Chuck up and lowering my voice, “you’re supposed to go to 137 Maujer Street. This is 337 Maujer. 137 is on the other side of the BQE.”
She stomped a high heel and stuck out her bottom lip, and I felt guilty for wondering if this really was the first time in her life she’d faced disappointment.
“Weeeeell,” I gently touched her elbow to guide her back to the door, “I don’t wanna keep you from your office, so…”
She refused to budge, and looked like she was panicking.
“I can’t leave! Need money!”
She must have been out of her goddam mind if she thought I was going to pay her just to go away. Of course the thought of paying her to actually have sex crossed my mind – I was, after all, on a break while Chuck was upstairs napping - but my unfettered principles refusing to allow such a thing while on duty along with only having four dollars in my pocket made such a thing quite impossible.
“Look,” I pleaded with her, “you have to go. This isn’t even my house. You need to go to the correct address.” I pointed to the piece of paper again. “Some guy’s waiting for you right now.”
“Driver,” she yelled. “Driver gone!”
“Hey hey,” I shushed her, again perking an ear for Chuck. “Quiet, there’s a kid sleeping upstairs!”
She calmed down enough to tell me the driver had told her he’d be back in twenty minutes, and when we called him he said he still couldn’t be back for another ten or fifteen minutes, so she would have to wait. I had no idea what the hell to do. I couldn’t make her wait outside, as it was pouring buckets. I considered asking her to wait in the hallway, but that would be rude; besides, Chuck still had about an hour left on his nap, so she’d be long gone by the time he woke up. Since he’d made it through my newest friend ringing the bell without waking up, I figured I was in the clear. It would also give me a chance to inquire about the fifteen-minute rate I’d heard was on some working girls’ “secret menu.”
“Okay, come on inside where it’s warm,” I walked her into the living room. “You can wait here until your driver comes back.”
“Thank you, thank you!” she gushed while sitting down, to my annoyance, in my big white chair. After she refused as glass of water or soda I crossed over to the couch, and tried to think of what hookers might like to talk about. Nothing immediately came to mind and she certainly didn’t look very interested in helping move the conversation along, so I was forced to end the silence myself.
“So, you’re…Chinese?”
It took her a while to realize what I was asking, but she finally answered.
“No Chinese. Filipino.”
“Ah,” I replied, nodding my head with a knowing look to indicate that “Filipino” was going to be my real guess, but some small item of her appearance made me think Chinese, and it turned out I had been correct in the first place.
“You know,” I said, “down home when I was growing up, there was a Japanese family in my hometown.”
She nodded politely, as if really listening.
“Of course, since they were Asian, we called them ‘Chinese.’ Funny, right?”
She didn’t laugh, but was polite enough to keep nodding and smiling. I was beginning to find myself a bit smitten.
I shook my head with a serious, ‘can you believe that?’ look to let her know that I never thought like that, I was above such things, even as a child, and was not to be lumped in with people who did such a thing. She gave no outward appearance of giving a shit about what I had said, or my knowing look that had followed.
“I mean, you know, I ju-“
“RATS!”
The noise from above startled my guest, who must’ve thought someone had just run into the room while shrieking their head off. I was startled too but for different reasons, including being in the previously unthinkable position of hearing Chuck’s voice while making casual conversation with a hooker.
“RATS!”
“What’s that? What’s that?” My friend, whose name I knew better than to learn, looked around the room frantically.
“It’s my buddy, Chuck,” I tried to calm her. “I baby-sit him, he’s taking a nap upstairs.”
Hearing the word “baby” calmed her down, and she resumed her stoic pose on my chair while I tried to figure out what the hell to do. I was in that most classic of unlicensed child caretaker predicaments: I couldn’t bring Chuck downstairs and let him see the hooker I was sitting with in the living room, and I couldn’t make her wait outside in the driving rain. Oldest story in the world, right?
“RATS! RATS! RATS!”
I also knew Chuck was unaccustomed to having to holler more than once for me to run up and grab him after his nap, so if something didn’t happen quickly, I’d be in for a barrage of shit from the kid. I considered staying upstairs in his room with Chuck until I heard my guest leave, but I also didn’t feel right leaving her alone downstairs. I’m sure she was a nice girl, I didn’t want to be judgmental, but she was in the business of selling her affections for cash and, if I was able to surmise anything from having a driver who couldn’t be bothered to either wait for her or hurry back to pick her up, not a lot of cash. Explaining to Jimmy and Beval how I’d let a hooker rob them blind was not something I was looking forward to having to do; meanwhile, as Chuck’s yells became louder and more insistent, my guest was shooting a judgmental look at me like I was committing child abuse by not going upstairs to get the kid.
“Okay, look,” I squatted in front of her to draw up our plan. “Listen: I’m gonna go upstairs to get him. I’ll be back in one minute, maybe even less, well, probably less, definitely less than that, there’s no use in you bothering to even get up, or even look around the room to see what stuff’s here. I’ll barely be out of your sight, so you just sit there, without touching anything, just as you are. Okay?”
She nodded, saying nothing.
“I’m gonna bring him down the stairs and distract him so he doesn’t see you, and bring him into the kitchen. He’ll watch TV, he won’t even know you’re there, and then you’ll slip out when your driver comes. Okay? Got it?”
She nodded again. I stood up straight to survey her expression. She seemed to know what I was saying, which was a relief. I’d get to pat myself on the back for helping out a damsel in distress without Chuck knowing a thing about it, and long after my Manny tour of duty was done I could tell the story over and over at classy dinner parties, should anybody ever actually invite me to one.
I sprinted upstairs into the second floor hallway and pushed the door to Chuck’s room open. Usually I’d stay back and look between the hinges, watching him excitedly look where he thought I’d be walking through the door; after a few seconds of confusion, he’d spot my eyeball looking through the crack and shout “RATS!” while jumping up and down and pointing at me, which was my cue to burst through the door like a comedian going on The Tonight Show. But I’d left a prostitute downstairs all by herself, I skipped our normal routine.
“Hiya, lil’ buddy! Have a good nap?”
He was bouncing up and down and laughing, reaching his arms out for me to pick him up, which I quickly did. Sometimes I wondered if when Chuck woke up from his afternoon nap he thought it was another day, in which case if he saw how much I got paid he’d think I was twice as poor as I already was.
I shuffled the two of us out of his room without our usual fanfare and hustled down the stairs, blathering who the hell knows what so he wouldn’t notice a complete stranger sitting in his living room. My foot touched the final step and a voice saying “home free!” entered my head, unfortunately followed a split-second later by another voice.
“Oooooooh! Baby! Baby!”
While I’d imagine that was normally a good thing to hear from a woman of her vocation, my body clutched in a panic as Chuck stopped his babbling and spun his head in the direction of the voice, in spite of my efforts to physically block him from doing so.
“Who dat, Rats?”
What was it about the Chinese always fucking up this kid’s naps? I thought she’d understood our plan - we were a team, goddammit!
“Nobody buddy, nobody, let’s eat!”
He was kicking and pulling for me to let him down, and by the time we reached his high chair his kicks were so frantic that he slipped away from my grasp.
“Buddy!” I chased after him, “Let’s watch George! George is on, lil’ buddy!”
But it was too late, he was running right over to her. I was helpless to do anything, so I just watched while he stood in front of her, beaming as she smiled back, all while I hoped we weren’t being charged for her time. Turning to look at me, he pointed a finger at her.
“Rats. This is your girfren’, Rats?”
I wanted to laugh, but I knew if I did it would be at that moment Jimmy or Beval would come walking through the door and see me laughing while I chaperoned their child’s first time with a prostitute, so I merely stood there and watched Chuck as he picked up one of his books off the floor and handed it to my new girlfriend, the hooker. By that point nothing could surprise me, so as he sat in her lap, the both of them blathering away about a book neither one of them could apparently read, I just slumped down on the couch and waited for the driver to show up. When we heard his car horn outside the three of us exchanged our goodbyes, promising to “do this again sometime, real soon!” and Chuck and I were finally alone again.
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