Driver's Education (7 page)

“Where's your mother been?” The question came as I was buttoning my pants, and when I heard it I stumbled backward. His voice was exactly like mine, but also different. It held the same tenor, and the question lifted at the end in a familiar, self-conscious way—yet something was off, unsettling. As if it were coming out of one speaker instead of both.

“Busy,” I told him. “And she sees a lot of movies on her own.”

I pushed hair away from my forehead and so did the boy.

“No,” he told me. “She doesn't.”

The faucet he was using still choked out scalding water. As I began soaping my hands at the sink adjacent to his, he did the same.

“And you'd know, I guess, right?”

“Cool it,” the boy said. “You would too.”

There was a silence, then, in which we both heard the perturbed buzzing of the bathroom's lights, in which the popcorn exploding behind the concession stand sounded like mines combusting in a field.

“My dad's waiting outside.” I shut off the faucet and began drying my hands, spending too long on the spaces between my fingers.

The boy said, “You know what happens to her, don't you?”

I punched him and both our noses bled.

Finn

Randal and I agreed to meet this afternoon on Thirtieth Street, under the languid shadow of my office. Since last night the temperature has gone from miserably hot to stifling to suffocating: streets and subways are plugged with sweat, the stench of 8 million people plus us. I'm wearing this black ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME T-shirt that Karen got for me when she visited an aunt in Cleveland, on her way back from Toronto. I zoom in on Randal, who has a Coke can pressed to his face.

“It's hot,” he says. “It's just so fucking hot.”

“You'll be all right.”

He adjusts his backpack on his thin shoulders and then moves the sweating can to his left cheek. We've both got packs. And we've stuffed them full with items we've deemed essential. Toothbrushes. Camera batteries. Doritos. Two sets of underwear. In Randal's case: three individually wrapped sporks.

“You just—you never know.”

I fix the cap to the lens. In my back pocket: the hamburger wrapper where I've written down the address.

I say, “We should definitely get going.”

We catch the M train at Bryant Park and ride it south to Houston and Second Avenue. It's hotter downtown: there are fewer patches
of cool ground where the sun's been hidden by skyscrapers, more open sky, more bricks baking in the heat, more halal meat charring on stands erected along the sidewalks. On Houston we walk east, toward the river. We pass the Sara D. Roosevelt Park on Chrystie Street, where a group of teenagers in flaccid jeans are smoking Swisher Sweets and listening to a hip-hop song, the one that everyone's already heard 3 million times this summer.

“That song,” Randal says. “That fucking song.”

At Allen we turn right and we walk by places we know. Places like Lolita Bar and Rockwood Music Hall and Congee Village. And then, farther south, there are wholesale kitchen supply stores, pushing blenders and cutting blocks and things whose names I don't know. The storefronts have signs written in English, rarely with small Chinese characters scrawled under them in bright red. I film a food processor. Randal asks why, and I tell him I've always wanted one.

He says nothing, he just tightens the straps on his backpack and nods as we move farther south.

And then we're below Broome and we go right on Canal and the Chinese begins to overtake the English on the storefronts and the streets get more crowded. We pass under lower Manhattan's concrete mixing bowl, where the off-ramp for the Manhattan Bridge plunges into Bowery and Chrystie and Canal. Periodically Randal asks me to slow down so he can peel his sweat-soaked shirt off his sticky skin.

“What time does this place close?” he asks.

“Seven?” I say. “Maybe eight? I don't know. It's a meat market. When do meat markets close?”

We keep going.

On Canal near Mott there are the jewelry shops—thousands and thousands of them. In their windows are displays of mock red velvet necks draped in spectacular golden lotuses. There are rings with squares of jade or pearl globes and pink-beaded necklaces and jeweled statues of fat happy Buddhas. There are watches, handbags, DVDs of movies that haven't hit theaters yet, and all the men who are selling them tell us and 1 million tourists that they have
a special deal for us,
a
special deal only for us
!

Then, down Mott, the greengrocers: boxes stacked thousands of miles high with dried peanuts and shriveled mushrooms that look very illegal. Stands hawking apples and oranges and pears, but also exotic, fascinating-sounding fruits like rambutans and mangosteens and pomelos. And fishmongers—so many fucking fishmongers. Tubs of raw grey shrimp, jagged bouquets of detached crab claws, whole fish shoved into buckets, their gaping mouths and black eyes the only things to stick out through the ice.

Randal sees the George Meat Market International first. It's on the east side of Mott, past Pell Street and the Peking Duck House and Hop Kee and Wo Hop: a long white shop that spans a quarter of the block and has slabs of God-knows-what dangling from the ceiling and in open-air cases on the sidewalk. A sign hanging from the store's awning advertises REAL AUTHENTIC CHINESE BUTCHERS. We walk slowly along the troughs of pork and beef and chicken. We count flies and dodge past tourists and screaming women with canvas shopping bags, stopping in front of a set of pigs' feet that are attached to strings that hang from the white awning. I feel Randal grab my bare arm, and he whispers some awful joke, like, “Man, these guys will have a tough time getting
a foot in the door,
wouldn't you think?” before he pokes one of the hooves, sending it rocking.

It feels as though we're standing in the middle of a convection oven, the hot air cracking like whips around us, our T-shirts sticking to our backs in wet zebra lines, and it's uncomfortable, which is probably why we can't stop laughing. We poke the foot, make it tap dance, do the cancan—things that are wholly inappropriate and borderline disrespectful. And it's at that point that one of the butchers—this massive guy with a thick brow and arms the size of palm-tree trunks—ducks out from within the market to tell us, in so many words, that if we push that pig's hoof one more time, he'll give us something to laugh about.

“You coming here you need something?”

There's a brief moment when we have to unscramble his words, and then: “Yes. Yes, we need some help. We're looking for a man named Yip.”

“You find Yip?”

“Yes, we find Yip.”

He cranes his neck back and looks past the customers—the excited rabid women, the tourists in baseball caps, with cameras dangling from their necks—and then back toward the shop. “Yip at this time very busy. Yip a busy man.”

“He's expecting me,” I say. “He knows my granddad. They talked.”

He looks at Randal, and then at me, and then back at Randal again. “You wait here,” he says. Growls.

The street and the stalls outside the shop are getting more crowded with pedestrians contending for space. Randal leans into me and asks,
Who is this guy again?
and I tell him the truth, which is that I don't know, that I have no clue how he knows my grandfather or how he's come to play Lucy's keeper.

“But—they've spoken, right? As in, recently?”

“I think?” Then, because I can tell his eyes are boring into my skull and I want to throw pigs' feet at his head, “Yes.”

“Finn—”

It's for an exhausting few minutes that we stand there, dodging women and their bags and the various chopped-up appendages hanging on all sides of us. We see the brute with the cleaver first, motioning wildly, waving his knife as he speaks to a man who's half his height but twice his width, a man who we surmise is Yip.

They bark back and forth at each other as they approach, but the brute slinks back when they're about two feet from us. Calling Yip stout would be generous, I think, because the guy is straight-up fat. Fat and bald with a broad creased face that funnels downward, ending in three slick grey hairs that hang from a cleaved chin. He takes me in his arms immediately, squeezing me around the waist till I have no breath left, till all I can smell is the raw pork on his glowing head. Around us, the
click click click
of tourists' cameras.

“Can you think!” he shouts, and rocks me back and forth. “Can you think last time I seeing this one?” He buries his head in my chest but turns his face toward Randal. “The last time I seeing this one he so small!” He finally releases me. “Can you imagine? He so small and pink
I holding him like this!” Yip holds both hands in front of him as if he intends to cup water out of a fountain. “I holding him like little piglet! So tiny! And he moving like this!” He flails his arms and his legs in these waves. “He looking up at me and he dancing like this!”

I look to Randal, who is now smiling and nodding earnestly, completely infected with Yip's enthusiasm, and then I look back to Yip, to this bald man who is now holding both my hands in his blood-caked paws. “You no remembering me!” he says. And then, before I can say no: “Is fine! I expecting you no remembering me! I expecting this because the last time I seeing you you so pink and tiny and dancing like this!”

He shakes his limbs again and more cameras click. When he stops, he points at the camcorder hanging from my shoulder, points at the bright red light next to the lens. “What, bub! Whoa! I am being on the
Candid Camera
? I am being television star?”

I ask, “You want to be a television star, Yip?”

“Yip is having been made for the television! How I telling so many people this! How I telling them that Yip is having been made for television!”

And so I keep filming.

“You looking so confused! He looking so confused! You want the story how the way I know your
ye ye
? Yes, yes you want story how the way I know your
ye ye
.” He turns around, faces the shop, starts walking into it, still holding on to one of my hands. “You follow me, you follow Yip.”

The interior of the George Meat Market International is populated by more carcasses of slaughtered beasts than people. I lose my grip on Yip quickly. He sweeps through them adeptly, these hanging pieces of flesh; his head is inches lower than the longest duck or the broadest rib cage. We lose him for a second behind some massive cow leg, and then he reappears, materializing on the other side of an army of plucked, humiliated chickens. We try to keep up with him, Randal and I, as we trace his path through the flesh, but it's basically pointless: we end up getting sideswiped by some short loins or tangled up in rounds, and then he just vanishes again. The only reason we're able to find him in the end is that he shouts, very loudly, for everyone to hear,
I always moving very very fast! I always losing people! But you come, you come here!
He's standing
in front of a steel door with chipped blue paint, and he ushers us into a room that, at least from the looks of it, used to be a meat locker.

The place has been turned into a makeshift office. On the wall: a framed picture of Yip with a Chinese movie star I'm pretty sure I recognize. In front of it, two mismatched chairs and a single wooden desk, upon which sprawls an orange cat, ragged and ancient, with only one front leg.

“Sit! Sit!” he tells us, pulling out both the chairs. He perches, authoritatively, on the desk. He reaches into one of the drawers and offers us both unfiltered cigarettes, which we both take, and which makes me hack. He motions for Randal to close the door.

“My God,” he says in unaccented English after he gets the thing lit. “It's exhausting, isn't it?”

The smoke rises, forming clouds that blanket the ceiling. I cough some more.

“Pardon?”

He nods to the door, to the circus of sightseers that festers outside. Smoke seeps out of his nostrils, a dragon. “Just this—this whole routine.
So tiny and dancing like this!
Christ almighty.” Yip waves the cigarette in wide dismissive loops. He motions, again, to the tourists. “But which one of them wants to buy things they can't pronounce from a guy who's lived in Long Island City since he was eight? A guy who talks like he's Tony Fucking Soprano? I'll tell you who—not a goddamned one of them.

“Chen at Global Seafood, over on Broome—he's the asshole who came up with the shtick first.
They want authenticity,
he said.
They come from Kansas and Iowa with their cameras and they want authenticity.
This! Coming from a Szechuan Jew from Astoria!” Then: “They came, though. Can you believe it? They bought the gag, and they came. Now Chen's got tourists lined up around the block, paying to take a picture with him and a goddamned plucked
duck
. And let me tell you something about tourists, kid—they don't haggle over the price of mushrooms. They don't bitch about the shrimp not being big enough. They buy shit, and they get out of your hair. So, here we have it:
authenticity.
”

The cat makes a noise, something asthmatic and irritated.

Yip tells us, “Just ignore Mrs. Dalloway.”

“Is she—all right?”

“Mrs. Dalloway? She's fine. Better than fine, unfortunately. Damn thing is fifty years old. I've had her since I was fifteen.”

“That's impossible.”

“You're calling me a liar?”

“No. Or, maybe? No, I'm not. It's just—”

“Lighten up, kid, I'm kidding. But yes, a cat that's fifty. No one can figure it out. No vet, no medicine man. She just—she just won't
die
. She can't breathe to save her life, and in ninety-two her front leg got chopped off in a ground beef portioner. But still.”