I'm the One That I Want (3 page)

Since I didn’t really have friends who I was not related to, and the kids that were cruelest to me were other Koreans, my entire world was an exercise in not belonging. The answer seemed to lie in being white, so in my fantasy life, I chose to be Lori Laughlin. In my mind, I got ready for dances, wearing only a neat white towel wrapped under my arms, spraying myself with Love’s Baby Soft, wiping a cotton ball soaked in 10-0-6 lotion over my troublesome T-zone, lining my big, big eyes with Aziza by Prince Matchabelli, putting on a long, ruffled denim skirt with a petticoat underneath and then a puffy-sleeved blouse with a big ruffle forming aV on my ample but not slutty chest. Then finally, I’d let my naturally curly chestnut hair fall across my narrow shoulders, pulling it up close to my head with red oval barrettes. The only time the fantasy would change would be if I decided to be Charlene Tilton instead of Lori Laughlin, but this occurred less frequently because I read in
Teen Beat
that Charlene took forty-five minutes to blow-dry her hair, which even then I found unreasonable.

I usually never got to the dance, because my fantasies were all about getting ready, looking a certain way, about not being me. How sad to use such a rich and vibrant imagination to dream about
grooming
, and not only that, but
grooming someone else
.

Sometimes, I would get so caught up in the fantasy that I would actually go to the dance, but since I’d never been to one yet, that image was rather muddled. I’d end up slow-dancing to Air Supply with the cutest guy in my grade, Steve Goldberg, a hot Jewish kid with blonde hair and a huge ass. Steve was relentlessly mean to me, perhaps because he knew I had a crush on him, but he was also in his own pain because of his big behind. Once, on a field trip, he made all the kids in the class say “Hi Margaret” to a big golden retriever as they walked by. “Hey everybody, say hi to Margaret. She’s a dog! Get it?!” I wasn’t offended. I always thought dogs were beautiful. It hurt me only because it was
meant
to, but it was nothing compared to the treatment I got at church.

It started with my name. I was born Moran Cho. Moran is a Korean name, meaning peony flower, a plant that blooms even in the harshest winter. My father gave me this thoughtful, unusual name without the knowledge that someday the kids I grew up with would use it against me. It started when I was around twelve, not at school, but at church.

“MORON!! YOU ARE NOTHIN’ BUT A MORON!!!” They said my name every chance they got.

“Excuse me, but MORON didn’t pass the basket this way.”

“Hey! I have my hand up. You can’t see me past MORON’S fat head.”

“May I be moved? I don’t want to sit next to MORON!”

“Jesus loves everyone, even MORON.”

It was stupid, but it hurt my feelings so much. Especially since the main perpetrators had once been close friends of mine.

Lotte and Connie Park were the daughters of my parents’ best friends. During the previous summer vacation, I had spent many days at their house in San Bruno. We listened to Michael Jackson’s
Off
the Wall
. We went down the hill to Kmart and I bought my first pair of designer jeans. We watched
Creature Features
until we got too scared and had to change the channel to
Saturday Night Live
, where we’d laugh our asses off at Steve Martin doing King Tut.

They told me their parents fought all night long, but when they prayed to God to make them stop, it got quiet. They said they were afraid their parents were going to get a divorce. I was scared that was going to happen to me, too. We were kids of the ’80s, when divorce and nuclear war loomed large. We were afraid of being abandoned by our parents, yet excited at the possibility of peace in our homes and spending our weekends with dads we never saw as long as our parents stayed together. We also had nightmares of radioactive fallout and hoped that we’d get stuck in a bomb shelter with a cute guy.

Connie had a tendency to have sties, which gave her eyes the bubbly look of a pop-eyed goldfish, but she was thin and confident, which made her condition seem oddly attractive. Lotte looked like a Korean Genie Francis, which was exciting as this was the time when
General Hospital
ruled the airwaves—there was even a song about it, parodying the plotlines and the scandalous characters, and we’d call up KFRC and request it over and over again.

We’d commiserate about our piano teachers, the strange, old white people who would come into our homes and sit next to us as we hammered out “Close to You” on the keys. Those lessons were the one luxury my family could afford, and my brother and I suffered through them for years. Lotte and Connie would make me howl with laughter at the tales of their teacher, who would use the bathroom for up to half an hour, and help herself to Sanka in the kitchen. “Best cup I ever made . . .”

I don’t know why it was so funny. Maybe because this was the first time anybody seemed to
understand
me. Those girls made me feel so much less alone in the world, which made their betrayal particularly painful.

Lotte and Connie had a cousin, a shy, awkward girl named Ronny, who started going to our church. She had two older brothers who were really good-looking, with glossy, black feathered hair and tan, hard bodies, which made her popular by proxy. I was friendly to her at first, not knowing that she was to be my replacement.

One day Lotte came up to Ronny and me as we chit-chatted in the church parking lot. She looked at Ronny with a knowing glance and said, “Oh, I see you’ve met MORON!!!” They both started laughing hysterically and I tried to be a good sport, accepting it as some healthy ribbing among friends, even though my face got red and a knot grew in my throat. The two girls walked off and joined Connie, who was nursing a sty the size of a golf ball. They didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the day, which was suspicious, but I tried to ignore it.

I went home and looked in the mirror to see if there was something wrong with me. My hair was too short: my mother had cut it into “Sheena Easton,” and the feathered sides wilted in the midday heat. Maybe I was paranoid. I hoped the situation would right itself before I went off to the church summer retreat, three days in the red-woods with all the kids from MYF, a chance to be away from parents, smoke cigarettes, and bond with one another. It was
Little Darlings
— and although the thought of losing my virginity was a rather lofty notion for me then, at twelve, it was still in the heady mix of possibilities of being
away at camp
.

I could barely sleep the night before because I was so excited and worried at the same time. I tossed and turned and woke suddenly with the sun shining in my face, not having been aware that I had fallen asleep.

My mother drove me to the church and then inexplicably burst into tears, begging me not to go. I couldn’t understand this at all. We had not been getting along lately. None of my family had. My mother and I would fight because I wouldn’t practice the piano, my brother and I would fight over the TV, and my father and mother would fight all night long. I pulled away from her as she gained control of her emotions. She was cold again as I left the big yellow station wagon. I was relieved to be getting away from the fighting.

I’d hoped to get a ride with Lotte and Connie, but they’d already gone with Ronny. I was too afraid to ask Carl, the cute monkey-faced popular boy who lived to make me miserable, or Jaclyn and Eugene, the equally simian brother and sister who fancied themselves trend-setters because they’d started hating me long before anyone else.

All the kids had organized themselves into groups riding up together, and since I was late, and hated, I just stood there with my cowboy sleeping bag and tried not to look scared. I reasoned with myself that the more I worried about something bad taking place, the less likely it was to happen. Since I’d been so tortured about this trip, by this law it was bound to turn out fine.

I rode to the camp with the young minister who led the youth group. He never wore a clerical collar and was of indeterminate age—youngish, unmarried, but ageless in the way Korean men sometimes are. As his yellow Pinto puttered up the freeway, I must have fallen asleep because later, close to the camp, I woke up all sweaty.

“You are very cute when you are sleeping.” Reverend Soo was always nice to me, in an uncreepy, comforting way. We got to the campsite around the middle of the day. It was hot and teeming with Korean kids. Ronny’s fine-ass brother had the door of his Trans Am open, and the stereo was blasting Chicago.

“Everybody needs a little time away, just for the day . . .

From each other . . .”

The beautiful Jolie, who was a few grades above me, perfect in her cut-off jeans and ribbed purple tank, a red bandanna tied suggestively like a garter around her lean thigh, looked over at us and smiled. My heart beat faster. Jolie had never been mean to me, but she’d never spoken to me either. She was way too sophisticated for that. I had a crush on her, but I was too much in awe to even admit it to myself. Whatever Carl or Eugene did to me, it didn’t matter unless
she
saw it. If
she
was a witness, then the sting of humiliation would last for days. I think it was less that I wanted her, and more that I wanted to be her. With her taut brown body and baby face, she represented to me the glory of the ’80s, the idea that beauty was a powerful thing, that if you looked a certain way, you could have everything.

Around 1985, Jolie turned preppy, and her beauty, her gleam, her youthful sensuality was lost in the translation. But back then, still in her slutty prime, she held all the boys at our church in the palm of her purple-nail-polished hand.

She leaned over to Ronny’s brother and whispered something. He grabbed her face and they fell into each other laughing. Oh, to laugh like that, to be held by a boy and get lost in your own wondrous being. To be able to throw your head back like a pony while the boys admired you. To be the object of desire and the one doing the desiring . . . I wished that for myself. As I was lost in this reverie, someone threw a pine cone at my face.

“Oh shit. MORON’S here!!!!”

I tried not to cry as I looked for the perpetrator in the crowd of kids. Jolie stifled a chuckle, biting her tantalizingly glossed lip, and turned her head away. Unable to look at me because it was just too embarrassing, she nuzzled Ronny’s brother’s golden neck.

The shards of pine cone made my eye blaze red. Half blind, I made it to the girl’s cabin without further incident.

The cabins were made of logs. Inside, there were about ten bunk beds, which were exotic and exciting to me, as I’d never slept in one. I looked around for an unclaimed top bunk, but none was to be found. I unrolled my stained old sleeping bag that didn’t zip up all the way onto the bottom bunk near the back door.

Jaclyn was in the bathroom complaining to no one in particular, “The food here is so baaaddd!!! I was sticking my finger down my throat trying to throw up. That didn’t work so I was on the toilet trying to
crap
it out. I want to go home!”

I wanted to go home, too. This was going to be bad. I could just tell.

Lotte came into the empty cabin and saw me. I was glad to see her and walked up.

“Hi. I just got here. Where is your bunk? I want to be near you guys,” I said.

She had a mean smile on her face, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye—kind of an “I can’t wait to tell my friends this . . .” expression.

She said, “We’re over there. It’s too crowded already. I’m going to the canoes.”

“Well, wait for me, I’m going to change and go down, too.”

I ran over to my bunk to get my bathing suit, but she was already gone.

I put on my orange one-piece and an oversize white T-shirt and walked down to the lake.

Carl saw me first.

“Oh shit. It’s Moron. Let’s drown her. Hey Moron. Why’d you come here? Nobody likes you. It’s going to be the worst three days of your life.”

“Shut up!” I yelled.

Carl’s brother Mike jumped in.

“Don’t tell my brother to shut up! You shut up, Moron! MORON!!!!”

I tried to ignore them and got into a boat by myself. Not really knowing how to row, I pushed back from the dock a few feet and panicked. I must have only been about five feet away, but it might as well have been miles because I couldn’t move the boat back at all. I was slowly drifting out onto the lake. I envisioned myself washed ashore on a deserted island, far away from the taunts and flying pine cones, meeting Christopher Atkins there in our own
Blue Lagoon
, eating bananas and wearing a loincloth and having sex for the very first time . . .

Carl and Mike started to miss me, I guess, because they started to scream at me.

“MORON! MORON! Just paddle it back. Don’t hog the boat, pig! Boat Hog!! MORON!!!”

Lotte, Connie, and Ronny joined them on the dock. They all stared yelling. “MORON!!! God! Can’t you do anything? Just paddle it back. We want to go, too. MORON!!! Stupid. C’mon. Hurry!”

I was trying to make the oars move in the water, but they were too heavy. The boat started to drift back toward the dock, but not nearly as quickly as they would have liked, so they all screamed louder.

“MORON! Can’t do anything! Why don’t you just go home? You are ruining it for everybody. MORON! WE hate YOU!!! MORON!!!! GO HOME! GO HOME GO HOME GO HOME!!!!”