Forever Eighties

If I were forced to pick a favorite record of The Smiths, it’d probably be Reel Around The Fountain, the penultimate track on “Hatful Of Hollow.”  (Ordinarily I would put the quotation marks around the song and not the album, but the cover of Hatful Of Hollow just so happens to state its name in quotes and so I thought it necessary to refrain from putting quotes around “Reel Around The Fountain.”  I can’t help myself…I’m a converse anti-symmetrist.  It’s like a religion with me.)  The guitar is so feathery and yet so incisive, the bass alternately scrappy and pretty, always confident.  And, of course, Morrissey carries the melody with panache.  I like the drumming, too, sputtering and a bit nervous.  Great song.

When I was a teenager in the 80s listening to vinyl, I preferred the version of “Reel Around The Fountain” that was featured as the first track on The Smiths’ self-titled album.  Whereas the version of the song on Hatful Of Hollow was basically a live performance (it was a John Peel session), the version that opened the eponymous LP was a relatively slick studio production.  Morrissey’s voice is given echoey treatments, there are subtle but fancy sprinklings of piano, the tempo is a bit slower (and a lot more even) than on the Hatful Of Hollow recording…the studio recording on The Smiths is definitely the more professional and more adult-sounding version of the song.  I suppose that as a teen I craved the measured gait and smooth gloss of adulthood, but now that I’m middle-aged I get a kick out of the rawer, more energetic, more frantic sounds of youth.

I discovered The Smiths when I was 14, and it was a pretty big deal.  Like all adolescents, or at least most of them, I yearned to be cool, and I imagined that, since I felt so uncool, coolness must feel the opposite of how I felt.  And I was a depressive youth, given to bouts of melancholy and fits of outright despair, and so I thought that the cool people must be the happy, self-assured, easygoing, satisfied-with-life people and that the whiny malcontents such as myself were all a bunch of losers and write-offs.  But my worldview changed with The Smiths, who were so clearly cool and yet so unabashedly mopey and pathetic.  The Smiths taught me that I needn’t fear an inability to be content, that happiness was no prerequisite for coolness.  This world may not be right for me, but I could be just what this world needed, the coolest thing in town.  I could be the bee's knees, all the bees' knees.

The Smiths are a particular favorite of mine, but I could go on and on about the 80s rock and pop that helped to forge my identity and values and attitudes about life (REM, The Jesus And Mary Chain, etc.).  I just love 80s rock!  I wish I could go back, like Marty McFly went back from the 80s to the 50s (well, not exactly like that...I'd want to get younger as I traveled backwards in time).  I realize that the 80s weren’t really the best decade for rock ’n’ roll (that distinction would go to the 70s or the 60s, I guess) and I realize that an hour of Mozart or Schubert or Beethoven is worth more than all of rock ’n’ roll put together but, still, 80s rock is the music that has most touched my heart.

Were you born between 1960 and 1975?  If so, I would like to hear your story about how 80s rock inspired/moved/influenced you.  Please post your memoir as a comment to this blog entry.  And don’t be shy or embarrassed.  This is a no-shame zone.  Did you think that Bono and Sting were cool?  Big deal.  Who didn’t?  I doesn’t make any sense now, of course, but those were weird times.  Next to Ronald Reagan everyone seemed cool, and people with one-word names seemed extra cool.  Did you pop your collar and wear epaulettes like Simon Le Bon did?  Don’t worry about it!  Go ahead and post pics if you want.  It’s all good.  It’s all, like, totally good.

A Pirate For Halloween

When I was a child I – like most youngsters, I presume, at least most of the boys – was heavy, heavy into pirates.  Of course I don’t mean the nerds who bootleg media and software, nor do I mean today’s malnourished, seafaring Somali teenagers with flip-flops and automatic weapons and unruly teeth.  I’m talkin’ ‘bout old-school, buccaneer-style, walk-the-plank motherfuckers, the ones with sabers and parrots and striped sox and plumes in their hats, reeling to accordion music and reeking of rum and tobacco.  Aarrrgh!  God bless those guys.  You gotta love ‘em.  They didn’t fit in, so they flipped civilization the bird and they charted their own courses and they took what they wanted…louis d’or, bitches, and lots of ‘em!  It’s all about the napoleons.  Therefore I was a pirate for Halloween almost every year as a grade schooler.  Pirates were awesome.  Who wouldn’t want to be a pirate?

I was also a bookish kid and so I sought out pirate lore, and it wasn’t long before I read that the worst thing that you can call a pirate is “scurvy dog.”  It’s the sharpest insult there is, like when an Arab throws his shoe at you or when a foppish white guy slaps you in the face with his dandy glove.  You call a pirate a scurvy dog and you best be prepared to throw down cuz that shit don’t play.

Then I read that scurvy was caused by a lack of vitamin C and that successful pirates always stocked lemons on their ships so that they could regularly suck their lemons to prevent scurvy.  So I took to sucking lemons ‘cause I thought that doing so would make me cool like a pirate.

It wasn’t long before I acquired quite a taste for my sour li’l pick-me-ups, and I must’ve sucked a couple thousand lemons before I hit middle school.  That was about the time that I discovered the culture’s biases against lemon-sucking.  To tell someone to go suck a lemon was to tell someone to fuck off and go do something silly or unproductive, such as fly a kite or jump in the lake.  And to say that someone had sucked a lemon was to say that someone had woken up on the wrong side of the bed, so to speak, and was being surly or unreasonably disapproving.  When I learned of these slanderous, hateful metaphors, I was devastated.  I suddenly found myself the object of universal scorn, a pariah to be despised and ridiculed.

My shock soon gave way to anger.  Who were these people to judge me?  If they didn’t like juicy, tasty lemons, then fine…but that was no reason to demonize me.  I decided to keep on sucking lemons and to do so with a defiantly conspicuous lack of shame.  I’d suck extra lemons, what the hell…just to spite everyone.  Fuck all y’all!  It’s lemon season, dickheads, so get used to it.

But that didn’t last long.  The peer pressure was too much (kids can be so cruel!), and I soon realized that I couldn’t keep on sucking lemons, at least not openly.  It just wasn’t going to work.  The stigma was too much.  I had enough problems, and I didn’t need to be courting extra trouble.  It just wasn’t politic.

I was caught between Scylla and Charybdis.  Society wouldn’t tolerate me as a brazen lemon-sucker; on the other hand, I was a very social youth and so it was much too inconvenient (not to mention humiliating) for me to always be hiding, sucking my lemons in private.  And so I coped by squeezing lemon juice into all of my foods and beverages.  It was amazing how the same so-called friends who would have savaged me for sucking a lemon would not bat an eye as I squeezed that same lemon’s juice into everything I ate and drank.  Colas, tomato juice, soups, mayonnaise-based salads…you name it, I’d squeeze lemon juice into it.  Indeed, at any given moment one could likely find a couple of lemons in my backpack.  And thirty years later, this is still how I live my life. 

Then the other day I was at the Safeway getting canned soups and lemons.  I had my soups, a chicken-noodles and a beef-barley, and I went to get my lemons.  As I entered the produce section, some phlegm suddenly started tickling my throat and I felt an overwhelming urge to cough.  Yes, mother, I did think to cover my mouth…but I had a can of soup in each hand and my instinct was to not swing a pound of metal-encased soup at my face.  In the next split second, half of my mind tried to suppress the cough and the other half of my mind scrambled for a plan B (such as to cough into my shoulder or arm), but before I could do anything the cough’s spasm overcame me.  It was a mighty expectoration, the kind that wrenches one’s neck muscles and makes one feel as though one’s torso is imploding.  After a brief moment of paralysis, I looked up and caught a glimpse of my discharge mid-arc, a great globule of phlegm shimmering in the fluorescent light.  I tried to follow its trajectory as it landed (I believe) somewhere among the stacked cucumbers.

I quickly regained some modicum of composure, and I went to the cucumbers to try to locate the phlegm.  My plan was to wipe it on my pant leg, or maybe I’d fetch one of those plastic bags (the ones on perforated rolls throughout the produce section) and wipe it on that.  But I couldn’t see anything anywhere…not a gob or a glob or a blob to be found.  I set my soups down on the floor and I started handling the cucumbers.  I figured the phlegm had to be on the side of one of the cucumbers stacked toward the top, or maybe it had slid down from the side of the cucumber and settled onto its underside or maybe onto the top of the next cucumber below.  I began lifting cucumbers, running my palm over shaft after mottled green shaft, feeling each fruit for moisture as I visually inspected the space where that particular cucumber had lain, but to no avail.  Had the phlegm simply kept on sliding on down to the bottom of the pile?  Then I started to get nervous.  I decided to give up.  I looked too weird stroking these cucumbers, and I wasn’t prepared to explain myself if someone were to inquire into my business.

And that’s when I had my epiphany.  It dawned on me that I was a total loser.  I lived an adventureless life, a life devoid of all thrills and derring-do.  I hadn’t swashbuckled in decades, I’d never grabbed fortune by its throat…my life was nothing like a pirate’s life!  And it wasn’t enough to say that I was merely boring; it was worse than that.  I was lower than humdrum.  I didn’t even enjoy the humble dignity of being normal.  I couldn’t even manage to make it out of the goddamn grocery store without grubbing around for my lost ball of snot.  All of my claims to manhood were tenuous at best.  It was time to furl my Jolly Roger and raise my white flag.  I was all washed-up, beached without treasure or pride or sense on a shore where I made even the landlubbers look cool.  I had to face it: I didn’t have what it takes to be like a pirate.

I suppose that my realization that I was a huge loser was enlightening, but I didn’t immediately know what to do with this knowledge, and so I just left.  It wasn’t until I got home that I realized that I’d forgotten the soups and the lemons.

That night was a night of profound soul-searching, and I resolved to not let my demoralizing epiphany rob my life of meaning.  It was too late for me, yes, but I could still help the younger generations hang on to their glorious dreams.  You know what they say: those who can’t do teach.  So I decided that this was to be my destiny.  I was to be a teacher, and my terrible awakening at the supermarket had been my ordainment.  If I couldn’t be cool like a pirate, at least I could redeem myself by helping young people keep hope alive.  And with Halloween coming up so soon, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect!

You see, one of the few foods that I eat without lemon juice is pistachio nuts.  I eat them while I watch TV, and I must go through a couple hundred bags of them each year.  I get ‘em cheap at Trader Joe’s…I always mix a bag of the salted with a bag of the unsalted…lightly salted is the way to go.  Anyway, in every bag of pistachios there are always a few nuts whose shells are completely sealed.  Without a nutcracker, these nuts are virtually uncrackable.  And even if one had a nutcracker handy, one would probably end up smashing up all the pistachio meat while cracking the shell and so it just wouldn’t be worth the effort.  So these nuts are practically useless.  Well, I save these nuts.  All year long, I collect these worthless nuts and then, on Halloween, I give them out to all the little bastards who come around begging for freebies…teach those brats to come bothering me and threatening me just because they like candy and they’ve got some cheap, ill-fitting Spiderman costumes.  Go home and do some homework, you irritating little fuckers!  Who am I, Willy Wonka?  It’s called a liquor store…they sell candy bars there.

So today at lunchtime I’m gonna go to the bank and get some crisp $10 bills.  Then, after work, I’m gonna go to Trader Joe’s and buy some of those giant, footlong Toblerone bars.  When the trick-or-treaters come around tonight, I’ll be ready for them.  Any kid I see who's dressed like a pirate gets a Toblerone bar and a ten-dollar bill.  Everybody else gets to dip a meathook into my salad bowl full of frustrating pistachio nuts.

Imagine all the little faces when little Johnny, the pirate, gets a giant chocolate bar and a sawbuck and everybody else gets a handful of stupid nuts.  Ha!  Pirate school’s in session, kids…Lesson #1 tonight at my house.

Todd Bridges' Ghost

This dream becomes a nightmare every time.  It always unfolds as follows:

I’m in a mobile home with Dana Plato, a couple of days into a speed binge, and it’s hot.  Curtains are drawn across all of the windows, but the sunlight and the heat are pouring in just the same.  The air-conditioning unit is chugging away valiantly.  The calendar on the vertically grooved faux-wood wall paneling says it’s 1990.  We’ve been in there for days, talking and fucking and smoking cigarettes and drinking Gatorade to stay hydrated.

I feel as though Dana is my soul mate.  In the hours upon hours of conversation, punctuated with sex, we seem to have become boundlessly, inextricably intimate.  We’ve plotted crimes together, sworn secrets, and expounded on art, ethics, class, gender, race, family, God, globalism, humanism, liberalism, and pretty much everything else.  I feel as though I know every crevice of her psyche as well as I know the contours of her body, and I love everything that I’m seeing.  Dana is my world; she is everything to me.  And she seems totally into me, too.

She’s in the bathroom, peeing.  I’m naked, on my stomach, lying breadthwise on the bed.  She comes out of the bathroom, naked, and she jumps onto the bed.  Then she settles into the bed, lengthwise on her back, atop a crumpled sheet, with her calves resting on my back and buttocks.

“I wanna try umami,” I tell her.  “You ever tasted umami?”

“What’s that?” asks Dana.

“It’s some new flavor.  Scientists in Japan discovered it.  It’s the fifth flavor, I guess.  It’s supposed to be delicious,” I explain.

“The ‘fifth flavor’?” she asks.  “Aren’t there, like, a billion flavors already?”

“Supposedly there are basic flavors – elementary flavors, like how blue and red and yellow are primary colors.  There were four basics: sweet and salty and sour and…something else.  But now they’ve discovered a fifth basic flavor: umami.  They say it’s the tastiest flavor.  I think umami means 'deliciousness' in Japanese."

“That sounds like bullshit,” protests Dana.  “Deliciousness isn’t a flavor.  At least, it’s not a particular flavor.  It’s any flavor that’s found extremely pleasing.  It’s not even the flavor, really; it’s the pleasingness, the pleasingousity.”

“Yeah,” I agree, “it does sound like bullshit.  I still want to try it, though.”

I roll out from underneath Dana’s legs, and I rest my head on her belly and I stare up at the broken ceiling fan.  My gaze is broken when Dana flops her hand and arm down past my face and onto my chest.  On her inner forearm, near the wrist, are two bright red bug bites, about an inch and a half apart: the mark of the bedbug.  With my left pinky finger, I trace figure eights (figures eight?) around her bug bites.  My figure eight is an infinity symbol – two zeros, one slightly bigger than the other, joined together in an eternal embrace.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” Dana asks.

“Hell, yeah.”

“No, I mean really pretty.”

“Hellz-ya, baby.  You Playboy-bunny pretty.”

“Featured model,” she concedes.

“How could you not know you’re pretty?” I ask.  “You were Diff'rent Strokes’ cheesecake.  You must be in the top one percent of people on the planet who are known for being good-looking.  Remember that one episode when you were in leotards and leg warmers?  Who wasn’t jerking off to that episode?”

“I never felt pretty on Diff'rent Strokes.  I wanted to look like Farah Fawcett, but my cheeks were too full and I was too freckly and pale.  I looked more like Melissa Gilbert.”

“Who’s that?”

“The daughter on Little House On The Prairie.”

“The blind one?”

“No, the other one.  Half-pint.”

“Oh.  But she’s hot, though.  I mean, she got hot, later, when she got older.  She’s hot now, not when she was Half-pint.  I saw her recently on a magazine cover…she’s super attractive.”

I think about how good-looking the actress who played Half-pint is.  The blind sister was really hot, too.  Even the mom on that show was sexy.

“Listen, Dana,” I say, “I’ve only known you for a few days, but I’m perfectly qualified to verify that you are absolutely gorgeous.  You're exquisite.  If Lanny couldn’t see that then he was an idiot.”

“Todd always used to tell me that I was the cutest girl on TV,” Dana tells me.  “I wonder what might have been, what could have been, had I fallen in love with Todd instead of with Lanny?” she asks, sighing wistfully.

Dana’s sigh for Todd Bridges unleashes a monstrous ghost, a ghost from Dana’s past who knows her as I have never known her and whom she understands as she will never understand me, a ghost who will vanquish me and reclaim its place by her side.  Everything – the walls, the bed, the floor, the ceiling, everything – shatters and crumbles and swirls up in great waves of soot that crash down upon me, propelling me downward into the abyss that’s below me, a black oblivion as vague and as vast as Hades.  When I land I will die, and as I fall I am dying.

And then I wake up, palpitating and disoriented and a little bit sweatier and more traumatized than I was when I fell asleep.  I lie there, growing ever colder and more brokenhearted, and I ponder my aloneness and the bitter taste that life has left in my mouth.  And then I remember: bitterness.  The fourth flavor is bitterness!  There is no umami, and the fourth flavor is bitterness.

I don’t know what this dream means.  It doesn’t mean that I’m a racist, if that’s what you’re thinking.  True, there is some black imagery in my dream, but the fact that Todd Bridges happens to be African American has nothing to do with it.  Bridges and his ghost could be Eskimos, Swedes, Aborigines, Basques, whatever the fuck…I don’t care.  I just don’t want Dana thinking about them while we’re all naked in bed together, that’s all.  The dude’s ghost’s race is totally irrelevant.  The whole thing is ridiculous.  Nothing’s really haunting me anyway.  I don’t even think Todd Bridges is dead yet.

Once A Tough Guy, Always A Tough Guy

My youth and early adulthood were badass, no complaints, but middle age hit me hard.  It was as though my mojo glands stopped functioning the day I turned 40, and suddenly I was not a confident man.  I became less than a man, a hint of a man.  You might say that I became a pusillanimous mouse whose greatest ambition in life was to avoid conflicts and confrontations wherever possible.  But then about six months ago I discovered Ageless Male, a testosterone supplement that I saw being peddled on TV.  I was skeptical the first few times that I saw the commercial, but I eventually called.  And it changed my life.  You see, I don’t take any shit anymore…not from you, not from anyone.  I will fucking destroy you.

You know that old maxim, “all for one, and one for all”?  Well, I got a new motto: “me first, so fuck you and everybody else.”  I yield for no man.  That’s my new thing.

Every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up, even before I do my piss/smoke/shit routine, is take my supplement.  I pound it down with a Red Bull.  It’s a great way to start the day.  https://www.tryagelessmale.com/  True, there are some side effects.  I think these pills are making my hair fall out and I have an erection almost all the time (definitely not the pleasant experience one might expect it to be!), but it’s all worth it.  I’d rather be a bald man with an inappropriate boner than a comfortably flaccid and handsomely coiffed shadow of a man.

Six months ago, my morning commutes were ordeals.  Taking AC Transit isn’t an option (gross!) and riding my motorcycle hurts my back, and so I BART to work.  At the ticket machines and at the turnstiles I’d wait as everyone and his brother cut into the line, shoving their way past me as if I didn’t exist.  When I’d finally make it to the train I’d cringe and shrink, contorting my body to squeeze into tight spaces so as to signal to onlookers that I was making an effort to create room for others on the crowded train car.  I struggled to avoid making eye contact with my fellow travelers because I didn’t want to invade anyone’s space psychically or physically.  I walked on eggshells.  Meek deference drove me, and I felt it was my duty as a citizen to be careful to stay out of everyone’s way.

But now…now I stand my ground, tall and proud.  Well, actually, I sit whenever possible.  I like to try to take up two seats on the train, one for me and one for my bag, and sometimes I laugh out loud at the folks who are standing while I’m occupying two spaces.  Sheep!  I like to stare at everyone, especially after they’ve caught me staring at them, and I think, “The only things between this and my utter dominion over all of you people are (a) the scruples that I’m choosing to keep and (b) my lack of a handgun.  Not even an automatic…just a hundred-dollar twenty-two and, like, one or two bullets.  It would take so little to crush you, to pluck you as a weed…Il Vermicello, the gardener, pullin’ weaklings like weeds…time to clean up this lawn, you sons o’ bitches.  You think you’re so great.  You’re nothin’!"

And my morning crucibles weren’t over once I’d reached my office building, either; oh, no, there was always that goddamn elevator.  I’d get into the elevator and then, as the elevator doors were taking forever to close, some straggler would invariably gesture urgently for me to hold the door.  Of course, politeness compelled me to oblige.  I swear, some of those fuckers would see me reaching toward the “open door” button and then they’d stop hurrying.  They’d smile thankfully as they lazily waltzed their ass on board, as if we’d just shared some wonderful joke together.  “Oh, what a happy and amusing coincidence that you were able to delay the elevator for me just when I needed someone to do so; isn’t it funny how fate takes its turns?  What a special moment this is that we're sharing.”  I’d silently endure the hatred that swelled and burned in my chest, and I’d die a little bit in that elevator each morning.

But now, just as soon as I’ve boarded the elevator and pressed my floor button, I immediately start hitting the “close door” button.   I don’t give a shit who sees me trying to close the door as they’re trying to catch the elevator.  If I win, great.  If I lose, my argument is (a) why should I give a shit whether anyone else makes it to work on time? and (b) if you’d’ve been Plastic Man then you could’ve been pushing the “open door” button all the while and you wouldn't hear me whining about it.  And if the person is clearly less powerful than me, I suggest that we settle our dispute with fisticuffs.  That usually shuts ‘em up.

Ageless Male has made my commutes much easier, but my new ‘tude is causing me some difficulties at the workplace.  Interpersonal friction on a BART car is one thing, but friction at the office can be problematic.  When one works as a member of a team, one must be diplomatic.  Unfortunately, the testosterone coursing through my bloodstream is making it hard for me to relate to my colleagues in a collegial manner.

For example, yesterday I was in the kitchen at work waiting for my noodles, and my co-worker was going at it hard with the lunchtime chitchat.  I bobbed impatiently by the microwave and nodded while he blathered on about the weather and sports and how the weather was affecting sports.  Finally, the microwave bell rang.  I got my noodles and tried to wrap up the conversation so I could get back to my office and watch porn.  “All right, then, “ I said, “I gotta get this status report in.  Take it sleazy.”  And this guy chuckles knowingly and says, “Hey, I’ll take it any way I can get it.”  And he said it so smugly, as if he might know of ways of taking it that were even sleazier than I could imagine, like he was more worldly than me or something.  He was definitely trying to one-up me.  His punk attitude enraged me.  I wanted to take the handle of my plastic spoon and start stabbing him in the neck.  Stab, stab!  “How’s this, motherfucker?  Huh!?  Will you take it like this?  Do you like it like this?"

So there are still some wrinkles to iron out but, still, these supplements have given me a whole new lease on life.  Honestly, these hormone treatments have had a significant impact on both my physical and mental health.  And I figure that the best way for me to adjust – physiologically, emotionally, and spiritually – to the higher testosterone levels is to introduce even more testosterone into my system so that my body can develop a higher tolerance.  So a couple of weeks ago I increased my dosage.  Now I wash down an additional supplement with another Red Bull each night.  I take it right before bedtime, and then I teach that erection of mine a lesson or two before I go to sleep.

Something Wrong With This Trajectory

I suppose the people whom I knew as a child found my real name to be somehow cumbersome…too many syllables perhaps, or maybe it sounded too formal.  In any case, most everyone called me Tom when I was a youngster.  And my elder brother, 13 months my senior but slightly shorter than me, was nicknamed Ted.

In 1980, when I was ten, my maternal grandmother finally managed to emigrate from Vietnam to America (she’d been trying to do so for years, since before the Vietnam War – or rather the American War, as it was and is known in Vietnam – had ended).  Both my brother and I had known our maternal grandmother as babies, but we had no recollections of her and it was as if we were meeting her for the first time when she flew into Los Angeles that summer.  (Embarrassingly, I can’t even remember the woman’s name…chances are that her name consisted of three words and that the first word, which would be the family name, was Nguyen.)

Vietnamese Grandma was ancient as fuck and she looked a lot like a tree stump, and she died a few months later (of some sort of cancer, I think).  I’d only visited with her a handful of times before she disappeared entirely into her hospice, and since we had always needed an interpreter to communicate (she spoke no English; I spoke no Vietnamese) we had never gotten to know each other much at all.

Vietnamese Grandma wasn’t just Vietnamese, she was also a Buddhist, and so the funeral was a Buddhist funeral conducted in Vietnamese.  Vietnamese Grandma had had a whole boatload of children, most of whom had been able to leave Vietnam, and many of them were there in attendance with their families, and so it was a pretty big crowd (though not a particularly Buddhist one).  My brother and I were among the very few present who weren’t 100% Vietnamese.

Now, apparently, part of a Buddhist ceremony for the departed involves the priest singing out a list of the names of all those gathered – presumably the deceased’s family and friends, the people who are going to mourn and remember her.  And it just so happens that tom is the Vietnamese word for “big shrimp” and that Ted is extremely homonymic with the Vietnamese word for “little shrimp.”  When the priest read, “So-and-so will be missed by her beloved friends and relatives, including…Ted, Tom…” a wave of titters (including some from my mom) swept through the congregation.

I didn’t speak or understand a lick of Vietnamese, and so I wasn’t completely partaking of this mirth when it occurred.  I understood that folks were laughing, of course, and I even felt a vague sensation of being implicated in the laughter, but I wasn’t privy to the joke.  I hadn’t even noticed that my name and my brother’s name had been mentioned among all of the Vietnamese names.

After the fact, my mother explained to me what had happened, and I remember being amused that Ted had played the little shrimp to my big shrimp (it seemed so appropriate…Ted was, after all, perceptibly shorter than me and he had always been such a sniveling little bitch, a total weakling who thought he was hot shit just because he got good grades and because he was White Grandma’s favorite and because he got more allowance than me simply because he was older…what a dick!).  But although I didn’t understand the crowd’s pleasure as it was happening, I’ve always been delighted to have been the source of that pleasure.  Why wouldn’t I want to bring some levity to what might otherwise be a strictly somber affair?

I mention all of this because I’ve been thinking a lot about race in recent weeks.  I suppose the big story has been the acquittal of George Zimmerman re his killing of Trayvon Martin, the demonstrations in protest of that verdict, and the federal government’s reaction to the public’s response.  (Btw, I thought last week’s unannounced speech to the White House correspondents was President Obama at his best, sober but passionate, down-to-earth but eloquent…I wonder if/how his message might have differed were he a descendent of slaves.)  But the story that’s been capturing my imagination even more lately, perhaps because I’m Amerasian, has been KTVU’s mishandling of the story of the Asiana Flight 214 crash and the aftermath of that mishandling.

You’re probably aware of the plane crash a couple of weeks ago at SFO (why the heck is San Francisco’s int’l airport called "SFO" when "SFX" would sound so much cooler?).  A flight from Asia, maybe Korea, came in flying too low and too slowly and therefore hit some embankment that separated the bay from the runway.  Some people died (although a surprisingly and encouragingly high percentage of the 300+ aboard survived, many unscathed).  The crash made national news and was quite a sensation locally.  Everyone believed (and, I think, still do believe) that pilot error was involved, but for the first day or two none of the news agencies knew the pilots’ and crew members’ names, let alone whether authorities had gleaned any information from them.

Then KTVU purported to break the Asiana pilots’ names.  But all of the names were joke names, such as Ho Lee Fuk and Sum Ting Wong and Wi Tu Lo.  KTVU printed the names out on the screen for the viewer to see, and the anchorperson read the names aloud.  I think Bang Din Ow was one of them (it struck me because Din sounded more Arabic than Asian and didn’t sound enough like “then” and because Ow didn’t look particularly Asian...although I've since learned that Ow is a variant spelling of Ou, which is a fairly common Asian surname).  Within seconds of the anchorperson’s reading of the names it was apparent that the names must have been gag names and, of course, they were.

There was immediate public outcry.  I didn’t have time to read or watch the news in the next few days, but I think that KTVU’s explanation, which everyone accepted as truthful, was as follows: (1) some intern, presumably with unprofessional intentions, generated the names and passed them on to a KTVU supervisor, (2) the supervisor fact-checked the names with an official federal aviation bureau of some sort, (3) the federal aviation bureau, whether due to negligence or to mischief, confirmed the names as accurate, (4) the supervisor passed the names off to the news department’s line staff, who added the names to the newscast’s graphics and teleprompter, and (5) it was only after the anchorperson read the names aloud during the live broadcast that the gaffe was discovered.

In any case, the intern was promptly let go, as were three of the news departments’ senior producers.  I’m not going to apologize here for the intern (what a jerk…thousands of people were anxiously waiting to find out what had happened to their dead and injured loved ones…not cool, dude), but I think that the firing of the producers was something of a small tragedy.

As anyone who’s ever worked in a face-paced environment knows, professionals must rely on procedures (and the other people in positions responsible for implementing those procedures) to prevent and rectify errors.  Perhaps better managers would have identified a need for some extra layer of quality control, but this was an honest mistake and I don’t think that multiple heads toward the top of KTVU’s totem pole needed to roll.  Indeed, I think that these senior producers’ careers were sacrificed at the altar of political correctness.

I guess the specific principle that I’m railing against here is the principle that a captain is necessarily to blame whenever something bad happens on his or her watch.  But there’s another principle against which I’d be willing to rail – namely, that it’s necessarily wrong to make a mockery of foreign-sounding names.

Honestly…think of that Northern Alliance warlord named Mullah Abdullah.  Are you gonna tell me that that’s not funny?  And how about that Egyptian general, El-Sissi?  C’mon!

Let me tell you one more story.  It was the late 80s, it was the first few minutes of the first day of Astronomy 101, and I was not happy to be there (I’ve always suspected science to be bullshit…I think I was taking astronomy only in order to avoid having to take physics).  The professor was looking down at the class roster on his lectern, taking the first day’s roll, and he had gotten to the Ds: “Carla Dang?  [“Here.”]  Jason Dang?  [“Here.”]  Philip Dang?  [“Here.”]”  The professor looked up from his roster, deadpan as a motherfucker, and said, “It seems like the whole Dang family’s here.”

I thought it was absolutely hilarious.  It literally filled my day, hitherto wearisome, with joy.  25 years later, it sometimes still makes me laugh.  And I worry that, today, an astronomy professor could never make that joke or other similarly funny jokes.  And this makes me sad.  And I’ll tell you something else: it’s terrible that people suffer and die in plane crashes, but “Sum Ting Wong” is still pretty funny (the other phony pilot names weren’t nearly as good).

Making fun of foreign-sounding words and names has enriched my life on numerous occasions and it is part of my heritage and culture.  It may not be sophisticated, but it’s not necessarily overly mean-spirited and I think that people tend to get way too bent out of shape about it.  Can we fully appreciate diversity if we aren't able to make fun of diversity?

The Lord Is My Escort

You’d think that if all you wanted your escort to do was to give you a hand job while dressed in a nun’s habit (clean and provided by you) while reading Psalm 23 and other verses (from a large-print Bible provided by you) then she’d charge you less than the usual rate.  After all, it’s just a hand job.  How gross could it be?  I don’t want to wear a condom but she can always wear gloves…I got a box of gloves.

But, no, it costs extra, a lot extra!  Apparently, it’s called “the Sunday-school experience.”  Personally, I think it’s bullshit.  I think they just gave it a name so that they can charge more.  I’ve been to Sunday school…nobody ever gave me a hand job.  Granted, I’m not Catholic.

Playing My Race Card

I work at a nonprofit and so I’m undoubtedly a fundamentally good person.  My fundamental goodness (and, I’ll be honest, others’ recognition of that goodness) gives me some considerable satisfaction but, still, I feel as though I’m not reaching my full potential, career-wise.

These days, the typical employer (like society generally, I hope) sincerely appreciates diversity, particularly racial diversity, as a value to be embraced, and this is especially true in the nonprofit sector.  As a person of color, I’ve never fully exploited this premium on diversity, which I could be using tactically to more fully impose my will at the workplace and/or to stay out of trouble with all of my various bosses and rivals.

I’m an American, living in America (Oakland, CA…hellz-ya!) and born in Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and a Caucasian, American father.  (I didn’t want to insert a comma into “Caucasian American” but I suspected that those words placed together so closely as one term might, illogically but understandably, seem redundant, and my purpose was to present my dad’s citizenship and his whiteness as discrete criteria.)  This makes me Amerasian.  I suppose that one could accurately describe me as being hapa or as being Asian American, but “Amerasian” is definitely the most specifically accurate term for what I am.  There aren’t that many of us, although there are certainly enough of us that we’re a thing.

So I’ve decided to start actively using my status as a racial minority to my advantage.  I could be using my ethnicity to get me out of all kinds of jams.  For example, say that white lady from Accounting comes at me with some problem:

Finance Manager:  your Regional Center invoice doesn’t match your monthly billing reports.

Me:  oops.  My moms was Vietnamese, so, you know, what do you expect?

Finance Manager:  I thought the stereotype was that Asian Americans were good at math.

Me:  what makes you assume that my mother’s an Asian American?

Finance Manager:  I was thinking that you were an Asian American.

Me:  actually, I’m Amerasian.

Finance Manager:  what’s the difference?

Me:  maybe HR can explain it.  Let’s go see.

Finance Manager:  nevermind; just get your reports right next month.

Me:  will do.

Or say that I’m at an all-staff meeting…there’s one last slice of pizza, and the black guy from Human Resources and I are both reaching for it:

HR guy:  score!  Last piece.  Sorry, dude.

Me:  what are you sorry about?  There’s no dog on this pizza anyway, right?

HR guy:  what?

Me:  there’s no dog on the pizza.  That’s what Amerasians like to eat, right?  Dog.

HR guy:  I never said that.

Me:  you didn’t have to.  What if it were anchovy pizza?  Would that be okay, or would the anchovies have to have their little heads still on ‘em?  What if this pizza were made out of rice flour and soy sauce and had fish heads all over it?  Would that be okay?  Could I have it then?

HR guy:  dude, just take the fuckin’ pizza.

Me:  will do.

This could be a real game changer for me.  If I play my cards right, this could take me to the next level of my professional development.  Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be on the lookout for business situations in which I might be able to leverage my racial heritage.