Gestas and Dismas

FICTION

by Daniel Choe

          After midnight, the patrol called my dad and reported a sighting on the roof of his restaurant. Dad asked if I wanted to come, to hurry up if I did. I was afraid, but I had to go. On my back from the rear of our minivan, I looked up at the black sky. My right hand became a running marionette, the index and ring fingers twiddling, acting as pumping legs, vaulting him over dangerous obstacles outside. A series of pointed trees, the burning halo of a streetlight, stars. The inertia created by Dad’s hurried turns pulled at my limbs. I didn’t fight it and rolled into the sides of the van, pausing the marionette until I returned to my back. On road trips when I was younger, I’d stand balanced in the rear of that same van, arms out and knees bent, negotiating with the inertia to which I now surrendered.
         When we arrived, he said, “Stay here,” and descended out of the van to speak with the guard. A dumpster had been shifted from its usual position and now sat beneath one of those roof ladders with only its uppermost rungs. There was an odor you knew well if your family ran a restaurant where food was fried in oil. Each night he came home with the smell of frying in his clothing and hair. I too smelled after spending part of my day there, or even after a quick dine-in at a fast food restaurant. But it was nothing like the smell of his daily sixteen-hour shifts. The sixteen-hour smell rose from the clothing hamper in his bathroom and swam down the hall into my bedroom to greet me each morning. Since we’d parked in the rear, there was also a hint of chlorine and an undercurrent of refuse. The chlorine smell was typical in large kitchen operations and reminiscent of indoor swimming pools. It was a warm smell, paired with the steam released by industrial dishwashers that heated water to such a temperature to render detergent unnecessary. The heat killed it all.
         Dad paused a moment before ascending the dumpster and ladder. The guard yelled, “We should wait for the police!” Dad was gone for several minutes and then descended the ladder and hopped off the dumpster. He dusted off his hands, staring up at the roof and recounting how he’d found little more than verminous chittering and shadows. He seemed to freeze just like that with his hands pressed together for what felt like ten minutes before the police came and took their reports. The sheen of sweat on his face spoke for the hot night air.
         The next morning, I patrolled outside the building, kicking pebbles to watch their clattering trajectories. One pebble left a gray mark on the powder blue exterior of the building. That blue was the color of the world in the ’50s, the color of Happy Days. Beside the pebble’s smudge, atop the trunk of a classic car jutting out the restaurant wall, was a faint boot print. Three such cars were embedded in that street-facing wall. I wondered how they were installed. As a consolation, I would dart in and out of the entrance, envisioning where the absent seats, windshield, and engine would have emerged into the interior of the building, running my hand over those parts of the wall. Years later, the building housed a pizza buffet, and they painted it a dark forest green. Of course, halves of classic cars didn’t go with pizza and if they were still there, I bet people would write and stick all kinds of stuff onto them anyway. It must have been those cars that attracted Dad to this building early on. Either that or his obsession with Ray Kroc. He’d often talk about what an accomplishment it was to franchise all those McDonald’s restaurants back then. On Sundays, his only day off, I’d see him reading Kroc’s Grinding It Out, which they’d translated into his language.
         In the summer, I often spent weekdays there. Dad had hired a number of white teenagers to staff his illusion of the 1950s. Those teenaged white kids would smile at me, but I heard them whispering things like, “He should stop doing American food and just cook his own food.” I wonder how many other people have these child-of-expat restaurant memories. We could form an association where we’d recognize in each other our unusual positions of kid authority, translating many of our parents’ wishes and instructions to the white teens. Usually, when a child is said to have grown up too fast, the parent is at fault. It was hard to imagine calling Dad’s immigration a fault. Innumerable children have come to grow this way, acting as protectors of their own protectors. Dad might have stolen a component of my childhood, but it had been a sacrifice for the family, he would say. Always sacrifice. The confusion in their white teenage eyes was thus: how is it that a child acted as middleman for their employer? A Lord Fauntleroy problem. Despite his attempts, an observant customer could still spot an Asian costumed as a ’50s diner chef, adding malt to blended milkshakes, frying burgers and fries. I was already protecting him, absorbing blows dealt in a language he had not mastered. They huddled outside making jokes about sushi burgers or Kung Pao fries, and I’d flee into a restroom stall, spending time categorizing the frequencies and types of graffiti. Nothing specifically geared against Asians. Just the usual misogyny, phone numbers, misanthropy, and penises. There was a lovely, unfiltered quality to restroom graffiti.
         Josh was my only friend amongst the staff. He was a freshman at the Catholic high school down the street. He would talk to me about comic books, video games, and the things I cared about. He kept a comb in his back pocket at all times, and he used it to comb his short orange hair in affectation, once every thirty minutes or so it seemed. His freckles made him look perfect for working there. Most of the employees there, being a few years older than I was, weren’t interested in talking with me, but not Josh. It had been Max though who’d broken the ice. Max had come lumbering over on break one day, his blond curls spilling from below his pointed soda jerk cap and over his bug eyes. I’d been working on some math practice and Max became obsessed with a sticker I’d affixed to the back of my calculator that read “Beware of Africanized Honeybees.” He loved that, and over time, I heard everything that went through his mind about Doc Martins, being straight-edge, and pornography. But Max only ever talked at me; Josh asked me questions and sometimes gave me a ride home at night if Dad was too busy. I didn’t have many friends, and so Dad didn’t mind. He trusted Josh.
         The effect of the killer bees wore off and Max soon grew bored of me, but Josh stuck around. He liked to talk about socialism a lot.
         “Did you know Jesus was a communist?” he asked me once.
         “Pastor Kim never told us that. He says we ran away from communists and that’s why we’re here.”
         “What, you guys are Christian? That’s stupid. The church is a capitalist puppet and so is every business.”
         “Even our restaurant?”
         He paused. “Yes, even the restaurant, but . . . don’t worry about that, you’re too young and also you’re not part of the evil West.”
         “Okay.”
         “Do you like it here? Do you think it’s good that you came here?”
         “Well, I was born in Michigan.”
         “Oh. But still, you can’t be as bad as the stupid people whose families have been here forever and forgotten what anything means.”
         Most people I met didn’t think this way about generational origin and psychology. I was young, but I’d already internalized the prime birthright of immigrants: most humans wanted to make some kind of mark, but when you picked up and went somewhere new, that urge was supercharged. It pushed your goals and ambitions perhaps higher than they were meant to go. Every success became redemptive and every failure, large or small, shameful. My first-generation report card was burned at an altar before my ancestors, who would breathe deeply of the aroma before issuing their assessments emblazoned across the sky: “It’s good that you came here” or “It’s bad that you came here.” It didn’t matter that it hadn’t been my choice.
         I felt of Josh how I felt about Rob, another older friend I’d met in our apartment complex. Rob had lent me a new, popular video game, which I’d beaten (or “solved” as he would say, something I’ve never heard again to mean finishing a game) and promptly lent to a popular neighbor kid I’d wanted to impress. The next morning, Rob knocked on my door with increasing urgency, but I was too afraid to answer because I knew what he was looking for. Frozen on the couch under a sheet, I saw him appear and disappear as he jumped up and down behind our fence, flailing his arms. When I returned the game to him after desperately clawing it back, he said, “It wasn’t yours to lend out,” and shut the door before I had a chance to respond. I wouldn’t have known what to say anyhow. He stopped talking to me after that. I didn’t want to disappoint Josh like that, so when he and Max asked if they could borrow our tape player over the weekend, I’d said, “Yes, but don’t return it this weekend because we’ll be out of town at a church retreat.” Dad heard about the tape player loan and told me on the way home that night, “Don’t tell people when we will be out of town. It’s dangerous.” Pastor Kim had fallen ill though, and the retreat was canceled. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to respond to the prowler call.
         Dad kept seeing signs of the prowler’s passage. Stress marks where the thief had managed to pry open the roof hatch. Misaligned tiles where he’d swung down from the ceiling. Smudges on the office furniture, pencils or mugs that had been displaced. Dad started bringing his earnings purse home and keeping it in a basket on top of his tallest, heaviest oak dresser. This dresser had golden drawer pulls in the shape of lion’s heads. Why didn’t he take out some kind of insurance policy or why not a late-night deposit to a bank through one of those marvelous pneumatic systems that disappeared beside the entrance to the information age. I don’t know. I feel this way whenever I’m watching a movie with someone, and they won’t stop asking why the characters don’t do this or that. I don’t know, because they chose not to. He’d never shown interest in the homeless people who’d pace the exterior of the restaurant, but after the scare, I’d often see him watching them. He’d asked me once, “Why do you think people end up homeless?” Neither of us could really say. It’s hard to say.
         The next Saturday morning, I was a layabout as usual, watched my cartoons as usual, and decided to invade my dad’s belongings. I set a chair by the dresser and stood on my toes, peering into the wicker basket. Moving the old sweater that Dad used as camouflage all these years, I saw the cash purse. It smelled like I already knew money smelled and bore the red, white, and blue logo of our bank on its pliable gray skin. Shaking with excitement, I unzipped it. Over the years I’d found condoms and pornography in that basket. These items seem linked somehow by power and mystery. They were the iceberg’s tip of some complex and submerged monstrosity I hadn’t yet isolated in my mind. But money, of course I knew what to do with it. Each night, hundreds of dollars in rubber-banded rolls appeared anew in that purse under the old sweater meant as camouflage. I carefully removed and replaced the rubber bands, taking a couple twenty-dollar bills now and then.
         I roamed strip malls and comic stores, watching adults, trying to want what they wanted. With the money, I still headed to all my usual haunts, but now I could have everything I was never able to afford. What that amounted to was a lot of candy, pizza and soda, unlimited quarters for arcade video games, and most devastatingly of all, expanded purchasing power at the local comic book store. I bought all the versions of new comics in their multitude of shiny covers, though they held the same contents. I had to have those covers. I had to have them all. A poster with Spiderman grappling with Venom above a city too. But that was the most noticeable purchase. Everything else I managed to hide away in my closet, trading cards being the easiest to conceal. I loved my Beavis and Butthead scratch and sniff trading cards. I still remember the smell of the “Buff ’N’ Stuff” card, which portrayed the two white teens topless with their arms raised. It was supposed to smell like body odor. I think of it every time I use my Pine Tar bar soap, which somehow smells exactly like that card did.
         Once, at the comic book store, there was a new item beneath the glass case that held impossibly expensive items. It was a sterling silver ring with Spiderman’s face on it priced at $300. I haggled for hours that day to bring them down just a little. I sat and whimpered in a corner as the day faded outside. The owner kept saying to me, “Nope, I can’t do it.” And he won. I handed him the $300 and he said, “I guess your parents are rich and give you a crazy allowance.” I slunk away. Of all the things I wish had built-in provenance, money seemed the most deserving, the most ill-served by the lack of provenance. It wasn’t supposed to matter where the money came from. Businesses didn’t care because they were businesses. But it was starting to matter to me. It was dark by the time I got home, and I was afraid to be caught walking in with the ring bulging in my pocket. I found a spot behind a bush on the other side of our building, and making sure no one was watching, buried it there.
         Another weekend, I was on the way home from an arcade and candy spree when I recognized Dad’s van approaching from down the street in my direction as he drove to a church function I was to have attended as well. But I’d forgotten. I ducked and scurried, skidding behind the nearest parked car, scraping my knees a bit. I peeked out from behind a tire to see Dad looking straight ahead, but I couldn’t tell if he was angry. His dispassionate face, the relief, and the shame curled me up into a fetal position behind the wheel well. I limped home and recovered by ordering a pizza and removing the evidence by the time he got home. He didn’t say anything about church, but I thought he sniffed the air on his return. I thought I saw him linger in front of the Spiderman poster a bit the next day. He started re-tallying his earnings frequently, shaking his head and frowning.
         As an adult, people often describe me as generous. I don’t feel like I am. My first memory of generosity came at this time, as I’d started giving Josh $20 here or there. The first time, we’d gone to the mall so he could pawn a copy of Green Day’s album Dookie, which he’d won in a radio call-in contest. I watched the awkward exchange that happened at these secondhand stores, where the desperation of a customer selling his belongings was transmuted into sales for the proprietor, who was of course pretending not to care a single whit. You could even be pawning yourself and the buyer would still remain inscrutable. That’s how a sale is made. It made me sad to see Josh hesitate and frown as he surrendered Dookie. On our way home, I gave him the first of what would become frequent cash gifts. It was easy to be generous with money that wasn’t mine. I didn’t feel the pain of having lost money myself. I didn’t feel the heat of sacrifice, that requisite warmth housed within the act of generosity. But other kinds of echoes and repercussions would come. I don’t know how much I’d stolen in total. Over several months, I would guess thousands, maybe three or four. Maybe I was trying to give the money away at this late stage to alleviate my guilt. Tried and true: alleviate the guilt of misappropriated earnings by giving it away, as if it mattered at that point.
         When Josh invited me to a comic book convention the following weekend, I was excited to meet his father. I found white parents to be much easier to read and interact with than Dad. But Josh’s father was quiet. I thought I’d be able to read his face better in the lighted convention hall, but it was just as hard as when I’d met him at dusk, leaning out of a dark station wagon. We moved as a group from display to display, as I bought up anything that seemed interesting in the slightest. Josh had told me to be careful about spending around his dad. Josh had started to look uncomfortable when I gave him money lately. I could tell he wanted to ask where it came from. That night, I spent hundreds of dollars buying rare issues, and first issues in hard, protective casings. Josh’s father had been standing at one table for several minutes, weighing a comic in his hand. He shifted it from right to left, seeming to check its weight. He tapped the hard plastic surface of the protective case before handing it back to the vendor. Eventually, he took a deep breath and moved on. It was the first issue of The Punisher he’d been handling. Josh told me it was his father’s favorite hero. He froze when I told him I was going to buy it for his dad.
         “Can you not do that?” he asked.
         “If he doesn’t want it, I’ll just keep it. What’s the problem.”
         “I’m just telling you I wouldn’t do that.”
         It was insensitive and bold, but I ignored his advice. I should have understood that what I’d imagined as an act of generosity was barely concealed spite.
         Josh’s dad, stone-faced, declined my “gift.” The whole way back, I’d try to catch his eyes through the rearview window, through his eyeglasses. I imagined him thinking, “Goddamn this kid.”
         It might have been Josh’s dad that ended it all. Dad might never have thought it was me otherwise. It was like one of those TV mysteries where the culprit seems impossible until you realize who it is and then it’s obvious. Or maybe Josh told his dad everything after the convention or Josh could even have told my dad directly. I never found out.
         The next evening, Dad was even quieter than he usually was. I anticipated what was happening. The events seemed to unfold as if behind smudged, transparent Mylar. Everything was moving just slowly enough to unbalance me but not frighten me. I was getting into bed, relieved, when Dad called me into his bedroom, where he was seated in the fashion of an imperial tribunal, on his knees in the center of the room with a steady and serious gaze. His hands were open, palms resting on his thighs. I smelled oil.
         He said, “Come, sit down here in front of me.”
         I sat.
         “Have you been stealing money from the basket on top of my dresser?”
         I looked down.
         “I thought of all the other ways it could be happening. It had to be you.”
         My tears came up and fell in silence for some seconds before I began repeatedly wailing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, forgive me.”
         “It wasn’t just a little bit of money either.”
         He said nothing for a minute before he started crying too. He never cried. We sat like that, crying at each other for a few minutes before I crawled forward to embrace him. There was a surprised resistance at first, and then our bodies trembled together. I didn’t even get spanked. I was the hoodlum breaking into our family’s livelihood from the roof. My effect was felt, but I didn’t feel caught.
         The next time I came to the restaurant, I planned to tell Josh everything. I asked one of the other teens where he was.
         “Josh is gone. Max too.”
         “Why?”
         “I don’t know, dude. Ask your fucking dad.”
         I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I was afraid of somehow incriminating Josh if I asked Dad about it. I never saw Josh again. When I think of him now, I see him leaning against his car that day at the mall, preening and combing his hair, his army green jacket covered in pins and badges, images of eyeglass-wearing agitants, parodies of consumer iconography. Really the last time I saw him was when he looked at me from inside his dad’s car after the comic convention. He looked scared. Not long after, in the restaurant bathroom, there was a fresh piece of graffiti, a milkshake colored in with black marker, labeled “Soy sauce milkshake.” A crude drawing of a wide face with eyes that slanted upwards at the edges. It wore a triangular straw hat. Big front teeth like Mickey Rooney.
         Our lives continued. Dad started to say he thought the true thief was the system, though he didn’t quite put it that way. Mainly, I think he didn’t want to blame me. He said it had more to do with original sin, a condition we were generally helpless to resolve on our own. The Jesus solution to original sin was the foundation of Christianity. But underneath that foundation were structures he could not subvert. Hierarchies, commercialisms. These very things had drawn Dad here and were now arrayed against him. What could wash that clean?
         My dad now says that money will come and go. That makes me proud for some reason. Several months later, I learned that another employee had been fired for stealing from the register. There were cameras in a few spots now, and I remember one customer even remarking that there were “new observers” in our restaurant. Dad could’ve hidden the cameras better. But he didn’t seem to take theft personally. Instead, he saw it as a compulsion too tempting for most to resist. After all, his own son had stolen from him. Soon, a nationwide E. coli scare ended the business of the diner. That was the reason he told me, anyway. Following bankruptcy, we started using public assistance, and Dad still does to this day. I lay this upon myself. I have penitence. But what purpose is there, why does it matter how I remember these events so many years later. It’s a bit like saying yes to Christ at the last minute, at Extreme Unction. After a life of sin, that’s all it takes to go to heaven? After a life full of it, that’s all it takes?
         The other day, Dad was paying me back for using my credit card to purchase laundromat credits. I peeked into the envelope absentmindedly. I wasn’t trying to count it. I just didn’t know what else to do, standing there holding an envelope of cash handed to me by Dad.
         He said, “It’s all there, don’t worry,” reigniting the shame. I don’t know if he was thinking about the diner, but I was.
         “Can you fetch a pair of those warm socks from my dresser?” he asked.
         I went into his room where I found that old dresser and its lions. The basket’s gone now. I pulled a lion, removed the socks, and walked back toward the living room when I froze in the hallway. The lions brought it all flooding back. Josh. Max. The ring. I don’t have that Spiderman ring anymore. But I have a dream or memory in which I tried to recall where I’d buried it and dug out a few empty holes in my search. But I finally found it. It was still there, and the subterranean moisture had turned the sterling silver into a mossy green, as if it had been imbued or overtaken by all these things.