Even now, forty-one years later, if I think of him, his name comes back (both his names) immediately and easily: gliding up from an opaque and then translucent depth, flashing to the surface like markers for a wreck or trap, like floats from a storm-torn net. “Mr. Jerome.” “Theodore” (I never called him that but…
My father always said he was a betting man and that his first love was gambling. Dice and cards, not sports or cars, not girls. Curbside on the gritty Depression-era streets of Providence, Rhode Island, he honed this practice rolling dice against the gutter or shuffling cards with the grace and speed of a magician….
I am a child of a Confessor, born in 1956, the same year the McCarthyesque Chinese Confession Program was sanctioned. Its purpose, simply put, was to seek and flush out Chinese—arriving or already landed—who held derivative citizenships. America began with an open door policy that admitted everyone but "lepers, prostitutes, and morons." The Chinese were…
After my mother died, I needed a word to describe how I felt. When I couldn’t find one, I realized that what I needed was not so much a word, as a sound, a sob, or maybe even a howl, a noise only the other motherless could hear, and come running. If I couldn’t find…
On a motorcycle, a dash to the grocery store takes on epic proportions. It requires armor: you pull on stiff black boots; zip yourself into a thick leather jacket with kevlar plates at the shoulder and elbow; squeeze into your helmet, buckle the chinstrap; pull on long leather gloves with hard knuckles. Hazards abound: cars…
“If it is true that there is an origin of language and if it is true that the origin of language is other to the uttered experience of language, then the origin is irreparably lost and unreachable.” —Paolo Bartoloni I. It was snowing that day. A scree of snow fell against a sky so white…
Chi Chi inhaled the screen from her crack pipe.” I laugh and wait for Leslie to join in, but there is only silence on the other end of the line. “You’re serious?” I ask. “You better believe I’m serious. That child gone and almost killed herself.” I want to apologize for laughing, thinking this was…
1. I knocked on the picture window of the Marlin Cafe, trying to get the bartender’s attention, so I could get in and have a Sunday morning hangover drink. The Marlin was an old man’s dive on Broadway near Cathedral Parkway, a street that everyone in the neighborhood called 110th Street. Technically, the bar was…
Twenty years old, sparkly makeup on my eyes and cheeks, I wrap a leg over the back of my uncle’s motorcycle, hoist myself onto the cracked vinyl seat. He’s the cool uncle. The uncle who’s fifteen years older than me, who dates a model, who sips tequila from wide-mouthed glasses in Chelsea bars. Who gives…
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