Friday, December 7, 2007

Connecting the Dots


I’ve always been one of those people who has imagined that drafting a novel hits some critical point where everything coalesces and then the task becomes more like skiing than rock climbing. Maybe this is true, but I’m having the opposite experience I’ve been really busy in my non-writing life, but thus far it’s gotten more rather than less difficult. I actually write short stories and other things very quickly. I’ve even been known to complete story drafts in two hours. If you think of a novel as maybe twenty five short stories, I should be able to do this in about six weeks. Right now, it’s taking me about a month a chapter.

There are several phases to any fiction project. I’ve come to realize that I’ve very fond of the “explosion of ideas” phase. If you’re old enough to remember them, kids project books used to have these pages with a bunch of points with numbers attached to them. If you drew a line from number to number, a picture would emerge. Some people would start at one and find two then three, etc. Others, like me would try to connect the numbers that would reveal the picture as quickly as possible. Once I figured out what the shape was supposed to be, I sometimes wouldn’t take the time to line in the still unconnected dot/numbers on the page. I love recognizing connections and shapes. To me, the rest is just something you do. I remember there were other kids who would painstakingly fill in all the lines then spend even more time coloring the shape in. Coloring was just never for me.

In developing a draft, I’m having to force myself to go one, two, three, four this time. When I’ve skipped around in the past, I’ve always had some notion of what goes in between, but I couldn’t settle down to fill in the connections that most other people would need to see the picture. The single hardest thing for me though is that as I’ve moved in more linear fashion, each chapter has felt less like an opening out of the material than a shutting off. Let me offer an obvious example. Once Marie appeared in this last chapter, Lucky now can’t be married to someone else, not involved with a woman, etc. At a more serious level, each chapter also commits you to certain themes and stylistic decisions for the rest of the book. It’s hard for me to give up the shuffle of possibilities where any plot card can turn up at any given moment.

Fascinatingly, chapters three and four were parts of the book that I’d refused to fill in for some time. I’d started chapters that included Luke Howard “present time” and Marie, but I’d never sustained them. It feels good to finally set them into the flow of the book. Of course, I may well change my mind soon. It’s also been a struggle.

I did want to mention that blogging the draft has been very helpful. For one, it’s actually very useful to have a single “ordered” draft up that I can access from any place that I can get on the internet. I get to view my “process” including the length of time it takes between chapters, but it also holds me accountable in an odd way. Very few people visit this page (I don’t make any attempts to link it), but I know they can and that if too many weeks go by between installments they’ll see that.

Two of my blog friends, Mr. Pogblog and Bellarossa are, whether they know it or not, doing a similar thing with blogs. Mr. Pogblog is doing his 88 days to Druidic enlightenment and has gotten more or less half way there. Bella’s been documenting her “creative” life since her decision to move to Chicago. She includes pictures, links to articles she’s gotten published, and more recently video clips of performances, events, friends’ performances, shows she’s helped produce, etc. It’s certainly been inspiring to follow and it’s a really interesting way to track someone else’s creative process. I know this notion of “blogging” as something other than an end in itself isn’t exactly novel, but I believe that it has great potential. I think Orson Scott Card, a much better known writer, has also been putting his drafts online so this technique is not limited to those of us who blog in obscurity.

In the meantime, I’m on to Chapter Five and trying to find a way to let the various streams of Lucky, Luke Howard, the Ghost in the Blue Screen, etc. run together for a bit while still moving forward.

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Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Chapter 4: The Answering Machine


Over the next four days, my answering machine had six phone calls from Uncle Leon and one from Jan Grady. I don’t always return Uncle Leon’s calls, but he usually waits a couple days before trying again even if the matter happens to be important. According to Uncle Leon, it’s always important. I wouldn’t expect him to phone me just to see how I’m doing. We’re very Americanized, but this is one of those Confucian customs that isn’t written anywhere yet everyone observes it. As far as I can tell, Confucius didn’t know about telephones, though my Grandfather would have disputed that. In fact, he used to insist that the Chinese invented everything from the computer, to the movie projector, to chocolate milk. Anyway, the younger generation is supposed to call the elder generation to pay “respects” which is the Confucian equivalent of just saying “Hi”. You don’t do the reverse because that would well just reverse everything.

It is, however, okay to call younger members of the family on a business matter. I know that Uncle Leon has a non-business life, but I’ve never been part of it. He used to take regular hunting trips and he’d return to the house with various brothers in law and some of my male cousins dressed in camouflage and bearing assorted dead birds and an occasional mammal carcass, but my Dad never liked the idea of shooting things. As I got older, I could have gone on my own. My cousins loved talking about guns and I’d never fired one. It was just that I thought about the constant level of hostility within my Dad’s family and determined on my own that a hunting trip was something better done with non-relatives. I’ve still never gone hunting.

It was however obvious from all those phone messages that Uncle Leon was hunting for something. Somehow, the sale of Paperson suddenly depended on me or whatever my connection to Jan Grady happened to be. He wanted to know as much as he could about Jan Grady, project manager for the Howard Group. I doubt that it was because he cared about Jan Grady, my long lost dorm pal, or our time in Dunster House at Harvard, he simply liked to be the one in any business transaction who controlled the information. Uncle Leon had spent most of his adult life trying to finally become the family member who took care of the business. Suddenly and entirely by accident, or so it seemed, I found myself in the intriguing position of having some sort of influence over the process.

While this aspect was certainly fun, I’d managed to get through adult life by minimizing my formal responsibilities. After all, who else let’s someone leave him six phone messages in a row?

“So, Lucky. Aren’t you going to call your Uncle Leon?”

Marie was in the backyard preparing to plant tomatoes. As a concession to being together, I’d built her two redwood planter boxes. Dirt was already pouring out of one unjoined corner. I had hit that corner twice with the back end of a shovel. Twice a year whether I need to or not, I do time in Marie’s garden in the spirit of being a good boyfriend. As I mentioned, formal responsibility has not been one of my adult strengths. We’ve shared a bedroom now for five years, three crops of vegetables, and one year where I forgot to water when Marie went to visit her family for a week without me.

“Did he leave another message?”

“I told you about the first four. You’re not even listening to them.”

“Why should I rewind the tape to listen to them. He’ll tell me what they’re about when I call him.”

“Look, there are two things you always avoid. One is anything to do with taxes or money and the second thing is anything that has to do with your Dad’s family. Why do you do that?”

I stick one end of the shovel into a slab of black compost and transfer it to the planter.

“I don’t know. I just don’t like dealing with those things.”

“You think maybe I’ve figured that out after five years? You won’t even talk about those things…..And who’s Jan Grady?”

Marie stands on top of the far end of the planter box with a pair of hedge clippers. She’s been out in her garden since the sun came up. She wears a pair of shorts, a blue work shirt, and a not necessarily flattering sun hat which obscures her face. She’s naturally on the pale side, so takes care to ration her exposure to the largest object in our solar system. The travails of blonde-haired people remain very exotic to me.

I don’t answer at first, well aware that this is not the kind of question one answers casually. It’s not like anything bad has happened with Jan Grady. It’s more that Marie is the sort of woman who will read what might happen into my answer. Naturally, I have to make my answer sound as casual as possible but only after I have taken some care in my choice of words.

“She’s the project manager from the Luke Howard organization. I thought I mentioned her when I went to Paperson the other day.”

Marie looks at me suspiciously. She tugs at the brim of her sun hat and snips the air with her shears.

“Paperson?”

“You know, my grandfather’s estate. That’s the name of the town. I lived there when I was a kid.”

“I know your grandfather’s estate has never had a name before….And why would she call you instead of your uncle. Isn’t he the one who takes care of everything?”

I find myself instinctively placing the shovel between my body and Marie’s shears. I take another angry scoop of compost and slap it into the planter.

“I thought you wanted me to help you out here….”

Before Marie can react, it dawns on me that I’ve just made things look far worse than they actually are and soften my tone, “Jan Grady turned out to be an old friend from Harvard. I was totally surprised that she showed up. I hadn’t much thought about her since we graduated.”

“Hadn’t much thought about her?”

Marie can be on the jealous side in both senses. We come from very different backgrounds. My father screamed at me when I admitted to him that I hadn’t applied to Yale or Harvard Law School because I wanted to come back to the west coast and didn’t have the grades anyway. After he stopped yelling at me, he called me at two in the morning to keep talking to me about how it was embarrassing for him to tell people that I didn’t want to apply to places like that. Marie’s parents didn’t even talk to her about going to college after high school. She got married instead, divorced the guy after several years of trying, then finished college locally a few years after we met.

When we first met, I still talked to an old girlfriend. Marie made me stop. It was a reasonable request even though it was just talking. After that, I’d gotten in the habit of not going out of my way to mention other women even business associates unnecessarily.
The fact that Jan Grady had been to Harvard with me made the situation many times worse. Even worse, I was going to have to confess that Jan more than twenty years out of college was probably more attractive now than she was then.

“She’s just someone I knew from the dorm. I hadn’t seen or talked to Jan Grady since graduation at least until the other day.”

Marie looked at me and shook her head. Once again, I pretended to be diligent about filling the planter box with compost.

“Then why’s she calling you at home? How did she get our number?”

“I didn’t say we we hadn’t been friends. She probably just wants to catch up.”

Marie nodded. “You never went out?”

“Actually at that time, no one exactly went out.”

I swallowed as I saw Marie’s eyes widen underneath the brim of her sun hat. I’d said the right thing the wrong way. I quickly reminded her.

“I never slept with anyone until I was almost twenty four. You know that. That’s three years after I left Cambridge.”

“But did you want to?”

“No, she was just a friend in the dorm. We’d sit at the same table in the dining commons sometimes. Jan had a boyfriend. It wasn’t me. I knew her boyfriend, Jamie.”

That answer was finally good enough for Marie even though it left out a key fact or two about my friendship with Jan Grady back when she was Jan Free and when it wasn’t strange to talk to a near stranger for two hours over dinner about making the University divest any stocks it held that had investments in South Africa or say alone in a dorm room at three in the morning. I finished my time in Marie’s garden and we even kissed some at the end when she came to bring “Manolo” ice water. Manolo is the imaginary illegal Mexican laborer who works in her garden twice a year who looks exactly like me and does her bidding both in the garden and in certain parts of the house.

Once in the house and in sight of the telephone message machine, I had a problem. Obviously, I couldn’t call Jan Grady first with Marie around. I had to call Uncle Leon.

“Lucky, how are you?”

“Hi Uncle Leon, I was away for a couple days. Sorry, I didn’t get your call earlier.”

“Your wife was very nice. She didn’t mention you’re being away.”

“Marie’s sort of absent-minded sometimes.”

“Well, I hope I get to meet her one of these days.”

“Sure, one of these days? How are your kids?”

“Good, good….Did I tell you that Mikey’s working in Manhattan? He recommended Microsoft and Cisco a few years ago. Smith Barney loves him.”

I doubt that Uncle Leon knew that one of my friends insists that he’d seen my cousin Mikey at Studio 54 a decade earlier in the bathroom with a razor blade and a powdery substance. He only told me because my friend Ambrose is the sort of east coast guy who is sure that every Chinese person from Sacramento has to know every other Chinese person from Sacramento. As it happened, I did know my cousin Mikey, who had once been Uncle Leon’s “overweight” son whose mother used to embarrass him about it.

“You know, I had a friend who sort of knew Mikey. He said he was having a really good time in the city. I’m glad to hear that Mikey’s doing well.”

Truth is that most of Manhattan did cocaine in the Studio 54 bathroom that decade. I felt like I was one of the few college graduates who managed to avoid that sort of thing entirely which may have had something with my keeping my virginity until I was twenty four. It’s not like Mikey was an addict. He was probably just a pretty typical Go-Go Wall Street type of the era.

“We’re really proud of him. Who would have thought that Mikey would make it on Wall Street?”

Uncle Leon’s other sons probably weren’t doing as well in “parent” terms as Mikey. One was in the retail clerks union and another worked for the State of California. The youngest had managed to stay in junior college for seven years. They seemed happy enough, the couple times I’d seen them in the twenty years since my Grandfather’s funeral, but I wouldn’t really know.

“So, it must have been a surprise for you to run into someone you knew from college.”

“Well, it was a big school.”

“Jan Grady must have done very well.”

“I assume so.”

We had crossed over into the seemingly casual part of our phone call that really mattered to Uncle Leon only he wasn’t going to show it.

“How did you know her?”

“She lived in my dorm. We used to talk once in a while.”

Marie was at the sink washing lettuce. As I mentioned the dorm, she turned in my direction and watched me intently.

“Uncle Leon, is there something I need to do here?”

“Well, yes…but we can talk about that later.”

“Okay, I just have a few minutes though. I have to deal with a client in a little bit.”

Marie looked at me quizzically and mouthed “Client, what client?”

I waved her away with my non-phone hand.

“I didn’t know you were practicing law again Lucky.”

“Well sort of. It’s not a big deal. I just promised to call this guy back.”

“What is it you were doing again these last few years?”

“Well, I took time off to write a you know kind of a book.”

“And how did that go? Did you ever finish? Did you find a publisher. You know I remember that eulogy you gave for your cousin Chucky. You’re good at that sort of thing.”

“Thanks, Uncle Leon.”

“No really.”

I was very close to saying “Uncle Leon, what exactly do you want from me right now? It’s not like you to smooth talk me about stuff like that”, but I resisted the temptation.

I was now twisting the phone card in my free hand. In the meantime, Marie was shaking her head. We went through almost two years of my taking the day to write and my not really writing anything. I was perfectly sincere about doing the writing, I had just found it hard to say exactly what I wanted to say.

“No, it’s a big project and it needed a little more time.”

“Wasn’t it going to be about your Grandfather?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“Well, I’d love to see it some time. I’m sure it would be really interesting.”

“Sure, it’s got to be ready though…So is there something going on with the Estate Uncle Leon?”

There was enough of a pause over the phone that I wondered briefly if Uncle Leon was still on the line.

“Well, I know you have a client, but Lucky I need to ask you something.”

“Ummm…sure.”

“You know how important this sale is. Paperson’s been in the estate and trust for almost twenty five years. If we can sell it or license it whatever these people want, it means we can close the Estate finally. I’m sure you want that.”

“I think we all want that Uncle Leon.”

“Okay….I know you and I haven’t always cooperated on this.”

“Uncle Leon, I filed that petition almost twenty years ago. We worked it out.”

“Lucky, look. This Jan Grady seemed to be very friendly with you. If she winds up talking to you on your own, would you mind letting me know right away what she has on her mind?”

“What?”

“I mean just about the things that pertain to Paperson.”

“Uh…”

“Look Luke Howard is a big fish. He’s supposed to be a very shrewd businessman. They say he’s been so successful because he manages to bring his productions in under budget. You’ve got to be a tough negotiator to do that.”

“I thought it was because of those furry aliens he created.”

“Lucky, this family’s going to need every edge it can get if it’s going to get what it deserves in this deal. You know what I mean? Whatever you can find out, I need to know. I don’t know if you know this, but in real estate timing can be everything.”

“Honestly, Uncle Leon, I haven’t talked to Jan Grady since we were in Paperson that morning. I doubt that I’ll ever have anything to tell you. She’s someone who I haven’t seen or spoken to since Boz Scaggs was on the radio.”

“Who?”

“I’m just saying I don’t know anything more than you do at this point and I don’t expect to.”

“Lucky, I was there. She’s going to call you.”

“Is that it Uncle Leon?”

“Do we have an understanding?”

“Sure, why not?”

Marie was already hand shredding the romaine and dropping it into a paper bag for me to shake out the moisture. This was perhaps the first time in five years, I would have preferred to be out working on Marie’s garden instead of having her around for my next phone call. In the meantime, the message light was on and that last message from Jan Grady was still on the tape.

“Dear, you didn’t happen to write down Jan Grady’s number when she left that message?”

“You mean you didn’t write it down yourself? Maybe you were too busy with your client?”

“Okay, I’ll answer your questions. Can I just make this call first?”

“Lucky, I know you think I’m being jealous. It’s really not that. It’s just like there’s this whole part of your life where I don’t seem to know you.”

“I’ve talked about it.”

“Honestly, maybe you have a little, but you hardly say anything about it. I’ve never met most of your father’s family.”

“Well, we’re not that close.”

“But, you and I are. You’re the one who claimed you wanted to write about it. How do you expect to do that if you won’t even talk about it with the woman you live with?”

That should have made me feel better, but it only made me feel worse. I had never dated Jan Grady never even hugged her before a few days ago in Paperson. At the same time, Marie had a good reason to be jealous. I just wasn’t sure how or in what form it was going to come out.

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Thursday, November 8, 2007

Chapter 3 The Ghost in the Blue Screen




Americans have no idea about this, but what passes for their imagination is completely contained in an old warehouse building just off an overpass of highway 101 a few miles north of San Francisco. A cash register and check out counter still sit in front of the building’s lone window that faces the street. Before it became the home of Luke Howard’s Illusion Factory, this was the headquarters of the retail clerk’s union Local #1138. Their hand-painted sign remains the only identifying marker on the outside of the warehouse.

As you get closer to the front door, you’ll see a reptilian hand reaching out to the checker side of the counter. It’s Luke Howard’s idea of a joke. Having observed him here from the days since he was excitedly building models and matching matte paintings for his first movie, that weird combination of car chase scenes and space aliens, I’ve only seen the man actually make people laugh a handful of times. After he became famous a lot more people do laugh, but it’s not actual. I can tell the difference.

For the first few years, Luke refused to acknowledge my presence in the warehouse. Perhaps he was so focused on the illusions one can project onto a two dimensional screen in a dark room, he forgot that we exist in other forms. Could there have been a better place for me to hide than the Illusion Factory? There aren’t many places for homeless ghosts to go. When the last business closed in Paperson and the last resident moved to Sacramento, it took me three years to find this new home. Ethereal travel only permits us to move a few hundred yards a day and then only in fog. Can you imagine the traffic jams if that weren’t the case?

I’m sure that Luke saw me in those first few years. If you look at some of the matte work thirty seven minutes into that first movie, you’ll see my silhouette in the upper right hand corner of the shot. Arguably it looks like a discoloration in the film stock, but Luke Howard is a perfectionist. He examined every frame of his first movie with a magnifying glass. Those who aren’t in the business of illusions always underestimate the level of precision involved. I watched as he worked frantically to get it out of the master. He even re-shot the scene twice.

Still, it wasn’t until about three years ago that Luke was forced to acknowledge my presence in his Illusion Factory. I wasn’t a virus in one of the Silicon Graphics Indigo Workstations. I wasn’t a shadow from some unaccounted light source next to the blue screen, canvass for America’s mass imagination. I wasn’t some special effects technician’s prank with the lariat in Image Maker. He called in a Feng Hsui specialist from Hong Kong. For three thousand dollars a day, the woman ordered the server room reoriented, made them run network wires transversely instead of parallel to the walls, and forced them to move the trailer for the model-making shop away from the Best Buy parking lot behind the Illusion Factory. That poor shyster never saw me and I’m almost certain that she never really tried. At the end, she deposited his check immediately before he took the next flight back to Hong Kong.

I knew then that Luke Howard had begun to understand that he was dealing with a real ghost, not the kind you make with CGI or in-camera effects. That was when I began planning my return to Paperson.

Even when he shows up at the Illusion Factory by surprise, it seems that everyone there knows he’s coming. In most any other workplaces, they’d be clearing out the empty pizza boxes and half-emptied cans of Pepsi and Jolt Cola from the conference table. The programmers would be taking down the video games they play while brainstorming. With Luke, that’s not what they worry about. He doesn’t care how things look in the building. He’s never minded the spike-haired graphic artists or even said a word about the number of his employees who have purple or pink hair. The only thing that matters is what shows up in the dailies. Luke hits the door and they cue up the screening room as if they run the dailies there 24/7.

Luke’s own project isn’t going well. To be honest, none of his own film projects in the last thirteen years which happens to be since the day I took up residence in the Illusion Factory have made much of a dent either financially or critically. Once in a while the supervisors even dare to whisper that Luke’s done. When special effects genius consisted of paintings, models, and even blue screen, Luke was the master. Ever the visionary in this realm, Luke was the first major movie maker to insist on going full CGI. It’s just that he doesn’t have the same feel for effects that are purely digital. Others insist it’s the scripts. Luke Howard hasn’t put his own name on a movie in close to seven years. The last one, a parody of a nineteen thirties detective story done with live actors playing on digitized backgrounds, went straight to VHS.

At one level, it doesn’t matter. The Illusion Factory does contract work for other production houses and still has no peer. Thirty seconds of a house going over a waterfall is three days work and half a million dollars. A two minute segment of an underwater city being destroyed by an earthquake went for seventeen million. It’s easy money. Even if the bit isn’t done all that well, the director uses “special effects by the Illusion Factory” in the promos. It’s not the quality of the work. It’s the brand name that sells the tickets and gets them a spot in the rotations at the multiplexes. The money in commercials is even better. Much of the time, that’s just a matter of taking stock bits and flipping the perspective or changing the lighting and it’s a quick fifty thousand for what amounts to fifteen minutes work by a sixty eight thousand dollar a year junior graphic artist.

Taco Bell paid Luke Howard a billion dollars just to put the characters from his new trilogy on their napkins and drink cups. Financially, he doesn’t need to make another movie. In fact, it might be even more lucrative if he didn’t.

In the screening room, Luke never sits in the front row. Usually, the supervisors sit at the table that takes up the front middle with their notepads. Luke’s spot is in the peanut gallery, a seat in the upper right hand corner. His routine goes like this. He has them play the daily at normal speed three times in a row, beginning to end. The fourth time, he looks at it in slow motion with no volume. He then makes everyone leave the room except for the projectionist. The fifth time, he uses a series of signals with the guy in the projection room to let him know exactly when he wants the run stopped, slowed down, sped up, or repeated. He makes his notes. After that, he watches at theater speed and volume alone before he invites the crew back in to view the run again.

As he watches run four, I’m certain that Luke Howard is trying to figure out where I’ll show up on the daily. I don’t make an appearance in every one. I do it just often enough to remind him of my presence. I wonder too if he’s trying to figure out where I am in the screening room as he watches. If he only knew. If he only understood.

Luke raises his right hand and waggles two fingers at the projectionist who goes back twenty frames to a spot where a woman is rolling down a hill in a tornado. The flying cow is about to appear from the left side of the screen. The cow’s a bit out of proportion and the shadow doesn’t match the maelstrom around it. Luke’s eye is so good, he usually picks it up in a run or two.

“Dammit…it’s not quite in synch,” Luke mutters.

He means the sythesizer chord that plays atonally in the background. Luke is the one director in America who understands that moviegoers see with their ears as much as they see with their eyes. For this bit, they need to feel the cow before they can see it.

“Run it brighter,” Luke tells the projectionist by pointing to his eye and making an upward motion with his right palm.

I think my most famous appearance in a Luke Howard movie was in his first big outer space epic. There was a long line of starships getting ready to attack. Luke used models that he ran in endless loop, an old technique that he made fresh by painting in little variations in each ship on the film stock. With most of them, the frames are moving too fast for the viewer to even see this sort of detail, at least in any conscious way. It was the crazies who found me in the scene. I was surfing on top of one of the starships, arms up, robes blowing in the solar wind, and at one point I wave to the audience. I’m there for less than five frames, just above sumbliminal. The crazies caught it the first time the print went to VHS.

Luke still doesn’t acknowledge it. What they don’t know is that Luke spent hundreds of hours trying to get me out of the VHS transfer and again seven years later in the initial DVD release in the boxed set edition, he tried to edit me out. I’m not sure when, but he got obsessed somewhere along the line.

This time, Luke signals for a stop frame. “Where are you, you fucker?” he mutters.

It’s a good guess, but I’m not in the frame yet.

“Luke, is there a problem?”

The projectionist pokes his head out the sliding glass window of the booth.
“No, nothing.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s in this one Luke.”

“And you were going to tell me when exactly?”

“We would have, but.”

“But what?”

“Well, it’s like he’s in a different frame every time with this one.”

Luke shakes his head angrily and I laugh hysterically.

Luke pulls out his cell phone.

“Look, can you contact Jan Grady. I’d like her to meet me down here.”

One of my favorite games in the screening room is to sit right behind Luke and to do exactly what he does. He moves his left hand over the arm rest. I move my left hand. He scratches himself, I scratch myself. He turns around, I slip behind him and turn around. I’m convinced that he feels my presence at this point, but he still can’t seem to catch me.

Movies are based on an optical illusion. If still frames move at a rate above a certain speed, the eye and mind conspire to see them as continuous motion by implying connections between the frames that don’t actually exist. Human beings blink up to hundreds of times a minute. I show up in between. In a sense, I’m a counter-movie, that which exists but only appears when the eyes are momentarily closed. There’s nothing you can do about it, the blinking is autonomic. I do remember hearing once that Japanese scientist did some live experiments during World War 2 with prisoners turned into human subjects. They forced their eyelids open with clamps and kept the subjects pupils dilated. Every one of the subjects went insane in a matter of hours. Some bits of experience, we’re simply not meant to see.

Am I going to let Luke Howard find me on one of the frames for his tornado movie? Maybe I could hide behind that flying cow or the spinning newspaper?

Luke makes another cell phone call, “Did you find Jan Grady?”

In a few years, Luke or maybe his competitors at Magyc City, the ones who used to be his employees, will announce that it is now possible to put any event you can visualize onto a movie screen. Maybe a generation from that date, you’ll be able to sit at home, choose some options off a menu, and create any scene you care to. Think of the porn you could make. The only problem and it’s one that Luke Howard is all too aware of himself is this. Only certain people have the kind of imagination that makes these sort of capabilities worthwhile. It’s just that Luke is starting to wonder if he’s still one of them.

It was three months ago that Jan Grady sent Luke Howard the e-mailed memo.
“Luke, I think I have a way to deal with that ghost in your blue screen. I need to drive to the Sacramento Delta, but I’m pretty sure that’ll work out. You now how they say the things you pick up in college don’t really matter. Well, I’m not so sure.”

“Let the Adventure Begin” I say.

I wonder if Luke hears me. I’m standing right behind him. He’s not even blinking right now.

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Monday, November 5, 2007

Where I'm at


I made a decision to push forward to Chapter 3 and just fix the problems with chapter 2 after I generate more momentum. 3 is not one of the chapters that I happen to have an earlier draft for. Well, actually I did have an earlier draft, but I misplaced it between hard drives/computers somewhere along the way.

This one was known as "The Ghost in the Bluescreen" and it disappeared in a rather ghostlike fashion. The hard thing has been making sure I get the time and energy to get it moving.

Over the weekend, I had a story accepted by the Summerset Review. That was definitely encouraging.

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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Aaargh....


Okay, that was frustrating. I had an extremely busy month with more pressure at work and various family events. I also have been sending out a bunch of my stories to journals. They’ve all been getting rejected. On top of that, I’ve had a couple longtime friends who asked for copies of my stories like a year ago. They’ve never said a word about them and we even had dinner together over the weekend. Ouch!

Writing fiction is a test of self-confidence. Most of us who try this imagine that everyone who reads us will at least like what we do. The truth is that no writer is universally appreciated. In the meantime, I have my own inner critic, that thing that sits inside my head and does its best to stop me from embarrassing myself. “If it’s not perfect, it won’t be universally acclaimed by those who read it, “ says the inner critic.

It’s diabolically circular.

I feel good that I kept pushing nonetheless, but I found myself perpetually rewriting the same few paragraphs. I’d have some thought about “fog”, “walls”, “the passage of time” and want to get it written down and I’d hear this thing tell me that it didn’t fit or that it impeded the flow of the story. I began to forget that there are times to fix that sort of thing and times to simply let ideas flow and set their own shape. I certainly have times when I don’t seem to have any ideas, but having too many ideas can look like the same frustration, the inability to move forward.

So here I am again, I pushed through chapter two and still feel like it doesn’t do what I want it to do. Have I waited too long to start the conventional part of the action? Probably so. Is there a mood shift from chapter one to chapter two that’s not accounted for? Possibly. Am I closer to my goal or not? I have no idea.

The current chapter two has any number of problems, including the fact that I haven’t worked out the logistics of why Jan remembers Lucky better than he remembers her. I probably have more worries than “Wow, I did thats” in the chapter. Right now, I’m trying to decide between just moving on to chapter three or fixing the slow sections of chapter two and running the risk of taking myself sideways once again.

Sometimes, it just isn’t fun.

Read More......

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

At Home in the Fog ( a stab at Chapter 2)


If you’ve ever been to Paperson, California, you know about the fog. Regardless of temperature, the town is always covered in fog. Scientists will tell you that fog is actually a low lying cloud that forms when the temperature of the air is within a few degrees of the dew point. Those who have lived in Paperson for any length of time will tell you that the fog that matters most there isn’t necessarily visible.

The fog here is no accident. If fog, as the rest of the world knows it, is a substance that’s part air and part moisture, it’s only natural that Paperson is buried beneath a persistent fog. First, Paperson is artificial in the most literal sense. Until the 1880’s, it was part of the Sacramento River. The only people who ever used the occasional islands that would form on the river there during the summer were a small group of Indians, arguably they weren’t even a tribe, who went up and down the river in their canoes trading with gold miners, farmers, and railroad workers. Around that time, a Stockton banker named Andrew Bowen recognized the possibilities tied together in the completion of the transcontinental railroad, the development of mechanized farm machinery, and the very rich soil of the Sacramento River Delta.

Andrew Bowen took an option on the land underneath the river, brought in the Chinese workers from the completed railroad, sold the dredges, and nearly two decades later helped turn malarial swampland into thousands of acres of farmland. The Chinese drained the swamps and built the levees. Their reward was to be turned into illegal immigrants on land that they had made possible. Paperson, the land leased from the Evans Ranch in 1908 by Morris Tang, became the one part of the Delta they thought of as their own. The town actually has no legal name. “Paperson” comes from the fact that most of the Chinese who took up residence near there were in the country either with false papers or none at all.

The truth is that the natural state of Paperson is mud or water suspended in earth. It’s no surprise then that such a place is constantly covered in water suspended in air otherwise known as fog. When Morris Tang leased the land from Dan Evans in 1908, he was not only aware of the persistent fog, he chose this spot between the levee and the Sacramento River for it. Morris was a shrewd man. He recognized that such a fog had its uses. While the fog might make it harder to find the general store he had put up there, it helped to hide the gambling hall next to it. Patrons would like the fact that the hall and its occupants couldn’t be seen from the levee road easily. Morris Tang was right. In fifty five years of continuous operation, the gambling hall would only be raided once without notice. Even then, it was closed for less than a week after the raid by a squad of police officers dressed in black face. Equally significant, none of the many illegal residents of Paperson were ever picked up in the town by the Immigration and Naturalization Service or its predecessor agencies.

Morris was already an old man at the time. No one knew exactly how old. He also spoke very little about most things. Morris had found ways to communicate about most every aspect of daily life through some combination of nods, hand gestures, and facial expressions. Rumor had it that before he had come to California, Morris had grown up in a family of street performers in Canton. They had found ways to entertain the foreign sailors and merchants by acting out entire dramas without words. It was said that this unusual education accounted for Morris’s success in California.

The only thing that anyone remembers Morris talking about at length in the conventional way was the fog. Given that so little happened in Paperson and the persistence of the fog, Morris’s preoccupation with it wasn’t out of the ordinary. At least a hundred days a year, the tule fog lay in pockets along the river so thickly that it prevented vehicles from moving along the levee road for hours at a time. One fog had been so persistent that it lasted two days in 1918. Some insisted that the fog had inoculated the residents of the Delta from the great influenza epidemic that had mysteriously killed millions across the world that year. It was true that despite the mix of origins among the farmworkers there, the Delta did not see a single fatal case of the flu that year. Every year there was at least one story of people, pets, and even buildings somehow disappearing in the fog. Even more disconcerting, there were sometimes claims that whole portions of the river would be altered between bouts of thick fog. Orchards would go from being barren to bearing huge crops. Bends in the river would appear. Fishing piers would move as much as a mile down river.

Morris though didn’t limit his talk to the more extreme and obvious effects of the fog. If he trusted you, Morris would tell you, “It’s not the fog that you see, that makes this spot special, it’s the fog that you can’t see.”

My Grandfather, two generations younger than Morris, and recently arrived from Toishan village, happened to be one of the person in whom Morris entrusted with the deeper secrets of Paperson’s persistent fog. When I was young, he would warn my father before we drove back to Sacramento at night, “Be careful driving the road. Even if you can’t see the fog, it doesn’t mean that it can’t keep you from seeing.”

I remember my father indulging his father, then as we got further away from Paperson driving us home in pretty much the way he always drove at night, one hand on the steering wheel, the radio on to what would later be called an “easy listening” station, and his free elbow hanging out the open driver’s window. My dad was of the generation that thought of Morris Tang’s “fog” as old timer’s superstitions, the sort of things that should have been left in China, barriers to the Chinese becoming fully modern and respectably American. I doubt that he ever understood the real importance of the fog or the role the passing of its secrets played in Morris Tang’s giving the nominal “mayoralty” of Paperson to my Grandfather.

Just as my father failed to heed everything his father tried to pass on about the fog, my Grandfather had himself failed to understand something that Morris Tang had warned him about the fog. Morris had understood that Paperson lacked the elements of real permanence. As a place where land, water, and air were always in transition from one state to another, Paperson would never sustain a single form. For some reason, my Grandfather insisted on giving a place made of fog and mud the trappings of continuity. He paved the street and built sidewalks. The town acquired a school, a newspaper, a movie theater, and even a six story community center. The more he tried to set the town of Paperson towards an identity that would sustain and grow, the more the place became shrouded in fog.

As I grew up, I sided with my father about the fog. If I thought about the mysteries of the fog at all, it was just to fantasize that it might some evening come through at a time when my grandfather and grandmother happened to be in Sacramento or San Francisco and make the town of Paperson itself disappear. Otherwise, I was simply convinced that the fog was just low-lying moisture and little more, the sort of thing they talked about on Sunday morning television shows like Mr. Wizard, in which a man dressed in a lab coat would explain all mysteries of the natural world to small children.

Still, as I got old enough to drive to Paperson myself, I started to notice that no matter how careful I was and regardless of the time of day, temperature, or presence of the sun, I consistently managed to miss the town along the levee road despite the fact that I had spent four years of my life there. Given the fact that Paperson included the six story Chinese community center and that it stood a few hundred yards from what had once been the tallest television tower in the world, I began to suspect that even Mr. Wizard wouldn’t have had a ready explanation. Though by that time, I had learned enough about real science to understand that even science is least as much about mystery as it is about certainty.

Each time, I couldn’t find some longtime landmark along the river that would lead me to Paperson, I thought a bit more about Morris Tang’s fog. I would remember walking with my Grandfather along the river bank one evening when the fog had begun to build and his skipping a generation by telling me, “It’s not the fog that you see, it’s the fog that you breathe here. Wherever you go, it stays inside you.”

I didn’t exactly begin to believe in the mystery of the fog, but I got to the point where I didn’t disbelieve it either. I didn’t actually believe it until Uncle Leon spent seven thousand dollars to cover the levee side of Paperson with this six foot high cyclone fence.
Uncle Leon is a far more practical man about material things than my father ever was. He has never believed in the power of the fog to protect the now abandoned Paperson from intruders.

I wedge the point of my vibram-soled walking shoe into a diamond of steel wire just above what would ordinarily be the height of my knee. My hands curl around the top bar of the fence. I have known people who take on a fence like this in a single fluid motion. Once they put the tip of their foot into the diamond, they grab the top cross bar, and somehow fling themselves upwards almost vaulting the obstacle while barely touching it with their anything but feet and hands. They land on the other side and then wave for you to follow.

I was always the one they wave at. I wasn’t built for climbing fences. Despite the fact that I’m of average height even by American standards, my arms and legs are shorter than average. Some people refer to it as short-waisted, a condition that makes it especially embarrassing to buy Levi’s. In addition, my upper body isn’t especially strong. Oddly, my legs and thighs are unusually muscular. Perhaps it’s a sign that I was meant to stay on the ground. Although I swim, I don’t much like water. Other kids always had to coax me into the river. I’ve also never liked heights. On those occasions when other kids would get me to climb a fence, I always did so with an uncommon deliberateness that simply served to make the feat that much more difficult.
“You can do it,” they would call out to me. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

This of course only embarrassed me further. I even remember being shown a photo of the Berlin wall in Look Magazine and hearing my cousins talk about the possibility of simply pole vaulting the barrier between Communist slavery and western freedom and prosperity. “Just one vault and you’re free for the rest of your life,” he claimed, “I’d train a couple hours a day.”

I was the only one of us who seemed to think that it was worth the misery of East Berlin and the Stasi if it meant not having to scale the Berlin Wall. As I tried to keep up with other boys my age and even girls my age, I failed that early childhood marker of status. I couldn’t scale even the easiest fences and thus never got to lead anyone anywhere.

I learned too that I had a peculiar knack for hesitating at the worst possible moment, something which only added to the terror. Instead of completing the climb up my neighbor’s fence, I sometimes would even pretend that I had to go home for dinner or worse yet I’d shrug and try to convince them, “I don’t want to be up in that treehouse with you. I’ll guard the approach in case bandits come.”

I’m way too old to be climbing fences anyway. The only people my age who do it are generally on some sort of Reality TV show or a Japanese game show. It’s just that I’ve lost the key to Uncle Leon’s padlock and I’m already an hour late for the meeting on the other side of the fence. My car is parked along the levee road where it could be sideswiped easily enough by a truck bearing crates of pears from the Evans ranch or by some pleasure boat-bearing trailer. I look back at my car and consider the fact that mine is the only car parked along the cyclone fence and the gate remains padlocked. Could Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy have driven in and locked the gate behind them once I failed to show on time? Could they have taken the entrance through the Evans ranch?

I had considered the latter possibility, but figured that I would only get more lost in the fog and that would make me even later for our appointment. When my grandfather died, the bickering over the fate of the estate had been so extreme that he had named all three of his sons as co-executors. When my father died before my Grandfather, a comma in the will and the words “or his heir” had turned me into the third signature on all transactions involving the estate. Over the years, all but one asset of my grandparents’ estate had been sold, the town of Paperson, which technically isn’t even a town. My Grandfather realized that it was in Paperson’s interest to never be incorporated. As a result, there are no road signs that mark the approach to the town and there is no town limits sign. In fact, this is one of the very few occasions since I started to drive to Paperson on my own that I haven’t gotten lost. Uncle Leon’s fence gave it away.

Other than my waffle-soled walking shoes, I’m more or less dressed for a meeting. My shirt has buttons and a collar. I’m wearing a belt and my pants have cuffs. I’m definitely not dressed for climbing fences. Still after much hesitation, I pull myself upwards. On the way over, my cuff catches on the edge of one of the wires and tears. I reach across instinctively and cut myself on the rough cut edge of another bit of cyclone wire. Much to my surprise though, I make it over and find myself off the fence. Instinctively, I wave to the other side, but the only object on the outside of the fence is my red Nissan Sentra with the bad radio.

After three years with no new prospects, Uncle Leon claims to have found a serious buyer for the town. He made a point of calling me a couple nights ago, “Lucky, you need to know that this is very important. If you don’t mind let me do the talking.”

“Don’t you usually?”

“If you have questions, I was hoping we could use this call for you to ask them now and I promise I’ll figure out how to ask them during the meeting.”

“Well, for one. Who’s the buyer?”

“I shouldn’t say yet.”

“Do you know who it is?”

“Of course, I know who it is. I’m just not sure I’m at liberty to say. He’s a very big player.”

“Okay.”

“Lucky, I’m glad we had this chance to talk first.”

“Sure.”

I step onto the high sidewalk that fronts Paperson’s one main street, Prosperity Boulevard. My Grandfather named the town’s three streets for each of Sun Yat Sen’s Three People’s Principles, the San Min Chui. The family house was located at 10 Democracy Drive. The third street was named and signed as Nationalism Avenue, but no buildings ever went up there. Much to my surprise, there’s no sign of either of my uncles or Uncle Leon’s blue Mercedes sedan. As strange as it seems, this is the first time I’ve ever been alone in Paperson.


As I walk I hear voices coming from what I know to be abandoned buildings. There is Benny Tang, wire-rimmed glasses, gray hair, and white shirt with a bow tie, standing behind the candy counter at the town’s liquor store, his palm is opened to the counter, “Your choice, you pick something, anything you want. You can have it. Just for you.”

It’s all the English he seems to know. I remember the pleasure of the struggle of deciding between a pack of root beer lifesavers and a Hershey’s bar with almonds. The lifesavers could last an entire afternoon. The Hershey bar tasted better and you could use the silver-wrapped paper to make toy gun barrels. Was it the Hershey Bar that had the silver paper or was it wax paper? There is the cook at the diner that fronted the gambling house, The Imperial Kitchen, asking me what I wanted him to make for me if I didn’t happen to like the food he’d made for everyone else that day. I was a prince in Paperson yet never managed to understand or appreciate that fact. I hear Mona, the woman who sold tickets at the movie theater calling me over to tell me that next Friday, they’d be showing a new “Roadrunner” only with the “r’s” mangled.

It had never occurred to me that they were ordering the cartoons just for my cousins and I. The movies themselves were Chinese sorcery dramas complete with combatants flying off of tile roofs, soap operas about family devotion, and war stories filled with Japanese treachery. The audience was mostly old bachelors munching on pine nuts and talking through all the scenes. Of course, they had no interest in the fate of the coyote, his latest purchase from ACME, and the impossibly fast roadrunner with his talent for just missing danger.

The buildings remain, but the people and establishments who go with the voices either died or left for Sacramento and Stockton at the end of the seventies not long after Jimmy Carter recognized Communist China. I take a moment by a metal tripod that used to dispense newspapers, The China First Weekly, the only weekly in America that published twice a month. The plastic that kept the papers dry in the fog cracked to pieces years ago. There is no slot for coins.

The China First Weekly was always distributed free. The newspaper itself had a circulation ten times bigger than the town of Paperson itself even when the town was the largest self-contained Chinatown in North America. It’s just that it was never clear that anyone actually read it. When I was in junior high, I used to make fun of the headlines in the English language portion of the paper. In its last years, China First managed to combine fervent Chinese Nationalism with the Weekly World News. Typical front page stories alternated between tales of the hundreds of million mainland Chinese who were awaiting a secret radio signal to assist in Mao’s overthrow when Chiang Kai Shek began his re-invasion of the mainland to gruesome stories about the Communists that always seemed to involve severed body parts and unnatural acts.

I still remember the China First headlines the day the estate sold the linotype printing press and Royal typewriters that had been sitting around the China First building to a scrap dealer. I made the trip to Paperson just to see how they'd get all that metal out that little door. China First’s last edition bore a headline claiming that the Communists had started using Chinese political prisoners as an involuntary source of involuntary organ donations for wealthy and desperate westerners and Japanese.

Four years at an Ivy League college in the late seventies had so convinced me that China First was an anti-communist's Weekly World News or the Nationalist Enquirer that it never occurred to me that those stories might be true. The tales of Koumintang sympathizers being fed to the pigs, forced abortions, and adults who had never seen an orange had simply been one of the staples of old man conversation in the mini-park that stood between Prosperity Boulevard and Democracy Drive.

I remembered hearing them repeat these bits of China First editorials when we'd walk by them to retrieve stray baseballs or as we threw pennies off the bottom of the statue of Sun Yat Sen in the middle of the park. We didn't believe their any more than the filial piety parables they forced us to read in Chinese school. After all, the only American kid who would ever take seriously some story about good sons cutting off body parts to put in stews for hungry parents had to be Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

I was thirty before I realized that China First also published that book of Confucian parables that set out to make every kid born who grew up in Paperson before 1965 feel guilty for being too selfish and too Americanized. Instead, the little red book (China first chose the color quite purposefully), strengthened our resolve to waste our youths here in the Sacramento Valley by mastering un-Chinese activities like roller-skating, watching the Monkees, or turning our Stingray bikes into Harleys with baseball cards in the spokes. I was convinced that some of my cousins had third degree black belts in watching Roadrunner cartoons.

I suppose too that my college professors never predicted that the Berlin Wall would come down. The day that Grandfather waited for, the fall of Communism in China, may have lurked just beyond his lifetime, but it seems that some of my old professors are now insisting that it might happen during mine. That may be the irony of the cyclone fence around Paperson and the not so discreet for sale listing these last eighteen months in the investment section of the Wall Street Journal. Now that it's about to happen, there's no one left in Grandfather's town to celebrate.

I hear two real voices. It’s my Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy. Uncle Leon wears a brown business suit with a striped tie. His shoes are a polished mirror black. He wears a gold Rolex that looks like a big gold doughnut. He’s seventy years old. Uncle Persy is two years younger. He wears a gray Italian suit, the jacket of which is folded over his arm. He’s not wearing a tie. He looks like the successful Seattle industrial stylist that he is.

“Lucky, you’re early. Good to see you taking today so seriously.”

I open my hands and shrug. “Actually, I thought I was late.”

“You didn’t get the call?... Ms. Grady had to attend to something first.”
A five minute silence that takes the form of a conversation about children and houses follows. I haven’t seen any of my cousins in ten years, but we talk as if that weren’t the case.

We are standing beneath the twenty foot neon dragon that hangs bug eyed above what used to be a movie theater. The six story Community Center is directly across from us. Uncle Persy breaks our non-conversation to look at his digital watch.

"What time did she say she'd get here? ..She's running late."

Uncle Persy has a habit of answering his own questions. It may have something to do with his being the youngest of the six children in Dad's family, although now that he's sixty eight it's harder for me to think of him as the youngest anything.

"Have you met this woman?" he asks Uncle Leon who shakes his head.

Uncle Leon pulls out a stack of blue appraiser's reports from a rectangular leather briefcase, "I've put fourteen years into this sale. This is the first looker that has the money to do the deal. You remember, we spent the money on a development appraisal. This is where it comes in handy."

"Is that it?" I ask, pointing to the thickest of the blue reports.

"I thought I sent you a copy," Uncle Leon says.

"I don't know, can't tell you until I see it.," I say.

My uncles shake their heads, but Uncle Leon hands me a copy of the report. I read the first paragraph and look at a table of numbers detailing the costs involved in bulldozing Sam-Yup, sub-dividing, and turning it into a promising riverside development less than half an hour from downtown Sacramento and within commuting distance of the Greater Bay Area. A paragraph in bold type near the bottom points out that the value of the property quadruples from two million dollars to eight, if a proposed bypass to Highway 80 goes forward. Naturally, I try to calculate my undivided one fifth interest for either possibility.

“Leon, I thought they contacted us.”

“But I’m sure they contacted me because they saw the development plan. This is a very shrewd group. I’m sure they recognize the potential here.”

Ms. Grady is now an hour and a half late. Uncle Persy has twice remarked on how hard it is to take a day off from clients like Boeing and fly from Seattle. Finally, Uncle Leon can't contain himself, "You might both be familiar with the Howard Company?"

"I guess not," I say. "Should I be?"

"Well, I thought you might have seen some of their movies," Uncle Leon tries to hide his smirk, the same expression my Dad always hated. Dad insisted that his younger brother would always break it out any time he knew something about my Grandfather’s financial plans that my Dad didn’t.

"Why didn't you tell me that this was Luke Howard's Company?" Uncle Persy shakes his arms as he says it. For the first time since I got here, he seems to be smiling.

"I didn't tell you the best part," Uncle Leon continues, "I found a contact at CalTrans. He golfs with Harvey, my brother in law."

"I thought you didn't talk to Harvey," I say.

When we were younger, the cousins used to whisper about Aunt Sunny's sister who married a "Hok-guay", a word our elders used casually and that we repeated innocently enough until we grew up and bothered to translate it with our limited Cantonese into its literal meaning, "black devil". Sunny and Uncle Leon had tried to disown her sister and Harvey only to run into the fact that they lived three blocks away, sent their kids to the same school, shopped at the same stores, and the fact that Harvey was the only non-union electrician in their part of Sacramento.

Uncle Leon shakes his head. "Times change. Harvey's okay. His buddy says the bypass is going to happen, they're already doing the crew assignments."

"Does Luke Howard know the same thing?" Uncle Persy asks. "Probably does, wouldn't be coming here if he didn't." He answers himself.

Before we can speculate further, a brown Toyota Corolla sedan pulls to the sidewalk along Prosperity Boulevard. A woman, who's voice and bearing suggest that she's no older than I am, hops out of the car, "Mr. Tang," she calls out, "So sorry to be late.”

“No problem Ms. Grady, everyone gets lost near Paperson,” my uncle’s voice oozes with a business-inspired over friendliness.

“Actually, I got stuck on the Bay Bridge. Once I caught the levee road, it was easy.”

I start to say something about the fog, then catch myself.

“You know the nice thing about working for Luke Howard, is I can never be too late for any of these meetings. Everyone is incredibly patient with me.”


Janet Grady laughs at her own joke. I laugh, but my Uncles don't at first. Uncle Leon finally smiles and answers her, "Well, I hear that it's not going to be so hard to find soon. I guess renting a car and all...."

The representative from the Howard Company doesn't seem to respond to his hint about the bypass.

"Renting a car? I don't understand."

Uncle Leon is a bit flustered. "Oh, I just assumed...."

"He thought someone from the Howard Company would be in a BMW," I jump into the conversation. Jan Grady has now made it on the sidewalk and she moves directly for me.

Uncle Persy looks at me in horror. Uncle Leon starts to apologize, "That's just Lucky's sense of humor. Toyota Camrys are great cars. I almost bought one myself.”

“Instead of your Mercedes SLK?”

Uncle Leon gives me another look. “Lucky, we talked about this,” he whispers.

Janet Grady shows no signs of taking offense. "Well, my Toyota does have power windows and a CD player."

I hold out my hand. "I'm Lucky Tang, I'm one of the nominal trustees."

Uncle Leon steps between us as quickly as possible without turning it into a shove. "Janet, thank you for coming out. I'm Napoleon Tang, we spoke on the phone a few times."

He hands her his business card. Janet Grady hands us each a copy of hers.

Uncle Leon's card reveals far more than he intends about himself. His full name appears in flat black letters across a plain white background, Leonardo Woodrow Wilson Tang. Just beneath that, his title fills several lines by itself, President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, Trustee, Tang Investments Inc. At the bottom of the card, Tang Investments claims offices in Hong Kong, Newport Beach, Honolulu, Seattle, and Sacramento. When I was younger, my copy of Uncle Leon's card had high school graduate scrawled between the title and the offices.

Janet Grady's card offers as strong a contrast in style as possible to Uncle Leon's. Her name is printed in raised letters on two-toned stock. Her title follows the current vogue by implying importance through its simplicity, Project Coordinator. The card offers no physical address, just a phone number and jgrady@howard.org. The Howard Company logo, an "H" somehow stylized to look like an extended multi-colored hand, appears in the otherwise blank left side of the card.
Janet Grady barely glances at Uncle Leon's card as she slips it into bright blue nylon bound organizer. As a peek across Uncle Leon's shoulder, I can see that it has dedicated pockets for the things I always tend to misplace, business cards, pens, a calculator, a trio of labeled three and a half inch floppy disks. Uncle Leon starts to follow suit by slipping the Howard Company's card into his thick black leather wallet, but stops himself. Instead, he holds it up in front of us seemingly admiring the printing. After nearly two years of having Paperson on the market and after several members have repeatedly questioned his real estate judgment, Uncle Leon wants to revel in the pleasure of having managed to attract the investment interest of the most famous movie maker in the world.

As I stuff Janet Grady's information aged business card into my front pants pocket, I am reminded that at almost forty I have no card of my own to toss into he mix. My business identity hasn't changed much since twenty years ago when dad first started bringing me to family business meetings. I think he did it partly hoping that I'd get interested in business partly because my Grandfather never did the same for him. The only real changes are that Dad's passed away and that I've gone from being his son to a Tang nephew.

Uncle Leon quickly sets in to show Janet Grady a series of charts and numbers supporting the value of Paperson for development. He tries to hand her a copy of the development plan/appraisal, but she refuses him politely. I tag along a step back my two uncles between Janet Grady and myself until she stops walking for a moment, steps in front of Uncle Leon, and starts to talk to me, "Lucky, your name is so familiar and so is your face."

I shake my head. My uncles shrug. I look at Janet Grady. She tilts her head, stares at me again. I stare back. It's a pleasant thing. She's quite attractive in a business-like fashion.

"Did you live on the third floor of Dempster House in the late seventies?" her voice rises into a kind of casual girlishness.

I nod.

"I'm Jan Free. Do you remember? We used to share notes from Craig's Modern Asia survey class."

"I think I used to borrow your notes. I don't think you ever had to borrow mine," I say.

She laughs. We are now walking together and my uncles are walking slightly behind us. Uncle Leon keeps rubbing his forehead with his fingers. Uncle Persy keeps asking and answering questions in Cantonese that translate roughly into, "What did he get all that money for school for? So, he could make connections like this. Why did I fly down for Seattle. For a college reunion."

Jan Free and I are now laughing and talking excitedly about classmates. At one point, she spontaneously gives me a hug. I hug her back awkwardly. I'm not sure just how hard to hug a prospective buyer. Uncle Leon bumps into us just as Jan Free-Grady pulls away from me.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt."

I take the opportunity to move back to my former spot, something that seems to make Uncle Leon stop touching at his forehead. As soon as he gets Janet's attention again, he begins discussing possible lot sizes and zoning ordinances.

Janet Grady is pleasant, polite, but curiously uninterested. She nods her head as Uncle Leon speaks, but takes no notes and asks almost no follow up questions. The only questions she does ask are about the buildings that do stand. She comments on the moon-shaped entrance to the restaurant that my father once owned. She asks about the statue of Sun Yat Sen. Uncle Persy starts to explain something about Sun Yat Sen being the Chinese George Washington, but Janet surprises him, "I understand he came here to Paperson to raise money."

Uncle Leon whistles and decides to downshift from his investment banker mode to more of a small town boy act, "Gee, your company sure does its homework. I guess you probably already have all the numbers yourself. What else do you know about Paperson."

Janet shakes her head and smiles "Well, I looked into it a little bit. I understand that this was once the fourth biggest Chinatown in North America and that there's a story that Chop Suey was invented here, that some of the locals believe that Dr. Sun might have fathered a daughter during his stay here, that the town had a movie theater and a newspaper. Lucky probably doesn’t remember, but I first heard about this place from him.”

My uncles are staring at me. I’m staring at Jan Grady.

“That reminds me."

Luke Howard's project coordinator pulls a modest auto-focus camera from her shoulder bag.
"Would it be all right if I took some pictures, Luke always prefers to look at pictures before we discuss possibilities."

She then begins snapping photos of the peeling paint and broken windows that now amount to Paperson. She seems to take a special interest in two buildings, the community center, once the largest and most expensive Chinese community center in America, and the non-descript lunch counter, the Emperor’s kitchen, that served as the front for Grandfather's gambling house. Throughout this, she keeps asking me to pose in front of the buildings to establish scale or some such thing.

I've seen Uncle Leon this puzzled before. One time just before I went off to college, he was trying to find out if Dad was going to get a loan from Grandfather to remodel the restaurant. At the same time, Uncle Leon needed money to fix up one of the duplexes that he'd bought as an investment in Sacramento. Grandfather then announced that he wanted to visit both of his sons and see how they were doing. Uncle Leon, who had just finished a night accounting class, busied himself with a profit and loss statement, cleaning gutters, repainting a kitchen. Dad, on the other hand, did nothing. A week later, Grandfather announced that he would lend my father what he'd asked for and lent Uncle Leon only half the money because someone had told him that Leon's duplex faced the wrong way for the money spirits to work prosperously.

As Uncle Leon pointed however, things change. Twenty years ago, he blew up and yelled at Grandfather for being a "superstitious old fool".

As an old man, he hides his frustration better. In twenty five years as co-executor, I have watched Uncle Leon work at least half a dozen real estate sales. Whether the buyer was a retired school teacher or representatives from the Teamsters Pension Fund, believe it or not we did make a deal with them, Uncle Leon has always taken complete control of the transaction from beginning to end. He answers all questions, has all the facts at hand, and works up all the projections. At least twice, Uncle Leon's perseverance got him a price at least twenty five percent higher than even an optimistic appraiser. But, in all of those deals, Uncle Leon was working with buyers who like him slipped their business cards into steak and martinis wallets, who wore business suits, and drove Cadillacs or Mercedes.

As Janet Grady photographs Chinese street signs and facsimiles of the Nationalist flag, I can see the uncertainty in Uncle Leon's eyes as he struggles to find the approach that will let him feel like this encounter is back under control.

As we walk past a row of houses, we stop in front of the largest one. Actually it's far larger than the rest and closer inspection reveals that it's not just one house but a cluster of four houses joined together by a shared courtyard.

"This was our house," Uncle Leon says. "I think my father would be happy to know that whoever redeveloped his town still appreciated its history like you do, Janet."

Janet barely seems to hear him.

"Lucky, I can't believe it. Is this where you grew up?"

I squirm slightly. When I was younger, I was always very self-conscious about having spent any part of my life in a Chinatown. When I went to Sacramento private schools, I never even told my closest friends there that two nights a week my mother drove me the half hour down the river to a special Chinese school in Paperson. I even missed half a year of Little League because of it.

"Well, sort of...We moved to the suburbs when I was 8 or 10."

Grandfather's family complex. (My Dad was the one who came up with the name and the joke).is really the one part of Paperson that now looks like it could be moved straight from China. For the most part it is shaped and colored like a traditional wealthy man's home in Southern China. The odd thing about Paperson is that it has little of the tourist's eyed Chineseness of San Francisco Chinatown and yet it does not look fully Americanized either. For the most part, little details have always set it apart as neither Chinese nor American. Stores and streets are a little to tidy to be in South China, building's are too close together to fit into the Sacramento Valley. More than anything it's the colors. The concrete blocks are a lime green. Wooden buildings are a dark-stained redwood. Whenever Paperson, in its dying days, would get its occasional newspaper article or local news report, reporters would always comment on the sense one always got that it looked and felt like no other place on either continent.

"Boy, I can't believe you lived here. It must have been so fascinating," Janet continues.

"Would you like to take a look inside?" Uncle Persy offers.

"Absolutely."

"Just understand that no one's lived here in ten years," Uncle Leon warns.

"Well, it wasn't that exciting really," I mutter. “Before we go in though, I should warn you about the squatters.”

Uncle Leon gives me a dirty look.

"We had a little problem with squatters after the last Chinese family moved out of town eight years ago. It was a family of illegal immigrants who were picking pears for the Evans family. They were harmless once I found a Spanish translator, we found them a place to stay. Ever since we put the fence up, it hasn’t been a problem again.”

"I'm not worried. I've been in my share of abandoned buildings." Janet says.

Uncle Leon reaches for the key.

“But have you been in haunted buildings?" I ask.

"Really?"

Uncle Leon shakes his head.

"Well there was a story about thirty years ago about a group of robbers who tried to break in to find the safe, having things mysteriously thrown at them keeping them away from the house.”

For the first time, Janet Grady pulls a pad from her organizer and takes notes. They start to go in. I don't follow.

"Look, I don't understand why you're interested in all of this, if you're just going to take it all down for houses?" Uncle Leon doesn’t hide his exasperation well.

Janet stops at the entryway. Uncle Leon and Uncle Persy are already standing inside the door. Uncle Persy brushes a cobweb off the suit jacket that he still holds in the crook of his elbow.

"But, we're not. The Howard Company isn't in the residential housing business."

"Well, I'd wondered what a movie company wanted with this property anyway,” Uncle Leon jumps in with new confidence. "The development plan we commissioned looked at the possibility of turning the site into an outlet mall. You guys are right on top if it. In some ways, that might be the most promising use of all. It's the only land for fifteen miles that can be zoned commercial. Paperson isn’t a town, it’s not controlled by county zoning ordinances."

Uncle Leon begins to spouts off an entire paragraph from the report surprisingly quickly. Janet Grady’s answer pushes him back into renewed confusion, "I'm terribly sorry. Please unerstand I couldn’t make our interest clear over the phone. People take such an interest in anything to do with Luke Howard projects, we have to be extraordinarily careful. Naturally, you were thinking that we were interested in buying Paperson as real estate?"

My Uncles have stepped back out of the doorway. My mind speeds wildly, in a way that has not always been helpful in my adult life until a single possibility pops through, "You mean you're thinking of making a movie?"

"A movie? A Luke Howard movie? "My uncles open mouths reveal their half dozen gold fillings.

"Not exactly." Now it's Janet Grady's turn to pull paper from her shoulder bag and start passing it out.

"I'm sorry, I actually only brought two copies with me. She hands one to Uncle Leon and starts to hand the other to me.

"That's okay, I'll get a copy from my Uncle," I say.

Uncle Persy clicks his tongue at me anyway and shakes his head.

"I have to confess, I really don't know much about real estate Mr. Tang. We're interested in licensing Paperson. We'd like to...."

As Janet speaks, my uncles have opened their brochure to a brightly illustrated artist's rendering that folds out to the size of a road map.
"Well, for want of a better phrase for it. We're interested in developing Paperson into a kind of theme park. I apologize for not going into more detail over the phone. I was little afraid that you'd think I was crazy."

My uncles are talking rapidly and heatedly in Cantonese. They are speaking too quickly for me to even attempt to understand them. They have now turned one of the reports to a page that seems to be describing some sort of Silicon Graphics computer system.

"I imagine you've heard something about virtual reality," Janet starts in.

They nod cautiously as if they don’t dare reveal the fact that they know nothing about virtual reality.

After several minutes of folding and unfolding brochures and disconnected spinning questions, Uncle Persy is the first to recover. "Miss Grady, how big a deal is Howard film talking about? Are we talking Disneyland here?"

"Well, if you'll sign the non-disclosures I've brought along here....I can tell you that we're not talking about spec houses and agent's commissions here. We're hoping to make this something like nothing anyone's ever imagined

I look at my uncles, at Jan Grady, at the booklet from the Howard Company. I take a second to close my eyes and inhale, but on the inside, I am nothing but fog.

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Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Chapter Two Blues


I spent a good part of the weekend tinkering with chapter 2. For whatever reason, I’ve always struggled with the second chapter. No, that doesn’t mean that I stopped there. I’ve tried a variety of strategies including going ahead and writing chapter 3, 7, 9. I’ve written an ending. I’ve redone my opening chapters.

Chapter two keeps feeling like the moment sculptors sometimes have with a block of granite. Once you get to a certain point a lot of your possibilities disappear. The opening chapter lays out a basic situation and piques interest. The second chapter always feels to me like it’s the moment when the story sets a direction.

In any case, I found myself literally writing about the origins and purposes of a cyclone fence for close to a day. How’s that for a metaphor?

In the meantime, all manner of bloggable topics float past me. There’s Barry Bonds’s auctioned baseball with the online poll, OJ (the guy who was the subject of my very first blog post), the progress of my daughter’s volleyball team, the strange state of the war and the attorney general appointment…..A few months ago, I would have been posting away about any of these items. These last few days, I’ve been telling myself “focus”, make sure you work on the “big thing”. Grrrrrr…..


In the midst of my writing day on Sunday, I got a reply for a story that I’d submitted to a journal on 9/4. They had it for all of 11 days. Their e-mail to me used my name, mentioned my story by name, said they really enjoyed it, but it wasn’t quite right for them. Essentially, they said to try them again. I then spent a couple hours puzzling over whether this was just a very diplomatic, but canned brush off, or if it was a genuine act of kindness on the part of some “editor” or “slushpile” slave. Who knows? I do know that it reminded me of why I really liked blogging in the first place. I could at least just get the story out there and not screw with whether or not some gatekeeper felt it was was worthy and what it meant if they didn’t.

So despite the fact that my life has turned insanely busy, I’m going to get chapter 2 of very very rough drat out. Just to warn you, I’ve done this before then felt like Chapter 2 just wasn’t good enough. Anyway, back to climbing that cyclone fence.

Oh geez, I forgot, I also spent an hour writing a fax to google legal to see if someone would help me reclaim my old blog address and/or help me recover the hundreds of posts there. In the meantime, I check my e-mail constantly thinking that someone might have replied to either my e-mails or the fax.

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Friday, September 14, 2007

American Name (the very rough draft begins)



“Lucky, is that your Chinese name?”

I’m used to the question, but I’ve never had a snappy answer as in “No, it’s actually Albanian” or “I was named for Lucy Ricardo, my grandmother’s favorite tv character. The person filling out my birth certificate was either dyslexic or improvised a way to save me the indignity of a girl’s name.”

Instead, I assure them that “Lucky” is an American name. It’s not a transliteration of “Lew-Chee”, “Lu-Qui”, or “Liu-kee” and not some odd variation of “Luke,” the sort of Biblical name all too popular with the missionaries and their associated organizations. My parents were both born in California and thus were not misguided immigrants confused by the conventions and occasional mysteries of American naming customs. Even if the circumstances of my birth were peculiarly Chinese, they chose my name for American reasons. While I was born well before California families started naming their kids Zen, Harmony, and Spiritwalker, I sometimes like to think that my parents were just a bit ahead of their time.

In 1956, my father attended the River God Festival held in Hellenville’s hundred and thirty three person Chinatown. He was twenty seven years old and had been married to my mother for five years. As the oldest son of Y.P. Tang, the most prominent Chinese man on the Delta, my father felt the pressure of expectation throughout his life. At this point, he was specifically feeling the pressure to produce a grandchild. For two years since their return to Paperson from my dad’s Korean War service in Augusta, Georgia as a clerk typist for the Signal Corps, my parents had been discreetly visiting fertility specialists, both medical and herbal in and around Sacramento.

In general, these celebrations existed for a simple reason - they were an opportunity to gamble out in the open. The Cantonese who came to the Sacramento Delta as laborers enjoyed two forms of recreation, eating and gambling. Eating is perfectly legal and remains a central part of Cantonese identity no matter how removed one is from southeastern China. Gambling has been a different matter in the state of California. Horse races are legal. At various times, low ball poker has been legal. Currently, the state runs its own lottery for the benefit of the public schools and a corporate gaming company. Real estate speculation remains very legal. For whatever reason, traditional Chinese games like fan tan and pai gow have never been legal.

My Grandfather saw the ethnic snobbery of the California legislature as an opportunity to build his own fortune in the Sacramento, Delta. My Grandfather had come to Sacramento as a common laborer just after the San Francisco Earthquake. By 1956, he was so prominent in the underground Chinese gambling industry that even the organizers of this River God festival some seventy five miles from his home in Paperson, understood that it had to cut Y.P. Tang in on at least a token percentage of the gambling take.

This normally meant a brief appearance at the festival, a visit to the pai gow tables to play a hand or two, a few words of advice, an exchange of handshakes and an envelope from the organizers, then the drive home. This weekend, however, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco had called a meeting of its representatives. My Grandfather’s proudest accomplishment was the fact that he had been elected three years earlier to a body known as the Control Yuan as the representative for Overseas Chinese of the Western States.

He voted by proxy, was never asked for or expected to offer opinions, and his single obligatory visit to Taipei once every four years essentially consisted of attending banquets with the other Overseas Chinese representatives. Even those who had long been active in the Koumintang knew little about what the Control Yuan did or how it operated. The position largely existed to ensure a continuing flow of contributions from the millions of overseas Chinese. My Grandfather had won the position by being more than generous. Given a choice of being the big man in Hellenville’s Chinatown or an unimportant though respected attendee at the Chinese consulate, my Grandfather went to San Francisco.

As a result, my father went to Hellenville to help out my Grandfather. Although my dad’s involvement in my Grandfather’s gambling interests had always been minimal, he was quite excited to take on this responsibility. He borrowed my Grandfather’s white Lincoln, put on a blue suit with a handkerchief folded into the chest pocket, and drove the seventy five miles and two hours to Hellenville. Over the years, as they told the story of the events that led to my getting the name “Lucky”, sometimes she witnessed it sometimes she just heard about it. It depended on her mood. She did, however, play a prominent and more certain role in my conception and birth that fall.

Having slipped the envelope into the money belt hidden between his pants and sports jacket and having promised seven different elderly men that he would convey their respects to my Grandfather, my father decided to stay to watch the mid-afternoon dragon dance. The boom of drums, the clang of cymbals, the firecrackers accompanied the undulations of the seven man dragon. Was this what festivals were like in China?

Although he had spent his entire life being identified as “Chinese”first by others, my father had never been to China. With the takeover by Mao, it seemed that he might never go. It didn’t necessarily bother him. Since he could remember, China had been either at war with Japan, in the midst of a civil war, or was being plundered by communist bandits. A visit to the ancestral village in Guangdong held little appeal. Besides, my Grandfather rarely talked about the place of his birth and childhood.

Nineteen minutes later, a pile of green, gold, and red silk lay folded on the ground next to the sidewalk beneath a still open-mouthed dragon head that was roughly the height of a nearby fire hydrant. Seven men roughly his own age dressed in white t-shirts and black pants smoked cigarettes and chatted with wives and girlfriends next to the remnants of the mythical beast and the open bed of a blue pickup truck. The truck would take the dragon back to storage for the next three hundred and sixty four days unless there was a banquet, parade, or some other demand for its reappearance. A four man lion had both the New Year’s and the Moon Festival celebrations to itself. The smell of spent firecrackers lingered in the air and my father’s ears were still ringing.

“Tally, what are you doing here?”

My dad turned to see that the shortest of the dragon dancers was also a friend from the Chinese Students Association at San Jose State.

“Just helping my dad.”

“Wow, so you’re doing pretty well.”

“What are you up to Donnie?”

“I’ve been helping my father supervise the olive picking. I’m still on the waiting list for a state job in Sacramento.”

“Well, good luck. What department?”

“The Secretary of State.”

Did anyone Chinese work there, even as clerical staff? My father chose not to mention that he was serving as the assistant manager for one of my Grandfather’s legitimate businesses, a small take out restaurant on the wrong end of Sacramento. The small crowd around them began to head towards the temple.

“Tally, you going to try to catch a ring? Maybe it’ll help at the tables?”

I should probably mention that my father’s American nickname of “Tally” may sound rather like “Lucky” in that it clearly happens to be an English word with an actual meaning yet is rarely to never used as an actual proper first name. My Father’s Chinese name was Wei Lan Tang which became “Wellington” easily enough. That became his legal American name, but schoolmates shortened it to “Tally,” as in the very British “Tally Ho.” To be clear, my father never went fox hunting either as a child or an adult.

In any case, this is how Donnie Woo played a critical role in my life even though we would not meet for another forty three years.

The ring catching portion of the River God Festival was simple enough, but it had begun to cause controversy. Towards the end of Saturday afternoon, the festival organizers set off a series of small fireworks. Each of the fireworks or “bombs” looked like small sticks of dynamite glued fuse up to a small block of wood. A ring bearing a silk ribbon was embedded near the top of the cylinder. Twenty four bombs were lined up along the middle of the street fronting the River God’s temple. Local police kept the crowd at least twenty five feet from the bombs. A member of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce bearing a three foot long glowing punk stood prepared to light each bomb in order. Most years the mayor of Hellenville would join him in lighting the first fuse.

The tip of the punk would make contact, gold sparks would dance along the fuse, and then the sparks would stop for a fraction of a second and there would be that odd silent pause that comes with all good fireworks. If things went right, the moment of silence would end abruptly with an explosion, smoke, then a ribbon-tailed metal circle would fly hundreds of feet into the sky above the temple. Catching any of the rings was supposed to bring good fortune. Catching the fifth ring, which bore a purple instead of red ribbon, was supposed to be especially portentous.

Gambling and the luck that the rings might bring may had too much of a natural affinity. Cantonese peasant culture which for so many generations was constantly at the mercy of weather, bandits, floods, earthquakes, and bad government had coped with the inevitable sense of helplessness with a strong faith in all forms of omens. They created superstitions around everything. For instance, my grandmother always took care to pick up the telephone with her left hand even though she was right handed because she feared that it would bring bad news if she used her dominant hand. Oddly, it was fine for the rest of us to use either hand. That particular superstition applied only to my grandmother’s use of telephones.


Not surprisingly, gamblers began paying for the rings. In 1951, someone reportedly paid a hundred dollars for the number five ring then won thousands (no one ever seemed to know exactly how many thousands nor did anyone seem to know who the gambler with the ring had been) at the tables that weekend. Unlike American style gambling, Chinese gambling is not at the mercy of a hot run against the house. The players in pai gow rotate turns as the “dealer”. The house share comes off the top of the pot. They only care that people bet and play. The organizers of the River God Festival thus publicized the link between the ring and the subsequent “killing” at the pai gow table. Unfortunately, the law of unintended consequences, something that seems to exist both in American and Chinese lore (in the Chinese version it usually takes the form of the Monkey God in America it usually involves either the Democratic party or the San Francisco Giants) appeared center stage.

Instead of contributing to the quaintness of this celebration of the River God and the Chinese invention of gunpowder, the rings became the source of scuffles and even fights. While this did not reach Tolkein-like heights, the scene changed from being a group of happy celebrants hoping that the ring would drop near them like some lazy pop foul at a baseball stadium to a frenzied circus of testosterone, money, and children pushing at the edges of the crowd hoping to see a fight. By 1956, only young men and a few hardened gamblers dared to venture into the drop area. Donnie Woo persuaded my father to join him in the drop zone that day anyway.

“Donnie, you don’t even gamble. Why would you want to get beaten up over a circle of metal?”

“I want that job with the Secretary of State’s office. There’s no work in Helenville for a college graduate.”

My dad nodded as he pictured what his life might have been like with different parents.

“Come on Wellington. Help me out here. You’re bigger than I am. If I catch a ring, you can scare some of those kids off.”

My dad shrugged and took two steps inside the circle of bystanders.

“Okay, but I’m not getting in any fights.”

“You sure you want to keep your jacket on? One of my friends can hold it for you.”

My dad remembered the money belt and the envelope around his waist. It did occur to him that he shouldn’t venture into the drop zone at all, but if he changed his mind it would look like he was chicken.

“I’ll leave it on.”

My father then stepped into the middle of what looked to be a Chinese rugby scrum, the only blue jacket in a swarm of young men in white Brando t-shirts. None of them looked anything like Stanley Kowalski. The first two rings landed well away from them. The third bomb was a dud. How did that affect figuring out which one was number five? If number five was the big one, why did they fire off nineteen more? It seemed like white people would never do it that way.

The Chinese chamber of commerce rep with the three foot punk had a sense of drama around number five. He made a little show of pointing to the bomb itself which instead of having a red paper jacket was covered in red and blue. He waved the punk like a wand, did a little dance, the crowd grew quiet, and the swarm of young men in the center of the drop zone swelled. My father noticed that there was no space to move in any direction. He saw the sparks, heard the sound of the explosion, then looked up towards the sky. He spotted the ring arc upwards as it tumbled across the sky. Much to his surprise, it was right above him.

He felt the bodies press against his then pulled his own arms close to his money belt. It takes about four seconds for an object to fall from a height of two hundred feet. It felt like forty. In his peripheral vision, my dad noticed that the other young men around him had gotten too excited. They were jumping too early. For an instant, my father decided to forget about the money belt and jumped himself, his right hand stretched upwards. The number five ring fell into the flat of his palm, he squeezed it, landed, then thinking quickly acted as if nothing had happened. The men around him had just landed from their second jumps. They were looking around for some sign that the ring had hit the concrete. My father had already stepped away from the scrum, the ring and ribbon in his front pants pocket. He shook his head in mock disappointment as someone in the crowd pointed towards him. He didn’t even tell Donnie Woo when he ran into him again later that day well away from the crowd.

“Tally where did you go?”

“Sorry, Donnie, I forgot I had to check on something for my Pop,” he lied.

As bombs seven, eight, and nine went off, my father found an empty phone booth at the back of a nearby restaurant. Once there, he slipped the ring into a second pouch inside his money belt. Certain that no one had noticed, he decided that he might as well use the luck that had fallen from the heavens a few moments earlier. He went back to the pai gow table, much to the surprise of the elders who first thought that he had returned because he was dissatisfied with their envelope. He then, in his turn as dealer, won seven hundred and fifty dollars on a distinctly mediocre hand, which was three times his monthly income from the restaurant. The ring either worked or the elders had been afraid to let Y.P. Tang’s son lose that weekend.

My father drove back to Paperson with the three prizes from his quest, the envelope, the ring, and seven hundred and fifty dollars worth of folding money packed in his money belt. Despite the valley heat, he left his jacket on even during the drive. He didn’t care that he was sweating. He stopped for gas on the way. While the attendant was looking at the highway traffic, my father impulsively took fifty extra dollars and slipped it into the envelope that he had received from the members of the Hellenville Chinese Chamber of Commerce. He thought that my Grandfather would think he had done an even better job if he brought home more money from the trip than expected.

He slipped in late that night, told my mother the story of his day, then pinned the ring above the headboard of their bed. They treated themselves to a weekend in Monterey. And took the ring with them. I was born late that year, a healthy boy, the first son of an eldest son in a Calfiornia-Chinese family. My parents insisted that “Lucky” was the only name that fit.

As I grew up, my mother and father would tell me variations on the story of my name. Sometimes my mother would be there with him. Sometimes she would slip out of the story. Oddly none of the versions specifically mentioned the presence of Donnie Woo. Eventually, my father framed the ring and ribbon and covered it in glass. Until we moved out of my Grandfather’s house in Paperson in 1961 for the Strawberry Creek subdivision in Sacramento, the framed ring hung over my parents’ headboard in their bedroom on the second floor of my grandparents’ house. Once in the suburbs, it felt too Chinese to keep on the walls. Regardless of the version of the story, it made me feel special. I was the product of fate and the fact that my father had played forward on the Lincoln Junior High basketball team.

I was thirty years old before I realized that there was a problem with my parents’ story of the ring. I was with my friend Grover and his friend Yale. We were sitting at dinner in a dining hall at a college even though none of us were students at the time.

“So Yale, did you get your name because you were conceived in a patch of ivy?” Grover asked.

“No, it’s an old family name and no, I never went to Yale, never even applied…Speaking of odd names though…”

“You mean why was my family named for a powdered orange drink consumed by astronauts?”

“No.”

“I got the name Lucky because my parents had spent the first five years of their marriage trying to conceive. My dad caught a lucky ring at a Chinese festival and I was born not long after that.”

“What kind of festival was it?” Yale asked.

“You know it never occurred to me that Tang is a Chinese name,” Grover, who isn’t Chinese, added.

“Chinese food in space?” Yale shook his head as he said it.

“Did you ever try eating that powder straight up? …. The only thing grosser was trying to eat Fizzies without adding water. Do you remember that stuff?”

Both Yale and Grover made lemon-sucking faces.

“To answer your question, it was celebration of the River God in a little town called Hellenville. I think there were some Greek families who settled there.”

“So when do they have it?”

“In the spring some time.”

Grover looked up and to his right. “Lucky, Isn’t your birthday in late September?”

It had never occurred to me that my mother had to be either two months pregnant when my father caught that “Lucky Ring” or that I was born some twenty months after the event.

So, why had I never counted the months? I guess the answer is simple enough – I wanted to believe in the power of my own name. It still doesn’t seem right to me that a couple months should get in the way of a really good story. I guess that’s something of a family trait.

At that point, my father had already been gone for eight years. He had a sudden heart attack behind the bar at his restaurant when I was twenty two. My mother was remarried despite the fact that she had deeply loved my father. I was already worried that I was doomed to do less with my life than everyone had expected or was it demanded? I had managed to go to the right schools, but never had quite found the right jobs. My first marriage had just ended after just two years. Even then, I hardly felt lucky.

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