12-12-06

On the day my brother was born, I was exactly nine years old, and my friend Hanzhi, who later changed his name to Harry, was eight years and some months, and it was a beautiful time because no one had started to make fun of us yet for being best friends (we had about a year and half of this bliss left), even though we were basically asking for the ridicule with our role-playing games. They all went along the lines of: I was his wife, he was handsome, I had a sharp wit, he had good arms, I knew an impressive amount of words, he could bench 250, we served in the secret service and had committed to spending our entire lives trying to vanquish enemies from the outside, and traitors from within (his dad and my dad of course, and their code names were Diarrhea Daddy, and Constipation Papa), and after we completed a mission (usually took about an afternoon’s time) we would pretend to sleep like husband and wife, and since we were so hyper all the time and would exert massive amounts of energy in trying to capture Diarrhea Daddy and Constipation Papa, whenever we ‘pretended’ to sleep, we would actually fall asleep, and all the grown-ups fawned at us, stood over us and whispered annoying things like, “They’re little monsters when they’re awake, but look how beautiful they look now,” as if we were better unconscious, as if the most beautiful state we could ever achieve was akin to being in a coma!
On the day my brother was born, Cindy was in a junior in high school and mom was starting to cry because Cindy’s only requirement for picking a college was that it be as far away from New York as possible, and I asked her in the middle of the grayest December day in all of 1991 why she would ever leave this place, I asked her to please tell me why she would want to spend her life away from here, and she crouched down beside me and picked my eyes wide open and said, “Wake up you idiot, this place is a shithole.”
On the day my brother was born, it was Christmas, also known as Cindy and mine joint birthday. I begged my mother the year before when she asked me if I wanted a brother or sister for Christmas to please not give birth to the male version of Cindy, and please, please, please not forget to get me a real present, two real presents, one real present for Christmas, and one real present for my birhday, if for some horrible reason my baby brother or sister was to be born on my/Cindy’s/Jesus, son of God’s birthday. But, despite all that, I woke up at seven in the morning and ran downstairs to find my friend Hanzhi’s mother cooking ground pork and green spicy peppers, which I could not digest properly because I had a poor intestinal system, or so my dad said whenever I refused to eat the crud he cooked on the weekend, and my friend Hanzhi drawing pictures of giant cylindrical presents coming out of Santa’s butt.
“Guess what? You’re brother is being born.” Hanzhi crumpled one of his pictures and threw it at my face. “He’s got to come out of your mom’s butt.” His mom didn’t understand English, and I hit him for grossing me out first thing in the morning.
“Not her butt, you idiot. Don’t you know about the other hole?” He had his violin case with him, which meant he was supposed to practice thirty minutes in the morning and another thirty in the afternoon. I played the piano. My mom made me do one full hour, and it didn’t matter if I did in the morning or afternoon. I picked afternoons because I was the kind of person who waited until the last minute, and sometimes in the afternoon, if I was cute all morning, my mom would let me finish ten minutes early.
I was mad at my mom and I decided I would not practice piano that day. She had broken her promise to me, and later she would probably say something like, “No, I never promised you that. No, I didn’t,” and she would make me cry and I would not have anything to say back because she was my mom, and she always had to have the final say. I said good-morning to Hanzhi’s mom and she hugged me tightly, her dirty apron getting on my cheek.
“You must be so happy, Cici,” she said in Chinese. “Your family is the first family to have three children.” She shook her head and looked away for a minute, “Well. Some couples don’t even have one child yet. You have to wonder why some people aren’t trying to have children when they are getting on in their age. They’ll be crying alone, with no children, no grandchildren come retirement age.” She hugged me again and I tried my best to crane my neck away from the spilt soy sauce on her apron.
I ran up the stairs to find Cindy. I wanted to pounce on her, with the stink of a night’s sleep still on my breath and yell into her face, “We have a baby brother!” but when I threw open her doors there was no one there. I had been left along in the house. They woke up Cindy and took her with them to the hospital, but they left me and called up Hanzhi’s mom. I was hopping mad. I read a children’s book once about why bees sting human, and the tale was extremely sympathetic towards bees, and had a tone of disdain for humans that I only picked up on many year later when I was cleaning out my old storybooks. Towards the end of the book, there was an illustration of a bee that had been provoked by a thoughtless human and the bee had slits for eyes and was diving, stinger pointed southward, into a beefy, red-faced kid’s arm. For all intensive purposes, when my brother was born, I felt like a pissed off bee, and I zipped through the rooms of our house hitting all the things I could hit without getting in trouble: my parent’s mattress, my sister’s mattress, the clothes hanging in both of their closets, all of my own stuff, including a Clue board that I ripped in half and was never able to tape back together properly.
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On the day my sister went to college, I started writing letters to people I wanted to meet. First, I wrote a letter to Hansen, the washed-out teen band I once had a sex dream about. I woke up with my hands dug into my underwear and felt so ashamed that I took two showers in a row, then went outside and dirtied my hands with dirt from the backyard and went back and took another shower. I started off the letter like this:
Dear Hanson brothers!
Dear Hanson trio!
A trio of brothers!
Hanson bros!
Trio of bros!
Tro bros!

I’m writing to you today in hopes that I will sound crazy enough that whoever sorts through your mail, (probably someone who looks like me, is the same age as me and is in your immediate family, in which case, it would not actually look like me since I’m not blond, blue-eyed, or a white girl!) will find me interesting and startling enough that they will pass this letter on to you.

I don’t normally like to look back at my diary entries once I’ve written them. I especially would not like to look back at my seventh and eighth grade diary entries, but if I did, I would probably find a few entries that are trying to be all deep and pose the question, “Can you love someone you never met before?” Obviously, what I was really getting at was: is it weird that I want to have mad wild sex with Taylor Hansen, and if not Taylor, then okay, I’ll take Ike because he’s got a good name and I could do with an older man, and if not Taylor or Ike, then fine, I’ll take Zach even though he sings like my brother and I’d rather not be thinking of my brother while boning a Hansen brother.

I also wrote letters to Denzel Washington, Devon Sawa, Posh Spice, the English teacher who left my school when I was tenth grade, who I thought once touched my arm and lingered there and another time, I thought maybe he was giving me the once-over during exam week when it was hotter than a baked turkey and I wore my old green shorts that were too small for me. I thought for sure when he asked me to stay behind at the end of class, he was going to shut the door, pull down the blinds, and whip out his dick, and I had it all figured out—I would confidently say, “I wore a special bra today. I was hoping you’d get to see it,” and he would rip off my bra, (because he could care less about what I was wearing compared to the wild passionate fucking we were about to engage in), but it turned out in the end, that he just wanted to congratulate me on my excellent scores and performance this year and that I should feel free to call him or write him next year when I was a junior and he was teaching a bunch of private school fuckheads in Southern California the multiple dimensions of Hemingway’s imperialist ambitions. I kept his address in a box with the Kleenex pack the video store clerk gave me when I first moved into this town.
I wrote the video store clerk a letter too even though I didn’t know his name so I addressed it to, “The boy I have loved ever since I moved into this crappy, shithole, no-future-whatsoever-in-store-for-me-here town,” and I meant it completely. I would have sex with Mr. Clarke, I’d let him do me doggy-style, I would jack off all three Hanson brother simultaneously, and if they were into kinky shit, then I’d wear nipple clamps and high heels, and I’d lay out on the beach, hard-core porno style and enhance my boob with some kind of miracle bra or whatever, and all this, I decided I was perfectly comfortable with and considered including in my letters (I ended up including the three handjobs at once but omitting the nipple clamps, and I was afraid to use the word ‘doggy-style’ in a letter to one of my favorite teachers, but I did implore him to come back to New York and have sex with me in his car) even though I did not want to admit to myself that the most experience I had at that point was kissing my ninth-grade boyfriend on the cheek outside of Computer Science class, and ripped my hand away from his when he had put it over his hard-on during Chasing Amy. He was a fucking perv.
But my fantasies of the video store clerk were entirely pure. I counted the number of times he smiled at me when I was in the store, and sometimes I lurked and watched out of the corner of my eye the number of times he smiled at the other girls in the store. One time, I counted seven smiles and I was so happy because seven was also a lucky number, that I shouted, “I love him,” in my room and my mom ran in and looked at me with furrowed eyebrows.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, get out, would you? How would you like it if I just ran into your room when you were trying to do something private?”
“You do that all the time, and I’m also your mother.”