SIBERIA/LA

legacy

it’s 6:30.
the dog stops stepping on my neck when i give in,
open my eyes and say, let’s go.
she jumps off the bed on to the floor
once slippery, now just covered in shed fur and old socks.

i follow her off the bed in pieces
my right leg first
then my left, the numb one,
the one that the doctor said doesn’t get enough blood.
it was something about my spine.

we turn the corner on st. andrews and 5th
to patches of tall grass that i mistake for wheat
where she is distracted by idling garbage trucks
and the sure sound of a closing door.
we make our way a few more yards
to her spot beneath a window where a korean woman chants
to buddha 20 hours a day
as if she has sons who have disappointed her.

back inside the apartment
i leave the light off and crawl into bed behind jude’s
warm curled body
grab her tits and pull her into me
and wait for sleep to come.
but when our bodies shift
i tell her i want to leave a legacy
and she rolls over and buries her face into my chest.
the world is ending you know, i say.
she nods.

the dog is on her side on the floor
the sound of her licking the area around her face
and i look over at the clock by the hairbrush
the red numbers taking me back to vegas
to the stardust
to last august
to our broke honeymoon
and how she held the door handle to catch her breath
her face red with excitement
before going out naked to get ice
and we fucked and drank and when the ice was gone
it was my turn to go
into the narrow hallway that smelled like asian men smoking
where i stopped laughing
where i broke my heart
thinking about the first time i fell in love with hotels
on the border of brazil
sleeping out the night before we’d see iguacu falls
for the last time
how i ran through the hallways with the clean white walls
rising so tall on either side of me
like shiny arms holding the ceiling up near paradise.

i wanted to stay there
in that hallway that led to the kitchen
where dark-skinned men in white hats looked down at me
between screams
smiling like they saw something on my face.

there is this, you see, this indescribable feeling
when your skin pushes against a perfect round ass
but the weight of me is pushing all the things i have loved
out of my life.
i could have stayed small if they’d given me the choice
i’d have chosen to live in a space i can not fill with
empty bottles, unfinished poems, and cum-stained sheets.

but this is the canvas of my choosing
what ends in the breaths between hopeless chants to
dead gods,
a cigarette stenched hallway waiting for me
to run through with legs that will never heal,
something about my spine,
something about my heart that murmurs,

and i dig my fingers into her chest
to feel the last moments of my regret
because it was the ceiling,
it was always the ceiling so far above me
that taught me to love my life,
the ceiling so low now
so close
too attainable to ever want.

and in the dark
she puts her lips to my chest
and i nod.

I haven’t been this sad about the basketball season coming to an end in a while. Last year was such misery, the 2 and 19 stretch to end the season, listening to morons talking about how Clippers play real basketball, listening to my father curse at Tierre Brown, or as he liked to call him, “that damn number 5,” before stomping up the stairs to his bedroom. But this season, this one’s been special.

After Lamar Odom makes a sweeping reverse lay-up in a game last week, coming from the left side down the baseline, then using his 6-10 frame and long left arm to come up on the other side of the basket for two points, he has a big smile on his face that reminds me that they’re kids, big kids out there, just playing a game. We all make big O’s with our lips and stare at each other with approval. My mother has the same smile as Lamar and she says that this has been a good season. She talks about Kobe’s 81-point game, still shaking her head about it because she was there in the living room with us that night watching the game against Toronto, on her feet as she walked back and forth from kitchen, so nervous that she couldn’t sit still. She’s like that the whole game during the playoffs. And after each basket that night, she clapped her small hands together and let out a “Waaaahhhh!” And she’s talking about it again as my father tries to figure out how we can get rid of Luke Walton. “It’s been a good season,” she says, and stands on the two bamboo sticks that my father got her. She does this every night, balancing herself on the bamboo, swinging her arms up and down to lower her blood pressure, all part of my father’s plan to keep her healthy and alive for as long as he can.

My father curses again as he sees Luke Walton enter the game and he digs into the Easter candy basket that Judy’s mom has sent, pulling out a yellow marshmallow bunny.

“What is this?” he asks.
“Sugar coated with sugar,” we tell him.
He eats it anyway and says, “This is all sugar.”
“How’s the fatso doing?” she asks.
“Shaq’s washed up,” I say.

Luke Walton holds the ball for five seconds, afraid to throw a simple pass, and that’s enough for my father. “That damn number 4,” he says and gets off the couch. He stomps up the stairs to his room.Our family moved to America in 1980, twenty-six years ago already. I can track the history of my family in this country by Lakers seasons. Magic returning from his injury filled second season only to throw up a last second air-ball in the lane against the Rockets in the playoffs. Sending Norm Nixon to the San Diego Clippers for a rookie named Byron Scott. Dr J dunking on Michael Cooper. Firing Paul Westhead and hiring Pat Riley. Losing to those ugly white guys on the Celtics again. And losing. Then winning. And the day I woke up at 4 p.m. and walked through the campus of UC Irvine to get to my film class, finding a seat in the back row where all the black, Hispanic, and Asian students sat, which was all of six, only to leave when I got sleepy again, returning to my dorm to a ringing phone. It was my mother, worried, her breath short, saying, “I was worried about you, I thought you’d be heartbroken.” And I sat there confused until she explained to me that Magic had AIDS, Magic had AIDS, and she was worried that I was wandering around with a broken heart because Magic had AIDS, and I hung up and went to sleep, dreamed of eating chicken fingers in the cafeteria with some red punch.

She gets off the bamboos and sits down again, smile as big as these kids playing basketball, and when the game ends we leave, first my brother, then us, and my father runs down from his room to say goodbye, making sure we don’t forget the soap he’s given us, the pretty and fragrant soap he spent the weekend making in the bathroom. He’d given them to us before dinner before the game, a red one and a blue one and one shaped like a bear. Clear soap with little white chunks inside.

“What’s that?” I’d asked him.
“Soap,” he’d said.
“What’s that inside?”
“Soap.”
“Your dad makes soap now,” mom had said. And we’d looked at each other.

He is now standing at the door waving goodbye as my mom hits him with an elbow, reminding him that he’s forgotten to put his teeth back in and we make the short walk across the front yard with the new roses toward the gate, the soaps in my hand smelling like fruit and I look back over my shoulder and see him running back into the house to find his teeth and mom leaning against the doorway. It has snuck up on me, the season’s end. This sweetest and saddest season is coming to an end, this season of cleaning with soap made by hands once strong enough to crush bricks, this season that gave us an 81-point miracle, leaving us to gather in a cold room inside a yellow house for each game that followed, praying for one more blessing to come.

Oops. How could I forget to mention Lost In Translation in a post about worst films of all time.

I think this sums up how I feel about it: I’m at a bar called Grassroots on St. Marks in downtown Manhattan with a classmate from NYU. A playwright. We’re talking about all the buzz surrounding Sofia Coppola’s new “masterpiece” when I voice my displeasure about its absolutely ludicrous story (Poor successful and wealthy American guy has to spend a WHOLE TWO WEEKS or some shit in Japan for a mere 2 million dollars!!! Dealing with freaky Japanese! And they can’t speak English, those freaks!!! And he has to kiss Scarlett Johansson!!!).

“That’s exactly Japan,” the playwright says. “I was there a whole year!”

“As an Asian man, I’m pissed at how they portray our people as freaks,” I say.

“You can’t say that,” says the playwright. “You’re not Asian. You’re Korean.”

Anyway, that sums up Lost In Translation for me.

And my boys and I still haven’t forgiven Ms. Coppola for being the most horrible part of the horrible Godfather III. (Dying on the steps…”Dad,” she says then croaks…God, I hate her.)

For the longest time, I was responsible for picking the worst film that my friends and I ever watched. We made our occasional trip to the mom-and-pop video store down the street, like Videotheque inside the lot of The Boys Market (once Market Basket) on 9th and Western. This was when we got bored of descrambling SelecTV porn. Anyway, we went to store and I held up the box for The Love Butcher, a 1975 slasher flick, that would become the bad movie that all movies were measured against.

There’s a new breed of terrible movies that, as Emeril would put it, is kicking it up a notch. The Bad Quotient, that is. It sort of begins with American Beauty (although the cinematographer was flawless as always), surpassed recently by the incomparable Sideways (I guess Asian women, if enlightened through Westernization, that is, can’t help but love asshole white boys), and now trumped by the WORST FILM EVER.

Of course, I’m speaking of none other than…CRASH.

There has been a lot said about it since the Oscars, how it may be the worst Best Picture selection and such, and this incredible (and very self-serving) rip by Annie Proulx. But I don’t think anybody has gone far enough. It is the worst Best Picture selection BECAUSE it’s the worst film ever made. Ever.

I don’t even want to go into how fucked-up and idiotic a take of Los Angeles this movie is. This hilarious article in the LA Times from a bit back does a great job of that.

I just want to point out one scene: the Chinese guy (we know this because he has JADE) is laying in the hospital bed and his wife runs in and he calls to her…”KIM LEE!” In the history of, I don’t know, THE WORLD, no Asian man has ever called to his wife, “KIM LEE!” This has never happened. I swear. People don’t usually call their wives by two completely random last names.

I don’t think Paul Haggis has met an Asian person before. Or Hispanic. Or African-American. Or Persian. Actually, I think Paul Haggis has officially become eligible to enter Hell by being the creator of Crash. But really, could we have expected anything more from the writer of this brilliant show about the reality of race and from the creator of this incredible piece of art that graced our television sets for so long?

The saddest part of it all may be that I have to remove The Love Butcher from the pedestal that it had sat on for so long. Just mentioning those three words made all of my friends shake their heads in silence, followed by a punch to my arm for the pain I inflicted on them so long ago. But now it’s all gone. The Love Butcher is no more.

Crash. Worst. Film. Ever. The end is near…

I was meeting with my friend Kate this morning, who has a wonderful blog up, about the make-up of a writer. I was saying that we are this really fucked up combination of pure ego and zero self-esteem, a combination that makes it nearly impossible to edit anything sometimes. I don’t want one word changed because this is my art and it’s perfect! Soon followed by: You mean I just wrote something that’s not perfect? I’m worthless and should give up writing forever! It’s a wonder we can survive a week in the world. But that’s not what I really want to talk about right now. Right now, I don’t even know what it means to be published.

I came upon this article a couple of months ago about Wonkette and got into a not-so-heated discussion about what it means to be published in today’s age. So here is this writer whose work is read by thousands and thousands (or as I like to say, “billions”) of readers everyday around the world. So she gives this all up for…a book deal. Of course, there are probably other factors involved, like burn-out or boredom or new challenges or huge advances. But I couldn’t help but wonder if, as writers, at the same time technology is trying to find a way to NOT use traditional paper anymore, we still don’t feel validated as “writers” unless we have something published on the same, soon-to-be-replaced, traditional paper. When somebody asks me if I have had a poem or a story “published” before, can I say, “Yes, on my website,” and not be embarrassed?

It sort of reminds me of the chapbook, this blogging thing. You know, I’ve made (see how I said “made” and not “published”?) many chapbooks in my life, but there’s this huge part of me that won’t let me count those collections, some of them my best work, as “published” books. What a jerk.

So somebody out there, please enlighten me on this. What am I striving for as a writer? What is it to be published? Will anybody, two hundred years from now, care that the dusty little book of poems they have found in a pile of dirt by a writer named Chiwan Choi was not published by some big company in New York?