Chinatown Beat (2 page)

After four months here he realized that working in the 0-Five was like living in two worlds at the same time. In a precinct that was ninety-nine percent yellow, the Commanding Officer was named Salvatore Marino, and the beat cops were ninety-nine percent white. The white cops put in their shifts, then beat a quick retreat back to the welcome of white enclaves beyond the colored reaches of the inner city. Chinatown was like a foreign port to them, full of experiences confounding to the average Caucasian mind. Don't worry about it, fake, its Chinatown. They were able to dismiss it as a troublesome nightmare, half-remembered and unfathomable. These Chinese were creatures unlike themselves, existing in a world where the English language and white culture carried little significance. Generations of sons and daughters of the Celestial Kingdom, they lived their lives by their own set of odd cultural rules. When a crime was committed, no one ever saw or heard anything. When the cops rousted them, it was a Chinese fire drill.

But Jack had grown up in Chinatown, knew what it felt like to look and breathe Chinese, to savorfoo yee, ga lei, pungent and spicy aromas that white precinct cops wrinkled up their noses at, to speak and decipher regional dialects that sounded to the others like a back-alley cockfight.

He could remember a boyhood time when there were no Chinese cops, no Asian Squad, no interpreters, no community liaison, only gwai to white devil faces in the blue uniforms howling watseemotta no speakeeEnglee?

Four months after his transfer, his father passed away in the Chinatown tenementJack remembered growing up in. Realizing Jack was a cop, the landlord graciously allowed him the full month to clear out his father's belongings, purposely Jack figured-never once mentioning the key money he'd taken from the old man those many long years ago.

When he opened his eyes, nothing had changed except the sound of the rain falling harder outside. Now, with his father six days in the still-soft ground of Evergreen Hills, he was feeling the tiredness heavy in his bones, the fung sup, arthritis, setting in. He adjusted the Detective Special nestled in the small of his back, then rose from the desk and took a black canvas knapsack from the steel lockers, checked it for disposable cameras, a pager, cellular phone, a silver flask. He went down the hundred-year-old stairs, exited onto Elizabeth Alley and followed the streets back to the Mott Street tenement he'd grown up in.

The rain came down in thick sheets, rattled the stairwell windows as Jack climbed with leaden legs the five flights of tenement squalor.

Pa had lived here, all his forty-nine years of Chinatown life. A dead dog, the Chinese numbers meant: forty-nine, say gow.

Time and again Jack had asked Pa to move. Uptown. Crosstown. Queens maybe. A decent apartment they could rent somewhere, where the winter freeze didn't sneak in through the windows, where the dank misery of changing seasons didn't settle on the bedcovers. Where vermin didn't feast on the kitchen table, in the toilet, under the pillow.

Pa wouldn't hear of it, angry each time Jack brought it up. Where would he get his Chinese vegetables? His Chinese newspapers? Where would he find his cronies to gossip with, to keep track of who died, who lost at the track? All the important things. Didn't matter, Jack would say. There were three Chinatowns now. Sunset Park. Or Flushing.

Flushing, too far, would be Pa's answer. And Brooklyn, too many halt yun-blacks.

New frontiers were opening up for old-timers stuck too long, for newcomers too long locked out. No longer was the Chinese community defined by a single geographic boundary, but by a single consciousness of race. Not that any of that had mattered to Jack. He knew who he was, but knew he needed another space to live in, to be free from the burden his past here placed on him. But they trapped themselves, the old bachelors, wrapping themselves in their fierce Chineseness, taking pride in their disdain for American ways. Jack's ways. The man accusing the boy of trying to be white. Father and son were at cross-cultural odds, their lives a clash.

The keys were old and tarnished, the metal edges worn smooth and rounded from a hundred thousand turns. The lock itself was older than the keys, older than the grime in the hallway.

Jack twisted the key and heard the bolt open silently, effortlessly. He pushed open the creaking door and stepped inside Pa's world, his own past.

Nothing had changed. He wondered why he had ever thought it might have. Under the dim lifeless circle of fluorescent light spreading along the flaking gray ceiling, everything looked the same.

He stared at the scuffed and dented linoleum floor, produced the slim silver flask he'd prepared for the visit to the cemetery, full of the whiskey with which they'd celebrated life and mourned death. Sanctified liquor. He took a deep swallow, swinging his black knapsack down to the floor.

There was the tear-off wall calendar from the Hang Seng Bank, bright red with raised gold Chinese characters, trumpeting the Year of the Dog, the thin sheet of white paper printed with the number Four in black, freezing the day Pa died.

September 4, 1994, gow say gore say, twice a dead dog.

He crossed the stillness of the room to Pa's bed, pulled plastic packets of photographs from the bedside table, saw they were thick with dust except for spots where fingerprints had touched down recently, pushing across clear lines in search of memories.

How soon near the end do we begin to grope for our past?

When he opened the albums, the fingerprints led him to streaked and faded black-and-white photographs of himself as a child, then pictures of Ma, sometime in the 1940s. Her hair was shiny and combed back, away from eyebrows perfectly curved and sharp as a razor, her mouth slightly opened and dark lips smiling, revealing teeth framed in gold. She couldn't have been more than nineteen, an arranged bride, her almond eyes small lights of hope, resignation.

And there was the picture of himself with Pa, taken on a visit to the Tofu King almost a decade ago, by the front counter with the bean curd-dao foo-and the flat sheets of white noodles.

He swallowed quickly, noticed Pa's gourd-shaped bottle of mao-tai liquor on the floor. The seal had been broken but it felt more than half full. His mind drifted backward.

Jack was never the good son, but he struggled to maintain the truncated sense of family he had with Pa, who, in the few hours he was home from the laundry or the restaurant, was full of criticism or complaint, the smell of whiskey tinging his words.

Other times, around holidays, Pa was more melancholy, but managed a smile and brought home sweet cakes and fruit for his son, the jook sing, the American-born, the empty piece of bamboo.

Jack flipped the cellophane-covered pages, came across old prints of Pa in the laundry, with Grandpa, who had gone back to China, beside him.

He took another swallow, then sliding his fingers through the dust-covered pages, came to a curled print of himself, in the poolroom, in between Tat Louie and Wing Lee, all mugging for the camera.

Now, sitting on his father's crumpled bed, Jack was unable to find the peace of mind he needed. What bothered him wasn't the neon lights from the Lee Luck restaurant sign whose colors intruded into the darkened room. It wasn't the clawing sound of rat feet scratching for entry somewhere along the baseboards, near the radiators. And it wasn't the smells of lop cheung-pork sausage-and hom yee-salted fish-long since leached into the walls, becoming one with the cracked and peeling green paint after thirty years, making time stand still.

It was the sense of being here, too late, the son, the cop. After the fact.

Somewhere down the stairs, across the hall, he could hear the vague singsong of Chinese opera, and closer, the rat-a-tat-tat action of Hong Kong videotapes.

He hadn't had the chance to say goodbye.

Decades of Chinese smell and sound hung so thick he could almost touch them, settling upon him a strong feeling of his father's presence. It wasn't Jack sitting on the bed after all. It was his sense of his father mixed with the spirit of his own younger self, surrounded by the ghosts of his father's bachelor apartment.

Jack felt thirst grabbing in his throat and emptied the flask. Pulling the few much-fingered pictures from the album, he slipped them inside his vest pocket and tossed the rest into the empty Seagram's carton on the floor.

As he lay down on Pa's pillow, memories came flooding; then the alcohol reached his brain and rolled him back a decade and four years, into a nightmare.

The three of them, Tat, Wing, and himself, racing across rooftops, leaping the spaces between buildings. Tat is throwing stones at windows as they run, three teenagers shrieking with juvenile laughter, curses following them from inside the tenement apartments.

They are clambering down a fire escape, dropping to a courtyard below.

Wing is shouting, "Race! Last one out sucks lop cheung."

They are sprinting through a back alley, jumping cinderblock partitions, dashing for a connecting tunnel. The other end of the tunnel leads out to a side street, and they don't see the gang of Wah Yings until Wing crashes headlong into the leader.

He cuffs Wing with a backhand punch, snatches a gold chain from his neck. Wing lunges for the chain and the nasty boys break out their knives. They're flipping the chain from one to another, taunting Wing. Tat steps sideways, launches a side kick into the leader's groin, and suddenly everybody's screaming, cursing.

The Ying leader swings his switchblade around, and with a short punch blunts Wing's desperate charge. Wing lurches back, then charges again, his eyes white now.

There is a crash of black and white across Jack's forehead, blood from the gash running into his eye, as he watches Wing dropped by a chopping right hand, the color of red wine suddenly spreading across Wing's white T-shirt. Tat is screaming, and the Yings are beating the shit out of him.

Then everything is black, filled with the wails of a family overcome with grief. Racks of flowers fail to brighten a room cloaked in the choking odor of incense and death.

Wing is laid out in the casket and mourners are bowing, bowing, bowing, and burning death money. Tat is speechless and Jack watches him flee the funeral parlor as Wing's mother explodes with grief.

The sound of gunfire awoke him, yelling and shooting in the connecting back alley that led out to Mott Street. In the dark of Pa's apartment he could not tell what time it was, only that it was still black outside. More gunshots and screaming. He groped for his Colt Special, found it, and crept out onto the stairwell landing.

From the hallway window, he could see shadows and figures darting through the alleyway. He slapped out the hallway bulb with the gun barrel, crouched to observe the action below. But in another instant, it was quiet again. When he climbed down the fire escape into the alleyway, they were all gone, only a few spent shell casings on the ground and the burnt smell of gunpowder in the dark air. No bodies, and too dark to see if there had been bloodshed. He tried to shake the grogginess from his head, his adrenaline rush subsiding now, leaving a ferric taste in his mouth.

Back in Pa's apartment he sat upright on the bed and closed his eyes. Sleep didn't return and he reached for the flask and tilted it, but it barely wet his lips now. He picked up the gourd, shook it, refilled the flask with mao-tai. Then he found the keys to his Fury and went back out into the deadness of night.

The streets were wet, black.

The midnight-blue Dodge Fury sat on the corner of Mott and Bayard, a police permit on the dash visible through the windshield. No one was on the street when Jack slipped inside, started it up, let it idle while he fired up a cigarette, letting it burn halfway down before he slowly pulled away from the sidewalk, heading toward the East Side.

He rolled through the extended communities of Fukienese, Malaysians, Chin Chaos, settlements stretching east to Essex and north to Delancey, into areas longtime Hassidic, Puerto Rican.

Whenever he cruised the neighborhoods, he thought of the boyhood Tat and Wing and he had shared. They were workingclass Chinatown boys, but they were also Manhattan boys, who stayed mostly in the borough and came of age trolling through the various ethnic neighborhoods: Little Italy, the Village, Soho, Tribeca, Chelsea. When they ventured into Brooklyn or Queens, it was usually on the snake that roared through the subway tunnel, always a dusty noisy death march to get anywhere.

He used to like cruising the old places, remembering the year Tat got a used Volkswagen and they bombed around town, wolfing at girls.

Manhattan was twenty-two square miles and if he took his time, he'd cover it in two hours. He needed the air, needed to clear the alcohol from his head. The perspective from the driver's seat was a bittersweet pleasure to him.

He continued east.

The Greater Chinatown Dream, the Nationalists had called it: an all-yellow district in lower Manhattan running from the Battery to Fourteenth street, river to river, east to west, by the year 2000.

Then he turned the car north and made all the green lights through loisaida, the Lower East Side, past the Welfare Projectsthe Wagner, Rutgers, Baruch, Gouverneur-federally subsidized highrises, which ran along the East River, blocs of buildings that stood out like racial fortresses. Blacks in the Smith Houses, Latinos in the Towers.

That's how the Lower East Side really was, not a melting pot but a patchwork quilt of different communities of people coexisting, sometimes with great difficulty.

Manhattan was symbolic of the rest of Gotham, the Big City, where the best walked the streets alongside the worst.

When the red light caught him, he was already past Alphabet City, in that part of the East Village where the druggie nation came to score: smoke, crack, rocks, pharmaceuticals, and a brand of Mott Street H tagged China Cat, so potent and poisonous it had sent twelve of the hardcore straight to junkie heaven in August, keeping the Ninth Precinct narcs tossing.