Fresh Off the Boat (15 page)

Warren and I were trading places. He used to go to Southwest Middle School with everyone, but in seventh grade his parents pulled him out and he had to go to First Academy, where I went in third grade. What were the odds? He went to TFA and of course, who’s his best friend? My boy Chris Nostro, who I used to chill with. I remember Warren called Nostro on the phone one day.

“Yo, Nostro, you remember this Chinese kid, Eddie Huang?”

“Wait, the Chinese kid that went to TFA in third grade?”

“Yeah, that’s my boy! He lives across the street from me now.”

“Oh hell, no! I remember when he put Edgar in the microwave, dude, ha, ha. That shit was wild. What’s he doing in your neighborhood? He got money now, too?”

Neither Warren nor I wanted to accept the fact that overnight, we’d become the “rich” kids at school. Warren was somewhat apologetic about it and I was, too. If someone needed money for lunch, I’d just hold them down because I remember being that kid even though my parents weren’t actually giving me money. I was just as “broke” as them but perception was a bitch and even at that age I didn’t want people catching the vapors. At Trinity, I used to eat this kid’s matzo and peanut butter because my mom didn’t give me enough money for lunch but I didn’t say anything. It bothered me a lot because people at public school thought I was spoiled, but I’d spent my life being the dirty kid at school wearing his dad’s old clothes.

Romaen and Easy Eric took my swag into their own hands. I always liked shopping for sneakers, Starter jackets, and Polo, but I would lace my shoes up high, not match, or just rock my shit goofy. I remember one day for lunch Baber clowned me, too.

“Eh, boy, your parents work at Champs Sports or something?”

“Oh hell, naw, Baber, this motherfucker paid! Stop clowning him, dude.”

“I’m not clowning him, Romaen, he wearing a Champs Sports Polo, son! They wear that shit at the register!”

“Man, it’s a Nike polo I got for ten dollars!”

“Aw, damn, man, we gotta go to the West Oaks Mall. Son, you can’t be steppin’ out like that.”

“Like what? It’s Nike for ten dollars.”

“Baber just told you, son, it’s ten dollars because it’s the motherfucking uniform, b! What made you think that shit was fresh? It’s navy!”

Easy Eric had paper because his father died in the Air Force and he got a six-hundred-dollar check every week. He spent it all on kicks and clothes but he’d sell us his shit after he wore it. Dude had mad style; I got a lot of my steez from Easy. He had all the Tommy, Polo, Nautica, Wu-Wear,
Mecca; that was our shit. We were all little fourteen-year-old kids rockin’ tall tees, baggy jeans, and Timbos. I mean, it was Florida, we didn’t need six-inch Timbs, but we all read
The Source
and wanted to look like Capone ’n’ Noreaga posing in front of Queensbridge. I switched it up when the six-inches got played out and rocked the Beef and Brocs.
^‡

There were only two places to cop Mecca, Wu-Wear, Pelle Pelle, or Karl Kani. We had to go to the Magic Mall, owned by this rapper White Dawg, or to the Jamaican store, Nappy Gear, in the West Oaks Mall. The difficulty was an advantage; they only had a few sizes of each design, which made it harder for people to jack your style.

The must-have item of the late nineties in Orlando was the Air Penny II. After we’d been brainwashed by a million Lil’ Penny commercials, we were literally fighting at Foot Locker the day they were released to cop a pair. I’d never seen anyone fight over shoes without the Jumpman, but for three years, the Penny 1, 2, and Foamposite changed the game. Everyone wanted a pair of those shits with the wave on the side, ice-cold soles, and the one-cent on the back. That shoe was the one. I didn’t have the money to cop a pair, but Easy had two pair of each color so I just waited till the second week, when he scuffed the first pair, and bought them for half price. That Dominican had some stank-ass feet, but I didn’t care. I rocked those Pennies till they were talkin’.

Warren loved Mecca, but besides a few Mecca tees and silver-tab jeans, he wasn’t as materialistic as Romaen and I. He was a different cat. I’d come home from school and see Warren walking around the street with no shoes, sitting in the grass, or fixing his boat. There was this Sunfish sailboat he had in the backyard that he loved. One day, he let Chris Nostro and me take it out. Before we left, we all got high hitting this bong we made out of a plastic Mountain Dew bottle. Warren wanted to steer the sailboat.

“Yo, you guys are way too high to steer this shit.”

“Naw, man, you worried we gonna break your little Sunfish?”

“Ha, ha, ha, yeah, Warren, this shit is cheap, man. We ain’t gonna wreck this, anyway. I been to sailing camp!”

“My aunt gave me this sailboat. Just let me steer it.”

Nostro started laughing so hard he fell off the side of the boat into the water and then got stuck under the boat.

“Dude, what if he dies! He can’t get up under the boat!”

“Why doesn’t he just swim around?”

“ ’Cause he’s high as shit, man, and doesn’t have his life vest on.”

We started bugging out. Nostro was under the boat for a good forty-five seconds and then we heard him bumping underneath it.

“I’ma flip the boat!”

So Warren and I flipped this sailboat over, which is usually OK, but then it slid out, hit a dock, and a few pieces broke.

“I’m alive! I’m alive!”

“You fucking bitch, you couldn’t even swim under the boat?”

“Yo, I think I inhaled plastic! I’ve never been this high. I thought I was gonna die!”

We ruined Warren’s boat, just like we’d mess up Warren’s house, or leave beer and weed that his mom would find later, yet he never got mad. Warren was the best friend I ever had. He was a wild-ass kid who would jump off his roof into the pool or off the bridge into five feet of lake water, wrestle a wild alligator in the dark, and break his collarbone snowboarding. He was never good with words, but he had this smile that’d do the talking for him. I never understood why he would put his life in danger, stand in the back of Jared’s pickup truck going forty-five down Apopka Vineland, or just go sit in the woods by himself. But I realized, Warren was looking for something.

Warren and I both came from families that worked really hard to get where they were. He was unlike any white people I’d ever met.
^§
In a lot of ways, he was just like me. He respected his dad for how far he’d come, but didn’t want to eat off his pops. Mr. Neilson was a lawyer and Warren would work in his office, but it’s not the life he wanted. Just like my dad had me work in the restaurant as a busboy, but neither of us wanted to be our dads.

Two or three days a week like clockwork, one of us got disciplined at home. We knew something had gone down when the other didn’t pick up the phone after dinner. A lot of times, Warren would come by the house and I was sleeping because I just didn’t want to deal with shit anymore, but he’d wake me up to go run around the neighborhood.

I came into ninth grade an upset, stepped-on, defensive Chinese kid who felt white people were out to get me, but Warren showed me a new perspective even if we didn’t always agree. At the time, I was libertarian because I was reading Ayn Rand; I know, it’s horrible, but I simply didn’t trust the government, I hated people like C. Delores Tucker, and felt that money was the third party that won every time. In my mind, if money was winning, what chance did government have against it? We just needed to stack paper ourselves.

Warren, on the other hand, was a Republican because of his dad. My parents were the same way; they’d always tell me to vote for whoever wanted lower taxes. I’d argue with Warren, but it’s a funny thing with people. Even if you argue, when that person isn’t around to say their piece, you say it for them. You may not even link with their point, but out of loyalty you make that man’s point for him ’cause he ain’t there. Years later, in college, surrounded by cynical liberals like myself, I’d say things that I swear came out of Warren’s mouth and it helped me understand that old saying that no man is an island. People ask me what my greatest strengths are and I say perspective. The best way to get that is to meet people that are polar opposites; you learn the most from them. There are pieces of you that are inherently yours, but everything else is a collection of the things you’ve seen and the people you’ve met. In the end, we’re like the Triumph beat: who’s next on this RZA track? Step up and drop a verse on my story. That’s the illest.

One day in tenth grade, this girl Emily Connors came over to my crib after school to kick it. She used to see my boy Ben, who lived down the street from us. It was pretty unanimous in ninth and tenth grade that if you liked shawties with curves, Emily, half Cuban, half white, was the one. She was also the only other person in our crew in the gifted program with me, not that it mattered. We were all family.

I was walking Emily out of the crib that day when we noticed these Indian kids cruising up my block. I remembered them from Lake Highland in sixth grade. The kid driving’s initials were A.K. and so his vanity plates read AK-47. We ignored them and said our goodbyes but when Emily got in her car and tried to pull out of the driveway, these Indian fools pulled their ride up to block her. They didn’t just casually block the driveway. They drove up onto the grass, cut the turn tight, and sat one side of wheels on the dip on the front of my driveway and the other on the grass. Alim thought he was slick, cheesing, and refused to move. I called Romaen, Warren, Austin, and Ben. While we were waiting for them, eight-year-old Evan saw this dude parked in our grass and got pissed. He came out with a paintball gun and just started blasting this fool’s Jeep to fuck up his paint job. Of course, the Indian kids called their people, too. In the end there were twenty-plus fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids in my driveway. It looked like a Ruff Ryder Proactiv commercial with a bunch of skinny punks in white tees staring each other down.

“Yo, it’s one-on-one, man, Eddie versus one of y’all.”

“What, you pussies don’t want a piece?”

“I’m saying, we doing you a favor, we got you by at least five people. You gettin’ off easy one-on-one. Keep it clean.”

I didn’t give a fuck so I pushed AK’s boy first. I wanted to smack both of them so I figured just go for one and the other will fall back, but these Indian motherfuckers had heart. As soon as I pushed his boy, AK punched me in the face, a closed fist studded with rings, and I went down. I couldn’t believe the shit. I looked at my friends, but all of them just stood there while it went down. The only one out of our crew that did anything was my brother Emery, who went running at AK with a pitchfork, but Ben held him back.

When my dad got home that night he was so mad I almost got a second ass-kicking. Warren, Ben, and Emery were all still at the crib and my dad just kept talking about how fighting isn’t about fair. It’s about winning. Warren kept shaking his head, but Ben and I were all ears. He talked about how in Taiwan they never fought one-on-one or if they did, it was a trap just to jump people. Warren didn’t agree, but he wasn’t sitting there with
a broken nose. I never wanted to get hit again and from that point on, I got busy.

The next Monday at school, I showed up with a broken nose and black eye. That fool AK got me good. We couldn’t go to Lake Highland to even things up with AK because private schools were so small; we’d never get in and get away without getting caught. But AK’s friend M-Ron—the one I pushed first—went to Dr. Phillips and Ben found out his schedule.

English class was my first class after lunch and when I sat down I noticed everyone acting really weird. Kids who usually spoke to me or said wassup just moved to the side. I figured it was ’cause I had a black eye so I said to this one kid, John, “Damn, man, is my face that bad?”

“Naw, you didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Your boys got that dude that lumped you up.”

“For real?”

“Laid him the fuck out in the middle of the lockers, then changed clothes and left school. Kid is all fucked up in the office.”

I couldn’t believe it. Ben and our boy Jared took what my pops said to heart. What kind of parent teaches kids things like this? My motherfucking dad, that’s who. If we were gonna run around causing trouble, talking shit, and starting fights, we had to be ready to finish them. From then on, if one of us was in a fight, we all were.

Pops didn’t just let me run buc wild, though. He understood why I had to defend myself, but there was no excuse for stealing. One day Warren wanted to get his friend Kurt a birthday present and decided he’d like this giant tiki pole he saw in someone’s yard. I thought it was kind of fugazi, but whatever, I was down to steal some shit. We pulled your average midday smash-’n’-grab, throwing the tiki pole into a car and then driving it home, figuring no one saw it. A few hours went by and nothing happened, but then there was a knock on my door. It was Officer Randolph.

I never liked cops, but this dude wasn’t so bad. He was always patrolling the neighborhood, stayed out of our way for the most part, but when something happened, he’d come to our cribs first.

“Hi! How are you, Officer?”

“Good, how are you, Mrs. Huang?”

“Good, good! Can I help you with something?”

“Is Eddie home?”

“What he do now?”

“One of the neighbors is missing a tiki pole that was on their lawn, just wanted to see if Eddie knew anything about it.”

“Ahhh, I see. Give me one second.”

“Sure.”

Mom closed the door politely, but as soon as I heard it click in my room, I covered my ears.

“HUANG XIAO MING NI GWO LAI NI TSE GU WAN BA DAN!”

“OK, OK, hold on, I’m sleeping.”

“SOOSIN! NI GWO LAI!”

I paced around my room thinking if he’d let me go playing stupid or if he’d come search my room. Meanwhile, downstairs, Pops had to stop karaoke-ing to come talk to the police so he was pissed, too. He put his leather slippers on and walked toward the door.

“Hi, how are you today, Officer?”

“Good, just waiting to speak with Eddie.”