Shrimp (23 page)

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Danny smiled bigger. The nerve! "Who's looking pretty happy herself?" he teased. Danny lifted a piece of my hair. "Purple?" he asked. Apparently when I proclaimed I would never go for body art as a form of self-expression, I was lying. Shrimp and I were in his rooftop hammock at a rare time when we had the house to ourselves. He was explaining to me about dysentery, which he had in Papua New Guinea, while we were listening to a Prince CD. Then Shrimp and I shared, let's call it a lovely interlude (I told you it would get good again), while the Purple One sang "Erotic City," an interlude so inspired I had no choice but to celebrate it by going to Haight Street to get violet streaks highlighted into my long black hair. Some girls might get tattoos with their boyfriend's name--Johnny Angel or Stud Muffin or whatever--but I prefer a more wash-out-able form of branding to express my love for my man.

"Don't change the subject," I told Danny. "What's his name, anyway?"

Danny said, "Terry."

"That's a girl's name."

Danny did the whistle-snap. "There's nothing girl about Terry, let me tell you. I have never dated a man that beautiful in my life. Wait till you meet him!" The whistle-snap from Danny? Since when did he become a stereotypical Chelsea boy? Danny is the upstanding homosexual who wears wrinkled T-shirts and blue jeans from ten years ago, he has a scraggly mess of black hair and kind brown eyes with dark eyebrows so bushy he practically has a unibrow, and then there's also his avowed love of Pamela Anderson (don't ask me, I have no idea). Danny is the guy that if you didn't already know he was gay you would think he was a

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fence straddler at best, not a confirmed Friend of Dorothy. I am all for Chelsea boys, I have great appreciation for their beautiful bodies and exceptional fashion sense, and I, too, share their love for
The Golden Girls,
but that's not who Danny is.

"Well, where do you want me to drop you off?" I asked him. 'At Terry's house in the Oakland hills, or at the local intervention clinic for bad bad boyfriends who dump their true love just when the going gets tough for some shallow-vain he-man who probably shaves his chest and gets facials more frequently than my mother?"

Danny turned down the car radio and turned his body so he was facing me. "Listen, Ceece, I know this is hard. If you think you're taking it bad, you should know that lisBETH hasn't spoken to me since Aaron and I broke up. She's been too busy helping him find a job and a new apartment, like Aaron is her brother, not me. Dad's freaked out. He's never been comfortable with the gay thing anyway, although he always puts on a PC show about how it's all fine, but at least with Aaron he knew what to expect with me. Aaron is a great person--don't think I am not fully aware of that. We had some great years together, but we'd gotten to be more like friends than mates. Aaron and I were over long before Terry came along. The spark had died. So now I am unemployed and treading in dangerous territory. I don't know what I'm going to do with my life now that The Village Idiots is gone, and I'm so insecure with Terry, I'm sure I'm gonna blow it. I could really use some support. Help me out here, okay, Ceece?"

Faux-wanna-be Chelsea boy or not, he's still my Danny, the half-brother who made my summer in Manhattan

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worthwhile, the only person clever enough and who would care enough to give me a nickname like Ceece. "Okay," I said.

"So when do I get to meet the famous Shrimp?" Danny asked.

"He's out in the East Bay scouting a new Java the Hut location with his brother this afternoon, but he wants us to get together tomorrow. Maybe we could go get coffee and breakfast together or something."

Danny laughed. "I know your tricks. I am not enabling you to skip school on my account. Let me talk with Terry and maybe all of us can get together this weekend."

'Are you moving in permanently with Terry?"

"No. We're gonna see how it goes--no commitments as of now. I needed to get out of New York for a while, and what better place to escape than the Bay Area? I hardly got any time with you last summer, and it would be great to see Uncle Sid again too. Terry has a huge house with a great kitchen, so I can keep myself occupied just fine while he's working during the day."

Because Danny is a relatively new discovery in my life, I forget that other people besides me, Josh, and Ash have a claim to "Uncle Sid." Sid-dad was a doting godfather to lisBETH and Danny when they were kids, because he and bio-dad Frank were old college roommates and best friends, until Nancy came between them. As I looked at Danny through the corner of my eye, I felt proud to call him brother, and couldn't wait to introduce him to Shrimp and my friends--Helen, Autumn, Sugar Pie--but I can't say I was cool with the thought that Danny planned to hang with "Uncle Sid" during his time in San Francisco.

Weirder than the thought of Danny interacting with

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my parents would be Danny interacting with Nancy's mourning period. Mrs. Vogue hadn't been to yoga in a month, and she spends most of her days moping around the house wearing Sid-dad's plush old Ritz-Carlton hotel robe. Neiman-Marcus may possibly go out of business for how long since Nancy has shopped there. While Nancy's cooking skills haven't improved, she has mastered the art of the Duncan Hines mix. We no longer have to sneak sweets into the house because Nancy herself is making them and eating them. I found it hard to imagine how the Danny-Nancy chemistry could mix, especially since they were both at such strange intervals in their own lives.

The good news still was Danny had arrived in San Francisco and planned on staying a while, but the queasy news was having Danny in my Left Coast world may mean the separation gap between the two families can no longer be kept separate. Danny's presence could cause the vortex separating the old friends, and me from my other family and them from me, to close permanently, in a way my short summer Manhattan fling never had.

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*** Chapter 30

True love may
be making a comeback.

Helen's eighteenth birthday has passed, but that doesn't mean she's legally sanctioned to bring Eamon upstairs to her room. I feel her pain, so I am doing what I can to help her out. Originally I started hanging out in the kitchen at Helen's mom's Chinese restaurant on Clement Street because my work-study job had ended. Then it turned out I actually missed the restaurant environment, and I was looking for a way to get back at Helen for proclaiming Mrs. Vogue to be the "coolest mom ever." Helen's mom refuses to hire me for a regular shift--she said if her own daughter won't work in her restaurant, neither shall I--but she has been teaching me how to make her most excellent dumplings in exchange for occasional early-evening assistance with vegetable peeling and chopping. Helen's mom would also like me to encourage Helen to get rid of her new copper-spotted tiger-print eyebrows, and she'll throw in noodle lessons if I can convince Helen that proper ladies do not draw action-hero cartoon series about dirty old men with names like Ball Hunter.

The pot stickers Helen's mom makes are so good I have composed a love song to them: "Oh, pot stickers you are so yummy and juicy, so porky and full, love that ginger flava whateva..." That's the extent of my song so far, but I am working on a new, international tribute song in celebration

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of the new delicacy in my repertoire--steamed shrimp dumplings--and inspired by the minor language lessons the kitchen crew at the Chinese restaurant have been giving me:
"Hen hao chi de hsia long bao,
delicious, yummy dumpling,
hsia ren hsia ren hsia ren,
shrimp, shrimp, shrimp."

I was singing my pot sticker song while I stuffed a stack of gyoza wrappers with meat filling when I looked up to see Helen waving at me from the window at the back door of her family's flat, the back door that opens into a hallway leading upstairs to the apartment, or through which the restaurant kitchen can be entered. She must have jumped a dozen backyard fences to get to that back entrance without coming through the front. I saw the spikes of Eamon's fire-red hair behind Helen's head. Got it. I spilled the bowl of vegetable filling onto the floor, causing Helen's mother, who is crazy for cleanliness, to join me pronto under the work table to help clean up the mess. I looked up from underneath the table to see Helen leading Eamon by the hand as they creeped up the back stairs. "Thanks!" she mouthed at me. Ah,
chu lian,
young love.

Helen's sneak reminded me that my restaurant time was over for the day. Shrimp was due to pick me up in his Pinto, as my Betty Boop car does not do Clement Street, because Clement Street does not do parking. We were going to a fancy restaurant in the East Bay to meet Danny and Terry, the first time Shrimp would meet Danny, and I would meet Terry, like a double date. When I got outside, The Richmond fog spread a cold mist over my face while I scanned for Shrimp's car on Clement Street. I was especially excited to see him because he hadn't shown up at school for

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two days, and I missed seeing him live and in the flesh something bad. Two whole Shrimpless days equaled a veritable drought. I thought:
I am the luckiest girl in the world. I live in the coolest Jog city, I have a boss boyfriend, and we're going to meet my new best half-brother and his lover for dinner, all adultlike and fancy. Life is good.

It would be reasonable to expect some doomsday prospect at this point, just for the sake of irony and all. There I am, standing on my favorite street in San Francisco, life is peachy, I'm in luuuuv, blah blah blah, and then, you know, Shrimp's Pinto bolts down Clement Street and smashes into a fog-covered, double-parked UPS truck. Tragedy ensues; Shrimp is either dead or in a coma, and I spend the rest of my life believing it was my fault for starting to believe in the universe's grand scheme to bestow true love and a good life on me after some really fucked-up years.

The reality wasn't that bad but it wasn't pretty either. When I got into Shrimp's car he didn't kiss me. He announced, "Once we get to Oakland, I can only come inside to meet your brother for a minute. I have to go over to Berkeley to see about a room at some guy's house."

I couldn't go into a tirade about how dare Shrimp bail on the dinner with Danny and Terry, how many times have I sat through dinner the last few months with the Fightin' Shrimps, it's called being a supportive girlfriend and getting to know the important people in your partner's life, because I first had to know, "What do you mean, a room at some guy's house?"

"I'm gonna move over to the East Bay for a while. Now that Dee is pregnant, she wants Iris and Billy out of the bedroom

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they've been using so she can start the remodel to turn it into a baby room. But Iris and Billy, you know," here Shrimp mumbled low, "they don't, like, have enough cash for a new pad. So they're gonna move into my room for a while, lay low by spending some time up north with their friends up there, and since I am going to help start up Java's new store in the East Bay, I oughta just live over there for a while."

Where should I begin with this bombshell? I said, "How are you going to manage living and working in the East Bay and going to school in The City?" To say nothing of girlfriend time--when did he plan to fit that into this new schedule? What--and who--were his priorities, anyway?

Shrimp played with the dial on the radio station before settling on the news radio station with the traffic report. He is obsessed with hearing the traffic on the :08 every ten minutes. To piss him off I turned down the radio right as the traffic report started.

"Why'd you have to do that?" he griped.

"You haven't answered my question."

We were stuck in inch-along traffic on the freeway entrance toward the Bay Bridge, so it's not like Shrimp could escape my line of questioning. He said, "If you have to know, I'm failing out. I lost my scholarship, and Wallace doesn't want to pay the tuition if I'm failing or just not showing up because I can't catch up no matter what I do. The school was basically gonna kick me out anyway. So I dropped out this week. It was, like, a mutual decision all around."

It certainly was not a mutual decision all around because I'd never been consulted and wasn't I the girl for

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whom he painted
Blitzkrieg CC,
the one whose cell phone he called at home every night to rap love songs into her ear before she went to sleep? And what about those other so-called important people in his life, the ones called
parents!

"Iris and Billy signed off on this?" I asked.

"Sure." He shrugged. "They're cool with it. They know I'll get my G.E.D. eventually."

I turned the radio volume back up and changed the station to the pop music station, which was spinning the latest puke-pop princess's saccharine hit. Shrimp gave me a dirty look and changed the station to the alternative music college station playing a morose Radiohead tune. I met his dirty look and changed the radio station back to the pop princess number. Sometimes Shrimp is just too hipper-than-thou. Sometimes I just want to be a geek and listen to bad pop music and not care whether that's pathetic.

"WHAT'S YOUR PROBLEM?" The Artist Formerly Known as Mr. Don't Harsh My Mellow yelled at me. "I hate that shit music. What's the look for? Don't tell me you're mad about me dropping out of school. You hate school. What do you care?"

"I care enough to know I ought to just finish it," I said. I also care enough to know that parents who were "cool with it" were less than cool themselves. I certainly care enough to know that he should have brought all these issues up with me much, much earlier. We'd been sleeping together, talking about our dreams together, assuming we had a future together, for months now, and this was the first I was hearing about all this? Now I felt like all the time we'd spent together since becoming a couple again was a lie, because he had been holding out this crucial piece of