with all the force of a great typhoon
he
shaves his head / goes on T / grows a beard / drops an octave / hardens up / slims down / strips down to his jeans, skinny jeans, to no effect, or none that he can tell, anyway, on the Object of His Admiration. Which is, what’s the point, he asks himself, coming in on a weekend to do the dinner shift / family meal prep if the girl of his sweat-filled post-coke newly hormonal dreams can’t even give him the time of day. He falls for her, hard, when he hears her singing along to the top 40s during inventory and her voice is surprisingly whispery and low, and somehow keeps falling when he learns she has a spiked nose ring that she keeps flipped up until nine p.m. (ballsy), and when she has the gall to wear patent leather flip-flops for a Friday night bar shift (hot). He tells no one but Ralph, who takes on extra bussing shifts if things get too crazy, who takes a look at his new get up / look and says maybe you should consider micro-blading, I know a guy who does mine? Shaving his head is too much work to maintain, so he grows his hair back out close to his usual length and keeps the new five o’clock shadow thing until Ralph pulls him aside on a cigarette break and says honey, look, I know you’re excited about the brand-new facial hair but for the love of God you look like a fucking mess. To which he: breaks down in the walk-in freezer, carrying a carton of zhug, no less, and gets chewed out by the other prep guy and the new sous and also the hot chick who’s started trailing and whom he worries is going to give him a run for his job if he doesn’t shape up and start holding down the line. And gets zhug and snot on a pair of leather pants that he isn’t supposed to have on the shift anyway, and which he was borrowing from one of the roommate’s many girlfriends and takes forever to wash that evening by hand. Ralph, in a rare moment of sincerity, tells him to man the fuck up ok? and get the meez together or you’re gonna have your ass handed to you by the newer Asian sous, the newer cool Asian sous, on a fucking silver platter.
One month in, he’s: gained ten pounds out of stress and newfound appetite and then lost them because now instead of crying / eating Flaming Hots between shifts he skips family meal to try and make up the lost tickets from the month before; he’s shed some of the muscle mass, because instead of the bootlegged thirty-day warrior regimen he was sweatboxing through every evening, he comes back and lies on the futon on the living room while the roommates play Smash and tries to forget the weird half-hallucinatory dreams he keeps waking up to in the morning, which he chalks up to some forbidden mix of alcohol / testosterone but which also, in their uncannily on-point mix of musical interludes / surrealist humor / woodland creatures / full-frontal are starting to remind him of Disney movies remixed for CrashPad. Ralph paints his nails after work because Ralph thinks it’ll look hilarious and does his eyebrows for free, in the end, because Ralph’s thinking of actually starting a microblading business and how hard can it be, and then shows him off to Ralph’s boyfriend, who says he looks hilarious and maybe could break some hearts in a nursing home drag night. The Object of His Admiration still hasn’t so much as spit in his direction. One time when he’s taking a plate to a couple at the bar, he thinks she is noticing him and smiling, but actually she’s making eyes at the girl behind him, who is just a regular with no game.
True but stupid: he listens to the Mulan soundtrack at his niece’s wushu birthday party and starts crying uncontrollably because it’s just so real. His niece comes over and gives him a big hug and then tries to karate chop him in the spleen.
Also true and also stupid: he learns to say you smell nice in Vietnamese from YouTube and during a lull in the tickets he comes up to the bar and leans over to the Object of His Admiration, and she does actually smell amazing, like a violet-scented musk ox or a sexy flower bed or something, he’s never been a poet but it’s got him mixing metaphors like no tomorrow, and anyway he tries it out and he knows it’s definitely not right but she looks at him, hard, as if seeing him for the first time, which come to think of it, maybe she is, and says, are you trying to make fun of my accent? And also, just so you know, I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to say.
Catherine Wong studies computer science and cognitive science at MIT in Cambridge, MA. Their fiction has appeared in publications including Bayou, Shenandoah, Chicago Quarterly Review, and The Cimarron Review.