Koreans love me

“Commercial, you mean. There’s only one, Gabe.
“Well, it starts out with me sitting in a chair looking directly into the camera. I’m wearing the kickass silk suit I got in Itaewon. You remember the one? No, the one with pinstripes. No, the black one. Yeah, that one. Well, I start by asking the audience a question, ‘Are you tired of being the last one picked in gym class’—No, I don’t think it’s too infantile. People respond to that: most of my clients—okay, fine, potential clients—will really understand what it’s like to be picked last in gym class.
“Anyway, I continue: ‘My name is John Smith’—Yeah, I decided on Smith. Nitkowski is just too much, you know? Nobody respects that name.—‘My name is John Smith and I’m here to help you.’ I point directly at the camera on ‘you’ and then swivel in my chair to camera two—I know, two cameras is fancy.
“I finish with: ‘Let John Smith help you to become the man you’—No, I don’t think so…It’s not like I need to say ‘woman’ or anything like that. What woman is going to go see John Smith speak? Well, yes, I am quite handsome.—Oh shut up. I’m not saying it. Okay fine, dashing—but I just can’t see it happening.—‘Let John Smith help you to become the man you want to be. Come to my seminar and renounce the old you and apotheosize the new you’—It’s a word. No, it is. I looked it up. It means to turn into a…okay, you know what it means. See, it works perfectly with what I’m trying to accomplish. To make people gods, yes, that’s my goal. Just like the deification of motherfucking Julius Caesar.
“No, no venue—that’s what we call it in the industry—yet. But I do know a guy who works at one of the stadiums around here. Yeah, it seats 50,000. What do you mean? I don’t see what testosterone has to do with anything. Oh, the no females thing. I’m sure men will bring their wives. Yes, or mistresses. Start small schmart small. I’m looking for the big time, Gabe. This is my chance. Thanks, but I think I know what’s best for me, and little high-school presentations are not in my future. I’m not a washed-up NFL lineman. I’m John Nitkowski—That’s right, I’m John motherfucking Smith, bitch.”

I’ve often been impressed by John’s almost godlike ability to deflect any criticism. He is the apotheosis of himself, I suppose, and he exudes ethereality. He is, to put it succinctly, John motherfucking Smith, bitch.

I am a poet's poet's poet.

10/3

Taking a taxi to work is starting to drag on me. Today I stood outside in the rain for fifteen minutes before the first one even stopped, and when the driver saw my WaeGuk face he drove away. Eventually, my neighbor Mi Hwa walked out of her apartment and hailed the cab for me. The cabbie nearly drove off when I quit obscuring myself with my umbrella and he saw who was getting into his car. I’m assuming Mi Hwa threatened him (the whole conversation consisted of snaps and pops and syllables I’d never heard strung together before, galvanized by a fantastic scowl that creased her forehead), as he allowed me to tell him where to go and drove off. The drive was a solid half-hour of griping and complaining and the smell of kimchi emanating from a bag on the front seat. I watched the digital dial move with inexhaustible momentum towards the 13000 won that the trip would end up costing me.

Woong-han kept me away from Kindy (word got out about Kenny yesterday and he decided that it’d be best if I stayed away from the younger kids) today. I agreed with him, as I didn’t particularly enjoy reliving, being reminded, etc. The older kids all laughed at my story about the cabbie. They said that Korean taxi drivers didn’t like foreigners because they couldn’t understand them. I said, “That’s interesting, because in America people don’t like cab drivers because they can’t understand THEM.” They didn’t notice the chiasmus.

John called from San Antonio. He asked all the roommate questions first (“How much was the last gas bill?” “How about the last electrical bill? Cable bill?”). He has by now started his motivational speaking business. He has zero clients, but he has enough startup capital to put some commercials on television. He attempted to extract various details about my personal goings-on for the last few weeks, but I managed to distract him by asking about his commercials.

Do you know what makes time travel possible?

The first—and only—time I’d visited Nebraska was the day before I flew to the ROK. My car broke down just outside Lincoln, so I locked the doors, grabbed my backpack and wallet and trudged the five miles into town. I walked into a sports bar and ordered a beer and tried to figure out what to do. The bar was filled with an assortment of lifers and University of Nebraska students, at least that’s what I figured.
The place stank of the antique cigarette smoke that was continually reborn out of the fibers of chairs and booths. Fifty-year-old Pall Malls clawed their way to the surface of the swiveling barstool I plopped down in next to an old guy wearing a baseball cap that said “Fishermen have longer rods.”
“Can’t sit there. That’s Hep’s seat,” he said. The man didn’t look up. He talked directly into the mouth of his glass.
“Excuse me?” I said. Surely this man wasn’t talking to me, the college-educated genius sitting before him.
“That’s Hep’s seat. He’ll be in ‘bout ten minutes,” he said in a slow drawl. He was gripping his glass tightly, I thought for a moment that he’d break it. He took his face from out of his glass, turned to the bartender and said, “I’ll have another blackberry brandy and bitters.”
The bartender walked to the old man and poured his drink stiff. I asked him for a beer and he obliged.
“Blackberry brandy and bitters, huh? I’ve never seen anyone drink that before,” I said. For some reason, I was—I guess still am—very keen on chitchat whenever I sat next to a stranger in a bar. The old man seemed nice enough, if a little reticent. Perhaps he didn’t like my eyebrows or the way I wore my shoes. Either way, talking to him was difficult.
“Yep,” he said taking a long swig of his blackberry brandy and bitters. The liquid stained the inside of the glass momentarily, the sides darkened and infused by its alcoholic heat. The old man squinted and his lips pursed tightly at the angry liquid descending towards his stomach. The alcohol was having its desired effect, I figured, since he let out a sigh and smiled.
“That’s a good hat,” I said, commenting on the obvious hilarity of his hat. “So, you like fishing, then.”
“Yep.”
“Well then,” I said. I turned my body approximately 30 degrees away from him and pretended for a moment that he wasn’t there. But, of course, since I had just finished my first beer I was not about to quit talking. I swiveled on my bar stool and looked at the corner of the old man’s eye.
“I’m allergic to corn.”
“Say what? What’re you talking about, son?” the old man replied.
“I’m allergic to corn.”
“I heard what you said. Why’d you say it?”
“I just thought you should know. We are in Husker territory. I played football at Oklahoma, so I been here a few times before. I always like to tell Huskers about my allergies,” I lied. The bartender had given me another beer, and I pounded it.
“Oklahoma? Sounds like you’re some sort of Oklahomo,” the old man said without smiling.
“Aw mister, I’m just kidding. I actually played special teams for the Huskers for all four years,” I continued to lie. “I even started my last game as a senior. Only played two plays, but I did start.”
“Hell, you ‘bout gave me a heart attack talking about darn Oklahomos. Once Hep gets here he’ll wanna meet you. His son played for Nebraska, too,” he said. He called to the bartender, “’Nother blackberry brandy and bitters, Jose.”
“Well I’ll have to talk to Hep’s son, then. I’m sure I know him,” I said, realizing that I’d have to leave once Hep arrived. “You know, I can’t get over that drink of yours. I’ve never seen another soul drink something so interesting.”
“Well, let me tell you something, son. Now, I’ve been alive a long time, and I’ve learned some things,” he began. “You’re really a Husker then, right? ‘Cause no Oklahomo could handle this little bit of insider info. Good, good.
“Son, what I’ve got here is blackberry brandy and bitters. Tastes like shit, let me tell you. But blackberry brandy, that’s 35% alcohol by volume. Bitters, that’s 35%, too. And they don’t charge you extra for it. So the way I sees it, I’m getting 70% alcohol for the price of 35. That’s a deal, no matter how it tastes,” he finished. He tipped his hat towards me, I assume he wanted me to order myself such an exotic drink, but I demurred.
“That’s great to know. Seriously. I’m allergic to blackberry brandy, too, though. Can’t drink it or I break out in hives. Terrible. Tragic, even,” I said.
“There’s Hep,” the old man nodded towards the door as a lanky man walked in. “You was sitting in his seat, remember.”
“I have to go. It was nice meeting you,” I said and left the bar.

The kids didn’t really understand the story, but we worked out the math problem on the board and they did understand that 35 percent plus 35 percent did not equal 70 percent. They are really quite bright in every area except English language acquisition.

Tundra, Volcanic Island, Pampa, Savannah, Bayou: That's all I can remember right now

10/2

It’s weird, but this is the first time in my life that I’m happy to work overtime. Today I worked three extra hours. I told Woong Han that I’d teach some more advanced classes, and he was more than happy to set them up. I suppose it’s another few hundred thousand Won in his pocket. Since John left a lot of the kids have quit coming; Woong Han must be hemorrhaging money. I don’t blame the kids for not coming: compared with John I am not exactly Enthusiasm Jones. He did a good job keeping them engaged, whereas I tend to do a mediocre job keeping them awake.

Kindy was not so bad as I thought it would be, but not as good as it was a few months ago. Perceptive. That’s the adjective I need to describe the kindergarten students. Even without a modicum of English ability they know how they make me feel. Kenny (I think his real name is Sung Soo, but I could be making that up. He’s Kenny here.) sat in the back of the room crying softly, but whenever I went near him he burst into choking sobs. The second time I got close he cried so hard that he gave himself the hiccups and I had to send him out to the water cooler to get a paper cup’s worth of water and to calm down. He’s never re-acted that way before, but then again I’d never acted that way before. The class spent most of their time coloring animals. Most popular choice: Liger. Followed by Polar Bear, although they called it “Podu Bear” and drew a bunch of grapes around it. I assume that Podu means grapes, but I suppose it could mean “teacher is an idiot for not knowing Korean.” Though I highly doubt that.

Some of the girls in the advanced class had been watching Friends on Armed Forces Korea Network and wanted me to tell them about New York. I’ve never been to New York, so I decided to tell them a story about Nebraska because I had been thinking about the story earlier this morning. I think I’ve written about it before, but I’m not about to search through notebooks to find it. Or computer files. Or typewritten pages.

I'm a king amongst kings

The story goes like this:
At the end of the Korean War, all Koreans were allowed to choose which side of the DMZ they wanted to live on. The men were lined up on Freedom Bridge, and each man in turn could either walk across the bridge to North Korea or stay back and live in the south. I suppose it was inevitable that there was going to be some problem with the last man to cross, since that’s how stories about the war seem to work.

This man was not a brave man. When the Americans were near his village, he hid with American sympathizers. When the Russians were near his village, he hid with Russian sympathizers. Because of this, he didn’t want to go to either side, since he’d be branded a coward wherever he went. He had had one son, but the boy had frozen to death during the previous winter. During the next spring his wife took a boat across the East Sea and was granted asylum in Japan. So, not only was he a coward, but his wife had defected to the country that had previously started a war on Korean soil.

When the guns were pointing at him, pushing him to go to one side or the other, he made the decision to do neither. Instead of choosing North or South, he spent the rest of his life living on the strip of land under Freedom Bridge in the DMZ. Even as the Americans and the Russians—I mean South and North Koreans, of course—were putting land mines all around him, he stayed under the bridge and was safe. He only lived for two or three years, but during that time good-hearted people from both sides would throw him scraps during the winter, when he couldn’t fend for himself.

I asked Eun Hwa and Son Mi if the man brought messages from one side to the other, since that would seem to be a logical thing to have happen, but they said no. If he would have brought messages, someone might have shot and killed him. He became a type of phantom, a ghost feeding off the leftovers of the living.

Tomorrow I have to teach the kindergarteners. I don’t know how I’ll deal with it. Perhaps it will be okay

Caution: Abrupt Tone Shift and Seemingly different story. Trust me, it's the same one...

10/1

The sun was out today. On the way to the subway I saw two neighborhood kids, a boy and a girl. The boy had taken one of the girl’s inline skates and was using one foot to push himself across the road with it on the other. The girl was yelling after him, crying, trying to position her stockinged foot so she didn’t get her sock dirty on the pavement. I was going to go over and take the skate away from the boy, but I feared it might cause an international incident.

Son Mi said she called me this weekend, but I don’t remember the phone ringing. I probably wasn’t in any state of mind to talk anyway. She went to the Buddhist temple in Insadong, and I wouldn’t have wanted to go there.

Today is my 10 and a half-month anniversary (which is not an anniversary at all, but merely some sort of fraction of a versary that I choose not to figure out) which means I have thirty more days until I go back to the States. I should’ve already bought my plane ticket, but I haven’t. Plans change, etc.

Son Mi and Eun Hwa told me a story today. We were on our lunch break at school walking to the kimbap house to get some kimbap and soup. (The kimbap was good: they rolled the seaweed into a tight cylinder so that none of the vegetables or rice spilled out; the roll was cut evenly into discs; the rice was soft and fluffy and surrounded the vegetables and ham all sides.—the place was called Gim Po Kim Bap) I am never sure what to believe when they talk, because they have a tendency to bend the truth when they are together. If they are apart, both of them are, of course, paragons of virtue.

Sex boobs sex tattoos big big big big(let's see if that title gets some google hits)

This has to be where it began, where it incubated, why I am the I who I am, no? Childhood dreams destroyed, twice abandoned, the silence like a noose around my neck, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum?
But.
If I am the sum of all my parts, must every part hold weight? The weight of the egg was the eggshell plus the chick inside. These events, are they merely a shell for something with a much greater mass? Does it matter if what I’ve said is true? What about all the fluid on the chick’s wings? It’s neither egg nor chick, but it has mass and takes up space: it matters; it’s matter. It’s the matter that isn’t accounted for, that I forget to name. Or that I lie about. Or that I forget when I lie about.
I know what I don’t know; I lie about what I know. I lie about while I know. This is the beginning. In the beginning were these words, and these words were with me and the words were me. This must have been the beginning. Yet, even in this beginning, there is the other beginning. In the beginning my grandfather created my voice and the words. Because before I said nothing, and my voice was without form and a void, and my thoughts hovered over the silence. Is what I’ve written the beginning of the beginning, or is it in itself an end?
I must sleep, for I have to work, and work keeps me from forgetting to be the I who I am when I am not this I. And work keeps me forgetting about the I that I was before I was this I. And the He and the She who are no longer Yous to Me. The He who is no longer a You to Anyone.

I am the I that is the square root of silence.

Got a heart of gold right here in my rusting chest

My grandfather had given me a dictionary for my ninth birthday and often sent me letters laced with words that I had never seen before. The words were not arcane or sophisticated: they were merely words that were just beyond my level of comprehension. A letter that I had received in June, a letter that I still have to this day, had the word “foreboding,” a word that I did not know. I had looked it up and written it in my word journal, but up until the moment I walked into my room I never truly understood what the word meant. I could smell it in the air, something tainting the natural milk-mustard scent of the room. In the box I saw the little chick that I had never named, its feet sticking out from the top of the bowl of water I’d put in the box. It must have tried to reach too far into the water, and in doing so it drowned under its own weight. If it had been able to cry out, I would have been able to save it. It shall be resolved. I had cursed that little chick to its death; that was the only thought clear inside me. I looked at that notebook, the green notebook, and my eyes began to burn.

Start at the Beginning. It feels better

I couldn’t look at my father during dinner that night. He had used my mom’s makeup to create relatively normal-looking eyebrows, but that wasn’t why. I had stolen from him again, this time old chicken feed from out in the garage. I tried to keep my mind in check, but it kept wandering in all directions.
“It doesn’t look that bad,” my mother said to him. She was chewing on a piece of steak. They had decided that they’d had enough chicken for one day.
“Are you kidding? This is bad,” he said. He was probably pointing at his eyebrows.
“Yeah, well at least you didn’t burn your skin. I saw some bad cases when I was volunteering at the hospital last year. That never heals.”
“Seriously, that’s the last time I try that. Sorry, honey, but deep-frying it was a bad suggestion,” my father said to my mother.
“I guess you’re right,” she paused. “Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I finished my steak, washed my dishes, and went into my room. All through dinner I’d been thinking about how to resolve the issue of the chick. It had to be dealt with, I knew, and I had come up with an idea. I had planned to invite my father into my room after he finished dinner. If he wanted to take the chick away from me, I would let him have it. I would give it to him. If he thought it belonged to me, then it would stay in its box. I thought that this was what the message I had written was trying to tell me. It shall be resolved.

Connecticut/Washington/Minnesota/New York/Florida/Kansas/California/North Carolina/Japan/Wisconsin/Netherlands/Iowa/Oregon Next up: Oman

I awoke less than an hour later, my forehead and hair soaked with sweat, the sun splayed out in stripes across my back and face, cut by the window blinds. My mouth tasted as though I’d been sucking on kiwi skin, and there was a spot of drool on my baseball glove. I stood up and looked back into the box.
The tiny chick was still searching for its mother. It moved as though it were a stop-motion movie, everything happening in short bursts, head twists and the clamping and unclamping of its beak. The day’s events had left the lingering imprint of fire upon me, and something about the way the chick moved reminded me of flames. It was all unceasing energy and movement, its feature a shell for the energy it transferred, like the body for the soul.
I stuck my hand into the cardboard box and stroked the top of the chick’s head. It was startled and began opening and closing its silent beak. I could imagine that it would be afraid of my hand, which must have seemed huge on its little head. The chick probably couldn’t reconcile the differences between its fuzzy body and my hairless hands. I could feel the zealous crackle of recognition, confusion, and excitement all mingling in the touch of fingers to feathers.
Gently, I cupped my right hand and hoisted the chick out of its cardboard home. It was light, lighter than a pencil or a piece of bread. I hadn’t expected this, that life could be so insubstantial. By now its feathers were dry and fuzzy, and while looking at it and the discarded egg, its weight made sense: the egg minus the eggshell equals the chicken. I lay down on my bed and placed the chick upon my chest. Its tiny claws caught in the cotton of my shirt, and as it wobbled around my chest I could see it plucking miniature holes in the front of my grey t-shirt. As I moved to put a pillow behind my head, the chick began to slip off the plateau of my chest and dug its claws into my skin. I felt the pain and it confirmed the chick’s existence, the pain that proved we both existed. I had gone from farmer to herder.
This role reversal was a problem, however, because I couldn’t figure out how to tell my father about the chick. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the chick wasn’t mine. I was a thief of sorts, as my only claim was the bed of flower petals that I had made for it and the light I shone on it, a light I stole from my parents’ kitchen. But it had survived at least a few of my father’s egg raids, I realize now, based on the size of the embryo when I finally looked at it by candlelight in the bathroom. So maybe it was fated to be mine. I don’t know. Yet the question haunted me. My father had raised both the rooster and the hen that had laid the egg. It seemed the two competing forces had no points of intersection at which I could find some sort of solution.
I was afraid to talk to him, to tell him about it. I wanted to, I wanted to more than anything, but I couldn’t. I thought that he might see the chicken as an insult. It was broken, impure, mute. It was defective. What if I gave it to him and he returned it without saying a word? I was not ready for the little chick to feel that kind of rejection. No, there had to be some way to resolve it. I thought back to when I tried to bury the chickens in the garden. I had wanted to share my grief with him, but he hadn’t wanted that. For a moment, I thought we could share the chicken, but realized it wouldn’t work. I would still have to approach him, to talk to him about it. Ideas kept coming, my mind was like ice, but as each etched itself it was buffed out by others. I couldn’t keep a line of thought for long enough to come to a resolution.
I hoisted the mass of fuzz from my chest and put it back in the box. I shook my head, my hair lashing me in the eyes, and walked out of my room into the kitchen. The air was still slightly acrid from the fire, but the smell had lessened considerably. I grabbed a cereal bowl and filled it halfway with water, then returned to my room and put it in the fish tank. Nudging the chick on the head, I led it to the bowl and tapped its beak to the surface. It took tiny, spastic sips. Upon seeing that the chick knew what to do, I pulled down my notebook and again looked at the words I had previously written. Then something came to me again, something pushed my hand towards a pen and the pen to paper. I was powerless to resist. It shall be resolved. The words smirked at me with their strange diction. I had never written the word “shall” before, but even after writing it I felt like I’d never written it. It was already written somewhere and I had merely copied the words, like when I’d place a thin piece of paper over a picture of a tiger and trace the lines through the sheet.

Better...

As I walked back to my room, I knew. As I ran the back of my hand along the segments in the wall, my fingernails clicking as they reached each valley between two pieces of tongue and groove, I knew. As I entered my room and smelled the mustard-milk air, I knew. There was power in my words, though I didn’t know what kind. The nine-year-old I could not look objectively. He couldn’t see the blocks of the pyramid, just the burning chicken. He didn’t realize that he didn’t set the objects in motion, he just calculated their path. He didn’t know the word prophecy, only the word curse. He didn’t see the words as a portent of the action, but the words as impetus for the effect. And it frightened him. Images of The Ten Commandments floated into his head, memories from Easter Sunday network TV. Did Moses warn pharaoh about the death of the firstborn, or did Moses’ words beget such violence?
I walked through the room, which was a picture of chaos. Cutting a path through the clothes on the floor, my foot got caught in the neck hole of a T-shirt. Something about the room was different, and it had nothing to do with the smell of burning wood wafting in through the window. It was as though the room had told a joke, but I had only heard the punch line.
I took down the notebook and looked at the page where I had written the words. I traced the form of each letter with my eyes, sliding along the curves, braking at right angles, hopping from word to word like arcs of electricity on a spark plug. It was not a question of whether or not my words had power: I knew they were powerful as lightning, solid as rock; they were not to be trifled with. To a nine-year-old boy, a boy whose voice was a high-pitched squeak, whose legs were splinters on a matchstick body, the next decision was deadly serious. Would I allow my words to work a Moses curse, or would I hold my hands up in peace, drawing blessings from the ether? Images reflected dimly in the mirror of my mind, images of destruction and images of renewal. I saw a wrecking ball demolishing an office building, the shrapnel of smoke dust, glass and brick flying through the air. A tree quickly sprang up in its place, a leafy, green oak towering high above the wrecking ball and bulldozers left over from the demolition crew. I replaced the notebook, still unsure about my newfound powers.
Suddenly, I realized what was different about the room. Looking down into the box I saw that the egg had broken open and the baby chicken had emerged. It was smaller than I had thought it would be: instead of the size of a fist, it was the size of two fingers and a thumb. Its feathers were hardly feathers at all: pitiful, fuzzy, covered in slime. It did not look at me, even after I whistled at it to get its attention. It searched the contents of its box home for any sign of life, its head and eyes frenetically chasing any hint of movement. It was strangely silent, however, and though its beak opened and closed, no sounds emerged.
It couldn’t talk. I had a mute chicken. My eyebrows hung low over my eyes, pushing down and towards each other like tectonic plates. The inside of my throat was like sandpaper, and my stomach churned. Though it had been a shock, I had been able to keep my emotions in check for days after my garden was destroyed. Somehow, though, the sight of this chicken trying to find its protector in a crappy cardboard box was enough to give my sadness a voice. I lay down on the floor, my head resting on a baseball glove, my feet tucked under a sweatshirt, and began to cry. After a moment, I fell asleep.