One Saturday morning, my grandfather took me along to drop some tapes off at the store. While I waited, I spied on the customers. Cars came and left, a BMW and an old Chevy Caprice, a couple of Hondas. A Toyota pickup pulled into the slot next to me. A fat white man in sweats got out and waved his hand at me. Not knowing what else to do, I waved back shyly. A black man in jeans and a clean, white shirt walked purposefully down the sidewalk on Century as if he were going to keep going, but at the last minute, he swerved into the store’s entrance. Another white man, this one bald and skinny, walked out with a brown paper bag.
My grandfather had tried to explain to me what porn was and why it wasn’t that bad. His main argument was that if a man needed to have sex, wouldn’t it be better if he went to our video store instead of raping someone? So I’d thought the men who frequented my grandfather’s store were probably those too ugly to get a date and rapists, although I still wasn’t entirely sure what rape was. I imagined the men having greasy jowls and handlebar mustaches—that they’d be fat men with receding hairlines, freckled men with yellow teeth. But the men who parked in our parking lot always looked like normal men.
A yellow cab pulled into the lot, stopping behind me. A Japanese man in a suit got out and asked the cab to wait. He walked out a few minutes later with a full bag, my grandfather walking beside him. When they got to the cab, he opened the door for the Japanese man, shook his hand, then waved as the cab drove off.
“Good man,” my grandfather said as he got in the car. “Hard stuff to get in Japan, I suppose.”
So many different kinds of men came to our store, I thought every man must look at porn once in a while.
“And thank goodness they do, too,” Marilyn would sometimes say with a roll of her eyes. “Our little gold mine.”
Everything we had, my grandfather would often remind me, came from that store, and we had more than many families I knew. It was why Marilyn and I could buy new clothes at stores like Buffums and Bullock’s and take trips, why we could own a boat, and why I had toys, a playhouse in the backyard, books, videos.
“That store,” he’d say, “is the reason you’re so fucking spoiled.”
• • •
That day, as we pulled out of the parking lot, my grandfather asked, “Shall we get some lunch? Let’s go to the old Chinaman’s. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I nodded happily.
He took me to the Flower Drum, the Chinese restaurant that was a few blocks west of our store on Century Boulevard. I loved going to the restaurant we called the Flower Drum Song, after the movie, the way you walked by the red-lacquered columns and stone lions of its entry into a dark room paneled with wood intaglio, then were seated at a round table.
“I’ve been coming here for years,” my grandfather said, sighing as we entered.
“How’s the old man?” he asked the waitress who came to our table, as he always did. He knew the owner and the owner’s father. Then he ordered hot tea for himself, a virgin piña colada for me, cashew chicken and kung pao beef, pork fried rice, and wor wonton soup. Wor wonton was my favorite. It was what we ate instead of chicken noodle soup when someone in our family had a cold.
As we ate our soup, with its cloudy dumplings and soft bok choy sitting in the steaming broth, an old Chinese man walked slowly to our table. He’d come downstairs from the apartment above and looked sleepy, as if he’d just woken up, but his white undershirt was tucked neatly into his brown pants. He smiled at my grandfather and then at me. After they talked a bit, about business and the neighborhood, he pointed at my drink, then shuffled away again. There was the sound of the blender. A few minutes later, he returned with a new virgin colada, then left once more.
After we finished eating, my grandfather sighed a little, then crumpled a napkin on the table with his clawed hand.
“The boat’s almost ready for us to move on board,” he said. I was busy picking the tiniest crumbs of fortune cookie off of my place mat with a wet finger. “Marilyn doesn’t want to move, so you be the tiebreaker. It’s all up to you. You’d like to live on board, wouldn’t you?”
I tucked the fortune into my pocket so that it would come true. I hadn’t realized that we were going to move on to the boat, or at least I hadn’t thought about how that would mean we’d have to leave our rental house. I thought of what Marilyn had said about the Sirocco. I glanced at the bar where one of the waiters sat bored in the middle of a slow afternoon. I thought about our house, the yard with the coral tree, my bedroom with its many shelves of toys. I looked back at my place mat, its zodiac animals arranged neatly in a circle. I thought about the boat, how it smelled of fresh sawdust and paint thinner. It always held some new adventure—a new tool, a new joke from Jack or Guillermo, a new laborer with a new set of tattoos to peruse. I thought of whale watching and seeing dolphins. I thought of Marilyn, who had seemed a little sad recently. I knew she didn’t want to move on to the boat. But Marilyn often seemed sad and had as far back as I could remember. And then I looked up at my grandfather, who stared at me across the table, eager and prompting and hopeful. I knew that he wanted to move on to that boat, maybe more than he wanted anything in the world.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to live on the boat.”
He seemed proud of himself on the drive home, as if he’d won an argument. His estimate of the boat’s level of completion was optimistic. It would be two more years before we moved on to the boat, and even then, it still wasn’t finished.