POT MOUNTAIN
If you do not make friend at school,” my father said, “you will turn out Woo-Woo like your mommy.” Attempting to be funny, he made a cuckoo sign around his earlobe and a face that was supposed to be a drooling, pop-eyed zombie—he liked to imitate his wife to relieve the tension in our household. “Do you want to wake up and look scary?”
“But you don’t have friend,” I said after the teacher called my parents to tell them that I had difficulty adjusting to middle school.
I had gnashed my half-formed molars, frustrated. For how could I adapt? The formative years of elementary school had been squandered in the food court until my father, fed up, hired a woman from Hong Kong to raise us until my mother’s phobias subsided. It was she who equipped my mother with an arsenal of recipes for Chinese cuisine and taught her how to properly clean.
Middle school was a thrilling possibility for the Wongs to start over, perhaps even a real chance for ostensible middle-class respectability.
“Daddy doesn’t need friend because he is not retarded,” my father continued his humour that edged on spitefulness. He liked to quip that I was mentally disabled since my school had me tested (results: TBD) for everything from Asperger’s to hearing impairment. He went on cheerfully, “Retarded people need friend to help them.”
“How much will you pay me if I make friend?” I asked.
“Five dollar?” my father said.
“Ten dollars,” I said, “and ninety-nine cents.”
Unlike my mother, my father would leave the house for work and somehow, two-faced, was able to form business alliances to function in the professional world in a way I was learning to function in school. In his own sad, peculiar way, I think he worried about his children’s mental and physical well-being, even if he could be like a standoffish circus clown: preaching advice through hurtful humour and shrill, exaggerated pantomime.
My upbringing made me feel alone. I was a bully without realizing that I was a pretty decent one who casually told teachers to “Fuck off!” when I did not want to participate in class, which was often. After all, this was what my parents would do. But I was certainly not charismatic enough to build up a loyal mean-girl following. My sister and brother were cute, popular children, who seemed easy with others on the playground, but as the eldest, my parents’ sour-faced guinea pig in childrearing, I was afflicted with my mother’s neurosis and father’s zealous anti-social tendencies.
Our Chinese names were supposed to be personal blessings, our parents’ magical gifts for showy, boastful success. My sister’s name was Deep Thinker, but rather than becoming an intellectual, she sometimes seemed to me to be cursed to agonize her thoughts aloud with worrying frequency. CBC Radio 1, an auntie once called her. My brother, Make Lots of Money, was supposed to be blessed to attract abundant wealth, yet he has struggled with unemployment. And I had been named Talented One at birth but because of my hissing lisp and other wild behavioural issues was mostly called by my English name—it didn’t seem as if I had been born with that much talent (I had the gross misfortune not to live up to my name during childhood). It made me sad that I was considered less than my siblings, so I was determined to prove that I was better than them in every way, which would cause a deep and despicable rift between us, a gully of vicious contention.
Still, my father insisted that I should have at least two friends, so I could alternate between them, “like shoe,” he said, even though he had no friends himself.
At that time, I thought that this double standard was supremely unfair. “I had whole entire village of friends in Hong Kong when I was your age,” he bragged when I protested. “I’m so nice that when someone nice to me, I’m ten times nicer. But when someone is mean to me, Daddy is ten times meaner.”
“Why?” I said, confused. “I can play by myself.”
“You are too retarded to not have friend,” he said, frustrated, and then went back to his AutoCAD blueprints. They were usually spread on the dining room table when he decided to work from home to keep watch over my mother, who was still scared of the Woo-Woo ghosts and couldn’t be alone. At least she stopped taking us to the mall’s food court after school when we got older, and her moods seemed to slowly improve. She spent her days and nights in the kitchen, compulsively practicing what our former caretaker had taught her: sometimes origami-wrapping more than a thousand cardboard-coloured wontons and filling two giant freezers.
As an adult, I can see the likelihood that my father did not know enough English to explain the subject of friendship properly, and he was genuinely worried about my happiness, which was already spotted and sour, like my gym strip that hadn’t been washed in more than a year. Having friends was something I couldn’t understand. Although my father had professional acquaintances, and my mother had five close sisters and two brothers, neither of my parents had any friends—my father, I later realized, did not want me to become like my mother.
Our house had been christened the Belcarra by its builder in an effort to make everyone forget it was a boxy McMansion. The name was supposed to give us an element of inflated class and imply an aristocratic lineage that would never exist on a mountain two hours from the city of Hongcouver, a place known for its gigantic Chinese population.
By looking at us, people with no obvious interest in personal hygiene—my mother, siblings, and I had greasy rag-like hair plus eau d’ogre breath—you wouldn’t expect us to be comfortable suburbanites. I was not (still not) allowed to know our finances. But even though I thought we were very poor, we must have been at least comfortably middle class, but not small-time millionaires like some of my aunties and uncles, though Westwood Plateau was an affluent neighbourhood with a few well-known NHL players. My father had purchased the house because it was the cheapest one on the market in the area. The kitchen, dining room, and living room were on the very top floor, which had turned away every potential buyer except him, as our family did not invite people over.
To any sane person, the house’s interior probably resembled a type of rat-like, labyrinthine madness, a privatized mental institution of tiny, almost claustrophobic rooms. This was where our Woo-Woo dwelled, it seemed, inside the Woo: a netherworld aquatic tank swarming with foggy, morose ghosts.
Our isolated mountain had recently been renovated into Step-ford suburbia: real Canadian waterfalls competed with obnoxious fountains, green grass carpets, and dour-faced garden gnomes. You wouldn’t know it now, but only twenty years from when I was growing up, the mountain was known as the boondocks where the pizza guy absolutely did not deliver.
For millionaire migrants of Asia, this was must-have property and everyone snatched up these luxury boxes like accessories. The Chinese loved the mountain so much because the upward slope meant that the money would supposedly stay in our pockets. Many of the white families moaned about the “Asian tsunami” that had flooded their community and lamented the neighbourhood’s terrific ethnic decline into “Chinky Chinatown.”
But the isolation of the Plateau, shrouded by a canopy of black evergreens, was ideal for illegally growing and harvesting pot. The Poteau, as it was mocked in the newspapers, had been declared “a narco-terrorism zone” because of many moneymaking Asians who acquired luxury real estate for grow-ops and meth labs. This was the hottest Gold Mountain in history. The Poteau had become a neighbourhood of Chinese drug millionaires, and it seemed that everyone’s hardworking Chinese parents (three out of seven houses on our cul-de-sac) were cultivating BC bud for $250 an ounce, helping to generate a $6 billion industry for the province. No one ever suspected a hastily constructed show-off McMansion was manufacturing drugs.
When the story of the many marijuana plantations finally broke in 2004, the local newspapers exaggerated the Poteau’s crime rate, making it seem like everyone was always waking up to find a dead body on their flawless turf or a bullet hole in their front door. There was an exciting world that seemed more appealing than scary, from my child perspective. No matter how hard I prayed, I could never come across a corpse sprawled grotesquely on the Belcarra’s ample driveway.
Only once, in 2008, when I was twenty years old, did a meth lab a few streets down go boom, the palatial roof blasting high into the gloomy mountain sky, the glass shards from the foyer’s skylight lashing into the lush fronds of banana trees and splashing into the concave fountain like coins. For weeks, the newspapers raved and gushed and gossiped: “Posh Westwood Plateau House Explodes!”
As kids we heard our parents joke that if you purchased a multi-million-dollar toy castle with a multi-million-dollar view, the sellers threw in the Westwood Poteau Asian Barbie, toting her very own hot-pink meth lab starter kit.
Before the scandal in the news, my family, like everyone else on the block, was on the payroll for our silence. Every week, our neighbours brought over tinny buckets of clacking crustaceans, fine wines, chocolates, and a maybe a small cash gift of fifty dollars or more. There were usually two or three grow-ops on our small cul-de-sac at any given time, which would be immediately replaced after a police raid. At five p.m. at the end of the week, my mother, even when she was unwell, would wait with her carpenter’s hammer, ready to bash our live lobsters before boiling them for dinner. She would gouge out the crustacean’s beady, panicked eyes, and for another week, we would ignore the marijuana plantations reeking next door, and the methamphetamine fortresses down the street that oozed fresh cat piss and dizzying ammonia fumes.
It was only fair that we were paid to tolerate their moist toxic smells.
I grew up to love and expect my bounty of free chocolate—every week was trick or treat, except my neighbours came to me.
Just a year after we bought the Belcarra, the pinkest Barbie house in the middle of the cul-de-sac, mutual acquaintances whispered that the builder could not pay his debts, so his head was blown off at the Poteau country club, i.e., by Chinese gangsters. His death was hush-hush and did not make the news. I wondered if one of our criminal neighbours had discovered a creative way of killing him.
“What do you mean his head blew up?” I had asked when I was eleven years old, not so secretly thrilled with the wildness of his death. “Was it, like, a bomb? Did his head explode? Did his brains go everywhere? Was it hard to clean up?”
But all the grown-ups in the room told me to shut the fuck up.
“His brain go kaboom because he have low IQ,” my father said, turning this rumour into a lesson about school. He sounded tired and superior, which made me believe him.
There was nothing to see or do on the Poteau, except when our neighbour down the street got her brains eaten by a rebellious teenage black bear (the animal, not the woman, made the news). Everyone who witnessed the attack said the bear had somersaulted through her basement window and eagerly eaten half her head before the police arrived.
I had missed the incident, and then I was at school when another neighbour got his thigh chomped by a coyote when he was out gardening—the coyote only digested a little before deciding he didn’t like the chewy texture of old man. People seemed to forget this was a mountain in rural Canada masquerading as suburbia. You were more likely to be mauled by a gang of homeless bears while unloading groceries than to be bludgeoned to death with a trowel by the Chinese pot gardener.
My fascination with other people’s tragedies made me feel better about my own. I was convinced that nothing would happen while I waited for neighbourly maimings, so I was reduced to spending my summer hiding behind our scraggly bamboo bushes, my double assault Super Soaker sniper rifle pumped full of water and ready to spray at any neighbours I didn’t like. Rowdy and unafraid, I was a yodelling sixth-grade warrior, an assassin orangutan who’d leap out of the shrubbery and soak my screaming victims.
Eventually, on my block watch, a black BMW came to survey the neighbourhood and a smartly dressed Chinese couple and their daughter got out. They stopped in front of the beige McMansion across from the Belcarra, the one with medieval turrets and bulky buttresses that made it look like an obscene Disneyland theme park castle. There was no moving van and minimal luggage (a carry-on per person), which meant they had to be in the “gardening business.”
The man was young and ordinary and looked like some kind of professional, but the woman, an aging beauty queen, was wearing expensive clothes and five-inch stiletto heels that made her legs look like they belonged to a spidery silicone flamingo. She looked like a once-glamorous Hong Kong movie star with her crimson lipstick, except her teeth were blackish yellow and fanged. The skin on her face had been badly bleached (there were still slug-coloured spots that someone had missed), and this was why people on our block would call her Lesser Michael Jackson. She beckoned me over, but I was unsure if I should talk to her. Looking at her wobbling heels, I decided that I could definitely outrun her if she gave me any trouble.
The woman grinned, flashing her terrible fangs, and asked me which house I belonged to. I pointed at our pink Barbie house, and she nodded. “Tell your parents we’d like to meet them. Are you Hong Kong Chinese? Taiwanese Chinese? Singapore Chinese?”
“Hong Kong,” I said, and she looked incredibly relieved. She must have believed that her kind of Chinese was the best. “Us too. We’ll come by later with your presents.”
“Presents” confirmed that our new neighbours were savvy and practised pot growers, who would do their best to guarantee our silence with gifts.
“You may come play with my daughter,” the woman said, trying to make her voice sound less authoritative and more gracious. She pointed at the miserable-looking girl behind her.
The woman then pulled out a red envelope from her purse and stuck it in my sticky palm. “Here’s a small forty-dollar present for you, little sister. Please remember to tell your parents we’ll come by soon.”
Their daughter, also dressed in beautiful clothes, a pink silk tunic with a collar of boisterous red animal fur, looked seriously unhappy at our introduction, and I decided that she might be acceptable company. She was squat, with a brown dumpling-shaped face and some kind of raccoon snout for a nose. I sensed kindred deformity and shoulder-cringing anguish in her, like head lice that are helplessly drawn to clean hair. Her name was Terrifical Blossom, but everyone, including her own parents called her Pizza Head, on account of her blotchy scalp. She was noticeably bald, her head scabby and red.
She kept clawing at her scalp, and when she thought no one was looking, she stuck her hand inside her pants and scratched. I didn’t know what was wrong with her; it appeared to be some kind of psoriasis, which made patches of her skin look like ancient cottage cheese, but she seemed like she was my age, and I could show my father that I had quickly made a friend. It wasn’t as if we had to even like each other. She was brand new to the neighbourhood and would earn me an easy $10.99.
Unsure of what to say, I blurted hurriedly, “Do you want to be my friend? If you don’t, it’s okay. I don’t want to waste any time, so you should tell me right away.”
Pizza Head blinked and took a few seconds before she said, “Can I think about it?”
It seemed fair; after all, she needed time to decide if I would be a good friend. She didn’t know me. Her English was more stilted and awkward and confusing than mine, except I lisped and she didn’t. In those days, I had trouble with everyday talking noises. My tongue and lips and distended dinosaur teeth (stegosaurus underbite) didn’t like each other, and were at a constant three-way war. My father said that I looked and talked like “the Frankenstein,” which didn’t bother me until I learned what it meant when I was forced to read Mary Shelley in tenth grade.
“Fine,” I agreed, and quickly turned around and marched back to my house, thinking that I had a fifty-fifty chance.
The next day, Pizza Head told me that we could be friends on a trial basis, just in case she found other kids on the block that she liked better. Having no clue that this was a bad idea, I agreed. Pizza Head wasn’t sure if we would get along, and she really wanted to know why I dressed so funny.
“What you talking about? I said, confused. “I’m wearing shirt, you’re wearing shirt. I’m wearing pants, you’re wearing pants.”
“Yes,” she said, wrinkling her compact little nose so that it disappeared inside her face, “but why you wearing boy clothes? And why your sneaker too big?”
“What you talking about?” I said, not realizing she was embarrassed that I was dressed like a cellphone advertisement. I rotated between baggy men’s Motorola and LG logo T-shirts sent over by a rich uncle who owned a cellphone chain store in Australia. I had noticed a distinct difference between our clothes, but I assumed it was because my family was extremely poor (we lived off hand-me-downs) and she was in the “gardening” business, which meant that her parents had to spend a lot of money on finessing their upper-class appearance. It was like comparing someone who owned all the Manchu Wok fast food franchises in the province to someone who owned just one lowly Chinese restaurant in a rundown strip mall. Besides, she was the typical overseas Hong Kong princess who demanded everything that was girly, pink, and designer, and I was the rough tomboy CBC (Chinese-Born Canadian), which meant that I only liked food and all forms of hockey.
“But your house look way bigger than my house, so why you dress like that?” Pizza Head persisted.
I shrugged, and then her mother came out to give us glutinous red bean candies and a dish of deep-fried hot dogs drowning in black garlic bean curd, so I forgot what we were talking about.
You knew someone had a successful drug business when they wouldn’t tell you their real name, or their parents claimed they were successful travel agents but didn’t know the name of the company they worked for. Those in the standard marijuana occupation or the riskier meth business did not allow visitors inside. If their children invited you to play, you were confined to the front steps or the rusty backyard swings, where dishes of semi-frozen hot dogs and gluey sweets were served, their bowing parents apologizing about the sad, skunky smell.
This was our immigrant interpretation of suburbia: Chinese parents trying to be accommodating and white and country-club attending as much as possible. Pot was something assimilated people mass produced and distributed in British Columbia; it was a marker of success, like sending your children to Ivy League schools.
In fact, Lesser Michael Jackson proved to be a fabulous Poteau hostess, always smiling and bowing; she rotated between serving us the usual fried rice and undercooked spaghetti glued together by mustard, relish, and coagulated ketchup. Having been raised on fast food from the mall and easy Chinese food (fried rice, lo mein, chop suey), I could eat anything and didn’t yet know the difference between margarine and mayonnaise. My taste buds for Western cuisine were seriously undeveloped, and if someone handed me a sandwich full of gummy bears and potato chips, I would gladly eat it with a handful of sugar.
When Lesser Michael Jackson, who also didn’t quite understand Western cooking, brought out jumbo marshmallows smeared with mayonnaise and strawberry jam, I thought I had found my fairy godmother. Did this woman also exist just to feed me? She was the only Chinese lady I knew who cooked North American food, which made her a celebrity chef in a way. No grown-up I knew could read the English directions on packaged food, but Lesser Michael Jackson claimed she could, which is why she had mastered chicken nugget rice, spaghetti with ketchup like “the Italian,” and mayonnaise marshmallow casserole. She invented Western dishes like she made up stories about her life as a travel agent.
In contrast, at our house we ate a simple buffet of steamed fish, chicken, or pork on dry, gravelly rice if my mother was in a cooking mood; if she wasn’t, we devoured turd-shaped beef jerky from the box and slurped peppery instant noodles. Although she was a drug lady, Lesser Michael Jackson constantly fed Pizza Head home cooking and decorated her front steps with cheerful paper plants from Costco. My mother couldn’t be bothered to cook or clean the house when she was afraid and depressed, so I preferred Lesser Michael Jackson’s ersatz gourmet version of motherhood.
Because of their daughter’s memorable nickname, our newest pot-growing neighbours became known as the generous Pizza Family: friendly Mrs and Mr Pizza (Lesser Michael Jackson and Three Decade Younger Husband behind their backs), who had produced such a yeasty Pizza Head. It was rumoured that Pizza Head wasn’t really their daughter, just some sad, unfortunate girl who had been assigned to the sensational drug couple. The adults in our neighbourhood did not seem particularly concerned about Pizza Head, but there was an unspoken policy on the Poteau to never get involved if you didn’t want “your head blown up.”
Truthfully, she did not look like either of her enigmatic parents, and she bitterly referred to her mother as “That Woman” and her father as “Him.” I could certainly relate and began addressing both my parents as “You,” which they did not like.
Whether this was unsophisticated adolescent rebellion, or she had truly been sold/kidnapped/hostaged, poor Pizza Head despised both her parents and did not consider That Woman and Him to be her family. There might have been some unhappy truth to her story because the Poteau was known for stranger things, but I had been raised not to interfere or ask questions, especially when I had two or three delicious meals on their front porch a day. Like me, Pizza Head had an overbearing, dramatic mother and an emotionally distant, unavailable father, and I thought I knew why she loathed me so much—because That Woman and Him insisted that we be “the best friend OR ELSE.”
The “OR ELSE” in an immigrant Chinese family could mean many different things, and if your parents were old-fashioned like mine, you might have to sleep outside for talking back and relinquish half your Lunar New Year money. My parents believed that punishment was supposed to be practical and intensive, none of that go-to-your-room-and-meekly-apologize Western bullshit. Punishment had to hurt a little bit. In Pizza Head’s case, she had to sleep on an air mattress in the garage and hand over her platinum credit cards, which was just considered average according to my lofty Chinese Old Testament standards.
You really had to feel sorry for that Pizza Head. First, her head was always snowing like textured confetti, and second, she had no choice but to be my friend. Even I did not want to be friends with myself. In retrospect, I felt alien and apart from my surroundings, believing myself to be disgusting, inferior, and brain-damaged—a carbon copy of my parents’ projected phobias and insults. Because I struggled socially, I felt as if I had crash-landed from Pluto and could not fathom how to interact with the human species. With no idea how to be kind or generous or even mildly entertaining, I admit that I was lousy company. If I did not make friends with Pizza Head, I would not have $10.99, and I would incur the wrath of my father, who did not like losers and wimps.
“This is the only reason why I’m talking to you, you know,” Pizza Head explained to me. She had the refreshing honesty of someone who had to lie about everything else. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be the best friend at all.”
Because childhood misery tends to cut off oxygen to the brain, it makes the sufferer not only irrational but also irritable—it puts everything in a wholly negative and nightmarish light. My gloominess was like being a portly hamster forced to run on a never-stopping wheel, whereas Pizza Head was like a timid ladybug that had been inelegantly stuffed into a jar, taken from a lush botanical garden, and forced to live among a few scraggly maple leaves. We should have been miserable together, forced into unsavoury surroundings and situations by unstable adults who were too busy looking after themselves.
Unfortunately, even such a low-bar friendship wasn’t going to work—my father had elbowed me towards sociability, but he didn’t seem to think Pizza Head was good enough, even for me.
“Out of all the kid on the block, you choose that leper to be your friend?” he had asked me, shocked, when the smiley Pizza family first came by to pay their bribes, giving us three dozen fresh lobsters and two bottles of good merlot. “She looks like a fucking potato! There are fleas eating her head!”
I didn’t look much better, my father finally conceded, but thank Buddha I didn’t have a pepperoni pizza for a head.
Accustomed to his outrageous remarks, I could only pretend that I hadn’t heard, secretly rolling my eyes. It was an early defence mechanism that I was slowly developing, not engaging fully with either of my parents; that is, if I didn’t want to hear any stomach-churning screaming that could shatter my precarious, indistinct sense of self. The answer seemed so simple: if you didn’t react, you didn’t receive a fat stake in the chest. Yet it would take me many years before I could fully disengage. I was learning self-preservation, in the same way it was better not to walk outside during a lightning storm or to be caught outside when the black bears and coyotes were out. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough, and through adolescence to adulthood, I had to adapt: retreating so wholly into myself that I was afraid to convey any pulp-like vulnerability.
In short, there were times when I became too much like my father—assholian and unliked.
I figured that as long as my father paid me for acquiring my new friend, which he eventually did, I would not tell him that it all seemed like a very poor investment. Besides, I was the first-born and the first generation of Chinese immigrants, and I knew that if I did not succeed, there would be punishment. For instance, once my father forced my mother to buy me a box of cookies from the grocery store and ordered me to hand them out to some random kids playing roller hockey on the street. But they didn’t like me and said I looked and talked funny. So I took back all my cookies, including the half-eaten ones (they were worth $2.99 each), and everyone got incredibly upset, and I couldn’t see what the big deal was. I could not bear to go back on the street and hand out cookies like flyers to kids who had previously rejected me.
During the first two weeks of our friendship, Pizza Head and I sat companionably on her front steps, devouring whatever food Lesser Michael Jackson brought out. Our eating continued uneventfully until one day we had made our way through two plates of That Woman’s chewy specialty spaghetti and, for dessert, twenty plain soft taco shells (she had mistaken tortillas for puff pastry) when Pizza Head told me that she could not be my friend anymore. Without an ounce of false remorse, Pizza Head explained that there was a potential opening for her in someone else’s friend group and they had invited her to play tennis. This was a private invite-only audition, and I was not welcome, on account of my smell and terrible clothing choices, which had never even occurred to me. It wasn’t just one bad choice that I had made, she said, but I was wearing too many unforgivable choices that could not be ignored.
The news was shocking—when was clothing a decision-maker in this petty game called friendship? I certainly did not smell like pee anymore and washed my hair with some regularity, so why wasn’t that enough? Besides, we had spent a lot of time sitting and chewing on the porch together, even if we hadn’t ever talked. After all, I might have argued, in movies and television shows, cows and other intelligent livestock that grazed together often seemed to form silent and intense bonds. I was shocked at this sudden betrayal and testy judgment, especially from someone who had such an obvious skin affliction.
“I don’t smell!” I protested. “I shower every day now because the teacher said so. Before I didn’t, but I do now!”
“Well, a lot of other girl say you smell funny,” Pizza Head pointed out, as if this were an encyclopedic fact. “They say you go to special ed because there’s something wrong with you. I guess you should probably leave soon because I don’t want the other girls to see me talking to you. If they like me, they might invite me to go to mall.”
“I order you to be my friend!” I shouted, furious at her for dismissing me so easily.
In her place, I would have probably done the same thing except I would have ended our friendship with a strong farewell punch. I’d have given myself a broken or bloody nose if I’d been Pizza-Head, if I were ever so lucky as to be invited anywhere. She was exactly the type of friend that I would latch onto as an older teenager and adult, someone who had access to foreign food and money, and maintained a cool deformity. At the time, though, I saw her through my father’s eyes: she wasn’t even a delectable frozen pizza from Safeway; she was just a spud. A cheap potato.
Even though I was not fully attached to our version of friendship, I felt that I should have gotten a little more return for the efforts I had made. It was like handing over all your Lunar New Year and Christmas money to a jerky older cousin who promised you his Pokémon trading card collection and did not follow through, but what you really should have done was deposit the eighty dollars from your aunties and uncles in a savings account until you could afford the Pokémon deluxe collector’s edition.
I stomped off into the evergreens and chucked a rock at a fat singing blue jay, which missed. I felt wounded and bewildered. What just happened? My father had not explained the bratty betrayals of little-girl friendships. He made it seem like you showed up, paid a person in cookies or cash, and were thus entitled to make them do whatever you wanted.
Furious, the next time I saw Pizza Head lounging alone on her front steps, minus her new cool friends, I stuck out my tongue and gave her the finger—the only thing I knew how to do.
The very next morning, a pouting Pizza Head came by with a necklace, a lumpy translucent rock on a flimsy silver chain—a peace offering.
“That Woman says I have to be friends with you or I can’t use my credit card anymore,” Pizza Head announced, huffily. “That Woman says our job is to make the entire block like us, so you better take this stupid necklace. If I don’t like you, then your parents won’t like us.”
“I don’t want your necklace,” I said, which was true. “Why would I want to wear necklace with an ugly rock on it?”
“What wrong with you?!” Pizza Head said, horrified. “It’s Swarovski! What you want instead? Chocolate? Money?”
“Maybe,” I admitted, and thought that if she had just brought over five or ten bucks, I could forgive her for dismissing me earlier. I did not know what Swarovski was and did not want a gigantic, heavy rock. How could she think that she could repair our friendship by giving me a collar for a St Bernard?
“Fine,” Pizza Head snapped. “Let’s go back to my place and That Woman will give you present. I’m gonna keep necklace, but don’t tell That Woman.”
“Whatever,” I said, trying not to let her see that I cared very much.
I still felt hurt and betrayed, so I did what I thought would cause anyone else pain. I stomped at the back of Pizza Head’s heels as I followed her across the cul-de-sac—the quickest thing I could think of.
“Owwwww!” Pizza Head complained, rubbing her heels so that more of her skin flaked off. “Watch where you going, idiot!”
“Don’t be baby,” I said, recognizing that I was being as callous as I could, and stepped on the back of her flip-flops again. Soon, this turned into a competition of cruelty: name-calling and grass-flinging. Eventually, I decided that I didn’t want a friend anymore.
“Where you going?” Pizza Head asked me, a little shocked when I turned to go. “Come back right now!”
It took a long time before I could see that Pizza Head was permanently stuck with That Woman and Him, as I was stuck with my own parents, and that we were like unfortunate amphibians locked in the same pet store terrarium. She was most definitely a victim of her circumstances, as unhappy and surly as I was. Whereas her sores were bright and open, mine were dark and hidden inside, like termites or a dead body in an eccentric uncle’s freezer.
Certainly, I recognized her misery on some fundamental level, as much as I accepted essential forces like hunger or schoolyard malice, yet instead of making me feel a little more sympathetic, it just made me dislike her even more. I saw my ugliness and short-tempered wretchedness mirrored in her scrunched-up skin and glassy, bewildered eyes. It was as if I was hearing my voice for the first time on a tape recording and was shocked by how strange and tinny it sounded.
Suddenly, I despised her for being so goddamn sad all the time. Of course, later I realized it was because I was seeing myself.
As a Neanderthal sixth grader, my first instinct was to scream and make the monster go away.
So in that moment I reacted instinctively and cruelly. I threw a rock at Pizza’s head before stampeding away.
Maybe the openly generous Pizza Family drew unwanted attention with their exorbitant hydro bills because a month later there was a major police raid and all the neighbours were ordered indoors for the day. Three police cars and a special unit van containing a narcotics team kicked open the Pizza family’s McMansion doors. One of the mahogany panels fell off, and a police officer lugged it out of the way as if he were dragging a body.
From our front window, I watched a team of eight cops smash their basement windows, the glass falling like wilful icicles, the sound deafening and frightening. One by one, officers with heavy shields and gas masks confiscated more than 500 marijuana plants in black pots. I had never actually seen a grow-op before and was so disappointed—these were just plants that anyone, rich or poor, might grow in a garden. I had envisioned marijuana to be beautifully packaged candies, delicious despite the stink. I didn’t understand all the fuss over a bunch of potted plants that made our neighbourhood smell like dead skunk and old man breath.
Pizza Head and her parents were not home that day. Maybe a loyal neighbour had tipped them off. For the next six hours, I peeked through our foyer’s grimy windows to see what the exciting Pizza family would do next. When the police raid was finally over, and it was dark and only the coyotes were prowling the garbage for dinner bones, I saw the Pizza’s family’s BMW creep into the cul-de-sac. As soon as they saw that half their front door was missing and that their first-floor windows had been boarded up with planks and industrial garbage bags, they backed up and vanished.
I wondered what was going on inside that car: were they yelling and screaming and blaming each other for something that had gone terribly wrong like a real family would, or were they unsentimental professionals, stoically accepting the setback and moving on? Had this happened in their last-cul-de-sac? Did they have multiple backup marijuana houses and fake passports and IDs? I imagined Pizza Head would be scratching her flaky pie-crust arms in agitation, and when they reached their new destination, there would be nothing left of her except a mound of dead skin, like a pile of unbleached flour collected in the backseat.
If this incident had happened in my early twenties, I’d have packed a bag, rushed over, and begged to become a member of their absurd little tribe, offering to pose as someone’s big sister or bratty niece, if it meant getting my hands on some free weed. Instead, I just stared passively through the blinds. In the mountain blackness, which meant total darkness at five p.m., the house, without its door, no longer looked like a fun Disneyland palace. It was menacing and unclean. Just a broken, deserted junkyard castle.
I called Pizza Head and tried to message her online, but her cellphone and MSN account were suddenly deactivated. Eventually, I gave up and watched their house with a voyeuristic, vulture-like curiosity. That week, several police cars patrolled our cul-de-sac, but all of our neighbours insisted that they didn’t speak English. They were not talking.
During my watch, I once saw a chrome-coloured Mercedes slowly drive by with a group of youngish Asian men in business suits, who must have seen the boarded-up windows, because they shouted something panicky before zooming away. The house stayed shut down for only a few weeks. Then some real estate tycoons fixed it up and two grinning, charismatic Vietnamese men named Moolah and Poodle purchased it for a bargain price of $1.9 million to manufacture more cash-crop drugs.
For a while, our cul-de-sac began to see female carriers on foot, hired catalogue models dressed like country club tennis players—at least fifteen different girls each day—in brand-new sun visors and sporty white dresses, their identical blue duffel bags most likely stuffed full of drugs. They looked too upscale and sophisticated for weed, so it must have been cocaine or ecstasy. The hired girls would jog their circulatory route back and forth from the ex–Pizza home, always looking over one shoulder, eternally smiling—a perfect J. Crew catalogue of our specialized Poteau lifestyle. They’d deliver their moneymaking goods to different houses on the mountain, never once stopping at the Poteau country club where they were supposed to be playing tennis.
When I look back at this, I think about how amazing it all was, and how you could make people do anything for free lobsters and chocolate. It wasn’t as if you couldn’t acquire live crustaceans or sweets from the local supermarket, but people, no matter how much money they had, enjoyed free things. It seemed that as long as you hid behind your immaculate house with its green lawn and were kind to your neighbours most of the time, you had absolutely no one to answer to, except yourself.
I too then convinced myself that I was inherently special, exempt from and above the rules, better than many people, or at least better than everyone else my age, so I continued skulking behind my grisly bamboo bush. And with grand and unmistakable glee, I resumed my illicit water-gun activities, soaking anyone dumb enough to wander into my staked-out territory.