Birds of Paradise Lost

Slingshot

39 Slingshot This dude, right, a loner and everything, made his sorry ass part of our family, and Mamma insisted that me and Pammy call him Uncle Steve, but I wouldn’t. Uh-uh. I called him U.S. for short. U.S. came to eat at our restaurant a couple of years ago and ordered Mamma’s special Hu Tieu soup. Kept saying he hadn’t eaten authentic Vietnamese cooking since he was stationed in Nam and such. Next thing you know, dude’s a regular. And Mamma and Pammy, sweet, ready-to-please Pammy, started to treat him like a long-lost relative. “Poor Uncle Steve,” Mamma once said in Vietnamese, “he’s a nice man and all alone. He fought on your father’s side during the war and even knew his infantry. So treat him nice, you two, especially you, Little Monkey.’ “Sure,” I said, “sure, Mamma. Whatever.” The thing about regulars is that they sometimes get too personal . They, like, totally get on your nerves. They don’t leave at closing time. They walk up to the cash register when you’re way too 40 Birds of Paradise Lost busy adding up the bills or something and start kicking it with you, yammering and yacking ’til you get real distracted and lose your place and then you just want to tell them to shut the hell up. I mean they pay for good cooking and give a tip for good service but, ’scuse me, where does it say on the menu that our special dinner combo of spring rolls, salad, and curry chicken for $6.99 comes with psychological treatment? Some regulars just hang around late, you know, and ask if we need help cleaning up, or if we want an escort to our apartment after we close even if it’s only two blocks away, or what dish we’re preparing for tomorrow, but like, hello, it’s the same menu every day for the last three years. Some of them just didn’t wanna go home, period, and I’ll tell you why: most regulars are helluva loners. But U.S. was the worst. Kept telling us how he hated being an American and everything, hated “this damn country,” hated how his wife took the kids and skipped out on his sorry ass back to Texas after he came back a little loony-tooney from Nam. Sometimes U.S.’d get way annoying when he pretended like he’s somehow Vietnamese, ’cuz he’s been there and knew some stuff. Like he knew all about Tet: “You dress up nice and you go visit relatives and you give money in red envelopes to little children , am I right, Mrs. Nguyen?” About wedding traditions: “The groom’s side of the family comes over to the bride’s side bearing gifts wrapped in red. They carry a roasted pig on a big lacquered tray and fruits and tea on the smaller ones, isn’t that right, Pammy?” And about funeral arrangements: “You wear white headbands, you burn paper offerings to the dead, and you play really sad music. I remember people in the rural areas prefer to live near their ancestors ’ graves so they can tend to them. Hell, I’ve even seen graves in people’s backyards. Live and die together, that’s the way you people are, am I right?” If that’s not enough to yank your chain, there was this helluva annoying phrase U.S. always used when he came in a little tipsy: Toi cung la nguoi Viet Nam!—“I’m also Vietnamese!”—and sometimes Mamma, when she’s in a good mood, she’d laugh and clasp her hands and answer him with her broken English: “Uncle Steve, Andrew Lam 41 you, you Viet-Nam people like us.” Whenever he heard that, boy, dude’d be beaming like Mamma’d just announced that he’d won the Oscar for Best Actor or something. But Mamma was only humoring his ass. I mean, U.S. as a Vietnamese? Who was he kidding? A doofus from Texas with receding blond hair, a thick mustache, and a beer belly who loves to wear obnoxious-smelling cologne and loud Hawaiian shirts on the weekends? Puh-leeze, put black pajamas on that dude and he’d be looking more like, I don’t know, a chocolate truffle or something. Anyway, soon U...