Viet Ham

“Let’s play some bball or something physical around 4pm” was the instant message I received from Duckie, sitting in his Hannibal Lecter office, a mere 15ft from me. Duckie has a new diet scheme. His whole day would subsist of several diet sodas and morsels of food expatriated from home. Since then, there’s been a certain dainty swagger about him. He shuns my invitations to all the usual caloric goodies with a haughty aloofness, the kind reserved for ugly one-night-stands and George Michael posters.

“K, call me when you get home and dressed,” I typed back. I recalled the last time we played basketball with the singular image of Duckie awkwardly dancing about the ball like newly castrated monkey and catapulting it past the backboard. My mind immediately justified my decision as I peered down at my burgeoning belly.

At 530pm, I was hobbling from the pain of wearing borrowed running shoes. Several basketball courts were teeming with young, ghetto-raised Asians and Blacks. The SJ Police Dept readily replenishes these asphalt tokens of municipal generosity, so there was never a worry that we’d lose our audience. And I do say audience because they must have enjoyed watching Duckie and I leap about, playing a solid verbal defense of howling and screeching. What we lacked in physical skill, we made up in emotional harassment. Every time he went up for a shot, I closed the distance between us and squealed unintelligibly while making groping hand gestures towards his tits and ass. After five minutes of intense bball action, my lungs filled with a searing pain that was only exacerbated by the endless laughter.

Our theatrical game of 21 ended just as my sides were about to implode and Duckie’s last ounce of Diet Coke energy expired. I looked to the other courts, and noticed two teenage girls pretending not to notice the ghetto runts and their athletic moves. A thought occurred to me…these guys owe us so much. Without us, they wouldn’t look half as good as they did, and wouldn’t get to insert their penises inside the children of single welfare moms who don’t have the time to instill good moral values to negate the ghetto slut and her sweet baller.

The goal of a Vietnamese immigrant is to scurry about, memorizing knowledge, hoarding material possessions, advertising his socio-economic flatulence, marrying profitably, and dying with no greasy ambition left to burn.

There are too many obstacles in life to blindly gallop at breakneck speed. My wife never learned that lesson.

Her body resembles an anthropological survey of scrapes and scars. I sometimes abruptly recall certain furniture we’ve owned and their precise arrangement with the lucid aid of her bruise cartography. While these haphazard autographs of misery each have their own unique tale of woe, there are a few easily identified elements:

a) the verbal taunt
b) the rapacious lunge
c) the frenetic evasion of furniture and sharp objects
d) the blood-curdling screaming and screeching at the eventual failure of (c)

I suppose my ululating crescendo as I try to grope her ass doesn’t ease the trauma of the situation. In her mind, she must think she’s dodging objects with a spritely dexterity. In reality, I observe a harried conglomeration of arms and legs flailing about as she continuously looks back in my direction while adventurously dashing forward. I call this her “sideways running”. And sure enough, in the next moment, there is a scuffling noise, followed by a forceful thud. Then silence. A bit more silence. Then an unearthly screech fills the air, suffixed by bawling moans of primal tragedy. I rush over to console her, filled with an awkward mixture of concern and stifled laughter. She’s my one and only, and I can’t help but dread the day she proves it.