The Skinny

On May 27, 1991, Konerak Sinthasomphone became Jeffrey Dahmer’s 13th victim.  After finding Konerak walking in the street bloody, confused and naked, Sandra Smith and cousin, Nicole Childress, both 18 years old and black, called 911. Officers Gabrish and Balcerzak arrived on the scene and saw that Smith and Childress were arguing with Jeffrey Dahmer over the fate of Konerak.  Dahmer convinced the officers that Konerak was his 19-year-old lover and that he was drunk.  The cops led Konerak back to Dahmer’s apartment over the protestations of the two girls.  Thirty minutes after the officers left the apartment, Dahmer ended up strangling the 14-year-old boy, having sex with the body, taking photos of the dismemberment and decapitation of the corpse, and finally boiling the head.

12/1/76

My dad dreamed of Laos again last night, kicking and screaming, and running in place.  Mom took her pillow, walked into our bedroom and quietly slipped in next to me, hushing, telling me that dad would be fighting the communists till the day he died.  Those are the times when I wish we had a couch, just so mom would sleep there instead.  She snores so loud.

Slowly, but surely, I unwrapped myself from her embrace and went outside in the front yard for a breath of fresh air.  Wisconsin in the spring:

“There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home!”

I laugh when Dorothy does that clicking thing with her shoes because I know if I had ruby slippers and did that, like a boomerang, I would just end up where I started:  Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  This is all I know, no matter what dad tries to tell me and my brother about the old country, or our relatives left behind or the war that he had little choice but to participate in.

What do I care, I always mutter under my breath.  It’s bad enough that Cindy won’t look at me anymore in class ever since I gave her that Valentine and wrote in it, “Be Mine!” Hell, Martin dared me to do it, and I believed him when he said that Cindy really liked me.  She gave me all the signs:  the batting of her eyes, the casual brush ups in the hallway going to our next class.  And, I fell for it.  Hard.  Brother Somsak told me not to mess with the American girls anymore.  They have a reputation.  But, I thought to myself:

I’m an American, too.

Good Neighbor

I told that fool daughter of mine to stop sneaking out of the goddamn house.  All my discipline, all my hard work, it’s all for her, and for her own good, too.

I always remind her:  Mind your teachers, mind your grades and mind your manners.

To get by in this world you have to be honest, you have to be principled and you especially have to have a good head on your shoulders.

Sandra’s cousin, Nicole, can be a sweetheart, and I love her like one of my own, but goddamn that little miss gets herself stuck in some deep dung!  When them two’re together, I know everything’s not as square as it looks, but you gotta love ‘em.  This hell-hole they’re livin’ in is not anything they made; they inherited it from one generation to another, on down the line, just passing the buck.  Our little ones’re still dreaming the dreams of White folk, just like us old people did back in the day.  I still remember when I was little and I wanted a pony for my birthday.  Imagine that!  A goddamn pony in the ghetto!

I wake up and sometimes think this life has lost all its senses and the world is going blind.  I give those two girls a lot of credit, though; they tried to do good that night.  There’s no good reason why the police had to drag that kid away.  I don’t give a rat’s ass if he was gay or couldn’t speak English.  The girls said there was blood coming from between his legs and his head was bleeding.  Doesn’t take a detective to put those two things together and see that something doesn’t fit quite right.  What are we paying these cops for, anyway?  And the way Sandra and Nicole described that tall White boy, there sure must have been something wrong with him, too.  His eyes, they said, were blood shot and his whole body stank of beer.  He was gonna give Sandra a shove, but that’s when one of the officers jumped in and told the two girls to mind their own business and get back inside the house.  Didn’t even take down their statements.

“There’s a time and a place,” my daddy used to tell me.  “There comes a time when you need to go out of your way to step out of place and speak up.” So, this morning I called the police station and asked about that poor Asian boy.  They gave me the runaround and paid me the same lip service that they did to those two girls.  Not to worry, they said, nothing out of the ordinary.  As far as they were concerned, it was just a misunderstanding.

Case closed.