Pushing through the fluorescent-lit single aisle of the gas station’s convenience store and out into the damp night, he still felt hazy, disconnected from himself. He’d spent the loose hours of the afternoon sitting in back of an olive green streetcar, riding the line from terminus to terminus and back again, watching as the sky turned a misty dark blue before he finally hopped off. Now Andrew crossed the street, walking past a dry cleaner and a couple of small houses. The green awning of the bar was covered with beer names—Bass, Carlsberg, Harp—and a couple of guys stood under it smoking. On the other side of the street, a power plant hummed. He felt like a greaseball, dirty and unshowered, dragging along a bag that was too big and too expensive-looking for this place.
After signing up, he still had half an hour to kill. He should have been excited, sitting there in that wood-paneled bar, a whiskey and Coke in front of him, waiting to go onstage. Instead, he was lonely. The thirty long minutes felt like a weight. One extended sip through that skinny red straw and his drink was gone. All the guys around him—and it was mostly guys—they looked like people he might be friends with except they wore really lame T-shirts and they weren’t actually his friends.
Maybe this was depression. Tak took Prozac and went to a therapist. They’d talked about it once. Andrew rolled his eyes at himself. Was two days of being homeless really all it took to knock him off-kilter? He ordered another drink.
By the time the emcee finally called his name, drawling it out so that it seemed to go on forever, an endless lazy a sound, Andrew had already toggled his mental state back and forth between boredom and anxiety and anticipation at least half a dozen times. He’d practiced the last minute of this set over and over in front of the full-length mirror in his dorm, so even the uncertainty of working with props wasn’t enough to keep him nervous and keyed up. But he was a professional. He’d leave it all on the stage.
“Yo, is that you?” the guy next to him asked.
“Yep.”
“Good luck, man.” Andrew checked his pocket to make sure everything was in place, downed the last of his drink, and ran up the narrow room just as the emcee ribbed him. “Ain’t nothing funny about taking your time, alright!”
Andrew catapulted himself onstage and shook the emcee’s hand before turning around to look out at the room. LSU frat boys, townies, and tourists. He spread his arms out.
“So, I’m Asian. Mm-hm. Yeah.”
There were a couple cheers as he turned his head right and left, showing his profile.
“Yep. One hundred percent Asian. I know you want to know what kind. Because people always say they can’t tell the difference between Asians, right? And that goes all ways. Like, you can’t tell the difference between particular Asians, and you also can’t tell the difference between different types of Asians. You know right now you’re all thinking, Is he kimchee and born-again Christian, or is he sushi and octopus porn??”
He leaned in and whispered, “Oh, or is he that guy I used to work with? That real quiet one in the IT department with the Hello Kitty license plate frame??” Straightened up. “Except you don’t say any of it out loud because you know that thinking all Asians look alike is one of those stereotypes that’s supposed to be super offensive, right?”
He was starting to feel like himself again. This was different from the club in Texas, where Barbra had seen him bomb. These people were laughing. Who could say why? He saw a guy shush his girlfriend when she leaned over to whisper something. Yes. He pumped a mental fist and then stepped a little to the left, turned, and said, in a John-Wayne-as-frat-boy voice that sailed out of him, booming and false, “So, hey, bro, you Korean or you Chinese?”
Stepped back to the right, turned, mimed a super-offended, borderline effeminate gasp and immediately hated himself for it. Still, he pivoted forward to face the audience. “I’ll tell you a secret . . . we can’t tell the difference either.” He pointed to an Asian guy in the crowd who luckily hadn’t moved since Andrew had first spotted him. “You, you could be a real cool-looking Chinese guy or a real dorky Japanese guy. I mean, I really can’t tell. ’Cause, dudes, honestly, we do all kind of look alike.” Thank god that got almost as big of a laugh as he’d thought it would, which buoyed him, making him talk even more expansively. “Oh, by the way, I’m Chinese, so just think, like, dumplings and human rights abuses.”