Made in China Chapter 11

               There were more cars than I could have possibly imagined and they were all nearly identical. The exhaust from their engines hung thick in the air making me gag and my eyes sear. Tears streamed down my face. It was too muggy to roll up the windows. Ruby has no air conditioner, no fault of her own. I told Chloe to remove it so I wouldn’t be tempted to use it and lose power. The noxious fumes must be the reason most of the drivers wore tank goggles and emasculating handkerchiefs over their grimy unscrupulous faces. There was no reason to want to be anonymous—this after all is a show of balls and bravado! They were lined up beginning at Palisades Park all the way across the George Washington Bridge, clear up 9A into Yonkers. It was arranged by numbers but it was apparent that numbers weren’t being considered any longer. Odd men in reflective vests armed with those airplane signaler lights they use on tarmacs waved us on further and further. I was 1703 according to my tag which hung off my rearview mirror next to my Jesus air freshener, but clearly since I arrived late, I was going to be waved all the way up 9A and my starting position would be somewhere in Yonkers, tens of thousands deep. I dropped dad off after we crossed the Hudson River at the station on 181^st. 

They were bumper to bumper, packed in like Chinese sardines. I know this only because my dad, Bobby Bubonic, ate sardines by the ton and I remember the sight of them after he would peel back the tin top and the expression fits. Their headlights were like the staring fish eyes. I don’t know which smelled worse, these cars or those little fish. Dad got a free lifetime supply because he endorsed a brand out of Muncie, Indiana. After dad’s endorsement, sales went through the roof and that little factory became a bigger factory and they are currently the world’s top selling sardine brand for what it’s worth. His smiling face is on every can holding his javelin long-ways across the red, white and blue label. I have to admit that I was beginning to contemplate what brands I would endorse if I lived through this. Sitting there idling in that sea of Plexiglas sardines I was thinking of endorsements with my Blue Eagle on the chest of my red leather jacket. The drivers in their little chopped Chinese cars glared at me as I slowly rolled past. None were Chinese. They were all dopey Americans: a hodgepodge people. Everyone was glaring at everyone in the jam. Competition, they say, brings out the cream of the crop, or worst of the worst. I should punch myself for thinking of endorsements.

            I look like a fish out of water in my Mustang. The love gun I got all those years ago was tucked in the glove compartment along with a gas mask, a knife, some twine, matches, three road flares and a few packs of chewing gum. Paper bags of non-perishable groceries from my mother were in the back seat, buckled in. She insisted. At the 181 St. Subway station, dad tried to give me his gold pocket watch which belonged to his great-great-great grandfather who was a slave in North Carolina in the years before the Civil War. His name was Jem and besides for the kid in To Kill a Mockingbird, he is the only person I have ever heard of with that name. He didn’t have a surname, like other freed slaves he got to choose what he would like to be called. Like people do today. He chose Washington, after America’s first President, because he felt it was a good American name and with it he could fit in with society nicely. George Washington owned slaves. It wouldn’t be that easy.

            I reminded dad that I was probably going to be killed and my belongings plucked from my dead corpse so it wouldn’t be prudent to give me such a significant memento unless he wanted his great-great-great grandfather’s prized gold pocket watch in the sleazy hands of some two-bit, murdering, raping scumbag road pirate. That being said, he thought on it for a moment and instead gave me a can of Muncie’s Best Sardines and tucked the watch safely back into his pocket. We shared a meaningful handshake and that is worth more to me than anything he could have given me. His hand was calloused and his handshake firm. There was a spark of something genuine in that moment that seems to be unlike anything else in the world. No one shakes hand anymore. Not since the White Plague.

            My place in line ended up near a coffee shop called Latte Lust. There were all sorts of flowers in an ornate wood-walled flowerbed and the undeniable sign that it was a Chinese business, a thumb of the nose to America and Americans, bamboo brazenly in front. To kill a bamboo tree (which was the original title of this story), is a capital offense. It is practically the only thing that will get you killed by this government and it will get you killed quickly. Never mind that bamboo is planted everywhere there is devastation and which grows fast enough to practically watch it grow, it is considered sacred. You may as well cut the balls of the Chinese Emperor. There are rumors that the Chinese plan to populate the world with panda bears, thus all the bamboo, as a symbol of their power. I sat there looking over at that coffee shop and thought of Chloe, idling, waiting. I put on my gas mask to alleviate myself of the Chinese motor smoke. I had two silver Colt Dragoons that I found in a pick in body holsters, butts facing me for easier access, juxtaposed to my ribs. “Cowboy guns,” I called them. My hands caressed them as I remembered Chloe’s virgin posterior. “No man has ever done that,” she said about everything. Soon, I felt like I was walking on Mars, or discovering a cure for Parkinson’s. I could still smell her on me and feel her below the way some men I knew from the war felt arms or legs that were gone. A picture of Zula Zane hung above my head like a guardian angel but my mind was occupied by thoughts of Chloe and not even her pretty face could change that.

In my daydreams, I was nudged a few times from behind by some of those little Chinese cars. The manufacturer of all the cars present besides mine was a company called Lucky Motors. The President of Lucky Motors was a fat man named Yeh-Po Chung who was the most influential person on Earth and who owned much more than Lucky Motors. He was the most successfully pimp in world history and was the innovator of the Made in China line of human female exports. He monopolized the business but he had no interest in China girls himself. They were too commonplace for his taste. If you become rich you might develop such idiosyncrasies. It is how caviar became something. Chung had a hankering for American girls and offered Heathcliff Bernard any amount of money in the world for Zula Zane, but Bernard declined. He insisted on having the satisfaction of watching perfectly healthy men die because of his insatiable taste for death and chaos. His Parkinson’s was in such a late stage that there was no way he would be able to spend all the money he had let alone a Chinese fortune. So Chung hired at least 1300 professional drivers of different races equipped in the finest supped-up Lucky Motors cars and felt assuredly he would win that way.

I sat in my car and people came around telling us drivers to tune in to radio frequency 88.5 FM for instructions. They also gave us a small camera to mount on our dash, part of the rules. Heathcliff Bernard would talk to us periodically during the race and we would be updated in regards to our position and any road hazards so on and so forth. The idiot that told me stood there and laughed at me and my car. “Yeah! You gots to have balls, boy! Gots to have you sum big ass balls to be up in here! Yer gunna git killed in that big ass muthafucka Detroit slow-ass car! Have ya got ya some balls, boy?!” He was a disgusting rat-looking man, an obvious illiterate with the erratic behavior of a drug addict. He was some kind of rapper, he tried to say. Worse, he wore a Casanova jacket. Anger boiled in me and I withdrew the Colt on my left side with my right hand and shot him in the face. Fortunately, he fell backwards and there wasn’t much blood splatter on Ruby or me.

“I don’t know about balls. But I do have two Colt dragoons. I don’t like illiterates and I don’t like people making fun of my car.” There was no sense in talking he was dead but I did anyway. Who knows what you can hear as you die. No one bothered to move him.  He was run over as the race began.