T. Johnson - Welcome to Braggsville

And the Asian students, he’d once confessed awe-stricken during a phone conversation with his mother, Some of the Asians, well, I shouldn’t say some when they are a majority, but some of the Asian students speak multiple languages — more than a Holy Roller — languages I didn’t even know existed. Kaya, in Calc Two, for example, is half-Korean but raised in Malaysia. She speaks Korean like her mom, Chinese like her dad, Malay like her cousins at home, and is already in French Two and Spanish Three. Does she even speak English? He sighed. Don’t fret, honey. You earned the right to be there and you’ll do fine DD baby. Don’t fret. He murmured his thanks, reluctant to admit, let alone explain, that his distressed aspiration bespoke not lamentation but yearning. Kaya! Kaya mesmerized him, sitting in the basement commons study sessions twirling her hair around her pen as she wrote notes in Korean and IMed in English and tweeted in Malay, all while conjugating the subjonctif, her bare knees pressed together to balance a laptop surely hot to the touch.

DON’T FRET, HIS MOM WOULD REPEAT after his long silences. He didn’t.

He didn’t fret . Nor did he reckon . Or figure . Or git . Or study. Having followed his favorite cousin Quint’s advice and picked a school more than a day’s drive from home, he found the freedom intoxicating. If his parents could see him Monday mornings: tongue a rabbit’s tail, stiff and bristly, D’aron not knowing whether to feel pride or shame. They guessed at it, though, after reading his midterm report. His mother, Are you sick, honey? His father, in the background, With alcohol poisoning maybe. (Following that call, D’aron changed his mailing address to the dorm.) But he didn’t yet regret his decision to go westward-ho!

When he’d left home back in August to start school, Quint warned, Don’t go ABBA or Tiny Dancer! Huh? Don’t get gay. Don’t get roofied and get made gay, either. Or, ho-mo-sex-u-al.

When he returned home for Thanksgiving, Quint squinted, You got AIDS? D’aron gave a lick and checked his reflection in his spoon, as if he hadn’t only hours before, and every morning for that matter, paraded at length before the bathroom mirror in his skivvies. I can see your fucking ribs. You need a one-eight-hundred number. D’aron smiled. Without grits and waffles and hash browns and toast all at the same breakfast, and with walking everywhere, the famous freshman fifteen had gone the other way, but it looked and felt like fifty. Without the extra weight, he could finally confirm that his relatives weren’t lying when they insisted he’d inherited his father’s shoulders and forehead, and his mother’s eyes and nose, and from them both a decent height.

And when he went home for Christmas, his aunt Boo teased, So you do have cheekbones. What are they feeding you, grass? You spent that money I sent you on crack?

Hey, hey, c’mon Auntie B.! Don’t essentialize. All crackheads aren’t skinny.

Is that a joke, Dookie? I got one for you. Hay is for horses!

He loved his family, but God was he glad they now lived so far away. Quint was at least right about that.

During those three years in special ed, I only missed the food. Quint paused. And tits. And of course my mom, she’s mom, you know. And you, number one cuz. Exclamation point by way of a punch. But sure didn’t miss all the yappity yip-yappity yap. And hunting. I missed hunting.

At least Jo-Jo, D’aron’s best friend from high school, was happy for him. Jo-Jo patted his belly, I oughta go to college. That was a lot from him.

CHRISTMAS BREAK DIDN’T END SOON ENOUGH. The morning the dorms opened, D’aron was on the ground in Cali three time zones away. It wasn’t even the same country. By then he understood the geo-lingo. San Francisco was The City, Oakland was O-town, to be avoided at night — that was where the blacks lived — and the city of Berkeley was Berzerkeley, while Berkeley the school was Cal . The East Bay, where Berzerkeley was located, supposedly suburban, felt plenty busy. Collectively, it was the Bay Area, a megalopolis — oh how that word polished his tongue — where the elsewhere unimaginable was mere mundanity.

Across the bay, The City convened in costume to race from bay to breakers. Happy meal toys and plastic bags were long outlawed and voters threatened circumcision and goldfish with the same fate. They’d once had a mayoral candidate named Jello. A roving band of Rollerbladers performed the Thriller zombie dance — that pop nativity — Friday nights in Union Square. And fuck, it was China in the airport. Yet The City thought Berzerkeley was weird. D’aron thought it beautiful, never mind the nag champa, never mind the crusty hippies and gutter punks in greasy jackets stiff as shells lined up on Telegraph Ave hawking tie-dye and patchouli and palming for change. On clear days, a pageantry of wind and water under sun, the bay a sea of gently wriggling silver ribbons, and the Golden Gate hovering in the distance like a mystical portal. East of campus lazed tawny hills. On foggy days blinding bales of cotton candy strolled the avenues dandy while in the distance the tips of the bridge towers peeked through the mist like shy, gossamered nipples. The Bay Area was a beautiful woman who looked good in everything she wore.

What had intimidated him those early weeks of his freshman fall semester felt like home during his second semester — freshman spring. The clock tower known as the Campanile rose from the center of campus with the confidence of the Washington Monument, marking time in style, and on the hour, music students sounded melodies on the carillon. He often lunched alone at the base of that monolith, on the cool stone steps, facing the water due west, attention drifting with the lazing waves and the steady stream of Asian students moving — no, migrating — between the library and the engineering buildings. As he worked up the courage to wander farther from Sather Gate, the symbolic campus border, he discovered Indian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Thai: tastes luring him deeper and deeper into a town of Priuses and pedalers, both of which yielded patiently to pedestrians. Laid back, liberal, loose. The locals’ mantra, No worries; the transplants’ motto, It looks like a peninsula but feels like an island.

His second semester, freshman spring, also brought a life-altering move to a new dorm. His first-semester six-man suite had been too rowdy, excepting D’aron, of course, so the RA dispersed them across campus like parolees. D’aron’s new roommate wanted to be the next Lenny Bruce Lee, kung fu comedian. Asked who the first one was, he answered, See?

Chang, aka Louis Chang, aka Loose Chang, was none too pleased to have a D’aron Davenport aboard. After Louis’s former roommate dropped out midway through the first semester, he’d grown accustomed to living single in a double. The room was barely fifteen by fifteen, with a bed, desk, and chair on each side, and on the wall opposite the door a window overlooking the courtyard. The day D’aron arrived clothes smothered both beds and books tottered on both chairs: chemistry, botany, zoology on one side; George Carlin, Steve Martin, Paul Mooney on the other; and atop each pile several well-worn National Geographic s. Had Res Life double-booked the room?

Chang crossed his arms, Which side do you want?

He was slight, dark-skinned, narrow of eye, and like so many other California Asians, he spoke with no accent, a phenomenon to which D’aron was still growing accustomed. At home, all the Chinese people (seven) had thick, nearly impenetrable accents, incomprehensible unless pronouncing dinner items; numbers and directions were plain fudruckers. Shrimp-fry-rice. Yes. Fie-dolrah-fitty. Huh?