Daniel Rose - Larry's Kidney, Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China

“No idea: blood and death?”

“Oh, you are clever one. Hairy homeboy, you make deep impression! No, red does not mean blood and death. It mean longevity! So many thing in China mean longevity! Ward off evil spirits, blah, blah, blah. Quiz at end of car ride, ha, ha.”

“What is this?” I ask, pointing at a four-story computer store pulsing orange beams through the milky air like a space-age lighthouse.

“‘What is this, what is that?’” Yuh-vonne mimics me. “You so curious man, ask many question. I like curious man, but not too much!” she says, tugging playfully on the brim of my panama hat.

“Hey, look,” I say, “Mamma Mia is playing in Beijing!”

“Hey, look,” Yuh-vonne says, “what are you job?”

“Free-range writer,” I say. I’m in an okay mood because my nonstop scoot from Denver was so short it felt like a nap-not even long enough to incur bad breath.

“Ow my God,” Yuh-vonne says, hiding her smile with rhinestone-covered fingers. “A writer, my God!”

“Believe me, it’s nothing to get worked up about,” I inform her. “We’re a dime a dozen back on the East Coast.”

“But not travel with family? Selfish bad boy!” she says, jabbing me playfully in the ribs. “I only joking,” she resumes, for the record. “Your wife is a considerate girl. Beautiful, too?”

“Oh, yes, very. Very.”

Yuh-vonne is momentarily subdued enough to adopt a serious tone. “Yuh-vonne not my real name,” she says. “My Chinese name unlikable for you, so I take name I read on Web site for my favorite TV show. You know Batman, Adam West, all them dogs?”

“Yvonne what’s-her-face? The one who played Batgirl?”

“See resemble?” she says, flitting her long eyelashes. “But correct pronunciation Yuh-vonne.”

“But it’s French-”

“Your bad! I read on official Web site!”

“Whatever,” I say. “And you can call me WillandGrace.”

“Ha ha, that’s a humor one!” Yuh-vonne laughs, slapping my knee. Aren’t you supposed to slap your own knee when amused? I can’t remember. I’m forgetting my American customs already. The flirtatiousness is making me a little light-headed, though I remind myself not to take it personally-beautiful Asian women often waste their wiles on undeserving Western visitors, just in case we’re higher up on the food chain than we necessarily are. Anyway, I’m fascinated by her laugh, which is more like an openmouthed bray, before it turns suddenly into a rough bark at the driver, who executes an extreme left turn across four lanes. Lesser cars scurry to acquiesce, for the sole reason that we’re bigger and shinier. At home if a limo barged through like this, he’d get the finger at least, but here everyone clambers to the curb as though we were a shiny black fire engine.

“I can’t believe this traffic,” I marvel to myself.

“You prefer last time, only bicycles, eh?” Yuh-vonne says.

“That’s right. But how’d you know I was here before?”

“Fact file,” Yuh-vonne says, yanking a bright red three-ring binder onto her lap. “Free service kindly provided by my agency. Have you age coordinates, you food preference, even you college transcript. Not so good in French language, we note, maybe that why you have problem with my fine name?”

I’m not sure if she’s kidding and all those pages are merely the itinerary she’s worked up for our week together. But the laugh’s on her in any case, because I didn’t even take French in college-further evidence that Chinese surveillance, if that’s what this is, is more Keystone Kops than anything else. A fact I learned to my amusement and horror twenty-five years ago, and one that even Yuh-vonne seems ready to concede.

“But fact file have sorrowful gaps,” she goes on, “as to what-is-you-mission, what-is-you-choice-liquor-recreation, so on so forth. You fill us in, please, so we make accommodate as possible.”

“Well, it’s true I’m partial to bicycles,” I say, relaxing into a reminiscence. “The whole way in from the airport last time, we were practically the only car, it was past midnight and the driver kept his lights off to save gasoline, flashing them from time to time to light up the swarm of bicyclists everywhere. Then we had these banquets twice a day that called on us to make these amazing toasts-”

“What-is-you-mission?” Yuh-vonne barks, so severely that she reminds me of the guides of twenty-five years ago.

I weigh the question. Only a few minutes in the country and here it is already, the first test of my undercover chops. I’m aware that this is the moment I’m supposed to be super-surreptitious in this top-secret assignment of ours. But you know what? Surreptitious isn’t going to get me where I need to go. Furthermore, Yuh-vonne doesn’t seem to know such basics as my arrest here last time. So much for her alleged “fact file.” Even if she were a Keystone Kop, I wouldn’t judge her a threat.

“I’m here to help my cousin Larry,” I say.

A statement that sends Yuh-vonne into eye-flitting mode again. “Laurie is handsome?”

“Whoa!” I say, almost bumping my head against the ceiling when we run over an unknown object. The pause gives me time to be judicious. “Well, he has a certain animal vitality,” I reply. “If you’ve ever heard of a guy named Al Goldstein-publisher of Screw magazine, squat and tough-Larry looks sort of like him, minus the cigar. Kind of the friendly family pornographer type, but you know he could deck you with a sucker punch if he wanted to.”

“He bald as billiard ball?” Yuh-vonne asks.

“Great head of hair, I’m happy to say. Women find him endearing.”

“Now is talking turkey!”

“Yeah, well, he’s a charmer when he chooses, with a razzle-dazzle smile despite a couple of teeth knocked out when he was a kid. And he uses these quaint expressions from an earlier age when chivalry wasn’t quite-”

“Cutting to chase, what are he job?”

“Hard to describe,” I say.

“You not like Yuh-vonne enough to try?” she says, pouting. She also slaps my wrist. Not that playfully.

“Okay,” I say, “you’ve probably never heard of a professor packing a semiautomatic before.”

“True that!”

“Well, I exaggerate,” I say. “Or rather he exaggerates. He calls himself a professor, but really he’s just an adjunct at some Catholic college down South, with links to the underworld and a sometimes-lucrative sideline of suing people. Mostly he’s an inventor of get-poor-quick schemes. The latest one I heard was Canine Kippahs, yarmulkes for dogs, though that might have been one of my inventions I was trying to sell him. That’s the thing about Larry: He’s so much like a part of you that you don’t want to admit, you start to think like him after a while and come up with wacka-doo schemes yourself. At least I do. But the point is that everything the guy’s ever touched has turned to dust. He’s been close to making a million dollars more times than I can count, and always at the last minute he blows it, like he’s programmed to self-destruct over and over again.”

“Bottom line, he is unemployed?” asks Yuh-vonne, a little winded from working to stay ahead of me.

“Always been his own boss,” I clarify. “He’s an operator, a finagler holdover from the Old World, which is why the rest of the family’s kind of embarrassed by him, a throwback to the ghetto-the kind of shtetl gangsta some of us may have been before we all evolved into Ivy League doctors/lawyers/Indian chiefs.”

“I want meet him!” Yuh-vonne says.

“Let’s let him rest till tomorrow,” I say. “He was scheduled to get into his hotel late last night and must be exhausted. He’s got a lot on his plate the next few days.”