Abortion Is NOT a Victimless Crime

sometimes people ask me if i've ever killed a baby. "no," i always say. "that's fucking barbaric and i would never do that." but i do know this girl who killed a baby once. and it was my baby!

so a few weeks after i do this girl (responds to "foooo-ng", also "honey" and "ching chong whheee hhoooo AAAYYYYY!!!") she says to me, "i don't kotex long time." so of course i'm like: "huh?" and she repeats, "i don't kotex. i'm worry." so i say, "ok ok relax. i'll buy you more kotex, but geez don't cry about it. you look like you're about to cry. why are you crying? what, you need it right now?" and she responds, "NO! i think uhh... i have baby." at that moment, no words existed in the entire lexicon of human language to express how i felt. so i gently raped the delicate silence with a barely audible "no way." but the next day she went to the doctor and he confirmed what i've always kinda suspected: my jizz really is magical. and yes, mat anh nguyen-lorusso was indeed conceived from a hate fuck.

my first thought was: "wow. i'm actually fertile!?" i thought my penchant for rubbing my balls on the tv screen every time i saw christina aguilera had totally schiavoed my boys. thank god i was wrong about that. "atta boy!" i thought. sperm number 8859237409291 made it and you know what? i was fucking proud of'em. i felt like sticking my hand up there, wrapping my finger around the little zygote and slapping him hard on his undifferentiated clump of cells of an ass, but she was wearing pants.

yeah i was already shedding my old deadbeat dickhead attitude and taking on my new role as a dickbeating dadhead. but then she was all "bla bla bla i'm too young this and bla bla bla my mother kill me that and bla no money bla bla bla blatt, and asked if it was ok to kill it. to kill my baby boy! who the hell did she think she was? god!? ummm yeah, last i checked god wasn't a 22-year-old vietnamese chick having sex with me. i mean what right does she have going off and killing babies all willy-nilly like some kind of modern day genghis khan or fucking stem-cell researcher? ok so it's inside her. so what? so was i and i'll be damned if she tries killing me!

and then she showed me the sonogram of the 5 - 8 week-old fetus which i've taken the liberty of scanning and now present to the world for all to see.



he was beautiful: predominantly vietnamese features including yellow skin (though you can't tell because this is a black and white photo) and slit-like slanty little eyes, but blessed with some of his father's trademark characteristics: a football-shaped head complete with easy to grip hair for our carrying convenience; a cool, highly distinctive bump in his nose that will no doubt be all the rage since michael jackson's pervertedly puny proboscis has thoroughly disgusted mankind of late (the squished, flared nostrils he gets from his mother); the clinical term for his left eye is "lazy" but i think it's just a phase, like when all you wanna do is stare at the side of your nose all the time while someone else does all the work looking at stuff (maybe he just needs something more interesting to look at than a placenta); while most 5 week-olds don't even have heads yet, as you can see, our special little guy is already sprouting a lucky tooth of his own, just like mom and pop (hell, maybe we'll combine our secret nicknames for each other and call our boy snaggle-puss... it's short for pussy); and then there's that awesome club foot that'll make him a natural at golfing. can anyone say "hole in one?!"

i was overwhelmed with the potential of this thing. we could enter him in baby beauty contests and baby golfing tournaments. or maybe he could be the spokesbaby for the antiabortion movement. and if none of that worked out we could offer him up for one of those baby eating competitions. for a price of course. fuck, we could have more kick-ass babies and i wouldn't have to work another day in my life. and when the boy's old enough to walk i'll never have to mow the lawn or get up to go to the bathroom ever again. "this is the best thing that's ever happened to me," i thought. and to top it all off, he's got a 100% certified giant american penis. lord knows how that happened!

and then it dawned on me. how did that happen? there's no way i'd have believed his sluthole mother if it weren't for all the striking similarities in that sonogram. but when i looked closer at it, i realized that his "giant penis" was neither giant nor a penis, but actually a smaller conjoined twin with no arms or legs and a disarmingly pleasant disposition. as i later learned or made up, the twin was the result of exposure to agent orange, though, oddly enough, what was there of the fractionally formed quasifetus was 100% american... and gay, taking over poor mat anh organ by organ beginning with his penis.

it was horrible. so i gave her about $70 which she used to pay the doctor for his services and to purchase baby killing juice. she swallowed the anti-mat anh elixir in one gulp just as she had swallowed so many wannabe mat anhs (i'm lying, she doesn't really like to swallow). and that's the story of how phuong killed my baby.



R.I.P. Mat Anh Nguyen-Lorusso
(from either march 10 or april 2 to sometime in early may...
i can't really remember)

Saigon to New York: Perpetual Sunrise

i was a stranger, surrounded by japanese like a raw fish or a new tentacle-rape comic or a used panty dispenser, and felt just as uncomfortable. flying into the sunrise, the sun hung low in the sky for most of my voyage home on a june 10th that began 36 hours before it ended. but what felt truly strange about this journey was that i would have preferred the company of a plane full of vietnamese charlies, commoners and communists alike, rather than these alien japs. and yeah, contrary to popular belief there's a difference you god damn racists.

yes i've come a long way. in the 8 months i spent in vietnam i learned that asians, indeed all people, are like rice. at first you think all rice is the same: squished (almost squinty-like) pellets of starch grown for the consumption of the starving masses. no style, no flavor, no reason to expect this boring old bowl of rice to be any different than the last. but then you discover that there's not only white rice, but also yellow, and there's even more of it than white rice. and even though you suspect that they're quite a bit dirtier and you can't understand what the fuck they're saying with their sing song hong kong fooie way of talking, you're just so damn tired of white rice that you scoop up the smaller, more resourceful yellow rice, shove'em into your mouth, and chew'em until your belly's full of those tasty little fuckers. then you check your watch, say you've got somewhere to be, and go. and that's pretty much how i feel about people.

sorry, metaphors get mangled when i'm hungry, but luckily it wasn't long before i was flying over the enchanted island of consumer electronic ninjas and tree spirit automatons. at first i was excited about being in japan, if only to transfer flights, but when they're fucking feng-shui houses and fuel-efficient sub-compacts came into view, i became overwhelmed with an urge to drop an atomic bomb. well, not a real one. maybe like, a giant water-atomic bomb. some kind of... hydrogen bomb.

the bong of a gong reverberated throughout the plane when we touched ground. fuck the japanese are big. or at least that's the way it seemed coming from vietnam. i distracted myself from the horrible realization that i would once again be considered a malformed midget by buying some candy, and then spent the worst 800 yen i ever spent in my life on a pitifully uninformative issue of newsweek (the future of television my ass). then i sat down in a robot chair that tried convincing me to spend 100 yen so it could vibrate me. naturally, i slapped it across the head rest and moved to a less forward chair to take a brief nap before my plane took off for jfk.

the 20-something hours i spent sitting in an airplane were comfortably uneventful, due in no small part to my prime real estate next to a window and an absent seat to the other side of me in both flights. the biggest event of the whole journey was when the guy sitting a couple chairs next to me got smacked in the head by the passenger in front of him who was apparently quite eager to recline his seat. shitake! the time i didn't spend sleeping (most of it) was spent cursing out that ricoculously expensive newsweek until i figured out how to work the monitor with a little over an hour left til arrival. then i watched the end and beginning (in that order) of million dollar baby, hoping the whole time that hilary swank would become pregnant and give birth to a million dollars as clint eastwood exclaimed, "jackpot!" but the plane landed before i could catch the middle so i guess i'll never know.

i slid past customs without a hitch, which was rather fortunate because i had a whole bag full of communism that they never even checked. say goodbye to your "free markets" and "free speech" and "free samples" all you suck-ass americans! ahhhh but my disdain for freedom instantly subsided when i saw both of my sisters and blatt holding up a sign with some random gook talk on it (tinh tu danh tu!) yes, welcome home indeed. hugs all around and, when my parents returned from either pooing or peeing, a second round of hugs. as we made our way past all the fatties to the quad-wheeled enclosed personal transportation units so common on this side of the planet, i anxiously waited for someone to make the inevitable comment about the extraordinary weight of my largest suitcase so i could unleash something i had been sitting on since somewhere in the pacific. no, not a wretched bubble of slow-stewed stool. a joke. behold!

"how else was i gonna get her past immigration?" then i kicked the suitcase and said, "you ok honey?."

classic, aging beautifully like a dry californian bordeaux. it was good to see that the people, places, and jokes haven't changed too much. we went to john harvard's for lunch, a restaurant somewhere between the applebee's/chili's fare and a fancy pants place, but then again maybe it's just the cloth napkins. there i ate approximately 6 bites of a massive chicken sandwich (even the chickens here are fat) on a plate overflowing with a farmful of fried potato sticks. kenny lake showed up a little while later and we exchanged our impressions about our recent teaching experiences. i told him how lucky i felt to be teaching there, working with students and teachers who i knew not as such, but as friends. he told me about how he'd told a student that he'd end up in jail one day after the toocoolforschool 9th grader called him a faggot, and then about the fidgety black student whom his observer advised him it wasn't ok to call a "jungle boy" when he had actually called him "drummer boy."

fuck i love this place. it didn't feel at all weird to be home, once again surrounded by family and familiarity (though i'm sure my sentiments will be different the next time around when i leave the nam for good). sure the people here look different and don't speak with vietnamese, or australian, or south african, or korlean accents, but they still make me laugh. and yeah my house is surrounded by grass and trees, not jeans selling, ban xeo making vietnamese, but i still have a comfortable bed to sleep in. the only thing i've found that will truly take some getting used to is being able to understand ambient conversations.

"that house on maple, on the left just before four winds, has a beautiful lawn."
"yeah, it really looks great. i see the man out there almost everyday."
"it must be the fertilizer. you know, i'm using a different brand for the first time. i just had no luck with that scots."
"i know and you can definitely tell. i think this is the best the front lawn's looked in ages..."

[5 minutes and billions of blades of grass commented upon later...]

"ok well it's almost midnight and i'm pooped. goodnight, mom. goodnight, dad."

upside-down again for the next 7 weeks.

How To Take Off Your Pants In Front Of Your Boss And Not Get Fired (Or Promoted)

"what if i can't play my song?"
"not gon' happen. shut up and drive, fool."

thoughts of dissidence often creep in from the region of my brain responsible for preventing behavior that may result in humiliation. but i've found it's best to ignore it. yeah the song was key. i had my whole routine mentally choreographed, and i was sure i wouldn't disappoint with the theatrics i had coordinated with it. i was psyched.

welcome to the jungle
we got fun 'n' games
we got everything you want
honey we know the names

flying down hai ba trung street to rendezvous with my boss and some of her friends, another annoying internal naysayer nagged me, this time to slow down. since getting a motorbike a few weeks ago, i've been told by almost everyone that i drive too fast. personally i believe this to be an oxymoronical impossibility since the bike probably couldn't reach 50 mph going down an icy hill and rarely, rarely goes faster than 25. but phuong had told me earlier that day that she didn't want to see me ever again in part because of an incident involving supposed "recklessness" (my word, obviously not hers) the night before while driving her motorbike. but i was late, and i still didn't have a name.

uhhhh hank.... something
hank spank.
nah, too masturbatory.
hank... huge.
hugo hank.
ugh... forget hank.

with a flick of the wrist i quickened the pace towards my destination.

i really coulda used another half hour of preparation, but the day was now approaching its state-imposed midnight curfew. despite texting me a final goodbye ("forget me takecare urself. u'll go american happy fun!") phuong had showed up at my house at precisely 9:30, just as she has almost everyday for the past 2 months (further explanation another time). i left the mirror and killed an hour and a half with her both cooing and accusing. then when her mother-imposed curfew arrived, she went home. "now i go to bed and you too," she said and i mock-obediently nodded my head. i only had 20 minutes to get dressed and practice my moves one last time before heading out. it took me nearly that long just to get a decent knot in my tie, and it was then that i regretted spending so much time earlier that evening shaving my balls and trimming my pubes.

...if you got my money honey
we got your disease
in the jungle, welcome to the jungle
watch it bringya to ya
cha na na na na na na na knees, knees!

i turned the corner and spotted the sign: "juice," our usual saturday morning breakfast spot or, alternatively, occasional nighttime drink spot. but i would neither be eating nor drinking anything here tonight. i walked in, greeted the staff as i walked passed them, and headed upstairs to the third floor which had just been cleared out for the party. i met teana, my boss, who immediately informed me that they didn't have the cable to hook my ipod up to the stereo. shit. no guns.

welcome to the jungle
we take it day by day
if you want it ya gonna bleed
but it's the price you pay...

the only music they had was... well, it wasn't 'welcome to the jungle.' i could barely hear it playing on the stereo and i thought it sounded campy at best and, at worst, totally buttfuckingly gay. teana asked me if i still wanted to go through with it.

...and you're a very sexy girl
that's very hard to please
you can taste the bright lights
but you can't get them for free...

ok decision time. i believe there are two ways to approach these types of situations. most people, as a matter of addressing the necessity of any given decision, have a tendency to ask "why?" as in: "why is my boss asking me to take off my clothes and dance with her friend?" however, i believe that often the more appropriate and equally valid question is "why not?" invariably this leads to riskier and more frivolous behavior which, to me, form the monumental moments that make life worth living.

you know where you are?
you in the jungle baby
ya gonna diiiiiiiiiiiieee!!!!

but neither of these approaches could convince me one way or the other so i asked myself a third question as a last resort: "what would jesus do?" and i do believe jesus would strip for his boss, especially if god was a sexy 30-year-old korean chick with a few hot friends all expecting a piece of man-meat to ogle. so i did as the lord would do and said "fuck it," threw on the aviators, strutted into the room as i declared class to be in session, and started dancing all up on the bride-to-be.

...in the jungle
welcome to the jungle
feel my, my, my... my serpentine
i... i wanna hear you scream!

the shirt came off, the only snag being a stubborn button on the sleave. then i broke a glass while chasing her around and that's when i knew it was a party. the black tie remained on while i continued to pump and girate my junk, making sure i shook my ass near my boss. i had just taken my belt off as the first song ended and one of them asked me if that was it. of course i had one more surprise left, so i waited for the next song and then went for the pants. when the moment was right, i dropped my trousers like a choir boy to reveal the piece de resistance: hot pink elephant underwear, the trunk fully filled (...with the help of a sock) and drooping down halfway to my knees. i swung it around for a little while and then called an end to it, in all, dancing for no more than 5 minutes. i said, "the name's johnny dangle. thank you, and goodnight," and made a prompt exit.

and when you're high you never
ever wanna come down, so down, so down, so downnn, YEAAHHH

i drove back home at a leisurely pace and wore a lightness of being on my face. my experiences in vietnam have reinforced my belief that happiness comes when expectations are abandoned and whatever life has to offer is taken with open arms. i felt reinvigorated and quite satisfied with everything, if slightly uncomfortable as all that dancing had made the g-string ride way up my butt crack.