beef tomato diary

After work, I took a few tokes before I ate my beef tomatoes in the Bay Avenue house. Sometimes I listened to freight roaring through the night air by the slough, only separated from me by the dirt field and the cyclone of blackberry vines. My immigrant forebears could have laid the railroad tracks. They came as far as Washington State and settled in Hoquiam, the twin town of Aberdeen. Now the Georgia-Pacific line comes to the Port of Grays Harbor, where timber is shipped to Japan on Hong Kong merchant ships, and Hong Kong sailors sometimes come to our restaurant, the Hong Kong Café on Simpson Avenue, and sometimes, in a hushed tone, they asked how they can jump ship. I was naïve, even though I was in my late twenties. Years later I took a U.S. history class at the University of Washington in Seattle for someone else. They paid me to do it. I read about the “Underground Railroad.” I then put two and two together and questioned my parents’ integrity. Then things began to make sense. I knew then why my father told me, in the wee hours after the bar rush, while we are eating our late meal while sitting at the makeshift table on milk crates, that during the Sino-Japanese War, he was bookkeeper to an illiterate criminal, one who had murdered an old woman he robbed and then was later hung for the crime. My father told me between mouthful of white rice, from the platter he put a rib steak on top of a mound of it. He was matter of fact, telling me about the “real” business he was in but without telling me. Later, I was diagnosed mentally ill, and I myself questioned my own thoughts and judgment, so insidiously was the illness that I cannot know reality for certain.