So on Friday I went to go check out what turned out to be a not-very-interesting play. Yet there was some intriguing drama — co-starring me and very capable actor Mark Ruffalo.

Let me just say from the outset that I’m a fan of Ruffalo’s work. He was great in You Can Count on Me and more recently, Zodiac.

In any case, while the audience was still arriving before the show, I had my nose in my program. Because I was close to the aisle, I had to stand up a few times to let people into my row.

Some guy dropped next to me and started fiddling around with a smartphone. A lot of people were. I didn’t pay much attention to him and kept reading the program.

When the lights came down, there was much fidgeting in the audience as people turned off their devices and socked them away. But I noticed that the guy next to me had left his device on and it was blinking.

A minute later, it was pretty clear that the blinking wasn’t a part of a shutdown sequence. Because the offender had his hand on top of his device, he couldn’t see the blinking, although I had an unobstructed view of it.

I hate people who don’t turn their shit off — more so those who continue to text friends during movies and plays. I don’t even care if it’s new and you thought you hit the off switch. You paid for it, so at least learn how to use it!

So in the second minute of the play I turned to the guy and said, not too kindly, “Could you please turn that off? It’s very distracting!”

He leaned out of the shadows and I could see his face by the light of the blinking smartphone. Gee, I thought, that guy kinda looks like Mark Ruffalo.

“I don’t have anything on!” insisted the Ruffalo-look-a-like.

“Dude, it’s blinking!” I said. Gee, I thought, that guy even kinda sounds like Mark Ruffalo. I saw a measure of scrutiny in his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t used to being spoken to in that way and he was evaluating my face that was surely illuminated by the blinking light of his smartphone.

Who the fuck is this guy, maybe he was thinking. Chow Yun-Fat? Damn, he kicked some ass in The Killer!

Suddenly he looked down, moved his hand and literally saw the light.

“Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry!” he blurted.

I turned back to the play.

Damn, I thought, I just put the hammer to Mark Ruffalo.

At intermission and at the end of the play, I thought I caught some sullen looks from him. Maybe he wanted to say something. Introduce himself.

“Hey, I’m an actor myself, so I know all about being a respectful audience member.” Something like that.

It didn’t happen. I could’ve approached him, but for what? It would have merely extended an awkward exchange to an awkward conversation.

I left the theater, got a can of Dr. Pepper and went home.

It’s the summer of 2002. Waylaid has been out for a few months. It’s getting some pretty good reviews and I’m receiving some weird emails from people who have somehow found me.

My old Web site, worldlyinvestor.com, has already gone belly-up but thankfully our parent company has survived and very graciously has chunked in several months of severance in our last paychecks.

I’m trying to finish up what eventually became This Is a Bust. It’s not going so well. I’m not good at writing during the daytime. In fact, I’m like Sonny Rollins. I get hot around 3 a.m. or so. In the morning my wife goes off to work, I make a pot of coffee and shop eBay all day. I’m finding some amazing stuff and the classic Macs and Atari cartridges are piling up in the house.

My old pal Jake drops in to tell me that the grant writer at his non-profit organization has just quit.

“You’re a writer — can’t you write grants?” he asks me. Jake’s the number-two guy at the organization, which provides after-school services (nice vague description, Jake!) to kids in Chinatown.

I cross my arms, put my feet on the coffee table and pause “Spartacus” on the DVD player. I’d be giving up a lot to start working. Apart from unstructured days in which showering and dressing are optional, I’d also have to cut off the $405 (pre-tax) that comes rolling in every week from unemployment.

But what the hell. It would be my first paying job in Chinatown and it was literally around the corner from our apartment. I wouldn’t even have to cross a street to get there.

I go in for an interview with the director (whom I’ll call Pop) of the organization (which I’ll call SIS). I’m a little surprised that the man is Italian American and even more surprised that I can barely understand him. He sounds like a smoker who’s had his voice box cut out, but in fact his neck doesn’t bear the tell-tale hole from such an operation. I can’t help but stare at his throat as he croaks on in administrative-speak about helping the kids.

“What should I pay you?” Pop grunts.
“The going rate,” I say.
“Naw, that’s not enough. I’ll give you $15 an hour.”
“All right.”
“You know I was born in this area. Before it was Chinatown, a lot of Italians lived here. Then you guys took over.”
“Well, you guys stole pasta from us.”
He smiles, but it’s a sore point. He doesn’t like the idea that pasta came from Chinese people. He probably doesn’t even like Chinese people.

Turns out that these “after-school services” include letting the kids play table tennis in the basement of SIS’s tenement building or goof off on the Internet on the computers on the upper floors. What are they doing up there? I’m not sure because when the kids hear me walking up the rickety stairwell, there’s a buzz of activity and they’re quietly doing something else by the time I hit the room.

–

My first day at SIS, I came into the office around 10 and found only one other person there, the accountant, of whom Pop had already told me was “on the verge.” Jake wasn’t in yet and neither was Pop. I said hello to the accountant but she barely acknowledged me. The brief glimpse of irrational hate in her eyes made me wish there was a metal detector at the door.

I got on the PC set up for grants and poked around. Pop had mentioned that a prominent grants organization had already expressed interest in visiting SIS to see how badly the tenement needed repair. It was in pretty bad shape. Bad enough so that I had to keep both feet on the floor, otherwise, my swivel chair would roll to the other side of the room on the tilted floor.

They had sent letter after letter to the grants organization, but apart from the initial feedback, SIS hadn’t received a reply.

I picked up the phone and called. I got to the secretary of one of the top executives at the grants organization. She even scheduled a time for the man to visit that week. Yeah, sure, he’ll show up, I thought.

Around 11 Jake came in.

“What time does Pop come in?” I asked. He laughed.
“You mean what day,” said Jake.
It turned out that Pop, the executive director of SIS, only came in two or three days a week, at most.

Later, at lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, I asked Jake who takes care of business when Pop was out.
“Nobody,” he said.
“Nobody!”
“I have enough things to take care of, I have to deal with the whole bureaucracies of the schools.”
“Pop told me the accountant was ‘on the verge.’ I thought that meant she was incompetent and about to be fired, but apparently, it means she’s ready to crack!”
“It could mean both. A lot of people at SIS are ‘on the verge.’”

I met the other people who worked at SIS eventually, including a Catholic nun, a frazzled young woman from Taiwan who seemed to be out of her depth, and a hard-boiled counselor who dealt with at-risk youth.

Pop finally came in on my third day, the day the grants guy was supposed to show up. I told Pop, and also told him that I wasn’t sure if he really was. His eyes lit up like Christmas that there was a chance the guy was coming in.

Shockingly, the guy showed up. He was a dignified man in his early 50s and looked amazed at the state of disrepair the building was in, just from where he stood. I stepped into Pop’s office and introduced the two. I was about to leave when Pop asked me to take the man on a tour of the building.

“It’s my first week here, I don’t really know the place well,” I said to both men, apologizing.
“Please, just take this gentleman around the building,” croaked Pop, his eyes bugging out.
I didn’t know it then, but Pop had problems going up and down stairs. Jake wasn’t around that day, for some reason, otherwise I would have begged him to do it.

So I took the grants guy first — at his request — to the backyard, an area I had never been to. For some reason, some old PCs were sitting on the ground among the weeds. There was an entrance to the building’s crawlspace that the guy ducked into. There could have been a body in there and I wouldn’t know. He came out nodding.

“The foundation has seen better days,” he said.
“That’s one reason why we need this money so badly,” I said. We were asking for about $2 million to renovate the building. I was hoping he wouldn’t ask me anything deep about SIS, because I simply didn’t know.

I took him upstairs to the computer room and even stopped by the nun’s office, hoping that they’d get in a long, involved conversation that I could slip away from. Unfortunately, they had nothing to say to each other.

I took the grants guy into Pop’s office and sat back at my desk. I trolled the Internet for grants. It’s mostly a useless exercise. I’ve received no training and Pop has never given me a comprehensive history of SIS. He doesn’t even have copies of the grants my predecessor had sent out.

Nearly every grant application asks for a detailed history of the applicant, including breakdowns of past budgets. I’ve asked Pop several times, and he either demurs or claims that I haven’t looked through the files enough.

My file drawers are crammed with irrelevant documents, including books of pictures of past parties at SIS. Pop sure used to smile a lot. Even the kids are smiling. Now they just shuffle somberly past the office doorway before running up the stairs to the computer room.

Without the relevant information, it has become useless for me to even fill out grants. Three weeks in and I had fallen into this routine of coming in late, going to lunch as soon as possible with Jake, and then looking at pictures of old SIS parties.

Speaking of which, I actually did set up a fundraising dinner party for SIS. I trudged around all of Chinatown to all the other organizations that we apparently had a past relationship with and got them to buy tables for the dinner. As I went from non-profit to non-profit, I felt like I was getting a glimpse at the dirty heart of the less-credible world of community service.

A lot of these organizations had similar-looking boards of directors and were aligned according to allegiances with different members of the city council. They also used that old trick of Shoe’s — Pop apparently had a job at another non-profit, one reason why he wasn’t in every day.

I also gave brief interviews devoid of any real information to Chinese-language newspapers, in one sense being a Robert Chow-type, but in text.

When September rolled around, a number of colleges around the country contacted me to do readings for their Asian American group or multicultural literature class. (Some of these would go a little rough, but hell, maybe one should read the author’s books before inviting him.) I started taking time off from SIS to travel.

That was the beginning of the rot between Pop and I. With me not there every day, phone calls would go unanswered and the buffer zone between Pop and the accountant was now gone.

One day, I was trying to put together another hopeless grant application and as usual, Pop wasn’t helping me at all. I left the application on his desk. It was due in a week and I wouldn’t be there.

When I came back after a few days off, he tried to chew me out for not getting the grant done and blowing the deadline.

“I sense a lack of urgency about you!” he croaked.
“I’m just imitating you from a week ago, when I tried to get these numbers from you!”
“You show no initiative whatsoever!”
“Oh yeah? I quit!”
I went to my desk to get my jacket.
Pop popped out from the back.
“Hey, I was too hard on you,” he started. His rasp never sounded so mournful.
“This is a job for someone else,” I said.
I waited until I got home to call Jake and tell him the news.

I haven’t written a blog entry in a while, partially because I’ve been sorta tied up and also partially because I’m so tickled by the “To Hell With Williamsport, Pennsylvania!” headline on the last entry! That should be up at the top for, like forever!

Anyway, I’ve been thinking back to my first job in “the community,” working for a not-for-profit Asian American organization that I’ll call AC.

It was the summer of 1990, and I met the head of AC, a woman I’ll call Shoe, at ECAASU, which stands for East Coast Asian American Students Union. It’s an annual intercollegiate meeting with workshops, panel discussions and parties galore.

In any case, Shoe was looking for a summer office worker in New York City and I was totally psyched to be working for “the community” after working for “the man.” Of course, at that time, working for “the man” meant my work-study job in the maintenance office at 118 Hartley Hall, working the wet-vac half-asleep at some dorm room’s overflowed toilet.

Shoe was a middle-aged Chinese woman with a big mouth, big teeth and zero tact. She offered me the job on the spot after a clumsy interview that included her musings about how Chinese people view sex as a soup that shouldn’t be cooked until after marriage.

After ECASU was over, I boarded one of the buses that went back to New York. I ran into this guy I had met earlier and told him that I’d be working at AC with Shoe.

“Oh. . .” he said slowly. “I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t want to say something bad.”

I’m the kind of person who sees negative signs and keeps barreling forward. I want to see how bad things could possibly be, convinced that the situation is not that terrible or that everything is fixable.

On the first day of that job, sometime in June, I found myself standing on the roof of Teachers College on 120th Street. I didn’t know the elevator went to the roof or that the university rented out space to offices that were accessible only on the roof. There was a young girl there, I’d say about 16 or 17, who had the keys to the AC office.

The lock always gave her trouble and she had to fiddle with the keys for a few minutes before the door would finally open. Maybe having the cylinder lock exposed to the elements had something to do with it. In a few days, I’d start praying that the door would never open, but it always did.

The young girl said that Shoe was her aunt, which probably just meant a family friend and close enough to get the keys. Shoe never gave me a copy of the keys the entire summer.

The young girl’s job was to unlock the door and study. Also, I guess she was supposed to keep an eye on me, in case I tried to wheel the computers out the door.

The office was fairly big, about 1,000 square feet, but a lot of it was crammed with boxes and legal files. Several desks sat along the walls, but only two of them were inhabitable. The girl’s had a lamp. Mine had a computer and a phone.

I had thought that I’d be sitting with Shoe, doing important “community” stuff. Instead, my job was stuffing envelopes with propaganda about the need for funding Asian-American community groups and sending them to members of city council. Shoe rarely came into the office. She had a full-time job elsewhere.

One time I had to write a cover letter for a report on anti-Asian violence in the city’s schools.

Shoe had called me from her job to read her the cover letter I was writing. I had originally asked her to write and fax me a letter that I could type up, but she didn’t or wouldn’t.

So I started, “Dear Councilman. . .”

“What! That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! You start it with ‘Dear’! Are you some kind of idiot?”

Then she slammed her phone down.

I tried calling her back at work, but she wouldn’t pick up. I couldn’t do anything else without that letter, so I started going through file boxes, making the high-school girl think I was working. I came upon a cache of large (five-inch diameter) almond cookies sealed in plastic.

“Can I eat these cookies?” I asked the girl.

“They’re left over from the Chinese New Year banquet. They’re not going to use them again.”

Cookies can last a few months, can’t they? They tasted stale but they weren’t horrible. I sat down in a chair in the sunlight and ate a cookie while I waited for Shoe to call again.

As the summer went on, I realized that Shoe could work herself into a frenzy with no apparent catalyst. Once she started, it was off to the races. Then her phone would slam down and I would reach for an almond cookie and wait. I ate a lot of cookies that summer.

It would take her about half an hour to collect herself and finally call back. Maybe the realization that she was paying me by the hour ($8, I think — not too bad for 1990) brought her back to her senses. I would read her the cover letter/fax/report that I was working on — the same exact words — and she would never fail to tell me that what I had was fine.

Maybe she only called me when she wanted someone to yell at.

One day, I came into work to find the office door already open. Who was in but Shoe and she had brought her son in, also. He was about four or five and very excited about talking.

Shoe told me to take her son out on my lunch break. It convinced me that one had to be extremely patient to be a good parent, a value that I didn’t have in college.

That goddamned kid never shut the fuck up. He read everything out loud — labels, signs, expressions on passersby — with no apparent need for acknowledgement. But just when I would tune him out, he’d suddenly barge in with a question and repeat it louder and louder (”What time is it? What time is it! What time is it!!!”) until I heard him and said something in response.

Then he would go back into his extroverted autistic state and babble on and on. I brought the kid back into the office and handed him over to his mother. She pointed to some things around my desk and then left with her son. I went over and had a cookie.

I think my breaking point was when she told me to hand-deliver an envelope to some place in Alphabet City. It was a major pain in the ass to get there, transferring trains three times from the upper west side of Manhattan diagonally to the lower east side. Getting there and back took about three hours.

When I came back there was Shoe sitting in the office, complaining about the amount of time it took for me to get there and back.

“It would have been cheaper if I had just hired a courier!”

It was time for me to leave for the day, but Shoe handed me a stack of envelopes she wanted me to bring to the post office.

They ended up in the trash instead. I don’t take shit from anybody on a hot, humid day.

My last day there, Shoe came in and begged me to stay and work through the school year.

“There were times I didn’t treat you so good,” she said, shaking her head. I said I couldn’t because I wouldn’t have time with my heavy courseload for my custom mining engineering/literature writing double major.

She told me she’d have my last check in a few days and that I should drop by to pick it up.

I didn’t bother and by the time half of the fall semester was over, this sophomore who knew me came up and explained that she was now working at AC for Shoe.

“You have to come by and pick up your last paycheck,” she said.

“Why? Can’t she just mail it to me?”

“She wants you to sign something. And we need you to come in soon. We’re closing the bank account and your check is the only thing that’s holding it up.”

“Oh, really?” I asked, intrigued. Screw something up for Shoe by merely doing nothing? Surely that was worth more than the $50 or so that my last check was for.

I never went back. A few more times during the year, the sophomore — looking ever more defeated and tired (but from dealing with Shoe or me?) — reminded me about the check.

It was the best check — but not the last in my years of service in “the community” — that I never cashed.

I hate that goddamned town!

Let me give you some background about Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was once the lumber capital of the world — in the late 1890s. From that era there are still a couple of streets of mansion-like homes known as “Millionaire’s Row.” The town has been in decline since about 1900.

We moved there in 1986, the summer before my senior year in high school. My parents had sold the sleazy motel in New Jersey and bought a brand-name joint in Williamsport.

In the first few weeks I was living in the town, I figured I could handle it for one year and then take off for college.

I knew it was a bad sign when we went to the one Chinese restaurant in town and the restaurant’s waiters and hostess stared at us. The only Chinese person in the joint was the cook and everyone else was white.

I remember thinking, “We’re in a Chinese restaurant — and you’re staring at me?”

Then I was driving down a mountain road and saw a gorilla costume lynched in a tree in someone’s front yard. It wasn’t close to Halloween, either, and the message was clear.

The message became clearer when I realized that there were no black waiters or waitresses anywhere in the entire town. If you were black, you either bussed tables or washed dishes. The black section of town was right next to a highway overpass. And in a town that’s basically been falling apart for a century, the black section was in the worst shape.

Here’s something else about Williamsport, its modern claim to fame, if you will. It is the site of the Little League World Championship every year. The town has held on to that identity with a death grip.

You might know that Asian teams, for much of the 1970s and 1980s, dominated, with Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean champions trouncing their rivals.

You might not know that such a record had whipped up anti-Asian sentiment in the town, to the point where people were in the stands yelling, “Strike those Chinkies out!” during the games.

It was pretty shocking, this town that lived in its own skeleton from the lumber days. Now, racism was nothing new to me. But this was the first time I found it so freely expressed — and welcomed. I didn’t know it at the time, but the local KKK chapter applied for a license every year to rally for the “white” American team in the Little League championships. Although they never got the license, the members still filled the stands and blended in well with the general populace in appearance and attitude.

Still, I thought I could just endure it all unscathed and that I could handle any jerk kids. Little did I know that my staunchest enemy would turn out to be the administration.

If you’re not inside a particular institution — jail, school or hospital — you never realize how much control The Man has over them.

Williamsport Area High School was located on the top of a mountain, with a barbed-wire-topped fence that only rolled back to let school buses in and out.

The first day of deer-hunting season was a school holiday. Also, while I was there, students could stand outside of the cafeteria during lunch and smoke, regardless of age.

With regards to the kids, sure I got some racist comments, but I was too funny to hate and too big to really mess with. I actually made quite a few friends. I was easily the most popular Asian kid in school. Okay, in my year, there was a young Indian woman, and two Asian juniors — a Chinese dude named Herb and a young man who had escaped from Vietnam with his family (and was written up in the local paper). That makes four Asian kids in a school of about 3,000 students.

(I’m amazed by people from California, such as my wife, who tell me about Asian clubs in their public schools.)

I guess all the shit started in the second half of the year when I drew a hammer and sickle and safety-pinned it to the back of my shirt. It was an ironic statement about how we were all forced to conform in a supposedly free society.

This assistant principal, I’ll call him by his initials — PMT, forced me into the principal’s office and declared, “There’s no place for that in this school!” But apparently there was room for shirts that read, “If you ain’t a biker, you ain’t shit,” which the same kid wore two or three times a week.

PMT had a tic, and flicked out his tongue and licked his top lip, when he got excited. Now that he had caught his commie, he was in full lizard action mode.

The principal at the time, now dead, was Wayne Newton — no joke. This Wayne Newton was balding, overweight and tired. He smiled weakly and joked, “Yes, I’ve had some people asking me if you were from Red China.”

PMT forced me to remove the safety pins and even kept my little commie flag.

Then in March, when I didn’t make a deposit for my cap and gown for graduation, he called me down to his office to tell me I didn’t bring in a check.

“I’m not going to graduation,” I said.

“Oh, OK,” said PMT, flicking away.

The main reasons why I didn’t want to go was that it meant one less day of school and I also wanted to piss off my parents.

I wasn’t the only kid skipping graduation by any means. By my count, at least 30 graduating seniors weren’t going. But one big problem for PMT was that I was on track to be the top student in the subjects English and Math. If I didn’t show up at graduation, they couldn’t give out those awards.

Later that month, I found out that I got into Columbia. The local newspaper reported that I was one of a handful of students admitted to “most selective” schools. The others were all going to University of Pennsylvania because they loved their fucking state so much they couldn’t leave.

The National Honor Society wanted to throw a dinner and celebrate us and introduce new members who were juniors and sophomores. I got a notice in school about the event telling me I had to wear a suit, get my parents to attend, blah blah. I laughed and crumpled it up.

PMT took action. He noticed that I didn’t RSVP for the dinner so he called up my parents. PMT said, his tongue likely doing a mean cobra dance, that if I didn’t attend the dinner, I’d be thrown out of National Honor Society. Which was total bullshit, but you know how Asian parents are — any authority figure is not to be questioned.

PMT also told my parents that if I didn’t go to graduation, it could prevent me from going to college. Again, total BS, but my mother still bought it.

Through May and June, PMT called me into his office at least once a week during my computer class (so I wouldn’t have time to write my programs, natch), for some random new threat for not going to graduation.

The worst was when my guidance counselor, Mr. Stackhouse, called me in for a meeting to ask why I wasn’t going. I started talking about how I thought high school should end in an implosion of personal change rather than ending in explosion of a public event. Mr. Stackhouse looked extremely uncomfortable the entire time. When Mr. Stackhouse’s closed door opened, I understood why.

“I’ve been listening outside,” said PMT as he walked into Mr. Stackhouse’s office. “And I’m not hearing a legitimate reason why you’re not going to graduation.”

Mr. Stackhouse had been cool the entire year, but even he had betrayed me when the heat was on.

The last time I ever saw PMT, he had me in his office, called my mother and handed me the phone. For so many years later, I realized that the perfect thing to do was to not take the phone and remain silent. PMT would have to struggle to explain that I really was in the office but I wasn’t talking.

But I took the receiver.

My mother was freaking out, saying that PMT was going to stop me from going to college if I didn’t go to graduation and other bullshit.

In a calm, even voice, I said, “We’ll talk about it when I get home.” Then I hung up.

“So you’re not going to graduation?” asked PMT.

“No.”

He nodded, his head down.

Shit, who knows, maybe if he had begged me to go, maybe I would have. But instead, every meeting he tried to pull a power move on me. I guess his technique was to not show a soft side to a commie.

On the morning that graduation was to have taken place, I reached over, turned off my alarm and went back to sleep.

I spent the summer in the haunted house and then it was off to New York where wearing a hammer and sickle was passé. PMT went on to become head principal.

I have wanted to be in a band ever since I heard The Clash and U2. I have wanted to play bass in a band ever since I heard that throb from John Entwistle (R.I.P.) in “The Kids Are Alright” right when Roger Daltry sings “But I know sometimes I.” Right on that second “I.”

Just this past Friday, I’ve joined a new band. No name yet, but we’ve already got a great dirty sound.

Being in a band has little to nothing to do with being a good musician or singer. It’s a real chemistry thing. The love/hate/attraction/repulsion you all have for each other has to work out. A lot of bands break up on tour because if you’re not making music together, you may not all have that much in common. You’re sitting in a van or bus for hours on end you’re bound to have fights sooner or later about something personal or political.

Having been in many different bands, I would say that Jake and Elwood summed it up pretty well in “The Blues Brothers.” They said they were on a mission from God to put the band back together. And it is a spiritual undertaking, being in a band. You have to believe in something bigger than you and every other individual in the band in order to make the music work.

About 12 years ago, I was in a band called Tea Club. The drummer was this dude named John who reminded me of a gaunt Herman Munster with thick glasses. The guitarist was Stan, who was in charge of booking our rehearsal time at Tucasa and would routinely show up an hour late even though he was the one who set the time. Donna, the singer, was usually either high or pissed off that she wasn’t.

None of us were great at what we did, but we were pretty good at creating ferocious sonic landscapes for Donna to flip through her notebook and find words to shout over. We could come up with three or four songs every two-hour rehearsal.

We played two shows. One was at the grand opening of the Asian American Writers Workshop at its basement St. Mark’s street location, and we successively drove out most of the more than 100 people onto the street. The second was at the Asian Pacific America Heritage Festival in 1995 in Union Square.

Amazingly, I found an academic paper on us (apparently presented last year) that referenced our song “Alien,” which I came up with the music and Donna the lyrics.

That Union Square show was memorable for me because Donna and I got into a huge fight right before we were going to go on. A. Magazine was sponsoring a contest to find the best Asian-American band and Donna wanted to enter it.

Unfortunately, the deadline was that day and they needed a cassette handed over immediately at their booth at the festival for us to be considered. I had brought a cassette for the soundboard guy to record us. Donna wanted us to hand over the tape to A. Magazine after we played so we could enter the contest.

I was like, we hand that tape over, we’re never going to see it again and anyway they’re looking for like some bullshit pop garbage like Ace of Base.

Donna: “We need to enter that contest!”
Ed: “It’s a band decision!”
Donna: “So what, majority rules?”
Ed: “Yeah!”
Donna: “Well what the fuck is your problem!!”
Ed: “It’s a band decision!!”
Donna: “So why are you against it, you fucking asshole!”
Ed: “Go talk to Stan and John! If they go for it, then we’ll give A. Magazine the tape!”

So she goes over and bullies Stan and John into agreeing with her. But she still has to have it out with me.

Donna: “Why are you against it?”
Ed: “We’re never going to see our tape again! We’ll never have a record of the show!”
Donna: “We have to be in this contest!”
Ed: “Well, the band already agreed, so we’re going to give them the tape! Now shut up, you little bitch!”
Donna: “Don’t call me a stupid bitch!”
Ed: “I didn’t call you ’stupid bitch’! I called you ‘little bitch’!”

Then we had to go out there and play. Stan owned two guitar amps, one good and one bad. For some reason, he brought the bad one and when it died, I started jumping up and down to distract the crowd.

So of course we didn’t come close to winning the contest. And despite repeated calls to A. Magazine and head honcho Jeff Yang, we couldn’t get our tape back. To be fair to the magazine, in any contest like this, you can’t go through the expense and time to return submitted materials.

But I still wish I had that tape because we had put on a pretty good show.

I also had a serious conflict in another band with another woman. It’s not that I have a problem with women. I have a problem with drug addicts. Yeah, this second woman, Laura, I found out later, was a crackhead.

So I was in this band, which never really had a name, with my college friends Howard and Dan on guitars and Laura on drums.

It’s tough finding a drummer in New York City. There aren’t many drummers and even fewer actually have drum kits because of the space situation in the city. Even fewer can actually play.

So when Laura would go on her crazy rants between songs (she said I looked like Chairman Mao and that the NHL goaltender Grant Fuhr was cool because he was black), Howard and Dan would just look at the floor. She was a good drummer who generally showed up on time. Because of that, she usually got her way.

She slowed down one of Howard’s songs, changing a Replacements-like song to a funereal-beat, robbing the song of all its hooks and appeal. She also said that none of us could use curse words in our language anymore (i.e., “Shit, I’m sorry I fucked up that song, guys.”) because it was offensive, even though she would go off and sing the lyrics to Richard Hell’s “Love Comes in Spurts.”

The end for me was when my grandfather had died and I had to go to Taiwan for the funeral. Laura was yelling at me, saying I wasn’t committed to the band if I left. I just smiled at her. Howard and Dan stared at the sidewalk. I walked away from Laura and the band.

To this day, I still feel so much animosity towards both Donna and Laura I can totally understand how former band members can hate each other’s guts. When you’re creating music together, such an arena is fraught with heightened emotion. Everything you feel is doubled or tripled.

This new band I’m in, after one practice I can already tell we’re already experienced enough to not piss each other off. We’ll probably get out and do some shows.

Will we ever do an album? I think I have the right attitude in saying that I don’t fucking care. Being a band and recording an album are two completely different things; as different as writing fiction is from publishing fiction.

After the sleazy hotel in Jersey, after moving to the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania the summer before my senior year in high school (thanks, mom and dad), after a senior year in a redneck high school in which I spent every other day in the principal’s office, there was the haunted farmhouse.

It was the summer before I was leaving for college (and in my mind, never fucking coming back). My parents found an old farmhouse on a large plot of land (including half a mountain). It was really cheap (this is when the warning light should have gone on), but it was about an hour away from the town proper.

[I still hate that town. In fact, I’ll save more discussion about it for a future entry on its own.]

Anyway, they sent me to live in it for the two months before school to keep an eye on the place.

It was a house that was built, I’m guessing, in the early 1800s. There was a ground floor, an upper floor and a dirt-floor basement with a coal furnace. The steps for all the stairs were steep and uneven — crudely hand-sawed. I had to shovel coal into the furnace to get hot water and clean out the ashes regularly and haul them to a disposal chute so the coal could get enough oxygen to burn properly.

[Years later, when a reviewer noted that the narrator in Waylaid “seems bent on more than hauling his ashes,” I knew exactly what he was talking about.]

Some days, when the water wasn’t coming through properly, I had to go up to the top of the mountain, clear the mud, stones and other debris from the lake drain so that water could again flow uninterrupted down to the house.

My first night in the house, I had just moved in what I planned to take to college: records, a stereo, a pillow (and later a blanket because although it was the summer, it got cold at night) and some clothes. I took one of the bedrooms on the second floor.

I turned off my bedroom ceiling light and was about to go to sleep when I heard some snoring sounds coming from the bedroom across the hall.

My first thought was that some homeless person had snuck in and was hiding out.

I got up, turned on my light, the hallway light and then I stepped into the other bedroom and snapped on the light.

What I didn’t find was scarier than anything I could have found.

The room was completely empty. There wasn’t even a bed, or any other furniture. But the snoring had stopped.

Then I thought, man, I’m just imagining it all. I turned off all the lights and went back to bed.

And the snoring started again.

Mind, you, I know what a settling foundation sounds like. It’s sharp and irregular. Not rhythmic and certainly not offset with sounds of exhaling.

I turned on all the lights again and went back to the room. Nothing there and no snoring.

Okay, I thought. I could choose to be afraid or not.

I went back to my bedroom and left the light on. I put on Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power album and flipped it over a few times.

After a while, I turned everything off and got back in bed. I heard the snoring again. I was now less scared, but I couldn’t sleep.

If I heard “Get out!” I would’ve been gone so fast, but the presence was nothing more than just some disembodied snoring.

In the early morning a rooster crowed in the distance and the snoring stopped. It was truly amazing to hear that relationship.

No more sounds came forth, such as trudging to the wash basin and then downstairs to breakfast and then work in the fields.

I called my parents and told them there was a ghost in the house. They told me to shut up. Typically superstitious Asians.

The snoring didn’t happen every night, but at least a few times a week. When I left that house and went to college, I started asking other people if they had ghost stories.

Even now, it’s still an icebreaker with me. If we ever meet, please tell me one.

Or write one into the comments!

this one is now up.

Thanks for stopping by. I already keep a two-sentence-per-entry blog on myspace, but I plan to write a less-frequent, more-impactful blog here.