Typical American Read Online Free PDF

don't care what kinda trouble you in, no funny business in my house, or I kill you."

    they could sit for a quarter hour at a time in complete silence. This, with all their friends to draw on for conversation. Something was just not right. Ralph would eat and play with his hat. Litde Lou would watch, blank.
    And yet Ralph appreciated his visits. They were something solid to stand on, anyway. Respite. They were a breakwater against some black undertow in himself that could any moment snatch him away to its killing home. He felt himself to be small, barefoot, lacking friction. Nearsighted. Everyday events seemed magnified another power. Little Lou's dropping by became the concern of a boddhisatva. A pigeon corpse on his doorstep was Ralph's true self come to rot at his feet. Everything signified, everything blared and reverberated as though some adjustment was off, some knob turned all the way up. Exhausted, that's what he was. Gone out. Looking to the future, he saw no future; and who doesn't hurt when he sees his life fizzling, his life that should have climbed and burst, blooming, a fire-flower in the sky? Once Ralph could imagine his parents watching, breathless, amazed, but now ...
    And then there was another pain too, quieter, weightier, its roots in what everybody knows — that one day a person looks back more than forward, that one day he'll have achieved as much as he was going to, loved as much as he was going to, been as happy as it was granted him to be. And that day, won't he have to wonder — was it enough, what he's lived? Can he call that a life and be satisfied?
    So it was that Ralph felt not only his future to have failed, but with it his past, the twin engine that might have sustained him. He missed his home, missed having a place that was home. Home! And yet his life there, no; it didn't begin to fill the measure of his hopes for a life. It was no golden time. He might gild it, but in truth it was lacking. Lacking what? Something, everything, he didn't know exactly. But he did know this — that the world he had lost had waxed valuable in the losing, like an unwon love. How perfect Cammy had become in his memory, how much

    more desirable for having stepped behind a locked door! He saw all of this now, with the terrible lucidity of a strained mind; and seeing it, wondered what there was to live for. His new job?
    His new job. Being Chinese, he had thought the safest place to work would be in the Chinese restaurants scattered like toys in around the legs of the el on 125th Street. Weren't people needed to wash dishes, wait table, make noodles? Ralph had no experience, it was true, but everyone started with no experience.
    And as it turned out, his lack of experience didn't matter.
    "Please, may I speak to your boss/' he'd say in Mandarin.
    "What you say?" the answer would come back; or at least that's what he guessed, not understanding a word of Cantonese. "Whaatr
    Once or twice he tried asking in English, but it was no use. Talking wrong, he might as well have been a barbarian invader; the town gates were closed. Still he knocked, until finally a tiny girl perched on a stool in the fresh-killed meat store said, "Yes?"
    In perfect English, this was. Off the stool she barely cleared the countertop, but she knew where her father was, and her father — also American-born, it seemed, a gum chewer — guessed Yeah, he could use someone. Sure.
    Ralph's non-life began. At dawn he would get up, wash, put on his bloody clothes, and walk to the store basement, where by the light of a yellow forty-watt bulb, crates of animals surrounding him — pigs and rabbits against one wall, pigeons and snakes against another — he would kill and clean and pluck hours upon hours of chickens. The first week he vomited daily from the stench of the feces and offal and rotting meat. But the second week he only blanched, and by the third he worked as though indigenous to this world. Instinct — first the most sickly or troublesome