Read Online Driver's Education by Grant Ginder - Free Book Online Page B

television star?”
    I ask, “You want to be a television star, Yip?”
    â€œYip is having been made for the television! How I telling so many people this! How I telling them that Yip is having been made for television!”
    And so I keep filming.
    â€œYou looking so confused! He looking so confused! You want the story how the way I know your ye ye ? Yes, yes you want story how the way I know your ye ye .” He turns around, faces the shop, starts walking into it, still holding on to one of my hands. “You follow me, you follow Yip.”
    The interior of the George Meat Market International is populated by more carcasses of slaughtered beasts than people. I lose my grip on Yip quickly. He sweeps through them adeptly, these hanging pieces of flesh; his head is inches lower than the longest duck or the broadest rib cage. We lose him for a second behind some massive cow leg, and then he reappears, materializing on the other side of an army of plucked, humiliated chickens. We try to keep up with him, Randal and I, as we trace his path through the flesh, but it’s basically pointless: we end up getting sideswiped by some short loins or tangled up in rounds, and then he just vanishes again. The only reason we’re able to find him in the end is that he shouts, very loudly, for everyone to hear, I always moving very very fast! I always losing people! But you come, you come here! He’s standingin front of a steel door with chipped blue paint, and he ushers us into a room that, at least from the looks of it, used to be a meat locker.
    The place has been turned into a makeshift office. On the wall: a framed picture of Yip with a Chinese movie star I’m pretty sure I recognize. In front of it, two mismatched chairs and a single wooden desk, upon which sprawls an orange cat, ragged and ancient, with only one front leg.
    â€œSit! Sit!” he tells us, pulling out both the chairs. He perches, authoritatively, on the desk. He reaches into one of the drawers and offers us both unfiltered cigarettes, which we both take, and which makes me hack. He motions for Randal to close the door.
    â€œMy God,” he says in unaccented English after he gets the thing lit. “It’s exhausting, isn’t it?”
    The smoke rises, forming clouds that blanket the ceiling. I cough some more.
    â€œPardon?”
    He nods to the door, to the circus of sightseers that festers outside. Smoke seeps out of his nostrils, a dragon. “Just this—this whole routine. So tiny and dancing like this! Christ almighty.” Yip waves the cigarette in wide dismissive loops. He motions, again, to the tourists. “But which one of them wants to buy things they can’t pronounce from a guy who’s lived in Long Island City since he was eight? A guy who talks like he’s Tony Fucking Soprano? I’ll tell you who—not a goddamned one of them.
    â€œChen at Global Seafood, over on Broome—he’s the asshole who came up with the shtick first. They want authenticity, he said. They come from Kansas and Iowa with their cameras and they want authenticity. This! Coming from a Szechuan Jew from Astoria!” Then: “They came, though. Can you believe it? They bought the gag, and they came. Now Chen’s got tourists lined up around the block, paying to take a picture with him and a goddamned plucked duck . And let me tell you something about tourists, kid—they don’t haggle over the price of mushrooms. They don’t bitch about the shrimp not being big enough. They buy shit, and they get out of your hair. So, here we have it: authenticity. ”
    The cat makes a noise, something asthmatic and irritated.
    Yip tells us, “Just ignore Mrs. Dalloway.”
    â€œIs she—all right?”
    â€œMrs. Dalloway? She’s fine. Better than fine, unfortunately. Damn thing is fifty years old. I’ve had her since I was fifteen.”
    â€œThat’s