We got to Hu Chin's apartment in Bushwick. His apartment was above a jewelry shop. Petra and I couldn't find the door. We went in the shop and asked the old man at the counter where the door was. He said go outside and turn left. We did. The door was there. We buzzed and were let in.
The hallway was ugly and had bad lighting. We went upstairs to his door. Hu Chin opened the door and let us in. Hu Chin was short and frail. He was only 5 and half feet tall and weighed less than 130 pounds. He smiled and went back to organizing the photo shoot. Hu Chin was a first generation immigrant from Taiwan. He was very much a product of the Asian work ethic. He worked endlessly on his writing and on promoting himself. He had no close friends and no lovers. He got up every day and worked. He had no religion. There was no supernatural reality for him. Life was very concrete for Hu. He was a mixture of Confucius and Buddha. The Confucius was all about work, morals, and duty. The Buddhist part was seeing that everything would pass and there was no reason to cling to anything too strongly. Work was the only thing that held him together. Women would pass, his parents moved back to Taiwan, everything eventually left, but the work. Even the books passed. One book was finished and he was on to another one. The work kept him alive; even if everything left, he would still have his work. He liked the Protestant philosophers Kant and Schopenhauer, their views on duties, imperatives, suffering and music. Hu Chin believed firmly in self-control and rational action. His life was well ordered, organized, and perfected. There was little freedom in his everyday life; when spending time with him, one could tell he was thinking three moves ahead. There was none of that American spontaneity and the spirit of the old blues man about him. He didn't smoke, drink much, or have sex with women after his readings. But when he wrote freedom came. His stories and poems were always fucked up and completely out of tune with his Confucius/German Philosopher way of life he was leading in public. His stories were always strange — featuring talking animals and humiliating experiences — but one could still see that work ethic. The stories were always well-ordered, perfected, pondered over intensely. He would sit in front of the computer and dwell over the sentences, making sure they conveyed exactly what he wanted them to. There was no joking around when it came to him building a sentence. It was deadly serious. He enjoyed the freedom of controlling the sentences. A person could never fully control their public life. We are always subject to the contingencies of others and nature. But when writing poetry or fiction, a person may assume the role of boss and dictator over the story and style. There is freedom in literature. In science and engineering, one has to get to a certain fact that society wants. Society wants a car that runs on less gas; the engineers must design that car, society wants a pill that makes their dicks hard. The scientist must get to that certain fact. Society does not demand certain facts from its story tellers. The story tellers still remain free to make their stories. Hu Chin's behaviors could have been conducive to science, but he didn't want to seek certain facts. But there is something of the doctor and scientist in the writer. Fans are more than just people out there buying units; they are patients coming to you for therapy. A writer knows this because he or she has gone to many writers and asked for therapy before they ever started writing. Romance writers know the people who buy their books are those who lack good sex lives and are coming to get mental escape, horror novelists know that their readers are scared of real things, be it bills or losing their jobs, and have come to get escape. Writers of literature, if they are real writers, know that their readers are confused about reality and the emotions derived from that reality and are looking for clarity concerning the life that they are engulfed in.
Two years before in the summer I sat with Hu on the roof of his apartment building. He lived in a different apartment then. He lived with four other men who he never spoke to. We sat on his roof for several hours talking about what ever came to us. He kept pretending that he would jump off the roof. I kept yelling to get away from the edge and that they would blame it on me and send me to prison. Eventually we got tired and went back to his closet room. It must have been 8 feet long and 5 feet wide. I sat down and took my shoes off. I had forgotten to put socks on and my feet smelled badly. It was a horrible smell, it was unbearable. There we were two writers; earlier in the day an Irish immigrant had declared us two of the best writers of our generation and all we could think about was how to get my feet to stop stinking.
I went to the bathroom and washed them off with his gay roommate's expensive shampoo. The smell went away a little. I went back in the small closet room and Hu sprayed female body spray on my feet. My feet smelled like watermelon. The whole thing was very strange considering there was a giant bear head in the corner of the room staring at us. I laid down on the floor and went to sleep. In the morning he made me a vegan smoothie that was purple.
While watching him walking around the room, making sure the two women from the magazine were well taken care of, and that everything was going smoothly. I looked at him and his tense face hoping one day he would get enough money writing and move out west and farm corn or beans. Or maybe he would move to a small town in Pennsylvania and play drums and relax. He probably never would though: work was his life. He was one of those people that died as soon as they stopped working.
John Walters was there; he was sitting outside on the fire escape smoking and drinking Pabst. He was acting carefree and totally apathetic to the world around him. Jason Bassini, a writer from Seattle who had grown up in Utah, was sitting on a stool drinking a beer. I went over to him and gave him a huge hug. We had spoken many times on Gmail chat. He was twenty-four and had graduated college two years before with a Psychology degree. He was short, very thin and Italian looking. Actually all the males were very skinny. I was the largest by a good fifty pounds. Jason was from a different place than Hu, John and I. He was from the west. He was from the deserts of Utah and the forests of Washington. He had grown up under big skies like Tom White. He had grown up amongst natural wonders, Mexicans, and Navajos.
Jason went to Catholic School when he was little. Jason Bassini was the only one of us raised with any religion. He never wrote or spoke about religion. There was no god for him. When he was bored, once every six months he would attend afternoon mass by himself. He would sit and kneel with the Latinos in Seattle saying his Hail Marys. He considered it a nice thing to do when he was really bored. You go someplace and perform an ancient ritual with people you don't know. Even though he didn't believe in god, Catholic mass seemed more worthwhile than Wal-Mart or Starbucks.
Jason's parents were both high level executives. He told me that one night on Gmail chat, “My parents are high level executives.”
I googled “high level executives.” It didn't supply any real information. Both of his parents were professional people that wanted him to be a professional person. Jason Bassini finished college by the time he was 22. He was showing signs of being a professional human being. His dad got him a job at his company writing for reality television in Seattle. Jason went there and didn't care. He left the job and started working in an office writing directions on how to work things. He sat for eight hours a day staring at a computer checking Facebook and writing long emails to a girl in Munich. None of the success and good things of life made him happy. He left there and got a job working at a coffee house. He rejected his parents by not taking part in the ambition game the corporate world supplies.