SAMBAL BADJACK

My father sits in a white undershirt at the kitchen table and eats Sambal Badjack, a paste of onions and chilies and garlic cooked down into a dark red, almost black, yellow-seeded mash. He buys it from Asian food markets. Along with petis, a fish paste that smells as bad as it sounds, or krupouk, prawn crackers that look like chips of shrinky dink plastic that when deep fried puff up into giant tasty Styrofoam things that tingle on your tongue.
Dad eats Sambal Badjack on everything. He eats it on bread, he eats it on spaghetti, he eats it with chicken, or he takes a big spoonful and shovels it in. Dad cooks us other Indonesian food, like the stuff that Kokki, his cook, made when he was growing up on Java. Like bami chicken, or nasi goring, fried rice, or babi ketchup, pork in soy sauce, or a lot of white rice with diced up hot dogs. He told me that’s all he ate when he came to this country, hot dogs and rice, hot dogs and rice.
When Dad sits at the kitchen table eating Sambal Badjack sandwiches he tells me stories. Stories of the jungles of Java, stories of the concentration camp. I take a seat next to him. First I have to pull the pile of old newspapers, broken roller skates and ketchup-stained rags off of a chair. Then I have to push back the zillions of thimbles, coffee-stained coupons, empty thread spools, rubber bands, textbooks, lace, rusty nails, buttons, magazine clippings and open spilling Sweet ‘N’ Low packets that cover the table with a fine white dust. I make a little clearing, and I put my peanut butter and butter sandwich there to eat.
I watch my father. His light Dutch blue eyes are like sapphires pressed into his dough-white skin, shadowed by a hard forehead streaked by bushy black brows . He stares off into the distance as if he is remembering something. Something. He takes a big spoonful of Sambal Badjack, smears it on wheat bread, folds it and takes a bite. I watch his jaw chew eagerly, rhythmically, and then I see the little beads of sweat, like rock candy, form on his temples and above his upper lip.
“Arhh!” he clears his throat. “God that’s hot! Wheew.” He loves it. He rubs his fingers through his hair. It would be all white, like his father’s sugar head of premature white at 40, if it weren’t for the hair color Grecian formula for men that Mom makes him use. So it’s a peanut butter brown, long on top with sides and back buzzed short.
He leans back in his chair to pull out a white cloth handkerchief from his pocket, keys and coins competing for his hand. He takes off his glasses, dabs his temples, wipes his lip, blows his nose. He clears his throat again, takes a spoonful of white sugar and places it on his tongue. It absorbs the heat, he says, or if that doesn’t do the trick, drink some buttermilk.
I watch. It’s like he’s having an out-of-body experience, like the one he had in the camp.
“Did I tell you that story?” he asks me. “How I died in the camp?” I chew on my peanut butter and butter sandwich. I know the story. He tells it a lot. When he’s 11 years old, about a year after being separated from his mother. When he got amoebic dysentery after eating snails from the river that the locals used as a latrine. The terrible cramps and diarrhea came and he went into the corner of a room where nobody came out alive. It was the same corner that the Japanese ordered him and the other little boys to drag out the bloated corpses of old men by their rubber band wrists and pile them up. Then once a week, to dig a hole outside the camp gates to bury them. Things decompose fast in the jungle, he says.
“I was in terrible pain, with cramps so bad, and then suddenly I saw myself outside of my body. I was looking down on everything, clear as day. I saw my grandmother and some other woman I didn’t recognize.” He is all hot from the Sambal Badjack. He chews a little bit more. “She said, ‘You must go back.’ And I thought. Back there? No way! But she said I must go back. Then I felt this strong pull and I was forced into my body again. The men looking after me said I was dead, but when I awoke, there was no trace of the disease. They couldn’t believe it. I was dead, and then I wasn’t.”
He keeps on chewing. Breathing heavy heat, holding on to a threshold. I’m with my father, in our kitchen, staring at the splat pad, the plastic sheet tacked to the wall behind the trashcan that catches all the multi-colored spit and food Mom launches in that direction. I stuff my mouth with the last of the peanut butter and butter sandwich. The ones I always make myself for lunch and for dinner these days. A big dry lump of peanut butter is still stuck in my throat, it only moves a little bit with each swallow. I think about the bully Vinh Grant in class. This Viet-Nam refugee and his sister Tia whose legs are in metal braces. How in class he reaches for my tit and my head gets hot in anger, and I push him away, but I don’t say anything. I wish he’d have died in his war and never made it to Mrs. Hinkle’s third grade class. I start making another sandwich.
I watch Dad again. Dad’s with his Sambal Badjack, with his hot peppers. The moldy hot peppers he collected from those in the camp who couldn’t take the heat.
“Thereafter, it’s the hot peppers I’m sure that burned out any amoebas or anything in me.” Hot peppers saved his life. But I can’t figure out why he had to go back. Why he had to live. I swallow the peanut butter down finally and it moves down my throat like a bowling ball in the gutter. Down to my stomach without a strike.
My mother walks in.
“Are you still eating that crap? It’s burning up your guts,” she laughs. “I don’t know why you eat that stuff. It’s going to kill you. And it costs a fortune as much as you eat, Albert.” She proceeds to microwave an egg.
My father doesn’t hear her. He is chewing on his Sambal Badjack sandwich. Heating up his body.
I go with Dad to the Asian supermarket in Boulder. Its smell should’ve warned me of what was to come in our kitchen. Dad searches for his ingredients, and I wander the store. There are cans of coconut milk, chili oil, and these tiny, dried fish, their eyeballs staring right out at you, crammed into little plastic packages, screaming, “There is no God.” There are stringy packages of noodles, cookbooks in Vietnamese. I recognize the clear jars of dad’s Sambal Badjack by the funny red writing and the drawing of a red rooster.
A little old Asian woman with a brown bubble perm and bad teeth smiles from behind the register as we check out. Dad has a handful of red peppers and puts them on the counter.
“Are these hot?” he asks her.
“Oh, Thai dragon. Yes, very,” she says, with a half smile, probably thinking what the hell is this white guy going to do with these peppers and is he going to sue me if he dies from eating them?
When we come home, Mom is exercising in yellow terrycloth shorts and a black t-shirt that says, HERE COMES TROUBLE. She has on The Green Berets record full blast and she is jumping up and down. Jeanie has on a blue jean jacket swarming with dozens of music group buttons. She’s swinging her arms left-to-right too, and then starts marching like in the army.
PUT SILVER WINGS ON MY SON’S CHEST. MAKE HIM ONE OF AMERICA’S BEST. ONE HUNDRED MEN WILL TEST TODAY. BUT ONLY THREE GET A GREEN BERET.
“Come on, Patti, dance with me.” I watch the thunderous jiggling of Mom’s fat belly, like a giant slab of pizza dough stretched around her middle and forced to endure a bumpy joy ride. “Help me lose this fat off my belly,” she says and grabs it. She dances on her thin legs, pasty white, racked with varicose veins, blue like the map of a river delta. “I wish I could move some of this fat to my skinny dog bone legs,” she calls out. She lifts her knees, left, right, left. “I hate my skinny dog bone legs.”
I laugh as Dad goes into the kitchen to start cooking. I watch as he chops with precision the garlic and onions and chilies and puts them into a pan of hot oil. “SHHHHHHHH” they hiss as the oil sizzles.
I hear the needle scratch across the record and Mom puts on Eartha Kitt.

I USE MY CHARMS TO DELIGHT YOU, MY TRICKS TO ENTICE YOU, AND ALL OF THE CHARM OF THE WEAKER SEX TO VOODOO YOU. THEY SAY THAT I’M A WITCH AND THAT I WEAVE A SPELL. BUT I’LL BE A SON OF A, I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE… WELL LET ME TELL YOU BROTHER I’D RATHER BE BURNED AS A WITCH THAN NEVER BE BURNED AT ALL.

I come in to dance with Mom. She makes a funny evil face scrunching it together, so that she looks just like the puppet witch from Santa Fe that is hanging on our front door. Our front door that is covered by a white screen door that the spring is broken so it closes with a whack. Jeanie and I start slam dancing off each other, throwing our arms up in the air, laughing, jiggling.
“Hey, be careful, you’re going to break something,” she says. She touches her toes, twists left to right panting. “I wish I were beautiful, kids. Patti, Jeanie, get a rich husband. Why can’t we be rich? We could sail to Europe, move to New York and eat at fancy restaurants all the time. Beautiful, beautiful, BEAUTIFUL.” Her arms are thrown up in the air. “Marry a rich husband, girls. Don’t live in dog dump like this.”
Soon you can really smell the onions and garlic and chilies all cooked up. A heavy haze of smoke fills the house and begins to burn our eyes.
“My God! Albert! Rat, cat, dog shit. Dog tricks!” my mother cries, half laughing, running toward the kitchen. “Hurry! Open the doors and windows! Our eyes are burning up from that crap, Albert!” Dad stirs the onions and the garlic and the chilies. Stirs the onions and the garlic and the chilies, his head in all the smoke.
Jeanie and I throw open all the windows, rubbing our eyes. I can see Brad the neighbor boy across the street watching. Then Mom, Jeanie and I run out to the back yard and are flooded with yellow sunlight, hot rays on our faces. My eyes still sting, my stomach hurts from laughing. We dance. We sing. We smell the Sambal Badjack.