My Seoul Man

Chapter 5

She'd had a baby face and sad, soulful eyes, the young girl who killed herself over AJ.

Swallowed a whole bottle of Adderall after reading an engagement rumor on some kind of website where K-pop idols posted messages to their fans.

There were all kinds of forums and things where fans of different groups spend hours chatting and bickering about their "biases." Those are the members you like best out of all the others in the band.

And these fans were ready to go to the mattresses for these people. There were even "sasaengs" who would launch themselves at idols like missiles whenever they made a public appearance of any kind. Found their home addresses and personal phone numbers and pretty much stalked them day and night.

And in case you're wondering where all this random fandom info came from... Well, instead of working on the Food Service year-end report and budget that were due by the end of the week, the next morning I fell down a rabbit hole while I was thinking about my plan to pay AJ back.

The best plan was the simplest: a Sunday soul food dinner like Mama Sadie used to make, for AJ and his grandparents.

My "mercenary mind" hoped the elder Ahns might taste some things they'd like to add to those "heat and eat" meals in their freezers. But another part of me that had been hibernating for a good long while was kinda hoping their grandson might find me kinda tasty, too...

And that got me looking for some K-pop playlists on YouTube that I could listen to while I crunched the numbers. But most of the music didn't move me much.

Bless their hearts, they'd studied Black music and moves for sure—they were especially good at 90s R & B. But they were selling our sounds back to us like...genetically-altered tomatoes. Almost too perfect. With all the stank "scienced" out of it.

AJ's music—well, the very first video I found opened with a sampled James Brown "squeal" and some pretty serious footwork. But he wasn't faking the funk.

He'd been steeped in it legit, growing up in Whitman where the Net was spotty at best and the only radio station we'd had for decades was run out of a store front owned by this crazy white guy who fell in love with R & B in the military. Even the newbies were down with that station; it had a kind of exclusivity that appealed to them.

That authenticity won AJ all kinds of trophies on the weekly K-pop awards shows, too. I grinned like a proud mother watching the numbers run up and the confetti fly when his totals went higher than all the others.

He always thanked "AJ's Angels" for that—remember how he'd called them angels before? Well, they had these little angel wing light wands that they held up when he was onstage. And they sang along with starry eyes and big, happy grins. So cute...

I probably would've just kept right on clicking links if my secretary, the incomparable Miss Clarice Givens, hadn't come rushing in. She'd had a doctor's appointment that morning, which was how I got away with all that "stan" stuff.

Cause, to paraphrase James Brown since I just mentioned him, Clarice didn't take no mess. The woman knew where all the bodies were buried and which closets the skeletons were in, too, district-wise.

That was, in fact, how she wound up being sent way out back with me in the "Old District." That was two rows of shabby pre-fabs almost a block away from the newer ones, where they hoped she wouldn't be able to see a lot of the shady shit they got up to anymore.

She was almost as wide as she was tall, Clary, but it didn't slow her down at all. That morning, she came and set a peach cobbler in a Pyrex dish on my desk and said, "Sweet little Black lady at the home gave me that yesterday. Made me think about Sadie's diner."