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Piny Pollock was just about the coolest person I've ever known. Yes, that was his real name. Piny was Vietnamese and was-- despite being merely eleven-years old-- quite suave with the ladies. He once confided in me that when it came to women, he tended to fool himself over and over again, and was typically in a mild state of self-loathing. He had a well-known weakness for "dames with great gams." On one particular occasion, he had been out to dinner, speaking for a long while with a particular beautiful woman fifteen years his senior, and all of a sudden, the magic faded and he saw the conversation for what it was: a dull, one-sided-- her-sided-- dialogue about wallpaper or cardboard. But he was trapped by the way she sparkled like antique glass resting on a stack of photocopied legal documents. I asked him why he hadn't just left, then. He explained that she had been a "puréed Slim Jim girl." I asked him what that meant. As it turned out, Piny had developed an unusual but highly effective system for gauging his attraction toward a woman. If a woman was "beautiful," she was a "Spaghetti-Os girl," which meant that he would be willing to eat Spaghetti-Os out of the valley of her naked ass. Piny hated Spaghetti-Os almost as much as his family had hated Ho Chi Minh. He called "stunning" girls "corned beef hash girls," which meant he would be willing to go so far as to eat cold, canned corned beef hash out of the valley of the woman's naked ass if that was what it took to make love to her. Corned beef hash-- even the THOUGHT of corned beef hash-- could turn Piny's stomach into a reckless, belching acid-swamp. The most unfathomably beautiful, goddess-like angels were called "puréed Slim Jim girls" for reasons which, by this point, should be self-explanatory. Pretty sophisticated for an eleven-year old, don't you think? Piny Pollock was the first kid on the block to own his own VCR, the first kid on the block to acquire a replica samurai sword, and the first kid on the block to grow hair under his arms. He predicted the advent and ubiquitousness of electronic mail more than a decade before the technology took root, and warned that handwritten correspondences would all but vanish soon afterward. I failed to see the trouble with this scenario; in fact, the mode of communication he described sounded like a dream come true until he said," just wait until the time when that pixie-ish girl you've got the secret crush on stops calling or writing and starts forwarding mediocre jokes to your inbox in their stead. THEN you'll see how great it is." It was Piny Pollock who took the time to teach me chess and the fundamentals of the classical guitar. Everyone in Piny's family played an instrument, and everyone in that household was, Piny insisted, a "complete asshole," though he was clearly being overcritical on this second account. I'd found his mother quite charming. She once told me that Piny's Grandfather-- whom everyone called "Pappy"-- had been a renowned jazz drummer in a trio called "Fresh Chicken" when he was a young man living in Hanoi. I found this story hard to swallow, because for as long as I'd known Pappy, all he had ever done was watch game shows and chew Red Man. In fact, it was never obvious to me that Pappy was any more alive than a mechanical Santa. Piny and I once went so far as to spike Pappy's tobacco with ground Vietnamese peppers and switch the channel from Jokers Wild to a broadcast of the most carnal homosexual pornography I've ever witnessed just to get a reaction out of Pappy. However, his lack of any observable response to either of these stunts only served to deepen the mystery surrounding that strange creature lying on the couch. Years later, I heard that Pappy had died, but as I have told you, I never saw a quality in the man to convince me that he had ever been truly alive to begin with, so the news of his passing was no more successful in provoking an emotional welling within me than if I had been told that there was a Father's Day sale at the lumberyard. Piny Pollock and I struggled to stay in contact with one another after my father uprooted the family and resettled us in New England. In time, we lost contact with one another altogether. But I have made peace with that time in my life. I understand now that all relationships inevitably change or end whether you want them to or not. When I last spoke with Piny, he had landed a gig with a popular Pacific cruise line singing emotional ballads in the style of Placido Domingo. He had never been a very good singer, but he was not the kind of person to let a little something like that stop him. Once he got an idea in his head, there was no deterring him. He had sounded despondent at the time of that final conversation and confessed that it was an especially difficult experience to go on stage and sing his heart out on those evenings when he'd just been dumped by some woman he'd really cared about. Piny Pollock was nineteen-years old. To this day, I find it difficult to capture a rook or lose myself in the strumming of Heitor Villa-Lobos' Chôros No. 1 for guitar without the memory of Piny Pollock's wise gaze staring back at me through the years. Every once in a while, I run a search on the internet for information on Piny. Believe it or not, there's another person named "Piny Pollock" living in this country, in rural Nebraska, but I have contacted this individual and confirmed with absolute certainty that he is not THE Piny Pollock of my youth. Not so long ago, I did succeed in contacting an old acquaintance of Piny's, though this person had been no friend of mine and was clearly unsympathetic to my nostalgic crusade. I learned from this man that Piny had moved in with a "corned beef hash girl" and purchased a failing wholesale wine distribution business somewhere in the Southwest. I asked this old acquaintance of Piny's if he happened to know the name of the place and he said it was called "U-Win Discount Wine for Winos." My hope of ever discovering the fate of Piny Pollock vanished at that moment. This was a completely ridiculous sounding name, and I could never imagine Piny allowing himself to get wrapped up in a venture by that title. Over the last week or so, I have conducted an extensive search, but my investigations have proved conclusively that no such business has ever existed anywhere in this entire country-- let alone the Southwest-- by the name of "U-Win Discount Wine for Winos."
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