“Bud, bud, hey,” I said, blocking his path and spreading my arms, but now to stabilize him.

“Where ya goin.”

“Fuck you motherfucker,” he yelled. “All o’ yous.”

“Bud, what happened.”

He flailed to his right, to a group of white girls.

“Ohhhkay,” I said, grabbing him by his shirt collar and pushing him back.

“And you!” he yelled over my shoulder. “Fuck you too, white motherfucker!”

Jeez.

Dude was heavy.

Pushing him, I felt like a lineman pushing those dummy linemen linemen push in football practice drills.

Ex-roomie bro—whom he was pointing at—was like Wha?—before Indian dude grabbed the coat rack over my head and tried to blitz past me—before ex-roomie bro hit him with a linebacker tackle and pushed him back to where I’d gotten him.

Back into the doorway.

I threw all the coats off me like “Ohhhkay, done playing nice.” Pushed him through the boot room and down the front steps. Like Fuck outta here, bitch.

Was pissed now.

But also hyper-lit, euphoric almost, given the adrenaline plus molly.

Indian dude hit the pavement like thwack.

Slid some feet on the ice.

Then popped back up, eyes bulgy and crazed, like he was on bath salts or some shit.

“The fuck, dude,” I said. “Thought we were cool.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Fuck you and fuck you,” he said, pointing at ex-roomie bro and other ex-roomie bae’s boo, T, who lived around the corner. “Fuck all you white motherfuckers. Colonizers, all o’ yous.”

I started laughing.

“Bro—what are you even talking about? Weren’t we literally just talking about—”

Before one of the girls from the whitegirl trio he’d flailed at, who’d followed me out, cut in like “Dude. Chill. You need to go. You’re making it worse.”

“I need to chill?” I said, feeling gaslit. “I—”

“Yeah you. Back inside. We got this.”

Speaking to me like a grade school teacher.

Ex-roomie bro and T were hovering in front of Indian dude, crouched and hands raised, like animal trainers coercing a tiger back into its cage.

What I was going to continue saying to Indian dude before side bae yanked me away was,

“But what I realized was, for however much I want to rep the motherland, be bitter towards America for merking 1/20 of Japan’s population, I actually know next to nothing about Japan.

“About Japanese culture.

“Japanese homogeneity.

“Japanese gender roles.

“Like, my mom had to have had her reasons for not only not wanting to raise me and my sisters over there, but for leaving herself.

“Like, every other nation has an ethnic identity. America is the only one that doesn’t.

“That takes on, as its national identity, the task of working through ethnic differences.

“Of uniting them.

“To assume it was all my dad’s idea to leave Japan is like weirdly patronizing to my mom…

“Y’know?”