David Yoo - The Choke Artist: Confessions of a Chronic Underachiever

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Names and certain details have been changed to respect the anonymity of individuals. In some places the sequences of events have been changed, events combined, and time lines condensed for story flow.

Copyright 2012 by David Yoo

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

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ISBN 978-1-455-51026-9

An admitted rug-humping, shrimpy, underachieving choke artist, David Yoo confesses his deepest, darkest, hilariously unattractive and sadly relatable truths. And in turn, sets us all free.

Hilary Winston, author of My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me and writer for Community and Happy Endings

THE CHOKE ARTIST is daring, alarming, and wickedly funny. Each new episode explores darker territoryshot through with surprising moments of insight, laughter, and light.

Dave Cullen, author of Columbine

Brilliantly sneaky. David Yoo is so funny that sometimes you forget hes writing about his (and Americas) deepest, most basic fears. In a country that worships success, failure is taboo. Yoo embraces it head-on, his humor leavening yet never concealing the pain of not having enough faith in oneself.

Stewart ONan, bestselling author of Wish You Were Here

David Yoos voice is so witty and charming it only seems fair to give warning: Hell break hearts of teenage readers of all ages with this bittersweet love story.

Jonathan Lethem on Stop Me If Youve Heard This One Before

Girls for Breakfast performs the neat trick of taking the misery of adolescence and transforming it into fiction that is funny, engrossing, and perceptive. David Yoo is a talented writer with lots to say about sex, ethnicity, and whitebread suburbia.

Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and Election

Young Adult:

Girls for Breakfast

Stop Me If Youve Heard This One Before

Middle Grade:

The Detention Club

For my family

I like a look of Agony,
Because I know its true.

EMILY DICKINSON

I FORMED MY FIRST posse junior year of high school. There were three of us: me, my best friend, Jay, and his best friend, Chris. What initially brought us together was our mutual love of rap music. That, and we were three of the bigger losers at Avon High. Previously, Id been a member of the elite soccer crew. It was the main sport in schoolthe football team sucked, and at one point the varsity soccer team was ranked second in the country, according to the USA Today national rankings. Just being on the team carried serious social cachet, but I didnt get along with the coach at all, and startlingly soon after quitting I had a major falling-out with my friends and found myself temporarily sitting by myself at lunch. I needed new compadres, fast, and the only two guys in school who werent part of an established clique already were Jay and Chris.

They hung out by themselves because they didnt play sports, and on top of that, they were from the poor part of town. Or relatively poor, at least. Avon was absurdly wealthy, so to clarify: by poor I mean squarely ensconced in the middle class. But within the utterly unrealistic microcosm of society that was Avon, they were the closest thing to burnouts at our school. While most guys were working up a sweat playing sports or freely making out with one another in the privacy of drama rehearsal, these two still rode Mongoose dirt bikes with plastic fluorescent green pegs on both sides of their back tires, practicing bunny hops and rail slides outside Chuckys food store on West Avon Road after school. Suffice it to say, socially this was a giant step down for me, but I desperately needed a new crew, and they were my only viable option.

I was stunned when I found out they listened to rap music, too. Id tagged them as typical skate punks, whereas it made perfect sense that I would get obsessed with rap, since I was the closest thing to a black kid in town. Well, there actually was one real black kid in my grade, but definitely anytime he was out sick from school I was easily the next best thing, simply due to the fact thatas an Asian kidI was pretty much the only other male student of color within town limits. Although now I can see how he might have secretly resented it, back then I was always deeply jealous of the fact that everyone assumed the black kid was tough just for being black, while my skin tone suggested to everyone that I was a bookish nerd destined to one day steal engineering jobs from them before getting selected as an alternate for the Olympic table tennis team. Nobody would believe that I was in reality a C student and an utter nightmare for my parents at home, and this glaring oversight distressed me to no end.

Id gotten introduced to rap freshman year by Trent, a junior on the JV soccer team. On weekends hed pick me up in his dads Buick Regal and speed around town blasting his homemade Best of Rap mix tapes, and over a semester I received a thorough and surprisingly nuanced schooling in rap music, not just learning to appreciate Big Daddy Kanes Raw and Kool Moe Dees Lets Go, but also developing a certain measure of respect for the few female rappers at the timeMC Lyte, Silk Tymes Leather, and the Cookie Crew; wed nod our heads to Salt-N-Pepas Let the Rhythm Run as we barreled up and down Route 44 on sunny afternoons. On the rare occasion when wed get tired of listening to rap, Trent would replay the opening seven seconds of Wingers Seventeen at full blast for literally several hours straight.

Every day after school and on weekends throughout the fall of junior year, Jay, Chris, and I would fanatically listen to rap and compose original rap songs. We transcribed all of our favorites by Run-DMC, Ice-T, and the like into a five-subject notebook and then wed take turns reciting Rock Box and Colors and Express Yourself back to one another. Since I was the ringleader (because I was the only member who could sort of beat-box), I got to come up with the name for our little posse: D-Lite. The D stood for Dave, and the Lite was a reference to how all three of us were really skinny. I was positioning us to be the answer to the Fat Boys; at one point I sincerely believed we were destined to take over the worldall we needed was a great demo tape. We kept the name until the actual group Deee-Lite came out at the end of the school year and we were forced to immediately drop it. Shoving a frightened frosh guy against the lockers and informing him, Yo, you just got marked by D-Lite, homeslice, didnt carry any menace to it anymore because merely saying our posse name now conjured up the dance club hit Groove Is in the Heart.