Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

1

TRIPPERS AND ASKERS

MAYBE IT COMES from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warn—omen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omens—and not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day. Entertained it. There slid beside his right eye a black gun. He looked side-eyed for it. Here it comes. He actually crooked his trigger finger and—bang!—his head breaks into pieces that fly far apart in the scattered universe. Then blood, meat, disgusting brains, mind guts, but he would be dead already and not see the garbage. The mouth part of his head would remain attached. He groaned. Hemingway had done it in the mouth. Wittman was not el pachuco loco. Proof: he could tell a figment from a table. Or a tree. Being outdoors, in Golden Gate Park, he stepped over to a tree and knock-knocked on it, struck a match on it. Lit a cigarette. Whose mind is it that doesn’t suffer a loud takeover once in a while? He was aware of the run of his mind, that’s all. He was not making plans to do himself in, and no more willed these seppuku movies—no more conjured up that gun—than built this city. His cowboy boots, old brown Wellingtons, hit its pavements hard. Anybody serious about killing himself does the big leap off the Golden Gate. The wind or shock knocks you out before impact. Oh, long before impact. So far, two hundred and thirty-five people, while taking a walk alone on the bridge—a mere net between you and the grabby ocean—had heard a voice out of the windy sky—Laurence Olivier asking them something: To be or not to be? And they’d answered, Not to be, and climbed on top of the railing, fingers and toes roosting on the cinnabarine steel. They take the side of the bridge that faces land. And the City. The last city. Feet first. Coit Tower giving you the finger all the way down. Wittman would face the sea. And the setting sun. Dive. But he was not going to do that. Strange. These gun pictures were what was left of his childhood ability to see galaxies. Glass cosmospheres there had once been, and planets with creatures, such doings, such colors. None abiding. In the Chronicle, a husband and wife, past eighty, too old to live, had shot each other with a weak gun, and had had to go to a doctor to have the bullets prized out of their ears. And a Buddhist had set fire to himself and burned to death on purpose; his name was Quang Duc. Quang Duc. Remember. In the cremations along the Ganges, the mourners stay with the burning body until its head pops. Pop.

Today Wittman was taking a walk on a path that will lead into the underpass beneath the gnarly trees. In fact, the park didn’t look half bad in the fog beginning to fall, dimming the hillocks that domed like green-grey moons rising or setting. He pulled the collar of his pea coat higher and dragged on his cigarette. He had walked this far into the park hardly seeing it. He ought to let it come in, he decided. He would let it all come in. An old white woman was sitting on a bench selling trivets @ ½ dollar ea., which a ducky and a bunny pointed out with gloved fingers. She lifted her head and turned her face toward Wittman’s; her hands were working one more trivet out of yarn and bottlecaps. Not eyelids exactly but like skin flaps or membranes covered her eye sockets and quivered from the empty air in the holes or with efforts to see. Sockets wide open. He looked at her thick feet chapped and dirty in zoris. Their sorry feet is how you can tell crazy people who have no place to go and walk everywhere.

Wittman turned his head, and there on the ground were a pigeon and a squatting man, both puking. He looked away so that he would not himself get nauseated. Pigeons have milk sacs in their throats. Maybe this one was disgorging milk because last night a wind had blown in from the ocean and blown its squabs out of their nest, and it was milking itself. Or does that happen in the spring? But in California in the fall as well? The man was only a vomiting drunk. This walk was turning out to be a Malte Laurids Brigge walk. There was no helping that. There is no helping what you see when you let it all come in; he hadn’t been in on building any city. It was already cold, soon the downside of the year. He walked into the tunnel.

Heading toward him from the other end came a Chinese dude from China, hands clasped behind, bow-legged, loose-seated, out on a stroll—that walk they do in kung fu movies when they are full of contentment on a sunny day. As luck would have it, although there was plenty of room, this dude and Wittman tried to pass each other both on the same side, then both on the other, sidestepping like a couple of basketball stars. Wittman stopped dead in his tracks, and shot the dude a direct stink-eye. The F.O.B. stepped aside. Following, straggling, came the poor guy’s wife. She was coaxing their kid with sunflower seeds, which she cracked with her gold tooth and held out to him. Ho sick, la. Ho sick, she said. Good eating. Good eats. Her voice sang, rang, banged in the echo-chamber tunnel. Mom and shamble-legged kid were each stuffed inside of about ten homemade sweaters. Their arms stuck out fatly. The mom had on a nylon or rayon pantsuit. (Ny-lon ge. Mm lon doc. Nylon-made. Lasts forever.) No! said the kid. Echoes of No! Next there came scrabbling an old lady with a cane. She also wore one of those do-it-yourself pantsuit outfits. On Granny’s head was a cap with a pompon that matched everybody’s sweaters. The whole family taking a cheap outing on their day offu. Immigrants. Fresh Off the Boats out in public. Didn’t know how to walk together. Spitting seeds. So uncool. You wouldn’t mislike them on sight if their pants weren’t so highwater, gym socks white and noticeable. F.O.B. fashions—highwaters or puddlecuffs. Can’t get it right. Uncool. Uncool. The tunnel smelled of mothballs—F.O.B. perfume.

On the tunnel ceiling, some tall paint-head had sprayed, I love my skull. And somebody else had answered, But oh you kidney! This straighter person had prime-coated in bone-white a precise oval on the slope of the wall, and lettered in neat black, But oh you kidney!

He would avoid the Academy of Sciences, especially the North American Hall. Coyotes and bobcats dead behind glass forever. Stuffed birds stuffed inside their pried-open mouths. He was never going to go in there again. Claustro. Dark except for the glow of fake suns on the scenes. Funeral-parlor smell seeping through the sealant.

Don’t go into the Steinhart Aquarium either. Remember The Lady from Shanghai? The seasick cameras shoot through and around the fish-tanks at Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth saying goodbye. The fish are moving, unctuously moving.

No Oriental Tea Garden either. Oriental. Shit.

On the paths where no other human being was wending, he stepped over and between fallen trees into sudden fens of ferns and banana trees with no bananas. A wild strawberry—someone had been wounded and bled a drop here—said, Eat me, but he didn’t obey, maybe poison. How come ripe when it isn’t even spring? There were no flowers in the Shakespeare Garden, its plants gone indistinguishably to leaf and twig.

Long before Ocean Beach and the Great Highway, he turned back into the woods. Eucalyptus, pine, and black oak—those three trees together is how you tell that you’re in Northern California and not Los Angeles. The last time he had walked along the ocean, he ended up at the zoo. Aquarium and dank zoo on the same day. Fu-li-sah-kah Soo. He said Fleishhacker Zoo to himself in Chinatown language, just to keep a hand in, so to speak, to remember and so to keep awhile longer words spoken by the people of his brief and dying culture. At Fu-li-sah-kah Soo, he once saw a monkey catch a flying pigeon and tear it up. In another cage, a tiger backed up to its wading pool and took a dump in it. The stained polar bears make you want to throw things at them and to bite into an eraser.

If it were Sunday, football roars would be rising out of Kezar Stadium, and everywhere you walk, in the woods, along the Chain of Lakes, at the paddock of buffaloes, you’d hear the united voice of the crowd, and the separate loudspeaker voice of the announcer doing the play-by-play. Football season. Good thing that when he was in school, an American of Japanese Ancestry had played on the Cal football team, and there had been a couple of A.J.A. pompon girls too. Otherwise, his manhood would have been even more totally destroyed than it was.

Having lost track of his whereabouts, Wittman was surprised by a snowy glass palace—the Conservatory—that coalesced out of the fog. A piece had sharded off and was floating to the right of the spire on top of the cupola—the day moon. Up the stairs to this fancy hothouse (built with Crocker money), where unlikely roses and cacti grow, climbed a man and a dog. They were the same color and leanness, the dog a Doberman pinscher. Bitch. You fucking bitch. The man was scolding the dog, the two of them walking fast, the dog pulling forward and the man pulling the short new chain taut. Who do you think you are, bitch? Huh, bitch? You listening to me? Who the fuck do you think you are? The man had plucked his eyebrows into the shapes of tadpoles, the same definition as the dog’s, which were light tan. The dog wore a shame look on its face, and its legs were bending with straint. Bitch animal, said the man, who looked nowhere but at his dog. How could you, huh, bitch? Huh? You listening to me? A yank on the choke-chain. You hear me? You cuntless bitch.

Along a side path came another Black man, this one pushing a shopping cart transporting one red apple and a red bull from Tijuana. It was time, Wittman thought, to stop letting it all come in.

Newspaper, sir? said the man with the red bull. Newspaper. Ten cents. He was holding out a folded page of newspaper. He was embracing an armload of these folios and quartos. Wittman had dimes in his pocket, so bought one. The man thanked him, and specially gave him a color insert from last Sunday’s paper. He must be illiterate and not know that newspapers come out new every day.

Some children were climbing rocks. A little girl, who was at the top of the pile, jumped off, saying, "Don’t tell me your personal problems. She talked like that because she copied women. I got problems of my own," she said. The kid was ruined already. A shot of hate went from him to her that ought to have felled her, but up she climbed again. Wittman tossed his smoke and headed for an exit from the park.

Under a bush was a rag that had been squirted with blue paint. That rag had sucked a boy’s breath and eaten up his brain cells. His traitorous hand that should have torn the rag away had pressed it against his face, smeared him blue, and made him drag in the fumes.

Wittman stood at the bus stop on the corner of Arguello and Fulton. He was avoiding the corner where the grizzly bear on one rock and the mountain lion with tensed shoulders on the opposite rock look down at you. The Muni bus came along on the cables not too much later. Continue. I can’t go on, I go on. I can’t go on comma I go on. Wow.

On the ride downtown, for quite a while—the spires of St. Ignatius to the left and the dome of City Hall straight ahead as if rising out of the center of the street—San Francisco seemed to be a city in a good dream. Past the gilded gates of the Opera House and Civic Auditorium. Past the Orpheum, once the best vaudeville house in the West; on the evening of the day of the Earthquake and Fire, its actors went to the park and sang an act from Carmen. In 1911, Count Ilya Tolstoy, the Tolstoy’s son, lectured in the Orpheum on Universal Peace. Wittman had heard the orotund voice of Lowell Thomas intone, THIS IS CINERAMA! The Embassy, the Golden Gate, U. A. Cinema, the Paramount, the Warfield, the St. Francis, the Esquire. Then the neighborhood of the Curran, the Geary, and the Marines Memorial, where he had seen the Actor’s Workshop do King Lear with Michael O’Sullivan as Lear—Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks. Out the bus window, he kept spotting people who offended him in their postures and gestures, their walks, their nose-blowing, their clothes, their facial expressions. Normal humanity, mean and wrong. He was a convict on a locked bus staring at the sights on the way from county jail to San Quentin. Breathe shallow so as not to smell the other passengers. It’s true, isn’t it, that molecules break off and float about, and go up your nose, and that’s how you smell? Always some freak riding the Muni. And making eye contact. Wittman was the only passenger sitting on a crosswise seat in front; the other passengers, facing forward, were looking at him. Had he spoken aloud? They’re about to make sudden faces, like in El. Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? All right, then, all right. Out of a pocket, he took his Rilke. For such gone days, he carried The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in his pea coat—and read out loud to his fellow riders:  ‘My father had taken me with him to Urnekloster.… There remains whole in my heart, so it seems to me, only that large hall in which we used to gather for dinner every evening at seven o’clock. I never saw this room by day; I do not even remember whether it had windows or on what they looked out; always, whenever the family entered, the candles were burning in the ponderous branched candlesticks, and in a few minutes one forgot the time of day and all that one had seen outside. This lofty and, as I suspect, vaulted chamber was stronger than everything else. With its darkening height, with its never quite clarified corners, it sucked all images out of one without giving one any definite substitute for them. One sat there as if dissolved; entirely without will, without consciousness, without desire, without defence. One was like a vacant spot. I remember that at first this annihilating state almost caused me nausea; it brought on a kind of seasickness which I only overcame by stretching out my leg until I touched with my foot the knee of my father who sat opposite me. It did not strike me until afterwards that he seemed to understand, or at least to tolerate, this singular behavior, although there existed between us an almost cool relationship which would not account for such a gesture. Nevertheless it was this slight contact that gave me strength to support the long repasts. And after a few weeks of spasmodic endurance, I became, with the almost boundless adaptability of a child, so inured to the eeriness of these gatherings, that it no longer cost me effort to sit at table for two hours; now these hours passed comparatively swiftly, for I occupied myself in observing those present.’  Some of those present on the Muni were looking at the reader, some had closed their eyes, some looked out the window, everyone perhaps listening.

 ‘My grandfather called them the family, and I also heard the others use the same term, which was entirely arbitrary.’  Wittman read on, reading the descriptions of the four persons at table. The bus driver did not tell him to shut up, and he got to the good part:  ‘The meal dragged along as usual, and we had just reached the dessert when my eye was caught and carried along by a movement going on, in the half-darkness, at the back of the room. In that quarter a door which I had been told led to the mezzanine floor, had opened little by little, and now, as I looked on with a feeling entirely new to me of curiosity and consternation, there stepped into the darkness of the doorway a slender lady in a light-colored dress, who came slowly toward us. I do not know whether I made any movement or any sound; the noise of a chair being overturned forced me to tear my eyes from that strange figure, and I caught sight of my father, who had jumped up now, his face pale as death, his hands clenched by his sides, going toward the lady. She, meantime, quite untouched by this scene, moved toward us, step by step, and was already not far from the Count’s place, when he rose brusquely and, seizing my father by the arm, drew him back to the table and held him fast, while the strange lady, slowly and indifferently, traversed the space now left clear, step by step, through an indescribable stillness in which only a glass clinked trembling somewhere, and disappeared through a door in the opposite wall of the dining-hall.’ 

None of the passengers was telling Wittman to cool it. It was pleasant, then, for them to ride the bus while Rilke shaded and polished the City’s greys and golds. Here we are, Walt Whitman’s classless society of everyone who could read or be read to. Will one of these listening passengers please write to the Board of Supes and suggest that there always be a reader on this route? Wittman has begun a someday tradition that may lead to job as a reader riding the railroads throughout the West. On the train through Fresno—Saroyan; through the Salinas Valley—Steinbeck; through Monterey—Cannery Row; along the Big Sur ocean—Jack Kerouac; on the way to Weed—Of Mice and Men; in the Mother Lode—Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, who went on a honeymoon in The Silverado Squatters; Roughing It through Calaveras County and the Sacramento Valley; through the redwoods—John Muir; up into the Rockies—The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner. Hollywood and San Elmo with John Fante. And all of the Central Valley on the Southern Pacific with migrant Carlos Bulosan, American Is in the Heart. What a repertoire. A lifetime reading job. And he had yet to check out Gertrude Atherton, and Jack London of Oakland, and Ambrose Bierce of San Francisco. And to find Relocation Camp diaries to read in his fierce voice when the train goes through Elk Grove and other places where the land once belonged to the A.J.A.s. He will refuse to be a reader of racist Frank Norris. He won’t read Bret Harte either, in revenge for that Ah Sin thing. Nor Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson, in case it turned out to be like Gone with the Wind. Travelers will go to the reading car to hear the long novels of the country they were riding through for hours and for days. A fool for literature, the railroad reader of the S.P. is getting his start busting through reader’s block on the Muni. Wittman’s talent was that he could read while riding without getting carsick.

The ghost of Christine Brahe for the third and last time walked through the dining hall. The Count and Malte’s father raised their heavy wineglasses to the left of the huge silver swan filled with narcissus, Rilke’s ancestral tale came to a close, and the bus came to the place for Wittman to get off. He walked through the Stockton Street tunnel—beneath the Tunnel Top Bar on Bush and Burill, where Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy—and emerged in Chinatown. At a payphone—this was not the phone booth with the chinky-chinaman corny horny roof—he thought about whether he needed to make any calls. He had a couple more dimes. What the hell. He dropped one into the slot and dialed information for the number of the most ungettable girl of his acquaintance.

So, that very afternoon it happened that: It was September again, which used to be the beginning of the year, and Wittman Ah Sing, though not a student anymore, nevertheless was having cappuccino in North Beach with a new pretty girl. The utter last of summer’s air lifted the Cinzano scallops of the table umbrella, and sun kept hitting beautiful Nanci Lee in the hair and eyes. In shade, Wittman leaned back and glowered at her. He sucked shallow on his cigarette and the smoke clouded out thick over his face, made his eyes squint. He also had the advantage of the backlighting, his hair all haloed, any zits and pores shadowed. She, on her side, got to watch the sun go down. A summer and a year had gone by since graduation from Berkeley. Somebody’s favorite tune was Moscow Nights, and balalaikas kept trembling out of the jukebox.

You, he said. You’re from L.A., aren’t you? Why didn’t you go back there? Well, the place that a Chinese holds among other Chinese—in a community somewhere—matters. It was a very personal question he was asking her. It would pain a true Chinese to admit that he or she did not have a community, or belonged at the bottom or the margin.

People who have gone to college—people their age with their at-tee-tood—well, there are reasons—people who wear black turtleneck sweaters have no place. You don’t easily come home, come back to Chinatown, where they give you stink-eye and call you a saang-hsü lo, a whisker-growing man, Beatnik.

Nanci brought her coffee cup up to her mouth, bouging to catch the rim, and looked warily, he hoped, at him over it. Beautiful and shy, what a turn-on she is. She took a cigarette out of her purse, and held it in front of that mouth until he lit it. Yes, I’m from Los Angeles, she said, answering one of his questions. Pause. Take a beat. I’m going back down there soon. To audition. I’m on my way. Pause yet another beat or two. Why don’t you go back to Sacramento?

Unfair. No fair. L.A. is wide, flat, new. Go through the flashing arch, and there you are: Chinatownland. Nothing to going back to L.A. Cecil B. DeMille rebuilds it new ahead of you as you approach it and approach it on the freeway, whether 101 or over the grapevine. But, say, you stake a claim to San Francisco as your home place.…

Golden Gate Park was wild today. I fought my way out. Lucky. He blew smoke hard between clenched teeth. The paint-heads were cutting loose out of their minds, and messing with my head. Through the pines and eucalyptus, I could smell the natural-history museum. They may have let those trees grow to hide the funeral-parlor smell, which seeps through the sealant. You got claustro, you got fear of the dark, you keep out of museums of natural history; every kind of phobia lets you have it. It’s too quiet, the ursus horribilus propped up on its hind legs; his maw is open but no roar. I don’t like walking in the dark with fake suns glowing on the ‘scenes.’ Pairs of cat-eye marbles look at you from bobcat heads and coyote heads. Freak me out. The male animals are set in hunting poses, and the female ones in nursing poses. Dead babies. There’s a lizard coming out of a dinosaur’s tail. Stiffs. Dead behind glass forever. Stuffed birds stuffed inside pried-open mouths. ‘Taxidermy’ means the ordering of skin. Skin arrangements. If you’re at my bedside when I die, Nanci, please, don’t embalm me. I don’t want some mortician who’s never met me to push my face into a serene smile. They try to make the buffaloes and deer more natural by balding a patch of hair, omitting a toenail, breaking a horn. I paid my way out of the park. I saw the pattern: twice, there were people refashioning and selling castoffs. Flotsam and jetsam selling flotsam and jetsam. I bought this insert from last Sunday’s paper.

Nanci took the paper from him, and folded it into a hat. She put it on Wittman’s head. She was not squeamish to touch what a dirty stranger had touched, nor to touch this hairy head before her. He was at a party. He took off the hat, and with a few changes of folds, origamied it into a popgun. He whopped it through the air, it popped good.

In Sacramento, I don’t belong. Don’t you wonder how I have information about you and L.A., your town? And how come you have information about me? You have committed to memory that I have family in Sacramento. And, yes, a wondering—a wonderfulness—did play in her eyes and on her face. Two invisible star points dinted her cheeks with dimples; an invisible kung fu knight was poking her cheeks with the points of a silver shuriken. And I bet you know what I studied. And whether I’m rich boy or poor boy. What my family is—Lodi grocery or Watsonville farmer, Castroville artichoke or Oakland restaurant or L.A. rich. Smart was what he was. Scholarship smart.

No, she said. I don’t know much about you.

No, she wouldn’t. She was no China Man the way he was China Man. A good-looking chick like her floats above it all. He, out of it, knows ugly and knows Black, and also knows fat, and funny-looking. Yeah, he knows fat too, though he’s tall and skinny. She’s maybe only part Chinese—Lee could be Black or white Southern, Korean, Scotsman, anything—and also rich. Nanci Lee and her highborn kin, rich Chinese-Americans of Orange County, where the most Chinese thing they do is throw the headdress ball. No, he hadn’t exactly captured her fancy and broken her heart. When the rest of them shot the shit about him, she hadn’t paid attention. Though she should have; he was more interesting than most, stood out, tall for one thing, long hair for another, dressed in Hamlet’s night colors for another. Sly-eyed, he checked himself out in the plate-glass window. The ends of his moustache fell below his bearded jawbone. He had tied his hair back, braided loose, almost a queue but not a slave queue, very hip, like a samurai whose hair has gotten slightly undone in battle. Like Kyuzu, terse swordsman in Seven Samurai. A head of his time, ha ha. He was combat-ready, a sayonara soldier sitting on his red carpet beside the palace moat and digging the cherry blossoms in their significant short bloom.

You must not have been in on the Chinese gossip, he said, counting on what would hurt her, that at school she had been left out by the main Chinese. (They left everybody out.)

Let me tell you about where I was born, he said. She was, in a way, asking for the story of his life, wasn’t she? Yeah, she was picking up okay.

Chinatown? she guessed. Is that a sneer on her face? In her voice? Is she stereotypecasting him? Is she showing him the interest of an anthropologist, or a tourist? No, guess not.

Yes. Yes, wherever I appear, there, there it’s Chinatown. But not that Chinatown. He chinned in its direction. I was born backstage in vaudeville. Yeah, I really was. No kidding. They kept me in an actual theatrical trunk—wallpaper lining, greasepaint, and mothball smells, paste smell. The lid they braced with a cane. My mother was a Flora Dora girl. To this day, they call her Ruby Long Legs, all alliteration the way they say it.

Yes, when she came near the trunk, a rubescence had filled the light and air, and he’d tasted strawberry jam and smelled and seen clouds of cotton candy. Wittman really does have show business in his blood. He wasn’t lying to impress Nanci. He was taking credit for the circumstances of his birth, such as his parents. Parents are gifts; they’re part of the life-which-happens-to-one. He hadn’t yet done enough of the life-which-one-has-to-make. Commit more experience, Wittman. It is true you were an actor’s child, and when your people played they wanted to be seen.…

She did the blackbottom and the Charleston in this act, Doctor Ng and the Flora Dora Girls. Only, after a couple of cities, Doctor Ng changed it to Doctor Woo and the Chinese Flora Dora Girls so that the low fawn gwai would have no problem reading the flyers. ‘Woo’ easier in the Caucasian mouth. Not broke the mouth, grunting and gutturating and hitting the tones. ‘Woo’ sounds more classy anyway, the dialect of a better-class village. ‘Woo’ good for white ear. A class act. You know? Of course, she did not know; he rubbed it in, how much she did not know about her own. Doctor Woo’s Chinese Flora Dora Jitter and June Bug Girls were boogie-woogying and saluting right through World War II. Yeah, within our lifetimes.

"What was the blackbottom?" she asked.

For her, he danced his forefingers like little legs across the tabletop. (Like Charlie Chaplin doing the Oceana Roll with dinner rolls on forks in The Gold Rush.)  ‘Hop down front and then you doodle back. Mooch to your left and then you mooch to your right. Hands on your hips and do the mess around. Break a leg and buckle near the ground. Now that’s the Old Black Bottom.’  She laughed to see one finger-leg buckle and kick, buckle and kick, then straighten up, and the other finger-leg buckle and kick all the way across and off the table. Knuckle-knees.

O Someday Girl, find him and admire him for his interests. And dig his allusions. And laugh sincerely at his jokes. And were he to take up dandy ways, for example, why, remark on his comeliness in a cravat. Say He’s beau, without his having to point out the cravat.

But at the moment, this Nanci was smiling one of those Anne Bancroft-Tuesday Weld sneer-smiles, and he went on talking. In case she turns out to be the one he ends up with, he better tell her his life from the beginning. You have to imagine Doctor Woo in white tie, top hat, tails—his Dignity. He called that outfit his Dignity. ‘What shall I wear? I shall wear my Dignity,’ he used to say, and put on his tux. ‘I’m attending that affair dressed in my Dignity.’ ‘My Dignity is at the cleaner’s.’ ‘My Dignity will see me out,’ which means he’ll be buried in it. Doctor Woo did sleight of hand, and he did patter song. He also did an oriental turn. Do you want to hear a Doctor Woo joke? No, wait. Wait. Never mind. Some other time. Later. It’d bring you down. He rip-rapped about sweet-and-sour eyes and chop-suey dis and dat, and white people all alikee. Yeah, old Doc Woo did a racist turn. (What Wittman wanted to say was, Old Doc Woo milked the tit of stereotype, but he went shy.) The audience loved it. Not one showgirl caught him up on it. Wittman made lemon eyes, and quince mouth, and Nanci laughed. He scooped up shreds of nervous paper napkins, his and hers, wadded them into a ball—held it like a delicate egg between thumb and forefinger—palm empty—see?—and out of the fist, he tugged and pulled a clean, whole napkin—opened the hand, no scraps. Come quick, your majesty. Simple Simon is making the princess laugh; she will have to marry him. During intermissions and after the show, we sold Doctor Woo’s Wishes Come True Medicine. The old healing-powers-and-aphrodisiacs-of-the-East scam. I’m dressed as a monkey. I’m running around in the crowd handing up jars and bottles and taking in the money. Overhead Doc Woo is giving the pitch and jam: ‘You hurt? You tired? Ah, tuckered out? Where you ache? This medicine for you. Ease you sprain, ease you pain. What you wish? You earn enough prosperity? Rub over here. Tired be gone. Hurt no more. Guarantee! Also protect against accidental bodily harm. And the Law. Smell. Breathe in deep. Free whiff. Drop three drops—four too muchee, I warn you—into you lady’s goblet, and she be you own lady. Make who you love love you back. Hold you true love true to you. Guarantee! Guarantee!’ We sold a line of products: those pretty silver beebees—remember them?—for when you have a tummy ache?—and Tiger Balm, which he bought in Chinatown and sold at a markup—cheaper for Chinese customers, of course. The Deet Dah Jow, we mixed ourselves. I use it quite often. Deet Dah Jow means Fall Down and Beaten Up Alcohol. Medicine for the Fallen Down and Beaten Up. Felled and Beaten.

When I smell Mahn Gum Yow, said Nanci, saying Ten Thousand Gold Pieces Oil very prettily, high-noting gum, I remember being sick in bed with the t.v. on. I got to play treasure trove with the red tins. I liked having a collection of gold tigers—they used to be raised, embossed—they’re flat now—with emerald eyes and red tongues. I thought Tiger Balm was like Little Black Sambo’s tiger butter. That in India the tigers chase around the palm tree until they churn into butter. And here they churn into ointment.

May this time be the first and only time she charms with this tale, and he its inspiration. Yeah, he said. Yeah. Yeah.

He continued. Onward. Backstage old Doc Woo used to peptalk the Flora Dora girls about how they weren’t just entertaining but doing public service like Ng Poon Chew and Wellington Koo, credits to our race. Show the bok gwai that Chinese-Ah-mei-li-cans are human jess likee anybody elsoo, dancing, dressed civilized, telling jokes, getting boffo laffs. We got rhythm. We got humor. Oh, god, he was so glad. He had not lost it, then—the mouth—to send the day high.

Nanci said, You aren’t making this up, are you?

"Hey, you don’t believe me? I haven’t given you anything but facts. So I don’t have an imagination. It’s some kind of retardation. So I am incapable of making things up. My mother’s name is Ruby, and my father is Zeppelin Ah Sing. He was a Stagedoor Johnny, then a backstage electrician, then emcee on stage. To get Mom to marry him, he bought out the front row of seats for entire runs. He loved her the best when she was on stage as Ruby Long Legs; and she loved him best leading his Army buddies in applause. They got married in Carson City, which is open for weddings twenty-four hours a day.

To this day, whenever they go gambling at State Line, they start divorce proceedings. To keep up the romance. My parents are free spirits—I’m a descendant of free spirits. He left her and me for World War II. My aunties, the showgirls, said I was a mad baby from the start. Yeah. Mad baby and mad man. Come on, Nanci. The stars in a white girl’s eyes would be glittering and popping by now.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh, she said. Uh-huh.

You should have seen me in my Baby Uncle Sam outfit. The striped pants had an open seam in the back, so if I could grow a tail, it would come out of there. Sure, the costume came off of a circus monkey or a street-dancing monkey. You want details? I can impart details to you. She wasn’t bored out of her mind anyway. Please be patient. Are you the one I can tell my whole life to? From the beginning to this moment? Using words that one reads and thinks but never gets to hear and say? Think back as far as you can, he said. First it’s dark, right? But a warm, close dark, not a cold outer-space dark. A stupid girl would think he knew her personal mind. "Then you made out a slit of light, and another, and another—a zoetrope—faster and faster, until all the lights combined. And you had: consciousness. Most people’s lights turn on by degrees like that. (When you come across ‘lights’ in books, like the Donner Party ate lights, do you think ‘lights’ means the eyes or the brains?) I got zapped all at once. That may account for why I’m uncommon. I saw: all of a sudden, curtains that rose and rose, and on the other side of them, lights, footlights and overheads, and behind them, the dark, but different from the previous dark. Rows of lights, like teeth, uppers and lowers, and the mouth wide open laughing—and either I was inside it standing on the tongue, or I was outside, looking into a mouth, and inside the mouth were many, many strangers. All looking at me. For a while they looked at me, wondering at my littleness. And pointing at me and saying, ‘Aaah.’ Which is my name, do you see? Then one big light blasted me. It was a spotlight or a floodlight, and I thought that it had dissolved me into light, but it hadn’t, of course. I made out people breathing—expecting something. They wanted an important thing to happen. If I opened my mouth, whatever it was that was pouring into my ears and eyes and my skin would shout out of my mouth. I opened my mouth for it to happen. But somebody swooped me up—arms caught me—and carried me back into the wings. Sheepcrooked m’act." … a door had swung open before you, and now you were among the alembics in the firelight.… Your theater came into being.

Yes, this flight, this rush, the oncoming high. He had talked his way—here—once more. Good and bad, the world was exactly as it should be. The sidewalk trees were afire in leaf-flames. And the most beyond girl in the world was listening to him. The air which contained all this pleasure was as clear as mescaline and he was straight. The sun was out which shines golden like this but three times a San Francisco autumn.

When I was a child, said Nanci—her turn to talk about her kiddiehood—I had a magic act too. But it wasn’t an act. I didn’t have an audience; it was secret. I believed I could make things appear and disappear by taking every step I had seen the magician take at my birthday party. I sprinkled salt on a hanky to make a dime appear. She opened a paper napkin, and shook salt into it. What’s this? She doing geisha shtick for me? I tied the corners together and said my magic words. Then undid the knot, and blew the salt. She made kiss-me lips, and blew. The wind is driving snow off of a silver pond. The wind is driving a snowcloud across the full moon. I didn’t find a dime then either. What step did I do wrong—not enough salt, too much salt? Didn’t I tie the knot right? It has to be a seventh birthday? She giggled, looked at him to help her out, to sympathize with her gullibility or to laugh at her joking. Doesn’t she know that all magic acts you have to cheat, the missing step is cheating? You’re not the only one, Wittman, who fooled with magic, and not the only one who refuses to work for money. And also not the only one to talk. She had to talk too, make this a conversation. In those days, women did not speak as much as men. Even among the educated and Bohemian, a man talked out his dreams and plans while a girl thought whether she would be able to adapt herself to them. Girls gave one another critiques on how adaptable they were. The artistic girls had dead-white lips and aborigine eyes, and they wore mourning colors. There were two wake-robins, Diane Wakoski and Lenore Kandell; the latter wailed out sex-challenge poems larger and louder than the men, who were still into cool.

Why did you ask me out? asked Nanci.

Because you’re beautiful, he thought, and maybe I love you; I need to get it on with a Chinese-American chick. He said, I wanted to find out if the most beautiful girl of all my school days would come to me. There. Said. Would come to me. Intimate. He let her know that he used to be—and still was—in her thrall. I’m calling you up, he had said on the phone, to celebrate the first anniversary of our graduation. Come tell me, have you found out, ‘Is there life after Berkeley?’  I told you—we’re having a reunion, a party for me.

Shouldn’t we be at Homecoming, then, with everyone else?

What? Buy her a lion-head chrysanthemum, pin it on her tweed lapel? Do the two of us have to walk again past the fraternities on College Avenue, and admire their jungle-bunny house decorations? The Jew Guais too with Greek letters—Sammies—and Yom Kippur banners. Yeah, there were a Chinese fraternity and sorority, but if you were bone-proud, you didn’t have anything to do with SOP sisters and the Pineapple Pies. Nor the Christian house, which let anybody in. The crowd let the city and county sawhorses route them, governments too co-operating with football. He was always walking alone in the opposite direction but ending up at Strawberry Canyon—the smell of eucalyptus in the cold air breaks your heart—among the group looking down into the stadium for free. Only he was up here for the walk, awaiting a poem to land on him, to choose him, walking to pace the words to the rhythm of his own stride. And there was all this football interference. The Cal Marching Band, the drum booming, and the pompon girls kneeling and rotating an arm with pompons in the air, and the teams running toward each other with the crowd going oo-oo-OO-OH! How do all those people know you’re supposed to stand and yell that yell at kickoff? The reason he didn’t like going to football games was the same reason he didn’t like going to theater: he wanted to be playing. Does his inability at cheers have to do with being Chinese? He ought to be in Paris, where everything is dark and chic.

The Big Game soon, she said.

Weren’t you an Oski Doll? You were an Oski Doll, weren’t you?

Come on. It was an honor to be an Oski Doll. It’s based on scholarship too, you know? It’s a good reference. Some of us Oski Dolls helped integrate the rooting section from you boys.

 ‘Here we go, Bears, here we go.’ ‘We smell roses.’ ‘All hail Blue and Gold; thy colors unfold.’ ‘Block that kick, hey.’ ‘Hold that line, hey.’ ‘The Golden Bear is ever watching.’ 

See? You did participate.

Well, yeah, I went to the Big Game once. Stanford won. But most of the time I was participating in the big dread. Those songs and cheers will stick in the head forever, huh?

I know your motive for wanting to see me, she said. You want to know how you were seen. What your reputation was. What people thought of you. You care what people think of you. You’re interested in my telling you.

He looked at the bitten nails of the fingers that held her cigarette and of her other fingers, both hands; they put him at ease. Yes, if you want to tell me, go ahead.

Well, let me think back, she said, as if school had been long ago and not interesting anymore. It seems to me you were a conservative.

No. No. No. He had been wild. Maybe she thought it flattered a Chinese man to be called temperate? Safe. What about his white girlfriends? What about his Black girlfriend? His play-in-progress? That he read aloud on afternoons on the Terrace and at the Mediterraneum (called The Piccolo by those hip to the earlier Avenue scene). There had been no other playwright. Of whatever color. He was the only one. She hadn’t cared for his poem in The Occident?

Conservative like F.O.B.? Like Fresh Off the Boat? He insulted her with translation; she was so banana, she needed a translation. Conservative like engineering major from Fresno with a slide rule on his belt? Like dental student from Stockton? Like pre-optometry majors from Gilroy and Vallejo and Lodi? But I’m an artist, an artist of all the Far Out West. Feh-see-no. Soo-dock-dun, he said, like an old Chinese guy bopping out a list poem. Gi-loy. Wah-lay-ho. Lo-di. But hadn’t he already done for her a catalog of places? Repeating himself already. One of his rules for maintaining sincerity used to be: Never tell the same story twice. He changed that to: Don’t say the same thing in the same way to the same person twice. Better to be dead than boring.

I mean quiet, she said and did not elaborate, poured more espresso out of her individual carafe, sipped it, smoked. She wasn’t deigning to go on. No examples. He had talked for four years, building worlds, inventing selves, and she had not heard. The gold went out of the day. He came crashing down. He must have