Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  On the radio, Sweet Dick Whittington the Allnight Cat was playing King Pleasure.

  When you see danger facing you,

  little boy, don’t get scared.

  When you see danger facing you,

  little boy, don’t you get scared.

  When you see danger facing you,

  little fellow, don’t get yellow,

  and blu-u-e.

  Then, Cannonball Adderly, being interviewed, told about a young musician coming to New York. “He gets cut bad.” He has to stop playing his tune, and change his ways to New York ways. “He becomes a better musician,” says Cannonball. That can’t be true. New York cant.

  On the Black station, people were phoning in and arguing whether you can tell somebody’s color by his voice. Back at the jazz station, Wittman heard: “Louis B. Armstrong and John Cage credit Chinese opera for inspiring their rhythms.” Yes? Yes? Was Wittman’s yearning giving him an hallucination of the ear? A piece he could not identify bingbanged forth and jangled his mind.

  The reason he had the radio on was that whenever he stopped typing, he heard someone else nearby tapping, tapping at a typewriter, a typing through the night. Yes, it was there, steady but not mechanical. Not furnace or pipes or adding machine or teletype or timer. Not an echo. Now and again, the noise did hesitate, as if for thought, then a few word-length taps. An intelligence was coming up with words. Someone else, not a poet with pencil or fountain pen but a workhorse big-novel writer, was staying up, probably done composing already and typing out fair copy. It should be a companionable noise, a jazz challenge to which he could blow out the window his answering jazz. But, no, it’s an expensive electric machine-gun typewriter aiming at him, gunning for him, to knock him off in competition. But so efficient—it had to be a girl, a clerk typist, he hoped, a secretary, he hoped. A schoolteacher cutting mimeo stencils. A cookbook writer. A guidebook-for-tourists writer. Madam Dim Sum, Madam Chinoiserie, Madam Orientalia knocking out horsey cocky locky astrology, Horatio Algiers Wong—he heard the typing leave him behind.

  He picked up a ballpoint and crossed out by the line what he had written that night, every page. He had been tripping out on the wrong side of the street. The wrong side of the world. What had he to do with foreigners? With F.O.B. émigrés? Fifth-generation native Californian that he was. Great-Great-Grandfather came on the Nootka, as ancestral as the Mayflower. Go-sei. The story boat has got to light out on the Mississippi or among the houseboats on the San Joaquin Delta. It should work the yachts at Lake Tahoe. His province is America. America, his province. But story boats and story teahouses where a professional can talk are as gone at Lake Anza and the Bay as they must be gone from China. What is there beautiful and adventurous about us here? Dave Brubeck was playing “Take Five” on the radio.

  Wittman took the trash down the hallway to the garbage closet. The pages made a flying noise down the chute. Pure Jack Kerouac set fire to his day’s words. There used to be a furnace at 17 Adler Place—the Chinese Historical Society of America is in that building now—where the Society of Beautiful Writing used to burn important papers. Fire up them poems. See the phoenixes and salamanders. The Society took the ashes to Baker Beach and Fort Point and scattered them in the Bay. Much purer than sitting in the garbage waiting for the truck to the dump.

  It’s all right. Wittman was working out what this means: After two thousand days of quest, which takes a hundred chapters to tell, and twenty-four acts, seven days to perform, Monkey and his friends, Tripitaka on the white horse, Piggy, and Mr. Sandman, arrive in the West. The Indians give them scrolls, which they load on the white horse. Partway home, Monkey, a suspicious fellow, unrolls the scrolls, and finds that they are blank scrolls. “What’s this? We’ve been cheated. Those pig-catchers gave us nothing. Let’s demand an exchange.” So, he and his companions go back, and they get words, including the Heart Sutra. But the empty scrolls had been the right ones all along.

  Back at his table, Wittman put his head down and groaned. He ought not to have gone ape in front of Nanci. It was the sort of episode that can back up on you anytime and make you want to shoot the embarrassment of it clean out of your head. Too late. And one has nothing and nobody, and one travels about the world with a trunk and a case of books and really without curiosity. What sort of life is it really; without a house, without inherited things, without dogs? With Rilke singing the sound track of my life?

  A rooster crowed. It woke up in a cage stacked above and beneath other chickens, grain and shit dropping from tier to tier; the grocer must be pushing the cages out to the sidewalk. Zoning laws are different here from Union Square, I. Magnin’s and the City of Paris, or else we’re breaking them. The fish trucks were unloading today’s catch, lobsters and catfish coming back to life in window tanks. Farm trucks were bringing vegetables and fruit from the Valley. Soon alarm clocks will ring and toilets flush. It was time to go to sleep. I have taken action against fear. I have sat all night and written and now I am as agreeably tired as after a long walk over the fields of Ulsgaard.

  Sleeping in this part of the City was very odd. He was often awakened by dinosaur garbage-truck noises. But in daylight the garbage would still not have been picked up. Why is the air shattering like it’s raining glass? To think that I cannot give up sleeping without the window open. Electric street-cars rage ringing through my room. Automobiles run their way over me. A door slams. Somewhere a window-pane falls clattering: I hear its big splinters laugh, its little ones snicker. Then suddenly a dull, muffled noise from the other side within the house. Someone is climbing the stairs. Coming, coming incessantly. Is there, there for a long time, then passes by. And again the street. A girl screams: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus. An electric car races up excitedly, then away, away over everything. Someone calls. People are running, overtake each other. A dog barks. What a relief: a dog. Toward morning a cock even crows, and that is boundless comfort. Then I suddenly fall asleep. More than one pane of glass has fallen; an entire glass side of a building has crashed down, but the next day, if he remembers to look, the street will not be covered with glass. The electric cars do not run on this street at four in the morning.

  The storyboatman vaults on his pole of changing lengths. He whizzes through lands and time. He touches down here, and he takes off and touches down there. Over Angel Island. Over Ellis Island. Living one very long adventurous life, thousands of years long, perhaps accomplished with the help of reincarnations and ancestors.

  The calls in Wittman’s dreams came from the children of the building going off to school. I don’t even know how it is possible for school-children to get up in bedrooms filled with grey-smelling cold; who encourages them, those little precocious skeletons, to run out into the grown-up city, into the gloomy dregs of the night, into the everlasting school day, still always small, always full of foreboding, always late? I have no conception of the amount of succor that is constantly used up. Bang! Bang! Bang!—that’s the grandmas smashing garlic with the flats of their cleavers. (Knights dealt what the storytellers called garlic-banging blows.) Bang! Bang! They were also chopping up pork for patties, and shrimp into paste. There was a kitchen on this floor anybody could use. On its kitchen scroll, Wittman was able to recognize three words—“Food body fire”—out of about ten, and took Confucius to mean that the superior person, fueling up, pays no mind to aesthetics. That humming that underscored everything was the motor sound of sewing.

  At noon, Wittman got up and walked his bathroom gear, including his private roll of toilet paper, down the hall. He walked in on a woman, who scolded him from her throne, “Who you think you are, haw, boy? Haw, boy?” As he stepped out—her own fault, she hadn’t locked the door—she called him some of the many Chinese words for “crazy”—“Saw! Deen! Moong cha cha! Ngow! Kang!” So many ways to go bananas. Kang, the highest degree of nuts. “Too late, he’s gone kang.” He returned to his room and pissed in the sink. “There comes a time in life when everybody must take a piss in the sink—here let
me paint the window black for a minute.”

  He brushed his teeth and washed up, plotting how he might have socialized better with that bathroom woman. “It happens in the best of families,” he might’ve said.

  He took time combing out his moustache and beard, which were sparse but coarse. Hairs didn’t just hang there, they stood out. His face was wired. Buttoning up his dark green shirt, he took a good look at his skin above the collar—yellower. Sallow like tallow. This effect of the wearing o’ the green had been pointed out through the years by his mother, aunties, kid friends, make-up artists. “Don’t wear green.” One said it like a secret, another like a helpful hint, yet another, a sure fact that any fool knows. “Green’s a bad color.” For a long time he thought it had to do with bad taste or bad luck. Or his own personal complexion. “Green doesn’t look good on you.” Then some dorm guy said, “We look yellow in that color.” It had to do with racial skin. And, of course, from that time on, he knew what color he had to wear—green, his color to wear to war. He tied his hair back in the samurai-Paul Revere-piratical braid. He had assumed his mirror face, but thought he always looked like that. Once, on drugs, on the mirror trip, this face had zoomed backward and whomped forward in time—he was a star, a tadpole, a cave baby, himself like now, then a dry old man with skull pushing against, almost protruding out of, his skin. Then he saw through skin to poor, jesting, once-singing Yorick. And his farflung soul returned on a starpoint of light in Yorick’s eyehole.

  He put on the suit that he had bought for five bucks at the Salvation Army—the Brooks Brothers three-piece navy-blue pinstripe of some dead businessman. Wittman’s suited body and hairy head didn’t go together. Nor did the green shirt and greener tie (with orange-and-silver covered wagons and rows of Daniel Boones with rifles) match each other or the suit. The Wembley label on the tie said, “Wear With Brown Suit,” which Wittman defied. He pulled on his Wellingtons and stomped out onto the street. His appearance was an affront to anybody who looked at him, he hoped. Bee-e-en! The monkey, using one of his seventy-two transformations, was now changed into a working stiff on his way to his paying job.

  Out on the street, Wittman fitted onto his mongolian cheeks his spectacles that blurred everything, thus finding metaphors everywhere, like how a cable car looks like an animal-cracker box. Some things he couldn’t tell what the fuck they were, so he’d go up to a bedevilment and have a look-see, not to miss out. Like Rimbaud, I practice having hallucinations. He had picked his hallucination glasses out of the Lions Club donation box at the bank.

  What got him to take the glasses off, a brother of the streets hit him up for a light. In thanks, the street man offered a look through a toilet-paper roll tube, which he demonstrated how to use. One eye peeping, other eye squinting, he pointed that pirate spyglass viewfinder, here, there, everywhere, and said, “Wow. Oh, wow. Here, hippy, dig.” I look like a hippy dippy’s idea of a hippy dippy.

  Wittman’s turn, he saw encircled: the traffic light change to amber, and a sparrow burst out of the light can, straw straggling after it. Autumn nest. A bum-how pass wine to his fellow clochard, who drank from the bottle without first wiping its mouth. Water flow in the gutter at their feet—Lenny and George at the river. “Guys like us …” Tu Fu and Li Po beside the Yangtze. Pigeons. He looked for i.d.s on their red ankles. Nope, these hadn’t performed in Doctor Woo’s Bill and Coo act. The red flag click up in a parking meter. A hand put money into a newspaper dispenser and take two Chronicles. A leaf. Faces. He thanked the cinéma-vérité freak for the look-see. “Hippy, you are welcome.”

  At the department store where he had a job—“Are you in the English Department or the History Department?” “I’m in the Toy Department.”—it was Hallowe’en month. Wittman had helped trick up the kid dummies in flat apron-like run-over-with-a-steamroller cartoon costumes. The Management Trainees had sent out a memo: Floor personnel to wear costumes of their choice on Hallowe’en, which Wittman hoped would not fall on one of his workdays, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 1:00 to 9:00 p.m., Open Late for Your Shopping Convenience. Another season, in the Candy Department, he had worn rabbit ears and white gloves. For revenge, he had stolen candy—white chocolate—and saved on buying groceries. Do something about your life. Find a way out before you have to set up Christmas Toy-land. Transfer into Notions? Sell armpit shields and corn pads? When he was a kid, he thought he could be happy forever working in a store. The tall glass at Kress had curved around brand-new toys, each one in many copies, which the owner arranged as he pleased. Is this malcontentedness what comes with a liberal-arts education? The way they taught you to think at school was to keep asking what’s really going on. What’s that thing at the end of this assembly line for? Why merchandising? Why business? Why money? Who are the stockholders? What else have they got their fingers into? Are any of the holdings in bomb commodities? Seek out vanities and emptiness. Which way out? Which way out? One of the clerks spotted him, and left the floor—quitting time for her. No wonder he didn’t know anybody. But anything’s better than the Defense Department. And he wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a prison guard. He was barely employed, a casual employee.

  Wittman readied his station, sized up the house. Who are these people that no matter what odd time of day or night they have the wherewithal to go shopping? Put up roadblocks, do a survey, where are they going, and what do they do for a living? Are there many people like himself, then? They’re all poets taking walks? “Just browsing.” “Just looking.” Between customers he was supposed to staple-gun black-and-orange corrugated cardboard into walls and along counters. The toys on the demonstration table could use a tidying up. Few of them sprang into action today because the customers had wound them too tight, unsprung them, or their batteries were shot. He pressed the laying hen, and a white marble rolled out of a hole in her stomach. He turned her upside down and re-inserted the half-dozen marbles that had rolled to the little fence. So it has come to this. (Lew Welch, the Red Monk, says: now and again, stop and think, “So it has come to this.”)

  The other clerk, Louise—see? he remembers their names, so there’s something wrong they don’t remember his—Louise was standing on top of a ladder, taking down a Back to School theme sign. He pretended he didn’t see her. Let her do it herself, he’s not good enough for her to say hello to.

  Two tourist ladies held a large toy before his critical eyes. “Would my grandson like this? What is it? How much is it?” How come people leave their brains at home when they go on vacation? “It’s a basketball gun,” he said. “See? It says so right here. ‘Basket Shooter.’ You shoot this ball with this gun into this hoop here. It’s a basketball game, but it’s like a cannon.” No kidding. The fuckers were turning basketball into target practice. “It’s the cheapest large toy we have.” Any job can be human as long as there are other people working in the same room as you. Even in a hell of noise, such as an automobile plant, you can roll a tire or pass a tool to the next guy on the line, and do it with good will. There are big people in small jobs, and small people in big jobs, and big people in big jobs, and small people in small jobs. The only wrong job would be where you have to be cooped up by yourself making some evil item, such as a bomb part, and never meet anybody. So here were this grandmother and her buddy giving him a chance to make this toy job human. Humanize them, as they said in the Cal Education Department, meaning one’s contacts in the teachable moments during contact hours.

  “For the good of the kid, your grandson,” said Wittman, “you should not buy him this thing that is really a gun.”

  “You said it was a basketball game,” said the buddy.

  “But the kid shoots the ball with this trigger, see?”

  “How clever,” said the grandma. “May I try it?”

  “No, no. We can’t take it out of its blister pack. You don’t want the kid to grow up to be a killer, do you?”

  “Oh, is this Basket Shooter dangerous? I don’t want to buy him anything dangerous.”

  “We d
on’t want him to hurt himself,” the buddy agreed.

  “Well, kids can’t hurt one another with this basketball gun even if they aimed point-blank at any part of the body. The harm comes from their pretending to kill. They learn to like the feel of weapons. They’re learning it’s fun to play war.”

  “Are you one of those people against war toys?” “We didn’t come in here to be lectured to.”

  “Yeah, I’m against war toys. I’m anti-war. Look, I’m looking after your grandkid better than you are if you’re going to let him grow up to be a draftee.”

  “We don’t have to listen to this.” “I’m buying whatever present I want to buy for my grandson. I’ll take this—this Basket Shooter.” She flipped out her charge card. “How much is it?”

  “Fifteen ninety-nine,” said Wittman, who discovered that his anger was mightiest when he was forced to be a spokesman for an inimical position. Speak up against charge cards too, Wittman. Instead he wrote up the sale, let these women fuck over themselves and the kid.

  “Where’s the ladies’ room?” a lady interrupted, bouncing impatiently like she was going to unload on the spot. He gave her the labyrinthine though most direct directions to the restroom, which he had never actually heard a store manager say should be kept secret and hard to find. “You stay here, honey,” she said to her son. “Mommy has to go take a grunt for herself. Stay there, Bobby, stay there. Keep an eye on him, okay?” She was dumping him.

  “Wait a minute,” said Wittman. “No. We’re not a nursery. You can’t leave him here.”

  “I’ll be right back,” she said from aisles away.

  The place was filling up with dumped kids. They were poking holes in cellophane boxes. One was rubbing his runny nose on the very clean white plush tummy of a Snoopy. “Stop that,” said responsible Wittman. “Go away. Go that way,” he suggested, pointing in the direction of the Shoe Department. “Shoo.” Was that a diaper smell? He ought to get on the intercom. “We have a lost child, a lost bleeding child found unconscious, possibly dead, in the Toy Department.” Don’t you mothers drop your get on me.