Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  “Fellini is a man’s film-maker.”

  “But at the end, when everybody is running in an outdoor circus ring, didn’t you like that? Didn’t it make you feel good?”

  “That part was okay. Everybody dressed in white, the opposite of the death dance—black silhouettes—in The Seventh Seal.”

  “Sunny, you like Jules and Jim, huh?”

  “Of course, I like Jules and Jim. Everyone likes Jules et Jim. That’s everyone’s favorite movie.”

  “No, it’s not. Everyone’s favorite movie is The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

  “My favorite movie is Ugetsu.”

  “Children of Paradise.”

  “Yes, Children of Paradise.”

  “You like Jules and Jim because Jeanne Moreau has two men. We like 8½ because Mastroianni has two women.”

  “There weren’t two women. There were more like twenty.”

  “That’s what’s so funny.”

  “No, it’s not. It’s not funny.”

  So, they had themselves a thorough visit right there in the middle of the bigger party, that’s how good friends they are. If you have some very good lifelong friends you haven’t seen or called for a long time, you have to catch up on what movies you’ve seen.

  But there had been a time when Wittman and Lance had been the entertainment—tapdancing feet beating on skid row cement—Mr. Chin and Mr. Chan, howdy do, grin bones, grin bones, marionette arms dangling from tatter-stick shoulders, shuffle shoes, shuffle shoes. “Howdy do, Mr. Chin?” “J’eat rice, Mr. Chan?” “Yeah. Yeah. Rice and salt fish.” “Crabs and black bean for me.” “Wedding food, Mr. Chin.” “Ah, Mr. Chan, we dance at the marriage of death and fun.” Wittman quit the act; all Chinese jokes, no Japanese jokes.

  The newlyweds waved to somebody, urgently, and they were off. A long-time-no-see friend has at last made the scene. Mix. Circulate. So, talking to him didn’t count as circulation? Ditched. Don’t anybody notice who’s friendless at the party. He fought his shoulders’ hunching up and his feet’s shuffling, and his eyes’ hunting from downbending, wine-sipping head for who was noticing that he was unpopular. If he could stand by himself alone, him and his cigarette, he would have perfected cool. In another corner, an overexcited party-goer had shut his eyes and was holding his hands in salaam position, his lips ohming and mumbling, trying to calm the space in and around him. How rude. Go home, why don’t you? When you meditate, meditate; when you party, party.

  Well, here’s a “pool of acquaintanceship” of two to three hundred. According to friendship experts, the average American has seven “friendship units,” couples counting as one unit, that is, from seven to fourteen friends. How many does he have? Below average.

  Over by the fire, people suddenly burst out laughing, apparently at something the chattering fire did. “Oh, no!” “Oh, yeah!” Silence. Then many of them spoke at once, trying to get the rest to listen. “We could get arrested for watching that.” “There are people who want to arrest other people for watching that.” Giggles. Quick lookings around by the paranoid to check out who meant what by “that.” “They want to arrest people for feeling good.” Gleeful laughter. Scornful laughter. The glee winning out. Then they were all smiling calmly, gazing into the now silken flames. They were swimming in hallucinogen, ripped but appearing as ordinary as pie. So this is how the psychedelic state looks from the outside, that is, through the vantage eyes of a head straight from ear to ear at the moment. The stoned heads didn’t look especially strange, a little high and red-eyed maybe, but they were smoking too, and topping mescaline and/or lysergic acid with god knows what else—combinations, asmador and Stelazine, carbogen and laughing gas, Romilar C.F. and belladonna from Vicks inhalators, whippets and whipped cream and aerosol. If peyote, the messy throw-up stage was over. They were not outwardly extraordinary; they were not actually flying around the room or going through the changes from amoeba on up. They were looking Neanderthally at the fire because we were cavemen for a long time. Then it will be a campfire on the lone prairie because we were cowboys for a generation (and more, counting the movies). And then—atomic flashes. The ages of man, though, did not visibly ripple up and down their faces. Their hair was not standing up on end as antennae for the aurora borealis. Now, all of them were calm, breathing in unison; they must be on that trip where the margins between human beings, and between human beings and other creatures, disappear, so that if one hurts, we all hurt, so that to stop war, all we have to do is drop lysergic acid into the water supply, but we don’t even need to do that—because all human beings of all time are in connection—the margins didn’t disappear—there aren’t any margins—psychedelics only make you know about things, and do not cause a thing to be—it is—it already is—no need to reconnoiter the reservoir at Lake Chabot over beyond Canyon and the one you can see from MacArthur Boulevard, climb the dam walls and elude guards and drop L.S.D. in the water supply after all. The pleasure of acid was in knowing ideas as real as one’s body and the physical universe. A girl with long hair brushed her face; the webs were bothering her. A couple of people suddenly sat up and looked around, alert. Somebody knelt like church, arms and face raised like stained-glass cathedral. Wittman did not dash over to ask what anybody saw. They were not a lively bunch. He and his compadres may not have actually flown, but when they turned into fenris wolves and dire wolves in a pack on the roam through the wilds, they had actually run barefoot through Berkeley, running to the Steppenwolf one night, having also dropped rauwolfia serpentina—“What’s the trip?” “Fear and panic, man.”—The fun of pure fear.—and on another night, landing at the laundromat, as you do, that laundromat on Telegraph Avenue, coming down with green paint on their faces. And recalling talking to a Black man, who was saluting a tiny American cocktail flag on top of a pyre. And they had talked, evolving language from growls to explanations of life in the universe. It must be that people who read go on more macrocosmic and microcosmic trips—Biblical god trips, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake trips. Non-readers, what do they get? (They get the munchies.)

  Wittman went over below the tall black windows, where a group were talking politics. “At the rate the Masai are killing elephants,” somebody was saying, “elephants will soon be extinct. Forever. From off the face of the Planet Earth.” “Fuck the Masai,” said this scientist girl, whom he had met before. “If I had a choice which—Masai or elephant—to conserve, I’d choose the elephants. There are too many people and not enough elephants. Elephants are peace-loving creatures, and faithful to their families and to their tribes their whole lives long. That’s more than you can say for people. You must’ve noticed, there’s a lot of anti-elephant propaganda. The movies are brainwashing us against non-human species. We have pictures in our heads of stampeding herds of elephants—rogue elephants on the rampage—man-eating elephants—trampling villages. Well, the fact is: Elephants can’t run. They walk. Remember in Dumbo the Flying Elephant when Timothy Mouse scares the circus elephants, and they tear down the tent? Walt Disney couldn’t do a Living Desert-type movie with elephants acting like that; he had to use animation.” Oh, yes, she’s the one doing her doctoral dissertation on Walt Disney with an emphasis on The Living Desert. “I say, Fuck the Masai. The brain energy of human beings goes into thinking up ways to kill whatever there is that moves. Fuck the Masai. Sure, I mean it. I’m on the side of life. When I shop at the Co-op, I choose the tomatoes with the bug bites and worm holes. I do.” “Yeah, yeah, I’m hip. Fruit and vegetables want to be eaten,” said this guy with a rep as a heroin addict. “Oranges drop out of trees and say, ‘Eat me. Eat me.’ ” Strange how heroin addicts are always eating health food. Somebody else, who had majored in Africa, said that the Masai were hardly the elephantine consumers the Disney scholar was making them out to be. They don’t cut up their cattle into hamburger and sirloins but only bleed and milk them. “The same way that Indian medicine women harvest parts of plants, some leaves from each plant, a branch, a sectio
n of a tuber system, rather than pull up the whole plant by the root.” “How come Masai men are really good-looking,” said a girl who traveled a lot, “and Masai women aren’t?” “They seem that way to you because you’re extremely hetero and not attracted to any kind of woman.” “No, no, I’m speaking objectively.” “What do you mean by ‘good-looking’?” “Masai are like fraternal twins. Take a boy twin and a girl twin who look so alike they’d be identical if they were both boys or both girls. The boy always looks good for a boy, but the girl looks like a boy.” “Yeah, like the Kennedys all look alike, but the men look good, and the women are homely.” “If you watch elephants closely, you’d see that they are individual in looks and personalities.” “Maybe you have a warped standard of beauty. Who amongst us in this room looks like a Masai woman? Come on, pick one out, and we can decide for ourselves whether she looks good or not.” The scientist girl and the traveler girl looked at this one and at that one, turned around to look, and said that nobody there looked as ugly as a Masai woman. “Keep looking.” Putting them on the spot. “You’re being fooled by make-up and fashions. The range of human looks can’t be that far apart. Of all the people here, who looks the closest to a Masai woman?” They waited, nobody letting the white chicks off the hook. There was a tall Black girl in the group, getting taller, and nobody was about to say it was her, and nobody was going to point out any other Black woman either. Wittman wasn’t shining; time to maneuver a getaway. A newcomer was looking over shoulders, and Wittman stepped back, made room for him, and walked off, his place taken. He was getting good at shed-and-dump.

  And he ran right into the most boring guest at the party, this left-wing fanatic who can’t tell the difference between a party and a meeting. Each time they’d ever met, he carried on about injustice in a country you never heard of, and invited you to a “demo” in front of a hotel or a post office, which is federal property. The “demo” would be sponsored by “The Ad Hoc Committee to Save Whatever,” founded by its only member, this left-wing fanatic. If you got a word in edgewise, he put it in his Marxist bag, and let you have it for not being radical enough. He had urged students to take R.O.T.C. to learn practical skills, such as shooting guns, that can be useful in making revolution. “You mean you want me to kill?” Wittman had asked, to agitate him; “I’ll join R.O.T.C. if you join the Tibetan Brigade.” Remember the Tibetan Brigade drilling on the soccer field near Bowles Hall? What happened to them? Did they ever get to Tibet? A man of principle has to hear a leftist out. It’s very brave of him to picket Nob Hill all by himself, vexing delegates of governments and corporations who stay at the Mark Hopkins, the Fairmont, the Stanford Court. Tonight, the leftist was dragging around an old and tired lady. “This is Doña Maria Francesca de Ortega y Lopez”—a longer name than that—“from Sud America.” Wittman, an irrelevant nobody, was not introduced by name. She didn’t look at him anyway. One moment she was silent, and the next, she was spieling from deep inside, barely audible. He hoped that she was not saying what he was hearing, “… political torture … every man in the village …,” and names, Dons and Doñas. She rolled up a sleeve; there was a dark indentation in the bruised fat of her arm. “Bullet wound?” he asked. She shook her head, “Sí”; she does that yes-no under interrogation. Please don’t be saying that soldiers killed kids—niños y niñas—in front of parents. “Rapid,” she said. “Rapid.” As in “rapo,” “rapere”? Wittman ought to come to her rescue. She is summoning him to responsibilities which would give him a life with important meanings. But he’s ignorant, inengagé, not serious. “Could you tell her for me, please, that I don’t want to help right now?” he said. Shame on him, so much more playing to do. The leftist rolled his eyes—a me-ay of exasperation—didn’t translate such a Norte Americano embarrassment. He took the lady by the unwounded arm over to another listener, who might have a better conscience. She said, “Gracias.”

  Wittman hurried to pass a set of modular sofa-chairs, arranged invitingly by the married women, who were sitting safely together. They were newlyweds, young matrons, who last year were dates, but now they were wives. The adventurous girls had left for New York. The husbands were getting loaded with the boys, or dancing with the Pan Am stews. He’d gotten stuck with the wives before—stopped to say howdy-do and couldn’t get away. Not a one of them was like Anna Karenina or Constance Bonacieux or Lady Connie Chatterley. Nobody bursting with sexy dissatisfaction. They were unappealing and blobby—well, two were pregnant. It was true about “letting herself go.” They might as well have blackened their teeth. He had asked, “What have you been up to?” After they say they’re housewives, there is nothing for him to say next. He had nodded and nodded, as if interested in “my stove,” “my dinette set,” “my floors,” “my husband,” “our pregnancy.” A husband would come by and ask his wife to dance, but afterwards he brought her straight back here and left her. Surely, wives hate being stuck with wives. But how to party without being unfaithful? Why hasn’t his lively generation come up with what to do with wives at parties? “Hi, Lisa,” he said. “Hi, Shirley.” That turning of wives’ faces to him, troping him as he hurried by to join the men and single girls, wasn’t because of his attractiveness; they didn’t have anything else to do. They’d been sitting here like this since the last party. Watch to see when Lance starts parking Sunny.

  His host and hostess were in the middle of a group that seemed to be having the best time, but he couldn’t very well go over there when he’d already been conferred his turn.

  “Excuse me,” said a little woman beside him. She was unusual in that she seemed older and straighter than anybody. “Have you seen Sam? I’ve been looking all over for him.”

  “Sam who? I don’t know anybody named Sam.”

  “I better go look for him. I’ll be right back.” And she took off. Another hit-and-run.

  “I can’t find him.” Whaddaya know. She had said, “I’ll be right back,” and she was back.

  “You’re smart to keep track of him. Sam’s a plainclothes narc.”

  Her eyebrows flew up, and she laughed, delighted. “Sam? You’ve got to be kidding. Not Sam. Oh. I’m not with Sam. I have been going out with him, though. I don’t think it’s going to work out. He’s a health-food freak.”

  “Is he a heroin addict?”

  “Oh, no, of course not. He’s a health nut.”

  “Every heroin addict I know is on health foods. They’re always trying to feel better. Another sign of the addict is strange-smelling piss. It must be the asparagus they eat.”

  “The only food I’ve seen Sam eat is lettuce with beige stuff. He took me sailing on the Bay, and we landed on Angel Island for a picnic. When he opened up the cooler, there were napkins, and his tacklebox with fifty-six kinds of vitamin pills, and this salad, which he drizzled beige stuff on top of. He talks about grinding up raw almonds in his blender. I guess that’s what that beige stuff is. There were deer and raccoons; they went over to other people’s picnics. He and I have no future.”

  “Want another drink?” asked Wittman. “Here I am letting you stand there with an empty glass. Let me freshen it up.” He was getting good at party brush-offs. You ask if you can get them a drink, and dig out. Testing them, do they want to talk to you further? If so, they’ll say, “No, thanks,” in which case you say, “I think I’ll get myself one,” and cut out before you get bored or boring.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, and headed toward the refreshments. There. He’d never used those manners before. Something must be happening to him. She hadn’t even been uninteresting, and he had ducked her. He could go back there and talk to her some more if he wanted. They’re not supposed to feel hurt. Nothing personal. Circulating. Calculating.

  He went straight out to the porch, and up some stairs to a balcony—no other party escapee here—smoked, considered hanging it up, half-ass gibbous moon in the sky—and re-entered to a corridor of closed doors. The Steppenwolf at the entrance to the Ma
gic Theater. Lu Sooon surrounded by the eight slabs of rock doors at Fishbelly Holm. “For Mad Men Only. The Price of Admission—Your Mind.” He opened any old door and went in. Movies. Also pot-luck doping going on. And they were showing a short co-produced by his own self with a stop-and-go hand-held camera. He crawled under the lightbeam and sat on the floor beneath the projector. The technique he’d helped invent was to try for a cartoon effect using face cards—you shoot a few frames, stop, move the cards, shoot again. And there they are, very bright, the Queen of Hearts, the Knave of Diamonds, the King of Spades running about on the wood table. The Knave is driving a toy pick-up truck, in the bed of which the King is suddenly hauled away. The Queen is backing off into the distance. And—deus ex machina—a black Hand (in a glove) clacking a pair of scissors beheads the Knave, picks up the King, chases the Queen, and carries them into the air. They’d filmed extreme close-ups of all three beheadings, and during the editing, decided which royal head would have the en scene star focus death. A new king and a new queen parade with the heads on pikes by torchlight. The grande finale—a cauldron of swirling water and red paint, and toy dinosaurs falling in by the Handful, and the pieces of the King, Queen, and Knave turning, and, what the hell, the rest of the pack, everything dizzying in the vortex of time. The End.

  People were clapping, and they had laughed. “Not bad.” “Not bad.” The movie was different from when he’d run it; it was the music. There had been dirge music—the royal family moved majestically. But now there was Loony Tunes music, and the playing cards were rushing nuttily about, though the speed was actually no faster. The same story can be comedy or tragedy, depending on the music. Bad noises roaring overhead and in the streets, the world gets crazier.

  Then up on the screen popped a slide of the sun setting beyond the mud flats of the Bay, the sun to the right, a branch of driftwood in the foreground on the left. Somebody said, “Sunset”; otherwise, would you know (if you weren’t from around here) whether the sun at a horizon were in the east or the west, a sunrise or a sunset? In real life, there’s no doubt. “Sh-sh. Look.” Lance at the projector. He ejected the slide, and flipped it over, now the sun on the left and the black stick on the right. It gave off a different emotion—a shift inside the mind and chest. I felt safe, and now I am desolate. Because the first was the image as it occurred in nature? And in this reversal the stick sticks out more lonely on the salt marsh. Lance flipped the picture again, and the sun was again important and warm. Because we saw it this way first? The audience, patient on dope, and never tiring of taking out a somewhat aphasic brain and playing with it, were wowed.