Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.” And walked. He left her there, kinky and alone. Sick seppuku chick slicing and sewing. Left her there with her shameful, unique deformity. He turned about, held his knuckles up to his eyes, and flapped his fingers at her. Like Daisy Duck eyelashes. Waved bye-bye with Daisy Duck eyelashes.

  He followed flashing light and music to the room that in olden days was the front parlor—a strobe-light dance, like he first saw at “America Needs Indians.” A lightshow dance at home. People breaking apart stroboscopically. Pieces hyperbright. My substantial body likewise—disappears and re-appears. A marionette who flies apart, scares kids, and suddenly reconnects. My parts dance whether I dance or not. Might as well dance. You move your crazy way; the light moves its crazy way. That hand or foot could be yours, it could be mine. Hands fanning. White sneakers stepping. White socks winking. Fanning feet. A white sleeve. The other sleeve. Angel wings feathering. White duck legs jumping. A white bra through a dark blouse. The fast, cold light will zap through to our white bones. And reveal which beautiful girl to be the White Bone Demoness. Them bones them bones gonna walk around. Step into the dark—floor’s there, no abyss. White oxfords doing the splits. Come and go. Go and come. Open and shut your eyes, change the periodicity. Can’t tell your blink from its blink. White gloves slapclap and fingerwave. Wittman moved any which way, invisible in his dark suit, crossing his hands before his eyes, like an umpire. Safe. Safe. Dance any silly dance you want to. The light does the rhythm. And rocknroll too loud for talk. Free of partners. I’m dancing with her and her and nobody and everybody. Loose. Is that beautiful Nanci I see? Yes, her face laughing; a curtain of hair swings over it—nope, the back of her head. Twist over in her direction. Here’s Sunny the bride coming at him in fragments, her hair a splendor of gold. “ ‘Titania,’ ” said Wittman, “ ‘dance in our round and see our moonlight revels.’ ” “Huh?” Hand to her ear. “Leave Oberon, and come with me!” Shout what you want. Dance how you want. Okay to make ass. “You’ve been married to that guy long enough. Run away with me.” She shrugged to the music, and flitted away, designs on her butterfly sleeves—two swarms of fireflies. He reached for her hand, missed, having aimed for the hand at the wrong end of the fan-out. But there’s beautiful Nanci again. “Hey!” he said. “Did I scare you the other day?! I’m sorry! That I scared you! Are you pissed at me?! I wanted—I want to show you what I’m like. You did too like my poems. Hey, I know your future. I can tell your future. You’ll end up with me.” His feet were stumbling; headwork and mouthwork throw the dancing off. She leaned to try to hear him, smiled him a stroboscopic smile, and flew away in a rush of afterimages. She almost stayed long enough to have been his dance partner. People seemed to chase one another—chase movie—all going in the same direction, then switch and run counterwise. Were they whacking one another with rolled-up newspapers? And who’s that? A very tall, very black Black man and a very tall, very blonde woman, both wearing street-fighting leathers, stood arrogantly in the center, the same couple, the same pose, at the far out left wing fundraiser chez Mitford-Treuhaft. Daring you to call them out. Wittman moved toward them, but they were gone, went into a room where they could be lit and appreciated better. There’s his old friend and enemy, Lance, looking down on me, no job, poor poems, square trips. Heads flickered by, and on the faces of the flickering heads were flickering expressions. Don’t take them personally—am I keeping my discomfiture hidden? Stay very cool. Don’t get caught with exertion or envy or smugness or any ugliness on your face. Nor let the light cut to a smile held tight too long, turning fake. A set of teeth were smiling on the floor, clackety-clack Hallowe’en choppers. Who choo laffin’ at, boy? The cat disappeared, his smile remained. Trick or treat. Is that a mask or is it your face? Ha ha. Whose hand is that? Doing what to whom? “Suspicious, Mr. Chan?” “I smell foul play, Birmingham Brown.” Whose foxy eyes narrowing at me? Wait a second. Just because eyeballs slide back and forth does not mean that conspiracy is afoot. Once paranoia starts, it keeps on coming. Okay, let me have it. Get it over with. A glower of thick eyebrows—do not react back—does not have to be a hate-stare. Keep my own face empty of suspicion and calculation. A mouth screwing up does not have to signify disapproval. A lot of people have piggy eyes and piggy noses and curly lips and flashy eyeteeth who mean no harm. Mugs are at large. No scene to comprehend expressions, and make use of them. We are blushing chameleons, ripping through the gears of camouflage trying to match the whizzing environment. Hang on. Hang on. Lobsang Rampa, who may not be a fake, says we will see monster faces, such as the ox face, on our way to death. Let them go by, he says. As Macbeth should have let pass the heads of kings without doing anything about them. Sunny winks at me. Interestedly? Lance glows greenly. Sunny hiding. Ah, sequences. Oh, no, a shmeer on my face. Don’t look, everybody. Re-arrangements. Control my slidy features. Put the old face in neutral. Hold it. Is there a neutral, or does it come out bored or tired or tightass? Cocksure, ha ha. And there’s the girl from the bus. Certainly didn’t turn into Queen Kristine. The light jerked her away.

  Flashes and music were beating together now. Wittman was getting used to things, yeah, his feet in step, the old bod bopping okay, and his monkey mind going along. His heart was beating with the bass. Go with it. If you fight it, you will shoot off on a long slow bad trip all by yourself, untethered like Destination Moon. He went monkeying around the room, fancy feet making intricate moves, multiplexed by the light. Pardon that foot. That’s okay. That’s okay. Somebody else’s unruly white bucks. Might as well be mine. We are as face cards being shuffled, and my fanning arms are merging into the images of the fanning arms of others. And the world is in sync. In sync at last. God Almighty, in sync at last. Feet go with drums. Heart booms to bass. My pulse, its pulse. Its pulse, my pulse. Ears, eyes, feet, heart, myself and all these people, my partners all. In sync. All synchronized. A ballet dancer and an m.s. spastic—no different—O democratic light. Innards at one with the rest of the world. And why not when we’re doing the twist, and Chubby Checker does the twist, “Let’s twist again, like we did last summer,” and the light is a strobe, and a strobila is a twisty pine cone. All right. All right. And—. And—. And—. And then—. Bang bang. Bang bang. But—. But—. But—. Banga. Banga. Lost. Found. Lost. Found. Gotcha. Gotcher teeth. Gotcher face. Boom. Boom. Bomb. The Bomb. Bomb flash. Bomb flash. In what pose will the last big flash catch me? What if. This were. Bomb practice? We’re training to dig flashes. And my fellow man and woman aglow. Like fast frequent pulsations of radioactivity. Why is the beat so even? If the bright intervals equal the dark intervals, like the black-and-white gingham on a Balinese butt, then are Good and Evil at an exact standoff? Paranoid again. Like we were last summer. What if Chubby Checker does not mean us well? What if Chubby Checker is up to no good? This is not Chubby Checker. Why is this tape going on for so long? Whose music is this? What. If. Music. Can. Kill. Evil drummer finds your heartbeat, and drums it. You dance along, drumbeat and heartbeat and feet together, like harmony; but what if all of a sudden—a last bang—the drummer stops, and stops your heart? But this set—ominous undertoning bass—goes on and on. This follow-along body is speeding. A race to the death. The End? The End. Is near. Ha ha. Fooled you. Longest coda in the world. To tear the heart from its mooring arteries. Hearts will flop like frogs all over the floor.

  The music, however, ended before anything like that happened. The strobe lights wrought craziness. Survivors talked over what happened. Wittman headed for normal light.

  But suddenly a whistling started up, higher and higher, then a supersonic jet war fighter plane crashed through the sound barrier right there inside the house—the fucking house taking off. People ducked to the floor, backed against the walls, dived under tables. Hung on to the shag rug.

  Sound waves pushed on them, and held them flattened. What the fuck was that? Oh, my god, they’ve gone and done it. This is it. Blown up the planet. Nothing left but noise. The Bomb. Has set off the Earthq
uake. California at last breaking loose from North America. The Rad Lab—on the fault. Blown. And resonating booming further sound. People laughed and giggled, holding their faces. Some of them might have been screaming—you could scream all you want, nobody could hear you—opening their mouths like the Munch painting. And the skull and the planet split into bowls of mush brains.

  What it was were the sounds of World War II playing full blast out of the loudspeakers, of which there were twelve, hooked up to the roof and the corner eaves, engines for propelling the house away. Sound effects you can check out of the public library. Mixed with the sounds of a takeoff as you lie in the grass among the seagulls and the egrets and the jackrabbits next to the runway at the San Francisco International Airport—and this jumbo jet pulls up off the ground almost right over you, hair and feathers blowing, and just about pulls the soul right out of your body. The wind. The size. The steel. The speed. The noise. Acid flash. Acid flash. That mixed with the roars of Fleishhacker Zoo at feeding time. When you thought back on the tape, you could distinguish mortar shells from rifle shots, fighter planes diving, hand grenades, machine-gun fire, and the A-bomb at Nagasaki and the A-bomb at Hiroshima, and—finale—those bombs over-dubbed in multiplex bombilation. The boom of the Bomb, then subsequent booms, the resounding, rolling aftershocks—roaring, roaring, roaring. We are all hibakushas. The guests were thinking, “All right. Enough already. I got the joke”—and it went on and on and on.

  Suddenly it was over. In the silence, people kept explaining things to one another. The amps on the roof make a giant resonator of the house. You can get sound effects from studio connections in Hollywood, the A-bombs from the Oakland Public Library. Direct from the actual bombs to your ears. “That was the Bomb.” “Is that all the loud it is? It must have been louder than that.”

  Nobody heard police sirens. Red and blue lights swiveled onto walls and ceiling. Like the invasion of the Martians in War of the Worlds. Guests hiding at the windows listened to Lance sweet-talking the cops. Other guests were leaving, thank you, thank you, goodbye, taking zombie steps past the paddywagons. A two-paddywagon party. One of the policemen was asking him to go inside and bring out people who were breaking the law. Cops without warrants are like vampires; they can’t cross the threshold unless you invite them. Lance asked, “Such as which laws, Officer? I didn’t notice any unusual misbehavior, sir, but I’ll co-operate, and look around.” Then he was inside looking out the window at the police asking another person to go find him—“about yay tall, business suit.” People were going in, coming out, like the townspeople in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, unloading the truck of pods, as Kevin McCarthy and his girlfriend spy from behind the blinds. Lance went out there from another direction, and said, “We withdraw all charges. Sorry, we shouldn’t have called you. As you can see, no problem, no trouble-makers.” And so, toward morning, it became a quiet party.

  A girl, who was sitting at the top of the stairs, her sandaled toes playing peek-a-boo, was saying by heart for a crowd ranged on the steps below her every verse of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.”

  “There’s men that somehow just grip your eyes,

  and hold them hard like a spell;

  And such was he, and he looked to me like a

  man who had lived in hell.…”

  She looked right into Wittman’s eyes—chose him out—and he hung over the railing, listening to the whole thing, taking a liking to her cornball ways. She stood and stuck her elbow out, the jagtime ragtime kid taking five beside his upright 88. A stranger staggers into the Malamute saloon, and buys drinks for the house. She lifted her chin, as if showing off an Adam’s apple. She’s knocking back a shot of hootch—“the green stuff in his glass.” She brushed the swing of fringe on a buckskin sleeve, sat down, and made talon hands—the stranger clutches the keys and plays that piano.

  “Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the

  moon was awful clear,

  And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a

  silence most could hear;

  With only the howl of a timber wolf and you

  camped there in the cold,

  A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean

  mad for the muck called gold;

  While high overhead, green, yellow, and red,

  the North Lights swept in bars?—

  Then you’ve a haunch what the music meant

  … hunger and night and the stars.”

  Goddamn. She knows me, and she wants me bad. The way she’s looking at me, and none other, she understands, and she likes me, a heartbreaker and a rover. That’s me all over. She’s holding her hands over her heart, and beholding me like I’m the one breaking it.

  “There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,

  A race that can’t sit still.

  So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

  And they roam the world at will.”

  That’s me. She knows me and my timber wolf Steppenwolf ways, and sympathizes. She’s melting my loneliness. Four years of Chaucer and Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens, Whitman, Joyce, Pound and Eliot, and you shoot me right through the heart with Robert W. Service.

  Okay, so Bloomsbury did not recite Robert Service. Neither did Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon. Neither did the Beats. But Wittman Ah Sing’s friends—the most artistic people he knew how to find anywhere—his generation—did. Wittman had been there at Berkeley when Charles Olson read—and drew, spreading wide his arms, a map of the universe on the chalkboard—circles and great cosmic rings. And Lew Welch dangling his legs off the corner edge of the platform and nodding in rhythm, yeah, yeah, “Ring of bone. Where ring is the sound a bell makes.” And Brother Antoninus out of St. Albert’s for the night, some other monk ringing the angelus bells. A Black lady from the audience questioned “lily white,” and Olson answered her with a lotus vision, and Ginsberg, the social realist, had had to explain to him about politics. That’s how far Olson went into his created world. And Wittman Ah Sing had been there in the room too, though nobody knew it. It was okay that nobody knew; he was just a nobody kid. He had seen for himself what an older generation of poets was like. They had not tried to include Young Millionaires and Pan Am stewardesses.

  “They range the field and they rove the flood,

  And they climb the mountain’s crest;

  Theirs is the curse of the gypsy’s blood,

  And they don’t know how to rest.

  If they just went straight they might go far;

  They are strong and brave and true;

  But they’re always tired of the things that are,

  And they want the strange and new.…”

  Shrewd-eyed—Maria Ouspenskaya, “My son, Bela, has the curse of the werewolf.”—the girl at the top of the stairs caught and opened the hand of a lucky one of her admirers, and wrote in it the lines of his life and fate. It’s hard to tell, mock-corny or real corny. A rebel, reciting fervently what we’re supposed to not like. Come now, “The Men Who Don’t Fit In” does feel better than “The Waste Land.” The brainwashing of a too hip education is wearing off. She sounds so valiant, and one feels so sad. “Ha, ha!” she shouted. If Wittman were not shy, he’d say along with her in duet:

  “Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;

  He was never meant to win;

  He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;

  He’s the man who won’t fit in.”

  Her audience clapped, whistled. Wittman too. She’s our brave queen. We’re such geniuses, we know how to like anything. The hall light shone on her, an overhead light that cast shadow bags and hag noses on all but her; on her, a halo, a rainbow. Look at her, lifting her hair with both hands. Hair’s so heavy—let me just lift the gold chain-link weight of it off my neck. Oh, my burdensome hair. She sat up, the hair rippling as she leaned toward us.

  Wittman held out his hand, bidding her descend the stairs to him, but she shook her head and hair, and sat amid her court. He climbed over th
e railing and up the stairs to the glimmering girl. She turned away, her hair a golden curtain. He was reaching down to draw it aside when she threw back her head—her hair fell back—and they were looking each other in the eyes—he tall above her, and she feminine on the floor below him. Gazing into her hazelwood eyes, he sat beside her. He pushed aside her hair, broke that hazelwand gaze, cupped her ear, and whispered into it, whispering much, until the others, left out, left the two of them alone. Eat your heart out, Nanci Lee.

  O possibilities of what to say. Going over this later, Wittman, old with wandering, thought what if he’d done another one of the shticks that was flickering in the brightening air, would they have loved one another better? Everything counts; no time off ever, not on weekends, certainly not at parties. Go ahead, speak poetry to her. Seriously. Let her laugh. He would be grave. When in doubt, sez Dostoevsky or Tolstoy or Thomas Mann, always do the most difficult thing. Say to her your favorite by-heart poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” All the way through with no jokes. What’s the use of having poems in your head if you can’t have scenes in your life to say them in? And nobody to say them to? Who knows when the chance will come again. Here’s a girl who has said poems, and has made a way possible for someone such as oneself to say poetry back to her. Play with her a love scene in verse. And at the same time educate her to a better poet (Yeats) than Robert Service. She won’t take Aengus’ vow for Wittman’s vow. The silver-trout girl doesn’t stay. So go ahead, Wittman, bring her the silver apples of the moon, and the golden apples of the sun, and kiss her lips, and take her hands.