Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  But when he breathed and talked into her erogenous ear, he reserved “The Song of Wandering Aengus” for later, or for another. He praised her looks. “Thy rose lips and full blue eyes,” he said. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” he said, giving credit. He moved away from her ear; he held her hands, and beheld her mouth. He could make a wisecrack about the rosy swollen mouth on thy face like the elsewhere mouth that will leave a trail-spoor of silver snail slime. He could teach her some new words, get her to say, “En-woman me, Wittman.”

  He asked her her name. Taña De Weese. He will be able to find her again with an ad in the personals of The Berkeley Barb—“Taña, meet me on the barricades.”

  She asked him his name, and he gave her his first name and last name. If you give your last name, she can find you again. He let go her hands, stood, and galloped down the stairs. Leave before you fuck things up.

  Oh, it’s a good party now. There’s a beautiful girl in hot pursuit of him. Yeah, let her come after him.

  One more task to do, and the party will be complete: Clear up some friendship karma. Every get-together can be an occasion to have it out with a friend. The best parties end in a free-for-all.

  And there in an alcove were Lance and Sunny, reigning side by side on the window seat. Our emperor and empress. Wittman sat down on the side next to Sunny.

  “Make any good contacts?” asked Lance. “Are you having a good time?” asked his consort.

  “How many people have asked you, ‘Are you having a good time?’ ” asked Wittman.

  “One or two.”

  “When people are going around polling one another, ‘Are you having a good time?,’ they’re not getting into the party.” He looked across her to say to her husband, “I think that it is fucked to make contacts rather than to make friends. I don’t like contacts. What do you say to one? ‘Of what use are you to me?’ ‘What are you offering?’ ‘To what or to whom is your end connected?’ A party is a party. Or do you throw these parties for the sake of business deals? You go around assessing our connections? Why cultivate me? What good am I to you and your associates?” Wittman meant that he didn’t want to do business whatsoever. There has got to be a way to live and never do business.

  Lance only laughed. “Wittman. Wittman. You have to be subtle. You haven’t been bruiting it among others that you’ve been fired, have you? Sunny and I have been keeping your secret. You do know that you can’t get a job without you already have a job. You’re not moving fast enough up your own organization, you go after a promotion horizontally. You never admit, ‘I don’t have a job.’ You don’t have to talk business at all, especially not at my party.” Bidness a-tall. “You relax, have a good time, make friends, and at a future date, when they hear of an opening, they think of you. Make friendships longterm, Wittman. The frat brothers, or in your case, the coop guys will pay off.”

  “I didn’t go through Cal to make contacts.”

  “Of course you didn’t. You would’ve gone to a private school for that. Stanford or Back East.”

  “Lance, you’re using a tone on me, aren’t you? Will you quit toning on me, and answer me something? There’s a matter I’ve wanted to ask you about for years.”

  “Held it in all that time, huh?”

  “When do you think you first met me? From what time do you date our acquaintanceship?”

  “From school.”

  “Which school?”

  “Cal.”

  “No. Before that. You don’t remember meeting me in grammar school? I remember you. You were taidomo no taisho—leader of the kids. No. No. Try wait. General. General of the kids. You got to be taidomo no taisho in the camp. You led your army out of the camps and into the schoolyard, and beat the shit out of me. You don’t remember ganging up on a tall skinny transfer who didn’t fight back, and beating the shit out of him? That was me.”

  Shaking his head, Lance looked at Wittman, studied his face, but he looked at everyone with that intensity. In Japanese movies, noble knights, urban businessmen, peasant clowns, women—intense. In real life, Japanese-Americans don’t relax. Sansei born and raised in P.O.W. “relocation” camp. He’s looking at me with ex-con’s eyes.

  “You don’t remember a Chinese kid that was in class for a while, and suddenly disappeared? My parents moved around a lot. I didn’t get the knack of forming gangs. You don’t remember socking a lone Chinese? There was just one Chinese boy. That was me. I got in trouble for fighting, and you didn’t. You had witnesses. I think I’m running across members of your gang. Some of them were at Berkeley, grown. There are some here. None of you recognize me, huh?”

  “I’m taidomo no taisho still yet. I have been and will always be the adult among children. I don’t remember you. Are you accusing me of beating you up?”

  Now what? Forgotten. Why is it that Wittman remembers others, such as check-out clerks, bank tellers, the coins-and-slugs collector at the laundromat, bus drivers, teachers, fellow students (many gone from parties because of graduation), but they don’t remember him? Don’t back down. “Yeah. And fighting dirty, and you continue to pick on me. I want to know, are we having a continuous fight that you started at Lafayette Grammar School? And, do you want to finish it now?”

  “So I was a kid and didn’t know better. Who wasn’t? I don’t fight dirty.”

  “You had a gang, and I was by myself.”

  “If you think I did that, I apologize. You want to fight, we’ll fight. Do you want to fight right now, or do you want to go out in the alley?” Is there an alley, or is he being ironic about alley fights? I am not good at irony anymore. Sunny looked like she was being entertained, like they were dueling over her.

  “I am less interested in hitting you than in your admitting what you have been up to all these years. You don’t remember a kid who could juggle any three things? Erasers? Apples? Knives? Chomping the passing apples? That was me.”

  “Wittman, have you been smoking too much? You’re really paranoid, man.”

  “The best way to help out a paranoiac is to tell him the truth about whether somebody’s after him. You jack memories around, Lance, they turn on you psychologically. What you did, taidomo no taisho, you roasted goats, such as myself. You’re good at defining an enemy while the rest of us have our thumbs up our asses, which is the position of most people on most topics. Whoever comes along and tells them what’s going on, what the topics are, that there are topics, that a war is on, that’s the one who gets to be leader. I’ve got your strategy, huh? You harness the polymorphous paranoia that floats around all the time, and you rule. I’m not just bringing up something that happened during kidtime, but what you do to us now. I know your m.o., man. Every school I went to, a Sansei Nihonjin, dressed in the right clothes, driving the right car, speaking with no accent, like you’re dubbed, became the top bull and took over the junior prom and the senior ball and the assemblies and the student-body elections. At Cal, I recognized you right off, studying in the oriental section of the library at the table with the A.J.A. football player and the two A.J.A. girls on the pompon squad and the two Oski Dolls who were Chinese-Americans. Are you sure you didn’t recognize me, the one integrating the other end of the main reading room? I noticed the way you dealt with her kind.” A thumb at Sunny. “You take their shit like they’re not dishing out any. You act like you’re having the best time no matter what kind of racist go-away signals they’re flashing at you. And you keep it up and keep it up until they, having a shorter attention span, think that you belong all along. I spot your technique, see? You A.J.A.s are really good at belonging, you belong to the Lions, the Masons, the V.F.W., the A.M.A., the American Dental Association. That’s why they locked you up, man. They don’t like you taking over the dances and getting elected Most Popular. (While we Chinese-Americans are sweating Most Likely to Succeed, and don’t spend money on clothes, or on anything.) At camp you learned to tapdance and to play baseball, and you came out and organized everything, parties, labor unions, young millionaires.”
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br />   “So? So you’re envious?”

  “So don’t be such a conformist. Don’t be such a smug asshole.”

  “Smug?” said Lance. “Asshole?” said Sunny.

  “You better watch being so smug. That’s how you’re coming across, you know that? I bet you think you’re coming across menacing. Well, you’ve turned smug. No, no. You’ve always been smug. You had that same smug face as a kid.”

  “Maybe he’s got something to be smug about,” said the wife.

  “What are you smug about? Everything, huh? Once taidomo no taisho, general of the kids, and now the one who throws the parties, attended by all kinds. Working for the government. Asking what else your country can do for you. Your G.S. number. Your business friends. Your Victorian house and your sofas. And your wife. And your life.”

  And each and every one of them a samurai. Knights of the chrysanthemum crest, or the hollyhock, or the wave and sun. They didn’t come wretched to this country looking for something to eat. They’d been banished by the emperor or Amaterasu herself after taking the losing but honorable side in a lordly duel. A.J.A.s have sword names: Derek, Dirk, Blade, Gerald, Rod, Lance. Damocles, ha ha. Bart, probably a gun name. There’s five or six Dereks in a school, another five or six Erics, and the rest are Darrell or Randall. “Eric” probably means “epee” or “snee” in Anglo-Saxon or Viking. Snee Sakamoto, ha ha.

  “Let’s go outside,” said Lance. “I want to beat the shit out of you again.”

  They stood up, and walked, talking. “I want you to understand why you’re going to get it,” said Wittman. “This isn’t just because of your childhood shittiness. I’ve let you get away with too much lately. Like when you organized the whole party to humiliate that oenologist guy from Davis. Your husband,” he explained to Sunny, “emptied a good bottle of wine and put Red Mountain into the bottle with the expensive label and the price sticker still on it. We watched while the poor shmuck poured this rotgut into a stem glass, and stuck his nose into the glass, and swished the wine around in his mouth. We listened to him pronounce wine words about the nose of the full-bodied bouquet. And then, you showed him the Gallo Red Mountain jug, and everybody hooted him, gave it to him good. The worse thing was he tried to laugh and act as if he had been trying to put them on. That was a sick thing to do, Lance, and I should have stood up for that guy at the time. I should have said that the French love Gallo. Or I should have warned him. But I let you fuck him over. You prepped us to ask him, ‘Has that wine got legs?’ It was so premeditated.”

  Lance held his stomach with laughter at the memory of that scene. “He was smug, that wine major with a specialty in cabernets. He said the wine had ‘cello tones.’ Ha ha. ‘Cello tones.’ ”

  “Another time I should have done something was when you were living in that boarding house on Euclid with the rest of the A.J.A.s. Sunny, did your husband tell you that he and his buddies nailed Russell Saito inside his room? It was a team project; they surrounded his room, and hammered two-by-fours and plywood across the windows and door. You could hear him in there for three days banging with books and shoes, and crying, and begging about how he was missing his midterms. And asking about taking a crap. He said, ‘Who’s out there? Is there anybody out there?’ You reduced him, Lance. You shouldn’t have done that. I should have let him out. Sunny, have you gotten your A.J.A. Zen? ‘If the nail sticks up, hammer it down.’ ”

  “Look, Russell Saito appreciates what I did for him. He could’ve moved out of Euclid, he didn’t. He became known. He’s going to be the first Japanese-American governor of California one day, you watch. Wittman, I didn’t know you noticed all this stuff. You’ve got an eye for human nature. Very good.”

  Have you ever met a Japanese who wasn’t a madman underneath? And each one far out in a different direction, the girls too. They don’t get ordinary the more you know them.

  “Go on,” said Lance, sitting down on the rug. “Go on.” Wittman and Sunny sat down with him. Get on with the unfinished bidness.

  “There’s a rumor about you, that you keep a list of friends in order of best to worst. Is that true?”

  “Is that what they say about me? That I have a friends list?” He was delighted, and eager to hear more about his image.

  “It’s pretty childish, Lance, to keep track of who’s your best friend and who’s your second-best friend. The only people you ever hear anymore who talk about their best friend are department-store girls.” He wouldn’t mind knowing what number he himself was on the list but they couldn’t torture such a question out of him.

  Actually, he thought of Lance as his best friend, though lately he hardly saw him except at parties. When they hit the streets as a team, he could ass off, call “Pomegranates” at the girls from in front and behind. One of his kid vows, and it had been a drug vow too, was: Always tell people before you or they die that you like them. He didn’t see how he was ever going to tell Lance about his oft-times being the only good friend. Remember how, unless you were totally out of it, everybody had a partner? The problem with being Lance’s sidekick was that Lance got to be Don Quixote and Wittman was Sancho Panza, or, rather, Pancho to Lance’s leadership role as the Cisco Kid. Wittman didn’t like being Sancho or Pancho or Boswell or Tonto. Another vow was that from now on all friendships be friendships among equals. Lance had bragged about his two hundred closest friends. Who, now that I’m grown, is my best friend? Yeah, it’s better not to have best friends anymore—the time has come for community.

  “You have to be able to take red-ass in this world, Wittman.” Speaking as a friend, for my good.

  “I don’t like the times you came to parties dressed as an S.S. youth. What was the point of that?”

  “I was playing Tokyo-Berlin Axis. Everybody told me I looked exactly like Hitler, and that they had never noticed the resemblance before, how could they have missed it.” He laughed at people who are easily fooled.

  “But they shouldn’t have liked it. What were your motives? Satirizing Nazis, or wanting to be a Nazi? Were you trying to offend people? Giving us a chance to get straight with Hitler? Were you trying to flush out Nazi-lovers, or what? I was offended.” Shit. Admitted to having had my dumb feelings hurt.

  “I look good in a Nazi uniform. Girls are very turned on by Nazi uniforms.” (“We are not,” said Sunny. “No, we aren’t.”)

  “And you hate them for it. You bring stuff out in people, and then you scoff at them. Are you like sociopathic?”

  “I may be, Wittman. I’ve considered that. We geniuses who are more intelligent than ninety-nine point nine percent of the population of the U.S., and hence the world, have to adjust to a lonely life among stupidos. We have to live among them, and help them out. They’re our responsibility. They’re a real pain to me.” Wittman was overawed by anyone who achieved more pain than he did, given average American conditions.

  “Look. To be perfectly honest with you,” said Lance, “I don’t remember anything that happened to me before junior high school. My memories start at about seventh grade.” He is a sociopath, the kind that doesn’t admit to dreaming in his sleep. “If it was me that beat you up, I don’t remember.”

  He really doesn’t remember. My friend is in that much pain that he has to forget almost half his life. “The camps, huh? It must have been the camps did that to you.” You know that an A.J.A. has taken you on as a trusty friend if he’ll give you a word or two about “camp” and “the years we were away.” They’ve stomped the bad years deep down, like they never happened. Wittman, who didn’t forget anything, was struck with pity and envy.

  “My memories of kidtime events,” said Lance, “come from people who insist that they eyewitnessed me. A neighbor lady—she lived in the next horse stall at Tanforan—said I took a shit at the base of a flagpole. I did that regularly even though an M.P. with a rifle warned me not to. She said, ‘You were a free boy.’ See? I have a history of protest that goes back to toilet-training time, taking a public dump under the American flag. I ca
n sort of remember looking up at stars and stripes and out at a desert with barbwire all around. Hey, I can tell you exactly when my memory started up again. I’m going to tell the both of you now, my wife, and my best friend, about when the cameras of my life began to roll.” You had to admire the guy’s daring; he was not afraid to declare, “You are my best friend.” And disarm you.

  “The moon will be full soon,” he said, and, yes, over his shoulder the gibbous moon was mooning them through the window. Hoo haw. “There was blood on the full moon. But I have a new plan to wipe its face clean. I know what to do now. It’s come to me what to do. Let me show you.”

  Lance Kamiyama led them out of his cobwebby house; they followed him around the veranda to the back porch, down the stairs, and across the grass to the end of the yard, where two willow trees grew together above a trickle of a stream. “This stream is part of the system that fills the lake at Mills College. We have crayfish—edible crayfish. I’ll cook some for you one of these days. Here I will build a shrine—this is the site—for the fox spirit beside a running stream. Do you know that church they’re remodeling in Oakland J-town? The torii—do you know what that is? like a gate or door by itself, not particularly to anything—two uprights, like goalposts—you’ve seen it, where they hang the thunder god’s rope with white paper clouds and sometimes lanterns—the torii has been stolen, or lost in construction rubble. The fox is on the run again. How it came to be in Oakland: Samurai on their way to becoming American ronin saw a red fox sail with them as a passenger aboard the Arizona. He was not in a cage or a bag. He walked up the gangplank on his hind legs, which showed beneath his forest-green robe. There were flaps in the hood for his ears, and his snout stuck out of the cowl. For most of the journey, he stood at the prow with his snout pointing east, that is, toward the West. One paw rested on top of the other on his new cane. The ship sailed under the Golden Gate, which is the same color he is, international orange.