“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 been feeling good only because the sun was out amid grey weeks. (In the plague year, according to Defoe, the people’s moods were much affected by the weather.)
“Well?” she said, pushing away from the table, her shoulders up, like a forties movie girl being hugged. “I have an appointment at three-thirty.” As if she had come to the City for that important appointment and incidentally might as well have met with him too, a former classmate, after all. But there was no guile on her face, which seemed always uplifted. Was she joyful, or was that curve the way her mouth naturally grew? The way some cats and dogs have smile markings. Yeah, it was not a smile but a smile marking.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said, and grabbed her hand, held hands with her, a sudden endearment achieved right smack through force fields. “Let’s go for a walk. Come for a walk with me. I live near here. Yeah, I do. Let me show you where I live.”
Since she, in truth, did not have an appointment, she agreed to go with him. Finding digs, having digs, arranging them interested each of them very much. God’s solitaries in their caves and bare retreats.
“Let’s walk,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette. Let’s amble the blue North Beach streets as the evening sun goes down into the far grey water.
Though they walked through the land of the wasted, no Malte sights popped out to hurt him, she dispelling them. By day, the neon was not coursing through its glass veins. The dancing girl in spangles and feathers had flown out of her cage, which hung empty over the street. Nobody barked and hustled at the doorways to acts and shows. The day-folks, wheeling babies, wheeling grandpas, holding children by the hand, were shopping for dinner at the grocery stores and the bakery, dropping by the shoe repair. Oh, the
smell of the focaccia ovens—O Home. A florist with white moustachios jaywalked through traffic with armsful of leonine football chrysanthemums. Behind glass, at the all-day-all-night place on the pie-wedge corner, poets, one to a table, were eating breakfast. The Co-Existence Bagel Shop was gone. The old guys, Seventh Seal knights, had played chess with Death and lost. The Bagel Shop, Miss Smith’s Tea Room, Blabbermouth Night at The Place—all of a gone time. Out from the open door of La Bodega, a folksy guitar sweetened the air. The guitar was being passed around, and each played the tune he knew. You should have been there the night Segovia dropped by and played flamenco. Wittman musefully sang as if to himself a Mose Allison riff.
A young ma-a-an
ain’t nothin’ in this world today.
Because the ol’ men’s
got all the money.
The air of the City is so filled with poems, you have to fight becoming imbued with the general romanza. Nanci’s long black hair and long black skirt skirled with the afternoon breezes. The leather of her shoulder bag strapped a breast. Her arms and outstretching legs were also long and black; she wore a leotard and tights like an old-fashioned Beat chick but, honestly, a dancer, dance togs for a good reason. Here he was: Wittman Ah Sing profiling down the street with a beautiful almost-girlfriend, clipping along, alongside, keeping up with him, the two of them making the scene on the Beach, like cruising in the gone Kerouac time of yore.
He ducked into the bookstore. She followed right on in. She stood beside him, browsing the rack of quarterlies, quite a few brave Volume I Number Ones. There were homemade books too, mimeo jobs, stencils, and small-press poetry that fit neat in the hand. On the top rack—right inside the door at eye level for all to see coming in or going out—was: an artistic avant-garde far-out new magazine that had published—in print—a scene from his play-in-progress—the lead-off piece—with his byline—right inside the front cover. He could reach over and hand it to her, but it would be more perfect if she happened to pick it out herself, come upon his premiere on her own, and be impressed. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, trying to impress Sheilah Graham, had driven to every bookstore in L.A., but could not find a copy of any of his books.)
Wittman went downstairs to the cool basement, where among the bookshelves were chairs and tables with ashtrays. He had first come to this place when he was a high-school kid on one of his escapes from Sacramento, Second City to Big City. No No Free Reading sign. No No Smoking. You didn’t have to buy a book; you could read for nothing. You had a hangout where you didn’t have to spend money. Quiet. All the radios in Chinatown blaring out the ball game, but here, we don’t care about the World Series. He hadn’t known the City Lights Pocket Book Shop was famous until the Howl trial, which he had cut school to attend. “Shig” Shigeyoshi Murao was the one charged with selling an obscene book. The muster of famous poets had blown Wittman away—everybody friends with everybody else, a gang of poets. He, poor monkey, was yet looking for others of his kind.
There had been a Chinese-American guy who rode with Jack and Neal. His name was Victor Wong, and he was a painter and an actor. Wittman had maybe seen him, or someone Chinese with the asymmetrical face of a character actor; he wore a white t-shirt with paint streaks and “hand-tooled leather shoes.” Victor Wong, who went to the cabin in Bixby Canyon with Jack Duluoz and Neal/Cody. All this written up in Big Sur, where Jack calls Victor Wong Arthur Ma (“Little Chinese buddy Arthur Ma.” Shit.), and flips out of his gourd walking in the moonless night above the wild ocean that rants for his life. Jack hangs on to the side of the mountain and listens and shouts back and sings. “Mien Mo Big Sur killer mountain for singing madly in.” It would have been better if Victor/Arthur had been a writing man like the rest of them, but anyway he talked a lot and was good at hallucinations. “Little Arthur Ma [yet again “little”!] who never goes anywhere without his drawing paper and his Yellowjacket felt tips of all colors, red, blue, yellow, green, black, he draws marvelous subconscious glurbs and can also do excellent objective scenes or anything he wants on to cartoons—.” They stay up all night, and Arthur Ma keeps making it up; he’s not one of those storytellers who has to rehearse in the bathroom. Wittman had not gone up to the man with the character actor’s face—one eye big, one eye small—and grabbed him by the arm and introduced himself. The poets at Big Sur fall asleep but not Arthur, who stays awake with Jack, the two of them yelling till dawn. “… and Arthur Ma suddenly yells: ‘Hold still you buncha bastards, I got a hole in my eye.’ ”
It would be nice were Nanci to walk down the pine-slab steps and say, “Oh, you’re published. Why didn’t you tell me? Will you autograph a copy for me?” Holding his words to her bosom.
Girls in my native land. May the loveliest of you on an afternoon in summer in the darkened library find herself the little book that Jan des Tournes printed in 1556. May she take the cooling, glossy volume out with her into the murmurous orchard, or yonder to the phlox, in whose oversweet fragrance there lies a sediment of sheer sweetness.
She was two aisles away browsing through the French and German shelves. The Europeans made books with creme linen paper; the soft covers were not illustrated except for a sharp line of vermillion trim. When you slice the pages open with your paperknife, the book will have flossy raggedy edges. You feel like owning books like that. Remember Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield asking Holden to name one thing he liked a lot? “Name one thing.” “One thing I like a lot, or one thing I just like?” “You like a lot.” Wittman liked a lot this poky hole in the San Francisco underground earth. He will not point out to Nanci what’s so good about it. Spoil it to make a big deal. She had to take a liking of her own accord. He took his own sweet time, testing her scanning and skimming of foreign lit.
But the next time he looked her way, she was talking to a couple of Black guys, laughing, carrying on in French. Maybe they had met before, or maybe she let herself be picked up. There was something Black about her too, come to think of it; it was in a fullness of the mouth, and a wildness in her clothes, and something about her dry hair. “Très joli. Ahh, très joli. Oo-la-la, très joli.” So, people really do say “Oo-la-la.” She and they were mutually delighting in something. These black French must have lately arrived from one of those colonial places. Their faces were not chary and wary; they were not “friendly,” or “bad,” or “loose.” Their long hands and fingers wafted through a gentler atmosphere. Give them a few more weeks among the Amerikans; we’ll show them how far très joli manners get them, and how much respect with Saturday Review tucked under the arm. They’ll tighten up their act. Turn complicated. He squeezed past them; they easily stepped aside, gave him no trouble. Let’s go already, Nanci. Wittman gave a jerk of his head—¡Vamos! ¡Andalay!—and, surprisingly, she said her adieux and followed him up the stairs. You would think only homely girls obey like that.
“Wait,” she called. “I’ll be right with you.” She paid for a book. “See?” she said. “Beckett.”
“Ah, Bik Giht,” he said, Chinatown having a pronunciation because of Beckett Street and not because of absurdity. Of course not.
“I’m looking for audition pieces,” said Nanci as they walked along. “The speeches of just about any Beckett man make sense—more sense—coming from a woman. A minority woman. It doesn’t matter what a Beckett character looks like. I won’t play an oriental prostitute, and I won’t speak broken English. No matter what. I can’t. I won’t. I’ll be too old to play an ingenue? I’m a leading lady. I am the leading-lady type. No ching-chong chinaman for me.”
What did she say? She said “ching-chong chinaman.” She can bear to say that. God, she’s tough. He had to get tougher. His head and bod were going through contortions from merely hearing that. Did I hear wrong? Hallucinating again? She mean me? Who you talking to? You talking to me, girl? You talking about me? Am I too paranoid, or what? She hadn’t called me a name, had she? Someone called her that? Who called her that? Who she quoting? Was he hearing English wrong like any greenhorn F.O.B.? N
ow he was laughing nervously—the Chinese laugh—the giggle—lest it be a joke—that please-let-it-be-a-joke giggle. That betraying Chinese giggle trebled out of him. Where he’d almost gone deaf, she had said, “No ching-chong chinaman for me.” She meant she refused to read a grotesque whose bucktoof mouth can’t make intelligent American sounds. As if this language didn’t belong to us. Well, the ugly is ugly no matter whose beautiful mouth it comes out of. She shouldn’t wreck her mouth, and her voice, and her face, and her soul by repeating scurrilities.
“For my classical, I’ll do Rosalind or Portia. Then when I’m older, anybody can be the queen.” Anybody. Her. A leading lady. Why not? Who has more in common with a Shakespeare queen—a country-fair beauty starlet or Leontyne Price? Medea and Cleopatra and Clytemnestra and the statue lady from Winter’s Tale are not blondies. Nor, it so happened, were any of the people walking by them on the street, nor are most people in the world.
“I don’t like Flower Drum Song,” she said. Wittman didn’t either—a bunch of A.J.A.s and “Eurasians” playing weird Chinese. Not that Chinese have to play Chinese. Chineseness does not come to an actor through genetic memory. The well-trained actor observes humanity and the text.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” said Nanci, “that I took my grandmother to see The World of Suzie Wong for the scenes of Hong Kong. I’m so sorry. Wittman? I’ve been to New York and Hollywood. I look a bit dark. They’re overt, you know? They say, ‘You don’t look oriental.’ I walk in, they can tell about me. They read me, then they say, ‘You don’t sound right. You don’t sound the way you look. You don’t look the way you talk. Too distracting.’ I’m wearing my high heels, and walking elegant, you know? The a.d. hands me the script, and tells me I have to take my shoes off. It’s a cold reading, but I know what my part will be—an oriental peasant. You only need high heels for the part of the oriental prostitute. A good-looking talented actor, who’s gotten his callback, who’s been cast maybe, says my cue, which is ‘Hey, there, mama-san.’ And I have to say, I have to say, you know, something stupid. I have to speak in a way I’ve worked hard not to speak like. I stand there barefoot saying a line like—like that. And the director says, ‘Can’t you act more oriental? Act oriental.’ I haven’t been making rounds for a while.” Oh, no, Nanci, don’t lose the will to audition.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International) Page 3