Wittman, now’s your chance to whip out your Rilke, and give her his sympathy: Let us be honest about it, then; we have no theatre, any more than we have God: for this, community is needed.… Had we a theatre, would you, tragic one, stand there again and again and again—so slight, so bare, so without pretext of a role.…
“Wittman?” she said, laying a hand on his arm. “I performed twice as a crowd member. Once in a movie, and once on t.v. While the make-up lady was shading my nose, she said, ‘I’m going to give you a cute Irish nose.’ I’m tilted back in the chair, and holding my face steady. I don’t reply. I don’t want to get her mad so she makes me up ugly. And I wanted to see what I’d look like with my nose upturned. She shadowed the nostrils, and put white make-up down the length, ending with a diamond on the tip. The other show I was in, we had a male make-up artist—bitchy gay?—who finished my face without talking to me. Then he says, ‘There’s just so much we can do about those eyes.’ ” Those eyes were now downcast with mortification and tears. Oh, baby, what can I do to defend you against—cosmetologists. “They were trying to give me advice? For my own good? They didn’t mean to hurt me.”
“Yes, they did. They hurt you.”
“Yes. I should have done my own make-up.”
“It’s no fair,” said Wittman, who would not put his arm around her shoulder or waist. This called for a higher level of comforting. Help her out by thinking up a piece for her to do without insult. He ought to tell her that her face was perfectly lovely. But he was annoyed at her for talking about her face so much. Her nickname in college had been The Face. “How about the girl in The Seven Year Itch?” he suggested. “Yeah, that’s what the script says—The Girl. Not The White Girl. The Girl. She’s just a girl in New York on her own. No family from the old country camping in her apartment.”
“I hate The Seven Year Itch. I loathe it.”
“Just testing. I was testing you. You passed.” Therefore, thou art mine, sought and found.
“But you’re right. She could very well look like me. There isn’t any reason why she shouldn’t look like me. Wittman?” She had his sleeve in her fingers, and pulled at it for them to stop walking so fast. “I was thinking of Krapp’s Last Tape. I could do it by myself, no other face up there to compare mine to. A director doesn’t have to match me. My lost love who’s beside me in the boat could be a male nurse. ‘We lay there without moving but under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.’ When Krapp says, ‘Let me in,’ I, a woman, could mean: Open your eyes, and let me into your eyes.”
Why hadn’t he thought of that? She must think him ill-read and a dried-up intellectual not to have seen the sensuality in Beckett. “You’re resorting to Krapp, Nanci, because of being left out of the Hogan Tyrone Loman Big Daddy family. And whatever the names of those families were in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Seven white brides for seven white brothers. They took a perfectly good pro-miscegenation legend and wrote fourteen principal parts for Caucasians. I know legends about seven Chinese brothers named Juan; they were part of a nation of one hundred and eight heroes and heroines. What I’m going to do, I’ve got to wrest the theater back for you. Those Juans were hermanos chinos.
“I understand your agony, Nanci,” he said. “The most important tradition in my high school was the senior play. My year they did The Barretts of Wimpole Street. The student who won the most Willie Awards was supposed to play the lead. In the U.K., ‘willie’ means ‘weenie’; in Sacramento, it means ‘talent.’ I was the man of a thousand faces and got my Willies for winning talent shows. Robert Browning, tall, thin, sensitive, dark, melancholy—that’s me, let me count the ways. But the drama coach held auditions. Then he told me, I’m the emcee for the evening, the ‘host’; I warm up the audience, talk to them entr’acte, do my stand-up shtick, whatever I like, do my magic act, my ventriloquist act, throw my voice, ‘Help. Help. Let me out.’ I’d be featured. Very special, my spot. The way they staged The Barretts of Wimpole Street was Wilderesque, with an important Our Town stage manager character played by me. I look like Frank Craven, who had Chinese eyes and a viewpoint from the outskirts of Grover’s Corners, U.S.A. I did my medley of soliloquies, Hamlet, Richard III, Macbeth, Romeo. No Juliet. I did my bearded Americans, Walt Whitman and John Muir, guys with a lot of facial hair to cover up my face and my race. Mark Twain: ‘… a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white.’ Between Barretts, I also did great movie lines. ‘Philip. Give me the letter, Philip.’ ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ ‘As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again. Chomp chomp.’ ‘The calla lilies are in bloom. Such a strange flowah.’ ”
Nanci guessed the actress whom each of those lines belonged to. “ ‘Maybe you found someone you like betta,’ ” she said. “Mae Clarke before James Cagney shoves the grapefruit in her kisser. ‘I’d rather have his one arm around me than be in the two arms of another man.’ ”
“I know. I know. That movie where Linda Darnell and the British flyer and Tab Hunter are marooned on an island of desire. The British flyer has one arm, and Tab Hunter has the two arms but doesn’t get the girl.”
“No. Thelma Ritter says it to Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits.”
“Nanci, I think we’re on to something. That line is so meaningful, they’ve used it in two movies. It’s what you call a perennial favorite. Women have all the good lines. I almost turned into a Mei Lan Fan androgyne doing those lines single-handed. I’m ruined for ensemble work. I haven’t been on the stage since.”
Grant Avenue, or Du Pont Gai—they/we call it Du Pont Gai—changed from North Beach to Chinatown. That factory which baked the Beatnik fortune cookies for the Actor’s Workshop benefit should be situated at this border. You can’t pick out just exactly which Italian store or Chinese store or red or red-white-and-green festooning it is that demarcates the change, but suddenly or gradually—depending on how closely you’re keeping a lookout—you are in the flak and flash of Chinatown. Autumn was here: A red banner strung above the street announced the Double Ten parade and its sponsors, the Chinese-American Anti-Communist League and the Six Companies. They’ll leave the banner up there all this month before Double Ten and afterwards into winter. To show Immigration and HUAC that we Chinese-Americans, super Americans, we too better dead than red-hot communists. Neither Wittman nor Nanci had plans to observe Double Ten. They had no idea how you go about doing that since nobody they knew showed much interest. It seemed like a fake holiday. A woody station wagon with Ohio plates drove slowly by. Painted across it was: “North Beach or Bust.” Poor bastards. Too late. They had crossed the country to join the Beatniks.
“I’m writing a play for you, Nanci,” said Wittman. Wait for me while I write for you a theater; I will plant and grow for you a pear garden. Then she did look at him—he’s wonderful. She stopped in her tracks to look up at him. She took his upper arm with her two hands. “I’ll write you a part,” he said, “where the audience learns to fall in love with you for your ochery skin and round nose and flat profile and slanty eyes, and your bit of an accent.”
She made a pouty mouth. They walked on, she still holding his arm with both hands. Nanci, as a matter of fact, had a pointy nose with a bridge, where her dark glasses had a place to sit. Even Marilyn Monroe, blonde, dead, had not been able to get away with a round nose. Rhinoplasty. Nanci looked good. When the directors tell her, “You don’t look Chinese,” they mean: too pretty for a Chinese. She had represented Cal at the intercollegiate (Chinese) beauty-personality-good-grades contest at U.C.L.A.
What theater do we have besides beauty contests? Do we have a culture that’s not these knickknacks we sell to the bok gwai? If Chinese-American culture is not knickknackatory—look at it—backscratcher swizzle sticks, pointed chopsticks for the hair, Jade East aftershave in a Buddha-shape bottle, the head screws off and you pour lotion out of its neck—then what is it? No other people sell out their street
s like this. Tourists can’t buy up J-town. Wait a goddamn minute. We don’t make Jade East. It’s one of your hakujin products by Swank. Would we do that to you? Make Jesus-on-the-cross bottles, so every morning, all over the country, hairy men twist his head off, and pour this green stuff out of his neck? So what do we have in the way of a culture besides Chinese hand laundries? You might make a joke on that—something about ‘What’s the difference between a Chinese hand laundry and a French laundry?’ Where’s our jazz? Where’s our blues? Where’s our ain’t-taking-no-shit-from-nobody street-strutting language? I want so bad to be the first bad-jazz China Man bluesman of America. Of all the music on the airwaves, there’s one syllable that sounds like ours. It’s in that song by the Coasters. “It’ll take an ocean of calamine lotion. Poison iv-ee-eeee-ee.” No, not the ivy part. It’s where they sing, “Aro-ou-ound-aaaaa-ah.” Right there, that’s a Chinese opera run. A Coaster must have been among those Black guys you see at the Chinese movies and at dojos seeking kung fu power.
Wittman and Nanci toned down any show-off in their walks. Chinese like for young people to look soo-mun or see-mun. Proper. Well turned out. Decorous. Kempt. The Ivy League look is soo-mun. Clean-cut all-American. For girls: sprayed, fixed hair—hair helmet—and they should have a jade heart at their throat always. Wittman was glad Nanci was wearing a defiant black leotard. If they were Japanese and walking through J-town in their grubbies, the Issei, who have a word for every social condition, would call them “yogore.” (Zato-Ichi the Blind Swordsman, who flicked his snot into the haw-haw-haw mouth of a villain, is yogore. He’d be rolling the snotball all the time he’s pretending to be putting up with their taunts.) Wittman went up Jackson Street (Dik-son Gai), sort of herding Nanci, turned her at the corner, guided her across the street by leaning toward her or leading away. Strange the way a man has to walk with a woman. She follows his lead like they’re dancing, she wasn’t even a wife or girlfriend. Did you hear what Jack Kennedy said to his media advisers, who told him that in pictures Jackie isn’t walking beside him enough? He said, “She will just have to walk faster.” (It is not a Chinese custom for women to walk behind men. That’s a base stereotype.) No, Wittman didn’t want to slow down for anybody either, become an inclining, compliant owned man. Husbands walk differently from single guys. He unlocked the door of his building, having to reach in through the security bars for a somewhat hidden lock. Nanci went right on in. They climbed the many steps and landings, she ahead, and he behind thinking, “Pomegranates.” They didn’t run into anybody in the hallways, all decent people at work, their doors shut, rows of jailhouse-green doors.
“My ah-pok-mun,” he said, opening the door wide to his roomland, switching on the overhead light, which also switched on the desk lamp. “Come in. Come in,” turning his desk chair around for his guest. “Welcome to my pok-mun. Sit. Sit.” He dumped the fullness of his ashtray into the trash and set the ashtray next to his mattress on the floor. “For sitting furniture, I don’t have but the one chair.” She hung her suede jacket over the back of it, and sat down. Sweeping open his invisible magician’s cape, he presented: his roomland, his boxes of papers, his table, which was desk and dining table, his hotplate on a crate, which was a cupboard for foodstuffs such as instant coffee and Campbell’s Soup, edible out of the can. (Cook like a Mexicano: Put the tortilla directly on the burner, flipflop, ready to eat. So you get burner rings on your tortilla, but fast and non-greasy.) He quoted to her some Beat advice: “ ‘How many things do you own?’ ‘Fifteen.’ ‘Too many.’ ” No rug here. No sofa here. Never own a rug or a sofa. And thus be free. “ ‘What’s the use of living if I can’t make paradise in my own roomland?’ ” Peter Orlovsky was another one good at how to live. She laughed but did not give him the next lines, which are: “For this drop of time upon my eyes / like the endurance of a red star on a cigarette / makes me feel life splits faster than scissors.”
Good thing the typewriter crouched, ready, on the table—his grand piano—that faces the window, where you look out at another pok-mun. If he was going to bring people up here, he ought to have been a painter. Painters have something to show for their work—an easel with the painting they’re working on like a billboard all sunny under the skylight, their food composed into still-lifes, their favorite colors everywhere. They get to wear their palette on their grey sweatshirts, and spatters and swipes on their blue jeans. He sat down on the mattress, straightened out his sleeping bag, bed made.
“So this is where you live,” Nanci said, looking down into one of his cartons, not touching the poems, just looking.
“See that trunk over there?” He pointed at it with the toe of his boot. Books, papers, his coffee cup sat on its lid; a person could sit on it too, and it become a second chair.
“That’s the trunk I told you about. Proof, huh? Evidence. It exists. It became a theatrical trunk; it used to be a Gold Mountain trunk.” It was big enough for crossing oceans, all right. It would take a huge man to hoist it onto his back. The hasps and clasps were rusty (with salt sea air), and the leather straps were worn. Big enough to carry all you own to a new land and never come back, enough stuff to settle the Far West with. And big enough to hold all the costumes for the seventy-two transformations of the King of the Monkeys in a long run of The Journey to the West in its entirety. “My great-great-grandfather came to America with that trunk.”
“Yes,” said Nanci, “I recognize it.” Every family has a Gold Mountain trunk in their attic or basement.
“I can’t die until I fill it with poems and play-acts,” said Wittman.
“Would you like to read me a poem?” asked Nanci.
Oh, yes. Yes, I would. My name is Wittman Ah Sing, but you may call me Bold. When you get to know me better, you may call me Bolder, and I’ll show you like Emily Dickinson secret poems in the false bottom of my Gold Mountain theater trunk. Oh, too guest-happy.
He rummaged through a carton for a poem that had made him feel like a genius when he made it. “New poems. New green poems. Haven’t gone over this batch. Too green. Need one or two more drafts, make fair copies.” Oh, shut up. Take one up at random. Any old poem.
Remember when everyone you fell in love with read poems and listened to poems? Love poetry has gone. And thou? Where went thou?
He put on his intellectual’s glasses with the heavy black rims, scowled, made no eye contact. Oh, no—a poem—nah, a paragraph—that had been forced on speed, and coffee jacking the bennies up higher, then grass to smooth out the jaw-grinding jangles—does it show? A poem on beanie weenies, when he was a frijoles head—from his Making a Living series, a cycle of useful poetry—well, prose poems, actually—Gig Poems. Wishing he had a chance to re-do it, explain, he read aloud to Nanci something like this: Should a window-washing poet climb over the edge of a skyscraper, one leg at a time, onto his swing, and unclutch the ropes, may the tilted City hold still. Don’t look down those paned streets. In view of the typing pools, he makes a noose, and tests the slide of it, and the dingle dangle of it. Yes? Yes? No? No? Yes? No? Hey, look—sky doggies. Up here—a stampede of longhorns. Point the rope like a wand, whirl a Möbius strip, outline a buffalo. Shoot la riata sideways over the street, overhead at the helicopters, jump in and out of it, and lassoo one of those steers. It drags the poet right off the plank—but the harness holds! Hey, you pretty girls of the typing pool, give me a big pantomime hand. Can’t hear the clap-clap, but it’s applause, and it’s mine. Kisses blow through glass. Their impact knocks me off again, falling far down, and down as the pulley runs, and brakes. I vow: I will make of my scaffold, a stage.
The poet—the one in real life, not the one in the poem—wouldn’t mind, when the poem ends, if his listening lady were to pay him a compliment. Such as agreeing, yes, let’s transfigure every surface of the City with theater. Such as saying, “Did you on purpose make the line that tells about the tilted City bevel upsettingly—the verb fulcrumming a lot more phrases on one end than the other?” He’d love her for such particular
appreciation. At least, praise him on the utilitarian level. From out of my head into the world. The window-washer was using newspapers and water, the chemicals in newsprint as good as Windex spray. Also, you can get rich by contracting with the owners of buildings for window-washing services a year in advance. Charge thousands, but pay the window-washers minimum wage by the hour. The kind of men you hire, whatever you pay them, they think it’s a lot.
Nanci made no move to show that she heard that the poem was over. Give her a love story, Wittman. He ought to have read her the one about how this broken-hearted guy had long ago stashed in his Physicians’ Desk Reference the last letter, unread, from the ex-love of his life, written upon taking her leave of him. A lifetime later, an envelope falls out of the P.D.R.… (No, he wasn’t a doctor. Each head had his own P.D.R. to identify street pills, and their effects and side effects, that is, trips and side trips.)
“Want to hear another one?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said.
He reached into the poem box beside the black curve of her calf. His arm could graze its black length. But a true poet can’t love up a woman who doesn’t get that he’s a poet. He can’t touch her until she feels his poetry. Japanese have a custom where the host leaves a piece of art about, and the guest may notice it. The carton was labeled The International Nut Corporation, 100 Phoenix Ave., Lowell, Mass. His soul chick would notice it, and say, “Did you make a pilgrimage to Kerouac’s town and his city?” Then he grabs her leg.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International) Page 4