Wittman got up and moved to a seat two rows forward, on the aisle, near the exit, but entered the movie no deeper, looking up at the squished faces. Can’t get sucked in anymore. He went up to the balcony, smoked, nobody telling him to put out his smoke, and watched Tony talk to Doc, this lovable old Jewish candy-store guy—get it?—this movie is not prejudiced. Some of the Italians are good guys, Tony is reformed, and some are bad guys; the bad guys, see, are bad for reasons other than innateness. Wittman got up again and climbed to the back of the balcony. He would walk out except that he was too cheap to leave in the middle of movies. There weren’t very many people in the audience, and they were spread out singly with rows of empty seats around each one, alone at the movies on Friday night with no place else to go. “The world is just an address.…” So, white guys, lonely also, borrow movie stars’ faces, movie stars having inhabitable faces, and pretend to be out with Natalie, and to have a gang.
Chino does not disappear de-balled from the picture. He hunts Tony down and shoots him dead. Maria/Natalie kneels beside his body, and sings with tears in her eyes. “One hand, one heart, only death will part us now.” Gangboys look on through the cyclone fence. She throws away the gun, which hits the cement but doesn’t go off. “Te adoro, Anton,” she says foreignly. Some Sharks, some Jets, biersmen, in rue, bear the dead away. The end.
Where are you, Bugs Bunny? We need you, Mr. Wabbit in Wed.
Wittman came out of the theater to the natural world that moves at a medium rate with no jump cuts to the interesting parts. Headache. Bad for the head to dream at the wrong time of day. The day gone. Should have cut out—the only human being in the world to walk out on West Side Story—too late. He’d stayed, and let the goddamn movies ruin his life.
Well, here was First Street, and the Terminal. The end of the City. The end of the week. Maws—gaps and gapes—continuing to open. But Wittman did too have a place to go, he’d been invited to a party, which he’d meant to turn down. He entered the Terminal, which is surrounded by a concrete whirlpool for the buses to turn around on spirals of ramps. Not earth dirt but like cement dirt covered everything, rush-hour feet scuffing up lime, noses and mouths inhaling lime rubbings. A last flower stand by the main entrance—chrysanthemums. And a bake shop with birthday cakes. A couple of people were eating creampuffs as they hurried along. People eat here, with the smell of urinal cakes issuing from johns. They buy hot dogs at one end of the Terminal and finish eating on their way through. They buy gifts at the last moment. Wittman bought two packs of Pall Malls in preparation for the rest of the weekend. No loiterers doing anything freaky. Keep it moving. Everybody’s got a place to go tonight. Wittman bought a ticket for the Oakland-Berkeley border, and rode up the escalator to the lanes of buses. The people on traffic islands waited along safety railings. Birds beak-dived from the steel rafters to land precisely at a crumb between grill bars. The pigeons and sparrows were greyish and the cheeks of men were also grey. Pigeon dust. Pigeons fan our breathing air with pigeon dander.
Wittman was one of the first passengers to board, and chose the aisle seat behind the driver. He threw his coat on the window seat to discourage company, stuck his long legs out diagonally, and put on his metaphor glasses and looked out the window.
Up into the bus clambered this very plain girl, who lifted her leg in such an ungainly manner that anybody could see up her skirt to thighs, but who’d be interested in looking? She was carrying string bags of books and greasy butcher-paper bundles and pastry boxes. He wished she weren’t Chinese, the kind who works hard and doesn’t fix herself up. She, of course, stood beside him until he moved his coat and let her bump her bags across him and sit herself down to ride. This girl and her roast duck will ride beside him all the way across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. She must have figured he was saving this seat for her, fellow ethnick.
The bus went up the turnaround ramp and over a feeder ramp, this girl working away at opening her window—got it open when they passed the Hills Brothers factory, where the long tall Hindu in the white turban and yellow gown stood quaffing his coffee. The smell of the roasting coffee made promises of comfort. Then they were on the bridge, not the bridge for suicides, and journeying through the dark. The eastbound traffic takes the bottom deck, which may as well be a tunnel. You can see lights between the railings and the top deck, and thereby identify the shores, the hills, islands, highways, the other bridge.
“Going to Oakland?” asked the girl. She said “Oak Lun.”
“Haw,” he grunted, a tough old China Man. If he were Japanese, he could have said, “Ee, chotto.” Like “Thataway for a spell.” Not impolite. None of your business, ma’am.
“I’m in the City Fridays to work,” she said. “Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’m taking a night course at Cal Extension, over by the metal overpass on Laguna Street. There’s the bar and the traffic light on the corner? Nobody goes into or comes out of that bar. I stand there at that corner all by myself, obeying the traffic light. There aren’t any cars. It’s sort of lonely going to college. What for you go City?” He didn’t answer. Does she notice that he isn’t the forthcoming outgoing type? “On business, huh?” Suggesting an answer for him.
“Yeah. Business.”
“I signed up for psychology,” she said, as if he’d conversably asked. “But I looked up love in tables of contents and indexes, and do you know love isn’t in psychology books? So I signed up for philosophy, but I’m getting disappointed. I thought we were going to learn about good and evil, human nature, how to be good. You know. What God is like. You know. How to live. But we’re learning about P plus Q arrows R or S. What’s that, haw? I work all day, and commute for two hours, and what do I get? P plus Q arrows R.”
She ought to be interesting, going right to what’s important. The trouble with most people is that they don’t think about the meaning of life. And here’s this girl trying for heart truth. She may even have important new information. So how come she’s boring? She’s annoying him. Because she’s presumptuous. Nosiness must be a Chinese racial trait. She was supposing, in the first place, that he was Chinese, and therefore, he has to hear her out. Care how she’s getting along. She’s reporting to him as to how one of our kind is faring. And she has a subtext: I am intelligent. I am educated. Why don’t you ask me out? He took a side-eye look at her flat profile. She would look worse with her glasses off. Her mouse-brown hair was pulled tight against her head and up into a flat knot on top, hairpins showing, crisscrossing. (Do Jews look down on men who use bobby pins to hold their yarmulkes on?) A person has to have a perfect profile to wear her hair like that. She was wearing a short brownish jacket and her bony wrists stuck out of the sleeves. A thin springtime skirt. She’s poor. Loafers with striped socks. Flat shoes, flat chest, flat hair, flat face, flat color. A smell like hot restaurant air that blows into alleys must be coming off her. Char sui? Fire duck? Traveling with food, unto this generation. Yeah, the lot of us riding the Greyhound out of Fresno and Watsonville and Gardena and Lompoc to college—even Stanford—guys named Stanford—with mama food and grandma food in the overhead rack and under the seat. Pretending the smell was coming off somebody else’s luggage. And here was this girl, a night-school girl, a Continuing Ed girl, crossing the Bay, bringing a fire duck weekend treat from Big City Chinatown to her aging parents.
“Do you know my cousin Annette Ah Tye?” she asked. “She’s from Oak Lun.”
“No,” he said.
“How about Susan Lew? Oh, come on. Susie Lew. Robert Lew. Do you know Fanny them? Fanny, Bobby, Chance Ong, Uncle Louis. I’m related to Fanny them.”
“No, I don’t know them,” said Wittman, who would not be badgered into saying, “Oh, yeah, Susan them. I’m related by marriage to her cousin from Walnut Creek.”
“I’m thinking of dropping philosophy,” she said. “Or do you think the prof is working up to the best part?”
“I don’t know what you say,” said Wittman. Know like no, like brain. “I major in eng
ineer.”
“Where do you study engineering?”
“Ha-ah.” He made a noise like a samurai doing a me-ay, or an old Chinese guy who smokes too much.
“You ought to develop yourself,” she said. “Not only mentally but physically, spiritually, and socially.” What nerve. Chinese have a lot of nerve. Going to extension classes was her college adventure. Let’s us who wear intellectual’s glasses talk smart to each other. “You may be developing yourself mentally,” she said. “But you know what’s wrong with Chinese boys? All you do is study, but there’s more to life than that. You need to be well rounded. Go out for sports. Go out on dates. Those are just two suggestions. You have to think up other activities on your own. You can’t go by rote and succeed, as in engineering school. You want a deep life, don’t you? That’s what’s wrong with Chinese boys. Shallow lives.”
What Wittman ought to say at this point was, “Just because none of us asks you out doesn’t mean we don’t go out with girls.” Instead, to be kind, he said, “I not Chinese. I Japanese boy. I hate being taken for a chinaman. Now which of my features is it that you find peculiarly Chinese? Go on. I’m interested.”
“Don’t say chinaman,” she said.
Oh, god. O Central Casting, who do you have for me now? And what is this role that is mine? Confederates who have an interest in race: the Ku Klux Klan, Lester Maddox, fraternity guys, Governor Faubus, Governor Wallace, Nazis—stupid people on his level. The dumb part of himself that eats Fritos and goes to movies was avidly interested in race, a topic unworthy of a great mind. Low-karma shit. Babytalk. Stuck at A,B,C. Can’t get to Q. Crybaby. Race—a stupid soul-narrowing topic, like women’s rights, like sociology, easy for low-I.Q. people to feel like they’re thinking. Stunted and runted at a low level of inquiry, stuck at worm. All right, then, his grade-point average was low (because of doing too many life things), he’s the only Chinese-American of his generation not in grad school, he’ll shovel shit.
“It’s the nose, isn’t it, that’s a chinaman nose?” he asked this flat-nosed girl. “Or my big Shinajin eyes? Oh, I know. I know. Legs. You noticed my Chinese legs.” He started to pull up a pants leg. “I’m lean in the calf. Most Japanese are meaty in the calf by nature, made for wading in rice paddies. Or it’s just girls who have daikon legs? How about you? You got daikon legs?”
She was holding her skirt down, moving her legs aside, not much room among her packages. Giggling. Too bad she was not offended. Modern youth in flirtation. “You Japanese know how to have a social life much better than Chinese,” she said. “At least you Japanese boys take your girls out. You have a social life.”
Oh, come on. Don’t say “your girls.” Don’t say “social life.” Don’t say “boys.” Or “prof.” Those Continuing Ed teachers are on a non-tenure, non-promotional track. Below lecturers. Don’t say “Chinese.” Don’t say “Japanese.”
“You know why Chinese boys don’t go out?” she asked, confiding some more. Why? What’s the punchline? He ought to kill her with his bare hands, but waited to hear just why Chinese boys stay home studying and masturbating. You could hear her telling on us to some infatuated sinophile. Here it comes, the real skinny. “Because no matter how dumb-soo, every last short boy unable to get a date in high school or at college can go to Hong Kong and bring back a beautiful woman. Chinese boys don’t bother to learn how to socialize. It’s not fair. Can you imagine a girl going to China looking for a husband? What would they say about her? Have you ever heard of a Japanese girl sending for a picture groom?”
“No,” he said.
“And if Chinese boys don’t learn to date, and there are millions of wives waiting to be picked out, then what becomes of girls like me, haw?”
Oh, no, never to be married but to a girl like this one. Montgomery Clift married to Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun. Never Elizabeth Taylor.
“You shouldn’t go to China to pick up a guy anyway,” he said. “Don’t truck with foreigners. They’ll marry you for your American money, and a green card. They’ll say and do anything for a green card and money. Don’t be fooled. They’ll dump you once they get over here.”
Another plan for her or for anybody might be to go to a country where your type is their ideal of physical beauty. For example, he himself would go over big in Scandinavia. But where would her type look good? Probably the U.S.A. is already her best bet. There’s always white guys from Minnesota and Michigan looking for geisha girls.
“No, they won’t,” she said. “They’d be grateful. They’re grateful and faithful forever. I’m not going to China. People can’t just go to China. I was talking hypothetically.” Oh, sure, she’s so attractive.
“Last weekend, I went to a church dance,” she said, letting him know she’s with it. “I went with my girlfriends. We go to dances without a date for to meet new boys. All the people who attended the dance were Chinese. How is that? I mean, it’s not even an all-Chinese church. The same thing happens at college dances. Posters on campuses say ‘Spring Formal,’ but everyone knows it’s a Chinese-only dance. How do they know? Okay, Chinese know. They know. But how does everybody else know not to come? Is it like that with you Japanese?”
“I don’t go to dances.” Don’t say “they.”
“You ought to socialize. I guess the church gave the dance so we could meet one another. It’s a church maneuver, see?, to give us something beneficial. We’d come to their buildings for English lessons, dances, pot luck, and pretty soon, we’re staying for the services. Anyway, there was a chaper-one at this dance who was a white acquaintance of mine from high school. We’re the same age, but he was acting like an adult supervisor of children. We used to talk with each other at school, but at this dance, of course, he wouldn’t ask me to dance.”
“What for you want to dance with him? Oh. Oh, I get it. I know you. I know who you are. You’re Pocahontas. That’s who you are. Aren’t you? Pocahontas. I should have recognized you from your long crane neck.”
“No, my name is Judy. Judy Louis.” She continued telling him more stuff about her life. On and on. Hadn’t recognized her for a talker until too late. Strange moving lights, maybe airplanes, maybe satellites, were traveling through the air. The high stationary lights were warnings, the tops of hills. It seemed a long ride; this voice kept going on beside his ear. He looked at the girl again, and she looked blue-black in the dark. He blinked, and saw sitting beside him a blue boar. Yes, glints of light on bluish dagger tusks. Little shining eyes. Not an illusion because the details were very sharp. Straight black bristly eyelashes. A trick of the dark? But it was lasting. Eyes and ivory tusks gleaming black and silver. Like black ocean with star plankton and black sky with stars. And the mouth moving, opening and closing in speech, and a blue-red tongue showing between silver teeth, and two ivory sword tusks. He leaned back in his seat, tried forward, and she remained a blue boar. (You might make a joke about it, you know. “Boar” and “bore.”) He couldn’t see where her face left off from her hair and the dark. He made no ado about this hallucination, acted as if she were a normal girl. Concentrated hard to hear what she was saying. “You’re putting me on, aren’t you?” she was saying.
“What you mean?”
“You’re not really Japanese. You’re Chinese. Japanese have good manners.” Her piggy eyes squinted at him. He wanted to touch her, but she would think he was making a pass. But, surely, he could try touching a tusk because the tusks can’t actually be there. “And you look Chinese. Big bones. Long face. Sort of messy.”
“Listen here. I’m not going to ask you out, so quit hinting around, okay?”
“What?! Me go out with you? I not hinting around. I wouldn’t go out with you if you ask me. You not my type. Haw.”
“What type is that? Missionaries? Missionaries your type? You know where you ought to go for your type? I know the place for you. In New York, there’s a nightclub for haoles and orientals to pick each other up. It’s like a gay bar, that is, not your average straight thing.
Sick. Girls such as yourself go there looking for an all-American boy to assimilate with, and vice versa. You can play Madame Butterfly or the Dragon Lady and find yourself a vet who’s remembering Seoul or Pearl Harbor or Pusan or Occupied Japan. All kinds of Somerset Maugham combinations you hardly want to know about. Pseudo psycho lesbo sappho weirdo hetero homo combos.”
“You the one sick. Look who’s sick. Don’t call me sick. You sick.” The blue boar had eyebrows, and they were screwed together in perplexity. “If you are a Japanese, you shouldn’t go out with a Chinese girl anyway, and I wouldn’t go out with you. Japanese males work too hard. Chinese males dream too much, and fly up in the air. The Chinese female is down-to-earth, and makes her man work. When a Japanese man marries a Chinese woman, which does not happen often, it’s tragic. They would never relax and have fun. A Japanese man needs a girl who will help him loosen up, and a Chinese man needs a girl who will help him settle down. Chinese man, Chinese woman stay together. I’m going to do a study of that if I go into psych.”
“Don’t say ‘tragic’ You want the address of that place where keto hakujin meet shinajin and nihonjin? Look, I’m just helping you out with your social life.”
His talking to her, and her speaking, did not dispel her blueness or her boarness. The lips moved, the tusks flashed. He wanted her to talk some more so he could look closely at her. What was causing this effect? The other people on the bus had not turned into animals.
“Help yourself out with your own social life. Why don’t you ask me out on a date? Haw?” The boar lips parted smiling. “Because you are scared.” “Sked,” she pronounced it. “You been thinking about it this whole trip, but you sked.” Don’t say “date.”
“No, I’m not.” You’re homely. He can’t say that. She functions like she’s as good-looking as the next person, and he’s not going to be the one to disabuse her.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International) Page 10