Wittman decided to take the long way to the City, south on the Nimitz through Oakland (past the STOP CASTING POROSITY sign), and across the long, long San Mateo Bridge. Its railings ran low alongside the low car. Better not have car trouble. The sign says No Stopping and No Turning Around. No suicides allowed. There was hardly any traffic today, and the car seemed to be shooting out on a plank. A pelican floated up from under the bridge. Wings holding still, it glided over the open car. They got a detailed look at its beak with a pouch, its legs and feet perfectly tucked into its body, like airplane wheels fitting into the wheel well. Two more pelicans came up on an updraft. Pterodactyls. And the car an exoskeletal scarab. A new age of reptiles. One of the birds landed on the bridge rail, wings folding as legs came down, all in balance, not a wobble or a teeter. “Don’t look at them,” said Taña. “Keep your eyes on the road. I’ll do the looking.”
Wittman was having a problem with his natural eye-blinks. He kept seeing three tall pepper mills with round heads, not well delineated.
“They’re the windmills,” Taña explained. “They’re fading. Don’t look at them while you’re driving. They look like Egyptian cats, don’t they, with long front legs and long side whiskers. Those are the vanes.” She was holding her hands over her eyes, her hair blowing out behind her. Sometimes the wind tossed it into his face as if it were his own blonde hair. “Now they look like pepper mills,” she reported. “Now they’re keyholes. They’re fading.” How are you bound to the lady you dream with? And see things with?
Coming off the bridge they crossed the Bayshore and El Camino Real, and headed north on Skyline. The big bonsais were bent toward the sea, when today’s wind, thick with fog, was blowing inland. San Francisco—wet as if seen through tears.
“Look,” said Taña. “It’s a windmill.” It was the abandoned lighthouse. “What if we’ve been seeing the future? Do you want to stop?” No. He does not want her to contain him in her crystal ball. He wanted to be driving the Porsche by himself, his Porsche, and he did not want to take her to his secret tunnel or to his pok-mun. Where she’ll be needing to go to the bathroom, and he hands her his roll of toilet paper, and she hurries down the hall among the commentators in their armpitty tank-tops.
Yes, let’s stop and visit the lighthouse, then, as a theatrical family on a drive would do. Explore storefronts, mansions, barns, terraces, vineyards, caves, and imagine the theater they would house. Prisons, forts, water-pumping stations, beer factories, gas stations, lecture halls at teaching hospitals. This lighthouse could be it. The door stood open, but there was no air flow for creatures that need to breathe. A dead pigeon lay on the floor. Taña climbed the steel stairs, and Wittman followed her. The buzzardy air seemed hotter each step up. The windows were opaque with salt and dirt. On a ledge was another dead bird. “Let’s get out of here,” said Wittman. “We’re inside somebody else’s brain.” The foghorns were groaning, the far-off suffering of ogres and sea dragons. “We’re not going to be able to turn this lighthouse into a theater, Taña. Unless our show had vertical action, and an audience of six lay face upward. Or we could seat the audience up here and on the stairs, and they look down at a play about the abysmal.” Taña finally couldn’t breathe the air from one million B.C. anymore, and they got out of there.
Zip into the City quick past El Barrio Chino, and up Telegraph Hill to Coit Tower. Wittman parked next to Christopher Columbus, who stands with a foot on a rock and his nose toward the Golden Gate and the Pacific beyond. Sailboats and whitecaps were hoving sharp out there. Masts tick-tocking, the docked boats rocked like Daruma dolls. “Welcome to my estate, Taña,” said Wittman as he opened the car door for her. “Wait until you see the view from my top floor—all three bridges visible on this windswept morning.” They went up the stairs that were the stairway of Rita Hayworth’s mansion in Pal Joey, the camera avoiding Columbus in her front yard.
The elevator doors were in the middle of a mural about workers turning wheels of cable. A tower of W.P.A. artwork, a continuous epic of labor, musculatured men heroically operating turbines, women in white hats and aprons assembling milk. No place for us hummingbirds. The doors parted. Taña was not beside him. His mind was off of her for a moment, and she was gone. A wanderfooting woman. He looked for her outside.
A sweater had been left on a window ledge. He ought to try it on, a gift to him from the affluent society. A voluntarily poor person has a duty to take such a gift. Just then, a Chinese grandmother came running on gliding strides, to not pound the chi out of her system. She passed the sweater, went on circling the tower. He took the stairs up—Jimmy Stewart looking for lost Kim Novak in all the old familiar San Francisco places.
There she is, silhouetted in an arch, and she’s talking to someone. Mrs. Coit ought to have put in a brass pole for her volunteer firemen; he’d slide down the hole and away. He strolled the circularama. Yes, all three bridges in sight today. And the dragon’s tail zigzagging up and over Lombard Street. Alcatraz—our troupe will take over the Rock for theater-in-the-round, the audience as yardbirds, a guardwalk for the hanamichi thrust. The cellblocks were already a scaffold set like Bye Bye Birdie. And Angel Island too, waiting for us to come back and make a theater out of the Wooden House, where our seraphic ancestors did time. Desolation China Man angels.
Surely, one or two got off those islands and spread the theories about there being no escape against the ocean currents and sharks.
Wittman said a mantra for this place by the poet that his father tried to name him after.
Facing west from California’s shores,
Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound,
I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house
of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar,
Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle
almost circled.…
“Wittman. Wittman,” Taña called him. He went on over, his jealousy up. She had borrowed and was wearing a lumberman’s jacket off of a bearded man. Guys with beards, though, were trusting one another, for a few months more anyway, to be pure white doves, who practice right politics, that is, leftist politics. You can tell by the beard, he’s a reader of books, a listener to folk, jazz, and classical, a brother of the open road to pick up and be picked up hitchhiking. Taña did getdown introductions, “Greg. Wittman.” Last names unnecessary but for the government taxing you and drafting you.
“Gabe. I’ve changed my name to Gabe.”
“He’s hiding out from the draft,” said Taña. “You too, huh, Wittman?”
“Yeah,” said Wittman. “Me too.” We won’t turn each other in. So I too have a face trusted at first sight by the underground.
“I was hiding out in Mexico,” said Greg/Gabe. “But I came back to see if it’s possible to live a private life inside this country. Mexico freaks me too far out. Sugar skulls, bread skulls. Kids eat marzipan in the shape of death. Skulls biting on skulls. No trouble with the federales on either side of the border.” Yes, the autumn skeletons are appearing in “Gordo.”
“I didn’t re-register after graduation,” said Wittman. “And I didn’t give the feds my change-of-address. If I’d known it was coming to this, I would’ve shown up at a church every weekend until a minister got to know me to write me a recommendation for C.O.”
“There’s another way to go for the religious exemption. You haven’t gotten your Universal Life Church card?”
“No. How do I do that?”
“You have to be ordained by an ordained minister. I’m an ordained minister. The idea of the Universal Life Church is that the First Amendment gives each one of us total freedom to make up religion. Mine has as its main and First Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ No exceptions. My god is literal about that. I’m ethically prepared if I come up against the Army philosopher. Do you want me to ordain you? I can ordain you.”
“Yeah, go ahead. I’d like that. Ordain me.”
“I ordain thee a minister of the Universa
l Life Church. There. You write a letter to Reverend Kirby Hensley, 1776 Poland Street in Modesto, and he’ll send you a certificate and a card. You take that documentation to the Board of Health, and ask for a license to marry people, so you’re recognized by the State of California. If you hold public rituals in your living room, you can be tax-exempt. So you’re legit by the I.R.S. too. It’s all legal, First Amendment. Every pacifist deed you do, keep your documentation for your C.O. defense. Educated people who read and write well have a chance at it. The Army Ph.D.s and chaplains, who’ve graduated from seminaries, break down the high-school dropouts. You can get help on the argumentation from the American Friends Service Committee or Catholic Action.”
“I have my ideas straight. Thanks.”
“You should think out whether you really want to be an official Conscientious Objector. C.O.s do service, and don’t get to choose what kind. They’re the avant-garde, who go out ahead of the infantry to dismantle mines. The exemption for married guys is going to stop any day. Why don’t I marry the two of you? Cover all the bases. I have a perfect record; nobody I’ve ever married has gotten a divorce.”
“Sure,” said Taña. “I’d be glad to save you from the draft, Wittman.”
“Sure,” said Wittman, who had a principle about spontaneity. Zen. Don’t mull. There’s divinity in flipping a coin rather than weighing debits and assets. Taña, anyway, is probably his truest love already. Always do the more flamboyant thing. Don’t be a bookkeeper. He took Taña’s hand and said, “Will you marry me?”
“Yes,” she said.
The Reverend Gabe had the wedding ceremony memorized, the one from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer that we all know from the movies: “… wilt thou, Wittman ah—?”
“Ah Sing.”
“Wilt thou, Wittman Ah Sing, have this woman to thy wedded wife … love her, comfort her, honor and keep her in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”
“Yes, I will.”
Taña also said, “Yes, I will,” for her part. “My first marriage. Your first marriage too, isn’t it, Wittman? You haven’t been married before? No alimony? No child support?”
“No. My first marriage too.” No little Chinese wife back home.
“You can also say, ‘I plight thee my troth,’ ” said the preacher.
“I plight thee my troth.”
“I plight thee my troth.”
Thou. How do I love thee? What if I were always to address you as “thou”? Then how could I do thee wrong? Then I will always love thee. He will gather actors and ask them to improv “thou.” If his ardency flags, why, he need only call her “thee.” “Thee,” said Wittman again, looking at her.
“Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.”
O lovely peaceful words. What if I were to think in that language? I would not have the nervous, crimpy life that I do.
A movie kiss against the sea and sky. The End.
“I’ll send you the papers,” said Gabe.
A Sunday of vows. The way to make a life: Say Yes more often than No. Participate. Shoulder one of the vows that are always flying about like hovering angels. Every angel is terrible. Still, though, alas! I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing what you are. Swear, and follow through. No need to invent new vows; we haven’t done the old ones, and they aren’t done with us. Vows remain after those who gave them are gone. Think them in kanji and in English, so no matter if a part of your brain aphasicly goes out, some word remains. A posse of angels have rounded up some strays. To keep the old promises that are not broken, though the people break. To be a brother, a friend, a husband to some stranger passing through.
5
RUBY LONG LEGS’
AND ZEPPELIN’S
SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD
MR. AND MRS. WITTMAN AH SING monumentally descended the sculpturesque steps outside Coit Tower. Across their path ran the Chinese grandmother, wearing her sweater. She met another grandmother at the parapet, her white hair in a chignon bun, her hands on her hips, turning her torso this way and that way, breathing. The running grandmother talked loud to her about the price of fruit. She lifted her arms toward the eucalyptus trees. As the inter-racial couple walked past, she said, “Goot mah-ning.” “Good morning,” said Taña. So, this is the hour they come up here to do their old-lady kung fu. Taña had better not make a remark. Nobody had better make a remark. A girl jumped up on the parapet; she’s ballet-dancing on it. Two boys ran alongside, trying to catch her by the hand or by her skirt, but she pirouetted away, yes, on point. At the turn in the wall, she pivoted, and ran, leaping at her pursuers.
Taña went toward her car. She walks with her arms folded across her breasts. She’d returned the jacket to her friend. Oh, please don’t shrink up like that, Taña. All of young and old womankind dancing but not my Taña. It must be the effect of marriage. “Did you see the ballerina? You ought to be more like that,” he suggested. He was instructing her: Stay alive for me. Never tire. Stay up all night, and play all day. Don’t be cold in the wind. Else, how can I keep up loving you? She didn’t answer; she will get even with him later.
To perk her up, Wittman surprised Taña with a honeymoon—a trip to Sutro’s. For the rest of their lives, they could say, “That marriage, I spent my honeymoon at Sutro’s.” Their third anniversary, Sutro’s went up in a fire. Near the entrance, a true-to-life sculpture of a Japanese man stood almost naked, holding a hand mirror and looking itself in the eyes. Self-portrait. According to the plaque, the artist had used his own human hair for the hair on his statue. It had hair on its head; it had eyebrows, stub-brush eyelashes above doll glass eyes, nostril hairs, armpit hair. There was probably pubic hair under its loin cloth. There was a lot of yellowy-pinky skin. The honeymoon couple should have left then and there. It’s not true that freakiness takes you far out and breaks through into miracle.
“I hope that he used only hair from his head,” said Wittman, “clipped it and curled it for other parts of the body. How would you like to move into a studio, and find collections of eyebrow hair, fingernail clippings, eyelashes, beard shavings, pubic hair?”
“Call the cops,” said Taña.
“Doesn’t it make you want to cremate it?”
“He probably thinks that his statue is in some fine art museum in New York, America,” she said. The commiseration of one artist for another. “It’s exact, and it ought to be beautiful.”
“But isn’t.”
“But isn’t. Strange what he thought to be perfectly himself.”
Oh, god, is she profound and aesthetic. And she did not say that the thing looked like Wittman (which it did not), or had anything to do with him. We umberish-amberish people are not nitpicking hair-savers, creepy fingernail-collectors, or money-hoarding coprophiliacs. No way.
Near the real-hair Japanese man was a mechanical monkey dressed in Louis XVI courtier clothes, laces and plumes, bowing to guests, sweeping his hand back and forth. “I hope that’s fake fur,” said Taña. Its motor heart hummed and beat.
“If you scratch its hair, part it like looking for fleas, you’ll either see the pores and follicles of a real monkey or the warp and weave of cheesecloth.”
“Yew. Let’s not.”
“It’s probably real, hunted and shot by Lucius Beebe or Sutro.” Taña had never been here before. He was showing her new things, keeping the marriage lively, and the momentum of life rolling apace. A bond forms between those who have seen an odd phenomenon or laugh at a joke. He could never get it on with a straight chick.
In the musée méchanique, he led the way directly to his favorite mechanical, which was the amusement park that convicts had made out of toothpicks. He slipped a quarter into the slot, and started the Ferris wheel turning; the basket chairs trembled and lifted and, at the top of the ride, cunningly dropped. How many life sentences to build the latticework of the rollercoaster trestle? No people on the r
ides, but the music box plinked and tinked “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
“This is a meditation about time and doing time,” said Taña. “A meld of boredom and amusement. People who commit crimes are children, and when you lock them up, they stay children. This park is their idea of freedom. When they get out on parole, the first place they’ll go is the boardwalk at Santa Cruz. Amusement parks are full of criminals.”
Wittman hugged her shoulders. Here’s the girl he met at the party. Out in the dull world, he loved hearing Berkeley insights. And not having to make them all by himself. “Do you remember Robert Walker stalking Alfred Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia’s look-alike, and the merry-go-round and the Ferris wheel turning and turning?”
“Strangers on a Train,” said Taña.
After the fire, some people will remember the amusement park, and other people will remember a mining-camp scene with men panning and carrying and dumping, and a tram going in and out of a tunnel. It would have been a replica of the Sutro Metallurgical Works.
Taña put her arm around his waist, and they walked over to another exhibit. He ought not to feel afraid. Would there be less anxiety if she were taller and stronger than he? And women were the protectors of men. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Wait until he’s under fire in a battlefield. Panic then.
But there is something sickening about miniatures. Scale a thing down small, work on it for a long time, some life gets compressed into it. Only a tiny bit of life is needed to make a netsuke breathe, and be scary because alive, motored for always by the exhalations of its creator, and the chi and sweat from his hands. Frankensteinish animation. But I have always been afraid. It’s not the freak show, and it’s not her and marriage to her. I am always afraid.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International) Page 22