Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  How to break the news to a wife that she’s married a Chang? Don’t worry; she’s going to be supported but in a way that isn’t going to sacrifice his free life. She’s going to have to help out. He’ll teach her how to live on nothing, and she’ll always be able to get along, with or without him. For her birthday and anniversary, take her out to the dining rooms that feed any old body, such as the Salvation Army and the Baptist mission. Not the Old St. Mary’s kitchen, though, because of pride, too many Chinese nearby. Don’t go to the Red Cross either; after battles they meet soldiers carrying back their dead, and charge them for coffee and doughnuts, according to Zeppelin. For Wittman’s twenty-first birthday, his father took him to a skid-row bloodbank, where they gave blood for ten dollars apiece. The Red Cross and the bloodbank don’t preach.

  The car started. The uncles were applauding. The footsteps that came up behind him were the two mechanics’. “Here.” Pop whacked him on the shoulder with a sheaf of paper.

  “Zeppelin! Ah Zeppelin, ah!” The gamblers were calling for more chances at him. Pop handed him the paper, and left.

  “Bye,” said Taña.

  “Um,” said Pop without turning around.

  “Um,” said Wittman.

  The river continued flowing down from the Sierras and on to the Pacific. Taña drove, heading toward Reno and PoPo. “Pop isn’t so bad,” Wittman said by way of apology. “I know a family where the son had to throw a cleaver at his father’s head—this was in the kitchen, a restaurant family—and got him to start saying Hi.” We wouldn’t mind our fathers so much if Caucasian daddies weren’t always hugging hello and kissing goodbye.

  Wittman used his talent for reading in a moving car without getting carsick to read to his wife, busy at her practical tasks. Find Treasure was a newsletter published, written, edited, typed, duplicated, and distributed by Zeppelin Ah Sing. The main article this quarter was about the mountains of Hawai’i—they’re hollow inside, where continues to live the royal family that descended from navigators who came from Tahiti and Samoa via Malaysia via Israel. Even tourists and scientists have sighted the king’s warriors nightwalking through certain streets of the city and carrying torches on top of the sea. When he was stationed at Schofield, Zeppelin himself had seen menehune sidhe standing on rocks. They wore bright crowns, and turned toward him with open mouths. Another evidence of the hidden kingdom is that historically there were decoy funeral processions. Inside the mountains, there live ali’i more royal than the branch on the Peninsula. When Ko’olau the Leper alone held off the U.S. Army until he ran out of bullets, he was looking for a way inside the mountains. Zeppelin warned his readers that the Hawaiians at their most glorious were pre-metal, and their treasures were feathers, stones, hair, teeth, bones, and cloth.

  As in all newspapers and magazines, the Letters to the Editor were the best reading because of their non-conformity. Pop’s letters came from his six subscribers: Vincent “Helicopter” Hoople of Anchorage reported that termination dust has begun to fall. Luckily, he’s finished collecting the free coal that washes down to the beach from the melting glaciers. Worldbeater Tam Soong, who had been reporting about life on the Malay Peninsula—“I can’t like it”—has found work on a cattle ranch in Calgary, and recommended Canadian Short Stories as a field guide. Rosalie Manopian complained about missing cherry-blossom time in Japan and gardenia time in Hawai’i. She is in Guam during toad season. She has to hose out the dogs’ mouths, which foam from catching toads. “ ‘Guam is good,’ ” she quoted the sign at the airport. Chance S. L. (Shao Lin) Go gives up on getting near the gold and diamonds of Johannesburg, which the conglomerates have glommed, and is investing in a diving bell. He will join Mr. Arthur C. Clarke, who has news of a gold web over Ceylon. And Gavino McWong of the Americas complimented the editor for giving him info that is changing his life for the richer; he will send more details after he registers his claim on a river of opals in Baja. There was a query from Higinio Nicolas, Palos Verdes, who needs to know anything more about the treasure ship that came from China a thousand years ago and sank near the beachfront lots which he has bought up.

  Find Treasure featured an abandoned mine per issue. How much wealth it might realize. How to own it. A map and a deed upon request and twenty-five dollars. Each site personally visited by Zeppelin Ah Sing. His philosophy was that the mines had been abandoned at a time when the equipment was inadequate. Using modern techniques and positive thinking, one could dig deeper. Dredge the gold mines that had been but grazed, too much rush. Politically, change zoning codes, change society. His position on using acids to leach out gold was that he was for it.

  The history lesson was that Constant Fong’s grandfather fainted down the steps of the Gong Jow temple-and-courthouse in Sacramento. This happened at the very moment that John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, and their pains were in the same places. Grandfather Fong put two and two together when the news of the assassination reached the West.

  These were the filler facts: The Limit. Many first-generation Americans are named Gordon because when their ship landed on Angel Island, and Immigration asked for their real names, they took the one off the ship, the Gordon.

  The last page was about equipment for the retrieval of treasure, buried or sunken, types of metal detectors, prices of used machinery, where to order, etc. Professional geologists write dates and places on chunks of geode, quartz, garnet, gold with India ink on white paint. Professional archaeologists christen their sites. They dig with the Marshalltown trowel.

  Wittman used his English major’s skills to sneer at and correct the dumb grammar, but suddenly stopped, folded the paper away. Find Treasures by Pop gave him that same homey-internationale feeling as the Catholic Worker one-cent newspaper. The beans are growing at Peter Maurin Farm. I have a father who gives me a city in a coral-reef volcano. Father and son self-made men out of dregs and slags.

  The highway followed the American River east, up among the turkey vultures and the red-tail hawks. They stopped to put up the top. Wittman took the wheel and drove on toward Reno. If there is a plot to life, then his setting out in search of her will cause PoPo to appear. Do something, even if it’s wrong, his motto. His understanding of Kierkegaard: To think up reasons why something would not work guarantees that it will not work. Never do feasibility studies. Get on with creation. Do the most difficult thing. Keep the means moral. His path and her path will synchronize. Taña turned on the radio, which was talking about a “tragic automobile accident.” “At least somebody died,” she said. “To most people, tragedy is when they don’t get what they want.” She snapped the radio off. She sang “Clementine.” GrandMaMa will hear. It can’t be so easy to lose track of one’s people.

  He chimed in at “You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry.” He sped up, but smoothly. He felt the drag and pull of climbing. Don’t punch the gas. Shift smooth. Ahead, a slow Pilipino man in a Frank Sinatra hat peered at the road through his steering wheel. Pass him. If Wittman were alone, he wouldn’t be trying to live up to this Porsche, which didn’t let family cars overtake and pass it by. A car like this costs as much as a house. But as the Angelenos say, you can live in your car; you can’t drive a house. What do you get when you cross a Black with a Chinese? What? A car thief who can’t drive. Ha ha. How come twenty Mexicans show up at the wedding? How come? They’ve only got one car. Ha ha. How do you teach a chinaman a sense of direction? How? Paint R’s on his thumbnails so he can tell Right from Reft. Ha ha. A man’s instincts show up behind the wheel. Wittman naturally drove like an international student from a developing country. He concentrated on counteracting his stereotype. If he were Black, no Cadillac; if he were Mexican-American, no duck ass on his head, and no ’fifty Merc, raked and deshocked, waddling through the downtown; if he were a girl, no red Mustang; if he were socialist, no V.W. with a Co-op bumpersticker. He got out of the slow lane—carefully because of having no rhythm for merging. Lean one elbow casually out the window. Drive Okie. Lew Welch says, “Think Jew, d
ress Black, drive Okie.” Why Jack Kerouac had to hitchhike and be chauffeured was he couldn’t drive. Pass the Flammable truck with car lengths to spare. The oncoming cars could crash through the poison oleanders, head-on. He went back to hugging the mountainside. But bravely tried to pass a logging truck, the logs far longer than he’d thought. The trucker seemed to race him, and not let him back in for a long time—the last moment over the hill. His mouth dry, he wanted a cigarette but neither hand wanted to leave the steering wheel to fumble around on the dashboard for a lighter that might not even be there. He could use a look at the speedometer too, but. Having trouble breathing. The altitude or an acid flash? Don’t tell Taña. Shit. The log rig is too large behind him, tailgating the chinaman. He tried to step on it but seemed to go slower. He wanted to slow down, and to stop. But what if his shaky leg miscalculate the brake, and we overshoot the guardrail, or bounce off it into the logging rig? He may be about to lose it. “Isn’t that beautiful?” he said at the gorges. “That’s beautiful,” he said at the fires of red and gold trees. The quaking of the shiverleaf aspens was inside his feet. He cannot get into an accident; the Highway Patrol will ask for his driver’s license, which had expired. “Want to pull over for a good look?” asked Taña, and broke the spell. He pulled controllably into a rest stop. The logger juggernauted over the spot where he had been, its driver blasting him with the horn, giving him the finger while looking straight ahead, ignoring the bird Wittman flipped him in return. After they appreciated the scenery, he let Taña take the wheel. “I’ll do the looking out for GrandMaMa,” he said. She took them up and over the summit.

  The evergreen pines and redwoods stood in red tangles of poison ivy and poison oak. In a Disney flick, the trees would be picking up their itchy feet and scratching them with their branches. The railroad tracks ran above here and below there. The chaparral has grown over cuts, and the mountains seem to have never been re-graded and re-shaped.

  Taña was asking a question, some kind of a driving game. “See those lakes down there?” There were several flat lakes or pools, perfectly round—too round—no waves, no ducks, no campers. “You know what those are? Those are fake lakes. The C.I.A. built them. They store missiles and nuclear warheads under that glass. They press co-ordinating buttons at the Lawrence Rad Lab and Washington and Los Alamos; a lake slides open. Out of it will rise the nose of a timed rocket. It’s aimed at Russia. If we were to park here, and hide—you watch—at 3:00 a.m., the lakes will open. Workers and equipment will move in and out.” It was a very eerie secretive place, all right, no other cars. “It looks peaceful, huh? They’re disguising the violence.” She’s just being her old self. He liked her old self.

  Where are you, PoPo? Did you walk into the mountains and valleys, and fall asleep behind a tree, or accept a ride with a stranger, a yacht ride on Lake Tahoe? Be resting on a shoulder of the highway of life, be scraping the road apple off your shoe, I will find you.

  In Reno, he parked the car, and they walked up and down the main drag. GrandMaMa was not arm-wrestling the one-arm bandits in the open-air sidewalk casinos. She was not in hotel lobbies, or in cafeterias, nor was she trading her jade at the coin-and-metals stores. At the Washoe County Courthouse, they sat on the steps that Marilyn Monroe had walked down after her divorce in The Misfits.

  “Want to get a divorce?” asked Taña. She got the jump on him again. “Now’s your chance.” She was ahead by quite a few points.

  “What about you? You want a divorce?” She must have noted his driving, and been disappointed in him.

  “I asked you first.”

  “No, I don’t want a divorce.” Not bad, Mr. Monkey. Like “I’m not saying I don’t love you.” Better you should’ve said, “Let’s go inside and really get married.”

  Everywhere they walked, neon hearts winked and blinked. Stuffed doves—Bill and Coo—lifted ribbons in their beaks. Legal Weddings Legal. No Waiting. Flower Bo-Kay. Photos. Rings. Garter. Hitching Post. Witnesses. Cake Reception. Se Habla Español. Ceremony by the Reverend Love in the Chapel of Love. Taña took Wittman by the hand, and pulled him under the arch-gate of white bells and valentines that led to the Chapel of Love. They looked like the couple on top of the cake. World Famous & Reno’s Finest! Civil Marriage! Commitment! Non-denominational! In revenge for his not saying, “I love you, let’s really get married,” she said, “I wouldn’t be caught dead inside the Chapel of Love again. Once you get inside, they separate the men from the women. The bride and bridesmaid go into this room, where they change into dresses. The wedding march starts, and an amber light goes on, the signal for the bridesmaid to walk out. She emerges at the top of these stairs that go down to the altar. Like church. And at the top of the other wing of this double staircase, the best man walks out his door. Like a cuckoo clock. Then, green lights go on in the dressing rooms, and here comes the bride and the groom. In sync without a rehearsal. And the Reverend Love of the Chapel of Love marries them.”

  She’s been married before? She’s a divorcée? A bigamist? Nah. She’d been the bridesmaid, not the bride. Her gang of friends drove across State Line and married one another for kicks.

  “I’m glad we’re already married, and don’t have to go through that,” he said.

  They went into a coffee shop to tank up for the drive back. They filled out the keno cards with crayons. Tables in Reno have salt, pepper, and a carton of crayons. Numbers lit up on the boards. Although Zenly one doesn’t care about winning and losing, one feels a thrill and satisfaction at each number that matches. It’s sort of like watching the board at the U.C. library to see if they’ve got your book. Flash. Your book is in. Lucky. Gamblers think they want money, but they’re really after the hit-the-jackpot pinball lights. Like satori.

  “I can’t stand to lose,” Taña said. “But if I win, I’ll get addicted. I have an addictive personality.”

  “I don’t. Do you think I would be more stable if I acquired some habits like a rabbit?”

  Should they stay and make Reno their home? There was a Berkeley plot to take over Nevada, which is the state with the smallest population for its land size. Establish residency in kibbutzim of tents and caves, and vote our people into office. Two U.S. senators easy, same as New York, California, Texas. The prostitutes and gamblers of Reno and Las Vegas and Mustang would, of course, be leftish and help send hip representatives to Congress and Carson City. They will legalize marijuana, and re-appoint the draft boards, and ban bomb testing from the desert, and send our own friendly ambassadors throughout the world. The center of world revolution was supposed to move from Berkeley to Nevada.

  No, not yet. Still more private life to lead. Find GrandMaMa. Wittman paid for gas, and drove. Fall off a horse, get right back on. Same with a car. The sun going down, the casino lights going up, the night softening the Sierras, he’ll take it through. Taña looked for GrandMaMa on the right side of the freeway; Wittman looked to the left across the oncoming traffic. One more chance, PoPo.

  Silverado. Silver cities. If you know your history, you can see more clearly the ghosts in the ghost towns. There had once been Chinese parades. To the surprise of their neighbors, one day every Chinese in town and from out of nowhere, including the women with bound feet, had dressed up and paraded. On a buckboard stage, the few women, representing eighty-seven faeries, played banjos and flutes, and strewed flowers, and waved branches of quince and poles of streamers and tassels. A faery seemed airborne, dancing in the circles of ribbon she twirled on a stick; ribbon dancing will be an Olympic event, wait and see. The men walked with their birds or sat on antique throne-chairs on haywagons. Farm-hand clowns did handsprings and bird calls and animal calls, and acrobatic pile-ups. Those who remembered opera sang the parts of kings. They fanned themselves and their birds and the townspeople with elaborate vanes of feathers, paper, wood. At the end of the street, the procession turned around and went through town again, and again. The main streets were very wide, not for quickdraw gunfights, but so that wagons, which had no reverse,
could turn around. A buckboard carried a pyramid of buns for everyone to help themselves. A man walked among the crowds inviting them to look inside his gourd, and to drink from it. Merchants and traders—this happened on a workday—came out on the plank walkways and the balconies, and were amazed at their cook and babysitter, their laundryman, their cowhand, so changed. Why, but a few years ago, they had been pogrommed in a drive-out, and here they were parading. Yes, the citizens of the town will marvel at the comeback. They’ll find these human beings so beautiful that they won’t want to massacre them anymore. Already the lifetime of the town had never seen the like—when overhead sailed men in a basket lofted by a red silk balloon. It floated low. The people in the air seemed wonderstruck to see the people on the ground. Their runningwater sleeves streaming in the sky, they pointed at this one and that one. They dropped notes upon them. They called in a foreign language. Each wore a different shape of hat. They had long moustaches. The wind caught the balloon up, and they blew away to see the Indians and buffaloes. They went in the direction of one of the four words on the sides of their basket. Those words might have been the compass points, or perhaps they said, “We discover you, America.” Nobody could read Chinese, they could’ve said anything. It had been an exploration all the way from Cathay.