Wittman handed out a schedule of rehearsals to the actors going out the door. The would work scene by scene, the run-throughs, then open on Hallowe’en. Promise. We will meet again in the Pear Garden. They walked out wearing the shoes that will give them a way of going about in character.
But people didn’t say Good night right off. They had to say, “Good but.” “Good but you left out our millionaires. What about our millionaires?” “Good but bad impression of us. We not be uncivilized, we not be monkeys. We got inventors. We got scientists.” Oh, stop looking over your shoulders, why don’t you? And best friend Lance said, “Good but can a cannibal be capable of tragedy?” “What about an omnivore?” said Mrs. Lance. Wittman didn’t argue with wise guys, said Thank you for the constructive criticism.
At least nobody quit. The kung fu gang whose practice room this was did not take away the use of the hall.
Nanci was talking to one of the agent aunties. Without looking, he could sense the whereabouts of loveliness. Her atmosphere included him. She was leaving slowly, awaiting him? If he were a different type, and she were a different type, he could help her on with her coat, while saying in her ear, “I’ve missed you. I love you. I want you. Come with me.” He felt her tug toward the door. He stood in the path of the doe stepping into the night forest. “You aren’t going out there by yourself, are you? Do you have a ride?”
“We’ll give you a ride. We have a car.” It was Taña, his wife, with not a guile in voice or face.
“I live on Red Rock Hill now. Near the steps. It won’t be out of your way? Yes, thank you all.”
Everybody pulled his or her coat collar up. The fog and their cigarette smoke entwined in the San Francisco night. Out with two beautiful women, one on either side, if only a couple arrangement had not been made already. Wittman, of course, had to talk too much. “I love it when good actors come on stage, meet, interact and go off. In oceans and seas of time and space, amidst all the creatures and species, this one and that one find one another for a while of eternity on the same schedule and life-route as oneself. Nanci, you’re an actress who can deliver a Hello that makes us see the miracle of meeting, and a Goodbye that echoes all the partings and dyings.” Now, Nanci could say, “It’s your wonderful play that does all that for an actress.”
“I like the play,” Taña said.
“Me too,” said Nanci, giving him the opportunity to look at her. Say some more. Say, “I also like you.”
“I also like you,” said Taña, and put her arm through his.
They unzipped her pretty little car. Taña got in on the driver’s side. Wittman jumped into the air and landed in the space behind the seats. Taña reached over and opened the door for Nanci. Well, what did you expect? To ride through the suggestive City with her in his lap, his legs entangling with her legs? A hand at her waist curve? Scrunched amidst her and the gear shift? His back to the driver? As it was, he sat in the back with his head behind her head, and his feet sticking out the driver’s side. Black hair blew in his eyes and his mouth. One arm was like casual along the top of her door. The other arm was pinned. He can’t whisper into her ear, the wind blowing voices away. The Great Monkey would have given the neck in front of him a dracula bite. Dracula-bite them both. “Turn here,” she pointed, and jabbed him in the face with her elbow. She was not aware, then, of the air between them, and the exact boundaries between their bodies? She was sitting sort of upright. If she would fit herself better into her bucket seat, and back up against him, they could feel their connection through it. Come to think of it, he’s not feeling it much. Does this mean that it’s over? That would be okay, for it to be over. Let it be over. Let me out of love. How he thought then of the troubadours who feared nothing more than being answered. She was yelling the directions to where she lived, the Divisadero, near Ashbury, Vulcan Street, you know where the planet streets are, Mars, Saturn? The city lights streamed over the low car, and they dropped her off at her planet. Good night.… because I never held you close, I hold you forever.
In all scrupulosity, he can’t go home with Taña. She dropped him off. He spent the rest of the night looking for the plot of our ever-branching lives. A job can’t be the plot of life, and not a soapy love-marriage-divorce—and hell no, not Viet Nam. To entertain and educate the solitaries that make up a community, the play will be a combination revue-lecture. You’re invited.
8
BONES AND JONES
ON HALLOWE’EN, the red marble head of Sun Yat Sen breaks off, and kremlin gremlins fly out of the aluminum body and spook the City. His red marble hands move. Kids who once hid and waited in Portsmouth Square to be scared by this miracle had grown up. This year, these adults put on costumes again, and go-out clothes and fake and safe-deposit jewels, and went to an opening night of their own making. More maskers were at large than ever. They were trick-or-treating the Benevolent Association house. Jaywalking with children by the hand, they followed a boom-booming that pounded and sounded like Come come come until they arrived at the sight of the drummers. Two men and a woman banged the taikos with all the might of their workers’ arms. The tails of their sweatband-fillets jumped and flipflapped. A barker with pants rolled up over peasant legs ran barefoot up and down the sidewalk, calling friends by name and you and you while plinkplunking on his porcelain drum. Welcome. Welcome. The crowd walked through flowers—arrays of carnations and aisles of chrysanthemums sashed with red ribbons and calligraphy—and became audience.
A call—la-a-a-a!—out of the dark grew nearer with each of four soundings. The Talking Chief crosses the white rainbow. His eagle feathers flare—sun up—and he rains the audience with water from the Atlantic and the Pacific. Overhead flies Garuda, whose wings like a wheel we were wearing on our batik clothes, which Peace Corps volunteers were sending home from Southeast Asia. Ranga of the long fangs, long hair, long tits, shakes her scythe-like fingernails at a young man, and makes him arm-wrestle himself, his right hand trying to stab his bare chest, his left hand wrist-twisting his knife hand. Suddenly, he breaks from that Damballah trance and does the bent-knee hula—his thighs clapping, his hands rising from between his legs and up to the sky in enormous praise of the volcano goddess. Hanuman, the white monkey, swings in and out the windows. The black-and-white Abba-Zabba man—the one with the clown-white skull-white face and the black turtleneck—giving away Abba-Zabbas was Antonin Artaud, who had had to evoke genies of a crueler theater. Caliban is raging at not seeing his face in the mirror. Good red Gwan Goong is riding good Red Rabbit again, and has led eight genies through the streets to here. A sunseen man opens his water gourd that cools water as the sun gets hotter; the audience looks inside, and sees—everything, the Earth, everything. At any moment, one or another of these genie of the theater may interfere in a gambling scene and change the luck, or whisper answers to a test. And chant, “May he live” or “May he die.” The Talking Chief will cast his yo-yo, and hunt up children, twins, soldiers.
Across the stage, which was the size of Tripitaka’s hand, forward-rolled acrobatic twins, tied together—four heels over two heads that did not gravity-drop katonk. They backflipped off. And re-entered—verbal twins in green velveteen connected suits. Yale Younger and Lance Kamiyama as Chang and Eng, the Double Boys, pattering away in Carolina-Siamese. Chinkus and Pinkus.
“Sir Bones, how you feeling?”
“I feel like I’m being followed, Mr. Jones. The footsteps go where I go and stop where I stop. They don’t seem to be getting any closer but. I’m paranoid.”
“How do you do, Mr. Paranoid. I feel uneasy myself, you peeking at me sideways like that.”
“I have an idea that would make us be more like the normal American person.”
“What idea is that?”
“Let’s change our name.”
“What name would befit us?”
“Bunker. They like you in green velvet, and they like you being named after battles. Chang Bunker and Eng Bunker.”
“I’m dubious.”
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“Ah, Mr. Dubious, the footsteps pursuing us come on feminine feet. You all see that belle give me the eye?”
“She’s looking at me.”
“Do you think she’ll marry me?”
“She wants to marry me.”
“You all think every beautiful gal wants to marry you.”
“No, no. See that gal dancing with the Yankee officer? That’s Miss Adelaide, who wants to marry me. Her sister, Miss Sally, wants to marry you. And finds me repulsive. And vice versa.”
“Oh, such marvelous order in the universe. I’m beside myself with happiness. You’ll introduce me, won’t you?”
A tasteful scrim, a golden net, falls and a just-right pair of beautiful women hold out their arms and dance with him/them. Not the Virginia reel. It’s sort of a square-dance waltz. You never saw such a sight in your life. Two men dancing with their wives, Mrs. Bunker and Mrs. Bunker, née Adelaide and Sally Yates. And these lovely white ladies of the wider American world don’t spoil the brothers for the Chinese girls. Adet and Anor, Lin Yutang’s daughters, accept a dance. As do the Eaton sisters, Edith and Winnifred, a.k.a. Sui Sin Fah (Narcissus) and Onoto Watanna of Hollywood and Broadway and Universal Studios and M-G-M. Not a loner woman among them, each and every one a sister. And more concurrence: the brothers dance with their colleagues, Millie and Christine, the Carolina Black Joined Twins.
Eng: I’d like to buy you from Mr. Barnum. You be my slave. I have thirty-one slaves. You won’t be lonely.
Miss Millie: Why, no, sir. I won’t be your slave. Mr. Barnum pays me an artiste’s salary, the same as you. I’m a free woman.
Miss Christine: You are making her an indecent proposal, sir.
Chang: We shouldn’t be seen together in society. Rejects shouldn’t settle for rejects. We need to better ourselves. There’s nothing as rejected as a Black woman but a yellow man.
Eng: Speak for yourself, sir. I for one am an uncommon and rare man. And Miss Christine and Miss Millie are uncommon and rare women.
Miss Narcissus, who writes for newspapers: Are you fraternal twins or identical? You certainly do look alike.
Chang: I am alike.
Miss Narcissus: Tell me about your meeting with President Lincoln.
Chang: He told me a joke. Something about an Illinois farmer with a yoke of oxen that won’t pull together. He was making fun of me.
Eng: You’re always taking things personally. You’re too sensitive. He was speaking metaphorically and politically. The punchline goes, “To make a more perfect union.”
Miss Watanna: I’m so sorry for your sad life and persecution, and your loneliness. I sympathize.
Chang-Eng: Loneliness?
Miss Watanna: I’d advise a Japanese identity. Americans adore cherry blossoms and silk fans and tea ceremony and geisha girls and samurai and Mount Fuji and Madame Butterfly and sea waves and dainty vegetables such as a tempura of one watercress leaf. (Were this a movie, an extreme close-up: the Eaton sisters have blue eyes, which belie that the brown-eye gene is dominant. Their father was an English painter, and their mother was a Chinese tightrope dancer; such a miscegenation produces American children.)
Chang-Eng: Identity? (He are baffled.)
Eng: South Carolina, the rice capital of the world, also has cherry blossoms and butterflies, and women who are artful with fans and women with flower names. We have a seacoast and tea and watercress sandwiches, and our soldiers are aristocrats.
Miss Watanna: You’ve lost your identity.
Miss Narcissus: You’re assimilated, Mr. Eng. And you too, Winnifred.
The sisters go away, and from across the ballroom comes a beautiful girl, Miss Sophia, played by Taña. She holds out her hands and clasps the outside hands of each twin. They are in a ring-around-the-rosy circle. In an English accent, Miss Sophia says, “Will you marry me, dear? I love you, Chang-Eng.”
“No, thank you, Miss Sophia,” says Chang.
“I can’t marry you, Miss Sophia,” says Eng.
“May I see you now and then, dearest?”
“No, Miss Sophia.”
“May I write to you? Write poems to you? And mail them to you?”
“Yes, I’ll read your poems.”
“Goodbye, Chang-Eng dear.”
“Goodbye, Miss Sophia dear.”
Alone, Chang says to Eng, “I love her very much.”
“Me too. I was in love with her.”
“She had no discrimination. She had the capability for impartial love. She will write democratic love poems. I’m sorry I can’t marry her.”
“So am I.”
A stagehand in black spins the lottery drum that was once upon a time a Gold Rush cradle, and a voice calls out: “The United States Army wants you, Mr. Eng Bunker.”
Eng: We’ve been drafted into the Union Army. They need men to tear up the North Carolina and Piedmont Railroad.
Chang: What you mean “we,” white man? (As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger when they are surrounded by Indians.) As Confucius said, “You are you, and I am I.” I’m not going to tear up any railroads, and I’m not freeing any slaves. I don’t want to go to war.
Eng: Shall I make a plea of conscience?
Chang: You all ought to make a plea of the body. You all weren’t constructed to be a soldier.
Eng: I am an able-bodied man. Twice as able-bodied as most. I have to think out a deep philosophy against war.
Chang: Point out that you have an attachment to a dove of peace.
Eng: I’m on your side. And a good thing too. If you were to join the Confederate Army, I don’t see that we have enough room to shoot long rifles at each other. Does a conscience have to be pure of self-interest? When I think about fighting against my own son and your own son, I get a limpness in my trigger finger, and an anchoring in of my heels.
Chang: Yes, I feel that too. That’s our conscience all right, real and most concrete. Brother Eng, aren’t you afraid of going to Salisbury Prison as a traitor and a coward?
Eng: Only one thing I’m scared of—myself.
Chang: Mr. Jones, you strike me as ornery. I drink to you, an ornery American man.
Eng feels the liquor too. And they do drunk shtick, slurring and weaving, and falling down, which gets a laff.
But the circus crowd wants more. “Let’s have a look!” “Let’s see! Let’s see!” They rush the brothers and pull at the green velveteen to try to see and touch the ligament. A doctor gets between the twins, examines it, and says, “He is as human as the next American man.” The brothers hit the doctor from either side. Chang chases him, dragging Eng after him.
The lights throw bars of shadow across the stage; Chang is jailed for starting a riot. He yells at the audience through the bars, “We know damned well what you came for to see—the angle we’re joined at, how we can have two sisters for wives and twenty-one Chinese-Carolinian children between us. You want to see if there’s room for two, three bundling boards. You want to know if we feel jointly. You want to look at the hyphen. You want to look at it bare.”
“My, you all are a violent man,” says Eng. “How am I to make my plea of conscience?”
“Mr. Bones, your troubles give me a pain in the ass.”
The brothers are let out of jail and out of the draft on technicalities. Only one of them is a rioter and only one a draftee, so what to do with the extra man but let him go?
But they cannot evade age and death. Chang dies. He does death throes, then hangs there dead with his pigtail fanning like a fishtail sweeping the floor. The world has been contemplating the horror of being attached to a corpse—the albatross tied to the sailor; Ripley’s camel roaming the desert with the dead legionnaire tied to its saddle. The remaining brother pushes at the dead one, runs without getting anywhere, and says: Now it was there. Now it grew out of me like a tumor, like a second head, and was so big. It was there like a huge, dead beast, that had once, when it was still alive, been my hand or my arm. Eng dies too after several days and nights of sympathy and fri
ght.
Then here come The Flying Lings! The Living Target! The Frame of Knives! The Chinese Coin and the Enchanted Straw! Experiments in Human Elasticity by the Boneless Boy! The Bowl of Water and the Charmed Sling! The World Record Number One Balancer of Eight (8) Stools on the Nose—Going for Nine (9) Tonight Only! The Magic Balls! Bird Calls and Animals of the Farm! The Revolving Oil Jar! The Most Ambidextrous Jugglers in the World! The First Chinese Woman in America! And off fly the Lings, Four Muscular Orientals, to Mystic, Connecticut.
So, several families of brothers are dead. Kingdoms rise and fall. World war again. Vaudeville time! The screen for changing costumes behind—black silk stockings and a red feather boa flung over it—fell with a crash-bang! It’s Ruby Long Legs and the Flora Doras with all their clothes on. They ran out of their huddle and got into chorus-girl formation. They rolled their shoulders, winked over their high almost-Pilipina sleeves, wiggled their peplum asses. Ruffling the air with dusting powder and French perfumes, Auntie Dolly, Auntie Sadie, Auntie Bessie, Auntie Maydene, Auntie Lilah, Auntie Marleese, and Mom, all together now—knee kick, full kick, knee kick, full kick. “Can you do the cancan? I can do the cancan”—segueing into “There’s a place in France where the ladies wear no pants.” They gave us their backsides, and lifted their skirts. Each auntie was wearing undies with the flag of an ally on them. It’s the Pants Dance of the Nations. The audience went wild for each auntie doing her national special. Clicking castanets over her head, Auntie Dolly with a rose between her teeth stamped her feet in tight circles, and flung that rose at her old man. “La cucaracha. La cucaracha.” “King Georgie had a date. He stayed out very late. God save the King. Queen Lizzie paced the floor. King George came in at four. She met him at the door. God save the King.” Skirts down and hands proper, they sang as regally as queens. Aunt Maydene, Miss Finlandia, sang, “Dear land of home, our hearts to thee are holden.” “Yo-ho-HEAVE-ho-o!” The aunties bent their backs and pulled, a chorus line of Mother Courages. March march march, tappy toes, tappy toes, salute, salute. “From the halls of Montezu-uma to the shores of Tripoli.” Aunt Bessie sang “Mae Ling Toy and her Chinee Boy”; she danced, wagging her head back and forth between pointer fingers pointing up and down. The merry widows—they wore merry widows—were yet breaking hearts at forty feet; and at five feet, which was how close the front row was, their kicking spike heels could knock your head off. The oldest stars in our firmament sky were radiating. The audience whistled for encore after encore, drawing the aunties out amongst them, where they sat on laps, rubbed bald heads, gazed into eyes, vamped “I’d like to get you on a slow boat to China all to myself alone.” Ruby Long Legs parted her legs, and did the splits, sliding down all the way to the floor. Then everybody on her back—legs wide open making V for Victory.
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International) Page 39