Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage International)

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  “I applied at the insurance company where my wife works. Don’t worry, I knew better than to use her as a reference. Does anyone know why it is that at certain jobs such as insurance and teaching, they won’t hire husband and wife? Family fights and family sex in front of the customers? I dressed straight-arrow. I treated the receptionist like she’s boss. I applied myself, and filled out the forms without wedging any wisecracks or opinions into the answer spaces. I’m trying to be a Young Affordable, like you; then I’ll buy my own shoes and new socks. I borrowed these shoes from the costume shop. They’re too big for me.” He lifted his foot over his knee. The shoe, too heavy, kept going, pulling him over with it. “I took an arithmetic test in these shoes. I matched rows of long numbers with other rows of long numbers, digit for digit the same. For example, is 68759312 exactly the same or not the same as 68759312? I did not add, did not subtract, just read horizontally and vertically. What for I went to college? I did pretty well, got everything right. And this personnel guy says to me, ‘You people are good at figures, aren’t you?’ I can’t think of how to answer right off. I should take that as a compliment? It’s within his realm of insurance to recognize in me one of a tribe of born mathematicals, like Japanese? I say, ‘Who, me? Not me, man. I come from the group with no sense of direction. I’m more the artistic type. What do you have in the creative line?’ I didn’t get a callback.

  “At a corporation that I don’t know what they actually produce, I told the interviewer about having organized a sales campaign before. And he says, ‘Made fifty cents on the dollar?’ I think I heard right. I say, ‘What you say?’ He says, ‘Made a dollar out of fifty cents.’ I let him have it on the immorality of profits. ‘I’m against profits,’ I say; ‘I won’t work for a corporation that profits from making shit. And if you’re making something worthwhile, you should be giving it away.’

  “What they always ask is, ‘Why do you want to join our firm, Mr. Ah—Ah Sing?’ They don’t understand, I don’t want to. I have to. And I don’t join; I rule. But the most they’ll let me do is the filing. How I answer, I say, ‘I be-leaf in high high finance. I be-leaf in credit. Lend money; get interesting. Smallkidtime, I like bang money like Scrooge McDuck. I also likee bad Beagle Boys—follow map and dig under city into fault. No, not San Andreas Fault. Bang fault. Safu.’ I was up for teller—I’m pretty smart—passed typing, passed adding machine—but when they call the tellers ‘our girls,’ I can tell they’re not about to hire me.

  “I’m unfit for office work. I’m facing up to that. And I can’t write sales anymore. It fucks me up bad to sell anything to anybody. I have no attitude against blue collar, just so long as they make fruit cocktail instead of bombs, but I hate to lie that I’m not too overeducated. At this hiring hall for Fruitvale, guess what the guy says to me? He says, ‘Do you have your green card?’ My skin turning browner, my back getting wet, my moustache drooping, I say the truth, ‘I don’t have to show you no steenking green card.’ And I don’t, don’t have to show it, and don’t have one. I get so fucking offended.

  “Unemployed and looking, my task is to spook out prejudice. They’ll say any kind of thing to the unemployed. In Angel tradition, let me pass on to you the trick question they’re asking: ‘What would you say your weak point is?’ They ask in a terribly understanding manner, but don’t you confide dick. You tell them you have no weak point. Zip. ‘None that I can think of,’ you say. ‘Weak point?’ you say. ‘What you mean weak point? I only have strong points.’ They get you to inform on yourself, then write you up, ‘Hates business,’ ‘Can’t add,’ ‘Shy with customers.’

  “My caseworker at the Employment Office, that is, the Office of Human Development—he’s right over there—give him a hand—stand up—take a bow—Mr. Leroy Sanchez—advised me to get a haircut, and sent me to this shopping-news office on the Peninsula. On the bus, I thought out the power that would be mine peacemongering the shoppers with an aboveground grass-roots press. I’d be practicing right politics among locals who buy and sell. A radical can’t accuse me, ‘Poet, aussi, get your ass streetward,’ that is, aux barricades et rues of Burlingame. I’d already be out on the block. Dig: the shopping news taking a stand on zoning—zoning can change society—re-seating the draft board and ex-locating the recruiting office. We’ll sponsor contests with trips to Russia and Cuba and China for exchange workers and exchange soldiers. They will feel possessive of the Alameda shipyards, and can’t bear to bomb them. We’ll join one another’s Friends of the Library and League of Women Voters and Audubon Society and food co-op and Sierra Club and S.P.C.A. and SANE and cornea bank. We exchange families and pets and recipes and civil servants. Like Leadership Day in high school, we hand over the running of the Government and everything to them, and vice versa. We do one another’s work and keep up one another’s social invitations. Sister cities conduct the foreign policy. Pretty soon we’ll be all miscegenated and intermarried, we’ll be patriotic to more than one place. By the time I got off the bus, I wanted the gig a lot. I was on time for my appointment. I gave my plan for world peace to the editor. I hope he appropriates my ideas. And you appropriate them too. Please. He asked, ‘How old are you?’ They think we look young. I told him nicely that I wasn’t a short and young Chinese boy. He didn’t hire me. I’ll make my own shopping news. I’m passing the hat. Will you please put some money in it toward offset printing of my shopping news?”

  As you may imagine, when Wittman promised a love story, but it was turning into a between-gigs story, he was losing some audience. He didn’t try to stop them. Go ahead, leave. He did notice when this one and that one cut out. It’s all right. Go. Go. Squeeze out between the knees and the chairbacks. (There are two types of audience members when they’re excuse-me-leaving-excuse-me—some turn their ass and some their genitals toward the faces in a row.) They love fight scenes; they love firecrackers. But during a soliloquy when a human being is thinking out how to live, everybody walks about, goes to the can, eats, visits. O audience. For those who stayed with him, those with hungry ears but nobody has read to them since bedtime stories, he kept on talking. Those kind people were putting money and red envelopes into the hat.

  “Readers will be able to pick up my shopping news for free. I’m going to give ideas on how to live on barely anything. From experiments in living, I know that three thousand dollars a year is plenty enough to live on and to sock some away as back-up for eventualities, and for projects such as this play. Our editorial policy will be that Congress has to pass Walter Reuther’s plan for a guaranteed annual minimum living wage for United Auto Workers and everybody—three thousand dollars, which will bring every American up to the official poverty level. A married couple could pool their money—six thousand dollars. Two couples—twelve thousand dollars, a ten-percent down payment on a hundred and twenty thousand dollars worth of communal land. Life is possible.

  “I want to run an information exchange on how to live like a China Man. Whenever you buy a newspaper, whenever you spend a dime for a pay toilet, you leave the door of the dispenser or the can open—don’t slam it—for the next guy on voluntary poverty who comes along. I’ve found a route of newspaper dispensers where somebody’s being regularly thoughtful of me. I hardly buy anything. I use the bathroom at Pam Pam’s without being a customer, and they’re okay about it. Lately I order pizza, and leave an unbitten wedge for some hungry person to grab ahead of the busboy. Do the same with club sandwiches. I’m going to make a listing of cafés where you may sit for a long time over one cup of coffee, and they don’t say, ‘There’s a dead one at table eleven.’ Sticks and stones. Just be sure to tip the waitress extra well. The Christian Science Reading Room is a private club for yourself alone, no other readers ever in there. Old St. Mary’s has a reading room too, and the church part is open day and night seven days a week; in the middle of the night when you’re freaking out, it’s a quiet dark place to come down, sniffing the India Imports smells. Sometime in our lives, everyone ought to live on just what
nature and society leave for us. Loquats dropping off the park trees bid us who know they’re not poisonous, ‘Eat me. Eat me.’ To live on leavings, we find out just how inhabitable this planet, this country is. I pick up stuff off the street that I don’t even need. I have to think up uses for what’s there. If you sit on the seawall at Baker Beach or Aquatic Park for quite some time, you’ll see the shoes and socks that nobody is coming back for. You’ll not be wearing a drowned man’s shoes; he went out into the water or walked along the shore and lost his landmarks. If they’re still there after your own long walk, they’re yours. Take them or the tide will. Of course, later, you will lose those shoes, and the watch that was inside one of them; there’s a losing karma to things that you find. Like there’s a stealing karma to hot stuff. When a Chinatown coot gets his unregistered gun stolen from under his pillow, and another old coot gives him his, that gun gets stolen too. My free shopping news will help every human being survive as an artist. If you hadn’t helped me put on this show, I was going to drop Xeroxed copies of scripts into Goodwill bins. Painters can use the Salvation Army thrift shop for a gallery. Shoppers who buy art there would also buy playscripts, and read them and perform them.

  “Among the ads about the price of bananas and birthday clowns and other odd jobs, I plan to keep running my idea for an anti-war ritual: Cut off the trigger finger instead of circumcision for all the boy babies, and all the girl babies too. Chop. I’ll volunteer to have mine done first. On the other hand, the people who love shooting, they’ll use their toes, they’ll use their noses. It’s more difficult to make peace than war. You take war away from human beings, you have to surrogate them with projects that haven’t been thought up yet. Workers at weapons factories could keep their jobs making missiles but out of papier-mâché, and install them in the landscape for admiration. They’re launchable. We let ourselves go at long last, drop them on Russia and Cuba, and invite them to drop theirs on us.

  “You didn’t come to the theater on your night offu to think about jobs and war; you came to be entertained. For my last bit, I’ll tell you about marriage. I was learning to live poor—for one only. Then I got married. But. I have mixed feelings about that. About her. I may be getting a divorce. I have a marital problem. I married my second-best girl. I like her. She started the marital problem. She said that she’s not in love with me. ‘I’m not in love with you, Wittman,’ is how she put it. I answered, ‘Well, I’m not in love with you either, but. It’s okay.’ If I were in love with her, or vice versa, we should go to a shrink. Shrink the romance out of us. She—my wife—said, ‘We haven’t been romantic about each other. I never fantasized about you.’ And I said, ‘That’s good. I don’t want anybody fantasizing about anybody.’ And she said, ‘Out there somewhere is the soul chick you’re going to fall in love with and leave me for. She’s waiting for you, and you’re waiting for her. The prosaic things you do, Wittman, will be interesting in her eyes. You’ll become brave showing off for her. You better start regretting our marriage now so you won’t regret everything when you’re old, and it’s too late.’ One of the things I like best about my wife, she’ll face a bad trip head on.

  “I am sometimes somewhat in love with her. But it’s not fate or magic. There’s a specialness about her that is photographable. She has an expression on her face like she’s appreciating whomever she’s looking at. All she has to do is regard me, behold me like that, and I won’t be able to leave her. She’s listening; I hope she doesn’t get self-conscious on me; I hope she isn’t acting. The way her top lip upcurves with a dip in the center—she can’t act that. She can’t make mean lips. She smiles sideways. Quite a few movie stars have a sideways smile and beholding eyes, and we fans want them to keep reacting like that—to us, to everything. And she’s got long blonde hair. I wouldn’t mind a shrink immunizing me to it. I don’t like being taken in by movie-star eyes and movie-star hair and movie-star lips.

  “She admitted to me how she got this guy. Before she met me. On a rainy night, she went with her girlfriend and this guy into a coffeeshop. He held the umbrella and the door for this other girl to go ahead; he went in next. Water poured off the umbrella onto the girl in back, that is, her, my wife. He had made his choice. She said to herself, ‘I’m going to get him.’ At the next party, she let her hair down all clean and dry, a-tumble and curly, cascades of it down her back and shoulders, parted to the side, the way bad girls part hair, for a hank to fall over one eye and have to be seductively pushed back. That guy didn’t have a chance. He was mesmerized in love, and the only thing changed about her was her hair. She’s told me her magic. I’ve seen her with her hair wet and in a rubber band and in curlers. I’m not taken in. I’m not under her blonde power.

  “She’s not Chinese, I’ll admit, but those girls are all out with white guys. What am I to do, huh? I don’t want a Hong Kong wife marrying me for a green card. I’ve been testing my wife out. There was this sofa game in Life magazine a long time ago, where the guy sits at one end of the sofa and the girl at the other. They look into each other’s eyes. In the next frame, they move closer together. ‘Irresistibly,’ said the caption, they meet in the middle. In the last frame, they’re in each other’s arms, kissing. A time clock at the corners of the pictures marked off minutes and seconds. There were three test couples in a series of long photographs. I’ve wondered, what happens if you mix the couples up, or pair strangers at random? My wife and I tried it. She can resist forever. She kept talking; she recited love poems; she read. So I read back to her Thomas Hardy, where Sergeant Troy says, ‘Probably some one man on an average falls in love with each ordinary woman. She can marry him; he is content, and leads a useful life. Such a woman as you a hundred men always covet—your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you—you can only marry one of that many.… The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There’s my tale.’ ‘We don’t want to be part of a system like that,’ I told her. We’re going to prove that any two random people can get together and learn to care for each other. I’m against magic; I go into despair over things happening that skip causation. The superior man loves anyone he sets his mind to. Otherwise, we’re fucked.

  “From the day that I made my explanations to my wife, she hasn’t cleaned the apartment. I noticed before long that we’d gone through the dishes. Some of them have turned into ashtrays. I can trace the mess beginning at when I took my Hardyesque stand against romance. There are coffee cups all over the place with mold growing out of them. I can hear the dregs festering and bubbling. Her cups are especially disgusting because she uses cream. But black coffee grows mold too. Even non-dairy coffee creamer grows mold. Coffee must be nutritious, it can cultivate that much life. You have to watch where you step or sit. You kick aside newspapers, and the coffee cups underneath spill coins of mold that blend with the rug. All the doorknobs have towels and coats on them. I don’t know where so much stuff comes from. It doesn’t belong to me. It probably used to be in the drawers and closets, and she isn’t putting it back. The place smells of cat piss and cat shit. My sense of smell is shot from smoking, but the cat is getting through to my nose. She got this S.P.C.A. cat and made it into a flealess indoor cat. The vet de-fleaed it the same day the fumigator came. The cat never goes outdoors again. She didn’t have a cat when I married her. She does clean out the cat box and refill the kitty litter. But that fucking disoriented cat’s been shitting in the clothes and newspapers. You don’t want to step or sit for the cat turds.

  “At meals, we clear off two spots at the table for her setting and my setting. The centerpiece is growing—rib bones from Emil Villa’s Hickory Pit, a broken wineglass and candlewax and shrimp shells from an October candlelight dinner, plates from our last evening of clean dishes, movie popcorn boxes and used paper plates. I eat amongst mementos of other breakfasts, other suppers,
naked lunches.

  “The water standing in the kitchen sink started out as a soak for the pots and pans. Some are soaking in the bathtub too, and the skillet is in the living room from when we ate out of it. She can’t wash dishes anymore because you can’t run clean water without delving your arm through the scum and knives to unclog the drain. I wish, were I to flip the dispose-all on, a rotation would vortically twirl the room including the cat, and grind everything down and away.

  “To be honest, one of my wife’s attractions is that she’s got a coin-operated washer and dryer in the garage. She did some laundry the other day; she picked her clothes out of the piles, and washed them, and ironed them. She does outfits to go to work in. I tossed in a pair of my skivvies, which didn’t come back. As long as she’s running a wash, she could do an item of another person’s, right? I don’t give her a full load. It’s not as if she has to get depressed at the laundromat.” Wittman put on his shirt; he didn’t have the habit of dropping dirty clothes on top of piles of newspapers and banana peels and hair and cigarettes.

  “We’ve been running all over the apartment churning up the newspapers and cat shit, yelling at each other, looking for a shoe and car fare and the phone. The off-the-hook noise is driving me nuts. I fell down slipping on a phonograph record under newspaper. She’s always late for work because she can’t find her car keys, or the house keys. They’ll fire her, then the two of us on Unemployment, she can stay home and clean up. I was almost late myself tonight. The keys to the place were in the toaster oven. I don’t know how they got there. Like the gravity has been acting up. She does cook. She’s been standing at the stove and eating over the saucepan. If I want any, I have to eat her leftovers. We’re leaving the front door unlocked, which the bags of garbage and the bags of groceries are shoving against. Anybody who would want to do some thieving in there, clean us out. Please. The ironing board unfolded out of the wall and dropped across the doorway.