Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book by Maxine Hong Kingston
Wittman can’t be her rescuer. The only way he could see to rescue her was to take her place, and he had just escaped from wageslavery. But what kind of a monkey would he be not to stay and try to change her trip? Anyway, he had lost the energy to go out into the streets and catch the last bus of the drear night, stopping all along San Pablo, transferring, ending up at the Terminal again, walking to his poor room. And here were clean sheets, a made bed, and this girl getting into her lavender tie-dyed t-shirt. He had to have his feel of her. He ought to have said, but not any good at saying, didn’t say, “Thank you for being brave, showing me the insurance side of you. I love you nevertheless. I love you.” He loved her up quietly, stilling her chatter. Bodies have their touching ways, their own dumb language. Look into eyes and face, watch the giving in and the changing. The reason we’re made of flesh that feels pain, we’re evolving to be careful creatures who handle one another with all considerateness.
Taña lit up a Balkan Sobranie, and offered Wittman a Gauloise, both brands on her headboard shelf for decoration, the packs almost full because they taste worse than shit. Taña sucked a mouthful of smoke, rounded her lips. She puffed out a smoke ring that drifted upward. “Let me practice my call-in on you, okay? ‘Claudine?’ Picture an S.S. Nazi concentration-camp guard on the other end of the line. ‘Claudine, I can’t come in today. I’ve got … I’m embarrassed to say … running diarrhea.’ Can you tell I’m lying? I get all hesitant and inarticulate lying. ‘Claudine, I’m pregnant. Puking all morning. I’m going to be late puking in the mornings from here on in. I’ll get there as soon as I can. Upchucking goes away after the abortion.’ They probably fire girls for abortions. They fire you for getting pregnant, married or not. We’re always having baby-shower farewell parties, where Claudine says, ‘We can’t have you big as a cow in a business office, now, can we?’ I’ve got it. I’ll say, ‘Claudine, to keep my job I got an abortion, resulting in feminine complications. How much sick leave do I have?’ Good night, Wittman, my dear. I need to get some sleep, and get up early whether I go to work or not. Even when we’re legitimately sick, we can’t sleep in. We have to call as soon as the switchboard opens, before the clients start phoning. Claudine has hung up her coat and put her purse in her file cabinet, and hasn’t noticed that I’m late or missing, her phone’s got to be ringing, me on the line. They ought to let us call the night before, so we can relax.”
She pulled the covers up, turned her back, shut her eyes. Wittman panicked. Taña, please don’t go. Don’t shut me out. He leapt out of bed to the vase behind the door, whereout he pulled two fencing foils. When naked making love with a stranger, locate the weapons. “Taña, wake up. Here, take this sword. Fence me.” He found her lipstick, and painted a pink heart under his left tit. “Show me some moves. Come on, Taña. Be a good hostess.”
She sat up, picked up her sword, undid the safety tip, thrust, parried, parried again, and touched him at the heart.
“No fair. You’ve taken lessons,” he said.
“Good night, Wittman,” she said, sliding down, rolling over, her sword between her side of the bed and his.
He sat on the footboard, his sword between his knees. In the shining steel handguard, his penis reflected huge. Behind it, his pinhead peeped out a long ways off. How odd, his head, the container of his mind, which contains the universe, is a complicated button topping this gigantic purple penis, which ends in a slit, like a vagina. “Hey, take a look at this.”
She acted asleep. Well, he couldn’t expect her to watch him play with himself. He brought the sword mirror up to his face, a Jiminy Cricket face with a bug body. Hey diddly dee, the actor’s life for me. What interesting reflections of pinks and mauves and tans. She’s asleep, might as well explore her place. In the kitchen was another Toulouse-Lautrec, 75 Rue des Martyrs. Yeah, he ought to be living in Paris, home for his type. Taña had matching canisters, alphabetized spices, glass jars with red beans, green peas, sugar, pasta. Domesticity. Don’t get domesticated. In the living room, he sat himself down at her dainty secretary desk. Looking in the pigeon-hole dioramas, he found no letters either to or from her. He could write her a note saying that the buses aren’t running, he had to steal her car. Two a.m. already. Should he remove the Isolde sword, and uxoriously crawl into bed? No fair; “uxorious” refers to men, and “husbandly” also refers to men. He ought to use her expensive texture-weave stationery and the pen of her desk set, and write more play. Back in the bedroom, he went inside the closet. Behind her clothes were shelves of labeled shoe boxes—huaraches, sling-backs, spectators, red shoes, white pumps, etc. “Beeeen!” said the evolutionary monkey.
The curtain opens—he flung her dresses aside—the great killer ape in chains sees the audience. Bloodshot eyes roll, sharp teeth gnash. Roar! Roar! He opened his mouth wide like in the silent movies. Laughing at me, are you? Look at my red lashing tongue, and down my gullet—a real ape, not some fool inside an ape costume. Feel my guffs of hot breath. I will slip these chains. White hunters, you will die. Let me make my hand small here, change it into a wing, a red fin. Oh, no, I’m stuck at ape. I’ll grow then—to one hundred thousand feet. The chains snap. “Bring down the curtain!” shouts the stage manager. The curtain swings across. Down drops the asbestos wall. The shape of the gargantua ape swells and bulges. He tears through man’s puny barriers against reality, and leaps out of the proscenium into the stampeding audience. Swinging his chains—tool-wielding ape—he lassoos the chandelier, pulls himself up, and rides it. He screams louder and higher than the ladies. Swooping Fay Wray up in his mighty arm, he and she swing across the ceiling of the San Francisco Opera House. Down rain crystal and loose excrement—cee—on to the audience. Balso Snell. O, say can you cee? The ape is loose upon America. Crash their party. Open his maw mouth, and eat their canapés and drink their champagne. The party is mine.
No one left but me. And this fellow in milady’s dressing-table mirror, and in her hand mirror. With opposing mirrors, I can see my profile. I look like an ape. I have an ape nose. I do not look like a flounder.
Who’s that human being unconscious down there? Dead? And here is her suitcase for going away to death camp. I alone am left alive. She is a mother dead beside the evacuation road. I am her babe clinging to her dead body still warm. Tanks are coming. And bombers in the sky. If I run after the others, I leave her dead alone forever.
He put his cheek and ear close to her face, felt her breathing. Alive, whew. He picked up her sword, and put it on the floor. He lay down at her side, and slept.
6
A SONG FOR OCCUPATIONS
WITTMAN AH SING, for one who wanted badly to be a free man, was promising quite a few people that he would help them out. He had to create for Nanci Lee a theater. And find his PoPo. And keep Taña for richer, for poorer. “Forsaking all others.” That part of the ceremony ought to include the saying of the names of the forsaken, so that we can specifically and publicly give them up. The bride’s catalog of the forsaken. The groom’s catalog of the forsaken. I forsake thee, Nanci Lee, et alia.
He did too have a philosophy of life: Do the right thing by whoever crosses your path. Those coincidental people are your people.
He rode into the City with Taña, who went to work after all, having wakened too late to call in, and late for work too, though it was early. The air was yet unbreathed through too many engines and lungs. The sun was a dime in the rearview mirror as she bravely drove into the fog of the Bridge toward the City, which looked like a grey thought. Drag boats were visible section by section crossing blue clearings. The City emerged, unmoved. Among its necktied men and heeled women, Wittman was yogore, a mess on a business day. Taña dropped him off near the Unemployment Office, where he would try for full benefits, six months of money to finance all that had to be done. She volunteered a plan for the rest of their lives: alternately, each spouse work half the year and collect Unemployment the other half. Bending over the roofless car, he kissed her goodbye.
He walked pas
Inside a smoke shop, four bad boys, why weren’t they in school, were at the magazine rack. It had to be porn that they were reading so intensely, warping their imaginations. But the tallest kid was reading aloud to the others, and it was Astounding Stories. The next tallest kid hung on the reader’s shoulder and stared at the page as though there were illustrations. The littlest one rested his head on a shelf. The fourth kid sat on a bundle of magazines with his chin on his fists. Everybody enrapt.
At the corner across the street slouched a tough-shit girl with raccoon make-up, black motorcycle jacket, short skirt, fruit boots. Wittman prepared for rude eye contact, but at the light’s change, she waited to walk slow with her old-world grandma. He slowed down too, an additional pedestrian body in the crosswalk against cars jumping the light. The girl bent down, speaking in kind Spanish to the babushka head.
How to behold strangers: longer.
The reason he was receiving all these beneficences must be because he was free from work. The city becomes an easier place. Indian summer was holding steady.
And parked at the parking meter in front of a deli—a red toy bull in a shopping cart. Of course, no pets allowed. Wittman went inside and ordered a pastrami on rye. The owner of the red bull was not there. The guy at the counter reached into the refrigerator and handed him his sandwich. “Could you heat it up please?” Wittman asked.
“You want it hot? I’ll make it hot for you,” said the deli man. Wittman laughed in the street. He left the sandwich in the shopping cart.
At the Unemployment Office, the jobless were lined up clear out the door. He went inside to figure out whether that long line was indeed where he had to start. Nobody told him to get his ass back out there. No information booth or posted instructions to help him out. What do the dumb people, who are most of the people in the country, do? The unemployed, his fellow man, waited before windows marked A, B, C, and D, and 9:00, 9:30, 10:00, 10:30. Rows of them waited in chairs arranged as if the down-and-out were an audience. A man in a boss suit jumped ahead to the counter. “Half a sec. Half a sec,” he kept saying, a fired executive who hasn’t learned that his time isn’t valuable anymore. Everybody ignored him, and he left. Come on, give him the benefit of the doubt, he’s no different from you and me. Tail him, and he’ll lead you to a secret neighborhood of skylit lofts and underground poetry readings, and to the studio where he is making something beyond your imagination. Look at us: artists, squandering our creation time. Please give us our grants to do the work we were born for. We won’t waste our lives in front of the t.v., we promise. Wittman decided on line A, a beginning and also his initial. This maneuver put him out the door. Well, he’d learned patience at registration for classes. When inside again, he followed a stripe of yellow tape on the concrete floor. Yeah, hitting his marks. All together now: “Follow the yellow brick road. Follow the yellow brick road. Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the yellow brick road.” The people did not look particularly employable or unemployable, or tired or abashed. Some women and a few men had brought their children. The movie stars were traveling incognito. No communists leafletting the crowd. Some unshaven guys starting beards. Some ladies in curlers, and some Black guys in stingy-brim hats, a few in do-rags. There were a bunch of Chinatown ladies; he didn’t know them. They were talking about the advantages of migrant labor. “At the grape camp, I felt like a Girl Scout.” “Just like college girls in one dormitory.” “I forget my boy in Army. Indochina.” A good life, harvest the tomatoes, harvest the grapes, collect Unemployment between crops. They spoke good and loud because the low fawns can’t understand them. Wittman let his cigarette ashes fall, then his cigarette butt, and stood on it. No ashtrays for the poor. He wondered how much money he was going to get, whether this waiting and whatever else they’ll make him go through was worth it. Good thing he was a stable person, otherwise run amok. Nobody was running amok. How patient most people are. How law-abiding. He was standing amok. So, it has come to this. Lew Welch teaches us to stop and say every now and then, “So it has come to this.” So it has come to this.
The best dresser in the place was a very pretty Black lady a couple of lines over, the C line. She wore a halo hat, suit, gloves, and very high-heel shoes, on which she was rising on tiptoes above the situation. Her hair fluffed out around her Nefertiti face. She must be a high-fashion model back from Paris after the haute-couture showings. Two Black guys, who came in together, spotted her, and their faces changed—were gladdened—their postures straightened up, inspirited by her. There ought to be such a girl doing the same for our unemployed, but our career girls wouldn’t be seen at the Unemployment Office, too shame.
After about an hour, all at once, the clerks flipped the cards over the wire—11:00, 11:30, 12:00, 12:30. Eventually he got near the front of window A, where he stayed behind a white stripe perpendicular to the yellow line. The unemployed person gets privacy at the window. The one behind him could not overhear the right answers. Then our pilgrim passed the test of waiting. It was his turn to step over the white stripe. “Good morning,” he said cheerfully, to take the initiative, to keep up his end of the day, to shoot this government worker some sarcasm, it hardly being morning anymore.
She didn’t say Good morning back, but had her hand out for him to give her something.
“I want to sign up for Unemployment,” he said.
“Your form?”
“What form?”
“Application form.”
“What application? I thought when I made it to the front, you were going to hand me my money.” He didn’t really think that, but was suggesting to her a possible vision.
“You’re supposed to’ve filled out a form that looks like this”—she held up a sample—“before you got into line.” Don’t deck her out. She’s an artist too, artists and wayfarers all, earning her livelihood, meeting me in her path.
He reached for the application form. “Can I borrow your pencil?”
“I have to use it. I’m using it.”
He turned around, keeping his place, and said across the foot-fault line, “Anybody got a pencil I can borrow? Hey, can you lend me a pencil?” A kind soul threw him a pencil.
“You can get a form over there.” She put hers out of his reach.
“Then do I come right back here? I don’t have to stand in line all over again, do I?”
She looked at him like she didn’t know what he was talking about. Nobody in the history of Unemployment ever asked that before.
He did not but should have rushed the counter. Kick over file cabinets. Spill I.B.M. cards. George C. Scott as the social worker in “East Side West Side” revolutionizing the bureaucracy.
He stepped over to a wall table. List your previous employment, beginning with most current. Retail clerk, Management Trainee, ZIP sorter, busboy and grease-trap rongeur, U.C. Psych Department subject. Wittman Ah Sing, this is your life.
Line A came this side of the door now. He gave the blunt pencil to the next poor man to enter, someone even more behind than he was. Pass it on. The cards with half-hour increments flipped once more before he got to the front. The same clerk was in the window, but she did not recognize him. She asked him the same questions as were printed on the application, made a mark beside each of his answers as he re-answered them orally. Her supervisor is a checker of checkmarks. We unemployed keep many scribes employed.
“I.d.?” she said.
He said his Social Security number.
“You don’t have a driver’s license?”
“I don’t have
“You don’t have your passport?”
What’s this? Is she calling me a wetback? “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You don’t have a credit card?” A wide-open invitation to give her his speech against installment buying. “Is it government policy to encourage the jobless to go into debt?”
“All I’m asking you for is a firm i.d. card.”
“I’m morally against credit cards.”
“You shouldn’t leave the house without identification,” she said. He felt scolded.