“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, looked for you. Saw you there. Caught you. Yeah, I did that. I do that. Hug you. That too.” He’s her nuzzling colt, her baby houyhnhnm, nuzzling for its mama.
“And hold me in your strong arms, and kiss me. And kiss me again.” Oh, at last. He’d found his woman who will talk while making love. Will she blurt out everything of women he needs to know, please?
4
THE WINNERS OF THE PARTY
THE WINNERS OF the party were: Lance Kamiyama. His bride, Sunny. Wittman Ah Sing. Taña De Weese. Nanci Lee, who might have been by herself, but was sitting in the breakfast nook with Charley Bogard Shaw. And the plain girl from the bus, Judy Louis. To win, you outlast everybody else, and stay up all night. You were civilized, had not rushed off urgently with anyone. You got to talk those other people over.
Night was leaving through the tall windows. The winners of the party, those who did not find room on the banquette, sat on bar stools around the butcher block. Wittman was on one side of it, and Taña across from him. The little door for bowls and plates and for the entrances and exits of the creatures that danced on the sideboard was now shut. Lance was cooking a magic omelette (“oom-lette” he called it because it was special). He shook the grass out of a colander; the stems and seeds, he saved for tea. The heat and the scrambled eggs enriched the grassy smell, somewhat like a blend of Italian parsley and alfalfa. Doesn’t the smell of the herb cooking make your limbs shaky? Your guts untangle? The windowpanes steamed up from bottom to top, the kitchen warming like somebody’s mother was home, onions sautéing in butter, wooden mushrooms re-mushrooming and fluting in water. Sunny was grinding coffee beans; she fit the filter in a cone that came down by tackle from the ceiling. “The night is over,” said Lance, their chieftain. “We have gotten safely through the night. We’re alive.” He was giving a blessing that there is a time limit to difficulties. Let any battles that were being fought among them, any bad feelings, cease. Troubles and fears are not to be carried over into daylight. Dispel paranoia. The hardiest, the geniuses, the abiders of the tribe have journeyed far and come home. “The weekend is half over,” said Lance, handing out the oom-lettes on unmatched California ware. They ate quietly. “Nobody talk while the flavor lasts.”
Now, to have been everywhere at once just about, to hear the parts of the party you missed: the couple-fights; who left with whom; the man-to-man fights; the identification of strangers who stood out. Like did anybody see this gigantic, slow man in the black beard? He walked around and looked at faces. He carried a handsaw, and tapped the ban-the-bomb symbol on the door. Had anybody met him before? Whose friend was he? Who was that guy? “Nobody invited him,” said Lance. “He walked in from off the street. I asked him his name, and he said, ‘I am Friend of All the World.’ ” “That’s wonderful,” said Sunny. “Friend of All the World. That’s why he could walk in off the street.” They had been favored. An animal had emerged out of the camouflage, and chosen them to see it.
“I stopped Eugene from throwing a motorcycle through the window,” said Charley. “Somebody put chemicals in his drink—or he thought somebody did—and he tried to hang himself in the shower, but the curtain rod kept bending. He decided it must have been Chuckie who was trying to poison him, which it might have been; I wouldn’t put it past Chuckie, but not to poison him, only to surprise him. Accident. Eugene, with the strength of a madman, tore a board off the garage and chased Chuckie around the house. Chuckie ran inside, and got trapped in the bathroom, and escaped by squeezing out between the louvers. Eugene broke in the door, then got the idea to hang himself. Everybody—girls—who came in to use the john, tried to stop him, but he kept on tying belt, necktie, towels together and around his neck. Each time he lowered himself, the curtain rod bent lower too, and the knot slid down it. All the while, people were coming and going, taking a piss, taking a crap. They talked him out of it.” Imagine that, living for reasons thought up by others while crapping. What reasons were they?
“Did you notice,” said Sunny, “Candace got so drunk, she lost her English accent. One of her intimates asked her how come she was speaking American like anybody else. She screamed—and fainted. And when she came to, she was speaking like an English bird queen again. Do you remember her from when she went on her fortnight junket to London? She came back with clothes from Carnaby Street, and calling us Luv and Ducks. And birds and toffs. And she does that English babytalk—lolly and brolly and nappy and lorry and nanny and jolly and tommy and telly and tata.” Yes, Sunny, there are those of us right here who can no longer speak in pre-educated accents even among old friends and relatives unless stoned out of our minds.
And Nanci the beautiful, whose knees and long legs stuck out of the breakfast nook to trip one up, reported on a kissing contest. Everybody, male and female, kissed everybody else, no skipping over of anyone. She had won the title of Most Romantic Kisser. Wittman was feeling that he had missed out on the party. Where had he been during the motorcycle tossing and suiciding and fainting and mass kissing? And what had he to contribute to this after-party party? He finished his oom-lette—even square Judy ate hers—and took seconds. He didn’t want to get stoned; he was hungry. Nobody has cooked for him for a long time. Grass that’s eaten, ingesta, comes on gradually; you can take a-hold of yourself, you would think. And, surely, he was now such a naturally high person that he would not get too ripped, immune now, surely. The sun was brimming pale new light over the top of the hills, and through an open window a pretty breeze blew. Why, then, was he coming down? Who’s bringing him down?
“Somebody’s bringing me down,” he said. “So low. I’m crashing. You’re feeling pain too, but you think it feels good. The food tastes good, so your brain, which is right upstairs from your mouth, thinks, ‘This is good.’ This is not good. Lance. He’s the one making us turn the knife on our own stomach. I don’t mean only now. It’s longterm. We have to fight for our lives. I quit the Young Millionaires. There’s nothing to buy out there. I know, I worked retail in one of the biggest department stores in the City. I didn’t want to use my employee discount or my opportunities for employee theft to get anything. Nothing is worth a million dollars. You’ve got to let people out of the Young Millionaires, Lance.”
“I feel sorry for you,” said Lance. “I feel sorry for you because you can’t find something you care for enough to make the money to buy it. I give parties. It costs money to give parties, Wittman. You don’t return social obligations; you don’t entertain. You don’t know how much money I spend on my friends. Thanksgiving with turkey for me and Sunny and three or four orphans will cost fifty dollars at least. And I like serving two wines. And I have to re-stock the bar. Wittman, do I have to point out to you my largesse with the grass and several kinds of mushrooms? I’m stuffing my turkey with grass this year. I spent a couple of hundred dollars on you tonight, and you’re one of the orphans I plan to invite for Thanksgiving.”
“Give my share to the bums on Howard Street. I’m fasting on Thanksgiving. You ought to give the fifty dollars to a famine somewhere. Like on that island where the old man dived for your droppings. You should have stayed lost longer, Lance. You didn’t go far out enough. You spent the whole trip trying to get back. Like there’s no place like Oakland? I go further out than you. I’m a genius. I’m warning all of you. He softens us up on dope, then he does his imprinting. But I’ll be genius enough to save your lives.”
“You’re having one of those trips where you think everything comes clear,” said Lance.
“You’re going through the delusion of clarity,” agreed Charley, the mathematician and expert on metaphysical movies.
Wittman set down his cup, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out a sheaf of manuscript, the next part of his play, that had been in there all night all along. Taking the stance of Gwan Goong the Reader, who read in armor during battle, who read to enemies, who read loud when no one listened, Wittman Ah Sing read. He held his papers as Gwan Goong held his soft-covered
book rolled in his sword hand. His left hand stroked his beard. His intelligent head was turned in a reading me-ay, black eyebrows winging in thought. Whether or not a listener sat with him knee-to-knee, Wittman sat bent-knee kung fu position. The man of action aggressively reads and talks.
“Remember how bedazzled you felt at black-and-white movies when it rained all up and down the screen? Light and camera through the windowpanes made the lines of rain dripping from the eaves twinkle and sparkle—setting off bodily thrills. And the star in her mermaid cocktail dress shimmered over to the window, and crumpled up a letter. The paper crackled through the sound system. Remember the pure firing milli-shocks of light, and that sound?” Yes, his friends and enemies are nodding yes. They know what he means so far. “Spangling, she crossed the screen, and the camera dollied in a close-up pan around the Christmas tree dangling with foil icicles—tiers of winking metallic rain. Coruscations. Shivering and delighting your vertebrae up and down. And the story-line didn’t matter nor who she was in the shimmying dress—when that coruscation sparked and popped on the silver screen, you had corresponding feelings.
“The curtain for my play will be made out of tinsel; lights with blue gels will shaft through the very dark house and play on those moving rain-fringe curtains, which represent a waterfall. I want to suggest mermaids and flashing salmon, fluke tails flipping in the sun, sequins of water, Lorelei sequins, rainbows and trout refracting and multiplying. We’ll hang one of those junior-prom rotating mirror balls. Vegas nightclub floor-show glitz production values, but we’ll shoot for transcendence. You know what I wish? I wish while they’re damming the Feather River, they’d build a stage. All they have to do is shape some of that concrete into risers and platforms. And I could control the waterfall to rise and fall or part and shut—stage curtains. Acoustically, use the tourist information speakers like sound boxes at drive-in theaters. And the actors—you—project hard. Yeah, open the show in Oroville. Or Santa Cruz, at the Brookdale Lodge, where the river goes through the redwood-forest lobby. The guests sit and fish. We need a rain machine. Now, it may be enough in this day and far-gone age to stage a water-and-lights happening, but here’s the content: Monkeys live at the falls. All the actors who play monkeys will have to be tumblers. Tumble all over the apron, triple-somersault into the proscenium arch, pyramid barefoot onto one another’s shoulders. The Wallenda pyramid breaks; they pitch against the water, which bounces them out. With almost-flying skills, the raggedy-ass and barefoot monkeys are asking of nature and one another, what is on the other side of the water curtain? ‘Something to eat.’ ‘Why doesn’t one of you go through it somehow and bring back a report?’ ‘Whoever does that will be king.’ And off a catwalk comes flying on a rope-vine a glorious monkey. Red mask-paint rings his handsome human eyes, and points to his nose. He wears a heart on his face and has a heart on his ass. He swings out over the heads of monkeys and audience, and into the water-curtain, his tail wrapped ingeniously around the rope-vine—he can fly upside down—‘Geronimo!’—and plunges through to the other side. He does not return for quite a while. The rest of the monkeys do an apron scene: ‘He’s not coming back.’ ‘Is he dead?’ ‘He’s gone and drowned himself.’ ‘Was he suicidal?’ ‘What’s the motive? Did he leave a note?’ ‘I think he’s just testing his invulnerability.’ ‘He’s been gone too long. He’s not immortal.’ ‘I don’t want to die.’ ‘Me neither. I don’t want to die either.’ But what’s the test for immortality? There isn’t a safe test to prove once and for all that some medicine, peach, or fountain water blots out one’s name in the Book of Death. You keep on questing because of doubts. You can live to be over a hundred years old, and you’re only long-lived. You drink from a fountain of youth, and you don’t die that day, and whattayaknow, not the day after that either. Life goes along, and pretty soon you start getting suspicious for proof. So you’re thirty years old, and not dead. Forty, and still not dead. Am I living forever yet? You go into battle, you live through a war. You win some hand-to-hand combats. Are you a skilled fighter, or immortal? What if you were going to survive till eighty anyway in your natural lifespan? You can be ninety, a hundred, and still not know if you’re lasting forever. There are people who live to be a hundred and ten, even a hundred and twenty. I’m going to keep escaping from the old-age home, on quest until I’m a hundred and thirty.
“Plunging out of the waterfall comes Sun Wu Kong, the King of the Monkeys, hanging on to his rope with toes and tail, juggling pears and grapes and peaches and bananas, throwing them to the others, everybody juggle-eating. Monkey dives in and through the falls—the curtain opens, and we see what’s behind there. ‘Come on. Come on. Come on,’ says the handsome King of Monkeys, leading his people into one of those sets that should make the audience gasp and stop everything to applaud the set designer. The secret and protected country has a sky that is a vaulting dome—stage it inside a blue mosque like the inside of the stone egg that Monkey hatched from, by which he is sometimes known as the Stone Monkey. He will get mountains whopped on him twice—Stoned Monkey. In the ongoing vistas, mists and streams curl around green mountains and far grey mountains. The monkeys link tails—chains of monkeys bridge the trees and canyons. They spin around and around on their knuckles. Flowers and fruit everywhere, spring and autumn coeval, each tree blooming and leafing and hanging with all you can eat. You’ve all driven the length of the Central Valley, haven’t you, through the miles of peach ranches and plum ranches? We stage this in a barn in Fresno County, the audience will have to drive their pick-ups through a ranch of blooms—pear trees, tragic cherry trees, thorny inedible quince, and thorny citrus. Ravens (with the V-tails) and crows (with the straight-across tails) sit on tiptop branches, holding things down to earth. Welcome home to the land behind the falls. The older people will stick their tongues out of squared mouths in astonishment. And the younger people will remember that Zorro kept his black horse and his weapons and mask behind a waterfall. A black stallion in a spangly Mexican saddle gallops across the stage, and the monkeys have a rodeo.”
Taña raised an arm, twirled and snapped it, roping Wittman with her invisible lasso. “Ee-haw!” Cheered by that cowgirl yell, he went on:
“Three or four hundred years go by. The monkeys spend their time eating and showing off. Their cavortions become organized acrobatics. Their moves culminate in kicking feet and boxing fists and blade-like chops of the hands. They throw fists and feet and steel stars. The shirakens—stars of steel—zip like comets—meteor showers—at targets. Bullseye targets become cop-training targets, which look like men, that is, like themselves. Their circus parades straighten out, their hair straightens out, everybody in uniforms with scarves around their necks. Pheasant feathers wave above the heads of officers. They drill to the brass and drums of marching bands playing anthems, which the Monkey King leads with his magic rod, now the size of a conductor’s wand. Straight-rule chessboard divisions, troops, squadrons, ranks and files of eighty-four thousand monkeys, horizontals and verticals like a reinforced-concrete cubiform hundred-story building viewed from the sidewalk below—you feel hallucinated at the strictness of the perspective and the monumental unwavering immensity. What I want to know about: Why the totalitarian armies that even I, a pacifist person, helplessly see on laughing gas and carbogen?
“The King of Monkeys drills and reviews troops; he leads martial-arts regimens, but something is wrong. He sprawls depressed in his throne. He has enough to eat, and the baby monkeys chase his whipping tail. But he is not entertained. It’s not the militarization that’s getting him down. His people are transformed into soldiers, and the landscape always has a soldier on patrol in it, but he’s used to transformations, being the master of seventy-two of them himself; a slow change by a species is nothing. ‘Whyfor?’ he asks. ‘Whyfor?’ He is Aware of Emptiness. Aware of Emptiness is his middle name. His far-hearing ears have heard of a wonderful party being planned to which he has not been invited. He hardly knows the people giving the party, neither
hosts nor guests; it has nothing to do with him. But he’s got to be there. It’s a party that they give only once every three thousand years, it’s that special. A triple-millennial party. He feels so left out. Life would not be worth living if he didn’t get to that party. The party of a lifetime. Whyfor did they overlook him? He was most handsome. Was it his personality? His lower-class manners? His clothes not good enough for them? He’s as good as anybody. He gnashed his teeth over the feting and celebrating going on without him. Nobody should leave anybody out of anything. He’ll crash that party. He’ll invade it with his army. He’ll make a scene. He’ll eat everything on the buffet. He’ll overturn tables. He’ll piss in the wine. He’ll show them, leaving him out.”
Sunny was clearing her counters and uprighting her chairs. Dig this action, Sunny:
“A messenger comes riding but not with an invitation. Scouts patrolling the farthest ridges have spotted a king-size havoc monster coming this way. ‘Help! Help!’ shout the monkeys. ‘War! War!’ Now the drums go wild. Now there’s urgency and emergency. He will blood his magic lance. ‘I’ll go by myself,’ he says. ‘It’s best to meet the enemy one on one on his own turf. I’ll stop him from coming here to ruin our country. He won’t get you. While I’m gone, you guard our home. You stay here just in case.’ His plan is to fight this monster in the neighborhood of the party. He’ll drop in sweating heroically. A monster led me a chase this way. Has anyone seen a havoc monster? You having a party? Chase that monster crashing through their party.