“What do you want to hear? How about one of my railroad cantos? A land chantey, the worker-poet as chanteyman? How’s about a dueling sequence? ‘The Dueling Mammy,’ ha ha. Loss poems? You need a revenge sonnet? I’ve got twenty-eight sonnets now. I have one hundred and twenty-six sonnets to go to catch up with Shakespeare, who finished everything at the age of forty-five. I’m twenty-three. You too, right?”
She nodded, crossing one of those legs over the other. She folded her arms under her breasts.
He read to her about the ineluctable goingness of railroad tracks. Then he gave her the poet’s intense stare, holding her eyes until she spoke. “Lovely,” she said. “Sweet.”
But he did not want to be sweet and lovely.
He dug deeper into the poem box, letting the ashes of his cigarette fall right on in. He took hold of a bane poem. Standing up, as if on platform, he read to her about mongoloids. “ ‘What’s wrong with the baby, doctor?!’ ‘Is it deformed!?’ ‘Is it Chinese?!’ Interbang?! Interbang!? ‘But we’re Chinese.’ ‘He’s supposed to look like that!?’ ‘How can you tell if it’s defective or if it’s Chinese?!’ ‘Look at its little eyes.’ ‘Its tongue’s too long.’ ‘Yellow skin and yellow jaundice?!’ ‘It’s mongoloid?!’ ‘It’s mongoloid!’ ‘It’s an idiot?!’ ‘It’s a mongolian idiot!’ ‘They’re affectionate.’ ‘No, they bite.’ ‘Do they drool?!’ ‘All babies drool.’ ‘Can they be house-broken?!’ ‘Let’s put it in a home.’ The chorus goes like this: ‘Gabble gobble. One of us. One of us.’ ” Wittman opened his eyes as wide as they got and looked into Nanci’s—epicanthic eyes meeting epicanthic eyes. Fingers wiggling to communicate.
“ ‘Look at it cry!’ ‘Is that a cleft palate in there? And a giraffe tongue?!’ ‘It’s got a wee penis.’ ‘All babies have a small penis.’ ‘Unlike apes, mongoloids do not turn dangerous to their keepers at puberty.’ ” Wittman played like he was sitting with the other mongoloid children on the go-around in the playground at the home. Their arms and chins hang over the top railing, a head lolls. A club foot gives the earth a kick, and they go around and around and around. Reading in the manner of Charles Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame (who grunted and snorted in some scenes, and in others discoursed fluently on the nature of man) and like Helen Keller, he stuttered out, “ ‘Wa-wa-wa-water? Gabble gobble, one of us.’ ”
No coward, Wittman asked Nanci, “How do you like my work?” Straight out. Asking for it. I can take it.
“You sound black,” she said. “I mean like a Black poet. Jive. Slang. Like LeRoi Jones. Like … like Black.”
He slammed his hand—a fist with a poem in it—down on the desk—fistful of poem. He spit in his genuine brass China Man spittoon, and jumped up on top of the desk, squatted there, scratching. “Monkey see, monkey do?” he said. “Huh? Monkey see, monkey do?” Which sounds much uglier if you know Chinese. “Monkey shit, monkey belly.” “A lot you know,” he said. “A lot you know about us monkeys.” She got up and stood behind her chair. He sprang from the desk onto the chair, and from the chair to the mattress, and from the mattress up to the desk again, dragging his long arms and heavy knuckles. His head turned from side to side like a quick questioning monkey, then slower, like an Indian in a squat, waggling his head meaning yes-and-no. He picked a flea from behind an ear—is this a flea?—or is it the magic pole in its toothpick state that the King of the Monkeys keeps hidden behind his ear? He bit it. “Monkey see. Monkey do. What you do in fleaman’s pok-mun?” She didn’t answer him. He picked up loose papers with one hand and looked at them, scratched his genitals with the other hand, smelled hands and pages, nibbled the pages. “ ‘Black?’ ” he hatefully imitated her. “ ‘Jive.’ ” He let drop the papers, nudged one farther with his toe, and wiped his fingers on his moustache. “That bad, huh?” He lifted a page and turned it, examined it back and front. Upside down and sideways. “ ‘LeRoi Jones?!’ ” He recoiled from it, dropped it over the edge of the desk, and leaned way over to watch it fall. Keeping an eye on it, he picked up another sheet and sniffed it. “Too Black. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. That’s my motto.” He wadded it up and threw it over his shoulder. He jumped on top of the trunk, scrunching and scattering the whole shit pile, then pounced on a page, and returned with it to the desk. “This is it! Here’s one you’ll like. That is, likee. Guarantee. Ah. I mean, aiya. ‘Wokking on da Waywoad. Centing da dollahs buck home to why-foo and biby. No booty-full Ah-mei-li-can gal-low fo me. Aiya. Aiya.’ ” He wiped his eyes with the paper, crushed it, and pitched the wad at the window, which was shut. Sorting papers into two piles, he said, “Goot po-yum. Goot. Goot. No goot. No goot. Goot. No goot.” He tasted one, grimaced. “No goot.” Breaking character, he said, “Now, if I were speaking in a French accent, you would think it charming. Honk-honk-ho-onk.” He did the Maurice Chevalier laugh, which isn’t really a laugh, is it? He started new piles. “Angry po-yum.” “Sad po-yum.” “Goot and angry.” “Angry.” “Angry.” “Imitation of Blacks.” He threw some to the floor. “Angry too muchee. Sad. Angry sad. No goot. Angry no goot. Sad. Sad. Sad.”
“Please don’t freak out,” Nanci requested, standing behind the chair.
“I am not freaking out,” Wittman said. “I’ve got to tell you the real truth. No lie. Listen, Lois. Underneath these glasses”—ripping the glasses off, wiping them on his sleeve, which he pulled out over his hand, so it looked like one hand was missing—“I am really: the present-day U.S.A. incarnation of the King of the Monkeys.” He unbuttoned his blue chambray workshirt, which he wore on top of his black turtleneck. “Promise me you won’t blab this all over the front page of the Chron. You’d like a scoop, I know, but I’m trusting you to keep our secret. For the sake of the world.”
Now, if Nanci were the right girl for him, she would have said, “Dear monkey. Dear, dear old monkey. Poor monkey.” She could scratch his head and under his chin, laugh at his antics, saying, “Poor dear monkey, what’s to become of you?” and have him eating out of her hand. “Dear monkey. Poor poor monkey. You do have such an endearing Chinese giggle.”
But who could be the right consoling girl for him? Nanci was getting into her jacket and finding her purse. How fucked up he is.
She hurried for the door, and got it open. She turned in the doorway, and said, “An actress says other people’s words. I’m an actress; I know about saying other people’s words. You scare me. A poet saying his own words. I don’t like watching.” She held up her hand, “Ciao,” closed her fingers, and shut the door.
Alone, Wittman jumped off the table to the mattress, trampolined off that to the Gold Mountain trunk and onto the chair. Keep up the mood, not in liege to her. Elongating his chimp-like torso, he stretched for a look at himself in the built-in mirror on the door. He ruffled out his hair. Sao mang mang mang-key maw-lau. Skinny skinny monkey. “Bee-e-een!” he yelled, loud enough for her to hear. “Bee-e-een!” which is what Monkey yells when he changes. He whipped around and began to type like mad. Action. At work again.
And again whammed into the block question: Does he announce now that the author is—Chinese? Or, rather, Chinese-American? And be forced into autobiographical confession. Stop the music—I have to butt in and introduce myself and my race. “Dear reader, all these characters whom you’ve been identifying with—Bill, Brooke, and Annie—are Chinese—and I am too.” The fiction is spoiled. You who read have been suckered along, identifying like hell, only to find out that you’d been getting a peculiar, colored, slanted p.o.v. “Call me Ishmael.” See? You pictured a white guy, didn’t you? If Ishmael were described—ochery ecru amber umber skin—you picture a tan white guy. Wittman wanted to spoil all those stories coming out of and set in New England Back East—to blacken and to yellow Bill, Brooke, and Annie. A new rule for the imagination: The common man has Chinese looks. From now on, whenever you read about those people with no surnames, color them with black skin or yellow skin. Wittman made an end run, evaded the block. By writing a pla
y, he didn’t need descriptions that racinated anybody. The actors will walk out on stage and their looks will be self-evident. They will speak dialects and accents, which the audience will get upon hearing. No need for an unreadable orthography such as Mark Twain’s insultingly dumb dis and dat misspelling and apostrophying. Yes, the play’s the thing.
It is ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have grown to be 28 years old and of whom no one knows. I sit here and am nothing. And nevertheless this nothing begins to think and think, five flights up, on a grey Parisian afternoon, these thoughts: …
A long time ago, before the blackbottom, a band of ancestors with talent left their music house, which was the largest hut in Ancient Wells, a place, and sailed a music boat a-roving the rivers of China. They beat the big drum hard, which vibrated in stomachs and diaphragms for miles around. An audience gathered on the riverbank, and saw the red swan boat come floating on strains of mandolin and flute. Between red wings, got up in the style of putting-on-a-show, rode the players. To the knocking of the wood fish drums—dok-dok-dok—the singer lifted his skylark voice over water and fields. He threw out ropes, and their audience pulled them to shore. Party time again. Let musicians rule. Play a—what kind of music?—how does it go?—and make the world spin in the palm of your hand.
Our Wittman is going to work on his play for the rest of the night. If you want to see whether he will get that play up, and how a poor monkey makes a living so he can afford to spend the weekday afternoon drinking coffee and hanging out, go on to the next chapter.
2
LINGUISTS AND CONTENDERS
WITTMAN AH SING wrote into the dark of the night, through dinner time and theater time and bar time. Here I sit in the cold night, writing … the recluse in his night.… He followed the music boat on courses of waterways—sailing the Long River across the Earth and guided by the River of Stars in the sky—to the mouth or the ass end of China—the Pearl River Delta, where Americans come from. The Boca Tigris ejects The Song Boat into the bay between Macao and Hong Kong. Our singer poles it to the Typhoon Shelter. Gliding out of the glittering black of water and starry sky come other sudden lit boats. Land-people hire them for a night of eating, gambling, sleeping on the water. Here’s a boat selling escargots, steaming on the stove and smelling up the air with anise and garlic and snail. “Fresh shrimp,” shouts a cook, and tosses a live prawn across to a dining-table boat; it dances the Japanese shrimp dance. A trysting lover throws it back, “Ho. Ho, la. Cook it, la. Cook it with scallions.” And from another boat, he orders for his veiled lady: clams steeping in black-bean sauce. And here’s a boat named Cowboy bringing rice and kettles of jook. And here’s a floating bar with the beer and wine. Order the wine of the poets, the plum rosé that inspired Tu Fu and Li Po. The lights of the city on hills make a vertical shimmer from sky straight into the water, like a backdrop, like a dream.
“What do you want to hear?” Our singer, Joang Fu, calls for requests and dedications. (His name, Joang Fu, pronounced like Joan of Arc, like a bell of Time, means Inner Truth, which was also Wittman’s byname, it so happened. Named by his father at the throw of the Ching.) “Our band has traveled more than five thousand days, and found no gold, and found no eagle-feather shield, but we bring back music to our tribe.” Balancing, he hands a menu of songs over to the lovers. “We’ve stolen spells and bells from Tigermen. I can melt snow with my voice. Listen. Listen to the peal of these tiny silver cymbals.” The cymbals are no bigger than a pair of ears. “How far can you follow the rings of ringing? Do they sound longer in the crevasses and altitudes of the Himalayas or across water?” As bait, he tells bits of many stories and the most terrible customs you never did see. He makes sounds of other tongues. “Id al-Kabir. Id al-Kabir. A god asks a father to sacrifice his son. What to do? Hear the aria as he raises his knife. Hear the opera of White-Hat Muslims at the Great Festival of the Sacrifice. Hear the Passover songs of Blue-Hat Jew Guai Muslims of the northwest. We’ve found the lost story of Monkey and the Muslim. Hear how we were captured by the Lolos and escaped with their wild music too. Do you want to listen to me yodel-lay-hee-hoo like a Mongol cowboy wailing with the Gobi wind? Hear the songs that we sang against Genghis Khan.” Then, in a softer voice, confidentially: “My parents sold me to this opera troupe, and I’m trying to save money to buy my freedom and go to Hollywood to join the movies. I ran away in a storm one night, and met a beautiful girl, alone and wet in the rain. I sang her a song. Do you want to hear it? And she sang back to me, eerily. I remember her song. Do you want to hear it? Do you think she’s a real girl, or is she a snake?”
Springing up, the singer lands nimbly on the railing of the lovers’ boat, where he hunkers, riding the easy sea’s rise and fall. It’s a rich man’s boat, like a floating gazebo with its horned topside and red pillars, and veranda railings all around. He fills the shy silence for the lovers, “I myself have sailed to Bali.” (Like Antonin Artaud, who also sailed there in his imagination, he could’ve said, but a lot had to be left out.) “There, women play gods, and men play demons and monkeys.” He has given the rich man a cue to look teasingly into his lady’s eyes, and to toast her, “To a goddess,” and to flirt with her, “From a demon.” “I stayed up chitter-chattering and chanting all night with monkey dancers, little boys in the inmost circle, me, Joang Fu, among the youths in the next circle, middle-aged men in the middle, and old men on the outside—kit-chak kit-chak kit-chak—hum hum—waves of humming in fumes of clove and cubeba cigarettes—until gods dropped out of the sky and did their dramas amidst men and monkeys—halleluia hands halleluia hands.”
Joang Fu gets a good look at the dark lady’s unveiled face. The other boats have slipped away, and she has had to lift her netting to eat. Their oarswoman has fallen asleep, and the little boat turns in its own world. The dark lady says something to her fella, who makes the request for a new song. That world-wandering songboatman sings Stephen Foster of the West. “ ‘All the world is sad and dreary, everywhere I roam.…’ ” No, wait, wait. Let’s go back earlier—the world is yet newer. She asks to hear “The Gold Mountain Song.” “O, Susanna, don’t you cry for me. I’m going to Californyah with a banjo on my knee.” “O, Susanna,” the song of the Gold Rush.
The lady sees to it that our singer is paid lavishly. The Song Boat returns for him, and the troupe skims away, treating its audience to a skiddooing tableau vivant—a would-be king is pouring poison into the sleeping king’s ear, his crown pushed aside. A juggler throws the vial into the air, where other bottles are flying; they are caught, caught, caught, though the boat is shooting fast away.
Well, it was the ass end of things, all right. As you know from San Francisco Bay, hungry birds, swirling and diving, mirror the swirls of fish below them. Fishing boats follow these whirlwinds of birds farther and farther out to sea. The smallest boats turn back soonest, empty, and then the others also have to quit. So—no more entertainment dollars. The musicians sell their instruments and sing a cappella. Then, following the unlucky fishermen, they go on land, where they become as vagabond as poets who wrote on rocks and leaves.
At the Dogs Don’t Mind restaurant (which has piles of orts on top of the tables, and bones and slop buckets under the tables, but “dogs don’t mind”), he strolls from table to table, like a bridegroom, and tells homesick tales about pirates; he maps their hideouts among the dangerous keys and straits. City people can’t simultaneously eat and hear about torture-for-ransom; he disgusts them and wins their food. Whoever hears his sea yearnings stops feeling sorry for the people of the water and, instead, envies them their free lives. Born on the sea and never been landed, before. He’d met, so he says, Cheng I Sao, widow and lady pirate, but he can’t say what she looks like because she uglifies herself with the blue-and-black make-up of a stage villain. “I sent a poem for her to finish, but she returned it rhyming in ‘no’ when I’d set it up for an inevitable ‘yes.’ Do you want to hear how it goes?”
It was a good job. All
profit, no overhead except for food you have to eat regardless. And with self-discipline, he can live on what the dogs don’t mind. When the beer and wine cart comes around, and the voice dries out, why, somebody’s sure to buy a drink. And the friendly storyteller is likely to be invited to join in eating the rest of the dinner. You can always add one more guest to a Chinese meal; everybody eats from the mutual food in the middle. Feed the storyteller. Feed the storyteller.
Joang Fu invents and throws out generous new lines of bait: “I met a scientist who experimented in his laboratory with opium and mushrooms, and discovered how to make his sperm addictive.” Oh, the listeners were laughing already in anticipation of scenes of gluttonous unending sex. Ladies undone. Gentlemen unpantsed. “How does he find out it’s truly addictive? How many women have to be chasing you before you know? What happens to the economy when you market addictive sperm? Wheeling and dealing dope sperm. ‘Oh, no, this sperm’s been cut.’ ‘Does she love me for myself or for my golden sperm?’ ”
On moonless nights, our storyteller kindles light from the faces of listeners, and they cannot bear to leave. The gambler is turning over his hand. The executioner has raised his ax to the apex. The father is pressing his knife on the son’s throat. The princess is untying her blindfold. The widow lady pirate kisses the guy with the sperm. The storyteller pauses. “Pay up. Pay up,” he says. “Time to pay up.” And who could stand not to know what happens next? What’s money for, after all? The more money comes kerplunking down, the more flash in the swordplay, and heartfelt the lovers’ vows to meet again, and aphrodisiacal the sperm. Prolong the outcome, make the story burst one more time into payoff—like two-stage fireworks—one last outburst that wipes out stars—just when they thought it was the end.