Louise found him. Their taxi, which she had remembered to ask the first driver to send, was waiting. You could tell why she was a successful Management Trainee and he was not. On the ride back, she talked about how cute one of the Kens was—“What a doll.” Ha ha.—and how generous Mattel was to sponsor the do. “What an excellent presentation,” she kept saying. Excellent. You have to be dumb to be happy on this Earth.
“You know what I think would be the best thing that could happen to me?” she asked. “There would be a grand ballroom under the stars. I would be wearing a long white formal that has a loop at the hem to loop around my wrist. I’d have a wrist corsage of a single black orchid with white ribbons. My partner would be in white tie, and the floor would be of black and white diamond tiles. We would dance forever.” Wittman pictured lines of perspective extending to infinity, and Cyd Charisse dancing in the dress with the long long chiffon scarf that blew to the sky. That was it? Shouldn’t the dream for her life have more to it than that? But he didn’t say anything. Better than dreaming about world conquest.
“It’s going to be a really nice weekend,” she said. “The U.S.S. Coral Sea is coming into port. I know some guys on it.” She’d said that already. This was where he came in. Very short loop. He vowed (again) never to repeat himself.
Back in the Toy Department, finally having mentally figured things out, he took a pencil and a bicycle up the ladder, and, using the bicycle as template, marked the pegboard where the hooks ought to go, brought the bicycle down, placed the hooks, then hung up the bicycle.
Beneath him, a mother was explaining to her kids, “I can buy a toy for one of you if I feel like it. Sometimes I find just the right thing for one of you. I don’t have to buy three things for all three of you whenever I want to buy something for one of you. Just because Mommy doesn’t buy you something doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you.” She tried that again. “Mommy loves you even if she doesn’t buy you a toy. I can buy one of you a toy, and on another day, I can buy another one of you a toy. I love you the same.”
Another mother was leaving a child. Wittman put on his don’t-fuck-with-me face, rushed down the ladder, and nabbed her. “What’s your name?” he asked, notepad and pen at the ready. She said a name, but while he was writing it, it occurred to him that she’d made it up. A man said, “How about waiting on me? I have to catch a plane,” in a voice that made Wittman stay with his citizen’s arrest. “May I see your i.d., please?” While she went through her purse, he turned to the kid. “What’s your name?” Oh, no, something was sinking in his Mexican-American eyes, and he can’t jump in to save it. “Never mind,” said Wittman. “It’s all right. It’s okay. Everything’s okay. Here. Take this. A present from me to you.” Pushing a red truck into the kid’s arms. Taking it back, bagging it (to protect the kid from Security), giving it to him. “It’s yours. Take it home. Bye-bye.” “Okay,” said the kid. “Okay. Okay.” Don’t grow up worried about how much things cost, kid. Please. The kid had nicks in his home haircut where his scalp showed.
The plane-catching man wanted a look at no other bicycle but the one attached to the wall. “It’s a good thing you’re taking that down,” Louise called. “You’ve got the wrong bikes. You’re supposed to put up the Va-rooms.” Now how are those bulges going to sit on the flat wall?
“Look. Look,” a kid was saying. “Mommy, look.” The mommy turned her head too late and didn’t see that, in the mirrorwall, the top of the kid’s head came exactly to the height of a shelf of boats. As he walked, a flotilla of boat hats fleeted atop his head. Wittman was at an angle to have seen it.
“You’re pretty damn fast with the scissors, aren’t you? She’s pretty damn fast with the scissors.” A terrible, violent shouting. A gigantic man was shouting at Louise, then shouted his case to the masses. “How shall I be going back to Canada without my credit card? Look what you’ve done. Look at what she’s done. I’ll have your job for this, young woman. I’ll have her job for this. Damn fast with the scissors. I bought a building on Castro Street today, and you’re telling me I can’t buy a goddamn toy? Who’s your supervisor, Miss Fast-with-the-Scissors? Call him down here. I’m having your job for this. You’re going to answer for this, you are.”
The other shoppers were listening hard, giving the man flailing room, but acting intent on their own shopping, examining goods, their backs to the scene but prick-eared. “I have your number,” Louise was saying. “They gave me your number.” At last, a manager came, and the Canadian and Louise followed him away.
And the yammering began again. “How about helping me out here, you?” “Where’s the restroom?” “Mommy will be right back.” “Don’t you have those plain domino masks? Where can I get a plain domino mask?” Come to think of it, domino masks are no more. The Lone Ranger, no longer able to disguise his Chinese eyes, rides nevermore. “Where are the refrigerators?” “I want to make an exchange.”
Wittman went over to the display table and wound up a doggy. Once he had had a girlfriend whose dog named Dusty ran away. Whenever she heard on the radio, “Was it dusty on the train? P.S. I love you,” she thought of Dusty on the train, paws up on the window and tail wagging goodbye. The toy dog sat down, wagged its tail, stood, barked, walked, sat again, wagged, stood, barked, walked. Wittman pressed the egg-laying hen; the eggs rolled out. Tough shit if a kid swallowed one.
Out of a box, he took an organ-grinder’s monkey with cymbals attached to its hands. It had a red fez on its head. He took off its little vest, and inserted batteries in its back. It hopped about, clapping the cymbals and smiling. Its tail stuck out of a hole in its green-and-white-striped pants. “Look here, kiddos,” said Wittman, and unboxed a Barbie Bride. He put her on her back with her arms and veil and legs and white dress raised, and the monkey on top of her. Her legs held it hopping in place and clapping her with its cymbals. Her eyes opened and shut as the monkey bumped away at her. “Mommy, look at the monkey fight Barbie.” “Oh, how perverted.” Wittman walked. The tongue of his necktie stuck out from the bicycle. A green razzberry to you, World.
Ah, Bartleby.
Ah, Humanity.
Our monkey man will live—he parties, he plays—though unemployed. To see how he does it, go on to the next chapter.
3
TWISTERS AND SHOUTERS
IN THE TENDERLOIN, depressed and unemployed, the jobless Wittman Ah Sing felt a kind of bad freedom. Agoraphobic on Market Street, ha ha. There was nowhere he had to be, and nobody waiting to hear what happened to him today. Fired. Aware of Emptiness now. Ha ha. A storm will blow from the ocean or down from the mountains, and knock the set of the City down. If you dart quick enough behind the stores, you’ll see that they are stage flats propped up. On the other side of them is ocean forever, and the great Valley between the Coast Range and the Sierras. Is that snow on Mt. Shasta?
And what for had they set up Market Street? To light up the dark jut of land into the dark sea. To bisect the City diagonally with a swath of lights. We are visible. See us? We’re here. Here we are.
What else this street is for is to give suggestions as to what to do with oneself. What to do. What to buy. How to make a living. What to eat. Unappetizing. The street was full of schemes: FIRE SALE. LOANS. OLD GOLD. GUNS NEW AND USED. BOUGHT AND SOLD. GOING OUT OF BUSINESS. OUR PAIN YOUR GAIN. Food. Fast-food joints. Buy raw, sell cooked. If he got a-hold of food, he’d just eat it, not sell it. But we’re supposed to sell that food in order to buy, cook, and eat omnivorously. If you’re the more imaginative type, go to the mud flats, collect driftwood, build yourself a cart or a stand, sell umbrellas on rainy and foggy days, sell flowers, sell fast portable hot dogs, tacos, caramel corn, ice-cream sandwiches, hamburgers. Daedalate the line-up from cow to mouth, and fill up your life. If a human being did not have to eat every day, three times a day, ninety percent of life would be solved.
Clothes are no problem. He’d found his Wembley tie on a branch of a potted plant in front of the Durant Hotel, and an Eastern schoo
l tie hanging on a bush on Nob Hill. Coats are left on fences and wristwatches inside of shoes at the beach.
Musicians have a hard time of it. Sax players and guitarists and a bass player have left their instruments in pawnshops; they’re away perhaps forever, trying to make money, and to eat. A lot of hocked jewelry sits in the windows overnight; the real diamonds, they keep in the twirling-lock safe. These cellos and jewels belonged to people who for a while appreciated more than food. The nature of human beings is also that they buy t.v.s, coffee tables, nightstands, sofas, daddy armchairs for dressing the set of their life dramas.
Market Street is not an avenue or a boulevard or a champs that sweeps through arches of triumph. Tangles of cables on the ground and in the air, open manholes, construction for years. Buses and cars trying to get around one another, not falling into trenches, and not catching tires in or sliding on tracks, lanes taken up by double and triple parking. Pedestrians stranded on traffic islands. How am I to be a boulevardier on Market Street? I am not a boulevardier; I am a bum-how, I am a fleaman.
Now what? Where does a fleaman go for the rest of the evening, the rest of his adult life? The sets haven’t started at the Black Hawk, but no more spending extravagant money on music. Music should be overflowing everywhere. It’s time to find out how much free music there is. And no hanging out at the Albatross anymore, taken over by scary Spades. To feel the green earth underfoot, he could walk on the green Marina, look at the moon over the sea, and perhaps a second moon in the sea. Keep track of moonphases; are you going through changes in sync with werewolves? But something about that nightlight on the grass that looked sick, like the Green Eye Hospital. I saw: Hospitals. No walk in the Palace of the Legion of Honor either, not to be by himself in that huge dark; better to have a companion, and impress her at high noon, Wittman Ah Sing as Hercules chained to the columns and pulling them down, while shouting Shakespeare. If he went to Playland at the Beach, he would get freaked out by Sal, The Laughing Lady setting off the laughing gulls. Haaw. Haaaw. Haaaaw. He had yet to walk across the Golden Gate at night, but did not just then feel like being suspended in the open cold above the Bay; the breath of the cars would not be warm enough. Continue, then, along Market.
No boulevardiers here. Who’s here? Who are my familiars? Here I am among my familiars, yeah, like we’re Kerouac’s people, tripping along the street.
Soldiers, sailors,
the panhandlers and drifters,
[no] zoot suiters, the hoodlums,
the young men who washed dishes in cafeterias
from coast to coast,
the hitchhikers, the hustlers,
the drunks, the battered lonely young Negroes,
the twinkling little Chinese,
the dark Puerto Ricans [and braceros and pachucos]
and the varieties of dungareed Young Americans
in leather jackets
who were seamen and mechanics and garagemen
everywhere …
The same girls who walked in rhythmic pairs,
the occasional whore in purple pumps and red raincoat
whose passage down these sidewalks was always
so sensational,
the sudden garish sight of some incredible homosexual
flouncing by with an effeminate shriek of
general greeting to everyone, anyone:
“I’m just so knocked out and you all know it,
you mad things!”
—and vanishing in a flaunt of hips …
Well, no such red-and-purple whore or resplendent homosexual. Might as well expect a taxi door to open and out step a geisha in autumn kimono, her face painted white with tippy red lips and smudge-moth eyebrows, white tabi feet winking her out of sight on an assignation in the floating demimonde.
Shit. The “twinkling little Chinese” must be none other than himself. “Twinkling”?! “Little”?! Shit. Bumkicked again. If King Kerouac, King of the Beats, were walking here tonight, he’d see Wittman and think, “Twinkling little Chinese.” Refute “little.” Gainsay “twinkling.” A man does not twinkle. A man with balls is not little. As a matter of fact, Kerouac didn’t get “Chinese” right either. Big football player white all-American jock Kerouac. Jock Kerouac. I call into question your naming of me. I trust your sight no more. You tell people by their jobs. And by their race. And the wrong race at that. If Ah Sing were to run into Kerouac—grab him by the lapels of his lumberjack shirt. Pull him up on his toes. Listen here, you twinkling little Canuck. What do you know, Kerouac? What do you know? You don’t know shit. I’m the American here. I’m the American walking here. Fuck Kerouac and his American road anyway. Et tu, Kerouac. Aiya, even you. Just for that, I showed you, I grew to six feet. May still be growing.
Like headlines, the movie marquees seemed to give titles to what was going down—MONDO CANE, THE TRIAL, LORD OF THE FLIES, DR. NO, MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, HOW THE WEST WAS WON. Now, if there is one thing that makes life bearable, it’s the movies. Let them show a movie once a week, and Wittman can take anything, live anywhere—jail, a totalitarian socialist country, the Army. Not educational films but big-bucks full-production-values American glitz movies. WEST SIDE STORY. The biggest reddest block caps told him to go see West Side Story, which had returned from the sixth International Film Festival at Cannes. The girl in the ornate ticket booth said that he was on time, so he bought a ticket and went into the Fox. Inhaling the smell of the popcorn and the carpet, he felt happy. In the middle seat a screen-and-a-half’s width away from the front, he continued happy. In the breast pocket of his Brooks Brothers suit, on a page margin, Malte Laurids Brigge: This which towered before me, with its shadows ordered in the semblance of a face, with the darkness gathered in the mouth of its centre, bounded, up there, by the symmetrically curling hairdos of the cornice; this was the strong, all-covering antique mask, behind which the world condensed into a face. Here, in this great incurved amphitheatre of seats, there reigned a life of expectancy, void, absorbent: all happening was yonder: gods and destiny; and thence (when one looks, up high) came lightly, over the wall’s rim: the eternal entry of the heavens. Then a thunder-clapping pleasure—the movie started with simultaneous blasts of Technicolor and horns.
“When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dying day.” Oh, yes, that’s me, that’s me, a-crouching and a-leaping, fight-dancing through the city, fingers snapping, tricky feet attacking and backing up and attacking, the gang altogether turning and pouncing—monkey kung fu. “You got brothers around … You’re never disconnected … You’re well protected.”
Oh, yes, all the dances in all the wide and lonely gyms of our adolescence should have been like this. Us guys against one wall and you girls across the basketball court and along the opposite wall ought to have come bursting out at one another in two co-operating teams. The girls, led by Rita Moreno, high-kicking and lifting their skirts and many petticoats. “I like to be in America. Everything free in America.”
And Tony meets Natalie Wood, and asks her to dance, and falls in love at first sight with her. Me too. “I just met a girl named Maria.” And I’m in love with her too. Though her brother and her boyfriend belong to the Sharks, I love her like a religion.
In this world without balconies, climb a fire escape to court the city girl. And no sooner kiss her but have to part. “There’s a place for us.” Our monkey finds himself crying. Stop it. Look, identify with Chino, the reject. “Stick to your own kind.” What kind of people are Tony and Maria anyway, both with black wavy hair, and looking more like each other than anybody else on or off the screen? They are on the same mafioso side, Natalie Wood as dark as a star can be. “Make of our hands one hand, make of our hearts one heart, make of our lives one life, day after day, one life.” (Wittman had been to a wedding, he was best man, where his college friends had sung that song as part of the ceremony. The bride was Protestant and the groom was agnostic.)
The Jets are an Italian gang? But what
about jet black? Like the Fillmore, the Western Addition. Black. Only they don’t hire and cast Blacks, so Russ Tamblyn, as Riff the gangleader with kinky hair, indicates Blackness, right? (Like Leslie Caron with her wide mouth as Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans is supposed to be Black. George Peppard as Jack Kerouac, also as Holly Golightly’s boyfriend in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Mickey Rooney with an eye job and glasses as Holly’s jap landlord, speaking snuffling bucktoof patois.) The leader of the Sharks is Bernardo, Maria’s brother, played by George Chakiris. Greek Danish Puerto Ricans of the East Coast. This is Back East, where they worry about Puerto Rican gangs, who are Black and white and blond. Don’t the rest of the audience get Sharks and Jets mixed up in the fight-dancing? They should have hired dark actors for one side or the other. But not a face up there was darker than Pancake #11. Come on. Since when? A white-boy gang? Two white-boy gangs. White boys don’t need a gang because they own the country. They go about the country individually and confidently, and not on the lookout for whom to ally with. “You got brothers around; you’re a family man … We’re gonna beat every last buggin gang on the whole buggin street.” They mean they can beat kung fu tongs, who invented fight-dancing, and they can beat the dancing Black boxers, who fight solo.