Kingston - Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

ALSO BY MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

The Woman Warrior (1976)

China Men (1980)

Hawaii One Summer (1987)

F IRST V INTAGE B OOKS E DITION , J ULY 1990

Copyright 1987, 1988, 1989 by Maxine Hong Kingston

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published, in hardcover, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1989.

Owing to limitations of space, permission to reprint previously published material may be found on .

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kingston, Maxine Hong.
Tripmaster monkey : his fake book / Maxine Hong
Kingston.
p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-78790-3
I. Title.
[PS3561.I52T7 1990]
813.54dc20 89-40550

The italicized passages are from The Notebooks of MalteLaurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, W. W. Norton Company, Inc., New York, 1949.

v3.1

TO EARLL

This fiction is set in the 1960 S , a time when some events appeared to occur months or even years anachronistically.

MAYBE IT COMES from living in San Francisco, city of clammy humors and foghorns that warn and warnomen, o-o-men, o dolorous omen, o dolors of omensand not enough sun, but Wittman Ah Sing considered suicide every day. Entertained it. There slid beside his right eye a black gun. He looked side-eyed for it. Here it comes. He actually crooked his trigger finger andbang!his head breaks into pieces that fly far apart in the scattered universe. Then blood, meat, disgusting brains, mind guts, but he would be dead already and not see the garbage. The mouth part of his head would remain attached. He groaned. Hemingway had done it in the mouth. Wittman was not el pachuco loco. Proof: he could tell a figment from a table. Or a tree. Being outdoors, in Golden Gate Park, he stepped over to a tree and knock-knocked on it, struck a match on it. Lit a cigarette. Whose mind is it that doesnt suffer a loud takeover once in a while? He was aware of the run of his mind, thats all. He was not making plans to do himself in, and no more willed these seppuku moviesno more conjured up that gunthan built this city. His cowboy boots, old brown Wellingtons, hit its pavements hard. Anybody serious about killing himself does the big leap off the Golden Gate. The wind or shock knocks you out before impact. Oh, long before impact. So far, two hundred and thirty-five people, while taking a walk alone on the bridgea mere net between you and the grabby oceanhad heard a voice out of the windy skyLaurence Olivier asking them something: To be or not to be? And theyd answered, Not to be, and climbed on top of the railing, fingers and toes roosting on the cinnabarine steel. They take the side of the bridge that faces land. And the City. The last city. Feet first. Coit Tower giving you the finger all the way down. Wittman would face the sea. And the setting sun. Dive. But he was not going to do that. Strange. These gun pictures were what was left of his childhood ability to see galaxies. Glass cosmospheres there had once been, and planets with creatures, such doings, such colors. None abiding. In the Chronicle, a husband and wife, past eighty, too old to live, had shot each other with a weak gun, and had had to go to a doctor to have the bullets prized out of their ears. And a Buddhist had set fire to himself and burned to death on purpose; his name was Quang Duc. Quang Duc. Remember. In the cremations along the Ganges, the mourners stay with the burning body until its head pops. Pop.

Today Wittman was taking a walk on a path that will lead into the underpass beneath the gnarly trees. In fact, the park didnt look half bad in the fog beginning to fall, dimming the hillocks that domed like green-grey moons rising or setting. He pulled the collar of his pea coat higher and dragged on his cigarette. He had walked this far into the park hardly seeing it. He ought to let it come in, he decided. He would let it all come in. An old white woman was sitting on a bench selling trivets @ dollar ea., which a ducky and a bunny pointed out with gloved fingers. She lifted her head and turned her face toward Wittmans; her hands were working one more trivet out of yarn and bottlecaps. Not eyelids exactly but like skin flaps or membranes covered her eye sockets and quivered from the empty air in the holes or with efforts to see. Sockets wide open. He looked at her thick feet chapped and dirty in zoris. Their sorry feet is how you can tell crazy people who have no place to go and walk everywhere.

Wittman turned his head, and there on the ground were a pigeon and a squatting man, both puking. He looked away so that he would not himself get nauseated. Pigeons have milk sacs in their throats. Maybe this one was disgorging milk because last night a wind had blown in from the ocean and blown its squabs out of their nest, and it was milking itself. Or does that happen in the spring? But in California in the fall as well? The man was only a vomiting drunk. This walk was turning out to be a Malte Laurids Brigge walk. There was no helping that. There is no helping what you see when you let it all come in; he hadnt been in on building any city. It was already cold, soon the downside of the year. He walked into the tunnel.

Heading toward him from the other end came a Chinese dude from China, hands clasped behind, bow-legged, loose-seated, out on a strollthat walk they do in kung fu movies when they are full of contentment on a sunny day. As luck would have it, although there was plenty of room, this dude and Wittman tried to pass each other both on the same side, then both on the other, sidestepping like a couple of basketball stars. Wittman stopped dead in his tracks, and shot the dude a direct stink-eye. The F.O.B. stepped aside. Following, straggling, came the poor guys wife. She was coaxing their kid with sunflower seeds, which she cracked with her gold tooth and held out to him. Ho sick, la. Ho sick, she said. Good eating. Good eats. Her voice sang, rang, banged in the echo-chamber tunnel. Mom and shamble-legged kid were each stuffed inside of about ten homemade sweaters. Their arms stuck out fatly. The mom had on a nylon or rayon pantsuit. (Ny-lon ge. Mm lon doc. Nylon-made. Lasts forever.) No! said the kid. Echoes of No! Next there came scrabbling an old lady with a cane. She also wore one of those do-it-yourself pantsuit outfits. On Grannys head was a cap with a pompon that matched everybodys sweaters. The whole family taking a cheap outing on their day offu. Immigrants. Fresh Off the Boats out in public. Didnt know how to walk together. Spitting seeds. So uncool. You wouldnt mislike them on sight if their pants werent so highwater, gym socks white and noticeable. F.O.B. fashionshighwaters or puddlecuffs. Cant get it right. Uncool. Uncool. The tunnel smelled of mothballsF.O.B. perfume.