Trouble & Attitude 1/Trouble and Attitude - Issue 01.iso/pc/pctext/crowder.txt

Text File | 1995-06-02 | 25.7 KB | 540 lines

AT LEAST HE MET SOME FRIENDLY FOLKS
by Lucien Crowder

        Willie's journey began on the banks of a river
whose name he hadn't learned. But because he was an
American, blithe ignorance of geography carried its
own excuse, like a cowboy his pistols or a packhorse
its saddlebags. He decided, fancifully and willfully,
that it was the River to Nowhere; so he was eager to
board the boat.
        Willie knew a slender bit of Mandarin Chinese,
necessary utterances, halting and prosaic. How much is
it? Do you have noodles? I am an American. But as the
little river boat puttered upward through the
mountains, further from the big towns and the rail
lines, his vocabulary would become as meaningless as
Spanish or Bengali. He was entering the mountain realm
of the Miao, a race and place so content in isolation
that next to it even Han China seemed an adventure in
Modernity. But Willie was positively hoping for
encounters with alien consciousness. Exactly that
motive had sent him here seeking the world's furthest
inverse.
 By the time the boat's motor had reached
its full power, Willie had made a new friend. He was a
young Han man, decent in appearance, amused at almost
everything. Wherever Willie went, this man was sure to
follow: chatting at him near the stern, befriending
him at the bow, unanxious, manfully persistent. Words
being nearly useless, communication depended on
gestures, smiles, and drawings. Still the two managed
to establish that their shoes were widely divergent in
price, that Willie had visited several important PRC
cities and his companion none, and that China is the
world's most populous country. It was Willie's belief
that at one point they had formally introduced
themselves, and if he was correct, the man's name was
something like Xie Feng. Or Sher Fang. But Willie
thought of him as Happy. Willie relied on mnemonic
devices to attach names and faces even in his own land
and language. XieFengorSherFang would never do.
        Now, Willie knew that if he ever went home, he
would forever be asked the following question: How did
you get around? And since the answer could not be, I
knew the language, it would have to be, You manage.
Willie was already an experienced traveler. He knew
that all objects of commerce, food and shelter among
them, have the curious quality of presenting
themselves for sale when needed, no matter how unable
one is to ask for them. He knew that with stiff
persistence, one can learn from a seat mate of any
nation the names of his maternal aunts. In this light,
it is remarkable that people ever bothered to invent
language. Truly we could live without it and barely
feel the lack. So mused Willie.
        Willie handed his guide book to Happy and
pointed him to the pictures -- all the places Willie
wouldn't go. To him, the Great Wall and the
terra-cotta soldiers were stampeded, distasteful,
profane. Willie was on a calculated trip to nowhere
and the next stop was Fu Lu. He was making no
allowances for fun. Fun resided in Kunming and
Shanghai, where it was pickled and sold. There, if you
liked, you could buy a Fun sandwich with bacon and
extra mayonnaise, and potato chips on the side. But
fun is deadly quiet in Nowhere, or it makes a small
and distant sound; and he who has ears to hear, let
him hear. Fun at the moment was barely humming, much
less insistent than for instance the little boat's
motor, a marvel of muscular industrial combustion.
(This bobbly little washbasin of a transport was
plenty picturesque for one billion Chinese people, but
not for dreaming Willie. Willie wanted steam.) Fun was
not in the mists above the green and creeping
mountains -- that was existence, or otherness, or
something.
 While Willie was actually thinking the
preceding, Happy had been poking him in the ribs and
pointing at the pictures in the book: camels in the
West, beaches in the South, jungle and desert and city
and mountain. Ah, goddamnit, thought Willie. To be a
penniless tourist in your own godgiven land.
         Some hours later Willie was disembarked in Fu
Lu: a hardsloping river village, nearly innocent of
commerce. From the dock one could see both ends of
town, one of which was the dock itself. Even
capitalism, observed wistful Willie -- in truth, he
was nine parts hungry for every one part wistful --
even when capitalism finally gets its grip on the city
of Fu Lu, its fingers around the souls of the men and
women there, it will not find much to squeeze. But
let's hope for Fu Lu that river runs rapidly, and
returns downstream in bits and shards all that the
world sends up to it. Or one day a traveler, arriving
by helicopter, will see this brightly painted sign:
Welcome to the New Fu Lu
Where Today Meets Tomorrow
And Everything Is Possible
        But haven't you heard the rumors about foreign
languages visiting China? Many, they say, have been
stolen away -- to a sinister laboratory of malicious
translation, where shadowy scholars build evil new
grammars from the blood and the flesh of mutilated
tongues. Thus:
Welcome You to new Fu Lu
Where Tomorrow is Yesterday
but everything was Probable.
        Secured at the cuff by his host, Willie was
led to Fu Lu's one restaurant. The place was like a
halfbuilt barn, neither indoors nor out. It was
composed of three parts. The front part was a kitchen
with nothing in it. The middle was a large patch of
dusty cement. And toward the rear were chairs without
tables -- unsturdy tripods, suitable for dwarves --
occupied by a number of curious calm men, sitting,
smoking, not eating or drinking, sitting, smoking.
Near their feet was a vessel of embers, providing
cheer at best. Willie was led among the men, and after
a little splash of conversation that Willie assumed to
be about himself, there was silence. Willie hunched
himself upon a seat and put his feet almost in the
fire. Useless. But after a few silent minutes had gone
by and no one had offered him food or drink, Willie
began to ponder: How do I get a meal in this place?
        There was no explaining anything: why the men
were congregated there, why Happy had attached himself
and wouldn't let go and wouldn't stop smiling, what
the pot of coals was even supposed to be for, most of
all why the place had the appearance of a restaurant
if no one was actually interested in food. Willie
stood up and approached the proprietor, who was
leaning his elbows on the counter, and said, in
Mandarin, Lao ban, I'm hungry. The lao ban leaned his
elbows on the counter. Then Willie patted his stomach,
because this bit of international language is never
misunderstood (but pity him who must indicate that he
has an ulcer). The lao ban leaned his elbows on the
counter. Happy kept his distance, when for once he
might have been useful. Willie knew not what to do
except to say the names of all the dishes whose
Mandarin names he knew: seven: hoping that one might
have penetrated into the land of the Miao. None had.
The lao ban seemed to be made of wood.
        How did you get around? Willie would have to
devise a new answer. Because now there were no more
choices. Sacrificing his dignity to his desperation,
and arbitrarily choosing the chicken as the animal in
whose language he'd speak his shame -- Willie clucked.
He was dreadfully humiliated, but he'd finally made
his point. The lao ban lit the gas under two kettles
of water, and went purposefully into the street.
Absolutely reasonable, hugely encouraging, considering
what use the kitchen had been.
        As Willie reclaimed his seat he noticed that
he wasn't feeling very well. He was barely over a
strain of the flu and was already attacked by
something else. Any of these chills or sweats or
sneezes might mean malaria; because as a traveler he
was ardent, a dogmatist, and hadn't been bothered with
malaria medicine. And he'd been down in the lowlands
among the swamps. Then as if to demonstrate the power
of incongruousness, this thought murmured itself to
him: God so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should
not perish, but have everlasting life.
        It seemed so little help. For this
restaurateur had reduced him to clucking then had
promptly disappeared and Willie's faith was failing
that he'd ever see the man again because probably he
was just some guy off the street who liked to play a
little joke now and then and now loaves and fishes
would do nicely for dinner if only someone would
provide him a plate of something hot or cold spicy or
bland solid or soup and demand that he eat with his
hands or suck it through a straw it would not matter
simply anything edible insect or worm would do. But
just at the moment that Willie was becoming resigned
to his delirium, a little fond of it in fact, the lao
ban returned, inexplicably proud, bearing in his
motherly clasp a live, quite clucking chicken. Willie
became ashamed of his imitation, reminded of the
original's perfection.
        But that was to be his last rational thought
for a space of some few minutes; for when the
chicken's neck was laid across the block and a knife
was raised above it, Willie hallucinated a blade
racing down toward the thin and flimsy join between
his own temporal flesh and his own everlasting soul.
His mental balance did not improve at all when a pot
of boiling water was poured freely upon the carcass of
the still-bleeding bird, and its feathers were taken
off by the handful. Willie's appetite was nearly
killed dead when the lao ban threw the chicken at a
distance of a yard into the second pot of boiling
water.
 The lao ban was no believer in fancy food. He
used two ingredients: water, and a chicken. In
Guangxho Willie had feasted on every maritime
delicacy, all of it delicious and extravagant; in
Chengdu he had had a Sichuan hotpot, and had learned
to like the slices of cow stomach as much as the spicy
pork; in the Guanxi countryside he had been given rice
cakes with red star imprints on them, and that was
very charming; but he almost balked at a poor beheaded
bird in the town of old Fu Lu. Dizzy from sickness and
hunger, Willie saw the chicken scramble out of the pot
with a weapon in its vengeful wing, intent on striking
down a man or woman or child for every hideous chicken
death in history, till there were no more people left
to kill -- then take to the kitchen and put on an
apron to prepare a delicious sauce.
        Happy and the other men were staring at Willie
with a wonder near as wide as Willie's own wonder. He
was just as fantastic as a homicidal chicken. The lao
ban was standing over him as would a mother over a
little boy fiddling with a bowl of spinach. Willie
made every effort to suppress his fanciful thoughts:
only sober and determined eating was likely to improve
his state of mind. He forced himself to take a
chopstick stab at the floating fowl, and another, all
the while afraid that he would have to defend himself
against a flurry of pecks and flaps and eye-pickings.
He began to realize at the third or fourth bite how
strange everything, from an objective point of view,
had become. I have thought myself a reasonable person,
he observed, and yet I fear my food.
        Headline in the Fu Lu Times: Human Population
Increases by One, Chicken Population Shows
Proportionate Decrease.
        But presently Willie was fed. A little warmth
came back to his body and hallucinations ceased. He
wondered what might arise from an all-poultry diet:
lasting gratitude of the people of Arkansas, eternal
damnation if God is a chicken. Through the
restaurant's open front, he watched Fu Lu come and go.
Peasant woman, peasant man. Dog. Grandmother with
baby. Woman in floor-length white robe. Two policemen.
Cart of vegetables. Inquisitive policemen. Stockstill
staring policemen.
        One was tall and the other short, one thin and
the other stocky. The expression of the taller thinner
one was absolutely absent -- he seemed to have just
woken up from a nap. The shorter plumper one looked
from Willie to his colleague, then from Willie to his
colleague. The taller one's face suddenly took on a
lip-pursing look of decision. The shorter one noted
the change in the taller, and mimicked his expression.
The tall one advanced and the short one advanced. The
smoking men sat up stiffer on their stools and talking
stopped among them. Willie intuited that the magic
bond he'd shared with Happy had utterly dissolved.
Love is fickle.
        Willie guessed at once what occasioned the
lawmen's interest: Fu Lu was evidently closed to
foreigners. Willie had been negligent, purposeful
even, in wandering wherever the wind took him. But
what in this little nothing of a town-- certainly
indigent, but not possibly more so than the rest of
the province, and to its credit, a little picturesque
-- what the officials could want to keep from outside
view, Willie couldn't guess. But while Willie was
engaging in irrelevant little musings, the tall
officer was engaging in good detective work: he
ascertained with final certainty that Willie was not
Chinese.
 It turned out that the tall one knew a
little English -- half again as much as Willie knew
Mandarin. So while Willie was escorted to the station
house over Fu Lu's newly paved street, the town's only
evidence of civic improvement, a rudimentary
interrogation took place in two tongues. Do you have
noodles? I am an American. On either side of the
street, the tiny village was enlivened by the little
bit of life that enlivens tiny villages on any of the
world's continents. All of the nothing that for
thousands of years perhaps had made Fu Lu a very
citadel of nothing, prospered and endured. Willie was
about to be expelled from Nowhere.
        He was taken to a room full of desks. At none
of the desks was work being done. He surrendered his
passport, and while the tall policeman thumbed its
little pages, he felt as if a vagabond were rifling
his pockets and a pervert were groping his privates.
The short policeman stood attentively by and did
nothing. What Happy had been to Willie, the short
policeman was to the tall one: useless, and never
absent. If arrogance, thought Willie, is in inverse
proportion to a person's true importance, this little
uniform of a man must be the proof. Willie remembered
the story of the Australian traveler who was caught
with a prostitute and sent to Sinjiang province for
six months of moral reeducation. And then he began to
hear the screams -- or merely a miserable soul's
lament? -- coming from a place quite nearby. Almost,
you'd swear, in the building itself. The policemen
were perfectly unperturbed.
        If only he'd come a few centuries earlier,
Willie could have wriggled out of this by introducing
China to the magic of linear perspective.
        Later in the evening, enduring his house
arrest, Willie remembered the friendly official a few
towns back who'd warned him against Fu Lu. Willie had
a policy against taking advice, distrusting the
disinterest of disinterested parties and not much
believing anyway that things could be controlled. But
now the friendly man had to be respected, and
wistfully thanked in absentia. For justice was swift,
justice was fair, and justice went like this:
BY ORDER OF THE PEOPLE'S COMMUNIST DEPUTIES IN FU LU:
THE OFFENDER SHALL BE MADE TO PAY A FINE OF THIRTY
QUAI, payable in RMB as FEC are useless in the
hinterlands and thus unsuitable for the deputies'
private purposes AND SHALL FURTHER PRODUCE A
SELF-CRITICISM IN WRITING which no one will be able to
read IN WHICH HE SHALL EXPRESS HIS SINCERE REMORSE FOR
HIS OFFENSE though of course we'll know he doesn't
give a rat's ass AND FURTHER SHALL BE PLACED UNDER
HOUSE ARREST UNTIL SIX A.M. TOMORROW AT WHICH TIME HE
SHALL BE COMPELLED TO LEAVE BY THE FIRST AVAILABLE
TRANSPORT though damn if we're waking up early enough
to see that he does.
        Now that's tough justice, muttered Willie to
himself. The tall policeman looked as if he suspected
some sort of sarcasm. But he could not prove the
charge. And he could not ask Willie to repeat himself,
because he was supposed to know English. And Willie
understood all this, so he said quite aloud, smiling
widely, You fucking two-inch prick.
        Two hours later, buried under a bivouac of
blankets but feeling anyway as if someone were jabbing
icicles into his flesh, Willie achieved a new sort of
unity: his soul was forcibly brought into tune with
the shiverings and lurchings of his body. Another
thing suffered through, fed into the gnawing jaw of
his compulsion toward elucidating experience. Joy and
gain be damned. The Protestant approach to tourism.
One day he'll be able to say, I am blameless, I have
done every miserable thing that God gave me days
enough to do. He wished he could sleep, but he was
kept awake by his creeping fever and some cluster of
anxieties lodged in his esophagus.
        Was his anxiety moral?
It was attended by a moral sentiment, complicated and
uncomfortable.
 From what did the discomfort spring?
From being a social i.e. moral outcast without having
violated any scruple of his own.[PB]
        Did he call his scruples into question?
He doubted them as arbitrary.
        Did he analyze them deeply?
No. He was hindered by his illness; and even in good
health he made but a poor philosopher.
        Of his two discomforts, physical and moral,
which was the more unpleasant?
The physical, because it threatened to shred the soul
from the flesh; and the moral, because it might never
be healed.
        Was his moral discomfort really so great as
that?
It seemed so.
        Since he could not fall asleep, how did he
pass the time?
He coughed repeatedly.
        Was coughing amusement enough?
No. He began to re-read the only book he had.
        What book was it?
The Ambassadors by Henry James.
        How long did it hold his interest?
Not long. It seemed to have nothing to do with
anything.
        Did he find any other diversions?
He counted his money and discovered himself poorer
than he thought. He looked through his bag as if he
might find something new in it. He drank many cups of
tea. He wrote a postcard to his parents.
        Content?
Dear Mom and Dad,
On the boat ride a I met a nice guy. Ate a freshly
slaughtered chicken and was put under house arrest.
Love,
 Did he subsequently mail the postcard?
Yes, three days later, in the town of Kaili.
        Upon receiving the postcard were his parents
worried?
Greatly.
        What, that we may know, did his self-criticism
say?
I'm sorry I came to Fu Lu. In the future I'll
find out whether or not Chinese towns are closed
before I waste the boatfare.
        Are you certain that that's what it said?
Couldn't the official, even with his poor English,
have managed to decipher it?
I insist that it said exactly that. And anyway, who
are you to question my account? Potentially millions
of people will read this, and I dare say their
enjoyment won't be enhanced by these little retentions
of disbelief that constrict your hyper-rational brain.
It's much easier to criticize than to do; easier to
doubt than to inspire faith; much more pleasant, I'm
sure, to amble into the middle of a narrative and
leave again when it suits you, than to do the hard
work of building and rebuilding and rebuilding again.
So please suppress your destructive tendencies, or I
will have to ask you to leave.
        Very well. I am here as your invited guest,
and I must watch my manners. Returning to the matter
at hand, was there ever a rendering-sincere of the
meager lefthanded apology expressed in Willie's
compelled self-criticism?
You have a funny way of saying things; but yes:
gradually, and grudgingly.
        Did Willie in future times remember his day in
Fu Lu with fondness?
It provided the stock story of his travels in China,
but other days and places which left deeper prints in
his conscience, produced no tales to tell.

WHILE WILLIE SWEATED AND WORRIED

1.        The short policeman drank shots of bai jiu,
spitting every second one into his lover's mouth.
2.        His wife breastfed a sickly newborn baby.
3.        The tall policeman took a lonely walk by the
lonely river and wondered what lonely life lay before
him in this lonely town and world, then went home to
his extended family.
4.        Happy smoked with the smoking men.
5.        The smoking men smoked men smoking talking
men.
6. The lao ban rested comfortably in the
fortress of his logic, whereby restaurants exist in
the absence of food and no one asks any questions.
7.        The soul of the chicken ascended half to
heaven before remembering it could not fly.
8.        The short policeman spit the night's last
shot of whisky into the mouth of his failing mistress.
She hadn't any legs left. But the policeman found her
perfectly serviceable.

        ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD

1.        Two men, one fat and one thin, ordered
pastrami sandwiches at different Manhattan
delicatessens, unconcerned with events in Argentina
and Mali and China. The thin one burned the sandwich
off by dinner, while the fat one gained a pound.
2.        A stroke befell the oldest resident of
Jasper, Alabama.
3.        The President of the United States locked
the bathroom door and masturbated.
4.        The levitating soul of a chicken hawk
smelled the soul of a chicken, but couldn't place its
source.
5. A scared little boy and a scared little
snake were cast in mortal conflict, resulting in
mutual mortality. For which of the two do you suppose
more tears were wept? Does either care now for tears?
6.        Florida swarmed with lovebugs. Carwashes did
a thumping business.
7.        Junior Wells and several lesser bluesmen
snored drunkenly in a California motel. The late
morning light stuck its fingers through the blinds and
was cursed.
8.        A paranoid psychotic outside Kansas City
discovered he'd run out of medicine. All his thoughts
turned to dismemberment.
9.        Juliet Wilson of Memphis, Tennessee attended
a baptism by morning and a funeral by afternoon. One
ceremony made her feel peaceful and the other made her
sad; but the feelings belonged to the wrong
ceremonies; the world was reversed; and she wondered
why.

THE WORLD WAS REVERSED

        Willie's day was nearly done but he still had
strength for one wish. He wished that he were not in a
sickly body in a dingy room at a great remove from
comfort and love and cheer. But Willie had strength
too for this remorse: that opium was no longer king in
China, and thus couldn't help him to shake body free
from mind. Once he had smoked opium in Bloomington,
Illinois.
 Willie finally fell into dreams: a fat
grey cat supported on its head a fat red penguinesque
bird. The Penguinesque and the Picaresque are commonly
seen as complimentary forms, though one is
pre-Romantic and the other is flightless. Every second
the Great Watch of China ticks a ticktock second
toward a seventh millennium. Jericho Troy Xian St.
Augustine. Postcard home. The cat has lost its bird.
Do you suspect him? But look, he is not more fat. Tiny
green snakes wrap themselves around vines that cling
to an aquarium, and then snakes cling as vines and the
vines crawl snake. The vines seek prey and kill as
boas kill, but the snakes go hungry and wilt.
Photosynthesis. Detritus.
        Willie heard a sudden snap, felt a pain, and
awoke: it was Fu Lu morning cracking its lash on five
hundred backs. Tea was brewed and food was stewed.
Willie made his coughing cursing way to the bus depot:
to ride the only bus: on the only road: that led out
of town: in only one direction. Every seat on every
transport in all of China is filled up every time.
Willie succeeded in getting on the bus only because a
teenage soldier dragged him on while expelling someone
else. Farewell, my friend. May you soon quit this
place, with no more ill befalling you.
        Willie hoped that the worst was behind him,
but you cannot anticipate a day's events. Events such
as: a grim sneering bus driver honking a hellborn
bellhorn which sounded louder within the bus than
without and whose horror was loosed not once not twice
but three times when the bus passed even the loneliest
most harmless bicyclist on the loneliest country road
-- but Chinese cyclists are rarely lonely, for it is
hard to be lonely in China. And the clankclankclank of
the bus's rattly drafty windows clankclank. And
Willie's seatmate, the broadest-shouldered man in
China, whose unyielding breadth left half of Willie's
behind on the seat and half of it sitting on air. And
the four dismal days in dismal Kaili, where Willie
tried to recuperate in a cold nearly misty
plastercracked cage of a room while visitors to the
bathroom across the hall provided for his
entertainment emphatic expectorations and odors of a
very personal nature. And his weehour walk through the
rabid-dog outskirts of souldead Kaili to find at the
rail station he'd missed the Beijing train and would
suffer for another twenty-four hours the worst town in
the world. No, none of that could have been
anticipated; but neither will it pry the lid off a
well-closed story. Nothing of Willie's deliverance to
Beijing, Mongolia and beyond. Of all this let's say
simply, That he saw a lot of nice places and met a lot
of friendly folks.