Big Sur/Chapter 20
As i say my first little chinese friend, I keep saying “little” George and “little” Arthur but the fact is they were both small anyway—Altho George talked slowly and was a little absent from everything in the way of a Zen Master actually who realizes that everything is indifferent anyway, Arthur was friendlier, warmer in a way, curious and always asking questions, more active than George with his constant drawing, and of course Chinese instead of Japanese—He wanted me to meet his father the following weeks—He was Monsanto’s best friend at the time and they made an extremely strange pair going down the street together, the big ruddy happy man with the crewcut and corduroy jacket and sometimes pipe in mouth, and the little childlike Chinese boy who looked so young most bartenders wouldnt serve him tho he was actually 30 years old—Nevertheless the son of a famous Chinatown family and Chinatown is right back there behind the fabled beatnik streets of Frisco—Also Arthur was a tremendous little loverboy who had fabulously beautiful girls on the line and however’d just separated from his wife, a girl I never saw but Monsanto told me she was the most beautiful Negro girl in the world—Arthur came from a large family but as a painter and a Bohemian his family disapproved of him now so he lived alone in a comfortable old hotel on North Beach tho sometimes he went around the corner into Chinatown to visit his father who sat in the back of his Chinese general store brooding among his countless poems written swiftly in Chinese stroke on pieces of beautiful colored paper which he then hanged from the ceiling of his little cubicle—There he sat, clean, neat, almost shiney, wondering about what poem to write next but his keen little eyes always jumping to the street door to see who’s going by and if someone came into the shop itself he knew at once who it was and for what—He was in fact the best friend and trusted adviser of Chiang Kai Shek in America, true and no lie—But Arthur himself was in favor of the Red Chinese which was a family matter and a Chinese matter I had nothing to say about and didnt interest me except insofar as it gave a dramatic picture of father and son in an old culture—The point of the matter anyway being that he was goofing with me just like George had done and making me happy somehow like George had done—Something anciently familiar about his loyal presence made me wonder if I’d ever lived before in some other lifetime in China or if he’d been an Occidental himself in a previous lifetime of his own involved with mine somewhere else than China—The pity of it is that I have no record of what we were yelling and announcing back and forth as the birds woke up outside but it went generally like this:-
ME:- “Unless someone sicks a hot iron in my heart or heaps up Evil Karma like tit and tat the pile of that and pulls my mother out her bed to slay her before my damning human eyes—”
ARTHUR:- “And I break my hand on heads—”
ME:- “Everytime you throw a rock at a cat from your glass house you heap upon yourself the automatic Stanley Gould winter so dark of death after death, and growing old—”
ARTHUR:- “Because lady those ashcans’ll bite you back and be cold too—”
ME:- “And your son will never rest in the imperturbable knowledge that what he thinks he thinks as well as what he does he thinks as well as what he feels he thinks as well as future that—”
ARTHUR:- “Future that my damn old sword cutter Paisan Pasha lost the Preakness again—”
ME:- “Tonight the moon shall witness angels trooping at the baby’s window where inside he gurgles in his pewk looking with mewling eyes for babyside waterfall lambikin hillside the day the little Arab shepherd boy hugged the babylamb to heart while the mother bleeted at his bay heel—”
ARTHUR:- “And so Joe the sillicks killit no not—”
ME:- “Shhhhoww graaa—”
ARTHUR:- “Wind and carstart—”
ME:- “The angels Devas monsters Asuras Devadattas Vedantas McLaughlins Stones will hue and hurl in hell if they dont love the lamb the lamb the lamb of hell lambchop—”
ARTHUR:- “Why did Scott Fitzgerald keep a notebook?”
ME:- “Such a marvelous notebook—”
ARTHUR:- “Komi denera ness pata sutyamp anda wanda vesnoki shadakiroo paryoumemga sikarem nora sarkadium baron roy kellegiam myorki ayastuna haidanseetzel ampho andiam yerka yama chelmsford alya bonneavance koroom cemanda versel—”
ME:- “The 26th Annual concert of the Armenian Convention?”