Tom Bradley

Tom publishes his wonderfully scabrous work in Salon and

RealPoetik, and can be reached at tom@tombradley.org.

Sam Edwine says "Hi-hi" to a bum in Foo-Chow

(Marco Polo went there, too)

by Tom Bradley

"Quit your farting."

--Chairman Mao, The Little Red Book

The commies had kicked his family out, and now they were after Sam. So

he decided to take a walk, to search for a means of personal salvation.

As he lumbered down Derelict Hell Road, he came upon a likely

prospect.

Glistening black with filth, and naked but for a few rags that ended at

the thighs and armpits, the guy looked a bit like a far-eastern version

of Sam himself in his bachelor days, before his wife got hold of him

and cleaned him up. Best of all, this bum was wadded in an old and

ill-maintained handicap trike.

It might not be a bad idea to hunker down in front of this saint, to

put elbows on the false-cripple knees and do a little fast talking.

The standard slow-motion eyes rolled up and focused on Sam only after

he was settled comfortably in.

Sam began: "Perhaps you could lend me some of your wisdom, for I'm in

a quandary. It may sound like a Jesus complex to you--and maybe it's

even a mild one compared to your own, as you sit here weeping

blood--but there are several groups of people in this town vying with

each other to see who can nail me first.

"Now I'm asking you, possibly the observer, victim and perpetrator of

more than one crucifixion: shall I give these godless pricks the

satisfaction of capturing me and deporting me after a little marketably

sordid stuff in jail? Or shall I go fishing instead?

"Letting them bust me would offer the fair likelihood, or at least the

fighting chance, that I could go public with the charges against me, if

I survived. That would give me a crack at notoriety and financial

independence.

"I'd have to recruit a ghostwriter. Like they say: two weeks in

China, write a book; two months in China, write an article; two years

in China, write nothing. But, you know, I'd certainly be svelte enough

for the talk show circuit after a few months in the people's prison.

I've got a fair start on it now, don't you think?"

Sam smoothed his hands down his sides and leered sidelong at his mute

interlocutor, who moaned once absently.

"Now, the disadvantages we'll count up on your little bare black toes,

like marketing piggies.

"One: They'd fly me back on a China Airlines death-trap, and I'd have

take a chance on ptomaine from the Salisbury steak.

"Two: my adopted daughter, bless her dewy soul, would have to settle

for being parented by an international criminal, a C.I.A.-betraying,

counter-spying daddy who was thrown out of her homeland on the

equivalent of a Mann Act rap. She could never return thirty years

hence to witness the glorious results of the Four Modernizations and

learn about her rich cultural heritage and shit like that."

The bum suddenly laughed. Had he understood, or had he made up some

random funny of his own?

"On the other hand," continued Sam, "I could sneak off and go fishing

in the Straits with your 'fraternal compatriots' from Taiwan, who hang

around the phony show port. I know their lingo, for most of them are

lucky escapees from this very town. They would allow themselves to be

bribed with some nice herbal medicine or powdered pearl cream. And,

like the person who hates him/herself in the morning, they would beg me

to keep the ride to freedom and Big Macs a secret, so their mainland

typhoon-haven privileges wouldn't be revoked. No publicity value to be

had by that route.

"There are no snitches from either government among the tightly-knit,

profit-bonded crews, and it would be the first time in two years that

I'd be free of such ticks and fleas. And even if the Reds did find

out, they would never publicize such an embarrassing method of escape.

'Look,' the world would say, 'even their foreign experts are sneaking

over to Taiwan!'

"So my kid's childhood would be secure and obscure.

"But there would be disadvantages to this route as well." Sam looked

up at the placid, filthy sky. "I'd have to stick around here with you,

and I do mean 'stick'--" He peeled one dungareed knee off the

sidewalk. "--until typhoon season got into full swing and the

fishermen started showing up. And then I might die in the very storm

that brought my saviors. Or I might get seasick, which is worse than

death, as far as I know. What do you think?

"Also, they may be rich spies, but I've heard their boats are floating

petri dishes for hepatitis A, B and C, plus tetanus, tuberculosis,

dysentery, dyspepsia and dysfunctions of whatever organs you care to

list, not to mention backaches from midget-sized berths.

"Besides, I'd have to get a job when I finally got home, because no

publisher would believe I was telling the truth and things called

novels don't sell."

At the mention of the word 'job,' anguish geysered from Sam's outsized

hiatal hernia. He grabbed the bum by the crawly rags around his

throat. By this point it had slipped his mind that he was kneeling in

mucus and actually touching someone unwashed. And this was the

self-same Sam Edwine who had given himself a rare dose of male anorexia

from fear of the unclean utensils in socialist restaurants. He was

either making gradual progress or deteriorating rapidly. In either

case, he pushed forward and gazed into the raw face.

"What'll I do? I can't swim fast like the skinny comrades who wind up

peopling the gay district in Hong Kong. And the commie-bred and

-planted hammerheads would be attracted from nautical miles around by

the drainage from my itched-open mosquito bites. Anyway, how could I

get down to Kowloon in the first place, clear across mountains and

provincial borders, with an A.P.B. hanging over my head?"

Sam eyed the bum's wheeled conveyance and added, "I do have a ruse in

mind, a Yankee-style scheme, that might smuggle my bright bulk as far

as the show port, where I could link up with the Guomindang."

He considered it a while. Escape seemed so bothersome. It would be

much easier to acquiesce, like this rolled-over variety of lone

Chinaman, and wait to be swept away like dog shit.

"You must be one of those guys my age," said Sam, "the 'lost

generation' who can't do anything because the Great Proletarian

Cultural Revolution blew you out like light bulbs. You can't even sit

up straight while you beg, but slouch flat on your back in your

wheelchair, your pelvis poked forward, your head propped at a ninety

degree angle--just like me most of the time, except I have a bed and a

pillow and a book by Foucault to make it look legitimate.

"Back home in Utah, whenever I saw a huddled mass of your counterparts

outside the Sugar House White Slum Blood Plasma Donor Center, I always

went among them and asked, with sincere bewilderment, 'Why don't you

guys become grad students like me? Why peddle your precious bodily

fluids? I know 5000 dollars per year doesn't sound like much, but it's

about 4987 dollars and fifty cents more than you dribble from your

elbow crotches now. Besides, if you schedule everything carefully (pud

profs in classes you take; peer evaluation in classes you teach), it

works out to be about forty dollars per hour. And if you can keep

little Thumbelina inside your pants during lectures, you can even get a

Ph.D. Or just mail out for one from the back pages of Hustler

Magazine, as you collect your fellowship stipend and rack up the

federally insured student loans. Then you can become a foreign expert

in some hopeless third-world shit-hole whose barbaric Deans of

Humanities don't know any better, like Borneo or Sumatra or the

People's Republic of China.'

"Of course, you, my grimy friend, can't do that, because you're already

here, unfortunately for you, and you have no place toward which to be

downwardly mobile. But you can see some parallels forming, can't

you?"

Sam nudged him in the protuberant floating ribs.

"You must have some gumption under all that real estate, having avoided

the police, who, like the soldiers of King Shuddhodhana, pack your

unpresentable kind off to closed cities or god knows where:

crematoria, perhaps, or glue factories, where nobody important like an

American tourist will see you and know you exist."

No response was forthcoming, not even to this veiled compliment. Had

it been expressed in too condescending a tone? Maybe the guy didn't

know his own town's idiom. Sam resolved to get a rise out of him, one

way or another.

He snuggled and swished, "You be Therese Defarge and I'll be Miss

Pross, m'kay? Just back off, you slut! I push my saggy bosoms out at

you, ooooh!" He dug his upper body into the bony, death-smelling lap.

Nothing.

"Pull yourself together, young man!" cried Sam. "You've got to make a

better showing than this! Do something, and put your heart and soul

into it! You've got to think big and have gumption! Don't be afraid

to set out and go to new places on your own! You can tackle any

adversary singlehandedly, if you'll only show me a little old-style

Kipling liberalesque gumption! Come on!

"Look at me, for example." (Sam's mouth was getting tired; that last

came out 'fur-zampo.') "Short of injuring my large person, there's

nothing bad China can do to me. This country is impotent in terms of

psychological retribution. You probably think that if I got deported

I'd have to go home in shame to total ostracism and face-loss, like

you're suffering right now. But face counts for less than nothing in

an isolate place like America, in what your propagandist 'philosophers'

used to call a social-Darwinist society. And ostracized from whom?

Nobody, with a capital N, is the work unit Americans like me belong to.

Even if I brought home the highest Chi-com accolades and a vita

plumper than Mao's hemorrhoids, I'd wind up working a shit-job at

Seven-Eleven. For I'm a mere male Anglo Saxon, and therefore have

nothing to offer, of course. Lumpen intelligentsia all the way, and

proud of it!

"We Americans are, in your Confucian context, sociopaths; and, though

our society and culture are finished, we are the only free people on

earth, for we are perfectly, sublimely faceless. We're shameless.

"That, and not all the milk and beef we gorge on, is what makes us so

huge and mean and hairy. So watch your skinny, inhibited ass, Boy!

"China--all of this, the forty-year-old smog, the

four-thousand-year-old street, the incredible inch-thick jam under your

toenails here--it's just been a cheap, irrelevant vacation for me: a

way of forestalling adulthood another couple years; a financially

neutral expenditure of dead time; busywork to prepare me for the true

man's labor of placing pickles and cheese on a sesame seed bun and

nickels in a cash register, eight hours a day. You and your

most-ancient-of-all-civilizations and your one-in

every-four-faces-on-earth have been a way to kill time, nothing more.

"China, the world's biggest post-graduate school."

The bum rolled his head to one side and spat a plump yellow lunger on

Sam's hand. The glistening globule nestled and quivered warmly in the

web between Sam's thumb and forefinger. It was more of a response than

he'd gotten in years of classroom teaching.

"Okay, fine. You have done something. I'm glad you felt comfortable

enough to share with me. Let's talk about this now. It's a wise

choice of activity in your case, a natural vocation, you might say. By

now, of course, it is a commonplace among the educated classes that Mao

Zedong-- "

The bum twitched at the name as though at a bee sting.

"--was an oral personality leading an anal nation. But I say you're

all nasal types. Nasal expulsives. So please, lie there and follow

your natural bent. Snort a little something back and expel it!

"But," said Sam, rising to his feet, "be the very best spitter you can

be. Make yours the biggest spit on the block. Here, watch this--"

He inserted two of his more expendable left-hand fingers deep into his

throat and twiddled his soot-sore uvula, waiting for the standard

results. He was only sorry there was no party representative within

reach. But then, in mid-gag, he thought better of it.

"Enough of that," he murmured, and withdrew his hand.

Then, feeling lighter, he stripped down to his novelty teeshirt, which

read, zi jingshen wuran zhe. I am a spiritual self-polluter.

Finally, the embryonic sense of paternal responsibility long impending

inside this man, who'd been expelled from his last American university

post for displaying little evidence of the nurturing instinct, came to

full term and was born squealing and bleeding. It was time to get back

home and link up with his wife and daughter.

But before his total-immersion baptism in meconium, he wanted to have

one last fling in the Shipu Harbor Reception Center. He would lounge

around the diesel-redolent beach until the typhoon came, then he'd find

a likely-looking trawler full of counterrevolutionaries to ease him

across the Straits of Formosa.

"Your axles look a little orange, Comrade, but my big hands on the

crank will wrench them loose. I think I'll blow my last few kuai on a

dumped Hitachi television set and strap it to your luggage rack, a gift

for the belated family reunion in Salt Lake City.

"My kid will probably have forgotten the identity of her dad in the

meanwhile, but I can play with her non-stop a few days and fix things

up between us, before I hit the help-wanted ads.

"So, it's settled. Goodbye, sick asshole of the east. You'll forever

regret inviting this man in--and, even more, letting him slip out."

Sam laid hands on the derelict's legs, to move them gently off the

trike, simultaneously elaborating a string of drool and mumbles to flap

over his shoulder in the breeze for added authenticity as he rolled

along. By way of disguise, he wadded the bum's linty lap-blanket under

the back of his shirt to resemble a hunch.

"Come on, dead-butt. This is a legit act of requisitioning. Get your

arm out of your pants and help."

He felt something sharp move up against the palm of his hand, squeaking

like styrofoam as it pierced the flesh. For an instant, just before he

swatted the blade and derelict away, Sam Edwine almost became mindful

of the agony of this place.

Tom Bradley