THE UNBEARABLE WHITENESS OF BEING

Before I moved to the back of the hill, I still lived in North Beach. For the first three years of our illicit relationship, Savage Kitten and I sort of lurked in bookstores and coffee shops in that neighborhood. In the evening I would walk her home, crossing over to the other side of the street when we got within three block of her house. We didn’t want her parents to find out, or her nosey Cantonese neighbors to see us together.
I would keep an eye on her till she opened her front door.

[Indeed, a form of cowardice. But if you think an innocent little Cantonese adult woman-person has the freedom to live her own life as she sees fit, you’ve got another think coming. Cantonese parents are not enamored of big hairy kwailo seeing their daughters. And even if, miraculously, they are cool with it, they have neighbors and fellow villagers who believe that gossip and evil tongues are the mainstays of civilized life.
Oh, and hey – I am indeed a kwailo. Perhaps you had forgotten that? I am big and hairy, I glow in the dark, and like all white folks I smell bad, eat too much, and dress funny.]
We thought we were being absolutely discrete.

Sometime in 1992 I found out that we could have been more so.

One night after seeing Savage Kitten home, I was at Mickey’s when Nawlins Bongo came in.

[Mickey’s and Nawlins Bongo are not the real names of the business or the person, please understand. These are euphemismatic code names (ve ha mavin yavin). I’m protecting the guilty.]

Once Nawlins Bongo had found out that I spoke Dutch, he had confided in me that he thoroughly enjoyed his stay in South Africa, the Boers had had a real handle on things, everything was proper there and people knew their place …… damned shame that they had been forced to change! What was this world coming to?

He often got drunk after getting off work from Ristorante Italiano MultiPasti (see previous note about names), and fulsome praise for South Africa and the Afrikaners was one of his constant refrains at such times. He would weep. It was all so sad.


I JUST GOTTA AXE!

This particular evening, Nawlins Bongo wanted to ask me a question. How, he wanted to know, could I bear to pollute myself by being intimate with a Chinese person. It just wasn't right. Didn't I have ANY pride?
Wasn't I disgusted? What was wrong with me?

The restaurant at which he worked was in a neighborhood that was about fifty percent Chinese-American. The people who lived across the street from his job were Chinese-American. The place where he bought his smokes was run by Chinese-Americans. The local liquor store that sold him his lottery tickets and six-packs of swillbeer was Chinese-American.


"How can you bear to pollute yourself by sleeping with something like that?"

He was really far too drunk to require an answer. Even his belabouring the subject went off on a tangent, and he spent the rest of the evening gibbering.
I decided not to make a big deal of it. Had he been sober, I would have emasculated him.
But in the state he was in, he wouldn't remember a thing the next day, and would wonder why he hurt down there.

You see, I knew him. Nawlins Bongo was a good ole boy. A typical drawling inbred white idiot.
More beer than brains.

And I also knew that the previous night he had lost nearly two hundred dollars at poker to Ah-Choy.
Nearly every evening Nawlins Bongo would come in, join the card game on the back table, and leave an hour later a hundred or so dollars poorer, and drunker than ever - Ah-Choy (啊財) and Ah-Tam (啊譚) would have won all of his tip money. He never understood that their temperate habits and intelligence would triumph over a dumb white galoot such as himself every single time.
They would cheerfully thank him for the money, and buy him his last beer of the evening with the proceeds.

Even if Ah-Tam didn't come - having recently gotten married, he had to act like a responsible man - Nawlins Bongo would still lose it all. He just couldn't figure out that he was an idiot.

Ah-Choy, who didn't understand ninety percent of what Nawlins Bongo said, would pluck him nekkid. He had him pegged for a fool from the very first day.


NAWLINS BONGO AND MOOLOO

I can't quite remember what year it was, but Nawlins Bongo ended up in the hospital. No, it had nothing to do with his racist mouth and what came out of it. The medical attention was necessitated by someone else's mouth and what went in.
You see, he had offered to share some cocaine with Mooloo. Who had gone into convulsions and bitten off more than she could chew.

Don't worry, they reattached it at the hospital. Though, given the nature of the injury and where the stitches were, you will understand that they decided to keep him there. There is almost no way to isolate that part, or put it in a sling to prevent movement.
Catheters don't help.

I should probably also mention that Mooloo was from the Horn of Africa, and crazy as a bedbug.

So odd that she was just his type. I never bothered asking him how he could bear it - I'm not that kind of man. His eccentricities were his own business.

It just isn't the kind of question one should ask.

He was in the hospital longer than expected. That may have been because a number of us kept sending him care packages..... Penthouse, Playboy, Hustler, Teen Slut Parade, and Crack Whore Magazine.
Plus some really smutty stuff.
These were all just about his literacy level, and he probably got more reading done in those six weeks than the decades he was in grammar school.

One of the people sending Nawlins Bongo care packages was the big black bouncer from one of the Broadway clubs. A fellow poker player.

Even Ah-Choy contributed. So did Ah-Tam. As well as the Arab owner of Mickey's, whom Nawlins Bongo constantly referred to as "hey damned Terrorist".

In our own way, we all loved Nawlins Bongo.


FAST FORWARD....

I guess you can probably understand why I will not visit the South anytime soon, maybe not even in this life. Not everybody there is like that - I hear that there are in fact any number of nice civilized Rednecks - but there are still some folks down there who are too much like Nawlins Bongo.
He's long since moved back home, by the way.
The Bay Area was just too freaky for him.

I hope he's taken Mooloo with him. He probably can't remember what she did in any case, and they have so very much in common.
Beer. Coke. Big mouths.


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