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 troop-
