The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  The only reason I am mentioning this is to kind of set the psychological framework for 390 photographs of Christmas trees. A person does not get into this sort of thing without sufficient motivation.

  Late one evening I was walking home from visiting some people on Nob Hill. We had sat around drinking cup after cup of coffee until our nerves had become lionesque.

  I left around midnight and walked down a dark and silent street toward home, and I saw a Christmas tree abandoned next to a fire hydrant.

  The tree had been stripped of its decorations and lay there sadly like a dead soldier after a losing battle. A week before it had been a kind of hero.

  Then I saw another Christmas tree with a car half-parked on it. Somebody had left their tree in the street and the car had accidentally run over it. The tree was certainly a long way from a child’s loving attention. Some of the branches were sticking up through the bumper.

  It was that time of the year when people in San Francisco get rid of their Christmas trees by placing them in the streets or vacant lots or wherever they can get rid of them. It is the journey away from Christmas.

  Those sad and abandoned Christmas trees really got on my conscience. They had provided what they could for that assassinated Christmas and now they were just being tossed out to lie there in the street like bums.

  I saw dozens of them as I walked home through the beginning of a new year. There are people who just chuck their Christmas trees right out the front door. A friend of mine tells a story about walking down the street on December 26th and having a Christmas tree go whistling right by his ear, and hearing a door slam. It could have killed him.

  There are others who go about abandoning their Christmas trees with stealth and skill. That evening I almost saw somebody put a Christmas tree out, but not quite. They were invisible like the Scarlet Pimpernel. I could almost hear the Christmas tree being put out.

  I went around a corner and there in the middle of the street lay the tree, but nobody was around. There are always people who do a thing with greatness, no matter what it is.

  When I arrived at home I went to the telephone and called up a friend of mine who is a photographer and accessible to the strange energies of the Twentieth Century. It was almost one o’clock in the morning. I had awakened him and his voice was a refugee from sleep.

  “Who is it?” he said.

  “Christmas trees,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Christmas trees.”

  “Is that you, Richard?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What about them?”

  “Christmas is only skin deep,” I said. “Why don’t we take hundreds of pictures of Christmas trees that are abandoned in the streets? We’ll show the despair and abandonment of Christmas by the way people throw their trees out.”

  “Might as well do that as anything else,” he said. “I’ll start tomorrow during my lunch hour.”

  “I want you to photograph them just like dead soldiers,” I said. “Don’t touch or pose them. Just photograph them the way they fell.”

  The next day he took photographs of Christmas trees during his lunch hour. He worked at Macy’s then and went up on the slopes of Nob Hill and Chinatown and took pictures of Christmas trees there.

  1, 2, 3,4, 5,9, 11, 14, 21, 28, 37, 52, 66.

  I called him that evening.

  “How did it go?”

  “Wonderful,” he said.

  The next day he took more photographs of Christmas trees during his lunch hour.

  72, 85, 117, 128, 137.

  I called him up that evening, too.

  “How did it go?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” he said. “I’ve almost got 150 of them.”

  “Keep up the good work,” I said. I was busy lining up a car for the weekend, so that we would have mobility to take more Christmas tree photographs.

  I thought we should get a good sampling of what San Francisco had to offer in the way of abandoned Christmas trees.

  The person who drove us around the next day desires to remain anonymous. He is afraid that he would lose his job and face financial and social pressures if it got out that he worked with us that day.

  The next morning we started out and we drove all over San Francisco taking photographs of abandoned Christmas trees. We faced the project with the zest of a trio of revolutionaries.

  142, 159, 168, 175, 183.

  We would be driving along and spot a Christmas tree lying perhaps in the front yard of somebody’s lovely house in Pacific Heights or beside an Italian grocery store in North Beach. We would suddenly stop and jump out and rush over to the Christmas tree and start taking pictures from every angle.

  The simple people of San Francisco probably thought that we were all completely deranged: bizarre. We were traffic stoppers in the classic tradition.

  199, 215, 227, 233, 245.

  We met the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti out walking his dog on Potrero Hill. He saw us jump out of the car and immediately start taking pictures of a fallen Christmas tree lying on the sidewalk.

  277, 278, 279, 280, 281.

  As he walked by, he said, “Taking pictures of Christmas trees?”

  “Sort of,” we said and all thinking paranoiacally: I We wanted to keep it a big secret. We thought we really had something good going and it needed the right amount of discretion before it was completed.

  So the day passed and our total of Christmas tree photographs crept over the 200 mark.

  “Don’t you think we have enough now?” Bob said.

  “No, just a few more,” I said.

  317, 332, 345, 356, 370.

  “Now?” Bob said.

  We had driven all the way across San Francisco again and were on Telegraph Hill, climbing down a broken staircase to a vacant lot where somebody had tossed a Christmas tree over a cyclone fence. The tree had the same candor as Saint Sebastian, arrows and all.

  “No, just a few more,” I said.

  386, 387, 388, 389, 390.

  “We must have enough now,” Bob said.

  “I think so,” I said.

  We were all very happy. That was the first week of 1964. It was a strange time in America.

  The Pacific Ocean

  Today I thought about the Pacific Ocean on the platform at Shinjuku Station, waiting for the Yamanote Line train.

  I don’t know why I thought about the Pacific engulfing and devouring itself, the ocean eating itself and getting smaller and smaller until it was the size of Rhode Island but still eating away and getting smaller and smaller, an insatiable appetite, getting smaller and smaller and heavier and heavier, the entire weight of the Pacific Ocean into a smaller and smaller form until the Pacific Ocean was concentrated into a single drop weighing trillions of tons. Then the train came and I might add, it was about time.

  I left the Pacific Ocean behind on the platform underneath a candy bar wrapper.

  Another Texas Ghost Story

  She is brushing his hair gently with her hand. She is caressing his face gently with her hand. This is a ghost story. It begins in West Texas in the early 1930s at night in a large house full of sleeping people out in the hill country and will eventually end in 1970 at a picnic gathering of middle-aged people.

  She is standing beside his bed. He is fifteen years old and almost asleep. She opens the door and comes into his room. When she opens the door it doesn’t make a sound. She walks silently over to him. The floor doesn’t creak. He’s so sleepy that he isn’t afraid. She is an old woman wearing a very careful nightgown. She stands beside him. Her hair flows down to her waist. It is white with faded yellow in it as if her hair had once been singed by tire. This is all that is left of having been a golden blonde woman in the 1890s… perhaps even a West Texas belle with many suitors.

  He stares at her.

  He knows that she is a ghost but he is too sleepy to be afraid. He has spent the day putting twelve hours of hay into the barn. Every muscle in his body is beautifully ex
hausted and abstract.

  She touches his hair gently with her hand. Her hand is delicate and he isn’t afraid of it. Then she caresses his face gently with her hand. It isn’t warm but it isn’t cold either. Her hand possesses an existence between life and death.

  She smiles at him. He’s so tired that he almost smiles back. She leaves the room and he falls asleep. His dreams are not unpleasant. They are a floating bridge to his mother who wakes him up in the morning by loudly opening the door to his bedroom and yelling, “Time to get up! Breakfast is on the table!”

  He is silent at the kitchen table. His brothers and sisters are chattering away and his father hasn’t said a word while carefully drinking a cup of stoic coffee. His father never talks at the kitchen table, even when its dinner and there’s company. People have gotten used to it.

  The boy thinks about the ghost as he eats thick slices of bacon and eggs scrambled in the fat and nibbles on a jalapeno pepper. He really likes jalapenos, the hotter the better.

  He does not mention the ghost to anyone at the table. He doesn’t want them to think that he is crazy and the years pass and he grows up in that house with his two sisters and two brothers and his mother and his father and the ghost.

  She visits him five or six times a year. There is no pattern to the visits. She doesn’t come every May or September or the third of July. She just comes when she wants to, but it averages five or six times a year. She never frightens him and almost seems to love him but they never have anything to say to each other.

  It’s hard to make a living in that part of Texas in those days, so eventually the family grows up and scatters away from that house and it becomes just another abandoned old house in West Texas.

  One sister goes to live in Houston and a brother to Oklahoma City and another sister marries a mechanic and he has a filling station in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

  His father dies of a heart attack one rainy afternoon in San Angelo, Texas, and his mother goes to live in an old-folks home in Abilene, Texas, because her sister lives nearby, and one of his brothers gets a job in Canada, and his other brother is killed in an automobile accident in 1943 while in the Air Force stationed at Amarillo, Texas.

  Then there is himself: He marries his high school sweetheart and lives in Brownwood, Texas, for three years, working at a feed store.

  He is drafted into the infantry and fights in Italy and later on is a part of the Normandy Landing on D-Day 1944 and is wounded once, not seriously, shrapnel in the leg and rises to the rank of sergeant because so many men in his company are killed in a fire tight with some Waffen SS troops on the border of Germany.

  He comes back from the war and goes to college on the GI Bill for two years at the University of Texas in Austin, majoring in business administration, then drops out of college and works as a cigarette salesman for a few years until by a fluke he gets involved in selling television sets and eventually has a little TV store of his own in Austin. They have two children: a girl named Joan and a boy Robert.

  The old house just continues to stand out there in West Texas: abandoned, a monument to the growing years of an American family. Its dark outline stands against the sunset and the wind bangs something that is loose on the house.

  And on… and on… and on (years passing, life being lived, problems, good times, bills, etc., the children growing up and getting married… on, etc., on) until he is fifty-three years old at a family reunion picnic with his brother and his two sisters sitting alone together at a wooden table outside in the Texas afternoon, but their mother couldn’t come because she’s just too old and doesn’t recognize them any more. Her sister stopped visiting her last year because it broke her heart to see her that way.

  It is at a picnic table covered with plates of barbecue and salad, roast young goat, jalapenos and bottles of Pearl beer that the truth is finally revealed.

  He’s had four Pearl beers and is talking very affectionately about the old homestead way back there in the 1930s when he finally blurts out, “Did you know that I saw a ghost in that house? There was a ghost there.”

  Everybody stops eating and drinking and looks at one another without really looking at one another. The table is very silent. His oldest sister, fifty-live, puts her fork down.

  Then his brother says, “I thought I was the only one who saw a ghost there. I was afraid to mention it. I thought you would all think that I was crazy. Was it the ghost of an old woman with long hair? Was she wearing a nightgown?”

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  There is more silence and one of the sisters breaks it by saying, “I saw her, too. She used to come and stand by my bed and touch my hair. I was afraid to tell.”

  Then they all turn toward the remaining sister who just nods her head slowly. They sit there. Texas children are playing in the background. Their voices are running and happy.

  He reaches over and takes his bottle of Pearl beer and holds it out in a toasting motion toward an abandoned house a hundred miles away and says, “Here’s to her and to all of us these many years later.”

  This is the end of a ghost story.

  There Is No Dignity,

  Only the Windswept Plains

  of Ankona

  There is no dignity, only the windswept plains of Ankona, he thought as he looked at the calendar and wondered if the year 3021 would be as boring as the year 3020. That could not be possible, he thought, but then he reconsidered the past. The year 3019 had been just as boring as 3018 and it had been the same as 3017. There was no difference between them. They were all twin years of each other.

  He examined the past very carefully in his mind and the years had all been very boring ever since he had come to Ankona in 2751 as an experiment to see if a human being could live on the windswept plains for 500 years by himself.

  Well, they could God-damn it! he thought, and then tried not to think about the 231 years he had left before the experiment would be completed.

  He would like to have met the mastermind who thought up this thing, but the sound of the wind gradually silenced his mind and its anger until he could hear nothing but the wind blowing across the plains of Ankona.

  The Tomb of

  the Unknown Friend

  I saw somebody on the street yesterday that I almost knew very well. It was a man with a kind and interesting face. Too bad we had never met before. We might have been very close friends if only we had met. When I saw him I almost felt like stopping and suggesting that we have a drink and talk about old times, mutual friends and acquaintances: Whatever happened to so and so? and do you remember the night when we…?

  The only thing missing was that we had shared no old times together to talk about because you have to meet somebody before you can do that.

  The man walked by me without any recognizing expression. My face wore the same mask, but inside I felt as if I almost knew him. It was really a shame that the only thing that separated us from being good friends was the stupid fact that we had never met.

  We both disappeared in opposite directions that swallowed any possibility of friendship.

  Cooking Spaghetti

  Dinner in japan

  Yesterday, being yesterday in Tokyo, I cooked a spaghetti dinner for some Japanese friends. I bought the ingredients in a supermarket that specializes in food for foreigners.

  These are the things that I bought:

  tomato paste,

  tomato sauce,

  green and red peppers,

  mushrooms,

  sweet basil,

  a can of pitted black olives,

  pasta,

  olive oil,

  400 grams of hamburger meat,

  some butter,

  two bottles of red wine,

  and Parmesan cheese.

  I took the ingredients to a Japanese friend’s house and she had the rest of the things that I needed:

  3 yellow onions,

  oregano,

  parsley,

  sugar,

  salt and pepper,
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  garlic.

  And then I started cooking spaghetti.

  I chopped, opened and mixed together until there was the smell of spaghetti coming from the kitchen. It smelled just like dozens of American kitchens where I have cooked spaghetti for over twenty years except there was one thing different: a few feet away from my cooking was a bucket of water filled with tiny live eels.

  I had never cooked spaghetti before with eels for company. The eels swam in circles like science-fiction children of spaghetti.

  The Beacon

  I wonder if he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. The details of him being there are unreal, fragmented and seem to be further away than they actually were.

  He was simultaneously a few feet away from me and a mile away. He was standing on the other side of the railing, facing San Francisco, ready to jump.

  There were five or six other people standing like extras in the background of this tapestry. I think that he had just climbed over the railing. Soon there would be a lot more people sewn to it like strange buttons, some out of compassion, others from morbid curiosity.

  He was a man in his early twenties, wearing a classic Clark Gable It-Happened-One-Night undershirt. He had taken his coat and shirt off. They were piled neatly beside the railing. His mother would have been proud of him.

  He was very pale, white like the idea of frost and seemed to be in shock as if he had just seen somebody jump off the Golden Gate Bridge.

  I was in a car with two friends crossing the bridge and saw this as we drove by in the traffic. I felt as if we should stop and try to help him, but I knew that we couldn’t because it would only make things worse and add to the traffic jam already in his mind.

  What could be done right now was being done.

  I don’t know why he wanted to kill himself but I didn’t want him to do it and I couldn’t do anything about it.