The young man was like a lonely beacon of humanity lost in stormy confusion and we were the reaching out helpless shadows of his fading light. It was like trying to direct the events in a dream as we drove past him and on into San Francisco, the car moving like a reel of film, splicing and editing itself, taking us further away from him.
Blue Sky
The question: How could I do it?
The answer: I didn’t give it a second thought because somehow it seemed natural to me, the thing to do, and with no regrets.
He had worked on the puzzle for three days. It was a thousand pieces which were supposed to add up to some boats in a harbor and lots of blue sky above.
The blue sky turned out to be the problem.
Everything else went as it was destined to go hour after hour, piece after piece, the harbor and the boats appeared. Finally, it came down to the blue sky.
There was a lot of blue sky with nothing in it except itself and to finish it took hundreds of pieces. My friend pondered them through a long slow evening.
They fiercely resisted taking shape. He finally gave up, saying, “There is nothing here except blue sky. There are no clouds or anything to help me. Just the same blue sky. I give up.”
And he went to bed and a fitful night’s sleep.
The next day he did not work on the puzzle.
It lay 80% completed on the dining room table. It was finished except for a couple hundred pieces of blue. Above the harbor filled with boats was a huge hole the color of the table. It looked strange. The sky should not be brown. My friend cautiously avoided the puzzle.
It was as if the Hound of the Baskervilles was sitting there on the table. He didn’t want anything to do with that dog.
Early in the evening he sat down in a rocking chair in the front room and looked into the dining room where the puzzle sat on the table, licking its paws.
“I give up,” he said, finally, breaking a long silence. “I can’t finish it. The blue sky is hopeless.”
Without saying a word, I went and got the vacuum cleaner and plugged it in. He sat there watching me. He didn’t say anything while I took a long nozzle and vacuumed the puzzle off the table. It disappeared piece by piece into the vacuum cleaner; harbor, boats and unfinished blue sky until it was gone, the table empty, not a piece remaining.
I unplugged the vacuum cleaner and took it away with the puzzle inside of it.
When I came back, he spoke for the first time since I had vacuumed up his puzzle.
“There was just too much blue sky,” he said.
An Eye for Good Produce
Sometimes I am sloppy when I dial the telephone. I don’t get the number right and have to redial but I always dial her number very carefully as if I am an accountant for a glass factory.
I have just dialed her number and I wait and it rings… and… it rings again.
A third ring follows…
And a fourth.
I am listening to her telephone ring very carefully as if I am listening to a complicated piece of classical music or a couple of interesting people talking about a technical problem.
I am listening so carefully that I can see her telephone on the small wooden table in her front room. There is a book beside the telephone. It is a novel.
…a seventh ring passes, an eighth ring follows… I have been listening so carefully to her telephone ring that I am now in her apartment, standing beside it in the dark room, listening to it ring.
She is not home. She’s gone out. She’s someplace else.
Then I get bored with the telephone and begin wandering around her apartment. I turn the lights on and look at things. I look at a painting on the wall that I like and her bed is made very neatly. I can almost see my reflection in it, but that was last year.
There’s some unopened mail on the kitchen table; bills. That’s one of her habits. She doesn’t like to open her bills. She opens all the rest of her mail but leaves the bills on the kitchen table. They pile up. Sometimes she has people over to dinner with the bills still on the table.
I open the refrigerator and look inside. There’s half a tuna casserole there and half a bottle of wine and a tomato there. It looks like a good tomato. She’s very talented at selecting produce.
Her cat comes into the kitchen and looks at me. He’s seen me many times. He’s bored with me. He leaves the room.
Now what?
The telephone has rung over twenty times or so… at least. She’s not home.
I hang up.
Gone Before
We Open Our Eyes
I had nothing else to do but float along on a tide of memories carrying me toward no particular shore. I was lying in bed. It was the afternoon of a day that I would never really be in.
There are days like that when you just aren’t there.
…gone before we open our eyes.
I was thinking about a long-time-ago room and the objects in that room. I could remember five or six of them and part of the feeling in that room but there were other things that I couldn’t remember.
I tried as hard as I could but they wouldn’t come back to me. Finally, I gave up and made a vow. I was going to write down what I had remembered of the room and the feeling there and then wait a few months before looking at it again. At that time I would take my notes and try again to remember more things about that room and how it felt.
I thought it was an interesting thing to do lying there floating on shoreless memories.
So far so good, except for one thing; When I finally got out of bed in the late afternoon of a day that would never be, I forgot to write down the things I remembered about the room, and I even went so far as to totally forget about the room until today, a week later, and now I can remember nothing about the room.
Alas, once upon a time there was a room that I have forgotten.
Harem
He is almost invisible wandering around Tokyo, taking photographs of beautiful women. He is so nondescript looking in appearance and presence that it is not possible to describe him. He is one of those people that even when you are looking at him you are forgetting him so that the second he is out of your sight he is totally forgotten.
The beautiful women are never aware that he is taking their photograph or if they are aware of it they instantly forget it.
He has thousands of photographs of beautiful women. He develops them in his own darkroom and makes life-size prints. He has the prints hanging like clothes in his closet on thousands of hangers.
Whenever he feels lonely he just takes one of them out.
Montana Love
There was an article in the paper yesterday about a mother sitting on her teenage son, so that the police couldn’t arrest and take him away.
The boy committed a crime and then ran home to his mother with the police in what I guess they call hot pursuit. They were trying to handcuff him when his mother came into the room, saw what was happening to her son, and then sat down on him, so the police couldn’t finish their arrest.
I can imagine the thoughts that went through the police officers’ minds when this happened. I can see them trying to talk the mother off her son.
Nobody needs this kind of shit. When people say to you, “Have a nice day,” they don’t mean for this to happen.
Come on, lady, get up.
Come on, lady, get off.
The woman was arrested for obstructing justice, “allegedly” sitting on her son.
Cat Cantaloupe
We were eating cantaloupe and it wasn’t very good. We should have let it ripen a little longer or maybe it never would have tasted good. Perhaps it was a cantaloupe doomed to fail from the very beginning but we will really never know because it didn’t have a full chance to prove itself.
When my wife and I finished, feeling vaguely unsatisfied, we put our plates on the floor. I don’t know why. We could just as easily have put them on the coffee table.
We have a new borrowed cat in the house. Because we don’t spen
d the entire year here in Montana, we lure our neighbors’ cats over with extravagant promises of cat delicacies and all-expense paid vacations to the Cat Ritz in Paris. We have a lot of mice. The cats never get to Paris. When we leave Montana for California, the cats go back to their original homes with unused passports.
Anyway, the new cat walked over to the cantaloupe rinds on the floor and began very carefully examining one of them. The cat gave the cantaloupe an exploring lick. Then the cat, who would never get to use its French, gave the rind a few more licks, but they were very much more familiar.
The cat started eating the cantaloupe. I had never seen a cat eat cantaloupe before. I tried to imagine what the cantaloupe tasted like to the cat. I cannot think of anything that a cat would normally eat that would taste like a cantaloupe.
We have to rule out mice, birds, gophers, insects, and eliminate such housecat foods as fish, chicken, milk and all the stuff that comes in cans, pouches and boxes.
What is left that would taste like cantaloupe to a cat?
I have not the slightest idea nor will I probably ever have but I know one thing for certain: I will never walk into a grocery store and go to the pet food section and see a can of cat cantaloupe on the shelf.
Al’s Rose Harbor
Al went to sea for ten years and saved his money. He wanted to buy a bar because he liked good times. He bought the bar. It was called Al’s Good Time Harbor. It failed because it was in the wrong location and he didn’t know anything about the bar business and he wouldn’t let any of his friends pay for drinks.
When he owned the bar, he had a lot of friends. He thought the next time they came back they would bring paying customers with them and those paying customers would bring other paying customers. The free drinks he was buying for all his friends were a good form of advertising that would contribute toward his having a chain of Al’s Good Time Harbors all over the world.
There would be one in Hong Kong and Sydney and Rio de Janeiro and Honolulu and Denver and Yokohama, and even an Al’s Good Time Harbor in Paris, France! serving Three Star food. He would visit them, keep track of what was going on, in his own private jet with his own private stewardess right off the centerfold of Playboy magazine. When somebody bought the next issue of Playboy and turned to the centerfold, it would be blank because the Playmate would he flying beside him, holding his hand.
Al now lives with his mother.
He keeps telling her that he’s going to sea next month but it’s been two years. He doesn’t get out of the house much and there are no ships on the horizon, His mother has a back yard lull of roses. She likes roses. He doesn’t because the red ones are too red and the yellow ones are too yellow and the pink ones are too pink.
Sometimes he stares out his bedroom window at the roses, wondering why that is and wishing that roses were more inbetween.
Farewell to the First Grade
and Hello
to the National Enquirer
I always had trouble with school, especially the first grade. I became the tallest kid in the first grade by flunking it a couple of times. I just could not figure out how the first grade worked. I started off in the first grade as an average-size kid and a couple of years later I was the tallest kid in the first grade.
Reading was a particular problem for me. It did not make any sense at all. For the first couple of years that I spent in the first grade I might as well have read the books upside down for all it got me.
Eventually I taught myself to read because after a few years in the first grade it got pretty nerve-racking and the tedium approached a kind of blank religious experience, while I sat there busy growing away from September until June when I was paroled for a few months from the first grade before returning to it again in the fall.
I taught myself to read by figuring out what store signs and food products were saying. I would walk very slowly down the street and puzzle out SAM’S SHOE REPAIR, GOOD FOOD CAFE, AL’S SMOKE SHOP, FAST AND CLEAN LAUNDRY, NEON WAFFLE SHOP, ECONOMY MARKET, MABLE’S BEAUTY COLLEGE, and the ANTLER TAVERN where there were a lot of antlers in the front window and a lot more antlers inside.
People would sit around and drink beer and look at all the antlers while outside I studied menus in restaurant windows and slowly came to understand what the words steak, mashed potatoes, hamburger, salad and butter meant.
Sometimes I would go to a grocery store to study English. I would walk up and down the aisles reading the labels off cans. There were pictures on the cans which helped a lot. I would look at the picture of some peas on a can and read the word peas and put it together. I would hang around the canned fruit section and learn peaches, cherries, plums, pears, oranges and pineapple. I learned my fruits very quickly after I had made the big decision that I wanted out of the first grade.
The most difficulty I had in learning my fruits was of course fruit cocktail.
Sometimes I would just stand there holding a can in my hands, staring at it for ten or fifteen minutes, getting no closer to the truth.
That was thirty-seven years ago and my reading habits since then have bobbed up and down like a cork on a roller coaster horizon. Right now one of my favorite things to read is the National Enquirer. I am a real fan. I like stories about people and there are a lot of stories about people in the National Enquirer. This week’s Enquirer had articles with titles like these:
Food Causes Most Marriage Problems,
Short People Live Longer,
We Were Taken to a Mysterious City in an Alien World,
Why President Truman Always Washed His Own Underwear,
Angry Drivers Using Cars as Deadly Weapons,
“Lois Lane” Fumes Over Topless Photo,
Professors Wasting Your Tax $$ to Study Crickets.
I started reading the National Enquirer by originally reading the Sunday New York Times while I watched television. It was actually quite simple: One day I just substituted the National Enquirer for The New York Times, and that was that.
I let somebody else buy my copy of The New York Times instead of me. They could have my copy and the responsibility for being a thinking and aware person. I am forty-four years old and thank God, I got out of the first grade and sometimes all I want to do is have a little mindless fun with the years that are left in my life.
I am happy as a clam reading the National Enquirer while watching television.
The Wolf Is Dead
I have waited years for him to die, for death to come like an erasing wind and take him away with it and all the things that he stood for, which somehow have come to me to be symbolic of the 1970s.
His life for most of the decade was an uninterrupted pattern of pacing back and forth in a cage beside the highway. I never saw him standing still. He was always moving. His future was only his next step.
I first saw him in 1972 when I came back to Montana after an absence of thirty years and I would see him every year after that, always doing the same thing, pacing, until this autumn of 1978. I was gone from Montana for six months and when I came back he was gone. We had changed places.
The wolf must have died during the summer. There were grass and weeds growing in his empty cage when I came back. When he was alive, which was the 1970s, nothing grew there because of his endless walking. He walked the decade away a step at a time. If all those steps were put together, he probably walked halfway to the moon.
I am glad he is dead because I don’t think a wolf should spend his life in a cage by the highway, but I don’t want you to think that the wolf was on public exhibition. He was somebody’s private pet and the cage was beside that person’s house.
The owner’s position probably went something like this, “I have a wolf for a pet,” and whatever would happen then, would happen after that.
But the wolf is dead now.
Weeds grow in his cage.
His journey to the moon is over.
The Closest I Have Been
to the Sea Since Evolution
Last
weekend staying on the Japanese coast with friends, I had fish for every meal, fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I even had fish for a bedtime snack. I had raw fish, dried fish, broiled fish and just fish fish.
I must have eaten twenty different kinds of fish and they were all delicious, but after a while I literally had fish coming out of my gills.
One morning I took a shit and it smelled just like the sea. There was no difference between the smell of my shit and walking along a beach or sitting on a wharf, staring at ships and the sun going down behind them into billions of years of water.
After that shit I understood a little more about my roots that once swam with fish and my first home under the sea where I grew slowly like a garden toward the land.
Homage to Groucho Marx
1890-4977
“Locomotives!” he yelled.
He wanted a definite answer.
In fact: He demanded it.
“Locomotives!” he yelled again, and then waited impatiently for my reply. I very carefully chose my words as if I were a jeweler cutting a diamond in swiftly moving fog. I wanted them to have a lot to do with his life, so much so that he wouldn’t be able to understand them.
I thought that was the least I could do for him, seeing that he was so interested in my response and had come such a long distance to get it. I’m not saying that he had travelled around the world for it, but I’m not excluding that as a possibility.
He did look tired.
I would have offered him a doughnut if I’d had one.
Of course he was young but he was not as young as he would have you believe. He was one of those men who are thirty-one and constantly refer to themselves in the third person as “the kid” and make excuses to total strangers for mistakes that they have made, blaming it on a lack of experience, being young.
Sometimes they don’t even make the mistakes in front of you. They only make the excuses without having done anything.
The Tokyo-Montana Express Page 5