The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  In other words: They want you to treat them as if they are fourteen years old… sweet, unending fourteen.

  I slowly began answering his question by changing the subject from a curious question about locomotives to reminiscing about a few days I spent years ago in Connecticut.

  I stayed with some people that I didn’t know. Nothing much happened except that the meals were very, very long and often served outside on a patio that didn’t have a roof and as I remember it rained all the time that I was there.

  I never knew that it could take so long to eat a hamburger.

  I was uncomfortable staying there and I think the people were uncomfortable having me. The last morning I had breakfast with them they didn’t give me an umbrella.

  After I left I never got in touch with them again. It was a chance and accidental meeting that brought us together in the first place. I think that we were all much better off apart.

  When I was packing to leave their house I forgot a sweater that was hanging in the closet. I didn’t find out about it until later when I arrived home the next day after a long bus trip. I knew that they would never write to me about finding the sweater.

  And they never did.

  It was a cheerful sacrifice on my part.

  The idea of having anything more to do with those people was entirely out of the question. It wasn’t even within a stone’s throw of the answer.

  “So be the sweater,” I said, earnestly to the “kid” finishing my reply.

  He stared at me in total disbelief as it an elephant had stepped into the shower with him. “I wasn’t talking about a sweater,” he said. “I was asking you a question about locomotives. Where did the sweater come from?”

  “Forget it,” I said. “It’s gone now.”

  A Feeling of Helplessness

  There’s not enough work tor the waitresses. They need more customers in the restaurant. The waitresses have gathered at the back of the restaurant where I am sitting alone at a table. They are just standing around. They are awkward, impatient. There are five of them. They are all middle-aged and wearing white shoes, black skirts and white blouses.

  They need more customers.

  I take another bite of chicken fried steak. Three waitresses are absent-mindedly staring at me. I pile up some corn on my fork. Perhaps they want to remember what a customer looks like. I take a sip of ice water. Now there are four waitresses staring at me.

  The fifth waitress is looking at the front door. She wants it to open and a party of four people to come in and sit down at one of her tables. But she’ll settle for a sixty-year-old woman who just wants a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.

  I return to another bite of chicken fried steak. The fifth waitress joins the other four waitresses in staring at me but I’ve done all I can to help. There’s nothing more that I can do. If only I could eat five chicken fried steaks at five different tables, my life would be much simpler.

  One Arm Burning in Tokyo

  All I know about him is that he was twenty years old and he jumped out the 6th floor window of his hospital room.

  In the overwhelming rush of America like a self-devouring roller coaster and our problems of life and death everywhere all around us, 24 hours a day, never stopping, our friends and families, total strangers, even the President of the United States, his friends and everybody that they know, I take time out today to think about the suicide of a young Japanese boy.

  I didn’t read about it in the newspaper or see it on television. A friend told me about it while explaining why a young man working for her did not come to work yesterday. He was good friends with the boy who committed suicide and went to the funeral and was too disturbed afterwards to work.

  My friend said that the dead boy had been in an automobile accident and had lost his arm. Overwhelmed by the shock of losing his arm, he jumped out the window of his hospital room.

  First, he lost his arm in an automobile accident and then grieving for his lost arm, he took his own lite. He didn’t want the rest of his years: to fall in love, marriage, children, a career, middle age, old age and then death with only one arm.

  He didn’t want any of that, so he jumped out the window of his hospital room.

  When my friend told me the story, she said, “It was a big waste. Why did he have to do that? A man can learn to live with one arm.”

  Well, he couldn’t, and the end was just the same, anyway: A one-armed corpse burning in a crematorium. Where the other arm should have been burning, there was nothing.

  Rubber Bands

  …sixty and a few more scattered down the sidewalk for ¾’s of a block or so… They attracted my sleepy reptilian attention which has been like a snake left out too long in the sun recently. I haven’t been feeling very good. A spell of middle age and poor health have been grinding me down.

  Most of the rubber bands were in a thirty-foot place and the rest journeyed sporadically on their way to wherever rubber bands go when they are tossed out in the street.

  I stopped and looked at the rubber bands. They looked OK to me. I wondered why the person who dropped them didn’t bother to pick them up. Maybe there were a lot more where they came from. Maybe the person didn’t care very much about rubber bands to begin with. Maybe the person hated rubber bands and this was a long planned revenge.

  Suddenly, I was aware that I was standing there in the street thinking about rubber bands. I don’t know how much time had passed. I have better things to do than think about rubber bands. What about my eternal soul and its day to day battle with the powers of good and evil? And besides, I have plenty of my own rubber bands. I have a whole box full on my desk. They are enough.

  I don’t need these lost, abandoned rubber bands. If you want to play, you have to pay. Let them take care of their own fate. I walked away from the rubber bands, feeling somehow vindicated as if I could make it through another twenty-four hours.

  This morning when I went down to get a cup of coffee at a small cafe, the rubber bands were still there, but I didn’t care.

  Werewolf Raspberries

  (with a Glenn Miller record playing in the background, perhaps “Tuxedo Junction”)

  …and all you wanted to do was take your best girl out into the garden on a full moon night and give her a great big kiss… too bad the raspberries were covered with fur and you couldn’t see their little teeth shining in the moonlight. Things might have been different.

  lf you had played your cards right, you could have been killed at Pearl Harbor instead.

  Late spring

  1940

  Toothbrush Ghost Story

  This little story illustrates the sensitivity of Japanese women. It is about a toothbrush and of course there is always the chance that it is not true, that it is just a story somebody made up and if that’s the case, I am sorry I have wasted your time but we will never know if this story is true or not, will we?

  Once upon a time in Tokyo a young American man and a young Japanese woman met and one thing led to another, like lust, and they became lovers, but she was much more serious about their affair than he was. By this time, a month or so had passed and she had spent many nights at his apartment, leaving in the morning to go home or to work.

  One night she brought her toothbrush with her. She had always used his toothbrush before. She asked if she could leave her toothbrush there. Because she was spending so many nights there, she might as well use her toothbrush instead of his all the time. He said yes and she put her toothbrush beside his in the toothbrush holder. They made love as they usually did, shining brightly with the health of youthful lust. The next morning she happily brushed her teeth with her own toothbrush and went off to her day.

  After she was gone, he thought about their love affair. He liked her but not nearly as much as she liked him. He thought about her bringing her toothbrush to his apartment. He went into the bathroom and looked at it. The sight of her toothbrush beside his did not please him. Things were starting to get out of control.
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br />   He took her toothbrush out of the holder and put it in the garbage. Later that day he stopped at a drugstore and bought the cheapest toothbrush that you can buy in Japan. Her toothbrush had been blue. This one was red. He put it beside his toothbrush in the bathroom where hers had been.

  That evening she came to visit him.

  They had a drink and talked for a while.

  She was feeling very comfortable.

  Then she had to go to the bathroom.

  She was gone for ten minutes.

  She took more time than she should have taken. He waited. He carefully took a sip of whiskey. He held it in his mouth for a while before he swallowed it. Then he waited.

  She came out of the bathroom.

  When she went into the bathroom she had been very happy and relaxed. When she came out of the bathroom, she was very quiet and composed. She told him she had forgotten about an appointment she had made that night, and that it was a very important business meeting and she was very sorry but she had to leave immediately. He said that he understood and she thanked him for understanding.

  He never saw her again.

  Skylab at the Graves

  of Abbott and Costello

  Every time I look at the chickens these days here in Montana, north of Yellowstone National Park, I think about something and finally it’s reached the point where I have to share it with another person, so tor better or for worse, here it is.

  Oh, yes, a word of warning:

  If you are expecting something dramatic to be revealed about chickens and their place in the firmament, forget about it. What I am about to reveal here could not be used as the plot for a disaster movie starring Burt Reynolds as a chicken rancher who takes the law in his own hands with brilliant cameo appearances by Reggie Jackson, Lillian Carter, Red Buttons, Bill Walton, Elizabeth Taylor, the graves of Abbott and Costello, and also starring Charlton Heston as “Oak.”

  Last week I was taking some leftover ears of corn out to the chickens. I like to liven up their lives with scraps, so they will be stimulated to lay inspired eggs, eggs that are just like going to church.

  When the chickens saw me leave the house carrying something toward them, they all ran over to the fence and waited for me. My appearances at the chicken house with leftover goodies from the kitchen constitute a large part of their day.

  Sometimes I feel like chorale director because the chickens are always making a big racket clucking away as I start toward them. I wonder how The Messiah would sound sung by eighteen chickens.

  I was carrying six very large ears of corn in a small plastic bag, but if you really want the truth: The ears of corn were actually huge, gigantic, larger than life!

  I planned on just dumping them over the fence and going on with the rest of my life. When I got to the chicken yard and saw the chickens all gathered closely together, I realized that I had better be careful because I didn’t want to dump the ears of corn on the chickens heads. I had a vision of three or four chickens being knocked cold by huge ears of corn falling from the sky. I didn’t like that idea at all.

  I could see them lying unconscious with the other chickens gathered solemnly around their fallen comrades and looking up at me with expressions of anti-imperialistic hatred in their eyes:

  “YANKEE DOG, GO HOME!”

  No, no, I didn’t want nor need that responsibility piled on a life that already had enough problems, so I took a few steps down the fence away from the chickens and shook the corn out of the bag.

  As the ears of corn fell en masse out of the plastic bag, one chicken rushed out of the flock toward me and all six ears landed right on his head. They of course did not knock him unconscious. They caused him to be knocked sideways and then jump a foot in the air. Then down he came, gave his head a good shake to make sure that it was still there and joined in eating with the other chickens who did not give a damn about six ears of corn landing on this dumbbell’s head.

  I went away a little confused myself and thinking about the possibilities of six ears of corn and eighteen possible chicken head targets and how that one chicken got all the corn on his head. There should have been other combinations. For instance: One ear of corn on six different chicken heads or two ears of corn on one chicken head and three ears of corn on single chicken heads and the remaining ear of corn missing altogether a possible chicken head and just falling harmlessly on the ground.

  I think you get the picture of what was going on in my mind except that I have not told you the reason for this story. Sometimes I feel just like the chicken who got all six ears of corn on his head.

  The Bed Salesman

  He sits alone in a sea of beds. They break around him like silent, motionless waves. It is a rainy winter day in San Francisco and nobody wants to buy a bed. He is a middle-aged man and very bored. He sits there surrounded by beds of every flavor and variety. There are maybe fifty or sixty double beds in the huge showroom and he is sitting on one of them.

  He realizes that the situation is hopeless because he has taken his suit coat off and is just sitting there. He is wearing a dress shirt with a tie but he should have his coat on to create a responsible appearance, somebody who sincerely wants to sell beds, but he just doesn’t give a damn right now.

  “Nobody is going to buy a bed today,” he thinks. “I might as well be comfortable.”

  He also knows that his boss would not approve of him taking his coat off, but his boss is at the dentist having a wisdom tooth extracted, so… that takes care of the boss. Rain continues to fall.

  It will come down all day long.

  He stares out at the rain through the huge panoramic windows of the bed store but he doesn’t see it. For a few seconds he thinks about how he got into selling beds for a living. He took pre-med in college with the dream of being a doctor but he doesn’t complete the thought. It’s too depressing to finish, so his mind just blanks out.

  Meanwhile, the beds wait for owners.

  They wait for the stillness of sleepers and the spring-disturbing antics of passion makers. They wait for the thousands of clean sheets that will become dirty sheets. It will all begin very simply with two virginal sheets.

  People will be created and people will die in these beds.

  The beds wait to be in museums centuries from now, providing wonder and amusement for people wearing strange clothes and perhaps speaking languages that have not been invented yet.

  The salesman, almost lost in an immensity of beds, does not know that he is a shepherd of the future and these beds are his flock.

  Tire Chain Bridge

  The 1960s:

  A lot of people remember hating President Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on the point of view. God rest their souls.

  I remember an Indian woman looking for a tire chain in the snow. She was about fifty or so and we didn’t see her at first. It was New Mexico 1969. We saw her brother standing patiently beside a blue Age-of-Aquarius pickup truck parked on the side of the road. He was about her age, but as I said just a few words ago, she wasn’t there. We wouldn’t see her until later.

  Because he was basically parked in the middle of nowhere we stopped and asked him if he needed any help. “No,” he said. “Everything’s just fine.”

  That being settled we asked if we could get through on the road to the obscure place where we were headed; some old Indian ruins. I might add all this is taking place in a snowy landscape and the other person that it took to make a we or an us was a long since gone girlfriend. The last I heard she was in South America.

  Jeeping it in New Mexico, we were just driving around in the late winter, early spring, taking in the sights with not many people to distract us.

  “The road’s good,” the Indian said. “There’s more snow here than there is ahead. It’s pretty good three or four miles from here. This is the worst.”

  That made us feel better.

  The road was a white tire track vagueness that disappeared into a premature
horizon. There were fat beaconesque mesas towering up from the desert floor. The road vanished somewhere in between their shipless vigilance.

  I had a strong feeling that the mesas didn’t give a damn about that road. To them the road was just a passing cartoon. After all, they had been witnesses to the beginning of time.

  “My sister’s out there,” the Indian said, casually pointing down the road that very shortly vanished off the face of the earth.

  “What?” I said, not quite hearing or maybe just not believing what he had just said.

  “She’s looking for the chain. I lost a tire chain out there. She’s looking for it.”

  I looked down the road.

  I didn’t see anybody.

  “About a mile or so,” he said, still pointing.

  He had one foot on the running board of the pickup.

  “There’s somebody out there,” I said, still playing straight man.

  “My sister,” he said. “I hope she finds that chain. It cost me three dollars. Used.”

  “Yeah,” I said, blindly. What else could I say because I certainly couldn’t see an Indian woman down that road looking for a three-dollar tire chain?

  “When you see her,” he said, “tell her I’m still here waiting.”

  “OK,” I said, my voice like a white cane tapping along.

  We said our good—byes and continued down the road for a mile or so, and like the Indian said, we saw her walking along the side of the road looking in the snow for the tire chain.

  She was looking very carefully for it in the late-cold, Snowy-clear New Mexico morning. We stopped beside her and she looked up from her tire chain searching. Her face was weathered with patience, her eyes echoed timelessness.

  I think the Queen of England would be impatient by now if she had been looking for a three-dollar tire chain in the snow.

  “Your brother’s waiting for you,” I said, like a blind-man, motioning with my head down the road.