The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  I hope there is plenty of parking in Paradise.

  Studio 54

  Ever time; and I am talking about a period of seven years, I call a certain friend on the telephone, he is always home. I’ve called him maybe sixty or seventy times during these seven years and he always answers.

  There is no intentional pattern to my calling. It is strictly random dialing. I just call him when I feel like it. My linger pokes seven holes in the telephone and his voice automatically returns, “Hello.”

  Most of the time our conversations are not important, but what is important is that he is always there. Sometimes it is in the morning and sometimes it is at night.

  He says he has a job, but what proof do I have? He says he got married a few years ago, but I have never met his wife and she never answers the phone.

  I called him today at 1:15 in the afternoon and of course he was there. The phone rang only once. Lately, I’ve been thinking that since 1972 he has just been sitting around, waiting for me to call.

  Crows Eating a Truck Tire

  in the Dead of Winter

  We left Pine Creek, Montana, and headed down the road toward Bozeman to pick up a friend at the airport. He was flying in from Los Angeles, California.

  The snow was very deep, locking up the ground like a white jail, and the temperature was a permanent 13 below zero with a meat ax wind showing who was boss of the North Country.

  My friend was going to have quite a surprise when he landed. The expression on his face would be interesting to observe. The palm trees that he drove by on his way to Los Angeles International Airport only a few hours ago would instantly become a distant part of the past when he got out of that airplane. Those trees could have been in his childhood. Maybe he saw them when he was six years old.

  I was right and we drove back to Pine Creek.

  The road was an icy sword cutting starkly through country that wore winter like a suit of albino armor. We went around a bend in the road and there were six huge crows black as a blindman’s dreams. The crows were eating a truck tire in the center of the road. They didn’t move as we approached them. They didn’t show any fear or a desire to let us pass. They just kept eating the truck tire. We drove around them.

  “You’ve got some winter here,” my friend said, LA gone, now only a ghost town in his mind. “Those crows are hungry.”

  Something Cooking

  I’ve been thinking about this for years. It’s been like a soup simmering on the back burner of my mind. I’ve stirred the soup thousands of time… often out of nervousness as the years have slipped away, leaving me older and older, and not quite the man I once was.

  …of course it has to be a woman… that’s taken so much time… cooking

  slowly down

  until finally I have arrived at these words; I don’t know her name or what she looked like other than she was a short blond woman, and comely. I think she had blue eyes but I’ll never be certain.

  I do remember that she had a very healthy outlook on things and glowed with cheerfulness, though I can remember only one thing we talked about.

  I was very drunk. Whiskey had obscured my intelligence like a tropical rainstorm. Soaking wet monkeys were at play in my mind.

  But she was interested in me, though what I was saying could hardly have made any sense. I remember her looking up at me. She was amused. We talked for a few moments or was it hours? We were in a bar someplace. There were a lot of people. They were a shimmering have of clothing.

  She kept listening to me.

  The one thing I remember talking to her about was her body.

  I wanted it.

  “Yes!” she said, very enthusiastically—“But come back when you’re sober.”

  That’s the only thing I remember her saying the next morning, which was years ago, when I woke up alone in bed with a classic hangover like feeding time in an anteater grotto and you’re it, buster. I still had my clothes on or perhaps more accurately yet, my clothes had me on…

  oh, God! I couldn’t remember where I had been or how I got home.

  So I lay there hurting and thinking about her.

  I took her words, like fresh ingredients, and carefully sliced them into a huge mental pot, along with everything else about her that I had said here, and put a slow fire under the pot because it would have to cook for years.

  “Yes!” she said, very enthusiastically—“But come back when you’re sober.”

  Too bad I didn’t know where back was.

  Cold Kingdom Enterprise

  Once upon a time there was a dwarf knight who only had fifty word to live in and they were so fleeting that he only had time to put on a suit of armor and ride swiftly on a black horse into a very well-lit woods where he vanished forever.

  The Beautiful Oranges of Osaka

  Osaka is a Southern Japanese heavy industrial area of 8,333,845 people. It is not known for oranges.

  This evening I was thinking about eating beautiful oranges from Osaka. They were so sweet, so delicious, so orangy. I could see them growing in thousands of orchards all around Osaka which was known as the Orange Capital of the Orient.

  I could see the city almost possessed by oranges. Everybody eating oranges, talking about oranges and oranges on every tongue. Oranges and more oranges, and the babies of Osaka smelled like orange blossoms. I am also the only person who ever thought about this.

  Drowned Japanese Boy

  Somebody has to take his tennis shoes off. As an afterthought: nobody wants to, but it’s ridiculous for him to go on wearing them because he doesn’t need them any more.

  Nobody wants to take them off.

  They’re wet and very cold and have a strange whiteness to them that is absolutely silent.

  He lies on the riverbank with his tennis shoes a few inches from the water, the last thing that he ever knew, filling him up with death.

  Tokyo

  July 14, 1978

  The Great Golden Telescope

  She has let herself go and she is thirty-five pounds overweight. Her long dark hair is a tangled rebel against combs and brushes. Her wardrobe could be described as sloppy and desolate.

  And all she wants to do is talk.

  There are a bunch of us in a cabin; twelve or fourteen. The occasion is a very loose dinner party in the foothills of New Mexico, just outside of a small town.

  The food is delicious.

  We sit around on the floor eating it.

  We all look like hippies.

  On my way to the house, riding on the back of a truck, some spring snow tell. It was a slight flurry that didn’t stick, and a short while later I watched a beautiful sunset from outside the house and I played with two kittens and a tomcat and marvelled at how big New Mexico is.

  Everything is very casual inside the house, low-geared, mellow, except for the girl. She interrupts whatever we are talking about, which isn’t very important stuff, but still after a while it gets on our nerves a little.

  We are all very patient with her. She talks very slowly in a shy bumbling way. She is like having a difficult child about the house.

  These are the things that she talks about:

  1. We should all make our clothes out of a special seaweed that grows along the California coast. She has a notebook full of designs for seaweed clothes out in the Volkswagen bus. She will go and get the book after she has finished eating. Her three children are asleep in the bus. She never eats meat, so she is making an exception with this meal. They’re very tired.

  (It turns out later that nobody in the house had ever seen her before. She just came by and joined in. Maybe she smelled dinner when it was cooking and figured that this was a good place to park her bus for a while and get something to eat.)

  2. We’ll take the massive profits that will be earned from the seaweed clothes, everybody will want them, Dennis Hopper, he lives at Taos, and just everybody, maybe Frank Zappa too, and Carole King, and buy a mountain where people can live in peace and harmony with a great g
olden telescope. She knows right where the mountain is. It’s a cheap mountain, too. It could be purchased for just a few hundred thousand dollars from the seaweed clothes profits.

  (Nobody is really very interested in what she is talking about because it is such a familiar conversation that everybody has heard again and again coming from people who have been wiped out by taking too many drugs or living a life style that’s just too estranged from reality but somebody has to ask her about the telescope and they do, but…)

  3. By this time she has gone onto something else and the future of the great golden telescope is in serious doubt.

  (I take another bite of food.)

  4. “Do you know what?” she says suddenly, having just told us a long story about the possibility of building boats that look like old-timey train engines like the ones you see in Western movies and shipping them by real four-wheeled trains to the California coast, where they would look beautiful anchored beside our seaweed boutiques, “I think I’ve been in a Volkswagen bus too long.”

  The Man Who Shot Jesse James

  When I was a child I knew who killed Jesse James, shot him in the back when he was putting a picture up on the wall.

  That man’s name was as familiar to me as my own because Jesse James was a hero of my youth. My friends and I used to talk about him being shot all the time. It was one of our favorite topics and always good for something to feel sad about or get angry at. Jesse James’s death was as real and important to us as a death in the family.

  But now at the age of forty-three I can’t remember the name of the man who shot Jesse James. I’ve been trying to think of it all day but that name has remained out of sight in my mind, hiding somewhere in the canyons and crevasses of other memories.

  I can remember that Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid and the Dalton gang should never have gone to Coffeyville, Kansas, for a little banking where they were turned into bullet-riddled corpses stretched out on doors being photographed for posterity.

  No one wants to have a photograph of themselves taken lying dead on a door in a Kansas street and be remembered that way.

  …ugh.

  You don’t need it.

  But that still leaves me not able to remember the name of the man who shot my boyhood hero Jesse James. I try desperately to think of his name.

  Did it start with Matthew or Will or Sam or Richard… or I just don’t know.

  What I once knew and was so important to me, I can’t remember now. It has been claimed and taken away by the forces of time, a Western myth gone like the buffalo with nothing to assume its place.

  Dancing Feet

  He is a businessman who comes to Tokyo three times a year. He is very interested in shoes. No, that’s not his line of business. He is in some very strange way involved with computers, but still shoes are what he’s really interested in. Actually, it’s not shoes but feet: the feet of Japanese women. He is madly in love with their feet.

  He comes to Japan three times a year to look at the feet that are in the shoes. When he is in Japan, which averages two weeks a visit, he hangs around shoe stores a lot, watching Japanese women trying on shoes. He also carefully studies the sidewalks of Tokyo as if they were art galleries because they exhibit shoes like moving sculpture and where there are shoes! Sometimes he wishes that he was a Japanese sidewalk. That would be paradise for him but could his heart stand the excitement of being a sidewalk?

  In conventional storytelling this would be a good time to say some things about the life of the businessman: Maybe his age, country, background, family, does he masturbate? is he impotent? etc., but I won’t because it’s not important.

  All that’s important is that three times a year, he comes to Japan, spending two weeks looking at Japanese shoes and the feet inside of them. Of course, summertime is a must visit for him… sandals!

  When the airplane flies him to Japan, he always gets a window seat and thousands of dancing feet pass by the window in shoes that bring out all their beauty.

  Seventeen Dead Cats

  When I was twelve years old in 1947, I had seventeen cats. There were tomcats, and mother cats, and kittens. I used to catch fish for them from a pond that was a mile away. The kittens liked to play with string under the blue sky.

  Oregon 1947—California 1978

  Light on at the Tastee-Freez

  I saw a light on at the Tastee-Freez a few weeks ago and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. The Tastee-Freez has been closed since late October.

  This is early March.

  It will stay closed until the summer, June or sometime.

  I’ve only been here once when it reopened for the summer and that was a number of years ago and I was very busy at the time and I can’t remember exactly when it opened.

  Perhaps it opens as early as May or even earlier.

  I don’t know.

  But one thing is for certain: until last year in October, they would always close just after Labor Day and it would be a signalling symbol to me that the summer was rapidly coming to a close here in Montana where spring, summer and autumn are so short and winter so very, very long.

  They serve a good hamburger, the Big Tee burger and tasty onion rings and fifty flavors of milk shakes. You could have a different milk shake every day and almost two months would pass, like a Montana summer, before you would have to start over again with maybe Red Rose. That’s one of the flavors they have or if you didn’t want to start off with Red Rose, you could try a Grasshopper shake.

  I’m not kidding.

  Anyway, the Tastee-Freez used to close in early September and for some strange reason it would make me sad. I am growing older. There is one less summer in life with a closed sign on the door.

  …no more Big Tees or the possibility of 700 different flavors of milk shakes…

  After a while when they got to know what an enthusiastic fan of milk shakes you are, they might mix flavors together for you, opening up almost unlimited milk shake horizons stretching out to your first Red Rose-Grasshopper shake.

  For these long winter months every time I drive by, the Tastee-Freez is closed and dark at night. That is, until a few weeks ago when I saw a light on as I drove by.

  There was somebody inside the Tastee-Freez. Oh, I thought, maybe they’re going to open up early this year and not wait until June or so, but open up in February. It was a good thought. It would almost be like an early summer coming to this snowy land of Montana.

  The next day when I drove by, the closed sign was still on the door and that night the Tastee-Freez was dark inside again, and has remained that way ever since. It is definitely closed and probably will not open until May or June or I don’t know when but it is obvious they are not going to open up this winter.

  Maybe the person who was in there that night was just checking the supplies, the milk shake flavors, for next summer or… who knows why somebody would turn the lights on at night in a Tastee-Freez that’s been closed since late October?

  But I continue thinking about it, not so much about what the person was doing in there but just that the light was on months before the Tastee-Freez would open.

  Sometimes when people are talking to me about very important things like President Carter or the Panama Canal and think that I’m listening to them, I’m really thinking about the light on at the Tastee-Freez.

  The Eyes of Japan

  I am visiting a Japanese home outside of Tokyo. The people are very nice. The wife greets us at the door. Once she had been a very popular television star. She is still young and beautiful and retired now to married life and children.

  We are a party of four people, including her husband. I am the only person who is not Japanese.

  We are graciously, perfectly welcomed into the house and soon sitting in a Western-style dining room that is also part kitchen. His wife busies herself preparing food; little snacks, and getting us sake to drink. We have not been there any longer than just sitting down when her husband, a very kind and sweet man, says jok
ingly, “I am the lion of my own house.”

  I don’t know what that means but I know it means something or it would not have been said. I have a feeling that it is for my benefit. I look around the house. It is modern and comfortable. The man is a famous Japanese actor.

  Soon we are drinking sake on the rocks which is a good drink on a hot, humid Japanese June night. The wife continues busying herself. Now she is cooking things for us to eat and he helps her by cooking some things, too. They are a very efficient kitchen team. This could be a play.

  After a while, there are a lot of good things to eat on the table. We eat, drink and talk away. There is nothing more for her to do. She has not sat down since the company arrived.

  Now she sits down but she does not sit down at the table. She sits down maybe five feet away and listens to the conversation. I watch her sitting there five feet away from the table and I think about what her husband said jokingly when we arrived, “I am the lion of my own house.”

  I didn’t know what it meant but I knew that it meant something. Now I know what it means, watching her sit five feet away from the table, not joining us, but enjoying herself just the same.

  I look into her eyes. They are dark and beautiful. They are happy eyes. She is glad that we have come. She has done her best to make us comfortable and now she is enjoying our presence.

  In her eyes, I see the past of Japan. I see thousands of years of Japanese women, not sitting at the table and happy. As I write this, I can also see American women reading these words and grinding their teeth while thinking; Oh, the poor downtrodden slave of male tyranny! Instead of waiting on them like a servant, she should kick them all in the balls!

  I can see the expression on their faces.

  I can see their eyes filled with hatred that is so far away from this room.