The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  While he paused, I waited patiently for them. He had never taken so long before to say something. I watched his mind thinking like a mystery novel with all the pages somewhere else behind a secret panel and the words hidden from me.

  Then he finally spoke and what he said totally surprised me and threw me completely off balance. It was one of the most extraordinary things a person has ever said to me. I couldn’t think of anything in reply and he didn’t say a word more than what he had just spoken in a flat, almost confessionally-bewildered manner as if it were not quite really happening to him.

  We sat there in silence for a long time, staring at each other. What he had said was this: “I live with three people over eighty years old.” I searched desperately for an answer but there was none. “Interesting,” was obviously not the right thing to say.

  We continued staring at each other.

  The time seemed endless like growing old.

  My Fault

  A fierce warm wind blew up from Wyoming into Montana last night and through my sleep shaking the branches of my dreams all the way down to the roots of that which I call myself.

  Nightmares followed nightmares like rush home traffic on a freeway to oblivion. I dreamt that I was a junior comedy writer on a variety show that was fading slowly from television. The Nielsen ratings loomed on the horizon like a cold, gray ax or was it just another dawn in my future?

  I showed the star of the program, an ageing Jewish homosexual, an opening joke. He did not like it. Where did you learn to write?” he said. “In a chicken house?”

  The wind and the night seemed endless. My bedroom groaned like a ghost while trees continued thrashing against the sky and my dreams were shaking like a pair of false teeth in an old-folks home during an earthquake.

  They jumped around in a bedside glass like a fish.

  I cast off the chains of my last dream and my eyes tunnelled out of sleep at dawn. I got out of bed quickly and dressed and went outside. I wanted to escape anything that had to do with sleep.

  I was greeted by all the chickens standing outside the chicken house in a blown group staring at me. They were about thirty feet away. The wind had turned the latch on the chicken house door and then it had opened the door and there were all the chickens staring at me.

  Of course when a door is open, chickens have to go out and stand in the wind. That’s the way chickens think. They were lucky that they were not blown away. They would have been very surprised if they had found themselves in Idaho.

  The dawn and the wind were the color and movement of a gray ax. The chickens stared accusingly at me as if it were my fault that the wind was blowing so hard, that I had something to do with it and maybe even opened their God-damn door!

  Florida

  Sometimes it’s nice to get mail here in the winter. I walk out through the snow and there are letters waiting for me in the mailbox. I take them back into the house and see what they are about.

  I have a large blue mailbox like a small barn for letters. I have double-feelings about the mail: the + and – of letters. Some letters are interruptions and distractions, requesting, pleading or demanding! a piece of my life, most often from people that I have never met.

  I wonder if I were to ask them as a personal favor to me not to take a bath for a week if they would do it. I don’t think so, and some of the things they want me to do are just as inconvenient.

  Other letters are like glasses of cold water clear as the North Star on a very hot summer afternoon. They make me feel better and renew me and I am glad that I’m alive.

  Bills are forms of existential geography. They are the $ maps of where we have been.

  Sometimes, frustrating.

  Sometimes, pleasing.

  Sometimes, nothing.

  This is outrageous! I refuse to pay! or That’s fair, even cheaper than I expected. They did good work and charged a fair price or Oh, this bill for three dollars. I thought I paid that, but I guess I didn’t.

  Junk mail is just junk mail.

  It passes anonymously through my hands and into the fireplace where after a few flames it’s gone. There was no pain because there was no life.

  This morning I went out to the mailbox and opened its blue metal barn door and there was nothing for me. I closed the door and put my hand on top of the mailbox. It was nice and warm from the sun and felt good, almost like being in Florida for a few seconds. We’ve had some cold weather here with snow on the ground for a month.

  I walked back to the house without any letters, but I felt cheerful. Thank you, mailbox, for my little Florida vacation.

  Ghosts

  Sometimes just before I fall asleep I think about her, but all I can remember about her is that she had a dog. We met at a bar. We talked for a while. We had a few drinks. Then we went to her place. There was a bicycle in the front room. I almost fell over it. The bicycle was right beside the door.

  We made love and she had a dog.

  A Study in Thyme

  and Funeral Parlors

  I spend a lot of my life interested in little things, tiny portions of reality like a pinch of spice in a very complicated recipe that takes days to cook, sometimes even longer. Any more spice than the single pinch and you’re walking on dangerous ground. Two pinches is totally out of the question and the meal is ruined. Send out for the hot dogs.

  I’ll give you an example. Last night I was walking by a funeral parlor and all the lights were out. I have never seen a funeral parlor with all the lights out at night. It startled me.

  I know that there’s no federal law that says funeral parlors should keep a light on at night, but my reality assumed that’s the way it should be. Obviously, I was wrong. I thought about it as I continued on my way.

  It was a little thing but it had disturbed me.

  I guess nobody was home at the funeral parlor or if they were home, they didn’t care to have the lights on or it didn’t make any difference.

  Rabbits

  I have a friend who has a friend who collects rabbits in Japan. Whenever my friend travels abroad, Europe or America, she brings him back rabbits. She has brought back maybe two hundred rabbits for him. That’s a lot of rabbits passing through Japanese customs even if they’re not real. Her friend likes any kind of representation of a rabbit, glass or metal or a drawing or you name it as long as it has to do with rabbits.

  I know nothing more about him other than he likes rabbits. I don’t know how old he is or what he looks like. All I know is that a Japanese man likes rabbits.

  Often, when my friend and I walk around here in Tokyo, she is half-looking for rabbits to add to his collection. If there is a little store filled with knickknacks that looks as if it could be the home of some kind of rabbit, we stop and look.

  It has gotten now that when I wander around Tokyo by myself, I am sometimes half-looking for rabbits. I saw a place today that might have a rabbit and I stopped.

  Who is this man?

  Why rabbits?

  A Different Way of Looking at

  President Kennedy’s Assassination

  Sometimes life can be a series of flea-like aggravations and pimple disappointments. You count on a simple thing happening because it has been happening for years and it’s so simple and easy to do that there is no reason for it to stop happening.

  It’s not complicated like suddenly changing a president before his term is up or your eighty-year-old mother-in-law who gave birth to your wife when she was fifty-five, a sort of miracle birth, and she has decided to take up bowling, but she’s about 4-10 and weighs 79 pounds. Her skin is stretched so tight to her tiny frail bones that she looks like a strange kite.

  You know that she doesn’t stand a chance in this world if she picks up a bowling ball. You make subtle hints about another activity that might be more suited to her current status in life. She nods her head and appears to be agreeing with you when you suggest knitting or stamp collecting.

  Postage stamps are very exciting. When you are through
talking and feeling very confident that you have persuaded her, she gives her first verbal response to your conversation.

  She asks you if they have any bowling balls the size of an apple, so they might fit her fingers.

  Anyway, let’s forget about your eighty-year-old mother-in-law and return to the simple thing in your life that should have gone on forever without any complications.

  We are talking about pancakes.

  A restaurant in Livingston, Montana, has been open every day, seven days a week ever since it got off Noah’s Ark after The Flood, and it always serves breakfast 24 hours a day. Breakfast, of course, in Montana also means pancakes: Sourdough pancakes with lots of butter and syrup washed down with a large glass of ice-cold milk.

  One night last week you couldn’t sleep. You tried but it just didn’t work. You went to bed at nine and wrestled with your pillow until 2 a.m. when finally you decided to get up and go down to the restaurant and get some pancakes. An order of pancakes might make you sleep. The restaurant’s only a short drive away. It’s a warm night. It’s not snowing. The sky is full of stars.

  You park your car and go into the restaurant. You sit down at a table. There are a dozen or so people in the restaurant getting something to eat after the bars have closed. You don’t need a menu.

  “I’ll have some pancakes and a large glass of milk,” you say like a litany. The waitress doesn’t ask if you also want a cup of coffee. She just points at the wall. You are a little confused and then you follow the waitress’s outstretched arm to the end where her pointing finger waits. You go beyond her finger to the wall at the other end of the restaurant where there’s a sign that says:

  PANCAKES

  WILL NOT

  BE SERVED

  FROM MIDNIGHT

  TO 4 AM

  You are stunned. This is the biggest shock to your system since President Kennedy was assassinated. You can’t think of anything to say, so the waitress says it for you, looking down at her watch to make it very official, “It is now 2:30. You have to wait an hour and a half before you can get some pancakes. What would you like instead? Ham and eggs? Bacon and eggs? Sausage and eggs? French toast?”

  The word “no” stumbles out of your voice. You get up and leave the restaurant. Though the drive home is a short one it suddenly becomes a very long one like going to Billings for a funeral. You try to think of a reason why a restaurant that has served pancakes 24-hours a day since the beginning of time should suddenly change their policy and exile pancakes from their menu for four hours each day. It doesn’t make any sense. How difficult is it to make pancakes?

  Suddenly you think of President Kennedy.

  Your eyes fill up with tears.

  Portrait of a Marriage

  Poor girl, she literally had nothing going for her in Tokyo. First of all, when I saw her I thought that she was a fat, ugly boy. It took about ten seconds for me to realize that she was a girl about twenty years old, maybe, because it’s always so hard to tell the age of Japanese women.

  My heart forgot a beat when I discovered that she was a girl. She was about 5-9 and weighed maybe 200 pounds. She was walking with somebody whose gender and appearance I have completely forgotten for when I realized that she was a girl everything else vanished into the background.

  She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. I don’t know why I’m describing her clothes. They aren’t important at all, just words. I guess because I don’t want to write about what I have to write next.

  As she walked by, she smiled and she didn’t have any front teeth. Her mouth was just a pink hole in Asia.

  I know there are a lot worse fates in this world and she probably has a family and friends who love a fat girl that looks like an ugly boy and has no front teeth and she will probably find a husband who loves a girl that looks like an ugly boy with no front teeth.

  Maybe he will look exactly like her and people will mistake them for twins and maybe sometimes they will make the same mistake themselves and look slightly bewildered, trying to unravel their identities, who is who.

  Self-Portrait as an Old Man

  Last Sunday I bought a German chocolate cake at the Methodist Church annual October auction in Pine Creek, which raised money at the auction to keep the church going for the next year.

  I am not a Christian but neither is the chocolate cake. When I saw that cake, I was determined to have it. The cake was like a small three-story palace. The bidding was fast and furious and I stayed with it like a skier going down a steep slope.

  “Sold to number 81 for thirty dollars!”

  81 was me!

  Jesus Christ! and thirty dollars for a chocolate cake! I took it home and put it in the freezer, planning to eat it on a very special occasion like the Second Coming. I also got a receipt for the cake:

  German Choc. Cake

  $30.00

  rec for Pine Creek Church

  10/14/78

  I wanted proof.

  Yesterday I found myself talking to a friend about the thirty-dollar chocolate cake and then impulsively I took out my wallet and showed him the receipt for the cake.

  He looked at it with an amused expression on his face.

  Was this how I am going to end up? As an old man showing a barely recognizable scrap of paper to complete strangers that I have stopped and collated on the streets of the Twenty-First Century.

  By this time I may have added a few totally irrelevant newspaper clippings to the chocolate cake receipt and of course I will show them off, too.

  “Thirty dollars for a chocolate cake,” I will chortle, pointing at a newspaper clipping that hasn’t got anything to do with anything.

  The Twenty-First Century inhabitant in clothes of winking green metal will humor an old man whose eyes are a little too bright.

  “Thirty dollars for a chocolate cake,” I will rattle again from my reed-dry scrawny throat.

  “That’s very interesting,” the inhabitant will say but will really be wondering if I had just been sprung from a living time capsule, meanwhile thinking, “I guess this old man has not bought a cup of coffee recently because that costs fifty dollars, and five dollars extra if you want cream and sugar.”

  “Thirty dollars!” and my world only a memory… one afternoon at the Pine Creek Methodist Church back in the Twentieth Century.

  Beer Story

  “I like to cook in the winter,” the sixty-year-old Italian cook said, somewhere in California, holding his glass of beer in a professional grip. He was a man who totally knew the meaning of beer. Beer was an open book to him. He knew every page of beer by heart.

  ”I like to cook in the winter,” he repeated. “It’s just right, then. In the summer it’s too hot, too hot. I should know. I’ve been cooking for forty-two years. It’s never any different. The only good thing about cooking in the summer is that I drink more beer, but I do that anyway, so I might as well drink it in the winter when it’s not so hot and I can enjoy myself more.”

  He took another sip of beer.

  “After people get to know me, they all say I drink a lot of beer. I don’t deny it either. Why should I? I’m not ashamed of beer.”

  Homage to Rudi Gernreich / 1965

  The look in clothes expresses an anti-attitude, the result of being bored… And so, if you’re bored, you go for the outrageous gesture. Everything else seems to have lost any meaning.

  —RUDI GERNREICH

  Beneath the freeway that joins San Francisco to the Golden Gate Bridge, like lovers to a marriage, is a small cemetery surrounded by a white picket fence so short that you can step over it, and the graves are only a few feet long.

  The cars that pass over the freeway are translated into a gentle clang, clang, clang below in the cemetery where the wind blows among the flowers and the weeds. It is a sound that never stops all the time that you are there.

  You can look straight up and see nothing but the red meat-like metal of the freeway and the gray concrete that carries the freeway up to the cars.


  This cemetery is but a gnat compared to the cemetery further up the hill in the Presidio of San Francisco where thousands of graves climb in military precision and conformity. These graves are punctuated with small white tombstones that are out on patrol in eternity.

  I could never be this cemetery with its glory like slices of bread in a star-spangled loaf, and the American flag towering like a huge baker above the graves. But I could quite easily become the little cemetery down below the freeway where the soldiers bury their pets.

  I could put on its graves and markers and flowers like a Rudi Gernreich coat and stay there for a few hours idly dreaming in the windy California sun.

  I like the general informality of the pet cemetery. It suits me with the audacity of its affection. I seem to find almost more love here than in the cemetery up the hill.

  It’s ironic that I should spend a Sunday afternoon with dead military pets while our armies are in the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam and all my friends are worried silly about it.

  To arrive at the pet cemetery I had to pass through the fort, and drive past barracks and soldiers and green military equipment and cannons parked in a plaza.

  The Presidio is the home of the 6th Army, and soon I was standing in the pet cemetery, listening to the clang, clang, clang of the cars above on the freeway while I surveyed the dead pets of the 6th Army.

  I walked among the graves and there were many frail dandelions growing in the sandy soil of the cemetery and little purple flowers and little white flowers, fragile like miniature chandeliers.

  There were dogs buried there: Smudge, Butch, Shorty Johnson, Satan, Hula-Girl, Caesar, Sally, Wimpy, Tony McGuire, a fishing pal, and Oscar E945, a sentry dog.