The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Richard Brautigan

  House of Carpets

  An electric sign in a snowstorm town is flashing HOUSE OF CARPETS on and off; HOUSE OF CARPETS off and on. It’s a November night in Montana and the streets are abandoned. Everybody wants to get away from the snowstorm. There is only a very occasional car, rare like an old postage stamp. The snow swirls about the sign that wants people to buy carpets from a closed store.

  The carpets are inside but the door is locked and the carpet people have gone home.

  I cannot figure out why they have a flashing sign on at night when there’s nobody there to sell carpets. If you were walking along and saw the sign, say at midnight, and it excited you enough to want to buy a carpet, you couldn’t buy one because the HOUSE OE CARPETS is closed.

  On a snowy, damned-cold night like this one, seeing that sign, you might want to buy a carpet to roll up in and keep warm.

  But forget about it.

  The 1977 Television Season

  Last night the temperature went down to 12 degrees. It was our coldest night of the autumn. I kept checking the temperature while watching television: situation comedies, etc.

  I followed the temperature faithfully like an ice-cube shepherd hour after hour going down from 30 to 12 degrees. I would watch some television and then go outside on the back porch and check the temperature.

  This is a hard thing to say about American popular culture and I’m weighing any words very carefully but the temperature was much more interesting than television.

  Too bad the temperature couldn’t have been a program. Then I wouldn’t have had to get up and go outside to check it. I could have just sat there and the 9 o’clock program would have been 16 degrees Fahrenheit.

  The Window

  —like a kitchen window steaming up on a very cold morning and it’s hard to see out of, then the steam slowly disappears and you can see the snow-covered mountains, 10,000 feet high, out the window, and then the window gradually steams up again, coffee on the stove and the mountains gone like a dream.

  …that’s how I feel this morning.

  Painstaking Popcorn Label

  The night before last it seemed like a wonderful idea to stay up until 3 o’clock in the morning drinking one bottle of sour mash whiskey and putting a dent in a second bottle. Yesterday afternoon the shortcomings of that idea revealed themselves in the form of an almost morbid hangover and I found myself sitting at the kitchen table desperately reading the label on an empty jar of popcorn.

  The label told me more about the former contents of the jar than I ever wanted to know about popcorn. I just like to pop some corn from time to time, maybe once a month is enough, but this label totally ignored my simple approach to popcorn. It went into great detail about the man who grew the popcorn and his growing of it. It mentioned thousands of “painstaking” experiments and forty generations of fancy seed-breeding to arrive at his brand of “gourmet” popcorn. It mentioned “tender care” and protection from “alien pollination” and used the words “technical” and “scientific” and referred to their product as popping corn instead of popcorn. It also used the phrase “unspeakably ordinary” corns. I was surprised that they did not use the word general when talking about their corn.

  Anyway, my head hurt and I didn’t want to know all that shit about the farmer and his “popping corn.” The jar was empty. I couldn’t get any pleasure or diversion out of popping his corn, which of course would have been impossible even if I’d had some. My brain was too morbid to handle a pan full of howling corn.

  After I finished reading the label I vowed never to buy any of that popcorn again.

  There’s just so much room for so much information here in the Twentieth Century and you have to draw the line someplace and I was drawing it the next time I bought some popcorn. It would just be a simple bag of popcorn and not have the word painstaking printed on it.

  Imaginary Beginning to Japan

  This is the beginning of an imaginary first trip to Japan. You get on the airplane in San Francisco. You are very excited. Japan! The trip has taken months of planning. You have gotten your first passport, a smallpox shot and you have read tourist books about Japan and Japanese customs. You practice simple Japanese words and phrases: “O hayō” means good morning.

  The day of departure grows closer. You have promised to bring back presents, teapots and fans, etc. You have promised to write thousands of postcards. You start packing two weeks early. You don’t want to forget anything. You buy your traveler’s checks and get your airplane ticket.

  Then comes the big day and you are flying across the Pacific to Japan. The hours pass. Your excitement is almost out of control: A country thousands of years old, a civilization that was building great temples before the Americans were even building chicken houses!

  You don’t see anything for ten hours and then you see the coast and beginning at the shore’s edge Japan!

  As the airplane gets closer and closer to the coast, you can see millions of people standing on the beaches. Their faces are looking skyward in the direction of your airplane and closer and closer you fly until you can tell that the people are all looking up at your airplane and they have something in their hands that they are starting to wave at the airplane.

  At first you can’t make out what they are waving at the plane and then suddenly, like a miracle, you can see what it is. Millions of Japanese men, women and children are waving their chopsticks at the airplane.

  Welcome to Japan!

  Leaves

  I have been so totally erased from nature lately, like a blackboard before school starts, that yesterday when I was in the Japanese section of San Francisco: Japantown, I saw the sidewalk littered with chocolate wrappers.

  There were hundreds of them. Who in the hell has been eating all these chocolates? I thought. A convention of Japanese chocolate eaters must have passed this way.

  Then I noticed some plum trees on the street. Then I noticed that it was autumn. Then I noticed that the leaves were falling as they will and as they must every year.

  Where had I gone wrong?

  Waking Up Again

  I feel as if I have the weight of the world on my shoulders. In my scale of concern and detail Atlas would only come up to my knees and his world would be the size of a basketball.

  My mind is racing forward at such a speed that compared to it, a bolt of lightning would seem like an ice cube in an old woman’s forlorn glass of weak lemonade on some front porch lost in Louisiana. She stares straight ahead at nothing, holding the glass of lemonade in her hand.

  In other words: My sense of mental geography is a little more than a bit off. Actually, I’m about halfway to Albuquerque. I took a wrong turn when I opened my eyes this morning and the second wrong turn when I got out of bed.

  Where I would like to be is where I’m at, but now I find myself on Route 66, fifty miles from Albuquerque with the shadow of San Francisco in the background like a paralyzed film dissolve.

  Then suddenly the dissolve implodes like a television set dying of a heart attack, New Mexico vanishes, and I’m instantly returned to San Francisco where I’ve been all the time and for the last minute walking down the Kearny Street Stairs toward Broadway.

  What has brought all this about is the total reality of a window filled with drying duckbills and chicken feet. The rest of the birds are gone, only bills and feet remain.

  It is an apartment window that I think probably belongs to a Chinese person and they have five strings of duckbills and chicken feet hanging outside the window drying in the sun. I don’t know what they are used for, perhaps a special once-in-a-hundred-years Chinese feast or maybe just ordinary soup. Eat it when you’re hungry.

  All I know is that their reality has reestablished mine and I am starting the day all over again on the Kearny Street Stairs as if I had just awakened.

  Poetry Will Come

  To Montana on March 24th

  That’s what it says in TV Guide.

  Poetry will be here at 6 o’clo
ck in the morning; on Friday. I lool forward to poetry coming here to this land of cows and mountains. It will arrive just after the Early Farm Watch and be in Montana for half an hour until 6:30 before going on to its next appointment. Perhaps Arizona or maybe a return engagement to Greece, back by popular demand.

  The Montana TV broadcast day starts off at 5:20 with a program called Country Day and then there’s Farm News at 5:25 and Sunrise Semester at 5:30 and then as I said earlier we have Early Farm Watch at 5:50, followed by poetry coming to Montana at 6 a.m.

  Poetry will assume the form of a program called Poets Talking about which TV Guide says: “The subtle changes in a work‘s meaning that occur when it is translated.”

  This is just what Montana needs and will be greeted by a large enthusiastic audience. I can see thousands of ranchers with their eyes glued to the set at 6 a.m., meeting and finding out about poetry and then spending the rest of the day talking about it with their neighbors.

  “What do you think about poetry and that translation business and those lost meanings?”

  “Well, I lost a calf last week and my first wife ran off with my best friend on my birthday. I never want to be twenty-seven again, so I listened with a kind ear and I sure hope they find those meanings. I miss the calf. The wife I don’t. My second wife can cook. She isn’t much to look at, but she can cook and she ain’t going to run off with anybody.”

  Sunday

  Standing in line at the checkout stand, the middle-aged man in front of me has his San Francisco Lord’s Day all worked out. He unloads his basket, item by item, and puts his Sunday on the counter. First, there is a quart of cheap vodka, then a can of dog food, the newspaper and an artificial log for his fireplace.

  The young male checker stares impassively on while this urban still life is assembled in front of him. He’s seen enough of these customers not to care any more.

  “Give me two packs of Marlboro 100’s,” the man says, finishing off his purchases. The man is a long way from a cattle ranch. I don’t think he has ever smoked a cigarette in front of a herd of cows.

  The checker rings it all up, and the man takes a very crisp ten-dollar bill out of his wallet. He folds it in half like a knife.

  I’m forty-four years old.

  Now: it’s my turn.

  Japanese Love Affair

  I am watching a Japanese love affair from very close up. Actually, I am in bed with the lovers watching them fuck. I am a part of their movement, but these are different lovers.

  One of them is a film director and the other lover is film itself.

  If you saw me right now, you’d just see somebody sitting quietly in a theater very carefully watching a movie, but I am not watching a movie, I am watching a passionate love affair in which each frame is a kiss, a caress, and each scene a lightning storm fuck.

  Sometimes compared to the passion of art, human love affairs are studies in ice, like the skeleton of a refrigerator lying on its side near the North Pole.

  Tap Dancing Chickadee Slaves

  For John Fryer

  There are not too many fables about man’s misuse of sunflower seeds. Once upon a time there was an evil dance master who got the idea of using sunflower seeds to harness the energy of nature in a manner that would have met with Dr. Frankenstein’s wholehearted approval.

  The dance master was truly a very bad man because everybody knows that chickadees love sunflower seeds in the winter when heavy snows cover the ground.

  Using sunflower seeds was a sure and diabolical way to enslave the hearts and minds of chickadees, and that’s exactly what he did, buying twenty large birdfeeders and filling them up with sunflower seeds.

  Soon hundreds of chickadees gathered at his place out in the country and away from the prying eyes of men who possessed conscience or a desire to be President of the United States and use the issue of chickadee abuse beginning step to the Presidency.

  The chickadees gorged themselves on sunflower seeds which he bought by the hundred-pound sack and soon the chickadees were totally in his power. They would do anything for those seeds.

  …anything.

  From that point on, it was only a short distance to teaching them to tap dance. Within a few months, he had a hundred tap dancing chickadees under his wing, so to speak.

  He made little top hats for them and little canes to carry and he had them tap dancing on a huge ornate mirror lying on the kitchen table surrounded by dirty dishes and empty bottles.

  He would put some good tap dancing music, Beethoven or Dixieland, on the phonograph and soon the birds would be tap dancing their little hearts out for more sunflower seeds.

  Like a John Audubon Busby Berkeley, he taught them complicated precision routines that they would perform on that cursed mirror while he, their only audience, drank cheap gin out of a ten-year stale piece of hollowed out wedding cake.

  Moral: Don’t become too fond of sunflower seeds. Even if you’re not a chickadee, you never know.

  Pleasures of the Swamp

  The pleasures of the swamp just keep happening to me, oozing down through my waking hours, alligatoring my perceptions of reality and teaching me that stagnant water has its own intelligence and can be as brilliant as a Nobel Prize winner if you deal with it on its own terms and don’t try to make it into a Himalayan skyline.

  Dangerous snakes?

  I use them for silverware. They can turn a dull meal into an exciting experience. A hamburger steak can become a matter of life and death.

  Mosquitoes?

  They’re just bloodthirsty flying air conditioners. After you lose your blood egotism, they are no problem.

  Quicksand?

  I think of quicksand as a telephone call to a lover. We have a nice conversation about secret weather and agree to meet next week at a coffee shop that resembles the pleasures of the swamp.

  Sky Blue Pants

  The Japanese girl doesn’t know it but this is the greatest day of her life, the Mount Everest of her existence. She is maybe eighteen. I’II have to make a guess because I never saw her face. I don’t know what will happen after today, but it will never get any better for her.

  Getting off the Yamanote Line train at Harajuku Station, she is walking along in front of me with a young man beside her who possesses the clarity of a boyfriend.

  She is wearing a pair of very light blue pants that cling to her body like the sky fits the earth. The pants are not an accident. She has a magnificent body and walks like a Twentieth Century shrine in the pleasure of its own worship. She is totally aware of every movement and shadow her body casts. She can feel the power of her body’s religion by watching prayers in the eyes of men.

  At one point in the station, she reaches back and gives her own ass a cute little caress and it makes her happy. She knows a great thing and it’s all hers. Lovingly touching it, she is very happy.

  lf she lives to be a hundred, life will never be the same again.

  Kyoto, Montana

  Southeast of Helena

  In Kyoto, there is a Buddhist shrine called the Moss Garden where moss grows in a thousand colors and textures and each variation of the moss is a form of music, so pure in detail that it shines like a green light for the soul to go.

  The Moss Garden is over six centuries old, so that’s a lot of music and prayers rising like mist off the moss.

  Here in Montana there is a small canyon that narrows to a rocky gorge filled with a grove of cottonwood trees. In the autumn, they look like a yellow waterfall seeming to come and go from nowhere.

  A Different or

  the Same Drummer

  It’s a very old story that takes place in every culture on this planet Earth: A kid with some drumsticks pounding on everything in sight. He cannot take his drums with him, so he changes everything around him into drums.

  For weeks now I have watched a Japanese teenage boy and his drumsticks. I have seen him drum on trees, the backs of chairs, walls, tables, and parked bicycle seats.

  A few mom
ents ago the world within listening distance was filled with the sound of a hard drumming song pounding out of a pair of speakers in a cafe.

  I turned and saw the boy drumming in perfect rhythm on the air and it was as if the sound of the drums was coming from his sticks.

  When 3 Made Sense

  for the First Time

  A reasonable facsimile of a crime against nature attended a cocktail party in his mind. The facsimile was an interesting guest and provided entertainment for the other guests who when photographed together in a group portrait were his intelligence.

  The facsimile of a crime against nature told some amusing anecdotes and then started to dance. The other guests watched with fascination. Then the telephone rang and it was for the facsimile who answered the phone and had to leave immediately because it had forgotten a previous engagement that was being held out in the country many miles away.

  Apologies and farewells were made followed by departure. There was a brief shuffle of momentum and then the party continued. This time a memory of his childhood was the center of attention.

  The memory dealt with the first time that he understood that the number 3 stood for 3 things like 3 apples.

  A One-Frame Movie

  about a Man Living in the 1970s

  Three years passed and nothing happened.

  During the first year he didn’t notice that nothing was happening. Halfway through the second year, it slowly began to dawn on him like the dawn that occurs in a rejected cartoon, a cartoon that nobody wants to publish in their magazine or newspaper, that finally ends up being thrown out by the cartoonist who eventually forgets that he ever drew it.

  …with no copies of it left and no memory of it ever having been done…