The Tokyo-Montana Express (11 page)

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.”

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.

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.

…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.

(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

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.

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.