The Tokyo-Montana Express (23 page)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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: