The Tokyo-Montana Express (29 page)

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.

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!

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?

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.

That’s what it says in
TV Guide
.

Poetry will be here at 6 o’clock 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.”

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.