The Tokyo-Montana Express (31 page)

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.

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…

That kind of dawn began to occur halfway
through his second year of nothing happening.

By the time the third year was barely in
progress he realized fully that nothing was happening. Then he started to think
about it.

He didn’t know if it was a good thing or a
bad thing.

That took another eleven months which
brought him to the end of the third year of nothing happening. By that time he
wondered if he really missed things happening or was he suffering from a simple
case of nostalgia, another victim of the past.

He decided to wait one more year to see how
he felt.

No reason to jump into anything
, he thought.
You don’t want to get into water over your head
.

Groucho:

Harpo and Chico said that after they died
they’d send out a message if they could
.

George Jessel:

Have you heard anything from them?

Groucho:

Not a goddamn word
.

My friend here in Tokyo has been Groucho
Marx in his eighties. I brought with me from America a 586-page book about
Groucho as an old man and I’ve been reading it whenever I want to have some
company.

The book is called
Hello, I Must Be
Going
written by Charlotte Chandler who was a friend of his. She approaches
Groucho from every angle. There are personal recollections of him plus
conversations between him and people that he knew and liked; Woody Allen,
George Jessel, Bill Cosby, Jack Nicholson, etc. There are also interviews with
his living brothers Gummo and Zeppo.

Harpo and Chico are of course… not a
goddamn word.

For six weeks I have had an old Groucho
Marx for a friend. I am sorry that it has had to be a one-way friendship. I’ve
read hundreds of anecdotes about him and laughed and been amazed by his wit and
imagination.

When not spending time with him mirrored by
the book high above Tokyo in my little hotel room, I think about him wherever I
go. I’ll be on a train staring out the window and instead of seeing Tokyo, I’ll
be looking at a photograph of Groucho Marx in his eighties.

It looks like Tokyo to everybody else but
it’s Groucho to me.

Halfway through dinner by myself Groucho
will sit down beside me and say something funny and I will smile.

Or I’ll be talking with some very serious Japanese
intellectuals and Groucho will sneak up behind us as only Groucho can sneak up.
And he will say something like, “Either this man is dead or my watch has
stopped.” I’II laugh and the Japanese people will wonder why I am laughing.
They will look quizzically at me and I will apologize by saying, “Excuse me, I
just thought about something funny.” They will try to understand this American
of uneven strangeness but they really won’t be able to.

Having made me laugh Groucho silently
leaves, disappears into the shadows of the room, the shadows that go on forever,
taking you away into death.

Sayonara, Groucho
.

I almost think of them as people. Yesterday
it was windy here in Montana and they were Italians because I fed them some
spaghetti. They did a comedy imitation of a banquet in Rome, celebrating some
kind of obscure fraternal organization anniversary. The 51st anniversary of the
death of the mother of the founding father of The Sons of Italian Eyeglass,
Train and Bicycle Lovers.

As the chickens ate spaghetti for the very
first time, their brown feathery bodies were wind-driven like grass and a part
of the early morning sun patterns.

The chickens were all talking about the
spaghetti.

Maybe that is why I think of them as sort
of people, because they never stop talking. They always have something to say.

While seventeen chickens were dining in Rome,
the eighteenth chicken was in the chicken house laying an egg. She had her head
turned sideways toward the spaghetti benefactor. The wind glistened off one
bright eye, staring at me.

Today the chickens were Orientals because I
fed them some leftover rice. They very carefully very carefully examined first
bites of rice, using their beaks as chopsticks and soon were enjoying a good
time in China.

Moral: It is difficult to go any place
in this world without being close to the grave of a chicken
.

It is just another block-sized vacant
lot filled with the oblivion of urban memories. There used to be houses there filled
with people in disappeared-ago ages. The houses are gone and the people are gone.
They all, more or less, wore out at the same time. Now the vacant lot waits for
new houses and new people to fill them.

In another hundred years or so, it will be
a vacant lot again.

The lot is guarded by a Cyclone fence as if
anyone wanted to steal the emptiness held prisoner inside. The dry yellow grass
of summer passing covers the lot which has rolling contours to it like small
hills. I think a series of partially filled in basements have created the
illusion of hills. It is the miniature of a larger landscape.

An old man with a cane stares intently or
maybe it’s only abstractly through the fence at the vacant lot. I wonder what
he sees in there that demands so much of his remaining attention. Perhaps, he
lived there when houses still bloomed. Somehow, for no reason at all, I doubt
that, but often I’m wrong these days. I’ve been so wrong recently that because
I don’t think the old man lived there ensures the fact that he did.

Staring at the vacant lot causes him to
almost miss his bus. I sit down next to him. I look at the back of his hands that
hold the cane between the isolation of his thin, worn-out legs. His hands are
covered with death freckles that are so thick they almost look like an aerial
photograph of some Mayan ruins abandoned in the jungle.

The old man opens his mouth to yawn. He
still has his own teeth. God, they’re old. They look as if a slice of fresh
white bread would be an almost insurmountable challenge.

Then I smile to myself.

They put a six-foot-high fence around a
vacant lot to keep this old man out. What did they think he was going to do?
Climb over that fence and rebuild the past, put all the houses and the people back
just the way they were?

It’s morning and soon the Teletype
will start and this hotel in Tokyo will he connected like a bridge directly
with the events of the world as they happen.

Now the teletype is still asleep, getting
its last winks in before it’s awakened to bring us what historians centuries from
now will remember as July 17, 1978.

As the machine sleeps soundly here in the
lobby of the Keio Plaza Hotel, history waits just a few moments away to be
recorded by the machine which will be awakened by an alarm clock that instead of
ringing, it will wake the machine up by printing the word TESTING followed by
six apostrophes
’’’’’’
and then the letters:

M

MN

MNN

That is a different way to be awakened,
followed by more letters and then the almost religious chant of the wire
service machine:

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE
LAZY DOG.

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG.

The first test pattern ends with:

END HOW RCVD?’’’’’’

The alarm continues to wake up the machine
by typing out the first message five times for a total of ten wake-up foxes
jumping over ten wake-up lazy dogs and five
END HOW RCVD?’’’’’’