The Tokyo-Montana Express (6 page)

October 21, 1978: Yesterday I didn’t
do anything. It was like a play written tor a weedy vacant lot where a theater would
be built one hundred years after I am dead performed by actors whose great
grandparents haven’t even been born yet. If I were keeping a diary, yesterday’s
entry would have gone something like this:

Dear Diary, I put up a no hunting sign
today because tomorrow is the first day of hunting season and I don’t want some
out of state hunters driving a station wagon with Louisiana license plates to
stop and shoot a moose in my back yard.

I also went to a party. I was in a shitty
off-angle wrong mood and said the same five boring sentences to forty different,
totally unsuspecting and innocent people. It took me three hours to get around
to everybody and there were very long pauses between sentences.

One sentence was an incoherent comment
about the State of the Union. I substituted an obscure California weather
pattern in place of a traditional Montana weather pattern to use as a metaphor
about inflation.

What I said made absolutely no sense
whatsoever and when I finished nobody asked me to elaborate. A few people said
that they needed some more wine and excused themselves to go get some, though I
could see that they still had plenty of wine left in their glasses.

I also told everybody that I had seen a
moose in my back yard, right outside the kitchen window. Then I did not give
any more details. I just stood there staring at them while they waited
patiently for me to continue talking about the moose, but that was it.

A little old lady told me that she had to
go to the toilet. Later on during the party every time I was in her vicinity, she
immediately started talking desperately to the closest person.

A man I told my moose story to said, “Was
that the same moose you told me about yesterday?” I looked a little shocked and
then said, “Yes.” The shocked expression slowly changed into one of serene
bewilderment.

I think my mind is going. It is changing
into a cranial junkyard. I have a huge pile of rusty tin cans the size of Mount
Everest and about a million old cars that are going nowhere except between my
ears.

I stayed at the party for three hours,
though it seemed closer to a light-year of one-sentence moose stories.

Then I went home and watched Fantasy Island
on television. As a sort of laststand nervous spiritual pickup, I called a
friend in California on the telephone during a commercial. We had a very
low-keyed conversation during the commercial. He was not really that interested
in talking to me.

He was more interested in doing something else.

As we struggled through the conversation,
like quicksand, I wondered what the first thing he would do after I hung up. Maybe
he would pour himself a stiff drink or he would call somebody interesting on
the telephone and tell them how boring I had become.

At one point toward the end of our
thousand-mile little chat, I said, “Well, I’ve just been fishing and writing. I’ve
written seven little short stories this week.”

“Nobody eares,” my friend said. And he was
right.

I started to tell him that I had seen a
moose in my back yard but I changed my mind. I would save it for another time.
I did not want to use up my best material right away. You’ve got to think of
the future.

Once she owned a Chinese restaurant
and she worked very hard to get it. I think she spent her whole life earning the
money. The location had not been a restaurant before, so she had to start from
the very beginning and create a restaurant from a place that had been an
Italian men’s clothing store for years with a clientele that was exclusively old
men. The store finally closed when all its customers died.

Then the woman came along and made it into
a Chinese restaurant. She replaced somber dark suits with fried rice and chow
mein.

She was a small middle-aged Chinese woman
who had once been very good looking, probably beautiful. She decorated the restaurant
herself. It was a comfortable little world that reflected the values of the
Chinese lower middle-class. There were bright and cheerful Chinese lanterns and
inexpensive scrolls that had birds painted on them and little glass knickknacks
from Hong Kong.

She had to build the restaurant from the
very beginning, including lowering the ceiling and panelling the walls and carpeting
the floor. There was also, and this is a big also, putting in the kitchen and
creating two bathrooms. None of that is cheap.

She put her life’s savings into the
restaurant and hoped for the best, probably prayed for the best. Unfortunately,
it was not to come her way. Who knows why a restaurant fails? She had good food
at reasonable prices and a good location with lots of foot traffic, but people
just didn’t want to eat there.

I went there a couple of times a week and became
friends with her. She was a very nice woman. I slowly watched her restaurant
fade away. Often when I ate there, there were only two or three other people in
the restaurant. Sometimes there were none.

After a while she took to looking at the
door a lot. She sat at an empty table, surrounded by empty tables and watched
the door, waiting for customers that never came. She would talk to me about it.
“I can’t understand it,” she would say. “This is a good restaurant. There are a
lot of people walking by. I don’t understand.”

I didn’t understand either and when I ate
there, I gradually became a shadow of her, watching the door, hoping for
customers.

She put up a huge sign in the front window
that said OPEN. By then it was too late, nothing could help. I went away to Japan
for a few months. When I came back the restaurant was closed. She had run out
of time, staring at the front door while it grew cobwebs.

I didn’t see her again for about two years
and then I bumped into her one day on the street. We said our hellos and she
asked me how I was and I said, “Fine,” and she told me that she was fine. “You
know I lost the restaurant,” she said.

Then she turned and pointed her hand down
the street toward a neon sign two blocks away that jutted out, breaking the
anonymity of the block. The sign told us that the Adams and White Mortuary was
located there.

“I’ve been working for Adams and White
since the restaurant failed,” she said, her voice was almost desperate and
suddenly she seemed very small like a frightened child, just waking up from a
nightmare and trying to talk about it while it was still so vivid that the
child couldn’t tell the difference between it and reality.

It is autumn. Spiders are in the
house. They have come in from the cold. They want to spend the winter in here.
I don’t blame them. It’s cold out there. I like spiders and welcome them. They’re
OK in my book. I’ve always liked spiders, even when I was a child. I was afraid
of other things, like my playmates, but I wasn’t afraid of spiders.

Why?

I don’t know: just because. Maybe I was a
spider in another life. Maybe I wasn’t. Who cares? There are spiders living
comfortably in my house while the wind howls outside. They aren’t bothering
anybody. It I were a fly, I’d have second thoughts but I’m not, so I don’t.

…nice spiders protected from the wind.

One day in his life he realized that
he had more very good dead friends than he had living ones. When he first realized
this, he spent an afternoon turning thousands of people in his mind like pages
in the telephone book to see if he was right.

He was, and he didn’t know how to feel
about it. At first he felt sad. Then the sadness slowly turned into feeling
nothing at all and that felt better, like not being aware of the wind blowing
on a very windy day.

Your mind someplace else,

No wind there.

I don’t know. But it seemed like the
thing to do in that first week in January 1967, and I got two other people to
join me. One of them wants to remain anonymous, and that’s all right.

I think we were still in shock over
President Kennedy’s assassination. Perhaps that had something to do with all
those photographs of Christmas trees.

The Christmas of 1963 looked terrible, illuminated
by all the flags in America hanging at halt-mast week after week in December
like a tunnel of mourning.

I was living by myself in a very strange
apartment where I was taking care of an aviary for some people who were in
Mexico. I fed the birds every day and changed their water and had a little
vacuum cleaner to tidy up the aviary when it was needed.

I ate dinner by myself 0n Christmas day. I
had some hot dogs and beans and drank a bottle of rum with Coca-Cola. It was a
lonesome Christmas and President Kennedy’s murder was almost like one of those
birds that I had to feed every day.

The only reason I am mentioning this is to
kind of set the psychological framework for 390 photographs of Christmas trees.
A person does not get into this sort of thing without sufficient motivation.

Late one evening I was walking home from
visiting some people on Nob Hill. We had sat around drinking cup after cup of
coffee until our nerves had become lionesque.

I left around midnight and walked down a
dark and silent street toward home, and I saw a Christmas tree abandoned next
to a fire hydrant.