The Tokyo-Montana Express (10 page)

There would be one in Hong Kong and Sydney
and Rio de Janeiro and Honolulu and Denver and Yokohama, and even an Al’s Good
Time Harbor in Paris, France! serving Three Star food. He would visit them,
keep track of what was going on, in his own private jet with his own private stewardess
right off the centerfold of
Playboy
magazine. When somebody bought the
next issue of
Playboy
and turned to the centerfold, it would be blank
because the Playmate would he flying beside him, holding his hand.

Al now lives with his mother.

He keeps telling her that he’s going to sea
next month but it’s been two years. He doesn’t get out of the house much and
there are no ships on the horizon, His mother has a back yard lull of roses.
She likes roses. He doesn’t because the red ones are too red and the yellow
ones are too yellow and the pink ones are too pink.

Sometimes he stares out his bedroom window
at the roses, wondering why that is and wishing that roses were more inbetween.

I always had trouble with school,
especially the first grade. I became the tallest kid in the first grade by flunking
it a couple of times. I just could not figure out how the first grade worked. I
started off in the first grade as an average-size kid and a couple of years
later I was the tallest kid in the first grade.

Reading was a particular problem for me. It
did not make any sense at all. For the first couple of years that I spent in
the first grade I might as well have read the books upside down for all it got
me.

Eventually I taught myself to read because
after a few years in the first grade it got pretty nerve-racking and the tedium
approached a kind of blank religious experience, while I sat there busy growing
away from September until June when I was paroled for a few months from the
first grade before returning to it again in the fall.

I taught myself to read by figuring out
what store signs and food products were saying. I would walk very slowly down
the street and puzzle out SAM’S SHOE REPAIR, GOOD FOOD CAFE, AL’S SMOKE SHOP,
FAST AND CLEAN LAUNDRY, NEON WAFFLE SHOP, ECONOMY MARKET, MABLE’S BEAUTY COLLEGE,
and the ANTLER TAVERN where there were a lot of antlers in the front window and
a lot more antlers inside.

People would sit around and drink beer and
look at all the antlers while outside I studied menus in restaurant windows and
slowly came to understand what the words steak, mashed potatoes, hamburger,
salad and butter meant.

Sometimes I would go to a grocery store to
study English. I would walk up and down the aisles reading the labels off cans.
There were pictures on the cans which helped a lot. I would look at the picture
of some peas on a can and read the word peas and put it together. I would hang
around the canned fruit section and learn peaches, cherries, plums, pears,
oranges and pineapple. I learned my fruits very quickly after I had made the
big decision that I wanted out of the first grade.

The most difficulty I had in learning my
fruits was of course fruit cocktail.

Sometimes I would just stand there holding
a can in my hands, staring at it for ten or fifteen minutes, getting no closer
to the truth.

That was thirty-seven years ago and my
reading habits since then have bobbed up and down like a cork on a roller
coaster horizon. Right now one of my favorite things to read is the
National
Enquirer
. I am a real fan. I like stories about people and there are a lot
of stories about people in the National
Enquirer
. This week’s
Enquirer
had articles with titles like these:

Food Causes Most Marriage Problems,

Short People Live Longer,

We Were Taken to a Mysterious City in
an Alien World,

Why President Truman Always Washed His
Own Underwear,

Angry Drivers Using Cars as Deadly
Weapons,

“Lois Lane” Fumes Over Topless Photo,

Professors Wasting Your Tax $$ to Study
Crickets.

I started reading the
National Enquirer
by originally reading the Sunday
New York Times
while I watched television.
It was actually quite simple: One day I just substituted the
National
Enquirer
for
The New York Times
, and that was that.

I let somebody else buy my copy of
The
New York Times
instead of me. They could have my copy and the responsibility
for being a thinking and aware person. I am forty-four years old and thank God,
I got out of the first grade and sometimes all I want to do is have a little
mindless fun with the years that are left in my life.

I am happy as a clam reading the
National
Enquirer
while watching television.

I have waited years for him to die,
for death to come like an erasing wind and take him away with it and all the things
that he stood for, which somehow have come to me to be symbolic of the 1970s.

His life for most of the decade was an
uninterrupted pattern of pacing back and forth in a cage beside the highway. I
never saw him standing still. He was always moving. His future was only his
next step.

I first saw him in 1972 when I came back to
Montana after an absence of thirty years and I would see him every year after
that, always doing the same thing, pacing, until this autumn of 1978. I was
gone from Montana for six months and when I came back he was gone. We had changed
places.

The wolf must have died during the summer.
There were grass and weeds growing in his empty cage when I came back. When he
was alive, which was the 1970s, nothing grew there because of his endless
walking. He walked the decade away a step at a time. If all those steps were
put together, he probably walked halfway to the moon.

I am glad he is dead because I don’t think
a wolf should spend his life in a cage by the highway, but I don’t want you to
think that the wolf was on public exhibition. He was somebody’s private pet and
the cage was beside that person’s house.

The owner’s position probably went
something like this, “I have a wolf for a pet,” and whatever would happen then,
would happen after that.

But the wolf is dead now.

Weeds grow in his cage.

His journey to the moon is over.

Last weekend staying on the Japanese
coast with friends, I had fish for every meal, fish for breakfast, lunch and
dinner. I even had fish for a bedtime snack. I had raw fish, dried fish,
broiled fish and just fish fish.

I must have eaten twenty different kinds of
fish and they were all delicious, but after a while I literally had fish coming
out of my gills.

One morning I took a shit and it smelled
just like the sea. There was no difference between the smell of my shit and
walking along a beach or sitting on a wharf, staring at ships and the sun going
down behind them into billions of years of water.

After that shit I understood a little more
about my roots that once swam with fish and my first home under the sea where I
grew slowly like a garden toward the land.

1890-4977

“Locomotives!” he yelled.

He wanted a definite answer.

In fact: He demanded it.

“Locomotives!” he yelled again, and then
waited impatiently for my reply. I very carefully chose my words as if I were a
jeweler cutting a diamond in swiftly moving fog. I wanted them to have a lot to
do with his life, so much so that he wouldn’t be able to understand them.

I thought that was the least I could do for
him, seeing that he was so interested in my response and had come such a long
distance to get it. I’m not saying that he had travelled around the world for
it, but I’m not excluding that as a possibility.

He did look tired.

I would have offered him a doughnut if I’d
had one.

Of course he was young but he was not as
young as he would have you believe. He was one of those men who are thirty-one
and constantly refer to themselves in the third person as “the kid” and make
excuses to total strangers for mistakes that they have made, blaming it on a
lack of experience, being young.

Sometimes they don’t even make the mistakes
in front of you. They only make the excuses without having done anything.

In other words: They want you to treat them
as if they are fourteen years old… sweet, unending fourteen.

I slowly began answering his question by
changing the subject from a curious question about locomotives to reminiscing
about a few days I spent years ago in Connecticut.

I stayed with some people that I didn’t
know. Nothing much happened except that the meals were very, very long and
often served outside on a patio that didn’t have a roof and as I remember it
rained all the time that I was there.

I never knew that it could take so long to
eat a hamburger.

I was uncomfortable staying there and I
think the people were uncomfortable having me. The last morning I had breakfast
with them they didn’t give me an umbrella.

After I left I never got in touch with them
again. It was a chance and accidental meeting that brought us together in the
first place. I think that we were all much better off apart.

When I was packing to leave their house I
forgot a sweater that was hanging in the closet. I didn’t find out about it
until later when I arrived home the next day after a long bus trip. I knew that
they would never write to me about finding the sweater.