The Tokyo-Montana Express (19 page)

I’m here on the California coast. It’s
foggy. The Pacific crashes. I’m far away from that beautiful creek outside of Livingston,
Montana, where the sunset echoed off the mountains to remain in my eyes longer
than its existence. I could still see the sunset after it was gone.

The mosquitoes bit the hell out of me a few
evenings ago while I explored a hatch of May flies like an astronomer but instead
of discovering a new comet, I hooked a good German brown trout on my rod.

I lost him but I didn’t feel bad because I’ve
come to know that there isn’t enough space in your life to keep everything.

You’d run out of room.

Good-bye, mosquito bites.

A train is travelling from Cairo to
Alexandria. It is a blue sky, white cloud day in Egypt. I am watching the train
on television here in California, a long way from the Middle East.

Why do Egyptian clouds catch my attention
as I look at the train? These are the first clouds I remember seeing in weeks
or maybe months. I just haven’t been paying attention. When did I stop?

The train is carrying the President of the
United States Jimmy Carter and the President of Egypt Anwar Sadat. They are
trying to find peace between Egypt and Israel. It’s somewhere out there in the
desert. While they are doing this, I am watching clouds and trying to figure
out what they mean to my life.

We all have our roles in history.

Mine is clouds.

This is a little study in power. It is
something I have observed before in America, but especially here in Tokyo. The
subject is waitresses.

I’ll go into a Japanese restaurant that
serves nothing but eels cooked in a dozen different ways and all the waitresses
will be short, squat and slightly plump with round moon-like Japanese faces.

I’ll go into another restaurant and all the
waitresses will be tall, slender and with long Japanese faces. It will be a restaurant
specializing in noodles.

A third restaurant will have Chinese food
served by waitresses with large breasts and very small eyes and full mouths.
They could almost be sisters but they aren’t. It must be interesting to own a
restaurant in Tokyo, like owning a fantasy.

I have been fishing in the same
neighborhood of Mill Creek for six years now. One particular stream corner has always
been very good to me. If I had a newspaper stand there among the rocky blue and
green of the creek flow, business would have been quite successful for a fisherman
reader with headlines like:

WHY READ THE NEW YORK TIMES?

SIX GOOD TROUT CAUGHT RIGHT HERE

Last night was the middle of October and a
warm autumn sun was going down and I was fishing my favorite spot. Most of the
leaves had fallen from the brush close to the creek. I fished tor twenty
minutes or so and had two rises and caught them both.

One trout was a very fat sixteen inches
which I consider an excellent Fish for Mill Creek and he put up a good fight.
When I first reached my spot, I caught a ten-inch fish immediately. Then there
was a fifteen minute wait, like waiting for an Izaak Walton bus, before I
caught the big one. During that period I kept up a steady typing on the stream
with my fly rod while my mind drifted from place to place, past and present
watching the fly as if it were my imagination and the creek and its bank
products of that imagination.

Suddenly something moved in the fallen leafy
confusion of the underbrush across the creek, and I thought it was a penguin. I
didn’t actually see what moved. I only saw the movement, but for some reason or
another I thought that it was a penguin.

Montana is known for moose, grizzly bears,
elk, antelope, etc. You can practically name it but no penguins. Penguins are
the butlers of the Antarctic as if a trillionaire lived there and employed them
all. They have no business in Montana, not unless they are in zoos at Billings
or Great Falls.

Why a penguin? And as I said earlier: I
actually did not even see it. I saw only a movement that I thought was a
penguin. Needless to say I was quite relieved when I caught the sixteen-inch
trout that put up a good Fight before I let it go.

That trout made sense.

I wonder if when I fish that place on Mill
Creek again, I will be indirectly, subconsciously keeping my eye open for a
penguin. I will find out next year because I don’t plan on going back there
this year.

I knew that the son-of-a-bitch had to
be good for something, that there must be a reason for him to exist, and I finally
found one today.

I think he works for a company here in
Tokyo and I think he is from Australia. Whenever I go to a certain cafe to
write in Harajuku, I’ll see him if I am still there after 5 p.m.

He is in his early thirties and very good
looking, actually handsome, in a sort of obvious, predictable way that is skin deep.
He possesses a style that is modeled after images of certain men he has seen in
the movies and on television. I don’t think that the bastard can read.

He is probably a very important man for
some business in Tokyo. Maybe he is the vice-president and has many people at
his beckoning, but you don’t think I believe that, do you?

Anyway, he arrives after 5 and emits like a
gas a sort of false charm that he very carefully holds in arrogant restraint as
if he were doing the planet a favor.

Being cool: I believe is the word and I
overhear him talking to other foreigners that inhabit the place, and of course
he often meets women there or they arrive with him.

He makes it a special point for them to
know what a cool guy he is by almost totally ignoring them. He arrives with or
meets a girl there and then he spends his time talking to other foreigners.

There is always a mirror at the table where
he sits and he never lets his own image get out of his sight: Everything he
does like lighting a cigarette or taking a sip of beer or pausing a long time
before saying something stupid, he watches in the mirror.

Once he was with a very pretty Japanese
woman and when they left the place he walked off as if she wasn’t with him. She
had stopped to look at something and he just continued walking away. When she
looked up, he was almost gone. “Where are you going!” she yelled.

Good girl. When she said that I liked her
immediately, and as you can see, this guy has gotten on my nerves, though we
have never said a word or even recognized each other’s existence.

Today I was sitting there at the café when
he arrived early. It was 4 o’clock. I almost wondered what was up, why his
routine had been disturbed, almost, and then he sat down right beside me and of
course there was no recognition.

He sat there.

I sat there.

I think he dislikes me, too, because I
obviously don’t belong at the café. I look like a fading middle-aged hippie and
never talk to anybody except the young Japanese men who work there.

I know the prick is also a snob.

Anyway, today I finally found out why he
was put on this earth. I had to meet somebody later at 6 o’clock in another
part of Tokyo and I don’t even own a watch and from where he was sitting I
could see his watch, so from time to time, keeping track of my future
appointment, I looked at his watch.

As I said earlier: I knew that the
son-of-a-bitch must be of some earthly good, a reason for him to live.

No seats, no fenders, no
rearview mirror, no headlights, no brakes, no bumpers, no tires, no trunk, no
windshield wipers, no windshield

Inspired by a vision of poetic American
romance, my friend was interested in buying an old car in Montana and driving
it back to California. Every evening he would get a copy of the local newspaper
and look in the want ads for an old car that could get to California.

CALIFORNIA OR BUST!

He was thinking in a price range of maybe
two or three hundred dollars with a four-hundred-dollar tops.

That’s not much for a car in this year of 1978
but my friend had a dream of an old car going happily down the road to
California with still a few months of driving left in it after getting there.

A good old Montana car like a good old boy.

One evening he saw an ad that really wetted
his romance:

1953 CHEVROLET $50