The Tokyo-Montana Express (21 page)

I asked him what the calorie content of the
food was on Death Row. He called somebody on the telephone. “What’s the caloric
content of the food on Death Row? The mainline is 4200, huh. You’d guess about
4500 calories. OK. Thank you.”

4500 calories. How strange, I thought. That’s
a lot of calories for somebody who’s going to live a sedentary existence, and
it’s not true about the world loving a fat man. Or was Death Row different?

Then I asked him about television on Death
Row. He told me that they have a television set for every three cells and the
men have remote control devices in their cells so they can change the channels
if they want to. There are earphones for the sound and they can watch movies
all night on Channel 7.

He told me that the men were influenced by
the advertising on television and will suddenly start ordering a certain
product from the canteen after it’s been advertised on television.

I had an immediate vision of the prisoners
of Death Row all ordering brand-new Fords from the canteen.

“What’s the favorite food on Death Row?” I
asked. Mr. Park called a guard on the telephone.

“Uh-huh. Mexican food. And steaks. They get
steaks twice a week.”

After a while Warden Wilson came in and we
all sat around and talked about Death Row, capital punishment, the courts, the
gas chamber, rich people and poor people and the difference between them when
they start murdering other people and what happens then. It’s all been repeated
a billion times and we repeated it once more.

But I found the tamale loaf that was going
to be served Thursday for dinner on Death Row far more exciting than the fact
that ninety percent of the prison administrators in the country are against
capital punishment.

I was by now holding the menu in my lap,
and even then, as we talked about Death Row, I knew the menu was my equipment
for a perfect vision of Death Row. I knew that I could go a long way on the
menu, and that’s what I planned on doing.

Associate Warden Park showed me a “good”
book to read called The
Death Penalty in America
, but it did not look
nearly as interesting as the roast leg of pork on Tuesday.

Finally, I took my menu and left. I was no
longer curious as to how many Death Rows could stand on the end of a needle. I
wanted to know something else. Returning to San Francisco on the bus, I cradled
the menu gently in my lap and carefully planned its future.

That evening a friend came over to my
house. He’s an aspiring Hollywood scriptwriter and he was looking for someone
to type a manuscript of his, so he could sell it to the movies and become rich
and famous and invite me to come stay with him in LA, and think the good
thoughts while floating around in his new swimming pool.

Before he found a typist, we were sitting
in the kitchen drinking dark April-like bock beer. It was not by accident that
I showed him the Death Row menu. It was time for the menu to go to work. I just
handed it to him and said, “Take a look at this.”

“What do you have there, Richard?” He took
a look at the menu and it did not please him. His face tensed and became a
nervous gray. “That’s the Pop Art that hurts,” he said.

“You think so, huh?” I said.

“Yes, it’s sick,” he said. “It’s like that
sculpture. You know the kind that has drawers full of dead babies.”

The menu was lying in front of him on the
table and it said that for breakfast on Saturday the men on Death Row would
have a

California Orange

Cornflakes

Plain Omelet

Crisp Bacon

French Toast

Maple Syrup

Toast—Bread—Oleo

Coffee—Milk

My friend’s reaction to the menu assured me
that I was on the right track. This menu was a very powerful and strange
experience. I must find other things that it can do, I thought.

The next day I showed the menu to some poet
friends of mine. They are gentle poets who live in an old Victorian house
surrounded by trees and sometimes they do not have enough food to eat. We were
all sitting in the kitchen.

One of the poets looked at the menu very
carefully for a long time and then said, “It’s frightening, obscene and disgusting.”

The other poet looked at the menu and said,
“Look at all that food. I love crisp bacon. I haven’t had any bacon in a year.
Look at all that food. The men up there must really get fat. It’s like nailing
the goose to the floor and then feeding him to death. Why don’t they give this
food to a poet?”

“Because a poet didn’t kill anyone,” the
other poet replied.

Ah, to journey with a Death Row menu
through the streets of San Francisco and to nurture its expanding vision, its
search for new reality in a tired old thing.

I carried the menu in a Manila envelope
past innocent and unassuming people going to the store to buy halibut steak for
dinner and then to fall asleep while watching television on Channel 7.

I visited another friend. He works at night
and we had a cup of coffee together. We gossiped and got caught up with our
lives and then I said, “I want to show you something.”

“Sure.”

I took out the menu and handed it to him.
Ile read the menu and his face changed from a sitting-here-having-a-cup-of-coffee
face to a very serious face.

“What do you think?” I said.

“It’s so stark, so real,” he said. “It’s
like a poem. This menu alone condemns our society. To feed somebody this kind
of food who is already effectively dead represents all the incongruity of the
whole damn thing. It’s senseless.”

I looked clown at the menu lying there on
the table and for dinner Tuesday the men on Death Row were having

Spaghetti Soup

Beet and Onion Salad

Vinaigrette Dressing

Roast Leg O Pork

Brown Sauce

Ground Round Steak

Mashed Potatoes

Cream Style Corn

etc.

And this to become senseless? How could
beet and onion salad condemn our society? I always thought we were a little
stronger than that. Was it possible for this menu to be a menace to California
if it fell into the wrong hands?

I spent the day showing the menu to people,
curious and travelling all over San Francisco and leaving in my wake the food
for seven days on Death Row.

Finally, I ended up at the house of a
friend who is a straight-A student at San Francisco State College. His daughter
was playing on the floor. She was wearing a very beautiful striped shirt.

She was reciting her letters from an
alphabet book while her father read the menu. He read it slowly and with precision.
Actually he was hunched over it.

“S is for Santa Claus.”

She is a bright little girl four years old
and looks like Clara Bow come to visit us again in child form.

“It’s a menu,” her father said, after he
had finished reading the menu. “And a menu is the description of a meal that
never existed.”

My friend is an intellectual who takes a
fierce but quiet pride in the use of intelligence. He’s pleased by his brain.

“It’s not a salad,” he said, pointing at a
salad on the menu. “It’s the obligation of a salad to be fulfilled.”

“I guess you can look at it that way,” I
said.

His wife came home from work. She works at
a hospital and she looked tired. The day had been very long. I showed the menu
to her. As she looked at it, her mouth twitched and her face grimaced. “Horrible,”
she said. “It’s horrible. Just horrible,” and handed it back to me as if it were
something vile, pornographic.

After a while the little girl put her
alphabet book down. She was tired of it. As a kind of sad finale, she said hopelessly,
“N is for Nest up in the tree.”

Her father and I were talking about the
menu. We had a long conversation about reality being twice removed from the
menu. It was a long and deep conversation where the menu became a kind of
thought diving bell going deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper until we were at
the cold flat bottom of the sea, staring fish-like at the colored Easter eggs
that were going to be served next Sunday on Death Row.

Last week I saw two Japanese dwarfs on
the same day, maybe an hour apart, walking along the same street. They were a
perfect study of random chance, an example of how life is completely out of
control.

You never know what is going to happen
next.

I have always been fascinated by dwarfs.
Whenever I see a dwarf, it almost takes my breath away. To me they are like
watching magic. Many people think that dwarfs are like little children. That is
one of their first thoughts, but not one of mine.

I can never imagine a dwarf ever having had
a childhood. I think they were born just the way they are and are actually
about sixty years old. I believe they were that old when they were born and
learning how to talk was not a problem because they already knew how.

When I say these things, I am very
carefully telling what I think. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I know that they
are feeling, compassionate human beings who have to deal with extraordinary
problems. I would never dare take that away from them.

But still they are magic to me…

Maybe there was a convention of dwarfs in Tokyo
and I saw the entire convention an hour apart from each other.

I don’t know why I think she should be
at home with her child. They have as much right to walk around as I do, perhaps
even more. A child needs to get out of the house, not stay indoors until it
becomes the faded water of a child.

But still…

I see her on the street more times than often,
always with her child. She is about thirtyish and I think some kind of European.
She has fading good looks, her edges are turning in, and a tooth is missing. I
don’t know why she doesn’t replace the tooth. It’s not that she’s poor. This is
a good neighborhood and she doesn’t look out of place.

I have a couple of teeth missing, too, and
I certainly can’t blame her for it. Why don’t I replace my teeth? So as you can
see, there is more here than meets the eye.

Her child is a very animated little girl
who is always cheerfully dressed and clean as a whistle. There’s no reason for
me to get upset when I see them, and who am I to judge how often and how long
they can wander around outside?

But still…

I see them half a dozen or a dozen times a
day and I can guarantee you that I do not go out looking for them. I don’t set
the alarm clock. I don’t carry around a timetable and I certainly do not use a
stopwatch!

But still…

I wonder how many times I don’t see them.
Of course I know that life is not easy, it is not what we planned, and I must
not forget that whenever I am seeing them, they are also seeing me.