The Tokyo-Montana Express (24 page)

PANCAKES

WILL NOT

BE SERVED

FROM MIDNIGHT

TO 4 AM

You are stunned. This is the biggest shock
to your system since President Kennedy was assassinated. You can’t think of
anything to say, so the waitress says it for you, looking down at her watch to
make it very official, “It is now 2:30. You have to wait an hour and a half
before you can get some pancakes. What would you like instead? Ham and eggs?
Bacon and eggs? Sausage and eggs? French toast?”

The word “no” stumbles out of your voice.
You get up and leave the restaurant. Though the drive home is a short one it
suddenly becomes a very long one like going to Billings for a funeral. You try
to think of a reason why a restaurant that has served pancakes 24-hours a day
since the beginning of time should suddenly change their policy and exile
pancakes from their menu for four hours each day. It doesn’t make any sense. How
difficult is it to make pancakes?

Suddenly you think of President Kennedy.

Your eyes fill up with tears.

Poor girl, she literally had nothing
going for her in Tokyo. First of all, when I saw her I thought that she was a
fat, ugly boy. It took about ten seconds for me to realize that she was a girl
about twenty years old, maybe, because it’s always so hard to tell the age of Japanese
women.

My heart forgot a beat when I discovered
that she was a girl. She was about 5-9 and weighed maybe 200 pounds. She was
walking with somebody whose gender and appearance I have completely forgotten
for when I realized that she was a girl everything else vanished into the background.

She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.
I don’t know why I’m describing her clothes. They aren’t important at all, just
words. I guess because I don’t want to write about what I have to write next.

As she walked by, she smiled and she didn’t
have any front teeth. Her mouth was just a pink hole in Asia.

I know there are a lot worse fates in this
world and she probably has a family and friends who love a fat girl that looks
like an ugly boy and has no front teeth and she will probably find a husband
who loves a girl that looks like an ugly boy with no front teeth.

Maybe he will look exactly like her and
people will mistake them for twins and maybe sometimes they will make the same
mistake themselves and look slightly bewildered, trying to unravel their
identities, who is who.

Last Sunday I bought a German
chocolate cake at the Methodist Church annual October auction in Pine Creek, which
raised money at the auction to keep the church going for the next year.

I am not a Christian but neither is the
chocolate cake. When I saw that cake, I was determined to have it. The cake was
like a small three-story palace. The bidding was fast and furious and I stayed
with it like a skier going down a steep slope.

“Sold to number 81 for thirty dollars!”

81 was me!

Jesus Christ! and thirty dollars for a
chocolate cake! I took it home and put it in the freezer, planning to eat it on
a very special occasion like the Second Coming. I also got a receipt for the
cake:

German Choc. Cake

$30.00

rec for Pine Creek Church

10/14/78

I wanted proof.

Yesterday I found myself talking to a
friend about the thirty-dollar chocolate cake and then impulsively I took out
my wallet and showed him the receipt for the cake.

He looked at it with an amused expression
on his face.

Was this how I am going to end up? As an
old man showing a barely recognizable scrap of paper to complete strangers that
I have stopped and collated on the streets of the Twenty-First Century.

By this time I may have added a few totally
irrelevant newspaper clippings to the chocolate cake receipt and of course I
will show them off, too.

“Thirty dollars for a chocolate cake,” I
will chortle, pointing at a newspaper clipping that hasn’t got anything to do
with anything.

The Twenty-First Century inhabitant in
clothes of winking green metal will humor an old man whose eyes are a little
too bright.

“Thirty dollars for a chocolate cake,” I
will rattle again from my reed-dry scrawny throat.

“That’s very interesting,” the inhabitant
will say but will really be wondering if I had just been sprung from a living time
capsule, meanwhile thinking, “
I guess this old man has not bought a cup of
coffee recently because that costs fifty dollars, and five dollars extra if you
want cream and sugar
.”

“Thirty dollars!” and my world only a
memory… one afternoon at the Pine Creek Methodist Church back in the Twentieth
Century.

“I like to cook in the winter,” the
sixty-year-old Italian cook said, somewhere in California, holding his glass of
beer in a professional grip. He was a man who totally knew the meaning of beer.
Beer was an open book to him. He knew every page of beer by heart.

”I like to cook in the winter,” he
repeated. “It’s just right, then. In the summer it’s too hot, too hot. I should
know. I’ve been cooking for forty-two years. It’s never any different. The only
good thing about cooking in the summer is that I drink more beer, but I do that
anyway, so I might as well drink it in the winter when it’s not so hot and I
can enjoy myself more.”

He took another sip of beer.

“After people get to know me, they all say
I drink a lot of beer. I don’t deny it either. Why should I? I’m not ashamed of
beer.”

The look in clothes expresses an
anti-attitude, the result of being bored… And so, if you’re bored, you go for
the outrageous gesture. Everything else seems to have lost any meaning
.

—
RUDI GERNREICH

Beneath the freeway that joins San
Francisco to the Golden Gate Bridge, like lovers to a marriage, is a small cemetery
surrounded by a white picket fence so short that you can step over it, and the
graves are only a few feet long.

The cars that pass over the freeway are
translated into a gentle
clang, clang, clang
below in the cemetery where
the wind blows among the flowers and the weeds. It is a sound that never stops
all the time that you are there.

You can look straight up and see nothing
but the red meat-like metal of the freeway and the gray concrete that carries
the freeway up to the cars.

This cemetery is but a gnat compared to the
cemetery further up the hill in the Presidio of San Francisco where thousands
of graves climb in military precision and conformity. These graves are punctuated
with small white tombstones that are out on patrol in eternity.

I could never be this cemetery with its
glory like slices of bread in a star-spangled loaf, and the American flag towering
like a huge baker above the graves. But I could quite easily become the little
cemetery down below the freeway where the soldiers bury their pets.

I could put on its graves and markers and
flowers like a Rudi Gernreich coat and stay there for a few hours idly dreaming
in the windy California sun.

I like the general informality of the pet
cemetery. It suits me with the audacity of its affection. I seem to find almost
more love here than in the cemetery up the hill.

It’s ironic that I should spend a Sunday
afternoon with dead military pets while our armies are in the Dominican Republic
and South Vietnam and all my friends are worried silly about it.

To arrive at the pet cemetery I had to pass
through the fort, and drive past barracks and soldiers and green military equipment
and cannons parked in a plaza.

The Presidio is the home of the 6th Army,
and soon I was standing in the pet cemetery, listening to the
clang, clang,
clang
of the cars above on the freeway while I surveyed the dead pets of
the 6th Army.

I walked among the graves and there were
many frail dandelions growing in the sandy soil of the cemetery and little
purple flowers and little white flowers, fragile like miniature chandeliers.

There were dogs buried there: Smudge,
Butch, Shorty Johnson, Satan, Hula-Girl, Caesar, Sally, Wimpy, Tony McGuire, a
fishing pal, and Oscar E945, a sentry dog.

There were cats buried there: Blackout,
Cutie, Regina, and Patches who was born in Dachau.

There was a hamster: Willie.

And a pigeon: Deed.

And two parakeets: Jingle and Peppi.

There were two goldfish: Peter and Lela “God
bless them both.”

And there was Tweeter whose epitaph read:

HERE LIES TWEETER

WRAPPED IN SILK

THE LITTLE BIRD

DROWNED IN A

GLASS OF MILK

There were many line graves and many minor
graves and as I read the epitaphs of dogs, I could hear dogs barking in the
Presidio, pets that were still on duty.

One grave had a pile of carefully selected
rocks on it and a plastic Madonna lying on her side with her face turned toward
the gravemarker of a silenced pet.

Another grave was just a plain stake stuck
in the ground and stapled to the stake was an old nameless piece of paper, looking
almost like the sky in a Japanese painting. There were three rusty bottle caps
lying beneath it, and the rust had taken their identities away. They were
nameless as the pet buried there.