The Tokyo-Montana Express (7 page)

The tree had been stripped of its
decorations and lay there sadly like a dead soldier after a losing battle. A
week before it had been a kind of hero.

Then I saw another Christmas tree with a
car half-parked on it. Somebody had left their tree in the street and the car
had accidentally run over it. The tree was certainly a long way from a child’s
loving attention. Some of the branches were sticking up through the bumper.

It was that time of the year when people in
San Francisco get rid of their Christmas trees by placing them in the streets
or vacant lots or wherever they can get rid of them. It is the journey away
from Christmas.

Those sad and abandoned Christmas trees
really got on my conscience. They had provided what they could for that
assassinated Christmas and now they were just being tossed out to lie there in
the street like bums.

I saw dozens of them as I walked home
through the beginning of a new year. There are people who just chuck their
Christmas trees right out the front door. A friend of mine tells a story about
walking down the street on December 26th and having a Christmas tree go
whistling right by his ear, and hearing a door slam. It could have killed him.

There are others who go about abandoning
their Christmas trees with stealth and skill. That evening I almost saw
somebody put a Christmas tree out, but not quite. They were invisible like the
Scarlet Pimpernel. I could almost hear the Christmas tree being put out.

I went around a corner and there in the
middle of the street lay the tree, but nobody was around. There are always
people who do a thing with greatness, no matter what it is.

When I arrived at home I went to the
telephone and called up a friend of mine who is a photographer and accessible
to the strange energies of the Twentieth Century. It was almost one o’clock in
the morning. I had awakened him and his voice was a refugee from sleep.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Christmas trees,” I said.

“What?”

“Christmas trees.”

“Is that you, Richard?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“What about them?”

“Christmas is only skin deep,” I said. “Why
don’t we take hundreds of pictures of Christmas trees that are abandoned in the
streets? We’ll show the despair and abandonment of Christmas by the way people
throw their trees out.”

“Might as well do that as anything else,”
he said. “I’ll start tomorrow during my lunch hour.”

“I want you to photograph them just like
dead soldiers,” I said. “Don’t touch or pose them. Just photograph them the way
they fell.”

The next day he took photographs of
Christmas trees during his lunch hour. He worked at Macy’s then and went up on
the slopes of Nob Hill and Chinatown and took pictures of Christmas trees
there.

1, 2, 3,4, 5,9, 11, 14, 21, 28, 37, 52, 66.

I called him that evening.

“How did it go?”

“Wonderful,” he said.

The next day he took more photographs of
Christmas trees during his lunch hour.

72, 85, 117, 128, 137.

I called him up that evening, too.

“How did it go?”

“Couldn’t be better,” he said. “I’ve almost
got 150 of them.”

“Keep up the good work,” I said. I was busy
lining up a car for the weekend, so that we would have mobility to take more Christmas
tree photographs.

I thought we should get a good sampling of
what San Francisco had to offer in the way of abandoned Christmas trees.

The person who drove us around the next day
desires to remain anonymous. He is afraid that he would lose his job and face
financial and social pressures if it got out that he worked with us that day.

The next morning we started out and we
drove all over San Francisco taking photographs of abandoned Christmas trees.
We faced the project with the zest of a trio of revolutionaries.

142, 159, 168, 175, 183.

We would be driving along and spot a
Christmas tree lying perhaps in the front yard of somebody’s lovely house in
Pacific Heights or beside an Italian grocery store in North Beach. We would
suddenly stop and jump out and rush over to the Christmas tree and start taking
pictures from every angle.

The simple people of San Francisco probably
thought that we were all completely deranged: bizarre. We were traffic stoppers
in the classic tradition.

199, 215, 227, 233, 245.

We met the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti out
walking his dog on Potrero Hill. He saw us jump out of the car and immediately
start taking pictures of a fallen Christmas tree lying on the sidewalk.

277, 278, 279, 280, 281.

As he walked by, he said, “Taking pictures
of Christmas trees?”

“Sort of,” we said and all thinking
paranoiacally: I We wanted to keep it a big secret. We thought we really had
something good going and it needed the right amount of discretion before it was
completed.

So the day passed and our total of
Christmas tree photographs crept over the 200 mark.

“Don’t you think we have enough now?” Bob
said.

“No, just a few more,” I said.

317, 332, 345, 356, 370.

“Now?” Bob said.

We had driven all the way across San
Francisco again and were on Telegraph Hill, climbing down a broken staircase to
a vacant lot where somebody had tossed a Christmas tree over a cyclone fence.
The tree had the same candor as Saint Sebastian, arrows and all.

“No, just a few more,” I said.

386, 387, 388, 389, 390.

“We must have enough now,” Bob said.

“I think so,” I said.

We were all very happy. That was the first
week of 1964. It was a strange time in America.

Today I thought about the Pacific
Ocean on the platform at Shinjuku Station, waiting for the Yamanote Line train.

I don’t know why I thought about the
Pacific engulfing and devouring itself, the ocean eating itself and getting smaller
and smaller until it was the size of Rhode Island but still eating away and
getting smaller and smaller, an insatiable appetite, getting smaller and
smaller and heavier and heavier, the entire weight of the Pacific Ocean into a smaller
and smaller form until the Pacific Ocean was concentrated into a single drop
weighing trillions of tons. Then the train came and I might add, it was about
time.

I left the Pacific Ocean behind on the
platform underneath a candy bar wrapper.

She is brushing his hair gently with
her hand. She is caressing his face gently with her hand. This is a ghost story.
It begins in West Texas in the early 1930s at night in a large house full of
sleeping people out in the hill country and will eventually end in 1970 at a
picnic gathering of middle-aged people.

She is standing beside his bed. He is
fifteen years old and almost asleep. She opens the door and comes into his room.
When she opens the door it doesn’t make a sound. She walks silently over to
him. The floor doesn’t creak. He’s so sleepy that he isn’t afraid. She is an
old woman wearing a very careful nightgown. She stands beside him. Her hair
flows down to her waist. It is white with faded yellow in it as if her hair had
once been singed by tire. This is all that is left of having been a golden
blonde woman in the 1890s… perhaps even a West Texas belle with many suitors.

He stares at her.

He knows that she is a ghost but he is too
sleepy to be afraid. He has spent the day putting twelve hours of hay into the
barn. Every muscle in his body is beautifully exhausted and abstract.

She touches his hair gently with her hand.
Her hand is delicate and he isn’t afraid of it. Then she caresses his face gently
with her hand. It isn’t warm but it isn’t cold either. Her hand possesses an
existence between life and death.

She smiles at him. He’s so tired that he
almost smiles back. She leaves the room and he falls asleep. His dreams are not
unpleasant. They are a floating bridge to his mother who wakes him up in the
morning by loudly opening the door to his bedroom and yelling, “Time to get up!
Breakfast is on the table!”

He is silent at the kitchen table. His
brothers and sisters are chattering away and his father hasn’t said a word
while carefully drinking a cup of stoic coffee. His father never talks at the
kitchen table, even when its dinner and there’s company. People have gotten
used to it.

The boy thinks about the ghost as he eats
thick slices of bacon and eggs scrambled in the fat and nibbles on a jalapeno
pepper. He really likes jalapenos, the hotter the better.

He does not mention the ghost to anyone at
the table. He doesn’t want them to think that he is crazy and the years pass
and he grows up in that house with his two sisters and two brothers and his
mother and his father and the ghost.

She visits him five or six times a year.
There is no pattern to the visits. She doesn’t come every May or September or
the third of July. She just comes when she wants to, but it averages five or
six times a year. She never frightens him and almost seems to love him but they
never have anything to say to each other.

It’s hard to make a living in that part of
Texas in those days, so eventually the family grows up and scatters away from
that house and it becomes just another abandoned old house in West Texas.

One sister goes to live in Houston and a
brother to Oklahoma City and another sister marries a mechanic and he has a filling
station in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

His father dies of a heart attack one rainy
afternoon in San Angelo, Texas, and his mother goes to live in an old-folks
home in Abilene, Texas, because her sister lives nearby, and one of his brothers
gets a job in Canada, and his other brother is killed in an automobile accident
in 1943 while in the Air Force stationed at Amarillo, Texas.

Then there is himself: He marries his high
school sweetheart and lives in Brownwood, Texas, for three years, working at a
feed store.

He is drafted into the infantry and fights
in Italy and later on is a part of the Normandy Landing on D-Day 1944 and is
wounded once, not seriously, shrapnel in the leg and rises to the rank of
sergeant because so many men in his company are killed in a fire tight with
some Waffen SS troops on the border of Germany.

He comes back from the war and goes to
college on the GI Bill for two years at the University of Texas in Austin, majoring
in business administration, then drops out of college and works as a cigarette
salesman for a few years until by a fluke he gets involved in selling
television sets and eventually has a little TV store of his own in Austin. They
have two children: a girl named Joan and a boy Robert.

The old house just continues to stand out
there in West Texas: abandoned, a monument to the growing years of an American
family. Its dark outline stands against the sunset and the wind bangs something
that is loose on the house.

And on… and on… and on (
years passing,
life being lived, problems, good times, bills, etc., the children growing up
and getting married… on, etc., on
) until he is fifty-three years old at a
family reunion picnic with his brother and his two sisters sitting alone
together at a wooden table outside in the Texas afternoon, but their mother
couldn’t come because she’s just too old and doesn’t recognize them any more.
Her sister stopped visiting her last year because it broke her heart to see her
that way.