The Tokyo-Montana Express (17 page)

Sometimes when people are talking to me
about very important things like President Carter or the Panama Canal and think
that I’m listening to them, I’m really thinking about the light on at the
Tastee-Freez.

I am visiting a Japanese home outside
of Tokyo. The people are very nice. The wife greets us at the door. Once she
had been a very popular television star. She is still young and beautiful and
retired now to married life and children.

We are a party of four people, including
her husband. I am the only person who is not Japanese.

We are graciously, perfectly welcomed into
the house and soon sitting in a Western-style dining room that is also part
kitchen. His wife busies herself preparing food; little snacks, and getting us
sake to drink. We have not been there any longer than just sitting down when
her husband, a very kind and sweet man, says jokingly, “I am the lion of my own
house.”

I don’t know what that means but I know it
means something or it would not have been said. I have a feeling that it is for
my benefit. I look around the house. It is modern and comfortable. The man is a
famous Japanese actor.

Soon we are drinking sake on the rocks
which is a good drink on a hot, humid Japanese June night. The wife continues
busying herself. Now she is cooking things for us to eat and he helps her by
cooking some things, too. They are a very efficient kitchen team. This could be
a play.

After a while, there are a lot of good
things to eat on the table. We eat, drink and talk away. There is nothing more
for her to do. She has not sat down since the company arrived.

Now she sits down but she does not sit down
at the table. She sits down maybe five feet away and listens to the conversation.
I watch her sitting there five feet away from the table and I think about what
her husband said jokingly when we arrived, “I am the lion of my own house.”

I didn’t know what it meant but I knew that
it meant something. Now I know what it means, watching her sit five feet away
from the table, not joining us, but enjoying herself just the same.

I look into her eyes. They are dark and
beautiful. They are happy eyes. She is glad that we have come. She has done her
best to make us comfortable and now she is enjoying our presence.

In her eyes, I see the past of Japan. I see
thousands of years of Japanese women, not sitting at the table and happy. As I
write this, I can also see American women reading these words and grinding their
teeth while thinking;
Oh, the poor downtrodden slave of male tyranny! Instead
of waiting on them like a servant, she should kick them all in the balls!

I can see the expression on their faces.

I can see their eyes filled with hatred
that is so far away from this room.

How many stops?

How many stops?

How many stops?

To the reindeer

station?

Yesterday I bought four peaches though
I didn’t need them. When I went into the grocery store I did not have any
interest in peaches. I wanted to buy something else but I can’t remember now
what it was.

I was walking through the fruit section to
get what has been forgotten when I saw the peaches. Peaches were not my
destination but I stopped and looked at them, anyway. They were beautiful
peaches but still that wasn’t reason enough for me to buy them. I have seen a lot
of good-looking peaches in my time.

Without thinking I picked up one of the
peaches to feel how firm it was, and it felt just right, but hundreds of peaches
over dozens of years have felt the same way.

What was going to cause me to buy peaches
that I did not need?

Then I smelled a peach and it smelled just
like my childhood. I stood there travelling back as if on a railroad train into
the past where a peach could be an extraordinary event, almost like a reindeer
station with a herd of deer waiting patiently for the train on a summer’s day
and all carrying bags of peaches to the end of the line.

PART ONE:

I write in a small room at the top of an
old barn made out of redwood a long time ago, when many people were alive who
are dead now; Billy the Kid, Louis Pasteur, Queen Victoria, Mark Twain, Emperor
Meiji of Japan, and Thomas Edison.

There are no redwood trees in these
mountains of Montana, so the wood was brought over from the Pacific Coast and
made into this huge barn which is over three stories high if stories is the
right word to apply to the height of a barn.

The foundation of the barn is made out of
glacial rocks placed in perfect companionship to each other to hold the redwood
and all the things that are a barn up to the constantly changing Montana sky
where I sit writing just a few feet below it.

The rocks also form a huge basement for the
barn, which is kind of unusual because not many barns have a basement. The
basement to this barn is another world best left to another time.

Later…

To get to my writing room high in this barn
there is a flight of stairs that are almost metaphysical in their design
climbing step-by-step starkly like death and desire up to just below the sky
which now is filled with falling snow. The stairs are divided into two landings
and I have a railing, so I won’t fall off the barn on my way to writing or when
returning.

…not a good idea.

There is a light bulb at the top of the first
landing where the stairs turn to go up another flight ending at a second light
bulb.

I have a switch in the barn and a switch at
the top of the stairs. It is a two-way switch, so that I can control the lights
from the barn or at the top of the stairs, either way. When I turn the switch
on, the barn is bathed in a beautiful reddish light like a sundown from the
wood and I am illuminated in my comings and goings.

I like to turn the switch on and off. It is
very dramatic because the stairs are a cream-colored pine shining like a bridge
against the redwood sunset and an important junction in my day-to-day life here
in Montana.

[A slight meandering here because I just
wanted to say that there are birds living in this barn that keep me company and
there are some rabbits spending the winter downstairs where the hay for the
horses is stored. There are little outcroppings of rabbit shit lying in
mushroom-like designs in the loose hay from the bales. Sometimes when I feel lonely
it is comforting to know that there are rabbits sharing my huge literary house,
though I have never seen one, just their perfect poetic shit. Let’s return to
the lights.]

I receive pleasure from turning the lights
on and off when coming and going from words like these. For some reason unknown
to me I have been using bulbs of low wattage to shine my way.

Yesterday I discovered that the bulb at the
top of the first landing was only 25 watts and the bulb at the top of the second
landing where my room is, was only 75 watts, for a total of 100 watts of seeing
power.

I thought about it after I finished writing
and decided to increase the wattage and consequently the light in the barn.
Last night after watching a high school basketball game in town, I went to a
store that is open 24 hours a day and bought two light bulbs, which was one of
the greatest adventures of my lite.

I originally thought of increasing the
bulbs to 150 watts, knowing all the time that 100 watts apiece would be a dramatic
change, especially at the top of the first landing which had had a 25 watt
globe for God only knows how long.

Maybe years…

Who keeps track of light bulb anniversaries
these days, not unless you suddenly notice that you haven’t changed a bulb in
say, fifty years? Then you pay some attention, call out the media, but mostly
you just forget about it. There are other things to think about: Does my wife
love me? Why does she laugh a little too loud at my jokes when I know they aren’t
that funny or what am I going to do with the rest of my life?

Things other than light bulbs take up our
time, which is not unreasonable.

Anyway, there I was standing in the light
bulb section gazing fondly at wattage. From the way I looked you might think I
was a collector of electric postage stamps and was just adding some very rare
ones to my collection. Two 100 watt bulbs would be very adequate, but then I
got to thinking why not go for some dramatic lighting like 150 watt bulbs?

That would really be something to see when
I turned them on at night for the first time. The barn would explode in light
like a Broadway play.

I liked that idea a lot, and then I saw
some 200 watt bulbs. My heart almost skipped a beat like a critic falling in
love with a play.

200 watt bulbs!

What an opportunity for fun!

I could light up my Montana redwood barn
just like Times Square. Why settle for a Broadway play when you can have one of
the world’s most famous theater districts in your barn?

I bought the two bulbs with an eager
anticipation for the next day when I would put them in the barn and the next night
when I would turn them on for the first time.

Well, now it’s the day of that night,
eleven o’clock, and the hours pass here in Montana for night to come and then
Times Square in my barn.

These are the pleasures of my life.

I wait like a child for my electric light
dessert.

PART TWO:

I waited through the day, and night carne
to Montana as it always does… and the moment to Times-Square my barn with a
Great White Way of 200 watt bulbs, all two of them.

I had told my wife about the bulbs and my
excitement to see the barn shining like Broadway and she got a daffodil from a
bunch we’d bought in town earlier and put it in a little old bottle and we
headed out through the snow to the barn. I had a feeling of magic in my hand as
I touched the switch and the barn exploded into light, bathed in bounty like
Times Square.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

I was so proud of the light that I couldn’t
think of anything to say. We started upstairs. She was walking in front of me,
carrying the daffodil.

We reached the top of the first landing and
I looked at the light bulb shining away. I felt like stroking it as if it were
a cat, and if I did, I knew that it would start purring.